Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-10788405-20160720031315/@comment-27701762-20160721201532

So I mostly concur about how what you call the "abomination" stuff comes about. I have some quibbles, but they aren't important at the moment.

However, what is important is in your second paragraph. You claim that Flowey, upon absorbing six human souls, is able to feel compassion, but this compassion is dormant, mirroring what we observe in the Asriel fight. But there is no indication in the Photoshop Flowey encounter that he has any dormant compassion that could be awakened, even if we fail to do so. And there are certainly opportunities where this dormant compassion could be made manifest. If we never observe Flowey regaining his compassion simply by absorbing a soul, and we only see him regain his compassion upon aborsbing the combined power of seven human souls and taking on his monster form, then the conclusion we are meant to draw, absent some other piece of evidence, is that the mere existence of a soul (or, at the very least, a human soul) is not sufficient to allow Flowey to regain his compassion.

The souls as independent entities is a fairly important concept within the game world. You argue that the soul is the culmination of life and experience, but this does not detract from their independence. Without going into some vast metaphysical argument about the nature of the soul (since such an argument may be totally irrelevant to how the game operates), we are given two very important pieces of information. First, Chara is able to exert independent control over Asriel upon having their soul absorbed. Second, we are able to "reach out" to the six human souls, and they are able to act on their own to rebel against Flowey. If the human souls ceased to exist without their original host body, then either A) the six human souls would not exist, since their respective humans are long gone, or B) they would turn into empty vessels and would be incapable of exerting any will of their own. Since the souls do exist, and they do exert their own will, they must retain the fundamental nature of the original human form, and thus are independent entities. Independent, that is, from other souls and such.

You argue that Chara is still fused with Flowey, but there is no indication of this. If Chara was still fused with Asriel, Chara's "essence" would be contained within Asriel's essence as well, which would then transfer into Flowey. If this is the case, one of two things would occur. Either Chara's essence is just power, in which case Flowey is just more powerful than he would be if his essence was only drawn from Asriel (which we cannot say anything about, as we have no information of the counterfactual to be able to judge how this works), or Chara's essence is that culmination of life and experience, in which case Flowey would have two sets of memories, Asriel's and Chara's, and would exhibit two fundamental personalities. In the latter case, not only does Flowey only have any memories of being Asriel, but he recognizes Chara as someone else at multiple points in the game. At no point does he think of himself as Chara, or as some part of Chara.

Nor is this fusion even necessary to explain Flowey's behavior, as that behavior is explained in the Genocide route.

What's important for your question, though, is the earlier stuff. If Flowey simply needed to absorb any soul in order to feel compassion, then Flowey as Asriel, who has already absorbed six human souls twice, would need to know that he did in fact gain his compassion back, and have decided not to get it back, or have forgotten that it happened in the first place. The former solution does not make much sense, and the latter marks a major plot hole. But the plot hole only exists upon the premise that Flowey regains his compassion, which itself lacks evidence. So the most likely explanation is that Flowey doesn't regain his compassion simply by absorbing a soul, but only upon regaining his monster form (i.e. absorbing the combined power of seven human souls), and as such there is no oversight on Flowey's part.