~Delicious hats for sale!
Ultramega Ok! recordings! 2-23...
Shnabubula - Secret of Mana - Dueling Consoles
Arcien - Undertale - Spear of Justice
Sirenstar - Undertale - Lullaby for the Fallen Child
Video Games Live - Earthworm Jim
Atelier Izumi - Yume Nikki: Houchou Shoujo Gensoukyoku - Prelude
Ugh, a lot of distortion on this one... got some of my voice from the beginning but after that it's just music. The music sounds fine though!
3-9...
Gitaroo Man - Born to Be Bone
AHMusic - Undertale - Your Best Nightmare
BRZion - Yume Nikki - Dreams Falling
insaneintherain - Sonic the Hedgehog 2 - Aquatic Ruin Zone (Jazz Arrangement)
Elizabeth Zharoff & Akash Thakkar - Undertale - Once Upon a Gory Snow
Some faint fluttering but otherwise fine.
Last couple days it's felt like I've had to fight my brain to do anything, or at least start something substantial. Ideas float around but I can't pin them down into anything worthwhile. It's very frustrating. Continual bad dreams but at least they aren't so bad they wake me up, so that's something at least. Some of them are still haunting me a few days later though. Last night at least was just a fairly standard yume nikki type game exploration dream, that wasn't so bad. Or if there was something bad, I don't remember it now.
In more relevant news, I'm going to head up to see Moro for about ten days, starting tomorrow. I might work on some stuff while I'm there but I might not, I dunno. Maybe I'll update here and maybe I won't, I'm not sure! It'll probably be ghost stuff, if anything, so you can check that entry every now and then and see. I feel like I got to get a lot of stuff all together still...
Bunch of stuff I could write up, gotta decide on one of them. I did manage to put up a chapter for the Frozen fic last night, although it was shorter than I thought it was in my head. It's gratifying to think that even a few people are reading it, my expectations are really not high.
Can do a few Handplates comics, and maybe an extra doodle I never posted anywhere before. Last time the bros were hanging out with Asgore and we started getting flashback glimpses into key moments of Gaster's life. Two of those moments are in here, and boy they are doozies.
BUT FIRST, SOMETHING MORE LIGHT-HEARTED
This one is mostly to address a canon issue, which is why Papyrus doesn't have any friends in the game when you come in. This is a mystery that still baffles me! You'd think he'd have tons since he's so charming and handsome and tall, but nope. I have to get the brothers to where they are in canon by the time canon starts, so a lot of comics in this phase are chipping away at that roadblock, so to speak.
So, I figured that Papyrus is just loud and pushy and well-meaning but kind of annoying to most monsters, which fits with what we know about him, but still! There's some other stuff going on as well, I'll get to that in a sec.
A lot of these scripts are just dialogue in my head, or just have dialogue written down in my file, so sometimes figuring out what everyone's doing during a scene or what kind of visuals to accompany things with can be a challenge. It's tricky in Asgore's house because it's really not that big and there's not a lot of stuff for the brothers to play with or do inside or outside for that matter. And they needed to be somewhere where Asgore could come and talk to them easily, so I had them playing with puppets in front of the mirror by his room. UGH REFLECTIONS, WHY
This is also where they have some different clothes for once, with Asgore in orange and the brothers with some different bandanas. Sometimes I toy with changing their sweater colors, but I worry that'd either be confusing or misleading... the old kids HAD to have some other clothes, but I dunno...
A few people picked up on this but Papyrus's lofty ideal of friends and how free they are with their affections and how badly he wants their validation comes from wanting affection from Gaster, haha. More damage carried forward without a source now.
Asgore is described several times in the game as being a big pushover, and it's something the brothers are starting to pick up on, but I'm not sure it'll ever be an EXPLICIT thing, exactly... like I dunno if I'll center a script around that fact, you know? Mostly, it's relevant since later on Papyrus will gripe to you on the phone about how King Fluffyboy wants to make traps less dangerous and he also tells you that the king is a big pushover, so Papyrus has to KNOW that about Asgore to tell you that later. You can start getting a bit of a sense of that here, with how Papyrus just runs right over Asgore trying timidly to suggest that it won't be so easy to make friends, and later when Asgore is :/ when Sans just encourages Papyrus to stay the way he is even though he knows it'll make it harder for Papyrus to make friends in the long run. But it'll probably stay mostly as subtext.
Little bits of this were clear in my mind from fairly early on, with Sans using Sims talk bubbles to talk to the other monsters one of them, haha. The basic idea being that Sans is just mirroring other monsters, but not actually really establishing any kind of depth with them. Again another canon challenge to meet, since Sans in the game actually seems pretty popular and everyone likes hanging out with him, and he seems pretty comfortable chatting with people in Grillby's and such, so he's a lot more well socialized than Papyrus. How does that happen when both he and Papyrus started at nothing? I tied it into another canon trait of Sans's, his observational skills (given how much he can tell about you by the look on your face), so he just observes people a bit, gets a sense of what they're talking about, and then just mirrors that back to them. So people find him fun to be around or easy to hang out with, but no one actually really knows anything about who Sans really is or how he really feels about anything. Which is just how he likes it.
What turned out to be harder was figuring out what monsters Sans would be talking to. I looked up lists of monsters that hang out around New Home and the Core and everything you can encounter, but a lot of the monsters didn't really seem to work for small fiddly reasons... I remember going back and forth on Madjick for example because they almost always speak in "magic words", so I wasn't sure they could hold a conversation. But on the other hand, if you show them the stick, they WILL say a normal sentence, so I went for it. I did limit it to monsters you can either encounter or monsters that give you the Tragic Backstory as you're running around Asgore's House, which is actually a fairly large selection but still, it was tough to figure out who Sans could talk to.
Amusingly though, I didn't really notice that they were all :Ding monsters until someone pointed it out, haha. I also had to come up with a color scheme for Madjick since they don't have an overworld sprite... I tried a few things, but eventually went fairly simple with it.
I also had to come up with a color scheme for Whimsum, I'm not sure I'm into it but eh, it's too late now. I sort of wanted to do one for Froggits, but we actually DO see them in the overworld and they're white, so that at least was solved.
Loox was a tricky one, since you don't see them in the overworld either. BUT there is a monster that looks a LOT like a Loox in the librarby, and assuming that monster is a Loox, then they're actually pinkish in color.
I like that Papyrus asks why monsters don't like him, then proceeds to list off a bunch of reasons why monsters wouldn't like him. Oh Papyrus.
In the last entry, I mentioned that Sans was starting to puff up Papyrus's ego for various reasons, to try and make him happy and more confident in himself and all that. Which has its benefits, since it does protect Papyrus at times from cruel things people say to him! But it does also have its drawbacks, which was another thing this was meant to establish. Sans's praise helps Papyrus a lot, but it does also hurt him in some ways. Some people got real mad at Sans for this but lol that always happens, poor Sans can't catch a break. It's not like he's doing it intentionally! He always means Papyrus well. But like so many things, sometimes you don't realize the full effects of what you're doing, and the world and socializing with it is still so new to them both.
Asgore really SHOULD step in but nope lol. He did that with Gaster too earlier, just not stepping up to be more authoritative. It has its cost! I also had to figure out something for Asgore to be doing outside which was a little tough because there's like nothing outside his house... not even a tree or flowers or anything. Eventually I had him raking the mystery leaves outside his house. Where do those leaves come from!!
Papyrus never does get the hang of it, sadly.
Gaster's said he killed someone before, and a lot of people wondered about who or what it was he killed, and how that happened, and all that. So now it was finally time to answer some of those questions. This is an extremely significant moment for him for a lot of reasons.
Originally, the script for this had the brothers asking about color magic in general, and Asgore saying that skeletons would probably be good at blue magic, although he couldn't remember why. It didn't feel quite right to me though, so I eventually reframed it slightly to be more specifically about blue magic and the trauma they suffered because of it. It also is another bit of info on how the resetting of reality affected the trauma they experienced... they're afraid of blue magic, and know they should be afraid of it, but don't know why. Sort of like a phobia, which is just what Gaster wanted to give them in the first place, but it's weaker without the backing trauma to support it now. Papyrus has to get over his fear of blue magic by the time the game starts after all.
Papyrus is playing with one of those slidey tile puzzles, haha. The picture was originally just a :3 goatmonster if I remember right, you can't see it now though of course since it's all jumbled up.
Asgore's wearing the same glasses/vest combo he wore in that comic where they were all playing bridge, I just like drawing the goatparents with little glasses, haha. It always vaguely reminds me of Vincent from Silent Hill 3 though.
I remember getting really annoyed at the inconsistency between how far apart Asgore and the brothers are in the first panel, and how far apart they are in the sideways panel, but there was just no way to move them farther apart with the horizontal restrictions... I guess I COULD have zoomed out, but still. I feel like these are only things that I care about.
Coming up with non-combative uses for blue magic was interesting.
This flashback is probably the longest stretch of silence in the whole comic, come to think of it. For a very brief period while I was brainstorming it, I had the two humans talking trash while stalking Gaster about how skeletons give more EXP when you don't kill them immediately, how it sucks there aren't any left since they're great for grinding, general game-y type stuff, but then I figured that was overkill and all you really needed was the demon that comes when you call its name - that spirit inside you that makes you abuse these monsters for your own personal gain. I thought maybe people would make more of the =) face as it related directly to the kid, but it seemed like the effect I intended here came across pretty clearly, which is always nice.
Some assumed that the War was over when the goatparents found Gaster last time. Nope, the War isn't even close to over yet, there's a lot of fighting and suffering and such to still go through. Lots of untold tragedies and such. Here, I pictured their group getting ambushed by some humans, and while the goatparents held their own, Gaster panicked and tried to run and find a place to hide. Which wasn't smart but he's pretty severely traumatized already by this point and he's acting mostly on instinct. They lost track of him for a few seconds, but noticed he wasn't around fairly quickly.
A smaller detail here is that Gaster's coat is a bit big on him. Later, Toriel would help him take it in a bit so it fits him better.
The two humans that jump him were always going to be shadowed RPG heroes - the way the monsters describe the War, it's basically a standard RPG told from the side of the monsters. Flip the story around, and you have a band of brave humans who cleanse the world of wicked monsters and imprison them under a mountain, so the surface can be at peace. Killing monsters in an RPG is so standard, you don't even think about it at all. That's what monsters are FOR.
Deciding which hero to use was harder though. The Dragon Warrior hero was always my first thought, since I tend to picture the world during the War as pretty much Dragon Warrior, although when I went and looked them up, their silhouette was a little tough to read. Still, it seemed like a fair amount of people recognized them! It's weird how my mental image of them was totally off when I went and looked up their actual sprite.
I also knew that one of those heroes would be getting really brutally murdered, and as goofy as it sounds, I didn't want to really graphically kill a hero that I actually liked. Crono from Chrono Trigger for example... I didn't want to spear him like this, even though in his game he DID kill a lot of monsters.
Not only that, I had to find a hero that had a distinct silhouette. While looking through early 90s RPG protagonists, many of them are fairly interchangable, and a lot of them do NOT have distinctive profiles when shadowed. Lots of capes, shoulder pauldrons, boring hair, things like that. With the Dragon Warrior dude already covering that, I wanted someone who'd offer some contrast. I was REALLY tempted to use Serge from Chrono Cross, because CC sucks, but Serge's outfit was really difficult to read as a silhouette, AND his weapon really doesn't work for getting him speared like this. It had to be a sword, or even a spear. His weird swallow-y thing would just be visually confusing.
I cycled through a ton of heroes, asked Jaz and Malakin for heroes, trying to find one that would fit alongside the DW Hero, and finally I settled on the Boy from Secret of Mana, who at least in this case would be a bystander and not actively murdered. And to be fair, Secret of Mana was VERY heavy on grinding, with a lot of monsters falling under the Boy's sword. So thematically it was appropriate, and also the Boy has a very distinctive look as a silhouette. He got mistaken for Crono a few times but I think that was more his hair than anything else.
It was interesting to hear dubs of this scene, since some decided to add dialogue to it where there wasn't any, and that requires interpreting what Gaster is going through when you can't see his face. The Lost Soul head is particularly interesting in really dramatic scenes like this, since it has to all come through his body language. In a way he himself becomes a cipher, since you have to project some kind of expectation of how he's feeling or reacting. You have to fill in that gap yourself. Some saw him as angry, some saw him as afraid. But since you're here, I'll tell you what I was picturing.
Against two humans, death is almost totally assured, and there's no way to escape. Gaster is panicked and terrified, and the choice his brain presents him in its panicked state is fight or flight? In more game-like terms, you can picture the Fight button hovering in that black mindscape, untouched his whole life until this moment. And on the spur of the moment, he chooses to Fight. And once that happens, adrenaline kicks in, and his body starts to move on auto-pilot. I'm not sure if you've ever had this happen in a crisis, but there's this weird sort of zen state you can reach when something awful is happening that you can't do on purpose that just sort of happens to you. I'm thinking like, for example, if you're spinning out on the freeway, and without even thinking about it, you're handling the car to get out of the spin, and before you know it you're on the side of the road and you don't know what happened. Personally for me, that kind of hyper-aware, hyper-alert state only happens in those kind of life-or-death situations, and they sort of resolve everything around you into pinpoints. Like spinning out on the freeway again, I didn't say a word or scream or cry out or gasp or anything, my body and brain just REACTED. Which I think is why afterwards, people can often sit in a state of shock, trying to process what it is they just did.
That's what happened here, to an extent. After Gaster chose fight, everything else in the world totally fell away, and in a matter of seconds he came up with a plan and put it into action. He knows that monster bullets can't kill a human easily, particularly any human as high level as these, but a human weapon can hurt another human. He has to find a way to use the human's weapon against it, and he has to do it before the human gets their turn or else he's done for for sure. (Speaking of, a few wondered why Gaster managed to get his turn off first before the humans do, but that's actually backed up by the game to an extent - Sans also takes his turn first in your battle with him, so he passed that down to him.)
In a lot of ways, Gaster was lucky to pull this off, since it's not something every monster could have done. If the human hadn't dropped their sword, he'd be in trouble, but if he didn't have the spectral hands either, he wouldn't have been able to pick up the sword and position it to skewer the human either. It was a combination of several unique things he can do that let him do this. It all happens in a few seconds or so.
Getting one-shotted by a skeleton is a bit freaky, so I had the boy bail, but I like thinking the player behind the DW Hero was super ticked at getting one-shotted by a lesser skeleton after not saving for an hour, so they just quit, haha. Thus why they don't come back to life.
A few were confused about why Asgore is hiding under his cloak in that one shot of the Boy running away, and basically he saw what happened and he wants to get to Gaster, but he doesn't want to trigger an encounter by accident with the Boy, so he's trying to evade his notice. He wants to get to Gaster as soon as possible.
I had a loooooooot of fun doing the blood in this one, haha. One of the things that no one noticed but I'll point out anyway is that with the DW hero's shoulder guards, they shouldn't be able to be lying the way they're lying unless the shoulder guards are on a hinge and can fold up or something. I just decided that was the case here because uuuuuuugh.
After the moment has passed, Gaster's in a state of shocked disbelief. This is the same kind of shock you're in after a life-death experience, as mentioned above, where you're shaking and just sitting there trying to figure out exactly what happened.
There is another reason that he goes into shock though, as the realization of what he's done fully hits him. I mentioned it in the desc, but I'm not sure it was clear enough, so I'll explain it more here.
It isn't just the act of killing someone that sends Gaster into a shocked state that will last (as you'll see) for days. It's the timing of him doing it. By which I mean, Gaster was hiding underneath his coat while he heard his family and friends all dying around him, and he did nothing. And now he finds, that when he's pinned and trapped, he CAN do something. He CAN kill, but now it's too late. He COULD have done something, but he didn't, and this is proof. The different nature of both scenarios doesn't matter to him - this moment confirms all the self-loathing he felt for his survival, all the guilt he felt, all of it that he'd carry for the rest of his life. He could have done something, but he chose not to, and that never leaves him. Losing them was bad enough in the first place, but then doing this afterwards, basically confirming to himself what a giant, selfish coward he is, capable of saving himself but not them...
The self-hatred he feels about this is one of the reasons he refuses to explain the entire situation to Papyrus when he tells him he killed someone. He doesn't explain that he was in danger, that they would have killed him, nothing like that. All of that he views as meaningless justifications for cowardly, selfish behavior. Ways to try and duck responsibility for what he did and what he didn't do. By that point, when he's telling Papyrus about it, many many years have passed, and he's able to look back on it with what he considers a more detached, logical eye, but still.
This human was pretty high LV, so killing them shot his LV up accordingly. Like a LV 2 Caterpie KOing a LV 50 Onix, you're going to get a lot of EXP out of that. That's also a shock in and of itself, but more on that in a second.
When Asgore reaches him, he can see that he's in shock, and he shakes him and calls his name to try and get him to react. But Gaster can't look away from what he's done. Up to this point, he always thought of himself as a pacifist. Up to this point, he always thought he'd rather die than kill someone. And he was wrong. You can see how that kind of identity crisis would mix with the self-loathing to create a very volatile state for him. There's very little time to talk to him though, so Asgore just picks him up and bails. GASTER CARRYING WAS THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS SCRIPT, PLOT TWIST
(This is also partly why Gaster is so fixated on Papyrus's pacifism and testing its limits, and why Papyrus refusing to give in haunts him so much)
A small detail for the shot of the blood pool, you can see the reflection of the human's SOUL in it. One of the loopholes that lets this event happen is that in the monster's account of the War, they say that no human soul was taken, but they don't say no human died. So humans can die, but as long as a monster doesn't absorb their soul, then it's technically fine. I figure soul absorption is a pretty big and scary commitment anyway, definitely so for someone like Gaster who is still pretty young and terrified at this point, so it wouldn't occur to him to do it. And imagine having to share your body for eternity afterwards with someone you just killed who hates you!
The blood drips down into the next panel, spooookyyyyy
The last lines seem ominous on their own, but they're mostly just setting up the next one, haha. They made people really nervous though.
One of the things I was kind of aiming for here is a sort of deglamorization of the act of killing... I saw a few times people speculating about Gaster killing people during the War, and it was usually in very flashy, cool, justified ways, in big anime flare-ups of rage or skill, that kind of thing. But there really isn't anything heroic or cool about the situation he was put in, or what he did to get out of it. It's just sad. There really isn't anything noble or heroic about fighting in or being caught up in a war, it's just suffering and tragedy and trauma that carries on long after the war is over for anyone who survives. That's the sort of feeling I was bringing to this, anyway.
I thought this one took forever to do, but then the NEXT one...
This one took AGES TO DO, I swear I was going crazy by the end of it, haha. I actually timed it using a little clock app that only counts when you're using the designated program, and it took over 24 hours to do this comic. I wonder if any of that effort shows? Or if people know how long it takes to do these? I try to find shortcuts but really, so much goes into them and I'm not sure how much of it even shows...
Anyway, this follows the previous one fairly closely in terms of flashback, but it establishes some important things that I wanted to do but just couldn't logistically until this point. Namely, the relationship between Gaster and Toriel. The problem with Toriel is that she's just gone for most of the game, and even in the events leading up to the game (and Handplates), she's gone. And there wasn't really a very easy way to establish or show the relationship he had with her while she wasn't there... it's been hinted at a few times, but there weren't extensive flashbacks like this before this point, and Gaster deliberately didn't open up to the brothers about his life, so he wouldn't have told them normally. Toriel's relationship with Gaster, and the impact her leaving had on him, played a role in him making the decisions that he did, but it was so hard to find a way to weave that in somewhere where it felt natural when Toriel herself was impossible to get into a scene, since she locked herself in the Ruins. I didn't want people talking about Gaster and Toriel being close, I needed to show Gaster and Toriel being close or it wouldn't be believable. So in many ways, that's one of the key goals of this particular comic. Although, there are other things it was meant to do as well. But getting Toriel in there, finally, was a big one. I love her but her being in the Ruins all the time is just such a logistical nightmare.
For some background info, this script went through a number of revisions and I remember being very frustrated with it for a while... it started from Gaster's side, as the flashback with Toriel, and I had to find a framework for it on the Brother side, but I couldn't figure out which angle I wanted to approach it from. Before, it wasn't directly connected to any given event... the first version had Papyrus accidentally winging Asgore while they were sparring, and him freaking out about doing it, to tie into Gaster in a state of shock here. But I didn't like it, it didn't feel strong and it didn't feel right, and if Papyrus accidentally did damage during a battle, I felt like that'd do irreparable damage to his recovery re: blue magic. After brainstorming with Malakin for a while, finally I figured out the thread I wanted to run through both scenes... I shifted the focus from skeletons to the goat parents instead, to tie both of them parenting together, and through that, was able to find the running thread in both conversations, about getting used to things that are difficult, just from opposite sides of the room, so to speak. It was a really frustrating process to get there, but finally when the real shape of it became clear to me, I really liked this script for a lot of reasons.
On the contemporary side, this is the indication that Papyrus is starting to get over his fear of blue magic... and to believe in his ability to face his fears and slowly overcome them. Asgore dadding as hard as he can, haha. But again, it helps move Papyrus closer to his canon state, after the hideous things Gaster did to him with blue magic. Papyrus is using only a few very small, very short bones for Asgore to jump over because he's still really super, super nervous. Asgore is being very encouraging and positive though.
In retrospect I should've redone the balloon tails in the first shot with Asgore and Toriel, it's not really clear who's speaking and I should've done it a different way. But Asgore is the one talking until "He has not said anything to you?" which is Toriel, then it goes back to Asgore.
Having to find a place to set all these War scenes is tricky, in this one I was picturing a small sort of canyon with rock walls on either side where they set up a little camp.
Asgore saying that Papyrus's magic makes him special comes back later in the game, when Papyrus cannot stop crowing to you about his SPECIAL BLUE ATTACK. Over time he'll take greater pride in it and lose a lot of his fear over it, but at the moment, Asgore is planting the seeds of blue magic being good and doing his best to try and help them grow.
The rock canyon where they're hanging out sort of reminds me of Metroid Prime, or Brinstar in Super Metroid, woop. There's a big chunk of rock by the fire where they're sitting. You can't ever see the fire since it's off-panel, but you can see the light cast from it on them from where it is, and sometimes the sparks and embers of it.
One of the smaller details is that Toriel knows Gaster's first name at this point, and that's what she calls him. Hints that they've spoken to each other before this point. Gaster doesn't say anything throughout the conversation because he's going through that identity crisis I mentioned above, as well as the loathing from killing and the guilt of not doing anything, just a big storm of negative emotions that he is just barely, barely keeping in check. Speaking he feels would break that barrier, so he stays silent. Toriel didn't really expect him to respond right away anyway, she's just trying to get a read on how he's doing. Hearing her talk about what happened is also hard for him.
Asgore mentions Papyrus lifting people over his bullets, a reference to the last bit in his battle where he makes that giant bone and you sail over it. I've seen that mostly attributed to Sans helping you at the last minute, but I like thinking that Papyrus did it to stealthily help you. It's hard for Papyrus to listen to Asgore because he feels so tense and nervous, and he feels nervous about BEING nervous because Asgore is being so nice about it, but Asgore reassuring him that it's okay to be scared goes a long way.
One of the big reveals of this one, so to speak, is that Toriel killed someone. Possibly more than one person, but still, just the act of killing itself. This is a bit of a risky statement to make, but Toriel can one-shot Asgore and Flowey in the game, so she's powerful, and she CAN kill you by accident when you fight her, although that's really hard to do. I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility for her to have done, and I think her struggling with the weight of death and murdering adds more weight to her decisions later on to pursue peace.
Gaster also did not expect to hear that from her, and it jolts him out of his thoughts for a bit. He was so wrapped up in his own world, the idea that anyone could feel like he does flitted out of his head.
The question of how she killed someone is another concern, but really, from what we see of her, it would have to be fire magic. But what an awful way to go, can you imagine? Seeing a dude burn to death right in front of you? That'd mess you up man. Toriel took it pretty hard, but with a war on, you can't spare a lot of time to deal with that kind of thing... you have to keep going.
One of the things Toriel talks about here is the process of gaining LV, although that's not how she conceptualizes it. Basically, I figure that you can think of EXP as sort of the hurt, or damage, your soul can withstand... once you hit a certain threshold, a breaking point, your soul breaks and reforms instantly, incorporating the damage into itself. Thus why your stats jump so suddenly when you go up a level... when the soul reforms, it has the new stats. You can't unlevel either, so there's no real way back down.
Toriel doesn't know this, but what she says here really sticks with Gaster, since it's also how he experienced the same thing. He begins speculating around this point about the idea of LV, that there's a threshold, a limit, a "level" so to speak, of death a soul can take before it has to remake itself to survive. Over the course of the war, he'd study and refine this theory through observation and the like. But hearing it from Toriel here is what really gets him started on thinking about it.
When Toriel says its easier, she's talking emotionally, in that the initial boundary of killing had been broken, but also literally, as the LV she gained made her stronger and her attacks more powerful.
I really would've loved to have Asgore and the bros sitting in like a nice meadow or near some kind of feature or something but there's NOTHING OUTSIDE ASGORE'S HOUSE, WHY
I mean it'd be weird if they just sat in the leaves I think. So they're just having a tiny picnic off to one side. I figure that's where Sans was the whole time as he watched Papyrus and Asgore practice while feeling distinctly nervous and uncomfortable.
Papyrus looking down and Toriel looking down are right next to each other, more threads tying the two scenes together. I really liked how well some of the lines flowed into each scene... they were originally written separately, as in there was the Asgore scene, then -- and then the Toriel scene in my script file, and it was after both scenes were in their final form that I began to look through the lines and figure out where each one would go, and which line would transition to the next. It was tough!
Toriel is really troubled by what she's done, it haunts her, and she doesn't want to endorse killing, even under these circumstances, but she doesn't want to condemn Gaster for doing it since that's the last thing he needs... she's sort of stuck, and talking about it also makes her feel awful, thus why she dwindles off.
Toriel looks kind of giant compared to him in some of these I DON'T EVEN MEAN TO DO IT AT TIMES IT JUST HAPPENS
Toriel is reaching out to him as hard as she can verbally, but still he can't bring himself out of his traumatized shell to talk to her. She's empathizing with him hard (probably projecting on him as well) and she wants to help him, she NEEDS to help him. SHE HAS TO MOM HIM but what to do? It's at that point that she figures she has to go further.
Both Papyrus and Sans perk up when Asgore mentions bravery, particularly Papyrus being brave. A long while back, Gaster asked Sans what bravery really was, and a lot of what he said echoed back to these events. But hearing someone confirm that Papyrus is brave is really important to Sans, though he doesn't remember why.
Gaster really wasn't expecting to be touched at all, so Toriel pulling him into her lap catches him completely off-guard. What she says here, about how they would have wanted him alive, was something Papyrus actually said later during Gaster's "hypothetical" story, which is one reason why he started freaking out, as you can probably guess. He was able to keep it together when he was just silent in a ball, but having someone touch him and hold him is just too much, and his defenses break down and he gives in. In a way, you can think of it as the first time Toriel got past his metaphorical bonebox, haha.
Gaster lost his family, his friends, everything, and he's young and scared and he doesn't know what to do with himself, so Toriel offering to take care of him and protect him... that's very appealing, haha. It's hard for him to believe it... but he really WANTS to believe in her. It's at this point that he becomes very deeply attached to her, and he still feels a deep connection with her, something born from this moment they shared together, in a sense. Even so, when he starts crying on her lap, he doesn't actually reach out to hold her or anything... he just curls up into his own ball. Always so hard for him.
This is the moment when Gaster sort of lets the goatparents into his life/heart, and it's why he's so fanatically attached to them even right up to his death. In some ways his feelings towards them are still complicated by what happened to his family, but his blind devotion towards them starts here. And later on, that same devotion would play a part in him deciding to do such awful things...
This one is so stupidly long, it wouldn't fit in the tumblr image limits no matter how hard I tried, so I had to put the last panel, with Gaster crying and all, in the body of the post. Which I thought was really easy to see and all, but I noticed a few dubbers actually skipped the last panel as a result! Which is terrible, the last panel is like the most important one!! I really hope the bigger dubbers don't do the same thing... if you lose the last panels it sort of kills the whole thing, haha.
As a small easter egg, in the darkness around those last panels, you can see faint sobs. They're very hard to make out though unless the brightness on your monitor is high! Increasingly strange things going on in the borders of the panels...
on a lighter note i totally forgot i even did this until i was flipping through my files lol
haaasa diga eeeebowaaaiiii
christ this entry got SO LONG UGH
I also posted this at dreamwidth with reluctant ambivalence. Comment here or there, don't matter to me!
Shnabubula - Secret of Mana - Dueling Consoles
Arcien - Undertale - Spear of Justice
Sirenstar - Undertale - Lullaby for the Fallen Child
Video Games Live - Earthworm Jim
Atelier Izumi - Yume Nikki: Houchou Shoujo Gensoukyoku - Prelude
Ugh, a lot of distortion on this one... got some of my voice from the beginning but after that it's just music. The music sounds fine though!
3-9...
Gitaroo Man - Born to Be Bone
AHMusic - Undertale - Your Best Nightmare
BRZion - Yume Nikki - Dreams Falling
insaneintherain - Sonic the Hedgehog 2 - Aquatic Ruin Zone (Jazz Arrangement)
Elizabeth Zharoff & Akash Thakkar - Undertale - Once Upon a Gory Snow
Some faint fluttering but otherwise fine.
Last couple days it's felt like I've had to fight my brain to do anything, or at least start something substantial. Ideas float around but I can't pin them down into anything worthwhile. It's very frustrating. Continual bad dreams but at least they aren't so bad they wake me up, so that's something at least. Some of them are still haunting me a few days later though. Last night at least was just a fairly standard yume nikki type game exploration dream, that wasn't so bad. Or if there was something bad, I don't remember it now.
In more relevant news, I'm going to head up to see Moro for about ten days, starting tomorrow. I might work on some stuff while I'm there but I might not, I dunno. Maybe I'll update here and maybe I won't, I'm not sure! It'll probably be ghost stuff, if anything, so you can check that entry every now and then and see. I feel like I got to get a lot of stuff all together still...
Bunch of stuff I could write up, gotta decide on one of them. I did manage to put up a chapter for the Frozen fic last night, although it was shorter than I thought it was in my head. It's gratifying to think that even a few people are reading it, my expectations are really not high.
Can do a few Handplates comics, and maybe an extra doodle I never posted anywhere before. Last time the bros were hanging out with Asgore and we started getting flashback glimpses into key moments of Gaster's life. Two of those moments are in here, and boy they are doozies.
BUT FIRST, SOMETHING MORE LIGHT-HEARTED
This one is mostly to address a canon issue, which is why Papyrus doesn't have any friends in the game when you come in. This is a mystery that still baffles me! You'd think he'd have tons since he's so charming and handsome and tall, but nope. I have to get the brothers to where they are in canon by the time canon starts, so a lot of comics in this phase are chipping away at that roadblock, so to speak.
So, I figured that Papyrus is just loud and pushy and well-meaning but kind of annoying to most monsters, which fits with what we know about him, but still! There's some other stuff going on as well, I'll get to that in a sec.
A lot of these scripts are just dialogue in my head, or just have dialogue written down in my file, so sometimes figuring out what everyone's doing during a scene or what kind of visuals to accompany things with can be a challenge. It's tricky in Asgore's house because it's really not that big and there's not a lot of stuff for the brothers to play with or do inside or outside for that matter. And they needed to be somewhere where Asgore could come and talk to them easily, so I had them playing with puppets in front of the mirror by his room. UGH REFLECTIONS, WHY
This is also where they have some different clothes for once, with Asgore in orange and the brothers with some different bandanas. Sometimes I toy with changing their sweater colors, but I worry that'd either be confusing or misleading... the old kids HAD to have some other clothes, but I dunno...
A few people picked up on this but Papyrus's lofty ideal of friends and how free they are with their affections and how badly he wants their validation comes from wanting affection from Gaster, haha. More damage carried forward without a source now.
Asgore is described several times in the game as being a big pushover, and it's something the brothers are starting to pick up on, but I'm not sure it'll ever be an EXPLICIT thing, exactly... like I dunno if I'll center a script around that fact, you know? Mostly, it's relevant since later on Papyrus will gripe to you on the phone about how King Fluffyboy wants to make traps less dangerous and he also tells you that the king is a big pushover, so Papyrus has to KNOW that about Asgore to tell you that later. You can start getting a bit of a sense of that here, with how Papyrus just runs right over Asgore trying timidly to suggest that it won't be so easy to make friends, and later when Asgore is :/ when Sans just encourages Papyrus to stay the way he is even though he knows it'll make it harder for Papyrus to make friends in the long run. But it'll probably stay mostly as subtext.
Little bits of this were clear in my mind from fairly early on, with Sans using Sims talk bubbles to talk to the other monsters one of them, haha. The basic idea being that Sans is just mirroring other monsters, but not actually really establishing any kind of depth with them. Again another canon challenge to meet, since Sans in the game actually seems pretty popular and everyone likes hanging out with him, and he seems pretty comfortable chatting with people in Grillby's and such, so he's a lot more well socialized than Papyrus. How does that happen when both he and Papyrus started at nothing? I tied it into another canon trait of Sans's, his observational skills (given how much he can tell about you by the look on your face), so he just observes people a bit, gets a sense of what they're talking about, and then just mirrors that back to them. So people find him fun to be around or easy to hang out with, but no one actually really knows anything about who Sans really is or how he really feels about anything. Which is just how he likes it.
What turned out to be harder was figuring out what monsters Sans would be talking to. I looked up lists of monsters that hang out around New Home and the Core and everything you can encounter, but a lot of the monsters didn't really seem to work for small fiddly reasons... I remember going back and forth on Madjick for example because they almost always speak in "magic words", so I wasn't sure they could hold a conversation. But on the other hand, if you show them the stick, they WILL say a normal sentence, so I went for it. I did limit it to monsters you can either encounter or monsters that give you the Tragic Backstory as you're running around Asgore's House, which is actually a fairly large selection but still, it was tough to figure out who Sans could talk to.
Amusingly though, I didn't really notice that they were all :Ding monsters until someone pointed it out, haha. I also had to come up with a color scheme for Madjick since they don't have an overworld sprite... I tried a few things, but eventually went fairly simple with it.
I also had to come up with a color scheme for Whimsum, I'm not sure I'm into it but eh, it's too late now. I sort of wanted to do one for Froggits, but we actually DO see them in the overworld and they're white, so that at least was solved.
Loox was a tricky one, since you don't see them in the overworld either. BUT there is a monster that looks a LOT like a Loox in the librarby, and assuming that monster is a Loox, then they're actually pinkish in color.
I like that Papyrus asks why monsters don't like him, then proceeds to list off a bunch of reasons why monsters wouldn't like him. Oh Papyrus.
In the last entry, I mentioned that Sans was starting to puff up Papyrus's ego for various reasons, to try and make him happy and more confident in himself and all that. Which has its benefits, since it does protect Papyrus at times from cruel things people say to him! But it does also have its drawbacks, which was another thing this was meant to establish. Sans's praise helps Papyrus a lot, but it does also hurt him in some ways. Some people got real mad at Sans for this but lol that always happens, poor Sans can't catch a break. It's not like he's doing it intentionally! He always means Papyrus well. But like so many things, sometimes you don't realize the full effects of what you're doing, and the world and socializing with it is still so new to them both.
Asgore really SHOULD step in but nope lol. He did that with Gaster too earlier, just not stepping up to be more authoritative. It has its cost! I also had to figure out something for Asgore to be doing outside which was a little tough because there's like nothing outside his house... not even a tree or flowers or anything. Eventually I had him raking the mystery leaves outside his house. Where do those leaves come from!!
Papyrus never does get the hang of it, sadly.
Gaster's said he killed someone before, and a lot of people wondered about who or what it was he killed, and how that happened, and all that. So now it was finally time to answer some of those questions. This is an extremely significant moment for him for a lot of reasons.
Originally, the script for this had the brothers asking about color magic in general, and Asgore saying that skeletons would probably be good at blue magic, although he couldn't remember why. It didn't feel quite right to me though, so I eventually reframed it slightly to be more specifically about blue magic and the trauma they suffered because of it. It also is another bit of info on how the resetting of reality affected the trauma they experienced... they're afraid of blue magic, and know they should be afraid of it, but don't know why. Sort of like a phobia, which is just what Gaster wanted to give them in the first place, but it's weaker without the backing trauma to support it now. Papyrus has to get over his fear of blue magic by the time the game starts after all.
Papyrus is playing with one of those slidey tile puzzles, haha. The picture was originally just a :3 goatmonster if I remember right, you can't see it now though of course since it's all jumbled up.
Asgore's wearing the same glasses/vest combo he wore in that comic where they were all playing bridge, I just like drawing the goatparents with little glasses, haha. It always vaguely reminds me of Vincent from Silent Hill 3 though.
I remember getting really annoyed at the inconsistency between how far apart Asgore and the brothers are in the first panel, and how far apart they are in the sideways panel, but there was just no way to move them farther apart with the horizontal restrictions... I guess I COULD have zoomed out, but still. I feel like these are only things that I care about.
Coming up with non-combative uses for blue magic was interesting.
This flashback is probably the longest stretch of silence in the whole comic, come to think of it. For a very brief period while I was brainstorming it, I had the two humans talking trash while stalking Gaster about how skeletons give more EXP when you don't kill them immediately, how it sucks there aren't any left since they're great for grinding, general game-y type stuff, but then I figured that was overkill and all you really needed was the demon that comes when you call its name - that spirit inside you that makes you abuse these monsters for your own personal gain. I thought maybe people would make more of the =) face as it related directly to the kid, but it seemed like the effect I intended here came across pretty clearly, which is always nice.
Some assumed that the War was over when the goatparents found Gaster last time. Nope, the War isn't even close to over yet, there's a lot of fighting and suffering and such to still go through. Lots of untold tragedies and such. Here, I pictured their group getting ambushed by some humans, and while the goatparents held their own, Gaster panicked and tried to run and find a place to hide. Which wasn't smart but he's pretty severely traumatized already by this point and he's acting mostly on instinct. They lost track of him for a few seconds, but noticed he wasn't around fairly quickly.
A smaller detail here is that Gaster's coat is a bit big on him. Later, Toriel would help him take it in a bit so it fits him better.
The two humans that jump him were always going to be shadowed RPG heroes - the way the monsters describe the War, it's basically a standard RPG told from the side of the monsters. Flip the story around, and you have a band of brave humans who cleanse the world of wicked monsters and imprison them under a mountain, so the surface can be at peace. Killing monsters in an RPG is so standard, you don't even think about it at all. That's what monsters are FOR.
Deciding which hero to use was harder though. The Dragon Warrior hero was always my first thought, since I tend to picture the world during the War as pretty much Dragon Warrior, although when I went and looked them up, their silhouette was a little tough to read. Still, it seemed like a fair amount of people recognized them! It's weird how my mental image of them was totally off when I went and looked up their actual sprite.
I also knew that one of those heroes would be getting really brutally murdered, and as goofy as it sounds, I didn't want to really graphically kill a hero that I actually liked. Crono from Chrono Trigger for example... I didn't want to spear him like this, even though in his game he DID kill a lot of monsters.
Not only that, I had to find a hero that had a distinct silhouette. While looking through early 90s RPG protagonists, many of them are fairly interchangable, and a lot of them do NOT have distinctive profiles when shadowed. Lots of capes, shoulder pauldrons, boring hair, things like that. With the Dragon Warrior dude already covering that, I wanted someone who'd offer some contrast. I was REALLY tempted to use Serge from Chrono Cross, because CC sucks, but Serge's outfit was really difficult to read as a silhouette, AND his weapon really doesn't work for getting him speared like this. It had to be a sword, or even a spear. His weird swallow-y thing would just be visually confusing.
I cycled through a ton of heroes, asked Jaz and Malakin for heroes, trying to find one that would fit alongside the DW Hero, and finally I settled on the Boy from Secret of Mana, who at least in this case would be a bystander and not actively murdered. And to be fair, Secret of Mana was VERY heavy on grinding, with a lot of monsters falling under the Boy's sword. So thematically it was appropriate, and also the Boy has a very distinctive look as a silhouette. He got mistaken for Crono a few times but I think that was more his hair than anything else.
It was interesting to hear dubs of this scene, since some decided to add dialogue to it where there wasn't any, and that requires interpreting what Gaster is going through when you can't see his face. The Lost Soul head is particularly interesting in really dramatic scenes like this, since it has to all come through his body language. In a way he himself becomes a cipher, since you have to project some kind of expectation of how he's feeling or reacting. You have to fill in that gap yourself. Some saw him as angry, some saw him as afraid. But since you're here, I'll tell you what I was picturing.
Against two humans, death is almost totally assured, and there's no way to escape. Gaster is panicked and terrified, and the choice his brain presents him in its panicked state is fight or flight? In more game-like terms, you can picture the Fight button hovering in that black mindscape, untouched his whole life until this moment. And on the spur of the moment, he chooses to Fight. And once that happens, adrenaline kicks in, and his body starts to move on auto-pilot. I'm not sure if you've ever had this happen in a crisis, but there's this weird sort of zen state you can reach when something awful is happening that you can't do on purpose that just sort of happens to you. I'm thinking like, for example, if you're spinning out on the freeway, and without even thinking about it, you're handling the car to get out of the spin, and before you know it you're on the side of the road and you don't know what happened. Personally for me, that kind of hyper-aware, hyper-alert state only happens in those kind of life-or-death situations, and they sort of resolve everything around you into pinpoints. Like spinning out on the freeway again, I didn't say a word or scream or cry out or gasp or anything, my body and brain just REACTED. Which I think is why afterwards, people can often sit in a state of shock, trying to process what it is they just did.
That's what happened here, to an extent. After Gaster chose fight, everything else in the world totally fell away, and in a matter of seconds he came up with a plan and put it into action. He knows that monster bullets can't kill a human easily, particularly any human as high level as these, but a human weapon can hurt another human. He has to find a way to use the human's weapon against it, and he has to do it before the human gets their turn or else he's done for for sure. (Speaking of, a few wondered why Gaster managed to get his turn off first before the humans do, but that's actually backed up by the game to an extent - Sans also takes his turn first in your battle with him, so he passed that down to him.)
In a lot of ways, Gaster was lucky to pull this off, since it's not something every monster could have done. If the human hadn't dropped their sword, he'd be in trouble, but if he didn't have the spectral hands either, he wouldn't have been able to pick up the sword and position it to skewer the human either. It was a combination of several unique things he can do that let him do this. It all happens in a few seconds or so.
Getting one-shotted by a skeleton is a bit freaky, so I had the boy bail, but I like thinking the player behind the DW Hero was super ticked at getting one-shotted by a lesser skeleton after not saving for an hour, so they just quit, haha. Thus why they don't come back to life.
A few were confused about why Asgore is hiding under his cloak in that one shot of the Boy running away, and basically he saw what happened and he wants to get to Gaster, but he doesn't want to trigger an encounter by accident with the Boy, so he's trying to evade his notice. He wants to get to Gaster as soon as possible.
I had a loooooooot of fun doing the blood in this one, haha. One of the things that no one noticed but I'll point out anyway is that with the DW hero's shoulder guards, they shouldn't be able to be lying the way they're lying unless the shoulder guards are on a hinge and can fold up or something. I just decided that was the case here because uuuuuuugh.
After the moment has passed, Gaster's in a state of shocked disbelief. This is the same kind of shock you're in after a life-death experience, as mentioned above, where you're shaking and just sitting there trying to figure out exactly what happened.
There is another reason that he goes into shock though, as the realization of what he's done fully hits him. I mentioned it in the desc, but I'm not sure it was clear enough, so I'll explain it more here.
It isn't just the act of killing someone that sends Gaster into a shocked state that will last (as you'll see) for days. It's the timing of him doing it. By which I mean, Gaster was hiding underneath his coat while he heard his family and friends all dying around him, and he did nothing. And now he finds, that when he's pinned and trapped, he CAN do something. He CAN kill, but now it's too late. He COULD have done something, but he didn't, and this is proof. The different nature of both scenarios doesn't matter to him - this moment confirms all the self-loathing he felt for his survival, all the guilt he felt, all of it that he'd carry for the rest of his life. He could have done something, but he chose not to, and that never leaves him. Losing them was bad enough in the first place, but then doing this afterwards, basically confirming to himself what a giant, selfish coward he is, capable of saving himself but not them...
The self-hatred he feels about this is one of the reasons he refuses to explain the entire situation to Papyrus when he tells him he killed someone. He doesn't explain that he was in danger, that they would have killed him, nothing like that. All of that he views as meaningless justifications for cowardly, selfish behavior. Ways to try and duck responsibility for what he did and what he didn't do. By that point, when he's telling Papyrus about it, many many years have passed, and he's able to look back on it with what he considers a more detached, logical eye, but still.
This human was pretty high LV, so killing them shot his LV up accordingly. Like a LV 2 Caterpie KOing a LV 50 Onix, you're going to get a lot of EXP out of that. That's also a shock in and of itself, but more on that in a second.
When Asgore reaches him, he can see that he's in shock, and he shakes him and calls his name to try and get him to react. But Gaster can't look away from what he's done. Up to this point, he always thought of himself as a pacifist. Up to this point, he always thought he'd rather die than kill someone. And he was wrong. You can see how that kind of identity crisis would mix with the self-loathing to create a very volatile state for him. There's very little time to talk to him though, so Asgore just picks him up and bails. GASTER CARRYING WAS THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS SCRIPT, PLOT TWIST
(This is also partly why Gaster is so fixated on Papyrus's pacifism and testing its limits, and why Papyrus refusing to give in haunts him so much)
A small detail for the shot of the blood pool, you can see the reflection of the human's SOUL in it. One of the loopholes that lets this event happen is that in the monster's account of the War, they say that no human soul was taken, but they don't say no human died. So humans can die, but as long as a monster doesn't absorb their soul, then it's technically fine. I figure soul absorption is a pretty big and scary commitment anyway, definitely so for someone like Gaster who is still pretty young and terrified at this point, so it wouldn't occur to him to do it. And imagine having to share your body for eternity afterwards with someone you just killed who hates you!
The blood drips down into the next panel, spooookyyyyy
The last lines seem ominous on their own, but they're mostly just setting up the next one, haha. They made people really nervous though.
One of the things I was kind of aiming for here is a sort of deglamorization of the act of killing... I saw a few times people speculating about Gaster killing people during the War, and it was usually in very flashy, cool, justified ways, in big anime flare-ups of rage or skill, that kind of thing. But there really isn't anything heroic or cool about the situation he was put in, or what he did to get out of it. It's just sad. There really isn't anything noble or heroic about fighting in or being caught up in a war, it's just suffering and tragedy and trauma that carries on long after the war is over for anyone who survives. That's the sort of feeling I was bringing to this, anyway.
I thought this one took forever to do, but then the NEXT one...
This one took AGES TO DO, I swear I was going crazy by the end of it, haha. I actually timed it using a little clock app that only counts when you're using the designated program, and it took over 24 hours to do this comic. I wonder if any of that effort shows? Or if people know how long it takes to do these? I try to find shortcuts but really, so much goes into them and I'm not sure how much of it even shows...
Anyway, this follows the previous one fairly closely in terms of flashback, but it establishes some important things that I wanted to do but just couldn't logistically until this point. Namely, the relationship between Gaster and Toriel. The problem with Toriel is that she's just gone for most of the game, and even in the events leading up to the game (and Handplates), she's gone. And there wasn't really a very easy way to establish or show the relationship he had with her while she wasn't there... it's been hinted at a few times, but there weren't extensive flashbacks like this before this point, and Gaster deliberately didn't open up to the brothers about his life, so he wouldn't have told them normally. Toriel's relationship with Gaster, and the impact her leaving had on him, played a role in him making the decisions that he did, but it was so hard to find a way to weave that in somewhere where it felt natural when Toriel herself was impossible to get into a scene, since she locked herself in the Ruins. I didn't want people talking about Gaster and Toriel being close, I needed to show Gaster and Toriel being close or it wouldn't be believable. So in many ways, that's one of the key goals of this particular comic. Although, there are other things it was meant to do as well. But getting Toriel in there, finally, was a big one. I love her but her being in the Ruins all the time is just such a logistical nightmare.
For some background info, this script went through a number of revisions and I remember being very frustrated with it for a while... it started from Gaster's side, as the flashback with Toriel, and I had to find a framework for it on the Brother side, but I couldn't figure out which angle I wanted to approach it from. Before, it wasn't directly connected to any given event... the first version had Papyrus accidentally winging Asgore while they were sparring, and him freaking out about doing it, to tie into Gaster in a state of shock here. But I didn't like it, it didn't feel strong and it didn't feel right, and if Papyrus accidentally did damage during a battle, I felt like that'd do irreparable damage to his recovery re: blue magic. After brainstorming with Malakin for a while, finally I figured out the thread I wanted to run through both scenes... I shifted the focus from skeletons to the goat parents instead, to tie both of them parenting together, and through that, was able to find the running thread in both conversations, about getting used to things that are difficult, just from opposite sides of the room, so to speak. It was a really frustrating process to get there, but finally when the real shape of it became clear to me, I really liked this script for a lot of reasons.
On the contemporary side, this is the indication that Papyrus is starting to get over his fear of blue magic... and to believe in his ability to face his fears and slowly overcome them. Asgore dadding as hard as he can, haha. But again, it helps move Papyrus closer to his canon state, after the hideous things Gaster did to him with blue magic. Papyrus is using only a few very small, very short bones for Asgore to jump over because he's still really super, super nervous. Asgore is being very encouraging and positive though.
In retrospect I should've redone the balloon tails in the first shot with Asgore and Toriel, it's not really clear who's speaking and I should've done it a different way. But Asgore is the one talking until "He has not said anything to you?" which is Toriel, then it goes back to Asgore.
Having to find a place to set all these War scenes is tricky, in this one I was picturing a small sort of canyon with rock walls on either side where they set up a little camp.
Asgore saying that Papyrus's magic makes him special comes back later in the game, when Papyrus cannot stop crowing to you about his SPECIAL BLUE ATTACK. Over time he'll take greater pride in it and lose a lot of his fear over it, but at the moment, Asgore is planting the seeds of blue magic being good and doing his best to try and help them grow.
The rock canyon where they're hanging out sort of reminds me of Metroid Prime, or Brinstar in Super Metroid, woop. There's a big chunk of rock by the fire where they're sitting. You can't ever see the fire since it's off-panel, but you can see the light cast from it on them from where it is, and sometimes the sparks and embers of it.
One of the smaller details is that Toriel knows Gaster's first name at this point, and that's what she calls him. Hints that they've spoken to each other before this point. Gaster doesn't say anything throughout the conversation because he's going through that identity crisis I mentioned above, as well as the loathing from killing and the guilt of not doing anything, just a big storm of negative emotions that he is just barely, barely keeping in check. Speaking he feels would break that barrier, so he stays silent. Toriel didn't really expect him to respond right away anyway, she's just trying to get a read on how he's doing. Hearing her talk about what happened is also hard for him.
Asgore mentions Papyrus lifting people over his bullets, a reference to the last bit in his battle where he makes that giant bone and you sail over it. I've seen that mostly attributed to Sans helping you at the last minute, but I like thinking that Papyrus did it to stealthily help you. It's hard for Papyrus to listen to Asgore because he feels so tense and nervous, and he feels nervous about BEING nervous because Asgore is being so nice about it, but Asgore reassuring him that it's okay to be scared goes a long way.
One of the big reveals of this one, so to speak, is that Toriel killed someone. Possibly more than one person, but still, just the act of killing itself. This is a bit of a risky statement to make, but Toriel can one-shot Asgore and Flowey in the game, so she's powerful, and she CAN kill you by accident when you fight her, although that's really hard to do. I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility for her to have done, and I think her struggling with the weight of death and murdering adds more weight to her decisions later on to pursue peace.
Gaster also did not expect to hear that from her, and it jolts him out of his thoughts for a bit. He was so wrapped up in his own world, the idea that anyone could feel like he does flitted out of his head.
The question of how she killed someone is another concern, but really, from what we see of her, it would have to be fire magic. But what an awful way to go, can you imagine? Seeing a dude burn to death right in front of you? That'd mess you up man. Toriel took it pretty hard, but with a war on, you can't spare a lot of time to deal with that kind of thing... you have to keep going.
One of the things Toriel talks about here is the process of gaining LV, although that's not how she conceptualizes it. Basically, I figure that you can think of EXP as sort of the hurt, or damage, your soul can withstand... once you hit a certain threshold, a breaking point, your soul breaks and reforms instantly, incorporating the damage into itself. Thus why your stats jump so suddenly when you go up a level... when the soul reforms, it has the new stats. You can't unlevel either, so there's no real way back down.
Toriel doesn't know this, but what she says here really sticks with Gaster, since it's also how he experienced the same thing. He begins speculating around this point about the idea of LV, that there's a threshold, a limit, a "level" so to speak, of death a soul can take before it has to remake itself to survive. Over the course of the war, he'd study and refine this theory through observation and the like. But hearing it from Toriel here is what really gets him started on thinking about it.
When Toriel says its easier, she's talking emotionally, in that the initial boundary of killing had been broken, but also literally, as the LV she gained made her stronger and her attacks more powerful.
I really would've loved to have Asgore and the bros sitting in like a nice meadow or near some kind of feature or something but there's NOTHING OUTSIDE ASGORE'S HOUSE, WHY
I mean it'd be weird if they just sat in the leaves I think. So they're just having a tiny picnic off to one side. I figure that's where Sans was the whole time as he watched Papyrus and Asgore practice while feeling distinctly nervous and uncomfortable.
Papyrus looking down and Toriel looking down are right next to each other, more threads tying the two scenes together. I really liked how well some of the lines flowed into each scene... they were originally written separately, as in there was the Asgore scene, then -- and then the Toriel scene in my script file, and it was after both scenes were in their final form that I began to look through the lines and figure out where each one would go, and which line would transition to the next. It was tough!
Toriel is really troubled by what she's done, it haunts her, and she doesn't want to endorse killing, even under these circumstances, but she doesn't want to condemn Gaster for doing it since that's the last thing he needs... she's sort of stuck, and talking about it also makes her feel awful, thus why she dwindles off.
Toriel looks kind of giant compared to him in some of these I DON'T EVEN MEAN TO DO IT AT TIMES IT JUST HAPPENS
Toriel is reaching out to him as hard as she can verbally, but still he can't bring himself out of his traumatized shell to talk to her. She's empathizing with him hard (probably projecting on him as well) and she wants to help him, she NEEDS to help him. SHE HAS TO MOM HIM but what to do? It's at that point that she figures she has to go further.
Both Papyrus and Sans perk up when Asgore mentions bravery, particularly Papyrus being brave. A long while back, Gaster asked Sans what bravery really was, and a lot of what he said echoed back to these events. But hearing someone confirm that Papyrus is brave is really important to Sans, though he doesn't remember why.
Gaster really wasn't expecting to be touched at all, so Toriel pulling him into her lap catches him completely off-guard. What she says here, about how they would have wanted him alive, was something Papyrus actually said later during Gaster's "hypothetical" story, which is one reason why he started freaking out, as you can probably guess. He was able to keep it together when he was just silent in a ball, but having someone touch him and hold him is just too much, and his defenses break down and he gives in. In a way, you can think of it as the first time Toriel got past his metaphorical bonebox, haha.
Gaster lost his family, his friends, everything, and he's young and scared and he doesn't know what to do with himself, so Toriel offering to take care of him and protect him... that's very appealing, haha. It's hard for him to believe it... but he really WANTS to believe in her. It's at this point that he becomes very deeply attached to her, and he still feels a deep connection with her, something born from this moment they shared together, in a sense. Even so, when he starts crying on her lap, he doesn't actually reach out to hold her or anything... he just curls up into his own ball. Always so hard for him.
This is the moment when Gaster sort of lets the goatparents into his life/heart, and it's why he's so fanatically attached to them even right up to his death. In some ways his feelings towards them are still complicated by what happened to his family, but his blind devotion towards them starts here. And later on, that same devotion would play a part in him deciding to do such awful things...
This one is so stupidly long, it wouldn't fit in the tumblr image limits no matter how hard I tried, so I had to put the last panel, with Gaster crying and all, in the body of the post. Which I thought was really easy to see and all, but I noticed a few dubbers actually skipped the last panel as a result! Which is terrible, the last panel is like the most important one!! I really hope the bigger dubbers don't do the same thing... if you lose the last panels it sort of kills the whole thing, haha.
As a small easter egg, in the darkness around those last panels, you can see faint sobs. They're very hard to make out though unless the brightness on your monitor is high! Increasingly strange things going on in the borders of the panels...
on a lighter note i totally forgot i even did this until i was flipping through my files lol
haaasa diga eeeebowaaaiiii
christ this entry got SO LONG UGH
I also posted this at dreamwidth with reluctant ambivalence. Comment here or there, don't matter to me!