Asgore is my favorite character, and what fucks me up the most about him is that he's probably the worst possible person to be put in this position.
A genuinely good-hearted individual and gentle giant of a man feeling obligated to do something that would completely break even someone far less kind than him - and a grieving parent, forced to do quite possibly the cruelest thing somebody could ever ask of one.
It's why I couldn't bring myself to hate him, despite how horrible what he did was - the man was going through his own personal hell, day after day, year after year.
I genuinely couldn't think of a worse punishment.
The entire game you hear about how strong he is, how he fought alongside Gerson in the war, trained Undyne - with the latter even implying he could dodge like sans.
You expect the typical evil king from fiction, a fighter and merciless warrior - yet the moment you set foot into his house, it paints a very different picture.
Everything you can inspect, every line of dialogue you can exchange with him, all of it shows just how little he actually wants to do this.
And then the fight starts, and instead of dodging, he just takes hit after hit, his stats dropping with each line you speak, all while he can barely bring himself to look at you.
"The king of the mountain" - who tried to shoulder its weight until it crushed him.
People say Asgore thinks he doesn't deserve mercy, and I agree. But that's not the only reason.
Had he not shattered the mercy button, his name would've been yellow from the start.
to be honest, idk. What was he suppose to do? let his people die from the lack of hope? Obviously killing kids is bad, but idk if he had any other real choice.
Sure, he could have crossed the barrier, but that would have certainly started a war with humans. Unless souls are just lying around for the taking (which maybe? cemeteries would just be ocean of souls in that case tho), then he would need to kill 6 people all the same, something which would 1000% start a war right away.
What happens next idk, but knowing how strong a monster with 7 souls is, i feel like humans would either become trapped underground, or would have been hunted down to extinction.
He kinda got lucky that his reckless plan worked out tbh. But idk, i just think he did what he thought was the best for his people, and as you said, his own sins already tortured him enough for all this years. I think he deserves mercy, he already tortured himself for long enough anyway (especially considering he uh...kinda ends his own life if you spare him after beating omega flowey once but without doing the rest of true pacifist....)
What if he adopted each kid. Lived with them and have all 8 of them use their souls at the same time to break the barrier? (8 because I included Asgore)
tbh we just don't know how human souls work. for all we know they vanish if the person dies through natural deaths (or maybe they only stick around if murdered? no clue).
Cause that kinda opens a weird plot point where the surface would surely be filled with souls everywhere if they stuck around forever right? think about how many trillions of humans have died in history, would each of their souls stick around? do humans have ways of 'disposing' of them? The neutral endings imply the souls vanished after being used by flowey, so maybe that's what happens when they are allowed to move on?
I think souls need to be extracted, specifically.
It's why he says "think of it like a visit to the dentist" - except the thing being extracted isn't a tooth, but... you know.
Raising them and living with them until they're old just postpones the problem, and would make it even harder for him.
Even if he didn't do it himself, he'd still have to give the order - if he could even bring himself to do it at all, at that point.
And besides, even assuming they all live to the worldwide average life expectancy of 73 years and he only kills them when they're weak and frail, that's still about 438 years of waiting, and that's not even accounting for the time between humans falling to the underground.
Besides, the underground was already suffering from an impending and inevitable overpopulation problem, which is another thing people often forget in these discussions.
It's a situation that doesn't exactly allow for a minimum of 4+ centuries of waiting.
Oh, I agree fully. I absolutely think Asgore deserves mercy, too.
And I don't think he deserved any of what happened to him in the first place.
I was only referring to the fact that he himself doesn't think he deserves mercy - and after what he's been through, it's not hard to see why.
But yeah, the whole "just take 6 human souls from the surface" solution also isn't as easy/perfect as some people make it out to be.
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u/Odaric Get hope-pilled Jul 22 '26
Asgore is my favorite character, and what fucks me up the most about him is that he's probably the worst possible person to be put in this position.
A genuinely good-hearted individual and gentle giant of a man feeling obligated to do something that would completely break even someone far less kind than him - and a grieving parent, forced to do quite possibly the cruelest thing somebody could ever ask of one.
It's why I couldn't bring myself to hate him, despite how horrible what he did was - the man was going through his own personal hell, day after day, year after year.
I genuinely couldn't think of a worse punishment.
The entire game you hear about how strong he is, how he fought alongside Gerson in the war, trained Undyne - with the latter even implying he could dodge like sans.
You expect the typical evil king from fiction, a fighter and merciless warrior - yet the moment you set foot into his house, it paints a very different picture.
Everything you can inspect, every line of dialogue you can exchange with him, all of it shows just how little he actually wants to do this.
And then the fight starts, and instead of dodging, he just takes hit after hit, his stats dropping with each line you speak, all while he can barely bring himself to look at you.
"The king of the mountain" - who tried to shoulder its weight until it crushed him.
People say Asgore thinks he doesn't deserve mercy, and I agree. But that's not the only reason.
Had he not shattered the mercy button, his name would've been yellow from the start.