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Papyrus And His VERY VERY INTERESTING Gaster Connections

Papyrus is a character who, despite being wildly ignored by the fandom, has a ton of hidden lore to uncover, a lot of this lore specifically revolves around Dr. W.D. Gaster. Many people dont know about these connections because they arent as obvious or popular as Sans’ connections to HIM, however you all deserve to know the truth about Papyrus and his hidden Gaster lore. Shall we begin??

Papyrus Knows That Gaster Exists

Before even getting into the nitty gritty details of all of this we need to establish a basic connection between both Papyrus and Gaster. To start this we must first acknowledge that Gaster is someone who was not actually forgotten, it’s a large fanon misconception that he is, however one of the Gaster Followers states that Asgore took a long time to hire a new scientist due to Gasters irreplaceable brilliance. Which inherently implies that Asgore remembered Gaster.

With this knowledge in mind we know that if Papyrus knew Gaster he couldnt have “forgot” him. In fact the game actually seems to imply that Papyrus definitely does remember him. To find this we have to take a look at a Papyrus phone call that is accessible via calling him in front of the CORE. When doing this you are given the following dialogue.

Something about the core is…deeply upsetting…to him. Papyrus’ use of “…” heavily implies this as well, as he only goes silent like that when in distraught or depression.

Now at first you may assume Papyrus is upset because we’re going to leave to go to the surface soon, right…? Well, not quite, if you call Papyrus right as you’re about to enter the CORE Papyrus tells you the following.

This confirms that Papyrus isn’t worried about you going to the CORE. So what exactly IS Papyrus worried about?????? Well there is a special someone who created the CORE, and happened to die from it too.

This seems to imply that Papyrus was deeply affected by the death of Gaster, which may just be simple mourning, but it seems too personal to just be that. Especially since most people dont really mention him at all. However if we examine the similarities between The Skelebros and Gaster this connection seems to become clear. First of all Gaster is shown to speak in the font wingdings, this is seen through ENTRY NUMBER SEVENTEEN, which is found in “room_gaster” implying he was the writer of this entry. The only people to speak in special font in UT/DR are Sans and Papyrus, who are skeletons. Gaster also just bears basic physical resemblance to a skeleton as well.

However these strange connections dont stop here, both Sans and Papyrus use a weapon called a Gaster Blaster.

Sans is seen using these in his genocide battle and Papyrus is heavily implied to have them via dialogue and concept art.

So what exactly does this all mean?? We know The Skelebros and Gaster were close, but how close…??? Colleagues/friends, or maybe…..family…?????? I’m going to be exploring the concept of the latter, since it actually has a surprising amount of evidence to back it up. To understand this point we first have to understand the character Grandpa Semi. Grandpa Semi is a cut character from UT that was meant to be the grandfather of the skelebros. While we dont know much about him there was a VERY VERY INTERESTING find recently in the Demo of Undertale. Essentially in the Demo of Undertale dataminers were able to find data in the files revolving around Grandpa Semi before he was cut, through this we learned that Grandpa Semi was originally meant to be the one to give you the Alphys fun event pizza call. This seems like it’d be irrelevant but actually its a pretty huge deal. Alphys is the royal scientist, meaning that the royal scientist role was originally given to Grandpa Semi. This is further backed up by the fact that Grandpa Semi’s unused theme includes the leitmotif of Metal Crusher, a song that is the theme of the royal scientists creation.

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Now why is this important??? Well, who’s our favorite skeleton who’s the old royal scientist???

Oh……..OH!!!! Yep, that’s right, Grandpa Semi is indeed a Beta Gaster. We can see even more of these connections in Tobys notes as well.

If you pay attention here you’ll notice two points of interest. A. The hand connections. B. The stats. Essentially Gaster is heavily connected to hands (i.e. the man who speaks in hands) and his unused stats in the final game are strings of 6‘s as well as his fun value events all connecting back to the number 6. In terms of Grandpa Semi he not only attacked with hands but his stats were the inverse of Gasters. With all this in mind I think it’s pretty safe to say that Gaster was related to the Skelebros in a familial sense (grandfather? father? brother?). It seems like this was slightly teased in some Papyrus concept art as well where a censored box is displayed that says “Has a brother named Comic Sans and a [redacted.] named [redacted.].”

Grandpa Semi is also mentioned another time in some concept art however this doesn’t seem to connect specifically back to the Skelebros, its rather just acknowledging his existence

With these basic connections established we can now move on to the more in-depth connections between Papyrus and Gaster.

His Room And The Room Of HIM

While not blatantly obvious there is some very strange properties of Papyrus’ room. This usually goes unnoticed, however it is rather important. Essentially there’s a special property of the doors in Undertale, that being that they dont make noise. However there is a special instance of sound effects involving two doors in Undertale. The first being the Gaster/Goner door.

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(0:08) and the second being Papyrus’ room.

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(3:50) The actual sound effect used here is called mus_dooropen, and mus_doorclose.

These sound effects don’t play when opening any other door in the entire game. However these two doors are an exception for some reason, odd, is it not? It’s almost like these two…share similar properties of their respective rooms. In fact this isnt the only strange connection between these two rooms. The Gaster/Goner room is always dead silent, no noise other than snd_mysterygo is found in that room. Papyrus’ room is similar in this regard, it is always dead silent no matter the circumstance. In fact it’s the only place in the game that will prevent “Reunited” from playing and that will change “Room Of Dog” back into “Reunited”. It’s also always silent even if you try to replace the sound file “mus_silence” with anything else. Speaking of audio files and the ost though there is actually another interesting thing involving Papyrus’ room and its Gaster connections. The song “Dating Start!” (which plays when you go on the date with Papyrus in his room) actually has Gasters theme as a leitmotif in it.

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(0:42) Actually, now that I think about it, isn’t it weird that the song for Papyrus’ date doesnt even have his own leitmotifs in it…? In fact Papyrus’ leitmotifs aren’t found in any other songs then his own (minus “Bring It In Guys!”), except…

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Oh boy, that’s right! Gasters theme actually samples Bonetrousle. Something interesting I noticed about this is that in order to turn “Nyeh Heh Heh!” into Gasters theme you have to either add one extra note to the beginning, or… remove three…

All things considered I think it’s safe to say that Papyrus and Gaster have some…strange…connections when it comes to songs and audio files, however this is only scratching the surface of what we are about to discuss…

Picking Up The Pieces Of HIM

Holding a piece of him…? This seems to be implying that Gaster was shattered across time and space via separate pieces, correct? Well, he’s not the only one that’s apparently comparable of being ripped into shreds.

Papyrus is too…? I mean, the piece of Gaster that one of the followers is holding is literally a little smiling shred.

This actually isn’t the only time traits of Papyrus are heavily referenced to Gaster either. You know how it’s rude to talk about someone who’s listening (Gaster)?

Well he’s not the only one who’s rude to gossip around, this rule is applicable to Papyrus too.

What exactly does this whole “listening” thing entail though? How are Gaster and Papyrus “listening”? Well for Gaster he seems to have some strange connections to phones, if you call your phone in the dark world it just plays “static noise”, which is actually mus_smile, Gaster is implied to have called Spamton through a phone, and the phone doesn’t work in any secret Gaster-related events. Is he listening through the phone, maybe looking through it? Well, we don’t know for sure, however in the case of Papyrus he seems to have just as many phone connections as Gaster does. Papyrus literally can see through the phone.

Papyrus also has the most lines in the game other then the narrator, and most of these lines are found in phone calls. This stuff normally wouldn’t seem overly special but considering Gaster is connected to the phone I’m inclined to believe that this is relevant. While we’re on the topic of phones and pieces of Gaster I noticed something very interesting about the Memoryheads, which are heavily implied to be pieces of/related to Gaster. Their tails(?) look like a phone…?

They themselves also have strange connections to phones in general, as they are heavily involved in the fight.

Why is this important anyways though? Well lets take a look at something very interesting that Papyrus has to say.

“WHAT A TERRIBLE MEMORY!”, huh? Well that’s odd, because there’s another person who gives you a “terrible memory”.

Yep, that’s right, Memoryhead. In fact the bad memory hurts 1 hp, but if you’re at 1 hp it heals you to full health. Papyrus never kills you, only brings you down to 1 hp and then traps you.

However if you’re at 1 hp heading into his fight you’ll instantly be healed to full health. Pretty suspicious if you ask me. The Memoryheads actually say something interesting in this regard too.

“Lorem ipsum docet” is an edited version of the standard placeholder text “lorem ipsum dolor sit ame”. The reason this is relevant is because “Lorem ipsum docet” is intentionally edited, and translates to “pain itself teaches”, which can be connected back to Papyrus’ fight, in which he tries to teach you via capturing you. The Memoryheads also say “come join the fun”, and Papyrus is all about making fun activities for others to join to try and help them or to make friends.

What Those Two Thought

Entry Number Seventeen is quite the anomaly, it manages to open up so many questions and connections that we barely have the answers too, however it is not devoid of important lore. In fact there’s something very interesting we can learn about the Japanese version of this entry. The “What do you two think?” line includes the use of the pronoun “kimi”, which implies pretty intense closeness to whoever “you two” is. Now we already established in the first section how the Skelebros and Gaster are closely connected, so I feel as if diagnosing “you two” as Sans and Papyrus is fair game, however there’s actually evidence to back up this claim. To begin to explain this we have to first look into the hidden basement at Sans and Papyrus’ house.

While many may assume this basement solely belongs to Sans you’d actually be wrong. For one the basement is very clean and tidy, and we know this is not a trait that Sans has, Papyrus says his room is like a world where they dont know how to vacuum, and he’s always leaving his socks everywhere too. It’s very likely someone else is cleaning up this room for him. So who is this person then? Yep, you guessed it, Papyrus! Papyrus is all about neatness and organization, cleaning up after Sans in their basement makes perfect sense. Not only that but the blueprints in this room have some weird properties.

They’re written in symbols…almost like wingdings…? Lowercase wingdings are actually zodiac/star signs.

If we are to assume that’s what these are written in then we have a very interesting dilemma to investigate. Sans claims that Papyrus has been stumped on the horoscope recently.

At first glance this may just seem like some sort of gag to call Papyrus “dumb”, however we know that lore suggests he’s far from stupid, and actually incredibly smart. So what does this horoscope mean exactly? Well horoscopes are typically based on ones star sign, except…monsters dont know what stars are…?

Wait what even is Sans talking about then??? Are star signs even present in Undertale?? Well, yes, they are. As previously mentioned lowercase wingdings are star signs, so the “horoscope” Papyrus has been trying to solve is the blueprints written in wingdings. These blueprints are likely for the broken machine as well, which is interesting, since Toby confirmed that two people were working on trying to fix it.

If we assume that the two people here are the same ones from entry number seventeen then this is especially telling. Sans and Papyrus are the ones who have been trying to fix the machine. This explains what Papyrus was “busy” doing and why its been keeping him up all night.

We know that mechanical engineering like one found on a machine is something Papyrus is capable of as well, as he’s heavily knowledgable in puzzle-making, and multiple of said puzzles involved electricity. Some of these include the electric orb (which shocks you pretty bad), and some unused contraptions that were going to be used on the gauntlet of deadly terror.

Closing Thoughts

In the end I think it’s safe to say that in all of Papyrus’ strange and hidden knowledge that Gaster is very much included in this category, and I think the fandom doesn’t give him enough credit in this regard. With this in mind I hope the general takeaway from this post is that Papyrus is more then just comic relief and has lots of layers and lore that, unfortunately, goes unnoticed by most people in the fandom, and that we should be working to spread this lore so we can get a better understanding of the great character, Papyrus.

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