Deltarune Chapter 5: What the 'Smile' ARG Answers Reveal About Dess and the Roaring Knight

Hours before Chapter 5 went live, the Deltarune fandom got hit with something it wasn't quite ready for: the "Smile" ARG started answering back.

People who'd mailed in responses weeks ago suddenly received replies through a "thank you" website, and the community did what it always does — pooled the answers, screenshotted everything, and started reading them like scripture. The post collecting them, flaired Official News, rocketed past 500 comments in hours. One reply summed up the mood: "IM NOT FALLING FOR THIS HOLY SHIT THERE IS OFFICIAL NEWS TAG."

And once the answers were lined up, they all leaned the same, ice-cold direction.

1. "You'll move on" — and what it isn't saying

The line that broke containment was deceptively gentle: "you'll move on." The top reply cut straight to it — "I have a feeling 'you'll move on' has a double meaning" — and the thread filled in the darker reading underneath: "you'll move on, and probably forget about her."

Her. The ARG had been circling Noelle, but "move on" reads as grief language, not romance language. Another widely-upvoted answer added the second shoe: "she was used up." Put those together and the fandom arrived, very fast, at a single grim conclusion.

2. The lake. Dess. The bottom of the dark.

The consensus read, stated plainly by one of the highest-voted comments:

The blunter version got there too: "Does this mean Dess... drowned?" — and then the chilling callback that made everyone sit up:

A throwaway line from a 2018 secret boss, suddenly load-bearing. Classic Deltarune.

3. The Roaring Knight as a drowning

Here's where it stops being grief theory and starts being boss theory — the part that matters if you're walking into Chapter 5's fight blind. Players went back through the Roaring Knight encounter and found the water hiding in plain sight:

And the detail that turned a lot of skeptics:

A frozen lake you skate on in winter. A body at the bottom of it. A boss whose whole moveset is built from holding your breath and sinking. The pieces lock together uncomfortably well — and several players noted the attack descriptions themselves "allude to the stages of drowning."

4. "Where it happened" — and how the Roaring starts

One more answer is doing a lot of work. Responding to a prompt about "in the graveyard" / "where it happened," the ARG fed a separate, confident prediction (full theory here):

If that's right, the lake isn't just backstory — it's the site of the chapter's climax, and Dess's death is the wound the whole Roaring grows out of.

Going in

None of this is confirmed. It's release-eve speculation built from official-flavored ARG breadcrumbs, a 2018 Jevil line, and a community squinting at sprite water — exactly the kind of theory Toby loves to either detonate or quietly sidestep. But it's the single most coherent thread heading into launch, and it reframes the Roaring Knight from "cool armored boss" into something much sadder.

If you want the other big pre-launch questions — the Asriel reunion, the Weird Route endgame, and the Twisted Sword theory — we broke those down in our Chapter 5 release-eve preview.

See you at the bottom of the lake. Life is worth living.

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This breakdown synthesizes the most-discussed ARG answers and theories from the Deltarune community on release day. Theories are fan speculation, not confirmed canon.