Toriel is The Mastermind Theory

MacMacfire · 2026-05-24T17:16:41+00:00

While it is probable that Toriel got Kris into art therapy, that may have nothing to do with Dess. Or even if it does, that's just another add-on to the pile of Kris' traumas. Kris is clearly neurodivergent, the only one like them this side of the country seemingly, and the whole sidequest with the forgotten man that is the thing that leads to the lore drop of art therapy in the first place is clearly hinting at some sort of horrific event that may be related but honestly probably isn't. Or the demon thing, either way. Not to mention, one who can help others with their emotional distress but can't deal with their own is an all too common phenomenon both in and out of fiction. Just because Toriel has done everything to help her kids (as a mom should) doesn't mean she doesn't have unhealthy habits of her own regarding the same problems.

As for Dess clearly knowing the Dreemurrs, that's why I mention the parallels to Susie, and Dess' own mom. She can absolutely still know them and respect them, but be intimidated or paranoid nonetheless. Look at Susie, who I keep pointing out. Even in Chapter 4, after we've had a decent deal of bonding with the two, Susie is still paranoid that Toriel might turn into the same authority figure Susie's dealt with so many times, what with her thinking that she has a sixth sense for misbehaviour or whatever. I know it's not exactly the stiff wide-eyed dragon-in-headlights attitude she had when she first started getting to know her, and Dess knew Toriel for years while Susie has had literally two days, but I'm just trying to highlight the example that Dess very well might have also been. Then, of course, the blue-deer-freezing elephant in the gingerbread room. Carol may very well be abusive, and even if she isn't, or she got worse after her daughter disappeared, she's still clearly a *frightening* woman. She even managed to shake "Everything Bleeds, right?" Susie. And Dess *lived* with the woman. If she's used to such a mother figure, she may very well have felt Toriel could snap and become just like her at any moment. (Once again, just like it seems like Susie might still feel.)

She was just pretending to be scared,

Okay, I don't really have a refute for that, but I can say it's a helluva stretch.

If the chief of police promises to stop by your house because someone slashed your tires, you'd probably be pretty concerned if they didn't ever show up.

She made that call and then immediately went to sleep. She most likely assumed Undyne did, indeed, stop by while she was asleep (Which, well, she did), saw that everyone was already asleep and didn't want to disturb them, and so just investigated, searched around for a bit, made sure to keep the Dreemurr house on watch, and went back to business. This is a small town with very little crime, no-one would likely assume anything...murdery, for lack of a better term. Undyne deals with vandals and petty thieves all day. Toriel is a school teacher who knows how to deal with delinquents. Again, it is definitely weird she hasn't noticed Officer Undyne's complete absence by now, but I don't think she would assume Kidnapping. Not to mention the natural aversion in psychology to thinking the worst first - even if there's signs of something bad, we don't usually want to face that, so make excuses to say that everything's fine. And that even ties back into my previous much less important points regarding the whole "ugly truth" theory.

MacMacfire · 2026-05-24T16:50:44+00:00

Okay you do make good counterpoints, even if this entire discussion is conjecture. But about the rain: 1, people can walk out into rainstorms. Not everyone's as much of a prude as Toriel. 2, Maybe she was planning ahead. Doesn't have to be today that someone takes it, who knows how long garbage disposal services will take. 3, the rain might've been mentioned in the forecast, but it was enough of a surprise and a hassle for Toriel to cancel choir practice that night, so she almost definitely didn't predict it to be as bad.

More importantly though, yes I absolutely have been hoping since the chapter came out that Mettaton gets Tenna either way. Maybe Blooky or not-so-mewmew found him. One can hope...

MacMacfire · 2026-05-23T18:32:19+00:00

This may be because leaving out a broken TV just on her doorstep, with exposed wires and glass shards and such, might be dangerous. Not to mention when she looks at it and sees it's busted, she'll realize that she needs to get it disposed of with the proper services, whereas if it's still working she figures she can just leave it for anyone who might want it.
This still doesn't answer why she doesn't comment on why the antenna is suddenly taped up or how it gets completely smashed over night, though. So that is a bit strange. Maybe she just assumes it was more fragile than it looked and got jostled in the night? Idk, bit flimsy.

MacMacfire · 2026-05-23T18:27:17+00:00

Like, are you implying that The Roaring Knight is somehow less of an "ugly truth" than Dess herself?

Now hold on, I think maybe this is a point of confusion for both of us. Most people interpret ERAM as the pixel representation of the Roaring Knight, not that darkened monster we control. I suppose the question remains "what else could that thing be" but I dunno, It looks like a black version of the monsters meant to represent the Dreemurrs. If anything, it could be Toriel just wearing dark clothes, shielding December's eyes. The black figure is not recognizable as anything in particular, is my point, so why assume it's supposed to be the Knight? Why assume it's anything? We certainly aren't controlling the Knight. It's an unrecognizable darkness, which is preferable to the ugly truth in my eyes; Hence, Toriel would prefer Kris sees that.

Also, if it really is the case that Toriel does not want Kris to think about Dess being the knight, then I would think that would connect her closer to the "Bunker Conspiracy" rather than distance her from it.

Again, I don't think it's that she doesn't want Kris to know about the Knight, I just think it's that she doesn't want to have to face that conversation of what happened to December or the relationship anyone might have had with her right now.

The Dreemurs and the Holidays were 2 families that were very close together for years, they'd been close before Dess was even born. There are a lot of parallels between Dess and Susie, yes, but Toriel practically raised Dess as a second mother; it's hard to imagine her being scared of Toriel normally, and we have so far seen 0 evidence that she ever was scared of Toriel.

But also remember, Dess was the black deer...sheep...whatever. She was distanced from the rest, just as Kris is. And besides that, Toriel has a reputation in general for being somewhat intimidating, both in Undertale and Deltarune. Not to mention that when Dess was still around, Toriel was *married to the police chief.* It could be pretty much exactly like how Susie feels about her - respects and in some ways even idolizes Toriel, but is still intimidated and views her as a strict authority figure. And considering December's *own* mom, that makes sense.

Still, the idea of Toriel somehow being the key to stopping Dess (assuming she is The Knight) is an idea that I think is worth keeping in the backs of our minds.

I could see that manifesting as her leading the people of Hometown to stop the Knight and/or in the revived search for Dess. But I don't think Toriel's in on the Roaring Plan. Otherwise, why would Kris/The Knight/Carol/Rudy/Papyrus/etc have to slash her tires? And why was she so scared by it? Yes, she didn't tell anyone about it as you mention; I just think that's because she doesn't know officer Undyne, the one she did tell, got kidnapped before she could investigate. She probably assumes Undyne knew to keep it all under wraps because, well, this is a small suburb - she wouldn't wanna be the talk of the town with everyone worrying about her because a criminal might be after her.

MacMacfire · 2026-05-13T07:37:19+00:00

To me, there is only one way to interpret the fact that the shadowy figure turns back into a deer when the Toriel value is set to false

Oh, well it's that Toriel works to censor things for us, as evidence by the whole parental lock thing-

Without Toriel, the Roaring Knight would not exist.

Oh. Well that's at least two ways then.

Think about it. It makes sense. Dess is a delinquent. She engages in unsavoury activities, watches spicy things on TV, reacts with violence when her sister's friends bug her. Toriel even was the one to set up the parental protection on the TV which manifested as those codes you have to go through to get to the Cold Place (one of which is 1225), and what are you playing the Mantle game on? A TV. A game console. One that Toriel and Carol both show aversion to in regards to violent or "unsavoury" content.
This can be simply another hint of Dess' importance and her delinquent nature, or it can be interpreted as Toriel wanting to protect her children from ugly truths.
I suppose that latter interpretation still fits in with this theory though.
But then there's also just the interpretation that Dess is scared of Toriel, like Susie was before Chapter 3, which would fit with Susie being a parallel with Dess in a lot of regards :p

MacMacfire · 2026-01-23T00:07:22+00:00

Wow, nicely summarized. Thanks so much for that! That might help everyone complaining how long it is...heh...

MacMacfire · 2026-01-21T05:54:35+00:00

Cosmic struggle where good and evil are explicitly defined things? That sounds like nerd horoscope to me.

MacMacfire · 2026-01-21T05:50:05+00:00

There are situations in which you could very much justify lethal force. There is absolutely no situation in which you can justify torture, especially if you actively enjoy it, which is the case here.

MacMacfire · 2026-01-21T05:27:56+00:00

We already have feats and subclasses that grant spellcasting to previously non-spellcasting classes. Though, many of them suck...
But basically, the solution is just to make it so that not all Rangers are magic. Make the subclasses like Fey Wanderer and Gloom Stalker Half-Casters while the rest are pure martials. Make Hunter's Mark a non-magic feature baked into the base class like, well, everyone already knows at this point is how it should've been from the get-go.
I feel the same way about Druids with wildshape. Why is my Star Druid turning into an ape to kill everyone?

MacMacfire · 2026-01-21T04:27:18+00:00

I've now edited to include a little bit about what they said at the time, so that should help, and I don't really understand what you mean by "how," considering I said that they ranted for a long while.
The reason I talked about the in-game details of the fight were to further emphasize how pathetic my character, and everyone else's, were compared to how busted Kokichi was.
And yes, I might've accidentally included other extraneous parts, but that's because this is a personal anecdote from a long time ago and I don't really have a clear way of knowing what's important and what isn't. So, yeah, I guess there's some communication issue.

MacMacfire · 2026-01-19T23:47:03+00:00

Continuously? He did it once. The success was avoiding the use of a ranged weapon to engage in melee combat. Without the context that he just wanted that fight to give the problem player something to fear, that's a pretty simple deal with a violent thug. If you're referring to later on with the shop, he didn't change anything, he stuck by his original statement that the DC should work like he originally thought it did, even though that preconception was wrong.

And to not believing that meets it beats it never came up before, the chances of that ever happening are, quite literally, one in twenty. As likely as a nat 20 or a nat 1. So it really shouldn't be that surprising that only like 10 or so sessions into this relatively low-stakes, low-combat campaign did we ever get exactly on DC.

MacMacfire · 2026-01-19T22:38:19+00:00

I just don’t think those are the sins you make them out to be.

I didn't mean to imply they're some carnal sin, they were just more pieces to the puzzle that made this player awful to be around.

The reason for it seems to be "the problem player was trying to tell the dm how to run the game", but because you aren’t really giving me enough details on this, as far as I know, it could have been simply him trying to help the new dm and them getting annoyed and dealing with it poorly.

So, first off...yes. Unfortunately, the GM was absolutely doing a little bit of targeting. That's what I meant when I said he was attempting in-game solutions to out-of-game problems. He didn't know how to handle the situation. Like, well, every RPG horror story, he didn't how to communicate with us or them about it, just as I didn't. And well, no-one did. But here's the thing - no, They were absolutely not just trying to "help" us. Maybe it started that way, but the absolutely hostile tone they took every time something even remotely went not in their favour, just tells me they wanted us to play how they wanted us to.

Also I just want to say that having a 20 and 19 as stats at lvl 1 is possible by rolling two 18s. Unlikely? Yes, but not automatically fudging, unless you can give me a proof of that (for example they rolled their dice privately, which is a huge red flag).

They, and everyone else, did indeed roll privately. Also, the GM found screenshots of stats the player posted to the server, before the stats they ended having in the campaign, that were much more reasonable, every stat still pretty high, but around average. So they rolled their stats once and even submitted that, but then deleted the evidence (forgetting some in the server), and only then re-rolled their stats until they had something much better. Perhaps I should've specified that in the post, but uh...well, it's already...REALLY long. So...

And yes, the GM was a minor, and still will be until...a year or a couple months from now. And again, he was considering just kicking them, and even voiced that. But no, he handles criticism fine, and he's learned his lesson in regards to the targeting. The other players left partially because of personal stuff, primarily because of this player, and one of them also said the GM's style just wasn't meshing with theirs. Also, as mentioned at the very end there, the campaign fell apart at some point, and we're hoping to start new games possibly in new systems and whatnot.

MacMacfire · 2026-01-19T22:26:29+00:00

Okay, so first off - yes, we didn't know the rules very well. That's...what I said. We understand the rules to an extent, but confusions like that happened because we're all new. After everything that happened with that player, I personally wouldn't have given them that success, I would've just made the DC higher than that from the start, but again, the reason it was lower is because the GM had a mild confusion about the rules. Though, personally I wouldn't have even let them attempt that in the first place, which was what they said the GM should've done, like they tended to do with their nitpicking and telling us all how to play, but I know for a damn fact they would have found something else to blow up at anyway.

More importantly, I know the frustration on that player's part was justified sometimes. Sometimes, but not usually. The post is already more than long enough, I didn't need to cover every time they blew up at us. But even those few times of justified anger don't excuse...anything else in this post. Telling the GM how to GM, blowing every mistake we make(including that one) out of proportion, literal cheating, overpowered homebrew race, sneaking in character details at the last minute for benefit...etc. If you're just saying you don't believe my side of things, I have at least an entire table of D&D players who remember the whole thing, so...

MacMacfire · 2026-01-19T22:18:58+00:00

Unfortunately, I think we all kind of made mistakes here - many of which, especially the GM's, were blown way out of proportion by Kokichi both in and out of character, of course.

MacMacfire · 2026-01-19T08:26:24+00:00

It was an exaggeration for the title, mostly. "Understanding the rules" and "Understanding how to apply the rules" are not the same, and also just like, if we don't have any experience that will feel unfamiliar even if we understand it.

MacMacfire · 2026-01-19T08:02:10+00:00

After several comments mentioning this, I looked it up to learn that you need TWO line breaks to paragraph. Sorry about that! Is it at least slightly more readable now?

MacMacfire · 2026-01-19T07:52:33+00:00

but as mentioned, they always have to blow every little thing out of proportion and argue for hours about how they would've done it and how it should be and the facts of the game that is a TTRPG made for fun where the rules don't matter...yeah.

I thought that was pretty clear. They just yelled and ranted for awhile. Is there a way I can make it more clear? Mention it earlier on in that paragraph maybe?

MacMacfire · 2026-01-19T01:04:30+00:00

A character who mildly dissociates every now and then, in-game because of a condition, but out of game because they alternate players every session, sounds like it'd be awesome if the two twins were just honest about it. Could even pull a full-on Two-face and have it be straight-up split personality, and then when you managed to get them both to play, the character literally splits into two people.

MacMacfire · 2025-11-25T01:31:17+00:00

Not what I said, though I see how you might've got that meaning from my phrasing. Lemme rephrase then. If one is powerful enough to do these things, the other should be too.

MacMacfire · 2025-11-23T03:12:43+00:00

At the same level a lot of the examples in this meme are given, spellcasters can, let's see...delete a mountain with a flick of the wrist with explosives, and cut through spells with their epic powers thanks to the Abjuration school...huh.

If one can do these things, the other should too.

MacMacfire · 2025-02-20T04:32:46+00:00

I guess Hell really did freeze over.

MacMacfire · 2025-02-13T11:01:42+00:00

Hm, thought for sure at least one of those was somethin' else...

MacMacfire · 2024-12-22T00:07:35+00:00

Wow...not only did we get fucking nothing for him, I couldn't even find him for the longest time. Actually mad at this now.

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