pretty much. with the absence of his dialogue, for the most part. other characters understand his meows, but Frisk is just like ??? literally the only point is that it's cute. ~*pandering*~
okay but what if: chara attempting to translate for sans's cat monster language. only. they are really, really bad at it. they hardly know any cat monster language. they are fluent in like 4 monster languages but...not cat and dog monster languages. so from frisk's PoV it's about 90% ??? with the occasional word
*coughs quietly* Uh, are AUs where it's just our own OCs messing around and not actually anything so formalized as having a proper name or anything allowed in here? Because if so, I could ramble a bit about the thing I came up with?
http://archiveofourown.org/works/10521993 @Lambda Did you mean this fic, when you were talking about the first bit? Because if you weren't, and there's another AU where Sans is a cat out there, I'd like the link for it. :D
oooh, I have not read that, no. there's some other stuff out there, but the only thing I can remember off the top of my head is owosa's art, which isn't quite the same. very cute, though.
Okay, so - this is sorta in the "oh my god, this is so stupidly niche" area, but. The AU I came up with is "what if a Replayer from RV dropped into the Undertale 'verse" - in this case, my OC. Zeimah Dalyce is, at the time she wakes up in the Undertale 'verse, a 16 session veteran (which means that she's played SBURB and survived to go through the Door 16 times, but the Door's always been glitched so that trying to hit anything but 'replay' accomplishes nothing). She wakes up in a human area, and doesn't particularly feel like pretending to be her replayee (the person she's replacing in order to play the Game - the person who, if everything had gone right for them, would've survived their session and become a replayer in their own right) so she looks up somewhere to go camping until the session's ready to start. And oh frajbous day, there's a mountain nearby with an urban legend that'll keep her from having to avoid friendly hikers and other campers! Which is how she ends up falling down into the Under-region; she was poking around at the edge of the hole and it gave way. Zeimah isn't replacing Frisk, though; she's replacing someone else entirely, and can actually pass pretty easily for a monster as long as she doesn't get into a fight with anyone, since she's a troll-human hybrid and she definitely doesn't look human. She stumbles through the Ruins, figures out by the time she reaches Toriel that this isn't a Game thing and that she should definitely not attack people unless she's attacked (she can pass as human (sort of, mostly, as long as the Game magic that lets people ignore weirdness surrounding Players is in effect) with makeup and contact lenses, so running into Flowey would've gotten the "it's kill or be killed" speech up until Flowey got weirded out by how her soul looks). She moves on from Toriel pretty quickly, and starts exploring the rest of the Underground. At some point, she dies for the first time while in the Underground; it's not losing a fight to anyone - a Replayer has more determination than anyone in the Underground, and Zeimah's a native Time player; she doesn't really know how to actually give up any more, SBURB would've killed her a long time ago if she had any significant quantities of 'give up' left in her. (This doesn't mean that her resolve can't be shattered; just that it takes something pretty damn significant to do it, and she's used to putting herself back together and getting back up even after that.) It's actually just something stupid like she tripped and fell and landed awkwardly enough that it killed her. And because she hadn't saved at any point (she's been deliberately avoiding touching the save points, they're weird floating things that no one seems to know what they do), she wakes up back in the Ruins - back when she first fell into the Ruins. And at this point, things become really weird for her, because it doesn't take her long to figure out that she's trapped in a time loop. (Native Time player! She knows what it looks like and feels like if you're stuck in a Groundhog Day loop, although I don't think she's ever actually experienced one first-hand in an alpha timeline; she'd consider it the result of sloppy time manipulation.) This time, she cleans herself up before Flowey turns up, and she gets ignored as "just another monster". She finds her way out of the Ruins without needing to bypass Toriel. (Probably she goes down into the City to do it, possibly she asks some froggits which way to go.) And then she starts poking around and sounding people out and the only one who really bites in any meaningful way to "hey, have we met before" is Sans. Who knows everyone, but knows he's never seen this monster before (but she's familiar) and she's asking about time travel. It takes several loops before she manages to get his trust enough that he's telling her anything useful and it takes a while after that before they're really working meaningfully together. She's landed in the Underground several months before Frisk turns up, though, so it actually takes a long while before she even sees the human kid; in the meantime, she's joined the Royal Guard (since it gives her an excuse to wander just about anywhere without getting asked too much about it) and she's finding out what she can about what the heck is going on in this place. And then things get more complicated once the human turns up. There's a lot of looping, there's a lot of discussing stuff with Sans to figure out what do, and there's figuring out some weird and incredibly gruesome bullshit to separate Frisk and Chara so that Chara will stop taking Frisk over and trying to murder everyone and Zeimah really doesn't actually interact much with Frisk that they're aware of; she's just another Royal Guard who mostly just stares at them from a distance and doesn't really talk or start fights, in the final pacifist timeline. (She doesn't know what the hell happened to make the barrier drop, since she was down in the City when shit went down, she just knows that things got really weird, she woke up feeling hungover, and now the barrier's gone and the kid's being praised as a hero; Sans isn't really telling her much on the matter, and she's not sure he actually knows either.) On the RP tumblr account I set up for her, it's several months after the barrier fell and the monsters are carefully moving out from under the mountain and negotiating with the humans on things. She's been keeping herself busy by working on building a house for herself and catching up with friends online. (She's able to contact the Replayernet sites she's used to, but it's slow and she's not seeing any signs that this is a pre-session at all any more. It's all deeply weird for her, and she's trying hard to stay busy and avoid thinking about the implications.) She and her timeline's Sans are in flush, and her Sans is really good friends with Toriel; she's not exactly comfortable being around Frisk, but she figures it's only a matter of time before she ends up getting introduced to them. There's...probably a lot of stuff that's not clearly explained because I know how it works, but someone without knowledge of RV or Zeimah wouldn't, so - please ask whatever questions you've got, if you're interested?
Why's Chara taking Frisk over and killing people? They outright state in the kill-all route ending that either Frisk or the player taught them to kill, and only make 2 kills anyway-Sans and Flowey.
Because I hadn't (and still haven't) actually played the genocide route and my understanding of what was happening there was "Chara gradually takes over Frisk as you (the player) kill more monsters, until Chara finally tears control away and commits their own murders". Probably a flawed understanding, but this was how I understood it when I first came up with the AU.
ah i'm not sure why the fandom got that idea-it isn't really supported? i guess maybe it's from the demo, because if you only look at the Ruins but know that Frisk and Chara are not the same then it makes some sense, but then again in the demo there was nothing hinting at Chara and Frisk being separate beings meanwhile the actual game has Chara as the only logical choice for the narrator of all routes
admittedly, if you don't check things much and never backtrack, there's not much evidence it's not frisk the "the narrator can't be frisk" thing comes from the narrator knowing things frisk cannot possibly know (only clear if you check A Lot of things), having emotional responses to chara's family and belongings (you gotta check a lot of things to notice the pattern-there's reasons for frisk to be upset when fighting chara's family too), referring to frisk in second-person which some video games have as just a convention, having to guess at if the golden flowers broke frisk's fall (a flavour text requiring backtracking) and the true pacifist epilogue walkaround mirror flavour text (also requiring backtracking).
True! Plus, Zeimah is...not exactly aware of every single aspect of the situation. Her knowledge of what's going on with Frisk and Chara boils down to approximately this: Frisk is not the human child that the King and Queen adopted (everyone knows that kid died a very long time ago); there is some sort of weird ghost attached to Frisk; the weird ghost is Definitely Not Also Frisk; the weird ghost seems to be more strongly present in the timelines where Frisk turns into a gatdang murderhobo; doing a thing to separate Frisk and the weird ghost seems to have stopped any more 'Frisk the murderhobo' timelines from happening, which totally makes the cost of doing the thing worth it. Things Zeimah doesn't know, and can't actually test for: whether the weird ghost being more strongly present actually has anything to do with Frisk becoming a murderhobo; whether the weird ghost is actually gone. She has no idea who the weird ghost is, and sorta doesn't really care. The only way having that information would've altered how she behaved towards Frisk is that knowing the weird ghost was Chara and knowing that Chara wasn't making Frisk go be a murderhobo would've made her increasingly aggressive towards Frisk and she'd be keeping a much closer eye on them than she is right now.
that makes sense! does chara double-die in this AU, or do they wind up just. confusedly haunting the underground, or alive again?
honestly "chara haunting the entire underground" has a lot of potential. you get this weird ghost going around, trying to learn to touch things, and once they do you just know: they will be like a gd cat and knock over everything. they will start pranking people. it will be a hilarious mess.
i was thinking about ink sans and i got an idea or something. like, you know how ink sans is both the protector of the aus and really, really, really outcode? i mean, unlike error sans, he doesn't have an universe he came from before the anti-void. and it's fascinating to me. 'cause ink's basically protecting lots of universes that he has no personal connection to, protecting people he never knew his own versions of, and i think gives him a different perspective. like, yeah, he loves the aus and cares about protecting them, but i believe there's also something... cold... about it, a disconnect he feels. he's not the player of undertale and he's not the creator of the aus, but he is removed from the visceral experience of them in a similar way. so he can and does look at the aus he protects, sees bad things happening in them (eg. the genocide route, underfell monsters being typical underfell monsters, sans getting possessed by a 90's parasite), thinks those things are fascinating/creative/whatever and doesn't interfere. 'cause his perspective, in some ways, is more like that of a player or an fanartist/ficwriter than of a typical undertale character. he protects the existence of the aus, fighting error, but he doesn't really protect the people of the aus beyond making sure that they aren't killed by error. and like, i don't know if this interpretation of ink sans matches up to his creator's view of him, but comyet, i believe, did say that ink - despite generally being a force of good - is not a pure cinnamon roll. and in contrast to that, i think error is very driven by his attachment to his own universe, by the fact that he had one and lost it when he ended up corrupted in the anti-void. that when error looks at aus and sees only glitches, it is 'cause they feel like imperfect reflections of an universe he misses and really wishes he could return to. i'm not 100% sure of whether error remembers his own universe, but if he doesn't, this could all be subconscious. and once again, i am uncertain about how canon this is. like, the idea of this contrast is cool but i dunno whether i'm right about it. (or whether being right even matters, honestly.)
Yeah! I saw an ink thing that i think was comyets and not another interpretation, where when ink came into being he was just a scrap of an idea but had self awareness. He didnt want to be trashed before he was fully created so he made himself indispensable as a protector of aus and creativeness. Whats not to like about a sans that encourages art and ideas, promoting peoples imaginations and telling them not to give up like some sort of beacon of positivity and community? in reality he just wanted to be known and guaranteed not easily forgotten. Over time he probably came to really like what he does but overall he started with some pretty selfish ulterior motives (if you can call insuring survival selfish i guess) and still has a real disconnect from other characters as he's not really part of a story unless he injects himself in someone elses. I might be wrong about that being comyets intent, honestly im not sure. I do really like ink though, and error. They feel very yin yang at a surface glance and then you look deeper and see theyre actually really complex and morally grey characters and its cool as shit
I honestly worry a bit about error's character having a planned upheaval and complete rewrite by his creator, i rather like error as he is :( i suppose theres enough other people who've taken and run with the idea using their own versions of him that id still be able to find content similar enough to what i like about him now. if the change is too weird and drastic there'll still be stuff out there, but the original will still be different -_-
why is cq planning on rewriting and upheaving error? yep! :D:D:D that was part of what got me thinking about it. that and undertale's deconstruction of the nature of gaming and the fact that ink sans never really grew up with a papyrus. (there is an ink papyrus, i think, but he's not comyet's and probably not part of ink sans' backstory.) yep!!!
