Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-28128661-20160404143233/@comment-27701762-20160417043912

ClockworkTea wrote: And yeah, Chara died from poisoning, but poisoning by Asriel's hand  - thus, still an 'attack' by a monster, even if it's a physical one. It's been a theory of mine for a while that monsters absorb humans' souls (like Asriel did with Chara's) only if they strike the final blow; if a human dies from other means (environmental, accidental, illness, etc), their soul seems to just sit there, ready for capture. We don't know how the fight with Asgore went down (if, indeed, it did go down with every one of the humans, though he feels guilt enough to make it believable he was a major cause of at least some of their deaths). He could very well have brought them down to a few HP and just... let them die on their own, trapping their souls that way. This theory doesn't really seem to be needed to explain anything, and in the way you explain it is actually inconsistent. First off, we don't know if Asriel is the one who fed Chara the flowers. Asriel only says that he will go get the flowers. Chara could very well have poisoned themself, which seems more likely than Asriel force-feeding Chara. In turn, if this incredibly indirect method is what triggers Asriel killing Chara and thus allowing him to absorb their soul, then your description of Asgore almost killing the earlier humans and then letting them die of their wounds would be equally indirect, if not even more direct, and thus should trigger Asgore absorbing the souls.

It's a much simpler explanation of the same basic facts that when a human dies, their soul persists for some unspecified (but we should probably say not an indefinite) period of time. During that time, any monster can absorb the human soul. So the fact that Asriel absorbs Chara's soul and not Asgore or Toriel has to do with willingness: Asgore and Toriel didn't want to absorb Chara's soul, while Asriel did since it was part of the plan. No special (and esoteric) mechanic is needed.

That being said, y'all are forgetting that Asriel soul-merged with Chara after she died. If we're going with "red = determination," he would have access to her determination in addition to whatever he was injected with. Since the genocide route confirms that Chara is ghosting Frisk and controlling them, this could be why Flowey can't reset the timeline with Frisk. Chara and Flowey would likely cancel each other out (due to their powers being the same/shared), and Frisk would be the deciding factor, you know? The soul-merging, being a process that we know little of from the game's description, does not inherently imply what you are saying. It could very well be the case that when Asriel dies, his dust contains only his essence, and not Chara's (or any of their power, for that matter). Chara's soul would simply disappear as a result. So Flowey as the reincarnation of Asriel would not have any essence of Chara within him, and thus none of their determination as well. So there is no inconsistency that must be explained.