@@ihaetschool3361 I mean, in case of AA it does make sense and isn't that far-fetched. Altho, I'd argue that in this case it also makes sense, since it's a clear date so it's easy to connect the timeline with this competition.
@@TheSoulCalledZuzia i mean yeah, all it takes is the removal of context for anything to sound utterly stupid. but even with context i can't get over the fact that that is an actual sentence i can type out
Just a quick point as well, the shaky letters don't necessarily mean a monster is dying. Flowey speaks in shaky letters all the time as he mocks us. Alphys has shaky letters when in the date, and same with papyrus afterwards. It seems it's shaky when the monster has strong emotions as well. I reckon they're shaky because he's excited, not because he's facing his own death
Yeah, I think maybe we’re overthinking things and letting categories be the enemy of understanding. Asriel explains it best himself-it’s the “Scary Face” voice. It’s the sound of someone’s voice shaking because they’re scared, or anxious, or in Flowey’s case pretending to be scared to intimidate someone, to make a “scary face”. I like the idea it’s a “death rattle” thing, but the data doesn’t bear that out necessarily.
in a way it reflects how they act when in combat too, more movement in general seems to reflect unrestrained emotion. Look at undyne the undying for example by comparison to say sans or toriel's right (or even papyrus if you subscribe to the "papyrus is actually stupid strong but even more so able to control himself" theory)
I interpret it as gaster's mere existance being so fucked by his experiments that it changes the way that he "talks", as in the way that the entries before entry 17 are written in comparison to entry 17 itself, and as pointed out in the video he changed his focus from the Determination studies onto other things, which could've been what led him to fall into his own machine, either by accident or on purpose because of what he learned. Also, I am aware this is an Undertale video, but with his talk about Darkness, and Deltarune's Light and Dark World, I come to the conclusion that whatever Gaster learned about the "Dark" could've changed him drastically to the point it altered his personality and view of the world, kind of like Platos' Cave allegory for knowledge, Gaster could have learned something that had brought him such stress that it shifted focus away from escaping the Underground to something of a higher plane or importance, which is maybe the reason why he jumped into the Core and shatter himself across reality.
Everyone assumes that gaster fell into the core because he just disappears, it’s also slightly implied when talking about the railings in hotland; it would be an interesting idea if he had injected himself with DT then fell into the core for whatever reason. All fun theories.
Personally I think the thought of him nonchalantly logging a journal entry about his research while he's literally dying in front of his partners is way funnier, but your take does make more sense
I think there's a couple oddities in the theory that need to be resolved. For example, why the numbering gap in Gaster's entries? I think entry 8 is Gaster's last. He injected the flower and some of the bodies (likely left control cases or tried varying doses), and had the accident shortly after. Some of the monsters might have later woken up but the families and friends wouldn't ask why and Asgore wouldn't get noticed. The flower on the other hand was left in the lab, probably in some containment with automated watering. When Alphys got to the testing, she found documentation on experiments with no results and a singular golden flower. The plant didn't seem to be any different from the others, other than documents indicating it is a century old. None of the experiments she tried conducting were able to show what is different. Later on, the corpses wake up. At this point Alphys starts to get some level of confidence on her position and so she tries to write entries the way a scientist should. However, while Gaster's entries are mostly conclusions and scientific questions, Alphys' entries still speak with emotion about what happened and is about to happen, including ellipsis, question marks and a smiley face.
@@itap8880 The theory in the video states that flowey numbered the entries assuming they’re all by Alphys and assuming their order. But this sort of bothers me because Gaster says entry 17 out loud in that tape. So…yeah.
@@VerbDoesStuff I thought the video stated Flowey just set up specific screens to show you specific entries, not that he numbered them. Also, I think the entries are numbered in the scope of a certain area of research so Gaster's entry is numbered outside of the list visible in true lab.
I definitely agree with that, but it could be that he doesn't mess with certain elements around due to nostalgia and longing for the past. Not saying that's certain, but it's still a possibility
@@WallyWafflest True, there's a lack of beds in the castle. However in pacifist there are monsters all over New Home. It wouldn't be that hard for Flowey to slip in and place something like that.
The flower patches all being determination experiments infused with Asriel’s memories is actually backed up further in-game! As (I believe) every time we have a flashback to a memory from Asriel, we cut to Frisk waking up on a bed of the Golden Flowers, like they were sharing the memory with us!
plus, as flowey he seems to have control over plants outside himself like the vines on the doors and the ones he uses to capture everyone. that really only makes sense if you consider that he exists in the flowers outside just his main body since it clearly isnt coming directly from him
@@user-bx3ut8kp4g They're all Chara's memories, just associated with different things. Golden flowers are associated with Asriel because of their plan.
when he got to the part about papyrus I WAS SHOOK. years of playing undertale and i always chalked up papyrus's weird behavior to just simple writing to get the player to the lab, but to see that "Howdy" come on screen? my jaw dropped, wow how have i never noticed that i severely underestimated toby fox once again
I always figured flowey had simply convinced papyrus to call you, and that's why he was acting strange, because flowey was telling him what to say. But it's much creepier to think that it actually was flowey mimicking papyrus' voice
1. I am obsessed with the "First Fallen Child" being named "Kris" in this video 2. You went full blown CSI INVESTIGATION on all these details with the typing style, the distinction of the tapes versus typed entries, Toby's disposition to use word-play elements in his storytelling, and the timeline you graphed for us 3. It's insane to me how this game keeps coming back even after nearly 9 years, and how everything keeps getting recontextualized as we look at these games differently
@@frostedmoss It is. There's a theory that Kris is the name of the first human and the Kris in Deltarune is their version in that universe, as opposed to Chara being their name and Kris Deltarune being a separate character. I'm guessing that's what's being referenced
@@frostedmossidk what emir is on about, but i think the original commenter is referring more to how generally interesting it is to propose Kris is Chara, seeing as they'd be the sibling of Asriel and child of Asgore and Toriel. It's a satisfying fit even if we can't be confident that Chara's behaviors and decisions are at all reflective of Kris'
holy shit entry 17 is in wingdings because its gaster TALKING where the other entries are TYPED OUT its a fucking VIDEO the guy doesnt TYPE IN HANDS HE SPEAKS IN THEM
I couldn't help but think of The Goners as additional candidates for Gaster's De-Termination experiments, never forgetting the act of kindness that he had given them. With Goner having a double meaning too.
Gaster never seemed to experiment with Determination at least in Undertale. Sure he experimented with other stuff, CORE and darkness (according to entry 17) according to follower he was a slow worker which could limit his amount of experiments.
Yep. Even one of his entries when the monsters wake up, he ends it with "I thought they were goners". This is Undertale, of course that wasn't a coincidence.
@@rafsandomierz5313 The video shows that Gaster *did* experiment with De-termination. In fact, it shows that he was the one who came up with the idea, it wasn't Alphys
This was my thought exactly. Fits with the goner kid’s “Have you ever thought about a world where everything is exactly the same... Except you don't exist? Everything functions perfectly without you..." Text. If the goners cannot die, they’ve almost definitely outlived most of their families. The world has moved on without them, and yet everything in the underground is the same, and is repeating, both literally with the resets, and Alphys recreating the experiments. A world where everything is the same, without them.
With the implications that Gaster wrote the first couple entries and claiming that after the bodies started walking around and thinking they were GONERS takes on a whole new meaning.
surprising sock muppet neglected mentioning the goners as possible candidates for gaster's experiements considering theyre the only monsters who mention him by name
The concept of Gaster's entry 17 being a recording is really cool. This leads me to the idea that Gaster's "Darkness" experiment caused the room to go dark, explaining why the entry recording appears pitch black. In the course of his experiments with darkness, Gaster achieves a breakthrough and the surroundings go dark (similar to what darkness does in Deltarune). However, the experiment takes an unforeseen turn, which prompts Gaster to panic and hastily document the entry. Alternatively, the shattering happened at a later date. It is also possible that Gaster was just taken aback by the success of his initial darkness experiment, and the "next experiment" after the entry is what made him shatter.
If room went pitch black, then you wouldn't see gaster. Unless... the room iteself consumed all light, but the camera could see gaster, because he did "emit photons"(this is how we see things - they emit photons, we recieve). This is mainly a technicality on why you even can see Gaster in a pitch black room. Without this explaination, you could not argue that you see something in complete darkness.
@@DavidSartor0 the only thing you could see in the "darkened" room is Gaster - the room is pitch black, but not Gaster, since he emits photons, but not the room. It's like when Flowey or Asriel appear in the blackness during the cutscenes... kind of. That's what I meant.
@@klaudiso Darker-dark-light-lighter(lightner!?) Consumes photons - no photons - receives photons - emits photons. I think this is the logic. Like, a room (or an object) can get "more dark" by recieving less light(photons), to the point where an object receive no photons - the object would be completely dark. The only way to get even less light is by consuming light that does not hit said darker object, or the light that tries to shine on it. As if your flashlight would become dimmer when trying to flash it on a "darker" object without even lighting it up.
That part about Asriel under his Flowey identity mimicking papyrus' voice using his father's speech patterns to lure the player into thinking he was created by Alphys and that Gaster had nothing to do with the true lab and its entries is the most Jimmy Neutron brain blast thing I've ever heard
He explicitly said that Flowey was actually created by Alphys, since Alphys injected way to much Determination into one of the flowers that spread from the one Gaster planted in the throne room. Did you watch the video?
A suggestion- perhaps the gaster followers are the ones from Gasters expiriments? Afterall, they are among the only ones that are old enough to remember Gaster, and clearly must have known him pretty well. Additionally, they are all greyscale, which is reminiscent of the other amalgamates, all of which are shown to be black and white in and outside of battle. The reason they are more grey then white, is because they werent injected with *as much* determination. Plus they are all either in or close to hotland, which is where the lab is. Am I making sense here?
It makes so much sense! After all, even if Gaster didn't inject too much determination, we all know determination still has some effect on monsters' bodies, so it makes sense that the little determination they had inside started to affect their bodies with time untill they became greyscale and... somewhat... not all there, themselves...
There's so many misreadings in this theory of the game, thank you for pointing one out because most people here seem to take this video and not question it
@@fyrfytin-27 To be fair that "misreading" is barely relevant to the theory. The date is the same in the dog couple's dialogue and the trophy, so it doesn't matter if he is indeed still living in that room.
@@Kozmic_CL it wouldn't matter if the central part (the Alphys entries being Gaster's) wasn't wrong too. Also I just realized they deleted my comment replying to @imnotmurtaza3651
@@fyrfytin-27 Why do you claim it's wrong? I wouldn't say it is true as it hasn't been proven, but if you claim it's wrong then you must have a reason, right? It would help if you could also share the other misreadings you found in this video. Also idk if I'm coming off as aggressive but that's not my intention, text is just impersonal.
i love the abc file of (maybe) gaster telling the audience to not spread undertale secrets online, then we get him communicating w the audience directly on twitter and maybe at the beginning of deltarune! his ability to break the fourth wall is so interesting!
@@penntopaper9305while it being literally toby I think we are supposed to believe it is being written to have us believe it is gaster discussing this with us, for several reasons
42:50 if photon readings were negative, that would mean whatever he created is absorbing light around it, and there's 2 things we know of that do this. black holes. and the dark world. edit: to clarify, when i said absorbing light, i meant that it makes things darker around it, which is exactly what happens when you see the dark world.
Ngl, I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the story about Gaster falling into the core is just a nice cover-up legend while the actual reason for his disappearance is that he had opened the first ever dark fountain. His messed up look is likely a result of determination contamination in this case (dark fountain creation would be powerful enough to explode nearby determination vats and drown our fellow science man in said substance).
@@DavidSartor0here's the thing, in a medical or scientific test "negative" does in fact mean "lack of" instead of "below zero/reducing", if your COVID test is negative your body isn't absorbing COVID or has anti-COVID, you just don't have COVID. BUT it may in fact mean "below zero/reducing" like in mathematics, and since the entry is about darkness growing, the negative reading may be interpreted both as "there are no photons we can read" and "photons are being eaten by this growing darkness", and honestly the difference may be the key to understand how darkness even works, is it merely a lack of light or is it a hungry entity that needs to be checked before it eats too much?
@@DavidSartor0I feel like that wouldn't make sense, as the statement is probably quantitative and not qualitative, meaning the reading is to check how much light there is. And so the term "negative" would be implying that the photon reading is less than 0. Negative photon readings have been *theorised* to appear in things like wormholes, so Gaster could have been experimenting with the machine sans has in his super duper secret garage.
Everything absorbs light actually, black holes are just noticeably better at it because they're so massive. What do you think photosynthesis and solar panels do?
One point in favour of the Theory that Gerson lives due to DT experiments is the fact that in Deltarune all the Amalgamates are dead, aka the Monsters that made them up have fallen down and there wasn't any experiments to bring them back. And guess who's also dead in Deltarune? Gerson
🤯 So there's more hints that Gaster is involved with everything happening in Deltarune, with that cemetery lineup... That's pretty much the only way to link him to the other tomb stones there.
@@polishnope5609 that plus...dogamy and dogaressa's parents are said to be part of Endogeny. Dogamy explicitly says "sister". Adult monsters in the monster world only age up once they have kids (hence why asgore and toriel are alive and don't look like a bag of ashes, like gerson does, or why Rudy fell down), so somehow...their parents had to naturally outlive them, have Dogamy and Dogaressa de-termined, only then for the parents to fall down years later when Alphys takes over and creates the amalgamates. You can't say that they might've been part of Gaster's DT experiments and just fell down again later...because then what about Gerson? Shouldn't he also be an amalgamate, or at the very least...not present in the game? I'd say Gerson was 100% de-termined. In Deltarune, all graves in the graveyard reference amalgamates...the only outlier being Gerson. But as you said, Dogamy and Dogaressa are still alive.
@@Goldfish218 Okay, mb then. If anything, my point stands even stronger. Dogamy and Dogaressa didn't have to be "alive" for them to age. So there's no way they could've outlived them.
Something I do think is worth noting when it comes to this subject is that the first few True Lab reports align with what Alphys herself says at the end of True Lab. She says that Asgore tasked her to research the SOUL, that she discovered determination, etc, etc. For reference, here is her speech: "As you probably know, ASGORE asked me to study the nature of souls." Compare that to: "*This is it… *Time to do what the King has asked me to do. *I will create the power to free us all. *I will unleash the power of the SOUL." And then as the speech goes on... "*During my research, I isolated a power I called “determination.” *I injected it into dying monsters so their SOULs would last after death. *But the experiment failed. *You see, unlike human’s, monsters’ bodies don’t have enough… *Physical matter to take those concentrations of “determination.” *Their bodies started to meld, and lost what physicality they had. *Pretty soon, all of the test subjects had melted together into… *Those." "*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. *The will to keep living… *The resolve to change fate. *Let’s call this power… *”Determination”." There's also her cut Entry 17, too. "monsters’ physical forms can’t handle “determination” like humans’ can. with too much determination, our bodies begin to break down. everyone’s melted together… " "*Seeing them like this, I knew... *I couldn’t tell their families about it. *I couldn’t tell anyone about it. *No matter how much everyone was asking me." "*the families keep calling me to ask when everyone is coming home. *what am i supposed to say? *i don’t even answer the phone anymore." This also follows up with an earlier, proper grammar entry. "*Seems like this research was a dead end… *But at least we got a happy ending out of it…? *I sent the SOULS and the vessel back to ASGORE. *And I called all of the families and told them everyone’s alive. *I’ll send everyone back tomorrow. :)" So it stands to reason that these were written by one person. When you look at the entries in chronological order, the lowercase ones align with moments when Alphys was under great emotional distress or depressed, as they do briefly resume proper grammar again only to slip back into lazier writing. With True Lab being so focused on Alphys (right down to the music using her leitmotif), I believe Toby's intent really was that she wrote all of the entries and Gaster had his own thing going (perhaps with Alphys using blueprints he made to make the DT extractor). That's not to say that there aren't interesting ideas at play here, and it's also true that Undertale usually uses capitalization very deliberately, but just as Sans sometimes speaks in normal grammar during certain serious or emotional moments, there's certainly room to argue that Alphys slacking on professionalism in certain entries is due to her just not feeling it. She went from more confident at the start to a deep downward spiral. That's obviously not to discredit the immense work that went into this theory or this video, but I just wanted to kinda give my own two cents as someone who sits in the opposite camp. The production values on this are very well done, and any feature length video essay takes a crazy amount of thought and care. EDIT: It's also worth noting that Alphys definitely made Flowey from the first golden flower. If you look at the reports here... "ENTRY NUMBER 10 *experiments on the vessel are a failure. *it doesn’t seem to be any different from the control cases. *whatever. *they’re a hassle to work with anyway. *the seeds just stick to you, and won’t let go…" Golden Flowers came from the surface. The reason you see Golden Flower patches in places like the dump is because the seeds got carried around. Alphys frequents the dump, so the flowers grew there. Asriel died in the throne room, so the flowers grew there, and Chara was buried in the Ruins, which explains their presence there too. Golden Flowers are not the same as buttercups, as the latter are toxic and did grow Underground. It being the first flower would explain why Flowey has Asriel's memories, as the flower grew from Asriel's dust, whereas the other flowers came later. Plus, Alphys freaks out when Papyrus mentions a golden flower in the Pacifist reunion scene, which further adds to Alphys having been the one to have "created" Flowey during her research. I think it's really underselling Alphys to treat her as a fraud and really contrary to what True Lab was meant to be about. Gaster is a character who is fascinating, but ultimately is missable. A fun easter egg and very tied to Deltarune (it's obvious Toby has big plans for him), but I generally just don't agree with downplaying her significance and treating her as a copycat who failed on all fronts. The reason Flowey worked was because he had Asriel's dust, whereas the other vessels were just ordinary flowers. Keep in mind that Alphys is clearly competent in many areas. She built MTT's bodies (even if NEO ended up being useless), was able to make a phone have dimensional storage and turn into a jetpack, and is quite adept at hacking and manipulating the puzzles in Hotland from afar. I think one last point I want to make is that the way we know Gaster writes/talks in Deltarune and in the twitter takeovers is very different. All caps. Kind of fragmented speech. It's a very distinctive 'voice' that I do think would have carried over to his writing if he had penned the reports. The bit about the queen is one I've seen come up a few times, but I think knowing a queen existed and left a long time ago isn't quite the same as knowing *who* she is, and given the first flower grew from a Boss Monster's dust, it may have given it a long lifespan... or golden flowers are just really long lived. That, or Toby just made an oversight, but I can concede that it is kinda funky and one of those weird Undertale lore ambiguities since the precise timeline is kinda unclear.
Yeah, I agree there's a few... Bumps, in this theory. Plus I'm curious to see if it stands the test of "Japanese Translation Comparison". Although there are a few things this theory I'd say makes excellent note of: -Alphys not knowing who the queen is at the end of Pacifist, despite other evidence that she should have access to this information, -The oddities in regards to the elevator generator and the screens relaying the Entries to us, and how they might be showing Flowey's continued involvement, -And the idea that Entry 17 may be a recording, (as well as it and Tape 5 perhaps being a recording of the lab from a security camera,) and demonstrating how it lined up with the ways the other recordings have been presented.
@@dochatter3638 Tbh, I think there's a really simple explanation for the queen thing. Alphys probably knew there *was* a queen (all the monsters in the New Home story segment do as well), and just didn't know what she looked like. A lot of my issues with this theory stem from a) Alphys bashing and discrediting her work, b) over complicating what is meant to be a very focused arc on Alphys' mistakes during the DT experiments by inserting Gaster in, and c) Gaster is a character you only find out about in fun events, so making it essential DT experiments lore just feels very questionable to me, when I think the Gaster teases in UT were all meant to set up his role in Deltarune and it's very likely that his experiments, while still quite possibly utilizing DT, were of a different nature. Because otherwise, why have Alphys retread old ground? It's just more streamlined if it was all Alphys. Gerson and Dogamy and Dogaressa could just be old, and monster lifespans are not exactly clear (plus Gerson is a turtle). I feel like if either of them had been experimented on, it would've come up? This is also why I'm not super big on Undyne having injected DT from either scientist when she could just be naturally determined as a strength of her character.
On top of this, we know how Gaster speaks/writes even when he isn't speaking in wingdings. He has a very distinct manner of speaking, always in all capitals and odd spacing- almost never finishing a full sentence on its own but fragmenting it into separate lines. Such as the case with: THIS NEXT EXPERIMENT SEEMS VERY VERY INTERESTING. A very clear, distinct manner of speech that lines up perfect with how he speaks in Deltarune as well as the twitter account takeovers where it's very clearly him speaking. The only difference between the two being he isn't speaking in wingdings here, so we know that even when wingdings aren't a factor he still maintains the exact manner of speech. We have no reason to think that he would suddenly start writing with proper capitalization and grammar when writing lab entries
To be fair, @@Slyze, one solution to that is that he had an assistant write those for him. He DOES say "WHAT DO YOU TWO THINK", after all. He's not alone, at least when he talks in Entry 17. Sock even says something like that in the video, if I recall correctly.
The intended implication seems to be that asgore does still use the kitchen; the thrown away recipes are likely him trying and failing to recreate toriels pie. More strongly though, is the snails in the fridge; Napstablook at the snail farm says that their best customer disappeared a long time ago, but occasionally a "big hairy guy" comes and buys lots of snails, suggesting that he's trying to recreate toriels snail recipes too. While I personally believe that the nose nuzzle trophy is from ancient times with toriel (especially given the fact that even after all this time he clearly hasn't been able to move on from those times emotionally), there are theories floating around that he did find some one else more recently, who then passed on. The note may have simply been left there, or regularly restored, as it's still relevant to any monsters who come to visit. I personally don't think that ALL of the uppercase entries were written by gaster, perhaps just the earlier ones talking about discovering determination, and the parts mentioning blueprints being where alphys comes in. The stuff about flowey manipulating the pacifist run together is totally spot on, though I think the phone call from papyrus could still be him being pushed to recite lines given by flowey, which would explain how nervous he is and the use of his full face portrait in the call (even over the phone toriels face appears, but not from that one echo flower, and while flowey can change his face a lot, it's always still in the shape of a flower, until he gets access to souls). But that aside, this is great, lots of very thoughtful evidence based stuff.
"I think the phone call from papyrus could still be him being pushed to recite lines given by flowey, which would explain how nervous he is and the use of his full face portrait in the call". That is exactly what I thought too when that part of the video came up!! After all, the way Papurys says "very home" is a very Papyrus thing to say, it is so in character I'm sure Flowey wouldn't come up with that, since I think it was established that Flowey thinks lowly of Papyrus, only as a tool. Flowey would feel way too "dignified" to try to use Papyrus' speech patterns, which Flowey would find annoying and/or ridiculous. I'm certain the "very home" is something Papyrus added to the lines Flowey gave him, since we all know how Papyrus likes to put his own brand on everything he does
more proof the house isn't totally abandoned is the warm coals of the fire (recently used) and asgore's diary entry has a recent entry with the ink still being wet.
Honestly I'd argue Asgore didn't abandon their house in New Home (I mean where else would he live), but rather is too sentimental to change/get rid of anything related to Toriel. I mean, the ink in his journal is wet, and the coals in his fireplace are hot.
While I do not subscribe entirely to your take on the entires, your analysis of the VHS tapes and Entry 17 potentially being a video recording similar to them was a really intriguing and compelling proposition. I actually felt a tingling chill. Awesome video! Definitely subscribed.
Wow. I'll be honest. This has actually made me realise so many new things, which I haven't even considered before. At this point, I was certain that there won't be a new theory which would make a compelling case for a not wildly agreed upon thing, but here it is.
Great video with some really compelling ideas, but there is something that I take issue with. That being, Gaster can't be the author of the entries we read in the true lab. We know how Gaster speaks/writes even when he isn't speaking in wingdings. He has a very distinct manner of speaking, always in all capitals and odd spacing- almost never finishing a full sentence on its own but fragmenting it into separate lines. Such as the case in entry 17 with: THIS NEXT EXPERIMENT SEEMS VERY VERY INTERESTING. A very clear, distinct manner of speech that lines up perfect with how he speaks in Deltarune during the goner maker sequence as well as the twitter account takeovers where it's very clearly him speaking. He even repeats the same phrase during the first twitter takeover when Deltarune was releasing, writing: SOMETHING I THINK YOU WILL FIND VERY, VERY, INTERESTING. The only difference between the two being he isn't speaking or writing in wingdings in those instances, so we know that even when wingdings aren't a factor he still maintains the exact manner of speech. If that's the case, we have no reason to think that he would suddenly start writing with proper capitalization and grammar when writing lab entries. In all instances where we know it's him speaking or writing, he has a very distinct manner of speaking that's easily identifiable as him- wingdings or not. We've never seen him speak any other way
I think that's just how he speaks/writes now. Maybe the experiment that is happening in entry 17 screwed him up and now he only speaks in all caps. Characters who speak in all caps in this universe tend to be more goofy and silly in nature. But Gaster is described by the followers as a very brilliant man, so I feel like he would've spoken normally.
@@bustinmayo6595 But even if that's the case, we have no evidence for it. The only samples of Gaster's writing we have are all as I described- we currently have no indication he's ever spoken in any other manner. And even so, I wouldn't say the way he speaks is "goofy" or contrary to what the followers description would lead us to believe. He speaks in very cryptic, scientific language from what we've seen. "PHOTON READINGS NEGATIVE" "IT CONFORMED TO THE REFLECTION." "IT IS IMMUNE TO ITS OWN IMAGE." These are all things he says, if Gaster is a brilliant scientist like the followers describe this language definitely fits that expectation. It's not like what he says is goofy or hard to understand, as if him being shattered made his speech unstable and incoherent or something- it's just cryptic and scientific.
So flowey listened to 17 and understood it since the tape actually says entry 17 outloud. When flowey showed frisk the tapes, they skipped the tape that said 17 because it didnt fit with the order flowey had in mind and seemed irrelevant to souls or determination. Perhaps flowey didnt use 17 in the entries shown to frisk because they knew about 17 and didnt want to name "18" as entry 17 since the real 17 clearly already existed.
My only issue with this theory is the dog couple. When the dog amalgamate returns to their families they mention that their parents were fused into it, if they are so long lived why are their parents still alive? Are they long lived as well?
Papyrus' and Undyne's Undernet usernames end in 95 and 91 respectively, and I always assumed that was 2091 and 2095. I don't feel like the dog couple were apart of the determination experiments, as their parents from that one amalgamation was probably from Alphys' experimentation. I don't know who the dog couple lost too, but I guess they were apart of the 2098 competition, while Toriel and Asgore was 1998 as we are lead to assume.
You could argue that their parents were also subjects of the original Determination experiments, and eventually its power to keep them alive did run out, but that seems a bit of a stretch. It is much easier to believe that they were simply talking about a different Nose-Nuzzling Championship than the one which Toriel and Asgore won, even though it does still seem like a strange coincidence that they both happened in years that end with "98"! 🤔
I went to the Wiki and they seem to recognize your smell as human in dialogue, so that means that they are longer living than most other monsters. But they are alive in deltarune while gerson is not.
@@DemiIsNotHere Recognising a human smell is definitely very interesting too, I hadn't thought about the significance of that before. If it's true, then they are at least old enough remember when the last human fell into the Underground, which of course most Monsters don't seem to have been around for, including the Nose-Nuzzlers.
Biggest problem with this theory is the fact that Dogamy and Dogaressa are alive and well in deltarune universe, while amalgamates and Gerson are long dead. Dogamy and Dogaressa are a part of a dog gang and can be found in police station with the rest of the crew. If they are really that old, they should be dead by now.
"Deltarune's world is a different one with different characters that have lived different lives" while this is not exactly what Toby said,its a simplified version
@@user-bx3ut8kp4g my point being is that there is corellation between fallen down monsters between the two games. That is, if monsters in deltarune fall down like in undertale.
@@theBaka9 if were to assume monsters have "physical" bodies in deltarune (hence the lack of magic and sans bleeding if you subscribe to "sans is from deltarune" theory) than its likely they dont enter the fallen down state and just die like humans do
@@user-bx3ut8kp4g that is a great point, but it conflicts with the fact that there may be magic in deltarune lightner world. I've seen some theories about it. But if your point turns out to be correct - that would be game-chanigng
Okay I've been told about some new info that I've gotta share that sadly kills most of this theory. In the Legends of Localizations book, Toby explicitly says that Alphys discovered and extracted Determination. That is just a hard stop to Gaster doing early DT experiments. The most i can see Gaster being involved is by designing the blueprints for a theoretical machine to extract something from within human souls, which became the DT extractor. Honestly, that fits the little we know about Gaster pretty well. He was known as someone who worked really slowly, so i can see him taking a long time to design a theoretical device but never manage to finish it. It is a bit sad since i did like the flower hivemind idea, but them's the breaks. I would still like to highlight the Entry 17 recording theory since that is entirely divorced from this. It could explain why Gaster uses Wingdings in the entry but not in the intro to Deltarune. It's possible that in Deltarune's intro he is typing commands to us, and that idea is bolstered by his text in the opening not having a talk sound. Also, Chara dying in the lab is another cool way to think about that scene. It makes sense that if their child grew sick Toriel and Asgore would take them to the most brilliant monster they have on payroll rather than letting them die in their home(though I'm not sure how much help Gaster would be lmao. He probably has a doctorate in engineering and magical chemistry, not medicine). Overall, I'm excited to see what you might have to say about Deltarune and Gaster, but from my view the other parts of this theory are a bit of a wash.
> In the Legends of Localizations book, Toby explicitly says that Alphys discovered and extracted Determination. That is just a hard stop to Gaster doing early DT experiments. Probably, but not necessarily? He isn't exactly expanding the story on Gaster, it's meant to be mysterious. Noone* remembers him, officially, and Gaster is not named even in eg. the Tarot merchandise. > Honestly, that fits the little we know about Gaster pretty well. He was known as someone who worked really slowly, so i can see him taking a long time to design a theoretical device but never manage to finish it. This does fit with Alphys being a good mechanic. > It is a bit sad since i did like the flower hivemind idea, but them's the breaks. Doesn't it still leave the first flower unaddressed?
@@Minefan200 > Gaster being forgotten is a fandom trope. I mean by the vast majority. > Why did Asgore take so long to find a Royal Scientist otherwise? Well, that's also mentioned in the video, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
@@iamsam-cu9rz huh, did you also think “EXP” being “Execution Points” was stupid and childish? Because if so I regret to inform you that you are simply a dark pit and we cannot be friends
@@iamsam-cu9rz I mean as far as I’m aware it was directly confirmed it was ‘ de-termination ‘ and ‘ re-fused ‘ in the art book? It’s not stupid. It’s got evidence. I mean, come on, if there’s evidence that wordplay like this is completely possible in other areas of the game too, handwriting not literally meaning handwriting isn’t much of a reach at all.
@@sausagetuti it doesn’t fit tho. EXP and LOVE are acronyms like OSHA. They are capitalized in every instance we see them. Prefixes are not the same as acronyms. Determination is one word with the prefix De- but you can’t just take the prefix off and say “wow this is wordplay” because it’s part of the word.
this theory just overcomplicates so much of what the true lab describes in the entries and undermines alphys' narrative significance/contributions in it. even mentioning toby's wordplay of "de-termination" in the localization book mentions in the same sentence how ALPHYS came up with the term after PRODUCING the substance, she wouldve been the first to make it and not gaster.
I don't agree with the video, but considering there was already blueprints on how to use the DT Extractor that Alphys *found* , I think Gaster already discovered it and used it for his own separate experiments but Alphys officially named it
@@user-gd4fu3sf5i The more obvious interpretation to me is that Gaster created the blueprints for the DT extractor, but didn't have time to start building it before he died. Then Alphys took over his position, and used his blueprints to construct the machine and use it for the first time.
Just want to point out, the different capitalization and grammar and all that between the different entries is likely just a difference in the level of professionalism based off of both alphys’ mental state and the subject matter she’s writing about. There’s a distinct difference between talking about the nature of SOULs and “i love hanging out in the dump :)”. To argue that 2 different people are writing those not only discredits a lot of alphys’ involvement in the true lab, a GIANT part of her character, it also makes it look like she essentially just treated most of these entries as more of a personal journal than anything else, which isn’t a great look for her. Also, Toby has directly confirmed before that determination as a substance was at the very least named by Alphys (“”Determination” also turns out to be Alphys’ code word for an actual physical substance that she injects into monsters, one that humans produce naturally in large quantities” - Legends of Localization), which all but directly confirms that the earlier entries were written by her.
EXACTLY. I feel that the UT fandom is treating Alphys really shitty recently. Gaster was the greatest scientist. So great that he is incomparable to others. Of course, alphys would seem like a "fraud" in comparison to him. She is capable of great creation (including the seaweed ice cream lol). I really don't like how the guy phrased her as fraud, basically making her seem as a rando that snuck her way into the royal scientist position. She is a damn good scientist who in the end wants better for everyone. She had her fair share of awesome creations. Her creations don't involve mega builds, but something that may appease people and make their lives a little simpler through her appliances (hot fridge for undyne). I feel that she fits the royal scientist role in a way that she makes everyone's PERSONAL lives better, instead of overall public that is Gaster. I kind of think Gaster and Alphys have a stark contrast in their ways of science and engineering, as in he is the architect and she is the interior designer of the whole underground. Diminishing her title is kind of ridiculous, and pointing all the fingers towards her, when Asgore is just as complicit in these actions. And to me, it reads that he's aware of these actions of hers but still sees her as a worthy scientist, and the greatest mistake of Asgore is entrusting someone so meek to darker projects that involved living things, which basically led to the whole UT lore lol
As enamored as I am with the idea of what Gaster will do in Deltarune, I feel like to try and insert Gaster into this story is to try to strip Alphys of her agency, in terms of both her accomplishments and mistakes. Don't really care for the "gaster wrote some of the entries" theory.
Not only that, but the idea that the minor discrepancies in writing styles in the entries are properly explained by attributing it to a character whose speech characterization is wildly different from every single other canon appearance requires you to buy into something much more dramatic than just having Alphys write all of it. The discrepancies in Alphys writing it all are MUCH simpler than the discrepancy created by having Ring-a-Ding-Ding Blaster type out in a way unlike every one of his canon appearances. It's even worse in japanese too lmao
@@In.New.York.I.Milly.Rock. That's just false. As shown in the video, we've seen that characters who speak in special fonts write in the standard font. To assume Gaster would be the only character to write in the special font he uses to speak is WAY more of a stretch. On top of that, the question at the end makes it clear it was some sort of dialogue, as it wouldn't make sense to include that when writing an entry.
I fail to see how "It makes Alphys look worse" is an argument for anything, though? If that's the case, then it is what it is. I don't think less of Alphys's character because of it, but just saying "I don't like it" doesn't make it any less possible.
I think determination on a meta narrative level is a form of diagetic "plot armor" / "main character juice" as it gives the ability to change fate as in DETERMINE fate to your own liking much like a traditional rpg protagonist would in a story with choices.
And Save Points / Overwriting the Savefile literally "fills you with" something called "Determination", as well as heals the player. When we start the game, we learn over time that our presence overided Flowey's ability to save and reload, for some reason. In Deltarune it's different, it fills the player with "The power of - something - shines within you" or something to that effect.
@@lilacpenguin5329 It's less that the save points fill you with determination and more like taking in the immediate enviroment around you helps you keep going. In normal and nice routes, you revel in stopping to smell the flowers every once in a while.
I mean it's literally the ability to *determine* how the story goes. If you don't want the story to go a certain way, I.E. with Frisk dying, your *determination* lets you *determine* that it doesn't. Likewise, if you have a regret, and go back to change it, you *determine* that thing didn't happen. Of course, as another being with *determination*, Flowey used to be able to do this, but because you have more, he gets overwritten: He can't *determine* what happens anymore. But he does still have some ability to see what's really going on, or rather, *determine* what you change (heh heh.) Honestly, one of the problems I have with the Genocide Route is Undyne's determination ass-pull, because it both muddies the waters as far as what determination is and how it works, and because it distracts from what I've always interpreted as the core of the route's message, I.E. how a lack of emotional investment in a story mixed with a completionist urge leads players to perform actions that are unconscionable, out of nothing other than boredom. But that's a discussion for another time.
This is really good. The possible explanation of entry 17 being a new experiment makes a lot of sense. The missing original entry number 16 was likely an explanation for what that experiment was. There is still the question of where the blueprints came from. It's likely they were either given to Gaster or more likely found it snooping around somewhere as it follows entry 4 talking about the tapes as opposed to being created by him, hence the significant time gap. But who created them? Although Flowey is responsible for bringing the entries to our attention and activating them, it's also possible Alphys originally mixed the WD Gaster logs and her own, considering she follows his method so closely, down to getting a flower for a vessel. Maybe she decided to only overwrite the messages where the experiments differed and Flowey didn't notice the differences in writing when changing the order. Overall though, this is really comprehensive, I think this is now my go to video for the True Lab entries.
you know i think the blueprints are still alphys using them, maybe she was trying to get into the role of royal scientist and trying to think like gaster, possibly following the entries he left I a sense
entry 17 being a video is not something iv seen before, such a kool take and im convinced, maybe looking at instances of sounds being slowed down if there are any other instances that might help prove the slow to distance connection.
Note that I'm writing this comment as I'm watching the video. *> The main mystery being "who wrote the True Lab entries?"* Simple answer; it's Alphys. It becomes very apparent through a lot of what's written. Even before you enter the True Lab, there's Alphys's note in front of the elevator. "You all at least deserve to know what I did." There's also entries like 11, 20, 21, that note stuff related to Alphys. "now that mettaton's made it big, he never talks to me anymore." "one about this cute teacup he found that looks like me" "i spend all my time at the garbage dump now" Both the proper case and lowercase entries are VERY likely written by Alphys alone. The proper case being more professional, and the lowercase being more like how she writes on the Undernet. Entires 8 and 10 both are about the flower vessel, for example, and have different formats. "In the center of his garden, there's something special. The first golden flower, that grew before all the others." "whatever. they're a hassle to work with anyway. the seeds just stick to you, and won't let go.." And regarding the famously known ENTRY NUMBER SEVENTEEN. That one speciifcally is by Dr. W.D. Gaster, but not at the same time period as the rest of the entires. It's a different experiment from a different time. *(Note from after writing a bit more: I DO like the idea that this entry is a spoken one, rather than typed out, though. I never thought about it until now.) *> Alphys never speaks or writes in lowercase* Actually, many of her Undernet posts are in entirely lowercase. Not all of them, but many of them. For example, literally the first one we get I think; "just realized i didn't watch undyne fight the human v.v well i know she's unbeatable i'll ask her abt it later ^.^ for now i gotta call up the human and guide them =^.^=" *(Note from after writing the thing below: okay, they DID mention this a bit afterwards)* I CAN say that it's interesting that entry 8 mentioning the queen, but Alphys reacts with "(THERE'S TWO OF THEM???)" in the True Pacifist ending. Though, I wouldn't be surprised if she knew of the queen, but not that she was a Boss Monster like Asgore. It seems like an easy enough explanation. That, or Toby isn't too good of a writer sometimes, which... shows, on occasion. *> That leaves only one person who could have written the normal entries.* I believe it was still Alphys there as well, especially considering the mention of the flower vessel is written in both proper and lowercase. Entires 8 and 10, as I mentioned earlier. All in all, I don't believe Gaster wrote any of the entires in the True Lab, and believe they were all done by Alphys. ENTRY NUMBER SEVENTEEN was more than likely part of its own thing, unrelated to the others. The video has some good points, but the main thing is rocky at best, and nonsense at worse, sadly. Though, the effort is commendable, and the video is really good.
@@DavidSartor0 personally, it feels like that explanation is just handing Alphys's work to Gaster, and makes it like Alphys is just copying him, rather than doing her own thing.
@@SBtorms If you don't like that, then: Alphys worked on Golden Flowers for the same reasons Gaster did; they're easy to transplant, big enough to inject large amounts of determination into, last long enough for it to take effect, very common, and the King's favorite plant.
I think it's important to remember that everything in Undertale relating to Gaster was added _very_ late in development, when the game was almost ready to ship. GameMaker keeps track of a project's resources with arrays (sequential lists where everything has a unique ID number), with new assets being added to the end of the list as they're created. Everything Gaster is near the very end of these lists, meaning they were put into the project when nearly everything else was done. I believe the Occam's Razor interpretation of this is that they're easter eggs that were added once Toby felt that the game was basically finished, and that he did not consider these bits to be important, and especially not as important as something like the True Lab. He obviously knew he'd be working on Deltarune as soon as the Kickstarter stretch goal (referring to the game as "darker") was met, and Deltarune is known to at least be based on a much older idea that predates any planning for Undertale, so a character like Gaster was almost certainly kicking around in his mind, but Toby was also impressively disciplined in keeping Undertale as its own contained project. I firmly believe that if he saw the two projects as being integrated from the start, these bits of foreshadowing would have appeared throughout Undertale's development, rather than sprinkled in at the end. (My personal Deltarune theory is that while a direct connection to Undertale will be revealed, it won't actually matter to the existing story of Undertale and won't meaningfully change how we experience it.) There are a few things in the True Lab notes that are genuinely weird, like the references to Toriel, but it's extremely easy to slip from theorizing into writing fanfiction, and if it takes an hour to explain your theory, you'd better be sure you know how to spot the difference. I also think it's a very bad habit to assume that creators want to misdirect and throw off their audiences. Red herrings are a very situational storytelling tool. Most authors never use them at all, and when they do, they're typically intended to mislead protagonists just as much as the audience. There are a handful people like Hideo Kojima who are notorious for trolling their fans with disinformation (and even that was mostly a phase for him), but I've never seen any evidence whatsoever that Toby Fox is one of them.
22:27 Asgore wasn't amazed at the transferral of a Monster's SOUL into a mechanical body. Mettaton was advertized to Asgore as a machine with a soul of it's own, which was the lie that got her into the Royal Scientist position. If an artificial SOUL could be created, then could the barrier be broken without more lives being lost? 23:40 Calling Alphys a fraud is a...*kinda hard* on her. Considering Mettaton''s box form, which she built, is literally impenetrable by you and she turns your phone into a *separate inventory* and a *jetpack*. She lied about Mettaton, true, but she can do cool things when she puts her mind to it. 25:35 Gaster being forgotten is a point of contention, because why would Asgore take such a long time to replace someone who he forgot? 31:42 Alphys could've known of a queen and not know she was a fluffy goat like Asgore. The True Lab tapes has explanations as to why the videos were all black, like having the lens cap on while recording. Alphys didn't get to see Asgore and Toriel nuzzling because Toriel decided to film in the dark. 33:24 The fact that Alphys types in proper uppercase when writing a review on Mew Mew Kissy Cutie 2 can clue in to the fact that she changes how she writes based on the setting. After all, a review is supposed to be formal, so, proper uppercase. If Asgore had already assigned Gaster with trying to find a loophole in the barrier using human SOULs before Asriel was born, why did more have to die after the first 2 or 3? It makes more sense to say that Asgore hadn't considered a solution to the barrier other than opening it with 7 human SOULs. And then came Alphys, with a machine that has a soul of it's own, presenting a possible loophole to killing more children. Having being presented with this alternate solution, he hired her as Royal Scientist. 50:44 ...The CORE was literally an underground-wide electric generator? Why would it be used for the sole purpose of extracting a soul from a monster? That just feels very impractical, as the entry states. 54:32 "Alphys using a flower as a neutral vessel for DT like Gaster because she's a fraud" is not a great argument and assuming she picked more flowers as a control case to Flowey after injecting him with DT takes less mental gymnastics. 1:06:46 But if Gaster was the one who injected the First Golden Flower with DT, then he should've been the one to create Flowey. As, when Asriel died, his dust was spread onto the seeds the first flower grew from, so his essence lived on in that flower. 1:13:14 If Asgore hadn't been in New Home since Toriel left, where did he sleep?? Also the journal entries are new. 1:16:26 Ok, if Dogamy and Dogaressa were part of Gaster's original DT experiments, what about Endogeny? The dogs that made up Endogeny were included in those about to be "Fallen Down", from the Uppercase author. Why didn't they come back as normal monsters? 1:17:48. Wasn't the DELTA RUNE found by Gerson and adopted by monsters as an iconography of hope? 1:19:22. The golden flowers are buttercups?? Huh?
I don't think they said the Golden Flowers are buttercups. It's possible Alphys still had the flower that would become Flowey. She says she was injecting everything with determination, so it makes sense she'd add more determination to the same flower. I don't think they said that Gaster was forgotten by everyone; just most people, because they died of old age.
Honestly, saying that Gaster injected Dogamy and Dogaressa with DT and them waking up means nothing came out of the experiment is a fundamental misunderstanding of why the experiments were done in the first place. The True Lab experiments were done to find a way to prolong a Monster's soul after they die, not to save them from falling down. The fact that they even woke up in the first place should've been noteworthy enough to document for the future.
01:13:08 That's impossible because the ink used for the diary in this room is still wet when you first reach there. Toby even went so far to to correct that it has dried when inspecting it after fighting Asriel.
PLEASE THIS VIDEO IS SO SCARY 😭 i want so badly to add on to the really smart comments that everyone else left but this video literally feels like found footage the editing is CRAZY
Oh my god, this is earth-shattering to me. I never thought how I looked at this game could be changed nearly nine years out, yet you have done it. Bravo.
I'm only up to about 1 hour in, so I will continue watching, but I feel that the initial premise that alphys did not write all of the entries is wrong. There are two entry 17s in the game, and only one of them is Gaster. the other is an explanation as to the amalgamation effect, the same one Alphys gives us in game (likely omitted for dialogue flow). As for "how did Alphys know the Queen" - The VHS tapes, as for "Why does alphys say 'what we have now, monster souls'", she's presuming that no more humans will fall, and being proactive with a solution, finding a way to make a monster soul capable of destroying the barrier. "The unused entry 17 was removed from the code in later versions" - this is true, however I don't think this means we should discredit it entirely. However, this is sort of a moot point, as entry 11 confirms Alphys is the royal scientist, and as of yet I see no reason to assume they're out of order in the numbering sequence. Gaster's entry being 17 is likely just because Alphys' entry 17 was removed for brevity. While I'm not sure Asgore was ever made aware of Mettaton's SOUL, I do like the interpretation that seeing a monster soul in a physical vessel is why he was amazed. We know for a fact that Alphys' writing style is not exclusively lowercase like Sans, as she uses capitals in her Undernet posts. It's most likely that she forgoes using proper grammar when she doesn't feel like it, due to the emotional trauma of creating amalgamates or the inner conflict of mettaton's body. I like the idea that tape 5 is security footage, or something similar, and carrying that through to what entry 17 actually IS, is pretty compelling. Now, shaking letters is not exclusively for characters on the verge of death. It's also for any time a character's voice would be shaky, such as if they're fearful (flowey) or similar. However, this is still an important point for what exactly Gaster is doing (speaking)... There's an omission here. In one of the earlier ('normal') entries, the author writes "Using the blueprints, I have extracted [Determination] from the human souls." This implies they used blueprints that had already existed. If Gaster was the first royal scientist, or at least the first to experiment with DT, did he not write the blueprints? in my mind, it makes more sense for Gaster to have started looking into the topic, but being waylaid by THE DARKNESS and Alphys picks up the pieces. I appreciate that you introduce the concept of asgore's side chick just to debunk it, though I personally don't think the house has been abandoned (Asgore is still trying to replicate snail pie.) Ultimately, this is a very well thought out and coherent theory video. I don't agree with the conclusions, but I deeply appreciate the effort that went into this.
I take back every negative thing I have currently or will in the future write in this comment for the based choice of using "Kris" as the first human's name
On the "shaking letters" part, we also see shaking letters with Asgore when he's emotional (although thats at the end when we defeat him,) and with Toriel, and with Flowey like you said, and Undyne that was mentioned in this video. They're either afraid, dying, emotional or similar. The text for narration while we explore the world in a No Mercy route also shakes in some instances. Excluding Papyrus, what these characters have in common is that they all have Determination or are related to Determination to some degree. I'm not sure what those could imply for Entry Number 17, but Im glad somebody else caught this detail
I think a good refutation to this is that Alphys seemingly doesn't know about the queen/Toriel, whereas the ordinary-styled writer of the entries clearly knows about the tapes, including the one of Toriel.
@@MattJDave lol, some random froggits in Asgore’s house will tell you about the whole story about the royal family, Toriel’s existence isn’t some secret knowledge
@@joshuafreeman3609damn, I forgot about the random monsters telling you about the royal family. Of course people know about the queen even if they don't know what she looked like, there are history books and stuff in the underground.
This video is really well made, interesting, and brimming with personally. I’m shocked it was made only 9 days ago and yet it not only taught me more info about this game, but also completely convinced me of a narrative I’ve never heard before. Definitely subscribing. Well done man
Just a small note, on the comments concerning Flowey being unable to feel emotion, or specifically compassion - given Undertale's clear lack of an abject, outright villain and Toby Fox's tendencies in character writing, I think it's very likely that Flowey (and really, Asriel as well) saying this is specifically a trauma response, not a result of their state as a flower. Asriel has shown to be not completely reliable for information on multiple occasions (namely, placing their image of his old friend upon Frisk), and is very obviously subject to a lot of trauma - the way his friend treated him, the death of his friend, being fatally wounded while both literally and metaphorically carrying his dead friend with him, coming back to life and living for an unknowable and horrific amount of time in effective isolation from everyone around him due to his status as an effective time god, the fact that all of this happened to him during his childhood and he was literally never allowed to "grow up" - it's very likely that he's trying to cope with his feelings by shoving them as far down as possible. I feel this is especially supported in the Undertale alarm clock dialogue, which IIRC is considered canon - where he still shows the emotional bonds that he has with his family, although he tries to hide it.
Incredible theory!One of the most solid, groundbreaking and well-made I ever saw. I'm a little dumbfounded that: -Gaster would say "by using the blueprint" instead "by using the blueprint I made" or "by using the blueprint I made" -Gaster failed to create Flowey. I understand that without the mean to fill it with enough determination it won't be able to break the barrier, but creating Flowey would be more easy and less sensitive than injecting determination to the monsters. And having a "Flowey" would prove that the vessel can be used to destroy the barrier. I guess he understood that making a souless being come alive would be dangerous and immoral, especially if there is Asriel dust on it. -The way he types and his personality is so different from Deltarune's Gaster, and ot a lesser degree from entry seventeen. Also I don't feel like's he dying in entry seventeen, sine he's calm, taling to two other persons, and speaking about a next experiment.
1) Why, if it's obvious? 2) He didn't know that. 3) It's not unreasonable to assume someone comes across a little different in text, as opposed to speech. > Also I don't feel like's he dying in entry seventeen, sine he's calm, taling to two other persons, and speaking about a next experiment. Yeah, I assume everyone would be more bothered if he were dying.
Great stuff! Usually, stylistic analysis isn't a very good guide to authorship, as can be seen by the disagreements in the fandom over the authorship of the different entries; but here, I really like the narrative effect of assuming two different authors. It makes Gaster's absence that much more tragic because he turns out to be even more of an irreplaceable genius whose work did a substantial amount of good for monsters. It also makes Alphys more sympathetic because while she clearly has some skill with science, she doesn't match up to Gaster and is crushed by the expectations placed on her. "What an act to follow!" As for how Flowey organizes the entries, it might be his way of mocking Alphys: contrasting the success of Gaster's determination experiments with the failure of Alphys'. Some have mentioned the entry that talks about "using blueprints" as evidence Alphys wrote the earlier entries, but it depends on if the entry is to be read as "Using the blueprints [to build the machine], I've extracted determination." Or "Using the blueprints [to use an already-built machine], I've extracted determination." Either way still seems to be totally compatible with Gaster having been the first to build and use the Determination Extractor. Lastly, the part about the original flower injected with determination proliferating and being the cause of so many flowers in the Underground was a great connection.
Gerson in genoside references that he wont buy anything from you even at knife point, and that he knows a battle cannot start in a shop (being very meta). I have an inkling that all the characters that have some dialogue that is meta means they have some de-termination or more will to stay alive than others.
oh. I had never connected the fact Gaster is the one to say "i thought they were goners" with goner kid and the gaster followers (as well as the deltatune grey body thang). Fun.
i love how this has been my favorite game for 6+ years and yet i still discover more things and new theories keep popping up, this is so intricate, well presented and SO interesting!!!! well done to you !!!!
This was by far one of the best theory videos on gaster to date, and the Dogamy and Dogaressa being the first determination experiments is one of the most unique and actually makes sense lore wise. 10/10 theory video, this has to blow up
Just because a character doesn’t speak in lowercase doesn’t mean it can’t be them as seen with Sans in the judgement hall where he talks normally for a speech
I find it impossible to imagine toby put this much thought into this. Likely the simplest explanation is that all entries were by alphys except the missing one because weird timeline shenanigans.
@Poly_0000 I mean just because he looks like a reference to another character doesn't mean he has no relevance in the story at all. He's clearly a very important character in deltarune, and has some major relevance in undertale too
I knew I recognized you from somewhere! I absolutely love your Petscop videos! Glad to see you tackling this series, it's just as interesting in many aspects. I am absolutely looking forward to your futures theories and analysis, my personal favorite of yours was Dial Impulse 😊
This an incredible video. I have never heard this story told this way, especially with the two different determination experiments. It makes a remarkable, and intriguing story. Thank you, you have earned a subscriber.
I'm impressed and glad that in 2024 there's still theories about Undertale that can surprise me and make so much sense! I love this one, will eagerly wait for more from you
@@lilacpenguin5329 Flowey stringing you along isn't exactly new information, since it's already known that Papyrus likes to talk to a flower and that they're friends. Said flower gives him predictions, as well. Predictions that may have ended up becoming true.
@@rafsandomierz5313this video is full of missteps and leaps in logic, but the analysis of the true pacifist route is as close to canon as it gets. I didn't even realize it was up for debate until watching this video, Flowey orchestrating True Pacifist is just a fact. He literally sends you back to get a better end after a neutral run and drops extremely unsubtle hints about how to get that end.
This video is insane, I’ve read each of the entries a thousand times and never thought i could learn something new about them. sometimes I watch a theory video and it’s a stretch, but oh my god this video makes perfect sense.
A lot of this video hinges on the idea that people (or rather, monsters) cannot communicate information with each other. For example: "oh no, author mentioned that flower appeared before Queen left! Alphys couldn't have written this entry!!" ...or she was told so by Asgore. Additionally, you'd think that monsters researched immortality and SUCCEEDED would have been a bigger deal in the lore. And last but not least - in "Legends of Localisation" it is said that Alphys was the one to coin the term "determination", meaning she is the one who wrote entry 5. In other words, I'm afraid this theory is void. It was cool though! A lot of interesting connection about stuff like bg noises, and the idea that Entry 17 is a RECORDING by Gaster is novel and worthwhile. Some thing I never connected myself - like I never realised Flowey manipulating Alphys going into the true lab. I liked it!
i dont think alphys naming determination breaks the theory. if gaster was erased from everyone’s memory, whos to say his inventions and discoveries didnt do the same? if alphys and everyone else didnt know that gaster had discovered determination then its not strange for alphys to think she was the one that had discovered it
@@peeeeeeeeeeaf The blueprints in Sans's basement was written by Gaster and the CORE still exists. Along with Asgore taking a long time to find another Royal Scientist.
I haven't finished the video yet but GODDAMN IS THIS ANALYSIS GOOD. This was the kind of Undertale theory I've been yearning for years!!! Thank you!!❤❤
A slight counterpoint: Alphys says "I extracted the power I called determination" this with entry 5 would imply that dt was only called that after gaster fell.
This is absurdly thorough. Thank you for this beautiful little piece. I feel like we've circled these ideas and had the pieces forever but to figure out all of them connect like this is makes you wonder how we didn't stumble into this.
I can only imagine this took a lot of time, thought, and notetaking to compile, and the result was an entertaining watch. I definitely think you're onto something with entry 17 being a recording - also, "speaking" in hands as opposed to writing or typing? genius. and it never occurred to me that Papyrus telling you to go to the true lab was actually Flowey /impersonating/ Papyrus, but considering the evidence, it makes perfect sense. I am incorporating this into my beliefs now lol however, I do have a few problems with the idea that the properly capitalized entries were written by Gaster (and trust me, I say this as the world's most rabid Gaster nerd). firstly, with the advent of deltarune, we now have irrefutable examples of his speech patterns and vocabulary. and while we know for sure that he only speaks in capital letters, this could, as you said, reasonably be explained away by someone dictating his entries. what's less convincing is the fact that even on such an informal platform as twitter, Gaster uses very formal language. additionally, he NEVER uses contractions. many of the entries attributed to him in this video not only use contractions, but plenty of informal speech and words ("info", "weird", "snooping", etc.), which are far more in line with Alphys. I don't think it's contradictory to assume Alphys found the tapes. she wouldn't necessarily have recognized Toriel's voice in the pacifist ending just from having heard it briefly one time, however long ago. Sans only recognizes it because their interactions through the door became 'a thing' and happened recently. to me, it seems like a stretch to assume entry 15 wasn't written by Alphys as well; it describes calling the families to tell them their loved ones are coming home, which is perfectly in line with what we know: that everything went to shyte before she had a chance to deliver, prompting the subsequent barrage of letters and calls. entry 8 talks about the "first golden flower that grew before all the others, appearing just after the queen left". yes, Alphys couldn't have been around at the time that happened - however, there's no reason to believe Asgore wouldn't have told her about it, since those flowers and the events surrounding them are so important to him. it seems reasonable that she wouldn't have had to be present at the time to be aware of the flower and its significance. and as far as entry 2 goes: "we will have to use what we have now: the souls of monsters". I don't think this means there were no human souls available - just that they didn't have a seventh, and therefore had to make up the remaining power needed by using monster souls instead. so I ultimately think it makes more sense to assume all the entries were written by Alphys, and the capitalization discrepancies are simply indicative of her state of mind at the time (after all, by the time we meet her, she's at her lowest. there's no reason to believe she doesn't use proper capitalization when in a better headspace or a more serious setting). additionally, Alphys leaves a note telling us to enter the true lab specifically so we can learn the truth about what she's done. it doesn't make sense that she wouldn't be aware of which entries were on display for us to read - so why would Flowey need to set them up in the first place if the info was already there? (the only exception being the final two entries we read, with the smileys - I agree those were deliberately set up by him.) and as a final aside, Alphys may be a 'fraud' in the sense that she obtained her position under false pretenses, but it's unfair to discredit her as a scientist altogether - I mean among other things, she outfitted a cell phone with a freaking jetpack! that's pretty impressive. one last thing - the idea that Asgore hasn't gone back to the house in New Home since Toriel left is disproved when you read his diary, as the narrator tells you "the ink is still almost wet." additionally, the trashcan in the kitchen being full of scrapped butterscotch pie recipes implies that Asgore has been desperately trying to figure out how to make them the way Toriel did (also the coals in the fireplace are still warm and the fridge is full of snails, a callback to Napstablook's statement that their only customer now is 'some hairy guy'). I personally believe when Chara refers to the note as something they've read before, it simply means Asgore has always had an 'open house' policy. so, it isn't that it's literally the exact same note Chara once read, just another one saying the same thing. all that said (wow that was a lotta words), I'm not hating on this theory - I agree with some of the evidence presented, and even if I didn't, it was still a fun watch that clearly took a lot of work to make. so I'm definitely interested to see the next video :)
So unfortunate to still see Alphys slander in this fandom, for a main theory that breaks as soon as you have basic reading comprehension to understand why this whole experiment was done (To find an alternative to a seventh human soul because it likely would have been taking a long amount of time for one to fall at the time of the entries, this project being started before any souls were even collected makes no sense), and that just because one person talks a certain way in game, doesn't mean they only ever talk that way, there are differing writing styles for characters in Undertale since have seen Sans? Also not to mention that the note written OUTSIDE THE LAB by Alphys herself when you arrive, is using the same exact capitalization as the first few entries in the true lab, so that's another reason this all completely falls apart and that there is no "second" author to all of this. It's all Alphys set at most like a year before Undertale. It's also so sad to see hundreds of people praising this theory for supposedly being one of the best, like really? Is it one of the best when it's completely diminishing one of the main characters of the game??? I get it y'know, a large amount of people don't like Alphys as a character, but do you really think it's ok to completely get rid of all her accomplishments this way and throw all of her character nuance out the window until she's left with nothing? It no longer feels like a theory when it's intentionally targeted towards Alphys and her character considering how many jabs are made against her, with any actual theory points being brought up in the video just being considered void to me, since they would work in other videos that were not related to this. I recommend people go watch Dorked's video on Alphys instead. It explains her character pretty well and clears up a lot of misconceptions about her.
I didn't see this as Alphys slander at all. In fact, this video has pointed out an extra layer of nuance to her character that I hadn't considered before, and it makes me like her even _more_ as a character. There is just something so compelling about a character slowly sliding down a slope of deceit, white lies that build and build into a trap of her own making, one she feels like she can't escape from. One that leads her to a hit rock bottom, where it seems like the only way out is to end it all. Its relatable. Painfully so, because I and i'm sure others have been there in some capacity. Trying so hard to look good, to fit in, that you end up getting in over your head. But you feel like you've gone too far to take it back, to admit you weren't everything you said you were, so you keep the deception going because now if they find out you'll be in even more trouble, they'll be even more disappointed so you can't _ever_ let them know, and now your in too deep and everyone is looking to you for answers that you don't have, you don't know what your doing but they _can't know_ because then they will leave and then you'll be alone again and you can't have that, you _can't_ so now your desperate and reckless and just throwing everything at the wall to make _something_ happen, *_anything_* happen to keep this life, this job, this attention and praise just a little longer and- oh And now you've made a mistake. A horrific, irreversible mistake and as you look at it, at them, all you can think is *they can't know, **_know one can know._* Because if they ever do all this- this prestige and respect you've built on your house of lies, the house that's placed ever so precariously, as the sand it sits on shifts beneath it and falls, and you can _see_ your life falling apart before your eyes like a train wreck, from the sidelines, helpless to stop it as you see the cards start to fall. Watching it all like a spectator, numb and unmoving and unblinking with only the dull thought that _this can't be real._ So you shut down. Completely isolate from all the questions, the innocent questions from the families of the ones you-- who once had praise for you falling from their lips that now sounds like accusations, _blame,_ every word and letter and call and knock at the door saying _"liar, fraud, murderer"_ and the abominations you made shambling about beneath your home and you just want it all to *_stop._* Do you not see how gripping this is? How tragic and compelling and how much it can _resonate_ with people??? This video is not slandering Alphy's character. It's giving her the proper, thorough examination that she deserves. It allows the fandom to finally see her and what her character was meant to say in its entirety and her story is fucking _beautiful._ Because it makes her fate even more meaningful in the ending she gets. It makes her relationship with Undyne hold even more narrative weight. Because in the pits of her despair, when she saw no way out but down, Undyne came and showed her that there was another way. Undyne _saved her life_ and that resulted in her crush on the fish, and knowing that that's the origin of her attraction makes me kick my feet with joy and giddiness rise in my chest when I watch as they get together in the game, makes me even more invested in the happiness they can bring each other. And to see Alphys overcome, finally be honest with herself and others and see that owning her mistakes won't make her hated, that Undyne was right and there was a way out of that dark tunnel, that she can still love and be loved despite how much she lied and how many she hurt- Fuck if that isn't beautiful too. And it makes the other endings hit harder, makes it gut wrenching in the endings where Alphys gives into her despair and offs herself, makes it all the more inspiring when she evacuates the underground after Undyne's death. And those emotions and story beats are only felt so poinently when we realize that *_this,_* the things said in *_this video,_* are her origin. To recognize just how much of a fraud she was, just how deep of a hole she'd trapped herself in. It is only by seeing and fully understanding where she was at her lowest that we can truly appreciate her story, and how she develops during the game. During which, we see she is no longer at her lowest thanks to Undyne, but still scared with social anxiety and prone to old habits of lying to make herself look good. Her whole portion of the game is her deceiving Frisk by staging things to make Mettaton act like he's attacking them just so she can look good by saving them. Many fans dislike Alphys, as you said. Because her anxious behavior is annoying, because she lies, because she tricked Frisk, because she made the amalgams, because she represents all the cringy parts of ourselves, the parts that we are ashamed of and wish to hide away forever. But that's because most fans, myself included for a long time, didn't understand _why._ Why she is the way she is, why she's so desperate to make herself look good or scared to leave the house, or even why she likes Undyne. Don't you see that this video answers those questions? That it makes what once made her so unbearable to many suddenly understandable, even _relatable?_ Can't you see that this, the origin of Alphys, recontextualizes her entire character, her journey and her story, into one of heartbreaking and brilliant tragedy? One all the more powerful because *WE* get to chose how it ends, whether she overcomes or marches on or finally gives in? And the end of her story suddenly matters _so_ much, maybe more than any other's, because we can see ourselves in her, understand her, and we are invested in knowing if she turns out okay. We can chose to see her; a representation of all the things about ourselves that we hate and feel shame for, and tell her she deserves forgiveness. That she deserves love. _THAT_ is what Alphy's story is all about, that is the message it was meant to convey, and I didn't get that until I watched _this video._ Many fans didn't care about Alphys or get invested in her story because they couldn't see where she was coming from, but THIS VIDEO changes that. It exposes exactly where her story starts, and makes it so all of a sudden where her story ends become so much more powerful. Because now we can see, for maybe the first time, just how far she's come. And we can finally celebrate that for her in full. I think that you need to watch this video again, _really_ watch it, and you will see that this is not Alphys bashing at all. In fact, if you know some Alphys haters I would recommend showing them this video, and I bet they would see her in a whole new light. This video displays an understanding of her character and handles the nuance of it with more respect, with the full weight of what her story deserves, better than I have seen anywhere else. Try to keep an open mind. I won't address many of the things you said about what that disprove the theory in this video because the video itself addresses most of them. But I would hate for you to have dismissed valid arguments because you got caught up in defending a character. If you look past the discomfort you may feel at someone calling a character you like a liar and fraud, you can see that she needs no defending here. And you might even be able to see just how groundbreaking this theory is. Please give this video another watch. You might be shocked at what you hear if you're willing to listen. Sorry for the rant.
@@yellowsnake7300 Alphys slipping down a slope of deceit is already there. This 'theory' doesn't add that to the game. Alphys already lied to Asgore about the nature of Mettaton, lied to Undyne about herself, lied to Frisk to make herself feel liked, and lied to everyone about where their fallen down family members were. Stripping her away of her skill and insisting, repeatedly, that she's incompetent, is not adding to her character. This adds nothing. It only takes away. If you didn't already see Alphys being slowly crushed under the weight of her own lies, then you weren't paying attention to the game. It's her entire character arc. Turbulation is right and you're wrong. This theory, on top of diminishing Alphys's character, has absolutely NO basis. There is not a SINGLE point it makes that is not obviously, blatantly, clearly wrong. Alphys only writes in lowercase: Except Alphys writes the note outside the True Lab with proper punctuation. The entries were written before humans fell into the Underground: Except that the entry specifically says 'to create more, we'll have to use the SOULs of monsters' implying they already have a source other than those. The writer knows about Toriel, but Alphys doesn't: Except that 'knowing about someone' and 'knowing someone' are two different things. Everyone knows ABOUT Toriel, there are monsters all throughout Asgore's home that tell the whole story of the First Human falling into the Underground, their death, and the Queen's departure. Gaster wrote Entry 17, so it stands to reason he wrote other ones: Except that even in the video, he mentions there was an original Entry 17 in the game's files, written by Alphys, that was dummied out because it was redundant, making it clear that it was always the intention that they were all written by Alphys. Gaster's version of Entry 17 came after all the other ones were already written. Seriously, go watch Dorked's video about Alphys. It's a good one.
@@kilimachevsk623 I will go check out that video, but I’m gonna have to disagree with you about this theory. I just genuinely disagree with every point you made, so I think we’re just gonna have to agree to disagree on that. I will make clear though that I don’t think Alphys writing half of the entries instead of all of them makes her any less of a good scientist. Even if she didn’t invent the DT extractor and pioneer soul experimentation, she still would have had to follow up on research that had been left collecting dust for ages all by herself. That’s plenty impressive. Not to mention her upkeep on the core, building mettaton, the phone storage/jetpack and all the other stuff we see she invented. No doubt that she’s a brilliant scientist. Not as brilliant as Gaster I think we can all agree, but definitely not to be looked down on. I don’t think this theory undermines how competent Alphys is by only crediting her to half the entries in the true lab. Also, genuinely curious, why do you think that entries are numbered the way they are or appear in the order they do If you think they were all by Alphys? And why is Gaster’s entry 17 out of all of them? Not trying to be confrontational, I really just wanna know. The explanation for it in this video theory made the order make sense to me, but I’m open to an alternative view.
@@yellowsnake7300 It's not a matter of opinion to be agreed on or disagreed on; the video is just wrong. I'm having a hard time parsing what you're even trying to ask me here- so sorry if this answers more than what you were asking. The entries are numbered in the order they're written, and appear in the order they do so that they're relevant to the area that you're reading them in, and to set things up for the player in the way that Toby wants. The entries are written with proper grammar at first, as Alphys is taking this seriously and writing professionally. However, when things start going poorly, nothing seems to be working, and her confidence starts slipping, she stops treating the entries as seriously as she starts to panic. Then, when the fallen down monsters wake up, Alphys starts typing properly again. It wasn't the result she hypothesized, but she's happy that at least some good came of the experiments- before things turn even worse. It's incredibly obvious that the writing style of the entries corresponds to Alphys's rising and falling mental state. "I'm going to take this seriously, I'm the Royal Scientist now, I've studied up on SOULs, I'm going to properly document my findings." "shit nothings working why isnt anything working what do i do" "Oh, uh- I guess everyone's okay? Not what we were looking for, but being able to save monsters who'd fallen down is still a great scientific advancement!" "wow okay nevermind things are worse than ever and i hate myself" Gaster's entry is entry 17 because that's the one that was dummied out. It documents how monster bodies can't handle determination. Presumably, during the process of making Undertale, Toby decided that it'd be more impactful to have the explanation of what happened to the Amalgamates come at the end, from Alphys herself, and leave what exactly happened a mystery until then. This left an empty Entry 17. Toby could just renumber the entries... OR, he could slip in a fun little reference to Gaster, who's entire meta-narrative thing is about deleted or dummied out content.
@@kilimachevsk623 Thank you, that answered my question. That explanation for the entries makes a lot of sense! For me, I do view any explanations for the entries as a matter of opinion though. For any interpretation to be wrong, there has to be one that is confirmed true as a fact. Your explanation, while it makes perfect sense, is no more officially confirmed then what this video proposed. It’s only how you interpreted what the game presented. And there’s nothing wrong with that, your explanation is incredibly likely to be correct. It’s just that I find the explanation that this video proposed just as likely. They both have an equal possibility of being true in my mind, and that won’t change until one is outright confirmed. I think that your interpretation makes perfect sense, and I also think that the evidence presented in this video is sound enough to make this video theory equally as possible. If you don’t think the evidence for the theory is strong enough, then I would chalk that up to just a difference in opinion. You think this theory isn’t possible, I think it is. We’ll have to agree to disagree. It’s not a matter of one interpretation or the other being wrong, because none of us can say definitively that either is the right one. That’s the beauty of all this, it’s just a theory. Speculations with evidence to back them up, presenting cases for which one we think is most likely. Which one I decide to go with will be entirely up to which one I think has the best narrative implications. Thus, a complete matter of opinion. I watched that Dorked video btw and it was really good, thanks for recommending it!
Love your editing style. Had a good chuckle when the sock muppet peeked out from behind the map of where the entries are located, then peeked out again for an addendum.
I just realized In Deltarune Gerson has already passed away quite many years ago. Many assumed it was because it happends in a later time in the timeline than Undertale, BUT assuming Azzy was born in the same year, this means DR takes place in ~202X, which is long, long before the events of Undertale. So parhaps the reason why Gerson is dead, is because the Determination Experiments didn't take place, meaning, his lifespan wasn't prolonged by another ~100 years as we see in Undertale Now, we do see the Shopkeeper and Doggy and Dogessa (in bar and in jail) so maybe it isn't as deep, or maybe just an oversight, but still. Same comes for Gaster Followers, as I thought they could've been Gaster obssesed monsters, seeing him as their saviour after the experiments, buuut they seem to be moreso connected to Deltarune, giving their... odd properties, somewhat simmilar to Gaster himself (fun values and disappearing) Anyway, can't wait for your next theories! It's been a while since i've seen anybody dig up anything new on Gaster and the file entries, and especially the tapes, so I'm stoked to see where your slimy mind will go next. Hope to see you soon!
Can't have been too long before the events of the game, since the purple skater dude monster who is (presumably) a young adult and probably around Asriel's age has dialogue about Gerson being his teacher. At most Gerson died about 5-10 years ago.
I am shocked at how many people didn't realize the secret wing-dings entry was a recording! It was something I just... thought intuitively when I first saw it online. I didn't necessarily think it was a video recording in a spot where it was dark, I figured it was just an audio recording, considering the sound, the shaking of the letters, and the ending comment. But maybe I just wasn't thinking of it in-context with the other entries, which were all written logs. The "Papyrus" phone call being Flowey is something I never considered, though! And I love the timeline you constructed with the experiments, and the "dog lovers must be old" evidence point with the trophy. Great stuff! I'm surprised you didn't mention Room 269 when discussing the fact that Gaster might not be dead. My only point of criticism in this video is that I think you spent way too long explaining why Alphys was the lower case writer; at least, way too long before discussing the fact that she posts on UNDERNET in lowercase. Even though I didn't know of Gaster yet, the two writers thing with True Lab was obvious to me during my playthrough, with Alphys clearly being the lower case one. I still don't know if Gaster even is the other writer, though. I know it's the commonly accepted viewpoint (at least, I think it is), and there's good reason to believe it, but it could be someone else. It could even be Alphys, going from more professional to less professional writing, which is something else I considered in my playthrough, but found (and still find) unlikely.
this video goes hard and has a LOT of good bits (esp entry 17 being a video, i can totally buy that, always confused me that when it's meant to be him typing it's not in wingdings and that makes sense now) but i refuse to believe at 55:48 that gaster would use ':)'. broski would NOT use emoticons
An amazing look at the True Lab, it's content and implications. While some little details were off here and there as others have mentioned, this clearly took a lot of work and mistakes happen, especially in such large projects. Glad to see this video getting some attention, although I believe it deserves much more and hope it continues to garner more attention. I will be subscribing and sticking around for more content with any degree of similarity effort or topic wise, well done.
THANK YOU FOR SOLVING DOGAMY AND DOGERESSA THEIR AGE HAS BOTHERED ME FOR LITERAL YEARS I’m serious I once had a complete breakdown during a discussion with a friend because of the glaring inconsistency that is the Nose Nuzzle competition. The Golden Flowers everywhere has also bugged me because I could tell they were out of place and that the fact was relevant but I couldn’t parse out _how._ People said I was just crazy and reading into things too much! This entire video has been validating in a way I never thought I’d get. Ever since deltarune came out, I’ve been craving this exact type of theorizing from the fandom. A real in depth analysis of it now that we have the benefit of hindsight granted to us by deltarune. The story that was always there but that we may finally have enough clues to understand. You are literally answering my prayers with this video, something I honestly thought would never happen. So thank you so much for looking into all this!!! And you can bet that I’m gonna subscribe for the next part!
1:13:08 I reckon Asgore keeps the fridge stocked with fresh snails at least (perhaps hoping that Toriel will return). He may be implied to be the only customer of Blooks snail farm, with Toriel being former "main customer". * this place used to get a lot of business... * but our main customer disappeared one day... * now it's just some hairy guy that shows up once a month... Or I dunno, maybe Gaster really liked snails? Go wild, theorists.
if gaster needed weak souls, then wouldnt the sekelebros technically fit that category? i say that cuz of sans, obviously, as he himself has a tie to gaster due to the gaster blasters. Perhaps they were given to him as a gift for another way to defend himself. But what about papyrus? he mentions in an aborted geno that he would’ve “blasted you”, implying that he too at least has a blaster like attack, and at most be the only other blaster like attack we see being used thats not flowey or asriel (maybe mettaton neo with that cannon arm thing). why would he need to go to gaster too if hes on par with undyne? that also brings up the possibility of the skelebros being very old so how old are we talking? it either needs to somehow take place after the queen left but also before gaster quits the de-termination experiment. Or more likely, papyrus only knew of a queen, just didnt know they looked so similar to asgore, sans might also know of the queen, but didnt know the door voice hes been telling jokes too was the queen. i say that cuz the skelebros, to quote from a likely de-termination patient, “showed up one day and asserted themselfs”. to me that sounds like they moved from a far away land (relative to the underground) and immediately made their presence known, instead of poping out of the ground and kicking someone out of their home or something. so if gaster really needed weaker souls, then whos to say hes above using two homeless skeletons who lived in the middle of nowhere? thank u for reading a theory comment as to why sans and papyrus were hobos :P
A common theory is that Sans and Papyrus were lab-made by Gaster, likely for his soul experiments, but he couldn't continue because either they weren't fit or because he began to see them as his children (if they had not been created because Gaster wanted children in the first place). This used to be how the photo of three smiling people in Sans' lab used to be understood, a crudely drawn picture of Sans, Papyrus and Gaster as a family and Sans writing behind it "don't forget" because something in the process that destroyed Gaster made everyone forget about him, and Sans was holding onto what little memories he had left about his father. Now of course we know the picture is most likely of the Deltarune gang and "don't forget" are the arc words of Deltarune (which brings the question that Sans is in Undertale, how does he know about Deltarune?!), but the idea that Gaster is forgotten by everyone but his eldest son and the Goners is part of the community consciousness at this point.
the fact asgore entering a nose nuzzling competition is a crucial point in this video to figure out the timeline had me dying for a few minutes
even funnier is that he suggested that alphys is asgores side piece 😭
average ace attorney case (i swear guys leaking government secrets is vital to proving the innocence of my client (yes this is actually real))
@@ihaetschool3361 I mean, in case of AA it does make sense and isn't that far-fetched. Altho, I'd argue that in this case it also makes sense, since it's a clear date so it's easy to connect the timeline with this competition.
@@TheSoulCalledZuzia i mean yeah, all it takes is the removal of context for anything to sound utterly stupid. but even with context i can't get over the fact that that is an actual sentence i can type out
Its also got one of the few directly incorrect statements in the video (Asgore has definitely not abandoned the house, hes still living there!!)
Just a quick point as well, the shaky letters don't necessarily mean a monster is dying.
Flowey speaks in shaky letters all the time as he mocks us.
Alphys has shaky letters when in the date, and same with papyrus afterwards.
It seems it's shaky when the monster has strong emotions as well.
I reckon they're shaky because he's excited, not because he's facing his own death
Yeah, I think maybe we’re overthinking things and letting categories be the enemy of understanding.
Asriel explains it best himself-it’s the “Scary Face” voice. It’s the sound of someone’s voice shaking because they’re scared, or anxious, or in Flowey’s case pretending to be scared to intimidate someone, to make a “scary face”.
I like the idea it’s a “death rattle” thing, but the data doesn’t bear that out necessarily.
in a way it reflects how they act when in combat too, more movement in general seems to reflect unrestrained emotion. Look at undyne the undying for example by comparison to say sans or toriel's right (or even papyrus if you subscribe to the "papyrus is actually stupid strong but even more so able to control himself" theory)
I interpret it as gaster's mere existance being so fucked by his experiments that it changes the way that he "talks", as in the way that the entries before entry 17 are written in comparison to entry 17 itself, and as pointed out in the video he changed his focus from the Determination studies onto other things, which could've been what led him to fall into his own machine, either by accident or on purpose because of what he learned.
Also, I am aware this is an Undertale video, but with his talk about Darkness, and Deltarune's Light and Dark World, I come to the conclusion that whatever Gaster learned about the "Dark" could've changed him drastically to the point it altered his personality and view of the world, kind of like Platos' Cave allegory for knowledge, Gaster could have learned something that had brought him such stress that it shifted focus away from escaping the Underground to something of a higher plane or importance, which is maybe the reason why he jumped into the Core and shatter himself across reality.
Everyone assumes that gaster fell into the core because he just disappears, it’s also slightly implied when talking about the railings in hotland; it would be an interesting idea if he had injected himself with DT then fell into the core for whatever reason. All fun theories.
Personally I think the thought of him nonchalantly logging a journal entry about his research while he's literally dying in front of his partners is way funnier, but your take does make more sense
i like the idea of gaster essentially discovering immotality and being like "oh well, i guess ill send everyone home for now"
I think there's a couple oddities in the theory that need to be resolved. For example, why the numbering gap in Gaster's entries? I think entry 8 is Gaster's last. He injected the flower and some of the bodies (likely left control cases or tried varying doses), and had the accident shortly after.
Some of the monsters might have later woken up but the families and friends wouldn't ask why and Asgore wouldn't get noticed. The flower on the other hand was left in the lab, probably in some containment with automated watering.
When Alphys got to the testing, she found documentation on experiments with no results and a singular golden flower. The plant didn't seem to be any different from the others, other than documents indicating it is a century old. None of the experiments she tried conducting were able to show what is different.
Later on, the corpses wake up. At this point Alphys starts to get some level of confidence on her position and so she tries to write entries the way a scientist should. However, while Gaster's entries are mostly conclusions and scientific questions, Alphys' entries still speak with emotion about what happened and is about to happen, including ellipsis, question marks and a smiley face.
@@itap8880 The theory in the video states that flowey numbered the entries assuming they’re all by Alphys and assuming their order. But this sort of bothers me because Gaster says entry 17 out loud in that tape. So…yeah.
@@VerbDoesStuff I thought the video stated Flowey just set up specific screens to show you specific entries, not that he numbered them.
Also, I think the entries are numbered in the scope of a certain area of research so Gaster's entry is numbered outside of the list visible in true lab.
@@itap88801:06:19
@@elnuevoqlo970 Is that supposed to be an argument or a counterargument to my claim?
Asgore definitely still lives in the house, or at least visits it regularly, given that the ink in his journal is "still wet"
and the coal in the fireplace is still warm.
I definitely agree with that, but it could be that he doesn't mess with certain elements around due to nostalgia and longing for the past. Not saying that's certain, but it's still a possibility
@@WallyWafflest True, there's a lack of beds in the castle. However in pacifist there are monsters all over New Home. It wouldn't be that hard for Flowey to slip in and place something like that.
@@WallyWafflest He has a Santa Claus outfit in his room that he goes out to wear and give children presents.
@@PrinceBrightstar chalking everything up to flowey sounds lazy I think he did some stuff but writing entries is random
The flower patches all being determination experiments infused with Asriel’s memories is actually backed up further in-game! As (I believe) every time we have a flashback to a memory from Asriel, we cut to Frisk waking up on a bed of the Golden Flowers, like they were sharing the memory with us!
plus, as flowey he seems to have control over plants outside himself like the vines on the doors and the ones he uses to capture everyone. that really only makes sense if you consider that he exists in the flowers outside just his main body since it clearly isnt coming directly from him
I think that's just a general thing that happens when you pass out. Because it's happened while you sleep in the Ruins and when you die.
We also have a flashback during the TP ending, just before beating Asriel
@@Minefan200 those ones were likely from the first fallen themselves... go check out the Narrachara theory
@@user-bx3ut8kp4g They're all Chara's memories, just associated with different things. Golden flowers are associated with Asriel because of their plan.
when he got to the part about papyrus I WAS SHOOK. years of playing undertale and i always chalked up papyrus's weird behavior to just simple writing to get the player to the lab, but to see that "Howdy" come on screen? my jaw dropped, wow how have i never noticed that i severely underestimated toby fox once again
THE VINES ON THE ELEVATOR???? HOLEY MOLEY I NEVER PUT IT TOGETHER
@@ashiiu12 Flowey sets you up to hang out with Alphys in the Neutral Run? He tells you go make friends with everyone for the True Pacifist ending.
@@Minefan200 fr i thought it was obvious flowey was manipulating you so he could get the souls
Right @@blackshadow7214
I always figured flowey had simply convinced papyrus to call you, and that's why he was acting strange, because flowey was telling him what to say. But it's much creepier to think that it actually was flowey mimicking papyrus' voice
1. I am obsessed with the "First Fallen Child" being named "Kris" in this video
2. You went full blown CSI INVESTIGATION on all these details with the typing style, the distinction of the tapes versus typed entries, Toby's disposition to use word-play elements in his storytelling, and the timeline you graphed for us
3. It's insane to me how this game keeps coming back even after nearly 9 years, and how everything keeps getting recontextualized as we look at these games differently
I'm pretty sure the first child's name in those tapes are just inserted as the name you pick at the beginning of the game
@@frostedmoss It is. There's a theory that Kris is the name of the first human and the Kris in Deltarune is their version in that universe, as opposed to Chara being their name and Kris Deltarune being a separate character. I'm guessing that's what's being referenced
@@emirturkmen4524why would it be kris and not chara?
@@frostedmossidk what emir is on about, but i think the original commenter is referring more to how generally interesting it is to propose Kris is Chara, seeing as they'd be the sibling of Asriel and child of Asgore and Toriel. It's a satisfying fit even if we can't be confident that Chara's behaviors and decisions are at all reflective of Kris'
@@armoredman6941 Chara could be a reference to "character" and Kris be their actual name, Chara is used as a shorthand for character in the game files
holy shit entry 17 is in wingdings because its gaster TALKING where the other entries are TYPED OUT its a fucking VIDEO the guy doesnt TYPE IN HANDS HE SPEAKS IN THEM
That's HUGE.
Because it means that the "goner maker" segment in Deltarune is typed by Gaster, not spoken.
He is the man who speaks in hands afterall.
@@TheSkyGuy77just like the deltarune/undrrtale account upon release of chapter 1 and 2
-matpat
Haven’t watched the video yet but if his typing is in the Aster format I’ll lose it
I couldn't help but think of The Goners as additional candidates for Gaster's De-Termination experiments, never forgetting the act of kindness that he had given them.
With Goner having a double meaning too.
Gaster never seemed to experiment with Determination at least in Undertale.
Sure he experimented with other stuff, CORE and darkness (according to entry 17) according to follower he was a slow worker which could limit his amount of experiments.
@@rafsandomierz5313did you.. watch the video? Thw whole video is about the argument that Gaster might have done his own determination experiments-
Yep. Even one of his entries when the monsters wake up, he ends it with "I thought they were goners". This is Undertale, of course that wasn't a coincidence.
@@rafsandomierz5313 The video shows that Gaster *did* experiment with De-termination. In fact, it shows that he was the one who came up with the idea, it wasn't Alphys
This was my thought exactly. Fits with the goner kid’s “Have you ever thought about a world where everything is exactly the same... Except you don't exist? Everything functions perfectly without you..." Text. If the goners cannot die, they’ve almost definitely outlived most of their families. The world has moved on without them, and yet everything in the underground is the same, and is repeating, both literally with the resets, and Alphys recreating the experiments. A world where everything is the same, without them.
With the implications that Gaster wrote the first couple entries and claiming that after the bodies started walking around and thinking they were GONERS takes on a whole new meaning.
Sock muppet is just a menace. The way he predicted the hallway in Petscop...
surprising sock muppet neglected mentioning the goners as possible candidates for gaster's experiements considering theyre the only monsters who mention him by name
The concept of Gaster's entry 17 being a recording is really cool. This leads me to the idea that Gaster's "Darkness" experiment caused the room to go dark, explaining why the entry recording appears pitch black. In the course of his experiments with darkness, Gaster achieves a breakthrough and the surroundings go dark (similar to what darkness does in Deltarune). However, the experiment takes an unforeseen turn, which prompts Gaster to panic and hastily document the entry.
Alternatively, the shattering happened at a later date. It is also possible that Gaster was just taken aback by the success of his initial darkness experiment, and the "next experiment" after the entry is what made him shatter.
If room went pitch black, then you wouldn't see gaster. Unless... the room iteself consumed all light, but the camera could see gaster, because he did "emit photons"(this is how we see things - they emit photons, we recieve). This is mainly a technicality on why you even can see Gaster in a pitch black room. Without this explaination, you could not argue that you see something in complete darkness.
@@theBaka9 You can't see Gaster in that room.
@@DavidSartor0 the only thing you could see in the "darkened" room is Gaster - the room is pitch black, but not Gaster, since he emits photons, but not the room. It's like when Flowey or Asriel appear in the blackness during the cutscenes... kind of. That's what I meant.
So... what if it could "get darker than dark?"
@@klaudiso
Darker-dark-light-lighter(lightner!?)
Consumes photons - no photons - receives photons - emits photons.
I think this is the logic.
Like, a room (or an object) can get "more dark" by recieving less light(photons), to the point where an object receive no photons - the object would be completely dark. The only way to get even less light is by consuming light that does not hit said darker object, or the light that tries to shine on it. As if your flashlight would become dimmer when trying to flash it on a "darker" object without even lighting it up.
Man.. The implications that Gaster's attempts at resuscitation *Succeeded* And Alyph's merely involved too much De-Termination.. Adds to the tragedy.
The Chad Gaster vs the Virgin Alphys
Perhaps Gaster succeeded a little too much
It has been 10 years and we're STILL discovering hidden details in this game!
Well... people is happy to have those amalgamates around even when they are very odd
Gaster is HIM
That part about Asriel under his Flowey identity mimicking papyrus' voice using his father's speech patterns to lure the player into thinking he was created by Alphys and that Gaster had nothing to do with the true lab and its entries is the most Jimmy Neutron brain blast thing I've ever heard
asriel dreemurr try not to mind fuck everyone challenge (impossible)
??? Those two scenes are completely disconnected from each other what
professional gaslighter
He explicitly said that Flowey was actually created by Alphys, since Alphys injected way to much Determination into one of the flowers that spread from the one Gaster planted in the throne room. Did you watch the video?
bro played 4D chess on us
A suggestion- perhaps the gaster followers are the ones from Gasters expiriments?
Afterall, they are among the only ones that are old enough to remember Gaster, and clearly must have known him pretty well.
Additionally, they are all greyscale, which is reminiscent of the other amalgamates, all of which are shown to be black and white in and outside of battle. The reason they are more grey then white, is because they werent injected with *as much* determination. Plus they are all either in or close to hotland, which is where the lab is. Am I making sense here?
this is EXACTLY what i was thinking
They became ghosts, in a way.
Permanently stuck between being alive and not.
Kinda like the man himself...
It makes so much sense! After all, even if Gaster didn't inject too much determination, we all know determination still has some effect on monsters' bodies, so it makes sense that the little determination they had inside started to affect their bodies with time untill they became greyscale and... somewhat... not all there, themselves...
You're so right actually
"I thought they were goners"
And then one of the followers is called GONER kid
1:13:08 in that same room, when you interact with the diary it says "The ink is still almost wet." he's obviously still living there.
There's so many misreadings in this theory of the game, thank you for pointing one out because most people here seem to take this video and not question it
@@fyrfytin-27could you explain some of the other misreadings in this video?
@@fyrfytin-27 To be fair that "misreading" is barely relevant to the theory. The date is the same in the dog couple's dialogue and the trophy, so it doesn't matter if he is indeed still living in that room.
@@Kozmic_CL it wouldn't matter if the central part (the Alphys entries being Gaster's) wasn't wrong too. Also I just realized they deleted my comment replying to @imnotmurtaza3651
@@fyrfytin-27 Why do you claim it's wrong? I wouldn't say it is true as it hasn't been proven, but if you claim it's wrong then you must have a reason, right?
It would help if you could also share the other misreadings you found in this video.
Also idk if I'm coming off as aggressive but that's not my intention, text is just impersonal.
i love the abc file of (maybe) gaster telling the audience to not spread undertale secrets online, then we get him communicating w the audience directly on twitter and maybe at the beginning of deltarune! his ability to break the fourth wall is so interesting!
i mean im pretty sure thats just supposed to be a message from toby fox himself but its still interesting
@@penntopaper9305 there are many clues to it being gaster, such as his typing quirks in all caps and the use of the phrase “very, very interesting”
@@penntopaper9305while it being literally toby I think we are supposed to believe it is being written to have us believe it is gaster discussing this with us, for several reasons
Well, he was "scattered across time and space".
42:50
if photon readings were negative, that would mean whatever he created is absorbing light around it,
and there's 2 things we know of that do this.
black holes.
and the dark world.
edit: to clarify, when i said absorbing light, i meant that it makes things darker around it, which is exactly what happens when you see the dark world.
Ngl, I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the story about Gaster falling into the core is just a nice cover-up legend while the actual reason for his disappearance is that he had opened the first ever dark fountain. His messed up look is likely a result of determination contamination in this case (dark fountain creation would be powerful enough to explode nearby determination vats and drown our fellow science man in said substance).
"Negative", in this context, might be the opposite of "affirmative", not "positive".
@@DavidSartor0here's the thing, in a medical or scientific test "negative" does in fact mean "lack of" instead of "below zero/reducing", if your COVID test is negative your body isn't absorbing COVID or has anti-COVID, you just don't have COVID.
BUT it may in fact mean "below zero/reducing" like in mathematics, and since the entry is about darkness growing, the negative reading may be interpreted both as "there are no photons we can read" and "photons are being eaten by this growing darkness", and honestly the difference may be the key to understand how darkness even works, is it merely a lack of light or is it a hungry entity that needs to be checked before it eats too much?
@@DavidSartor0I feel like that wouldn't make sense, as the statement is probably quantitative and not qualitative, meaning the reading is to check how much light there is. And so the term "negative" would be implying that the photon reading is less than 0. Negative photon readings have been *theorised* to appear in things like wormholes, so Gaster could have been experimenting with the machine sans has in his super duper secret garage.
Everything absorbs light actually, black holes are just noticeably better at it because they're so massive. What do you think photosynthesis and solar panels do?
One point in favour of the Theory that Gerson lives due to DT experiments is the fact that in Deltarune all the Amalgamates are dead, aka the Monsters that made them up have fallen down and there wasn't any experiments to bring them back. And guess who's also dead in Deltarune? Gerson
🤯 So there's more hints that Gaster is involved with everything happening in Deltarune, with that cemetery lineup... That's pretty much the only way to link him to the other tomb stones there.
Dogaressa and Dogamy are still alive tho
@@polishnope5609 that plus...dogamy and dogaressa's parents are said to be part of Endogeny. Dogamy explicitly says "sister". Adult monsters in the monster world only age up once they have kids (hence why asgore and toriel are alive and don't look like a bag of ashes, like gerson does, or why Rudy fell down), so somehow...their parents had to naturally outlive them, have Dogamy and Dogaressa de-termined, only then for the parents to fall down years later when Alphys takes over and creates the amalgamates. You can't say that they might've been part of Gaster's DT experiments and just fell down again later...because then what about Gerson? Shouldn't he also be an amalgamate, or at the very least...not present in the game?
I'd say Gerson was 100% de-termined. In Deltarune, all graves in the graveyard reference amalgamates...the only outlier being Gerson. But as you said, Dogamy and Dogaressa are still alive.
@@zukamimotu..2071That rule only applies to boss monsters, I’m pretty sure other monsters age semi-normally.
@@Goldfish218 Okay, mb then. If anything, my point stands even stronger. Dogamy and Dogaressa didn't have to be "alive" for them to age. So there's no way they could've outlived them.
Something I do think is worth noting when it comes to this subject is that the first few True Lab reports align with what Alphys herself says at the end of True Lab. She says that Asgore tasked her to research the SOUL, that she discovered determination, etc, etc.
For reference, here is her speech:
"As you probably know, ASGORE asked me to study the nature of souls."
Compare that to:
"*This is it…
*Time to do what the King has asked me to do.
*I will create the power to free us all.
*I will unleash the power of the SOUL."
And then as the speech goes on...
"*During my research, I isolated a power I called “determination.”
*I injected it into dying monsters so their SOULs would last after death.
*But the experiment failed.
*You see, unlike human’s, monsters’ bodies don’t have enough…
*Physical matter to take those concentrations of “determination.”
*Their bodies started to meld, and lost what physicality they had.
*Pretty soon, all of the test subjects had melted together into…
*Those."
"*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.
*The will to keep living…
*The resolve to change fate.
*Let’s call this power…
*”Determination”."
There's also her cut Entry 17, too.
"monsters’ physical forms can’t handle “determination” like humans’ can. with too much determination, our bodies begin to break down. everyone’s melted together… "
"*Seeing them like this, I knew...
*I couldn’t tell their families about it.
*I couldn’t tell anyone about it.
*No matter how much everyone was asking me."
"*the families keep calling me to ask when everyone is coming home.
*what am i supposed to say?
*i don’t even answer the phone anymore."
This also follows up with an earlier, proper grammar entry.
"*Seems like this research was a dead end…
*But at least we got a happy ending out of it…?
*I sent the SOULS and the vessel back to ASGORE.
*And I called all of the families and told them everyone’s alive.
*I’ll send everyone back tomorrow. :)"
So it stands to reason that these were written by one person.
When you look at the entries in chronological order, the lowercase ones align with moments when Alphys was under great emotional distress or depressed, as they do briefly resume proper grammar again only to slip back into lazier writing. With True Lab being so focused on Alphys (right down to the music using her leitmotif), I believe Toby's intent really was that she wrote all of the entries and Gaster had his own thing going (perhaps with Alphys using blueprints he made to make the DT extractor). That's not to say that there aren't interesting ideas at play here, and it's also true that Undertale usually uses capitalization very deliberately, but just as Sans sometimes speaks in normal grammar during certain serious or emotional moments, there's certainly room to argue that Alphys slacking on professionalism in certain entries is due to her just not feeling it. She went from more confident at the start to a deep downward spiral.
That's obviously not to discredit the immense work that went into this theory or this video, but I just wanted to kinda give my own two cents as someone who sits in the opposite camp. The production values on this are very well done, and any feature length video essay takes a crazy amount of thought and care.
EDIT: It's also worth noting that Alphys definitely made Flowey from the first golden flower. If you look at the reports here...
"ENTRY NUMBER 10
*experiments on the vessel are a failure.
*it doesn’t seem to be any different from the control cases.
*whatever.
*they’re a hassle to work with anyway.
*the seeds just stick to you, and won’t let go…"
Golden Flowers came from the surface. The reason you see Golden Flower patches in places like the dump is because the seeds got carried around. Alphys frequents the dump, so the flowers grew there. Asriel died in the throne room, so the flowers grew there, and Chara was buried in the Ruins, which explains their presence there too. Golden Flowers are not the same as buttercups, as the latter are toxic and did grow Underground. It being the first flower would explain why Flowey has Asriel's memories, as the flower grew from Asriel's dust, whereas the other flowers came later.
Plus, Alphys freaks out when Papyrus mentions a golden flower in the Pacifist reunion scene, which further adds to Alphys having been the one to have "created" Flowey during her research. I think it's really underselling Alphys to treat her as a fraud and really contrary to what True Lab was meant to be about. Gaster is a character who is fascinating, but ultimately is missable. A fun easter egg and very tied to Deltarune (it's obvious Toby has big plans for him), but I generally just don't agree with downplaying her significance and treating her as a copycat who failed on all fronts. The reason Flowey worked was because he had Asriel's dust, whereas the other vessels were just ordinary flowers.
Keep in mind that Alphys is clearly competent in many areas. She built MTT's bodies (even if NEO ended up being useless), was able to make a phone have dimensional storage and turn into a jetpack, and is quite adept at hacking and manipulating the puzzles in Hotland from afar. I think one last point I want to make is that the way we know Gaster writes/talks in Deltarune and in the twitter takeovers is very different. All caps. Kind of fragmented speech. It's a very distinctive 'voice' that I do think would have carried over to his writing if he had penned the reports.
The bit about the queen is one I've seen come up a few times, but I think knowing a queen existed and left a long time ago isn't quite the same as knowing *who* she is, and given the first flower grew from a Boss Monster's dust, it may have given it a long lifespan... or golden flowers are just really long lived. That, or Toby just made an oversight, but I can concede that it is kinda funky and one of those weird Undertale lore ambiguities since the precise timeline is kinda unclear.
Yeah, I agree there's a few... Bumps, in this theory.
Plus I'm curious to see if it stands the test of "Japanese Translation Comparison".
Although there are a few things this theory I'd say makes excellent note of:
-Alphys not knowing who the queen is at the end of Pacifist, despite other evidence that she should have access to this information,
-The oddities in regards to the elevator generator and the screens relaying the Entries to us, and how they might be showing Flowey's continued involvement,
-And the idea that Entry 17 may be a recording, (as well as it and Tape 5 perhaps being a recording of the lab from a security camera,) and demonstrating how it lined up with the ways the other recordings have been presented.
@@dochatter3638 Tbh, I think there's a really simple explanation for the queen thing. Alphys probably knew there *was* a queen (all the monsters in the New Home story segment do as well), and just didn't know what she looked like.
A lot of my issues with this theory stem from a) Alphys bashing and discrediting her work, b) over complicating what is meant to be a very focused arc on Alphys' mistakes during the DT experiments by inserting Gaster in, and c) Gaster is a character you only find out about in fun events, so making it essential DT experiments lore just feels very questionable to me, when I think the Gaster teases in UT were all meant to set up his role in Deltarune and it's very likely that his experiments, while still quite possibly utilizing DT, were of a different nature.
Because otherwise, why have Alphys retread old ground? It's just more streamlined if it was all Alphys. Gerson and Dogamy and Dogaressa could just be old, and monster lifespans are not exactly clear (plus Gerson is a turtle). I feel like if either of them had been experimented on, it would've come up? This is also why I'm not super big on Undyne having injected DT from either scientist when she could just be naturally determined as a strength of her character.
Alright, yeah, fair enough, @@Dorked. My bad.
On top of this, we know how Gaster speaks/writes even when he isn't speaking in wingdings. He has a very distinct manner of speaking, always in all capitals and odd spacing- almost never finishing a full sentence on its own but fragmenting it into separate lines. Such as the case with:
THIS NEXT EXPERIMENT SEEMS
VERY
VERY
INTERESTING.
A very clear, distinct manner of speech that lines up perfect with how he speaks in Deltarune as well as the twitter account takeovers where it's very clearly him speaking. The only difference between the two being he isn't speaking in wingdings here, so we know that even when wingdings aren't a factor he still maintains the exact manner of speech. We have no reason to think that he would suddenly start writing with proper capitalization and grammar when writing lab entries
To be fair, @@Slyze, one solution to that is that he had an assistant write those for him. He DOES say "WHAT DO YOU TWO THINK", after all. He's not alone, at least when he talks in Entry 17.
Sock even says something like that in the video, if I recall correctly.
The intended implication seems to be that asgore does still use the kitchen; the thrown away recipes are likely him trying and failing to recreate toriels pie. More strongly though, is the snails in the fridge; Napstablook at the snail farm says that their best customer disappeared a long time ago, but occasionally a "big hairy guy" comes and buys lots of snails, suggesting that he's trying to recreate toriels snail recipes too. While I personally believe that the nose nuzzle trophy is from ancient times with toriel (especially given the fact that even after all this time he clearly hasn't been able to move on from those times emotionally), there are theories floating around that he did find some one else more recently, who then passed on. The note may have simply been left there, or regularly restored, as it's still relevant to any monsters who come to visit.
I personally don't think that ALL of the uppercase entries were written by gaster, perhaps just the earlier ones talking about discovering determination, and the parts mentioning blueprints being where alphys comes in. The stuff about flowey manipulating the pacifist run together is totally spot on, though I think the phone call from papyrus could still be him being pushed to recite lines given by flowey, which would explain how nervous he is and the use of his full face portrait in the call (even over the phone toriels face appears, but not from that one echo flower, and while flowey can change his face a lot, it's always still in the shape of a flower, until he gets access to souls).
But that aside, this is great, lots of very thoughtful evidence based stuff.
"I think the phone call from papyrus could still be him being pushed to recite lines given by flowey, which would explain how nervous he is and the use of his full face portrait in the call".
That is exactly what I thought too when that part of the video came up!! After all, the way Papurys says "very home" is a very Papyrus thing to say, it is so in character I'm sure Flowey wouldn't come up with that, since I think it was established that Flowey thinks lowly of Papyrus, only as a tool. Flowey would feel way too "dignified" to try to use Papyrus' speech patterns, which Flowey would find annoying and/or ridiculous. I'm certain the "very home" is something Papyrus added to the lines Flowey gave him, since we all know how Papyrus likes to put his own brand on everything he does
more proof the house isn't totally abandoned is the warm coals of the fire (recently used) and asgore's diary entry has a recent entry with the ink still being wet.
Clearly the nose nuzzle Champs of 98 were Asgore and Rudy 😎👉🏻👉🏻
@@drascia was just about to comment the same thing hahaha
@@100lovenana It's the opposite. Papyrus was the best 'character' Flowey ever interacted with, it took him the longest to get bored of him.
55:55 The only thing I find hard to believe is GASTER using the freaking smiley face in Entry 15
He was feeling happy :)
honestly i like the idea of him using emoticons lol
If you can talk in wingdings you can type with smiley faces
Well, he is associated with "smiles" after all...
Beware the man who speaks in emoticons
me trying to take this serious and then blud's sona makes the most toilet poop sound imaginable to move around
Honestly I'd argue Asgore didn't abandon their house in New Home (I mean where else would he live), but rather is too sentimental to change/get rid of anything related to Toriel. I mean, the ink in his journal is wet, and the coals in his fireplace are hot.
While I do not subscribe entirely to your take on the entires, your analysis of the VHS tapes and Entry 17 potentially being a video recording similar to them was a really intriguing and compelling proposition.
I actually felt a tingling chill.
Awesome video! Definitely subscribed.
Wow. I'll be honest. This has actually made me realise so many new things, which I haven't even considered before. At this point, I was certain that there won't be a new theory which would make a compelling case for a not wildly agreed upon thing, but here it is.
Great video with some really compelling ideas, but there is something that I take issue with. That being, Gaster can't be the author of the entries we read in the true lab. We know how Gaster speaks/writes even when he isn't speaking in wingdings. He has a very distinct manner of speaking, always in all capitals and odd spacing- almost never finishing a full sentence on its own but fragmenting it into separate lines. Such as the case in entry 17 with:
THIS NEXT EXPERIMENT SEEMS
VERY
VERY
INTERESTING.
A very clear, distinct manner of speech that lines up perfect with how he speaks in Deltarune during the goner maker sequence as well as the twitter account takeovers where it's very clearly him speaking. He even repeats the same phrase during the first twitter takeover when Deltarune was releasing, writing:
SOMETHING
I THINK YOU WILL FIND
VERY,
VERY,
INTERESTING.
The only difference between the two being he isn't speaking or writing in wingdings in those instances, so we know that even when wingdings aren't a factor he still maintains the exact manner of speech. If that's the case, we have no reason to think that he would suddenly start writing with proper capitalization and grammar when writing lab entries. In all instances where we know it's him speaking or writing, he has a very distinct manner of speaking that's easily identifiable as him- wingdings or not. We've never seen him speak any other way
could be that his brain started to get fried after the darkness experiment since thats the starting point of where we ever hear him speak
This fan base takes this way too seriously
@@Bokosuka-yl7eq you’re free to tell me where im wrong or overthinking things
I think that's just how he speaks/writes now. Maybe the experiment that is happening in entry 17 screwed him up and now he only speaks in all caps.
Characters who speak in all caps in this universe tend to be more goofy and silly in nature. But Gaster is described by the followers as a very brilliant man, so I feel like he would've spoken normally.
@@bustinmayo6595 But even if that's the case, we have no evidence for it. The only samples of Gaster's writing we have are all as I described- we currently have no indication he's ever spoken in any other manner. And even so, I wouldn't say the way he speaks is "goofy" or contrary to what the followers description would lead us to believe. He speaks in very cryptic, scientific language from what we've seen.
"PHOTON READINGS NEGATIVE"
"IT CONFORMED TO THE REFLECTION."
"IT IS IMMUNE TO ITS OWN IMAGE."
These are all things he says, if Gaster is a brilliant scientist like the followers describe this language definitely fits that expectation. It's not like what he says is goofy or hard to understand, as if him being shattered made his speech unstable and incoherent or something- it's just cryptic and scientific.
So flowey listened to 17 and understood it since the tape actually says entry 17 outloud. When flowey showed frisk the tapes, they skipped the tape that said 17 because it didnt fit with the order flowey had in mind and seemed irrelevant to souls or determination. Perhaps flowey didnt use 17 in the entries shown to frisk because they knew about 17 and didnt want to name "18" as entry 17 since the real 17 clearly already existed.
My only issue with this theory is the dog couple.
When the dog amalgamate returns to their families they mention that their parents were fused into it, if they are so long lived why are their parents still alive?
Are they long lived as well?
Papyrus' and Undyne's Undernet usernames end in 95 and 91 respectively, and I always assumed that was 2091 and 2095. I don't feel like the dog couple were apart of the determination experiments, as their parents from that one amalgamation was probably from Alphys' experimentation. I don't know who the dog couple lost too, but I guess they were apart of the 2098 competition, while Toriel and Asgore was 1998 as we are lead to assume.
You could argue that their parents were also subjects of the original Determination experiments, and eventually its power to keep them alive did run out, but that seems a bit of a stretch. It is much easier to believe that they were simply talking about a different Nose-Nuzzling Championship than the one which Toriel and Asgore won, even though it does still seem like a strange coincidence that they both happened in years that end with "98"! 🤔
I went to the Wiki and they seem to recognize your smell as human in dialogue, so that means that they are longer living than most other monsters.
But they are alive in deltarune while gerson is not.
@@DemiIsNotHere Recognising a human smell is definitely very interesting too, I hadn't thought about the significance of that before. If it's true, then they are at least old enough remember when the last human fell into the Underground, which of course most Monsters don't seem to have been around for, including the Nose-Nuzzlers.
Biggest problem with this theory is the fact that Dogamy and Dogaressa are alive and well in deltarune universe, while amalgamates and Gerson are long dead. Dogamy and Dogaressa are a part of a dog gang and can be found in police station with the rest of the crew. If they are really that old, they should be dead by now.
"Deltarune's world is a different one with different characters that have lived different lives" while this is not exactly what Toby said,its a simplified version
@@user-bx3ut8kp4g my point being is that there is corellation between fallen down monsters between the two games. That is, if monsters in deltarune fall down like in undertale.
@@theBaka9 if were to assume monsters have "physical" bodies in deltarune (hence the lack of magic and sans bleeding if you subscribe to "sans is from deltarune" theory) than its likely they dont enter the fallen down state and just die like humans do
although that still doesnt explain why Dogamy and Dogaressa are alive... perhaps that could be one of the differences Deltarune has from Undertale
@@user-bx3ut8kp4g that is a great point, but it conflicts with the fact that there may be magic in deltarune lightner world. I've seen some theories about it. But if your point turns out to be correct - that would be game-chanigng
Okay I've been told about some new info that I've gotta share that sadly kills most of this theory.
In the Legends of Localizations book, Toby explicitly says that Alphys discovered and extracted Determination. That is just a hard stop to Gaster doing early DT experiments.
The most i can see Gaster being involved is by designing the blueprints for a theoretical machine to extract something from within human souls, which became the DT extractor.
Honestly, that fits the little we know about Gaster pretty well. He was known as someone who worked really slowly, so i can see him taking a long time to design a theoretical device but never manage to finish it.
It is a bit sad since i did like the flower hivemind idea, but them's the breaks.
I would still like to highlight the Entry 17 recording theory since that is entirely divorced from this. It could explain why Gaster uses Wingdings in the entry but not in the intro to Deltarune. It's possible that in Deltarune's intro he is typing commands to us, and that idea is bolstered by his text in the opening not having a talk sound.
Also, Chara dying in the lab is another cool way to think about that scene. It makes sense that if their child grew sick Toriel and Asgore would take them to the most brilliant monster they have on payroll rather than letting them die in their home(though I'm not sure how much help Gaster would be lmao. He probably has a doctorate in engineering and magical chemistry, not medicine).
Overall, I'm excited to see what you might have to say about Deltarune and Gaster, but from my view the other parts of this theory are a bit of a wash.
About Deltarune’s intro: it’d also just be a dick move to put the seizure warning in Wingdings.
> In the Legends of Localizations book, Toby explicitly says that Alphys discovered and extracted Determination. That is just a hard stop to Gaster doing early DT experiments.
Probably, but not necessarily? He isn't exactly expanding the story on Gaster, it's meant to be mysterious. Noone* remembers him, officially, and Gaster is not named even in eg. the Tarot merchandise.
> Honestly, that fits the little we know about Gaster pretty well. He was known as someone who worked really slowly, so i can see him taking a long time to design a theoretical device but never manage to finish it.
This does fit with Alphys being a good mechanic.
> It is a bit sad since i did like the flower hivemind idea, but them's the breaks.
Doesn't it still leave the first flower unaddressed?
@@lilemont9302 Gaster being forgotten is a fandom trope. Why did Asgore take so long to find a Royal Scientist otherwise?
@@Minefan200 > Gaster being forgotten is a fandom trope.
I mean by the vast majority.
> Why did Asgore take so long to find a Royal Scientist otherwise?
Well, that's also mentioned in the video, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
@@lilemont9302 If he was forgotten, why did Asgore take so long to find another Royal Scientist instead of realizing he had none at all?
21:17 you actually got me with that one... Holy shit HANDwriting. Fucking genius
Made me feel like “oh, LV? It means LOVE! Oh, LOVE? Yeah that means LEVEL OF VIOLENCE”. Big rug pull.
Made me mad because of how stupid that logic is. “De-termination”? Give me a break
@@iamsam-cu9rz huh, did you also think “EXP” being “Execution Points” was stupid and childish? Because if so I regret to inform you that you are simply a dark pit and we cannot be friends
@@iamsam-cu9rz I mean as far as I’m aware it was directly confirmed it was ‘ de-termination ‘ and ‘ re-fused ‘ in the art book? It’s not stupid. It’s got evidence. I mean, come on, if there’s evidence that wordplay like this is completely possible in other areas of the game too, handwriting not literally meaning handwriting isn’t much of a reach at all.
@@sausagetuti it doesn’t fit tho. EXP and LOVE are acronyms like OSHA. They are capitalized in every instance we see them. Prefixes are not the same as acronyms. Determination is one word with the prefix De- but you can’t just take the prefix off and say “wow this is wordplay” because it’s part of the word.
I think the capitalization is just to reflect the mental state she's in. Calm and professional versus panicked, stressed, etc
Determination as a chemical/process rather than emotion is a concept I haven't heard before
Welcome to Undertale
“Determination Extractor” really made this go for me. How do you extract an emotion?
@@andyghkfilm2287 DT and Determination are two different things. But work in the same vein within the Undertale lore.
this theory just overcomplicates so much of what the true lab describes in the entries and undermines alphys' narrative significance/contributions in it. even mentioning toby's wordplay of "de-termination" in the localization book mentions in the same sentence how ALPHYS came up with the term after PRODUCING the substance, she wouldve been the first to make it and not gaster.
No, it could mean that it was only named by Alphys.
I don't agree with the video, but considering there was already blueprints on how to use the DT Extractor that Alphys *found* , I think Gaster already discovered it and used it for his own separate experiments but Alphys officially named it
@@user-gd4fu3sf5i The more obvious interpretation to me is that Gaster created the blueprints for the DT extractor, but didn't have time to start building it before he died. Then Alphys took over his position, and used his blueprints to construct the machine and use it for the first time.
Just want to point out, the different capitalization and grammar and all that between the different entries is likely just a difference in the level of professionalism based off of both alphys’ mental state and the subject matter she’s writing about. There’s a distinct difference between talking about the nature of SOULs and “i love hanging out in the dump :)”. To argue that 2 different people are writing those not only discredits a lot of alphys’ involvement in the true lab, a GIANT part of her character, it also makes it look like she essentially just treated most of these entries as more of a personal journal than anything else, which isn’t a great look for her. Also, Toby has directly confirmed before that determination as a substance was at the very least named by Alphys (“”Determination” also turns out to be Alphys’ code word for an actual physical substance that she injects into monsters, one that humans produce naturally in large quantities” - Legends of Localization), which all but directly confirms that the earlier entries were written by her.
EXACTLY. I feel that the UT fandom is treating Alphys really shitty recently. Gaster was the greatest scientist. So great that he is incomparable to others. Of course, alphys would seem like a "fraud" in comparison to him. She is capable of great creation (including the seaweed ice cream lol). I really don't like how the guy phrased her as fraud, basically making her seem as a rando that snuck her way into the royal scientist position. She is a damn good scientist who in the end wants better for everyone. She had her fair share of awesome creations. Her creations don't involve mega builds, but something that may appease people and make their lives a little simpler through her appliances (hot fridge for undyne). I feel that she fits the royal scientist role in a way that she makes everyone's PERSONAL lives better, instead of overall public that is Gaster. I kind of think Gaster and Alphys have a stark contrast in their ways of science and engineering, as in he is the architect and she is the interior designer of the whole underground. Diminishing her title is kind of ridiculous, and pointing all the fingers towards her, when Asgore is just as complicit in these actions. And to me, it reads that he's aware of these actions of hers but still sees her as a worthy scientist, and the greatest mistake of Asgore is entrusting someone so meek to darker projects that involved living things, which basically led to the whole UT lore lol
As enamored as I am with the idea of what Gaster will do in Deltarune, I feel like to try and insert Gaster into this story is to try to strip Alphys of her agency, in terms of both her accomplishments and mistakes. Don't really care for the "gaster wrote some of the entries" theory.
Not only that, but the idea that the minor discrepancies in writing styles in the entries are properly explained by attributing it to a character whose speech characterization is wildly different from every single other canon appearance requires you to buy into something much more dramatic than just having Alphys write all of it.
The discrepancies in Alphys writing it all are MUCH simpler than the discrepancy created by having Ring-a-Ding-Ding Blaster type out in a way unlike every one of his canon appearances. It's even worse in japanese too lmao
@@In.New.York.I.Milly.Rock. That's just false. As shown in the video, we've seen that characters who speak in special fonts write in the standard font. To assume Gaster would be the only character to write in the special font he uses to speak is WAY more of a stretch. On top of that, the question at the end makes it clear it was some sort of dialogue, as it wouldn't make sense to include that when writing an entry.
I fail to see how "It makes Alphys look worse" is an argument for anything, though?
If that's the case, then it is what it is. I don't think less of Alphys's character because of it, but just saying "I don't like it" doesn't make it any less possible.
The small tangent about the differences between Determination/De-Termination and Refuse/Re-Fuse was great
I think determination on a meta narrative level is a form of diagetic "plot armor" / "main character juice" as it gives the ability to change fate as in DETERMINE fate to your own liking much like a traditional rpg protagonist would in a story with choices.
And Save Points / Overwriting the Savefile literally "fills you with" something called "Determination", as well as heals the player. When we start the game, we learn over time that our presence overided Flowey's ability to save and reload, for some reason. In Deltarune it's different, it fills the player with "The power of - something - shines within you" or something to that effect.
@@lilacpenguin5329 It's less that the save points fill you with determination and more like taking in the immediate enviroment around you helps you keep going. In normal and nice routes, you revel in stopping to smell the flowers every once in a while.
I mean it's literally the ability to *determine* how the story goes. If you don't want the story to go a certain way, I.E. with Frisk dying, your *determination* lets you *determine* that it doesn't. Likewise, if you have a regret, and go back to change it, you *determine* that thing didn't happen.
Of course, as another being with *determination*, Flowey used to be able to do this, but because you have more, he gets overwritten: He can't *determine* what happens anymore. But he does still have some ability to see what's really going on, or rather, *determine* what you change (heh heh.)
Honestly, one of the problems I have with the Genocide Route is Undyne's determination ass-pull, because it both muddies the waters as far as what determination is and how it works, and because it distracts from what I've always interpreted as the core of the route's message, I.E. how a lack of emotional investment in a story mixed with a completionist urge leads players to perform actions that are unconscionable, out of nothing other than boredom. But that's a discussion for another time.
This is really good. The possible explanation of entry 17 being a new experiment makes a lot of sense. The missing original entry number 16 was likely an explanation for what that experiment was. There is still the question of where the blueprints came from. It's likely they were either given to Gaster or more likely found it snooping around somewhere as it follows entry 4 talking about the tapes as opposed to being created by him, hence the significant time gap. But who created them?
Although Flowey is responsible for bringing the entries to our attention and activating them, it's also possible Alphys originally mixed the WD Gaster logs and her own, considering she follows his method so closely, down to getting a flower for a vessel. Maybe she decided to only overwrite the messages where the experiments differed and Flowey didn't notice the differences in writing when changing the order.
Overall though, this is really comprehensive, I think this is now my go to video for the True Lab entries.
you know i think the blueprints are still alphys using them, maybe she was trying to get into the role of royal scientist and trying to think like gaster, possibly following the entries he left I a sense
entry 17 being a video is not something iv seen before, such a kool take and im convinced, maybe looking at instances of sounds being slowed down if there are any other instances that might help prove the slow to distance connection.
Note that I'm writing this comment as I'm watching the video.
*> The main mystery being "who wrote the True Lab entries?"*
Simple answer; it's Alphys.
It becomes very apparent through a lot of what's written.
Even before you enter the True Lab, there's Alphys's note in front of the elevator.
"You all at least deserve to know what I did."
There's also entries like 11, 20, 21, that note stuff related to Alphys.
"now that mettaton's made it big, he never talks to me anymore."
"one about this cute teacup he found that looks like me"
"i spend all my time at the garbage dump now"
Both the proper case and lowercase entries are VERY likely written by Alphys alone.
The proper case being more professional, and the lowercase being more like how she writes on the Undernet.
Entires 8 and 10 both are about the flower vessel, for example, and have different formats.
"In the center of his garden, there's something special.
The first golden flower, that grew before all the others."
"whatever. they're a hassle to work with anyway.
the seeds just stick to you, and won't let go.."
And regarding the famously known ENTRY NUMBER SEVENTEEN.
That one speciifcally is by Dr. W.D. Gaster, but not at the same time period as the rest of the entires.
It's a different experiment from a different time.
*(Note from after writing a bit more: I DO like the idea that this entry is a spoken one, rather than typed out, though. I never thought about it until now.)
*> Alphys never speaks or writes in lowercase*
Actually, many of her Undernet posts are in entirely lowercase.
Not all of them, but many of them.
For example, literally the first one we get I think;
"just realized i didn't watch undyne fight the human v.v
well i know she's unbeatable i'll ask her abt it later ^.^
for now i gotta call up the human and guide them =^.^="
*(Note from after writing the thing below: okay, they DID mention this a bit afterwards)*
I CAN say that it's interesting that entry 8 mentioning the queen, but Alphys reacts with "(THERE'S TWO OF THEM???)" in the True Pacifist ending. Though, I wouldn't be surprised if she knew of the queen, but not that she was a Boss Monster like Asgore. It seems like an easy enough explanation. That, or Toby isn't too good of a writer sometimes, which... shows, on occasion.
*> That leaves only one person who could have written the normal entries.*
I believe it was still Alphys there as well, especially considering the mention of the flower vessel is written in both proper and lowercase. Entires 8 and 10, as I mentioned earlier.
All in all, I don't believe Gaster wrote any of the entires in the True Lab, and believe they were all done by Alphys.
ENTRY NUMBER SEVENTEEN was more than likely part of its own thing, unrelated to the others.
The video has some good points, but the main thing is rocky at best, and nonsense at worse, sadly.
Though, the effort is commendable, and the video is really good.
Their theory for 8 and 10 was that Gaster and Alphys both worked on flowers, presumably because Alphys had read Gaster's notes.
@@DavidSartor0 personally, it feels like that explanation is just handing Alphys's work to Gaster, and makes it like Alphys is just copying him, rather than doing her own thing.
@@SBtorms If you don't like that, then:
Alphys worked on Golden Flowers for the same reasons Gaster did; they're easy to transplant, big enough to inject large amounts of determination into, last long enough for it to take effect, very common, and the King's favorite plant.
@@DavidSartor0 i mean... i guess
I think it's important to remember that everything in Undertale relating to Gaster was added _very_ late in development, when the game was almost ready to ship. GameMaker keeps track of a project's resources with arrays (sequential lists where everything has a unique ID number), with new assets being added to the end of the list as they're created. Everything Gaster is near the very end of these lists, meaning they were put into the project when nearly everything else was done. I believe the Occam's Razor interpretation of this is that they're easter eggs that were added once Toby felt that the game was basically finished, and that he did not consider these bits to be important, and especially not as important as something like the True Lab.
He obviously knew he'd be working on Deltarune as soon as the Kickstarter stretch goal (referring to the game as "darker") was met, and Deltarune is known to at least be based on a much older idea that predates any planning for Undertale, so a character like Gaster was almost certainly kicking around in his mind, but Toby was also impressively disciplined in keeping Undertale as its own contained project. I firmly believe that if he saw the two projects as being integrated from the start, these bits of foreshadowing would have appeared throughout Undertale's development, rather than sprinkled in at the end. (My personal Deltarune theory is that while a direct connection to Undertale will be revealed, it won't actually matter to the existing story of Undertale and won't meaningfully change how we experience it.)
There are a few things in the True Lab notes that are genuinely weird, like the references to Toriel, but it's extremely easy to slip from theorizing into writing fanfiction, and if it takes an hour to explain your theory, you'd better be sure you know how to spot the difference.
I also think it's a very bad habit to assume that creators want to misdirect and throw off their audiences. Red herrings are a very situational storytelling tool. Most authors never use them at all, and when they do, they're typically intended to mislead protagonists just as much as the audience. There are a handful people like Hideo Kojima who are notorious for trolling their fans with disinformation (and even that was mostly a phase for him), but I've never seen any evidence whatsoever that Toby Fox is one of them.
22:27 Asgore wasn't amazed at the transferral of a Monster's SOUL into a mechanical body. Mettaton was advertized to Asgore as a machine with a soul of it's own, which was the lie that got her into the Royal Scientist position. If an artificial SOUL could be created, then could the barrier be broken without more lives being lost?
23:40 Calling Alphys a fraud is a...*kinda hard* on her. Considering Mettaton''s box form, which she built, is literally impenetrable by you and she turns your phone into a *separate inventory* and a *jetpack*. She lied about Mettaton, true, but she can do cool things when she puts her mind to it.
25:35 Gaster being forgotten is a point of contention, because why would Asgore take such a long time to replace someone who he forgot?
31:42 Alphys could've known of a queen and not know she was a fluffy goat like Asgore. The True Lab tapes has explanations as to why the videos were all black, like having the lens cap on while recording. Alphys didn't get to see Asgore and Toriel nuzzling because Toriel decided to film in the dark.
33:24 The fact that Alphys types in proper uppercase when writing a review on Mew Mew Kissy Cutie 2 can clue in to the fact that she changes how she writes based on the setting. After all, a review is supposed to be formal, so, proper uppercase.
If Asgore had already assigned Gaster with trying to find a loophole in the barrier using human SOULs before Asriel was born, why did more have to die after the first 2 or 3? It makes more sense to say that Asgore hadn't considered a solution to the barrier other than opening it with 7 human SOULs. And then came Alphys, with a machine that has a soul of it's own, presenting a possible loophole to killing more children. Having being presented with this alternate solution, he hired her as Royal Scientist.
50:44 ...The CORE was literally an underground-wide electric generator? Why would it be used for the sole purpose of extracting a soul from a monster? That just feels very impractical, as the entry states.
54:32 "Alphys using a flower as a neutral vessel for DT like Gaster because she's a fraud" is not a great argument and assuming she picked more flowers as a control case to Flowey after injecting him with DT takes less mental gymnastics.
1:06:46 But if Gaster was the one who injected the First Golden Flower with DT, then he should've been the one to create Flowey. As, when Asriel died, his dust was spread onto the seeds the first flower grew from, so his essence lived on in that flower.
1:13:14 If Asgore hadn't been in New Home since Toriel left, where did he sleep?? Also the journal entries are new.
1:16:26 Ok, if Dogamy and Dogaressa were part of Gaster's original DT experiments, what about Endogeny? The dogs that made up Endogeny were included in those about to be "Fallen Down", from the Uppercase author. Why didn't they come back as normal monsters?
1:17:48. Wasn't the DELTA RUNE found by Gerson and adopted by monsters as an iconography of hope?
1:19:22. The golden flowers are buttercups?? Huh?
Will continue to edit the original comment, because writing comments on youtube freezes a lot and is ass. (I'm done with editing this comment)
I don’t think Gerson was the one to find the delta rune, but I’m not 100% sure on that.
@@Catpixeled Ok yeah but the point after that is still valid
@@Minefan200 Yeah that’s true
I don't think they said the Golden Flowers are buttercups.
It's possible Alphys still had the flower that would become Flowey. She says she was injecting everything with determination, so it makes sense she'd add more determination to the same flower.
I don't think they said that Gaster was forgotten by everyone; just most people, because they died of old age.
Honestly, saying that Gaster injected Dogamy and Dogaressa with DT and them waking up means nothing came out of the experiment is a fundamental misunderstanding of why the experiments were done in the first place. The True Lab experiments were done to find a way to prolong a Monster's soul after they die, not to save them from falling down. The fact that they even woke up in the first place should've been noteworthy enough to document for the future.
01:13:08 That's impossible because the ink used for the diary in this room is still wet when you first reach there. Toby even went so far to to correct that it has dried when inspecting it after fighting Asriel.
PLEASE THIS VIDEO IS SO SCARY 😭 i want so badly to add on to the really smart comments that everyone else left but this video literally feels like found footage the editing is CRAZY
Changing capitalisation seems more like Alphys stress indecation than anything
Oh my god, this is earth-shattering to me. I never thought how I looked at this game could be changed nearly nine years out, yet you have done it. Bravo.
I'm only up to about 1 hour in, so I will continue watching, but I feel that the initial premise that alphys did not write all of the entries is wrong. There are two entry 17s in the game, and only one of them is Gaster. the other is an explanation as to the amalgamation effect, the same one Alphys gives us in game (likely omitted for dialogue flow).
As for "how did Alphys know the Queen" - The VHS tapes, as for "Why does alphys say 'what we have now, monster souls'", she's presuming that no more humans will fall, and being proactive with a solution, finding a way to make a monster soul capable of destroying the barrier.
"The unused entry 17 was removed from the code in later versions" - this is true, however I don't think this means we should discredit it entirely. However, this is sort of a moot point, as entry 11 confirms Alphys is the royal scientist, and as of yet I see no reason to assume they're out of order in the numbering sequence. Gaster's entry being 17 is likely just because Alphys' entry 17 was removed for brevity.
While I'm not sure Asgore was ever made aware of Mettaton's SOUL, I do like the interpretation that seeing a monster soul in a physical vessel is why he was amazed.
We know for a fact that Alphys' writing style is not exclusively lowercase like Sans, as she uses capitals in her Undernet posts. It's most likely that she forgoes using proper grammar when she doesn't feel like it, due to the emotional trauma of creating amalgamates or the inner conflict of mettaton's body.
I like the idea that tape 5 is security footage, or something similar, and carrying that through to what entry 17 actually IS, is pretty compelling.
Now, shaking letters is not exclusively for characters on the verge of death. It's also for any time a character's voice would be shaky, such as if they're fearful (flowey) or similar. However, this is still an important point for what exactly Gaster is doing (speaking)...
There's an omission here. In one of the earlier ('normal') entries, the author writes "Using the blueprints, I have extracted [Determination] from the human souls." This implies they used blueprints that had already existed. If Gaster was the first royal scientist, or at least the first to experiment with DT, did he not write the blueprints? in my mind, it makes more sense for Gaster to have started looking into the topic, but being waylaid by THE DARKNESS and Alphys picks up the pieces.
I appreciate that you introduce the concept of asgore's side chick just to debunk it, though I personally don't think the house has been abandoned (Asgore is still trying to replicate snail pie.)
Ultimately, this is a very well thought out and coherent theory video. I don't agree with the conclusions, but I deeply appreciate the effort that went into this.
I take back every negative thing I have currently or will in the future write in this comment for the based choice of using "Kris" as the first human's name
On the "shaking letters" part, we also see shaking letters with Asgore when he's emotional (although thats at the end when we defeat him,) and with Toriel, and with Flowey like you said, and Undyne that was mentioned in this video. They're either afraid, dying, emotional or similar. The text for narration while we explore the world in a No Mercy route also shakes in some instances. Excluding Papyrus, what these characters have in common is that they all have Determination or are related to Determination to some degree. I'm not sure what those could imply for Entry Number 17, but Im glad somebody else caught this detail
It’s a good thing this theory doesn’t fall apart if you consider the idea that one person can type in two different ways depending on their mood
I think a good refutation to this is that Alphys seemingly doesn't know about the queen/Toriel, whereas the ordinary-styled writer of the entries clearly knows about the tapes, including the one of Toriel.
The theory doesn't rely on that as its whole basis. It's just one argument.
@@MattJDave lol, some random froggits in Asgore’s house will tell you about the whole story about the royal family, Toriel’s existence isn’t some secret knowledge
@@SuperRayman001 It’s also a great indication of how extremely flawed the logic is
@@joshuafreeman3609damn, I forgot about the random monsters telling you about the royal family. Of course people know about the queen even if they don't know what she looked like, there are history books and stuff in the underground.
this video has been full of surprises but the nose-nuzzle champions thing absolutely blew my mind
This video is really well made, interesting, and brimming with personally. I’m shocked it was made only 9 days ago and yet it not only taught me more info about this game, but also completely convinced me of a narrative I’ve never heard before. Definitely subscribing. Well done man
this is such an incredible video, so many things i never even thought about. so underrated!!
Just a small note, on the comments concerning Flowey being unable to feel emotion, or specifically compassion - given Undertale's clear lack of an abject, outright villain and Toby Fox's tendencies in character writing, I think it's very likely that Flowey (and really, Asriel as well) saying this is specifically a trauma response, not a result of their state as a flower. Asriel has shown to be not completely reliable for information on multiple occasions (namely, placing their image of his old friend upon Frisk), and is very obviously subject to a lot of trauma - the way his friend treated him, the death of his friend, being fatally wounded while both literally and metaphorically carrying his dead friend with him, coming back to life and living for an unknowable and horrific amount of time in effective isolation from everyone around him due to his status as an effective time god, the fact that all of this happened to him during his childhood and he was literally never allowed to "grow up" - it's very likely that he's trying to cope with his feelings by shoving them as far down as possible. I feel this is especially supported in the Undertale alarm clock dialogue, which IIRC is considered canon - where he still shows the emotional bonds that he has with his family, although he tries to hide it.
Hour and a half of a video about a ten year old game? Oh hell yea
oh my god. undertale is ten years old. i can't anymore 😭
the editing script music sfx humour timing pacing everything was so perfect. amazing video ❤
Incredible theory!One of the most solid, groundbreaking and well-made I ever saw.
I'm a little dumbfounded that:
-Gaster would say "by using the blueprint" instead "by using the blueprint I made" or "by using the blueprint I made"
-Gaster failed to create Flowey. I understand that without the mean to fill it with enough determination it won't be able to break the barrier, but creating Flowey would be more easy and less sensitive than injecting determination to the monsters.
And having a "Flowey" would prove that the vessel can be used to destroy the barrier.
I guess he understood that making a souless being come alive would be dangerous and immoral, especially if there is Asriel dust on it.
-The way he types and his personality is so different from Deltarune's Gaster, and ot a lesser degree from entry seventeen.
Also I don't feel like's he dying in entry seventeen, sine he's calm, taling to two other persons, and speaking about a next experiment.
1) Why, if it's obvious?
2) He didn't know that.
3) It's not unreasonable to assume someone comes across a little different in text, as opposed to speech.
> Also I don't feel like's he dying in entry seventeen, sine he's calm, taling to two other persons, and speaking about a next experiment.
Yeah, I assume everyone would be more bothered if he were dying.
Great stuff! Usually, stylistic analysis isn't a very good guide to authorship, as can be seen by the disagreements in the fandom over the authorship of the different entries; but here, I really like the narrative effect of assuming two different authors. It makes Gaster's absence that much more tragic because he turns out to be even more of an irreplaceable genius whose work did a substantial amount of good for monsters. It also makes Alphys more sympathetic because while she clearly has some skill with science, she doesn't match up to Gaster and is crushed by the expectations placed on her. "What an act to follow!"
As for how Flowey organizes the entries, it might be his way of mocking Alphys: contrasting the success of Gaster's determination experiments with the failure of Alphys'. Some have mentioned the entry that talks about "using blueprints" as evidence Alphys wrote the earlier entries, but it depends on if the entry is to be read as "Using the blueprints [to build the machine], I've extracted determination." Or "Using the blueprints [to use an already-built machine], I've extracted determination." Either way still seems to be totally compatible with Gaster having been the first to build and use the Determination Extractor.
Lastly, the part about the original flower injected with determination proliferating and being the cause of so many flowers in the Underground was a great connection.
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Gerson in genoside references that he wont buy anything from you even at knife point, and that he knows a battle cannot start in a shop (being very meta). I have an inkling that all the characters that have some dialogue that is meta means they have some de-termination or more will to stay alive than others.
I am READY for your next analysis, my dude, you go
you can tell huge amounts of effort were put into this video. thank you, seriously.
oh. I had never connected the fact Gaster is the one to say "i thought they were goners" with goner kid and the gaster followers (as well as the deltatune grey body thang). Fun.
Honestly, this video is worth the wait, because it's a new look at an old game, and on top of that, with good editing.
i love how this has been my favorite game for 6+ years and yet i still discover more things and new theories keep popping up, this is so intricate, well presented and SO interesting!!!! well done to you !!!!
this is absolutely fucking mind-blowing. Undertale is just a gift that keeps on giving. Hope to see your channel grow much more in the near future!!
This was by far one of the best theory videos on gaster to date, and the Dogamy and Dogaressa being the first determination experiments is one of the most unique and actually makes sense lore wise. 10/10 theory video, this has to blow up
Just because a character doesn’t speak in lowercase doesn’t mean it can’t be them as seen with Sans in the judgement hall where he talks normally for a speech
He changes his mode of speech to intimidate you. This does not apply to the context of written text. Only spoken dialogue.
I just want to say that the editing on this video is incredible and I applaud you for putting this information together in the ways that you did.
This video is seriously incredible- the amount of thought and research and production quality in it is astounding
Yeah, theres a lot of inaccuracies and missed facts but it’s SUPER well presented… I’d love t see an updated version
De-Termination. God dayum that’s so fucking smart
I find it impossible to imagine toby put this much thought into this. Likely the simplest explanation is that all entries were by alphys except the missing one because weird timeline shenanigans.
+1
Putting this much important lore behind a 1/1000000 chance of finding out about Gaster naturally is bad game design
@@W.D_Gaster In the end, toby mainly put gaster in the game as a pretty obvious reference to uboa. Most people totally overlook that lol
@@Poly_0000i think it's that and foreshadowing towards deltarune. There Gaster has significance from the very start.
@Poly_0000
I mean just because he looks like a reference to another character doesn't mean he has no relevance in the story at all. He's clearly a very important character in deltarune, and has some major relevance in undertale too
@@sapphire4310 I can agree with that, I just can't imagine Toby really put this much thought into it
I knew I recognized you from somewhere! I absolutely love your Petscop videos! Glad to see you tackling this series, it's just as interesting in many aspects. I am absolutely looking forward to your futures theories and analysis, my personal favorite of yours was Dial Impulse 😊
This an incredible video. I have never heard this story told this way, especially with the two different determination experiments. It makes a remarkable, and intriguing story. Thank you, you have earned a subscriber.
I'm impressed and glad that in 2024 there's still theories about Undertale that can surprise me and make so much sense! I love this one, will eagerly wait for more from you
This completely changed what I thought was happening in the True-Pacifist sequence, and holy shit this makes so much sense
If you inspect it closer it really doesn't.
@@rafsandomierz5313 The burden of proof is on you to validate your claims, friend
@@lilacpenguin5329 There is already burden of proof in game.
@@lilacpenguin5329 Flowey stringing you along isn't exactly new information, since it's already known that Papyrus likes to talk to a flower and that they're friends. Said flower gives him predictions, as well. Predictions that may have ended up becoming true.
@@rafsandomierz5313this video is full of missteps and leaps in logic, but the analysis of the true pacifist route is as close to canon as it gets. I didn't even realize it was up for debate until watching this video, Flowey orchestrating True Pacifist is just a fact. He literally sends you back to get a better end after a neutral run and drops extremely unsubtle hints about how to get that end.
This video is insane, I’ve read each of the entries a thousand times and never thought i could learn something new about them. sometimes I watch a theory video and it’s a stretch, but oh my god this video makes perfect sense.
Please make more videos, this was phenomenally well done and really fun to follow along with
THE ENDING ABT THE FLOWERS WAS CRAZY. THIS VIDEO IS AMAZING
A lot of this video hinges on the idea that people (or rather, monsters) cannot communicate information with each other. For example: "oh no, author mentioned that flower appeared before Queen left! Alphys couldn't have written this entry!!" ...or she was told so by Asgore.
Additionally, you'd think that monsters researched immortality and SUCCEEDED would have been a bigger deal in the lore.
And last but not least - in "Legends of Localisation" it is said that Alphys was the one to coin the term "determination", meaning she is the one who wrote entry 5. In other words, I'm afraid this theory is void.
It was cool though! A lot of interesting connection about stuff like bg noises, and the idea that Entry 17 is a RECORDING by Gaster is novel and worthwhile. Some thing I never connected myself - like I never realised Flowey manipulating Alphys going into the true lab. I liked it!
i dont think alphys naming determination breaks the theory. if gaster was erased from everyone’s memory, whos to say his inventions and discoveries didnt do the same? if alphys and everyone else didnt know that gaster had discovered determination then its not strange for alphys to think she was the one that had discovered it
@@peeeeeeeeeeafThis would make sense if the book statement was framed as an in-universe statement. But it really isn't.
@@peeeeeeeeeeaf The blueprints in Sans's basement was written by Gaster and the CORE still exists. Along with Asgore taking a long time to find another Royal Scientist.
I haven't finished the video yet but GODDAMN IS THIS ANALYSIS GOOD. This was the kind of Undertale theory I've been yearning for years!!! Thank you!!❤❤
i have come back to this video at least five times since i came across it, thank u so much for this.....
A slight counterpoint: Alphys says "I extracted the power I called determination" this with entry 5 would imply that dt was only called that after gaster fell.
One of the assorted books also has a quote from toby saying that Alphys named determination
As a massive fan of this channel for years in soo excited to see a new video, however that is 4am for me and I can’t watch it live, tragic
This is absurdly thorough. Thank you for this beautiful little piece. I feel like we've circled these ideas and had the pieces forever but to figure out all of them connect like this is makes you wonder how we didn't stumble into this.
i love your video style, this is super fun to watch :3
I can only imagine this took a lot of time, thought, and notetaking to compile, and the result was an entertaining watch. I definitely think you're onto something with entry 17 being a recording - also, "speaking" in hands as opposed to writing or typing? genius. and it never occurred to me that Papyrus telling you to go to the true lab was actually Flowey /impersonating/ Papyrus, but considering the evidence, it makes perfect sense. I am incorporating this into my beliefs now lol
however, I do have a few problems with the idea that the properly capitalized entries were written by Gaster (and trust me, I say this as the world's most rabid Gaster nerd). firstly, with the advent of deltarune, we now have irrefutable examples of his speech patterns and vocabulary. and while we know for sure that he only speaks in capital letters, this could, as you said, reasonably be explained away by someone dictating his entries.
what's less convincing is the fact that even on such an informal platform as twitter, Gaster uses very formal language. additionally, he NEVER uses contractions. many of the entries attributed to him in this video not only use contractions, but plenty of informal speech and words ("info", "weird", "snooping", etc.), which are far more in line with Alphys.
I don't think it's contradictory to assume Alphys found the tapes. she wouldn't necessarily have recognized Toriel's voice in the pacifist ending just from having heard it briefly one time, however long ago. Sans only recognizes it because their interactions through the door became 'a thing' and happened recently.
to me, it seems like a stretch to assume entry 15 wasn't written by Alphys as well; it describes calling the families to tell them their loved ones are coming home, which is perfectly in line with what we know: that everything went to shyte before she had a chance to deliver, prompting the subsequent barrage of letters and calls.
entry 8 talks about the "first golden flower that grew before all the others, appearing just after the queen left". yes, Alphys couldn't have been around at the time that happened - however, there's no reason to believe Asgore wouldn't have told her about it, since those flowers and the events surrounding them are so important to him. it seems reasonable that she wouldn't have had to be present at the time to be aware of the flower and its significance.
and as far as entry 2 goes: "we will have to use what we have now: the souls of monsters". I don't think this means there were no human souls available - just that they didn't have a seventh, and therefore had to make up the remaining power needed by using monster souls instead.
so I ultimately think it makes more sense to assume all the entries were written by Alphys, and the capitalization discrepancies are simply indicative of her state of mind at the time (after all, by the time we meet her, she's at her lowest. there's no reason to believe she doesn't use proper capitalization when in a better headspace or a more serious setting). additionally, Alphys leaves a note telling us to enter the true lab specifically so we can learn the truth about what she's done. it doesn't make sense that she wouldn't be aware of which entries were on display for us to read - so why would Flowey need to set them up in the first place if the info was already there? (the only exception being the final two entries we read, with the smileys - I agree those were deliberately set up by him.)
and as a final aside, Alphys may be a 'fraud' in the sense that she obtained her position under false pretenses, but it's unfair to discredit her as a scientist altogether - I mean among other things, she outfitted a cell phone with a freaking jetpack! that's pretty impressive.
one last thing - the idea that Asgore hasn't gone back to the house in New Home since Toriel left is disproved when you read his diary, as the narrator tells you "the ink is still almost wet." additionally, the trashcan in the kitchen being full of scrapped butterscotch pie recipes implies that Asgore has been desperately trying to figure out how to make them the way Toriel did (also the coals in the fireplace are still warm and the fridge is full of snails, a callback to Napstablook's statement that their only customer now is 'some hairy guy').
I personally believe when Chara refers to the note as something they've read before, it simply means Asgore has always had an 'open house' policy. so, it isn't that it's literally the exact same note Chara once read, just another one saying the same thing.
all that said (wow that was a lotta words), I'm not hating on this theory - I agree with some of the evidence presented, and even if I didn't, it was still a fun watch that clearly took a lot of work to make. so I'm definitely interested to see the next video :)
So unfortunate to still see Alphys slander in this fandom, for a main theory that breaks as soon as you have basic reading comprehension to understand why this whole experiment was done (To find an alternative to a seventh human soul because it likely would have been taking a long amount of time for one to fall at the time of the entries, this project being started before any souls were even collected makes no sense), and that just because one person talks a certain way in game, doesn't mean they only ever talk that way, there are differing writing styles for characters in Undertale since have seen Sans?
Also not to mention that the note written OUTSIDE THE LAB by Alphys herself when you arrive, is using the same exact capitalization as the first few entries in the true lab, so that's another reason this all completely falls apart and that there is no "second" author to all of this. It's all Alphys set at most like a year before Undertale.
It's also so sad to see hundreds of people praising this theory for supposedly being one of the best, like really? Is it one of the best when it's completely diminishing one of the main characters of the game???
I get it y'know, a large amount of people don't like Alphys as a character, but do you really think it's ok to completely get rid of all her accomplishments this way and throw all of her character nuance out the window until she's left with nothing?
It no longer feels like a theory when it's intentionally targeted towards Alphys and her character considering how many jabs are made against her, with any actual theory points being brought up in the video just being considered void to me, since they would work in other videos that were not related to this.
I recommend people go watch Dorked's video on Alphys instead. It explains her character pretty well and clears up a lot of misconceptions about her.
I didn't see this as Alphys slander at all. In fact, this video has pointed out an extra layer of nuance to her character that I hadn't considered before, and it makes me like her even _more_ as a character.
There is just something so compelling about a character slowly sliding down a slope of deceit, white lies that build and build into a trap of her own making, one she feels like she can't escape from. One that leads her to a hit rock bottom, where it seems like the only way out is to end it all. Its relatable. Painfully so, because I and i'm sure others have been there in some capacity. Trying so hard to look good, to fit in, that you end up getting in over your head. But you feel like you've gone too far to take it back, to admit you weren't everything you said you were, so you keep the deception going because now if they find out you'll be in even more trouble, they'll be even more disappointed so you can't _ever_ let them know, and now your in too deep and everyone is looking to you for answers that you don't have, you don't know what your doing but they _can't know_ because then they will leave and then you'll be alone again and you can't have that, you _can't_ so now your desperate and reckless and just throwing everything at the wall to make _something_ happen, *_anything_* happen to keep this life, this job, this attention and praise just a little longer and-
oh
And now you've made a mistake. A horrific, irreversible mistake and as you look at it, at them, all you can think is *they can't know, **_know one can know._*
Because if they ever do all this- this prestige and respect you've built on your house of lies, the house that's placed ever so precariously, as the sand it sits on shifts beneath it and falls, and you can _see_ your life falling apart before your eyes like a train wreck, from the sidelines, helpless to stop it as you see the cards start to fall. Watching it all like a spectator, numb and unmoving and unblinking with only the dull thought that _this can't be real._
So you shut down. Completely isolate from all the questions, the innocent questions from the families of the ones you-- who once had praise for you falling from their lips that now sounds like accusations, _blame,_ every word and letter and call and knock at the door saying _"liar, fraud, murderer"_ and the abominations you made shambling about beneath your home and you just want it all to *_stop._*
Do you not see how gripping this is? How tragic and compelling and how much it can _resonate_ with people??? This video is not slandering Alphy's character. It's giving her the proper, thorough examination that she deserves. It allows the fandom to finally see her and what her character was meant to say in its entirety and her story is fucking _beautiful._
Because it makes her fate even more meaningful in the ending she gets. It makes her relationship with Undyne hold even more narrative weight. Because in the pits of her despair, when she saw no way out but down, Undyne came and showed her that there was another way. Undyne _saved her life_ and that resulted in her crush on the fish, and knowing that that's the origin of her attraction makes me kick my feet with joy and giddiness rise in my chest when I watch as they get together in the game, makes me even more invested in the happiness they can bring each other. And to see Alphys overcome, finally be honest with herself and others and see that owning her mistakes won't make her hated, that Undyne was right and there was a way out of that dark tunnel, that she can still love and be loved despite how much she lied and how many she hurt-
Fuck if that isn't beautiful too.
And it makes the other endings hit harder, makes it gut wrenching in the endings where Alphys gives into her despair and offs herself, makes it all the more inspiring when she evacuates the underground after Undyne's death.
And those emotions and story beats are only felt so poinently when we realize that *_this,_* the things said in *_this video,_* are her origin. To recognize just how much of a fraud she was, just how deep of a hole she'd trapped herself in. It is only by seeing and fully understanding where she was at her lowest that we can truly appreciate her story, and how she develops during the game. During which, we see she is no longer at her lowest thanks to Undyne, but still scared with social anxiety and prone to old habits of lying to make herself look good. Her whole portion of the game is her deceiving Frisk by staging things to make Mettaton act like he's attacking them just so she can look good by saving them.
Many fans dislike Alphys, as you said. Because her anxious behavior is annoying, because she lies, because she tricked Frisk, because she made the amalgams, because she represents all the cringy parts of ourselves, the parts that we are ashamed of and wish to hide away forever. But that's because most fans, myself included for a long time, didn't understand _why._ Why she is the way she is, why she's so desperate to make herself look good or scared to leave the house, or even why she likes Undyne. Don't you see that this video answers those questions? That it makes what once made her so unbearable to many suddenly understandable, even _relatable?_ Can't you see that this, the origin of Alphys, recontextualizes her entire character, her journey and her story, into one of heartbreaking and brilliant tragedy? One all the more powerful because *WE* get to chose how it ends, whether she overcomes or marches on or finally gives in? And the end of her story suddenly matters _so_ much, maybe more than any other's, because we can see ourselves in her, understand her, and we are invested in knowing if she turns out okay.
We can chose to see her; a representation of all the things about ourselves that we hate and feel shame for, and tell her she deserves forgiveness. That she deserves love. _THAT_ is what Alphy's story is all about, that is the message it was meant to convey, and I didn't get that until I watched _this video._
Many fans didn't care about Alphys or get invested in her story because they couldn't see where she was coming from, but THIS VIDEO changes that. It exposes exactly where her story starts, and makes it so all of a sudden where her story ends become so much more powerful. Because now we can see, for maybe the first time, just how far she's come. And we can finally celebrate that for her in full.
I think that you need to watch this video again, _really_ watch it, and you will see that this is not Alphys bashing at all. In fact, if you know some Alphys haters I would recommend showing them this video, and I bet they would see her in a whole new light. This video displays an understanding of her character and handles the nuance of it with more respect, with the full weight of what her story deserves, better than I have seen anywhere else.
Try to keep an open mind.
I won't address many of the things you said about what that disprove the theory in this video because the video itself addresses most of them. But I would hate for you to have dismissed valid arguments because you got caught up in defending a character. If you look past the discomfort you may feel at someone calling a character you like a liar and fraud, you can see that she needs no defending here. And you might even be able to see just how groundbreaking this theory is.
Please give this video another watch. You might be shocked at what you hear if you're willing to listen.
Sorry for the rant.
@@yellowsnake7300
Alphys slipping down a slope of deceit is already there. This 'theory' doesn't add that to the game. Alphys already lied to Asgore about the nature of Mettaton, lied to Undyne about herself, lied to Frisk to make herself feel liked, and lied to everyone about where their fallen down family members were.
Stripping her away of her skill and insisting, repeatedly, that she's incompetent, is not adding to her character. This adds nothing. It only takes away. If you didn't already see Alphys being slowly crushed under the weight of her own lies, then you weren't paying attention to the game. It's her entire character arc.
Turbulation is right and you're wrong. This theory, on top of diminishing Alphys's character, has absolutely NO basis. There is not a SINGLE point it makes that is not obviously, blatantly, clearly wrong.
Alphys only writes in lowercase: Except Alphys writes the note outside the True Lab with proper punctuation.
The entries were written before humans fell into the Underground: Except that the entry specifically says 'to create more, we'll have to use the SOULs of monsters' implying they already have a source other than those.
The writer knows about Toriel, but Alphys doesn't: Except that 'knowing about someone' and 'knowing someone' are two different things. Everyone knows ABOUT Toriel, there are monsters all throughout Asgore's home that tell the whole story of the First Human falling into the Underground, their death, and the Queen's departure.
Gaster wrote Entry 17, so it stands to reason he wrote other ones: Except that even in the video, he mentions there was an original Entry 17 in the game's files, written by Alphys, that was dummied out because it was redundant, making it clear that it was always the intention that they were all written by Alphys. Gaster's version of Entry 17 came after all the other ones were already written.
Seriously, go watch Dorked's video about Alphys. It's a good one.
@@kilimachevsk623 I will go check out that video, but I’m gonna have to disagree with you about this theory. I just genuinely disagree with every point you made, so I think we’re just gonna have to agree to disagree on that.
I will make clear though that I don’t think Alphys writing half of the entries instead of all of them makes her any less of a good scientist. Even if she didn’t invent the DT extractor and pioneer soul experimentation, she still would have had to follow up on research that had been left collecting dust for ages all by herself. That’s plenty impressive. Not to mention her upkeep on the core, building mettaton, the phone storage/jetpack and all the other stuff we see she invented. No doubt that she’s a brilliant scientist. Not as brilliant as Gaster I think we can all agree, but definitely not to be looked down on. I don’t think this theory undermines how competent Alphys is by only crediting her to half the entries in the true lab.
Also, genuinely curious, why do you think that entries are numbered the way they are or appear in the order they do If you think they were all by Alphys? And why is Gaster’s entry 17 out of all of them? Not trying to be confrontational, I really just wanna know. The explanation for it in this video theory made the order make sense to me, but I’m open to an alternative view.
@@yellowsnake7300 It's not a matter of opinion to be agreed on or disagreed on; the video is just wrong.
I'm having a hard time parsing what you're even trying to ask me here- so sorry if this answers more than what you were asking. The entries are numbered in the order they're written, and appear in the order they do so that they're relevant to the area that you're reading them in, and to set things up for the player in the way that Toby wants. The entries are written with proper grammar at first, as Alphys is taking this seriously and writing professionally. However, when things start going poorly, nothing seems to be working, and her confidence starts slipping, she stops treating the entries as seriously as she starts to panic. Then, when the fallen down monsters wake up, Alphys starts typing properly again. It wasn't the result she hypothesized, but she's happy that at least some good came of the experiments- before things turn even worse. It's incredibly obvious that the writing style of the entries corresponds to Alphys's rising and falling mental state.
"I'm going to take this seriously, I'm the Royal Scientist now, I've studied up on SOULs, I'm going to properly document my findings."
"shit nothings working why isnt anything working what do i do"
"Oh, uh- I guess everyone's okay? Not what we were looking for, but being able to save monsters who'd fallen down is still a great scientific advancement!"
"wow okay nevermind things are worse than ever and i hate myself"
Gaster's entry is entry 17 because that's the one that was dummied out. It documents how monster bodies can't handle determination. Presumably, during the process of making Undertale, Toby decided that it'd be more impactful to have the explanation of what happened to the Amalgamates come at the end, from Alphys herself, and leave what exactly happened a mystery until then. This left an empty Entry 17. Toby could just renumber the entries... OR, he could slip in a fun little reference to Gaster, who's entire meta-narrative thing is about deleted or dummied out content.
@@kilimachevsk623 Thank you, that answered my question. That explanation for the entries makes a lot of sense!
For me, I do view any explanations for the entries as a matter of opinion though. For any interpretation to be wrong, there has to be one that is confirmed true as a fact. Your explanation, while it makes perfect sense, is no more officially confirmed then what this video proposed. It’s only how you interpreted what the game presented. And there’s nothing wrong with that, your explanation is incredibly likely to be correct. It’s just that I find the explanation that this video proposed just as likely. They both have an equal possibility of being true in my mind, and that won’t change until one is outright confirmed.
I think that your interpretation makes perfect sense, and I also think that the evidence presented in this video is sound enough to make this video theory equally as possible. If you don’t think the evidence for the theory is strong enough, then I would chalk that up to just a difference in opinion. You think this theory isn’t possible, I think it is. We’ll have to agree to disagree. It’s not a matter of one interpretation or the other being wrong, because none of us can say definitively that either is the right one.
That’s the beauty of all this, it’s just a theory. Speculations with evidence to back them up, presenting cases for which one we think is most likely. Which one I decide to go with will be entirely up to which one I think has the best narrative implications. Thus, a complete matter of opinion.
I watched that Dorked video btw and it was really good, thanks for recommending it!
Can i just say that the intro of this video was so good like the music, visuals of the underground and the monolog just hooked me up instantly
Love your editing style. Had a good chuckle when the sock muppet peeked out from behind the map of where the entries are located, then peeked out again for an addendum.
36:14 You named yourself Kris and it totally caught me off guard lol
I just realized
In Deltarune Gerson has already passed away quite many years ago. Many assumed it was because it happends in a later time in the timeline than Undertale, BUT assuming Azzy was born in the same year, this means DR takes place in ~202X, which is long, long before the events of Undertale.
So parhaps the reason why Gerson is dead, is because the Determination Experiments didn't take place, meaning, his lifespan wasn't prolonged by another ~100 years as we see in Undertale
Now, we do see the Shopkeeper and Doggy and Dogessa (in bar and in jail) so maybe it isn't as deep, or maybe just an oversight, but still.
Same comes for Gaster Followers, as I thought they could've been Gaster obssesed monsters, seeing him as their saviour after the experiments, buuut they seem to be moreso connected to Deltarune, giving their... odd properties, somewhat simmilar to Gaster himself (fun values and disappearing)
Anyway, can't wait for your next theories! It's been a while since i've seen anybody dig up anything new on Gaster and the file entries, and especially the tapes, so I'm stoked to see where your slimy mind will go next. Hope to see you soon!
Can't have been too long before the events of the game, since the purple skater dude monster who is (presumably) a young adult and probably around Asriel's age has dialogue about Gerson being his teacher. At most Gerson died about 5-10 years ago.
Great video. I've been wondering about the entries for a while!
this is probably one of the best undertale theory videos ive watched
I am shocked at how many people didn't realize the secret wing-dings entry was a recording! It was something I just... thought intuitively when I first saw it online. I didn't necessarily think it was a video recording in a spot where it was dark, I figured it was just an audio recording, considering the sound, the shaking of the letters, and the ending comment. But maybe I just wasn't thinking of it in-context with the other entries, which were all written logs.
The "Papyrus" phone call being Flowey is something I never considered, though! And I love the timeline you constructed with the experiments, and the "dog lovers must be old" evidence point with the trophy. Great stuff! I'm surprised you didn't mention Room 269 when discussing the fact that Gaster might not be dead.
My only point of criticism in this video is that I think you spent way too long explaining why Alphys was the lower case writer; at least, way too long before discussing the fact that she posts on UNDERNET in lowercase. Even though I didn't know of Gaster yet, the two writers thing with True Lab was obvious to me during my playthrough, with Alphys clearly being the lower case one. I still don't know if Gaster even is the other writer, though. I know it's the commonly accepted viewpoint (at least, I think it is), and there's good reason to believe it, but it could be someone else. It could even be Alphys, going from more professional to less professional writing, which is something else I considered in my playthrough, but found (and still find) unlikely.
this video goes hard and has a LOT of good bits (esp entry 17 being a video, i can totally buy that, always confused me that when it's meant to be him typing it's not in wingdings and that makes sense now) but i refuse to believe at 55:48 that gaster would use ':)'. broski would NOT use emoticons
He is ancient + yes, he definitely would, it came to me in a dream
@@lilemont9302 mm that IS a pretty indisputable source...
@@shoeling But seriously, from a story perspective, there is a lot of connection between smiles and Gaster/Gaster-related events.
mus_smile
@@RambunctiousFlan being linked with smiles =/= would use :) or :3 or anything of the kind
Very excited for your future videos because this is top tier content
An amazing look at the True Lab, it's content and implications. While some little details were off here and there as others have mentioned, this clearly took a lot of work and mistakes happen, especially in such large projects. Glad to see this video getting some attention, although I believe it deserves much more and hope it continues to garner more attention. I will be subscribing and sticking around for more content with any degree of similarity effort or topic wise, well done.
THANK YOU FOR SOLVING DOGAMY AND DOGERESSA THEIR AGE HAS BOTHERED ME FOR LITERAL YEARS I’m serious I once had a complete breakdown during a discussion with a friend because of the glaring inconsistency that is the Nose Nuzzle competition. The Golden Flowers everywhere has also bugged me because I could tell they were out of place and that the fact was relevant but I couldn’t parse out _how._ People said I was just crazy and reading into things too much! This entire video has been validating in a way I never thought I’d get. Ever since deltarune came out, I’ve been craving this exact type of theorizing from the fandom. A real in depth analysis of it now that we have the benefit of hindsight granted to us by deltarune. The story that was always there but that we may finally have enough clues to understand. You are literally answering my prayers with this video, something I honestly thought would never happen. So thank you so much for looking into all this!!! And you can bet that I’m gonna subscribe for the next part!
How were the golden flowers out of place?
1:13:08 I reckon Asgore keeps the fridge stocked with fresh snails at least (perhaps hoping that Toriel will return).
He may be implied to be the only customer of Blooks snail farm, with Toriel being former "main customer".
* this place used to get a lot of business...
* but our main customer disappeared one day...
* now it's just some hairy guy that shows up once a month...
Or I dunno, maybe Gaster really liked snails? Go wild, theorists.
This video is awesome. It's great and i want to see more, the theory is great and the edition and the script is insanely good
if gaster needed weak souls, then wouldnt the sekelebros technically fit that category? i say that cuz of sans, obviously, as he himself has a tie to gaster due to the gaster blasters. Perhaps they were given to him as a gift for another way to defend himself.
But what about papyrus? he mentions in an aborted geno that he would’ve “blasted you”, implying that he too at least has a blaster like attack, and at most be the only other blaster like attack we see being used thats not flowey or asriel (maybe mettaton neo with that cannon arm thing). why would he need to go to gaster too if hes on par with undyne?
that also brings up the possibility of the skelebros being very old so how old are we talking? it either needs to somehow take place after the queen left but also before gaster quits the de-termination experiment. Or more likely, papyrus only knew of a queen, just didnt know they looked so similar to asgore, sans might also know of the queen, but didnt know the door voice hes been telling jokes too was the queen.
i say that cuz the skelebros, to quote from a likely de-termination patient, “showed up one day and asserted themselfs”. to me that sounds like they moved from a far away land (relative to the underground) and immediately made their presence known, instead of poping out of the ground and kicking someone out of their home or something. so if gaster really needed weaker souls, then whos to say hes above using two homeless skeletons who lived in the middle of nowhere?
thank u for reading a theory comment as to why sans and papyrus were hobos :P
A common theory is that Sans and Papyrus were lab-made by Gaster, likely for his soul experiments, but he couldn't continue because either they weren't fit or because he began to see them as his children (if they had not been created because Gaster wanted children in the first place). This used to be how the photo of three smiling people in Sans' lab used to be understood, a crudely drawn picture of Sans, Papyrus and Gaster as a family and Sans writing behind it "don't forget" because something in the process that destroyed Gaster made everyone forget about him, and Sans was holding onto what little memories he had left about his father.
Now of course we know the picture is most likely of the Deltarune gang and "don't forget" are the arc words of Deltarune (which brings the question that Sans is in Undertale, how does he know about Deltarune?!), but the idea that Gaster is forgotten by everyone but his eldest son and the Goners is part of the community consciousness at this point.
Experiments were done on Fallen Down monsters because they were near dead and experimenting on monsters who aren't nearly dead is ethically wrong??