N+K4L

Dance of an Angel and a Devil

 A Primer, Prediction, and FAQ on Kris x Noelle Romance in Deltarune

By u/PeliPal   (she/they)

With feedback, assistance, and additional writing from u/Reasonable_Solid6251

And the help of months of discussions within the Kriselle and Deltarune shipping and theorycrafting communities

(Spoilers for Deltarune Chapters 1 through 4, the Weird Route, Undertale, and all official out-of-game content)

To Do List for future revisions:
1. Credits for everyone who deserves it. There are many things in this document that are unclear who may have been the first person to notice something. I’m not the originator of most ideas here, and I’m looking to compile these ideas, not to take credit for them. If you believe you are responsible for first identifying a piece of evidence or narrative and would like to be credited for it in this doc, please message myself on Reddit (u/PeliPal) with a link to where you posted about it and we can discuss crediting.

2. Add encyclopedia of Kris and Noelle interactions. Many of them are referenced here, but they are not all gathered in one place.

3. Add more supporting pictures and quotes where relevant.

4. See about hosting outside Google Docs for more multimedia support. Did you know you can’t even do Wingdings font on Google Docs? You can’t even copy and paste Wingdings. I wanted to have a fun secret Gaster easter egg and it’s ruined unless I upload it as a jpeg. My day is ruined and my disappointment is immeasurable…

Table of Contents

N+K4L: Fangamer Spamton Plush Video, and Intro

The Tension Between Shipping and Theorycrafting

Symbolism Inside and Outside the Game

1. Chapter 4 Shadow Crystal
2. Heart Locket from Spamton Sweepstakes
3. Cactus Theory
4. Matching Names
5. An Angel and a Devil
6. Elnina and Lanino
7. Seam and Jevil
8. Head Hathy and Werewerewire and… BERDLY?!
9. ILOVEMOUSE
10. First Sanctuary: Cuptains
11. First Sanctuary: Light and Sound
12. Skies Forever Blue

Themes of Kriselle (by Reasonable_Solid6251)

Repression

Why Love, when one can Prank?

The Hero, The Villain, and The Victim.

Kris Dreemurr

Freedom

FAQ

1. Q Noelle says that she was just forced to be around Kris and they were nothing but neighbors!
2. Q But the Weird Route is negative commentary on Kriselle, explaining why it is bad.
3. Q Nothing could break up Susie and Noelle at this point, so why all this song and dance about Kriselle?
4. Q Ralsei pushes for Susie and Noelle to have room to bond, and doesn’t want Kris and Noelle bonding alone without Susie. Doesn’t that mean that Suselle happens and Kriselle doesn’t?
5. Q How could Suselle not be the primary romance of the game after Toby put so much time and effort building it up? Is all that just supposed to go to waste?
6. Q Kriselle shippers just hate Suselle, that’s what this is all about, you’re grasping at straws coming up with all these other things because you’re jealous that Suselle is canon.
7. Q Isn’t it possible that no main cast ships are canonized by the end?
8. Q You waffle back and forth on polyamory in this document. Is there any reason it couldn’t be possible?
9. Q What if Toby only knows how to write - or only WANTS to write - summarized and upbeat romances? Like Alphys x Undyne and the Royal Guards
10. Q But the Kris and Noelle Teas only healed each other for a little bit of HP, nowhere near as much as Susie Tea for either Kris or Noelle
11. Q I don't like the idea of shipping Kris with anyone, because we're a parasite controlling them
12. Q We are given optional choices that tease possible romance with Susie, Ralsei, and even Berdly. Isn’t that a big strike against Kriselle being important to the story?
13. Q “Kriselle is the past, Suselle is the future"
14. Q But Kris doesn't fit into Noelle's canon sexuality, she’s a lesbian. Isn’t Kriselle heteronormative? The Weird Route is about heteronormativity, doesn’t that reflect Toby’s thoughts on Kriselle?
15. Q Isn’t Kriselle tropey, like ‘the hero and their next door neighbor’? Her song is literally ‘Girl Next Door’. Doesn’t Toby always try to subvert and deconstruct tropes instead of playing them straight?
16. Q What kind of ship is Kriselle, why do people call it yuri? Is it really ok to call it yuri even though Kris is nonbinary and not a woman?
17. Q The prophecy panel said that “Love finds its way to the girl.” Doesn’t that refer to Susie, and her falling in love with Noelle?
18. Q But Toby mentioned Suselle on the Undertale 10th Anniversary stream! And he didn’t mention Kriselle along with it.
19. Q Kris and Noelle spent a lot of their childhood together, I consider them like siblings or cousins, and couldn’t they end up thinking of themselves that way after they get close again? Wouldn’t it be weird for them to be romantically involved?
20. Q But why specifically do they need to have a romance, why can't they just be friends?
21. Q I have a critique about one of your points, and I can’t believe you think Kriselle could be canon because of it
22. Q I prefer [insert shipping here]
23. Q What do you expect people to do with this information?

N+K4L: Fangamer Spamton Plush Video, and Intro

First, an explanation of the first name of this document.

The mission statement and scope of this document radically changed over two months of writing, as fellow theorycrafters and I realized more and more pieces of the puzzle, but I knew from the beginning that the above image from the official Fangamer Spamton plush advertisement would form the name and the central thesis of this document.

The point of this document is not to explain “why I like Kriselle” or “why it’s ok, actually,  to ship Kriselle.” Those were my original motivations two months ago.

Now, it is to explain what I believe to be a reasonable prediction: Kriselle, aka Kris x Noelle, is very likely to be a canon romance by the end of Deltarune.

And it’s still possible that one or both characters would die or otherwise become incapable of continuing it. In fact, I think it is very likely that one or both could die in the ‘Normal Route’ of the game, and the Weird Route may leave them alive, but deeply troubled at best. And it’s still possible, though I believe unlikely, that it would be one facet of a polyamorous relationship for these characters. But I’m convinced that Kris and Noelle’s reconciliation and the start of a romance will be a major theme of the second half of Deltarune.

Now, to actually explain what you’re looking at above…

At 0:28 in the Fangamer Spamton plush video we get a shot of Spamton falling off a ledge and revealing yellow and white graffiti which reads as follows:

NO SHOT -> N+K4L <3 <3 NRKS

The letters, with no reasonable doubt in my mind, stand for Noelle + Kris For Life, and the initials of the Fun Gang: Noelle Ralsei Kris Susie, and Spamton wrote the ‘NO SHOT’ as vandalizing mockery, where he stood on the windowsill.

‘N+K4L’ can act as a shorthand for the idea that YES, there is an evidentiary basis for Kris and Noelle as a romantic couple within the story of Deltarune, without needing to say anything else. We are going to go through many other things in this document, but this graffiti, these five characters, are the foot shoved in the doorway to keep this possibility open and begin to examine all those other pieces of evidence and narratives with an open mind, earnestly.

N+K4L as a shorthand can be a rallying cry. A reminder that you aren’t misinterpreting the game for liking the two characters as a pairing, but rather, you might be seeing something that other people are not seeing yet.

If this sounds too wild, too rapidly out of left field, and too uncharacteristically direct to be real and there must be some other explanation, I understand that feeling, but there are some points I want to go over:

1. The immediately preceding shot is Spamton dancing on a destroyed piano in a public space, like the one Susie mentions in chapter 4 of having tried to destroy, and a later scene of the video references the infamous Webkinz cat plush meme about pouring liquid on a plushie and throwing it at a wall to make a loud noise, which was reused again in Chapter 3 with a suggestion by Tenna to do that to the Ralsei plushie.

2. The shot of the graffiti is an explicitly created location, there is no chance at all that this was a random window they happened to find with existing unrelated graffiti. The graffiti has all of the following characteristics: handwritten, legible, focused on by the camera without moving, and not solely related to a Spamton joke. It is the ONLY text in the entire video to have all those qualities simultaneously. It has no extraneous letters, the paint looks fresh, it happens to be in a color associated with Noelle (her chapter 2 UI color is yellow), and has a ‘shot’ reference which Spamton is placed in front of on the windowsill.

The only question in my mind is whether I am correctly interpreting an intended meaning. Could Fangamer have picked a shipping for Spamton to mock, on their own, without Toby’s direction? Or as reference specifically to the Weird Route despite no other indications of the Weird Route? Spamton is dead in the Weird Route, and I doubt that Noelle would have an attachment to Ralsei in the future of the Weird Route and consider the four of them a friend group. And it wasn’t even clear at the time that the Weird Route would even involve a romantic relationship between Kris and Noelle where Noelle could write such a thing.

What is the serious possibility that Kriselle would just be randomly picked at a time when virtually no one in the fandom thought it was a serious consideration?

But I assume Fangamer might have been told to make it Kris and Noelle because it's a hint to future content, and I raise that possibility because…

3. Official merch has already appears to have been used to give us at least one other possible clue for future content that didn't exist at the time - the Noelle sticker of her cowering and saying “That's not like you” was released before Chapter 2, and is presumed to be connected to the Weird Route. https://store.line.me/stickershop/product/13505512/en. Toby is not averse to teasing hints outside the game, like saying “Cool mantle, bro” regarding King’s cape, apparently referring to the Shadow Mantle.

The laser-targeted directness of this shot has eaten away at my brain for months since I first saw it.

I've tried making explanations to see how it could be made implausible from other angles, and come up empty-handed. I've shown this photo to many people who don't like Kriselle, or otherwise prefer other ships, and I haven't been satisfied with the responses.

This graffiti is implied to have been written by Noelle, in the fictional context of the world depicted. It's written in her UI color, and her initial is first in both the romantic initials pairing and in the Fun Gang initials. And this would only be possible in future content, a future chapter or as an epilogue, as Noelle will need to have learned Ralsei’s name and feel like they all make up a friend group. This might be in the epilogue of a ‘best ending’, as I believe the ending of the Normal Route to almost certainly be tragic and involve one or more character deaths, necessitating something else before the final credits roll.

There is a binary set of outcomes here - either the graffiti in the Fangamer video is not intended to represent future official game content, or it does represent future official game content and that official game content is a future Kris x Noelle romantic pairing. There simply is no room for another interpretation of the text if it is intentional. Attempting to supply other names, like “Nubert + King” will run afoul of the evidence for why it would be related to the game in the first place. And even if you were to apply a significance to Spamton vandalizing it, what would it be other than him being an envious gremlin with a history of messing with Noelle? It would still imply that Noelle will develop romantic feelings for Kris, and camaraderie with Susie and Ralsei.

And merchandise has been specifically curated by Toby, who approves and vetoes designs and gives direction. Including the oft-bemoaned directive that there would be no plushies of lightners, and minimal merchandise of them otherwise, to maintain a separation that the lightners would be seen as ‘more real’, more analogous to us as the player, than the darkners. The merchandising is treated as part of an optional experience of the game, and Toby can shape it to say things he wants to be said and to not say things he doesn’t want it to imply.

Just before this document was to be published, Toby wrote this comment on Bluesky relating to the TV Time Heroes advertisement, and I thought I should address it specifically:

I can’t claim to know Toby’s intentions for seeming to imply that they did not contribute to the visual directions of the TV Time Heroes advertisement, but he also does not deny that he may have given direction for hints of symbolism in this ad, as I suggest that he may have done for the Spamton plush ad.

What a commercial being ‘non-canon’ means is presumably the same as what it meant when he previously said that all material outside the game is not canon:

https://toby.fangamer.com/newsletters/release-time/

“After you give that a gander, it might be a good idea to check out the rest of the website for old time's sake, too. I only consider anything in the game itself to be "canon", so there is nothing critically important on there... but looking around the site itself sure is a lot of fun!”

There is no material released outside of the games that is necessary to understand the game’s story and themes. And he can make any changes to future Deltarune content at any time, to alter things that might have previously been intended to be foreshadowed.

The things that go into videos can be intentionally selected by him for a specific purpose. It’s just not that they are all like that. And it is very hard for me to imagine that Kriselle as a possible romantic pairing would have been picked on a random lark by someone not taking direction, though it is at least hypothetically possible.

But if you’re still suspicious about what the graffiti should mean and why I feel it should be taken seriously, because it has gone virtually unnoticed outside of a tiny minority of the fandom, I would ask you to consider whether the response of the community would have been the same if those letters had said N+S4L, Noelle Plus Susie For Life, or K+R4L, Kris Plus Ralsei For Life. Two of the most popular main cast pairings, that many in the fandom insist are promised to be romantic relationships in the ending, and most often assumed to be monogamous.

I don’t think there is any reasonable disagreement that if the graffiti said either of those other possibilities, it would have been noticed, and the respective community would have been uproarious in their celebration. They would never let the rest of the fandom live it down.

But because it said N+K4L instead, referencing Kris x Noelle, something that did not interest many people at the time the video was published, it went almost completely unnoticed. If you search for peoples reactions in 2022, 2023, 2024, even 2025 before the publishing of this document, there is virtually no response about it except for a few Kriselle shippers.

Kris x Noelle was considered a crackship in the pre-Chapter 3&4 era. Largely on the basis of people's assumptions that Kris is a boy and would not fit into Noelle’s sexuality, and on the basis that Noelle’s enormous crush for Susie and the game placing them in romantic setpieces represents something apparently sacrosanct, a promise, that they are the designated main romantic pair of the game. And for people who expect that all or most main cast members would have a romantic partner (which I’m not sure why it should be taken as a given, but that’s another topic), Berdly or Ralsei can ‘pair the spare’ for Kris.

But the research and discussions in this document should serve as the reasonable proof that not only is Suselle (Susie x Noelle) not actually yet the designated main pair of the game, but that Kriselle (Kris x Noelle) is much more competitive to that title than it is typically thought to be, and I would say by an extraordinary margin that outstrips all other romantic pairings in the game. I don’t believe there is any contest, with the game content being what it is right now and what it signals will be important in future chapters. The fight about people saying “Suselle is canon!” is a matter of education of small but easily observable pieces of content of the game that are on the surface for everyone to see, versus massive waves of content of the game that have been strategically built up around the edges with a specific goal in mind, that take just a little digging to start seeing.

Ironically, If that graffiti really was not meant to be indicative of future content, and was simply chosen by the video producer without direction - which is a possibility - then it would be a fun random prank of the universe that it still ended up helping to launch this endeavor.

There's one specific implication that I personally didn't like in the graffiti image when first seeing it, and that I repeatedly experienced while going through the whole process of writing this, and that felt like a test of my objectivity - the fact that the romantic initials are N+K and not N+K+S, for Krusielle, and that virtually all the evidence identified points to a monogamous pairing rather than a polyamorous one. If I give the evidence in this document as much importance as I feel like I should, this process leads me to assume that a canonized Kriselle romance is likely to be monogamous, or at least monogamous in the scope of the game story and that anything else might be teased as possibilities after a ‘best ending’ after we no longer get to see the world of Deltarune. I know that is going to rub a lot of people the wrong way, that I am arguing Kriselle may be an outright replacement of their preferred shipping rather than saying “yes, and,” as an amicable solution with polyamory, but this is where the process took me. I like Krusie, and I like Suselle, even as much as I will critique the latter, necessarily, because many people will insist that a monogamous Suselle is sacrosanct to the narrative of Deltarune. But if I thought the evidence was leading me to Krusielle - Kris x Susie x Noelle - then that’s what the document would be called. And it’s not.

I said that the scope and mission statement of this document radically changed over time, and that is part of why. The other reason is that, the deeper I dove into the game’s narratives and script, the more intensely apparent it felt to me that the process of analyzing Deltarune is also the process of analyzing Kris and Noelle - their history, their dynamics, their personalities. You are learning about these two characters without consciously realizing that you are doing so, just by playing the game, even if you don’t yet have the context that those pieces you learn actually belong to Kris, or Noelle, or both.

And that’s an interesting literary technique that is quite necessary to tell a romance narrative like the one I am predicting.

There are three layers to depicting character interaction and character development in Deltarune:

The Visual Level - What you see the characters do, on the most surface level. What is onscreen and visible to you from the fourth wall, including their facial expressions, and what they physically interact with. When you see a character blush, or laugh, or get scared, you are going to form connotations about what it means about them and about the thing they are reacting to.

The Verbal Level - What you read the characters say and think and what you read in narrations, which is both a surface level and a subtextual level. You can form connotations about what characters say and think, and also about what they seem like they could say based on information they would know, but which they selectively choose not to bring up.

For instance, Kris’s demeanor in narrating to us when interacting with objects relating to Noelle and the Holidays outside of their home, where Kris pretends to not recognize Rudy in their parents’ wedding photo in Flower King, and describes Toriel’s computer wallpaper as showing them having built snowmen with Asriel that have ‘two branches stuck diagonally in their heads’ instead of just admitting the snowmen were relating to Noelle and Dess.

(Aww, look at that little thing from the Winter 2024 Newsletter )

Kris is extremely tight-lipped to us about the Holidays, but then when they are in the Holiday manor they can’t stop gushing to us about everything cool and fun they remember, all the best hiding places and how that one smells like deer (like Noelle), and that tree can be climbed, and Noelle named that cactus Krismas… They lose their poker face and start volunteering more information than they were before.

The Allegorical Level - The supernatural elements of Deltarune which are externalized from characters’ memories, traumas, beliefs, and which often take the form of tropes from stories and common narratives.

Deltarune is at least partly a story about stories and our relations to them, which is why you have so many characters who are assigned mythopoetic roles that you would see in fables - you have two knights, a king and a queen, a jester gone mad, a court mage peering into shards of black glass, a lonely prince all alone in his castle with no subjects, a warrior-poet who wrote the most popular book series in the setting, an unscrupulous businessman who promises he won’t screw you over just before he does, a gameshow host with reality-shifting powers over his set… All of these characters are derived simultaneously from platonic ideals of stories, and from the minds of the lightner characters and the feelings they have attached to objects and to other lightners. Darkners and other supernatural elements are externalizations of the psyche of the lightners, without this being a conscious action on the part of lightners.

And sometimes that allegorical level appears in fairly obvious ways. To use Tenna as an example, Tenna is his own character in the fiction of Deltarune with his own thoughts and personality traits, but some of those are an externalization of the feelings and relationships of the lightners. Tenna has a personal attachment to both the Dreemurrs and Holidays as a result of both families spending Christmas in front of him and all the other ways they bonded with each other in the living room of the Dreemurr household, and his personality resembles Asgore in many ways - living in the past and loving Kris but not quite knowing anymore how to interact with Kris or what Kris likes, and feeling alienated for it.

That is something made to be easy to extract from the nature of the Chapter 3 Dark World. But the allegorical level also presents itself in some incredibly niche ways that you are exceedingly unlikely to catch at first glance and that can require information from later in the game before you are able to put it in its proper context. New information obtained from Chapters 3&4 allow us to go back and re-evaluate older content to better see how it all fits into the overall themes of the game.

And Kris and Noelle - a pairing of one character whose dialogue we don’t even get to hear except what little we can choose from a prompt, and one character who is absent for three quarters of the game thus far - make up a surprisingly large amount of that allegorical level. Likely much more than this document will be able to go through, as I tried to be very selective in what actually goes inside this document, with the goal that even if you don’t agree that something definitively 100% is related to Kris and Noelle, it can at least be understood why I believe that it is, and why it could be the case.

But before we get to that, I want to lay out some more of my thought process on the purpose of this document and how it came to be:

The Tension Between Shipping and Theorycrafting

I would like to lay some clear expectations about what this document is and is not -

This Document IS:

• An attempt to predict the composition and narrative importance of romance as a theme in the second half of Deltarune using existing content
• Written by someone whose only credentials are being a random dumbass oldhead gamer (I’m old!), so you should keep in mind that I don’t have any special analytical abilities, and I’m just as subject to tunnel vision and echo chambers as anyone else and so can be wrong or incomplete

This Document IS NOT:

• A prediction of exactly how a Kriselle reconciliation and romance would occur in a future chapter - there are simply too many possibilities, and it is likely to be a bumpy road with a possible false start before later coming into fruition more permanently
• A promise that anything is ‘guaranteed’ to happen in future Deltarune content. I’m not the annoying white dog, I don’t know the annoying white dog, and I won’t pretend to have any unique insight into the annoying white dog. All I know is what has been released inside and outside of the game. Let’s not have a repeat of ‘The Johnlock Conspiracy’ or ‘Squall is Dead’ by saying that anything is definitely going to happen or that anything was definitely 100% intended.
• Something you should use to bludgeon ships you don’t like. Kriselle is not ‘canon’ yet any more than any other ship. And even if one day it is, don’t be a jerk about it where people are talking about other ships they like.

That said, I thought this idea deserved its own section because I have a very specific critique of the state of theorycrafting in the Deltarune fandom as of the release of Chapters 3&4…

I feel that the romance plotlines are treated as a third-rail that many theorycrafters try to maneuver around when answering the tough question of ‘what is Deltarune about’. I don’t think they’re all doing it intentionally, it can be an unconscious thing, whether because someone just hasn’t yet seen an immediate reason to question the idea of Suselle as the presumed main romantic pairing, or because they don’t enjoy thinking about the topic of romance in the game, even if it is something that might have repercussions elsewhere in the story regarding things they do like, and regarding major themes. And there are some people who may be avoiding the topic of romance intentionally because they’re just anxious about the response they might get.

And that’s something I’ve been feeling all throughout the process of writing this document. Ever since I changed my mind from expecting Suselle to be the canon romance of the game to then believing it could be Krusielle and to now believing that the most likely outcome of romance in Deltarune would be a monogamous Kriselle, I’ve known that this document was going to make a lot of people upset. It made me upset, both for considering that some shippings I enjoy will be unlikely to occur if I am correct, and for the fact that there will be people who respond to this document who will be MUCH MORE UPSET than I am, at the idea that their hopes might be dashed.

And I don’t want to be a shock jock saying “we’re taking no prisoners today, folks,” I don’t want to upset people. And I can very well be wrong about the thing that I believe so strongly. But theorycrafting should try to be objective and unconcerned with ruffling feathers, or else it isn’t theorycrafting, it becomes more akin to social engagement..

To that end, I think Deltarune theorycrafters should become more comfortable with the idea of touching that electrified third-rail that is romance, but also only if they are willing to do more than the most elementary, surface-level commentary. Asking how important romance is going to be to the plot IS theorycrafting. Asking which characters are likely to be a part of such a romance IS theorycrafting. The romance plotline of Deltarune is almost certain to have taken the form of symbolism (like names, colors, etc.), inspirations and references, foreshadowing, conflict and resolution… All the same literary analysis tools you would use to ask “who or what is Mike”, “what is the purpose of the Weird Route”, “what did Susie see in the Final Tragedy prophecy that upset her,” et cetera, can be used in theorizing about romance.

And this document is a product of picking up exactly those tools and attempting to apply them to romance, with the expectation that romance really is as important to the plot of Deltarune as previous content has foreshadowed it to be. It is also a product of attempting to remove and contradict existing presumptions. To put it another way, to NOT assume that Susie x Noelle (Suselle) is a foregone conclusion as the main cast romance of the game. And that is something I perceive to be a pretty extreme limiter on discussion of both shipping and theorycrafting, simultaneously. It has been a very common experience in the fandom for me to see people say that they like Kriselle, they see evidence for Kriselle, but then append to those comments an offhand apologetic about how they “know Suselle will be canon.”

And that is not a statement of fact. It is a self-imposed pressure valve that could be preventing you from taking your thoughts further into potentially illuminating conclusions. Again, it’s not about being a shock jock and trying to upset people or be unaware of how the things you say might be upsetting. It’s about determining where the evidence might take you if you don’t prematurely terminate ideas, and attempting to come to potentially more accurate conclusions. Because ALL these elements of the game are connected. Not only is romance a major theme of the game, it is possible that ALL the other themes of the game are going to relate back to it in some way. And you would never get that indication when looking at the state of theorycrafting after the release of Chapters 3 & 4, when the game itself shows more elements that form a bridge between romance and the main plot than there have ever been in the Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 eras, and many times more than were in Undertale.

Part of the problem I perceive here is that experiencing new chapters does not necessarily mean that you are actively re-evaluating everything you have previously assumed about the setting, the characters, the story - you may have changed your opinion on who the Roaring Knight is, but that was something very explicitly pushed in front of you in a way you can’t avoid. Things that are built up in the background more subtly are not going to give you as much of a push to wonder if things you believed before might be wrong.

And this is a topic where the things you believe can be very heavily tied to your identity. This fandom is full of young people who have spent the most formative years of their lives not only playing these games, but having these discussions about romance in the games, making and enjoying fanart and fanfics.

The Resonant Arc podcast had a short discussion about the intersection of re-evaluation of information with deeply-held beliefs, possibly even with identity, that put it better than I can do so myself, so I'd like to quote them here, excerpting from a larger discussion - completely unrelated to anything about Deltarune or this topic - about how opposing sides should and shouldn’t engage each other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTi9Dcwa37c

Mike Brown: [...] There's tons of research done on this, this is something you can go look into yourself - the perseverance of belief, or what has been labeled by some the backfire effect - the idea that when you confront somebody who has a belief that is not rooted in fact, they believe something that is false, you confront them with the facts they oftentimes will actually believe even more firmly what they do and they will dispute the source of the fact or in in some other way try to get around that and why that can't be trusted, and they'll become more firm in the beliefs they already hold. This is not the fault of the person. This does not make them an 'idiot', this has something to do with the way humans just have evolved to be. That we are not rational beings, our emotions have much heavier weight a lot of times in the way that we make decisions and when we feel that facts that oppose or perhaps contradict our deeply held views, which are parts of our own identity, we perceive that as a threat. There’s a real emotional response that treats that fact as a threat. And so the response to that is to deny, denounce, otherwise do mental gymnastics to get around that fact, and continue believing the way we already believe.

Casen Sperry: The more core the belief is the more likely you are to do that because that belief is holding up a lot of other things.

Mike Brown: It's the foundation upon which you're propping up a lot of things about your personal identity.

Casen Sperry: Once again, as we've said many times on this podcast, do not build your foundation on sand. This goes with your mental stuff too, like if there's something where the rug can be easily swept out from under you but you don't know what that is until someone points it out, you don't know that you're on sand. It looked like a rock to me, I don't know. Until all of a sudden the rains come down and you realize oh dang I was on sand the whole time, well this is a problem, what do I do, I've got a whole house on this thing, I can't just start building a new house right now somewhere else. But yeah people often say it's a defense mechanism for a reason. And it's probably part of the reason why humans survive.

The idea that a romantic pairing might not be ‘canon’ is going to feel like a visceral threat to some people. That may sound silly to read, but it’s true. It’s not the kind of threat of seeing a snake pop out of the grass in front of you, but it’s a threat of what you feel to be true and to have been true for years suddenly being taken away from you. Even for people who themselves do not particularly love the most mainstream ships, there can be an expectation that it’s just the thing they’ve ‘known’ was going to happen for years and years now, and told themselves that there are reasons why it wouldn’t be replaced, and it would feel alien to have something else happen instead.

If they’re actually right, then this document was a harmless thought exercise, and they can gloat to me all they want. I’ll be ok.

But if I’m right, then I hope this document might help make that transition process into ‘a new reality’ a little easier, either to mentally prepare ahead of time, or to understand in retrospect, why it would make perfect sense for Kris and Noelle to be the main romantic pairing of the game.

Symbolism Inside and Outside the Game

I’ve tried to maintain a very high standard in these items, where the goal is non-repudiation - you should be able to review each these items and understand exactly where I (and the other theorycrafters aiding me) are coming from without ambiguity that “actually this might refer to something else.” That doesn’t mean that all of them will be completely correctly understood by me and without missing any elements that could be revealed by future content. It is likely to be incomplete.

Chapter 4 Shadow Crystal

The Shadow Crystals become glass in the Light World, and looking through them provides one of the three below visions, based on who is with Kris in the moment of doing so, or based on being inside or just outside Noelle’s house.

When Kris is alone and not in Noelle’s house:

* You looked through the glass.

* For some strange reason, for just a brief moment...

* You thought you saw through your hand.

When Kris is with Susie and in Noelle’s front yard:

* You looked through the glass.

* For some strange reason, for just a brief moment...

* You thought you saw Susie glaring at you, coldly...

* But when you moved the glass away,

* You see her looking at you, smiling and making a rude gesture.

And when inside Noelle’s house or in the front yard:

* You looked through the glass.

* For some strange reason, for just a brief moment...

* You thought you saw Noelle close against you, whispering.

I believe each of these visions are of the future. They show ‘the truth’ of the Light World, just as they reveal to darkners that the Dark Worlds are simply physical objects inside the Light World. They will happen no matter what.

It is often theorized that they show the Weird Route, because people believe that the vision about Noelle must be the couch scene - but that vision still appears if you use the glass after the Weird Route couch scene, whether in the bathroom or in the front yard outside. And the other two visions are almost certainly going to happen in the Normal Route.

Kris can see through their hand because they are going to lose it, in the Normal Route. There is foreshadowing for it in both routes, but the most evidence is actually exclusive to the Normal Route. And the Susie vision is likely going to be the result of Susie learning ‘the truth’ about her friend, that Kris has loyalty to the Roaring Knight, and that she isn’t going to know how much of the person she has been befriending the past few days is actually Kris or the Soul.

The Shadow Crystals, in the form of the Light World glass, show us a future where Noelle is ‘close against’ Kris, which may be a hug, or cuddling. It may not necessarily be romantic, but if the vision is of a major story-altering event on the scale of the other two visions - losing a hand, and losing a best friend - then it shouldn’t be surprising if it does turn out to be romantic.

Heart Locket from Spamton Sweepstakes

The Spamton Sweepstakes features a heart locket connecting Kris and Noelle, on the front page here: https://deltarune.com/sweepstakes/

Spamton makes a bad joke about how the “TWO MOST IMPORTANT CHARACTERS” are him and someone who gives him money, but that blue text in the ad links to here, a Noelle blog post waxing poetic about not know how Kris feels about her and reminiscing about them playing the piano: https://deltarune.com/kris_dreemurr_kris/ 

The subtext is barely subtext… the “TWO MOST IMPORTANT CHARACTERS” of Deltarune are Kris and Noelle. And it’s the “YOUR BEST [$#&*]' HEART LOCKET” because she doesn’t know what she and Kris are to each other. Neighbors? Friends? Soulmates? Something Else?

And they ARE in fact the two most important characters. Among all the things that I feel like the fandom tried to deny and make excuses about why they shouldn’t be concerned about Kris and Noelle and their connection, this is second only to the N+K4L graffiti. This is basically textual.

Cactus Theory

(credit to MiniatureBadger)

In chapter 3 “The cactus that lived upstairs loves you” is (In the thoughts of Cactus theory) a direct reflection of Kris and Noelle’s history and feelings for each other. With said Cactus being the darkener who appears in Tenna’s game and behind the curtains in the green room’s backstage.

Pushing this cactus in the first board will uncover a key, and on the second board it will move away from Kris, identifying itself as one of the targets for photos. Likewise, in both sections there is a pippin that refers to the cactus, referencing its love for Kris, and telling you to “push it aside” for the key underneath. After this, it claims that it is “Important to push your loved ones away sometimes.”

Pippins are associated with Kris as one of the toys they used to play with, and seem to have intimate knowledge of their history. (Such as the S-rank room Pippin asserting that Kris doesn’t like gambling, they like cheating.)

Furthemore, the second board Pippins alludes to the cactus’s ‘thorns’ holding love.

You can talk to the cactus in both Chapter 1 and Chapter 4 to show different dialogues:

Chapter 1:

* A cactus.

* There's not much to say about it.

That second line is unique among all interactions in the Dreemurr household, as other item interactions will either identify the object and say a fact about it, or just say the name of the object and nothing else. The cactus is unique among all the other objects in the home. And you are unlikely to catch this on your playthrough as something special, but with knowledge of the future, it becomes clear that there’s more history and symbolism with this cactus than Kris wants to tell us.

And after Kris is reminded of that history and symbolism in Chapter 3…

Chapter 4:

* (It's a cactus. It loves you, but mainly shows a sharp side.)

* (If only there was a word for that kind of personality.)

* (A word you liked.)

And notably, as in Noelle’s room her cactus (Which was previously named after Kris’s nickname, Krismas) was now referred to as ‘TsunTsun’ by Berdly. The following narration “It’s a cactus that apparently got poorly renamed at some point.” implies again at Kris’s displeasure, and hints that the word they have a distaste for is in fact Tsundere.
Connecting both Cactuses together, and in turn, Kris and Noelle’s relationship to them.

This Cactus has more parallels to Noelle as well. For example, interacting with it behind the curtains leads it to push Kris away, but also gives them a new sword. Similar to how Noelle gives Pencils to Kris, which can turn into weapons for them. This weapon in specific when transformed to its light world state and checked on reads



Implying again an intimate history to the weapon that as established, connects to Kris and Noelle.

Furthermore, if you don’t flirt with the watercooler in the battle next to the cactus’s curtain, the narration states that it is relieved by this. While if you do flirt, it becomes sad and implies regret at its own inability to confess.

This again highlights the romantic connotations to the Cactuses ‘love’, which would connect towards something romantic about Kris and Noelle as well.

All of this leads into the idea that the Cactus is in truth a metaphor for their relationship, with Kris pushing the cactus/Noelle away in some desire to protect her, and Noelle keeping distance due to this rejection. Though still deep inside holding feelings for Kris that she attempts to then hide as she watches them from afar.
All of this fits as well with the established idea in game of Kris giving Noelle the cold shoulder, of their relationship deteriorating, and of their being covered feelings between them, and in this case, romantic ones.

Matching Names

Kris and Noelle have matching names relating to the exact same two things - Christmas and Jesus Christ.

The name Kris is - in addition to referring to a kind of knife called a kris - a shortened form of the Scandinavian name and word Kristian and the name Kristopher, a variant of Christopher, referring to a ‘Christ-bearer’. You may also have heard of Kris Kringle, a name for Santa Claus, from the German Christkind, or Christ-child.

The name Noelle is the feminization of the male and unisex name Noel, from the French word Noël, referring to Christmas, which descended from the French word nael, which itself was derived from the Latin natalis, both of which mean ‘birthday’, and became associated with specifically the birth of Jesus.  

It’s actually also possible that Susie’s name is spelled that way (as opposed to Undertale’s Suzy) to be an anagram of the Latin name for Jesus, Iesus. And Ralsei is of course an anagram of Israel, the Promised Land - perhaps relating to darkners making an exodus from their original homes to Ralsei’s princedom. (Ralsei, no, please stop…) And Ralsei is also an anagram of Asriel, sounding similar to Azrael, an archangel who delivers the souls of the dead to their afterlife.

But both Susie and Ralsei lack the Christmas element, and their names are not so directly related as Kris and Noelle are without modification.

If you’re interested in more symbolism with names and what they might entail, an ‘ell’ or ‘elle’ is a unit of measurement that is the length of a person's forearm, from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. It is derived from the word ‘elbow’. Some Bibles used ell as the unit of measurement for Noah’s Ark in place of cubits, as they are exactly the same and some European locales used ell or elle instead of saying cubits.

Remember the song ‘Raise Up Your Bat’?

“Come follow me into the dark

With your heart as the ark

Which shall shine you the way

Because I'm with you in the dark

With your hеart as my mark

Which shall guide you the way, through the wavеs”

With your heart as the ark…

And the Pluey minigame has you saving cats into an ark, like the flood in Genesis.

Perhaps Kris’s heart will one day be a ‘No Elle Ark’? Because if they lose a hand, they no longer have the length between their elbow and the tip of their middle finger, so they have zero elle…

Sorry, sorry, bad pun  :P

You have permission to throw tomatoes at me for that one.

And yet, the lathe of heaven might be turning…

An Angel and a Devil

There are at least three pairs of angels and devils in Deltarune, and each of them has romantic tension. That fact feels very significant to me.

Those pairs are:

The Player, an angel, and Dr. Wingding Gaster, a devil - The Player, us, is associated with angelic imagery between the Deltarune religion referring to an angel looking down at everyone in the Light World, and the angel doll ironically being dropped on top of the soul in Noelle’s basement. Spamton also may be referring to us, the Player, when selling us the Thorn Ring. Gaster, ever since Undertale, has been associated with the numbers 666 - the stats of the Mystery Man sprite are all 6s, and the Typer variable holding the data for how to display Entry 17 is named 666. 666 is also the Typer variable for the voice speaking to us at the beginning of Deltarune.

The manner that Gaster speaks to us in the official Undertale Twitter is very romantically charged:

I don’t know about you, but if I heard someone whisper to me “how lucky we are to need each other in this way,” I think I’d have a reaction to either run or have my knees buckle, based on who said it.

Spamton, an angel, and Tenna, a devil - Spamton has an obsession with [HEAVEN] and the NEO body has angel wings. There is also a sprite of a tiny floating Spamton angel that heals you if you press the F1 key in a fight with him. Tenna has a sprite where he grows spikes on his shoulders, fangs, claws, and the tail of his coat looks like a devil’s tail. Tenna’s Doom Board is also hellish:

And Spamtenna is generally understood by the fandom to have existed prior to the beginning of the game, having had a major falling out.

Noelle, an angel, and Kris, a devil - Noelle is overwhelmingly associated with angelic imagery, between her Dark World outfit being an angelic robe, her fantasy of growing angel wings and flying, the pair of dirty, tattered angel wings in her dresser, among other things. And Kris is associated with devil imagery with the red horns they wore as a child - seemingly depicted in the Ice Palace doors in the Mantle game - and being called ‘lightbringer’ by King, which is the meaning of the Latin name ‘Lucifer’.

The game places a lot of importance on angels and devils and it is not clear yet why, but they seem to be central to the prophecy. There is an angel and their ‘heaven’ which must be banished before the end, and there will be a ‘ring of Heaven’s call’ and a ‘tail of Hell’.

Isn’t it funny how much people downplay Kris and Noelle’s importance to the story with how much angels and devils get built up? Just feels like another level of irony to how much everyone is focused on other characters.

A︎︎︎︎N︎︎︎︎G︎︎︎︎E︎︎︎︎L︎︎︎︎S︎︎︎︎ A︎︎︎︎N︎︎︎︎D︎︎︎︎ D︎︎︎︎E︎︎︎︎V︎︎︎︎I︎︎︎︎L︎︎︎︎S︎︎︎︎

A︎︎︎︎R︎︎︎︎E︎︎︎︎ T︎︎︎︎H︎︎︎︎E︎︎︎︎ S︎︎︎︎A︎︎︎︎M︎︎︎︎E︎︎︎︎ T︎︎︎︎H︎︎︎︎I︎︎︎︎N︎︎︎︎G︎︎︎︎

I︎︎︎︎N︎︎︎︎ D︎︎︎︎I︎︎︎︎F︎︎︎︎F︎︎︎︎E︎︎︎︎R︎︎︎︎E︎︎︎︎N︎︎︎︎T︎︎︎︎ D︎︎︎︎E︎︎︎︎G︎︎︎︎R︎︎︎︎E︎︎︎︎E︎︎︎︎S︎︎︎︎

O︎︎︎︎N︎︎︎︎E︎︎︎︎ B︎︎︎︎E︎︎︎︎C︎︎︎︎O︎︎︎︎M︎︎︎︎E︎︎︎︎S︎︎︎︎ A︎︎︎︎N︎︎︎︎O︎︎︎︎T︎︎︎︎H︎︎︎︎E︎︎︎︎R︎︎︎︎

A︎︎︎︎N︎︎︎︎D︎︎︎︎ A︎︎︎︎N︎︎︎︎O︎︎︎︎T︎︎︎︎H︎︎︎︎E︎︎︎︎R︎︎︎︎ O︎︎︎︎N︎︎︎︎E︎︎︎︎ A︎︎︎︎G︎︎︎︎A︎︎︎︎I︎︎︎︎N︎︎︎︎

https://tinyurl.com/KRISANGEL

https://tinyurl.com/DEMONTHATCOMES

Elnina and Lanino

(credit to Reasonable_Solid6251)

The objective of the Round 2 game board is to unite two lovers, Elnina and Lanino, in their sprite forms as depicted here:

Do you notice anything odd about their sprites?

This is how they normally appear outside of the game board:

Their color palettes have been substantially reduced. Elnina lost her yellow boots and the alternating yellow petals of her umbrella dress. Lanino is now primarily yellow, a color that only matches the collar of his suit and part of his face. He doesn’t even have his typical red hands, the fire from his epaulets, or the red outline on his face.

They have had their color palettes changed so that they are a primary color that almost exactly matches Kris and Noelle’s UI colors:

Uniting a short, wide-faced cyan person and a tall, long-faced gold person with a complicated relationship… who don’t hate each other, who don’t act out against each other, and who seem to still like the other. Neither of them will ever take a step to get back with the other even though they both want it, like Kris and Noelle continue orbiting around each other after their friendship falls apart, neither ever taking a step to show the other that they are still valued. It will probably take a third person's help, just like it did for Lanino and Elnina, even if that third person might not actually end up part of their relationship. (Sorry Rouxls)

Oh, you might have known that Elnina and Lanino are both named after the El Niño climate phenomenon, but you know that they are also actually a Christmas reference? It’s because El Niño was coined by sailors as reference to the Nativity of Jesus, ‘the boy’, because they noticed it most around Christmastime. https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/elnino/what-is-el-nino 

Seam and Jevil

(Credit to u/The2ndComingOfBeaZ and others in this Reddit thread for being the first mentions I saw of this https://www.reddit.com/r/Deltarune/comments/1lei1uc/noticed_something/)

Jevil is a devil-themed prankster with an affinity for blades, and was the 'closest companion' of Seam, a mage who lives in a completely holiday-themed home, who is conflicted about whether they were ever friends but also regrets that they were driven apart after a supernatural event changed the devil-themed prankster -

Which two characters does that remind you of?

Hell, Jevil even gets Kris’s sweater colors in his collar.

* He... was a funny little man. Once, the court jester. I, the court magician.

* A friend...? Could I consider him a friend...? Perhaps, perhaps not.

* But he was the only one who matched me in the games we used to play.

* One day, he met a strange someone... and since then, he began to change.

* He started saying bizarre things that didn't completely make sense -

* But didn't completely not make sense, either.

* Soon, he began to see the world as a game, and everyone as its participants.

* As the court mage, and his only companion, I was forced to lock him away...

* Or, rather, lock US all away, in his own words.

* Since that time, the strange words he's said have stuck inside my cotton...

* And my view of this world has become darker, yet darker.

* Reflecting on these old memories, I think, perhaps - I miss playing games with him.

* And I wonder, if I hadn't been asked to lock him up...

* Would I have found a little more purpose in my life...?

* Funny little man. How his jokes and dances made us chuckle.

* A shame he had to be tricked away, by his closest companion.

* The magician, Seam, whose smile has gone empty since that day.

I can't tell you what that means for the future of either Kris and Noelle or Seam and Jevil, but I’m at least surprised that this isn’t brought up more in the fandom. It’s not a Ship of Theseus thing where I’m finding weasel words to make them sound more comparatively similar than they are, it’s the literal text of the game in as few words as we actually get about Seam and Jevil. The only major change is Seam being made personally responsible for separating the two. Otherwise it is as 1:1 as parallel symbolism gets. Seam didn’t need to be Halloween-themed, Jevil didn’t need to be associated with devils or knives, and it’d still work. Very rarely in literary analyses do you find parallelism so cleanly connected at so many joints. As far as I’m aware, there is no other pairing of characters who gets this. So even in the absence of being able to say yet that “Seam and Jevil did x, so Kris and Noelle will do y” yet, I think this is an important piece of the puzzle.

And on the topic of darkners mirroring Kris and Noelle with something more deliberately teased as romantic…

Head Hathy and Werewerewire and… BERDLY?!

(credit to Reasonable_Solid6251, not the first to notice Head Hathy and WWW, but the first to notice the connections to Kriselle)

Head Hathy is an ice-element darkner who is unique in being the only enemy that can be flirted with by both Kris, Susie, and Ralsei.

And Susie's attempts to flirt with Head Hathy are awkward and don't land and make them walk away - in a similar way to Susie eating a flower in front of Noelle at her house gate and offering her the stem confuses Noelle and makes her run to her house, thinking "What? What? What?"

* You ordered SUSIE to flirt with the enemy!

* ...

* Annnnnnnnnd hell no.

* Aww, Susie, it's OK if you don't know how!

* What? Shut up, that's not the problem!

* ... Are you sure?

* Alright, LOOK, wise guy! I'll show you! Watch this!

* AHEM.

* So, uh...

* Come here... often?

* (Head Hathy felt awkward and left...)

* HEY, GET BACK HERE AND LET ME FLIRT WITH YOU!!!

And Werewerewire is described as being quiet but easily flustered, like Kris without the soul, who keeps getting distracted and blushing during the closet scene.

Werewerewire

It absorbed the wire with fighting spirit. Gets flustered easily.

There is unique dialogue for putting Head Hathy and Werewerewire together at the table in the cafe, where Head Hathy enjoys how quiet WWW is.

There is also unique dialogue for putting WWW at the top, watching Head Hathy sitting with another darkner from another table, where WWW gets intensely jealous - either crushing their drink or - if you put a regular Werewire with Head Hathy -  looking like they're about to flip the table.

* (... it's staring at the southern seats and crushing its drink hard.)

* (... looks like it's about to flip its table over.)

WWW and Head Hathy can be found in Queen's room doing online dating, and it is almost certainly with each other, as they only do it if both of them have been recruited - if one isn't recruited, the other doesn't appear in the room either.

(Isn’t that funny that ‘computer dating’ is depicted as a heart, as if perhaps a human Soul can connect two people…)

* HEAD HATHY - AT 8 DF 0

* It learned to hide its feelings... is that strength?

Hathy hides its feelings… Noelle certainly doesn’t hide her feelings about Susie, but doesn’t that accurately describe her dynamic with Kris? She thinks about them so often but pretends she doesn’t. She has a photo of Kris as one of her rotating computer desktop wallpapers but says that Kris is just ‘a neighbor’.

Funnily enough, putting Werewire and Werewerewire next to each other at the cafe table has WWW pranking WW:

* (It's crushing many of the surrounding drinks.)

* (... it seems annoyed that its energy drink has been crushed.)

Now why on earth is WWW such a hater about WW?

It’s because they’re both direct reflections of Kris and Berdly.

WWW absorbed their controller into themselves, like Kris with the soul, while WW had to be faceplugged, just like Berdly got faceplugged by Queen.

WWW is quiet but easily flustered, like Kris is described by Noelle as rarely speaking, and speaking softly, but Kris is also very quick to blush, as they do so repeatedly in the Chapter 4 closet scene, and when Susie asks if they always carry around the knife.

And WWW jealously watching WW with Head Hathy…

Berdly accuses Kris of doing the same.

Noelle repeatedly offers to switch seats with Kris in class to stop Susie’s bullying of Kris, but Kris declines. It might be because they believe they deserve Susie’s bullying, but it might also be because Kris would no longer be able to see Noelle from behind in school. But the only way they get to do that is to have to see Noelle sitting next to Berdly.

Aside from Kris’s pranks and Kris being quiet while Berdly is loud and obnoxious, Kris and Berdly are actually pretty similar. They are both tsundere, a word that Kris hates because they associate it with Berdly and anime, but it’s true. And even as Berdly accuses everyone else of being tsundere, even though it is just him and Kris.

Berdly:

* Kris and Susie!? At the library!? On a WEEKEND!? Is everything OK?

* Ahh, Kris and Susie. My two least, not hated... most, people.

* Oh no, exclamation point semicolon!; Noelle is busy! Today!

* That means... oh, spare me, sweet Goddess of Education!

* The three of US will have to have a study group!? No!!

Susie:

* Look, we GET IT. You still hate us in real life. We'll leave.

Berdly:

* Leave?

Susie:

* Uhh, yeah. That's what you want. For us to leave you alone.

Berdly:

* Hahah! Yes! Exactly! Alone. That's how I study best!

* A genius, alone with his thoughts.

* Mm. Being alone. So good.

Berdly:

* Oh thank god you came back. I mean... NO god you came back.

Susie:

* Stop messing with us already.

Berdly:

* (Why must she be so tsundere and confusing?)

Kris and Berdly don’t know how to actually talk about their feelings and hide everything behind a veil of deniability. Kris’s prankster personality actually tends to shine through the most when you select something sarcastic and cruel, like telling Susie “Sucks to be you” when she regrets not having understood how to make friends earlier. Berdly is an ironic mirror of Kris.

Remember that for the next section…

ILOVEMOUSE

The mice puzzles that initially frighten Noelle can be seen as an allegory for Kris's pranks on her, they are harmless but she doesn't understand why they happen and it confuses her, when it's just Kris's - and the mice's - form of communication with her.

On the Normal Route, she learns to understand that mice are cute and don't mean her harm. They become 'the good kind of scary'. On the Weird Route, where that process doesn't happen, she believes she's strong enough to not be scared anymore, still misunderstanding it as something harmful to her. This is called out by the mouse person in Chapter 4:

* Kris? Remember me...? Sorry if I was too strict when I babysat you and Noelle.

* Since then, Noelle's always seemed so nervous around me...

* ... until today. She even complimented my outfit! I wonder what changed...?

* And... she was muttering something like... "Mice are cute"...?

If you played the Weird Route, the last line is this instead:

* And... she was muttering something like... "You don't scare me"...?

Noelle’s relation to mice is an important theme to her character that transcends just being jokes in Chapter 2. And getting back to that…

There is an optional interaction in Mouse Room 2 where Noelle asks Kris:

* Wh-why do those mice keep attacking me?!

* What do I look like, the girl from the Nutcracker?

You have options to say “Yes,” “They like you,” or “Unknown.” Isn’t that telling that it might occur to Kris to say that the mice are only scaring her because they like her, that it is their way of showing affection?

Noelle’s reaction in Mouse Room 3 to realizing that Kris’s actions scaring her with the mice just saved her is to look away and blush.

This is a very quiet thing you wouldn’t notice unless you’ve been looking back at the menu, but the mice puzzles - Kris scaring Noelle with the mice - has actually been gradually raising her Boldness stat:

Her Boldness starts at -12 when you first meet her, and increases to -6 with the first mouse puzzle room, and then all the way to 12 after the ILOVEMOUSE puzzle

Defeating Berdly takes it to 15, and then the car ride with Kris and Queen takes it up to 48.

The DECEMBER puzzle changes it from 48 to 60

The process of understanding that Kris just wanted to help her - something that as of Chapter 4, she thinks just happened in a dream - made her open up to Kris and be nostalgic together about their past.

The ILOVEMOUSE puzzle room also has Noelle listening to Berdly - who doesn't realize she's there - talking about how Noelle has a secret attraction that Kris would never guess.

Berdly tends to get things wrong in strange ways that have kernels of both truth and irony to them.

* Ahh, Kris. Stuck on this puzzle, I see?

* I thought I heard Noelle calling for help, but...

* I get what that sound was now. Kris.

* Your brain must be crying.

* Poor, sweet, Noelle. Where could she be now.

* Stuck on a puzzle just like this one, no doubt.

* If only I was there to do it for her.

* She's but a powerless doe without my help...

* Though being alone might be better than being with you!

* Kris, you would only get in the way!

* After all, you can't understand Noelle like I can.

* Yes, you may have been her lifelong neighbor. But.

* I am a maestro of emotional intelligence.

* I can read her feelings like a strategy guide.

* Which, I have NEVER needed by the way!

* You may see her as the simpleton girl next door.

* But the reality. Is that she is.

* A lovestruck girl with her heart on her sleeve.

* And... Kris... The target of her affection...

* May be surprising to you.

* It's... Truly sad. Such love... May never fruit.

Berdly believes that the secret attraction is himself. We, the player, know in that moment that the 'secret attraction' is Susie, and not secret at all. What a silly, low-hanging-fruit mistake.

But there's another layer to it. The one Noelle doesn't consciously think would be true. She DOES have a secret attraction, that is misunderstood.

And that last line, that it may never fruit… He may or may not be correct. But it will probably be central to Kris and Noelle’s storylines.

First Sanctuary: Cuptains

In the Light World Church we have a mandatory interaction with Noelle, where one of her dialogue options explains how Noelle would get locked out of her house, leading to her sometimes ending up at Kris’s. Kris in turn helps Noelle break into her own room at times.

(Selected by: ‘Locked Door’)

A room that (Assuming locked doors.) would only be accessible at Noelle’s window in the second story of the house, hence the breaking and implied climbing in the act.
Other Holiday interactions also imply that Kris has a past in climbing around Noelle’s house, from getting stuck in lights

To their interactions with the Holidays trees.

The cuptains then are Darkeners found later on in the Dark worlds based on the cups of juices that the church residents hold. (Including Noelle during her interactions with Kris.)
The sole purpose of the cuptains then is to climb up high towers to earn the love of their Princesses. (The Mizzles.)

To reach Mrs.Mizzle then you need to climb the highest tower of them all that the cuptains down below are incapable of. Mrs.Mizzle herself is considered a Holy Princess by the Cuptains.



And in the battle itself Mrs.Mizzle challenges the young soldier (Referring to Kris, as the Cuptains have before.) to earn her love.



Where one of your actions to do is the second (and currently last) instance Kris gets with the direct ‘flirting’ option.

Which means Kris is engaging in the courtship process of the Cuptains, Which engage in climbing that they have done in the Holiday manor, Which they did so to help a lady in their past. The lady in question also has connections to holiness, both of them. And of course, we know that Darkeners are reflections of thoughts/personalities that are influenced by the lightners actions and or beliefs. And currently, the only characters we have that have history, have a character climbing for or around the other, and have romantic connotations IS Kris and Noelle. Making it very likely that the cuptains are influenced by that dynamic.

Also, it connects to Cactus theory.

First Sanctuary: Light and Sound

I haven’t seen much of any theorycrafting about the symbolism of pianos and darkness in Chapter 4 and it’s a bit surprising. I know people didn’t forget the song Don’t Forget, being a piano and vocals song about a light inside your soul, helping you to navigate through shadows.

Don't Forget

It feels like this should actually be the most important chapter for foreshadowing what is going to turn out to be an ultimate thesis of the game, isn’t it?

Here’s our attempt at building that up…

The switches that let you see in the dark in Chapter 4 are yellow (sound vibrations, like Noelle's singing, and again one of Noelle's associated colors) and blue (light, like Kris's soul can shine in the dark, and again one of Kris's associated colors)

And the pianos and notes that you need to unlock gates and the locked door are all blue:

And the piano and notes that you need to unlock the area behind the fireplace are all yellow.

The yellow piano and notes are actually explicitly connected to romance:

* "The Axe which nests beyond the pyre

* Awakes from rest by golden choir

* 3 tunes bekiss'd in dulcet wire

* Which whispers in the darkest mire."

And Noelle thinks of music as romantic, which is why she wants Susie to try playing the guitar despite not knowing how. And it's also why the Spamton Sweepstakes put her blog post where she waxes poetic about not knowing how Kris feels about her but feeling like them playing the piano was "a concert just for me" inside an advertisement for a heart locket. And this is a currently unused item text until Noelle is back in the party, but the Rhapsotea that causes someone to hear beautiful singing when it is poured makes Ralsei think of a singing choir, makes Susie think of Noelle singing in church, and Noelle... doesn't actually describe what she hears. Instead, she gets upset that Kris never joined choir.

Susie: Sounds kinda like Noelle.

Ralsei: ... the hymn of the prophecy.

Noelle: (... Kris would never join choir...)

You get the first set of golden notes from the Holy Watercooler, which Kris flirts with.

You get the second golden notes from walking through a very dark room to interact with something gold and vibrating, and then walking to a now unlocked yellow switch. Unlike the other yellow switches, this one turns into a blue switch when pressed, lighting up the notes.

And the third set is from walking in the dark through a set of gold switches, with disgusting swaying monsters in the background, and stepping on a blue switch that causes gold notes to appear.

Isn’t the intersection of cyan and yellow, blue and gold, interesting? People are on a hair trigger for seeing pink and yellow everywhere, but I feel like they should also feel trained to notice cyan and yellow.

And isn’t it also interesting that Noelle is a trained singer, and Dess probably wasn’t, she destroyed the microphone in her room, but people associate Don’t Forget with Dess and never - NEVER - with Noelle?

What if Kris’s heart and Noelle’s singing might actually be very important to navigating through a darker, yet darker place?

Skies Forever Blue

If you’re familiar with that name, then I can already hear your groaning about all the fights over the years about whether the song is connected to Deltarune or not, and what it could possibly mean if it is, but I have one datapoint I don’t know how many people have considered.

If you aren’t familiar with it, it is a music video composed by Toby Fox, who also conceived of the animation drawn by Omocat, and sung by Itoki Hana, and available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njgcjGojRKk

It tells a story of a blue RPG player character and their pink neighbor party member who falls in love with them (and seemingly also the player) over the course of an adventure that ends with slaying a dragon, and who only confesses her love after the game’s internal battery begins dying and just before the player’s save data is permanently erased.

It was very controversial to assume that the song was directly connected to Deltarune despite being released on the fourth anniversary of Chapter 1’s release, but we now have unambiguous confirmation that the song relates in at least one way, via the sounds of the dragon dying at the very beginning of the song matching, exactly, sounds made by ‘ERAM / John Mantle’ in the Sword Route games: https://x.com/dailytobytrivia/status/1959939430782808370 

And I submit that it is connected to Noelle via the ribbons worn by the pink girl, which are both pink and white in her sprite:

There are four colored ribbon items in Deltarune, in three colors - white, pink, and blue, with the Twin Ribbon being a combination of both the white and pink ribbons. Noelle has the following flavor text when equipping them:

White Ribbon: ... feels familiar.

Pink Ribbon: ... feels familiar.

Twin Ribbon: ... nostalgic, huh.

The Blue Ribbon, which does not appear in the Skies Forever Blue video, specifically does not follow this pattern, with its text reading: Go...  t... team?

The in-universe explanation for the discrepancy in Noelle’s flavor text between the ribbons is very likely that the white and pink ribbons belonged to her, as the Twin Ribbon says “you'll have to put your hair into pigtails” and Noelle used to wear pigtails. But the in-universe explanation is not as interesting to me right now as the possibility of an intertextual reference.

Even if she isn’t otherwise prominently associated with pink herself besides her bedroom, she IS a neighbor and friend to a ‘blue’ kid with a limited verbosity, with whom she has unspoken romantic tension, and who is textually both their own unique character and a passthrough of the player. Similar to how the Weird Route has Noelle communicating not just with Kris, but with us, the player.

I’ve seen mentions of how a scene in SFB includes ice crystals, the white ground that cracks and gives way and how that could figure into another connection to Deltarune, but I don’t agree that they look like that. Although I’m sure there is going to turn out to be plenty of other symbolism in the video that we simply don’t have context for yet.

I know I don’t feel good about it including killing a dragon. And so does Dragon Blazers, apparently.

…Is Skies Forever Blue a game in the Dragon Blazers series?

Themes of Kriselle (by Reasonable_Solid6251)

N+K4L

Repression

(And what it tells us of Kris Dreemurr.)

—

Kris is the outsider of Deltarune.
The different

The human prankster of the otherwise picturesque dreemurr household.

“Not Nice”

At the surface layer it doesn’t seem however as if this has affected Kris much. Largely they’re accepted by the community and no one holds them against their less ideal qualities.
In-fact Noelle, their childhood friend, holds a whole treasury of memories regarding Kris’s pranks. From hooves grabbed under the bed, to minor switches of beverage.

And despite all of this, she throughout the game shows both a desire and willingness to be Kris’s friend.
For example, Noelle will affirm their friendship and blush at how nice it is for Kris to say for themselves, that they are friends. (Within the Dating Shoe scene.)
However, if you made it to this point of the doc things like this should be obvious.
Noelle wanting to be close to Kris again, Noelle being into scary things, Noelle having a nostalgie for their past,
It’s all well and treaded ground.

What’s subtextual, and less talked of is how Noelle references Kris's pranks. Which is similar to how the others in hometown treat the pranks, as a memorable, harmless, but ultimately still ‘mean’ thing to do. Noelle does not see these pranks as affectionate acts. She does not see this as ‘loving’ behavior. And perhaps most importantly, regardless of how she herself might feel of the pranks,
She does not see them as proof that Kris likes her.

>’They like you’ To her question, of why the Mice keep ‘attacking’ her.

The Maus themselves are indicative of this. As a ‘scary’ thing, Noelle considers their approach malicious, unlike Kris who can interpret them as showing fondness.
At the core of this difference in perspective is of how Noelle herself expresses love. Doing so as she said, by giving those she’s infatuated with or cares for lunchboxes and or other objects.

That’s why when Kris does give her a gift, THAT’s what gets to Noelle emotionally.

When giving Noelle a gift.

On a personal level this is a fine and consistent view, one that the residents of home-town seem to share.
On an inter-personal level, this is awful, because this is absolutely not how Kris views pranking.

Why Love, when one can Prank?
(Analysis Section 2)

The right option.

The scene in question, that above, can give us an insight to why Kris is at times ‘mean’, but only when looking at all presented options.
Both of which (‘I’m not a dream’ / ‘Your friendships are real’) are played up by Kris as either heroic or creepy. Though despite the insincerity in presentation, Susie does not take this as a mockery or a jab to her feelings. Instead, she laughs, as she does with what most would consider the ‘Mean’ option in ‘Sucks to be you’

This is because for both Susie and Kris, ‘Meanness’ isn’t synonymous towards cruelty. Kris isn’t trying to hurt or disregard Susie, the intention in all their attempts is to get a laugh out of her. (Which they achieve regardless of the option you select. Hence, the intentionality.)

They even go to further the joke by howling if you are to pick the ‘kinder’ options.

A decidedly, ‘weird’ act.

Going back to the Maus, their acts can be tied to Noelle’s perception of Kris. Or in short, their pranking tendencies. After all,

They’re the ones Noelle frequently associates with the ‘prank’. And Noelle knows quite well what would be a NOT Kris-like behavior.
However, despite this, Noelle assumes harm even when the intentions are to help her.

Kris here uses the Maus to send Noelle to safety, where she would’ve fallen otherwise.

In some part, Noelle even begins to recognize this by the end of chapter 2. Hence her opinion of Maus changing from ‘scary’ to ‘kinda cute’
A consistent feature of her character, given that being scared, and even a level of ‘meanness’ is fine to Noelle. (After all, those are the exact qualities that attract her to Susie.)
The problem isn’t with the Maus scaring her, it's with the context of the scare. Noelle sees it as a ‘attack’, and only after the Maus ostensibly help her does she begin to remember them in fondness. In other words,
This is how Noelle would interpret Kris’s pranks if she were to be attuned to their customs as Susie is.
Yet despite showing fondness for them, she does not as stated before, see this as proof of affection. In fact, even when the presumed interpretation would be, almost undeniably positive



Noelle doesn’t infer positive affection with the act.

 (Despite again, liking scary things, and wanting to be around Kris!)

So then why? If Pranking is Kris’s love language, if Noelle likes being scared/pranked, and if they know each other so well, then why would Noelle take Kris pranks as an indifferent, to at times hostile intentioned act?

Well, it comes down to what it always come down to, Big fucking Sis, December Holiday.
                                                Or…

The Hero, The Villain, and The Victim.

(In the end of it all…)

So, with all the content currently available between Chapters 1 through 4, and the sweepstakes, what we can say without question, was the dynamic between Dess, Kris, and Noelle?

Well, Kris scares Noelle

Dess deals with Kris.

And the evils that come with.

And Noelle is protected from all that is ill, so was revealed

In the Ice-e sighting posts. (Among Other Sources.)

Now, this needs to be well established in your head, so I’ll repeat it again.

Kris pranks Noelle, Noelle gets scared, Dess deals with Kris and comforts Noelle.
Repeat that in your head if you must, now, with that being said ask,

Why?

As we’ve established, Kris’s pranks aren’t born out of malice, they aren’t to hurt Noelle, they’re an act of affection that Noelle enjoys.
And say, when Susie scares Noelle, does Noelle freak out? Does she freeze up or call someone out for help?
Well, she gets spooked and then,

She LAUGHS it off! And that’s consistent, because as we’ve also established, Noelle’s problem isn’t being scared, it’s being scared by something she views as malicious.

Now, there is something to say about the gap of time, about how Noelle might’ve developed to be less scared or at the very least spookable as she grew up.

But that still doesn’t explain why her view of KRIS’s pranks have not grown up with her. And so, knowing this you might conclude that Noelle has some reason to be scared of Kris. Perhaps of a, ‘Prank’ gone too wrong.

And while that’s certainly possible, Noelle not only does not make a reference ever to such a prank, if such a prank would occur, we have all reason to believe that it would happen AFTER every Dess Wiffle bat hitting.
Ergo, it wouldn’t explain why Dess is so protective of Noelle, or why Noelle is complicit with said protection during her childhood…

Unless, you presume Kris pushes it too far sometimes. That by accident or childish fun they hurt Noelle. And because of this Dess needs to take action, and Noelle needs to be saved.

The problem is however, that everything we know about Noelle and Kris contradicts with this assertion.

As Noelle by her own admission, considers Kris not only the person who knows her best

Proceeded by, ‘(We’ve been through so much, sometimes it feels like…)’ - In, Dating Shoes.

The friend she has the MOST amount of comfort saying no to

After she explains herself the trouble she has in saying no to Queen, in - Queen poster.

And the Person who knows things about her, that NO ONE else knows.

Noelle after sighing and blushing while looking at Kris, - In the December room.

So compare again to Susie whose she’s known for effectively a day, and it’s laughable the difference. Yet Noelle can get scared just fine by her crush who she has waaay less familiarity or comfort with compared to Kris.  

More importantly however, this is all AFTER whatever broke the families apart. Whatever strained Kris and Noelle’s relationship to the point she isn’t even confident that they are friends. To the point that the ONE act Noelle considers as intimate by Kris, immediately gets her to consider if this is them trying to return things to how it was like when they were kids.  
Or to put it bluntly,
Kris and Noelle were CLOSER as kids. Noelle had MORE faith, MORE comfort, and MORE trust in Kris. Yet this estranged ‘I don’t even know if we’re friends’ Kris ranks higher than everyone in hometown, and if we’re being honest, higher than Rudy, her doting father. (Within the margins of ‘familiarity’ and ‘Comfort’)

So already, the idea of a Kid Noelle being genuinely scared for her safety with the person she likely trusts most in the world, and feels as comfortable saying no to as her own lax and loving father is absurd.

But the thing is, it doesn’t work in ANY direction. Because everything we know about Kris contradicts this too.
For example, when a ‘’’prank’’’ does go wrong, what's the first thing Kris does when they’re allowed to act outside the parameters of their established plans?

Right, They apologize to Noelle, try to solve the problem the best they can, and take full accountability as their ‘stupid prank’ (Despite it not being ‘their’ prank.)

They do this, while having the pressure of an active Susie trying to get the one thing they attempt to block off in all routes of the game, the shelter code.

Which she would’ve accomplished if not for ‘Asgore’

That’s how committed they were to set things straight with Noelle, something they didn’t even need to do!

Now if we keep going we could establish more assumptions to try to make all this work. For example, maybe Kris handling Noelle was something that was ordered to them by The Knight/Their boss. Maybe Noelle being like this influences their own plans negatively. Maybe it’s part of something in the prophecy. Maybe kid Kris and teenager Kris aren’t comparable, so the former wouldn’t be as responsible as the latter.

But logically, with what we do know from Noelle’s blatant inner monologues of Kris, who do you think is going to be ‘The person she can say no to the best?’
The kid who supposedly pushes past her limit frequently, who doesn’t apologize or try to set things right, who needs to be thwacked off by her sister because of how dangerous they are…
Or the Kid who does apologize, does try to set things right, and has already shown all these traits when things do go awry?

And to finalize, we already DO know how Noelle reacts to a Kris who has gone waaay past her comfort zone, and backs it off as a joke.

‘Smack’ Sound Effect Here.

Right, she (likely) slaps Kris, then tells them

And that means, basically, if Kid Kris was to scare the hell out of Noelle to the point she’s not okay with it, then Noelle wouldn’t need Dess, because she would slap the shit out of them and tell them to cut it out. As she does, when she’s way way more afraid then anything kid Kris could’ve done.

And this is in fact, consistent with what we see in how she reacts to the Maus Puzzles (Which she takes as KRIS pranks.) Either with ribbing



Or, wouldn’t you guessed it,

Anger!
And highlighting that, Noelle is a person who gets frozen around Mice. Actual, mice. Because of a strict babysitter.


Further reinforced by their following comment of Noelle being nervous around them, - In chapter 4 hometown.

The fact a Person like Noelle can then get consistently angry at Kris even in extremely stressful circumstances while estranged from them, should I hope, show why Noelle being ‘So scared she needs Dess to save her because Kris is pushing her boundaries way too far’ is impossible to fit with the current characterization we have in the game.

But of course, that isn’t a comforting notion. As we’ve just spent the good part of 6 pages explaining why the most sound conclusion to why this dynamic exists is borderline Out of Character for two of the three people in question.

Though, we do still have one person in question, but to answer this dilemma we really need three, and we need to connect each one of them together.
So think again, and from the top of your head what connects all three of these Holidays Members 
Dess, Rudy, And Carol?

Given the wide ranges of both screen time and characterization, it might seem impossible to figure out what could connect these three back to our question.
But really, once you see it, it’s very blatant and sound.

Basically, they all worry about Noelle and her safety, or specifically, her inability to defend herself.

This is to Rudy, his one complaint about his otherwise ideal Daughter.

Rudy - Chapter 1 Hometown

To Carol, it doesn’t take long in Noelle’s own house to see the lengths she’s willing to go to protect the things Noelle has just made. And extra material like the sweepstakes show that she will END school days for something as small as bad weather. (Something even NOELLE thinks is ridiculous.)

Sweepstake link 

And Dess…
Will get to Dess.

But it’s important to note before we do that both of their methods seem ineffective in making Noelle notably stronger or more secure in her position.

Rudy, though he's not in a good position in general, makes it pretty clear where he stands here. If he could, he’d protect Noelle.

Rudy - Chapter 1 Hometown

When he can’t do that however, he seems fine with trying to relegate the duty onto others, like Kris. (Similar to what Catty says to Kris, really.)

Carol however takes a much more universal role, as in, she tries to control Noelle’s environment and or limit Noelle to a set of things.

Noelle Mom in deltarune chapter 4
I believe this is self-explanatory.

The point is, neither of these methods have shown to be effective in getting Noelle out of her shell.
Now that we’ve established Carol and Rudy, here’s one more question for the road.

Who do you think Dess takes after more?

Carol, the controlling if effective mayor of home-town that has almost no charisma but works her ass off to get things done swiftly?

Or Rudy, the guy who tells anyone who bothers Noelle that he’ll ‘kick their ass’ who is otherwise, cracking jokes and laughing in what might literally be his death bed?

What approach do you think the ‘Rule-Breaker’ girl who shows ‘nasty’ songs to kids  

Raise up your bat - I really liked it!

The girl who we know ‘Wiffle bats’ Kris when she thinks they’ve gone too far? Who writes songs about fighting with burning hearts?

But, enough beating around the bush, now that we’ve got all the pieces, let’s bring them together here.

Let’s say it how it is,
Given everything we know about the characters, about hometown, and the results it leads to…
This dynamic, despite what is presented in game, is NOT as wholesome as it seems. In-fact, it is in all likelihood the cornerstone of every problem in the game.

First off, there is a massive gap in communication here. Not between Kris and Noelle, they get along just fine,
But between Dess and her Sister!

For all intents and purposes there should be no reason for Dess to protect Noelle from Kris. As we’ve already concluded, it’s bordering on impossible for Noelle to feel threatened or genuinely scared of them. Then, in an ideal scenario Dess would be informed by Noelle that Kris’s pranks aren’t a problem for her, that it’s okay if she’s scared. Then, Dess would be playing the job of comforting Noelle, or at most scaring away the scary beast. In other words, there should be no need for any wiffle batting, considering it’s all consensual and desired between both parties.

Yet not only does no single instance between this trio include such an example, Noelle as we’ve established, seems unaware of Kris’s own intentions in the act! Nor does Dess, who really, seems like she’d understand Kris’s ‘meanness’ appeal, appears to connect that possibility for Noelle!

It’s all backwards! And it all starts at this initial assumption,
Noelle needs defending.

That’s the only reason Dess, a punk girl, would start smacking Kris instead of (presumably) laughing along at them wearing the Ice-e’s dead mascot. She’s trying to protect Noelle. Which again, is not something she needs to do around Kris!

So what is it? What could possibly explain this?
Well, right at the summit, there appears to us a road that could bring us all the way back to the bottom!
Maybe…Maybe this was Dess’s way to show affection! Unusual as it might be, it wouldn’t be odd for her character. In theory, it could just be her way to join in on the fun.
Unfortunately,

These rose-tinted glasses can be shattered with blunt force! You see, Dess, is as I’ve always hoped,
Irrelevant!

In-truth, whatever intentions Dess held don’t matter, as the parents,



As their classmates,

As the people,
And yes,
As Noelle puts it



Kris is weird. They’re other. They’re human
And though hometown might try, there isn’t any way to shake off that perturbing fact, that they are not normal.
Eating moss is not normal. Acting Creepy is not normal. And scaring your childhood friends is not normal.

No one is necessarily malicious about it in Hometown, nor is possibly Dess. As far as we know, no one really holds Kris’s abnormalities far against them. But it does hold them back. As no matter what anyone does, Kris will always be judged by the (relative) normality of home-town.

Them being creepy is not necessarily bad. But it's not necessarily good either. It’s strange, a grey-space no one can really say much on.
Are you beginning to see how this all fits?

Noelle at this point is a kid. Given the shoddy grammar, a very young kid. Even if Kris’s pranks make her happy, she wouldn’t click that the kid trying to scare her is doing it to make her happy. Because scaring people to make them happy is strange, That’s something Noelle herself identifies as weird in the December puzzle.

And when you're a kid dealing with unusual emotions, and your big sister who always protects you jumps out of nowhere to bat at the scary kid, then what do you think you're gonna end up assuming?

‘Oh, that was bad.’

Course, Kris is your friend, and you're not really angry at them, and Dess isn’t really hurting them either, so it must be only ‘kinda bad.’
But it doesn’t matter.

Because whether your Sister is trying to protect you or messing around with the weird kid, you’re still getting the message of ‘That’s not something Kris should do.’
So when the kid does scare you, even if you enjoy it, even if you're fine with it, you don’t go ‘Haha thanks Kris’ you think ‘Wow, that was a mean Prank Kris!’ because you don’t associate their pranking with being friendly. You associate it with your Sister jumping at them to ‘Knock it off!’

And then you and your friend grow up, and become estranged, and now you're wondering if they ever liked you at all, or were just using you for a good laugh. Because even now, you still don’t associate their pranks with affection!
But hold on, there’s more!

Your Sister is constantly protecting you from someone who’s not dangerous at all. Yet you're always being saved by that sister. In other words, you aren’t a willing participant, nor do you have a choice in the matter.
Though, if you did have a ‘choice’, you’d likely be okay with it. But you don’t, because you’ve gotten used to being saved even when you’re not really in danger. Even when you could handle it yourself with your friend.
You become,
The Victim.

And what about your friend? They’re just trying to be your friend here. Trying to be affectionate and do some of the things you like. But whenever they express this side of them, a side that is really at the core of how they express themselves and try to have fun with you,
They’re wiffle-batted. Maybe it's a joke, maybe they know it’s a joke. But you don’t consider it a joke. You don’t tell them, ‘Hey thanks for the Prank Kris!’
Because Kris’s pranks are bad. They’re doing something wrong and strange. And even if they get you to laugh and smile, that’s the underlying message to how they behave with you. That they're doing something wrong, and that’s why someone needs to come to protect you. And why you accept that protection, always.

And because of that, your friend, whose just trying to be a good friend,
Ends up the bad guy. Because no matter how gentle or affirming they try to be, their way of BEING will always be wrong.
Somethings that’s been whispered to them for likely their whole lives, just by living. By the horns they can’t grow. Maybe they’ve accepted it at this point, maybe not,
Regardless,
That’s what makes them The Villain.

And of course, you’re Sister! She’s always saving you! But what does that do for her really? Beating on a kid who’s not really a problem.
Well, maybe it’s just for fun. Maybe they get each other. Maybe she gets an ego. Maybe she gets or always was too overprotective. Maybe it causes problems later, maybe it’s fine.
But regardless, your sister can’t understand you. Not all of you, not really. Because if she did then she’d get that you like all the pranks and want the pranks and are really just stuck in place now and all you can think of is how comforting it was when she was here to protect you from all the bad stuff. Even when it wasn’t all that bad.
Maybe if she knew, it would be the worst thing of all.

Regardless, she saves you. She always saves you. That’s why she’s The Hero, after all.

So if you didn’t get it yet, this is a cycle where Noelle remains complacent, Kris can’t get their true intentions expressed well, and Dess is either unaware of the boxes she’s put the two kids in as Noelle doesn’t ever tell Dess her feelings about Kris’s pranks (And likely, does not understand them at this point) or Dess is aware, and has some twisted reason to why it’s fine.

And most favorably, it fits with their established characterization. Noelle has teasing to frustrated reactions to the pranks, yet remembers them and shows fondness for the past. Kris is both the person who Noelle trust most in the world, and also somebody she has no confidence in liking her due to their love language being completely illegible to her. It fits with both their established limitations (Noelle not being able to speak up for herself, and Kris being limited in expression in general.)
It includes Dess, but regardless of her personality or intentions, she still fits well into developing the problem. As do Noelle’s protective parents, and her protective friends like Catty. And really we could go on for a while here, but in truth this was never about Noelle. Or her family. Or her problems.

But really…

Kris Dreemurr

(And that part, that enjoys it.)

So to throw it out there

Egg room 4 - In The Darkness.

Yeah Kris probably has some violent tendencies and they might enjoy part of it in the Snowgrave route.
But that’s not what we’re talking about here.

For this you’re going to again need to put yourself in another person’s shoes for a bit. Basically,
You're the weird adopted kid who's forever in your cooler, more normal brother’s shadow.

You and your best friend have fallen out of touch, and Berdly gets to insult you for needing to partner with your mom.



Life kinda sucks. And it sucks worse thanks to him.

He's always talking you down, and Noelle never has the guts to give him a good nag.

She’s just not built for it. Never was. Even with Dess you’d just get it, or maybe, that’s just how she wanted it to be. You might’ve just been a bother.

…Well, at the very least, the new girl likes your pranks. And general-douchery. But she’s a loser too, maybe that’s why it works.

It would be nice though, for that bird to get full of it, for Noelle to defend you for a change. It won’t happen, but it would be nice to be cared like that.

Except,
That dream

Isn’t a dream anymore.

So yeah essentially I think there's contextual reasons to believe the part that enjoyed the snowgrave route wasn’t just a violent side to Kris, but one lingering by their repressed desires. For Example, Berdly isn’t really their ‘enemy’

From Noelle’s Blog!1! - Tumblred.

But he is an active presence between Kris and Noelle, and likely due to the idea of losing Noelle, is very defensive towards her ‘childhood’ friend.

Also he is delusional.

And as we’ve already shown, Noelle can’t speak up against Berdly, or anyone for that matter. So you have this kinda dumb, but very persistent guy always talking shit and poking at your old relationship.



And then Noelle (Your/Kris’s friend) doesn’t say or do anything about it. In that situation, what would almost anyone want Noelle to do?
To shut Berdly the fuck up.

Applied more generally,
What do you do on the snowgrave route? Practically, what is the main mechanic that gets everything done?

Well functionally, Kris defends to get enough tp for Ice shock, and then Noelle kills whatever Darkener is in front of her. Basically, Kris plays support to let Noelle finish the enemy with offense. That’s how you progress in Snowgrave.

Let me repeat that. Kris DEFENDS. Kris plays SUPPORT. Noelle does the rest.

And looking at this, just strictly on why Kris would enjoy this, why would they want to play essentially support for Noelle?
Well again, Noelle is Protecting Kris. She’s fighting for them. You see this especially in the end.

Where she takes the initiative, she’s actively ready to fight alongside Kris and protect them if need be.
To expand on this a bit, when doing the puzzles in the normal route, Noelle knows the solution for them before you even start.

The problem isn’t with her ability, but her inability to act. Which pushes Kris to bear the brunt of the work.

Now In Snowgrave…



Noelle can finish the puzzle by herself (With the help of ‘’’Kris’s’’’ commanding.) However, what’s more important than even that is what she says
(What was I thinking? Kris wasn’t trying to hurt me….)

This would in theory be exactly what Kris would want out of Noelle. As we’ve established there's some communication issues between them, and both sides have reason to believe they might not be appreciated much by the other. So the idea sticking in Noelle’s head that Kris doesn’t want to hurt her, but is actively doing things (At times scary things) for her benefit would be the idealistic outcome.

Of course, none of this is ideal. But more of a perversion of one. An anger towards a friend, a discomfort with a childhood bestie, a general feeling of isolation and loneliness,
Blown up to mass murder, gaslighting, and all without any real input from either Kris or Noelle. Which in itself, might be a bit intriguing for the girl who has headless game cats and the kid who owns a knife.

Regardless, in the same manner Noelle gains ‘enjoyment’ out of the Snowgrave route by increasing her strength/control over her life, Kris probably gains enjoyment from that as well. Because Noelle fighting for them, slapping Berdly out of the way, and trusting even their scariest side is based on what we’ve been able to analyze out of Kris, an immensely gratifying experience.

Ya know, minus the murder. But at the very least, no matter how wrong it got, Kris could still say,

Freedom

(And why we can reach it.)

It’s fair to say we’ve gone over quite a lot, and it’s not all clear what can be said of it.

Really, this part of the doc was just to establish factors of Kris’s personality that we can currently rely on with some level of certainty. I feel like, for those who do look into the characters, they get that Noelle is lacking in confidence or might have more complicated feelings towards other cast members (Like Kris) but the latter of analyzing Kris seems less done to me. Which makes sense, Kris is a very ambiguous character, and silent, and hard to read at times.

That’s why I stuck to general things I think most people could agree on
(Kris likes pranking.) (Kris doesn’t want to hurt their friends.) (Kris feels like an ‘other’ in their community) and expanded off that using textual evidence. I think people underestimate how much you can get out of the character, despite their difficulties as long as you're willing to cross reference with other sources of Kris. (Like their family or friends, alongside just their general position in life.)

But in the end, this is a Kriselle doc, so why is this in a Kriselle doc?

Because this relationship is not one-sided. Even if you disregard the weird route part as silly, the Dess section as conjecture, and whatever else you don’t fancy your going less against reasoned-interpretation and more textual-facts given the sheer volume and undeniability of some of these things. I think for most Kriselle shippers, the Noelle stuff is known, but again, Kris is kinda overlooked.

For example, that Snowgrave bit where they really didn’t need to go to Noelle’s room. Like as I mentioned, maybe it's some wacky prophecy or hidden plan shit. But from what we know, Kris can just tell Noelle they’re not going, and possibly that would in itself end the weird route since I’m not sure how you’d proceed past that point. Regardless, they take multiple risks to make sure Noelle is okay. But I’ve never seen that brought, because largely Kris’s perspective goes underdiscussed because it's tricky.

And I imagine for similar reasons a lot people won’t buy into my interpretation of Kris/Dess/Noelle Dynamic. Despite how much evidence I’ve tried to put into it, and attempts to logic out why certain things are bordering on mandatory to make sense of certain in-game reactions, it still, is going to be contested. Which is fine, everyone has ten thousand different Kris’s and Dess’s in their heads. The characters are pretty much made to be interpreted.

But regardless of that, if you do give Kris and Noelle a serious examination, I’m sure you’ll find something new to them. Not necessarily right, but new. Because that’s the experience me and the author of this doc have gone through for weeks now while discussing the ship, and it’s happened almost on a daily basis.

The original comment that started this wasn’t even about half the things it turned out about, (It was focused on Kris’s repressed anger and how the Hero/Villain/Victim stuff might’ve influenced it.) and honestly, there's more I could say.

For example, card kingdom. Just stop and think for a moment, the card kingdom with the ‘bad guys’ (Specifically, Lancer/His dad) coming from what’s likely the bad/weird kid themselves. Honestly, I could probably ramble for 5 to 10 pages about how Lancer relates to Kris and how that influences the Kriselle ship.

Point being, give it a chance, you might find something you like. And for those who for some reason agree with everything I’ve said, or enough to be aligned with this, let me say something about the ship itself.

Snowgrave, has romantic implications. From the ‘Noelle will ride with me’ Ferris wheel to the whole concept of giving Noelle rings to how Spamton refers to Noelle to blah blah. You get it. You buy it. And under this interpretation, the person who you thought never liked you going along with all your secret feelings for them obviously fits the ‘gratifying fantasy’ part of Kris’s now twisted ideal.

But to make it clear, Kriselle isn’t a snowgrave ship. It can work in Snowgrave, but it has equal if not better evidence in the normal route. After all, there is a ‘ideal’ to be twisted, and if you want a reflection of Kris’s inner, suppressed desires without a thousand assertions to get to that point,

Then chapter 3 is right here, and Cactus theory is very near, and now reflected by another route.

See, it’s not just that you can learn something. But the thing you learn almost always adds to previous things you already knew! That’s how you need to see it! Don’t see an answer, that’s a wall, that’s a ceiling! We don’t need a ceiling, we don’t need a limit,
Because for Kriselle?
The sky is the limit.

FAQ

This is where I move into opinions which are strictly my own, and are not necessarily representative of anyone else, including anyone else named or linked in this document. These are all based on conversations which I have frequently engaged in. I'm just a random dumbass and my only credentials on these topics are having beaten my face into these specific topics over and over and over and over in the last few months, and I welcome critique if I am missing a relevant point.

These are also an important part of the document, going over many topics which didn’t neatly fit elsewhere, represented in a Q&A format.

Q Noelle says that she was just forced to be around Kris and they were nothing but neighbors!

She says that in the context of two important things -

1. She wants to stress to Susie that she is romantically available to her. Susie is interrogating her about their history, and scowling as she does so, in both her talksprite and her overworld sprite. While normally it would seem obvious that Susie would think it’s really cool if someone likes Kris, Susie isn’t delivering that message to Noelle. There’s a strange dichotomy in how Susie acts and speaks while talking about Kris, versus how Susie acts and speaks while asking Noelle about her history with Kris.  
2. That is the narrative Noelle has told herself, the rationalization, for why Kris would have been part of her life while Dess was still around and stopping after Dess disappeared - that it must have been just Asriel or the parents bringing Kris over while Asriel was seeing Dess or the parents were hanging out together.

While she's calling it 'forced' she is blushing and stumbling over her words, giggling, trying to downplay that the moment ever held any importance to her - while the topic in question is a ferris wheel photo in her house that she walks by every day.

She's not saying that it felt forced to her, that's her rationalization of the series of events from her perspective. Kris was her friend, but she didn't know if she was actually Kris's friend. Kris must have been forced to leave their house and tag along with their family. Because why would they want to come see her?

Noelle is pessimistic and gets afraid that Kris being distant now is because they never actually had anything, they weren't friends, even as she hopes otherwise and keeps trying to reconnect. She tells Kris she missed them playing the piano and the Rhapsotea item - which causes the drinker to hear singing - makes her disappointed that Kris never joined choir with her. She prepares study materials for school just in case Kris asks her for help. She is the one to suggest the three-person study group. She is trying to tease out any hint that Kris DID have feelings for her.

And that’s what explains her reaction to Kris in the offscreen Chapter 4 Weird Route scene. Just a minute of hearing Kris’s real voice again, seeming to confirm that they do care about her feelings, swearing to protect her, flipped her brain upside down. She became bold enough to walk up to Kris and Susie in the church to ask them to come to her house, whereas the Normal Route has her conflicted for a moment about whether it would be safe. She became bold enough to invite Kris into her bedroom, with the curtains closed (normally they are open), to perform what was almost certainly a romantic advance on Kris - scooting all the way across the couch to lean into them with her eyes closed.

Noelle and Kris’s actual feelings about each other are buried under layers of isolation and alienation, and Noelle is trying to pick at those layers to see what lies underneath. Kris is the hold-up here, not wanting - for whatever reason - to tell Noelle that there really was or is something between them.

Q But the Weird Route is negative commentary on Kriselle, explaining why it is bad.

The Weird Route is us, the Soul, forcing Kris and Noelle to do terrible things. The Weird Route shows a different angle of these two characters that actually gives a more complete view of them and how they think of each other as of the start of the game. The ways they interact under duress are not indicative of how they would interact in a mutually consenting romantic relationship.

Through absolutely no fault on the part of Kris or Noelle, the Weird Route exploits the most bittersweet and most vulnerable connection possible - childhood best friends who were inseparable until tragedy struck and who just now begin to reconnect again - to bring both of them to the absolute depths of their characters, the worst of all possible universes. They have a uniquely special trust and love for each other - platonic, romantic, they don't even know, they're 'something else' - and we use it to force them to become dark, darker, yet darker.

And… that is still going to appeal to some people! It’s tragic, it’s upsetting, but it’s still official game content involving characters that are loved. I like Weird Route Kriselle, I just don’t accept the idea that it is the only canonical perspective we are going to get of a romance between them. We may just have to see them taken to their absolute nadir before they can come into their zenith. I believe the Weird Route will end horribly, but possibly turn out to hold the key to a better third ‘true’ ending.

But back to the strange way that people view the Weird Route as a kind of commentary on how Kriselle would happen or why it shouldn’t happen… we are experiencing the game in a fundamentally backwards order. People think of the Weird Route as a kind of extraction of Normal Route’s Suselle to replace it with Kriselle, but you don’t actually know what will happen in Normal Route Chapters 5, 6, or 7, or however long the NR actually goes for. If the NR builds up Kriselle more, then the WR is the corruption of that into something terrifying for yet-unknown goals.

Q Nothing could break up Susie and Noelle at this point, so why all this song and dance about Kriselle?

Nothing needs to break up Susie and Noelle for Kris and Noelle to have a romantic relationship. The game has already brought up polyamory, and did so in a positive light where the problem with Lanino, Elnina, and Rouxls Kaard wasn't anything to do with polyamory, it was that Rouxls Kaard is a jerk. Also, the Spamton Sweepstakes references a 'Mr. and Mrs. and' Throuple Cutting Board, though that could easily have been a reference to the Lanino and Elnina storyline and is not necessarily representative of future content as of this point. It’s just possible that polyamory could be brought up at some point as a real possibility and not just as a joke. It could also be to tease the possibility of polyamory post-game so people feel comfortable doing other shippings even in the case of having a monogamous ‘designated main romance’ pairing.

But also, no, there are many reasons in the immediate future for why Suselle might not work out. I want to stress that this is not to assert that “no it definitely won't work out,” or “it’s inherently bad,” but they have a lot of obstacles that could cause them to need more time to get to know each other again after the game's ending, or cause them to seek out other people altogether.

In the immediate short-term of Chapter 5, I think it is exceedingly unlikely that Susie and Noelle will have a good time at the festival. Susie just read a prophecy which she interpreted as saying she will fall in love - and then she also read the same prophecy saying that something extraordinarily bad is going to happen. Something so immediately upsetting that she bargains with the universe that it couldn't possibly happen, and it haunts her the entire rest of the night.

Whether or not that previous prophecy panel actually referred to her and whether or not it actually refers to romance or other possibilities, such as “LOVE, too, is an acronym” or Soul shenanigans is irrelevant in this case, because the important point of Susie seeing the prophecy panel - as opposed to just the player alone seeing it instead - is how Susie is likely going to associate romance with a terrifying prophecy from now on.

I think it's important that Susie didn't stay the night with Kris. If Toby just wanted to tease the prophecy’s bad ending again, there are still ways to do it with them in the same home. Even the Weird Route ending can still happen with Susie staying the night. There is a chance that Susie actually went to Castle Town that night, and that she's not going to show up to Kris or Noelle's homes in the morning. She thinks there isn't much time left, and she's going to be thinking about Ralsei and his wellbeing, and possibly about finding clues to the shelter while everyone else is distracted. And if she does come, then she might be more focused on trying to get Noelle to help her see the guitar again than on having a fun time together.

Is Susie going to be ok with the possibility of falling in love with Noelle, something she interprets as a step in the prophecy? I think she will be very conflicted about it. Anticipating that Susie will say, "no no, it's ok for this next step to happen, that's fine, it's the one LATER that I want to avoid," is perhaps expecting too much nuance from someone who just experienced something that shocked her to her core. And I don't think Gerson's words are going to matter here - she's not going to understand them yet.

Also, Susie lied to Noelle about something very important - the existence of the dark worlds, which Noelle wishes were real in order to heal her sick father. What is going to happen if Noelle believes that Susie prevented her from healing her father in time?

And the biggest question of all in my mind… what is going to happen after the truth comes out about the nature of the Soul and Kris's loyalty to the Roaring Knight?

There is someone who will be happy to learn that ‘the real Kris’ is going to come back and has been trying to save Dess, or otherwise keep a promise to Dess. And there is someone else who is going to be unhappy to learn that their best lightner friend isn't ‘real’ and has been working with the knight, helping the knight to hurt Susie, Ralsei, and Undyne, and even endangering Toriel.

As mentioned earlier, the shadow crystals appear to show a future where a wedge has been driven between Kris and Susie while Noelle may be on better terms with Kris again. It’s a reasonable conclusion that we are nearly guaranteed to see Suselle go through at least some of these major obstacles. That doesn’t mean that Susie and Noelle can't be together romantically by the end of the game, or that they are no longer open to the possibility by the end, it just means you should expect strong turbulence along the way.

And if I can put all my cards out on the table and say something I don’t expect everyone to feel is evidenced… I think there is a serious possibility that Susie and Noelle may be on opposite sides for at least part of the second half of the game. They may come to violent blows. This is a game where most of the antagonists are obsessed with living in the past and wrestling with their traumas and nostalgias until they become so desperate they make Faustian bargains for the power to get what they feel they deserve. That is the story of King, of Spamton, of Tenna, and very likely soon Asgore in Chapter 5, as is commonly theorized. And which character has more nostalgia than anyone else? Which character is going to carry the champion cup of Most Traumatized Character Ever after Noelle learns the truth of everything, and possibly has her father die, and possibly has the attempt to rescue her sister fail?

And I don’t think the solution to that is going to come in the form of letting go of all of those feelings, completely letting go of the past. It didn’t mean that for Tenna. But there’s someone very important to Noelle who is a part of that past and might be the key for making her have hope again, even if it has to happen in the middle of a battle with Noelle for what the world should look like.

That person will just need to learn to forgive themselves first, and to accept that they can love and be loved.

The answer...

... was LOVE?

Q Ralsei pushes for Susie and Noelle to have room to bond, and doesn’t want Kris and Noelle bonding alone without Susie. Doesn’t that mean that Suselle happens and Kriselle doesn’t?

I actually take that as possible evidence that Ralsie has already seen a future where Suselle did not happen, and he believes - rightly or wrongly - that it led to a very upsetting outcome. Remember, Ralsei is attempting to change the outcome of the prophecy that he has seen, not to follow all of its steps to its apparently frightening conclusion. Him pushing for Susie and Noelle to bond may mean that he knows Suselle wouldn’t happen without his interference.

Ralsei even seems to deliberately try to prevent Kris and Noelle from being alone together in Chapter 2, when the road splits into two directions after the first fight with Berdly. Ralsei begins to take the northern path and asks Kris to choose whether to go with him, or to go east with Susie. If Kris were to go north, then they never see Noelle again until the paths meet back up. If Kris were to go east, then they will be going with Susie, and all of Noelle’s attention will be on Susie. Susie pre-empts this plan by deciding that SHE wants to be the one to pick who goes where, which is what ironically puts Kris and Noelle alone together again.

And Ralsei trying to nudge the player against wanting to accompany Noelle to the festival alone would be him trying to do this again.

(I wonder if Susie could pre-empt his plans again?)

My assumption is that Ralsei hopes that when everything shakes out with the reveal of the soul and of Kris helping the Roaring Knight, a stronger connection to Susie could mean that Noelle picks a side other than the one he’s already seen her pick, or to otherwise prevent another catastrophe.

Ralsei dropping his upbeat facade in the weird route and saying that Kris going to the festival with Noelle is outright “a bad choice” with no subtlety may be a result of his fear that Noelle helping the Evil Roaring Knight Gang - or otherwise doing something very bad - is now even more likely for the fact of Susie and Noelle not having gotten the chance to bond in the Cyber World that he originally hoped for. He wants Noelle to pick Susie over Kris and her own family.

Q How could Suselle not be the primary romance of the game after Toby put so much time and effort building it up? Is all that just supposed to go to waste?

There is no ‘sunk cost fallacy’ in play here - almost every scene, almost every piece of dialogue between Susie and Noelle has served to characterize themselves and other characters, and not even necessarily to characterize what a romantic relationship between Susie and Noelle would look like. Remember that the Chapter 4 extended sequence in Noelle’s house was predominantly just them talking about having played the same videogame, having seen the same movie, and about Kris and Ralsei. The Dess room scene has the two sitting next to each other and talking almost exclusively about Kris and Ralsei. And it ends when the conversation turns back to themselves, with Susie getting upset about her tail being mentioned - the third time that Noelle has crossed that boundary without apology.

The annoying white dog never promised that there would be a canon romance, or that it would be any specific pairing, regardless of how much time has been spent on any one of them. We just finished the first half of a story that now has foundations laid for many different possible canon ships, and I happen to believe that one of them is going to be of very high importance to the narrative. Toby has a story he wants to tell here and it is going to have twists and turns that can recontextualize previous events in a new light.

I think the ‘sunk cost’ feels more real and pertinent because of how long we as the audience have been experiencing this story and waiting for the resolution. There is a time dilation effect to being part of the fandom, where even though Susie and Noelle have spent less than two hours in total actually getting to know each other, we've had that spread across up to four whole years since the release of Chapter 2. Noelle has had her crush for SEVEN of our real world years. There are people who have spent years making or experiencing Suselle fanworks, and making theories about that shipping similar to this one, and for some people it may have even been an important part of their own journeys of exploring their gender and sexuality. There were many people who reacted to the Undertale 10th Anniversary event by noting how young they were when they first played Undertale,with some people saying they were as young as 9.

And getting to have those formative relationships with a game is legitimately very special to the people described and I understand why discussion of shipping can get so heated. I'm not immune to this, I have my own biases, even ones possibly based on identity. I see a lot of myself in both Kris and Noelle, including that I’m a queer woman married to a nonbinary person. And I'm not immune to having my perceptions of canon shaped by fanwork - in fact, that was part of my experience of coming to enjoy Kriselle. My hope is that I've been able to use that drive to hoover up all possible evidence and then scrutinize it in a more objective manner, which will unfortunately never be 100% objective.

But this is all something that is shaped by the fact that Deltarune is being released as an episodic experience, contrary to Toby's original intention. If you like Suselle, then you've probably enjoyed Suselle for the same set of reasons for years, and if you don't like Kriselle, then you've probably had the same set of reasons for why you don't for years. Playing through new chapter releases does not necessarily mean that you are actively re-evaluating previous positions based on new information, especially if those previous positions have felt tangibly, undeniably real for a large chunk of your life.

My hope is that Toby can land this plane in a way that is best for the narrative he personally wants to show us, and that it can be satisfying to people even if it introduces complications to things they hoped to see. And it could very well end without Kriselle and I will still trust that he has a meaningful story to tell.

Q Kriselle shippers just hate Suselle, that’s what this is all about, you’re grasping at straws coming up with all these other things because you’re jealous that Suselle is canon.

I don’t hate Suselle, and I don’t think most Kriselle shippers do, even if there are plenty who act like jerks about the topic. I like Suselle. And before Chapters 3 and 4, I was perfectly happy not caring about shipping anyone in this game besides Susie and Noelle. They’re cute together. They are both in my top three favorite characters from Deltarune. And I would be perfectly happy if Krusielle polyamory was in the cards by the end, which I do see could be romantic on all three sides of the triangle.

But I also assert that there’s a pretty extreme dissonance in how Suselle as it has been presented thus far doesn’t feel like it engages the themes and tones of the game in the way that I anticipate a romance would at this point. Ch3&4 drastically changed how important I anticipate romance to be, and what I think a main cast romance would look like based on that importance.

There is a difference between a story presenting a romantic pairing on an inescapably explicit and surface level, versus it neatly tying into the tones and themes of the story in a compelling way. Suselle has, so far, been presented as an uncomplicated and comedic coming-of-age teen romcom characterized by Susie’s density and Noelle’s extreme thirst. And that clashes with a game where most main plots have involved some combination of melancholic nostalgia for something that once was and is no more, or a sense of foreboding and secrecy, or the vulnerability of having your worst thoughts and worst failings put on display.

And that’s not for a lack of these characters having those elements on their own!

The ‘the_n3w3st_g1rl_g1rl’ blog page from the Spamton Sweepstakes was taken by some people to be a character assassination of Noelle, such that it has been theorized by some to be describing an alternate universe other than the one we are experiencing in Deltarune, or it must otherwise be an intentionally inaccurate portrayal of events, or most commonly, accepting that it happened in the world of Deltarune but that it is flawed writing where Toby’s portrayal of Susie and Noelle is inconsistent with the game and that it flanderizes Noelle to be just her extreme thirst for Susie. But I would say that it really is just part of her character, and to any extent that it feels out of place is because her behaviors sound worse when they are written down and you have to sit with the implications of them, as opposed to when you see them acted out in the moment and then get distracted by the next story beat.

Noelle recently jumped over Susie to become my number one favorite character in the game, but she’s a very flawed person. She is obsessive, and routinely demonstrates boundary-crossing behaviors that would be seen in a horrifying light if a boy character was doing them in regards to a girl he was crushing on:

• Noelle knows that Susie puts her mouth on the school water fountain when drinking on it, which makes her rush to drink from it after Susie for an ‘indirect kiss.’

• When Noelle and Susie are both walking through the cyber world together, Noelle insists on walking behind Susie, and uses that opportunity to stare at Susie’s behind the entire time.

• When Berdly tells Noelle that he has developed a crush on Susie, Noelle either strangles him while yelling at him, or grabs his clothes and shakes him while yelling - the animation isn’t clear, but Noelle’s comments in chapter 4 seem to point to strangling:

* I shouldn't be afraid to... tell Berdly how I really feel.

* Next time I... I should be honest! Next time, I should...

* I... I should shake his neck and scream at him!

• Noelle crosses Susie’s boundary about her insecurity about her tail three separate times, without apology. Only the first time is understood to be ‘in a dream’.

Noelle is a yandere for Susie. A yandeer, if you will :P

I don’t expect the outcome of Noelle having these problematic elements to be that “Noelle gets what she wants without extreme complication.” She is probably going to be challenged for having these tendencies, in an uncomfortable way. And that is also likely to involve the game exploring the reasons why she developed these tendencies, because they likely stem from her childhood and from her relations to her parents, to Dess, and to Kris. Regular cycles of fear and irregular cycles of attention and affection.

Suselle needs substantial development like that to become complicated and compelling in a way that isn't "aww, they're so cute and funny together, Noelle is so thirsty and Susie so dense." And it’s hard for me to imagine, in the very specific space of where everyone is right now and how much of the game is left, that they’re going to have the time to do it after all this background setup for Kriselle and very little of it for Suselle. It’s a relationship that has to be shown organically onscreen because there is exactly one other piece of existing pre-game ‘background’ to it in the game, the scene in Noelle’s prison in the Cyber World where Susie describes Noelle being nice to her in offering the pencil when everyone else was afraid of her.

But Kris and Noelle are already, right now, the perfect vehicles for the second half of the game that Toby seems to be writing, without needing anything new and without needing any new previously unintroduced elements or heavy-handed forced drama. The second half of a story about desperation and yearning and vulnerability. A game where the psyches of both Kris and Noelle are almost certain to get violently unwound like a coiled spring shooting out of a broken machine. No one else, not even Ralsei, has more problems going on in their heads than those two, and their relationship with their shared childhood and shared trauma is at the center of most of the game's conflict and mysteries.

Q Isn’t it possible that no main cast ships are canonized by the end?

It is absolutely possible, but I think it is unlikely. Romance as a theme has been one of the most consistent narrative throughlines of the game since Chapter 2, with the following non-exhaustive list of times it has come up in substantial and often repeatedly-referenced ways:

• Kris and Ralsei’s swan ride through the Acid Tunnel of Love
• The only way to swap out Noelle's weapons is symbolically as engagement rings to Kris
• The Poppups make Kris, Noelle, Ralsei, and Susie each unconsciously click on things they are romantically interested in: “monsters 4 humans”, “hot female santas”, “lightners 4 darkners”, and “steak”, respectively
• The addison who offers Dating Shoes, Marriage Shoes, and Divorce Shoes
• The chapter 2 ferris wheel is extravagantly gaudy with heart shapes and Susie and Noelle immediately recognize the implication
• Noelle and Asriel being Grade-A Certified Gooners, and How to Draw Dragons continuously cropping up
• Multiple failed or failing relationships: Asgore and Toriel, Spamton and Tenna, Carol and Rudy
• Elnina and Lanino's breakup, rebound with Rouxls, breakup again, rebound with Starwalker
• The bridge that only appears when lovers stand before it
• Susie teasing Ralsei about 'finding him a lover', and taking Kris's controller to make the digital Kris hug the digital Ralsei over and over
• The cactus that loves Kris
• The emphasis on Kris's flirting abilities
• The repeated question of who is going with who to the Hometown festival
• Susie seeing a prophecy panel which she interprets (correctly or not) as saying she will fall in love

Given all of this build-up on the edges, it’s reasonable to assume that there is going to be a major romance plotline that engages at least some of the themes presented by them. It’s just not guaranteed.

Q You waffle back and forth on polyamory in this document. Is there any reason it couldn’t be possible?

There are reasons why it may be possible, and there are reasons why it may not be possible within the confines of the game. Like I said at the beginning of the document, my hope was that the canon romance of the story would be Krusielle - Kris and Susie and Noelle, romantic on all sides - and I feel like the process of researching the game more and more has made me come to the conclusion that it is very unlikely. Not impossible, but unlikely, with the most likely outcome being a monogamous Kriselle that could leave open the possibility of polyamory outside the story.

There are some simple logistical facts of the story that make polyamorous relationships within game content unlikely:

1. Deltarune is a game, not a shipping chart - there is a story that Toby wants to tell here, and it’s ok if characters are not paired up romantically. The idea that characters need to be paired up romantically, that characters should not be ‘alone’, is an emotional invention of the fandom. That can be resolved by headcanons and fanworks.
2. A coherent and compelling romance between characters takes a lot of buildup, and many pairings which the fandom likes are not really compatible with how much time the game can devote to building out the requisite backgrounds for those pairings to be romantic. There’s a practical limit to the number of romantic relationships.
3. A large portion of the second half of the game is going to involve the twists of the main plot, and recontextualizing previous events, in ways that are going to throw major wrenches in character dynamics. Like the upcoming reveal of Kris’s betrayal. Dynamics that look like they are happy and healthy right now may be destroyed, and may not have time to recover all the way to not just the current state but a romantic one, if that is even what the members would want, and they may not want it.

Krusie, Kralsei, and Ralsusie are pairings between characters who have put their lives on the line for each other multiple times now and are learning about each other very quickly, and that’s a basis for possible romance. But I perceive that Kriselle has a major step above all of them in being the one most likely to weather plot twists. Kris and Noelle already had something that can be reforged and built upon, and it is going to radically change Noelle’s disposition towards Kris to learn that they only gave her a cold shoulder to keep her safe or out of guilt over what happened to Dess. If Kris can forgive themselves for whatever happened with Dess, and if Noelle can forgive them - knowing that Kris has been trying to make up for what happened - then I don’t think being on opposite sides of a battle would be as destructive to their connection as Susie and Noelle’s connection could suffer.

Q What if Toby only knows how to write - or only WANTS to write - summarized and upbeat romances? Like Alphys x Undyne and the Royal Guards

I think Toby actually does want to incorporate melancholy and vulnerability and horizon-broadening as major parts of romance plotlines for Deltarune, and the Weird Route already demonstrates that. The Weird Route is being presented as us exploiting a deeply intimate connection where we force one person who buried all their feelings to perform what is symbolically a marriage proposal (albeit one which cannot be denied) to the one person who desperately wants to reconnect with them and who enjoys the thought that they "know each other better than anyone". As we force Kris to say, they are not friends, they are "something else."

And I don't know that Toby wants us to have a takeaway message reduced to just "and that's bad, mmkay," when the sequence it replaces very explicitly brings up the topic of whether it still matters how two people actually feel about each other when they are forced together by circumstances outside their control. I don’t think the Weird Route will have a good ending, for either Kris and Noelle or the world of Deltarune as a whole, but how they feel about each other can still matter. They are victims of circumstance and of our meddling but that may not necessarily prevent them from having victories where they can, and taking comfort in each other.

And the 10th Anniversary stream appeared to pose the [non-UT-canon, but still Toby-originating] idea of Gerson having had a human romantic partner who directly took part in sealing monsters underground, with Gerson having been an ironic witness to the event, in awe of their partner as a juxtaposition to the horribleness of the act.

And, even further, all three of Toby’s lyrical romance songs intertwine romance with horror and tragedy - Skies Forever Blue, 74, and The Greatest Living Show. We are buried in examples of this being something Toby likes, and yet the fandom endlessly points to Undertale’s Alphys x Undyne and the Royal Guards as being more representative of his tastes in romance.

Toby was very limited in what he could do with romance in Undertale for the fact of how little time we actually get to spend with characters, and the protagonist being too young to be involved with any of it beyond as a joke. And I submit that we're seeing elements of a deeply layered romance story strategically placed around the game such that the Normal Route is going to have at least one main cast romantic pairing that simultaneously feels like two people who naturally slot into each other’s lives but also feels like "this shouldn't be happening, and it’s scary that it’s happening, I didn’t intend for things to be like this, but… I want to be here for you if you’ll let me.” And that can exist in addition to poly shippings.

Also, Chapters 3 and 4 appear to predict that Deltarune will be a much more intimately dark and melancholic game than Undertale was. In Undertale, the stakes were your attachment to survival and, in the pacifist route, to finding a peaceful and cooperative resolution with characters who may attack you on sight but are open to reasons why they should avoid killing you. Deltarune is upping the ante with a doomed narrative - characters who know that they are going to die or have to do something terrible to prevent a worse outcome for the entire world. Susie’s elation at learning that she was special, she had a destiny, she has so many amazing things in store for her that she never thought would be possible… was a setup for the universe playing a practical joke on her and her friends. That’s incredibly dark.

Any main cast romance is going to exist in the context of that fate and will need to engage those themes.

Q But the Kris and Noelle Teas only healed each other for a little bit of HP, nowhere near as much as Susie Tea for either Kris or Noelle

Translating their feelings about each other to a single number is reductive and should be isolated to the context of what their interactions are at the point in the game that we see those numbers - Kris has been avoiding Noelle for years, and Noelle interprets that as evidence they might never have been friends in the first place. They both have buried feelings about the other that need to be teased out, even if you assume those feelings don't need to be romantic. Just two chapters after we saw the tea numbers, the Weird Route shows us that Noelle would accept Berdly being seriously hurt by Kris’s ‘prank’, with minimal explanation, as long as it meant she got Kris back in her life, and it also shows us that Kris would fly into a murderous rage against us for hurting someone they've been giving a cold shoulder to for years. Their connection is layered in intimacy and alienation at the same time.

I don’t believe that the tea numbers were intended to imply that characters’ connections with each other wouldn’t develop beyond the state of mid-chapter 2.

Also, it should not be discounted that Kris Tea is not actually Kris Tea, it is Kris And Soul Tea - Noelle identifies a strange aftertaste that she can’t match to Kris, and that may reduce how much HP she would heal. This is not a factor for Ralsei and Susie, who have only known Kris with the Soul inside them.

Q I don't like the idea of shipping Kris with anyone, because we're a parasite controlling them

We can still make reasonable predictions of what might happen after we no longer have control of Kris. We can't force Kris to feel a certain way - they have their own existing thoughts and goals - but what we can do is help make it easier for them to get the things they want.

Perhaps even the things they want which they tell themselves they don't deserve or that can’t happen.

The Roaring is coming, but this world already ended for Kris a long time ago. Kris seems to blame themselves for many things and they may even have tried to punish themselves. They threw out so much of their childhood, and they don't open themselves up to their friends who like them.

Something we can hope to do for them, that only WE might be able to do for them, is to make a world where they will be more comfortable unpacking their feelings and having long-overdue conversations with everyone they love and who loves them. It may be unclear how many endings there will be, but we already know one of them: without our continued involvement in Gaster's experiment, the world will fall into darkness.

So I think we can feel free to imagine what Kris's life will be like after we've said our goodbyes, after we are ‘banished’, without fear that it is inappropriate manipulation or voyeurism.

Q We are given optional choices that tease possible romance with Susie, Ralsei, and even Berdly. Isn’t that a big strike against Kriselle being important to the story?

I would say that’s a neutral point, it’s not a contradiction to Kriselle happening. And it goes back to the previous question, about Kris being their own person completely unrelated to us as their temporary controller - Kris is not going to develop romantic feelings for someone based on what choices we made when prompted to either hug Ralsei or tell Ralsei “fuck you and die.”

As of Chapter 4, Kris and Noelle’s relationship is out of our control. Even the opportunity to give Noelle a gift is taken out of our hands by Noelle’s own pessimism, assuming we’re trying to return it for money. We cannot do something that she appreciates as a romantic act. Telling the addison that she and Kris are not dating but are instead ‘something else’ just confuses and scares Noelle. Even having Kris visit her and Rudy in the hospital and interacting with her at her gate just piques her curiosity with no conclusion besides that ‘Kris has been acting weird recently’.

If Kris and Noelle have romantic development, it will probably have the most major elements happen outside of our control entirely. That will probably also be true of any other romantic story in the game.

There is a lot of optional content to keep track of, and the game allows for the possibility that you are going to play chapters out of order with a ‘default’ save where Toby has set parameters on what we would have made Kris do earlier in the game. If you don’t already know it off the top of your head, you don’t get to see whether one of your save files or the default save has ‘the most Kerdly moments’ or ‘the most Krusie moments’, et cetera. Could you imagine playing through the game choosing romance options for Ralsei, but then losing your save files and needing to restart the latest chapter from scratch, and opening the latest chapter to see Kris kissing Berdly out of nowhere just because that’s how the default save was set up?

You can see what acts you’ve obtained shadow crystals in, you can see how many eggs you have collected, and you can check whether you’re on the weird route through interacting with the bead toy in the hospital - but there is no visible metric you get for different Kris relationships. So my assumption is that it doesn’t matter, but the other three things do matter.

I’m sorry to say for anyone hoping to get to choose one of multiple romance options for Kris because it could make it more likely to see their preferred shipping, but I very much doubt that we are going to get to choose for any romances to occur aside from the choice of which ‘route’ gets played. There are shippings teased that are not going to work out in the scope of the story Toby wants to tell. Those are for you to help fill out in your fanworks.

Q “Kriselle is the past, Suselle is the future"

I’ve seen this pithy turn of phrase used a bunch, and I just can’t agree with the premise.

Suselle, as it exists currently (which does NOT mean how it has to stay), is an attempt by Noelle to relive a nostalgic past without reckoning with its thorny contradictions first. If you accept the premise that Noelle sees parts of Kris and Dess in Susie, and that Susie can act as a replacement for them, then that is not an unambiguously good thing - Susie is being molded to fit a role she doesn't realize is important to Noelle and that she hasn't consented to being placed in, just for Noelle to continue reliving a past that Dess's absence and Kris's avoidance have made unavailable to her.

Also… Kriselle was never the past. Remember that Noelle is acting and speaking and thinking in the context that she believes Kris is unconcerned with her feelings and never liked her as a friend in the first place - this is not true, but it is something that requires direct confrontation and healing for Kris to finally feel comfortable describing how they feel and what they would want, which will necessarily change how Noelle understands their connection.

One of the major points my coauthor and I are trying to make with this essay is that Kris could never demonstrate their affection for Noelle - platonic, romantic, they probably didn't know either - in a way that Noelle consciously understood what Kris was trying to do. Which is why it is an open question what will happen when they can both mature and finally learn to communicate with each other.

Q But Kris doesn't fit into Noelle's canon sexuality, she’s a lesbian. Isn’t Kriselle heteronormative? The Weird Route is about heteronormativity, doesn’t that reflect Toby’s thoughts on Kriselle?

Noelle is sapphic at a minimum, which doesn't mean she can only ever be attracted to women - nonbinary people may still fit into her sexuality if she is a lesbian. And she might even be bisexual or pansexual, though I don’t feel a need to fight on the issue of exactly what her sexuality is, because there is simply no indication that gender would be a problem for either character. She may be like every other UTDR character in being ‘UTDR-sexual’, having whichever attractions the writer wants them to have.

And large parts of the fandom having spent years assuming that Kris is a boy, and many people still wrongly making that assumption, doesn't have any relevance to whether Kriselle may or may not happen within the story or what Kriselle means for people who like the shipping. If you see people talk about Kris as a boy or with he/him pronouns, regardless of whether they like Kriselle or not, that’s on those people, that’s not something the game intends for people to think would be a complication for Noelle.

Noelle’s response to the addison assuming she and Kris are dating and trying to sell a ring is her being pessimistic about how Kris feels about her, and then happy that Kris tries to buy it for her despite that, not that she is gay and how that would be disqualifying:

* (Faha, Kris buying ME a ring...? Yeah, right!)

* H... huh? Kris, you'd... buy it for me...?

* Sure, I guess... we could ask about it.

* (Still, it was nice of Kris to offer...)

I’m about to go on a HUGE tangent here, the answer to the validity of Kriselle as a queer pairing doesn’t need to be more than the above, but the specific issues of how the fandom often acts about Kriselle and the Weird Route really grind my gears, and I want to respond to quite a lot. I want to try and elevate the level of discourse to a more mature one.

So this is your chance to avoid my whiney set of complaints and general scolding of the fandom in:

3…

2..

1.

Just as I have my own biases that inherently color my arguments, I think a lot of people who critique Kriselle with “but Noelle is a lesbian” should consider whether they are denying the possibility based on sincerely-held beliefs garnered from the available content, or whether they just personally don’t like the idea and that is an easy, ready-made excuse to pull off the shelf and proclaim authority on the matter.

The younger sides of the fandom can sometimes act as a kind of high-control group with an urgent paranoia about outsiders coming and stealing away the sense of queerness of these games - and it has the effect that characters or shippings that are straight or can be possibly misconstrued as ‘straight’ are treated with suspicion and like you are doing something morally wrong unless you hyperfocus on specific elements - or outright headcanons - that can be contextualized to make it ‘more queer’ or ‘less straight’.

Look at how Dess x Asriel, a shipping that is almost entirely a garden of headcanons that are likely to be wildly off the mark in future chapters, is often portrayed as ‘subby malewife and dommy tomchad’, or that Asriel is bi and had Pizzapants and Blue Bunny as suitors, or that Asriel is a (possibly closeted) trans woman, or that Dess is a (possibly closeted) trans man…

Those are fine headcanons to have. You're not doing anything wrong by liking any of these ideas. But there's a phenomenon of people describing, in the public sphere of fandom, that they only like the pairing, or only tolerate the shipping, as long as it “doesn't look straight.” And that is when it becomes a social dynamic, not just a personal feeling.

And Kris x Noelle, in the eyes of some vocal people in the fandom, “looks straight”. Despite being an explicitly queer ship.

There are some people in the fandom who consider shipping and theorizing to be things that can be done either ‘ethically’ or ‘unethically’, and not as a value-neutral act divorced from either reifying social mores or challenging them. That suspicion about which ships are straight or that ‘look straight’, versus being sufficiently queer, is a sincerely-held - if very juvenile - fear about whether a fandom is losing the comforting identity they perceive it to have. It’s a dynamic of making a piece of entertainment into a social clique where one feels safe and like their values are not going to be challenged, or that if they are challenged, they have like-minded fellows who will have their back. And that is a result of most other places on the internet being intrinsically and intensely hostile to queerness. Our trauma can make us act as prickly porcupines, and allies can be overzealous thinking they are doing so on our behalf too. And ironically, as I feel like is happening in the case of Deltarune shipping and Weird Route discourse, there is a need to feel grounded in where oneself stands in opposition to others, and it can effectively cause some queer people and cishet allies to reinvent sexual and gendered hierarchies to enforce upon other queer peoples.

And within this predominantly young and queer fandom, Kris is often perceived as ‘performing masculinity’ (both willingly and unwillingly) in opposition to Noelle’s nature as an assumed lesbian. Even when Kris is known by the audience to be nonbinary, Kris’s assigned gender at birth (AGAB) - which is currently unknown in the game and not yet assigned any importance - is interrogated and theorized for what it could possibly mean about Kris, and virtually always assumed to be that they were assigned male at birth (AMAB). Having a headcanon is fine, and when writing fanfic where the topic is broached you may just have to pick from a sex binary and there is no wrong answer because there is no right answer - but in the context of theory and literary analysis I see the widespread assumption of Kris as AMAB or that any aspect of them or any actions should be gendered as masculine or feminine so as to make a certain theory possible, as being an enbyphobia that unfortunately has become widely acceptable in queer discourse to make sweeping assertions of what message we should take away. In practice, it often just helps to unintentionally reify a gender binary (“are you the boy kind of nonbinary or the girl kind?”) without providing literary value.

And there’s been a socially-constructed dynamic here where people's realization over time that yes, Kris is actually nonbinary instead of a boy, caused a pendulum swing to what is now an assumption by many vocal people of Kris as a ‘canonically’ AMAB enby who feels vulnerable about their gender identity and is making a deliberate effort to escape masculinity. And in that fanon, having Kriselle fanworks depicting Kris with conventionally masculine elements - like any combination of having a flat chest, or a square jaw, or broad shoulders, or unshaven body hair or wisps of facial hair - is considered making Kriselle ‘straight’. And so is showing Kris as having parented any children also ‘straight’.

Some parts of the fandom are insistent that a nonbinary character should only be depicted in a narrow band of gender presentation that fits their personal headcanons - often defining conventional femininity as ‘wholesome’ by contrast to conventional masculinity - and that everyone else’s fanworks need to be policed to fit those personal headcanons. And I want to be clear, this is not talking about works misgendering Kris - that’s a legitimate issue. This is about people who can’t stand a canon-fitting Kris being seen as or written as anything that doesn’t fit the way they dress and pose their special blorbos within their mind palace.

That’s not a healthy dynamic, that’s erasing queerness under the guise of supporting it. And when I see people with LGBTQ+ pride flags in their nicknames or profiles saying they don’t like seeing people ship Kris with Noelle or Susie - two girls - and then turn around and suggest that it would be more ‘ethical’ to ship Kris with Berdly or Ralsei instead - two boys - I can’t help but feel like that is just turning their own discomfort with nonbinary people into a cudgel to bash everyone else with.

There’s a special place in Hell for the people who pretend to suffer oppression at seeing Kris shipped with girls, and who proclaim that the reason others are shipping that is because they’re simply homophobic. That special place is called the frontyard, and in that place, you are required to touch grass.

I’ve also often found that calling the Weird Route ‘heteronormative’ is not actually derived from how the characters present turmoil in how their gender or sexuality conflict with the situations we put them in and the things we force them to do - because the game does not depict that.

I’m afraid to quote specific people on the heteronormativity theory because I don’t want to risk anyone being singled out and spammed with messages about it, so I’m going to try and summarize it as neutrally as I can.

The heteronormativity theory is the idea that the Weird Route is deliberately evocative of straight relationships and ‘old RPG tropes’ that involve a male main character romancing a lead female, and that the player of the Weird Route is forcing Kris and Noelle to fit this ‘mould’ despite their queerness, and that this is a violation of their gender identities and their sexualities. It is the idea that the Weird Route makes Kris the ‘heroic male lead who uses violence against enemies’ and Noelle the ‘submissive love interest’, and that a straight-coded romance between them is forcibly arranged by the player.

There’s a very urgent and condescending insistence by many proponents of this theory that it is simply correct and that they are accurately interpreting Toby’s intentions, with no room for disagreement. It’s virtually never an “I see it as this” conversation any more, it is “you fail at reading comprehension if you don’t get this” bullying, and it is often pointing at queer people who are uncomfortable with the theory and asserting that we just can’t comprehend queer literature themes or we must be straight cis people because it’s so obvious otherwise.

The most vocal proponents of it seem to visualize that they are casting pearls before swine, and are actively hostile to discussing the finer points of the Weird Route to determine whether the content actually matches their assertions. Conversations often end up being juvenile and queerphobic under the false guise of being queer-positive. If you disagree with the common interpretation that the Weird Route is making commentary on heteronormativity, then it’s often asserted to be because you are just too fragile to have a conversation about negative topics or to understand that “abuse is bad” even when a videogame prompts you to do it, and not possibly because you have a differing opinion on the themes of the Weird Route based on content in the game, and also not because you might be a queer victim of abuse who is uncomfortable with people making arbitrary assignments of masculinity or femininity to violence and coercion between two queer characters. It’s a ground ripe for people to feel authoritative and superior on the topic while making painfully twisted and sophomoric analyses - like that Noelle murdering sentient beings and becoming frighteningly powerful makes her ‘the submissive wife to a domineering husband’ because that is something she is forced into doing so through supernatural trance.

I can’t escape a persistent feeling that there’s a reductive desire to make bad things sound more straight and to make good things sound more queer. And these ideas can have the most threadbare and intangible relationship to real histories of patriarchy and misogyny. Many of them do not have applicability to navigating those concepts in the real world. And in that context, the urgency of the insistence that they do can border on outright erasure of queer history and queer terminology.

There’s a difference between psychosexual horror and heteronormativity as horror - the former can contain the latter but does not inherently refer to it. The Weird Route is psychosexual horror, absolutely - but I just don’t agree that it is heteronormative. It looks like feelings of personal discomfort about the route are being called heteronormativity. For instance, the idea that engagement rings are ‘straight’ is very controversial in queer theory and I don’t see why it can be assumed that a videogame is taking that for granted as true and attempting to impart it on the audience, in the lack of any correlating evidence.

And the argument about the Weird Route following ‘RPG tropes’ has never been really properly examined without assuming a foregone conclusion, it seems to require selectively removing things that actually happen in the Weird Route and placing in things that never happened. “Noelle is made to be the damsel in distress saved by Kris” is something I keep seeing and it is simply not what happens in the Weird Route. Noelle is the one who is made to save Kris, from Spamton, and until that final boss fight Kris is made to do nothing but defend while Noelle kills and gets stronger.

If Kris makes even a SINGLE violent attack that happens to bring an enemy’s HP to zero while Noelle is in the party, then the Weird Route ends right then and there. You are suddenly back on the Normal Route. How is that relevant to ‘RPG tropes’ or heteronormativity?

It just isn’t.

And the only way to make “ordering Noelle to kill to get stronger and more emotionally detached from violence” sound more applicable to heteronormativity is to boil it down to its most absurdly reduced atom of “ordering a woman to do something,” and it has been my frequent experience that conversations on the topic somehow end up there after going through so much of why the theory doesn’t actually match game content. People don’t seem to realize how unserious they sound when we get to that point.

And there is actually such a thing as ‘old RPG tropes’. Ironically, Susie has actually been widely praised as a character for the uniqueness of NOT being the player character but still having the ‘roles’ that the player character would have in old RPGs:

• Susie is the one who makes choices about how to split the party
• Susie is the one who gets a comically-telegraphed romantic ferris wheel setpiece with the main love interest girl
• Susie is the one who gets dialogue in battles talking about how the enemy is facing down prophesied heroes
• Susie is the one who gets a sagely old mentor figure who uplifts her as a uniquely heroic figure
• Susie IS actually the one who saves the ‘damsel in distress’

Et cetera, et cetera…

And it’s hard for me to square why there are people who will say that those old RPG tropes are good in that instance, or who ignore it - because I’ve never once seen anyone criticize the gendered aspect of Susie being the recipient of those narratives - but then turn around to say that the Weird Route is actually especially victimizing and de-queering for Kris to be ‘the main character’ and forced to act through old RPG tropes in the Weird Route. As I’ve said before, I don’t even agree at all that it accurately describes the onscreen content of what is happening in the Weird Route, but taking for the sake of argument that it is true, I feel like there’s something else going on in this equation, and it’s not just the bit about ‘being forced’.

It feels to me that either they don’t actually see ‘old RPG tropes’ as causing someone to ‘inhabit a man’s role’, or that they do believe it but it’s a power fantasy when a girl or conventionally feminine-presenting person is the subject of it. And Kris is neither a girl nor a conventionally feminine-presenting person. Kris is someone whom many of those people assume has a complicated relationship with maleness and masculinity - entirely based on projection and vibes and not on ingame content.

I feel like it really ought to be enough to say “this is abuse, this is psychosexual horror, this is marrying two people who would have said ‘please no, not like this’ and you’re doing it for possibly selfish ends,” without trying to make it sound even more super-special-socially-relevant on top of all that by implying that Kris’s gender identity is just a threadbare mask that can be pulled away to reveal dysphoria about being allegedly AMAB, or that Noelle’s sexuality is violated for Kris being ‘masculinized’ by the Weird Route.

And the Weird Route IS allegorically sexual, it is uncomfortably sexual, in a way that is not consented to by either Kris or Noelle. Spamton has unique dialogue in the Weird Route where he uses creative language to indirectly call Noelle sexually promiscuous, and accuses Kris of having had sex with Noelle. [Hochi Mama] is used like a misspelling of ‘hoochie mama’. And Kris being forced to grab Noelle, on her own couch in her own bedroom with no one to help her, and appearing to insert something inside her that may be alive or growing - the shining red dot, often theorized to be part of the soul or the seed of a new soul - is incredibly easy to read as possibly evocative of sexual assault. That is not what is physically happening, there was no sexual assault, but that is a perfectly valid reading and it is one that I actually subscribe to.

And it can be read as an allegory for a sexual assault where the victim thanks you afterward? That’s fucking DARK! Holy shit!

It’s just that the way in which the Weird Route has connotations of sexual violence is still involving two queer people who are not men, while the heteronormativity reading insists on defining sexual violation as something a man does to a woman.

And in the urgent insistence that the sexual violence of the Weird Route is heteronormative and that it is authorial intention and not up for interpretation, its adherents remove all air in the room for more interesting and immediately tangible questions about the Weird Route - like why is it that we would need to make Noelle stronger? Why would we want to go through this route? What makes it even possible in the first place?

If you want to know what the Weird Route is principally ‘about’, I would suggest that we look at what it is called. It is not called the “Abuse Between Queer People Masculinizes the Person Made to Perform the Abuse Route” or “RPG Tropes Route,” it’s the Weird Route. That is the name most often used in the game’s source code, in addition to the lesser-used ‘Side B’ and ‘Snowgrave’. And it probably isn’t a coincidence that we get the “things just took a weird route” line in Chapter 4, the chapter that beats into our head that the game has a doomed narrative - it is likely ‘weird’ as in the Old English use of the word, having to do with fate. Like the Weird Sisters who give Macbeth a prophecy of fortune that ironically dooms him. Like how the characters in Beowulf say that ‘Wyrd’ governs their lives and deaths. Whatever we’re doing in the Weird Route, it is deliberately to change a fated outcome. And changing that fated outcome, at least in one manner, requires making Noelle stronger. Noelle must become stronger. Not ‘the wife’, but stronger.

And the vector for that change? The introduction of a weird machine, a piece that causes the program of Deltarune - as written and brought to you by Royal Sciences LLC - to operate outside of normal parameters for unintended (but very interesting) consequences. (Credit to ItsBetterOnAStick for catching that)

And ironically, Noelle is forced to act in the Weird Route in a manner consistent with the ways that she plays videogames, as described by her within the game and in the Spamton Sweepstakes blogs. She kills enemies to maximize her strength. She brute forces puzzles to which she already knows how to get the solution, because she doesn’t respect the intentions of the developer, like the maze puzzle described in her blog. The experience of the weird route feels glitchy and like it wasn't intended to be possible because that is how she breaks her games, probing the boundaries of what is possible and going beyond. And she is the subject of psychosexual horror in a manner resembling the one she put her Catpetterz tamagotchi pets through, hurting them so they don't fall in love, and forcing specific breeding pairs for a specific goal. The Weird Route is a character study of how Noelle interacts with fiction.

And Noelle becoming stronger to escape a fated outcome directly correlates with Spamton and Jevil’s multiple references to strength and freedom:

* I AM INNOCENT, INNOCENT.

* I JUST WANTED TO PLAY A GAME, GAME.

* BUT THE BORING KINGS FOUND SUCH FUN TO BE A TROUBLE.

* AS PUNISHMENT, THEY CRAVED TO IMPRISON MY BODY.

* BUT I'M FAST, FAST, CLEVER, CLEVER.

* THEY LOST THE CHASE, AND LOCKED UP THEIR ENTIRE RACE,

* BUILDING A PRISON AROUND THE WHOLE WORLD. NOW I'M THE ONLY FREE ONE.

* Huh? Free? But you're clearly the one behind bars...

* THINGS DON'T SEEM SUCH FROM HERE, LIGHTNERS!

* Well, sounds like you don't need any help, then.

* THAT IS UN-SO.

* I GROW LONELY IN MY LITTLE FREEDOM.

* SO, SHALL YOU PLAY A GAME WITH ME, ME...?

* I'LL SHOW YOU WHAT IT MEANS TO BE FREE!

* FIND THE KEY, AND I'LL LET YOU BE FREE, FREE.

* YOU'RE FAST, FAST, STRONG, STRONG.

* BUT THERE ARE YET FASTER, YET STRONGER.

* THE HAND OF THE KNIGHT IS DRIFTING FORWARD.

* SOON, THE "QUEEN" RETURNS, AND HELL'S ROAR BUBBLES FROM THE DEPTHS...

* LIGHTNERS, CAN YOU STOP IT?

* UEE HEE HEE!

* EITHER WAY, A MISCHIEF-MISCHIEF, A CHAOS-CHAOS...!

* LIGHTNERS!

* FROM INSIDE YOUR LITTLE CELL!!

* TAKE ME AND DO YOUR STRONGEST---!

* HOLY [[Cungadero]] DO I FEEL GOOD ...

* HERE I AM!! KRIS!!

* BIG

* BIG,

* [[BIGGER AND BETTER THAN EVER]]

* HA HA HA ... THIS POWER IS

* FREEDOM.

* I WON'T HAVE TO BE

* JUST A PUPPET

* ANY MORE!!!!

* ...

* OR... so... I... thought.

* WHAT ARE THESE STRINGS!?

* WHY AM I NOT [BIG] ENOUGH!?

* It seems after all I couldn't be anything more than a simple puppet.

* But you three... You're strong.

* With a power like that...

* Maybe you three can break your own strings.

* Let me become your strength.

The air crackles with freedom. It crackles green with freedom.

Sweet, sweet freedom sauce.

Freedom. That’s what you want, chum. It’s a thing for big shots, luv.

(And so are free pickles, and free milk, and free water, and free ham sandwich day, wow there’s a lot of talk about things being ‘free’…)

And where does FRIEND  fit into all of this? Because they may be deliberately nudging the player towards playing the Weird Route. The Sword Route is only possible because someone or something drops a controller in front of the console, and that controller has yellow and pink buttons. The Sword Route gives you hints on how to start the Weird Route - “THE FORBIDDEN PATH BEGAN WITH ICE MAGIC” - but that is after you are chronologically no longer capable of starting it on that save file.

So whatever FRIEND  is or whoever they may be working for seems to be aware of the nature of the Soul and saving and reloading, that they can give us information in the future with the expectation that, on a different save file, we will change how we play in the past to align with their nudging. What the hell is going on with that? What is all that leading up to? Is the Weird Route actually the experience of being offered a Faustian bargain, a deal with the devil, to try to escape a tragic fate only to be subjected to something even worse?

The same kind of deal that Spamton may have made with FRIEND , that Tenna made with Kris, and that King made with the Knight. A move of extreme desperation, and itself likely destined to end in failure or betrayal.

And isn’t all that so much more interesting? Why do you never hear mention of ANY of that besides the most unnecessarily summarized “Noelle breaks games”, and you’re surrounded with “it’s commentary about heteronormativity” almost everywhere you go? These are not some special super duper secrets that you need to look in a 30,000+ word essay to discover, these are very on the nose when you look into the Spamton Sweepstakes blogs and the connotations of the name of the route and the two most repeatedly referenced concepts of the game, freedom and strength. And these ideas raise more interesting questions for us to answer, whereas the heteronormativity theory seems to be a dead-end with nowhere to go. What does it have to say about what will be important in future chapters and the ending that coincides with the themes of the game?

There are some people who take personal discomfort (or at least, pretend to for social engagement and in-group/out-group identification) at the idea of Kriselle, altogether, and that gets mixed with an assumption that Toby is only writing the Weird Route in the upsetting and uncomfortable way he is because he shares that disgust for the pairing and is granting it word-of-God authority on the matter.

Think about that for a moment, how juvenile is that, how vapid and insincere, to imagine that the white dog is scrolling Twitter and saying “hehe, I’m glad people understand that I only put so much Kriselle content in the game to show it is LE EVIL SHIP YOU SHOULD DISLIKE.”

And a large part of it simply comes back to some terminally-online people turning shipping wars into moralizing, or people who haven’t given much thought to the topic having previously assumed that Kris is a boy, and possibly updating their pronoun usage, but not updating their understanding of the Weird Route now that it has the connotation of ‘marrying two people who have buried romantic tension and a uniquely intimate and possibly fated connection’ instead of the connotation of ‘marrying a lesbian to a boy.’

This is what you lose when you get a parasocial relationship to the idea that a writer is bestowing a blessing on you as the Special Important Kind of Fan, and is blowing raspberries at everyone in the fandom who argues with you. This is what you lose when you get excited by the prospect that “this one single thing that interests me personally is what the Weird Route is all about!” without actually scrutinizing how it would have to fit into parts of the game you aren’t immediately interested in, or being open to re-evaluation with new content.

You lose perspective.

Even people who like Kriselle can help to reinforce that loss of perspective as a kind of defensive apologetics against fearing that oneself could be misconstrued as anti-queer in a high-control group fandom where some people aggressively try to control what queerness looks like and doesn’t look like. That dynamic occurs without requiring you to think that you are helping to uphold a social construct when you agree that the Weird Route is heteronormative just to avoid a fight about the topic.

If you still have very strong feelings that the Weird Route is strictly ‘about heteronormativity’ and that I’m just wrong for disagreeing, I would like you to try an experiment. It’s a very quick one:

Switch Kris and Noelle’s positions in the story.

Imagine quiet grim knight Noelle, and ice mage Kris. And imagine that knight Noelle orders ice mage Kris to kill enemies to get stronger, and that Noelle is the one who puts a ring on Kris’s finger. Noelle is the one who grimly orders ‘Proceed’ and says nothing else. Kris is the one who is confused by the sudden change in behavior.

Is Kris being ‘feminized’ or ‘placed in a feminine role’ by being ordered to murder to get stronger?

Is Noelle now ‘masculinized’ as ‘the man’? Is Noelle ‘the husband’?

If you have any hesitation at the idea of calling Noelle ‘the husband’ or ‘in a man’s role’ in this hypothetical - a sapphic, conventionally feminine-presenting character who is headcanoned by some parts of the fandom (and by the primary author of this doc) as being a trans girl - then I would suggest that you hold onto the feeling of that hesitation, and consider why it might give you discomfort to try and rhetorically position Noelle into, or somehow adjacent to, manhood.

And I would ask that you consider if that discomfort might be the same one felt by other people when you try to position Kris into, or somehow adjacent to, manhood.

I perceive that people are more comfortable doing that to Kris than they are to Noelle, because Kris is nonbinary instead of a girl. A nonbinary person’s gender is seen as more socially acceptable to pry open for interrogation and second-guessing and headcanon-stated-as-fact, even by other queer people. Kris’s gender identity doesn’t get seen as unambiguously nonbinary, it gets seen as nonbinary with an asterisk next to it. An asterisk that, when you put it there, you can’t help but try to puzzle out ‘what is Toby trying to say’.

But Toby is not the one who put an asterisk there.

I also want to point out how the UT/DR universe has a unique relationship with queerness that does not cleanly match our world and how we speak and think about identity and sexuality. Queerness is inseparable from alienation and patriarchal oppression in the real world, but queerness in the Tobyverse is more fluid and comforting, a queerness where nonbinary and gender nonconforming people will have their pronouns respected by strangers they’ve just met without ever having had a conversation about it. And that kind of always-accurate non-specificity can sometimes create dissonance when queer people try to see ourselves in the setting or make queer literary analyses, because it is outright impossible for some real-world experiences of queerness to have a direct analogue. In the Tobyverse, there is no experience of someone describing how their gender identity or sexuality was disrespected - isn’t it curious there’s literally no remark about Berdly’s romantic hassling of Noelle in that regard? Almost as if UTDR characters may just all be ’UTDR-sexual’ rather than being straight or lesbian or gay or bi. And even though there is the act of coming out (as depicted in Mettaton's journals), there is no experience of signifying queer pride. Queer descriptors like gay, bi, trans, nonbinary, et cetera, simultaneously do not exist - they’ve literally never been said in either game - while they also get to be respected with no conflict whatsoever. It’s a strange kind of place of “getting to have your cake and eat it too,” in how suspiciously accommodating it is for queerness, and I’m not the first person to point out how that ironically complicates being able to talk about gender identity in the games. Discussion of canon or theorized transgender characters in the games becomes painful because the typical markers of a fictional character having changed their gender in the past are excised of any possibly discomforting topics, like dysphoria and the process of accepting one’s queerness in the face of shame and adversity. Transness is shaved down into ‘vibes’ that let you take-it-or-leave-it at your leisure whether it makes sense to read into them, like Mettaton’s journals or Noelle’s bedroom colors.

And that lack of queer discomfort in the games contrasts with how some people making queer analyses seem to want to have it both ways, where Kris effectively has Schroedinger’s Gender rather than simply being nonbinary: they are nonbinary as a statement of the game’s text, but also, supposedly, Toby is intentionally downplaying that fact and allowing the audience to assume that Kris is a boy to ‘make a point’ about people who assume that Kris is a boy. It’s a strange circular logic, and ironically I’ve seen it used by some of the same people who simultaneously have a desire to drudge through the game’s objects and locations and dialogue to find any pieces they can use to put Kris’s gender identity or sex into question, to ‘prove them being AMAB’.

I’ve seen people point to the gross pizza deodorant as though it were Kris’s, despite Kris being described as smelling like apples instead of pizza, and as if that would even mean anything if it did belong to them. Do cis boys or AMAB trans people smell like pizza? I’ve seen people point to Mancountry, despite it possibly being named that for the Forgotten Man, and it not actually giving any indication as to whether Kris is AMAB or AFAB because it could go in any direction, it’s just the vibes of the reader. And I’ve seen people point to Kris’s mischievous nature and affinity with knives as being indicators of them being AMAB. And these are NOT just queerphobic chuds doing this interrogation, it is other queer people and allies who very selectively change positions on whether to talk about Kris as nonbinary or as somewhere on a spectrum of boyhood or girlhood based on whatever they feel helps their argument in the moment, especially with regards to how Kris’s assigned-sex-at-birth is apparently supposed to be considered by potential romantic partners.

Deltarune, at least as of Chapter 4, does not invite players to treat Kris’s gender identity or sex at birth as a puzzle to be solved, and it does not reward it. Even the little baby Noelle from the Ice-E cryptid sighting post who misspells half her words is still cognizant that at that early point in time Kris has they/them pronouns, despite even misspelling those: https://deltarune.com/icee/

The game treats Kris as unambiguously nonbinary and responds to the question of “sex at birth?” with silence. And I want to be clear, it’s absolutely fine to have headcanons about it. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a specific headcanon about it, one that I don’t think anyone’s understanding of the game would be served by hearing me say. Asserting your own specific headcanon because it helps to make a theory sound more relevant, that Kris is ‘being pushed back into dysphoric maleness’ by the Weird Route, just isn’t something the game presents as something true.

And in the context of how the setting actually treats queerness in an anodyne and drama-free way, I feel that assumptions that an evil magic ring is ‘turning a canon lesbian straight’, or that a character is acting (or being forced to act) as ‘the husband’ or as ‘the wife’, could stand to undergo more scrutiny before being assumed to be uncontroversial authorial intent and that everyone who denies it is just a troll or uninformed.

You can have a literary analysis that is formed by viewing a work through a lens of gender and sexuality without saying that the game depicts your reading as happening diegetically in the game's content or that it is the intended takeaway by the writer.

If you still feel that you are seeing something in the Weird Route that I’m not, that’s absolutely fine. I’m not going to be offended by disagreement. But I am frustrated by the insistence that “Toby clearly intends it to mean such-and-such.” That needs to end. Everyone needs to start having some maturity and humility that none of us have a special relationship to Toby whereby we can psychically extract his thoughts. All we have are the games and songs and the official material surrounding them, and those are where your theories need to come from, not an appeal to an authority whom you assume would agree with you but who has never once spoken on the topic and doesn’t appear to be putting material for that opinion in the game.

And I think I know part of why that insistence and sense of urgency occurs; there’s an understated dynamic in Weird Route and shipping discourse that if your base assumption is that the Normal Route’s romance theme is principally about Susie and Noelle and that they are going to have a happily-ever-after (and often presumed by the fandom to be a monogamous one), then the Weird Route appearing to outright replace it can potentially trip that paranoia I mentioned earlier, that the game’s queerness can be arbitrarily ‘taken away’ as a result of actions by the player. And Kriselle - despite itself being a queer pairing - can’t be fully disentangled from that paranoia in the fandom. It will continue to be scrutinized on how it is potentially ‘more straight’ and therefore questionable, all the while critics ironically insist that this is actually them being respectful of the queerness of both characters, as a shield against accusation of bias. That will only end when, or if, people are able to see a romance between Kris and Noelle begin to fruit in the Normal Route.

To say one last thing on the topic…

Normalize telling even queer people and allies when they’re being homophobic, biphobic, transphobic or enbyphobic, and normalize not feeling like you need to respond to every drive-by shitpost like there’s earnestness behind it. Someone calling Kriselle ‘straight’ or ‘hetslop’ at this point is probably not actually interested in having their opinion possibly changed by new information or new perspectives, they’re just trying to assign a social status of themselves being in-group and you being out-group. You like the illegitimate and ‘straight-appearing’ ship, you uncouth barbarian, and whatever ship they like is the more moral and more queer ship. It is people with nothing interesting going on in their heads trying to do a dick-measuring contest about hyperfixations and what they should mean about them and you.

Cheezus Krist that was a lot and I apologize but we need to move the fuck on from these incredibly basic and circular conversations. When you see this crap come up again just copy and paste this link and the rest of us can all move on to higher quality conversation

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MFqJQXNUuoLgfwbuVPP31cVAfmlHDtPIP_S_Rb966Vc/edit?tab=t.0#bookmark=id.u95jdjm489pl

Q Isn’t Kriselle tropey, like ‘the hero and their next door neighbor’? Her song is literally ‘Girl Next Door’. Doesn’t Toby always try to subvert and deconstruct tropes instead of playing them straight?

The existence of Skies Forever Blue is a simple and effective example of how Toby uses tropes - he uses them as a common language to quickly get an idea across to the audience before complicating them into a deeper story. And Skies Forever Blue is very literally the romance of ‘the player character hero and their next door neighbor’ as a launching point for other themes and subjects, like the blurring of the fiction of the videogame romance with possibly also referring to a romance with the player. That is subversion, which doesn’t supplant the underlying trope in its entirety, it’s playing with expectations without just pointing at the audience and shouting “ha, gotcha, you thought you were supposed to be emotionally invested in X because of other stories, but you should have expected to be invested in Y instead!”

And considering Kriselle in terms of just tropes is overly reductive, and risks comparison to tropes in Suselle, like Noelle being a ‘damsel in distress’ in the evil queen’s tower in Chapter 2 and the big strong Susie has to rescue her because she can’t fend for herself. Whereas by that point in the Weird Route, Noelle is far and away the strongest entity in the Cyber World and more willing to use violence to protect herself. That doesn’t make the rescue scene in the Normal Route uninteresting for more closely obeying a romance trope than the Weird Route, because the focus should be more on how the characters develop in a scene and how they make the audience feel. The rescue by Susie is a really compelling scene that advances the characters despite involving common tropes.

Kris and Noelle both get possible romances teased with other characters before we even learn basic facts of their history together, which isn’t playing the ‘romance with the girl next door’ trope straight. And the facts that we do learn paint a complicated and confusing picture, of a girl who uniquely trusts and enjoys the presence of a character who themselves appear on the surface to want to ignore her as much as possible. By contrast, Susie and Noelle are the ‘designated pairing’ as presented to the viewer, on the strength of Noelle’s crush described all the way back in in Chapter 1 and the presence of narrative-forced identifiers of romance like the gaudy heart-encrusted ferris wheel in the Cyber World.

If all you care about is looking for ‘subversions and deconstructions’ of common romance tropes, Suselle is not going to satisfy that. And that does not make Suselle bad for not being that. But if that is really what you value, then yes, Kriselle is more of a subversion. Which doesn't necessarily make it better.

There’s a specific fascination among parts of the fanbase about writing only ‘deconstructive works’ that only have ‘deconstructions and subversions of tropes’, where supposedly a well-written story is only going to use tropes and genre markers in order to ham-handedly bludgeon those concepts on the head and tell the audience “that’s bad and sucks, actually.” As if all the beloved inspirations that drove a writer to begin the creative process themselves should be cast away if they aren’t bloated with cynicism and snark. And some people believe that Toby shares this idea, and I don’t understand it. It feels parasocial, and it feels like trying to turn the creative process into an in-group signifier.

None of these characters are just a set of tropes. Kris, Noelle, Susie, and Ralsei are all fully fleshed out characters, not caricatures. And if you’re backed into a corner of trying to prove or disprove plot points based on the idea that you can rhetorically jam one of them into a list of tropes, and that would subsequently make it undesirable in your eyes, all you’re doing is making the argument that you think the author has a special interest in sacrificing that already-extant coherency and depth to make some kind of out-of-character soapbox statement about tropes.

Making predictions like “well of course the damsel in distress is going to end up with the big brute who ironically has a heart of gold, because it’s always the knight in tropey stories, and this is a deconstructive work, it's like Shrek,” isn’t describing something more inherently compelling, it’s just assuming that you can guess the author’s intention by way of reverse psychology. Whatever you think a ‘tropey story’ would do, just assume the opposite is going to happen instead, because you imagine that the author is just cynically reversing things to make the same point you want them to make.

The fact that Kriselle would be a main character childhood friends to lovers relationship with the girl next door, and that this can resemble in some ways some RPGs from the 90s and 00s, doesn't mean that it is predictable or hacky. It will not become predictable and hacky in retrospect. That's an assumption born out of not liking the pairing and preferring another, but not born out of how the game has presented the pairing up to this point and how it would fulfill it in future chapters. Deltarune’s romance plot is a circuitous and layered path with no absolute guarantees of any specific endpoint, and if it just so happens to land on something resembling another game in some key words, that is not a bad thing. That other game was loved. And Kris and Noelle have one of the deepest, if not outright THE deepest, connections of any pair of two characters out of either UT or DR, and more than many of those old RPGs had between their protagonists and their main love interests.

(I promise you that one day, however many years from now, someone - not me - will upload at least an hour of video essays about Deltarune’s references and inspirations from the Soul Blazer trilogy, especially Terranigma (major spoilers for Terranigma). I mean, come on, Deltarune’s name even follows the pattern of the name Terranigma, a portmanteau of two archaic words that describe the exact thesis of each game. ‘Mystery of the Earth’ for Terranigma, and ‘Change Story’ for Deltarune.)

(And yes, you heard right, the fictional series name ‘Dragon Blazers’ is a reference to the real game series of Soul Blazer and its spiritual sequels. Even Deltarune’s moss was inspired by the moss from the second game, Illusion of Gaia)

Those 90s and 00s RPGs are still inspiring for good reasons, they can be built on. A trope isn't bad just for being a trope. Stories can be retold. They can be changed. That's what I believe.

(Gyaa Ha ha!)

Q What kind of ship is Kriselle, why do people call it yuri? Is it really ok to call it yuri even though Kris is nonbinary and not a woman?

I don’t know and I don’t care to have label-wars this niche, just stop trying to portray Kriselle as straight or ‘straight if you squint from a certain angle’, and stop treating nonbinary people as if they are supposed to be more rhetorically related to their assigned-gender-at-birth or the opposite of their AGAB, or that nonbinary people are supposed to be predisposed to girlhood or femininity. That’s all I ask. You can call Kriselle yaoi for all it matters. Just respect it being a queer pairing and let’s get on with our lives.

Q The prophecy panel said that “Love finds its way to the girl.” Doesn’t that refer to Susie, and her falling in love with Noelle?

It could refer to Susie, yes. I’m not going to get far into the theory that Susie might not actually be ‘the girl’ in the prophecy, or that multiple people can fit, so I’ll assume for the sake of argument that it does refer to Susie. That’s still not an impediment to Kriselle happening within the game. The prophecy is not that “Susie and Noelle will have a monogamous romantic relationship,” it is any of the below:

1. Susie will fall in love with someone, romantically or platonically
2. There are shenanigans with the Soul, perhaps whereby we no longer control Kris and instead control Susie
3. “LOVE, too, is an acronym” - it could refer to Susie doing something very bad, if Deltarune were to follow Undertale’s double meaning whereby LOVE is a reference to decreased attachment from the effects of one’s own violence

At least one of these will happen, or something not listed, and very possibly, multiple things will happen in combination. I’m not sure that there will be a specific single moment where we say “the prophecy came true,” because it might end up happening in multiple ways. But none of them have to mean that a monogamous Suselle (or Krusie) romance happens in lieu of Kriselle.

Q But Toby mentioned Suselle on the Undertale 10th Anniversary stream! And he didn’t mention Kriselle along with it.

He did reference Suselle, with this comment connecting Suselle and Alphys x Undyne:

He also described, in the same stream, his ideas for how Alphys x Sans and Asgore x Mettaton might have happened or could still happen. Writers and artists can want to play with their creations in the public’s view in a way that reveals part of their thought process, without it meaning that they are staking a claim on what is and isn’t ‘canon’ or giving away future story events, and Toby said roughly as much about the purpose of the stream. It was a celebration of both the creative process that went into these characters and environments, and the infinite possibilities they present for fanworks.

Toby’s comment about Susie is an accurate depiction of Susie within the game and doesn’t provide any more information than that. It’s not a promise that Suselle will happen or that another ship won’t happen. Toby should be able to have leeway to talk about these things without having his motivations interrogated for what they mean or don’t mean about the future.

Q Kris and Noelle spent a lot of their childhood together, I consider them like siblings or cousins, and couldn’t they end up thinking of themselves that way after they get close again? Wouldn’t it be weird for them to be romantically involved?

It’s fine to enjoy that idea, ‘found family’ is not an uncommon trope and I understand why it can appeal to people. And it’s possible that if they don’t have a romantic relationship then they can think of themselves as having something resembling a familial relationship. But ‘childhood friends to lovers’ is one of the most common genres of romance fiction, being neighbors who spent a lot of their childhood together doesn’t make it incest or otherwise weird or unethical in any way: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChildhoodFriendRomance 

Q But why specifically do they need to have a romance, why can't they just be friends?

Well, for whatever ships you like, why can’t those people just be friends too? :P

There’s a common, hacky refrain where people show a disdain for whatever ship by saying “you just can’t imagine friendships instead of romances, romances aren’t inherently more valuable than friendships you know,” where the answer is that, yes, we can imagine friendships, we just think the story is heading in a specific direction. I thankfully don’t remember anyone criticizing the Royal Guards or Alphys x Undyne in Undertale by whining that Toby “can’t imagine friendships” - it’s just not a serious analysis, it’s a personal kneejerk reaction and an attempt to make that reaction sound reasonable.

Kris and Noelle are in a superposition of different states, not knowing what they mean to each other, not having a clear way to describe their connection. Is it possible for them to just end up as friends by the end? Of course. If I thought the evidence was leading to them being friends, then that would be my conclusion. But the evidence leads me to believe otherwise.

Q I have a critique about one of your points, and I can’t believe you think Kriselle could be canon because of it

And I’d love to hear your critique and perhaps revise my thinking on something, but I would encourage you that if you wanted to ‘disprove Kriselle as possible canon’ to think bigger than any individual points made here. What I’m recording here is a list of all the features of the foundation of a building that I’m looking at while it is still in-development, and making a guess as to what that building will look like when it is finished; my analysis being wrong when checking one of those boxes doesn’t necessarily reduce the importance of all the rest of them. Not all of these are going to be necessary components to how a romantic relationship between Kris and Noelle should be understood as a possibility. I wouldn’t be surprised if half of them or more ended up being off the mark, but the ultimate thesis still proving true.

Please feel free to let me know how I can improve my understanding of the game, just keep in mind that saying “you’re reading too much into things”, “that’s just a reference to Undertale”, etc is unlikely to change my position. If you feel strongly about my assertions and want to take me down a notch, then I encourage you to bring the big guns by replaying the game and gathering as much narrative evidence as you can that the game is going to go in other directions, and build your own essay for it. If you make one and link it to me, I promise you I will read it and give my feedback, and I will try to be objective and constructive.

Q I prefer [insert shipping here]

And that’s absolutely fine! I’m not your mom, and shipping without regard for theory should be a positive activity; you can do and think whatever you like about a videogame. My goal with this document isn’t to make anyone stop liking other ships, it’s to explain the way that Kriselle fits into predictions and literary analysis in a way that I can no longer disentangle from other subjects in the game. This pairing has become a thorn in my brain and I cannot think of Deltarune without thinking about Kris and Noelle. As the heart locket advertisement in the Spamton Sweepstakes seems to point to, they ARE the two most important characters in the game. Their psyche and trauma and memories are building a story that our next two most important characters, Susie and Ralsei, get to explore.

If I’ve infected you with the Kriselle thorn too, then I hope it’s in a way that makes you want to build up further educated literary analysis and try not to put anyone down if doing so can be avoided.

Q What do you expect people to do with this information?

I expect people to stop making apologies for liking Kriselle. And I release you from feeling the need to append “but I know it won’t be canon” to everything you say about the pairing.

I’m not here to ruin anyone’s fun or to tell people they have to ship Kriselle too. And it’s very rare for people to change positions when presented with new information, as a general rule, and shipping is very contentious as a baseline.

But optimistically, my hope has been to advance the knowledge base of the fandom and increase the quality of conversation about canonical shipping and about Kris and Noelle, for anyone who cares. They're two of my top three favorite characters out of either game (the third being Susie), and I hope they will stay that way even if there are arguments and data points in this document which turn out to be wrong, misleading, or otherwise incomplete, as a result of learning more of the story from new chapter releases. And if you feel like any part of this document has improved your personal connection to Deltarune and to Kris and Noelle, regardless of whether you like the idea of a canon romance between them or regardless of whether you believe it could or should happen, then I'm happy.

Q Kriselle is literally a sibling-coded hetslop darkship with A FUCKING PROBLEMATIC HEIGHT GAP AND FUR GAP and-

Ok yeah sure whatever. MIKE! Cut their feed! We’re done!

Well, that’s a wrap folks. If you’ve made it all the way through this then you deserve an achievement. Here:

(So did she)

Thank you for humoring these wild ramblings. These two characters make me very ill when I think about them and I needed to get all these thoughts out of my head.

Special Thanks:

• Toby Fox, Temmie, Fangamer, and all the rest of the UTDR team for years of unforgettable game experiences
• The Kriselle community, especially all those who create fanwork, and even more especially those who did so prior to Chapters 3&4
• Everyone who graciously put up with me debating Deltarune theory with them
• The Resonant Arc podcast for teaching me the word ‘mythopoetic’, which I repeated to myself over and over while thinking through the narratives here :P

And Special Thanks to our mascot (according to my coauthor Reasonable_Solid6251, apparently):

“Really keeps the spirit of Kriselle alive.“

"The angels will return, and when you see the one that's meant to help you, you will weep with joy."

- Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me

Oh, about that special guest cameo of pink and yellow…

Why have I never seen anyone mention the Evil Mani Mani Statue in relation to FRIEND ?

An illusion-casting device (‘DEVICE’?) that causes you to see and hear another world, where random objects come to life and attack you, and when the illusion is shattered it is revealed you were just walking around a room… I’ve seen people mention Moonside, but not the statue.

I do subscribe to the theory that yellow and pink reference money or success (or ‘value’, as in the Spamton Value Network) and love respectively, as outlined in wandydoodles’ essay on the subjectTHE FRIEND MASTERDOC

But wouldn’t that be so on the nose if a devil statue that called out to people desperate for personal victories and corrupts their wishes into evil, and represented the protagonist’s dark side that must be defeated… was a big inspiration for something similar in Deltarune?

* I swear, you people see PINK and YELLOW and think, oh, a FRIEND!!