Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26905610-20160225224529/@comment-27701762-20160226082831

You're right that I didn't answer the question directly. I suppose I could respond by saying I like him, but I don't really give much thought to whether I "like" or "dislike" a character as such.

I think you're importing a level of knowledge to Asgore that isn't quite justified. I know you're referring to how when you talk to him following death, he has responses that acknowledge the fact. But you're taking this piece of information and ascribing to him a knowledge of resets and the futility of his actions. The only characters who have any actual knowledge of resetting are Sans and Flowey, while the others only get something akin to a vague memory. So Asgore gets this same vague memory, but that is the limit to his knowledge. There is no reason for him to come to the conclusion that he can never take Frisk's soul: he may simply need to perform the action X number of times (which is still always the first time for him) until he gets the soul. Especially since he already has six human souls, so why should this soul be different (it's not like monsters have some vast understanding about how Determination works)? Which again goes back to the tragic nature of his motivation: he has forced himself into a position where he has to acquire human souls, including Frisk's. So no, he doesn't feel good about it. But he has to do it.

Meanwhile, his response to Genocide Frisk should probably be seen as an attempt to reason with Frisk and being taken by surprise. Essentially, in facing certain death, he can either fight (which he'd prefer not to do) and definitely fail, or try to reason with Frisk and potentially persuade them out of the Genocide path. So when facing that basic calculation, reasoning is the better choice. Fighting is a waste.

I feel it somewhat necessary to take a quick digression that fighting just in general isn't really part of a monster's being. Both in the sense that they have to overcome a great deal just to kill a human (only a handful of monsters are actually willing to kill you, while the rest seem to kill you completely by accident, as they don't even recognize you're a human), and in the sense that when facing something that is filled with hate (like, say, Genocide Frisk), they become even weaker.

Your characterization of "he overcomes his reluctance to fight weaker kids" is kind of the problem I'm trying to point to. Asgore has basically forced himself into this situation. And he certainly bears the blame for it. But disliking him for it feels, I don't know...simplistic? I'm not sure how to describe it, really. Perhaps I'd be fine with disliking him so long as there is a simultaneous expression of sympathy for the situation Asgore is in. It tries to paint the scenario in a very specific light while ignoring all of the contextual information that actually explains the motivation. If, for instance, you like Toriel (maybe you don't), then it would be akin to disliking Toriel because she attacks Frisk and is able to kill them.

The reason I asked for more direct information on the attack power is because I actually did a quick search on r/Underminers for the claim you made, and did not turn up anything. Nor is there any such information to my recollection on the Wikia, and presumably such information would be here. I should also add that I am not confusing this with the battle with Toriel. No attack from Asgore will drop you from more than 1 HP down to 0. Meaning that if you have 2 HP, the next hit you take will drop you down to 1 HP, even if the attack normally does 5 damage.

So I've brought myself to a slightly different position than I started with. I'm not really concerned with convincing you to like Asgore. At the end of the day, if you look upon the full set of information and decide you don't like him, that is a valid conclusion. What really prompted me is the misrepresentation. You're trying to paint Asgore as a sort of character who is at once bloodthirsty and cowardly (admittedly, in two completely different routes). You only describe two actions (he attacks Frisk in one route, tries to reason with Frisk in another), and denounce Asgore over those two responses, while making no mention of the complex set of factors that lead up to those responses. Which, at the very least, gives off the implication (correct or not) that you are dismissing or ignoring very important contextual information about Asgore's character.