Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20160613103837/@comment-27701762-20160614192345

I still feel rather lost here.

The underlying idea that seems to carry this conclusion is that the flower that constitutes Flowey had some of Asriel's essence on it. Therefore, Flowey is still compromised of a monster soul, and since he absorbed Chara's soul, a human soul as well.

The major evidence is that Flowey exhibits some form of emotion, but this is built on the faulty presumption that being "soulless" means being unable to feel anything, which is never said. Flowey specifies the ability to love and feel compassion for others. Now this gets justified on the idea that if Flowey wasn't able to feel love and compassion, it was because he had Chara's soul inside of him. But this contradicts all of the explicit dialogue from the game that outright states that Flowey does not have a soul, including from Flowey himself.

The logic appears to be that since human souls persist, and Chara's soul is nowhere to be found, it must remain in Asriel's essence, giving Flowey an actual soul. But there is no reason for why this premise should be adopted. Given that we have only a single instance of an actual monster absorbing a human soul, and upon that monster's death nothing remains, the more likely conclusion to draw is that the human soul essentially takes on the property of the monster's soul, meaning that when the monster dies, the human souls within dissipate as well. In the other two instances we have Flowey, where in one case the souls rebel before he can be killed (and consequently disappear), while in the other they are released by Flowey in the form of Asriel, with an unknown conclusion.

Likewise, there is no evidence that the monster's dust from when they die is their soul. The only pieces of information we have on the subject suggest that the monster's soul disappears immediately upon death. Their dust simply carries their "essence," a sort of imprint of who they are. If Toby had meant for this "essence" to be the actual soul, he could easily have said that it allows the soul of the monster to live on. In turn, if this essence does carry the soul, then it should carry either just Asriel's, or both Asriel's and Chara's, meaning that Flowey would retain his ability to feel love and compassion, and leaving us without any explanation for why he describes himself continually as soulless.

So we lack a mechanism for how any of this actually works, and in turn any attempt to explain such a mechanism runs afoul of every piece of explicit evidence to the contrary.