#true lab

[donothello]

You laugh,

But it's not funny.

[ottosbigtop]

curse of life

[agentravensong]

thinking about how the extra area added on to a pacifist run of undertale, the true lab, is about alphys's past mistakes. how it ends with the story reaffirming that, despite the pain she's caused, the thing that matters is that she has now made the choice to do the right thing. she's still worthy of her friends' love.

thinking about how undertale doesn't expect the player to get a pacifist ending for the first time. how it's more likely than not that the player will kill toriel the first time they battle her, how lots of players don't initially figure out how to end undyne's fight without killing her, etc. what it expects — not even expects, really, but hopes — is that the player, if they care enough, will use their canonically acknowledged power over time to make up for those mistakes.

no matter how many neutral runs a player has done before committing to the pacifist run, the thing that matters to the characters, to the story, is that you've chosen, now, to do the right thing.

compared to alphys, the player honestly gets off lightly, in that you're the only one (other than flowey) who really remembers any harm you might have caused. and any direct guilting the game could have done about it is long past at this point. instead, as undertale often does, it makes its point via parallels: alphys caused harm, and she knows it. she has committed to being better. in doing so, she has unlocked for herself a better ending to her story. and she deserves it. she's forgiven.

those structural narrative parallels are all over undertale, if you know where to look. and that's one of the things that makes it so fuckin' good.

[shimmershy]

*But it wasn't funny.

Chara Week Day 3: Laughter

[Image Description: An Undertale comic that takes place in the True Lab. Panel 1: Frisk and Chara stand side-by-side, looking at something off-screen to the right. Frisk looks scared and is hugging themself while holding a stick. Chara, a ghost, is translucent and has a similar look of distress on their face. Panel 2: The amalgamate that resembles Snowdrake stands at the opposite end of the room, saying "Sn...o...wy..." Panel 3: A close up of Frisk's face. There are tears in their eyes. They hold their stick in front of themself as they open their mouth to speak, but Chara cuts them off with a laugh from off-screen. Panel 4: Chara holds a hand up to their face, smiling with their eyebrows knit together. They say, "...hehe. You laugh, and keep laughing." Panel 5: Chara is laughing in the foreground, hovering with their knees curled up to their chest and their arms wrapped around themself. They say, "It's SO funny, you can't stop." Frisk is in the background glancing sideways at them with concern. Panel 6: A closeup of Chara's face on a black background. They're laughing even harder and covering their eyes with their hand as tears run down their face. They say, "Tears run down your face." Panel 7: Chara looks to the side at Frisk, hand still covering one side of their face and still smiling, but their laughter dies out. They say, "... What?" Panel 8: Chara floats on a black background, alone, beside Frisk's red soul. They ask, "You didn't do that?" /End ID]

[itsmebeff]

bad bitch and her fucked up dog

alph by herself:

[megaderping]

Time and time again, people have tried to discredit Alphys' work in the Determination Experiments by crediting at least some of the True Lab entries to Gaster. A recent theory making the rounds has once again misled people into taking this as fact, and in this video, I take a critical look at the entries to prove that Alphys wrote all of them as well as debunking several of the arguments used to claim that Gaster was involved. Sources include both Undertale and Deltarune, the Undertale Gaster twitter takeovers, the Legends of Localization book, and the recent Valentines newsletter. My goal in this video is to put this argument to rest, as it relies on many cherrypicked pieces of information that really don't hold up under scrutiny and are a disservice to Alphys and Gaster both.

[gl4kiro]

end!

as you can see my ass isn't fit for making comics that aren't just sketches so i downgraded to that in the end 😭

beginning<< part 2<<

[re--ve--rie]

sometimes I wonder what the soul in the true lab implies

[maxladcomics]

[ophanstears]

DID ANYONE else notice how it is kind of implied that ALPHYS planned to bring ASRIEL back to life as FLOWEY ON PURPOSE?

I never see anyone talk about this so I gotta bring it up. Hear me out for this one.

Alphys had watched the tapes, she knew how [TRUECHARA] and Asriel died. She didn't want to show said tapes to Asgore because she knew how absolutely traumatizing learning that would be. That his own kids tried to sacrifice themselves and died in vain. Nobody else knows the truth, so the way monsters believed it happened is spread as a sort of legend to this day. So, Alphys knows that when Asriel collapsed in the throne room, his dust spread across the garden.

And of course, she would definitely also know about the belief and tradition that the essence of monsters lives on in their dust and where it is sprinkled over. That much is a given, it's a part of their culture.

We know her original intent was to bring one of the flowers to life to act as a vessel for both human and monster SOULS. This way, freedom could be so much closer than any of them imagined. Alphys talks about it in ENTRY 07.

The actual entry that Alphys wrote right after this one, ENTRY 08, only appears after you have talked to her in TRUE LAB. In it, she ominously talks about having chosen "a candidate". We don't learn what exactly her intentions are, only that it is meant to be a surprise for ASGORE. Alphys believes that this one special flower, different from all the others, might work for her experiment.

I find it interesting how she added on how it appeared just after the Queen left... Followed up by wondering what would happen if a being without a SOUL gained the will to live. Which feels almost... too specific. From making it a surprise, to talking about how special that flower is and when it grew, to calling it THE vessel.

Not the vesselS, plural, because surely she must be experimenting on all of these flowers. No, THE vessel, singular! This one special flower she thought would come to life if none of the others did.

Many entries later, Alphys notes that after returning THE VESSEL to its garden, it disappeared. And that's where her entries end. Granted, it is still kept generally vague. Maybe Alphys just thought that the flower was special in another way. Maybe she thought that Asriel's dust would have some kind of magic left to make the vessel coming to life more likely. Or, maybe she saw bringing that particular flower back to life as some kind of sweet, symbolic gesture towards Asgore? With all that knowledge she has gathered though, on how monster bodies and SOUL magic works..... is it really unlikely that she got too curious for her own good? We never really find out what her true intentions were, because beyond freaking out when she learns that Papyrus has been talking to a talking flower, she never talks about it (him).

So! I could totally see that Alphys wanted to see if she could bring Asriel back in some shape or form! And!!! I would like to know what you guys think!!! Because I am!! Going!! Crazy!!!!!!

[cluess-less-ness]

Imagine if Clover ran after Ceroba and ended up in the true labs where he learned about Kanako

[kriada]

Inktober2024. Day 11. Snacks

Follow me on Deviantart: https://www.deviantart.com/kriada Follow me on Instagram: www.instagram.com/kriadaart/ Follow me on YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCeU-l…

[darkcandy-starfait]

ut month 2023 ❤ - 22. true lab

the true lab instills such a strange feeling in me, but this particulary narration, when laughing at snowdrake's mother... it makes we wonder if the narration is freaking out at the sight here too.

info on UT month 2023 here!

* PROSHIPPERS DNI

[shimmershy]

Chara Week Day 5: Ghost

Every time I see that machine in the True Lab, I wonder if it could possibly be Chara's soul in there? Probably unlikely, but not impossible... It's interesting to think about what the implications of that would be.

A version with no text and then a version with just the machine, because I think it looks pretty cool and ominous alone as well.....

[itsmebeff]

scientific skeletons in her closet - a story of how sans met the amalgamates

[buttercupshands]

I love drawing reaper bird