the-salty-prince:

itsrainingsomewhereelse:

truereset:

doge-w-a-bloge:

doge-w-a-bloge:

A big part of Flowey’s character, I think, is…

We know Flowey can’t feel love. He can’t feel love for other people, and he can’t feel the love that others may express for him.

But he still experiences the psychological need to love and be loved that people, especially children, possess.

Look at his face when he talks to Chara about how he tried to feel something, ANYTHING, for his own father.

Look at his face when he remembers hoping his mother would surely help him feel the warmth of compassion once more.

These are not emotionally neutral memories. Thinking about how he discovered he didn’t care about his parents anymore…

…is painful for Asriel.

And he has no reason to lie or fake his emotions here, considering what route he says this on, and who he’s talking to.

And…throughout the game, he clings to the memory and idea of Chara as the person who can make him feel something, who can make him feel less horribly alone and give his life meaning again…

…but if you talk to him a few times in Neutral…

He admits that, deep down, he knows he can’t really love Chara, either.

The best he can hope for…is that he “won’t get tired of” them.

That they won’t stop being “fun” to “play with” like everyone else did.

And just like thinking about his first time interacting with his parents as a flower…admitting this to himself pains him.

Christ, someone give this poor fucking kid his SOUL back so that he can comprehend the emotion behind the hugs I want to give him.

#YES THIS i love this stuff #flowey spends an untold number of his resets going through the motions #but his very first one was the one where he realized he didn’t love his parents anymore and tried to kill himself #like #kiddo broke the remnants of his own heart #nearly died #was so scared of dying without a soul that he accidentally turned back time #and then spent a WHILE trying to help people #to give them all the happy endings he couldn’t have #that was his first set of reactions #to stop existing and then to help people #later he started hurting people to see what would happen #how they would react #and even later he started killing people #and the thing that hurt him the most was how little difference there was in the feelings he experienced between them

this reminded me of something i’ve been trying to figure out a way to articulate for a while. because when you look at flowey from as many angles as you can, take every facet of his character and begin to understand his perspective, it leads you down interesting roads.

like, maybe undertale isn’t meant to be as “meta” as we’ve come to believe it is.

i know ut is widely lauded at this point for being a game that understands it’s a game, and i’m still willing to bet that this is true! ultimately, there’s no reason to believe that this concept and the one i’m about to express are mutually exclusive. i mean, it certainly breaks the 4th wall enough.

flowey being a foil to you, to me, to us, as the Player, isn’t new information, but there’s something there that struck me during my last replay. flowey consistently refers to everything as a “game”, to people as “characters”, to reversing time as “loading” and “saving”. he talks about chara the way i think about things i remember enjoying before depression kicked my ass; he wants to see chara the way i want to find a new media to get invested in because i got bored of the old ones and desperately need something new to keep myself stimulated. not to get personal or anything, but when you take away the driven-in concept of flowey’s claims as purely meta references…

you get a kid processing his trauma through things he’s familiar with. video games.

flowey, as we know him, has completely depersonalized himself from the world around him. his inability to feel positive emotions for other people – only the memory of those emotions, and even then those have faded by the time we reach him also – and the added factor of his ability to manipulate time and experience the same events over and over, led him to see them not AS people, but as characters. and so on and so forth.

we tend to view flowey as one of the only people in the underground who “really” knows what’s going on. but in the end, flowey, just like us with our preconceived notions about how games like undertale Should Go when we first open it up, is as unreliable a narrator as they come. and that’s really why he’s kind of my favorite

#in the context of undertale’s story it’s important to remember that it really is NOT  a game #to undyne and papyrus and asgore this is their life #this is frisk’s life. they are all living inside this story as their reality #flowey only really sees it otherwise because that’s the ONLY way he can proccess it #and you’ll notice how when flowey regains his compassion as asriel he ceases to refer to the events around him as game assets #it’s a strange sort of abstract concept to articulate so i hope yall get me but like #flowey’s trauma and the way it affects his perception of reality is an important part of the game as a whole ok look its important                                                        

depersonalization/derealization/dissociation is no joke and really do feel like living in a video game with characters though