The central Video Game Fantasy Undertale tries to explore with its ‘Morality System’ is the Fantasy of Fun, Righteous Violence. With the knowledge that pretty much every encounter in the game can be won peacefully if you just put your mind into it, and the context the Player is canonically an Unkillable Time God, and the fact that pretty much every ‘Enemy’ in the game is an important part of the Monster Community and a beloved friend of someone - not a disposable number or an Objectively Bad Person everyone will praise you for killing…. That all takes away from the standard video game fantasy of, well, beating the Monsters and getting Stronger and knowing you’re a ‘Hero’ for doing so.
If anything, if you embrace the idea of beating Monsters and getting Stronger to its logical extreme, you end up being the Objectively Bad Person your enemies can face in acts of Futile, but definitely Heroic and Righteous Violence…
And then even when you are in a situation when you have to FIGHT, against Asgore, in a Fight that wouldn’t even lock you out of a Pacifist Ending if you do kill him, this lack of choice/judgement of your actions does not remove the emotional complexity of violence from this situation. The entire sequence leading up to it is designed to make Asgore as sympathetic as possible, you hear people speak highly of him through the whole game, you know he has become the symbol of hope for the entire Underground, the removed Mercy button feels more like an option taken away then a ‘permission’ to act violently.
The Asgore Fight is, in the context of a Pacifist or Near-Pacifist Playthrough, a Human and a Monster who would much rather solve things peacefully, but both feel like they have no other choice but to FIGHT. And that's not really Fun nor Righteous, that's just a tragedy. Not ‘you can’t Love and Understanding your way out of this one’ as a permission for violence, but emphasizing how truly terrible it is that Love and Understanding are insufficient for resolving the situation. "Kill or be Killed" as a tragedy, and not in the way Flowey has learned to use it, as a validation for murderous callousness.
Because outside of the Murder Route Battles, Violence/Killing isn’t always simple or easy or righteous to the other characters either (even if it still feels like the Player is held up to a different standard, cause, like, Unkillable Time God). Toriel is, similarly to Asgore, someone who would quite like to be a Pacifist, but just can’t put her faith in non-violence. And as much as she tries to avoid causing lasting damage, she can, much like the Player, make Fatal mistakes.
No matter how much she tries, Undyne can’t find the Determination within her to become Undying outside of the Murder Route because she always has a little hint of doubt within her that maybe Asgore’s plan isn’t the right, heroic thing after all. Alphys is at least tokenly on-board with the plan until she starts developing a parasocial relationship with the Player Character, and then she starts creating her hare-brained manipulative scheme to try and make sure both Asgore and you can stay alive….
And the one time the Player gets to FIGHT in a way that one could argue is both necessary and righteous is Omega Flowey. Like, much like Asgore, this is a battle you can’t resolve in non-violent ways no matter how hard you try, if you’re still on the Neutral Route, you do probably still have the moral high ground over Flowey, the elements that do make Flowey sympathetic are revealed for most players after this fight, and, like, the Player never stops being the Player of course, but within the fiction of the battle, Flowey has taken over as the resident Unkillable Time God. The only reason why the Player can still come back over and over again when they die is because Flowey lets them, because, well, he doesn’t have anything better to do.
You can say that between that battle and the Murder Route, that Undertale makes the argument that the only kind of people in the Underground that are both powerful enough and unreasonable enough to the point where violence feels actually righteous against them are people like Flowey and Murder Route Players, people who utterly disregarded any attempt to treat the Monsters around them as people - but rather as either Enemies and/or toys that need to be squeezed for every last drop of Content. But also… the ironic thing being, with Unkillable Time Gods, killing them is actually a rather inefficient way of dealing with them.
Killing Flowey is designed to never be satisfying for the Player either way, it's tragic on the Murder Route, and at the end of his Neutral Omega FIGHT it's very obviously the less triumphant option compared to giving him MERCY. Neutral Route Flowey wants you to kill him, because he feels pretty damn confident you'd be unsatisfied with the Neutral Ending and thus you'll RESET the game and bring him back to life. So the only thing killing him does is, in his eyes, validate his views of the world. "Kill or Be Killed" started from a place of genuine trauma and regret, a situation where honest non-violence was punished by a cruel world...
But it has become, like I said before, his justification for the cruelty and callousness he developed with his newfound powers and general disregard for the personhood of the people of the Underground.
He seeks out further validation of this philosophy, he wants to keep on believing his violence has also always been justified in some twisted cynical way (even though up until the start of the game, he was the resident Unkillable Time God), and if a Player is really interested in 'beating' him, it might be a better strategy to try to prove him wrong...
And then with Deltarune trying to be, on some level a more complex and darker look on defeating your enemies via the Power of Friendship and Understanding, with an acknowledgement right off the first Chapter that there are some battles you will have to FIGHT…
But also with the theme of Choices Not Mattering and the Dark Worlds having a more ‘Game-y’ approach to Violence than the Underground. With Enemies generally just running away when defeated rather than Literally Dying. So unless you go Full Snowgrave, you are at worst a Massive Asshole rather than a Literal Mass-Murderer… There are FIGHTs that are meant to just be Goofy Fun, like the Giga-Queen Battle (where I don’t think many people were worried about Queen seriously dying from her giant robot getting punched in the face a bunch of times)….
And FIGHTing the Titan fits pretty well into the archetype of a Heroic Righteous Battle, against something more like a force of nature with hands that can’t even understand the concept of Mercy…
But it’s nice that Deltarune never truly lost sight of the idea of ‘you can’t Love and Understanding your way out of this one’ being a Tragedy.
Like, King at first seemed like a classically straightforward Objectively-Bad-Guy that you can beat up and be hailed as a Hero (especially since this is basically what happens after a ‘Pacifist’ Playthrough of Chapter 1), but…
The more we learn about King and about the Metaphysical Mechanics of Light and Dark, the more clear it becomes he really is fascinatingly and compellingly rebellious. The way Darkners are ‘supposed’ to live really is Existentially Terrifying, and it’s easy to get invested in any of the few Darkners who find it to within themselves the will to try and break away from how unfair it all is. King’s refusal to believe the happiness of Castle Town will last and that the Darkners won’t end up abandoned to the despair of being denied their ‘Purpose’ again, not wanting to 'serve' Lightners, fighting to prevent the sealing of his Fountain, calling Ralsei a ‘patsy’ and a ‘puppet’, that all feels very understandable considering the opinions that Ralsei did believe during the events of the early Chapters of the game.
And, like, King still sucks. He’s still kind of a Terrible Person regardless of his goals, and it’s understandable why Susie has yet to soften on him at all.
(Especially as it’s very likely that he’s striking a nerve with her regarding her own family life).
But it still becomes more and more Tragic that there’s seemingly no way for the Heroes to prove King’s hardened heart, turned cynical and cruel through genuine trauma from a fundamentally unfair world just like Flowey's, wrong, that with Susie also wanting to break through the unfairness of Light and Dark in her own rudely optimistic way, there is no path for them to somehow join forces in this goal, that King will always reject friendship from Lightners, because on some level that will be surrendering to his original Purpose as a plaything over his newly self-built identity as the Bad Guy. Even if King is kind of a terrible person, the reason why the gap between him and the Heroes can’t be bridged isn’t up just to him being Terrible, but to the fact the Heroes of the Prophecy just seem… not very capable of addressing the legitimate grievances he does have.
And then with the Sound of Justice, that seemed to just be the Darkner equivalent of a Mindless Automaton, or on a more symbolic level, a Zombie. An ‘undead’ reflection of a lost loved one. And, while its apparent lack of sapience means we don’t have to worry about the ‘hey, did Ralsei just straight-up murder someone or what’ problem at such a critical moment, it’s still playing up the horrors that come with facing something that won’t listen to reason. And the Zombie/Undead horror of being forced to harm (or see your friend) harm something with a loved one’s face.
And then Chapter 5 is so cool on this front, because even though it’s the most ‘Pacifistic’ Chapter on many level (with both the Final Boss and a Secret Boss you basically have to solve peacefully) and very Not-Evil antagonists, it’s also the Chapter that’s most directly deconstructive of Undertale’s Pacifist Root Route since Chapter 1 - challenging the idea of always being able to find the Golden Solution that will make everyone happy. Sometimes people’s goals will be at odds, sometimes you can’t please everyone, sometimes it really is a matter of Kill or Be Killed Seal or Be Sealed.
And it’s so tragic because this is a case of two groups of equally sympathetic, equally well-meaning people who would both honestly prefer if they didn’t have to battle each other, that would have honestly preferred it if the other side would have been over by their Power of Friendship and seen things from their perspective, but they just can’t compromise on the ‘Fantasies’ that have become such important Homes for them. There’s smaller details you can litigate either way as to which of them is More Right, and also other grievances involved such as Flowery being aware that Kris is a Double-Agent working against the goals of both groups… But the Tragedy of being unable to find a peaceful solution, for both sides, is the important narrative focus.
At the end of the day, the situation is only peacefully resolved when one side had to admit that their Goals were just plain doomed from the start. So it’s hard to feel 100% Triumphant about even this non-violent victory either. Not when our Heroes are also trying to fight against their own Doomed by the Narrative Status, not when Ralsei’s defeatism and determinism was the cause behind so much of their negative behavior this chapter. Even winning Peacefully can be a very ambivalent victory.
And it’ll be interesting to see where this thread goes in the future. The Roaring Knight is one of the other few Fights so far where MERCY is just not an option, but I skipped over it in my analysis because we just know so little about them right now, it’s hard to say why, or what sort of emotions it’s supposed to invoke in us, or if even it’s going to stay that way in subsequent encounters. Not to mention any other potentially-antagonistic forces that the Fun Gang hasn’t fought directly yet. Like I said, Deltarune has a wide, nuanced variety of conflicts that fall in different places on the emotional Spectrum… But I hope this angle, of 'Kill or Be Killed' as a Tragedy is never lost on the game, that it keeps being an important focus.
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romaincrisis
