Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26242189-20160623232543/@comment-27701762-20160627232040

Yossipossi wrote: That like saying the lab behind Sans' house is unimportant cuz it's just for dramatic tension. Everything has a reason. If it is as you truely say, why is it only use twice? Why not in the True Lab when Alphys arrives? Why not during Flowey's monolouging? Your counterexample is fallacious: there is no analogy between Sans's lab and the two specific moments in the game where a circular light surrounds a character and everything outside of that light appears to stop.

For that matter, to say "everything has a reason" imparts nothing upon what that reason is. I have already attributed a reason to the very phenomena you point to. That it does not accord with the reason you want does not make it "not a reason."

You ask why it isn't used at other points, but at what other points is it needed? It isn't needed in the True Lab, since there is nothing else going on to distract the player from the scene. Nor is it needed during any of Flowey's other lines.

By contrast, however, your intention is to attribute the power to stop time to Sans and Flowey. And since you respond "why isn't this device used at other points in the game," the same response is equally fair from my corner: if Sans and Flowey have the power to stop time at will, why do they not use this power when it is convenient for them, for example: at any point when Flowey encounters the protagonist (and especially the first encounter); when Toriel fights off Flowey; when the protagonist is attacking Papyrus (since Sans could use his powers to prevent Papyrus from coming to harm); when Sans fights the protagonist; when Sans is about to die to the protagonist; when Flowey is about to die to the protagonist; when Flowey absorbs the human souls and traps the other main characters. At all of these points either Sans or Flowey should make use of this incredibly unique power for their purposes, and yet do not.

In turn, if Sans and Flowey have this power, there is no explanation for where it comes from: the fact that the power to save and reload, and thus what appears to be the power to control time, is housed in determination means that the only entity who should have the power to stop time is the protagonist. Nor is there an explanation for why those two specifically would have it, since there is no actual connection between Sans and Flowey. Not to mention that it flies completely in the face of everything established about the characters and the world, since now there is an additional power about time that is much stronger than what the protagonist has, yet is only ever manifested twice, and in those cases never in a way that would be beneficial for the characters that have it. If Toby is indeed saying that Sans and Flowey have this power, then the fact that they don't use this power at any moment when they face danger constitutes a major plot hole.

Your thesis, thus, requires a great deal more explanation than mine does.