Fridge / Glitchtale

aka: Megalomaniac

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Fridge Brilliance

• In "Your Best Friend", Flowey looks genuinely concerned for Sans when he's struck down by Chara's blow. This seems strange, considering he can't feel such emotions without a soul. Except he does. Six of them. How is this any different from when he becomes Photoshop/Omega Flowey in the game proper? In this context, Flowey and the souls are cooperating on a more common goal as opposed to him taking them by force.
• Frisk's knowledge of some things they shouldn't normally makes sense when you realize they have done the Pacifist route at least once before things started. It also explains why Sans' words in the first video snapped them out of it. Additionally, they've done at least one True Pacifist route and faced Asriel then. Which is how they know that fusing with him and resurrecting him as Asriel is what needs to be done.
• Frisk in "Megalomaniac" would occasionally flicker into Chara at points of the episode leading up to them fully taking over. It appears to be representing their control over Frisk. But after the reveal in "Continue" that Frisk initiated the Genocide Route on their own accord, it becomes clear that those flickers were really just Chara observing Frisk's actions and the path they were steering the timeline, biding their time until they could really seize control from them.
• The final battle of Season 1 is the same as the final battle of Undertale's True Pacifist route, with the same characters put into different roles.
  • Chara is now the antagonist of the battle, fighting to wipe the timeline slate clean, who eventually gives up due to how much they care about their best friend. They play Asriel.
  • Hyperdeath Asriel is now the protagonist of the battle, fighting to save the timeline and all of their allies in it, who eventually persuades their opponent to give up through reminding them of what they went through. They play Frisk.
  • And Frisk is now the narrator of the battle, helping Asriel take down their opponent and being present within their soul. They play Chara.
• The fact that the anti-magic device can't actually kill monsters is well-demonstrated in "Dust", since both times it's used, it fails to kill Sans, who is a One-Hit-Point Wonder. It doesn't cause even a single point's worth of damage.
• Betty being evil has been hinted at from the first time we've seen them. First, we have the car speeding at her appearing out of nowhere, with the driver inside it apparently content to just hit pedal to the metal even though there's clearly a little girl in the way. There's also the fact that even after Frisk intervenes and the car crashes into their shield at mach 3, there is absolutely no clue of any wreckage, fire, or tire marks at all. Frisk being not at all concerned about the life of the reckless driver behind the wheel, not even bothering to LOOK for the wreckage. which would have prompted a rather strong reaction, and the fact they seem to be content to just stand in the middle of a street they just found are also red flags. Then, when Toriel is explaining magic to Miss Grey, it's shown that Betty's soul is self-aware and aggressive, and doesn't even take the shape of a heart. She even follows Frisk around to find out who her friends are, presumably looking for potential enemies, what they're doing, what motivates them, and what opportunities she'll have to mess them up.
• Betty's ultimate ability, "Rhabdophobia". At first, looking at the definition may be confusing, as it translates into a fear of being beaten with a rod or wand. However, a secondary definition, related to the wand part of the first, is a fear of magic. And that's exactly what Gaster has: a fear of his magic being taken or used against him, leaving him helpless and unable to take revenge for Sans or stop Betty. The initial definition also works as a fear of "severe punishment," like as incurred in a battle.
  • This also explains why Undyne the Undying was able to completely demolish Betty and overpower the ability: she's powered by Determination, and thus rather than that fear overwhelming her like it did with Gaster, she just fights straight through it.
• It might seem strange to see Betty leaving Alphys, Undyne, and Gaster's souls unharvested, with even Sans' soul not her first target, considering how she and Akumu go around harvesting souls from the children at Toriel's school. But they're drawing power from souls. And humans have more powerful souls than monsters. Furthermore, these children are strengthening their souls further by learning how to channel their magic. By harvesting these souls, Betty gains more power per soul and has to gather fewer of them in total. Monster souls, by contrast, are little more than pocket change.
  • This is also why her first target was Asriel (though Sans prevented her from killing him). Due to Chara's actions, Asriel technically has a human soul, complete with traits from the six souls of the fallen humans. Once again, that would be a more powerful soul than the average monster soul. It would allow her to gain more power faster and by harvesting fewer souls.
• Slightly meta fridge: A checksum is a concept in programming where there is a command that checks if things are normal, and if not, fixes it. Undertale as a game was never meant to go past the end of the Pacifist Run. Thinking about it in program terms, it makes perfect sense for Betty to show up after Season 1 to eradicate the happy surface ending. This also validates Frisk's concerns that something bad would happen if they continued with the other monsters on the surface, despite the fact that they've never gotten this far and shouldn't have any reason to think so.
• When one thinks of it, it makes perfect sense that Undyne had the upper hand against Betty all through the fight, while the incredibly powerful Gaster lost:
  • Determination is the only force that can beat Fear. Gaster has no Determination; Undyne has it in spades.
    • Actually, Gaster has Chroma Magic, allowing him to utilize Determination, and WOG is that if not for Rhabdophobia, he would have won.
  • Almost all of Gaster's attacks use his hands or his Blaster. So when they were stolen with Rhadophobia, Gaster had essentially had his entire arsenal stripped away. By contrast, Undyne can summon more spears, even if some of them are hijacked. So the difference isn't just Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, it's Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors as well.
• Despite monsters being Made of Magic, Jessica's Anti-Magic gun doesn't One-Hit Kill Sans, which might seem like some Fridge Logic at first glance. However, in LOVE, we learn that living among humans and eating their food has given monsters more of a physical form. Since magic composed less of his body than before, that's how Sans was able to survive the initial blast.
• Most of the series being in Hard Mode. Even before the monsters left the underground at the end of Season 1, people were calling them Frisk. Except no one knows your name until after the fight with Asriel. Thus giving a subtle hint at the true nature of Glitchtale.
• Hitting LV 20 seems to completely remove your ability to show Mercy, since in the game you have no mercy button while facing Asgore at LV 20. In "Love Part 2", seeing Betty kill Asriel only brings Frisk up to LV 19, allowing them to still comprehend, with some difficulty, Papyrus's insistence on showing Mercy to his brother even as Sans was trying to kill him, and later decide to use the same method to try and save Asriel.
• Fridge Tear Jerker: In "Dust", Sans sacrifices his life to save Asriel. In "Love Part 2", Asriel is killed, but his death sets off a chain of events that allows Sans to be restored, bringing the sacrifice full circle.
• When Sans died, Gaster knew instantly. But in Love: Part 2, Toriel and Asgore don't seem to know what happened to Asriel until they ask Frisk. Of course, Asriel's original Soul is long gone. His original connection to his parents is no longer in place. This also means that the two of them were still not aging even after their son came back at the end of Continue.
• All the humans we're shown who have the potential to use SOUL magic have eyes the same color as their SOUL, optionally with a color-coded streak in their hair. So it makes perfect sense that when Frisk stops keeping their Eyes Always Shut, their eyes are red, despite usually being depicted as brown.
• The Law of Conservation of Energy says that energy cannot be created, nor destroyed. That's why the Hate that Frisk generated had to end up somewhere, instead of disappearing with a reset.
• Frisk's Oh, Crap! reaction to Hate Zombie Sans is well justified for a couple of reasons. In "Megalomania", Frisk at Lv 19 back then could not win against Sans; it's only when Chara takes over that the fight goes in Sans' disfavor. Another is unlike back then, Frisk is conflicted by the sight and isn't attacking his hardest while Sans, corrupted by hate, isn't pulling any punches in contrast to the original fight's attempts to get him to stop. This effectively makes it a rematch where he's at more of a disadvantage.
• The preview of Game Over shows us that Frisk's concerns of the glitched timeline being a random miracle are unfounded, and that this is the second time the glitched timeline has occurred. Why? Because glitches aren't truly random. They're almost always some kind of programming oversight that was left in the code, intentionally or not, and recreating them through experimentation and/or sheer luck is totally possible. The only real randomness in this case was Frisk stumbling upon the exact sequence of events that glitched the timeline, and even if Frisk doesn't remember the first time they did it (and, indeed, the implication is that they don't), there was no guarantee that they couldn't stumble upon it again.
• Looking at the souls that Betty has collected in Love Part 1, there seems to be the most amount of light-blue and orange souls. This makes sense, as since the traits associated with those colours are patience and bravery, the children most likely to die would be those either waiting around for too long (patience) or protecting another child (bravery).
  • Conversely, this also makes sense as to why there is only one green soul - Cam's - as the main power of the soul of Kindness is to shield themselves and contain the pink blobs. They can handle themselves better than any other soul colour, and as we see, Cam only died because of a sneak attack towards his little sister.
    • Additionally, WOG’s Kindness is the rarest SOUL trait.
• Glitchtale being a game:
  • In games, when something is upgraded, something else needs to be downgraded (without updates, of course). For example, if the visuals are improved, the FPS goes down, so the overall animation stays the same. Season 2 of Glitchtale adds a lot of new characters, and since it's still Undertale, it needs to account for this, so the overall number of entities stays the same. In this case, the amalgamates die and a load of new human characters are introduced, such as Jessica Gray, Ronan Cass, Rave Rutrow and (while she's not a human) Betty. But it really gets interesting when you consider the Undertale characters that are actually alive in this scenario. Gaster, the first royal scientist, exists now, and Alphys, the second royal scientist, is dead. Chara, the first determination soul to fall underground, is alive, and Frisk, the second determination soul to fall underground, is dead. Finally, Asriel, the first incarnation of himself, is alive, while Flowey, the second incarnation of himself, is no more. This gets even more genius when you remember these three facts: Flowey CHOSE to take the seven human souls and become Asriel, Frisk CHOSE to replace himself with Chara and Alphys CHOSE to have Jessica bring back Gaster instead of herself. Glitchtale is still a game, and it has to make compromises.
  • Next is the matter of Betty. Games can't just make characters from scratch; even Undertale's hard mode has enemies simply replaced by similar, harder enemies (like how Parsnik looks like Vegetoid and has the same snack mechanic), with some actually taken from CORE which is way further into the game. Except that Betty, upon looking at her closely, is made up of different assets of the game. She's a colour-inverted Palette Swap of Chara, she's a main antagonist of the game who starts out as a friend and used to be good, like Asriel, and she has a mission to kill all monsters, like Frisk used to. For all intents and purposes, the game didn't have to come up with anything new to make her.
  • Then there's Frisk. The entire goal of Season 2 is to kill Betty, as when they do, Glitchtale will stop being a game and the timeline won't be at risk from the determination soul dying. All ties to the game will be cut off. Looking at this, it makes sense that Frisk dies, as they were the one character who had no personality, backstory or motivations, even more so than Chara or Asriel - they were simply a vessel for the player to access the game world, and are the bridge between Glitchtale the world and Glitchtale the game. If the world has to move on from being a game, then it has to move on from Frisk, too.
  • Finally, there's a parallel between Glitchtale and Undertale. In Glitchtale, the penultimate character Frisk encounters before giving his soul to Chara is Toriel. Word of God mentioned that what Toriel said was one of the things that convinced Frisk to give his soul to Chara. Meanwhile, in Undertale, the penultimate character Frisk encounters before ending hard mode is Toriel, and their boss battle. So, just to recap, in both instances, Toriel is the penultimate encounter of Frisk's hard mode, the two of them make peace (in Glitchtale, by bringing back Chara, Frisk is giving Toriel her son back) and Frisk ends hard mode.
• In Undertale's backstory, Chara, consumed by hatred, lashed out at the people of his own race on the surface and ended up killing his own best friend of the opposite race. Over a century later, Asriel, consumed by hatred, lashed out at the people of his own race on the surface and ended up killing his own best friend. History Repeats.
• Betty seems to target souls that came from glitches a lot, doesn't she? First Asriel, then Gaster in Game Over, Part 2... well, of course she would. After all, she is the game's Checksum, trying to return it to its normal state, and those two do stick out a mile wide in terms of not fitting in with everyone else.
  • Why, then, did she use Asriel's soul to bring him back to fight on her side? Because the game actually is used to a not-soulless Asriel present within it... but only as a villain.
• Ironically, despite the fact that Chara is Killed Off for Real at the end of season one, we see quite a bit of him in the following season. In the second episode, Betty creates an illusion of him to trick Asriel. In Love, Part 1, while Frisk is flashing back to them abusing the timeline, we see a disapproving Chara. In Love, Part 2, when Asriel is going off to help Frisk, they flash back to Chara and Sans fading away and this motivates them. In-Universe, all of these have their reasons for appearing. However, post-My Promise, we see there was a meta reason for this too: Chara is brought back at the end of that episode and will be the main character for all of the following. If the last time Chara was drawn was Continue from the end of the last season, Camila would have had trouble bringing Chara into her new, vastly improved style, as she would have nothing to base him on. But by drawing Chara for every other episode between Continue and My Promise, Chara was able to keep up with the improving art each time and Camila would have something to base her art on.
• Episode 7, HATE, proves Camila's claim that the game is trying to fulfil all routes, but, if you look closely, it's only trying to fulfil the parts of each route that it hasn't already. Obviously, Alphys' speech to Undyne is from the True Pacifist route (though in that case it was from Undyne to Alphys) and it never happened thanks to the events of season 1, but remember, in New Home, Toriel shooting Asgore with a fireball to protect Frisk from him, as he flew off in an almost comedic fashion? How it also didn't happen? Now look at what happens at the end of this episode. Yeah. Doesn't seem so comedic now, does it?
• 'Animosity' ends in a similar way that 'Megalomaniac' did, back at the very beginning of the series: a human child blocks an attack from hitting a skeleton, a long slash tearing across the kid's back. All that's changed is the characters involved.
• At the start of 'Animosity', we see Noah and Rave, two siblings, injured, with Noah using the last of his strength to save Rave, making sure he's okay before Noah himself dies staring into Rave's eyes. When their mother reacts, she is both heartbroken and angry, saying that it "should've been [Rave]". Hard cut to the end of the episode: Sans and Papyrus, two siblings, are both injured, and Sans uses the last of his strength to save Papyrus (and Gaster), making sure he's okay before Sans himself turns to dust staring into Papyrus's eyes. When their father (Gaster) reacts, he is both heartbroken and angry, drawing on Papyrus's life force to brutally murder Bete Noire - subconsciously killing him in a fit of emotion. The difference? Gaster realises he's going too far and pulls back, showing how far he's come from the vengeful maniac we saw as far back as Dust.
  • In Undertale, the final enemy Frisk fights is Sans - though they're technically controlled by an outside force (the Player). After killing him, control of that body is corrupted by a much more malevolent force: Chara, who uses them to destroy the world. In Glitchtale, the final enemy Betty fights is Sans - though they're technically controlled by an outside force (Agate). After killing him, control of that body is corrupted by a much more malevolent force: HATE, who uses them to destroy the world.
• Why does Gaster have a much easier time taking down Betty in Animosity than his previous encounter with Betty? A simple combination of Polychromatism and The Kumuzilla. Polychromatism is Gaster at his full power, before the Monster and Human war, which means that this is a Gaster fighting with no restrictions and no limiters. Second, is the fact that Undyne just destroyed the Kumuzilla, which itself would have required a lot of soul power. When Undyne took down the Kumuzilla, Betty would have lost a ton of power, making it much easier for Gaster to finally kill Betty.
  • A final thing to note is how Betty doesn't have access to Rhabdophobia in her rematch, since she had just used it against Sans' Gasterblastermination attack. The only reason Betty was able to win against Gaster in the first place was because she was able to hijack Gaster's attacks, but since she doesn't have access to that power in the rematch, she's much easier to take down.
• When Agate is defeated by her brother, she loses her own trait of Bravery and goes seeking a power greater than Determination to defeat him. Before, she was a kind, courageous woman who wanted to protect the world from another human/monster war. After, her obsession with defeating her brother resulted in acquiring the power of fear, turning her into a psychotic, murdering lunatic whose desire to prevent the human/monster war was perverted into preventing the barrier from going down at all costs, and then putting into place measures to prevent human/monster peace and destroy the monsters even after her own death. Fear is the opposite of Bravery, so it makes sense Agate would Become Her Own Antithesis in the pursuit of it.
• Fridge Heartwarming: The fact that in season 3 episode 1 Gaster was able to say "I just want you to love me back" in as many words suggests that his time in the capital with the other Council wizards included real friendships that helped him realize what love was supposed to feel like.

Fridge Horror

• Toriel ALMOST DIED when Akumu was first revealed, as it lunges at her and is only stopped by Betty calling out "Akumu, no!" This was back when Akumu and Betty were viewed as innocents, so it gets forgotten about quickly, but in retrospect it can make one cringe.
• The Stinger for My Promise shows Asriel glitching in a similar manner as Frisk was throughout a good portion of Season 2. Asriel’s entire existence is closely tied to Frisk and their actions. In addition, unlike most characters, there isn’t a known scenario (in both Undertale and Glitchtale) where Asriel is able remain himself that doesn’t directly correlate to Frisk’s presence. Since Frisk finally succumbed to the glitch and disappeared, Asriel has no way of regaining his form which means that his presence is considered a glitch. Frisk may have just sentenced Asriel to a Fate Worse than Death if that’s the case...
• As of Season 2 Episode 5, Frisk has replaced themself with Chara, since Chara is free of glitches and has a better chance at saving Asriel. However, Chara still has 19 LOVE, as evidenced by suddenly gaining red eyes when they absorbed Frisk's Soul. We know what happens if Chara reaches LV 20. They're still 1 EXP away from causing a LOVE-pocalypse with a side of Glitch-mageddon, and if they kill Betty, they'll get that last point, fulfilling the reason for Betty's existence.
  • (subverted) The deletion of Frisk pretty much erases the Game for the most part, with LOVE and EXP becoming nonexistent. The only thing remains are the win and lose conditions of the game
• 'Game Over, Part 1' gives us the lovely reveal of Glitchtale having happened before, with this being the second timeline and the first one coming to a bloody end with Chara's death at the hands of Asriel. Most people will overlook this as the second timeline is now given a significant advantage over the first one, but then you remember how the first and second timelines were the same up until Chara made a tiny change to them, which is yet to take effect. In that first timeline, all of the same things happened - everyone's suffering, everyone's supposed happy ending, everybody's conflict - it was all for nothing as it all faded into a black nothing, rendering it all pointless. We're just lucky that we didn't see timeline one as our Glitchtale animation series...
• Yay, in Game Over, Part 2, Sans is awake! Except that his brother is unconscious and he's about to die. But don't worry - if he does survive, he'll be able to rest easy knowing that Alphys, someone he'd known for a long time thanks to the resets, is dead, and the person he'd recently made friends with and actually died for has probably gone the same way. He's not going to be happy...
  • On top of that, it’s been confirmed that Sans WILL die again, the Determination just got him back on his feet. He’ll survive long enough to fight Betty, and then according to Gaster, EXPERIENCE HIS OWN DEATH.