fionabahm:

pyreo: This might be a weird idea but What if Sans’s telescope prank wasn’t only a prank, but also a test?

Normally, the kind of prank where you trick someone into getting a mark on their face is a stealth one. The embarrassment is through them not realising the mark and going on with their lives until someone else decides to tell them, or they look in a mirror eventually. They also realise they were the ones who participated, unknowingly, in getting a silly mark.

In this scenario, everyone basically yells SANS and tries to call him on it, resulting in him joking about a refund. But there’s no way Frisk would know about the eye blotch. The normal run of the joke would be for Frisk to obliviously carry on until they find a mirror somewhere. Instead, most people confront Sans immediately.

Maybe he was testing to see if we, the player, really were there. Frisk could’ve turned on him and called him on the prank… despite having no way to know they’ve got a pink eye. That’s what WE know. We outed our existence to Sans.

@saveloadreset

Pyreo, I disagree with you and normally I wouldn’t feel the urge to confront this about it, but since I was mentioned I feel the need to make commentary on this. And my thoughts on the idea that the player is a distinct entity, and that sans is aware of it. If I come off as a little aggravated, it’s because I’m frustrated at seeing this sort of thing directed at me.

Again.

For perhaps the seventh time in twenty-four hours.

Alright …

Undertale messes with perspective constantly, The door behind Sans’ house. The switch behind the pillars. The fact that Toby designs the jokes so that the player will laugh at them doesn’t mean that Sans is a fourth-wall breaking deadpool. It just means that Toby is writing the jokes for the player. Sometimes a joke is just a joke.

Take the first pun-off with Sans for example. The screen zooms in, he faces the screen and gives us a darling wink, raising a hand in the air, then two. Ba-dum-pish! “SANS!” Does this mean that Sans is addressing the player? At first glance, maybe. But I would argue that it requires a little more digger.

You know, in that same scene, papyrus does the same thing. He faces the camera, scarf blowing in the wind, as he talks about how great he is and wonderful he is. Wouldn’t this suggest that Papyrus is putting on a show for the player as well? That’s a bit messy, isn’t it?

Here’s the simple fact; if Sans or papyrus did not turn to face the camera, that scene would have been more boring. We wouldn’t have been able to see sans raise his hands, the visual gag would have fallen apart. We wouldn’t have seen Sans raise his arms, we wouldn’t have gotten as good a glimpse of Papyrus’ scarf flapping in the wind. It would have made the game more boring to play. The game is designed around our limited perspective, the jokes it tells, the way it plays, even the puzzles it has us solve.

Everyone keeps on trying to insist that Sans is aware of the player and judging them, talking about where he’s facing, obscure moments he’s turned toward the player … ‘Look at him. He’s judging us. He’s never taking his eyes off us.’ Let me turn that around … Remember what direction that Sans is facing when he’s making the final judgment, right? When he’s hissing bitter sarcasm, when he’s asking why we killed his brother, when he’s counting down the number of times we died. Is he facing toward the screen when bitterly facing down the creature that killed all his friends or calling a time-traveler to task for their cruelty?

People LOVE to talk about how Sans faces forward in these prior scenes, but when he’s directly addressing judgment on us, facing down one of the few real threats to this universe, taking them REALLY seriously, Sans isn’t looking at us. He’s looking at Frisk. Talking to Frisk.

I don’t understand why people keep on trying to turn Sans into this meta-aware entity. He’s just a dude. Sans isn’t the only character who refuses to turn away from the screen on occassion. Undyne never looks backward or to the side when she’s waiting for us to sit down for our date. All sprites with multiple sides turn directly toward the front after we’re done talking to them if they don’t have anywhere else important to look. Monster kid looks ‘toward’ us all the time after Frisk/MK encounters Undyne each times. Many sprites are not actually capable of turning away from the front.

But people want Sans to be special. They love him. They adore him. They want him to surpass the limits of the game, they want him to dance on the fourth wall. That’s too bad, though. Because he doesn’t. He plays with some meta elements in his fight, but frankly, everyone in Undertale does. He attacks us while we’re still picking what to do and refuses to end his turn. Napstablook’s bullet patterns fall from his actual sprite rather than the borders of the box. Muffet drops spiders on top of us while her pet tries to eat us. Asgore destroys the MERCY button. Mettaton releases little robots with parachutes that fall below the box and then attack us with bullets thrown from outside the box and behind. And Omega Flowey God. God, Omega Flowey. Interface screw is a staple of Undertale’s best boss battles.It doesn’t mean they’re aware they’re in a game.

I am so tired of this argument. Because, in order to believe it, one needs to take possible insinuations during jokes and silly moments with Sans as having more weight than the actual, canonical things he says. The way he faces down Frisk the way he calls them ‘kid’ even at the absolute, when he hates them totally, how he shares his secrets and assumptions on Frisks’ nature at the very end because really there’s nothing left to lose and yet never mentions a third party or possessing force.

But because he doesn’t turn away from the screen when joking about fried snow, or pulls a prank on Frisk without a reflective surface in the area, or the camera zooms on him when making a bad pun, he is assumed to know about the player? Because that carries more weight than the scene of actual judgment?

Feels flimsy. I don’t buy it.

(via owllfinity-deactivated20181231)