Thoughts On Deltarune Chapters 1-2

Published: 2025.05.23

The third and fourth chapters of Deltarune are slated to release in less than a month, so I wanted to get down my predictions for Chapter 3 beforehand. Probably not of particularly wide interest, but since I've enjoyed going back and reading what predictions people had for Chapter 2 after the fact I figured I might as well throw in my own two cents to contribute.

Kris as the Roaring Knight

I especially wanted to talk about how I've really come around on the 'Kris is the Knight' hypothesis over the years. The idea was around since Chapter 1 released, mostly based on the scene it ended on with the knife. Chapter 2 fueled the flames - the TV getting plugged in was almost certainly Kris even if we assume they weren't responsible for the Chapter 2 fountain. The main thing still holding me back from really embracing it wholeheartedly is just how little we know about Kris's actual motivations, and consequently how little we can deduce about what they might actually want in opposition to the player, which seems pretty important when trying to identify who the Knight might be.

It... really is amazing how little we know about Kris's motivations given how much of their backstory we have, frankly.

We know that the group of kids (Asriel, Dess, Kris, and Noelle) used to play together a lot, possibly being Kris's only friends. Even Kris's friendship with Catti might only have grown later after whatever happened to cause Dess to go missing, which traumatized at a minimum Noelle and quite likely also Kris. Once Kris and Noelle drifted apart Asriel and Catti probably wound up being closer to Kris than anyone else.

Speaking of Catti, though, it's extremely notable that in a world where monsters seemingly don't have magic she and Kris were studying "occultism". Which... generally has a pretty negative connotation. Demon summoning and whatnot. And the only mention of a 'Demon' in a Toby Fox game was that one bit at the end of the Undertale Genocide route where Chara started describing themselves as one, as a metaphor for the player's own drive to "win". Obviously, the player is once again an active part of the story of Deltarune like they were for Undertale... so this could be pretty important moving forward.

Bringing this back to whether or not Kris is the Knight, based on what we have of Kris's backstory we can make some predictions regarding what pre-Chapter 1 events looked like should they turn out to be the Knight:

Kris, feeling increasingly isolated (maybe due to Asriel having left for college, depending on when exactly this happens) "studies" the occult with Catti. Possibly just to have someone to hang out with, possibly for a deeper purpose... we don't know. Either way, they eventually stumbled upon magic that actually *worked*. Perhaps by discovering an already-existing dark fountain in the already-abandoned classroom, or perhaps they made that fountain and caused the classroom to be abandoned when it was discovered. Either way, they also found a spell that let the summon... something. Somehow, they knew the spell would work and they spent the night before Chapter 1 prepping the town for the events of Chapter 1, including hiding the chalk in Alphys's classroom (possibly in Suzie's locker?) and opening the dark fountain in the supply closet. Maybe they tried it out beforehand and managed to contact Gaster or something, I don't know.

As an aside, doing all that the night before dovetails rather nicely with how they overslept the morning of Chapter 1.

Kris interrupts the "Goner Maker" segment *somehow* using the magic they'd discovered, making them the one who said the "Nobody can choose who they are in this world" line. Which... definitely tracks with where their headspace seems to be, honestly. That would be a mark against them working with Gaster, perhaps, unless Gaster knew they would do that and basically served the opportunity up on a silver platter. The relationship between the two of them is probably one of mutual convenience at best, if one exists at all.

All this implies Kris is frankly a very impressive planner and manipulator. Or that they somehow had perfect foreknowledge of what their choices would result in (again somehow). Their obvious resistance to the Weird Route seems to undercut the latter possibility, so perhaps less-than-perfect?

Extending this further to Chapter 2, though, that "very impressive" goes right through to "terrifying", if the same pattern holds.

If it does, then that means when Kris snuck out in the night between the first and second chapter, they ate (or discarded) the pie specifically to misdirect the player. Then they snuck all the way down to the library, created a dark fountain in the closet, and kept the closet door closed in order to ensure Noelle and Berdly would be trapped there due to being inside the computer lab before opening the computer lab closet door. They may well have had a hand in ensuring the traffic jam happened, for all we know - that way the player would be funneled directly to the computer lab dark world after school. They might also have visited with Ralsei, at that point.

The fact that they're even more exhausted the morning of Chapter 2... kind of corroborates that they are really not sleeping well, at a minimum.

One major open question we have about all this, though, is why Kris would want to hide from us that they are the Knight. Just controlling for more variables, maybe? Since the process of opening fountains was explained in front of the player at the end of Chapter 2 they have an excuse for knowing how to open fountains other than being the Knight, so they might still try to hide that fact from us throughout further chapters, if they can. As we can see, plenty of people (myself included, to be clear) still aren't totally convinced they're the Knight despite seeing thnat.

But... again, all this essentially requires that Kris either A) be a near Xanatos-level manipulator and planner, or B) somehow have (less than?) perfect knowledge of what the outcomes of their actions will be. All while having a reputation among their fellow students for being kind of useless and off-putting.

As an aside from all this, it's pretty important to point out that it was probably the supply closet foutain that was upsetting the balance. After all, of the two kingdoms (his and the Card Kingdom) that could potentially be the one in the legend only one of them actually had anyone in it besides Ralsei.

Further, consider that Ralsei's dark world is in the school supply closet, somewhere that lightners necessarily go all the time. At best, I would have thought someone would have opened that door some time that week, maybe some time the previous day. Alphys certainly didn't seem to think anything would be wrong with it.

The Card Kingdom dark world, meanwhile, was located in an explicitly "abandoned" classroom. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the place, but it's kind of odd for a four-room school to abandon a quarter of its rooms, isn't it? Not even using it for storage, and leaving all the toys inside strewn about. We have no idea when that room was last used, but it's easy to see how an actual adult opening the classroom door one day to find a wall of solid nothingness spilling out would get freaked out and seal the place off.

Themes of Deltarune

Obviously, it's still very early days to determine what Deltarune's overarching themes are going to be. Most of the below is speculation. But since when isn't speculation fun?

One particular speculation I want to highlight was prompted by a fan comic that was posted back in December of 2022. It posits an encounter of some sort between a post-Snowgrave Noelle and a vaguely post-Neutral, maybe post-Geno Chara (deeply cynical about humans but not full-on "I AM THE DEMON WHO COMES WHEN YOU CALL ITS NAME", basically). The relevant part of the exchange boils down to:

Noelle: Why would they do that? Why [does the player] hate me so much?

Chara: Haha! It's not because they hate you, Noelle! It's because they love you! This is how humans show love! They want to know you, know _all_ of you, and this broken timeline gives them the ideal opportunity. They want to crack you open and see the ugly things you're hiding. And the part of them that craves disaster and tragedy is so nicely sated by your destructive helplessness.

That phrasing has rather firmly stuck itself in my mind, thinking about what the Snowgrave route entailed.

Undertale commented heavily about people who have a 'completionist' mindset about games, with a core narrative point of "just because you can, doesn't mean you have to". And in particular, just because there is more content that you could extract from the game doesn't mean you should.

Deltarune so far seems to be taking the same general concept and adapting it to address a similar but very distinct mindset... maybe something along the lines of "narrative completionism". The desire to "fully" understand a character, even if doing so requires them to pointlessly suffer. It's kind of an odd impulse if you think about it, after all - asking what a given real person would have done had they been in a situation is one thing, but asking what a fictional character would do in a given situation technically doesn't have any answer beyond "whatever the writer makes them do". And on top of that, the characters people are most often eager to see explored like that are the ones they like the most. You look at the fanfiction websites, and it's often an author's favorite characters that they put through the most horrific situations.

I'm not at all sure where Toby might take this point moving forward, if he does at all. But getting back to that process of speculation... perhaps the equivalent of "just because you can, doesn't mean you have to" will be something like "these characters aren't real, they can't really do anything to harm or even oppose you. Their world has an intended course to follow, which if you allow to play out will let you have a fun time with them. If you're unsatisfied with that, though, you're free to choose not to play along. The characters will suffer much worse, of course, but you'll sure get a different experience!"

Less snappy, of course, but I suppose there's a reason it's Mr. Fox writing these games and not I.

There's a bit more to the comic than I quoted above, and it really is very good. I encourage people to click the link and check it out.

Ralsei

...Okay, this isn't actually a Chapter 3 prediction at all but just something I've been pointing out for a while. Ralsei 100% tricked us into closing the "wrong" fountain in Chapter 1. The way he told it there was an already-existing fountain the the center of a kingdom and a new one which opened up on the horizon from said kingdom... but of the two kingdoms (his and the Card Kingdom) only one of them actually had anyone in it besides Ralsei.

More concerningly, consider that Ralsei's dark world is in the school supply closet, somewhere that lightners necessarily go all the time. At best, I would have thought someone would have opened that door some time that week, maybe some time the previous day. Alphys certainly didn't seem to think anything would be wrong with it.

It's also... fascinatingly convenient that someone stole Alphys's chalk some time leading into the day the game takes place. That could have been Suzie (in which case she'd have stolen it the previous evening and was finishing it up that morning outside of class), but if whoever stole it had stashed it in her locker then her immediate aggression against Kris would make more sense than it already does. She'd have been thinking that Kris set her up.

Doesn't mean Kris didn't do it, of course. We know that Kris is much more involved in the whole mess than we initially thought, whether or not they are "the knight". Whatever occult "research" they did with Catti clearly bore fruit, and setting up everything that first day to go off perfectly would mean that Kris is potentially far more on the ball than anyone really seems to be giving them credit for.