#hercine

In one of the earlier iterations of the story, Asriel was a teenager who could not age due to his parents being killed in the Underground. To give him motivation to escape the Underground, I created Hercine, another boss monster whom he was in love with. I expanded the concept of boss monster aging in the form of Boss Monster Marriage: It tied the spouses' souls together and allowed them to contribute to each other's aging.

So essentially, rather than utilizing anything actually established about Asriel in canon, I had tethered Asriel's central motivation to a character who never existed beforehand, with lore that had never existed beforehand.

It. Was. Weird. It also came pre-packaged with certain unfortunate implications if you think hard enough about it, which I regretfully did not realize until I had already canned this version of the plot... the pitfalls of being a novice writer.

When I completely rebooted the project with this current iteration of the story, I aged Asriel up to a young adult so he could be the king of monsterkind, but kept his inability to physically age. Hercine was aged up as well, was made queen, and even had a complete personality revamp.

But... there was no real point to her anymore. Hercine was now just a vestigial element from a bygone version of the storyline who no longer served any narrative purpose. She was just... a new character, who would appear once, and possibly never again. And, call it a premonition, but I also had this gut feeling that Deltarune was going to establish something about Asriel that could be riveting to bring into Versotale's lore that Hercine's existence would dilute or even just flat-out contradict.

So, realizing Hercine had no reason to exist, I removed her from the project entirely. It IS a little bit sad since I actually was quite proud of her new personality, but ultimately, the many negatives of keeping her outweighed the few positives

Say hello to the new Hercine sprite! Not a redesign, just giving her a fresh coat of new paint for a character in sore need of a sprite touch-up.