Alright, so, we can establish right off, that Flowey projects. He projects like crazy. He is constantly trying to convince Frisk to be the kind of person that will do the Kill-All run. Insisting the world is kill or be killed, trying to goad them into murdering him at the end of the first neutral run and being CREEPILY happy with Frisk when they do cut him down. Like, imo, he has wanted Frisk to be his Chara from the very start.
The fact that his Chara is hanging out in there is pretty much a bonus.
Now, what is Chara to Asriel/Flowey? Chara is a memory of love, Chara is a partner, Chara is as close to a sibling as Asriel could ever want. Someone who is with him, someone who is like him, someone who understands him. That is what Flowey wants out of this world. So, let’s put it like this. You see some kid killing monsters mercilessly, without mercy. Killing everyone and everything. You’re Flowey, and you’ve seen something like this before. But you’ve only seen it because you did it.
This person is like you! LIke you, SOULless, empty, not caring about anyone! Aha! They’re like you! They understand you! They’re Chara! To be honest, I think that Asriel is super eager to see Chara in any entity in this world that is like them, and that understands them. Because that is the role that Chara played in his life. And it’s the role he wants them to have in this death.
Did you know, if you abort a Kill-All run, Flowey still calls Frisk Chara. He calls Frisk Chara all the time. If you spare Asgore he says, ‘Chara, you haven’t learned a thing, in this world, I T S K I L L O R B E K I L L E D.’ You can spare him. You can start to befriend everyone. He’ll ask if you’re loving people and being loved as revenge against him, by doing all of those things while he . . can’t. Does he ever say ‘but are you really Chara?’ Does he ever stop and ask, ‘Chara, why are you doing this, this isn’t like you!’
No, he doesn’t. Even when he’s trying super hard to push us onto the murder path in the Omega Flowey fight, he’s insisting that chara doesn’t understand the world yet, insists he’ll kill ‘everyone you love’ to try to goad us into killing him.
These are tactics we would expect to work on Chara. Telling them they haven’t ‘learned their lesson,’ a lesson that lots of people are convinced Chara taught Asriel, turns out to be something that Flowey have no problem trying to teach Chara. ‘I’ll kill everyone you love!’ To goad us into attacking. Hurting those Chara loved, as an effective way to get them to fight him. ‘You haven’t learned a thing’ as though Chara didn’t live their life by ‘kill or be killed.’ They loved people and would go to bat for them, and didn’t think the world was dog-eat-dog. That’s the only conclusion we can draw from this.
And if you reject that run, do pacifist, and talk to Asriel in the flower bed, he’ll say he doesn’t understand why he ever thought Frisk was Chara. Even if you’ve started a Kill-all run. No matter how long we followed that kill-all run through before aborting or resetting. Not ‘when you were hurting people, you reminded me of Chara, that’s why I thought you were them.’ Just ‘yeah I don’t know why I ever thought that, I was a weird flower, you’re nothing like Chara.’
tl;dr: While Asriel seems to be eager to see Chara in a Frisk who begins the Kill-All run, the fact that he is just as eager to teach who he sees as Chara the ‘lessons’ of kill or be killed and never doubts that they are Chara no matter who they love or save or befriend, casts doubt on the hypothesis that the reason he makes that observation is because Chara was cruel while alive.
back when i first entered the undertale fandom in the beginning of october, well…you would be hard pressed to find anyone who didn’t think chara was an absolute demon. nowadays there is a nicely sized group of people who feel pity for this kid, but back then? nothing.
i suppose that’s what drew me to the fallen human in the first place, the widely held disdain everyone felt for them. it was just so jarring compared to the rest of the game.
flowey is my second favorite character and had been my first favorite at the time, and the way the game went so far to show that this flower, who was an evil asshole who seemed to be a being wishing nothing more than death and suffering for all…
…was actually a poor kid who had a suffered so, so much to make him the way he was by the time the game started, just fell apart if there was another character who was presented as evil and actually was truly evil.
so i would say their thematic role in the story was what piqued my interest. the disconnect between how they were treated by the fandom and what that would mean for the game’s themes is how i started trying to look at what was presented in the game without any previous biases the fandom had spread.
over time, they became very important to me. another reason i care about them so much is that i see quite a lot of myself in the fallen human? the story of a child who wanted to disappear is something that i could relate to, a lot.
Finally finished this labor of love that I’ve been working on over the past couple of months. This game happened at a pretty difficult time in my life, and despite its silly fandom it’s still very important to me. Wish I didn’t feel so obligated not to replay it. ;;
I see this as a fairly common misconception. None of the Chara/Frisk/Player party are part of the Delta Rune Prophecy in either interpretation of it; not as the free-er or the destroyer.
First, here is, word-for-word, the prophecy, as written on the Waterfall texts.
Now, of course “seen the surface and returned” could apply to both of them, but it in fact only applies to one of them.
That’s because the Delta Rune is directly connected to the prophecy by the people in the Underground. Specifically, the “winged circle”.
The winged circle is especially important, as no one seems to quite know what it could be, but they have named the winged circle an “angel”.
It is important to note that the “Angel of Death” interpretation is not part of the original prophecy, but born of pessimism that’s slowly overtaking the Underground.
However, some people use this line as evidence that Chara never wished for monsters’ freedom, and only wished to “bring them destruction”.
The prophecy itself – “and the Underground will go empty” is vaguely worded, to be sure. The fact is, the Underground does go empty in both senses…at the same time, and from the same person.
This person brings destruction to the world, frees the monsters from the mortal realm, and frees the monsters from the Underground.
This person, as many of us know, is Asriel Dreemur.
The form he takes during the second part of the fight is his truest form after taking the souls; not the generated form it was before. This form is the only form in the entire game that fulfills the delta rune imagery.
Of a winged circle. The “Something else” in the imagery was the Soul of Asriel, made up of every soul in the Underground.
Asriel “freed all monsters from the mortal realm”.
Asrielbecame a “harbinger of destruction”.
Asriel freed them from the Underground.
We are given two different interpretations – of an “angel of death” and an “angel of freedom” because when we first see the delta rune in Asriel, he’s attacking us at full power. We should recognize the rune at that time and at first believe the “angel of death” must be the true interpretation, then realize later he is in factalso the “angel of freedom”.
Chara never manages to completely empty the Underground; every time, Alphys, Monster Kid, and every non-attacking citizen NPC (quite a few monsters!) make it to an escape route and are never caught.
Chara has also never been associated with the winged circle or delta rune, even at the no-mercy ending where the opportunity could have arisen. They are not part of the prophecy, and the prophecy is not “proof” they are destruction itself.
honestly just really like undertale 