this is bound to be very long and meandering. not quite "stream of consciousness", but...
...we recently completed (on All Saints' and All Souls' Days) an Undertale playthrough, achieving the Neutral Ending. we could have pushed on toward the Pacifist Ending but these days, it rarely seems appropriate. ours is not a world that encourages belief in happy endings.
then we watched a no-commentary playthrough of the Undertale murder run—the "Genocide" Ending. it had been some while since we'd subjected ourselves to a recording of the UT murder run, and I felt that we needed our memory refreshed. we have not ourselves played UT through to the Genocide ending, although we did make a start back in 2018, and quit after reaching Snowdin. I've occasionally been tormented by the feeling that it's somehow dishonest of us not to subject ourselves to the experience, and also cowardly—because we'll be bad at the actual gameplay and won't have any enthusiasm for practicing. but I'd rather not do it, and I don't think our host Kris wants to do it, either. we must be content with recordings.
my friend and partner Kaylin has said to me in the past that the Genocide run feels, to them, like the most honest part of Undertale. and the terrible thing is...I feel like I know exactly what she means. I ask myself, what's the most likely outcome of a human child (especially one fully inculcated in the values of "Western civilization"), a child who most likely is frightened and fleeing from something horrible up above, falling into an underground domain full of monsters who spray out magical attacks? monsters who turn out to be easy to kill? AND that child finds out that they themself have apparently been granted magical powers in this domain as well, powers that strengthen with continued slaughter? it's harsh of me to say this but I think that the Genocide outcome is likely, especially because I think that the child who went that direction could easily convince themself that they were disposing of dangerous enemies.
I remind myself that Toby Fox did not need to create a "Genocide" path for their game. there seems to be a widespread feeling among UT fans that the Pacifist route, with its improbably happy and harmonious conclusion, is the "correct" route, the "True Ending" as it's been called—but if Toby Fox really wanted to create a game whose overall purpose was to give us a hopeful message of Monsters freed from captivity and reunited with humanity in the surface world, Fox could have given us only that, but they didn't. Fox clearly felt that their happy ending needed some counterbalance—but that doesn't necessitate the existence of something like the Genocide path, for Fox gives us a selection of downbeat "Neutral" endings depending upon how many Monsters the player cuts down. for whatever reason, though, this wasn't enough for Toby Fox. the Genocide route is something extraordinary by comparison: it's not just murder that's come to the Underground, it would seem, but an inhuman force of chaos and destruction, as if Aŋra Mainyu personally decided it was time to punch the Monsters' tickets.
you have to go well out of your way to enter the Genocide run, too. if you simply wanted to push through Undertale to advance the story, even if you killed every Monster you came across along the way from the start of the Ruins to Toriel's house, you'd not trigger the Genocide path because random Monster encounters are widely spaced. methodically killing all the Monsters in the Ruins is tedious and repetitive, requiring a lot of walking in circles (or walking in place). why would someone new to Undertale play in such a fashion rather than simply walking through? well...there's an answer to that question, although it's an answer that I don't myself fully understand because I am not a gamer: if you prioritize maximizing your stats in an RPG, of which Undertale is an example, then perhaps you develop a habit of doing as much in-game killing as possible, as long as your numbers are still benefiting from it.
I would be curious to know if any first-time players of Undertale did, in fact, enter the Genocide pathway out of habit, because of past experience with other games, rather than foreknowledge of the existence of the Genocide pathway. because I would guess that most Undertale players already knew about the Genocide run and how to trigger it before starting on it, out of curiosity or some principle of "completionism". in the modern Internet era, news about games spreads quickly; we knew of the existence of the Pacifist route in Undertale well before we actually started trying to play the game in 2016, and from the first we were worried about not doing it right—which is, when you think about it, a rather incongruous feeling to have about playing a video game, which is supposedly an activity done out of curiosity and fun, not a sense of moral obligation.
let's go back to contemplating the Undertale Pacifist ending, the "good" ending. as I said, if Toby Fox simply wanted us to feel happy and hopeful about humans and Monsters maybe someday living together in peace—a situation that could easily be construed as merely another metaphor for humanity learning to live in harmony with itself and the other creatures of Earth—then Fox could have done that. instead Fox deliberately spoils the mood: Flowey shows up to remind you how small your victory is. the Monsters and Frisk seem happy, but it's all confined within a game that you can erase and start over any time you want...so what does the victory actually mean? if you (the player) really believed that playing a game through to the end was a self-contained experience that only had meaning within a limited instance of "ludic space" (i.e. the temporary sense of being within a pocket Universe with its own rules, created by playing a game), then why would you ever feel discontent after attaining the happiest possible ending to Undertale? and if you did feel content with a Pacifist UT victory, then Flowey's closing words wouldn't stir up any trouble. but I conjecture that Toby Fox, through Flowey, is deliberately needling players who, for reasons of their own, wanted Undertale and a successful Pacifist run to mean more than just successfully completing a game and then leaving the game's inhabitants in peace afterward.
ugh. I feel like whatever point I was aiming at, I've let it slip away from me. so I'll stop now.
~Chara of Pnictogen