so this has probably been discussed tons of times before but I wanted to spend some time talking about the symbolism of golden flowers in Undertale, and how the inclusion of golden flowers in a scene can act as a visual shorthand for other things.
Like 70% of this post is about Alphys and how golden flowers are used to represent her guilt and anxiety, but there’s also some discussion about the Boss Monster family.
this is an excellent post; and by god i will chicken peck the n my phone to add a small thought. which. since i can’t use a readmore is going to get creative. Spoilers ho?
There’s only really one person we know has directly interacted with Flowey since Flowey began _____ possibly consistently; at least by the time you arrive. Papyrus.
Papyrus, for whatever reason, can interact with grief. Even if floweys motives are bad, he talks to him. encourages him. Papyrus listens to him.
Sans, meanwhile presumes what he’s being told about is something else. Or he approaches talking about it and chooses to pull away, depending on how you look at it.
Papyrus embraces how he feels, as a person. He is the single most aware person in the game.
Sans deflects, or chooses to not recognize them.
so this has probably been discussed tons of times before but I wanted to spend some time talking about the symbolism of golden flowers in Undertale, and how the inclusion of golden flowers in a scene can act as a visual shorthand for other things.
Like 70% of this post is about Alphys and how golden flowers are used to represent her guilt and anxiety, but there’s also some discussion about the Boss Monster family.
Okay so we all know buttercups are a big thing in Undertale…. but those can’t be the flowers that Chara wanted to go back to their village to see. They were already growing down in the Underground, otherwise Chara wouldn’t have been able to get them for their plan. And buttercups look a bit different and are way smaller then the flowers shown in the game, and they don’t stick to clothing like Alphys described.
Well the flowers in these pictures are called Bidens Laevis. They are a species of wild flower that is a member of the genus Bidens (which comes from the Latin for “two” and “tooth”). Common names for them are beggarticks, black jack, burr marigolds, cobbler’s pegs, stickseeds, tickseeds, or tickseed sunflowers.
Nice! A golden flower with the distinctly sticky seeds, and the shape of the seeds is oblong like Flowey’s “friendliness pellets,” and can be made into tea!
But a couple of things don’t seem quite right about it to me. Gaster was around before the flowers arrived from the human world, and it seems weird for him to be named after something that’s after his time, when it seems like much of the relevant stuff about him was before that. And Aster is a font– a nice dignified one at that– so it could be simply “font with a thematically appropriate name”.
But moreover, well, asters don’t quite look like Flowey. They have long skinny petals like daisies. Flowey is sort of the opposite. His petals are unnecessarily short. I mean, pixel art and all, but there is definitely screen real estate to draw larger petals than *that*. So perhaps he is a flower with shorter petals.
What does he resemble? Well, he does look like a buttercup. But those existed in the monster world beforehand. And I think we all know they’re not going to be anyone’s favourite tea.
My first thought was actually a youngpeony. One that is just starting to bloom and has few petals (like the growth stage the one in this picture is at, although that particular one is really pale despite being called a yellow peony. For some odd reason everyone wants to take pictures of their flowers in full bloom. XD) That looks more like him to me? Peony flowers are definitely used to make tea; it’s popular in Chinese medicine. So I think that could be a possibility as well.
Another thing I was thinking is that maybe the reason the “flowers that bloomed in the human’s village” were a Thing is that village’s unique flowers that were known for blooming only there, and nowhere else in the world. In which case we couldn’t identify them as anything we knew. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a flower with a white center, and I know that’s probably to improve his look in the graphics like unto Monster Kid’s apparent bow, but that could also just mean that he’s a weird rare flower.
Tagging @passivechara in case you have any thoughts on this?
those peony’s do look closer to what a golden flower does with it’s large petals.
Flowey is pretty unique compared to these, and it could be just because he is a monster dust and determination injected golden flower.
I mean, magic clearly transformed this ordinary golden flower to have a working pair of eyes, vocal cords, and teeth. Flowey even displays minor shapeshifting that lets him mimic the faces of both his parents and his past self, but it is limited to his “face” which is normally where a flower’s seeds and reproductive organs would be. So, Flowey being so visually different to other golden flowers in color and petal count could be the effects of the DT charged monster essence mutating his flower body.
And it is quite possible that golden flowers are simply a unique breed that exists only in the world of Undertale that draws inspiration from the plethora of medicinal yellow flowers that exist in real life.
Golden flowers could be drawing from asters, peonies, or Irish gorse flowers. Maybe we’ll learn more about these unique and plot pivotal flowers in the future? Who knows? Just another thing to be revealed in time I suppose.
It should be noted that there are many, many species of yellow flower.
Especially yellow flowers with the sort of large, flat, circular face Flowey has. (Flowey’s clearly not a typical Golden Flower, for all the reasons @passivechara listed, but we don’t get any close-up views of typical specimens.)
honestly just really like undertale 
