Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-29788596-20160906011125/@comment-37550376-20181118162720

Guessing this thread is dead more or less, but I wouldn't mind tossing my opinion in anyway. Sorry if this gets rambling at all, thoughts are pretty jumbled. Anywho...

I personally subscribe to the idea that in-game Chara is a blank slate that is affected by our chosen path, not necessarily because I think Chara is "good" but more so because of the idea that Chara being a pure evil loon that exists solely for the reason to be hated is boring, thematically.

If you go exclusively off what you can observe in-game about their life before the game starts, you see Chara mostly commit naive and callous acts. They're very clearly willing to manipulate Asriels' emotions for their own benefit, something that is never acceptable to do towards someone you love, even if it's for what you think is a good cause. They didn't react very much when Asgore got sick, which is definitely a red flag considering how kind Asgore was to them, and they killed themselves without much consideration for the pain the monsters as a society would experience in seeing them die. Not a very good start to the character.

You do also observe some comparatively benign/affectionate acts from them. They knit a sweater for their adoptive dad, which is a kind enough gesture, and implies they do care about him. They draw and play with Asriel a lot, so they probably have some emotional attachment to him as well, which makes sociopathy relatively unlikely in my opinion. And if they wanted to break the barrier out of a desire to free monster kind, emancipation is almost always a morally righteous cause, but that's speculation and can't be proven.

Unfortunately, without the context of their life on the surface, the "what happened and why" of it all, we can only either make educated guesses or base our judgments on a very incomplete picture, neither of which are going to be wholly satisfying. I'll go with the former, myself.

Chara being a victim of untreated trauma is a reasonable assumption to make based on their behavior and way of approaching things. They hate humanity intensely but refuse to ever talk about why, for example. And the "Mr. Dad Guy" on the sweater could be inferenced as a way to stay somewhat distant to a parental figure while doing something kind for them, or just something silly an adopted child would do. It could also explain them laughing it off when Asgore got sick, either they do it as a way to hide their real feelings to his pain and their role in causing it, or they are just very detached from the idea of death and suffering. Given at this point Chara is still a child, their behavior is off without question, seeming to be older than their implied age range, but doesn't seem entirely sociopathic considering some of the actions they commit while alive, and the uncertain reasons behind their choices.

But no matter what suffering they may have gone through on the surface, at some point you stop being a victim and become responsible for your own actions. Getting your sibling killed, attempting the murder of more than likely innocent people and traumatizing the surviving family who took you in with love and compassion are terrible things to do without question, and punctuate the end of Chara's normal life with tragedy and callousness.

So going into the game, you only see Chara for certain on the Genocide route, where you see them behave at best in a completely detached and apathetic way, and at worst in brutal and sadistic glee while they destroy the Underground. At the end they claim that "you" (the player, Frisk, whatever) are the reason they came back, and that you taught them the meaning of their reincarnation: to kill and become more powerful no matter the costs.

The way it's worded implies the two aren't one and the same; Chara came back, and was then shown the path towards power. Again, implying, that Chara is likely still there with Frisk in alternative runs. This makes sense considering that memories that only Chara should have about their life continuously crop up in the neutral and Pacifist routes, such as when you go to bed in Toriel's house, when you die, when you fall into the garbage dump, and rather pointedly when you save Asriel. The "Chara is the narrator in all runs" theory would complete this situation the most fittingly, but as usual can't be proven, so... make of it what you wish, I guess.

In the end, it seems most fitting (and narratively satisfying to me at least) that Chara exists alongside Frisk in all paths, and either  comes to atone for the (many) mistakes and cruelties they inflicted when they were alive, or they continue further down the path of madness and "evil" to become a destroyer of worlds. Redemption or damnation, basically.

But as usual most of that wall-o'-text can't be proven for certain, so... eh.

TL;DR - Chara probably suffered some kind of trauma that was never treated properly, did genuinely bad things but also seems capable of kindness, and probably is there in all three runs, but it's not a certainty.