#metanoia!papyrus

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I am here! To ramble about Papyrus in the Metanoia AU!

So, I put him and Sans into Frisk and Chara’s roles, respectively, mostly because switching skeletons and humanity in this AU lets me call the war the skeleton war and who doesn’t want that, really

They’re both around 12 here.

Papyrus spends most of this AU being somehow even more of a ball of sunshine than his canon counterpart, with the notable exception of the geno run, which I will talk about my ideas for later because that deserves its own post.

Undyne adopts him on sight in much the same fashion as canon Toriel does Frisk.

Though he and Sans aren’t sufficiently contemporary in this to be siblings the normal way, they eventually discover they were grown in the same lab and immediately claim one another as brothers.

His items are the tough gloves and cool scarf. Since this is basically what the bravery soul has in canon, I’ll probably give them Frisk’s items here.

I struggled a lot with his color scheme, and I’m still a bit iffy on it, but the reasoning for what I’ve got currently is: I want him to still have orange as a main color, since it’s iconic, but I don’t want to leave it on his scarf, since then it becomes difficult to tell my Papyrus apart from a younger canon Papyrus, so I stuck it on the sweater. I picked a blue for his scarf and sweater stripes, since I want him to have at least one major color in common with canon Frisk. It’s a darker color because a lighter one looks weird with the orange. I made his pants that weird green color because in canon he’s got all of the primary colors on his outfit and I wanted to match that, but I’m a bit iffy on the shade and I might change it a bit.

Here’s his concept art:

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The original concept sketches for the Metanoia AU. Some of the designs have changed a bit already from this, but most of them remain about the same.

Some notes:

I later added a border around the crest on Undyne’s dress. It took me a bit to decide what the border should look like, so the one that appears in the first post I did for this AU is slightly different from the final design, making for a total of three iterations.

I decided Alphys’ cloak should have fur on the bottom as well, for symmetry. (And also because fur is just fun to draw) I currently have no idea what she’s wearing under the cloak, but I’m definitely going to have fun deciding.

Mettaton is pictured in his box form here, but later I decided he’s in his EX form for most of the AU, and only uses his box form for the genocide run, since his whole “impenetrable armor” thing matches pretty well with Sans’ dodging of attacks.

I love this AU’s Napstablook so much. I want to give them the world. When I start talking about story stuff, you’ll understand.

Frisk’s design is not final in the least, mostly because it looks weirdly familiar to me and I’m scared I’m copying someone else’s design for them by accident. So I’ll probably change a couple details for their final look.

Chara’s design is also not final in the least, because it’s literally just the first thing that came to mind when I thought “Chara with armor”. You can expect some pretty major revisions there.

Papyrus is pictured here with a turtleneck instead of his scarf, as well as Frisk’s stick. Later, I switched his items so he starts with his scarf for armor and his gloves as his weapon. Given this is basically the bravery soul’s gear, I’ll probably be giving them Frisk’s stuff in this AU.

I’m still a little uncertain on how Sans should look, but currently I’m leaning toward giving him his fluffy slippers as well as Chara’s locket. If you guys have any ideas on how I might alter the locket for this AU while still keeping its meaning approximately the same, I’d love to hear them - I want to switch out the locket for something else, but I currently can’t think of anything.