A choir of mizzles blocked your path

because i maintain that these two are not the simplistic good and evil they often come across as, i think the fact that asriel says chara is the only one who understood them, and the fact that chara was loved by the dreemurrs and did seem to love them in return, tells us that there's light and dark inside both of them (also while i've had this post in my head all week, posting it in the wake of the livestream feels appropriate bc that's certainly some form of vindication!)

but because pacifist is so much asriel's run and genocide chara's, and because these two are nevertheless thematic opposites, they do get flattened down to that a lot

and i think also about the fact that asriel and chara haunt the narrative regardless of what route you do, but it's chara's soul that's present, their body is long gone, whereas asriel's body will follow you around, but he'll never get his soul back

and that's the thing. it's easy in undertale especially (though a little bit in deltarune too), to assume that it's the soul that makes the person. asriel saying that he and chara were both in charge of the body when they went to the surface certainly implies that yeah, the body doesn't matter, a person's soul is what contains their will and personality

but that's not true. because asriel didn't stop being himself when he lost his soul, he just stopped being able to feel emotions, and it was that boredom and emptiness that drove him to do everything flowey did. and the asriel you see at the end of pacifist is asriel, but he still hasn't gotten his soul back, he's just borrowing the souls of everyone else. it's his physical dust, combined with the determination to come back to life, that made flowey, that let asriel survive at all

so maybe what survived of chara wasn't everything they were. now granted human souls are textually stronger, so maybe they survived intact, but we don't know that for sure. we never see who chara used to be firsthand, we only get the impression they left on everyone else. and while that definitely paints a picture of a complicated child, who yes could be a little cruel, and was definitely a deeply wounded child, it doesn't talk of pure evil, or of all consuming hatred. there was love and hope in their story too.

but if souls are primarily emotional. if everything that made asriel a person was largely contained in his body, but everything that made him feel was contained in his soul. then what if the soul of chara that follows us through the story, the one who was the driving force in asriel's body when they went to the surface, is only an echo of their personality holding on to the emotions that they felt?

because we know what emotions drove them. the hatred of where they came from, spurred on by the fear of ever being hurt again. the restlessness of injustice and the chill of loneliness and, whether it was born of love or hate we'll never fully know, the determination that led a child to kill themselves in an attempt to solve all the world's problems

because i remembered to go back and film it this time - reminder that kris is an absolute dork who when faced with the possibility of us probing their memory for the knight's identity, panicked and decided to do this before remembering they were in control of the flashback

1HKO game breaking knight fight

(commentary/explanations/better quality screenshot of that last bit under the cut to avoid video spoilers)

realised some people may not have access to the newsletter, so for anyone who hasn't seen the video yet! toby fox's one "spoiled" scene from ch5