Chapter Text
RUINS ARC
They would accept any punishment, endure any torture, put up with anything, just please, please save Asriel…
I started with a flashback of Asriel and Chara’s last moments to show Chara feels regret over their actions, to prime people that Chara a) makes mistakes, sometimes huge ones, yet b) is still intended to be a sympathetic character. In the first couple chapters especially Chara is aloof and kind of a jerk because the only person they can speak with is a human who they owe no favors to. They needed this humanizing moment.
Chara stopped shouting and their grin faded as a thought came to them. “… Can you really not hear me?”
Try examining the flowers when you first start a game: you get nothing. However, if you return after the Flowey tutorial, then and only then do you get the message about flowers which “must have” broken your fall. Chara is guessing: they weren’t awake to see it firsthand but they’re making inferences based on available data. I interpreted this as Frisk being unable to see or hear Chara when they first woke up, but it’s also possible Chara was not awake yet. Either way, Chara does not provide narration until after the Flowey “fight”.
Chara felt an invisible wall push against their back.
More than one reader asked whether I was inspired or had outright thieved from the flavortextchara tumblr comic. I’m not going to lie and say I’m completely unfamiliar with it, but a lot of ideas I had predated reading the comic. I never for one moment considered having an internal voice Chara or adopt any kind of body sharing mechanic; to me Chara was always a ghost. So much of what they say and mean comes from slight changes in expression and body language. The kind of body-sharing common in Narrator Chara fics sounds more like soul absorption, which a human canonically cannot do with another human soul. I decided from the start that Chara had a small piece of their soul remaining, since the chapter 14 scene at the barrier is one of the first scenes I wrote, and this limited my options a bit. More on that when I get there.
The child thought for a moment. “What are your pronouns? Ah, it’s they/them for me.”
One of the people I showed the original version of this chapter to had some words for me. I had Frisk ask for “preferred” pronouns” and this reader got upset. “They are not a preference,” they told me. “They are a requirement. They are part of who they are and you don’t get to disrespect that and call them your friend. Those are their pronouns.” As a cis straight male my privilege means I don’t need to think about gender issues in my day to day life, or at all if I don’t want to, but basic civility and respect requires I am sensitive to them and correct myself. I removed the word “preferred” and the scene works much better for it. At that time I had not folded language difficulties into Frisk’s character yet; it is possible even without this conversation I would have removed the word later while questioning whether Frisk would use it. Another reader pointed out this is a sort of awkward way to introduce the subject; I rationalized it as, the typical way to learn someone’s pronouns is to hear someone else talking about the person, and since that was not going to happen with Chara, Frisk has no way of learning them other than asking outright.
“Oh?” Chara’s smile became a bit smug. “You aren’t good at puzzles?”
Two things I want to mention here. First, let’s talk about the Player. In my humble opinion the Player is not directing Frisk like a puppeteer, but rather subtly nudges them into being more decisive. The options presented in battle are based on things Frisk wants to do in that particular situation; the Player can subtly guide them but can’t make them act contrary to their nature. So when Frisk crushes Snowdrake’s spirit with the “Heckle” command or acts creepy towards Shyren those are impulses Frisk has. The Fight and Mercy commands are also part of Frisk’s problem-solving toolkit, so it is totally possible Frisk might have freed or genocided the monsters even without the Player’s input (really unlikely, mind, but possible). Because those are things Frisk would do normally, when the Player guides them Frisk believes it was their own idea to act in that fashion. They don’t realize they’re being controlled at all. In the game Chara is almost certainly aware of the Player and how they might perceive things, given the jokes they make about perspective and the GUI. The Genocide speech also shows they know the Player has some influence over Frisk but may or may not know the full extent of it. In this series neither Chara nor Frisk is aware of the Player; this fic is about the relationship between Chara and Frisk, and having a largely unknown and unknowable third party would distract too much from that.
The other thing? I consider it my greatest failure of the fic that, with the timid and wary personality I gave Frisk in these early chapters (because they have no idea what’s going on), I was unable to work in the line, “Wow! You are super fast at being wrong!”
Chara sighed. “If I had known you would be in danger I would have told you about this earlier.”
I took some minor liberties with how magic and bullet combat work. I tried to steer away from video game terminology as much as possible, except in the case of Save/Load where it would be awkward to avoid those terms. Needing a direct hit to the soul for bullets to kill is setup for Frisk’s solution to the Toriel fight, and the near one-hit kill aspect allows for future battles to maintain tension. Also it doesn’t take much before I get bored with writing fights, so I tend to exaggerate damage to end them more quickly. I would provide more details on what an expanded magic field means in later chapters; this is what allows Chara to get an estimate on the attack and defense of monsters and know their names even if they are not familiar with them. Because it is only an estimate this also allows for Chara to be wrong if the enemy is strange (like Papyrus) or are deliberately holding back (Toriel and Asgore).
The chocolate had a smooth, rich, sweet taste. They failed to suppress both a moan of satisfaction and a single tear; hurriedly they wiped it away but not fast enough.
Chara likes chocolate. Few kids don’t. To have such a passionate reaction in the Genocide route, though, implies there’s more going on there than just the chocolate. As we later learn, chocolate is Toriel’s way of saying “everything will be alright now, you are in a safe place”. That chocolate was rare in the Underground meant they could only have it when it was really necessary for their psychological well-being. Chocolate was very much a sometimes food for Chara, and that made it all the more meaningful for them.
“Wow!” Frisk beamed. “That’s amazing! So handsome, and the hat is cool too!”
I originally had a recurring joke in store concerning Frisk’s flirting: in my earliest versions Frisk would make incredibly lewd remarks without really understanding what they were saying (eg, openly wondering how it would feel for Napstablook or Chara to be inside them, referring to their incorporeality but implying… yeesh). I wisely decided that, funny as that might be in my head, when it comes out of the mouth of an eight-year old it crosses a few lines.
“What, you don’t like puns? How disappointing. Frankly I’m a-ghast.”
One of my betas suggested it should be “I’m a-ghost.” I replied that was more of a Sans-level joke. Chara takes some pride in their punnery. Personally I’m ambivalent about puns; I grumble about them but I think Chara is essentially right when they say even people who hate puns smile when they hear one.
“Yes, I have red eyes. I suppose it is a demon thing.” Chara pointed at the switch which next needed to be flipped to open the door. Looking to change the subject quickly they asked, “Now that you mention it what color are your eyes?”
There is some debate over whether Chara’s eyes are actually supposed to be red; by now it’s such a huge piece of fanon that it’s odd to find a fic or artwork where they are not depicted with red eyes. I personally feel when Chara is seen at the end of the Genocide route the resolution of the sprite is too small to make out what color their eyes are supposed to be (see also Toriel or Asgore’s overworld sprites). Frisk’s eyes also being red makes their question less of curiosity than as an invitation to camaraderie: “So… [life with] red eyes [kinda sucks], huh?” This was perhaps a too clunky and obvious way to draw attention to the idea that Frisk’s eyes were not always how we see them in the game while setting up Chara’s “creepy face” to also be a product of the same phenomenon. Still not sure if there was a better way to do this.
“Don’t be like that,” Frisk laughed. “Tell me what it is. I’ll help if I can. Please?” Something in their tone suggested this was not just an idle question or random small talk.
It was not until I was nearly finished writing the second chapter that Frisk’s personality started to coalesce. Many writers give Frisk saintly patience and endless good intentions, but I’ve always found that default unsatisfying. I always felt a “perfect Frisk” takes away from the message of Undertale; if Frisk doesn’t need to try to be a good person, why do Neutral routes exist? Why is Genocide a possibility? And how are we, the player, supposed to relate to a perfect being? The easiest way to explain my Frisk is with Enneagrams, basic personality types based on a persons needs, wants, and fears. Most authors write Frisk as a healthy-ish Nine, concerned primarily with promoting harmony among their peers. My Frisk is a moderate to unhealthy Two; they are ashamed of who they are, feel they are unlovable, and are motivated by a need to be validated by other people. They don’t actually mean it when they say, “It’s no trouble”, “I’m okay”, or things like that, what they want is to be recognized and appreciated for their effort and sacrifices. They may do or say the same things as a Nine, but there is an undercurrent of manipulation and quid-pro-quo present in their interactions which a Nine has no interest in, but they also show much more personal and targeted care toward others which a Nine might think of as favoritism. When Frisk offers to break the barrier they are not deterred by Chara’s anger, they are encouraged. After all, if it’s difficult that means Chara will be even more impressed and love them even more for it, right? By contrast Chara is an unhealthy Five; they are terrified and confused by the world and seek to retreat from it so they can study it and understand it better, and their greatest fear is that there is no place for them to belong. Chara feels a lot of guilt throughout the story because they’re still coming to terms with what they did, but guilt or shame is not the negative emotion which motivates them: it’s fear.
Toriel wagged her finger, “No no no! It’s more than that, it’s a celebration of you! Denying someone their birthday is denying them as a person.”
An advice column letter went viral in the late aughties; a mother wrote in for assistance dealing with her moody child, whom she claimed was acting up because she forgot their birthday a few times. The advice columnist unloaded on her with a variation of what Toriel says here. As someone who doesn’t and never did care about their birthday that much it stuck with me for some reason.
If they climbed Mt. Ebott they were not planning on ever coming back, but Chara let it go. It clearly bothered Frisk to talk about it and Chara had to respect their boundaries if they expected Frisk to respect theirs.
As we later learn Frisk fully intended to return from Mt. Ebbot. Chara might be empathetic and analytical but they are by no means psychic.
It was on the tip of their tongue, come on now, Toriel makes her pie crusts using flour made from ground… water sausage! They were water sausages! Maybe it was not much, but they would take their victories where they could get them at this point.
Frisk will not look at any of the books, but Chara would need to know what a water sausage is to identify Sans’ hot dogs. Cue shoehorning this in. I would later forget to write Sans’ hot dogs into the Hotland arc, rendering this superfluous. Whoops.
How could she do this, they asked themselves. Yes she always had a bit of a temper, she raised her voice and even grounded them or put them in time out when they acted out, but… she was actually attacking! The same person who held them as they cried, who gave them a warm and loving home when they had nowhere else to go, who gave them faith that maybe adults weren’t all terrible, was raising her hand against a child with the intent to kill. With her power Frisk would become Crisp in seconds, and even knowing that she was still going to fight? How could she?! […] “Knows what’s best for you.”
The Check description in the Toriel fight is short and clipped. It reads not unlike most of the narration in the Genocide route. Chara is furious. You may also notice this is when the Check descriptions stop being so one-sided in favor of the monsters; their faith is badly shaken, and unless Frisk actively works to make Chara believe peace between humans and monsters can still work… well, the bag of dog food will remain half-empty. By contrast, in my headcanon the Toriel fight is when Chara becomes fully committed to the Genocide route. If even Toriel could betray their trust maybe monsters aren’t worth saving after all.
They did. Between ragged breaths Frisk croaked out, “I have to go. I made a promise… I’m going to free everyone.” "This isn’t goodbye,” Frisk promised, returning the hug. “We will see each other again.” Toriel did not respond.
In order for the Hug and Talk commands to work as they do in the Lost Soul fight, Frisk had to have said something like this in the Pacifist route. This is a rather clever use of the “silent” protagonist on Toby Fox’s part: he could not put these lines into the fight itself because he would have no way of knowing the player intended to continue on a Pacifist route through the rest of the current run. Instead he slips these lines into the Lost Soul fight under the rationale that since you are on a Pacifist run Frisk must have said something like this to Toriel. Your current actions inform what your past ones must have been.
The flower watched Frisk with a goofy smile on their face, radiating insincere whimsy.
I contemplated having the first Interlude be here, where Frisk would kill Toriel and Load to undo it. There were a lot of dramatic problems with this and I abandoned the idea. First, Frisk is not yet aware of their power and their stress has not yet reached the point where they are ready to lash out; they have no desire to hurt Toriel. Second, Flowey telling Chara about Loads and that Frisk killed Toriel would do irreparable damage to Chara & Frisk’s relationship as it is still too young to survive a shock of that magnitude; the only other place for this reveal would be during the Photoshop Flowey fight, and there was already enough drama and angst in that chapter without piling more on it (not to mention, since that timeline would ultimately be Loaded away, it could not be from Chara’s POV and thus be mostly meaningless). Finally, if Frisk were to kill Toriel it would be retreading old ground for them to also kill Undyne later, and that was a scene with a lot more potential. I had not yet read a lot of Undertale fanfiction at the time, so I had no idea killing Toriel was so common in novelizations nor that killing Undyne was almost unheard of.
SNOWDIN ARC
Fields of Snow
I gravely underestimated how much of a pain this chapter was to complete. At one point I deleted over 2,000 words because I was just going through the motions of what happened in the game without adding anything new or funny. I did not start posting this story until everything up to chapter 3 was finalized, with the expectation that I would be able to complete one chapter a week and have a two-week buffer. My buffer vanished pretty much instantly and never recovered.
After Toriel went to all the effort to paint Chara into a corner, she was not going to punish them? Nothing about this house made sense. They felt like they were standing on quicksand.
Children coming from an abusive household have trouble understanding new environments; they can’t let go of the survival instincts they honed in their previous house and get confused when others don’t understand their coping strategies.
Asgore chuckled for some inscrutable reason. “Now that that’s settled… honeyblossom, can you contact the carpenters?” Honey- what? His tone became saccharine-sweet at that word. Who was he calling that? Toriel smiled. “Of course, Snookie-wookums.” Oh, of course. Asriel stuck out his tongue in disgust, and Chara had to bite back the urge to do the same.
Before everything happened Asgore and Toriel were gross as a couple. They were one of those pairs that mentally never left the honeymoon phase. Even at eight years old Asriel is thoroughly sick of them.
it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts
This is the first hint we get that something is wrong with Chara’s memories. Their inability to remember what should be a very happy memory is because they’ve sealed off their ability to love; remembering something like this would break that seal and leave them vulnerable again. Representing this with the phrase “it hurts” in all lowercase and no punctuation is a reference to the PC adventure game Trillby’s Notes, though these words in that game have a completely different meaning.
Chara swore loudly, stamping their foot in a miniature tantrum. “I knew it I knew it I freakin’ knew it! That comedian…!”
The evidence for Chara knowing Sans is thin. Sans is the only character whose theme on the soundtrack ends in a period, like whoever is reading it is spitting out the name in contempt. If Chara provides all the flavor text and possibly the save point names, why not the soundtrack titles? There is some debate about whether the “That comedian” text in the Genocide route refers to Sans or Snowdrake (IMHO, it is unclear whether “the comedian” in “the comedian got away” is the same as “that comedian”). Also, remember here that Sans can see what Chara is doing. He’s very careful about how he acts because he knows if he drops any hints Chara is smart enough to figure out he actually can see them. He’s proven right in “Old Familiar Faces”, when he stops caring and Chara puts the pieces together almost instantly.
“I know that sound just now was you. Can you please stop toying with your prank devices and recalibrate your puzzles? Today could be the day a human comes!”
I kept Sans’ speech quirk of speaking all in lowercase but not Papyrus’ quirk of speaking in all uppercase. The big reason for this is because of personal preference: in a dialogue box all uppercase still sort of works, on a page of prose it absolutely does not. It is very distracting and strains my eyes. If you don’t believe me go read A Prayer for Owen Meany, a great book but the title character’s speech is in all uppercase for important reasons and it still looks awful.
“Oh no you don’t Sans!” Papyrus said. “You’re not getting out of work that easily! If you can’t be bothered with your puzzles, at least brush up on your jokes! You’ve made the same old skeleton puns for years, I know you can do better!”
Too many authors and comic artists depict Papyrus as hating puns. The same guy who jokes about being the only skeleton in his closet, claims the Royal Guard is a “pupularity contest” because only dogs are allowed to join, and insists his makeshift guard station is fortified in “cardboardhydrates”. Papyrus loves puns! He hates skeleton puns. I suspect this is because he’s heard all of them, every last one, and Sans keeps telling them.
Chara made a special note of two of the dogs: Dogamy and Dogaressa.
These two characters make any discussion of the timeline a gigantic pain. Many people theorize one hundred years or more must have passed between Chara and Frisk’s time; most monsters don’t know what a human looks like, so they figure nearly everyone who ever met the previous humans must be dead. But Asgore could not have won the trophy on his own, so the ‘98 competition had to have been held while he and Toriel were still together. Since Dogamy and Dogaressa do not appear very old at all and participated in the same contest, the time between Chara and Frisk falling must be significantly shorter than the lifetime of a single ordinary monster. There has to be some other reason monsters don’t know what humans look like. I decided on Chara being reclusive and the other children trying to keep a low profile on their own journeys.
“I don’t have [a last name],” they said, relenting while still appearing defiant. “I gave it up when I fell down and never got another.”
The operative word in the story of Chara and Asriel is “like”, as in “like siblings.” If Chara had been adopted as a Dreemurr there would not be a need for that qualifier.
Frisk exhaled sharply through their nose. “Holder. As in ‘placeholder’.”
Chara picks up on what Frisk means so easily because they’re the one who made this observation in the first place. The Interlude takes place before this scene, so Chara is essentially interpreting their own joke.
Frisk seemed about to protest but instead closed their mouth and nodded.
Frisk was about to Load here. They realized, however, they had technically fulfilled their condition for this Save point (have Frisk and Chara each tell something new about themselves). They know at some level they are getting frustrated so they back off.
Interlude: CONTINUE On
The Interludes were a very late addition, or at least putting them into place so early was. In my original outline the first Interlude would not take place until after Chara learned about Saves and Loads. While going over chapter 4 I realized it was not entirely clear what was actually happening and what was making Frisk act so strange. It made Frisk too much of a cipher to have them learn from and react to events and circumstances the reader would not be aware of for a dozen chapters, so I decided to intersperse the Interludes through the rest of the narrative. In retrospect this is probably the single most important decision I made in the entire fic: Chara not remembering Loads is the obvious point differentiating this story from many other similar novelizations of the Undertale story, and concealing it for 3/4 of the fic would have been a serious mistake.
Adoptive parents want a happy, smiling, white infant they could pretend is their own flesh and blood, that they can look at and sometimes forget does not share their blood.
This is a real issue in the foster care and adoption systems: there is a high demand and low supply for white children and a surplus of minority children but especially black and Hispanic kids. For the record even Frisk is not sure what demographic they belong to; they suspect they are Latinx but can’t be sure.
Thoroughly Bonetrousled
At about this point I was in the market for a new beta reader, my old one no longer having the time nor inclination to assist (they were not that big a fan of Undertale and their own projects were calling). I tried a couple different people, but they either did not have the time or did not have the interest. Given the choice between going on indefinite hiatus to find one or posting without a beta, I decided to go beta-less.
Chara crossed their arms. “I’m still not sitting on his lap. That’s for babies.”
An adult does not feel the need to prove they are an adult (they may not feel like an adult depending on their living situation but that’s not the same thing). Only a child worries about seeming to be too much of a child; their protests that they are not a child are the proof they are not yet an adult. Chara might pretend to be aloof and worldly, but they are actually quite immature in their unguarded moments (heh heh, ButtsPie).
“He likes to say ‘Nyeh heh heh’? I am not sure what else you are expecting of me.” Papyrus laughed his mentioned trademark laugh as another row of bones lazily crawled past Frisk.
Papyrus laughs after you Check him as though he’s responding to his own Check description. He is one of the very few monsters that do this. This is what originally gave me the idea that Papyrus can see and hear Chara.
Frisk bit their lip trying to think of something. “I can make paskemi?”
My wife pronounced “spaghetti” like this when she was very young, and she will do it now when she’s feeling whimsical. In case you’re wondering how I got this specific word.
Chara just kept smiling. “He’s using gravity magic on you. This one’s a pretty complicated and potent spell, making you heavy on the ground and lighter in the air.”
In my humble opinion, what we see in a game or movie is not a representation of how things in that world work but a translation of that world which makes sense within the mechanics and capabilities of the medium. I die a little inside when I read an Undertale fic and battles are described as seeing a heart in a box with a row of buttons and a hit point counter underneath it. Then I close the browser window. The heart in the box is how battles are presented to us as players, but everything the characters experience has to look and feel realistic to them. This principle informed how I would interpret all the battles and the various soul modes, starting here with Papyrus’ blue attack. I think it worked out really well. As a side note, I also interpreted each color of magic as having a different specialty; purple magic turns physical objects into data and back again (it’s how the phone boxes work), what’s called “healing magic” is a combination of green binding magic to stitch wounds together and yellow energy magic to re-energize damaged tissue, etc. I did this mostly to codify what magic can and can’t do, because what makes magic interesting is its limitations. Magic that can do absolutely anything at any time is boring; it becomes the solution for all things, and there is no dramatic tension when any conflict can be resolved with the right spell. Brandon Sanderson wrote a trio of articles, “Sanderson’s Laws” which go into more detail about this, I strongly recommend any aspiring writer who wishes to include fantastic elements from magic to psychics to superpowers in their stories to read them.
Supposedly the colors represent your strongest trait: yellow for justice, blue for integrity, cyan for patience, purple for perseverance, green for kindness, orange for bravery… and I don’t remember what red signifies but I know it was stupid.”
Chara does not tell Frisk what red means because they are embarrassed about it: when you’re trying to be cool and edgy you don’t want to tell people your greatest strength is love. Caring about stupid stuff like that is part of how Chara’s childishness manifests itself.
“So, what if I don’t defeat the blue attack… I just get rid of all his other bullets? Come on, I’ll show you.”
Everything Frisk does after breaking out of “jail” is a setpiece I brainstormed for a hypothetical Undertale anime. Obviously that isn’t going to happen, and if it does I won’t be involved in its production, but it was cute and silly and was a way of getting through the fight that wasn’t just “dodge stuff until Papyrus gets bored and lets you win”.
The date was… indescribable. Chara felt embarrassed on Frisk’s behalf just thinking about it.
Yes, I skipped the Papyrus date. Can’t improve upon perfection.
WATERFALL ARC
“In a certain country, there is a tribe with a unique punishment for anyone who commits a crime against their own family.”
The meaning of this story should be clear on a re-read; this was the one and only time Chara tried to talk to Asriel about what happened to them on the surface, and they did it in a very impersonal way. Not only was Asriel extremely disturbed, he completely missed the point. I find it hard to believe Chara would never talk about why they hated humanity with Asriel, but it fits Chara’s personality to have attempted to do so in so roundabout a fashion that Asriel did not recognize what Chara was trying to tell them.
“I don’t like that story either, Ree. Forget I mentioned it.”
I’m hardly the only or even the first writer to have Chara refer to Asriel by the nickname “Ree”, but I can honestly say I didn’t steal it from anyone. My thoughts were as follows: Chara would not be able to resist turning “Azz” or “Azzy” into “Ass” at some point and even Asriel would not tolerate that kind of thing for long. While pondering this I watched a comic dub where Chara called him “Rie” (pronounced REE-eh), which grated at my ears and I thought, “Why wouldn’t they just use Ree?” And, well, there you go.
“Monsters come in lots of shapes and sizes so it can be tough to tell the difference between a child and a monster that’s just naturally small. If the kids are all in stripes you can tell at a glance who needs looking after and who would feel patronized.”
I want to say I stole this idea from Ebbot’s Wake by TimeCloneMike, but to be honest it’s been a while since I read it and the story is a tad on the lengthy side to breeze through just to verify.
“It’s 204X now? I’ve been dead more than thirty years?”
Precisely one person has guessed why I chose to set the timeline to thirty years between Chara’s death and Frisk’s fall. Maybe more than that has, but none of them bothered to comment soooooo…
Chara swallowed, the smile disappearing from their face. “You can’t read.”
Some people have Chara reading the signs for Frisk because monsters have a different writing system. But the Nice Cream Man's punch cards have a message which is clearly English. So my solution for why Chara reads things aloud: Frisk has undiagnosed dyslexia. Dyslexia’s most infamous symptom is difficulty in reading. Secondary symptoms include an inability to understand jokes and wordplay, a smaller than typical vocabulary, and minor speech impairments. Poor self-esteem is also very common, but is due to social factors rather than a direct result of the disability. Among other things, it means every spelling mistake in Frisk’s dialogue is 100% intentional.
“Friendship headbutt!” he called out gleefully. “We’re friends now!”
I wish I could say I had come up with the idea of the friendship headbutt all on my own, but I actually got it from this comic by benteja. Thanks to Cyrus67 for finding this for me again!
“Suddenly, it’s a concert!”
This scene was probably a mistake. It sounded fun in my head but doesn’t do much to move the plot forward and the song lyrics are gratuitous (not to mention they took forever to translate and parse). I probably still would not have done a statue scene even if I cut this out; there’s really only one way to do a statue scene with the music box playing and it’s been done by people way more talented than me. Besides, there's enough upcoming Chara angst to go without.
“Humans are supposed to be tough to kill. They would never die to a fire, or being left in the cold, or water, or even… a fall.”
I had a rough time coming up with a rationale for why Undyne knocks the bridge out from underneath you in the game. Her goal is to kill you in a way that allows her to get your soul, and causing the bridge to collapse either allows Frisk to escape or kills them in the fall, guaranteeing the soul will vanish by the time she can get down there to claim it. I decided on “the bridge is too rickety to stand having a pitched battle on and she figures the fall won’t kill a human because humans never die from a fall in anime”.
They had not meant to fall, not at that time or in that way. It was entirely possible they would have jumped willingly if they had been allowed a few more minutes. But they had tripped, they had not been ready, and so the fall had failed to kill them.
Some authors posit that Chara tried to kill themself. But only falls when their foot gets caught on a root. It’s an accident. That doesn’t mean they were not suicidal (a well-adjusted kid isn’t going to think of, let alone execute, the buttercups plan on their own), but this time at least it was not suicide.
“Come on, take my hand. You still shouldn’t walk on that leg. I’ll take you to New Home and we’ll have a better look at it.”
There is a theory floating around that Chara lived at Home and their coming is what prompted the monsters to open up the rest of the underground and found New Home. I don’t subscribe to this: Home has only three chairs at the dining table and one bed in the children’s room (implying there was only ever one child occupant) and the story the monsters tell in New Home say Asriel brought Chara back to the castle, which is only ever used to refer to New Home. This brings up the logistics issue of Asriel dragging Chara through literally the entire underground, but the Riverperson and elevators would make this not quite as huge a trek. The “Chara causes the pilgrimage to New Home” theory also would not make sense in my condensed timeline; if all the monsters lived in the Ruins prior to the capital being founded, the monster population could not explode so fast for there to be overcrowding issues throughout the Underground a mere thirty years later.
Chara’s own arm hung limply, but there was no pain so it was probably just exhaustion. Hopefully.
This is one of the few places I deliberately chose to contradict canon. The image of Asriel helping Chara walk shows Chara with an apparently normal walk and a limp arm, suggesting it was their arm that got hurt in the fall. I chose to hurt Chara’s leg because with the way I characterized them at the time of their fall they would not have called out for help unless they had absolutely no choice.
“whatever you’re doing isn’t something a ghost like me can do. it isn’t possession because you can’t control their body. and it’s not absorption because they don’t get any of your power. you seem to be just, stuck together. like a piece of your soul got anchored onto their physical body.”
This is not a bad guess, given what Napstablook understands of the situation. At one point in the writing process this literally was going to be the answer to how Chara and Frisk were stuck together, but shortly before publishing the first chapter I hit the inspiration with Asriel’s soul chaining the humans’ souls together. I left this in to set up Chara’s next line about haunting Frisk, because there is no reason to throw away a joke even if it isn’t a very good one.
Frisk stared with open-mouthed fascination, reaching out before anyone could stop them. “So this little thing is your-!” As their fingers brushed against the red line on Chara’s chest they jerked backward suddenly, letting loose a tiny yip of pain.
Subtle foreshadowing for the “But it refused” event and why Chara does not attempt to do this earlier. Touching someone else’s soul without permission HURTS.
Chara put their hand to their chest, feeling the color leave their face. “I… I can’t feel love.”
I got a lot of questions about this from several different people, most of them some variant of “so how does Chara not being able to feel love work when it’s really obvious how much they care for Frisk?” I answered that Chara could still be affected by love but could not feel love itself. The best analogy I could come up with without spoiling the ultimate reveal is that it was like taking a whole bunch of caffeine after an all-nighter; you don’t want to sleep but can still tell your mind is sluggish and your body won’t work properly. You can’t feel tired but are still being affected by your tiredness.
Juice boxes, apples in the shape of crabs, some books and old reading glasses… nothing they really needed, but the items were not the most valuable find.
The book and glasses are associated with the Perseverance soul. In my headcanon the Perseverance soul did not bring these items with them to the Underground; the child was poor and black, so they never got an opportunity to develop their gifts and this led to being so dissatisfied with life they decided to climb the mountain. Gerson provided these items to them after noting how studious the child was.
“Well, the opposites of those are hatred, cruelty, and savagery. They’re poisonous to monsters. If a human struck us with emotions like that we’d be done for. But it’s not good for us if we feel that stuff, either. It worms its way inside, makes us weak and feeble. It ages us, and that’s how we grow old.”
This was the solution I came up with for the longevity of some but not all monsters: Gerson very carefully takes care of his emotional health so he survived for over a millennium. Dogamy and Dogaressa hardly age at all between the ‘98 Nose Nuzzling Competition and the time the game starts because they are in a permanent honeymoon phase. Meanwhile Sans has had it rough, so he’s aged as fast or perhaps even faster than a human would in the same timeframe. You can bet I’ll go into more detail about Sans’ backstory in the sequel.
He took a sip of his tea to collect his thoughts. He gave Frisk a patient smile. “Red means ‘love’.”
I expected to get a lot of pushback about this; red being determination is so ubiquitous it’s treated as canon. Basically nobody saw a problem with it, though. I’m not sure whether that’s because I successfully argued my case or whether people don’t care about it that much.
[Gerson] knew. He could not see Chara but he knew.
A couple people asked me how Gerson knows about Chara, and I never got a chance to explore this in the narrative. The short version of the story is that the first couple humans weren’t clever enough to hide Chara from Gerson, and Gerson has been around long enough to be able to recognize patterns (specifically, if a human comes through asking about soul colors but doesn’t know what red means it’s because Chara told them).
Chara pinched the bridge of their nose. “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.
Chara has heard this phrase before on the 201X internet but the odds are low that they’ve ever actually seen Cool Hand Luke. And I don't say that just because, uh, I haven't seen it either.
“You… you have meltdown and you still became captain of the Royal Guard?! You idiot! You absolute idiot! Don’t you know how dangerous that is? You should be in bed, you should be-”
Chara is being a casual ableist here; Undyne is very well aware of the limitations her health places on her and it’s not up to Chara to decide what she “should” be doing. To be fair, Chara’s experience with C3 is from Sans, who really does have to take it easy. They don’t mean any harm by it, but as has been shown Chara can be pretty thoughtless concerning the feelings of others when they’re under stress.
I don’t think anybody but Dr. Gaster has ever examined a human, so is it okay if we go in order rather than skip anything?”
This slides by if you aren’t paying attention, but W.D. Gaster has been around since before the war. This appears to be a contradiction; Gerson mentioned that being angry and hateful ages monsters, so how did someone as surly as Gaster survive for that long? How indeed.
“HP of 7 is still not good for a human, it’s barely more than a fifth of what it should be for your age, but it’s not-”
If you bother to do the math out this means Frisk and their 20 HP is also lower than average. From the snippets we get of their history this ought not to be a very big surprise.
Chara sat on the examination table and kicked their legs in the air. They read all the posters around the room, infographics with titles like “Falling Down: Know the Signs” and “A Healthy Child Starts with Choosing Who Will Carry”.
This throwaway line here is the only indication in the entire fic that monsters are, biologically speaking, without sex. Any monster can carry the child, and any monster can donate their material. I didn’t go into detail because it isn’t important to this fic, but there will surely be an opportunity to explore the idea in-depth in the sequel.
That was when the lights came back on, revealing the shape of their visitor: a skeleton like Dr. Gaster, but much shorter and dressed in blue shorts and a blue and white striped shirt. The stranger chuckled, “Heh heh, I put a whoopie cushion in my hand. Surprised you, huh?”
Of course, Sans is in a striped shirt here because he’s a child. I consider Sans’ all-lowercase dialogue as a symptom of his crippling depression; things are fine with him as a kid so he doesn’t have that speech tic yet.
The table was small and very low to the ground; there was only one seat, and it seemed more like a pillow with a backrest than an actual chair.
I gave Undyne a Japanese-style low table, less because of her obsession with anime than because there’s clearly no chair on Undyne’s side of the table and she is able to sit there anyway.
“He and his brother make a pretty good singing pair though, you should see ‘em at karaoke night!”
This is a reference to the “Drop Pop Candy” series of Youtube videos featuring Papyrus and Sans.
“It will be easier for us to forget you and move on if you’re not a person, not a name. Just the eighth human and nothing more than that.”
Of course, we know the reason none of the monsters ask for your name in the game is to preserve the reveal of Frisk’s identity. It seemed a little odd to me that this course of action made sense in-universe, though, given how friendly monsters are portrayed as. So I imagined something like this was going on in the background.
HOTLAND ARC
But put them together and… Well, that was how things like Operation Fire Sled happened.
This particular incident is loosely based on the time my siblings and I set up a ramp at the bottom of a steep hill and then rode an overloaded toboggan off it. I couldn’t breathe right for a week after that one.
“Is it B, Mercy?” Frisk asked hopefully.
This was my response when I played the game through the first time. I caught Alphys’ hand signals around the third question. And yes, I got tripped up by the Froggit T-shirt.
“All right human, for the game and your continued survival, who, does Doctor Alphys have a crush on?” Frisk bit their lower lip in concentration. Alphys waved her arms frantically, imploring them not to say anything at all. “Is it… me?”
I went back and forth on what Frisk’s answer would be. It doesn’t actually make sense for Frisk to intuit she has a crush on Undyne since Alphys hasn’t dropped any of her massive hints yet. I went with “the human” in the end simply because it was the funniest option while being the least intrusive.
“Oh, uh, it was nothing. I thought I was going to have to make the letters with my hands. I guess it’s just, uh, lucky you knew sign, uh…”
It is an incredibly common bit of fanon that Frisk knows sign, originally because people thought Frisk is mute because they do not have any lines we hear. But why would Chara narrate Frisk’s lines word for word? Frisk already knows what they’re saying. I kept it because in doing research I found some people with dyslexia have an easier time learning sign than other languages. Frisk was originally taught sign because one of their guardians believed they might be deaf.
Chara Dreemurr. What a joke.
At the time this comes up in the narrative it isn’t 100% clear how badly hurting Asgore broke Chara. Rereading this line after the “family picture” memory in the final battle makes the meaning more clear: this is the moment Chara gives up on ever being part of a happy family. Asriel says they should have “laughed it off like you did”, implying that in retrospect Asriel and the other Dreemurrs didn’t think that much of the incident; they goofed but nobody died so we can all move past it. But Chara couldn’t. Over a year of healing got wiped away in one awful moment; they backslid hard and never fully recovered.
Chara took a shaky breath. “Have you been seeing my memories?”
I did not originally intend to end the chapter here, but the original way I had Frisk and Chara’s fight progressing involved a lot more screaming. Chara is normally very passive about their aggression (the line “I don’t know why I expected any different from a human” in particular is ice cold) so it didn’t make sense for them to flip out on Frisk, but I did not have the time to rewrite the scene. So I cut it at the key line to create a cliffhanger and give myself another week to put it together.
“Those poor spiders! Who would do such a thing?” Chara pouted, eyeing Frisk in mock-suspicion.
My wife and I are both very passionate about spiders. We think they are cute and refer to the spiders we find in our house as “pets”. Most spiders can’t hurt you, their poison either being too weak to hurt humans or their fangs being too small to penetrate skin. The obvious exceptions to this are black widows and brown recluses. Anyway, this is something my wife says when someone talks about killing spiders in front of her.
Oh, now this was an interesting spell.
I have a loose idea in my head of the specialties of all the different types of magic… except orange magic. I still don’t have a good handle on how to justify the way it works in the game without overlapping with other types of magic. My concepts of blue, red, and green magic are already a bit too close to each other for my liking.
Muffet winked back with a giggle. “Oh, don't worry. I have more self-control than that. Besides, you're much too young, not even out of your stripes! I just thought I'd… leave the door open. Come along, everyone! Let's get them tea and see them to the top of the tower!”
A day after publishing I stealth-edited this line to make it more clear that Muffet is not, in fact, a pedophile.
Chara regarded the phone with utter disdain. “Alphys thinks Mew Mew Kissy Cutie 2 sucks.”
This doesn’t come across well here because we never hear Alphys’ side of the story, but I think of their disagreement as a legitimate controversy with no clearly correct answer. Sort of like how there is still debate to this day in some anime circles about whether Eiken and Mayoiga were intended as parodies of their genres or they are just really bad.
It was a beautiful red dagger, with whorls and eddies on the flat of the blade and the edge still quite sharp despite its obvious age. “Damascus steel”, he called it, though Chara was uncertain what made that different from normal steel.
Damascus steel is characterized by the distinctive patterns of banding and mottling along the flats of blades; I’m not exactly a metallurgist but I can’t think of anything else which would create the rather odd series of marks on the blade depicted in the Real Knife’s Steam card.
Sans had a look on his face like he was filing this away for later use. “what’s with that reaction? am i wrong?”
The way I read this scene in the game is, Sans suspects Frisk is the anomaly and is trying to get a reaction out of them. They assume it was very likely Loads happen when the human dies, so making a dad-level joke about it allows them to test the water while not being too suspicious if he guessed wrong.
“it would have allowed them to take energy from the past which dissipated without being used… well, that’s a little much for a kid to understand.”
The cover story Gaster used to justify his experiments to Asgore was about reaching back into time to collect a monster’s soul the instant they died; as long as there was even .0001 seconds between the monster’s death and their soul disappearing it should have been possible to reach back to that exact instant and snag it. Of course, that’s not what Gaster was actually after. This will get touched on in the sequel.
“if you wanna tell me some random person told you about him i can accept that, but…” His shoulders sagged and he stared as if looking at something very far away. “i’m kinda hoping you could throw me a bone here.”
Remember, Sans knows exactly what’s going on here. He’s offering Frisk and Chara a chance to prove they are trustworthy by coming clean about something he already knows.
Interlude: ERASE Your Sins
This was the most painful of the Interludes to write. Let’s not mince words, Frisk is a complete asshole here. Their patience is down to nothing and they feel they are above consequences. They have long forgotten Flowey’s weird speech at the end of the Ruins.
“There’s a trick to it: I said your name and you appeared. Heh heh, you’re like a doggie, coming when your name is call-”
In retrospect this is a pretty ham-handed way to trigger this particular flashback.
Between their sobs they said, “I am the demon… who comes when their name is called.”
I might be alone in this, but I always read Chara’s assumption of this title in a second Genocide route not to be triumphant, but profoundly sad. With the backstory I’ve given Chara it’s especially so. A post-Genocide Chara has accepted Those People were right about them all along, that they bring misery and pain to the people they love and they are 100% deserving of the treatment they received on the surface.
“Fuck the monsters, and fuck you Chara.”
Eight year olds know the “f” word, right? I learned it long before then but I think my childhood may not have been typical.
“You know what I think, Chara?” They felt bile in their throat. Some tiny voice in the back of their mind cried out, telling them to stop, to not do this, that what they were about to say next crossed a line which must never be crossed. That voice faded and was silent before the violent storm in Frisk’s mind.
Frisk’s temper is one of their biggest and least attractive flaws. The way they explode and lash out verbally and physically is not okay. At the end of the story they’ve acknowledged it as a problem but it hasn’t really been resolved.
NEW HOME ARC
“It’s a family photograph,” Chara said wistfully, putting a hand over their heart to soothe the sudden ache. “Everyone is smiling.”
Though there’s no evidence to confirm this, I believe the photo on the dresser is the same as the “family” portrait shown during the tail end of the Asriel fight. This is why I believe Frisk almost assuredly knows of Chara’s identity by this point in the story; only one person’s face is visible yet the narrator knows everyone was smiling at that point in time.
“It’s a gardening tool,” Chara said, mildly offended. “Perfect for cutting plants and vines. Why would you think it’s a weapon?”
Pacifist Chara remembers using the knife to cut plants, so to them the Worn Dagger is a gardening tool. On the Genocide Route their perception has been warped by LOVE to the point where they can only see items for their use in combat, so they recognize the same item as a Real Knife.
“… and a pink hand knit sweater that says ‘Mr. Dad Guy’.”
This might be an instance of me trying to be too cute.
“Humans are the worst creatures in the world. They’re petty, cruel, ignorant, and hateful. They see something that doesn’t fit in and they destroy it. But they are also many, and they are strong. Monsters are kind, loving, caring, and gentle… but they are weak, and they are few. Even one human could kill dozens of monsters, and there are billions of them on the surface. If the barrier comes down the war will start again. But humans don’t have magic anymore. They can’t put up a new barrier so they won’t have a merciful option. Monsters would be wiped out in an instant, they don’t stand a chance. But monsters are the only people that have ever shown me love, and I don’t want to live in a world without love. I want the monsters to live even if it means humans don’t.”
It’s ridiculous to claim an 8-12 year old would come up with a complicated plan involving their own suicide just to murder some people. But to claim Asriel would not fight back even in self-defense isn’t giving him enough credit. So from the moment I heard the story about the village this is how I envisioned it happening: Chara did not originally plan on killing people, but in the heat of the moment had a dark epiphany and decided it was a good idea. Asriel did not intend on letting himself get killed, but he was taken aback and confused and his moment of hesitation ended poorly. Mind you, this was my first time through the game, before I thought about the themes of the story or had even heard of Narrator Chara. From the very beginning I had sympathy for the demon.
‘Ree, please, they’re hurting us! We have to fight back! We have to kill them, or we’re going to be killed!’
This is the line that sticks with Asriel past his death. He decided Chara was right, that the world was ‘kill or be killed’.
“there were six humans that knew Gaster, but we know where the souls of five of them are. kinda narrows it down.”
This is not a counting error: one of the humans never met Gaster because the accident had already occurred.
Their immediate thought was, Cartoons were right, you really do hear birds and see stars. Their second thought was incoherent keening.
This was my exact reaction to getting concussed.
“Oh riiiiight, you must be so confused right now! As a little thank you for helping me achieve the one thing I hadn’t done yet, I’ll tell you a story!”
Flowey’s story has certain parallels with a player’s mindset on the Genocide route that simply don’t resonate on Pacifist, but I put this story here because it was important to understanding Flowey.
Flowey’s eyes went from the pocket to Frisk’s face and back again. He tilted his head and nodded in a slow, knowing way. “Oh. OH. I see how it is now.”
Monsters can’t tell humans apart very well. So when Flowey sees the locket hanging out of Frisk’s pocket, he realizes A) this human knows about the significance of that locket so they must be Chara, and B) they aren’t wearing it so Chara must still be so furious about what happened in the village that they don’t consider Asriel their friend anymore. Obviously this pisses Flowey right off and leads into the fight.
“No… NO!” Chara covered their mouth and shook their head in wide-eyed horror. “It’s not true! Y-you can’t be… you can’t be…!”
As many people guessed, this is the moment Chara figures out Flowey’s true identity. Flowey attempting to taunt Frisk by calling them ‘weird’ is the trigger, as this was Chara’s affectionate insult for Asriel.
“Just so you know, now that I’m powered by human souls my bullets are way stronger than they used to be. They’ll blow through monsters like tissue paper, and even a human body is no defense against them. It’s not just your soul in danger anymore, you’ll get blown to pieces no matter where I hit you.”
Having established that bullets aren’t actually a very good weapon against humans, the problem came with how having a human soul could make a monster so powerful. The solution was to make the damage bullets caused real. Remember for a moment the streams of fire Asriel could use at the very beginning of his fight. Now imagine if every single one of those flames could kill someone instantly. “Asriel had the power to destroy them all”, indeed.
The television screen filled with static, and Flowey’s face could only be dimly seen. “No! The souls are rebelling! They’re… you’re leaving me!”
Part of the reason I skipped the soul segments of the Flowey fight was that the chapter was a bit long already. A more important reason, though, is that I had not yet developed their personalities and stories. I had only gotten a little bit better at this by the time the end of the Asriel fight came around; when it was time for this to be posted I didn’t even have that much.
They were going to kill Flowey, and if they had to do it in cold blood then so be it.
I did not originally plan the scene to play out like this. Instead, when I reached it and considered what Frisk’s headspace was like and how I’d characterized them up to this point, this is what came out. Chara and Frisk are both being true to their characters, and that’s what makes the scene work.
“So together you and I can get one person through the barrier.” They held up their index finger. “Just one.”
There is some debate over what, exactly, happens in a Neutral route. Whether the barrier is ahead or behind, whether Frisk was trapped or destroyed by the barrier, whatever. This is how I always figured the ending played out; Frisk is able to leave through the barrier with a combination of their soul and Chara’s soul, but we cannot follow what happens to them afterward because going through kills Chara and severs our connection to Frisk.
“I’m really glad we met. Be good, won’t you?… My friend.”
This scene is the oldest in the work. Originally I was going to post this as a one-shot, but I was unable to complete writing it before I got the idea of expanding the Save Chara section into a fic spanning the entire game. I wasn’t going to write the scene twice, so I slotted it into the proper spot in this fic instead. Also, a minor plot hole here: Chara often takes after Toriel’s speech patterns, and there are obvious similarities between what Chara says here and what Toriel says following a normal (not Genocide or betrayal) kill. The hole comes in when one wonders, “How the heck would Chara know what Toriel would say in that situation?” Yeah, I’ve got nothing.
“I tried to delete your Save, but… I couldn’t actually do it. I could stop you from Loading but that was it. I told you I did because, let’s be honest, the look on your face when I did was priceless. I figured I would kill you and you’d never learn I was lying.”
This is another instance of me scrambling to come up with an explanation why what happens in the game actually makes sense. Flowey lies when he tells you he deleted your save file… why? This is my answer.
The song continued but the voice was different now. It was a crystal-clear mezzo-soprano, less confident than Toriel’s singing but with no reason for a lack of faith.
I’m not sure where the fanon that Chara is a good singer came from but I’ll take it.
TRUE PACIFIST ARC
"i only personally saw the sixth and seventh die. i have my suspicions about the others, but i know for a fact asgore didn’t kill them. for all his power his LOVE is still 1, and before you go giving me the stinkeye mine is too.”
After he is defeated Asgore regrets making the proclamation to take the souls of fallen humans but never expresses remorse for killing them. His extreme reluctance to fight you is also odd; if he had already killed six humans before Frisk came along, his increased LOVE should have made it easier to deal harm. Instead he gives you every option to back out and holds back from dealing the killing blow (if you have more than 1 HP, an attack that would otherwise kill you will instead reduce you to 1 HP). Taking these two facts together gave me the idea that Asgore never killed anyone; Frisk is the first human he actually attempted to fight to the death. This does not make him blameless by any means, and opens up further questions of how the humans died if Asgore did not do the deed.
Chara reached up with trembling fingers and grabbed Papyrus’s hand. “H-How are you doing this? Even Frisk can’t touch me…” “Oh? Perhaps I can touch you because I don’t know I shouldn’t be able to.”
Papyrus is obviously being evasive, but Chara does not push the issue. The source of Papyrus’ powers and abilities will be explored in the sequel.
“Olympic Games gives me the option to boycott the games at the cost of DEFCON. If I do that, DEFCON will drop to 1 and end the game with your loss.”
This is a real rules issue newbies to Twilight Struggle will sometimes fall into. Papyrus being into board games is canonical (if Toriel is ousted in the neutral route Sans mentions the three of them play board games sometimes), but I decided on this particular game because it shows that Papyrus is very much not stupid, and the rules hang-up is both edge-case enough so that it makes sense to have tripped Chara up while not being so esoteric that it would require a detailed explanation of the game’s rules.
“Will you stay for breakfast?” Papyrus asked. “I don’t have spaghetti ready, but we have plenty of oatmeal. It’s the kind with the dinosaur eggs in it!”
See the official 2016 anniversary Ask blog for more details on Papyrus and oatmeal. Just remember, it was being run by an Annoying Dog.
“I can understand not wanting to kill someone defenseless, but to try and put myself between you and him…? I’m sorry, I’m not sure what I would have been thinking.”
Because Chara’s realization was based on the exact words Flowey used, Frisk’s summary is unable to trigger the same deductive reasoning.
“And be nice to Alphys! It’s not her fault Undyne likes her, so it’s not fair to get mad at her for stealing Undyne away.”
When Frisk learned Alphys was only trying to protect her king they forgave her for lying to them. Also, for Frisk this feels like ages ago. That’s how we get from Alphys’ betrayal making them angry enough to use profanity in ERASE Your Sins to here where they ask Chara to be nice to her.
“It’s full of nothing but…” Frisk frowned deeply, letting the sentence trail away. “Popato chisps.” Chara gave Frisk a small wink, and the human child smiled back.
Chara knows what potato chips are, they pronounced it correctly when looking in Sans’ fridge. And the items in the vending machine really are chips, Alphys refers to them that way. So why does Chara call them “popato chisps” here? Chara is being playful. That they use it here and not earlier implies “chisps” was something Frisk said to them, which in combination with Chara reading off all the signs is what led me to surmise Frisk might have dyslexia.
Chara swallowed, laughing once. “Seems like it’s losing itself. Its mind is so far gone it doesn’t remember how to use bullets anymore.”
I’m not too proud to admit realizing this is what was happening to Snowy’s mom broke me. I lost my maternal grandmother to dementia and I imagine this is the monster equivalent. Even thinking about it now gets me pretty close to “not okay”.
“It says the one who has seen the surface will ‘return’ to free the monsters. That must mean they begin their journey here underground, see the surface, and then come back to free everyone. I have seen the surface, but I was always there. I am not ‘returning’ underground, so it can’t be referring to me.”
More than one author/artist has posited Chara must have believed themself to be the angel of the prophecy (such as the aforementioned flavor-text-chara tumblr). I think Chara was a little too smart to go with such an easy solution, especially because their lack of self-esteem would cause them to immediately look for ways to reject this mantle placed on them. After all, they can’t possibly be that powerful and important!
“How long will I live underground? Seventy years? Eighty? More? But we have the power to get things started now. We can get started on freeing everyone now, so why wait?”
Chara’s lack of patience coming to the forefront here. There are other reasons I made Patience Chara’s worst trait: they get annoyed with you for wasting time, repeatedly examining objects, and in the Ruins straight-up tell you the solutions to the colored switch puzzle if you’re having trouble understanding the puzzle’s gimmick. Even in Genocide mode they get annoyed with any distractions from the mission.
Toriel had said Asgore might have died if the pie had not been burnt. Heat destroyed the poison. It would weaken its power, and they would not get another chance at this.
This is true: rananculus poison breaks down at high temperatures.
It would not be long now. Soon Chara would give this family and these people the one gift it was in their power to give: freedom.
Many authors, acting under the assumption that Chara’s main trait was Determination and this would have kept them alive for some time, often depict Chara’s illness as a drawn-out, wasting affair. Or perhaps they thought making them suffer longer would make them more sympathetic. But I take the story the monsters tell at their word: “One day the human became very ill. […] The next day, the human died.” It was over fast.
Chara cried hysterically, “I thought you would just get my power! Why didn’t you tell me I’d still be me after being absorbed?!” ‘I didn’t know!’ Asriel howled. ‘Nobody knew! We always knew monsters could absorb human souls, but it had only ever happened once or twice and they never said anything about this!’
The monsters did not know an absorbed human retained their consciousness, else they would have mentioned that detail while telling the story of Chara and Asriel. The humans did not know, or they would not have been so terrified of the possibility of a human soul being absorbed. So how did Chara know? The answer is clear: they didn’t. So any interpretation of Chara’s backstory which boils down to, “Chara tricked Asriel into absorbing their soul so they could go kill humans because they are a murderous psychopath” is objectively wrong, there is no way they could have known they would have any control over the Chara&Asriel combo pack.
After a minute Frisk rewound the tape to the beginning, saying nothing, betraying nothing. They removed the tape and returned it to an empty place on the shelf.
Frisk doesn’t know what a VHS tape is, so they should not know it is a courtesy to rewind it to the beginning when you are done watching. I felt this scene required a pause to let the tension build, and Frisk very carefully putting the tape away gives the reader a chance to hold their breath.
They were holy so they were allowed to dictate what was profane, and they knew they were holy because they never committed a profane act.
One thing I sort of regret is, there is an observation to be made about Those People that Chara is not insightful enough to make but no one else in the story has experience with. One commenter lamented how some people’s ideas of holiness can be evil, but the reality of the situation is that religion has less than nothing to do with how they treated Chara. Reading closely you can see their real problem with Chara wasn’t that they considered the child evil, but that Chara was disobedient. Chara insisted on determining their own identity and that was what could not be allowed. What Those People did was about power and control of someone smaller and weaker than them, religion was just the excuse they used to justify it to themselves. Expect an expansion on this idea in the sequel.
And of course if we were careful my sister and I could talk in her room late at night after Those People went to bed. She did not believe them at all, but fear of punishment kept her from speaking with me during the daylight hours. But at night she would tell me about school, and her friends, and her sports clubs, and so many other things. My sister came to check up on me and bring me soup or broth when she could get away with it, which was not often.
Chara downplays the significance of this because they are still angry about her betrayal, but children who have no interaction with other people at all deteriorate very quickly. What happened to Chara is bad, but their outcome is much more positive than, say, Genie, Danielle, or other “feral children” (for the love of god don’t google any of those if you want to have any kind of faith in humanity). Chara’s sister saved their life in more than one way, and it may be unfair to judge her based on the one really bad thing she did. Why, are those some parallels I see? I think they are.
Frisk was biting their lower lip hard enough to draw blood. “I… guess that isn’t… the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” they seethed. “But it’s close.”
Frisk has met and spoken to many kids in the foster care system, including many children who had to be temporarily or permanently taken away from their parents. They have seen some shit. On a related note, when developing the content and extent of Chara’s abuse I never for a single moment considered tacking sexual assault to the list of Those People’s sins. I feel like sexual abuse gets too much play from amateur authors and fanfic writers, where it’s the go-to trauma if you need something bad to happen to a character (especially a child or a woman) with no thought given to how it affects the tone of the work or the psychology of the perpetrator and victim.
Frisk shook their head. “I know that, but I can’t feel it. It’s wrong for you to take all the blame. I can’t say why, but I know it.”
Frisk is right but for the wrong reasons. Chara is using a double-standard by taking the blame for every consequence of their suicide while absolving Those People for their role in Chara’s life: if Those People are not responsible for Chara’s actions, then Chara is not responsible for Asgore’s or Toriel’s or even Asriel’s actions, and vice versa. However, Frisk is denying Chara’s acceptance of all the blame not because of that but because Frisk’s high Love and low Justice leads them to prioritize their closest friends over anyone else; even if it isn’t fair to other people or Chara is objectively in the wrong Frisk will always take their side. Love is not the always-positive force media often portrays it as.
[Save Chara]
This section is the second-oldest passage in the entire fic, and has remained essentially unchanged from the first draft. I originally wrote the scene at the barrier and this scene as one-shots, but I decided the Save Chara portion would not have nearly the emotional impact if it were unclear what all was being referenced (with the added bonus that Frisk remembered every one of these side details from their journey despite everything else going on, because they are very thoughtful like that). In a way this scene is responsible for the entire fic being written. If I’m going to be arrogant enough to offer any writing advice it would be this: figure out where your story is going before you start. The ending should be one of the first things you plan out because endings are hard.
“They were just hasty, that’s all. You’ll forgive your hasty friend, won’t you?”
A reference to Mother 3. By the way, did you notice that Asriel didn’t actually answer this question? Don’t worry, Chara noticed too.