Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-31371445-20170222233857/@comment-27136653-20180627041655

"Um, we CAN go back."

By which I meant, our soul wouldn't need to refuse after dying, we could just go back to our last save point. But we can't, since Asriel is in control, and wants to reset.

"We need to find out what happens if you die, and DON'T "stay determined" in time."

Define "don't stay determined". Human souls persist after death. So I'm guessing that's what happens if they choose not to reset (as in, they have that option, but reject it).

"We're not loading at all here."

So it's obvious then. Quitting = reloading, and reloading = coming back to the last save, no matter who's save it is. I mean, we didn't physically run away, it doesn't look like that's the case. Though, the question still is, why can we reload, if we're not in control? We can either come up with yet another guess theory here, or disregard reloading by quitting as an in-game thing altogether, despite the game addressing it (we could say it is another meta moment that does not and cannot fit the story narrative).

"File X, as we know it, is not LOADed. (Flowey SAVEs and LOADs within the battle frequently.) Flowey instead chooses to load File 3, at the start of the battle. Frisk did NOT keep the ability here."

I'm not talking about Frisk loading, I'm talking about Flowey. And for sure Flowey saved the moment he got the souls. That's the only way we can explain returning to that point in time after restarting the game.

"Therefore, it is unreasonable to assume that Frisk lost ANY of their powers on these grounds alone."

If you chicken out like that, sure. That's because Asriel didn't save, as I said. Unlike Omega Flowey. But he gets the control after you die, implying that reloading by dying is NOT an option for you anymore.

"So, these six SOULs just weren't determined enough to do this."

Or they decided not to do it. As in, determined to persist, instead of going back in time again. Kinda like what Chara did, if you believe that Chara had this power too. Besides, I think it's impossible for humans to just "lose" DT like that. Sure, they can gain it and for example "refuse" to die, but they have a set amount of DT in them, as I've postulated before and I don't think simply refusing (in the normal meaning) to go back is an option for them. That would have been too easy. It would also be too easy for Flowey, who also has a set amount of DT pumped into him.

"Shattering IS LOADing?"

Yes, it's an old theory. I'm surprised this is the first time you're hearing it.

"that it would make Asriel's plan of killing you to reset useless"

Asriel had the control, so in that case, this wouldn't work. As I said many times already. And the soul splitting in two means nothing. The soul refused, that's the main point. You could say the essence was still inside the split soul, and leaves only when it shatters into multiple pieces.

"They would want to reload, and have another chance at killing the other humans.. But, they didn't. Why not?"

You say it's because their soul shattered, but that happens to Frisk every time they die. What did you mean by this then?

"THIS is why he makes it so that you can't move your body in phase 2-It's to prevent you from reaching your SAVE, and to make it so LOADing by dying is therefore impossible"

I think loading by dying doesn't require any physical movement. It's something the essence decides to do. After all, at that moment, we are dead. You can't exactly move when you're dead. So I don't think this is why we couldn't move in the battle. I think the reason for that was, that it was simply a side effect of Asriel's powers. After all, if he didn't want us to also reset manually, he could have simply done what he did as Omega Flowey, that is, make his own save, so that us fleeing would bring us right back there.

"That applies to Omega Flowey too, you know! So why doesn't this special case apply here too?"

Uh... it... actually does? Well, I mean, we don't KNOW if it does, since Omega Flowey never reset, but certainly nothing is disputing it. Omega Flowey I BELIEVE couldn't reset either, due to the SAME reason he couldn't reset as Asriel. And that reason is the composition of his soul... Maybe there's another explanation, but the idea that it's his own soul seems pretty straightforward to me, so I'm taking it.

"Also, he has plenty of SAVE slots, he could just LOAD the empty slot 3 before he saved over it. That'd be a reset too."

I'm getting a bit lost here. Those slots came from the save files of the other souls, which he erased and inserted his own saves into. So explain the importance of the slot 3 to me. Also, what we saw on the screen was how the world looks to an individual without the SAVE power. So MAYBE our DT matched Asriel's DT in the last fight, but ONLY because the said power had trouble distinguishing the souls that Asriel absorbed as individual units from the whole entity they were creating. There were thousands of them after all. You could say the SAVE file interface was bugged, hence why Asriel didn't gain the ability right away, and why WE kept the interface. But in no way was Frisk's DT greater than the combined DT of (technically) 7 human souls. I do not view a 600% boost as a particuarly good and striking explanation, simply because it is quite a bit of a stretch, considering we have plenty of other explanations at hand.

"If you can LOAD, you can reset. He had the full set of abilities. So, I ask again-Why wasn't he put under the same restrictions as Asriel? And why couldn't we LOAD by closing the game in this fight, unlike with Asriel?"

Loading and resetting are two different things. It is unreasonable to assume that having one gives you the other too. And as I said, we couldn't load, because the powers were completely transferred over to Flowey. Maybe because he saved, or maybe because he simply existed. If you believe in the first one, then the explanation for Asriel's fight is, that he didn't save. Whatever we had in that fight that we didn't have in the Flowey fight was because Asriel didn't save. Or, if you believe the latter, it is due to the complexity of Asriel's soul. Omega Flowey had 6 souls. The consequence? Us being able to reload (though that just moved us back to Flowey's last save). Asriel had probably tens of thousands of souls. The consequence? Us being able to do everything, except reload by dying (hence why our soul chose to refuse instead).

I guess, the reload by quitting is so meta, we kept that even during the most drastic fight, the Omega Flowey fight, where nearly everything was taken away from us. On the other hand, reload by dying is very non-meta. The reason this was the only ability we lost I speculate to be, that when we die, the SAVE power checks who's in charge and moves their essence back in time. In this case, this was the only way the SAVE power realized that Frisk is NOT the one in charge, but Asriel is. And our soul knew this, so it REFUSED instead.

"We can't in Omega Flowey, but can in Asriel. Hey, have any way to resolve this contradiction?"

By running away, we get moved to our last save, BEFORE the fight with Asriel began. From there, we can choose to continue normally, or to reset (the screen that appears before we "respawn"). We never technically reset during Asriel's fight, you could say. We always reset at our last save point, where we get moved by either dying, or by quitting and restarting the game.

"It just means he can display things on his screen."

I meant on our screen. The in-game world.

"This means Flowey did NOT overwrite our SAVE, but created a NEW file-And yet, the HUD still recognizes our own SAVE when we try to SAVE."

Yep, as I said, a save file matrix stack.

"as telekenesis would normally work"

Define "normally". Telekinesis is not a thing irl. So how exactly do you imagine telekinesis working? Like in the movie Chronicle? In there, they managed to move an entire pack of cards, one by one, through the air, as if some sick card trick. So controlling many bullets at once might not be as difficult, according to the rules of this movie's world. Or have you got something different in mind? And if you're concerned about hitting different targets, remember, arrays of objects CAN hit multiple enemies at once, provided you position it correctly.

"You MIST exert some magical force."

But for sure you can also apply that force on all objects at once, if you can control them all at once and not each one individually. The most difficult case would be to assign each magical object a different speed, acceleration and trajectory. But that would be rather unpractical and I don't see anyone ever having the need to summon something like that.

"That would explain why bullet patterns is just them represting themselves, that's their natural reaction, just as the complex movement of muscles required for us to move our hands and type these responses are natural to us!"

That would also explain why humans don't have magic in the first place. Heh.

"That is the reason why they can't represent their magic."

Representing yourself is something far different than letting your attacks persist without any constant focus. Like, you are comparing apples with DVD cases over here. You can say that that's what a "magical representation" is, heck, you can say that a "magical representation" is the ability to summon an image of the POTUS into existence in all his glory, but at the end of the day, that's just gonna be your idea, your headcanon about what that phrase really means. My explanation is simple. I've noticed how abstract it is, and how many possible abstract explanations it could have - one worse than another, so I chose to go with the literal meaning of the phrase, which isn't all that bad actually. It's straightforward, so you don't need to question it to understand it, or go to any great lengths to comprehend its connection with the original phrase. You only have to question whether it doesn't contradict the game. Which, as I've shown, it really doesn't. The abstact explanations don't make any sense, that's why I chose to believe that this phrase was literal, that is, that humans cannot / can no longer use magic. Those books in the Snowdin library are no ancient plaques. The chances are that some of them were written after Chara fell are quite high. And if Chara told the monsters that humans cannot use magic, that would be the full explanation.

Also, I don't see any contradiction with my explanation. Can you elaborate?

"The intro shows them as humans, so they were humans."

I could argue that the intro is inaccurate, for it is just an intro, and that the only thing that matters is the stuff we learn about the world's history later down the path, but, to be absolutely honest, I believe in the existence of a third race, that looks similar to humans, but whose souls are not the same. Kinda like with boss monsters, who also look like monsters, but whose souls function a bit differently. But then again, if you want an alternative explanation, one that wouldn't be so far-fetched, it is that the humans lost the ability to use magic over the years, due to the monsters leaving, as magic is NOT native to their bodies.

"All of them? That's quite unlikely, especially when consider that they're not the first ones with this power"

I mean, maybe it was like a social thing. The best ones would not engage in sexual activities, have families, etc. But then again, this is not my default explanation.

"Why did the humans have ALL of their magical power, after a long battle where monsters didn't support them with more food to replenish their magic, to make a barrier of the FULL power of seven human SOULs?"

Three explanations for that: A) The wizards didn't engage up until the end, or B) they did, but the battle didn't exhaust their magic, because they only used their magic to cast the barrier (and fought the rest of the battle with physical weapons), or C) they did fight and they did fight with magic, but it did not exhaust them, as their magical potential was made from years of built up magical foods and whatnot, so a single fight would not totally deplete it.

Actually, the premise itself implies they gave their ENTIRE souls to the task, which does rule out the possibility C, but also kinda supports my head canon, that they weren't human, since WHO would kill themselves for such task? Either those guys were REALLY devoted, or they weren't human and giving away a human soul worth of magical power was no big deal for them.

"Why did the humans throw away their magical wares that allows them to use magic after making the Barrier?"

I meant they would absorb the magic from those items. So eventually, those items would get totally depleted, and the magic itself would get lost after the humans who absorbed it died. However, think about the logic of items giving humans magic, that do not get depleted like this. Those would not count as human magic, would they? More like, an artefact magic or something. Eventually, as the ages would progress and the human population would rise, these would get lost, forgotten or destroyed, and would become increasingly rare. In the end, a majority of the humans would once again be left without any magic (and most likely also oblivious to the existence of magic), and what's left of the artefacts would most likely get hidden away from the general public, assuming that the public doesn't know about these things (so as per usual, we have the case of the "big government" hiding something from the people in order to protect them - think of Warehouse 13: a normal world, but with everything paranormal getting hidden away - something like that).

In essence, the question of why magical items did not preserve their magic is self-explanatory, there's too many humans, and too little of these items.

"weren't YOU the one arguing that reducing the humans to 7 groups and saying those don't act like us was ludicrous?"

I don't think I did? I certainly don't believe that there's more or less than 7 traits, and I don't believe that there's only 7 human behavior types. It's neither N to N, nor 7 to 7. It's 7 to N, hence eliminating the possibility of souls absolutely correctly representing everyone's personalities, without employing trait mixing. However, I also don't believe that you can get every single possible human behavior type by mixing just 7 traits, and certainly not the 7 traits that the game introduced. So I don't believe in trait mixing.

This is what I believe in: we have 7 soul types, that CANNOT be mixed, and yet, each human in existence MUST be assigned one. I'm thinking a soul trait hash function. You don't get to choose from a ratio of the 7 traits, you must pick one and only one trait for each human, as the traits do not mix. That is my head canon. A soul trait hash function. Large constant input, small constant output. Whatever the souls represent is therefore not their personality per se, because a human's personality can only be described with a hundred word long range of nouns or adjectives, it cannot be condensed to just 7 archetypes. But what DO the souls represent then, if not the personalities of the humans? I may be wrong, the hash function might hash anything for that matter, but I firmly believe that it is what the game already showed to us, that is, the fighting styles.

Also, a funny thing, I managed to connect this idea with the 7 lightsaber forms from Star Wars. Interested? Here: https://redd.it/8ds53w

"Because of the fact that, well, the names of the traits DON'T fit the modes."

And yet, the modes bear those trait colors. I do sense a connection. Don't you?

"Why can't humans ALSO have "no specilization", and have a white SOUL?"

Because... magic. That's what their souls are, that's how they work. Their physical brains get hashed into one of 7 outputs. This isn't something to be questioned, this is rather a premise the game established. As for monsters, maybe the explanation is the same, they have no physical matter to be hashed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"Same magic that makes the shield appear in green, and the webs to move across appear in purple."

I didn't mean the color, I meant the bullets themselves. I actually don't think the device provided the magic for them to us. I think it was the mode itself that somehow made it possible for us to use magic. Most likely by tapping into and drawing from the massive DT pool of a human soul to do so.

"Which would make the patience kid die in the Ruins."

Now hold on, soul modes are active magic. Soul traits either force behavioral archetypes on you, or, as I expounded above, represent your personality in an odd way. They don't affect you physically, unlike soul modes.

"What about Toriel's spiraling flame pattern? Or Papyrus' complex bone attacks? Or Undying spear patterns?"

Arrays, precision, arrays of arrays (sinusoidal movement + spiraling). There are other interesting patterns too, but most of them are just random, which isn't really complex. Though, one thing I would give to humans, and that is an inability to cast complex shapes, such as butterflies or crescents. Their straightforwardness would benefit from plain attacks, such as those shown in Harry Potter or Avengers: Infinity War.

"How could a human compare to that?"

Summon a pre-prepared array? I'm really not seeing the issue here.