Serious Issues with Undyne's Character Development [Oh no the Spaghetti got SPOILED]

[FaelisongTalim]

Undyne, also known as the aquatic psychopath otaku. She's there for both comedic effect and turning the player into a badass. However, there are some extreme inconsistencies with her character design that makes her more awkward than Napstablook.

When the player first meets Undyne, we see her as a knight in a suit of armor, with a glowing eye that is capable of disappearing into the murky depths of the Waterfall. She also chooses to remain silent, yet her gaze menancing enough to throw Papyrus into doing her bidding. This gives the impression of a silent badass, just no talk and all assassination. Obviously unnerving, yet the fading into blackness effect is the one that really doesn't seem to match with Undyne at all.

Depending on what type of run is done, Undyne is either portrayed as a screaming maniac that has an innocent heart or a heroine that refuses to fall to the slaughtering protagonist and metamorphisizes into a goddess filled with Determination. Which honestly contrasts with her encounters in the Waterfalll, where she appears out of nowhere and just randomly showers the player in a tsunami of spears, without warning nor explaination.

She also seems to take brawn over brain very clearly, yet she deliberately traps the player with the Echo Flower after the darkening lantern room, which is odd considering in any other situation she would just swooce right in and try to stab Frisk's face in, but no, she chose tactic over the usual mindless violence.

The fading into darkness bit is still bothering me immensely, as not even Undyne in the Undying uses that ability to try to stop Frisk. Also her eye doesn't just seem as luminescent as without her helmet, which just seems weird. And Undyne just patrolling around without her battle suit seems so unusual, considering she's the head of the Royal Guard, yet takes more breaks than Sans does on Genocide Runs. I mean, there was a clear problem going on when Papyrus called Undyne to halt the ASGORE encounter, and yet she decides to rush in without her armor? That's just, "do you know how to do your job or what."

Undyne also is shown to have a deep hatred for humans (which contradicts her love for humans in anime), yet in the Alphys date, is even going as far to put on a wig and a leather jacket to look as humane as possible. I get that it's a semi-formal date, and that her RG Armor or her Casual clothing wouldn't cut it, but... wig? Really.

Her Undyne the Undying fight depicts her with immense amounts of Determination just to kill Frisk, and yet refused to morph when trapped by Flowey? She's even shown to struggle, yet even with her inner strenght, she wouldn't try to give it her all as she usually promotes? It doesn't make snese.

Look, I adore Undyne as a character, from her just smashing her foot to shower vegetables (which are mostly fruit, excuse me?), to her transforming into a badass that won't stop trying to end the genocide, but her character development seems way off.

TL:DR: Undyne, the anime isn't good for being consistent in character design, stop watching it you geek.

[Strider VM]

Anime is two stuff happening both at once.

- One is heroics! Fights! Honor!
- Two is theatrics. Silliness. Coolness beyond all else!

I think both embodies Undyne.

[FaelisongTalim]

Originally posted by StriderVM:

Anime is two stuff happening both at once.

- One is heroics! Fights! Honor!
- Two is theatrics. Silliness. Coolness beyond all else!

I think both embodies Undyne.

Sure, but the initial Knight getup still sets everything up in a weird manner.

[Strider VM]

But she's also a Royal Knight appointed by Asgore. Think of it as a sort of a guard who is loyal, menacing and fierce.... Then she fangasms when givenchance. Because her inspiration came from anime.

[Doggy Davis]

I don't think she was wearing a wig, I think she had just styled her hair.

[FaelisongTalim]

Originally posted by Doggy Davis:

I don't think she was wearing a wig, I think she had just styled her hair.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=525002231

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=539452252

Nah, her battle sprite shows her with a hair that's much lighter in tone.

[FaelisongTalim]

Originally posted by StriderVM:

But she's also a Royal Knight appointed by Asgore. Think of it as a sort of a guard who is loyal, menacing and fierce.... Then she fangasms when givenchance. Because her inspiration came from anime.

It's still pretty awkward that a character can have both ends of the spectrum, from comedic to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ serious.

...then again, Sans is a dude who exists.

[Theawolf]

Well, I'm gonna start addressing questions as best I can in no particular order, but mostly going backwards in your list. Everything in this post can be considered spoilers for all runs:

- Doesn't transform for Flowey fight.
So, this is our first stop and already it's a doosie to account for, but there's actually reasoning there. Quite simply, there is no danger until the crew is all trapped by Flowey, at which point he has the 6 souls worth of power and determination. She may well have had the intense determination at this point to turn into Undyne the Undying, but Flowey's power was focused into erasing her and he was significantly stronger at this point. Even if we can assume that she could force out a transformation under the pressure of being erased by that level of power, she would still be helpless to stop it so it would just become a Genocide run spoiler.

- Doesn't wear her armor to stop the Asgore fight
There's actually a couple of reasons for this to be okay. We don't know what Papyrus told the group as he called, but it's perfectly possible that he didn't mention any sort of danger to Undyne. We already know that she trusts Papyrus enough to spend time with him outside of her armor, so this should be no surprise.
Conversely, if Papyrus told her it was a major emergency and she needed to hurry, it's still reasonable to take off unarmored. Donning heavy plate mail can take a considerable ammount of time (the few accounts I've found say ~10 min to don), and we've already seen what happens when Undyne goes running through hotland in her armor to get up to the castle. For time and safety, going unarmored seems fine, especially since she sees both you and asgore as friends and probably doesn't plan to fight you.

- Undyne's Wig
Really, I've got very little here... Best I can think is that she wanted to look good for when she went to visit Alphys, but I have no reasonable answer.

- Fades into Darkness
For me this 'fade into darkness' thing seemed more like her hiding in the shadows and then stepping out or being seen, or else disappearing into the shadows, than any actual ability. She always 'appears' in areas that are heavily shadowed, so I don't think it's unreasonable for us to say that she was there all along and Frisk just didn't notice her until then.

- Brawn over Brains, Hail of Spears
She actually sets up two traps for the player. The first is when she is stabbing through the floor and traps the player on the dead-end bridge. She destroys the bridge and drops the player to what she expects would be their death. The player manages to survive the fall the same way they survive the fall into the Underworld to begin with, and the fighting begins again later, but she shows a tendancy towards tactics when they are available.

Still on the Spears, the first time she attacks the player with spears, we know that she wants the last Human Soul so that they can go to the surface again. We know from later in the game that she's a good person at heart, and we see that once she gets to know Frisk a bit, they become fast friends and she has no more desire to attack Frisk. She probably attacked the player because she had rationalized that she needed to do this for the good of all monsters, so she couldn't let even her being such a good person at heart get in the way of things. She probably only stops this first attack because Monster Kid was likely in the area, and we've seen several times that Undyne places the safety of monsters above her mission.

Just some thoughts on things here for ya

[(Edgy) Asriel Dreemurr]

As for her rushing to Asgore without her armor. She can't survive in Hotland long with the armor on, which is shown at the end of the pacifist fight with her. So she couldn't wear it and get to the castle.

[holly]

Originally posted by 'VOGGING FINAL FANART:

Originally posted by Doggy Davis:

I don't think she was wearing a wig, I think she had just styled her hair.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=525002231

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=539452252

Nah, her battle sprite shows her with a hair that's much lighter in tone.

I think this is a matter of modifying the design for clarity in rather than suggesting it's not her real hair. Since the date encounters use monochrome sprites for characters as in battles, if her "date" hairstyle was filled in white like her practical battle ponytail, it would be much harder to "read" as an image. That's my take on it at least.

[brickey.8]

Why would Undyne feel the need to wear armor to stop the fight with Asgore? She knew the participants were going to be Asgore, who would never hurt her, and Frisk, who is unlikely to hurt her and has had better opportunities.

The "fading into darkness" thing does seem a bit at odds with her later behavior, but also note the dramatic shift in her behavior between the start of her pre-battle speech (and the earlier speech when she corners you with the flower) and what she says after she starts "ad-libbing" her speech. I think Undyne just had the idea that this job called for her to act like a cold, stoic and unstoppable force of nature, and so she tried to play up that role (probably drawing on some anime villains for inspiration). But eventually she got sick of that and just started acting like herself, which at that moment meant becoming extremely hammy. (Unless you killed Papyrus, in which case she can't even bring herself to be hammy because of the loss, so "herself" is just cold fury).

As for not turning into Undying for Flowey... that was a thing she did under extraordinary circumstances. She was mortally wounded, and had just witnessed you attack an innocent and recognized you as an existential threat to everyone. Flowey probably didn't actually hurt her that bad, and she didn't know enough about him to say how important beating him was (and honestly the stakes *were* lower), and anyways it was all over in a few seconds.

[overflow]

Well, real people can act very differently depending on the situation they're in. I've known people who appeared silent and stoic, but once I got to know them a bit better they turned out to be raving weirdos haha.

Also, I think Undyne was trying to look and act super cool. Getting the echo flower prepared, saying cryptic, slow phrases, threatening the player, standing on a rock posing, it's clear to me that she wanted to inspire awe and intimidate us. But then when she says "you know what? SCREW IT" she lets more of her natural self shine through.

[Wow!]

She chose tactic over the usual mindless violence because the mindless violence hasn't worked. The opponent is more formidable than she expected and she changed up her tactics. She's the head of the Royal Guard, she knows what she's doing.

The fading into darkness and flashing eye thing struck me more as an artistic choice than any sort of power or ability.

Maybe the wig was a cosplay wig (If it was even a wig at all and not artistic choice)

[SundownKid]

I wouldn't take the badass part so seriously. Most of that was most likely just a representation of what the Main Character was feeling at that moment about Undyne. They don't know anything about her, so, they percieve her as a cold, evil monster.

Papyrus is that way about Undyne no matter what. So, it wasn't like she was trying to act evil, more like the Main Character is percieving her as evil.