Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20160613103837/@comment-26006155-20160617131829

Well, here's my theory about the Amalgamates:

First, you have to ask, what does it mean when a monster "Falls Down"?

When Toriel first finds you, and says she goes here every day to see if anyone has "Fallen Down", we immediately assume she's looking for humans. But like most assumptions in Undertale, they're dangerous to make.

Undertale tells us that only Ghosts and burrowing creatures (like Flowey) can travel back and forth between the Ruins and the Underground. So you'd think humans were the only ones even capable of Falling Down, and it would only happen in that skylight of the Ruins.

And yet, there are multiple accounts of monsters Falling Down in the Underground, which is why Asgore has so many Fallen Down monsters to send to Alphys in her lab. A common trait is that these monsters are all unconscious and unresponsive, and yet, since monsters turn to dust when they die, none of them are actually DEAD.

Alyphs remarks that soon they will all turn to dust, but before that happens she hopes to inject them with Determination so, as Asgore ordered her to, she can make their SOULS persist after death for collection, eventually over time giving Asgore enough to reach the equivalent power of the 7th human soul needed to break the barrier.

But this never happens.. because instead of dying, the monsters wake up again, being normal for a while, but then join together to become the amalgamates, and Alphys never succeeds in collecting any monster souls at all.

Now, let's go back to what it means for a monster to Fall Down. People have theorized this means a monster dying of old age, and yet when you break into Mettaton's house and read his/her journal, you learn Shyren's cousin has also fallen down, a young girl monster. In fact, the Lemon Bread amalgamate has AARON in it, who's literally as healthy as a horse! Old age does not explain the Falling Down phenomenon.

Remember how I mentioned that Omega Flowey and Absolute God of Hyperdeath Asriel should act like amalgamates, a merging of several different monsters, but don't?

If my main thread theory is true, it's because Asriel, and all the other monsters he absorbs all have SOULS, which preserve each of their individual identities even when merged together, and allow the merged monsters to be seperated out into their original forms again.

And the reason the Amalgamates all blend together into a mess where you can't tell where one monsters ends, and another one begins, where there's absolutely no seperation between the minds and identiies of merged monsters, is because NONE OF THE FALLEN DOWN MONSTERS HAD SOULS TO BEGIN WITH!!

Why does a monster Fall Down, yet not die? It's because something essential has been taken from them. Someone has already taken their souls, although this sounds impossible.

The only way to get a soul from a non-boss monster would be to give them an injection of determination, so our soul-stealing assassin would have to have both a source of determination on hand, and the know-how to gather it, and inject it into others.

And this attacker would also have to be a ghost in order to be able to strike at the Ruins as well as the Underground, since monsters have been falling down in both locations. Remember that a human hasn't fallen down into the Ruins in ages, yet Toriel, the Queen of All Monsters, makes daily patrols looking for ANYONE who has fallen down.

So we're looking for a ghost, who was once human and has a human SOUL, and a knowledge of how Determination Extracton works, who has a love of decidedly dark experiments.

Don't everyone say GASTER at once :)