Chromatic AU

This AU is fairly simple in it's premise. It's a Deltarune AU specifically, where darkners and lightners live together and there's honestly no difference between the two. There's magic, but only vaguely, and only in one specific way. Basically, everyone has their own colour (Noelle is pink, Kris is green, Susie is indigo, etc), and the vibrancy of their colours signifies how they feel, emotionally. Meaning that, if someone's feeling depressed, directionless, or hurt, their colours start to dull, and people turn grey entirely if this gets out of hand (kind of like the Gaster followers in Undertale). Because of this, people's emotional distress is really, REALLY easy to spot, even if they try to hide it, because the colour literally drains from them. The side effect of this is actually LESS drama and angst overall, people notice issues more easily and look for help more openly, because everyone can tell when there's something wrong and can lend a hand in doing something about it.

As an example (since this AU started with her), Noelle lives with her dad, and her parents are divorced. She doesn't see her abusive mom nearly ever anymore because people can Tell that being near her makes Noelle unwell. Ever since her and her dad moved out, they've both been a lot more vibrant in colour, and Noelle kind of doesn't even remember what living with her mom is like, since her parents divorced so early in her childhood. A similar but opposite example is Kris, who's parents also divorced when they were young but they started turning grey only after the fact. It became clear Kris missed their old family structure, but with a bit of talking and adjusting, and living some days with their mom and other days with their dad, Kris slowly but surely got their colour back. Nowadays they mostly live with their dad (they like helping around his flower shop and spending time by the lake), but they still visit and spend some nights at their mom's house, their family is pretty close again thanks to them.

Susie is a bit of a unique case, cause trying to fix her family never really gave her her colours back. It turns out she was just feeling really isolated in general, and once she got a few friends to spend time with every day she started looking brighter. She lives most days with Ralsei who, concearningly, seems to be teetering on the edge of turning grey himself! Him and his friends have started looking into why that might be, but so far they haven't found anything concrete. Ralsei's happy with his friends, he's decently happy at home, he's got good grades, what could it be? It's the lack of direction and purpose in his life that he thinks he needs in order to be a real and normal person.

Some of the other characters I've actually given a thought to for this AU have been my trio of favs, Toriel, Asgore and Spade. Toriel is honestly the least depressed out of them, she gets a bit sad about her kids leaving the nest but otherwise? She couldn't be happier. She has two wonderful kids, a job she likes, and a home she enjoys spending time in, even if it's a bit emptier nowadays, it's hers. Asgore is similar in that he couldn't have asked for better circamstances (what with Kris staying with him so often he actually had to buckle down and manage his business more concretely so he's not in debt), he has a job he enjoys and a family to take care of, but he's... a little more prone to pessimism, so to speak. He's a bit clinically depressed, but he finds ways to cope and keep it at bay, and it's just one of those things that can't be helped. People worry about him sometimes over it (it's the closest thing you're gonna get to stigma in this AU) but he insists there's nothing to fret over and really nothing to fix. Even when he's emotionally fulfilled the mental illness doesn't stop illnessing, y'know?

Lastly, there's Spade (and by extension, Lancer, who has decidedly a lot less going on in this AU). Spade never stops being a grouch and a meanie, and in this AU he doesn't even have any kind of power or authority that he'd usually lean on as a crutch. He's just some guy who turns grey seemingly at random, seemingly over nothing, because he's fundamentally dissatisfied with life in a way he can't quite pin down. Even in fulfilling relationships, even in having a family and a home, Spade never really stops teetering on the edge of misery, if only because of his mentality about it all. He's not clinically depressed like Asgore, he's just... a bit avoidant about any real introspection, and it kind of shows. Obviously in this AU spadesgore is canon, but that's not really a fix for either of them being their specific brands of depressed and unfulfilled.

Originally, I wanted to give some kind of plot to this AU, a-la a kids mystery adventure book. Something weird or paranormal starts happening around town and the main kids (Kris, Susie, Noelle, Ralsei and Lancer) try to figure out what it is and how to stop it, and meet new people and new challanges along the way, the moral of the lesson essentially being "you can't be happy all the time and it's ok to be hurt". It'd be kind of simplictic overall, intentionally so, but exactly because of that I never got that spark of inspiration to fully develop it. Some loose ideas centered around maybe Dess or other "outcasts" who were grey basically by choice, and what it really means to be distressed in the first place. Another offshoot idea was the Gaster Followers one, where strange grey people started appearing around town and the kids were the only ones to notice something was Wrong with them rather than them just being sad or something. Overall, the plot could've gone basically any which way but, again, inspiration never struck, so for now this AU is just some loose ideas and a cozy rainbow aesthetic.