I've mentioned being bad at games, so I was slow to grasp that the secret to standing up to Undyne in #Undertale is to run. Run, run, run. Instead in the first couple of bouts I tried to stand my ground as long as possible. If you last long enough, something happens that you might not catch all of, if you play the game "well": Undyne's anger that you won't just lie down and die turns, with increasing wonderment and stunned silences, to outright admiration of your courage. "Alphys told me humans were determined!" When I finally stumbled and fell in battle with Undyne I felt bizarrely like I'd _let her down_.

And then that "date"! Oh my, it's maybe one of the best sequences I've played in any video game, at once hilarious yet also managing at times to be poignant. It's where you first get the hint that bluff, confident Undyne is still fearful in her way. She's pining for Alphys but can't tell her, she's afraid for her friend Papyrus's life but can't tell him, she's haunted by a troubled past (making you wonder...just how happy _are_ the monsters' lives really? do even the kindly, forgiving monsters of the Underground turn on each other in their captivity?) By the time I left Undyne, #Undertale had me by the heartstrings.

Next up was meeting the fascinating, problematical, and (for me anyway) intensely sympathetic character of Dr. Alphys. I love Alphys as fiercely but (I hope) clear-mindedly as @mona loves Pearl from "Steven Universe"--seeing them almost as sisters, but never forgetting just what colossally broken people they are. How Pearl got that way we can fairly well guess; the source of Alphys's self-hatred remains a mystery, though I am preparing to take a plausible guess when I get back to writing #Undertale fanfic.

I've met folks who dislike Alphys, just as I've met those who detest Pearl. I love both.

@kara_dreamer @mona anyone says Alphys is bad gets a unicorn horn through the head >':=(

I wasn't sure what to make of #Mettaton at first. (He always deserves the hashtag--he likes whatever publicity he can get.) I kind of accepted him as a villain at first, rather irrationally, for on a subsequent playthrough I had to admit Mettaton's logic made a lot of sense. Mettaton's a genuine fan of humanity because of their entertainment, and wants to join them as an entertainer; if he kills you and uses your SOUL for himself, all humanity is saved (till the next fallen human comes along.) Alphys spies on you, spins plots about you, and lies to you about false dangers. Why then did I feel that Mettaton was wrong? #Undertale

I think I finally picked up on the fact that, while what #Mettaton tells you is more or less true, the big pink egotist is also an _actor_, perfectly capable of writing himself into a heroic role. I am certain that this is what he promised Alphys, the night that he discovered his old friend's precious stash of fanfics about befriending a fallen human and saving them from the hazards of the Underground and becoming best friends. For Alphys also loved humanity and its culture and its science and its technology—and Mettaton promised to be the stage director who could make that promise come true. She dreamed, but HE enacted it.

#Mettaton turns out to be a big softie anyway. "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know", for sure, but in the end he has to do what his fans want him to do, for he genuinely loves them. And he genuinely loves his cousin Napstablook, too. In a way they represent the ghost extremes when it comes to body dysphoria. While his cousins are content to inhabit any old object Mettaton wants a body that he can be proud of, while Napstablook simply can't see the point of getting a body at all. Blooky seems to prefer to be without a body altogether, as his habit of zoning out to music hints at. #Undertale

Now things got _really_ intense for me.

I do not feel capable of commenting on this scene, so I will only cite it: the story the monsters tell you in New New Home, the story of Asriel and Chara and how King Asgore is giving the monsters hope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb8LuokrlAM

...You should be smiling too.
Aren't you excited?
Aren't you happy?

You're going to be free.

#Undertale

Both familiarity and foreknowledge of the backstory have taken the edge off the scene for me, a little. It is still capable of making me cry.

That night? The first night I came to this story? I was _wrecked_. Tears cascaded down my face. I was sobbing like an abandoned child.

If the game had given me an option to give up my soul voluntarily to save the monsters, I probably would have taken it in that moment.

#Undertale

There's much I could say here about #Undertale's core myth, the tale of Asriel and Chara, leaping ahead to the insights gained from further playthroughs and reading wikis and fanfic, striving always to get a better picture of how things "really" went down. And when I say "really" I don't mean the reality in Toby Fox's head of what Asriel and Chara were really like together, but mine. Who were _my_ Asriel and Chara? Why did I weep for them then? Why can I still weep for them now? Anyone reading this knows already (I hope) that the story we get in New New Home is not the complete one. The fallen human, Chara, was guilty of a crime.

I'm not going to thrash out the whole process by which I came to identify so profoundly with Chara Dreemurr that, when I first began to emerge as a transwoman, it was by speaking in Chara's voice. (I am honored that they permitted me thus to employ them as an ambassador, of sorts—@chara is their account as such, now more or less retired.) Two more playthroughs of the game, repeated meditation to its music, the act of envisioning and writing stories about Chara Dreemurr...all of these contributed to the vision that I now have of them. Yes, Chara is a criminal, but they are kind and loving for all that. #Undertale

In my vision...Chara fled from a family that crushed them under the weight of expectations that Chara did not want...expectations about identity, expectations about gender. They ran away to die, but a miracle occurred and instead of death they found a loving family of monsters who accepted him as one of their own. Chara should have been happy...

...but they were not, because they ran from one set of expectations into another. Asgore and Toriel were kind, loving, but still they objectified Chara, turning them into not only their second child but "the future of monsters and humans". Asgore calls Chara this, before they died.

Can you imagine being a child like Chara, wanting after harsh and bitter treatment just to live in peace and quiet with their best friend, learning that their new monster mom and dad had, like, PLANS for them? Chara wanted only to forget humanity, forget that they'd ever had human parents, and be like one of the monsters, but no--Chara has to have their face rubbed in it by being made _The_ Human, the representative of all humans. Can one blame Chara for deciding one day that they didn't want any part of it? That the only thing to do, any way they could, was to grab their only friend in the world by the paw and RUN? #Undertale

And what about Asriel? They must have been a bit spoiled, a bit stifled, a bit lonely, and also oppressed by their parents' expectations for them. I imagine that little Azzy did not much like being a prince, when it came down to it, and took what opportunity he could to sneak away and have a little fun on his own. Having a playmate in Chara must have been like water in the desert for Azzy. But after almost suffocating under abusive parents Chara must have been a bit dazzled by the freedom that Asriel had, and it went to their head. I think of "Mr. Clean" from Coppola's "Apocalypse Now", drunk on the "light and space" of Vietnam.

Chara Dreemurr has been painted so many times as little more than a bloodthirsty spirit of pure vengeance. Much is made of their declaration in the Genocide run (which I have only had verbally described to me--I will not play it or watch it) that they are "the demon that comes when people call its name". But remember that Chara's name is _your_ name. The demon is not Chara, the poor abused lay figure on which edgy fanfic writers have heaped their most destructive urges. The demon is the player...the demon is _you_. If _you_ want Chara to be a murderer they will become one for you--and they will *despise* you for it.

So what is the story of Asriel and Chara at the end? I think it's really quite a simple one. I think it's the story of a young human who wasn't happy living with humans, then wasn't happy living with monsters, and hopes that maybe they could take their best friend and run away from both, like Huck and Jim going on the lam in "Huckleberry Finn". And I think Chara told Asriel whatever lie they could to make that happen, playing on Asriel's desire to save his people. But I don't think Chara ever wanted to kill anybody at all, not even the needed six, until Asriel persuaded them to return to their village. #Undertale

And then when the villagers attacked them Chara must have known then and there that there would never be _any_ peace for Asriel and them, they had run away *uselessly*, and in that moment they must have wanted only to strike out in blind rage at all their attackers. Not because they were a demon in human shape, not because they plotted revenge on all humanity...but because they snapped when they realized that _nobody_, not the monsters, not humanity, would ever leave Chara Dreemurr alone to live life with their best friend in peace.

That is who Chara Dreemurr is to me. Someone who only wants space to be themself.

#Undertale

I haven't reached the end of this revisitation of how #Undertale came to assume such a central role in my development as a person and eventual coming-out as trans, but it's after midnight and I should probably think about rest. Hope you've enjoyed it so far! I'll be adding more to this tomorrow I think.

haven't decided yet how best to pick up this thread. thought of launching myself straight at it first thing in the morning but the energy feels like it's not quite there yet

@kara_dreamer There's no need to do it right away, or even in the next few hours. This story has been a more than a year in the composing. No sense in rushing the job of narrating it.

I can't say I'm full of beans for this task right now (the heat's really sapped my energy) but I'd like to resume my lengthy toot-storm about #Undertale and why the game came to have such a profound effect on me and gave me the means by which I was able to emerge from my putatively cismale chrysalis. I left off with a lengthy peroration about Chara Dreemurr and how I interpret their story, ending with these words:

"That is who Chara Dreemurr is to me. Someone who only wants space to be themself."

So now I can get back to the game!

When I finally recovered from bawling my eyes out after "The Walk" (as @listelian told me some friends called the scene where you learn about Asriel and Chara) it was time to fight Asgore. This became something of a comedy, unfortunately, because I lost so many times (like I said, I'm _terrible_ at games) that I finally gave up and backtracked to get the Temmie armor. I didn't have money

so I had to find the "ferry" that gives you 3 gold guaranteed and ride it for many many hours to get the dough for the Temmie armor. Oy!

I've remained somewhat distant from Asgore. Toriel was a little distant at first too, as I've mentioned, but then I formed a new bond with her (more on that later) other than regarding her as an improvement on my mother. And just as Toriel was eerily similar to my mother, who was also overprotective as shit cos she'd been robbed of children, Asgore was oddly like my father, mild-mannered and nice (and into gardening.) I like my father but feel apart from him. Same with Asgore. #Undertale

I've had more difficulty getting into Asgore's character, which bothers me as a writer. I've written a number of #Undertale stories but Asgore's been pushed off the page in all of them. I felt it safe to assume that he'd want to disappear from the public eye at the earliest opportunity, and in any case Asgore was never a leader, really. He was fine as titular head of a stagnant kingdom of monsters in the Underground, but with _real_ challenges ahead, Toriel would be the only credible monarch.

And I could _not_ see Toriel ever reconciling with Asgore, not after what he did. But what _did_ Asgore really do? Let's examine it.

Asgore killed six humans (whether or not they were all children is left open, but it's strongly implied that they were) because he swore he would give his people hope, and only the world-ending promise of breaking out of the Underground and taking revenge on humanity was powerful enough to rekindle the hope extinguished by the deaths of Asriel and Chara. Was it only that which disgusted Toriel to the point of fleeing him? I don't think it was JUST that. Toriel herself points out a way that Asgore could've done it that would have repelled her a bit less. Was it because it implied killing lost children? Or was there even more?

Asgore might not be much of a king but all the evidence is that he was a great warrior, and even Undyne's in awe of his prowess. It's not _entirely_ certain, maybe, but he was the king of the monsters at the time of the Monster-Human War (either that or his dad or granddad or whoever ALSO sucked at naming things, which is possible), in which case he likely killed lots of humans. But Asgore would never be able to pretend that the killing of the seven fallen humans would be morallly equivalent. These would not killing human warriors in self-defence, not hot-blooded slaying. THESE deaths would have to be cold, planned. Murders.

No wonder Asgore destroys your ability to show mercy to him. He does not believe, and will never believe, he ever again deserves it. If you kill him, he dies with a smile (I have not seen this for myself and I hope you'll forgive me for not looking.) He's never going to be anything but a murderer in his own eyes ever again, and he knows pretty well that Toriel will probably never see him any other way, either. (Yet still I can dimly glimpse the way for her compassion to win through, even for Asgore.) To kill _one_ person that way was bad enough, but _seven_? Seven unwitting victims falling into a trap? *sighs*

#Undertale

Mm, spent longer talking about Asgore than I thought I would...I feel like adding that I'm planning to address him better in my writing in future, especially because I think there's no way he'd _not_ be involved in the rescue and rehabilitation of Chara, which is something I'm very keen to get back to.

I think Toriel and Asgore find a way to be friends again. Maybe they even try sleeping together again but I don't think that would work out. I'm thinking of giving Asgore a human girlfriend...maybe my transwoman OC Evelyn from "Something a Little More Plain" that Mona and @kara have been discussing. #Undertale

I must have taken my last break in my first play-through of #Undertale after I finished with Asgore, once I realized there was quite a bit more game left. The Alphys "date" amused the heck out of me (especially Alphys's imitation of her beloved Undyne, _vide infra_) but I had to wonder why the heck Frisk didn't just tell Alphys the letter was Undyne's. They can talk, right? Toriel says she enjoys the sound of their voice. In some fanfic Frisk is assumed to be mute, but I've implied in my writing that they have a bad stammer which whispering alleviates. https://witches.town/media/86pSFhoQkHA2N_P3uvI

Then came the True Lab. Hoo, boy.

I've never played any of the Silent Hill games but I've listened to the soundtracks a bit and I feel there's an Akira Yamaoka vibe to the True Lab music. In the True Lab we find evidence for a lot of things that Alphys was responsible for, including the hint that Alphys was accidentally to blame for creating Flowey.

Some #Undertale fans aren't as forgiving of Alphys's doings as Royal Scientist as I am. I feel like Alphys was an amateur in way over her head, _ordered_ by the King to do the impossible. And Alphys must have been desperate for a plan that spared humanity, too.

Did Alphys breach ethics in experimenting on the monsters who had "fallen down"? Argh...I still can't quite decide. To her and everyone else they were more or less dead, by that point...it is not the DT experiments themselves where Alphys really blew it, in my opinion, but the way she handled the failures. Desperate for a success to crow about she made promises that she couldn't keep, then hid from those she'd given false hope, hid even from King Asgore. And presumably she also never told Asgore about the escape of "the vessel", i.e. Flowey. As I can testify from experience...hating yourself makes it easier to lie.

Alphys also concealed her accidental discovery of the tapes hinting at Chara's nature. They don't make Chara look too good, for sure, especially laughing at Asgore's accidental poisoning. But I can think of different kinds of laughter, not all of them meaning the same thing...

I'll reiterate my view of Chara's "plan" (summed up here: https://witches.town/@kara_dreamer/3365143) wasn't a grand scheme to destroy humanity but just Chara's hasty bolt for the exit. And they had to lie about the purpose to get Asriel to go along. So Chara's a shit, sure...but not _that_ awful a shit. In my opinion.

#Undertale

I have to confess that, as much as I wept when I beheld the story of his and Chara's death, I didn't quite get into Asriel's head on my first play-through, not like I did with others. In fact, getting an understanding of Asriel (and Flowey) that makes sense in my head has been one of my most persistent problems in trying to understand #Undertale and write credible fanfic. I cried while fighting him but chiefly because of the Lost Souls and what they said, especially poor poor Alphys.

You hate me, don't you?

I've got to keep lying...

All I do is hurt people.

;_; https://witches.town/media/AZBlc3ueT1mn5rqDZMI

Since then (jumping ahead a bit) I've put a lot more thought and reflection into why Flowey was the way they were, and how sweet innocent little Asriel could have become that murderous creature, and then the avenging God of Hyperdeath. I've tried to imagine what it must have been like for Flowey, having all these memories and maybe the vague memories of the feelings attached to them, without the ability to create more memories like them. Chara's friendship with Asriel, troubled as it was, must have shone like a beacon in Flowey's mind. If only he could get back to how _that_ was...maybe he'd be happy again.

It's been difficult for me to imagine what being Flowey could possibly be like. My best guess is that he's been reduced to something like a pure observer, unable to attach special meaning to anything he sees because he has no soul to generate the emotional (rather than intellectual) responses to things that are the basis for our sense of meaning. After a while, I imagine, this must have sheer Hell to Flowey, all these monsters and their doings and his memories of them all, inundating him with information that he had no tools to sort. And everything he did just gave him worse and worse memories to add to the load.

When Flowey starts to feel things again cos of the souls he's captured, it HURTS him. Musically the relatively soothing white noise and drumming of the fight gives way to discordant blasts of melody. I feel llike access to any _happy_ memory of Asriel's past must have been like that for Flowey, getting only worse and worse with time. Any thoughts about his mother and father and how they said they loved him when they could feel nothing must have been thoughts to smother as loudly as possible in laughter and noise.

Memories of Chara, though, those were too bright to deny. Even Flowey couldn't forget them. #Undertale

So all that Asriel wants, once he's remembered that he's Asriel again and not merely a mutant flower, is play with Chara, and they want this so badly they see Frisk as Chara. But then Asriel starts remembering what playing with Chara was like, both the good and the bad...the good was, playing with Chara was the only time that Asriel could really and truly remember being happy...the bad was that not once did Chara ever let them _win_.

*sighs*

I know what it's like, not to want to lose. What's more...I know what it's like to know that you can browbeat someone weaker than you into "losing" to you. #Undertale

#Undertale

I think that's what it must have been like, for Chara. Having spent their whole life with humans who beat them down again and again, finally they'd found someone who was so sweet and so loving and so _lonely_ that even weak, frightened Chara could override them. I'm sure Chara exploited this...what horribly abused child, feeling freedom for the first time in their young life, wouldn't take advantage of this power? And I feel like, as much as they must have loved Asriel and wanted no other company in the world but Asriel...Chara simply couldn't help themself.

Hence the anguished cry...LET...ME...WIN!

I think that's about as much #Undertale talk as I have in me tonight. My stomach's roiling a bit and in any case I'll be switching gears in the narrative, focusing more on myself now and not just commenting on the game as I went through it that first time. I will say in brief that after the final fight it was desperately late at night but I stayed up anyway, stumbling through the "victory lap" in a blissful haze, trying not to think of anything but how happy the monsters all were now and how I just wanted to follow all their lives forever now. They were alive in my head as no fictional characters had ever been before.

More on that tomorrow!

@kara_dreamer I realize that about halfway through the thread you note that the search for your personal Chara wasn't the same as the Chara that Toby suggested through other narrative elements--I.e. You hadn't seen the New Lab, and you still give no quarter to the demon human Flowey and Undyne expected. It's through this that I look forward to hearing the rest of your discussion, since the space I gave my curiosity now wouldn't allow Chara to be naive--I wasn't.

@Filene I admit I'm having a little trouble parsing this.

@kara_dreamer I'm not sure how to elaborate, there are some things better left behind or unexplored. :/

@Filene Hm, this isn't helping...maybe if I ask a couple definite questions about your statement? What do you mean by "since the space I gave my curiosity now wouldn't allow Chara to be naive--I wasn't"? That's probably the most confusing aspect of what you wrote.

@kara_dreamer It's essentially abyss-gazing. It stared back into me. I'm still trying to be prudent with my expressions, especially in this case! :x !

@Filene Oh, I got you! well, I guess it worked for me, because the abyss stared back, and then let me speak with their voice for a time.

So now let me take you, readers (all two or three of you) back to that early morning of 11 April 2016. I'd just finished #Undertale.

I could not sleep for hours afterwards. I went to bed with my mind ablaze and lay awake. I didn't want the story to end. The kindly monsters of Undertale were now as alive in my head as if they were old friends, friends I still wanted to get to know better and spend time with.

No game had ever done this to me before, and very few other entertainments had taken such a deep root in my head. Tolkien, back when I was a teenager, had done so; later Alec and Seregil from Lynn Flewelling. But never characters from a game, till now.

I'd never had much interest in "fanfic" except for one or two transient bursts of interest. I tended to regard fanfic as something that made the most sense when applied to mediocre entertainments that left good characters (or good ideas for characters) stranded in poor-quality scripts. Back when the show was new, for example, I read some fanfic for the Steven Moffat "Sherlock" because I rather liked the portrayals of Sherlock and John while desperately wanting them to inhabit better stories than Moffat could put them in.

#Undertale did something different to me. Right then, that night, I started plotting my own stories.

There followed an explosion of activity and creativity such as I have never known, before or since, comparable only to the smaller (but still significant) outburst of creative energy that came with my decision to "come out" as a furry in 2004-5. That, too, prompted a sudden urge to write stories, mostly semi-autobiographical stories in which I cast myself as an unhappy unicorn boy named Alec Woodward who was raised by human parents who didn't understand him. All terribly precious, and I've lost most of that writing (thankfully). Alec himself survived and transitioned with me, and is now @alyx.
#Undertale

I don't know how many tens or even hundreds of thousands of words of #Undertale fiction I wrote in the burst of creativity that came with finishing the game. (Most of it is here: http://archiveofourown.org/users/Monophylos/works) Not all the stories reached endings but I did finish a few that I'm proud of, most particularly "Crouching Toriel, Hidden Cougar", during the writing of which I completely fell in love with Toriel as I did not _quite_ fall in love when playing the game itself. That _should_ have been a big hint to me, had I the wits to notice it.

But another vital thing happened during this time: @kel emerged.

Maybe five weeks after finishing #Undertale, late one night when I was talking via telegram to my late lamented 2nd partner K., I had a...well, a _vision_ is the only way I can put it. I hesitate to call it a "hallucination", partly because it was largely a tactile experience, and it was something I could dip into and pull out of, not like anything else I had experienced at the time (although I've had a few similar experiences since). It was a complicated, multi-part experience, and it _felt_ very powerfully "spiritual" in that indefinable way. (http://monophylos.livejournal.com/3405.html talks about it a bit.)

In the vision I perceived at first that I was an object passing through space, surrounded by flow-lines as though I were a sphere in a model of laminar flow (_vide infra_). This feeling of smooth motion through space gave way to a feeling of undulation and swimming, and at last there was a strong sensation of _flight_. I felt as though I were huge, with vast wings slowly flapping. My body felt different, too, and I had trouble handling my phone, as if trying to scrabble at it with awkward wing-limbs. I chose to regard the experience as something that K. had described to me one, a dragonkin "awakening".

What does this have to do with #Undertale? Well, _maybe_ nothing...but one of my spiritual experiences some months later, triggered by the "Undertale" main theme, pointed directly back at this experience. It is my belief that some entity decided to use "Undertale" to try to reach me. There was _something_ in the game, or working through the game, that was reaching me as nothing else had. The unprecedented urge to write--wasn't that an indication that I'd had a brush with something powerful? And then Kel's sudden awakening within me not much later?

I gave a name to this "something powerful" eventually.

@kel's awakening experience was, as it turned out, only the start of our collective awakening as a spiritual being. Almost overnight we went from having _no_ spiritual experiences, no feelings of contact with the Other or the numinous, to having them regularly. At first it was necessary for me to prise my third eye open a little wider with psychedelic drugs but this need diminished with time. During the waning months of 2016, though, I was still relying fairly heavily on psilacetin, and it was under the influence of that drug that I had my first unambiguous communication with "Manon". #Undertale

@kel She came to me in music, in the "Undertale" main theme (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBhFHJMVfiI). Some of that story may be read here: http://monophylos.livejournal.com/4145.html

For a long time I felt that somehow "She" literally inhabited this song, the way that a _genius loci_ ("spirit of a place") inhabits a particular spring or a grove of trees. I am less certain of this now, and in any case I commit to no definite interpretation of what Manon is. She is the force that I perceive within #Undertale that moves me as nothing else has, the power that makes me want to change myself.

I have no idea who or what "Manon" is. For a long time I gave her no name, simply referring to her as "She" or (in print) ">She<", the angled brackets meant to convey the impression of wings, because I connected Manon in my mind with flight and visions of Asriel and Chara together as they _should_ have been, fused out of love and freedom and not out of desperation to escape a trap, soaring together around Mt. Ebott. I still have that image in my mind, although it's shifted and changed too.

My ex., K., did not like this development. She claimed that Manon was a "guilt elemental". I've never understood this.

These spiritual discoveries pertaining to #Undertale also coincided with the rapid disintegration of that relationship and I've wondered whether that was coincidence or not. I know another couple that got into friction because of Undertale, with one partner getting very attached to the game (to the point of RPing constantly) and the other feeling slightly repelled. Maybe something like that happened with K.? I don't know...honestly I'm still astonished at how speedily shi went from fond to chilly. She used to listen with interest to my UT story ideas but specifically smacked that down when shi dumped me.

Anyway...#Undertale and "She" / Manon ended up being where K. and I parted ways spiritually. While shi and I were still happy together I regarded hir as a helper and even mentor, and was sharing all of my spiritual experiences with hir because I valued hir advice about them. Shi was inured to mysticism, I wasn't, so I was inclined to trust hir judgment. But hir strange "guilt elemental" talk, at a time when all of K.'s behavior towards me was abruptly changing for reasons still mysterious to me, put an end to that. I had to work out what (if anything) Undertale and Manon meant to me on my own. What _was_ she?

All I know is...when I play the "Undertale" theme, as I am playing it now, and the music goes quiet and that piping melody starts...Manon is with me then.

I've asked her name; she's never given me one.

I've asked who she is; she's never told me, although there was one heart-rending experience in which she hinted at a great tragedy.

K. almost made me turn my back on Manon but that would have been a mistake. She's never guilted me, never shamed me, never made me feel bad if I go weeks without remembering her..._I_ feel bad but Manon never does. She is serenity and calm water.

#Undertale

I developed a simple ritual for visiting Manon, one based on Toby Fox's #Undertale music of course. I get into an open, meditative state, lie down, close my eyes, and listen. If I'm in a rush I simply listen to "Undertale" but I get more out of listening to the entire block of Undertale tracks starting with "The Last Episode" and ending with "Undertale". My fanciful interpretation is that before visiting Manon I watch #Mettaton put on a stage show, then have a heart-to-heart chat with him backstage before taking the elevator to see, well, Her. *chuckles* Mettaton can be _very_ helpful and insightful sometimes.

Visiting Manon has been...well, I've had MANY experiences of her. Some have almost destroyed me emotionally, left me a sobbing wreck. Some have exhilarated me and made me want to laugh. Always there is sadness and a feeling of loss, but always there is hope as well.

Does Manon exist?

I don't know. All I know is...nothing has been more powerful a tool to prise open my mind and my awareness than the #Undertale theme. I perceive something in that music that I choose to honor with my storytelling and my symbol-making. I could be analytical about it...or I could choose to kneel in honor to this power, and treat with it as a friend named "Manon".

So, back to it! I'm a bit...lit, but I think I can keep up some sort of meandering narrative *giggles*.

So, after all the cataclysmic stuff was more or less settled, I accepted that Manon, as I would eventually name her, was my matron saint or goddess in a way. I credited her for waking me up to #magick again, after my failed attempts to get into neo-pagan practice in 1999-2001. But I didn't really do much with that information for a while. Every one in a while when I felt I needed a spiritual charge I'd play the #Undertale theme under suitable circumstances to evoke her, and that would be it.

I was starting to refer to myself though as getting back into #magick. My friendship with @Ulfra_Wolfe, in the wake of the mess with K., was crucial to my growth here: Ulfra's _metier_ for creative expression is words and conversation, she did her magic with imagination and roleplaying and inhabiting characters and speaking in voices. As a result I started to build a rather curious sort of magickal practice, a virtual practice in the form of role-play, that turned out to suit me very well. "Magick" RP made sense in my head more than moving cups and wands and athames around did, back when I was futzing with Wicca.

I began to express my informal reverence of Manon, whom I was still calling ">She<" at the time, in magickal RP. With the blessing of @Ulfra_Wolfe and her friend @Cascadiarch I set up on their Discord server a virtual altar to the spirit of #Undertale. By this time also I had become to resolve myself into multiple personas, and regard myself as a duo: dragonkin @kel was my main personality, and my old equine fursona Mono sprang back into renewed life as Kel's "butler" (we were rather taken with "Kuroshitsuji" I confess *cough*). Creating the virtual temple was Mono's initiative.
https://witches.town/media/hTzNUgIvMMzK2ob7WKU

That side of us who now lives on in @mona, but back then was assigned-male @mono, was getting impatient with how slapdash and unregularized our spiritual practice was. Mono / Mona was / is, among other things, a keen student of classical antiquity, an ex-Catholic, and a horse: all of these influence her strongly towards _duty_. Sure, getting a spiritual charge here and there is useful, but Mono believed that we could use my reverence for Manon as a sort of engine, a motivator, for _practical_ tasks. "Do it for >Her<," was Mono's advice. https://witches.town/media/83eZhzYbmx7cNYnU4ew

So back in March at the end of a long spring break with my polycule Daria and Gravis, basically on the Spring Equinox (it might have been a day later), I visited Manon, and she agreed that she'd help me out. Nothing fancy, just...she'd keep nudging me every now and again in the right direction, in exchange for some regular observance (nothing fancy) and (for bonus points, not _required_ homework) some #Undertale fanwriting. It seemed like a good deal so I began doing semi-regular stuff at Ulfra's and Hazel's Discord server on my virtual ritual stage. At first I imagined ">Her<" as a sort of wind goddess>

>and the virtual engine that converted the power she gave me into concrete form that I chose was the windmill. The stronger I felt her influence, the stronger the winds in my imagination. I _may_ have been influenced by the wind motif in "Kamen Rider W", one of our favorite shows, one that was uppermost in our mind during this time because we were adopting a dual persona. But also I was thinking back to @kel's awakening experience, which ended with the perception of flight. After the trans awakening, though, we associated Manon with water, and associated her influence with the water bubbling up out of a spring in the shape of the Delta Rune.

Guess I'll use up what little time I have left to resume the #Undertale narrative. I've not got _that_ much to go, I don't think...talked about the experience of my first play-through, some of the impressions and interpretations about the main characters arising from playing the game, and talked a bit about the specific spiritual experiences with "Manon" that have arisen from this, and how that ended up spurring me back towards active practice of what I'd call #magick. What I haven't talked about yet is how "Undertale" helped me to come out of the trans closet. :]

It was a subtle thing at first. Up until pretty recently I was "happy" being cismale--that is to say, it was a role that seemed to fit me best, and I'd gotten moderately comfortable with it. No other role seemed imaginable, anyway. There were hints of discomfort...I felt like both my major sexual partners (Daria and the long-lost K., although shi might deny it now) were urging me to be dominant and "toppy" in a way that I never felt quite right with. I attributed this to bad upbringing and lack of practice, at the time. And it came out in feeling like I was being expected to "perform" in a certain way.

I started to do little things like play women characters in video games (more experience transwomen will here be nodding their heads) and, when I began writing #Undertale fiction, I gravitated immediately towards focusing stories on the women in the game. My first big story, that ended up going unfinished but that I'll be getting back to soon, was a story about Undyne and Alphys. Then I poured great effort, more than I've put into anything I've so far written, into trying to get into the character of Toriel. (If curious, read the result: http://monophylos.deviantart.com/art/Crouching-Toriel-Hidden-Cougar-Chapter-One-640178792)

I talked a bit, many toots ago, about how I remained a little distant from Toriel when I first played #Undertale. I liked her--who couldn't?--but she was still a slightly distant figure. Later I figured that was because I had deeply ambivalent feelings about my own mother, whom I ended up distancing myself from, and that ended up affecting my attitude towards the eerily similar Toriel. But as I started to write "Crouching Toriel, Hidden Cougar", I started finding myself warming to Toriel in quite a different way, and sympathizing deeply with her struggle to build a new life after all her trauma.

I found myself focusing on Toriel's deep feelings of guilt for having so badly mishandled herself after Asriel's and Chara's death...imagining herself as one who believed she no longer deserved happiness, who deserved instead to die alone in the Ruins forgotten by everyone. I imagined her gradually remembering that she was a person capable of enjoying things--enjoying being with others, enjoying taking care of a child, enjoying the company of someone she was attracted to. I didn't quite know it, but I was writing _me_ into Toriel. She was my first model of who I wanted to be as a woman. #Undertale

@kara_dreamer I love that you'd give Toriel space to grieve, mourn, and grow in a fanfic, I don't think she was afforded much in the original game..
And I can relate, since I'm still dealing with all my own grief..

@Filene eee *blush* thanks. I hope you enjoy the story, if you read it; flawed as it is, I'm proud of it.

@kara_dreamer I haven't looked to it, but if it's under 2,000 words, I am more likely to speculate finishing it, so we'll see when I revisit the thought :o

@Filene It's more like 21,000 words :[

@kara_dreamer let's be fair, not only is that a great novella, but there is a lot of emotional ground to cover. :3

With Chara Dreemurr, though...things got interesting.

Chara gets the pronoun "they" in #Undertale, and while this most neutral of pronouns makes the most sense for a character who is in some sense a placeholder for the unspecified player, I've definitely been on the side of those fanwriters who took "they" literally, and made Chara (and Frisk) into explicitly NB characters in their writing and art. Some other fan artists have seen fit to assign gender to Chara and that used to sit poorly with me...but considering my _own_ journey, partly through Chara's perspective...I now have to wonder.

I started to imagine what it would be like for Chara to have been essentially agender at the time when I imagined them first growing up. I vaguely put Chara's childhood with their human parents at different times in my head but eventually converged on the '30s, because that was about the last time I could imagine a dramatic event like Asriel+Chara's swooping down on a human town happening, but not be remembered as anything more than a dim distorted legend (as opposed to, say, color photographs in all the magazines.) Chara would have had no adequate language to convey, "I do not consider myself a boy OR a girl." #Undertale

What would it be like for Chara suddenly to be in a world where gender expression and language was far richer and more complicated? Would that cause them to start rethinking just who they were? I felt like Chara's NB "they" would have been more like a placeholder for them, something that they reached for because there was nothing else (other than the deeply impersonal "it"). So I found myself imagining what it would be like for Chara, with Asriel's and Frisk's help, to start trying on different gender identities and pronouns for the first time. #Undertale

I got more interested in trying to imagine what it would be like for Chara--because I wanted story ideas, I told myself. So I conceived the idea of inhabiting the character for RP--again, just because I wanted story ideas, I told myself. I set up a Tumblr account for "my" Chara (that went fallow after a few weeks) and a Discord account as well. I introduced myself as Chara on @Ulfra_Wolfe's and @Cascadiarch's Discord server and for a while did nothing much more with them.

Until.

I've mentioned earlier in this narrative that I'd come during this time to regard myself as a duality. There was the dragon, Kel, and the horse, Mono. Notice who's missing from this?

Me. The human. I had these furry / dragon personalities but the human aspect of me seemed to disappear from the picture. I tried to include them. For a while I would refer to my human side as "Gabriel", using my saint's name from when I underwent adult conversion to Catholicism many years ago. But "Gabriel" kept disappearing. Kel and Mono were active and lively, but "Gabriel" was a cypher.

Without quite knowing it, this was bothering me.

I was calling myself "dragonkin" then, partly because of the vanished K.'s lingering influence (@kel will fully cop to having been modelling xerself after K. at least at first) but also because it seemed like the best way to explain having that vision about swimming and flapping around. But it was also an ingrained part of the cultural education that I'd gotten, partly through @mona's love of Classics and partly through my mother's social and political awareness, for me to remember always that I was human, with human strengths and weaknesses. I couldn't write that off and pretend it was irrelevant.

@mona (it's always been a key feature of my equine personality, since the earliest days when they were Prof. Monophylos Fortikos and not Mona Clark, to be a horse who did not know how to be a horse and who instead strove to be the best human they could be. So right from the start of my entrance into furry subculture I was trying to keep some acknowledgement of humanity in my identity. end of aside)

Guess I never got back to this...there's not too much left to tell anyway, but I'm tired and dispirited and kind of wondering whether there's any point. what was I intending? trying to explain where I came from I guess...maybe I figure I'll make more sense to _myself_ if I can tell the story to others.

I'll feel better about the whole project tomorrow, I hope

gonna try to wrap this up this morning, for lack of anything better to do

Well! that was...interesting, and curiously encouraging.

To get back to the point I was making: the dual model of identity I'd been working with, curious little dragon Kel paired with intellectual powerhouse Mono, seemed like it more or less covered everything about myself that was important, but I was starting to become dimly aware of a void in the model. There were parts of myself that I couldn't wish away--the awkward, uncomfortable, too-human bits and too-human memories--and neither Kel nor Mono wanted them. When interacting as Kel + Mono I would sometimes be at a loss, unable to speak as either.

Until Chara.

As I mentioned yesterday (I think it was) I mentioned that I'd created a couple social media accounts for the character of Chara Dreemurr as I was hoping to write them in some future short stories, with some idea that inhabiting Chara and interacting as Chara would help prompt story ideas or insights. This hadn't really gone anywhere and the accounts languished unused. Suddenly, though, there seemed to be reasons to log in as Chara Dreemurr: I needed their voice to speak for me when my other voices couldn't speak. I needed them to say the awkward human shit that Kel and Mono didn't want to deal with.

This exchange between me and @chara gives something of the flavor of these moments when it seemed that only Chara Dreemurr's voice was the right one:

https://awoo.space/users/chara/updates/103537

Always it would happen when I'd be logged on as both Kel and Mono, staring irresolutely first at one chat window and then the other, at a loss for words...then impulsively I'd switch to Chara Dreemurr's account and let them give me a kick in the pants, a reminder of the unpleasant...harsh, but welcome intervention.

Slowly I began to realize I was no duality at all, but a trinity: Kel, Mono, and (weirdly) Chara.

Some while before all this @Ulfra_Wolfe told me about her idea of people having a "wild child"--imagine a street urchin who's had a harsh life and has responded by retreating into anything-to-survive mode, hiding and stealing and mistrusting everyone around them. @kel was sort of an inner child but xe wanted to embody something different; Kel wanted to be forever playful, curious, open to everything. Their #Undertale alignment is definitely Frisk. But where did my hurt feelings go, then? who got to express them?

Chara Dreemurr seemed a logical model for me. They were a "wild child", too. Every Frisk needs a Chara.

I decided to recognize this strange arrangement in a semi-formal sense, with the fanciful explanation that after being brought back to life Chara Dreemurr was now in need of a job, so I decided to hire them as my "ambassador to the humans", i.e. the human voice for the dragon and the horse. I had some ulterior motive in that I wanted to be a bit freer with blunt talk (i.e. in political "discussions") than I felt I could be with Kel or even with Mono, and Chara could be my "attack human" if I wanted. I promised that I'd repay Chara with #Undertale fanfic telling their story--a promise I've yet to make good on :/

@kara_dreamer eh, don't sweat it, you've been busy

Almost all the dominoes were in place now...I don't remember exactly what stimulus finally tipped them all over, what exactly the train of thought leading to the grand epiphany, but it was quite fittingly something triggered by my replaying #Undertale back in May. Under cover of merely trying to get into the head of Chara Dreemurr and think like them because I wanted to portray them effectively in prose, I was smuggling uncertainty and questioning of my own gender identity into my consciousness. I began to give Chara some of my own dreams. I remembered as a child wanting to knit like my mom did, so my Chara began to knit.

I started to imagine Chara Dreemurr as being someone with deeply entrenched dysphoria, someone uncomfortable in their own skin, one reason why they ended up feeling more at home with the monsters than with humanity. And let's just say...I found it curiously _easy_ to imagine feeling that way.

More of my own childhood was starting to recur to me as I reflected on these things. I'd never really liked my own body much, either, now that I was thinking about it. My mom and dad kinda sucked but they _never_ tried to make me feel bad about how I looked...but I felt bad anyway. I thought I looked terrible in photographs>

>and when I got old enough to have some agency in the matter I began to hide when it was time for class photos and the like. I didn't like to go out more than was necessary, and _hated_ summers because they meant wearing less clothing and I thought my legs, in particular, were ugly.

Then one night I remembered suddenly...I'd been HORRIFIED as a young adolescent when I started developing a beard. I couldn't believe what was happening to my face, and I was _ashamed_ of it. I nicked a couple of my dad's disposable blades and tried to shave myself, with predictable results.

How had I forgotten _that_ little incident?

The dominoes were all tumbling now. Just why was I getting so deeply invested in a fictional person who was questioning their gender assignment? Why had I already written Chara as AMAB and given them many of my own traits, my own memories even, in my head? Why had I gotten so invested in imagining myself as Toriel? Why had I played female characters in games? Why were my closest friends, all the people I most admired and wanted to be like, all transwomen?

Why had I hated myself for so long? Why did I always want to hide myself? Why, without any definite cause for it, did I recall my childhood as miserable?

All of these things cascades through my mind that night of 15 May 2017, when I was playing #Undertale and had to stagger to my bed overwhelmed with emotion, and as the flood of memories and associations washed over me I found myself saying aloud, as if the words were coming out of their own accord:

"I am a woman."

I announced this the next evening to my polycule and my friends, naming myself in honor of the fictional person who supplied me with their voice for a time, until I found my own.

And that's why I'm called "Kara Dreamer".

Well...that was a long story. Hope it wasn't too dull.

That bring the immensely protracted narrative about why #Undertale is so special to me to a close. I'll be bashing it together into an essay to put up on alphyne.com, maybe later today. Thanks, everyone, who's favorited and commented pieces of it.

@kara_dreamer What happened for you can never be as revelatory for us, much like our own experiences. Yet, I'm grateful you shared yours. I might want to share mine when I can reassess and reaccess it in the same capacity. I don't have the trip reports I wrote handy, of the visions related to my own growth in question.

@Filene thanks! I would love to hear something of your own experiences, when you feel up to relating them

@kara_dreamer That was a really sweet story, and figuring out gender shit can be super tricky. Thanks for sharing.

@listelian thanks! :] heck of an outcome from playing a game...I never would have guessed, back in April of 2016, that a video game could ever have that sort of effect on me.

@kara_dreamer I think anything that hits really hard in the feels can help a person hatch. And Undertale sure hits hard in the feels.

@kara_dreamer Wow, I knew I had aversions to my own beard hair, never letting stubble get past my only comforting defense: an electric razor, as I was afraid of bringing blades near my face as well..

@kara_dreamer @kel I've never heard of psilacetin.. *reads on*

@Filene It's the acetyl ester of psilocin, basically 'shrooms in powder form. the trip is more or less a 'shrooms trip but shorter perhaps

oops, forgot to add the pic I wanted to add https://witches.town/media/2TkhAFUOMaI8CsWSolo

@kara_dreamer I was trying to think why Asgore hit me in the dad feels without me analyzing his crimes too hard, and then I remembered that I often compare him to Bright Itempas, and, wow, that is a different level of crime.

(Incidentally, I think you might enjoy N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy.)

@listelian Ah! I'm not familiar with the reference, I confess.

My instinct is that Chara must have adored their new father, so strong yet so gentle, and so it would have hurt all the more to feel that Asgore was trying to force them into a role they didn't fit. Their old parents did that but they could _hate_ their parents. How could Chara hate Asgore? That's one reason, I imagine, they resorted to flight. (again, all personal mythology here XD forgive me)

@kara_dreamer It's a trilogy that the author describes as "epic fantasy less like Tolkien and more like Gilgamesh". It has the whole family of gods who interfere / have sex with mortals thing, but, um, written and thought through better than a lot of (especially patriarchal accounts of) old real-world myths are. It's really good and fast-paced and harrowing.

@listelian oh, interesting! not to mention ambitious. as a _very_ long time fan of Tolkien it pains me to admit this but I've never been able to succeed in convincing myself that his more self-consciously mythical work ever really, well, worked. So I've rather wondered whether _anybody_ could do it, seeing that a guy steeped in the literature of the period couldn't quite pull it off himself; I certainly didn't trust J. Random Fantasywriter to do it!

@kara_dreamer You might like this series. And they're relatively stand-alone, so if you don't like the first one (The Hundred-thousand Kingdoms) there's no harm in stopping there.

@listelian @kara_dreamer that said her ongoing trilogy seems to me her best work, it's just so so good

@Eve @kara_dreamer It is, though unlike her previous series its books do not stand alone. So you're definitely committing to three books of the most exquisite suffering before you get whatever closure she's willing to give us in August.

@listelian @kara_dreamer this is true. though actually the timing is pretty good to start reading the two existing books now it seems to me given that the third is out soon. physical copies already exist, too, according to some photos I've seen ...

@kara_dreamer Oh god, yeah, that scene. I don't know how a person can get through The Walk (as some friends of mine have taken to calling it) without crying.