Game Theory: Penumbra Phantasm is GASTER?????

[An Undertale-style Matpat stands grinning dorkily with his hands behind his back]
Matpat: It’s a beautiful day outside. The sun is shining, flowers are blooming. On days like these, kids like you…
[Big-eyed Matpat comes into frame]
Matpat: Woah, there. Ha ha. We’ve already dealt with Undertale. Remember how I beat it to death with a three-parter? Well that’s in the past! I have a brand new theory to share with you guys and it’s certainly not about Under—
[Screen glitches out, Matpat’s talking becomes garbled]
[Gaster appears on the screen]
Matpat: W-what? Gaster? I thought we already figured Gaster out. What’s that you say? [The first panel of Homestuck shows up on the screen] There’s more evidence that totally changes everything ever? [Show nice cream guy on the screen] Could this friendly figure be Gaster?

[Sburban Blaster (shortened version) plays]

[Matpat shows up in the GameBro pose]
Matpat: Alright, bros. Welcome to game theory, the smartest show in gaming. Back in April 2007, a man named Andrew Hussie decided to follow up on his previous success in writing the webcomic “Problem Sleuth” by writing another webcomic called “Homestuck.” His number one fan at the time was, you guessed it, Toby Fox, who went by the pseudonym “Radiation.” References to Homestuck crop up all throughout Undertale, from fire creatures named after Homestuck characters to unnervingly sweaty horses.

Now, quick disclaimer. Homestuck is a massive work of literature, and to be able to comb through all that unrelated stuff to get to the juicy center of this theory would’ve been, well, time consuming! So instead, I did some research and got a synopsis on the main storyline, as well as any details I thought were relevant.

As anyone who’s played the game knows, Toby Fox composed the soundtrack to Undertale, and his contribution to Homestuck was no-ho-ho different. You know the whole “motif” thing, where a theme will show up over and over again with an association to an idea? Well, the ever elusive Toby “Radiation” Fox did that for Homestuck too. Themes related to characters or places play in the numerous flash animations peppered through the webcomic. And most of these themes have an original song that they came from.

But there’s one theme that doesn’t have an original song. Penumbra Phantasm. [psuedumbra plays softly] This iconic motif shows up a whopping fourteen times in the official Homestuck discography. A quick google search for “Penumbra Phantasm Toby Fox” yielded three youtube videos, a tumblr post, a bandcamp link, and several reddit pages. The reddit pages are just a bunch of people wondering about the song, and where it is. The bandcamp link is a fan recreation, while the youtube videos are a motif breakdown, a livestream recording of Toby playing bits of the theme on the piano, and a joke video. The tumblr post goes into the history of the song, saying, quote “It was completed in February 2010, but it has yet to make its own appearance in an album because it has not met the composer’s standards of quality.”

So is that it? It’s unreleased because Toby Fox didn’t think it was good enough? Pretty strange for a guy who composed something as iconic as Megalovania in 2008.

“Penumbra Phantasm,” penumbra meaning “the outer region of a shadow cast by an object” and “phantasm” meaning an “apparition,” a “specter.” Fitting name for a mysterious unreleased song on the very edge of the public consciousness. But it also bears a striking similarity to our mystery man from Undertale, Gaster. [Gaster’s Theme plays]

While the music file that’s widely thought to be Gaster’s Theme, mus_st_him as it’s called in the project files, sounds very little like Penumbra Phantasm, there are some similarities that can’t go unnoticed, most importantly the word “phantasm.” Gaster is a Penumbra Phantasm. He’s a specter who lives on the edge of reality, in the penumbra of the underworld. Given that the one unsolved mystery in Undertale and the one unreleased track in Homestuck are one and the same, it’s clear that these two franchises are more closely intertwined than a few easter eggs.

Take, for example, the end of the song “Negastrife,” a song from the Homestuck discography. Negastrife is a song about two of the main villains of the comic, Jack Noir and Lord English, and the end of it sound suspiciously like an ice cream truck. A nice cream truck. [Nice cream guy shows up on the screen] Could this guy, of all characters, hold the secret to Gaster?

Now I know what you might be thinking. Woah-ho-ho, hold on there Matpat. Sure, I can believe that Gaster is Penumbra Phantasm, but the nice cream man? Really? I mean, come on. And yeah, the connection to Homestuck proper mayyyy be a bit tenuous. But to really examine this claim in detail, we have to go back. Way back.

As in, the wayback machine, of course. Before he worked on Homestuck, Andrew Hussie co-created a comic called “And It Don’t Stop” with artist Tauhid Bondia. In this comic, a no-name ice cream man faces up against the rap champion and prepares to take him down. They battle each other with robots, weirdly enough. On the side of this ice cream man’s truck reads the following: “nice cream.” Now that’s a huge coincidence. Or is it?

The most mysterious character in Homestuck—no, not you, Calmasis, nor you, Oglogoth (cool name, though)—the most emotionally mysterious character, I mean, is Dirk Strider. Seriously, this guy hates himself for being so emotionless.

Dirk also thoroughly enjoys building robots and rap battling them, and there’s even an obvious allusion to And It Don’t Stop in one flash file where Dirk raps in the same style as And It Don’t Stop. Throughout And It Don’t Stop, we see no indication of emotion from the ice cream man, much as we see no indication of emotion from Dirk. That’s some pretty strong indication that there’s at least some connection between Dirk and the ice cream man. And furthermore, because Dirk is the ice cream man, he’s also the nice cream man, from Undertale.

Want more proof? Look no further than the colors of the nice cream man. Blue, yellow-orange, and red. Guess what one of Dirk’s outfits looks like in Homestuck. That’s right. Blue overalls, yellow-orange overall straps, and bright. Red. Hair. Interestingly enough, Dirk wears this outfit when he’s in something called “Trickster Mode,” which is supposed to make people’s personalities change drastically and make them much happier. Dirk… doesn’t go through this. But imagine an alternate reality where he does. [Show another picture of the nice cream guy]

Now Dirk is a Prince of Heart, which means that he splits up souls. Sound familiar? [Show a picture of the true lab] Get this. Throughout the comic, Dirk creates splinter selves such as an AI (who ends up merging into sweaty horse man [show picture of Aaron]) and a ghost self conjured up from his friend’s imagination. In one timeline, Dirk even splits himself up into a bunch of shards. Hmm. Who else do we know who’s made up of a bunch of shards? [Gaster pokes up from the bottom of the screen]

But that’s just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.

[Outro music]