Gaster, the man who speaks in hands and the Royal Scientist before Alphys.
Only known about through his four followers.
Only appears in certain timelines of the game.
With him being shattered across time and space,
he must share some connection with the other two characters that seemingly straddle time and space:
Flowey and Sans,
and indeed he does, in the form of his Gaster Blaster.
Entry 17.
It says the following...
*Dark, Darker, Yet darker,
*The shadows cutting deeper
*Photon readings negative
*This next experiment
*Seems
*Very...
*VERY...
*Interesting
*What do you two think?
Based on the Gaster Follower dialogue,
He fell into, QUOTE, 'His Creation'.
Gaster himself fused his body with excessive amounts of Determination.
W.D. Gaster is Sans.
W.D. Gaster is ALSO Papyrus.
'Pyrus?
How could he, the Great Papyrus, be wrapped up in all of this?
*Intro Music*
Hello Internet!
Welcome to Game Theory!
And to part three of the who is Gaster trilogy!
Last time I left you with an absurd claim
That Sans and Papyrus are the two halves of Gaster's
fractured brain.
It is, without question, one of the most
extreme claims that I have ever made in the history of this show
And I have claimed that the FNAF story have been wrapped up like-
-No less than five times
Soo.. It's pretty bad
And so far I'd say I've done a fairly good job of covering the literal
BUTT TON
of information on how Sans fits in to all of this
His connection with the True Lab,
His knowledge of bending TIME and SPACE
His desire to GO BACK
His 'serif-laden' font that appears when he falls asleep
His theme song's connection with Goner Kid,
>>1.7x Speed with Static>> His Gaster Blasters, the secret room behind his house, the BROs appearing out of NOWHERE to assert themselves...
Sans' irrational HATRED toward humans, the whole Shyren is two halves to create a single entity thing...
ALL of that. Do you see now, why this had to be in three parts?
And that's only a PORTION of everything that we've covered.
But TODAY, it's time to get SCIENTIFIC with the SkeleBros
because when you stop and look at some of the weird details that Toby Fox included
about these two characters, you start to realize that their connection goes much deeper than just being mere BROTHERS.
ho HO and I'm NOT DONE.
We're concluding this WHOLE three episode series by revealing the fact that...
PAPYRUS.
isn't NEARLY as naïve as he let's on
Sure, he MAY play innocent enough, but behind that basketball-shoulders-pad-wearin-spaghetti-lovin
<>creepy voice<> ...-Starman-posin-cool-dude-façade,
is someone who is DEEP with Sans and Alphys and the Gaster experiments.
These three game theories are a trilogy BIGGER than 'Mass Effect'
...and hopefully with a more satisfying ending.
Starchildren? Really? Go home, BioWare...
you're drunk...
And don't you dare, DON'T YOU DARE FOR A SECOND MAKE Mass Effect Andromeda your sloppy seconds.
It's comin' out MARCH and we've BARELY seen ANYTHING about it, I AM CONCERNED.
So I've promised you science and doggonit' we're gunna START with science.
Specifically, the neuroscience of Undertale.
Now, I'm pretty sure that you've heard the old adage by now, that the two halves of the brain
handle different parts of human functioning.
The left is Analytical, and the right is Creative.
Now, while this might not be 100% scientifically accurate, it DOES HAVE some basis
in scientific reality. In the late 1960's, a man named Roger Sperry wanted to explore the extent
to which the two halves of the human brain COULD function independently.
To do this he took some volunteers and severed their Corpus Callosum
AKA: The nerve fibers that carry signals between the two halves of the brain
And that Ladies and Gentlemen!
Is why you got to read the fine print when you sell your body to science
Awww! Hey, I'm just a college student in need of some extra 'date' money
Cindy in Woman's Studies She's pretty cute...
Welcome to the experiment kid, we're cutting your brain in two
Gee wilickers, Scientist! That sounds dangerous!
Naaah, those nerves aren't important. Here's twenty bucks, nighty night!
Now where's my Nobel Prize?!
Ok, but in all seriousness, this guy wasn't just hacking
away at McNugget starved brains. In the olden days
of the 60's, this is actually how they
cured extreme cases of epilepsy, by
dividing the brains right down the middle.
And allthough the patients were able to live
normal lives, every so often a strange
functional gap would start to pop up..
Not being able to identify something that they saw,
Having trouble with a word,
Perceiving something on one side of
the body but not on the other. So Sperry
studied these perceptual gaps and confirmed
that the two halves of the brain are
indeed specialized in specific functions.
The left brain is the verbal and logical center
it can break down numbers and
words and analyze situations.
Conversely, the right brain is the
nonverbal and intuitive center. It thinks in
pictures or patterns. It's involved when
you're making a map or giving directions
but can only produce rudimentary words
and phrases.
However, it contributes the emotional
context to language. In the words of Sperry
himself, the great pleasure and feeling
in my right brain is more than my left
brain can find the words to tell you. Get
it? Because the right brain has feelings
but the left brain is the one who does
all the talking? Anyway it all makes
sense when we look at how this applies
to Gaster and the two SkeleBros.
Papyrus dreams big: He wants to capture
humans to impress Undyne; he wants to join the
Royal Guard. The cares in his world are
whimsical; he likes japes, gags, and even wears
a caped costume at all times. Sans also
mentions that Papyrus gets cranky
without a bedtime story.
He wears his emotions on its star man
inspired sleeve; becoming flustered
if the player even hints at flirting with him.
Basically Papyrus seems very
emotionally driven: He's very much the
right brain. Sans, on the other hand, seems
the lot more analytical and logical than
his brother: he's very sarcastic, dry,
witty, clever; at times it's difficult
to tell if he's being serious or very
very threatening. He's also shown to be
extremely intelligent but Papyrus
takes a little bit of time to figure out
the player's human. Sans sees it
immediately. And in Genocide runs Sans sees
through the player's facade for the
monster that they are. He even asks them
to continue pretending to be a human
for Papyrus' sake. Sans, for all his joking,
is very logical: interested in science
and the time-space continuum;
driven by reasoning. He's the
left brain. And sure those surface
connections are all well and good but I
wouldn't be making this claim if it
didn't go a whole lot deeper, so let's
take a minute to look at the SkeleBros
puzzle section in Snowden. Throughout
this iconic section of the game, Papyrus
and Sans present you with various
challenges to block your progress.
Papyrus' challenges are all spatially
focused: Doing things like forcing you to
map out a walking path so as not to step
on the same switch twice. Puzzles that
require the right brain to solve. On the
other hand, the one challenge that Sans
presents you with -- the monster kids word search,
a language-based task -- is one
specifically oriented from the left
brain. So are the left and right halves
of your mind blown yet?
Well if not, it keeps going. One detail I
always thought was weird was the game
going out of its way to tell you which
type of puzzle in the newspaper the two
brothers find more difficult. Sans insists
that the word search is harder, but Papyrus
thinks that the word jumble is harder.
A word jumble involves taking a series of
letters, breaking them down, and
rearranging them to find the word that's
made of those letters. It makes sense then
that Papyrus, as the right brain, would
find it more difficult:
it's about forming words -- a specifically
language-based process -- and why Sans, as
the left brain, would find it easier. On
the other hand, a word search while still
a left brain activity, involves
identifying already existing words within
a giant collage of letters. Since it's
just identifying patterns of existing
letters, it would make sense why the
creative pattern-based Papyrus would
find that easier, and why Sans would
think it's a bit harder than the jumble.
It's crazy, right, how these details
line up, but if that still wasn't enough, even
the humor of these two matches up with
their appropriate brain hemisphere.
Papyrus, as the right brain, would be much
more prone to physical comedy: his
so-called japes. Sans, as the left brain
and linguistic center, would get endless
amounts of joy out of wordplay: things
like, say, bad puns.
Oh, well wouldn't you know? In fact that's
why so many of you get such cringey joy
out of my bad puns on Twitter: as
Theorists, most of us, myself included, are
analytical left brains. So witty turn of
phrase will keep us roflcoptering
for days. Then there's the True Pacifist
ending, where Papyrus doesn't know the
word for Sun, having to rely on Sans to
tell him; yet another language based
knowledge item and yet another odd
detail that gets explained away by the
split brain theory. Even their handedness
aligns: Sans greets the protagonist with
a handshake using his left hand;
holds and drinks the ketchup bottle with
his left hand while dining at Grillby's;
steers a tricycle using his left hand in
the True Pacifist credits; and even
manipulates gravity during the Genocide
boss battle with -- you guessed it -- his left
hand. Now admittedly we don't get to
see Papyrus move quite as much but
he does scratch his chin with his right
hand; an action you would be a lot more
comfortable doing with your dominant
side. And yes, a quick disclaimer since
I know it's going to appear in the
comments, I know that handedness is at
least partially controlled by the
opposite hemisphere of the brain, but
I'm saying from a symbolic left right
perspective and not a functional one. But
just like the slap chop guy, I'm still
not done, because if we want to dive into
semantics we can even use the names of
the skeletons to connect them even
further. As we mentioned last episode, WD Gaster's
name appears to be a combination
of two different fonts: WingDings and Aster
WingDings is a completely
silly font; it's a joke. Nearly unreadable
to anyone who doesn't know how to decode
it. This lines up with the ridiculous
scheming Papyrus. Aster on the other hand
is a very serious, very color between the
lines normal-looking font, and this
lines up with Sans, who, despite his jokester
appearance is very serious
underneath: casting judgment on you in
the final minutes of the game, holding
down multiple jobs, having some
mysterious role in the determination
experiment, being very focused into his
research on the time-space continuum.
So yeah that's why I think the two halves
Gaster's mind are now embodied in the
two SkeleBros. When you actually take a
step back and look at all the details
that just fit into this theory, there's a
lot of them: their behavior fits
unbelievably well, their names and visual
design are undeniably related, and in
addition to everything else we've
covered, the fact that the two brothers
appeared out of nowhere and exist
separately from the rest of the other
monsters and underground is also really
telling, but it does leave us with one
last question: Why would Sans be aware
of their origins while Papyrus isn't?
Papyrus seems ignorant to everything in
the secret lab behind the house and
didn't even know that Sans and Alphys had
a history of working together, so why
doesn't he have Gaster Blasters or any
knowledge of the time-space continuum,
anything like that?
Well, who's to say he doesn't? For as innocent as
he behaves, he's in just as deep as Sans. The
evidence doesn't pop up too often but
every once in a while he'll slip and
reveal just how much he really knows.
First, similar to Sans, he clearly knows
about different timelines and the
ability to manipulate actions across
them. After going to some extreme lengths
across different saves and reloads to
convince Sans that you're a time
traveler, he finally gives you a key to
his room to reveal the truth. Go in and
what you find will shock you!
He tricks you into running on a
treadmill. Funny, sure, but the real mind
blow here's when Papyrus enters and
asks is Sans pranking you across time and
space?
I hate it when he does that! So clearly
he knows about Sans' time line
hopping and isn't weirded out by it. Then
in the True Pacifist ending, Papyrus
exclaims that this is the worst ending
since he's not a royal guard. Hah hah hah that's funny,
but wait, WHAT!? Saying that this
is the worst ending implies that he
knows other endings are possible, again
demonstrating a knowledge of different
timelines he seemed ignorant of for the
rest of the game. And then what about his
connection with Gaster? Well like Sans,
he's also able to manipulate gravity,
once again implying that they are two
halves of the same whole.
It's also worth noting that it's the
only one of the soul modes that actually
manipulates a spatial law. Green gives you
a shield, Yellow is had by pressing a
button, and Purple is a bunch of
spiderwebs, but Blue changes gravity. It's no
small feat, but it goes beyond that. In
one of the patches to the game if you
stop a Genocide run by sparing Papyrus, he
says that it's good you stopped when it
did if you hadn't he would have had to
use his special attack and that the
player would have been quote "blasted." He then
quickly changes the subject, but it's
an odd choice of words, right? Blasted
seems to imply him also having the
ability to use a Gaster Blaster. And just
to clarify, his special attack is not
changing the heart to Blue, because he starts
referencing the special attack after
turning the heart Blue. And it's also
not the giant bone that he uses to end the
battle since the Annoying Dog steals the
special attack and he winds up having to
use a normal attack which features
that giant bone. It's also important to
note that this odd detail was included
in a patch to the game, especially when
other details added during those exact
same patches were making Gaster a more
official part of the game experience: you
no longer had to hack into the game's Fun
value in order to experience Gaster as a
real part of the game's lore. Given all
of those details, I think it's likely
that Toby Fox was strongly hinting at us
to believe that Papyrus also has access
to Gaster Blasters. And with that, we've
reached the end. Literally everything in
three episodes that I could piece
together about how all these characters
connect. And when I stopped and looked at
all this evidence to write these
episodes, the most sensible conclusion
was one that I initially thought was
absolutely absurd: that Sans and
Papyrus are two halves of the Gaster
whole. It was quite honestly the
neuroscience bit and the fact that they
appeared out of nowhere that sold me on
it. Were they created when Gastor
fell into his machine or were they
present throughout the whole series of
experiments? It's not really clear. I
personally like to think the former but
the pictures and Sans' laboratory of
three smiling faces with the quote
"never forget" seems to imply the latter.
Either way this is how our story and the
theory ends, because as Toby Fox himself
confirmed on Twitter, quote "You've all
seen the happiest outcome.
Neither of them could fix the machine, no
matter how hard they tried. No one can."
Neither of them being the operative word
there because it means not just Sans but
both the brothers were involved in
trying to fix machine. The SkeleBros
wrote never forget on that picture
because they don't want to end up like
Goner Kid or what Asriel warned them
about: that by resetting the timeline
over and over again the memories start to
fade from existance. They can't let
themselves forget Gaster or their former
origins, even though they'll never be
able to bring him back or get their
normal lives back, no matter how hard
they try. It gives this game, even in the
happiest True Pacifist ending, a new
layer of tragedy, a new depth of story
that is hidden to almost eighty-two percent
of the game's players. It just shows how
much care and love went into crafting
this plotline and gives testament to why
everyone loves this game's story so very
much. But hey, that's just a theory -- a GAME
THEORY!
Thanks for watching!