Undertale 9th

[malymin]

I kind of want to write a post about Undertale's 9th anniversary... but I'm exhausted (went to a local convention yesterday), and I don't know where to begin.

I guess one thing is... Chara and Asriel, who got a thinly veiled shoutout this anniversary.

I ran an Undertale theory blog on Tumblr back in the mid-2010s, and it was Chara and Asriel that fueled 90% of my fervor. Sans? Gaster? Only interesting to me when their lives intersected with the dead kids. The skeletons may be the easy-pickings theorybait, but the Tragedy of the Dreemurrs is the beating, bleeding heart of Undertale's story, themes, and lore. The grief carried in self-exiled Queen, the regrets of the King with the blood-soaked trident, and that grief seeps into the Underground even as nobody ever speaks the names of the King's first two children.

I think people tend to assume the metanarrative layer of a story that has one must be the most important layer - that it's inherently more real, more deep, more true than the silly simulacras of people acting out a story where we expect to take their world and problems as real. I've seen people reject, thus, the idea of even treating Chara as a character, because they think it's more deep if the "realest" layer of Chara is simply... a demon of videogame grinding, a manifestation of an external player's selfish impulses - not a character who had a past, who died and is grieved by a father-figure who reminisces about the hope in their eyes, who fell down a mountain in 201X, who liked chocolate and flowers just as much as knives, who was loved by their new family and hated the humanity they left behind, who made scary faces but also was camera-shy.

Personally, I think the best way to understand Undertale is that the metanarrative layer is in service of the more "in universe" story it tells. Undertale is a ghost story, of the hauntology of old sins and old wounds; the metanarrative exists to make the medium haunted. Asriel/Flowey and Chara are the unquiet dead, manifested as videogame creepypasta demons in the vein of "Ben Drowned." And I feel like that's fitting - they strike me as children the same age as the ones who read about Jeff the Killer and thought he was cool, who were fascinated by Pokemon Lost Silver and Buried Alive and Sonic.Exe, scaring themselves with amateur internet horror alongside all the anime and JPRGs that Asriel displays signifiers of in his Pacifist battle, or the literature than Chara quotes at one point in their narration of the cruelest run.

They dress themselves as what they find to be the scariest kind of malevolent spirit in-universe, just as much as Toby Fox wrote them in that mold in the real world to elicit a response. They conceptualize their detachment from the living in terms of the world being a replayable video game, with save states and finite dialogue, numbers and level-grinding; they just happen, on our layer of reality, to be right.

In some ways, Undertale's use of metannarative can be considered a successor to how 19th century horror utilized the epistolary format, and even outright "hoaxing", to make its ghoulish events feel more visceral, more believable, more real.

Undertale is not conventionally gothic, or purely gothic, but it is a story of the hauntological.

Hauntology, a category positing, presuming, implying a ‘time out of joint’,(21) a present stained with traces of the ghostly, the dead-but-unquiet, estranges reality […] with a radicalised uncanny – ‘something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it’ […]

Within the confines of the text itself, Asriel resigns himself to self-isolation by Chara's grave, feeling he deserves no better after all he's done. He fears that once the vestiges of souled-ness wear off of him and he returns to being a flower, he will be unsafe for other people; in his own mind, his story falls into the pattern of the undead bringing nothing but pain to their former loved onces.

(The Amalgamates went back to their families, and are loved and welcomed despite their uncanny new voices and forms; this is not a world where the undead have to be doomed.)

Just outside the text, he leaves the mountain. Flowey plays up his malicious nature, but he implictly is coexisting with others; Flowey is Asriel, and deep down wants many of the same things Asriel did, no matter how bitter and alienated he's become. And between him and Toriel, we see the fleeting ghost of Chara's memory - a child both of them knew, who was concerned with efficiency and rationality, and a little ridiculous for it. Asgore, even more briefly and discreetly, acknowledges them too.

Whatever form it takes, I wish the best of luck to Asriel and Chara in finding happiness and peace.

Comments

[clovercrayon]

This was such a good read... happy anniversary undertale ❤🤍

[malymin]

Thank you! ^_^

[axolotls]

Well said. I was always really peeved with people being more obsessed with the idea of the game being literally a game (when compared to games such as OFF and in particular OneShot, Undertale never actually confirms their reality is not real in any way in-universe) rather than the story that was there, particularly when it came to the kids (and Sans, to a lesser extent). The tragedy is at the heart of the game, you're right, and you've pointed out well how the story and the characters are in a way haunted.

[malymin]

Yea! I've seen people act as if it's confirmed that Undertale's world is "really just a game", but really we only have Flowey's word... and Flowey/Asriel is hardly an objective source for what the world "really" is, when so much of how he perceives the world is based on his current emotional landscape. (Treating Frisk as literally being Chara in not just NM but in the leadup to True Pacifist, talking about Asgore and Toriel as if they're strangers as Flowey vs calling them "mom and dad" as Asriel...)

For all his edgy posturing, he's not an omniscient god.

I eventually dipped out of the UT/DR theoryspace because it ended up being very focused on "really just a game" metanarrative-first perspectives in the wake of Deltarune Chapter 2, to the absence of really engaging with anything that doesn't feed into that concept. The conflict between Kris and the player-proxy possessing them (the Soul) is clearly going to be important, but the indication that the Soul was put in Kris by a third party (and implications that they have difficulty operating their own body after removing the soul) suggests a narrative more complicated than "we're bad for playing Deltarune and hurting Kris." Plus, changes are that's going to be intertwined with more "in universe" plot threads regarding what happened to Noelle's sister Dess, anything that might be going on with currently absent characters like Papyrus or Asriel, the nature of the Dark World, Ralsei/Susie/Noelle's continued development and fleshing out as characters...

I kind of suspect that when it's finished, the history of what happened to Dess is going to be at least part of the "beating heart" of Deltarune. It's just hard to say how, for now.

[axolotls]

Damn, that's rough to hear. I drifted out of Undertale spaces due to a special interest change just before Deltarune Chapter 2 came out (still haven't played it, so I'm thankful for the lack of spoilers (aside from Noelle apparently having a sister, huh, I wonder what the pun in her name is?), and I was never really able to get into Deltarune proper, didn't grip me as much as Undertale (still a really good game, we'll see when it comes out in full!). I would have been really frustrated to see all the theorycrafting focusing on, as you call it, the metanarrative, rather than the in-universe story, which I always favoured in Undertale... Hope the tides shift as more of the game comes out eventually.

[malymin]

aside from Noelle apparently having a sister, huh, I wonder what the pun in her name is?

Dess' full name is heavily implied to be December! We don't know much about her, currently, but from what little we're told she sounds cool. ^_^

I would have been really frustrated to see all the theorycrafting focusing on, as you call it, the metanarrative, rather than the in-universe story, which I always favoured in Undertale... Hope the tides shift as more of the game comes out eventually.

Same. I'm hoping that future chapter installments, and eventually the full game, bring people to appreciate the in-universe story more. It looks like it'll shape up to be interesting.