that found family post finally expressed what drives me insane about undertale fandom now, which is that people wildly misinterpret that chara had a found family with the dreemurrs (objectively true) and that frisk could call toriel mom or think of asgore as their dad (both optional but possible) to mean that chara and/or frisk are LITERALLY dreemurrs and asgore/toriel’s children and asriel’s sibling.
which, as i’ve discussed many times, is ludicrous and in no way the intention of the text. but that found family post expresses why - what needs to be understood is that EVEN IF gerson was not misinterpreting by calling chara one of asgore and toriel’s “children” and EVEN IF frisk calling toriel “mom” or asking about being asgore’s child were not both optional and EVEN IF chara calling asgore “mr. dad guy” showed they thought of him as a dad rather than not being sure what to call him, all that really proves is that chara and frisk have a found family relationship with the dreemurrs, not that they were literally adopted.
like the posts say, found families can call each other “mom,” “dad,” “brother,” “sister,” and so on. a found family can be many many people - frisk could just as easily see undyne and alphys as their aunts, or papyrus and sans as their uncles, despite undyne/alphys, papyrus/sans, and toriel/asgore having no actual biological or legal connection to each other. i don’t see chara as comfortable with the idea of “mom” or “dad” or “brother” for the dreemurrs, but even if they were to use those terms, that wouldn’t make them part of a nuclear family with the dreemurrs unless that was something CHARA wanted as well.
in other words, the idea that chara, frisk, and asriel are literally siblings is a complete misinterpretation of the ideas of close friendship and found family that are core to undertale, and people need to stop thinking that “chara dreemurr” or “frisk dreemurr” is canon just because of fandom or wiki entries. it’s not.
Great post! This 100% articulates something I’ve felt for a long time. While I do personally consider Chara as part of the Dreemurr fam, it drives me nuts how people act like Frisk being adopted is canon and Frisk being siblings with Chara and Asriel is canon rather than just… a really popular headcanon, because it leads to people bullying those who have differing interpretations. I have seen people post “because this is a popular headcanon, it might as well BE canon and if you don’t see it that way, you are wrong,” and that really rubs me the wrong way because calling Toriel mom is a choice. Staying with Toriel is a choice. Places to go is a valid interpretation, too. Frisk being taken in by another monster is valid, too. Or Frisk having a family to return to but still being close to monsters. I see it like… people have their favored interpretation of Undertale, and the collective fandom has built up a lot of ideas that have just kinda been unanimously accepted in bigger circles, but much like with Gaster speculation, I think there needs to be room for other voices and other takes on Frisk’s relationship with the monsters. We can have a Frisk who is uncomfortable with Toriel’s doting even though she means well, for instance. Frisks who do jerk pacifist are valid, too. So many ways to view a character , so I wish some people in the fandom would be less aggressive about that sorta thing.
#really the ambiguity of their relationship becomes so blatant when you confront it with the deltarune version of the dreemurrs #where kris is explicitly textually and narratively set as “human child formally adopted by the dreemurrs” #where there are multiple instances of kris thinking asriel as their brother. asgore as their father. toriel as their mother (tags from @carlyraejepsans)
This is a relevant, essential and true series of posts, and I wanted to jump off it a bit and call attention to a particular part of the phenomenon it describes and how it interacts with Deltarune’s theming/decisions; these tags are a great jumping-off point.
The fallen child, of Undertale, is ambiguously the Dreemurrs’ ward, their adoptive child, a very long-term houseguest, etc., etc. The general monster public understands them as a Dreemurr and Asriel’s sibling, but the general monster public — as we can observe from the True Lab, No Mercy et al. — doesn’t know what actually happened.
Nevertheless, we can observe that this understanding of the child/goat dynamic was widely adopted (so to speak) by Undertale fandom, which is where we get “Chara Dreemurr” from — both the name and a particular, widespread take on the character.
I’ve written a little about Deltarune as the reunion of old friends. The scenario set up for us at the start of Chapter One seems pretty unambiguous at first blush, and — what’s more — it’s a scenario I, at least, have seen in a million after-canon fics. We’re on the surface! The human has grown up some! Everyone has their own lives here (in roles that make sense to us, given who they were Underground)!
And Toriel as mom is core to those fics. Maybe my sampling is biased by my preferences, but I don’t think I’ve seen a single one where Frisk isn’t either immediately adopted by Toriel or sent briefly into foster care or to an abusive biofamily, then rescued by monsters. “I have places to be” isn’t a real option, it’s Frisk’s issues manifesting. (This is understandable and I’m not judging the trend. The surface is so low-res, and Frisk’s life there is so opaque to us, that imagining a happy family for them outside the existing dynamic we have would be a lot of effort for little payoff. Also these fics wreck me emotionally, so.)
I think being woken up by Toriel for school drops us into that mindset. It’s an after-canon story. Here’s mom; here’s all our friends; there’s dad. And it’s also the mindset that gets so effectively disturbed in the town walkaround section of Chapter One, when we realize that these aren’t our old friends, not really. Alphys and Undyne haven’t even talked to each other here! Bratty and Catty hate each other! Gerson’s dead! MTT’s dysphoric! They’re here, but they don’t remember us the way we expected.
Within that dynamic, Toriel and Asgore are — I think — some of the most securely fit into their roles. Alphyne was so core to both characters’ stories that losing it feels uncanny, but Toriel as Mom and Asgore as Dad/Epic Divorce Man, even if they’re never strictly canon, are so present that reifying those positions doesn’t really disturb us. Their dynamic with each other is largely unchanged: hostility with faint overtures of peace.
But the parts of the Dreemurrs that do stick out are, I think, consequences of their narrative pigeonholes. Specifically, they’ve gotten a little more, I don’t know… sitcom nuclear family.
The thing about Toriel not in keeping with our remembered Undertale characterization is that she’s deeply religious and a bit of a moral guardian — i.e. visiting church for a week straight after Asriel kissed a girl, editing Alphys’s screen saver so the buff superheroes aren’t making contact any longer, Sadie Hawkman’s, etc. The moral guardian thing is canon to Undertale (“Not in front of the human!!”) and we could reasonably derive the religiosity from that, given there’s a church now, but it still feels off, at least to me, and I suspect to other players too, because… who focuses on that aspect of Toriel, writing their future fics?
But it perfectly fits a Sitcom Mom. Tell me you can’t see Marge Simpson in the genetics of that characterization. The ways in which Toriel in Deltarune is jagged and difficult to reconcile are manifestations of the way she’s been fit into a less ambiguous position, in a fashion that calls attention to that fit.
Likewise, Asgore. Asgore is Epic Divorce Man. Asgore is Mr. Dad Guy. He’s a bumbling, good-hearted loser, loving but largely incompetent… with a certain gravitas — as the Bergentrückung, simultaneously gentle and brutal, a king waging a doomed war for the sake of his people — that gets dispelled in True Pacifist and humanizes him without erasing the costs of his actions.
In Deltarune he’s undignified from the start, in what feels like continuity from Undertale… and that has real, material consequences for him! He’s in dire financial straits, at least in part because he’s a florist — the thing he does in the Undertale post-canon cutscene, the thing he’s doing when we first met him, which he repeats almost exactly in his store in Deltarune, this core motif baked into his character via buttercups and golden flower tea and etc. and etc., a device we use to recognize him — and he’s not good enough at it to function financially! Hell, he’s losing his store in a month!
Deltarune’s Asgore does his goofy “eggs-husband” thing like the oldest-school style of Sitcom Dad, who messes up but has a good heart… and being Sitcom Dad has wrecked his life, because he’s been reduced to the part of his character — his relationship with his family, particularly Toriel and Asriel and their human ward — where in Undertale he failed most badly, and is most consistently defined by his failure. Because that’s what he has left, within the narrow paradigm available to him, within the reunion of old friends, to be slotted into that position of Father in which we know him and love him as incompetent.
This post has dragged on a bit so I’ll bring it around and say that Deltarune is definitely interested in troubling our relationship with “Chara Dreemurr,” the fallen child , albeit subtly. It does that through characters whose relationships are being shaped — and deformed — by our expectations, nostalgia and desires, either explicitly (“Nice to see you again,” we say to a man Kris has never met) or implicitly, through these characters constrained by (and uncanny within) the roles we’ve imagined for them in our long seclusion, the last one out of the Underground. It’s a lot of fun, and I’m excited to see how this theme pans out!
[Image ID: Screenshot from Undertale. In a battle screen, three Moldsmal narrate. "Over time, Asriel and the human became like siblings. The King and the Queen treated the human child as their own. The underground was full of hope." /End ID]
Tags by @stainedglassthreads:
#oooooooooh this is such a good analysis of both undertale fanon #and also of the differences between ut toriel and asgore and dr toriel and asgore #that i hadn't quite managed to articulate
#it's probably obvious to everyone but asriel is ALSO kinda sitcommed #he's the big brother! he's the golden child! the perfect son and friend who's just out of the picture enough that he can remain idealized #and perfect! #he's the perfect big bro for kris! he's bratty AND catty's crush #and got up to highschool tv show romance hijinks with them! #he's pizzapants' best buddy! he was a good boy who sang in the choir!
#and this is also a continuation from what we saw of him in undertale and how many fanfics continued his character #the goldenhearted pacifist and idealistic young prince! too good for this sinful earth! #i've always thought that BOTH dr asriel and ralsei are 'responses' to the fanon asriel #specifically the fanon asriel in all those 'save asriel' fics that used to be really popular #where asriel and flowey are expressly different people
#and frisk only knew asriel for basically five minutes where he wasn't trying to kill them #but his plight grabs their heart AND the player's so intensely that they go to incredibly lengths to give him a second chance #or to fix goat mom and goat dad's marriage
#and now asriel is here! he's the best bro in the world! everyone loves him! he's off at college doing exciting amazing things! #it's still not enough to keep toriel and asgore together #he's still not here because presumably he's happy and successful and alive but we don't SEE him being all those things #we miss him and kris misses him and all we and kris have to replace him is other people's memories #and the memories he and kris would share that other people tell us
