Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-31371445-20170222233857/@comment-32182236-20180909211552

"Of course, 1+0 is 0 according to you! No, why should we pay attention to those 90 something neutral routes, when in a single pacifist route, no battle even went down! Of course that makes all those other encounters when he does smash the said button of ours vanish!"

Oh, the irony in your statement.

The explanation should be consistent along all of the routes. Pacifist was cited as evidence against this idea, because it wouldn't work in that route. No, he's not ignoring the many neutral routes, you're ignoring the Pacifist Route. It has to work in all of the routes, not just most of them. By the way, I'll have to clarify a few things.

In the actual Pacifist Route, Toriel blasts Asgore away before he would smash the button. But, what Malice is likely referring to is the Pacifist-Neutral route-A Neutral run where you don't kill anybody. ...And with that in mind, the argument makes sense, and you're ignoring 4 endings, not just 1 (though it's a problem either way). 17-13 still leaves 4:We want NO ending unaccounted for. ..Where'd you get 90 from, anyway? I counted 17 Neutral Endings (Dirty Hacker doesn't count, you can't actually get that ending from just playing the game).

"Yeah... just like they don't want to stay among their buttons forever and actually want to enter the battle box and risk death? I'm sorry, but right now, you are experiencing what I have had many times already, you are nitpicking equal evidence to fit your own narrative."

..Chances are, that's the monsters' doing. You know, the same monster that dragged your SOUL out to initiate the battle in the first place?

"No, it does not. But tell me, which of these two explanations is simpler? If we had more evidence for either, I would not be casting such ultimatums. Unfortunately for your narrative, this is all we have. And therefore, I must resort to Occam's razor in this (and similar) situation(s)."

Let's see:No reference to it being a game by anyone, the mechanics still being discovered, they reach the Surface, and the timeline's implied to continue onwards even after the ending, because of Flowey's last speech...

"Hmm... what about monsters one can spare right away, do they want to fight? I can't imagine Whimsuns like this, and I bet Moldsmals couldn't care less."

..I'm just going to refer you to Malice's explanation.

"Nitpicking between monsters and locking them and us into some otherwordly mechanism filled with a plethora of 'alien' concepts, such as turns, buttons, invisible slashes (this is how THA explains monsters not dodging our attacks)."

...Please, just look at my simple razor, and start applying it. I'm sure you'll get the same results. And there's only basically ONE rule.

"And you made the claim that for human-monster encounters, the in-game mechanism applies, but now you added that it does not happen to any other combo, e.g. human on human, or (assuming you also implied) monster on monster."

I have a natural explanation for that, and it involves taking yet another look at the game itself. A battle begins when your SOUL exits your body. That's what triggers a FIGHT. So, if we just say that humans can't do that, since, you know, they're not like monsters with magic, and monsters are attuned enough to their SOULs to not let that happen (btw, if they did let that happen, they die), then it's pretty clear why the battle system would only apply to human-monster conflicts-That's the only viable case of someone using magic on a SOUL, and getting it out of its body, for a FIGHT to begin. No computer codes or anything. It's not even arbitrary, and there's no sentient being making the decision-It's quite literally:A FIGHT breaks out when a SOUL is taken out of their body. That's universal. It just can't happen in other combinations. Monster vs monster would be closer to Touhou.. But everyone gets a pattern, not just one monster, and the other being limited to straight lines. ...And without Spell Cards.

"I've had the impression you opposed the idea of shops being the way they are presented in the game: a safe space where one is limited to only a handful of prompts. And I said "why not" to this idea, the same way I said "why not" to the idea of invisible impassable barriers. But that doesn't matter anymore, I assume you oppose this the same way you oppose the latter."

There's one thing about shops that are definitely canon-You can't attack the shopkeeper when the window is open. ...But you can't really attack NPCs in the first place, so we really have a split on whether the rule applies specifically to shopkeepers, or to NPCs in general-Each has its own set of complexities (If it applied to all NPCs canonically, then we have to ask how the humans attacked the monsters to begin the battle. If it was the former.. Okay, maybe there's not much complexity in that. ...Oh right, it was the shop window HUD.)

"Remember Gaster? Toby had no big plans for him and yet, people crafted such insane theories concening him, such as that he was the one to write the first 8 lab entries. I'm positive this was never Toby's secret plot line, but just something we crafted ourselves to patch the plot holes. And I have created this hypothesis to justify those weird arbitrary rules the world of UT presents itself with to us."

Yeah, Entry 17 kind of starts to blur that line, and Entry 5 doesn't require that the writer made the blueprints:In fact, you could argue it implies the writer DIDN'T make them. ..So much for Gaster being involved.

"Ah pardon me, didn't realize that had to be turned into a point."

..What else would the "one rule of S/L/R" be, instead of literally the only rule about it that the game flat-out spells out for you, and the only one we're SURE exists?

"Weren't we talking about Flowey and Asriel? Yeah, of course the power goes to the strongest one. But I just added one more rule, that to reset as a being with a composite soul, the previous user must be killed first. An arbitrary rule, but fit for the SLR ability."

While I simply decided to take away the assumption that DT was SOUL power, a much simpler choice!

"You see, I am content with the SLR behaving like a computer program, because I believe it was forged by Gaster through whatever means (so I am fine with assigning arbitrary rules to it). Of course he would need some sort of a computer simulation to create something so complicated, resulting in such arbitrary rules. But while I am willing to admit Gaster the creation and presence of SLR, I cannot admit him the HUD."

Look, the HUD always existed. It's not like SLR which appears to only exist in the Underground (then again, we don't even have to assume SLR was artificial:It could be a result of magic accumulating in the Underground over time, seeing that it, alongside everything else, can't leave the Underground, causing a steady increase, and the density soon reached a critical point that allowed SLR to exist)

"Therefore, the HUD must be a natural occurence then, if not an artificial one (artificial as in, not created by any of the "inside" subjects of the universe)."

Yes, the HUD is a natural occurrence.

"And if so, let the entire world be a computer simulation (created by some "outside" subjects)."

...And that's where you jump from somewhat logical steps to an unfounded leap, probably bigger than those 20-foot leaps in the Matrix. At least build a bridge so you don't fall and take everyone else down into the ravines.

"Yes. And that would have happened before the war, simple. Though, I have one alternative explanation, but this one suffices, so let's leave it at that."

..Yeah, that's the likely explanation. The metric was given in early plaques, which we're pretty sure were written before Chara fell. (We're ABSOLUTELY sure about some of them being written before Chara fell.)

"I dunno, souls reserving a part of the DT for something and then using the rest for something else... seems weird, considering the former doesn't ever get utilized, unless the human dies."

No reserving:The idea is that everyone has SOME determination. That part is obvious, it's something we all know. But that's below the threshold for gaining S/L/R, and below the threshold of naturally getting DT as your trait. (Well, it's not that simple-Red would have to be your dominant trait, so you need a balance of all the others to get that.)

"But my point was, that this idea was pointless; that tiny amount of DT that would make the soul red wouldn't do add any new ability any other human soul already wouldn't have, considering the souls mustn't vary, they must be nearly identical in their inner capacity due to the measuring rule, and so, that tiny difference would be negligible."

..Or if DT isn't SOUL power, it need not be tiny. And there's evidence that they're different.

"Especially so, considering the above, that the majority of the DT wouldn't get utilized under normal circumstances. So most of the time, you would have like 98% of the soul's DT available, and 99% with red souls. Such a tiny difference cannot make a difference, it certainly cannot be enough to fuel for example the refuse mechanic."

You've just doubled the total DT. (That is, if the DT that's used up to keep living is the "unavailable" DT in your model, which remains constant, and would thus require doubling the DT to cut the share of said unusable DT in half. This is the potato paradox all over again.)

"Sure, if it was like 40% and 80%, I'd believe it, that's a significant difference. But this isn't the case here."

Sure, tripling the total DT is more significant than merely doubling it. (Same rules as the previous case) But, there's really no evidence that the difference has to be small.

"You are assuming the other traits are the same thing as DT, that they hold "power", and that they are a scalar item like DT."

Do you mean scalar as in, they have a value, or as in, they have a CONCRETE value? In the latter case, you're assuming that DT is when it isn't, and in the former, if dominant traits exist (and they do), then there must be absolutes used:You have more X than you have everything else, and in term, a scaling system can be used. There's actual quantities going on-There's no reason to assume the other traits aren't scalar.

"She didn't deny it but alright, we can end this discussion if it bothers you so much as to throw you into a state of absolute denial. It'll probably be better for your health anyways."

So, we have SOUL power, the thing locking the Barrier, then Alphys extracts DT to try to make monsters persist, as a vessel. Then, Entry 5 comes along, and she extracted "it", which she now believes is what makes humans persist, and now coins it as "Determination". And she calls the substance this for the rest of her entries. If she believed the two were identical, she wouldn't have given it a new name, she would have just called it SOUL power, and she most definitely wouldn't be implying a Eureka moment about "THIS must be why they persist after death", when the idea of SOUL power causing it was a simpler hypothesis:It's clear she only found out about this after the fact. Why didn't she recognize it as SOUL power, and why didn't she hypothesize that SOUL power is what gave them this ability, being pretty much the only thing SOULs have? (Well, it has DT as well, but according to your model, they're the same.) Thus, it's quite clear that the two are separated here.

"And what would be the rest, hmm? DT+X=SP, solve for X."

Let's see, we have magic, we have HP, we have the ATK stat, we have just about every stat that defines strength ever, we have magical capacity (or as you might know it as, MP).. Should I go on, or do you get the idea? (Really, I see it as similar to power levels from Dragon Ball.)