Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-31066439-20170116175126/@comment-27701762-20170117055144

Sarah Baiocchi wrote: You make good points. I still think the probability of the flowers being asters creates a likely connection between them and Gaster, especially considering their meaning. (In the "language of flowers," one of an aster's meanings is "a wish that things had gone differently."  They can also mean "patience," which in Undertale is represented by the color light blue, which is a tone theme of Sans's.) But this is an incredibly roundabout connection. Gaster is connected to Aster which is connected to patience which is connected to light blue which is connected to Sans. So going through all of that, all we could get is that Sans is connected to Gaster. And reaching that conclusion requires making four distinct logical leaps.

Which is even more complicated by the fact that a quick perusal on the whole "language of flowers" concept is that Aster's are generally associated with love and daintiness as well as patience. Which complicates the associations.

This all assuming that Toby was even aware of the Aster as a classification of flower in the first place and the meaning behind it (and happened upon the right encyclopedia), and then decided to use that connection to patience to suggest a connection to Sans (when, of course, that connection was already there because of the implied name derived from a font).

As opposed to, say, Toby playing with the name "Aster" because it is also the name of a font.

Either Gaster or Alphys could have built the DT extractor, but there's no need for Gaster to get the blueprints from someone else if he built it. If you're building something complex, you ALWAYS make up blueprints first. That way, when you put it together, you have a plan to follow that will prevent you from making expensive and/or work-intensive mistakes. So I think it's equally possible for Gaster, Alphys, or both of them together to have made the DT extractor. Except what's in question is not "did someone make a set of blueprints before they built machine." The line specifically runs as follows:

ENTRY NUMBER 5: I've done it. Using the blueprints, I've extracted it from the human SOULs. I believe this is what gives their SOULs the strength to persist after death. The will to keep living... The resolve to change fate. Let's call this power... "Determination."

If you were building a machine, you would indeed likely come up with a set of blueprints. But you wouldn't say you "used the blueprints" to make the machine. You would just say you built the machine.

The only reason why you would specifically "use blueprints" is that those blueprints were not made by you. So if Gaster built the machine "using the blueprints," then he had to have gotten them from somewhere else. Same with Alphys. But with Alphys we at least have an explanation for where the blueprints could have come from.

The "maybe trying to bring back the children" thing IS a bit of a leap, I'll admit. That, in particular, was just an idea I thought I'd throw out there. It IS implied, I think, that Flowey/Asriel owes his current state of existence to the determination experiments somehow, though there's no actual evidence of this beyond the peculiarity of him being a sentient flower of a type that's not normally so talkative. I got the "children" idea because it occurred to me that it's odd for Asriel to have been caught up in any of this, especially if, as is fully possible, he may have been dead at the time. You're right that there's no actual evidence, though, so it's best to take that idea as more of a starting point for other speculations, and less of a hypothesis in its own right. :) I'd say calling it an implication that Flowey owes his existence to the experiments somehow is an understatement. It is all but outright stated that this is the case.

But it is all entirely an accident. Alphys selects the first Golden Flower that grew in Asgore's garden. In other words, the Golden Flower which would have been infused with Asriel's dust and essence. Alphys of course tries a whole bunch of other Golden Flowers, but the first flower is meant to hold a sort of symbolic significance, hence why Alphys wants to surprise Asgore with it. The experiments fail, nothing happens with the flower, and Alphys returns it to Asgore. Some time later the flower awakens as Flowey, and so on and so on.

So yeah, Flowey was made by the experiments. But it was a side-effect of the experiments to find a way to destroy the Barrier. At no point was there an intent to bring back Asriel and Chara.