@Aeondeug yeah it has become clear to me that I absolutely do not understand what you're talking about or where you're coming from. Maybe it is my ignorance of Buddhism that makes it opaque to me, sorry. To me, a bad action never goes away, you just do as much as you can and take the hit again if someone reminds you that you did a bad thing. It happens, it can't be erased, and making up for it completely depends on who you have to make it up to. If the person wants you to apologize and prove ten times over that you're different now, that's what it takes. If there is no way to make up to the person wronged that you did them wrong, then you're SOL. So to me that means that a 'genocide' can only be forgiven if all the victims want to forgive you, and in Undertale, Spoiler: spoiler that's impossible, because if no one else doesn't, Sans sure doesn't. Who is Angulimala? That sounds like a super cool story : O
http://calanii.tumblr.com/post/130757070815/this-has-quickly-become-my-favorite-thing hey also just going to leave this here no reason go about your days
I've been thinking, about how people say the game guilts you for watching lets plays of the Bad Times run, because Spoiler: choo choo the only lines that do this in the genocide run is from Flowey. And this is at the very end before meeting up for the last time against Sans too. Flowey is supposed to be manipulative. They are a manipulative flower, aren't they? The way of life they have come to know and accept is "kill or be killed" and because of the person they see you as, they want YOU to accept this too. So I guess I'm just sort of pausing and thinking about the significance of the fact that Flowey is the speaker here, and the context of this excerpt in the rest of his lil speech.
Flowey is a huge fucking jerk and anything he says just kinda falls on deaf ears for me because well. he's supposed to be the villain here. Spoiler: whomp whomp He's so manipulative and it's massively creepy and I love that in villains. Flowey is actually scary to me! Which is a feat. He really freaked me out when he first changed faces and it kinda filled me with unimaginable glee to have a video game villain actually SCARE me, even for a moment. Usually I am cynical and jaded and that doesn't catch me. I think in this, Flowey is intentionally pointing out that yeah, people DO watch Lets Plays, and I really find it so cool how this game pokes and prods at that fourth wall. People are there, and he knows it. And just. Shivers. I love that. It lends life to this work and I love it for it.
@littlewhitemouse Angulimala is a serial killer. He became rather hateful of humanity and basically spent a couple years of his life stealing from people and murdering. Then he met the Buddha and learned of the Dhamma. Angulimala converted and joined the Sangha. Through hard work Angulimala became one of the Buddha's most learned students and he achieved Enlightenment. This was possible because, one, Angulimala acts, no matter how bad, do not define him (in fact nothing defines him) and, two, the Buddha treated all people as equals. It did not matter what your age, sex, occupation, caste level, or even actions were if you had a sincere interest in Dhamma you had it. That is what counts in the end ultimately. So to morality and redemption in Buddhism. I think a good place to start would be kamma. So basically karma means action. Any act you perform has a result. If I drop a all the ball falls. To drop the ball is the karma, the act. The ball falling is the vipaka, the fruit or result. All actions bear one of four kinds of vipaka. Basically good, bad, neutral, and ENLIGHTENMENT results. Now vipaka go away in one and only one fashion, namely their falling. So if I kill someone I will gain a fruit based on that and no matter what I do that fruit will fall. However the karma system is awful and shitty. Everyone suffers and everyone has gone through countless rebirths. Who is to say that you weren't a murderer in a past life? Who is to say that someone who is murderer will be in his next? Now I did say that Angulimala's acts do not define him, but I also said that nothing defines him. This is because Angulimala does not have a self. There is nothing in this world that bears the intrinsic quality of Angulimalaness. This is because all things in reality are in a state of flux. A cup that sits in on a table is not the same cup it was a moment ago and it will not be the same cup a few from now. This is most obvious if I take the cup and break it. However even if change isn't noticeable it is still taking place. So because Angulimala was constantly changing and had a variety of lives we can't really say that he is defined as and is Angulimala. This also applies to the whole evil thing. See you can perform an evil act but you cannot be an evil person. To be an evil person you must permanently and without change or exception always possess the quality of evil. You would effectively be incapable of doing anything but be evil. You would have to evilly drink your tea and evilly walk the dog and evilly evil. It's actually even more ridiculous because in order to be an evil person you would have to be doing the same evil act forever. Without change. The evil act would somehow have to be occurring and bearing its result constantly for all time. This of course is absolutely nonsense. So in Buddhism there is no such thing as an evil person. And because there is no such thing as an evil person everyone has the capacity for Enlightenment and redemption. So now we need to go to the matter of mercy. Mercy and love are to be given to ALL living beings. It doesn't what kind of living thing they are. Ants? They deserve mercy. That asshole who cut you off? He deserves mercy. A serial killer? Deserves mercy. So on and so forth. Metta doesn't pass over people no matter what. This is because we are all suffering. All of us. If there is one constant about us it is that we are suffering. Metta is also to be extended towards everyone because, like I said, there is no such thing as an evil person. Which I guess leads to the next thing, which is that I am not necessarily thinking of redemption on the individual level. I am thinking of redemption on a grander and more meaningful scale, at least by Buddhism's standards. One that doesn't revolve around people forgiving you, though it might involve it, but instead revolves around you personally becoming a better person. This is the sort of redemption Angulimala earned. I have no idea if all the families he destroyed forgave him. That ultimately isn't what matters. What matters is that Angulimala became an arahant and by doing that redeemed himself.
Also do feel free to ask for clarification or more on any of that? I sometimes forget that this shit is kind of. A lot to grasp. Just because I spend so much time with it. I am more than happy to explain things and take time. I just want to make sure that I'm understood.
Oh definitely! Spoiler: All aboard the Sans Train So, just to reiterate. Apparently, what people have been able to find out about Gaster is that he was the Royal Scientist before Alphys, and he was the one that created the Core. One of the Grey NPCs you can get by messing with your files talks about "how Gaster fell into the core, his 'own creation', cutting his life short." Another "mentions that his life was cut short due to an experiment going wrong, before saying that it's rude to talk about someone while they're listening." Gaster is apparently scattered across time and space in the aftermath of an experiment gone wrong, to keep it short. He also appears to speak in Wing Dings, and is possibly named after the font as well, which puts him in the same family of terrible fonts as "Papyrus" and "Sans." But yeah, definitely had some connection to Sans. I mean for gods sakes, those skulls that shoot beams at you in your fight against him? They're called GASTER BLASTERS. So for a refresher, these are what I'm talking about. Which is interesting since in the True Lab of Alphys, the DT Extractor is also in the shape of a skull. Speaking of the true lab: BUT ANYWAY BACK ON TOPIC. In the battle you fight against Sans he says: OUR reports. As in, he has at some point in the past worked with others on this issue of a "massive anomaly." The dialogue itself here insinuates formal research. Now look at the sequence that allows you the key to his room where you find the key to another, more secret room. As silly as the code phrases are, Sans has still prepared beforehand codewards in the event that he happens to meet someone who can travel through time. When you look in the drawers of this...lab? Workshop? Anyway, you find: If you look at the large curtained off object to the side, you get this dialogue: In this thread on the topic, they mention that: That thread has a lot of interesting analysis, if you're more interested, I just wanted to summarize some of the hints that Sans and Gaster may have known each other in the past! Honestly, I love this sort of thing! It's like a neat sort of puzzle to me, anyway. There actually are! Mentioned in the above spoilers, hehe
When I saw that piece of fuck Spoiler taking asgore's face after asgore was dead i was ready to strangle him. as i said, i played this game specifically so that i could play the pacifist route, so i wasn't expecting to hate someone that much. after flowey's fight, while i was sparing him, i just couldn't believe that i kept damn sparing him, i would pause at a singe option for five minutes and make myself spare him again because i just had to TRY being a complete pacifist and TRY IT ONCE even if it was a dumbass decision that led to me being killed and shit getting worse because i was too much of a heard-headed idiot to kill the one thing that needed a good killing around here. i just had to TRY fulling sparing him once, you know? i said i was going into the game without killing anyone so i had to blessed try ONCE and the fact that i was rewarded for doing something that incredibly stupid is AMAZING. this is not what i was going to talk about. the amount of distaste and fear i felt for flowey was sort of amazing, i agree. when he starts rolling his head back towards you and telling you that, if you keep sparing him, he will kill you, your friends, and everyone else.... brrr. and i could just never tell when that thing was being genuine and when it was tricking me again, i had no way of KNOWING, at ALL, so i didn't even try to figure it out i just kept going forward and sparing people and accepting that i was putting no thought into this and its a dumb way to play a game so if that fails, legit. double spoilers just bc i want to make sure people have finished the pacifist route before they read the rest Spoiler and if you walk back through the whole game to find Asriel in the flower patch, he does tell you that what you did in relentlessly sparing flowey and himself was... kind of dumb. not in those words, but he informs you that you're going back into a world where not everything can be solved by being nice. and i just sort of reflected on the fact that i jumped on the chance to play a game in which i hurt no one because that is so impossible irl, and isn't that a thing. it's amazing how on point they get flowey's speeches because he is rarely wrong about the player, when usually, it is very easy to be wrong about the person playing a video game. now i'm getting the hell aboard the sans train. Yes! when I saw the Extractor, I was like, 'that looks exactly like the little skulls in that Fight I'm Never Playing. And that's weird. What does DT mean anyhow, I don't remember that acronym being in the game? But anyway, yeah, it seems pretty obvious that sans and gaster were in cahoots doing... something. and something got gaster so incredibly killed that he does not show up in any timeline, excluding in glitches? which is fascinating considering how into exploiting video game tropes Undertale is, i feel like it should mean something tangible that there is someone you can only find in glitches and when you search for them painstakingly int he extras, but i'm not sure what to say about that, really! sans, what are you hiding. why do you know so much about the mechanisms of your own universe? what are you trying to do, if anything? and why do i feel like we don't know as much about the core as we should? And I'm going to reply at @Aondeug 's post in a minute, or maybe somewhere else since it's not exactly about a video game, because it's taking me a minute to understand what i'm reading -u- no fault of your own, it's just a lot of stuff i'm not familiar with, but that in itself makes it fun food for thought for me!
We could move it to private messages yeah. And sit here and talk about how great Doggo is. Killing Doggo was the most heart breaking thing. Even more so than Toriel who I thought would be the worst for me because I HAVE FEELINGS FOR HER OK. Doggo though. He is just a Doggo! HE DID NOT DESERVE THIS FATE. And yeah it's ok that it's taking a while. It's a lot to take in because like. Even words that we use aren't being defined the same at all. So it's a whole confusing mess. Again feel free to ask questions.
D : I hadn't even CONSIDERED THAT This is why i'm not playing murdertale, you guys. if i think the stuff i am expecting is bad, i know i wont believe the stuff i'm NOT EVEN EXPECTING like after a full week of knowing about it i realized that you have to actually kill mettaton in the no mercy route. how screwed up is that? Mettaton doesn't even know what's going ON he's just making good TV. that's being filmed live and watched by thousands of his adoring fans. this robot just wants to feel, he just wants to be BEAUTIFUL it just doesn't sink in at first that you have the option to kill literally everyone in this game. even doggo. doggo is so confused and stressed out i feel bad even talking to the poor kid. i'm not trying to be holier than thou and looking down at respectable murdertale players, im amazed at the flaming, pummeling hoops they are able to jump through. ...do you think having the player fight a whole bunch of dogs in the first town area was an oblique reference to kicking the dog and testing whether or not you would
It's not that bad on me when I am actively playing it, because I essentially just kind of roleplay my way through it. Like, for this moment, I am a sadistic murderer who feels that people like Papyrus are forgettable. At best they might be amusing, but really why bother with any of them? So killing Papryus doesn't really matter to me while actively playing because Papyrus doesn't matter to me as the genocide route kid. He's just an annoying, forgettable skeleton who is in my way. It's the stopping and getting out of that mindset that is the hard part for me. Because then I'm not roleplaying as a murderer anymore. Now I'm just me and I killed someone.
Same, killing them is sort of a roleplaying thing. I slip into "sadistic murderer" character mode and it all is like "ehhhhh, how droll" when characters try to stop me. ALso YEp. I felt so bad killing Papyrus. My spaghetti bro. The bony nerd. The hometown hero. sob. Papyrus is a cinnamon roll, too good for this desolate world.
Spoiler I'm pretty sure DT is for DETERMINATION Hi I'm YggiDee and I love Undertale. I never played the demo but I backed it because I was a bastion of good decision making two years ago and then literally forgot it existed until release. Now I lie awake at night thinking about Sans and collect Undertale fanart en masse and save random people's theorycrafting into text files because it's not like Tumblr has a useable bookmark system. I'm basically staggering around and having feelings. I don't really have anything useful to say at the moment.
See I hadn't played the demo, but had heard of it when the demo came out. I was like "eh whatever" and then. the game came out. by this point i had forgotten it existed. Keleviel there bought it for me cuz he's an a+ bf. and just. welp, Toby Fox owns my soul and I couldn't be happier. Me and Kel were discussing terrible Undertale AU with our characters today. It makes no sense without context but "wow my girlfriend is literally a dog" was a thing.
So last night my friend was skyping the game to me, and during the final neutral ending boss I fucking realized that "Ebott" is basicaly "Toby" backwards and I told her and she just put her head in her hands and let herself die.
