Analysis of Deltarune’s parallels to The Snow Queen

Since chapter 3 & 4 released, I've noticed a lot of weird connections between the plot and themes of Deltarune and the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale The Snow Queen that I haven't seen anyone else point out. With the release of Chapter 5, I've started thinking about it again and noticed even more connections than before.

I'm not going to summarize the whole story, but I do want to lay out the basic premise and setup before going into the direct analysis. In case you want to experience it for yourself, here is the pdf of the translation I used, and here is a summary by Overly Sarcastic Productions, which I found to be the more entertaining way of experiencing it.

The story begins with a spirit of some sort (various translations call it a sprite, hobgoblin, troll, or even the devil himself), who runs a school and creates a dark mirror that shows only the bad parts of anything that is seen through it. At some point, the demon and his pupils attempt to bring the mirror to heaven to see what angels look like when distorted, but as they approach the mirror becomes slippery and shatters. of broken glass spread across the land, embedding themselves in the eyes and hearts of people, which drives these people insane by making them unable to see/feel anything joyous. A young boy named Kai is struck with the shards in both the eye and the heart, leaving him unable to see beauty in anything but mathematics. Kai goes to the town square to tie his sled to a big fancy sleigh which turns out to belong to the Snow Queen, who gives him two kisses which makes him numb to the cold and makes him forget about his family and brings him to her palace. This leads his friend, a young and magically hopeful/pure girl to go try to find him after she's told he's not dead by various animals and natural features.

Now, hopefully some of the parallels to Deltarune should be apparent, but I want to run through some of the other, less focal similarities before I give my take on what they could mean.

• In general, Deltarune and The Snow Queen both have strong motifs of snow and ice, as well as flowers, hearts, and angels.
• Gerda and especially Kai are associated with roses, with roses reminding Gerda of Kai throughout the story and Kai eventually regaining his memory from Gerda singing a song about roses. Roses in Deltarune are frequently associated with Kris.
• Gerda encounters a lonely old woman with a magical connection to flowers, who attempts to distract her and make her forget about her quest by hiding all the roses, so she will stay with the woman forever. This resembles both Flowery, with the connection to flowers and hiding Asgore's notes, as well as Tenna, who does what he does out of loneliness.
• After the flower woman incident, the roses all return and tell Gerda they know Kai's not dead yet because they could see underground and he wasn't there. Flowery in chapter 5 warns the Fun Gang of something stirring underground, which he can sense because he's a flower.
• There's a chapter in which an intellectual princess is looking for a groom as intelligent as her who cares more about conversation than her beauty or status. Gerda and a crow assume this groom will be Kai, but it turns out to just be a different guy. Admittedly this one is a bit of a stretch, but in Deltarune chapter 2, Queen is looking for someone with specific qualities in order to rule an empire of smartness, with the person she finds mirroring Dess, who is missing.
• Towards the end of her journey, Gerda is captured by bandits and held prisoner as a playmate by the daughter of one of the bandits in the dungeon of the bandits' castle, until the girl becomes close with Gerda, and lets her continue her quest. In Deltarune chapter 1, Lancer is the child of a villain, who becomes friends with the Fun Gang and briefly traps them in a dungeon before being convinced to let them go.
• When she arrives alone at the base of the Palace, Gerda is alone in the cold and dark, menaced by snow monsters. When she prays, the purity of her heart causes her breath to glow and summon angels to protect her. This feels very similar to what is described in the song Don't Forget in Deltarune.
• The Snow Queen's kisses end up turning Kai blue, like Kris's dark world form.
• Within the Snow Queen's palace, Kai attempts to assemble a puzzle of fractaline ice crystals into the word 'Eternity', an impossible task given by the Snow Queen to keep him busy while he freezes to death. This feels thematically resonant with the prophecy, which appears in frozen, crystalline form in chapter 4 and refuses to be changed or rearranged, and Susie's arc of wanting to defy the prophecy and wanting the story not to end, which Gerson refers to as 'choosing eternity'.
• On a meta level, The Snow Queen is divided into seven chapters much like Deltarune. Additionally, much of Hans Christian Anderson's writing features religious theming and attempts to reconcile the beliefs of Christianity with his own beliefs, much like how Lord of the Hammer seems to be a mix of the Prophecy and Gerson's own beliefs.
• And, of course, the Snow Queen literally lives in an Ice Palace lit by the Northern Lights.

While it's clearly not one-to-one, and some of these are likely stretches, I do think there is enough here to assume that this is at least somewhat intentional on Toby Fox's part. With that established, I think we can start to apply info from The Snow Queen in order to lend some clarity to the story of Deltarune. This isn't meant as some kind of crazy theory that solves Deltarune perfectly or whatever, but rather something of an alternate lens that, when looked through, makes some parts of the story very, very, interesting.

First off, I think it's fairly safe to say that the mirror shards are analogous to the Shadow Crystals, both being small shards of invisible glass that show a twisted version of the world and drive those who find them to madness. While the Shadow Crystal seem to form somewhat naturally, they do seem to be pieces of something that Seam is making, and have some, yetnknown connection to the Mantle Holder/ERAM, who fits the mirror-maker's description of a devilish spirit prone to laughter who takes joy in seeing the worst of people. However, the invention of a mysterious dark device and it's shattering is also fairly consistent with Gaster. It seems likely to me that the events of the first chapter of the Snow Queen loosely maps onto something involving Gaster and ERAM, potentially even the Goner-maker sequence, which seems to feature ERAM (assuming it is the second voice) invading Gaster's domain and causing some sort of disruption.

Getting into the actually important parts of The Snow Queen, our most obvious 'Kai' stand-in is December Holiday, as the character whose disappearance motivates others. From this lens, we can intuit a little more about Dess as a character and the circumstances of her disappearance. Both Dess and Kai seem to have known something was coming for them. Kai notably encountered the Snow Queen several times before being taken away by her, while Dess' room is filled with rations and tactical gear, and Noelle's out-of-game blog posts tell us Dess was willing to believe in supernatural circumstances, specifically a haunted Ice-E's P"e"zza box, which is obviously also associated with snow, but also with ERAM through it's burning eyes (I swear to god if Ice-E is somehow the true villain of Deltarune). While Kai was affected by two, separate events, the mirror shards and the Snow Queen herself, I think it's more likely that in Deltarune these were combined into one. While she may or may not have been 'changed' earlier like Kai, Dess' vanishing seems entirely connected to the Dark World, which ties back to the Shadow Crystals.

I think from these connections we can also see that Dess is clearly still alive in some way. Early on in The Snow Queen, Gerda is willing to give up hope and move on, only for the world around her to bring news of Kai's survival. Placing Kris as our Gerda figure, this becomes twisted into the motivation for their more villainous actions, a reminder of their worst traumas that refuses to let them let go until they Find Her. Putting this together with the changes that affected Kai caused by both the mirror shards and the Snow Queen's kisses, I think that this interpretation strongly supports Dess as the Knight, turned into a twisted, emotionless shell.

With all that said, however, I do not think Dess is the only character who fits into the role of Kai. As I said before, the story of Deltarune, while clearly drawing from The Snow Queen, is not one to one, and while Dess does reflect much the themes and storyline of Kai, so does Kris. I do want to note that this interpretation is not mutually exclusive with Dess as Kai or Kris as Gerda. Deltarune is clearly drawing parallels to The Snow Queen rather than being a direct adaptation, so I think both interpretations can coexist.

Under this interpretation, the event analogous to the mirror shard would likely be the same as with Dess, whatever 'incident' happened in the town's past involving a Dark World. Whereas Dess was changed into the Knight, this incident is likely the reason Kris has something wrong with their Soul, much like how Kai was struck in the heart by the mirror shard. If I'm right that this incident is in some way connected to the Goner-Maker, then that moment is essentially the game establishing what makes Kris the way they are immediately before we meet them.

This incident, like with Kai, causes a change in demeanor, although while Kai began to pull cruel tricks, Kris instead seems to have stopped, based on some of Noelle's dialogue. While not spirited away like Kai or Dess, Kris does seem to have an analog to the Snow Queen. The connections between Carol and the Snow Queen should speak for themselves, and in fact are part of the reason I even began this analysis. Like how the Snow Queen takes in Kai to meaninglessly rearrange frozen crystals into Eternity, I wouldn't be surprised if Carol's goal involves Kris completing a similarly impossible task, likely one that involves bringing Dess back. Kris' ambiguous relation to the Knight could also be analogous to Kai's enthrallment, especially since the Knight is also associated with snow.

In this case, the obvious assumption for our Gerda figure would be Noelle, the seemingly-optimistic, steadfast childhood friend who is the first to notice Kai/Kris' change. However, from a narrative standpoint, I would argue Susie is the more likely candidate. Potentially even both, considering the intentional vagueness of the prophecy of The Girl, who's description of "Hope crossed on her heart" matches up nicely with Gerda's own magically pure heart. Either way, my prediction is that before Dess can be freed from her Shadow Crystal, Kris will have to go through a similar process, much like how the shard from the heart had to be dislodged before the shard in the eye.

Whether or not I'm correct on the finer details, I think that it's useful to consider the various thematic parallels and what they could imply. There are certainly many more connections one can make between the two stories that I did not go into, but I mostly wanted to get my basic analysis laid out before I head off to college. I'd be curious to hear any other interpretations of the parallels and anything else I might have missed, as well as any other obvious connections or similarities I might have missed, but overall I mainly wanted to get this out there because it feels like there are too many similarities to be purely coincidental.