Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-32182236-20170602170443/@comment-27701762-20170602234219

TheHumanAmbassador wrote: Why would the monsters present THEMSELVES as terrifying? Are they TRYING to justify their own imprisonment? Remember, this was NOT from the humans! If anything, they'd present themselves as merely power, not a terrifying beast who looks evil.

Except, again, the tablets themselves describe the monster with a human soul as "a horrible beast with unfathomable power." Saying the monsters would only represent the power is, well, false by virtue of what the tablets actually say.

Why is it a HORRIBLE beast with unfathomable power? Why not just a monster with unfathomable power? The humans may have associated "monster" with terrible and horrifying, but the monsters themselves? Because the monsters, generally peaceful creatures, are themselves abhorrent of the destructive power that would be wrought by this creature? You rely on the assumption that the monsters have to portray themselves in the most positive light at all times, but there is no reason to assume that this is true.

And.. These mythological creatures we don't even know exist. They're only seen in myths, not serious scientific studies, such as the monsters' hypothesis on why the war started. Just like scientists today don't actually consider dragons to be real. Except that gets right to the point: the beasts aren't "seen" in myths, because by definition they can't be seen, since they don't exist. They are creatures with forms that are imagined, and that imagined form is captured through painting, sculpture, and so on. Your claim is that there is an illustration of what is presumed to be a monster with a human soul, therefore that monster actually existed and the illustration is an accurate rendering. The conclusion does not logically follow from the premise, since illustrations are not always records of things that are actually witnessed.

Speculating on what could happen when two souls combine would lead to something similar. Monster souls are weak on their own, why would the two combine into a beast able to destroy an entire village single-handedly? How would we have evidence that soul absoption is even a THING? And vague prophecies are just that-vague. The angel was Asriel Dreemur, yet he wasn't represented as a flying triangle like with the other monsters. We'd have no idea what was going on, just like the Delta Rune before Asriel broke the barrier.

How would the monsters know that something with the combined power of seven human souls would break the Barrier? There's no actual scientific study that can be done, since there is only one Barrier, and yet that speculation turns out to be true, based on some reasoned conjecture. What is so different about that conjecture from one about what might happen if a monster and human soul combined? Why is the latter a form of conjecture that needs to be proven prior to the war beginning to explain why the war happened?

But by the same token, presumably you want the "horrible beast" part to be an indication that there was a monster that absorbed a human soul, and because that monster caused all of these problems, the other monsters came to resent it. Which leaves open a gaping hole: why not just say there was a monster that took a human soul? It's a hole that exists no matter what, but the more negatively the monster is described and depicted, the more that oversight suggests that rather than an incredibly important historical event that precipitated a war was glossed over, that even just never happened, and the story played out precisely as it is actually described.