Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-32182236-20190721003717/@comment-26006155-20200107185829

One thing that always bugs me watching other theorists work is just how willing they are to classify something that doesn't fit their models as "an inconsistency". Then they throw out the element and ignore it, and go whistling on their merry way, never realizing that they just jumped right off the train track leading to the answers.

Elements that stick out are often clues, not mistakes.

When I was reading Harry Potter, and learned that rat familiars normally only live to the age of 3, I felt sure that J K Rowling had made a mistake, because we already had the example of Ron's pet rat Scabbers being 12 years old.

Imagine my shock when Scabbers suddenly turned into Peter Pettigrew. Voldemort's spy that had been close to Harry all along.

Of course Scabbers wasn't a normal rat, he was 12 years old. This wasn't an inconsistency, this was information.

It's an example of what I call "Make A Rule/Break A Rule". Where a rule is created just to show that some character can break it, to demonstrate that there's something different about them. And instead of calling it an inconsistency, we should be asking How and Why they broke it.

For example: How does Sans have a boss power level that eclipses Asgore, the King of All Monsters, by several orders of magnitude?

No natural monster should be more powerful than Asgore.

Unless, of course, Sans isn't a monster at all?