kenomacreature

[kenomacreature]

YES, IT REALLY IS JUST KRIS

No, Deltarune is not a whodunnit mystery

(The beautiful art for this banner was made by CursedMemes420 on Discord)

Okay, I didn't think I'd have to do this, but it turns out the new chapters of Deltarune are apparently an entire two months away still so we all have some time to kill. I'm going to use it to try to convince the last remaining fence-sitters that Kris is, in fact, the Knight, and hopefully maybe even convert some doubters.

The idea that Kris is the Knight has figured prominently in my other writing on Deltarune, such as my essay titled The Magic Circle, and my corollary speculation post about the metaphysics of Deltarune. To be frank, I think reading those two would be a much better use of your time, because I cover a lot of the evidence there too and utilize it to actually present an in-depth analysis of what the game's narrative is about. This post here will be purely lazer-focused on making the case for Kris being the Knight, presenting all the evidence I can think of and debunking the major counterarguments.

Let's begin.

THE POSITIVE CASE FOR KRIS BEING THE KNIGHT

Kris creates a Fountain on-screen

This is the requirement for a character being the Knight and Kris is the only one who explicitly clears it ��� we don’t even have a reason beyond order of elimination to suspect anyone else at the moment.

Kris does it on the Weird Route too, and in spite of Ralsei having explained the ramifications

This tells us that Kris is extremely committed to making fountains and must have some strong reason to be doing what they're doing, something which takes precedence in their mind over potentially risking the lives of other people, including close friends and relatives. On the Weird Route, the risk they're taking is obvious, but I also want to remind people that on the Normal Route - if Kris isn't the Knight - they're creating a Fountain despite another active Fountain creator still being out there, which is arguably even more dangerous and morally objectionable; Kris would be risking omnicide here.

Kris planned the Fountain ahead of time

Between Chapter 1 and 2, Kris plugs in the TV which they later make the focal point of the Fountain they create. This existing as a plot point at all very strongly points to Kris knowing how the mechanics of Dark World creation work prior to Queen’s explanation. On top of this, them eating the pie just so happens to later give them the crucial distraction needed to be able to slash the tires and have Susie stay over. Then, at the beginning of Chapter 2, the narration (which is often aligned with Kris's thoughts) says that "it is not yet time to wash your hands" when you try to do so, further implying that the chapter's ending is already planned.

Kris generally seems to know a lot of stuff that they shouldn’t

For example, they know exactly what’s going on with our control over them, enough to be able to remove or block our control when they need to, and they're confident enough in their abilities that they taunt us about it, smiling at the camera and such. This meta-awareness could potentially be explained by their numerous connections to Gaster (for example, Monster Teen anxiously mentioning that something happened with Kris in relation to the Bunker). Kris also seems to know exactly how Dark Worlds are influenced by Light World objects, as seen in the following point:

Kris’s Fountain creation method is deliberately paralleled with the Knight’s in Chapter 2

Kris plugs in the TV and leaves it on to ensure that they become the Darkner villain - as it turns out, this is exactly what the Knight does with the laptop in the computer lab. Setting aside the fact that Kris is using the Knight's exact methods, how does Kris even know to do this? Kris does it regardless of whether you inspect the laptop and find out what the Knight was doing. How are they so confident about their ability to properly set up this Dark World, if they've never done it before?

Kris uses the Knight's weapon and tool of choice

Queen says that the Knight used a blade to create their fountain, and shows an image of an identical looking knife to Kris’s. Later, we see Kris use that same knife to create the Chapter 3 Fountain. Kris is also named after a type of knife, and is heavily associated with them in general. Toby laying it on this thick would frankly just be kind of dishonest if it didn't have any meaning.

Kris does not have an alibi for the creation of Chapter 2’s fountain

Kris was established to have done something mysterious and physically taxing with a knife over the previous night. Lo and behold, the next day, someone has used a knife to create a Dark Fountain. Just a tad suspicious, maybe? This is why a number of players figure out that Kris is the Knight well ahead of the actual reveal - because the game never gives a satisfying answer to a question it established (what was Kris doing last night?), while providing clear hints (the knife, the TV flavor text) which point towards the correct solution so its reveal doesn't feel contrived or like it's coming out of nowhere. Some Deltarune fans call Kris Knight "obvious" - but they're evaluating it on blatantly unfair pretenses. Kris Knight was surprising, you just can't expect to cash out an already-revealed twist for a second surprise.

Kris’s soulless scenes seem tied to Fountain creation specifically

Chapter 2’s ending seems very much intended to be continuous with Chapter 1’s, answering mysteries which the previous ending left us with. In both instances they use their knife to do stuff, flash their red eyes, and taunt the player.

Kris actually is a knight

Kris wears knight attire in the Dark World and Toby has referred to Kris as a “sword-wielding fantasy knight”. This is not a trivial point; many of Toby’s biggest inspirations, such as Illusion of Gaia and LIVE A LIVE, figure knights and knight-like imagery very prominently, so the symbology of knights in fantasy seems like something he's specifically interested in, including the fact that they are frequently heroic protagonists. And yet most other Knight candidates have no clear or satisfying explanation for why they would be dubbed a “knight”, and why Toby would be choosing that narrative archetype for them. Certainly none of them have the advantage of being a knight protagonist, which leads us to:

Toby is clearly interested in subversions of the protagonist and antagonist roles

Discussing the SNES game LIVE A LIVE, Toby said this (and I must warn the reader of some implied spoilers):

As far as individual chapters go, I really loved the “Middle Ages” chapter. After all the scenarios with atypical game protagonists, finally revealing a standard fantasy setting with a knight hero as one of the “final chapters” was such an excellent twist for a JRPG, and a perfect lead up to the actual last chapter itself. To think that our heroic knight of justice would end up like that… It’s the kind of wonderful betrayal of expectations that influenced me when I created UNDERTALE as well. You know, the thought process of, “to think the protagonist could actually...” Anyway, I don’t think I’m supposed to say any more about that. To be honest, if anything this LIVE A LIVE influence is even stronger in my current work, DELTARUNE. Not only is the story separated into different chapters, but the player’s character is also a sword-wielding fantasy knight, who may play another role than just a simple “hero”.

To be clear, (and again, spoilers!) Toby here is referring to a knight character who goes from being a heroic protagonist to the main villain of the game (whose title is "the Lord of Dark").

OFF, another big inspiration for Toby, features a playable character who is established as firmly separate from the player. As the game progresses you are invited to question their actions and whether you should truly be siding with them.

In moon: Remix RPG Adventure, the traditional JRPG hero turns out to be the game’s antagonist.

Metal Gear Solid 2 complicates the player’s sense of morality and desires with what the “game” pressures them into doing.

And in Toby’s own Earthbound Halloween Hack, the game constantly questions whether what you’re doing is truly “heroic” or right.

It's strongly implied the Knight did not enter the Dark Worlds they created

This is clearest in Chapter 2, where Queen says she doesn't know the Knight's plans and is just guessing based on their actions (which she also recorded via the laptop's camera). Instead, the Knight is implied (in the laptop flavor text, for instance) to have simply manipulated the room and that this is mostly how they exert their will on the worlds they create. This of course sheds new light on how we are to understand Dark Worlds and alters what we thought we knew about Chapter 1 and Fountains generally. And it's all perfectly consistent with Kris’s methods at the end of Chapter 2.

The Darkner bosses are corrupted by the Fountains themselves, not an encounter with the Knight

Even though the Darkner bosses so far purport to serve the Knight, something which has been repeatedly emphasized is that this is not because the Knight sought them out and convinced them to be their servant, but because the Fountains themselves had a corrupting influence. In other words, the Darkner bosses are generated by the Fountain as villainous servants of the Knight.

This is supported both by in-game evidence:

Queen wasn't always so… harsh.

No, she WAS! She just got WORSE somehow!

It wasn't 'til that DARK FOUNTAIN showed up,

That she started going into overdrive.

"Knight" this, "Knight" that, "Fountain" that…

Like, what does that Knight have going for it that I don't!? C'mon!!

And external evidence:

Timestamped Undertale 6th Anniversary stream, where Toby says the Fountain changed King

Kris being the Knight fits well with the storytelling subtext

Deltarune is loaded with subtext about the Dark Worlds being like fictional stories or dreams, and Kris being the Knight is a great fit for this because it implies that they are creating Fountains specifically to be sealed. Their connections with Ralsei (which I'll explain later) also imply that they are guiding/directing the adventures themself. This also opens up plausible speculation about their motivations, such as wanting to get stronger by leveling up or populating Castle Town.

Kris’s CD Bagel noise is the same glissando jingle that plays at the end of the scrapped animated intro

If you don't know about the scrapped intro, here's a timestamped link to the part in the 6th anniversary stream where Toby discusses it. Basically, a jingle which played during a part where the Knight looked down at the Fun Gang from atop a staircase was repurposed in Chapter 2 as a special jingle for Kris. Below is a comparison between the two (I'm not sure who made it, so sorry for not crediting!), and an illustration I threw together of how I imagine the scene looking like.

Kris is arguably the only one who makes sense for the scrapped intro

If the Knight was seen on-screen, even just as a silhouette and even heavily armored, it would reveal too much about their body shape and size to have it be a functional mystery, and it would ruin the “red herring” that it’s Kris in Chapter 2 (the sole exception being if the Knight was the Vessel). Not to mention that Tenna, who would be featured on the staircase, is not created by the Knight if Kris isn't the Knight, so their inclusion is very questionable. Meanwhile, the appearance of "dual" or "split" selves is a common trope in anime intros, so both LW and DW Kris being featured in the same scene would be understood as metaphorical by the viewer.

Ralsei has extremely suspicious ties to Kris

For starters, Ralsei is the same height as them, looks like a typical Dreemurr, and his name is an anagram of Asriel. It seems very likely because of his horns that Ralsei is Kris’s red horn headband, which represents Kris’s desire to be closer to their family and community. From this, it's a pretty intuitive jump to assume that Kris created him, and thus the Grand Fountain as well.

Ralsei initiates cutscenes in both Chapter 1 and 2 where the player looks away from Kris and Ralsei, and upon returning back to their viewpoints finds that Ralsei has been secretly speaking with Kris alone. Ralsei also seemingly lies in Chapter 2 about having “sensed a dark presence” when explaining why he arrived in the Cyber World - what this line implies about when the fountain was created does not make logical sense with the timeline (we'll get more into this later). All in all it seems rather likely that Ralsei is working for Kris, and has been tasked with keeping the player "on track" (but still invested).

Kris is heavily tied to Chara, Undertale’s morally ambiguous player character

Chara – like Kris if they’re the Knight – had an incredibly ambitious and morally questionable plan which they were working towards, and they also have a knack for taunting or rejecting the player with scary smiles and red eyes. Kris being the Knight seems like it’s continuous with the moral ambiguity which Toby clearly seems interested in exploring with his human protagonists.

Some features of the Fountain seem to point to them springing from Kris’s “will”

For example, the consistent emergence of secret bosses located underground with a shared origin story about being contacted by Gaster, where they learn about their lack of control over fate and their subordinate position to some higher entities, has a lot of parallels with Kris’s predicament, and their ties to Gaster. Is there some subconscious reconstruction happening here? I talk about this in my Magic Circle essay.

The question of the Knight is not presented as a whodunnit mystery.

So far, there’s been exactly one major candidate, and they’ve hoarded basically all of the evidence. The remaining characters are left fighting for scraps – the most popular non-Kris candidate is a minor NPC who happens to say some thematically relevant and evocative stuff and has minor ties to the Fountain locations. But there’s no reason in the first place to suspect that there’s anyone who knows about how Dark Fountains work other than the currently established characters, and even less to suspect they’d have the motivation to create them. We barely even understood who the Knight was and what they were doing until approximately two seconds before it was revealed to be Kris (and no, that’s not a red herring just because you say so).

COMMON ARGUMENTS AGAINST KRIS BEING THE KNIGHT

“Any Lightner can create fountains!”

This is true, no doubt. The problem with this line of argumentation is that it does not suffice to dismiss the overwhelming evidence for Kris being the Knight. Kris is not suspected because they’re a Lightner, or even just because they create a Fountain. They are suspected because there are quite literally no other Lightners with any concrete positive evidence for them being the Knight except Kris. When push comes to shove, there’s just not a compelling reason to believe a more complicated alternative explanation for Kris’s actions other than the simple one that is them being the Knight. Occam’s razor says: give preferential treatment to those hypotheses of equal explanatory power which require less assumptions.

“Kris being the Knight is a red herring!”

You can feel that way, but this isn’t an argument. The idea that the Knight’s true reveal is coming sometime later is just baselessly assumed and used to cash out the red herring objection. Again, there’s nothing wrong with thinking that it’s true – it’s okay to have hunches and intuitions – but you can’t use it as an argument, because it isn’t one. 

“Kris isn’t evil!” / “I just don’t want Kris to be an antagonist.”

Again, it’s hard to argue with feelings. It bears mentioning that we really don’t know anything about the motivations of Kris if they’re the Knight. We don’t know whether they’re an “evil” bad guy. Personally, I find it very unlikely, because Toby is typically in the business of writing sympathetic characters even when they do bad stuff, and Kris is already in a fucked up situation just by virtue of us controlling them. If Toby can make Asgore (of child murdering fame) sympathetic, I’m sure he can manage with Kris, and we’ll all be happier for it because conflict and ambivalence creates interesting stories.

“The Knight wants to cause the Roaring, and Kris clearly doesn’t want that!”

We actually know neither of these supposed facts. Our information about the Knight comes from King and Queen, who both quickly prove themselves to be out of their depth and not very knowledgeable about what they’re doing. Queen herself strongly implies she has never even met the Knight. All we know for certain is what the Knight has done – create Dark Fountains. As for Kris, whether they’ve done or said things which would indicate they don’t want the Roaring to happen, the fact is that with this much evidence against them, all their other actions are called into question. That said, who’s to even say Kris as the Knight wants the Roaring in the first place? Because their name is the Roaring Knight? That could easily just be a moniker for their storytelling purposes.

“When Kris dies, the Roaring happens! How could that happen if Kris was the Knight?”

More accurately, when the SOUL shatters, “the world was covered in darkness” (an obvious double entendre for the game screen going black). But assuming that the Roaring does happen, this doesn’t seem to contradict anything. I mean, Kris’s SOUL is the only thing that can seal the Fountains, and every chapter boss so far explicitly intends to cause the Roaring. It makes sense that the Roaring would happen if they were left unopposed and their Fountains unsealed.

“How does Kris know where to make the Fountains ahead of time?”

This is one of the few objections to Kris Knight I can genuinely respect. I mean, it is quite strange that Kris and Susie always end up going to where the Fountains are through pure accident (Alphys and Noelle respectively send us to the locations where they are, and Kris can't have known Susie would stay over). To explain this, I would point to the fact that Kris almost certainly has had an encounter with Gaster, and one of the main effects of being “Gasterpilled” that we see is having precognitive powers and being able to read “FATE”. This also explains Kris’s extremely contrived action of eating the pie in anticipation of Susie coming over (which is something, to be clear, we need to be able to explain regardless of whether or not Kris is the Knight).

“Kris just plugged in the TV to watch it while they ate pie!”

Disregarding the fact that this would be legitimately horrible storytelling, this is objectively false because Susie points out that the remote is dusty and hasn’t seen use in ages.

“Kris was just preparing a sleepover by plugging in the TV!”

So was eating the pie a part of it too somehow, or just a very lucky coincidence? How can this explain Kris making the Fountain on the Weird Route, and people’s often-cited idea that they are doing this in some bid to warn Undyne? Are we just fifteen-layer deep in coincidences here? This doesn’t seem likely, to put it mildly. There is no reason for Toby to make this a plot point other than to establish Kris knowing Fountain mechanics ahead of time.

“King and/or Queen didn’t recognize Kris!”

This is almost certainly because neither one have actually met the Knight. Queen strongly implies this in her dialogue, and it already seems likely from the fact that we don’t even know of any way to exit those two Fountains except by sealing them – Ralsei says as much. It seems much more likely that the two are, as Queen says, intuiting the will of the Knight from their actions, such as creating Dark Fountains in the first place, and from things like how they arrange the rooms and the Will they imbue the Fountains with.

“But the Japanese translation–”

Yes, King says “command” instead of “will” – except this is every bit as ambiguous as the English dialogue. The substance of the dialogue remains identical: King thinks he knows the will, or command, or goal of the Knight, and thinks he’s fulfilling it. Both lines retain the Biblical overtones, and there’s still nothing proving they’ve actually met. 

“How does the Queen know to call the Knight ‘the Roaring Knight’ if they haven’t met?”

Another objection I can respect. There isn't a particularly clear answer for it, but my personal argument would be that Darkners seem to be generated with certain “inherited” knowledge, derived from a Fountain’s will. If you want to hear the in-depth case for that, you can check out my other essays mentioned at the beginning.  

"Spamton's line about communion clearly hints at Alvin Knight! Spamton has met the Knight!"

Spamton's line about communion is not referring to the Christian ritual, it's referring to Gaster (who Spamton reveres as some sort of deity, clearly). Let's look at the full context:

I USED TO BE NOTHING BUT THE E_MAIL GUY, NOW I'M THE [[It Burns! Ow! Stop! Help Me! It Burns!]] GUY!

[[Amazed at thi5 amazing transformation? You too can]] HAVE A [[Communion]] WITH [[Unintelligble Laughter]]

SOON I'LL EVEN SURPASS THAT DAMNED [[Clown Around Town!]]

BUT UNLIKE HIM I'M GONNA [[Shoot For the Sky!]] AND GET ON THE PATH TO ...

[[The Big One]]

I'LL GET SO. I'LL GET SO. I'LL GET SO. I'LL GET SO. I'LL GET SO. I'LL GET SO.

[[Hyperlink blocked.]]

SPEAKING OF [[Communion]]

KRIS, DID YOU KNOW THAT THE KNIGHT...

No, I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I didn't mean to --

TOO MANY EXCESS VACATION DAYS?? TAKE A GOD DAMN VACATION STRAIGHT TO HELL

Spamton's "communion" is clearly alluding to his contact with the "someone" who also contacted Jevil. Likewise, "unintelligible laughter" calls to mind mus_smile, Gaster's signature audio track which is actually a highly corrupted version of Muffet's laugh.

As for what this is communicating about the Knight, it seems to be alluding to them being connected with Gaster - which is true under Kris Knight.

“Kris was scared of the Fountain at the beginning of Chapter 1!”

Since Kris is easily the prime suspect when it comes to being the Knight, it would be absurd to just take their actions at face value. To be frank, we don’t even really need to know what Kris was thinking here, because when a case is resting on as firm a foundation as Kris Knight is, odd behavior becomes something you work to try to explain or reconcile with all the other evidence you have; without the foundation destroyed, the hypothesis can’t be dismissed.

Anyway, the most reasonable explanation seems to me to be that Kris was goading Susie into entering the closet first, since she was clearly reluctant to. Kris can’t risk Susie not falling into the Dark World with Kris, so she needs to go first.

“Kris warns the Kings about the Roaring in Chapter 1!”

This one is subject to the same scrutiny as I described above, but this line has also been massively decontextualized and blown out of proportion; this is a very minor piece of dialogue where the Kings are vainly worrying about their jewels and diamonds and asking Kris about them, and Kris seems to dryly respond that their world is in danger – in other words, that there are bigger things to worry about than their jewels. It’s a cute little joke, and hardly debunks Kris being the Knight. Kris is just roleplaying the hero they’re supposed to be in the Dark World narrative (just as I think they ‘roleplay’ the Knight!)

“Kris warns Undyne about the Dark Worlds and the Knight! Why would they lie?”

Could it have something to do with the Chapter 2 ending where they stage a break-in and presumably lure concerned individuals into the Dark World? Concerned individuals like... the one Toriel called shortly before? I mean, it would be really convenient for Kris if they could guarantee a way for people not to suspect them of being the Knight if that’s who they actually were…

This is not to mention that we're the ones who make Kris say that to Undyne. We have to go out of our way to meet Undyne and pick that dialogue option. But either way, it evidently fits with Kris’s plans, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t strain to say it or something like that.

“Queen says that the Knight created the Fountain that same day!”

Past midnight is still on the same day. Remember that Queen is a computer.

Also, I just want to point out that if the Fountain wasn't created the previous night (regardless of whether it was Kris who did it), the Cyber World timeline seems extremely rushed and shaky. Did a whole rebellion against Queen really form in like, 30 minutes or whatever? And there are more issues with the timeline we'll get into in a second.

“How did Kris have access to the Library?”

The same way we have access to both the School and Library after hours (no one is working at either at the end of Chapter 2) – nobody seems to bother to lock the doors. As per Alphys, there’s no crime in Hometown, so maybe we shouldn't be too surprised.

“How did Kris walk all that way in zombie mode?”

We have no reason to be putting arbitrary limiters on what Kris can or can’t do when soulless, so this is just kinda making stuff up. Kris is doing anime leaps from windowsills; I think they’re fine walking a relatively short distance. In Chapter 1 they also do the strained zombie walk before they even rip the soul out, so this seems mostly to be a presentational thing.

“Why couldn’t Ralsei sense the Library Fountain if Kris created it the previous night?”

As I hinted earlier, Ralsei’s line is nonsensical. For what he’s implying to be the case, it would have to mean that the Knight created the Fountain in the time it takes for Kris and Susie to walk from the Supply Closet to the School’s exit (because we can hear the traffic jam outside, and we know the Annoying Dog went into the Dark World before us, still in the car) – a patently absurd proposition that doesn’t even seem logically possible, even assuming optimal timing. It would also mean Berdly and Noelle were in the room when the Fountain was created, which leads us to:

“Closet Knight!”

Black Chestnut’s video on Closet Knight is definitive as far as I’m concerned, he goes into great detail in explaining how and why it makes absolutely no sense at all and is riddled with holes.

IN CONCLUSION...

Kris being the Knight is a conclusion that is surprisingly marginalized in the Deltarune theorizing community for how intuitive, well-supported and repeatedly suggested by the game it is. In many circles, you tend to get shut down or labelled a "casual" who "doesn't understand the game" if you attempt to start a discussion about Kris Knight, or put forward ideas which are premised on it. If I'm allowed to pontificate a little, I can only imagine that this is because people are simply really attached to the idea that the Knight plotline is a whodunnit which will result in some surprise external villain for the Fun Gang. People have been daydreaming about boss battles against the Knight ever since the release of Chapter 1 nearly seven years ago; to speculative headcanons like that, Kris being the Knight is a rude splash of water to the face, so it perhaps is understandable that people would reject it as "not feeling right". At the very least, though, I hope that even if I haven't convinced you that Kris is the Knight, I have at least convinced you that they can't be so easily dismissed as a candidate.

Thanks for reading! This post is pretty long and I know this topic gets some people heated very quick, so I appreciate the show of faith in sticking to the end.

[kenomacreature]

ELYSIUM ESSAY: KILLERS OF THE FUTURE

On the pale's connection to nihilism, and their shared theological origins.

This essay contains spoilers for Elysium Corona Mundi; that is to say, the video game Disco Elysium (2019), as well as the novel Püha ja õudne lõhn (2013), better known as The Sacred and Terrible Air.

My interpretation is heavily informed by the analysis of the pale outlined in ghelgheli’s incredible Introductory Entroponetics. Though it is not strictly required reading for this essay, there will be resonances between the two, and I heavily recommend reading it to gain a better understanding of the pale as both a diegetic and thematic element in the storytelling of Elysium.

Introduction

This is where nihilism leads. It is no longer what could be, or what could not be. It is. [1]

So says Ambrosius Saint-Miro, Elysium’s final innocence, in the ninth and titular chapter of Sacred and Terrible Air, shortly after declaring an atomic war explicitly aiming to expand the pale across the planet’s (?) entire surface. The following chapters depict a world in the process of being wiped out. Nihilism succeeds, it seems – in what Ambrosius would have one believe was an inevitable victory. But though we know now where nihilism leads, one is conversely compelled to wonder: from where did it originate?

Here in our world, nihilism is often thought of as a phenomenon of modernity, a vague force that’s risen to prominence in an increasingly secular and existentially reflexive world. The pale is treated in much the same way by most analyses of Elysium; people suppose it to be an allegory for some offspring of our modern (or postmodern) world. Interpretations differ; some point to the above-mentioned conceptualization of modern nihilism, others might think of Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism and hauntology, others still might have an extremely specialized (and limited) metaphor in mind like social media. Many combine and blend together these various readings to their liking, but most seem to agree on the fundamental point that the pale’s function as a narrative device is to communicate something about the cultural condition of modernity. While it’s doubtlessly right that the pale is used for such narrative purposes, what's at risk of being forgotten here is the fact that the pale is distinctly not a modern phenomenon in the universe of Elysium. In fact, it seemingly predates recorded history. How do we make sense of that fact?

To be clear: I'm not looking to explain what the pale is - you can read ghelgheli's brilliant essay for an attempt at that - what I wish to do is propose an explanation for how the pale developed through Elysium's history to encompass two-thirds of the world. To that end I will be looking at the pale through its association with the concept of nihilism, a connection repeatedly emphasized in the text, and to explore its historical character I will be delving into the thought of what was arguably its first major theorist.

Nihilism and Morality

Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed beneath, masked by, dressed up as, faith in “another” or “better” life. Hatred of “the world,” condemnations of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented the better to slander this life, at bottom a craving for the nothing, for the end, for respite, for “the sabbath of sabbaths” [2]

Nihilism really became a *thing* in the 19th century with Russian nihilism, a radical socio-political movement grown from a milieu of moral and epistemological skepticism, seeking to tear down enshrined institutions and cultural values. While I don’t intend to explore the subject in depth right now, it bears mentioning that Elysium’s portrayal of Current Century nihilism as more of an organized political movement rather than the vague dispositional boogeyman that nihilism is so often conceptualized as today takes some clear influences from the history of the early nihilist movement in Russia; Martin Luiga’s Full-Core State Nihilist depicts the countercultural movement in the process of transition into state hegemony following Ambrosius’ ascent to power. Nevertheless, though lines were often blurry between nihilism and more radical political activity here in our world, by itself the former tended to lack a constructive side: it was a movement centered on negation above all. [3] The name ‘nihilism’ was popularized by Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, where it was used to describe a disillusioned younger generation, and that sense of disillusionment is what has persisted in the image of nihilism to this day.

Eventually, Friedrich Nietzsche incorporated the concept of nihilism into his philosophy after hearing reports of the Russian movement, and it's arguably his interpretation of the concept which has really had the most influence both academically and colloquially. I won’t concern myself much with whether or not Nietzsche’s formulation is truly accurate to the historical character of the original movement; while he may have played fast and loose with the term, I do believe it’s his idea which ultimately reflects the core of Elysium’s nihilism.

Something Nietzsche held, in stark contrast to the understanding of nihilism as an exclusive phenomenon of modernity, was that it was not something new. Rather, it was only the most recent form of a far older idea. To Nietzsche, nihilism was immutably tied up with Christianity, and to what he called slave morality.

Nietzsche had postulated something of an (abstracted) origin story of morality. [4] He starts from the idea of two groups: haves and have-nots, masters and slaves, the powerful and the weak – and he traces the beginnings of morality to the concept of the “good.”

Well, what is good? To Nietzsche, the idea of the good begins simply as that which is synonymous with one’s nature. Or in more immediately intuitive terms, perhaps, what is good begins as what is good for oneself. A way of reflecting yourself in the world around you; all is good that is conducive to your own justice, your own benefit, your own power. This is to say that the concept of the good was affirmative, positive, constructive. The bad, by contrast, was an afterthought; it was simply a word to describe all that was not good, or worse yet hostile to that which was good. This affirmative morality was the domain of those who held power: indeed, its very conception was an act of power and domination. Their conception of the bad encompassed the character of those lower than them on the social hierarchy; the powerless and enslaved masses. Importantly, the condition of being enslaved was what was seen as bad – slavery as a social relation was not. And importantly, “bad” for the masters did not have any inculpatory dimension: people’s badness was not ontologically wrong, it did not call for punishment, it did not rouse one to righteous anger. Far from it; a predator does not resent its prey for being weak, after all.

Contrasting this, Nietzsche describes another sort of morality which takes as its basis the exact same content of that which is good in the masters’ morality; only, it no longer goes by the name “good.” This morality has reversed the traditional axes of valuation – but what was previously “good” is not just called “bad” now, either. The negative axis, which the masters termed bad, is substituted for a new concept: evil. The slaves, weary of life and helpless in fighting their oppressors, develop a deep-seated resentment for the masters which festers inside of them and can only be expressed through an imaginative capacity. It is thus that the slaves (in collaboration with a similarly impotent priestly faction of the masters) mendaciously turn the dominant morality against itself. Everything synonymous with their masters becomes evil: intrinsically, immutably wrong, and blameworthy. And its opposite – the good – is an afterthought: being good simply consists in not being evil. In this way, slave morality is premised on negation. This is Nietzsche’s (very truncated and simplified – because this essay can only be so long) psychological explanation for what eventually is crystallized in Christianity.

The idea of ressentiment is core; a hateful, vindictive, yet impotent desire for revenge. Also important is the promise of relief. Not only is satisfaction taken from the fantasy of one’s oppressors burning in Hell for eternity, but also in the idea of eternal reward, eternal rest, eternal peace. All that which one could not have in this life, bequeathed infinitely. Those are the engines which power slave morality for the next centuries. Though it achieves cultural victory with the coming-into-power of Christianity, Nietzsche describes these opposed modes of valuation duking it out on the battlefield of History for thousands of years; through different ages and societies, the dominant morality was invariably some uneasy mixture of the two. Slave morality is eventually perfected in the bourgeois class and achieves victory and dominance with the French Revolution, before culminating in its own self-immolation. The search for Truth uncovers the illusory quality of God – and from his rotting carcass, secular nihilism emerges like a butterfly from chrysalis, its theological shell cast off. While God and the afterlife may no longer be sustainable ideas, the rejection of the material world remains for the nihilists. Life-denial remains.

On the supposed innocence of Innocentic Rule 

What if a symptom of regression were inherent in the “good,” likewise a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, through which the present was possibly living at the expense of the future? The desire for a unio mystica with God is the desire of the Buddhist for nothingness, Nirvana - and no more! [4]

How are Nietzsche’s ideas relevant to Elysium? We should be careful in applying them since, after all, Elysium’s history developed differently to ours. That said, it can’t have been too differently. Communism is a thing, along with its associated historical materialism, which means that the development of classes proceeded along more or less similar lines – from the specialization of labor, civilization is birthed in antiquity alongside class distinctions, slavery emerges from civilization's necessities, serfdom becomes dominant as slavery declines, the merchant class of the bourgeoisie comes into tension with the aristocracy, and finally the proletariat is born from the decline of serfdom. Likewise, we have evidence of slave morality: life-denial as virtue which secures a better afterlife, [5] the heaven and hell dyad [6] and the monotheistic god [7] are all ideas we see crop up from time to time. And, of course, overt nihilism becomes dominant near the end of Elysium’s history, a situation which Nietzsche viewed as a sort of end state for slave morality.

To get to the root of how slave morality might’ve developed in Elysium, it seems prudent to travel back to the beginning of its recorded history, to the Perikarnassian. Indeed, we find that 'Pius' is said to have invented the idea of the monotheistic god and the equality of all men before it; [8] a surefire sign of slave morality. Now, to be fair, the Perikarnassian and Elysium’s antiquity in general is shrouded in mystery, and it’s dangerous to presume too much about their beliefs. Given that 8,000 years ago is remarkably early for the invention of a monotheistic god compared to our world (where Judaism and Christianity only came to prominence ca. 2,500 and 2,000 years ago respectively) it may even be that this is an historical revision of some sort.

Regardless, Perikarnassianism is always emphasized as a theology, [9] and the one thing we can (with relative certainty) say they founded is the innocentic system. The true novelty of the Perikarnassian, thus, was the view of History as finite and teleological; the future no longer a ceaseless, unknowable onslaught on the present, but a distant destination, a promise. Potentialities erode; in the ecclesiastic view, events move along a fixed track. God has a plan and the innocence carries it out.

Let’s inquire into the name innocence for a second. What does it actually mean? Ambrosius has something curious to say about it in his speech to the citizens of the world: “I am innocent, and now you are too.” [10] What this connotes to me is a certain psychological function for those who accept innocentic rule. The Perikarnassian must have emerged from a society of widespread suffering, presumably abounding with slavery and other brutally pronounced forms of class domination, with no relief in sight. Unlike the communists of modernity, a working class revolution was literally unthinkable for the laborers of antiquity, since surplus extraction was absolutely vital for the functioning of ancient civilization. What is left but to reject the world and place faith in death itself? Such (I postulate) was the Perikarnassian zeitgeist; rejection of material existence. Nietzsche always emphasized that people can suffer through anything, so long as they believe that suffering to be meaningful. And I think this is precisely what the idea of the innocence provided: a meaning for one’s place in the world, in history. It said: you are okay. You suffer now, but that suffering is necessary. Your existence is not arbitrary; it is positioned on a path that is proceeding righteously towards liberation. The basic idea behind the innocentic system is that people defer responsibility for their own existence to an innocence, which redeems it as necessary (and thus innocent) by virtue of their own inherent necessity (thus innocence). I also believe (assuming that the Perikarnassian really was the first monotheist) that followers were assured that upon their own death, they would be reunited with God, and that the destination of History was a universal reunion in divinity, a perfectation; in other words, I think the Perikarnassian faith developed Elysium’s first robust eschatology.

We know that the pale was first studied in Perikarnassian antiquity. But there’s something peculiar about the information we get: study of the pale only reaches back 6,000 years, 2,000 years after the Perikarnassian was appointed innocence. 2,000 years is a long time. We know that by the time the pale was being studied, it surrounded the Perikarnassian super-isola, even if its inhabitants were only aware of it to the west. [11] But did the same apply when the Perikarnassian was coming into power? My proposal is that the first major expansion of the pale was the result of the invention of innocentic rule. Through a rejection of material existence, and belief in its eventual end, possible futures were narrowed down, feeding the pale. In a world like Elysium’s where thoughts have extra-physical properties, it perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise if the first step on the road towards apocalypse was the widespread belief in its inevitability.

Nihilist Universalism

Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole. If I am a worker, for instance, I may choose to join a Christian rather than a Communist trade union. And if, by that membership, I choose to signify that resignation is, after all, the attitude that best becomes a man, that man’s kingdom is not upon this earth, I do not commit myself alone to that view. Resignation is my will for everyone, and my action is, in consequence, a commitment on behalf of all mankind. [12]

The nihilists of Elysium's modernity understand themselves to be rebels, breaking with the past in radical fashion. I suspect they’re really anything but. They are, rather, the culmination of the past 8,000 years of cultural development. Ambrosius Saint-Miro understood this fundamentally, and though we should be careful not to just take him at this word, I really can’t disagree when he positions himself as the inheritor of the innocences’ historical legacy. The widespread belief in an inevitable reckoning made it a reality; Ambrosisus was simply the one who ended up fulfilling that long-held desire.

I really think that in Elysium, nihilism should be understood as a latent principle pervasive throughout human history, present from its dawn and structuring most of its hegemonic culture as it develops into the perfected form that materializes at the end. It contaminates everything. Moralism seems like its opponent – the Moralintern talks of its duty to protect humanity from eschatologians, [13] and Mesque street nihilists talk of moralf*gs [14] – but really, they are united on the question of humanity’s future: there is none. The main difference is that the moralists believe that humanity already achieved its highest level with Dolorian humanism, whereas nihilists believe there to be one more step. The moralists enable the nihilists, because no one could be satisfied with the status quo they reify as humanity’s final form. By closing off alternative paths, they leave people with only the same choice as the ancient Perikarnassians: to reject the world entirely.

The line is likewise thin between communism and nihilism. In-universe theorists have framed communism as a secularized version of Perikarnassian theology, [15] and in our world similar comparisons have been drawn with Christianity and Judaism. The communist view of history is, if not teleological, then at least perilously close. It likewise dreams of future liberation, made inevitable by the laws of history. The difference is that in spite of its arguable origin in slave morality, communism rejects it. Communism conceives of a future beyond liberation. Its hope for the future is nearly limitless, the plans for a post-revolutionary humanity are too many to count, and it's all possible in this world, by ordinary human hands, if only we fight. [16] That is the difference; absolute negation is replaced by sublation. Communism isn’t the end, it’s a new beginning. As the ghost of Ignus Nilsen sums up: “Communism is the morning, it is jubilation!” [17] This is why Sola is actually, in spite of what some Yugo nationalists believed, a truly communistic innocence. Paradoxically, it was only by rejecting the innocentic system itself, undermining its credibility and power, that she could ever truly embody the revolutionary spirit.

One day, I was scrolling through reddit when I saw this meme posted on the subreddit r/nihilism, which I guess the algorithm thought appealed to me.

It’s a very simple, typical kind of antinatalist sentiment, but I found it illuminating. This is just suicidal ideation universalized. Instead of non-existence being preferable to one’s particular set of circumstances, non-existence is placed above existence itself. And really, this is what almost all organized religions amount to; it is the basis of slave morality.

I haven’t talked much about the ressentiment that so majorly factors into Nietzsche’s critique of slave morality and nihilism, but if we look at Zigi, Elysium’s nihilist par excellence, we see very well the consequences of a worldview based entirely on negation. Zigi’s attraction to communism extends only to its destructive potential, its utility in tearing down the middle class. Zigi’s not motivated by any kind of hope for a better world, only by his hatred for everything in it and especially those on the rung above him. As the text colorfully puts it, he wields the communist tradition’s numerous terms for the bourgeoisie “like a butterfly knife” [18] and before long is hallucinating Ignus Nilsen egging him on as he promises to rape and murder them. Zigi himself is not oblivious to his own motivations, at least not twenty years later; Ignus asks him, “Why have you been with me all these years if you don’t believe in communism?” and Zigi answers, “Because of anger towards those who’ve had it better in life.” [19]

Nihilism doesn’t discriminate. As we see with Zigi, communism can easily be bent towards nihilistic ends. So can fascism: Ambrosius comes to power by weaponizing nationalism in a similar way. [20] Nor are moralism or ultraliberalism or any other ideologies off-limits. Ambrosius understood that nihilism is anti-sectarian; people can find relief and comfort in anything as long as it's incubated in the warmth of memory. Maybe it’s the mass optimism of revolution, or the splendor of a royal parade, or the extravagance of boiadeiro movies, or the power of Dolores Dei radiating off the stained glass. “I don’t pretend to know what terrible beauty is to you. The secret to your heart.” [21] Ambrosius positions entropolism as the realization of heaven on earth, by swallowing material existence in its own memory. But is this right? When Zigi spouts Miroan philosophy, the narration tellingly informs us that the hall is filled with his “half-truths.” [22] One is compelled to ask: who will be doing this remembering? Who will be there to live in the past? Ambrosius certainly does not make a distinction between annihilation via the pale or via atomic explosion. Nihilism lays bare what apocalyptic faith has always been beneath the obfuscations: at heart, a desire to be unborn.

Death -- but for the universe.

List of references

1 Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air, Chapter 9. Group Ibex translation

2 Friedrich Nietzsche, “An Attempt at Self-Criticism”, preface to The Birth of Tragedy. Walter Kaufmann translation

3 Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche, pp. 140

4 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (which the discussion of Nietzsche's metaethical theory in "Nihilism and Morality" is primarily drawing from)

5 “One should live virtuously in this life to live better in the afterlife…” (FAYDE)

6 “The passage between heaven and hell…”

7 “God is dead…”

8 “It’s said he *invented* God…”

9 “Perikarnassian theology…”

10 Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air, Chapter 9. Group Ibex translation

11 “The study of the pale reaches back 6,000 years…”

12 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism. Philip Mairet translation

13 “Protecting it from ideological highwaymen and eschatologians…”

14 Martin Luiga, Full-Core State Nihilist

15 “It replaces faith in the divine with faith in humanity’s future…”

16 “All the other plans we had. To love. To colonize the pale…”

17 Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air, Chapter 16. Group Ibex translation

18 Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air, Chapter 12. Group Ibex translation

19 Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air, Chapter 16. Group Ibex translation

20 “An especially nihilistic strain of nationalism…”

21 Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air, Chapter 9. Group Ibex translation

22 Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air, Chapter 12. Group Ibex translation

[kenomacreature]

A META-HISTORY OF ELYSIUM CORONA MUNDI

Chronicling (almost) everything we know about the development of Robert Kurvitz's quasi-sacral object complex

This post represents an attempt to gather (almost) all the reliable public info we have about the broader worldbuilding of Elysium Corona Mundi (the series to which Disco Elysium and Sacred and Terrible Air belong) and how it developed over time into one place, presented more or less chronologically and in a way accessible to fans unacquainted with the, shall we say, more arcane lore of Elysium. In the original incarnation of this post, basically every sentence was scrupulously referenced; however, referencing is a major pain in the ass on tumblr, so instead I just have a broad list of sources at the bottom and if you want to inquire any further into a specific claim you can just message me.

I'll also warn readers that the sections discussing the Torson & McLaine campaign and the (currently cancelled) sequel to Disco Elysium contain potential (albeit relatively minor) spoilers for the planned plot of that game. The creators still hope to make that game one day, so if you want to go in totally blind, you know what to avoid.

Evermier

The first serious worldbuilding project that Robert Kurvitz embarked on dates back to at least the year 1997. It was developed with his childhood friends in Estonia, including later Elysium worldbuilders Martin Luiga, Argo Tuulik and Kaspar Kalvet, and went by the name Evermier. This was a medieval fantasy setting formed around a tabletop roleplaying system that Robert Kurvitz and Martin Luiga have referred to as “bootleg Finnish Dungeons and Dragons,” but which Argo Tuulik suspects was actually a Powered by the Apocalypse framework. The vast majority of the boys’ time with Evermier was not spent actually playing any campaigns, but rather formulating the setting and mechanics (both Argo and Luiga ended up never participating in a roleplaying session of Evermier). Argo splits the time spent conceiving Evermier into two broad periods – one he dubs “Evermier 1.0,” which stuck close to traditional Dungeons and Dragons – and one dubbed “Evermier 2.0,” where no tabletop campaigns were ever actually played and all the time was spent system-building. Argo estimates this latter period lasted some 2-3 years.

Scope creep quickly hit the project, with character sheets evolving into whole character books. Luiga alleges that that “the wizard book” was supposed to have 350 spells altogether, each with at least a half-page story about the spell, in prose, and that “about a healthy third of the book got done in the end.” Argo gives a different number, stating that early estimates for it had more like 900 spells, but agrees that two-thirds of each page would’ve been reserved for “juicy literary stuff” about the spell in question while the rest of the page was dedicated to stats, and says that Luiga and Kaspar wrote a lot of excellent stuff for these spells.

Argo says there were about twenty different schools of technology (such as “metallurgy” and “optics”), at least twelve classes of mages, and “so many” subclasses of elves. There was also a subclass of dwarf that, instead of being stocky, chubby and bearded like traditional dwarves, were veiny and more like “Russian miners.” When implementing necromancers, Robert “zoned in on this soul aspect,” which later became the basis for Elysium’s pale. Argo describes these necromancers as “hobbits, but with these little lanterns that guide spirits or souls from this massive fog.” Luiga places the invention of this “fog of death with whom some could communicate” as happening late in Evermier’s development and likewise considers it a primitive precursor to what would become the pale.

The worldbuilders spent a lot of time gearing up for an ultimate roleplaying session that never ended up materializing, but their artist friend Jüri Saks drew illustrations in anticipation of it, including character portraits. Luiga’s character was a “sickle-elf” whose class was called “saint.” This saint character was a handsome elf with small pointy ears and a neat little beard, who wielded two “light swords” (possibly katanas), and a crossbow called Crucifix on his back. The character was from a “grim northern land” and was a “religious lunatic type” who believed in a “grim, monotheistic God.” Argo alleges that Luiga related to this character so much that it almost became a part of his persona; he “developed this mode that sometimes when we were drinking he happened to slip in, where he would start judging people. I would like to say that it still remained within the boundaries of normalcy, but uh, unfortunately it didn’t.”

Kaspar Kalvet at some point played an archer character named Minor Mortifer (“Small Death-bringer”), and there was also a dwarf king named Fuirum Thundergate.

According to Luiga, the name “Elysium” was suggested by someone on the dragon.ee forums, but it took half a year for Robert to start seriously considering it. This was back when the setting was still a medieval fantasy world. Luiga and Argo both agree that the historicized Elysium as we know it now was born around the time when Robert decided to get rid of fantasy races, because – as Argo puts it – “they were kind of stupid.” With this decision, Evermier underwent a modernization process of sorts, an attempt to bring the setting closer to real life, where many other fantasy elements were stripped away in favor of more realistic representations of cultures, mostly in the form of nations. Argo says that many of the fantasy races transformed over the course of this process into the nations of Elysium – the dwarves became the nations of Graad, the elves became the great desert isola of Iilmaraa (formerly Armaghast, a nod to Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, still referenced to this day with Iilmaraa’s Erg desert), the night-elves or star-elves eventually became Seol, and the snow-elves became Katla (which apparently has not changed too much since the Evermier days, and whose namesake is the dragon in Astrid Lindgren’s novel The Brothers Lionheart). Among the first innovations of the new modernized setting was the concept of floating magnet trains, later described in Sacred and Terrible Air.

After the Evermier setting had been discarded, many of its ideas ended up being repurposed into historical periods within the new historicized Elysium setting.

The Elysium tabletop campaigns

Between the years 2003 – 2007, three tabletop campaigns were played in the then newly formed Elysium setting. These all took place in Revachol during the Current Century and featured Robert as dungeon master. The first campaign seems to have been called Soul Milton’s World Autumn, the second one Riget and the final one known simply as Torson & McLaine, or alternatively the RCM campaign. The first two were played at Robert’s old apartment in the concrete block project at Mustamäe, while the third one was played in the house of Luiga's dad, which the three later lived together in following his death.

Soul Milton’s World Autumn

Of the three campaigns, Soul Milton’s is arguably the one most shrouded in mystery as it stands. It took place in Revachol and Martin Luiga played the titular character Soul Milton. The character has been described as “one of the cornerstones of the Elysium mythos” and an “aspiring world-historical person.” By the time of the campaign, Milton seems to have become an amnesiac as a result of “suppressing his own mind to protect himself from his enemies,” and in this process apparently also adopted a disguise by “putting another skin on himself” (what precisely that means, we don't know). He was “very rich” and came from a well-off family, had a complicated and possibly romantic relationship with his sister and was a “politician slash businessman” who “wanted to be the innocence of consumerism.” As it turns out, the enemies who were chasing him were the Therriers of Elysium’s final innocence, Ambrosius Saint-Miro (a major figure in both Sacred and Terrible Air and Full-Core State Nihilist, to be discussed later), who Soul Milton met at one point. Saint-Miro apparently told him that “there has never been an innocence who is also not an innocence.” This encounter places the Soul Milton campaign firmly after the events of Disco Elysium, possibly in the late Fifties or Sixties. During this campaign, Argo played Soul Milton’s horse carriage driver, a man by the name of Elroy Quint Duval.

Also associated with Soul Milton are two other characters. Before Sacred and Terrible Air was conceived, Robert had planned to tell the story of Elysium in three books; one starring Soul Milton, another starring a character named Dister, and the third a character named Dallasz.

Dister, or Marius Dijsters, was an extraphysicist and published author hailing from Oranje. He was a son of diplomats, one of them the grand ambassador of Oranje on Iilmaraa. He seems to have been a significant enough figure to have an entire strand of thought – Disterism – named after him (mentioned in the inside covers of Sacred and Terrible Air), and like Soul Milton, he had an antagonistic relationship with Ambrosius (as made apparent by an incident where he was threatened by the innocence’s Therriers at age 25). He is also apparently involved in some way with Theo Van Kok (of Sacred and Terrible Air fame), along with a Paul Messier (presumably the husband of Disco Elysium's Joyce Messier), apparently the beneficiary of such prestigious titles as "Enemy of the Press '67" and "Worst Person of the Year '67."

Information is rather scant on Dallasz, but during the making of Disco Elysium, there were plans to repurpose him into another project, a comic book named Mercurio Dallasz and the Twelve Kojkos which was going to be illustrated by Aleksander Rostov. This project unfortunately fell through, but we know the premise: a band of kojkos under Dallasz’s leadership attempt to assassinate innocence Saint-Miro. This was presumably an Inglourious Basterds type affair. 

Riget

“It’s better to die in the Kingdom than live in a shithole.”

This was the tagline of Elysium’s second tabletop campaign, Riget, whose name is Danish for “kingdom” and was taken from Lars von Trier’s mini-series of the same name. Once more, the setting was Revachol, but this time it was limited to a peculiar part of it: Le Royaume (French for, again, “the Kingdom”) a vast network of dungeons and burial chambers two kilometers beneath the city, housing ancient ruins and remnants (quite possibly of the Seraseolitic civilization mentioned in Disco Elysium), along with treasures such as bioluminescent plants which have adapted to living in total darkness. The stars of this campaign were three impoverished children, all between the ages of 10-12 and members of a gang named “Earthworms,” who decided to venture down into the catacombs in search of valuable artifacts to sell. At some point, these kids somehow found themselves unable to get out of Le Royaume, supposedly trapped underground by demons who sought to use the children as vessels to escape back to the surface. When this campaign was being played, demons were still a part of the setting and haunted the halls of the underground network, along with monsters – such as the armakhaan beast, also known as Lelo Lelo, a terrifying blind and flightless hunter killer bird which was a mix between the xenomorph and cassowary. As for whether demons are still part of the setting in any way; both Argo and Luiga's statements are too ambiguous to reach any firm conclusion. Argo does note that the concept of 'demons' connotes something subtly different in Estonian than the scary red guys in popular Western culture, and are more like a primordial evil.

In the campaign, Argo played a boy named Miron, whose nickname was ‘Sneaker’, while Luiga played Joschka, a crippled boy with a bad leg. During the campaign, individual roleplaying sessions with Robert were held where the players’ stories evolved in parallel without them being kept on the same page. Each of them would get info the others were not privy to: Argo’s was that Joschka is unaware of the fact that he’s not considered a true member of the gang; in reality, he’s an outcast generally considered a weird, creepy weakling, and was only brought on for his lockpicking and mechanical skills.

Eventually, the Riget campaign got quite far into “Lord of the Flies territory.” Near the end, Sneaker and the third boy (played by another friend) conspired to kill Joschka deep underground.

Torson & McLaine

The worldbuilders continued to refine the roleplaying mechanics they were working with for the campaigns. By the time of Riget, the basics of the Metric system had been introduced, with the now familiar INT, PSY, FYS, and MOT. But according to Argo it was the RCM campaign, known principally as the Torson and McLaine campaign, which was “the first mature cycle of Elysium storytelling.” It took place, once more, in Revachol – this time in a ghetto called Jamrock, named after a Damian Marley song, and was focused on the goings on in Station 51 (renamed Precinct 41 by the time of Disco Elysium), the RCM’s lone precinct in Jamrock. The campaign took large amounts of inspiration from the TV series The Shield and its depiction of corrupt police officers and the intermingling of gang warfare and state-sanctioned violence. A central concept was: the cops are a gang, and the gangs are cops.

The RCM campaign began on a sort of prologue session, wherein Argo and Luiga played characters named Antwone Novak and Trinidad Tranquile respectively, two junior officers newly recruited into the RCM. Antwone was a “petit bourgeois type,” whereas Trinidad was a young communist who had recently been given time off work due to excessive violence. Luiga describes him:

He worked at a meat shop that belonged to Carson Torsson, Mack Torson’s dad, and had a system of stealing from work in order to ‘adequately compensate for his labour’. He also liked to practice a crude type of critical theory in the vein of ‘this building has been made that large to humiliate me, to show off with a power greater than me, to scare me into submission’. And he had a system of smoking no more than five cigarettes per day to cut down on smoking costs — Kim’s single cigarette habit might be a distant echo of that. He had, I think, a 7 in PSY (at least 5) and 2 in INT and mediocre physical stats, the core system was pretty much set by then.

At the end of this prologue session, Station 51 became the target of a terrorist attack. We don’t know much about the perpetrators beyond them being “Church of Evil type guys” in Luiga’s words, but the dice was rolled badly and Antwone and Trini both ended up dying in a “horsebombing” attack, falling onto the bridge outside the station.

Map of Station 51, located in a repurposed steel mill.

Going forward, Argo and Luiga had to find new characters to play, and they ended up going with ones they had earlier conceptualized, half-jokingly, on one of their many walks around Tallinn from parties and other events, since public transportation was notoriously unreliable. These characters were Chester McLaine, played by Luiga, and Mack “the Torso” Torson, played by Argo. Torson was derived in half from Vic Mackey, the protagonist of the Shield, and half from Argo’s own personality. Argo says that Luiga put his own personality into Chester as well, but isn’t sure where the other half of that character came from.

The main plot of the campaign centered on a revenge operation against those who perpetrated the attack on Station 51. In the second session of the campaign, Torson and McLaine are involved in a church raid; though Argo takes care to mention that he doesn’t think this is the church raid mentioned in Disco Elysium, and that it’s not a Dolorian Church but rather the “Armed Church of Saint-Michelle.” Among the tasks of Torson and McLaine were gathering “guns and drugs” for the “big revenge operation.”

Mack Torson was an idiotic body builder, an admirer of Lieutenant John “the Archetype” McCoy, the Station’s resident mass murderer, and altogether “way too stupid to concentrate on the main plot and politics of the police station,” focusing his attention instead on matters like “how to get it on with the captain’s secretary and tattooing the word ‘Jamrock’ on his body hundreds of times over.” Chester McLaine was a little more perceptive, wondering about things such as “what the hell is going on with the armour maker or Nix Gottlieb,” but was still an all-around uncritical person who put a lot of stock into “loving the captain” and “being a communist memebot.” McLaine was also “a sword guy,” since at this point in the worldbuilding swords were still viable weapons, with guns being slow to reload. Torson and McLaine lived together, along with two other cops, Sundance Fischer and Elfboy Williams. “Elfboy’s thing was being the dexterity bro, in which he continually lost to McLaine, and Sundance’s thing was having a fat ass and cleaning his guns all the time.” Torson had a wife named Tessa Torson, and later in life both Chester and Mack would apparently raise adopted daughters, Tessa and Triss (whether these Tessas are separate characters or represent the same character at different stages of development is unclear; Argo and Luiga seem to contradict each other, unless there's something very weird going on).

Torson and McLaine both regularly abused their powers, as RCM officers in general were prone to do, and in their heads they were justified in doing so. A highlight of the RCM campaign had been sessions dubbed “the Ballad of Chad Tilbrooks and Émile Mollins,” centering on two junior officers who were ritually abused and exploited by the older members of their station, including Torson and McLaine. At one point, Torson and McLaine were also involved in an interrogation of a local religious figurehead which devolved into mutilation torture, which only the “bullet-lobotomized” officer Damien “44” Latrec called out for what it was (enthusiastically). The interrogation ended up being ineffective as the religious leader simply “retreated into a happy place inside his head.”

The Captain of Station 51, Ptolemaios Pryce, was immensely respected and glorified by its officers, whereas the station’s lazareth Nix Gottlieb, while also respected, was generally resented and found hard to tolerate for being “an absolute horrible cunt.” In spite of this, Nix Gottlieb was known to have a curious friendship with Pryce, talking alone with him in the Captain’s office long into the night. This fact regularly perplexed the officers of Station 51.

Eventually, at some point in the campaign, Torson and McLaine would come to the focal point of the story, when they make a shocking discovery: the reason for Pryce and Gottlieb’s strange friendship is that they are both members of the top-secret underground anarchist organization the Ultra, and not only are plans underway for a national liberation movement freeing Revachol from Coalition control, known as THE RETURN, but the two have set their sights on a much larger goal: world revolution. 

The novel cycle

No more campaigns were played in the Elysium world after 2007, when the boys stopped playing the RCM campaign (with the story unfinished). Robert Kurvitz instead shifted his attention to writing a book in the Elysium universe. Eventually the plan became for it to be the opening to a cycle of novels, totaling eight altogether. We have the English titles of each book and their epigraphs, along with the order of the series, from a post by Kurvitz on the dragon.ee forums.

They are as follows:

#0 A SACRED AND TERRIBLE AIR My heart will not rest until it rests in you. - St. Augustine

#1 THE COUNTERMEASURES What am I searching for in your dreams? I am not searching. I am merely cleaning up. - Christian Emmerich

#2 NO TRUCE WITH THE FURIES Man-kind, be vigilant! We loved you. - Julius Fučik

#3 MADRUGADA It must be lit as dreams, by lightning flashes only. - Witold Gombrowicz

#4 TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY NINE DAYS REMAINING Evening brings the child back to the arms of the mother. - Sappho

#5 COALITION WARSHIP I don’t want to be in no indie shit. I want to be in the big ones. I want to be in the ones that matter. - Mickey Rourke

#6 WE ARE THE WAITING What remains, is longing for something completely different. - Luis Althusser

#7 INDIFFERENCE A great silence, some low pressure front is forming. - Arvi Siig

Sacred and Terrible Air was eventually released in Estonian back in 2013, and after the success of Disco Elysium plans were made to translate the book into English. Rumor goes that this translation was very far along or even finished, but unfortunately all plans for releasing this translation to the public have been halted with the ongoing legal dispute.

Fortunately, dedicated fans have taken it upon themselves to translate the book into English for those particularly interested. The most successful translation by far is the one by Group Ibex, which still receives updates to this day.

Read it here.

Full-Core State Nihilist

Many don’t know that Sacred and Terrible Air is actually not the only written work predating Disco Elysium. Before even Sacred and Terrible Air was released, Martin Luiga wrote a short story later given the English title Full-Core State Nihilist, which was uploaded to the old ZA/UM blog. While obviously not as meaty a text as Sacred and Terrible Air, it deals with some overlapping themes and gives us our first proper window into the nation of Mesque, so important to the broader narrative of Elysium.  

Full-Core State Nihilist was later heavily edited and uploaded to nihilist.fm, another blog site which many of the ZA/UM members were active on.

Finally, in 2022, Martin Luiga translated the Estonian story, basing his English version on the original ZA/UM blog version, and uploaded it to Medium. This translation itself could be seen as a third edit of the story, featuring new references to Disco Elysium.

(As it happens, I have also arrogantly taken it upon myself to create my own translation of this brilliant story, which combines elements from all three versions, and is an attempt to render the prose in slightly less idiosyncratic English, closer to the “house style” of Disco Elysium, while remaining heavily informed by Luiga’s own translation.)

You can find Luiga’s translation here and my version here.

THE RETURN

In 2014, Robert Kurvitz pitched an idea to his friend and associate, novelist and businessman Kaur Kender, to turn the Torson & McLaine roleplaying campaign into a full-fledged video game for PC. The pitch proposed a 3000 EUR investment to produce a vision document, with design and artwork handled by Aleksander Rostov and Juri Saks, detailing the setting, plot, game mechanics and art style. In 2015, this document was finished, and by this time a provisional name for the project seems to have been settled on: THE RETURN.  

This vision document reveals that the game was once planned to feature turn-based tactical combat. The plan was also for the player to create their own character from certain “archetypes,” each with different personalities, talents and appearances. Over time it became clear that these plans were too ambitious; by 2016 the archetypes had been narrowed down into a single character – the “disgrace to the uniform” Harry du Bois – and the prologue chapter of his story, set in Martinaise, was split off into its own game. This smaller project received the title that originally was given to the third novel in the planned cycle (which was almost certainly anticipated to center around the story of Precinct 41 in the year ’51) – NO TRUCE WITH THE FURIES.

No Truce became Disco Elysium and the rest, as they say, is history. But unlike many fans who view Disco as a singular statement that needs no further comment, the developers were far from done with the world they had created. The dominant internal view, especially among the original worldbuilders, was that Disco Elysium was merely a minor project to get ZA/UM’s foot through the proverbial gate. Work on the true game – the one they had wanted to create all along – could finally begin now.

As far as we know, the plot of the game would’ve stuck fairly closely to the events of the Torson & McLaine roleplaying campaign. The game was to open with an attack on Precinct 41, and the rest of the game would’ve been a revenge story of sorts. Players would assume control of Harry again, and this time his primary partner would be Jean Vicquemare, although there would be an assortment of other potential party members. The map would be at least four times bigger and set in Jamrock.

Plot points which would be explored in the sequel had already been set up in Disco Elysium – among these are Pryce and Gottlieb’s revolution, Le Royaume, Edgar Claire, and La Puta Madre. Cuno and Cunoesse would’ve featured as returning characters; not much is known about how Cuno and Kim would’ve been integrated into the game given how variable their endings in Disco Elysium are, but Argo says that he would’ve insisted on Cuno returning. X7 – the now-cancelled DLC project which Argo worked on for the remainder of his time at ZA/UM after Robert, Rostov and Helen were ousted from the company, would’ve featured Cuno as the protagonist. Meanwhile, Cunoesse was planned to reappear in THE RETURN as a leader of a gang of kids in Le Royaume, according to Martin Luiga.

Obviously, the characters of Precinct 41 would've featured heavily, and we'd be introduced to many familiar names which we were already given glimpses of in Esprit de Corps checks in Disco Elysium. One of these would be Lt. Berdyayeva, a superior of Harry’s, whose daughter is Jean Vicquemare’s ex. A character we know nearly nothing about except for the fact that he was conceptualized back in the tabletop days as a sort of joke character, but survived all the way into the planning stage for THE RETURN, is “Marivald the Merry Butcher” – what his role might've been, your guess is as good as mine.

Pryce and Gottlieb’s goals in the game might've involved an attempt to unite several diverse groups with a common interest in an independent Revachol; this would’ve included the besmerties, the West Revacholian crime syndicates mentioned in Disco Elysium. Prominent among them would’ve been La Puta Madre, a Mesque gang leader and drug manufacturer, a man of such immense power that he has RCM officers tending his poppy fields in terror (his influence also seems to survive past the events of the game; he gets a mention in Sacred and Terrible Air). The Madre would’ve apparently been an attractive feminine-presenting man, impeccably dressed and wearing beautiful makeup; his gender-nonconformity a way of projecting power over the traditionally macho culture of Villalobos. The rival gang, Ahura Mazda, led by a gangster known as the Mazda, would’ve presumably also featured prominently – Rostov recently released old concept art depicting one of their gang members.

There were more plans for the sequel that only came along after the development of Disco Elysium itself. Robert has talked about wanting to double down on events like the Mercenary Tribunal, handling big action scenes within the more closed literary format of the FELD dialogue system, hopefully allowing for even more variation than was possible in Disco's big confrontation. Another infamous idea was the inclusion of a second protagonist – a pregnant woman, about 5 months along. Kurvitz has mentioned this idea in interviews, saying that it would be "an incredible writing challenge" within Disco Elysium's internalized skill system: "It would be unbelievable to use our skill system to speak about the bodily sensations of having another organism inside of you, while you're in the setting and talking to another person." That said, the addition of an entire new protagonist is very ambitious indeed – it's not clear whether the idea would involve alternating perspectives of some sort, or a choice in the character creator of which one to go with, but Kurvitz made it clear that these would be entirely different characters, unlike many games which offer only a superficial choice between male and female playable characters. Kurvitz expressed some doubt about being able to include this in the game, but at least expected it to be integrated via an expansion post-release if not.

Miscellaneous info

Argo and Robert have both hinted that there is a metatextual element to the overarching Elysium narrative. Whenever presented with readings or theories that contextualize the game as some sort of story-within-a-story, they act coy and refuse to give any clear answers. Argo outright offered an interpretation of the pale which presents it as what happens as the narrative starts “leaking out” of the head of a reader or audience member no longer actively absorbed in the world and said that “Elysium is a fictional world that is aware that it’s fictional.”

Apparently related to this aspect of the narrative, according to Argo, are the three satellites in orbit above the world of Elysium – Iikon, Zenith and Shakermaker – which have been there since “before the 8,000 years of recorded history” and before “the Polycarpeum event.” The satellites have only been mentioned in niche corners of the currently published materials, and the innocence Polycarp has only been mentioned in secondary materials, such as the artbook and the inside covers of Sacred and Terrible Air, leading to speculation about him being involved with the pale and the memory of his reign being wiped from history.

Also related to the metatext, again according to Argo, is a character known as “the Man Behind the Black Sun” – he gets one mention by the Paledriver in Disco Elysium, but curiously she seems to refer to it as the title of a movie that was released in Mesque during the revolutionary era, potentially a boiadeiro picture starring the actor Gabriel Buenguerro.

The magical elements of the pre-Elysium fantasy world morphed over time into what is called “extraphysics” in Elysium. The innocences, the pale, and “plasm” all testify to this supernatural aspect of the setting.

At some point, Ambrosius Saint-Miro apparently constructs nihilist death camps, which Triss and Tessa (the adopted daughters of Torson and McLaine) end up in and eventually escape.

"Magpies" are not a real thing and were never a part of the original plan for the Elysium narrative. The concept artist who made the image from which the term was popularized has gone on record saying that he invented this idea himself and that it was taken from his own worldbuilding ideas. There is nothing to suggest that this was integrated into the game; Argo and Luiga reacted with confusion at the mention of this concept.

Kurvitz had an insanely ambitious list of projects he wanted to make in the Elysium universe before he was ousted from ZA/UM; "The last one I want to make, when I'm 50 or 60, that I want to absolutely go crazy on and throw out all commercial considerations and get this as conceptual as possible, is the tabletop setting. The working title for the tabletop setting is You Are Vapor. It will be a really, really, crazy pen-and-paper game."

List of sources:

All parts of Argo Tuulik's Human Can Opener Podcast episode.

Martin Luiga's Human Can Opener episode.

Martin Luiga's Medium account and other blog posts: Interview, 8 years ago..., Hello Fellow Worldbuilders, Correction, A Policeman In Revachol, Fuirum Thundergate (Substack)

Tweets by Martin Luiga: 1, 2, 3, 4

Tweets by Argo Tuulik: 1

The dragon.ee post about the novel cycle

"Welcome to Revachol" on the devblog

"Outro" by Robert Kurvitz, featured in the official Disco Elysium artbook.

Disco Elysium, Sacred and Terrible Air, and Full-Core State Nihilist. Obviously.

Possibly more that I'm forgetting. Feel free to ask.

[kenomacreature]

NO, THE VALENTINE'S LETTER IS NOT FROM W.D. GASTER

On the supposed veracity of a 'quirked up' Gaster

A little over a year ago, Toby released a newsletter on Valentine's Day. It contained a bunch of cute little Valentine's cards from various characters across Undertale and Deltarune, randomly selected for individual recipients. The rarest one, however, stood out from the rest, and contained a lengthy letter from an unknown sender, seemingly addressing us as players of Deltarune. After a while, it was deleted from the official website. Naturally, people jumped to the conclusion that Gaster had sent it, and this hypothesis remains the most popular to this day.

There's only one problem: the letter isn't from Gaster, and I can prove it. Or get pretty damn close, anyway.

I'll keep it short and sweet. I've gone over every single piece of confirmed Gaster dialogue multiple times, and done the same with the Valentine's letter. I'll start by listing the key features of Gaster's confirmed dialogue up to this point, and then compare it to the key features of the letter writer. Then I'll expound a little bit on what I think we can take away from this whole situation.

Key features of Gaster's dialogue

Gaster’s dialogue is characterized by a very peculiar syncopated rhythm, with frequent and arbitrary caesura which is communicated either through short pauses in the rendering of dialogue on screen, or (double) line breaks. This is Gaster's key identifying feature. There is no consistent pattern tying the caesura/line breaks to any practical or grammatical feature (such as punctuation); it is purely arbitrary. You will sound like G-Man from Half-Life if you voice the dialogue with the appropriate pauses.

Sometimes, Gaster will split one line of dialogue across multiple “text boxes” (or any other equivalent) for extra emphasis.

Rarely, Gaster’s punctuation will follow a space. In both instances so far, it happened as Gaster was introducing a new chapter of Deltarune.

When speaking in Wingdings, Gaster does not use punctuation.

When speaking in a normal typeface, Gaster consistently uses punctuation, the only exception being one instance in the tweets preceding Chapter 1.

Gaster’s use of language distinctly tends to be either quite formal or lyrical.

While Gaster is usually perfectly coherent, he will occasionally indulge in philosophical musing, make leaps you can’t reasonably be expected to follow, or present bizarre notions (such as the “flavor” of pain, or the notion of “favorite blood types”, where C and D are apparently candidates; that said, Gaster might simply be testing how the player will respond).

There are certain words or phrases Gaster repeatedly comes back to: “VERY, VERY...”, “INTERESTING”, “WONDERFUL”, “EXCELLENT.”, “TRULY…”. Toby seems to rely on the first two phrases especially to make it clear to the reader that Gaster is the one who's speaking.

Gaster retains a serious tone and almost never exhibits humor or self-awareness.

In Japanese, Gaster's dialogue is spoken (very unusually) exclusively in katakana and kanji, with very formal language used.

In Japanese, Gaster's first person pronoun is 'watashi' - to the best of my knowledge, a common neutral way to refer to yourself in formal settings or to strangers. In informal/casual contexts, however, it apparently tends to only be used by women.

In Japanese, Gaster refers to the player exclusively with 'anata' - a formal neutral pronoun which is most often used in cases where the speaker doesn't know the name of the person they are addressing (in paperwork for example).

The only exception is in Entry 17, where "what do you two think" is translated with the pronoun 'kimi'(-tachi, the plural form). Kimi seems to carry some complex nuances - as far as I've gathered, the gist is that it signifies a superior position by the speaker, is socially acceptable when speaking to a subordinate (if you're a teacher or boss for example), can be affectionately used between close friends and family, but is otherwise typically seen as rude or condescending, especially to strangers or superiors.

"During the survey portion, [Gaster] uses “ware-ware” - a rather stiff way of saying “we.” He ends his requests with “kudasai” (please) and uses the polite endings desu/masu. He’s almost excessively formal, as this level of politeness is unusual in Undertale/Deltarune." (source)

The above points by and large do not apply to the text after the vessel is discarded, which is part of why people theorize it's spoken by a different person. This post looks at the differences in Japanese between Gaster and the 'second voice'.

Key features of the letter writer

The letter writer utilizes (single) line breaks which exclusively follow punctuation. Gaster’s arbitrary caesura is not present. You will not sound like G-Man if you voice the letter.

The letter writer says “DELTA RUNE”, whereas Gaster has only used “DELTARUNE”; this is, admittedly, not entirely consistent across translations.

The letter writer uses very idiosyncratic and/or shoddy punctuation, which Gaster rarely does.

The letter writer uses none of Gaster’s common words/phrases.

The letter writer comes off knowingly forgetful, aloof and silly – behaviors which Gaster has never exhibited in his dialogue.  

The letter writer exhibits a fondness for riddles and paradoxical statements, something absent from Gaster’s characterization so far.

The letter writer is noticeably less formal and elegant than Gaster usually is, joking, meandering and rambling where Gaster is typically succinct and to-the-point about the topic at hand.

The letter writer seems easily excitable and uses exclamation marks at multiple points throughout the message, something which Gaster, heretofore characterized as reserved and calm, has done a total of one time.

The letter writer seems aware of the player, which is consistent with Gaster… and yet, the letter writer adopts an unfamiliar, questioning stance towards us and commissions our help, despite Gaster having already established contact with us ages ago and collaborated with us for two chapters now – on cordial, well-acquainted terms at that.  

The letter writer does not have a clear objective in mind, whereas Gaster has been “patiently waiting” to put his plans into action. 

The letter writer is quite blunt and judgemental, dismissing Valentine’s Day as “absurd” and remarking that the player (presumably, anyway) is “very odd”. By contrast, Gaster is reserved, unanimously polite, and only ever offers his opinions when he has something positive to say.

In Japanese, the letter is in a mix of hiragana and kanji (but slanted towards the former) and uses casual language.

In Japanese, the letter writer uses the first person pronoun 'watashi'.

In Japanese, the letter writer refers to the person being addressed with 'kimi' - not 'anata'.

So what do we make of this?

The Valentine’s Day letter is, at the very least, presented in such a way as to make the reader think about Gaster. This is mostly from contextual features of the letter – the letter being “strange”, its “illegibility” possibly referring to the Wingdings font, it disappearing and getting deleted from the website shortly afterwards, and, of course, the letter seemingly being addressed to the player, who only Gaster has been shown to be truly aware of so far.

While all of these are valuable considerations, it must be stressed that not only does the actual content of this letter contain zero substantive similarities to Gaster’s dialogue, it outright contradicts every significant pattern that’s been established so far.

The letter is clearly meant to evoke Gaster, and it would’ve been trivial for Toby to confirm that it was Gaster if he wanted to. Even with all the other patterns broken, Toby could’ve retained the caesura, or written it in katakana, or had the letter writer say “VERY INTERESTING” or “WONDERFUL” or any other common phrase of Gaster’s and this matter wouldn’t even be up for debate. However, Toby deliberately refrained from clearly identifying the writer as Gaster. Instead, he systematically cast doubt on that idea by making it, in every respect, completely unlike all other dialogue we’ve heard from him.

So I think the question to ask is: why would Toby even do this? If this really is just Gaster, why not make that clearer? Again, even if this is showing a “different side” of him, it still would’ve been the easiest thing in the world for him to prevent undue speculation about it being a different character. It seems tremendously implausible that in the already unlikely case of Toby doing a complete 180 on Gaster’s characterization, that he wouldn’t communicate that fact more clearly. If you think this letter is from Gaster, you have to basically ignore the fact that Toby is deliberately (because to imply that he's unaware of this would be absurd) posing a question about the identity of this letter which on first glance would seem to be from Gaster; you either have to assume that his doing so is meaningful (in which case it can't be Gaster), or that Toby is essentially doing this for no reason to trick or confuse the fandom.

I personally see no other plausible answer to the question of “why give us such good reason to believe that this isn’t Gaster” than… this simply not being Gaster. Or at the very least, not the same Gaster that we’ve previously spoken to. 

Who could it be then?

The short answer is that I have no idea. But I think we can narrow down a list of candidates (presented here in no particular order).

#1 - It really is just Gaster The first possibility is that this actually is just the same Gaster that we've come to know. I've made it clear how I feel about this scenario.

#2 - It's a shard of Gaster or a flashback I personally am not fond of Gaster having some form of split personality, but there is at least some support for that idea in Undertale. Likewise I don't see why pre-shattered Gaster would be less coherent than shattered-across-time-and-space Gaster, but it's technically plausible. The benefit of these candidates is that they obviously go some ways towards explaining the Gastery aspects of the letter while also accounting for the dramatic difference in their characterization, but if you ask me, they come with considerable baggage.

#3 - It's the Secret Boss of Chapter 3 or 4 It would fit the bill. All caps dialogue, distinctive speech pattern, probably insane, connected to Gaster, and seemingly about to send you on some weird personal quest. This is the one my money's on. The only issue is that it might be too on the nose if they really are addressing us, the player, directly, and referring to the game of Deltarune (but remember - they say "DELTA RUNE", like the prophecy, or the symbol).

#4 - It's the Man behind the tree Obviously this is assuming that the Egg Man isn't Gaster (and personally, I don't think he is). Handing you an Egg is a similar kind of mix between surreal and silly that characterizes the letter. The Egg Man seems at the very least connected to Gaster, so this would explain that aspect of the letter too. There's also the mirrored flavor text "Well, there is a man here" / "Well, there is not a man here", which is reminiscent of some of the contradictory repetitions in the letters - though, granted, that kind of language is also somewhat associated with the "someone" contacting the Secret Bosses, who I do think is Gaster. Let's move on before we get too confused.

#5 - It's Everyman Everyman certainly has Gaster connections through his appearance in Undertale's True Lab, his status as a recurring easter egg in Deltarune, and his liberal travels between the Light and Dark Worlds. Other than that, we can't say much about Everyman (cards on the table - I think Everyman is the Egg Man). But he definitely isn't Gaster, and he seems semi-important, soooo... could be him! A combination of #4 and #5 would be my second choice behind a new Secret Boss.

#6 - It's FRIEND Okay, I'm not even convinced "FRIEND" is a real character, but if you're not aware, there's a weird Spamton-like entity that briefly appears in Queen's basement in Chapter 2 which, oddly enough, is tied to Gaster via its internal filename, DEVICE_FRIEND. There are a ton of crackpot theories about this thing; I'm not particularly fond of any of them. But I haven't been able to come up with a very enticing explanation for the FRIEND phenomenon myself, so maybe it really is a new character, and the letter was their formal introduction. At the very least I'd say it's more plausible than it being Gaster.

#7 - It's the 'second voice' Once you've accepted that the vessel was discarded by someone other than Gaster, this may seem like a tempting conclusion. However, there are a number of issues with this idea, namely that the SV does not speak in all-caps, uses kanji more frequently than the letter writer, and uses different pronouns. The same reasons that compel us to distinguish between Gaster and the second voice also compel us to distinguish between the second voice and the letter writer.

#8 - It's Dess We know very little about Dess other than that she disappeared in what many assume to be a Gaster-related incident. The problem is that there's not much reason to believe this over the other options, aside from maybe the choice of the 'watashi' pronoun.

#9 - It's the "unused" voice in the code Which many assume to be Dess. Again, not impossible, but I think this stretches credulity even more because there's quite a shift in characterization from UNUSED's scared helplessness to the letter writer's brash, loony arrogance. And while I'm not an expert in Japanese, from a quick glance it seems like UNUSED uses kanji with more frequency than the letter writer does. This post seems pretty informative re: what can be gleaned from the Japanese translation of UNUSED.

(Thanks @kitten-kokomo for the above two suggestions)

#10 - It's some entirely new character unrelated to all of these This is possible, of course, but there's nothing to say about this scenario; if this is the case we couldn't have predicted it and we have nothing to work with at the moment, so we'll just have to wait. I will say, the Gaster connections make me think this is unlikely. We already have a bevy of potential Gaster minions.

Okay, that's all I have to say about the letter.

Good by!

[kenomacreature]

SEMI-COHERENT MUSINGS ON THE METAPHYSICS OF DELTARUNE

Exploring such topics as: - "what are the Depths?" - "what's with all the water references?" - "why do Darkners know all that stuff?"

Chapters 3 & 4 are fast approaching, the time we have before we’re faced with an influx of novel topics for speculation is running out, and I still have some leftover thoughts on the first two chapters that I'd like to get out there in writing before that happens. These thoughts primarily center around the metaphysics of Deltarune’s diegetic world, and various discursive methods that might be employed to help elucidate its nature.

This will be a loosely structured collection of thoughts that draw heavily from philosophy, literary theory and mythology, so if you don’t like pseudointellectual ramblings this is your warning to close the tab.

All of the points made here will be ancillary to the premises I argue for in my essay titled The Magic Circle. You should probably read it first!

Crossing the Fountain – art vs. byt

Much of my Magic Circle essay is concerned with the almost magical way in which one’s experience of reality is mentally transformed when under the spell of art or fiction. Indeed, this is the source of the essay’s title, and what I argue Darkness in Deltarune represents. I wanted to illustrate this idea a little more.

In the essay, I quoted J. Huizinga’s Homo Ludens – in that book he's talking about games and play specifically, but one of his most salient observations is that play is undergirded by an impulse to abstract from immediate reality that is shared between many branches of culture, including all aesthetic traditions. Huizinga is not the only theorist who noticed that art (which I define to include games and play) is experienced as a break from ‘immediate’ or quotidian experience. Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky posited that art was a transformation of everyday life into its own seperate realm. In his analysis, he put forth an oppositional model between art and what the Formalists called “byt” – an evocative term which could be translated as “life,” but also evokes the way in which life stabilizes into predictable molds.

Within the realm of byt, we experience events causally – and causality, as David Hume famously noted, is at bottom arbitrary. Art, on the other hand, is constructed towards certain ends – it is teleological. In art, essence precedes existence.

In byt, there's material – paper, canvas, film reel, computer code. In art, there are (artistic) devices – stanza, perspective, montage, mechanic.

Byt produces recurring patterns and routines that threaten to turn us into automatons. Art de-familiarizes, jolting us out of the narcotic patterns of everyday experience by presenting us with novelty to reflect on.

Now, you may or may not find this model for understanding art convincing or all-encompassing, but I think it provides a useful idea for understanding Deltarune's metatext.

When we interact with art or fiction, we voluntarily undergo certain illusions. When I read a story, I condition myself to think that I’m reading something that actually happened. When I watch theater, I condition myself to think that the actors are actual people, and the stage is a real environment. When I watch a film, I condition myself to think that the camera doesn’t exist; that it is a window into a different world which is also somehow not of that world. And when I play a (narrative) game, I condition myself to think that I am not interfacing with a program, but a world of its own. Of course, these self-imposed illusions are in no way totalizing. There is always a part of us that remains aware of the artifice. But our experience qua art operates under these illusions – we might say that there is always a part of us experiencing byt too, but this part is marginalized when we’re absorbed in an aesthetic experience.

Some readers might be scratching their heads at what any of this has to do with Deltarune, so I'll make the connection clear: Deltarune itself explicitly formulates Dark and Light – obvious analogues for fiction and reality (or art and byt) – as separate worlds, existing in a similar oppositional balance. Darkness transforms everyday objects – the raw material so to speak – into narrative devices, like characters and settings. In Deltarune there is a dual-reality to everything that comes into contact with Darkness (or the power of art). Might we climb one step up the hierarchy and try to use something akin to this oppositional model to explain the ways in which Deltarune refers to reality from within its fictional domain?

For example, there is the uneasy fact that we are an active force within the narrative, instead of just an invisible spectator. Sidestepping the question of whether the force we’re embodying in the game is supposed to literally be us, the player, at the very least the characters can only understand us in more conceptual terms, as some sort of in-universe deity or anomalous entity. So there’s us – the player – and there’s the Angel – our in-universe embodiment.

So what about the character who contacted us – what about Gaster? In The Magic Circle, I discussed how the information we have about Gaster leads us to think that he exists in some sort of transcendent state as a result of his experiments with Darkness. From that, I extrapolated that Darkness was the fundamental substance underlying Deltarune’s reality (which we can fit into another binary: there’s Darkness, the magical substance that makes up the reality of Deltarune’s world, and there’s what the concept clearly allegorizes: the creative or imaginative capacity of human beings – which is what gave rise to Deltarune, the video game). Gaster’s “transcendent” state trades heavily on video game creepypasta tropes; he’s like a ghost haunting the code of the game. And as it turns out, Deltarune has explicitly made the move to extend its diegesis to its code with the inclusion of a character who seems to be stuck there.

If the code is a part of the diegetic world, we can extrapolate another binary: there’s the code or internal workings of the program, and there’s “the Depths” – a higher (or deeper) metaphysical layer of Deltarune’s world that transcends time and space. Worded differently, the Depths are what we get when the 'eye of the narrative' turns its gaze towards the code of the program.

To close off this section, I want to mention that in Shklovsky’s theories about art and narrative, he makes heavy use of a machine metaphor; he wanted to focus on the ways in which art was a constructed object abiding by its own internal rules. The specific word the Formalists preferred is “device”. In fact, one of Shklovsky’s most well-known essays is titled “Art as Device”. Just something to think about for you Device Theory fans.

Water, Darkness and Chaos as Symbolic Motifs

Water is everywhere in Deltarune. The magical worlds we explore are given form by “fountains” and “geysers”. Onion-san talks of ominous songs under the sea. Ocean.ogg briefly plays after we fall into the supply closet Dark World. And the source image of IMAGE_DEPTH, the background of the GONERMAKER segment, is apparently of an ocean. What gives?

The basic gist is that water has an extremely long and prominent symbolic history in mythology, and figures especially prominently in ancient creation myths. One of the earliest creation myths we have, derived from Enūma Eliš, a Babylonian poem of the 2nd millenium BCE, describes a primordial state consisting of nothing but two deities – Abzu, god of the freshwater ocean, and Tiamat, god of the saltwater sea; from the “comingling of their waters”, all of creation emerges. This is consistent with what we know of ancient near-eastern cosmology in general; they viewed the world as essentially like an air bubble. In the beginning, there was water. Unordered, chaotic, formless. Then, something happens to produce the earth and firmament, both disc-shaped, which separate this cosmic ocean into heavenly waters above the earth (the source of all rain), and lower waters of the deep (the source of all rivers, springs, fountains and geysers).

This cosmological account survives into the Biblical narrative. From Genesis 1:6:

and God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”

The ancient near-eastern flood narrative, which likewise is preserved in the Bible as the story of Noah’s ark, is made less arbitrary with this in consideration; its basis is not merely that drowning in a storm is a scary concept (though it certainly is) – the real symbolic threat of the flood is of a return to pre-creation chaos. The gates of heaven opening and all of creation coming undone. From Genesis 7:11:

In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.

(Sound familiar?)

The idea of water as underlying all reality cropped up not just in religion and mythology, but also philosophy. Thales of Miletus, credited since Aristotle as the world’s first philosopher, famously believed that all of reality was made up of water. Thales and his philosophical successors are sometimes called material monists for their belief that all of reality was composed of a single ultimate substance – the arche from which everything originates.

Thales’s idea was no doubt influenced by the cosmological picture painted by mythology. Though not identical to the near-eastern accounts, the world of ancient Greek mythology is preceded by a state of primordial Chaos – a vast chasm, abyss, or emptiness. Though we in the present day might be tempted to understand Chaos as something like space, ancient commentators such as Pherecydes of Syros interpreted it as water. It was the fluid, formless and undifferentiated nature of water that made it such an enticing candidate for the pre-creation substance.

Chaos was also associated with darkness. Unambiguously born from Chaos are Erebus and Nyx – deified personifications of Darkness and Night. And this is a point of similarity with the ancient near-eastern accounts. From Genesis 1:1-3:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

In short, the primordial state across world mythology tends to be that of an infinitely dark, chaotic ocean.

The parallels to Deltarune are obvious, and having tracked the symbolic history which the game is working with can, I think, lend us a better understanding of "Darkness" as it appears in the game. Needless to say, all of what I've discussed supports the thesis I laid out in The Magic Circle: that Darkness is the arche or prima materia of Deltarune, the underlying substance that its reality is made of. Likewise I think we can intuit what “the Depths” are – simply what in the Hebrew Bible is referred to as “the (great) deep”. A mass accretion of formless Darkness which sits below reality itself. Dark Fountains are formed when the fabric of reality is pierced, creating a gap from which Darkness bursts forth. And since Darkness is the “raw material of reality” so to speak, the Darkness forms a new reality within the old one. But too many holes in reality threaten to “burst the air bubble”, so to speak, and flood the world with Darkness.

I created the above diagram a while back, and used it in The Magic Circle - no doubt you'll notice the similarity between this and the earlier diagram of the Biblical cosmology. The funny thing is that this connection wasn't consciously intended at all; I was barely aware of what the Biblical cosmology was like when I made the first version of this image. That makes me feel like I'm on the right track.

I do want to make something clear; the world of Deltarune isn't necessarily a literal Biblical style air bubble, with a disc-earth and dome sky. The air bubble thing is just for the sake of visualization. I think the Depths are more like a different layer of reality, simultaneously "higher" and "deeper". It's not that there's literally a bunch of dark water under the ground; what Kris is really stabbing is, again, the fabric of "phenomenal" reality itself.

Another thing I want to note; these early mentions by Toby of concepts relating to twilight or the meeting of light and dark have long been a topic of discussion in the community. I want to formulate my understanding of what its significance is.

The first thing God does in the Biblical creation story is summon light. Light meeting the darkness is presented as a precondition to any further creation. Likewise, fiction (darkness) can not exist without an observer in reality (light). The meeting of light and dark is a fundamental condition of art; it can't exist without somone to "shed light on it".

It could also well be referring to the Roaring; when the distinctions between light and dark threaten to dissolve, that is when we must travel to the "edge of the shadow" (the outer boundaries of the dream, near where reality is), and "shatter the twilight reverie" (twilight: when only the sun's afterglow remains) (reverie: being lost in a dream).

On Darkner Knowledge

As established earlier, Darkners are teleological beings whose essence precedes their existence. That is to say, they’re created with an inherent purpose. This purpose is what Ralsei and Queen call “the will of the Fountain” – a guiding force determining the nature of the Dark World and its inhabitants, originating in the Fountain’s creator. In my Magic Circle essay, I used this fact to explain the behavior of Darkners, and why certain ones (like King and Queen) know things that they seemingly shouldn’t (like the fact that the Knight exists, and what their title is). On this latter part, however, I didn’t go into too much detail. Here, I want to elaborate on it a little by invoking an argument made by René Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy, known as “the trademark argument”.

(Don’t worry, I’m not actually going to get into the weeds of Descartes’ philosophy. It might be fun to talk about how Descartes’ idea of hierarchical degrees of reality, which consist of infinite substances, finite substances and modes, correspond to Deltarune’s Angel, Lightner, and Darkner hierarchy, but I don’t think it would unearth any particularly useful insights.)

The (very simplified) trademark argument goes something like this: God must exist, because I can conceive of God, his features (that he is an infinite and eternal substance), and the fact that he is altogether more real than I am despite me not possessing this degree of reality. The idea can’t have come from me, but it must have come from somewhere – consequently it must be that I have this idea innately as a sort of “trademark” of my creator.

Now, I very much doubt anyone who's reading this finds the above to be convincing evidence for God’s existence. Thankfully, we aren’t setting out to find out whether God exists or not. The God in this scenario – the Knight – is someone we know exists, and how the relevant knowledge is possessed really does require an explanation (unlike in Descartes' argument, where the notion that an explanation is needed for how we can conceive of the idea of God is dubious at best).

Of course, I don’t mean to imply that the trademark hypothesis is the only possible explanation you could offer. Obviously, you could posit that the Knight entered the Dark Worlds and imparted the knowledge personally. But to do this you’d have to deny the Kris Knight hypothesis, marginalize the religious subtext, assert that there’s no meaning to certain patterns between Chapter 2 and 3 (such as the main Darkner bosses being activated before the Fountain Creation), ignore the latent implications in Queen’s dialogue, among other things – and I’m not interested in doing all that. For the moment, the trademark hypothesis seems much safer, not least of all because it explains other mysterious details too.

Consider the fact that Darkners are aware of the battle system, and know how it works. Do we suppose that someone went around telling each and every Darkner the mechanics of the game? Or does it just make intuitive sense that Darkners would be created with certain ideas that are consistent with their purpose?

Granted, there is still some weirdness left over that we’d have to explain. For example, Darkners – most notably Ralsei but others as well – know about the player’s button configurations. We might be tempted to just chalk this up to the necessities of tutorializing, but the game calls attention to this by having Susie ask questions about it. The trademark hypothesis doesn’t explain why Darkners specifically would be stamped with this knowledge while the Lightners are left out.

The best explanation I can come up with is that since the Dark Worlds are created by Kris, and Kris almost certainly has forbidden meta knowledge imparted by Gaster, the Darkners likewise inherit that knowledge since Kris knows that the player will be controlling them when they go to seal the Fountains, and is aware that we will need some level of guidance.

Conclusion

All right, that’s pretty much everything I wanted to get out there before Chapters 3 & 4 release. Thanks for reading! I hope this wasn’t complete babble to anyone who’s not as knee-deep as I am in random literary theory and philosophy.  

[kenomacreature]

DELTARUNE ESSAY: THE MAGIC CIRCLE

A comprehensive, themes-first take on what Deltarune is "really about"

[Click here] FOR [All parts]

[Click here] FOR [Part one]

[Click here] FOR [Part two]

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[kenomacreature]

THE MAGIC CIRCLE, or "WTF is Darkness, anyway?"

Part Three

A comprehensive, themes-first take on what Deltarune is "really about"

The Gaster of it all

The foremost trouble with Gaster is that there just isn’t very much to work with. We know so little about the guy that we couldn’t even figure out if a certain Valentine’s Day letter was or wasn’t from him. And since we know such little concrete information about Gaster, some might argue that trying to conjecture one’s way towards grand conclusions about him is a fool’s errand. Luckily (or unluckily) for you, dear reader, a fool is exactly what I am.

All joking aside, I do actually want to try my best to be cautious in this section. Since Gaster is someone who exists just as much outside the text as he does within it, any theory involving him risks mixing evidence with unsubstantiated fanon interpretations. For this reason, I will try to specifically list every premise that I need to come to my conclusion, so we can be on the lookout, together, for any pesky leaps in logic. Make up your own mind on whether these are all within the bounds of reason, or whether there’s something here that you can’t accept or find implausible. 

Premise 1: We can use information about Gaster in Undertale to inform our understanding of Gaster in Deltarune. Given that every known character that exists across both Undertale and Deltarune share not only similar personalities but also broadly similar circumstances, it seems like a safe assumption that the same applies to Gaster.

Premise 2: The information the Gaster followers give us can be trusted. This is to say that Gaster was the former royal scientist, that he was shattered across time and space, and that he exists at some higher level where he can “listen in” or watch during gameplay despite not physically being present. If we don’t trust the information of the Gaster followers, there's barely any discussion to be had, as these are some of the only sources of information we have about him. We don’t have any reason to distrust their claims, so they can be taken on faith for now.

Premise 3: Entry 17 was written by Gaster. The room displaying Entry 17 is literally named room_gaster in the files of the game.

Premise 4: The subject of Entry 17 is the substance of Darkness, as seen in Deltarune. Gaster literally refers to the subject of his experimentation as “Darkness”.  

Premise 5: Gaster is the mysterious person talking to us during the opening of Deltarune. There are numerous allusions to Gaster during this opening scene, such as the track which plays during it being titled ANOTHER HIM, a reference to an Undertale file tied to Gaster. The person speaking also shares Gaster’s exact manner of speech and verbal tics, minus the Wingdings font.

Premise 6: Deltarune Gaster exists in a similar state to his Undertale counterpart. The Gaster who speaks with us in Deltarune is a disembodied voice who is somehow able to communicate with us, the player, and seems to exist diegetically as part of the menus. A reasonable explanation for this would be him also being shattered across time and space and occupying a higher plane of "reality".  

Premise 7: Gaster’s experimenting with Darkness is what led to him being shattered across time and space and existing in this higher state. What else could the relevance of Entry 17 possibly be? The fact that you need to manipulate time and space to even access the room displaying it seems to point clearly towards this conclusion. As discussed earlier, Dark Worlds seem to behave strangely when it comes to time and space as well.

Premise 8: Darkness is a metaphysical substance that somehow dictates the nature of Undertale and Deltarune's worlds. If Darkness caused Gaster to become a disembodied being able to exist within the menus and code of the game, then this must surely mean that Darkness is tied to the very fabric of reality that makes up the worlds of Undertale and Deltarune.

With all of our premises established, I can now make what might, devoid of context, seem like an insane claim, but which follows quite naturally from the premises outlined here.

Conclusion: The Light World is actually a Dark World

Okay, what does that even mean?

Well, think about how in Chapter 2, Queen planned on making a Dark World inside a Dark World. What if she’s already inside a Dark World inside a Dark World? If sufficient manipulation of Darkness can shatter one’s embodiment in time and space, placing oneself on a higher or deeper plane of reality, then what that seems to point to is that Darkness simply is the substance that makes up the reality of Deltarune and Undertale. And if that’s the case, it means that the Light World is essentially just a very big Dark World.

The beauty of this hypothesis is that it makes perfect sense thematically. Deltarune and Undertale are fictional worlds where, like in the Dark Worlds, certain characters are aware of their own nature as fictional beings – characters like Gaster. And really, Gaster is exactly like the secret bosses in that he’s not free even in his own confrontation with his lack of freedom. Like how the Will of the Fountain guided Jevil and Spamton towards their reckoning with their nature as Darkners, the Will of Toby Fox guided Gaster towards a reckoning with his own nature as a fictional character. This is why Gaster, and possibly Dess, exist diegetically within the code of the game. Here in our world, the code is what forms the existence of Deltarune (the program). But once you immerse yourself in Deltarune (the fictional world), crossing its Fountain (so to speak) via your suspension of disbelief, the code becomes representative of something else – the “Depths”, a deeper layer within the cosmological fabric of Darkness.

Armed with a basic understanding of Deltarune’s cosmology, we are prepared to tackle the question of who and what the Angel is.

The Angel is in their Heaven, all is right with the world

Let me pose you a question. If Darkness represents fiction, what does Light represent? Because Light is an established concept in Deltarune. It’s not mentioned quite as much as Darkness, but it’s right there in the name of the “Light World” and “Lightners”. Darkners talk about the light inside Kris’s soul, which also makes an appearance in the lyrics of Don’t Forget.

So, what is Light? Well, if you’re on board with the conclusion that Darkness represents fiction, I think there is no choice but to accept that Light, as its opposite, represents reality. Or, at least reality in relation to fiction.

Deltarune seems to operate on a certain hierarchy of command. There are Darkners, who, as Ralsei is eager to remind us, are subservient to Lightners. But Lightners themselves seem to be subservient to an even higher force, one that shines more radiantly… A figure that is, funnily enough, shrouded in darkness. Their Heaven is only briefly mentioned at the end of Ralsei’s prophecy. They’re worshipped as a monotheistic God in the organized religion of Light World’s Hometown. And Spamton yearns to confront them, hoping it will allow him to cut his strings. In fact, Spamton seems to think they’re already present and addresses them directly in dialogue, asking if they’re watching.

This hierarchy of command maps out perfectly to the metatextual layers of Deltarune. Darkners are fictional beings within the fictional world of Deltarune and so occupy the lowest level of this hierarchy, worshipping their creators, the Lightners. Notice that “Lightners” is plural – Darkners don’t just worship the individual creator of their Fountain, they worship Lightners in general because it’s only through them, collectively, that they can exist. And who are the creators of the Lightners? Well, it’s us, right? We’re the beings one rung up the ladder. We’re the ones who “give their existence meaning”. Granted, Lightners worship an individual being, the Angel, instead of a category of beings. I think this is fairly easy to explain, though.

The world of Deltarune is made in service of the player. It is for the player’s sake that the game is designed as it is. Even if Toby Fox operates in a sort of demiurgic role of actually having to construct the game and the narrative for us, it is ultimately we who are the God of this world. We, the player, are the Angel.

I can already hear the question forming in your mind: “But what about Noelle? Isn’t she the Angel?” I mean, she does literally compare herself to one. And an Addison calls her one. And Spamton calls her one. And she's associated with snow angels. And the doll her and Dess create looks like an angel. And her Dark World attire is very angelic too. Is there any possible explanation for this other than Noelle being the Angel?

Noelle is certainly associated with angelic imagery and language, as all the examples above indicate. But take note that whenever she’s associated with angels, it’s in the lower case, referring to angels abstractly. Not once is she directly associated with the capital-A Angel. What seems clear to me is that Noelle is a special Lightner, with a special connection to the Angel, which is to say a special connection with us. This is made clear in the Weird Route, where we can use Noelle to “break” the game, bypass certain restrictions, disregard what’s “supposed” to happen and forge a new path, in a twisted reflection of Noelle’s own interest in video game glitches and creepypastas.

But really, when you think about it, Noelle being the actual Angel is kind of an incoherent notion in the first place. Even beyond the thematic significance of Light, we know what the Angel is, broadly speaking. It is a watchful deity existing above the Lightners and Darkners – this much is clear from how both Lightners refer to them, and from how Darkners like Spamton do. There is simply no explanation for how Spamton could be referring to Noelle when he talks about the Angel.

If you’re already convinced that she’s the Angel, this dialogue might mislead you into thinking Spamton is referring to Noelle. But on further inspection it’s quite obvious from context that Spamton is referring to the one who’s actually looking for the ring – us, the player. Immediately proceeding this dialogue, he asks us (the player - or Kris, who we're controlling) to pay for the ring. It plainly does not make sense for the dialogue to be addressed to Noelle.

Likewise, you’d have to jump through a lot of hoops to interpret this as anything other than Spamton directly addressing the Angel’s Heaven, which he believes is observing his current actions (as opposed to many Noelle Angel theories which speculate that the Angel's Heaven will be not a literal, but abstract concept corresponding to a future Dark World, or even the Roaring itself, at any rate caused by Noelle). But this naturally leads us to the question of what exactly the Angel’s Heaven is.

From what Spamton says, and from its description in the prophecy, it seems that the Angel’s Heaven refers to an actual, tangible location or plane of existence. Given that, I think it makes intuitive sense that the Angel’s Heaven is simply our world – the world above the Light World, the Even Lighter World so to speak, the home of angels and divine light. This is how Heaven can be “watching”, as Spamton says.

Banishing the Angel’s Heaven – the goal of the prophecy – would thus mean, well, sealing away the real world and severing the connection that was established at the beginning of the game, which is just a more complicated way of saying that it refers to ending the game. As explained earlier, Deltarune is itself a sort of Dark Fountain, a constructed world filled with characters prepackaged in certain contexts that we’re meant to enjoy and bring meaning and resolution to. The primary difference seems to be that within the story of Deltarune, this “Fountain” (if you will) was opened from the inside, by none other than Gaster, our gracious host, and must thus be banished from the inside as well, by the Delta Warriors of Legend.

I believe that this is the ending that Toby has teased, the conclusion that he dreamed of nearly 14 years ago. As the boundaries between the player and the game gradually break down, so will the boundaries between the Light and Dark Worlds within the game's diegesis, culminating in the Roaring, which I fully expect to be represented through overt meta-awareness and glitch aesthetics, similar to Undertale’s endings. What else would an apocalypse look like within the metaphysics of a video game program, after all, but a fatal exception error? The Roaring will deliver us to the the edge of the shadow, where reality and dream meet. And to bring an end to the Roaring, that connection must be severed.

In conclusion…

Deltarune’s narrative, like Undertale before it, is highly concentrated on a metatextual exploration of fiction and the impact it can have on people’s lives. The crucial difference is that where this was mostly relegated to subtext in Undertale, Deltarune is overtly grappling with these ideas through its plot. Not only with the metaphorically loaded nature of the Dark Worlds which serve as the backdrops to the adventures of our characters, but also with the player character themselves, their outright awareness and rejection of the player controlling them, and the ways in which those complicated feelings manifest in the Dark Worlds generated from their Will.

In this way, Deltarune is not only interested in exploring the impact of fiction on the lives of its creators but also the impact of reality on fictional constructs, which in turn reflects our own real world struggles to make sense of our place in an incomprehensible world which may or may not be created by a higher being.

A proper understanding of the thematic preoccupations of a text can open up new avenues of speculation and focus one’s sight on the things that truly matter the most. In this essay, I offered answers to some of the most pressing questions in the community, such as the identity of the Knight, the mechanics of Dark Worlds, the nature of the Secret Bosses, the identity of the Angel, and the significance of their Heaven, but I think more important than any answers to those mysteries in themselves is how they connect and tie into the central themes of the narrative.

By no means do I expect all of my conclusions to be completely correct, having less than a third of the full game to work with, but I do at least think they’re in line with the established themes it's been exploring, and well supported by the textual evidence we’ve been provided with so far. I’m eager to hear my ideas picked apart and criticized, and even more eager to get my hands on Chapter 3 and 4 – even if it ends up invalidating every conclusion I put forth here. Ultimately our theories should not exist for the sake of establishing or perpetuating arbitrary divisions, or to further our own profile as independent theorists, but to attain a better understanding of the narrative we’re being presented with. To that end, I can only hope I was successful.

[kenomacreature]

THE MAGIC CIRCLE, or "WTF is Darkness, anyway?"

Part Two

A comprehensive, themes-first take on what Deltarune is "really about"

The Will of the Fountain

With two important premises established – that Darkness is representative of creative expression, and that Kris, as the Knight, operates as something of an author of fictional worlds – compelling avenues of speculation start to open before us.

Here is how I posit the Dark Worlds work in the most basic sense: for reasons that will become clearer throughout the essay, I believe that Darkness operates beyond the boundaries of space and time. When a Dark Fountain is generated, I think something peculiar happens: even though a Dark World can only take form with the appearance of a Dark Fountain in embodied space and time, the Darkness that it’s constructed from radiates out backwards in time, making it appear like it’s somehow “always existed” within its own internal logic. I also think Darkness can radiate out into the future, and across space, which is how denizens of one Dark World can become aware of or interact with Dark Worlds that haven’t even been created yet, or how Ralsei can seemingly teleport between Dark Worlds at will. The future being to some degree set in stone also happens to slot nicely in with Deltarune’s themes of predestination and fate.

This is essentially to say that I believe a Dark Fountain spontaneously generates a history for its Dark World – history that only comes into being at a particular point in time, but from thereon, paradoxically, also somehow always took place – mirroring the act of creating a fictional setting. The history the Fountain creates is in part influenced by the history of the Light World objects being brought to life, but I think there is another deciding element as well: the Will of the Fountain’s creator. Will here refers to the general motivations underpinning a Lightner’s Determination to create a Dark Fountain. Like fictional stories and worlds are influenced by the perspectives of the people who author them, I believe Dark Worlds are influenced by the internal lives of the Lightners responsible. Certain things can’t be controlled, of course: Queen will always be a personification of a computer, Lancer will always be a spade card, Spamton will always be a spam email. But the circumstances in which these characters find themselves: their allegiances, their social standing, even their characterization and psychological states, these will reflect the mindset of the Fountain’s creator, intentionally or not.

Ralsei explains:

This is important to note: though it can seem, from the mechanics I explained above, like the Fountains operate more like portals into a separate dimension that exists independent of the Light World, Ralsei informs us here that that these worlds are in fact created by the Fountains, and that they reflect their specific will. Queen reinforces this and expounds more on what exactly this will is.

And a bit later…

It seems crystal clear that the “will” which governs the internal logic of the Dark Worlds has its origins in the creator of the Fountain.

With that in mind, we might direct our attention to something peculiar King says…

Very curious choice of words there. For a long time, this has been a sticking point for opponents of Kris Knight: how can King be a devoted follower of the Knight if he’s never even met them? How would Queen know about the name “Roaring Knight”? The same can be asked of the many other Darkners who know of the Knight’s existence. These things can sound impossible to explain without an appeal to some direct intervention, and indeed it very much seemed back in Chapter 1 like King had been directly assisted by this mysterious Knight. However, with the additional context brought by Chapter 2 about the Fountains' Wills, another picture is painted entirely: of something closer to a believer’s relationship with their god. What seems far more likely than the Knight having had some one-on-one with King where they convinced him to join their side before helping him overthrow the other kings, is that the Knight simply arranged the room in such a way that the other kings were locked away, and imbued the Fountain with the Will to have King establish a tyrannical rule as his devoted follower. Likewise, Queen and Tenna were "blessed" by the Knight's Will as rulers of their worlds when Kris turned them on before creating their Fountains. King does not do what he does because the Knight is a silver-tongued manipulator, he does what he does because, as he succinctly puts it:

That’s his role, his purpose, his ergon – it’s what he needs to be to facilitate an adventure where the Lightners are sent to stop him. His villainy is not chosen, it is ontologically essential. The same way that Darkners intuitively know how the battle system works, King intuitively feels himself to be a servant of the Knight, “the bad guy”. King, of course, is under the delusion that he’s rebelling against the Lightners, not even realizing that his every action has been foreseen and approved in advance by one. Once more, the themes of predestination and fate rear their head. The wills of the Darkners are totally subservient to the wills of the Lightners, because they simply have a better claim to “reality” than the Darkners do. Some Darkners, however, are able to see beyond that veil.

THE RETURN OF [the repressed]

The secret bosses of Deltarune are a very, very interesting class of Darkners. They are, essentially, fictional characters that have come to understand their own nature. They realize that they are not autonomous beings, that the very nature of their existence is constructed and ephemeral, that, indeed, their wills are not their own, but the Will of their Fountain.

At the forefront of speculation about the secret bosses is the question of who exposed them to this knowledge. Darkners who knew Spamton and Jevil speak of them having been contacted by a mysterious “someone”. As might be expected with an enigmatic figure who seems to possess metaknowledge about the fictive nature of the game, the community consensus is that this “someone” is none other than W.D. Gaster.

This seems not only plausible but the only reasonable explanation outright. I mean, who else could it even be? Some might say the Knight, under the assumption that they aren't Kris, but as mentioned earlier, it seems unlikely that the Knight entered the Dark Worlds after creating them, and besides, Seam talks about the mysterious someone and the Knight as if they’re two different people. In Undertale Gaster is already depicted as a shadowy, hermetic being granting arcane knowledge to chosen followers; we know that Gaster is significant to the Dark Worlds, so it’s a very natural assumption that he is involved here. It’s no wonder that it’s nearly universally accepted that he’s the one who contacted the secret bosses.

And yet.

There are just a couple of nagging issues with this idea that I haven’t seen many actually bother to work through. For example, how is Gaster doing this, exactly? Lest we forget, both Dark Worlds were created the nights before Kris and Susie enter them, whereas this “someone” contacted the secret bosses in the distant past. But okay, this is Gaster we’re talking about. Waving this off is a trivial matter. Just insert something about being scattered across time and space and let people’s imagination do the heavy lifting. There are other questions, though, like why Gaster would even be doing this in the first place. How could it possibly benefit him or anyone else to drive some random Darkners insane?

It’s safe to say that Gaster comes with a bit of baggage, but this is far from enough to discredit him completely – we would need a better candidate to dismiss him on the basis of these questions alone. So naturally we should ask ourselves: is there a better candidate?

The answer is: not really, but sort of.

The problem isn’t actually with Gaster – it is almost certainly correct that he is the mysterious someone. The problem is clarifying why or how this is happening, which I haven’t seen anyone manage to do convincingly. And sure, we’re only two chapters in, but we should still see if it’s possible to use what we’ve established about the Dark Worlds so far in this essay to come up with a feasible hypothesis about what’s happening. And I think we can.

What we’ve found is that Darkners, and the goings on more broadly of a particular Dark World, are reflections of the Will of the Fountain from which they are born, a Will that originates in the Lightner who summoned the Fountain. So, what if even the secret bosses’ knowledge of their lack of freedom is yet another chain tying them to this Will? The word ‘will’ implies something that is consciously wished for, but if this is a metaphor for creating fiction, as I indeed believe it to be, then not only will a Dark World reflect the conscious perspective of the Lightner who creates it, but also the unconscious and unexpressed. And that is precisely what I believe is responsible for the corruption of the secret bosses. I believe that they are reflections of something deeply repressed. Something painful, something frightening. That is why they’re hidden away, locked in dungeons and sleeping in trashcans in dingy alleyways. That is also why they share a preoccupation with themes like fate and freedom. Because they are, ultimately, reflections of Kris.

We don’t know a lot about Kris. But we know that they had some sort of incident with Gaster’s bunker, and we know that they know a hell of a lot more than they should. We also know that they’re the vessel we control as we play the game, and we know that they are themselves aware of this.

And, oh yeah, we know from what we established in this essay that they are the Knight who made the Dark Worlds we’ve explored so far.

Thus, my proposition is this: there was only ever one Gaster encounter – the one that Kris had. What the secret bosses are experiencing are really its aftershocks, Kris’s memories haunting the worlds that they create. The mysterious someone is not truly Gaster, but rather his mirage. And I think that it is a constant in the worlds that Kris creates that there is always a Darkner – abandoned, forgotten, and desperate – who is contacted and corrupted by a mysterious, elusive someone. It's no coincidence that the Secret Bosses are fought deep underground; not only is it reflective of the memory that produced them being buried deep in Kris's psyche, but also of the very contents of that memory, that subterranean bunker.

But we’ve talked around the royal scientist enough; it’s time to address the spectral presence in the room.

To be concluded in Part Three.

[kenomacreature]

THE MAGIC CIRCLE, or "WTF is Darkness, anyway?"

Part One

A comprehensive, themes-first take on what Deltarune is "really about"

…play is not "ordinary" or "real" life. It is rather a stepping out of "real" life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own. Every child knows perfectly well that he is "only pretending", or that it was "only for fun"…   Nevertheless, […]  the consciousness of play being "only a pretend" does not by any means prevent it from proceeding with the utmost seriousness, with an absorption, a devotion that passes into rapture and, temporarily at least, completely abolishes that troublesome "only" feeling. Any game can at any time wholly run away with the players. The contrast between play and seriousness is always fluid. The inferiority of play is continually being offset by the corresponding superiority of its seriousness. Play turns to seriousness and seriousness to play. Play may rise to heights of beauty and sublimity that leave seriousness far beneath… All play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the "consecrated spot" cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.

J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, pp. 8-10.  

Introduction: No, really, what is Darkness?

The connective tissue of this rather wide ranging essay lies in its being premised on a two-fold understanding of this omnipresent concept within the narrative of Deltarune – “Darkness” – as not only a crucial plot device governing the supernatural mechanics within the diegesis but also, on a subtextual level, a metaphor for humanity‘s imaginative capacity, specifically the ability to suspend disbelief and temporarily immerse oneself in the internal logic of fictional narratives. Darkness is in essence a literalization of the concept of the “the magic circle”, described in the excerpt above from Dutch theorist Johan Huizinga’s seminal work of cultural theory, Homo Ludens.

There is extremely strong support for this thematic interpretation of Darkness. Not only does the actual content of the two currently released chapters of Deltarune make repeated and explicit comparisons between Dark Worlds and roleplaying games, along with Dark Worlds being deeply steeped in the tropes of fantasy fiction in general, but this metaphor is also embedded into the very form of the game. Whenever a Dark World is entered, Deltarune transforms from an experience of minimal gameplay into a fairly traditional roleplaying video game, complete with battle, party and save systems.

Within the story, Dark Worlds function almost identically to some of the most primitive (narrativized) forms of play among children, literally animating toys and other objects to life. The Lightners then exhibit similarly contradictory behavior vis-a-vis Dark Worlds as humans do when entering the “magic circle” – prepared to take whatever transpires within it very earnestly, and quick to rationalize and adjust to almost anything regardless of how "unnatural" it might seem. If the going ever gets too rough within the Dark World, however, the Lightners are prone to reminding themselves of the subordinate position of what they’re experiencing to “reality”, and indeed, once the Fountains are sealed and the Dark Worlds exited, objects which had come to life turn inanimate again, and the Lightners quickly find themselves reverting to the logic of everyday life.

Most frequently the separation between these worlds is expressed through a comparison between the Dark Worlds and dreams, a constantly recurring motif throughout the first two chapters. Dreams themselves – as phenomena where human beings tend to stop detecting unreality, operating earnestly within the bounds of a “constructed” world – have a long history of being compared to fiction, especially with the advent of more vividly visual-temporal mediums like films and video games.

The opening stanza of Cecil Day Lewis's poem "Newsreel" is illustrative:

Enter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, leaving Your debts asleep, your history at the door: This is the home for heroes, and this loving Darkness a fur you can afford.

I believe this understanding of Darkness to lie at the thematic core of Deltarune, informing almost every other narrative thread contained within it. With that in mind, the goal of this essay is to investigate and make sense of the first two chapters of the game, answering some of the biggest questions posed by the narrative thus far, and speculating about what direction it might be heading in, all while orbiting around this central metaphor of Darkness as the power of creative expression.

First on the agenda is perhaps the most hotly debated topic in the community: the question of the Knight.

Finding the Knight

If our goal is to discover who the Knight might be, it behooves us to establish a rudimentary profile of the kind of person we’re looking for. This is a relatively simple task, as the information we have about the Knight is rather limited and can be reduced to a couple of key points.

1. The Knight creates Dark Fountains.

The most important knowledge we have about the Knight, by far – their primary distinguishing feature – is that they are in the business of creating Dark Fountains. It is among the first concrete pieces of info we learn about the character during their formal introduction by King in Chapter 1, and what primarily foregrounds our understanding of them. If we want to find the Knight, we need to look for someone we have cause to believe is going around creating Dark Fountains in the Light World.

2. The Knight is already familiar with the mechanics of Dark Worlds.

The second most important thing we know about the Knight is related to the first: they specifically created the Dark Fountains of Chapter 1 and 2. This can be intuited from King’s words in Chapter 1, and Queen confirms it outright. This fact has important consequences: if the Knight created the Dark Worlds of Chapter 1 and 2, they must have known how to do so before anyone from those Dark Worlds told them. To find the Knight, we should be on the lookout for someone we have reason to believe already knows about the mechanics of Dark Worlds before the events of the game.

3. The Knight wields a bladed instrument, specifically a knife.

Queen says in no uncertain terms that the Knight used a blade to create the Library Fountain. She then generates an illustrative diagram showing a knife. We are looking for someone who wields knives and uses them to create Dark Fountains.

4. Darkners tend to believe the Knight wants to cause the Roaring.

Though King and Queen don’t actually seem to know the specifics of what the Roaring entails, they both believe that the Knight wants to blanket the Light World in Darkness. Queen, however, explicitly says that she was only assuming this based on the Knight’s actions, strongly implying she hasn’t even met or talked with the Knight. King, for his part, appeals to the Knight’s “will”, which he similarly believes himself to know. It’s not immediately clear why King and Queen believe so strongly that this is the Knight’s plan, beyond potentially assuming it from the mere fact that they are creating Fountains in the Light World. It’s relevant information, no doubt, but not quite as concrete as the other points. Still, at the very least we seem to be looking for someone rash enough to risk the potential end of the world for their goals, if that isn’t their goal to begin with.

We know some other small things about the Knight; Jevil and Spamton are familiar with them in some way (as are many other Darkners), and we have some ominous remarks about communion and hell’s roar and shadows in their hand, but ultimately these are too ambiguous to make much of.

Having erected these four key points, we can now ask ourselves: do they apply to any character in Deltarune?

Well, yeah, as it turns out, there is a character who fits every single criterion listed above. This makes them, to put it bluntly, an incredibly compelling suspect. No prizes for guessing this one: it’s Kris.

What, were you expecting a mystery?

Before going any further, I need to say that when it comes to arguing for Kris being the Knight in this essay, I will be concerning myself almost exclusively with making a positive case for it. Which is to say that this is not a “defense” of Kris Knight, but rather my formulation of it. I won’t be bringing up any common counterarguments (though some of them will be organically refuted over the course of this essay), in part because I want readers to engage with the writing on its own terms, instead of it getting bogged down in the tedious Knight discourse that has consumed the community for the past few years. However, I’m aware of what a controversial point this is, and that there are those in the community who consider Kris to be a total non-starter as a candidate - all I can do is hope that those readers extend me enough grace to entertain the ideas I present here with an open mind.

To get the obvious out of the way, the main piece of evidence for Kris being the Knight is the fact that we see them create a Dark Fountain on screen outright. This immediately fulfills our first criterion: Kris is someone who is willing and able to create Dark Fountains.

Next we must ask ourselves whether it’s possible that Kris created the fountains of Chapter 1 and 2 and was thus already familiar with the mechanics of Dark World creation before the events of the game; as it turns out, this is not only possible but exceedingly likely.

This is because between Chapter 1 and 2, during a time in which Kris’s actions are ominously unaccounted for, we know that the TV is plugged back in after ages of not seeing any use, and that Toriel’s butterscotch pie is eaten by Kris: two things which directly lead to the Fountain creation at the end of Chapter 2 – the need to bake a new pie provides a distraction for Kris to slash Toriel’s tires, forcing Susie to stay over and pushing Toriel to call the police, and the TV is chosen by Kris as the focal point of the Chapter 3 Dark World. Moreover, ominous narration such as (It is not yet time to wash your hands.) if you try to do so at the beginning of the chapter, the general narrative continuity between the ending scenes of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, and the fact that Kris makes specific arrangements to the rooms like turning on the TV (similar to how the laptop was turned on before the Library Fountain was created) and opening the door, all seem to point to the Fountain being premeditated, which would necessarily mean that their knowledge of Dark Worlds precedes the game’s opening. It should also be uncontroversial to acknowledge that not only does Kris wield a knife to create the Dark World of Chapter 3 (the same knife they brandish at the end of Chapter 1), but they're heavily associated with knives in general, with even their name – "kris" – being the name of a distinctive dagger. It's hard to imagine any other character fitting the third criterion so perfectly.

Finally, though we are no closer (for the moment) to understanding why King and Queen were so confident about the Knight’s intentions, it can absolutely be shown that Kris is rash enough to, at the very least, risk the end of the world: they already know about the danger of the Roaring from Ralsei, but it doesn’t stop them from creating a Dark World. If they aren’t the Knight, they are arguably behaving even more rashly; it would mean that they are knowingly contributing to more Dark Worlds being created while there’s someone already going around creating them, massively increasing the risk of the Roaring. Kris even creates a Fountain on the Weird Route, despite experiencing firsthand the very real threat that Dark Worlds can pose to Lightners who venture into them. All in all, the Fountain creation at the end of Chapter 2 serves as more than enough evidence of Kris behaving in an extremely reckless and potentially morally questionable fashion. It’s perhaps not impossible to understand why King and Queen assumed that they are trying to cause the Roaring on purpose.

Of equal importance to the above evidence is the fact that Kris being the Knight is a perfect fit for Deltarune’s themes, which encompass topics like escapism, agency, freedom and the power of fiction. As one might expect from a well-constructed narrative, these are all relevant to Kris, the protagonist of the story, and these connections are only strengthened if Kris does turn out to be the Knight.

As stated earlier, the Dark Worlds are a relatively unsubtle metaphor for fictional creation and roleplaying. They are dream-like fantasy worlds where good guys band together and go on adventures to stop the bad guys. If Kris is the Knight, that means they are essentially authoring these metaphorical fictional worlds, serving something of a dungeon master role where they literally create the settings, obstacles and conflicts to overcome, and then guide the stories of those conflicts to their resolutions; not only by accompanying the player and Susie on their hero's journeys, but also through Ralsei, the party's guide, tasked with keeping the adventure "on rails" so to speak (evidence strongly points to Ralsei, who is likely Kris's horned headband that goes missing some time before the events of the story, being in cahoots with Kris – watch Black Chestnut's wonderful "Ultimate Ralsei Theory" for more on this). From this perspective, “the Knight” is rather more like a persona that Kris adopts when necessary, no more reflective of their real personality than the prophetic hero role they assume when we take control of them.

Think back to them slashing the tires and opening the door at the end of Chapter 2; the mythology of the Knight is practically being built in real time – "this dastardly Knight is now targetting our Lightners, going so far as to break into their homes!" – it's almost a comic analogue to Deltarune theories which take the character at face value, such as the one positing that the Knight hid in the closet of the Library before ambushing Noelle and Berdly. And one gets the feeling Kris treats this all as separate from themselves. Just think of how into the performance they get; big flashy gestures, red eyes, knives – the Roaring Knight is essentially an anime villain! But Kris isn't any less invested in their role as the hero of prophecy, either. And this seems to reflect what we know of Kris’s Light World personality; we’re told that they’re mischievous, and sometimes take their pranks too far, but we also get indications that they have a kind-hearted disposition and like to help people out. Symbolically, these dual aspects of Kris’s personality are intensified in their Delta Warrior and Roaring Knight personas.

This ties into the theme of escapism; we see that the Dark Worlds serve an important role for the Lightners who venture into them. They provide the troubled teenagers with hope, entertainment, reprieve from their troubles, self-confidence, a medium of connection with others, and a way to reflect on their lives and provide it with meaning. At the same time, they risk being consumed by the allure of that unreality, embodied in the Weird Route’s erratic, obsessive actions that put the Lighters in danger (itself indicative of the player getting "too invested" in the game), and of course with the Roaring itself, which happens when Dark – the domain of fiction – overpowers Light, the domain of reality. If Kris is the Knight, it at the very least highlights the danger of their commitment to the Darkness, especially in light of the fact that Kris creates the next Fountain regardless of whether Berdly dies or not, even if we don't yet have a clear picture of their intentions or whether they have a good reason for their troubling actions.

Kris is at the epicenter of the themes of agency and freedom in Deltarune, mainly explored in the memorable chapter endings where Kris rips out their player-controlled heart to do things without our prompting, and in the quests of the secret bosses where the ongoing motif is a confrontation with the characters’ own static existence, their lack of agency as lines of code in a video game, forced to play a particular role – especially apparent in the quest of Spamton, whose similarities to Kris lead to them becoming quite visibly distraught by the end. This is true irrespective of Kris being the Knight, but one can't help but notice how well that development plays into the established divide between the player and the protagonist; if Kris is the Knight, that would sharpen the contradictions even more and mean that where we control Kris as the protagonist, they also act as our antagonist when they disconnect from us, creating the Dark Worlds we later have to seal. This separates Kris’s character even more from our control of them and their function as our player avatar, blurring the lines between who's "really in control" of the story.

Earlier we went over the strong textual evidence for Kris being the Knight, but sometimes we might have reasons to be skeptical about a seemingly obvious conclusion if it conflicts with the mode of storytelling or thematic framework of a narrative. That is not the case here; at the very least Kris being the Knight does not conflict with any of the core themes of the story. I'd go much further, though, and say that it massively deepens and adds layers to those themes. It’s a decision the story would only benefit from.

There are many questions that remain. The Darkners seem to be quite familiar with the Knight, but we know that Kris couldn’t have entered the Fountains and made themselves known, because that would mean the Darkners would've immediately recognized Kris as the Knight when we later inhabit them. We actually don’t even know if it’s possible to enter the Dark Fountains without sealing them in the first place; Ralsei and Lancer make it sound like you can’t in Chapter 1.

Though we have a satisfying enough answer to who’s responsible for the Dark Worlds, we don’t yet have a great understanding of the internal dynamics of those worlds. How could it be that the Darkners know about the Knight without ever having met them? This is something we must inquire into.

To be continued in Part Two.