Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27997069-20160317174518/@comment-27701762-20160325084713

Lunasmeow wrote:

For the first point, let's be realistic. The maker of the game can't possibly control what every single person is feeling when they start the game. Also, unless you had spoilers that told you that there were mercy and permadeath mechanics, even expecting it to be "atypical" you'd still expect to kill monsters and level up, as evidenced by the huge surprise that "exp" was actually "execution points" and "lv" was "level of violence" from the players who weren't spoiled. I'm trying to respond to a lot of stuff that you've said at once, so bear with me here:

Why is Chara the "personification" of our will? To put it another way, the player has as much will to complete the game the "right" way as they do to complete the Genocide route. In fact, for the "average" player who doesn't know what they're doing (which probably isn't a lot of people), the most likely result is a Neutral run in which some monsters are killed, and Flowey likely ends up dead. Is the result to then start over and just kill everything? No, given that the game constantly and consistently pushes you away from killing monsters. The result is either A) you look up what happened on the internet, or B) start over and try not killing anything. The player's will is aimed, at least initially, at getting the "good" ending. So in order for Chara to be the personification of our will, they would need to mimic this in some way.

Given that the atypical nature is presented upfront when the game is purchased, and Toby certainly pushes the idea that "no one has to get hurt," it would seem that the expectation is that most players would already have some idea of what they need to do. Which would help explain the way the game messes with you with Toriel (among others). So in fact if Toby is expecting a particular playstyle and constructing everything around that, the playstyle of "I'm going to try to avoid fighting because that's what the blurb says" would be the way to go.

So how do we get to the idea that Chara is a personification, or representation, or whatever you'd like to say, of the player? Why do we need this big explanation about how Chara was never a real person to begin with, rather than the much simpler explanation that Chara is their own separate entity who, through some as yet unknown/unexplained reason, has been brought back to life and is capable of taking control of Frisk in a particular circumstance?