So yesterday Toby Fox released some pictures of his old college notebook where he started working on Undertale. One thing stuck out: a few blacked out words when Toby was talking about Papyrus’s family.
The first assumptions I had were either W.D. Gaster or Grandpa Semi, who is mentioned in this notebook. W.D. Gaster seemed unlikely as there were no signs of his development until Toby was mostly finished with the True Lab.
However, there are a few clues as to what was written underneath.
Peeking under the two bigger black rectangles, we can see the tips of letters. Namely, there is a loop or hook at the upper-left corner and three “flicks” visible to its lower right. I am not an expert on letters and handwriting, but I gave it my best shot.
The “hook” at the upper-left corner seems to taper off to the lower right, indicating that it was either a beginning or an end stroke. Toby’s loops, such as those found in the letters “h” and “l”, are much thicker with no tapering at that point. Examining his other letters, I found several that have slight hooks at their beginnings.
It was at this time that I noticed that the word next to “and a” is extra blacked-out with another smaller black
rectangle, indicating that one was not enough. It’s placement further
indicates that the next letter was connected to the “a”, which leads me
to conclude that it was either “an” or “another”. As the rectangle which hides the next word is placed closer to the “a” than Toby’s wide spaces would require, it leads to the conclusion that the word was “another”.
I realised that the word with the hook is not a part of the name, but comes before “named” and is probably the kinship term, as that is the format established with the previous statement of “has a brother named Comic Sans”. So we have “and another [family member] named [name]”. The most probable possibility is “another brother”. Taking this into account, I examined how Toby writes the letter “b” and found that his “b” sometimes develops a hook at the tip of the ascender.
The only other part of that word that is visible is the uppermost flick. It seems like it was an upward flick at the end of the last letter. Many of Toby’s letters end in this way, but having discovered a match to the letter “b” at the beginning, I checked if the letter “r” has that upward flick. It turns out that Toby’s cursive “r”, as it is written in the above statement, does have that upward flick. Finally, I compared the length of that blacked-out word with the length of the word “brother” written just above and found that the length fits.
In conclusion, Toby Fox blacked out parts of a note saying “and another brother named”.
The name beneath is hard to decipher, but it may be possible by looking at the shape and position of the black rectangles and the two visible flicks which belong to the name.
honestly just really like undertale 