a thought about MEGALOVANIA

15 Sep, 2025

last modified 3 weeks, 2 days ago

Originally written July 2025, majorly revised the night before publishing. Most links in this post are gonna be YouTube links. I like warning people what website I’m linking to, for vague common courtesy purposes (maybe you’re in public and trying to save mobile data, for example). If you see a link in this post and it’s not labeled as any sort of link, it’s probably a link to a YouTube video, I’m just letting people know…

Y’know, I don’t think I’ve talked about how much I like Undertale on this blog before. It’s kind of incongruous with the vibe I try to set, but it’s not surprising if you’ve been paying attention to who I actually am. Like, I was an autistic terminally-online tween who watched too much YouTube when it came out, if I hadn’t been a fan it’d been statistically anomalous... And it’s difficult to stop being an Undertale fan once you start. It’s the sorta game that tends to stick with you.

Anyway, today I had some thoughts about a minor element of the story, so I wanted to share them. Might as well.

There’s a song in the Undertale soundtrack called "Song That Might Play When You Fight Sans". You might be aware of this, but despite its name, this song never actually plays during the game. Under normal circumstances, there’s no point in the story where you fight the laid-back skeleton character Sans. There is a fight against Sans, but it’s walled off in a separate “evil” route of the game. This route is known by fans as the No Mercy route or Genocide route.

The fight against Sans in this route is famous, for a whole lotta reasons. It’s a very shocking presence; it’s the hardest fight in the game by a wide margin; it breaks several pre-established “soft” rules of the game (and genre); it’s entirely unexpected, in and of itself; and it’s also entirely unexpected that it’d be Sans, of all people, that antagonizes you during the fight. It also completely re-contextualizes Sans’s character, taking him from a primarily comedic character with a creepy cryptic streak, to a multifaceted, tragic, cryptic little piece of fan-bait.

And (& this is the subject of today’s post), when you fight Sans in this route, the game doesn’t play the aforementioned “Song That Might Play When You Fight Sans”. Instead, it plays the now-infamous track "MEGALOVANIA".

“MEGALOVANIA” has a pretty interesting history. It’s not a song that’s original to Undertale, though it was indeed composed by Toby Fox¹. Before Undertale, the song was best known for appearing in the webcomic Homestuck². But it wasn’t originally composed for Homestuck, either. Its first public iteration can be found in The Halloween Hack, an Earthbound hack Toby Fox created and published when he was in secondary school, some eight or nine years before Undertale‘s release. It’s a song that followed Toby Fox through nearly a decade of composing for different internet-art-things.

The Undertale fanbase, back when it was really feisty, had a slight… controversy, so to speak, over this song.

There’s this idea, both in Undertale specifically and videogames more broadly, of there being a relationship between a videogame boss enemy and the music that plays during encounters with them. If a song plays only when you’re focusing on a certain character, it’s “their” theme, and therefore “theirs” in some way.

Undertale is a game directed, written, and programmed by a musician, who also (naturally) scored it. As a result of that, this game's soundtrack has a larger-than-average weight on the story it tells. Like, the score’s full of these character- and theme-specific leitmotifs, and many characters and locations get assigned two or three variations on nearly the same song, or sometimes widely disparate songs that happen to share a motif, etcetera, etcetera. Right?

For example, let’s look at the character Undyne. Her boss encounter theme's called "Spear of Justice". There’s a motif in this song that’s also present in the songs "Undyne" and "Run!", which appear while she’s chasing you around the overworld before her boss encounter, and in the song "Dating Tense!", which plays during a more comedic moment later in the game, a moment centered around her. These motifs can also appear in the themes of other characters, and it often indicates some connection between the two. For example, Undyne’s motif briefly appears in "ASGORE", a song belonging to Undyne’s boss, King Asgore.

Another example can be found near the character Papyrus, who has an overworld theme in "Nyeh Heh Heh!" and a boss encounter theme in "Bonetrousle". And his motif also appears in a song related to his brother, a song by the title “Song That Might Play When You Fight Sans”. And Sans, too, has an overworld theme (simply titled "sans."), and this song has a motif that’s also present in “Song That Might Play When You Fight Sans”. Nearly every song in Undertale is connected with another song this way³.

Nearly every song, of course, except “MEGALOVANIA”. “MEGALOVANIA” has no intentional shared leitmotifs with any songs in the Undertale soundtrack⁴.

So it’s weird, right? There’s an unused song titled “Song That Might Play When You Fight Sans”, and it sounds like it should be Sans’s assigned boss encounter theme, but instead, when you do have a boss encounter with him, what plays is “MEGALOVANIA”, a completely outside-context song with no relation to anything else in the soundtrack.

There’s also the circumstances behind the fight (and therefore the song). When Sans fights you, at the end of the evil kill-’em-all route⁵, he's not the “bad guy” in that fight, you are. Not (necessarily) “you” as in Frisk, the character you control, but rather, you as in the real-life player. You’ve made the decision (and this is something the game makes very explicit) to kill every single living being in the game, every single monster existing in the planet⁶, and you probably did this because you were curious about what would happen if you did, and because you don’t see these fictional characters as real people⁷.

And Sans is also (near-uniquely in the game) aware of the fact that he cannot defeat you; he can only “win” if you concede the match, because if he kills you, you’ll just reload your savefile and try again. (Sans is, uh, reacting in a pretty logical way to what is essentially an elder god stomping its way into his city and murdering everyone...)

These circumstances informed a particular interpretation of the song “MEGALOVANIA”. See, it’s a completely out-of-left-field song within the soundtrack—a soundtrack that’s tied intimately to the game’s fictional cast and world. It’s completely disconnected from Sans himself, and from any songs Sans might have partial or total “ownership” of. And like, Sans himself is decently well-connected with his own world⁸. And the title is weird, too, because it’s obviously based on the word "Megalomania" (Merriam-Webster link), but Sans exhibits no signs of deluded or disordered thinking during the encounter; to be honest, you could probably describe him as more lucid than usual, here.

But there is someone in this fight who is completely disconnected from the fictional world of the Underground and its cast, and that figure is also positing themselves as great and omnipotent. It’s just that it’s not Sans, but instead the player. As in, you.

And so, several fans thought, “well, what if ‘MEGALOVANIA’ isn’t supposed to be Sans’s boss encounter theme against us, but our boss encounter theme against Sans?” That is to say, “MEGALOVANIA” isn’t a song that plays when we fight Sans; rather, it’s a song that plays when Sans fights us.

Some people thought this interpretation was genius and repeated it as gospel, while some people disliked it. This was for a whole lot of reasons, some of which I think are legitimate problems with the interpretation, and some of which I find overly dismissive of the possibility.

The problem I find with this interpretation is difficult to express convincingly... I'll do my best. Essentially, I just don’t buy the evidence for this particular claim as anything more than circumstantial. The claim that the player character has a theme is a hefty one, and with “MEGALOVANIA” only appearing one time in Undertale, and its motif referenced nowhere else that could tie it to anything, particularly the player… I just can’t believe it, you know?

But the idea that “MEGALOVANIA” isn’t Sans’s “usual” boss encounter theme intrigues me. That is, the idea that “MEGALOVANIA” is specific to Sans’s No Mercy route boss encounter because of circumstances that aren’t Sans’s presence; that if we fought him in any other context, the song that would play would be “Song That Might Play When You Fight Sans”, and “MEGALOVANIA” overrides it here, for some reason. Something that makes Sans’s fight unique, and therefore means the music that plays during it is unique, as well⁹.

...Except for the fact that “MEGALOVANIA” is not unique. That is, it’s unique within Undertale, but Toby Fox’s audience would’ve heard it twice before: in Homestuck and in The Halloween Hack.

And listen, Homestuck is beyond me. Homestuck is a subject I don’t want to touch publicly, actually. I think it’s probably a really good story, and in fact I might like it if I read it¹⁰. And, beyond finding it kinda funny, I don’t really care either way that Toby Fox was a huge fan turned contributor to it. But I’m still not going to touch Homestuck with a ten-foot stick anywhere public because (for personal reasons) it gives me a headache whenever I think about it...

But I can talk about The Halloween Hack. Not a lot; I haven’t played it myself, nor have I played Earthbound. But I watched a playthrough when I was a tween and living through the peak of Undertale mania, and I’ve read a bit about it recently, and it features a final boss encounter, during which the game plays “MEGALOVANIA”.

Before I say anything, here’s another disclaimer. When The Halloween Hack was released, Fox was seventeen and it was like 2008. Fox has expressed some level of regret over THH, which I think he’s entitled to, as its creator (god knows I’ve regretted some shit I’ve put online). I hold absolutely nothing from THH against Fox. And I’m not referring here to any specific instance of the edgelord bullshit. Rather, I don’t hold any of the broad, vast swathes of edgelord bullshit that compose most of THH against Fox, nor its incredibly clumsy, if admirably sincere, writing.

I also don’t think people should revisit THH just because they’re fans of Undertale or Deltarune. I don’t want people to revisit the bad fanfic I wrote when I was seventeen when I release good fanfic at twenty-four¹¹. More importantly, it’s nowhere near the level of Undertale or Deltarune in quality. This doesn’t mean I think THH has no value: I think it has a lot of value - to the Earthbound modding community, and to the Starmen forums, and to anybody who might be interested in an edgelord Earthbound hack some random teenager made that explores the weirder and spookier bits of Earthbound with, if nothing else, blunt personal honesty.

Most people have no idea what THH is. I told my younger sibling about all my thoughts earlier today (as I write this, on the 23rd of July, 2025) and they had no clue what the plot of THH even was. I’m going to do my best to summarize, but again, I haven’t actually played Earthbound, and my memories of THH are blurry.

Earthbound is a funny little turn-based JRPG from the 90‘s, which differentiated itself from its contemporaries in several ways, including its story’s genre: it’s set in a newspaper comics- and Saturday morning cartoon-inspired take on the USA named Eagleland, and its protagonists are mostly kids-next-door types (and Poo, who’s an eleven-year-old martial artist). Its plot revolves around an immensely powerful psychic alien being named Giygas, who’s commanding its army to conquer the Earth.

Four plucky kids named Ness, Paula, Jeff and Poo battle Giygas’s forces throughout what’s mostly a cutesy, silly adventure full of absurdist comedy. However, an extended sequence partway through the game involves Ness entering a magical mind-scape known as Magicant, where he fights his own personal dark side (quote Wikipedia), I think to retrieve an object or piece of information that’s key to defeating Giygas. And at the end, it’s revealed (if I recall correctly) that Giygas has already won, and the only way to stop him is to travel back in time and prevent him from ever being able to muster his armies.

Jeff’s father, Dr. Andonuts, is an Einstein pastiche and a reknowned inventor. He creates a time travel machine he calls the Phase Distorter (what a name!) so that Ness and friends can fulfill their mission. But this Phase Distorter only allows for inorganic material to travel, and so the kid protagonists need to have their bodies switched with robot bodies to successfully make the trip.

And then, as if things weren’t creepy enough already, Giygas's boss encounter looks like this.

The Halloween Hack is set after the events of Earthbound. In the world of THH, Ness and his friends never returned from the past. And there’s these… strange, horrible monsters that have started emerging from the sewers and rampaging through once-idyllic towns, with one monster notably ripping a family apart limb from limb.

You play as Varik¹², an alcoholic failed bounty hunter, who’s forced into a quest to find the murderous monster and kill it. He follows its trail to Dr. Andonuts’s laboratory, where the doctor is revealed as the monsters’ creator. Andonuts fears that Varik’s been sent here to kill him, a belief which the following events validate. Because of this fear, the doctor attempts to escape to his own version of Magicant. (His “mindscape”, if you’d like). At this point in the game, the player-as-Varik is given an initially false choice between killing Andonuts and nothing (an option that loops the dialogue and prompts you once more to kill Andonuts). However, pressing the SNES’s B button allows Varik to instead follow Andonuts into the doctor’s mind.

Within Andonuts’s Magicant, Varik learns about the fears and neuroses gnawing away at the doctor’s mind: his repressed sexual hangups, his abysmal relationship with his wife, and most importantly, his regret over building the Phase Distorter and enacting the gruesome surgeries that let four children - including his own son - travel somewhere and never return. Eventually, Varik and a recruited party of mental constructs find Andonuts and face him, with Andonuts ranting incoherently beforehand about how his circumstances have turned him into a monster, about how Varik is an amoral sellsword, how terrified Andonuts is of dying, and how he thinks it’s still inevitable, because (the player-as-) Varik has been designated a “hero”, and “[heroes] have to kill the monster”.

There’s a multi-part fight here, first against “Andonut’s Id” (which doesn’t attack, instead guilting the player and generally saying sad shit) and then with Andonuts himself, who turns mad with rage and distorts his body with psychic powers. And then he calls Varik a slur¹³. Hell yeah.

Anyway, this is when "MEGALOVANIA" plays in The Halloween Hack. Then the player-as-Varik kills Andonuts and the hack ends.

Meanwhile, in Undertale, “MEGALOVANIA” plays during the fight against Sans in the No Mercy route. This, too, is a situation where a player character's shallow curiosity and nonchalance about violence allows them to “sequence”-“break” the game into showing you a certain hidden side, despite how the characters beg you to stop... And Sans, in these circumstances, after losing it all, still desperately tries to appeal to the impossible, implacable juggernaut that is a player character; but he’s still unable to mask his own rage and his grief, and how they’ve motivated him to take a stand against you, demonstrating heretofore unknown fighting prowess once he goes “all out”…

Yeah, in case I need to make it explicit: I’m highlighting all of this to compare the boss encounter with the one in THH. …I don’t think it’s a new idea at all to find parallels between THH‘s Andonuts fight and the Sans boss encounter. It’s pretty much just kinda there to find. (I also have a theory that nearly any two things can be paralelled anywhere in fiction… You could find parallels between a Bluey side character and Jeff the Killer if you wanted to. This is the beauty of rhetoric and of literary analysis!)

But that’s all conjecture and me reading into things. “MEGALOVANIA” is the only explicit connection between both boss encounters. That said, I think this connection can imply something. Specifically, it can imply something in the context of Undertale, since there’s zero evidence within the text of THH that “MEGALOVANIA” isn’t a theme for Andonuts in some way… (THH doesn’t really have any of Undertale’s musical cohesion, and I’m not equipped to analyze it anyway, so, let’s just worry about Undertale…)

Here’s my conclusion, and it’s kinda simple, and I’m sure it’s not new.

I don’t think “MEGALOVANIA” is Sans’s “usual” boss theme, if there is such a thing. I also don’t think “MEGALOVANIA” is the player’s boss theme. I don’t actually think “MEGALOVANIA” even belongs to any character in Undertale particularly as a boss theme. Rather, I want to interpret “MEGALOVANIA” as a song emblematic of circumstances such as these. Desperate all-out last stands doomed to fail, presented as a slow tragedy, an unavoidable murder on the part of a player-as-main character who’s gone this far. A player-voyeur who has, despite all odds, continued playing the game well past its “intended” expiration date. One who, in fact, sought out even more of the game to play, leaving no stone unturned - no matter what consequences it had or what long-buried things it failed to leave well enough alone.

I want to read “MEGALOVANIA” as the theme of a particular shape of final boss. It’s the Sans boss encounter’s theme, but not because of Sans’s presence (nor, in a way, “the player”’s). Rather, it’s because of the shape and conditions of the fight itself. The song, I think, doesn’t have to “belong” to anyone but the story; personally, I see this as a nice way for the text to take a step forward.

That’s about all the thoughts I have on “MEGALOVANIA” as it pertains to Undertale. Well, almost all of them; I want to point out that both Sans and Andonuts are scientists with knowledge of timey-wimey shit, and this informs the despair that drives their fights, allowing them insight into things deleterious to their mental state (Andonuts connecting the kids’ disappearence to his Phase Distorter and Sans’s understanding of time travel). And I’m sure there’s some other thoughts I’m forgetting, too. But this is most of it.

…Oh, of course, there’s also a meta-textual parallel — THH became famous because of the hidden Andonuts boss (it was nicknamed “Press the B Button, Stupid!”), and Undertale owes some of its fame to the bossfight, too. Guess people are suckers for ruining guys’ lives, huh?

Ummm, I also want to point out that Undertale is way better at delivering its intended message, here, than THH. Like, y’know, I’m aware that it was probably bad to break & enter into Andonuts’s mind, but I’m not to blame for being hired to kill him — that was a direct consequence of him making meat monsters that kill people! It’s not as convincing as Undertale. Fun to point out as an example of a writer’s growth.

I think I’m going to queue this post up for Undertale‘s next anniversary, which is its 10th, cutely enough. I don’t think Toby Fox would like it if I brought up THH on the tenth anniversary of Undertale, but ¡oh well!. I hope it’s enough that I acknowledged his publicly-stated relationship with it. And in a way, it’s fitting to me that I celebrate the tenth anniversary of Undertale through a post like this. Sans is infamous for the character derailment he underwent at fans’ hands, and you can trace nearly all of it to his boss encounter, to the extent that I wouldn’t be surprised if Fox regrets making it, to some extent. The Sans fight is the most famous part of Undertale, bar none, and it’s also one of the most speculated-about and misunderstood. It doesn’t fit well with the rest of the game, be it on purpose or accidentally. I hope to hew closer, with this post, to something Toby Fox wouldn’t hate to hear about his work. I’m not sure if it’s possible for me. I’ve watched a lot of MatPat. I’m not even sure this is a goal Fox himself would approve of; I think he’d prefer me to Death of the Author™ him. But it’s a thing I want to do anyways.

I think we, the fanbase, often get really lost in the literal and the diegetic. It’s not disconnected from the text. Undertale isn’t subtle, and like attracts like; it doesn’t surprise me that Undertale‘s fans can be unsubtle, too. But I think ultimately, treating works of fiction as “lore machines” does them a disservice. Not just the text, either. Of course, the author, as a living representative of the text. But I think it does ourselves a disservice, too, as the audience. Entertainment is more than information; experience is more than classification. Reality itself defies it, and art, which reflects and expresses the experience of reality, follows suit. We understand this intuitively. I don’t know about other people, but sometimes I like to say it.

& as always,

thank you for reading!

P. S.: I excised a whole section of this post that was about Chara. I might turn it into something coherent enough to share… If I do, I’ll link it here! : )

#longform #✨ #🌕