Before we dive into Deltarune Chapters 3 and 4, I want to share something I was emailed after I posted the Closing Thoughts update to the previous page. Alpha of FTLFW (who I did this interview for and want to give a shoutout to for proofreading this page and catching my myriad of typos. And then I found more stuff to add, so hopefully I didn't introduce any major mistakes) sent me some very enlightening information as to where "the player is the true villain of Toby Fox's games" comes from.

It seems to come from Homestuck.

Again, I've never been able to get very far into Homestuck before my head starts to hurt so I can't give my own thoughts on any of this, but Alpha tells me the basic gist of Homestuck is the main characters play a game that destroys Earth, so then they go on an adventure to create new worlds that will then destroy themselves with the same game in order to create more worlds, which will then destroy themselves to create even more worlds and so on. Earth itself was created by the trolls destroying their world with the game, and no doubt the trolls' world was created after another world destroyed itself. Homestuck is an endless fractal of worlds destined to destroy themselves. What's more is the characters are all selfish children who take pleasure in creating and destroying these worlds for their entertainment.

And all this destruction only happened because you read the comic. To entertain yourself. You are the true villain of Homestuck.

Or at least that's one possible interpretation, as the more I hear about Homestuck, the more it seems Hussie's mentality while writing it was, well...

Alpha also tells me Hussie inserts himself into Homestuck, first as a joke then as an important character who admits to creating the comic but denies any responsibility for the destruction his characters have wrought. Combined with the multiple layers of reality and one being created following the destruction of another straight out of Flex Mentallo, it sounds like Hussie was also inspired by Grant Morrison.

"The only winning move is not to play" is also the moral of the Earthbound Halloween Hack, and while I don't know where exactly he said this, sources tell me Fox regrets ever making that game. Even so, using a game Fox made when he was a teenager to predict Deltarune's ending would be like suggesting everything I write is going to end with a Tweeter shooting the big bad with a crappy video game.

I still want to know what he meant when he said you're supposed to name the villain of Undertale after yourself and why he suggested that instead of "Chara" if you couldn't think of anything else. Yeah, you can call the king of Figaro in Final Fantasy VI whatever you want, and if he's the one you want to be your self-insert then you can name him after yourself, but ultimately but his name is supposed to be "Edgar." So why did Fox act like the Fallen Child didn't have a default name, like when John Romero said the Doomguy doesn't have an official name because he's supposed to be you?

Now, for anyone just joining this party, here's everything so far:

Knight of the Fox

Son of the Knight of the Fox

Son of the Knight of the Fox - Part 2

Son of the Knight of the Fox - Part 3

If this is the first page you've stumbled into, you'll want to start at least at the second link because each part builds on each other, and I will be calling back to information from previous entries.

I did finally read The Invisibles - in the same way one reads a foreign language where they know what sounds the characters make but only what maybe half the words actually mean - as well as The Filth, Batman: Gothic, and Seven Soldiers of Victory. To be honest if it wasn't for this project I don't think I could have gotten through The Invisibles. In this interview with Gerard Way, Morrison claims to have been completely sober while writing Doom Patrol (except in another interview Morrison claims to have experimented with shrooms partway through the book). So, imagine if Morrison was on drugs while writing Doom Patrol. Like, all the drugs. That's only scratching the surface of how screwed up The Invisibles is, and not in the goofy, absurd way as Doom Patrol. It is easily my least favorite Morrison book so far.

I'm sure there are people who feel different, but I like narratives where the philosophy serves the story. The Invisibles is the other way around, with the story being a vehicle to deliver the philosophy, and it's just so tedious to read an old man babble about magic for two whole issues, or walls of text about parallel worlds that honestly Doom Patrol did better, or King Mob and Ragged Robin bang every other issue. At some point one of the main characters is revealed to be one of the insect aliens who adopted the personality of a human woman so she could infiltrate the Invisibles as a sleeper agent, and then surprise! This was all a ruse by some other Invisibles to root out a... bug or something in her memory, and she's totally who she thought she was! Well, that was a great use of my time!

And far too often, The Invisibles dips into being offensive just for the sake of being offensive, and I say that as a Berserk fan. Another member of the Invisibles - albeit from a different team than the main one - is a voodoo magician channeling Papa Gede, who goes by the moniker Jim Crow...

... whose introductory story has him investigating a pharmaceutical company that made a pact with Zaraguin, the loa of insects and other creepy crawlies, to create a drug that kills anyone who takes it. Zaraguin gets their souls while the CEO and his business partners get to possess the corpses and use them however they want. Which involves lots of rape. In the end Jim Crow raids their headquarters and forces them to whatever the fuck is going on here.

I'll let you guess what that word I censored out is. There's also all kinds of shit involving fellatio and people having their faces dunked into chamber pots while getting sodomized and adult breastfeeding I really don't want to bring in here, and one of the characters is the fucking Marquis de Sade. Yeah, it was the 90s, fuck your sensibilities and all that.

As for The Filth, it's at least much shorter than The Invisibles but almost as impenetrable and fucking nauseating on top of it. Ostensibly it's about a man, Gregory Feely, who just wants to take care of his sick cat but he keeps getting dragged into missions to save the world by some secret organization who - I think? - replace him with a doppelganger when he's on a mission, and the doppelganger eventually kills the cat by neglect. But according to Morrison a major influence on the book was porn so there's phallic imagery everywhere and one of Gregory's missions involves this porn star whose, let's say, "man juices" are black and a porn director who somehow turns his "tadpoles" into giant monsters that fly around the world, skewering women through their lower abdomens. I am not including images of this shit.

I'm not even going to try to explain what the hell is going on in The Invisibles, but it is a key part of Morrison's philosophy so I'll do a lightning round of weird stuff pertaining to Deltarune I found in it. And The Filth is going into the "I'll reference it where relevant" pile with Crisis on Infinite Earths and 52. That said, if I believe Toby Fox has read The Invisibles - and I do, oh boy, if you thought Zenith having a character named Ruby Fox was creepy wait until you see what The Invisibles has - there's no reason to believe Berserk would be off the table for him.

Another book I read was Grant Morrison: The Early Years by Timothy Callahan which had a number of useful analyses on the themes and symbols of five of Morrison's early books and their love of anticlimaxes but overall wasn't quite as informative as The British Invasion (heck, that book is where I learned about Joe the Barbarian). Callahan also has a habit of explaining events out of order, like he details how Flex Mentallo turns the Pentagon into a circle in the battle with the Telephone Avatar before he even mentions the Avatar, then has to go back and explain what the Avatar is. He also seems to misunderstand how the Telephone Avatar is defeated, thinking Dorothy kills it after encouragement from the Candlemaker when the Candlemaker is the one who kills the Avatar after Dorothy asks it to.

One more thing, I know this is supposed to be about Deltarune and the works of Grant Morrison, but I'm going to be discussing Berserk quite a bit in this part. Just a reminder that manga is read right to left.

Now then!

Chapter 3 gets off to a smashing start when not ten minutes in, Susie and Ralsei have the same conversation Buddy and Grant have at the end of Animal Man.

By the way, Ralsei's explanation of how a Dark Fountain creates a Dark World? How a Dark Fountain causes you to go past "dark" and into a world opposite the light? That is literally the Anti-Light from the Discworld books.

Ralsei's existential crisis is interrupted by the introduction of the chapter's main antagonist, the personification of the front room television, Mi... er, Tenna, who looks like he got lost on his way to the Hypnospace Outlaw auditions. Tenna is the most benign of the chapter antagonists so far; he doesn't want to KILL ALL HUMANS LIGHTNERS or enslave the world, he just wants to chill on the couch with the kids and entertain them with quizzes, rock concerts, and a Zelda-like video game.

So it's you, playing a video game of characters in a dream world, playing a video game. Are we at Flex Mentallo layers of realities yet? If you don't count the comic in Flex's reality that Flex came out of, I guess so.

It's not until the kids discover Tenna is holding Toriel in a plastic ball and confront him about it that he loses his shit and starts lashing out at everyone, including his staff. On that note, I want to mention that the silhouette gangsters were called Shadowmen in the Spamton Charity Auction but Shadowguys in-game.

I'm sorry, they will always be Mr. Nobodies to me.

Tenna's power grab just causes everybody to tell him go fuck himself. At the end of the chapter he's all alone and makes one last attempt to rein the kids in, and when that fails he finally breaks down and confesses he just wanted the same thing we all do: purpose.

He reminisces on all the fun he used to have with the Dreemurs and Holidays until everybody moved on without him. He wants to go back to a time when he wasn't just sitting around collecting dust, so when the Knight told him it could give him that he agreed to do whatever it wanted.

Ralsei lays down the sad reality of existence to Tenna, and even though he says "Darkners" it's true for all of us, really.

Which is certainly more tactful than how Cassandra Nova puts it.

Susie insists that's a crock of shit and agrees to find him a new home in exchange for Toriel because while his time with the Dreemurs might be over, surely there's somebody else out there he can serve. Tenna happily obliges but his joy is cut short when he's attacked - and from what I understand you have to both beat him mercifully and recruit all the Chapter 3 Darkners or else he's killed - by...

Okay, hold that thought.

Chapter 3 differs from Chapters 1 and 2 in that it has two optional bosses, one a secret and the other a mandatory encounter you don't have to and mostly likely won't defeat, certainly not on your first playthrough. The one we'll call the secret boss is fought after a series of sidequests spanning the whole chapter and is the one we get the Shadow Mantle from. You have to complete three rounds of a grindy, genocide version of the Zelda-like you play through the main story, full of creepy shit like allusions to the Snowgrave route and having to kill simulacra of Susie, Ralsei, and Tenna to continue. And given how the second optional boss can only be won violently and is easier with the Devilsknife and Puppet Scarf, it feels like the game telling you "You want this Crystal? Then screw your goody two-shoes Pacifist run."

I suppose it was worth doing once, if only to find out what happened between Spamton and Tenna. Going in I was eager to find out what the hell he did to Spamton and how much of an ass-whooping he deserved but it seems like some mysterious third party got between them and each one thinks the other reneged on their end of the deal. But if I ever manage to down Chapter 3's Shadow Crystal boss on my laptop and want its rewards on my desktop, I'm just going to copy the file and get them from the hole.

At the end of it all is a boss fight against Eram, a cackling, cape-like monster which might even be the Mantle itself, and a voice (I'm not 100% sure if the voice is Eram) that asks if Kris seriously believes the Shadow Crystals will get them what they want.

Except I don't fight Spamton NEO to get the Shadow Crystal, I fight Spamton NEO to get Spamton. Showing him Mercy in the fight, then taking him away from his life in the dumpster is the closest thing I can give him to peace, canonically anyway. The Crystal just comes with that and if I'm fighting one optional boss, might as well go for all of them.

And once again, I have to ask: if Toby Fox's message with Deltarune is "you are evil for playing my game," what would that make him for creating it, lying to everybody about "hopes and dreams" and other Care Bears bullshit for years to set them up for a rug pull, and dragging a team of people into his elaborate prank, then shunting the blame for everything onto Gaster?

Or maybe the game isn't calling you a piece of shit for playing it, it wants you to question why you're doing tedious bullshit you're not even enjoying for imaginary trinkets which... as somebody who pissed away far too much of her life mount farming in World of Warcraft, I feel called out. Maybe the game is even taunting you for not having the power over it you think you do the same way the cursed issue of The Multiversity taunts you for continuing to read it, knowing you can't stop.

When our mystery voice taunts Kris for thinking the Shadow Crystals will get them what they want it doesn't mean them getting rid of us, but us getting rid of that voice in the back of our heads taunting us for missing out on something. That FOMO. Even if you don't particularly care about the Crystal, you still want to beat the boss and can't just walk away because the game is in your... hold up, if Jevil is the Mad Hatter crossed with the Joker and Spamton NEO is Crafty Coyote crossed with the Telephone Avatar, is Eram supposed to be the Veil crossed with Intellectron? It even has an attack where it catches fire and rushes you, and Ultra Comics sets Intellectron on fire at one point. The boss music for it is called "BURNING EYES" and Intellectron's most notable feature is its giant eye.

It might be a reach, but with everthing else going on it's still weirding me out.

So who's the enemy we need the Shadow Mantle to fight and get the Shadow Crystal from? The Roaring Knight itself. Which looks like the offspring of Deoxys and the Beast from Over the Garden Wall.

Yes, Tenna slapped me around quite a bit the first time I fought him, shut up.

The Knight is effectively a supposed-to-lose boss fight where the big bad shows up early in the game and kicks your ass, but you can stand up to it if you either have the Shadow Mantle or are just really good. Even with the Mantle it's a bastard and while I could get a handle on most of its attacks two things caused me to finally say "Fuck this," three if you count the nagging question in the back of my head of why even bother if the moral of this game is you're evil for playing it. One, I don't know if the hit boxes in the hall of swords attacks being larger than the actual swords is an oversight or a joke on bad hit boxes, but the more times I got fucked over by that bullshit the more frustrated I got and the more mistakes I started making. Two - and this is probably going to cause a lot of people to write off every word of this project - the music was pissing me off. Original Starwalker joke not intended.

I thought maybe it was a case like Blaze Heatnix's level music which really isn't that bad but good lord does it get maddening to listen to while dealing with those damn snakes. So I tried listening to "Black Knife" on its own and no, I still think it's irritating. The beginning with the bassline is fine, but most of it just sounds like death moans and banshees screeching to me and what is even going on in the last thirty seconds before the loop? It literally sounds like it's playing off a cassette tape that's getting eaten by the player. But Monsoon's boss theme also drove me bugfuck while fighting him, so maybe I'm just too stupid to "get" songs with lots of random electronic noises.

I did not care for "The Stains of Time" yadda yadda I love "It Has To Be This Way." That is my answer to that statement.

It'd be a huge stretch for me to say "Well, Overman was an overwhelmingly powerful foe that Buddy was only able to beat with the aid of the raggedy, shadowy Veil" because bosses that will hand you your ass without a certain item are a common video game trope. To name a few examples, if you're not wearing the Goddess Ring when you take on Darm in Ys Book 1 and 2, his meteors will be unavoidably fast and you can't even damage him (flashing light warning). In the first Phantasy Star Lassic's lightning attack will one-shot the entire party if you don't have the Crystal, and in IV you have to use the Psycho Wand in the rematch with Zio or he'll rip you apart with Black Wave like the first time you fight him. I know that's what happens because the first time I played the game my dumb ass didn't realize you had to actually use the wand and thought you let him kick your ass again, then a cutscene would play of Rune using the wand. As I've said time and again, teenage me was an idiot.

(Shoutout to Alpha for reminding me of needing the Franklin Badge to take on Mr. Carpainter in Earthbound, which completely slipped my mind even though that's the most obvious example I could have brought up here. This also reminded me of another "teenage Codie was a stupid dumbass" moment when I beat the monster tent and for whatever reason didn't check the garbage can it leaves behind and get the Fly Honey. Needless to say my battles with Master Belch were not going well)

The only thing connecting the Roaring Knight to Overman is the item that counters them unless you make the leap from Superman to Batman to Knight, so unless Fox himself confirms that's what he was going for I'm willing to take the L on that. Even then, my guess on what Chapter 3's secret boss would be wasn't so much "I know for a 100% fact this will happen" and more "I will die laughing if this happens." Can't fault a girl for hoping.

We'll speculate on who the Knight is later. But now that we've seen it, or at least what we're led to believe is the Knight (after the big reveal of who Mike is, I don't know what in this game is a supposed to be legitimate plot development and what is just Fox fucking with everyone, henceforth known as Toby Fox Troll Logic™), when I want to refer to the hypothetical top of the Deltarune antagonist food chain - be it Gaster, the vessel, Carol, "Raha," or Fox himself - I'm going to use "the Devil" as the catch-all in reference to the tarot card about a mysterious entity hiding in the shadows. Again, it's hypothetical, maybe it stops at the Knight or the Angel, and I don't actually believe Fox is the ultimate baddy of the game anyway.

Win or lose to the Knight, Chapter 3 ends with it turning into a Deathcoat and dragging Undyne into the bunker.

Yeah, Chapter 3 is a lot of little bits and bobs. Things get more cohesive in Chapter 4.

For this part, I highly recommend you watch this video on Morrison's philosophy if you haven't already, or rewatch it if you need a refresher. In particular, take note of the parts on Morrison's musings on space and time and purpose, and J.M.E. McTaggart's A and B theories on time. And not to sound like a broken record but again, Grant Morrison accepts all pronouns and doesn't care what anybody calls him/her/them.

Chapter 4 opens with "DELTARUNE" in a water texture - in fact, the very same water texture used in the background of the vessel creator at the start of the game and the Dark Fountains - which then crystallizes and shatters. When you continue the chapter, the Delta Rune itself is shown instead. A lot of people, myself included, probably thought this was the water freezing into ice, but through the course of the chapter we learn it's glass the water turns into.

Chapter 4 starts with its Light World town segment as Susie joins Kris and Toriel for church. After that you're free to screw around town, trash a diner, check on your new Castle Town recruits, and find Tenna a home if you're ready to say goodbye to him. Finally you head to Noelle's house to look for clues on the bunker, leading to a prolonged Tom and Jerry sketch between Kris and the player.

Incidentally, did you ever wonder why Cliff is black when he confronts the Archons of Nurnheim when he's bronze in every other image of him?

This is a body William Magnus made for him after witnessing his meltdown here. Unlike the bodies Niles Caulder builds this one is capable of all five major senses in particular touch, much to Cliff's delight, but he only has it for the Nurnheim arc because it soon begins to malfunction. When the events in Nurnheim are wrapped up Caulder removes Cliff's brain to figure out what's wrong with the body, dismisses it as a piece of junk fitting of Magnus, and storms off.

Turns out, the body somehow gained its own consciousness and when it was "malfunctioning" it was rebelling against Cliff. When the two are alone it drills a hole into the nutrient tank containing Cliff's brain to kill him so it can be free to do whatever it wants.

This leads into a philosophical question about whether the mind controls the body or the body controls the mind. I'll let you read how Cliff's plight here is resolved because that's not pertinent to the discussion (and also because it's that gloriously over-the-top and you should read it for yourself), but does this remind anyone else of another body getting into a tiff with the mind? Or SOUL, I should say?

The first act of Chapter 4 ends with the introduction of Carol Holiday, Noelle's mother and the mayor of the town, and she's a bit intense. In the same way Grant "I once summoned the spirit of John Lennon and he taught me a lost Beatles song" Morrison is a bit loopy.

Chapter 4's Dark World takes place in the church, and while Chapter 3 differed from Chapters 1 and 2's approach to optional bosses by having two, Chapter 4 differs in its approach to its chapter-specific antagonist messing with you throughout the chapter in that, well, it doesn't have one. There's a mysterious old man who keeps popping up to aid the kids, but he winds up being the chapter's secret boss, the Hammer of Justice.

The Roaring Knight could only be beaten violently, and the Hammer of Justice balances that out by only being beatable mercifully. He also balances the Roaring Knight encouraging you to beat Jevil and Spamton NEO violently by encouraging you to at least beat Spamton NEO mercifully as the Dealmaker is one of if not the best piece of armor you can have for the fight while the PuppetScarf is literally useless. I guess it's a tossup if the magic boost from the Jevilstail makes up for the superior defense of other armors or the TP discount on Rude Buster from the Devilsknife if you favor it over OKHeal.

Sure, you do attack him and get a weapon from him, but the whole thing is a friendly sparring match instead of a fight to the death. Him, I was actually able to beat, on my first try even. Barely, yeah, but considering I was focused on screenshots and laughing my ass off I think I did all right. On the plus side none of his attacks have screwed up hitboxes that just made me angrier and angrier with each attempt, nor did his battle music make me want to pull my hair out.

Now why was I laughing through this fight? What's so funny about it? Well, when Chapter 4 was revealed to take place in the church I thought, huh, maybe Chapter 4 will pull from Arkham Asylum, Grant Morrison's passion play where Batman was Jesus Christ. And, haha, wouldn't it be funny if Chapter 4's secret boss was based on Killer Croc? In the game he stalks you around a sewer for a bit and you drop him down a hole, but in the graphic novel Batman fights him in one of the towers of the asylum and kills him with a spear in an allusion to the warrior angel, Michael, slaying a dragon. In fact, Batman takes the spear from a statue of Michael slaying the dragon.

Well, Chapter 4's secret boss is a reptile man who uses the Undyne mechanics, and while the Hammer of Justice uses a hammer Undyne used a spear. You fight him one-on-one as Susie who, again, can have the title of "Dark Knight," and through the battle he makes multiple references to a book he wrote, the first chapter of which sees the heroes fighting a dragon.

Batman's fight with Killer Croc is symbolic of him defeating his inner demons, "the dragon within" as he puts it, and his fears as to whether he has the strength to do so. While Gerson isn't trying to kill Susie, the whole point of the battle is still to get her to overcome her own doubts and come out of the battle stronger. Of course if you look at it from another perspective Gerson in his plate armor is the Dark(ner) Knight and Susie is the dragon. You could even argue that Susie is both the Dark Knight and the dragon. Oh, and there's a giant window behind them, and there's a thunderstorm going on outside of the Batman/Croc battle. The air is crackling, you might say.

He... he's actually Killer Croc. And I called it on a total asspull. But I speculated the secret boss of the book chapter would be a monkey at a typewriter, and the church is the music and book chapter so does that cancel out getting Killer Croc right? But Gerson is an author so is he both Killer Croc and the typewriter monkey? Wait a minute... is Gerson named after Grant Morrison? Is his last name, Boom, a reference to King Mob, Morrison's self-insert in The Invisibles? And is the Celtic style of Gerson's theme supposed to be a nod to Morrison being Scottish? Sorry, I need to go lie down for a second.

I'm back, let's talk about the Dark World proper.

(Look, maybe he gets the armor and hammer from Steel. Natasha Irons even has a long ponytail and her hammer is shaped like Gerson's. Or he's just a Hammer Bro. I dunno.)

Scattered throughout Chapter 4's Dark World are these panes of glass depicting the same prophecy Ralsei tells us at the beginning of Chapter 1, though worded a little different. In fact, remember back when I was talking about Zenith, and how the chapter where Maximan tries to ascend to the plane of the Lloigor in a pillar of light formed by the alignment of the Omnihedron was called "World's End"?

And how the prophecy of Deltarune talks about "WORLDS' edge" while showing the characters standing around a pillar of light with an angelic figure in it?

"But wait!" you say. "'End' and 'edge' mean the same thing and both start with E, but they're still different words! Also 'worlds'' and 'world's' don't mean the same thing!" Well, joke's on you, St. Rawman, 'cause guess which wording the version in the cathedral uses!

Said panes of glass shimmer with that same water texture we keep seeing. Water itself is prevalent throughout the chapter, from the fountain you can drop money into to the water pouring down the climbable walls to the Mizzle enemies that are frequently found sleeping. Churches are full of stained glass windows and churches connect Earth to Heaven, that part makes sense, but where does the water fit into this? Well, remember the Dreamtime?

Water symbolizing changes in reality is a common theme through Morrison's books. Caulder's Think Tank was literally a pool of water that could reshape the world. And over in Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne water was involved in each of Bruce's time jumps, each revision of his character, until he finally comes back around as Batman.

This also pops up in Seven Soldiers of Victory, but we'll save that for when we discuss the comic itself.

I already talked about water being a good analogy for dreams because it's the source of life and can be molded into any shape, but another property of water is it's reflective. Well, when it's not polluted, anyway. In fact, I read somewhere the reason humans like shiny things so much is because they remind the caveman part of our brain of clean water. Glass, too, is reflective (another name for a mirror is a "looking glass") and is frequently used to hold water. And just as water and glass reflect the world, dreams reflect reality. Our art and stories, our dreams brought into reality, reflect the world we live in. We can tell a child not to call for help when nothing's wrong or else people won't listen when they actually have a problem, or we can tell them the story of the boy who cried wolf. Which one is the kid going to internalize better?

A common storytelling trope is dreams being able to predict the future. In Joe the Barbarian, Queen Bree keeps some fish that can see the future and, well, what do fish live in?

Now, recall J.M.E. McTaggart's B Theory on time from that Grant Morrison video, and how it asserts all events occur alongside each other. Early in The Invisibles the team gets attacked by a demon called Orlando, and Lord Fanny calls upon the Aztec god of the dead, Mictlantecuhtli, to deal with him. Several issues later we flash back to Fanny as a teenager and her initiation into magic during which she encounters Mictlantecuhtli, demanding compensation for his intervention with Orlando.

But Fanny is subject to A Theory and has no idea who this demon is because to her she has not called for Mictlantecuhtli's help yet. But she has to us who have already read it happen, as well as Mictlantecuhtli who as a god sees time according to B Theory. She will call for his aid, so as far as he's concerned she already has. Of course Mictlantecuhtli should also know he has been paid for his intervention, but maybe he's doing this because this is how he gets paid.

Yes, I'm copy-pasting "Mictlantecuhtli."

The idea of our lives being predetermined goes well beyond Morrison's books. The first four lines of Hades' ending theme are "Fates weave their threads / Our lives are sewn / Born to a life / All but our own" referencing how ancient Greeks believed their lives were predetermined by the Fates. And fans of Berserk will recognize this exact idea as the flow of Causality.

We experience our reality according to A Theory, but the lower realities according to B Theory. Deltarune's not the best example because while the ending was decided when Fox had his fever dream (assuming the fever dream actually happened and isn't a mashup of Grant Morrison's staph infection and Toby Fox Troll Logic™) the game itself is still in development, so think of any other game, book, or movie that has been completed. Even though you don't know how it will end until you play, read, or watch it or have it spoiled to you, the ending has already been written. And you will know how it ends if you go through it again, while the characters remain as oblivious as they did the first time (I already hinted at this with my digression on M*A*S*H* and Henry Blake when I was talking about The Multiversity). Of course many games and Choose Your Own Adventure books have multiple endings, but those endings and the criteria to get them are still predetermined.

So what am I getting at here? The Dreamtime and J.M.E. McTaggart's B Theory on time are one and the same. The past, present, and future all exist simultaneously but you can only see that for realities you exist above. And these panes of glass tell the future because they're crystallized pieces of the Dreamtime, the sea of potential Deltarune emerged from.

When Susie sees parts of the prophecy about her specifically she's overjoyed, knowing she's a part of something that can't be taken away.

Morrison reasons that if a higher power - be it the Ancestors, God, the Fates, or imps from the fifth dimension - saw fit to create us then they created us for a reason. And the idea of purpose is a recurring theme through Deltarune.

James Gunn cited We3 as a major influence on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and while Superman: Legacy isn't a direct adaptation of All-Star Superman it pulls from it, so the dude's obviously a Grant Morrison fan. I wonder if he was also influenced by Morrison's philosophy with The Suicide Squad where the thesis statement is "Rats are the lowliest and most despised of all creatures. If they have purpose, so do we all." Interestingly, Joe the Barbarian makes a reference to how despised rats are.

The Bone Coda adds that according to the Dreamtime, everything has its place when the world is in balance.

Of course, the force controlling everyone's destiny doesn't have to be a god, it can be as mundane as everyone else in the macro-organism of humanity, or life itself. Everything is connected, and failing to understand the balance of life and each creature's place in the world is how you get disasters like the Great Sparrow Campaign (on that subject, as annoying as mosquitoes are wouldn't wiping them out affect fish and bats and other animals that eat mosquitoes? They're also pollinators when they're not drinking blood to make their eggs). Again, think back to the fractal bird in Animal Man, simultaneously a part of creation and containing all creation.

In Zenith Peter St. John's superhero code name was Mandala, and what is a mandala but an artsy fractal? And his codename being a symbol of how everything is connected plays into what caused the breakup of Cloud 9. The team came up with a plan to ascend to their "rightful" place as gods and crush the humans under them, but St. John wanted to elevate humans to their level with only Siadwell Rhys taking his side. Some of St. John's actions suggest his motives weren't entirely altruistic, but he still saw the tygers and the humans were connected.

That's not to say your choices aren't your own, just that... they don't matter. Not with all the other people splashing around in the Dreamtime and doing cannonballs that overwhelm the waves you make. You can dream of playing basketball all you want, you don't get to choose if a drunk driver runs a red light and leaves you paralyzed from the waist down. Want to be a writer? The publishers get to decide if your work sees the light of day. Fresh out of college, eager to join the work force? Here's a nice global pandemic shutting everything down for two years. Weren't interested in having a dog? Well, one night somebody dumped an unwanted puppy in front of your house, so now you have a dog. Always dreamed of playing the guitar? Sorry, you were helping a coworker install a FitBit display at work one day and got several fingers crushed when it suddenly dropped into its frame, so fuck you*. Even if you want to make independent videos on YouTube, it's the algorithm, the people who wrote it, and the tastes of the audience that determine if it gets seen.

* The thing with the dog happened with me, and at least three of my cats came from people dumping them, maybe five. And while I've never aspired to play the guitar, I was inches away from losing three three fingers on my left hand that day.

If you read my little interlude here you'll know that another recurring theme in Morrison's work is that nobody really has control over their own lives, and that contrary to what MatPat thinks, affecting another person's life is not "disrespecting their autonomy" because nobody has autonomy. You cannot exist in the world without affecting another person's life and telling somebody that's a bad thing they need to minimize if not stop doing altogether is how you, at best, get hikikomori. Or as Luthor realizes in All-Star Superman...

I hope this is what Fox is trying to say by shoving us into Kris and not "you ruined everything for everyone by coming into this world." And all this talk of purpose and being a part of something and nobody getting "thrown away" only reinforces what a phenomenally awful idea it would be for him to end Deltarune with the characters banding together to kick us out of the game because we're assholes for intruding on their lives and telling God knows how many depressed people "Wait, you thought any of this applied to you? Pfff-HAHAHA, get fucked!" in his ultimate subversion of expectations unless he wants to be the Reverse Alec Holowka.

I genuinely cannot stress how disgusted I am that MatPat got away with suggesting to hundreds of thousands of kids that the moral of Deltarune is "everybody would be better off without you and if you want them to be happy you will 'respect their autonomy' and take yourself out of the world so they can have their lives back" and was not only praised by fans but rewarded with multiple fistbumps from Fox in Deltarune newsletters because the fucking jackal was smart enough to do it when everyone was distracted by his retirement. My expectations were low but holy shit, dude, you do not go near that.

("Codie, he meant you're an unwanted nuisance to everyone in Deltarune and should take yourself out of their world for their sake, not this world." Yeah, and I guess when Undertale says "Don't kill and don't be killed" that also only applies to the in-game characters? Tell me you don't know what an allegory is without telling me you don't know what an allegory is.)

All through the chapter Ralsei is acting weird, desperate to find something before the other two. I think the "Ralsei is secretly evil because he clearly knows more than he's letting on, is secretive about his past, and keeps talking to the protagonist in private" theory is far fetched, but after a mishap involving one of Gerson's statues Susie finally snaps at him, causing him to break down into tears.

My tinfoil hat isn't on quite tight enough to think this is specifically about him wanting to talk about Grant Morrison, but I can't help but feel like this is a reference to Fox's frustration with all the theories popping up while not being able to come out and just tell everyone what he's trying to say with his story.

Chapter 4 climaxes in another confrontation with the Roaring Knight, which gets away by opening a Dark Fountain within a Dark World and showing us what would have happened if Berdly had opened that fountain at the end of Chapter 2. So back at the start of Chapter 3, Ralsei tells us what Discworld already taught us, that darkness isn't the opposite of light but the absence of it. And a Dark World is what you get when a Dark Fountain takes away more light until you enter a world on the other side. So, what happens when you take away even more light? What happens when you go past your dreams and into the deepest pit of your subconscious? You get a Titan.

This was supposed to be a big "Oh shit" moment. I spent the climax of Chapter 4 laughing harder than I did at anything that was supposed to be an actual joke.

The Roaring Titans are raw fear or negative emotions in general, given physical form that draws blatant parallels to angels by a body of water that makes dreams reality, and their sole mission is to destroy the world.

You know what else I just described?

I glossed over what the Candlemaker was in Part 2, so let's go a little deeper. Kipling calls it an egregore, a manifestation of strong, negative human emotions, in its case anxiety over nuclear war. It entered Dorothy's mind intending to use her powers to manifest her dreams into reality to enter the physical word, but it got stuck in there. So it came up with a scheme to trick her into letting it out.

When a bully killed her cat the Candlemaker came to her and offered to grant a wish. Without hesitation she asked it to kill the bully to which the Candlemaker gladly and gruesomely obliged (gore warning). The Candlemaker offered her two more wishes after which it would be strong enough to break out into the real world, but she managed to bury it in the back of her mind for years until she was facing down the Telephone Avatar. That's when she used her second wish, after which the Candlemaker was strong enough to torment her into making a third.

Once freed it takes over a cyborg body Caulder created using the Think Tank. You know, the pool of water that can make dreams reality, that Caulder then tries to consume the world with? Now the Candlemaker aims to destroy the world by destroying its soul, and once the soul is dead all you have to do is sit back and wait for the body to follow. We see this when the Candlemaker casts Jane into Hell where she has her spirits shattered in a mental hospital then ground into dust by a pointless, dead-end job, and is getting ready to jump off a bridge when Cliff finds her.

And yes, the Candlemaker also has a fuckoff death laser.

After my laughter died down I realized the Titan is the Candlemaker with a big scoop of Emperor Ganishka mixed in and started laughing again, but we'll save that story for later. I have to confess, however, that Kris and Susie jumping into the Titan to destroy it from within reminds me more of Cliff jumping into the core of the Think Tank to shut down Caulder's catastrophe program than how the Candlemaker is defeated.

There are also a bunch of crystals floating along the pathway to the Titan, like the prisms floating around when Cliff first enters the Think Tank.

Once the Titan is downed it looks like our heroes can go home, but on the way to the fountain Susie learns what Ralsei wanted to protect her from, taking us back to our discussion on purpose. Recall this line from the philosophy of Grant Morrison video: "being created doesn't necessarily impart dignity." Rats have purpose, but their main purpose is to provide food to other animals. Paper cups are created to be used once then thrown away. A writer may include a character just to be killed off to motivate another. And whatever plan the Dreamtime has in mind for Susie enrages her.

Ralsei insist there must be a way to change their fates...

... but if Fox wants there to only be one ending there's jack shit they can do about it. They cannot thwart divine providence.

But perhaps we, who do exist outside the story, can. While Fox has stated the game is only going to have one ending, maybe that's supposed to be like Lady Yunalesca insisting... well, that's another story for later in this essay. Besides, we already saw what happens when Fox tries to tell us only his choices matter here with Spamton: everyone just writes fanfic.

If you'd like and it doesn't distract you too much, you can play this music in the background while reading this section.

When Dane/Jack Frost tries to flee from the warden of Harmony House, he's trapped in a series of rectangles that remind me of the rectangles Kris and Susie fall through when they enter the Dark World.

And why is Dane given the code name Jack Frost when he joins the Invisibles? Yup, ice magic. Here he is casting Snowgrave.

Speaking of which, long before Morrison worked with DC they wrote about a character named Gideon Stargrave for a local newspaper. Gideon Stargrave makes a return in The Invisibles as a character King Mob writes about under the pen name "Kirk Morrison."

I'm not sure if this is supposed to be the same Gideon Stargrave Morrison wrote about as a teen, but this Gideon Stargrave is a self-insert of King Mob (whose real name is Gideon Starorzewski), specifically a fiction suit of what King Mob thinks he would be in whatever world Stargrave is supposed to be from. But King Mob is a self-insert/fiction suit of Grant Morrison, as is Wally Sage in Flex Mentallo, so King Mob, Wally Sage, and Gideon Stargrave are all fiction suits of each other. And I'm pretty sure Joe from Joe the Barbarian, whose last name is Manson, is also a self-insert of Morrison (Grant's father was also a soldier who was absent when they were growing up, except Walter Morrison was kicked out of the house for having an affair while Joseph Manson Sr. was KIA. Morrison doesn't appear to be diabetic, though). Meaning everybody including Morrison is the same person in a different reality.

But I know what you're really focused on and that's "Stargrave" looking eerily similar to "Snowgrave," with "Star" and "Snow" having their vowels and consonants in the same spots. Also, several of the Knight's attacks involve stars, and given who the game suggests the Knight is... wouldn't it be funny if the Knight's ultimate attack was called "Stargrave" to mirror Noelle's "Snowgrave"?

During his agonizingly long speech on magic with Dane, Tom O'Bedlam tells him about the second London in the darkness of the London we see.

He shows Dane how to enter the "sunless" London by smoking a blue mold found in an abandoned subway system.

Tom also asserts the dream London is just as real as the surface London.

When you save Lancer from the cactus he offers himself, because himself is all he has to give you.

When teenage Fanny meets Mictlantecuhtli, he demands herself as payment for his intervention with Orlando because she has nothing else, until she comes up with something he accepts. And what is that, you ask? A really tasteless joke. Specifically "What are purple, wrinkled, and stiff, and make women squeal? Death cot babies." (Death cot, if you don't know, is another name for SIDS)

Oh... oh no, don't tell me Sans, a skeleton who loves bad jokes, was based on Mictlantecuhtli laughing at a dead baby joke...

When King Mob is captured and interrogated, his captors infect him with a drug called Key 17 as part of their attempt to break him.

For example, if you showed somebody infected with Key 17 a piece of paper with the words "calico cat" written on it they would not see the piece of paper nor the words "calico cat," they would actually see a calico cat. And which log in Undertale is the weird one, again? The one where all the words have been replaced with little pictures?

Multiple references are made through the book about how everything is "just/only a game."

A recurring plot point is a Lovecraftian monster that lives in a mirror known as the Moonchild, which wears a hood under which you can see a single light for an eye, shining in a cross pattern.

Which is reminiscent of some other monsters that have single, cross-shaped lights for eyes.

To bring the Moonchild out of its mirror so that it can feed, its servant has to shine a prism that looks like Chimera from Zenith into the mirror in a certain pattern.

This doesn't tie into anything directly yet, I just want to put a pin in it as we learn more about the Shadow Crystals.

There's something or other about the human soul being used as a weapon and the alien overlords destroying reality by detonating everyone's collective soul.

Boy, Tenna used to be a lot edgier.

Colonel Friday here can coat himself in shadows from another reality.

In The Invisibles' world, J. Robert Oppenheimer was a priest for Azathoth and the atomic bomb was created to open the way to a parallel or higher reality and bring a piece of the Dreamtime into their world which manifests as a liquid mirror but everyone thinks it's an angel and do you understand now why I'm not even trying to make sense of what the fuck is going on in this comic?

By the way when I first wrote that I put "Alan Oppenheimer" and had to double check to make sure I wasn't confusing the father of the atomic bomb with Skeletor's voice actor. Indeed I was.

Like Animal Man, foxes pop up throughout The Invisibles. On multiple occasions agents of the insect gods who secretly rule the world (I think, this whole comic is a fever dream) are seen hunting down rebels while dressed up as old timey British fox hunters while calling their victims things like "vixens", just to hammer the symbol home.

Later on Jim Crow is trying to bust into some top secret facility using a deadly virus (which is really just plain old water), and tells the guards the story about scorpions being unable to change their nature. Usually this story is told with a frog and a scorpion, but he uses a fox and a scorpion instead.

Ragged Robin is revealed to be from the future, and before she travels back in time she stops to see her brother, who's shooting up while watching smut of an actress named Shae Fox.

I don't think Shae Fox is a real porn star because searching "Shae Fox" brings up people who just happen to have that name and I am not searching "shae fox porn." But nevermind that, would you like to guess what Ragged Robin's brother's name is? Who, again, is watching smut of Shae Fox?

Reminder that "Toby" Fox is a nickname but his real name isn't Tobias, it's Robert.

In the last third or so of the book an artifact known as the Hand of Glory becomes a key plot point. It's a green glowing hand that can warp time and space.

King Mob hypothesizes the Hand of Glory can, like the blue mold, serve as a doorway to the dark side of reality.

This chess game seems particularly interested in the knights.

The Invisibles get a lot of their funding and tech research from a billionaire who joined up after being abducted by aliens and shown the nature of reality. He later confides he had pneumonia at the time, and for a while wondered if his alien abduction was just a fever dream he had while sick.

This is Morrison combining their Kathmandu alien abduction and staph infection, but I can't help but think of Toby Fox claiming Deltarune is based on a fever dream he had while really sick.

After the success of Arkham Asylum Morrison was given a shot at a mainline Batman story, which became the Batman: Gothic five-parter showcased in Legends of the Dark Knight. This book doesn't have anything as creepy as a black, white, pink, yellow, and red telephone god that gets strung up by its own cables or a guy named Toby watching porn of an actress named Shae Fox, but when looked at alongside everything else I've talked about you can't help but raise an eyebrow.

Gotham City is celebrating the restoration of Gotham Cathedral, which is set to reopen to the public soon. At the same time, the criminals of Gotham are getting picked off by a man known only as Mr. Whisper, an unkillable murderer who doesn't cast a shadow. In their desperation, who are they to turn to but the Goddamn Batman.

Mr. Whisper not casting a shadow is the inverse of the Shadow Crystals, which are themselves invisible but cast a shadow.

Batman is ready to tell the crime bosses of Gotham City to reap what they sow until he remembers Mr. Winchester, an abusive teacher from his old school who didn't cast a shadow. After digging up some old audio tapes his investigation leads him to Austria where he learns of Brother Manfred, a Capuchin monk from the days of the black plague.

Manfred was the most pious monk of his monastery, and his devotion gained him the unquestioning loyalty of the other monks. After a boy led him to a blasphemous altar in the church he, uh, decided he wanted in on that and turned the monastery into a Satanic frat house, massacred a party of traveling nuns, and sold his soul to the devil for 300 years of immortality.

When I saw that panel of Manfred standing on a ledge, pledging his soul to the "fallen angel," my thoughts turned to that shot in the Deltarune trailer of the heroes standing on a ledge, facing down an angelic figure.

We learn at the end of Chapter 4 this is a Titan but like a lot of people, I thought they were facing down the Angel. However, I had not read Batman: Gothic when that trailer dropped, so when I first saw this my thoughts went to something from Joe the Barbarian I'll talk about later.

Now that Manfred was unable to be harmed or killed, he and the other monks took things to 11 until the nearby Dess river broke its banks, flooding the monastery and turning the surrounding valley into what is now known as Lake Dess.

"Dess," if you've somehow forgotten, is the nickname of Noelle's missing sister.

Which, yes, is short for "December" but this is what I was talking about with "none of this would be noteworthy in a vacuum but when taken alongside everything else I've talked about, what the hell?" Even weirder? "Dess" does not seem to be a real river or lake in Austria, I searched both and all I got back were references to this comic. But whatever, Gotham and Metropolis aren't real cities, either.

Mr. Whisper's 300 years of immortality are almost up, so he's devised a plan to get out of his deal with the devil. He was the architect behind the Gotham Cathedral, and within its windows is a particularly nasty strain of the black plague. When the cathedral's bell rings at midnight it'll shatter the glass and unleash the plague upon Gotham, and Manfred will offer the souls of the dead to Satan in exchange for his own. Why he thinks Satan wouldn't gladly accept all the other souls then take his anyway is anyone's guess, but rationality isn't Mr. Whisper's strong suit, I guess.

One convoluted death trap and fight in the Gotham subway system later, Manfred's plan is thwarted and Batman retires to Wayne Manor. As for Manfred, Satan is quite displeased with his attempt to get out of his end of the deal and calls in the debt early. The next morning Bruce receives a mysterious gift box containing...

... huh, where does Kris keep trying to dispose of their little [HeartShapedObject] at the start of Chapter 4 again?

What's Batman supposed to do with a bloody heart? The youngest of the nuns Manfred murdered all those years ago still roams the halls of the flooded monastery, so he takes Manfred's heart back to Austria and casts it into Lake Dess, hoping she'll get the message her murderer is dead and she can move on. As for where Fox is going with water, disembodied hearts, Dess, and a dark knight in Deltarune, we'll just have to wait and see.

Seven Soldiers is another old DC property Morrison brought out of the mothballs but it goes even further back than Animal Man, all the way to World War II. Like Final Crisis, Morrison's take on Seven Soldiers centers around a world-ending calamity, and since we're still waiting for Deltarune's apocalypse the juiciest bits might still be to come.

The premise is there's these creatures from the far future known as the Sheeda (based on the sidhe, an Irish fairy which is somehow pronounced "shee"), and every ten thousand years they travel back in time and ravage the world in an event known as the Harrowing, leaving just enough life to repopulate for next time. And yes, drop the H and the W and you can rearrange that into "the Roaring." A prophecy says the Sheeda will one day be destroyed by seven warriors, so whenever they conduct a Harrowing they make sure to start by targeting teams of seven. But what if the seven warriors weren't a team? What if they didn't know even each other, and had little in common?

Seven Soldiers jumps around the stories of seven heroes going through their own adventures, only two maybe three of which are fighting the Sheeda from the start while the rest just sort of happen to get roped into the conflict. One of them is a blue kid named Klarion.

There's also the Shining Knight, who's first seen crashing the Sheeda's mothership Castle Revolving. You know, like "world revolving."

There's a twist with the Shining Knight, but I'll save that for when we learn who the Roaring Knight is in case it's not who the game implies it is.

In the book's introduction Morrison mentions going through their old comics and trying to pick the seven most obscure characters with untapped potential they could find and give them a chance to shine (pluck them out of Comic Book Limbo, you might say), but either Morrison needed at least one character who wasn't completely unknown or Zatanna had a Mr. Freeze-style surge in popularity in the past twenty years because she's reasonably well-known these days. Not Batman levels by any means, but any half-dedicated DC fan will know of her. In fact out of the seven soldiers she's one of only two I was at all familiar with, the other being Mister Miracle. "Klarion" sounds familiar but I'm probably thinking of the planet the aliens in Garfield and Friends always came from, and I had actually forgotten until researching this page that Frankenstein appears in Final Crisis.

Zatanna is a stage magician who casts real magic by speaking backwards, but for whatever reason it switches between the individual words being backwards and the entire sentence being backwards. Maybe this inconsistency is intentional and how she speaks affects the potency of the spell or something. Anyway, a dumb wish caused her to lose said powers, and she's trying to get them back as well as find four books containing her father's magical secrets. And if that wasn't enough she suddenly has to play mentor to Misty, a girl with a die that can grant wishes and a mysterious connection with the Sheeda's champion, Neh-Buh-Loh, a horned warrior made of darkness and stars.

Zatanna's quest leads her to the mysterious Slaughter Swamp in search of the "Seven Unknown Men of Slaughter Swamp." Here she runs into Zor, an evil doppelganger of her father, and things get weird. Their battle takes place on the astral plane so to an outsider they look like they're just standing there trying to glare each other to death, but their astral versions keep growing and growing to try to outdo each other.

Eventually they break out of the comic and into the white space between their world and ours, and start using the very panels of the comic to fight each other like the Overman battle in Animal Man.

After subduing Zor, Zatanna finally makes contact with the Seven Unknown Men of Slaughter Swamp which I'm pretty sure are seven clones of Grant Morrison. She falls out of the comic again but this time she falls into the text-based space between worlds, the one Morrison controls being the writer and all, but she can see us reading the comic all the same.

Yes, Zatanna gets so big she stands with her head in the clouds and looks into Heaven.

Bonus points for Zatanna wearing high heels, by the way.

Now, Mister Miracle. I said I'd heard of him, but the only thing I really knew about him going in was he's the adopted son of Darkseid. Yes, "Thanos of the DC Universe" Darkseid. He's the biological son of Highfather, leader of New Genesis, but was traded with Darkseid's son, Orion, as part of some exchange program between New Genesis and Apokolips. He managed to resist Darkseid and Granny Goodness' brainwashing and, with the help of the New God Metron, escaped Darkseid and Apokolips entirely and now lives on Earth as an escape artist.

And yes, Orion was the god Darkseid killed with the Radion bullet in Final Crisis, which Batman then used against Darkseid.

But then it turns out that, because DC continuity, this isn't the same Mister Miracle I was thinking of. That's Scott Free (oh ho, I see what you did there) and the Mister Miracle in this book is Shilo Norman, who's not a New God but is still an escape artist. Norman is contacted by Metron during one of his shows instructing him to "free the bright ones," dragging him into the middle of a conflict between New Genesis and Apokolips. Now people on both sides are popping up in his life, his best friend is trying to hook up with prostitutes that are really citizens of Apokolips in disguise, and his own therapist turns out to be secretly working for Darkseid. And where Darkseid is involved so is the Anti-Life Equation.

Back when I talked about Final Crisis I summarized the Anti-Life Equation as a signal that mind-controls anybody who hears it. To elaborate on that, "anti-life" effectively means "dead inside" and the Anti-Life Equation fills the listener with despair until they're a hollowed out shell under the control of whoever spoke the equation to them. And yes, there is a Life Equation which can be used to negate the Anti-Life Equation, but it too can be used to mind-control somebody just with zealotry instead of hopelessness.

Oh, but Darkseid isn't content to speak the Anti-Life Equation to Norman over the phone. He shows up personally (though in disguise) to speak it to him directly.

When Norman manages to shrug off the Anti-Life Equation, Darkseid hits him with the Omega Sanction to trap him in a loop of anguished lives and painful deaths, each more degrading than the last.

And even that he manages to break free from. So, yeah, Mister Miracle's storyline is focused on freedom and somebody saying creepy hypnotic shit through the phone.

That leaves the Guardian, Frankenstein, and Bulleteer. The Guardian is a former police officer who resigned after he shot a random kid he mistook for the drug dealer who'd just shot his own partner.

We don't know what caused Toriel and Asgore's divorce or why he left the police force yet, but if they're connected to Dess' disappearance... uh, yeah.

Frankenstein - and before you pedants out there say Frankenstein was the doctor, not the monster, I'm of the mentality that the monster is the doctor's reflection so it's fine to call it "Frankenstein" too and in DC continuity the monster took the name of his creator anyway - is an immortal warrior sworn to defend humanity against supernatural horrors. After dealing with a mind-reading kid who slaughters his class on prom night Carrie-style and taking a trip to freaking Mars, he's roped in by his old flame, the Bride, to help her and her espionage group, S.H.A.D.E., investigate a small town that's been corrupted by a substance that turns everything backwards. Nice people become assholes, cows become meat-eaters, birds tunnel underground, there's a Ghostbusters reference somewhere in here I'm not quite putting together, and so on.

A glass giant containing some strange, toxic substance escaped a nearby research facility, so obviously the town has gone backwards because the giant put some mind-altering contagion in the water, right? Frankenstein braves a sip to figure out what the contagion is.

It's just water. The glass giant hasn't done anything to it, it's plain old water.

If it hasn't been contaminated by anything, why is the water altering the town like this? Because some scientists pissed it off.

There's that theme of water is reality and reality is water, again. Unfortunately there's no way to reverse the effects of the water so they have to go scorched Earth on the town. S.H.A.D.E. offers Frankenstein a lift but he says he'll walk, probably because he wanted this badass shot to end the issue on.

And finally, Bulleteer. Other than sharing Susie's reluctance to be a hero I don't really have anything for her, but if that "Asgore running over Dess with a car" meme comes true, I am going to have a field day.

One more thing I want to put a pin in. To help combat the Sheeda and the George H.W. Roaring, the gods of New Genesis gave humans seven treasures: a sword, a spear, a hammer, a cauldron of immortality, a winged horse, a Fatherbox that takes the form of two dice, and a sprite of living language. The Roaring Knight uses a sword and the Hammer of Justice a, well, hammer, but Jevil and Spamton NEO don't really mirror any of those. Well, not unless you really stretch and link Jevil and his J-shaped tail to the "sprite of living language" and really stretch and link the winged horse to Spamton NEO's angelic appearance or the dice to the two lenses of this glasses. Still, the idea of seven mythical treasures giving the heroes the edge against the end of the world is something I want to keep an eye on.

I'm not as convinced that Toby Fox has read Berserk as I am of him being a massive Grant Morrison fanboy (after the thing with Ragged Robin's brother I'd bet five dollars against it because in the one-in-a-million chance this is the mother of all coincidences, I'd get a far bigger payout for the price of a bag of chips) but if I'm to believe he made it through half the shit in The Invisibles then THE HORSE would be no problem for him. Still, the closest things to Berserk references I picked up on in Deltarune on aren't exactly on the level of characters calling the higher reality "Heaven" and alluding to "Heaven" watching them.

Before you ask what I'm smoking, no, Spamton saying Kris has guts on it's own wouldn't be worth mentioning, it's a common phrase. It's "Guts" having the brackets around it that makes it a little weird, but it's just as if not more likely a reference to the stat that affects your crit rate in Earthbound than the protagonist of Berserk.

Berserk is often dismissed by outsiders as "that hyperviolent manga where everybody gets raped" and... yeah, that's not untrue but when you read it there's a surprising depth to its world and lore. I'm by no means an expert on the mythos of Berserk so bear with me if I get something wrong.

I already explained the three layers of Berserk's world - the Physical World, the Astral World, and the World of Ideas - in Part 2 so I won't bore you by repeating it, but that third world, the World of Ideas, doesn't get brought up very often. In fact, I think the most we learn about it is in the chapter where Griffith encounters the Idea of Evil which is omitted from collections. The canonocity of the Idea of Evil is often debated, but Void and Flora allude to it in chapters that are present in collections so again, I think Miura just felt like he'd revealed it way too soon.

To influence the course of human history, the Idea of Evil is constantly sending these stone eggs with faces on them called Behelits (in the Dark Horse translation, a lot of fans go with "Beherits") to the Physical world, each one destined for somebody with a strong conviction to something. Faith, a dream, being the very best like no one ever was, whatever. One might even say they fall into the hands of particularly determined individuals.

When the holder of a Behelit has a big "fuck everyone and everything" moment that causes them to lose their faith in humanity, the Behelit temporarily merges the Physical and Astral worlds, granting the holder an audience with the Godhand where they can sacrifice somebody of importance to them to become a demon known as an Apostle. The Godhand are the most powerful demons and they stand atop, well, a giant hand.

The unique Crimson Behelit allows the holder to join the Godhand itself.

The Skull Knight has this trick where he infuses his sword with Behelits to form the Sword of Actuation, which allows him to cut rifts between the Physical and Astral Worlds. Remember back in Part 2 when I talked about his sword being covered in thorns, like the Thorn Ring? When he turns it into the Sword of Actuation, a twisting mass of vines sprouts out of the hilt.

One of the items Malius can create is called the Twisted Sword, but it's currently unobtainable because you need a Pure Crystal (hinted at to be a purified Shadow Crystal, or maybe even a distillation of multiple Shadow Crystals) to craft it. The other reagent is the Thorn Ring you get during a Snowgrave run. Is the Twisted Sword a reference to the Sword of Actuation?

Anyway, let's talk about Emperor Ganishka and the Great Roar of the Astral World.

Ganishka is the emperor of the Kushan empire and an Apostle, but unlike other Apostles who serve the Godhand he defies and seeks to usurp them. One of his tools in his crusade against the Godhand is a mass of other Apostles stitched together into a monstrosity known as the Man-Made Behelit. The power of the Apostles that comprise it connects it to the Abyss, the deepest part of the Astral World just before the World of Ideas and what is basically Hell in the Berserk world. The Man-Made Behelit is mainly used to create demonic soldiers called Daka, but how exactly Ganishka does that is a fun little surprise I'm going to let you read about for yourself!

I won't get into the details of Midland and the Tower of Conviction and the Neo Band of the Hawk, you can read that yourself if you're interested in the book but long story short, Ganishka's ambitions eventually lead him into conflict with Griffith, and Griffith completely hands Ganishka his ass. Seeking more power, Ganishka enters the Man-Made Behelit to soak up as much of the Abyss' power as he can and become to an Apostle what an Apostle is to a human.

The transformation swiftly destroys his mind, and he becomes a mindless vehicle of destruction which Daiba (the beared guy) dubs "Shiva" the destroyer. He even steps on legions of his own soldiers and revives them as Ganishka-spawn, I guess you could call them. A massive battle ensues, with humans and Apostles on one side and Ganishka/Shiva and his spawn on the other, and Griffith rides Zodd to the top of Ganisha where he, in his Femto form, incinerates Ganishka from within with light.

This is when the Skull Knight tries to ambush Femto and strike him down with the Sword of Actuation.

Unfortunately for absolutely everyone, Femto saw this coming and distorts space to redirect the Skull Knight's cleave into Ganishka, tearing him open and unleashing all that power he'd absorbed in - you guessed it - the Great Roar of the Astral World. The power of the Astral world floods the Physical world and merges the two into Fantasia. Beasts of human fantasy now fill the world and a giant glowing tree stands where Ganishka was struck down, at the base of which lies Falconia, the kingdom Griffith wanted since he was a child and damned the Band of the Hawk to Hell for.

tl;dr Ganishka in his Shiva form is a mindless, colossal avatar of destruction born of the deepest pit of human consciousness, is capable of creating little versions of himself, is destroyed from within with light, and is instrumental in an apocalyptic "Roar" triggered by a Knight that fucks over the world. Sound familiar?

Oh, and the five members of the Godhand are frequently referred to as "angels" and Void calls Griffith "the fifth angel" when he's reborn as Femto. So yeah, a Knight and an Angel were at the heart of the cataclysmic "Roar." Whether you want to call Griffith's ultimate dream coming true "the Angel's Heaven" is up to you.

After seven years of hype and speculation we finally see the Roaring Knight at the end of Chapter 3, and that it's a completely different entity than Kris. Also, the Roaring Knight's horns ends in three points like the Holidays' antlers hinting that it's Dess, Noelle's missing sister. Maybe it's Carol with a tiny chance it's Noelle herself, but it's one of those three, mystery solved.

(Note: For sake of discussion I'm going to refer to Dess as the Knight but again, it could be Carol, with Noelle at a distant third)

Thing is, we blatantly see Kris open the fountain at the end of Chapter 2. And when Susie opens a fountain in the church we see a Dark World's palette changes depending on who creates it, and the world Kris created has the same palette as the Card Kingdom, Cyber World, and Cathedral which were created by the Knight. Allegedly, I guess, in Chapter 4 King confesses he never actually met the Knight and only heard about it from Jevil, and Ralsei might just be assuming the Knight created the Cathedral's fountain. Castle Town also shares this palette, but I don't recall if anyone explicitly says the Knight created that fountain.

Also, Lancer and Rouxls Kaard are somehow able to exist in Kris' house despite being from the Card Kingdom, but not the Cyber World. And several of the Darkners in Kris' house petrify at the end of the chapter despite being present when the fountain was created, suggesting whether or not a Darkner "belongs" in a given Dark World depends on who created the fountain, not where it was created. So the Card Kingdom and Cyber World fountains can't have been created by the same person, otherwise Lancer would have been able to exist in the Cyber World.

And Gerson was created from his own dust which Ralsei says requires a very particular fountain.

I highly doubt either Kris or Dess were close enough to Gerson to do that, but you know who would have been? Gerson's son, Father Alvin.

So there's more going on than "Dess is the Knight, end of story." Also, what's with the voice on the phone, and why does Kris keep throwing us out of their body and putting us back in?

Going back to that idea of any character taken over by the Devil becoming the Knight like any Aeon taken over by Yu Yevon becoming Sin, then the Dark Worlds aren't being shaped by the will of a single person, but the combined will of the possessor and the current vessel. Here are three possibilities:

1. The Knight at the end of Chapter 3 and throughout Chapter 4 is Dess under the control of the Devil the same way the Sin of Final Fantasy X is Jecht/Braska's Final Aeon under the control of Yu Yevon. But should the Devil vacate her and take over another character i.e. Kris at the end of Chapter 2 or Alvin in Chapter 4, that character becomes the Knight.

2. The Knight, Dess, herself is the game's "Yu Yevon" and took over Kris and Alvin to open those fountains, along with whoever was used to create the others.

3. Only Dess is the Knight, and when the Devil takes over somebody else like Kris or Alvin it forms something else.

I still maintain that Noelle (or Noelle and Berdly) is the best candidate for the Knight/conduit of the Cyber World. But in Chapter 3 we learn you can leave the Dark World without closing the fountain through a door that's open in the Light World, opening up another possibility besides Rouxls Kaard for the Card Kingdom's Knight/conduit - whoever created that fountain could have simply left and closed the door behind them.

With the plot revelations of Chapter 4, I want to go deeper into the lore of Final Fantasy X but before I do let's discuss where I stand on the idea of Fox pulling from Final Fantasy X: there is no way in Hell he doesn't know about Final Fantasy X. I also have a hard time believing he hasn't played it. But as for whether it inspired Deltarune, two quirks in the new chapters lead me to believe Fox was at least subconsciously influenced by it, but whether he was intentionally influenced and to what extent is a tossup and I'm certainly not saying "These two graphical details prove the Yu Yevon Theory is totally true, everyone!"

After Yu Yevon created Sin, the first Summoner to defeat it was his own daughter, Lady Yunalesca. After this the Church of Yevon sprung up and taught everyone that Sin was sent by the gods to punish them for letting the war between Bevelle and Zanarkand get to where it did and relying too much on technology (or machina as it's known in Spira), but if they follow the teachings of Yevon and atone for the crimes of the past, the gods will call it off. One of the practices to pop up is the Pilgrimage, where people train to be Summoners and, escorted by Guardians, travel to Zanarkand to acquire the Final Aeon and put Sin down in the hopes that this time it won't come back.

When Yunalesca was killed by her Final Summoning she became an unsent (an unsent is, well, it's a ghost in FFX's world, don't worry about the details) and now resides in the ruins of Zanarkand to greet Summoners who complete their Pilgrimage and grant them the Final Aeon. All the way up to this point everyone talks about the Final Aeon like it's this single, special Aeon that's powerful enough to destroy Sin, but when they get there they find out the Summoner has to pick one of their Guardians to be turned into the fayth for their unique Final Aeon. The Summoner then uses their Final Aeon to destroy Sin, but Sin keeps coming back because a Final Aeon only destroys its exterior, leaving Yu Yevon to regenerate it.

It's not until somebody gets inside Sin and takes out Yu Yevon that Sin stays down.

Minor tangent, you can skip to the next paragraph if you don't care about Final Fantasy X. According to some official Final Fantasy X guidebook, Sin was only ever put down five times with decades if not centuries passing between its rampages. I find this super weird because the game suggests every time Sin is defeated with a Final Summoning it stays down for a few years as Yu Yevon rebuilds it and continues its rampage until the next Summoner puts it down, and there have been many Summoners and Guardians lost to the cycle. I guess in a sense many have if you count all the Summoners and Guardians who perished during their Pilgrimages.

Back on track. In my original theory, I referred to "psychic backlash" killing the Summoner when Yu Yevon possesses their Final Aeon. An Aeon's power is determined by the strength of the bond between the Summoner and the fayth, and a Final Aeon is created from somebody the Summoner had a strong connection with in life (Yunalesca used her husband, Lord Zaon). The purpose of the Pilgrimage is to build that bond between the Summoner and whatever Guardian they choose for their Final Aeon. This deep personal connection is what gives a Summoner's Final Aeon the power to defeat Sin, but is also what kills the Summoner when Yu Yevon possesses the Final Aeon and breaks the connection between the two. Imagine a tether between the Summoner and the Aeon, which Yu Yevon snaps and sends flying back at the Summoner. For a normal Aeon it's like getting cracked in the shin with a rope. It smarts, but you'll survive. For a Final Aeon, it's like getting struck in the face with a hawser cable. That is going to take your head off.

Okay, those of you familiar with Final Fantasy X are pulling on your hair right now and yes, Anima was supposed to be a Final Aeon. Anima is the Aeon that looks like a giant mummy in a Venus flytrap that gets dragged out of the ground by a hook, and she was meant to be Seymour's Final Aeon. Seymour is one of the game's four main antagonists and Anima's fayth is his mother, but he never used her to defeat Sin as intended. And yes, he'll say something if you summon her in the battle with Seymour Omnis. But for Yuna she's just an ordinary Aeon, which is why Yu Yevon possessing her in the Aeon Battle doesn't kill Yuna.

Is it possible, then, that Kris is not the one throwing us out but the Devil, Deltarune's "Yu Yevon," taking over Kris and similarly breaking the connection between us and them? Then when the Devil vacates Kris, the connection is reinstated. The voice over the phone is implied to be Carol but whether she's the Devil or working for them, I have no idea.

(So, something in the Snowgrave route might disprove this. I don't touch Snowgrave and only know what I've picked up from what others have documented, so that's a big hole to me)

So if the Final Summoning can't defeat Sin for good, why keep doing it? Because it's the only way.

Sound familiar?

The teachings of Yevon and the Final Summoning are false hope, but it's all Spira has and false hope is still better than no hope. And what does Yuna say when she hears this? She and the others tell Yunalesca where she can stick her false hope. They'll find a way to break the cycle and put Sin down for good. And this is why Final Fantasy X ~Will~ is so insulting and would be the biggest middle finger in the history of video game storytelling if it wasn't an audio drama released over a decade after the original game and thus easily ignored. (Final Fantasy X ~Will~ in a nutshell: Somehow, Sin returned. Yunalesca was right. Your efforts and the Aeons' sacrifice were for nothing. Go fuck yourself.)

I have no idea what is going on with the camera in that video. It does that in every video of that scene I could find, and even one I found of the original PS2 version.

So why, when Lady Yunalesca says there's only one way do we say "screw that," but when Fox says there's only one way we say "okay, got it"? Because one is an antagonist in the story, and the other is the literal creator of the world; of course we're going to challenge the former and take the latter at face value.

That's not to say Deltarune will have multiple endings. I'm not Fox, and I don't know what he's up to. But if it will he can't just come out and say so or it would defang the ending of Chapter 4. But when the discourse around his game has gotten to the point that people are comparing each other to puppy murderers for playing it and the biggest theorist on the Internet is using it to promote Alt+F4ing from life, I think he could afford to step in and say something (from the bottom of my heart, MatPat, fuck you.)

As for those two quirks in the new chapters I mentioned? First, when the Knight is flying around, it occasionally turns into an orb.

Which reminded me of the orb Yu Yevon manifests as during the Aeon Battle.

And when the Roaring Knight creates the fountain that spawns the Titan...

... my thoughts immediately turned to that pillar of dream water coming from the fayth in Mt. Gagazet.

The Knight freaking out before taking up its sword might be a nod to Braska's Final Aeon powering up and pulling a sword out of his chest when transitioning to the second phase of his fight, but I'm not as sold on this as the orb and the fountain.

You might be wondering why Yu Yevon keeps possessing the Aeons. Doesn't he realize he's being cornered? No, actually. The strain of maintaining Dream Zanarkand and Sin shattered his mind centuries ago, so he's little more than a moth being drawn to a flame. And if he ever had any control over Sin, that too was lost long ago, leaving it to mindlessly rampage across Spira.

And shit, I damn near forgot about the Sinspawn, monsters that drop off Sin. So looking at Sin and Emperor Ganishka, is there something in Japanese culture about a giant monster born of dreams, destroying everything around it while spawning small versions of itself?

Since my previous look at tarot cards I picked up three more decks: an actual Kawaii Tarot set that coloring book is based on, a dragon-themed one, and a Rider-Waite-Smith set I found in the Barnes and Noble bargain isles. So when I talk about what the cards mean, these are my sources:

Only Cat Tarot's booklet says what each card is supposed to mean upright and reversed while everything else just gives summaries of the cards. Well, if you can call this a summary. And while the Kawaii Tarot cards are really cute, the descriptions given in the guide are identical to the coloring book.

I do have the Undertale deck but as I've said before it's missing almost all of the minor arcana so it's more of a cute novelty than a proper deck, and it doesn't come with any documentation on what the cards mean.

So yeah, Lanino and Elnina aren't the Two of Wands, they're the Lovers. Their relationship even hits a rocky point and has to be reconciled, like the Lovers reversed.

Tenna is the King of Coins, which is about nurturing and helping others grow but reversed warns of being controlling, deceptive, and insecure. Tenna says he watched Kris grow up and taught them to laugh and cry, and may have also protected them during Toriel and Asgore's fights. But through the chapter he's hiding something (Toriel) and almost loses everything when he tries to dominate everyone else to compensate for his feeling of inadequacy (and in fact does lose everything if you're unforgiving to him). He's also obsessed with Points which take the form of coins in-game. Rider-Waite-Smith tarot depicts the King of Coins surrounded by plants and Tenna sprouts a flower from his nose when he's really happy, and the themes of growth might be reflected in his ability to change his size.

And I know the Coins suit is more commonly called Pentacles, I personally go with "Coins" for people who don't know what a Pentacle is: a coin with a star on it. Interestingly, Tenna's coins have + signs on them which are used for addition, while asterisks look like stars (on my keyboard and Notepad++ the * has five points but the font on my site gives it six points which ruins it) and are used for multiplication. And Tenna does use a lot of star imagery. Any connection between "Tenna" and "Pentacles" might be a reach.

So we have the King of Swords, the Queen of Cups, and the King of Coins, which I guess leaves the Queen of Wands but we've already seen what happens when we try to follow patterns in this game. Then again, during the Hammer of Justice fight, Gerson alludes to a garden "charred in an inferno of jealousy." The Wands suit is aligned with fire, and jealousy is an attribute of the Queen of Wands reversed.

Also, when Chapter 4 was revealed to take place in the church, I thought it would be the music and art chapter. Church choirs and organs are a thing, and the Sistine Chapel is known for the painting on the ceiling. Well, the church does heavily feature music but instead of art it also serves as the book chapter. So well done, Fox, you missed the opportunity to make the main boss of the literature chapter a Page.

In the Undertale tarot deck Gerson was the Hermit, but in Deltarune he's the Hierophant. The Hierophant is a wise teacher who believes that while some rules are good to follow others are better off broken. And as far as Gerson is concerned the prophecy can pound sand.

Cat Tarot's Hierophant is also blind in one eye, symbolizing the wisdom of Odin and knowing when to turn a blind eye, but none of the Hierophants in the other three decks have this feature. However, in the Undertale deck, Papyrus is the Hierophant and he does have one eye closed on the card. The Hierophant is also known as the High Priest and while Gerson was an explorer and writer, his son becomes a priest. And as the Hammer of Justice he's, well, Justice. As for the Hermit, that's Seam, the reclusive storekeeper who keeps to himself and observes the world from a distance.

One of the prophecies makes a reference to "the Queen's chariot," and the Chariot is one of the major arcana.

The Titan is the Tower, the card of destruction. It literally erupts from a stone tower and the music that plays while climbing it is called "Crumbling Tower."

The Roaring Knight may be the Knight of Swords, but I'm getting mixed sources about what the Knight of Swords means. Cat Tarot says it's about confidence and warning to not let hubris be your downfall, but the others say it's about courage and conviction towards a given task and it's hard to say whether either of those apply with what little we know about the Knight. The Swords suit in tarot is aligned with wind (Cups is water and Coins is earth), and the flavor text in the Knight fight does make multiple references to wind. The thing about hubris makes me think of Berdly, and some of Berdly's attacks involve tornadoes.

It could also be Death. Again, the Death card doesn't usually mean literal death but more commonly means change (i.e. symbolic death) but it absolutely can mean literal death and the change the Roaring Knight wants to bring to the world would certainly lead to a lot of that. And Rider-Waite-Smith tarot cards depict a knight on the Death card.

While Japanese will usually use the Japanese word for "death," "shi," for style reasons a writer might opt use the English "death" in katakana (Death Note and the Grim Reaper in Castlevania games pop to mind) which is "desu." You don't pronounce the U in "desu" (something about u's and unvoiced consonants i.e. consonants that don't use your vocal cords, it's been years since I seriously studied Japanese and I can barely read books meant for babies anymore) so "desu" is pronounced like, well, "dess." If the Roaring Knight is indeed Dess, her nickname could be a play on "Death." And yes, "desu" is also the polite affirmative in Japanese. Incidentally, remember how the final boss of Joe the Barbarian is the Iron Knight possessed by King Desu? Sorry, King Death?

But of course the real villain is the Devil, imprisoned in the depths, manipulating everyone from the shadows in pursuit of freedom. Catti also believes so, but thinks Susie is the Devil.

So if Susie isn't the Devil, what is she? The first three cards of the major arcana are the Fool, the Magician, and the High Priestess, and the Fool fits Kris and the Magician Ralsei (the Magician reversed suggests it's time to learn new things and Ralsei teaches Susie healing magic), but is Susie the High Priestess? That description I posted of the dragon deck's High Priestess talks about balance, and Susie is both a massive bully and a nice girl, is capable of both offensive and healing magic, and might be the key to restoring balance after the Roaring. And if the High Priestess is supposed to serve as a counter to the Magician (which the dragon deck calls the Shaman), Susie's hostility in Chapter 1 counters Ralsei's sickening sweetness. But Noelle is also capable of offensive and healing magic, and we don't know who's key to undoing the Roaring yet.

Huh, just a thought I had, don't pay it too much attention, but Queen says she wants to use Noelle to cover the world in darkness because she senses her inner strength. I wonder if the game wants you to think Susie is Strength and Noelle the High Priestess, but it's the other way around.

On an unrelated note, Cat Tarot's Death card is a vacuum cleaner, I wanted to share that with you because I think it's adorable. I also like that the Devil card in the dragon deck is basically Deathwing.

Back when I said Doom Patrol has two places where it cracks the fourth wall, I screwed that up because there's at least one more. When the Cult of the Unwritten Book summons the Decreator at the end of the Nurnheim arc, the comic itself breaks apart similar to when Mr. Nobody's painting disintegrates.

And what is the Decreator? It's described as God's shadow, created when He spoke "let there be light," but it manifests as a giant eye in the sky, erasing everything it looks at.

Boy, with the angel statue, doesn't this look familiar.

If you've seen the show, yes, the storyline with Nurnheim is taken from the comic. But while some elements are shared (the horse with a nail in its head, ringing a bell in Nurnheim's cathedral) how the Doom Patrol ultimately deals with the Decreator is completely different so if you've seen one version, the other's still worth checking out.

When you scoot on all the way over to the end of the comic the Candlemaker has two blank eyes and one with a pupil and iris, which is the one it fires its death laser from.

Unlike doors and tarot cards, eyes of destruction aren't the most common trope in Morrison's books. The only other examples I can think of are the tygers in Zenith calling their initiative to cleanse the world of the humans the "Horus programme" (because Britain) after the eye of Horus, the Tower card in Arkham Asylum having an eye on it, and in 52 Lobo becoming Pope to a magic space dolphin and stealing the eye from a death god that turns out to be...

Oh sorry, did I fail to mention that in 52, Lobo becomes Pope to a magic space dolphin?

If you have any doubts as to which of 52's four writers - Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, or Mark Waid - came up with that, the notes at the end of issue 17 confirm it.

Eyes in general pop up here and there. You had Intellectron back there. In Flex Mentallo, Limbo has an eye on his costume but in his case that's the "mind's eye" used to symbolize his psychic powers. And in Klaus, when the miners breach Krampus' prison under the town the first thing they see is his eye but the first thing you see of a major threat being its eye is a common trope. I really only want to focus on when they're specifically used to symbolize destruction, the same way Deltarune uses eyes in connection to the Roaring.

Are the eyes that bring the Roaring supposed to be our eyes? Father Alvin says the Angel watches down on them, and when Zatanna sees us watching her she references our eyes. But our eyes come from above while the dark eyes mentioned in the prophecy are coming from below, which would make them the eyes of Hell. So when the prophecy talks about the Titans emerging from "darkened eyes" I hope this a metaphor for the Titans being manifestations of negative emotions and a loss of hope (eyes are often called the windows of the soul, and after Jane has her spirits broken in the mental hospital the doctor narrating comments on how "something had gone out in her eyes") and not another clue Deltarune is going to end with Fox villainizing us for playing his game because the Roaring never would have happened and everybody would have been better off had we never butted in.

And just in case you weren't completely sick of me going on tangents about Berserk and Final Fantasy X, the Idea of Evil which lurks below even the Abyss, the deepest pit of the human mind, assumes the form of a giant heart covered in eyes when Griffith meets it.

And Ganishka, who becomes Shiva the destroyer after he gluts himself on the power of the Abyss, wears clothing that's covered in eyes.

Over Final Fantasy X, when you defeat all the Aeons and Yu Yevon solidifies, he turns into this tick-like thing with a glowing symbol on it.

That symbol is "A" in the Yevon alphabet, but tell me it doesn't look like an eye.

So what's with eyes symbolizing destruction? In an interview with Callahan at the end of his book, Morrison mentions how growing up during the Cold War they always felt like they were being watched. As for destruction specifically, Doom Patrol compares the eye of the Decreator to the eyes of Horus and Shiva.

Except the Eye of Horus is usually a symbol of protection. And while Shiva was the destroyer and used his third eye to incinerate the god of lust, his eye is usually a symbol of spiritual enlightenment, hence why a third eye on a character's forehead is often used to symbolize psychic powers like with Limbo up above. Maybe Morrison is referencing them because regardless of their meaning they're still the eyes of higher beings, watching us for reasons we can never comprehend.

I want to preface this section by acknowledging, yes, there is a perfectly logical explanation outside of Grant Morrison's comics as to why Deltarune is so obsessed with the color green: the SOUL's primary color is red, and green is the complementary color of red. That said...

When you look through the hallway dresser in the first chapter you'll find a bunch of crayons, but the green ones are missing.

This moment in particular interests me because over in Doom Patrol, Wally drew Flex's comics with a green pen.

"My Greenest Adventure" is a goof on "My Greatest Adventure," the comic line the original Silver Age Doom Patrol debuted in.

Along with drawing instruments, Spamton NEO's strings are green...

... as are the strings on the Archons of Nurnheim. Who are also curiously obsessed with the dark.

The juice Lancer digs up for a photo op is green...

... as is the juice the Fact cards were always stained with in both Doom Patrol and Flex Mentallo and what the shit is going on.

Okay, for some examples that don't completely creep me out, the lounge in Chapter 3 is called the Green Room.

When Dorothy is negotiating with the Candlemaker over the Telephone Avatar it mentions "the Muller child and the white bandage" but when we actually see his body, the bandage is green (again, gore warning). When Wally was hospitalized as a child in Flex Mentallo, he was obsessed with a green light in the room.

Just to get away from Doom Patrol for a second, Zatanna's search for her father's books takes her to a world with a green sun.

The fluid Castle Revolving uses to travel through time is green.

The death god and the eye Lobo steals from it are green.

Which is fitting because the so-called "death god" is actually a Green Lantern's space ship.

An alien invasion in The Invisibles manifests as a green abscess in reality.

And lest we forget, the Hand of Glory is green.

Uh, just like the hand of the Knight Queen draws in the sky.

And the hands shown when Ralsei is explaining what a Dark World is at the start of Chapter 3 and GAH.

You might be wondering, hey, green is the color of will in the Lantern Corps, and the Green Lantern's power is he can make anything he wants out of green light. Almost as if his power is making his dreams real. Does that have something to do with Morrison using it as the color of fantasy? While it's possible Morrison chose green because of the Green Lantern (though only Morrison could confirm or deny that), green being the color of will wasn't a thing until 2004 when Geoff Johns cleaned up the Zero Hour clusterfuck and added the emotional spectrum to the Green Lantern mythos in Green Lantern: Rebirth (not to be confused with the Green Lanterns title from the 2016 DC Rebirth line) so for Morrison's works, green as the color of will is just a coincidence. As for whether Fox pulled green from the color of will, only he could tell you.

(Addendum: Alpha tells me green was prevalent in Homestuck, from the color of the logo to Hussie's self-insert wearing a green shirt to the source of the big bad's power being a green sun. Okay, Hussie totally lifted that from Crisis on Infinite Earths, where the source of the Anti-Monitor's power was a black sun)

Some time since I posted Part 3, the YouTube channel I originally got all those Doom Patrol show clips from was taken down. I'm a little surprised it was up for as long as it was.

It turns out Chapter 4 did not feature sentient chairs and "Chariel" is just the name of Toriel's chair in the living room. I'll take the L on that one.

One of the Ambyu-Lance's attacks involves ambulances driving along a highway, trying to run you over. You can instantly pacify them by using Ralsei's action command and letting them run you over. Somehow, I didn't notice until I replayed Chapters 1 and 2 on my Switch in preparation for 3 and 4's release that there are cacti on the sides of the road.

So, this attack involves large vehicles on a desert highway, where said vehicles can potentially run over an anthropomorphic animal.

The song the trucker and hitchhiker are singing is supposed to be "Roadrunner" by The Modern Lovers but some of the lyrics aren't matching, "I'm in love with the modern world" is from "Modern World," and I don't know where "It will be all right" is from.

An important character in Joe the Barbarian I didn't talk about is Lord Arc because, like the Mirror Master in Part 1 of this project, nothing came up to make me reference him.

Lord Arc was, I think, the original god of the Iron Kingdom before King Death fell from the sky and dethroned him, and he's the one who gives Joe the call to adventure promising that if he succeeds he will "hear again the voice of [his] father." This page, with Joe on a ledge facing a giant being of orangish light, is the shot I was talking about earlier with the Titan in the Deltarune Chapter 3 and 4 trailer.

...wait, how did it take me so long to catch on to Lord Arc referencing King Death's "endless night"?

The prophecy in Deltarune: Chapter 4 warning of the Roaring is shown on panes of glass, while the prophecy Foxy shows Buddy warning of the second Crisis in Animal Man is painted on a rock.

Maybe it's a stretch to compare glass to rock, maybe it isn't, but you can at least draw a parallel between stained glass and paintings.

When characters refer to the "Bleedspace," the DC universe's version of the Dreamtime, I totally forgot "bleed" is a comic book term. Bleed is art that goes beyond the intended edge of the page that gets trimmed off during printing, so if the artist wants the artwork to completely fill the page there won't be any white around the edges. It also serves as a buffer so important stuff like text doesn't get chopped off. Also, the space around the comic panels is called the gutter (for whatever reason I thought the gutter was only the outermost space between all the panels and the edge of the page) and what does a gutter do but direct the flow of water?

I managed to find one more person who noticed the similarities between Animal Man's ending and To Boldly Flee's.

Leading up to the boss fight with him, Tenna asks if Kris remembers the good times they used to have together.

Which calls back to Morrison bringing up the lost and broken trinkets from our childhoods.

Are you fighting Tenna on the Cosmic Treadmill?

And is Lancer's motorcycle supposed to be a reference to the bicycle Mr. Nobody steals? The one Albert Hofmann made psychoactive (I was going to say that is totally a real word and to shut up but, uh, it actually is a word) when he rode it while tripping on LSD?

If the Knight is Dess, then her sword may be her baseball bat like how Kris' sword is their pencil. Sorry, is the Roaring Knight, the Knight of Darkness you even might say, wielding a bat? (And to clarify, no, the joke of Batman wielding a baseball bat was not lost on me.)

In what is quite possibly the biggest "how the fuck did I not realize this before" of this entire project, one of the members of Mr. Nobody's Neo Brotherhood of Dada is Bobby Carmichael who has no arms, but can control floating gloves Rayman-style. His right-hand glove is called the Love Glove which is also his codename, and he can reach into a pocket dimension and pluck any number of left-handed gloves from a tree (it... it's Doom Patrol, just go with it) with additional powers like the Shove Glove and the Techno-Glove (yeah, they don't all rhyme). But the Love Glove itself is constantly emanating hearts, and Bobby uses it to pacify his foes.

There's also an in-game movie called Blood Crushers 2 about a man who wakes up one morning without a hand, and Bobby's origin story is he woke up one morning without arms.

And I'm kicking myself for not realizing until I was looking at the Roaring Knight's page on the Deltarune wiki that the holes in the Knight's hands are reminiscent of stigmata, holes in the hands alluding to Jesus' crucifixion. After attacking Tenna, the Knight seemingly tries to vacuum up Toriel through one of its hand holes.

The doorway between our world and Nurnheim is a hole a man's hand.

The show calls it a stigmata but the comic just calls it a wound. This is probably because a stigmata is specifically a hole in the hand, so in the show the gateway was known to be on the hand while in the comic the gateway could have been anywhere and just happened to be on the hand.

You know what else in hindsight reminds me of the Telephone Avatar? Omega Flowey with all the cables coming out of him, and the kicker is his sideways mouth resembling the Avatar's tusks. You know, in Grant Morrison: The Early Years Callahan makes a comment on what a boring villain the Telephone Avatar is. I know it's a context thing, but I think the Avatar is amazing.

A weapon for Ralsei called the "FlexScarf" is available Chapter 3.

If this isn't an homage to Flex Mentallo, then it's at least an homage to the same Charles Atlas ads he is.

Going back to the Roaring Knight blatantly looking like a Deathcoat when it hauls Undyne into the bunker, during the battle with King Death's zombies Sir Ulrik grabs Joe and tries to haul him to the Hypogean Labyrinth.

He even swoops around before grabbing Joe the same way the Roaring Knight does before grabbing Undyne.

Klarion lives in an underground town descended from the lost colony of Roanoke known as Limbo Town. The citizens of Limbo Town are led to believe their town is the only life in the world with nothing but rock surrounding them, but legends speak of "Blue Rafters," a world beyond Limbo Town. Talk of Blue Rafters is highly taboo, but one of his friends shows him evidence of Blue Rafters in the form of the wrapper off a chocolate bar.

When Klarion makes it to Blue Rafters (which is the surface world, you know, the sky being blue and all), he's obsessed with all the strange sights including candy bars. So, yeah, chocolate-obsessed blue kid, you know?

After Chapters 3 and 4 were released, clips of a scene from Batman: The Brave and the Bold where Batman where Batman says "The Hammer of Justice is unisex" got overrun by Deltarune fans. This is hilarious and I will die laughing if this very scene is where Fox got the idea for his own Hammer of Justice.

In a rare instance of YouTube's recommendation algorithm being helpful, one day I was randomly recommended a video on the evolution of the Mad Hatter in Batman shows. It's been years since I saw his debut episode of The Animated Series, "Mad as a Hatter," and while I distinctly remembered the card maze I had completely forgotten he attacks Batman with an axe.

Yeah, shame it wasn't a scythe, but I decided to watch the whole video and after making it through the nightmare fuel that was his appearance in Batman: Bad Blood, I saw the clip of Jervis from 2016's Batman: Mechs vs. Mutants and... just... what is going on???

In Zenith, Dr. Peyne called the superhumans "tygers" after the William Blake poem "The Tyger" When Zenith meets Chimera in his apartment, it's citing Blake's "The Book of Urizen", and when St. John is gazing into Chimera after trapping the Lloigor in it, he's citing Blake's "Auguries of Innocence."

In Chapters 3 and 4, the darkness is associated with black bubbles. The inside of the Titan is made of black bubbles, and they pour from doors with Dark Fountains behind them.

When Fanny summons Mictlantecuhtli, black bubbles are pouring out of his eyes and mouth. When Bruce ends up at the end of time in Return of Bruce Wayne the aliens are consolidating the history of the universe for preservation, and there's a shot of pearls emerging from a pool of black bubbles.

And in Seven Soldiers, Neh-Buh-Loh's speech balloons are clusters of black bubbles.

When Ralsei tells Tenna "We aren't real" I wonder if he knows the Lightners, the creators, aren't real either.

Susie punching the prophecy and cutting her hand reminds me of Buddy headbutting the bathroom mirror and cutting his forehead. Zatanna also cuts her hand on the jar containing the sprite of living language during her fight with Zor.

Metron, the New God that contacts Mister Miracle, is almost certainly a reference to Metatron, an Abrahamic angel. "Metatron" is also one of Deus' pillars in Xenogears, which you can destroy before fighting Deus to weaken it. I bring this up because Mettaton is almost certainly a reference to Metatron.

Susie is perplexed as to why the prophecy calls Kris "the cage."

I mentioned Agent "!" having a cage for a torso, but when the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse first appears he's just a wireframe with a bird cage inside. So, like, a cage within a cage. The Doom Patrol's first attempt to stop him has Jane placing herself in the smaller cage in an attempt to control him.

But she's soon overwhelmed and the Doom Patrol and Brotherhood of Dada join forces to... well, you can check back in Part 2 for spoilers. By the way, I was calling the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse "Conquest" in reference to The Binding of Isaac, but in Grant Morrison: The Early Years Callahan calls him "Oblivion." I also thought the Doom Patrol being attacked by the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse was just a Morrison non-sequitur, but it all came together when I learned through Callahan's book what "dada" is French for.

In the comic Agent "!" blatantly has a tiny airplane with legs in his torso cage. If you're not sure, there's a scene that makes it much clearer but I don't want to include it due to spoilers but trust me, it's a tiny plane. But on the trade cover (volume 5 of the six-volume version, volume 3 of the three-volume version) Brian Bolland drew him with an African Gray Parrot in there instead. I have no idea why this is.

During the big battle in astral New York, the Candlemaker smashes through a window and rides two chunks of glass to the ground. There's just something odd about the detail of it having its feet on the glass I wanted to point out because it was clearly a deliberate choice, but I don't know what it's supposed to represent.

I learned through Callahan's book that Batman attacking Arkham Asylum with an axe is a reference to Hell's Harrowing, in which Jesus descends into Hell and tears down the gates to free the souls imprisoned there. This is also probably where Morrison got the Harrowing in Seven Soldiers and as I already pointed out, if you drop the H and the W from "the Harrowing" you can rearrange it into "the Roaring." Would it be a stretch to call Batman the Harrowing Knight here?

Callahan also makes the same observation about Zenith that I did, that Zenith isn't really the hero but the character the story is happening around.

The Filth occasionally cuts to this Superman proxy who was left insane and wheelchair-bound after he left his comic and entered Heaven.

I legitimately have no fucking idea what he has to do with the old man with the cat.

When I made that comment about having a "field day" if Asgore really did run over Dess, that's because after the other six soldiers get their shots against the Sheeda in, their queen, Gloriana Tenebrae, is finished off by Bulleteer hitting her with a car. I wasn't going to give this away until I remembered another scenario with a queen and an exploding car.

And on that note Tenebrae has a thing with apples and is capable of temporarily entering a more powerful form by biting into one.

Harkening to another fruit-obsessed queen.

At some point in the Chapter 4 spat between Kris and the SOUL, you go into the basement and turn off the breaker switch.

Joe's battle against King Death climaxes in him going into the basement (the Tomb of the Iron Knight in the dream world) and turning on the breaker switch.

I was iffy on whether I should put this here or in the next section, of stuff I felt was too much of a stretch even for this section because, what, you think Joe the Barbarian invented breaker switches or something? But Joe's bright red blood standing out the same way the bright red SOUL does gave it the nudge for me to put it here.

The basement manifests as the Tomb of Iron Knight in the dream world because that's where Joe's mother stored Joseph Sr.'s stuff, notably his chair and army jacket, after his death.

In Dess' bedroom you'll find army rations in the boxes and under the bed, and there's a camouflage jacket in the closet.

And I won't go into details because of spoilers, but don't think I didn't catch what was going on with Gerson's letter.

The church has an altar of what are called hope candles.

Later on you can explain to Susie hope candles are used to pray for people.

Dorothy's story about the Candlemaker, the man who would make candles for kids who were afraid of the dark, was corrupted when she learned about lighting candles to honor the dead. Jane's backstory is a minefield with what happened with her and her father and how she was split into 64 personalities and I don't want to go into it here, but towards the end of the book she goes on a trip to reconcile her 64 personalities... well, 63 as one of them, Miranda, destroyed herself before the start of the book. On this trip she thinks back to how she and the other personalities would go to the cathedral every Easter and light a candle to pay respects to somebody they couldn't quite remember.

As for how Miranda destroyed herself, she threw herself into the Well, the absolute deepest pit of Jane's mind.

If the Titans really are manifestations of what's lurking the deepest pits of a person's mind... let's just say yes, there's something massive down in the pit of Jane's mind.

In The British Invasion Carpenter talks about Morrison's alien abduction and compares it to a story about Samuel Taylor Coleridge writing "Kubla Khan." The story goes that Coleridge had a vivid dream and started to write it down, but was interrupted by a knock at the door and when he returned to his work he couldn't remember how the dream ended. Whenever Carpenter brings this up in one his classes he always gets students asking him if the story is real, and his response is that of course it's real, all stories are. Now, whether it's factual is another matter. So when Ralsei says the prophecy can't be changed...

Yeah, the prophecy can't be changed. Neither can a book once it's gone to print. But as for whether the future can be changed is another matter and only Fox knows.

Investigating the town was just a cover story, and Frankenstein and the Bride's real mission was to extract a highly-trained pilot who went down in the town, only to find he intentionally infected himself with the water trying to communicate with it. When Frankenstein destroys the glass giant, the Bride grabs a giant shard from it and uses it to behead the pilot to preserve his knowledge.

The weapon you get from the Roaring Knight is called the "Black Shard" implying it's a piece of glass, which Kris then uses as a sword.

Once in a great while Queen follows up words with synonyms, the way Huss does in Doom Patrol.

It turns out Lanino wasn't even designed by Fox but Nelnalium, which make me more confused as to why he looks so much like Lennox. Okay, unless Fox gave Nelnalium a rough idea of what he wanted Lanino to look like, I guess it's an easily explained coincidence and it's only the similarities of their names that pushes it into "weird" territory. Weather forecasters typically wear suits, Lennox and Lanino are both going for the well-groomed gentleman look, and sunglasses are for, you know, the sun even though Lanino's a moon.

As he tries to connect the dots on Mr. Whisper and the Gotham cathedral, Batman muses on how gothic architecture was based on a shape known as an ogive. Here he is drawing one for Alfred.

Admit it, you pictured Batman drawing Lancer.

On a more serious note, the door to the first fountain in chapter 4 is an ogive.

When you enter the room filled with images from all the prophecies, there's one of a string of spheres.

This comes from a prophecy talking about "the tail of Hell" I was unable to find even on my second playthrough, but when I saw that I thought "What the hell are Martha Wayne's pearls doing here?

Thanks to the research I did for this project, I cannot read this...

... without picturing Temmie reading The Filth and dry heaving. (VERY NSFW)

When the kids escape from Tenna's capsules, he makes a reference to shock therapy.

Shock therapy is how Jane's spirit is ultimately broken in the Candlemaker's Hell, and Maxie Zeus is undergoing shock therapy when Batman encounters him in Arkham Asylum.

More weird shit with the Titan and the Candlemaker: when the Titan first appears it looks human then turns into the angelic form for the boss fight, the same way the Candlemaker possesses the blank body then morphs it into its angelic form. Both's faces look like they're melting. The Titan has a bunch of weird protrusions coming out of its head, some of which look like flames and one even looks like an arm of the Candlemaker's candelabra rotated around. The Candlemaker has long, pointed fingernails in both Dorothy's visions of it and on the cover of the sixth volume of the six-volume Doom Patrol collection. Both will leave the dreamless higher reality "shambling aimlessly towards oblivion" and "lost eternally in an endless night."

When the gang returns to the Titan, Ralsei mentions how it's "been here the whole time." When Zatanna contacts the Seven Blatant Clones of Grant Morrison Unknown Men of Slaughter Swamp, she says she couldn't find them before because "they were here all along."

The Titan has an attack where two shadowy creatures circle around each other, and while the flavor text describes the darkness "slither[ing] like a snake" they look way more like fish.

And they remind me of the fish Arkham observes swimming around each other in Arkham Asylum.

There's this in-game game series, Dragon Blazers, which comes up a lot in Chapters 2 and 3. After you beat the Hammer of Justice, Susie and Gerson discuss how it was based on a book Gerson wrote, Lord of the Hammer.

I wonder if Foxy Tob is hinting at something.

After I originally uploaded this, I learned of a controversy with Chapter 4 and the Snowgrave route that led to the game getting patched. If you're on the Snowgrave route in Noelle's house, instead of the Tom and Jerry sketch you instead get the chance to force Kris to stab Noelle in the hand with the Thorn Ring's Light World counterpart, a literal thorn. When this happens the screen goes black and a giant red crack appears over Noelle. But when Chapter 4 first released you were shown a rose wilting, then its petals falling off, symbolizing the loss of Noelle's innocence. This was replaced with the crack because a lot of people thought this was a euphemism for Kris "penetrating" and "deflowering" Noelle.

Which is a shame because while the crack is creepier, you lost all the other symbolism associated with the rose. Love. Courage. Sacrifice. Jesus' crown. Kris is literally stabbing Noelle with a thorn, as in the spikes roses are covered in. And remember how the Skull Knight's sword is covered in spikes and sprouts vines when it becomes the Sword of Actuation? His shield has a rose on it.

So all his spikey bits aren't just to be edgy, it's rose symbolism. I don't think "amusing" is the word to use here, but it'd certainly be something if Fox was supposed to be invoking the Skull Knight here and everyone thought he was invoking Griffith instead (if you know, you know). And as unlikely as it was that Fox was specifically pulling from the Skull Knight with the rose, I find it even less likely the giant crack is based on the Skull Knight breaking through the Eclipse but who knows.

Over in Batman: Gothic, after his meeting with the crime lords of Gotham Bruce has a dream of his dead father and old schoolmates telling him to "unlock the rose." This is a reference to the nursery rhyme "Ring Around the Rosie" being about the black plague, and a hint at the connection between the plague and Gotham Cathedral.

My guess as to what the final prophecy is: Susie and Noelle kill each other. If Dess is the Knight, the "Angel's Heaven" is the Roaring, and Noelle is the Angel whose Heaven the Roaring is, then Dess would be trying to bring about the Roaring for Noelle's sake. Why, I don't know, maybe the Devil convinced Dess it will make Noelle happy, I'm just spitballing here so take it with a mountain of salt. Following this the so-called "only" way to stop the Roaring is to kill the Angel at the center of it all, and in doing so Noelle takes Susie down with her.

Heck, maybe the final prophecy changes depending on if you play pacifist, violent, or Snowgrave.

Asgore has a small stack of superhero comics sitting on his television.

Sometimes I wonder if Fox's father was the original Grant Morrison fanboy of the house (several of these books are older than Fox himself) and is the one who introduced him to Morrison, unaware of the psychic damage it was going to do to the kid. And this is a nod to that.

This is for stuff that felt like too much of a stretch even for the "Odds and Ends" section. Yeah, Fox could have pulled this stuff from the comics, but they're just as if not more likely to be coincidences and common tropes.

One of the chapter 3 minigames is an 80s glam rock band. Kris plays the guitar and wears a jacket with sequins in the collar, like Zenith.

Okay, I didn't intend for it to look like Zenith was scowling at Susie wailing on the drums, but it was too funny to "fix."

Toriel turns into a queen in the Dark World, while Queen Bree of the Iron Kingdom is based on Joe's mother.

One of the seven treasures in Seven Soldiers is a cauldron and Ralsei cooks with a cauldron but, I mean, witch's cauldrons have been a thing for centuries.

Another prophecy I was unable to find for myself references Asgore as "the flower man trapped in asylum." You know, like Arkham Asylum. But comparing Asgore and Poison Ivy might be a reach.

The cat in The Filth is named Tony.

I mentioned before that green is the color of will in Green Lantern and red is the color of determination in Undertale/Deltarune and "will" and "determination" are synonymous and green and red are complementary colors yadda yadda. But in the Knight's Dark World of the church, the prophecy panes about the hope of the world are blue, and blue is the color of hope in the Lantern Corps.

In Susie's Dark World the panes take on a purple color, and while I screwed up and gave her more of a hot pink color in that Spamton comic many Darkners call Susie "purple." There are no Purple Lanterns, but... okay, technically there are no Violet Lanterns either, they call themselves the Star Sapphires but shut up, my point is...

... violet is the color of love in the Lantern Corps.

Jackenstein is an obvious cross between "Jack-o-lantern" and "Frankenstein." This wouldn't even be worthy of this section because what, you think Seven Soldiers of Victory is where Fox got Frankenstein from when it's one of the most popular Halloween icons? Except the battle theme for the Titan is called "GUARDIAN" which was another one of the Seven Soldiers. But in Final Fantasy X, a Summoner picked one of their Guardians to be turned into a Final Aeon and by extension Sin and I've gone cross-eyed.

Susie telling King off for threatening to throw Lancer off his castle, with "CLIFF" in all caps, made me giggle.

I wanted to post this next one before but felt it too much of a stretch, and this is the perfect place to put it. When Bane breaks Bruce Wayne's back in Knightfall, Bruce passes the mantle of Batman over to Jean-Paul Valley who, uh, is totally nuts. Once Bruce recovers he retakes the title of Batman, and Valley adopts the moniker Azrael after the angel of death.

In other words, Wayne and Valley are the Knight and the Angel. And "Azrael" is the name "Asriel" is derived from.

I'm probably done with this page, but certainly not this project. I still have several more Morrison books to read, like their runs on JLA and Batman, and Deltarune: Chapter 5 is supposed to come out next year but this page is already quite chunky. I also want to check out some non-Morrison comics because there's at least one thing in Moore's Swamp Thing that caught my attention, and Neil Gaiman's Signal to Noise is about weird shit coming through the phone but I've already gone off the path with Berserk and Final Fantasy X. I dread to see how far this rabbit hole goes.

And yes, I really need to finally read Watchmen.

I'm not going to try to guess what Chapter 5's optional boss might be, mostly because Chapter 4 doesn't leave us any clues like the Shadow Mantle and the ending of Chapter 2 hinting at the television theme of Chapter 3. But also because after the first two optional bosses were little men based around things found at amusement parks who went crazy after realizing they're characters in a video game, fought in the basement of the big bad's hideout, Chapter 3's turned out to be the main antagonist of the game. Chapter 5's optional boss could be Seam, or a forgotten can of soda in the back of Asgore's fridge, or a bucket of Homestuck troll spit for all anyone knows. Maybe when the teaser for Chapter 5 drops I'll take another Killer Croc shot in the dark.

And just to hammer home how pointless it is to try to predict where Toby is taking this game, we've got the revelation of who Mike is. Yeah, the guy Spamton keeps talking about. When you beat Jevil violently he talks about "the queen" and Queen turned out to be the main boss of Chapter 2. And when you beat Spamton NEO violently he makes a final shoutout to Mike, so this Mike guy must be the main boss of Chapter 3, right? But then the main boss of Chapter 3 turns out to be named Tenna, somebody who, to my knowledge, was never mentioned in-game before. But then who is Mike?

There is no Mike, and there's a joke boss in Chapter 4 that mocks people for obsessing over him. So yeah, with Toby Fox Troll Logic™ and his love of subverting expectations, the final boss of the game really could end up being the Goddamn Batman.