Why do you like the Fallen Human so much? Whether it's their characteristics, thematic role, or just their backstory or lack thereof, what's so intriguing about them?

We know both a lot about Chara and very little about Chara. Explicitly, we are told that Chara was the future of humans and monsters, Asriel adopted sibling and beloved of the Underground until the kids’ grand, terrible plan got them both killed. The only other time we are directly given info on Chara is after the Kill-All, during their monologue.

In a way, they are the least explored character in Undertale … and yet, they are also the most explored character in Undertale.

As the narrator, they tell Frisk, and through Frisk, us–more jokes than anyone else in the Underground They tell more puns than Toriel and Sans combined many times over.

Chara is like a friend who you spend all your time with, joking with, falling in love with, while never talking about themselves. Always involved with what’s in front of them, with what comes next, but never talking about their personal history.

We know more about them than anyone, we know their attitude, we know their sense of humor, we know their brightest point, we know their lowest point. But for all that, we have precious little information about what shaped them into the person they are. We can only extrapolate, try to tease hints and implications and give it framework.

Very little about Chara is stated outright, but so much is implied. Falling in love with Chara, the first fallen child, is a rewarding experience. It turns the game into a egg hunt for hidden detail and character moments disguised as narration, as we try to get to know our best friend and inseparable partner a little better.

And once that starts, you’re not only deeply invested in searching for more Chara details, you’re finding more hints as to what they may have been like in life, and certainly how they are right now. Their little virtues, their soft, gentle moments. The echoes of their old loves and heartaches.

They become incredibly fascinating. Once you’ve started looking, you’ll never stop seeing them , and once you’ve started seeing them, you’ll never run out of things to find and fall in love with all over again. When you play UT, you see everyone’s dialogue, and eventually, things start to get stale You know these words by heart. You know the lines by memory. But Chara’s hidden nature makes it easier to miss their little flashes of character and makes it ever more a joy to find these insights.

When you’ve long since gotten bored of Sans’ “Let’s get to the point,” when you’ve figured out everything Undyne says when you kill any combination of her friends, when you’ve exhausted every possible bit of dialogue Alphys could throw at you in her facade with Mettaton … you’ll still be discovering Chara hidden in the margins, flashes of character moments tucked into the narration we take for granted.

Chara remains a just barely understood, but they can be understood. And that makes them feel real long past the point where everyone else has been reduced to, as Flowey says, ‘sets of numbers, lines of dialogue.’ We know nothing about Gaster of substance. If we have headcanons, we have to make them up and flat out guess. But we have a wealth of material to draw on to figure out what Chara is like.

Chara, as the narrator, is with us always. They make us laugh more than anybody else. We hear more of their dialogue than anybody else. They share our triumphs and failures Yet, what we know about their history is scarce and threadbare. Their constant presence by our side and the challenge of trying to reverse engineer their history … This isn’t all the reasons I like Chara, but it’s certainly one one of the biggest ones, and this ask has gone on long enough already.