My Deltarune Theories

Chapters 3 and 4 of Deltarune are right around the corner! I’ve been working on a Deltarune shrine/fan site for a while now. I had a page dedicated to fan theories, both mine and others, that I thought were cool. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be able to get the whole thing out before chapters 3 and 4 release on June 4th, so I figured I’d just share them on my blog instead.

For the sake of brevity I'm going to try to focus on ones that I came up with. At least I think I'm the first one to come up with them. Maybe these are really obvious to other people, but whatever.

What’s the Deal With Blood?

I guess this one is less of a theory and more of an observation. I know I'm not the first person to notice this, it's pretty blatant, but it's still interesting enough to talk about in my opinion.

We've received conflicting information about wether or not monsters in the Deltarune universe bleed. In chapter 1, Susie says that Everybody bleeds, right? which would suggest that they do. However, the Japanese localization makes no mention of blood, leading some fans to think she was just talking figuratively. Toby Fox works very closely on both versions, and has gone out of his way to preserve certain metaphors in both languages, so if he didn't preserve this one, maybe its not meant to be taken literally.

A little later in the chapter, Lancer also makes references to buckets full of blood, which suggest that blood isn't a strange/foreign concept to the Darkners.

During the segment in Hometown, things are made more muddy by a monster NPC who asks Ooo, are you the human that lives at the top of the town? Wow, my mommy told me about you... Does it hurt to be made of blood???

So, being "made of blood" is something associated with humans, but is it exclusive to them?

In chapter 2, there's an unused sprite of Susie bleeding, but since these aren't used in the final game I don't know if I should be taking them at face value.

In the developer intended way of playing the Snowgrave/weird route, we technically don't see any characters besides Berdly die, they just get frozen. But there are exploits you can do to power up Noelle early and see her use Snowgrave on regular enemies. The defeat animation in this situation is eerily similar to the death animation in Undertale. Maybe the Darkners are the ones that turn to dust? I was going to say that maybe it's just a placeholder animation at first, but if that was the case wouldn't they just use the same non-lethal defeat animation that they use in the rest of the game? This feels very intentional to me.

So, a lot of conflicting information, I'm not really sure what to make of it. I'm just curious to know how they're going to thread this crazy needle in Chapter 3.

Eyes, Darkness, and Ignorance

The games eye’s motif is pretty blatant. One of the first puzzles in the entire game is the eye puzzle, the first section of the closet dark world has eyes carved into the walls, and the creatures shown when Ralsei is describing the roaring are cyclopes with similar looking eyes on them. Some fans have even pointed out how certain characters covering their eyes, like Susie in chapter 1 and Kris, could possibly symbolize various things. Lightness and darkness are also very obvious themes of Deltarune. We have the Light World and the Dark Worlds, with their Lightner and Darkner inhabitants, respectively.

Something I don't think I've seen anyone talk about though is the possibly related motif of ignorance and how it connects to those other themes. I'm not really sure how to fully explain my thoughts. I guess they're based more so on "vibes" than actual dialog from the game. Bare with me a little bit here.

We have a lot of phrases in English that equate lightness with knowledge and darkness with lack of knowledge. When someone doesn't share important information with you, you're "left in the dark". When people learn, they become "enlightened". These figures of speech are often related to sight-based idioms, because people need light to see. For example, we say someone is "blinded by rage" when they're so angry that they can't think rationally

There's this one part of the game that I think about a lot, and I haven't seen a single other person talk about it. In Chapter 2, the Queen makes different, personalized rooms for several characters, based off of their internet searches. All of the narration when interacting with these rooms is lighthearted, until Kris reaches Asriel's room. The player can make Kris open the door, but Kris will just close their eyes.

Trying to read up on Deltarune fan theories can be so annoying sometimes. "oooooh… is this a reference to Gaster? Is ICE-E the knight??? Is Kris evil?????" Shut up!!! I don't care about any of that!!! What I really wanna know is why Kris opened the door with their eyes closed!!!!!

Anyway, a similar thing also happens in the chapters Light World segment. Kris can go to the second floor of the library and pick up the book "How To Care For A Human". If you make them read it, they'll notice the pictures of "unfamiliar humans" and shut it closed.

I guess a simpler interpretation of that second scene would be centered around Kris being uncomfortable with their humanity. That's probably the intended reading, but a part of me wants to connect these two sections of the game to the idea of being willfully ignorant. Kris is shown information, possibly even new information, but they avoid it. They want to remain in the dark. Ignorance is bliss, after all.

But I don't know, maybe I'm just looking too deep into it.

Asriel Is Not the Same Asriel From Undertale

This is maybe a tin foil hat theory, but it’s something I genuinely think could happen and I haven’t seen anyone else bring it up yet so I will. I think it’s possible that Asriel in Deltarune is not the same character as Asriel in Undertale. Not just a different version of the character, like we’ve seen before with other characters that appear in both games, I mean a totally different character.

Why do I think this? For one, the game seems to be hyping up his appearance a lot. More than any of the other returning characters. Imagine how crazy it would be if Toby subverted our exceptions and just made him a totally different guy.

Secondly, remember how bad Asgore is at naming things. I mean, Asriel is literally just a mash up of Asgore and Toriel. The name "Asriel" isn't inherently connected to this one individual character if that makes sense. He wasn't named after any specific traits he has, he was named that because he's Asgore and Toriel's son. Following that logic, Asgore and Toriel would have probably named any child of their's Asriel, even if it's not the Asriel we know in Deltarune.

If it's not the same Asriel as in Undertale, maybe this Asriel isn’t a boss monster. Maybe he’s not even Asgore and Toriel's biological son. The only thing we know about him visually is that he has horns. We find this out when talking to Toriel in hometown in Chapter 1, when she tells the story of Asriel's horns coming in and Kris getting jealous. But a lot of monsters have horns, not just boss monsters. Maybe he's some other kind of monster.

Dess and Mayor Holiday Are Not Reindeer

In a similar vain, I wonder if Dess and Mayor Holiday are reindeer monsters. Again, another tinfoil hat theory, but I feel like it's more likely than the Asriel one, since Dess and Mayor Holiday (technically) aren't returning characters.

In the Xbox One version of Undertale, Sans describes Noelle and Dess as "the antlered girl and her big sis". This strongly implies that Dess doesn't have horns. This is maybe a stretch, but what if the two are totally different species of monster? Maybe Dess’s species just doesn’t have horns, while Noelle’s does.

We see a lot of cross-species couples in Undertale and Deltarune, but I don't think we've ever seen a "mixed species" family. With the obvious exception of Toriel and Asgore adopting the fallen child/Kris, every family we see in the games are of a single species. I don't think there's any major lore implications of this, it's just easier to convey that two random NPCs are related by giving them similar designs, but it would be interesting to see it subverted.

The more I think about it, maybe it would add some interesting parallels to Noelle and Kris’s relationship. Not only are they childhood friends who both have older siblings, but those older siblings are completely different species from them. Kris is very insecure about not being a monster, but maybe Noelle handles it differently? Obviously, she's still a monster, but you know what I mean. Maybe the game could compare and contrast the two’s experiences, that’d lead to some interesting character moments, I feel.

Footnotes

1. Blood mystery: Susie actually made no mention of bleeding. ↩︎
2. Snowgrave death animation. ↩︎
3. This Tumblr post covers all the times in Undertale where it's explicitly mentioned that Asgore sucks at naming things. ↩︎