None of this should be news to you (and if it is, then I'd politely suggest clicking off and playing the game yourself :P), but the central conflict between Kris and us, the "player" is perhaps the single most interesting aspect of DELTARUNE.

Kris, even before The Fuckening, is an immensely troubled person. They have trouble feeling at home with a town full of monsters, generally dislike attention, lack relationships that aren't strained, estranged, or just plain fantasy to them, and they aren't even comfortable in their own skin. I feel like it's not really a stretch to posit that, regardless of how or in what circumstances our connection with them was made, they wanted, more than anything, to be someone else.

But in allowing us to take the reins of their life, they have to reckon with a horrifying question: Were they so unpalatable of a person that our simple, even stilted displays of paragon kindness, are preferable over who they really are? However much they embody the angsty teen archetype, they're still a *person*, and it must sting to know that this pantomime shambling about in their flesh is somehow better at being them than *they* are.

This is not to say that we are in the wrong for playing DELTARUNE. Far from it. Our relationship with Kris is closer to mutualism than parasitism. A Toby Fox story would never villainize the player without good reason; the genocide route of UNDERTALE is less about murder being wrong and more about the existential horror, from a fictional character's perspective, of someone who's fallen out of love with a story, scraping the edges of their plate for more, more, MORE. Something, ANYTHING to keep the flame alive, rather than move onto something else, ANYTHING else. The game doesn't villainize you for this, but instead empathizes with you, holding this feeling up against narrative foils, picking apart what it's like to have wrung a world dry, and what that does to both the world and the reader.

Toby Fox's handling of the player's influence over Kris is likely in much the same boat. Kris may loathe us for the stranglehold we've put their life in, but they adore the adventure we allow, the friends we've let them make. There's overwriting someone's life, and then there's gently nudging a troubled, scared group of teenagers in a healthier direction, a *happier* direction.

And really, are we not, as players of the game, in the same boat? Are we not looking for a reprieve from the world around us? Don't we kinda wish we had a place in Kris's world, too?

DELTARUNE's coveted "one ending" will not involve the player being told off for controlling a child. It will end with us saying goodbye to a friend, a world.