First of all, he doesn’t get more depressed as time goes on. His behavior changes only marginally as runs go, and mostly in response to Frisks’ expressions. He’d grow less happy as resets become more common, in that case. And he doesn’t. His mental state remains the same on the tenth run as it was on the first run.
Hm. I’d agree he’s in a better position to make sense of his feelings, since he understands time travel. The thing is, people usually write Sans as if he has some strong connection between the timelines and ability to make sense of it, well and beyond other monsters. I’d argue that he doesn’t even know MORE than any other monster, that Undyne is probably the monster that remembers the most. Make the most sense of the impressions he has? Sure. But ‘memory’ is a strong word for the things that monsters have after resets or LOADs, especially considering how many people consider Sans to have near-total recall.
And anyway, is he that depressed? Like I get that people like to give Sans a lot of existential angst and that’s a fine headcanon, fine but the closest we get to seeing him ever really looking and sounding tortured is, uh, either after everyone he knows and loves is dead or when we’re in LOST SOUL mode, and he seems to be talking about a completely unrelated event.
Anon, you realize that depression doesn’t necessarily need to be triggered by a severe event to *be* severe itself, right? Sometimes it just starts as a screwy chemical imbalance in the brain, that on a good day makes it hard to give shits, and on a bad day makes every downward turn in life twenty times more demoralizing than it’d otherwise be.
I’m just saying, Sans can be depressed without it all being related to timeline angst. He doesn’t show existential despair over the existence of resets outside of NM (where, everyone is dead, at the hands of an unstoppable entity – a really fucking bad enough situation to deal with without having a case of the badbrains on top!), and, like saveloadreset says, whatever he’s talking about in the Lost Soul fight seems likely to be more related to the workshop, Gaster, etc, than to anything Frisk’s done.
That’s a pretty common misconception. He seems to be vaguely aware of how SAVING and LOADING functions, and there’s some evidence, between his awareness of Papyrus having died in prior runs and the preservation of the True Pacifist photograph in his workshop, that there is some sort of continuity between the resets that he has access too.
However, he doesn’t seem to actually personally remember anything. He asks us ‘not to tell the other sanses’ that we were never friends, referring, presumably, to the now-orphaned and soon-to-be-made timelines, with their own version of Sans.
This line only makes sense if his memories are wiped and if he is as unaware as any other character, brought back to ‘zero.’ The main difference seems to be the fact that, he has some physical continuity, doesn’t he? The photograph hints that Sans can, at the very least, transmit some form of limited data across timelines. Enough to print a photograph, at least, and perhaps a little more. How much more? Well, I dunno, but I feel like he would behave a differently if he was aware of prior runs in any great detail.
What he says, warning you not to touch Papyrus after you have killed him in a prior run, also hints that he may have some awareness of prior runs … Or that there’s something in Frisks’ expression as they look at Papyrus that sets him off.
But, does he remember them? Nah. He says it himself in the Kill-All fight, doesn’t he? That the reason he finds it hard to try is that, one day, everything is going to be reset, and “We’ll just end up right back here, without any memory of it, right?” He includes himself in that statement, doesn’t he? He doesn’t remember.
I am more ready to accept that Sans uses tools, ‘readings,’ to figure out things about prior timelines than simply ‘remembering’ them. Persistent memory across timelines, however, seems to be limited to Asriel, Frisk and Chara, with that growing somewhat fuzzy around True Reset. Most of Sans’ knowledge seems to come from intuition, expertise … and perhaps other was related to how that mysterious photo persists across timelines.
A series of Undertale minis! This game is honestly really fantastic and I couldn’t decide which character I wanted to make a print of, so I tried to narrow it down to some favorites – grab a set at my online store if you’d like!
honestly just really like undertale 