User:RD/9k/glass Knight (Q66,30)
(Redirected from Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q6630)
Main entries
- The Knight is a ball of glass -> there's so much to say about this that it needed its own page
- The Knight is some kind of ball or stone that Dess skipped into the Dark Worlds and Light World to make waves — possibly a ball formed out of molten glass shards that fell away from Dess while escaping the game world [1]
Dess
- Dess Holiday / (9k)
- The Roaring Knight / The Knight (Deltarune)
- The Knight contains Dess / (9k) -> I think this is almost certainly the case. Dess is fully in control of what's going on, and the Knight is being sent up to the Light World by Dess for some particular purpose. I think that is casually taunting Kris and trying to get them to come down to the Titan world while Kris is too afraid to go there without some strong encouragement.
Dess, wake up
- only eyes blinded by darkness can see / (9k) -> Lightners consider being in the Dark World to be being asleep; Darkners consider it being awake. everything points to Dess looking down on the Light World from the monochrome world or Titan world (although it's actually below) and acting toward the Lightners like they still need to wake up
- it's better you don't wake up (Chapter 2) / (9k) -> Kris turns the literal cactus needle into a sword item. there's already a link between thorns and swords [2]
- it's better you don't wake up -> this is said to Noelle, like she shouldn't wake up to the thing that could give her Gaster hand holes and a hand sword. and admittedly, it does sound pretty bad at that moment.
but what stands out to me is that Noelle and Ralsei can each use Pacify or Sleep Mist. they seem to have one technique that heals people and one that simply makes them shut up. which is interesting when the Knight and the Titan are each antagonists with encounters. it makes me ask if at the end of the game it's going to be possible to send the Knight to sleep without actually solving whatever the problem is, or maybe make Dess go to sleep and make the Knight disappear because its object is sitting around in the Titan world so it isn't coming back. but if the Knight or Dess remains awake you're going to have to actually Spare them, right? - 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 December -> when I first recorded this statement I didn't think there was as heavy a separation between the Knight and Dess as there probably is. but I think this is still true thematically. the really big decision in Chapter 6 or 7 will be whether you simply try to get rid of the Knight or actually solve the root problem such that Dess and the Knight are "reunited".
- Shadow Mantle -> an odd little character that is both a usable equipment and an antagonist. it's seen on King in Chapter 1, and then it reappears deep inside in Chapter 3. I think its presence on King may vaguely suggest that Kris doesn't actually want it and sees it as something of an antagonist to them. it also explicitly taunts Kris about the ability to control game worlds and destroy monsters, which Kris doesn't actually seem to like to lean into. but it gives them the ability to face the Knight. so, is Kris trying to walk away from facing the Knight "properly"? the vague implication they don't want the Shadow Mantle implies they don't actually want to win, and hid the mantle so the player wouldn't find it. this behavior seems really strange within a fantasy landscape like the Dark Worlds where there are heroes and retries, but it would make sense if winning against the Knight potentially means killing Dess or that Dess never comes back.
Glass
- Roaring Knight sphere / (9k) -> The Knight reverts into a little rotating sphere when defeated. it may be a baseball. or, just an indistinct wad of glass.
- The Black Shard is proof that Asgore can find Dess / (9k) -> why? we need to ask why on a material level. The Black Shard chipped off the Knight, and seems to be a piece of the material on or within the whole figure along with Shadow Crystal material. then right after you get it the Knight speeds away off the screen. the Knight is possibly the most important thing that comes up in Chapter 3 besides the strange alliances around Carol. so logically, you get one piece of the Knight and then Kris and Susie are chasing after the Knight to somehow pick up the rest of it. assuming they want what's obvious to the player (which probably isn't true), they would want to chase down where the Roaring Knight sphere is actually stored and maybe take it home.
here's my weird new thought: "find her" is actually suggesting we need to find the Knight. the Knight is actually a "her" — being more or less an inanimate object different people assign different connotations to objects, and nobody in the Light World knows much about the Knight but to Dess the Knight is the repository for their old gender they want to get rid of so they have dubbed it "her" and made it the unwanted antagonist of the story that Dess doesn't want to deal with and Kris doesn't want to deal with. it makes a lot more sense why the Knight has a Shadow Crystal now, doesn't it? - my life was viewed through glass (Chapter 5) -> Noelle appears to almost explicitly say that her body is a pane of glass — specifically a pane of glass that prevents her from having agency. this would sound like a weird reading if two things in the chapter (the lake, "what if I left") did not imply that one way out of being trapped in Hometown doing the same things over and over is to destroy her body.
once you see it... everything said about glass recontextualizes Undertale. Undertale also operates like monsters are thin walls of glass, and that's why they fall into a pile of sand when you hit them hard enough. sand is the border between beaches and water, which is why in Deltarune the other side of the border around a monster is conceptualized as water. ice is used as a metaphor for "whatever is within a monster" freezing into a solid object without having a proper boundary around it. but the image of snow either has the same meaning as sand, the glass around monsters scattering everywhere, or maybe refers to the "black ice" inside the Knight being shattered into sand. - magic glass (Undertale) -> this was the first thing that actually allowed me to figure out that monsters had glass around them a few months before Chapter 5. it was Alphys' story of wanting to jump off the waterfall in Waterfall. presumably at the bottom, she'd go crashing through the floating glass. so that had to mean something. crashing through the magic glass is apparently something you don't want to do, but there's water beneath it, and Dess is implied to have somehow done a parallel thing in Deltarune by all the stuff about Shadow Crystals strewn around.
- Shadow Crystals are lost dreams (Chapter 5) -> this. this one line says everything. if you have figured out that monsters have glass around them and that Souls are replaced by Dark Worlds in Deltarune, then monsters are normally filled with dreams. but if you broke the glass and the Dark World leaked out, the dream would be lost.
given this context, characters like Spamton now make a lot of sense. because the glass barrier around Lightners is a boundary, it can be seen as more of a limitation than a real source of power. all the Shadow Crystal can truly do is keep Darkners from reaching the Light World, unless you somehow find a way to stab yourself with it, so once again, the Shadow Crystal is a reminder of pain but not a route to freedom.
Reunion?
- love finds its way to the girl (generic) -> in the original version of the prophecy before Dess twisted it, this panel might actually mean that Kris is supposed to spare the Knight, who represents the old version of Dess that Dess banished to the upper worlds. treating the Knight or its object with cruelty, or more accurately indifference leaves it with nothing to do but to act out, while if everyone takes Ralsei's advice to be kind to it, it will allow itself to be reshaped into a new body through Dess' crazy reality-shaping powers which is why the ending of the story can be 'rewritten'. it's the ending of the Knight's biography as a Darkner or projection-Lightner. it's not the ending of the prophecy, which seems to have started itself over in a very similar shape after it wasn't completed the first time.
Related
Ideologies or fields
- UTDR / Deltarune
- (D)Fy / body horror
- (D)Fy / cosmic horror