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What I learned about racism from UNDERTALE. [1]

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Date: 2025-07-25

For those who never played UNDERTALE, here’s a short synopsis of the game. You, the player, control a human child who fell into the Underground, where monsters have been sealed behind an impenetrable barrier since time immemorial. It turns out that with the power of determination, even a human child is powerful enough to easily kill almost any monster, and so the monsters fear your sudden appearance and frequently attack you. For your part, you can either respond with hostility or mercy; retaliating against the monsters who attack you (thus killing them), or enduring and avoiding their attacks until you can convince them to stop attacking you.

You learn later on that the actual reason the monsters are attacking you is because they need seven human SOULs (represented by different colored hearts, of which they have six) in order to break the barrier and free themselves, as well as the tragedy that led to this point — how humans attacked the monsters out of fear at their ability to manipulate SOULs, in a short-lived war without a single human casualty where monsters were either killed or imprisoned underground behind a barrier put up by humans, as well as the fate of the first human to fall into the Underground and the monster prince who became their adopted sibling.

It’s not obvious — what we consider racism isn’t even mentioned in UNDERTALE, since you only ever see one human, and a child at that — but the game has a lot to say on the subject via allegory. Such as how those who have benefited or are benefiting from racism have the responsibility to do something about it, not just those who have been harmed or are being harmed by it. The monsters have every reason to attack the fallen human you play as, since you are more powerful than them, an invader to boot, and your SOUL is the final key they need to be freed from their dark prison; it is up to you as the player to prove to them that you will not harm them, and that you will find a way to free them instead of killing them or even just escaping.

Just as it is up to white people to ACT against white supremacist racism in this country. White people are the ones who benefit from it, and so white people must ACT against it. Black people been victimized by white supremacist racism in this country since long before it was a country; while they can and do ACT against it, the societal structures put in place by white supremacist racism prevent them from succeeding on their own. It is up to white people to sabotage those structures from the “outside” to allow us all to SAVE ourselves from the shackles holding us prisoner to the whims of the powerful.

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