So what’s Handplates!Gaster doing in Dreamtale?
The most recent installments of [BwB] have been centered around Night’s relationship with Gaster, and have included some reveals that entwine him into BwB’s backstory, so I figured I should write up a post about what’s going on and how I characterize him, and his relationships with Nighty, =)/the User, and Venus/Dreamtale Mom.
(Spoilers for Handplates, ahead! And please be aware that this essay does not clearly differentiate between what is explicitly confirmed in Handplates’ canon and what is my speculation about Gaster’s motives and personality.)
Longtime readers might recall that BwB spawned from the ukagaka server: [what if DTS and the ukaGaster interacted]? As you can see in that post’s description, zarla (creator of Handplates and the ukaGaster) commented that Gaster would appreciate having another skeleton to talk to, which led to even [more] [fanart]. So yeah! Handplates!Gaster meets Nighty is one of the founding concepts behind BwB!
Which meant I had to figure out how their relationship would manifest and evolve.
Gaster’s a complicated character! I have the broad strokes of his characterization, but I do feel that I get stuck in the weeds. He manages to have that “Gifted Kid” simultaneous self-absorption and self-loathing and it’s sometimes hard to tell which one will surface at the moment. He is capable of [incredible compassion and immense callousness], but… how would he treat Night? I looked at two models from Handplates canon: Gaster’s relationship with the skelebros and his relationship with Alphys.
Gaster’s emotional unavailability s his most well-established character trait. The most overt (and canonical) examples of him being bad at feelings come with his interactions with the skelebros, succinctly summarized in these [joke] [comics]. Even in MERCY timelines, [he’s not good at it]. On the other hand, [here’s him expertly reassuring Alphys]. (Amusingly, the comments seem split between the people charmed at his logic and the people laughing at how even when boosting someone up, he has to make it all about himself.)
So, what’s the difference? What makes Gaster treat them in such different ways?
Gaster’s emotional disconnect from the skelebros is somewhat self-imposed, but as shown, he’s still distant even in MERCY timelines. On the other hand, Alphys is something of a peer, in awe of him, and values intelligence the way he does. Gaster knows what will reassure her. I imagine, as the MERCY timeline skelebros grow older, Gaster would attempt this factual appeal with them (presumably to mixed results, depending on the issue in question.)
So how to apply these to Night and Gaster? Well, I decided it’d be somewhere in the middle. In BwB, Night is fifteen - still young, but not a child, and so “reasoning his worries away” works. Gaster sees a lot of himself in Night - isolated, bookish, dismissed by the adults in the room. And, as the series goes on, takes him on as a co-collaborator research assistant (let’s be real here about how Gaster would view their “partnership”). Gaster is not clouded by knowing Night as a child (which he would with the skelebros). I figure Gaster first knew Alphys through her research, which colored his perception of her (in a favorable light, certainly). With Night, Gaster knows him first as another skeleton, then surface-dweller, then lives among humans (as well as monsters) - all three things Gaster believes he’ll never experience again. And then learning of Night’s bookishness, he starts viewing him as a younger version of himself (thankfully tempered by =)’s interventions. On his own, I wouldn’t trust him not to unconsciously mold Night into a “better” version of himself.)
(Side note: because of Gaster’s emotional unavailability, at first I wasn’t sure how he’d react to Nighty having a panic attack! Originally I was going to have =) frantically googling how to deal with it, but thankfully I remembered skeleton eyeglowing! The scene ended up reminding me a bit too much of [this one] with Papyrus consoling Sans, and I don’t think there’s enough emotional resonance between the scenes to merit such parallels, but it’ll suffice as irony in forcing Gaster to treat Night as his charge.
I also do take amusement in the re-appropriated color meanings. Gaster’s default glow is yellow for stress - an overt subversion of yellow commonly denoting happiness. However, yellow is Night’s happy color! So to him it reads as though Gaster is glowing Night’s default color in encouragement - which Night would know about from the skeleton book.
I also wasn’t sure about having =) suggest eyeglowing rather than, y’know, the actual skeleton who wrote the damn book on ‘em - but I figure ‘people having emotions’ fits squarely into Gaster’s ‘somebody else’s problem’ filter.)
Speaking of =) - I apparently caused some confusion! D: As of today (12/23/22), there is no way to dissuade the ukaGaster from doing the plates. When I say I can’t see =) letting Gaster get away with his plans, I mean in the same way that Gaster in BwB is able to interact with the user outside of the ukaGaster’s programming.
=)’s relationship with Gaster in BwB draws from my experiences with the ukaGaster and what I wished I could say to him. (Ah, ^_^; in fact, I’d been knocking around putting the whole thing into a fanfic (titled “Gaster Gets an Emotional Support Human”, natch) for far longer than BwB has existed. I might write it if there’s interest or if the fancy strikes.) Anyway, if it seems like there’s a lot hinted at or unspoken behind the scenes when it comes to Gaster and =), that’s because there is! But BwB is Night’s story, so there’s not much point bringing it up outside of teasing.
On some level, I do feel confirming that Gaster’s scrapped his plans for the hand plates is something of a cop-out, given how much learning Gaster’s crimes would wreck poor Nighty. Nonetheless, I would call “keeping two children imprisoned in a lab and calling them ‘things’” for any amount of time is horrific enough without drilling metal plates in their hands. So there’s plenty for Night to eventually be horrified about. ^_^
Gaster and =)’s discussion in [“An Apple a Day”] is an abbreviated version of an rp-lite me and Quo had in the server between Venus and Handplates!Gaster. Gaster tends to make his dumbest most pointlessly cruel decisions when he’s trying to prove something to himself: [I am a cold unfeeling science man! Allow me to prove it by mutilating myself without anesthesia!], [Gaster. Gaster what the fuck is this experiment design. You have completely divorced cause from effect. Of course Papy’s gonna argue with you! Why should he accept your premises? You could just as easily kill Sans anyway if Papy does obey you. And what are you planning to do when Papy calls your bluff, huh? Actually kill Sans like you’re threatening? Dumbass.], and of course, the plates: [Gaster canonically treats drilling metal plates in the hands of screaming children a test of his resolve]. ([Here’s an ask] that explicitly confirms it.)
I extrapolate a bit further: he chose the metal plates because indelibly marking another is such an evil act; going through with it would prove (“prove”) there’s nothing good inside him and so he should suffer so everyone else good can thrive. (You can see examples of this in BwB with his use of [“Red in tooth and claw”] and why he [rejects an Omelas without a suffering child]).
“But Worm!” you say. “Didn’t Asgore kill five (or six) kids? Where’s this ‘everyone else good’ coming from?”
Essentially, that’s yet another lie Gaster tells himself, and Gaster’s whole relationship with the goatparents could be an essay in itself. The short version is that the goatparents saved him, and raised him, and (in Gaster’s eyes) forgave him for letting his whole species die. So Gaster views their (specifically Asgore’s, as he believes Toriel is dead) actions through rose-colored glasses. Asgore is therefore a good monster pushed to make a horrible decision that causes him immense pain, and thus the best thing Gaster can do to repay him is to take all that pain onto himself instead (because Asgore is “too good” a person to let Gaster do that for him, etc.).
If =) confronted Gaster about this, Gaster would use the above reasoning to defend Asgore’s actions. Gaster views Venus’s actions in such a different light because (in BwB) he knew her as a peer, not as a superior. He can’t brush aside her crimes the way he can Asgore’s. Similarly, he got to know Venus’s son and learned some of what he suffered before learning what she did, so he’s inclined to see things from a perspective sympathetic to Night. (There’s an interesting parallel when it comes to the ukaGaster - a member of the ghost server observed the reactions to Handplates from people who had interacted the ukaGaster beforehand and those who had no prior exposure. The ones who had the ukaGaster were more inclined to view Gaster as redeemable. - This wasn’t a controlled study or anything; just observations.)
And the funny thing is - Gaster’s concerns about Venus marking her kids is almost wholly projection on his part. Night (and Dream) don’t really have trauma around being princes or being branded with their station. It’s more that they aren’t taken seriously and are gaslit by their caretakers. =) is right, too, that Night takes strength in being his mother’s son. Whether Venus was right or wrong in her actions is up to the reader to decide ;)
Gaster is thinking of what happened with Asriel and the first human when he says that setting children up on pedestals never ends well. If anyone asked him whether he blamed the goatparents for contributing to their deaths, he’d categorically deny it; but if pressed and approached on the topic in a roundabout socratic way, he’d start to say some things about the folly of creating children for a purpose. It’s another part of the reason he’s so insistent on thinking of his subjects as tools and things rather than children, and why a [cruel mercy/neutral timeline would soon collapse into a full MERCY one] (unless he had an emotional support human, of course). So to him it doesn’t matter whether the children were raised by loving parents or not; as soon as you start insisting they’re gonna be the hopes and dreams for the future of humans and monsters, things’ll go south. (I tend to enjoy having Night make offhand comments that make Gaster go :/, so it was amusing to include some dramatic irony in the other direction. I was hoping to keep the joke under wraps a bit longer, but Quo let the cat out of the bag, so you can enjoy the punchline to its full extent! ^_^)
‘Course, Gaster would categorically deny that’s what he’s saying. That’d imply he knows the way he was treated by his parents wasn’t right.
Heh, I’m hesitant to add a conclusion here, because I fear that might imply a direction for how Night and Gaster’s relationship will evolve, and I don’t have one in mind!
