I’ve talked about the ‘chara’ sprites before, if briefly. Long story short, there are a set of sprites in the game called ‘Chara.’ Frisk’s called ‘Mainchara,’ the Chara we see at the end of the Kill-all is called ‘truechara’, but what is a little more nebulous is the existence of another set of sprites, these sprites, which are all called simply ‘chara.’
I once said that there was a lot to talk about here, but that that was not the time to dig into what these sprites are, or what they could or could not represent. And I stand by that, it wasn’t the time.
Now. Now is the time. This post is long, and there’s a lot of datamining stuff in here, so click at your own risk.
im still thinking about how like…if you abort a genocide run, do a neutral pacifist run afterwards then spare asgore, flowey will be like,
Chara…
You haven’t learned a thing.
(for reference, his line is normally “You IDIOT” instead of “<playername>”)
his whole emphasis in the genocide route is that they’ve learned something. his whole emphasis in the pacifist route is that they need to learn something. this, imo, is pretty solid evidence that chara was not like this when they were alive.
even if you stop the genocide really really late – like, as late as right before entering the throne room, even if you close the window during chara’s choice AFTER KILLING FLOWEY and reset – he’ll still be under the impression that chara hasn’t learned to kill yet
like, feeling that strongly about this just makes it feel like proof that chara really was not murderous in life. he doesn’t say they need to go back to normal. he doesn’t say that this isn’t like them. he says they haven’t learned a thing.
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.
It’s almost amusing how gungho people to absolve asriel of any wrong doing and yet still staunchly describe chara as evil……. For doing the exact same shit? Like hey maybe both of them are fucked up children who made bad decisions in grief snd pain and this is oneof those stories where true evil does not exist
I’m very fond of this song, and several others on the Songs From Mt. Ebott album, though overall it’s extremely hit or miss for me. (One nice thing about a free album is there’s no reason not to listen to the whole thing and keep only what you like!) Another in this same vein that I’m particularly fond of is Asleep (Don’t Let Me).
I feel that in their heart, Chara always wanted to believe in Asriel. They wanted to believe that he was right in sparing the humans on the surface, hence their optimism during a pacifist run. Frisk is proving to them that no matter how hopeless or dire the circumstances seem nobody has to lose their life.
Think back to what happened in the past. Chara desperately wanted to free the monsters who had done so much for them; these people were looking up to them as a beacon of hope. In their mind that plan was the only option they had left and nothing else could possibly work. Add in a huge dose of self-loathing and guilt over the buttercup accident and… well. Perhaps they once wanted to believe in a peaceful solution, but lost sight of that after all that had happened. They lost all hope.
Frisk’s actions during a pacifist run are showing Chara that there is always a peaceful solution, even when it seems impossible. They’re showing them that Asriel never betrayed them.
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.
I was looking at some of things Flowey says when you beat Asgore repeatedly on the same save file, and I found some interesting stuff that corroborates your Chara analysis and might help with your future Asriel/Flowey analysis, since it sheds some light on how Flowey views himself and others.
When you beat Asgore the 2nd time, Flowey says this:
And when you beat Asgore for the fifth time, he’ll say this:
I think this pretty much confirms that the reason Flowey “recognized” Chara isn’t because he saw Frisk’s actions in the genocide run and thought “this person’s a violent, abusive jerk? That sounds like the Chara I know and love!”
The dialogue above will appear even during an (incomplete) pacifist run, yet Flowey will still remark how Frisk is “just like me,” despite Frisk going out of their way to not harm a single soul. I think it’s evident that Flowey isn’t projecting his sadism and violent tendencies onto Frisk here, or at least not primarily.
In Flowey’s own summation, a person who’s “just like” him is someone who’s bored and detached from those around them, either as a result of soullessness or save abuse (or a combination of both). In other words killing is just a potential symptom of those two things, but it is not the cause. This is backed up by Flowey’s story in New Home, where he points out that he initially tried to use his powers for good in spite of his own soullessness. Speaking of which…
It’s important to remember that this line comes after Flowey mentions that killing has “grown tiring” for him, and immediately after that he says “You understand, Chara. I’ve done everything this world has to offer,” implying that he thinks Chara feels the same way and has gone through a similar experience with their soullessness and save-scumming. Think of the implications of that–Chara, who hated humanity and who gave up their life to kill six humans, eventually grew bored of killing, at least in Flowey’s estimation. Apparently violence and nastiness weren’t high on their priorities list, according to Flowey.
The main takeaway from the “creatures like us” line isn’t how violent or abusive Flowey and Chara are (or were), but rather how unique the two of them are from everybody else because of how detached they’ve become. Flowey’s obviously not saying “we should totes kill each other right now because we sure do love violence, don’t we?”
The reason Flowey “recognizes” Chara so early in the genocide run wasn’t because of the slaughter itself, but rather how methodical and illogical it was. From Flowey’s perspective, the boredom resulting from soullessness was the only explanation for it, and there’s only one other person he knew who could be in that same situation. Again, he recognized this behavior as the symptom of Chara’s current condition, not the cause (i.e. Chara wasn’t like that from the beginning).
You’ve pointed out that Chara clearly had a soul at one point (otherwise the Asriel fusion would’ve been impossible), and Chara more than likely didn’t abuse the save function when they were alive (given the weight they place on “consequences” and their refusal to undo their own mistakes). I think it’s also evident that Chara didn’t go around slaughtering monsters in life, nor did they use them and throw them away like broken toys without caring (otherwise I doubt monsters and their history books would’ve remembered Chara so fondly). Conversely, Flowey did do all of these things, but only after he became soulless–if such a stark reversal happened to Asriel, then it’d be no stretch for him to assume that the same thing happened to Chara after they lost their soul.
Flowey does not identify with Chara because of any sort of hatred, abusiveness, or violence on their part, nor does he ever imply that they were ever like that in life. Flowey can identify with Frisk on a pacifist run despite Frisk never displaying those qualities, even before he mistakes Frisk for Chara. What Flowey, a soulless Chara, and a save-abusing Frisk all have in common is boredom and an increasing detachment from the world around them, not a mean streak or a tendency towards violence.
If a relentless, knife-wielding killer was the only thing Flowey was looking for then I can think of at least one other person he could’ve latched onto
But Flowey’s attitude toward people with souls is pretty apparent
Some of this is going to be retreading old info for old readers, but others tuff is new support, so bear with what you know .There may be something I’ve not mentioned yet. Here’s the full direction I’m about to take this: Chara is the reason that monsters moved out of the RUINS and into
To cover old ground, I’d like to talk about the number of chairs and beds in HOME. In HOME, there are three, two adult sized, one child sized.
Three people lived here, these chairs seem to say to me.Two adults and one child. Asriel and his parents. Compare this to NEW HOME.
Two child-sized chairs and two adult sized chairs. Four peyple lived here. Chara, Asriel, Asgore and Toriel. Likewise, there are two beds in NEW HOEM and one bed in HOME.
It’s possible that Toriel could have remodeled the kids’ room a little though, right? I mean, she’s presumably only taking care of one child at a time. Surely she’s changed things. The current state of the kids’ room is no indication of what it was like when Asriel was there.
Or is it?
We find this bit of script from a particular section of the strings that includes details like this. I’m talking in the same section that has stuff on ‘goofy rocks’ and early Toriel. RUINS. HOME.
This could be talking about his room in NEW HOME though, right? Its location in the strings is not proof, it’s correlation, and that’s not worth much at all. But there’s other things to be aware of …
There’s a lamp in the far right corner, yes, but we don’t interact with it. Those alarms, those are there to help with programming specific events, and situations. And we don’t really interact with his bed in any meaningful way that would require that many alarms. Doesn’t fit. And as I pointed out, this is back in the RUINS. There’s really only one thing that this script could be talking about, right … ?
Now, what’s interesting is that this clarifies that not only was this room formerly Asriel’s but that it hasn’t actually changed that much since the Dreemurrs left for NEW HOME . The lamp, the bed, they are all ‘Asriel’s. Which, while cute, is also super morbid. That’s not the point though.
The point is that this room has not changed. That Toriel has not refurnished Asriel’s room in preparation for the fallen humans. And that therefore, if Chara had a bed here once, it would still BE here.
That means that Chara’s fall happened before the move. But, isn’t it possible that Asriel already lived in NEW HOME when Chara fell, and then took Chara home? I had only conjecture to suggest this wasn’t true: ‘wouldn’t Asriel not wander that far from his home? Coulod he have carried an injured Chara all the way to the castle in NEW HOME?’ But that was all I had. Until now.
You see, @doge-w-a-bloge found something very interesting in the strings. Monster history books that we never see in the game to accompany the two that we see, one in Toriel’s home, and another in the library. There’s more, and they paint an interesting story of the Kingdom of Monster’s timeline.
Immediate reaction: part one and four seem to establish some sort of chronology between them. We’ve read both of them in the game. They’re not just in the String, but part of the file, in books. It’s in order.
Part 1: Monsters are sealed and settle in HOME away from humanity out of fear. Part 2-3: Unknown events. Part 4: Unafraid of humans monsters settled in NEW HOME flush with the Barrier’s edge.
That’s a fair assessment, right? Well, that makes the next chapter we can read interesting.
Part 4: Unafraid of humans monsters settled in NEW HOME flush with the Barrier’s edge Part 5: Unknown Events Part 6: Unfortunately monsters don’t know much about illness. Part 7-8: Detailed chapters on what happens when a human dies and how a monster can absorb their SOUL.
Monsters don’t get ‘sick.’ They sometimes ‘fall down’ but the author recognizes this to being similar to, yet distinct from, whatever makes their lack of knowledge on illness unfortunate. Who is sick, if not a monster? Chara. Why are there chapters on how a monster can absorb a human’s SOUL after the chapter on how their illness was not familiar? Because that’s exactly what Asriel did after Chara died.
So, part five is probably the context where they actually talk about how Chara actually GOT sick. This chapter, where Chara must have been explicitly mentioned, is not included in the list of histories available to us in the strings. The events before the move to NEW HOME that gave Asgore the hope for a peaceful resolution with humanity. These chapters were also not available to us in the strings.
Noticing a pattern? I know I am. Chara is important enough to this hstory that their illness is discussed., and there’s not a lot of room in any of these parts. A handful of sentences, at most. Part 5 must be all about how Chara fell ill, there’s no room for anything else.
But that means that Chara’s existence, as a ‘good human,’ must have been established before. Chara must have been mentioned BEFORE. In part 2, part 3 or both … Before monsters settled NEW HOME, and before monsters overcame their fear of humanity.
There is no way that Chara’s fall and monsters’ sudden courage are coincidence. There is a reason, after all, that Asgore calls Chara ‘the future of humans and monsters.’ He’s not just saying that. He believes it …
Chara is the person who convinced an Asgore who agreed with a Gerson that believed that monsters and humans could NEVER live in peace …
… Chara convinced THAT Asgore he was wrong … Probably by example. Chara is the person who gave the monsters hope for a life under the bright sun, in the overworld. The reason that their death plunged the kingdom into despair, and stole all their hope was that Chara was the CAUSE of that hope. I become increasingly convinced of this by the day.
honestly just really like undertale 