#the concept is cool! its just fundamentally ignoring either the character’s views on a certain subject

[thatgirlwithasquid]

breaking news: local idiot reads fanfic that’s premise made them say ‘he would not fucking do that’, proceeds to get annoyed when character does said action

[maxknightley]

"Re: The third point, I could go on about the specific example of Dragon Quest and how I think Undertale works best when read as a response to that franchise + similar series in particular" do you think you could find the time to elaborate?

Fair warning. This one is a bit long.

Let’s talk about Dragon Quest.

Overview

The Dragon Quest series of games (originally localized as Dragon Warrior in the U.S. due to a copyright/trademark issue) is pretty much one of the “Big Two” JRPG franchises alongside Final Fantasy. It’s extremely big in Japan, while enjoying more moderate success in the United States. 

I’m not going to go into too much detail comparing the two or talking about their history, but I think it’s relevant to note that Dragon Quest games tend to be straightforward, high-fantasy stories in a way that a lot of beloved JRPGs (Final Fantasy included) aren’t. You’ll fight a robot from time to time, but sci-fi elements beyond that are rare; explicit social commentary/allegory is extremely rare; the plot rarely becomes especially bizarre or complex, with the narratives tending to rely a lot on characterization to make an impact; and so on.

(I should note that none of this is a bad thing, per se - I love Dragon Quest games. DQ8 and DQ11 are some of my favorite RPGs of all time, in large part because of their gorgeous settings and excellent character work, and I’ve played a fair few!)

Monsters

With that being said, if you know anything about JRPGs, you probably know how the player spends most of their time in a Dragon Quest game - going from town to town and dungeon to dungeon, fighting a wide array of whimsical monsters. (big ups to Akira Toriyama for his excellent character designs, with the exception of the Cyclowns, which I hate a lot.) There’s sidequests and minigames and such, but by and large, this is how the player interacts with the world - find monsters, fight monsters, get strong enough to fight the Big Boy monsters, maybe halfway through you start fighting the occasional anime boy or possessed dog.

The role that monsters play in the narrative is also, for the most part, very simple: they’re almost exclusively the minions of either the local boss/miniboss, or of the big mean demon lord you fight at the end of the game, and pretty much all they do is terrorize villagers, cause mayhem, and so on.

Note that I said almost exclusively...

“Don’t worry, I’m a nice monster!”

...because in basically every Dragon Quest game, some monsters are chill and friendly. Most commonly, this will be a slime, the franchise mascot:

Sometimes they’ll show up at the bottom of a well and give you a trinket for talking to them, other times they’ll hang out in a dungeon and give you some lore or a hint about a nearby puzzle. They say a lot of things like “goo-ness gracious” and it’s very cute and charming, and, uh, hang on, these guys talk, and make puns, and aren’t just bags of XP and herbs? Okay. Sure.

Depending on the game, you can often encounter other monster friends as well. Sometimes there’ll be a town with friendly monster NPCs to talk to; other times, beating monsters allows you to recruit them to your party or your Monster Arena team. It’s neat.

But what never changes is that it’s some monsters that are nice. A tiny minority. And they’re only ever a curiosity, a side note. They’re the exception that proves the rule, and the rule wants to kill you.

Which brings me to:

The One Guy Who Isn’t Evil

There’s a thing that a lot of speculative fiction does where cultures are set up as broad and all-encompassing. These are the Primitive But Kind Bear Goblins, and over here are the Mafia Slugs. These are the Prissy Forest Guys, and they hate the Gruff Cave Guys.

This isn’t necessarily bad writing, but it can be a bit repetitive and one-note after a while, so a lot of speculative fiction also has The One Guy Who Isn’t Like That. The illogical robot, the pacifistic/intellectual barbarian, the pragmatic and materialistic guy who bailed on the monastery.

And, of course, The One Guy Who Isn’t Evil. The vampire who doesn’t drink human blood. The dark elf paladin. That one dragon from Skyrim with the cool speech. They’re very useful characters, in that they soften the Troubling Implications of an entire species or ethnicity of bastards, and there’s a lot of cool stories you can tell about their conflict with family and former friends, and perhaps even... with themselves... with the beast within.

At the core of these stories is the assumption that a creature capable of thinking independently and acting on their own free will can always choose to be good, regardless of their “nature.”

But this goes both ways. If something is capable of choosing to be “good,” or even “nice,” they have to be able to conceive of these concepts. To make that choice. They can’t truly be Made Of Pure Evil, or be beasts acting on instinct, or be slaves to the will of a much more powerful entity.

Are Slimes People?

So, in the example of Dragon Quest, we’ve reached a conundrum. Some monsters - very few, but some - are nice, or at least open to conversation. Most are only there to, pardon the phrasing, kill or be killed.

Which means there’s basically two main possibilities:

Some slimes are nice and they’re always already nice. They attacked you first so it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.

Slimes are definitely all thinking, feeling beings, and it’s probably a little fucked up to kill a bunch of them because you’re saving up money for the casino, even if they “attacked you first” after you spent a half hour running in circles, Erdrick.

The first one works fine for the context of a story like Dragon Quest, because we can employ suspension of disbelief. But it kind of unravels if you look at it for too long. In some installments, there are evil but non-hostile monsters who won’t attack you, but will deliver a whole little monologue about how cool Lord Merdur of Fort Finalboss is. And, hey, what causes a monster to decide to be nice instead of evil? 

For the most part, we never learn, because it doesn’t matter. The Nice Monster is a throwaway character, usually a bit of a joke. They’re there for flavor, not because of what their existence implies.

And that’s kind of weird, right?

Undertale As Response

It’s obvious how Undertale works as a critique on level grinding and the like, but this alone would be kind of facile, imo. People will say, “well, that monster was trying to kill me, so I acted in self-defense. It’s only fair.” And it can be difficult to argue against this without getting into weird arguments about monsters’ Actual Motivations or the relative negative utility of thousands being imprisoned beneath a mountain vs. seven children being killed.

Here’s the thing that I think a lot of people ignore, though. Undertale is also a critique of the idea that Some Monsters Are Nice, as seen in Dragon Quest and similar games. And part of why that critique works is because it does not allow you to set up a dividing line. All those monsters have a place in Underground society - you can’t simply write some off as Fights while viewing others as worthy of kindness or redemption.

If you spare Toriel and Papyrus, because they’re nice and well-meaning... then how can you justify killing Undyne and Mettaton, who are kind of assholes, but have good intentions, and are pillars of the community?

If you spare Undyne and Mettaton, how could you justify killing Whimsun, who’s terrified of you? Or Temmie, who’s just kind of scatterbrained and weird? Or Snowdrake, who constantly tells bad jokes, just like your friend Sans would if you had to fight him?

So how could you justify killing Tsundereplane and Vulkin, so desperate for affection?

So how could you justify killing Muffet, so desperate to save her family and friends?

And so on, and so on, until we reach Moldsmal.

Oh! That One’s A Slime! Is Maxie Tying It All Together?

Trying to, anyway.

This is Moldsmal and Moldbygg. They’re called that because they’re Jell-O Mould monsters.

Moldsmal just kind of sits there, lazily firing bullets. Its description says it has “no brains.” If any monster is okay to kill, it’s this one, right?

Moldbygg pretends to be a Moldsmal, but is actually big. It also has explicit boundaries and preferences: It does not want to be hugged. You spare it by Not Hugging it. It’s goofy, but still: Moldbygg, explicitly, has thoughts and emotions.

And if it’s not okay to kill Moldbygg, how the hell are you going to justify killing Moldsmal? They’re both slimes! They’re practically identical! Maybe they have family reunions where instead of eating the Jell-O one of them just sits on the dining table! You don’t know!!

So Here’s My Thesis On The Morality of Undertale Or Whatever

Fundamentally, the commentary Undertale is making on the idea of the “nice monster,” the “recruitable monster,” the “monster town,” is this:

If one monster can be your friend, is there actually a reason all of them can’t be?

And it says “no, what, that’s dumb,” and I don’t think it’s wrong to do so. Viewing Undertale specifically with this additional context, of the weird push-and-pull certain RPGs have between “that’s a monster! kill it for loot!” and “okay well not that monster,” shores up the related critique of XP grinding by rooting it in a more specific moral core.

Anyway I hope that all made sense, I’m gonna go eat exactly one maraschino cherry and have a glass of water