random-ferret:

This is a little late, but I was playing a little Undertale to celebrate the one year anniversary the other day, and something occurred to me that I’ve never seen anybody mention before. Maybe everybody’s already aware of it, I don’t know.

In a game where the characters pride themselves on how many special attacks they have, nobody thinks of Sans as anything special. Even the game itself calls him the weakest monster, but he seems to have tons of really abilities. He moves impossibly fast, appears in places he shouldn’t and summons things from out of nowhere. If you end up fighting him, he shifts gravity around, breaks through invincibility frames and dodges attacks that aren’t supposed to be able to miss. He’s much harder to beat than the ‘gods’ you fight as the final bosses of the other two paths.

If you follow the clues the game gives you and piece together his backstory, it becomes clear that Sans is much smarter than he lets on. He’s spent a lot of time trying to understand how the world works, and he’s the only character without Save powers to realize that you’ve been loading your game. If you manage to get the key to his room and get inside his hidden workshop from there, you find this:



There’s all sort of theories about what this machine is, but most people agree that this is related to the royal scientist W.D. Gaster, the secret third skeleton character who fell into his creation and was torn to pieces before the events of the game. There are little signs of him here and there, but nobody remembers him because the circumstances of his death somehow removed him from existence entirely, and the timeline shifted around him to close the gap. Earlier in the game, characters say that Sans and Papyrus appeared in Snowedin out of nowhere one day. Even if Sans doesn’t have his own memories to go by, he’s smart enough to put the pieces together to try and figure out how he got where he is, and that would have brought him to the remains of Gaster’s creation. The only thing that could completely erase somebody like that would have to be some kind of time machine, and even if Sans couldn’t get it working like it was supposed to, he might have gotten it to do something else. Instead of going forward or backwards, he can make time stop.



There is one scene in the game where you can clearly see this in action. When Sans invites you to Grillby’s, pay attention to the animations in the background. When he’s hinting to you about Flowey, the room goes dark except for a light around both of you.

It looks like it’s just for dramatic effect, but outside of that bubble of light, all the animations freeze completely. When he’s done talking, everything goes back to normal. He even turns around before he leaves and tells you that he forgot what he was going to say. He’s putting on a show for the other characters in the bar who just saw him start to ask you something, then get up and leave.

Of course, if you’ve read other theories online you probably knew about the time machine and the connection to Gaster, but that’s not the part I wanted to talk about.



Undertale is full of anime references, but the one it references the most is JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. You can spot it in bits of dialogue, musical cues, and even the design of one of the main characters:

The main antagonist of several seasons of the anime, Dio, appears to have godlike powers too. He teleports around, escapes inescapable attacks, and even summons huge things out of nowhere. The main characters can’t figure out how he can do all these things, it appears to break the established rules for how their powers can work. It’s not until the second to last episode that they learn that every ability he seems to have is just a creative use of his real power, to freeze time.



Sans isn’t moving fast, he’s just moving faster than everything else. He can move people and things while time is stopped, explaining his ability to take you through ‘shortcuts’ that only work while he’s with you. The huge skull cannons he summons during his fight are physical machines, not magic (They’re actually another invention of Gaster’s, going by the name of their sprites in the game files). His gravity-changing attacks are just him freezing time and then rotating everything around you so that it feels like the force pulling you down suddenly started pulling you up. It’s completely seamless, the only time in the game you even notice anything happening is when he’s trying to intimidate you by making the screen flash while he ‘teleports’ away.



This is why the other characters think Sans is lazy. This is why he eats multiple lunches a day. He’s spending hours running around in between the seconds, and he only stops when he needs to sleep. The fight with Sans is the longest one in the game, and it takes a solid fifteen minutes if you do everything perfectly. For him, it went on for days. In the end, he just couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer.

