Gaster Turns Out To Be Just The Most Punchable Loser You've Ever Seen

gaster turns out to be just the most punchable loser you've ever seen

i need gaster to eat shit in deltarune chapter whatever ok? portray him as a real loser. just a guy who gets it all the time. guy you’d shove into lockers. like don’t get me wrong i love the guy and whatever it is i’ve imagined he is but i just genuinely need him to suck so fucking bad

Do you think that our various games exist in the world of Deltarune.

Like what if Chara or Dess were playing Yume Nikki and then they met Gaster and they were like

yo what the fuck Uboa

an addendum:

although I believe gaster is clearly a tragic character who's afraid of being seen while having an odd and extreme urge to help the world in some positive way, that does not exclude the possibility of him thinking the only way to achieve such things is through immoral acts. It is not an accident that he is so heavily depicted with devilish symbolisms all over — even a "mad scientist" could have good intentions. Maybe he has done something irreversible to the world — aka, the creation of Dark Worlds — and is trying to minimize the damage he knows his creation is about to cause.

I think he is trying to do good things through questionable means as a way to somewhat forgive at least a small part of himself for doing something unforgivable in the past.

i think one of the most telling examples of how we’ve been influenced to think about gaster is that if we say no to him after he asks if we want to continue after a chapter 1 game over, we’ll proceed to hear the absolute gentlest most heartbroken fucking unaccompanied piano arrangement of gaster’s motif any of us has ever heard and we’ll still be like "huh wonder why THAT’S there."

it’s because he’s sad!!! he’s fucking sad!!! this is the sound of an incorporeal man holding back metaphysical tears!!! WHY would the game have us linger here at a black screen instead of immediately going back to the menu like a normal RPG would? because it wants us to have this quiet moment in the dark with him, to finally catch him in a moment that’s raw and deeply vulnerable and unmarred by either cryptic mythologizing or his own mask of confident, neutral professionalism, just a black screen and a tender, melancholic song. and then he closes the fucking game himself.

it’s like, after narrating our ending, he just can’t think of anything else to say. he doesn’t want to tell us to go away because he probably doesn’t want us to, we’re both his last hope for success and the only person he’s been able to "connect" with in a very long time. he just sits there awkwardly with us while he quietly processes the situation, before he finally accepts that this is the world’s (and his) fate and he can’t force us to stay there with him any longer.

again im not trying to woobify him, what im saying is that we’re so used to seeking out spooky, vaguely sinister lore for an extraplanar entity that even when we finally meet him, it doesn’t occur to us that he could just be another character, one who’s VERY different from the other characters but a character nonetheless.

gaster is fundamentally cryptic and ambiguous, possibly in part because he intends to be hard to read. i think he hides himself between layers and behind clinical speech and trees because he’s uncomfortable with being seen, but he isn’t a perfect rational being, he’s just a guy, and he can’t connect with us without risking "pieces" of himself seeping through. just as undertale challenged us to hunt through it for pieces of gaster’s lore, deltarune is now going out of its way to give us insight into his character, but just as with his lore, we have to seek it out and consider it carefully in order to learn anything. like do you understand why im suddenly so obsessed with this guy!!! not to mention all the ways he parallels kris and chara and alphys and serves as a reflection of the player and. god. i love these fucking video james so much

yknow i think the fact that the utdr community tends to skew younger is a little unfortunate for how some of toby fox’s utterly brilliant writing is lost. i dont think younger people quite see the full scope of the meta horror element of video game easter eggs without having been a part of the pre-internet/early-internet world. icepalace_glaceir and egg especially i dont think will hit people quite the same if they never played games in the era before social media.

it’s hard to overemphasize how isolating playing video games was before the internet became an organized, tagged, easily-searchable universal database, or even before it existed at all.

if you were lucky, you knew maybe one other kid who played the same games you did, or had a sibling close enough in age to you to take interest. that was it. other than that, you navigated these worlds completely on your own, having to learn their rules and what their “normal” is without any outside guidance. if you were poor (and you most likely were), you only had a very small number of games that you would play and replay endlessly. you would explore every inch of terrain, examine every polygon, out of pure habit more than anything.

so when something in that familiar lattice is suddenly, unexplainably different, it’s horrifying in a way that’s really hard to put to words. it’s coming home to your solo apartment to find your furniture newly askew. it’s the unknown, the fact that all the rules you thought you understood are being broken. and through all these gnawing feelings, there’s absolutely no one you can tell who will understand, and those rare few that can will most likely not believe you. so whether it’s an easter egg, a glitch, or something else - it’s you, alone, having to newly rationalize this foreign invader to your world. will you shut the game off, hide it away on a shelf to never think about it again? or will you investigate further to try and grasp it? every individual reacts differently - but they all know the overpowering emotion that came with finding it.

it’s why we fell for mew under the truck, for san andreas’ bigfoot. almost every single one of us had some personal event, some elusive experience that sounded so unbelievable to any outsider - and yet it happened. the concept of what could and couldn’t be in a video game became muddy, uncertain. “every copy of ___ is personalized” might be a joking phrase, but that really is an accurate way to describe how it felt. or, with the fact that having a dirty cartridge could cause bizarre, unique occurrences to occur - how it actually was. some people question why one would be afraid of antipiracy screens. well, this all is exactly why.

all this is why i find utdr’s current direction for gaster so transfixing. “he” is not a character to me - to me, “he” represents this concept. of being able to peer through the tiniest crack in the foundation of a digital world, and to see something peering back at you.

i guess i should wrap this up with an example of this phenomenon that i actually personally experienced, so people don’t think i’m dramatizing this.

in the original animal crossing for gcn, there’s an incredibly rare easter egg which can occur when traveling from the main town to your island via kapn’s boat ride. there’s a very, very small chance that your boat will pass over a massive shadow, far larger than any catchable fish you can encounter in the game.

whenever this event was posted about on early internet forums and personal sites, it was met with an inevitable wave of irritation and scorn. posting about this “huge fish” would earn you the title of liar, attention seeker, or - if you managed to take a blurry photo of your CRT - hacker/troll.

but it was real. it was always real - a purposeful, scripted event so rare and specific that it could easily pass as fake. documentation nearly 20 years after the game’s release could finally confirm it as such, beyond a reasonable doubt.

but the thing is, as someone who played a lot of animal crossing, i had a personal experience that colored my view of this event very differently. i’ve come to internally refer to it as the “big fish nightmare”. it’s very much what it sounds like - a nightmare about animal crossing, where you encounter a huge fish. you might only glimpse it, or you might try to catch it, among many other things. but it involves a massive fish, and a sense of fear from the fact that it absolutely did not belong there.

the only problem is that this description isn’t a personal experience. my siblings had this dream. my friends at school had this dream. and in the tags of another post i’ve made about animal crossing fish shadows in the past, i could see complete strangers mentioning having this dream. it’s understandable why, because of how much time you spend in these games assessing fish sizes, that it might show up in your dreams in one way or another. psychologically, it’s very normal, and not something i consider any way in paranormal.

but knowing this experience, it gives me a greater insight to the visceral reaction that posting about this easter egg would garner. i have the lingering sense that, to at least one person, their stirred emotions weren’t exclusively over the thought that someone was clogging discussion with a bunch of screenshots of an edited save.

it was the thought that, somehow, the big fish that you saw in your dreams wasn’t content with staying there.

IT'S HAPPENING

ITS FUCKING HAPPENING

HOLY SHIT SANS UNDERTALE EMAIL??? REAL??????

I wanna take a closer look at the scene where Kris makes a new fountain.

First of all, those little sparkles before they stab the ground. Are those important? Maybe, maybe not! Here are my observations.

My first thought was, of course, SAVE points. They're little white twinkles, right? And you need Determination, which is also associated with the ability to SAVE and LOAD, to make a dark fountain. Makes sense to me!

They start out looking like the ones on the right in this image, and then change to look like the ones on the left. It's also worth noting that their position is randomized - thank god I realized that before trying to translate them to notes in a song like that youtube comment hypothesized.

Ok, now, this might be a stretch, but they also kind of look like Titan eyes, don't you think?

What with the crosses through them and stuff? Actually, come to think of it, the Titans have SAVE points for faces, don't they?

In fact, that same cross pattern from the sparkles also emanates from the ground when they actually stab it.

If it's too hard to see in that image this one might also help.

So... cool, we found a possible connection with the sparkles and the save points and the titans, but, like, is there any meaningful conclusion to be drawn from it?

...

Not that I can think of!

I like to call these kinds of posts "theorist food". I don't have a theory, but theorists should probably know this in case it winds up being helpful for one of their theories!

...

Ok! Bye!