Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-31371445-20170222233857/@comment-32182236-20181006154654

"That line is incredibly blurry, since one can be "alive" even with only their essence left and nothing else. I will reiterate this below.

Besides, I see that the reload happens after the soul shatters and after we hear the encouraging words. I don't think it happens before we die."

We REFUSE after the SOUL shatters as well. As we were leaving the mortal coil..

"And yet, the possibility of it is coded. My point is, you are trying to keep everything canon, and yet you're filtering through the canon. How's that ANY different from what I'm doing? How do we know what to filter and what not? What is meta and what isn't?"

Simple. Can you reach there by normal means, without just messing around with the game code? If you can, it happened, otherwise, it's not canon. This does make Entry 17 non-canon by these principals, though...

"How about the post-pacifist credits with Asriel, how meta is all of that once again, I ask?"

We can reach there by normal means, so that falls under canon principals-Especially since we get to open a door that was always there because of this. It's one last challenge, to find one last bit of lore.

"Hence why I argued the hole didn't use to exist. That this was before things have changed to their current state."

The point is, though, the monsters got something wrong. Humans DID fall, and they WON'T be trapped forever. So we can't call the plaques as perfect pieces of information that can't ever be wrong. They're just as unreliable as Alphys' lab entries. In both cases, they reached a valid conclusion based on what they thought to be true, but turned out to be wrong because of something else they didn't think about.

"They weren't wrong, back when this information was written down. At least, that's my guess here."

But in meta, which is what you argue all of this is, it IS incorrect information.

"And about information that doesn't change, for example the rules of magic, I argue that that's unchanging, ergo, the plaques cannot be wrong about this topic, unless disputed somewhere else by the game, by Toby explicitly creating a plot twist where old information is discarded and replaced by new."

It IS disputed elsewhere in the game! By the lab entries! That's the WHOLE reason why I made this workaround in the first place! So that everything fits! Like Einstein and his theory of general relativity!

"And thinking about the utility of the plaques, they serve no other purpose but to inform."

Under what lens? Because I spy something wrong about them...

"Replacing them therefore seems utterly pointless. Hence why I argue they are objectively true."

And my workaround keeps them true. But if they and the lab entries were to differ, they both carry the same weight, and seeing as the lab entries were later in the game, and confirmed to have been made by the Royal Scientist herself..

"It's someone's vision. At first, it's an objective truth, that's what we're meant to think. But then we learn that it isn't."

Tell me, where is the information of the intro disputed by the rest of the game?

"And that's why I don't think her sole role is to educate the player. Which was kind of obvious from the get go."

Mettaton MAKING her wrong doesn't mean she's not good at making rational deductions, or that she's a bad scientist. It just means Alphys didn't know what METTATON did to the CORE. Also, we should stop using the meta so much. We should stay with in-universe explanations, and an in-universe POV.

"Why tho, why complicate it so much? Why "the power of the strength", why not "strength of the soul = power of the soul?" We are allowed to interpret it like this, since those two words could be synonyms, referring to the same object."

But one leads to problems and contradicitions, eventually culminating in the Asriel paradox, and you decide to handwave it as a "plot error", creating a plot hole, and the other keeps everything canon. And keeping everything canon is MUCH more important than going off of what seems simpler. Remember, classical physics seems far simpler than the theory of relativity, until we run into the problems that lead us to shift away from that thinking and move onto the theory of relativity. Besides, it says right there that the greatest strength is also it's weakness, then goes onto talk about this power. This strength. I really don't see the problem. This is "the SOUL's strength" that also happens to be its greatest weakness, not "The power (level) of the SOUL." It's an ability, not a measure of power level. There is a VERY clear difference between the two concepts. This implies this is talking about a specific strength, a specific advantage, a specific ability, and yes, a specific power.. But that's not the same as the power level that is used as a metric that all humans always have the same amount of.

"I think it's like this on PC too. My info source probably merged all the plaques together and spliced them row by row. I've been referring to them as individual plaques simply for clarity.

This doesn't change anything."

It PROVES the two MUST be connected, though. The second is a natural extension of the first, so it implies this is talking about the power of the strength, not just how powerful a SOUL is in general.

"And is left unexplained. DT flux is never mentioned in the game, and it is rather implied that everyone has their own levels of DT, so this would be rather a bit weird, Frisk going from 1 to over and beyond 7... somehow."

Undying is a very clear case of a DT flux, and it was enough to go from natural DT levels to flat-out being enough for her to melt like an Amalgamate, and at the same speed, if not quicker, than the ACTUAL Amalgamates melted at, meaning she was at an Amalgamate-level, if not higher, amount of DT from this. Also, if red is DT, it need not be 1, it might be something like 4 or 5, which is my take on the matter, as that means we need only to double our DT, no, not even doubling it is required, to reach this stat.

"Plus, if Frisk blah blah flux, then their soul wouldn't need to refuse, and there's no proof that Asriel's projectiles would prevent them from reloading, none."

1-Refusing is always superior to reloading. We just couldn't do it with our lack of enough DT before Asriel's fight. Remember, fighting a battle with infinite HP is a lot more useful than just having infinite tries, because you never have to start over, your damage will always be saved, and you are virtually guaranteed to win.

2-Let's see, we have HYPER GONER, we have the speech that the world forgets you a little more each time you "die" here, until it eventually ends right here, at Asriel's battle, in a world where nobody remembers you. Asriel says he's feeling it right now, even though this is only Round 1 (We never lose to fight Round 2). What this means is that this is Asriel's plan.

Hyperdeath.. That's a lot worse than regular death, don't you think? Deader than dead.. Even your SOUL won't persist anymore, and perhaps not even your essence.

"Plus, throw in the correlation of DT and SP, and you've got yourself a nice and convincing argument, that's nowhere near as dumb as your deux ex machina hypothesis."

Take the correlation out, and add in Undying's case, and my hypothesis is far less dumb than it appears to be to you. Also, taking out a part of the game that happens under normal gameplay like that is ALWAYS dumb. Flat-earthers do that with this world all the time.

"One can exist as an essence though. Plus, our soul clearly breaks and that's it. I think we DO die."

In a way. We're in the process of leaving our mortal coil. You're "dead", but you still exist and are conscious. But if you're completely dead, "hyperdead", as in, you don't even have that anymore, that's it. No LOAD for you, because no DT for you.

"Flowey is different though. He has no soul. What does that mean, I'm leaving up to you now."

It means absolutely nothing, that's what. The process is still exactly the same, just without the SOUL shatter that occurs at the stage just as you start to leave the mortal coil.

"Redundant? He comments on all sorts of things as Flowey."

He's already said it himself that he needs to kill you to take control over the timeline and reset. That's good enough for him to get the point across that he doesn't have control. And us still being able to LOAD and even RESET at this point is enough to show that we have the ability.

"My point is, this action has no acknowledgement in the game, and considering the intensity of the situation, it makes sense that Toby might have forgot about this possibility."

..And never patched it? Look, it worked absolutely FINE in Omega Flowey's fight. As I said, you'd have a much better case if this action was never acknowledged at all. But it is in Omega Flowey's battle, meaning that Toby HAS thought of this, and thus, this event is canon. If it's canon in Omega Flowey's fight, which it is, then it's canon everywhere else too. Including this particular fight.

"Let's face it, this is the limitation of the game, that if you close the program, it will execute a reload, even if it previously established some lore rules, such as, losing means X, yet we can bypass it."

Not quite, Omega Flowey managed to bypass this "limitation". Just do what you did with Omega Flowey.

"Not quite the same, is it? It seems like everything is at stake during the final battle, and then we get this loop hole. No, I'm not buying this, this isn't something that Toby did intentionally. This is no longer theorizing, this is nitpicking."

No, this is refusing to throw out evidence just to make a theory look plausible. You're cherrypicking.

"You make up a rule about composite SOULS and another rule about S/L/R splitting just to explain why Omega Flowey and Asriel are different."

"And you're arguing that power isn't power, yet strength is power."

No, I'm arguing that "Power of the strength" isn't "Power of the SOUL". So really, I'm saying Strength≠SOUL. Can't exactly refute that now, it's an obvious statement.

"We have a strength and power used as synonyms here, both referring to the same object, not to each other as you're claiming."

The latter continues off of the former, so based on basic grammar, it refers to what's lexically closer:That is, "the strength of the SOUL."

"All I'm doing over here is addressing the simple issue that Asriel had more power than Omega Flowey, yet seemingly lesser abilities (which I've explained by attributing those lesser abilities to Omega Flowey too, which I can do, since the game didn't actually confirm whether he had more or less abilities than Asriel, especially with the reset power, since he didn't get to use that one at all)."

And then you say Asriel just didn't think of doing what he did last time as Omega Flowey to take our power away, because reasons.

"If we truly were capable of generating so much DT, there would be no fight, no struggle, the battle would have been a breeze to us. But it wasn't, it was presented as a single-shot situation."

The battle IS a breeze to us, you literally cannot lose this fight. And I told you, hyperdeath is worse than regular death.

"The solution cannot lie in DT, because then it wouldn't "feel" right. I'm also referring to how Toby made us feel about the plot, not just the info it presents."

The former is completely subjective. It is just as reliable as spectral evidence, and is definitely less reliable than even anecdotal evidence.

"Plus, you know, you're claiming that you use Occam's razor, yet you're refusing to acknowledge the fact that the "power of the strength of the soul" is more redundant than "the power of the soul", and the latter works totally fine gramatically, and would actually be the preferred meaning linguistically."

That's literally the ONLY complication that arises from my take. Yours gives a whole BUNCH of complexities to try to explain that original interpretation of the plaques. It's just like flat-earth, a flat-earth looks simpler at first, it's easier to say it looks flat because it IS flat, but a whole bunch of complications arise from that.

"I made what claim, that power is power?"

That SOUL is strength..?

"If that's what we're discussing, once again, my take is simpler, and the burden of proof is on you."

As I said, it only looks simpler when you ignore all of the implications of this.

"Yeah. I'm not saying that. I'm saying it's ridiculous for their DT to multiply 7-fold, enough to beat a literal god."

It only multiplies 7-fold if red is not DT. The jump perhaps wasn't even a 2-fold multiplication.

"As I said, with so much DT, getting through that fight would be a breeze, since nothing can threaten Frisk at that point."

It IS a breeze!

"So now we get to the fact that their soul refused instead, which is really weird. There's no proof that Asriel poses any threat to them, they're just another monster. The only two explanations remaining are: pointless addon, or our assumptions about Frisk being so determined were wrong."

The stakes were still high, though, and even though Asriel couldn't touch Frisk, Frisk couldn't touch Asriel either. Go on, try to fight Asriel instead of saving him. And remember, no hacking! =3

"This entire discussion is getting a bit stupid. I show you that the game referred to determination as "soul power", and you both instead point to the synonym and say that that's the object of interest."

...

"Despite the correlation between soul power and DT."

Terribly weak correlation, there would be a 50% chance of finding a correlation by chance (Monsters have high of both, or humans have high of both) "Despite the fact that merging the two creates no issues anywhere else in the plot, and removes the need of turning Frisk into a mary sue."

Frisk being able to reload during Asriel's fight. That's an issue in the plot that is created specifically by your theory. And this need not be a Mary Sue. "Despite the fact that never was the red trait labeled as DT, and never was it implied that the other traits are physical, like DT."

It was labeled as the combination of the other six traits. Can you give me a better match for the combination of the other six traits? And no, having none of the traits doesn't count, you HAVE to have ALL of them.

"I think it's clear what's driving your denial, your head canons. My head canons are these, but I didn't come up with them for the sake of a personal belief; just LOOK at how ridiculous my theory about the SLR split is! I created it out of necessity, not because I like it."

That's just it-It's ridiculous, and a complication that arises only out of your theory, one which I need not use in my take on the theory. It's like adding epicycles instead of just converting to heliocentrism. (which looks more complicated at first, because hey, the sun LOOKS like it orbits the earth, and the model seems to work at first, we only have a few tiny issues... You could call them nitpicks if the Asriel paradox was a nitpick.)

"Or, you know, we COULD start by saying that due to a lack of resources, red must be nothing but DT, and then start tweaking all the evidence accordingly... The exact opposite of what we should be doing as theorists."

That's kind of what I thought you were doing.. You definitely are if you're willing to throw out evidence and then say what we see on the screen as text isn't what the characters are actually saying.

"Open your head to the idea that the absolute nature of "red" was not determined yet (fuck the pun in here), just like the absolute nature of the "soul." "

As I said, it's the only way to explain the Asriel paradox without deleting evidence just because there's no way to make it fit. If you have a better explanation that doesn't involve Asriel getting tossed the Idiot Ball or tossing out evidence, I'd love to hear it. Then, we can have a REAL competitor to my theory.

For now, red being determination seems to be the only way to have Frisk's DT not just multiply 7-fold like that.