#btalks

This is a really wide topic, hope you don't mind if i just ramble

Undertale's magic system is so bare-bones, it might tell you a pun, which is definitely by design as a concise story game that doesn't have time to drone on and on about intricately deep lore. But I think there are some things we can extrapolate from what we have, and I can give my own personal opinion on things, too :3c

First thing I find interesting is that monsters aren't completely made of magic -- the books in undertale say they're MOSTLY made of magic, and it compares this "mostly" to how humans are mostly made of water, giving us a quantifiable percentage of how much magic monsters are made of -- 70%, give or take. so with this, we can deduce that monsters have SOME physicality to them. The issue is, where?

It could very well just be trace elements. What I like to think is that the remaining percentage of body mass is made up of what they've accumulated from their environment over time: Dirt, dust, microscopic organisms, just stuff humans have all over their body as well, acting like a natural glue binding their magic together, if that makes sense lol. I mean, monster souls are also said to be made of love and compassion, and those could manifest as physical things? unclear. im making shit up at all times

Anyways, magic is so weird. Monster food is pure energy, no digestive tract required, which also tracks with the fact that there are no bathrooms in the underground, and the only bathrooms topside in deltarune are ones that commonly house the only human in town (unless youre a human Dess theorist lol).

But on the other side of that, monsters clearly have some sort of gestation period as we've seen with Toriel, but still, is it a physical pregnancy that involves the body changing and growing, or is it purely soul related? we'll never know. I'm partial to the whole "soulling" deal with monster/monster parents, where the offspring soul leeches off the parent soul, and the body manifests at a metaphysical sort of "birthing" (with monster/human offspring, i headcanon traits are shared -- the parent soul grows the offspring, but without the magic of two monster parents, the physical body grows alongside it as substitute)

I also think that there are like. REMNANTS of the physical organs humans have in there. Not quite as gross as slippery as our own, but they are there in some capacity. I say this because how the hell did Asgore eat the buttercup flowers??? They are physical matter, where did they go??????? So monsters CAN consume human food, just to how much they can stomach (pun) is entirely unknown. Personally I like to think there's a tradeoff with that situation -- Monsters can live off of some human food, but they need monster food to help replenish magic, likewise humans can survive off of some monster food, but they need the nutrition of human food to stay healthy and well.

moving on, i gotta talk about everyone's favorite vague term -- Intention. Intention is clearly a huge part of magic use, as stated by the snowdin library:

Because they are made of magic, monsters' bodies are attuned to their SOUL. If a monster doesn't want to fight, its defenses will weaken. And the crueller the intentions of our enemies, the more their attacks will hurt us.

Intention is a powerful tool in magic, and we see it being used in several places throughout the game. Toriel's attacks start avoiding us if our health gets low enough, signaling that she doesn't really intend to kill us, or really fight us at all. The same happens with Asriel after we start trying to spare him. Another place we see it is with Papyrus, who literally cannot kill you no matter what. His intention was never to kill us and harvest our soul, but to just capture us, reflected in the fact that we live even after losing the battle.

So intention plays a big part in how magic seems to behave (which is interesting itself that magic isn't totally at the user's whim, and can act out based on emotion), and it can easily give away the true thoughts and feelings of its user. I would love to see this fact be used more in fics fr fr

Moving on to another thing I think about -- Monsters and the effects of their magic level! This one is purely headcanon <3 and i adore the thought of higher LV = Hotter natural temperature

Here's the way I think of it: Magic in monsters is a sort of... metastable energy battery. The body natural creates magic in the same way we create everything our bodies need -- with a healthy diet, a steady amount of sleep, and generally just taking care of our core needs.

Well, the thing about bodies is that we're always using it, even when at rest, through all the processes our bodies are constantly pumping. The body keeps a pretty tight watch over our energy stores, with excess "fuel" going into storage (lipids/fat) or being released as heat. We literally use like, 75% of our daily energy just staying alive (basal metabolism rate), there's not a lot of room for a ton of extra lol

But monsters? With assumedly no physical organs or systems? Sure, their magic powers their physical forms, but for all we know beneath their skin, they could just be all cotton and stuffing lol. i like using leylines in my writing for how their magic moves about their bodies. Kinda like our circulatory system, just invisible and magic

Anyways, as I was saying, monsters do NOT have the means of burning off excess energy like we naturally and idly do. If you're hopped up on magic, ya gotta make it go somewhere. And while it isn't explicitly stated to do so, I believe that a monster's magic storage and need to exert it scales with their LV (which I can only assume is correct, seeing as how the human's stats in undertale (hp, defense, attack) all increase with more LV, it only makes sense that a monster's would, too.

So, I equate a human's energy to a monster's magic. The more magic they have, the more tends to convert to heat when too much is accumulated and has gone unused, like how a running machine gets hotter the longer it draws power. And when a monster is low on magic, their body gets colder.

There's a little nuance to this with the boys:

High LV/Magic, so higher natural body temp: Killer, Dust, Cross

High LV but low Magic, so lower body temp: Horror

Low LV but high Magic, so higher body temp: Delta, Color, Epic, Dream

Nightmare has high LV and high Magic, but the corruption on his body is cold. If you reach in an make contact with his actual bones, you'll find them to run hot

Ink is soulless and runs permanently cold

Fresh is feeding off of his host's soul, so the host's body is always cold, but Fresh himself is actually warm

The problems that arise when a monster's body has too much energy lies in the adverse effects on their souls. As I mentioned before, our excess energy is stored in the lipids throughout our entire body, balancing things out when we've got extra to store. If we had just one centralized location, it would be incredibly harmful to our evolution -- just one spot that accumulates fat? Your center of gravity would be fucked, and that area would be incredibly vulnerable to injury. Phew, good thing we DONT have one spot where everything is stored!

monsters... aren't so lucky. A monster's soul is its everything. Its heart, its brain, its nervous system, everything, all in one incredibly vulnerable spot (not related to anything, but I see the soul as the brain of a monster -- the culmination of their being, holding their hopes and dreams, and the last thing to shut down at the moment of death). So all that magic buildup on someone with a high LV? It has the potential to make them dangerous, unstable. That magic has to go somewhere, and it might manifest itself forcibly one way or another just to get out, like a bloated battery on the edge of exploding.

Now, high magic doesn't necessarily make someone dangerous -- Delta has high magic due to his extra soul (and maybe the ability to unlock its inert magic with his own monster soul?), but he's not dangerous because of how he regulates his magic (gym bro fr) and because of his intentions. Yeah, there's that word again.

High magic does become dangerous if you have nefarious intentions. And what could be more nefarious than your, quote, "Capacity to hurt"? LV is gained through intention to hurt, which therefore increases your capacity in a vicious correlative relationship. Attaining LV literally changes your soul on a fundamental level in order to make it easier to gain more LV, like evolution's most fucked up party trick. That, coupled with the instability of high magic and the need to expend the excess is a dangerous combination, even more dangerous with any attached traumas (hello Dust and Killer)

So! If there are three things to take away from this insane fucking ramble, its these:

Magic is wonky and you can do whatever the hell you want with it

Intention is everything

the bad guys are warm and snuggly in the wintertime