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The rainy kid in Hometown asks about tsunamis:

Raise Up Your Bat calls your heart an ark that guides your way through the waves:

In the Pluey minigame you bring cats to an ark while it rains:

The second board in chapter 3 has Atlantis:

Will there be a flood? Should we worry?

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*points at the waiter* your soul is uniquely sick

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observation: among a certain subset of tumblr users, the term “blorbo” has become unchic, but the concept it describes is still important; and so it has been replaced with “The Character”

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thinking about how susie was so happy to be in the prophecy, to finally be seen as good and worthy, and just how mad she was at ralsei when she found he'd been keeping secrets from them both.

and the way all of that melted away instantly the moment she saw how upset he was

what ralsei said in that moment has every right to make her more angry, to make her more suspicious. he's hiding something terrible from them, something terrible about what happens to them.

but thats her friend. she loves and trusts her friend. so she puts it all aside to comfort him instead

and later, when SHE is the one who's hurting,

she still smiles at him and comforts him

oh she truly is so kind isnt she :((

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gilbert gottfried voice...armored core six...da fires of rubiconnn

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hm. dont usually put my own two cents for theories but somethings been kind of annoying me recently so yeah. ralsei thoughts.

i really dont like the idea that ralsei is a specific object. especially not with newer stuff from chapters 3 and 4.

For starters, most people that try to figure out what ralsei is in the real world are basing it off of this appearance

however, I feel like there's plenty of evidence to point to this not being his real form, right? People have already pointed out that his original shadowed form isn't fully consistent. It's possibly the most obvious when you compare his singing animations in both forms. His hat form makes what was later 'revealed' to be his ears look more like hair?,

Ears don't really split the same way that hair does, and theres other examples of hatsei having this kind of spikyness to his 'ears' that hatless ralsei doesnt have.

even the fangamer plush makes his ears spiky!!

its a pretty major part of how hatsei looks, and its certainly been talked about before. And then comes chapter 3+4. And we have plenty of evidence that ralsei is a shapeshifter, and I have seen literally nobody talk about it????? huh?????

Oh, and the hat casting a shadow on him makes no fucking sense because he goes onto wear SEVERAL hats in chapter 3 and he's normal????

also I know its like. A funny bit, but HE TURNS INTO A HORSE

WHY THE FUCK WOULD KRIS'S HEADBAND TURN INTO A HORSE???? WHY WOULD A GREEN CRAYON TURN INTO A HORSE???? WHY CAN HE DO THIS????? THIS ISNT A COSTUME THATS NOT HOW THEY WORK????? WHERE WOULD HIS BODY GO.

not to mention that changing shapes was literally his ability in the legend of tenna game???? he plays it off like 'oh every character has abilities i can turn into a box' but he can also turn into a dog? since ralsei was the only one who read the manual it very well could be an ability given to him since the real Ralsei is also a shapeshifter.

It would also explain why ralsei draws himself in his hat form

thats closer to what his natural form is. Dont have any screenshots on hand right now, but he's got two lines in chapter four (if you leave him lying on the ground for too long, and right before they find the first fountain) about how much longer he can 'keep this body for' that make it very obvious that he's only using a form that looks cuter to appeal to us. Him being a shapeshifter would also explain things like

His face being a deliberately made abstraction would also make this interaction make a lot more sense. Pre chapter three, I assumed Ralsei based his face on Asriel to either try appealing to Kris or as fanservice for the player/red soul, however, now that we've slowly started learning more about Ralsei, it's beginning to seem more like Ralsei just wants to have a face and more distinct appearance, like the lightners do. However, because of how dark worlds work, he can only base it off of what already exists, with that already existing 'model' being Asriel, although with modifications to make himself cuter— pink horns and eyes, and his usual glasses. It's why Kris is always quick to point out differences between them, and why Ralsei is embarrassed at being told that they look similar, he didn't have a choice other than be based off something that already exists.

Alright, so Ralsei is a shapeshifter. He still has to have some equivalent in the Light World though, since that's how Dark Worlds work. He was literally about to tell Susie what he was before getting interrupted, and Toby Fox is deliberately dancing around the topic.

However, I think the answer is actually pretty obvious. Ralsei is a being of 'pure darkness', which is why he can exist in any Dark World, unlike Lancer and Rouxls, who need to be objects that 'belong' in their respective worlds. His form is made up by the original dark fountain, and he describes himself as a 'Prince of the Dark'. Characters in the Dark World know about what happens to and around their real world equivalents, but Ralsei in particular seems to be especially aware of all of Susie and Kris's actions and movements. He doesn't need to be brought in by Kris like Lancer and Rouxls do, and he always appears in the Dark World a few moments after Susie and Kris do, while somehow almost always having pretty intimate knowledge of how the world came to be. Ralsei is also the most adamant on being depended on by Lightners, even more than people like Tenna. He talks about how a Darkners role is to be used by Lightners and to make them happy, and his character development in Chapter 3 especially goes into how he wants to be needed and how he's afraid he's slowly developing his own personality, and why he believes darkners shouldn't do that.

So, taking all of that into account, I feel like the most obvious answer for what Ralsei is is a shadow.

He's a literal prince of the dark. It explains why he can shapeshift, since shadows can be made to look like anything— I'm specifically thinking of things like shadow puppets, and why when he gets knocked out he seems to literally disappear, returning to the shadows. A shadow is also the most dependant on light, shadows literally cannot exist without light, or they'll just be darkness. It even explains his empty room.

His insistence that his only role is to help the Lightners, the way that people can never find anything notable about him (asking swatch for specials his suggestion for Ralsei is based purely on how he dresses and Queen literally forgets to get him a cage), and his ability to be in any dark world (since there's literally nowhere without shadows) all seem to point towards Ralsei being a shadow.

Ralsei being a shadow also means he's literally with you in the dark, could probably straight up not exist if the world was plunged into darkness, and also makes him a weaker version of a titan (explaining the 'prince' title. not quite king, but noble nontheless).

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there's a segment of people who have big, big feelings about how "democratic" other countries are and how evil totalitarianism is who turn around and rail against ranked choice voting or caucuses as too complicated and exclusive, and I think that says a lot about their idea of "democracy"

instead of something you have to be actually actively engaged in, voting should be "easy" like picking one of two brands of pasta sauce off the shelf. and you can even have a closed primary where you pick what YOUR personal ~perfect pasta sauce~ is. wow!

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liberals be like he bombed a country…. without congress approval

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Mire deltarune thoughts, bot really theorizing just hypothetical stuff I sorta think could happen

So Undertale and Deltarune contain lots of secrets obviously. Acknowledgement of the most obscure secrets, which involve cracking open the source code, is either pretty low stakes (a comment addressing the person reversed engineering the game) or never actually directly addressed (the secrets hidden behind the Fun value in undertale never come with the acknowledgement "you probably edited the games memory to get this fun value, didn't you?"

I sort of think this genre, deltarune in particular, is suited for making this a reality. There have been lots of references already to our human player's existence, from Ralsei looking at us when Susie first switches the controller cables around in chapter 3, to the direct conflicts between Kris and the SOUL.

Someone commented that the prophecy about what the Angel looks like is intentionally obscured in black, not to hide what it looks like to the player, but to make the physical screen the black part of the screen, reflect the face of our player. Meaning, the angel of the prophecy is literally us, the humans in front of the keyboard.

Anyway, a thought for how it could play out would be something like this: a number value regularly oscillating between 3 values, up and down. This presents a very easy target for value manipulation in cheat engine: searching for the specific value is one thing, _then_ scanning for that values changing to one of the 2 other oscillating values, you can find the memory address for that values pretty quickly.

So the it'd require some addressing of the Angel, of us. Like, maybe aralsei is explaining something, or Susie is demanding evidence: angel, if you exist, make this readout change to show the value X, that sort of thing.

It only being able to be done in cheat engine is what brings this home: nkt only is the existence of us at the Angel proven, but also the power we wield is made starkly clear: the game can be put into slow mode, health values can be forced to stay at max, damage calculations could be broken to high or low values.

I don't think this would actually happen, Deltarune is out on Switch now so a maneuvre like that isn't possible there. At best, there would be a mechanism in game to manipulate the number, in some way that only us as the human player could do, so doing it via cheat engine would be like, a PC exclusive. Which is another reason that wouldn't happen, switch exclusives are what make monetary sense, not the other way around.

Anyway. I think it's would be cool if a game was made with cheat engine in mind. It would have alimited audience of course, but as far as secrets go, few else would being game player and game designer in the same room, same level of understanding.

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deltarune chapter 4 is the kinda game that makes me wanna write shit like this

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I could NEVER be one of those ppl complaining about the classic undertale characters being “irrelevant” in deltarune. I find the way deltarune highlights each of their flaws through their much more mundane lives so fascinating

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This scientist crafts stunning visual art through chemistry.

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what are yall doing that we need this??

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hmm

dragonflies. haunting implications: