#undertale analysis

This line. THIS GODDAMN LINE CHANGES EVERYTHING!

Most people always assumed that Chara wasn't doing jack while Frisk was saving Asriel, and that the fight with Asriel didn't do anything for them. And then during the final fight, TOBY GODDAMN FOX drops their name when it's time to save Asriel.

Think about it! Why would he make the DELIBERATE CHOICE TO TYPE THEIR NAME in the text-to-speech at the very moment when it's time to save Asriel? He could have chosen to not mention Chara's name after saying "Now there is one last person to save," BUT HE DID!

So that means either one of two things happened. Either A) this boss fight is as much about saving Chara as well as Asriel, AND/OR that Chara was actively participating in the fight with Asriel and trying to save him!

In chapter 4 of Deltarune, when Susie fights and wins against Gerson after two or more attempts, Gerson emphasizes the quality of perseverance he sees in her. He encouraged her to never give up in regards to her magic earlier in the chapter, and he most notably expresses that same sentiment in this scene. Susie's resonance with Gerson's words exemplifies her perseverance, the core trait the purple soul in Undertale possesses.

Gerson's dialogue also draws attention to the fact that like Gerson, not only does Susie embody the trait of perseverance, but she also is a fervent storyteller. Gerson takes note of Susie's burning passion when she narrates her adventures at the tea session, and he later encourages her to "overwrite the dark" with "a white pen, known as hope".

And you know who else harbored a passion for writing? The purple soul from Undertale. Their weapon of choice, the "Torn Notebook", resides in Gerson's shop in the Underground, hinting at a possible connection to Gerson as well as a love of writing.

The purple soul's ties to writing are further indicated in the fight with Omega Flowey; their attacks are displayed as negatively connotated words such as "destroy", "terror", "trapped", "sadness", and "despair" (among others). These words emerge from the two columns of notebooks the player is trapped between.

When the player reaches the ACT Button, upon influence from the green soul, the representation of kindness, the language changes to be much more positively connotated. Words such as "kindness", "success", "freedom", "mercy", and "dreamer" appear, and they can be used to heal the player.

This transformation in language serves as a mirror to Susie's character development. Before she befriended Kris and Ralsei, Susie was always cast out from her peers, labeled as a scary misfit, as someone who didn't look like she belonged playing a piano in public. Such notions led Susie to believe herself capable of only destruction and harm to others, to believe she was merely "a broken toy" no one wanted to play with. As we see in Deltarune, her respective friendships with Lightners and Darkners alike help her move past that mentality, showing her that she is so much more than that through their kind actions and words.

In chapter 4, Gerson continues to push Susie in a positive direction, demonstrated through the encouragement he provides her with when she doubts her healing abilities. He tasks her with writing a letter to Alvin, inspiring her to use her own words. He also breaks a fragment of the prophecy to show Susie a different way to his study, which drives in the fact that Susie doesn't have to be confined by the rules, or by fragile glass panels that tell of a prophecy. She doesn't have to be trapped.

Meanwhile, being "trapped" is the essence of the purple soul mode in Undertale, as the player is confined to move between lines that resemble those on a page of notebook paper. The fight with Muffet is representative of the captivity theme introduced to us in the Ball Game, and it serves as an antecedent for the linear confinement brought upon by the purple soul in the Omega Flowey fight.

A lot of Deltarune… isn’t quite a refutation or counterargument to Undertale’s themes as much as it is going, like, “I mean, you’re not wrong… but it’s a bit more complicated than that sometimes”. Or, like, elaborating on nuances that were present in Undertale but weren’t given as much focus as Deltarune, as a much longer and more complex game building on Undertale’s themes, can give them.

And it happens most often with Ralsei. Ralsei’s worldview often seems to be an oversimplified and corrupted reflection of Undertale’s themes. Exaggerating them and stripping them of their nuances so that the other characters (mostly Susie) can respond to them and re-introduce nuances and complications back into them.

Most obviously this is done in Chapter 1 with his ultra-Pacifistic and ultra-nice attitude to conflict. His views at the start were a lot more simplified than Undertale, as even a True Pacifist Playthrough requires one to defeat Asgore and Flowey through violence at least once. Plus a bunch of times where Sparing an enemy required an acknowledgment that they can’t be appeased or convinced to back down from a fight. There was sometimes a bit of trickery involved, rather than just 'being nice'.

But these nuances weren’t really Undertale’s narrative focus, the focus was on selling the Player on the value of Pacifism in the first place. So Ralsei’s oversimplification of the idea is a good basis for Deltarune to start putting these nuances to the forefront of the story and really focusing on them, now that Undertale has already established the baseline of “even Random Encounters can be real people with feelings and you should always strive to non-violence.”

And I think a similar thing is kinda happening with his whole…

Which feels to me very reminiscent of…

Like, okay, it is very thematically important that Asriel can’t be ‘saved’ in Undertale. The Royal Siblings Tragedy is a traumatic shadow looming over so many characters in the game, and it’s not something that can be perfectly fixed by being nice or even with Unkillable Time God Powers. Toriel and Asgore and, yes, Flowey/Asriel himself all have character arcs centered around moving on from the tragedy and accepting the present, and would be weakened if a Player could just… magically fix things.

But that doesn’t mean that doesn’t hurt to hear Asriel be so resigned to his fate. Susie Deltarune’s reaction to hearing Ralsei speak so plainly about the idea that he’s just an illusion and that she should prioritize her ‘Real Friends’ very much echoes the emotional reactions of most Undertale Players seeing Asriel ask them to not worry about him and focus on their real friends because he’s already doomed. And in both cases it’s extremely understandable.

The fact that even with Unkillable Time God Powers, the past is the past and there is a value in acceptance and moving on is itself an important nuance in Undertale’s central theme of Determination. With enough Willpower and Defiance, the Player can defy the concept of a kill-or-be-killed world, and free the Monsters from their seemingly hopeless prison, and resist the laws of death and time… it’s a power that comes from a refusal to accept the inevitable. But if you deny everything that goes against your personal will, you’re gonna end up like Flowey, utterly consumed by grief and denial over Chara’s death.

Flowey has to accept that the game between him and the Player is going to end, Asriel has to accept Chara is dead, Asgore has to accept his family will never truly return to what it was before, the Player also has to accept the game is over and that replaying it will just tear away the characters from their happy ending, and that the Asriel they saw at the True Pacifist Ending is gone.

But even with all of that… that doesn’t lessen the emotional pain of watching a little goat boy asking you very kindly and very genuinely to abandon him. It doesn’t make it any less valid for one’s reaction to be “Well, who said I have to leave and forget you? I’m sure that with the pure strength of my heart and the Power of Friendship(TM) I could save you too!!”. It doesn’t make it any less heartbreaking, even frustrating, that this is the thing the game ask you to give up on.

Undertale already added some nuance to the situation, first things first, Asriel does honestly appreciate it if you go all the way back to the start of the game and talk with him. Although he still feels that he's doomed, at least he accepted that Frisk is going to remember him.

Secondly, with Flowey’s Post-Pacifist Dialogue

And especially that Winter Alarm Clock Dialogue…

…both showing that while there was nothing that could be done to stop Asriel from turning back into Flowey, that does not necessarily mean Flowey is doomed. Despite his claims both in his Flowey form and as Original Flavor Goatboy Asriel, Flowey does still show hints that he cares for other people, that he has been truly affected by the events of the True Pacifist Playthrough, that the heart he had as Asriel isn’t actually truly gone…

We’re still dealing with the fact that we can’t undo the trauma of the Royal Siblings Tragedy but… Just because Flowey can’t be magically turned back into the person he was before his Trauma, doesn’t mean he is doomed. What happened happened, but he is still capable of healing and self-improvement. And although he’s still kind of in the margins of the Post Pacifist Friend Group, it doesn’t seem like he’s just been abandoned or forgotten for the sake of the people who are more ‘real’.

So just like with Ralsei’s Pacifism, I think his fatalism and absolute lack of self-worth is an exaggerated and simplified reflection of Asriel's situation. It's kind of a Very Different Thing between Ralsei believing he's ontologically doomed to matter less than Lightners and Asriel believing he's ontologically doomed to be an asshole, but...

It still creates a basic foundation to add nuances and subversions to the point about the importance of moving on and acceptance. Not rejecting it outright, but demonstrating how seemingly clear-cut situations of acceptance can become more complicated.

Because in Susie we now have an actual character to voice the frustrations many players felt about being unable to 'save' Asriel and argue in favor of the desire to never abandon a friend, no matter how doomed or unimportant or lesser he claims he is.

Because now we can better demonstrate the more toxic and unhealthy manifestations of the idea of ‘moving on’. How it can be just as bad as clinging to the past relentlessly.

And allow more time on-screen to explore the nuanced alternatives that aren't either unhealthily clinging to the past or quietly accepting your own lousy fate.

And now we can create more situations where Susie’s instincts to reject acceptance and reject leaving anyone behind and reject ‘moving on’ are actually the unambiguously correct answers.

Not necessarily always, I do think she’ll have to accept that Gerson is dead. And obviously with this being DivorceRune the Divorce Game, the theme of needing to move on from clinging to a past that will never be restored just as you remember it is still very important.

though it was merely a joke two pages and four panels long, i considered a bunch of tiny details while i was making it, and i thought sharing that would be fun for those interested in knowing.

this doubles as a character analysis for sans, papyrus, and their dynamic as well!

and so, here it is, in approx. [1,200 words]:

likewise and yet more specifically i'm chewing on the corollary idea that, perhaps, chara saw their best friend spiraling over the part he played in making his father very very sick and thought: if they could model playing the whole fiasco off as a nothingburger, that would help. they'd be doing it for themself and him. neither of them would have to fall to pieces over this if it could be helped (not that it worked, though obviously something about chara's response stuck with asriel):

anyway,

would be a hell of a thing to see this echoed in a time and place where the stakes are ostensibly higher, by several orders of magnitude

right?

there's been weirder street-legal things people have done irl anyways

and considering the things he seems to have built, it's not out of the question there's something important how Papyrus seems to have built most of the puzzles he uses like, aside from the tile puzzle, that was made by Alphys, and the crossword from Sans, there's nothing saying he didn't make the rest of them

and it's kinda funny actually like, compare all of that to his self-crafted sentry station, which is basically cardboard screwed together with rotini but at the same time, there's the puzzles he made, and even his Battle Body

hell, he made a snowman completely in his own image and like, sure, he gave the snow-Papyrus muscles, but it's also EXTREMELY impressive how it's standing up when the visible "spine" part is so skinny under all of that

and then there's his creativity like with the snow-papyrus and his battle body but ALSO with the fact that he painted a rock formation to look like a bridge for dramatic effect