⧠some of my fandoms: I'm into stuff like pokemon, sonic, ace attorney, object shows, ut/dr, and rhythm games!
⧠some of my other interests: drawing is my main hobby, and character design goes along with that! I also like learning about obscure games and lost media where I can.
⧠feel free to message me about whatever! I'd love to talk to people on here :D
(pssst btw I have an art sideblog at @kibbehthekib and a neocities site here if you wanna check either of those out!)
list of tags below:
undertale and deltarune - characters tagged "[character] undertale" or "[character] deltarune," e.g. "kris deltarune."
special tags:
- skelefam (sans, papyrus, and optionally gaster)
- sciencepeoples (sans, alphys, and optionally gaster)
- fun gang (kris, susie, and ralsei)
- suselle (susie and noelle)
- holiday sisters (noelle and dess or the knight)
- princeps tenebrarum (ralsei and gaster)
- corestrings (soul/player and gaster)
- lost duo (knight/dess and gaster)
- weird route (also includes sword route stuff)
theory/meta tags:
- deltameta (general "talking about deltarune" tag)
- forgotten prince theory (theory that a young gaster was the prince in deltarune's original story, and "his deltarune" is an attempt to rewrite his past and erase himself from the narrative)
- cosmic divorce meta (following the prince theory, the idea that gaster and the knight had a relationship in that original timeline that broke down, acting as co-stars kinda like spamton/tenna and seam/jevil. like gaster, the knight is from that timeline and remembers what happened. warning: critical brainrot.)
- (most of my polished stuff is under more public theory tags like "deltarune theory")
sonic the hedgehog - characters tagged with "[character] sth," e.g. "amy sth."
special tags:
- team sonic (sonic, tails, knuckles, and sometimes amy)
- team rose (amy, cream, and big)
- team dark (shadow, rouge, and omega)
- team chaotix (vector, espio, and charmy)
- archie sonic
favetags: sonic, amy, metal sonic, shadow
other series I have tags for:
- pokemon (tagged w/ pokemon names, e.g. "celebi")
- nights into dreams (characters not tagged)
- gravity falls (tagged w/ full names, e.g. "dipper pines")
- bfdi (tagged w/ "[character] tpot" or "[character] bfdi" mostly on vibes lol)
- inanimate insanity (tagged w/ "[character] ii")
- homestuck (tagged w/ full names)
- ace attorney (characters not tagged)
- rhythm heaven (characters not tagged)
- parappa the rapper (characters not tagged)
other special tags:
- animations
- comic (wip)
- pixel art (wip)
- neocities (buttons and stamps I've made)
- gone fishing (characters fishing)
- pro skater (characters doing sweet kickflips)
idk it's the "whether you're ready or not" that freaks me out because it implies that toby believes the "clarification" is one that the active audience has known to anticipate but they're reluctant to actually receive. it's something they could have and maybe even should have prepared for, whether or not they did. he's talking about it like some inevitability that's frightening but had always felt distant enough that we didn't have to seriously worry about it, which is now suddenly barrelling down on us earlier than most of us expected. he's talking about it like death LOL like the end of an era like this shit is going to radically alter our world forever
maybe recency bias makes the dessknight question feel like a much bigger deal in people's heads but dessknight has only been popular consensus for like a year and before that we'd spent several years getting just as invested, sometimes even moreso, in shit like alvin knight and papyrus knight. we've literally already experienced knight-related disillusionment lol. anyway while you or i might be devastated by a non-dess knight for various reasons i don't actually think most fans are so invested in dessknight specifically that it will actually feel like the world is crashing down on them if it's someone else. like yeah people get into heated psychic nerd battles over dessknight but most of the time it's still a disagreement over evidence and shit and it's not necessarily motivated by anything more personal than a need to feel more correct than a stranger in your phone
meanwhile Old Man Gaster has been fandom institution for basically a decade. people who are young adults in college now spent some of their most formative years stewing in handplates comic dubs or whatever. toby put a strange little dude in undertale to tease his next project, probably expecting him to be a minor curiosity at most, and then thousands of misfit children imprinted on him. maybe gaster as a brother is acceptable as long as he functions indistinguishably from a dad but you merely suggest that gaster might be younger than sans and tons of people receive it as an existential threat. it's very common for fans to respond to any evidence-backed argument for middlebroster with flailing defensiveness and dismissal and denial as if you're telling them that their dad only has a year left to live. maybe that's because you basically are telling them that their dad only has a year left to live
to be clear i don't actually think he's ragging on a particular theory here i think it's just a general statement and he could have had any number of popular ideas in mind. with that said it's funny that everyone jumped on "dessknight must be wrong" instead of like. 90% of gaster theories
admittedly this whole email is kind of a rorschach test for theorist brainrot, and i have my own obvious bias, but whatever LOL i do think this combination of
reassurance that speculative fan creations are still valuable for what they are even if they end up being inaccurate to or divergent from canon (a sentiment also echoed in the UT10 stream. it's clearly been on toby's mind for a while)
a certain subtext of "hi guys maybe you'll want to gird your loins for what's coming"; and
stating that something is "clarified" (not necessarily "revealed") in chapter 6, with a loose implication that it may or may not be the kind of thing that we're expecting chapter 6 to address (holiday family stuff(1), i.e., knight identity reveal or dessappearance explanation)
(bonus) toby being relatively loose lipped about gaster-related topics in UT10
reeks of gaster IMO. what other mystery in the game has so many widely beloved fan interpretations and works dedicated to it. no single interpretation of the roaring knight or FRIEND or dess has ever commanded the fandom's attention in the way that handplates gaster has, for as long as he has. dad/grandpa/"old man" interpretations of gaster still largely dominate the fandom's imagination even though toby's arguably been trying to seed broster discussion since 2015. oh yeah, also, guess what discourse had large swathes of utdrtwt in a flame war as recently as 2 weeks ago, likely around the time that toby was writing this newsletter. thats right it was dadster vs. broster, specifically centering on the kinds of tensions toby mentioned here
anyway if we're talking about toby having different expectations about theories, i mean, "sans has a mysterious unnamed little brother" has always seemed to me like the most hilariously obvious gasterbait of all time. there's no way toby did that in 2018, after seeing how eager fans were to assign basically any unknown to gaster, with the expectation that the vast majority of fans would proceed to Erm Actually Paptalk their way out of entertaining the idea basically at all. of course he was expecting fans to take the bait lol when you look at it from the outside it's actually completely absurd that a fandom with such a rabid and imaginative theory scene managed to almost universally agree that not only was it not worth considering, but that toby wasn't even trying to tease it as a possibility. of course we did get a new wave of middlebroster enthusiasm after UT10 which is cool but maybe also too little too late y'know
(1) i'm still inclined to think that chapter 6 might be holiday-centric and maybe even dess-centric even if the one major thing that's "clarified" isn't. that might sound weird but you have to believe me there are ways this could make sense. consider: asriel had a very important relationship with dess, so it makes sense that he might be present in a chapter that goes into greater depth about her; it's also "next week" as of ch6 and anyway rudy's decline might be a good reason for toriel to pick him up early. with that in mind, it just so happens that someone else is projected to show up around the time our brother comes home
I keep tossing around the idea of like. a "knightster 101" post or something that's accessible to the average fan⊠but god. it's tough to know where to even start unpacking this.
it's not hard to link the two and show their thematic contrasts - that's just Looking At The Text. people have intuitively been connecting them since chapter 2. you can even make a strong argument for romance as a recurring part of deltarune's story! but the fundamental logistics that even make knightster possible (particularly middle bro gaster, "unaltered" timeline bullshit, and maybe forgotten prince) are like, several theory posts of their own LOL.
with one year out from ch6 I have to wonder if it's worth the effort⊠but it would be so so convenient to just have something accessible to show people.
