Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20160613103837/@comment-26006155-20160614120334

Isthereaplace wrote: Except Flowey has basic feelings, even when he is soulless. He can get bored, annoyed, worried, terrified, sort of satisfied, has basic survival instinct (it shouldn't even be surprising knowing what determination is), and so on. He just lost the ability for more complex feelings. Like, to feel satisfied for something that has no intrinsic reward. He enjoys having power - he doesn't understand compassion or generosity. He will play with you, kill you, take away what he can - he won't care (or will aim for) inflicting pain or causing fear, and won't make sacrifices on anyone's behalf. He is morally and ethically corruptable, since morals and ethics have no intrinsic rewards.

Actually, even plants can supposedly feel, up to an uncertain variety and complexity, but including fear, and that alone presumably doesn't cause them to have a soul. Flowey is basically a plant that gained sentience, determination, and some kind of ability to move around and weaponize his pellets.

Flowey even confirms that he is empty inside, and that he lost the ability to have the feelings that, as Asriel, were satisfying and therefore important to him (but that doesn't mean he lost all feelings in all forms in a world where even rocks have some). Considering that Asriel started out helping everyone after turning into Flowey, but decided on killing for fun, because it was more satisfying, what he says practically immediately after turning Flowey again doesn't prove he has a soul.

By the way, since he came back as a flower and not his goat self, his body had to turn into "essence", or monster dust if you don't fancy the posh word. Correct me if I'm wrong, but dust is normally teeny-weeny little specks, of which you would need like at least thousands to hold what the size of a soul is depicted (and souls broken into pieces don't seem to work too well). And shouldn't Flowey be like, already the most determined after having a combined human-monster soul with extra determination infused? What is Frisk then, some incarnation of pure determination? Did they eat the stuff for breakfast their whole life? Or did the Asriel-Chara combined soul just linger around without a body, unnoticed by the monsters, who have six tubes with visible souls in them, which they even passed over to their scientist to do research, and can measure the power and intentions of a soul? And then simply decide to go and save Asriel from turning into a flower, just because it sucks and, apparently, you like him? Wait, if that's the case, what Flowey does there on screen after restarting the game? Help, a boss monster with an absorbed human soul he pulled out of a magic hat is badly cloning himself!

So, since I consider the soulless = no feelings approach false, I don't find the supposed evidence convincing. In his confession sequence at the end of the Genocide route Flowey shows a huge range of emotions. He even knows that he's missing something, and WANTS to feel, but is jaded when not even his mother can make him feel love. He plays the Groundhog Day game, saving everyone, using his powers (he's quite powerful for a flower, actually. Sure, Toriel could one-shot him, but Toriel could also one-shot ASGORE) to help others, then, exasperated that nothing helps him feel love, he tries killing everyone out of boredom. Flowey and Asriel both say they specifically lacked compassion, while exibiting all other emotions. The exact thing that Chara lacked.

Alphys injected a score of yellow flowers with determination, yet only Flowey became self-aware, and mobile, he clearly has something that the others lack, and in abundance. It's true that Frisk gets his vision of falling earlier when he falls into a yellow flowerbed, and there may be traces of Asriel's essense in other flowers, but Asriel absorbed Chara's soul before he died, and it's part of him now, and would be in his scattered essense as well.

Also, remember that Flowey tells you about how he wanted to die at first, but then while he felt himself going he realized he wanted to live, his determination kicked in, and he went back to his SAVE point.

Asriel, on the other hand, had just come to the realization that his best friend in the world, Chara, has never actually been his friend at all, and had simply been using him as a means to an end the entire time, thinking she could cynically control his body like a puppet to kill her own people. How did he feel after an experience like that? He wanted to DIE. And so he did.

Remember, Chara was the first human to fall, Gaster and his determination experiments (Alphys used blueprints she found to make the Determination Extraction machine, she didn't design it) had to come later. It was only after Asriel died that Asgore declared all humans who fell from then on would die.