Redid My Inscryption Reference Sheets

new pfp

i was laughing uncontrollably the entire time i was drawing this

miku 😎

miku 😍

eating this up so hard, thanks @goony-gooner for rbing this and making it materialize on my feed

Chara’s Laughter - An Analysis of Chara and Toriel

What? Oh, yeah, I remember. When we tried to make butterscotch pie for Dad, right? The recipe asked for cups of butter… But we accidentally put in buttercups instead. Yeah! Those flowers got him really sick. I felt so bad. We made Mom really upset. I should have laughed it off, like you did… Um, anyway, where are you going with this? Huh? Turn off the camera…? OK.

This dialogue is from the third of the True Lab tapes in Undertale, spoken by Asriel. It recounts something popularly referred to as ‘the buttercup incident’, where when trying to bake a butterscotch pie for Asgore, Chara and Asriel accidentally poisoned the king by putting in ‘buttercups’ rather than ‘cups of butter’. Later on, Chara uses knowledge gained from this incident to kill themself, so their soul can be used to break the Barrier… but that isn’t the main point of this piece of character analysis. 

The thing I’d like to bring to your attention is Chara’s initial reaction to accidentally poisoning their adoptive father– they ‘laughed it off’, according to Asriel. 

Chara is an extremely ambiguous character in Undertale, with many members of the fandom having sharply divided opinions of them. Likewise, the opinions on this hint of their character is similarly divided. Some think the laughter was metaphorical and that Chara simply didn’t take it as seriously as Asriel did, others go so far as to say Chara purposefully tried to murder their adoptive father. 

It has also been hypothesized that, rather than gleeful giggling of a demonic child, this is just hysterical laughter, and that hysterical laughter is how Chara, specifically, responds to distress. If you subscribe to the Narra-Chara theory, which appears heavily supported, then there’s another instance of the game where a distressed Chara seems to be laughing. 

When in a fight with the Amalgamate that was once Snowdrake’s Mother, one of the Actions Frisk can take is to tell a joke. If they do so, you get the following bit of narration– 

You laugh, and keep laughing. It’s SO funny, you can’t stop. Tears run down your face. 

… what? You didn’t do that?

If the narrator of the game is indeed Chara, there are certain points of the game where they say ‘you’ are doing something, only to take that back and say you didn’t. One possible interpretation is that this is something the narrator–CHARA– does themself, and assumes Frisk must also be doing too, only to realize Frisk is reacting differently, backing up the idea that Frisk and the narrator are two separate entities. That all said, while this character analysis assumes the Narra-Chara theory is canon for this specific narration, the Narra-Chara theory is not the focus of this post. 

Rather, the focus is the similarities between Chara and their adoptive mother, Toriel Dreemurr. 

Some similarities between Chara’s brother and Toriel’s son, Asriel Dreemurr, have been pointed out between him and his father, Asgore. Both greet you with ‘howdy’, both are very openly emotional(Asriel is called ‘crybaby’ by Chara, Asgore’s openly seen weeping several times on the True Pacifist run}, both have a strong connection to golden flowers, are poor namers, and attempt to kill Frisk at the end of all runs barring No Mercy. But the parallels between Chara and Toriel are strong as well, although much subtler. 

Returning to the Narra-Chara theory, it is noted by many that Toriel has a very strong love of puns, exchanging them through the Ruins door with fellow noted punster Sans the skeleton– but although Sans and Toriel are the most well-known pun lovers of Undertale, they are not the most prolific ones. No, that honor belongs to Chara and Papyrus. Chara being the narrator means they have the most lines in the game, granting them opportunity to be the character with the most puns. 

Among other things, they refer to Toriel’s chair as ‘Chairiel’, insist that a snowball is actually a ‘Snowdecahedron’, claims Lesser Dog wields a stone dagger made of ‘Pomer-granite’, and says ‘Pomeraisins’ are all over the floor of Lesser Dog’s station. 

This love of puns is a marked similarity between Toriel and Chara, but there’s another interesting one that I’ve never seen mentioned before. 

They both laugh when horribly distressed. 

It’s a popular fandom misconception that Toriel is very emotional. Often in fanart of her battle with Frisk, or of her being killed on a No Mercy Run, Toriel is crying tears of sorrow and desperation, at either the prospect of losing yet another child or at being betrayed by a human she’d thought innocent. This is not the case. Her sprite, for the most part, remains stoic, with an expression appearing almost cold for the majority of the battle. In contrast, Asgore doesn’t cry either in his fight, but unlike Toriel chooses to hide his face by looking down, and then openly weeps afterwards, and is noted by his subjects to be ‘a big fuzzy pushover’ and ‘a marshmallow’, further backing up the idea he’s much softer and more emotional than his ex-wife. 

Throughout the battle with her, narration says Toriel is acting aloof. But what’s interesting to note, is that Toriel DOES get emotional when killed in a No Mercy Run, or when betrayal killed… just not in as conventional or comfortable way. 

Here is what she says when you attack her, after you’ve convinced her to stop attacking you: 

You… … at my most vulnerable moment… To think I was worried you wouldn’t fit out in there… Eheheheh!!! You really are no different than them! Ha… Ha… 

She says all this with a rather unsettling smile. 

Some people use Chara’s laughter after poisoning Asgore as evidence that Chara is a deeply disturbed child, who went on to possibly coerce or force Frisk into killing monsters. But like Chara, Toriel also laughs in a situation that doesn’t call for it– does this also make Toriel a horrible disturbed mass murderer? She certainly isn’t opposed to the idea of murder when it’s necessary, and is as likely as Asgore to have lived through a war, but seems strongly against gratuitous murder as well as the murder of innocents and children. 

Do not “Tori” me, Dreemurr. You pathetic whelp. If you really wanted to free our kind… You could have gone through the barrier after you got ONE SOUL… Taken SIX SOULS from the humans, then free us all… instead just waiting here, meekly waiting for another human to come.

While Asriel takes after his father, and though Chara may not have been born a Dreemurr, Chara appears to strongly take after their adoptive mother Toriel in many more subtle ways. Chara and Toriel are both deeply interesting characters who are too often flanderized, be it into ‘murder demon’, ‘scapegoat’, ‘perfect mother’ or ‘dirty coward’, but looking deeper into canon grants a more nuanced look into both of them. 

stupid bug men

how do i nearly have 80 posts on my blog oh boy i need to clean this up tomorrow

trick or treat :D

You get two (2) Goodfellow’s tree kangaroos

Did the evil color wheel

oh heck yeah, thank you so much for this info !!

helped me figure out that all i really struggle with is the actual snow effects and sometimes seeing tiny floaters, but thats about it so i’m probably just overreacting over not having perfect vision and at least it isn’t bad enough to the point where it actively disrupts my life. plus, nobody really has perfect eyes so there’s no point in worrying about that,

thank you again, and i hope you have a super cool morning / day / evening 👍

today i have made the discovery that i have been living with visual snow syndrome

like what do you mean not everybody sees really tiny particles and like drowned out shades of colors

also what do you mean that you’re supposed to see pitch black when you close your eyes

if anyone has anymore information on this stuff that be like. super duper cool because a bit of this realization has me going through a mini crisis

hey you. you have a very beautiful mind. please make some art