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under-lore · 2 months

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Just earlier today i've been sent by a friend a post that put in questions some aspects of file attribution theory.

While said friend ended up answering it for me, that made me think i should probably address it here a little.

It concerns some special lines of dialogue regarding no-SAVE runs.

While i did mention that those things existed and could be relevant to that theory briefly in the original theory post, i put it off at the time since it seemed unnecessary to explain what was the deal with that within that post which was mainly an introduction to the ideas of the theory in general. It felt like it'd just overcomplicate things.

But well i suppose i'll bring it up here now !

So, the critic regards the fact that there exists some secret bonus lines which can be obtained after playing through the game without ever saving file 0 manually.

Such as these for instance :

Their common message being that Frisk would have not SAVED before, which would thus put in question what file attribution theory says about file 9 by not taking it into account as a file in those particular lines. Hence the argument that file 9 wouldn't be considered as a proper SAVE file by canon and questioning the model.

So well, what is the issue with that, then ?

Well, the question is actually pretty legitimate ! Although its answer can be a little unsatisfying.

To understand what i mean by this, here are a few more examples of some other secret lines you can also get during no-SAVE runs :

That dialogue is, to put it pretty simply, not coherent with what the rest of the game repeatedly shows us to be Sans' abilities. There is no way Sans should be able to know that we have not saved, even if he suspects us to be the anomaly. After all, Sans does not remember LOADS.

This isn't like in the dinner where he could use Frisk's facial expression to make a guess as to wether we must've died before. For not only does Sans not get any more occasions to read us after we reach Asgore (where we can very well still SAVE or die), but that line still triggers even if we do not die at all, and yet it won't trigger if we SAVE for the first and only time right before Asgore, and then beat Asgore without dying after that.

So even if Sans could remember SAVES, which he doesn't, this line still wouldn't make any sense. He would have to like, be able to magically tell every time we use a SAVE point manually or peek through computer files or something, which would only lead to more incoherencies in his behavior in other instances.

And it isn't an isolated case, either :

Again, the "challenge" Sans talks about here requires you to never change your armor, weapon, not eat... All things that there would be no way for Sans to verify. What if you did those things once all the way back in the Ruins, for instance ? There would be no plausible way for him to know, either. Yet the line only triggers if the challenge was a success.

You also have lines for some of these individually, with the same problems.

You could also add this one arguably, though there is a point to be made it isn't impossible for the Snowman to know what happened to its piece, and to have told Sans, though that is still slight stretch given the other lines.

But anyway, the point this is trying to make, is that the bonus lines you get from playing the game with certain challenge restrictions break what should logically make sense following the in-world canon literally all the time. Pretty much all of them do, actually.

Why ?

Well, because they're just easter egg lines, really...

Little bonuses that are here to congratulate a player that purposely made the game harder for themself. They aren't supposed to be taken seriously lore-wise, else you'd also find yourself with "proof" that Sans has not only knowledge of SAVES, but is either secretly omniscient or cheats by reading the game's code to know everything he needs to, but only uses it to say "btw, gg" at the end of a route sometimes or call you a hacker. Just because he happens to be the one who calls after a route ends, so all the challenge easter egg lines that requires to complete the game first naturally fall on him to say along with the consistency issues that come with them.

So well, if those lines can blatantly contradict Sans' character that badly just for the sake of making a nod to the player congratulating them for the challenge they're playing, they can definitely break the SAVE file rules, too.

So basically, those lines are the ones that you could conclude shouldn't be taken as canon, not file 9. Those lines are easter eggs with a history of not being lore consistent, so they do not seem like very good ground to base criticism on.

Of course i don't think file attribution should be treated as a fact, its definitely still a theory, it is just that picking the no-SAVE lines that don't match up with it to criticise it whilst ignoring the greater context of massive non-reliability behind those lines as a whole feels a bit like cherrypicking or at least is misleading.

#undertale #undertale theory #sans #undertale file attribution theory

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under-lore · 3 months

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Hey so everyone's been getting pretty crazy about the hidden "Gaster" card in the last newsletter.

But, whilst this might just be my theorist sense telling me to stay overly skeptical of everything... Do we know if this is really Gaster ?

Obviously, the capital letters or the usage of the "forgetting"/mysterious theme does feel like him, but there is one thing that kinda bothers me :

The japanese version of that letter uses hiragana, instead of the katakana that had seemed to be the law for Gaster up to this point.

Then again, the truth is that we have seen so little actual official dialogue from Gaster that you can't rule out the idea that he might have some specific speech pattern particularities we haven't really been able to explore yet (like how Sans has a serious mode of his own and doesn't always use comic Sans for example.), and that also makes it hard to judge if it is him based on punctuation or anything like that.

So i suppose it is just a possibility to keep in mind that it isn't necessarily him ?

It would be pretty interesting if this wasn't Gaster though. In that case, it would likely be still someone linked to him in a way. Like anywhere from someone involved in an experiment to a chapter 3 secret boss...

#undertale #deltarune #deltarune newsletter #gaster #maybe or maybe not #deltarune theory #undertale theory

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under-lore · 3 months

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You know what ?

I know we like to bully Matpat a lot in this fandom, but i'd like to say something positive about him today since his last DR theory just got posted.

As much as one can have reasons to disagree with it or (quite validly) criticise some of its points, this theory is likely the most reasonable one he's ever made about the franchise.

Previous Game theories on UT/DR have usually been pretty out there, rather crazy or even missed key pieces of evidence that contradicted them. But whilst this one still has some flaws, it does seem to have actually put in effort in understanding the game, you can even tell that he's done his homework in actually researching on the narrative of Toby's games since the halloween hack to propose an ending that would remain pretty consistent with those themes.

He's also tried to avoid repeating some of the issues that had been pointed out to him in the past theories, like crediting even tiny clips present for barely a second in that video (following Toby's response to him not giving proper credit once), didn't call Kris he, remained a lot more grounded in the game text itself, etc...

Like, i think you can tell that this time around, he actually genuinely tried, and did came out of it with something that's at least fairly reasonable for DR theory standards.

So well, since this is likely the last we will see of Matpat covering this franchise, i think i wanted to give a little credit to that.

#undertale #deltarune #game theory #matpat #toby fox #kris #deltarune theory #undertale theory

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under-lore · 4 months

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The good ending.

#undertale #toby fox #game theory #matpat #sans #papyrus #ness #Its nice to have a conclusion to this little beef from a few years ago

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under-lore · 5 months

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I kind of fear that Undertale Yellow coming out is going to popularise some fanon things again. (Such as misconceptions about Flowey's creation for an obvious one)

But at the same time, it is pretty neat to see an Undertale fan game actually being finished. Those are quite rare.

95% of them post a demo that only covers the ruins, and then never updates again...

#undertale #undertale yellow #flowey #undertale fandom

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under-lore · 5 months

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have you considered temporarily closing the askbox?

I did, but i'd rather still be able to receive asks, even if i cannot answer them all.

#ask

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under-lore · 5 months

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do you have a discord server for discussing theories? ^_^

I do !

Here is a link.

#ask

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under-lore · 5 months

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Yeah... I don't know what to say about this one. Just... This exists.

#undertale #among us

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under-lore · 5 months

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I heard that the red soul in the FloweyX fight is called ‘OurHeart’

Is that true?

It is.

#undertale #flowey #undertale red soul

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under-lore · 5 months

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Hello, I sent you a couple of questions about narrachara a while back. Did you recieve them?

I'll answer this one but this is the case for many other asks as well.

I already receive asks much quicker than i can answer them, and whenever i do try and answer a lot in a somewhat short time, that only quickens the pace at which i get even more of them in reaction (i tried). I have a permanent stockpile of 50+ asks.

So well, while i do read them all, there's no way i can *answer* them all.

I will sometimes answer a few because they are either short to answer or that i find them interesting to talk about on the moment, but due to the fact that i tend to answer asks very seriously and take like an hour to write detailed responses most of the time, i am simply not capable of answering that many of them either. That is why some asks remain without response for a long time.

I don't think there's much i can do about this...

#ask #meta

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under-lore · 5 months

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This might seem like a random question but you seem the most likely out of everyone to know this. How many puns in total does the undertale narrator make?

I do remember having counted the exact number at some point a year or two ago, but i don't really remember exactly anymore...

I think it was somewhere in the sixties ?

#undertale #ask

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under-lore · 5 months

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Hello! I'm a big fan of yours and your theories. I would like to know if I could have your permission to translate your posts and theories into Spanish, of course, giving you full credit. I'd appreciate a response from you. Keep up the great work! ✨💕 If you notice anything odd in my English, it's because I'm using a translator; English isn't my first language XD.

Sure !

#ask

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under-lore · 5 months

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In your recent post, you mention that Chara can take control whenever they want, and that certain stuff can be attributed to frisk instead of Chara. What is/where can i find the evidence of this, and which actions can be attributed to which?

Frisk is usually the more "in control" of the two. The actions that can be attributed to Chara are the rarer and more specific cases.

The actions that the narrator attributes to "you" during battles and the majority of the cutscenes in which Frisk moves on their own are just Frisk. By default, it is usually them. (and/or the player)

There are two types of situations in which we can observe intervention from Chara.

The first are the cases in which Chara uses their ability to control the body to perform an assertive action fully independently from the wills of Frisk or that of the player. Although those ones are practically centered around the genocide route, as in other routes Chara acts more passively in comparison.

Examples of this type include among others, stepping towards monster kid, or landing the second blow during Sans' special attack.

However, the way to actually prove that those are actually Chara's actions (and not say, Frisk's) vary with pretty much every single one, going from the flavor text, to process of elimination, to even the code of the game itself among other things.

So getting conclusive evidence that Chara was the one that performed a specific action of this type is often something that has to be done on a case by case basis in order to be rigorous, and isn't that intuitive.

As a rule of thumb, though, keeping in mind that the player can control Frisk's actions but not Chara's tends to be pretty useful in that regard.

The second type is way more sneaky and are the ones that are the most often missed. They can be seen in any route, even pacifist. Those are the ones in which, the narrator's speech, betrays certain actions to have been not from Frisk, but from themself. those cases are often accompanied by circumpstancial evidence surrounding them, to give them more context and probably also to reassure that they were here intentionally and not as just an error from Toby when writing the flavor text.

One such case appears quite early on in the game.

Normally, whenever Frisk reads a sign, a book, etc... the narrator describes it in the following way :

This appears as quite in tune with everything else the narrator normally says throughout the game. They describe that Frisk (refered to as “you”) performs the suggested action. Nothing out of the ordinary here.

But there is one singular exception to this, in which the narrator rather says :

Notice that the "you" refering to Frisk is absent, and was replaced by an active "Here is" which suggests first hand action from the narrator, presenting Frisk with a so called "random page" rather than a description of Frisk opening the book themself.

And furthermore, while it may seem odd at first that Chara would take action over something so meaningless as opening a book, this actually makes a lot more sense when considering that the "random page" isn't actually random at all, and our narrator is currently being an unreliable narrator here.

The page in question just so happens to be the singular page of the monster history books that paints humans in the most negative light, portraying them as aggressive creatures to be feared and who monsters (seen as the victims of human cruelty) would have had to run and hide from, trapped.

Chara's bias here is clearly showing. They were deliberately wanting to show this specific page due to their own dislike for humanity.

Even the specific moment in the game in which this scene happens would be fitting for Chara to do such a thing. But that would be more fitting to the subject of a future post regarding the way the relationship between Frisk and the narrator evolves throughout the game.

There are a few more examples of this, of course, to give just one more of them : Here, when the player pushes Frisk to try and give Gyftrot their gold, but where once they do attempt it, Chara physically prevents Frisk from doing it and the gold isn't given. Which is then followed by the narrator berating the choice we tried to make.

By the way, for extra context, one could also note here that Chara also specifically called gold as one of the statistics they show interest in in the genocide ending, too. So one could draw a parallel there.

For this second type of cases, there is a more consistent method to spotting them. It is simply about carefully looking for irregularities in what the narrator says or does, and optionally comparing that to the wider context surrounding Chara to clarify things.

#undertale #chara #frisk

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under-lore · 5 months

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What's the evidence in favour of the previous six human souls being able to SAVE and RELOAD? do you have a dedicated post for it?

I do have this one made for a similar ask.

Although it isn't as extensive as it could be evidence-wise, it still covers the core idea behind it.

#undertale #undertale fallen humans

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under-lore · 7 months

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Do you agree with Nochocolate post "cooperation, not corruption"?

That post is one that i find to be both very correct and very wrong depending on which part of it you're asking about.

Whilst Nochocolate can be a pretty good blog in terms of purely gathering information about a topic, their actual analysis of that information often tends to suffer a lot from confirmation bias compared to other UT blogs.

That is especially true for Chara in particular, Nochocolate team has a particular vision of Chara (which you can see in their AU : Caretaker of the Ruins) and often ends up twisting the facts to make it line up with their version of the character. To the point where the screenshots they show and the conclusions they make based on those images sometimes contradict each other. I would suggest keeping an open eye when reading their Chara related posts in particular. (their other posts are much better, though)

At its worse, this can result in posts like this one, which is quite blatantly wrong in nearly everything it tries to argue in its last section and was quite obviously only posted because Nochocolate made their Chara masculine.

That particular post's most recurrent issue though is jumping to conclusions far too quickly and bias in the wording.

Its also really long, so going through it bit by bit to detail all of that would be quite boring (especially since a lot of it would be nitpicking every couple paragraphs.)

Making a detailed post covering that same topic with evidence is something that i may do in the future, but for now here are a few key talking points :

LOVE does have some amount of impact on one's behavior, however, Nochocolate is right in saying that LOVE couldn't have been the sole reason for Chara's aggressive behavior in genocide (as shown by the more aggressive variants of the neutral routes). Chara's decision to cooperate with the player and go along with the route is and remains their own choice. Whilst they were influenced, they were not "corrupted" either and remain responsible for their own actions. The overall idea that gave its name to the post is mostly right, but it was exagerated quite significantly.

However, neither LOVE nor kills scales with Chara's ability to control Frisk ! Rather, Chara is present and is capable of exerting control on Frisk in any route (and does ! This is actually one of the things where Nochoco contradicts themselves). But they however do not decide to exert it so assertively in other paths than in genocide. (This particular assumption causes many minor issues throughout the post. Tying multiple things to Chara's presence/influence/etc... that just aren't.)

The genocide route is mechanically driven by kills and by unique encounters indeed. Although, those are not takeover requirements as much as they serve both as help and as requests to the player. For instance, Chara themself decides to abort the genocide route if Snowdrake isn't killed, even if the kill count is fulfilled. The helping/guiding goes both ways. That is why we are "partners" after all.

Frisk isn't ever "replaced" either, they're still openly present, stated as having conscious feelings and opinions on what is happening up until the very end of the route, however Chara's increased assertiveness makes their influence feel relatively weaker within the PFC. (The entire post tends to try and ignore Frisk as a factor in general for the sake of their narrative. Multiple things which are from Frisk get pushed into Chara instead without solid evidence.)

#undertale #chara #undertale chara #chara undertale #frisk #frisk undertale #undertale frisk #undertale player

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under-lore · 7 months

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I wish people wouldn't edit the Undertale wiki with their headcanons all the time.

The Undertale fandom wiki can be freely edited by pretty much anybody, and that unfortunately results in many of its pages often containing minor inaccuracies here and there.

Of course, in some cases the people in question were genuinely trying to help improving the wiki and frankly can't be blamed for missing out on a small detail, but sometimes people are just openly trying to sneak their personal takes into the wiki to validate themselves.

In all cases, eventually a number of people (including myself) have to report those mistakes and fix them. Sometimes they manage to stay there for quite a while before being noticed...

That wouldn't be that big of a deal in itself, but it becomes problematic when considering how many people use the wiki as a reference for debating or even sometimes treat it like all they read on it is official information.

Interestingly enough, there are a few characters who i've seen get their wikis incorrectly edited a lot more often than others. Those characters being Frisk, Chara, and Papyrus.

#undertale #meta

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under-lore · 7 months

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What do you think about the entries in the old lab? I mean, some people say that some of them are by Gaster

The lab entries were written by Alphys.

The reason why some people have speculated that other people could have written some of those in the first place was due to the fact that capitalisation became more inconsistent as the situation deteriorated. (along with entry 17 being a thing)

Though, inconsistent capitalisation is something that happens to multiple characters in certain situations, such as Sans, or even Frisk. It doesn't necessarily mean a change of the character speaking. And in the case of Alphys, hers can change due to stress, which is pretty unsurprising considering her character.

Given all that, if Gaster had been intended to have written some of those entries, surely they would have at least taken into account things such as Gaster's singular consistent capitalisation trait. (The fact that he always uses full caps when talking.)

In addition, Alphys was hired as royal scientist and went on to start those entries long after Gaster was gone, so how could Gaster have written direct follow ups to Alphys' entries ?

Though the famous entry 17 is a case of its own there, its separate from the rest of the lab entries.

In fact, there's even actually a separate hidden second entry 17 that is a regular "Alphys" entry 17 :

The other suggested candidate for having had a hand in some of the entries was Sans, based on the fact, once again, that some of the entries do not have capital letters at the start of sentences.

But once more, that quickly turns out to be incoherent when looking at entries like entry 12.

Here we can clearly see that despite the entry not using a capital letter at the start of sentences, the "i" writing those entries here is still openly talking about Alphys.

#undertale #asks #alphys #gaster

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