Charasriel and Friskriel!
first: thank you :)
Charasriel
oh man. so much! everything about it! not in a world without you speech gets me... the whole asriel not being ready to say goodbye speech...
ironically, no mercy route probably made me ship it extra hard because of how much dread is injected into the dynamic there - i felt extremely bad about that route, but fascinated.
after all these years it's you
i promise i won't do anything to get in your way, i can help
maybe it would be okay if we just lived on the surface the two of us...
asriel's obvious obsession, and the rockiness between the two despite how close they were... that's fascinating.
2. What are your favorite things about the ship?
oh man, so many things about it!
I think charasriel is very obviously my peak 'go to' ship - it is very obviously what I love condensed into this. thing. I love the mourning, I love the codependency, I love all the different interpretations of their dynamic and different ways you can read certain things - and how you can never know EXACTLY how it went down which allows you to keep tackling the same moments from different perspectives. kind of like turning a little piece of trauma in your hands over and over again, kind of like flowey/az does haha. I love how asriel and chara are Bad Kids and things go the worst way possible and how they're both entirely different fascinating characters who Have Similarities But Differences. i love how different routes of the game lead to entirely different information on the characters and their relationship. there's so many tiny little pieces of insight to collect about their relationship, but it's all fractured from where you're collecting it.
it is the most pure and distilled codependency ship. you can write about things going wrong in so many ways. i'm a sucker for codependent childhood friends, and here the codependent childhood friends are super plot relevant and serve as this... backbone to every event, even though no one is aware of it.
3. Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?
man i try not to complain but I actually AM a little picky about fanfic, so
- genre of fic where Chara is Always Right. if you don't know the fic I mean, it goes like this... asriel has flaws (correct) but asriel is spoiled. chara is right because chara is a victim and has seen the abuses of the world. asriel is wrong because he is Spoiled and probably neurotypical and anyway none of what chara did was that bad anyway-
- asriel is a simple sweet kid. always innocent. always morally right. always says chara that's wrong!
- chara is a simple sweet kid. they just loved gardening. they are super sweet. they never wanted to hurt anybody!
basically i don't like when either side is painted as wholly innocent and flat because it's not how i read either character, but i also don't like when the story paints it as chara never doing anything wrong to asriel either. it's a complex dynamic that 'seems' simple
ironically, very similarly to chasriel, it's the not in a world without you speech. and then... the speech at the end too, where he acknowledges he's projecting and frisk's differences.
I mean... asriel is projecting obviously, and I think both that similarity and Recognizing the dissimilarities are both interesting things going on with that relationship.
i'm also... hm. I think a lot of people play very nice Frisks! but I always imagine Frisk did do things sometime to see just what happened. it's tempting right? so I always imagine a Frisk who could fundamentally understand Asriel, and an Asriel who can do similarly
2. What are your favorite things about the ship?
ahhh so one thing I really love is that... a lot of what's shared between Frisk and Asriel is stuff basically no one knows about. there's this bottle of secrets between them. Asriel is aware of what Frisk has done during time loops, and Frisk is aware of Asriel's true identity and what no one else knows about him as a character at the end of the game. there's also... so much potential for time travel shenanigans, and playing around with life and death. basically two kid characters rewinding time endlessly.
i love time loops. i love the idea of characters who wrong others and then get used to being able to just rewind to fix it. i love that flowey and frisk are the only two characters who can really bond over this together... this game both of them have played with each other, specifically
3. Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?
hmmm... definitely another case where frisk and asriel are often made too nice for me! i think a lot of separation of asriel from flowey as an identity happens as well, and so you end up with a lot of characterizations where it's like... the character frisk spent the majority of the game with isn't even really... IN the interpretation of the character fanficwise. I like some flowisk labelled fics, but tend to not get the bite I want out of friskriel labelled fics. asriel is... a brat! that's why I love him
basically, comes back to the fact that without injecting a bit of flowey in him, asriel is a character who doesn't have a lot of character meat to me
frisk is someone where i think every interp is valid, but interps of frisk where they don't do everything right first go are more interesting to me