~~~ WARNING! This theory contains spoilers for pretty much all of deltarune thus far, so it's recommended you play the game all the way through before reading. We apologize for the inconvenience. ~~~ The Weird Route of deltarune has been the subject of some pretty intense debate lately, especially with the absolute chaos (, chaos!) of Chapter 5's Weird Route content. Besides Kris and Noelle travelling to Davy Jones's locker, we finally got confirmation that the world of deltarune is a simulation (I mean, ignoring the fact that you can literally buy it on Steam for $15). This is already a pretty lore-shaking discovery, but I think it's led me to another major conclusion about deltarune's darker path: The Weird Route is video game glitches taken literally. Now, allow me to explain the evidence behind this rather jarring theory, starting with the most confusing mandatory item in all of the Weird Route: bread. It's required to obtain bread to access the lake in Chapter 5's Weird Route, and it's stated to leave crumbs everywhere it goes. If alarm bells are not ringing in your head at the mention of breadcrumbs, then you are either not an EarthBound geek or not a glitch scientist. Don't worry, I'll educate you! In EarthBound Beginnings (or MOTHER 1 for those of us in Japan), there exists an odd glitch where you can use breadcrumbs to warp to a monochrome, out-of-bounds copy of the map you're currently in. (It's a lot more complicated than that, actually, but that's all you need to know for this theory to make sense.) This connection is further reinforced by the Manhole Dungeon of the Sword Route--an eerie underground map that many people have realized lines up suspiciously well with Hometown's map. Since the Sword Route is a literal step-by-step Weird Route tutorial, it's not a stretch to assume that we may visit a Goner version of Hometown in the finale of the Weird Route. (This makes even more sense when you consider that a non-Goner version of the third Gaster Follower appears in Hometown as an NPC.) Next up: route prerequisites and the Kennel World. For those among us who have never heard the words Kennel and World put together, I'll give a brief lecture on this glitch: in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, there is a glitch where if you defeat a specific number of enemies and then walk into a kennel from above (please note: glitches do not make sense), you can enter a corrupted dungeon map. The Weird Route is locked behind freezing a specific number of enemies in Cyber City, and the Sword Route's entire premise is defeating enough enemies to achieve LV MAX and progress. This is a bit more of a stretch (after all, No-Mercy was literally the same thing, and it had barely any glitch ties), but it's still plausible that this is hinting towards us travelling beyond the confines of the game world in Chapter 7. (Sadly, I don't think we'll be walking into a kennel from above in the Weird Route.) The final thing I'd like to touch on in this theory is the Spamton Sweepstakes, more specifically, Noelle's blog posts. We can tell from the blog that Noelle enjoys finding oddities in video games, and her whole monologue at the lake seems to revolve around breaking free and seeing what's past the edge of Hometown. Since the entire Chapter 5 Weird Route seems to be about crossing a lake--remember that bodies of water tend to represent the edge of the world in old video games--I think Noelle has discovered that deltarune is a video game and is trying to quite literally travel out of bounds. I'm not quite sure why Noelle wants to go out of bounds so badly, though. Perhaps she thinks Dess is somewhere outside the world? Maybe she wants to perform a "sequence break" by travelling to the future to see the fate of the world? Is she just curious about what's outside? Who knows. We haven't even had a week to think about Chapter 5, so I can't jump to too many conclusions just yet. However, I think it's safe to say that the Weird Route is video game glitches taken literally. But hey, that's just a theory. A GAME THEORY! *cue awesome outro music*
Music - "Premonition" by Toby Fox
