first lets get the shippy stuff out of the way. oh did i ever mention if hrkl and kist were dances hrkl would be tango and kist would be waltz. what's horrordust? they dont dance you dummy they'd trip eachother and die anyways

i actually already have a swap mtt with dust!killer killer!horror and horror!dust but this is just t hat but in the opposite direction basically. these guys are barely developed compared to my murder swap trio tho bc idgaf about them LOL

ok this isnt really art its just a meme i made in the context of my mtt fic and its funny as hell So

this post was a sketch for my old post where i talked about my take on mtt's players but i just never drew it LOL. loop and dust are the goofballs ever tho. if loop ever found dust again with hrkl they'd probably be like no way my little tortured blorbo has BOYFRIENDS??? and dust has to go THEYRE NOT MY BOYFRIENDS MOM i mean LOOP

shameful self promo aside. in general for characters, i prefer to simplify them down to as few traits i can get to describe their character. for killer, it would probably be something like 'awareness', 'emotionlessness', and 'choice'. for horror, it would be 'power', 'irrationality', and 'protection'. and for dust, based off what i've seen for him, he would probably be 'duty', 'hypocrisy', and 'longing' (all together, mtt all share 'death', 'regret', 'control', and soo many more that make them SO GOOD to think about together)

i usually focus on hypocrisy as dust's main word. why hypocrisy you ask? well...

all of these are GREAT examples of hypocrisy being a key defining trait in dust. dust doesn't want to be understood by others (likely out of fear that they will judge him), but he also fears that he'll never be understood (likely out of fear of being alone forever).

dust is scared that nobody will ever stand by his side, but when someone tries to 'take over his responsibilities' (or offer their help, like CORE frisk offering to take dust to the omega timeline), he gets furious or refuses that help, believing he can do all of it on his own.

on that train of thought, dust believes that he has jurisdiction over what happens in his timeline, as he goes around killing people with the same determination that we as players have, even going so far as to believe that papyrus's death should only be caused by himself. however, as soon as dust is taken out of dusttale (i didn't include this in the photos but trust me, this is there in askdusttale), he devotes himself to being a bystander in those other aus, refusing to involve himself in whatever's happening unless it's another dusttale (i like to think of this as dust minds his own business when it comes to the dealings of other worlds, LOL. he's got his own issues to deal with and he doesn't care about anybody else's)

dust prioritizes efficiency. he's said to be constantly calculating (a 'mad tactician', as calvatelya puts it), planning for the most effective way to kill the human. he doesn't use armor and weapons, probably because it would slow him down. he doesn't eat much for the same reason. he sets up traps to catch the human off guard or potentially kill them earlier. he's always switching up his bullet patterns just for the chance to kill the human and get it over with already (this is one of his fears: that he'll have to repeat the same thing over and over. yet by optimizing like this, isn't he only leading himself to fufilling that fear once he's found the best way to stop the human and is forced to repeat that method?) but despite being efficient, he wears slippers which can't be good for movement. he still taunts the human despite that having no efficient purpose (might even anger them into continuing the resets, honestly).

he hates the human for what they do, but he also does the exact same thing. he hates himself for what he does, but he thinks this is better than his inaction before, and yet, he still longs to go back to those days before the resets, but he denies himself that luxury, saying that he's gone too far to go back now and that he doesn't deserve such a thing. yet, he finds himself deriving sadistic joy from killing everyone, LOVEing the rush that LV and EXP give him and like calva says, even falling into a similar mentality like the human. but then he'd snap out of that, because he hates the human for what they do, and then the cycle repeats...

calvateyla honestly does an even better job of keeping dust's character consistent than even horror is in the horrortale comic (which is surprising, considering one of the few things i praise from the comic is horror's characterization). but with the basis said in the intro posts (1 2) for dust, i've pieced together some things that should be kept consistently in mind for a canon adjacent dust sans :D

he should be hypocritical in his... everything. but i already went into that in all of the stuff above. at least for the more serious stuff like his backstory, if he doesn't have contradictory thinking or cognitive dissonance, then i don't get the dust sans vibes, ya know? for my own dust, so i could apply this hypocrisy to his day to day life, i make him chase after bad experiences. as he says in my mtt fic: "if there's suffering to be had, then there's satisfaction and contentment, and things for me to enjoy among all the things that i hate, and make me hate." sounds confusing, yeah? why would you purposely choose to do things that you don't like and force yourself to find something good in that? well that's kinda his whole thing i fear he's a walking contradiction

despite being hypocritical, he should still make sense. despite both him and horror probably having psychosis, i can't imagine dust to be on the delusional side of it (that's horror's thing), but rather on the hallucinatory side, WHICH calvatelya says that he has enough awareness to realize that phanpaps isnt really papyrus, but he chooses to believe in anyways, otherwise he'll spiral and that. that is the dust sans mentality. he knows exactly what he's doing and chooses to keep doing so for however many reasons he can possibly come up with because if not he'll lose himself. he NEEDS to be able to rationalize what he's doing or else he CANNOT be able to do it anymore, which goes against the next point...

he is both determined and patient, without justice. unlike humans, monsters don't have soul traits, so associating determination and patience with him doesn't truly mean anything... but it is a key factor in considering his character traits. calvateyla defines dust's determination as two things: to be able to remember the resets (which yeah duh lol) and also as this drive that makes him more active. this 'drive' is precisely what brings him to do what he was thinking. any other sans can lose their mind over a bunch of resets and want to do something about it, but if they don't have the DETERMINATION to do so, they never will (gtfo outta here killer this isnt about you even though im literally referencing you rn). but even if dust's determination manifests as his ability to go through with his ideas or this nagging feeling that he has to do something, it's still probably the root cause of what makes him him. the patience is what's left over of him from sans, and what keeps him from just giving up with all of what he has to go through. any player can have hope and dream to be able to beat a hard game, but if they don't have the PATIENCE to do so, they'll just give up eventually. additionally, this adds to his hypocrisy... he's associated with a trait of the human's and one of sans's. how can he embody both of them? because he loses his JUSTICE, that's how. it blurs the lines between what's him and what's us, because sans undertale would NEVER do this, and he's no longer sans. he still knows right and wrong, yet he chooses to turn a blind eye to it, and that's why he loses it

also... this isn't necessary, but to ME, reading askdusttale, i got the vibes that dust is actually a little bit of a gentleman. when calva was asked if dust was a pervert (LOL), they straight up responded No. when dust takes something from a store whose owner he killed, he always pays for the product. he believes that what he's doing is nicer than having the human kill the underground, perhaps even that this is a mercy he gives them all. maybe it's just for his own sanity, but he covers his face and obscures his identity to perform betrayal kills, so that the people who cared for him so dearly will never have to feel the pain of a loved one hurting you. and maybe it's just machine TL from calva not fully knowing english, but i always imagine him to be more literate and poetic than your average sans based off how calva writes him, but also considering he spends a LOT of time thinking to himself and reading is one of the hobbies he still indulges in. so at least compared to killer (utmv's resident morality slayer) and horror (a SLOB) he's got poise and grace and at the very least some respect for the dead

basically: he's the definition of sunk cost fallacy (if we're talking about business terms then horror should be quid pro quo btw... this is unrelated LOL) (what would killer be?? i dont fucking know man that guy's the worst to characterize for a reason ok)

NOW TO GET INTO MORE HC PERSONAL FANON TERRITORY (im still not done nope)

if mtt were un-alive characters, killer would be a robot, horror would be a zombie, and dust would be a ghost. to me he's always given wispy vibes... smoke from a cigarette makes pretty patterns in the air just like ashes falling through the sky, just like the controlled madness that dust has. he could be massacring the whole underground with a smile on his face, but it's a tranquil smile with tired eyes, and yet if you look at his eyelights you'll find bloodthirsty savagery paired with regret and apathy all mixed into one mess of red and cyan. fucking hypocrite

i also like to associate him with other forms of dust. one very popular comparison made for dust is a 'dust bunny' (which is cute i do subscribe to that hc), but there are other associations there too. for example: a dust storm. in mad time series, calvateyla writes about dust touching a flowing stream of dust and mistaking it for sand. dust storms are natural disasters that happen in arid climates, typically in deserts. in a dust storm, you can't see anything with your visibility obscured, and despite not being hit by anything large, the wind still knocks you around and the dust overwhelms your vision. i imagine this is the type of dangerous that dust is. 1) you got the hypocritical vibes right there: dangerous powerful natural disaster and yet there's nothing actually hurting you, just the small particles of dust. dust sans is unstable and insane, and yet he has a gentle and wistful aura to him. 2) also fits with his fighting style i'd imagine he has, where he's the 'bombardment' type fighter. 3) the obscured vision of a dust storm doesn't fully blind you, nor are you trapped. you're just lost now, unable to figure out where you're going or what's going on, yet maybe if you squint your eyes enough you'll be able to distinguish something in the distance, or at least get the stupid dust out of your eyes. sounds like a way dust would navigate his messed up mental state, at least

additionally, dust is also associated with the past and memories. when you leave your childhood bedroom for a long time and come back, what are all of your things covered in? dust. those old photos hung up on the wall that are too high for anyone to clean are covered in dust. the things on the shelf that you could clean but you're just too lazy to do so are collecting dust. dust gathers on things that represent our memories and when you go back to revisit them, is cleaned off. out of all of mtt (actually even out of the bad sanses), dust is most often defined by his guilt and his regret. like i said, he YEARNS to go back to those days where all he had to worry about was what new jokes he had to come up with, when he could still consider himself sans, but he refuses to let himself go back. he refuses to taint his precious memories with the duststained murderer that he is now, so even though his memory and what he remembers are what drove him insane and yet what drives him forward, he refuses to do anything that could bring him back to that. he refuses to disturb the dust collecting on his old picture frames. and considering how dust is a creature of optimized habit and routine from being stuck in the loop, once he got out of it he'd likely take a while or even never change his ways, making him a relic of dusttale and the history and the events that played out there, never to be forgotten.

ok this has been getting too long but last thing last thing i swear but i hc that dust would be super independent to the point of isolation. like refusal to accept help on levels that beat even HORROR. here's a longer post on that since i dont wanna repeat myself