#utbarebones

[blujane]

The Mythos That Devours Itself (part 3)

Section II: The Inverted Missingno.

Note: My apologies for the long wait. I had to get a new computer that could handle Tumblr a little better.

There is one additional possible factor in why so many believe Gaster being erased after falling in his creation, despite everything going against it, that I didn't discuss in the last chapter:

The idea that since Undertale deconstructs gaming constructs like the save mechanism, EXP, leveling, and fourth wall observers, then Gaster must be a deconstruction of cut content and The Missingno. 

Then again, I left this idea out because, I'm not so sure it's a factor in the creation of the theory or a poorly thought out justification for its existence.  There are many things wrong with this concept, starting with an apparent misunderstanding of the definitions of deconstruction, cut content, and The Missingno.

The Missingno. is a game character created by memory error that came into existence by accident and should not exist yet does.  Using it can mess up a game by freezing, crashing, or outright corrupting it.  It is even claimed to be capable of ruining save files.  This is pretty much the complete opposite of what popular Gaster fanon claims Gaster to be.  

Gaster is fairly consistently described as someone that should and did exist but was erased from existence in the theory (but not in canon, but that’s a meta for another day).  Their take on Gaster is less like a Missingno. and more like an inversion of the concept.  The only thing linking Gaster to the Missingno. is that some of the cut content (the actual cut content) involving him closes/crashes the game and the fact that typing in Gaster on the naming screen restarts the game.  Problem is, a lot of the cut content that doesn't involve him also crashes/closes the game and the Missingno. is better known for crashing games, not restarting them, though they can freeze up the game and force players to restart manually.  The only case where an in-game event involving Gaster crashes the game is the music testing room.  The game closes after a message pops up after playing his theme.  The message might be from Gaster despite a lack of wingdings -- or, more likely, given what it says, just a message from Toby Fox to the beta testers that he decided to just leave in for some reason or something (I dunno).  Not a particularly strong case for a character being the Missingno.

Undertale does contain two bosses that bear some resemblance to the idea of anthropomorphized Missingno.s: Photoshop Flowey and maybe Asriel Dreemurr.  Photoshop Flowey isn't stylized to be corrupted the way the amalgamates are, but his powers include deleting the save file, "corrupting" and crashing the game, among other things associated with the Missingno. Asriel is less obvious because it is much more faint and only shown from a storytelling perspective instead of the same dynamic meta angle used for Photoshop Flowey.  

In Asriel's case, he erases the monsters' memory of Frisk and essentially corrupts them, and states that every time "Chara" dies they are forgotten a little more.  This doesn't actually affect the game files any, but -- since nothing indicates that the monsters' memories of Frisk fade with each death during the rest of the game -- it can be taken as a kind of data corruption caused directly by Asriel, who shouldn't even exist, as he died long ago. Since he is breaking the laws of reality just by existing, an argument can be made that this makes him (and naturally by extension Flowey) a full-fledged Missingno. character.

Characters with corrupted data aren't a new concept in Undertale in general.  The amalgamates are, from a meta perspective, jumbles of corrupted data mashed together that create visual and textual glitches. The only reason I wouldn't consider them Missingno.s is the fact that this is the only thing they have in common with Missingno.s.   Yes, even taking Memoryhead into consideration.  An argument can even be made that Undyne is a glitched character that weaponizes her own innate data corruption to be stronger and longer lasting than the game would normally allow at the cost of causing her body to break down in the end.  This is the other hole in the reasoning that Gaster is a spoiler because he's a deconstruction of cut content/The Missingno.  The game has no problem with doing deconstruction correctly or openly depicting characters that are glitched in some way or even essentially the Missingno. So why? Why treat Gaster as if it's a deep secret meant to be handled by top men (insert obligatory Raiders of the Lost Ark clip here)?

Needless to say, this explanation makes no sense.  It makes even less sense when we consider the meaning of deconstruction.  In regards to story writing, the most basic definition of the term deconstruction is to "take apart" a common plot element or character archetype by applying real world logic to it and showing what would happen.  A deconstruction is supposed to shed fresh light on a concept and make the audience think about a subject that they might otherwise overlook.  They teach the audience something about themselves and the world around them, while letting writers approach a potentially overused idea from a fresh and informative angle.  While some stories attempt to deconstruct several things with no connection, it tends to be more effective when a story focuses on one deconstruction theme.

All of the elements deconstructed by Undertale relate to the player, things like stats and game saving, and player/character relations. Take for instance, Sans, who deconstructs the concept of the medium aware fourth wall observer, the character who is aware on some level of being a fictional character and of the existence of a player/audience. This type of character tends to take this all in stride. They are also frequently depicted as being capable of seeing the fourth wall because they are insane, sometimes dangerously so (e.g., The Joker according to some DC writers), which leads to the mindscrew question of whether or not they are really aware or suffering from psychosis that makes them believe they are a fictional character in a story (basically, a form of dramatic irony because the audience knows they are a fictional character, but the character only believes this because they are completely mad).

Instead of taking "it's a game, I'm a game character, and you're the player" in stride or being insane, Sans doesn't even come close to reaching the conclusion that he's in a game, because that wouldn't be a logical conclusion to finding out that some godlike being of unbelievable power is messing with the timeline, erasing everyone's memory at a whim, and toying with their lives, and the revelation is implied to have broken him somewhat. To underline the point that his medium awareness is real and not a case of insanity invoked dramatic irony, he discovered this as the result of scientific research into something monsterkind was not meant to know.

This is a good example of a deconstruction, because we know how medium awareness usually works, but once realism is applied, it becomes like something out of a cosmic horror story. Except better because Sans is also a realistic take on the concept of being driven mad from the revelation, which is pretty much a staple of cosmic horror (even though this usually took the form of scientists having the weird habit of fainting in terror when faced with something that should from a logical standpoint make them foam at the mouth with excitement).

The biggest problem with the idea of fanon Gaster being a deconstruction is that what Undertale's deconstruction themes don't have a connection to is the developers and game development process.   There are good stories about the relationship between artists and writers and their creations, but Undertale isn't one of them.   This should've been apparent to everyone playing the game.

I remind you, Toby Fox has a "shitty dog" with a silly little leitmotif for an in-game author avatar that is said to have "accidentally programmed a game by barking into a machine" and is involved in all kinds of hilarious and random high jinx throughout the game.  A spooky "deconstruction" of cut content would be thematically out of place and the idea isn't explored at all. Not from the developer/creation perspective nor from the perspective of the cast.  A few jokes are made about how cheap and lazy the creators of the game are, but they are all lighthearted little quips.  There isn't a single serious jab at the developers.

It's not even technically possible to deconstruct cut content, dummied out characters, and Missingno.s in this way because they aren't characters or even story elements in and of themselves. As a rule of thumb when it comes to writing deconstruction, you can deconstruct story concepts, plot elements, and character archetypes, but you can't deconstruct objects, concrete or abstract.  Cut content, dummied out characters, and Missingno.s are objects.   What people are probably thinking of is anthropomorphism and a story that explores how cut content would be perceived by the characters of the game and how they would think and act if they were alive and had awareness.  This is an idea that has been done before to great affect.  Atop the Fourth Wall has done it. Homestuck has done it.  Hell, Undertale has done it, as explained above. Atop the Fourth Wall and Homestuck both contain a sapient major villain that is essentially The Missingno. and their affect on the world around them is much like how a Missingno. affects games, erasing people and things from existence and corrupting reality itself.   Homestuck didn't really explore the character from this angle all that deeply and the villain never sees themselves as being The Missingno., but Atop The Fourth Wall characterized its resident Missingno. as desiring to absorb all existence so it will become all rather than nothing.

So this kind of plot is very much doable, but to pull it off in a way people can appreciate the story, you would have to do much, much better than just hinting in the most cryptic and logic defying ways possible.  

I think one could theoretically build a game that utilizes the game files themselves to tell a story, even the main plot of a game, with some clever game writing programming where even the least code savvy gamer is provided an easy way to hack into the plot-significant "cut content" files by the actual game with the developer's blessing.  The special game file content can even treat the game files like the player character's dream world, or the afterlife where the player character can encounter and talk to characters that they've killed (in the case of a game like Undertale, all versions of this room except one would be rendered 'unreadable' at the end of a run) or characters who have died in the past with obvious comments on how the player shouldn't be there.  

Another idea is to depict the world presented in the special game file bits as the existence before life where the "dummied out" characters that never got the chance resent the working NPCs and manage to escape into life/reality to become the game's primary villains in the "actual" game.

There are so many ways cut content and game files can be potentially used to tell a coherent story, but that is not at all what I'm seeing with this widely accepted interpretation of Gaster.

More information on The Missingno. can be found here on Wikipedia, which explains the term's origins more fully, and  here on TV Tropes, which explains the concept in its story trope form (please don't get lost in there!)