Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27907368-20160428221757/@comment-27701762-20160429032926

Wow. This is a lot of stuff that's really well-detailed. I have some quibbles, but I'm trying to go through to figure out which points are important for the theory, since I don't want to go through and nitpick stuff when it's not important for what you're trying to do.

So one of the first things that struck me was in the first section, where you lead off by saying the player is the one with the ability to SAVE. But I don't see how you're getting to this conclusion. Moreover, it seems like the central support for the player's role comes from this idea. The player has the most determination, because we're more physical than pixels? But this is introducing concepts outside for the game's universe to explain the game's rules. At the very least, there needs to be some justification for this conclusion within the game. Especially given that at each SAVE point the narration mentions something that Frisk does/observes, which then grants them determination. Often these are just things that are seen, and thus could potentially refer to what the player sees and fills us with determination, but other narrations - such as crinkling leaves in the Ruins - indicate that it has to be Frisk performing the action, or else it wouldn't make sense.

I feel like you may be making too much of Frisk's/Chara's independent actions within the game. You refer to it as a sort of "rebelling," which might not have a great deal of significance, but the basic idea is that Frisk/Chara is wrestling control away from us at particular points. While the character does perform some things independently of our input, I think it's better to think of those actions (except at times like the Genocide route, where Chara is taking charge) as part of a cutscene or to retain narrative flow, rather than significant actions in and of themselves about the relationship between Frisk, Chara, and the player.

I don't really buy into this "jumping" thing you're referring to, which I'm assuming is from the second section where you claim that Chara's essence jumps into Asriel before jumping back to us. But I'm not sure how important it is to the rest of what's going on. I'll address this later on in the post.

I'm rather confused by the last claim in Section 3, about Chara living on with Frisk, which feeds into my confusion about Section 4. My assumption is that you are referring here to a non-Post-Genocide Pacifist ending. But what indication is there that Chara lives on with Frisk in this ending? The warning about letting Frisk live their life has to do with not resetting the timeline, so it would seem that Chara's existence sort of stops at that point, and the choice is either to do nothing, or to start over. ['''Note: Looking back on this paragraph, I think this is a minor point. Please feel free to ignore.]'''

Section 4 as a whole confused me. I don't understand what you mean by "Flowey is talking to us in the first person." What appears to be going on here appears to be incredibly complex, but I haven't been able to follow any of it. I think I might have gotten some inkling of what you're getting at, but even then I'm not certain. So I don't feel like I can offer any counter-argument here because I'm not yet sure what I would be countering.

I wanted to weigh in as briefly as I can on the Asriel fight. Rather than trying to fight you point-by-point, I figured the best way to offer a counter-argument would be to offer a competing theory that explains the same pieces of information:

When "Someone else" choice pops up, we are taken to a video showing Asriel coming upon Chara and helping them. The choice is then switched to saving Asriel, but since the text leading up to this had us saving only one person ("There's still one last person taht needs to be saved"), to say that we are saving Chara and then Asriel gives us two people, not one. So the "someone else" is referring to Asriel. But how are we saving Asriel from Asriel? As you argue, the Asriel in the boss fight is very different from the true Asriel we come to know. Boss-fight Asriel can be seen as a corrupted form, something more like Flowey in the shape of Asriel's body (we don't need a soul-jumping explanation here to explain how Asriel is corrupted by Chara, making the explanation more parsimonious). But we can reach out to Asriel and remind him of who he truly his, hence how we are saving him.

As a final point, I wanted to raise a larger idea about the approach you're employing as a whole. I'm not really concerned with whether you have a response to this last part. In fact, this thread probably isn't the best place to discuss such an issue. But I think it's an important question to raise and keep in the back of our minds.

To what extent is Undertale a fully consistent and vastly deep game, to the degree that we can say that these incredibly complex explanations are the way to understand what is going on in the game? Why, for example, could Flowey's calling us "Chara" just be a mistake Toby made, since it suggests that we as player are Chara, while as we know from the end of the Genocide run Chara is a distinct entity from the player? Rather than Frisk and the player vying for control, why not just say that Toby just set up the scene so that Frisk does or says something to help move the game along, and that there is no real signifance to these moments? To get at the issue broadly, is it really a good idea to go into the process of theorizing about the rules of the universe and the story with the assumption that every tiny detail is significant and interconnected, and that Toby made no mistakes? The potential error here is that we are basically constructing theories out of nothing: we fixate upon a detail, then construct an elaborate explanation about why the detail is there and what it means, and then go searching for other details and interpret those details in a way that justifies our initial explanation.