sideblog for tvlandofficial

this sort of stuff makes me wonder if 7b will be a simple wrongwarp or something else entirely. we try to follow the old man’s advice and go “between the lines”, where it’s darker, and noelle’s sentiments echo his, but we walk a path of strict, necessary steps that only enforce the world’s restrictive nature, and come out bathed in a bright light. you have to proceed if you want to continue the weird route. you have to stick to the intended steps.

it really seems like kris’ appreciation isn’t what you'd expect from good friends, nor do they seem to simply have a teenage crush. instead, they seem to see susie as someone who literally gives their life meaning. it’s understandable why kris doesn’t hold her bullying over her head, but it seems like they can’t even let her have the catharsis of an apology because the thought that she would need to at all is unbearable to them.

look at the words kris’ narration uses here. they’re similar to the way susie is described in the prophecy. ralsei makes explicit in ch5 that the heroes’ purpose is to stop the darkness, and here kris is, saying susie’s smile alone can blow all darkness away. susie is the “girl with hope crossed on her heart,” and here kris is, seeing her as a shining pinnacle of just that. that said, i do agree that kris’ guilt over working with the knight is a part of this. by trying to defy fate, kris might fear that they’ll both interpersonally and prophetically lose their connection to the “girl with hope crossed on her heart”. i think susie's sentiment here is one that really does go both ways.

susie, too, seems to fear that without the prophecy, she won’t be friends with ralsei and kris. susie, like the both of them, seems to want to defy fate but fear the consequences. she doesn’t like ribbons, but if the prophecy says she has to, she can just wear them as armbands, right?

but susie doesn’t just share kris’ hesitance to fully buck the prophecy. i think the sort of jealousy kris has now is meant to reflect the sort of jealousy susie used to have of them back before they became friends.

but there’s a bit more in ch5 that i find could add some interesting context to him, too. the initial bit that struck me, before i got into the dark-world segment, was the introduction of the festival king and queen tradition. for a long time, i couldn’t pin down why the festival was treated with a romantic connotation, but this seems to be its source. (it even comes with a couple’s parade!) contrary to popular belief, i feel that fate and founding fables in deltarune’s world are represented not by the dark but by the light that presides over it.

and of the lightners, asgore seems the primary originator and enforcer of this particular fable. he and toriel have won year after year, and his shop is named for his series of victories. to him, even kris and asriel exist in relation to this tradition.

according to noelle, asriel and dess were "supposed to win", too. no one outside of dess’ family seems to even think of her as anything other than “asriel’s girlfriend”.

this, then, frames kris and noelle’s childhood games of play-pretend in an interesting light. i’ve always been partial to the idea that spades and queen’s relationship was fated in some way – not that they didn’t love each other, necessarily, but that a romantic relationship is something they spawned in as having “because they were supposed to”. to me, it tracked with the arbitrary way a lot of the other couples were presented. similar to the prophecy and its many reinterpretations, the older children were "supposed" to follow in the footsteps of one party’s parents, the younger children followed in the footsteps of the older children, and the toys followed in the footsteps the children that played with them. even the character who mentions these games offhand is the herald of a weird-route-esque game, and said route is one where we coerce kris and noelle into performing a romantic relationship complete with wedding ring.

seeing the festival’s king-and-queen tradition in ch5 really tied this all together for me. queen calls spades her ex-husband “or something”, as though even she is somewhat aware of their relationship’s arbitrary nature. the two of them being tied together by fate is definitely a stronger read now than it was before. and in keeping with that, so too does the relationship between kris and noelle seem influenced by this tradition. they play pretend as a king and a queen, though noelle admits they were never sure of who should take which role. it’s all asgore ever talks about, especially when kris is alone with him, and ch5 draws more attention than ever to his symbolic weird-route connections. even susie tells kris that she’d been under the impression kris and noelle were a couple in a way that suggests such an expectation is self-evident in hometown. she hesitates around noelle because she fears noelle is someone a girl like her isn’t “supposed to” be with, but i think that she hesitates because she’s thinking “wait, but aren’t kris and noelle together?” too.

i don’t think everything between kris and noelle was caused by their parents, as evidenced by some of noelle’s new anecdotes. but noelle is a biased source of information, too. a lot of noelle’s coping mechanisms reason around ascribing herself agency in situations where she lacked it in a way that terrified her. their relationship is intentionally portrayed as very ambiguous.

but when we enter ch5’s dark world, i think we see another way in which spades follows in the tradition of “kings” that kris is familiar with. it seems easy to forget when one sees how flowery proudly declares he’s living completely on his own merits, but flower kingdom is shaped not only by its status as a light-world location cultivated by asgore but by kris’ “power of will,” too, their literal determining. elements from card kingdom that just shouldn’t be there, like the toy-based puzzles and “blocky foliage”, are. flowery is not unlike a more dutiful lancer. the dark-world forms of asgore and toriel, both of which show up in kris’ dark worlds, are even a queen and a king. kris looked at the place where their father lives and thought, “this should look like the place ruled over by a neglectful and cruel tyrant.”

of course, there are some key differences between the two. while spades is driven by vengeance quest on the lightners who have power over his king, asgore is the opposite, a powerful lightner driven by a quest for revenge against what he sees as darkness’ corruptive influence on his suburban small-town lifestyle (and thus, that power). they occupy different roles within the hierarchy that frame spades as a more sympathetic figure. but kris’ drawing of a line between the two of them is still significant to me. it only causes me to feel greater concern at the ways in which flowery and the other flowers desperately try to get him to let his scheming go.

when talking with sans about toriel, asgore treats her like a prize he must win – someone he must “make” love him again by any means necessary. he doubts toriel’s ability to financially support herself without him and his scheme to reclaim his position as police chief – a scheme she openly disapproves of – while claiming she “tries to hide it” and that he knows better. i don’t really know if baking is even something toriel would take to on her own terms – there’s a heavy indication in deltarune that toriel has a complicated relationship to the tasks expected of her as mother and housewife. but time and time again, asgore acts as though “his wife” is what toriel ought to be. he’ll even parade someone’s dead body around town if it means his way’ll win out in the end.

asgore is, i would argue, not particularly objectified here. instead, he acts with great entitlement over toriel. symbolically, we can even see this entitlement reflected in how asgore uses the festival’s traditions to name his shop – “flower king”. it is a monument not to toriel but to himself, and to his “kinghood”.

the vector for this scheming, more often than not, is kris. this is most directly reflected in flowery, who takes on similar roles to kris in asgore’s life. like them, flowery deals with the dichotomy of someone who wants asgore to let go of his ideals and who placates him by catering to those ideals simultaneously. (they even seem to have both learned from asgore to unfairly resent toriel for moving away from her role as housewife, albeit in different ways.) like a flower trapped in glass, kris has little power over their father. but he seems to primarily regard them as one of two things – a co-conspirator for his plans regarding toriel, and a symbol of his self-imposed role as a protector of his family against threats to the normalcy of his suburban life.

almost every scene we see involving the two of them centers one of these two things, with asgore paying minimal lip service to anything about kris that doesn’t involve him. (he gets, like, a half-a-point for being decent about ralsei’s transition, but that’s it.) while kris’ relationship with dess and subsequent reaction to what’d happened “that day” was significant enough for to be placed in therapy, asgore’s account of “that day” doesn’t even mention dess by name. it’s all about how he felt.

and while we don’t really know how asriel feels about his father, we do know that asgore heavily associates asriel with “old times.” whenever he lacks the upper hand in a situation with kris or toriel, asriel is his trump card. to me, it reads less that he’s doing this all for asriel’s sake and more than he’s using asriel to get the others to do what he wants. when asriel comes home, he says, things will go back to the way they were before. you’d like them to be nice for asriel, wouldn’t you? (and note how he almost always phrases it it as “comes home,” he says, not “visits” like toriel does.)

i’ve discussed it before, but it’s telling that asgore can only appreciate the flowers when they’re his “captive audience”. when people in asgore’s life can’t be his objects, he starts to lose interest in them. he is more than happy with the status quo that treats the darkness as a plight upon his slice of suburbia. while this is a position that makes asgore and the people around him miserable, certainly, it is still a position of power. his behavior reads differently than that of a darkner or a darkner-adjacent being like flowery, powerless beings fated to try and guess at what would please the lightners. toriel, asriel, kris, and the flowers are all at the mercy of what he decides to do. after all, asgore could genuinely begin to consider what others want instead of what he wants. he could let go of toriel for her own sake. he could let go of the idea that asriel cannot escape his birthplace. he could see flowery as a young man chained to his light. but if he stopped clinging to his power, he would have to question the foundations upon which the light world is built. and, well, he just can’t do that.