I don’t really get it when people decide that they hate Alphys for tricking them. I get that people don’t like being lied to, but a lot of the time it’s only Alphys that draws the player’s ire. I have heard sneers of disgust when Let’s Players see her.
99% of all monsters have tried to kill the human child and Alphys is apparently the worst monster in the Underground because she lied in order to impress them.
They usually try to say she put you in danger, but completely ignore the fact that you literally cannot die during any segment that she has set up, either to the Mettaton games or the laser traps. You can only die to random encounters (not her fault, monsters hurt humans simply by emoting), to the Royal Guard (who Undyne is in charge of) or when Mettaton steals the show (when he hires Muffet and has taken over entirely once you enter the core.) And while she does want to feel better about herself, and her plan is less than great, she’s also trying to stop you OR Asgore from dying, since she knows you will have to kill him to leave or that he will kill you and she doesn’t want to see either of you die.
A lot of people refer to the amalgamates being horrible abominations too, and her hiding them was undeniably bad, but ultimately they end up living happily with their families when they would have been dead otherwise. People thinking they are horrible abominations is one of the reasons Alphys thought she had to hide them in the first place.
I can understand disliking Alphys, her humor isn’t going to click with everyone, she did make a lot of mistakes, and her situation is complicated, but it confuses me too that people seem to hate her so much as to put lying as worse than murder.
ALPHYS DEFENSE SQUAD
Honestly the only thing that REALLY bugs me about Alphys is that she kept the amalgamates hidden away, when they could have gone home a lot sooner. However, the capstone of her whole character arc is realizing that was the wrong thing to do! Which is! Actually very important to me! (I think it would be nice if certain real people could maybe realize that no level of weirdness or illness makes keeping folks hidden away instead of with loved ones in their communities the appropriate course of action! Certain real people don’t even have the excuse of having caused the weirdness in the first place and being afraid of the consequences!) This is not to say that Alphys was justified in this area or others, but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the main theme of Undertale is that everyone has the potential to be better or worse than the person they currently are, depending on what actions they take. It’s a story about imperfect people either striving to be the best they can be or giving in and giving up, or, most importantly, both at different times. It’s about how those choices change both the person making the choice and the world around them. A major part of that is learning to see the value in morally ambiguous and even frightening people, people who have done the wrong things, people who have understandable and sympathetic motives but come to recognize that those motives don’t justify their actions.
Alphys, like the rest of the main cast, showed a willingness to change. That is brave and admirable, especially in her case, where she is SO scared and SO lost. She is a mess, but she is a mess that is making an effort and improving things in the process. And it makes her an interesting character! She’s not some one-note helpful/harmful NPC with no apparent life, dreams, or fears of her own.
I love this depressed anxious nerdlizard so much, flaws included.
honestly just really like undertale 