after so much struggles, finally i did this after a month… i took reference of our old-style-street with old style kedai runcit (grocery stores) in our kampung. tried to draw the nostalgic and warm atmosphere but ehhhh i just tried my best 🌚
anyway i made UT fellows visit the store! i hope you guys noticed papyrus over there, 😂
hope you guys like this pic! sorry for being inactive too, might took another month to draw next pic, orz
hey guys! this ship has already sailed…and sunk…several times already, but there’s something that’s still incredibly important to me that i feel the need to address in a genuine, comprehensive matter.
this is going to be a post talking about why it’s important to recognize frisk from undertale as nonbinary, and not just in canon, but in fan material as well, and why people tend to get so angry when frisk is gendered unnecessarily. if you’ve ever seen posts like this before and thought “this isn’t that important, it’s just a video game, it’s not even real, why do other people’s headcanons matter so much?” then this post is for you.
if you care at all about trans people – hell, about people at all – and you’re unsure about the matter or currently someone who genders frisk, i am begging on my hands and knees for you to read this post. no anger, no defensiveness. just listen to what i have to say. i’m not going into your inbox and yelling at you; i’m simply explaining why this is something that matters to so many people so much.
as a disclaimer: frisk isn’t the only nonbinary character in the game who frequently gets misgendered, but i’m only going to be referring to frisk here for brevity’s sake; this post is already long enough as it is!
Your “DETERMINATION”… The power that let you get this far…
It’s gonna be your downfall!
Undertale, Filled With Determination
Extremely late to the party, but I finally played the game. The finale really stuck with me, so this is my homage to it. Illustrated this while listening to this orchestral rendition of Hopes and Dreams on repeat.
Drawn for my younger brother, @atekasey, who kept bothering me to play it until I did. Consider this making up for that time I never drew that thing you wanted when we were kids. Love you!
We
know Flowey can’t feel love. He can’t feel love for other people, and
he can’t feel the love that others may express for him.
But he still experiences the psychological need to love and be loved that people, especially children, possess.
Look at his face when he talks to Chara about how he tried to feel something, ANYTHING, for his own father.
Look at his face when he remembers hoping his mother would surely help him feel the warmth of compassion once more.
These are not emotionally neutral memories. Thinking about how he discovered he didn’t care about his parents anymore…
…is painful for Asriel.
And he has no reason to lie or fake his emotions here,
considering what route he says this on, and who he’s talking to.
And…throughout
the game, he clings to the memory and idea of Chara as the person who
can make him feel something, who can make him feel less horribly alone
and give his life meaning again…
…but if you talk to him a few times in
Neutral…
He admits that, deep down, he knows he can’t really love Chara, either.
The best he can hope for…is that he “won’t get tired of” them.
That they won’t stop being “fun” to “play with” like everyone else did.
And just like thinking about his first time interacting with his parents as a flower…admitting this to himself pains him.
Christ, someone give this poor fucking kid his SOUL back so that he can comprehend the emotion behind the hugs I want to give him.
this reminded me of something i’ve been trying to figure out a way to articulate for a while. because when you look at flowey from as many angles as you can, take every facet of his character and begin to understand his perspective, it leads you down interesting roads.
like, maybe undertale isn’t meant to be as “meta” as we’ve come to believe it is.
i know ut is widely lauded at this point for being a game that understands it’s a game, and i’m still willing to bet that this is true! ultimately, there’s no reason to believe that this concept and the one i’m about to express are mutually exclusive. i mean, it certainly breaks the 4th wall enough.
flowey being a foil to you, to me, to us, as the Player, isn’t new information, but there’s something there that struck me during my last replay. flowey consistently refers to everything as a “game”, to people as “characters”, to reversing time as “loading” and “saving”. he talks about chara the way i think about things i remember enjoying before depression kicked my ass; he wants to see chara the way i want to find a new media to get invested in because i got bored of the old ones and desperately need something new to keep myself stimulated. not to get personal or anything, but when you take away the driven-in concept of flowey’s claims as purely meta references…
you get a kid processing his trauma through things he’s familiar with. video games.
flowey, as we know him, has completely depersonalized himself from the world around him. his inability to feel positive emotions for other people – only the memory of those emotions, and even then those have faded by the time we reach him also – and the added factor of his ability to manipulate time and experience the same events over and over, led him to see them not AS people, but as characters. and so on and so forth.
we tend to view flowey as one of the only people in the underground who “really” knows what’s going on. but in the end, flowey, just like us with our preconceived notions about how games like undertale Should Go when we first open it up, is as unreliable a narrator as they come. and that’s really why he’s kind of my favorite
honestly just really like undertale 