Since Chapter 5 of Deltarune came out, I’ve been making audio rants and doodles about it to the point that one or two people have joked it’s like I’m hooked on an ex-girlfriend. The reality is that, because the game has a story and a lot of us were personally invested in what that story could be, I just keep getting into conversations about it, I get stuck ruminating on the story, the points someone else made, the subject of the argument, and so on.

When it felt like things were going good and I was just excited for the next installment, there wasn’t a whole lot I felt like I had to talk about. Like everyone, of course I had a bunch of my own cool theories and thoughts, but the ones I felt were most productive to share were those thoughts concerning the characters and their possible motives. Actual story-related stuff, rather than trying to guess about the various phantoms in the code. After all, with most fiction, you’re not going to want to go back and examine all the small details if there isn’t a lot of good stuff in the front-facing work. Before I care about the mysterious Scripulous Fingore who only shows up for three seconds in one optional scene, I need to be invested in the world and the characters in it. If the setting of Deltarune feels meaningless then of course Sripulous Fingore is meaningless too.

And this is why, for me, it feels like analyzing Chapter 5 has been more like an autopsy. I feel like I want to scoop the guts out of the game’s stomach and see what it ate before it died. Or rather, I want to understand what about this chapter made me feel so disappointed and so disillusioned, especially when this is one of the few pieces of media I genuinely let myself get excited about. I mean, I’ve lived through Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Toy Story 4, live action reboots of every single Disney film, the gradual death of almost every single game studio I ever liked, and so many other letdowns in media that it’s hard to keep track at this point. Seeing a franchise go down in flames is so natural to me that I usually trust they’re just going to do that unless they prove otherwise. But for whatever reason I didn’t even question whether or not I’d enjoy Chapter 5 of Deltarune – I just assumed it was a given that I would!

Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy things. These days I just anticipate that everything needs a little pinch of salt. There might be a new series out that’ll be pretty cool for one season, and if I don’t love the next season, I can quit watching. I didn’t really like Digital Circus, but did enjoy analyzing its writing and where it was going wrong, but I haven’t enjoyed that enough to actually watch a movie about Digital Circus. I might bring myself to watch it if some friends join in with me, because friends will make the experience more fun, but I’m not going to sacrifice that time to watch Digital Circus in the gloomy solitude of my bedroom with nothing to keep me company but the asthmatic snoring of my dachshund.

I almost quit playing Deltarune during Chapter 5, except my son is into the game and wanted to watch me play through it all. He’s still too young to really master the bullet mechanics, and in fact isn’t even good at the old JRPG mechanics of pushing “attack” and healing often enough not to get annihilated by random piles of snot. He thought Super Mario: Legend of the Seven Stars was a hilarious and awesome game right up until Croco kicked his ass and he got booted back to his last save – that’s when we both learned that kids today don’t really get trained much on save points, because his last save was practically at the game’s starting gun.

He tried Deltarune on his own for a bit, and it was not as unforgiving as Legend of the Seven Stars. Deltarune often sets you back to a reasonable checkpoint to try again, but if you didn’t save when the game gave you a chance in those old games, that is your fault. I tried to explain he got to keep all his XP but it wasn’t enough to keep him going, and with Deltarune there is no XP gain really, so it doesn’t get any easier for a young child and, perhaps like platformers of olde, you just need a parent or sibling to do the hard parts for you.

But let me tell you, the flowers in Chapter 5 almost – not quite, but almost – provoked the same visceral reaction from me as the Underground Railroad did when I played Fallout 4. See, in that game, when I got to the Railroad, they informed me they’d been spying on me, but they still needed to “test me” to see if I was worthy being their errand boy. It was at that time that I realized I could probably finish the game a lot faster if everyone in this room suddenly died. This is also why I don’t know anything about the character “Father”, but people tell me you learn about as much by killing him as you do by working with him.

See, in Undertale, the precursor to Deltarune, Toby makes certain light of people who play JRPGs by shuffling back and forth, grinding for levels until they can trivialize encounters. We did this as kids because, like my son is right now, we were stupid idiot children incapable of even the most basic strategy, and when a game gives you the option to brute-force your way through a problem, it’s the option that requires the least amount of thinking. Yes, it causes you to come across as psychotic, but I regret to inform everyone that kids are just slightly psychotic, especially when you ask them to play within the realm of imagination land. Barbie cheats on everyone, and GI Joe commits war crimes.

As an adult, however, the point at which I become a psychotic angel of death is always right around the moment I find myself no longer immersed in the fictional world, and when I instead start wondering if I’m putting off household chores so that I can learn the inner thoughts of a dipshit in a tutu who’s dating an even bigger dipshit with a gun pointed at my head. Now don’t get me wrong, I recognize that by the end of a game like Cyberpunk 2077, I have personally killed enough people to depopulate an island nation, but I will still sit there and listen to what Takemura has to say about his family before I brutally and unapologetically ruined everything for him – and it’s unapologetic because you are not given the option to be nice to Takemura. You can only be an asshole to him every time he talks to you, and the fact that Takemura still tries to be polite with you only makes me like him more.

I love Takemura because he’s trying so hard not to tell you what he really thinks about you throughout the game. You give him so many reasons to think your character is the worst person since the guy who invented Kellogg’s Cereal, but the guy stoically eats his humble pie and coordinates with you as best as he can. I think my favorite interaction with him is if you make a frontal assault on a highly guarded Arasaka facility, and he’s laughing at you because he thinks you’re going to die and that you deserve it. He went over a plan with you, painstakingly establishing everything you could have done to not be in that position, and he can’t help himself because you’re finally going to get your stupid, dickhead comeuppance, and then he stops laughing when you blow up the giant, killer robot he assumed was going to smoke your ass.

In many ways, he reminds me of a less friendly Kim Kitsuragi, a character from another game who’s patiently trying to work with you having a mental breakdown in the middle of investigating a murder.

You do have the option to be so insufferable that Kim eventually screams at you, because you keep coming back to him with all these insane theories about yourself, or him, or society that has nothing to do with the plot or the subject of the murder. And yet, I couldn’t bring myself to do that to him, and in fact most players can’t, because Kim is so on the level with you. He quickly recognizes our hero nearly drank himself to death before Kim arrived on scene, and he approaches the situation with as much reservation and tact as he can muster. Normally, in most games, I’d be inclined to screw around a lot and see what every dialogue option does, but somehow Kim made me so conscious of my choices that I got laser focused on my job and I finished the main plot of the game just so that it’d feel like he respected me more. The only side quests I did were the ones where Kim tried to hide that he was secretly interested in doing them, at which point that was kind of great, because he was being a stick in the mud, but it made it feel like you were causing the both of you to have more fun and bond together as a team.

I couldn’t not finish Disco Elysium. Kim would have been sad.

All that said, fuck most of the characters in Deltarune Chapter 5. And for a variety of reasons, too. The first big nail in the coffin was Flowery, and I cannot understand how anyone turned their view around on him – or actually, that is a lie. I know why people suddenly like him at the end, and it makes me hate him more.

Flowery’s thing is pretty much exactly what caused the Underground Railroad to get splattered across their own basement. He’s a smarmy, condescending prick of a character who shows up at a point in the game when you’ve already established and proven yourself. We’ve already been through the big mentor moment with Gerson and Susie, we’ve tackled a Titan against the expectation that it’d be impossible, and yet he still acts as though you have a lot to learn and you’re far beneath him. Ralsei immediately hates him, which feels like the correct reaction, and in fact I believe that’s what most players felt initially.

Now, if this had been an open-world RPG like Fallout 4, I probably would have emptied a shotgun into him after this went on for a little while, and I would have missed all the “character development” he gets from a single dramatic scene at the end. The scene is, he enthusiastically rushes at the primary antagonist of the series and quickly dies, but he acts like he did it as a valiant effort to help you, so people sort of understand they’re meant to accept Flowery is redeemed. Yet, he could have not been suicidal and his impact on the plot would be the same, so in reality the whole scene was just for Flowery, for Flowery’s sake. Think about it – this character could be cut entirely and if nobody told you he ever existed, you wouldn’t have reason to think a character got cut.

It doesn’t help that Chapter 5 is easily the most “tell don’t show” chapter in the entire game so far, and Flowery helps contribute to that by apparently informing Susie about meta concepts like the “config menu” while the two of them are off screen.

Oh, really? So I assume Flowery got to see your reaction to that while you were both beyond my notice, but I have no idea how that got explained such that Susie is excited to hear she’s a character in a video game. This scene, here, was like the “Baby shoes, never been worn” of undermining the seriousness of your story. Susie is told, off screen, that there’s a config menu, and she’s just cool with it? Like no rational reaction. No existential crisis or anything. Just, “Oh yeah, the smuggest character we’ve seen since John Harvey Kellogg told me about it, and that’s fine.”

This here was one of the moments where everyone would have gotten the shotgun in Fallout 4 – no, actually, this is worse. I didn’t even have to do anything to kill the game at this point. This was the moment in Fallout 4 where you have to visit the Children of Atom.

See, in Fallout 4, one of the mandatory things you have to do is wander into an irradiated wasteland to find a small town populated by the dumbest people in the game, which is truly an accomplishment for Fallout 4. There are raiders willing to live side by side with robots that are programmed only to blend raider ass, and yet they are not as dumb as the Children of Atom. The Children of Atom live deep in radiation that would kill them all, they are armed with weapons that can only inflict harm via radiation, and they are surrounded with ravenous, blood-thirsty beasts that become sexually aroused by the smell of human blood, and those same beasts are immune to radiation. If you were like me, you ran straight from the edge of the wasteland to the town as quick as possible because you didn’t want to prolong your exposure to subatomic death, which means you were being followed by no less than six giant scorpions hellbent on the destruction of any primate dumb enough to stop running. Unfortunately for the Children of Atom, they aren’t programmed to start running.

It’s like if you decided to have a civilization of mermaids that lived under water, and then for some reason some asshole in the writer room said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if all the mermaids were armed with super soakers, because they have kind of a water theme?”

It becomes Schrodinger’s Idiots, where as soon as you look in the stupid-box where these people live, no one with a brain could believe this society was able to exist. I appear, and the dominoes fall! Everybody dies, because that’s the only logical thing that would happen!

It is not quite as bad as the Children of Atom, but man, Deltarune is dancing dangerously close to that line when you’ve got people bringing up the game menu as an ironic joke that you’re not allowed to second guess or ask any questions about. Susie now knows I can adjust the volume in the game’s settings and she’s just… I’m not allowed to touch that or interact with it in any way. What am I meant to think? Would a normal person react that way to finding out their friend can mute the world? Is she cool with it because Flowery taught her how to mute everything too? This is falling apart and I haven’t even done anything to cause this.

I realized fairly quickly into this chapter that the writing didn’t feel right, and wound up easily persuaded in conversation with friends to believe that this chapter wasn’t even written by Toby Fox, because it seems almost nothing at all like his previous work. Of course, his name is still present in the credits, and no one else is cited as doing the writing, but that same thing happened with Terry Pratchett when his daughter finished off the last of his books.

In the case of Pratchett, his final books were full of little niggling details that just didn’t sit right. Things that didn’t feel like him. For example, in “Shepherd’s Crown”, the witches call a sort of witch-moot to establish Tiffany Aching as the new queen of witches, and this scene is so bizarrely antithetical to everything ever written about witches prior to that book that you can’t help but think someone else wrote it. At one point, Tiffany casts a fireball spell in order to kill a bunch of faeries, and it’s the first time in perhaps the entirety of the Discworld setting where you ever see a witch cast fireballs. However, you’ll only see Pratchett’s name on the books – they don’t tell you upfront that other people helped write them or to what extent Pratchett was truly involved in the process.

“Flowery told me about the menu” feels like someone other than Toby trying to copy how Toby might have written Sans if they barely understood it. For example, in Undertale, when you visit Sans’s room, your character will wind up walking almost endlessly into the dark. This goes on and on, until Sans flips on the lights and you find out there’s a treadmill directly in front of the door, and you’ve literally been going nowhere the entire time. You’re set up with the expectation that something strange and mysterious is going on, and then that gets playfully subverted. This, however, is like Hagrid bursting into the room to tell Harry Potter he’s a wizard, only for Harry to reply, “Oh, yeah, Flowery told me,” and then the book does nothing with this information because they’re being wacky and subversive! What if Harry already knew he was a wizard and didn’t care! Eh? Eh? What do you mean that’s boring?

I think the only good excuse I’ve seen for being this subversive is the suggestion that it’s supposed to distract you from wondering what else Flowery and Susie talked about. Flowery might have revealed… well, heck, all of the plot to Susie, for all the player knows. In which case… well I mean that’s just one more character who knows more than they’ll say and who apparently intends to keep everything a secret from the player. So oh well.

As for the other characters? Well, Seth and Aqua did grow on me over time, but mainly because they had a good two man act going on. You’ve got a crazy person in Aqua, doing everything wrong, and then Seth having a heart attack trying to sort it all out. Aqua by herself felt very trite at first, like the infamous “penguin spork of doom” whispered of across the dark corners of the internet, but as soon as you pair her up with someone trying to talk her into sticking the spork into a light socket because that’s got to be a brilliant strategy or else why has no one else thought of it – now you’ve got a comedy.

Seth is also easily the best designed character among the flowers. Everything about them screams nerd so hard that even those naturally acclimated to pocket protectors would want to stuff Seth’s head in the toilet. And while I’d like to give credit to Deltarune’s team on this one, the fact is, they were straight up copying Seth from Illusion of Gaia.

I point this out because a really notable feature of Chapter 5 is the feeling that most of the flower characters don’t fit the game that well. Aqua is tolerable if only because there’s nothing outstandingly strange about her, but typically the enemies in this game are based on some kind of inanimate counterpart in the real world. All the “color” characters, plus Seth, are supposed to be flowers, but none of them have any themes evocative of flowers. In fact, when I was first introduced to Aqua, I thought she was going to be some kind of ghost that was haunting the grotto she was standing in.

I didn’t look at this and think, “Ah, yes, this must be the first flower.”

Instead, partly because the chapter is set in Japan for no reason at all, I assumed she was supposed to be some kind of folklore ghost.

It’s possible that maybe Aqua was supposed to be a little child wearing an oversized, hand-me-down shirt or something, but if that was the case I feel like they really could have emphasized the floppiness of the sleeves more. I actually can’t say for sure if they were going for the look of an oversized shirt, however, because the general themes and ambiance of Chapter 5 are a tad schizophrenic. None of the flowers are consistent with the surroundings of the chapter, and the dark world is supposed to be set in a flower shop. The only reason it becomes Japan is because Asgore owns a single manga which is laying in the shop upstairs. You don’t actually see the manga until the end of the chapter, so you’re not exactly primed to expect Japan for any reason.

Regardless, the dumb leading the blind shtick Seth and Aqua have going on make some of these issues easily forgivable, and I was willing to look past SUDDENLY JAPAN if it meant more interactions with these weirdos. It’s also pretty fortunate that while you’re interacting with Seth and Aqua, Flowery kindly fucks off to go advance Asgore’s character arc while they’re not on screen. I mean, it’s not fortunate for the story of this chapter, but it was fortunate that I got to have some fun with characters I actually like instead of being subjected to one I hate.

But speaking of the flower design and not fitting in, probably the worst offender of all has to be Yellow.

What am I looking at, here? Is this a Deltarune character? He looks like he got lost on his way to an audition for the Muppet Show, and he looks like the Muppet Show was going to reject him, at that. This is a guy who would have a hard time finding a place to stay in Avenue Q, partly because I assume he doesn’t make that much money in the cowboy-themed Chuck E Cheese where rejected muppets have to work to make a living. As soon as you start talking to Yellow, you discover he’s supposed to be endearingly stupid, and he does at times succeed at being endearing, but not always.

Basically, Yellow’s thing is that he’s an unattended special needs child who thinks he’s a sheriff. After wandering around for a while, he accuses you of destroying “Blue’s flowers”, and you probably did, but Susie says you didn’t do it. Instantly convinced, Yellow resolves to kill himself as a punishment for his own wrongdoing, and the F@&$ Squad is then required to follow him around, disarming all of his Looney Tunes antics before he hurts himself.

This causes you to stumble into Blue.

Now Blue is… apparently Blue is what the kids of 2026 refer to as “zesty”. I don’t know what the fuck that’s supposed to mean, but apparently it’s what you call it when Lucio from Overwatch puts on a tutu. I think maybe it’s a polite way of saying someone looks stupid, but in a dress.

To make matters worse, Blue’s facial sprite is doing this beatific smile thing all the time, with pronounced cheek bones and what appears to be a beauty mark. Now, it’s NOT a beauty mark, that dot is just supposed to be part of the nose, I think, but my brain kept reading it as a beauty mark. The eyelashes are emphasized, and it looks like he has an earring in the right ear which, I’m told by the gay youths, is part of the mesozoic era gay signals no longer practiced by modern homosexuals. I assume that’s not actually true because you could probably still do the earring thing if you felt like it, but basically it’s just a less common or more esoteric style than it used to be.

So at a glance, what kind of personality would you assume Blue is? How might you describe them in as few words as possible? If you said “cult leader”, I don’t know how you guessed it, but you’d be right.

Blue explains that they are an endless font of forgiveness and tolerance, and they begin to award you a key you need to advance the game just for being a good sport and hanging around. I think I was still with the game up to this point, while I felt like Blue was supposed to be odd and you were supposed to think they were odd, but harmless. Then Blue realized that you’d gotten mixed up in a negative way with Yellow, and they withheld the key.

As is often done in cults, as soon as the cult leader suspects treachery, all that endless benevolence evaporates. Suddenly Blue begins looking around the stage, and you have to backtrack across everything you’ve done during these shenanigans with Yellow, picking up random “evidence” under the assumption Blue is at some point going to make you prove your innocence. It’s unclear what Blue is going to do to you, but the other flower characters appear during this sequence and make it clear that they take Blue’s opinions quite seriously. Blue is a figure of leadership and authority somehow.

Now, again, I want to emphasize what a cult-like feeling this is. The way a cult works is they promise a better, happier life, and they will gradually feed you acceptance and a certain amount of purpose until you’ve sold off all your belongings and cut yourself off from your family. Once you have nowhere else to go, nowhere else to turn, and nothing left to give, that’s when the cult leader will begin withholding the “love” they originally promised. Now, in order to remain a part of the collective, you’re subject to the whims and emotions of the leader. If they want you to gather evidence for you own trial, you will. If they want you to be subjected to a farce, you will be, and that’s exactly what Blue sets up.

It turns out that in spite of Yellow’s obviously feeble mental ability, he is in love with Blue and will do anything Blue tells him to. Blue responds to this with his own affection, but the relationship feels disgustingly unequal. Yellow thinks of himself as someone who upholds the laws and the local righteousness, but is too dumb to know what the laws are, so he trusts in Blue to tell him how to do everything. This means if you upset Blue, Yellow goes after you.

Blue allows Yellow to take you to task, but then acts like this is all out of Blue’s hands. Blue promises to help you if you need help. All you have to do is beg at Blue’s feet for his benevolence… to get out of a situation Blue is willfully allowing you to fall into. I think quite a few players probably don’t read enough between the lines to get quite how evil Blue truly is during this segment of the game, but none of this is copacetic. He makes it seem like he’s helping you, but you know he could just obviously stop this.

What proceeds is a trial wherein Yellow accuses you of every crime he can think of, and you have to pin each crime on a different flower person. The final crime is perpetrated by Blue, and when you highlight him, he makes a face that made me concerned selecting him would result in him… withholding his tolerance.

Cult leaders commit crimes against their followers regularly, and it’s obvious Yellow was wrapped around Blue’s little finger. When it came to this moment, I knew it was up to the game to decide what happens next. You can attempt to get through this kangaroo trial by fighting, but the flowers heal themselves and are immortal. You have an easier time killing the Titan than dealing with Blue on your own terms, basically.

For merely accusing Blue, Yellow threatens to kill you. Then Blue confesses they stole Yellow’s “Special Petals”. Instead of holding Blue accountable, Yellow puts his own gun to his face and declares he’d rather take his own head off his shoulders than live in a world where he has to punish Blue. Blue then informs Yellow that he stole Yellow’s petals to make a present for Yellow, and somehow it winds up being Yellow who apologizes and who seems in the wrong.

But hold on, didn’t Blue steal from Yellow? Blue can’t just say it’s for Yellow’s “own good”, he still could have asked if he could have the petals for something special and there wouldn’t have been a theft to cause Yellow any distress. It seems wrong that Blue felt entitled to Yellow’s belongings like that. I don’t even let my wife touch my fingernail clippers because she loses the dang things all the time, and because we have an equal relationship, she asks if it’s okay to borrow them, and then returns them when she’s done. She has her own fingernail clippers, but they are perpetually missing. The point is, you can’t just disrespect and steal from your partner, regardless of how petty it is or even if you’re doing it to make your spouse a present.

But Yellow is, basically, a child. A child that Blue, in spite of being Yellow’s lover, has complete and total authority over. If Blue asked Yellow to kill himself, Yellow would. And when I saw this final scene it re-contextualized a lot of Yellow’s goofus attempts at suicide. That is, this is the personality that Blue prefers beneath him as a romantic partner. Someone who cannot and will not stand up for themselves, who is quick to give up on themselves at the slightest sign of doubt, but who will stalwartly attack Blue’s enemies should Blue express the desire. This is just filthy.

After all this, I hated both Blue and Yellow. Yellow only to a certain extent, because he was too child-like to really lay the blame at his feet. Blue, however, is scum. From that point on, I tried to avoid interaction with Blue as much as possible, mainly because he gave me the impression of being a dangerous person wearing a brittle mask of benevolence over a true face of malevolent cruelty. Blue is the kind of person who asks for unyielding respect and obedience, but who can’t even fucking ask if it’s okay to filch your special petals.

Blue marked the first character in Deltarune that I’d legitimately rather defeat in battle than help and spare, but it wasn’t even an option. I think I was intended to like Blue, because Susie mentions several times how cool he seems.

You can take two paths, and it’s unfortunate that I started with Blue and Yellow, because over on the other side were Orange and Green. They weren’t terribly interesting, but they were also pretty harmless, so if I’d gone through their segments first I probably could have done it without feeling so wary and rankled about what motives the flowers might have.

The thing is, this is a mouse and a lady with a frying pan. Like, what happened. Am I still playing Deltarune? They’re not fantastical monsters, they’re not household objects. It’s a lady and a mouse. They don’t even do anything all that interesting. The lady cooks food, which you can collect if you don’t get burned by the cooking fires, and the mouse will punch you.

Back in Chapter 3 I was fighting the TV remote, and the boss was a TV. In Chapter 1, I fought a checkers piece, and the boss was a playing card. In Chapter 4, I met a bunch of plastic cups, fought a jack-o-lantern used for Halloween decoration, and then fought with God’s tools of apocalyptic judgment. How’d I go from these imaginative and whimsical creatures to fighting a mouse and a lady? I can fight mice and ladies in Skyrim, I don’t need Deltarune for this!

Come to think of it, what happened to the enemies in general? In every other chapter, all the enemies were inspired by objects found strewn about the place the dark world was created in. Game room pieces like chess pawns or cards in Chapter 1, plugs, sockets, and viruses in the computer lab of Chapter 2, I battled a live studio audience of shadow guys in the TV chapter, and I’ll be honest, the church chapter having ghost enemies was a stretch but at least I can see it.

What is this scarecrow guy?

We’re in a flower shop. You’re looking around, and you spot… what? I asked my friends if they had any ideas, and one person suggested maybe he was one of those little wooden posts they use to help keep plants upright. Or maybe it’s one of the tags that tells you what a plant is? But I didn’t see how that really becomes a scarecrow.

What is a “Netskie”? These fox guys. Are they compost, maybe? They look like roots with leaves attached, so I guess this one sort of gets a pass, but I’m not sure why it shapeshifts. Honestly, really, the Netskie is probably forgivable, but I’ve already begun a spiral of questioning everything.

And what about this? This… bird. Thing. I didn’t dislike this enemy and I thought it was pretty funny that you could make it cry it until surrendered, but in terms of a thing you’d find in a flower shop, what the heck is it? It’s a bird buried up to its neck in sand. Is this a Japanese folklore monster? I don’t know what I’m looking at.

But bah, I’ve admitted now I’ve begun to approach a spiral of questioning everything, and that’s not a great place for a game to have its player. We’re at the point where I know we’re supposed to be seeking a shelter code from Asgore, but I’m wondering why would Asgore even have it. He’s trying to investigate dark worlds, right? Well, there’s a dark world in the shelter, which he has one of the keys to. So does he not know there’s a dark world in the shelter? Speaking of Asgore, what is he doing?

Ah. Yes, the horrible day.

Yep. The strange dark fountain.

Prove what?

Yeah, your obsession with the dark worlds must have been pretty serious, given that you let it drive your wife away.

Huh? But… wait. What about the Horrible Day? And driving your wife away? I mean, it’s nice that you realized in between scenes that it’s time to let all this stuff go, I guess, but why did you let it consume you in the first place?

This stuff with Asgore is writing so bad you normally only see it in a fanfic. You might see or hear people saying Asgore is a “pivotal character” to this chapter, but he absolutely goddamn is not. If you look up “all Asgore scenes” on Youtube, you’ll find a grand total of maybe ten minutes of video. I guarantee you, you are going to spend more time dealing with Hatsune Miku in this chapter than you will learning anything about Asgore or why he ever cared about anything. Seriously, you get more insight into Hatsune-Fucking-Miku than you do into Asgore, and I only wish I were kidding.

Whoever wrote this chapter basically skipped all the actual meat and potatoes of writing a story, and they rushed straight to the big money shots. The exciting heartfelt resolution, where Asgore tells you he’s proud of you and ready to put all this behind him. But why? I mean, you don’t say hardly two words to the guy. He doesn’t do anything. Nothing happens!

Which brings me to the point of this article and its title namesake. Bergentruck. It’s one of the fandom’s dumbest theories, but Chapter 5 was so badly written that I think the chapter supposedly about Asgore and his motives, somehow, against all common sense, actually made the Bergentruck theory more reasonable than it started.

Allow me to explain: Bergentruck is the theory that Asgore hit his friend’s daughter, Dess, with a truck. That’s it. That’s pretty much the whole theory.

It comes with its own stupid song that has millions of views. Pretty much nobody believes that’s how the story goes, and prior to Chapter 5, all logical sense implies this COULD NOT be what happened. But NOW look!

Originally, people believed that Asgore was obsessed with dark worlds because they were somehow connected to the death or disappearance of Dess. He was unable to let go of his hunt, because dark worlds represented closure for his dear friends Rudy and Carol. Carol was providing funding for Asgore to look into these things, because she believed in what he was able to find. Yet, this hunt made Asgore seem insane, and that association rubbed off poorly on Toriel, who teaches children. The school won’t let insane people teach kids, so to protect her own reputation she began to push back against the idea of dark worlds, and eventually divorced Asgore when it all went too far. Her refusal to believe in their existence led to a split with Carol, and now the two women don’t speak to each other.

At least, that’s what one would think. This is all the most obvious thing you would conclude given the information available prior to Chapter 5.

But now we know Asgore was willing to admit, with almost zero provocation, that dark worlds were kind of dumb and bumming him out. He can quit any time. He can just go tell Carol, “Hey, I’m not into this anymore.”

That means there’s almost no way investigating dark worlds had anything to do with the death or disappearance of Dess. In fact, Asgore never had to investigate, and never cared about it, because he hit Dess with his truck. The dark world stuff was just a weird, unrelated, obsessive hobby.

The answer was staring us in the face this entire time. Bergentruck confirmed!