Is Friend even a character, or, like, a type of creature? From its appearance in Ralsei's dark world explanation and multiple being spawned in the Shadow Mantle fight, it might be more like some personification of darkness than a single character.
I think he’s either the Darkner everyman or he stole the Mantle
Honestly my thoughts playing the new chapters is that that particular face is some sort of like, generic "sleep paralysis demon" kind of thing. I don't think it's a character at all (the fact that someone snuck in and made a page in the character format with awkward sections about how it has no personality because it's just a face feels silly..) but that it's just like, a representation of the idea of seeing a scary face in the dark that isn't there. That's the only thing I think would make sense with all the random places it turns up. I can't imagine it ever becoming an actual character with its own characterization and dialogue, I think the most that seems likely to happen is we'll get some backstory at some point about how one time when Noelle was little she thought she saw a scary face in some sort of important situation. (or this could happen to whoever but these sorts of things seem to usually happen to Noelle...)
With that said I also agree it's jumping to gun to have a page that confidently describes it as a character when it's currently more of a recurring symbol than anything.
He's Frie side me
nd in
I agree. I wonder what we should do with the page? Should we delete it, or restructure it? I feel like IMAGE_FRIEND should have a page, but I don't know what an actually good page on it would look like. Maybe something like Everyman's page?
The thing is... Friend was the most searched-for term on the wiki before we had that page, like 500 failed searches or something. It doesn't have to be a character page, it could be a plot element, but there's certainly a pattern there that I feel like we should document considering how frequently it appears.
Also, the fact that they are trying to conceal its true name by completely redacting it from code and internal names seems suspicious.
Absolute fa arch
iled se
These failed searches are
pissing off...
me
I'm the original
searchwalker
I suppose having a character page for Friend is a safe bet, just in case
I forgot to say when I did this earlier, but I thought I should say here that I tried to edit the page a little, with the angle of treating Friend more like an Everyman-type easter egg than an "actual" character, since that seems to be more or less its current status for now. I hope that's a reasonable compromise for everyone...Honestly, I had to change less than I expected to manage that, most of my edits ended up being unrelated to that idea. (I did remove some trivia I thought was tenuous that was just listing any instance of the colors pink and yellow in really irrelevant-looking contexts...For some reason I left the "fields of pink and gold" one in, but I was hesitant about it since I don't know the full context of it yet.)
I may have been a little unclear before when I said "it's jumping the gun to have a page (...)", I think having the page for it is fine, since it's showed up more than once now. It's just that the page seeming to expect it to be a really important character seemed off to me since even now I don't know if there's enough basis for that. It's kind of just a scary face right now.
SCREW YOURSELF IN THE DEPTHS!!!!! /j
I think what Friend is meant to be is like. A living plot device. Gaster's Device created to advance the plot and create conflict. (Or something similar to that)
Also Chapter 5 of Lord of the Hammer, a story in universe based off the Legend of Delta Rune, is named "The Field of Pink and Gold." Which is a reference to Friend's eye colors. Which would imply that Friend will play a HUGE part in chapter 5, where he will most likely stir up conflict again.
(Just realized that last part wasn't really related to the topic, but I just like. talking about Friend a lot he's very! awesome)
GUYS I HAVE A THEORY
Friend IS the Shadow Mantle Holder
More specifically he CREATES Friends