Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27907368-20160428221757/@comment-27701762-20160504184356

GetYourFix wrote: Again, Frisk is not the player. There is canon evidence for this at the end of TP. Again, Chara isn't contributing determination unless they are awoken. Nor have I denied these claims.

I'm not creating a vast philosophical explanation for Undertale - I'm recognizing that the game identifies the player as a being separate of Chara and Frisk. One of the precipitates of doing this is discussing DT v. dt. But the different versions of determination are not inherently tied to these distinctions. Before we can discuss their significance in relation to what the player provides versus what Frisk provides, we first need to prove your theory of what role each entity is playing.

Chara points to the player and says that it was their doing, that we pushed it all to the edge. They talk to us in the Abyss. You seem to be equating Frisk to player, which is against canon. So, we aren't Frisk or Chara. Therefore, we're something else. I've never suggested that Frisk and the player are only a single entity. But the very fact that, for instance, Chara talks to "us" in the abyss, and demands "our" soul, and the consequence is that the protagonist (i.e. Frisk) is corrupted poses a great deal of ambiguity for who Chara is really talking to.

Honestly, the dt DT idea makes the canon make sense. Why the human SOULs are in jars, why the DT machine produced two different types of effects, why Asgore ups and kills us time and again, why we don't gain re-fuse in the sans fight...

If you'd like to answer those questions while remaining true to canon, be my guest. If you'd like to sweep it under the rug as an oversight by Toby, then color me surprised. He's spent five years working on the code and had incredibly dedicated players go through it tens of times. He even comments that one tester in particular went through the game hundreds of times to ensure that the story was consistent.

Again, I have never denied the possibility of there being a difference between capitalized and non-capitalized determination. But what that significance is constitutes an entirely distinct discussion, as its bearing on the topic in question depends upon the proof or disproof of the theory you are providing about the relationship between the three entities.

But you are particular hung up on this issue. With due cause, because there is the particularly weird moment of the near side-by-side use of the two forms of determination. But as I noted before, there are, by my count, only six instances of specifically capitalized determination. Of those instances, two, fairly clearly refer to the ability to "keep on living," two could be reasonably interpreted to refer to this ability, one is ambiguous in whether they refer to one of the two effects of determination, and one refers to the "will to change fate." In order to get at the conclusion you are trying to reach, you have rejected the final instance, but by the same token of assuming that there is a great deal of care being devoted to every tiny detail, I may as well raise the question why Toby bothered to use the capitalized form at all here, rather than the non-capitalized version, which would then pose no problem. The fact that it needs to be explained away suggests some problem with some portion of the set of assumptions we are working with.

Ultimately, I have never claimed that Toby is careless, or that he didn't care about details. But there is still an important gap between caring about details and having a grand plan which is subtly revealed through these details and making sure that those details point the observant player toward that plan. That Toby pored so much time into the game does not in itself prove the latter, and while having extra eyes can help to catch errors and inconsistencies, those extra eyes need to know exactly what the plan is in order to make sure it all adds up, which is a premise we cannot rely on.