Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20190403163405/@comment-26006155-20190425221811

Ambassador, you're a champion of Occam's Razor, right?

Why do there have to be eight universes?

While it's true that if you consider that Frisk's actions could create any number of potential new timelines during a playthrough of Undertale, if we start at the origin point of Frisk waking up on the flowers at the beginning of the game, I only see the neccessity of two universes.

The Alpha Timeline, where Gaster didn't die until his Darkest Experiment.

And the Beta Timeline, where Gaster died in 201X because Sans and Papyrus went back in time to change the future, and help Frisk/BetaSans get a better ending.

These form the ironclad parts of Undertale's lore. And while it does look like Gaster has tweaked the universe again in Deltarune, I can explain just about every observable aspect of Undertale's lore with only two original timelines.

Any more than that might really produce a too-complex answer, and risk getting lost in outer space.