memes

It’s just a good story using meta elements as a metaphor for power dynamics. I thought people here would appreciate that.

Undertale’s message isn’t “doing RPG thing make you bad”, it’s that if you are in a state of privilege, you have more moral responsibility than those who are not. As a protagonist with the literal privilege of warping time and space, it is treated in-game as cruel to kill monsters because they are a political underclass that is nearly powerless to your massive systemic advantages.

The good ending is what happens when you show solidarity with Monsterkind and have genuine sympathy for them. That’s why it’s so cheery and positive, it’s the result of you leveraging your own systemic advantage against the human/monster class system and for liberation, allowing Monsterkind the space to develop a true mass movement and escape the Underground. This is also why, despite doing stuff like killing six children, people like Asgore are not treated narratively as evil, merely cowardly. Undyne, someone who I would never describe as cowardly but is arguably just as murderous, is treated in a significantly more positive light, even though she is also trying to kill children. This is because the children she (and Asgore) are trying to kill are members of a reality-warping upper class, and humanity are the people that put truly put those children into this position, not the monsters trying to kill them. This is reinforced by the heavy implications that all of the human children that fall to the underground are ostracized or struggle with immense mental health issues- Humanity both literally abandoned them and figuratively abandoned them by putting them into a situation where they have to choose between their own freedom and the freedom of Monsterkind.

This isn’t me doing the whole “media I like is communist!” thing, by the way. It’s a reading of the game that other people have mentioned and talked about. There’s an entire essay online of someone from Ireland comparing the themes to the Irish independence movement. It’s not even really subtle, the way the game actively treats the violence of monsters as less reprehensible than the player makes it the only sensical analysis of it.

This entire thing is also heightened even more by the fridge logic when you realize that all of the other human children that fell would have ALSO had the ability to save and load (UT Yellow sadly can’t be canon because of this), and would have to had to actively give up to die like they did, meaning that at least some of them likely realized the state Monsterkind was in and actively sacrificed themselves to work towards freeing them, an echoing and final act of solidarity between ostracized people. The high capability for humans being able to kill to gain more power means that with proper saving and loading, it probably wouldn’t be hard for any of the children to do a more low-intensity equivalent of the no-mercy route and escape, so this theoretically implies that every single child made this choice independently.

You don’t have to enjoy the game, but the hype isn’t really unwarranted IMO. It’s a rare example of genuine art in the medium getting actually popular. There’s plenty of other artistic and well made (and arguably better!) games out there, don’t get me wrong, but we live in hellworld and for some reason none of them get the attention they deserve. Undertale is just a rare exception to that.