#waves my hands vaugely around uncertantly

[askfallenroyalty]

I can't recall if this has already been brought up (it's been a minute since I read through the comic as a whole), but what is the power dynamic with the whole time travel powers? It seems like Frisk had them before, but later on Chara is the one that True Resets. Did Chara have that power from the get-go, or did they get it in place of Frisk at some point later?

mm. it's a side effect from me jumping into this blog without having spent a lot of time dissecting undertale's finer details

so like: when you Reset - there's things monsters will remember with a sense of deja vu. frisk is implied to be the only one to remember -reacting to things with boredom or without surprise. Same goes for Flowey, who notices if you kill Toriel and try to fix it.

however, obviously, in a true reset this is not true. Flowey asks not to remember so that's why he doesn't. so i thought, "oh, but frisk should still remember." except..... obviously they don't. outside the narrative, a True Reset is literally resetting the game properly. it wouldn't work to have Frisk remember despite with player-usability in mind. also, narratively, with how hard Flowey insists to not reset and let Frisk live their life, removing their memory of the underground is fitting to your destruction.

but if they did remember, that's kinda interesting, ain't it? cause like, how would Frisk handle that? you toying with their life like that. Everyone's life. I feel for someone to want a "everybody lives" au, you'd have to really care about the characters. i often see it as a "reward" for trying to get a different outcome, so like, thats a contradiction to the game's messages! that leaves a lot of room to explore how that would all work out.

Chara's memory to resets is a bit of a grey-area. cause they, as a narrator, have fresh reactions to things just as Frisk does. Because of user functionality ofc. Which makes it harder when no mercy runs happen and chara ruins the pacifist ending. i like to think nm chara exists deep within Frisk's SOUL and exists outside of narrator chara. only coming to surface upon the surface (ha). because nm chara is VERY different from pacifist chara, it doesn't make sense for them to be "secretly evil" while behaving like their normal self. you're hurting pacifist chara too when you do nm.

ANYWAY to actually answer your question: Frisk is the vessel, Chara is the one with the SAVE file so they're the one who calls the shots. (well. next to the player who I don't talk too directly about in the comic) Though it's Frisk's (and the Player's in nm) emotions that create the DT. Having them split up by giving Chara body means they can't work in tandem.

I kinda just... skirt around this in AFR because its running on an assumption i made that doesn't fit canon (or at least, my interpretation) so i'm like ._. oops. So chara just magically gets enough DT to use the save power again. its all very hand wavey... i hope I can fix this up when i get to this point in the rewrite.

Something Something Gaster used Chara's og SOUL for experiments, that's why there isn't one left over from when the Asriel fusion died. Gaster took it and he was erased from time so no one remembers. Convenient for him and me.