#Ask NarraChara

[underblogdetermination]

[krispdreemurr]

oh oh i have an interesting discussion/query ! what do u think the meta purpose of making kris act like they do at the end of chapter 1 was? specifically like the imagery of a kid in a green/yellow shirt manipulating a red soul, pulling out a knife, having red eyes and grinning evilly cause like... i feel like deltarune definitely incorporates the memory of undertale throughout? like its advertised as a game for people who finished undertale and theres lots of references and things that are only as impactful if you had an emotional connection to the original game, like spamton neo and gaster saying "have you been looking for me?" and just.. so many things but most interestingly imo being that ralsei almost comes across like a fanonized "cinnamon roll" version of asriel that was so popular way back when? ofc he's more than that but thats like. a Part of him anyways what i mean is like, when chapter 1 released many people (myself included) saw that and instantly assumed that kris was being controlled by chara because of how strongly chara-esque (*especially* to the fandom, like ralsei) the imagery was, only for chapter 2 to come out and many people (myself included^2) completely disregarded chara as having any bearing on the story whatsoever and that kris is just themself trying *not* to be controlled by us. i think we can all agree that the latter is correct, and some people were clearly smarter than me in chapter 1 and deduced the truth even then (e.g. lynxgriffin in their comics), but i am left wondering what the point of that was almost? i thought you might have some interesting thoughts on that, cause like, if kris's frustration with the player is essentially the main plot of the game (give or take), the allusion to chara was a little bit 'distracting' for the fandom i feel like? some ppl are (somehow) still confused & blaming chara even! i guess im just wondering, what if kris had wore a different shirt and menaced the player in a different way at the end of chapter 1? do you think it would have improved the story to eliminate the possibility of confusion, or do u reckon toby fox want us confused? idk LMAO just thinking aloud atp. just been on my mind the past few days bc in retrospect, while the intro to deltarune is obviously trying to trick you into believing this is "undertale 2", post-dark-world the game is unambiguously super different, to the point where it feels a little bizarre that there'd be a red herring *after* deltarune already smashed the notion that it's a prequel or sequel into pieces doesnt it?

i think it's most legible to me as an attempt by Kris to psych us out that they sort of get lucky with thanks to toby helping them!

like, obviously they have no way to know you've been menaced by nonbinary children before - the specific parallels aren't a thing they're reaching for. but they're trying to get the player freaked out, and toby sort of lends them a helping hand by making them coincidentally charalike.

it's not the first time he's had a character freak us out with knowledge they don't have (thinking about sans and the talking flower in grillbys), and it's not the first time in Deltarune alone where a parallel is arguably sheer coincidence in world but happens to echo something to the player. i don't think it's like cheap or anything - toby fox does a really good job building up a language of associations and connections and motifs and then sometimes uses that to trick you just the tiniest bit lmao

but just like Chara, the ways to see thru the trick are there if you're looking. if you pay attention to Chara, you learn their oh so ominous faces and scares were originally just a thing they did to have fun with their brother, and maybe you get an appreciation that they were a child trying to scare you in childish ways. similarly, if you talk to everyone in town, you learn that Kris is a prankster by nature who delights in freaking everyone out (and also someone who would eat an entire midnight pie), and maybe you get the chance to go "oh, they're pranking me, huh?"

a little like Chara, Deltarune ch1 uses Kris to ask if you've been paying attention to the material. did you notice this really, really wasn't Undertale? and if you did, what conclusion do you reach about this new kid?

[random-autie-fangirl]

👻 A headcanon about what scares Chara

(here comes another one)

A lot of normal fears don't scare Chara. Death, physical pain, gore, horror…they actively wish for death, they have such a high tolerance for pain that it's kinda funny(I genuinely believe that Chara once cut their hand clean through while chopping vegetables, didn't notice, and just kept cutting while their family looked on in horror), and can stay completely stone faced during horror movies while Asriel cries into their shoulder (Asriel does like horror movies, but is also terrified of them, Noelle behaviour). And we absolutely know of their lackadaisical attitude towards violence, don't we? ("Chara laughed it off, If you're cuter monsters won't hit you as hard, you just remembered something funny, you tell a joke about a child who slept in the soil, if you laid here you might never get up)

But what are they scared of… rejection, embarrasment, criticism, failure… they're scared of humans of course, this horrible ever present threat who could destroy their kingdom at any moment, and of anything happening to Asriel, they tend to assume that all the general public is out to get them and Asriel, to steal their wealth and status (I mean, who wouldn't be jealous of the dreemurr siblings, huh? Chara and Asriel are the most perfect people in existence and they do everything right, who wouldn't want what they have)

…and the other side of believing you can do anything (because they're the angel and the future of humans and monsters), is…if anything in the kingdom goes wrong, it will be Chara's fault, because they always could have stopped it (they are mentally ill), also for the longest time, they could not believe in Toriel and Asgore's kindness far after they learned to hesitantly trust Asriel… (And yet they stay anyway, they're prepared for anything, and isn't Chara also…lying? in the end)

And they're scared of anyone figuring out they don't care, that they can't trust, that they don't feel the "proper emotions" for people, that they're not kind to others for other people's sakes but so that people will like them, see them as a good person and as a hero… They're hiding everything they feel they are and are terrified of people finding out the truth.

Quite ironically, they're also genuinely scared of well, living...at the end of the pacifist route where they can suddenly see their future stretching before them with no end soon in sight, that terrifies them more than anything. They were supposed to give up their life in a heroic sacrifice, they weren't supposed to live that long, they weren't supposed to live past the happy ending, and they don't want to...why are they still here now that the war is over, now that there's no longer any part for them to play? Angels don't...live full lives on earth, do they?

(On the surface, this was more of a fact than a wish, they would sacrifice themselves for the good of humanity (how ironic that would end up being?), they would never live to be an adult, and then their pain would be over, it would be worth it, because they would finally have done something good and they'd be remembered well)

(There's also a meta reason for this, of course, all the characters in a video game get to live their lives once a happy ending is achieved...but the narrator, the hint system, the numbers on screen, they don't get that do they?, they're not proper characters after all, after the game ends, the narrator just ceases to exist, simple, of course it would be natural for Chara to assume the same and feel distressed when that doesn't occur.)

[under-lore]

Hello, so i wanted to Ask you, what was that about in the "jugement hall" when chara (chara narrator theory) explain to us what is exp, lv, ect and at the end of their explaination sans take the lead, like he kind of continue what they where saying, like he Heard Chara and just waited for his turn to talk, i mean it just felt kinda off that no one noticed that or maybe i'm just crazy, well good day to you.

Good day to you as well.

For your question, Sans doesn't actually "take the lead" from the narrator here, neither does he wait for them, and so for a very simple reason.

The narrator is not the one that explains the meaning of EXP, LOVE, etc...

That was already Sans himself speaking. Both before, and after his face sprite was shown. He's just continuing what he was himself saying.

This is actually a surprisingly common mistake made in multiple different situations where the dialogue of a character speaking without a face sprite (but who usually has one) is confused with that of the narrator.

Let me explain...

In Undertale, characters which usually have a face sprite next to their dialogues often lose this face sprite whenever they are talking from a position in which they are not visible, are hidden, or sometimes for tension or dramatic effect.

Here is an example :

Papyrus usually has a face sprite.

But in this scene at the entrance of Waterfall, however, he speaks without a face sprite for the reasons mentioned above. (Notice his face is in the dark, for example)

What is happening here with Sans is pretty much the same thing.

Sans' sprite is shown as hidden, and the tension is palpable. So, the conversation begins with Sans speaking with no face sprite, but the face sprite appears once the dramatic tension begins to fall back down.

Besides, it is pretty easy to see that Sans is the one talking even without the sprites, with lines like that :

(As a side note : This scene actually has more effects added due to the situation, such as with sound bytes or font. Though it ultimately comes down to the same.)

There are actually several scenes throughout Undertale that have sparked confusion because of this exact same reason !

I'll give another one, which many have also gotten the wrong idea about :

This, as you may have guessed at this point, is also not the narrator speaking, but Asriel himself. As a matter of fact, you can even hear Asriel's sound bytes as those lines are spoken.

But due to the absence of a face sprite and NarraChara theory, many have misinterpreted this scene when seeing it again as a collection of screenshots as if it was Chara which had said those things. Which is incorrect.

In sum, it is actually semi-frequent in Undertale for characters that usually have face sprites to speak without them in certain circumpstances. That is why, when attempting to recontextualise certain lines under NarraChara theory, it is important to be able to identify which lines are actually from the narrator, and which ones are not.

Those lines are not, it is just Sans talking.

[lilybug-02]

you are also subcribe to the narrachara theory arent you

Hehe kinda :) The narrachara theory is just so fun!

Who wants to see Frsik walking around alone when they can have a little fwend. 🥰

[coffinsister]

i ♡ soleil and the gang! i'm super happy to have met y'all!

This is us arriving to your life

We are super happy to have met you too! You said Gang so I decided to reply to this ask myself, Nice to meetcha! - Shift

[mell0bee]

you voting for sans in the tumblr sexyman polls... finally one of the people I follow has taste and knows the truth

thank you anon. i did not spend the ages of 12 to 14 as a glitchtale stan & narrachara truther to vote for the onceler

[utdrmv-confession-box]

Transcript: i really have no problem with fanon, except that for alot of people what they think is canon is actually fanon and then its spread as misinformation.

like...its totally a-ok to headcanon sans as remembering resets or hc asriel and flowey as being separate people (not commenting on either of these), even narrachara is just a theory & popular hc, but you shouldn't go telling people they are canon and should clarify their just hc/theories when asked. that and i think most fans SHOULD try to interact with the source material to remind themselves of whats canon & not.

Debating the 'canon' of aus is a bit silly when most exist TO go against canon and explore headcanons and theories/ do their own thing with pre-existing characters but even then i think people should be allowed to complain when popular fanon misrepresents the actual canon of aus. (ex, horror sans eating humans. its fine to hc that but its wrong to lie and claim he does if someone who is unaware asks if thats true. Horrortale itself is founded on headcanons and the fanon idea of a queen undyne being a bad leader, saying its what 'would' happen is untrue as its fanmade. the same idea goes for clover of uty, their A justice soul but they arent the 'canon' justice soul and claiming they are is misinformation.)

Basically a good rule of thumb, is that its fine to prefer certain fanon over canon and its also fine to complain about fanon, you should just be up front about what your headcanoning and whats actually true in canon. not everything HAS to be canon, UTY works the way it does because its NOT canon, and it doesnt NEED to be.

we need to reclaim headcanons as an idea and stop with the whole fanon v canon stuff, just say you headcanon 'this' as 'that' and let people be annoyed when popular headcanons & theories break containment and are treated as canon. (sorry for the long post mod, this isint fanon negative, i just dont like how defensive some people get and how the term fanon is now being used to mean headcanon when they are two different things)

[carlyraejepsans]

Ok genuine question, and if this comes off as rude I’m sorry, but I’ve heard you dislike No chocos interpretation of Chara I I wanted to ask why.

I allways thought there take on Chara’s aid of the player during the genocide run was pretty good.

well from my vague understanding of that blog it was actually run by multiple people (?) so my beef might be with someone specific and I'm just lumping all the mods together under the url.

i think the essay where they try to argue that asriel is being abused by chara is just about the most idiotic, self referential piece of "analysis" I've ever read. like, nearing jaru levels of "you cannot seriously believe what you're saying there HAS to be a catch right". chara... forced asriel to pick the buttercups for them because they would've blistered his hands which is a sign they're physically abusing him? seriously?

anyway, sure, i might even agree with some of their analysis of how NM chara plays out. yknow... if they didn't completely disregard every other run in the game and how it plays into their metanarrative as the pseudo-player character. they've gone on record multiple times saying they don't believe in narrachara unless it's in NM.

now I'm not the strictest narrachara believer myself—in the sense that I don't believe most flavor text is supposed to read as direct quotes from them, more as a nebulous representation of our/their feelings on what's going on. which is fitting! i think direct quotes would be detrimental in a run where our identification with chara isn't questioned (or is even affirmed, like in flowey's plea after the pacifist ending) because it would be needlessly driving a wedge between Us and Them. that... doesn't make it discardable though???

it feels like they got obsessed with their own idea of chara as a vicious "narcissistic" manipulator and cherry picked information from the canon that would make chara look bad while disregarding everything else. which, inevitably, means disregarding the metanarrative. and that's undertale analysis crime numero uno to me baby. tomato tomato etc

[underblogdetermination]

ANONS NOWS OUR CHANCE

PAT.

DA.

CHARA.

[narrachara-evidence-bracket]

Greetings, Narrachara fans

The submission form has re-arrived. (I don't think the last one was working)

You can also submit through asks if need be!

[ofekma]

Undertale Yellow should have let us meet Kanako. We never made it to the true lab because it would have contradicted undertale's canon but come ON!

We do all this way to just die?

We don't manage to do anything for the five missing humans like Clover initially wished. I'm not sure what we could have done but something that would bring us some closure. Learning their names? Put an item that belonged to them on their graves? Make a memorial for them? Literally anything? Show us Clover meeting their souls after the ending?

We never manage to reunite Kanako and Ceroba, and considering how it was the big plot of undertale yellow that's a real shame.

Our sacrifice never helps turn other monsters into boss monsters like Chujin initially wanted.

We don't even die next to our friends, we ask them to leave us alone and we just die alone.

And no one except four people will remember us and what we did.

There are too many loose ends, and of course that's because it's a prequel but it's still heartbreaking and unsatisfying.

I think that we should have had a Kanako narrator or something. Like, if we had a narrachara in undertale then why not? Have her be the reason why we can see those flashbacks from Ceroba in the final battle, confirm that she was the friend who gave Dalv corn, connect her to the story some more! Let her haunt the narrative!

[under-lore]

Is it okay if I post your pacineutral narration analysis (the one about Chara's relationship with Frisk) here as long as I provide credit and a link to the reddit thread?

I intend to post it on Tumblr myself later on, updated with some more details and explanations compared to the single image i had shared on Reddit. (Which was more or less a brief summary of the main results without going into much more details)

[moddeydhoo]

bow i wanna hear your thoughts on narrator chara lol

:D That's sweet of you! I was honestly expecting my previous UT post to be either ignored or flamed into pieces, haha, but a few people seem to have liked it.

Well, won't bury the lede here: my thoughts on NarraChara are basically "it's a nice idea, but it's wrong".

(Full warning that I don't have the spoons to drag up lots of screengrabs just now. In this post I just ramble a little bit without posting pics.)

Vibes-based NarraTobism

I call my take on the narrator's identity NarraToby, though just for brevity and not to suggest Toby inserted himself as a character into the game (would that be called dogegesis? A DPC?) to narrate.

Toby's brain is lovely and subtle and silly, and he'd be capable of making the narrator their own person, Slay the Princess style (or Homestuck style, more fittingly, considering his pomerorigin story), but I just don't agree he crafted Undertale's text in that way. Vibes no check out. I've written, read and watched things that play around with narration, and you really kinda have to have a concept like that in mind from the beginning. It's a huge amount of work to keep it in character, and frankly, I think Toby would have done it better if that's what he intended.

(There'd also be more about it in Legends of Localisation, I feel like. Every character's dialogue was carefully fitted to their personality upon translation. IS THE NARRATOR ORE OR WATASHI TOBY WE NEED TO KNOW. YES THEY USE A PRONOUN IN "I COULDN'T STOP LAUGHING")

I warned that this is mostly vibes-based ramble, so... to me, it doesn't feel like every instance of Undertale's non-dialogue text is from the same POV. Sometimes it's omniscient-seeming, peeking at an opponent's thoughts or going into detail about what brand of cosmetic they're dabbing behind where, and sometimes the narration describes the world from Frisk's more limited point of view (lol height joke short nerd). Sometimes it's outright holding your hand and giving you hints (no, really really, talking will do no more good here, try something else). In a game, the text has a lot of tasks to do, some semi-contradictory even.

In In Stars and Time, the tutorial is spoken to you by the characters in your party and other hints are also spoken to you by a named character. That's an example of it being done deliberately. And Slay the Princess, of course.

A lot of Undertale's narration isn't stuff the First Fallen Then Rezzed Human could reasonably know. Was Papyrus born when Chara was around? They have been dead, and/or a bit of them has been stuck inside a goat inside a flower, all this time. Our determination was what raised them from death, they tell us; ours in particular and not the other children's. It doesn't seem like they were doing much of anything before we landed on their oft-squished grave. At this point they need to be a ghost and psychic, and have the game's design documents on hand, and be able to read Toby's spaghetti code to tell you the monsters' stats, and...

(also when tf did Chara read Kitchen)

Dare I say it's not that serious...? aka Unnrtall Funni

Discussing NarraChara is made harder by UT's general goofiness. Fourth-wall breaks and commentary on game mechanics leak more than once into character dialogue (Paps, I'm looking at you, mister "hold up to jump higher" dating HUD guy). This happens for spoops as well as goofs, such as when you accidentally kill goat mom and panic and feel horrible and load the game and she says something that suggests she remembers what happened and then you TOTALLY get got by Flowey afterwards and no that didn't happen on my first playthrough why do you ask (it did).

Goofiness is also why I feel things like Blooky responding directly to narration text ("oh, i'm real funny") shouldn't be taken as serious. It is really cute to imagine a ghost exchanging banter with the other ghost over your shoulder—like I said, I do see the appeal. I just don't think it works overall.

SIDE NOTE! If you want a fangame that uses this concept (ghost Chara, not NarraChara), download PS!Outertale and make sure you explore Toriel's home very thoroughly (hint: 1 is too high).

Trying to assemble a coherent personality for the narration text, when the entire game occasionally messes with you just for fun, feels like a doomed project.

Red text is them, though, right?

Yeah, I feel like that's very much intentional. As far as red text goes on the murder route, we're all correct that this is meant to be understood as PlayerName/Chara's dialogue.

Butttttt I don't necessarily think it represents their unaltered personality. By the time any red rext shows up, you've cleared out the Ruins to "nobody came" levels, so plenty of murder has already happened.

The murder route is the process of fully overriding Frisk's personality, forcing them into a true player analogue in an intentional mirror of the true pacifist route, as much as it is the process of teaching Chara the true meaning of this world. Chara outright tells you this at the end: at first they were confused, but now they see that the point of life is Number Go Up. You showed them that.

(All this is why I think it's good to keep in mind that the expected Undertale experience is playing with your own name for the human. [child pops up] "Greetings. I am PlayerName. Aaaaaand it's time to grab your knives and get ready for the wall dance because today we're 100%ing Undertale!")

In other words, Pacifist teaches one sibling that the world is better than he thinks. Murdercide teaches the other that humanity is exactly what they think. "Don't kill and don't be killed" vs. "Actually, kill". ("Be killed" is just rage-quitting because you can't figure out the Mettaton fight because you forgot the yellow soul could shoot and you thought the idea was to get the ratings to zero so he'd go off air and no I didn't have to look up help with that fight on my first playthrough why do you ask (I did).)

Headcanony murder route stuff rambling from previous

If this even still counts as a NarraChara post, it's sort of wandered onto the murder route ending monologue now, so you're welcome to peace out here. ♥

This part'll get headcanony, but to me, Chara was a troubled child who hated humanity, in a childlike way, and did not hate monsters. I don't credit the fanon about them intentionally poisoning their dad; they just reacted with apparently low empathy to his illness, while filing the consequences of their mistake away for later.

The one person Chara ever directly killed was not a monster and it wasn't murder.

Their desire to see monsters go free feels genuine to me. In the planning stage, whether or not they intended to murder any humans for their souls (it's not super clear; maybe they thought they could sneak into a hospital and kill-steal their way to victory), in any case, they weren't out to kill more than six. Chara's goal was a focused one: free monsters. Any dabbing on humanity, such as placing their body back in their village as a giant "frick you", seemed to be secondary (and something explainable as them being, y'know, a child who felt the need to climb that mountain).

My take on the murder route is that it's a process of retraumatising the child by making them watch their family and subjects die. Starting with their mother! Chara loved Toriel, if their speech patterns are anything to go by. (Ever noticed Asriel says "Howdy" and Chara says "Greetings"?)

Anyway, Chara is intelligent, pragmatic and self-determining, and so they intellectualise the horror that's happening to them in such a way as to assign themself agency. I am the one in control. Yes. I must be doing these things. I... am the demon.

Right?

This end screen could use more nines. ♥

he literally pUT THEIR DIALOGUE IN RED TEXT TO EMPHASISE THE DIFFERENCE and I know we're a fandom starved for content but seriously how badly is it possible to overcomplicate tHE BIG RED TEXT

also Chara was a good kid and I will mercy u all

[coffinsister]

trick or treat! *holds up a pillowcase*

This is us coming out to greet you and give u lotsa candy !!! =)

[whathappenedtodecember]

frankly i don't mind people saying that laura palmer does a more thorough job haunting her narrative than chara did re: the narrahaunt poll, or that she deserves to win. people are allowed to have their faves and from what i've heard about her she is a solid contender. but what disheartens me the most are comments on that post from other ut fans or people who have played ut in the past being like 'chara didn't even appear until the end of a bad route!' 'chara only haunts the dreemurrs!' 'narrachara isn't even canon!'

...guys, did you even play or watch the game? :') chara doesn't need to 'physically' appear or be explicitly mentioned in order for the haunting to count; the ways in which they haunt the narrative is subtle but deafening. surely we don't need everything spelled out for us? why did toriel have a patch of golden flowers she retreats to tend to once you've beaten her and decided you're going to go out despite her wishes? why did flowey greet you at the gate? why are the monsters comfortable playfighting and making friends with a human being, despite everything that's going on? why does alphys hide the tapes in her basement with the rest of her regrets? why does mettaton's humanity-obsessed entertainment schtick sell that well? i can point at any random happenstance in the game, ask about its how's and why's, and i'll be guaranteed to come across chara throughout the reasoning at some point. the underground has chara as its heart and asriel as its frantic veins. there is nothing without them.

if you need to bully them until they implode to see that they've been there all along, if you need their narration as evidence of their footprints before you'll take the underground denizens at face value, then. well...