Talk:Chara/@comment-27559354-20160106183834

The amount of people that see Chara as nothing but a psychopathic killer (and, by extension, a flat, 1-dimensional character) kinda saddens me. Because it's you, the player, that makes them like that when you do the No Mercy route. Chara states that "at first, I was so confused. Why was I brought back?" and goes on to say that the player helped them realize their true purpose. So yes, you taught Chara to be an emotionless murderer. Remember, Chara is still a child- so they're probably not a reliable source of information. Just because they say that killing everyone is their purpose doesn't mean it is.

The narrator! Chara theories are pretty well-supported at this point, so I'm not going into detail. If you don't buy them, look into it yourself. But, provided this is true, we see much more insight into their personality based on the flavor text throughout Undertale.

Let's talk about before they died. Most people I've seen here say things like "Chara secretly hated the monsters!" But I don't think so. Chara was probably abused severely at home-- after all, what could drive such a small child to loathe humanity that much? I'm pretty sure Chara just had no idea how to handle the affection the Dreemurrs gave them, since they'd never received anything like it.

Chara is a child, a reckless child. Their plan was not  a good one by any means, but I genuinely think they had good intentions. I mean, humanity treated them like garbage while monsters treated them equally, so it's no wonder that they'd sympathize with their plight and try to help them break free.

Another thing that's brought up is the pie incident. Asriel states that Chara "laughed it off"- most people seem to agree that this was them finding enjoyment from Asgore's sickness but I beg to differ. Laughing things off is a pretty typical reaction when one is nervous but trying to conceal it, and I'd say that fits with Chara pretty dang well.

Now, Chara was not a perfect person by any means. They obviously had some pretty severe mental issues, probably from the abuse they suffered, and they didn't really seem to know how to handle emotion. They did some pretty bad things and treated Asriel pretty badly, but I think they genuinely did care a lot about the monsters.

tl;dr: chara is not a 1-dimensional character nor a psychopathic murderer, but they also aren't excused for some of the bad things they did. they're mentally ill and probably had no idea how to handle the affection from the dreemurrs, though they did care about monsterkind.