From Earthbound to Touhou to Undertale to hell

since i only ever send rick rolls to ppl i figured id just post one for all my followers for april fools day this year to save myself the effort

Like, put aside his desperation and his depression and the way he waits until the last minute of the worst run to confront you with violence. I hear the ‘he never does anything in any other run’ issue and raise a different take: he absolutely does something, in every single run, good or bad. Those just don’t involve stopping you with force.

sans doesn’t drop his comedy routine for much, so, I’m gonna be honest with you, when I hear him talking about how if he hadn’t made that promise, you’d be ‘dead where you stand?’ I take it as a sign that sans had a favorite way of stopping potential anomalies. And that was killing them immediately, whenever he caught a whim of any weird time shit.

So, he makes that deal, and he doesn’t fight you. Doesn’t kill you. Just watches you waltz through. And if you don’t kill PAPYRUS, he’ll joke with you, mess with you, have fun little jokes and escapades with you. ’Good friends, bad jokes.’ And then he comes at you in the judgment, every time, looking over what you did. Calling you out with this isn’t the first time you’ve done a neutral and counting your kills, laying it thick, telling you to do better, only dropping the veil when you kill PAPYRUS out of what I assume to be pure brotherly rage.

He ain’t a hero. And in any case, it’s not what he’s trying to be, most of the time. sans’ knowledge of the timeline is incomplete, but he appears to know that resets are possible. In fact, in many neutral judgments, sans will allude to how you must have heard this many times before, or how you should try not killing anyone ‘next time.’

See, sans’ first instinct on seeing the human go all murdery doesn’t seem to be to stop them now. Naaah, he seems more concerned with setting things up so that he can try to advise them, guide them. He takes it as a matter of course that this is but one iteration of the world, and that his end goal isn’t to stop the human in this iteration, but try to inspire mercy in the the next one.

He’s never trying to be the hero of the story. He’s trying to be Frisk’s Iroh. Knowing his tactics, in a messed up way it make sense that he waits until the last minute.

Waits for the human to change. Waits for the timeline to veer into a course where there isn’t a reset, where there’s still room for the human to reconsider next time. It’s the foundation of his strategy; looking at this shitty timeline and thinking ‘well, it’s gonna get reset anyway, might as well try to get them to like me and the other monsters so the next one might be better, even if I don’t remember it.’

It’s only at the end that sans steps in. Not because everyone is dead but because if the human keeps going, there will be no further iterations and plan A is now a wash.

In spite of looking at time linearly, he thinks on the same plane as the human does. Viewing the world in terms of timelines; in terms if ‘this time’ and ‘next time.’ In a manner of speaking, it’s a very cold way to view the world. But you could also argue that it’s one of the most effective ways, considering how many players just refuse to do the worst run and never meet sans in his serious mode.

I agree largely with you: he isn’t trying to be a hero, and he shouldn’t be treated as such by fans. I think the way I feel about his motives for acting this way, though, are mixed. If his first instinct is to kill you, then he really spends most of his time in most routes just protecting you from himself. It makes it a little hard for me to feel like he’s necessarily a good person for that: it’s like someone saying you should be grateful that they’re being nice compared to what they ‘could’ do to you. Suddenly, his loving Uncle Iroh banter with you looks a lot scarier because behind that is this constrained desire to murder you, a child, over a promise to a stranger. At what point does the act drop and ‘real’ Sans show his face? It does say a lot, however, that he’s willing to give kindness a try, despite all his instincts to just give up and kill, which is precisely what made me like him to begin with. 

I like that Sans is playing the long game, but I will still point out that hoping passively for mercy in the next world is an active decision to not prevent suffering in the one in front of him; I understand where you’re coming from, and I feel like you have very good points, but I still don’t feel necessarily that Sans’s actions in the No Mercy route are necessarily the best options he could have chosen. I think why people do or don’t choose the No Mercy run is largely a result of their own morality. A part of it is because they don’t want to hurt the characters they’ve grown to love, such as Sans playing nice, but that also includes Papyrus, Undyne, Alphys, and other characters who don’t view the world as hopeless. Even if they’ll be fine in the next world, they still die in this world. By letting you kill them, he enables your power trip. He might hope that he canstill  influence the player to choose a better option, but he simply… is gone for most of the No Mercy run. No helping Alphys evacuate, just giving you minimal warnings, etc. He could still attempt to control your behavior while minimizing the amount of damage you do. He doesn’t even know at this point if you’ve done a pacifist route or not, so he doesn’t know if he’s influenced you before. He’s so convinced he’s right, in this sense, that he doesn’t contribute in a way we know of to other attempts to influence the human. It’s hard to say he does something besides nothing- or, verbally threatening you- in that route before the fight.

He, again, only steps in when it’s absolutely necessary. His goal at this point is to irritate you until you reset. Punishing you by force in this way is, in a sense, influencing your behavior to become better, even if in a different way than usual. How many people would have still done the No Mercy run if you had to fight Sans right out of the Ruins? In such a setting where it’s nearly hopeless that the human will stop their behavior, it takes him a long time to realize that. His reluctance to fight you, while interesting (is it his promise? Does he put weight in Papyrus’s words that anyone can be better?), also ironically makes his job harder; it’s much harder to fight you at LV19 than, say, LV6. I have to question how much of Sans’s guidance actually influences the player; it’s Flowey, of all people, who tells you to not kill anyone to get the ‘best ending’, even if it was just so he could set the stage to become the god of hyperdeath. I suppose it depends on who’s playing.

He never seems able to shake how dangerous the human can be. And instead of dealing with that in a constructive, positive way, his first instinct is to explain why he hasn’t tried to kill us. For someone who’s supposedly so laid back, he really needs to chill.

Hey.

I don’t know if you noticed, but it’s been quite a while since I last published anything new regarding TBPW, especially this damned 7th chapter. Just a few more days and it’ll be one entire month without updates. And now, the more time advances, the more desperate I grow about ever being able to finish it. The fact that I still haven’t been able to find anyone who could effectively help me handle this all doesn’t help my condition, whether physical or moral.

I’m already hearing people tell me that they don’t mind if it takes that much time. That it doesn’t matter how long it takes, it’ll still be worth it. I’ve heard it too many times, but I don’t really think these people truly realize how much in trouble this puts me regarding TBPW’s plot. There was a plot-related reason why the CMJ blog started on August 1st, 2017 with these four meaningless posts supposedly written by a 13-year-old oblivious teenage boy who definitely can’t draw a thing, let alone tell a story. There was a plot-related reason why his writing style changed all of a sudden, getting more mature along with proper capitalization, changing his behavior ever so slightly, to the point that his big sister eventually started to doubt that something wrong truly was going on with him. There was a plot-related reason why I wanted to publish at least a chapter a week. Because the characters supposed to introduce the CMJ blog and stand as TBPW’s writers were just as much part of the plot itself, and because THEY were never supposed to spend years writing their own stories. Because all at the same time, something else is also going on in another part of the multiverse while these guys are writing and obliviously pretending to tell a story. And depending on the tumblr anons’ questions and actions, this story could have been getting very far.

And still. Even if I pretended that the tumblr posts’ dates were inaccurate. Even if I pretended that five years of our time represented hardly a few months in theirs. This still would pose quite a big issue. The TBPW chronology possesses at least 15 main stories, 3 to 5 of which (as a minimum) could stand on their own as entire, elaborate series lasting at least a few years each. All stories depict different people, different eras (the earlier stories being more than a trillion years older than the last ones), different places in yet always the same multiverse, where everything is nonetheless so unrelated and yet so intricately tied to everything else, that one cannot read a story and be left without questions because all those tiny irrelevant details are to become all the more relevant in other stories – so that it all was always meant to work as a whole. One could get away with reading only one of the stories alone and be perfectly happy with it; and yet, any reader who would really pay attention to everything couldn’t be entirely satisfied, until they found the answers to their questions in another story, either set in the previous one’s past, or in its future – when the question would have been “Wait, are these characters really gonna leave things that way?” (Spoiler alert, the answer is practically always “Of course not, dummy.”). TBPW’s complexity comes from my deepest desire to make it sound as realistic as it ever could be. Every single character is an individual of their own with their personal ambitions, values, backgrounds – and every single action they have been through, along with every single action they inflict to others – everything comes with consequences, both “good” or “bad” depending on all the different characters’ points of view. Before wanting my characters to be loved, especially my original characters (though of course it’s quite preferable obviously), I want them to be realistic. Whether making them fully human makes you love them or hate them, the same way you can love or hate equally real and human individuals around you for various reasons. In a way, this is almost like History. Things have happened in so many ways, so many places, because of so many people – and yet, despite everyone’s struggles, it is never truly finished. All of TBPW’s characters have, at least at first, “good intentions.” But instead of writing a story, they were ideally meant to build their own multiverse’s History.

TL;DR: Honestly, if I were to keep working on this at the rate I currently manage (accessorily, at the cost of my entire life and health, so it also assumes that I am physically able to follow – which I apparently am not, since just today I got to entirely miss my 7PM-9PM class because upon getting out of my 5PM class, I was so exhausted that I crashed on my couch and overslept by accident), I’m entirely positive that I wouldn’t be done yet in more than ten years. TBPW is just that long, that dear to me, that complicated, that awesome that I can’t stand the idea of not sharing it, and yet that impossibly exhausting to handle for one single person.

TL;DR of the first TL;DR: Eddy basically summed up my thoughts right now. So early in the story even.

In other words… I wished for so long that I would never have to say that, but for what I get from it… Right now, at the rate I am working, that is to say doing practically nothing while all at the same time working myself to death by trying to work on everything at once, even if I decided to just get along with the idea of slowing my pace, it doesn’t reduce the amount of efforts I give, nor does it help me feel better about anything when I get the feeling that hardly anyone enjoys it, and yet that the few who do are awesome people that wouldn’t ever deserve to be let down. But now…

It simply feels like it isn’t worth it anymore.

I still love the story. I still so desperately WANT to share it with so many people. I still hope so foolishly that it would ever get anyone’s interest, because of how much effort and thought I put into it during these past years. I still don’t want to let go, and I technically never will… But if working on it is what currently kills me bit by bit to the point of falling asleep in the middle of a conversation with my friends, then there is a major problem. Something needs to be done.

There is a compromise I’m thinking about right now. If I can’t find anyone to help me, then all I can do is work on something that I CAN afford to work on alone. But if I can’t write the entirety of TBPW’s plot on my own, how about a summary? A script of some kind? Maybe, during my craziest moments when I miraculously get some free time, random fanarts or even short scenes? That, hopefully, would be something I’d be able to manage– isn’t this what I have been working on during the five last years, after all?

This wouldn’t ever feel the same. There are so many scenes, so many stories I wanted to SHOW, not tell– but I am just a human being, guys. I have physical limitations just as much as you do. Unless some kind of miracle shows up, this currently feels like the only solution I can think of that wouldn’t eventually end up in a burn-out. I truly am sorry for the few who found some interest in my stories. But under such conditions… I simply can’t keep pretending that I’m doing fine on my own.

Physics is a fuck.

As nice as it would be for time and energy for all the great ideas everyone gets, reality is that it just doesn’t happen often. Especially trying to do everything independently. Self-sufficiency is a myth, frankly. And can’t really be expected of you. You’ve done what you can, and that’s all anyone can ask for. I’ve ended up quietly abandoning a ton of projects myself, either from lack of motivation or simply having to do other things until it was too late...

So. Don’t blame yourself for this. I enjoyed what you managed to get out, and I won’t insist on anything further. Whatever you feel you can share, whenever you feel you can share it - feel free to let us know. Even if it’s just a summary of what the plan was supposed to be, even if the full thing won’t come to fruition.

Yonic: resembling of vulva/labia/vagina 

Yonic, from from sanskrit word Yoni 

he can’t go to grillby’s because he’s a cat and the place is full of dogs

he can also finally sleep at his job