#THE IMPLICATIONS FOR CHUCKER. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

blazichu · 5 years

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There are a lot of moving parts in this, and I’m still trying to figure it out as I’m typing, so I apologize if I’m not making the most sense.

I have one big question, and I’m pretty sure it’s awfully similar to a lot of other questions people have:

Who exactly was the soul in ch1’s ending, and who was the soul-chucker?

There are two natural conclusions to come to: the player took control and threw Kris’s soul away, or Kris rejected the player’s influence and threw them out. As of writing this, I’m leaning toward the latter, and I’ll try to explain why.

Three important facts to take into consideration:

The first time you save, there’s already a file labelled ‘Kris’. Every time you save after this, it uses the name you gave when the game asked what yours was.

When you’re exploring the town, you can talk to, among others, Noelle and her dad, Rudolph, both of whom comment on Kris’s strange behavior. Both imply that Kris is being more social than usual. Noelle says that they’re being more talkative, and Rudolph says that they wouldn’t normally come visit him.

When the soul is thrown into the bird cage, you can control it.

So if Kris is the one whose file has been overwritten, whose behavior is strange according to some of the people who know them best*, and you, the player, can control the soul that’s been thrown out of Kris’s body, we have to assume that Kris was the one who did the throwing.

*Bear in mind that Rudolph and Asgore have been friends for a very long time in this universe, and that Noelle knows Kris enough to be prepared to help them with the homework they haven’t done. Out of everyone we meet, they’re the most familiar with the Dreemurr family (outside of Toriel and Asgore, of course).

Now here’s another good question: are you, the person reading this, and who physically played the game, the ‘player’?

My guess is actually no. Everything about Deltarune thus far has been about mixing things up in ways we hadn’t expected. The set dressing of the town is familiar, but it’s above ground and we don’t even know what it’s called. The characters are, at their core, the same people, but they don’t have the history or relationships that they did in Undertale. The fact that things aren’t the same is, quite literally, the name of the game.

So, let’s go back to Undertale for a moment. It’s pretty common knowledge by now that the ‘fallen child’ you name at the beginning of the game isn’t Frisk, but Chara. The overruling interpretation is that Chara, in-narrative, is the one in control during a no mercy run, and that, in function, you’re filling that role as the person choosing what to do. For simplicity’s sake, let’s not get into the implications behind No Mercy’s ending right now.

Now, back to Deltarune. From a meta standpoint, we already have experience with the way Undertale worked, so the natural assumption is that you want to get through the game without hurting an enemy—at least, that was my train of thought: ‘I’ll get the best ending if I play as a pacifist’. With that in mind, is it so strange to think that the script’s been flipped? For lack of better terminology, Chara is in Frisk’s old position (now Kris), and Frisk is in Chara’s (now the player’s name).

And if the characters are, at their core, the same people, doesn’t that clear a lot up? Regardless of your own interpretation of Chara’s, well, character, it’s canon that they had a lot of issues, and ‘weren’t always the best person’. Rudolph gives us several examples indicating that Kris might be much the same—terrorizing Noelle from beneath her bed, covering their arms in ketchup and telling Noelle it was blood, and whatever else inspired him to call them a creepy kid.

Meanwhile, in the Dark World, from the moment their save is overwritten, they do stuff like hugging Ralsei/the dummy, flattering the Hathys, bowing/deeply bowing to the K. Round, eating moss off a dungeon floor and/or wearing the shackles, and—of particular note—they flirt with the Head Hathys. This is important for two reasons: one, the game goes out of its way to demonstrate that both Susie and Ralsei just make things awkward when they try, but that it totally works when Kris is the one doing it. The second (flimsier) reason is that, of all the actions in UT, ‘flirt’ is the most iconic and is heavily associated with Frisk. The main point, however, is that none of this behavior is what you would expect from someone with a reputation for being creepy. well, maybe the shackle thing.

It’s also worth noting the change in Kris’s color palette between the Light and Dark Worlds, the latter of which primarily takes place after the aforementioned overwriting.

Another important fact? After the intro, but before the game actually starts, we’re given a screen that reads “Your name is—”, and then Toriel cuts in, calling Kris’s name. It’s easy to read that as the introduction to the character, and it does function that way, but considering that it’s identical in all but text orientation to “[name]? That’s a nice name. My name is—” in Undertale, I don’t know if we can dismiss it so easily. If we’re running with the ‘the PC is a variation on Frisk’, then it would stand to reason that we won’t hear their actual name until very late, contrasting the Chara’s name and Kris’s, which you give/we get upfront.

I think that’s about all I’ve got for now. I do want to make it clear, though, that I’m not saying Kris is evil. To be honest, I think they just want to be in control of their life, and I suspect that they haven’t really been given that opportunity. A good example is Toriel’s comment about Asriel carrying them to school, or Toriel herself holding their hand on the way in, which left them no room to decide for themselves.

The ending was… creepy, yes, but Kris themselves was established as a creepy kid. It might not be as sinister as we’re immediately led to believe.

In any case, that was a lot of babbling about nothing in particular. If you made it through the whole thing, A++.

#continued chatter about ut #dr spoilers

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