9k:RD/ Gaster is Dess (Q12,666)

Main entry

DessAster theory / All Gaster lore is Dess lore / ... -> this is the entry I will use for the sum of all my predictions about Dess and Gaster and the sum of all interconnected theories that went into RedactedTale and Auldernet.
this entry wasn't really made for use in Wavebuilder combinations (although representing all the component theories through characterizations could be fun), it's more to have a fresh, unique heading for a 9k / Ontology page.

New version

Dess Holiday / (9k)
Deltarune is one idea repeated / Deltarune is just one thing repeated over and over and over [vid] / Undertale-Deltarune is one narrative repeated over and over (sense) ->
and, importantly, the one thing is not "Howard Blast theory". Undertale had to look like that to disguise what the actual idea that would appear in Deltarune is, so as not to outright spoil Deltarune. this is obvious once you've seen Chapter 4 or so of Deltarune. I'd argue that the Knight apparently hiding in a closet / dark room twice already begins to set up a different story in and of itself, if rather subtly.
Dess is not female / Dess is actually a trans man / (9k) -> I still think this is true, because there has only been more evidence added connecting transgender characters to the Knight in Chapter 5. previously there was only evidence connecting "man" to "Dess" and "eggs" to "man" (Forgotten Man, Asgore, Sans; the only non-male character who is keeping an egg is temmie). but now the egg has been connected to Friend, and there was an entire encounter which was about Pink, the cat spirit, straining against her body that is a different entity from her. I think what this is saying is that Friend is inside the Knight even though the Knight was originally Dess. Friend can guard against anyone finding the eggs who wasn't meant to. so that is what the Knight is doing. the Knight is a barrier against the Angel finding Dess and the secret that Dess is a man, which would in turn reveal that Dess is posing as Gaster and is trying to control the world.
The forgotten "man" is Dess / The Forgotten Man symbolizes Dess struggling against an antagonist within the giant Amalgamate figure echoed by the mystery man in Undertale -> I still think this is definitely true but not in the same way. what I now think is true is that Dess is the same character as Gaster and always was playing Gaster within Deltarune but what Dess is struggling against is the game world. Dess thought he could take control of the game world to be in control of the Roaring and stop it, but the game world took control of him to make a scarier Roaring complete with Titans and a freaky-eyed starry deer face.
"Beware the man that speaks in hands" means that Dess controls the world and normal_npc is Dess' hand puppet
"Beware the man from another world" refers to Dess, and means either that Dess was projected from Deltarune into Undertale as the mysteryman and the legends of W.D. Gaster, or that Dess resides in a hidden layer of Deltarune's reality ("world"; "Titan world"; Nowhere) below Hometown
Dess will only be shockingly revealed to be a man after Chapter 5 / Dess will only be shockingly revealed to the player as a man in Chapter 7, and not in Chapter 6 (sense) -> I genuinely don't think it will happen in Chapter 6 now, due to the skip. That skip has to be there to avoid some kind of "time waster".
The Knight contains Image_Friend -> this is such a troll suggestion but I think there's real reason to believe Chapter 6 will pull this to mess with players and make them stop looking for what is truly controlling the Knight. Friend is inside the Knight. Dess is controlling the Knight by controlling Image_Friend. (and also controlling the Shadow Mantle so that can be hidden until it is able to taunt Kris in a boss fight toward a goal the player does not yet know about in Chapter 3.)
The Knight is a ball of glass / The Knight is a ball formed out of molten glass shards that fell away from Dess while escaping the game world / (9k) -> this ball of glass used to be the outer boundary of Dess that separated a Lightner's body from the world. now it's whatever he wants it to be.
it's better you don't wake up (Chapter 2) / only eyes blinded by darkness can see (generic) / (9k: 1, 2) -> this pair of motifs is describing Titans, as well as loosely describing whatever narrative symbolism they have. we don't have all the pieces of what the narrative symbolism is, but as far as "grayble foreshadowing", the meaning is clear: "waking up" represents a world beyond the current one. "eyes blinded by darkness" means either waking up to the Dark World being another world rather than just a dream (Dark Fountain = eyes blinded by darkness), or the possibility of opening a gate to another world in the Dark World (second Dark fountain turned Titan fountain = can see). Queen says it's 'better Noelle doesn't wake up' because to her that means the Titan appears, though it could also be the case that Titans are strictly Dark World objects and if you had actually "woken up" it wouldn't look like a Titan any more.
Dess' primary goal is to never get found by The Angel / Dess' primary goal is to never get found by God; here "God" is specifically a reference to the entity that arbitrarily decides to persecute lesbians and transgender people and keep them from reaching happy endings although the majority of Hometown does not mind whatsoever -> after Chapter 5, I think that a major thing that Dess has been hiding from throughout the game is the Weird Route. in Deltarune rebellion against "Christianity" equals rebellion against the player, so every sign that Dess is rebellious is supposed to be a clue that Dess is intentionally hiding from the player in order be safe from the player in the Weird Route — although it's unclear what will actually happen there. however, I think it's relatively safe to say that in the Weird Route whatever happens is much worse than what happens normally, and Dess never comes back to Hometown.

Old version pre- Chapter 5

Dess is not female / Dess is actually a trans man / (9k) -> there is a very obvious parallel between looking for Gaster in Undertale, looking for the Forgotten Man to get the eggs (!), and looking for Dess. I did not think before Chapter 5 that Gaster or the Forgotten Man were Dess themselves, but I did think that Dess was like them, and they were each meant to exist as hints to who Dess was and what his aspirations were. I was fairly sure that Gaster in Undertale was some kind of role model to Dess, such that Dess wanted to be as great as Gaster although Undertale characters were considered fictional in Deltarune. Dess wanting to be 'a great scientist' in control of reality runs parallel to Dess becoming a man, all out of view of his relatives, as he knows that Carol does not approve of the first one although whether she will accept the second one is more up in the air. I thought that after such an ordeal of Dess going missing she would probably stop caring about it because she would rather have her son back.
The Knight contains Dess -> pre- Chapter 5, I thought Dess had basically twisted the world so their body and their will were in totally separate worlds connected only by the Knight and the physical boundary of its glass "armor". meaning that Dess, "the next aspiring Dr. Gaster", is kinda inside the Knight either way, even if he isn't directly there standing in the Light World. his location is in the Light World but he's still in the Titan fountain / "The Depths" pulling the strings to move the Knight, like you'd drive a car, or a remote-controlled mech. it's black-hole logic, Dess changed the actual shape of spacetime, such that he's technically there even though he isn't. which sounds pretty bogus out of context, but if you have all the evidence and the propositions leading up to this then it makes sense.
The forgotten "man" is Dess / The Forgotten Man symbolizes Dess struggling against Gaster within the giant Amalgamate figure echoed by the mystery man in Undertale (sense)
Dess will only be shockingly revealed to be a man after Chapter 5 / Dess will only be shockingly revealed to the player as a man in Chapter 6 (sense) -> before Chapter 5, I used to be convinced all the interesting stuff was going to happen in Chapter 6, with several possible slightly elaborate scenarios of Dess chewing out Kris for forgetting him all these years and not going along with his plans, and Chapter 7 was just going to be an action sequence of navigating through the Roaring where you might or might not successfully retrieve Dess.
There is one choice: killing The Knight / There will be exactly one actual choice to kill or spare in Deltarune, and it will be the reflected memory of Dess / (9k) -> before Chapter 5 I thought you would have the choice to either destroy Dess and the Knight in order to help Gaster so he can hatch out of Dess and put the world back together with his powers, or help Dess (the real Forgotten Man) defeat Gaster, leading to the Roaring unless you properly reunite Dess with the Knight and close the rift in the world. so Deltarune has one sequence of events, the Roaring happens and then with a little more trying you put the world back together, but the one meaningful difference between the endings is whether Dess comes back or you give up on bringing Dess back.
Dess' primary goal is to never get found by The Angel -> I did think this was true pre- Chapter 5, but I actually thought it was true because the player could be working with Gaster. the player is "The Angel" because they are Gaster's messenger — that's what "angel" traditionally means. Dess has to be very very cautious where he treads because with Gaster being everywhere (see below), if you say something too loud he hears everything and then either he will stop you or the player will stop you. this makes clues like the silent guitar sound, or the highly guessable code inside the guitar, or the cryptic verse about wormwood seemingly referring to Dess actually make sense. if Dess plays the guitar sound but it isn't heard inside the world itself, Gaster theoretically might overlook it, but the player might notice it, and if the player is sympathetic to Dess, they might help Dess overcome Gaster rather than the other way around.
W.D. Gaster is the demiurge of the Deltarune universe, formed out of the totality of the game code come to life -> I was so excited about this one. not only did it make perfect sense with Undertale — Gaster having absurd stats, Gaster being a legendary figure that was never seen in person, Gaster having made such amazing inventions they almost can't be mentioned or explained, leaving you to wonder if all of this stuff is characteristics of the Core or if Gaster maybe just created the whole world of Undertale, messages in the code, be careful what you say because he can always hear you — but it also gave an actual coherent narrative to Deltarune. the characters in Deltarune think they can take control of their world because they realize it's all just physical objects (code objects), but they don't realize that while the game is running it's all one coherent entity that is able to plot against them, and thus they learn their own arrogance when Gaster turns out to be invincible although benevolent and willing to fix the world and create a better future if the player will only cooperate with him instead of Dess. Deltarune's "creator god" is mysterious, adversarial, and like a giant "opposer", making it more like a devil than a god in appearance, but it still created Deltarune and has no evil intentions for its own creation, only the best intentions. this was my proposed explanation for how Gaster "fell into his creation". he is the god of Deltarune that basically created it by existing, but simultaneously fell into it and became not directly accessible; he functions almost exactly like Arceus does in Pokémon, where Arceus itself is the universe all the Pokémon live in and one fragment of Arceus is what appears as a Pokémon (that's the mysteryman).
as for Gaster in Undertale... I had a more complicated explanation for that one. what I thought was going on there was that Undertale was a microcosm of Deltarune — like a Dark World to part of the Light World — where one of the characters inside Deltarune had created Undertale (I thought it was Kris) and merely become the Gaster of Undertale relative to Undertale by analogy, and they manifested as Gaster because that's just what a creator god looks like in the Undertale-Deltarune cosmos. so Deltarune Gaster was the first Gaster, then Kris became the second Gaster that was successor to Gaster through the act of creating Undertale. Undertale stars a human because the story is from Kris' point of view, but is fixated on death and Chara because those are echoes of Kris dying to become the world of Undertale.
W.D. Gaster is the demiurge of the Deltarune universe -> so, yeah. Gaster being the creator god of Deltarune was a cool theory and I almost miss it.
but the upside is that when I lost it, the Deltarune world became fully material and then it became possible to have Communist characters in Deltarune. that wasn't possible with the straight-up Arceus setup, because in that scenario there was actually a thinking entity that could stop them and say objectively that treating the universe as a material thing they could take into their own hands wasn't going to work. quite honestly though, if Deltarune is going to begin with the concept of "killing god", there can't be a demiurge figure. it's much more likely the Far Side is lore accurate than that demiurge Gaster exists

Ideologies, topics, or genres

pronounced U.T-D.R. / Deltarune
pronounced U.T-D.R. / Dess
pronounced U.T-D.R. / The Roaring Knight
pronounced U.T-D.R. / W.D. Gaster (Deltarune)
pronounced U.T-D.R. / W.D. Gaster (Undertale)

Wavebuilder combinations

pronounced P: pronounced Wave-builder: forms result [Item]

: --
along with [Item]: ?? (pronounced proposed / Fy)1-1-1
forming from [Item]: ?? (pronounced proposed / Fy)1-1-1; --; --

Subpages or related scraps

playlist - list of YouTube videos that serve as prior context, or occasionally were just accepted into the Ontology project as propositions

9k:RD/ Gaster is Dess (Q12,666)

Main entry

New version

Old version pre- Chapter 5

Related

Mike is an allegory for Communism

Ideologies, topics, or genres

Wavebuilder combinations

Subpages or related scraps