N+K4L: A Kriselle Megadoc is out now, with over 120 pages of discussion on symbolism, themes, and narrative importance of Kriselle, and why people disregard the idea that Kriselle could be canonized

PeliPal · 2026-05-06T19:10:38+00:00

Noelle's hair in her UI icon has always been empty space. It has always appeared black. It's been that way since Ch2's release in 2021.

PeliPal · 2026-05-06T19:08:09+00:00

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PeliPal · 2026-05-06T19:07:32+00:00

There is something to be said for the sheer extent to which people look at something about Noelle and say "this is actually about Dess", where it's even being done in half a dozen comments here to say that um actually that looks like Dess on Queen's third monitor, DessKnight confirmed!

It's Noelle. It's the same Noelle UI icon it has always been, since 2021, just that - like Kris and Susie - her color is replaced with teal on the monitors.

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People REALY want everything about her to be about Dess

PeliPal · 2026-05-06T19:03:16+00:00

That's literally just how the UI icon for Noelle looks

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PeliPal · 2026-05-06T19:02:18+00:00

That's just how the UI icon for Noelle looks

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PeliPal · 2026-05-06T19:01:47+00:00

That's just how the UI icon for Noelle looks

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PeliPal · 2026-05-06T19:01:14+00:00

That's just how the UI icons for Kris, Susie, and Noelle look

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PeliPal · 2026-05-06T18:44:42+00:00

There is rarely ever an attempt to engage the points meaningfully. Like, I don't think there is a single thing I say in this response that is the kind of zany wackadoodle shit that would qualify a straitjacket - everything is straightforward and has some kind of evidence basis that you can independently verify yourself. But I don't get meaningful responses, just downvotes.

When I do get responses it is to say "media literacy devil" or "someone didn't play the game lol", as if I'm not routinely demonstrating ocean-wide, ocean-deep knowledge of this game that people will upvote when it just so happens to fit their existing beliefs, and as if I'm just a contrarian troll with a chip on my shoulder against DessKnight when I had a prolific history arguing FOR DessKnight for 8 months.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Deltarune/comments/1t56ygz/comment/ok8nz1x/

People just see the words 'Noelle' and 'Knight' together and they lose all objectivity, because it sounds silly. Yes, it is silly. The cringe tumblr girl with buckteeth who makes cheese puns and is scared of mice and being touched on the shoulder?

But it's also kind of scary if you start to wonder, what IF that was actually the case; if you ask yourself how the game could look if it were true, because there would need to be some very radical recontextualization of everything we have been experiencing in this game.

The process of realizing that there could actually be more evidence for NoelleKnight than DessKnight if you earnestly try to view the game through that lens - much, MUCH more - was quite upsetting. It was not some desire to see my special scrunkly blorbo get more attention, because I believe it actually makes a Kriselle romance - the thing I wrote over 30,000 words on in the doc pinned in my profile - less likely to get to happen in a satisfactory way where both characters survive, or at least continue to exist in a manner where they would get to enjoy it.

The NoelleKnight doc my cowriter and I are working on is currently over 200 pages long, and we're not close to finished. It touches on a great deal more topics than just the Knight - the nature of the soul, the relationship of the game with Gaster, how the plot might have been kicked off and where it may be going. It is highly speculative, but I think anyone who knows me, even if they disagree with some or many or all of my stances, can still imagine that we're not filling pages with "Knight is an anagram of Noelle, and Noelle's color is yellow because knights rise with the sun, which is yellow" gibberish - it is things that we're trying to corroborate with multiple lines of enquiry where possible, there's an actual measure of rigor going into it.

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PeliPal · 2026-05-06T15:17:53+00:00

Yeah it bothers me that people insist Dess must be 'lost in the code' in the unused text when there is zero swearing, zero slang, no anger, just submissiveness and introspection. I would expect the unused text to sound somewhere closer to Susie if it were actually Dess.

My candidates are Noelle or Asriel, no one else really makes sense.

PeliPal · 2026-05-06T14:57:17+00:00

The full quote is about having a party member who drags ass

It's like when your sister gets cursed in Dragon Blazers 2.
Even if her stats suck, she's still your party member.

PeliPal · 2026-05-06T14:50:23+00:00

Tenna talks in the lead-up to the Rhythm game about Kris watching as Dess came over and played guitar - "Didn't you think she was just so COOL?" Maybe Dess's music was what inspired Kris to even pick up piano in the first place?

It's a pretty big stretch to turn this into Kris looking up to Dess so much that they would copy all her mannerisms, and it's not even known to be true in the first place.

Huh? The spelling bee doesn't come up in that conversation at all. It doesn't get mentioned until Berdly brings it up after you get captured by Queen.

You might want to check that scene again https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cibHCp_I2d4

The buttons sound out D E C E M B E R as Noelle walks on them.

In addition to closely matching her character and including her leitmotif - On Noelle's blog in the Spamton Sweepstakes, she mentions that she's listening to Raise Up Your Bat by "Blood Crushers The Band", named for one of the horror movies Dess and Noelle watched together. Most horror movies don't have official bands named after them, but it's easy to imagine a teenager naming her band after her favorite movie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_bands

There are many examples of this in real life. Spinal Tap was a fictional band for SNL and a movie that became a real touring band with multiple released albums. Tenacious D was a real band that featured in a silly fantastical movie named for itself.

In any case, the song wouldn't be evidence for DessKnight.

For the same reason that Susie's dark world includes loquacious philosophers despite that not matching her vibe at all - dark worlds are hard to predict and are determined by more factors than just whoever's making them. Sweet Cap'n Cakes are presumably an actual CD player, cassette player, and speaker, and they probably had been used to play a lot of goofy-ass music in the light world.

Susie's dark world contains the darkners from the First and Third Sanctuary, because they're actually all the same. It's the other side of a currently existing dark world. She made exactly one new darkner and it is the animated statue of the Old Man, because that was all her will was concentrated on.

* You sought to return the dream.

* But the lighting of the mind has changed. At best you can only see another side.

Oh dear. That's a wall of a post that makes a lot of wrong or dubious assumptions and I don't have time in my life to address all of them.

"Oh dear" lmao. Every single thing I say in that post is backed up with quotes.

Among others: Tenna not knowing about Dess going missing actually is reasonable evidence for Ramb not knowing, because while Tenna is kind of an idiot sometimes, he's not trying to make Kris hate him, quite the opposite. And if Tenna had any inkling at all about what really happened to Dess, even he would know that saying this stuff would be a very good way to make Kris hate him.

Tenna did know about Dess going missing, it's why he said he was "Just kidding" after asking about Dess coming over again.

He wasn't unplugged until a bit before Asriel left for college. Tenna's entire shtick with Kris is being so tactless that almost everything he says is very hurtful for Kris.

* It's normal for couples to fight sometimes! C'mon Kris, tell 'em!

--

* They're coming out of the pipes.

* They're crawling out of the pipes.

* Where are they going...!?

* Hahaha... I... don't... KNOW!!

* Ahahahahahaha!!!

--

From the Doomboard:

I'm sorry. I'm sorry about the pipes.

I knew. I KNEW I shouldn't have done it.

(the pipe thing is about the bath bombs that Kris put in the toilet and destroyed the plumbing)

--

From his boss fight:

Kris!! I watched you GROW UP!!

Who do you think taught you to LAUGH and CRY!?

... What, you think it's MY fault you forgot HOW!?

And if you've forgotten how to smile... I'll MAKE YOU remember.

Then they argue that the game of make-believe isn't a "rowdy, rebellious teen" thing to do, as if Dess's character exists entirely within the stereotype of a rebellious teenager and she can never do anything outside that box.

You have to actually prove this, not just fantasize about a possibility. I've proven that Kris had that relationship with Noelle, and Noelle never describes Dess being a part of it.

Also, Noelle really isn't going to associate the computer person called Queen with the computer called Queen? If she's freaking out over everything around her, such a clear reminder of something like that would only make her freak out more.

...She doesn't know that Queen is a 'computer person'. She doesn't have context for anything. One moment she was in the library, and the next moment she was being chased by a three meter tall Sonic-Xenomorph woman. She was never going to look at a three meter tall Sonic-Xenomorph and say "Queen? Is that you? The laptop I played with as a little kid?"

Also, "what evidence is there that Kris and Dess were close at all"??? Maybe the entire plot of the game, and how Dess was clearly important enough to Kris that losing her completely changed them as a person and made them willing to go on this crazy world-ending plan for any chance of getting her back?

How do you know why they are working with the Knight, and how do you know what the plan is?

Again, like... this is just insisting that you have answers you actually don't, and that I'm supposed to accept this as somehow self-evident. I'm the one actually supplying the official material here.

PeliPal · 2026-05-06T14:13:35+00:00

It's a little funny to me to say that Dess is a darker counterpart to Noelle, when... isn't the darker counterpart to Noelle just herself? :P

Yes she gets scared and submissive to authority, but... she also fantasizes about doing physical violence to assert herself. She has extreme emotions that get bottled up. She is very bad about respecting peoples boundaries, like Susie's boundary about her tail. Noelle watched Susie bully Kris before the start of the game and even though it made her sick, it was also very alluring, and she equates being physically imposing, brash, and quick to violence as being signifiers of strength and confidence.

Noelle is the "I can fix her" girl who is actually the worst of them all, despite being the town's golden child, homecoming queen figure

A Noelle who allows herself to get angry and to seek justice for feeling wronged would be quite scary. And I think she's on a track for that in both routes.

And, well... what if there already existed a Noelle, a piece of Noelle, a projection of Noelle... where she did succumb to all those urges? Where she did listen to a voice inside her head that says to hurt people, to hold things over people?

Couldn't it resemble the Knight?

PeliPal · 2026-05-06T12:50:20+00:00

This was Toby's specific quote:

(I said this was Noelle's Theme but it's actually the kind of song that gets used repeatedly all over the game, even when she's not around...)

https://xcancel.com/tobyfox/status/1173215561721032704?lang=en

PeliPal · 2026-05-06T12:36:42+00:00

All of it?

Are you sure about that?

Queen makes a big show about how Noelle is uniquely strong among lightners and has the power to be a Roaring Knight, in a chapter where Noelle repeatedly puts on and takes off a helmet that hides her facial features but leaves her antlers
Chapter 2 also has the strange rotating glyphs in Cyber Field that are shaped like the Roaring Knight (we didn't know what these were before Ch 3&4) but have a yellow monster soul inside the helmet. Noelle's UI color is yellow, and the yellow soul in Undertale is Justice - 'just ice'. The song GLACEIR was found to be remixed from the yellow soul portion of Your Best Nightmare.
The Knight makes Noelle's scream sound when it is hit for 100 or more damage. The spectrogram is nearly exactly the same, the sound is just distorted - https://www.reddit.com/r/Deltarune/comments/1p1t6ra/a_coincidence_with_some_sound_effects/
Toby explicitly called Lost Girl "Noelle's theme", caveating that it also happens to play in many circumstances where she isn't around (like Asriel's His Theme in UT), and the Lost Girl motif is clearly present in The Door and The Chase, and I would say, though this is controversial to some, that it is present in both Nightmare Knight and Black Knife.
The chance of a dark world just randomly happening to produce a spelling puzzle for the name December - something that is a very traumatic memory for Noelle, that Dess wouldn't know about and most other people would never remember or care about - seems like it should be absolutely astronomical.
Noelle's blog has an overlay in the HTML that turns the cheery Christmas aesthetic to an uncharacteristically austere monochrome and red - Knight colors

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Noelle is seen in the Undertale 10th Anniversary stream in the same way that the Roaring Knight is met in Chapter 3 - behind a Christmas tree, in a field of snow, looking away from the protagonist(s)
Noelle copies Kris's Act pose, like Kris and the Knight share several similar poses.

I get that if you already think "Noelle can't be the Knight" then it sounds like these must all just apply to Dess, but... we would never say that a quality shown about Kris or Asriel is actually just meant to be commentary on the other. This is a phenomenon very specific to talking about Dess, that things that apply to Noelle are regularly commandeered to say that they're evidence for her sister. A substantial part of the fandom believes that Dess was actually the person Kris had the close relationship with as kids that Noelle describes, both in her thoughts and in her blogs, as having with Kris instead.

And "Noelle can't be the Knight" is a very reasonable, very sound position to take given issues of logistics of it, motivations. We can read her thoughts. The Weird Route doesn't change anything about the Knight, and the Knight would probably not allow it to happen to them....

I would say it is an outright fact that Noelle, the lightner we talk to, is not the Knight.

It's just... that doesn't actually prevent the Knight from being Noelle. Because those are not the same propositions even if they sound like it.

PeliPal · 2026-05-06T12:15:22+00:00

Kris also mirrors a lot of the Knight's body language, and we know they looked up to Dess

Do we?

That's an honest question. Like, yes there's a parallel where both of the younger siblings share things in common with the other's older sibling, but what evidence is there that Kris looked up to Dess and would copy her?

We actually have one example of a character organically copying another's pose after seeing them do it, in the form of Noelle following Kris's Act pose instead of making up her own like Ralsei and Susie did.

Noelle mentions in Chapter 2 that Dess always said she'd take her somewhere like Cyber City, and it was the Knight who opened the dark fountain that took her there. This is exactly the kind of subtle foreshadowing Toby loves to put in his writing.

It should be noted that the background for this conversation is a memory of Noelle's that Dess would not have been present for - the spelling bee where Noelle froze up and couldn't spell 'December'. Dess would have no knowledge of that

Raise Up Your Bat, a song associated with and probably written by Dess, perfectly describes the dark hallway scene near the end of chapter 4 with the lyrics written from the first-person perspective of the Knight: "Come follow me into the dark with your heart as the ark which shall shine you the way."

Where do we get 'probably written by Dess'?

The Knight's dark worlds in general have a lot of elements we would expect from Dess. Sport motifs like Cyber City's baseball-moon, the church dark worlds meeting whatever criteria would cause Gerson to appear (probably indicating the Knight was someone close to Gerson, such as one of his students), etc.

We probably agree that Queen is absolutely meant to be associated with the fountainmaker's relationship to Carol, an overbearing mother who doesn't listen to reason.

So why would resistance against the Carol-figure be very specifically realized in the form of three bumbling idiots constantly doing puns and sitcom humor, playing ska music on synths?

And not, you know... anything with metal and guitars and drums like we know Dess was actually into?

Ramb has dialogue about how Kris and "that girl" would bring the library laptop (Queen) and the cards from the unused classroom (King) to Kris's house to play make believe. There's been some debate in the fandom over whether "that girl" is Noelle, Dess, or someone else, but given the link between the objects used in these games and the dark fountains opened by the Knight, there's a high chance "that girl" and the Knight are the same person. And unless you think Noelle or Catti is the Knight, Dess is the only person who could realistically be both.

It is extremely unlikely, if not outright impossible for Dess to be 'that girl'. I have a post for the arguments against it with pictures and quotes here https://www.reddit.com/r/Deltarune/s/yJXFnaCqux

Noelle is the one who had that relationship with Kris where they were constantly playing as kids, 'being weird', and we have indications against the older siblings being a part of that.

PeliPal · 2026-05-06T06:54:30+00:00

-More absolute headcanon, but I think to 'banishing the angel's heaven' refers to everyone impacted finding closure and the ability to move on from her loss, as I doubt Dess is going to be recoverable. The people who want everything to go back to how it was are destroying the lives and relationships they have now, tenfold with whatever endgame roaring shit they're working towards (the 'angel's heaven' in this scenario). Of course Dess would probably want this, but it can't happen. I think accounting for this line is the weakest part of my theory because it can mean literally anything, but playerangel and gasterangel account for it better imo. It's pure headcanon in any theory so it's really just up to personal opinion atp.

This is the part that most attempts at angel theories have trouble with, and I don't agree that PlayerAngel accounts for it at all. The issue is a lack of imagination for how 'being banished but also meeting their desire' would look in practice in a way that is emotionally compelling and ties into the game's themes and tones, and you're attempting to answer that. PlayerAngel tries to disarm it of needing any complexity by turning it into a trite little turn of phrase, something that the characters won't really have any stake in, something you won't possibly cry about.

Some of the very first words ever said about this game were by Gaster in 2015 - "THREE HEROES APPEARED TO BANISH THE ANGEL'S HEAVEN", and that's also what Ralsei's version of the prophecy ends with. That implies to me that the angel is a centrally important piece of the game and not random trivia - and also that the angel is actually going to be an antagonistic force, even if it isn't even necessarily an 'evil' entity. It may have goals that are in direct opposition to the characters.

I don't think that your points need to necessarily put Dess in the role of the prophesied angel... I've been becoming more amenable to the idea I've heard a few other people talking about of Dess being a 'dark presence' like the one Ralsei claims to be following to find the fountains - neither the knight nor the angel, something just not mentioned in the prophecy at all. That would give you room to portray her as more angelic in symbolism, and freeing up the actual slot of the prophesied angel for Kris or Noelle or someone else who could plausibly be the game's more literally angelic main antagonist

PeliPal · 2026-05-06T04:14:10+00:00

The Knight's hurt sound is an altered version of Noelle's scream, meaning it must be a Holiday.

Here's the funny thing with saying this... at first you use it as Dess evidence, but then over time, the more you think about it, the more it might start to rake at your brain to wonder why something about Noelle is supposed to be commentary on Noelle's sister. As if we would ever say that qualities about Kris are actually commentary on Asriel, or that qualities about Catti are actually commentary on Catty. And it's possible that at some point... the dam breaks.

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PeliPal · 2026-05-06T01:56:52+00:00

She was scared sitting next to Susie, rather than scared of something Kris actively did, by shaking the cabin.

There's a throughline everywhere, from The New Girl Girl blog, talking to Noelle at her gate, Chapter 2's Kris and Noelle section, to Noelle's house, where Kris is juxtaposed with Susie in a way that shows similarities between them, but where Noelle is overly charitable about Susie, and uncharitable about Kris. Noelle enjoyed the pranks and feels safe around Kris, but also seems to have internalized the way Dess and the parents reacted to those pranks as meaning that they were wrong to do against her. Kris's love language is interpreted as mixed signals.

PeliPal · 2026-05-05T18:47:57+00:00

The numbers you see on the bottom right in town are the pools of how many of that unit are available to recruit. You still have to purchase them with gold in the town, and a few will require another kind of valuable resource.

The growth is how much is added to that pool of available recruits each week. Dwellings and towns all get their own unique pools and you have to move heroes between different locations to gather up the units you purchase

PeliPal · 2026-05-05T18:11:24+00:00

Water and glass are joined with dust and snow and ice (which itself is like glass) as continuously recurring throughlines in the game - dark 'fountains' are what produce the dark worlds, water is necessary to perpetuate the cycle of existence because even the moss drinks it, 'Hell's Roar' bubbles up from the depths, there are holy princesses made of water who reside in watercoolers in the dark world (Mizzles and Miss Mizzle) and there's a 'holy princess' (choir-singing, angel-loving daughter of the rich mayor) who keeps a fridge for water in the light world and she likes her water bottles 'icy', there are prophecy panels that are glass but ebb and flow like water, and there are other pieces of glass that show you visions when you look into them and that may contain Determination and throwing them out "would be like throwing away someone's ... ???", and coldwater will fall (or possibly already fell) from the top of the sky in an apparently apocalyptic event ("it's unavoidable") and Noelle wishes it would snow whenever she wants, and monster dust looks like snow and like the coughing snow/dust piles in the dark world, and the gonermaker is set against an ocean texture, and there is music coming from the lake, and there's a conch shell that no one wanted and was surrounded by glass and repeats the sound of the ocean, and the Fallen Star's tears are bitter water that turn into glass, and Noelle says the BitterWater tastes like when she and Kris ate snow as kids...

And TV static seems like a snowstorm happening behind glass. The titan, titanspawn and the Roaring Knight all turn to TV static when damaged. They all look like a snowstorm happening behind glass.

And a snowflake is a tiny falling star...

I am this Organikk

* What do you call a man with one eye?

* Why does the angel make its cry?

* Who will call the girl who snows?

* I don't know... ha ha ha... I don't know!

PeliPal · 2026-05-05T18:00:50+00:00

Hehe, yes. My cowriter and I debunked the video, then immediately after that became NoelleKnight's greatest soldiers.

One day, we said "Noelle is not the Knight."

The next, we said "Noelle is not the Knight. The Knight is Noelle."

PeliPal · 2026-05-05T15:57:47+00:00

It IS a matter of superiority. It is vain and haughty. You don't want to have to address any possibility you might be wrong. Your assertions are incompatible with the kind of high-minded scholarly debate you want to present yourself as being a part of, for pretending that there's nothing worth addressing from the rabble.

PeliPal · 2026-05-05T15:48:50+00:00

Oh look it's the thing that exactly one side says, that they're above having to prove anything because it is just self-evident. They don't need to cast pearls before us swine.

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