UNDERTALE

personal history

undertale released when i had just turned 13, more or less, and 13 was probably one of the worst ages in my life, at least because the trauma i had at that point was exceptional and new.

additionally, 11-13 was about the age range at which i think i started developing outside interests via the internet and was amazed that things outside my parents' taste in media existed. at the time i had already begun to watch video game let's players, and i think jacksepticeye or markiplier's playthrough was my first exposure to it, not that i was a turbofan of theirs. to this day it remains one of three games i've ever actually purchased after watching someone else play -- along with minecraft and night in the woods. i'm pretty sure i stopped watching the playthrough by the papyrus fight because i didn't want to be spoiled!

honestly, my response to undertale is probably one of the more incriminating evidences of autism in recent memory. i was fixated on a lot of stuff before it came along (h*rry potter (yuck), marine biology, dhmis, animal jam, the great pacific garbage patch, wolves), but it's maybe one of two interests i've ever had that i've invested days of my life in and still always been able to get right back into.

i was crazy for it. i even printed out quotes and put them on a corkboard in my bedroom, but hurriedly threw them all away when my mom started reading one aloud. i daydreamed about it, i reblogged a million posts, i scoured the wiki into the early hours of the morning, the whole nine yards.

it was a good game, sure, but i think what struck me most about it was how comforting it was. i needed that at the time, and the barrage of very friendly, silly characters whose humor stylings meshed perfectly with someone who had already spent the first chunk of its adolescense on homestuck delivered in a way i don't think most other properties then or now can compete with. the off-the-wall personalities and familiar absurd goofiness, as well as the fucking heap of homestuck references, absolutely hooked me.

of course, it wasn't just its offbeat style that nabbed me. its characters, and especially the parental ones, really got my attention. as an avoidant, autistic, very traumatized kid, i didn't really have a knack for making friends, and you could forget my parents entirely. being able to step into frisk 's narrative and have so many silly, friendly characters drop such niceties on me meant a lot at the time, as pathetic as it sounds.

the themes intrigued me too. choosing to do good in the face of hopelessness and powerlessness, the quest for forbidden knowledge, suicide, depression, implied child abuse, the ambiguous morality of humankind, life as a narrative -- man, i ate that shit up then and i love it now. even if was simply the case that at the time undertale presented a unique avenue (outside of homestuck and tentatively fnaf) for lil' sal to engage with darker themes related to childhood, the narrative it presented is one that's sort of rotted my brain a little bit.

i like deltarune too, if you're curious, and "like" would probably be an understatement. as it stands, though, undertale is just a little more special to me since i developed an interest in it at such a formative time in my life, even if deltarune arguably is or will be doing the childhood trauma and trapped in the narrative themes a little bit more explicitly. that and it doesn't speak to my mommy and daddy issues quite as much. and undyne is a cop.

the fallen child

if you read that i liked undertale for suicide and child abuse themes, well, this non-character is why. the fallen child is a lot more interesting than most people know, and that's not a surprise given that you have to be sort of acute (or autistic) in looking into undertale lore to know their story, which most people reasonably aren't too into doing, and particularly so when flattening chara makes the no mercy route that much simpler narratively speaking.

we don't know much about the fallen child, on purpose, but we are given a little information so long as we either accept the very popular narrachara theory or the less popular but still intriguing theory that the flavor text is derived in some capacity but perhaps not entirely by the fallen child's influence, which is actually a personal theory of mine that comes from a synthesis of those ideas.

there's the "i see two lovers" flavor text when checking the royal guards in a no mercy route, which is a reference to a book with themes of flowers, yellow/green, depression, loneliness, death, transness, found family, declining health, and has other scenes that directly parallel chara as a character, no matter how little to that character there is.

there's this, which isn't huge, but which got my and a lot of other folks' attention.

yeah, i'll be the first to admit that everything i seem to like about this "character" is a stretch, but that doesn't strike me as a bad thing -- frankly, flexibility in interpretation is one of undertale's core strengths when it comes to character writing, and i don't think chara's villain-looking ambiguity is a bad thing.

taken with flowey and the game's general theme of choosing morality in the face of one's circumstances, i think the fallen child presents an interesting case study with regard the potential outcomes of making that choice or declining it.

committing suicide was a mistake and a result of the near-constant pressure the dreemurrs put on them to save their adoptive home. the narrative stage of undertale as we experience it, at which point they've been "reawoken from death" by the player's presence, gives them, like flowey, a postmortem opportunity to grow or wither. it's important, i think, to note that in whatever capacity chara exists in -- pre-fall, post-fall, and post-death, their actions are guided by a guardian force (previous guardians, the dreemurrs, and now the player). they seem to possess little agency of their own prior to wrenching control of the game from the player pursuant to the requirements of a no mercy run being met, and their actions seem directly related to the guidance they receive.

parents that hit you? run away/attempt suicide. parents that need you to save them? die for them. revived and have your faith in humanity restored/see your unfinished business completed? accept the narrative end and remain out of the picture. revived and have what you died for razed to the ground? none of this was for anything, everyone suffered for nothing, destroy it.

i don't know. as someone who endured child abuse, coped with misanthropy borne from humanity's cruelty to its own kind, and struggled with suicide (including eating buttercups!), the fallen child's life and afterlife seemed incredibly poignant, even if both were more or less entirely off-screen. it miffs me but doesn't surprise me that most people think of chara as a spooky jeff the killer, not because i take personal offense or whatever, but because doing so cuts you off from such an exemplar of undertale's most compelling themes.

the fallen child represents a lot to me -- the power and peace in choosing hope despite the limitless capacity of the world for unabashed cruelty, the potential impact that one's surroundings can have on one's eventual choices, the devastation and isolation inherent to distancing oneself from the world and one's sense of sympathy for self-preservation...

oh, and they and frisk were the first examples of singular they/them on a character i had seen. thank you tobias for transing my gender.

friends

everyone knows that undertale's characters were one of its strongest suits, in addition to the story and the soundtrack. they're around just long enough for you to get attached to them, and like i've already said, their writing is both unique and familiar enough to the at-the-time netizen that you, or at least i, felt right at home with them. you know them for just long enough to feel like you're a part of their world, and for long enough for their interest in you to seem sincere if not borne out of desperation or a long history of incidental and unhelpful run-ins.

i keep using the word "flawed" in regard to the characters, but it's truthfully what i love about each of them.

like this douchebag. i'll never forgive the internet for making his tag unusable, as well as basically all undertale-related tags, but i can at least take comfort in knowing that it would render him absolutely speechless.

he's my lazy, clinically depressed uncle who falls asleep in the hamper and i love him. i wish that his depression weren't twisted into the emo!caught cutting! kind that's so popular with the crowd undertale got in with, because it's so much more fitting and heavy when it's the kind of depression that just makes it hard to get out of bed or care about the ruination of your life. he's much better as the guy who canonically looks after grillby's bar on off days and gives his brother a hard time and awkwardly threatens a kid in public than as whatever skinny emo that whiteweebs keep imagining him as.

criminally underrated outside of sans. i wish toby took him a little more seriously, too, to be honest. let him say fuck and know what sex is, man. other than that, he's pretty much perfect. imagine nailing your character's delivery so well everyone gives them the same voice.

there's not a lot i can say about papyrus that hasn't been said better elsewhere, but papyrus' whole thing of doing the most good whenever possible makes him a key character as far as delivering undertale's main theme is concerned, and it's no wonder his death is of monumental importance regardless of what route in specific you go down.

part of why i wish toby would let up on the naivete papyrus has is because part of what i think makes him so impactful is that his decision to spare a murderous frisk is well-informed. he dies for his ideals, not out of ignorance. i guess his immaturity is supposed to foil asriel's, particularly given sans' thematic foil to chara as judge/executioner pushed around by the player, but given how autistic people tend to adopt papyrus, i wish toby would get with the program a little.

i love undyne. she was one of the first dykes in media i recall, and even though it's 2023, her role as an unambiguously kickass heroine isn't to be understated. there aren't a lot of well-written, non-sexualized spitfires out there, and none as hilarious as she is.

i love her commitment to her people and her friends. i love that her passion for protecting is so strong it allows her to breach the capabilities of her body and soul in the no mercy route. i love that she loves stupid nerd stuff and that the flavor text is extremely reverent of her determination to save people in a way that casts light on chara's character a bit, or at least that it demands the game's attention. i love that she kicks a child's ass.

brutally underrated and a recipient of so much more disdain than she should've gotten. on god it's the fatphobia a little, trust me.

i know people don't care for anime references at the best of times, but it's not so bad so as to detract from her charms or her story for me. i like that she's actively suicidal. i like that she's a great example of the suffocating, nigh-fatal pressure that's put on many of the main characters in the underground.

as an autistic shut-in myself, i like her flaws and find them cuttingly relatable. avoiding other people out of shame and anxiety. lack of belief in her interpersonal prospects. eating shit, easy-to-make food. forcing herself into a fictional storyline to avoid her current situation (a main theme of deltarune, so this is a big one!).

she's great. and so is the fact that she took style cues from john egbert and was changed from male to female by adding eyelashes.

transgender icon and i'm sick of people not getting that. christ, people could use a crash course in themes. all ghosts are they/them, he gets a body that represents his "true self," and estranges himself from his family. plus that trans lioness he gave his dress to. does it get any better than this?

yes, because he's also a huge queen and a robot. leg memes haven't been funny in years, but god was he a legend (lol) back in the day. i wish his neo form wasn't such an improperly-timed jab of humor in the no mercy route, but i like to think he got some respect put back on him from spamton's whole thing. 10/10. why the hell wasn't he present post-asriel battle. and why does he stand like this.

who

family

toriel is the GOAT as far as i'm concerned. granted, she's made a lot of mistakes, but i really enjoy her character nonetheless. for starters, she's a huge comfort character, if anyone still says that anymore. some people think it's a little weird how quickly she takes to new kids, and i get that, but from a contextual standpoint, she's a very lonely and regret-filled woman who was never able to fulfill motherhood. i find the ease with which she takes to frisk very sweet.

i like that she's pretty flawed, to be honest. i like that she's weak in a similar way asgore is -- after all, the fact that she storms out of new home and sends seven kids to their deaths, knowingly, one at a time, is pretty cowardly -- and she's angry at her ex-husband for doing pretty much the same thing.

she's not a perfect mom but she doesn't hit her kids, so as far as i'm concerned, we're golden.

it's nice that he's a deadbeat dad who isn't like, spade king-tier shitty. you feel bad for him because he's in an insanely difficult situation that makes the logical procession impossible for him to reconcile his empathy with -- a trait his son inherited that got him killed.

despite his reluctance to free his people through violence, you can tell he still cares about the people he's tasked with protecting, and that only makes him more sad. he's not a good king, he sort of encouraged his mentally ill adoptive kid into self-sacrifice, so not an award-winning dad, and it's hard to say if he's even a good person, but he's definitely interesting and a really tragic character to be a furry.

the little bastard the story's about. there wouldn't be an undertale without asriel/flowey, in that his decision to help the fallen child commit suicide and his refusal to go through with the brutal plan they'd designed at the eleventh hour would set up the events that would unfold up until frisk's fall, and that the entire story is devoted to reconciling his trauma and his death if you play the game right.

again, i like that he sort of sucks. i like that asriel shows the dangers of being too soft on the wrong people and that flowey shows the dangers of being too unsympathetic to the wrong people, even though the latter is, of course, the outcome of being imbued with godlike power following the loss of your and your sibling's life by murder. it's interesting that the internet's soft uwu goatboi or whatever the hell is shown to be capable of both deep mercy and ruthless cruelty (borne out of trauma-sourced curiosity and detachment), on screen, only for the internet to round on his foil sibling and paint them as irretrievably and exclusively evil.

i feel like it kind of does him a disservice and fundamentally misunderstands both who asriel is as a person -- a hyperdeath-oc-toting golden child -- as well as what he's supposed to represent as a character. it's not as though he and flowey are separate entities, and the limitless potential of any one person for sympathy or brutality is pretty much the name of the game for everyone in the world of undertale. if we were able to see him post-game as in the alarm clock dialogues, i'm certain that reconciling his identity in that regard is one of the biggest things he would have to grapple with, in addition to the difficult battle of choosing hope and mercy over pessimism and brutality even when you're completely apathetic.

it boggles the mind that people don't think of asriel as being a little bit of a jerk in the way that kids can be when that's arguably the best thing about him. chara was willing to die for their parents, and asriel, as their pushover sibling with the same parents was willing to help kill them in the name of carrying out his mom and dad's responsibilities. if you wanted to go even further and wonder if deltarune's hyper-accomplished college student asriel played the golden child role to his sibling's emotionally troubled and self-hating problem child one, and further ponder what that would look like in the context of being the first child and the one viable to take the throne one day, the ease with which flowey dove off the deep end and started mass-murdering makes a lot of sense.

i don't think it's a shock that not everyone would start doing that if imbued with that ability, if the groundhog day movie's lack of a mature rating is anything to go off of, as well as my (and plenty others') complete inability to even consider playing a no mercy route post-pacifist. i think asriel was in just as much of a pressure cooker as chara, really, and his comparative naivete just helped him go down that path.

he's a product of his environment just the same as his sibling, his parents, and everyone else in his world. good character. goofy as hell locket, though. i got one in the collector's set and it's as thick as my thumb is long.