NAME: Swirl
OVER 18?: Yeah, very much so
CURRENT PLAYER?: Nope!
PREFERRED CONTACT: DM this account, swirlingflight, or pinging me on the game's discord

CHARACTER NAME: "The Great Papyrus"
CANON: Undertale
CANON POINT: Post-canon AU based on the derailed happy ending of a "true pacifist" ending after the player did a "genocide" run. I'm going with the version of this ending featuring a photo of all the main characters, with X's drawn over all the monsters but not the human. The implication seems to be that the kid went on a killing spree, possibly related to the bargain where they sold their soul to restore the broken world. I'm not specifying the cause here - that's for any potential players of the human in the future! - but I am specifying that it came as a surprise to Papyrus and happened about 12 weeks after the end of Undertale, after he had been working as ambassador to humankind.

HISTORY: Undertale.fandom.com, which is unfortunately currently the best wiki available for him. (Fandom.com, ugh.)


SUITABILITY: Is it really a game about death if there aren't any skeletons in it? He's providing important welcome mascot services for everyone that emerges from the River on this trip!

More seriously, Papyrus is a character who hides his fears about the threat of death behind avoidance, joking, and scolding. When murdered in canon he responds in one of two ways: catching his own skull as it detaches (so as to make a Yorick joke before he dissolves), or spending his last moments reassuring his killer that he knows they can be a better person (even if they don't think they can). He doesn't want to die, he avoids actively acknowledging the ways he or the human are in danger, and he'll briefly admit to having been scared if he's spared... but in the moment of his death, it doesn't seem like he's especially worried about it. If he has any expectation of an afterlife, he never hints at it.

And his avoidance of passive thinking goes further - he's always seeking something to do. There's multiple jokes in the game saying that he barely sleeps, and instead fills days and nights alike with everything from puzzle-building, reading, artistic projects, playing with toys, and messing around online. He claims that he practices monologues for various scenarios, and at a few points demonstrates word for word repetitions of lines - and not just in the videogame way, but with different expressions if he's said them before. And as the only boss who will knock the human out instead of killing them, one can go through his fight multiple times - there's a whole different speech for each time, but the lines he says before his attacks are the exact same.

...He's not one for solitary deep reflection on his circumstances, when he could instead focus on tasks and projects to fill his days, is what I'm saying. This lingering existence after death with little to do is going to be strange for him. Initially, it's a surprising almost-relief, that death didn't finish him off. To his knowledge, he has the chance to reunite with people (hopefully a long time off)!!!

But these days of seemingly varying length, with no food to prepare or consume, no need for sleep and no ability to dream, without much for entertainment sources but imagination and the conversations they have with each other... Long term, that's going to be challenging for him. The change of scenery with each Crossing will at least provide new things to investigate each time, but he'll be clinging to the other people for trying to address his restlessness and boredom.

Additionally, and relatedly - Papyrus tends to come up with new dream and goals to shape his life around from time to time. All through his introduction in Undertale, that dream was to join the Royal Guard, to gain the popularity and prestige that would surely come with it!! He boasts and threatens all along the road to town, as the human faces the various obstacles he's built in the way. But if he's spared in his boss fight, he stops loudly emphasizing that dream, instead rapidly announcing his intent to switch goals to being the human's friend and helping them out of the underground. After an entertaining hangout/date, he offers details about the underground and the people in it, and schemes ways into getting the human to befriend a couple other influential monsters.

In the various "neutral" endings he survives to see, he's generally changed course to a new life unrelated to the royal guard - being an agent/enforcer of the new ruler of the underground, or being an almost-figurehead ruler himself, learning to be a "great mom," or putting his own life goals on hold to help keep a friend from making a drastic and final decision in her grief. And by the end of the happiest ending, he's brought it up at least once more just to lampshade it and joke about what a terrible ending they've gotten, otherwise is content to reinvent himself the moment they reach the surface (ambassador or mascot, depending on what the human chooses for themself).

He's one for loudly proclaiming a dream is what drives him, but also for suddenly changing that dream to something else that better suits his circumstances. In the pursuit of it he might make abrupt changes in how he dresses and interacts with people, and then again switch goals with little mention of that past one when another takes hold.

Likewise, he doesn't mention a thing about where he lived or what he did before he and his brother "just showed up one day" in Snowdin. Nothing about what he might have done as a job or for study or for passing his time, nothing about where they grew up or what other friends or family they had before. Every other major character in Undertale, including Sans, offers at least an anecdote or hint about their past - not Papyrus. The thoughts he shares are largely on the present and his hopes for the future. The most commentary on the past he does is in the various neutral endings of the game where the human killed some of the other major characters - he'll comment on them and their absence (never using the words 'killed' or 'dead' but some roundabout sentiment like 'destroy' or 'on vacation'), before asking the human if they can bring those people back. Seems like whoever he knew before the brothers moved to Snowdin is even further removed from his day-to-day life than those we kill through the game.

(I'm honestly still holding out to see whether they're secretly from a destroyed Deltarune world, as a couple easter egg comments might imply... but even if that turns out to be the case, the update schedule of Deltarune so far means we probably wouldn't find that out until years after The Crossing ends anyway.)

So, for suitability: There's things he clings to, but also a lot of things he's very willing to let go of and change focus on. He'll be reluctant to outright give up pieces of himself or the people he was close to, but almost certainly prefer the 'choice' of what to give up over the risks of losing far more by going without the Ferryman's help, especially since he doesn't have his magic anymore. I'm interested to explore how he'll change through the combination of losing memories and interactions with the other characters in the game. What new dreams will he come up with and try shaping himself and his interactions with others around?


FIRST TOLL: The skeleton's first toll is having gone by the name "Papyrus," any nicknames derived directly from it, or any other name he might have ever had - which is to say, his name is redacted from his otherwise intact memories of the past and sense of self. The Great... [redacted]..?

Even if someone shows up who can remind him of it, it won't spark recollection and he'll always quickly forget it again. (At best, he might manage a mnemonic that it starts with P by comparing himself and his shorter brother Sans to salt and pepper shakers.) He may even struggle to recognize nicknames and other suggested names as referring to himself, though I'll wait to decide that based partly on how annoying calling him 'the skeleton' in narration is.

My thinking is, he's a character who introduces himself as The Great Papyrus in English and goes by 'ore-sama' in Japanese, posing with an invisible wind to flutter his capelet, typing and talking in all-caps, and taking selfies with excessive fake muscles and extra pairs of sunglasses. He's big on the value of believing in himself, loudly, and telling others to believe in themselves too. Losing that cornerstone of self will be unsettling on an ongoing basis for him, leaving him to stumble in introductions, search for nicknames that he'll be able to recognize in a crisis, and otherwise wonder what other pieces might be more subtly missing.


SAMPLES:
- Arrival and rescue with Nagito, including bickering about many worlds theory, erratic attempts to get along, and an ongoing rundown about the afterlife
- Pepper punnery and the state of sleep in this afterlife, with Sunny
- A mutual scare with Arche, including discussion of the undead and where skeletons come from, and unanswered questions about wraiths and missing memories