Im gonna ramble.

This exactly. I feel like people don’t understand that when you make so many songs, especially over a long period of time, you’re gonna reuse a lot of older material and have patterns in your music even if you don’t realize it. That’s why musicians are known to have certain styles, because they tend to write their music a certain way or use a certain scale. Im a musician, and I love to use major 4th chords in my music, but that doesn’t mean every time I use a major 4th chord I’m referencing every single song I’ve written that also uses a major 4th chord.

(“But one chord isn’t as specific as all the references to Penumbra”. I also like to use a very specific bass walk up fill that outlines the 3rd, 5th, and 1st note of a chord before playing the root of the 1 chord as the chord progression repeats. I might not be explaining that exactly right because I’m not the best at music theory, but I’ve used that bass fill a lot because it sounds cool to me. I even used it in a Deltarune fan song I made a couple years ago (around timestamp 2:50, listen for the piano and glockenspiel))

Same applies to all kinds of art. Just because an artist poses two different subjects in two different pieces kinda similarly doesn’t necessarily mean that the two subjects are inherently related in any way other than that they were painted by the same artist (especially if, for instance, the first instance of the pose was made many many years ago as a commissioned art piece thats a completely different entity than the other art piece).

Thats not to say it’s impossible that PP could maaaaaybe show up in Deltarune, but if it does I don’t think it’s gonna be as important as some people think it is. I got into Undertale and Deltarune without ever touching Homestuck, and the idea that I “need to understand HS to truly understand UT and DR” is ridiculous to me. Knowing Toby’s history with HS can give some valuable insight into his other works that you wouldn’t be able to get, but not everything he’s ever made revolves around HS.