Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20190617222636/@comment-32182236-20190728134815

So, what did Gaster's experiment look like?


 * Involves the Dark World and the prophecy of the Delta Rune
 * Would result in an interesting result if successful
 * If something went wrong, Gaster's very essence could be shattered across time and space
 * Could be repeated by Alphys
 * Actually has a purpose (though I suppose Gaster could be a mad scientist and is just doing it for science!)

There are a few possibilities I have in mind.

The first is that the world of Deltarune itself is Gaster's creation.. But considering that Sans is probably a Darkner, the clues would clash here.. Unless, as I think may be the case, there was an Undertale version of Sans as well, that vanished alongside Gaster when the experiment went wrong. But then.. why was it made? Well, to think about it, we have to look at what the world of Deltarune is.

Deltarune is a world not far off from Undertale's world. But if you look at it closely, it has an alternate history. It appears to be a world where the monsters won the war, rather than lost it.

In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, changing the past does not change the future-It only creates an alternate universe.

''I don’t know why everyone believes that, but that isn’t true. Think about it. If you travel in the past, that past becomes your future. And your former present becomes the past. Which can’t now be changed by your new future.''-Bruce Banner

Now, one could argue that the mechanics of SAVING and LOADing directly contradict this principle, but they really don't. Flowey and Sans both describe the process of everything reverting to how it was at the SAVE point-Everyone is "sent back". You aren't going back in time-You're reverting the universe to how it was. That's why the characters can remember previous resets with some accuracy.

So, what if Gaster actually succeeded in causing the monsters to win the war.. But this happened? Instead of changing the future, it just made an alternate reality? The reality that we know as Deltarune?

But winning the war wouldn't be enough. Gaster wanted more than that. He wanted to restore peace to the world. To make the humans and monsters work together again. And how might he do that? By creating a threat that they have to work together to solve, of course!

It is said in the Prophecy of the Delta Rune that if the balance between Lightners and Darkners broke, the world would approach its end. And we see a depiction of a human with a monster-looking being... Despite the fact that monsters are supposed to be Lightners.

In fact, Darkners themselves appear to have similar traits to monsters and humans combined. They can dodge like humans, yet use magic like monsters. Could it be that the whole point of the Dark World was to demonstrate unity between humans and monsters?

...The only problem with this hypothesis is that the Delta Rune itself predates written history. Though I could easily solve this by saying this is exactly why Gaster used that symbol for the prophecy-To make it more genuine. The meaning is still lost.

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And that's just one of many possibilities.