Warning: I'm about to start overthinking video game mechanics.
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The biggest mysteries about what Undertale’s gender-ambiguous protagonist has in their pants are:

1. How the pie, hot dogs, and other unwrapped food items in their pockets don’t get mushed together into disgusting mutant goo.

2. How the pie’s plate fits AT ALL.

3. How EVERYTHING fits AT ALL.

4. How the snowman piece, bisicle, and Nice Cream don’t melt. (MAGIC.)

5. How Frisk knew that cramming these items into their pockets was a good idea in the first place. I mean, Toriel implies that that’s where the kid keeps their stuff, but when have you ever looked at a piece of pie and thought “That should go in my pocket”?

Did they shove their hand into their pocket, feel the presence of this newfound pocket dimension in their pants, shrug, and say, “Welp, in a world with ambulatory skeletons, talking rocks, and murderous flowers, this is a normal level of weird, so I might as well just roll with it”?

And of course, there is always the most important question of all...

​6. Do they have enough healing items to get through the next boss battle?

More Handplates fan art, this time starring little Papyrus.

The foreshortening didn't go as planned, but meh, it's lazy late-Saturday side project and I really don't feel like tinkering with it further.

I'm starting to give myself permission to work on side projects until I lose interest, and then call them done, rather than daunting myself out of starting them by saying I have to bring every single artistic whim to my closest semblance of perfection or else not do it at all.

I'll save my perfectionism for Just Cause, haha.

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Click here to download the full-size version: undoing_the_undying_wallpaper.png

As much as I got frustrated by the sheer amount of time it took, I'm pretty happy with the end product.
 
And here I told myself I'd just use one layer of cel shading when I first started the comic, in order to keep production time down. WHO WAS I KIDDING?

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The latest page of Just Cause is ready! Have fun. :)

Because there's no situation so horrible that it can't be made worse with an extra dose of guilt.
 
On a much happier note, assuming none of the scripts end up being longer than I expect, we're only 4 pages away from getting into the first timeline! *Delighted squealing* I can't waaaait!
 
I'm really looking forward to being able to show Frisk's real personality and facial expressions, and have I mentioned how much I love the relationship development between them and Sans in the earlier timelines? BECAUSE I LOVE IT SO MUCH.
 
Now let's hope I can avoid giving myself another situation like the one in this page, where ONE FREAKING PANEL more than doubled the production time all by itself, ACK. That picture with Undyne and Frisk was That One Panel in the same way Sans is That One Boss. >_< 
 
*Almost posts the page without shading the hearts on Undyne's gloves* *Notices the unshaded glove hearts* *Glitched internal screaming*

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One of those lucky instances where even though this is fandom-specific, there are no spoilers, and the joke requires no context to be understood.
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Be nice, Gaster. I know this isn’t the best thing you’ve ever come home to, but he’s trying so hard, and he did it for you.
 
This is based on the “Babyplates” version of Zarla's Handplates AU. They aren’t babies anymore, but they’re still young enough that “I made (insert life form here) pretty” is automatically bad news, haha.
 
I wasn't sure whose style to use for this one, so I ended up doing a hybrid of my style and Zarla's.
 
Since some of her readers will probably be wondering, this wasn’t inspired by the printer incident. I thought of it when one of my siblings told me about a parent who discovered that their child had painted the kitchen with butter. BUTTER, of all things. >_<
 
The animal suits, on the other hand, were totally based on this Handplates comic and this Handplates side comic.
 
I probably should’ve drawn this in time for Father’s Day, but I didn’t. :( Oh, well. 
 
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The 33rd page of Just Cause is ready! Enjoy the emotional pain.
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Uh-oh. Frisk is slipping, in more ways and more timelines than one.

For extra sadness, try listening to "Remember Me" by The Birthday Massacre after reading this comic.
 
I've seen a few stories that explain Frisk's choice to repeatedly reset the timeline by saying they were curious, or bored, or just enjoyed their journey through the Underground so much that they wanted to relive it.
 
Some of these stories were really good, and I'm certainly not bashing their creators. But to me, the "resetting for pleasure" explanation seems to come from a very player-centric point of view, and it ignores a few key differences between the in-game protagonist and the player:
 
1.
 
For the player, Undertale ends when you leave the Underground. The only way you can continue to interact with the story and characters is to reset to the beginning of the game and replay it.
 
But for Frisk, that isn't the case. After they leave the Underground, life goes on, they can continue interacting with their friends, and there are endless new events and experiences to discover.
 
If they had to choose between Undertale's happy ending and reliving their journey through the Underground, the former seems like the less boring and more enjoyable choice.
 
2.
 
The whole Undertale experience is probably a lot more fun for the player, who is sitting comfortably in their home, than it is for the protagonist, who gets stabbed, burned, beaten, and otherwise hit with various magic attacks on a regular basis, depending on the player's skill level.

Depending on their backstory, their trip through the Underground might very well have been the most brutal and traumatic experience of Frisk's life.
 
I doubt they'd repeat that experience for fun, unless they like pain, and it would take a powerful and twisted sense of curiosity for them to choose to endure that just to see what happens when their loved ones die.
 
And speaking of their loved ones...
 
3.
 
When Frisk resets, they possibly lose EVERYONE.
 
While player-created backstories vary, there are signs - such as the bandage that's been used multiple times, the fact that you can flirt with Toriel AND call her "mom", and the fact that you can choose to go live with Toriel at the end of the game - that suggest that Frisk's home of origin may have been neglectful, abusive, both, or simply nonexistent.
 
If they don't have friends or family on the surface, then the monster friends they meet in Undertale are all they have.
 
Imagine a world where all your friends have forgotten about you. You remember loving them and being loved, and you still care about them, but to them, you're just another stranger. To some of them, you're even an enemy to be destroyed.
 
Sure, you can repeat the experiences that created your relationships. You can go through the motions. But interactions and experiences that came from your authentic emotional reactions will never be truly recreated, because this time you'll be faking it, and observant people will pick up on that.
 
You aren't completely the same person anymore, and the people who remember the events that made you who you are are gone forever.
 
All in all, resetting the timeline would probably be a miserable experience. It certainly is for Just Cause's version of Frisk. To them, time travel is a blade without a hilt: useful as a last resort, but it will inevitably hurt them.

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The 33rd page of my Undertale webcomic, ​Just Cause, is 5 panels away from being done! I just finished one of the more challenging panels late last night, and I liked it so much that I decided to share it on its own, without any dialogue to obstruct it.
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As promised, here's the 32nd page of Just Cause! If you haven't read the preceding pages yet, click here to read the comic from the beginning.
 

As he so often does in this comic, Sans looks a lot happier than he feels about what he's saying. After all, the reason Frisk has no friends is because they killed the people who could have been their friends - the people he cares about.
 
Being a robot, Mettaton doesn't actually turn to dust when killed, but having his flashy robot body in the midst of all that dust would've felt out of place, so a dusty silhouette it is.
 
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As promised, here's the 31st page of Just Cause! Have fun. :)

Just when you think things can't get any worse, even the Save Screen - the space between life and death - isn't safe anymore.

This page was an interesting challenge; at first I wasn't sure what kind of light would even exist in the Save Screen. I made Frisk's soul visible mostly for the purpose of having a light source, haha.

The red glow does lend itself nicely to dramatic shading, though my decision to portray the Save Screen as a gravity-free zone certainly didn't make the hair any easier to draw. So many floating strands.

Speaking of glowy red things, the mysterious figure, ugh. The script didn't even specify what this being is supposed to look like, for good reason, but that's kind of hard to convey visually. So an ambiguous red outline it is.

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