i’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about frisk and chara, and what their lives and families were like before they fell into the underground. and i’ve used a couple observations i’ve noticed throughout my several years of liking undertale to come up with a couple theories.
i do wanna leave a disclaimer and say that this post is probably gonna be a mess because i’m not the best at explaining complex thoughts, but i will try my best
i would also like to say that everything i’m about to say is 100% hypothetical, especially for my ideas about frisk. it really all does depend on the perspective that you have on the game, the storyline, and also, the way that the player controls frisk. these are just my thoughts that i want to share :)
also, a small trigger warning for chara’s section: i will be talking briefly about topics of abu$e and su!c!dal ideation, so just be careful please :)
chara:
because of chara’s evident hatred for humanity, i feel that they must have come from a broken home. whether their parents were abusive or neglectful or not around, something drove them to that conclusion that humans are awful.
because of their home life, chara probably acted strangely around peers at school. this could have led them to be outcast, or worse, get bullied. and this is another thing that probably increased their hatred for humanity. it would make more sense that their hatred came from many places, not just one.
chara definitely did not have good intentions when they climbed mt. ebott. legend says that when you climb up the mountain, you never return. so it was clear that chara didn’t really care what would happen to them. they just never wanted to come back. i do think too that a part of them probably wanted to end their own life.
when they climbed up and saw what it looked like at the top, however, they probably got scared and changed their mind. they were just a child after all, and they had probably been through a lot to drive them to this point. maybe there was a specific incident right before that too that drove them to climb the mountain in the first place. but either way, i think the fact that they ended up tripping into the underground, and the fact that they called out for help, does show that they probably changed their mind at the last second.
despite all this, chara is clearly very smart. the way that they were able to draw conclusions in the underground regarding poisoning themself and binding souls with asriel. this was either something they inherited from someone in their life on the surface, or they spent a lot of their time reading and studying, which made them as smart and observant as they were.
frisk:
there’s a lot less evidence that supports anything i have to say about frisk’s past than their is with chara’s, but i still do have some ideas.
if we’re considering frisk as the pacifist/merciful character here, they probably grew up around good people, for the most part. however, i don’t think it was their parents, and i’ll get to that in a moment. maybe it was an older sibling, or a teacher, or a friend. and they were probably born as a kind person, too. but the people around you influence you a lot, especially when you’re a child. you’re very young and impressionable, so i think that frisk must have had some kind of figure in their life before falling down that taught them to be so kind and helpful, and especially to never give up.
now i also have reason to believe that frisk probably didn’t have a very good financial situation in their life. maybe i’m overthinking it, but the fact that the bandage they had as armor in the beginning of the game had “already been used several times” kind of tells me that they didn’t have much more than that.
i have a lot of speculation about what their parents could have been like. but i really don’t think that they were very good or important figures in frisk’s life. the fact that frisk so quickly trusted flowey and toriel when they fell into the underground is the first sign for me. hasn’t anyone taught them “stranger danger?”
however, a child would likely be terrified in that kind of situation and lean on whoever they could find for support. so i do have some other ideas about it too.
it really does depend on how the player controls them in the game, but the “check” feature in battle and all of the strange things that are available for them to do, in or outside of battle, are signs for a couple things. one of those things is that frisk is probably very observant, and quite good at reading people. this leads me to believe that they’ve built up this skill as a sort of defense mechanism, maybe due to being alone a lot, without parents or guardians around.
additionally, frisk doesn’t seem to understand social cues too well. all the flirting in the middle of battle is one example of that, but of course that probably is there for comic relief of sorts. and of course, a lack of understanding of things like social cues could be due to a huge variety of reasons, maybe one of them just being that frisk is a child. but there’s also a potential that maybe they just didn’t have anyone to explain these things to them.
as for falling down, if we’re believing the theory that frisk was alone a lot in their childhood, they probably played a lot, too. maybe they were using the stick weapon that was equipped at the beginning of the game as a walking stick, and they were just playing, wandering up the mountain. and fell by accident, of course.
please remember that my theories are just things that i’ve thought of because of observations, im not saying that anything here is canon or makes perfect sense. and i know that a lot of it is very far fetched. just some ideas. please be kind :)
