truereset:

buttercupsandbrokendreams:

truereset:

im not going to add it onto the post because it’s too long already (sorry sheepdoge) but i think when you look at flowey’s perception of being in a game as his way of processing trauma, then his further inability to understand frisk’s kindness towards him and his reaction of running away becomes more relevant to us, as people playing games, as well.

because like, isn’t that kind of the same way a lot of us reacted upon first playing the game when it threw us a curveball? we went into it expecting things to go a certain way, conditioned by years of video games that followed the same typical formula; self contained, existing in a vacuum, ultimately completely outside of ourselves as individual people even if they did relate to us on personal levels.

but undertale is very good at being very close with its players, and making us uncomfortable in the process. are we, as individuals, obligated to help strangers at any range of cost simply because we are capable of doing so? is it valid for us to judge people based on first impressions? and then undertale takes these questions, throwing them in our face: here’s a literal child dying over and over to free a race of people, simply because theyre the only one who can! here’s these people who are trying to kill you, but if you go back and talk to them later you’re realize they have their “reasons” and have their own problems.

flowey has learned to accept a world where kindness is meaningless, worthless, and a weakness; has learned to reject it, has learned the value of presenting it to manipulate others; has come to expect the world around him to operate in a certain way based on these assumptions.

we have learned that video games will not literally talk to us on an individual level, that they have some variability but no real value in terms of culbability; that characters who present themselves as tropes will fill those roles.

and upon first being confronted with something outside of these expectations, persistintely and without apology, we just…can’t understand

Flowey meta like this makes me go nuts because while it’s cool making video game mechanics a literal part of the world building in undertale (like item inventory being a form of magic) THIS is the Flowey I wish more people would see. A lot of people chalk up all of Asriel’s issues to him being soulless and see giving him a soul as a viable solution to him not being able to function like a decent, empathetic person, but while depth of character and acknowledgement of the real harsh effects your actions have is afforded to other characters, no one really looks at Flowey and goes “maybe he’s not fucked up because he realizing he has no soul to feel with and that his reality is a simulated lie broke him but instead he’s fucked up because who WOULDN’T get fucked up over eating your friend’s soul, becoming your fursona, dying, and coming back as a Flower?”

I think about how Flowey is a foil of not only destructive potential and motive (going on the nm route just to see what happens) and capacity for atonement (Frisk going the tp route, Asriel breaking the barrier and Flowey making a plea to let Frisk live their life) but ALSO in just not know what the fuck any of this bs means and trying to make sense of it by processing it in a way that can make sense and offer some form of comfort and doesn’t that make sense for someone whose been severely traumatized several times over?

it’s really so fuckin wild but entire portion’s of flowey’s personality can be interpreted incredibly different if you take the time to understand him as a person, instead of a character. (a person who’s experienced trauma and heartbreak trying to come to terms with it in an incredibly unhealthy manner, instead of an entity meant to fill a narrative role), and that’s so totally ironic to me that i can’t believe i didn’t realize that before now