Got a few human-related asks, so might as well combine them into one post! Spoilers for Undertale, obviously. DISCLAIMER THAT THIS IS ALL JUST MY OPINION AND IS NOT A STATEMENT OF FACT IN ANY WAY.
I’ve always interpreted that line as a metaphor. At the end of the game, the being addressing me is... me. Myself. Radic, in this case, haha. After all, that’s how they introduce themselves... they use my game name. They’re the most potent distillation of my own curiousity - I did the run simply because I was curious, because I wanted to see what would happen. And if any other part of me had been strong enough or powerful enough, I would have stopped myself. But I didn’t! The one in “control”, the part of myself that was stronger than all the others, is the being that addresses me at the end. The demon that comes when you call its name, the feeling I get when numbers go up. My curiousity! It was a real moment of self-reflection for me. I feel like I’m really in the minority here with how I took the last scene though, haha.
As for the other fallen humans, honestly, I don’t really think about them at all. If you really want to pull back and look at Undertale as a game, the other six humans weren’t really “humans” at all anyway... they were just npcs like all the other characters in the game, equally scripted and created to serve a purpose for the actual human to come. The only real “human” in the game is the player. But I’ve also at times speculated about them just being failed runs from the same player they don’t remember, OR previous runs done by people who owned the game before you, or vague things along those lines. Admittedly I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about them though! They don’t really interest me like the actual real human player does, haha.
I haven’t read any stories solely about the human that I’ve liked to be honest lol. I’m just not interested in any story that focuses on Frisk/the fallen child, they always feel “OOC” because they don’t reflect my personal experiences with the game, which I realize is an unreasonable expectation and is entirely on me, haha. I’m not asking anyone to accomodate me! I just prefer to read about the other characters as a result.
And I see Frisk/the fallen child as one player! The same person outside the game just making different choices. After all, I did a murder run and a pacifist run, and I’m just one person, and the game was addressing me throughout both of them. I was capable of both things! Both those elements of myself exist in one mind. But again I know this is a deeply unpopular opinion, haha.
This is a tricky question, since it’s hard for me to imagine myself not doing the run for various reasons, haha. But honestly... I don’t think I’d really think about them at all? The murder run made me analyze why I didn’t really think about them or notice them, but...
One of the things about Frisk that makes it so hard for me to see them as anything more than a vessel is that Frisk is almost entirely empty space. We know practically nothing about them. All of the instances of Frisk moving on their own volition are so small and ambiguous that they just easily fall into the category of things I would’ve done anyway.
Actually, a good contrast here would be comparing Frisk to Kris from Deltarune. Kris, in comparison, does feel like their own established character, and the reason for that is because Kris exists within the game’s world without me. Kris has relationships with their family and friends, they existed before I started playing the game, they were a person before I took control of them (which I highly suspect will be a key theme in Deltarune). While who Kris is exactly is still unclear since the game isn’t finished, Kris feels like a person to me in a way that Frisk does not. Gordon Freeman is a similar case. While what characterization he has is pretty thin on the ground, Gordon still existed in the Half-Life world before I started playing, and likewise, Kris also existed in the Deltarune world before I started playing. Even though both of them are entirely silent protagonists who never reveal any of their internal thoughts or feelings about what’s happening, they have a history that doesn’t involve me.
Frisk, in contrast, has nothing establishing them in the world of Undertale at all. They might as well just pop into existence the second you hit start. They have no history before they fell - we never even find out why they want to leave the Underground so badly. Their defining trait, determination, is entirely motive-less. They’re just doing things for the apparent sake of doing them - just like a human player. They have no family, friends, background, history, jobs, hobbies, likes, dislikes, nothing. They are in all ways a complete and total outsider to the Undertale world - just like the human player. There’s literally nothing else there by design.
(Ironically, the first child has more history than Frisk does... barely. But their close meta ties to the player and the player’s experience just leaves me utterly uninterested in that aspect of their existence. Sort of a forest for the trees situation.)
If I never did the murder run, I doubt Frisk would even register as a character in my mind to think about, and I doubt I’d even think about the fact I felt that way about them. I’d have no reason to! Thinking back to when I first beat the game (a pacifist run), I don’t remember thinking about Frisk at all. It was all about me and what I’d done and what I’d accomplished and the friends I’d made. I’d probably use Frisk the same way I use them now - as a way of showing my own actions or thoughts or interactions with the existing characters. A proxy for myself. Though they’d probably do nicer things more often and be less “player-like” in their demeanor or choices. I might just replace them with my own avatar entirely.
For me not to do a murder run, the ability to do one would practically have to be removed, so I probably wouldn’t explore the hideous things you can do as a player with them too often either. Without prompting, I might not think too hard about the intersection of player and avatar and the real consequences of my actions at all... and without that, who knows if I would’ve even gotten as deep into Undertale as I did? I might’ve just wrote it off as a cute RPG and that would have been that...
