Chapter 5 Was Supposed to Be Dess's Chapter
This is gonna be a long one. I don't expect this to do numbers, but it's 4am and I'm writing it anyway. Take everything I'm about to say with a grain of salt. This could just be conspiracy theory, red string bullshit but I think I'm cooking and I wish I wasn't. Just bear in mind with me here.
If you care to read until the end: Thank you.
Part 1: Toby Fox really loves mysteries.
Or rather, he really likes creating mysteries.
He likes putting things in his games that point at being part of a bigger whole, little breadcrumbs, references to bigger things that may or may not mean something important. He loves watching people scramble over themselves to try and piece the most tangential bits of story together into something strange, fantastical and new.
But Toby Fox does not love it when people solve his mysteries.
The Freedom motif showed up in a lot of important areas of the game, tying certain characters together in odd ways, and it seemed to be trying to establish a narrative through-line that was alluding to them all being connected, somehow.
And people noticed, and they started to think it meant something, and they were getting excited: And Toby noticed. And now you can find the Freedom Motif in a bunch of random places it didn't really belong before. Guess it doesn't mean anything after all.
Dark Worlds exhibit a number of blatantly out-of-place attributes that mark them as being distinctly fake and videogame-y, even in the videogame world of Deltarune. Previously left to subtext, this has become increasingly obvious with each chapter. Surely somebody's got to notice eventually, right?
Perhaps somebody who's fallen in love with the Dark Worlds more than anyone else, and might be pretty upset to learn they're way more fake than she was lead to believe? And might... Do things, if she had to confront this strange, uncomfortable part of her reality? Well, I wouldn't worry about it. She already knows! Flowery told her. Lol, good one.
Mike. Who is he? Spamton keeps muttering his name in a frenzy, he seems to be connected to the mysterious voice on the other side of the line, the one that sent Spamton spiraling - Surely he's important, right? Well, no, actually.
He's three goofy guys in goofy clothing who do goofy things. One of them is confused: Isn't Mike supposed to mean something? He pulls out a conspiracy corkboard with red string and does a silly paranoid monologue. That's you, dude! That's what you sound like. A silly little guy getting upset about silly little guy things. In the end, the silly little guys decide Mike doesn't matter after all.
What I'm getting at here is that there is a clear, distinct pattern of Toby Fox setting up mysteries and then, once everyone's noticed those mysteries and started forming conclusions and theories around them*: He drops them*.
Turns them into jokes, laughs at the audience and then goes on to the next mystery. These are just the big examples that come to mind, I think if you looked you could find a bunch of other mysteries he's set up and "resolved" similarly.
And what's the biggest mystery of all in Deltarune?
What's the big, juicy secret that everyone's been salivating over since the start of the game?
Who is Kris working with?
Why is Kris working with the Knight?
Who is the Knight?
Who is December Holiday?
Why is December Holiday the Knight?
Why is December Holiday doing any of this?
Here's a better question.
Part 2: How long did it take you to figure out who the Knight actually is?
It's a tall, adult-proportioned deer-inspired creature with a strong connection to Kris. Kris has a strong connection to exactly four deer creatures. They're a family: One of them is an over the top "obvious villain" who is practically chewing the scenery, daring you to fall for the reddest herring in the world. One of them is dying. One of them says "holy cheese and crackers" unironically. One of them went missing ages ago under mysterious spooky circumstances. This isn't a big mystery.
But the thing is, I think Toby thought it was a big mystery. I think he actually believed it was because surely he wouldn't have planted all those breadcrumbs, the voice in the code, the hidden page playing Lost Girl, the Lost Girl motif playing just beneath the Knight's theme song, if he didn't think that it was a secret so deep and dark we'd need hints to find it.
But a lot of people figured it out the second the Knight showed up on-screen, and everyone else figured it out when the rule34 artists showed us Dess's ass popping out of her armor. The Knight's identity is more or less common knowledge now. Mystery solved!
And remember: Toby doesn't like his mysteries being solved. Every time there's a mystery in the game that gets solved, he rushes to turn it into a joke, or writes around it so it doesn't matter all that much. So far it hasn't been too much of an issue because it's been relegated to side characters or plot beats that you could probably write around. You don't really... Need all that stuff, not really.
But what if the big mystery of the game was also the entirety of its plot in the second half?
What do you do then?
Do you remember that blog post he made a while back? The one where he went out of his way to address the fandom, directly, something he absolutely never does, to tell us that we'd "gotten something wrong" and "shouldn't assume we know the entire story"? Where it seemed like he was addressing a big, popular fan theory, seemingly setting it up to be debunked?
Isn't it kinda weird how fast Chapter 5 dropped after 3 and 4? Only a year's wait. The last two chapters took forever to come out by comparison. For a game with such a glacial development cycle, that's pretty unusual.
More importantly, isn't it kinda weird how Chapter 5 just feels like... Filler? Like it's stretching too little plot over too much gameplay, how the star attractions of the chapter are basically just quirky side characters with a weird amount of screentime? Isn't it weird how much of the chapter is jokes, and how many of those jokes are kinda... Rushed?
It's not a coincidence.
It's not "just a creative decision".
It's not just "one last fun adventure before the sun goes down".
Part 3: Chapter 5 was supposed to be Dess's chapter.
It was going to be about her. After we were formally introduced to the Roaring Knight in Chapter 4, we were going to learn who they are and what they want in Chapter 5. Dess was gonna be the star of the show, one way or the other. We were finally going to learn what her deal is and why she's doing what she's doing.
Chapter 5 was supposed to catch the narrative ball that Chapters 3 and 4 threw, keep the tension going with a big reveal: The identity of the big bad, her goals and motivations - And not a moment too soon, either, because the story is over halfway done.
Usually you learn the villain's goals in the first half of the game, but stories written with mysterious villains can get away with it, as long as the villain's plan is revealed just before the climax.
We were right at the point in the story where it would've been most impactful to reveal the big bad in all her glory, just in time for chapters 6 and 7 to turn the heat up to maximum. It was maybe a bit late in the story, but it would've been the best shot you could get as a writer to deliver a gutpunching reveal that kickstarts your knockout ending. It would've been the chapter that delivered on all that narrative buildup and given this game enough steam to rocket to the finish line.
But it's gone.
He panicked and he wrote it out at the last minute because he doesn't like that we figured out Dess is the Roaring Knight.
He dropped too many breadcrumbs, vagueposted too close to the sun, and everyone figured out who the girl in the code was like, four or five years too early.
When Chapters 3 and 4 dropped, and everyone immediately realized who the Knight was, he panicked. Because he likes to create mysteries, and everyone solved one of his biggest mysteries before his story was even finished. So instead of continuing to write a mystery that everyone already knew the solution to, he decided to drop it and start writing another. And in the process, he cut out a ton of plot.
That's why Chapter 5 is filler. Why it doesn't really mean anything, why the jokes have so much screentime, why Asgore just vagueposts endlessly and why it just feels like the story has fallen flat right at the point where it should be getting good. It's because all the story that was supposed to be there was deleted, and whatever was left got stretched out to fill time.
It's why Chapter 6 is going to be so short. It was probably going to capitalize on Dess's reveal but because Dess got written out, or rewritten, he had to also write out all the parts of the story that referenced her being the big bad. It's a domino effect from him trying to rewrite the story after it's already been set in stone.
I'm calling it right now: He's writing a new ending, a new fresh twist to knock everyone's socks off and prove just how tricky he can be once again - And the Knight isn't Dess anymore.
Whoops! The big reveal that you've been waiting for? Red herring. When all you have is a ball, everything looks like a bat. The Knight isn't Dess at all! It's... Idk, something evil or whatever, I dunno. Good job putting all the pieces together but actually, you're a silly little guy getting upset about silly little guy things.
Because remember: Toby likes to create mysteries, but he hates having those mysteries be solved. And if I'm right, it means he's trashed a bunch of the game's story specifically to keep his biggest mystery going just a little while longer. From a writing standpoint, this is generally considered "not good".
If you wanna know what I think is gonna happen now: I think it's gonna get ugly.
I think it's only gonna get worse from here, probably. The story is already mostly told, man, it's something like two-thirds complete. I think we're past the point at which really good stories start getting really good. I think if something big, satisfying, and crunchy was gonna happen, it would have happened by now.
I think we missed the last stop, the absolute last point in the story that Toby had to tell something really, really compelling. I don't know if what he cooks up now is gonna be trash - But I dunno, man.
Chapter Five was bad. Really bad. We gotta admit it to ourselves. If I'm right about this, and I'm pretty damn sure I am, it means he spent years writing something and then got mad people were reading his writing, and so he turned it into trash. So he could get the last laugh, still be Tricky Tony.
Is that the job of a writer? To treat your story like trash? To treat something that you've spent years of your life pouring blood, sweat and tears into like trash? To treat your audience, who've been following and loving your story for nigh-on almost a decade like idiots? I think that's pretty mean-spirited, dude.
If you're going to tell a story then you have to respect your story. You can't get mad when people listen to the story you're telling and then change it so that you can feel like a mysterious, unknowable trickster god.
I've got a question for you.
If he treats the middle of his story like trash...
How do you think he's going to treat the ending?
Part 4: Let me tell you about Homestuck.
Homestuck was written by a person named Andrew Hussie, and Andrew Hussie loved being a trickster god. They loved writing elaborate twists with years of buildup, getting people invested in their characters and their story, and then, whenever they felt like it: They'd just turn them into a joke. Or they'd forget about them and act like they never existed.
At first it contributed to the appeal of Homestuck: You never really knew where the story was gonna go, or what was or wasn't going to end up mattering. It was exciting, really exciting, it was a roller coaster with no brakes and we were all just puppets being lead along by a mad trickster god's strings.
But then... The god got bored. Their story started to drag. They made too many mysteries, started too many plot threads, and they were weighing down the story because it had become a horribly convoluted mess with no cohesive direction. Hussie had tied themselves into the writer's equivalent of a gordian knot.
So. What did Andrew Hussie do?
They took every character in the story and threw them onto a big platform in the middle of nowhere, and there, on that platform, they made every one of them tie up their respective plot threads by talking. The exact opposite of show, don't tell.
Imagine the plot of your favorite story grinding to a halt so everyone can spend a couple hundred pages speedrunning the rest of their character arcs in endless paragraphs of therapyspeak, liberally interspersed with quirk chungus humor. It was bad, really bad.
When it was done, the heroes cooked up a big, complicated plot to beat the nigh-omnipotent, unbeatable big bad.
And then... They did it. The plan worked. They beat the big bad in a flashy anime sequence. They won. Bad guy beaten, story wrapped up.
And then, with no fanfare or further parting words:
The story ended.
Toby Fox wrote Undertale while he was living in Andrew Hussie's basement.