I was so ready to jump in and scream, “Of course both of those songs have those motifs!!!!!” But, after a listen, I remembered that Memory isn’t really present in Hopes and Dreams/Save the World. The main melody sounds… Similar-ish but not quite enough to constitute it being the same motif as Memory in my opinion. Here’s a rough transcription (Memory is transposed into Bb Major for ease of analysis).
I would consider the melody in Hopes and Dreams/Save the World to be an alternate motif for Asriel, as it’s also in Last Goodbye, Reunited, and the Full Menu theme. All of these are songs we don’t hear until after the final battle with Asriel.
As for the Your Best Friend portion, I think most can pick up on the motif in Hopes and Dreams at around the 1:19 mark. I’m sure you already knew that one, though c:
Thanks, notes!
Me and notes talked a little more in chat after he made this reply and…the only place in the game that that melody appears that isn’t True Pacifist exclusive, it seems, is during the last bit of “Once Upon a Time.”
So, it’s technically part of the “Once Upon a Time” melody, but…the first two segments of “Once Upon a Time” are quoted much more liberally, throughout the entire game. The third section, as Notes noted, appears only during and after the fight with Asriel.
My first thought was, “Wait, what about the other menu themes? There’s a bunch of them, right?” So, as I’m a crappy skeptic that needs to fact-check everything, I checked on that.
There are seven mus_menu, labelled 0-6. One of them is unused (shame, it sounded quite nice with the glockenspiel). Now, instrumentation is added whenever you befriend someone new, hence the various menu themes. However, even after the Alphys date, a True Pacifist exclusive, you still don’t get the C part of OUAT. It’s only after the Asriel fight that it appears in mus_menu6.
This is certainly strong evidence for the motif being strongly related to Asriel. I’m certainly willing to consider it. Nice observations, guys!
A big happy first birthday to one of my most favorite games to ever exist, and a big thank you to Toby Fox for sharing his beautiful creation into the world 🙂
i would like asriel to be saved but also i love portrayals of asriel where, despite being saved, he still has a lot of emotional problems and habits that carried over from being flowey
like, the stuff that he did wasn’t inherently tied to lacking a soul, and instead a result of the things he went through being forced to repeat the same events over and over and over again. as a soulless being, he started out a pretty nice person. even if he couldn’t feel compassion, according to him, he still befriended people and tried to help them out during his first several timelines. soullessness =/= evil or rage.
there’s no way getting a soul is going to undo all of the trauma he went through. he had a soul (a lot of em!) during his fight, but that didn’t immediately make him stop and go “Wow maybe I should consider Not Doing This.” he still fought to gain control of the timeline and reset everything.
the thing that actually saved him was being reminded of his memories. could this have happened if he was in the form of flowey, perhaps during the omega flowey fight if his identity had been known? well, in my opinion…yeah. the memory of compassion is a pretty powerful thing too.
this is why i often say i like floweypot, tbh. i see this kinda thing explored far more in those AUs than anything where asriel got his body and soul back. in my experience, the latter tends to assume that he’s been cured and he reverted to his original pre-death state, which is simply impossible.
he wouldn’t be completely cured by having a soul. it’d help him out, sure, but it wouldn’t cure him.
he might still have issues with empathy. empathy problems is a common reaction to trauma, after all – they wouldn’t be to flowey levels, maybe, but still there. as well as a hell of a lot of other stuff. maybe he’ll still be rude to people and have to over time unlearn that, since even though now he’ll feel bad about it it doesn’t change the fact that it’s an ingrained habit. things like that.
basically Let Asriel Have Issues
Asriel developed PTSD and created an alternate persona to deal with his trauma. Flowey is still a part of Asriel, and will always be. I dislike the notion that Flowey is completely separate from Asriel just because Flowey doesn’t have a full SOUL. When people imply that Asriel would never be capable of some of the things Flowey did, I have to respectfully disagree, because the game explicitly showed us that Asriel IS capable of those things, even though he goes by Flowey or The God Of Hyperdeath… He’s still just Asriel. And he still deserves to be saved, just like everyone else in Undertale.
Basically I agree 200% with what you said.
exactly!!
i think part of separating the two of them also comes from the fact that a lot of people in the undertale fandom have difficulty seeing the shades of gray of each character in undertale.
after the true pacifist ending…well, we just can’t hate flowey/asriel anymore. he’s too sympathetic. unfortunately, a lot of people’s response is to just completely dismiss anything wrong he did as something “flowey” did, as if they’re separate entities. but the thing is, you can do bad things and still get redeemed. but a lot of people have trouble reconciling bad actions and sympathetic person, so it’s all ignored.
if asriel did Nothing Wrong Ever, then he can’t have been affected by it. thus we have bland ball of fluff asriel, which sucks, because he’s so much more interesting than that.
Reblogged this to the wrong blog. Opps. Here’s the right one.
Indeed.
Personally I am not really a fan of floweypot AU, but mostly because it involves a Frisk taking a Flowey who says ‘please don’t take me back I’m ashamed and can’t deal with being around the people I loved, the last time I lived with them I killed myself.’ And … Just taking them back anyway.
It’s like … Nah.
Give me a fluffy, enSOULed Asriel who still deals with flashbacks and violent impulses please. Show me a kid who tries to be good but spent so long being awful that it leaves an inertia he has a real problem stopping. Let him remember and let him heal.
You can see this with some of the other characters as well. For a long time there was a big surge of people who tried to find ways in which Asgore was not the killer of the six former children, in spite of the anagram of his name (sage or murderer) what Toriel, Undyne and eventually word of god had to say. People would rather minimize what he did than look it in the face and say; yeah, he’s sympathetic, but he has messed up Big Time and has been the source of a lot of violence and suffering.
People do this all the time. And it kind of needs to stop.Your favorites are flawed and it’s okay to love them anyway.
You know how Flowey’s favorite “character” is Papyrus?
No one ever talks about Chara’s favorite, and BOY do they have one. Who’s the one monster that they never disrespect, no matter what route you take? The one who’s death they lapse into almost complete narrative silence about, other than Toriel and Asgore? The one who always, ALWAYS, has the title of the Heroine?
It’s Undyne. Undyne is Chara’s favorite, and that’s not all.
Think about the similarities between Papyrus and Asriel. Both are kind to a fault, and would never kill. They stick to their beliefs, even when it meant their own deaths. They cared about their siblings, and pushed them to do better. I think Flowey picked up on that, and that’s part of the reason why he liked Papyrus so much. It was a reminder of what he lost.
Now Undyne. Undyne is goal oriented. She is willing to kill if she believes it is for the greater good, and she ALWAYS holds people accountable for what they’ve done. She’s the first person to call you out on your kills, and all of her pursuing and attacking you is because she’s trying to free monsterkind. You cannot befriend her if you’ve killed one of the people she’s sworn to protect, and that’s literally everyone in the Underground! She is the protector of all monsters. And that includes Papyrus, who she won’t let into the guard. Papyrus, who she tries to protect and guide away from his dreams because she knows about a harsh reality that he hasn’t been exposed to- or willingly chooses to ignore. Guards sometimes have to attack. Guards sometimes have to kill. And the people you protect will depend on you to make that choice, however hard it is. She is, by all counts, a rude, crude, pushy, impatient, and stubborn person. … who is undeniably a hero.
Undyne is everything Chara would have aspired to as “the hope of humans and monsters.” She isn’t the best person… But it doesn’t matter, does it? People still love her. She can still protect what she has, and exacts justice no matter what, even if that means sacrificing herself in the process. That’s something that Chara would have looked up to, especially given that they tried to do the same thing, however fucked up their process got.
Papyrus and Undyne- Asriel and Chara. They’re sorta parallels, aren’t they? And you can learn a lot about their personalities from their “favorites,” because honestly, who doesn’t have a fav that we see ourselves in?
workin’ hypothesis: Flowey and Chara’s “favorites” reflect their ideals in life, or whose characteristics they shared or aspired to. I’m willing to bet both.
honestly just really like undertale 