What The Internet did To Undertale

Undertale is a small game released on September 15, 2015 and started its life as a 5000 kickstarter and here you can see the bewilderment of its creator, Toby Fox, as a source of budget of 10 times its initial order, as well as small updates like that fox has to take time off from development to take his college exams and

what

I find interesting about these posts is that you can see in them a person who had no idea

what

he was doing or what he would become and how he could become five years later in Undertale. one of the most massive and baffling forces on the

internet

, seriously, I've made two videos like this and exploring those fandoms felt like digging into a mine, but the background was more like staring into a huge, infinite, ever-expanding abyss, and what I want.

What we need to do today is look at how it happened, how the

internet

took this little game and transformed it into one of the most loved and hated online phenomena, and to do this we need to start with Undertale, I guess many of you know this. In the case of Undertale, you play as registering a little boy who has fallen into an underground kingdom of monsters and from here you can treat them as you would in any other RPG and kill them or become their friend. It's a nice idea, but in isolation it was. It's not that new or interesting that 2015 games, like Moon, have very similar concepts, but they were released 18 years earlier with non-lethal executions and games that are popular at the time, so why the simple choice of battles? from Undertale is so important and I think there are two?

The answers to that are that the first is that its characters have great characters and how much you agree with that will define how you feel about this game. Take the character as undyne initially, she just seems like a human killing machine, but spend time with her and you. You 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 that papyrus isn't suitable for combat and teaching her how to cook or appreciating Alphys' pathetic love of anime. She is someone who is able to see people for who they are instead of what they wish they were and is able to love them for those reasons and learning all this about a character who at first seemed like a standard RPG boss is really endearing, but that same discovery exists for all the principals.

Undertale character, whether it's Alfie's self-deprecating humor that hides an intense layer of guilt and self-loathing, Flowy's hateful and pathetic existence, or Meriton's journey to transition into a body where they can be themselves despite that a single game of

undertale

takes approximately six hours. You have a lot of these characters and I think one of the reasons is the subtlety with which their personalities communicate. Each character has a home you can explore filled with all these little details, like the bed in Papyrus' race car. As a side note, I really like the mirror. and toriel's house that just says "it's you", what a cute little joke and it's certainly not a prelude to any massive emotions, plus each character has their own highly expressive theme song, like Take Asgore, the king of the monsters that await you at the end of the game that constantly tell you that he is a super nice guy but that he has also murdered six human children, your soul is the seventh and last, he needs to break the barrier that traps his people underground and his theme musical, the reluctant but frantic bergentrucken, captures that it is the sound of a good person trying to convince himself to do something horrible for what he believes is the greater good and that same level of expression can be found everywhere in the underground, even in many of the small supporting characters in Burger Pants. a nihilistic fast food worker vaguely deranged to make a bun for the spider who is as adorable as you could make one of those abominable creatures from hell take a nap to the depressed ghost who at one point asks you to lie down on the floor with him and you listen to trance music and oh my gosh, I don't know if I've ever related so much to a fictional character and it all comes together to create this world of memorable little creatures that have been forced underground by humans and yet They've managed to muster happiness in that, but there's an underlying current 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 place so much importance on this is if you don't care about these characters if you don't believe in this world then the options that Undertale's battle system offers mean nothing, but if you do that's where the option Killing or sparing these monsters starts to have real emotional weight, but it would 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 idiosyncratic ways. small, like so that sans can know that you have reloaded your saved game. file and you're experiencing the same sequence again, but where this becomes a big problem 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 will fall into the pacifist rule, which means zero. Level up or increase stats 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 saved confronting asriel and making him see through pacifism that he still matters, he's still loved despite the terrible things he's done and all the hate he feels until azrael finally loses his mind. will to fight and in a final act of repentance breaks the barrier that seals the monsters underground, freeing them to seek new life on the surface, in the end there is a feeling that you did this, you showed these creatures true kindness, not through a binary decision, but consistently. do what you think was right instead of what was easy and the result is an ending that feels meaningful and responsive to your actions, a genuine statement of the power of love over violence and I think that's a beautiful thing, but This is also where things get really interesting.

Return to the title screen and you will meet Flowey, who warns you that there is one last threat to this world. You've given these characters the best life possible and now you have the option to just walk away and leave them alone. happy or you could restart the game and start over by ripping them from their ideal future and the interesting thing is that he is not talking to register the character, he is talking to you the player so why would you do this simple? Why do you do something in any video game to see what happens and specifically what happens if you kill all the monsters in the underground.

This is what takes you down the route of no mercy or genocide as it is known online. I'm going to call him mercilessly from here because otherwise youtube. You might think this is a very different type of video than it is. Ruthless racing is exhausting. You have to walk back and forth through each area killing each monster and it can take hours, but it's like all the time the game is asking you about. This really is what you want and as you do it, the underground transforms into this eerie empty place as monsters run away from you, abandon their homes and even leave notes begging you not to hurt their family.

It feels cruel, like you are a terrible violent force in this world. The main encounters of the game change to reflect that and make it 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 in my soul, There is a burning feeling. I can't describe a burning feeling that won't let me die. This isn't about monsters anymore. Is it that if you surpass me, you will destroy them all? In an instant right now, everyone in the world I can feel their hearts beating as one and we all have one goal: defeat you, human, be whatever you are for the good of the entire world.

Undyne I will take you down. I love how this speech plants you. like a villain about to fight the real hero of this story, but what's really interesting is that line: humans know what you are because you're not human, you're not in this world, humans can't control time, humans They cannot come back from the dead again and again. you are not human you are a being that exists outside of this fictional reality you are a person who plays a video game and that gives you enormous power over this world and every character in it illustrated by the battle that follows undyne is now dramatically more powerful and more Harder than anything you've faced before, but as grueling as this fight is, it's not fair because every time you die you can reset your respawn to the last save point and with each new try your muscle memory gets stronger as you learn. her patterns. the attacks make them useless you are growing she is not she can defeat you an infinite number of times and it doesn't matter you only need to kill her once and it's over you are not two equals participating in a fair competition you are a real person in the real world, using all the advantages you have in defeating a fictional video game character and this fight shows the inherent unfairness of that and this isn't the only moment the game recognizes it, remember the moment sans knows you've reset your file saved.

This happens because every time you reload a saved game that is canonical, it is the player who manipulates the timeline of this world, something that becomes even more evident when later, in a merciless race, Flowey tells you that he used to have the same power as you. 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 again until the people of this world to him became nothing more than sets of numbers and lines of numbers dialogue like characters in a video game and that power is what made Flowey so pathetic and cruel, but at this point you are just like him, you have destroyed the lives of creatures much weaker than you just to see what happens and realize it is chilling , but this is the strength of undertale: it presents you with a choice through its battles, it gives meaning to that choice through its world and characters, and the consequence in how the game reacts to your decisions and uses it to go further of the screen and form a real connection with you. the person holding the controller and making a direct statement about how you choose to engage with the lives of beings in a position inherently weaker than you and at its best it's a powerful personal experience and why I think people react to this game the way they do it.

And oh boy, do people react? The reason I spend so much time talking about Undertale's appeal is that whether you like it or not, it's important to understand that this is a game that provokes a lot of emotion in people, but this created an underlying problem that it was still a small indie game. , you could see most of its significant content in less than 20 hours and from there all that excitement had nowhere to go. Take a character like Azrael. Return to the beginning of the game after a pacifist run. and there he is taking care of the flowers, he won't go with you and you can't save him, he resigned himself to being alone in the ruins forever, slowly returning 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 reimagines this scenario where now frisk shares his 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 the release of Undertale. Dream Reborn became hugely popular, even resulting in its own fan game, and was a critical moment for what Undertale would become online because it told fans that if they wanted more Undertale they could make it themselves. This opened the door to a whole world of new content for fans. Say you really liked a character like Alphys, who has maybe 20 to 30 minutes of dialogue throughout the entire game. Well, thanks to the fan content, it became endless, now you could watch her take cooking lessons. 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 on one of the many undertale quiz blogs, people even create elaborate animations like this short film showing the sinking of Alfie. in despair at the atrocities he has committed and how his first encounter with undyne began to change, it's beautiful, but the thing is that this type of fan content was now being created for every main character in the game, a sign of how quickly was spreading online. toThrough nothing more than fan passion, the game became a hugely popular subject for video essays that scraped every little corner of the game, desperate to uncover new information for an increasingly voracious fanbase.

The game even made its way to some of the most popular creators on the internet. Who would stream and play this niche indie RPG to audiences of millions, generating a massive influx of new fans? And if you want to see the most explosive expression of that newfound popularity, you can find it in the underlying battle animations, no matter how dramatic the clashes. In Undertale I felt visually that they were almost always very simple and had to be to remain feasible for their small developments and what these fan animations did was free the most dramatic moments of Undertale's story from those limitations, allowing us to experience the pure ratings madness. war driven with meriton the violent and desperate cruelty of a merciless route undyne or the pure tragic beauty of a pacifist route asriel as the impressive hopes and dreams of television lz that capture all the emotion, tragedy and tenderness of the confrontation with the god of hyperdeath and I think that's what drives a Many of the artists behind these creations want to recreate what these fights felt like and I guess that's why the most popular, by far, is the battle that occurs just At the end of a ruthless race, this is where the game finally regresses.

The player, having not seen you repeatedly destroy the lives of everyone they love, now faces you in a terrible final fight and it is a nightmare without even taking control of the timeline and forcing the player to fall victim to saves and reboots and these animations. What I 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 is not even how many of these animations there are or their great quality, but their incredible popularity that I want you to take. Take a look at this animation on the screen now and I want you to try to guess how many views you think it has.

Well, keep that number. Did you guess up to 4 million views? Well, if you did, you drastically underestimated it because it's actually 60 million views. this is not an anomaly with Undertale fan animations 22 million views 66 million views 95 million views I'd bet that with such a high view count, these animations were probably how many people actually discovered the meaning of Undertale at a point where 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 expressed in really crazy ways, an entire music scene built around undertale fan remixes, people were programming their own games from undertale fans, kenny omega even maine evented wrestle kingdom 13 down to the entrance music in the background, I swear to god this is a huge problem and within the fandom itself, every little corner of the game was now being mined for fan content , remember those little supporting characters we mentioned before, each of them now had their own massive fan following that every little thread of the story was being filtered through a thousand different lenses, resulting in legions of fan art, fan comics, fan fiction, stuffed animals, theater productions, live action movies, cooking videos, body pillows, porn which yes, I'm going to talk about because I refuse. being silenced on this platform resulting in a profound sexual awakening like I never thought I would experience.

My point here is that from the bearer's little cascade of burden to the bank's quiche, every little thread of the story was being magnified a thousand times. and was given new life online and if you want to see what my newt becomes, look no further than wd gaster, if a fictional character could win an award for appearing in media, the least but inspiring fan content, gaster would win that award. His existence is only hinted at in a handful of easily overlooked moments throughout the game, the real scientist before Alfie. Your chances of finding it are small and depend on a number randomly assigned at the beginning of the game from 1 to 100 and whether that number happens. be 66 a mysterious gray room appears 10 of the times it can contain a sprite character commonly believed to be gaster, meaning he only appears in about 1 in every 1000 games, and yet he is a hugely popular character in the game. fandom that appears in countless fans. comics fan fiction a fully playable boss battle as well as fan animations, the most popular of which has 45 million views, is barely in the game and if it's starting to make sense why I call the Undertale fandom in Abyss, Oh friend, we're just getting started.

On October 17, 2015, Tumblr user Underfella uploaded a drawing of Toriel, but instead of the kind mother goat you meet at the beginning of the game, this was a creepy distortion of that character and something about it resonated with people so much. that Underfella began to resonate. imagine each undertale character in this more sinister light, these images proliferate in fan communities with people now creating their own fanworks from this fanwork creating a collective online world of thousands of people imagining what this new reality would be like. darkest undertale and This was the birth of Underfell, one of the first massively popular undertale alternate universes for a use.

I've seen full-blown AAA games with less of a following than Underfell to the point where it's hard for me to convey how massive it is, so I'm going to use a very specific example. This is what happens when I type Underfell Remix on YouTube and just look at all the results. These are all soundtracks for a game that doesn't exist, except there are several fully-grown Underfell fans. games along with all the other weird stuff you'd expect from any property with a huge fan following all this dark and edgy stuff. I love it, but I think the appeal is deeper than what the underlying story was at one point where every little part had been meme-ified. a thousand times, so the only option left was to free these characters from that canonical limitation and thus, like a remix of a song you love, let the fans come back to experience them again and, in doing so, make them personal, specific and unlimited, oh. and if you're wondering why i refer to underfell as one of the great undertales, aus underswap came about when a piece of art by tumblr user popcorn prince swapped the personalities of sans and papyrus sans, now the enthusiastic human hunter.

Goof and Papyrus, the laid-back older brother who knows more than he should just didn't like the idea gained a lot of momentum among the undertale fan community with the popcorn prince creating similar swapped characters for each character in undertale undone. became alfie's real scientist the head of the guard, you get the idea, however, while Underfell imagines a dangerous and more violent story in exchange, it is quite the opposite, often depicted as a softer and more violent reality. Pacific which tends to focus more on a slice of lifestyle stories and, like Underfell, is huge. Searching deviantart underswap returns 37,000 results, same remix test above that also works for under swap.

There is a massive community that still produces content to this day and it's crazy to me that there can be two hugely popular undertale. EU Horror Story began as a deviantart webcomic that reimagined the world and characters of undertale as horrible nightmare versions of themselves that gained a large following with fun fan game art and a very popular creepy version of sans with a broken head and open dust tale is a korean question. blog in which Sans, emotionally destroyed by experiencing repeated genocides, murders the underground monsters to level up and finally defeat the human and end the infinite loop genocide.

He also has a large following with a very popular version of sans. like undertale crossed with brazil outer tail is an undertale au said in space it also has a hugely popular following oh ok that's the latest undertale eu bell swap is an alternate underswap merge universe set during the cold war 20th century in which characters swap lower personalities as they do in underswap, not to be confused with swap fall, which is something different where underswap characters become velified versions of their swapped selves and technically this version of fel swap is fel swap gold which is something different from phil swap red or fel swap emerald and this is the point where my mind started to break and I started to feel like this community was bottomless.

There are hundreds of undertale aus and many with their own hugely popular fan communities. I've been researching this stuff for weeks and I have no idea what the papyrus of disbelief is. How is it possible that this video has 20 million views? not only had someone committed complete genocide in a papyrus boss battle, double the speed at which these things hit the internet and muta is amazing, like taking fresh sands, another hugely popular sans iu character, but That one day someone asked: what if fresh sand existed? in an insufficient situation leading to non-fresh sans, which in turn led to someone being like: what if non-fresh sans was a person leading to human non-fresh 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 bug without who i actually think is pretty cool who travels from one alternate universe to another eliminating different aus from undertale whose counterpart is ink sans who helps and encourages fan creators to create their own undertale universes, both are also hugely popular fan characters with their own communities and if you want to get really crazy, what if everything What we just talked about, what if everything existed in a massive metauniverse?

Underverse is a multi-hour animated web series that combines all the different undertale au's into one gigantic meta-story featuring popular fandom characters like core frisk underswap papyrus ink sin aerosands fresh sands fell sands nightmare dream cross sands that last one is the crossverse sands the underverse prequel series that focuses on the story of frisk and kara two siblings who have to watch their own universe rebooted repeatedly by Cross Gaster as he tries over and over again to recreate his own history. This is an alternate universe about creating 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 how cute Alvi looks in her dress, how tough Undyne looks in her suit, Muffet in the royal guard and it's her class, but I think what's really great about this series is that, as Undertale recognizes. a video game and uses that to tell his story cross verse recognizes that it is a piece of fanfiction and does the same try to imagine what it would be like for these characters to exist in a use trapped in universes where at any moment their timeline could be restarting frisk and Cara are the only ones who retain memories of their previous timelines, having to repeatedly look at their family, friends, and lives all reduced to zero and starting over with the character writing strong enough to support that concept and yeah, look , it's crazy.

You have to know an obscene amount about Undertale and its different aus to understand what's going on, but if you can get past all the weird abstract lore and world building it's actually really good, oh my god I'm a Kingdom fan Hearts, I have become everything I want. Once hated, well, and yet, as obtuse and inaccessible as this series is, it's a barrier that millions of people have crossed in the Wonderverse by generating their own fan art parody analysis videos and it's not even the undertale animation au multi-hour long most popular on youtube, that would be the surprisingly well-animated battle failure story, the new version of the first episode has 20 million views after watching this stuff for long enough, something really strange starts happening, You start to see the original story as only a small part of all of Undertale has gone online and I have to wonder what that's like for Toby Fox.

I've made two videos on gigantic online fandoms, but the difference is that one was a massive multi-million dollar ip designed to revolutionize the global gaming industry and the other was a prime time television show created by a multi-billion dollar corporation. Undertale was a 5k kickstarter from a guy whoI liked Earthbound and I imagined all that attention just on you and not everything was positive. Undertale fans were now everywhere flooding every message board. and social media and 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 gaming fax poll, beating out many titles that for years had defined what games were. games and this was the beginning. of a massive backlash from the broader gaming audience with cringeworthy builds and other videos ridiculing the game and the people who loved it and not helping, were reports of bullying and harassment from within the fandom itself, YouTuber markiplier infamously canceled his let's play after only two episodes were as negative as the reaction to her merciless career with other strange incidents such as one that took place at a Taiwanese convention in which a popular fan artist was injured after being given a cookie with a baked needle.

You will find stories. like this from any community that grows enough, but this was the level this niche indie RPG had reached now and if you want to get an idea of ​​how intense it could have been, both the creators of underfell and underswap deleted their original blogs and imagine. what it's like when even the people who make things from what you made are unable to handle that massive online feedback for years to come. Fox would become notoriously shy in interviews and public appearances speaking about the experience on his blog, a retrospective on the popularity of Undertale, not only did he not expect this level of popularity, but he was initially afraid.

I even tried to contact certain players to tell them not to make any content about it, like thunder to a small dog. All this attention stressed me out. He had a way of stifling attention. I felt a strange helplessness, but the phrase that really shakes me from Fox is one he gave in a 2017 interview with Edge magazine where he stated that my life has changed permanently and will never change again and I must say that he understands that Undertale is a small tiny game that was released on September 15, 2015 and at the time I was making my first YouTube video, that's right, this whole video has been just a prelude for me to get weird and personal and you're too far away to leave to look at now.

I've been thinking about that moment a lot lately. I've been doing this for five years and somehow in that time it's always been this small to me. The personal YouTube channel has grown to almost a 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 them. They see their own identity, their own concept of who they are. They are filtered through a thousand different lenses and it is impossible not to get lost in it to the point that when I think about the person who made that first video I no longer know if I am them, that is scary, but that is what the Internet takes things and change 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 is not relatable content. Oh no, I have too many fans on the Internet. I understand. but I have to believe that the emotion behind it is universal, the feeling of looking back five years ago and asking what happened to that person and I think that's why it hits so hard when right at the end of the story you approach that mirror and it says that despite everything you are 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 a part that is undeniably infinitely you and that is beautiful undertale is a game which creates a lot of excitement and all the internet did was give that excitement a conduit that allowed it to spread through countless fan art, let's play Twitch streams and countless other pieces of fan media, and Undertale is still the same game it was. five years ago, it's still a small indie RPG.

It's also one of the biggest games on the planet, internet social media and fan culture have evolved to the point where both things can be true at the same time, a duality that even 10 years ago wouldn't have been possible and which comes with a lot of weird stuff, but it also means that people all over the world can experience things they would never have otherwise experienced and with Undertale and hell this too, I'm so glad that happened folks, thanks for joining me today, I really hope they do. You had a good time with this one, if you did and want to help me create more like it you can do so on patreon.com slash eyepatch wolf where for a single dollar you can join me for our video diaries discord anime watch parties. for every video and see your name with these beautiful people right here, special thanks this week to Tate Fancher, winks, poop face, time for Thomas, Serena, Rahul, Fay Sadler and cue number 29, as always you can find me hosting the gaming podcast Let's Fight A Boss. or on twitter at ipatchwolf friends, take care of yourselves and see you next year