Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-32182236-20190721003717/@comment-26006155-20200112053550

Have you read my other two parts yet, Ferret? I hope you have. I wonder what you have to say about them..

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I'm reading through them Cutesy, and taking notes as I go. Thank you, by the way, for using proper paragraph spacing.

To start, the very first step in any deductive project is to learn the Rules of the Game.

These rules might be different for every project. So creating an overarching set of rules that Undertale Lore Must Conform To, is very dangerous if you don't actually use the Undertale Lore itself while setting these ground rules.

In Steven Universe, for example, it's ok to use in-world TV commercials as foreshadowing and evidence, even though this seems insane, because it's a vehicle the Crewniverse uses for quick compact lore deliveries. "The Immortal and the Restless" in Sister Location seems to take this style also. What are the odds that the soap opera that Michael is watching is actually about him? Normally we'd say Zero.. except that "The Immortal and the Restless" was also custom-made by Scott, and Michael seems to have a great interest in this show, since it resonates with him somehow.

Making up a list of artibrary rules before even jumping into the project lore, and expecting all other theorists to abide by them, is a bit how the offical language in the novel "1984" actually loses words each year, because controlling the process of throught itself is considered valuable by The Party in preventing dissent. A dangerous precedent that has less to do with solving mysteries and more to do with seeing that they aren't ever solved.

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My take on Undertale's Hard Mode, where we actually put our name in as "Frisk", is that this is an impossibility. Frisk is a canon character from another video game, and we, who lent are own name to The Fallen Human, Chara, are a human playing a video game. They cannot possibly be the same person, any more than The Soul and The Vessel can be the same entity in Deltarune. The soul resides in the Vessel, they are not the same.

So in Hard Mode, the Undertale characters actually are putting on a theater production for us, knowing that this setup is impossible. That's why Toriel dramatically pretends to be dying, then stands up again, revealing that it was all an act.

Is Hard Mode Canon? Maybe...

My theory currently is that Frisk is the Beta Timeline version of Sans, who took this trip on the Alpha Timeline, then went back in time and changed the past, most notably resulting in Gaster's early death, so that when the version of him that already existed in that timeline, Beta Sans, took that trip, the world had changed, presumably to make it easier for Frisk/Beta Sans to achieve the True Pacifist Ending.

Choosing to actually be Frisk.. and not a version of Frisk being remotely controlled by Chara.. might force us to play the Alpha Timeline adventure instead of the normal Beta Timeline that Undertale usually resides in. Naming ourselves "Frisk" is the only name choice that actually radically changes the game, so perhaps we're seeing the Ruins when Sans arrived much earlier in the past, before the monsters migrated to New Home, which is why we see endgame monsters living in the ruins?

This, like everything else about Undertale, will have to be looked at from several angles, before we find one that makes perfect sense. But declaring it to be Non Canon before a complete understanding of it can be reached cannot be good for anyone.

Updating as I go.