So I know folks don’t care much about my Undergarden AU, but I still love the concept that I want to propose a timeline in which Flowey “befriends” Asgore and basically turns Asgore into his bodyguard.
Like it’s one of those timelines where Sans is gonna kick Flowey’s ass but then BAM, Asgore is in the way, of his own free will, because Flowey’s convinced him that Flowey’s his true friend that can fill the emptiness in his heart over the loss of his sons and wife. And when it comes down to the end, Asgore’s willing to get dusted for this little piece of shit flower.
I’ve seen a lot of hate going around regarding the situation these two are in. Sometimes, in defense of one goat someone viciously bashes the other. It doesn’t have to be like that, though.
TORIEL
It seems like a lot of people are condemning her dislike of Asgore in their defense of him. But…I think we should try to understand her point of view too.
Why is she so mad at Asgore?
It is heavily implied the children he killed were her children, in the same way Frisk is. Maybe for years.
It’s safe to say Toriel didn’t just nab these kids’ shoes and send
them on their way. Some or most of them stayed long enough to need to
new shoes and grow out of their old ones (or they’d still be wearing them when they left the Ruins) – a process that takes months or years depending on their age. Their old ones were put in the bin. They left, and died in their new
ones. Rinse and repeat.
Added to this is the photo frame in the children’s room. This frame is empty; if it were meant for her old family in New Home, it would still have them in it or not be there at all. It’s empty because the children, the humans who occupied the room before, in the picture died.
They were not just children that were murdered; they were her children. The same way Frisk is.
This isn’t just two exes disagreeing over policy; from her point of
view, he killed six of her children (only one way into the underground,
and that’s the hole in the ruins; Chara fell there too) and was starting
on a seventh. It’s understandable that she can’t forgive him.
It
seems the other childrens’ items were lost along the way, and scattered
over decades, not markers of the childrens’ graves; it’s mentioned that
the “faded ribbon” was dropped down a hole. The other items likely met a
similar fate; however, all the humans made it Asgore at the end. They
did not make it past him.
Why did she take Chara when she left?
She didn’t do it out of spite, but believed that they deserved a proper burial.
Why didn’t she leave the barrier, and kill six people herself?
Toriel never wanted that plan to go through.
Toriel never wanted humans to be killed to break the barrier, even to free her kingdom. She would never have killed anyone to make it happen.
She didn’t call him out because she thought he should have left the barrier to kill more humans, she called him out because he gave everyone false hope and killed people; if four humans died and no others arrived then monsters would still be trapped forever, but the humans would still be dead.
Even when she’s facing down someone who killed her children, she cannot allow someone to take his life. She didn’t just come here to save Frisk; she came to save Asgore. No lives could be taken to exit the barrier. The value of life was absolute.
ASGORE
…and I think we should try to understand Asgore’s plight as well.
He declared war in a moment of devastation.
When Asgore declared war on humanity, he had just lost two children. He watched his son die from the wounds the humans inflicted on him, when he didn’t raise a finger to harm them. Humans who locked them in a hole to rot for thousands of years.
…and then couldn’t take it back.
The kingdom was in despair too; they had lost their prince, they lost their hope for reconciliation with the humans with Chara. He promised his entire kingdom he’d take the humans’ souls and free them.
He saved his kingdom from despair, and by the time his own grief had settled it was too late to take his promise back. He couldn’t take away their hopes and dreams.
He had a duty far beyond six souls of the humans – who doomed them to their situation and murdered his own son after he cared for one of their children – to the thousands of people in his own kingdom. It would have been justified for him to leave the barrier and kill six more humans after he got the first soul, right?
Even after everything the humans did, he still valued their lives.
This is why he didn’t leave the barrier after getting the first soul.
He couldn’t state outright that he didn’t want to kill them to the kingdom, and plunge them back into the horror of being trapped in the dark forever. But he still hoped to never kill another one, even after they kept coming. Even after the sixth. If he could avoid killing even one, he would. To this end, he even instructed his scientists to find any other way to
break the barrier, without a single other person having to die.
For the record, here’s how he looks at Frisk when he sees the very last soul he needs to free his people from millennia of imprisonment that they never deserved:
He takes two steps back and stares at Frisk in utter horror. There’s a long silence. He actually panicked when he saw Frisk.
And how many times does he try to to spare your life?
Translation: Please don’t come into the next room.
“If not, I understand. I am not ready either.”
Translation: Please turn back.
There’s still time.
And when he finally does fight you…
He holds himself way, way back. He has the ability to one-shot you. He has the potential to not get a scratch on him from Frisk’s tiny LV 1 self. What’s going on here?
Because they are made of magic, monsters’ bodies are attuned to their SOUL.
If a monster doesn’t want to fight, its defenses will weaken.
And the crueler the intentions of our enemies, the more their attacks will hurt us.
This is how much he doesn’t want to fight you. Along with holding back his last attack, so you can only ever die if you’re already at 1 HP.
So why’d he destroy the mercy button?
He doesn’t really want to win either. And in the event he loses, he doesn’t want mercy. If Flowey doesn’t show up…
He dismisses his idea of living with Frisk peacefully as a fantasy, says Frisk and his other human child “have the same look of hope in your eyes”, thinks Frisk could be the Angel of the delta rune prophecy, and believes they can free everyone from outside the barrier. He then takes his own life.
He was not wrong to want to spare the humans.
Despite their souls being necessary to free everyone, It’s important to understand the stakes here. With each successive soul, he is not just looking down at the possibility of taking another child’s life when they show up. If he gets 7, he will no longer have an excuse to stay below ground. He will have to break it. He will then have to destroy the lives of billions to let his people on the surface.
but if one shows up….
If a human shows up in his castle, it is because they want to leave. The confrontation is then inevitable, because they have to take his soul to do that. He never hunts them down. But if it comes to fight, he has a duty to fight and try to take their soul, for the entire kingdom. Their hopes are riding on him. So he killed them.
…and the barrier really couldn’t have been be broken without 6 of them, and the souls of every monster underground except Napstablook.
I think it’s possible to appreciate the agonizing position Asgore was put in, as a person so gentle he couldn’t even painlessly take the lives of humans, who killed his son and trapped them underground, with the hopes of the entire kingdom, and the destruction of an entire species, resting on his shoulders to do it.
I think it’s also possible to appreciate the position of Toriel, who has lost several of her children to his hands, and can’t forget it or forgive it, but still believes he deserves mercy.
It’s no competition. Please love both of the goat parents. Neither are bad people and they’ve been through too much.
Having had some time to process Undertale’s Pacifist Ending, it occurs to me that Toriel and Asgore’s acrimonious relationship probably points to some deeper issues.
When I first played through it, I was struck by the fact that Toriel’s major problem with Asgore’s plan isn’t just the whole “murdering humans and stealing their souls” bit, but the fact that he’s going about it in such a half-assed fashion, and making everyone suffer in the process. As Toriel correctly points out, after acquiring the first human soul, Asgore could have passed through the Barrier and taken the other six souls any time he wanted; the whole business of sending the Royal Guard out to hunt for fallen humans was just a way of avoiding taking responsibility for his own scheme.
While that’s all true as far as it goes, upon consideration, Toriel is hardly above reproach there, either. She could have destroyed the exit from the ruins at any time, yet she kept allowing fallen humans to leave anyway, despite knowing that Asgore would kill them and take their souls. Indeed, she demonstrably has the power to force the issue with Asgore, but instead she chose to isolate herself from monster society and do nothing. Her big plan for saving innocent lives is… what, bribing them with pie? And when she finally works up the nerve to act, she goes and challenges a small child to lethal combat in order to prove a rhetorical point – I mean, what the hell, goatmom?
Of course, it’s hard to put too much judgement on them. It’s abundantly clear that both Toriel and Asgore’s issues stem from a total failure to process – or even constructively acknowledge – their grief over the death of their children. The identical houses they’re constructed are cute and all, but look at what that implies: they’ve both built their entire lives around going through the motions of caring and providing for a family that no longer exists. They’ve literally spent centuries baking treats with no-one to eat them, carefully maintaining a child’s bedroom whose occupant is never coming home, and so forth.
It strikes me that, from a personal standpoint, the biggest benefit they gain from bringing down the Barrier is access to modern psychiatry. They clearly need some serious, serious counseling.
(Given how things go down in the game, it’s probably going to fall to Frisk to take the initiative there, too. You think saving the world was hard? Try talking Toriel into making an appointment with a therapist!)
blacknovelist55 