What The Internet did To Undertale

undertale is a tiny tiny game released on the 15th of september 2015 and started life as a 5 000 kickstarter and it's here you can see its creator toby fox's bewilderment as the budget source to 10 times his initial ask as well as little updates like fox having to take time away from development to sit his college exams and what i find interesting about these posts is you can see in them a person who had no idea what he was making or what it would become and how could he five years later undertale has become one of the most massive and bewildering forces on the internet seriously i've done two videos like this and exploring those fandoms it felt like digging through a mine but undertales was more like staring into a massive yawning abyss infinite and ever expanding and what i want to do today is look at how that happened how the internet took this tiny little game and transformed it into one of the most loved and hated phenomenon online and to do this we need to start with undertale itself i'm guessing a lot of you know the deal with undertale you play as frisk a small child who has fallen into an underground kingdom of monsters and from here you can treat them like you would in any other rpg and murder them or become their friend it's a cute idea but in isolation it wasn't that new or interesting in 2015 games like moon having very similar concepts but releasing 18 years earlier with non-lethal runs and games being popular by this time so why then is the simple choice of undertale's battles a big deal and i think there's two answers to that the first being its characters undertale has great characters and how much you agree with that is going to define how you feel about this game take character like undyne initially she just seems like a human murdering machine but spend time with her and you'll see that her more homicidal tendencies are just an expression of her loyalty to asgore that's how much her friendships mean to her whether it's knowing papyrus isn't suited to combat and teaching him to cook instead or appreciating alphys's pathetic love of anime she's someone who's able to see people for what they are rather than what they wish they were and is able to love them for those reasons and learning all this about a character who first seemed like a standard rpg boss is really endearing but that same discovery exists for each major character of undertale whether it's alfie's self-deprecating humor hiding an intense layer of guilt and self-loathing flowy's hateful pathetic existence or meriton's journey to transition into a body they can be themselves in despite the fact that a single playthrough of undertale takes about six hours you get a lot of these characters and i think a reason for that is how subtly their personalities are communicated each character has a home that you can explore full of all these little touches like papyrus's race car bed as a side note i really like the mirror and toriel's home that just says it's you what a cute little joke and certainly not a prelude to any massive emotional as well as each character having their own highly expressive theme music like take asgore the king of the monsters waiting for you at the end of the game who you are constantly told is this super nice guy but who has also murdered six human children your soul being the seventh and final one he needs to break the barrier trapping his people underground and his theme music the reluctant but frantic bergentrucken captures that it is the sound of a good person trying to convince himself to do something awful for what he believes is the greater good and that same level of expression can be found everywhere in the underground even in a lot of the really tiny little side characters from burger pants the nihilistic vaguely unhinged fast food worker to muffin the spider who is about as adorable as you could make one of those abominable hell creatures to napstablook the depressed ghost who at one point asks you to lie on the ground with him and listen to trance music and oh my god i don't know that i've ever related to a fictional character this much and it all comes together to create this world of memorable little creatures who have been forced underground by humans yet have still managed to scrape together happiness in that but there's this undercurrent of longing for something more a desire to escape the underground for a better life under an open sky and it's sad but it's that contrast that gives the world of undertale its beauty the reason i make a big deal about this is if you don't care about these characters if you don't believe in this world then the choices offered by undertale's battle system they don't mean anything but if you do that's where the option to kill or spare these monsters starts to carry real emotional weight but it would still all be for nothing if the game didn't react to your decisions in a meaningful way and undertale is extremely reactive to the player's actions even in some really tiny idiosyncratic ways like sans being able to tell that you've reloaded your save file and are experiencing the same sequence again but where this becomes a big deal is how undertale reacts to your actions to shape the larger story if you go through the entire game without killing a single monster you'll go down the pacifist rule which means zero level ups or stat increases and it's difficult but it's the only way to experience the full story of azrael asgore and toriel's son killed by humans and now transformed into the evil emotionless flower that tried to take your soul at the beginning of the game the final battle with him seeing you and all the monsters you've spared facing asriel and making him see through pacifism that he still matters he is still loved despite the terrible things he's done and all the hatred he feels until finally azrael loses the will to fight and in one final act of repentance shatters the barrier sealing the monsters underground freeing them to pursue a new life on the surface at the end of it there's just a feeling that you did this you showed these creatures a real kindness not through any binary decision but by consistently doing what you believe was right over what was easy and the result is a ending that feels meaningful and responsive to your actions a genuine statement of the power of love over violence and [ __ ] i think that's kind of beautiful but it's also here that things get really interesting go back to the title screen and you'll be met by flowey who warns you that there is one final threat to this world you you have given these characters the best possible life and now you have the option to just walk away and let them be happy or you could reset the game and start again ripping them from their ideal future and what's interesting is he's not talking to frisk the character he's talking to you the player so why would you do this simple why do you do anything in any video game to see what happens and specifically what happens if you kill every single monster in the underground this is what takes you down the no mercy route or genocide as it's come to be known online uh i'm going to call it no mercy from here because otherwise youtube might think that this is a very different kind of video than it is no mercy runs are grueling you have to walk back and forth through each area killing every single monster and it can take hours but it's like the entire time the game is asking you is this really what you want and as you do the underground transforms into this haunting empty place as the monsters flee from you abandoning their homes and even leaving notes begging you not to hurt their family it feels cruel like you are some terrible violent force in this world the major encounters of the game changing to reflect that and done more so than your battle with undyne who before the battle is mortally wounded trying to save a child from you and just listen to the dialogue here deep deep in my soul there's a burning feeling i can't describe a burning feeling that won't let me die this isn't about monsters anymore is it if you get past me you'll you'll destroy them all won't you monsters humans everyone everyone's hopes everyone's dreams vanquished in an instant right now everyone in the world i can feel their hearts beating as one and we all have one goal to defeat you human know whatever you are for the sake of the whole world i undyne will strike you down i love how this speech plants you as a villain about to battle the true hero of this story but what's really interesting is that line human know whatever you are because you're not human not in this world humans cannot control time humans cannot come back from the dead over and over and over you are not human you're a being that exists outside this fictional reality you are a person playing a video game and that gives you massive power over this world and every character in it illustrated by the battle that follows undyne is now dramatically more powerful and difficult than anything you faced before but for as grueling as this fight is it's not a fair one because each time you die you can just reset respawning at the last save point and with each new attempt your muscle memory strengthens as you learn the patterns of her attacks rendering them useless you are growing she is not she can defeat you an infinite number of times and it doesn't matter you just need to kill her once and it's over you are not two equals engaging in a fair contest you are an actual person in the real world using every advantage you have to defeat a fictional video game character and this fight shows the inherent unfairness of that and this isn't the only moment the game acknowledges this remember the moment where sans knows you've reset your save file this happens because each time you reload a save that is canonical it is the player manipulating the timeline of this world something that becomes even more apparent when later in a no mercy run flowey tells you that he used to have the same power that you do he used to have the ability to reset the timeline of this world how he used it to do everything he saved everyone he killed everyone over and over until the people of this world to him became nothing but sets of numbers and lines of dialogue like characters in a video game and that power is what made flowey so pathetic and cruel but at this point you're the same as he is you've destroyed the lives of creatures much weaker than you are just to see what happens and that realization is chilling but this is the strength of undertale it presents you with a choice through its battles gives that choice meaning through its world and characters and consequence in how the game reacts to your decisions and it uses that to reach out beyond the screen and form a real connection with you the person holding the controller and makes a direct statement on how you choose to engage with the lives of beings in an inherently weaker position than you are and at its best that's a powerful personal experience and why i think people react to this game the way they do and oh boy do people react the reason i spend so much time talking about the appeal of undertale is that whether you love it or don't it's important to understand that this is a game that elicits a lot of emotion in people but this created a problem undertale was still a small indie game you could see the majority of its meaningful content in less than 20 hours and from there all that emotion had nowhere left to go take character like azrael go back to the beginning of the game after a pacifist run and there he is tending to the flowers he will not go with you and you cannot save him he's resigned to stay alone in the ruins forever slowly reverting back to the soulless version of himself and that's it that's the end of this character and this is where dreamer reborn comes in a fan comic that re-imagines this scenario where now frisk shares their soul with azrael allowing him to join his family on the surface and start a new life and if you want to know how hungry people were for this kind of content dreamer reborn was uploaded just eight days after undertale's release dream reborn went on to be massively popular even resulting in its own fan game and was a critical moment for what undertale would become online because it told fans if you wanted more undertale you could create it yourself this opened the door to a whole world of new fan content say you were super into a character like alphys who maybe has 20 to 30 minutes dialogue across the entire game total well through fan content she became infinite now you could watch her take cooking lessons with undyne you could explore the horror of her failed experiments you could watch her get married try on outfits play video games hell you could even argue with her about anime in one of the many undertale ask blogs people even creating elaborate animations like this short showing alfie's sinking into despair over the atrocities she's committed and how her first meeting with undyne began to change that it's beautiful but the thing is this kind of fan content was now being made for every major character of the game a sign of just how quickly undertale was spreading online through nothing more than fan passion the game became a massively popular topic for video essays that would scrape at every tiny corner of the game desperate to uncover new information for an increasingly ravenous fan base the game even reached some of the most popular creators on the internet who would stream and let's play this niche indie rpg to audiences of millions leading to massive influxes of new fans and if you want to see the most explosive expression of that new popularity you can find it in the undertale battle animations no matter how dramatic the showdowns in undertale felt visually they were nearly always very simple and had to be in order to remain feasible for its tiny developments and what these fan animations did was free the most dramatic moments of undertale's story from those limitations letting us experience the sheer lunacy of the ratings driven war with meriton the violent desperate cruelty of a no mercy route undyne or the sheer tragic beauty of a pacifist route asriel like the [ __ ] stunning telly lz's hopes and dreams capturing all the emotion tragedy and tenderness of the showdown with the god of hyper death and i think that's what drives a lot of the artists behind these creations a desire to recreate how these fights felt and i'm guessing that's why the most popular by far is the battle with coming right at the end of a no mercy run this is where the game finally pushes back against the player sans having watched you repeatedly destroy the lives of everyone he loves now faces you in one final terrible fight and it is a nightmare sans even taking control of the timeline and forcing the player to be the victim of saves and resets and what these animations do is capture all that violence all that emotion and express it in a way that was never possible in the original game the crazy part isn't even how many of these animations there are or their sheer quality but their insane popularity i want you to take a look at this animation on screen now and i want you to try and guess how many views you think this has okay hold that number did you guess as high as 4 million views well if you did you drastically underestimated because it's actually 60 million views and this is not an anomaly with undertale fan animations 22 million views 66 million views 95 million views i would wager that with view counts this high these animations were likely how a lot of people actually discovered undertale meaning at a point the undertale fandom became self-perpetuating fan works creating new fans who would in turn create new fan works and you could see this new level of popularity being expressed in some really insane ways an entire music scene built up around undertale fan remixes people were programming their own undertale fan games kenny omega even maine evented wrestle kingdom 13 to undertale entrance music i swear to god this is a big deal [Applause] and within the fandom itself every tiny corner of the game was now being mined for fan content you remember those little side characters we mentioned earlier each of them now had their own massive fan following each tiny strand of undertale was being filtered through a thousand different lenses resulting in legions of fan art fan comics fan fiction plushies stage productions live action films cooking videos body pillows porn which yes i am going to talk about because i refuse to be silenced on this platform [Music] resulting in a profound sexual awakening the likes of which i never thought i'd experience my point here is that from the little carrier burden waterfall to the bench quiche each tiny strand of undertale was being magnified a thousand-fold and given new life online and if you want to see how my newt this gets look no further than wd gaster if a fictional character could win an award for appearing in a piece of media the least but inspiring the most fan content gaster would win that award his existence is only suggested in a handful of easily missable moments throughout the game the royal scientist before alfie's your odds of actually encountering him are tiny dependent on a randomly assigned number at the start of your game from 1 to 100 and if that number happens to be 66 a mysterious grey room appears 10 of the time which may contain a character sprite commonly believed to be gaster meaning he only appears in roughly 1 out of 1 000 play throughs and yet he is a massively popular character in the fandom appearing in innumerable fan comics fan fiction a fully playable boss battle as well as fan animations the most popular of which has 45 million views he's barely in the [ __ ] game and if it's starting to make sense why i call undertale's fandom in abyss oh buddy we're just getting started on october 17 2015 tumblr user underfella uploaded a drawing of toriel but rather than the kindly goat mother you encounter at the start of the game this was a creepy distortion of that character and something about it resonated with people so much so that underfella began to re-imagine each character of undertale in this more sinister light these images running rampant throughout fan communities with people now creating their own fan works of this fan work creating a collective online world of thousands of people envisioning what this new darker reality of undertale would be like and this was the birth of underfell one of the first massively popular undertale alternate universes for a use i have legit seen full-blown aaa games with lesser followings than underfell to the point that it's difficult for me to even convey how massive it is so i'm going to be using a very specific example this is what happens when i type underfell remix into youtube and just look at all the results these are all soundtracks for a game that does not exist except it kind of does there are multiple fully developed underfell fan games along with all the other weird [ __ ] you'd expect from any property with a massive fan following all this dark edgy [ __ ] i love it but i think the appeal is deeper than that undertale was at a point where every tiny part of it had been memified a thousand times over and so the only option left was to break these characters free from that canonical limitation and so like a remix of a song you love underfell let fans re-experience them all over again and in doing so making them personal specific and limitless oh and if you're wondering why i referred to underfell as one of the big undertale aus well underswap came into existence when a piece of fan art from tumblr user popcorn prince swapped the personalities of sans and papyrus sans now the over-enthusiastic human-hunting goof and papyrus the laid-back older brother who knows more than he should just like underfell the idea picked up a massive amount of momentum among the undertale fan community with popcorn prince creating similar swapped personas for each character in undertale undone became the royal scientist alfie's the head of the guard you get the idea however whereas underfell imagines a dangerous more violent undertale under swap is kind of the opposite often depicted as a softer more peaceful reality that tends to focus more on slice of lifestyle stories and like underfell it is huge a deviantart underswap search yields 37 000 results that same remix test from earlier that works for under swap too there is a massive community still producing content to this day and it's just crazy to me that there could be two massively popular undertale eu horror tale began life as a deviantart web comic that reimagined the world and characters of undertale as horrific nightmare versions of themselves went on to gain a massive fan following with fan games fun art and a hugely popular creepy version of sans with his head cracked open dust tale is a korean ask blog in which sans emotionally destroyed from experiencing repeated genocide runs murders the monsters of the undergrounds to level himself up to finally take down the human and end the infinite looping genocide it also has a massive fan following with a hugely popular version of sans it's kind of like undertale crossed with brazil outer tail is an undertale au said in space it also has a massively popular fan following oh okay that's the last undertale eu bell swap is an underfell under swap combination alternate universe set during the 20th century cold war in which the characters of underfell swap personalities as they do in underswap not to be confused with swap fell which is a different thing where the characters of underswap become velified versions of their swapped selves and technically this version of fel swap is fel swap gold which is a different thing from phil swap red or fel swap emerald and this this is the point where my mind started to break and i started to feel like there was no bottom to this community there are hundreds of undertale aus and many with their own massively popular fan communities i have been researching this stuff for weeks and i have no idea what the [ __ ] disbelief papyrus is how does this video have 20 million views a lot of these universes even have different pacifist neutral and genocide timelines i googled genocide underswapped papyrus just to see if that was a thing and not only is it someone had done a full genocide underswap papyrus boss battle twice the rate at which this stuff hits the internet and mutates is staggering like take fresh sands another massively popular sans iu character but then one day someone was like what if fresh sands existed in underfell leading to unfresh sans which in turn led to someone being like what if unfresh sans was a person leading to human unfresh sands this is a fan character of a fan character of a fan character of an original creation at some point these fan characters even got really weird and meta like error sans who i actually think is pretty rad who travels from alternate universe to alternate universe wiping out different undertale aus whose counterpart is ink sans who helps and encourages fan creators in making their own undertale universes these are also both massively popular fan characters with their own communities and if you want to get really insane what if everything we just talked about what if it all existed in one massive meta universe underverse is a multi-hour long animated web series that combines all the different undertale au's into one gargantuan meta storyline featuring popular fandom characters like core frisk underswap papyrus ink sans aerosands fresh sands fell sands nightmare dream cross sands that last one being the sands of the cross verse the prequel series to underverse that focuses on the story of frisk and kara two brothers who have to watch their own universe repeatedly reset by cross gaster as he tries over and over to recreate his own undertale au this is an alternate universe about making alternate universes and you want to know the absolutely [ __ ] crazy part it's good the art style is beautiful the character designs are really sharp and expressive look at how cute alvi's looks in her dress how [ __ ] badass undyne looks in her suit muffet's in the royal guard and it's it's class but i think the really genius thing about this series is that just as undertale acknowledges it is a video game and uses that to tell its story cross verse acknowledges it is a piece of fanfiction and does the same it tries to imagine what it would be like for these characters existing in a use trapped in universes where at any moment your timeline could be reset frisk and cara being the only ones to retain memories of their previous timelines having to repeatedly watch their family friends and lives all of it pulled back to zero and starting again with the character writing strong enough to support that concept and yeah look it is insane you have to know an obscene amount about undertale and its different aus to just understand what's happening but if you can get past all the weird abstract lore and world building it's actually really good oh my god i am a kingdom hearts fan i have become everything i once hated oh well and yet as obtuse and inaccessible as this series is that is a barrier that millions of people have crossed wonderverse spawning its own fan art parodies analysis videos and it isn't even the most popular multi-hour long undertale au animation on youtube that would be the shockingly well animated battle heavy glitch tale the remake of the first episode having 20 million views after you stare at this stuff for long enough something really weird starts to happen you start to view the original undertale as just one small part of everything undertale has become online and i have to wonder what is that like for toby fox i've done two videos on gigantic online fandoms but the difference is that one was a massive multi-million dollar ip designed to disrupt the global games industry and the other was a prime time tv show created by a multi-billion dollar corporation undertale was a 5 000 kickstarter from a guy who liked earthbound and imagine all that attention on just you and it was not all positive undertale fans were now everywhere flooding every message board and social media feed and they were going to make themselves heard just two months after undertale's release it was voted the best game of all time in a 2015 game fax poll beating out many titles that had for years defined what games were and this was the beginning of a massive backlash from the wider gaming audience with undertale cringe compilations and other videos ridiculing the game and the people who loved it and not helping were the reports of bullying and harassment from within the fandom itself youtuber markiplier infamously cancelling his let's play after just two episodes so negative was the backlash to his no mercy run with other bizarre incidents like one that took place at a taiwanese convention in which a popular fan artist was injured after she was given a cookie with a needle baked into it you're gonna find stories like this from any community that grows large enough but this was the level that this niche indie rpg had now reached and if you want an idea of how intense that might have been both the creators of underfell and underswap deleted their original blogs and just imagine imagine what it's like when even the people making things from the thing you made are unable to withstand that massive online feedback in the years that follow fox would become notoriously shy to interviews and public appearances speaking about his experience in his blog post retrospective on undertale's popularity not only did i not expect this level of popularity but initially i was afraid of it i even tried to contact certain let's players to tell them not to make any content about it like a thunderclap to a small dog all this attention stressed me out i wished i had a way to quell the attention i felt a strange powerlessness but the line that really chills me from fox is one he gave in a 2017 interview with edge magazine where he stated my life has changed permanently and will never change back and i gotta say i get that undertale is a teeny tiny little game that released on the 15th of september 2015 and at the time i was making my first youtube video that's right this whole video has just been a prelude for me to get weird and personal and you're too far in to stop watching now i've been thinking about that time a lot lately see i've been doing this for five years and somehow in that time what to me has always been this small personal youtube channel has grown to nearly one million subscribers which is something i find equally exciting and horrifying i love you guys i really do but you also terrify me i love this job but it changes you you see your own identity your own concept of who you are filtered through a thousand different lenses and it is impossible not to get lost in that to the point that when i think back to the person who made that first video i don't know that i am them anymore that's scary but that's what the internet does it takes things and changes them i'm not trying to compare the moderate success of this channel to that of undertales there is no comparison and i know this isn't relatable content oh no i have too many fans on the internet i get it but i have to believe the emotion behind it is universal the feeling of looking back five years ago and asking wow what happened that person and i think that's why it hits so hard when right at the end of undertale you walk up to that mirror and it says despite everything it's still you that no matter how much you change or your world changes around you through all the beautiful and terrifying things that will happen there will always be some part that is undeniably infinitely you and that is [ __ ] beautiful undertale is a game that creates a lot of emotion and all the internet did was give that emotion a conduit letting it spread across countless fan art let's plays twitch streams and innumerable other pieces of fan media and undertale's still the same game it was five years ago it's still a tiny indie rpg it's just also one of the biggest games on the planet the internet social media and fan culture have just evolved to the point that both those things can be true at the same time a duality that even 10 years ago wouldn't have been possible and that comes with a lot of weird stuff but it also means people across the world get to experience things they never otherwise would have and with undertale and hell this too i'm really glad that that happened [Music] friends thank you for joining me today i really hope you had a good time with this one if you did and want to help me create more like it you can do so over at patreon.com forward slash super eyepatch wolf where for a single dollar you can join me for our discord anime watch parties video diaries for each video and see your name with these beautiful people right here special thank you this week to tate fancher winks poopy face time for thomas serena rahul fay sadler and the 29th taco as ever you can find me hosting the let's fight a boss video game podcast or on twitter at ipatchwolf friends take care of yourselves and i'll see you next year

Channel: Super Eyepatch Wolf

Views: 5,020,680

Keywords: Undertale, Sans, papyrus, Boss Fight, Frisk vs Sans, Undyne, No Mercy, Pacafist, Gaster, WD Gaster, Metaton, Secret, Error Sans, Fell Sans, Horror Sans, Dust Sans

Id: FFIs6LsV0a4

Length: 39min 15sec (2355 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DancesCloseToTheFire]

I think this video missed a key component to this whole thing, the fact that the Undertale fandom did not come from nothing.

Toby wasn't just some small time person who liked earthbound, he was, in fact, one of the most famous members of Homestuck's music team, something that singlehandedly got him the support of a fandom that was, at the time, arguably even more rabid than Undertale's is even today. In fact, all the anomalies mentioned in the video, from the absurd amount of fanwork to the mess of fanfics , AU's, and sheer popularity for even the smallest characters, are all things the Homestuck fandom had back in the day, except of course taken to a much larger number of people due to Undertale's considerably easier-to-understand narrative and that videogames are more popular with people than having to read thousands of walls of text.

[u/danielcube]

Undertale is still my favorite indie/kickstarter game. I went into the game completely blind so I fell in love immediately. Typically these types of games have to played blind for the best experience.

[u/Cadwae]

Ummm there is a critical part of the story he is getting wrong. During the 'No Mercy' explanation with Undyne he says humans can't come back from the dead and control time. But that is the whole thing with Humans and why they won. They have 'Determination' which is the save system in game and why you can do that stuff. It is a key reason behind the story and also a reason why that part is so good. Because Undyne comes.back from the dead because of her Determination, something monsters don't have and that makes her special in the moment. She calls you a monster to point home to the player that a human would never be doing this, that you are some sort of beast for doing this run. Odd that he wouldn't get that detail.

[u/whatnameisnttaken098]

I knew of the AU's but good lord I didn't think it spiraled so far out of control. Like shit there's probably people who imagine Fierce Deity Link as something like a Super Sayian form for Link, but you don't see people making billions of billions of art, videos, ect.

[u/elscorcho91]

Can’t wait to see Super Eyepatch Wolf use his favorite hyperbolic adjectives like he’s describing a piece of renaissance art.

[u/Big_Ad_9539]

I've read about 10 comments in this thread and I have no idea what anyone in the post is talking about.

[u/banjosuicide]

Came to the comments to see if anybody had anything interesting to add about the game/fans and only found hatred for the person who made this video. Did he kill a child or something?

[u/KrypXern]

This really ought to have a spoiler warning on it, because watching the first part of this video will pretty much ruin the rest and is totally redundant for most people have played the game.

[u/RobDaGinger]

I know UnderTale is kinda divisive these days after becoming a huge behemoth, but I do love it. There’s something so appealing to me about a game with compassion, empathy, and mercy as a core theme.

I am really looking forward to DeltaRune and hopefully there’s still a big focus on being nice, showing love, and determination.