Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-10788405-20160720031315/@comment-27701762-20160720170725

Heedfulconch3 wrote: Remember that he said in the true pacifist ending that having a soul inside of him whilst he was himself allowed him to feel compassion again, and the thousands of monster souls within him granted him knowledge of how much those monsters truly cared about Frisk. We need just a bit of clarification here. The relevant lines go as follows: "However, with everyone's souls inside of me... I not only have my own compassion back... But I can feel every other monster's as well."

Asriel isn't quite saying that reverting to his true form plus having a soul equals getting his compassion back. Compare to the lines that come just before:

"As a flower, I was soulless. I lacked the power to love other people."

If we went just by that line, then the only relevant difference is not having a soul, which is resolved when Flowey absorbs six human souls. If all Flowey the flower needs is a soul to be able to love other people, then the six human souls should have already been sufficient. There has to be something more that's missing.

The True Pacifist ending then gives us what is missing: it is not the mere addition of a soul to Flowey that brings back compassion, but when Flowey is able to retake his true form as Asriel. Asriel says that he will turn back into a flower, and thus be unable to feel love again. From the various changes we observe, the equation, so to speak, that gets us to "Flowey is able to feel compassion" is the power (perhaps we might specify "soul power") equivalent to seven human souls which allows Flowey to transform into Asriel. Anything less is simply a more powerful Flowey.

This has been a long digression for a very tiny point, though.

I agree with the next couple paragraphs that you wrote, so I won't quote them here and take up space.

I'm also going to skip the paragraph on the overloading stuff. I disagree with your speculation, but I don't think the specific way in which the souls revolt is actually telling us anything about the matter at hand.

Finally, with what you said about Flowey regaining his monster form, I actually somewhat agree with that. As the god of hyperdeath (what the @$#%! is Hyperdeath?) and the angel of death (why not the angel of Hyperdeath exactly?), he more or less remained the same as Flowey except in physical form. I think that when Frisk saved Asriel, he completed that transformation and brought Asriel back from the abyss (not 100% on whether or not this was temporary or permanant), maybe allowing the real Asriel to fill one (or more) of the human souls with his own mind. then again, heavy speculation. The very end of this runs into a bit of a problem. The souls are sort of independent entities. They almost, you could say, have a mind of their own. It's not quite that Asriel could "fill" the human souls with his own essence.

We can see some evidence from the Photoshop Flowey fight, since the souls are able to rebel of their own accord (and of course, you call to them for help, so you must be appealing to the "person" to whom each soul belonged).

But more importantly is what happened to Asriel once he absorbed Chara's soul. Asriel tells us that though he had the combined power of two souls, what was really happening is that he and Chara were essentially competing for control of Asriel's body. Chara was actually responsible for originally crossing the barrier and carrying their body to the village. Asriel was responsible for holding his body back and not killing the villagers attacking him. So each soul retains its own free will, so to speak, and isn't an empty vessel that can be filled by another's essence. If Asriel were to keep any of those souls, it would turn him into a more powerful version of Flowey, though still unable to feel compassion.

Also, the Photoshop Flowey form is something that Flowey seems to be able to transform into willingly

in the true pacifist ending, we see that after Flowey absorbed the Human souls and bound Frisk's friends with a photoshop vine, he was able to retain his normal flower form

I'd say you're right about this. Just before the Photoshop Flowey fight as well Flowey maintains his flower form (albeit in a much larger size) before changing. I'm not sure what its bearing is to the topic at hand, though.