#Asgore wants to “go look again”... Carol has a string-theory-cork-board in her bedroom...

[eesbegovic]

Carol Holiday is a red herring.

Carol Holiday is not the Roaring Knight, or the mysterious Caller. The scene with her in the Holiday Mansion is a red herring.

Evidence for this:

In the Weird Route, the normal end-of-chapter phone call is replaced by one, implied to be from Carol, that: - Uses the normal text box - Uses the Carol SFX - Is only concerned with Noelle and the Festival, not any of Kris's Dark World adventures or their mysterious promise to the Caller. None of this is consistent with Carol being the mysterious Caller we see on the normal route.

From a Doylist perspective... Chapter 4 sets up many mysteries: What is the missing end of the prophecy? Why is Kris sabotaging the player? Why does Asgore have a Black Shard? It is not congruous for the answer to one mystery (who is the Caller?) to be handed to the player on a silver platter, in an unmissable cut scene that could not be less subtle. - Contrast the Carol scene with Asgore's: He has an easy-to-miss monologue in the Holiday mansion that suggests he's up to something, and then there's a second, even easier to to miss monologue that ends with the revelation that he has a Black Shard. The whole sequence raises more questions than answers.

Seriously, there are just so many alternate explanations for everything Carol says or does that could be evidence she's the knight or the mysterious caller. In reverse chronological order: - Carol reminds Kris that they're welcome any time because they're a longtime friend of the family: a fixture from the earlier, happier days when Dess was still around. And also they're her co-conspirator Asgore's kid. And also she just went nuclear on Susie and is explicitly apologizing for her outburst. - (The "YOU" in "YOU are welcome" is highlighted in red for the same reason the "slashed" in Toriel's "The tires looked like they'd been slashed" in Chapter 2 was highlighted in red: to catch the player's eye.) - Carol doesn't want Susie associating with Noelle because Susie is the infamous town delinquent. (She's already wanted for SEVERAL counts of comic mischief! After Carol went to so much trouble to clean up the town!) - Carol is furious that Susie had Dess's guitar because, my god, it's Dess's guitar. And Susie is playing it. She is desecrating one of Carol's last mementos of her missing daughter. - She left work early because there was just a power outage in her home - her castle, her fortress, the place she stores everything too valuable to be kept at city hall - and she was, presumably, informed by Asgore and/or an automated alert. - (OK, this one is kind of a stretch, but tell me you can't imagine a scene in Chapter 5 where Asgore says something to the effect of "Carol, you didn't have to rush home as soon as I called"... and she just replies "given the forces we're messing with, I certainly did.")

Carol and Asgore are collaborating on something (he, Toriel, and Rudy each comment on this), but Asgore doesn't act like Kris is in on it while Carol doesn't act like she's trying to keep the "Asgore plan" and a (hypothetical) "Kris plan" separate.