~And you'll drown before the water lets you in
Slept a long time last night which I guess makes sense, I felt so tired. It doesn't at all feel like Wilson's gone, it's like nothing's wrong or different! He's just hiding somewhere, napping under a bed, something like that... it's kind of hard to know how to feel as a result. I did spend a lot of last night looking through pictures of Wilson on my phone. I need to transfer them off so I can put together some of the best ones...
In the meantime I've been thinking about Deltarune on and off. Finished both routes, I think, so I'm trying to put it together. I remember when the first chapter came out, I wrote a long post about what I thought the themes would be, of no escape and your choices not mattering. Things will just happen regardless of what you want or try to do. Chapter 2 then came and sort of blew that theory out of the water, but now with 4 and 5, I'm wondering if maybe I was onto something the whole time. Snowgrave in 5 in particular made me think about it.
There's a running theme going with Snowgrave of "Freedom" or breaking what the game wants you to do, or what you're supposed to do. Whenever you do Snowgrave or Snowgrave adjacent things like the Sword game in Chapter 3, freedom keeps getting mentioned all the time. Even when the game tells you in so many words that what you're doing is "wrong", it still gets associated with the idea of "freedom", even if at certain points actions are taken out of your hands. 2 and 3 have the feeling of doing something wrong, something unintended, seeing things you're not supposed to see. A feeling of subversiveness, of finding loopholes. You can't kill things as Kris, but you can USE Kris to make Noelle kill things. You can find ways around the rules, if you're clever.
So you run into Chapter 4's huge emphasis on predetermination, on fate, on helplessness, on the meaninglessness of choices. There is a fate and a destiny and a prophecy for you guys and it's going to come true whether you like it or not. Fits alongside Toby saying there was only one ending, and that general feeling again from the first chapter of there being no real meaningful choices about anything. This is how things are going to go, even if you don't want them to. You're stuck on rails, just like Spamton was. There's a lot of talk about wanting to break free of that destiny, but the question of if it's even possible keeps getting raised with no answer.
In 4 though you engage in more trickery to start breaking things again. Kris is trying to fix the things you're breaking, comforting Noelle and trying to hide things from you. They don't want to hurt Noelle, even if it's in the service of some kind of "freedom". The shadow mantle in 3 implies that Kris enjoys the kind of "freedom" that comes from hurting others. There's a fair amount of hints here and there of a darkness in Kris, aside from their general weird edgy kid behavior. Something that they might be scared of. Which parallels nicely to when you talk to Noelle in 5.
But anyway, again in 4 you manipulate mechanics to try and break free of the intended route. The game fights you when you do this, it makes it tricky and counter-intuitive to keep things going. I didn't realize I could move the soul back into Kris the first time I did the scene, for example. But you have to use the game mechanic to break it. A choice leading to an unintentional freedom, which you can then use to again try to derail things.
It isn't Kris that's exerting enough pressure on Noelle (and Kris) to make these things happen, it's the Soul. The lighting in the scene comes from the textbox, even. Your power as a player overriding what the game wants you to do, making you just a little bit stronger than the intended narrative. And as much as Kris hates it, as much as the game does not seem to want you to do it (with how counterintuitive it is and the ominous unhappy sound cues when you succeed), it can't really stop you, by the nature of how the game itself is coded to allow it.
(Of course, you run into the meta problem of a game coded to let you glitch it not actually being under your control, since it was coded to let you do that. Toby put this route in specifically so you could do it, you're not actually breaking things since it's meant to be done. But you have to operate within some kind of framework or the whole meaning of it kind of collapses into "all fiction is an illusion" mess which isn't as much fun to work with)
So when you talk to Noelle at the lake, you run into a really fascinating mirror of what it is you're doing, and a return to the themes from the first chapter I was thinking about. How you're trapped in the town, you can't get out, everything's cut off, everything's on rails. Noelle says as much! She says she wants to escape but she can't! She's stuck in a role as "Noelle", or, essentially, an NPC. She has to do her NPC things because she's just an NPC. But she can see what real power or "freedom" is, even if she can't see your real face. She knows that Kris isn't an NPC anymore, they've become something different under your control.
Noelle doesn't want to be an NPC anymore. She's gotten a taste of it through the medium of Kris's/Your commands. That's why she says that she can do anything, including defying her NPC intended behavior and plot, as long as You, the player, tell her to. Controlling her by proxy instead of directly, like with Kris, since you can't do that with anyone BUT Kris (and Susie I think that one time?). As close as she can get to the "freedom" Kris has from the narrative she's currently trapped in.
The trapped feeling Noelle talks about is really interesting, it has a lot of potential layers to it. Trapped in her grief after Dess disappeared, trapped in the expectations of her family and the society around her, trapped in her own perception of herself as "Noelle" and the person she thinks she has to be and is, trapped in her role as an NPC in the greater plot, trapped in her role as a character in a videogame that can't go beyond the borders of her intended reality. It puts a new light on how she talks about being "stronger" in Chapter 2, how she was willing to offload the responsibility for that and her behavior onto Kris. I wonder how deep those feelings of frustration and resentment ran? Even in the normal route, Noelle hints that she wants to leave town and her responsibilities, you get the impression that she's unhappy with her status quo. She wants change, and in the normal route, she finds that in Susie to give her more courage to break free of who "Noelle" is supposed to be in her (and others') eyes.
But in Snowgrave you kind of turboblast your way through that. Noelle freaks out about breaking convention, she's scared of it at first, but slowly she gets more desensitized to it. As she tells you in Chapter 5, she did feel stronger when she killed someone, the strongest she'd ever been, and it terrified her not just because of what she did, but because she liked and wanted that feeling. A lot of her dazed behavior after killing Berdly takes on a different light now, where it isn't just the act of killing him that's freaked her out so badly, but how she liked how powerful it made her feel, how it let her break free of the constraints of who "Noelle" is. Freedom at a price.
(Noelle acts so weird when you keep selecting Snowgrave in chapter 2... the feeling I got from it was that she DID know what Snowgrave was and was just pretending she didn't. With this new information, this gets even more ominous. She DID always have the ability to kill in her... but to do it, she has to off-load the responsibility to you for telling her to cast a spell she "doesn't know", even though she clearly did.)
She says that she's terrified of what could happen if she sticks with Kris (really, You), like it's a point of no return, but also that she wants that. I don't think Noelle at this point is brainwashed or has been like, mentally broken by Snowgrave. At least, I think it's way more interesting if this kind of darkness in Noelle is always there, and Snowgrave just gave it the ability to come out, pushed it far enough that Noelle had to face the dark shadow in her psyche and decided to embrace it.
Is it the ability to kill people that interests her, or just that it so completely breaks who "Noelle" is supposed to be, what she's supposed to want? Noelle's lived her life according to everyone's rules, she's timid and hates conflict and lets people boss her around (and enjoys it, from how she likes Susie's bullying), but she's had hints of darker thoughts or tendencies here and there. How she acts towards her petz and such for example, the evil route she takes in Dragon Blazers that intrigues her specifically because you're not supposed to do it. She chafes against her "role" in the world around her, both in-game and out-game.
Her suicide-pacting with Kris in the lake to escape the narrative is insane, what an incredible scene. You've never left the town, and I doubt you ever will leave the town, so her desire to go over to the other side of the lake, where she and Kris always wanted to go, to me reads as a desire to escape the game itself. To go outside the map, like you do in the Sword game when you clip out of bounds. You don't see anything beyond the lake, you black out before that point. I assume that when chapter 7 is out, you may skip directly to the next point when you do this sequence. For now we get the ominous "Side B" waiting screen.
But still, what I got out of that scene was Kris and Noelle using game mechanics again to try and go around what the game intends. Using the power of choice (even if it's an illusion of it, since both say "proceed", but at the same time, it IS still a choice, since you can just... not choose) to keep the game from closing in and pushing them back onto the intended path. Breaking the rules of the game's reality (they should drown, but they keep moving). Finding "freedom" even in risking their own deaths.
Noelle freaks out on the couch in chapter 4 a lot about what happened, and she's very insistent that none of what happened in chapter 2 was real, since it lets her pretend that that darker version of herself, her shadow, isn't real. She's not like that, she's not that person, it was just a dream, she's good. She's still "Noelle" as she and everyone around her understands her. She looked into the abyss of her Self, but it was just a dream, what she saw wasn't real.
So when you confirm for her in 4 that it WAS real, that that shadow in her IS real, that she DID and CAN do those things, she freaks out. She panics. When Kris moves to equip the ring to her, she backs up but she doesn't run. She says she wants to, but she couldn't get herself to move. And in 5 it's clearer in that she was terrified of what this would mean for her and her sense of self more than anything else. That Kris/You present the possibility of embracing the darkest part of herself and, with that power, escaping the narrative that she feels stuck in.
So in a sense, Noelle's panicking on the couch is her fear of facing her darkest self and accepting it, and when she finally lets it happen... she calms down. She smiles. She says thank you. She's committed to it now - the scary part of it is over. Now instead of fear she's filled with a kind of exhilaration, a resentment almost for how no one else wants to break free of the shackles the narrative has on them, that no one else can see that they're also trapped, like she was. That they don't know that there's a power out there that can change things and make the impossible possible. That can give her a way to escape, even if it's at a cost.
This is so interesting to me!! It's so fascinating. This peek into this reservoir of resentment and frustration that Noelle has, as well as her total faith that You can do anything, and thus SHE can do anything, as long as she's listening to YOU. And even better, that the lines still get blurry! Even as the player, your actions and influence are still limited. Kris does things you don't want, Susie does things you don't want. Kris can still rip you out, Kris can still kick you around in a trash can, Kris can still make dark worlds whether you like it or not. Like you don't have total freedom, you don't have total control. You can get more control or exert strange influence on the storyline if you're sneaky.
But Noelle has total faith in your ability to do anything! And the funny thing is that her faith in you is what actually lets you do these things! Your partnership with her is what lets the entire Snowgrave route even happen. When she starts to pull you into the water, you can try and say "Stop" and she'll ignore you! She'll just keep pulling you in! Her faith in you right now is so unwavering that you can't actually stop her! You HAVE to proceed! And there were moments back in 4 where you were locked in, but you have to take a lot of steps to get there. In 5, you're entirely locked in right from the start of the chapter. You have to talk to Noelle, you have to go into the lake. Your choices, at that point, as the player, are to keep pushing them forward or let them drown to go back to the normal storyline.
BUT you can't tell them to go back. You can just stop and let them drown, but you can't pull them back to shore. And it's so fascinating to me that Noelle is the one telling you to keep pushing, yelling at you to keep pushing them forward, and that you CAN keep pushing them forward, past where they should die, just by the quickness of your button presses. The power to keep them alive is yours, but it's Noelle that's pushed you into that position in the first place, who gives you those choices! Noelle is the one guiding the scenario, you're going along with HER wishes! In a sense Noelle is the one forcing your hand at that point, and YOU'RE the one who decides whether or not to play along. Which is such a fun contrast to Noelle being so sure that you're the one who has all the power. You're the one who gives her the power to do these impossible things! She needs you! And you need her to keep the route going!
Kris and Noelle, the player and Noelle, the relationships get so fuzzy! And it's very telling you get basically nothing from Kris the entire scene. They move a bit slowly coming towards her, but after that they don't seem to be doing anything to fight you or resist. They shut down so entirely at the beginning of the chapter, but they can't fight your direct control forever. What were they thinking during that moment? Were they also locked in? Did they also want to escape? Noelle doesn't say anything about how Kris looks or what they're saying. She just tells them (and you) not to hesitate when they move forward, and just to follow her lead. Can she see that Kris is troubled? That they're scared? She can tell they're "different", but what is Kris thinking during that sequence? I'm so curious.
UGH I CAN'T BELIEVE WE HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL CHAPTER 7 FOR THE REST OF THE ROUTE well, maybe. I accidentally aborted it without knowing the first time, and things seemed normal enough until later. It was vague whether or not the scene in the lake happened... Noelle was frustrated that nothing changed, haunted by it, frustrated by her lack of power to change things. Just a Noelle, just an NPC, and an NPC alone can't change things. Can't escape their fate. So I thought maybe it was just a dream.
Then later, you sit with Susie by a river near Blue's flowers, and she asks you different questions, and slowly she gets back to you and Noelle. She's clearly troubled by how Kris and Noelle are behaving, and Noelle was acting weird earlier that day when she was just with Susie and Kris was sleeping. Like she can tell something's going on. Slowly the music fades out. She mentions how she thought Kris and Noelle were together when she first got to know them. She wonders why Kris and Noelle are acting so strange around each other recently. Why Noelle wanted to talk to Kris alone specifically. Why Kris's hair was wet. When you try to say not to come between Kris and Noelle, Kris throws themselves into the river to not finish the sentence.
So the question is, did the Snowgrave scene really happen? Did they really walk into the lake? Are elements from that route bleeding into the main route, even though it supposedly didn't happen? Noelle says things didn't change, but DID they? Has the Snowgrave route at that point become strong enough to start influencing things in the main route? It's presented like a dream, with Kris asleep on the bench when things realign, but were they? Did they blip from one reality to another? Why was Kris's hair wet?
I do have a save set for that aborted run, since I'm wondering if more stuff from that will show up in 6. I have no idea what's going to happen in chapter 6! Not even Gerson knows, haha. We won't check in on Kris and Noelle drowning in the lake until 7, but that doesn't mean that things might not still happen in chapter 6, depending... it sounds like Noelle is going to join the party in 6, and considering how weird things are between Kris and Noelle on that route so far, it feels like that has to influence things. But again, 6 is a total unknown right now... it just seems so odd to not check back in on it until 7! Then again, if drowning in the lake just essentially skips a ton of the game to get to the "end game", then that'd make sense. There's only one ending, Toby said... so maybe drowning is just a shortcut over to it. Or to a variant of it, a Side B to get to it.
Still, it feels like there should be more consequences to it in 6... well, I have a save set-up to see when it drops. I can't believe how long we'll have to wait! At the same time the thought of no more Deltarune is kind of sad, I do enjoy these wait times where everyone goes crazy theorizing about stuff. It'll be strange when it's done...
UGH I'VE BEEN TYPING TOO LONG
dw post
In the meantime I've been thinking about Deltarune on and off. Finished both routes, I think, so I'm trying to put it together. I remember when the first chapter came out, I wrote a long post about what I thought the themes would be, of no escape and your choices not mattering. Things will just happen regardless of what you want or try to do. Chapter 2 then came and sort of blew that theory out of the water, but now with 4 and 5, I'm wondering if maybe I was onto something the whole time. Snowgrave in 5 in particular made me think about it.
There's a running theme going with Snowgrave of "Freedom" or breaking what the game wants you to do, or what you're supposed to do. Whenever you do Snowgrave or Snowgrave adjacent things like the Sword game in Chapter 3, freedom keeps getting mentioned all the time. Even when the game tells you in so many words that what you're doing is "wrong", it still gets associated with the idea of "freedom", even if at certain points actions are taken out of your hands. 2 and 3 have the feeling of doing something wrong, something unintended, seeing things you're not supposed to see. A feeling of subversiveness, of finding loopholes. You can't kill things as Kris, but you can USE Kris to make Noelle kill things. You can find ways around the rules, if you're clever.
So you run into Chapter 4's huge emphasis on predetermination, on fate, on helplessness, on the meaninglessness of choices. There is a fate and a destiny and a prophecy for you guys and it's going to come true whether you like it or not. Fits alongside Toby saying there was only one ending, and that general feeling again from the first chapter of there being no real meaningful choices about anything. This is how things are going to go, even if you don't want them to. You're stuck on rails, just like Spamton was. There's a lot of talk about wanting to break free of that destiny, but the question of if it's even possible keeps getting raised with no answer.
In 4 though you engage in more trickery to start breaking things again. Kris is trying to fix the things you're breaking, comforting Noelle and trying to hide things from you. They don't want to hurt Noelle, even if it's in the service of some kind of "freedom". The shadow mantle in 3 implies that Kris enjoys the kind of "freedom" that comes from hurting others. There's a fair amount of hints here and there of a darkness in Kris, aside from their general weird edgy kid behavior. Something that they might be scared of. Which parallels nicely to when you talk to Noelle in 5.
But anyway, again in 4 you manipulate mechanics to try and break free of the intended route. The game fights you when you do this, it makes it tricky and counter-intuitive to keep things going. I didn't realize I could move the soul back into Kris the first time I did the scene, for example. But you have to use the game mechanic to break it. A choice leading to an unintentional freedom, which you can then use to again try to derail things.
It isn't Kris that's exerting enough pressure on Noelle (and Kris) to make these things happen, it's the Soul. The lighting in the scene comes from the textbox, even. Your power as a player overriding what the game wants you to do, making you just a little bit stronger than the intended narrative. And as much as Kris hates it, as much as the game does not seem to want you to do it (with how counterintuitive it is and the ominous unhappy sound cues when you succeed), it can't really stop you, by the nature of how the game itself is coded to allow it.
(Of course, you run into the meta problem of a game coded to let you glitch it not actually being under your control, since it was coded to let you do that. Toby put this route in specifically so you could do it, you're not actually breaking things since it's meant to be done. But you have to operate within some kind of framework or the whole meaning of it kind of collapses into "all fiction is an illusion" mess which isn't as much fun to work with)
So when you talk to Noelle at the lake, you run into a really fascinating mirror of what it is you're doing, and a return to the themes from the first chapter I was thinking about. How you're trapped in the town, you can't get out, everything's cut off, everything's on rails. Noelle says as much! She says she wants to escape but she can't! She's stuck in a role as "Noelle", or, essentially, an NPC. She has to do her NPC things because she's just an NPC. But she can see what real power or "freedom" is, even if she can't see your real face. She knows that Kris isn't an NPC anymore, they've become something different under your control.
Noelle doesn't want to be an NPC anymore. She's gotten a taste of it through the medium of Kris's/Your commands. That's why she says that she can do anything, including defying her NPC intended behavior and plot, as long as You, the player, tell her to. Controlling her by proxy instead of directly, like with Kris, since you can't do that with anyone BUT Kris (and Susie I think that one time?). As close as she can get to the "freedom" Kris has from the narrative she's currently trapped in.
The trapped feeling Noelle talks about is really interesting, it has a lot of potential layers to it. Trapped in her grief after Dess disappeared, trapped in the expectations of her family and the society around her, trapped in her own perception of herself as "Noelle" and the person she thinks she has to be and is, trapped in her role as an NPC in the greater plot, trapped in her role as a character in a videogame that can't go beyond the borders of her intended reality. It puts a new light on how she talks about being "stronger" in Chapter 2, how she was willing to offload the responsibility for that and her behavior onto Kris. I wonder how deep those feelings of frustration and resentment ran? Even in the normal route, Noelle hints that she wants to leave town and her responsibilities, you get the impression that she's unhappy with her status quo. She wants change, and in the normal route, she finds that in Susie to give her more courage to break free of who "Noelle" is supposed to be in her (and others') eyes.
But in Snowgrave you kind of turboblast your way through that. Noelle freaks out about breaking convention, she's scared of it at first, but slowly she gets more desensitized to it. As she tells you in Chapter 5, she did feel stronger when she killed someone, the strongest she'd ever been, and it terrified her not just because of what she did, but because she liked and wanted that feeling. A lot of her dazed behavior after killing Berdly takes on a different light now, where it isn't just the act of killing him that's freaked her out so badly, but how she liked how powerful it made her feel, how it let her break free of the constraints of who "Noelle" is. Freedom at a price.
(Noelle acts so weird when you keep selecting Snowgrave in chapter 2... the feeling I got from it was that she DID know what Snowgrave was and was just pretending she didn't. With this new information, this gets even more ominous. She DID always have the ability to kill in her... but to do it, she has to off-load the responsibility to you for telling her to cast a spell she "doesn't know", even though she clearly did.)
She says that she's terrified of what could happen if she sticks with Kris (really, You), like it's a point of no return, but also that she wants that. I don't think Noelle at this point is brainwashed or has been like, mentally broken by Snowgrave. At least, I think it's way more interesting if this kind of darkness in Noelle is always there, and Snowgrave just gave it the ability to come out, pushed it far enough that Noelle had to face the dark shadow in her psyche and decided to embrace it.
Is it the ability to kill people that interests her, or just that it so completely breaks who "Noelle" is supposed to be, what she's supposed to want? Noelle's lived her life according to everyone's rules, she's timid and hates conflict and lets people boss her around (and enjoys it, from how she likes Susie's bullying), but she's had hints of darker thoughts or tendencies here and there. How she acts towards her petz and such for example, the evil route she takes in Dragon Blazers that intrigues her specifically because you're not supposed to do it. She chafes against her "role" in the world around her, both in-game and out-game.
Her suicide-pacting with Kris in the lake to escape the narrative is insane, what an incredible scene. You've never left the town, and I doubt you ever will leave the town, so her desire to go over to the other side of the lake, where she and Kris always wanted to go, to me reads as a desire to escape the game itself. To go outside the map, like you do in the Sword game when you clip out of bounds. You don't see anything beyond the lake, you black out before that point. I assume that when chapter 7 is out, you may skip directly to the next point when you do this sequence. For now we get the ominous "Side B" waiting screen.
But still, what I got out of that scene was Kris and Noelle using game mechanics again to try and go around what the game intends. Using the power of choice (even if it's an illusion of it, since both say "proceed", but at the same time, it IS still a choice, since you can just... not choose) to keep the game from closing in and pushing them back onto the intended path. Breaking the rules of the game's reality (they should drown, but they keep moving). Finding "freedom" even in risking their own deaths.
Noelle freaks out on the couch in chapter 4 a lot about what happened, and she's very insistent that none of what happened in chapter 2 was real, since it lets her pretend that that darker version of herself, her shadow, isn't real. She's not like that, she's not that person, it was just a dream, she's good. She's still "Noelle" as she and everyone around her understands her. She looked into the abyss of her Self, but it was just a dream, what she saw wasn't real.
So when you confirm for her in 4 that it WAS real, that that shadow in her IS real, that she DID and CAN do those things, she freaks out. She panics. When Kris moves to equip the ring to her, she backs up but she doesn't run. She says she wants to, but she couldn't get herself to move. And in 5 it's clearer in that she was terrified of what this would mean for her and her sense of self more than anything else. That Kris/You present the possibility of embracing the darkest part of herself and, with that power, escaping the narrative that she feels stuck in.
So in a sense, Noelle's panicking on the couch is her fear of facing her darkest self and accepting it, and when she finally lets it happen... she calms down. She smiles. She says thank you. She's committed to it now - the scary part of it is over. Now instead of fear she's filled with a kind of exhilaration, a resentment almost for how no one else wants to break free of the shackles the narrative has on them, that no one else can see that they're also trapped, like she was. That they don't know that there's a power out there that can change things and make the impossible possible. That can give her a way to escape, even if it's at a cost.
This is so interesting to me!! It's so fascinating. This peek into this reservoir of resentment and frustration that Noelle has, as well as her total faith that You can do anything, and thus SHE can do anything, as long as she's listening to YOU. And even better, that the lines still get blurry! Even as the player, your actions and influence are still limited. Kris does things you don't want, Susie does things you don't want. Kris can still rip you out, Kris can still kick you around in a trash can, Kris can still make dark worlds whether you like it or not. Like you don't have total freedom, you don't have total control. You can get more control or exert strange influence on the storyline if you're sneaky.
But Noelle has total faith in your ability to do anything! And the funny thing is that her faith in you is what actually lets you do these things! Your partnership with her is what lets the entire Snowgrave route even happen. When she starts to pull you into the water, you can try and say "Stop" and she'll ignore you! She'll just keep pulling you in! Her faith in you right now is so unwavering that you can't actually stop her! You HAVE to proceed! And there were moments back in 4 where you were locked in, but you have to take a lot of steps to get there. In 5, you're entirely locked in right from the start of the chapter. You have to talk to Noelle, you have to go into the lake. Your choices, at that point, as the player, are to keep pushing them forward or let them drown to go back to the normal storyline.
BUT you can't tell them to go back. You can just stop and let them drown, but you can't pull them back to shore. And it's so fascinating to me that Noelle is the one telling you to keep pushing, yelling at you to keep pushing them forward, and that you CAN keep pushing them forward, past where they should die, just by the quickness of your button presses. The power to keep them alive is yours, but it's Noelle that's pushed you into that position in the first place, who gives you those choices! Noelle is the one guiding the scenario, you're going along with HER wishes! In a sense Noelle is the one forcing your hand at that point, and YOU'RE the one who decides whether or not to play along. Which is such a fun contrast to Noelle being so sure that you're the one who has all the power. You're the one who gives her the power to do these impossible things! She needs you! And you need her to keep the route going!
Kris and Noelle, the player and Noelle, the relationships get so fuzzy! And it's very telling you get basically nothing from Kris the entire scene. They move a bit slowly coming towards her, but after that they don't seem to be doing anything to fight you or resist. They shut down so entirely at the beginning of the chapter, but they can't fight your direct control forever. What were they thinking during that moment? Were they also locked in? Did they also want to escape? Noelle doesn't say anything about how Kris looks or what they're saying. She just tells them (and you) not to hesitate when they move forward, and just to follow her lead. Can she see that Kris is troubled? That they're scared? She can tell they're "different", but what is Kris thinking during that sequence? I'm so curious.
UGH I CAN'T BELIEVE WE HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL CHAPTER 7 FOR THE REST OF THE ROUTE well, maybe. I accidentally aborted it without knowing the first time, and things seemed normal enough until later. It was vague whether or not the scene in the lake happened... Noelle was frustrated that nothing changed, haunted by it, frustrated by her lack of power to change things. Just a Noelle, just an NPC, and an NPC alone can't change things. Can't escape their fate. So I thought maybe it was just a dream.
Then later, you sit with Susie by a river near Blue's flowers, and she asks you different questions, and slowly she gets back to you and Noelle. She's clearly troubled by how Kris and Noelle are behaving, and Noelle was acting weird earlier that day when she was just with Susie and Kris was sleeping. Like she can tell something's going on. Slowly the music fades out. She mentions how she thought Kris and Noelle were together when she first got to know them. She wonders why Kris and Noelle are acting so strange around each other recently. Why Noelle wanted to talk to Kris alone specifically. Why Kris's hair was wet. When you try to say not to come between Kris and Noelle, Kris throws themselves into the river to not finish the sentence.
So the question is, did the Snowgrave scene really happen? Did they really walk into the lake? Are elements from that route bleeding into the main route, even though it supposedly didn't happen? Noelle says things didn't change, but DID they? Has the Snowgrave route at that point become strong enough to start influencing things in the main route? It's presented like a dream, with Kris asleep on the bench when things realign, but were they? Did they blip from one reality to another? Why was Kris's hair wet?
I do have a save set for that aborted run, since I'm wondering if more stuff from that will show up in 6. I have no idea what's going to happen in chapter 6! Not even Gerson knows, haha. We won't check in on Kris and Noelle drowning in the lake until 7, but that doesn't mean that things might not still happen in chapter 6, depending... it sounds like Noelle is going to join the party in 6, and considering how weird things are between Kris and Noelle on that route so far, it feels like that has to influence things. But again, 6 is a total unknown right now... it just seems so odd to not check back in on it until 7! Then again, if drowning in the lake just essentially skips a ton of the game to get to the "end game", then that'd make sense. There's only one ending, Toby said... so maybe drowning is just a shortcut over to it. Or to a variant of it, a Side B to get to it.
Still, it feels like there should be more consequences to it in 6... well, I have a save set-up to see when it drops. I can't believe how long we'll have to wait! At the same time the thought of no more Deltarune is kind of sad, I do enjoy these wait times where everyone goes crazy theorizing about stuff. It'll be strange when it's done...
UGH I'VE BEEN TYPING TOO LONG
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