#I try so hard to play nice but it always strays back into People Pleaser territory | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

feralphoenix · 8 years ago

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on soul virtues & the undertale main cast

there's been a lot of on and off ado about the main six npc monsters in undertale and how they relate to the six non-determination soul virtues. some of the arguments i've seen are that each of those monsters (toriel, papyrus, sans, undyne, alphys, and asgore) correspond directly to the soul virtues (patience, bravery, integrity, perseverance, kindness, and justice) in order. some of the arguments i've seen are that these monsters are lacking in those virtues, and that frisk (and the player and chara) have to teach them An Aesop(tm) in said virtues to get past them/cause their character growth.

i don't particularly agree with either of those theories because i've got my own, i.e.: those six virtues are what each of those six monsters VALUE the most, and displaying each of those virtues is how one spares and becomes close to them.

let's break this down character by character.

TORIEL AND PATIENCE

toriel can only be spared by enduring her assault and tirelessly whacking the spare option over and over again until you outlast her, and she gives in and lets frisk go.

i think that that's already pretty telling that toriel isn't some sort of patron saint of patience--that you can outlast her. frisk is also the seventh kid who's passed through the ruins; all the other kids either were let go by toriel, or they wore her down or found some other way to sneak past her. and when toriel has brought frisk to live with her, you don't even have to have them ask toriel how to leave the ruins--just talking to her over and over again without asking will eventually make her nervous, and she'll get up to destroy the door to snowdin on her own.

and although she's firm in her resolve to wait in the ruins and try to help stray human kids to keep them safe from asgore, she does not like to stay in one place. flavor text reveals that she's read all her books over and over; she readily admits that the ruins are very small once you're used to them, and part of her excitement of having frisk around is joy at having someone new to interact with, and make everything else new again.

patience isn't toriel's strong suit at all. (in fact, i'd argue that there's a very different virtue that she embodies, but we'll get there when we get there.)

but it is something she values very highly in other people. take her relationship with sans, for instance--we know sans' recollection of their meeting, but try imagining it from toriel's perspective. sans came to the door to the ruins day after day and kept practicing his knock-knock jokes there, although he had no audience and nothing to gain from it, until finally toriel rewarded him by responding. he doesn't ask her name, doesn't press her for personal information; he just enjoys their joke exchanges and doesn't demand a lot from her in return.

sans is also, in general, very placid and passive and hard to move to emotion or action. (because he's depressed, and also kinda lazy and chill.) even if you do something he can't forgive, like murdering papyrus, he still won't take a stand against you unless he has no other choice; he will continue to keep his promise with toriel.

in contrast, you can make a case that one of the main reasons toriel left asgore is because of his lack of patience. soon after chara and asriel die, he declares his go-to-war-with-humans plan in a rage rather than stepping back to calm down before making any executive decisions. he refused to give humans another chance. (and then he went on to waffle about the choice he made in anger, which also goes against the importance toriel places on staying true to yourself and your decisions.)

so toriel doesn't need to be taught patience, and if she can be outpatienced by a 10-year-old kid, she's hardly got a monopoly on it. but because it's important to her, you can use it to appeal to her and make it through the fight with her in one piece.

PAPYRUS AND BRAVERY

you are always given the chance to spare papyrus, no matter what route you're on, but the "natural" course of meeting and making friends with papyrus (e.g. the neutral/pacifist route) is the one that i would like to focus on right now.

because papyrus will ultimately spare you no matter what you do, but to get to the point where he will do so in a neutral or pacifist run, you have to make it through a whole forest of his puzzles and then fight him--and either last through his entire battle, or get defeated (and healed up and deposited in the garage) and come back to challenge him either until you can successfully outlast him or he himself gives in.

papyrus is easy to please--he'll interpret all your responses in a positive way. all you have to do is meet his challenges head-on, with bravery.

as for papyrus himself? he's far from a coward, but his great acts of courage--standing up to undyne in a neutral or pacifist route, and showing concern for the player and offering you mercy in a no mercy route--are more about things other than bravery itself for bravery's own sake.

papyrus is a notorious people-pleaser who wants more than anything to be liked, and while he does try to confront undyne, he's not particularly successful; he spends the entirety of waterfall trying to keep both undyne and frisk appeased and safe. he never jumps in to peacemake or defuse the situation directly, either. he's wary of sparking confrontation, but he loves his friends too much to take the easy road and just pick one to side with, and he's too hopeful to give up on the idea of frisk and undyne making friends too.

and in a no mercy route, when he confronts the player at the exit to snowdin, he's not making a big last stand to try to save the underground from this murderous human. no, he sees a strange violent little kid who won't even do him the courtesy of playing along with his japes and puzzles, and he's genuinely concerned for that kid's well-being. he hasn't given up reaching out to you, because he believes that all you need to do to try to be a better person is to have a little help.

as with toriel and patience, though, papyrus absolutely values bravery in other people. he admires undyne so much not just because her position makes her ultra-popular and he wants to learn her ways, but because she's a brave hero who will stop at nothing to protect the underground, and he genuinely likes and looks up to her.

SANS AND INTEGRITY

the case of Sans Undertale, Himself is a pretty interesting one because you cannot make friends with sans the way you can with other characters. papyrus, undyne, and alphys all have specific sequences of events that you have to go through in order to become close with them; toriel and asgore don't really become your "friends" per se but you still have to appeal to them in certain ways to be able to spare them in battle. but while sans follows you around all game long, he's doing so on toriel's behest and because he's suspicious of frisk, not because he necessarily wants to be in their company. he dictates the tone of all your in-game interactions, and if you're ever in the position where you're fighting him, you've already nailed your coffin shut in terms of being able to so much as spare the guy, let alone befriend him.

but in sans' case we don't even have to speculate what virtue he values in other people, because he comes straight out and tells us. during the mtt resort event, he talks about being won over by toriel's integrity.

you can theorize based on context clues that integrity appeals to sans because it isn't a virtue that he has himself. he is too depressed to be reliable and too cagey to be trustworthy, and is not able to be open and honest with others about his circumstances or his feelings. too, people with integrity are appealing because sans doesn't have to be suspicious of them.

the people he values most, toriel and papyrus, both embody these qualities. toriel values her ideals and sense of right and wrong even more than she valued her relationship with her own husband, and walked out on him in disgust rather than compromise her values to stay with him through the collect-human-souls plan that she found cowardly and immoral. papyrus is open, friendly, and trustworthy, and he refuses to take a life no matter what the circumstances.

therefore the only way you can get frisk to be on genuinely good terms with sans is to let them be their genuine self (i.e. do the true pacifist run). you can't just tell a guy who doesn't trust you that you're honest and trustworthy and have him believe you. you've got to earn that "nah, i'm rooting for ya, kid" by demonstration.

UNDYNE AND PERSEVERANCE

sparing undyne was, reportedly, one of the most difficult spare sequences back in ye olde september '15 when everyone was still trying to figure out how the game worked for the first time. to do so successfully, you have to endure her green magic sequence and then run away... and then repeat the process several times as she catches up to you. and then even after you manage to run her to a state of collapse in hotland, you have to give her water, or she won't be willing to become friends with you... which is another whole event by itself.

basically you have to put a LOT of time and effort into becoming close to undyne. she is a lot of other things too (determined, as she'll tell you herself/demonstrate on a neutral or no mercy run; brave, as we've covered in papyrus' section; as well as kind and just, as we'll cover later on), but undyne is VERY MUCH ABOUT persevering and not giving up in the face of obstacles.

we see this again in her story of how she started training papyrus: initially she wasn't going to give him the time of day (because it was the middle of the night), but she relented and decided to work with him after finding that he'd camped out in front of her house to wait for her to get up. even though she has no intention of letting him join the royal guard, finding him to be "too nice", papyrus refuses to give up both in her training and in his own efforts to impress her enough to merit an invite.

and the two other most important people in undyne's life, alphys and asgore, both refuse to buckle in the face of adversity too... if in their own disparate ways. alphys is incredibly passionate and thorough in her anime-collecting, robot-building, and sciencing. the former two required a lot of waiting for good junk to fall at the garbage dump, and as for the latter, she may not know what to do now about the amalgamates and her mistakes, but she's still hanging in there (in her job, and in hanging on to life). asgore has kept the underground going in the face of practical and personal hardships for at least a thousand years, and hasn't given up on freeing the monsters after all this time.

the ideas of perseverance and determination inform undyne's (slightly anime-biased) view of humans, too; she talks about humans' refusal to give up in the same breath as she discusses how alphys' anime made her think that humans were cool.

undyne and alphys are each a bit of an interesting case because you can make an argument that you need to display both perseverance and kindness to become friends with each of them; for undyne specifically you do have to give her water, and appeal to her by reminding her of asgore's reluctance to harm others, to complete her friendship event. as friends and later as a couple, undyne and alphys get along so well because they have similar cares and concerns.

ALPHYS AND KINDNESS

alphys, like sans, is an irregular case; she does not have a spare sequence. the only time you fight her at all in the entire game is her lost soul sequence during the true pacifist final battle.

she's always set up as a friendly character who's trying to help you, but because her "help" throughout hotland is just her manipulating the circumstances to try to get you to like her and give her the chance to persuade you to stay in the underground, that doesn't really count as becoming her friend. in order to become truly close to her, you have to come back and keep being nice to her and trying to help her, from playing cupid for her and undyne to chasing after her when you find her would-be suicide note.

beyond the initial circumstances of your getting to know her getting in the way, it's so difficult to get through to alphys because she's got a lot of self-loathing. it's hard to believe that anyone else could like you when you're convinced there's no real reason that anyone ever would if they knew the real you.

all of the people alphys associates with are kind, though; mettaton is capable of great generosity and empathy underneath his thick layer of narcissism, and undyne's whole superpower is love for her fellow monsters. asgore, too, is well-known throughout his kingdom for his care for people. even if alphys has difficulty actually accepting much kindness for herself, she still gravitates towards those who could give her the love and acceptance and forgiveness she craves.

undyne and alphys are each a bit of an interesting case because you can make an argument that you need to display both perseverance and kindness to become friends with each of them; for alphys specifically you have to replay the game or restart from old save data to do her date event, and then keep chasing her into the true lab to get to the heart of her character. as friends and later as a couple, undyne and alphys get along so well because they have similar cares and concerns.

ASGORE AND JUSTICE

asgore's actual spare sequence is in an event after his battle. the man literally breaks your mercy button when he challenges you; there are hidden easter egg events in the asgore fight that you can do to make him not hit as hard, but you still can't pass go and collect $200 until you've punched him very thoroughly in the face.

and he definitely wants frisk to punch him in the face: undyne tells us how it took her years of training to be able to lay a blow on asgore, so if he wanted to pull a sans and dodge your attacks instead of just standing there and taking them, he could. he doesn't. any ambiguity surrounding what asgore is after in forcing frisk to fight him should be cleared up by the event viewable by replaying a neutral or neutral pacifist route after ""killing"" flowey, fighting asgore again, and sparing him: he is suicidal, and kills himself in that event.

asgore is well aware that he's done wrong in killing human children to save the monsters, but feels trapped into the course of action he's chosen by his sense of obligation and fear for his people's future without this source of hope. all he really wants is to go back to having a happy life with his wife, son, and foster child, but as he says himself before his suicide, he knows full well that it's only wishful thinking and he'll never get that life back. and he wants frisk to make him pay for what he's done.

it's been written elsewhere about how this ties in to why you need the help of all the other monsters to save asgore, so i won't go into that here. but it's also a good demonstration of how strongly asgore values justice.

justice is a virtue that asgore has taught former wild child undyne and which is now one of her defining characteristics. it's also, i think, one of the reasons that he loves toriel so much: gerson talks about how toriel was the brains behind the throne as compared to asgore being in charge of public relations, and if you talk to politics bear in snowdin during the endgame walkaround, you can hear about how asgore and toriel take a good cop bad cop ish response to hearing about alphys' experiments. (asgore forgives her on the spot, hugs her, and expresses sympathy for her turmoil; toriel fires her immediately.)

asgore is too mild-natured, gentle, and forgiving to really be a hardass in the name of standing up for right and wrong like toriel does, and he clearly respects that in her: when she upbraids him at the end of the true pacifist route he openly admits that she's 100% right about everything she's saying.

so in order to spare and befriend the monsters, you need to appeal to them using the virtues that they care about: wait out toriel, meet papyrus head-on, let frisk be themself in front of sans, don't give up on trying to survive and then reach out to undyne, show alphys how much you care, and make asgore face justice the way he craves so he'll listen to you.

and on the subject of appealing to characters via traits they value, it seems there's still a little bit left to be said.

BONUS ROUND 1: ASRIEL AND DETERMINATION

in order to truly make friends with asriel, you have to clear the true pacifist route.

obviously this is a feat that requires determination. determination is the byword of undertale. to get through the flowey persona to asriel, you have to play undertale to the end at least once and then go back and play it more--or replay it from the beginning and do it the harder, more fun way, i.e. without killing anybody. this requires devotion, time, energy, stubbornness, and probably a little savescumming if you're not good at bullet hell/don't know how to spare each boss. both of asriel's boss fights--as omega flowey and as the absolute god of hyperdeath--involve his trying to beat you into submitting and surrendering control of the world to him, and you trying to find ways to resist him regardless despite how hopeless the situation might initially look.

and we know that the soul virtue that asriel values most is determination because the person he values most is chara, and determination is absolutely chara's defining trait. and he imprints on frisk at the end of the game immediately after he sees how immense their determination is too.

only by demonstrating the strength of our determination are we able to make asriel remember his original feelings and original purpose, and bring him back to himself so that he can save everyone and let them go.

BONUS ROUND 2: CHARA AND COMPASSION

there is no flashy spare/befriending sequence for chara.

this makes sense because a) they are literally the game's protagonist, the player character, whom we are directly controlling; and because b) they are seamlessly hidden behind the game's main character, frisk, the npc to whom they are passing the player's orders in a convoluted game of telephone, almost exactly in the way that frisk is hidden behind "us".

and unlike frisk, who is revealed to be their own person and not just an anonymous player-insert at the end of the game, chara's role in the entire game is very subtextual and takes some extra squinting at the narration/flavor text and at their speech to the player at the end of the no mercy route to puzzle out. naturally, wank over the exact nature of the player-chara-frisk symbiosis is still flourishing in the year of 2017 and does not look to be disappearing any time soon.

but it's still one of the hidden meanings of the game's title itself: the flip side of the story of frisk falling underground and making friends with all these funny monsters is the story of chara and asriel. (the track undertale itself tells the story of chara and asriel's meeting, friendship, and deaths--really it does, once upon a time is chara's theme and memory is asriel's theme, keep that in mind when you listen--but that's an analysis post for another day.)

anyway it's really difficult to gauge what if any interaction is happening between chara and frisk in-game outside of chara definitely being middleperson in our game of telephone with frisk. BUT you can still keep track of chara's personal growth through a true pacifist run, and what causes that growth.

chara's narration and flavor text starts off pretty snappy and sarcastic, even mean, in the ruins. their change in tone on a no mercy run is very dramatic and readily apparent, but their tone changes over the course of a true pacifist run too, just more subtlely: they get a lot nicer, a lot gentler, a lot more encouraging. there is a veritable mountain (lol) of character development separating the kid who sasses you for getting puzzles wrong in the ruins and the one who tells you that there's still something you can save during the fight with asriel.

and this is a direct result of the player's choices. not just because you are having chara and frisk be compassionate, but because chara is responding to the compassion you show--

because the person chara valued most was asriel, their best friend, and compassion is asriel's core virtue.

#undertale #undertale spoilers #essay #toriel #asgore dreemurr #papyrus (undertale)#sans (undertale)#undyne #alphys #asriel dreemurr #chara (undertale)#long post -#canon typical discussion of suicide & child death -

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