Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-32182236-20190721003717/@comment-26907577-20200110144605

I don't have any good examples on-hand, so I'll make one up.

Let's look at the Multiple Simultaneous Springlock Failures in another way. Suppose that FNAF did NOT establish that normal failures cause cascading failures. What then?

Then, as above, we have two solutions. While the canon helps us eliminate one, that's not the point- after all, we went dry on Undertale evidence for four years, and Chapter 1 doesn't help much. I'm going to say this one more time, for clarity: I know that option 1 is discounted by canon. This is a non-canon hypothetical.
 * 1) Multiple springlocks failed simultaneously, in the same suit.
 * 2) Multiple suits suffered simultaneous springlock failures.

I think that's enough of me saying the same thing. Where was I?

In this hypothetical, which option has more Story Potential, and which one has fewer assumptions.

Option 2 obviously has more Story Potential, as it implies that somebody took out a roomful of springsuits.

But Option 1 suggests that such a cascading failure is still possible, while not being guaranteed. With this small assumption, (I lied, more repetition- this being a hypothetical where we don't already know it's guaranteed) Option 1 seems significantly more probable.

Hmm. I don't like that one.

Here's a reductio ad absurdum example: Now, it's not a particularly good story. But the conspiracy I just described above could arguably work, with enough ridiculous assumptions. And it does have a story, albeit, again, a bad one. And since we don't know what goes on in Toby Fox's head, maybe he thinks that story would be better. It's a possibility. Which is where we bring in Occam's Razor. And then we set it aside, unless all seemingly-reasonable interpretations turn out to require yet more ridiculous assumptions.
 * 1) Undertale is a story about a human who falls down a mountain, gaining strange powers over time, and interacts with the monsters underneath, making odd choices that can cause a variety of outcomes and much humor.
 * 2) Undertale is a story about a human in a post-apocalyptic wasteland who falls down a mountain and interacts with the extremely persuasive cosplayers underneath, making odd choices which are looked upon by a great wizard who sits by judging, and never showing more than the tip of his pinkie in the deeds wrought by his command. His name is W. D. Gaster and he's the last surviving employee of Aperture Science after WWIII between the United States, Western Europe, and Japan against Russia, China, and much of the Middle East (which was conquered by Iran, a puppet state of Russia, early on).

Does that make sense?