IM BEGGING YOU PLEASE STOP POSTING K-POP IN THE ASTRO BOY TAG WERE TINY AS IT IS

IM BEGGING YOU PLEASE STOP POSTING K-POP IN THE ASTRO BOY TAG WE’RE TINY AS IT IS

More fun thoughts about Delta Rune.

I’m betting a lot of people are thinking Toriel, Kris’s parent, has to be the one to try and step in to stop their dysfunctional behavior. That’s not going to happen.

I love Toriel but, as a parent, I see at as pretty WILD and fucked up that she allows them to just, have their own knife, and that eating a pie in the middle of the night is something to laugh off.

Toriel is a very dysfunctional “permissive” parent in a few different ways, and I really don’t doubt that was a strain on her and Asgore’s relationship. I have a lot of suspicions that Asgore’s “incident” had to do with the stress of repeatedly trying to bring up their concerns about Kris only to be rebuffed.

I think we’re going to be exploring Toriel’s key flaws in her loving, compassionate personality in Ch 3. Love is not enough to help Kris.

Kris has so much love given to them throughout their life, and yet, that really hasn’t been enough for the emotional turmoil resulting from social isolation, and possession by an entity Kris can’t even talk about.

I could even see Toriel deciding, well, if Kris wants to stay in Dark World, why should anyone stop them? Let alone their doting, loving mother.

I can't even believe I'm saying this, but...

I think that Kris actually is possessed by something other than the player.

To be clear, I'm not talking about the Weird/Genocide/Snowgrave route, or about anything that happens during gameplay. Pushing Noelle to proceed, her hearing a creepy voice that doesn't belong to Kris - all that shit is on you. Like in Undertale, the fact that the player controls the player character is a central mechanic of the universe.

But them ripping out their soul and opening dark fountains? That isn't really them. And given that I'm a person who absolutely hates the "blame everything on Chara possession" attitude that plagued Undertale, as you already know if you've been following me for a while, you know that I wouldn't believe this if there wasn't evidence for it.

So here's the deal.

In Chapter 1, when we saw Kris tear their soul out of their chest and stuff it into a birdcage, everyone — including myself — saw this as a way of asserting their independence from the player: they no longer want you to control them. But in Chapter 2, when we saw them do it again not once but twice, some odd details stood out to me.

The first thing is the way they move when it's happening. We see Kris walk on their own during cutscenes and such, and they never do it with their head down and their legs splayed out, shuffling along like a zombie. Maybe you could say that it's just how humans move after their soul's been ripped out...if it weren't for the fact that they start doing it in the moments before they tear out their soul. I don't feel like hunting down gifs and screenshots for this post, but if you watch them at the end of Chapter 1, there's this moment where they hold out their hand and open and close it a few times. Almost like they — or someone — is testing their control of it. Again, they never do this at any other point when they take over their own movements.

Related to this is the second point: two out of three times that this has happened, Kris has been hurled out of a dead sleep to do it. They quite literally get thrown out of bed/off the couch to shuffle around and create dark fountains. Speaking hypothetically, if you were an entity that could possess people, wouldn’t it be easiest to do it when they were sleeping? Their mind would be at its most defenseless, and they’d already lack full control of their body. That in itself isn’t direct evidence, but it’s worth noting.

What is direct evidence is the fact that Kris only ever rips out their soul after dark. And after finishing the game, if you’ve recruited enough Darkners from the Cyber World, you can talk to Seam again and they’ll say: “You don’t want to get caught when the sun goes down…”

The wording there feels very deliberate. Get caught. Like they know that something will “catch” Kris after sundown, something beyond their control. And sure enough, it does.

So Kris has been caught by someone who wants to create Dark Fountains. There’s only one person we know who wants to do that: the Knight. Worth noting is the fact that other characters refer to the Knight as “he,” not “they.” Given that pronouns are actually important in Toby Fox world, this indicates that Kris isn’t actually the Knight, just being controlled by him. So how come the first thing the Knight does is make Kris rip out their own soul? Because he doesn’t want you, the player, to interfere. Undertale introduced the idea that you can directly control a person via their Soul; now Deltarune is expanding on the concept, showing that you’re not the only one with this ability. The next few chapters of the game may very well involve you and the Knight struggling over your “vessel.” You want to use Kris’s power to seal the fountains; he wants to use that same power to create fountains.

I’m not one hundred percent sure who the Knight is yet, or how exactly he ended up getting control of Kris — maybe the fact that they canonically studied the occult has something to do with it. But I think I know why. Things are going to get a little more speculative than evidence-based here, so forgive me, but there are a few things to suggest that Kris isn’t the first pawn that the Knight has tried to open fountains with.

Queen mentions that only Lightners can open Dark Fountains. She learned this through the Knight, but what if the Knight learned it through trial and error? What if he tried to use Darkners to do his bidding first, but his attempts backfired?

This is where our trash friends Jevil and Spamton enter the picture. We know that long before we ever met them, they both encountered a mysterious person who caused them to begin seeing the nature of their reality, and that this knowledge drove them insane (albeit in different ways). There’s no hard evidence yet that the mysterious person was indeed the Knight, but if it was, maybe he thought that Jevil and Spamton could be used to open fountains for him, but whatever he did wound up breaking them. I could be completely wrong about this — even if the mysterious person was the Knight, he could have had a totally different reason for driving them both insane — but based on the information we currently have, I think it’s a possibility. It wouldn’t be just Jevil and Spamton who were his “test subjects,” either; Seam alludes to there being more Dark Crystal carriers, and thus more secret bosses.

But in the end, the Knight found out that Darkners couldn’t achieve what he needed them to achieve. This would also imply that he’s a Darkner, or that there’s some other reason why he can’t open fountains on his own; either way, he turned to Kris, and now he can take control of them. Just like we can.

But seriously, guys, Kris isn’t possessed by Chara in the Snowgrave route, so take some goddamn responsibility for your actions. That is all.

@kuromoai made the art in the thumbnail. Be sure to check out her original post on Twitter!

@asterofthedeepforest suggested this mashup on a Discord call. Half an hour and a few edits later, and it actually wound up working. Hope you guys enjoy the result as much as I do!

You can also listen to this mashup in high quality on my SoundCloud here!

everyone goes about their day with multiple impulses in their head of what they could do in any given situation; many of them things we would never do, that don’t actually reflect anything about our identity or desires. y’know, like how most everyone who’s ever held a very small animal has had a thought pop in their head about what would happen if they chucked it at full speed, and then didn’t do that.

my interpretation of how kris experiences being inhabited is that all of the options we’re given are impulses of theirs — not things they always want to do, just thoughts that enter their head — and we get to decide which of those impulses they act on. that’s why although they narrate with the word “you” to describe actions they ascribe to the player, they also use the word “you” in many cases that seem to be referring only to themself. for example, when you command noelle to Act on her first encounter with virovirokun and she gets confused, the narration says “you and virovirokun explained combat to noelle” without any input from the player telling kris to explain it to her.

kris knows that their heart is making decisions for them, but they don’t always perceive a difference between their decisions and the ones their heart makes because some of those decisions are things they would’ve done anyway.

SONIC UNDERGROUND |  Redesign