Archive of Our Own

Notes:

Thanks for listening!

I wanted this fic series to be my first foray into a full podfic series, as I've been reading the fics for years now. We're actually coming up on its 10th anniversary, what with having started a few months after Undertale... It almost (but doesn't actually!) make me sometimes wish I could get in a time loop, to keep things from moving so quickly for a while. Time flies when you're having fun throwing skeletons into situations. =P

I'm very fond of this series for a few things that I won't go into yet, since spoilers - note that ambiguity tag! Things will get less ambiguous as the series goes on, bouncing back and forth in time and character points of view to give increasing context.

But a good part of the focus is on the things going on in Papyrus's skull, which - despite having the most lines of any character in Undertale - we maybe don't know a lot about. Sans gives a few oblique hints about his own past, with an unexplained friendship with Alphys, people he can't get back to, and reports on the timelines... but where the skelebros lived before moving to Snowdin, much less anything about Papyrus's background specifically? It's a mystery in Undertale.

And more than that, there's a lot of things with Papyrus where he contradicts himself in different contexts, and it's difficult to weed out which things are for a jokey bit and which things have more behind them. What drives a skeleton to practice lines to stand around and repeat, like some self-aware videogame NPC?

...Well, maybe having more memory of the resets than he lets on, but combined with some reason to tell himself they're just dreams and to stick to a routine for his life that keeps him largely doing things the same...? His ominous check text of *Forgettable., paired with his desire to be prestigious and popular? Something's Up with Papyrus.

I especially love the framing device of the title here - the nod to his action figures, which in his hangout he says he uses for depicting theoretical battle scenarios, now given new context as a cue to himself for immediately recognizing when time has fluctuated again.

Intro/outro music clips are from Just Another Day by Oingo Boingo, as I found the overlapping repeating "just another day" to be extremely fitting to Papyrus's experience in this fic, and I especially wanted to include the "I have a smile on my face / for everyone" part of it. (That the song starts with "there's life underground" and mentions bones in the third line also added to the choice here.)