So there are these really long strings of binary in the Undertale text dump and this is what happened when I pasted one in a separate window and messed around with the window size a bit. Apparently the game was originally supposed to use strings like this to render monsters turning to dust, since it’s less computationally intensive than reading the sprites one pixel at a time. In the final version of the game, the process is a little bit different, but there are like 40 strings of apparent gibberish that turn out to encode death sprites.
Holy crap