I genuinely can't take people seriously who complain suselle doesn't have enough attention then say they ship spamtenna...
There that's what did it it's spamtenna's yaoislop killed suselle's momentum in the fandom!
Cause you all never cared about suselle enough in the first place and lost your damn minds when you got CRUMBS of spamtenna hating each other! Oh no the consequences of my own actions 🙄
sorry guys i still dont think we talk about suselle enough. they literally canonically got together but the standout ship from chap 5 was blellow. ykw the mlm ship. and with suselle being dethroned by spamtenna. im not gonna say it but ykw what im getting at right
ok thank you for noticing the difference in how people treat flawed-but-trying parent toriel as opposed to really-flawed-but-really-trying parent asgore. like they're both interesting characters but holy shit. even the kindest toriel takes i see are pretty exclusively about defending her from the excessive criticism, meanwhile asgore defense posts are largely just "why meme on nice man :(" and ive seen hundreds of people wax poetic on how kind he is at this point and the closest some people get to mentioning his flaws is talking about how sad he is
which. those takes on asgore are missing out on the best parts of him anyway, like his whole "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" thing and the fact he's genuinely complicated
like damn! im gonna have to start making extensive posts on why tori is a great character just to balance out the rampant fandom sexism! and it's going to earn me death threats!!!
and god don't even. get me started on how stupid it is that 90% of toriel discussion is about her being a mother, another 7% is about her being a wife, and another 2% is about her being a girlfriend. god forbid a woman have hobbies. ok that last sentence was a joke but it's also so real
Misogyny is so ingrained in all of us (some people seem to have forgotten about unconscious bias even) but any time you bring it up in fandom spaces everyone wants to wash their hands clean of it. If your vitriol towards a group shows up this often in your fandom spaces sorry but that's something we're gonna have to talk about!!
It's like whenever fans want to show horrid attitudes towards women in their media they'll go all in and criticise every little thing and blow it out of proportion but when you point out that they have misogynistic ideas suddenly "it's not that deep" okay which one is it buddy?
[this got long, rest under the cut]
It's classic poor little meow meow syndrome where every time they see a flawed man they have to become his personal defence lawyer, my client did not wrong your honour in fact he was the victim 👆🏻🧐
And at the same time quickly disavowing any woman who dares to be her own person within a narrative. Let's not even get started on how differently male and female characters who are just slightly annoying are treated lmao.
To talk of Asgore first, you are exactly right, he is an extremely egregious character, both in Undertale and Deltarune, and that's what makes him interesting! It's not just oh sad man makes mistakes. It's about just how horrific those mistakes can be, actually look at that and sit with it!! With UT your first introduction to him is a warning: he will kill you, he will take your soul. And every subsequent thing you hear is conflicting messages.
"He's the sweetest"//"He has killed several children"
"He never wants conflict"//"He just needs one more soul"
"I'm sure you can just talk to him"//"No one has made it past Asgore"
Within the circumstances of Undertale, Asgore stands for the question of violence and when it is necessary, he is the one character that will not even give you the option for Mercy till you fight him for it, he IS everything they've all said him to be: sad, and scared, and kind, and yet paradoxically merciless, and intimidating, and willing to kill.
Because notice in Undertale where characters are not willing to kill (Toriel, Papyrus, quiz-time Mettaton) you simply cannot die to them (unless you really try with Toriel lol). My point being whatever reasons he has and whatever conflicts he has aren't there to excuse him or absolve him. They're there to complicate him. Like with the rest of the game it's an interesting meditation on what violence is justified and how do you move forward from it? And if your answer is 'by pretending it didn't happen yay♡' maybe you haven't engaged with the themes of the story.
That's fine right? You can have fun with a story and move on. And yet the moment any flaws show up on women characters the oodles of misogyny find a perfect little punching bag and no one wants to let go anymore.
In that same chapter of Deltarune we see Asgore once again overtly stalking an ex who does not want to get back together and has made it clear enough. And maybe this second part irked people less but I was also uncomfortable with how Asgore just sat and watched the way Carol treated Noelle and Susie without thinking to intervene as the only other adult in the room. Which again, is what makes him interesting! He's prioritising something selfish, his own relationship with Carol and everything it gets him (including whatever help he may be getting on his investigation or whatever other 'good' purpose you can imagine) over jeopardizing that to take some heat off the children in his presence. Which is what's at the core of his flaws there, that kind of selfishness and avoidance, so not only is it ridiculous when people make it out to be like he's fully a Good Person™, it's also something I don't get the appeal of, because what compels you about that character then? And what makes you so readily happy to overlook some creepy ass behaviour because you like the character it comes from? I saw some jokes even about people cheering on Asgore killing Sans or something as "fix-it" and it was not funny to me lol, stalker ex who kills your new partner isn't a haha funny silly thing lmao why are you framing it as a heroic thing to fix the protagonists' problems XD
Which brings me to Toriel, I was never really into her that much in Undertale, the overprotectiveness, overbearing nature, it's again rooted in good reasons within canon which makes her a good character but put me off with how claustrophobic it can come off as. And again, it's the flaws that round her off as her own character. Which is why your point about all discussions around her is so important, it's always "is she a good/bad mother/wife/girlfriend?" and never just about her as a character.
We see so many scattered evidences of Toriel (Deltarune) trying to be there for Kris throughout Hometown, reading and learning and asking about Kris, being happy enough that they made a friend that she slackens the reins, and the cute changing wallpaper of her kids on the computer screen. And just as Kris is finally making a new friend, someone on the same wavelength as them after so long, the same is happening with Toriel and Sans. But we don't treat those connections the same way and this is where misogynistic ideas come out in criticism about her.
It's that age old deal where we want our mothers to always be mothers, any moment they take away from being that, to being anything else anything more, goes against that entitlement we feel. The woman is the caregiver how dare she be anything but. The nurturing teacher in my school is just my teacher how unseemly that I saw her out with her boyfriend ewww.
To put the situation into perspective: we only see Toriel drunk once, it is on a weekend, it is after everything else has closed down in town and her new friend has come over to have fun with her. My first thought was also that she seems to have gotten carried away enough that she didn't check on her kid. But really had it even been that late into the night, especially when the kids were out together? I see a lot of people projecting stuff about themselves onto the characters there, and I do not care about that whatsoever, what your personal experiences are, are yours, and aren't a substitute for textual analysis I'm sorry to say, like again Toriel in Undertale reminded me of some things with my mum and that's why I felt off about those things but that's a me thing. That doesn't say anything about Toriel as a character and I never claimed for it to. We all had fucked up shit, that's not a trump card to use against people calling out your misogyny.
When you make an analysis of the character and the basis for it is ideals that are misogynistic: what is expected of a woman, how we talk about women who aren't given to childcare 24/7, how we talk about women who unwind, how we talk about women we find frivolous or promiscuous for having a new partner after a breakup etc etc, when your character analysis relies on misogynistic ideas that analysis is GOING to be misogynistic. The language you're using is GOING to be conservative and people will rightly see is as being so. It's not that the game and the characters and all that shit is "that deep". It's that the language you feel emboldened to use and the conservative concepts you flaunt around for the sake of your arguments ... Well they ARE that deep. Especially when it's so obvious that you apply them selectively to women.
To revisit the scene: Kris and Susie return from witnessing something like the end of the world, cannot tell anyone about it, and are met with life going on jolly as usual. We don't need to extrapolate alcoholism and abuse and neglect where there isn't enough textual evidence of any from a very VERY specific circumstance.
(Though if you're writing fanfic and treating it as fanfic rather than character analysis because you Do want to explore that possibility, ofc fic is fic, do whatever the hell)
However, imagine back in chapter 2 if we had got a similar scene with Kris and Susie, new friends, similar wavelengths, want to spend time together, unwind on the weekend, you'd take that on face value as just two characters having fun together. Why? Because they don't have the added baggage of being a mother. You expect, consciously or unconsciously, for a woman to stay a mother once she becomes a mother. Her role has to subsume her personality, because she is something to someone now, not just her own someone. And if you aren't ready to unpack that sort of bias when you're doing analysis, if you take it personally and get mad when people point out you're using conservative language, you stop having an "unconscious misogynistic bias" at that point and start being wilfully misogynistic. And I'm not here for that lmao die mad about it
