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flightworks2018-11-22 02:27 pm
feralphoenix) wrote in flightworks2018-11-22 02:27 pm
Undertale Classpect Headcanons
one more rehomed undertale essay for the road......... this was also originally posted to my main tumblr @feralphoenix in 2016. it initially accompanied an illustration of frisk, chara, and asriel in god tier pjs, which can still be found on page 23 of this log on pixiv.
okay, i'm for sure not the first person to talk about what classpects i'd assign the undertale kids, and a lot of the most involved classpect discussion went on last year after undertale had only just came out. but on the other hand now that undertale is a year and a month old, my own interpretations of canon (and my headcanons lol) are more nuanced and more solid.
it's noon on a friday and i don't particularly have better to do, so Let's Go it's classpects meta time. spoilers for undertale and homestuck, as well as extensive talk about child abuse, child death, trauma, and resultant mental illness (as is typical for both canons) will feature significantly.
now, i've got the trio situated as thus: frisk as muse of heart, chara as page of time, asriel as prince of light. i'll start with my asriel analysis because canon gives us the most to work with in his case.
in homestuck canon, the prince class is a very active, destroyer class. princes can destroy their aspect (dirk splinters his own soul and tries to remove aranea's; eridan destroys the matriorb and kills or seriously injures his own teammates) or destroy using their aspect as a weapon (kurloz destroyed meulin's hearing by screaming in rage).
too, light is a very interesting aspect because we get to see three characters (rose, vriska, and aranea) handle it in very different ways based on class. light can mean literal light; it can represent luck, fortune, or destiny; it can also represent information. i could write a full essay about the three canon heroes' of light's interactions with their aspect alone, especially because rose, vriska, and aranea are all characters i love - this would be kind of hilariously apropos because all three of them are prone to long-winded passionate infodumping, but also this isn't an essay about homestuck canon. it is about undertale.
i posit asriel as a prince of light. a destroyer of, or with, light/luck/fate/information. this is a classpect that i think works well both for his role as asriel and as flowey.
the very beginning of undertale gives us two characters - flowey and toriel - who provide us with extremely different views on the underground and what kind of story we're in. i have seen a LOT of personal anecdotal accounts of players who were extremely suspicious of toriel and didn't believe her at all because it's flowey we meet first, and his "kill or be killed" philosophy - the information he hands us, if you follow me - has preemptively damaged our trust.
before we and frisk arrive and chara wakes, flowey has control over the timeline, and he uses this control to exhaustively play with causality and sniff out every potential possibility. the knowledge that he can just reset or reload a save to undo his actions works with the trauma of his and chara's violent deaths to corrode his sense of morality, and the amount of information he discovers during his reset spree is detrimental to his mental health itself, as he becomes bored and disillusioned with his surroundings. trapped in the underground, he can no longer stimulate his curiosity as a distraction from his depression and suicidal ideation.
asriel destroys with literal light, too, in his battle - his bullets take the form of fire, lightning, stars, laser beams. and once we, frisk, and chara remind him of his love for chara and what he and chara originally set out to do, he destroys the barrier, which is represented by light (so he destroys literal light as well).
by fulfilling the role he and chara share in the prophecy, he also destroys the monsters' fate of being trapped underground forever.
like the canon light-associated characters, flowey occasionally serves as our helper/hint character; in a no mercy run he finally provides us his own side of the story, and at the end of a neutral route he gives us hints on how to get to the true pacifist end as long as we've spared him.
too, if we track asriel down during the true pacifist ending walkaround, he gives us information about chara and their nature as he understood them. though what he says is still informed by his own biases, thoughts, and experiences, it is a much more nuanced picture of the living, breathing person chara once was - one with flaws and vulnerabilities. asriel's speech should help to shed light on chara's humanity, and therefore destroy any lingering misconceptions the player has of them based on modern monsters' idealized, even mythologized picture of who chara was/those alarming tapes in the spoopy lab that give us a few out-of-context snapshots of chara's suicide plan.
(it doesn't always, because sometimes people's preconceptions are too firm, but alas, such is life.)
so there's asriel. for frisk and chara, we're going to be leaving the realm of Solid Irrefutable Canon Events And Evidence and branching out into the fuzzier and slightly more woo-woo kingdom of personal interpretation. bear with me, though.
i have frisk set up as muse of heart. heart in homestuck stands for soul and identity as well as love, whereas muse is the ultimate passive class. muses inspire: just by existing they automatically lend their teammates a sort of field of effect bonus in their aspect. roxy, who tried and tried to recreate the matriorb with no luck, suddenly succeeds just by having calliope sit in on her attempt.
but although very little is asked of muses and their presence is so valuable, being allowed to live and take up space can be an insurmountable challenge for them. calliope spends most of her life trapped, abused, and neglected; she is then killed, and her time in the dreambubbles is dominated by the need to hide so that she is not wiped from existence altogether. when she finally meets her alternate, god tier self, the great task she is charged with is to simply live, exist, be herself, and reap the benefits that alt callie couldn't. alpha calliope goes on to live in the new world as one of the 13 survivors from the 4 sessions, while god tier callie conducts the end of lord english and the dreambubbles.
so, back to frisk. what we know about them in canon is: they are obedient and willing to put up with a lot of inane bullshit and nonsensical directions from us and from chara, and will only do a 90's era sonic the hedgehog and go "I'M OUTA HERE" if you start up a no mercy run and deliberately go hunt down and kill every living thing. this suggests either a tolerance or a capacity for a broad range of behavior; however, we only get to learn their name and see them for the person they are (e.g. not chara or a player self-insert) at the end of the true pacifist route.
it is also very, very heavily implied that frisk, like chara, came to mt. ebott from some sort of unhappy circumstances and was hoping to disappear.
if, like me, you read the ACT options and dialogue choices as all things that occur to frisk to say and do - and the game's interface as a hectic game of telephone where chara plays middleman, relaying frisk's ideas to us and our orders back to frisk (though sometimes the line gets snarled up at chara; see the fight with snowy's mom, most infamously) - then that still gives us a pretty wide range of actions that they're capable of. if the bounds of frisk's friskness are "don't kill anyone" then that doesn't necessarily stop them from being outright cruel (there are mean ways to spare some monsters through ACTing, like snowdrake and vulkin) or just not very friendly (lots of monsters can be spared my doing a bare minimum without meeting their befriend conditions - lesser dog and shyren, for instance).
but there ARE some specific actions and friendly overtures that MUST be undertaken to get the true pacifist end. you have to befriend and help papyrus, undyne, and alphys, and you have to assist undyne and alphys in getting together. frisk's presence is indispensible in these three monsters' growth, as well as in toriel's, sans', and asgore's. in the battle with asriel, you literally save their souls by retracing the actions you've already taken to bond with them, reminding them the lessons that they've learned by interacting with frisk before. (there's more on that in each of the links i've included.)
so: frisk as muse of heart, an overall passive and obedient person who nevertheless inspires extreme positive personal growth in the people around them - not by doing anything special or out of character, but by way of the actions and gestures that come naturally to them.
i'm going to add to this that i draw pretty heavily on the implications that frisk was abused or neglected in their pre-underground life in my interpretation - my explanation for why they will submit to the player right up to the threshold of what they Cannot stand to do, why they disappear quietly instead of rebelling, is that they have been conditioned to believe that they have no right to take up space.
frisk as i portray them in my body of work is willing to go to extreme lengths to help others, they are stubborn and determined and forgiving and kind, but they struggle with standing up for their own needs. they would rather suffer in silence to please the people around them than inconvenience anyone, because they've been taught not to expect forgiveness or unconditional care, and they never know what the final straw is going to be. if they are abandoned or mistreated, they've been convinced thoroughly that it must be because of something that they have done. they're still struggling with suicidal ideation, too, because that didn't stop being a thing or anything.
so their character arc isn't in learning to choose kindness and discovering the benefits of doing so, as a neutral-to-pacifist frisk's would be, but in learning first that yes they do want to stay alive, and second that they are allowed to take up space and assert their needs. the nature of the player and also of chara's powers have a big role in the * but it refused. of the final battle with asriel, but i think that this is frisk finally standing up, flipping the table, and proclaiming emiya shirou style that uh no actually this is bullshit, i want to stay alive, i am not just going to roll over and let you step on me and everyone else, i'm not immediately going to knuckle under to the threat of abuse this time, because my life and my friends' lives are too important to me.
we can't make frisk sacrifice themself to save asriel. they've chosen to live, now, and it would be unconscionable to ask them to go back on their own character development and go back to self-destructive altruism. their arc culminates in flowey begging chara and us players to let frisk live their life. i like the parallels created with calliope's arc very much.
so, finally, here we are with chara as page of time. time is a very interesting aspect in homestuck canon because of its relation to and dualities with space - obviously it gives time heroes literal timey wimey bullshit powers, but it's also related to entropy, death, destruction, and decay as the other half of the cycle space starts with creativity and creation and birth and potential. time players often have a negative/pessimistic outlook on the world and struggle with a sense of helplessness and lack of control (dave, damara), see the universe as a food chain to be climbed to the top of to insure one's safety and power (caliborn), and/or arrive at a peaceful and cheerful deterministic nihilism (aradia).
loss of control/agency is an important motif of chara's arc and character in all directions it can go, so i'm sure you can see where i'm going here. that plus the fact that the overall save/load/reset powers seem to be chara's, though us players' determination + frisk's give said powers extra juice - chara and the player together can true reset even after frisk has long since left the underground - time seems really obvious as their aspect.
so! so. page class. this is where things get even more interesting. it's a common misconception that "page" refers to the medieval servant/lowest rung in knight training social role, as in someone at the very first stage of their journey for personal growth. this is false, as "page" is (like many homestuck concepts) an infuriatingly brilliant shitty pun, and means page as in of paper.
a page has near unlimited potential because the sheet of paper is blank. unfortunately, that shiny blank space just waiting to be filled is often willfully interpreted by strong and selfish personalities as an invitation to come fill it themselves. vriska and gamzee spend a great deal of time actively steamrollering tavros - vriska wants to shape him into the summoner to go with the mindfang she's desperately trying to become; gamzee spends a lot of time coming onto him persistently and forcefully. jane, roxy, and dirk all project their own romantic hopes onto jake; aranea, once poisoned by mindfang's influence like vriska, acts out similar patterns with him to vriska and tavros.
pages' sense of identity is also generally extremely unstable, making them vulnerable to any and all outside influence: tavros and jake's confidence level, outlook, and actions change wildly depending on the conduct of their many advisers, and horuss desperately borrows from the identities of others to try to cobble together his own concept of self.
all of this makes pages incredibly, dangerously vulnerable to abuse and abusive grooming/conditioning.
there's already a very good, analytic, and (i think) probably very canonically accurate essay on chara here that describes them as morally gray/neutral in life, operating on a classic rpg protagonist-esque mentality, and their and asriel's death at the hands of the villagers/asriel's choice to show mercy shaking them up and setting them up for an extreme paradigm shift. you should read it now if you haven't already.
chara is, by their own admission, very confused when they wake up after death. they have no idea hap the what is fuckening; they've been minimally conscious at best over the past century. the failure of their plan has shaken them and led them to question their values. why did asriel do that? was he in the right, and they in the wrong? why are they back? what are they supposed to do now?
and again by their own admission, they're looking to the player to answer all their questions. they'll mirror whatever you show them. teach them to solve things with mercy, and they'll gradually become kinder, and help save asriel. teach them to solve things with murder, and... well.
chara's vulnerability to and absolute trust in the player's guidance is very typical of a page class character. but because of the nature of undertale's story (it is specifically our role to guide chara and help them grow - we're basically frisk and chara's mom), the optimal development of a page - that is to say, to find a way to resist outside influence and define their incredible potential/be the best person they can be on their own - is blocked to them now.
therefore, though this isn't supported by the mechanics of sburb/homestuck, i would like to propose that chara undergoes a class change in either ultimate ending of undertale, based on how the player has raised them.
a no mercy end chara is now the prince of time. their time manipulation abilities are used for savescumming in order to destroy enemies, and after attacking asgore on their own power and being pushed into killing flowey by the player (while we don't hit the FIGHT button, they do hesitate before striking, and need player prompting to finish the job in what is otherwise a cutscene that advances automatically). they destroy the whole timeline in the end no matter what we choose, and if we have them reset afterwards, they'll still follow through on our direction and end a true pacifist route in destruction.
on the other hand, a true pacifist end chara is now the sylph of time. sylph is a healer class - both sylph players we see in homestuck canon have a strong desire to help others, and both struggle with the desire to be valued/loved and to have their efforts rewarded. as a healer, chara's time powers and savescumming are now used to keep frisk and the other monsters alive, and to set right their and asriel's destiny, fulfilling the prophecy and helping the monsters go free.
the tendencies/system functions of a prince and a sylph can both be used for good or evil, and chara displays traits shared by both classes. their boundless page potential, when shaped by the player, can be used in the manner of either.
now, as for what chara would look like if they were able to stick with the optimal page arc and shape that potential without a player's help... it may be impossible in undertale canon, but i've written about my thoughts on the matter (180+k and counting about it!) elsewhere.
as a cool fun bonus/reward for getting to the end of this massive fuckton of words, here's some brief thoughts on other undertale characters' classpects!
- toriel: witch of life (she heals, controls and manipulates growth, struggles with when to step in and when to let go).
- asgore: heir of blood (public relations, bonds, and friendship come naturally to him, but he struggles with the trappings of tradition, law, and the past).
- papyrus: maid of hope (he's the literal embodiment of belief and positive thinking!).
- sans: mage of space (can actively manipulate his own and to some extent others' spatial position, and is vaguely aware of our/flowey's time shenanigans, though he doesn't retain memories).
- undyne: knight of breath (she defends and fights for the monsters' right to freedom and agency, and worries whether she will be strong enough to protect them).
- alphys: sylph of doom (brought in by asgore to try to fix the system/find another way to break the barrier, serves as a helpful guide to us, falls back on manipulation due to own anxiety/past failures).
- player: lord of mind (must work within constraints of the game's programming, but otherwise has absolute dominion over causality/possibility, and has absolute power over chara).
okay, i'm for sure not the first person to talk about what classpects i'd assign the undertale kids, and a lot of the most involved classpect discussion went on last year after undertale had only just came out. but on the other hand now that undertale is a year and a month old, my own interpretations of canon (and my headcanons lol) are more nuanced and more solid.
it's noon on a friday and i don't particularly have better to do, so Let's Go it's classpects meta time. spoilers for undertale and homestuck, as well as extensive talk about child abuse, child death, trauma, and resultant mental illness (as is typical for both canons) will feature significantly.
now, i've got the trio situated as thus: frisk as muse of heart, chara as page of time, asriel as prince of light. i'll start with my asriel analysis because canon gives us the most to work with in his case.
in homestuck canon, the prince class is a very active, destroyer class. princes can destroy their aspect (dirk splinters his own soul and tries to remove aranea's; eridan destroys the matriorb and kills or seriously injures his own teammates) or destroy using their aspect as a weapon (kurloz destroyed meulin's hearing by screaming in rage).
too, light is a very interesting aspect because we get to see three characters (rose, vriska, and aranea) handle it in very different ways based on class. light can mean literal light; it can represent luck, fortune, or destiny; it can also represent information. i could write a full essay about the three canon heroes' of light's interactions with their aspect alone, especially because rose, vriska, and aranea are all characters i love - this would be kind of hilariously apropos because all three of them are prone to long-winded passionate infodumping, but also this isn't an essay about homestuck canon. it is about undertale.
i posit asriel as a prince of light. a destroyer of, or with, light/luck/fate/information. this is a classpect that i think works well both for his role as asriel and as flowey.
the very beginning of undertale gives us two characters - flowey and toriel - who provide us with extremely different views on the underground and what kind of story we're in. i have seen a LOT of personal anecdotal accounts of players who were extremely suspicious of toriel and didn't believe her at all because it's flowey we meet first, and his "kill or be killed" philosophy - the information he hands us, if you follow me - has preemptively damaged our trust.
before we and frisk arrive and chara wakes, flowey has control over the timeline, and he uses this control to exhaustively play with causality and sniff out every potential possibility. the knowledge that he can just reset or reload a save to undo his actions works with the trauma of his and chara's violent deaths to corrode his sense of morality, and the amount of information he discovers during his reset spree is detrimental to his mental health itself, as he becomes bored and disillusioned with his surroundings. trapped in the underground, he can no longer stimulate his curiosity as a distraction from his depression and suicidal ideation.
asriel destroys with literal light, too, in his battle - his bullets take the form of fire, lightning, stars, laser beams. and once we, frisk, and chara remind him of his love for chara and what he and chara originally set out to do, he destroys the barrier, which is represented by light (so he destroys literal light as well).
by fulfilling the role he and chara share in the prophecy, he also destroys the monsters' fate of being trapped underground forever.
like the canon light-associated characters, flowey occasionally serves as our helper/hint character; in a no mercy run he finally provides us his own side of the story, and at the end of a neutral route he gives us hints on how to get to the true pacifist end as long as we've spared him.
too, if we track asriel down during the true pacifist ending walkaround, he gives us information about chara and their nature as he understood them. though what he says is still informed by his own biases, thoughts, and experiences, it is a much more nuanced picture of the living, breathing person chara once was - one with flaws and vulnerabilities. asriel's speech should help to shed light on chara's humanity, and therefore destroy any lingering misconceptions the player has of them based on modern monsters' idealized, even mythologized picture of who chara was/those alarming tapes in the spoopy lab that give us a few out-of-context snapshots of chara's suicide plan.
(it doesn't always, because sometimes people's preconceptions are too firm, but alas, such is life.)
so there's asriel. for frisk and chara, we're going to be leaving the realm of Solid Irrefutable Canon Events And Evidence and branching out into the fuzzier and slightly more woo-woo kingdom of personal interpretation. bear with me, though.
i have frisk set up as muse of heart. heart in homestuck stands for soul and identity as well as love, whereas muse is the ultimate passive class. muses inspire: just by existing they automatically lend their teammates a sort of field of effect bonus in their aspect. roxy, who tried and tried to recreate the matriorb with no luck, suddenly succeeds just by having calliope sit in on her attempt.
but although very little is asked of muses and their presence is so valuable, being allowed to live and take up space can be an insurmountable challenge for them. calliope spends most of her life trapped, abused, and neglected; she is then killed, and her time in the dreambubbles is dominated by the need to hide so that she is not wiped from existence altogether. when she finally meets her alternate, god tier self, the great task she is charged with is to simply live, exist, be herself, and reap the benefits that alt callie couldn't. alpha calliope goes on to live in the new world as one of the 13 survivors from the 4 sessions, while god tier callie conducts the end of lord english and the dreambubbles.
so, back to frisk. what we know about them in canon is: they are obedient and willing to put up with a lot of inane bullshit and nonsensical directions from us and from chara, and will only do a 90's era sonic the hedgehog and go "I'M OUTA HERE" if you start up a no mercy run and deliberately go hunt down and kill every living thing. this suggests either a tolerance or a capacity for a broad range of behavior; however, we only get to learn their name and see them for the person they are (e.g. not chara or a player self-insert) at the end of the true pacifist route.
it is also very, very heavily implied that frisk, like chara, came to mt. ebott from some sort of unhappy circumstances and was hoping to disappear.
if, like me, you read the ACT options and dialogue choices as all things that occur to frisk to say and do - and the game's interface as a hectic game of telephone where chara plays middleman, relaying frisk's ideas to us and our orders back to frisk (though sometimes the line gets snarled up at chara; see the fight with snowy's mom, most infamously) - then that still gives us a pretty wide range of actions that they're capable of. if the bounds of frisk's friskness are "don't kill anyone" then that doesn't necessarily stop them from being outright cruel (there are mean ways to spare some monsters through ACTing, like snowdrake and vulkin) or just not very friendly (lots of monsters can be spared my doing a bare minimum without meeting their befriend conditions - lesser dog and shyren, for instance).
but there ARE some specific actions and friendly overtures that MUST be undertaken to get the true pacifist end. you have to befriend and help papyrus, undyne, and alphys, and you have to assist undyne and alphys in getting together. frisk's presence is indispensible in these three monsters' growth, as well as in toriel's, sans', and asgore's. in the battle with asriel, you literally save their souls by retracing the actions you've already taken to bond with them, reminding them the lessons that they've learned by interacting with frisk before. (there's more on that in each of the links i've included.)
so: frisk as muse of heart, an overall passive and obedient person who nevertheless inspires extreme positive personal growth in the people around them - not by doing anything special or out of character, but by way of the actions and gestures that come naturally to them.
i'm going to add to this that i draw pretty heavily on the implications that frisk was abused or neglected in their pre-underground life in my interpretation - my explanation for why they will submit to the player right up to the threshold of what they Cannot stand to do, why they disappear quietly instead of rebelling, is that they have been conditioned to believe that they have no right to take up space.
frisk as i portray them in my body of work is willing to go to extreme lengths to help others, they are stubborn and determined and forgiving and kind, but they struggle with standing up for their own needs. they would rather suffer in silence to please the people around them than inconvenience anyone, because they've been taught not to expect forgiveness or unconditional care, and they never know what the final straw is going to be. if they are abandoned or mistreated, they've been convinced thoroughly that it must be because of something that they have done. they're still struggling with suicidal ideation, too, because that didn't stop being a thing or anything.
so their character arc isn't in learning to choose kindness and discovering the benefits of doing so, as a neutral-to-pacifist frisk's would be, but in learning first that yes they do want to stay alive, and second that they are allowed to take up space and assert their needs. the nature of the player and also of chara's powers have a big role in the * but it refused. of the final battle with asriel, but i think that this is frisk finally standing up, flipping the table, and proclaiming emiya shirou style that uh no actually this is bullshit, i want to stay alive, i am not just going to roll over and let you step on me and everyone else, i'm not immediately going to knuckle under to the threat of abuse this time, because my life and my friends' lives are too important to me.
we can't make frisk sacrifice themself to save asriel. they've chosen to live, now, and it would be unconscionable to ask them to go back on their own character development and go back to self-destructive altruism. their arc culminates in flowey begging chara and us players to let frisk live their life. i like the parallels created with calliope's arc very much.
so, finally, here we are with chara as page of time. time is a very interesting aspect in homestuck canon because of its relation to and dualities with space - obviously it gives time heroes literal timey wimey bullshit powers, but it's also related to entropy, death, destruction, and decay as the other half of the cycle space starts with creativity and creation and birth and potential. time players often have a negative/pessimistic outlook on the world and struggle with a sense of helplessness and lack of control (dave, damara), see the universe as a food chain to be climbed to the top of to insure one's safety and power (caliborn), and/or arrive at a peaceful and cheerful deterministic nihilism (aradia).
loss of control/agency is an important motif of chara's arc and character in all directions it can go, so i'm sure you can see where i'm going here. that plus the fact that the overall save/load/reset powers seem to be chara's, though us players' determination + frisk's give said powers extra juice - chara and the player together can true reset even after frisk has long since left the underground - time seems really obvious as their aspect.
so! so. page class. this is where things get even more interesting. it's a common misconception that "page" refers to the medieval servant/lowest rung in knight training social role, as in someone at the very first stage of their journey for personal growth. this is false, as "page" is (like many homestuck concepts) an infuriatingly brilliant shitty pun, and means page as in of paper.
a page has near unlimited potential because the sheet of paper is blank. unfortunately, that shiny blank space just waiting to be filled is often willfully interpreted by strong and selfish personalities as an invitation to come fill it themselves. vriska and gamzee spend a great deal of time actively steamrollering tavros - vriska wants to shape him into the summoner to go with the mindfang she's desperately trying to become; gamzee spends a lot of time coming onto him persistently and forcefully. jane, roxy, and dirk all project their own romantic hopes onto jake; aranea, once poisoned by mindfang's influence like vriska, acts out similar patterns with him to vriska and tavros.
pages' sense of identity is also generally extremely unstable, making them vulnerable to any and all outside influence: tavros and jake's confidence level, outlook, and actions change wildly depending on the conduct of their many advisers, and horuss desperately borrows from the identities of others to try to cobble together his own concept of self.
all of this makes pages incredibly, dangerously vulnerable to abuse and abusive grooming/conditioning.
there's already a very good, analytic, and (i think) probably very canonically accurate essay on chara here that describes them as morally gray/neutral in life, operating on a classic rpg protagonist-esque mentality, and their and asriel's death at the hands of the villagers/asriel's choice to show mercy shaking them up and setting them up for an extreme paradigm shift. you should read it now if you haven't already.
chara is, by their own admission, very confused when they wake up after death. they have no idea hap the what is fuckening; they've been minimally conscious at best over the past century. the failure of their plan has shaken them and led them to question their values. why did asriel do that? was he in the right, and they in the wrong? why are they back? what are they supposed to do now?
and again by their own admission, they're looking to the player to answer all their questions. they'll mirror whatever you show them. teach them to solve things with mercy, and they'll gradually become kinder, and help save asriel. teach them to solve things with murder, and... well.
chara's vulnerability to and absolute trust in the player's guidance is very typical of a page class character. but because of the nature of undertale's story (it is specifically our role to guide chara and help them grow - we're basically frisk and chara's mom), the optimal development of a page - that is to say, to find a way to resist outside influence and define their incredible potential/be the best person they can be on their own - is blocked to them now.
therefore, though this isn't supported by the mechanics of sburb/homestuck, i would like to propose that chara undergoes a class change in either ultimate ending of undertale, based on how the player has raised them.
a no mercy end chara is now the prince of time. their time manipulation abilities are used for savescumming in order to destroy enemies, and after attacking asgore on their own power and being pushed into killing flowey by the player (while we don't hit the FIGHT button, they do hesitate before striking, and need player prompting to finish the job in what is otherwise a cutscene that advances automatically). they destroy the whole timeline in the end no matter what we choose, and if we have them reset afterwards, they'll still follow through on our direction and end a true pacifist route in destruction.
on the other hand, a true pacifist end chara is now the sylph of time. sylph is a healer class - both sylph players we see in homestuck canon have a strong desire to help others, and both struggle with the desire to be valued/loved and to have their efforts rewarded. as a healer, chara's time powers and savescumming are now used to keep frisk and the other monsters alive, and to set right their and asriel's destiny, fulfilling the prophecy and helping the monsters go free.
the tendencies/system functions of a prince and a sylph can both be used for good or evil, and chara displays traits shared by both classes. their boundless page potential, when shaped by the player, can be used in the manner of either.
now, as for what chara would look like if they were able to stick with the optimal page arc and shape that potential without a player's help... it may be impossible in undertale canon, but i've written about my thoughts on the matter (180+k and counting about it!) elsewhere.
as a cool fun bonus/reward for getting to the end of this massive fuckton of words, here's some brief thoughts on other undertale characters' classpects!
- toriel: witch of life (she heals, controls and manipulates growth, struggles with when to step in and when to let go).
- asgore: heir of blood (public relations, bonds, and friendship come naturally to him, but he struggles with the trappings of tradition, law, and the past).
- papyrus: maid of hope (he's the literal embodiment of belief and positive thinking!).
- sans: mage of space (can actively manipulate his own and to some extent others' spatial position, and is vaguely aware of our/flowey's time shenanigans, though he doesn't retain memories).
- undyne: knight of breath (she defends and fights for the monsters' right to freedom and agency, and worries whether she will be strong enough to protect them).
- alphys: sylph of doom (brought in by asgore to try to fix the system/find another way to break the barrier, serves as a helpful guide to us, falls back on manipulation due to own anxiety/past failures).
- player: lord of mind (must work within constraints of the game's programming, but otherwise has absolute dominion over causality/possibility, and has absolute power over chara).