. . . that probably won’t make sense unless you’ve played the game and might disagree with you if you have. But here I am anyway. If you haven’t played the game, I do recommend it.
So, for Christmas, a friend gave me Undertale, which I had heard of but not played. I knew a few things but not that much—mainly that there were different paths based on whom you decided to kill or spare. I should mention that I have played fairly few video games in my life, though I sometimes watch Let’s Plays, and therefore am fairly slow; it took me about 10 hours to finish the game.
Knowing what small spoilers I did, I thought about how I
wanted to play the game, and decided to try not to let my knowledge influence
me. It came to me very quickly that I
would play as follows: kill only those characters I found it absolutely
necessary to kill and do my absolute best to spare everyone else.
TORIEL
The first monster I killed was this psycho kidnapper who
imprisoned me in her home and decided to make me her child against my will;
then, when I tried to escape, dragged me back again and again before finally violently attacking me. Aside from the fact of kidnapping and
wrongful imprisonment, it became clear to me that the only way I’d ever be safe
from her was to defeat her.
After that, I didn’t kill any monsters. I went way out of my way to be merciful and
spare them. The only time I slipped up
was once monster that attacked me. I
tried to spare it, but it refused, so I hit back . . . and hit way harder than I
expected, since I didn’t fully understand the fight mechanics. It died by accident. A pity, but since it had attacked me first and I’d
done my best to spare it, I wasn’t too broken up.
UNDYNE
The next monster I killed was this psycho stalker who followed me halfway across the world, repeatedly attempting to murder me. I offered to spare her, to talk with her,
anything—and she refused. She screamed
at me again and again that she was going to murder me and use my soul to open a
portal to the human world, where she would murder all humans. (And she dared call me a
murderer!) Se refused to back
down, but I wasn't about to let her murder not only me but all humans. I therefore fought back and I killed her.*
(*The game went all sad-music and then silence, as if I
should be sorry for what I’d done; as if I’d been ruthless. You know, because it was so wrong of me to prevent the monster who’d hunted
me across the world from murdering all of humanity. . .)
There were three more encounters, over the course of the
game, in which monsters attacked me and I couldn’t figure out how to save them,
and who died while I was trying to get them to accept mercy or at least let me run away. One of these encounters was the royal guards,
so there were two of them. My overall
kill count was now up to six: four by accident, in defending myself, and two on
purpose, out of reasonable necessity.
ASGORE
I then encountered the king, the one who had ordered
everyone in his land to murder me in order to further his plans of genocide—for which plan he had already murdered six children. To quote the king’s exact dialogue: “I said
that I would destroy any human that came here.
I would use their souls to become godlike… Then, I would destroy
humanity...”
(**The wiki says he plans “to kill seven humans and use
their SOULs to break the barrier that traps everyone Underground. However, he
is not evil or malicious” . . . Did whoever write the second sentence bother to
read the first?)
I wished to accuse him of his crimes, of the deaths of the children and of the deaths of his own citizens (who had only died because he'd ordered them to murder me. And . . . the game wouldn’t let me accuse him. Instead, it made me listen to this child-murdering genocide-plotter give a long whiny speech about how it wasn’t his fault he murdered children. He didn't want to do it; he didn't like it. He just had to, y'see?
You are king. You are
king. How dare you not want to dirty
your own hands. I guess it’s easy to
order murder when you don’t have to do it yourself! But it is your responsibility. You evil murderer, how dare you!
Then the king attacked me, and I defeated him but didn't yet kill him. As he lay wounded, he gave another whiney speech about how, really, he wasn’t a bad guy; he just murdered all those people because he wanted to give his people hope, but now doing that was too much bother (how tiresome child-murder and genocide had become!) and all he wanted was to go have a nicer life, so how about I just do what I like and leave him alone?
How unbelievably selfish, capricious, and evil can you get? But beyond that: what would happen if I did leave, and left you in charge, you murderer? Of all the monsters I have met, it is you above all who deserve the name “monster”!
And so, rather than let the king continue to do what he pleased, I killed him, determined to take his
place as king: to rule the monsters as they should be ruled, to protect them
without resorting to the evil methods of my predecessor.*** And without taking the monsters to the land
of the humans, where their peaceful society would have been shattered into
bloodshed. Maybe someday, in small
pieces, when the time was right. But
for now, when the monster society was peaceful and the king's prejudice strong and it had been established the monsters would easily be wiped out? No. I would bring about a fruitful society where we were.
(***But did the game allow this? No, it crashed, made me fight a flower, and
then had my character leave for the world of the humans, saying a robot was now
king. But that was not my choice. My choice was not to leave. My choice was to take responsibility and act as a king should act.)
I AM FRUSTRATED.
The story of the game accuses me of being a murderer and has
all sorts of sad music for the actual murderers when they die. It says—you must be a pacifist (but everyone
else can be a murderer) or you’re just the worst!
Ultimately . . . this game, which is full of seeming choice, did not give me the choices I wanted: to accuse the king and to rule in his place. (And yes, I’d have been allowed to rule in that society. Apparently, any old person can rule it, based on how some endings allow a dog to rule, a celebrity robot to rule, the unknown Papyrus to rule, etc.)
To survive with
mercy, with sense, and with strength, to take what was broken and work with it,
to take responsibility . . . these things, the game would not allow.
What a pity. What a waste. And yet I stand by my character's decisions, every one of them, as reasonable and just and necessary.
I would have been the king they needed. And whatever the game says, I declare this my ending.
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