oat milk fandom

i've been really wracked by the stuff asgore said to flowery at the end of the chapter because it's genuinely so.... sad to me like to tell him you were just playing along and you didn't care you just wanted the fountain and act like the burden was on him to know... i'm sad.. and i kept thinking about it because it's literally incomparable to how asgore treats toriel to me, because asgore was DIVORCED by Toriel, he knows what reciprocation from toriel looks like and he knows toriel doesn't want him back, he has all the resources to know he's desperately and obsessively harassing someone who divorced him, and flowery is ... a flower and does not have that history of relationships or of reciprocation enough to know. i have a lot of thoughts and questions about it, mostly from a character pov - WHY would asgore say that?

my first thought was that asgore actually doesn't have a ralsei to tell him how the dark worlds work, so everything he knows is just assumptions about it off rip. so when he says "Back in the real world, my shop is waiting. It's not right to leave it empty. Someone has to take care of the flowers", he might GENUINELY not even KNOW flowery is one of the flowers, right? i might have to go back over the whole chap, but maybe he genuinely doesn't realize it's the same consciousness, it's the same living thing. flowery might have shot himself in the foot by trying to convince asgore he was his lifelong college roommate and best friend. i don't know, that's the explanation where i give asgore the benefit of the doubt of just not understanding dark worlds — and i think by his use of "back in the real world" and his general neglect of the flowers in the dark world, he also just doesn't have the same sympathetic tendency susie has to darkners where she sees them as real (though she also tends to refer to 'reality' vs the dark world some of the time, i think it's a matter of how you treat the beings in the dark world that is intentionally juxtaposed)

my other thought is that when you think about it, asgore is kind of not the most socially tactful person. he's not very bright, period, but also i'm thinking of that true pacifist dialogue at the end where he apologizes and then takes it back (abbreviated caps). which is like, played as a joke, but does indicate something. some kind of emotional incompetence. which colours his general strat of 'declare war on humans after death of child -> lose wife who doesnt agree -> crash out and kill 5 or 6 kids and feel horrible about it every time' and it's such a horrible plan toriel cooks him for it. he just... says and does things. i dont know

idk there's more to say and before this chap i didn't focus a lot on sincere asgore analysis so i think i have to go back to both games and cook more but i think maybe there is something to be said about who asgore is as a person. maybe he struggles with empathy, which isn't really a sin, and we know he is kind... you can be kind and still struggle with experiencing empathy (RALSEI). i thought it was also really revealing that during the That Day flashback he puts "proving it wasn't my fault" first over "making sure it never happens again", which kind of furthers this notion of asgore as really just in his own head, being extremely fixated on A Goal so much he loses sight of how fucked up he's acting (he has a similar emphasis on The Goal as chara as mentioned in alarm clock dialogue - they both fill/filled bowls and cups up to the brim for efficiency's sake)