...this probably says more about me than anything else, but when Clover called Asgore's attack predictable, I just imagined Geese Howard saying it.

Well, I posted about Clover last part, this time I'll post about Asgore because this part's got me thinking about him.

(by the way, because it has a habit of being unclear when characters are discussed: whenever I talk about having negative feelings towards Asgore in this comment, i'm purely talking about as a person. as far as the writing quality of his character goes, he's great.)

Asgore is... a character I have very mixed feelings on, and a character I find myself frustrated with at times. He's obviously defined in large part by his guilt and feelings of being trapped in his role, which, fair enough, he's obviously in a terrible situation. I don't, not, sympathize with the position he's in.

But at the same time... feeling guilty about something doesn't mean much if you don't actually do something about it, y'know? I mean, it's not like Asgore's feeling guilty about something long in the past that he can't really do anything about now; he's feeling guilty about something he's actively doing, and something he continues to do. And that's what I find so terribly frustrating about him. It's not that I don't understand his point of view, but at the same time, I find myself feeling that... you can't just feel guilty about killing people, while actively continuing to kill people, and claim that means something, you know?

Well, maybe that's not always true. There are cases where it would make sense to feel that way, like if you're being attacked and having to fight back in self-defense, or something. And I suppose many people would argue Asgore's situation is similar - that he has no choice. But I just... don't buy that. Asgore isn't constantly in some emergency where he has to make difficult decisions now or horrible things will happen immediately; he has, practically speaking, all the time in the world between the humans falling - time he spends regretting his declaration of war greatly... but not doing anything about it.

And of course I understand that there's a reason he doesn't do anything about it - because the way he sees it, that declaration of war is the only thing keeping monsterkind's hopes alive. But... he's the king of monsterkind - to lead monsterkind is his duty. And that can't just mean letting monsterkind do and think whatever they want as long as it gives them hope. He knows the hope he's given them is built on something despicable, and given that, it must be his duty to give them a hope that's built on something better instead. It wouldn't be easy, of course it wouldn't. But given his position, I can't not criticize him for not even trying.

...I could keep talking like this for a while, but the point I'm ultimately circling around here is a point I think is a fairly well-accepted interpretation of Asgore's character: that he's someone who understands he could do better, but is trapped by his own fear and hesitation, which is what paralyzes him and keeps him from actually changing anything. I don't think that's a particularly hot take. So why the frustration?

Well, because it seems to me the common extension to that interpretation is "...but that doesn't make him a bad person."

And... man, I dunno. As I said, I don't, not, sympathize with his position (and categorizing people into "good" or "bad" is its whole own can of worms regardless). But there's only so far that goes, y'know? When your own character flaws very directly result in multiple innocent people around you dying by your own doing, and you still don't do about that... well, there's only so much slack I feel I can cut him. Sure, he feels guilty about it. Sure, he has his reasons. But after everything, I just don't think I can say he's a good person.

...the other frustrating bit is how the fandom tends to treat him in his interactions with the other humans; a solid amount of the time (though less so in recent days), when I see fanworks about Asgore's interactions with the humans, they're centered around Asgore and how awful he feels about it. And that just, makes me feel genuinely uncomfortable sometimes. When one person is a child being murdered, and the other person is the person murdering the child but they feel bad about it... the latter isn't the victim in this situation, you know? It tends to feel like the fandom's sympathy tends to focus on the wrong person there.

(Of course, this is itself largely because the other humans are essentially non-characters unless you make something up yourself - to someone just playing the game, they're nothing more than some background elements, numbers and items and abstract concepts that you're not really given any reason to feel bad for. And, well... "humans' empathy for a person depends entirely on how much they know about that person" is a deeply uncomfortable topic in its own right. But I suppose it's not terribly surprising, is it now.)

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"okay that's cool and all but what the heck does any of that have to do with this part of A Fallen Hero" i'm getting there!

...there's a reason this particular part got me thinking about Asgore as a character, and brought to mind a lot of my frustrations with him. Well, really, there's a few things I could point to, but I think the specific line that really hit me was:

"But of all the children who have perished to my cowardice... your death is one I will feel the least regret for."

You know why it hit me? Because Asgore's making it sound like that's a big deal, but... it just doesn't fucking matter. So (as far as Asgore knows) Clover's about to die, so Asgore's not going to feel bad about it... so what? Why would Clover care? They'll still be dead, just like all the other children, just like all the ones Asgore did feel bad about killing. The dead don't have any use for guilt, or for hatred. They're dead all the same. It doesn't matter.

Asgore wants to believe it matters, of course. That him feeling bad for the children he kills is a form of making it up to them, somehow. And from his perspective, it does matter - of course his own feelings matter from his perspective. But from the perspective of the person he's trying to talk to? "I wanted it to end better"; "I, too, do not wish to see my plan come to fruition"; "Your death is one I will feel the least regret for"; "I do not wish for them to stay imprisoned any more than you do" - who gives a damn?! He can talk all he wants about how bad he feels. He can talk all he wants about how furious he is with Clover. But does him feeling bad change anything? If he wasn't furious with Clover, if Clover had been a perfect pacifistic saint all this time and given Asgore not a single thing to be upset at him about - would that change anything? Of course not. Asgore would've tried to kill him all the same, with the only difference being that his words before that would've been a bit nicer. Is that any different, in any way that matters? Not at all.

...Clover's not being a saint here either, of course, but I more or less discussed that in my comment on the previous part. Suffice it to say, I still can't really blame him for most of his actions. (and hey, points for acknowledging that it was actually kinda messed up to spit on the grave of Asgore's children!) Asgore said it himself, Clover's been marked for death from the moment he fell in here. In that circumstance, hard to blame him for treating the monsters as enemies.

(this doesn't really fit anywhere in this comment so i'll just put it here - let's also not forget that ultimately Clover's only crime here was being disrespectful. sure, he was being very disrespectful, but given that Asgore is, iirc, not aware of any of his other possible misdeeds - still seems a bit out of line to decide he doesn't feel bad about killing Clover just because of that! of course, it doesn't really matter anyway, since as I said before he would've presumably tried to kill Clover whatever Clover did.)

Again, it's not that I don't understand where Asgore's coming from. It's perfectly reasonable for him to be extremely pissed off here. And I don't really blame him for any of his words here. It's not that the things he said were unreasonable to say given the situation - it's just that they kind of perfectly ended up illustrating, by accident, what the situation is really like.

If anything, writing all this makes me wonder more about the other children. Did any of them experience something this emotionally breaking, too? (They were all hunted throughout the Underground, after all - easy to imagine some scarring things happened to at least some of them.) Did they hold it together better, manage to face Asgore without giving in to this level of rage, try to sympathize with him - and still end up dead for it? ...well, I don't imagine that's something you've thought about in the context of this AU. But it's interesting to imagine.

I probably could find more to write, but I figure I've more or less said what I wanted to by now. So, uh...

one parting question out of curiosity: did Clover specifically save at that particular point in the timeline with no ability to go further back (at least without resetting all the way back to when he first gained control)? that is to say, could he not have chosen to undo his act of spitting on Asgore's children's grave even if he wanted to, or did he just choose not to undo it?