whathappenedtodecember

[whathappenedtodecember]

i have a new theory. i'm not very defensive about it because it still has a few discrepancies that are currently unexplainable, but as far as i can see this is considerably cohesive. i ask that if you engage with this to supply details that i might have missed, that you do so not only by mentioning that a detail immediately disproves the entire thing, but rather what the detail represents in the larger picture of the story

ok. with that being said. (this is a bit long, so bear with me).

this theory entertains the fanon that undertale is set in a dark world. i've talked about it in brief before, no attachment. i've also mentioned how, presuming the theory holds, monsters in undertale seem to be roughly divided between those based on 'sentient'/'sapient' beings and those based on inanimate objects. in essence: these are darkners and lightners, existing alongside each other.

keeping that in mind, we revisit chapter 4. in deltarune, the knight created the two dark worlds inside of the church. after kris and susie sealed the first sanctuary, susie created the second sanctuary, which looked extremely similar due to the fact that it was made in the same spot, but a little bit to the left due to the fact that it was made by a different person. ancestor<>descendant swap etc (homestuck savvy people may understand better - please provide your input if inclined). what we can conclude from this is that different people can create what is, essentially, the same dark world, even if it looks different from one another.

we return to undertale. in undertale and deltarune, there exists a mechanism that requires determination. in undertale, this is reset. in deltarune, this is opening a dark fountain. here i offer that the two of them are one and the same - that in order to reset in undertale, what you do is essentially seal the dark fountain that sustains the underground and open it anew. which is why, tracked by the fun value, some monsters belong in the underground and some others turn to stone in the new world.

anyway.

when you kill a monster in undertale, you can revive them after you reset. at the risk of skirting the madness that is 'ralsei is asriel's pile of dust' theory, i'm going to explain my thinking. death in the dark world doesn't seem to be permanent. what we do have is berdly, who is hospitalized and alive, even if freezing, post weird route tragedy. it is entirely possible that lightners living in the underground could be in a similar state until the dark fountain is reset. however, damage in the dark world seems to carry over. berdly's arm remained paralyzed post violence non-weird route. tenna sustained damage from the knight's attack. we don't see enough of this in deltarune in order to build a cohesive conclusion because most enemies flee when attacked, but the fact remains that we have yet to see someone dust from being killed in the dark world. i really don' t think snowgrave exists in undertale.

(although - it is also possible that the case here is similar to what happens to susie! monsters dust after being 'killed' underground because even though they're not actually dead, they perceive that what happens when they lose all strength is death, and their death looks like turning to dust. similar to how susie, having been raised in human-dominated areas, doesn't instinctively realize the difference between her and humans (she's not familiar with dusting), and thought she was supposed to bleed whenever she was hurt, and as such that's what happened in the dark world. even if she /doesn't/ actually bleed.)

which brings us to our first discrepancy/unexplainable part: 1) could berdly have been revived, if he were brought to the dark world again? if yes, does it need to be the same dark world (cyber city), or, say, if kris opens a dark world in the hospital will it be enough? 2) does the dark world need to be created by the same person? if cyber city was made by the knight (for example) and kris opened a dark world to save berdly, would he have been revived 'a bit to the left'? (what even is the implication of that ... ???)

-> side note: remember that the resetter and the killer in undertale are always the same person (frisk is the one who resets after you kill someone during your playthrough, and flowey reset during his traumatic murder spree). one exception i can remember to this is the omega flowey fight, where frisk can reset at the last leg after which point the souls started rebelling against flowey. ps: this is related to how determination works. i don't mean that noelle should be opening the dark world to save berdly. although that remains a possibility, it's not what i'm talking about right now.

returning to the point at hand, i'm sure the idea of the underground as a dark world isn't exactly appealing. "but if it was /just/ a dark world, then doesn't that cheapen the theme of the war between humans and monsters?" that's what i thought too! which is why i wasn't necessarily attached to this reading at first. but then we found out that the bunker is actually called the shelter, and that the bunker has always been a fanon name to begin with. per gerson, "stories can be retold. they can be changed...that's what i believe". the dragon is now the hero of the prophecy. so what if, lost to time, what actually happened between humans and monsters, depicted in the waterfall wall murals, has been distorted or misinterpreted? what if, instead of being sealed underground, monsters actually retreated and sought refuge from a threat, and with the passing of time, having been darkners for longer than they had been lightners, lost the knowledge of dark fountains to time? if they were trying to protect themselves, then the noah's ark themes make sense ('with your heart as the.., song from the sea).

(i will revisit this later)

now, on to determination. this brings us to the second discrepancy. the undertale prophecy states that seven human souls are needed, yet kris has always been able to seal dark fountains on their own accompanied by only one monster. (can't recall the detail - they did have noelle with them in the weird route, right?) however, if you remember from undertale, during certain neutral endings, frisk was able to leave the underground without asgore's soul - despite alphys having told them that leaving requires one human soul and one monster soul. this is where i think research/the prophecy has mixed up: one human soul and one monster soul are actually the requirement for sealing a dark fountain, while humans are free to come and go as they please (see also: kris visiting and leaving castle town easily).

these are the questions that this poses: how did such a simple requirement metastasize into seven human souls, to the point that the entire monster population is equal only to one human soul? was everyone so deteriorated by being in the dark world for too long that whatever determination they have rapidly dwindle? and then, if it really was that simple, then why didn't chara and asriel just seal the dark fountain together and be done with it?

unfortunately i don't have satisfactory answers for these ones, but i can bring you this: i consider the "the only human" theory (which, btw, i don't think necessarily disproves narrachara. if anything, chara and frisk being the same person just means chara has been narrating their own journey all along, just like kris and their narration in deltarune). (Sorry for the narrakris plug. I'm too fond of that headcanon/theory lol). if chara was frisk all along, then that would mean they reset the underground and the ancestor (chara) became the descendant (frisk) (please note that i am NOT in any way insinuating that chara is frisk's parent or whatever. ancestor and descendant here just means that in the continuity of time, the first fallen human has become the last fallen human, or vice versa. sorry if that's incongruent with homestuck). insert frisk/kris reflection at the waterfall puddle image. if chara was frisk, it would mean that there passed very little time between chara's 'death' and the events of undertale - interspersed only by flowey's resets - which would imply that whatever went wrong with chara and asriel's attempt, it was fixable by chara/frisk having reset the underground anew and taking up pacifism to return hope (and possibly determination) to the underground.

still on the topic of determination, people have speculated that dess, as the knight, is stuck in a state between being a lightner and a darkner, where they could still make dark fountains. (i wish i could cite but i don't have the link ready at hand). i agree and i think flowey is the same way - no longer a lightner, but not quite a darkner either. which brings me to the topic i promised to revisit: dess was trying to recruit darkners to aid their cause. misguided as it was, what if - the knight was the one to lock everyone else to keep them safe? (god, dess really is carol's child, huh). and, misguided as this is, it's why the knight needs to be stopped, because continuing on would mean rehashing the tragedy of undertale?

anyway, that's all. take what you need from it and leave what you don't need. my point - reset and fountainmaking are probably one and the same. which is why kris has an empty save file right in the beginning of chapter 1.

[whathappenedtodecember]

watching the device theory; at the time of their release, mollystars didn't dwell too long on the chapters having default states and figured that future chapters might require past completion files at the TIME

but chapters 3 and 4... also have default states, if you start them without completion files. i'm wondering; based on the device theory, deltarune's ending was already written, and gaster grew so attached to its world that he wants to rewrite the ending for kris, susie and noelle, thus making a device for our world and deltarune's world to connect.

if that's the case, then what are the odds that the chapter's default settings without a completion file is the version of deltarune without the player's input? then that's interesting to me, because a lot of us has been concerned that kris isn't happy with the player's choices and might be forced to make responses they don't want. so if the chapter default states are what kris had done on their own -

none of the enemies are defeated with violence, but not everyone is recruited. i think that would make sense, if kris was the only one holding the reins until that point - they don't want to hurt people unnecessarily, but isn't the type to get close to everyone either. kind but reticent, perhaps.

there are still some recruits, however - so that says they are still able to form bonds in a journey they walk on their own, even if they don't go out of their way to do the optional stuff or glitchhunt or fight the fourth-wall aware secret bosses like the player does

and that strikes me as very compelling, truth be told!!!!! it's hard to get a full picture on kris as a character because their relationship with us is fraught in a 'resent you but still need you' manner. so if the default chapter states can imply anything about kris, we can grasp that even if it's not 100% the same, our goals do somewhat align with kris's at the moment

most importantly, it'd help shut down the concern that 'oh, susie wouldn't be friends with kris as they are because we've been piloting them' - but then they would be!!!! friends without us giving input

the only wrench in this possibility is what chapter 5's default state would be, because. chapter 4 had us do something that's impossible to dismiss as not needing player input. chapter 4 had the player and kris partake in a tom and jerry skit that lures susie and noelle over to dess's room. so if the default chapter files is 'deltarune before we came in', then chapter 5 would either / 1) doesn't have a default state and requires a previous save file to proceed for once

2) is going to be fucking massive not just because the chapter is gonna be a story-heavy one, but because toby fox needs to account for an entirely new third alternate route where carol just didn't come home because susie didn't see the guitar (assuming the phone call had been carol and not a red herring) - would susie have declared she's bringing noelle to the festival if carol wasn't there? questions

or 3) will have a random chain of dialogue to imply that sequence still happened but in a different way from chapter 4's actual events (there was no mouse to catch)

i believe heavily in the device theory with some differences to how mollystars explained it, especially since it survived the theory purge chapters 3 and 4 had done; i believe in deltarune's mechanical functions playing a role in its storytelling. i also believe that, if deltarune is still letting people play the chapters as separate games without having a previous save file (which is REALLY FUCKING WEIRD to allow in an rpg, you cannot change my mind) then there's probably a storytelling function for that.

the device theory made a point that an item called the twisted sword needs the player to abort the weird route at the last minute; it also made the point that the secret boss battles are remembered even if you start a completely different file. what happens if even the default chapter states play a role in this? what happens if we need a glimpse of the world we weren't involved in in order to continue the game? what happens if susie doesn't take noelle to the festival (if option 2 is correct)?

i have no idea what toby has planned or if the playing a save file without a previous completion file will actually be necessary to the game's completion, but wouldn't it be cool. it would be very cool

i really like this idea actually. with that in mind you're right i also wonder how ch5's default state is gonna look

[whathappenedtodecember]

wrt last reblog, 'roaring fraud' and similar jokes are also misogynist in the same vein. that type of people don't want to admit dess's entrance scared them shitless. worse if paired with 'old man can clean the knight easy' type of jokes. like they're both butches and that's dess's mentor in case you haven't noticed

[whathappenedtodecember]

idk how to say this without sounding bitter but like… I hate Chester Holiday. he's lowkey the embodiment of fandom misogyny/androcentrism. like ppl literally invented a random Holiday brother gave him dess's personality / role in the plot so they could sideline Dess a canon female character with narrative weight and replace her with a guy who can be shipped yaoi style. it feels like another case of fandom bending over backwards to prioritize male characters evan ones who don't exist while erasing or downplaying women in the story. The straw that broke the cables back was seeing multiple people make Chester knight headcannons and fanart when a) he doesn't fucking exist b) the most likely knight candidates are both female and Chester knight feels fandom attempting to like erase them.

the way i kind of agree... i genuinely don't even know where chester came from

[whathappenedtodecember]

SUSIE ATTACK!!!!

[whathappenedtodecember]

i have a new theory. i'm not very defensive about it because it still has a few discrepancies that are currently unexplainable, but as far as i can see this is considerably cohesive. i ask that if you engage with this to supply details that i might have missed, that you do so not only by mentioning that a detail immediately disproves the entire thing, but rather what the detail represents in the larger picture of the story

ok. with that being said. (this is a bit long, so bear with me).

this theory entertains the fanon that undertale is set in a dark world. i've talked about it in brief before, no attachment. i've also mentioned how, presuming the theory holds, monsters in undertale seem to be roughly divided between those based on 'sentient'/'sapient' beings and those based on inanimate objects. in essence: these are darkners and lightners, existing alongside each other.

keeping that in mind, we revisit chapter 4. in deltarune, the knight created the two dark worlds inside of the church. after kris and susie sealed the first sanctuary, susie created the second sanctuary, which looked extremely similar due to the fact that it was made in the same spot, but a little bit to the left due to the fact that it was made by a different person. ancestor<>descendant swap etc (homestuck savvy people may understand better - please provide your input if inclined). what we can conclude from this is that different people can create what is, essentially, the same dark world, even if it looks different from one another.

we return to undertale. in undertale and deltarune, there exists a mechanism that requires determination. in undertale, this is reset. in deltarune, this is opening a dark fountain. here i offer that the two of them are one and the same - that in order to reset in undertale, what you do is essentially seal the dark fountain that sustains the underground and open it anew. which is why, tracked by the fun value, some monsters belong in the underground and some others turn to stone in the new world.

anyway.

when you kill a monster in undertale, you can revive them after you reset. at the risk of skirting the madness that is 'ralsei is asriel's pile of dust' theory, i'm going to explain my thinking. death in the dark world doesn't seem to be permanent. what we do have is berdly, who is hospitalized and alive, even if freezing, post weird route tragedy. it is entirely possible that lightners living in the underground could be in a similar state until the dark fountain is reset. however, damage in the dark world seems to carry over. berdly's arm remained paralyzed post violence non-weird route. tenna sustained damage from the knight's attack. we don't see enough of this in deltarune in order to build a cohesive conclusion because most enemies flee when attacked, but the fact remains that we have yet to see someone dust from being killed in the dark world. i really don' t think snowgrave exists in undertale.

(although - it is also possible that the case here is similar to what happens to susie! monsters dust after being 'killed' underground because even though they're not actually dead, they perceive that what happens when they lose all strength is death, and their death looks like turning to dust. similar to how susie, having been raised in human-dominated areas, doesn't instinctively realize the difference between her and humans (she's not familiar with dusting), and thought she was supposed to bleed whenever she was hurt, and as such that's what happened in the dark world. even if she /doesn't/ actually bleed.)

which brings us to our first discrepancy/unexplainable part: 1) could berdly have been revived, if he were brought to the dark world again? if yes, does it need to be the same dark world (cyber city), or, say, if kris opens a dark world in the hospital will it be enough? 2) does the dark world need to be created by the same person? if cyber city was made by the knight (for example) and kris opened a dark world to save berdly, would he have been revived 'a bit to the left'? (what even is the implication of that ... ???)

-> side note: remember that the resetter and the killer in undertale are always the same person (frisk is the one who resets after you kill someone during your playthrough, and flowey reset during his traumatic murder spree). one exception i can remember to this is the omega flowey fight, where frisk can reset at the last leg after which point the souls started rebelling against flowey. ps: this is related to how determination works. i don't mean that noelle should be opening the dark world to save berdly. although that remains a possibility, it's not what i'm talking about right now.

returning to the point at hand, i'm sure the idea of the underground as a dark world isn't exactly appealing. "but if it was /just/ a dark world, then doesn't that cheapen the theme of the war between humans and monsters?" that's what i thought too! which is why i wasn't necessarily attached to this reading at first. but then we found out that the bunker is actually called the shelter, and that the bunker has always been a fanon name to begin with. per gerson, "stories can be retold. they can be changed...that's what i believe". the dragon is now the hero of the prophecy. so what if, lost to time, what actually happened between humans and monsters, depicted in the waterfall wall murals, has been distorted or misinterpreted? what if, instead of being sealed underground, monsters actually retreated and sought refuge from a threat, and with the passing of time, having been darkners for longer than they had been lightners, lost the knowledge of dark fountains to time? if they were trying to protect themselves, then the noah's ark themes make sense ('with your heart as the.., song from the sea).

(i will revisit this later)

now, on to determination. this brings us to the second discrepancy. the undertale prophecy states that seven human souls are needed, yet kris has always been able to seal dark fountains on their own accompanied by only one monster. (can't recall the detail - they did have noelle with them in the weird route, right?) however, if you remember from undertale, during certain neutral endings, frisk was able to leave the underground without asgore's soul - despite alphys having told them that leaving requires one human soul and one monster soul. this is where i think research/the prophecy has mixed up: one human soul and one monster soul are actually the requirement for sealing a dark fountain, while humans are free to come and go as they please (see also: kris visiting and leaving castle town easily).

these are the questions that this poses: how did such a simple requirement metastasize into seven human souls, to the point that the entire monster population is equal only to one human soul? was everyone so deteriorated by being in the dark world for too long that whatever determination they have rapidly dwindle? and then, if it really was that simple, then why didn't chara and asriel just seal the dark fountain together and be done with it?

unfortunately i don't have satisfactory answers for these ones, but i can bring you this: i consider the "the only human" theory (which, btw, i don't think necessarily disproves narrachara. if anything, chara and frisk being the same person just means chara has been narrating their own journey all along, just like kris and their narration in deltarune). (Sorry for the narrakris plug. I'm too fond of that headcanon/theory lol). if chara was frisk all along, then that would mean they reset the underground and the ancestor (chara) became the descendant (frisk) (please note that i am NOT in any way insinuating that chara is frisk's parent or whatever. ancestor and descendant here just means that in the continuity of time, the first fallen human has become the last fallen human, or vice versa. sorry if that's incongruent with homestuck). insert frisk/kris reflection at the waterfall puddle image. if chara was frisk, it would mean that there passed very little time between chara's 'death' and the events of undertale - interspersed only by flowey's resets - which would imply that whatever went wrong with chara and asriel's attempt, it was fixable by chara/frisk having reset the underground anew and taking up pacifism to return hope (and possibly determination) to the underground.

still on the topic of determination, people have speculated that dess, as the knight, is stuck in a state between being a lightner and a darkner, where they could still make dark fountains. (i wish i could cite but i don't have the link ready at hand). i agree and i think flowey is the same way - no longer a lightner, but not quite a darkner either. which brings me to the topic i promised to revisit: dess was trying to recruit darkners to aid their cause. misguided as it was, what if - the knight was the one to lock everyone else to keep them safe? (god, dess really is carol's child, huh). and, misguided as this is, it's why the knight needs to be stopped, because continuing on would mean rehashing the tragedy of undertale?

anyway, that's all. take what you need from it and leave what you don't need. my point - reset and fountainmaking are probably one and the same. which is why kris has an empty save file right in the beginning of chapter 1.

[whathappenedtodecember]

Yesterday, my mother fractured her arm while trying to get aid. I couldn’t go with her because I’m severely malnourished. She smiled through the pain so we wouldn’t worry, but I could see it all in her eyes — and it broke me.

[whathappenedtodecember]

anyway all this talk about alvin bringing gerson's remains to the church. god forbid an undead butch lesbian excavate a grave in their free time

[whathappenedtodecember]

i have a new theory. i'm not very defensive about it because it still has a few discrepancies that are currently unexplainable, but as far as i can see this is considerably cohesive. i ask that if you engage with this to supply details that i might have missed, that you do so not only by mentioning that a detail immediately disproves the entire thing, but rather what the detail represents in the larger picture of the story

ok. with that being said. (this is a bit long, so bear with me).

this theory entertains the fanon that undertale is set in a dark world. i've talked about it in brief before, no attachment. i've also mentioned how, presuming the theory holds, monsters in undertale seem to be roughly divided between those based on 'sentient'/'sapient' beings and those based on inanimate objects. in essence: these are darkners and lightners, existing alongside each other.

keeping that in mind, we revisit chapter 4. in deltarune, the knight created the two dark worlds inside of the church. after kris and susie sealed the first sanctuary, susie created the second sanctuary, which looked extremely similar due to the fact that it was made in the same spot, but a little bit to the left due to the fact that it was made by a different person. ancestor<>descendant swap etc (homestuck savvy people may understand better - please provide your input if inclined). what we can conclude from this is that different people can create what is, essentially, the same dark world, even if it looks different from one another.

we return to undertale. in undertale and deltarune, there exists a mechanism that requires determination. in undertale, this is reset. in deltarune, this is opening a dark fountain. here i offer that the two of them are one and the same - that in order to reset in undertale, what you do is essentially seal the dark fountain that sustains the underground and open it anew. which is why, tracked by the fun value, some monsters belong in the underground and some others turn to stone in the new world.

anyway.

when you kill a monster in undertale, you can revive them after you reset. at the risk of skirting the madness that is 'ralsei is asriel's pile of dust' theory, i'm going to explain my thinking. death in the dark world doesn't seem to be permanent. what we do have is berdly, who is hospitalized and alive, even if freezing, post weird route tragedy. it is entirely possible that lightners living in the underground could be in a similar state until the dark fountain is reset. however, damage in the dark world seems to carry over. berdly's arm remained paralyzed post violence non-weird route. tenna sustained damage from the knight's attack. we don't see enough of this in deltarune in order to build a cohesive conclusion because most enemies flee when attacked, but the fact remains that we have yet to see someone dust from being killed in the dark world. i really don' t think snowgrave exists in undertale.

(although - it is also possible that the case here is similar to what happens to susie! monsters dust after being 'killed' underground because even though they're not actually dead, they perceive that what happens when they lose all strength is death, and their death looks like turning to dust. similar to how susie, having been raised in human-dominated areas, doesn't instinctively realize the difference between her and humans (she's not familiar with dusting), and thought she was supposed to bleed whenever she was hurt, and as such that's what happened in the dark world. even if she /doesn't/ actually bleed.)

which brings us to our first discrepancy/unexplainable part: 1) could berdly have been revived, if he were brought to the dark world again? if yes, does it need to be the same dark world (cyber city), or, say, if kris opens a dark world in the hospital will it be enough? 2) does the dark world need to be created by the same person? if cyber city was made by the knight (for example) and kris opened a dark world to save berdly, would he have been revived 'a bit to the left'? (what even is the implication of that ... ???)

-> side note: remember that the resetter and the killer in undertale are always the same person (frisk is the one who resets after you kill someone during your playthrough, and flowey reset during his traumatic murder spree). one exception i can remember to this is the omega flowey fight, where frisk can reset at the last leg after which point the souls started rebelling against flowey. ps: this is related to how determination works. i don't mean that noelle should be opening the dark world to save berdly. although that remains a possibility, it's not what i'm talking about right now.

returning to the point at hand, i'm sure the idea of the underground as a dark world isn't exactly appealing. "but if it was /just/ a dark world, then doesn't that cheapen the theme of the war between humans and monsters?" that's what i thought too! which is why i wasn't necessarily attached to this reading at first. but then we found out that the bunker is actually called the shelter, and that the bunker has always been a fanon name to begin with. per gerson, "stories can be retold. they can be changed...that's what i believe". the dragon is now the hero of the prophecy. so what if, lost to time, what actually happened between humans and monsters, depicted in the waterfall wall murals, has been distorted or misinterpreted? what if, instead of being sealed underground, monsters actually retreated and sought refuge from a threat, and with the passing of time, having been darkners for longer than they had been lightners, lost the knowledge of dark fountains to time? if they were trying to protect themselves, then the noah's ark themes make sense ('with your heart as the.., song from the sea).

(i will revisit this later)

now, on to determination. this brings us to the second discrepancy. the undertale prophecy states that seven human souls are needed, yet kris has always been able to seal dark fountains on their own accompanied by only one monster. (can't recall the detail - they did have noelle with them in the weird route, right?) however, if you remember from undertale, during certain neutral endings, frisk was able to leave the underground without asgore's soul - despite alphys having told them that leaving requires one human soul and one monster soul. this is where i think research/the prophecy has mixed up: one human soul and one monster soul are actually the requirement for sealing a dark fountain, while humans are free to come and go as they please (see also: kris visiting and leaving castle town easily).

these are the questions that this poses: how did such a simple requirement metastasize into seven human souls, to the point that the entire monster population is equal only to one human soul? was everyone so deteriorated by being in the dark world for too long that whatever determination they have rapidly dwindle? and then, if it really was that simple, then why didn't chara and asriel just seal the dark fountain together and be done with it?

unfortunately i don't have satisfactory answers for these ones, but i can bring you this: i consider the "the only human" theory (which, btw, i don't think necessarily disproves narrachara. if anything, chara and frisk being the same person just means chara has been narrating their own journey all along, just like kris and their narration in deltarune). (Sorry for the narrakris plug. I'm too fond of that headcanon/theory lol). if chara was frisk all along, then that would mean they reset the underground and the ancestor (chara) became the descendant (frisk) (please note that i am NOT in any way insinuating that chara is frisk's parent or whatever. ancestor and descendant here just means that in the continuity of time, the first fallen human has become the last fallen human, or vice versa. sorry if that's incongruent with homestuck). insert frisk/kris reflection at the waterfall puddle image. if chara was frisk, it would mean that there passed very little time between chara's 'death' and the events of undertale - interspersed only by flowey's resets - which would imply that whatever went wrong with chara and asriel's attempt, it was fixable by chara/frisk having reset the underground anew and taking up pacifism to return hope (and possibly determination) to the underground.

still on the topic of determination, people have speculated that dess, as the knight, is stuck in a state between being a lightner and a darkner, where they could still make dark fountains. (i wish i could cite but i don't have the link ready at hand). i agree and i think flowey is the same way - no longer a lightner, but not quite a darkner either. which brings me to the topic i promised to revisit: dess was trying to recruit darkners to aid their cause. misguided as it was, what if - the knight was the one to lock everyone else to keep them safe? (god, dess really is carol's child, huh). and, misguided as this is, it's why the knight needs to be stopped, because continuing on would mean rehashing the tragedy of undertale?

anyway, that's all. take what you need from it and leave what you don't need. my point - reset and fountainmaking are probably one and the same. which is why kris has an empty save file right in the beginning of chapter 1.

[whathappenedtodecember]

"She'll find another kid and instantly forget about you" -> "I'll never let you go again, Asriel"

"I don't think my father could rest well knowing I was... tarnishing his legacy." -> "Telling stories as a way to entertain his children"

[whathappenedtodecember]

[whathappenedtodecember]

[whathappenedtodecember]

If Undertale had come out in a similar chapter-to-chapter release as Deltarune, what sort of bizarre fan theories might have been conconcted in the interim to the next installment? (assuming a magical preexisting rabid fanbase, to be clear.)

oh this is such a lovely question, oh my god.

easiest answer by far is Alphys. Undyne having a bunch of lines directly hinting at Alphys, specifically calling her out as their last hope in the no mercy route, I think people would be 1000% wrong on the type of person Alphys is, Mike style. Which would then make it more insane when you get to the true lab. I also honestly think like. Maybe people would be more cool towards Alphys this time around. You get more time to know her as a cute loser weeb, and then the rug pull is the proper tragedy it was meant to be, not a reason to hate her.

I also think that people would go fucking insane over the Gaster stuff in a very very different way. Because for us in reality, it was all one contiguous mystery, the answer to which is clear. That is connected to Gaster, foreshadowing Deltarune. But if you are playing this episodically? You’d be expecting a resolution, it’s foreshadowing Undertale, not Deltarune, and that’s fuel to speculate. People would go fucking insane over it and I think it ultimately would make the narrative VERY different as a result of reacting to fan direction

[whathappenedtodecember]

something they can't take from you

[whathappenedtodecember]

this was originally part of the kris headcanon post but i kinda spiraled halfway through into what i think about deltarune's narrator situation plus other assorted headcanons, so here it is in a separate post

like with chara's buttercup plan i don't think they're someone who always fully understands the exact scale and scope of the consequences to their actions (which kinda ties in with what they say at the end of no mercy. everyone in undertale is a master projector in their own ways). you can see this in a smaller way with kris in how they shook the ferris wheel ride with noelle. personally i see their pranks at her as kind of a love language, because she likes scary things as long as there's someone to comfort her + kris is one of the people who she can comfortably tell off, so obviously the intention behind the ferris wheel shaking was harmless but i also think there's a possibility kris might have overestimated how sturdy ferris wheel carriages are lol

anyway i kinda see both kris and chara as "this major problem has a potential solution -> i will carry out this solution even if this hurts me -> due to my lack of hindsight i am not the only one hurt......well well well if this isn't the consequences to my actions". so, like, martyr complex. we know this already with chara, but this kinda ties in with my headcanon for kris.

so um, i kinda view deltarune's narrator as kris themself. you're welcome to disagree ofc i know this isn't the most favorable read of the game, but i'll explain why i think this way. this is mostly because of how much the narrator knows about kris's life and childhood memories and preferences that it would've been creepy if it was anyone but them, or at the very least, someone who's really really close to them. we can rule out everyone we've seen, and i personally don't think it's asriel even though that would make for an interesting fic, and narrator!december is also a headcanon that i cherish with my entire heart but that's a post for another day. this is also because the contrast between undertale's narrator (chara my beloved) and deltarune's narrator is very stark.

so if you go through undertale's narration, you'll see that chara actually almost never railroads you into or prevents you from making a choice. they'll snark at you, yeah, and make sarcastic comments about your poorer decisions, but they never outright tell you to do anything, and most of the times even after they make a suggestion they immediately offer you a choice. the only exception to this that i can think of is the ending of no mercy where they really have had enough of your shit. in contrast, deltarune's narration is one hell of a backseater. they warn you over and over before making decisions, they don't let you drop lancer and rouxls, they won't let you go back inside the computer room after gathering everyone up, they won't even let you wash your hands at the sink.

easiest way i can compare this is these narrations where you drop the ball of junk and undyne's letter. DR's narra gives you a warning against this but UT's narra just snarks at you.

(You took it from your pocket. You have a very, very, bad feeling about throwing it away.)

(You really didn't want to throw it away.)

*

(Despite what seems like common sense, you threw away the letter.)

i know that this basically plays up to the themes of the respective games where all of your choices have consequences in undertale and none of your choices matters in deltarune, but that's from a writing perspective.....

from a character perspective i feel like it boils down to chara and kris as two versions of the same kid in two different universes. and btw yeah i'm aware this is putting the eggs before the basket or however the saying goes, and so i'm really not trying to convince anyone of this. and this is a headcanon post anyway. but basically i feel like chara is really holding back on backseating in undertale because the last time they tried to do that on a shared body............yeah, we all know what happened. so as we can tell kris is also not a normally really bossy person (as per noelle), and tbh i think neither is chara, but in situations where they have a plan to carry out they can get very tunnel visioned. and kris doesn't have the misfortune of hindsight to know what could possibly go wrong with a haggle for control in a shared body, so they try to keep us on track on whatever it is they're planning. (which is why they don't let us get distracted by reading books, because they think we're wasting time...)

but how do we even get here?

i don't really have a guess. it can be anything. but what we do have so far is that they need the red soul to seal the fountain, and with how they can rip it out at will (though not for long) and how we control the soul, it's fair to assume the soul isn't theirs.

i like to think that the person intercepting gaster at the very beginning of chapter 1 wasn't chara. it was kris. don't get me wrong i 100% believe that their speech pattern is the exact same as what chara uses at the end of no mercy, both in the english version and in the japanese localisation, but we have never heard kris talk directly. not only that, but we also know that chara's speech pattern as the narrator and their speech when they were trying to intimidate us at the end of no mercy are also different. and we know that kris also has a way with words (saying 'unknown' instead of 'i don't know', practically waxing poetic during swatchling's fight, making an emotional toast to the queen, the spiel they went on just to eat the moss in chapter 1.....like, hell, their mom is still toriel across the universes).

so basically i see that contact scene as gaster preparing a vessel for us, and then kris is like WHOOPS SORRY I NEED YOU WITH ME YOU'RE ME NOW HELP ME OUT. i don't even wanna think about what could be so dire that they're willing to undergo possession for it (finding dess? preventing the roaring? other yet to be explained plot reasons?) but we already know now that both kris and chara suffer from a martyr complex just like how both UT asriel and DR asriel suffer from a guilt complex.

i mean, regardless of whether this is with approval or not from kris's side, possessions hurt. they can't play the piano properly, they look sickly and pale, they act and sound different from what they used to do. it's all still painful regardless of the original circumstances. (is this how asriel feels when chara involves him in their suicide plan...........) but i think most painful of all is when they start to realise that this might bring out even more awful problems than what they started with.

yeah, snowgrave.

so like, unless i missed something during my read through the dialogue dump and my playthroughs, the narrator is very railroading, yes, but this is only very noticeable in the light world. they exert considerably less influence over you in the dark world and theyre powerless over what you do in battles. i don't think i've ever seen the narrator do anything but, well, narrate, and carry out the ACTs you've chosen in battle. they snark at you for backtracking in the cyber city (presumably because you're wasting time) but they can't stop you here.

and a bulk of what constitutes as snowgrave is carried out through battle. you backtrack. you order noelle to use iceshock and eventually snowgrave. when you go to force noelle to freeze the addison the narrator inundates you with choice options to overwhelm and dissuade you from continuing the route. i feel like the thought of how you could possibly step off the button to let noelle die didn't even cross their mind that they didn't realize they should probably stop you (and i feel like this is why this point is the turning point of snowgrave? like, the tune to indicate youre in the route now, the music change, etc. happened here. this is probably where kris realized that bringing you in was more damage than it was worth). and like, as i said i don't think they can do much in-battle. outside of battle they can move - to protect susie, to protect noelle.........but in-battle? shit, i don't think they have the power to cancel battles or flee from it, and with how we still have power even when kris is down and how noelle's HP won't go lower than 55 it's kind of impossible, isn't it?

sjsjshsjshdh i've been going on for a while acting like it's a sure thing that kris is the DR narrator, and in some ways yeah that's my go-to headcanon, but again there's a reason this is a HC and not a theory. but i like how kris is noticeably breaking through our control/possession as the chapters progress (they control the delivery of the options, now). i can't wait to see kris break free and do whatever it is they need to do. (assuming their plan /is/ safe to do!!! kris please i just want you and everyone you love to be safe and happy). i hope they kick our ass into the outer space for snowgrave the way chara did for no mercy. but in a normal route, i hope they get whatever it is they wanted to get when they did a driveby kidnapping through gaster's void.

[whathappenedtodecember]

“I am aware that this request is fundamentally selfish. I can offer no justification for it, no argument in its favor. It is simply the outcome I desire to see the most.”

[whathappenedtodecember]

people are so quick to compare kris' situation in deltarune to demonic possession, but in my opinion it's a lot closer to sainthood. having your will imposed on by a greater authority (the player metanarratively, but also carol and potentially others diagetically) with immense pressure on you to succeed, martyring yourself for a cause you can't fully explain to anyone because (you believe) they wouldn't understand, sacrificing your personhood for a "higher purpose", the themes of psychosis and disordered identity and being in a state of stress-induced crisis which were exceedingly common - and an implicit condemnation of the consequences of ignoring or recontextualising them as divine influence instead of making any attempt to meaningfully help the person experiencing them - in so-called saints, the imagery of being a cage for a soul formed of "human parts"... and at the end of it all, you were just an ordinary person whose suffering was retroactively made meaningful (and more palatable) by narrativisation and mythologisation. that's not possession, that's sainthood.