Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-31981697-20170722123329/@comment-27136653-20171020234319

If 201X is 2015, then Toby won't be alive in 211X, since that's like 2115. And the fact that it's not the real Toby, as you said, puts this argument to grave anyways.

It's not an exception, since it's canonically and factually proven. Just like Donald Trump is the POTUS, the Annoying Dog represents Toby Fox, which complicates the entire situation. When there's no evidence nailing this fact down, we CAN bend it, in order to account for some strange occurences (such as, the artifact room). However, when there IS evidence (most of the stuff laying around in the developer room), there are two posibilities. Either, the occurence is important to the plot, in which case, the entire game is self-aware, or, if it's not, we can ignore it. Unlike with the artifact room, there are facts present this time which cannot be bent, so we can't make up our own story, we must instead simply ignore the given one. So this is why you cannot say the dog in the developer room is "just" some dog. The only thing you can do is ignore it. And the fact that we can do so allows us to label the dog present in the artifact room as just some "normal" dog.

And questioning why is the mushroom there is the same as questioning why did the boss monster in the intro (presumably Asgore) had only one horn? It's a graphical thing that could well be the result of simply not thinking about it that much during the making of it. I can see that it looks good on the black box. It's nice, symmetrical, maybe that's the only thing Toby was going for here. I am convinced it has no other meaning, and it certainly wasn't placed there to disprove some wild theories.