Pacifist vs. No Mercy - New Home Narration Comparison

ok it’s been a long time coming but here it is: a comparison of every single line that changes in new home between the pacifist/neutral route and the no mercy route, along with my theories on what the changes symbolize and how it reflects on the characters and the game’s larger meaning.



warning: this post is covered in huge, end-game spoilers and is very very long. feel free to look at just the screenshots, but you’re going to have to do a lot of scrolling!

also, a warning for people who don’t read my blog and need to be aware: i ship chara/asriel. i see them as friends, not really siblings, and i see it as a mutual childish crush/extremely unhealthy co-dependent trainwreck rather than remotely “romantic,” but at any rate, it’s probably going to leak into my speculation a bit. i try to keep it to a minimum but, if that bothers you, feel free to skip this post - i completely understand!

(and if it bothers you and you feel like bothering me about it: don’t!!!)

(by the way, descriptions that i don’t list here are because the descriptions don’t change between routes - those include the golden flowers, the fireplace, and the text when you pick up the key, for example)

notice that in no mercy, chara doesn’t bother to look at the note at all, because they’re already intimately familiar with new home and have already read it. in a normal playthrough, they are reading it for frisk’s benefit alone - but if frisk is effectively MIA, there’s no point.

interestingly, the note kind of supports the “frisk is blind” headcanon - if chara was narrating the note to the player and not to frisk, it’d make sense for them to read the note in no mercy anyway, and if frisk could read it themselves there wouldn’t be a need for chara to narrate it.

of course, chara could be narrating to the player in a normal playthrough and just not care in no mercy - they’re just getting right to the point like they do with the puzzles. or they could be pretending not to care, since this house is a flood of memories and they want to get out as fast as possible. either one makes sense

also in a regular playthrough, the note ends with “(The keys are in the kitchen and the hallway.)” because of the really similar wording to what chara says, it’s possible that line isn’t part of the note, but chara explaining to frisk where to find the keys





people assume a lot that the Worn Dagger and Real Knife are different items, but that’s pretty silly - it’s really clear, especially side-by-side, that they’re the exact same thing. the only difference is perspective.

remember what the game says about monster souls: “the crueler the intentions of our enemies, the more their attacks will hurt us.” the Real Knife isn’t any more dangerous or sharper than the Worn Dagger - but Chara no longer sees it as a gardening tool, but as a weapon. because you’ve taught them not to see the monsters as people, but as enemies.

that’s what gives this tiny rusty dagger 99 ATK.

(by the way, chara’s lines and maybe even the knife itself are a joke about the demo - there was a rumor that there was a way to find a “real knife” instead of the “toy knife” in the demo, so i guess toby thought it’d be fun to give you a way to really do that in the full game)





of course, the same principle applies to the locket - all of the items in the game are based on belief. that’s how a ballet tutu can protect you from magic even though the game jokes about how it’s “finally some real armor.”

the heart locket is the symbol of chara and asriel’s relationship. after being a flower for centuries (if not millenia), asriel in the true end immediately reforms it once he recreates his original form, and he maintains it in every form he takes. to chara, it holds the same importance as the knife does, even though it’s a defensive item - with it, with a symbol of asriel, they literally feel invincible.

chara’s line of “Right where it belongs.” and the description of it as “The Locket” rather than “Heart Locket” suggests that, even as corrupted as they are by the player’s actions at this point, the locket is still the most important thing in the world to them - that it and the knife and what they’ve been working for, what their determination has driven them towards, for the whole no mercy run. it’s easy for me to imagine that, even once the world is destroyed and even after killing their best friend in cold blood, chara would continue to have and treasure the locket as one last memory they can’t bear to get rid of.

chara and flowey/asriel, like chara and frisk, are in a lot of ways mirror images. remember that flowey is obsessed with somehow bringing chara back and returning to those happy days with his “best friend” - he projects chara onto frisk in both routes. in his monologue in new home, flowey wonders how chara seemingly came back from the dead, and asks “What made you wake up? Did you hear me calling you…?”, a line that implies that it is flowey rather than the player who is summoning chara at the very beginning of the game.

in no mercy, what chara calls “your guidance” turns chara into flowey. you don’t just teach them the same things that asriel learned from his death - that it’s either “kill or be killed.” you go a step further, teaching them that the only correct response to the injustice they faced is to destroy everything, all of these “worthless memories,” even their adopted family, even their best friend who they still cherish even when there’s nothing at all left.

in other words, the heart locket holds the same symbolism - of a past they can’t let go of, of a relationship destroyed by a bad choice, of the last hope they have in a world that’s abandoned them - to them both. it’s like what asgore describes when he commits suicide on a reset, what all of new home symbolizes: a “fantasy” of a better time, a fantasy that can’t ever become real.

”You can feel it beating.” is also interesting - it shows how ridiculously close the two of them were, to a level that i feel goes way beyond “best friends” and even beyond what the monsters in the fairy tale call “siblings.” i mean, flowey clearly feels more strongly about chara than he does about his own parents. as for chara, it may be that chara is feeling the rapid beating of their/frisk’s own heart, or that chara is remembering (or hallucinating?) the feeling of asriel’s beating heart when wearing the symbol of their relationship around their neck. either way, it’s clear that, to what was probably a really unhealthy degree, they both meant the world to each other.





and they literally shared clothes

kind of makes asriel’s awkward comment about chara and frisk’s “similar, uh, fashion choices” funnier, doesn’t it? don’t act like you’re above fashion trends asriel





asriel’s bed is on the right, corresponding to the locket, as well as the original bed in toriel’s home in the ruins.

that asriel’s bed is the only bed in toriel’s home, as well as the fact that there are only three rather than four chairs in the living room there, suggests that chara fell much later in their lives - after the point where the monsters felt safe enough to establish New Home closer to the barrier. we have no idea when asriel was born or how fast asriel ages, so how much later is ambiguous, but this (along with the calendar later) helps to establish a timeline.

pure speculation but, because there’s a large gap between the monsters living in home and chara’s fall, as well as the fact that the “people who climb mt. ebott disappear” legend was established in chara’s time, it’s also pretty likely that chara wasn’t the actual first human to fall. that also would explain why asriel, who lived in new home, would be all the way over in home (probably along with his parents, since he seems to say “it sounds like it came from over here” to someone offscreen) - to keep an eye on the hole and look out for any fallen humans.

there’s something subtle, but significant, about chara having never lived in home - even though chara never lived there, there’s a single set of golden flowers on the dresser in toriel’s room, the only golden flowers in the whole house. that suggests, along the fact that toriel took chara’s body all the way back to home, that toriel loved chara as much as she loved asriel - and it’s really hard to believe that toriel would have been oblivious if chara had just been “evil” the entire time.

also, since there’s double meanings to asgore’s king-sized bed and toriel’s queen-sized bed, it’s possible that asriel’s “twin sized” bed has a double meaning too - you could think of it as suggesting that he and chara were literally

“like siblings” as the monsters suggest, which obviously i don’t, but i think of it as more like they are metaphorically twins. in other words, they’re mirror images of each other, two kids from different worlds who were the same relative age and wore the same clothes and never separated from one another.





and chara’s bed is the bed on the left, corresponding to the knife.



since the time me and a few other people first started theorizing about chara, there’s been mountains of evidence people have found all but confirming that chara is the narrator in both routes, not just in no mercy, and not just when the narration text’s color changes to red.

the fact that, in new home, the descriptions change without also changing to red is also evidence of this, but this is really unambiguous. if you assume that chara is not the narrator, there’s no reason for frisk to have this comment about the bed on the left and not the bed on the right.

but if chara is the narrator, then the fact that this is chara’s bed isn’t a coincidence. this is where they died - they poisoned themselves, laid in this bed, and never got up again. their family watched them die here.

this is why, when you go to sleep in the bed in toriel’s house after fleeing from her battle, you get the same text from the game over screen and from the true lab, where chara’s family is begging them to live. because laying in that bed gives them strong memories of laying in this bed in their final moments.

so what does the red text mean? well, one interpretation i’ve seen is that it just means strong emotions. let’s skip ahead a bit and look at something in asgore’s room:





“wait, you just posted the same screenshot twice”

i did! that’s because this text doesn’t change. but backin the bedroom, this text does:





chara remembers - and has a strong connection to - the drawing of a golden flower next to their bed. but they don’t have any reaction at all to this macaroni art of a flower in asgore’s room. most likely because they didn’t make it, but asriel did.

because they created the golden flower drawing, and because it’s explicitly a golden flower (with all of the associations that has for chara), we get red text - showing chara is emotional about it. this interpretation is the best explanation of the red text to me.





and that gives this a lot of significance. through the whole game, in both routes, chara has a description for every single thing - with three exceptions: when you fight asgore, when you fight toriel, and when you fight asriel, and even in those cases we still get white text. even in new home, when nearly every description is changed, when chara is flooded with memories and emotions, they still manage to bring up one or two word descriptions when you look at things.

but when it comes to this picture of them, with their family, still happy? they can’t tell you what it is. they can’t stand to look at it. they can’t even stand to think about it - it’s as much emotional turmoil to them as being forced to battle their surrogate family!

which really makes no sense at all with these ideas that chara is enjoying this, that this is what chara wanted all along, that chara never loved their family. in no mercy, you the player are putting chara through a literal hell - remember what flowey said to them in the ruins?

“Let’s destroy everything in this wretched world. Everyone, everything in these worthless memories.”

and they do it. they destroy everything they ever loved - their mother, their father, their best friend, the entire world. they try and put all these “worthless memories” aside, to (as sans says) become “detached” from the world and from its people and everything it meant to them… and, even then, when faced with this photograph, they still can’t do it. they’re still overwhelmed with emotion.

chara isn’t evil - you are. you put them through this. chara is just a hurt child struggling to understand a world that’s hurt them again and again.





in other words, asgore’s journal says “Nice day today! Nice day today! Nice day today! Nice day today! Nice day today!”

well, that’s a little creepy.

anyway, chara responds to this the same way they respond to the note on the padlocks, as if they’ve read it before. and that’s not really surprising - the journal entries being “always the same” reflects a lot of what’s happened to asgore’s mental state after the loss of his children, after his self-described “fit of anger” that lead him to declare war.

like i said earlier, he wants nothing more than “the fantasy” of everything being undone - of his life being reset. he wishes he hadn’t given hope to the monsters by declaring a “war” he knows he can’t win, that forces him to kill completely innocent humans who fall into the underground. he wishes he hadn’t lost toriel. he wishes his children hadn’t died.

that’s why new home is in black and white, as if it’s in the past. that’s why he tries to recreate toriel’s butterscotch pies. that’s why he says to frisk that he and “my wife” will take care of them, even though he and toriel separated so long ago he doesn’t even know if she’s still alive. and that’s why this journal’s entries are all the same.

asgore is trapped living in the past, repeating the same day over and over and over. and so is flowey, just with the added hell of time travel - there’s a lot of parallels between this journal and flowey’s desire to reunite with chara, to “have fun” with them again no matter the cost. even chara themselves can’t let go - the only option they see to do that is the one you’ve taught them, to just destroy it all completely, and even then they probably will still have the locket.





chara’s line in no mercy here, like 90% of chara’s character and basically the entire game, is pretty clearly a reference to rpg mechanics. in a standard rpg, the world exists for you to plunder it - enemies and homes are things to be killed and looted so you can kill and loot faster.



remember how chara reacts to the snowman? frisk sees them as a friend to help - chara, thanks to your guidance, sees them as a series of healing items.

(also: asgore canonically acted as santa claus for chara during christmas. pass it on)





remember how i said that chara has a strong emotional reaction to the flower drawing they made, but not the flower macaroni art that’s in this room?

yeah. they made this too. they loved their family (even if they weren’t quite able to call asgore “dad”), and their family loved them. i think, from their line in no mercy, chara half-expected asgore to throw away that sweater after they died - but they didn’t. asgore always held onto it, which seems to surprise chara in the pacifist version too.

(and thank you to everyone who has drawn cute fanart of chara knitting already!)





this appears if you try to open the padlock using only one key. i bet you didn’t even know there was a line for this!

but it’s interesting that, even for an easily missable minor line that has the exact same meaning, chara’s narration takes on a very different tone - chara in no mercy gets straight to the point, sounding almost impatient (and, as the red text might imply, even angry) in comparison to their line in the pacifist version. their line in the pacifist version sounds helpful and even conversational.

one reason for that is the use of “you” - chara is talking to frisk here, but it’s ambigious who they are speaking to in no mercy. is it still frisk? is it themselves? is it you, the player? with the lines between them blurred to nothingness, does it even matter?





and speaking of that, here it is, probably two of the most well-known lines in the whole game.

chara’s line in no mercy is exactly the same as it is in toriel’s home (and the demo), but look at how much it’s changed in the pacifist playthrough - chara seems amazed that after all of the horrible things they’ve been through, frisk has stayed themselves, maintained their own independent personality from both the player and chara.

that they haven’t turned into what they both have become in no mercy.





of course, the photo albums and scrapbooks on one level represent asgore’s life - another example, along with the golden flowers and the otherwise untouched house, of how he can’t let go of the past.

but, if those albums and scrapbooks are filled with pictures of the dreemur family, that means there are hundreds of pictures of chara in there too - chara with their adopted parents, chara with asriel, chara happy and safe. just like the photo in their room.

and chara doesn’t even give it a glance in no mercy. just more worthless memories of a life they lost long ago.





but, worst of all, no chocolate. and they’re really mad about it



…anyway everyone knows what the snails symbolize, but the no mercy line is an interesting line because toriel does have a “brand-name chocolate bar” in her fridge. it’s one of the only connections, besides the golden flowers in her room, that toriel’s home has to chara

i can’t really speculate why it’s there. maybe it was for chara (or even belonged to them originally?) and she took it with her? maybe chara did love in home for a little while? maybe asriel gave chara a sweet tooth? or maybe toriel just likes brand-name chocolate. who knows





again, another sign of how new home is a giant time capsule, completely untouched from the day asriel + chara died

and, of course, it’s not just this for asgore, but for chara and flowey. when flowey introduces himself, he says chara finally made it, and asks if he “remembers” having played here a long time ago - that’s all to set up the idea that, for all three characters, this house symbolizes a ton of painful memories.

also notice the use of “i’ve” rather than “you’ve,” even though the text is plain white - further proof that chara is canonically the narrator in both routes. this is also another example of them not bothering to read things for frisk/the player’s benefit - it’s not important, and since when were you the one in control anyway?





another example of the detachment from the world that chara/frisk is experiencing, very much the same as the save points just saying “determination.” they already know toriel/asgore used fire magic to cook, so they’d be explaining that for frisk/the player’s benefit in pacifist, but in no mercy, who cares? it’s a stove. let’s move on.

also one is in parentheses, but one is not, but i still don’t know what that means. thinking vs. speaking out loud?





almost completely identical, except for the pronoun. by the way, several times chara uses “you” pronouns in new home in no mercy, but only in lines that aren’t changed - with the one exception of the locket, where they say “you can feel it beating.”

it might be just a mistake/reused lines, but you can maybe read this as chara disassociating, which makes sense with the hallucinatory nature of the locket “beating” as well. a lot of players aren’t sure when chara “takes over’ or who is control of their shared body at any given point - and it’s possible chara is in a mental state where they don’t entirely know who they are either, and haven’t been sure for a long time, which is why it’s inconsistent before and after this area.

(why the red text here? most likely because chara knows what unlocking the chain symbolizes - that there’s no turning back. they’re going to kill asgore, their adopted father, and asriel, then destroy the world.)





you might have heard of this one already - it’s probably one of the most important line changes because it confirmed a lot of speculation people had about the game’s timeline.

that it’s an “old” calendar, along with bratty and catty’s passing mention that the monsters have been trapped behind the barrier for “millennia,” tells us for sure that the child in the intro is chara and that it’s been thousands of years since the barrier was formed and at least centuries since asriel + chara died and asgore began to collect the human souls.

it also, again, further implies that asgore hasn’t changed anything since that date.

as for why the date is circled, feralphoenix had some cute speculation that they celebrated the date chara fell as chara’s birthday! i really like that - i also like to think that’s why the knife and the locket are in gift boxes, which would mean asgore put them there after chara’s death.

and i guess this isn’t technically in new home but…





ow my heart :,)



of course, it doesn’t have to say “chara” - it says whatever name you named the fallen child at the beginning. and, as flowey speculates, chara is not in the coffin because toriel took their body back to home with them once asgore began to collect the human souls (that’s why the “bandages” are in there, as mentioned in the epilogue).

although it’s an interesting, and incredibly creepy, line for another reason - wasn’t chara dead? does their revived spirit have memories of their time as a corpse? were they “living” for however long they’ve been dead as a kind of ghost (the non-monster kind), experiencing their time in the coffin and then buried underground in the ruins? is it their soul? was their soul in a state of undeath, experiencing everything their corpse did, the entire time?

(considering how determination works, that’s horrifyingly possible)

it’s really not clear at all how chara came to be a part of frisk - my own is that their “soul” or “essence” passed to the golden flowers which stuck to frisk through the game - and i feel this only raises even more questions. but maybe this helps shed some light on what happened to chara’s soul between their death and the events of the game.

anyway that’s it!

there are other lines that change in the no mercy route - for instance, they have a long first-person monologue if you Check RG01/RG02 about how they “see two lovers staring over the edge of the cauldron of hell,” and strangely, the description of the dog food in alphys’ lab changes to say “(It’s a half-empty bag of dog food.) (You just remembered something funny.)”



this, though, is the most extensive set of changes, so i thought it’d be good to document them all to get a better picture of what’s really going on in no mercy and what kind of person chara really was - not evil or cruel or manipulative, but one of two hurt children you the player push into committing mass murder.

i hope this helps people