saveloadreset:

imitationknife:

eroshiyda:

imitationknife:

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.