#all of my characterizations come from how i roleplayed the skeletons based off the wikis

[tyranttortoise]

Hey Ty, what made you play Undertale? And what brought you to the Undertale fandom?

It was actually my s/o’s doing; when Undertale came out, he said, “Hey, there’s an RPG out that I think you might like.  Wanna play it together?”  So, I started playing while he watched.  I didn’t listen to Toriel, so I killed everyone in the Ruins, including her, because I thought “Oh.  Standard RPG, kill or be killed, I got it.”

But then I started to feel uneasy about it.

The skeleton brothers came, and they were much more interesting than Toriel.  ‘course, I was possessed by Chara, so I didn’t go along with any of their puzzles, and they were making me feel guilty.  I got to Lesser Dog, and he was so cute that I just couldn’t kill him.  “Is there any way around this?  I can’t kill the cute dog!”

And then my s/o turned his phone toward me, and on his screen was “Undertale: The Friendly RPG Where Nobody Has to Die!”

“HOW?”

He shrugged.  “Apparently, you can talk to them and then spare them.  You fucked up.”

So I spared L.D. and the rest and kept going.  “You’re going to get a shit ending,” my s/o warned.  I was pissed off about accidentally going Genocide, so I got to Papyrus, fell absolutely in love with him during his battle, Spared him, and then went on a date.  

And then he crushed me.

“WHY?  IS IT BECAUSE I’M A MURDERER?!”

“You look like you’re actually upset that a skeleton rejected you.”

“I AM!  DAMMIT, I NEED TO START OVER!”

“But this is so boring, and that combat is garbage.”

So I stopped at Papyrus and forgot about Undertale because honestly, I didn’t have the will to go through the Ruins again, either.  

Fast forward to about six months later, and I’m having a slow day at work.  I happened to have my laptop with me for some reason, so I decided to play a game.  I looked through Steam for something my laptop could run, saw Undertale, and thought bingo.

As soon as I got to the skeleton brothers and experienced their puzzles the way it was supposed to be–as a Pacifrisk– I fell in love all over again.  I knew Papyrus was probably going to reject me, however, so I kept thinking about Sans.  He was a mystery to me–some funny guy that was always around, seemed to know a little too much.  When it came to the Judgement Hall, I wasn’t even surprised.  That’s not to say I didn’t love all the other characters in Undertale, too; they all had a special place in my heart.  I was just paying attention to Sans because the moment he caught my interest, I knew I wanted to roleplay as him.

When I finished the game, I made an rp account for him that night, and then devoured every bit of info I could on the wiki.  I read all his different dialogue options because I wanted to get him right.  While I was looking for other RP’ers, I saw that a lot of them were versions of the characters that I didn’t recognize.  Underfell, Flowerfell – was I missing something?  So, I got a Frisk RPer to explain the AU’s to me.  I rp’ed as Red before I ever even got to do a serious RP as Sans, and my take on him was just based on the Underfell wiki info.  

I jumped to GaiaOnline to look for more Undertale rp, and I lucked out and found a ton of partners.  I didn’t know anything about any other AU’s–just Underfell and Flowerfell–so when I had partners ask if I could do Underswap, I just looked up the wiki for it and thought, “Papyrus that has Sans’s personality and smokes?  Yeah, I got this” and ran with it.  I admittedly hated tumblr at the time– I didn’t understand it, and it was so confusing–so I didn’t even think about the fandom on here.  I was just having fun roleplaying and meeting people that way.

Someone linked me to Ao3–I’d never heard of it before–and showed me that Reader-insert was a thing.  Initially, I kinda blew it off because second-person was so foreign to me (and seeing second-person in rp always rubbed me the wrong way, which is funny considering that’s how I always respond on the skelelodge now), but then… man, I loved it.  The skeletons having a thing for me?  Yeah, count me in.  

I really wanted to rp as Frisk, though, and it was hard to come by.  I was almost always a skeleton or Mettaton or Asgore– and dammit, I wanted romance of my own.  I got someone to agree to be Red for me, and I wrote and sent a starter that never got a reply.  

I really liked that starter.

Soooo, I took that starter, pasted it in a word document, and then expanded on it.  Man, I expanded on it.  And that became the first chapter of Broken Promises and Timelines–it has my original starter interspersed throughout it!  I posted it up just because I wanted an excuse to write about the AU’s, mostly to practice for RP purposes, and because I wanted to try my hand at smut outside of an RP setting.  

People were commenting, telling me about AU’s I didn’t know about, and I eventually started coming to tumblr to read about them.  I saw other writers on Ao3 had tumblrs, so I took a jump and signed up with no idea what I was doing, other than that I wanted to write and talk about Undertale.  And somehow, I ended up actually being a part of the fandom, and it’s just so amazing because I’ve never been an active participant in any fandom before!