# underlight (essay by sol)
[TOC] \< i dont think this works yet
a preface
this was really just an excuse to ramble about something a lot. sorry. also i know it's in the ultrakill font, i painstakingly uploaded it on purpose. look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!!! /j
made by sol (it says my URL in the corner. yeah, the right corner. "solsoups," it reads. don't google that.)
what is underlight?
you don't understand. underlight isn't just an underverse spinoff based on my own half-remembered details of the plot, no, no it's so much more-
nah, it's basically just that with more emphasis on the dreamtale twins because i can be normal about them 5ever and ever (lying). also sooo much detail on nightmare i am super duper mega over normal about him also. ummm basically i don't have the plot very well figured out yet (who knew) but i know that the later half has cross, dream, and blue (YES I'm still salty over his death) go to nightmare's castle to try and [MESSIAH OOF SOUND] him. also there's some stuff about ship of theseus with nightmare WHATEVER GET TO THE GAY SEX PART ALREADY!!!!
the WHAT?
i am a hormonal teenager who likes men. you'll never guess what the average sans au's gender is. (disclaimer: i am transmasc and headcanon multiple characters as such! this includes nightmare, blue, murder, and more ^_^ i <3 fictional trans wrongs)
ok more about that ship of theseus stuff?
augh it's so hard to get my intricate au from my head out into the world... nightmare is, well, nightmare, right? maybe? imo in canon it's made pretty clear by joku that purplemare (pre-incident, 6 years old) is not the same person as tealmare (post-incident, 6-500+ depending when your little comic or whatever is set). dream himself has a bit of good ol' Fridge Horror about this, but recently I've begun to wonder about nightmare's reaction. how would it feel, over the lifetimes of many over, to feel the mask of the body you stole becoming one and the same with your true self? who is nightmare anyways? canonically, tealmare is just the spirit of the guy who killed nim who took over nightmare's corpse upon the second the black apple touched his "lips" (remember: canon dreamtale has skeleton twins. spoooky!) purplemare is, in the strictest definition of the word, the original nightmare. and yet. and yet.
dream knows in canon, but i thought it would be more interesting if he always held onto the hope that somewhere, deep, deep down, is the brother he knew all his life before everything went wrong. it was terrible from the start, but for dream, he'd look at anything with rose-tinted glasses to avoid confronting the reality of his situation. that's kind of also why i dislike the canon "dream can only feel negative for a little while before going back to being perky and happy again!" stuff. sometimes you aren't like, consciously negative. it's a creeping feeling, or maybe lingering on things for too long, or being a bit more tired than you usually are. for someone like dream, functionally immortal due to boss monster + literally only one guy can kill him, these small slip-ups must feel like hell to him. "why aren't i doing as well as i usually do? I'm letting them down. just a few more hours of work and it'll be over." but it's not just a few hours. it's going to go on for as long as he lives, for as long as there is darkness in the world. for others, there's home, friends, family. for dream, his home is rotted, his friends were never truly his, and his family forsook him. forsaked? forsakeneded? idk.
going back to nightmare, how does it feel? open a book one day, you're sure you hated it years ago but now you realize it's enjoyable as sinking your claws (nails after a certain length are claws. to me) into a warm body. before you can really notice, the sky is dark outside. just as you drift off to a rare bout of sleep you remember this was one of his favorites. (you should be able to figure this out, but purple means purplemare.) honestly it's gotta be worse for underlight nightmare than underverse nightmare because in underlight, nightmare's "death" was at thirteen (13), minutes away from fourteen (14). that's a lot more personality than a 6 year old. at some point the line between him and the other would blur, would it not?
HUGE WIP !!
DONT MIND THIS STUFF DOWN HERE BTW 👍
<h2>quiz results n stuff</h2>
