feralphoenix:

i’ve got… a few thoughts… about a thing… that i’ve been seeing a lot recently. i’ll try to keep this as low-sodium as i can lmao

undertale fandom as a whole is a lot more accepting of the idea of chara as a nuanced character with flaws and virtues like the rest of the game’s cast than it used to be. it helps that over the past six months a lot of evidence has been found supporting chara-as-the-game’s-narrator as a real thing. there are still plenty of folks who disagree, but there’s a lot more breathing room for folks who are into that reading.

(if you hadn’t played undertale or interacted much with the fanbase yet back in september/october, for the record back then us team chara folks legit needed our own term for chara-as-not-innately-evil because the evil chara reading was so overwhelmingly popular and the content we wanted to engage with was so difficult to find. we needed our own term so badly that people took my silly soft grunge/a softer world jokes and made them a thing – that’s where the phrase “soft chara” originated. some fun trivia for the day.)

so, before i get too sidetracked recounting Ye Olde Fandom History – my point is, there are a lot more people willing to believe in chara’s potential for goodness now, and thus willing to believe that the no mercy route isn’t chara’s doing.

this growing acceptance generally makes me very happy, but it also leads to the discussion of “so whose fault IS no mercy then?” and, uh.

spoilers: the correct answer to this question is not and will never be “it’s frisk’s fault.”

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