[Undertale Mac Download
Tilo Chopin
Undertale is a 2015 indie video game developed by Toby Fox. It is a 2D role-playing video game with a focus on story, player actions, and metafictional storytelling. Combat encounters in the game can be resolved through both lethal and nonlethal methods, with the game's dialogue, characters, and storyline changing depending upon how the player chooses to resolve encounters.
Upon Undertale's release, the game was well received by professional gaming publications and the general public, and gained a extremely large fandom on social media. The game's fandom became notable due to its size, activity, and variety of fan works, and has been covered by professional outlets. However, the fandom has also been the subject of controversy and negative reception due to the behavior of some fans.
In Undertale, the player assumes control of a human child who has fallen into the Underground, an underground region inhabited by monsters, who were sealed inside a mountain after losing a war with humans long ago. In searching for a way out, the child encounters different monsters, some friendly and some hostile.
During combat, the player can choose from various actions, including attacking, performing encounter-specific actions to pacify enemies, or offering enemies mercy. Enemy attacks play out similarly to a bullet hell game, requiring the player to dodge their attacks.
In-game character dialogue changes not only depending on in-game decisions, but from data management elements such as saving, loading, resetting, and multiple playthroughs. This aspect of the game, along with many hidden elements and easter eggs, encourages multiple playthroughs to find all of the game's secrets.
Thanks to the innovative nature of the game, its high polish for a mostly single-developer project, and Toby's visibility as a creator involved with already popular works like Homestuck, Undertale's fandom took off almost immediately after the full game was released, and it exploded with a popularity that even Toby himself later referred to as overwhelming and intimidating.[1]
The new-fandom period of warm fuzzies and peace lasted for about a month or two, but then as with all large enthusiastic fandoms, pernicious wank and non-fan annoyance towards fans' exuberance began to emerge, and Undertale's fandom gained a reputation for being the latest Fandom That Ate Fandom. Despite this, it is still well-beloved for its story, gameplay, characters, and the highly personalized experience of playing it--even by many fans who are so frustrated by fandom drama that they refuse to interact with the fandom at large.
Undertale's popularity attracted the attention of many well-known indie and professional gamemakers worldwide, such as Hatoful Boyfriend creator Moa Hato, who loved the game so much that she created her own Let's Play of the neutral route with Japanese subtitles (now no longer available) in hopes of garnering fan interest in Japan. International interest led to the creation of fan translation patches in many different languages, and eventually to 8-4 releasing an official Japanese localization in 2017. Trends in ship popularity and fan interpretations sometimes differ from country to country.
Undertale has a myriad of "public-domain" AUs dabbled in by many fanwork producers. Some of them involve twists on the Undertale setting based on classic fic tropes, while others are more or less limited to aesthetic changes to the original setting rather than changing the plot. Several of both varieties originated as or take inspiration from fanart posted to tumblr. Many of these AUs are named a relevant noun prefaced by "Under-" or with "-tale" tacked on, stylistically similar to the naming scheme of Homestuck AUs that use "-stuck".
AU-centric fanworks commonly focus on characters from one AU meeting characters from another AU, or meeting themselves from another universe. The differences in these AU versions of characters can be as simple as a personality change, or so drastic that they could debatably be called original characters.[2]
Some parts of Undertale fandom, as well as people who aren't members of the fandom, find these kinds of AUs distasteful. Said detractors often believe them to be "cringey" or unnecessary. Proponents of Undertale's AUs would argue that this sort of fan content is only natural for a large fandom with many young fans, and draw comparisons to other game fandoms popular with kids and young teens like Five Nights at Freddy's. A commonly voiced opinion within the latter crowd is that older fans should calm down and let the kids have fun, no matter what they think of kids' fanwork.
Aside from Reader Insert fanworks and creating AU spinoffs of canon characters, it is also highly popular within fandom to create OCs set in the Undertale universe. These fandom OCs range from original monsters--most popularly skeletons with font names or Boss Monsters, but also sometimes of other canon monster species or completely original monster characters--to human ones. Popular categories for human OCs include made-from-scratch characters created to populate the surface world in postcanon fanworks, as well as interpretations of the six human children who explored the underground and died pre-canon. Similarly, fans often create OCs based on the war-era human and monster characters in the game's opening stills. One such notable OC is Reada, created by tumblr user spottoydog (mod of the theory blog passivechara).
Interpretations of the six souls are often based on extrapolating headcanons from the flavor text descriptions of their equipment and of their soul traits revealed by the Ball Game minigame. Examples of such OCs include the cast of tumblr artist doreenchartreuse's Dreem Team AU fanart series, and recurring side characters in Feral Phoenix's you can only use your own series and other works.
Other notable fan OCs include Chisk, created by blending Frisk and Chara's sprites, and Linda, a bigoted PTA parent created to have enmity with Sans in the PTA Undertale tumblr AU. Linda in particular is a community OC whose portrayal varies depending on the fans drawing or writing her; she plays a large role in DoniDrabbles' longfic Blood of the Covenant.
Not long after the full game was released, Toby Fox posted a request (in-character as Mettaton) that fans use the alternate tag "Undertail" for NSFW fanworks where possible, in order to help younger fans avoid accidentally stumbling across 18+ fanwork. The term Undertail was successively adopted for smut use, and is even used in overseas fandom websites, such as on Pixiv.
Initially, for-profit fan merchandise was forbidden by Toby for fear of other people profiting off the IP damaging sales to official merch and the like, but after consulting with a lawyer he released detailed guidelines for what sorts of for-profit fanmade goods are and are not allowed. Moa Hato keeps a Japanese translation of these guidelines available and updated for Japanese fans.
In Japanese fandom specifically, Undertale doujinshi and other fanmade goods such as acrylic charms are regularly sold at doujin events. In addition to making a strong showing at yearly events such as Kemoket (Comiket's furry fandom cousin) and pan-overseas game fandom events such as UNLIMITED EX, fans have organized multiple Undertale-only doujin events: Minna no Ketsui (Determination for All, abbreviated to MinKetsu) 1 and 2 in 2017, Yasashii Chitei Tanken (Explore the Gentle Underground, abbreviated to YasaChin or YasaTan) 1 and 2 in 2018, and Kimi no Sentaku. (Your Choice) 1 and 2 in 2019. Some doujin circles make limited runs of their products available to purchase via overseas-shipping-friendly vendors such as Alicebooks.
As of Apr 17, 2020 Undertale has 31,967 stories on Archive of Our Own and 9.6K on Fanfiction.net. Undertale inspires a surprising number of Reader Insert fics, and a lot of AUs, in both fic and art. Reader insert fics are encouraged by some fans as an alternative to using Frisk or Chara as a reader stand-in for writing romances with Sans (see "Shipping" under the Fandom Controversies section). Fanfics where the reader is not Frisk/Chara will frequently be tagged as "reader isn't Frisk" or "reader is not Frisk."
Fanfiction is usually post-game, set after the events of Undertale, or set at the beginning of the game. Notable exceptions to this rule are Not as Simple As a Happy Ending by Pastelclark, and You Can Only Use Your Own by Feralphoenix, both of which are set before the game begins.
Magicae est Potestas is a notable crossover, this one with the science fiction-fantasy series Artemis Fowl. Another notable crossover is A Cord of Two Strands, a crossover between Undertale and Outlast by author Ghostigos.
Let's plays are especially common, because many players don't want to play through all three main styles, and most players don't care to play through enough to find all the possibilities and easter eggs.
As Undertale's story features a number of plot threads that are mostly communicated through subtext or small plot hints, it is the subject of a great deal of fan theorizing. Popular subjects for speculation include the past of popular character Sans, the true identity of secret character W.D. Gaster and what relation he has to Sans and Papyrus, and what Chara's true role in the game and real moral nature are.
As Undertale was released in 2015, well into the era of fandom mostly living on Tumblr, there are fewer devoted hubs for fans to talk about Undertale than for fandoms of the 00s and earlier. However, a subforum for Undertale does exist on Toby's old hangout, the Earthbound fan forum Starmen.net. There is also a community devoted to datamining the game on Reddit, called Underminers.
Due to much of Undertale fandom history taking place on Tumblr, much of that history is currently at risk of being lost to Tumblr's 2018 NSFW purge. Preserving pages on the Internet Archive, backing up one's content to other websites, and encouraging others to do the same is strongly recommended.
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