Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20181123023529/@comment-32182236-20181203030207

And now, time for my cross-examination!

"I just came up with a new argument for why Asriel’s own soul, the 7th one you save, had to be Chara’s."

"Frisk is directly healing Asriel’s own soul at the end."

OBJECTION!! Your testimony has a clear contradiction! You claim that Chara was the one saved.. And then proceeded to prove that it was Asriel all along! So, which is it? Chara, or Asriel?

..Actually, your proof had a flaw on its own.

"Yet God of Hyperdeath Asriel was in this same situation, filled with the love of all the monster SOULs in the Underground (minus Napstablook and Mettaton)... and it didn’t effect him. Hyperdeath Asriel should have already been brimming with 2nd-hand compassion.. But he clearly wasn’t.?"

Of course he wasn't! The SOULs became Lost Souls, remember? Flowey took that AWAY from the SOULs, and we had to give it all back, slowly saving everyone!

..Asriel was the last one we did that too. There.

"As for SOULs being fused into one.. I don’t know. “SOUL” is probably another misleading acronym like LOVE, and until we learn what it actually means there are going to be unanswered questions."

Chasriel already showed that's how SOUL absorptions work. I really don't see why this can't be the case. Which means your proof isn't actually a proof. It missed one big possibility. Are you going to try and debunk that one, or just say that since we don't KNOW whether it's possible or not, the proof is concrete because we just ASSUME it's not? The latter's not how proofs work.

"About Undyne and Determination: Undyne might declare at the end of her neutral fight that she will not die.. But she does die, and turn to dust, after melting a bit. Undyne also doesn’t seem to have any of the Save and Load powers that time-traveling Sans and Flowey possess, nor the ability to remember things that happened in previous lives. While Determination might be a type of power that comes from human souls, the ability to rewind time and remember previous Saves seems to require the power of an actual human SOUL, not its residue."

Of course she doesn't! Her determination was lower than Flowey's, since she only had trace amounts of it! Of course she wouldn't gain SLR! She didn't have enough!

"But if we go back into that very The End save, we still can go back to the beginning and find boss monster kid Asriel at the beginning. So there seems to be a paradox at work."

No there's not.. and I can prove there's not.. TAKE THAT!!

You see, to have that happen, we have to LOAD the world. We have to set it back to before Asriel actually faded. We didn't actually save after he faded, so any point in time we LOAD to would be before he faded. Which means his fading would have undone itself. No paradox.

However, I'm pretty sure you CAN'T do that. https://steamcommunity.com/app/391540/discussions/0/496880203072114426/

"I still don’t see why Asriel, who’s achieved his boss monster kid form again, would have to fade now that he has a more powerful human soul inside him, when he had that monster form earlier with a much weaker boss monster soul."

Oh, that one's easy:He DIDN'T have that human SOUL.

"I remember that Jacksepticeye was confused in his playthrough because he thought he’d bought The Mystery Key to get into Napstablook’s cousin’s house, except that he hadn’t had the gold at the time, and there was no way to check whether The Mystery Key was actually in his inventory or not."

OBJECTION!! He didn't see it because it wasn't there. There IS a way to find the Mystery Key in your inventory! If you couldn't look for it, you wouldn't be able to use it:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JecylTSsZl0

See? Right there in the inventory.

"Just as strange as it is that Undertale reminds us constantly that Sans can teleport.. But makes a point of NEVER letting us actually see what it looks like when he does."

Time magic. The sound effect matches exactly with a move Sans uses in the Genocide run. The most likely thing he did was freeze time, and just walk away. Alternatively, the sound also matches the very beginning of a battle initiation, meaning he could have triggered a fight to make our vision turn black, and using that opportunity to use his teleport. Though we do have to ask why Sans is hiding all of this..

"Only a SOUL can generate more Determination."

Where's the proof? Why can't essence be what actually generates determination, and the SOUL is simply where determination is held/stored? Chara is soulless, and they MUST have determination, else they wouldn't be alive!

And we already have Gaster still having a soul after being shattered into pieces across time and space.

Yet to be proven. Can't use unproven hypothesis as proof. It's not stable.

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"This is why I’m not a huge fan of using Occam’s Razor, a tool usually reserved for scientific research, in solving a Mystery. Occam’s Razor will do everything possible to cut out the least likely possibilities in a story. And yet these remote possibilities that nobody expects going in will often contain the most amazing of stories, the very sort of places a good mystery writer will hide their most valuable treasure. While it can be a useful tool at times, Occam’s Razor should not be consider the end-all-be-all of problem solving tools in this instance. Occam’s Razor can work.. But only if you’ve vigilant enough to preserve the importance of the smallest details, instead of discarding them as trivial, and force this terrifying lightsaber to accept a complex result."

The scientific world is also quite complex. Tell me, why can't we use the scientific method to solve mysteries? Why shouldn't we act as scientists? I use Occam's Razor precisely BECAUSE it's meant for scientific analysis. And if you read my whole post, you'd see that I actually spoke out against abusing Occam's Razor to justify discarding evidence that goes against their theory. Yes, every piece of evidence matters. Small evidence was the difference between General Relativity and Newtonian Relativity. Everything must be explained.

...But that's it. That's the only rule! (well, minus all of the rules of logic, like no contradictions, etc)

Allow me to quote Einstein again, and this should reflect what my POV about all of this is:"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

As I said before, failure to explain evidence lowers your theory's credibility. And since the razor only applies to EQUAL theories, even the tiniest piece of evidence that the rival theory fails to explain completely NULLIFIES Occam's Razor!

"Granted, calculating the probability of something being true is super subjective, and requires a lot of creative thought. I’ll try to describe my process as well as I can."

I mainly use the scientific approach, and use probability theory. When things fade away from physics and a clear set of "this happens 1 in X times", and start getting into rational descision-making, I start with presuming that the characters have consistent personalities, just like real-world people do, and use a lot of analysis to figure out what might be the most likely outcome!

"A complete list of ALL possibilities is impossible. If I wanted to go that route, I could say that Frisk was so exasperated after Sans got away that he stabbed HIMSELF in the forehead, killing himself and giving Chara the EXP for his death. While not technically impossible, the Probability of this stupid result being real is basically Zero."

Indeed it is. I'd already call it zero since I believe I've proven that the Player is Frisk. We of course discard these possibilities, just as we discard the possibility that this message is being made by a monkey randomly typing keys right now!

"So, to avoid becoming lost in endless possibilities and going fucking insane, we need a way to refine the search and steer our focus towards timelines that are more promising."

And to do that, I use scientific principals. Consistency is very key, and given that the characters all act in free will, having a set personality, we should look at the possibilities that have a chance at being a realistic world. (By realistic, I don't mean:This could really happen in this world, but rather, that given a new set of laws, the laws of Undertale, could a world like this, events like this, logically happen?)

"This is why I keep talking about Story Potential. It might be more art than science, but whenever I come to a fork in the road where two possibilities exist, I ask myself, what type of story would each of them lead to? Which branch would lead to a better story? Which choice would I make, if I was the one writing this?"

I, and what I argue any theorist SHOULD do, instead ask myself:Which possibility is more logically plausible, given the evidence? Which would be assigned a high probability? The case about Story Potenital is completely subjective, and has no scientific basis.

"Anyway, back to The Good Artist Assumption. This is my first, most dangerous assumption in starting a project, assuming that there IS a story to be found to begin with. The only way to really prove this assumption is at the very end when a cohesive story is uncovered, and there’s never a guarantee this is the right assumption until then."

Cohesive? My theories do lead to something cohesive, if you mean "logically consistent". I assume not a single plot hole exists. And if that was your only other razor, I wouldn't have a problem with it. But, of course, you look for the "better" story, instead of the most LIKELY story. And.. That doesn't end well.

"I’m still skeptical of this, because gem forms seem to depend entirely on the cut of the gem, and real world rose quartz and pink diamond gems are cut EXACTLY the same way. The are times where “Rose Quartz” acts very differently, once calling Pearl “My Pearl”, which Rebecca herself pointed out was a way an inferior gem would address a superior."

Of course she does. She doesn't want to blow her cover as a Diamond! She acts in-character.

"Ambassador, not everyone forgot about Gaster. Sans is carrying weapons with his name on them, and Papyrus is hinted to also have a Gaster Blaster in some of his updated dialog. Sans probably doesn’t volunteer info about Gaster because 1) It never came up 2) It’s an incredibly painful subject for him, when an old friend turned heel."

Having his stuff does not equal memories. But he probably did find a way to preserve them in his room. "Don't forget." But when the CORE was described by Alphys, why wasn't Gaster mentioned THEN, and why did she think she knew all about how it worked, as if she designed it? And what happened to Goner Kid?

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I still have more to say, soon..