Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27524978-20160210030742/@comment-4383275-20160724235927

Invader Jib wrote:

Oobooglunk wrote: PSI Seven wrote: Oobooglunk wrote: PSI Seven wrote: Another thing is that any TRUE EarthBound fan would know, is that there are multiple Franklin Badges. In EarthBound Beginnings/Mother/EarthBound 0, it is possible to have two Franklin Badges.

How is that relevant? Sans's badge could be a Franklin Badge, but not necessary Ness's badge. Would it make sense for Ninten or Lucas or whoever to be in the world of Undertale, though? Sans shares more aesthetic and narrative similarities with Ness from the Halloween Hack than with anyone else. I meant San's badge may not have belonged to anyone from the Mother series. Remember Occam's Razor: "When faced with competing hypotheses, select the one that makes the fewest assumptions. Do not multiply entities without necessity."

If the badge were the only item of evidence linking Sans to Ness, it wouldn't carry so much weight, but it's the combination of existing evidence that makes this theory work. The same goes for any other individual piece of evidence in this theory. The problem here is that there's nothing solid. The similar posture and basically everything else mentioned could be interpreted as simply coincidences, and there was multiple things used that were very clearly supposed to connect to Gaster, not Ness.

Perhaps I haven't made myself sufficiently clear throughout this discussion.

I understand that all the random, seemingly coincidental similarities between Sans and Ness may not explain the connection between them individually, but the beauty of the "Sans is Ness" theory is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Specifically, Sans' similarity to Ness can be tested by a form of reasoning used in critical thinking called the Duck Test: "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck." Likewise, if it stands like Ness, has a badge and a glowing eye like Ness, wears shorts like Ness, and teleports like Ness, then it probably is Ness. Not definitely, but probably--the Duck Test is, after all, a form of inductive (not "this is fact") reasoning.

Connecting the machine and writing to Gaster is not invalid, but it doesn't make any more sense than connecting it to Ness: Gaster is not technically an in-game character--in fact, his true face is never seen. The closest we have are the Mystery Man and Redacted sprites, and even those aren't part of the actual game any more or less than the world of EarthBound is (because, after all, the surface world and the world of EarthBound look strikingly similar).