For context: Toby held a Q/A on the anniversary of Undertale’s release where the cast of UT answered questions. He provided an example question: “Papyrus, what is your favorite food?”
This is the only question Toby answered. He answered it ten times. And then he closed the ask box. However, regardless, there are things that we have learned from it. There are things that we can gleam about a few characters. But, mostly, I am interested in talking about Papyrus.
Now, we assume that we know the answer to this question. It’s spaghetti, right? ANd you could bef orgiven for thinking that. It’s the kind of food that Papyrus makes for Frisk, it’s the kind of food that he is amazed and super happy with Frisk for knowing how to cook, if they say ‘I can make spaghetti.’It’s spaghetti. Gotta be. The other characters in this ask seem to agree with us. Alphys and Undyne say as much. But Papyrus says that he has never tasted spaghetti in his life. That he only makes it because other people love it.
And this tendency to erase his own desires in order to adopt what other people like is well-established by Papyrus already. Wtih Frisk, if you ask to go out with him, regardless of his own personal feelings, he will try to fit the roll of Frisk’s boyfriend on their date. And, countless times in phone calls when other people are present, you can see how Papyus flip-flops, his true opinions overidden because he’d rather agree with the eople around him in hopes they will like him more than reveal his true self.
And we could say that maybe Paps has learned a lesson about being his authentic self, about showing pride in what he is. That maybe we’ve seen some of that.
But … we don’t even know what his favorite food is by the end of the game.
How much of what we saw of Papyrus was just an act, to entertain us, to make us like him more?Papyrus acts happy, but is he? Or is that just another front to endear us to him?
Do we actually know Papyrus at all, or is everything we learned over the course of Undertale like his spaghetti?
What would we find if we peeled back the image that he presents to the world and saw what he really was underneath?
What we learned about Papyrus is that nobody cares to know him past the surface level besides Flowey. We also learned (or, rather, it was reinforced) that Papyrus likes to keep himself a mystery. He can talk forever about himself and still never *actually reveal* anything about himself.
We learned that Sans and Alphys really did know each other, as Alphys mentioned Sans’ love of ketchup-flavored chips. How they know each other, we still can only speculate.
We learned that Sans, Toriel, and Papyrus live together. Toriel makes their lunches for them. She also drinks wine.
We learned that Alphys and Undyne are still dating, and that Mettaton is still a nosey little butt when it comes to Alphys’ love life.
We know that Asgore’s favorite food is, indeed, Butterscotch-Cinnamon pie; his second favorite is tea and biscuits. Also, he is a meme lord.
I was really, really happy with the update. Despite the only question being “Papyrus, what’s your favorite food?” the Q & A answered a whole lot of other questions for us. I know it was staged, but it was still the best thing. A lot of my headcanons were confirmed also. I couldn’t be happier.
honestly just really like undertale 