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Rambling notes on canon details, my sense of his timeline, the truths and the lies he tells others and the lies he tells himself.
geno new home
the first time flower!asriel woke in the garden, he as "so scared," unable to feel any limbs, no idea what was going on, and he cried out for help. he still expected his parents to love him, and come running to help. that part wasn't broken or lost.
*but nobody came
asriel cried.
eventually asgore came, saw the crying flower, and asked what was up. asriel explained, and asgore held him (tears in his eyes) and tried to comfort him.
but... while asriel had felt fear and cried for himself? he felt nothing in response to asgore's tears. no mirror neurons, no automatic reciprocal emotions. asgore's reassurance didn't reassure him. asgore's tears didn't inspire his own tears. he just felt empty.
asriel stayed there a few weeks (maybe a month or two), trying to force his full array of emotions to return... but they didn't. not for asgore, not for anybody else who came by the castle. and the disappointment, the frustration with himself for not feeling like himself, the frustration with asgore for not being able to make it alright... got to him.
so asriel ran away (burrowing through the ground as we see him do through the game, maybe moving around by making roots pull him, maybe just handwavium magic)
"eventually", after exploring the underground (possibly for signs of where his mom went), he found the ruins and found toriel. hints that asriel thinks more highly than asgore, "if anybody, SHE could make me feel"
* ...
* she failed
* Ha ha...
(with that genuine furrowed brow he uses when he's sad and trying to hide it.)
Asriel couldn't handle thinking of this as something innate to him, as something that couldn't be fixed... so he blamed his parents as "useless," and decided life wasn't worth living, unable to care about others.
Chara wasn't around to let him downChara had already let him down, by pressuring him into that plan, by trying to kill the humans without giving him any warning. Chara was the only one he could believe in emulating anymore.
So Asriel tried to kill himself. And succeeded. But... all that Determination filled him with doubts about going through with it. What would happen to this him, since he'd already died, and no longer had his soul?
He wills himself not to die.
He resets for the first time.
He wakes in the garden, alone, and Asgore meets him for "the first time" again.
He gives in the videogame term, because that's an easy way to think of it, and begins to experiment. Kills himself an unspecified number of times in an unspecified number of ways, and over and over reloads the garden save.
Once he confirmed he could do that, he started to "do good." To live out the sorts of actions that Asriel would have wanted to do, had he this power. Figured out what was wrong with peoples' lives and manipulated them into being happier. Fixed their problems for them (instead of helping them to learn to fix their own.)
Treated the people around him like videogame NPCs with no real agency. Not outlandish, given that compared to him, who could at any point erase everything they did, who had all kinds of insights into their personalities and fears and doubts and circumstances... they were living this all for the first time.
Flowey gets a little meta at this part of the story. He'd been treating them like it was a game of the Sims 1, where characters don't really grow up. Where you eventually get bored, and want to see everything in the game, and start lighting houses on fire and removing ladders from pools. Where it's fun and funny to see them die, and to watch the others react to their grief. Where it's godlike power.
Unfortunately for Asriel, he's seemingly never played Sims 2, 3, or 4. He kept fixing everyone's lives in the way he determined was best for them, then got bored with them doing the same things. The problem with resetting the game to play the beginning over and over, with playing the same areas over and over, is that the variables reveal themselves and it all gets predictable.
- Why did Asriel keep going back to the garden and toying with people from the same parameters? Why didn't he try living for decades, and get to know their children, or their grandchildren?
I've read every book.
I've burned every book.
I've won every game.
I've lost every game.
I've appeased everyone.
I've killed everyone.
Sets of numbers...
Lines of dialogue...
I've seen them all.
- Flowey has been to the True Lab. He befriended everyone, which includes Alphys. He's seen all the lab entries, he knows his origins.
- He's simplifying his interactions with everyone here as befriend+experience vs destroy+execution.
- He's also exaggerating. There's a few things he hasn't seen, things he doesn't know:
I just have one question for you, Chara.
How did you get back to the RUINS from here...?
...Wait, I know.
She must have taken you when she left.
The king has six [human souls] locked away.
I've tried hundreds of ways to get him to show me them...
But he just won't.
geno new home
the first time flower!asriel woke in the garden, he as "so scared," unable to feel any limbs, no idea what was going on, and he cried out for help. he still expected his parents to love him, and come running to help. that part wasn't broken or lost.
*but nobody came
asriel cried.
eventually asgore came, saw the crying flower, and asked what was up. asriel explained, and asgore held him (tears in his eyes) and tried to comfort him.
but... while asriel had felt fear and cried for himself? he felt nothing in response to asgore's tears. no mirror neurons, no automatic reciprocal emotions. asgore's reassurance didn't reassure him. asgore's tears didn't inspire his own tears. he just felt empty.
asriel stayed there a few weeks (maybe a month or two), trying to force his full array of emotions to return... but they didn't. not for asgore, not for anybody else who came by the castle. and the disappointment, the frustration with himself for not feeling like himself, the frustration with asgore for not being able to make it alright... got to him.
so asriel ran away (burrowing through the ground as we see him do through the game, maybe moving around by making roots pull him, maybe just handwavium magic)
"eventually", after exploring the underground (possibly for signs of where his mom went), he found the ruins and found toriel. hints that asriel thinks more highly than asgore, "if anybody, SHE could make me feel"
* ...
* she failed
* Ha ha...
(with that genuine furrowed brow he uses when he's sad and trying to hide it.)
Asriel couldn't handle thinking of this as something innate to him, as something that couldn't be fixed... so he blamed his parents as "useless," and decided life wasn't worth living, unable to care about others.
Chara wasn't around to let him down
So Asriel tried to kill himself. And succeeded. But... all that Determination filled him with doubts about going through with it. What would happen to this him, since he'd already died, and no longer had his soul?
He wills himself not to die.
He resets for the first time.
He wakes in the garden, alone, and Asgore meets him for "the first time" again.
He gives in the videogame term, because that's an easy way to think of it, and begins to experiment. Kills himself an unspecified number of times in an unspecified number of ways, and over and over reloads the garden save.
Once he confirmed he could do that, he started to "do good." To live out the sorts of actions that Asriel would have wanted to do, had he this power. Figured out what was wrong with peoples' lives and manipulated them into being happier. Fixed their problems for them (instead of helping them to learn to fix their own.)
Treated the people around him like videogame NPCs with no real agency. Not outlandish, given that compared to him, who could at any point erase everything they did, who had all kinds of insights into their personalities and fears and doubts and circumstances... they were living this all for the first time.
Flowey gets a little meta at this part of the story. He'd been treating them like it was a game of the Sims 1, where characters don't really grow up. Where you eventually get bored, and want to see everything in the game, and start lighting houses on fire and removing ladders from pools. Where it's fun and funny to see them die, and to watch the others react to their grief. Where it's godlike power.
Unfortunately for Asriel, he's seemingly never played Sims 2, 3, or 4. He kept fixing everyone's lives in the way he determined was best for them, then got bored with them doing the same things. The problem with resetting the game to play the beginning over and over, with playing the same areas over and over, is that the variables reveal themselves and it all gets predictable.
- Why did Asriel keep going back to the garden and toying with people from the same parameters? Why didn't he try living for decades, and get to know their children, or their grandchildren?
I've read every book.
I've burned every book.
I've won every game.
I've lost every game.
I've appeased everyone.
I've killed everyone.
Sets of numbers...
Lines of dialogue...
I've seen them all.
- Flowey has been to the True Lab. He befriended everyone, which includes Alphys. He's seen all the lab entries, he knows his origins.
- He's simplifying his interactions with everyone here as befriend+experience vs destroy+execution.
- He's also exaggerating. There's a few things he hasn't seen, things he doesn't know:
I just have one question for you, Chara.
How did you get back to the RUINS from here...?
...Wait, I know.
She must have taken you when she left.
The king has six [human souls] locked away.
I've tried hundreds of ways to get him to show me them...
But he just won't.
