Undertale's Flowey's First Meeting

Humble though Toby Fox gives every appearance of being, there’s not much doubt that his greatest claim to fame, Undertale, is a masterful work at nearly every turn. There’s so much that Undertale has to say to its player, and so much that it can say, and it never wastes an opportunity for that communication, whether through direct or indirect (or both) methods.

You take the initial meeting with the antagonist Flowey, at the very start of the game. Although I’m sure we’re all familiar, the quick rundown is that you’re dropped unceremoniously into the game, within a largely dark and alien setting, and within moments of gaining the ability to move your character, you come across a smiling, cute little talking flower who greets you and offers to let you know how things work down here. Expecting a tutorial at this early stage in the game, the player of course goes along with Flowey’s directions, and catches the little white “friendliness pellets” he tosses the player’s way...only for that pellet to immediately reduce the player’s HP, and to their dawning horror, Flowey’s face twists into an ugly, demonic grin as he tells you that the real way things work is that it’s kill or be killed, and that you’re an idiot for so easily trusting him. He prepares to finish you off, but you are, at the last moment, saved by another, later revealed to be Toriel. But the true damage is already done, as I’ll get into later.

It’s the first, formative experience that the player has with another entity in Undertale, the first moment in which the player has some agency in the game’s events and the protagonist’s actions...this is, essentially, the moment of birth for Undertale’s narrative, that from which every following moment in the entire course of the game will be informed. And Toby Fox uses this incomparably vital, founding event to its utmost! Many a player and critic has lauded Frisk and Flowey’s first meeting for all it accomplishes as Undertale’s opening gambit, and rightly so. It serves as the first taste and tutorial of the gameplay interface, and the pattern of the conflicts to come over the course of the game. It establishes a clear, prominent, and compelling villain to the work, to such a penetrating degree that Flowey can then be absent beyond occasional hints and rumors for 90% of the rest of the game without losing his singular presence when on stage. It grabs the player’s attention with violent speed and effect, drawing them immediately into the game to a degree that many RPGs can’t match with their more basic narrative methods.

But like I said, there have been many players who already have made note of all these ways in which Flowey’s introduction is a very skillful and effective narrative stroke, and let’s face it, most of them have probably done so more eloquently, and all of them have done so with more brevity, than I’m likely to. But there is 1 more way in which Flowey’s introduction is worthy of notice, in my opinion, which I have yet to see made mention of* by Undertale’s fans and philosophers, and so that’s why we’re here today.

Flowey sets a tone of paranoia that makes trusting those who follow him a frightening and difficult task for the player. Now, this by itself isn’t a unique revelation; many have spoken of how effective this is as a way of keeping the looming fear of trusting others present through the whole game. Flowey’s betrayal is sharp in our mind as we meet Toriel, and we have to make an effort to trust her in spite of how clearly kind and loving she is, because Flowey, too, seemed friendly and helpful, at first. Then, once we have allowed ourselves to trust Toriel, a being who clearly wishes only to keep us safe, happy, and loved, we have to re-learn to trust when we leave her protection--the meeting of Sans puts our hackles up again for a moment, for he approaches from the darkness, his intentions unknown, and though we learned to trust the familial Toriel, her warning that there are others out there who wish to harm us, and that we’re going out among them, brings back our memories of Flowey and the fear of others once more.

But Sans is immediately friendly, as is Papyrus, through whom we can learn to trust someone even though they are strangers, and even more, strangers who supposedly are our foes. But then we next encounter Undyne, and she is our foe, and once more the knowledge that there are those who wish to destroy us, imparted so effectively through Flowey at our beginning, brings us to fear this new and unknown person. Yet if we can find it in ourselves to master our fear once more and avoid resorting to violence, we discover that even those opposed to us can, in fact, be made into friends, with patience and understanding. Mettaton ups the stakes once more, a threatening figure who has (we think) not chosen enmity with us, but rather is hardcoded to seek our death, reminding us of Flowey once more (as Flowey posits that the world we’re in is a black-and-white case of kill or be killed, a hardline belief related to Mettaton’s supposed programing). And if we can even manage to put forth the effort to befriend--or at least sidestep--him, we finally face Asgore, the threat of whom we have been warned over and over again since Toriel, and who reminds us a final time of that first, scarring meeting with Flowey by forcing us to subdue him much in the way that Toriel shooed the malicious little dandelion off.

The betrayal experienced at Flowey’s petals early in the game, the distrust it creates within the player, is recalled again and again as Undertale goes on, admittedly with less pull every time (which makes Flowey’s return, at the point at which you believe yourself to have completely overcome the paranoia and perceptions he created in you, all the more jarring and even terrifying). But what I believe, and haven’t seen others comment on, is that this does not just serve to create a lasting, engaging question of trust and fear in terms of the player’s own experience and perceptions. The juxtaposition between the fear of betrayal and the hope for friendship and love created through Flowey’s introduction and all the following encounters in the game also comes back to 1 of Undertale’s themes: the examination of conflict resolution in one’s journey through life, and the creation, mentality, and terrible destructive wake of choosing to kill, of a mentality that chooses to meet opposition with violence, and to delight in doing so.

Undertale allows the player to play in 1 of 3 ways: Pacifist, in which they take care to never kill anyone;*** Neutral, in which the player opts to kill opponents at least once during the game’s course; and Genocide, in which the the player goes out of their way to murder every single possible opponent, even hunting them down to do so. Of these methods, however, it’s safe to say that only Pacifist and Genocide have particular significance to us and to Undertale’s messages, with Neutral seeming to exist mostly to urge you to pursue the Pacifist route. In each of these 2 more important routes, the game examines not just the results and mindset of resolving one’s problems with either violence or peace, and the difficulties therein for each, but also the formation of the kind of person who chooses to never repay violence in kind, and, more significantly, the formation of the kind of person who kills, casually, frequently, indiscriminately, habitually, and most importantly, remorselessly.

While Undertale examines the formation of such a psychopathic monster in multiple ways, the opening encounter with Flowey represents its best attempt, in my opinion. See, ultimately, that which keeps a person from solving their problems with others with violence is empathy.**** To have an immediate, strong compulsion not to harm others as a means of resolving conflict, one requires the ability to understand another’s feelings--to recognize their capacity to experience the pain you could inflict upon them as the same as your own capacity for suffering--and the ability to see other people, even initially hostile ones, as people that you can personally connect to in a positive way. Without the ability to view others in the same way as you view yourself, there is no possibility for regret for your harmful actions towards them, and there is no possibility for respecting their life.

And that’s what Flowey damages: the player’s ability to empathize. Flowey being our first and arguably most memorable formative experience in Undertale attacks our ability to trust anyone we meet after him. And trust is foundational to empathy: without trust at its most fundamental level, the ability to trust that another could possibly not be a threat to you, the ability to trust the world enough to recognize the capacity of any other being to be a source of anything but danger...well, one cannot empathize if one cannot allow for the possibility that others will not, sooner or later, be a threat to one. By making such a strong attack on our ability to trust every character that follows him, Flowey’s introduction by extension makes the same attack on our ability to empathize with them, and thus pushes us in our paranoia strongly toward a killing mentality, where otherwise we might have had a far easier time choosing to be peaceful from the start.

And through this scenario, Undertale examines the creation of a killer. Flowey’s introduction and its effects upon the player are allegorical for the cause--or a cause, at least--of a mindset of violence. So much of who and what we are as individuals is formed upon our early experiences, the perceptions of our world and its other occupants that we first gather--and Undertale argues, through Flowey and his influence, that an initial lesson that the world is threatening and contains dangerous falsehoods will strongly push a person to respond in kind for the rest of their life, even if subsequent positive experiences can eventually break that paranoia’s hold. An early experience bereft of love, nurturing, and security can damage our perception of the world in ways that will be felt forever--and can easily start us down a path of mistrust, then apathy, and finally violence.









* Which doesn’t mean that no one has thought of this, of course; it’s not like I scour the internet all day every day for every single comment and video made on the game,** so I certainly could have missed someone else figuring this out, as well. But I at least am confident that if I haven’t seen this observation made yet, most other people probably won’t have, either.


** Not to say that I’m doing anything better with my time, mind you. In fact, since I am at the time of writing this playing yet another Kemco game, I’m pretty sure I spend my time on far worse activities.


*** Jerry notwithstanding. But, I mean, it’s Jerry.


**** Yes, logic should also be a deterrent against violence, as any long-term understanding of social forces will inevitably show that peaceful resolution is the superior approach in the vast majority of cases...but let’s face it, interpersonal problems are called interpersonal for a reason, and that which is personal triggers our emotions, not our rationality.