DELTARUNE? I HARDLY

7-17-2026

deltarune suffers a bit from fandom's recent tendency to overanalyze and lore scrape that's surfaced since the inception of FNAF, and it makes it unnecessarily harder to like, engage with. i say a bit because it's not as if there's nothing to analyze; obviously there is. that'd be obtuse to pretend there's not. but the fact that a story is pretty clearly being told to us straight to our faces as we play the game—and yet everyone insists that all the backdoors and secrets are what's REALLY going on, what you HAVE to know to understand the TRUE meaning of everything—oh, never mind that you should also know how to get into the game's source code, do the ARGs, periodically review 7-10 year-old posts on toby's tumblr and bluesky—it's Disorienting! it's hard to follow! admittedly, whenever i see how much people theorize and expand upon one screen's worth of dialogue and stray pixels or an easter egg, and then i finally see the next chapter—and it's none of that? it's no where near as convoluted as any of that? it's jarring! after chapters 3, 4, and 5—it feels like we're literally doing too much and not even enjoying any of the actual story we've been given, which i can only imagine is frustrating for the deltarune team itself, never mind for the rest of the fans when we all but set ourselves up for being disappointed.

when it comes to dess specifically—it's crazy to think about how little she is even really talked about by name. obviously what happened to her is important to some degree—but if it came out that she really was the knight, would that be satisfying? carol is obviously a red herring, but at least what little we've seen of her character already spawns ideas for a motivation; classic 'i have to do whatever it takes to save my child', at the very least, if not more.

to be honest, i do like the idea of rudy as the knight; if the knight is meant to be a twist, there's something to be said about how kind he is—portrayed as the 'good' parent between noelle's two—and how much dialogue he has. and yet, hearing that people think this theory the more 'crackpot' one, or the one less 'narratively' driven than say, 'dess was split into two entities, one is the person trapped in the code, the other is the knight'—are we serious?

that said, i do think, also, that gerson's gimic as being all but 'revived' in the dark worlds temporarily is a great chekov's gun for rudy as well; if he does fall down and all but die in the lightworld, then it's a perfect set up to see him once again in the next dark world. even given the evidence for the potential of rudy as the knight—i do find it hard to believe that an injured/sick man that's been bedridden and hospitalized would apparently be able to grab and run off with undyne to the shelter.

i don't know, i just think it's frustrating that this idea of rudy gets written off as being "too out there" or "not narratively satisfying enough" when we truly don't have any more of a connection to dess as a character beyond the stray crumbs. we know noelle misses her, we know she was all but dating asriel—but what else? it's tragic that anyone would get stuck in a limbo dimension away from their friends and family; we don't yearn to see her because she's a cool, compelling character we miss dearly, too—we miss her because it's unjust that an innocent person would get seperated from their life. it's not that it's uninteresting at all, the idea that she's the knight—but i'd argue it's no more 'narratively interesting' or 'justified' than rudy.