SPIDERS | Deltarune Animatic | Check Description

song: SPIDERS by Lola Young


i think we can all (the literate part of the fandom) agree that kris is non-binary, and noelle is a lesbian. let’s also make it clear right now that this is NOT a ship animatic in ANY way, this is meant to be pure angst because they’re being forced together by the weird route narrative!

i once saw an interpretation of the weird route that explained its underlying themes of queer erasure that feed into the extra slightly less relevant theme of heteronormatization. now, do i think that this is the core theme of the weird route? not really, the biggest theme is the loss of agency.

in the weird route, both noelle and kris lose their agency, with kris not having the ability to make decisions (as they have been thus far due to US, the player), and noelle being compelled by who she assumes to be kris due to her pushover trait.

one of the reasons that the weird route fits the theme of the erasure of queer identities hinges on susie. she’s not directly involved with it, but she gets a bit left behind from noelle’s normal-route-narrative where it’s more obvious that she has a crush on susie. quick question, how often do you see weird route fanart that features susie? ALMOST never, kris and noelle are usually the subjects of it, and are commonly portrayed in a sort of faux-romantic context. the symbolism of noelle having rings equipped by kris is just the cherry on top!!

i’d like to clarify that the heteronormative versions of themselves in this are not a literal representation of them being a “straight ship” in the weird route, they’re more of a representation of their discomfort about being forced into roles they don’t want.

the second and less obvious reason is the way they get boxed into stereotypical traditional gender roles, where men are more dominant and women are more submissive. by the player’s (our) hand, kris is forced to be a dominant force over noelle, nearly electrocuting her in force fields at least twice in the process. they are forced to tell her to “proceed” and order her to freeze everyone in sight, including berdly. noelle is forced into a subordinate position with kris as the proxy for us. it’s like the usual bare-bones rpg roles of a swordsman and next-door healer girl, but that’s not solely what kris and noelle are.

when we were talking about this in their server, @a‪@ace0fh3artz‬put it REALLY well: “the queer erasure for snowgrave kriselle is erasing the fact that hey, maybe these character don’t like being brought together like this. hey, maybe these characters don’t like being controlled into doing something they don’t wanna do. hey, maybe we’re imposing stereotypical roles that don’t fit them onto these characters!!”

that’s it for the actual snowgrave symbolism in the game, but now i wanna explain the symbolism that i added into these frames :)

i noticed that noelle lost her sister and is now longing for susie, so i thought “huh, maybe i can work with the idea that she lost part of herself when dess went missing and compare it to how she now wants a relationship with a girl she likes and all of that stuff about how couples are halves of a whole yada yada” that also works with the frame that includes berdly, i imagine she lost part of herself AGAIN when she was forced to do that.

also it should be really obvious, but some of the frames are colored with the lesbian and non-binary flag colors! i intentionally used that in conjunction with a gray color pallette to indicate that “loss of queer identity” and for a few places i just used canon colors switching into the gray for a general loss of self.

and again, this next thing should be pretty obvious, especially for kris. for some of these frames i chose to put them in clothes that are so painfully NOT THEM, which kinda broke my heart to draw. (listening to Girls Against God by florence and the machine while drawing those frames was a MISTAKEEEEEEE)

in one of the frames, noelle has her soul out and it’s got susie inside of it to symbolize that susie is the one that has her heart but she literally can’t do anything to act on it because the weird route has kris being so dominant on the SOUL’s/player’s order and romance is really an afterthought when you’re being forced to kill darkners and your own friend.

a few times i made noelle’s dress look like it had angel wings as well, just to insinuate how tied she probably is to the prophecy.

the “get in your car but don’t cause a scene” is sorta ironic because kris isn’t really capable of “causing a scene” when the player has control of them.

AND! “you’re not a man if you don’t have me” has an equivalent meaning to “and you’re a man if you have me”, tying kris to the role of the swords”man”. by canon characters, they’re simply referred to as “soldier” and other neutral terms.

also, when the text color is blue, that’s meant to be a reference to the snowgrave route specifically!