Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26173722-20180625135942/@comment-26173722-20190911144103

I'm going to go through this one claim at a time.

- If someone loses the will to live, their soul will shatter.

That's not what is said in the game:

"I've extracted it from the human SOULs. I believe this is what gives their SOULs the strength to persist after death. The will to keep living... The resolve to change fate. Let's call this power... "Determination.""

Determination is described as an actual substance; a power that allows Human souls to persist after death. That's how Alphys is able to extract it from the human soul and inject into monsters and plants.

Determination, in this context, is not a feeling. A soul losing the "will the live" and just shattering isn't ever brought up as something that can happen in the canon.

That wouldn't explain why human souls are stronger. Do monsters just not have as much will to live as humans? No, they're just composed of different things, making one species have stronger souls than the other.