Undertale Deep Dive: Who Is Toriel?
By: Priya Sridhar
Tags: Gaming, Features, Character Analysis, Narrative, Videogames

Undertale Deep Dive: Who Is Toriel?

And are her actions justified?

It has been a month since the fifth anniversary of Undertale. We have seen fan video homages, an official orchestral performance, and a piano cover medley from the creator. In short, the game and its following are still going strong.

There is some division in the fandom, though, about a character who is seen unequivocally as the hero. That is Toriel, who is more important than she seems at first. She also invites equal love, sorrow, and frustration. But does she deserve all of that?

Toriel The Tutorial

Toriel makes her grand appearance saving you, the player, after she finds a flower taunting you. She calls herself the Keeper of the Ruins, the entrance into the Underground. Goat mom, as we call her, treats you with kid gloves, no pun intended.

She carries both an aura of kindness and mystery. Some players in the fandom joke that she is a serial killer waiting for you to get complacent. We find out that’s not the case: Toriel is overbearing but she ultimately wants you to stay alive in a hostile world. That is where the problems begin. You have to challenge her on how to leave so as to make the game progress. She wants to keep you safe. That creates your first major conflict.

This article contains spoilers for Undertale.

Your Choices Make A Difference

What happens to Toriel depends on what you do. Her boss battle has an option to kill her if the player feels like taking her down or wants to see what happens. If you backstab her or are on the no mercy path, she laughs while dissolving to dust, knowing you are evil. She had no idea what you would do in advance.

Toriel’s death is meant to shake the player awake. It shows that being pacifist is hard; that you have to risk death. You also will feel guilty about her death, because she wanted to keep you safe.

To make matters worse, we learn that Toriel was the queen of the Underground. She and Asgore ruled together, with a monster child named Asriel and a human child simply called the Fallen.

If you’re a neutral pacifist and have spared Toriel, she will return to the throne. She becomes queen and undoes the “kill all humans” policy that her husband instigated. The ending provides hope that the monsters can change their fate. Or you can make an attempt to fix your mistakes and create a better ending.

Toriel finds some joy — if not happiness — if you do the work required for the so-called “Golden Ending”.

This changes if you’ve killed monsters, and whether or not you spare Toriel. If she’s not spared, then one of the other boss monsters will rule the Underground in the end, or a random dog will if you’re particularly cruel. When you’ve killed too many monsters, she gets ousted by the beings that fear for their lives and are angry at you, the human. This provides foreshadowing about her motivations and decisions. Hindsight is key.

The Golden Ending has none of these options. Instead, Toriel and her husband Asgore are implied to abdicate, and start a new life on the surface. Asgore becomes the gardener at the school where he works, and Toriel becomes a teacher. There is hope they can fix their relationship, but not a lot.

The Keeper Of The Ruins

Toriel makes a strong, sweet first impression on the player. She rescues you from Flowey the flower, escorts you into the ruins, and teaches you how to interact peacefully with monsters. The off part about her is that she treats you with kid gloves, and expects everything to be dangerous.

Another big concern with Toriel is that she seems to be a hypocrite. Given her powers and authority, it would seem likely that she could fight Asgore directly or reason with him. What’s more, TV Tropes notes that her strategy was to use love and affection to keep humans interested underground, so that they would never have an incentive to leave. This didn’t work, as seen from the number of human items that are strewn around.

There is one factor that people seem to be forgetting: Toriel lost two of her children in one night, and she had to face a terrible choice. It was either go along with Asgore’s plan (kill all humans who enter the Unerground) or run away and hide at the ruins, where everyone seems to enter when they first come into the world of monsters. Or Toriel could have used her human child’s soul to cross the barrier and get more souls. That was not an appealing option to Toriel, and in fact, it could have made things much worse. Don’t forget that Chara, also known as the Fallen, compelled Asriel to try and murder humans. Toriel could have easily fallen victim to the same corruption.

The other fact is that Toriel may have pointed out Asgore’s flaws in his plan, or they had a big fight in their grief. We don’t know what happened, since the monsters focus on the fact that Asriel died trying to bury his best friend and human sibling. Even the videotapes stop just as the Fallen dies from a terrible buttercup poisoning. (A good word to the wise; never try to commit suicide using buttercups. It’s a terrible way to go.)

The third point is that Toriel does not kill. She won’t even defend herself in a boss battle and is grateful you’re strong enough to survive the Underground. Thus, she wouldn’t stand her ground to fight all the monsters under her regime. Undyne’s strong enough to force her out nonlethally, as she does in several endings. It is not fun for Toriel to fight, as she mentions repeatedly.

My educated guess is that Toriel did try to reason with Asgore, while still grieving herself. Why is that? Because he’s not surprised when she brings up how he could have gone to the surface to reap more souls, just saddened that she is absolutely right. Yet Asgore was too angry and feeling that the last hope of monsters — Asriel and Chara working together to undo the barrier — had been extinguished with a simple battle. So he created the mandate, and monsters’ grief turned into anger. Toriel could try to overrule him, but she was outnumbered. So she fled — into the darkness and the ruins — to try and prevent the problem ahead of time. Grief also didn’t help. She was also mourning her children and had to cry alone. Her sink is clogged with fur, implying she would let her tears run there.

Sadness and trauma tinge much of Toriel’s actions. In the first part of the ruins, she won’t let you get hurt and has babyproofed the potential traps and obstacles. At worse, you’ll fall through a pile of leaves. That’s because Toriel saw a bouquet of buttercups kill her adopted child. Flowers can be pretty but so deadly. She became paranoid, especially after five more children left the Underground and died, presumably killed by the friendlier monsters in Snowdin and Waterfall. Her trauma made her unable to do more than be a caretaker. While Asgore went in the direction of violence and destruction, she became stuck in the motions. As she puts it to the player character if you backtrack to find her in the ruins, “Someone has to take care of these flowers.” We find out later that Asgore is the gardener, so the ironies abound that Toriel is keeping plants alive.

Toriel is many things, but she is not a killer. Perhaps she stared death in the face during the great war between monsters and humans, noting that dust may soak into the soul but dust will blow away with the wind unless you catch it first in record time. Or she saw how monsters were losing hope, and that death is very final. No one else besides the player and Flowey can use savepoints within the story. They all work to make sure that each of their lives is meaningful, whether it’s realizing they can become braver towards a nice human, or regaining their confidence in singing.

For this reason, Toriel is helpless to protect the ones that she loves. All she can do is make Sans promise to keep you alive. Her love of puns convinces him to not break his word, and spare you. Perhaps Sans spared other humans before you came.

A pacifist player gives her hope to finally take action; when you choose to sheath your fight attacks, she’s surprised and insists that you prove yourself. That final hug, and her order for you to not come back, show hesitation. Toriel doesn’t want you to leave. Yet she lets you go, trusting you’ll be able to live. Something keeps nagging at her, however. Then she arrives in the nick of time to stop yourself and Asgore, saying that no one deserves to die, not even him. There are hints that she found out that you were befriending everyone in the Underground, refusing to lift a weapon and strike. The spiders in the Ruins and Hotland can send telegrams, for example, and shopkeeper Gerson knows about “King Fluffybuns” and his wife well. This gave her the impetus to return to the throne room, confront Asgore, and break up the fight before it begins. Toriel knows there’s a chance at peace, and for the first time fights for it. She gets her happy ending: running a school.

Her parallel self in the Delta Rune demo is much mellower. Toriel is lenient with Kris, the new player character; she allows Kris to walk home at the end of the chapter, only punishes them for coming late by sending them to bed early, and is relieved they weren’t hurt. Toriel is solely a teacher in this timeline, with no more responsibilities than getting Kris to school on time and staying in touch with Asriel. Time will tell what later chapters reveal about her divorce from Asgore and how their backstory changed.

Ultimately, Toriel is certainly flawed but she’s also a traumatised figure. Saying she’s to blame, however, isn’t fair to her. Monsters need hope, and so do grieving mothers. Sometimes we can’t protect everyone, as she could not.