YMMV / Handplates

• Alternate Character Interpretation: In regards to Gaster; is he a good person deep down who has convinced himself he needs to be evil, or is he an evil person who happens to have a (debatable) worthy end goal? Gaster himself (not to mention Sans) believes he is more the latter, while Papyrus is dead-set on the former.
• Awesome Moments:
  • Papyrus's fascination with puzzles is characterized as both a need to prove himself to show he's not stupid, and an indominable resolve to make sense of things, and when the later is at play, he refuses to back down until he's satisfied. It culminates in the brothers entering the void to finally confront Gaster about his torturous experiments. Gaster keeps insisting that they're better off letting him slip back into nonexistence after he's made his case, but Papyrus is not having it. He and Sans dive deeper into the void, fending off Gaster's own personal demons made manifest to personally demand clear-cut answers, an apology, and offer their creator some kind of hope at living with himself.
  • A very sad one during the Genocide run, with Papyrus going to talk down the Human. Sans frantically tells him that the Human is beyond reasoning with, will kill him, and they can easily get to safety. Papyrus doesn't disagree. But he goes out to talk to them anyway.
• Base-Breaking Character: Zarla's readers are usually split between whether Gaster is a sympathetic Jerkass Woobie who needs someone to help him work through his trauma or a Jerkass who crossed the Moral Event Horizon for experimenting on children, whose traumatic backstory doesn't make him sympathetic. The former usually love him for being a troubled Anti-Villain, the latter usually despise him and wish they could throw him into the Core themselves. Zarla's own opinon seems to firmly be that Gaster's tragic backstory should merely be seen as an explanation, and not a justification.
• Fanon: Many fan works about the webcomic, when delving into Gaster's past, choose to depict him as having multiple brothers, all with their own common font names like Times New Roman. The former is likely based on the "hypothetical" scenario Gaster told Papyrus about the "skeleton who got all of his brothers killed," though in the comic itself the usage of the word "brothers" was a Last-Second Word Swap because Gaster knew Papyrus wouldn't know the word "family".
• Funny Moments:
  • In the "Mercyplates" variant where Gaster stops the experiments after drilling in the hand-plates, his interactions with the boys can be pretty funny as Sans snarks him at every opportunity and Papyrus makes him uncomfortable by treating them all as a happy family.
  • One alternative comic where Gaster catches Alphys in his lab after she broke in to check on him.
    Gaster: I'm afraid I cannot allow you to leave this place.
    Alphys: Top ten anime betrayals
  • A somewhat longer "momplates" comic that Zarla created, where the boys escape the lab and live in the Ruins. Flowey, being Flowey, leads Papyrus back into Gaster's clutches... and then Gaster finds out that the two have been adopted by Toriel. His horrified expression to learn she considers them "her children" is either tearjerking or hilarious.
  • Several of Alphys' interactions with Gaster, where she makes it hilariously obvious how big of a crush she has on him (such as accidentally sending him fanfiction she's made about him or giving him cool clothes to wear and geeking out when he tries them on.)
• Jerkass Woobie: Gaster, himself. He's got an overinflated ego, has done terrible things to Sans and Papyrus, and he can be standoffish at best to people who aren't his close friends. But he's also been severely traumatized by the deaths of his entire family, if not species, which he feels he contributed to by not fighting. He's further devastated by the loss of Asriel and the subsequent falling out from that (as Toriel was something of a surrogate mother to him,) and he loathes and neglects himself more and more as the experiments progress. Then there's the implications that he's being tortured by the goop monster after he's erased.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Several fans commented on being exhausted by the portion of the story that focuses on Gaster's experiments with Sans and Papyrus, which features the boys going through all manner of cruel situations without any hope of it changing for a long time. It doesn't help that the first couple years of the comic's run focused on this arc.
• The Woobie: Papyrus and Sans both count, Papyrus for bearing the physical brunt of Gaster's experiments in addition to Gaster constantly deriding his intelligence, and Sans for being constantly reminded of how "useless" he is because of his physical weakness.