hey! just wanted to say sorry for all the spam, i'm so so *SO* deeply in love with all your art and ideas, specifically your gaster art at this moment, they really scratch a specific itch i had about how i've always imagined this wet cat of a man!!! (that i never could have imagined before deltarune haha)
im also so curious on your ideas on dess and him.... i think you've won me over on this speculation and idea. It would be genuinely heartbreaking how it'd portray gaster as someone asking eldritch powers (us, players, in a maze he created for us to go through, hence no choices matter) in a last ditch attempt to save Dess from being gone, if i got it right from looking from some of your posts, with the nuance that wingdings loved them... if you have any posts detailing more of your thoughts on it, id love to see it! Be it ut or dr centric, no matter
thank you for posting your creations on tumblr too, have a good day or night! :)
I always appreciate notes-spam! It’s especially nice seeing someone enjoy the dess-gaster posting.
Aside from one-off ephemera here and there, I don’t know if i have much in the way of posts really detailing my current ideas about the dess-gaster situation. i DO have many, many thoughts about it, but the amount of unknowns and potentials right now make it difficult to organize those thoughts or talk about them coherently. there's also the issue of how much variation there is in the theory/headcanon game currently, and i worry about my ideas being confused for or conflated with something sinister. It’s a tough needle to thread sometimes... to a certain degree i’m biding my time to see if ch. 3-4 have any further information to give that might clarify or change things (Little Brother gaster… toby please…).
But i do have a general fanfiction concept that i tend to favor – the basic assumptions are that gaster originates in deltarune’s world, like sans & probably papyrus do, and ended up stuck with them in undertale, and that he’s a skelebro, specifically the middle or youngest. These are both ideas that i think have reasonable basis and could slot easily into the story as we currently know it. These open up possibilities for him to have some kind of in-universe history with dess as a relatively “normal” person around her age (whatever that could possibly look like), and i think there’s an outline of a story that can naturally evolve from there – basically, a youthful infatuation and a naive promise to her that, over time (and across narrative universes), becomes sort of a desperate, gnawing obsession with fulfilling that promise. The line between “love” and “sickness” seems relevant to deltarune’s thematics, in a possible inversion of undertale’s No Mercy, and i think gaster could be synecdochal for that tension. the promise, and his dedication to it, are motivated by love, and he’s Determined to fulfill it by any means, but the hurdles become harder and harder to overcome, and the deeper he gets into it, the more it isolates him and causes him to forsake his own future – he can’t move on or live his own life until he succeeds, he can't love anyone else or imagine a future without her – and that’s ultimately literalized in him effectively becoming a ghost, unable to interact with anyone else in a meaningful way, stuck "with her" in a parallel fate and yet unable to even have a future with her, his continued existence now entirely predicated on his pursuit of that mission. if he does succeed, and loses the need for his Determination, will he just... die? I think that’s sort of the thought underlying the noelle and gaster conversation – to what degree is this about love, and to what degree is it about death? they aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. It’s deeply sad and very messy, to say the least, but i think there’s a core to it that’s sincere, and vulnerable, and honest. there's a beating heart under it all. it's broken, it aches, it should be impossible for it to beat at all, and somehow it still does.
and it's harder to talk about dess because we haven't even met her, but we know she's protective, maybe self-sacrificing in her own way. sometimes i wonder if she's trying to stop him, antagonize him until he gives up, not because she hates him or doesn't value her own future, but because she doesn’t want help if This is what it requires – putting noelle and kris and everyone else at risk, and, even aside from that, seeing her friend destroy himself for her sake. I think about them meeting again, and she’s like, “why can’t you just let this go? i'm the reason for this, and i don't even get a choice? i never wanted you to do this.” and all he can say honestly is “i couldn’t have lived with myself if i didn't. I can’t even die knowing that you’re stuck here, no matter how much i want to.” and like. both things would be true. I’m fascinated by it
