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Well, Deltarune chapter 5 is almost out, which blows a massive hole in a theory video I was working on, since I won't have enough time to actually make this behemoth into video form in a week. As a compromise, you're all getting my hastily edited draft on tumblr so that I can at least have it out before release.
To start with, I was wondering about the games established Gaster/Gerson parallels. They are both entities that “fell into their creation”, who are able to commune with people through the medium they fell into— for Gerson, his writing, for Gaster, the dark world. But to complete the parallel implies that Gaster has some kind of equivalent to Alvin— someone who brought him here and gave him the ability to interface with the world at large, but refuses to finish his work.
The fact that Gaster’s theme is called “Another Him” strikes me as interesting, because it implies that “him” from undertale is the theme of a different Gaster.
It also feels obvious in hindsight that there would be another Gaster. After all, anyone who is at least a little familiar with his lore knows he’s from the undertale timeline, which means that deltarune!gaster is completely unaccounted for.
I’d go through the list of all the possible suspects for deltarune!gaster, but the obvious culprit is the forgotten man as the only other mysterious, explicitly male gendered character we get. However, I also think the forgotten man is Papyrus, so rather than entertaining other suspects, I figured I’d get out the corkboard and red string and hope that whatever I tied together would produce a coherent image instead of a monochrome smear.
CASE 1: Papyrus and the Forgotten Man
A bunch of people beat me to finding the evidence that papyrus is the forgotten man, but I’ll go over it again so we’re on the same page.
The most obvious bit is the egg in his dating sim hud
But there’s also the reference to dinosaurs in the chapter 3 egg room— Dinosaur Egg Quaker Oatmeal being Papyrus’s favorite food.
As an additional point, the only character in Undertale who is aware of this is Flowey, who can reset timelines, implying that his acquisition of this information was through some kind of random event.
One of the snowdin puzzles consists of Papyrus shoving a bunch of snow around to make the shape of his face. If you ask him for the solution, he’ll tell you to press a button behind a tree, solving the puzzle.
There’s also a few references in the genocide route that are more than a little eyebrow raising.
Compare
to
Not to mention the “Forgettable” as his act description.
Papyrus’s phone dialogue has a lot of eyebrow raisers as well.
There’s also this bit of phone dialogue that I’ve been eyeing since I ran into it:
In deltarune, every trash darkner is named trashy, implying that Papyrus has been to the dark world version of his own house.
This feels especially significant considering you need to use an escape ticket on a ribbick to reach MANCOUNTRY, a mob that canonically lives in a garbage can.
In order to get this far, you also have to interact with a Bibliox, which is a misspelling of byblos, which is greek for Papyrus.
While not strictly being evidence, I think Papyrus being an out-of-work child psychologist also recontextualizes his character in undertale in a lot of interesting ways.
It’s not unheard of for adults to be friends with teenagers, but it makes a lot more sense that sans would choose Kris for Papyrus to hang out with over say, Alphys or Undyne, if his brother specializes in working with children, especially if Kris was one of his former patients. Which is to say nothing of Flowey, who is the child psychologist equivalent of handing an understimulated tiger at the zoo a watermelon.
I’ll wait to the end to get into what Papyrus being the forgotten man could further imply, but I did want to draw some attention to this the forgotten man’s 2024 valentine to segue to our next point:
Who was the forgotten man trying to help?
There are three potential culprits here, so I’ll start with the one we have the most exposure to: Kris.
CASE 2: Papyrus and Kris
Let’s start with their most superficial similarities: their appearances.
While their outfits aren’t one to one, I think it’s interesting to note that Papyrus’s armor covers all the same areas of his body as Kris’s does, sans the blue underwear. Rather than covering their entire chest, Kris’s chestplate only covers their ribcage— a fact that feels intentional when you consider the prophecy refers to them as The Cage, which stands true for Papyrus too as a skeleton. His outfit doesn’t cover his midriff.
As an aside, it also got me thinking. “The Cage” needs a human soul and parts, but the prophecy never strictly said it was human. A skeleton isn’t a human, but it is unambiguously a human part. Considering Kris can survive without a soul for a certain amount of time, and monsters can absorb human souls, it does beg the question of whether or not Papyrus could fulfill the role of the cage if tasked with doing so. It’s not something I imagine will come up in the game proper, but think it would be really funny if it did.
They also both have capes that are different shades of red, which ties what might otherwise be tenuous similarities together a bit more.
Papyrus is a shoddy reproduction of Kris’s outfit, though I think that’s the point. If this is supposed to be Kris’s outfit, then it’s blatantly supposed to be a bad cosplay created from Papyrus’s equally bad memory. Considering that Papyrus’s stupid underwear has a similar silhouette to the roaring knight’s, though, I think there’s a nonzero chance that Kris and Papyrus might just be borrowing visual motifs from the same third party as opposed to each other.
There's also their shared hatred of anime.
On its own these similarities are a little vague, but there’s one I’m a bit more invested in: their random bouts of memory loss and depersonalization.
Granted, this is a running gag for Papyrus, but it's not like Toby's never foreshadowed anything through a joke before.
They both seem to be experiencing memory loss as well. For Kris this is associated exclusively with the forgotten man and whatever caused Dess to disappear, whereas Papyrus instead seems to struggle to get a grip on his surroundings all the time, though granted the most concrete example of this is also from cut content.
The interesting distinction to me is that this is a trauma response for Kris, but a simple fact of life for Papyrus. For Kris this is an incident that is being erased, along with everything associated with it, whereas for Papyrus his entire existence seems to be a cycle of forgetting and remembering, as if existing itself is the thing he wasn’t supposed remember.
I feel like parallels open themselves up a bit more clearly when you open up a sibling quartet, though. In some ways, sans and Papyrus directly mirror Asriel and Kris.
Most notably, sans’s room is in a similar state to Kris’s side of the bedroom, while Papyrus’s room is on the same side as Asriel’s. However, sans has an established social life, like Asriel, and Papyrus is regarded as the local weirdo, like Kris.
All in all, the evidence towards Kris being the person the forgotten man is trying to save is borderline nonexistent, though some inexplicable parallels with Papyrus have me squinting anyway. “Savior” doesn’t feel like the word for their dynamic, though there’s plenty of room in future chapters for tricky tony to prove me wrong.
As the only two characters who have canonically interacted, however, Kris and the forgotten man don’t strictly need a strong narrative connection for this to be the correct answer. The most straightforward solution may be the correct one, though I think it’s more likely that their connection lies in them chasing the same mystery: Dess.
CASE 3: The Forgotten Man and the Knight
Dess has a lot more going for her as the person the forgotten man is attempting to save, but the caveat is that the evidence has a lot more ‘if’s to it. The big one is the assumption that Dess is the knight, but if you’re in any way familiar with Deltarune fan theories you should have seen that coming by now.
They’re both siblings who are suspiciously absent from the first half of the game, and their respective siblings are practically mascots for the bad routes for undertale and deltarune respectively. Both Papyrus and Dess have been mentioned by name but never physically shown.
The determination extractor is also inexplicably shaped like a deer skull, and the true lab gets us an early forgotten man easter egg.
(I've hit Image cap so you're just gonna have to imagine it)
If I’m going to have a bit where I assert Kris and Papyrus share visual motifs just because of a cape, then I also feel remiss to not point out that the roaring knight is a deer skeleton specifically, one whose silhouette is noticeably Papyrus shaped.
The most common assumption I see made about the roaring knight is that her skeletal form is a sign of her body decaying, but monster bodies turn to dust immediately, so that justification falls apart instantly from a watsonian perspective.
It’s also kind of hard to say whether or not monsters even have bones, given the current discourse over whether or not they even have blood.
However, it has been heavily established that monsters from the same family are always the same species. Considering the big stink the plot makes about Kris’s body dysmorphia over not having horns, I think it’s actually fairly likely that Dess on some level subconsciously regards herself as a surrogate part of the skeleton family and alters her cool knight form to match.
A hidden piece of xbox shrine dialogue also establishes that Papyrus canonically loves snow, an extremely holiday family trait. He also seems to forget it snows every time it does for some reason. From the sound of it, he also went out of his way to get to know Noelle, Dess, and Monster Kid in Undertale. Considering sans’s relationship with Toriel carries over between both games, it’s fairly likely that Papyrus had a relationship with the Holiday family in the deltarune timeline, too.
It’s a bit semantic, but I also feel the need to point out that in chapter 1, sans says “we just moved here, so i hardly know anyone” and not “we just moved here, so we hardly know anyone”, leaving Papyrus’s relationship to Hometown surprisingly ambiguous. In Undertale, Papyrus also says his house is "technically sans's too" which further implies that he is at least the owner.
The meat of this, however, is in the unused deltarune text. Like a lot of people, I think Dess is the one saying this, but there are some connections to the forgotten man I want to point out anyway.
I always did have that nightmare.
Walking into the darkness,
With the light shining from the doorway...
Then the door slams behind me.
And everything goes black.
... is this that nightmare?
... or was everything else a dream?
This is a reference to the opening of Magami Ibunroku Persona, who apparently got it from some guy named Zhuangzi.
In Persona, this quote is made in reference to the characters’, well, Personas and their relationships to the surreal landscapes they end up going to, which is one of the reasons I’m not super pressed about the whole “if Dess is lost in the code then how is she also the knight” thing. The same thing happened to my good friend Maki Sonomura in 1996. though I think an analysis for what this implies about the themes of Deltarune are better left to someone who actually knows things about Taoism.
What’s relevant to this conversation is that the forgotten man talks in this recursive way of speaking all the time. It’s a sort of typing quirk of his, I guess you could say.
To clarify some ground rules for the people who are inevitably going to go looking for them after this, for it to count as a butterfly dialogue it has to follow a “Is x y or is y x” type syntax, if not explicitly then implicitly. The subject and the speaker need to switch by the final sentence.
Unfortunately examples for butterfly dialogue in the forgotten man’s dialogue is like. all of it, but I think the most noteworthy ones are at the end of the chapter 4 egg room (where the rudin asks if we’re the patient or the doctor) and the valentines message we were here to analyze in the first place.
(Again I'd post examples here but I'm out of pictures)
The unused text has a syntax too different from the way the forgotten man speaks to be him. But almost every other reference in this vein is in regards to the forgotten man or the prophecy itself. From this I can only really conclude that whatever happened to the forgotten man also happened to Dess. Or whatever happened to Dess happened to the forgotten man.
On the subject of Papyrus, he also has a few lines of dialogue where he mentions he doesn’t sleep very much. He also refuses to go to sleep unless sans is there, too, which makes it fairly plausible he’s having the same kind of nightmares that Dess did and is avoiding sleep altogether in order to not deal with them.
The last parallel also brings us to our final (albeit least likely) candidate for who the Forgotten Man was trying to save: Undyne. She’s the knight’s first captive, but also the first person Papyrus actively befriends in the underground, a fact that doesn’t strike me as entirely coincidental.
Is she the person the Forgotten Man was trying to save? Probably not. Especially with two much more likely candidates already on the table. But I’m putting her here just in case some extra twisty twist disqualifies the other two for some reason.
Dess is definitely the prime suspect as far as I’m concerned. There’s more meat there than anywhere else. In hindsight most Papyrus knight theories themselves feel like people subconsciously picking up on the unexpectedly large number of Papyrus and Dess connections but coming to the wrong conclusion about it.
What it all means is harder to sus out, though. These two characters technically aren’t even characters in deltarune yet, after all. They’re just kind of… haunting the narrative in tandem right now.
A man who wants to be forgotten vs a girl who insists you can’t forget.
Papyrus is a character in Undertale, though, so before I come to any actual conclusion, let me derail this entire discussion for a character analysis essay that may or may not be related to anything I was saying beforehand.
CASE 4: Undertale and Deltarune
Personally, I’ve always found it strange that the common fandom consensus is that sans is aware of the metanarrative and Papyrus isn’t when sans and Papyrus live together, Papyrus’s other best friend is Resets Georg, and Papyrus exclusively fights god (Toby) on the regular.
Like it’s true that Papyrus’s association with these concepts is wholly within the realm of speculation, but I also think it’s strange to assume there are no inferences to made just because the plot doesn’t spell out his involvement.
That being said, Papyrus’s involvement is hard to pin down for a reason. He is fucking with us to a certain degree. He’s blatantly lying about not knowing what a laboratory is, for instance, but he also seems genuinely confused when he starts talking to Undyne about spiders.
I’m choosing to believe that this is an intentional bit on Papyrus’s part. He knows he has random episodes of psychosis and amnesia, but doesn’t want to worry the people around him, so he just makes a series of bits where he pretends to forget things so that it’s less obvious when he has genuine episodes.
I actually think the most interesting bit of contrast between sans and Papyrus is that sans is like. desperate to tell anyone his secrets, to the point where he’ll hand you the keys to a massive bombshell of a lore drop the minute you give any indication that you’d understand, whereas Papyrus will usually just double down until you drop the subject if you catch him red-handed in a lie.
This also strikes me as a really funny example of survivorship bias — the only reason the undertale fandom sees sans as this penultimate keeper of secrets is because he’s the only character in undertale who instantly tells you everything he knows the minute you’re left alone with him.
Papyrus doesn’t know less than sans, he’s simply better at keeping secrets than him. If he wasn’t, we wouldn’t have needed to talk to sans to find out Papyrus was friends with Flowey in the first place.
The issue with doing any meaningful character analysis of Papyrus is that he’s too good at keeping secrets. sans has extremely obvious tells. He acts like a jokester whose words you shouldn’t take too seriously, but he drops the act the minute he has something important to say.
Papyrus, on the other hand, is in Papyrus mode no matter what. He never even drops his font the way sans does. Not even during the lost soul segment. The only way to tell how much he’s telling the truth is through the reactions of other characters, and the majority of your interactions with him are exclusively between the two of you. He never, ever drops his guard and that’s exactly what makes him interesting and infuriating to try to analyze. Anything but the most superficial analysis of him is like trying to catch smoke.
How to kill a time traveler is just about the only theory post I’ve seen run with the idea that Papyrus is just as meta aware as sans is, but it does so in a way I think ignores a lot of the juiciest concepts here.
There’s also uh. A really big hole in it?
In How to Kill a Time Traveler, one of the biggest points sock muppet tries to make is that Papyrus is playing the fool to coax information out of the people resetting, which he allegedly feeds back to sans, but Flowey blatantly gives himself away according to the videos own observation, so like. Why doesn’t sans know flowey can reset the timeline?
In the genocide route he blames you for every reset. The reason the “you’d be dead where you stand” monologue happens even when you haven’t done a neutral route is because sans can’t differentiate between flowey’s resets and yours. He thinks you did everything on flowey’s saves. Which begs the question: If Papyrus knows that flowey has been doing resets, why hasn’t he told sans?
If you really wanted to defend this point, you could argue that flowey simply learned his lesson and reset, creating a timeline where he doesn’t tell Papyrus, but flowey doesn't know that anyone else know it's Papyrus's favorite food, so that can't be it either.
It’s honestly one of the reasons I think Papyrus kinda has to know about saves. Even if he isn’t from the deltarune timeline and sans told him nothing, there’s no way he’s never caught a ten year old he spends all his time with hiding something so big from him.
Sock Muppet argues that Flowey was manipulating Papyrus into instigating the true ending in Writing on the Wall, and even without that I think a lot of people are under the impression that he was naively tricked into helping, but let’s take stock here:
Who set you up with Undyne, who would have otherwise refused to befriend you? Papyrus.
Who forced Alphys, an infamous shut in, to leave the house long enough for you to sneak into the true lab? Papyrus.
Who invited everyone to new home to get got by Flowey in the first place? Papyrus.
So I gotta ask. Which do you think is more likely?
A child whose defining character trait is being alienated from people’s feelings understanding the concept of gay yearning well enough to know that he needed Undyne to keep Alphys distracted in order to instigate a series of events that would indirectly let him regain his body.
Or a guy who canonically convinces his homicidal friend to befriend you by trapping you alone in a room together…doing that twice.
If the Pacifist route can be said to have a mastermind, it is almost definitely Papyrus. He just doesn’t scan as such to the audience because he’s less the stereotypical, moustache twirling Man Behind The Slaughter, and more the DM of a local game shop who is trying his damnedest to convince the party’s local murderhobo to stop killing every npc he meets.
Simply put, rather than sans and Papyrus being in cahoots with each other, I think Gaster, sans, and Papyrus are simply coping with the metanarrative like those bitches from Pathologic.
They’re aware of each other’s existence, and they aren’t necessarily hostile, but each has a radically different philosophy on how to deal with the topic at hand that leaves them diametrically opposed, which ultimately causes them to tackle the subject alone. The plot of undertale (and deltarune) consists of the player deciding which character’s rhetoric regarding the player is true.
sans assumes the worst of you, and the genocide route consists of you proving him right. The ways this is true and how he reacts to being disproven in other routes has already been talked to death though, so let’s move on to Papyrus and Gaster.
Papyrus’s philosophy is a radical belief in the player’s ability to do good. With all the talk about Noelle being a character skilled at finding video game secrets who is part of a secret route, then I think we may be underestimating the significance of Papyrus being a roleplayer who lives in a roleplay game. Papyrus acts like he doesn’t know what a human is or what the sun is for the same reason an actor at a renaissance fair pretends not to know what a cell phone is. He’s a professional. Of course he wouldn’t break keyfabe.
I think a majority of Papyrus’s actions are informed by the monologue Flowey makes near the end of the genocide route:
“As time repeated, people proved themselves predictable.”
“What would a person say if I gave them this?”
“What would they think if I said this to them?”
“Once you know the answer, that’s it.”
“That’s all they are.”
Imagine, if you will, if a skeleton heard that kind of rhetoric. Imagine if he then manufactured more npc dialogue than the game’s narrator to forestall that end point for as long as humanly possible.
In 1001 Nights, the framing device is Scheherazade telling a story to her captor every night, and then ending the story on a cliffhanger so that he has to wait another day to behead her.
In a lot of extra materials, Papyrus is noticeably less talkative than in Undertale. Not a total recluse by any metric, but he doesn’t seem to speak much unless spoken to first. In Undertale, Papyrus mentions being a big fan of Mettaton, but when he’s actively in Papyrus’s house during the alarm clock christmas party, Papyrus doesn’t speak to him at all.
Deltarune itself has made a progressively big deal about how Kris’s closest friends have never really seen them as they are because of the player’s influence, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Papyrus became another avenue for exploring a similar concept— how his persona is influenced by our presence, and how little of his personality it likely captures, even if he’s never lying, per say.
In programming spaces, “spaghetti code” is slang for just about any badly optimized, hard to read code. Undertale, as a starter project, is full of spaghetti. Every NPC interaction in the game is in one switch statement. By reading Papyrus’s NPC dialogue, we are consuming his spaghetti. He will tell you 1001 stories in every room you go to because that’s what will keep him alive to you.
In much the same way sans weaponizes boss mechanics to prevent us from progressing, and Gerson uses shop mechanics to prevent us from killing him, Papyrus uses flavortext as a means of influencing players towards his goals. He prevents the player from succumbing to boredom and killing everyone by actively going out of his way to make the pacifist option the most interesting choice.
Even if you, like Flowey, are only here to mine the game for more flavortext, you’ll naturally end up doing true pacifist anyway, because that’s where a majority of the flavortext is, for reasons almost exclusive to Papyrus.
Ironically I think the most obvious examples of Papyrus weaponizing boredom against you are in violent routes. If he meaningfully reacts to his friends deaths, it will make killing them interesting and further incentivize you to do it, so he intentionally feigns ignorance until he can guilt trip you into undoing it at the very end.
A lot of people think Papyrus is more powerful than he lets on, and I agree, but I think one of the reasons that something like disbelief Papyrus never happens in canon is because putting up a meaningful fight would give the player a meaningful objective to overcome, incentivizing them to kill him even more. He instead frames sparing him as an accomplishment in the hopes that it incentivizes you to stop killing.
While sans copes with entropy with a sense of nihilism, Papyrus gives his life meaning by being an arbiter of player choice. His choices don’t matter, but yours do, which means that he can give his actions meaning by influencing your decisions. His purpose isn’t to make decisions, but to make options. He has a plan for where he wants you to go, but he also realizes you’ll just reset afterwards if you don’t gain a sense of self-actulization from it, so he makes uh. Suggestions.
As an aside, I’d argue that this specific angle of Papyrus’s character makes him haunt the narrative in chapter 4 to a surprising degree. A lot of people were kind of agog at how their favorite characters from Undertale were much shittier people in Deltarune, but they’re honestly just as self-interested in Undertale. Toriel losing track of you after getting drunk is actually pretty mild compared to abandoning you in a town you don’t know with monsters that might try to kill you. The latter just scans better because another character instantly picks up the slack.
Kris basically spends the entirety of chapter 4 begging any adult in their life to do what Papyrus does within minutes of meeting you in Undertale. The tone of chapter 4, where the world is at stake and nobody is on your side, would not work if Papyrus was in the game before this point, because he would never have left Kris in this position, no matter the consequences.
The tl;dr of all this is that I think Papyrus is a solid representative of Undertale’s game design ethos. He’s at the epicenter of most player decisions in a game centered around player choice. His boss theme is literally used in the game's trailer. It’s one of the reasons him being the forgotten man intuitively makes the sense to me. That a version of Papyrus, stripped of memory and individuality, would devolve into nothing more than a series of “yes”s and “no”s. It’s what his role in Undertale already was, so it makes sense that he would be a metaphysical representation of the player choice that’s been taken away from us in Deltarune.
If Papyrus is a flexible DM who “yes,and”s off of the player’s decisions (even to the campaign’s detriment), then Gaster, as Deltarune’s DM, is one of those guys who watched a bunch of episodes of Critical Role and then held his friends at gunpoint until they acted out the novel he wrote. Absolutely dogshit DM who will railroad the party just to make sure that he gets to do the cool set pieces he came up with: the overwrought lore bible of “prophecy”.
If Undertale is a game deconstructing player choice, then I’d argue that Deltarune is a game deconstructing developer choice. If Undertale uses the existence of Frisk and Chara to analyze why players make the decisions they do, then I’d argue that Papyrus and Gaster exist to analyze why developers make the decisions they do.
It’s why Deltarune is filled with games within games, both literally in chapter 3 and metaphorically through the creation of dark fountains, which is to say nothing on the existence of chapters in the first place. Through the act of playing them, the game wants you to better understand the characters making them. It wants you to ask why these decisions were made in the first place.
Why would the developers give you the option to fight if acting opens up more engaging options?
Why would the developers give you the option to recruit enemies if the changes are only superficial?
Why would the developers add a bunch of secrets that are roundabout and difficult to get?
If there’s a single objective best choice, then why add any others?
Why would they let you make a machine to thrash your own ass?
While Toby definitely errs on the side of player choice, he does add nuances to the discussion. The weird route is nothing if not an admission that the player isn’t always right, that guard rails should be set to prevent people from acting in bad faith before they tear the whole campaign apart.
Another detail that airs on the side of this authorship interpretation is the name WD Gaster itself. In English, two initials and a surname is a common format for pen name: RL Stine, KA Applegate, JRR Tolkien, ect.
It’s not a theory I have a lot of evidence for, but I actually think WD Gaster is supposed to be an alias. In publishing, it’s common for a pen name to be used by a team of writers rather than a single author, especially for a book series. In the same vein, I think WD Gaster is supposed to be the pen name of whoever the acting royal scientist happens to be.
Throughout most of Undertale, it’s established that a lot of monster culture is holdovers from the war that monsters just. Never got out of the practice of doing. Likewise I think this alias was likely a tactic from the war days to prevent humans from tracking down the royal scientist that just. Never went away.
The biggest rebuttal to this is Alphys still being called Alphys, but her not going by an alias makes sense when you consider she made Mettaton before becoming the royal scientist, and didn’t publish most of her work as the royal scientist to the public to begin with. Even with the exceptions… the cat’s out of the bag already. The underground’s one celebrity is telling everyone your name. Not much point pretending it’s a secret. Most of the monsters don't even know you're human, so they don't put much stock in keeping it, either.
I actually think this is on of the things that makes her an interesting foil to Gaster. The man currently known as Gaster presumably buried himself so deeply into his work that everyone forgot his original name, while Alphys became so famous that her work as the royal scientist was no longer anonymous.
As for Gaster’s actual identity, it's undertale!papyrus. He's totally undertale papyrus. Just trust me bro.
CASE 5: Torrent
Okay. So. Deltarune. It’s the name of the game. Let's break it down.
First word:
Delta
noun
del·ta ˈdel-tə
1: the 4th letter of the Greek alphabet see Alphabet Table
2: an area of low, flat land, sometimes shaped like a triangle, where a river divides into several smaller rivers before flowing into the sea
3: mathematics : an increment of a variable —symbol Δ
A lot of people have been talking about the greek letter connotations, but, given the constant allusions to water by npcs, I think it's more likely "delta" refers to a place where bodies of water meet.
This seems relevant in that, well, we have Dark Fountains, which are certainly bodies of rushing water.
Then it hit me. A rush of water is called a torrent. By opening up a dark fountain, you are opening up a torrent.
For those who don’t know, a torrenting program is and was a common form of piracy infamous for giving people viruses back in the day. The way it works is that you’d obtain a seed, which basically a piece of a file, and then use a torrenting program with a connection to the internet to find the other seeds, which would get you the other pieces of the file you were missing. One might even call it a way to reassemble pieces of something scattered across time and space.
And. Well.
Seed
noun
si·d
1: a small, round or oval object produced by a plant and from which, when it is planted, a new plant can grow
An egg from a tree counts as a seed.
The forgotten man’s eggs are literally seeds found in a torrent. That’s why he says “There were some issues” if you collect any of the eggs. Gaster can’t download the torrent without the seed. The roaring knight is seeding a torrent.
This actually puts together a lot of puzzle pieces with Dess, considering a very common piracy stereotype of the mid-2000s was teenagers giving the family computer a billion viruses on a torrenting program called limewire
There's already a billion posts about deltarune gaster being associated with green, and I think it's very likely that the sound test room from undertale was simply a fake "album" that Gaster put a piece of himself into and tricked dess into torrenting. The "device" is just dess's now virus riddled computer
This would also explain why the internet is out in hometown, and why you can’t make phone calls in the dark world. Gaster is using up all the bandwidth. In ye olde days before wifi was an accessible thing. People used to have to use the internet through their phone lines. This famously made a horrible screeching noise when it started, and also made it impossible to use the phone while you were online.
As an aside this also informs a lot of Spamton’s deal. His writing quirk is that his speech is formatted in broken wikitext. The double brackets are supposed to be replaced with a link to a website containing information on whatever he’s saying, but the website doesn’t work anymore. It’s also probably why “Mike” stopped calling him. The signal was suddenly occupied by Gaster.
If a delta is a place where bodies of water meet, and any form of writing with a secret meaning could be said to be runes, then a torrenting program is, in fact, a delta rune. Every time you download more of "Deltarune" through chapter updates, you are downloading more of Gaster.
As an aside, there’s been something bothering my autistic ass since 2016. See, Toby Fox is a guy obsessed with coming up with double entendres names for all of his characters. “Asriel” being a mix of Toriel and Asgore, while also being the name of an angel. Undine being the name of a mythical creature, but also sounding like the word Undying. Sans being a reference to comic sans, while also being a character who has been displaced, and who is most relevant when he experiences loss.
Which begs the question: what the hell does Papyrus have to do with Papyrus?
Which is when it occurred to me. The dark fountains are constantly written to be evocative of ink. Papyrus… is another word for Paper. In a game where you are already overwriting something. And where a prominent theme about characters being used up. And he hasn't been seen in five chapters.
CASE 6: Ink and Paper
So finally, let's talk about color spaces.
To simplify a lot of technical shit, color spaces come in two modes: CMYK and RGB.
They're named after the colors in them (see chart).
CYMK is designed to add color to a white sheet of paper. Through this framework, you could say they draw by adding darkness to light.
RGB is designed to add color to a black computer screen. Through this framework, you could say they draw by adding light to darkness.
As you can see, combining each letter with one from the opposite color space combines to make black in a CMYK color space, or white in an RGB color space.
This is also why Kris needs the soul to seal the fountain: Cyan and Red combine to make white.
Susie then furthers this pattern with the green soul. Magenta and Green make white, and Gerson calls her "the white pen of hope" during his secret boss battle. Not to mention her development of green healing magic over the course of the plot. Green denotes something Susie can interact with.
Which leaves Noelle’s yellow as the only part of the pattern yet to be completed. She still needs to interact with someone with blue soul mechanics.
There's even the same shade of blue in the flowers on the countdown...
In conclusion, I think Papyrus might be relevant to the plot of Deltarune.
Well, Deltarune chapter 5 is almost out, which blows a massive hole in a theory video I was working on, since I won't have enough time to actually make this behemoth into video form in a week. As a compromise, you're all getting my hastily edited draft on tumblr so that I can at least have it out before release.
To start with, I was wondering about the games established Gaster/Gerson parallels. They are both entities that “fell into their creation”, who are able to commune with people through the medium they fell into— for Gerson, his writing, for Gaster, the dark world. But to complete the parallel implies that Gaster has some kind of equivalent to Alvin— someone who brought him here and gave him the ability to interface with the world at large, but refuses to finish his work.
The fact that Gaster’s theme is called “Another Him” strikes me as interesting, because it implies that “him” from undertale is the theme of a different Gaster.
It also feels obvious in hindsight that there would be another Gaster. After all, anyone who is at least a little familiar with his lore knows he’s from the undertale timeline, which means that deltarune!gaster is completely unaccounted for.
I’d go through the list of all the possible suspects for deltarune!gaster, but the obvious culprit is the forgotten man as the only other mysterious, explicitly male gendered character we get. However, I also think the forgotten man is Papyrus, so rather than entertaining other suspects, I figured I’d get out the corkboard and red string and hope that whatever I tied together would produce a coherent image instead of a monochrome smear.
CASE 1: Papyrus and the Forgotten Man
A bunch of people beat me to finding the evidence that papyrus is the forgotten man, but I’ll go over it again so we’re on the same page.
The most obvious bit is the egg in his dating sim hud
But there’s also the reference to dinosaurs in the chapter 3 egg room— Dinosaur Egg Quaker Oatmeal being Papyrus’s favorite food.
As an additional point, the only character in Undertale who is aware of this is Flowey, who can reset timelines, implying that his acquisition of this information was through some kind of random event.
One of the snowdin puzzles consists of Papyrus shoving a bunch of snow around to make the shape of his face. If you ask him for the solution, he’ll tell you to press a button behind a tree, solving the puzzle.
There’s also a few references in the genocide route that are more than a little eyebrow raising.
Compare
to
Not to mention the “Forgettable” as his act description.
Papyrus’s phone dialogue has a lot of eyebrow raisers as well.
There’s also this bit of phone dialogue that I’ve been eyeing since I ran into it:
In deltarune, every trash darkner is named trashy, implying that Papyrus has been to the dark world version of his own house.
This feels especially significant considering you need to use an escape ticket on a ribbick to reach MANCOUNTRY, a mob that canonically lives in a garbage can.
In order to get this far, you also have to interact with a Bibliox, which is a misspelling of byblos, which is greek for Papyrus.
While not strictly being evidence, I think Papyrus being an out-of-work child psychologist also recontextualizes his character in undertale in a lot of interesting ways.
It’s not unheard of for adults to be friends with teenagers, but it makes a lot more sense that sans would choose Kris for Papyrus to hang out with over say, Alphys or Undyne, if his brother specializes in working with children, especially if Kris was one of his former patients. Which is to say nothing of Flowey, who is the child psychologist equivalent of handing an understimulated tiger at the zoo a watermelon.
I’ll wait to the end to get into what Papyrus being the forgotten man could further imply, but I did want to draw some attention to this the forgotten man’s 2024 valentine to segue to our next point:
Who was the forgotten man trying to help?
There are three potential culprits here, so I’ll start with the one we have the most exposure to: Kris.
CASE 2: Papyrus and Kris
Let’s start with their most superficial similarities: their appearances.
While their outfits aren’t one to one, I think it’s interesting to note that Papyrus’s armor covers all the same areas of his body as Kris’s does, sans the blue underwear. Rather than covering their entire chest, Kris’s chestplate only covers their ribcage— a fact that feels intentional when you consider the prophecy refers to them as The Cage, which stands true for Papyrus too as a skeleton. His outfit doesn’t cover his midriff.
As an aside, it also got me thinking. “The Cage” needs a human soul and parts, but the prophecy never strictly said it was human. A skeleton isn’t a human, but it is unambiguously a human part. Considering Kris can survive without a soul for a certain amount of time, and monsters can absorb human souls, it does beg the question of whether or not Papyrus could fulfill the role of the cage if tasked with doing so. It’s not something I imagine will come up in the game proper, but think it would be really funny if it did.
They also both have capes that are different shades of red, which ties what might otherwise be tenuous similarities together a bit more.
Papyrus is a shoddy reproduction of Kris’s outfit, though I think that’s the point. If this is supposed to be Kris’s outfit, then it’s blatantly supposed to be a bad cosplay created from Papyrus’s equally bad memory. Considering that Papyrus’s stupid underwear has a similar silhouette to the roaring knight’s, though, I think there’s a nonzero chance that Kris and Papyrus might just be borrowing visual motifs from the same third party as opposed to each other.
There's also their shared hatred of anime.
On its own these similarities are a little vague, but there’s one I’m a bit more invested in: their random bouts of memory loss and depersonalization.
Granted, this is a running gag for Papyrus, but it's not like Toby's never foreshadowed anything through a joke before.
They both seem to be experiencing memory loss as well. For Kris this is associated exclusively with the forgotten man and whatever caused Dess to disappear, whereas Papyrus instead seems to struggle to get a grip on his surroundings all the time, though granted the most concrete example of this is also from cut content.
The interesting distinction to me is that this is a trauma response for Kris, but a simple fact of life for Papyrus. For Kris this is an incident that is being erased, along with everything associated with it, whereas for Papyrus his entire existence seems to be a cycle of forgetting and remembering, as if existing itself is the thing he wasn’t supposed remember.
I feel like parallels open themselves up a bit more clearly when you open up a sibling quartet, though. In some ways, sans and Papyrus directly mirror Asriel and Kris.
Most notably, sans’s room is in a similar state to Kris’s side of the bedroom, while Papyrus’s room is on the same side as Asriel’s. However, sans has an established social life, like Asriel, and Papyrus is regarded as the local weirdo, like Kris.
All in all, the evidence towards Kris being the person the forgotten man is trying to save is borderline nonexistent, though some inexplicable parallels with Papyrus have me squinting anyway. “Savior” doesn’t feel like the word for their dynamic, though there’s plenty of room in future chapters for tricky tony to prove me wrong.
As the only two characters who have canonically interacted, however, Kris and the forgotten man don’t strictly need a strong narrative connection for this to be the correct answer. The most straightforward solution may be the correct one, though I think it’s more likely that their connection lies in them chasing the same mystery: Dess.
CASE 3: The Forgotten Man and the Knight
Dess has a lot more going for her as the person the forgotten man is attempting to save, but the caveat is that the evidence has a lot more ‘if’s to it. The big one is the assumption that Dess is the knight, but if you’re in any way familiar with Deltarune fan theories you should have seen that coming by now.
They’re both siblings who are suspiciously absent from the first half of the game, and their respective siblings are practically mascots for the bad routes for undertale and deltarune respectively. Both Papyrus and Dess have been mentioned by name but never physically shown.
The determination extractor is also inexplicably shaped like a deer skull, and the true lab gets us an early forgotten man easter egg.
(I've hit Image cap so you're just gonna have to imagine it)
If I’m going to have a bit where I assert Kris and Papyrus share visual motifs just because of a cape, then I also feel remiss to not point out that the roaring knight is a deer skeleton specifically, one whose silhouette is noticeably Papyrus shaped.
The most common assumption I see made about the roaring knight is that her skeletal form is a sign of her body decaying, but monster bodies turn to dust immediately, so that justification falls apart instantly from a watsonian perspective.
It’s also kind of hard to say whether or not monsters even have bones, given the current discourse over whether or not they even have blood.
However, it has been heavily established that monsters from the same family are always the same species. Considering the big stink the plot makes about Kris’s body dysmorphia over not having horns, I think it’s actually fairly likely that Dess on some level subconsciously regards herself as a surrogate part of the skeleton family and alters her cool knight form to match.
A hidden piece of xbox shrine dialogue also establishes that Papyrus canonically loves snow, an extremely holiday family trait. He also seems to forget it snows every time it does for some reason. From the sound of it, he also went out of his way to get to know Noelle, Dess, and Monster Kid in Undertale. Considering sans’s relationship with Toriel carries over between both games, it’s fairly likely that Papyrus had a relationship with the Holiday family in the deltarune timeline, too.
It’s a bit semantic, but I also feel the need to point out that in chapter 1, sans says “we just moved here, so i hardly know anyone” and not “we just moved here, so we hardly know anyone”, leaving Papyrus’s relationship to Hometown surprisingly ambiguous. In Undertale, Papyrus also says his house is "technically sans's too" which further implies that he is at least the owner.
The meat of this, however, is in the unused deltarune text. Like a lot of people, I think Dess is the one saying this, but there are some connections to the forgotten man I want to point out anyway.
I always did have that nightmare.
Walking into the darkness,
With the light shining from the doorway...
Then the door slams behind me.
And everything goes black.
... is this that nightmare?
... or was everything else a dream?
This is a reference to the opening of Magami Ibunroku Persona, who apparently got it from some guy named Zhuangzi.
In Persona, this quote is made in reference to the characters’, well, Personas and their relationships to the surreal landscapes they end up going to, which is one of the reasons I’m not super pressed about the whole “if Dess is lost in the code then how is she also the knight” thing. The same thing happened to my good friend Maki Sonomura in 1996. though I think an analysis for what this implies about the themes of Deltarune are better left to someone who actually knows things about Taoism.
What’s relevant to this conversation is that the forgotten man talks in this recursive way of speaking all the time. It’s a sort of typing quirk of his, I guess you could say.
To clarify some ground rules for the people who are inevitably going to go looking for them after this, for it to count as a butterfly dialogue it has to follow a “Is x y or is y x” type syntax, if not explicitly then implicitly. The subject and the speaker need to switch by the final sentence.
Unfortunately examples for butterfly dialogue in the forgotten man’s dialogue is like. all of it, but I think the most noteworthy ones are at the end of the chapter 4 egg room (where the rudin asks if we’re the patient or the doctor) and the valentines message we were here to analyze in the first place.
(Again I'd post examples here but I'm out of pictures)
The unused text has a syntax too different from the way the forgotten man speaks to be him. But almost every other reference in this vein is in regards to the forgotten man or the prophecy itself. From this I can only really conclude that whatever happened to the forgotten man also happened to Dess. Or whatever happened to Dess happened to the forgotten man.
On the subject of Papyrus, he also has a few lines of dialogue where he mentions he doesn’t sleep very much. He also refuses to go to sleep unless sans is there, too, which makes it fairly plausible he’s having the same kind of nightmares that Dess did and is avoiding sleep altogether in order to not deal with them.
The last parallel also brings us to our final (albeit least likely) candidate for who the Forgotten Man was trying to save: Undyne. She’s the knight’s first captive, but also the first person Papyrus actively befriends in the underground, a fact that doesn’t strike me as entirely coincidental.
Is she the person the Forgotten Man was trying to save? Probably not. Especially with two much more likely candidates already on the table. But I’m putting her here just in case some extra twisty twist disqualifies the other two for some reason.
Dess is definitely the prime suspect as far as I’m concerned. There’s more meat there than anywhere else. In hindsight most Papyrus knight theories themselves feel like people subconsciously picking up on the unexpectedly large number of Papyrus and Dess connections but coming to the wrong conclusion about it.
What it all means is harder to sus out, though. These two characters technically aren’t even characters in deltarune yet, after all. They’re just kind of… haunting the narrative in tandem right now.
A man who wants to be forgotten vs a girl who insists you can’t forget.
Papyrus is a character in Undertale, though, so before I come to any actual conclusion, let me derail this entire discussion for a character analysis essay that may or may not be related to anything I was saying beforehand.
CASE 4: Undertale and Deltarune
Personally, I’ve always found it strange that the common fandom consensus is that sans is aware of the metanarrative and Papyrus isn’t when sans and Papyrus live together, Papyrus’s other best friend is Resets Georg, and Papyrus exclusively fights god (Toby) on the regular.
Like it’s true that Papyrus’s association with these concepts is wholly within the realm of speculation, but I also think it’s strange to assume there are no inferences to made just because the plot doesn’t spell out his involvement.
That being said, Papyrus’s involvement is hard to pin down for a reason. He is fucking with us to a certain degree. He’s blatantly lying about not knowing what a laboratory is, for instance, but he also seems genuinely confused when he starts talking to Undyne about spiders.
I’m choosing to believe that this is an intentional bit on Papyrus’s part. He knows he has random episodes of psychosis and amnesia, but doesn’t want to worry the people around him, so he just makes a series of bits where he pretends to forget things so that it’s less obvious when he has genuine episodes.
I actually think the most interesting bit of contrast between sans and Papyrus is that sans is like. desperate to tell anyone his secrets, to the point where he’ll hand you the keys to a massive bombshell of a lore drop the minute you give any indication that you’d understand, whereas Papyrus will usually just double down until you drop the subject if you catch him red-handed in a lie.
This also strikes me as a really funny example of survivorship bias — the only reason the undertale fandom sees sans as this penultimate keeper of secrets is because he’s the only character in undertale who instantly tells you everything he knows the minute you’re left alone with him.
Papyrus doesn’t know less than sans, he’s simply better at keeping secrets than him. If he wasn’t, we wouldn’t have needed to talk to sans to find out Papyrus was friends with Flowey in the first place.
The issue with doing any meaningful character analysis of Papyrus is that he’s too good at keeping secrets. sans has extremely obvious tells. He acts like a jokester whose words you shouldn’t take too seriously, but he drops the act the minute he has something important to say.
Papyrus, on the other hand, is in Papyrus mode no matter what. He never even drops his font the way sans does. Not even during the lost soul segment. The only way to tell how much he’s telling the truth is through the reactions of other characters, and the majority of your interactions with him are exclusively between the two of you. He never, ever drops his guard and that’s exactly what makes him interesting and infuriating to try to analyze. Anything but the most superficial analysis of him is like trying to catch smoke.
How to kill a time traveler is just about the only theory post I’ve seen run with the idea that Papyrus is just as meta aware as sans is, but it does so in a way I think ignores a lot of the juiciest concepts here.
There’s also uh. A really big hole in it?
In How to Kill a Time Traveler, one of the biggest points sock muppet tries to make is that Papyrus is playing the fool to coax information out of the people resetting, which he allegedly feeds back to sans, but Flowey blatantly gives himself away according to the videos own observation, so like. Why doesn’t sans know flowey can reset the timeline?
In the genocide route he blames you for every reset. The reason the “you’d be dead where you stand” monologue happens even when you haven’t done a neutral route is because sans can’t differentiate between flowey’s resets and yours. He thinks you did everything on flowey’s saves. Which begs the question: If Papyrus knows that flowey has been doing resets, why hasn’t he told sans?
If you really wanted to defend this point, you could argue that flowey simply learned his lesson and reset, creating a timeline where he doesn’t tell Papyrus, but flowey doesn't know that anyone else know it's Papyrus's favorite food, so that can't be it either.
It’s honestly one of the reasons I think Papyrus kinda has to know about saves. Even if he isn’t from the deltarune timeline and sans told him nothing, there’s no way he’s never caught a ten year old he spends all his time with hiding something so big from him.
Sock Muppet argues that Flowey was manipulating Papyrus into instigating the true ending in Writing on the Wall, and even without that I think a lot of people are under the impression that he was naively tricked into helping, but let’s take stock here:
Who set you up with Undyne, who would have otherwise refused to befriend you? Papyrus.
Who forced Alphys, an infamous shut in, to leave the house long enough for you to sneak into the true lab? Papyrus.
Who invited everyone to new home to get got by Flowey in the first place? Papyrus.
So I gotta ask. Which do you think is more likely?
A child whose defining character trait is being alienated from people’s feelings understanding the concept of gay yearning well enough to know that he needed Undyne to keep Alphys distracted in order to instigate a series of events that would indirectly let him regain his body.
Or a guy who canonically convinces his homicidal friend to befriend you by trapping you alone in a room together…doing that twice.
If the Pacifist route can be said to have a mastermind, it is almost definitely Papyrus. He just doesn’t scan as such to the audience because he’s less the stereotypical, moustache twirling Man Behind The Slaughter, and more the DM of a local game shop who is trying his damnedest to convince the party’s local murderhobo to stop killing every npc he meets.
Simply put, rather than sans and Papyrus being in cahoots with each other, I think Gaster, sans, and Papyrus are simply coping with the metanarrative like those bitches from Pathologic.
They’re aware of each other’s existence, and they aren’t necessarily hostile, but each has a radically different philosophy on how to deal with the topic at hand that leaves them diametrically opposed, which ultimately causes them to tackle the subject alone. The plot of undertale (and deltarune) consists of the player deciding which character’s rhetoric regarding the player is true.
sans assumes the worst of you, and the genocide route consists of you proving him right. The ways this is true and how he reacts to being disproven in other routes has already been talked to death though, so let’s move on to Papyrus and Gaster.
Papyrus’s philosophy is a radical belief in the player’s ability to do good. With all the talk about Noelle being a character skilled at finding video game secrets who is part of a secret route, then I think we may be underestimating the significance of Papyrus being a roleplayer who lives in a roleplay game. Papyrus acts like he doesn’t know what a human is or what the sun is for the same reason an actor at a renaissance fair pretends not to know what a cell phone is. He’s a professional. Of course he wouldn’t break keyfabe.
I think a majority of Papyrus’s actions are informed by the monologue Flowey makes near the end of the genocide route:
“As time repeated, people proved themselves predictable.”
“What would a person say if I gave them this?”
“What would they think if I said this to them?”
“Once you know the answer, that’s it.”
“That’s all they are.”
Imagine, if you will, if a skeleton heard that kind of rhetoric. Imagine if he then manufactured more npc dialogue than the game’s narrator to forestall that end point for as long as humanly possible.
In 1001 Nights, the framing device is Scheherazade telling a story to her captor every night, and then ending the story on a cliffhanger so that he has to wait another day to behead her.
In a lot of extra materials, Papyrus is noticeably less talkative than in Undertale. Not a total recluse by any metric, but he doesn’t seem to speak much unless spoken to first. In Undertale, Papyrus mentions being a big fan of Mettaton, but when he’s actively in Papyrus’s house during the alarm clock christmas party, Papyrus doesn’t speak to him at all.
Deltarune itself has made a progressively big deal about how Kris’s closest friends have never really seen them as they are because of the player’s influence, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Papyrus became another avenue for exploring a similar concept— how his persona is influenced by our presence, and how little of his personality it likely captures, even if he’s never lying, per say.
In programming spaces, “spaghetti code” is slang for just about any badly optimized, hard to read code. Undertale, as a starter project, is full of spaghetti. Every NPC interaction in the game is in one switch statement. By reading Papyrus’s NPC dialogue, we are consuming his spaghetti. He will tell you 1001 stories in every room you go to because that’s what will keep him alive to you.
In much the same way sans weaponizes boss mechanics to prevent us from progressing, and Gerson uses shop mechanics to prevent us from killing him, Papyrus uses flavortext as a means of influencing players towards his goals. He prevents the player from succumbing to boredom and killing everyone by actively going out of his way to make the pacifist option the most interesting choice.
Even if you, like Flowey, are only here to mine the game for more flavortext, you’ll naturally end up doing true pacifist anyway, because that’s where a majority of the flavortext is, for reasons almost exclusive to Papyrus.
Ironically I think the most obvious examples of Papyrus weaponizing boredom against you are in violent routes. If he meaningfully reacts to his friends deaths, it will make killing them interesting and further incentivize you to do it, so he intentionally feigns ignorance until he can guilt trip you into undoing it at the very end.
A lot of people think Papyrus is more powerful than he lets on, and I agree, but I think one of the reasons that something like disbelief Papyrus never happens in canon is because putting up a meaningful fight would give the player a meaningful objective to overcome, incentivizing them to kill him even more. He instead frames sparing him as an accomplishment in the hopes that it incentivizes you to stop killing.
While sans copes with entropy with a sense of nihilism, Papyrus gives his life meaning by being an arbiter of player choice. His choices don’t matter, but yours do, which means that he can give his actions meaning by influencing your decisions. His purpose isn’t to make decisions, but to make options. He has a plan for where he wants you to go, but he also realizes you’ll just reset afterwards if you don’t gain a sense of self-actulization from it, so he makes uh. Suggestions.
As an aside, I’d argue that this specific angle of Papyrus’s character makes him haunt the narrative in chapter 4 to a surprising degree. A lot of people were kind of agog at how their favorite characters from Undertale were much shittier people in Deltarune, but they’re honestly just as self-interested in Undertale. Toriel losing track of you after getting drunk is actually pretty mild compared to abandoning you in a town you don’t know with monsters that might try to kill you. The latter just scans better because another character instantly picks up the slack.
Kris basically spends the entirety of chapter 4 begging any adult in their life to do what Papyrus does within minutes of meeting you in Undertale. The tone of chapter 4, where the world is at stake and nobody is on your side, would not work if Papyrus was in the game before this point, because he would never have left Kris in this position, no matter the consequences.
The tl;dr of all this is that I think Papyrus is a solid representative of Undertale’s game design ethos. He’s at the epicenter of most player decisions in a game centered around player choice. His boss theme is literally used in the game's trailer. It’s one of the reasons him being the forgotten man intuitively makes the sense to me. That a version of Papyrus, stripped of memory and individuality, would devolve into nothing more than a series of “yes”s and “no”s. It’s what his role in Undertale already was, so it makes sense that he would be a metaphysical representation of the player choice that’s been taken away from us in Deltarune.
If Papyrus is a flexible DM who “yes,and”s off of the player’s decisions (even to the campaign’s detriment), then Gaster, as Deltarune’s DM, is one of those guys who watched a bunch of episodes of Critical Role and then held his friends at gunpoint until they acted out the novel he wrote. Absolutely dogshit DM who will railroad the party just to make sure that he gets to do the cool set pieces he came up with: the overwrought lore bible of “prophecy”.
If Undertale is a game deconstructing player choice, then I’d argue that Deltarune is a game deconstructing developer choice. If Undertale uses the existence of Frisk and Chara to analyze why players make the decisions they do, then I’d argue that Papyrus and Gaster exist to analyze why developers make the decisions they do.
It’s why Deltarune is filled with games within games, both literally in chapter 3 and metaphorically through the creation of dark fountains, which is to say nothing on the existence of chapters in the first place. Through the act of playing them, the game wants you to better understand the characters making them. It wants you to ask why these decisions were made in the first place.
Why would the developers give you the option to fight if acting opens up more engaging options?
Why would the developers give you the option to recruit enemies if the changes are only superficial?
Why would the developers add a bunch of secrets that are roundabout and difficult to get?
If there’s a single objective best choice, then why add any others?
Why would they let you make a machine to thrash your own ass?
While Toby definitely errs on the side of player choice, he does add nuances to the discussion. The weird route is nothing if not an admission that the player isn’t always right, that guard rails should be set to prevent people from acting in bad faith before they tear the whole campaign apart.
Another detail that airs on the side of this authorship interpretation is the name WD Gaster itself. In English, two initials and a surname is a common format for pen name: RL Stine, KA Applegate, JRR Tolkien, ect.
It’s not a theory I have a lot of evidence for, but I actually think WD Gaster is supposed to be an alias. In publishing, it’s common for a pen name to be used by a team of writers rather than a single author, especially for a book series. In the same vein, I think WD Gaster is supposed to be the pen name of whoever the acting royal scientist happens to be.
Throughout most of Undertale, it’s established that a lot of monster culture is holdovers from the war that monsters just. Never got out of the practice of doing. Likewise I think this alias was likely a tactic from the war days to prevent humans from tracking down the royal scientist that just. Never went away.
The biggest rebuttal to this is Alphys still being called Alphys, but her not going by an alias makes sense when you consider she made Mettaton before becoming the royal scientist, and didn’t publish most of her work as the royal scientist to the public to begin with. Even with the exceptions… the cat’s out of the bag already. The underground’s one celebrity is telling everyone your name. Not much point pretending it’s a secret. Most of the monsters don't even know you're human, so they don't put much stock in keeping it, either.
I actually think this is on of the things that makes her an interesting foil to Gaster. The man currently known as Gaster presumably buried himself so deeply into his work that everyone forgot his original name, while Alphys became so famous that her work as the royal scientist was no longer anonymous.
As for Gaster’s actual identity, it's undertale!papyrus. He's totally undertale papyrus. Just trust me bro.
CASE 5: Torrent
Okay. So. Deltarune. It’s the name of the game. Let's break it down.
First word:
Delta
noun
del·ta ˈdel-tə
1: the 4th letter of the Greek alphabet see Alphabet Table
2: an area of low, flat land, sometimes shaped like a triangle, where a river divides into several smaller rivers before flowing into the sea
3: mathematics : an increment of a variable —symbol Δ
A lot of people have been talking about the greek letter connotations, but, given the constant allusions to water by npcs, I think it's more likely "delta" refers to a place where bodies of water meet.
This seems relevant in that, well, we have Dark Fountains, which are certainly bodies of rushing water.
Then it hit me. A rush of water is called a torrent. By opening up a dark fountain, you are opening up a torrent.
For those who don’t know, a torrenting program is and was a common form of piracy infamous for giving people viruses back in the day. The way it works is that you’d obtain a seed, which basically a piece of a file, and then use a torrenting program with a connection to the internet to find the other seeds, which would get you the other pieces of the file you were missing. One might even call it a way to reassemble pieces of something scattered across time and space.
And. Well.
Seed
noun
si·d
1: a small, round or oval object produced by a plant and from which, when it is planted, a new plant can grow
An egg from a tree counts as a seed.
The forgotten man’s eggs are literally seeds found in a torrent. That’s why he says “There were some issues” if you collect any of the eggs. Gaster can’t download the torrent without the seed. The roaring knight is seeding a torrent.
This actually puts together a lot of puzzle pieces with Dess, considering a very common piracy stereotype of the mid-2000s was teenagers giving the family computer a billion viruses on a torrenting program called limewire
There's already a billion posts about deltarune gaster being associated with green, and I think it's very likely that the sound test room from undertale was simply a fake "album" that Gaster put a piece of himself into and tricked dess into torrenting. The "device" is just dess's now virus riddled computer
This would also explain why the internet is out in hometown, and why you can’t make phone calls in the dark world. Gaster is using up all the bandwidth. In ye olde days before wifi was an accessible thing. People used to have to use the internet through their phone lines. This famously made a horrible screeching noise when it started, and also made it impossible to use the phone while you were online.
As an aside this also informs a lot of Spamton’s deal. His writing quirk is that his speech is formatted in broken wikitext. The double brackets are supposed to be replaced with a link to a website containing information on whatever he’s saying, but the website doesn’t work anymore. It’s also probably why “Mike” stopped calling him. The signal was suddenly occupied by Gaster.
If a delta is a place where bodies of water meet, and any form of writing with a secret meaning could be said to be runes, then a torrenting program is, in fact, a delta rune. Every time you download more of "Deltarune" through chapter updates, you are downloading more of Gaster.
As an aside, there’s been something bothering my autistic ass since 2016. See, Toby Fox is a guy obsessed with coming up with double entendres names for all of his characters. “Asriel” being a mix of Toriel and Asgore, while also being the name of an angel. Undine being the name of a mythical creature, but also sounding like the word Undying. Sans being a reference to comic sans, while also being a character who has been displaced, and who is most relevant when he experiences loss.
Which begs the question: what the hell does Papyrus have to do with Papyrus?
Which is when it occurred to me. The dark fountains are constantly written to be evocative of ink. Papyrus… is another word for Paper. In a game where you are already overwriting something. And where a prominent theme about characters being used up. And he hasn't been seen in five chapters.
CASE 6: Ink and Paper
So finally, let's talk about color spaces.
To simplify a lot of technical shit, color spaces come in two modes: CMYK and RGB.
They're named after the colors in them (see chart).
CYMK is designed to add color to a white sheet of paper. Through this framework, you could say they draw by adding darkness to light.
RGB is designed to add color to a black computer screen. Through this framework, you could say they draw by adding light to darkness.
As you can see, combining each letter with one from the opposite color space combines to make black in a CMYK color space, or white in an RGB color space.
This is also why Kris needs the soul to seal the fountain: Cyan and Red combine to make white.
Susie then furthers this pattern with the green soul. Magenta and Green make white, and Gerson calls her "the white pen of hope" during his secret boss battle. Not to mention her development of green healing magic over the course of the plot. Green denotes something Susie can interact with.
Which leaves Noelle’s yellow as the only part of the pattern yet to be completed. She still needs to interact with someone with blue soul mechanics.
There's even the same shade of blue in the flowers on the countdown...
In conclusion, I think Papyrus might be relevant to the plot of Deltarune.
Well, Deltarune chapter 5 is almost out, which blows a massive hole in a theory video I was working on, since I won't have enough time to actually make this behemoth into video form in a week. As a compromise, you're all getting my hastily edited draft on tumblr so that I can at least have it out before release.
To start with, I was wondering about the games established Gaster/Gerson parallels. They are both entities that “fell into their creation”, who are able to commune with people through the medium they fell into— for Gerson, his writing, for Gaster, the dark world. But to complete the parallel implies that Gaster has some kind of equivalent to Alvin— someone who brought him here and gave him the ability to interface with the world at large, but refuses to finish his work.
The fact that Gaster’s theme is called “Another Him” strikes me as interesting, because it implies that “him” from undertale is the theme of a different Gaster.
It also feels obvious in hindsight that there would be another Gaster. After all, anyone who is at least a little familiar with his lore knows he’s from the undertale timeline, which means that deltarune!gaster is completely unaccounted for.
I’d go through the list of all the possible suspects for deltarune!gaster, but the obvious culprit is the forgotten man as the only other mysterious, explicitly male gendered character we get. However, I also think the forgotten man is Papyrus, so rather than entertaining other suspects, I figured I’d get out the corkboard and red string and hope that whatever I tied together would produce a coherent image instead of a monochrome smear.
CASE 1: Papyrus and the Forgotten Man
A bunch of people beat me to finding the evidence that papyrus is the forgotten man, but I’ll go over it again so we’re on the same page.
The most obvious bit is the egg in his dating sim hud
But there’s also the reference to dinosaurs in the chapter 3 egg room— Dinosaur Egg Quaker Oatmeal being Papyrus’s favorite food.
As an additional point, the only character in Undertale who is aware of this is Flowey, who can reset timelines, implying that his acquisition of this information was through some kind of random event.
One of the snowdin puzzles consists of Papyrus shoving a bunch of snow around to make the shape of his face. If you ask him for the solution, he’ll tell you to press a button behind a tree, solving the puzzle.
There’s also a few references in the genocide route that are more than a little eyebrow raising.
Compare
to
Not to mention the “Forgettable” as his act description.
Papyrus’s phone dialogue has a lot of eyebrow raisers as well.
There’s also this bit of phone dialogue that I’ve been eyeing since I ran into it:
In deltarune, every trash darkner is named trashy, implying that Papyrus has been to the dark world version of his own house.
This feels especially significant considering you need to use an escape ticket on a ribbick to reach MANCOUNTRY, a mob that canonically lives in a garbage can.
In order to get this far, you also have to interact with a Bibliox, which is a misspelling of byblos, which is greek for Papyrus.
While not strictly being evidence, I think Papyrus being an out-of-work child psychologist also recontextualizes his character in undertale in a lot of interesting ways.
It’s not unheard of for adults to be friends with teenagers, but it makes a lot more sense that sans would choose Kris for Papyrus to hang out with over say, Alphys or Undyne, if his brother specializes in working with children, especially if Kris was one of his former patients. Which is to say nothing of Flowey, who is the child psychologist equivalent of handing an understimulated tiger at the zoo a watermelon.
I’ll wait to the end to get into what Papyrus being the forgotten man could further imply, but I did want to draw some attention to this the forgotten man’s 2024 valentine to segue to our next point:
Who was the forgotten man trying to help?
There are three potential culprits here, so I’ll start with the one we have the most exposure to: Kris.
CASE 2: Papyrus and Kris
Let’s start with their most superficial similarities: their appearances.
While their outfits aren’t one to one, I think it’s interesting to note that Papyrus’s armor covers all the same areas of his body as Kris’s does, sans the blue underwear. Rather than covering their entire chest, Kris’s chestplate only covers their ribcage— a fact that feels intentional when you consider the prophecy refers to them as The Cage, which stands true for Papyrus too as a skeleton. His outfit doesn’t cover his midriff.
As an aside, it also got me thinking. “The Cage” needs a human soul and parts, but the prophecy never strictly said it was human. A skeleton isn’t a human, but it is unambiguously a human part. Considering Kris can survive without a soul for a certain amount of time, and monsters can absorb human souls, it does beg the question of whether or not Papyrus could fulfill the role of the cage if tasked with doing so. It’s not something I imagine will come up in the game proper, but think it would be really funny if it did.
They also both have capes that are different shades of red, which ties what might otherwise be tenuous similarities together a bit more.
Papyrus is a shoddy reproduction of Kris’s outfit, though I think that’s the point. If this is supposed to be Kris’s outfit, then it’s blatantly supposed to be a bad cosplay created from Papyrus’s equally bad memory. Considering that Papyrus’s stupid underwear has a similar silhouette to the roaring knight’s, though, I think there’s a nonzero chance that Kris and Papyrus might just be borrowing visual motifs from the same third party as opposed to each other.
There's also their shared hatred of anime.
On its own these similarities are a little vague, but there’s one I’m a bit more invested in: their random bouts of memory loss and depersonalization.
Granted, this is a running gag for Papyrus, but it's not like Toby's never foreshadowed anything through a joke before.
They both seem to be experiencing memory loss as well. For Kris this is associated exclusively with the forgotten man and whatever caused Dess to disappear, whereas Papyrus instead seems to struggle to get a grip on his surroundings all the time, though granted the most concrete example of this is also from cut content.
The interesting distinction to me is that this is a trauma response for Kris, but a simple fact of life for Papyrus. For Kris this is an incident that is being erased, along with everything associated with it, whereas for Papyrus his entire existence seems to be a cycle of forgetting and remembering, as if existing itself is the thing he wasn’t supposed remember.
I feel like parallels open themselves up a bit more clearly when you open up a sibling quartet, though. In some ways, sans and Papyrus directly mirror Asriel and Kris.
Most notably, sans’s room is in a similar state to Kris’s side of the bedroom, while Papyrus’s room is on the same side as Asriel’s. However, sans has an established social life, like Asriel, and Papyrus is regarded as the local weirdo, like Kris.
All in all, the evidence towards Kris being the person the forgotten man is trying to save is borderline nonexistent, though some inexplicable parallels with Papyrus have me squinting anyway. “Savior” doesn’t feel like the word for their dynamic, though there’s plenty of room in future chapters for tricky tony to prove me wrong.
As the only two characters who have canonically interacted, however, Kris and the forgotten man don’t strictly need a strong narrative connection for this to be the correct answer. The most straightforward solution may be the correct one, though I think it’s more likely that their connection lies in them chasing the same mystery: Dess.
CASE 3: The Forgotten Man and the Knight
Dess has a lot more going for her as the person the forgotten man is attempting to save, but the caveat is that the evidence has a lot more ‘if’s to it. The big one is the assumption that Dess is the knight, but if you’re in any way familiar with Deltarune fan theories you should have seen that coming by now.
They’re both siblings who are suspiciously absent from the first half of the game, and their respective siblings are practically mascots for the bad routes for undertale and deltarune respectively. Both Papyrus and Dess have been mentioned by name but never physically shown.
The determination extractor is also inexplicably shaped like a deer skull, and the true lab gets us an early forgotten man easter egg.
(I've hit Image cap so you're just gonna have to imagine it)
If I’m going to have a bit where I assert Kris and Papyrus share visual motifs just because of a cape, then I also feel remiss to not point out that the roaring knight is a deer skeleton specifically, one whose silhouette is noticeably Papyrus shaped.
The most common assumption I see made about the roaring knight is that her skeletal form is a sign of her body decaying, but monster bodies turn to dust immediately, so that justification falls apart instantly from a watsonian perspective.
It’s also kind of hard to say whether or not monsters even have bones, given the current discourse over whether or not they even have blood.
However, it has been heavily established that monsters from the same family are always the same species. Considering the big stink the plot makes about Kris’s body dysmorphia over not having horns, I think it’s actually fairly likely that Dess on some level subconsciously regards herself as a surrogate part of the skeleton family and alters her cool knight form to match.
A hidden piece of xbox shrine dialogue also establishes that Papyrus canonically loves snow, an extremely holiday family trait. He also seems to forget it snows every time it does for some reason. From the sound of it, he also went out of his way to get to know Noelle, Dess, and Monster Kid in Undertale. Considering sans’s relationship with Toriel carries over between both games, it’s fairly likely that Papyrus had a relationship with the Holiday family in the deltarune timeline, too.
It’s a bit semantic, but I also feel the need to point out that in chapter 1, sans says “we just moved here, so i hardly know anyone” and not “we just moved here, so we hardly know anyone”, leaving Papyrus’s relationship to Hometown surprisingly ambiguous. In Undertale, Papyrus also says his house is "technically sans's too" which further implies that he is at least the owner.
The meat of this, however, is in the unused deltarune text. Like a lot of people, I think Dess is the one saying this, but there are some connections to the forgotten man I want to point out anyway.
I always did have that nightmare.
Walking into the darkness,
With the light shining from the doorway...
Then the door slams behind me.
And everything goes black.
... is this that nightmare?
... or was everything else a dream?
This is a reference to the opening of Magami Ibunroku Persona, who apparently got it from some guy named Zhuangzi.
In Persona, this quote is made in reference to the characters’, well, Personas and their relationships to the surreal landscapes they end up going to, which is one of the reasons I’m not super pressed about the whole “if Dess is lost in the code then how is she also the knight” thing. The same thing happened to my good friend Maki Sonomura in 1996. though I think an analysis for what this implies about the themes of Deltarune are better left to someone who actually knows things about Taoism.
What’s relevant to this conversation is that the forgotten man talks in this recursive way of speaking all the time. It’s a sort of typing quirk of his, I guess you could say.
To clarify some ground rules for the people who are inevitably going to go looking for them after this, for it to count as a butterfly dialogue it has to follow a “Is x y or is y x” type syntax, if not explicitly then implicitly. The subject and the speaker need to switch by the final sentence.
Unfortunately examples for butterfly dialogue in the forgotten man’s dialogue is like. all of it, but I think the most noteworthy ones are at the end of the chapter 4 egg room (where the rudin asks if we’re the patient or the doctor) and the valentines message we were here to analyze in the first place.
(Again I'd post examples here but I'm out of pictures)
The unused text has a syntax too different from the way the forgotten man speaks to be him. But almost every other reference in this vein is in regards to the forgotten man or the prophecy itself. From this I can only really conclude that whatever happened to the forgotten man also happened to Dess. Or whatever happened to Dess happened to the forgotten man.
On the subject of Papyrus, he also has a few lines of dialogue where he mentions he doesn’t sleep very much. He also refuses to go to sleep unless sans is there, too, which makes it fairly plausible he’s having the same kind of nightmares that Dess did and is avoiding sleep altogether in order to not deal with them.
The last parallel also brings us to our final (albeit least likely) candidate for who the Forgotten Man was trying to save: Undyne. She’s the knight’s first captive, but also the first person Papyrus actively befriends in the underground, a fact that doesn’t strike me as entirely coincidental.
Is she the person the Forgotten Man was trying to save? Probably not. Especially with two much more likely candidates already on the table. But I’m putting her here just in case some extra twisty twist disqualifies the other two for some reason.
Dess is definitely the prime suspect as far as I’m concerned. There’s more meat there than anywhere else. In hindsight most Papyrus knight theories themselves feel like people subconsciously picking up on the unexpectedly large number of Papyrus and Dess connections but coming to the wrong conclusion about it.
What it all means is harder to sus out, though. These two characters technically aren’t even characters in deltarune yet, after all. They’re just kind of… haunting the narrative in tandem right now.
A man who wants to be forgotten vs a girl who insists you can’t forget.
Papyrus is a character in Undertale, though, so before I come to any actual conclusion, let me derail this entire discussion for a character analysis essay that may or may not be related to anything I was saying beforehand.
CASE 4: Undertale and Deltarune
Personally, I’ve always found it strange that the common fandom consensus is that sans is aware of the metanarrative and Papyrus isn’t when sans and Papyrus live together, Papyrus’s other best friend is Resets Georg, and Papyrus exclusively fights god (Toby) on the regular.
Like it’s true that Papyrus’s association with these concepts is wholly within the realm of speculation, but I also think it’s strange to assume there are no inferences to made just because the plot doesn’t spell out his involvement.
That being said, Papyrus’s involvement is hard to pin down for a reason. He is fucking with us to a certain degree. He’s blatantly lying about not knowing what a laboratory is, for instance, but he also seems genuinely confused when he starts talking to Undyne about spiders.
I’m choosing to believe that this is an intentional bit on Papyrus’s part. He knows he has random episodes of psychosis and amnesia, but doesn’t want to worry the people around him, so he just makes a series of bits where he pretends to forget things so that it’s less obvious when he has genuine episodes.
I actually think the most interesting bit of contrast between sans and Papyrus is that sans is like. desperate to tell anyone his secrets, to the point where he’ll hand you the keys to a massive bombshell of a lore drop the minute you give any indication that you’d understand, whereas Papyrus will usually just double down until you drop the subject if you catch him red-handed in a lie.
This also strikes me as a really funny example of survivorship bias — the only reason the undertale fandom sees sans as this penultimate keeper of secrets is because he’s the only character in undertale who instantly tells you everything he knows the minute you’re left alone with him.
Papyrus doesn’t know less than sans, he’s simply better at keeping secrets than him. If he wasn’t, we wouldn’t have needed to talk to sans to find out Papyrus was friends with Flowey in the first place.
The issue with doing any meaningful character analysis of Papyrus is that he’s too good at keeping secrets. sans has extremely obvious tells. He acts like a jokester whose words you shouldn’t take too seriously, but he drops the act the minute he has something important to say.
Papyrus, on the other hand, is in Papyrus mode no matter what. He never even drops his font the way sans does. Not even during the lost soul segment. The only way to tell how much he’s telling the truth is through the reactions of other characters, and the majority of your interactions with him are exclusively between the two of you. He never, ever drops his guard and that’s exactly what makes him interesting and infuriating to try to analyze. Anything but the most superficial analysis of him is like trying to catch smoke.
How to kill a time traveler is just about the only theory post I’ve seen run with the idea that Papyrus is just as meta aware as sans is, but it does so in a way I think ignores a lot of the juiciest concepts here.
There’s also uh. A really big hole in it?
In How to Kill a Time Traveler, one of the biggest points sock muppet tries to make is that Papyrus is playing the fool to coax information out of the people resetting, which he allegedly feeds back to sans, but Flowey blatantly gives himself away according to the videos own observation, so like. Why doesn’t sans know flowey can reset the timeline?
In the genocide route he blames you for every reset. The reason the “you’d be dead where you stand” monologue happens even when you haven’t done a neutral route is because sans can’t differentiate between flowey’s resets and yours. He thinks you did everything on flowey’s saves. Which begs the question: If Papyrus knows that flowey has been doing resets, why hasn’t he told sans?
If you really wanted to defend this point, you could argue that flowey simply learned his lesson and reset, creating a timeline where he doesn’t tell Papyrus, but flowey doesn't know that anyone else know it's Papyrus's favorite food, so that can't be it either.
It’s honestly one of the reasons I think Papyrus kinda has to know about saves. Even if he isn’t from the deltarune timeline and sans told him nothing, there’s no way he’s never caught a ten year old he spends all his time with hiding something so big from him.
Sock Muppet argues that Flowey was manipulating Papyrus into instigating the true ending in Writing on the Wall, and even without that I think a lot of people are under the impression that he was naively tricked into helping, but let’s take stock here:
Who set you up with Undyne, who would have otherwise refused to befriend you? Papyrus.
Who forced Alphys, an infamous shut in, to leave the house long enough for you to sneak into the true lab? Papyrus.
Who invited everyone to new home to get got by Flowey in the first place? Papyrus.
So I gotta ask. Which do you think is more likely?
A child whose defining character trait is being alienated from people’s feelings understanding the concept of gay yearning well enough to know that he needed Undyne to keep Alphys distracted in order to instigate a series of events that would indirectly let him regain his body.
Or a guy who canonically convinces his homicidal friend to befriend you by trapping you alone in a room together…doing that twice.
If the Pacifist route can be said to have a mastermind, it is almost definitely Papyrus. He just doesn’t scan as such to the audience because he’s less the stereotypical, moustache twirling Man Behind The Slaughter, and more the DM of a local game shop who is trying his damnedest to convince the party’s local murderhobo to stop killing every npc he meets.
Simply put, rather than sans and Papyrus being in cahoots with each other, I think Gaster, sans, and Papyrus are simply coping with the metanarrative like those bitches from Pathologic.
They’re aware of each other’s existence, and they aren’t necessarily hostile, but each has a radically different philosophy on how to deal with the topic at hand that leaves them diametrically opposed, which ultimately causes them to tackle the subject alone. The plot of undertale (and deltarune) consists of the player deciding which character’s rhetoric regarding the player is true.
sans assumes the worst of you, and the genocide route consists of you proving him right. The ways this is true and how he reacts to being disproven in other routes has already been talked to death though, so let’s move on to Papyrus and Gaster.
Papyrus’s philosophy is a radical belief in the player’s ability to do good. With all the talk about Noelle being a character skilled at finding video game secrets who is part of a secret route, then I think we may be underestimating the significance of Papyrus being a roleplayer who lives in a roleplay game. Papyrus acts like he doesn’t know what a human is or what the sun is for the same reason an actor at a renaissance fair pretends not to know what a cell phone is. He’s a professional. Of course he wouldn’t break keyfabe.
I think a majority of Papyrus’s actions are informed by the monologue Flowey makes near the end of the genocide route:
“As time repeated, people proved themselves predictable.”
“What would a person say if I gave them this?”
“What would they think if I said this to them?”
“Once you know the answer, that’s it.”
“That’s all they are.”
Imagine, if you will, if a skeleton heard that kind of rhetoric. Imagine if he then manufactured more npc dialogue than the game’s narrator to forestall that end point for as long as humanly possible.
In 1001 Nights, the framing device is Scheherazade telling a story to her captor every night, and then ending the story on a cliffhanger so that he has to wait another day to behead her.
In a lot of extra materials, Papyrus is noticeably less talkative than in Undertale. Not a total recluse by any metric, but he doesn’t seem to speak much unless spoken to first. In Undertale, Papyrus mentions being a big fan of Mettaton, but when he’s actively in Papyrus’s house during the alarm clock christmas party, Papyrus doesn’t speak to him at all.
Deltarune itself has made a progressively big deal about how Kris’s closest friends have never really seen them as they are because of the player’s influence, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Papyrus became another avenue for exploring a similar concept— how his persona is influenced by our presence, and how little of his personality it likely captures, even if he’s never lying, per say.
In programming spaces, “spaghetti code” is slang for just about any badly optimized, hard to read code. Undertale, as a starter project, is full of spaghetti. Every NPC interaction in the game is in one switch statement. By reading Papyrus’s NPC dialogue, we are consuming his spaghetti. He will tell you 1001 stories in every room you go to because that’s what will keep him alive to you.
In much the same way sans weaponizes boss mechanics to prevent us from progressing, and Gerson uses shop mechanics to prevent us from killing him, Papyrus uses flavortext as a means of influencing players towards his goals. He prevents the player from succumbing to boredom and killing everyone by actively going out of his way to make the pacifist option the most interesting choice.
Even if you, like Flowey, are only here to mine the game for more flavortext, you’ll naturally end up doing true pacifist anyway, because that’s where a majority of the flavortext is, for reasons almost exclusive to Papyrus.
Ironically I think the most obvious examples of Papyrus weaponizing boredom against you are in violent routes. If he meaningfully reacts to his friends deaths, it will make killing them interesting and further incentivize you to do it, so he intentionally feigns ignorance until he can guilt trip you into undoing it at the very end.
A lot of people think Papyrus is more powerful than he lets on, and I agree, but I think one of the reasons that something like disbelief Papyrus never happens in canon is because putting up a meaningful fight would give the player a meaningful objective to overcome, incentivizing them to kill him even more. He instead frames sparing him as an accomplishment in the hopes that it incentivizes you to stop killing.
While sans copes with entropy with a sense of nihilism, Papyrus gives his life meaning by being an arbiter of player choice. His choices don’t matter, but yours do, which means that he can give his actions meaning by influencing your decisions. His purpose isn’t to make decisions, but to make options. He has a plan for where he wants you to go, but he also realizes you’ll just reset afterwards if you don’t gain a sense of self-actulization from it, so he makes uh. Suggestions.
As an aside, I’d argue that this specific angle of Papyrus’s character makes him haunt the narrative in chapter 4 to a surprising degree. A lot of people were kind of agog at how their favorite characters from Undertale were much shittier people in Deltarune, but they’re honestly just as self-interested in Undertale. Toriel losing track of you after getting drunk is actually pretty mild compared to abandoning you in a town you don’t know with monsters that might try to kill you. The latter just scans better because another character instantly picks up the slack.
Kris basically spends the entirety of chapter 4 begging any adult in their life to do what Papyrus does within minutes of meeting you in Undertale. The tone of chapter 4, where the world is at stake and nobody is on your side, would not work if Papyrus was in the game before this point, because he would never have left Kris in this position, no matter the consequences.
The tl;dr of all this is that I think Papyrus is a solid representative of Undertale’s game design ethos. He’s at the epicenter of most player decisions in a game centered around player choice. His boss theme is literally used in the game's trailer. It’s one of the reasons him being the forgotten man intuitively makes the sense to me. That a version of Papyrus, stripped of memory and individuality, would devolve into nothing more than a series of “yes”s and “no”s. It’s what his role in Undertale already was, so it makes sense that he would be a metaphysical representation of the player choice that’s been taken away from us in Deltarune.
If Papyrus is a flexible DM who “yes,and”s off of the player’s decisions (even to the campaign’s detriment), then Gaster, as Deltarune’s DM, is one of those guys who watched a bunch of episodes of Critical Role and then held his friends at gunpoint until they acted out the novel he wrote. Absolutely dogshit DM who will railroad the party just to make sure that he gets to do the cool set pieces he came up with: the overwrought lore bible of “prophecy”.
If Undertale is a game deconstructing player choice, then I’d argue that Deltarune is a game deconstructing developer choice. If Undertale uses the existence of Frisk and Chara to analyze why players make the decisions they do, then I’d argue that Papyrus and Gaster exist to analyze why developers make the decisions they do.
It’s why Deltarune is filled with games within games, both literally in chapter 3 and metaphorically through the creation of dark fountains, which is to say nothing on the existence of chapters in the first place. Through the act of playing them, the game wants you to better understand the characters making them. It wants you to ask why these decisions were made in the first place.
Why would the developers give you the option to fight if acting opens up more engaging options?
Why would the developers give you the option to recruit enemies if the changes are only superficial?
Why would the developers add a bunch of secrets that are roundabout and difficult to get?
If there’s a single objective best choice, then why add any others?
Why would they let you make a machine to thrash your own ass?
While Toby definitely errs on the side of player choice, he does add nuances to the discussion. The weird route is nothing if not an admission that the player isn’t always right, that guard rails should be set to prevent people from acting in bad faith before they tear the whole campaign apart.
Another detail that airs on the side of this authorship interpretation is the name WD Gaster itself. In English, two initials and a surname is a common format for pen name: RL Stine, KA Applegate, JRR Tolkien, ect.
It’s not a theory I have a lot of evidence for, but I actually think WD Gaster is supposed to be an alias. In publishing, it’s common for a pen name to be used by a team of writers rather than a single author, especially for a book series. In the same vein, I think WD Gaster is supposed to be the pen name of whoever the acting royal scientist happens to be.
Throughout most of Undertale, it’s established that a lot of monster culture is holdovers from the war that monsters just. Never got out of the practice of doing. Likewise I think this alias was likely a tactic from the war days to prevent humans from tracking down the royal scientist that just. Never went away.
The biggest rebuttal to this is Alphys still being called Alphys, but her not going by an alias makes sense when you consider she made Mettaton before becoming the royal scientist, and didn’t publish most of her work as the royal scientist to the public to begin with. Even with the exceptions… the cat’s out of the bag already. The underground’s one celebrity is telling everyone your name. Not much point pretending it’s a secret. Most of the monsters don't even know you're human, so they don't put much stock in keeping it, either.
I actually think this is on of the things that makes her an interesting foil to Gaster. The man currently known as Gaster presumably buried himself so deeply into his work that everyone forgot his original name, while Alphys became so famous that her work as the royal scientist was no longer anonymous.
As for Gaster’s actual identity, it's undertale!papyrus. He's totally undertale papyrus. Just trust me bro.
CASE 5: Torrent
Okay. So. Deltarune. It’s the name of the game. Let's break it down.
First word:
Delta
noun
del·ta ˈdel-tə
1: the 4th letter of the Greek alphabet see Alphabet Table
2: an area of low, flat land, sometimes shaped like a triangle, where a river divides into several smaller rivers before flowing into the sea
3: mathematics : an increment of a variable —symbol Δ
A lot of people have been talking about the greek letter connotations, but, given the constant allusions to water by npcs, I think it's more likely "delta" refers to a place where bodies of water meet.
This seems relevant in that, well, we have Dark Fountains, which are certainly bodies of rushing water.
Then it hit me. A rush of water is called a torrent. By opening up a dark fountain, you are opening up a torrent.
For those who don’t know, a torrenting program is and was a common form of piracy infamous for giving people viruses back in the day. The way it works is that you’d obtain a seed, which basically a piece of a file, and then use a torrenting program with a connection to the internet to find the other seeds, which would get you the other pieces of the file you were missing. One might even call it a way to reassemble pieces of something scattered across time and space.
And. Well.
Seed
noun
si·d
1: a small, round or oval object produced by a plant and from which, when it is planted, a new plant can grow
An egg from a tree counts as a seed.
The forgotten man’s eggs are literally seeds found in a torrent. That’s why he says “There were some issues” if you collect any of the eggs. Gaster can’t download the torrent without the seed. The roaring knight is seeding a torrent.
This actually puts together a lot of puzzle pieces with Dess, considering a very common piracy stereotype of the mid-2000s was teenagers giving the family computer a billion viruses on a torrenting program called limewire
There's already a billion posts about deltarune gaster being associated with green, and I think it's very likely that the sound test room from undertale was simply a fake "album" that Gaster put a piece of himself into and tricked dess into torrenting. The "device" is just dess's now virus riddled computer
This would also explain why the internet is out in hometown, and why you can’t make phone calls in the dark world. Gaster is using up all the bandwidth. In ye olde days before wifi was an accessible thing. People used to have to use the internet through their phone lines. This famously made a horrible screeching noise when it started, and also made it impossible to use the phone while you were online.
As an aside this also informs a lot of Spamton’s deal. His writing quirk is that his speech is formatted in broken wikitext. The double brackets are supposed to be replaced with a link to a website containing information on whatever he’s saying, but the website doesn’t work anymore. It’s also probably why “Mike” stopped calling him. The signal was suddenly occupied by Gaster.
If a delta is a place where bodies of water meet, and any form of writing with a secret meaning could be said to be runes, then a torrenting program is, in fact, a delta rune. Every time you download more of "Deltarune" through chapter updates, you are downloading more of Gaster.
As an aside, there’s been something bothering my autistic ass since 2016. See, Toby Fox is a guy obsessed with coming up with double entendres names for all of his characters. “Asriel” being a mix of Toriel and Asgore, while also being the name of an angel. Undine being the name of a mythical creature, but also sounding like the word Undying. Sans being a reference to comic sans, while also being a character who has been displaced, and who is most relevant when he experiences loss.
Which begs the question: what the hell does Papyrus have to do with Papyrus?
Which is when it occurred to me. The dark fountains are constantly written to be evocative of ink. Papyrus… is another word for Paper. In a game where you are already overwriting something. And where a prominent theme about characters being used up. And he hasn't been seen in five chapters.
CASE 6: Ink and Paper
So finally, let's talk about color spaces.
To simplify a lot of technical shit, color spaces come in two modes: CMYK and RGB.
They're named after the colors in them (see chart).
CYMK is designed to add color to a white sheet of paper. Through this framework, you could say they draw by adding darkness to light.
RGB is designed to add color to a black computer screen. Through this framework, you could say they draw by adding light to darkness.
As you can see, combining each letter with one from the opposite color space combines to make black in a CMYK color space, or white in an RGB color space.
This is also why Kris needs the soul to seal the fountain: Cyan and Red combine to make white.
Susie then furthers this pattern with the green soul. Magenta and Green make white, and Gerson calls her "the white pen of hope" during his secret boss battle. Not to mention her development of green healing magic over the course of the plot. Green denotes something Susie can interact with.
Which leaves Noelle’s yellow as the only part of the pattern yet to be completed. She still needs to interact with someone with blue soul mechanics.
There's even the same shade of blue in the flowers on the countdown...
In conclusion, I think Papyrus might be relevant to the plot of Deltarune.
since the official Deltarune homepage is plastered as for now with forget-me-nots, do you think that at the end of Chapter 5 we'll witness something that brought Sans to get all the "Don't forget" related blueprints and stuff?
I am almost certain that the world Sans and Papyrus come into Undertale from is in fact the world of Deltarune, but as to what extent that will be shown..? I'm not sure! It would require Sans to become a fairly important character, which I can definitely see given his connection to Toriel, and especially considering the note itself!! Let's take a look at that now:
There are three photos, and obviously the biggest one is the last one. It's definitely possible the drawings are of The Fun Gang, and someone has presumably written the text.. It.. could be Sans, but I've never really considered the idea that it could have been Ralsei, or maybe Susie, maybe Sans didn't have anything to do with the picture, and it was simply sent along with him to this new world by someone else..
I'm not sure what the first photo could be.. presumably it's Sans with people Frisk wouldn't recognize, but if those people were from Hometown, it would have to be excluding any of the people who also exist in Undertale..
As for the third photo.. I'm sure nobody has ever really thought about this, because we see a photo very similar to this at the end of the game, and it's easy to assume it's something similar to that.
However, taking a second to think about it... why would Sans have a photo with all these people at that point in Undertale? He's met Toriel, but has never actually interacted with her past the door, he knows of Undyne because Papyrus is trying to join the Royal Guard, and possibly he was coworkers with Alphys at one point.. But it wouldn't really make sense for him to have a group photo of them all, would it?
Of course, unless.. they're the versions of your friends he used to know..
(June 20th, 3PM CST I will be finishing my Deltarune replay by finishing Chapter 4! We've been having a blast noticing new details and discussing Chapter 5 theories, and I've really enjoyed providing full voice acting for each of the characters :3 If you're interested it'll be on Youtube and Twitch at the aforementioned time :3)
Same as before, real, physical Swap!Spamton has since been reworked into a little puppet guy. Most of this stuff still tracks with how I see them, just imagine Spam as small. *Redesign for comparison included this time!
Extra addendum: I might rework Spamton’s motivations here. Like, would he know about the soul and its properties? I think he sees heaven here as just the Light World and not as our, the player/the angel’s world since this spamton isn’t as aware as Deltarune Spamton. Idk he could still want the soul, but not know the full nature of it. Just think it’s very powerful, which it is. I’ll ponder my orb about this.
I’ll redraw the final boss sprites, but Holospam and the machine will remain the same, spamton will just be little and swagless lmfao
*redesigned BSE Spam shown here! ^
I still like the idea of his face becoming more plasticy, frozen, and inexpressive due to lack of use, but it makes way more sense visually to have him be in a different body than the marketable Holospam body. So again, real swapton is the swagless little big shot.
Oh my gosh the pipis its real -wait what did Tenna say?
Part 4 of Comic 5!
Here is Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, (5)
Had a lot of fun with Tenna here! Hes such a goober why does he sit like that?? And i added a few highlights on the expression lines to make them more readable, I hope it worked 😅
For those newer to my blog, Deltarush is my grind fiction deltarune au. Everything is exactly the same but the designs are changed and they all have weapons
666. triskelion. 3 skeletons. the cycle of birth, life and death. past, present and future.
sans, who is grieving and stuck in a past that won't come back. papyrus, who lives in the present and is hellbent on grounding you to it. wingdings, who wants to build a new future with us.
always 3 doors. always a trio to set them up. although past and present don't need a future to exist, future must rely on a past and present. with future gone, time rearranges, prophecies are uncertain, and anything is possible. other doors are opened.
nobody could fix the machine. this is the happiest outcome.
