Getting those Gaster headcanons out here before the rest of Deltarune smashes them all lol
I like imagining him as being a big sweetie pie goober, if a little wordy and pretentious.
BUT also absolutely horrifying at all times
He doesn’t move like a normal monster. He mostly teleport-walks silently to wherever you are like Watson (never in your range of vision, you just turn and BAM he’s there).
When he’s in a room, the light bulbs tend to flicker and go out because his void body is absorbing the room’s energy. Also bad for cell service and battery life. If you see one light out at the end of the hallway, chances are he’s standing there. Even when you can’t see him.
His body shakes and has rapid mini-seizures, making it look like he’s glitching out.
He clips through walls and floors accidentally sometimes. Sometimes he gets stuck there. Sometimes he absorbs chairs.
His body sometimes folds unnaturally through itself, but after a good nap it tends to straighten out.
He doesn’t appear in the real world all the time, depending on the fun value of the timeline, but he can still show up in mirrors, or in photos. Similarly, his voice can come through speakers. His speech is loud, terrifying gibberish to most people.
He forgets when people can see him, so sometimes he does weird stuff like stand outside of peoples windows staring in.
He basically turns wherever he’s at into a survival horror game, except that he doesn’t want to do anything to you except ask if you want a Werther’s.
I headcannon that Gaster does use sign language but he can also talk, and when he does it sounds like he's talking backwards and sounds like multiple voices at once are speaking.
How about this? He signs because his voice is unintelligible, the garbled screeching animalese we hear in the game.
When his voice goes through a speaker, it gets “refracted” into other sounds. Like multiple voices speaking on top of each other (like the memory heads), or like a backwards voice.
do you think Gaster will ever be a "canon" character ?
I mean, he IS name-dropped in canon by at least one of the Gaster followers, so he’s a legit part of the story. But if you mean will we ever see him?
Before the Switch version, I would’ve said ‘no’ because the mystery and open-endedness was more fun, but the new Clam Girl dialogue seems to indicate otherwise. Looks like Toby DOES have plans for that character.
I’m a little concerned though because I feel like any Gaster content is going to feel super weird and awkward after having fans make up ideas for him for 3+ years. My gut says that whatever Gaster IS, it’s going to be radically different from anything the fandom’s ever come up with.
And once something does get revealed about him… I’m going to kind of miss people being able to make up whatever they wanted about him?
I feel like there’s going to be a lot of pushback and whining to write “canon” Gasters from that point on, even for older stories started before the reveal. And it will be ironic because fans will also keep on writing 10,000 AU Sanses that are wildly OOC, because who cares, writing should be fun and you should write what makes you happy. I hope everyone remembers to be chill to authors when we have a canon Gaster.
But yeah, I’m curious what we’ll end up with either way. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
but does anyone rilly want canon gaster, when fanon is so much more fun?
I mean, if he’s written half as enjoyably as literally every other character in Undertale, then, uh, canon will probably be more fun than fanon. I trust in Toby’s writing.
I hope he leaves us with another open-ended mystery at the end of it though, if the current mysteries ever get answered. I feel like 90% of UT’s longevity of fan content has been the Sans backstory and being able to angst about it come up with fun ideas to fill in the gaps.
State of the fandom’s going to be weird if there is no Sans mystery anymore.
I’m sure folks will still find a way to write angsty cool stuff about him tho, so it’s all good.
We get hints that the other children were able to reset.
We know that the souls still have consciousness because they reject Omega Flowey to help you in a Neutral Ending.
So why, if you’re a resetting child, do you settle for getting killed by Asgore? Certainly even if you can’t go home or get a happy ending, going back to the beginning to live the rest of your life with a nice goat mom is better than dying?
So imagine, then, that the soul jars aren’t just to preserve them. But to trap them.
The jars are specially designed to prevent the souls from resetting. They’re time-travel resistant.
But who created them? Someone studying souls. Someone studying time.
Someone who was apparently around to use them on the previous six children, but isn’t around to use it on you.
Here’s where it begins to fall apart:
The jar creator (I mean I’m talking about Gaster here, obv) disappeared. No more jars available to stop time travelers. No one else understands how to create them. The machine that created time-resistance is broken.
Sans doesn’t have anything he can use to trap Flowey, explaining why Flowey resets indefinitely and freely while the other children didn’t. Sans can’t stop him, despite trying to recreate the jar technology.
Flowey being unchecked while the other children weren’t also correlates to Alphys replacing the previous Royal Scientist.
Sans still doesn’t have anything he can use to trap the human, explaining why he’s so passive about everything.
However, studying the jar technology, and having some relationship with Gaster, he has access to timeline data and readings. This data was originally gathered because of the other human children.
Sans uses some version of the same technology to preserve his family photos between resets.
The proposed fanfic would’ve focused on Gaster being the one who figures out that the humans keep coming back and tries to jar the humans as soon as they die, before they reset.
And here’s where it completely fell apart:
I forgot that there was an empty seventh jar. So why wouldn’t someone just use it on you?
There isn’t necessarily a correlation between the jars, souls, and the disappearance of the jar maker.
If Sans is trying to stop the anomaly and these are time jars, wouldn’t be beeline for this thing?
Something interesting to note if you didn't already know, hah, but apparently Gaster was first implemented into the game only after Toby had developed the majority of the True Lab, which was at the very end of the game’s production. This was discovered by Karibil_Watar on reddit and he made a couple of posts about it (I'll send them to you in case you haven't and want to read them). So, anything that was put in the game long before that probably doesn't have anything to do with Gaster.
I’ve read this before, but it’s a really interesting read!
Check it out if you haven’t!
Even if Gaster is one of the later ideas added to the game, I wonder how much of him is tied to the earlier Grandpa Semi character. At least in that sense we have some evidence that a relative of the bros existed at some point, and that Gaster may not have come completely out of nowhere.
Even if there aren’t any answers to be found, it’s still fun to wonder about it! XD
Any thoughts on why Gaster seems to have a possible connection to orange/bravery? At least, that's what seems to be implied during the Bravery section of the Flowey fight. I have my own theories but I'm curious if you have any thoughts on the matter?
I don’t, really! I’ve seen the connections people have pointed out, and it DOES seem like there is a connection. ...I just don’t know what any of it means, haha!
Maybe it just means that he was a brave guy? (TBH I’m still not convinced Gaster was fully implemented in the game, so I don’t know if there are really answers to be found. Still fun to wonder tho.)
I think I’m sliding back into the “Pap and Sans are split from Gaster” or “Mystery Man is a third piece” theories, over dadster (even though dadster is my favorite). I saw the idea that the venn diagram shape on the gloves indicates a split cell or something, and that’s cool and fits with what I’ve been thinking.
I also saw a good theory and want to believe that Gaster is the tucking spoon ghost. Because Tucking Spoon Ghost is my number 1 favorite character in the game.
I have no idea how it ties into the color though. If you’ve got some theories feel free to throw them my way.
(Did you ever finish the other colors and their meanings? I’d love to see them if you ever did, I remember reading the first few and finding them interesting.)
