Deltarune Thoughts Post Chapters 3&4 Part 3: Ralsei

Yep, posting a second one of these in the same day. On a single topic, too, but it's a pretty major one:

Ralsei's Identity

Ralsei has very much become a fan-favorite character, to nobody's surprise. Yet despite how much more insight into him we've received in these last two chapters, we still don't really know anything new about his past.

But we have received a whole lot of new information about darkners and dark worlds in general that we can start using to infer at least the outline of what Ralsei's whole deal is.

In particular, Ralsei clearly has a whole thing about his "purpose" being to serve lightners and the prophecy. That scene of Susie entering his room was, frankly, gut-wrenching. And any future playthroughs of Chapter 2 I do will absolutely involve choosing to give him the gift.

A new (at time of writing) Youtuber has an excellent video covering the topic of Ralsei's... clear self-esteem issues which I'll link here instead of going through in detail. It's definitely worth a watch, and it really helped me crystallize some of my thoughts on this topic.

The step beyond the video I'd take here, though, is to put forward in earnest (i.e. not just "Gaster did it") the idea that Ralsei might indeed have been created specifically for his role. After all, someone had to make the dark fountain in the closet. It's not unreasonable for whoever that was (Kris, the Roaring Knight, etc.) to have also planted a Darkner there for Kris and Susie to find, in addition to ensuring they would be the ones to show up there due to the chalk being stolen.

This would explain quite a lot.

Why doesn't Ralsei know any other Darkners despite Darkners that encountered each other as objects being familiar with each other? Because whatever object he's "based on" hasn't ever encountered anything complex enough to be an actual darkner. Probably due to having been made right then and there in the closet before the fountain was opened.

Why is he so gung-ho about his role? Because he really was made specifically to fill that one role.

I think we can even consider the widespread headcannon/theory of Ralsei being Kris's old monster horn headband to be disproven.

Recall that Tenna and the other Chapter 3 darkners know a huge amount about the Dreemurr family, especially considering that one story we get from Ramb about Kris and (probably) Noelle playing pretend. But... Kris was wearing the headband back then. All the time, apparently, probably even to school. So why is Ralsei so utterly familiar with the concept of people being friends?

Friendship... isn't just...
About being happy all the time.
It's something far, far greater than I could've imagined...
-- Ralsei

Time flies... Seems like just yesterday you and that girl had everyone here lined up.
Queen on her side, King on your side, Tenna in back... Oh, it was chaos, CHAOS!
Heh, only kids like you two would take a laptop home just to play make believe.
-- Ramb

A similar sort of reasoning could also apply to the idea that Ralsei is Kris's knife, but I'm not ready to write that one off totally yet. We just don't know enough about Kris's history with that knife to know if they're comparable in that way. But it also might be moot since I'm not sure how to get around the question of how the knife winds up back in Kris's possession after leaving him behind in the various dark worlds. We certainly don't see him wind up in Kris's pocket as they're sealing the fountain... in fact, he seems to make a point of being off-screen when a fountain is being sealed.

And regardless, it's clear that the closet was prepped for the purpose of being a dark world before the fountain was open. If nothing else, you'd expect a supply closet dark world to be much less empty - it almost seems like someone cleared out all the shelves beforehand, really.

Whether all of the above leans more towards the Roaring Knight (Dess, likely - see my first post in this series) having opened Ralsei's fountain or Kris, though... is harder to answer.

Related Topic: Ralsei, Asriel, and Dess

Ralsei's similarity to Asriel is obvious both in-universe and out. Which a lot of people have interpreted to indicate that he is most closely connected to Kris, for similarly obvious reasons. It's a pretty reasonable conclusion, and makes up a considerable part of the weight behind the idea of Ralsei being Kris's headband or knife.

But Dess also has a very close connection to Ralsei. They were almost certainly dating to some extent when Dess disappeared, judging by Noelle's story of Dess wiping Noelle's tears with Asriel's jacket and the fact that Asriel "somehow" lost a retainer in her room. And the dragon book thing, whatever's up with that.

It's really not much of a stretch to conclude that a fragment of Dess desperate to return to the light world would create a darkner resembling a younger Asriel. Younger since it seems Dess disappeared quite some time ago. After all, we know that the mind of whoever makes the fountain has a significant impact on what the darkners in the resulting dark world are like. Especially after Chapter 4.

It's left very ambiguous just how long ago, though. Asriel probably hasn't been off at college for more than a single semester, Asgore being removed as police chief was probably connected to Dess's disappearance yet he may not have been divorced from Toriel that long, Berdly winning the spelling bee happened probably not long after Dess disappeared... but we don't know for sure how long ago any of those events were.

It would even kind of make sense that Ralsei's dark fountain is somehow distinct from the others by being "made of pure darkness", then, since if the Roaring Knight winds up being a fragment of Dess it probably doesn't have the entirety of her "will", if any of it at all. Or perhaps all of her "will" but nothing else, depending on how Toby means that word. In either case, whatever fountain it makes could easily be more "pure" than one made by a more "complete" person like Kris or Susie.

Of course, this would kind of require that the Roaring Knight be capable of things other than roaring and knighting, which we haven't seen any evidence of yet. Unless there's more fragments of Dess running around behind the scenes, I guess, which feels like just adding epicycles for the sake of it. Maybe Kris made whatever turned into Ralsei and cleared the shelves in the supply closet, while the Knight just opened the fountain?