So you're saying the game canon continues after we turn it off but only through our creative artistic representation?

Yeah. And the characters live on through our relationships with them. I guess you could say the "spirit" of the game lives on inside the player, hehe.

Your icon goes really well with "Death by Glamour" X'D Just Sayin'!

While you are free to have your own headcanon, the assertion that Asriel can be saved is false for a handful of reasons. The canon's story outside of the players existence is an existential hell. When you leave a true pacifist ending it is already made clear that Asriel becomes Flowey again. And without the player, Flowey is doomed to repeat his life indefinitely. When his life ends, the timeline is restarted at his last save, or at his reset. He explains that this is what drove him to the decision to become the monster he is. He explicitly states as both Flowey and Asriel that the player is the only thing that gives his life any meaning.

So in that outcome, we have the Undertale Timeline completely encapsulated by Flowey's life. Undertale is Floweys Story. However, with the player present, Flowey loses his control over SAVE. The timeline is now completely encapsulated by the players game time. There are 12 possible outcomes of this. A true pacifist ending, a corrupted pacifist ending, genocide ending, eight neutral endings, and one ending where Sans calls you a dirty hacker and to GTFO. In each of these endings, you either kill Flowey (and then leave, reverting him to his last save) or return the game control to him. With a single exception, being when Chara is awakened by you and destroys the timeline.

There is a potential alternative. But so far no players have solved that puzzle. Flowey has to be erased from the timeline. Our understanding of Gaster suggests that this is an imperfect solution. But even if it is doable, it may have unintended consequences, as Flowey has a convoluted connection to the souls of Asriel, Chara, and the Player, and there are a lot of unknowns related to the soul and to Gaster's fate.

Finally, while Determination is an important aspect in the game, it is not clear that it is directly tied with the SAVE feature. Asgore, is able to manipulate the Mercy feature, and displays limited reading of the SAVE file, (he keeps track of how many times he's killed you) but does not, to our knowledge, have Determination. Sans is also able to read the SAVE file, and reminds you often that he is watching for changes over a possibility of multiple SAVES but also appears to have no Determination. While Undyne does have some measurable Determination, but is oblivious to the timelines. So I would suggest that another explanation is required.

Apologizing in advance for the tl;dr >w<

I suppose my underlying point is to challenge the traditional assumption that a canon has to be confined within the boundaries of the game, and can't extend beyond the game to the player community. It's one thing to have a personal headcanon, it's something altogether different to have a community agreed-upon interpretation of the game. AUs like Dreemurr Reborn are tremendously popular within the Undertale fandom. A sizable portion of the community agrees collectively that this is emotionally meaningful. The only thing I'm trying to do is justify it logically, and get rid of the cognitive dissonance so that we can take the fanmade AUs at full force, something I suspect Undertale's canon has the heart to allow.

And ultimately, what is a canon? A canon is a set of statements agreed upon collectively by the community to be true about the game. Nothing in the essence of a canon *insists* that it be confined within the boundaries of the game itself. A canon is not a feature *of the game*, it's a feature *of the player community*. The game itself is just a sequence of bits ordered by game coding - there are no "characters" or "plot devices" literally in it at all. A canon requires flesh and blood interaction with the game, and it's among the player community interpreting the game that the game's canon, and its characters and plot devices, are formed. The canon is born in the player community, and persists among the player community. Not the game itself.

You say that Asriel reverts to Flowey and is doomed to this form eternally when the player leaves the game. This is predicated on the idea that the characters are confined within the game, because the *canon* is confined within the game, which I understand to be your position. But again, what forces us to accept as fact that a canon must be confined within its game? This is the underlying principle I'm challenging.

If we assume that the canon is strictly confined within the game, then there's a problem with the Gaster solution. We can't accept it, for the simple reason that the game itself doesn't give it to us as an option. At this point, with so many millions of people playing this game, watching playthroughs, hacking into game files, etc., the internet has most likely totalized everything that exists in the game, so it's pretty safe to say that we've siphoned out everything the game has to offer about Gaster. No such solution was ever found in the game as a playable route - it most likely doesn't exist.

Thus, taking the canon to be strictly confined within the game forces us to accept nihilism. Asriel is going to suffer hell for eternity - which he is among the very *last* in the game to deserve - and there's nothing we can do about it. For many of us, that's meaningless. That's nihilistic. So then we have to face the question of whether or not we have reason to care about the canon anymore, since there's no more meaning left in it.

There's alway the brute-force, Nietzschean option of just saying "well, you know what, fuck the canon, it's worthless and doesn't deserve to be followed." I've tried that. My problem with that is, it's kind of a pretentious asshole move, and in taking that route you start to isolate yourself from everybody else in the fandom, and you make yourself look like a dick.

That's why I wanted to go back to the canon and find a way to interpret it and make it meaningful again. That's what drove me to the idea of challenging the notion that the canon is strictly confined within the game. What if it isn't? What if it can extend beyond the game and into the player community? What if the game itself is only telling *part* of the canon, and not the entire canon, and that the rest of the canon is really in the hands of the player community? After all, the game itself gives the player the freedom to choose their own ending, why not extend this freedom to a freedom of interpretation as well? It would be perfectly rational.

Yeah, I actually initially made the same assumption that monsters don't possess determination. But when I looked back at the game lore, I realized that it was never actually explicitly said that monsters lack determination entirely. What was said, however, was that "human souls are stronger than monster souls," and that monsters have a maximum amount of determination they can take before they morph into amalgamates. What this suggests is that determination is not an "on/off" thing, but exists as a gradient. Every soul has some amount, more or less, of determination, but human souls tend to have much more than monster souls. This makes Undyne less of an anomaly, because it allows for the possibility that certain individual monsters can/do have higher levels of determination. And nothing prevents us from supposing that Asgore and Sans might have higher levels as well. (Though there is also the alternate theory that Sans is just using a time machine, which is why he doesn't actually see it as different SAVEs.)

There is a whole lot of evidence in the game that Determination is linked to the SAVE ability. Every time the player encounters a SAVE beacon, "Determination" is mentioned. Also, Flowey at the end of the Genocide Route says this:

And when I tried to load my save file...
It didn't work.
[Chara]... Your DETERMINATION!
Somehow, it's even greater than mine!

There is enough compelling evidence to say that Determination is at least the ability to revert death and to handle SAVES, and that everything Flowey is capable of doing is a result of harnessing Determination. If you go back and read the sections about Alphys' experiments and about Flowey in my file, you'll see even more evidence of that. I cite the evidence literally so that we know for a fact what's said in the game. If we want to challenge the idea that Determination is linked to these console powers, we have all that evidence against us.

And then, if you accept that, then, since Determination is a core element of the game's canon, the canon then has to include game mechanics within itself.

Also, don't forget, Flowey on the Genocide Route says this:

At least we're better than those sickos that stand around and WATCH it happen...
Those pathetic people that want to see it, but are too weak to do it themselves.
I bet someone like that's watching right now, aren't they...?

How could he know about Let's Plays? Unless we allow ourselves to include aspects of the player community into the game's canon, so that characters could know about them. In any case, it's undeniable that Asriel is interacting *directly* with the player community. So either (1) certain aspects of the player community outside the game are within the boundaries of the canon, or (2) Asriel is capable of being influenced by elements outside the canon other than the player, in which case, what prevents us from saying Asriel can be scooped out of the canon entirely anyway? But then we have a canon element outside of the canon, which is contradictory. As Sherlock Holmes says, once you eliminate the logically impossible, whatever remains, however far-fetched, must be the truth. Therefore, it must be the case that (1) is true.

Another problem with the nihilist conclusion is that meaningfulness is an integral part of the game. Tobyfox is quoted to have said here that he wanted to create a game where the player's interaction with the monsters could be, for once, meaningful in an emotional way. That's the whole reason why he wanted to give them individual personalities:

"I feel that it's important to make every monster feel like an individual. If you think about it basically all monsters in RPGs are the same ... They attack you, you heal, you attack them, they die. There's no meaning to that."

If the game itself leads us to a nihilistic, meaningless conclusion, i.e. that a cute, lovable character has to suffer an eternal hell, wouldn't that be missing the point of the game? Meaningfulness? Sure, we could argue that the pacifist ending's story was just badly written, but I find following the spirit of the game still leads to a meaningful conclusion that many of us can agree upon if we're willing to break certain traditional assumptions about how a canon works, and thus by the definition of canon, can be accepted within canon.

Undertale itself breaks a few traditional rules about how an RPG works. It would only be natural that its canon break a few traditional rules about how an RPG canon works.

And when we accept that, if we were to go back to the game itself and see Flowey, we would understand that the sprites and dialogue we see in the game are just rehashing what we've already seen before. The characters at this point are no longer in the game - the game itself is just rehashing meaningless shadows where they used to be, while the characters themselves live on outside of the game, in the player community, where the canon is located anyway. When we're going back and looking at Flowey, that's no longer Asriel. That's just the lifeless mark he left in the game, that the game is just going to keep retelling every time we reopen it since it's restricted to meaningless programming, while Asriel himself is in the AUs among the player community.

You don't have to take this interpretation if you don't want to, but I find it to be meaningful, and I've found some other UT fans agree with me, so maybe I'm onto something....? :3

The "WATCH it happen" comment could also be referring to W.D. Gaster, or Alphys who is watching via hidden cameras. But it has a lovely double meaning like a lot of things Toby Fox put in the game.

I remember the last big paper I wrote, a ten page paper on gender bias and nonconformity (school assignment). That paper pales in comparison to the 52 page behemoth that you wrote apparently for fun? (I'm not sure what your motives were) Still I look forward to reading the whole thing some time.

Most of that 50-someodd pages was just me braindumping the canon just so I know what it is. :3c

I know myself to be a fast writer, haha.

Honestly, that's what most scholarly reports are, 90% dump 10% conjecture

Oh good, I'm not alone, hehe
That makes me feel better >w>

I only had time to read the "tl;dr" version, but I strongly agree with your assessment.

Thank you so much

>w<

Thanks for the fave though

Yeah, there's so many different ways it could be said. Some easier than others, and others more artistic than some..... It can be hard to settle on a "best" way.

And I'm kind of bad at writing concise with this kind of thing >w< that's a real skill.

That's pretty deep stuff.
How about we all just use our determination to pester Toby Fox until he gives us a sequel where Asriel gets to join in on the happy ending too?

I'd be down :3

The AUs do a pretty good job of it themselves though :3

I'd love to be a backer of another game too, but I think after the success of the first, I think the minimum donation to get your name in the final credits is going to go up.

I think I remember Toby Fox said he wanted Undertale to just be a one-off.
He did mention something about maybe doing a DLC with some side stuff if I remember correctly. That could be our foot in the door ;3

Eh, really it's probably better that way. Occasionally you get a sequel of something that's as good or better the the first, but not too often. It's not pleasant to see characters we love with an unhappy ending, but it does give a higher quality to the story when not every single character has a fairy tale ending too. That's one of the things that has been said about Pixar's Inside Out, and I have to agree with the notion. It's not always best for the audience or play to get just desserts. Also, I wonder if Asriel would be quite so dear to us if he didn't end up like he did.

Aside from all that babbling of mine, it's easy to see why the game is so great. Just because it makes you think about so many deep and important things that most games don't.

Yeah in all seriousness, I think I'd agree with you that at the end of the day the game itself really doesn't need any changing, it is fine the way it is. If Toby Fox were pressured to continue much further with it it might start to feel half-assed. It kind of goes back to what I've said before, that the future of Undertale after the game lies in the fandom activity rather than in any more "official" releases.

There certainly is an artistic value to lack of resolution in a story. It gives it realism, plausibility, and a wider and more interesting emotional palette. But it can be tricky to find the right balance between realism and gratification in art - on one extreme too much gratification gets boring, formulaic, and predictable, and starves us intellectually, but on the other too much realism can detract from the work's artistic value and starve us emotionally.

In this case the lack of resolution surrounding Asriel within the game in itself could be taken as just a little heavy-handed, particularly for a game that advertises itself on lighthearted humor. Asriel's plotline synced up quite beautifully with what I would have considered to be my own genuine choices within the game, and I think that's much of what made him such an intimate character. At least, up until the the last conversation with him in the Ruins. The fact that his fate as Flowey was established as this hard-coded ultimatum that we didn't have any choice about felt like the game was beginning to detach itself from me, and it felt counterintuitive to the positive spirit not just of Asriel's plotline, but also of the whole rest of the game.

The whole game seems to ride on the spirit that we can take an issue, think it through, and come up with our own better solutions (viz. sparing) rather than just choosing from the superficial traditional choices given to us (viz. kill or be killed). It's a very humanist kind of spirit, very empowering, and offers a very refreshing challenge to the whole "face the painful truth and take it or leave it" attitude we tend to have toward real world issues. To suddenly take that away with Asriel seems to be problematic not only emotionally, but logically too. And the fact that he's also our supposedly "intimate" character just serves to maximize the degree of severity of this logical problem, and put that logical rift front and center.

We could take that as just bad story writing. Or, and I find this to be very interesting, we could take it as a new kind of puzzle. Undertale prides itself on being a puzzle game that incorporates within itself the player's own emotional experiences. Quite naturally to the spirit of the game we can approach Asriel's in-game fate as introducing a kind of "final" puzzle, constructed entirely out of emotions. Undertale's ultimate Pacifist challenge, if you will.

Monsters in Undertale have a talent for creating puzzles after all. This could just have been Asriel's puzzle. I like to think some of the fan artists online have solved it by creating their AUs. :3
And I'd like to think that what I'd written here could serve as a kind of "walkthrough" for anyone else who might really, really, desperately want to solve it. <3

If Toby Fox were to come out with new material, it would probably ruin this whole "Asriel's puzzle" interpretation of the canon. So I guess in that way it is nice to have an "open and shut" franchise like this for once as opposed to "FNAF2 FNAF3 FNAF4 etc. etc." continuing to overwrite the canon at the expense of fandom freedom.

Yeah, there's certainly an element of believability added by things not being perfect.

My mind has been completely blown... And I love it! XD

*Act*
Check* <3 Compliment*
Flirt*
[You tell Acayl they did an Excellent job! 10/10]

* Acayl is unsure how to handle this information,
* but he is flattered anyway.

owo <3

There's one real problem. Monster souls don't persist past death. Asriel's soul was well and truly shattered. Your assertion that "essence" contains the consciousness of the monster is false - it contains only part of it. Look at the circumstances we are shown in game: Asriel's essence cannot provide Flowey with emotions. Asriel's own identity can't be reforged without a power equivalent to 7 human souls - 6 actual human souls, plus ALL the souls of the monsters! Even then, Asriel can't go with you in the end - because he wants to give all the monster souls back to their owners. And as much of a fan I am in my heart of Dreemurr Reborn, who is doing a wonderful job with an AU "Asriel saved forever" fanon, that work still fails to explain/deal with the other six souls involved.

Timeline manipulation with the power of seven souls could indeed break the normal save/load rules. If you go back in time and save Asriel at the moment of his original death, so that his soul is all there, you have two problems:

- Chara's soul is there too. Chara hates humanity. According to Asriel, they hated humanity before ever falling into the underground. I don't know that this is impossible to resolve, but it's a problem.

- Monsters cannot handle DETERMINATION on their own. Even a Boss Monster would not be able to withstand human levels of the stuff without at least one human soul.

Ultimately, this isn't impossible to resolve - it's just not an option presented in game, to wield the power of all seven human souls to remake Asriel and put Chara to rest.

Hm, nice challenge.

First, to use Flowey as a counterexample against the statement that "essence" contains the consciousness of the monster makes an assumption I don't make - that consciousness includes within itself the emotional ability of the monster as well. That wasn't what I was trying to say. In this use of words "consciousness" is meant to refer to only that part of Asriel's psyche that remained in Flowey, and would exclude the parts of him that were lost in the destruction of his soul. So "consciousness" in this sense is not the whole monster anyway. But that's just a matter of words.

As for the 7 souls thing, what the game had stated was that the power equivalent to 7 human souls was the requirement for shattering the barrier, not for recovering Asriel's original form. Those two conditions aren't the same.

Here's what Flowey actually said:

And now, with their souls and the humans' together...
I will achieve my REAL FORM.

Nowhere does it say that he *needs* all of that soul power to come back as Asriel. All it does say is that, now that he does have all of that soul power, he could make the change. Additionally, it could also be the case that Asriel at this point in the story is suffering a kind of power-hunger, to the point that he's calling his "real form" his power-boosted God of Hyperdeath form rather than his normal Asriel form.

After you defeat Asriel, and he talks to you, he says this:

However, with everyone's souls inside me...
I not only have my own compassion back...
But I can feel every other monster's as well.
They all care about each other so much.
And... they care about you too, Frisk.

The game seems to imply that, with respect to recovering Asriel's original form, the power of 7 human souls was actually a gross overkill. Not only did it revive Asriel, but it went even further: it gave him super-Asriel (if you will) powers. Asriel himself called this even higher state of being God of Hyperdeath.

Admittedly, he does say this:

Without the power of everyone's souls...
I can't keep maintaining this form.

But this could very easily just be a matter of loose language. For sake of simplicity, Asriel's dividing the situation into two possibilities: either have everyone's souls, or not have anyone's. All or nothing. He doesn't consider the middle ground, because even to hold onto a single soul would be to deny it from whatever individual monster/human he'd be taking that soul away from, and he doesn't want to do that.

The implication here is that the bare minimum for simply recovering Asriel's form is actually pretty meager. If you think about it, each living monster has only one monster soul. So a single monster's soul is perfectly sufficient for maintaining the natural life of a monster. With this in mind, since Asriel's soul is a monster's soul, it's really not all that much soul power required to keep him fully alive. Even the power of a single human soul (like, for example, the player's) is already way more than enough.

You explicitly stated in your document that essence contains the monster's consciousness.

Conclusion

Essence carries the consciousness of the individual, the soul carries the individual’s ability to feel and express compassion, and determination is a power of the soul that allows the individual to resist death.

You can't say you didn't say this. I just copy and pasted it from the document you uploaded here. You also can't say "nowhere does it say he needs all of that soul power" and then later acknowledge that he says EXACTLY THAT after you defeat him. A must equal A; and if A is not equal to B, then B must not be equal to A. You are not arguing logically. You are redefining facts each different paragraph to support the conclusion you want. You argue for loose language interpretation - we can't do that. If we do that, we might as well write our own story. If the question is to logically support what can and can't be done in the canon established by the game, the specific language the game uses is literally all we have to go on.

Unless you want to allow creator intent, which you clearly do not, since Toby Fox publicly tweeted "This is the happiest ending." in reference to the uncorrupted pacifist ending.

If you want to write your own vision of the world in which saving Asriel is possible, that is GOOD. Not just fine, but a great literary tradition. But if you want to make logical arguments about the structure of what's already presented in the existing work of fiction, you have to take the work on its own terms. You can never assume the work is not saying what it means.

Hm, ok. Perhaps I should be more careful trying to understand your critique. If nothing else, I'd like to try to boil our disagreement down to as most basic as we can get. This could be a neat learning experience.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something about the critique's overall structure, it is composed of two different points of disagreement, which below I'll call [A] and [B]. [A] appears to me to be simply a misunderstanding of the meaning of words, perhaps because my own poor choice of words in the document. But [B] appears to be the main point of the critique.

(If I misconstrue anything here, please tell me. Make sure I correct any strawmanning I accidentally commit.)

[A]

My claim: The statement "Essence carries the consciousness of the individual" is true.
Your counterclaim: The statement "Essence carries the consciousness of the individual" is false.
Your proof against my claim:

Put semi-formally:
1. Essence carries the consciousness of the individual. (assumption to be refuted by reductio ad absurdum)
2. For all x, if x has its essence, then x has consciousness. (rewording of 1 as a universal conditional)
3. If Asriel as Flowey has his essence, then Asriel as Flowey has consciousness. (instantiation of 2, substituting "Asriel as Flowey" into x)
4. For all x, if x has consciousness, then x has full emotional power. (premise)
5. If Asriel as Flowey has consciousness, then Asriel as Flowey has full emotional power. (instantiation of 4, substituting "Asriel as Flowey" into x)
6. Asriel as Flowey has his essence. (premise)
7. Asriel as Flowey has consciousness. (modus ponens of 6 into 3)
8. Asriel as Flowey has full emotional power. (modus ponens of 7 into 5)
9. Asriel as Flowey does not have full emotional power. (premise)
10. Therefore, essence does not carry the consciousness of the individual. (reductio ad absurdum using 8 and 9 to refute 1)

My defense against your proof:
Statement #4 is a false premise. Consciousness does not include the full emotional power of the individual. Consciousness (at least, what I tried to mean by that term) is something less than that.

(Perhaps in the document I should have picked a better word instead of "consciousness"?)

[B]

Asriel states:
Without the power of everyone's souls...
I can't keep maintaining this form.

My claim: Asriel means, "I need at least one of these souls to keep maintaining this form."
Your counterclaim: Asriel means, "I need every single one of these souls to keep maintaining this form, not one less."

Your proof of the counterclaim:
In order to get the canon exactly right, we have to take the literal meanings of the statements that appear in the game whenever they are providing canon information.
The literal meaning of Asriel's statement is that he needs everyone's souls in order to be revived, not one less.
Therefore, this must be the correct interpretation.

My points of defense:

1.

First, a canon can't just be the sentences by themselves. Otherwise, the definition of "canon" would be too strict: we wouldn't be able to allow any paraphrasing of the exact sentences presented in the game to be canon. Therefore, we have to allow for the *meanings* of sentences to be included in the canon. In order to arrive at these meanings, however, we have to parse each sentence and interpret the semantic function of each of the different parts.

This is not a matter of "A=A." The two A's are actually very much unequal - the first is a sequence of meaningless cyphers on a computer screen, and the second is a complete meaningful thought in the brain. There is an act of transference here from one entity to another. If you want to use a mathematical model to describe the logical structure of semantics, let's do it right. :) Consider a relation R between the universe A of written sentences and the universe B of complete thoughts in the mind. R is not an equivalence relation, because A and B are two very different sets. Thus, equality is an inappropriate model here: A!=B. R is also not a function - there exists at least one a in A that has more than one b in B for which (a,b) is in R. In other words, some written sentences are ambiguous in their translation to mental thoughts, and thus have multiple possible meanings.

A (declarative) sentence has two mandatory parts: a *subject* and a *predicate*. It can also have any number of optional *modifiers* that can be attached to the subject, the predicate, or to other modifiers.
Each part of the sentence can perform one of two semantic tasks:
1. To refer to an idea that has already been given to us by previous information.
2. To introduce new, significant information.

There are some rules of semantics that tell us when a part of a sentence is performing the one function or the other. For example:
* When the subject is definite (e.g. preceded by "the," a determiner like "this" or "that," or is a proper noun), then the function is to serve as a referent, and when the subject is indefinite (e.g. preceded by "a," "an," or "some"), then the function is to introduce new information.
* The above rule also applies to any modifier that is a noun or a pronoun, such as direct and indirect objects.
* The predicate always serves the function of introducing new information.

With modifiers, however, the rules are much trickier, and they don't cover every single possible case. As a result, there are often some ambiguities as to how this or that modifier of a sentence ought to be interpreted.

Additionally, when a part of a sentence is being used as a referent, we understand intuitively that the referent is only *approximating* the real meaning, and the real meaning is usually understood by context. Though sometimes the context isn't good enough, and we have ambiguity.

It seems to me to be a little unfair semantically to insist that your interpretation is the *only* literal interpretation. In the noun phrase "the power of everyone's souls," what is the semantic function of the prepositional modifier, "of everyone's souls"? Is it to convey new information, or is it to serve as a referent to an idea we are already familiar with from previous information? Why, strictly in terms of semantics, should literalism have a bias toward one or the other interpretation of the phrase?

If the prepositional modifier "of everyone's souls" is meant to serve as genuine information, then the choice of verbage becomes important. There is emphasis on the choice of the word "everyone's," and thus we have your interpretation of the sentence.
If the prepositional modifier "of everyone's souls" is meant to serve as a referent, then the choice of verbage is merely to imitate an idea that's already in our heads. The word "everyone" had showed up five times between finishing the fight sequence with Asriel and this sentence, not including this sentence. And the phrase "everyone's souls" had already been used once:

However, with everyone's souls inside me...
I not only have my own compassion back...
But I can feel every other monster's as well.

However, the concept of partitioning the idea of "everyone's souls" into "one of the souls" in the context of Asriel's revival had not been introduced yet in Asriel's monologue. In order to specify it, we would have to introduce new information. But that's more burdensome in reading than simply making a referent to an idea that's already been in use before. It's much easier on the reader simply to approximate using a referent to an idea that has already been stated.

Compare the statement "without the power of everyone's souls" to "without the power of one of these souls." They have the same number of syllables. However, the second still feels more cumbersome than the first because it's trying to introduce new information, while the first sentence is simply riding on a referent to old information that had already been presented to us, and thus is easier and "lighter" to read.

For this reason, interpreting "everyone's souls" as an all-or-nothing rather than insisting that it mean "everyone's souls and not one less" is a perfectly natural and viable way to interpret the sentence. It's not some foreign or arbitrary twisting of the sentence any more than your interpretation is.

Here's a simpler example of the semantic problem I made up on my own:

Toriel: "Let's get all the snails."
Asgore: "Ok."
Toriel: "Now I have all the snails."
Asgore: "Great!"
Toriel: "Oh no, I lost all the snails!"
Asgore: "Can you make snail pie?"
Toriel: "No."
Asgore: "Why not?"
Toriel: "Without all the snails, I cannot make snail pie."

In the last sentence, the phrase "all the snails" could very easily simply serve as a referent. Does Toriel necessarily mean that she needs *every single one* of the snails in order to make snail pie? Or is she just repeating the phrase "all the snails" simply because that's been said so many times? It's still meaningful to interpret this conversation with the possibility in mind that Toriel could make snail pie with only *some* of the snails. The idea of considering only *some* of the snails in the context of Toriel being able to make snail pie was simply never introduced in the conversation. But the fact remains that, technically, she only needed *some* of the snails. She didn't lie to Asgore, she's just speaking within the limited context of the conversation.

I'll admit that having said "Asriel never said he needed all the souls" was a bad move on my part in my last comment. I'll admit I was wrong there. There is a part that could be interpreted as saying that Asriel needs all the souls. But it's not the only way to interpret the sentence, it's not the only "straightforward" way to interpret the sentence, and it's not the "absolute" way to interpret the sentence. To insist on that interpretation *is* an arbitrary choice.

2.

But, as you said, you're concerned about introducing ambiguity into the canon, because you're afraid it will destroy the canon. If we're starting it, where does it stop? We might as well write our own story. This is understandable.

But we already do that. We already write our own contrasting versions of Undertale, simply because we have differing experiences, opinions, and interpretations of the game. Once again, this comes from the fact that much of the points of the canon are *ambiguous* - there is a certain freedom of interpretation. If you go back to my document, there are several key canon questions I pose that I never explicitly answer. Instead, I explore possible theories. Which theory is correct? That depends on who you ask.

Throughout the document, I make a point of frequently using the language of "the most likely case seems to be," rather than simply stating in absolute language. This is because most of the logical leaps required to make meaningful interpretations of the canon are *not* deductively airtight. They make assumptions. And those assumptions can very easily be challenged. The absolute structure of the canon is really much weaker than we tend to assume, and this is true of the canons of the good majority of the franchises out there.

This is especially the case when we consider the question of which parts of the canon are *important*, and which *aren't*? How important are the skeletons? Are they major characters, or minor characters? Is Sans equal in importance to Toriel, or is Toriel more important a character than Sans? Again, different people are going to answer that question differently, depending on what personal background they bring to their own experiences of the game. The only possible way to speak of a single, monolithic, absolute canon is to restrict it all the way down to the text verbatum, word for word, *without any attempt at parsing meanings*. But then we have to exclude even the paraphrasing of sentences, since that's how far the ambiguity goes (case in point, Asriel's sentence). That's too much. That literally renders the canon meaningless.

3.

You are right in the fact that this document isn't an absolute logical construction from the information presented in the game. There are some arbitrary choices being made, such as interpreting Asriel's sentence the "referent" way, and they are spearheaded by a specific desire and agenda. But allowing for multiple choices is not totally nihilistic - it doesn't mean that the whole idea of a canon breaks down. It doesn't mean that we lose all communicability with respect to the game. There is still a meaningfulness to it on account of the fact that it's not *my* desire alone, but one shared by a multiple collective. A significant portion of the Undertale fandom reacts in this way to Asriel's situation, and thus has this desire. A significant portion of the fandom wants Asriel saved, or at least alive in his normal form in some way. The point of the document is to speak to *that* collective portion of the fandom, and thus it takes that goal as a common assumption. In other words, there are definite patterns of emotional reactions to the game that can be identified, and within which we can still meaningfully talk about the game.

Because of that, I tried to be very careful not to self-insert anything in the document particular to me as an individual. Nowhere is my own fursona in the document other than the title page. Nowhere am I inserting some kind of unique mark particular to me. Other than the introduction and in quotes from the game, I never use the first person singular.

This document is meant to offer an answer to a very common sentiment reacting to the events of the game. And in response, I've had several people agree to me and tell me that they love this interpretation, and that they're willing to adopt it. It was written with the goal in mind to empower those of us who fall into this sentiment, and it seems to me that for the most part it has succeeded in doing so. I find getting these responses from others to be very spiritually fulfilling to me, and I'm very glad I wrote and submitted this document.

That was the point of saying this passage in the introduction:

I won't insist on my own interpretation as being the only correct way to interpret the game. My reason for offering them is merely to provide an emotional resting place where we can settle. I consider my conclusions to be justified by the emotional fulfillment that follows after, rather than any airtight logic built up before. The emotional justification, I think, will be sufficient as a grounds for mutual agreement. Those of us who want Asriel saved, I think, will be willing to agree to them.

4.

I'm also trying to be very careful not to get in the way of people who don't have this particular sentimental reaction, and who don't care to follow this interpretation. I was very deliberate about positing the overall goal of the document in *existential* language:

Is there an interpretation of the canon in which Asriel's true form is salvageable in the post-Pacifist ending?

as opposed to this:

Does the canon insist that Asriel's true form is salvageable in the post-Pacifist ending?

Like I said before, it accepts the fact that canons are not absolute systems of clockwork precision, and that there are holes, and ambiguities, and multiple conflicting interpretations, some more creative than others.

I never mean to say that the canon *insists* on this specific interpretation, but only that the canon *allows* for this interpretation for those of us who do fall into this sentimental reaction. I try to keep a space for the traditional interpretation to stay as it is, and simply offer an alternative for those of us who find it disenchanting and going against what we take to be the spirit of the game.

Reconciliation:

This could all simply boil down to a disagreement on what a "canon" means. I tried to delineate what Undertale's canon was in my own document, but perhaps you arrive with a different meaning of the word "canon" in mind? Perhaps you really mean just the words by themselves, and not any kind of attempt at interpretation?

For sake of being transparent, my reason for fighting against the normal idea of a "canon" here is because I find it a little bit irritating when people go to an AU or a fanfic they enjoy, and they start to go into this self-torment over the fact that this AU or that fanfic is "not canon." "If only this was canon," etc. etc. That whole cognitive dissonance. I find it to be unnecessary self-torment. I find it to be unnecessary self-enslavement. I find this kind of abstract, apathetic, totalitarian "godhead" canon to be totally meaningless, and sometimes even destructive. Why is something like that worth being put on a higher pedestal than a personal interpretation that you actually find *fully* emotionally fulfilling? It seems so backwards to me.

There's two ways I could fight that. Either try to say that the canon itself is worthless and that we ought to value our personal interpretations more than the canon, or take advantage of the fact that canons are logically weak structures and try to bring the canon around to an interpretation that's meaningful and fulfilling. The second choice seemed to me to be the less "asshole-ish" of the two. But if it does fall flat logically in the end, I suppose I could just defer to the first way, and salvage Asriel that way. That would work too, I guess...

Though I am curious, what would be an emotionally realistic basis for counterarguing against this? What would be emotionally fulfilling about insisting that Asriel suffer an eternal torment? I'm much more interested in going transparent, reaching a compromise, and learning about each other's values than I am in, you know, the usual drama. :3

The semantic point about what you mean by consciousness is not one I'm interested in discussing further, I'm satisfied that even though I disagree with your interpretation of it, you at least admitted you made that claim. It annoyed me when you tried to back off it as though you'd never made it, that's not fair play.

The semantic point about Asriel's meaning, I can't agree with you. I did, though, take the wrong approach to explaining myself. I'm not trying to say "Asriel's words are the only thing we can consider," nor as you claimed with reducto-ad-absurdum that "snail pie can't be made without literally every snail in the recipe." (SOUL pie, snail pie, whatever) I'm trying to say, "Asriel unequivocally knows what he can and can't do here." Asriel contained the sum knowledge and feelings of all monsters, and had the powers of a literal god (of hyperdeath). If it were possible to maintain his form somehow, he would have known it. Even if we assume he only needs ONE monster SOUL, to combine with Frisk, to restore the form he had when he first went to the surface - it would take the death of another monster for his sake. Why? Because for all that his emotions were at least temporarily restored, nothing tells us that his shattered SOUL could ever be recreated. In fact, we're told other places that many other best efforts at it have failed. In that vein, I could imagine a timeline in which ASGORE gives up his life for the sake of his son.

As far as the emotional basis for it, that I can answer in both Asriel's words and my own: "you can't regret the hard decisions forever." This game contains a lot of life lessons, and this is one of them. IRL, you can't save everyone. EMTs have to deal with this, for example, when they come to a patient who has a Do Not Resuscitate order in place - or one who has trauma so severe that, while they are technically alive when help arrives, the help can't actually do anything but watch them die (massive brain trauma, for example). Death is one of the constants in every human life. You and I will both die one day, as will everyone we love. Asriel said, "Don't kill, and don't be killed, that is the best you can hope for." In that, he was echoing the words of the Teacher from Ecclesiastes (probably Solomon), who wrote in what we call the 9th chapter: "3 This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of men, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead. 4 Anyone who is among the living has hope--even a live dog is better off than a dead lion! 5 For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even the memory of them is forgotten."

There is a real world virtue in letting Asriel die, therefore. Remember - the game is structured to reach outside itself, and tells you that YOU are the terrifying power that can keep resetting the timeline. If that is taken into consideration, think on this: if you get an untainted pacifist ending, and then don't open the game again, the ending doesn't show you Flowey suffering. That reality is created by our act of observation. To let Asriel and Flowey rest forever, the game gives us an option: to not open the game, and let that ending stand.

Final point before closing: fanon and AU fanfic and the like are GOOD things. I think the authors of such works should bravely and boldly make them, and should acknowledge where they diverge from the original canon. Take as example my favorite such work: A Dreamer Reborn. Can't find the specific post right now, but the author acknowledged that the story isn't strictly possible in the original canon. And that's okay, and even good. Fan works shouldn't try to enslave themselves to canon - they should create something using the original canon as ingredients and leavened with things from their own experiences and inspirations. Neither should they be enslaved to the strict construction, nor should they feel the need to justify their fan works based on a particular construction of the canon. Instead, they should depart from the canon where they need to, leaving road signs for those who would follow them on this journey. Discussing what is and isn't canon isn't about validating or invalidating fanfic; it's about figuring out where the original work ends and where the new content begins.

Apologies for that. ;w;

First of all, let me just say that I could have made it "soul pie" if I had considered Mettaton xD I thought the snail thing would have been cute though.

I agree with you that we can for the most part do away with the idea of "re-creating" Asriel's soul. For sake of this debate, we can both consider that an impossibility.

As for the fact that Asriel never explicitly considers the case of taking *one* monster soul? I believe what I had interpreted from this is that Asriel refuses to do so not necessarily only because of a knowledge that it's *impossible*. There is also the possibility that he refused to bring it up because, with his compassion back, he considered it to be *wrong*.

In his unsoulled form, he was fine with being greedy before, but when he found his compassion back, he wouldn't allow himself to steal from any one of the monsters. Every one of the monsters has a definite will to keep living, and in every single case it would be wrong to take that one soul. If he were to introduce the idea of "what about *one* soul?" on his own, it would seem out of character for his "recovered" self. He doesn't allow himself even to make that assumption about Frisk (which was the only character whose soul he didn't absorb - disregarding Chara), because he knows that it's not his place to do so. He considers that to be outside of his right. He not only concludes, but *wants* everyone to keep on living, including Frisk.

What Dreemer Reborn does, quite creatively, is pit that attitude against what could have been Frisk's desires. As noble as Asriel was trying to be in insisting that everyone live on without him, what if Frisk could never have been happy that way? What if, even though everything else was handed to him in that ending, Asriel was the single most meaningful character to him, and having been denied the possibility to save him in particular was the cruelest turn of events, to the point of robbing their entire life of meaning?

More to the point, if we allow Frisk to stand in for the player, what if the player could never have been happy that way as far as their experience of Undertale goes? Asriel doesn't allow himself to consider taking the player's soul as a choice because he wants the player to continue on in their life. But what if the player is the kind of player that reacts to these events in such a way that Asriel's decision is, in an ethical sense, really backfiring on him?

Asriel wanted Frisk (or, perhaps in some interpretation, the player) to keep on living in natural life, but suppose the player wanted the same of Asriel? Who's in the right, ethically speaking? I would imagine it all depends on the reaction of the player to the game, which once again brings us back to the game's overarching theme of player choice, quite within the spirit of the game. The variable of the player has a dramatic influence on the ethics here.

The passage from Ecclesiates is a very nice touch, and I think it does highlight a religious sense of fulfillment in accepting the fate of Asriel presented in the game. I think I remember someone else here in the comments, or perhaps in the older version of this submission, mentioned something about whether Asriel would have been as valuable or as beloved a character if he hadn't been the victim of tragedy. In a way, it's a sense in which Undertale rediscovers the ancient art of the classical tragedy.

I'm reminded of a passage of Nietzsche I found recently, in regard to his distaste of the deus ex machina:

At the end of the old tragedies there was a sense of metaphysical conciliation without which it is impossible to imagine our taking delight in tragedy; perhaps the conciliatory tones from another world echo most purely in Oedipus at Colonus. Now, once tragedy had lost the genius of music, tragedy in the strictest sense was dead: for where was that metaphysical consolation now to be found? Hence an earthly resolution for tragic dissonance was sought; the hero, having been adequately tormented by fate, won his well-earned reward in a stately marriage and tokens of divine honour. The hero had become a gladiator, granted freedom once he had been satisfactorily flayed and scarred. Metaphysical consolation had been ousted by the deus ex machina.

(fun fact: "tragedy" comes from the Greek "tragodia," which means "goat song" :33333)

To really appreciate it, however, I think it requires a certain specific life outlook, and that outlook isn't for everyone. The better portion of Nietzsche's philosophy is a philosophy of art, and is dependent on his claim that certain things, like "metaphysical consolation," are in fact beautiful. But the most common and the most successful criticisms of Nietzsche attack him by saying that the things he calls beautiful are, to many people, tasteless. Nietzsche's philosophy is limited in a social sense to the individuals in his own little clique, who like the same things he does.

Some people, myself included, find emotional music to be enrapturing. Other people stay away from that kind of music because it takes them places they don't like. To these other people, emotional music is painful to them in an unartistic sense. It's simply unpleasant, and for them it has no place in the art world.

And I think this is the real question. There certainly are very important morals to be taken from the traditional interpretation of the game's canon. But are they *beautiful*? Are they fulfilling in an internal, emotional sense? Or are they simply painful to the point of being unartistic, and become merely an eyesore in the artistic world of indie gaming? Different people will take different sides on this question. Some people love it, and find that it gives Undertale a lot of artistic merit. Other people would prefer to be taught morals like that in something like a sterile class lecture rather than in the world of art, and would prefer their experiences of art to be something less painful, since they already have to put up with that kind of shit in the real world.

And for those people who find the tragic messages unartistic, then what? Well, that's the AUs.

And yes, I don't at all mean to say they're inherently "bad" in any way. They *are* good. My only issue is, supposing you're the kind of person who finds this or that rule of the "official canon" tasteless and unartistic, and an AU that does something else more fulfilling, why regard the "official canon" as superior to the AU? Why bother with the cognitive dissonance? Why give the canon a whip?

This document is not an attempt to "correct" the AUs themselves by bridging them to the rules of the canon. I agree with you, the AUs are fine the way they are. They don't need to be tampered with. They don't need to be subordinated to the canon rules for their own sake. The document is not directed to the makers of AUs. It's directed to the fans of AUs. In particular, those who find the AUs more beautiful than the canon and yet still suffer from the notion that the canon is somehow artistically "superior" to the AUs, for no other reason than because, quite blankly, "that's the rule." My understanding is that people like that don't take too kindly with the idea of abandoning the rules and having total anarchy. Instead, why not simply reconcile the rules with the area of the franchise they find beautiful, and at the same time empower them to become artists themselves?

The last sentence interests me. It's quite a different sense of "canon" than I've been aware of. If I understand correctly what you mean by "original work" and "new content," this defines canon with respect to the boundaries of intellectual property, which would connect it directly to Toby Fox and the development team with respect to the original game, and to fan artists like Fatz Geronimo (Dreemurr Reborn) with respect to the AUs.

If we're defining canon with respect to "who did what," then sure, what is and isn't canon would not be debatable. What would be debatable, then, would be the question of "why should we place the material coming from Toby Fox on a higher pedestal than the material of Fatz Geronimo across the board?" This is not at all to assume that the AU is "bad" in any way, but simply that attitude of, "I love this, I only wish it was canon" that some people do in fact run around with.

Other than that, if the difference between "original content" and "new material" is simply that - "original" vs. "new" - what about features such as official DLCs, bug patches, sequel/prequel/spinoff games, and so forth?

My own understanding of "canon" has been that it was something standalone and abstract. I took it from the notion of canon as derived from the sense of the Biblical canon, which predates the modern capitalist idea of "intellectual property," and is more connected to the sense of an absolute, standalone religious law. The canon, then, is the "official standard by which we define the franchise," and is opposed to the "unofficial." In the history of Christianity, the "Canon Bible" was the set of books accepted by the Church, and was distinguished from the "Apocrypha," which was rejected by the Church. Modern literary canons, while perhaps lacking an officiating body like the Church, still mimic the religious origin of the "canon" by having an "official standard" accepted by a collective - a kind of echo of the Church Law. Suppose a significant number of followers find the original Canon lacking, and a certain apocryphal book to be "the necessary missing piece"? Why not simply branch off into a sect with an alternative official standard, in which that apocryphal book is added into the sect Canon? Why be monolithic, especially since in this case we're talking about a game that sells itself on the premise that different people can play it different ways and get vastly different experiences out of different routes? Why not have a canon that behaves the same way the game itself does, giving the player multiple possible routes for them to choose according to their personality and values? Why not put those points of departure, as you put it, into official recognition?

It's pretty late and I don't have enough brain to do a long reply right now. I think the debate about what could or couldn't happen has pretty much been covered, though, so I'm just going to make a short note about one point: Word of God vs. Death of the Author.

There is no objective rule for deciding whether Toby Fox or Fatz Geronimo is more right. As you can see by the linked articles, there is more of a set of balkanized camps with a no-man's-land in the middle. Flame wars rage in the space between. Which is to say, a lot of people disagree over whether an author has any right to have influence over the way their works are interpreted or not.

Objectively speaking, there is only one thing I can say for Mr. Fox over his skillful fans in this regard - he has the right to publish directly derivative works. If his darker yet darker next game is indeed a prequel to Undertale about Gaster, it might give insight into a lot of metaphysics which are currently question marks.

Subjectively speaking, I can't even bring myself to kill a single whimsun and get myself a neutral ending, let alone try genocide. I am a sentimental dork and despite believing it canonically impossible due to Asriel/Flowey lacking a monster SOUL, I wanted it to be true when I read Fatz's fan work. I'm a $1 donator to the Patreon to support this artist, who I hope continues to make good things. Toby Fox got his start with fan work, after all!

I'll reply to the bit about the virtue or lack thereof in acceptance of death later. That's a much heavier concept.

So, two other things you mentioned here I'd like to comment on: the relationship between IP and a series canon, and the virtue of accepting death versus the virtue of prolonging life.

IP and canon are not the same, you're right. However, in the modern literary environment, they are mutually influencing. In one direction, the original IP is guaranteed to have the largest reach compared to any fan work derived from it, so elements within the original work have the virtue of mass recognition and acceptance automatically. In fact, the branching off into sects that you describe is exactly what happens when large segments of a fan community decide to accept a certain fan continuity as their canon, thus creating what I termed "fanon." Related but separate fanon lines exist all over the place - ask a transformers fan about their head-canon some time. Amazingly, Undertale has been released for just three months, and we already have an explosion of fanon - from in-depth metaphysics discussions like your work here and undertale-science on tumblr to the works of Fatz and sansy-bones and many others.

The influence in the other direction, flowing from canon/fanon to IP, is economic and legal in nature. If the holder of the IP fails to rigorously defend its borders, they lose the right to do so. Toby has gone on record where he declares those borders to be for Undertale. However, he might have to stake out more territory. If he wants to release an Undertale comic officially, for example. Now, given his level of connection with the game's community and his own roots as a fan creator, he might not do this harshly - he might reach out to community creators and co-opt some well done fan work into his official canon by making it part of the corporate IP, thus granting it the same reach to millions of fans. This has happened before, even with quite large companies. RIOT Games, for example, has brought a number of fan creators on board in the past, as well as individual fan works.

It's definitely not a matter of "original" versus "new" in just the content; though the original creator has a special status. Mainly in having greater reach to influence people's idea about the fictional world they created, and secondarily in the need to protect their IP if they wish to keep it that I just mentioned.

SO! Moving on to the other point I want to address: acceptance of death vs. prolonging life.

Both of these things are virtuous, despite being difficult to reconcile. In our current experience of the world, death is inevitable. Various transhuman technologies loom on the horizon, but don't seem to be coming up within our lifetime yet, or at least it's hard to tell if they could be. And regardless of those technologies, there are a lot of people who already died, who probably won't be revived. Or maybe they will... conservation of information is being studied as well. Perhaps at some time in the future, death will not only be prevented, but reversed. Yet, that is still far off. At this point, there's no difference between believing in a far-off resurrection brought on by science or one based on the promises of a religion, since both require faith in something we won't see in this lifetime. They say there are two certainties: death and taxes. Of the two, death is the truly universal one for humanity. If you believe there is any virtue in acknowledging objective reality, then the power in a story of death is undeniable.

On the other hand, you have the idea of mercy. Prolonging life, easing suffering. If it is possible to extend life, that extends hope. Yet sometimes, life brings only suffering. Hence our preference for a truly saved Asriel rather than his continuing life as Flowey, the emotionless husk. Though in thinking about it, I've come to believe that Flowey actually doesn't have it so bad after the true pacifist ending, as indicated by the earnest manner with which you are addressed by the flower. Well, you/Chara. More on that separately in a moment. Still, we have a deep emotional preference for Asriel with full capacity to experience life over Flowey with his sociopathic detachment and physical disabilities, and (presumed) unending torment. Just like we have a preference to save everyone, bring them out of the underground, and not kill any of them. "When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love." - Marcus Aurelius said. This is the obvious, instinctive, emotional preference - and it's not wrong.

The reconciliation between the two comes in a decision medical practitioners often have to make with elderly and seriously ill patients: what treatment, within the means available, improves both the length and condition of life the most with the least risk of worsening matters through side effects or potentially failed procedures? This calculation is done in terms of Quality Adjusted Life Years. These are, as the wiki article explains, often used along with incremental cost in a ratio to determine what the most effective treatment plan will be. So, for an example, I will come back to Flowey.

The incremental cost of restoring Flowey to Asriel is high. Somewhere between one and all of the monster souls, since Asriel needs a monster soul to be able to absorb the human souls, and use that power to sustain his form. Our only presented alternative is leaving Flowey be. The question we ought to ask is, what are we leaving Flowey to be? I propose that we are not leaving the flower to be a mere lonely sufferer. I propose we are leaving the last remnant of Asriel as the jailer of the last remnant of Chara, the Fallen Child. Flowey addresses the player by the name of the Fallen Human when you reopen the game after a successful true, uncorrupted pacifist run. We are asked to let everyone be happy. And we're told something interesting: Flowey doesn't feel like going through all that again, and wants us to completely wipe his memories too if we do reset everything. Flowey has some kind of feeling; maybe there was some permanent effect of the transformation after all? And maybe another reason for Asriel/Flowey remaining behind. The true pacifist route doesn't give us any way to interact with Chara, but we are told that Chara hated humanity. Asriel/Flowey renewed their dedication to the ideals that caused them to originally sacrifice their own and Chara's lives in the original encounter that killed them. Another reason, then, to not leave the underground: to keep Chara company, and also to keep them imprisoned. Brothers united in what might be an eternal standoff, or might be eternal rest.

After all, even Fatz's work has somebody die, alone and cursing fate, rejecting the compassion they are shown. It doesn't wrench the same way to lose Chara as it does to lose Asriel, but it should be considered similarly. Chara is you, and me. We are Chara. Toby's advice on this should be considered, because the game itself acts that way. Flowey addresses the Fallen Human as "YOU" while facing the screen. It is the name given to the Fallen Human that has the stats controlled by Lv. If we do a true pacifist run, then Chara's spirit guides Frisk to the good guy ending. Or maybe Frisk guides Chara's spirit, in a way, because we see the world through Frisk's eyes and allow ourselves to be emotionally influenced by the cute and cuddly characters they see. Really, it's both. So this is one of the most powerful aspects of Fatz's piece, and the reason it's my favorite fan work so far. I feel for Chara as strongly as I do for Asriel. How could I not love myself as I do my brother?

Sorry for taking so much time to respond. I've been busy lately with work, and my music group started getting active again. :3

Yeah it's a very murky area of debate once we get into the fine print. I remember reading Wimsatt and Beardsley's "Intentional Fallacy," and I have a copy of it in my library. I also remember the story of Pierre Mendard - Borges has been among my most favorite writers for a long time.

Not only does the question of "who's right" depend on which camp you belong to, it also changes on a case-by-case basis, depending on how the author is related to the material and to the audience. I still feel as though the ultimate deciding factor to which camp you subscribe to on any one given case should be your desires regarding the art. Whatever interpretation of that particular art is most meaningful to you, should decide the camp. A lot of people, however, seem to always stay in one or another camp on principle, and at times that could possibly be misguided with respect to what the reader really wants from the art. As far as I'm concerned, the proverb "know thyself" is the best guide to fulfilment. So I suppose in the way of the religious metaphor, I find myself quite partial to this very brilliant work of art.

That makes two of us. ;) The Whimsuns never did anything to harm us, haha. I will admit to having killed Flowey on one occasion, though that was before I'd learned about Asriel. Even after I found out in the pacifist ending, I don't much regret it, mostly just because it's established that he comes back from the dead anyway whenever you kill him. But it's not something I could bring myself to do again. It's not the same experience anymore once you know too much, which is much of what makes the game so brilliant as a narrative experience.

On the other hand, I can still see the artistic value of the Genocide Route. There's a certain thrill that comes with watching the game fall apart, and falling out of our familiar characters and into the total unknown. It takes me back to the

As for the second post, I'll cut it up to try to keep it organized in my head. (Fair warning, I've been getting back to Kant lately, so yeah, that "section/subsection" mentality....)

1. IP vs. canon

1.1. "IP influencing canon"

If I understand your intentions correctly, the answer to the question "why place Fox on a higher pedestal than Geronimo" is because Fox, being the *original* maker of the content, has his work produced to a wider audience, whereas Geronimo's audience is smaller. In that case, we direct ourselves to a collectivist valuation of art. Which is fair enough objectively, considering that's often how we tend to highlight the importance of certain artists like the Beatles, etc. But there's still the question of, should that be necessarily important on a *personal* level. Again, what I'm most interested in is the reader's *personal* fulfilment of the art, and the only thing that's directly connected to is the reader's *personal* valuations. In order for collectivist valuations to even be relevant, they have to connect in some way to *personal* valuations. It goes right back to the Monty Python message - work it out for yourself.

Of course, it's all too common for individuals to look to and adopt collectivist valuations as their own personal valuations. In itself, that's perfectly fine. The problem arises when trying to adopt a collectivist valuation begins to contradict against the individual's personal fulfilment. Suppose someone is an avid fan of some lesser known rock band XYZ, but finds the Beatles to be rather boring. But since, on the collective level, the Beatles have reached a wider audience than XYZ, collective valuation would conclude that the Beatles are more valuable than XYZ. If the music fan had previously adopted collective valuation, since that's the common thing to do, then suddenly they're forced to deal with cognitive dissonance. Who should they value more? My answer is that he does have a direct reason to care about his own sense of fulfilment, not so much the opinions of the collective. If he takes the fulfilment of his artistic spirit seriously, then he should listen to himself, and offer a challenge to the collective belief. In his personal life, he should accept his own belief that XYZ is more valuable than the Beatles. In communicating with the collective, however, he should at least acknowledge in a distant sense that there *is* a collective favor of the Beatles to XYZ. But he should allow that valuation to be disconnected from him. Of course, doing so condescendingly, with a pretentious, assholish attitude would make him a hipster, but that's a different scenario altogether. Just don't be condescending about it. ;3

As with rock, so with Undertale. True, Fox has a higher following than Geronimo. But once we put the individual in the picture, there remains the question of whether or not it's right for the individual to care about the collectivist valuation in any personal-fulfilling sense. For sake of dry, unartistic common sense, the individual should at least acknowledge that Fox is more popular. But that doesn't have to be a part of their personal artistic valuation. In their heart, they can still place Geronimo above Fox. And the best part is, it's a simple enough inversion, and a common enough sentiment, that a new community could sensibly be constructed in which Geronimo is in fact placed above Fox. Whether or not that's to say that Geronimo is "our canon" at the expense of Fox, or merely that Geronimo's "fanon" is *better* than Fox's "canon," is then simply a matter of superfluous differences of language.

So I guess bottom line for this portion, collective valuation need not hold the whip. Otherwise, we have collective authoritarianism - the cutting extremity of which is fascism. But some people have difficulty getting to that conclusion for themselves, and because of it they continue to flagellate themselves for no other reason than because the collective told them to. (The term "groupthink" comes to mind.) It can be quite sad to see, and I have in comments from other people on other sites with UT fanart, which was largely the source of my inspiration for creating this document. But, well, that's there.

1.2. "Canon influencing IP"

This would certainly be interesting, to see what would happen. Though, from what little I've heard of Fox from his Twitter, he didn't seem too keen on wanting to add more to the original content - he sounded like he wanted to be basically done with it. Though, it could very well be possible that he didn't predict just how wildly successful UT would end up being, and now that he's seeing it his interests might have changed? In any case, it is pretty well apparent that he's interested in protecting his IP. I'll have to catch up on his Twitter or something, perhaps...

To draw another example, I'm certainly familiar with Star Wars having done this on such a mass scale, taking in fan work and stamping the official "seal of approval" on it. But even here, we have camps. On one extreme are the fans that consider the entirety of the Star Wars material that has the "seal of approval" on it canon. But on the other extreme are the purists who refuse to accept even the prequel trilogy, and prefer to see the canon as limited only to the original unedited trilogy. And I can see the merit to both extremes, in an artistic sense. So I guess in this sense it goes right back to the question of whether or not the consumer - and more to the point the *individual* consumer - sees any reason to care, in a personal artistic sense, about the boundaries of IP with respect to canon.

2. Valuing acceptance of death vs. valuing prolonging of life

First of all, I did make a point earlier in saying that there's a difference in valuing something *morally*, and valuing it *artistically*. You can have a very good, very powerful moral message, but at the same time have it carry zero, or even negative artistic value. Some morals are, to some people, unartistic. Depends on the artistic personality, I suppose. Or perhaps because of some negative real-world experience coming to terms with this or that moral value. Some people are tragedians at heart, others prefer sunshine and rainbows.

It also depends on a case-by-case basis, I think. The value of accepting death with regard to Asriel has a much higher weight because it attacks our understanding of *fairness*. None of it can be pinned down on Asriel, Asriel didn't deserve any of it. He's simply a victim of circumstance. But he's the only one that suffers in the end. The degree of precision is what makes the value of accepting death here so painful, and at such a high level of pain quite a few people would address it as simply being unartistic, and would prefer to step around it like a quarantined area and skip merrily along to making sunshine-and-rainbow AUs shipping grown up goatson all over the place. On the other hand, considering the value of accepting death with respect to someone like Chara doesn't carry as much weight, since we have plenty of reason to dislike that character. But then, applied that way several people would consider that to be weak, since it doesn't tug at heartstrings all that much.

You mention a condition of accepting a virtue in acknowledging objective reality as an important factor. This is interesting to focus on. I suppose whether or not that condition is met depends on the experiences of the person. Is there an artistic value to realism? I suppose if reality was to any one person so terrible and so awful that it entirely eradicates the possibility of artistic beauty within realism, then it may be expected that that person find zero or negative artistic value in realism, and see art as purely for sake of escapism. On the other extreme, though, there are people that feel they need some kind of realism in order to take an artwork seriously. The artwork has to connect to their everyday life somehow. This may be because their experiences with escapism have been negative and they need things grounded in realism in order for them to be artistic. Who knows? It's purely psycho-speculation at this point. But the bottom line is, different people in different scenarios would differ as to whether realism has positive, zero, or negative artistic value, or for that matter whether its inverse, escapism, has positive, zero, or negative artistic value.

And then, naturally enough, in the event that we do accept a positive artistic value to realism, then all the moral values we consider to be important to hold in real life would become important to hold in art as well, for sake of said realism. That's all well and good, I think.

As for Asriel being preferable to Flowey, there is one other reason... This is FA. We are furries. Goat child is a cutie pie. :3c And seeing cutie pies get hurt makes one very sad.

The jailor interpretation is interesting. I only have one issue with it. You want to say that post-pacifist Flowey shows a permanent change in being able to express "feelings." Though I'm not sure that's necessarily a difference from what he's capable of prior to the ending. Flowey isn't *fully* emotionless. In the Genocide ending, for example, he very clearly shows some powerful emotions, particularly fear. Flowey, being soulless, lacks the ability to feel compassion. The real core of the tragedy of being Flowey, I think, lies in the fact that what's missing in Flowey is precisely the same thing that is the central characteristic of Asriel's natural personality - the power of sympathy. This is what makes "whole" and "broken" Asriel such polar opposites of each other, and what makes Asriel such a widely dynamic character it's dizzying to think about. It's almost as if Flowey is precisely anti-Asriel, if it wasn't for the fact that certain analyses into his character show that Flowey's evil isn't total, but rather, misunderstood (he simply wanted to hold onto his best friend). I'm not quite convinced that post-pacifist Flowey is permanently changed. Reading his words now, it could be construed that he's expressing compassion. But I don't see it as a hard and fast thing. It could alternatively be construed that his interest in the other characters' happiness is predicated on his own selfish interest in not wanting to do everything all over again, just using the case of the others to appeal to the player. Even if it was the case that Flowey has his compassion back, what metaphysical justification is there for it? I guess, perhaps, that would explain why I see only the tragedy here.

I think I remember having suggested that Chara is an aspect of the player. In particular the player's gaming ego, that we fall into when playing more traditional, competitive, grinding-based RPGs like WoW. So I do agree with you personally. Though, I have had it challenged before, by other people who took a drew a lot of artistic value out of interpreting Chara as a purely separate character, that's evil simply as an arbitrary character trait rather than by some psychological connection to the player. It's more superficial, perhaps, and it might be a little bit more boring to you and me since it confines everything in Undertale within a box separated from the real world. But it is something a lot of people roll with, I suspect because that's the way they're habituated to interpreting games, animes, etc.

As for Fatz's work, I think much of the main difference is who the loss wrenches. Losing Asriel wrenches us directly. Losing Chara, not so much (at least, not in the immediate sense of Chara as a simple character rather than something connected to the player), but it *does* wrench Asriel. Insofar as we take our ability to sympathize with Asriel seriously, losing Chara wrenches us *via* wrenching Asriel. In that sense, it tests our ability to sympathize with Asriel by considering the question of whether your relationship with Asriel is enough to change your mind about Chara. Do you allow him to change your own mind? Can he reciprocate your relationship, or is it just one-sided? I imagine that's much of the beauty of that strip.

Phew... looking back, we're finding Asriel connected to so much of the external world. Why don't we tally some of it up?

- Deductive logic
- Semantics
- Set theory and functions
- Ecclesiastes
- Bioethics (EMT decisions, etc.)
- Nietzsche
- Classical tragedy
- Biblical canon
- Word of God vs. Death of the Author
- Indirectly, Wimsatt and Beardsley and J.L. Borges
- Intellectual property
- The black hole information paradox
- Marcus Aurelius
- Quality adjusted life years
- Monty Python
- Star Wars

That's a lot of serious weight we put on one little goatchild.

I think the fact that we're seeing Asriel in everything says something important. It's rare to find fans who are willing to open the box and take the characters out so that they interact with real life elements. So many fans want the canon to be self-contained. I suspect much of it's just because it's easier on the mind to keep everything inside the box, but there is a lot we lose by doing so, as I suspect you'd agree.

Going from there, I kind of started a personal UT fanfic centered around a grown up Frisk-Asriel ship, where they deal with real life issues and elements after the events of the game. And plays around with hypertext poetry. Just kind of a personal thing. We'll see if it ever goes anywhere ;3

The last note I really have to add is that I intentionally use the word "virtue" to represent all possible goods - moral, artistic, emotional - which can come out of the situation. Since many of these things are inherently subjective, I felt it necessary to abstract the way I talked about them to a level where I could objectively deal with "this can be a good thing to someone for various reasons," rather than trying to separate out to whom it is good or bad and why. Simply because otherwise I believed my attempt to discuss the matter would have fallen down an even deeper rabbit hole and never come out again.

And yes, I'm really quite satisfied with the depth and breadth we've gotten out of this discussion. Cheers. =)

That's fair.

Cheers. ^w^

You might enjoy the fanfic I'm writing for it, which is from a very different perspective.

Oh? Why don't you drop a link when it's ready :3

I think the crucial difference between Asriel and the amalgamates were that the monsters involved in creating the amalgamates never actually died. They were sick and dying, but Alphys injected them with determination as part of the experiment while they were still living. Asriel, on the other hand, did actually die, as it was told at the end of the Neutral Route. Because of that, his original soul was lost. Asriel himself admits to having lost his original soul at the end of the Pacifist Route. The theory could still work, but it's got a lot to fight against.

I probably should have been a little more careful about not confusing different senses of "saved." After all, ingame he's "saved," but he still tells you he's soulless. I was interested in finding a way to "save" him in such a way that he doesn't have to slip back to soulless form. Maybe I should have titled it something like, "How to save Asriel more." x3

In any case, I agree with your point about open-ended questions. The canon is definitely pretty loose. There's a lot of lack of clarity, and it's actually pretty easy to exploit the plot holes to get what you want. And I think in the end that's really my whole point - it's better to work through what the game gives you, and pull out an interpretation of the canon that's meaningful and gives you emotional closure, than to insist on the traditional interpretation of the game for no other reason than because it's the "right" way. Though, the more closely you reconcile your own interpretation with what's said in the game itself, the stronger that interpretation will be.

In that line of thinking, I recently heard that a fan-made sequel game is in the making, based on the Dreemurr Reborn AU: http://gamejolt.com/games/overtale/108207 It looks pretty exciting. :33

I'm hoping what I'd written here could help connect Undertale to this sequel game. It admits to being non-canon, but I'm not so sure it has to be that shy about it. If you jump through the mental hoops I talked about up in the submission, you could arrive at a way to take this sequel as something that could certainly exist within canon boundaries. That will help overcome the cognitive dissonance that seeps out of "not-canon."

I'm very curious to see how well this game does if/when it gets released. If it happens to successfully rival Undertale in popularity, it could make some very interesting implications about how much people tend to overvalue canon anyway, considering a non-canon game can deliver just as much and just as well.

That's a neat theory. I love the fact that you have personal experiences backing it up, that gives it something meaningful from out in the real world.

I'm all for it, I think the only part I'm really hung up on is where you say some of the monsters in the experiment actually did die. I don't remember the game saying that anywhere, but maybe you have a source that does say that?

If it is in fact true that some of the monsters in the experiment were already dead, then it would mean that their souls stayed inside instead of being immediately lost at the time of death, and that would introduce the possibility of Asriel's soul having in fact not been lost. owo

Yeah, that was definitely a lot of work, haha.

Nice little holes you pointed out in those entries. It never was directly explained what happened to Chara's soul at the time of Asriel's death, nor when exactly the monsters in the experiments had the injections. Intuition would suggest that it happened before they died, but I suppose intuition could be challenged by pressing the details of the question.

Counterarguments against the theory might try to say something like we're cherry-picking details to get what we want out of the game. But, honestly, that's precisely what I did, too, in my own argument up in the submission, and I feel like the meaningfulness that comes out of the theory justifies the cherry-picking. We force these interpretations into the game to get emotional closure, and as far as I'm concerned that's perfectly fair play. What's usually considered to be the canon of the game isn't very satisfying, and theories like this one help resolve things a little better. And it helps to keep pushing the fact that canons are much weaker logical structures than we tend to assume, and there's always holes all over the place, especially in games like this one.

It is pretty geeky, but keeping in mind *why* we're doing all this stuff in the first place makes for good perspective. Asriel's a cute character and a character that lovable deserves a better fate than what the game itself seems to suggest to us at first playthrough. That's incentive enough for me. :)

Very interesting connection. Yeah, I love the idea of connecting these canons/theories/etc. to things in the outside world - that has a way of actually giving meaning to it rather than merely forcing the canon to exist in a vacuum. And I believe a game as well-meaning as Undertale has a lot of great potential being connected to everything in the outside world.

And yes, I would say it's more important to ask the question of whether or not what you have to say about the game contributes to people in a positive and fulfilling way than it is to stay within the question of whether or not people will agree or disagree with it.

Thank you so much ^w^ yeah, I loved chatting about this, too.

Peace <3

This is make makes the game so amazing. It also makes the story that  benjaminwolvenhour is writing for this page so easy to write! There's no strict guideline for how it all fits together.

It's really cool to hear it's such an inspiration. :D I'd like to read the story sometime when it's done.

Well, lucky for you it's being done in chapters! It's for sure an inspiration.. to many!
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/21768615/