Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20190820122909/@comment-26006155-20190919230513

Usually a "paradox" happens when one of our assumptions going into the problem is wrong.

Deltarune exists in a timeline where Asgore's monsters have successfully defeated the barrier, and reached the surface. 201X is in the past, it's 202X now, as reflected in the date in Ralsei's handbook.

And even if it seems like a mirror universe where everyone is flipped in some way (Alphys loves Kissie Cutie 2 better than 1, etc), these characters are clearly designed to relate to the ones in Undertale. This isn't a completely different world, it's a version of Undertale's world where something weird has happened.

Monster Kid and our protagonist have both grow a bit more. Meanwhile, Gerson Boom, who was alive before, is now dead. Time has progressed.

So Deltarune must be a sequel for these specific monsters to have reached the surface.

But at the same time, something's wrong with the timestream.

The clocks in school keep going haywire, even outside of the Dark World. And Toriel and other characters have memories of being on the surface years in the past, which isn't possible by anything we know.

And all traces of Undertale's magical anime supertechnology are gone. Mettaton no longer has a body. Alphys is a mundane school teacher, not a mad scientist. All technology is modern for the human world of the same time. No dimensional boxes, no nothing.

And even weirder, our decisions no longer have more than a feathertouch of an effect on the story, where it had so much impact before.

In Undertale the story was ours to decide. And Chara was the one who tried to possess us and take it over.

But in Deltarune, we're actually the invading soul that's trying to control the protagonist. The very first save reveals that this is Kris' story... until we try to save over it.

We can't change the story.. because this time it isn't our story. It's a story that happened in the past, that's already set in stone.

Which is why I think ghostly Alpha Gaster, with his godlike powers of adding the Six Human Souls to his own, is forcing Frisk to relieve Chara's story. And making the Undertale monsters re-enact the roles of humans that lived at that time, sort of like an episode of The Prisoner TV show that messes with your head.

Frisk, who remembers Sans, and the similarity of saving out of habit, has been placed on rails that lead to the very incident that caused Chara to become compassion-damaged in the first place.

Gaster could have done anything to Frisk, the earlier version of Sans who killed him. And out of this infinite world of torture.. he choose to have Frisk relive Chara's story.

Frisk is in deep trouble.