Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4383275-20160827054600/@comment-27701762-20160828193044

Oobooglunk wrote: All good points! Two weak links, however, still remain.

1. Alphys knew she would be bringing the flower to life ("What happens when something without a SOUL gains the will to live?"), as assigned by Asgore. However, the Amalgamates, were contained in the True Laboratory. Mettaton had a giant OFF switch in his normal form, severely low battery power in his EX form, and comically low speed in his NEO form. Flowey, on the other hand, was planted in the garden of the king of the underground.

Any way you slice it, bringing a soulless being to life in the home of a royal figure is a bad idea and, regardless of her intent, Alphys deserves to be held accountable. But again, the entire reason that Flowey was planted in the garden was that he appeared to be nothing more than a normal flower. All of Alphys's experiments with the flower had failed to transform it, and so by all accounts the experiments had been a complete failure. Since the flower itself holds some significance (being the first Golden Flower that grew after Asriel's death), returning the flower to the king is the logical sequence of events. Especially since there is no reason to hold onto it. At that point it is just a normal flower. Only after everything goes wrong does Alphys realize that it is no longer a normal flower, but by the time she finds out the flower is gone.

2. When the player discovers the Amalgamates, Alphys casually chases them off and casually remarks "sorry about that, they get kind of sassy when they don't get fed on time." When Mettaton first approaches, Alphys warns the player. However, before the fight with Asriel in the True Pacifist ending, when Papyrus says a "tiny flower" helped him, Alphys freezes in horror as a bead of sweat runs down her face and she chokes out "a...tiny...flower?." If Flowey is all that benevolent and reasonable, what could Alphys be so afraid of? Again, she may not have intended to release something this evil into the world, but something sketchy was clearly going on with her thought process and she should have taken responsibility.

Alphys clearly knows that the flower gained sentience, since she has the lab entry about the flower being gone. What she does not know, up to that point, is what the flower is doing.

So she's having a big meeting with all of these friends, and it turns out that pretty much everyone was brought together through the manipulations of "a tiny flower." If it had just been revealed to you that you had been manipulated into being in the exact place you are, would your mind go to a benevolent or malevolent presence? Since we are generally disposed to find manipulation bad in any form, it would only be natural for Alphys to be concerned that the missing flower had set things in motion. Her thought process is pretty much normal, and it's not like she has any time to warn the other characters that something bad is about to happen.

But let's say that she should have warned Asgore or someone else about the flower once she found out it was gone, just in case. Even if we presume some failing on her part for it, it still doesn't get us to the conclusion that Alphys is evil or a villain. The most likely explanation is that she just hopes that nothing more comes of the flower and no one finds out about it. As with everything else, she would be rather selfish in her thought process and exercising poor judgment, but neither of those constitute evil or villainy.

As a final note, Alphys is definitely worried about the flower being gone. Her lab entries are written in two very distinct manners: she writes professionally with proper capitalization when things are going well, and in all lower-case when things aren't (minus Entry 16). Entry 18 just says "the flower's gone.", indicating that she is worried about the event. Obviously she does not warn people about it (see the above paragraph), but she is not hiding the results for any malevolent purpose.