Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-31066439-20170116175126/@comment-27701762-20170117210040

Sarah Baiocchi wrote: What about the asters? Let me ask this from a different perspective:

Let's begin with the assumption that the flowers are some breed of Asters.

Let's also begin with the assumption that Gaster's name is meant to be a reference to the Aster flower.

The question is, what does this explain? Or in other words, what was Toby's intention?

All you've suggested is a roundabout connection with Sans. But that connection is much easier to make by assuming that the "aster" part of Gaster's name is just a reference to the font. In fact, taking the longer road requires making several further assumptions about how Toby came upon the specific pieces of information that allow us to bridge each individual part of the connection (i.e. how might someone not confuse the other meanings of the Aster flower with the one that was intended?): if one bridge falls apart, the entire connection collapses. Even if Toby is clever, the flower connection requires jumping through several mental hoops just to arrive at a tiny connection between Sans and Gaster. The simplest possible explanation is that the "aster" is only a reference to the font, and the connection to the flower genus is a coincidence, or at the very least had no meaning for Toby.

But I'll take the broader thrust of your question: what are the Golden Flowers? Could they be Asters, or based on Asters?

Sure. Toby might very well have found a flower to base the Golden Flowers on. But it is also possible that he added details about them himself. I tried to find information on this, but I did not come up with anything saying that Aster flower seeds are particularly sticky. If you could provide some evidence for that, it would be useful for you to make that connection. Otherwise, the detail about the seeds being sticky is a device to help explain the basic fact of how the Golden Flowers got into the Underground in the first place (i.e they stuck to Asriel's fur), as well as how they got to various places in the Underground (the seeds stick to Alphys's lab coat and come off as she visits the Garbage Dump, explaining why there is a bed of flowers there; the seeds stuck to Chara's body or to Toriel, explaining why there is a bed of flowers in the Ruins).

Whether the details all perfectly match up is in fact only slightly consequential to the answer. If the flowers are meant to be exactly based on Asters, then any mismatch is a problem. If the flowers are just generally based on Asters (i.e. Toby based the look of the Golden Flower on some breed of Aster, such as the sunflower), then a mismatch of facts isn't really important, as the intention was not to say "these flowers are Asters." The flowers don't have to be identified with a specific breed of flower that exists today. The game is, after all, populated by various types of monsters, so it is not exactly a stretch of the imagination that there is a completely fictional breed of flower that vaguely resembles an Aster, has sticky seeds, and is used to make tea.

But in the end, I'm more concerned with the former question than the latter. If all you want to claim is that the Golden Flowers are Asters or based on Asters, I happily concede the point to you.