Susie, the player, and escapism: a Deltatune analysis/theory
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Part 1: Fiction vs Reality.
One of the biggest themes in Deltarune is the idea of agency, the idea that when you play a video game you are essentially controlling another person.
The divide between player and player character is one that most people basically never notice when they’re playing a game. Take a more traditional RPG for example… in Final Fantasy 7, you play as Cloud Strife. In that sense, you ARE Cloud, but you are also aware that he’s his own person. You control him, meaning that you decide everything he should do. You can even choose his name at the start of the game.
However, sometimes he’ll do things outside of your control. These are the cutscene actions, when you lose control of the character and they do something without your input. Fundamentally, the player understands these as being cutscenes, and they do not question why the game has suddenly taken control from them.
On the other hand, you also have no issue referring to him as “me” as you play the game. You can be playing the game and think something like “I need to heal myself,” because you kind of understand Cloud as being you, since you are primarily controlling him. When the game’s controls switch to another character, that character becomes the new “you.”
Deltarune (and Undertale) love to play with this idea. At first glance, the player thinks of themselves as Kris, and refers to Kris with first person pronouns. At the end of Chapter 1, when Kris takes out a knife, most players understand this as being part of a cutscene.
But as the game progresses you learn that you’re literally puppeteering Kris around and telling them what to do, via the SOUL. The only times Kris can act on their own accord, is when they physically remove the SOUL from their body.
If the player character is the avatar you use to interact with the game’s world, then it’s correct to say that the SOUL is the true player character in Deltarune. You control the SOUL as it controls Kris.
With that in mind, it is also correct to say that there is a divide between you, the real life flesh and blood human playing the game, and the SOUL. Similar to how there is a divide between you and Cloud Strife in the case of FF7.
This is especially obvious in how people portray the SOUL in fanart, as if it were a character in the game. And that’s because it’s true, the SOUL is just another character in the story.
The following discussion points are related to the idea that Deltarune is a simulation created by Gaster, which seems to be the most correct assumption as of Chapter 5.
Imagine that Deltarune is divided into two layers for now: there is a “meta” layer, that’s the one from the beginning of the game when someone (presumably Gaster) talks to you as you create your vessel. And then there’s the “game” layer, in which the fiction of the game takes place. In short, this is where all the characters live.
The story of Deltarune is told via these two layers. In the Meta layer, you are presented with the fiction that Gaster created the Deltarune program in order to reach you. This was originally called SURVEY PROGRAM. You also have the ARG with the email responses, which are believed to be Gaster once again taking to you.
The characters in the Game layer can interact with the Meta layer. The most obvious example is Ralsei seemingly being aware of things like UI elements and stuff, and Kris seems to be aware of it as well, although they need to SOUL in order to interact with it.
It’s important to note that the Meta layer is not exactly the real world that you and me live in. In the real world, we know that Gaster is not real and that Deltarune is a game developed by Toby Fox that you can buy on Steam. But when interacting with the game’s narrative, you willingly get yourself to believe that you are part of the Meta layer.
Deltarune's Meta Layer, vs Deltarune in the Real World.
It’s roleplaying, essentially. Think of it as a haunted house or escape room - you know that all the characters are actually actors in costumes, but in order to engage with the narrative you have to interact with them as if they were real.
Why do I bring this all up? Because it’s the best way to explain my theory that Susie is a human girl who’s playing a video game.
Ok, I know this sounds bonkers, but the more I think of it the more it makes sense.
I don’t know the specifics, is she trapped in the game? Maybe, maybe not. It might not even be a literal thing. But I do believe that Susie is the result of someone who completely erased the barrier between “Player” and “Character.” Or at least, she is meant to represent that.
Part 2: The Player-Character barrier
You could say that all games have a player-character barrier. Sometimes that barrier is naturally thinner, for example in games where you can create your own character or that allow you to make choices. Some games have an enormous player-character barrier, like in RTS games in which the player is placed at a god level and the characters are literally obeying your commands.
In most games, this barrier can be dynamic. This means that the barrier gets thinner or thicker at times. The barrier gets thinner whenever you think of yourself as the character - referring to Cloud Strife as “me” for example. And conversely, the barrier gets thicker whenever you think of the game as being just a game.
You could say that the barrier is at its thickest when you turn the game off, and it is at its thinnest whenever you find yourself truly caring about the characters and story. In the case of Deltarune, the player-character barrier is naturally very thin. Remember, you play as the SOUL, and the SOUL is literally meant to represent your ability to take control of Kris. Whenever Kris acts of their own accord, this is explained diegetically. They remove the SOUL from their body, thus stopping you from controlling them.
Anyway, there is something that tends to happen a lot to people who play games - the flow state. Basically, this happens when you get so absorbed in a task that you forget that you’re a person. People who had spent hours in a flow state may come out of it hungry, or with a full bladder, or with pain in their hands from too much physical strain. But they were not aware of their own body’s needs during their flow state.
During a flow state, that’s when the player-character barrier is at its thinnest. You get so invested in the game that you stop being aware of your own existence in the real world. For a brief moment, the game’s world becomes the world that you inhabit.
But… what if it could get even thinner? So thin that player and character merge into one?
This is what I believe happened to Susie, in a way.
So, is Susie just playing Deltarune? She is, but the way she plays it is different from how you, the SOUL, plays it. You are controlling the SOUL, which in turn puppeteers Kris around. Susie is playing the game in a more traditional way, in which she’s controlling her own character, a purple dinosaur girl.
Why do I believe this is the case? Let’s go over the evidence. I’m going to start with the most obvious one.
Part 3: Hometown
We know a few things about Hometown: it’s a small town in which Kris, Noelle, Dess, Asriel and all the other characters have always known each other. It’s a typical small town, which doesn’t get a lot of newcomers.
Even Gerson, who was presumably a famous author, still lived out the rest of his days with his family in Hometown, and now he is buried in the local graveyard. (Well, he should have been at least)
Hometown only has a few exits: There is a road that leads out of town, which is blocked by police tape; there the lake; and presumably the shelter could also contain a way out.
In the Weird Route, Noelle mentions how she wants to leave this place. She wants to travel to the other side of the lake, to somewhere no one has ever been before.
She is talking about out of bounds. There is a lot of evidence supporting this, down to the Mother 1 reference with the Breadcrumbs. Noelle has always had a knack for trying to intentionally cause glitches in the games she plays, so when she says she wants to leave Hometown, it’s very likely that she’s talking about breaking out of bounds.
Deltarune does not exist outside of Hometown. Think about it - the only people who have left town so far have been Dess and Asriel (and I guess Onion-san). We’re told that Asriel left for college, but we have yet to see him come back. It was teased that he might come back for the festival, but in the end he couldn’t make it. Convenient, isn’t it?
And Dess is lost, with some evidence pointing that that she’s literally lost in the code. In other words, she has left the game’s world.
The entirety of Deltarune’s world is Hometown.
...
So, if the world of Deltarune doesn’t exist outside of Hometown, where did Susie come from?
Susie is clearly an outsider. She’s the new girl in town, struggling to fit in. She mentions bits and pieces about her life outside of Hometown, how she always struggled to make friends because she was always moving from place to place with her parents.
Unlike Kris and Noelle, we have no idea what Susie’s homelife is. Who her family is, where she lives. At the end of Chapter 2, Toriel asks Susie to call her parents, but she then ignores that request. She clearly does not care about her family… or maybe she doesn’t have one?
This is typical for the player character in RPGs. When you start a game, you are playing as someone who just got introduced into the world, whether it be literally a new planet, or a new town, country, etc. This is common because it’s an easy way for the player to relate to the main character - they are both experiencing the world for the first time.
I will mention that she is not the only character whose family never gets mentioned - Berdly also doesn’t seem to have parents, neither does Jockinton or Monster kid, etc. This could be because they’re minor characters, unlike Susie. Or maybe I’m really just reaching with this one.
Let’s move on to my second piece of evidence.
Part 4: The newcomers
Aside from Susie, there’s only one other recent arrival at Hometown, and that is Sans. I shouldn’t need to mention why this is significant, since Sans was the one of the few characters in Undertale who was aware he was in a game.
In the Chapter 5 Weird Route, if you examine San's house, this is what Susie says about it:
It's almost as if the house showed up out of nowhere. It makes sense, right? If the world of Deltarune doesn't exist outside of Hometown, then it means Sans had to have arrived there by unconventional means. He did arrive after Susie though, which is interesting. By the looks of it, he might have arrived at the same time as the SOUL did.
There are more similarities between Susie and Sans: namely, back in Undertale if you manage to kill Sans, he’ll bleed. He’s the only monster who bleeds after you kill him. Normally, monsters just turn to dust, but Sans specifically crawls away until he’s offscreen, and that’s when you hear the “death” sound effect.
Susie also bleeds. In chapter 1, she mentions that “everybody bleeds, right?” This could mean that Deltarune works differently from Undertale. I mean, we know that monsters get buried, so does that mean they leave corpses? Lancer also mentions blood, but this is inconclusive since he’s a lightner, so not exactly a monster.
And here's her reaction to Lancer telling the party he'll smash them into blood. I think it's interesting that this exchange even happened, and it could have been just a throwaway funny moment but I feel it's better to mention it...
And of course, when she punches the prophecy glass in Chapter 4, she's clearing bleeding from the broken glass. We haven't seen her bleed in the Light World, which could be significant... some injuries carry over from the Dark World into the Light World (as evidenced by Berdly's broken arm,) but we don't know the extent of it.
This could mean that monsters in Deltarune are different from in Undertale but... in Chapter 1, as you explore Hometown, one of the NPCs asks Kris “does it hurt to be made of blood?” which implies that having blood is uncommon among monsters.
So let’s recapitulate: Susie bleeds, but she also seems to be under the impression that everyone bleeds. If she was a monster, wouldn’t she be aware that most monsters turn to dust?
Let’s talk about worldbuilding for a moment.
When you create a story that takes place in a fictional universe, it is important to tell the audience about the concepts that are important to your world. But you also don’t want to break their immersion by pausing the story to explain all of these concepts. The solution is simple: have a character be oblivious to a specific concept, which then justifies another character explaining the concept to them.
Video games do this a lot, especially when the concepts in question are also part of game mechanics. And usually, the newcomer character is the player character.
Deltarune uses this technique quite a few times. In this case, Ralsei is typically the character that explains all the concepts about the dark world, and this makes sense because neither Kris nor Susie would be familiar with the dark world.
But when it comes to the light world, Kris already knows everything there is to know. They have been living in Hometown since childhood. This is enforced by other characters reminiscing about the past, talking about the things Kris used to do...
This is also very common in video games, and it helps the player character feel more like they’re part of the world. Susie acts as a newcomer as well, to help explain things that Kris would already know, like the Festival’s King and Queen for example. It makes sense that she would not know about Hometown’s traditions.
What doesn’t make sense though, is how the reacts to things that in theory she should know, by being a monster. In Chapter 4, when she retrieves the glass case containing Gerson’s dust, she doesn’t recognize what it could be. She thinks it’s odd that there’s a glass case with dust inside... but Kris immediately reacts, and tells her what it is.
She seems surprised by it.
And sure, maybe she’s just surprised by the ritual of burying a monster’s dust, which could be unique to Hometown. But even so, as a monster would she not immediately recognize the significance a glass case full of dust? The book on funeral rites specifically mentions that “everyone knows that.”
Susie's bit of dialogue was likely just included to remind the player of the significance of the dusty hammer, since understanding what happened is important to the story. But even so, that doesn’t mean that Susie had to be unaware of it. It could have been written as if she’s just surprised to see the glass case inside Father Alvin’s desk, a reaction similar to Kris’s.
But it was a deliberate choice to make it seem as if she’s unaware of a monster’s funeral rites.
(I’m fully aware that I could be reaching with this one though.)
Then there’s Kris themself. See, when the other residents of Hometown talk about the past, that increases the thickness of the player-character barrier. They are talking about stuff that Kris would know, but not the player. The SOUL does not know anything about Kris before it showed up in the game...
Susie is in a similar position. When she talks to Noelle in Chapter 4, there is a very clear divide in how they talk about Kris; Noelle can clearly tell that something is wrong, while Susie insists that Kris had always been like that.
I do think it’s kind of interesting how Susie doesn’t seem to catch on to what Noelle is telling her. Noelle is clearly confiding to Susie something that seemed to have been bothering her for a while. But Susie is unable to understand what she means, because her experience in the game is fundamentally different from Noelle’s.
Part 5: Susie can control the game
I think this might also be another really relevant detail. Whenever you, as the SOUL, get a choice, Kris will allow you to choose between the options they give you. You can always say whatever you want and get a reaction out of the other characters.
Susie has always been able to cancel your choices. This could imply that she’s making a choice of her own that overrides yours. Or, that being from outside the game, she just has more control than the average character.
She's the only character in the game who's able to do this. Granted, maybe it's because she's the one that you spend the most time with, but still I think it's worth noting.
During battles, it’s implied that the other characters are merely following your commands out of their own volition. This makes sense narratively, because the SOUL can only control Kris. Note that the only characters who join your party are Ralsei, Noelle and Susie. These characters all have something strange going on with them, and we don’t know how a “normal” character would react to being in the party.
In Chapter 1, Susie makes a point to leave and do her own thing as soon as she’s able to. Later, she joins your party and starts to follow Kris’ commands out of her own volition, but even then she gives her input sometimes. She’s the one who questions why Kris should be the only one to ACT, and during some boss encounters you’ll get the “Susie’s idea” act which is the thing that allows you to win the fight.
Worth noting here that not only did she learn S-Action by herself, she was able to make Ralsei learn R-action regardless of him wanting to do it or not. She seems to be able to activate new abilities to help you progress through the game, in a way that Ralsei can’t. Not only that, but she makes him learn new stuff.
Chapter 4 seemed to be very centered on her place in the prophecy. We have “The Girl” sequence, and I know some people theorized that The Girl could be Noelle or even Dess, but I think it’s clearly meant to be Susie. The Holidays have antlers, which the silhouette on the prophecy did not have. The silhouette Girl is shown carrying a sword, which in RPGs is the weapon typically associated with the player character. This feels intentional...
Yeah, Susie doesn’t yield a sword but that doesn’t mean that the Girl isn’t her; it could simply mean that she’ll come to yield a sword at some point. Or that she was supposed to?
Susie also works as a character foil to Ralsei, who has always believed that he must be whatever other people want him to be. Like a video game character, programed to follow a role. But Susie’s whole deal is making her own decisions, even when it seems like she shouldn’t be.
Ralsei is in a sense, aware that he’s a video game character, but Susie isn’t. Most residents of Hometown aren’t. But Susie specifically behaves like a player character.
“Noelle does Noelle things” - When Noelle says this it implies that she knows that she has a role to fulfil. She’s also aware of everyone’s roles, and thus is inspired to break free when she finally figures out that Kris has managed to break free from their “programming.”
Susie is not aware of this. So yeah, I don’t think she’s aware that she’s in a game. Her player might be aware of the game they’re playing, but they are not playing with the same level of cognizance that the SOUL is. They are playing just like a regular video game, with the belief that Susie is a character in her own story, and all the other characters are also just NPCs in the game.
This would not explain why Susie sometimes just lets you make decisions for her. She also wasn’t aware of the Dark World’s UI until Flowery pointed it out to her. I think this supports the hypothesis that Susie and her player are merged into one, perhaps in a super intense flow state. And when she lets you (The SOUL) makes decisions for her, it's because she actually trusts your decisions (under the assumption that they are Kris's decisions.)
Deltarune exists in this weird place where the “fictional” spaces already share a very thin barrier with the “real” ones. This can be seen in the original Legend of Tenna game basically mirroring the weird route; or in how Noelle supposedly created Friend by glitching Cat Pettez 2. Both of these games are said to be actuals games the characters can play within the narrative, and yet they have a connection with the light world.
More than that, the characters can interact with the Meta layer: become lost in the code, or break out of bounds by themselves.
Susie is doing the opposite. In the same way this game has the power to interact with the “real world,” Susie’s player allowed themselves to become completely sucked in by the game. Instead of breaking free, they have broken in.
In other words… Noelle is a video game character who is aware she’s part of a game, while Susie is a real person who is not aware that she’s playing a game.
Part 6: The theme of escapism
Escapism is the other theme of Deltarune. The idea that we get attached to inanimate objects… and video game characters can be considered inanimate objects.
The Dark World is a world of imagination. It’s a world where the laws of reality get bent and twisted. And more importantly, it’s a world where you get to be the Hero. You can get cool powers and wield cool weapons, and you become more important than you could ever be in the Light World.
It is like a video game.
Literally, that’s what it’s supposed to be… the Dark World is where the UI becomes more detailed, all the gameplay happens there, and it’s always described as being an adventure. IIRC, save points where also originally intended to only appear in the Dark World prior to Chapter 4.
Susie is clearly the person who enjoys being in the Dark World the most. I mean, she literally lives there, describing it as her home. From what we know of her, she has had a very rough and lonely childhood, which means that when she finds a place where she can be important and always surrounded by friends, she latches onto it.
I’m trying to draw a parallel between Susie the character, and Susie the player. In the same way that Susie (the character) wants to spend most of her time in the Dark World, Susie (the player) would want to spend most of their time immersed in a game’s world.
In Chapter 3, when Ralsei reveals the true nature of the Dark World, and how darkners cease to exist when they leave, Susie refuses to accept it. In her heart, Ralsei is real, and will always be her friend. Same as Lancer, Queen, Tenna...
The narrative is arguing that as long as you care, a fictional character can feel real to you. It’s okay to care deeply for stories. But on the other hand, it seems to be making the argument that neglecting reality can be a problem: at the end of Chapter 5, Asgore says that while it would be nice to live in a dream in which all his flowers can be his friends, he still acknowledges that he has responsibilities in the real world.
We don’t know yet how the rest of the game is gonna play out, but I’m expecting it to put Susie kind of on the spot.
This whole time we have been closing the fountains to prevent the Roaring. The SOUL is the only one with the power to close the fountains, thus ending that Dark World. Similar to how in a game, the player is the only one with the power to turn it off.
Susie does not have that power. Maybe Gaster had contacted the SOUL in an attempt to get us to save her, as she had fallen into the game’s world and can no longer get out (or maybe she doesn't want to.) Or maybe the SOUL is just there to carry out a task that Susie was originally supposed to do, and is now unable to carry out.
I have also seen others speculating that the final prophecy involves closing the fountain in Castle Town, which is why Susie got so upset at it. It would make sense in the way that once we finish the game, we’ll likely not play it again.
Have you ever had that feeling? I remember the first time I played Twilight Princess, I actually one-hundred percented my save file because I was having such a good time that I didn’t want the game to end.
Susie probably feels the same with the Dark Worlds.
Part 7: Who is the player Susie?
I think the answer to this could be in Undertale. We know that Clam Girl mentions a girl named Suzy. If Deltarune truly is a game created by Gaster before the events of Undertale, maybe this could mean that Suzy is the player… but that wouldn’t add up, since earlier I had claimed that the player Susie is a human like the SOUL’s player.
I also have no idea what Sans’ deal is, but he clearly has something to do with all this. Is he another player that became part of the game? In Undertale he seems more like he’s upset at the idea of an outside player resetting the game over and over. But why is he different from all the other monsters, including his own brother? Whom I might add, never actually shows up in Deltarune?
Why are Susie and Sans the only characters who have moved into Hometown after the events leading to Dess’ disappearance?
This is where I run out of speculation... I know this theory is flawed so far, but I believe there’s some merit to it.
Thank you for reading this!