Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20190820122909/@comment-32182236-20190824211239

It's not 2400 AD. It's 2400 AF (After Founding). (And now that I look at the evidence, it's probably closer to 2300 AF)

Once again, we see the Surface in a completely modern era. It's clearly the present, or at least close to it.

I'm actually arguing that 201X AF is the same as ~1700 AD. So that's the argument that I want you to tackle.

Now, human calendars from the garbage might be used to form the basis for a year.. But why would they base their year on the Common Era system? They don't even celebrate Christmas! (They do have a holiday similar to it, but that started because of decorations on Gyftrot-No mention of a Messiah.)

Do you know what the Human Era system actually is? It's derived from the Gregorian. All it does it add 10000 to the current year, so that "year 0" is the building of the first temple. It exists to place year 0 on what could be the start of humans evolving away from the rest of life on Earth, and starting their own proto-civilizations.

Far better starting point than a bad estimate of the birth of Christ.

The war happened around the Middle Ages, at the latest. The Gregorian calendar wouldn't exist until October of 1582. While the older Julian calendar did exist at the time, the leap cycles were off.

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...Which, as I think about it, actually doesn't pose a problem at all. The monsters couldn't tell seasons, so they'd have no idea that the Julian calendar was off. After all, even humans didn't know that when said calendar was made..

Even still, why would they adopt our starting year, when they don't seem to regard this event as important at all?

I don't think that the monster calendar doesn't have a 365-day year, with leap-years here and there. I just don't believe that their years match ours.

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So no, it's not several centuries in the future. Chara was several centuries in the past, and human technology was also at that level. Meaning the monster's technology at the time came from Gaster himself.

Sure, the phone Toriel has appears in our modern era.. But recall that at the time, she was royalty. I think she'd have access to Gaster's technology.

So what happened over the four centuries? Simple.

After Gaster fell, monster technology became stagnant. Gaster's future technology did exist, but there was nobody to reverse-engineer it (Try having someone from 1600 reverse-engineer a modern computer! They wouldn't know enough about how technology works to succeed in that!)

Meanwhile, human technology gradually developed. Eventually, it caught up with what monsters had at the time, and that's when they started gaining new technology from the humans.

While reverse-engineering something from centuries in the future is nigh-impossible, doing it from just a few months in the future is quite easy. They followed what the humans did, step-by step.

All while the CORE is still way past what they can accomplish on their own. If Gaster was remembered, they probably would have figured it out, as Gaster's wisdom could have given them what they needed. But he was forgotten-They only know there had to be someone brilliant to design the CORE. The person that the Memorial Fountain was for.

It's only fitting, as well. The fountain was directly next to the CORE, after all.