What The Q/A Tells Us About Papyrus
For context: Toby held a Q/A on the anniversary of Undertale’s release where the cast of UT answered questions. He provided an example question: “Papyrus, what is your favorite food?”
This is the only question Toby answered. He answered it ten times. And then he closed the ask box. However, regardless, there are things that we have learned from it. There are things that we can gleam about a few characters. But, mostly, I am interested in talking about Papyrus.
Here are the questions for you to read. Do so if you haven’t so that you can understand the rest of this post.
Now, we assume that we know the answer to this question. It’s spaghetti, right? And you could be forgiven for thinking that. It’s the kind of food that Papyrus makes for Frisk, it’s the kind of food that he is amazed and super happy with Frisk for knowing how to cook, if they say ‘I can make spaghetti.’ It’s spaghetti. Gotta be. The other characters in this ask seem to agree with us. Alphys and Undyne say as much. But Papyrus says that he has never tasted spaghetti in his life. That he only makes it because other people love it.
And this tendency to erase his own desires in order to adopt what other people like is well-established by Papyrus already. With Frisk, if you ask to go out with him, regardless of his own personal feelings, he will try to fit the roll of Frisk’s boyfriend on their date. And, countless times in phone calls when other people are present, you can see how Papyus flip-flops, his true opinions overridden because he’d rather agree with the people around him in hopes they will like him more than reveal his true self.
And we could say that maybe Paps has learned a lesson about being his authentic self, about showing pride in what he is. That maybe we’ve seen some of that.
But … we don’t even know what his favorite food is by the end of the game.
How much of what we saw of Papyrus was just an act, to entertain us, to make us like him more? Papyrus acts happy, but is he? Or is that just another front to endear us to him?
Do we actually know Papyrus at all, or is everything we learned over the course of Undertale like his spaghetti?
What would we find if we peeled back the image that he presents to the world and saw what he really was underneath?
