Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-32182236-20190721003717/@comment-26006155-20200107175522

(reads all of this, making comments as he goes)

It's really impressive that it took the text equivalent of a novela to actualy start talking about Undertale's lore.

While I never took debate in school, and don't know all the fancy Latin terms for types of arguments, I do have a great respect for the scientific method, and have expanded my vocabulary by reading this.

Appeal to Authority does happen a lot, whether MatPat or Toby, and it's refreshing that that's adressed here. While I do think that Toby, as the person who wrote and created the game, does count as "God" in terms of Undertale, that doesn't mean he isn't going to troll us. Just like Scott and FNAF, what's the point in making an epic puzzle and then spoiling the answer for people? Artists who make mysteries love to have fun with the fanbase, so I do think it's constructive to consider only the game lore itself canon. If an artist drops an idea, it's good to research it to see if something new can be learned, and respectuflly hear them out, but only in-game evidence should be used for proofs.

I do think caution is neccessary, though, when getting overly lost in the mechanics of logic to the detriment of the game itself.

Undertale, like FNAF and Steven Universe, is a Mystery. And Mysteries as a genre make a point of diving into complex models, incredibly improbable events, and deliberately subverting the reader's expectations as much as possible. Going into such a project with the expectation of Normalacy is self-defeating.

For example, I've often had people try to stab me with Occam's Razor by saying that there's no possiblity that my intricate and complex theories could pass any sort of simplicity test.

But that's not how Occam's Razor actually works: It says that out of all possible WORKING SOLUTIONS, the simplest of these is bound to be true. Like saying that people stay on the ground because of Gravity, instead of claiming invisible aliens are constantly pushing on our shoulders so we don't fly off into space.

In a Mystery, the simplest solution to the labyrinthine details within is often very complex indeed. Occam's Razor does not say that "only simple solutions are possible". It just lends weight to the simplest working explaination you can find.

A Working Solution is one that explains all the available evidence, without exceptions. Otherwise, it isn't actually a Solution at all, and should be disqualified even before being exposed to Occam's Razor.

We should expect a complex solution when encountering a Mystery, not dismiss any solution out of hand simply because of its complexiity.

One element where I sharply disagree with Ambassador frequently is the importance of story to the mystery-solving process.

Consider a jigsaw puzzle. How do you know when you've solved it? You might find a solution where all the pieces seems to fit, but how do you know it's the right solution?

Because the goal of a jigsaw puzzle is to put together a Picture. And once all the pieces are in their proper place, we should be treated to a coherent image. A dragon in flight, an iceberg at sunrise, a unicorn with a machine gun... it doesn't matter how fanciful the picture is, as long as it makes coherent sense.

With FNAF, for example, the goal is clear: Find The Story. The Story is the picture that's been shredded into a thousand pieces and scattered about, waiting for us to reassemble it. And once we do find how all bits of lore fit together, the story should make sense.

Is it right to expect that that the story of the FNAF games could be described by the single sentence "It was all a dream", or the simple claim that "William loves to kill kids and put them in robots for no reason other than he's a bad person" when the story of the novels, which have been demonstrated to be related to the story of the games, fill three entire novels, and counting?

Obviously not. So much is missing that it hurts.

We should know that we're looking for a complex story.

And yet I still get resistance to ideas about how Sister Location shows beyond any doubt that Michael has a metal endoskeleton under his flesh that we even get to see a relfection of, on the grounds that this is too complex.

All sorts of attempts are made to change the evidence: That can't be Michael's reflection we see in Ennard's mask, even though physics says it's a mirror reflection. It must be part of Ennard that we're seeing.. even though you can't find a glowing eye in a wide socket anywhere on them. 20 2ft tall Minireenas climbing into Michaels' wiggle-tight springsuit that shouldn't have room for even one of them doesn't mean they burrowed into his flesh... that's ridiculous! And the sound of rending flesh that begins the moment Michael starts typing on Baby's keypad isn't important because it's only a stock sound unworth of notice... even though the Guts.wav sound was painstakingly engineered to be subtly mistaken for the Drips.wav sound that was playing earlier, reveal ingit's a custom-made sound rather than a stock sound, that the author deliberately concealed to anyone who wasn't paying close attention.

The idea of Michael being an android covered in synthetic flesh isn't outlandish at all by FNAF standards: We learn that Charlie herself, the protagonist of the novels, is an android by the end of the last book, with amazing synthetic flesh that is still capable of eating, healing and growing despite not being fully human.

Androids are canon in FNAF. There's no disputing this now, not with the mountain of evidence presented and several canon reveals. Yet still.. the resistance goes on.

There's nothing that blinds theorists more than Wishful Thinking. Seeing what they want to see, rather than deal with an unpleasant truth they'd rather avoid. I feel into this trap myself when I started to research Undertale's lore to debunk the Ness Theory, only to find more evidence that supported it instead.

But the evidence must win in the end, which is why I adopted the Ness Theory into my own models for Undertale.

Finding elements that, when put together, make a promising twist in a story, is just like finding all the Sky pieces in a jigsaw puzzle and putting them together in a clump, then seeing how this clump might fit with other clumps. It's an essential part for making the progression steps neccessary for solving the puzzle as a whole.

So searching for what makes the best story, in my own research, is an invaluable compass that suggests possiblities to explore, which can then been compared against the known clues to test the possiblity of whether the idea scores a hit or not.

Undertale is a creative project.

There's no hope of discovering it's mysteries unless we also apply creative thinking in our own approach to it.

I think it's a fallacy to assume that only complex left-brained alegbra will yield us the answers.

Or that Latin terms will help explain the story to laypeople.