POST 3 - CONNECTION

 

W. D. GASTER – CONTINUED, AGAIN 

 

You may have noticed in the last post that some of the FUN events involved phone calls—one from Sans, one from Alphys, and one from an unknown caller. While the identity of the unknown caller is still ambiguous, Sans and Alphys both have strong ties to Gaster. 

 

Because Gaster was the former royal scientist, Alphys is naturally his successor and interacts often with his work. (Many fans speculate that the DT extractor in the True Lab was originally Gaster’s creation, because Alphys mentions building it from “the blueprints”, as opposed to “my blueprints”.) 

 

Sans is, as always, a little more complicated. He is alluded to have known Alphys, likely in a professional context due to his interest in science. Papyrus mentions he loves “OUTER SPACEY SCI-FI STUFF”, he has a machine in a secret lab behind his house, and he mentions having researched the timespace continuum during his fight (which Alphys also mentions working on!). The most blatant connection, however, is that one of the attacks in his fight is named a “spr_gasterblaster” in the code.  

 

This is strange, because outside of the Gaster followers, the soundtest, and here, his name does not and in fact cannot appear anywhere else. If you try to enter your name as Gaster in either UNDERTALE or DELTARUNE, the game immediately crashes or restarts upon entering the last letter. This indicates an extremely strong tie between Sans and Gaster, though the nature of this connection is still unclear. 

 

Some fans believe that Gaster may be genetically related to Sans and Papyrus (usually a father or third brother) for a few reasons. Sans and Papyrus are known for speaking in the fonts that they are named after, and Gaster speaks in wingdings, which may be what the W. D. in W. D. Gaster stand for, which would indicate that he is a skeleton. Because every character of the same species in these games are typically related (such as the Dreemurrs or Cattenheimers), it can be assumed that all the skeletons are related as well. Some fans also speculate that if Gaster is their father, Sans may have inherited the blasters from him as a genetic trait because they are a magical attack and not a physical object. 

 

EXTRAS 

 

Gaster has a large variety of calling cards that can signal his presence or involvement in something when they appear, and can be important in determining connections relating to him. Some of these motifs include, but are not limited to: 

•  The number 6 (and to a lesser extent 17) 

• Hand imagery 

• His musical theme 

• Any variation or snippet of “very very interesting”, including just “interesting” 

• Devil imagery 

• The use of wingdings or other unreadable symbols 

• Being referred to as a “man” or “him” 

• Text in all capital letters, especially within the code 

• Several sound effects, such as snd_mysterygo 

The association with 6 appears in a few places. In the code of UNDERTALE, Gaster has a set of unused stats as though he were an enemy, and every digit is 6. The FUN value in which he appears is also, of course, 66. But there’s one instance of particular interest: the version number of the original release of DELTARUNE (named SURVEY_PROGRAM, hey, capital letters!), which is 0.6.6.6, indicating a direct connection to the program itself. Many fans even believe he is the actual creator of the game—which we’ll get into next time.