flamingsalyut:

I feel like Gaster got his twink ass blown through time and space cuz he was like

“Okay so what if I extract determination from a human-monster soul fusion?”

No, in all seriousness, I do believe this is possibly how/why Gaster was scattered across time and space. How? I’ll tell you…

My search started by accident, when I was looking around at articles on THE CORE for things on Gaster. Turns out that many of its aspects, such as its design and how the music keeps going during combat, is based on The Ocean Palace from Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger appears to be one of the big inspirations to Undertale. I decided to look further, and I found that this may be what fills the gaps in what seemed to be a bunch of dead ends in Undertale. First we need to establish an important story about three magical/technological geniuses that were also scattered across time.

These are the Gurus from Chrono Trigger, what I do believe heavily contributed to the story of Gaster and his demise.

They are (from left to right), Belthasar, the Guru of Reason, Melchior, the Guru of Life…and most interesting of all…Gaspar, the Guru of Time. Gaspar’s name and role are probably inspiration towards Gaster’s name, but what happened to all of them is what’s truly important.

They were royal Advisors/Scientists for their kingdom. Deep beneath the world was Lavos, an immense power source that they believed could be a source of immortality. In order to extract this power, they built The Mammon Machine.

As their work continued, it became apparent that activating the machine would mess with time itself if activated, but they were ordered to activate it nonetheless. As pretty much expected, the activation went horribly wrong, and all three of the Gurus ended up scattered across time.

Yes, a very similar story, but how does this fit into Undertale in any way? Well, we must look into the evidence and parallels.

First off, The DT Extractor

This machine has most likely been around since Gaster was alive. The main reason is due to Alphys’s fifth entry in the true labs, which states that she had to find blueprints in order to figure out how to operate the DT Extractor. This leads us to believe this had been in the lab before she was the current royal scientist.

But, what is the parallel to Lavos? Some sort of world destroying force that can serve as the source of immense power?

The Fusion Soul of Chara and Asriel. First off, there’s no word on what happened to this soul after the fused two perished. Both entities also ended up persisting after death without a soul. Where is their soul? Now this may be a big ball of hunches based on Chrono Trigger, but I feel that the following is a strong, possible explanation of what had become of Gaster.

[ahem…]

What I’m seeing is that the soul of the fused two was taken/given to Gaster. It was likely that the power of this one fused soul could’ve been a way to either shatter the barrier, or creating synthetic souls, which was the thing that Alphys lied about doing that landed her the position of next royal scientist in the first place.

Now, playing with souls is a pretty big real, especially a red soul, absolutely swelling with a ton of determination, which directly relates with the ability to SAVE, aka mess around with time a bunch (as Flowey said to Chara while monologuing at NEW HOME). So, attempting to extract from the fused soul did what it did best, mess with time itself. Gaster was caught in the midst of this, an experiment gone horribly wrong. He had fallen into his creation, and was scattered across time.

That my dear people, is, from what I can scrape together so far, The Tale of Gaster’s Demise.

(Sorry there’s no page break, I don’t know how to do that on mobile, also the image of the fusion soul is from Dreemur Reborn, go check them out I guess.)