I want to point out that Carol owns a Katana, one that she loves so dearly that she frames it in her kitchen. And by the virtue of being the sort of person who owns a katana Carol absolutely imagines herself as a samurai, not a knight..

"siphon their determination" it's like she has some king of determination extractor.

Knight discourse feels a lot like going in circles

Edit because I remembered something important: There was this one comment under an Andrew Cunningham stream where someone was talking about a famous literary analysis that a guy called H. R. Stoneback wrote. One of his points was that the initial interpretation that most attentive readers of a book have is usually the one that the author intended. That's cause (and people might not believe this) the author actually WANTS you to think certain ways while consuming their work and will plant clues accordingly. Only through overthinking will people stray away from these obvious clues and they'll arrive at an interpretation that is not intended.

Remember how the majority of the fandom assumed the Knight to be Dess when they first played Chapters 3 and 4?

I think one one of the most damaging assumptions in Knight discourse has to be that the answer to a mystery can't be obvious to some or even most readers/players. That's straight up not how most mystery stories work. The identity of the Masked Man in Mother 3 is obvious to anyone who paid attention to the story, it's more of a question of "How did this person end up this way?". There's a lot of detective novels where it isn't about finding out who the culprit is, but about finding out HOW they did it. I think we should shift from "Who is the Knight?" to "Why is the Knight the way they are?". That's almost an afterthought to many die-hard Knight theorists.

the roaring lets all the darkness out. dess seems to be trapped somewhere in the darkness. in causing the roaring, perhaps she could break free.

I'm thinking that the Knight might be to Dess what Ralsei is to Asriel. Like, maybe if it's not Dess herself, there's still at least SOME connection.

calling it Knight mayor might be the single reason I start to not hate Carol Knight

I like to think the knight isn't dess, but more of like her memories or something. More on a spiritual level

Stars are typically used as symbols for wishes and dreams. Dess is surrounded by the image of dreams all over the game. Maybe that explains the attack?

I wonder if the reason why Carol is so strict with Noelle is because Carol saw so much of herself in Dess. Dess seemed to be the rebellious type which she might have gotten from her mother. Reminds me of the typical story of a mom trying to control their children from doing bad things but it turns out in the mom's youth, she was just as crazy if not more so. Like Carol seems to me like she used to be a leader of a biker gang or something and she put all that away for her kids. But Carol having a backstory similar to Dess would help the idea that Carol is the knight. She's aggressive and sometimes irrational because of her age. Like she's trying to remain in control. Her old self is coming back because she needs that version of Carol to find Dess.

Just a thought really. I'm not married to the idea.

While not necessarily evidence, the biggest thing from chp 5 for me personally was the reveal that shadow crystals are the manifestations of the broken dreams of lightners. With how the knight is heavily tied to shadow crystals and black shards, the idea of the knight being the lost girl fueled by her own lost dreams is an incredibly compelling one imo

good video btw

13:15 Ok so many people refute this by saying that Asriel also has stars in his room. However there is one major detail, Asriel ONLY has stars in his room, paralleling his boss fight in Undertale where he uses stars primarily, while as Dess has both stars as well as dark posters as well as a dark poster with a sword on it. Basically Dess has both dark imagery and star imagery in her room, and guess what, the Knight uses the Dark/Star element.

I consider myself a Dess knighter, but I think I moreso believe something similar to echo knight. The knight isn't Dess herself, she's stuck in the game files, it's her shadow. I think the original theory stated that the knight is essentially a sapient shadow crystal made from the dream of Dess returning.

One piece of Dessknight evidence thats also partly anti-Carolknight is their relationship to objects. The Knight has at two points now destroyed very sentimental objects (and also Jackenstein). The Dreemur TV and a flower from Toriel and Asgore's wedding. Carol meanwhile is the type of person to cast paper snowflakes in bronze to preserve them. That doesnt match. However, looking around Dess' room, we see all kinds of smashed shit, objects thrown about, put into disorganized piles...

Susie and the Knight are antithetical. Susie believes in the realness of Darkners to a degree thats started to border on concerning, while the Knight to some degree even discards the value of Lightners, being willing to kidnap them and seemingly use its ability to attack things directly in the Light World to attack Susie after a "win" in the fight. (But notably doesnt attack Kris, though all halfway serious Knight candidates have reasons there [aka everyone except payprus.])

Then there's also the simple fact of the Knight at several points being refered to as *it*. While IRL its perfectly fine for that to be the pronoun of a person, in the context of UTDR we haven't seen any person refered to as it before. With the only "beings" so far refered to like that I think being the Titan/Titanspawn and the Angel.

To me, combined with the paralels between Kris and the Knight, this suggests that the Knight will likely have some kind of equivalent to the SOUL... which IG COULD work as an explanation for Rudy's illness, him having DT poisoning and falling apart like an Amalgamate, but I think works much better for the case of Dessknight, what with Dess' bat paralels clearly connecting her to Ness with the shared "protagonist" vibes.

In this reading, the SOUL is a "player" from a higher level of Light, while the Knight has a "player" from a higher level of Dark

8:29 Two quick points here.

1. The hanging hands really look like pig tails. This is the sprite we see after Susie asks "Who the HECK are you?!". If it is pigtails, it seems to strongly indicate neither Rudy nor Carol.

2. Tenna's last quiz question (VERY relevant) is about Asriel's favorite character in Smashing Fighters. The correct answer is "sword magician". Tenna then says something like "Oh yes, Asriel used to like that green dinosaur but then suddenly changed to liking that fiery magical girl". This directly connects Dess to fire, and sword magic to Dess. Obviously the question is referencing Smash Bros, a game Toby is known for playing. One of the characters (Robin) is a fiery sword magician girl who's symbol is a red knife that looks strikingly similar to the knife in the Knight's attacks.

i think it'd make for some good narrative irony if dess, someone who's known to be rebellious and rowdy, became forced in some way to follow the prophecy as closely as possible with little to no actual freedom of her own, wanting so desperately to break it and do it her way but knowing she can't for whatever reason. maybe that's her version of the freedom motif; the freedom to do things your way, but being unable to for one reason or another

I do think that a possible scenario is that dess is trapped inside the knight

And that the knight itself is made of pure darkness and dess is inside being made to do things outside of her control entirely since the pure dark entity would be in control. The knight never speaks and acts like a being of destruction, but is just more calculative than other titan spawn or titans, as if it's using her

5:40 "Wouldn't you wanna keep him in the dark as much as possible?" But you see, that's why the lights in her room are off.

Even without the plot, it just makes sense that it’s dess.
Just like the dark worlds give us insight into who Kris is cuz they open them, and we never interact with them, dess’s dark worlds do the same. There’s so much stuff that’s obviously Dess, and I just don’t think it’s Toby’s writing style to be using the idea of a person as a red herring. Every new chapter makes it more obvious.

Edit: also, a lot of ppl have issues with Dess being it but we gotta remember that it being Dess’ memories, soul, corpse, etc. still counts as Dess. I don’t think anyone arguing it’s Dess is saying she’s not also the person in the code, etc. the reveal is gonna be HOW all of it happened, not that it’s Dess.

Hmmm
I do think the knight is it's dess's body
WITHOUT a soul/personality
And the goner dialogue (the one of someone Lost in a dark, darker yet darker room is dess's soul

Dess Knight for me is a lot easier to square if you figure it's something more Kingdom Hearts-like and the Knight and Unused are each parts of Dess. The Knight seems to be neither truly Lightner/Darkner, like Flowey being neither monster/human and more tenuously Ralsei being an impossibility. So something formed by her shattering on That Horrible Day and both is Her and Not Her. A Heartless, a Nobody, a Lingering Determination Will, or even a Vanitas. Urizen and V making up Vergil type of shit, Bury the Light deep within and such. It provides a possible motivation for wanting the Roaring if spreading darkness out of the depths and across the world might make it possible to reunite with its other half/pieces that are normally drowned so deep in depths that she's functionally unused assets. Which could be an intensely overconfident motivation if the idea also is "I can totally fix this after I get what I want" which could fit with Dess as described and show where Kris gets it from. And it also loosely ties Dess to Gaster/The Voice by being shattered into pieces which I think could be very useful to the story later on if it goes a certain way.

That and, like, I'm pretty sure Dess is the only member of Noelle's family who has been mentioned directly in the Dark Worlds both by Noelle herself and characters unrelated like Tenna so far. Tenna did not talk about how close Aunt Carol or Uncle Rudy was with Kris, Tenna noticed how cool Kris thought Dess was and the things she would do with them. The Cyber World itself makes Noelle think about Dess's promise, and Kris being close to Dess as a little kid mattered enough for Tenna to design a minigame around those memories. That could mean anything but I feel like the story would really have to u-turn hard to center Chapter 6 or 7's big Knight reveals on Carol or Rudy being desperate parents. Feels like "I've always been with you in the dark" almost writes itself.

I'm not 100% on the Knight's motivation purely being to find Unused but I feel like that's the cleanest way to tie it to a missing Dess and can give a reasoning for why Kris would go along with the plan to this extent.