Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27997069-20160317174518/@comment-27701762-20160325185922

Lunasmeow wrote:

I mean quite simply the Completionist Effect. The portion of our will/persona/desire to complete everything, mixed with our curiosity. The part that is willing to do whatever it takes.

Chara isn't *dominant* until you decide to kill everything in a genocide route. Chara only *begins* to come to power from your desire to win battles in the neutral route that you describe as the first playthrough. But as Flowey says in conversation with him, once he had tried to do things differently enough times, "he began to wonder what would happen if he killed everyone" this is put into the game specifically to trigger your subconscious and make you start to wonder what would happen, just in case you don't play the game enough times to wonder about it on your own like flowey eventually did, like anyone eventually would if they could only play the game time and time again. After all, you can just "reset" and bring everyone back is what you reason to yourself. Except this runs into the exact same problems I already outlined.

Given that Chara's already established personality is sadistic bordering on malevolent (or perhaps clearly within the camp of malevolent), the only connection between the player and Chara is through the Genocide route. The curiousity to see what happens triggers Chara's reawakening, but is not a representation of Chara in any way, except insofar as the growth in power causes Frisk/the player to distance themselves or become more bloodthirsty. But the curiosity and drive to complete everything is completely distinct from Chara.

If we're going to use the game's dialogue, then we should make sure that we have it exactly right:

In the case of Flowey's curiosity, that line is only triggered once you've already done everything necessary to complete the Genocide route, except for killing the final boss. It's far too late at that point to serve as a subtle hint at what you should. The only time that Flowey encourages you to kill everything is if you complete a Neutral route with some kills, spare Flowey and get told not to kill anything, then complete another Neutral route with some kills, then spare Flowey and get chastised for only going halfway.

Chara notes that the various stat increases are them. Which includes gold, attack (ATK), and defense (DEF). But these things increase even when enemies aren't killed. Even setting aside the increases to attack and defense, since they are not increases to the base stats, gold certainly goes up no matter what you do. Yet why is Chara not brought back in a Pacifist route?

You say that Undertale is deep, which means that it has all sorts of hidden meanings within it. But that is begging the question. By what accounts is the game "deep?" How deep exactly? If it raises questions, for instance, about the relationship between player and video game characters, does that mean that we have a reason to question everything? The surface explanation of everything going on here - that Chara was a rather sadistic human who sacrificed their life in order to bring about the destruction of humanity; that Chara is somehow reawakened and is able to start taking control if the player begins a Genocide route - fits perfectly fine with everything else in the game. Other parts of the game already chastise the player and attempt to drive home the bigger questions the game is certainly raising. So jumping through these hoops to turn Chara into some representation of the player's will to complete everything at best adds nothing to the message which hasn't already been hammered home, and even runs the risk of confusing the narrative and thus harming any message that is meant to be brought out. So what is the value being added here?