Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20190820122909/@comment-32182236-20200104145039

Until then, I'll give you something else to respond to, though.

There has to be a reason why Toby said he hates the term "Genocide Route" and prefers to use "No Mercy Route".

I think it's because the term was coined by a neo-nazist or something..? It came from a twitch livestream where Chara got named "Hitler", and the streamer made a bunch of offensive jokes regarding the situation.

Maybe he doesn't want us to call it that, because its origin comes from that guy, and we shouldn't be using HIS names?

Of course, that's a genetic fallacy, which is why I still use that name-I can use it WITHOUT acknowledging this person. Even if Chara did want to kill literally everyone.. I don't think she succeeded, even at the end of the No Mercy Route.

Why not?

Alphys' force fields might keep Chara-possessed-Frisk from killing the evacuated monsters themselves, but if they were all just hanging out in the true lab together, this wouldn't protect them from The End Of The World at the end of No Mercy.

Why is this a problem?

Sans leaves the timeline when he's defeated, and goes into another one where Papyrus is still alive. Although he's very dead in our present one.

Or he died. Our LV went up, the dusting sound occurred without us pressing spare, and he spoke to a DEAD Papyrus. It's pretty clear that he just died. (And when you're about to die, you tend to "see" other people that are already dead. It's called a Near-Death Experience.)

Undyne said Alphys was taking the monsters somewhere where Chara could never find them.

No, Undyne said Alphys was taking the monsters somewhere where FRISK could never find them. She didn't even know Chara was around!

Considering that we already know the Core contains the time/space portal that Gaster was shattered in, and that Alphys is an ace at dimensional tech, I think the reason that the No Mercy run isn't an actual Genocide is because Alphys evacuated them all to a different world beyond Chara's reach.

You're assuming that it wasn't an actual Genocide.

Somehow, they went from modern surface human technology and handheld VCR recorders at the start of 201X.. to building the anime-tech Core later in the same decade.

What makes you think Toriel's old phone had to have been from 201X? She could be the kind of person that keeps on to old phones. It is reasonable, given that her phone is STILL working when we arrive. It must be long-lasting!

They learned dimensional warping, sentient robot construction, how to build massive Arcologies like The Core, and how to put 60 seconds of flight fuel into a cell phone along with laser weaponry... all in less than a decade.

I agree with all of it.. Except for the "less than a decade" part.

And remember that nobody in Asgore's kingdom even came close to Gaster's level of brilliance, because it took Asgore years to finally settle for Alphys as the best mind he was able to find among his own poeple.

I've argued several times that Gaster's brilliance was irreplaceable. I'm with the Gaster Followers on this one.

Alphys has proven that while she can't innovate like he can, she does have the power to learn from Gaster's notes and unlock his secrets. And yet.. these amazing technological wonders which ought to overturn everything in their path have just started to spread into the monster world outside the Core at the time Frisk arrives.

Alphys was only chosen as the scientist a while ago. Remember, there was a HUGE gap of time between Gaster's fall and Alphys getting chosen. Gaster didn't arrive centuries ago. He only left a few years before Undertale begins.

We only know from that that he didn't FALL centuries ago. And he didn't. He fell around ONE century ago.

For this same fate to be possible for Alphys, the same dimensional-warping equipment Gaster fell into must still be operational in The Core. Of which the True Lab is a part.

What tells us that the True Lab is a part of the CORE?

And even if it is, that still doesn't rule out Gaster's time travel experiments from being in OTHER parts of the CORE, or elsewhere.

Yes, the experiments that Gaster went through could happen again. And yes, it was the result of those experiments that got Gaster shattered. But that still doesn't tell us WHERE they happened.

That's a bit of a leap where I don't see the connections.

Perhaps I should have phrased my argument as a reductio ad absurdum.

Premise 1 (Ferret's premise):Gaster performed the DT experiments in the Beta Timeline. Premise 2:DT experiments require DT Premise 3:Gaster fell prior to any sources of DT. Conclusion 1:Gaster couldn't have performed the DT experiments in the Beta Timeline. Conclusion 2:Paradox!

We need to eliminate a premise to eliminate the paradox. And I eliminated Premise 1, since Premise 2 is factual, and Premise 3 is a direct consequence of him falling prior to Chara.

By all accounts Gaster was brilliant. And he made the blueprints Alphys used to make her DE Extractor, they were artifacts she found in the lab. While there might be several mad scientists in the world Gaster is from, Sans is from that world, and doesn't have his level of scientific prowess.

As I said, I believe that Sans is a Darkner. And of course Sans doesn't have that level of prowess. As the Gaster Followers said, Gaster's brilliance was irreplaceable.

Somehow, somewhere, Gaster gained knowledge of how to use Determination. Either he must have studied humans in the Underground before Chara fell, or there were humans back in his homeworld that were so similar to the ones on the surface above that their Determination both worked the same way in different worlds.

The second is highly unlikely, and the first is impossible if no other humans were in the Underground. Why not just go for the only WORKING escape route?

Remember that Alphys got all her extracted Determination from the Six Human Souls, all of which were from humans who fell from the surface. Anime might not be real on the surface above, but the humans there have the same type of Determination that they have back in Gaster and Sans' homeworld.

You can't just.. say that! Earthbound doesn't even have souls! The two worlds are fundamentally different! There's no evidence that determination even EXISTS in Earthbound! (At least, not as a physical substance)

Unless you're suggesting Gaster's homeworld was Deltarune, what you said makes no sense. (And if you are suggesting his homeworld is Deltarune, then there you go, it's not Earthbound, so he's not Dr. Andonuts.)

It is possible that humans Toriel wasn't counting could have fallen through the skylights above Asgore's Garden. Although I don't see them getting very far.

Me neither. But that would certainly explain why the legends existed before Chara fell, AND why there were no known humans in the Underground at that time.

Once again, Toriel never gives us the number of actual humans who passed through the Ruins, so this possibility exists, and is something we need to be aware of going forward.

If any humans passed through the Ruins after Toriel left, they had to have either died in the Ruins, or gotten captured by Asgore.

And the head we see talking in Gaster Follower #1's hand doesn't look like a skeleton head. It's mouth moves when it talks, and it seems quite fleshy.

Yes, his mouth does move. Like Papyrus.

Not as if we even know what skeleton heads should act like. Papyrus has fully animated features, while Sans' face never changes except the eyes. We've already had that long conversation.

Exactly, so we can't rule out a skeleton head. But we CAN rule out a human head.

We've been over how the Waterfall Glyphs and Librarby books were written by different civilizations at different times. The glyphs describe a world very different from Asgore's kingdom, where no entrances and exists exist at all.

I still think it was the SAME civilization, but the glyphs were written long before Chara fell. That way, it was reasonable to believe that such entrances didn't exist. (It might have been not long after the war!)

And we agree that the Waterfall statue, which Undyne says existed longer than anyone can remember (and Gerson can remember the end of the pervious war and Barrier casting) must have been from an earlier civilzation.

I DO believe in that. What we disagree on is what the other cilivization actually was, and the state they were in. I believe the other civilization were the primitive monsterkind. The ORIGINAL. Mt. Ebott is where monsters first evolved. You think they were banished there.

While many different timelines are certainly possible depending on how we play Undertale, Flowey talks about how everyone is ripped out of the timelines they ended up in, and returned to this one when everything is reset.

Actually, the timeline they were in gets destroyed, and they're returned to a new timeline, matching the null case.

Chara's flowers knew in advance where Frisk would fall, just as Sans knew exactly what Frisk would look like when he emerged

Why couldn't Toriel have planted the garden right where the hole was, as to prevent anyone from getting injured by the fall?

and that he would eventually emerge from the Ruins.

If Frisk did go through the New Home Route, they wouldn't need flowers.

But there only seem to be two copies of Sans/Frisk running around. Which would indicate that Sans backtracked through time only once, otherwise there would be more of them, a duplicate for every rewind.

There shouldn't be any duplicates at all. When you reset, you don't meet your other self. You ARE your other self, and everything afterwards is GONE.

There are two versions of True Lab Entry 17, written by two different people. And while Gaster wrote the first one, he couldn't have written the second one because in that timeline he died long beforehand, being replaced eventually by Alphys.

Why doesn't my timeline work?

WDG-15, WDG-16, WDG-17, ALP-1, ALP-2, ALP3... …. ALP17

While it would require someone to repeatedly rewind time to erase the memories of someone from the world, reloading a save might be a lot simpler than tearing through the fabric of the universe to go to a place you've never been before.

That's exactly what resetting is, though, as Flowey and Sans both describe it. And that would certainly explain where the deja vu is coming from.

Whatever other worlds exist, Frisk experience a world where time has been rewound once during Undertale. It might be different with Deltarune, but if you want to propose a Gamma and Delta timeline, we need evidence for that.

I don't propose any timeline. I'm saying your hypothesis NECESSITATES those timelines! If you think it's also incompatible, then it looks like we debunked your hypothesis!

(Also, there's not two Papyri.)

Papyrus did not see through Sans' disguise on sight. And quite clearly, Sans' mask fools almost everyone else that he hasn't shared his secret with.

Okay, that does work.

Sans isn't alone. He was with at least one other person when he heard this report.

The rest of Gaster's team.

Sans has demonstrated that he can travel through time. Yet there's a place he once was that he can't get back to anymore.

Gaster's timeline was retconned away. Going back in time would take him to an alternate turn of events where Gaster never existed. It wouldn't help. Besides, the machine is broken.

If Sans and Gaster were from the Underground originally, why did they need to build The Silver Key Machine? It's the vehicle they used to travel here and investigate The Anomaly.

No it's not. The machine was specifically to investigate the many timelines, and how they discovered the anomaly. They made reports. You can't make reports if you don't have a way of gathering information. (It might have allowed one to travel through timelines as well, we're not sure.)

Nope. Remember that Papyrus showed us the box of bones he used for his attacks. While the battle screens might show the weapons being used in an idealized, cartoon fashion, the weapons are real. And Frisk's attacks change depending on what weapon he's weilding.

Interesting.. Perhaps his attacks are him SUMMONING the bones, making magical constructs of it?

All that would prove is Gaster's research wasn't in the True Lab, though. Not that Gaster Blasters never existed.

Everyone might have forgotten Gaster, but if Alphys was working as an understudy of Gaster's at the time, and she wasn't repeatedly killed, people would still remember her.

Yes, but they wouldn't remember who she studied under, just that she knew science.

And Alphys would certainly remember all the science she learned from Gaster. Even if she couldn't remember who taught it to her.

That is correct. But there are likely things Gaster knew that he didn't tell Alphys. And now she had no way to go back and check, either. They'd fade over time, wouldn't they?

This is a world where a very specific bit of information has been deleted. And if Alphys was already a highly trained scientist at the time of Gaster's death, she still should have been a shoe-in for continuing his research.

She WAS. (She was able to create an artificial vessel, Mettaton!) But nobody knew that.

This is debunked in the fight with Hyperdeath Asriel, where Sans, along with all the other Lost Souls, start to forget who Frisk is as we're repeatedly killed by Asriel.

Then I suppose Sans was there when it happened. It must be that the reason why Sans didn't become a Follower is because he was from another world. That's the separation between the FOLLOWERS and Sans, not the rest of the world and Sans.

And Sans DOES remember Gaster. He's carrying a gun with his name on it. And remembers the companion he traveled from the other world with.

Perhaps he pieced together Gaster's existence from the machine, and had other memories tangentially related to Gaster, that he was able to deduce DID come from Gaster? And if he forgot those memories, that meant he lost all evidence of Gaster existing?

The memory of Gaster might have faded, but his work remains. Alphys found his blueprints and used them to make her Determination Extraction machine. And in Sans' lab, there are notes that can't be read. Because, perhaps, they're all in Wingdings.

Right.

How can two Entry 17's exist, at the same point in time? Because they both happened in different timelines.

They're not from the same list!!

Okay, have an analogy. Suppose that there's a series of books. There's only two books in the series so far, but that will suffice.

The first book has 17 chapters, and they're labeled as such.

What will the first chapter of the SECOND book be labeled? Chapter 1, or Chapter 18?

As anyone who reads chapter books would know, the answer is Chapter 1.

Does that make Book 2's Chapter 17 equivelant with Book 1's Chapter 17? Of course not. Same thing here.

But although Gaster died years ago.. somehow he was able to stand where Alphys was, and write his own version of Entry 17?

"Book 2's Chapter 17 was only written a few weeks ago! How could Book 1's Chapter 17 possibly have existed when the author died a few months ago?"-Your question converted into my analogy

Explain to me how Sans and Chara's flowers gained so much pre-knowledge about Frisk's journey if no time manipulation was taking place?

Sans analyzed the timelines, and Chara's flowers didn't know.

Undertale's story doesn't work unless you factor in time travel. The Silver Key is an HP Lovecraft story about time travel, after all. And Sans' love of quantum physics and science fiction(?) is hammered home far too much for it to be irrelevant.

Multiple timelines? Yes. Seeing into the future by analyzing them? Yes. Reloading to fix a mistake you made? Also yes. Going back in time to a point of time that isn't either the Reset Point or the current file state? NO.

Unless the Barrier also prevents time and dimensional travel beyond the limits of when and where it existed.

Perhaps the Barrier does exist as a four-dimensional barrier across space-time.

Alphys should have been able to find an alternate dimension where the Barrier didn't exist.. and yet she wasn't. Perhaps the Barrier itself prevented this, making soul energy collection necessary.

Or she did, but when Gaster tried to go there... He shattered across time and space. This is my hypothesis.

The Waterfall glyphs clearly describe the monsters being trapped behind a Barrier.

The waterfall glyphs were not from that civilization!

And while the ancient war the glyphs describe was over before it started, with a massive human sneak attack.. Asgore's war lasted a long time before his people were defeated.

It was a long battle. One battle.

Two civilizations at different times. Two times a Barrier was cast. Two times a Barrier was broken.

You'd think the humans would learn the first time, right?

Are the Amalgamates more powerful than Undyne? They've very ghostlike and probably require magic to defeat, just like Mad Dummy. And despite all of his advanced PSI powers, Frisk never had magic to throw at them. I wonder how long the Amalgamates would last if their weakness to magic was exploited.

But they're not actually ghosts. It's still perfectly plausible for them to be more powerful than Undyne, and as that is what the simplest effective model tells us, it is the most likely. So we shouldn't use its negation as evidence.

I don't see any evidence that Alphys even knew that Undyne was getting Determination from the seagrass ice cream.

She didn't. But she did know that all monsters have determination. ALL life has determination. It's just the amount that matters.

Giving a dead flower determination brings it back to life, and Asriel as well via essence. Determination and life are close to synonymous.

Anyways, Undyne and Alphy's experience with Determation was very different from what the Fallen experience. The Fallen slowly woke up, and seemed completely normal, until they fused.

Because they were FALLEN. It'd take time to wake up. Perhaps Undyne also took time to gain the superpowers of determination. And they fused because they had TOO MUCH.

The Waterfall Glyphs say it would take an amazing amount of power to take the soul from a living monster. Which confirms right there that such a thing is theoretically possible.

Yes. But that doesn't mean it HAPPENED, just that it COULD. That doesn't mean that it HAD to have happened.

You say that other flowers that absorbed part of Asriels' dust would act like seperate organisms.

Yes. But they'd also be Asriel at the same time if given determination.

Well, that's what happed to the other golden flowers (all of which were tracked by by Asriel at first) when they decided to grow in places where Frisk would fall in the future.

The only golden flower that came from Asriel was the first. The others came from it, and appeared long after the dust. The non-golden flowers in the garden at that time would have absorbed it.

Gaster's soul was shattered across time and space, leaving multple versions of him. It seems the same happened to Chara and Asriel. Who, in the Alpha TImeline, knew Sans. And where his adventures would take him.

There's only ONE Chara we see. Unless you're suggesting Frisk is actually another version of Chara, much as you suggest Jeremy is another version of Mike.

Perhaps bits of Chara's soul, still infused in Asriels' essense, allowed the flowers to remember events from the world before, as time was reset? Letting them act with this pre-knowledge?

Determination is how Flowey knew. It's also how we know, at the time when Flowey decides to take that ability away from us.

I changed "It's been a long time" to "It's been a long time since we've met" to better flesh out what this dialog says about the past. Elevator Voice very clearly knows Chara. Well.

It doesn't "flesh things out", it adds things that weren't there, making it look like it says something it doesn't, and completely twists the meaning of the text! You don't add to the text, and then use the additions as evidence! That's no better than making things up! (And I know you're better than that.)

So stop making things up. JUSTIFY the addition you added. Why do those words have to be there? I argue they're not, and that it's simply been a long time since the plan failed. Please, justify the words you added in, because right now, it looks like something completely made up just to make your hypothesis look stronger.

For that to work, the monster would have had to know a human was in their midst.

OR, it could be a property of the Barrier that Gaster was able to discover.

Either Gaster needed motivation for time travel.. or Sans did.

Or NOBODY did, and there was no time travel involved.

Though I believe it was Gaster's motivation, and the great shattering was a failed attempt at just that.

Again, something about The Darkest Experiment caused a rift in the Font Brigade, that caused Sans and Papyrus to make the trip to Snowdin.. without Gaster.

Or Gaster's erasing made Sans and Papyrus' origins unknowable, so it looks like they just showed up in Snowdin. And Gaster wasn't there because he was shattered across time and space.

Something happened that was so bad that it tore apart friendships that had lasted for years, and literally transended time and space.

Why can't that just be Gaster's death?

We might not know the timeline events that led to Sans somehow appearing in the Ruins without his costume, and calling himself Frisk. But I've compiled a huge list of evidence in the script for why this must have been what happened.

And I've devised an alternative explanation for it, that actually gives us a coherent timeline.

Perhaps one day we'll see the rest of the story, and all these observations will make sense.

From what little we might know about Deltarune post-Chapter 1, there still doesn't seem to be evidence of going to Undertale's world. (Kris'll be heading off to a city, and Noelle will become important. We'll also go back to the Dark World, because Ralsei will learn a new spell.)

Of course, all that information might also be.. a troll. Toby Fox has done this before, after all..

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Now that I'm back at it, I should be able to finish Part 6 this week.