Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27524978-20160210030742/@comment-43574-20160322195544

I haven't even seen the video and may be paying devil's advocate here, but: The Starmen being robots was entirely a creation of the American localization, and even then it's treated vague and inconsistent. They make "robot noises" (whirrs, beeps, clicks), but they are still unaffected by items that targets mechanical and robotic enemies, they still have ghosts and both the guide that came with the game and Super Smash Bros. describe them as an alien race. Also, not all timetravel in Earthbound destroys organic matter; both buzz-buzz and Pokey/Porky did it. The (miss)interpretation of them being robots is probably due to them speaking only in katakana script in the Japanese. It is often used for robots because its hard-edges and straight lines contrast with the softer edges and more organic lines of normal hiragana script (and to a lesser degree Kanji, Chinese characters), but just because a character uses them doesn’t mean they are a robot. It is essentially the cultural equivalent of writing in all-caps. Also it is not actually said that the Phase Distorter destroy organic matter, but that lifeforms can't survive the process ("the machine cannot warp living things, I mean lifeforms. Life is demolished in the process of warping"). Exactly why is never stated, so "it destroys all organic matter" is just an interpretation (and not a very strong one at that since "organic matter" doesn't have anything chemically that unifies them and separates them from inorganic matter, it is just a term for matter that is or was part of an organism). My interpretation was always that the process would have overexposed them to the effects of time causing them to deteriorate quicker, which is not particularly scientifically sound either, but is at-least consistent with Pokey/Porky always being in some form of stasis-machine after he goes all Flowey with timetravel.

Realta8 wrote:

'Why would Toby Fox work hard on letting fans figure out the game he poured his blood and sweat on for years was just a fangame''? '''That doesn't make any sense. In principle; why not? People have put a lot of work into fangames before; Starry Expanse and Mother 4 have been in the works for years, and as far as fan-works go Alan Moore has been writing The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a cross-over fan-comic, since 1999. And even if Sans was intended to be Ness, that would still just be a small part of the game that is ultimately irrelevant to everything else, like Toby made Varik the main character of that Earthbound hack even though nothing that goes on in the game has anything to do with Brandish.