#flower-asriel

[marshmallowprotection]

Hello! This is my first mysme ask so I'm very nervous haha.

I wanted to jump in on the VAE talk, but it has nothing to do with Saeran! What I don't like about the VAE is...the difference in V himself.

I don't think I have a good grasp on his character. It's difficult for someone like me to want to even try to understand him after some of the things he's done! It feels as if the VAE forces us to be in a position of being forgiving and understanding of Rika and her abuse towards Saeran for him to be happy...and that's very strange to me? Because, V, in VAE works to help Saeran while simultaneously you only get the good ending with him if you're explicitly "okay with" what she did to him?

I think either version of Another Story V is a frustrating character to delve into! Its easy to look at him and think "wow he spouts off about caring about his friends and caring about saeran but when it all comes down to it, he only cares about this one person that hurt everyone else he claims to care for"

Ray AE V and VAE V are very hard to adapt to because of this, I think? :/ Character analysis for these types are not my strong suit clearly. I know there's more to V than this, but it's hard to look past his "be okay with forgiving an abuser for me to be happy with you (VAE) or be okay with me going alongside this abuser while guilt tripping you to understand her (Ray AE)" type thing.

I think I at least understand Rika as a character better than him to be quite honest.

Let me preface this by saying that V's After Ending is a mess. It's a hot mess and it does a major disservice to Jihyun Kim in more ways than one. A lot of people really don't believe this because Saeran is my favorite character, but Jihyun is my third favorite character right behind Saeyoung. His After Ending hurts in more ways than one due to what happens in terms of forgiveness and judgement.

The game forces you into a corner and shames you if you decide to judge Rika Kim for her actions. I cannot tell you how triggering the Judgement Ending is, not only for myself, but for many others who played it. I don't suggest anyone play that ending if they don't think they can stomach being told it's "their fault Rika is suffering for them not forgiving Rika."

Nope.

It's not our job or obligation to forgive Rika Kim.

If you choose to forgive her, great, but why are we, as the players, being told that the only way to achieve the Good Ending, because, let's face it, the forgiveness ending is the real GOOD ENDING, is by being told to forgive Rika no matter how you feel about it. Cannot tell you how angry I was when that happened, and I know plenty of other people were just as upset.

When the VAE first came out, I can remember people emailing Cheritz and telling them why telling people they need to forgive another person isn't okay. I can't believe that's something that's gotta be explained. But, we live in a world where people tell us we need to forgive, forget, and get over our pain, no matter how large or small very often, and people don't think about those who don't want to ever forgive the people who hurt them or the people they love.

That's the one thing I love about Saeran's After Ending. The RAE doesn't mince words with anyone about affirmed choice. You get choices in the RAE to decide what you want in terms of forgiveness, and by God, the other characters do, too. You get to decide what you want, Saeran gets to decide what he wants, and the RFA gets to pick what they want, and you know what's great?

NOBODY'S JUDGED FOR CHOOSING ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. IT IS THAT EASY.

You are not being forced to forgive Rika in the RAE. I don't know where people get that thought. If anything, you get to tell her the truth of how you feel her for her multiple times, and the only time that the player is "nice" to her is near the end of the RAE where you speak to her to find out where Saeran is, and honestly, you can read into that as "I'm pretending to be nice because I need to find Saeran before he dies" or, if you decide to embrace Rika and forgive her on your own, you can do that and then find Saeran.

But, you're not being forced one way or another to forgive Rika here. But, in Jihyun's After Ending, you are baited into forgiving her to not get the ending that tells you that you're to blame for Rika suffering in the hospital for not forgiving her. That's being kicked for choosing to do what you want, and that's WRONG.

Jihyun himself confesses that he knows he's in the wrong with Rika in the RAE. He's given up on himself, though. He decides he has to keep his promise no matter what. That's the difficult part for most people to swallow.

His mentality is: "I need to save her because of my promise, but I also made a promise to Saeyoung, so I need to keep both of my promises even if that makes my a villain." This is not okay. This isn't healthy. It's not ever going to be okay and he knows it's not okay. He just... wants to be a savior even if it's self-destructive.

I don't like that Jihyun is hardly in his own After Ending. It focuses on judgement and forgiveness of Rika. I would've preferred to spend all my time focusing on Jihyun instead of playing a losing situation with the RFA. We had to face Rika no matter what because she is more or less the main reason why the game exists, but V's After Ending had no business being as focused on her as much as it was.

Because, in moments we do see with V, I enjoy those, because I see him reflecting and growing in as a person, not perfect, nobody's ever going to be perfect, but he was trying, and for someone who stopped trying a long time ago, it's hopeful to know that he's decided to try his hand at life once again without succumbing to self-destruction as we often see him do.

Jihyun Kim is a character that a lot of people have a hard time understanding, so if you feel like you haven't gotten a grasp on who he is as a person, I think that's understandable. Rika Kim is up there, too. I like to understand what brought them to the point they're at in the game, and sometimes, there are people who think that I do that to find excuses for their actions. I don't.

I don't find reasons to explain their actions because I want to excuse them. I want to understand as best as I can why they got to that point in the first place. Understanding someone doesn't mean you excuse their actions. It means you have better insight as to why they do what they do, and even then, understanding why someone got somewhere in life doesn't mean you'll understand their choices. It just means you see their explanation, their excuses, their reasoning, and knowing the in's and out doesn't mean you condone what they did.

It just means you learned who they are and how they feel. I know why Jihyun and Rika react the way they do at times, but I don't agree with it or excuse it. I get angry because I see them walking down a path of torture, hatred, and pain. I see them stand at the precipice of choice, and chose to ignore reality in favor of another route, and I get angry, and disappointed. Because, especially in the case of Jihyun, he was so close to making the right decision in Ray Route, but he decided to turn away from it.

Jihyun Kim regressed from making any personal progress because he saw Saeran and MC do what he and Rika seemingly did not. That is that, it's important to understand that V/Rika and Saeran/MC are narrative foils. If you want to see toxic, unhealthy codependency as it sinks deeper and deeper into a pit, look no further than V and Rika. If you want to see a couple who're trying to be individuals but also value communicating with their partner before they leap, that's Saeran and MC.

V and Rika make choices that feed into the worst parts of each other and they don't stop even when they know they could. Jihyun admits it himself in the RAE. He thinks that he has no choice but to keep his promise he made to Rika, even though he knew it wasn't healthy for him, or Rika, for that matter. Jihyun believes in his heart that he can't abandon Rika even if he wants to, because he hasn't overcome that grief in his heart over his mother's death.

He hurt his mother when he was a teenager, and he never had the chance to make it up to her or apologize. His mother died protecting him. She gave her life to save his. He thinks that love requires a sense of selfless sacrifice no matter what, that he needs to a Savior or even God to make up for his mother's death. He sees beauty in Rika's pain, she's his muse, and she looks upon him like a God for very long time. He relishes in that, because it helps him feel better about his trauma.

Jihyun was everything she wanted to be because she didn't want to be herself. She idolized Jihyun Kim. She was obsessed with him. It's just that her obsession was different than his. She wanted to become him, in every sense of word, so she would no longer have to Rika Kim. It's written in her diary that you can get from the Special Believer box.

Rika and V's love was built on infatuation, obsession, and the hurt two people had from their childhoods that had not yet healed. They helped each other "cope" but the way they "coped", was only further serving as a means to destroy both of them. I think the visual novel on Day 9 does a good job of having V express his clarity on this fact, and Rika's vehement denial of it, though, it's still messy since V isn't out of the thick of it.

This is just the start of his acceptance journey and he stills chooses to protect Rika after she stabs him at the end of this scene. It's not perfect, but... you can see the lightbulb going off.

Rika herself lives in denial within the confines of the game, and she can only face reality there is when the truth about Mother Choi is revealed. I don't know if people really grasp this at first without sitting down and looking at all the details, but Rika killed Mother Choi in self-defense. The scene is shown to us as Rika would've imagined it, and given that Rika thinks of herself as the devil, it's easy to think she did it without a second thought.

That scene plays out as Rika viewing herself as a devilish murderer who killed in cold blood.

But, that moment when she killed Mother Choi was the moment she gave up on trying to ever see herself as anything but the devil. Do you know what the strange thing is? I never once considered over all the years I've played this game that Jihyun was there with her that night, but he was. He confirmed he was there that night.

That means both he and Rika are bonded with the agonizing fact that Mother Choi is dead because of Rika, self defense or not, and they're the ones who likely had to get rid of her body or even tamper with the crime scene to protect the twins. Murder is a heavy act to carry and I know it's easy for us to joke about wishing harm onto others, but to be a person who has taken another person's life is... I cannot begin to imagine what that feels like.

I know some people feel guilt for the rest of their lives, even if the person they hurt was a bad person. Because, a life is a life, and even if you protect yours and the people you loved, you feel shameful for what you've done. My trying to understanding how that effected Rika is in no way condoning the creation of Mint Eye or the abuse of not only Ray and Saeran, but countless others, it's just another piece of the puzzle to understanding why Rika is the way she is.

Because, hey, cool tragic backstory, still murder!

But, knowing how that fact really bleeds into Jihyun's Savior complex gets you a much broader understanding of why he won't leave Rika in most situations even if that's the correct and right choice for not only him, or her, but quite frankly, literally everyone else.

Jihyun wanted to save his mother from death. He couldn't do that. He wanted to save her because she saved him, and he's wandering life with this idea that love is built on selfless sacrifice no matter the circumstance because he thinks that's what love is. Love is throwing your life away to protect the people you care about. Which, that's not what his mother's sacrifice was about. She died protecting him, but... she never would've wanted him to believe that love is about sacrifice.

She died protecting him of her own accord, that's correct, but that doesn't mean Jihyun has to spend the rest of his life trying to prove to himself that his mother's sacrifice was worth it by sacrificing his mind, heart, body, and soul all the time.

That's what he has to learn to heal.

I sometimes think the game isn't as heavy-handed as it could be to help people understand that this is what's going on inside his head, because a lot of this detail work comes from venturing out into every piece of media you can own from this game and really sitting down to put your head into what you're reading. 

It can be hard for people to understand him or to even want to understand because you get frustrated with his choices. After all, they are so self-destructive. Not only are they destructive to him, they end up being harmful to everyone around him, and that's not okay. Watching him is like watching somebody shoot themselves in the foot.

He doesn't always make the best decisions, and as you get to learn more about him, you realize that he knows he can do better but he doesn't do better for himself. I think that's an aspect of his character that makes him very human, but because it makes him so human, it's easy to be upset with him. You know he can do better and you want him to do better. It leads to a sense of disappointment in him.

People like him do exist, to an extreme degree and to a lesser degree, and I can relate to him in many ways which is why I think it's easier for me to empathize and relate to him as a person. But, it's because I do understand him so intimately that I get angry with him. I get so angry because I know he can do better than what he's doing, and it places a mirror in front of me when I make poor decisions.

As frustrating as he can be at times, he's helped me a lot as a person, and in some regard, I want to help people understand what he's like beyond being upset with him if anyone ever wants to learn about him in any way.

Understanding him will never mean I condone his choices. I can't believe I have to say this so many times, but if I don't reiterate this simple fact, people seem to misconstrue what I'm saying. I like to understand and learn why people do the things they do, but I am right there with everyone else here who is judging and holding them accountable for their actions. I want to have some answers, and even if having those answers doesn't explain anything, I feel better being able to have them.

You know how Saeran feels a little better once he's able to talk to his abusers? He needed to be able to hear what brought them to the point they are standing at today. He needed to know why they were the way they were so that he could learn how to forgive himself. He copied Rika, his Mother, and Saejoong specifically to make himself feel powerful in Mint Eye because that's what he was told to do, he invoked their words and actions against innocent people, believers and even the MC.

He feels better confronting them and having an explanation from their lips even if it's not an answer that explains why people would be needlessly cruel to an innocent person. He's not looking for excuses, he's not looking for them to give him some tragic backstory that makes everything okay, he's looking into their eyes and choosing kindness when they themselves never choose kindness towards him.

He is facing them so that he can face himself. 

Forgiving them is about learning how to forgive himself. It's not about making them feel better, and it's certainly not about letting them into his life. He has those conversations with them as a parting gesture. He's never going to meet with them ever again, but that was how he decided he would find peace for himself.

Would you do the same if you were in his shoes? I don't think I would, I don't think I can ever forgive the people who hurt me, no, I know I'll never forgive them, but Saeran chose what felt right for him and I will not fault him for that.

I will never shame him for choosing what felt right for his healing journey. He forgave them so he could forgive himself and I'm glad that he had the opportunity to make that choice and not a damn person told him not to do what felt right for him. I don't forgive Rika, and I don't forgive V for what happened in the RAE, but, I'm glad to know Saeran got his peace and that he won't judge me for what I feel.

Sometimes, you want an explanation, even if it only proves that those people don't have remorse for what they did. At least, for some folks, having that proof can he helpful. It helps you feel like walking away is the right choice for you and you did what felt right. If you don't want an explanation, if you don't want to hear it, don't seek one.

Walk away and find peace another way.

It's your life, choose what feels right for you and find peace your way.

Wow, I went off a little here, but... I think it's important to note that these characters are complex and it's easy to take away one thing about them when there is so much going on... especially with Jihyun who hasn't always been favored by company and ends up getting the short end of the stick even in his own route. He and Rika can be very frustrating for most players because nobody wants to deal with their back and forth.

I hope this helped give you a little more insight on him. It's always fun to talk about him, contrary to popular belief. Thank you for your question! I hope you feel comfortable asking more!

[sukifoof-art]

happy 9th anniversary undertale!!!

[akanemnon]

Family game night

[wiredphonez]

* Chara.....hey Chara!

*...

* Did you hear me calling you?

[strawbebe-dk]

His mother would fucking kill him

[akemiiya]

behind the mask

color picked from their sprites (:

[the-irreverend]

I've come to love this scene much more after reading the latest newsletter because it demonstrates how Asriel's relationship/understanding towards Chara changed for the better after the Pacifist ending.

It shows that even after saying that Chara "wasn't the greatest person", Asriel doesn't completely hate or resent Chara despite their failures and shortcomings as siblings, and he still wants to see them happy and content.

When Asriel said Chara "wasn't the greatest person," it meant that he let go of his unhealthy view/relationship with them; NOT THAT HE LET GO OF THE LOVE AND CARE HE STILL FEELS FOR THEM AS HE STILL WANTS TO HAVE A RELATIONSHIP WITH THEM!

Another way this scene greatly demonstrates Asriel's growth as a character is that it also shows that despite everything, Asriel/Flowey still recognizes Chara's CAPACITY FOR GOOD DESPITE THEIR MANY FLAWS.

The line "nothing can hurt anyone anymore" PROVES that he isn't saying that because of wishful thinking, but that he KNOWS FOR A FACT that Chara had good intentions (even if they paved the road to hell with them).

So when Flowey tells Chara there's nothing to worry about, he's reassuring/comforting Chara by telling them that they finally got what they wanted and that the people they care about have got the freedom and prosperity that Chara wanted for them all along, even if it didn't happen the way they intended!

[rainbowscones]

the kiddos again =]

[comictoony]

A bunch of Floweys... 🌼

[marshiemonarch]

Thank you.

[poopystain]

uhhhhmm

[aquapede]

fucked up in the club thinking about the alarm clock dialog again

[sukifoof-art]

missed the dreemurrs and flowey taking himself way too seriously all the time

[niccillustrates]

Fallen Down

[Undertale]

[wickjump]

praying for the day people realize asriel saying "chara wasnt really the greatest person" is more in reference to his idolization of them and him finally admitting that he doesnt have to follow them blindly anymore, because even after they died, their beliefs still stuck with him. and not "yeah chara, my dead sibling (who is like 11 years old) that i miss a lot and clearly care for immensely despite everything? evil. i am explicitly saying that they are evil. and they only wanted to kill the dreemurrs and also everyone else. did you get that down? write that down. they are evil forever."

becajuse... chara is not evil... chara isnt even a bad person... asriel doesnt say they are a bad person!!!!! he says they "werent the greatest". guys im begging you to realize this.chara was a kid!!! who literally killed themselves because they wanted to free monsterkind!!!! come on!!!! it’s 2024 I thought we were past seeing people say chara is canonically evil and terrible and grrrrrr

[hatgame]