Game Theory - Who is W.D. Gaster? (Undertale)

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he UNMASKS W.D. Gaster from Undertale!

What did papyrus say the first time he served spaghetti to frisk? Bon Appetit! And? Speaking of puns, why does Sands love puns so much? Oh, I know. It must be because he finds them humorous. No, no need to show me the door. I'll see myself out there. Welcome to Game Theory, where deep breath. I think I'm finally ready to tackle Lunder Tail again.

But overly dramatic game theory, voice aside! I gotta be honest with you, I'm scared of this game. So, before we begin today's episode, I need to take a moment to level with you all because it's time I pull back the curtain of the show a bit and address a couple things. Now don't get me wrong, I love this game. I really do, but doing episodes on Undertale have been some of the worst experiences that I've had in the six years of doing this show. The first was Sansa's Nest, a theory I was so excited to share with you. In fact, it was one of, if not my favorite episode that we had done of game theory to date because it allowed me an opportunity to talk about one of my favorite franchises growing up, Earthbound, as well as one of my favorite modern franchises of Undertale. And it was a fun episode. Now don't get me wrong, did I in any way think that this was canon lore to the series? No.

Of course not. I didn't think that Sands is actually Ness, but at the end of the day, these are theories meant to get you to think about things from a different perspective. And let's be honest here, there are a lot of similarities between Earthbound and Undertale, okay? From visual design to actual sound effects to even the timelines of the games. But the overwhelming negativity and ridicule that that video got was just... It was just crushing. It sucked, man. And don't get me wrong, I have gotten used to dealing with internet hate over the years. I've gotten through the Sonica's slow controversy,

I've had literal petitions written to remove me from the internet for slandering Mario's name by calling him a sociopath, but this one, this one hurt, but it was nothing compared to the next time I talked about undertail on the channel. When I was selected for the honor of meeting Pope Francis as one of the first 10 digital creation, to introduce him to the world of online video. And as part of that, we were expected to give him a gift.

So I gave him a copy of Undertail and then made a video talking about that. One, because it was such a huge honor for me, but two, because I was excited to share it with you. This was our achievement as a theorist community, as gamers, as online digital creators, and people who love online things. And the hate that that video received in the first week. I mean, this was a video where I specifically talk about accepting others and saying no to hating other groups of people and it got hate. Just you gotta love the internet sometimes man.

Now, I tend to stay quiet in situations like that since I've learned that fighting back only seems to make the problem worse. But since I'm talking about undertail and since I know all of those comments are gonna come flooding back on this video, I figured let me address some of the misconceptions and errors that were leveled against me when I first released that video. One, I talked to the Pope about cyberbullying in schools. I did not, as many people wrongfully accuse me of, waste his time talking to him about video games or gamer problems. In fact, my entire conversation with the Pope is available on YouTube right now. If you had actually taken a couple minutes to do research before assuming and accusing me of things,

would have actually saved me a lot of sleepless nights. Two, the gift of a game was symbolic. Of course the Pope isn't gonna play a video game, but three, if you thought that the gift of a video game, was bad and had problems with that one. At least it was better than a surfboard, an illegal tree, and a YouTuber's self-written book about themselves. All things that the Pope also received as gifts that day. Which leads me to number four. Yes, obviously other games talked about peaceful solutions before Undertale, but geez I like the game. It was recent at the time, and it was the Pope's year of mercy. And I don't know if you've noticed, but the word mercy appears a whole heck of a lot in Undertale. And lastly, number five. was selected via an application that I submitted for this opportunity as a representative of America, as a representative of gamers, and of online digital creators. I know a lot of people were upset that I was selected and I'm sorry if you don't like me.

But as someone who tries to advocate for science, logic, and critical thought, I did my best to put a good foot forward for all three of those different categories. And you know what? I did my best. I tried. Anyway, enough of me talking on camera. Let's hop back into the video because no need to do. see this on camera anymore. I just thought it was important to talk to you. Mono e mono. So, as you could probably tell, after those two videos, I wasn't super enthusiastic about tackling Undertale too much. Anyway, in the wake of all the tension going on in the world lately,

I played through Undertale again, and was filled with determination to try and do another episode on it. It was the most requested episode you loyal theorists wanted back when the game first came out, and to not cover it felt like just leaving the series unfinished. And I'm not the ton of it. to give up. So here we are back in the ring for round three to answer everyone's biggest question about the series, who is Gaster? From what I can tell on Reddit, despite all the theorizing in the months after the game's release, it looks like most people ended up throwing in the towel. Writing this

mysterious character off as some code Toby Fox tossed in at the end of the development of the game to get people speculating but without ever coming up with a fully fleshed-out story of his own. I however disagree. After looking at all the evidence from a ton of different sources, In the game itself, in the game's code dug up from places like the underminor community, from Toby Fox's own statements and my own scientific look at things, I think you can come up with a fairly solid theory of who Gaster is and what happened to him. So no more sins crawling up my back.

I present to you my theory on W.D. Gaster. Let's start off with the easy stuff to get everyone on the same page, since it's possible that some of you are like, I've played Undertale all the way through three times. neutral, pacifist, and genocide, watch Jack, Felix, and eventually Mark play it and still have no idea who you're talking about. Well, that's because your chances of running into any evidence of this character in the game is a slim 2.8% That's right, I did the math. In other words, you could play through the game a hundred times and you'd only find references to Gaster about three of those times. Holy Temy Flakes, Batman! Those are some slim chances!

So let's back up for a bit and quickly talk about what we know about this character for sure. The first hints of Gaster came from the river person and is now infamous line of Beware the Man who speaks in hands. Now obviously this got players more excited than an annoying dog with a stick since you know there's no one in the game who does anything close to speaking in hands and in a game already full of hidden secrets and vague clues this appeared to be another big one so they started digging. What they found were four gray NPCs labeled in the game files as Monster Kid Goner and 3G followers or Gaster followers with dialogue that provides us the only solid

information that we have about this missing character. Through their text we learned that Dr. W. D. Gaster was the royal scientist before Alfie's was responsible for building the core, i.e. the structure that provides magical power to the underground, and that he disappeared after falling into his creation, getting himself scattered across time and space. Although he may not be physically present, he's supposedly always around, since these guys are all super reluctant to discuss him openly. And beyond that, mostly everything else's speculation. There are these mystery man images in the game data that many speculate might be him, but flip this character upside down. Here, you don't have to imagine it, we can do it through the power of editing. And boom! This could also be him. See the face? Just like so many other things in this game, appearances may be deceiving.

There's also this wispy white thing that could also also be him according to online theories, but again, it's all just speculation. Game speculation! So where does all this speculation end up in the theorization? The theorizing begin? Well, theories are hypotheses supported by evidence, so let's start gathering evidence. Now, whether or not the gray NPCs show up is based on a weird stat programmed into the code called the fun value. Basically, whenever you start a new game, Undertale picks a random number between one and a hundred. Depending on what number you get, different things happen in the game. It keeps things spicy. And also keeps things really similar to Fnaf when you come to think about it.

Seriously, are we sure that these two fan bases really hate each other? Because no joke, between wacky animal hijinks, hidden plot mysteries, random Easter eggs, and large quantities of murdered children. The two franchises are a lot more similar than I think people want to admit. Anyway, these gray NPCs show up when the fun value is at 61, 62, 63, or higher than 90. And even if the number is there, they only have a 20% chance of showing up per game. Which is why your chances of ever even seeing them is so low. Even creepier, if you have a fun value of 66, this eerie gray door appears in waterfall. When you walk through it, there's a chance that the mystery man appears. Touch him and poof. He pieces out faster than a babysitter's boyfriend when the parents come home. And the fun value dictates more than just gaster encounters in secret rooms. When you played undertail, did you get a call from sands about your refrigerator running? Or maybe someone called you with a wrong number and then you got a really random song out of it. Or Alfie's called to order some pizza. Well, all of those situations were dictated by your fun value. So why spend all this time talking about fun? Well, because it's the

If there's one thing we know, it's that in the world of Undertale, game mechanics aren't just game mechanics. Toby Fox makes it clear throughout the game that game mechanics make up the very fabric of the game's reality. These aren't just artificial invisible layers on top of the story for players to use while interacting with the game. These rules, from saving to loading and everything in between, all encompass the actual physical laws of Undertale's universe. Much like quantum mechanics and general relativity define ours. Character stats like LVLs or levels of violence and E-XP or execution points in any other game would be numbers relevant only to the player. But in Undertale, their real, tangible values that characters, most notably Sands, can sense and judge. So if fun is what dictates the appearance or non-appearance of a bunch of these characters connected to Gaster, well, then it behooves us to figure out what fun actually is in the context of the game.

And if you are under the mistaken impression that fun is a sense of childlike glee that often comes with playing a game, then you are wrong! You're just wrong! The fun value in Undertale is the embodiment of the very real theory from quantum mechanics known as the many worlds interpretation. Long story short, the many worlds interpretation involves the measurement of photons and wave particle duality, but in a nutshell, imagine you're starting a new game of Undertale. You have the option of either going true pacifist or genocide.

Now, in that moment, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, it doesn't matter which you choose. If you choose a pacifist run, there's an alternate reality where you went to full-on homicidal maniac and vice versa. All possible realities simultaneously exist. Each time you're presented with an option to either kill or show mercy to a new character, two new timelines are created, one for each option. And this is where we get back to Gaster and his followers. You see, if you find him, Goner Kid speaks the following line. Have you ever thought about a world where everything is exactly the same, except you don't exist? Well, in my first play-through of the game, that's exactly what happened. A world where he didn't exist.

In fact, I must have gotten a really lame fun value since I didn't find anyone mentioning Gaster. No secret rooms. No one even wanted to call me. Truly, I was forever alone. But there are realities where he does exist, and where Sam's does pick up the phone to call you. In short, think of each new fun value as another world in the many worlds interpretation. Another timeline. Parallel realities where one small detail is different. Goner Kid does or does not exist.

Elfie's does or does not order pizza. So the next time someone tells you to do that, Someone tells you to go outside and have some fun. All you really got to do is create an alternate reality in your own backyard. Simple as that. But not only does this fun value make repeated play-throughs of the game interesting, but it makes a world, pun intended, of difference when it comes to Gaster's storyline. From speaking to the Gaster followers, we know that an experiment went wrong and Gaster was shattered across time and space. Those are some pretty specific words. First, shattered, as in pieces of him went in many different directions. there are multiple pieces of Gaster that now exist.

And then there are the operative words of time and space, meaning that these pieces ended up across many different timelines, the many different worlds each represented by a different fun value. But what other characters do we know are able to retain memories across multiple different timelines? Only two, Flawey and Sands. Flawy tells us at the end of the genocide run that he's lived hundreds, if not thousands of timelines, doing everything under the sun from being nice to people to torturing them.

And in the true pacifist run, Asriel, Flowy's true identity, makes mention of being able to destroy this timeline once and for all. Asriel even says the following lines, Every time you die, your friends forget you a little more. Your life will end here in a world where no one remembers you. It's a really specific thing for Asriel to know that killing something over and over again will cause the memories of it to fade in everyone's mind. In fact, we may even know someone who he's done this to. Goner Kid. Asriel's speech during the final battle is a direct parallel to the same

lines we just saw Goner Kid speak a few minutes ago. A world where he no longer exists. The thought terrifies him, almost as though Asriel did this to him to the point where he does no longer exist. Sands, on the other hand, isn't as powerful as Fowie from a time manipulation perspective, but he does bend the laws of space around him, phasing through walls, and during his battle, continually teleports over and over and over again. Though he doesn't show the ability to save or reload like Flowy does, he openly acknowledges that there are other Sands as out there in other realities and tells you to say hello to them. He has tests in place to see if someone is a time traveler. And even though he can't outright control time,

he has at least some deeper understanding of timelines being manipulated, as evidenced by his various dialogue options when you fight him over and over during the final genocide battle, sensing how many times he's beaten you. So is it any wonder that the two characters who together manipulate time and space both wield weapons that look like this, and that, at least for Sam's, this weapon according to the Sprite files, happens to be called a Gaster Blaster. Or that for Flawey, this is the weapon that he specifically calls out will destroy the timeline. In fact, as you can imagine, there's a lot more to say about the Sands-Flawee-Gaster connection.

But before we do, let's quickly recap. Gaster, the man who speaks in hands in the royal scientist before Alfie's, is an entity only known about through his four followers, ones that only appear in certain timelines of the game. These timelines are ultimately dictated by a random fun value. With him being shattered across time and space, He must share some connection with the other two characters that seemingly straddle time and space, Flawey and Sands, and indeed he does in the form of his Gaster Blasters. But there's more, so much more, from the determination experiments to information found in the True Lab, to Toby Fox's Twitter, to the pivotal clue that makes sense of all of this.

The word search. No joke. But to begin, we have to start with perhaps the darkest area in all of Undertale, the True Lab. It's an area of the game that you can only access if you're doing a true true pacifist play-through, and inside are some of the darkest secrets from the entire game. According to the entries found in the computer screens throughout the lab, Elfie's, the Royal Scientist after Gaster, experimented with injecting determination defined as the will to keep living and the resolve to change fate, into comatose monster bodies, in an attempt to create souls strong enough to break the barrier keeping the monsters trapped in the underground.

Of course, it turns out that the soul itself has to already be strong, And since all the souls of all the monsters in the underground added together don't even amount to the strength of one human soul, the results of these experiments are downright terrifying. Instead of creating stronger monster souls, these experiments yielded horrific monsters melted together, fused bodies that turned into shambling creatures called amalgamates. And if that wasn't bad enough during these experiments, Alfie's not only injected monsters with determination, but also injected a tiny yellow flower. Hmm... wonder if that was a good idea.

And thus, the main antagonist of the entire freaking game was born. G.G. Science. G.G. Now, most of you watching probably already know that story. You're actually expected to piece it together bit by bit from numbered lab entries scattered throughout that area of the game. But only the truly astute players will notice that one number is missing. Entry 17. Is this just an error by Toby Fox? Did you lose count, buddy?

Svorteen. 15, 16, 18, 19, Schventi? What do you say? Nope. If you edit the game files manually and set your location to room number 264, and otherwise inaccessible room in the game, you find contained inside, entry 17. And what it says is bone-chilling. Unlike all the others, this entry is written in the font of wingdings.

And if you translate those random symbols into English, it says the following. Quote, entry number 17, Dark, darker yet darker. The darkness keeps growing, the shadows cutting deeper, photon readings negative. This next experiment seems very, very interesting. What do you two think? What we have just read is Gaster's final letter. But how do we know? Well, the entry is written in the font wingdings. Definitely not one you see people dipping into all that often. And at this point, it's widely accepted that the WD in WD Gaster's name is meant to stand for the font wingedings. wing dings, just like sands is comic sands and papyrus is papyrus.

This explanation would also account for the whole man who speaks in hands bit from the boatkeeper. Wing-Dings is the only font ridiculous enough to have actual hands as letters. But more on that one later. What I want to note first is that this entry reveals what happened to Gaster. Based on the Gaster follower dialogue we covered last time, we know that he fell into, quote, his creation. But it's not specified that his creation is necessarily the core. In fact, I would hazard to say that it's not. What Entry 17 tells us is that Gaster, not Elfiz, created the determination extractor, and then tested it on himself.

Now, don't get me wrong, what we actually see in-game was the result of Elfiz's work, but she based a lot of her research on the work of Gaster. How do we know? Well, Alfies mentions blueprints in Lab Entry 5, but she does so in a way that doesn't lead me to believe that she actually created those blueprints. The exact entry reads, I've done it. Using the blueprints I've extracted it from the human souls, I believe this is what gives their souls the strength to persist after death. Determination! Look at the phrasing here.

She didn't say her blueprints worked. She didn't say her device or her research, just the blueprints. Which implies to me that they were just laying around. And indeed they were. You can actually find them in a secret lab behind Sands and Papyrus's house. There, on the table, blueprints for a mysterious machine.

written in symbols. Symbols or wingdings perhaps. Not only this but look at the device she ends up building from these blueprints. The determination extractor looks a whole lot like an animal's skull. The same skull-like shape of the Gaster blaster and the hyper-goner. Gaster's signature shape. But lastly on this topic, just look at the mystery man's sprite. The design is droopy, slightly melted. Just like the other monsters, Alfie's infused with determination. The amalgamates. And just like undefi's, before her death who melts because she's too determined for her own good. Determination melts monsters. Thus, the melted sprite of Mystery Man seems to imply that Gaster himself fused his body with excessive amounts of determination. But let's hop back to entry 17. Look at the language here. The darkness keeps growing. The shadows cutting deeper. Cutting. This reads not like a room that's slowly losing light, but rather like a man who's being broken apart. losing control of himself and his identity. And as we discussed last time, Gaster's followers confirm that he was indeed shattered across time and space in the aftermath of his experiment. So now that we have a fairly strong suspicion about what happened to him, is that it?

Where is he now? Have we solved the mystery of W.D. Gaster? No, not yet. Because I'm about to convince you that W.D. Gaster is Sands. Mind blown? Well, get ready because I'm not done. W.D. Gaster is also papyrus. My theory is that in being shattered, half of Gaster's brain got infused into Sands,

and the other half went to papyrus. Now, I already know that you're gonna start drawing parallels to the over-the-top claim that Sands is Nest. And yeah, I am saying that Sands is Gaster, so start the memes, go ahead, go for it. But keep an open mind, because I have a ton, a ton of evidence supporting this idea. And I'm gonna hit you with one hard piece of evidence, right off the bat since I know winning you over on this topic is gonna be an uphill battle. So obviously, Sands and Papyrus are named after fonts, and as we already discussed, it seems like Gaster is the same, being named after wingdings. Plus, all three are skeletons, so already there's some weird connection there.

But let's look again at Gaster's name. It's W.D. Gaster. Wingding, sure, but what's this Aster part all about? Well, Aster is a font with seraphs. You know, those little hooks on the ends of letters to make a more readable? A font that, well, not exact, closely resembles the font of Sands's Z's when he falls asleep during his genocide battle. And that, in and of itself is a bizarre choice for a character who does everything else in a non-serifed font of Comic Sans. So W.D. Gaster, a skeleton-looking character with a name made up of two fonts, has pieces of him divided up into the two other skeletons, who each have a single font name, and one just so happens to have text that closely resembles an aspect

It's a lot of weird coincidences to account for. And if you think the idea of one creature creating two others is far-fetched Then look no further than the amalgamates one creature made from multiple others glued together by determination Experiments or take for instance Shiren on the official Tumblr of Undertale Toby Fox in character as Sands Immediately after making a clear reference to Gaster mentioning someone who's listening suggests doing research about Shiren So I did and found a fact that most other players don't know about. The head and body of the sprite that you fight in the game are actually two different beings, but an optical illusion makes them look like they're one single creature. It's odd, isn't it, that Toby would call attention to this, unless Gaster himself was a sort of illusion. One character split across several others.

But let's continue since this is a pretty massive claim, and I still don't expect you to be convinced yet. When asked about papyrus and sands, the Snowden shopkeeper explains that the Skellabros just showed up one day and asserted themselves. It's a weird origin story. They're not like the other monsters. They're different in some way. Well, them being the result of a failed experiment would explain why they just showed up one day. They literally popped into existence out of a different timeline. Need proof? Happy to provide. Look no further than the fact that Sands's song on his date and in his lab is named It's Raining Somewhere Else. That somewhere else is a different timeline, as it parallels the line Goner Kid himself says, quote, An umbrella? But it's not raining. Yeah, it's raining somewhere else. A kid from a lost timeline randomly talking about the rain?

I don't think that's just a random coincidence. It's Toby's way of showing how this kid and the gaster followers from these various timelines are all connected to the Skellabros. It would also explain Sans's strange hatred for humans. For a guy who seems so laid back about so many things, during your date with him, he gets deadly serious. He outright admits that if he hadn't made a promise to Toriel to protect your character, quote, you'd be dead where you stand. Sure he plays it off as a joke afterward, but you just don't joke about stuff like that. And we all know Sands's no eye pose is his serious face. But why would Sands care about a human walking around?

He doesn't really seem to care about anything else except for papyrus. Well, if he truly is a part of Gaster, who's shattered while trying to replicate the powers of human determination, then that's a pretty solid reason to hate mankind. He's got a vendetta, a grudge. Also has a direct connection with the Royal Scientist's lab. In a patch that came after the game's release, if the player calls Papyrus twice on the top floor of the lab, he'll say that the bag of dog food in that room looks familiar, that Sands had it in his room for a while. We also see in some versions of the true pacifist ending that, in a surprise to all the characters, Alfies and Sands know each other. When Papyrus calls out this out of nowhere revelation, Alfiz starts to get super nervous until Sands deflects the question and everyone moves on. It's a lot. Almost like the two of them are hiding something. But here's the clincher a detail that to my knowledge no one has picked up yet We've all assumed that all the lab entries except for the one in wingedings were written by Alfie's as she conducts her determination Experiments but the truth is they're not

There's another author for about half of them and that author is Sans Pay close attention to the text of the entries half are grammatically correct with proper punctuation and capitalization The other half are entire who else in the game not only speaks in lowercase but according to the note in his room is also confirmed to write in lowercase Sans it all seems to indicate that the what do you two think at the end of Gaster's entry number 17 refers not to Sands and papyrus but rather to Sands and Alfies who are staying silent about what happened to Gaster that day and all of this isn't even mentioning Sands's lines about wanting to go home or go back he says as much during his dinner date scene at the Mediton Hotel. He notices that the player must want to go home and says, buddy, I know the feeling. And in the genocide run during his boss fight, he says, look, I gave up trying to go back a long time ago. So where does he want to go back to, the surface? That's not it. In his very next line of dialogue, he says, and getting to the surface doesn't really appeal to me anymore either. Key word there being either. He wants to go back home, but to him, home isn't a place. It's a time, a different timeline, a different state of being. It's a time. A different state of being. It's obvious that Sands was trying to fix something for a long time and just couldn't. The thing he's trying to fix is Gaster.

But perhaps Sands is the easy one to convince you of. He has weird space-bending powers and knowledge of other timelines. His room is filled with metaphysical things and he's the one with the key to the secret workshop. He openly acknowledges timelines and research about anomalies in the time space continuum and breaks the fourth wall. But papyrus? He exhibits none of that. How could he, the great papyrus, be wrapped up in all of them? And why would I possibly say something as balzy and specific and as extreme as their two halves of the same brain?

That is me making a huge final claim for this theory. But today, it's time to get scientific with the Skellabros. 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. Oh, and I'm not done. We're concluding this whole three-episode series by Reveau. revealing the fact that papyrus isn't nearly as naive as he lets on. Sure, he may play innocent enough, but behind that basketball shoulder pad wear and

spaghetti-loving star man pose and cool dude facade is someone who is deep with Sands and Alfie's and the Gaster experiments. So I promised you science and doggone it we're gonna start with science, specifically the neuroscience of Undertale. Now I'm pretty sure that you've probably heard the old adage by now that the two halves of the brain handle different parts of human functioning. Left is analytical and the right is creative. Now, while this may not be a hundred percent scientifically accurate,

it does have some basis in scientific reality. In the late 1960s, 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 gotta read the fine print when you sell your body to science. Oh, hey, I'm just a college,

student in need of some extra date money. Cindy and women's studies. She's pretty cute. Well, we're doing the experiment, kid. We're cutting your brain into. Gee, Willaker, scientist, that sounds dangerous. Ah, those nerves aren't important. Here's 20 bucks. 99. Now where's more Nobel Prize? Okay, but in all seriousness, this guy wasn't just hacking away at McNugget-starved brains. In ye olden days of the 60s, this is actually how they cured extreme cases of epilepsy by dividing the brains right down the middle. And although 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 the 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 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'll all make sense when we look at how this applies to Gaster and the two skellabros.

Papyrus dreams big. He wants to capture humans to impress Undine and wants to join the Royal Guard. They He cares in his world are whimsical. He likes jakes and gags and even wears a caped costume at all times. Sands also mentions that Papyrus gets cranky without a bedtime story. He wears his emotions on his 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. Sands, on the other hand, seems a 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. While Papyrus takes a little bit of time to figure out that the player's human, Sanz sees it immediately. And in genocide, Sands sees through the players' facade for the monster that they are. He even asks them to continue pretending to be a human for Papyrus's sake. Sands, 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 Skellabro's puzzle section in Snowden. Throughout this iconic section of the game, Papyrus and Sands 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 Sands 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. Sands 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 words 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 Sands, 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 creation creative pattern-based papyrus would find that easier and why Sands 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.

Sands as the left brain and linguistics 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 have you, get such cringy joy out of my bad puns on Twitter. As theorists, most of us, myself included, are analytical left brains. So a witty turn of phrase will keep us raffle-coptering for days. Then there's the true pacifist ending, where papyrus doesn't know the word for sun, having to rely on Sands 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.

Sands greets the protagonist with a handshake using his left hand. Holds and drinks a ketchup bottle with his left hand while dining at Grillbees, steers a tricycle using his left hand in the true pacifist credits, and even manipulates gravity during the genocide boss battle with you, yes, 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. In action, you would be a lot more comfortable doing with your dominant side. And yes, a quick disclaimer, since I know it's gonna appear in the comments,

I know that handiness 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, W.D. Gaster's name appears to be a combination of two different fonts. Wingdings and Aster. Wing-dings 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. Astor, on the other hand, is a very serious, very color between the lines normal-looking fonts. And this lines up with Sands, 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 experiments, being very focused into its research on the time-space continuum. So yeah, that's why I think the two halves of Gaster's mind are now embodied in the two Scalibroes.

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 Sands be aware of their origins? Well, Papyrus isn't.

Papyrus seems ignorant to everything in the secret lab, behind the house and didn't even know that Sands and Elfys had a history of working together. So why doesn't he have Gasterblasters or any knowledge of the time-space continuums? Anything like that. Well, who's to say he doesn't? For as innocent as he behaves, he's in just as deep as Sands. 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 Sands, 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 Sands 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 is when Papyrus enters and asks, Is Sands pranking you across time and space? I hate it when he does that. So clearly he knows about Sands's timeline hopping and isn't weirded out by it. Then, in the true pacifist ending, Papyrus exclaims that this is the word,

ending since he's not a royal guard. Ha ha ha 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 Sands, he's also able to manipulate gravity, once again implying that they are two halves of the same hole. 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 spider webs, 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 Sands and Papyrus are two halves of the Gaster hole. 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 Gaster 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, put the pictures in Sands's laboratory of three smiling faces with the quote, 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 Sands, but both the brothers were involved in trying to fix the machine. The Skelabros 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 existence. 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 82% of the game's players.

It just shows how much care and love went into crows. 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!