#and the meta implications of them affecting aus and their creation

[opal-kitty333]

Thinking about Dreamtale and how the "negative au" vs. "positive au" territories work. Like always, lots of ramblings under the read more

Like I feel when things are in balance, no au is inherently positive or negative. With resets, any timeline is capable of moments of great happiness but also great tragedy. The thing is, they're fluid and ever changing. Even if you do the genocide route, it only mucks up the happy ending. But that's just the ending, which is never permanent anyway.

I feel like the only way for an au to become truly positive or negative, even the rough and tumble aus like fells, is if you forcibly give them an ending or actively alter something so you can't "play" anymore.

Imagine Nightmare cultivating entire timelines to do this. Horror timelines could be a great example. A perminant ending to the original that spirals on so much longer than it should with EVERYONE being as miserable as possible and often doing things against their own best interest because they're reaching a breaking point. Imagine corrupting timelines, forcing more and more negative emotions into a Sans until he snaps and becomes Dust.

Hell, it could be part of the reason Nightmare is so particular with any Killers he has. Because it's such a specific thing of having his soul twisted by a player/creator, Nightmare can’t influence or force that to happen. He needs to have a tighter leash on him because he's so much harder to replace. It doesn’t matter how much he alters a timeline, a home grown Killer is impossible.

It also adds more into what "missions" can be. It's not just going in and killing a bunch of people at random. Dead people don't feel emotions, positive or negative. But remove the possibility of a happy ending? Remove just the right person so the dominos in the background don't fall or make someone snap, so they never trust the human no matter what they do, all so that a true pacifistending would be impossible no matter what you did. Maybe even somehow softlocking the human so everyone is stuck in a permanent miserable limbo no matter how often they reset to try and fix it.

And then you have Dream and his "positive aus". These are obviously the ones that get happy endings, the post pacifist where Frisk promises to never reset and everyone lives their days out on the surface in harmony. The ones where everyone is happy and healing and okay.

This can be part of why Ink helps him at first. Creators like making these happy ending aus and Nightmare, of course, would want to sow seeds of political discourse to turn the surface into hell. Dreams stops that, forcing things to turn out fine again and with Ink's help, ensure the happy aus stay on track.

But that's also where Ink and Dream clash. Dream sees a Horrortale and wants to attempt to fix it, but the thing is people love making horror aus. Maybe the first few Ink is fine with fixing up because these one were MEANT to be those softer interpretations that you see floating around. But then Dream comes across one that is truly rotten, something that's more canon compliant to the original horrortale comic, maybe even worse, and Ink stops him from doing anything. such a thing would go against what the creator wants the world to be. Sure, Nightmare is the one who got the ball rolling and sunk it deeper, but these monsters in the underground were never supposed to be saved.