#Undertale

say, uh...got an odd request. is there a Undertale fan out there who's well-versed in the lore of the game and has played the "Genocide" track or at least knows a lot about it? there's some info I need that I'm not getting through simple wiki-crawling. I could look for playthroughs but I find actually _watching_ "Genocide" Undertale videos very unsettling.

@kara_dreamer I can probably help on this one. I couldn't bring myself to play the genocide route at all , nor even START it, let alone kill anybody purposefully, but I did trawl into the lore like heck, so maybe I can be a help here. Whatcha need?

@Nine well, the aspect of the game that I'm having the hardest time imagining how it'd happen is how Flowey, who presumably had Asriel's memories and a copy of his personality to start with, ended up getting so twisted. yeah, I guess being murdered would do something to you...also I guess learning that he couldn't really die? how did that actually happen? is it said?

@kara_dreamer ahh, yeah, though NOT in the genocide route as it turns out. It's in the true pacifist run, via text logs. This will get long, so bear with me , please. ^^;

Turns out when a monster is killed, because their SOUL is their entire being , suffused with magic (hence why every monster shows up as a greyscale image in the battlescreen, whilst you are just a heart), their soul is destroyed and cannot persist at all, except in the case of boss monsters.

@Nine This I know. I'm asking about the evolution of Flowey's personality, not the magical mechanics :p

@kara_dreamer It's only once you attempt to Save him as well that he truly breaks down and relents, but at that point he wants to end. You return him to being Asriel but now he has a soul, he knows what he's doing is wrong and it crushes him. Hence why he can't bear to say goodbye to his parents and doesn't want anybody to know he was Flowey. :( Even he can't abide by what he did without his Soul.

@Nine it is ever explicitly explained that Asriel / Flowey can no longer reload? That seems to be a feature of fanfic but wasn't sure if it was canonical

@kara_dreamer Yes, I believe it's in one of the conversations you have with Flowey directly after Toriel, if memory serves. I distinctly remember him saying how he used to be able to RESET the world until you came along, and now somehow he can't. At least on my playthrough he mentioned

"Oh don't worry my little prince. I'm not interested in Regicide yet! This is FAR more interesting!!" then leaves with a laugh.

@Nine So, let me get more specific with what I'm trying to do: because I want to write stories featuring a revived Asriel and revived Chara, it's important for me to get the best possible handle on these characters. With Chara that's been easier...I think. Is there information about Chara that's _not_ in the neutral / pacifist run? I feel that gave me enough to imagine a fully-fledged character. With Asriel it's been more difficult for me.

@kara_dreamer by this, resulting in Asriel innocently joining with Chara's Soul to have the power to go past the barrier and carry out Chara's dying wish, to return to the humans. It's stated by Asriel though that HE was the one who held them back from killing all the humans above ground like Chara wanted, so he let himself and Chara die rather than hurt them all, but YEARS without a soul broke him and only once he had a soul again did he realise what he'd done.

@Nine I interpret Asriel's information about Chara somewhat differently, as you might imagine, since I named myself after Chara once I realized I was trans :3 But I'll have to get into that later, I'm being dispatched on errands

@kara_dreamer I had noticed the icon seemed familiar somehow :3

Not a problem! Also I realise everything I said was kind of ...I dunno speculatory rather than actually factual and what you asked, I kinda...got carried away. I have a lot of feels about undertale ^^;; my bad. I'll quickly post what I know about the genocide run facts wise for you after this one ^^;

@Nine I've attempted btw to enter Flowey's headspace, using the music (along with drugs, I admit) to see if I could find anything in myself that would let me understand Flowey better. I found some help in comparing his situation to that of Wentworth at the end of Charles Williams's "Descent into Hell"--I realize that's an obscure reference. Wentworth's not "lost" his soul, exactly, but he has damaged it fatally, and now nothing that happens to him or that he sees makes any sense. People are blobs of color to him that make sounds he can barely understand. It's an extremely chilling depiction of a hellish state of mind>

@Nine >and I found myself thinking of it, when listening to "Your Best Nightmare". Flowey's music is dominated by noise, noise almost without structure, even descending into pure white noise at times--but interrupted by discordant bursts of melody. Basically I think that not having a SOUL, for Flowey, means having Asriel's memories (and his own) but without any of the emotional associations with those memories that would enable Flowey to make sense of them or place them into a meaningful context. That interpretation even if faulty, at any rate, enabled me to see Flowey as something other than a mere villain.

@Nine Wentworth at the end of "Descent into Hell", too, has the chaos that has surrounded him interrupted by bursts of meaning--by seeing shapes that he still dimly recognizes, by hearing voices uttering things he can still dimly understand, such as his own name. But amid the chaos these bursts of meaning are now _painful_ to him. He only wishes them to stop, to be let alone. So it is with Flowey getting jabbed with, well, _feelings_ for the first time in ages. Being abruptly reminded of pleasant things now _hurts_ Flowey, which is why he wants only to wipe Frisk out.

@kara_dreamer Yep! This also feeds into when in a genocide run he realises Chara can kill him. It strikes him full of abject terror to the point he tries to curry favour with Chara at the end...which fails, ending with Chara /taking their time killing him/ even as he pleads for "his best friend" to spare him D: D: D: It's...really really chilling and quite scary. I barely can stomach watching it.

@Nine I think Chara ends up deciding what to do based on how the player inhabits them. If they are kindly, Chara's faith in humanity (damaged almost irreparably by what happened when they and Asriel went to the surface) is restored, and they realize there's still a point in going on and being hopeful. If the player is a murder, Chara turns into an avenging angel, and they _despise_ you (the player) for having turned them into that. And at the very end, they punish you for it. At least, that's how I like to read it.

@kara_dreamer That's also possible and valid, but it also stands to reason that they want to punish themselves and all humanity, given the Post-Genocide Pacifist Endings. (staying with Toriel grants that creepy epilogue scene with Chara's eyes opening with that smile at the end, and leaving on other business shows the photos with everyone's faces crossed out and Chara's smile and red eyes)

@Nine tell me more about this "post-genocide pacifist" run. I know about the picture at the end being different...are there any other differences?

@kara_dreamer Chara even suggests maybe taking a different course of action next time after accusing the player of a "perverted sentimentality" wrt recreating and destroying the world again. Choosing to not give your soul this time results in Chara saying "this is what I was talking about", then reminding you that you already "made your choice long ago". followed by a reset anyway after a jumpscare.

@Nine This is fascinating! I don't think there's anything here that contradicts the rather elaborate interpretation of Chara that I came up with on multiple replays and a lot of meditation. I should interject here that Undertale has a virtually religious significance with me now, and playing the game and listening to the music has now triggered multiple mystical experiences, some of them of extreme intensity. Chara Dreemurr ended up being my human voice for a while, my "ambassador" (q.v. @chara).

@Nine in any case I decided on this backstory for Chara, very broadly sketched: they fled a deeply abusive childhood and found themselves in a loving family, but for multiple reasons still could not be happy. I feel that the breaking point for them was learning that Asgore regarded him not merely as an adoptive child but as "the future of monsters and humans". I can think of few things that would have galled Chara more than being asked without their permission to act as the representative for a species they had come to despise

@Nine So in my interpretation Chara's reckless "plan" wasn't part of any grand scheme; they just wanted, _a la_ Huck Finn, to run away with the only friend they had, making up whatever lie they needed to get their friend to go along with them. I don't think they intended to kill anyone, but when they (in Asriel) were attacked I think they realized in a flash that there was no running away, they would never find peace anywhere, and then they simply lost their rag and wanted to go on a murderous rampage until Asriel stopped them. So I don't think it was intentional genocide.

@kara_dreamer I actually like this interpretation a lot! This is good stuff! :D

@Nine *smiles* so, another set of questions...have you given much thought to how magic works in the Undertale universe? for the purpose of playing the game it hardly matters but I'm writing some fiction in which I feel I need to come up with a working explanation, even if it's a very sketchy one.