Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27677820-20160131035943



People love Asriel, people want to save him, everyone likes to think of him as some perfect angel-like selfless being, an innocent playful child, "if we could just stop him from turning into Flowey again, he could be happy," but I don't think he's as good a person as people like to portray him as. He did some really terrible things, and being sorry about it for 10 minutes doesn’t make up for them.

It's a pretty dang popular opinion that when Asriel reverts back to his child form he immediately begins weeping. Who could blame him? He’s completely overwhelmed by a force he’d forgotten about over his time as a flower. He can finally can  feel  things again, he can feel the power of the souls inside of him, he can feel bravery in the face of you, and most importantly, he can feel love . When Asriel goes back to his old form, it doesn't take a minute for the whole "I'm a demon messing with the lives of innocent people I once held dear to my heart" thing to hit. He can feel love immediately, but it doesn’t sway his opinion of the world. He knows he's a terrible person, that the little child he once was would never do something like this, yet still continues to destroy. You could argue fairly that Flowey wasn’t really Asriel because he couldn’t feel, he was just acting the way anyone else would, which is true to a certain extent. What I find puzzling about that is, even when he becomes his former emotional self, he still chooses to absorb the souls of innocent people, family and friends included, and keep Frisk trapped in an infinite time loop. He loves each and every person he absorbs the souls of, yet his desire for power is stronger than the love he feels for anyone else.

“Now,” someone could argue, “ we do save him.” “That’s true, good job for following the plot of the game” I could reply. The problem with this is, if he was brought back, what’s to stop him from going full Flowey again? He was obviously willing to look past love and good for pursuit of power once, what’s to stop him from doing it again? The only thing that changed his mind was seeing how Frisk saw the good in everyone, and tried to save him. (Boy oh boy though, do I have some opinions about Frisk. If you think this is harsh, just wait for “Frisk is Evil.”) What if though, someone wasn’t always there to remind him of that? What if he sees injustice in the world and reverts back to his “kill or be killed” philosophy. In the pacifist ending, Asriel refuses to be saved by Frisk, even though he knows it could be done with the power of resets. He’d rather become a joyless yet harmless flower than risk hurting the people he loves. It’s a noble sacrifice, there’s no way to turn it around and say “it’s actually because he wanted destroy humanity and everything you care for.” The problem is though, the only reason he makes this sacrifice is to preserve his “goodness.” He understands that if he was given another chance, there would be nothing stopping him from turning into something he didn’t want to be again. As a flower, he might not be good. He might not regret the things he did and he might not understand why he saved everyone. He might even try to make a plot to destroy the world again. He know though, that without resets he’s harmless.

Besides all that, even if he decided once and for all to try to be a good person, he’s broken. Asriel was likely somewhere between 8-12 based on his character design. Compare that to the high likelihood Flowy could have been “playing” in the underground for centuries, millennia even. We know he’s been a flower for quite a while for a few reasons. First, he makes a reference to having tried to get Asgore to show him the human souls “hundreds of times” in the genocide story. Just that alone could have taken centuries, considering he probably had to wait a few years before asking each run. It’s also been said that in the timeline where Frisk fell into the underground, Flowey had just let time move forward without interfering because he’d done “everything this world has to offer.” Can you imagine how long that would take? Depending on how long between when he was brought back as a flower and when Frisk fell, each reset could have taken years, and he would have had to do thousands of them to do everything  if scale of the ruins and capital backgrounds show anything of the underground’s actual size. The exact amount of time he’s a flower is left vague, but no matter how you look at it, that it was 20 years or thousands, he was a flower much longer than a child. He spent lifetimes torturing and slaughtering people who did him no harm, compared to at most 12 years being a nice kid. By the time we see him, he doesn’t even remember what it’s like to feel emotion, let alone how to act as a gentle and caring person. We all fall in love with the Asriel from Chara’s story, the one that genuinely loved an (admittedly debatable) evil sibling, and refused to even lift a finger against the humans that killed him. The truth is though, that by the time we meet him, he doesn’t even remember who that person was. The Asriel we meet is broken, irreparably.

<span style="font-size:13.333333333333332px;font-family:Arial;color:#d9d9d9;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Even if we were able to save Asriel ( <span style="font-size:13.333333333333332px;font-family:Arial;color:#d9d9d9;font-weight:400;font-style:italic;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">Dreamer Reborn <span style="font-size:13.333333333333332px;font-family:Arial;color:#d9d9d9;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;"> style if at all) he’d not be the person we all want him to be. Dozens of stories show Asriel as being a goofy fluffball that believes in the good of people. He’s funny and charming and cute, the kind of person everyone wants to love. At one point that Asriel <span style="font-size:13.333333333333332px;font-family:Arial;color:#d9d9d9;font-weight:400;font-style:italic;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">did <span style="font-size:13.333333333333332px;font-family:Arial;color:#d9d9d9;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">exist, but he died long before we could save him.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.89;margin-top:11pt;margin-bottom:11pt;"><span style="font-size:13.333333333333332px;font-family:Arial;color:#d9d9d9;font-weight:400;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;">(Sorry if this seems a bit messy, I really should have just written it all in one sitting, but I think I got my point across somewhat.)

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.89;margin-top:4pt;margin-bottom:6pt;">

<ac_metadata title="Is Asriel Such a Cinnamon Bun?"> </ac_metadata>