So this is an idea about Gaster and about the forgotten man's identity.
It used to be the general consensus for the fandom to believe that the man behind the tree was W.D. Gaster, as in, the same guy as the one we hear at the beginning of the game in the Gonermaker.
However it has become clear in the last two chapters that the forgotten man and Gaster are not supposed to be the same person.
The speech patterns are different, the forgotten man mentions being unable to speak anywhere outside of Mancountry and we can see G talk to us at different times throughout the game outside of Mancountry, and a PS4 achievement seems to suggest that the "Eggs" the forgotten man gives us are considered "issues" by Gaster.
These achievements don't unlock if you complete a chapter in which you have received an Egg
With all of those new informations in mind, we're left with a new question : WHO is the forgotten man?
In this post I want to explore one possible answer to that question. I won't get into WHAT the forgotten man did to be so heavily associated with Kris's past trauma, but I have a very specific idea concerning WHO he could be.
For starters, I want to re-establish WHY we thought that the forgotten man was Gaster in the first place.
It basically boiled down to two or three debatably weak arguments, being 1) the room in which we meet the forgotten man has a shape similar to the one in which we meet Gaster in UT, 2) the song "man.ogg" has some similarities to the Gaster's Theme (only one interval is a match), 3) the way the narration only refers to the forgotten man as "a man" is reminiscent of how Gaster in UT is also often only referred to and identified with only the face that he is "a man". Of course we have the famous RIverperson's quote "the man who speaks in hands", but we also have his theme in the game files which is simply called "him.ogg" (and in DR it is called "ANOTHER HIM"), and a line of strings which appeared only in the 1.05A version of UT, before being erased in the following update, simply reading "HE IS".
Some would also say that Gaster's role in UT as a character only appearing through "easter eggs" was referenced with the frogotten man's Eggs. And also the Mystery Man's sprite in UT, widely accepted as a representation of Gaster, kinda looks like an Egg.
While these arguments aren't the strongest there are, they WERE understandable. There ARE some reasons to assume the forgotten man and Gaster are, at the very least, linked in some way.
And I believe that the latest chapters, while COMPLETELY debunking the idea that they could be the same person, gave us EVEN MORE reasons to logically link Gaster and the forgotten man together.
First and foremost, of course we have the PS4 achievements themselves. Gaster might not be the one giving us the Eggs, but the Eggs somehow represent an "issue" for him. As if, among ALL THE THINGS the player can or cannot do during a playthrough, meeting the forgotten man is somehow THE ONLY THING that Gaster didn't plan for, or didn't want, or tried to avoid etc... that Gaster considers an "issue". That, on itself, establish that the forgotten man and Gaster have a link through this "issue" that can be caused, and maybe imply some kind of antagonism between the two of them, somehow.
The forgotten man's appearances in Ch3 and Ch4 have a TON of references to the Gonermaker, a place in which only Gaster (and the player, because Gaster explicitly invited them in it and connected them to it) has access to. The Flying Aces' dialogues talk about "monochrome copies" and "photocopying" a Kris, directly making us think about the Vessel that was created in the Gonermaker. Not only that, but in Ch4, the dialogue with the sink mentions the "grey" in-between Kris's fingers, that they cannot "completely wash away", once again calling back to the Vessel, its grey skin, and the fact it seemed to be a copy, like every other Goners we know, of an already existing character, Kris.
BUT NOT ONLY THAT, we can ALSO find references TO the forgotten man, IN the Gonermaker!! For the question "WHAT IS ITS FAVORITE FOOD?", there used to be other options than the ones we have in the game, being "SWEET; SOFT; SOUR; SALTY; COLD; PAIN". These other options were "GRAINS, MEAT, DAIRY, SWEETS, FRUIT, VEGETABLES, EGG". AND THAT'S NOT ALL!! For some reason, the variable for the error handler in the Gonermaker is simply called "EGG" (which can be tied back to the "COMPLETE WITHOUT ISSUE" achievement, because the "EGG" here is an error handler).
And I'm still not done with the Gonermaker! One of the questions Gaster asks us is "PLEASE GIVE IT A GIFT", and the options are "KINDNESS; MIND; AMBITION; BRAVERY; VOICE". It is strange for this list to be made out of positive characteristics describing someone's personality, and then also "VOICE". Gaster calling "VOICE" a gift implies that having a voice shouldn't be taken for granted in this world, implying that at least ONE person, somewhere, doesn't have a "VOICE"... The only character we know who is unable to use his voice, to talk to us, most of the time, is the forgotten man. He says himself that Mancountry is the only place in which he can talk, and that this place will disappear soon enough, effectively making him a mute character, someone without a voice. It seems that by considering "VOICE" as a gift, Gaster is implicitly referencing to the forgotten man himself.
A much more benign and possibly meaningless connection we can draw, but that i still feel the need to mention, is the fact that the forgotten man and Gaster are the only characters referring to "DELTARUNE", without precising "the tale" or "the legend" OF "DELTARUNE". As if they were directly talking about the game itself. The way they talk about it too seems to be breaking the fourth wall in some way, as they are both talking to the (relative) long time it is taking for the game to be completed. They are the ONLY ones talking about DELTARUNE in that way, as if they were aware of its status as a game, BEYOND its status as "THE LEGEND OF THIS WORLD" in the prophecy, like all the other characters know about it.
Because of all of these connections that clearly feel purposeful, I think it is impossible to completely separate the forgotten man from Gaster. Even though they're not the same guy, there is something going on between them IN SOME CAPACITY.
In fact, I believe that the forgotten man has been "teased" alongside Gaster in UT, but we simply didn't have enough context to know that those hints weren't meant to be talking about Gaster.
After all, the Riverperson has always mentionned TWO men that we must be wary of.
"Beware the man who came from the other world."... Maybe the "MAN'S WORLD" we visited in Ch3?
We cannot be sure. But the fact that now the word "man" is much more linked to the forgotten man than Gaster, it recontextualizes those two quotes, and maybe even explains WHY there were TWO in the first place, with one seemingly refering to nothing we could know of at the time : because one was talking about Gaster, and the other was talking about the forgotten man.
And now we reach the start of the actual theory.
Let's reconsider that first Riverperson quote, first.
"Beware the man who speaks in hands."
Of course, this quote has been associated with the font Wingdings, used in room_gaster to write the Entry Number 17, because that font uses a lot of hands in its alphabet.
But a lot of people also pointed out that "speaking in hands" could be easily interpreted as "using sign language" by people who wouldn't know about Wingdings.
This interpretation was considered an incorrect one for the longest time, because clearly, that dialogue was meant to talk about Wingdings, and we know Gaster is the one using Wingdings because the Entry Number 17 appears in room_gaster and the full name of Gaster is "W.D. Gaster", as one of his followers told us.
It has always seemed strange to me that, somehow, the guy named W.D. Gaster is no longer talking in Wingdings when he's meeting us and talking to us in DR. Of course, it wouldn't have been possible for most players to play the game with an intro entirely written in Wingdings, but still. It is strange that Gaster just, starts talking with a common alphabet instead of the one he has always used.
In fact, any reference to Wingdings has now totally disappeared from Gaster's character in DR. The letters "W.D." are never brought up nor relevant, and any phrases suggesting that it might be a bit hard to decipher literal Wingdings in front of us, like "You cannot read the strange symbols" or "...or maybe it's just the handwriting" from Sans's secret lab in UT, are just never brought up at any point in DR.
There was a reason why people thought the secret valentine letter from the 2023 february UTDR Newsletter was written by Gaster, and it was because this introduction, mentionning an illegible letter than the read can only understand if they "squint their eyes" and "squint their heart" was reminiscent of the way Wingdings used to be described in Sans's secret lab in UT.
But it is now clear that this letter wasn't written by Gaster, but by the forgotten man. The quote "WASH YOUR FACE" that both the letter and the Ch3 interaction with the forgotten man share should be enough to prove it.
So what, the forgotten man wrote this letter in Wingdings?
In UT, there's this unused room everybody knows about in which we can find a NPC named "redacted", who seems to be covered up by a white stroke of a brush, as if to hide what it looks like behind it, and who can only say, in Wingdings, "[redacted]".
This NPC seems to have been, in some way, "redacted" from something, maybe from reality itself, since its appearence and what it has to say seems to have been purposefully blocked out from our reach.
This NPC, in my opinion, is very reminiscent of the forgotten man himself, who also is in some way "redacted" from DR, as he can never truly "appear" himself, and is only represented as being hidden behind something, and is ALSO unable to talk. This makes me think that the NPC [redacted] from UT was always meant to be a representation of what the forgotten man is, out of the context we now associate with him.
Actually, the very fact that the forgotten man is unable to talk thematically links him directly to the Wingdings font, as the most common alternative to communicate for someone who is unable to talk, is to convey what they mean through hand gestures, "speaking with their hands", and as we can directly see in DR ;
(Ch2 optional dialogue if you met the forgotten man in Ch1)
(Ch4 optional dialogue is you met the forgotten man in Ch3)
the forgotten man uses his hands A LOT to communicate what he has to say.
So what am I trying to say? Isn't all of these potential connection to Wingdings just an indirect way to connect the forgotten man to Gaster once more?
Well, yes, but not only. I think it is interesting to point out that, for some reason, Gaster is no longer using Wingdings in DR, and we have that new forgotten man who maybe seems to be using Wingdings, or at least making references to Wingdings more often than Gaster himself.
And before that, those two characters were so similar it was very common to assume they were the same character.
We know that W.D. Gaster was "shattered across time and space", whatever that means. What would have prevented this "shattering" to split him in two, making one entity out of "Gaster", anagram of "Stager", the one staging DELTARUNE for us and inviting us in, and another entity out of "Wingdings", in the form of the forgotten man, who communicates mainly through hand gestures, and canoncially writes in a way that is illegible until we "squint our heart"?
Could be why the theme of Gaster we can hear at the beginning of DR is called "ANOTHER HIM", and not simply "him" like it used to in UT.
The name W.D. Gaster has always had that weird dichotomy to it, because it clearly was composed of TWO things ; a font, like we could see characters like Sans and Papyrus being named after on, and a surname we can actually encounter in real life, which seems to be an anagram of "Stager". People always had a sort of suspicion that Gaster somehow was "two", in some way (one of the most popular case of this tendency being how some people used to interpret the Mystery Man sprite as having a second face that is made more visible if the sprite is turned upside-down).
Could this second face be a representation of "Wingdings", the forgotten man?
it is worth noting as well that, according to how Sans and Papyrus are named, the font chosen to call a character fits their personality and main characteristics : Sans is named after Comic Sans because it is a small and goofy font, and Papyrus is named after a bombastic and (also) goofy font.
Wingdings, as a font, is a joke ; it cannot be understood without decyphering it, so if ever used as an actual font, it will always be in the context of some puzzle to solve (it was used for this reason in UT). This would fit very well to the forgotten man, who seems to LITERALLY be a puzzle we need to decipher, ESPECIALLY with how convoluted and confusing his riddles in Ch3 sounded.
Not only that, but the much friendlier and explicitly confusing way the forgotten man speaks compared to the straight-to-the-point, concise attitude of Gaster in DR, fits a lot more the silly and joke-adjacent aspect of the Wingdings font.
this is the main theory of this post. I think W.D. Gaster got split into two different characters, the voice from the Gonermaker ("Gaster"), and the forgotten man ("Wingdings").
I have some more thoughts to add but this is mostly baseless so don't take it very seriously.
We can assume, based on how the forgotten man talks about DELTARUNE in a similar way as Gaster does, that he too is somewhat aware of DELTARUNE's status as a game.
Gaster seems to be some sort of "creator" to this game, it is implies through the way he talks about sharing it with us, or how he mentions the long wait between chapters release, or how he directly calls it "MY DELTARUNE" at the end of Ch4. So, if the forgotten man is talking about DELTARUNE in a similar way, does it mean that he has a similar status in regards to DR? Is he too some kind of "developper"?
Well, we know that for some reason, "EGG" is used as an error handler in the Gonermaker, and several dialogue options for one question were scrapped, but used to include "EGG".
Could it be that those part of the DEVICE code weren't made by Gaster, but by the forgotten man?
The reason why i propose this idea is because of one of the way we can interpret the forgotten man's Eggs, as on-the-nose references to video games' "easter eggs".
Thinking about those Eggs as being called "Eggs" as a way to refer to "easter eggs" in turns makes the topic of "easter eggs" central to the forgotten man's discussion, and with it its history. And the origins of easter eggs in a video game came from a creator dispossessed of his work, who still wanted a part of him to be present in the game he made, so it could still be his.
The easter egg in question is in a way very similar to the forgotten man's apparitions, appearing only in an usually unnaccessible part of the map that can be unlocked by going through some very unusual steps.
this story is very cool i invite anyone to look it up for more information
If the forgotten man's Eggs are meant to be the purest representation of an easter egg, maybe they represent the forgotten man's effort to still have an impact on this game he helped to create but was evicted from, as this used to be the easter egg's original purpose.
But this last bit is just wild speculations.
All of this to say. Holy shit two Gasters.
