Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-30088034-20170108152544/@comment-27701762-20170109033654

Yes I&#039;m single wrote: 2. but i thought human souls persisted after death. or is that not true when  a monster aborbs it then dies? It's true that human souls persist, but given that there is no soul remaining upon Asriel's death, it is presumed that the human soul dies with the monster soul once the monster dies. There are a variety of possibilities for why this happens, but all that really matters is that it happens.

3. you're probably right, i've never played genocide, but i heard that all the puzzles are solved because flowey helps you. are you 100% sure you're correct? For the Ruins, the puzzles are all the same, so Flowey definitely doesn't help you there. For Snowdin, all of the puzzles are set up by Papyrus, and he becomes quickly distressed that the human is not playing along and eventually gives up. This is the only place where Flowey could ostensibly help, but there is no actual indication that he does, aside from the vines bit (and even that is ambiguous at best). He never says that he is helping you out. In Hotland the puzzles all exist because they are reactivated by Alphys (so that she can play the hero by helping you to solve them). So during the Genocide route Alphys hasn't reactivated the puzzles, and thus there is nothing that needs to be solved. So yeah, I'm sure about all of that.

4. so chara would kill themselves to destroy humanity? that's like a suicide bomber. very cruel. It's presumed that Chara was abused. This then led to their decision to kill themself by going to Mt. Ebott, and their general hatred of humanity. There isn't really any evidence for this, though. All we know is that Chara hated humanity. Not the why.

6. but who was flowey trying to be nice to, then who did he trick? you said no one was aware of flowey besides alphys, papyrus (kind of), or sans (possibly.) once he transforms into asriel, though, god. the power of souls! He started out trying to be nice to everyone. When that didn't accomplish anything for him, he would reset (meaning that all of the monsters he interacted with would not recall having ever seen him), try again, fail, try again, and eventually he became bored and started killing them, then resetting, killing again, and so on, and so on. Alphys is presumably aware of Flowey in general, though it is not clear how much she knows. The limit of what we are certain of is that she knows the flower she experimented on disappeared. Papyrus is told by a talking flower about various things, but since Papyrus is very naive and to a large extent stupid, he doesn't really know what Flowey is or what Flowey is really trying to do. Sans is presumably aware of Flowey because he is aware that there is something that is messing with the timeline. Though it is also important to note that A) when he mentions the "talking flower" he says that it is someone playing tricks using an Echo Flower, and B) he assumes that all of the issues with the timeline are a result of the human. So it is possible Sans doesn't really know about Flowey.

7.  this goes back to questiom 6. and also couldn't he absorb boss monster souls, since they persist for a little bit? Yes, he probably could have absorbed the souls of a Boss Monster, but that would only give him two monster souls (Asgore and Toriel being the only Boss Monsters). Monster souls aren't particularly strong, and wouldn't help him to accomplish anything, so they don't hold much worth. The only thing that might help is if he could absorb the souls of every monster in the Underground, which could theoretically give him the ability to cross the Barrier. But there's too much that is unclear about how the souls work to really know, and it wouldn't really matter anyway.

which leads me to another question: why is the most determined being allowed to SAVE? and obviously frisk is the most determined, but what about the oher humans? were they more determined then flowey? what about chara/asriel?


 * As for the "why," it is basically just the way the world works. There are certainly incentives from a game-making perspective to set it up that way, since otherwise you have the game being reset on you at different (perhaps even random) intervals, which makes playing through frustrating. But beyond that, it would sort of be like asking why gravity works the way it does, as opposed to some other way.
 * The stuff about the other humans is unclear. They did presumably have the ability to save, as Toriel drops a line about feeling like she has met Frisk before, which she felt with the other humans. Why did they die? Unknown, though I tend to go with the explanation that their ability to save is much weaker than Frisk's, and so they cannot manipulate the world in the same way.
 * One thing about the other humans and Flowey is that it is unclear if they existed simultaneously. This gets into questions about the timeline, though we certainly know that it has been a long time since a human has fallen into the Underground. But one possibility, and one that I think is the case, is that Flowey came to life fairly recently, and the other humans fell down and died before Flowey existed. Which prevents any problems.
 * The Chara/Asriel bit is unclear. One possibility is that the necessary determination to save/reload was not present, as Asriel was not particularly determined to carry out the plan. You can think about how Frisk saves in the game: you encounter spots in the Underground that fill you with determination, and thus allow you to save. But presumably at other points that doesn't work, since Frisk isn't specifically "filled" with determination. In turn, if Asriel isn't himself determined to go on, then it doesn't matter how much power he has, he won't be able to save and reload.


 * Another possibility, which certainly seems likely, is that the power to save and reload only operates within the Underground. In which case, since Asriel/Chara went to the Surface and then came back, their "save point" would be set to when they came back into the Underground: when they were already near death. In that case, it wouldn't matter if Asriel/Chara could save and reload or not. It would always result in their death. Essentially like reloading a checkpoint where you immediately die.