Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-28898329-20160901162911/@comment-27701762-20170102014734

Boost the Cat wrote:

I don't really think Chara was evil to begin with, just dangerously depressed. As a depressed person myself, I can guarantee that their actions in the True Lab Logs could just as well them coping with depression. So I don't think we can be certain that they ever wanted to kill anything (other than the humans to save the monsters) without our influence. If it was just Chara "laughing off" Asgore's illness, the claim that Chara is simply laughing as an expression of anxiety would certainly be plausible. But Asriel also specifically says that Chara was not a very nice person. And Asriel doesn't have any reason to lie about this, nor do we have any reason to distrust Asriel on this point. Combined with Chara's laughter, their very clear intense desire to hurt the humans on the surface, and the way they eventually come to essentially despise the very monsters that they purportedly loved, strongly suggests that Chara was genuinely "not nice." Whether we want to apply the term "evil" is not really of consequence, and we can reform it as Chara being slightly sadistic, consumed by intense hatred, or what have you.

I'm one who believes Chara is souless, but not in the evil way. The same kind of souless as Flowey started out as. (Flowey states that "You're empty, just like me", and the like.)

This means that if Chara was more or less a blank slate, for the player to mold with their influence. If we kill everything, we tell the emotionless remains of a horribly depressed child that killing is the answer, and they become what we see at the end of a No Mercy run, because of the influence of the player.

However, if we are nice, we are reminding them of the reasons life is worth living, and keeping them from becoming another Flowey.

There's a rather important hole in this idea, though even I'm not exactly sure about the details of what follows, but I'll sum it up in the following way:

Chara remembers everything across Resets, including True Resets.

As evidence, not only does Chara obviously remember everything post-Genocide, but at the end of True Pacifist Flowey comes by and addresses Chara, noting that they've probably heard his spiel before. Which means that Chara doesn't forget everything once you perform a True Reset, like the other characters. If true, then the "blank slate" theory falls apart, as it doesn't matter how many times we perform a True Pacifist run and show Chara the importance of love and friendship: the moment that we complete the Genocide Route, Chara becomes a malicious killer. In turn, it would suggest that Chara couldn't be the narrator, as the various things the narrator "learns" throughout the course of the normal game have to be relearned (e.g. the "water sausage").

There are some complications to that explanation. It is possible that Flowey is actually addressing the player and mistaking us for Chara (it has happened before, after all). It is possible that the identities of Frisk, Chara, and the player are not as cleanly delineated as they would need to be in order to make any coherent theory about them. It is possible that Flowey is mistaken about Chara's ability to remember across True Resets, though the rest of the game backs him up on this, since Frisk's soul cannot be what causes Chara to remember (since Frisk does not recall anything across the True Resets), but Chara certainly retains control and remembers their "true purpose" always once a Genocide run is completed. Regardless, this hole would need to be taken seriously.