14 April, 2024: Entry #15
Song: 015 - sans.
Ah, Sans the skeleton. Everyone’s favourite character. Funny bone man makes jokes, breaks fourth wall, and fights you. There’s countless fanart, AUs, a literal universe of content around him. Why does the internet love him? There’ve already been several character analyses of him, but I’ll attempt my own; I haven’t talked a lot about Undertale on the Undertale soundtrack, so I’m doing that justice now.
When the player first meets Sans the skeleton, he is presented as a typical prankster and comic. Your first interaction with him is literally one of his pranks. When you solve his and Papyrus’s puzzles, he’s just a lazy guy. When you enter their house, he doesn’t feed his rock, doesn’t pick up his sock, and doesn’t do anything else that rhymes with those words.
However, slowly, throughout the rest of the game, he starts showing more and more mysterious behaviours. The only difference between him and you in 9th grade is that he actually pulls off being funny and mysterious. He gets close to the game’s lore with Flowey, tells you about the ‘ in ‘dog, and most importantly, he talks about his promise to Toriel about you.
And of course, his boss fight in the Genocide route. An all-out battle where he reveals all the lore. Even if everyone focuses on getting 27 no-hit itemless runs in a row, there is a truckload of information about the lore of the game and his role in all of it.
I think he’s such a popular and memorable character for almost everyone because he defies a common character trope, that being a funny albeit lazy jokester, where Sans also is a lot more unassuming than one would think. However, I think almost every major character in Undertale follows this inversion; Undertale is meant to be a game of subversions, after all. Alphys is portrayed as the smark geek type; only to be shown to have anxiety and depression. Asgore is the mighty and powerful king, shown in his physical structure, only to have several character flaws. Why I think Sans stands out even more is because he’s memable, he’s relatable, he’s meant for the internet, in a way. Him, the unassuming and naive person who turns out to be far from it, contrasted with Papyrus… who’s just unassuming and naive. Sans is the perfect fit for the chaotic and random nature of the internet, and specifically Undertale fans. Him being the poster child of Undertale, the most recognisable, is both the cause and the effect. That’s why Sans is everywhere in the community.
I don’t really want ‘See you next week’ to become a tagline so I’m just leaving this blank
