My progress on the Bernadette animation so far. I have it all planned out on paper already but the sketch is so embarassingly messy I'm just not gonna show it.
Anywho, I've got brainworms for these two and their relationship (not romantic), and it is a key factor in my Sonderverse AU so, uh, yap below if you're interested.
So in Underverse, Ink and XGaster play a game together, and the game gets out of hand. XGaster is Aroace, and Ink is literally incapable of truly feeling love for anything, so their relationship isn't romantic at all but I honestly find that really interesting and compelling. Like, they're both willing to commit atrocities for each-other, or rather for the sake of the game they made together, long ago grown tired of, but are unwilling to end.
I mean, imagine you're just chilling in your world. It's a little lonely and empty, but you're content because it's all you've ever known, and then suddenly a god/gaurdian appears and shows you the multiverse, everything that your world could be, all at once, and then asks if you want to make something amazing out of your world together. You'd probably get attached pretty tightly pretty quickly. As a creative person who's gotten a taste of prolonged isolation, I know I would.
And the thing is Ink knows that everybody is a character, and, lacking empathy, treats them as such. XGaster, even with empathy, adopts that mentality over time for the sake of their game, becuase Ink is the one who showed him the truth of the multiverse, that it was all a script that could be overwriten.
And this is my sloppy segway into Sonderverse, where Ink is the literal concept of creation, space, and substance. He creates a vessel to experience the multiverse, which is himself in a way, out of a detached sense of curiosity. and becuase the Nightmare and Dream have been doing so in order to get closer to the souls whos emotions brought them into being
But while Dream and Nightmare, being the combined concept of meaning, have empathy for the souls inhabiting their universes, Error and Ink, the unfeeling combined concept of existance, do not.
So, Ink, on a whim, with no thought spared for the concequences, shows the multiverse, the reality of everything, his true form, to XGaster, and gives him a fraction of his power to play with.
This interaction only lasts for a few minutes, and Ink doesn't think anything of it, quickly growing bored and returning to fighting with Error on the edge of the multiverse, but it leaves XGaster with a broken mind and the ability to overwrite his world's script however he pleases. And by broken mind, I mean eldritch madness. This guy saw something he shouldn't've, that being everything everywhere all at once, and, for just a moment, he understood it for what it really was, he could hear the creators and see their scripts all laid out in front of him. And then the moment is gone and he's left with just enough memory of it to drive him crazy, and the power to attempt to recreate what he saw.
And then there's the fact that Ink did attempt to interact with him like a "person", to mimic what Dream and Nightmare were doing with the mortals they approached, both before and after the incident, and though Ink didn't get much out of the conversation, XGaster certainly did. In his broken mental state, he latched onto Ink's idle encouragements and chatter, taking the god's words (i bet you can make something beautiful, no, not just beautiful, perfect, absolutely perfect) as a sort of divine mandate.
Look, look, look, the religious trauma's gotta go somewhere, so I'm dumping it all on Cross, which means his dad's gotta be a zealot, ok? Okay.
Anywho, XGaster's obsession with Ink is born from his madness and swings between reverance, fear, and hate because he knows the encounter changed him irrevocably, and for the worse. He continues to overwrite over and over in order to create the perfect universe, the perfect overlapping crossover of everything he saw, whether to spite or please Ink he doesn't know anymore. And with each Overwrite his universe loses something because he barely understands what the effects of each little change will be. It's not turning out like its supposed to, he's been given knowledge and tools he can't use. He can't stop, he doesn't want to stop, he knows he should stop, he hates Ink for doing this to him, he needs Ink to come back and tell him he's done well with the power he was given.
His sanity comes more and more unravelled as times goes on and his memory and imagination blur together, and his obsession grows stronger and stronger as his grip on reality slips further and further and he grows ever more daring with his use of the overwrite ability. He stops caring for the other souls in his universe because they're just characters he can toy with as he pleases, and after a while they stop feeling real. All that keeps him going is the twisted, fading memory of the vision he was granted and his increasingly solid beleif that, if he just makes his universe perfect, Ink, who is is real, the only real thing, will come back.
...ye that's all for now, uh, I hope that made sense. I've been told that I'm incoherent. Feel free to ask questions if my ramblings have confuddled you.
Ink belongs to Comyet and XGaster belongs to Jakei