r/AsrielUndertale
Does Asriel actually exist in DELTARUNE? [Serious Question/Theory, CH. 5 Spoilers]
[This is my first theory, and a long post. Please read with a cup of tea, and I'd greatly appreciate honest feedback. Cheers!]
Of course, the obvious answer is "yes, bro, he's at college." We know it from most of the Hometown NPCs, and from Tenna's dialogue with Kris in Ch. 3.
However, I believe things have come to light, especially in Ch. 5 of DELTARUNE, that call into question what we trust as "real." There are two main things that jump out to me in Ch. 5.
Susie talking about Sans'/Papyrus' house. Image from Dualshockers.com
In the weird route, Susie's mentions how the Bones Bros' house is pretty new. Sans did mention back in Ch. 1 that he moved in recently. But what's interesting is that Susie remarks:
This is very, very interesting, as back in Ch. 3, it's implied that Susie moved to Hometown early enough to meet Toriel as at least an older child, given the way she fondly speaks of Toriel's kindness (and spares Kris' face on account of it in Chapter 1). Wouldn't someone who lived in Hometown for at least a few years remember what was there before two bone brothers barged in to bunk there?
And of course, [MAJOR SPOILERS]
...there's that scene.
As Noelle and Kris walk deeper and deeper into the lake, they discover some sort of mysterious light, somehow out of the water:
Final sprite unblurred, light coming from underneath, Noelle's hair undisturbed by water anymore
And we are greeted at the end by a prompt from some program (a SURVEY_PROGRAM, perhaps?), displayed on what appears to be a CRT TV:
This seems to imply that we, through Noelle and Kris, proceeded straight out of the bounds of Hometown, to somewhere that, indeed, "no one has gone before."
Considering this with Ralsei, Susie and Flowery's fourth wall shenanigans in the normal route of Ch. 5, this seems to suggest that DELTARUNE is a game/simulation, some sort of program, likely made by Gaster, the same voice who asked us if "we are connected" at the very start.
But what does this mean about all the characters we've come to know in Hometown, or Hometown itself?
Hometown is bound on all four sides for its residents, with its only paved entrance being blocked off by police tape. As of now, there have been only two residents to ever break those bounds, and we saw how it went for them. (Possibly three including Onion-san, who went to investigate the lake's song. That poor soul...rest in peace.) As a matter of fact, the internet is down in Hometown, too, and we have never seen a mailman/post office around town.
Hometown is completely isolated. So, then, how on earth could Asriel go to college, and how on earth could he possibly return? (And how could Sans and his little brother show up one day and "assert themselves?")
I think the answer is in Susie's comment, about how she oddly isn't able to remember what was there before.
Assuming DELTARUNE is a programmed world, its programmer (most likely Gaster) is responsible for creating, or coding, the world, including all of Hometown's NPCs. Their bodies, and their minds, alike, each simulated in the game as actual monsters (and a human, as we know them from Undertale). If this is the case, then it would make perfect sense for some NPCs to have convenient "lapses" and changes written into their memory to explain away certain "holes" in the logic of Hometown and its residents' experiences.
As a matter of fact, we may actually witness this in real time in the aborted weird route of Chapter 5. If you let the screen turn fully white in the lake, there is a strange cutscene in which Noelle somehow gaslights herself into thinking that the lake scene played as it did in the normal route. We see her enjoying her time with Susie, while she repeats a chilling mantra:
How does Noelle, after mentally falling apart on this level, somehow convince herself that nothing changed? My hypothesis is that she didn't.
Any game developer must account for what happens when the player moves out of bounds. Most games simply refuse to let the player move beyond said bounds, or otherwise punish the player for trying. Is this not what we see happening in the lake? The forced abortion of the weird route that we have to push through could simply be Gaster's developed "failsafe" for DELTARUNE, which somehow reverts Noelle's physical and mental state, including her memories, to the normal route. Not fully, by any means, but enough. Susie still notes that Kris and Noelle's hair was wet, but perhaps it didn't matter at that point, since we were safely back on the normal route.
(I might as well take a minute to note that the way Noelle describes the characters of Hometown...is eerily close to how we would describe a game's non-playable characters.
No wonder she wanted to \"leave this stupid town.\"
She felt like she was "marching down her path," just like every other NPC. She talked about how she felt that since Dess left, she couldn't change, because "a Noelle does Noelle things." The reason why "Kris" changed her is because we, the SOUL, took her down a twisted path to freedom, making her no longer a programmed, robotic girl, but a vessel, who can do anything. She hates Hometown because she recognizes that everyone's stuck in its boundaries, too. When she saw that we, through Kris, horrifically broke her out of those boundaries, she became self-aware, to a degree, and determined that it was better than her current "code.")
So, assuming that Hometown is THE boundary of DELTARUNE, the game, and that every NPC in Hometown is programmed with this boundary in mind, then again, how on earth could Asriel actually be at college, given that he has no way of going out, no way of coming in, and seemingly no way of existing (normally) beyond Hometown in DELTARUNE?
I'm not entirely sure he is.
Of course, Asriel has tremendous detail as a character from the people we can talk to about him in Hometown...but again, assuming DELTARUNE is a game, it's completely possible for the NPCs to simply have their memories of Asriel "programmed" into them, perhaps the same way Noelle points out that they're all programmed to walk down their seemingly predestined paths.
(On that note, I figured I should point out that Susie, one of the few characters who moved into Hometown, is one of the few characters to have changed her "predestined" social role, of being a bully, and is actively fighting against the final outcome of the Prophecy. We're also not too sure about how much Sans actually knows about DELTARUNE, especially in light of the "Bread Crumbs" theory, so him moving into Hometown could also represent how he, too, is on a different path.)
There are holes in this explanation, however. If that's the case, then why would Toriel even think of/suggest going to Asriel's dormitory to bring him home at the start of Ch. 5? I'm honestly not sure, but it is worth noting that she writes it off as "just a crazy thought," and was expecting Asriel to come home this day (Ch. 5). She wouldn't suggest heading to his dormitory if Asriel was set to come a day or two after the Festival (Ch. 6-7), right?
Another hole is that it'd be hard to make it make narrative sense that a character who literally everyone knows in Hometown doesn't even truly exist...but at the same time, is that not parallel to what happened in Undertale? The loss of Prince Asriel, and Chara, is written all over the Underground despite him no longer existing there, not in his true form, at least.
To conclude, because Hometown seems to be the boundary of DELTARUNE, which seems to be a simulated world with programmed characters, I do not believe that any character can normally exist outside of Hometown. This means that there is no college for Asriel to exist at in the world of DELTARUNE, meaning that he either doesn't exist, or simply isn't in the form we think he is in.
As for what that form could be...
\"This changes everything...\"
Well, that's a whole 'nother bag of worms, isn't it?
Thank you for reading this theory! If you have thoughts about where I went right and where I went wrong, please comment them below! Thank you, Deltafans, and have a wonderful day.
u/justasmoothdood — 2 days ago
I guess they're in love...
Notes:
-Inspired by the Susie and Noelle's lake scene in Deltarune Chapter 5. This art reimagines said scene with Kingdom of Hometown's versions of Dess and Asriel.
-Note that this art does NOT take place in the Deltarune continuity. This is meant to take place sometime during the Kingdom of Hometown AU timeline.
Links to my Undertale AU: Kingdom of Hometown: Tumblr Deviantart ComicFury
u/ThePilotDogee — 5 days ago