whoa Chara….didn’t know you read Japanese literature from over a decade from when you fell down the hole in 201X… The alternate check text for the Royal Guards in Genocide route is a direct quote from page 66 of the translation of Banana Yoshimoto’s book “Kitchen” and published in Japanese in 1988 and published in English in 1993. The version in the game may have been a slightly different translation. I have no idea why Toby included this quote. It’s not that famous a book or a quote, even the Google books doesn’t have it as one of the “popular passages”. You can read it online here http://docslide.us/documents/kitchen-banana-yoshimoto-5584503f21857.html, let me know if you find any other references in it, I unfortunately have a full reading list of exciting scientific articles to struggle to understand.
So! There seems to be a lot of wondering going on about EYE COLORS lately, so let’s put a few bits of information on the table.
The corrupted pacifist ending bedroom scene has been variously taken to mean that Chara’s eyes, or more recently Frisk’s eyes, are canonically red.
In Frisk’s sprites, the eyes are black (#000000). In Chara’s end-of-NM sprite, the eyes are slightly lighter, being the same shade of dark brown (#3d120e) as Frisk’s hair and outline. From this, you might decide that Frisk’s eyes are canonically black, and Chara’s dark brown. However, the eyes/pupils of nearly every monster character are depicted as #000000 on overworld sprites for the sake of visual clarity, including…
…Toriel, whose eyes we know to actually be very dark red (#400000) from her battle interface sprites. So we cannot say for certain that Frisk’s or Chara’s eyes are black/brown, just because of their sprites. They could easily be red like Toriel’s are.
On the flipside, we cannot say for certain that their eyes *are* red, either. The bedroom scene, from the corrupted pacifist ending, has been used to argue:
Chara’s canon eye color is red, because they are possessing Frisk in this scene.
Frisk’s canon eye color is red, because it is their body that is getting possessed.
But it should be noted that the red (#ec1c24) seen here is clearly not natural, in any case; F/C’s eyes are brightly glowing in a dark room, which is not a normal thing for human eyes to do. Ever. Also, Frisk’s face and clothes seems to have instantaneously shapeshifted into Chara’s in the corrupted endings, and that’s also not a natural phenomenon. (lol)
There’s an interesting clue to the narrator and their state of mind when you check the bag of dog food in the lab.
You see, unlike the dummy and tree, it’s affected by kill count, not LOVE.
If you kill no one…
The narrator becomes optimistic. They don’t want you to kill. The bag is “half-full”.
If you kill even one person (even a tiny whimsun, who won’t increase your love to even two)
…the narrator becomes pessimistic. The bag is now “half empty”. Their state of mind is directly changed by you killing even one person.
But if you kill Doggo, and your kill count is 21+….
The dog bag becomes funny. This is directly affected by killing Doggo and killing more than 20 people. The narrator doesn’t find his death funny before 20 kills. Something has changed in them.
Now, why is that? What kind of narrator becomes affected by you killing things, to the point where they become pessimistic if you even kill once? What kind of narrator becomes sadistic if you kill so many people?
One that is with you. One that shares your EXP and LOVE. One who becomes distanced as you distance yourself, and violent as you become violent yourself.
One who is looking to you for guidance.
One who only ever refers to themselves as Chara. One who only ever refers to “you” as Frisk.
Chara is the narrator, and their view on the world is directly changed by how much you kill.
If you kill no one, they’re optimistic. They don’t want you to kill.
If you kill even once, they become pessimistic.
If you kill over 20 people then they can be sadistic, even on a non-genocide route.
But they do not find Doggo’s death funny unless you kill more than 20 people (which is more than the equivalent of an entire area’s worth of monsters). They did not find it funny before the kills corrupted them, or they would always find his death funny, even without the kills.
Chara’s Level of Violence and Execution Points start at 1 and 0.
What is this? How is this? We know “who” is this but…exactly how are we seeing this? Where did this come from?
Certainly they did not walk from all the way back here:
where their body was buried, which by now is probably in an advanced state of decay. (also not a zombie)
But is this being something that can be classified as a ghost, when we have seen previous examples of ghosts being a type of monster in the world of Undertale?
Or are human ghosts by nature different then monster ghosts? But this spirit can later identify themselves as a “demon” if the geno-run is done twice. So I submit to you that this is not a normal phantom or demon.
This is Chara’s doppelganger, their eidolon. A greek concept that is
a spirit-image of a living or dead person; a shade or phantom look-alike of the human form.
This fits their physical appearance and would mark them different then the other ghosts of Undertale. But an eidolon isn’t just defined as a kind of ghost, but an image of an ideal, an “idol.” they are a manifestation of the ideal that was created by “your guidance”
There are not just Chara, they are not even just the narration anymore, they are the ideal image of Chara created by the actions of the Player through Frisk.
And in the second to last verses of Walt Whitman’s poem Eidolons (about eidolons) reads this:
And thee my soul, Joys, ceaseless exercises, exaltations, Thy yearning amply fed at last, prepared to meet, Thy mates, eidolons
Thy body permanent, The body lurking there within thy body, The only purport of the form thou art, the real I myself, An image, an eidolon.
The Soul meeting their mate/friend/“partner” the eidolon. Frisk the Soul meeting Chara the eidolon that was created by Frisk’s actions.
The permanent body, lurking within the body. The effects of creating this eidolon are permanent and are not canceled out by True Resets. This manifestation will carry over from the geno timeline and lurk within Frisk’s body until the end of the Souless Pacifist run.
Before reaching the end you can abort the run and Chara’s spirit will revert to being the benign narrator, but once you create this ideal version of them out of LOVE, it’s not going to go away. (unless you fully wipe your data) This branch entity is no longer a spirit bound to Frisk, it’s not the narrator in the next run, it’s a lingering reminder of your past choices.
(so not only are you dooming Frisk, and everyone else, but you are dooming the passive narrator Chara from finding peace in the Restarted timeline as well when you do a Soulless pacifist run)
honestly just really like undertale 