It would be really funny if the police tape reveals a college right next to hometown

You go past police tape you find that Asriel's parked there since chapter 1 waiting for someone to open the path for him

papyrus is on the other side of the tape in his car waiting for it to lift up for him

Imagine if we go past the police tape and there's a suspiciously familiar mountain

mfw i cut through the police tape and GENUINELY realize the hometown is in boston theorists were right as i walk through a 1:1 replica of the city

You could go past the police tape if you really wanted to. You'd just need someone to hold you hands and walk backwards.

Note: Susie walks over spikes as early as Chapter 1. She states deliberately that she walked through them when Ralsei asks her about how she got so far ahead. Barriers aren't something that used to contain people, and now are revealed to be ephemeral. They are things that you must respect, but NPCs can walk through whenever they want. It's why Ralsei and Noelle were capable of grabbing Kris and walking past boundaries with them.

I can't believe Gaster is hiding in the bunker, lake, AND behind the police tape!

As someone who lives in Boston I can assure you guys that Im yet to see anything suspicious... but I will update if I see any black fountains

I guess the implications that Ch5 Weird Route presents imply that there's things that NPCs cannot do without our help, because they aren't programmed to, and things that we the player cannot do, because the videogame environment restricts us, but with teamwork, we can drive NPCs to do things they normally can't do (due to their code) and in return they can help us circumvent videogame restrictions.

Parallels include, for example, Ralsei helping us cross through spikes, which we normally can't, and us driving Noelle to do weird things in the weird route. So I guess it is not entirely lunatic to think that there's more characters apart from Ralsei that are aware of our limitations as players due to videogame restrictions and that they're using those things specifically to block us or keep us from doing stuff, like an in universe explanation.

The weather channel coloring indicates a heat index or severity of precipitation on a scale of green to red, its not showing the color of the ground lol

This is a really cool theory considering that maybe Carol Knew the damage we could do to the rest of the world if we got out of "confinement" in hometown.

1:19 "as a Deltarune fan, I don’t know what outside is" 😭

Mt.Ebbot in undertale VS Mt.Bobet in Deltarune

Tenna is airing reruns of the weather channel though. He says so after his fight.

"Since... since a little while ago...
All that I've been broadcasting, is the same reruns, over and over..."

As well, the Internet has been down all week. The town is basically entirely isolated in a bubble of sorts, sorta like Gravity Falls actually

I do find it funny, the whole "Ralsie just made those puzzles go away" aspect. Ralsi has intentionally been holding back. At any point we could have taken a shortcut, blasted away a threat or just flown to the bunker fountain.

I do find it very interesting that Chapter 5 returned us to the status quo of zero on-screen presence for Carol. It means that the one time Carol has appeared on-screen so far this whole game is when she was "summoned" by Kris. The game even goes out of its way to not use Carol's face sprite at the end of the chapter 4 Weird Route, only using her voice to let us know who it is. The fact that we don't see or hear Carol at all in chapter 5 has me thinking that she won't be reappearing so casually in future chapters.

My headcannon is hometown is the world is only hometown but that this is a recent thing.  Before we start the game the internet just went out, no ones been able to contact Asriel suddenly plus a couple other recent isolations i cant think of rn.  I think hometown was part of a whole world until the device somehow transported it on top of the depths - similar to mancountry

I think the alignment between the police tape and Ralsei's room in castle town mean something: Ralsei's Light World equivalent is there.  I'm thinking its either a giant pine tree with roots underground, or it's something alien, like a crashed meteor (fallen star). There was a meteor behind police tape at the start of Earthbound

To me the full weird route AND the normal route are both “blindly marching forward without even knowing where you’re going”, and by not fully proceeding past the lake you get off that path and do something else