POST 1 - THE BASICS

 

THE SPOILER WARNING 

 

Before I get into the meat of any analysis, I want to lay out a few things first. 
 
First and most importantly, this blog will contain full, unmitigated spoilers for the games UNDERTALE and DELTARUNE, including endings, secrets, and alternate routes. They’re my favorite games of all time, so I would highly recommend you play them first! This blog will also assume that you are familiar with these games, so it may be confusing if you are not. 

 

Secondly, two new chapters of DELTARUNE released a week ago, and I will be fully talking about those as well, so please play them if you haven’t yet! They contain some especially major spoilers for the game, and this blog will very much be a hazard in that regard. 

 

That being said, let’s get started. 

 

There are a few characters in DELTARUNE (and arguably UNDERTALE) that many casual fans are unfamiliar with, but they are likely to be vital to the later story, and we will need to be familiar with them in order to make more informed predictions. 

 

The first of these characters is Dr. W. D. Gaster. 

 

W. D. GASTER 

 

There’s quite a web of information about this character scattered in many different places in and around the games, and just trying to lay it all out is enough to make someone sound like a conspiracy corkboard, so bear with me on all the tangents. 

 

To make a long backstory short, Gaster was the royal scientist before Alphys. He is said to have built the CORE, but later “fell into his own creation” and was “shattered across time and space”. We learned this info from several rare, greyscale NPCs that have a small chance of appearing around Hotland who speak in rhymes and disappear once you leave the room. In the early UNDERTALE fandom this “creation” was universally assumed to be the CORE, but new evidence from DELTARUNE suggests that it may have been a dark fountain. 

 

One of the first and most important pieces of direct dialogue we receive from Gaster is known as ENTRY NUMBER 17, in the form of scrolling Wingdings text in an unused room in UNDERTALE accompanied by glitchy background noise. It reads as follows: 

 

ENTRY NUMBER SEVENTEEN 

DARK DARKER YET DARKER 

THE DARKNESS KEEPS GROWING 

THE SHADOWS CUTTING DEEPER 

PHOTON READINGS NEGATIVE 

THIS NEXT EXPERIMENT 

SEEMS 

VERY 

VERY 

INTERESTING 

… 

WHAT DO YOU TWO THINK 

 

Because dark fountains in DELTARUNE are described as “darker than dark”, a sort of advanced darkness that goes beyond the simple absence of light, it can be reasonably assumed that this was the moment Gaster either discovered or created a dark fountain, which was likely the initial cause of his relevance in DELTARUNE. 

 

There’s a lot more to go over with Gaster, so I’ll explore more details in the next issue.