Chapter Text
"Don't you have anything better to do?"
Those words still hurt. After all this time? Always.
Congratulations! If you're reading this you've reached the level of emotional investment required to care about the fate of Asriel Dreemurr. Ain't gonna judge, part of that is why I'm here. Some stories or even characters just get their hooks into you, and the hooks can take many forms. Perhaps you just like fluff, forgiveness and redemption. Second chances are pretty rad, after all. Or maybe you think the pieces are all on the board and you like to resolve it all into a neat and tidy conclusion. Maybe you just need Asriel to pick up that lightsaber during the climax of your crossover. Or perhaps you're like me and consider the idea of someone being twisted into something unrecognisable, then restored, then to lose it once again through an act of self sacrifice, a rather harsh fate.
So perhaps you've resolved to do something about it. Great! The only question is: How? Well that's what this guide is for, the exploration of some of the approaches I've experienced (and utilised) in granting a second change to the Prince of this World's Future. Hopefully you should cultivate some ideas for how you want to explain Asriel's return. Don't think that the existence of any one method outlined here, or my accompanying sample writings, means you cannot use the same method yourself. We're in an environment where we already use others' toys to tell our stories in our own way, and there's nothing inherently wrong in putting your own spin on them. Without further ado, let's jump in.
In the broadest strokes, there are two barriers to Asriel going with Frisk and seeing his family again: An external barrier, and an internal barrier. The External Barrier can be addressed in a large variety of ways, so let's cover it first.
THE EXTERNAL BARRIER
Not to be confused with the Barrier™, this is about the physical (and magical) rules of the setting. As implied by the True Pacifist ending, the Asriel we see at the end of the game at the start of the game has used all his power to shatter the barrier, and is fated to revert back to Flowey. If you restart, you have proof positive of this. The inevitability of this is the main reason he cites in refusing to see anyone he loves, to avoid hurting them even more than he already has. Makes sense, even if you can concoct a justification for getting past this, perhaps through your own values regarding the truth. Now the game implies that it's soul power that allowed him to regain and maintain his form, so the single most common solution to the external barrier is simple: Get Asriel a soul.
ONE LUMP OR SEVEN?
But whoa, hold on there! The text of the game is ambiguous about this, but Asriel has an important line: "Without the power of everyone's souls, I can't maintain this form." This leads to a school of thought that it's not just the one soul you need, it's the equivalent of seven human souls. This is also supported by Flowey not becoming Asriel in the neutral endings with six souls to play with. If you follow this interpretation, even Asriel's original soul won't be enough to keep his form. The only way is seven souls, which probably harshes any plans you have to continue a Post True Pacifist story. There's also an important sub-variant, that one of the seven souls had to be the combination of monster souls Flowey uses before the final battle, because the monsters' innate love are what gave Asriel his compassion back. This has possible implications for exploring a save attempt that goes wrong or otherwise incomplete.
That being said, there are looser arguments that a single soul could be enough to keep his form once he's already attained it. I call this the Pumpkin argument: In Terry Pratchett's Witches Abroad, it is revealed that pumpkins are the most morphologically inert objects in the universe, to change their form through magic means requires the most powerful brute force magic known. There is a loophole however: If there was ever a time the pumpkin was not a pumpkin, its form "remembered" this, and it's comparatively easy to nudge the pumpkin to that form. So it goes for Flowey/Asriel. A Flowey that "remembers" being Asriel in this way doesn't necessarily need all that raw power to regain the form.
And there's another loophole to consider if you want to address the brute force problem: Maybe all the human souls are completely unnecessary. Maybe Asriel's essence responds much more efficiently to a single monster soul. It's still a dilemma because most of the time folks of any species are reluctant to bequeath their soul before they're finished with it.
This isn't a dilemma often explored in stories primarily focused on the process of saving Asriel however. The common consensus seems to be a single soul will do the trick. You don't have to follow that, and if you manage to come up with a good explanation that addresses the seven soul assumption, then good for you, I hope it made a fun story! And that's what's important in general: Understand that it's okay to break the rules laid out in the canon text to achieve your outcome. If it wasn't, every piece of fan content would be merely a retelling of part or all of the official story with varying levels of detail.
THE INTERNAL BARRIER
The main internal barrier is Asriel himself. In the game he relies on the difficulties surrounding the external barrier to push you away, but this means he doesn't have to talk about what else would make him reluctant: His Guilt and his Fear.
The Guilt is pretty obvious, especially if you've listened to Flowey's genocide speech: As Flowey he lost all sense of the monsters as people and just had fun manipulating and killing them. Repeatedly. For god knows how long. This is a big thing for a child to suddenly have to grapple with, and it's incredibly easy to draw the conclusion that you can never be forgiven for it, especially when your victims can't really appreciate what it is you did. Guilt will nearly always be at least a part of post-Flowey Asriel, and a subtext that's easy to explore if you commit to writing about his later life. How to address the guilt will probably come down to your own thoughts on guilt and forgiveness. My personal take is that with sincere remorse, anything is forgivable. But it requires constant work, making it up to those you hurt, especially when what you did can't be really quantified. So in my stories I've attempted to have Asriel learn this eventually, and perhaps learn to forgive himself.
The fear is connected and yet contradictory, base fear of Sans turning up and giving him a Bad Time™ notwithstanding. His fear of going to everyone and basically being shunned. They see him as the psycho flower who attacked them at the Barrier™. Depending on how you interpret resets they may remember his past crimes, or be instinctively wary. In short, they don't forgive him. So he's left just as alone as he was as Flowey, only now with the emotions to feel truly awful. For the most part this is an irrational fear, and most incarnations of Asriel know this. Monsters are generally too easy to befriend to hold a grudge over something that, from their perspective, didn't happen. Except Jerry, because that guy won't let go of when you cut in line in front of him. It is a common interpretation of Asriel that he was timid before everything happened, so you may need a way to give him a shot in the arm to reveal himself, even if it's just Frisk holding his hand.
On the whole, I think exploring these feelings will help improve your story. I wouldn't try and have them define the story however. You could write a story that's entirely about him feeling guilty and genuinely not wanting to return, and that kind of character exploration can make good bittersweet reading. But in my personal preferences, the very core of Asriel does want to return, does want to see his parents, and does want to apologise. It's just the combinations of not being able to and his own emotions that is smothering that desire, and you probably want a compelling argument to persuade him.
So now we've established the stakes of saving Asriel, the following chapters will cover the more common mechanics of doing it, with writing samples to explore how I may approach it, if I haven't already. I can never claim that this will be exhaustive, and it's possible I've whole, for want of a better word, genres of saving him. If you've read as far as this first chapter, never feel afraid to suggest your own examples. Now lets get into it!