Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20190617222636/@comment-32182236-20190807205817

If a series has contradictions in its story.. Any theories about it will also have contradictions.

...But Matpat should have totally made note of the roads.

And if Henry did indeed have the last name Afton in the games.. And Charlie's father was Henry.. And Charlie's last name wasn't Afton... There are really only two explanations for this.

The first is this is an alternate universe. There goes the big theory that they're the same universe.

The second is that Henry and William got married.. Sometime after Charlie's death.

It would also have to be after the events of FNAF1, given that this kind of marriage was illegal in the early 90s and earlier. So Henry's name wouldn't be recognized as different.

Or the quote Matpat highlighted meant (Henry) and (William Afton), rather than (Henry and William) Afton.

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But let's get back to Undertale. This is the Undertale wiki after all...

Time duplicates are a common trope in time travel stories, where a future version of someone interferes with the life of their past self in an attempt to change the future.

Yes.. But their past self must become their future self.. Otherwise we wouldn't still see their future self in the timeline. They would either fade away, or become the new future. There must be a closed causal loop to avoid a paradox. It wouldn't be the future Frisk would be forgetting. He came here along with Gaster from The Other World. Frisk would be closer to Gaster than anyone, even his future self Sans.

But even present Frisk supposedly came with Gaster to the world. So he should remember Gaster as well. Just not the Darkest Experiment, as he didn't remember that.

For Frisk to completely forget about Gaster.. might force him to forget how he even got there. Who he even is. Sans would remember, but Frisk would be a mess afterwards.

But why would Frisk forget? Gaster's memory was wiped from Undertale's world.. But Frisk isn't from Undertale. If people from other worlds were affected as well... Then so should Sans have been affected.

Human souls from Undertale's surface still seem to have properties similar to those from The Other World. They have PSI, they can telekinetically move themselves, like we saw when they rebelled from Omega Flowey's control.

But what about the abilities that they don't have in Earthbound?

The two worlds are very similiar. Parralell perhaps. The game expects us to compare the world we're visiting to the one we know. And perhaps learn something from this world that's also applicable to ours.

Earth. Not Earthbound. Or Mother, for that matter.

Now we have to figure out what the interaction between Gaster and Chara was. And how somehow she, Sans and Gaster crossed destines.

Besides giving Gaster the initial inspiration for the DT extraction machine.. In just a few days.. I don't see how they'd be connected in the Beta Timeline. In the Alpha Timeline, however..

We don't know. Chara's death had nothing to do with Gaster.. And was part of a plan. Gaster probably couldn't have saved Chara.

But laying out what the timeline was like with Gaster's influence would be quite interesting.

Anyways.. When Frisk and Gaster showed up.. When did they appear? The time we play in in Undertale? Or the time before Chara when the DT extraction machines began?

...If it was the former.. What if Gaster took his DT from the humans then.. And brought them back to the past? He could have attempted to gather a near-infinite amount of DT from this method.

Say human X falls in December 10, 8:00AM.. And dies on December 12, 1:00PM.

Gaster travels to December 12, 12:59PM.. Extracts DT from it. Then he goes back a few minutes from before it was extracted.. And extracts the DT again. Now he has twice the determination that he could have gotten normally.

This may have in fact been the original purpose of the time machine. But we can't be sure.

I'm still pondering about how Asgore seemed to recognize Frisk immediately when they first meet, and he's taken aback by it. Yet when murderous Chara approaches Asgore after possessing Frisk.. Asgore can't tell what type of monster she is at all, and greets the Destroyer of Worlds calmly without alarm.

The former is easy to explain. Humans do look different than monsters. Toriel knows you're a human.. Undyne knows you're a human.. Alphys knows you're a human..

It seems that spotting humans is a skill, though. Catty and Bratty don't know that you're a human.

Papryus has never seen a human, either. At least that's what Sans tells us.

This seems to imply that there was a large gap between the time the last human fell. One that lasts for nearly a full monster generation.

And Gerson lived since the war. So a monster generation is centuries long.

So it was decades before a human fell.

This supports the idea that "201X" to the monsters is what we would call the Distant Past. Something changed between those scenes. Even though both humans should look the same, Asgore is able to look into people to see what they're made of, it seems.

Or Chara did the creepy face he did to Flowey earlier.. And that face looked too demonic to be recognized as a human. After all, we see that face for ourselves later on.. And it does not look human.

And my point that creativity has always been a part of Science remains. The left brain can recreate experiments. But only the creative right brain can innovate, and dive into the uknown in search of hidden aspects of physics we're not yet aware of. Like what Einstein did with The General Theory of Relativity.

He dropped an assumption. That is the exact opposite of creating an assumption.

Sure, eventually, mankind would discover what the different numbers meant. But my point is that out of all of humanity, it was Einstein who actually did it. He must have been doing something right. And he did what he could to encourage creative thought and open-mindedness in other scientists, so humanity might learn faster as a whole.

Yes. He dropped a dogmatic assumption. Just because he did one thing right doesn't mean EVERYTHING he did is right. That's a hasty generalization.

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Right answer... Wrong method.

But in this case, I do think he did something right. As I said, it was dropping an assumption.

Stifling creativity is what religion did to humanity during the Dark Ages, where questioning the church canon in any form was considered Heresy. The Renaissance and the science it brought helped erode that stranglehold so humanity could finally move forward.

You're confusing creativity with skepticism. One is a very important tool for logic that prevents people from believing that a dragon exists in my garage when the evidence does not support this claim, and the latter is a tool mainly used for art. Can you guess which is which? And regardless of whatever beliefs Einstein may have had personally (his family was Lax Jewish, I think), his teachings have helped others find the real truth of the universe. So that we might never suffer the Dark Ages again.

The Scientific Revolution is what took us out of the Dark Ages. When people started to question the idea of just attributing everything they can't explain to magic, and start actually using empirical tests.

Einstein did revolutionize science.. But it wasn't by searching for a good story. It was spotting an error in Newtonian physics, and doing everything he can to fix the error.. Even if it meant removing an assumption that we have all believed for millenia-The idea that time and space are absolute.

That really is just an assumption. Why should we assume that everyone experiences time at the same rate?

Creativity might have created religions. But it can also free people from them.

No, skepticism frees people from false religions.

Note that I said false religions. Who knows? Maybe the universe was made with a purpose. But we can't just go around assuming that Apollo carries the sun with a chariot just because the ruler of Greece tells us so. Or because it tells a good story.

And that's the fallacy. We should be looking for what fits the evidence. Not what makes a good story.

When there are multiple explanations for what happened.. It's often the least interesting one that also happens to be correct.

As for the history of life in Undertale's universe, and the origin of monsters? We may never know. This is a fantasy world, that may or may not have the same laws of physics that we're used to. It's a world hand-crafted by an artist to make a point, and tell a story.

Yes, the laws are probably different. No, we can't assume that there's some meaning to this.

Let's imagine a future where God has been PROVEN to exist. As in, we find direct evidence of his existence. Maybe we see a direct violation of the first law of thermodynamics. Or we invent a time machine, go back to the Big Bang, and literally see God initiating the creation of the universe.

Okay, God exists. Now how do we know that God is trying to prove a point to some outside world by making this universe?

This is the Fine-Tuning Argument.. But with zero of the evidence that is used to make it a real argument.

A mystery writer has to do two things: Provide the reader with all the clues neccessary to solve the mystery before the ending. And also hide those clues as well as they can, to make solving the mystery as difficult as possible.

Before the ending? Why can't the ending itself give a revelation? So we can't expect there to be a simple answer for everything. Mysteries by their very nature try to be as vexing as possible.

If you want to make the Teleogical Argument for Undertale, then actually provide evidence that supports that Undertale was finely tuned for mystery.

But we do know one thing: In the work of a good artist, the clues will be out there. And at some point, the artist themselves had to point them out. This is why I pause and scrutinize anything weird and overly-specific that turns up along the way. Things that might not seem to have a purpose at first.. but only because we don't know what to look for.

You're assuming that this is a work of art.. And not just any work of art.. But a masterpiece.

We need to take away all of our assumptions.. Just like Einstien did for relativity.. And NOT like what he did against Quantum Mechanics.