- Joined
- May 21, 2023
Unlike half life i think this time we'll have a number 3
The Tumblr Files - Official Thread (Case I: Steven Universe) - An exposé on the media and people that destroyed the Internet
- Thread starter I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis
- Start date
-
🐕 I am attempting to get the site runnning as fast as possible. If you are experiencing slow page load times, please report it.
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2023
- Joined
- Jun 27, 2024
gata
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 26, 2020
While I agree with most of what the OP said here, I will disagree to not be judgemental to homosuck tumblr people because they're one of the groups that fucked over online fandom culture/discourse once they migrated to twitter and other fandoms. They're also one of the fags that popularized tranny headcanons.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2021
> 9 Years ago
Fuck im old now. Feels like this was more recent. If only I knew how wild things would really get.
It was funny at the time, but the porn ban on Tumblr really fucked over the Internet as a whole. Not that fandom culture was sane to begin with, and plenty of it bleed over enough to still fuck with media anyways. But at least it was mostly contained to their corner of the Internet and we could all laugh from afar.
Last edited:
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2023
I beg to differ. A lot of people used both Tumblr and Twitter circa 2015-2017, so the Tumblr exodus ultimately just completed the transition, more than anything else. Progressive culture was already on the rise outside of Tumblr thanks to #LoveWins, followed by #MeToo 2 years later.
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2023
We might be looking at a double-post, again.
- Joined
- May 21, 2023
What made me revile the Tumblr progressive community more was their "boiling frog" tactics alas slowly & gradually inserting their ideas while they also take over, making it popular with the finishing blow being the normies that Chase after them, it happened with evry fandom you can think of
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2017
Based on the notecount, how much you wanna bet there's stomping of feet and gnashing of teeth over this "call-out" in the reblogs?
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2023
The Tumblr Files
I: Steven Universe
II: Tumblrcore & the Wii U-Chew
III: Undertale
IV: [WIP]
Long ago, two races ruled over Earth: Humans andFurries Monsters.
I: Steven Universe
II: Tumblrcore & the Wii U-Chew
III: Undertale
IV: [WIP]
Long ago, two races ruled over Earth: Humans and
The main reason that Steven Universe and Undertale specifically get their own dedicated cases is because they are two sides of the same coin. The coin in question being how they would mold the media/culture online going forward following their explosions in popularity by Tumblr’s hands.
For Steven Universe, it was western animation, and later Hollywood media at large, in addition to giving the lesbian-dominant side of Tumblr a voice.
For Undertale, it was the point at which the audience of retro game enthusiasts, who specialized in emulation, ROM hacking, datamining, music remixing; and Tumblr’s LGBT and fandom-obsessed audience began to blur together.
Legends say that those who climb the mountain never return.
Well, I did, and I’m here to tell you the tale.
The Indie Game SceneWell, I did, and I’m here to tell you the tale.
As the gaming industry shifted from the tumultuous decade of the 2000s into the 2010s, one thing had become apparent amongst the gaming community: The indie game revolution had arrived.
Thanks to the widespread of affordable game development tools and software, as well as the arrival of digital distribution platforms like Steam, Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare, and PSN, independent developers were able to give their smaller, lower-budget games a wider release, filling in the widening hole that came about as a result of the slow and painful death of the AA / “B-List” game that took place during the 6th and 7th generations of consoles.
Indie games had begun to truly take off in the wake of notable releases like Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya’s Cave Story, The Behemoth’s Alien Hominid & Castle Crashers (which was formed up of major Newgrounds-era talent like Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin), and Michael "Kayin" O'Reilly’s infamous “I Wanna Be the Guy”, among others.
While a lot of the people creating these games grew up with older eras of gaming like the Golden Age of Arcades, or the NES, and so drew heavy inspiration from them, others took what they knew and sought to deconstruct it. One major example was Jonathan Blow’s Braid, released in 2008.
Jonathan Blow & Braid
The main gameplay mechanic of Braid was being able to reverse the flow of time at any point by holding down the X button. Other levels played around with the flow of time itself, like having all the enemies and moving parts in a level move only when you do. While the game presents itself as using a standard platformer plot of a young man saving a princess, the end of the game deconstructs this narrative by showing that the protagonist was the "monster" from whom the princess wished to escape from.
To add further intrigue, fans found evidence that the themes portrayed in Braid doubled as an analogy for the development of the Manhatten Project, with one of the in-game texts being a quote uttered during the development of the atomic bomb:
Despite the game’s heavy use of both painted artwork for its sprites and backgrounds, and heavy use of metaphors and complex themes, a lot of people who played the game simply didn’t care much about it. Others found it utterly pretentious. Someone was attempting to take a simple platformer and make it way more complex and too “adult” for its own good. The go-to example of this apathy would be when famous hip-hop (& scam) artist Soulja Boy filmed himself playing Braid, messing around with the time-warp ability, and uploading it online.
Jonathan Blow, hoping to “make something more” with his artsy platformer game, was completely heart-broken by a man simply having fun playing a video game. Even when his game received rave reviews, he lashed out at people, claiming most of the people who played Braid weren’t able to fully comprehend the message he was trying to tell. He kept appearing in the comments sections of blogs and in forum threads and sperged all day about people misunderstanding his game that he spent all those years working on.
All this did in the long run was cement Jonathan Blow as an overly pretentious artist first and a game developer second. The whole situation with Braid would go on to set a precedent with independent game developers as a whole. Slowly but surely, a particular malaise began to form around indie games throughout the early 2010s, where the focus was put more on the “indie” and less on the “game”.
Suffice to say, while Jonathan Blow would be amongst the first, he would not be the last, with other notable indie developers following in his footsteps, such as Fez creator Phil Fish, and Depression Quest creator Zoe Quinn, both of which are already well-documented on this site and on the Internet at large. They made games that sought to break away from the foundations and conventions set by the games of yesteryear, but their methods, execution, as well as the public personas they displayed, both online and in-person, would give indie gaming the reputation it has today.
Gone Home
In 2013, indie developer Fullbright Entertainment released Gone Home, a first-person adventure game where the main protagonist wanders around her house searching for clues on where her friend disappeared too. Amongst the notable games that were released in 2013, Gone Home stuck out to both game fans and game reviewers, albeit for different reasons. Gone Home marked a turning point in the growing rift between fans of games and the gaming press, as they did not see eye-to-eye on it at all.
It wasn’t so much as Gone Home was marketed as an alternative for people less inclined to games focused on violence, as much as major names and figureheads in the games journalism scene propped up games like it as being the “next step forward” for gaming. “Reclaiming humanity in games”, as some put it. Gone Home featured progressive themes, such as prominent female and gay/lesbian representation, which was a novel thing back in 2013.
Adam Sessler, formally of G4 fame, was particularly notable, as during the leadup to Gone Home’s release, he had become particularly infamous for going the way of the Joss Whedon-style male feminist that had become the style at the time. This could be due in part to him trying to compensate for his edgier past during his time at G4, which had been notable for relying far more on offensive humor; the kind of humor that the social paragons of the following decade would tar and feather him for if he didn’t essentially get on his knees, beg, and pledge allegiance to their causes.
To many gamers online, Gone Home’s coverage seemed too unnatural. Thanks to its progressive themes, combined with its lack of fun, engaging gameplay, Gone Home became the game to mock on 4chan’s /v/ board in 2013, usurping the throne from other infamous duds at the time like Ninja Theory’s DmC: Devil May Cry and EA’s SimCity reboot. It would go on to win the Most Hated award at the 2013 Vidya Gaem Awards: /v/’s own annual video game award show.
Gone Home was an independently made video game that didn’t really feel like a video game. It instead sought to be something more than a game, something that tried to instill emotion in people, to potentially even inspire social change through its homely themes and aesthetics. To some, this was its biggest net positive. To others, it’s what made it so dreadful.
This sets the stage for how indie games were perceived by what used to be the nexus of the online video game community, and what ultimately would lead to one of their biggest disruptions yet. And no, I’m not just talking about GamerGate. That’s already been covered in far more detail elsewhere.
Mibibli’s Quest
On May 11th, 2015, HiddenBlock YouTuber Balrog’s Game Room uploaded a review of the indie platformer, Mibibli’s Quest. What Mibibli’s Quest represents in our story is that it was the point at which surreal, off-beat indie games by “eccentric” developers were starting to be picked up by popular YouTubers of the day. Of course, there are far bigger examples like PewDiePie being responsible for Flappy Bird’s popularity, or Five Nights at Freddy’s pretty much owing its popularity to Markiplier and MatPat, but Mibibli’s Quest sticks out for its own special reasons.
Mibibli’s Quest is a run-and-gun platformer in the same vein as Mega Man, only the game strives to be far more artsy, weird, deconstructive, and in some cases countercultural in its approach to level design and aesthetics. You play as Mibibli, whose goal is to find a way to kill his archrival. While the game starts out relatively sane, it eventually devolves into utilizing religious themes such as satanic cults and pentagrams as part of its plot and aesthetics.
And this happens to be a running theme with the game’s creators…
Ryan Melmoth / ResniFur / Resni / rain1338 & Josh Roach / Juniper Jollipepper / jarshooch
Ryan is a trailblazer in his field, for all intents and purposes. When you hear “Progressive indie game in the early 2010s”, your mind would probably go to something pretentious, but also low-key, like Gone Home. Not Ryan, though. He is a prominent case of an indie dev who loved to mouth off on Twitter about how being gay gave him superpowers. He’s also a furry, which ties into the odd overlap between furries, NSFW artists, and satanists. His website at the time pretty much says it all, “gamesforweirdpeople.com.”
And there’s his partner in crime (and troon wife), Juniper. While troons would not explode in popularity until later in the decade, Juniper is an early example of someone who was clearly mentally ill at the time, trooned out, and used that both as an excuse for the degenerate stuff he made, and to act like he was on drugs all the time. And that’s not even getting into the games that the two worked on together, such as Peen Peen, a point & click adventure game where you play with a penis made of lobster meat… with anime eyes.
And to top it all off, the games they worked on exude the progressive, millennial laziness we’ve come to expect of developers of this type. While a lot of the art and themes in their games, Mibibli’s Quest in particular, may have seemed innovative and creative for their time, it also resulted in stuff like Dampy the poorly drawn dancing mouse.
Get it? Because he’s poorly drawn? Because the developers are lazy? In its attempt to be deconstructive, Mibibli’s Quest does a lot of things most millennial-made media often gets harped on for today.
The developers are lazy. Please laugh.
Mibibli’s Quest would receive a decently sized boost in popularity thanks to Balrog’s review of the game. Both parts of the review would average at around 50k views, which is impressive for an otherwise underground and unknown-at-the-time indie platformer. It would also receive an updated Steam release in 2016. In a way, the game set a precedent for “unknown” games with aesthetics and themes like this to be picked up by prominent members of the Nintendo-adjacent YouTuber scene of the time.
This helps set the stage for the saga that would unfold just a few months after Balrog uploaded his review of Mibibli’s Quest.
Earthbound / Mother 2
The sequel to the 1989 Famicom classic, Mother, directed by Japanese celebrity Shigesato Itoi. Itoi and his company, APE Inc, were instrumental to a lot of Nintendo projects throughout the 80s and 90s, such as creating and publishing strategy guides for Nintendo games in Japan, helping Sakurai decide on the Japanese name for Kirby Super Star (Hoshi no Kaabi: Super Deluxe), or working with Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata on a few ill-fated projects for N64, but his biggest contribution to gaming as a whole is his series of RPGs, Earthbound/Mother.
Mother 2 would release for Super Famicom in 1994, with its English release, Earthbound, releasing the following year. During its release in America, Earthbound would perform rather poorly compared to its contemporaries on SNES, despite coming with an elaborate Player’s Guide. Part of this is owed to the game being arguably the biggest victim of Nintendo’s Play It Loud campaign, which was prominent throughout the back half of the SNES’ lifespan.
Despite this, Earthbound would go on to garner a cult following during the early days of the Internet, due in part to things like the rise of emulation and Ness, the game’s protagonist, appearing in the Super Smash Bros. series. Dedicated sites like Starmen.net and EBCentral would pop up and become the home for Earthbound’s fandom; sharing fan artwork, remixes, guides on the games, and pretty much every form of fan content you could think of. And given how early on in the Internet’s life this all took place, Earthbound’s fandom set the bar for other rising fan communities online. It says directly on Starmen.net’s website banner: “Do not underestimate us.”
What’s especially notable is PK Hack, the go-to program for creating Earthbound ROM hacks back in the day. Earthbound ROM hacks, much like the other content hosted on the site, would be shared on the site’s forums, and in other circles. Among the aspiring creatives getting their sea legs from using PK Hack was “him”:
Robert “Toby” Fox / fwugradiation / Radiation
During his formative years, Toby gained a reputation amongst his family and friends at school for being a very stand-out kid. For example, his Central English teacher, Selma Naccach-Hoff, is cited as saying “Toby was a really funny kid, not afraid to express himself and come up with a different take on something.”
Riley Larkins, a fellow student of Fox’s from high school, is quoted as saying, “People liked him. He was always sort of a little weird, but not in a bad way.” “He’s very good at everything he’s done, and he doesn’t want to be constrained by what other people think is right.”
Toby is usually not the type who likes to be interviewed, or answer questions, but the interviews and footage of himself that exist paint a picture of a socially awkward, but well-meaning guy who was passionate about his creative works. At the same time, Toby sometimes resented the reputation he had with “normies”. When he was a teenager, one of the things on his mind was how most people, be it in real life or even online, saw him as just “another funny guy.”
The Halloween Hack
Amongst the ROMhacks Toby created during his PKHack/Starmen.net days, arguably the most iconic was his Halloween Hack, released in 2008.
Toby created the hack for Starmen.net’s Halloween Funfest, following the positive reception a winter-themed hack of his received back in 2006. The game takes Earthbound and delves further into horror themes, making use of far more grotesque enemies, themes of murder and homicide, and later on, ventures into Dr. Andonuts’ warped mind.
Even as early as 2008, Toby was thinking about A) “the lack of non-stereotypical, major homosexual characters in media,” and B) “the player's consciousness of their own decisions in video games.” For example, when Varik, the protagonist, encounters Dr. Andonuts, he is given the choice to kill him, but the player can refuse to kill him by pressing B when the dialogue calls for it. This is how the additional 2/3rds of the game is accessed.
The one part of the Halloween Hack most, if not all the people who know about it remember, is the final battle against Dr. Andonuts, where following his absolute spergout, the game plays a fully custom music track written by Toby and programmed into the game himself. You may have heard of it.
Given how unwieldy of a tool PKHack was at the time, this was a big deal, with Clyde “Tomato” Mandelin saying, "It even has custom music, which is crazy hard to hack in EarthBound..."
Toby actually goes into great detail about the development of the Halloween Hack on his old website, which was actually hosted on Fobby.net, the same website that the Mother 3 Fan Translation is hosted on. Fobby.net is actually a web-hosting domain created by Starmen.net and was also responsible for hosting sites by Clyde “Tomato” Mandelin (A project lead on the Mother 3 Fan Translation, founder of EB Central, and worked on dozens of localizations of Japanese media), and also hosting the forums for the emulator Mendafen. It’s honestly a miracle I was even able to get all the information out of his site that I did, given it has been scrubbed and excluded from the Wayback Machine.
To top it off, the Halloween Hack unabashedly makes use of the prominent style of humor that dominated the Internet during this era: The very kind of humor that Something Awful and 4Chan fostered, and Tumblr (and by extension, sites like YouChew) did everything in their power to snuff out in the following decade.
I wouldn’t entirely label the things Toby would do later on a result of Troll’s Remorse though, given what he said about homosexual characters on his site. Ironically, when Toby says “homosexual” in the context of the Halloween Hack, he’s referring to the “Cho Aniki” kind of homosexual, not the “yiff fluffy boys uwu” kind.
Regardless, being meta about game design, and the journey a character takes in an RPG setting, was already established as a key element of Toby’s personal design ethos as early as the late 2000s. A few years after the Halloween Hack’s release, Toby would be involved in a special project that would go on to take various corners of the Internet by storm.
MS Paint Adventures & Andrew Hussie / S_O
In the early 2000s, aspiring webcomic artist Andrew Hussie started up his own website during the webcomic boom entitled Team Special Olympics. It housed various comic strips made by him and two other artists and lasted until 2008. In 2006, Hussie set up a forum game on the TSO forums called “MS Paint Adventure”, where it was set up in a format similar to old text-based adventure games. Users on the forum would submit commands, and Hussie would choose the best one to advance the story being told.
Eventually, the original “MS Paint Adventure” would grow in popularity and be renamed “Escape from Jail Island.” It was during this time, in 2007, that Hussie launched a brand-new site focused on these new forum-decided text-based adventure comics, entitled MS Paint Adventures.
Just as before, the site’s forums would be used as a means for suggesting new story commands/paths, as well as speculation on what would happen next. In the following years, new adventures would launch on the site, such as Bard Quest and Problem Sleuth. Ironically, the artwork in most of the MS Paint Adventures past Escape from Jail Island (later renamed to just Jailbreak), were not actually done in MS Paint, but Photoshop.
Homestuck
On April 13th of 2009, the fourth MS Paint Adventure was launched on the site, entitled Homestuck. Hussie best describes Homestuck as “a tale about a boy and his friends and the game they play together.” The game in question, Sburb, is a sandbox-like game that bleeds into, and is used to interact with, the real world itself.
Taking inspiration from both Earthbound and The Sims, the four kids, John Egbert, Rose Lalonde, Dave Strider, and Jade Harley all get mixed up in a massive multiverse-spanning adventure. It’s so massive, that it’s far out of the scope of my research for this Case.
Just know that the comic spread around the Internet pretty quickly online after “the funny, quirky blog site” (and related parties) caught wind of it, the comic features humanoid creatures with grey skin and candy-corn horns called Trolls (because they’re literally Internet trolls), there was a ton of crazy mishaps that happened at conventions involving Homestuck cosplay and in turn led to the modification of convention rules involving cosplay as a whole (around the same time progs were harping on Jessica Nigri for catering to ‘muh male gaze’), and the comic features a ton of elaborate artwork, interactive games, and even flash animations, a few of which crashed NewGrounds. (The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?)
What’s also worth noting is Homestuck’s overall tone and personality, and how it shaped the up-and-coming zeitgeist that was reading it. It was arguably something Tumblr based its personality around, the sporadic animations and quirky characters really spoke to the generation that grew up on Tumblr, especially women. Apparently, according to an online survey conducted by Hussie, Homestuck helped a few people “find their sexuality or ‘true’ gender.” Without reading through the whole comic (because there ain’t no way I have the time or patience for that right now), I can only wonder what would drive people to believe that beyond the general picture I’ve laid out, and the vibe that bled through the fanbase that had formed on an already progressive social media site.
Danganronpa
During one of Homestuck’s hiatuses, Tumblr desperately needed something to hyper-fixate on during that time. So much so, that they flooded the Something Awful forums to read Slowbeef’s LP thread for a then-obscure Japanese visual novel called Danganronpa. It too had quirky characters and hyper-exaggerated designs, all set in a murder mystery setting with a stylized artstyle, just Tumblr’s type. The flooding of SA got so bad, that Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka had to once again lock the forums behind its infamous $10 paywall, much to the Tumblrites’ chagrin.
Toby’s Involvement with Homestuck
Given Homestuck’s status as a massive multimedia project, Hussie brought on many artists to assist with it, with their main base of operations being the aforementioned MSPA forums. One of these guys was, in fact, Toby.
He would end up contributing over 140 music tracks to Homestuck and its music albums. In fact, Toby would be heavily involved with some of Homestuck’s biggest Flash animations, such as Descend and Cascade. According to Hussie, he and Toby worked closely on the scoring and timing for Cascade, ensuring that the music served the visuals well and did a good job of setting the tone.
Toby would even revisit an old song of his for the animation, Wake. The song in question would even be referenced a few times as a leitmotif in other songs, such as FIDUSPAWN, GO! and Fighting Spirit.
Toby’s Musical Style
Music in retro games, especially games made during the 16-bit generation, used what was commonly referred to as “soundfonts”, or samples. The SNES’ S-DSP soundchip allowed developers to make use of samples to enhance their music and sound effects, and some of the SNES’ most iconic games made heavy use of them.
Years after the SNES stopped being supported, an online scene formed that continued to make music utilizing ROM hacking tools and soundfonts that were available for download. Artists like DJ Yuzoboy and TheLegendofRenegade were pioneers in this genre of remix culture in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
In addition, the music composer for the SNES game Mario Paint also spawned a remix scene of its own, with Mario Paint covers of songs, utilizing a fan-made expanded version of the composer, going viral around the same time.
Among these people utilizing old game samples in music was Toby. Given his background in ROM hacking, it made perfect sense for him to put his existing skillset to use when making original music of his own, starting with his original boss track for the Halloween Hack. Toby would upload dozens of experimental tracks to his website in addition to his works on Homestuck. As is to be expected, they were tracks that took advantage of soundfonts utilized for notable retro games.
He also contributed a few songs to an Earthbound soundfont album, entitled I Miss You. An early version of the song, Fallen Down, was included on this album. It would be refined, extended, and included in his own game later down the line.
Toby’s use of soundfonts would help give his work its own identity, but also helped give it a “familiar, yet fresh” feeling. The samples themselves were nostalgic to those who grew up with the SNES and similar consoles, and so helped his music resonate with people that much more. In some ways, it felt like a proper continuation of the musical style that was present during the SNES era, in a time when most major developers had moved on to using other methods to make music.
The Baby is You
A particularly infamous chapter in Toby’s Homestuck era was the time he made a music album all about male child pregnancy. No, I did not studder. In 2011, the MSPA forums had a strict rule against discussion of child pregnancy. Looking to stir up some drama, Toby thought to himself, "i wonder if the pregnant kids thing extends to song". And so, he made a 10-track album, with the focus being on Dave Strider giving birth to John Egbert. After posting the album, Toby would be banned from the MSPA forums completely.
Toby would get the last laugh though, as the main leitmotif of the titular track would later be reused by him when he was commissioned to write a song for Pokemon Sword and Shield in 2019.
UnderGround / UnderBound
On October 29th, 2012, Starmet.net forums user Mr. Tenda created a thread announcing an upcoming ROM hack he was working on, entitled UnderGround (later referred to as “UnderBOUND” in the same post). The hack stars a boy named Face as he makes his way through the caverns underneath Earth in order to heal the planet’s heart, with the main theme being the existence of love.
Despite the vague description and only a single screenshot of one of the game’s areas, reception to the post seemed somewhat positive, even if the hack’s “announcement” could be seen by some as an ironic fakepost.
Sometime after the thread was started, in February 2013, Toby bumped it, announcing that he was making a “sequel” to UnderBound called “UnderBound 2.” Toby posted early screenshots of the game, claiming he would be using the SNES’ Mode 7 to increase the game’s internal resolution, and a recently discovered technique to play CD-quality audio on SNES for the game’s soundtrack.
He went as far as to introduce some of the game’s characters and how they tied into UnderBound, such as Flowey the flower being a reincarnation of UnderBound’s Face. Right off the bat, a few people in the thread knew something was up, with dwiese1998 stating, “Radiation’s pictures look like they could actually be from a game but definitely not an EB hack.” A few months later, his suspicions would be proven correct.
The Undertale Kickstarter
On June 24th, 2013, Toby Fox would launch a Kickstarter for his new game, Undertale. The game’s Kickstarter struck the iron at just the right time, being another milestone moment in the initial boom of Kickstarter game projects, such as Super Retro Squad, Shovel Knight, Mighty No. 9, and Shantae: Half-Genie Hero.
At the same time as the Kickstarter’s opening, a demo of the first area of the game was also released, showcasing the game’s combat system, as well as its “unique sense of humor.”
It was thanks in part to Toby’s solidified reputation and popularity with both the Earthbound and Homestuck fandoms that word about his game got out, and the project’s initial funding goal was met within a day. From there, the funding would meet all the requirements for the Kickstarter’s additional stretch goals such as a Mac port, secret bosses, Magnolia Porter being brought on, and a concept art book being created later down the line.
Unfortunately, some of the stretch goals, such as the expanded instruction manual and alarm clock app, had to be scrapped either due to engine limitations, or Toby being unable to find the time for them.
On the other hand, backer rewards were in-line with what most game Kickstarters offered at the time, such as a copy of the game, the soundtrack, having your name be featured in the credits, or having an NPC or enemy/boss of your design featured in the game. Toby even threw the Homestuck fans a bone by including “Your fantroll becomes canon” as a reward for those who donated $1000. This is in reference to the Homestuck Kickstarter, where that was a reward tier, and a few people did in fact donate to it.
Three minibosses were added to the game, thanks to the high-level tiers being fulfilled by a few people. As a result, the midboss, Muffet, and the hidden enemy, Glyde, would be added to the game. In addition, someone also fulfilled the $1000 “fantroll” tier, that being Samael / Robert Brettel. He paid to have his OC featured in the game as a miniboss, and it wasn’t long before people dug up his profiles and found out what he was “into.”
Toby’s Partners
While Toby was the lead developer for Undertale, he brought on plenty of other notable names to assist him with things he couldn’t do on his own, such as artwork.
Temmie Chang / Tuyoki
A freelance artist, animator, and illustrator who joined Tumblr in April of 2011. Though, her online presence goes back to the days of DeviantArt, where she created an account in 2005 under the name, “Tuyoki.” Back in the day, Temmie wasn’t really all that different from your average Anime-fan Internet girl who frequented DA back in the day:
“Born in the 90s, has a furry/kemonomimi motif in her OCs & art, makes heavy use of smudge lighting, talks in ‘LOL RANDOM XDDDDDDD’, is a fan of ‘Tales of?’” Yup, definitely someone from that era. However, as we move into the next decade, Temmie would get a better grasp on what would become her signature artstyle and characters. For example, her main OC, Yoki, who would develop overtime.
Now, how did Toby meet Temmie? From Toby’s own recollection, he had been following Temmie’s art for a while and asked her for help on Tumblr as soon as Undertale had begun development. As soon as Temmie agreed, Toby dumped a ton of info on what he wanted to do with the game. Thankfully for Toby, it was at a time when Temmie herself really wanted to work on games and was even told off-hand that Toby had already cemented himself as a “sparkly big shot”.
Temmie’s most iconic contribution to Undertale would come in the form of a cat-like creature named after herself. Unlike the rest of the monsters, Temmie spoke in what was essentially l33t speak; The same tongue that she and her kin used back in the day. In fact, from Toby’s recollection, Temmie used to misspell words on purpose over Skype, or on the sites she used.
In the time since Undertale’s release, Temmie has held drawing streams on Twitch using a VTuber avatar, and still does plenty of artwork, animations, and even a few games featuring her OCs, in addition to a separate webcomic; Soul Beacon of the Netherworld.
Gigi D.G. / GigiDigi / Hiimdaisy / Peachifruit & Cucumber Quest
Gigi is primarily known for her webcomic, Cucumber Quest, which started in 2011. However, before then, she was known for making video game parody comics on Livejournal under the alias “Hiimdaisy”. These comics were primarily based around games such as Metal Gear Solid 3, as well as Persona 3 & 4 (call it a hunch, but these comics may have greatly contributed to Persona’s growing popularity in the west around this time). Her webcomics would help serve as inspiration for other aspiring comic artists, such as othatsraspberry.
To further drive home just how popular these comics are, they spawned a few legendary memes you may be aware of:
Eventually, Gigi got troll’s remorse and deleted the comics, while shifting focus to Cucumber Quest. It was during this time that Toby gained interest in her works, meeting up with her for the first time at a convention. The two linked up and collaborated together in a minor capacity on Undertale, with Gigi providing the Steam Trading Card artwork for Undyne, doing artwork for some of Undertale's merchandise, as well as being one of the game’s playtesters.
In addition, Toby created a fan song for the Cucumber Quest character, Noisemaster. Take a listen, because it may sound familiar:
Gigi played a major part in getting the word out about Undertale, advertising the game in a banner ad on her webcomic, and even putting a pair of Toriel-themed slippers in a page of the comic. Gigi stated in an interview, “At the time, I was just proud of my friend and wanted to show off the game he’d worked so hard on.” Toby would use the picture of the Toriel slipper as his Twitter PFP for a while.
Gigi would later on troon out, declaring herself to be a stunning and brave butch broccoli-hair non-binary, not unlike Rebecca Sugar. And given the amount of LGBT/progressive pandering she did in her “kid-friendly” comic, it’s hard not to see why. Cucumber Quest fell into the same traps a lot of Tumblr-made webcomics fell into; focus on romance, the main story/plot takes a backseat, Gigi saying she wanted to teach children about LGBT issues, etc. To top it all off, the webcomic would go on permanent hiatus in 2019.
She’s since done concept art for Deltarune and even worked on graphic novels for Netflix’s version of She-Ra.
Drak Bryant / fancydrak / “Lynn B Tcheska” / VideoChess
Drak is best recognized as that indie game dev with the Ditto profile picture. He was originally gonna program the Undertale alarm clock app that was one of the Kickstarter’s stretch goals, but it was ultimately cancelled.
Drak would later troon out and, low and behold, he would also rebrand with a picture of a furry avatar too, because apparently furring out is also mandatory in the process of trooning out half the time.
Wreckboy
One of Drak’s most notable projects pre-Undertale was a pet simulator made in Flash. Only here, you took care of the main character of Wrecking Crew, more specifically the version seen on the US box art for the game. While the game mostly reuses music from other sources, Toby Fox, being in cahoots with Drak, composed the song that plays when your Wreckboy dies. The game achieved a decent amount of viral attention when it was released in March of 2015.
While on the topic of Wreckboy, the game’s dialogue would 100% be seen as pedo dog-whistles if the game was made today.
Come to think of it, “boy” was a word that was thrown around pretty often amongst this group and related parties, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Everdraed
A Something Awful goon who was involved in creating small animations on his YouTube channel. Toby would bring him on to help create visual assets for the Photoshop Flowey boss fight. He also created the trailers for Undertale and its ports, as well as Deltarune.
Magnolia Porter
A webcomic artist and illustrator who Toby likely knew thanks to her collaborating on a few other projects with Andrew and Gigi. Her contributions to Undertale involve designing a few minor monsters, such as the NPC, Monster Kid. Of particular note is the fightable monster, Vulkin, who literally has the Tumblr bean mouth/heart/uwu face. Outside of that, her art is mostly the kind of stuff you’re average Tumblr women normally draws. At least she’s married and has a kid.
Jones N. Wiedle / J.N. Wiedle
Wiedle is another artist who worked on Homestuck, in addition to designing merchandise for Hussie’s company, What Pumpkin. In addition to his HS work, he worked on his own webcomic about skeletons, Helvetica. It would help serve as inspiration for Sans & Papyrus. In Undertale itself, he is also credited with having done “fashion help” for Undyne. Whether he’s the reason Undyne wears a tank top underneath her armor, I can’t really say. He's also worked as a storyboard revisionist on Craig of the Creek, and a character designer for the game Neon White.
FanGamer
A website and producer for merchandise, both official and unofficial, for various games and franchises. Having started as a spinoff of Starmen.net, the site’s founders, Reid Young and Jon Kay, seeked to find ways to provide new Earthbound merchandise for fans to buy, given the franchise’s neglect in the west at the time.
Eventually, FanGamer cut their teeth handling merchandise work for various Kickstarter projects in the early 2010s, starting with a Minecraft documentary and later the Kickstarter for Tim Schafer’s Broken Age. As luck would have it, they at one point also sold Bob Chipman’s infamous book, SMB3: Brick by Brick.
FanGamer helped promote Undertale early on and ensured merch was available relatively close to the game’s release. They also held a Twitch stream where they played an earlier version of Undertale’s demo, prior to its Kickstarter opening. When it was released, Undertale’s merch sales would skyrocket FanGamer as a business, which led to them acquiring several more licenses for many indie and otherwise niche properties. They have also sponsored various gaming-related events such as GamesDoneQuick.
Last edited:
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2023
So, with all that exposition out of the way, what about the game, itself? What did Undertale do to deserve such an elaborate deep dive, well…
When Undertale was released in 2015, it completely exploded on Tumblr. It had a modest start sales-wise on Steam, though early on word began to spread around Tumblr that the game wasn’t doing too well. Tumblr, given this news, hyped it up in masse. A lot of major blogs on Tumblr, including some mentioned in Case II, covered the game, drew fanart, and did everything in their power to ensure word got out.
Two major key components of this early hype is the game’s sense of humor, which catered to Tumblr’s (and related parties) style, and the use of progressive themes.
Toby’s Vision
Given Toby’s comments about being progressive on the Halloween Hack site, it should turn out to not be a surprise that Toby had progressive themes in mind when developing Undertale. For example, in an early design document, among the gameplay features Toby wrote down was the ability to date almost every boss. He even mentions being able to date a “hot robot”, which would later refer to Mettaton EX. In the final game, Mettaton and a few of the other major characters are not datable, but Papyrus, Undyne, and Alphys are.
Speaking of Alphys, she pretty much represents your average overweight nerdy raging lesbian that used Tumblr around this time. Heck, I’d argue it’s this type of person that also hyped up Steven Universe as well. However, did you know at one point, Alphys was going to be a guy, instead?
Toby decided to make the character female due to it better complimenting the design, and just because “he grew to dislike it.” Though, given Toby’s inherit want to be progressive, maybe making Alphys a nerdy guy who lusts after Anime catgirls may not have earned him any brownie points with his fellow progressive friends.
The “Monsters”
Do you ever notice how despite the game’s enemies and bosses are labelled as “monsters” in the game’s lore, an awful lot of them don’t really look “monster-like”? A vast majority of monsters go the cute route, rather than the scary or menacing route.
For example, the aforementioned Vulkin does the Tumblr bean mouth/heart face. It’s totally something you would see on an episode of Adventure Time, or in a Tumblr blog reblogging cute cartoon characters and art. I imagine Toby wanted to incentivize sparing by making players feel guilty for killing something so cute, but it kind of goes against the point of communicating with something that you'd otherwise want to fight and kill in any other RPG.
When you look at something like Monsters Inc., for comparison, while some of the monsters in the movie could be considered “cute”, they all still maintain a monster-like element to their designs and thus providing cohesion and not seem like something a group of Tumblrites came up with.
Why Goats?
One neat thing about Undertale’s pacifist ending credits is that thanks to it, we know who individually designed each character and enemy in the entire game. All three goat characters, Toriel, Asgore, and Asriel, were all designed by Toby himself.
It kinda begs the question though, why the focus on anthropomorphic goats, let alone Anthro characters as a whole? Is Toby secretly a furry? There didn’t seem to be much of an indication in his previous works, right? Well, for starters, Toby definitely loves dogs. His avatar, the annoying dog, makes plenty of appearances throughout Undertale in small gags, and that’s not even including all the dog characters that the player encounters. In fact, the floppy ears the goat characters all share kind of fall in line with some of the dog characters Toby did, such as Dogamy & Dogaressa.
If anything, it just provided bait for furries. Given that they had always been a very sexually-driven fanbase ever since the late 90s, of course they were gonna become attached to whatever furry characters Toby would end up creating, for better or for worse, and Toby himself knew this.
The Topic of Vulnerability
In an interview between Toby and Melee community members Toph and BobbyScar, Scar brings up the idea that what makes Undertale hit close to home is its presentation of vulnerability. The idea that every monster has that vulnerability that the player can discover and help them cope with. In a roundabout way, it ties into one of the reasons Tumblr latched onto Steven Universe so much, that the main character was a crybaby, yet at the same time, Tumblr saw that as a virtue.
Hitting the Right Vibe
Part of Undertale’s humor is how Toby was able to completely nail on the head the ironic zeitgeist that had formed online. While the game doesn’t make that many direct references to Internet memes, you can tell that the game, through it’s characters, scenarios, and dialogue, is able to convey the right “vibes” for its audience.
Take for example, Nabstablook’s room. You can listen to multiple records in his room, and they’re all of a simple trumpet track, and then when you lay down with him, the room turns into a realistic spacefield filled with stars. Sometimes, a picture can speak a thousand words, and this spoke heavily to the audience that Undertale was aimed at.
Given how much time Toby spent online during the halcyon days of the Internet, from Starmen.net, to the MSPA forums, to other places like Twitter and potentially Something Awful, he had a firm grasp on how to properly portray the Internet “vibe.”
Another thing worth pointing out as a part of Toby’s style is just like with Mibibli’s Quest, lazy = funny. Toby used MS Paint, or rather, the MS Paint “aesthetic” to get his points and vibes across, and this is something that rubbed off on him from working on Homestuck, as well as something he’s done since his earlier days online, such as on his DeviantArt account:
“Anime” Humor
While Anime had been experiencing a renaissance period online during Undertale’s development thanks to shows like Attack on Titan, a lot of people online, especially on Tumblr, still made fun of anime for a lot of its inherit eccentricities, such as common character tropes or over-reliance on fanservice. Some people straight-up used the word “anime” as a punchline in of itself. This would lead to memes such as “anime sucks” to get a rise out of people, or the now famous “Anime was a Mistake” image accompanied by an image of Hayao Miyazaki.
Undertale takes this logic and runs with it a bit, including enemies such as the Tsundereplane (who talks like a stereotype of the titular character trope), Mettaton EX, who's basically a walking Jojo reference, or this famous line from the end of Alphys’ date:
Toby just couldn’t help himself when it came to ironic humor about “anime”, given what many Tumblr reblogs were posting. That’s really how a lot of things on Tumblr operate when it comes to irony. A similar thing happened to Family Guy around this time. Originally, when shows like Steven Universe and Gravity Falls were at their peak, Family Guy was hated, with even a few memes and now-famous posts making fun of it. However, later on that hate turned into ironically praising the show. Later on, a “No Context Family Guy” account was created on Twitter, and all of a sudden people were sharing clips of the show and giving it a fair shake.
This even goes back to the days of 4Chan and My Little Pony, what started out as ironic obsession and fandom in response to a scathingly negative CartoonBrew article, became an unironic fandom on 4Chan, and later the Internet at large.
Bepis
Bepis was an injoke amongst Toby and his friend group. It found its way into Undertale in multiple places, one of which is an image that replaced a disclaimer telling dataminers to not upload the game’s sprite sheets early on in the game’s shelf life.
Undertale’s Endings
What ultimately makes or breaks Undertale for people are the game’s endings/routes. Normally, the game ends at the boss fight with Flowey, but if you clear a few “dates” with certain characters, in addition to not killing any enemies, an additional area, the hidden lab, will become available, which is then followed up by the true final boss and ending.
Part of what makes the game’s endgame bosses so effective is how they completely betray the expectations of the player that are built up all the way until they’re reached.
The Setup and Expectations
Part of what makes Undertale unique as a game is that it doesn’t just look “bad”, it knows it looks “bad.” The game’s graphics have unflatteringly been called “MS Paint” by its detractors, such as how the game’s battle sprites primarily use only black and white, and the game’s tilesets are comparatively simply. In fact, Toby didn’t even do a majority of the game’s tilesets of graphics, as that job was given to artists he hired, such as Temmie.
At the same time, this was actually all done on purpose. Some sprites and animations were cut because Toby thought they looked “too good.” Yet, this was done with the intent of making the higher-effort (in comparison) animations and boss fights later in the game that much bigger of a shock to the player.
Undertale as Creepypasta Bait
At the very start of the game, Flowey hypes himself up as a menacing individual and is established as a threat. His reappearance at the end of the game, and the fight against him reeks of creepypasta bait. Some Tumblr users even described the fight as such. A lot of the popular creepypastas in the early 2010s were shocking to people because they took what was otherwise family-friendly material, and made it creepy, bloody, and horrifying in some way. Toby took this concept and used it as a basis for that extra “shock factor” that Photoshop Flowey gives the player upon reaching him.
You feel as though you’re playing a low-quality RPG Maker game with MS Paint graphics, and then all of a sudden, you’re hit with a hyper realistic creepy boss that unleashes a barrage of attacks at you, followed by the game closing if you fail.
This also ties into the original fight against Giygas from Earthbound, and how the boss topped many “scariest enemies in video games” lists back in the day. Given the game’s simplistic, Peanuts-like artstyle in the overworld, it seemed like such a shock to have the characters transported to an uncanny and mysterious area with a droning ambient soundtrack, followed by a trek up what looked like a realistic esophagus tube. This was around the same time when games like Final Fantasy VI were pushing the SNES’ hardware through the use of more detailed sprites and shading, as well as using the system’s Mode 7 for the overworld.
Meanwhile, the Genocide Route takes Undertale’s “No One Has To Die” premise and completely flips it on its head. The name of the game isn’t just about killing everything that attacks you, but now you have to kill EVERY monster. It doubles as a commentary on classic RPG grinding, where you fight as many enemies as possible to boost up your status.
In contrast to the other route, the genocide route goes out of its way to make you feel horrible. Once you kill enough enemies in the first area and start the route proper by killing Toriel at a significantly higher level, the game paints Frisk as a ruthless killer, and the game starts playing a heavily slowed down, corrupted music track. The route turns Undertale into more of a horror game, with a droning tune playing while traveling the overworld in search of monsters to hunt, the townsfolf run away, leaving their home and shops abandoned, and you fight the hardest bosses in the game.
Psychologically Manipulated Nostalgia
For being a relatively short game, Toby was able to spark nostalgia for Undertale within the players through the game’s heavy use of leitmotifs. A leitmotif refers to a reoccurring piece of music that takes on multiple forms in different songs, and this can be done to help give a soundtrack a sense of consistency and even be used for driving emotional impact.
Take for example Asriel Dreemur’s theme, simply titled “Memory.” The song and its leitmotif are first heard in a special easter egg the player can find in Waterfall by bringing an umbrella to a lone statue, and that song is used to find a hidden cave where a secret item is held.
Memory’s leitmotif is used at pivotal moments later in the game, such as at the end of “UNDERTALE” (the titular song, which plays when Frisk explores Toriel and Asgore’s old home and the player learns the backstory behind Asriel and the Fallen Child).
It’s most notable use, however, is as the backing of “His Theme”, the song that plays at the end of the fight against Asriel. Acting as a powerful conclusion to the final boss of a pacifist route, as Asriel attempts to kill Frisk for good using all his power, but then slowly being weakened by Frisk’s refusal to hurt him. This brings Asriel into a weaker emotional state, ending with the two conversing with each other and Asriel apologizing.
And believe me, this worked. Heck, you could owe a lot of the game’s acclaim and success to its powerful use of leitmotifs.
Tumblr’s Sacred Cow
Hot off the heels of #Lovewins, Undertale featured an androgynous player character, multiple gay characters, and was able to tap into the cultural zeitgeist in ways that its contemporaries like Gone Home and 2064: ROM were unable to. And this led to the game experiencing that massive boom in popularity on Tumblr as stated earlier.
Just like with Steven Universe before it, Tumblr wanted to let the world know that Undertale was their game and wanted to punish any naysayers that dared to criticize it. They finally had their North Star in animation, and they finally had their North Star in gaming. The sheer explosion in fan art and buzz around the game was enough to make it the 2nd most reblogged video game on Tumblr in 2015, toppling other heavy weights that year like Splatoon, Animal Crossing, and Super Smash Bros.
The Way You Were “Supposed” to Play Undertale
Undertale clearly marketed the Pacifist Route (Acting with monsters and sparing them) as the primary way to engage with the game. It’s right in the game’s very tagline: “The Friendly RPG Where No One has to Die.” However, the game’s rising fanbase would take this logic to new levels and took it as a personal attack when anyone who played the game did not follow this seemingly simple instruction.
God forbid you publicly announced you were playing the Genocide Route. Undertale marked the point at which the Internet took fictional characters and the world they inhabited very seriously. As in, committing murder in a video game was just as bad as committing murder in real life. People on Tumblr used it as a way to test the character of anyone who was playing it.
In fact, when discussion around fighting against Undertale’s enemies took place, some fans didn’t use the term “defeat” or even “kill”, but “murder.” You were committing murder in a video game, and you were supposed to feel horrible, even if you had gotten sick of having the game shoved down your throat from seeing it everywhere. Whether that was through fan art, fan comics, mashups, remixes, or other bizarre methods of fan “appreciation” only Tumblr could come up with.
W.D. Gaster
Toby already had a firm pulse on the way online culture works and its fixation on speculation. Just ask the Smash Bros. and Gravity Falls communities back during their heyday. Because of this, a few hints were thrown into Undertale of a secret underlying side-plot involving W.D. Gaster, a scientist who was completely erased from the world, and all timelines, in a freak accident.
Hints and traces of him could be found in the game, but only through sheer luck or editing the “fun” value assigned to your save file. This included things like a secret sound test, a hidden room, or uncanny NPCs that shared info about Gaster.
Undertale RED
I wanted to give special mention to this fangame in particular, because it overlaps with another specific part of Tumblr culture. Undertale RED was a single boss fight with both a pacifist and genocide route the player could take, but the game prominently featured an original character by the game’s creator, Taxiderby. While Undertale itself was made in Game Maker, Undertale RED was made in Unity.
What makes Little Red Slicing Hood, or simply “Red” stand out is that this is a character archetype that was quite popular on Tumblr in 2015, at least going off of personal recollection. It just so happens that Taxiderby’s work on Undertale RED, as well as a few other projects, helped inspire Toby to bring him on for work on Deltarune.
Undertale Takes Over SoundCloud
Over the summer of 2015, Splatoon was the go-to source of content amongst SoundClown. Everyone under the banner was making their own mashups and remixes of songs from the game, and even an entire collab was started by MtH. Not even a few months later, history would once again repeat itself with Undertale.
Thanks to the overwhelmingly positive reception to the game’s soundtrack, mashups on SoundCloud were popping up at a previously unheard-of pace. Soundclown Renim G would host an Undertale mashup collab, featuring many of the mashups from the game’s initial boom period on Bandcamp.
Some of these mashups would explode to previously unheard levels of popularity for the mashup scene, such as BotanicSage’s “Waters of Megalovania”.
Triple-Q (Cont.)
Just like with Steven Universe before, Triple-Q, having a sizable presence on Tumblr and among Tumblr alumni, was pestered about Undertale. However, unlike his run-in with Steven Universe, things were slightly different this time. Triple-Q did the Genocide Route, posting screenshot proof of it to boot.
And to top it off, both Undertale mashups he would do made use of songs prominently featured in the route, that being Megalovania and Battle Against a True Hero. With the former, the mashup for it was assisted by MtH, who was very much obsessed with Undertale, to a far greater extent than him, so pressure from one of his closest friends at the time probably contributed.
GiIvaSunner / SiIvaGunner
Undertale’s use of both leitmotifs and old soundfonts would inspire a few Soundclowns to start their own fake video game music channel, entitled GiIvaSunner. The channel primarily used songs like the Flintstones theme and Love Live’s Snow Halation (because Triple-Q and his friends were massive fans of it) as leitmotifs, implanted onto iconic video game songs.
Many of the Soundclowns that took part in the aforementioned collab would go on to be founding members of the GiIvaSunner team. Undertale would also become a massive element of the channel’s identity, not just with Megalovania and other UT songs being a part of rips, but also the game being among the games to receive the highest number of rips throughout the channel’s early history, and even to this very day.
Toby even contributed a few rips of his own. No, really. When one of the channel founders, Chaze the Chat, asked Toby about contributing to the channel, he sent the team a few rips he had done, albeit under the request that he be credited as anonymous.
SANS UNDERTALE
Sans himself became a massive meme not just amongst Undertale fans, but on the Internet at large, with a majority of the memes surrounding the fight against him at the end of the Genocide route.
On the flipside, Sans’ pure aggression during the genocide boss fight painted him as a far more “emo” character than the pun-loving lazybones he is otherwise normally portrayed as, which was a net positive in Tumblr’s eyes. These implanted character traits made Sans one of the premier examples of the “Tumblr sexyman” trope, with Sans even winning a poll for the “Best Tumblr Sexyman” many years after Undertale’s release.
Outside of that, a majority of Sans memes simply amounted to referencing the Sans fight, with even the slightest hint of the beginning of Megalovania, and Sans memorable line, “Do you want to have a Bad Time” being the key aspects of the meme.
The Nintendo Community’s Dire Straits
As previously discussed in Case II, the Nintendo fanbase was at a low point after the one-two punch of E3 2015, followed by the death of Satoru Iwata. That year at E3, multiple games were announced that were either divisive, or universally panned for being too gimmicky, and only proved to the fans that Nintendo had lost the plot when it came to making the kinds of products their fans wanted.
Even though Splatoon 1 was already out, and a few more major titles for the Wii U and 3DS were in the pipeline, like Super Mario Maker, Yoshi’s Woolly World, Xenoblade Chronicles X, and later on, Kirby Planet Robobot and the next generation of Pokemon, the Nintendo fanbase was in desperate need of some kind of game that would really lift their spirits given the dire state they now found themselves in.
Given a lot of them already used Tumblr and/or Twitter, it only made sense for them to discover Undertale and latch onto it. Here was a game that channeled the spirit of Earthbound, during what was at the time a minor renaissance period for the series. Earthbound had finally received a long-awaited re-release on Wii U Virtual Console, Lucas was being added back to Super Smash Bros. for 3DS/Wii U as DLC, the 1st Mother game (now rebranded as Earthbound Beginnings) was also released on Virtual Console after its localization had been cancelled in the early 90s, Earthbound characters were included in Super Mario Maker, and to top it off, rumors had begun to sprung up that the long-awaited Mother 3 would finally see a worldwide release sometime in 2016 for either the Wii U, or Nintendo’s next console, then still known as “NX.”
Right away, major names in the Nintendo community began to play Undertale, and bring it into discussion alongside the other games they were playing at the time, despite Nintendo having zero involvement in Undertale’s development, and the game having yet to see a release on a Nintendo platform, the community really treated the game as one of their own.
For example, Balrog, hot off the heels of his discovery and review of Mibibli’s Quest, know full-well that Undertale would be a game perfect for his show, and got to work on a massive-multi-segmented review of it, covering the various routes of the game.
Undertale’s impact on the Smash Bros. community
Given Earthbound owes a lot of its popularity to the Super Smash Bros. series, it makes sense that Toby Fox was involved with the competitive scene for Super Smash Bros. back in the late 2000s, having gone to many Melee tournaments and met up with prominent members in the community like BobbyScar.
Prominent Smashtubers like Alpharad, RelaxAlax, and InfernoOmni were all quick to pick up on the game and both cover it, as well as use Undertale music and sounds in their videos. Acestar the 3rd, another example, even changed his profile picture to Asgore after he played the game, and later came out as gay that year.
As a side effect of the game’s newfound popularity here, Sans in Smash became a meme in a similar manner to characters like Goku and Shrek getting in. Even if this is due in part to Sans and his Genocide fight already being a meme in itself, the massive crossover between the Undertale fanbase and the Nintentuber/Smash fanbase would allow this particular idea/meme to have a decent amount of staying power.
Toby’s Goal
Going into this case, the one question I wanted to find a definitive answer to was as follows: “Given the content featured in Undertale, the circles it blew up in, and the impact it would have on the Internet and pop culture as a whole, did Toby set out to do all of this on purpose? Did Toby want to use Undertale to inflict societal change, to usher in the ‘new age of gay,’ much like what Rebecca Sugar and her cohorts were doing?”
Throughout all the research I did, all the sources I’ve gathered, and all the stuff I’ve been typing up until now, I feel like I can come forward and say I’ve found my answer.
We know Toby has technically always kept a progressive mindset when making his games, going back to the Halloween Hack. Toby’s aspirations led him to put what he deemed “progressive themes” in his works at large. It was a far more subtle affair when it came to indoctrination, beyond the tagline of “The friendly RPG where no one has to die”, the gay stuff was not really advertised or virtue-signaled about. It was a game first, and a cultural virus second, hence the Internet had a harder time resisting it.
At the same time, Undertale was at least able to stand on its own, whereas Gone Home was literally a dyke-core walking simulator. Gone Home was made by a bunch of no-name progressive devs and the game came out when 4Chan still ruled the roost. GamerGate and m00t’s connections to people like Anita Sarkeesian through XOXO fest definitely contributed to their power taking a hit between the two games’ releases.
On top of that, Toby already had his hand in a fair number of jars, giving him further reach. He had the Homestuck fandom on his side, he had made allies with various Tumblr artists like Temmie and Gigi, and he was also slightly notable in the competitive Smash Bros community.
And even though Toby saw his game as being relatively niche compared to major titles, he didn’t want it to be a flop either, which is why he pushed his followers to get more people to buy the game, anyway. In doing so, Undertale took over the Internet, at the right place, at the right time, and the rest is history.
American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year
Frisk, the game’s main protagonist, in addition to other characters like the fallen child, are referred to with pronouns that would otherwise be plural, such as “they” or “them.” This was done because Toby wanted to leave Frisk’s gender up to the player’s choice, yet at the same time, Tumblr’s ideology of breaking away from gender norms was reaching a new-found peak in the wake of Tumblr-led media like Steven Universe exploding in popularity, as well as Tumblr-favorable political movements like #LoveWins making headlines.
The conversation around using “they” as a single pronoun got far enough that the American Dialect Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to the study of the English language in North America, named “they” as their word of the year for 2015, and later the Word of the Decade for the 2010s as a whole.
To quote from their page discussing the vote, “They was recognized by the society for its emerging use as a pronoun to refer to a known person, often as a conscious choice by a person rejecting the traditional gender binary of he and she. ‘In the past year, new expressions of gender identity have generated a deal of discussion, and singular they has become a particularly significant element of that conversation,’ Zimmer said. ‘While many novel gender-neutral pronouns have been proposed, they has the advantage of already being part of the language.’”
Coming in 2nd place was “Thanks, Obama”, and coming in 3rd place was “ammosexual”, i.e. “someone who loves firearms in a fetishistic manner.”
Game Award Snubs
During the award season for gaming that year, Undertale didn’t receive much attention from mainstream gaming award and journalism outlets, most notably Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards, where while it was nominated Best RPG, Best Indie, and the Games for Impact award, it was not nominated for Game of the Year, which many a Tumblrite felt it very much deserved.
In spite of Tumblr having their wholesome and funny RPG game being snubbed, Toby didn’t really mind it all that much, stating on Twitter, “Hearing “UNDERTALE made me want to be kinder” or “UNDERTALE helped me through a dark time” feels more valuable than any award or score.”
GameFaqs’ Best Game Ever
While it’s best known as the go-to site for video game guides and cheats in the pre-social media era of the Internet, GameFaqs also acquired a very passionate base of gamers that discussed their hobby on their forums. In 2004, 2009, and 2015, GameFaqs would hold the “Best. Game. Ever.” Poll.
It was a tournament-style bracket where users of the sites would vote for their favorite game to determine what the titular “Best. Game. Ever.” was. In previous iterations of the poll, major games of the era like Final Fantasy VII and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time won the poll, both of which had been primary subjects of “Best Game of All Time” discussion since the late 90s, when the PS1 vs. N64 console wars were at their peak and the Internet was still a relatively niche thing for computer nerds.
But in 2015’s poll, things would play out a little bit differently. Undertale had managed to make the tournament as a nominee, and much to the shock of the site, it had broken through many barriers throughout, having toppled many all-time classics like Super Mario World, Super Smash Bros. Melee and the 1st Generation of Pokémon.
It all came to a head in the final round, which ended up being Ocarina of Time… vs. Undertale. To say the GameFaqs forums were in uproar over the whole thing was an understatement, and the rest of the Internet took notice, writing articles and plenty of Tweets about the discourse. Allegations of Tumblr and/or Undertale fans rigging the vote began to fly around, and people who were on the fence about the game were now convinced not to play it, as Undertale’s undeserved (in their opinion) victory persuaded them against playing it.
When asked about the poll, and the massive reception to the game at large, Toby didn’t expect this many people to like it this much. Even to him, he thought people would simply give it a 6, 7 or an 8 out of 10. Toby described the game as “[him] doing stuff that [he] likes and think is cool, so it’s interesting that it resonates with people, so much.”
Alas, GameFaqs was in utter disarray that a game like Undertale was all of a sudden being heralded as “Best Game of All Time” material, given its graphics and Tumblr-level humor. To some, it even signified that the standards for gaming were now at an all-time low, having fallen from the highs of the 90s and early 2000s.
2015 Vidya Gaem Awards
Thanks in part to just how fed-up 4Chan’s /v/ board was with the game during its initial explosion period, Undertale won multiple negative awards at the 2015 Vidya Gaem Awards, including Worst Character (Alphys), Worst Fanbase, and Most Hated. Not only that, but it also won Best Soundtrack and even made it into the Top 5 for Least Worst.
If there was any more proof of just how divisive of a game Undertale had become all across the Internet, this was it.
The “Earthbound-inspired” Indie Game
So, with a game like Undertale now having taken the Internet by storm, what would the game development scene learn from this? Well, given Undertale’s exploration of vulnerability and humanity in individuals, a trend began to form: Games that would explore heavy themes like depression and anxiety, a majority of which were played in a top-down RPG format.
A lot of them also seeked to deconstruct the RPG genre in a similar matter to what Undertale did, or deconstruct a different genre, such as platformers. From here, the term “Earthbound-inspired Indie Game” or “Quirky Indie RPG” would enter the gaming lexicon, with notable entries such as Omori, In Stars and Time, YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG, Knuckle Sandwich, and so on.
Indie games were already infamous for their inherit need to deconstruct the rules and conventions of gaming, but this created a whole new layer on top of that. Now, indie games needed to have LGBT representation, sometimes furries, they needed to be deconstructive or ironic, sometimes they tried too hard to ape existing, iconic retro games, at the cost of forming their own identity.
Regardless, this pillar of the indie scene would continue to truck along, with some games gaining more notoriety than others, while some would become infamous, such as YIIK.
During research for this case, I dug up some stuff that’s unrelated to Undertale and Toby directly, mainly involving FanGamer artist Ashley Davis, and potential connections to other notable artists in the lefty art scene like Noel Stevenson, Gigi, Magnolia, and even OMOCAT and Tyson Hesse, as well as connections to Anthony Burch of Destructoid and GamerGate fame. That’s a rabbit hole best saved for a different day.
As for me, I’ve got one more case left to crack and then I can finally stick a fork in this thing, and trust me when I say this is when everything will finally fall into place.
And before you ask, I will play Deltarune when it's done.
When Undertale was released in 2015, it completely exploded on Tumblr. It had a modest start sales-wise on Steam, though early on word began to spread around Tumblr that the game wasn’t doing too well. Tumblr, given this news, hyped it up in masse. A lot of major blogs on Tumblr, including some mentioned in Case II, covered the game, drew fanart, and did everything in their power to ensure word got out.
Two major key components of this early hype is the game’s sense of humor, which catered to Tumblr’s (and related parties) style, and the use of progressive themes.
Toby’s Vision
Given Toby’s comments about being progressive on the Halloween Hack site, it should turn out to not be a surprise that Toby had progressive themes in mind when developing Undertale. For example, in an early design document, among the gameplay features Toby wrote down was the ability to date almost every boss. He even mentions being able to date a “hot robot”, which would later refer to Mettaton EX. In the final game, Mettaton and a few of the other major characters are not datable, but Papyrus, Undyne, and Alphys are.
Speaking of Alphys, she pretty much represents your average overweight nerdy raging lesbian that used Tumblr around this time. Heck, I’d argue it’s this type of person that also hyped up Steven Universe as well. However, did you know at one point, Alphys was going to be a guy, instead?
Toby decided to make the character female due to it better complimenting the design, and just because “he grew to dislike it.” Though, given Toby’s inherit want to be progressive, maybe making Alphys a nerdy guy who lusts after Anime catgirls may not have earned him any brownie points with his fellow progressive friends.
The “Monsters”
Do you ever notice how despite the game’s enemies and bosses are labelled as “monsters” in the game’s lore, an awful lot of them don’t really look “monster-like”? A vast majority of monsters go the cute route, rather than the scary or menacing route.
For example, the aforementioned Vulkin does the Tumblr bean mouth/heart face. It’s totally something you would see on an episode of Adventure Time, or in a Tumblr blog reblogging cute cartoon characters and art. I imagine Toby wanted to incentivize sparing by making players feel guilty for killing something so cute, but it kind of goes against the point of communicating with something that you'd otherwise want to fight and kill in any other RPG.
When you look at something like Monsters Inc., for comparison, while some of the monsters in the movie could be considered “cute”, they all still maintain a monster-like element to their designs and thus providing cohesion and not seem like something a group of Tumblrites came up with.
Why Goats?
One neat thing about Undertale’s pacifist ending credits is that thanks to it, we know who individually designed each character and enemy in the entire game. All three goat characters, Toriel, Asgore, and Asriel, were all designed by Toby himself.
It kinda begs the question though, why the focus on anthropomorphic goats, let alone Anthro characters as a whole? Is Toby secretly a furry? There didn’t seem to be much of an indication in his previous works, right? Well, for starters, Toby definitely loves dogs. His avatar, the annoying dog, makes plenty of appearances throughout Undertale in small gags, and that’s not even including all the dog characters that the player encounters. In fact, the floppy ears the goat characters all share kind of fall in line with some of the dog characters Toby did, such as Dogamy & Dogaressa.
If anything, it just provided bait for furries. Given that they had always been a very sexually-driven fanbase ever since the late 90s, of course they were gonna become attached to whatever furry characters Toby would end up creating, for better or for worse, and Toby himself knew this.
The Topic of Vulnerability
In an interview between Toby and Melee community members Toph and BobbyScar, Scar brings up the idea that what makes Undertale hit close to home is its presentation of vulnerability. The idea that every monster has that vulnerability that the player can discover and help them cope with. In a roundabout way, it ties into one of the reasons Tumblr latched onto Steven Universe so much, that the main character was a crybaby, yet at the same time, Tumblr saw that as a virtue.
Hitting the Right Vibe
Part of Undertale’s humor is how Toby was able to completely nail on the head the ironic zeitgeist that had formed online. While the game doesn’t make that many direct references to Internet memes, you can tell that the game, through it’s characters, scenarios, and dialogue, is able to convey the right “vibes” for its audience.
Take for example, Nabstablook’s room. You can listen to multiple records in his room, and they’re all of a simple trumpet track, and then when you lay down with him, the room turns into a realistic spacefield filled with stars. Sometimes, a picture can speak a thousand words, and this spoke heavily to the audience that Undertale was aimed at.
Given how much time Toby spent online during the halcyon days of the Internet, from Starmen.net, to the MSPA forums, to other places like Twitter and potentially Something Awful, he had a firm grasp on how to properly portray the Internet “vibe.”
Another thing worth pointing out as a part of Toby’s style is just like with Mibibli’s Quest, lazy = funny. Toby used MS Paint, or rather, the MS Paint “aesthetic” to get his points and vibes across, and this is something that rubbed off on him from working on Homestuck, as well as something he’s done since his earlier days online, such as on his DeviantArt account:
“Anime” Humor
While Anime had been experiencing a renaissance period online during Undertale’s development thanks to shows like Attack on Titan, a lot of people online, especially on Tumblr, still made fun of anime for a lot of its inherit eccentricities, such as common character tropes or over-reliance on fanservice. Some people straight-up used the word “anime” as a punchline in of itself. This would lead to memes such as “anime sucks” to get a rise out of people, or the now famous “Anime was a Mistake” image accompanied by an image of Hayao Miyazaki.
Undertale takes this logic and runs with it a bit, including enemies such as the Tsundereplane (who talks like a stereotype of the titular character trope), Mettaton EX, who's basically a walking Jojo reference, or this famous line from the end of Alphys’ date:
Toby just couldn’t help himself when it came to ironic humor about “anime”, given what many Tumblr reblogs were posting. That’s really how a lot of things on Tumblr operate when it comes to irony. A similar thing happened to Family Guy around this time. Originally, when shows like Steven Universe and Gravity Falls were at their peak, Family Guy was hated, with even a few memes and now-famous posts making fun of it. However, later on that hate turned into ironically praising the show. Later on, a “No Context Family Guy” account was created on Twitter, and all of a sudden people were sharing clips of the show and giving it a fair shake.
This even goes back to the days of 4Chan and My Little Pony, what started out as ironic obsession and fandom in response to a scathingly negative CartoonBrew article, became an unironic fandom on 4Chan, and later the Internet at large.
Bepis
Bepis was an injoke amongst Toby and his friend group. It found its way into Undertale in multiple places, one of which is an image that replaced a disclaimer telling dataminers to not upload the game’s sprite sheets early on in the game’s shelf life.
Undertale’s Endings
What ultimately makes or breaks Undertale for people are the game’s endings/routes. Normally, the game ends at the boss fight with Flowey, but if you clear a few “dates” with certain characters, in addition to not killing any enemies, an additional area, the hidden lab, will become available, which is then followed up by the true final boss and ending.
Part of what makes the game’s endgame bosses so effective is how they completely betray the expectations of the player that are built up all the way until they’re reached.
The Setup and Expectations
Part of what makes Undertale unique as a game is that it doesn’t just look “bad”, it knows it looks “bad.” The game’s graphics have unflatteringly been called “MS Paint” by its detractors, such as how the game’s battle sprites primarily use only black and white, and the game’s tilesets are comparatively simply. In fact, Toby didn’t even do a majority of the game’s tilesets of graphics, as that job was given to artists he hired, such as Temmie.
At the same time, this was actually all done on purpose. Some sprites and animations were cut because Toby thought they looked “too good.” Yet, this was done with the intent of making the higher-effort (in comparison) animations and boss fights later in the game that much bigger of a shock to the player.
Undertale as Creepypasta Bait
At the very start of the game, Flowey hypes himself up as a menacing individual and is established as a threat. His reappearance at the end of the game, and the fight against him reeks of creepypasta bait. Some Tumblr users even described the fight as such. A lot of the popular creepypastas in the early 2010s were shocking to people because they took what was otherwise family-friendly material, and made it creepy, bloody, and horrifying in some way. Toby took this concept and used it as a basis for that extra “shock factor” that Photoshop Flowey gives the player upon reaching him.
You feel as though you’re playing a low-quality RPG Maker game with MS Paint graphics, and then all of a sudden, you’re hit with a hyper realistic creepy boss that unleashes a barrage of attacks at you, followed by the game closing if you fail.
This also ties into the original fight against Giygas from Earthbound, and how the boss topped many “scariest enemies in video games” lists back in the day. Given the game’s simplistic, Peanuts-like artstyle in the overworld, it seemed like such a shock to have the characters transported to an uncanny and mysterious area with a droning ambient soundtrack, followed by a trek up what looked like a realistic esophagus tube. This was around the same time when games like Final Fantasy VI were pushing the SNES’ hardware through the use of more detailed sprites and shading, as well as using the system’s Mode 7 for the overworld.
Meanwhile, the Genocide Route takes Undertale’s “No One Has To Die” premise and completely flips it on its head. The name of the game isn’t just about killing everything that attacks you, but now you have to kill EVERY monster. It doubles as a commentary on classic RPG grinding, where you fight as many enemies as possible to boost up your status.
In contrast to the other route, the genocide route goes out of its way to make you feel horrible. Once you kill enough enemies in the first area and start the route proper by killing Toriel at a significantly higher level, the game paints Frisk as a ruthless killer, and the game starts playing a heavily slowed down, corrupted music track. The route turns Undertale into more of a horror game, with a droning tune playing while traveling the overworld in search of monsters to hunt, the townsfolf run away, leaving their home and shops abandoned, and you fight the hardest bosses in the game.
Psychologically Manipulated Nostalgia
For being a relatively short game, Toby was able to spark nostalgia for Undertale within the players through the game’s heavy use of leitmotifs. A leitmotif refers to a reoccurring piece of music that takes on multiple forms in different songs, and this can be done to help give a soundtrack a sense of consistency and even be used for driving emotional impact.
Take for example Asriel Dreemur’s theme, simply titled “Memory.” The song and its leitmotif are first heard in a special easter egg the player can find in Waterfall by bringing an umbrella to a lone statue, and that song is used to find a hidden cave where a secret item is held.
Memory’s leitmotif is used at pivotal moments later in the game, such as at the end of “UNDERTALE” (the titular song, which plays when Frisk explores Toriel and Asgore’s old home and the player learns the backstory behind Asriel and the Fallen Child).
It’s most notable use, however, is as the backing of “His Theme”, the song that plays at the end of the fight against Asriel. Acting as a powerful conclusion to the final boss of a pacifist route, as Asriel attempts to kill Frisk for good using all his power, but then slowly being weakened by Frisk’s refusal to hurt him. This brings Asriel into a weaker emotional state, ending with the two conversing with each other and Asriel apologizing.
And believe me, this worked. Heck, you could owe a lot of the game’s acclaim and success to its powerful use of leitmotifs.
Tumblr’s Sacred Cow
Hot off the heels of #Lovewins, Undertale featured an androgynous player character, multiple gay characters, and was able to tap into the cultural zeitgeist in ways that its contemporaries like Gone Home and 2064: ROM were unable to. And this led to the game experiencing that massive boom in popularity on Tumblr as stated earlier.
Just like with Steven Universe before it, Tumblr wanted to let the world know that Undertale was their game and wanted to punish any naysayers that dared to criticize it. They finally had their North Star in animation, and they finally had their North Star in gaming. The sheer explosion in fan art and buzz around the game was enough to make it the 2nd most reblogged video game on Tumblr in 2015, toppling other heavy weights that year like Splatoon, Animal Crossing, and Super Smash Bros.
The Way You Were “Supposed” to Play Undertale
Undertale clearly marketed the Pacifist Route (Acting with monsters and sparing them) as the primary way to engage with the game. It’s right in the game’s very tagline: “The Friendly RPG Where No One has to Die.” However, the game’s rising fanbase would take this logic to new levels and took it as a personal attack when anyone who played the game did not follow this seemingly simple instruction.
God forbid you publicly announced you were playing the Genocide Route. Undertale marked the point at which the Internet took fictional characters and the world they inhabited very seriously. As in, committing murder in a video game was just as bad as committing murder in real life. People on Tumblr used it as a way to test the character of anyone who was playing it.
In fact, when discussion around fighting against Undertale’s enemies took place, some fans didn’t use the term “defeat” or even “kill”, but “murder.” You were committing murder in a video game, and you were supposed to feel horrible, even if you had gotten sick of having the game shoved down your throat from seeing it everywhere. Whether that was through fan art, fan comics, mashups, remixes, or other bizarre methods of fan “appreciation” only Tumblr could come up with.
W.D. Gaster
Toby already had a firm pulse on the way online culture works and its fixation on speculation. Just ask the Smash Bros. and Gravity Falls communities back during their heyday. Because of this, a few hints were thrown into Undertale of a secret underlying side-plot involving W.D. Gaster, a scientist who was completely erased from the world, and all timelines, in a freak accident.
Hints and traces of him could be found in the game, but only through sheer luck or editing the “fun” value assigned to your save file. This included things like a secret sound test, a hidden room, or uncanny NPCs that shared info about Gaster.
Undertale RED
I wanted to give special mention to this fangame in particular, because it overlaps with another specific part of Tumblr culture. Undertale RED was a single boss fight with both a pacifist and genocide route the player could take, but the game prominently featured an original character by the game’s creator, Taxiderby. While Undertale itself was made in Game Maker, Undertale RED was made in Unity.
What makes Little Red Slicing Hood, or simply “Red” stand out is that this is a character archetype that was quite popular on Tumblr in 2015, at least going off of personal recollection. It just so happens that Taxiderby’s work on Undertale RED, as well as a few other projects, helped inspire Toby to bring him on for work on Deltarune.
Undertale Takes Over SoundCloud
Over the summer of 2015, Splatoon was the go-to source of content amongst SoundClown. Everyone under the banner was making their own mashups and remixes of songs from the game, and even an entire collab was started by MtH. Not even a few months later, history would once again repeat itself with Undertale.
Thanks to the overwhelmingly positive reception to the game’s soundtrack, mashups on SoundCloud were popping up at a previously unheard-of pace. Soundclown Renim G would host an Undertale mashup collab, featuring many of the mashups from the game’s initial boom period on Bandcamp.
Some of these mashups would explode to previously unheard levels of popularity for the mashup scene, such as BotanicSage’s “Waters of Megalovania”.
Triple-Q (Cont.)
Just like with Steven Universe before, Triple-Q, having a sizable presence on Tumblr and among Tumblr alumni, was pestered about Undertale. However, unlike his run-in with Steven Universe, things were slightly different this time. Triple-Q did the Genocide Route, posting screenshot proof of it to boot.
And to top it off, both Undertale mashups he would do made use of songs prominently featured in the route, that being Megalovania and Battle Against a True Hero. With the former, the mashup for it was assisted by MtH, who was very much obsessed with Undertale, to a far greater extent than him, so pressure from one of his closest friends at the time probably contributed.
GiIvaSunner / SiIvaGunner
Undertale’s use of both leitmotifs and old soundfonts would inspire a few Soundclowns to start their own fake video game music channel, entitled GiIvaSunner. The channel primarily used songs like the Flintstones theme and Love Live’s Snow Halation (because Triple-Q and his friends were massive fans of it) as leitmotifs, implanted onto iconic video game songs.
Many of the Soundclowns that took part in the aforementioned collab would go on to be founding members of the GiIvaSunner team. Undertale would also become a massive element of the channel’s identity, not just with Megalovania and other UT songs being a part of rips, but also the game being among the games to receive the highest number of rips throughout the channel’s early history, and even to this very day.
Toby even contributed a few rips of his own. No, really. When one of the channel founders, Chaze the Chat, asked Toby about contributing to the channel, he sent the team a few rips he had done, albeit under the request that he be credited as anonymous.
SANS UNDERTALE
Sans himself became a massive meme not just amongst Undertale fans, but on the Internet at large, with a majority of the memes surrounding the fight against him at the end of the Genocide route.
On the flipside, Sans’ pure aggression during the genocide boss fight painted him as a far more “emo” character than the pun-loving lazybones he is otherwise normally portrayed as, which was a net positive in Tumblr’s eyes. These implanted character traits made Sans one of the premier examples of the “Tumblr sexyman” trope, with Sans even winning a poll for the “Best Tumblr Sexyman” many years after Undertale’s release.
Outside of that, a majority of Sans memes simply amounted to referencing the Sans fight, with even the slightest hint of the beginning of Megalovania, and Sans memorable line, “Do you want to have a Bad Time” being the key aspects of the meme.
The Nintendo Community’s Dire Straits
As previously discussed in Case II, the Nintendo fanbase was at a low point after the one-two punch of E3 2015, followed by the death of Satoru Iwata. That year at E3, multiple games were announced that were either divisive, or universally panned for being too gimmicky, and only proved to the fans that Nintendo had lost the plot when it came to making the kinds of products their fans wanted.
Even though Splatoon 1 was already out, and a few more major titles for the Wii U and 3DS were in the pipeline, like Super Mario Maker, Yoshi’s Woolly World, Xenoblade Chronicles X, and later on, Kirby Planet Robobot and the next generation of Pokemon, the Nintendo fanbase was in desperate need of some kind of game that would really lift their spirits given the dire state they now found themselves in.
Given a lot of them already used Tumblr and/or Twitter, it only made sense for them to discover Undertale and latch onto it. Here was a game that channeled the spirit of Earthbound, during what was at the time a minor renaissance period for the series. Earthbound had finally received a long-awaited re-release on Wii U Virtual Console, Lucas was being added back to Super Smash Bros. for 3DS/Wii U as DLC, the 1st Mother game (now rebranded as Earthbound Beginnings) was also released on Virtual Console after its localization had been cancelled in the early 90s, Earthbound characters were included in Super Mario Maker, and to top it off, rumors had begun to sprung up that the long-awaited Mother 3 would finally see a worldwide release sometime in 2016 for either the Wii U, or Nintendo’s next console, then still known as “NX.”
Right away, major names in the Nintendo community began to play Undertale, and bring it into discussion alongside the other games they were playing at the time, despite Nintendo having zero involvement in Undertale’s development, and the game having yet to see a release on a Nintendo platform, the community really treated the game as one of their own.
For example, Balrog, hot off the heels of his discovery and review of Mibibli’s Quest, know full-well that Undertale would be a game perfect for his show, and got to work on a massive-multi-segmented review of it, covering the various routes of the game.
Undertale’s impact on the Smash Bros. community
Given Earthbound owes a lot of its popularity to the Super Smash Bros. series, it makes sense that Toby Fox was involved with the competitive scene for Super Smash Bros. back in the late 2000s, having gone to many Melee tournaments and met up with prominent members in the community like BobbyScar.
Prominent Smashtubers like Alpharad, RelaxAlax, and InfernoOmni were all quick to pick up on the game and both cover it, as well as use Undertale music and sounds in their videos. Acestar the 3rd, another example, even changed his profile picture to Asgore after he played the game, and later came out as gay that year.
As a side effect of the game’s newfound popularity here, Sans in Smash became a meme in a similar manner to characters like Goku and Shrek getting in. Even if this is due in part to Sans and his Genocide fight already being a meme in itself, the massive crossover between the Undertale fanbase and the Nintentuber/Smash fanbase would allow this particular idea/meme to have a decent amount of staying power.
Toby’s Goal
Going into this case, the one question I wanted to find a definitive answer to was as follows: “Given the content featured in Undertale, the circles it blew up in, and the impact it would have on the Internet and pop culture as a whole, did Toby set out to do all of this on purpose? Did Toby want to use Undertale to inflict societal change, to usher in the ‘new age of gay,’ much like what Rebecca Sugar and her cohorts were doing?”
Throughout all the research I did, all the sources I’ve gathered, and all the stuff I’ve been typing up until now, I feel like I can come forward and say I’ve found my answer.
We know Toby has technically always kept a progressive mindset when making his games, going back to the Halloween Hack. Toby’s aspirations led him to put what he deemed “progressive themes” in his works at large. It was a far more subtle affair when it came to indoctrination, beyond the tagline of “The friendly RPG where no one has to die”, the gay stuff was not really advertised or virtue-signaled about. It was a game first, and a cultural virus second, hence the Internet had a harder time resisting it.
At the same time, Undertale was at least able to stand on its own, whereas Gone Home was literally a dyke-core walking simulator. Gone Home was made by a bunch of no-name progressive devs and the game came out when 4Chan still ruled the roost. GamerGate and m00t’s connections to people like Anita Sarkeesian through XOXO fest definitely contributed to their power taking a hit between the two games’ releases.
On top of that, Toby already had his hand in a fair number of jars, giving him further reach. He had the Homestuck fandom on his side, he had made allies with various Tumblr artists like Temmie and Gigi, and he was also slightly notable in the competitive Smash Bros community.
And even though Toby saw his game as being relatively niche compared to major titles, he didn’t want it to be a flop either, which is why he pushed his followers to get more people to buy the game, anyway. In doing so, Undertale took over the Internet, at the right place, at the right time, and the rest is history.
American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year
Frisk, the game’s main protagonist, in addition to other characters like the fallen child, are referred to with pronouns that would otherwise be plural, such as “they” or “them.” This was done because Toby wanted to leave Frisk’s gender up to the player’s choice, yet at the same time, Tumblr’s ideology of breaking away from gender norms was reaching a new-found peak in the wake of Tumblr-led media like Steven Universe exploding in popularity, as well as Tumblr-favorable political movements like #LoveWins making headlines.
The conversation around using “they” as a single pronoun got far enough that the American Dialect Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to the study of the English language in North America, named “they” as their word of the year for 2015, and later the Word of the Decade for the 2010s as a whole.
To quote from their page discussing the vote, “They was recognized by the society for its emerging use as a pronoun to refer to a known person, often as a conscious choice by a person rejecting the traditional gender binary of he and she. ‘In the past year, new expressions of gender identity have generated a deal of discussion, and singular they has become a particularly significant element of that conversation,’ Zimmer said. ‘While many novel gender-neutral pronouns have been proposed, they has the advantage of already being part of the language.’”
Coming in 2nd place was “Thanks, Obama”, and coming in 3rd place was “ammosexual”, i.e. “someone who loves firearms in a fetishistic manner.”
Game Award Snubs
During the award season for gaming that year, Undertale didn’t receive much attention from mainstream gaming award and journalism outlets, most notably Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards, where while it was nominated Best RPG, Best Indie, and the Games for Impact award, it was not nominated for Game of the Year, which many a Tumblrite felt it very much deserved.
In spite of Tumblr having their wholesome and funny RPG game being snubbed, Toby didn’t really mind it all that much, stating on Twitter, “Hearing “UNDERTALE made me want to be kinder” or “UNDERTALE helped me through a dark time” feels more valuable than any award or score.”
GameFaqs’ Best Game Ever
While it’s best known as the go-to site for video game guides and cheats in the pre-social media era of the Internet, GameFaqs also acquired a very passionate base of gamers that discussed their hobby on their forums. In 2004, 2009, and 2015, GameFaqs would hold the “Best. Game. Ever.” Poll.
It was a tournament-style bracket where users of the sites would vote for their favorite game to determine what the titular “Best. Game. Ever.” was. In previous iterations of the poll, major games of the era like Final Fantasy VII and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time won the poll, both of which had been primary subjects of “Best Game of All Time” discussion since the late 90s, when the PS1 vs. N64 console wars were at their peak and the Internet was still a relatively niche thing for computer nerds.
But in 2015’s poll, things would play out a little bit differently. Undertale had managed to make the tournament as a nominee, and much to the shock of the site, it had broken through many barriers throughout, having toppled many all-time classics like Super Mario World, Super Smash Bros. Melee and the 1st Generation of Pokémon.
It all came to a head in the final round, which ended up being Ocarina of Time… vs. Undertale. To say the GameFaqs forums were in uproar over the whole thing was an understatement, and the rest of the Internet took notice, writing articles and plenty of Tweets about the discourse. Allegations of Tumblr and/or Undertale fans rigging the vote began to fly around, and people who were on the fence about the game were now convinced not to play it, as Undertale’s undeserved (in their opinion) victory persuaded them against playing it.
When asked about the poll, and the massive reception to the game at large, Toby didn’t expect this many people to like it this much. Even to him, he thought people would simply give it a 6, 7 or an 8 out of 10. Toby described the game as “[him] doing stuff that [he] likes and think is cool, so it’s interesting that it resonates with people, so much.”
Alas, GameFaqs was in utter disarray that a game like Undertale was all of a sudden being heralded as “Best Game of All Time” material, given its graphics and Tumblr-level humor. To some, it even signified that the standards for gaming were now at an all-time low, having fallen from the highs of the 90s and early 2000s.
2015 Vidya Gaem Awards
If there was any more proof of just how divisive of a game Undertale had become all across the Internet, this was it.
The “Earthbound-inspired” Indie Game
So, with a game like Undertale now having taken the Internet by storm, what would the game development scene learn from this? Well, given Undertale’s exploration of vulnerability and humanity in individuals, a trend began to form: Games that would explore heavy themes like depression and anxiety, a majority of which were played in a top-down RPG format.
A lot of them also seeked to deconstruct the RPG genre in a similar matter to what Undertale did, or deconstruct a different genre, such as platformers. From here, the term “Earthbound-inspired Indie Game” or “Quirky Indie RPG” would enter the gaming lexicon, with notable entries such as Omori, In Stars and Time, YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG, Knuckle Sandwich, and so on.
Indie games were already infamous for their inherit need to deconstruct the rules and conventions of gaming, but this created a whole new layer on top of that. Now, indie games needed to have LGBT representation, sometimes furries, they needed to be deconstructive or ironic, sometimes they tried too hard to ape existing, iconic retro games, at the cost of forming their own identity.
Regardless, this pillar of the indie scene would continue to truck along, with some games gaining more notoriety than others, while some would become infamous, such as YIIK.
During research for this case, I dug up some stuff that’s unrelated to Undertale and Toby directly, mainly involving FanGamer artist Ashley Davis, and potential connections to other notable artists in the lefty art scene like Noel Stevenson, Gigi, Magnolia, and even OMOCAT and Tyson Hesse, as well as connections to Anthony Burch of Destructoid and GamerGate fame. That’s a rabbit hole best saved for a different day.
As for me, I’ve got one more case left to crack and then I can finally stick a fork in this thing, and trust me when I say this is when everything will finally fall into place.
And before you ask, I will play Deltarune when it's done.
Last edited:
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2023
https://web.archive.org/web/20160211231531/https://twitter.com/RyanMelmoth
https://web.archive.org/web/20150513022732/http://gamesforweirdpeople.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20150521121715/http://gamejolt.com/games/adventure/peen-peen/40264
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S9zndnR_mc (archive)
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/desig...-freeware-classic-interview-with-ryan-melmoth (archive)
https://www.unionleader.com/voices/...cle_ef527592-4b1a-5402-8393-944173180028.html (archive)
(archive)
https://archive.is/67gZR
https://forum.starmen.net/forum/General/Tech/fobby-net (archive)
http://tomato.fobby.net/ (archive)
https://hsmusic.wiki/artist/toby-fox/ (archive)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gc-1Dq3uQQ&list=PL4IZq7fxXgMp702qe0LVqBXcG_12P6G7t&index=2 (archive)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65n6ns34Xeo (archive)
(archive)
https://mspaintadventures.fandom.com/wiki/MS_Paint_Adventures (archive)
https://mspaintadventures.fandom.com/wiki/Homestuck (archive)
https://mspaintadventures.fandom.com/wiki/Toby_Fox (archive)
https://web.archive.org/web/20111028175330/http://mspandrew.tumblr.com/post/11938555890/about-eoa5-part-1
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/14293468/homestuck-adventure-game/posts/1453119 (archive)
https://hsmusic.wiki/album/the-baby-is-you/ (archive)
https://tobyfox.fandom.com/wiki/The_Baby_Is_You (archive)
(archive)
https://x.com/OutOfRadiation/media
(archive)
(archive)
https://toby.fangamer.com/interviews/temmie/ (archive)
https://temmiechang.tumblr.com/ (archive)
https://web.archive.org/web/20060216162732/http://tuyoki.deviantart.com/
(archive)
https://cucumber.gigidigi.com/ (archive)
(archive)
https://toby.fangamer.com/interviews/gigi/ (archive)
(archive)
https://videochess.itch.io/wreckboy (archive)
https://web.archive.org/web/20150306151716/http://itisaneggpudding.com/wreckboy/wreckcredits.html
https://magnoliapearl.tumblr.com/ (archive)
https://magnoliapearl.tumblr.com/post/47217290882/iothera-fanart-omg-look-what-magnolia-just-drew (archive)
(archive)
https://egmnow.com/how-fangamer-leveled-up-gaming-merch/ (archive)
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2...d_the_world_of_video_game_merchandise_forever (archive)
https://tcrf.net/Undertale (archive)
(archive)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1002143342/undertale (archive)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLr9V6TderbX3f18JsQqDUjPIeUI_gi0Vy (archive)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU5qMWleU_g (archive)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt0uLCI14YA (archive)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI8CkCp8mao (archive)
(archive)
Interviews:
2013:
https://meloshantani.wordpress.com/2013/05/25/toby-foxs-undertale-dev-2-dev-interview-1/ (archive)
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/undertale-dev-every-monster-should-feel-like-an-individual/ (archive)
2015:
https://www.tumblr.com/doge-w-a-bloge/152781562315/you-know-i-usually-hear-people-say-toby-said (archive)
https://web.archive.org/web/20161006121359/http://existentialgamer.com/undertale-review-half-missing-face-of-downtown-la
https://web.archive.org/web/20161108130408/https://outermode.com/interview-toby-fox-undertale
https://www.themarysue.com/interview-undertale-game-creator-toby-fox/ (archive)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Undertale/comments/3wznew/toby_fox_interview_from_last_night/ (archive)
https://funnyjunk.com/channel/undertale/Interview+of+toby+fox+dev+of+undertale/xxlfLkk/ (archive)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U0vagkvUV4 (archive)
2016:
https://www.thesoundarchitect.co.uk/why-the-music-to-undertale-is-awesome/ (archive)
https://medium.com/kickstarter/unde...hat-s-become-an-industry-darling-fa4df6cee2db (archive)
https://wethenerdy.com/talking-undertale-with-toby-fox/ (archive)
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/busin...-s-like-to-have-your-game-become-a-phenomenon (archive)
Other~:
(archive)
(archive)
https://metalbatteryzone.tumblr.com/tagged/undertale (archive)
https://metalbatteryzone.tumblr.com/post/130514227784/bunjirouu-kushamisaru-courtesy-of (archive)
https://metalbatteryzone.tumblr.com...ndertale-is-shitty-and-you-are-all-shitty-for (archive)
https://metalbatteryzone.tumblr.com/post/130730890724/so-um-yeah-that-was-undertaleuh-wow-like-that (archive)
https://metalbatteryzone.tumblr.com/post/130737058839/im-also-gonna-genocide-tomorrow-but-only-as-a (archive)
https://metalbatteryzone.tumblr.com/post/130797724679/more-also-after-my-screwed-up-pacifist-run (archive)
http://gaming.moe/?p=1257 (archive)
https://undertalemashcollab.bandcamp.com/album/undertale-mash-collab-mega-in-description (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/72991833 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6182-did-the-best-game-ever-contest-convince-you-to-try-undertale (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/features/bge20_vote (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale?page=54 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/72979223 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/73020719 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/73000926 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/73005773 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/73010403 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/73008163 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/72992338 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/72988813 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/72992597 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/73017540 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/73001452 (archive)
https://megancondis.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/undertale-defeats-gamers-pop-culture-canon/ (archive)
https://unwinnable.com/2015/12/22/how-undertale-broke-the-internet/ (archive)
https://kotaku.com/undertale-is-tearing-gamefaqs-apart-1747991599 (archive)
https://mcvuk.com/business-news/und...e-best-game-ever-and-the-internet-is-furious/ (archive)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Undertale/...rtales_win_from_gamefaqs_best_game_ever_poll/ (archive)
https://americandialect.org/2015-word-of-the-year-is-singular-they/ (archive)
https://web.archive.org/web/20150513022732/http://gamesforweirdpeople.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20150521121715/http://gamejolt.com/games/adventure/peen-peen/40264
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S9zndnR_mc (archive)
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/desig...-freeware-classic-interview-with-ryan-melmoth (archive)
https://www.unionleader.com/voices/...cle_ef527592-4b1a-5402-8393-944173180028.html (archive)
(archive)
https://archive.is/67gZR
https://forum.starmen.net/forum/General/Tech/fobby-net (archive)
http://tomato.fobby.net/ (archive)
https://hsmusic.wiki/artist/toby-fox/ (archive)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gc-1Dq3uQQ&list=PL4IZq7fxXgMp702qe0LVqBXcG_12P6G7t&index=2 (archive)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65n6ns34Xeo (archive)
(archive)
https://mspaintadventures.fandom.com/wiki/MS_Paint_Adventures (archive)
https://mspaintadventures.fandom.com/wiki/Homestuck (archive)
https://mspaintadventures.fandom.com/wiki/Toby_Fox (archive)
https://web.archive.org/web/20111028175330/http://mspandrew.tumblr.com/post/11938555890/about-eoa5-part-1
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/14293468/homestuck-adventure-game/posts/1453119 (archive)
https://hsmusic.wiki/album/the-baby-is-you/ (archive)
https://tobyfox.fandom.com/wiki/The_Baby_Is_You (archive)
(archive)
https://x.com/OutOfRadiation/media
(archive)
(archive)
https://toby.fangamer.com/interviews/temmie/ (archive)
https://temmiechang.tumblr.com/ (archive)
https://web.archive.org/web/20060216162732/http://tuyoki.deviantart.com/
(archive)
https://cucumber.gigidigi.com/ (archive)
(archive)
https://toby.fangamer.com/interviews/gigi/ (archive)
(archive)
https://videochess.itch.io/wreckboy (archive)
https://web.archive.org/web/20150306151716/http://itisaneggpudding.com/wreckboy/wreckcredits.html
https://magnoliapearl.tumblr.com/ (archive)
https://magnoliapearl.tumblr.com/post/47217290882/iothera-fanart-omg-look-what-magnolia-just-drew (archive)
(archive)
https://egmnow.com/how-fangamer-leveled-up-gaming-merch/ (archive)
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2...d_the_world_of_video_game_merchandise_forever (archive)
https://tcrf.net/Undertale (archive)
(archive)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1002143342/undertale (archive)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLr9V6TderbX3f18JsQqDUjPIeUI_gi0Vy (archive)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU5qMWleU_g (archive)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt0uLCI14YA (archive)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI8CkCp8mao (archive)
(archive)
Interviews:
2013:
https://meloshantani.wordpress.com/2013/05/25/toby-foxs-undertale-dev-2-dev-interview-1/ (archive)
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/undertale-dev-every-monster-should-feel-like-an-individual/ (archive)
2015:
https://www.tumblr.com/doge-w-a-bloge/152781562315/you-know-i-usually-hear-people-say-toby-said (archive)
https://web.archive.org/web/20161006121359/http://existentialgamer.com/undertale-review-half-missing-face-of-downtown-la
https://web.archive.org/web/20161108130408/https://outermode.com/interview-toby-fox-undertale
https://www.themarysue.com/interview-undertale-game-creator-toby-fox/ (archive)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Undertale/comments/3wznew/toby_fox_interview_from_last_night/ (archive)
https://funnyjunk.com/channel/undertale/Interview+of+toby+fox+dev+of+undertale/xxlfLkk/ (archive)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U0vagkvUV4 (archive)
2016:
https://www.thesoundarchitect.co.uk/why-the-music-to-undertale-is-awesome/ (archive)
https://medium.com/kickstarter/unde...hat-s-become-an-industry-darling-fa4df6cee2db (archive)
https://wethenerdy.com/talking-undertale-with-toby-fox/ (archive)
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/busin...-s-like-to-have-your-game-become-a-phenomenon (archive)
Other~:
(archive)
(archive)
https://metalbatteryzone.tumblr.com/tagged/undertale (archive)
https://metalbatteryzone.tumblr.com/post/130514227784/bunjirouu-kushamisaru-courtesy-of (archive)
https://metalbatteryzone.tumblr.com...ndertale-is-shitty-and-you-are-all-shitty-for (archive)
https://metalbatteryzone.tumblr.com/post/130730890724/so-um-yeah-that-was-undertaleuh-wow-like-that (archive)
https://metalbatteryzone.tumblr.com/post/130737058839/im-also-gonna-genocide-tomorrow-but-only-as-a (archive)
https://metalbatteryzone.tumblr.com/post/130797724679/more-also-after-my-screwed-up-pacifist-run (archive)
http://gaming.moe/?p=1257 (archive)
https://undertalemashcollab.bandcamp.com/album/undertale-mash-collab-mega-in-description (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/72991833 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6182-did-the-best-game-ever-contest-convince-you-to-try-undertale (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/features/bge20_vote (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale?page=54 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/72979223 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/73020719 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/73000926 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/73005773 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/73010403 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/73008163 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/72992338 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/72988813 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/72992597 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/73017540 (archive)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/180989-undertale/73001452 (archive)
https://megancondis.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/undertale-defeats-gamers-pop-culture-canon/ (archive)
https://unwinnable.com/2015/12/22/how-undertale-broke-the-internet/ (archive)
https://kotaku.com/undertale-is-tearing-gamefaqs-apart-1747991599 (archive)
https://mcvuk.com/business-news/und...e-best-game-ever-and-the-internet-is-furious/ (archive)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Undertale/...rtales_win_from_gamefaqs_best_game_ever_poll/ (archive)
https://americandialect.org/2015-word-of-the-year-is-singular-they/ (archive)
Last edited:
- Joined
- Jan 23, 2022
Love the work so far! Especially the Steven Universe write up.
If suggestions are allowed: can you one day cover the graverobbing/bone theft/selling of stolen humans remains in the Tumblr Witch community, saga? ifykyk
If suggestions are allowed: can you one day cover the graverobbing/bone theft/selling of stolen humans remains in the Tumblr Witch community, saga? ifykyk
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2021
Solid work, seeing all this lore I could only vaguely recollect before being contextualized in the lefty political zeitgeist of the time is pretty eye-opening, if only because it sheds light on what all the game's fans were doing prior to its release. Curious what the last case will be centered around - gonna keep that one a secret for now?
Also, don't forget to update the Table of Contents at the top of Case II with a link to the new one, too.
Also, don't forget to update the Table of Contents at the top of Case II with a link to the new one, too.
- Joined
- Jan 19, 2020
I didn't really get into Undertale and ditched Homosuck during one of Act 6's many hiatuses. I just can't believe Toby put "The Baby is You" in Pokemon
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2023
The problem is that I can't edit the posts for Case II. There's just this bizarre rule in place where posts become uneditable at seemingly random times. I'll have to get a mod to do it. I already tried to get a mod to fix the title of the thread, but that never happened.
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2021
Ah, gotcha. I'd recommend just reporting the post(s) with a request for a mod to make the change. It's worked for me before when I needed to update a thread title.
- Joined
- May 21, 2023
On top of having a huge nostalgia blast with the forementioned double post, my mind was just opened and realized how much damage toby fox & co did do the overall web culture by making furries and progressive themes popular, yes those years where full of let's be honest some of the best fan content ever created but the flood gates where also open and thus we find ourselves in a living hell, the devil always mask himself as an angel of light isn't it?
- Joined
- May 21, 2023
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2022
That Undertale's popularity was potentially astroturfed to some degree or another does not really surprise me, seeing how there's absolutely nothing groundbreaking about it other than mediocre, weird postmodernist deconstruction of video game mechanics and tropes. That and making furfaggotry mainstream.
Yet another reason why the 2010s was an absolute cultural dumpster fire.