So! There seems to be a lot of wondering going on about EYE COLORS lately, so let’s put a few bits of information on the table.
The corrupted pacifist ending bedroom scene has been variously taken to mean that Chara’s eyes, or more recently Frisk’s eyes, are canonically red.
In Frisk’s sprites, the eyes are black (#000000). In Chara’s end-of-NM sprite, the eyes are slightly lighter, being the same shade of dark brown (#3d120e) as Frisk’s hair and outline. From this, you might decide that Frisk’s eyes are canonically black, and Chara’s dark brown. However, the eyes/pupils of nearly every monster character are depicted as #000000 on overworld sprites for the sake of visual clarity, including…
…Toriel, whose eyes we know to actually be very dark red (#400000) from her battle interface sprites. So we cannot say for certain that Frisk’s or Chara’s eyes are black/brown, just because of their sprites. They could easily be red like Toriel’s are.
On the flipside, we cannot say for certain that their eyes *are* red, either. The bedroom scene, from the corrupted pacifist ending, has been used to argue:
Chara’s canon eye color is red, because they are possessing Frisk in this scene.
Frisk’s canon eye color is red, because it is their body that is getting possessed.
But it should be noted that the red (#ec1c24) seen here is clearly not natural, in any case; F/C’s eyes are brightly glowing in a dark room, which is not a normal thing for human eyes to do. Ever. Also, Frisk’s face and clothes seems to have instantaneously shapeshifted into Chara’s in the corrupted endings, and that’s also not a natural phenomenon. (lol)
HELLO THERE it has… been A While…. sorry for the wait on this !
for your trouble, here’s 6.3k words of post-pacifist frisk+flowey (with a side of chara n’ asriel)
[content warnings for: allusions to child death, suicidal ideation and grief. also casual ableist language because Flowey]
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44. “If you die, I’m gonna kill you.”
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Everything about this is so stupid.
Frisk almost got up too early for you to catch them
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you’ve never been a morning person, not in any timeline or iteration
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and it was a goddamn chore to wheedle them into not leaving you behind for… wherever. Destination is something you couldn’t care less about, though Frisk did. Enough that once they admitted defeat to your wiles (“I’ll vore your stubborn butt and drag you back through that window, you know” ‘Do you even know what ‘V-O-R-E’ means’ “GOD who cares!!!!”), their tack retreated into something… familiar.
They didn’t fuss or offer some placid mote of back-sass when you insisted on your favorite flower pot for this trip into Hell Possibly, no ifs, ands or buts about it. They strapped on your preferred pack, the front-carrying one that makes it easier for you to see them talk, even though Frisk isn’t fond of it from a sensory standpoint and you both know it. You decided to call these accommodations “red flags one and two.”
The way you felt Frisk’s pulse pick up, more than was strictly necessary for climbing this mountain, just tweaked your hackles more. It’s not any better now that they’ve reached the summit.
If I accomplish nothing else with this blog, may it at least be a small haven
for Undertale fans who are as sick of Tiny Satan Chara (with or without
Sobbing Helpless Frisk-Ghost), Angst Porn Sans, and Actual Porn Sans as I
am.
This is the piece I’ve been posting teasers of for a couple of days. My heart hurts whenever I think about these two, but… You know? I feel like I did them proud here.
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.