I hate how it's blackrom this and blackrom that all over everything as if everyone was a bunch of grey aliens with candy corn horns (I am super joking)
A recent incident; I do not comprehend how someone can be a fan of a kids' fantasy series in which the plucky underdogs battle ostentatiously-wealthy lying asshole villains and think Trump is awesome. Obviously you didn't pick up the very subtle message in those books.
Too quick to assume that the real people who such villains are based on must have better reasons, or else everybody would see it?
This is a common mistake and me just being pedantic so i feel i shouldnt be as bothered as i am but. Undertale fandom. PLEASE stop having the skelebros "crack their bones". When you crack your bones youre actually just releasing gases from the joint lubricant your body makes, or a tendon is moving back into place from shifting with movement. The skelebros (or any other skeleton character in other fandoms) do not have that stuff. No bones are actually being cracked. Please stop. You can keep doing the overdramatic shock thing with them hearing humans do it if you want though, thats just plain funny.
No, I'm fairly certain Squibs cannot do Potions or Divination just because there's no wand involved. If a Muggle tried to make a potion, all they'd get is a sludgy mess, and Divination doesn't work for most of the people who do have magic.
ngl, I find Claptrap uncomfortable to be around. But I've still wondered if he'd be less...the way he is, if people were nice to him. (And some parts of his quests are really just deeply sad and kinda depressing. Like, I get that part of the gag is "no one likes Claptrap if they've actually had to spend time around him" but it's still really sad that it's so severe that no one wants to come to the party he's throwing himself.) And then I remember that a good portion of why he's like that is that he's literally coded to be like that (if I'm remembering right?) and that 1) he probably literally doesn't realize why people dislike him (or if he does, he really can't do much about it) and 2) even if he were capable of consenting to having his code tweaked, it'd be a personality rewrite, which makes me deeply uncomfortable on a worse scale than Claptrap does. Honestly, I take Claptrap as a lesson in "you don't have to like everyone or be comfortable hanging out with them, but they still have the right to exist". Yeah, I suspect that at best, he's just found a way to pass himself notes that persist through the reset; he can't really tell for sure which way a timeline's going to go until it's too late to actually do anything to prevent the worst stuff from happening - all he can do is stall the human at the chapel for as long as possible, once it becomes clear that things have gone completely south. (You can't tell me that he wouldn't step in to prevent Papyrus dying, if he could.) After the first playthrough, though, everyone's got deja vu regarding the human, so it wouldn't surprise me if Sans has just started paying close attention to his and piecing things together from that.
No joke, I left the undertale fandom because of sans fanon, both the omniscience thing and all the drastic misinterpretations of his personality. Also the Discourse, but the inaccurate characterization got under my skin enough that I couldn't browse the AO3 tag without having to go rant to my roommate.
Spoiler: Ranting about Sans Undertale Yeah. I'm very frustrated by the common misconception that Sans remembers significantly more than any of the other monsters. He doesn't. He has some scientific knowledge that the time bs exists, he mentions that in the genocide fight: the same fight where he says "we'll wind up back here without any memories" and something about the other sanses. And after a true pacifist run (at least before the update, I forget if it changed now) he somehow gets a photograph of the happy group on the surface to his past self, so it would be in his hidden room where we could find it. That's the thing. That's a central theme of the game. We're the biggest threat because we're the only ones with true lasting memory or the power to reload or change fate. We're the ones with the determination. It's unbalanced and limited and awkward, and that's how Flowey got to be the way he is, the combo of [being the only person with memory] and [not caring about or loving anyone]. If Sans remembers stuff to be a cool and knowledgeable and threatening and dynamic antagonist, it takes away from the impact of what a danger we (and Flowey) are. The fact that he's got the most difficult fight (due to using the skelebro powers as hard as he does plus spamming all the meta stuff attacking in the GUI, ignoring the invincibility period, and so on) means he's got cool powers. That's all!! There's no need to try to balance the agency of the characters by giving him and only him additional special powers. That doesn't balance shit.
There's some AU that I really like, but they're AU. They'd be less interesting to me if they weren't transformative. And the fact that so so so many are Sans-centric is the thing that really wears them thin.
Spoiler: fun police rambling Yes! All of this! And it all goes hand in hand with the fandom collectively not recognizing that you, the player, are the bad guy in the game. Underfell was the first major AU to get big, and I feel like that's because people really struggled with the departure from normal video game tropes - anyone not blatantly friendly is out to get you, everyone knows more about what's going on than you do and you have to solve the mystery, and of course the whole dungeon-crawler thing where you have to kill all the monsters that jump out at you. I could never stand Underfell because it took everything that was interesting about Undertale's concept and said "what if instead we take all that away and shove these characters into boring, stereotypical roles that don't make you think or feel bad?" God, Undertale fandom could have done so many interesting and meta things, and instead it's all endlessly interbreeding AUs which never involve the stuff that made the original game so unique and fascinating. People can't get enough of (ooc versions of) the characters, but the original setting and foundation of game philosophy that made the characters so good has been totally forgotten. It's the Onceler of fandoms. tl;dr: incensed gnashing of teeth and
To be fair, I haven't looked into the undertale fandom in some time, so it could have gotten better since I left. And I'm sure many of the aus are really good! It's just impossible for me to enjoy them because of all the the stuff that I love which none of them have.
So. I really want to watch a Young justice AMV set to Let's See How Far We've Come but NO ONE gets it right. come ON. and I don't even have video editing software, either.
yeah, fandom doesn't portray frisk like a bad guy at all. like, yeah, it portrays chara like one, but frisk is usually just the sweetest, most boring, most loved by everyone, pacifist cinammon roll. and the player is just... ???. there isn't really much established fanon about them, what they are in the game world, and what their relationship with chara and frisk is. i reckon to everyone in undertale, even frisk and chara, the player must appear as some eldritch horror or something, resetting and destroying the world 'cause it's fiction and fun to them, being emotionally connected to the characters but not believing in their reality. though if i think too long about that, i get awful Antis Are Policing My Taste In Fiction feelings. it's not the same as that, i know, but "you are the bad guy for treating this video game like a video game and being completionist" feels like that. and there are people that are strongly anti-genocide route, that do police it, too.
Huh, interesting. I've never gotten those kind of feelings from Undertale, only from the antis in the fandom (ex. the anti-genocide route people you mention). I think that's because the game is designed for you to do the genocide route as well as the pacifist and various neutral ones. All the characters don't want you to do it, sure, and the game wants you to think about it and maybe feel bad, but the stuff that Undertale is trying to communicate doesn't come all the way through if you don't do the genocide route. It wants you, the player, to act out your part in the game and try to do everything you can just because you can. And then maybe face the consequences of that and decide not to do it any more (in this particular game, not games in general). (but it also wants you to think about it in relation to other games? idk man all I know is that since I played undertale I've spent a lot of time wishing that other games also had pacifist routes.) That all is how I see it, anyway. It's a game about games, you gotta play the game to get the game. I should definitely go to sleep.
I think the thing to remember about Undertale is that I don't think Toby Fox wanted or expected everyone to share everything about the story online- he didn't think it would get anywhere near as much attention as it did, and he probably didn't expect most players to know all the details of the plot before going in? In that light of course you are supposed to play the genocide route bc that is how, as @adisagestar said, how one completely engages with the message of the game. But since there was a period where everyone played it and was talking about its meaning, ect, the story became that it is somehow immoral to play the goddamn game.
thanks! these are all some really good points. i've thought about some of them before and i think they are essentially correct, but unfortunately, that doesn't stop me from getting a little vibe of Antis Policing My Taste In Fiction whenever i go too deep into What Is The Player Exactly and/or The Player As A Character Themselves. and that might partly be my own issue with inserting myself in things (hehehe), with telling stories involving characters that represent me. that it feels weird to me, thinking of myself as a participant in the stories i engage with, rather than a semi-omniscient viewer. which might sound weird, considering that it's a video game, but it makes sense in my head.
Due to shenanigans, I've been reminded of Reboot. I've been giggling at the parallel. The user, playing games and destroying worlds in their victory, the guardian/judge trying to prevent that destruction, the way the game NPCs are people characters while the user/player is distant and unknowable.
