under-lore

[under-lore]

There's something pretty amusing about the fact that Fangamer released a Chara-themed shirt with a description and name that follows the patterns and themes used in Undertale by Chara or to refer to Chara, putting Undertale before Deltarune in its credits, to go along with Toby Fox sharing a Chara-relevant newsletter for Undertale 9th (strongly Chara associated number) anniversary. ...And yet many people still went "omg those lines are about Kris Deltarune"

I mean, obviously it isn't irrelevant to Kris, but it should be rather obvious that Chara was the intended primary focus here, i suppose there is some kind of recency bias going on towards the newer game.

Either that or people unfamiliar with Fangamer's past merch rushed to conclusions over the Chara-Kris design nuances.

[under-lore]

I miss being able to post about UT lore much more often.

I have far less free time than i used to, and gets harder to spend all of it writing UT essays over a couple days.

[under-lore]

It feels like Toby has been purposely avoiding saying that there would be 7 chapters for quite a while now. Whenever it comes up, he only mentions "more chapters" or "future chapters." I wonder why that is.

[under-lore]

Today, we've gotten good news. What ? Deltarune chapter 3 & 4 announcement coming out ? Nono, that's not what i was refering to, i meant that we no longer have to deal with the "Deltarune tomorrow" memes.

[under-lore]

...So has enough time passed yet for it to be okay for me to say i didn't really like Undertale yellow ?

[under-lore]

Gasp. A new video ? On the YT channel ? After over a year ? Impossible.

So, this was supposed to be out a very long time ago, and since then, there are actually quite a few things that i would change about this video script.

But for the most part, i am just glad to be able to post this and say that hopefully, this time it'll stick and i'll be able to start making videos at an acceptable rate in the future.

Also, this one is a YT exclusive ! Not based on an existing Tumblr post like the first one.

[under-lore]

How does Sans feel about Papyrus' death ?

A lot of common Undertale-related debates revolve around the morality of a character.

But among these, the one about Sans' reaction to Papyrus' death somewhat stands out. Both because of how widespread it is, but also because of the way two opposite yet equally inaccurate interpretations of it repeatedly seem to clash against one another.

So let's take a look at how Sans actually behaves in Undertale after his brother is killed :

First, we can observe a number of changes in his behavior, showcasing that he is not unaffected by it.

To start with an obvious one, the fact that nearly all of Sans' other casual appearances during that playthrough will be gone, Sans just... doesn't show up.

No pranks with telescopes, no stacking 29 hotdogs on your head.

While one flavor text with Shyren mentions that he is still 'watching over us' in some form even then due to his promise, he is evidently not as thrilled about this as usual.

But his lack of enthusiasm when it comes to watching over Frisk isn't the only thing that changes.

For instance, there is a present for Papyrus under the tree in Snowdin. However, as soon as Papyrus is killed and Sans vanishes, the present disappears along with him. Implying that Sans has retrieved the gift that his brother will not be able to open anymore.

He also appears to not have gone to Grillby's after our passage in Snowdin this time around. Something that's apparently quite unusual for him as it is part of his routine for that time of day.

And of course, in some iterations of his judgement scene in neutral routes :

...Needless to say that claiming Sans is totally unaffected by the death of his brother is inaccurate. While we do not see much of it, it is fairly solidly implied that Sans does grief his brother at least in his own way. And he does hold it against us to an extent.

However, that isn't all there is to it.

Sans' knowledge of RESETs does play a role in the way he handles the situation. Just not quite in the way it is often portrayed.

First, Sans may be aware of resets, but he does not remember them. This means that for a given Sans, the loss of his brother still feels permanent for that particular timeline iteration's Sans.

Knowing his brother will probably be alive again in another timeline eventually doesn't mean his loss in this one isn't real. Even if it does happen, he will not be there to see it. At least not this version of him.

However, Sans does still have a couple tricks up his sleeve, that maybe, if things work out, could spare of that fate the other Sans'es.

I showed this line earlier on :

However, this line isn't just Sans showing us his feelings about our actions. Instead, it is a part of a much more tricky strategy Sans begins engaging in after Papyrus is killed :

Psychological warfare.

The anomaly has reset this world many times before, and in neutral routes, he is left with the impression that it will likely do so again. This thought had previously been a demotivating one for Sans as he explained in genocide.

This was the case whilst Sans lived a semi-regular life under the constant threat of everything being undone on the snap of a finger.

However, now that what Sans incorrectly believes to be the anomaly has revealed itself and killed his brother, the situation has actually somewhat changed.

A reset, while it would wipe out his memories, would still bring his brother back to a different Sans. Papyrus' death doesn't have to be truly permanent. Because of this, Sans now wants the anomaly to reset. Not to keep doing it forever, but at least just one more time, to make sure that this timeline won't be the one that'll end up sticking around for good.

He also has a secondary motive :

While he is at it, he might also try to get the anomaly to changes its ways. Of course, Sans knows he's not a time traveller, not a god, but just a guy who is probably not capable of forcing a being such as the anomaly to change.

That being said, maybe, just maybe, he could help in giving it a little push to make it decide to want to change on its own.

To incite a RESET to happen, Sans has one main strategy : Making the anomaly regret its actions.

Sans believes that the anomaly keeps on RESETing the world because it is unable to find fulfillment, and that it keeps consuming timelines out of a desire to find happiness one way or another.

Thus, Sans aims to make the anomaly feel like this timeline can't be what they were looking for. Ensuring that, for the anomaly's quest for happiness to continue, they will have no choice but to reset this timeline as well.

That is the reason why Sans asks us this question :

The question was very carefully chosen on his part.

It both serves to confirm the anomaly's identity, but also more importantly, no matter what they answer, it allows him to either point out that the anomaly's actions did not match with their own morals, or forces them into making a selfish confession which he can then use to make them feel like they've done the wrong thing.

In either case, Sans is able to present his brother's death as an event that would only bring the anomaly further unhappiness. And thus, might get the anomaly to reach by itself the conclusion that the only way for it to find happiness now would be to RESET this world once more and avoiding killing Papyrus again in the future. A pretty good outcome for Sans.

This is what he refers to as taking it the 'easy way' to deal with an aggressive anomaly in a few routes. (as opposed to the 'hard way' he mentions halfway through his genocide dialogue).

In the neutral endings in which Papyrus was slain, Sans once again attempts a similar strategy. Although the awareness that a RESET still hasn't taken place even after quite some time passed since the anomaly was last seen in the underground & his last attempt at it is likely quite worrying to him.

This leads him to be a little more blunt than last time when it comes to the ways he tries to make the anomaly feel like this timeline isn't the one. Although his approach method remains broadly the same.

Though these lines are still rather noteworthy :

Given Sans wants the anomaly to go back, they might sound odd to hear at first.

It turns out that the more brutal we have been throughout the run, the less optimistic Sans' approach to dealing with the anomaly becomes during the phone call.

Here, Sans might be trying to play on another bleaker aspect of his psychological profiling of the anomaly : The consideration that they may view the world as a kind of game to explore, in which if they 'can', then they 'have to'.

By saying it is not welcome down here, he is also saying that it won't be able to keep exploring the possibilities of this world unless it makes them all forget everything.

In another of the neutral endings where both Toriel and Papyrus are killed, Sans seems to begin to doubt wether the anomaly can really be redeemed after all.

This all ultimately culminates in the leaderless endings.

In this one, Sans acknowledges that this is likely not our first time hearing him saying those kinds of things over the phone.

And that his 'strategy' seems to have failed to push it towards the right path.

In this route, Sans appears to have reached a similar conclusion as in the genocide one, that his hope of a redeemable anomaly merely looking for happiness may have been just naive/wishful thinking on his part after all.

In sum, Sans' awareness of the RESETs does not prevent him from missing his brother if Papyrus is killed. However, it allows him to weaponise his own grief using the psychological profile he has made of the anomaly in order to attempt to push it to RESET. Although he knows his own memories would be wiped out if he is successful, it would ensure Papyrus' death isn't permanent. Depending on the run, he also still harbors a dwindling hope that the anomaly itself could be steered towards a better path.

He mostly just needs to convince them to RESET one way or another though.

Past that point, it'll be up to the other Sans'es.

[under-lore]

What could Sans find out about Flowey ?

By finishing a neutral route over and over again multiple times, Flowey has some unique dialogues in which he mentions various trivia or shares his thoughts on some of the other characters.

One such character is Sans, who Flowey notably gives us a warning about.

However, the way he words that warning feels a little intriguing :

While Sans is generally a very perceptive character who is often capable of making pretty good guesses from limited information, Flowey makes it rather obvious that he is speaking from experience rather than simply making a general comment about Sans' observation skills.

But a question that isn't brought up very often is, what was it exactly that Sans would frequently "find out" about Flowey to warrant this warning ? And how ?

While the question may seem unanswerable at first due to Flowey not giving us any specifics whatsoever, there are a few details scattered throughout the game which may allow us to deduce our way towards what was most likely the intended answer.

First, we know what solution Flowey ended up settling with in order to deal with whatever that issue was : Simply avoiding Sans.

In any given timeline, Flowey took the habit of avoiding to be seen by or around Sans at any point, unless he specifically had something in mind that required him to do so. (such as in the pacifist ending) As a general rule of thumb, he would avoid Sans altogether as much as possible.

However, even with that effort on Flowey's side, a quick mention of a talking flower from Papyrus is already enough to seemingly get Sans at least a little suspicious that something may be up with that.

This is our second clue : The fact that it took Sans so little information for him to get suspicious of what Papyrus told him about a flower.

Our last clue is the few words we hear from Sans after he sees and hears Flowey at the end of the pacifist route :

In order to find out what to make of those clues, we need to introduce a fourth element : Sans' scientific background.

Luckily, none of the more complicated or speculative nuances of that side of his character are required here, all that we need is to highlight his somewhat-hidden friendship with Alphys.

She knows him well enough to call his jokes in advance :

Or here, the game more obviously points out that these two seem surprisingly friendly.

Sans tries to play it off, but it is clear they know a lot more about each other than seems at first glance.

But how much exactly ?

Well...

To go back to our main point, if one were to call Papyrus' phone in front of Alphys' lab, the conversation between the skeletons brothers would eventually deviate towards the question of wether or not Alphys is hiding dogs inside of her lab.

To which Sans answers, winking :

If it had just been this one joke, it may have been a coincidence, but the game doubles down on this exact same implication if you call Papyrus from within the lab as well, showing that this connection between Sans and Endogeny was absolutely intentional :

While the determination experiments were sorely Alphys' entreprise, it appears that Sans was at least made aware of the way they ended up playing out.

We cannot affirm with certainty how much detail exactly Sans has regarding the experiments, but if he is aware for the dogs and possibly even involved in dealing with them (as he had the dog food bag in his room), then he most definitely would also know about the vessel too. It was the main goal, after all.

This vessel had a few particularities.

First, it was a golden flower, the flower from the outside world, chosen for symbolic reasons.

But second, that specific golden flower was chosen because it was different from the rest.

It was at the center of the garden, it had grown before all the others, those were the ones mentioned by Alphys in her entries. But there was one more specificity which she omitted to bring up :

Golden flowers in Undertale are a species of flowers which has 5 petals.

But our "vessel" had a mutation, resulting in an extra 6th petal.

A design choice in part, perhaps, but one that takes a very real in-world importance within this context.

Adding to this that, from the view of the current timeline iteration, the vessel seems to have suddenly vanished one day and...

Since it is likely for Sans to have been aware of all of this, now, it makes a lot of sense that the mere idea of a new mysterious talking flower that says strange things showing up out of nowhere would immediately put him on high alert. A potential connection with the missing vessel is easy to make.

Actually, now that we have this context, even Alphys seems to make the same connection as well after hearing Papyus mentioning a talking flower just before Flowey arrives.

But most of all, it now feels incredibly clear why Flowey needs to avoid being seen by Sans so much.

His entire appearance, and particularly his obvious extra 6th petal, are all dead giveaways of his origins.

Could Sans, who is skilled enough at analysing faces to tell the difference between the face of someone that has died 9 or 10 times in a row, really miss out on such blaring evidence ?

Of course not.

Flowey might as well have written "i am the vessel" on his face with a marker as far as Sans is concerned.

Chances are that merely seeing Flowey even once would be all it takes for Sans to be practically certain that Flowey must be the former vessel.

Not only that, but given that those experiments were all about determination, the so called "resolve to change fate", Flowey would also immediately be considered extremely likely to be the anomaly, too.

This is what we see in this scene :

Not only does Sans get to see Flowey here, but the speech that Flowey makes during this scene also provides him with definitive evidence that Flowey really was the "anomaly" he had been worried about, as his psychological profile matches extremely well with the one Sans shows us to have built for the anomaly in a genocide route. But, it also shows him that Flowey has, for now at least, lost his anomalous time powers to Frisk, and is thus struggling to keep them in his "game".

This suggests that for now, Frisk actually still has the advantage, and that despite all those crazy speeches, without his reset powers, that weirdo has got nothing on them.

But this is all later on in the story.

During Flowey's earlier RESETs, being seen by Sans, even once, quickly becomes a major pain for Flowey in every timeline iteration in which it happens.

At best, he might get "pranked accross time and space" a number of times. At worst, Flowey might have no choice but to reset and start all over again on whatever he was aiming to do.

Except this time around, without letting the smiley trashbag learn ANYTHING about him.

[under-lore]

That last line bothers me...

Are we reading too much into it ? Is Toby trying to mess with us on purpose ? Is this actually trying to say something ?

I wonder...

[under-lore]

First impressions on the new Asriel letter

So...

It seems we finally have some new Chara content in 2024 !

At the end of the latest newsletter, Toby shared one more letter with us, which contained some very interesting things.

Let's try and dissect it a bit.

First, to start with the obvious, this is a letter written by Asriel about Chara. We can see this from such as things as :

Using the term "best friend"

But also because 9 is already a number associated with Chara.

Of course, it is present with them rather strongly during the genocide route. Such as during its ending, but also through things like the statistics given to some items associated with them in the route.

The same can also be said for Narrator Chara too. Such as how new special dialogue appears from the narrator if one were to attempt to talk to Asgore precisely 9 times.

The idea that it would be their favorite number thus comes fairly naturally.

Next, the few following lines rationalise this association, all the while phrasing it in a way that reminds of their speech at the end of the genocide route.

Finally, we have a few more minor implications.

Asriel & Chara with flowers together may call back to this image :

But it was also a very old concept, that could be found way sooner in Toby's concept arts for the game.

While Chara's "creepy faces" are openly mentioned in-game.

The friend is also refered to as "they", which may be noteworthy.

As for laughs...

The letter ends with

...But alright, what can we learn from it ?

Quite a few things, actually.

First, obviously, Chara's favorite number being 9 feels more like confirming some trivia or association that had been noticed by fans a long time ago than actual true new information.

But it isn't the only noteworthy thing in this letter.

Here are some lines that i had cut earlier on :

The last few lines feel somewhat unprompted from that initial context. But they may have secondary meanings.

First, they may be used to indirectly refer to a type of numbness brought upon by killing mentioned by Sans in his neutral judgments.

However, while that hint may have been intentional on Toby's part, it surely wasn't the main thing that the "in-world" Asriel who wrote this letter was trying to suggest.

The main "in-world" intended meaning of this section was far more likely refering to this :

While Chara did not ever tell Asriel exactly what happened in their past, Asriel seems to believe that the humans they had known did not make a good impression on Chara. Suggesting that they may have been abused or even have come to the mountain to disappear because of them. Regardless, this was all something that had worried Asriel regarding his best friend.

Of course, in the original game, those things remained mostly implicit or speculative. Asriel did not know these things for certain. And neither did we.

But bringing it back up today after so many years certainly feels like a very interesting choice on Toby's part...

Of course, this is all still from Asriel's point of view, which is limited. But metatextually, this is saying more than it looks.

Asriel associating Chara's favorite number the idea that with it, "Nothing can hurt you anymore" is a much more direct way of saying that he believes Chara was hurt by humans in their past than we'd seen before.

Again. This content comes from Undertale's 9th anniversary. It was pretty much Toby's one special occasion to show us content about Chara again. Which he actually did with this letter.

He only disposed of a limited number of characters or lines to either tell us something new about them, or give more precision/information about something which he believed was important for us to see.

From the metatextual context of asking "What was Toby trying to do by showing us this letter ?", him choosing to give more detail on Asriel's belief that Chara may have been abused of all things would serve no other purpose than to volontarily insist on pushing forward his line of reasoning to the fandom.

This suggests that Toby is very likely trying to tell us that Asriel is at least largely correct, and thus that the idea of Chara having been hurt in some form by the humans in their village is now significantly more likely.

Indeed, this had been an issue in some parts of the fandom. While that interpretation had been largely popular amongst most of it for a long time, there had been some voices calling out to the lack of clean proper evidence pointing to that which weren't somewhat speculative. So this seems a lot like Toby attempting to point us in the right direction. Seems like the simplest answer may be the right one, Occam's razor strikes again.

A new questions also now asks itself : Is this meant to suggest that this was Chara's motivation for power ?

Having power, so you are no longer weak ?

Not being weak, so you can no longer be hurt ?

A way of feeling "in control" ?

There were already some implication of Chara disliking to show weakness to others in the past. This would be coherent with those.

In such case, the genocide route may be a macabre recontextualisation of this original motive on Chara's part.

It might also be made relevant in the context of Chara's plan, though that deserves its own future post.

Besides, Asriel saying this highlights how much he cares about Chara. Which is always nice to see.

As a side note :

Between the demo and the final version of the game, the flavor text for the faded ribbon was changed from a regular one to one which raised a few eyebrows :

While some people had tried to use this line as evidence of Chara having been abused, many other voices had (fairly rightfully) pointed out that this piece of "evidence" was quite fragile, due to things like other interpretations of it being just as plausible, the fact that it specifies " 'monsters' won't hit you as hard" which wouldn't fit Chara all that much, or simply the lack of other similar implications elsewhere in the game.

Now that we do have such implications, this argument, whilst still a bit of a long shot, is at least not quite as far fetched as it used to be anymore. The item is a thing which gives you DEF (increases your numbers), and prevents you from being hurt.

We are not quite done yet, though :

These lines feel like they also have meaning.

Once again, there is an indirect reference to the genocide route, with 99 being the maximum value for things like HP, or the next required EXP to gain LOVE. When you have them, you cannot get any more. It is the absolute.

However, there seems to be another strange connection to make here.

What is the opposite of a so called "good memory" ?

The bad memory is an item obtained from the memory head amalgamate.

It feels noteworthy as it, along with the "Last dream", are the two items in the game who's effects are theorised to have something to do with NarraChara in the way they are presented/work. (Suggesting that the memory/dream may come at least partially from Chara.)

For a reminder, the bad memory is a item that actually decreases HP by 1. Unless it is eaten on the brink of death, in which cases it restores all HP instead. Bringing it to the "highest number".

On top of that, this item also had a strange specificity to it :

It is impossible to drop it.

With this additional context, one may draw parallels between the Bad memory item's effects and what Asriel is saying, only in a reversed way, and applied to Chara.

In the same manner as previously. The previously existing theories trying to tie the bad memory to Chara now find themselves being rendered more plausible. In fact, given that these lines directly follow the previous ones, you may even associate them to make the argument that the memories could be of Chara's past on the surface hypothetically. Though that would likely be stretching it.

Also :

39 left.

Pretty impressive, the way every last line in this letter can be read as a genocide route reference one way or another.

And... the code of the page describe the contents of the page as "Here's a letter".

This is also the wording used in the lines with which Toby introduces us the letter.

This wording of this feels very significant considering who the letter is talking about...

So i suppose that makes for even more NarraChara fuel to have Toby writing down such things.

For one last thought, those couple lines.

If one were to follow a certain interpretation of things such as "Mr Dad Guy", the "future of humans and monsters", and Chara's relationship with the concept of "efficiency" & "usefullness", then they might be readable as an allegory for pre-death Chara's view on their role within monsterkind & one of their motivations regarding their plan. (along with their hate of humanity).

And this odd insistance on the term "happy" throughought the message..Is there a chance it could be refering to those secret lines, stored within the game's code in the echo flower room number #9999 ?

Some of the things mentioned in this post are somewhat stretchy admittedly. I am not yet certain of which ones of these would i actually argue for and which are only a product of first impression brainstorming.

Nevertheless. There are many many new ideas to explore regarding Chara now.

Thanks, Toby !

[under-lore]

Are you still gonna make the post about how the narrator warms up to Frisk throughout the game?

Yes, i plan to.

[under-lore]

Hi, I recall seeing a post on reddit by you of an analysis on the narrators progression over the course of the game? I was wondering how you determined which catagory each line went into?

The process wasn't particularly complicated actually.

First i went one by one through every line the narrator has in the game, and sorted out of those lines the ones in which the narrator says something which is relevant the question of how do they treat Frisk. (The other ones could be ignored for the goal of this analysis)

Once you have those ones, it was simply a matter of grouping them by type, and showcasing the evolution of which "types" appeared the most frequently in each of the game's areas.

Most of the time, that category attribution process tended to be surprisingly simple and straightforward. A joke is a joke, an insulting comment is an insulting comment. There aren't many possible mistakes to make.

The choice as to what the possible categories would be in itself though was a slightly more nuanced one, but it was chosen mostly via my prior knowledge of which type of lines were common from the narrator in that regard, and of which categories could be used in order to make them both form a gradual scale from more to less rude/friendly and to make sure to maintain the categories broad and distinct enough to have as many representative data points as possible so that the end results would be as unbiased as they could be in reflecting the big trends of the narration.

There are a few cases here and there though where more extensive literary analysis was required to accurately be able to judge the meaning of certain narration lines to settle on their category, but those cases are actually quite a minority, and even if you were to ignore them all, the overall result of the analysis would actually have remained the same, since it is based on broader trends rather than individual examples. So im not too worried about these.

That "literary analysis" can consist of things like watching out for context clues, making comparisons with other things the narrator says, wether it makes references to another thing from the game or not, character speech patterns, or established things regarding Chara's character (as that analysis did assume NarraChara theory as pre-established) amongst other things. I also in some cases went out of my way to ask other people on discord or such for their thoughts on some of those lines in order to make sure that my personal biases or interpretations would not skew the analysis through my category choices for some of the most debatable lines.

Its difficult to make a general answer to that as most of those were determined on a line-by-line basis, but that was the idea.

Really, though, most lines were actually very simple/natural to rank.

[under-lore]

Hello, I am a UTdr theory enthusiast from China. Thank you very much for your long-term efforts in theory construction, and I hope to get your permission to translate your article into Chinese. I wish you a happy life and thank you here.

Sure, and thank you !

[under-lore]

The effects of LOVE are quite overstated.

It has been quite frequent to see the concept of LOVE mentioned by Sans in his judgments being interpreted as a force progressively depriving the person possessing it of all empathy or judgement until they are rendered into practical killing machines whilst approaching the cap of 20.

Whilst there are some truths to part of these concepts, interestingly, extrapolating implicit data from the game suggests that the effects LOVE have on a character's personality, whilst existing, are not as significant as they are generally believed to be.

Let's do a proper analysis of what we can say of LOVE's effects based only on the in-game content :

First, aside from Sans' words about it, do we dispose of any clear cut examples of changes relating to LV to analyse ?

That might seem like a silly question, but some of the lines that are often attributed to LV-induced personality changes turn out to not actually be LV-dependent once you check the game's code.

For instance, the narration of the bag of dog food is decided through kill count, not LV, meaning that it possible for instance to get the 'pessimistic line' despite not gaining any LOVE, and thus, this line cannot be attributed to changes related strictly to LV gain and isn't very useful to us here.

Actually, the amount of direct evidence we see of it having any effect at all which we can be certain off is quite small. But such a thing does exist via interactions relating to this dummy :

LV1 :

LV2+ :

LV5+ :

LV 8+ :

The only factor involved in deciding which of these lines will appear after deciding to punch the dummy is LOVE, it is notably distinct from other similar interactions like those mentioned above which tend to be governed by some variation of a kill count or a check regarding wether particular characters were killed.

As similar LV can be reached through killing various amount of monsters or varieties of monsters, unique or not, no equivalence can be built between the required LV for each of those interactions and particular character(s) or amount of monsters required to be killed to reach said LV.

We can thus only take the code of the game at face value and conclude that those changes are strictly caused by changes dependent on the influence of the LV we've gathered in our route so far.

The first pattern that can be established is that the narration in the left column reports Frisk punching the dummy with increasing levels of strength following our command as LV increases.

In the right column, there is a split between the four lines in the middle regarding the way the narration reports it.

The first two lines are narrated in the more common style, notably, explicitly reminding us that the actions or thoughts presented are Frisk's by refering to them as "you" as the subject of the sentence.

Those first two lines describe Frisk going from regret to a form of hesitant apathy regarding the fact that they've just punched a dummy as LV grows.

The latter two lines, however, mark a change in the narration type.

The "you" is dropped, and the thoughts presented are instead presented in a declarative form. This form is often used for first person affirmations, but can also be used outside of it in order to showcase a strong emotionally-driven reaction.

This ambiguity is particularly relevant here, as it blurs the line between wether those thoughts are Frisk's, the narrator's, or both. A detail that gains much importance under the NarraChara theory.

That being said, this nuance leads to a similar conclusion regarding LOVE in either case :

If the thoughts are fully Frisk's, then the last lines have Frisk moving from a hesitant apathy to a confident one before ultimately "feeling good". This would stay in line with the previous pattern.

(Although it is worth nothing that the "feel good" part may be at least partially due to a kind of natural endorphin release in Frisk's body from the physical exercise of "punching at full force", and thus could be only indirectly due to LV.)

If NarraChara is taken into account, then this would mean that this transformation in the tone of the narration in the last lines is due to LV related changes on Chara. And that this ambiguity in the phrasing of who those feelings belong to may indicate that the same observations we've just made on Frisk previously would apply to them similarly.

(Note : Given that the game code and files suggests that Chara and Frisk share their statistics, them both being affected by this same LV count would be coherent.)

In the official japanese version of the game, those lines for the dummy are mostly similar. However, the first two lines of the left column are a bit less distinct from each other, and the narration phrasing ambiguity seems to begin on the 2nd line of the right column rather than the 3rd.

Okay, so, what's wrong about the common perception, then ?

So far, it seems that LV does have some kind of trend that leads to growing apathy regarding the suffering of others and more aggressive actions being taken as a result of identical stimuli as it increases. That doesn't sound too far off ?

Well, sort of, but careless extrapolation made from those basic ideas have led to the emergence of theories and interpretations that treat those effects as being more consistent, generalised, and effective than can hold up to the scrutiny of our known cases through aggressive neutral routes.

Here is what i mean :

In some of the more aggressive variants of the neutral route, it is possible to attain a really high LOVE that comes close to what we see in the genocide route. Comparison between those routes and the genocide one, or sometimes content from these neutral routes themselves, can help show us incoherencies in some of those popular interpretations regarding how much difference LV really makes.

The first one that comes to mind is a popular one among 'Chara Defenders', suggesting that Chara's openly aggressive actions & narration which are specific to the genocide route in particular would really be a result of "corruption" induced by the LV-related changes which we would have forced onto them.

How well does this theory hold up through the aggressive neutral routes ?

Well...

Not very well.

To make a 'short' list :

Chara's "corruption" in genocide would generally begin to show as soon as LV3 at the end of the Ruins, however, they show no particular signs of this "corruption" in any neutral routes despite being able to reach much higher LV's of say, 14 near the end of the game.

It is possible to arrive at the end of the Ruins (or other areas) whilst having the same LV as in genocide during a neutral route, yet Chara shows none of those "corruption" lines in those cases either.

It is possible to finish many areas in the genocide route whilst having a lower/higher LV than usual by only fighting particular monsters who give you more/less EXP than average, yet none of Chara's genocide lines are changed to account for this lower of higher LV.

It is possible to abort the genocide route at many points by sparing a particular monster or failing to reach a kill count. When this happens, Chara's "corruption" lines suddenly disappear although the LV doesn't.

This still happens even if Chara's LV would have remained the same wether the monster was killed or not. Thus the lack of extra LV from the spared monter cannot explain this difference.

The aggressiveness shown by Chara does not seem to correlate with their growth in LV. For instance, they treat Toriel more harshly than Papyrus despite a past connection between Chara and Toriel and a lower LV at the time of that encounter.

Regarding some interpretations of the final genocide scene : Why would Chara oppose us for what we did at this point in time ? Shouldn't they still be "corrupted" ? The files at this stage still continue to list our LV as 20 indicating that they should.

Similarly, regarding some interpretations of the soulless pacifist route : If their previous behavior came from corruption, why would Chara kill at this stage or follow up on their previous plan ? By now our LV has long been reset to 1 and said corruption should no longer be in effect.

For all these reasons, it would not be coherent for the peculiarly aggressive behavior shown by Chara during the genocide route to be strictly caused by LV-induced changes.

To be fair, this time some minimum amount of LV is required to progress through the route and access many of those lines, meaning that a minor impact of said required LV cannot be ruled out, but this does mean nevertheless that the primary reason as to why Chara behaves this way in genocide is not related to their LV.

Actually, once you remove from consideration all those things, what you are left with in the rest of the genocide route is a Chara that hardly seems all that impacted by LV at all despite having a very high one.

In New Home, they still display some hints of emotional reactions in spite of a LV of 19.

And throughout the whole genocide route, NarraChara continues going through the regular encounters with the same jokes or sarcasm-filled comments as they would in any other route (If you take the time to ACT a bit or read the narration before killing that monster.) Once again, even with a LV of say, 15.

That doesn't make the very high LV's seem like they turn one into that much of a mind-numbed killing machine does it ?

Okay... Well, what about Frisk, then ? Our other example ?

There are some more narrations out there who can bring us a bit more information about Frisk :

The Sans fight can only be triggered if all previous checks of the genocide route have all been properly met up to this point. This means that it is not possible to start this fight at any other LV than 19, as the NEO fight is scripted to send you to that LV if the criteria for Sans are met.

Therefore, the narration of the Sans fight talks about a Frisk that necessarily has a very high LV of 19.

And yet...

Even at this point, Frisk does not seem to be immune to thoughts regarding the morality of the actions their body has undertaken. It quite literally appears to weigh on them.

This isn't a one-off case either :

If the genocide route is aborted in Hotland, Mettaton NEO has some special dialogue that goes in the same direction :

he says it quite clearly :

And, the same thing also applies regarding the regular encounters too. The ACTs Frisk can take and their behavior whilst executing them remain unchanged compared to a pacifist route, even during the end-stages of genocide in Hotland.

Of course, it isn't like we could have expected Toby to adapt the ACTs and narration of all encounters to vary depending on LV either, that would have been very tedious to code, but such a pronounced absense of any change is definitely noteworthy.

This all leads us to a few conclusions.

It is correct that LV can affect one's personality to some extent, but :

The effects of LV are not consistent through time & situations, they show up quite sporadically. Most of the time, you could hardly tell the difference between someone with high LV or merely LV1 during an average interaction.

Even having an extremely high LV does not dehumanise you. One can still feel emotions and conserve proper judgment or capacity for self-reflection.

The growth in LV magnifies the impact of its effects when they do manifest, but it does not seem to alter the frequency of such events.

It is not possible for LV to be the determining factor in Chara's behavior during the genocide route.

As Sans originally said : LV is above all a capacity to hurt, not a permanent necessary degradation of perception.

[under-lore]

Just earlier today i've been sent by a friend a post that put in questions some aspects of file attribution theory.

While said friend ended up answering it for me, that made me think i should probably address it here a little.

It concerns some special lines of dialogue regarding no-SAVE runs.

While i did mention that those things existed and could be relevant to that theory briefly in the original theory post, i put it off at the time since it seemed unnecessary to explain what was the deal with that within that post which was mainly an introduction to the ideas of the theory in general. It felt like it'd just overcomplicate things.

But well i suppose i'll bring it up here now !

So, the critic regards the fact that there exists some secret bonus lines which can be obtained after playing through the game without ever saving file 0 manually.

Such as these for instance :

Their common message being that Frisk would have not SAVED before, which would thus put in question what file attribution theory says about file 9 by not taking it into account as a file in those particular lines. Hence the argument that file 9 wouldn't be considered as a proper SAVE file by canon and questioning the model.

So well, what is the issue with that, then ?

Well, the question is actually pretty legitimate ! Although its answer can be a little unsatisfying.

To understand what i mean by this, here are a few more examples of some other secret lines you can also get during no-SAVE runs :

That dialogue is, to put it pretty simply, not coherent with what the rest of the game repeatedly shows us to be Sans' abilities. There is no way Sans should be able to know that we have not saved, even if he suspects us to be the anomaly. After all, Sans does not remember LOADS.

This isn't like in the dinner where he could use Frisk's facial expression to make a guess as to wether we must've died before. For not only does Sans not get any more occasions to read us after we reach Asgore (where we can very well still SAVE or die), but that line still triggers even if we do not die at all, and yet it won't trigger if we SAVE for the first and only time right before Asgore, and then beat Asgore without dying after that.

So even if Sans could remember SAVES, which he doesn't, this line still wouldn't make any sense. He would have to like, be able to magically tell every time we use a SAVE point manually or peek through computer files or something, which would only lead to more incoherencies in his behavior in other instances.

And it isn't an isolated case, either :

Again, the "challenge" Sans talks about here requires you to never change your armor, weapon, not eat... All things that there would be no way for Sans to verify. What if you did those things once all the way back in the Ruins, for instance ? There would be no plausible way for him to know, either. Yet the line only triggers if the challenge was a success.

You also have lines for some of these individually, with the same problems.

You could also add this one arguably, though there is a point to be made it isn't impossible for the Snowman to know what happened to its piece, and to have told Sans, though that is still slight stretch given the other lines.

But anyway, the point this is trying to make, is that the bonus lines you get from playing the game with certain challenge restrictions break what should logically make sense following the in-world canon literally all the time. Pretty much all of them do, actually.

Why ?

Well, because they're just easter egg lines, really...

Little bonuses that are here to congratulate a player that purposely made the game harder for themself. They aren't supposed to be taken seriously lore-wise, else you'd also find yourself with "proof" that Sans has not only knowledge of SAVES, but is either secretly omniscient or cheats by reading the game's code to know everything he needs to, but only uses it to say "btw, gg" at the end of a route sometimes or call you a hacker. Just because he happens to be the one who calls after a route ends, so all the challenge easter egg lines that requires to complete the game first naturally fall on him to say along with the consistency issues that come with them.

So well, if those lines can blatantly contradict Sans' character that badly just for the sake of making a nod to the player congratulating them for the challenge they're playing, they can definitely break the SAVE file rules, too.

So basically, those lines are the ones that you could conclude shouldn't be taken as canon, not file 9. Those lines are easter eggs with a history of not being lore consistent, so they do not seem like very good ground to base criticism on.

Of course i don't think file attribution should be treated as a fact, its definitely still a theory, it is just that picking the no-SAVE lines that don't match up with it to criticise it whilst ignoring the greater context of massive non-reliability behind those lines as a whole feels a bit like cherrypicking or at least is misleading.

[under-lore]

Hey so everyone's been getting pretty crazy about the hidden "Gaster" card in the last newsletter.

But, whilst this might just be my theorist sense telling me to stay overly skeptical of everything... Do we know if this is really Gaster ?

Obviously, the capital letters or the usage of the "forgetting"/mysterious theme does feel like him, but there is one thing that kinda bothers me :

The japanese version of that letter uses hiragana, instead of the katakana that had seemed to be the law for Gaster up to this point.

Then again, the truth is that we have seen so little actual official dialogue from Gaster that you can't rule out the idea that he might have some specific speech pattern particularities we haven't really been able to explore yet (like how Sans has a serious mode of his own and doesn't always use comic Sans for example.), and that also makes it hard to judge if it is him based on punctuation or anything like that.

So i suppose it is just a possibility to keep in mind that it isn't necessarily him ?

It would be pretty interesting if this wasn't Gaster though. In that case, it would likely be still someone linked to him in a way. Like anywhere from someone involved in an experiment to a chapter 3 secret boss...

[under-lore]

You know what ?

I know we like to bully Matpat a lot in this fandom, but i'd like to say something positive about him today since his last DR theory just got posted.

As much as one can have reasons to disagree with it or (quite validly) criticise some of its points, this theory is likely the most reasonable one he's ever made about the franchise.

Previous Game theories on UT/DR have usually been pretty out there, rather crazy or even missed key pieces of evidence that contradicted them. But whilst this one still has some flaws, it does seem to have actually put in effort in understanding the game, you can even tell that he's done his homework in actually researching on the narrative of Toby's games since the halloween hack to propose an ending that would remain pretty consistent with those themes.

He's also tried to avoid repeating some of the issues that had been pointed out to him in the past theories, like crediting even tiny clips present for barely a second in that video (following Toby's response to him not giving proper credit once), didn't call Kris he, remained a lot more grounded in the game text itself, etc...

Like, i think you can tell that this time around, he actually genuinely tried, and did came out of it with something that's at least fairly reasonable for DR theory standards.

So well, since this is likely the last we will see of Matpat covering this franchise, i think i wanted to give a little credit to that.