incidentally that also means that if there's no evidence against it (like with mettaton) then a character that is referred to as they/them has they/them as their confirmed preferred pronouns and is almost certainly nonbinary
Spoiler: spoiler No, I absolutely agree that Papyrus would forgive him. He'd certainly get over it way before Sans forgives himself for, well. Anything. I enjoy the mental image of that "I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed" lecture coming with a helpful little diagram. A crossed out "SPARE--> HUG--> STAB" and a circle "SPARE --> HUG --> FRIENDSHIP!"
@unknownanonymous seems like it! there's also the mettaton poster in alphys's room, signed by mettaton with the sentence "thank you for making all my dreams come true" or something very close to that.
anyway imagine the culture clash on the surface even with ambassador papyrus, that's probably going to require frisk to sort out or maybe one of the other fallen humans-all their coffins are open and empty at the end, and asriel did bring all the other souls he absorbed back to life and even brought himself back to life for a bit even if he turned back into a zombie flower again.
by 'culture clash' i mean humans using they/them as neutral while monsters use it/its lots of monsters being offended that humans assumed their gender lots of humans being offended at being called 'it' frisk or someone has to step in and explain
had a fic idea of monsters getting their own country and basically becoming the most scientifically advanced and sustainable country because, essentially, it's cheaper for them to go cutting-edge than it would be for anyone else because they don't have to replace old technology since they're building from scratch
incidentally i was thinking about how to get an always-hot environment for the hotland monsters and then i was reading up on things for a sci-fi story and cloud nines giant geodesic spheres (they get stronger the bigger they are, because geometry) that act as greenhouses, big enough that they only need to be heated a degree or so above the ambient temperature to float into the air they'd have to be weighed down a bit during winter but you could have an always-tropical flying city in a temperate zone EDIT: added link
how many monsters do you think there are? mettaton's maximum ratings are something around 13,000 so that's the lower limit.
i dunno but 13000 feels like a good minimum, at least. there are quite a few big areas that the player is not able to explore, so there's definitely room for a lot of monsters. here's a complete map of undertale someone made, if that helps.
i found another helpful resource - the complete undertale text project! all the text of undertale and some textless images! the ultimate, convenient reference for fic-writing and fanart and stuff!
to revive a thing from about seven pages ago: i've been thinking about nochocolate's timeline and how nochocolate said that frisk's journey through the underground took a day or less and provided canonical evidence for it, and just... that doesn't make sense to me. the underground is pretty big, there are times when frisk sleeps, and well... it just feels to me like living through the game would take much longer and be much harder than simply playing it. so, i'm headcanoning that monsters have bad and/or inconsistent timekeeping when it comes to days, since they don't actually have a day-night cycle provided by the sun.
why would frisk's journey be considered as taking a day? i mean, it might take a day on the surface, flowey having his time powers up until frisk arrives implies that time in the underground and on the surface are separate so who knows what the difference is...time might pass three times faster in the underground than on the surface for all we know.
Or, y'know... Frisk is a lost preteen who just suddenly developed time travel powers. Their sense of chronology is probably going to be a bit off for a while.
this is why nochocolate thinks it takes a day or less i disagree with them but this is where they suggest the idea and their reasons for it
oh okay i didn't remember correctly. still that doesn't really make any sense-like, even if frisk only slept in the ruins that would still bring it to two days. so, really long monster days, or maybe monsters use a different language that chara's translating and there's a translation mistake, or something.
also i just realized something with my headcanon of "time used to pass much slower in the underground than on the surface, after chara fell the temporal differences reversed due to the temporal gradient becoming too steep", it is entirely possible that all the fallen humans personally knew chara before they fell. like for all we know they were all chara's cousins or something.