LogFAQs > #895399335

25. Sans (Undertale)

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". . . It makes it kind of hard to give it my all.
. . . Or is that just a poor excuse for being lazy. . .?
Hell if i know.
All i know is. . . Seeing what comes next. . .
I can't afford not to care anymore."

It's amazing how much more memorable one single segment can make a character. In the Pacifist route of Undertale, Sans is...pretty cool. Has some funny lines, plays off of Papyrus well, all that jazz. Definitely likable, but as a character he mostly just boils down to 'lazy skeleton'. Your talks with at him Grillby's Bar and that restaurant at the hotel imply a lot more about his character, revealing that he may know more than he's letting on (and that he has an adorable relationship with Toriel). Even then, he never becomes a plot focus.

The Genocide route changes all that. You actually see him less than in the Pacifist, and he doesn't say much other than "stop this shit" like pretty everyone else does. Then you get to the end and he explosively whoops your ass in two seconds. Everything you think about Sans' character gets recontextualized by your fight with him. His laziness and lighthearted joking is revealed as a (partial) coverup for his depression and resignation. Sans knows that the main character is essentially an immortal time traveler, and thus any action Sans himself takes is probably meaningless because it can be undone so easily. He correctly guesses that everyone's hopes and dreams of being freed from the Underground have already been achieved at least once before, only for all of it to be taken away by a reset.

It's only when faced with the possibility of reality itself ending that Sans desides to stop you the only way he knows how - by beating you into a pulp until you stop reloading the game and just quit. Sans would actually be less memorable if you experienced all of this gradually throughout the game. What makes him stand out so much is how absolutely perfect his boss fight is - it's an explosion of new characterization, new plot, and new gameplay, all of it thematically woven together. Sans is a *hard* fight, but what you're experiencing is nothing compared to what he is. Every victory Sans takes over you is meaningless. He starts counting how many times you've come back in order to try and taunt you, but it also shows just how screwed he is. Sans has to win again and again until you maybe, hopefully, give up. You only have to win once. He's the last hope of his people and you're a borderline eldritch abomination. It's a very interesting dynamic and there's little else like it. The ending of the fight is perfect and drives home the tragedy of the situation, a tragedy that hurts so much more because of how much you (paradoxically) don't want to win. It'll be a long time before I forget the hell Sans put me through - or the hell I put through him.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.