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PLAYER
Player name: Snapdragon
Contact:
Characters currently in-game: None
CHARACTER
Character Name: Asriel Dreemurr
Character Age: UP FOR DEBATE. A child? He was somewhere around 10 when he died, so it’s up in the air if time spent lingering post-death counts on his age or not.
Canon: Undertale
Canon Point: After the True Pacifist ending
History:
Wiki entry for Asriel
Wiki entry for Flowey
Personality:
In the beginning, Asriel was something of a coddled, sheltered child. What else could be expected of the heir of the Royal Family, the only child of two of the most doting parents on earth? Having grown up in an underground prison, Asriel knew nothing of the world at large, beyond what monster history books had to say. He played in the old capital, never straying that far from Home (his father, you see, is not very good at names). However, he often played alone - he didn’t really have much by way of friends.
Once Chara entered his life, he shone much more. Having someone devoted to him - and someone he could devote himself to utterly - was one of the happiest things he could ask for. Asriel was a bit sensitive - he’d burst into tears extremely easily, and he didn’t really have much idea at all how to handle confrontation or criticism. In his eyes, disagreeing with or saying no to a friend meant rejecting them as a person. Not many people ever said “no” to the crown prince, after all, especially since he was growing up to be such a sweet young boy. Chara was the first person he met who’d actually treat him like a friend, not like a prince, and it helped him bring out the sides of him that he was much shyer about. He made terrible OCs with unfairly huge powers - always was the creative type - and showcase a little more of the sass lurking inside of him, playing childish little tricks on his family.
Above all, in those days, Asriel didn’t want to hurt anyone.
Things changed after The Plan happened, and both he and Chara lost their lives.
Asriel, of course, was dead. He’d gone to dust. But monster funerals involve scattering a loved one’s dust over the things that mattered to them, because of the belief that their essence would live on in that thing. When Dr. Alphys, the Royal Scientist, plucked the first golden flower to bloom in the royal garden, one whose seed had been sprinkled in Asriel’s dust, and injected it with Determination - pure, concentrated will to live…
It woke up.
Asriel, as a flower, had the will to live, and had consciousness. He didn’t, however, have a soul. That meant he had an inability to feel emotions - empathy, love, compassion… they were all gone. When he awoke, he found himself at home, but home was all wrong. Chara was gone. His mother, Toriel, had left at some point, and there was no trace of her. His father, Asgore, was still there, at least, and he did his best to console his reborn son. But Asriel… he didn’t feel anything at all about Asgore. He tried, certainly. He tried for weeks and weeks. No matter what, though, he couldn’t muster any attachment or fondness for his loving dad. No matter how much Dad loved him, he didn’t feel any better. He only felt… empty. As empty as his home felt, now that it was gray and lifeless and half the Dreemurrs were absent.
In time, he left, and he found Toriel, locked away in the Ruins. In the place they all used to live before Chara joined the family. He was certain a mother’s love could fix him, could make him feel something. No dice.
This began a transformation of Asriel’s way of thinking. He cast off his old name, hating that it would only bring him pity from people, and instead started to call himself Flowey the Flower. (Nobody said he was good at names, either.) He realized… maybe the only person who could understand him, who could make this better, was someone who always seemed to get him. Someone who had been through the same horrible event he had. Chara. But… they were gone. Dead. He’d sit by their grave, and he’d call and call for them, but they never appeared. But… Chara was his best friend. Chara was amazing. The kind of person who could do anything. If he needed them, they’d do anything. They’d even conquer death, wouldn’t they?
...No. That was foolish, huh? He tried to tell himself to be realistic. Chara wasn’t here. It was all his fault, too. He KNEW that humans had to die to give up their souls. He watched Chara do just that. He HELPED them do it - he got the flowers they poisoned themself with. He made Chara go through all that, and he wasn’t brave enough to commit to taking six more souls. Wasn’t Chara right about humans, though? They attacked first. They didn’t listen to Asriel. They just lashed out. It would have been self-defense if they’d fought back. Chara would still be with him, their absorbed soul safe within him, and they could have freed everyone. If he had committed to the ugly truth of this world, if he had accepted that it was kill or be killed… everything would have been better, wouldn’t it?
It got worse when he figured out why his parents had divorced. Everyone in the Underground spoke about how Asgore had six souls, reaped from children who had fallen into the Underground like Chara once had. Even his gentle, soft-hearted father knew the truth. It had been in vain to let himself (and Chara!) die. Killing had been the only answer.
Asriel became despondent. He was wracked with blame for what had happened, crushed by the knowledge that his choice to not fight back had not made things better for anyone. They’d all be free by now, and they’d still be a family, if he had. He should have been strong, so Dad wouldn’t have to be. He should have been as strong as Chara believed he could be. Now everyone’s miserable, Chara’s gone forever, and he’s empty inside, and all of it was his fault.
He decided… life wasn’t worth living if he couldn’t be loved or love anyone. Why bother living if all you can do is stew in the consequences of your mistakes? He tried… ha ha, he tried to do as Chara did. He tried to… erase himself from existence.
It wasn’t any kind of external help that soothed his suicidal urges, his trauma, his depression, his grief. It was the determination fuelling the flower. He was too bereft to want to live, but he was also terrified at the thought of what might happen when something without a soul dies. At the last second, he thought, “I want to live!”
That was when he discovered the power to Reset, to SAVE, to LOAD. His determination gave him complete control over the timeline. Suddenly, he did have the power to erase his mistakes. Not the ones he REALLY wanted to erase, not losing Chara and being beaten to death by the humans on the Surface, but everything he did as a flower. At first, despite his lack of compassion, Asriel’s goodness won out. He tried to solve everyone’s problems perfectly. He made friends with everyone. He read every book. He played every game. He made sure everyone was happy.
...It wasn’t rewarding at all. He still felt as broken and empty as he always had, and now that there was nothing to look forward to, no hope of ever feeling any different than this, the world seemed to go flat and grey. Asriel… became bored.
What, he wondered… what might happen if he tried something else? To speak in a metaphor: what if he played the game a little differently this time? Didn’t get the perfect ending, didn’t go for 100% completion of all the little sidequests. It wasn’t much, but curiosity was a reason to go on. Was a reason to keep living for one more day. It filled these endless empty days with SOMETHING. So he began to experiment. See what might happen if he said something differently to someone, if he tried to sabotage something instead of fixing it, if he just got rid of the NPCs he found annoying?
It was a steep downward slope. At first, he tried to rationalize it - he didn’t LIKE killing or hurting, he just had to see what happened. And it was fine, right? If he had the power to Reset it all away, then it wasn’t like anyone was really getting hurt, was it? But even he knew that was just an excuse. Without any outlet or respite, Asriel’s despair turned hard and jagged, and he began to turn it outward. He became jaded, spiteful, cruel. He lashed out purely because he could, purely because he didn’t know any other way to DO SOMETHING with all this anguish. Love couldn’t fix it - he couldn’t feel love at all. So the opposite, surely, would work. Cruelty was the real nature of the world, so he would become cruel, too.
Then Frisk fell into the Underground. Asriel was lucky, in a sense - he never saw a No Mercy route. But he did see many neutral routes, and spend all of them taunting this new human, trying at every single turn to make them understand the world was kill or be killed. It wasn’t just that, though; there was something… familiar about this human. They had a red SOUL, just like Chara. They sort of looked like Chara, he thought. Sometimes, they acted like Chara, too. They seemed to understand the “kill or be killed” viewpoint that the surface had taught to both of them. Sometimes, too, they were like the Chara they remembered: the kind of person who filled the Underground with hope, who inspired everyone they touched with the willpower to keep going.
Soon, it wasn’t just about tormenting the human. It was about what happened - it was about searching for Chara, the only person who could understand what it was like to feel like this. It was about keeping the human here at all costs. Time and time again, he snatched away the six human souls to make sure that the human didn’t have a happy ending. Time and time again, he encouraged them to keep playing, to keep coming back to him. Even if they killed him sometimes, it didn’t matter - he could understand that far better than the times when the human spared him, in spite of all he’d done to them. Sometimes he began to give them advice (don’t tell Smiley Trashbag anything), sometimes he confessed what he was looking for (there’s only one person he cares about now, and he can’t even REALLY care about them), sometimes he began to try and coach them to achieve a happier ending.
Maybe… he began to cling again to that old, dim spark of hope. Maybe, somehow, Chara had come back to him after all. Maybe Chara still wanted to free everyone, and they were so determined to do it that they’d find a way to rise from the grave, just like he did. After a timeline where the human not only refused to kill anyone, but went back and befriended all the monsters who had harmed them, Asriel made up his mind. He was going to finish what they’d both set out to do. He was going to raise the stakes - or else the human may decide that there was nothing better waiting for them, and they would lose interest in this “game” of theirs.
Many times, during his time as a flower, Asriel had befriended Papyrus the skeleton. Had won him over with flattery, advice, predictions. Papyrus was something of a favourite of Asriel’s - maybe because he was as open-hearted and compassionate and confrontation-shy as Asriel himself had once been, maybe because he was so easy to manipulate - so he once again went back to the skeleton and whispered some advice.
Somehow, miraculously, mysteriously, this timeline went a little different. Papyrus suddenly had the idea to tell Undyne to write a letter to her crush, Dr. Alphys, about her feelings. The human was finally able to befriend Alphys and discover the truth of her Determination experiments, as well as run into old VHS tapes that hinted at The Plan. Finally, just like Chara had once done, this human had inspired everyone in the Underground. This human was their hope. They believed in this human.
Asriel became sure. This must be Chara. It had to be Chara! They knew the truth about what had happened to him after the plan, and they had the whole Underground on their side now. He congratulated them on their good work, and promised to see them soon. There was just one last thing he had to do. He went back to Papyrus, and gave him one more piece of advice: he told Papyrus to gather all the human’s friends, get them to come to the castle and make sure that Asgore and the human didn’t fight.
So he did. And there they were: all the souls in the Underground, all conveniently gathered in one place. Asriel could be a cunning manipulator when he wanted to be, and he’d used his coercive skills to get everything to fall perfectly into place. In one fell swoop, he absorbed the six humans souls AND the soul of every monster in the Underground. With all that soul power, the ruthless mastermind behind it all could reveal himself. More certain than ever that he was reunited with Chara, Asriel assumed his true form. Not Flowey the Flower, but Asriel Dreemurr.
Again and again, he taunted Chara, killed them over and over. Soulless creatures like them, after all, understood it was kill or be killed. Wouldn’t hesitate to cut down ANYONE. Time and time again, they welded their soul back together by pure force of will and continued to stand before him. He confessed his motives for all of this. He didn’t care about anything but resetting the timeline back to zero. They’d do this all over again, and again, and again. This dull grey playground he’d been trapped in would be full of life and light again, if he could spend eternity playing with Chara. And they’d do it, too! He knew Chara. They never gave up. They wanted a happy ending for all the friends they loved. They’d do anything for that.
Still, they refused to die. Asriel grew more forceful about getting his way - real friends, after all, NEVER say no to each other. He unleashed his true power, a form so monstrous and godlike that Chara couldn’t even move. (If this seems like a childish godmoding tactic from a kid shouting “YEAH WELL I HAVE THE ULTIMATE POWER AND I MAKE IT SO YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING SO I WIN,” that’s because it is. Asriel’s, like, ten.) He even made sure that they couldn’t retreat to their SAVE.
But Chara… did something else. They didn’t SAVE the game, they tried to SAVE the world. They called out to the souls of their friends, deep within the swirling hivemind within Asriel. One by one, they began to remember who they were. They remembered how much they cared about the little human who had been so kind to them. As they all awakened, something else began to resonate within the depths of Asriel’s stolen soul.
Chara began to remind him of what he hadn’t been able to feel for so, so long. Chara reminded him of the day he’d saved them, had shown them kindness for the first time. Chara reminded him how much they loved him.
He couldn’t understand this feeling. It had been such a long time that he had forgotten what it felt like to love someone. He became distraught, screaming that he didn’t need anyone, insisting that he was doing this because he cared about Chara more than anything, that he couldn’t possibly say goodbye to someone he loved as much as them. He begged them to let him win, to let him keep clinging on, to not have to let go of the past.
They refused.
Asriel… understood. The love all these monsters felt… it was for a different human. He could wish as hard as he wanted. He could try and try to make an artificial playground, try to simulate what he used to have… but the world had changed. Chara… they were gone.
Able to feel for the first time in ages, Asriel felt overwhelming compassion, sympathy, regret, grief. He really, truly, understood. This human… this was someone else. Someone he’d been unspeakably horrible to, thinking he could keep them trapped in his playground forever. Though he had infinite power, though he could have used it to live a life of his own, full of the ability to feel again, Asriel was the kind of person who chose to repent. He chose to do the right thing. He apologized to the human - to Frisk - for the awful things he’d done, and he unleashed all the souls that he had absorbed. At long last, the Barrier shattered, and monsterkind could go free.
But Asriel… he didn’t think he deserved that kind of happy ending. He didn’t want to leave Chara behind. He couldn’t bear the thought of breaking his parents’ hearts all over again. After all, with all the souls released, he was empty again. Soon enough, this residual energy would run out, and he wouldn’t be able to look like himself anymore. He’d go back to being a flower. He bade Frisk goodbye.
There was only one place Asriel chose to be in his last moments as himself: at Chara’s grave. Someone had to look after these flowers. Of course, being the determined kid they are, Frisk made their way back to the place it all began - to the grave that they fell onto - and confronted him.
Still, Asriel said “no.” He couldn’t come with them. Frisk, after all, had taught him that important lesson: not only was the world full of more possibilities than just “kill or be killed,” but sometimes being a good friend meant saying “no” to things that would hurt. Looking back with all the things he knew, Asriel was a much more melancholy, weighed-down person, one pressed down by hard lessons, but he saw with much more clarity now. Maybe… it wasn’t right to believe Chara was everything. Maybe Chara wasn’t perfect, wasn’t infallible. Maybe if they’d both had a friend who could show them this fanatic devotion wasn’t healthy for either of them, things would have turned out so much happier.
Frisk, he confessed, was the type of friend he’d always wished he had.
With that final conversation, they eventually left, and Asriel maintained his vigil - as he intended to do for the rest of his life, however long soulless flowers may live for. The very least he could do is make sure his best friend wasn’t lonely, after all, and the Underground was going to become a very quiet place. He may have understood the mistake that being so codependent had been, but he still loved his friend and sibling dearly, and still missed them with every last bit of his loyal little heart.
Inventory:
Heart-shaped locket: a locket with “Best Friends Forever” on it.
Abilities:
Fire magic: boss monsters (the species Asriel belongs to) are able to summon and manipulate fire. Being young and also soulless, Asriel can’t do this very well. In fact, all the godly, powerful techniques he’d used when he’d absorbed multiple souls are out of his reach now.
“Friendliness pellets:” a very basic form of magic: simple, oblong bullets made of pure magic. These don’t take a lot of magical ability to use, as Asriel could wield them even when he was completely empty.
Soul absorption: all monsters can absorb the souls of humans in order to become exponentially more powerful. As a soulless vessel, Asriel could technically absorb the souls of both humans and monsters - this is difficult, however, as all monster except boss monsters have their souls vanish the moment they die. Asriel could only take and restore monster souls when he had six human souls powering him up.
Flaws:
Hoo boy. Asriel has a lot of flaws.
First of all: he’s pretty clingy. He tends to look heavily to loved ones for approval, and since his parents approved of him pretty much 24/7, he didn’t have a lot of experience with disapproval. He tends to take disagreement or criticism as a personal attack, and it’s not uncommon for him to respond with tears. It likewise gets very difficult for him to stick up for himself around people he likes, because he also thinks that saying no to them means saying he doesn’t like them anymore. He’s also kind of pushy about his friends sticking around, ha ha. As in, “I’ll help you commit suicide if you still be my friend” or “I will murder you a million times over to keep you here with me.” So, you know, “kind of.” Ha ha. He still has a lot to learn about how to be a good friend without turning yourself into a martyr and how to be independent.
Second of all: he’s spent a LONNNGGG TIME wracked with serious trauma and having no way whatsoever to cope with it. He developed some severely maladapted beliefs to try and manage it, and that kind of did a number on him. There’s a bitter, deeply angry streak in him that he treats as wrong, evil, Flowey-like, but that doesn’t keep it from spilling out on occasion. Bitter, caustic sass became a way to laugh at a joyless, painful world, after all, and he doesn’t necessarily know how to deal with everything without that crutch.
Third: he idealizes. A lot. He tends to get attached very quickly, then hype the target of his affections up as the be-all, end-all. When he was alive, he tried to make himself into Chara’s saviour - the person who could single-handedly fix everything the surface had done to them. This isn’t exactly Ideal - a person should have support, and may need help, but people have the agency to be in control of their own recovery. Trying to make yourself personally responsible for someone else’s mental state makes you into a martyr. You emotionally exhaust yourself, and you place a burden of frustration and guilt on the person you’re trying to “fix” because they aren’t fixed yet. Saviour archetypes are inspiring in fiction, but don’t work out so well in real life. All the same, Asriel tries to do this, and likewise expects other people to do it for him. As a flower, he expected his parents to make him feel better, and grew resentful and distant when they failed. He pinned all his hopes on Chara being the one who could fix everything, and then went on to project so hard he idealized Frisk into being that person.
Also, uh. “Struggles with empathy” would be a good one. Technically, Asriel’s just running on soul-fumes. Again, he’s losing the ability to feel. The gods, theoretically, could help with that, but empathy would likely nonetheless be a struggle for someone who has been emotionally numb for so long.
SAMPLES
Action Log Sample: We only require one sample in Hadriel, and it can either be in paragraph or bracket form. The sample must be at least 300 word minimum and should demonstrate your character's thoughts and introspection. You may link samples from our monthly Test Drive Meme as well.
He has markers, and he has several loose sheets of paper. He should have everything he needs. Asriel, after all, used to love making things. Chara was always much better at reflecting real-life - they did such pretty drawings of their favourite flowers - but Asriel could spend hours and hours making up fantastic worlds and embellishing them. Maybe it had been because of how small his world had once been. A single mountain, nothing more. Daydreaming about what the rest of the world could be like had been the best way to make it feel less small, less prison-like. He’d try to picture what a “sunset” looked like, and he’d draw godlike monsters who would climb up onto the sun when it touched the ground.
Well, he knows what a sunset looks like now. His stupid old characters just feel ruined. Too naive, too immature, downright dumb. The Absolute God of Hyperdeath wasn’t a hero or a protector of monsterkind. He was a villain. A scary, possessive jailor. An unfeeling murderer. Just like Asriel himself turned out to be.
...Better to just throw such an awful character out completely. Bury him. He doesn’t deserve to exist anymore.
(Just like Asriel himself, ha ha.)
He used to like this. He’s Asriel again, not Flowey, so of course he has to be every part of Asriel. Exactly like his old self. Exactly like his good self. He can just… pretend Flowey wasn’t really him. Try to cut all the bad parts off, and act like whatever remains is still good. So it’s time to act like Asriel again. Asriel loves playing games and doing crafts and make-believe. Asriel’s good at expressing what’s inside him.
...Asriel… doesn’t feel like anything is inside him at all. He picks up a marker and draws a cloud, but it fails to even slightly resemble the smothering fog that he feels like he’s made of.
“I don’t like this anymore,” he mumbles to himself, crumpling the paper up.
(Bonus Fourth Wall post for additional Sample Juice)
revised personality
Honestly, Asriel has a tendency to be a little afraid of conflict. As a flower, he swung to the farthest possible extreme - he stood up for himself and disagreed, but in a way that was so selfish and aggressive and cruel that it was downright bullying. He's doing his best to do the right thing and be good, with whatever precious little time he has left, but he feels like he has a lot of atrocious behaviour to make up for and very little idea exactly how to be good enough to make up for it. He worries about turning into that cruel person, to the point where he's willing to isolate himself instead of risk a confrontation where he has to put his foot down and just ends up hurting someone because of it.
The kid's got a lot of guilt in general, though. He's been through some really hard things, stuff that no child should have to endure, and he didn't really have the benefit of anyone who could help him make sense of and cope with his trauma. He spent a lot of time blaming himself for everything he lost and everything that happened as a result of his choices. While he has gained enough maturity to say you can't spend forever regretting the hard choices, he also might have been trying to wrap everything up as neatly as possible so Frisk wouldn't have to worry anymore - for all the cruelty he showed to them, he did try to make sure his last moments were spent comforting them and telling them that they were a good person.
Despite his zealous extremes, his loyalty could certainly be considered admirable (though it, uh, might be healthier to tone it down a bit). For years and years after Chara died, he still held onto the thought of them. Even when he was unable to truly care about anyone, he still considered the two of them inseparable and regarded them as someone who could understand them. He made the choice to watch over their grave for the rest of his remaining days - though hard experience had shown him that it wasn't right to build them up as someone incapable of being or doing wrong ever, his love for them hasn't wavered. He knows what it is to be lonely - he doesn't think they should have to be, either.
That said, he's certainly not perfect. Being a child, he does still see things in somewhat unrealistic, simplified terms. He tries to pass off the ending as being perfectly happy and much better than the plan that he almost committed to, expecting that because nobody died this time around, the six dead children in the background don't count and humanity won't react with violence or horror at monsters appearing among them this time. As a child, he tried, in a way, to make himself entirely responsible for Chara's wellbeing, rather than expecting Chara themself to do that: he pledged to never doubt them, to believe in them so hard that he never disagreed, to love them so hard that his love cured every problem. He sort of does to Frisk what he did to Chara: he seems to expect that someone else can be the saviour who will fix him. At first, he turned to his parents for this, expecting they would make him feel better. Then, when they failed to make his emptiness go away, he built Chara up as the one person who could make him feel complete. When he accepted that Chara was dead and it was someone else he'd been talking to, he sort of set Frisk into that spotlight instead, setting someone he barely knew up as the kind of friend he wished he always had. But then... they were someone who could show him that the world wasn't as painful and cruel as he thought, and they were someone who could tell him that sometimes being a good friend did mean saying "no," keeping a person from what they wanted if it was self-destructive, and even learning to leave behind something you want to hold on to.
Asriel, for whatever wisdom and kindness he may have, is still a child. When he feels comfortable enough with someone to not be a perfectly docile prince, he does have something of a sassy streak; he used to love playing tricks, and he certainly made Frisk put up with their fair share of smart-ass remarks and tricks during their time Underground. Sometimes, too, all the anger and sorrow and grief that he's spent so long not knowing how to process rear their head in unpleasant ways. He's prone to projecting and lashing out at people, and can be downright vicious in how he mocks people sometimes.
He's trying, though. Anyone can be a good a person if they just try, right? Even people who aren't really capable of feeling love or compassion!
...Hopefully.