I was on board the magical constructs thing but I was not aware anyone thought sans was older? To me sans is clearly an adolescent, I think young (maybe ~11), and very very neglected, while Papyrus is recently postadolescent, like... 17ish, and had some kind of guardian up until recently. Spoiler: undertale spoilers, fictional character suicidality The reason sans can run circles around Papyrus in combat is because he taps into desperation measures more readily, not because he's actually stronger in some absolute sense. When he comes at you like an avenging angel at the end of that run, and he says he should have stopped you and implies he's at fault for what you've done, it's because he's been hurt before (whatever caused him to be neglected, whatever happened to him while he was neglected) and he wants no one else to ever be hurt like that again. He makes himself responsible because he doesn't want to ever find out how Papyrus breaks under strain. In the end, he isn't there when Papyrus spares you. Isn't there to warn him, to try to strike fear into his innocent heart and make him save himself. Isn't there to see him choose mercy; paradoxical, absurd, but the only choice he could have made in that moment and still been himself. In the end, there is nothing sans can do to protect Papyrus, and he can't bring himself to mount more than one ATK against you, because by the time sans is standing there, ready to kill and die for the sake of the world that failed him, all his rage has settled onto one target, and it's not you. It's himself. (His DEF has never been above one as far back as he remembers. That would require a will to live.)
The creators of Undertale said that Sans was older, or at least that Papyrus would address him with the term "aniki" in a Japanese translation, which refers to an older brother.
Wow, apparently an official translator, or maybe the actual author, disagrees? Huh. I really thought it was just... blatantly obvious that sans was the ruthless little child soldier and Papyrus was his gangling role model. Papyrus doesn't seem all that young to me, just sheltered. And sans's maturity feels extremely... fragile. Like it's missing every single nonessential piece. Ah well. Turns out there is more than one reading of a pair of fictional characters. We can keep our headcanons and go our separate ways.
I've always found it rather easy to read Sans as older mostly due to the difference in their personalities. Well that and I've got experience with being the shorter brother. I'm a five foot nothing compared to my younger brothers! Who just fucking tower. There's also the fan shit that makes it kind of hard to read him as younger than Papyrus. Dad Sans is just a staple of the fanbase. Or at least it was? Not sure if it is now since I don't really look into what the fandom does much nowadays.
It's looking like maybe my approach was the weird one. I figured I had nothing to add to UT fandom, but... perhaps me writing out my sans & Papyrus backstory would actually give lots of people a new perspective.
It'd be interesting to see a different take, I think yeah! You often end up running around the same ideas over and over again in fandoms...
On Arthur, the dog and the baby can see and react to Nadine, DW's imaginary friend, which implies she's not so imaginary. Ghost kid? Or I suppose she could be a thoughtform/tulpa, but that would belong in the lighthearted theories thread.
Spoiler: Minor Thor Ragnarok spoilers When Odin says "I love you my sons" that is the first and last time he's ever said that to Loki And Irkens can technically get taller but the Tallest cull any before they're old enough.
In "Holes", Lewis a.k.a. Barfbag is probably buried in one of the holes after his rattlesnake bite. It takes nine hours to drive to Green Lake, so an ambulance wouldn't do much good, and the Warden and Mr Sir haven't shown any concern for the wellbeing of campers otherwise.
A thought; alt Calliope would be no more able to run a utopia than Caliborn would. She wouldn't actively try to make it horrible, but she doesn't really have a good grasp of what is actually good for people. Time shenanigans mean she could be running Beforus the way Caliborn did Alternia.
Not so horrifying, but I saw some fanart of homestuck trolls with yellow teeth like their horns and claws and I think I might run with that myself from now on. (If I had to explain it further I’d probably say they’re like rat teeth - continuously growing and with iron in the enamel making them harder. Trolls probably don’t gnaw much but considering how long they can live continuously growing teeth would be useful)
So you know how pearls physically cannot disobey an order from their masters? And you know how in the episode IMMEDIATELY after we learn this, when Pearl confesses her feelings to Rose, she responds with "Please don't ever stop"? And you know how the wording of her order to Pearl in ASPR is very similar to that? Anyway I'm not saying Rose INTENTIONALLY ordered Pearl to never stop loving her. I'm just saying that Pearl might have processed it as an order, and that if so...well, can you really blame her for not moving on if she literally cannot?
Is the wording that similar? She says please in both, but I doubt that's a pearl command thing so much as a Rose thing, and she prefixed the silence command with actually saying 'this is my last order to you'. Plus what she was asking Pearl to not stop doing was imagining things Rose didn't tell her to imagine, and even the specific fantasy Pearl had was of being a runaway who met a Rose Quartz who she made happy, who she didn't belong to. If it were an order, wouldn't Pearl be always living in an imagined history where that happened, or at least always remembering two versions of how she came to Earth? ...then again, that could be a fun dark AU, depending on how it played out.
Maybe this is tacky, but a thing which struck me today; trolls turn job titles into violent ones like "legislacerator", "archeradicator", and "scienstiff", and I don't think they were used in canon but "mediculler" and "doctorturer" get used in fanfic. I also read a fic where in troll culture "therapy" was a form of intense mental torture. I wondered if they shouldn't have a violently-adjusted word for therapist too, but then I realised they might just pronounce it with a long A. Possibly too flippant to use in fic, but it's a thought.
Cirava took up smoking to deliberately damage their throat and conceal the obviously gendered nature of their voice because lowbloods can't access proper transition resources.
Everything we actually saw in the comic showed that many if not all of the lusii aren't sapient and can't communicate in language with their charges; the narration explicitly says the prototyping is the first time they've been able to talk with the lusii. Either PQ Vriska projected all her own self-loathing onto the spider psychically "talking" to her so she didn't blame herself, or she was lying to make Reader kill the spider for her.
Zebruh isn't just being a dick to his slaves for no reason. Colder blood equals slower metabolism. He genuinely doesn't realise his "guests" need to eat more often than he does.
