PART 1:

Look at the character pictured on the right. Who do you see?

If you have played or are strongly familiar with Deltarune to any extent, your immediate answer would probably be Kris Dreemurr, the adopted human child of divorced goat monsters Toriel and Asgore Dreemurr, raised as a sibling of collegebound Asriel Dreemurr and the only human in a town entirely populated by cartoon monsters. If you are only familiar with Undertale, you might see them as having a passing resemblance to Chara, the deceased adopted human child of divorced goat monsters Toriel and Asgore Dreemurr, raised as a sibling of young prince Asriel Dreemurr and for a while, the only human in an underground world entirely populated by cartoon monsters. If you are not familiar with both of these games, then there’s a good chance that you think I’m speaking in tongues right now, but bear with me here.

Left: a photo of the Dreemurr family from Undertale's True Pacifist route. Right: the Dreemurr family in Deltarune. As of Chapter 4, Asriel has only ever been seen in silhouette. I have conveniently labeled his sprite for your Asriel-identifying pleasure.

It is worth establishing that the Dreemurr family present in Deltarune is not the same Dreemurr family present in Undertale as both games take place in largely different universes despite both having characters with similar names, designs and defining traits. Essentially, Deltarune’s cozy, nostalgic suburban setting of Hometown acts as a fully remixed and recontextualized version of Undertale’s underground monster world, but upon playing the former game’s ‘SURVEY_PROGRAM’ demo for the first time on Halloween night of 2018 on my dad’s old Windows 7 PC, I, like practically everyone else who played it at launch, had no idea what the game even was. That being said, I did make a hasty guess as to what it was before even playing it as when I looked at that initial gameplay image of Kris’ bedroom that was being spread around by gaming news publications that day, I immediately thought ‘we’re getting a Chara prequel,’ just from a quick look at Kris’ appearance alone.

Publications such as Variety and Polygon have used this opening image of Kris in their bedroom as the header of their inital coverage of Deltarune on the day of its launch.

In fact, even avoiding physical similarities, one could make a sound argument on paper to suggest that Kris is an alternate version of Chara mainly from their relation to the Dreemurr family that I established at the start of this piece. Once I started playing the game and exploring its new yet familiar world, however, I started to think of Kris as their own character who has nothing to do with the outright hateful and abusive tendencies that Chara expressed in Undertale. When I look at Kris through this more individualized lens, I see a lonely introverted kid who is stuck living in the shadow of an absentee sibling that they have relied on for companionship since they were very young and who found themself becoming more distant from their peers as they grew older. As a matter of fact, several elements and smaller details of Kris’ life that were established in Chapter 1, from them (almost) ending up in a group of three as part a school group project to them being suggested to rejoin the local church’s choir, seem so familiar to me personally, mirroring aspects of my lived experience as a neurodivergent teenager who had difficulty interacting with my peers consistently and would later start to drift away from religious faith when entering my adulthood.

Left: After Kris arrives late for class, Noelle offers to add them to her study group despite already choosing Berdly as her partner. Right: Father Alvin encourages Kris to rejoin the church choir as it has sounded 'thinner' since Asriel left for college.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that Kris is ‘just like me for real’ since I don’t relate as much to their tendencies toward practical jokes and occasional self-deprecation as a means to embrace the absurdity of their presence as a human in a monster town, though I also feel like the things that separate me from Kris are also what make me appreciate them more as a nuanced character in their own right. Through providing this character with a very specific and somewhat relatable history, Deltarune goes out of its way to provide Kris with a large degree of individuality and imply that their existence is not an extension of something else but rather entirely their own. Despite this, the game also seems to be aware of the aforementioned similarities between Kris and Chara through its occasional and sometimes subtle acknowledgement of the player’s presumed familiarity with Undertale. While these references are not too frequent, they seem to partially serve the purpose of misleading players who attach expectations for Chara onto Kris while at the same time, setting the player and Kris apart from each other. One of the more prominent examples of this misdirection can be found in Kris’ observable love of chocolate demonstrated in their interactions with consumable chocolate items found in the game’s first chapters as Kris would ‘unhesitatingly devour’ Officer Undyne’s Box of Heart Candy if you make them use it and their throat would tighten as an emotional reaction from drinking the ‘delicious’ Hot Chocolate from QC’s Diner. While the latter instance of chocolate love can be tied to Kris’ nostalgia for going to the diner with their family when they were younger, one could also make connections to Chara’s established interest in chocolate from Undertale’s Genocide Route.

Left: Kris quickly eats the Box of Heart Candy after the player directs them to use it from their inventory. Their HP decreases by 1 as a result of them eating all of the chocolates like a gluttonous fool. Top Right: In Deltarune, Kris has a moment of bittersweet nostalgia after drinking diner-fresh Hot Chocolate. Bottom Right: In Undertale, Chara narrates a moment of disappointment at the lack of chocolate in Asgore's old refrigerator in New Home.

Whether the player takes these similarities into account or not, the recurring association of Kris with chocolate in Deltarune may motivate some players, including myself, to guess ‘chocolate’ when asked about Kris’ favorite food during one of Tenna’s quiz show minigames in Chapter 3 only to be proven wrong when the correct answer is revealed to be ‘pie,’ which definitely checks out considering how Kris has been living with piemaster Toriel for most of their life.

In response to correctly guessing Kris' favorite food, Mr. (Ant) Tenna waxes nostalgic about the times that Kris and their family used to spend with him.

While it can be initially assumed that Tenna made up the answer in order to appeal to Kris’ nostalgia for eating pie in front of the TV with Asriel as Tenna himself explains afterward, Kris themself subtly guides the player to select ‘pie,’ briefly coughing and scrolling the arrow down to highlight the answer themself if the player does not select a choice right away to indicate that pie is, in fact, their favorite food rather than chocolate. (pictured left)

This subtle moment of communication between player and playable character serves as a continuation of the game’s established separation between you and Kris as introduced at the end of Chapter 1 where we witness Kris tearing their soul out of their body and throwing it in a birdcage at the corner of their bedroom, literally separating the player from Kris as we are still able to move the soul while it is in the cage. (pictured below)

It hurts for both of us!

What makes this scene more shocking upon one’s first playthrough is what happens immediately after this separation of identity as Kris pulls out a knife and glares at the camera with a sinister smile, their eyes flashing red in the dark of their bedroom. Before any other chapters came out, this ending seemed to spur more definitive ideas in people’s minds that Kris and Chara may be related to each other if not one and the same with the possession of a knife and the appearance of demonic-looking eyes persisting as motifs between them, which was enough to seal the deal for many in the fandom.

Left: In Deltarune, Kris' eyes flash red after they pull out a knife. Right: In Undertale, Chara's eyes flash red when revealing themself at the end of a Soulless Pacifist run.

However, even then I was hesitant to think that Kris felt disdain for humanity to the extent that Chara did considering how the way that Kris had been written up to that point suggested more relatability and goodwill than open deviousness and emotional abusiveness.

Left: In the fourth True Lab tape, Chara convinces Asriel to go through with their plan of getting revenge on humanity in an attempt to free monsterkind, manipulating Asriel by citing his discomfort with their plan as a weakness. Right: Upon visiting him in the Ruins at the end of True Pacifist, Asriel honestly reflects on his complicated relationship with Chara years after their death.

It also didn’t help that a lot of fan predictions at the time surrounding what might happen in Chapter 2, made while under the assumption that Kris was Chara and was capable of embracing actively violent tendencies when given enough motivation, seemed to keep circling back around to turning the game into an uninspired rehash of Undertale’s Genocide Route. While the fandom at large is more likely to laugh at these predictions today, the game seemed to deliberately entertain the expectations that inspired them by attempting to imply a degree of ambiguity towards how Kris relates to Chara between their surface-level similarities and the specific details of Kris’ life and personality that were revealed at that point in Chapter 1. When looking at this ending scene after playing all four chapters of Deltarune that have released so far, one can look at the presumed ‘Chara-esque’ motifs at the end of the scene more as foreshadowing toward Kris’ implied allyship with the Roaring Knight, drawing parallels to Kris’ ‘flickering red’ eyes that the ‘Nightmare’ boss talks about at the end of Chapter 3’s secret Sword Route and setting up Kris’ eventual creation of a Dark World with their knife at the end of Chapter 2.

Left: After fighting the mysterious Nightmare boss in Chapter 3's Sword Route, they point out how Kris' eyes are 'flickering red, like pretty little flames.' Right: Kris stabs the earth and makes a Dark World in their living room, their eyes briefly glowing red as they do so.

However, Undertale fans who are playing this game for the first time wouldn’t have the context for how Dark Worlds are created or the Roaring Knight’s existence aside from some brief, easily skippable dialogue from King during his fight, leaving any potential for foreshadowing the actual events of the game to go over a new fan’s head in favor of implying Chara’s debatable presence in the narrative.

One of the only mentions of the Roaring Knight in Chapter 1 of Deltarune occurs very briefly during King's boss fight.

To further complicate things, Chapter 2 starts with a deliberate fakeout that fools players into thinking that Toriel is witnessing Kris do something shocking with their knife only to reveal that they just used it to eat her entire pie overnight, revealing to new players that Kris is not as capable of being as violent or abusive as Chara was when left without our influence while retroactively diverting the narrative’s focus from showing us who Kris is to showing us who Kris isn’t.

Toriel's shock at witnessing Kris' knife at the beginning of Chapter 2 initially gives off the impression that something horrifying is happening to her only to reveal that Kris was simply being a pie-loving prankster, though arguably, this intentional misdirection may have overshadowed the nuances of Kris' character.

While I do find the fakeout on its own to be an effective way to subvert the surface level expectations that fans had for Kris just from seeing them for the first time, I believe that it was kind of unnecessary for Chapter 1’s ending to go out of its way to deceive its audience in order to deliver on this point. I understand that the intention behind this ending is to hint that Kris has greater depth and autonomy than what most players were probably expecting them to have up to this point, but I think that there are more nuanced ways of portraying that depth that would still leave Kris’ true nature ambiguous while being less likely to overshadow what was established about Kris so far in the narrative for the sake of exploiting the audience’s initial assumptions about them. If this subversion of expectations played out in a more subtle and ambiguous manner that hinted at Kris’ relation to Chara without overtaking their own identity, I wonder how it will impact players’ perceptions of the Weird Route since the events of this alternate path involve the player making Kris perform more manipulative and emotionally destructive actions against their will that are more in line with what Chara would embrace when the player performs a Genocide Route in Undertale. Perhaps one may interpret activating the Weird Route as being an action that players would take while still under the assumption that Kris is Chara and that manipulating their childhood best friend into severely injuring one of her classmates is something that Kris wouldn’t mind doing regardless of our control over them, only to be proven blatantly wrong by Kris’ traumatized reactions to being forced to perform such behaviors. While I am not too sure if this was the main intent behind the Weird Route other than simply being a secret way to meaningfully alter the events of the game at the cost of Kris and Noelle’s relationship becoming more fractured, I can definitely see players accessing it for reasons other than sheer curiosity if the Chara subtext was more subtly suggested beforehand than it actually was.

Left: In the Weird Route, Noelle tries to reassure herself that her unquestioning obedience to Kris is a 'good thing' despite the fact that Kris is being forced by the player to manipulate and traumatize her into abusing her ice magic for the sake of becoming more powerful. Right: In the Holiday's bathroom, a traumatized Kris angrily throws the red soul in a trashcan and kicks it around in response to you continuing to manipulate Noelle in the Light World, indicating that you probably shouldn't be using your control of Kris to scar their friends for life.

Despite this one mishandled instance of intentional narrative deception, Kris’ characterization and development throughout the rest of the game never ceases to be one of the most fascinating and meaningful parts of Deltarune so far in how it captures an introverted teenager torn between escaping to the deceiving warmth of nostalgia and accepting that they could find happiness by making a new future with their new friends. With this understanding of Kris in mind, the game gets much better at providing some level of ambiguity to their motives as the true extent of their captivity as the prophecy’s ‘Cage with Human Soul and Parts’ begins to reveal itself and the long-term necessity of the red soul in Kris’ life begins to be called into question…