Undertale - Pet dogs and date a skeleton!

if we're going for as close to the Traditional Full Underswap as possible while still making sense, yeah, i think so.

i'm not sure how that swap would be done, though. i think i recall one underswap having asgore regretting his kill-all-humans orders and retreating to the ruins in shame, leaving toriel to rule in his absence, and i think that was a good take on it.

though what toriel and asgore would do probably would be influenced by the kids' actions and personalities, how the kids tried to break the barrier and who's favourite kid was who's (like, if asgore was closer to asriel than chara in the classic undertale canon, that might've pushed him towards his decision there.)

 

Went back and took screenshots of the books. They mention the cold/wet/hot on the journey to New Home, rather than the journey to Home, but... I'm thinking you're right anyway. The ruins have that impenetrably locked door to keep humans out, so probably all the monsters lived in the Home/Ruins complex until they decided to risk venturing further out. I'm a little surprised, but it is a world with magical barriers and fireballs and all that kind of obvious magic stuff. Underground pseudoweather can come too.

Spoiler: The books about their journey

and then

Those two are trickier, since their locations and motivations are so related to each other. I've been mulling them over, pinging ideas off a mental wall. Still mulling.

That one is simple and plausible, definitely on my "could go with that" options.

Fun thing to note, in the question of how they felt about their kids:

Toriel lives far away from Asgore, who so disappointed and disgusted her with his declaration of war and refusal to take it back. She lives in the mostly-abandoned ruins behind a locked door, where she's far from the monsters who supported it. To go by the Froggit who admits everyone in the ruins is afraid of her... I'm thinking she's distant and dismissive with most monsters, brushing most of them with the same stroke, this feeling of "you would cheer for the death of children, then you are terrible and nothing to me."
She seeks to adopt every human who falls in, partly trying to recreate the lost relationship she had with Chara, partly trying to give us reason to never go in Asgore's grasp.
When we kill him, she goes out to take back control of the underground, assuming it with all the entitlement of a queen, regardless of the fact that she'd abdicated for somewhere between years to centuries. And if we didn't kill anybody, the people let her, because they like having somebody else in charge. If we did kill people, though, her ideals of being friends with humans runs up against years-to-centuries of looking forward to the last soul, and taking control of the surface, and the very immediate experience with the fact that at least some humans really aren't friends. She doesn't suspect, even if you kill a bunch of monsters in the ruins. Partly because she doesn't interact with them, partly because she sees people in extremes; people she likes, children especially, are wonderful, while people she dislikes, Asgore especially, are scum.

Asgore regrets his declaration, as he doesn't want power, or to hurt people... but he's never been willing to take it back, because he feels it's his duty to offer hope to the people. (He went to Monster Kid's school and talked about responsibility, he tells us that the deaths of his two children devastated the underground...) If we spare him with the right history of whether or not we've killed Flowey, he gets enthusiastic about the idea of adopting us (and talking to us like Toriel will magically just come back and forgive him and live with him again in order to be your mom? uHHHHH,,,,,)
And yet. After we defeat him in a neutral run, and he talks up to the point of giving us the choice whether to kill him or spare him... he only ever says he to see his wife and child again. His son. Not children.

Spoiler: true lab spoilers

Alphys' note about the Asriel and Chara tapes says she doesn't think Asgore has seen them or should see them.

Implies that the tapes had seemingly never been watched.

I wonder how Toriel and Asgore would have felt if they had seen them.

Whether the knowledge that it was a plan, and Chara's plan at that, would have changed their perspective on it all. Would knowing of Chara's plan and Asriel's complicity be enough to sway Toriel to her own sharp and dismissive anger? Would knowing that Chara came to them so deeply wounded as to willingly, slowly and painfully poison themselves to hide their plan, be enough to convince Asgore to be there in the ruins to comfort the humans who've just fallen?

This thought loosely inspired by this comic where Asgore connects the dots enough to feel guilty as fuck for Asriel's death, and that extra reason for his declaring war on humankind.

Spoiler: relevant comic panels

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

eta slight typo fixes

 

splitting, basically.

and it's interesting how she is the more aggressive one while asgore is more gentle one, considering their roles in the story, how frisk is introduced to toriel as a mother figure and asgore as a villain out to steal their soul. it's a layer of complexity to their characters. and if they have favourite children, i wonder if it's a matter of which one fits their nature best, which they identify/project on the most.

with the more gentle kid, asriel, being asgore's favourite, and the more prickly kid, chara, being toriel's favourite.

 

I've seen theories that Asgore did consider Chara his kid, but is pretending he never felt like that to try to make the grief hurt less.

 

yeah, and what i'm talking about isn't so much asgore not considering chara his as asgore and toriel each having a favourite, a kid that they're closer to.

 

ah yeah

so...in this Underswap, Muffet replaces Mettaton, and Asgore and Toriel both saw the tapes, leading to Asgore exiling himself to the ruins and forcing Toriel to stay on the throne?

(Asgore'd probably be guiltstriken at seeing Chara take the "future of humans and monsters" to mean "it is my duty to die for the monsters".)

also, I thought of a possible way to have a whole village of benevolent Floweys: Flowey gets injured and loses a leaf. Someone sees the leaf and goes "oh, free golden flower!" The leaf has, by this point, been inundated with enough magic, from Flowey eating monster food and being a zombie flower, for it to develop into a monster flower.

Meanwhile Flowey have lost some other leaves...which also sprout...and suddenly there's like 5 baby flower monsters. All of whom are genetic clones of Flowey.
He is totally unaware of this until he runs into one trying to sell someone a pebble.

 

Alternatively, AU where Alphys did something slightly different while injecting all those golden flowers with Determination and had various monsters with plant magic come in and use their magic to care for the flowers-but like, in groups, so group A had one monster, group B had another monster, group C had nonmagical care methods, and so on.

Somehow this results in most of the flowers becoming flower monsters...that look exactly like Flowey but have

Spoiler

only small bits of Asriel's memories, while Flowey himself has all of them.

Obviously this isn't Underswap but hey, a plausible way to have a village of flower monsters.

 

and he is just so confused

he just does not know what to do with kids at all

and then some of those baby flower monsters will lose their leaves and he'll have grandchildren and great grandchildren and just...

the murderflower is not prepared

and imagine other people getting confused about which flower monster is flowey 'cause there are so many and they all look alike. i bet that would give flowey a few more ways to stave off boredom.

and...

Spoiler: on a darker note

... flowey killing his children, 'cause they're there and he can reset and he's bored and he doesn't actually feel anything for them...

 

frisk falls into an underground where there's one confused murderflower and all his clone children and one (1) not-quite-a-clone-because-of-mutation child
there's like 20 identical flower monsters and then 1 with darker petals
toriel doesn't arrive to flowey beating frisk up, she arrives to find frisk being SWARMED by flower children asking things like "why is your shirt that colour" and "do you know why the sky is blue" and "what does your shirt taste like"

with one embarrassed flowey being like..."there was an accident with a fence..."

 

also: it is possible the baby floweys have no souls, but it's also possible they do have souls
in fact, the riverperson puts "flowers" in a different category from monsters ("Humans, monsters...flowers") so it's possible the baby floweys aren't actually monsters as such, but some other type of being with a soul.

 

continuing on with the underswap thoughts, i like the riverperson being swapped with w.d gaster. they are almost equally mysterious, and we don't even know what kind of monster the riverperson is, so there is lots of room to make it make sense.

in my headcanony thing for that swap, the riverperson is a skeleton, gaster's datemate/spouse and worked with gaster in the main 'verse and was the royal scientist that got scattered in the swapverse. them being connected to each other is important 'cause of how papyrus and sans' backstory hinges on gaster and those two might be genetically related to gaster, possibly by means of cloning or some other sciency thing like that, and part of what makes papyrus and sans themselves is their genes, the blueprints that lay out how their bodies and minds go, nature. and like, if going with cloning or something else that requires them to be derived solely from gaster, there could be a reason (say, gaster having more stable or powerful magic, more hp, than the riverperson) that they were cloned from him in both 'verses.

and thus, papyrus and sans are still connected to the vanished royal scientist and still genetically themselves, despite the vanished royal scientist being a different person.

cuuuuuuteeeee :D:D:D

 

asgore is thrilled that his grandchildren are all a new yellow flowery type of being

 

I guess so, yeah. But with the term not really part of common parlance, I figured the fuller description worked best.

"Favorite" is a weird and difficult concept for me... I didn't mean to say it like that, like Asriel was always Asgore's favorite or Chara Toriel's. I don't have the info I'd need for figuring out how they felt about the two kids when the kids were alive. All I feel confident in is what's gone on in the time since the kids died.
Toriel's choices since then are most strongly guided by having mothered Chara. Taking the kid's body with her, I think to bury them where they fell... Living to the ruins, to intercept any who follow in Chara's footprints.
While Asgore's are most shaped by his initial fury at humans taking his son away, his heavy responsibility to the hopes of the people. Mourning Asriel, maybe mourning Chara... but pretending, even to himself, that he doesn't see them every time he kills another child.

Though I note that the messages when we die are all Asgore. He did care, or at least try to motivate the kid to live with reminders of how important they are to the people.

(....OUCH, YES. That works for me as a reason why Asgore would be the one to flee.)

I'm still not sold on Muffet and Mettaton's situations, even though I raised the idea. Swapping them, as the two bosses of Hotland, makes more sense to me than swapping the food makers and the ghosts. But I'm still not sure what Mettaton's deal would be, if he even would be Mettaton.

Like, I don't see explosives and armor and maybe even actual public transportation scientist Undyne... seeking to impress Queen Toriel by making a robot with a SOUL. Undyne's not all about electricity magic and machines like Alphys is. And mostly, I have no idea what her motivation in doing so would be, let alone the thought process to get there.

So maybe she becomes scientist some other way, that we haven't thought of yet. And she and Alphys collaborate a lot more on things, letting Mettaton get a body without all the secrecy...? Lacks the emotional struggle, which is the best reason for a complicated and conflicted Muffet to take over as the recurring obstacle of Hotland.

But I'm not happy with that idea yet. I wanna bounce it against a couple other ideas, some alternatives, before going with it. Just haven't thought of any yet.

 

on the topic of swap AUs, I thought of one that puts Chara in Mettaton's role
basically they never misread the recipe, so they never died, so all the other humans fell into a friendly underground

but then most of them died of various non-murder things, like allergies, and running out of meds, and deciding to explore snowdin forest without a jacket

chara is the narrator of a very popular show in the underground, where they narrate all sorts of bizarre shenanigans, which are only partially scripted


there isn't an actual chara fight because they may not like humans but they are not beating up a child, but there are a lot of puzzles and stuff that can damage frisk but not kill them
chara notices if frisk's HP gets really low and rigs it
sometimes hilariously obviously, then they comment on frisk's reactions (which are generally along the lines of -_- i could've done it without that)
alphys tries to help frisk but doesn't tell chara, this results in several instances of chara being utterly bewildered

maybe mettaton crashes the stage and then there's a sequence where you have to deal with mettaton while chara has 0 idea of what is going on and like...they are trying but what is going on


ETA: this is a friendlier underground but there are still lots of monsters you have to talk down, for reasons varying from "does not get that frisk is human, is trying to talk with bullets" to "I WANT THE SOUL" to "wait, this attack isn't supposed to actually hurt humans?? is supposed to be friendly sparring match? did not mean to scare" with the occasional "small child who doesn't realize that they're hurting frisk"

mostly, though, there's puzzles and chara's show shenanigans

 

anyway so

asgore in the ruins...assuming he even fights you, there's probably multiple ways to spare him
like, hitting him a bunch and then sparing him gives you different dialogue from just sparing him until he gives up, and you can also talk him down

talking him down could involve frisk like...asking if they have to kill him
frisk could even ask something like, "do i have to kill you? is it your duty to die so i can prove myself?"

 

inkblot do you have anything to add?

 

Nope, but your theories are lovely to listen to!

 

so royal scientist undyne

...maybe she figured out some of the rules of high-energy magic, or something, and impressed toriel with some weird spell at way more power than it should normally have been able to take?

 

thinking on the true pacifist final boss's echoy Suddenly Shouting speech and how its voice beeps are actually pretty similar to a lower-pitched version of the sound his beam o' death makes

and how the only way the narrator can talk to Frisk is via either bodysharing-induced telepathy or manipulating magic in a way perceived by Frisk as sound

and thinking: what if that's what the true pacifist boss is doing-with rainbow magic? would explain the echo-it's LOUD and probably bouncing off the walls

(like, seriously, with my other headcanons about rainbow magic...we're talking "shakes the ground" levels of loud)

ETA: also the narrator's speech can't really be bodysharing telepathy because napstablook reacts to them
and the final boss's speech thing is done with their mouth closed, as well as being bigger than the text boxes and with louder voice beeping-everyone else's voice beeping is the same volume, even Papyrus's

 

but then if that's a thing: what if frisk figures it out