I should finish that whole train of thought shouldn't I? seeing as how much trouble it bizarrely stirred up

like, do people exist who would actually be pissed off by me flatly asserting that _Asriel_ Dreemurr was trans?

like, I've tended to think of _my_ Asriel Dreemurr as trans

the older, wounded monster trying to piece some kind of life for themselves together with a rebuilt SOUL, burdened both with childhood memories of death and with the diabolical parody of adolescence that is Flowey

I would think _that_ sort of experience would get someone thinking hard about their identity, their gender even

don't you?

anyway...I wanna get back to the story of Chara Dreemurr and me, and how Asriel factors in there

needless to say, this is all headcanon, personal mythology, whatever--the way that I'm used to interacting with pop culture, these days. like, D.Va is trans!Shinji, right? I can just say that out loud, right, without crushing anyone's hopes and dreams, right?

*snorts*

anyway

at the time I played Undertale I was still about 99% certain I was cis

Daria had been "out" for, like, three years about, by that time

#Undertale didn't _directly_ make me start questioning my gender at all

but I latched immediately onto the women in the game. Alphys, Undyne, Toriel. they were my role models right from the start

and then there was Mettaton's subtle appeal, starting to undermine my certitude about gender in another way

and for a while I didn't really think about Chara (or Asriel) at all. I wasn't interested in writing stories about them, because I wanted to continue the story after the game, show how the monsters went on to build their lives

I imagined Alphys and Undyne working in a lab together

Toriel teaching, Sans drawing closer to her

I _almost_ forgot Chara and Asriel

then I ran into a particular fanfic writer on "Archive of our Own" named "valety", and a story called simply "you have earned your spring".

it's a story that posits, without explaining how it came about, just assuming it was managed somehow, that Chara and Asriel were saved from the ruins somehow and are now able to live with Frisk on the Surface

all three of them are older now, wounded, haunted but...at last, happy

all they do in the story is snuggle. that's all.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/6539260

I read that story and realized immediately that this was something I wanted to explore myself

I wanted to believe that Asriel and Chara could have a future

I was troubled with how...backwards-looking a lot of the fandom surrounding Asriel and Chara and all the Dreemurrs was. it was...trying to manipulate them into some kind of ideal family, a reclaimed childhood, idealized and luminous

Toriel and Asgore together again, of course, in this rosy picture, Asriel the lil goatboy again, Chara a pink-cheeked scamp

it was all very sweet and lovely and...I ran from it, it seemed so unreal

it seemed counter to the whole message of the game

#Undertale is not a game about idealized childhood, it's not EarthBound

it's about that most grown-up of things, learning to put the pieces back together after you fuck up

_that_ was the story I wanted Undertale to tell me, not this...sweet sickly family harmony stuff

I _wanted_ harmony but it would have to be a new one, pieces together from the ruins of the old

and that _really_ started getting me to think about Chara Dreemurr and just why they ran away from home

I considered Chara for the first time, what I could figure out of them

fortunately someone else has done all the hard work for me

I must thank my kind host @transcendentalConsensus for pointing this out to me, by the way

http://adamency.tumblr.com/post/143284030397/greetings-uh-so-ive-been-working-on-this

this document pieces together everything about Chara Dreemurr that we can based on the premise that theirs is the voice of the narrator in the game (and the document presents evidence for why we should trust that assumption).

I urge you all to read it

but at the time I was trying to figure out Chara Dreemurr I didn't have this to go on. I was trying to infer what I could from far less information

I guess I already wanted to believe Chara wasn't evil incarnate or some shit

that they had a reason for what they did, lying to Asriel and bullying them into their "plan"

and a picture started to form in my head of a child who didn't _want_ to be "the future of humans and monsters", who had escaped from a horrific upbringing into relative peace and safety, who wanted to forget about humanity but now was being made their representative

all they wanted was to be with their best friend in peace, and now here was Asgore putting some kind of destiny on Chara, the fulfillment of a grand prophecy

wouldn't you just...run?

like, isn't that the answer that made the most sense? all those ridiculous ideas about how Chara wanted to DESTROY THE WORLD MUHAHA uggh, I recoiled from those

Chara just wanted some space to be themself

their fake, "biological" parents didn't give that to them

and now Asgore and Toriel weren't giving it to them either

they just want to grab the only friend they had in the whole Universe and run

even if it meant dying in pain first

it's a strangely freeing thing

deciding that you're worthless

trying to approximate the condition anyway

once you decide that nothing is worth less than your own self, your identity and your life and your time and everything, then...you can kinda get to work after that, you can start to get stuff done.

get to work justifying your existence by doing the best you can

like Orual in "Till We Have Faces"

like Tomoe Mami in "Madoka Magica", who tries to do good because she feels it's the least she can do for having her literally worthless life saved

because

she

felt

guilt

because then the good you do...it's like a bonus, it's like getting an unexpected cherry atop a sundae made from unflavored ice milk

you don't get a _lot_ of satisfaction but at least you know you're doing better than most

I think that's why Chara, even though they wanted just to run away with Asriel, couldn't stop Asriel from insisting on collecting the six souls as well. that had to be part of the plan.

like, why wouldn't Chara agree to that

out of guilt

guilt so powerful that it was enough to overcome the pain of stuffing poison flowers down their throat

"I deserve to feel this much pain"

it took me a while to work all that out

but even the approximate understanding of this...made me start to empathize powerfully with Chara Dreemurr for the first time

I started trying to imagine things from their perspective more and more

never having once had a moment to be to themselves, always being _told_ "this is who you are", either in a nasty way or in a kind and smothering way, it's just as painful

turning into a person who just says "go away" with every habit and mannerism

avoiding everything

feeling at home nowhere, not even in their own body

a body that became strange to them as they grew

I'm trying to remember what I was telling myself, as I was developing these thoughts about Chara Dreemurr

like...did I really not notice that I was modeling Chara after myself, my own strangeness and my stunted growth

I told myself that I was trying to expand my horizons, think about fresh perspectives, be able to write better trans and NB characters because after all nearly all my friends were trans and NB folx by this time (but I was still cis! sure thing!)

I did the the same thing when I started playing female video game characters in stuff like FFXIV >_> "oh I'm just being broader-minded"

other mileposts on this strange journey

I started a Tumblr as Chara Dreemurr, thinking I'd imitate "Ask [such and so character]" Tumblr blogs for the purpose of ginning up some writing ideas for Chara stories

I gave Chara a Twitter account

then a curious thing happened on a friend's Discord server...

I started wanting to RP as Chara there, kinda...spontaneously

I had only two voices then, Mono and Chelydros / Kel. A duality seemed to be fitting us rather well but there were increasingly more moments where neither voice seemed to have appropriate words

awkward pauses, silences

in these, Chara first spoke