#which is why i have my ask box closed bc its a game from 2021 and i know im really behind the times

[moeblob]

I unfortunately picked up Bravely Default 2 again (I bought it back when it released) and then started over since I last played it in June 2021. And. You know what. I like these silly beans. And then I saw concept art for Dag's expressions and I am not the same. Why did they decide to give him huge fangs in it.

(also I'm trying so hard to avoid spoilers less for plot but more for characters so if you know anything that happens to characters shhhhh. also the expression concept is below the read more so you can see what I mean.)

[bublp0pr]

UT time rant

i realised that i never actually discussed my rantings about undertale’s time vagueness, did i? Ohhhhh yessss. This is going to be a fun waste of an hour (insane and evil laughter with conveniently timed thunderstorm in the distance)

Where do i even start?

201X

Ok. How about i start with something obvious? 201X. What the hell does that even MEAN? It’s genius on Toby’s part. Having released the game in a year whose first 3 digits are 201, we can interpret it to just mean some year within the decade beginning in 2010 and ending before 2020. But if someone was dedicated enough to the game to still be playing it all those years later in say 2021, then there’s a whole plethora of choices available to you to justify how you intend on interpreting it. How about i break some of them down? 

Well, the most simple view would be to just assume that the date is still maintains that meaning - that Chara fell into Mt Ebott within the previous decade under my hypothetical example. But if we’re letting this date exist in a time other than the present then why stop there? Everything that occurs within the game to give us some sort of indication of a time reference is circumstantial because the game is set some indefinite time AFTER 201X with Chara falling. 

Now, that being said there are likely some arguments to be made for certain objects we know existed at the same time as Chara - such as a video camera. BUT- and here’s another BIG THING we need to consider here, how do you know that monsters weren’t just more technologically advanced than humans? Look at the technology introduced in the game! The ramifications of a trans-dimensional box in your PHONE! A mass geothermal power system placed directly in the CORE of everyone’s city but that is SO SAFE that no one even worries about it! Technology that literally operates in tandem with MAGIC -by which i mean THE ESSENCE MANIPULATED BY THE SOUL ITSLEF- in some circumstances! This is startlingly advanced stuff. If we assume that monsters WERE more advanced than humans, then do we really have ANY reference to what time era Chara existed in on the surface? My opinion is no. You could argue that were it the case that Chara existed in a time that significantly predated certain concepts than integration with a society who did have this stuff would be difficult but- and again, TIME STUFF TOBY! TIMEEEEE- we have no idea how long Chara stayed with the Dreemurs before they died. So things like the video camera could have been completely foreign to them BEFORE they fell and they just slowly learnt about them down in the mountain. 

‘But wait!’ I hear myself saying because i’m not presumptuous enough to assume anyone is actually going to read this and ask this question lol. ‘The 201 still needs to mean SOMETHING though right? That narrows down possible dates a little...’ Ohoho I’d be wrong. First: the date could be set in the past, in like the year 201 AD, 201 BC or any year within the decade 2020-2010 BC. OR it could be set in the past/present/future of 2010-2020 AD. Second: the X is a vague substitution that, without context can mean ANYTHING. That means it can mean more than one digit which makes the possible date as infinite as the possible values of X (i’m tempted to say more infinite because obviously there’s an AD and BC version for each value but that’s not how infinity works. Figured i’d say so for perspective anyway). Third: since when was 201X a year???? Take another look at that moment in the opening menu flashback, because i assure you that the vague number below the picture of a mountain has NO OTHER INDICATION TOWARDS ITS MEANING WHATSOEVER. 201X could be a day and month, it could be a month and year, heck 201X could just as easily be the geographical location of the mountain by some reference standard. X stand to mean ANYTHING AT ALL. It doesn’t have to be a number.

Is your mind sufficiently blown yet? Because there’s a few other possibilities i haven’t even dared to go into yet. We can’t say with 100% accuracy haha but it’s a good bet that Undertale isn’t actually the reality of our history. Which makes the game a work of FICTION within a FICTIONAL universe. With that comes creative freedom in how time works in general! How society came to agree to understand, measure and interpret time; how history uses time as a reference to the present etc. And even worse, there isn’t even enough evidence to say that it’s set in a real world setting either in terms of humanity. History could be completely different! So would having a date really mean anything to us?! Ok, ridiculous stuff aside, let’s assume that this is the real world again. So what if the date was how monsters measured time instead of us? Do they measure time the same way? Maybe they’re measuring from when they were trapped underground. How would we know?! 

Final conundrum (and this one was actually brought to my attention by a really good web comic actually) : what if the use of determination to reset time didn’t apply to the outside world? The interpretations of this piece of information alone are vast, like the underground exisiting in a closed time loop or having a separate line of time running parallel to the surface that becomes more delayed with each reload or reset. However you consider it, it makes using time from one world not relatively correct to using time in another. (We are not given evidence that Chara actually ever does use determination to alter time within their life underground but there is evidence to suggest use of resetting occurring because of the 6 souls which sufficiently messes us up if we want to use the date as any sort of reference for anything)

So basically, giving us the 4 characters 201X at the start of the game might as well mean nothing to us.

Lengths of time between events

Ok. I want to say now that 201X is the ONLY time we’re ever given any date. So the fact we can’t even use that means we have no idea exactly when anything happened. But that doesn’t matter so much right? I mean, who cares as long as you can follow the stretch of time the game actually does exist in. Right? Hahahahahahaha. 

I’m just going to list all the lengths of time we DON’T know in the game. Take a minute to think over each one.

How long was the war between humans and monsters?

How long did monsters exist underground before the first human came?

How long did Chara stay underground before they decided on the plan with Asriel?

How long after Chara made plan with Asriel did they actually go through with it? For all we know they could’ve been older when they actually carried it out. (not that OLDER means anything when we don’t know how old they were when they made the plan lol. But atleast we knew they were kids then)

How did it take after Asriel died for Toriel to leave Asgore and go to the ruins? Or, to pose a better question, how long had Toriel been in the ruins when Frisk eventually came around?

How long after Asriel’s death did the next human arrive in the underground?

What sort of lengths of time were there between each human falling underground?

How long did each human spend in the underground before Asgore eventually killed them?

How long after Asriel’s death did Alphys inject enough determination into his flower to awaken Flowey?

Depending on the answer to that last question, did Flowey actually exist as the same time as any of the humans who fell? Or was Frisk the first they met? (i’m not counting Chara obviously)

As a rough estimate, how many resets do you reckon Flowey went through before Frisk came in and messed with that?

Unless you think about one of the theories about surface time and underground time not occurring exactly simultaneously because of determination tampering with things, obviously waiting for Frisk had been the longest run Flowey had ever done. How long had he had to wait in that run before they fell? [This one i find really interesting because it gives me an idea of how long he spent playing in each run normally before he would reset too]

How long did it take for Frisk to go through the underground? Is that length of time the same between pacifist and genocide timelines? Can we use real game time as a reference or not?

How long had Napstablook been abandoned by Mettaton for when frisk fell?

How long did it take for Alphys to conduct the amalgamate research?

For how long had Alphys been keeping the amalgamates secret from their families when Frisk fell?

For how long has Papyrus been training under Undyne?

How long has Undyne been head of the Royal Guard?

Are you thoroughly concerned about how little you know about the game yet? These are all things that would give more meaning to the storyline as well. Now, on some of these points you might think, well obviously we can use lifespan as a reference. BUT WE CAN’T. Because

We don’t know a damn about monster life spans

The only info we’re given is based on boss monsters. And that conveniently tells us that THEY DON’T AGE WHEN THEY DON’T HAVE LIVING CHILDREN. And since Asriel is dead, well we have nothing to work with. What really messes me up though is that the only constants we know for sure about across the two points in time, Chara’s and Frisk falling, is Asgore, Toriel and Gerson. Asgore and Toriel teach us nothing because THEY DON’T AGE. With Gerson aswell you might think haha i’ve got this cracked until you realise you have no idea how long a monster’s life span is, how long it takes a monster to reach old age and exactly what stage of aging Gerson is at. May i point out that NONE of the other monsters were mentioned?! That means that for all we know they weren’t born yet. But we have no idea. Were most of the monsters we know alive during the war? I’d have to say probably not but at the same time i have no substantial evidence either way. Another down side of this is that we don’t know how old any monster is in the game, how old the monsters are relative to eachother (like, is sans older than papyrus for example? we don’t know) and how old monsters are relative to Frisk. Because it puts an entirely new spin on everything if the only reason Frisk was called kid and my child was because they were younger than 100, for example, which was the age bracket of a child in their eyes. But we also don’t know Frisk’s age so who the hell knows anything? 

Let’s sum this up

The point of this game is that we don’t have reference for ANYTHING so that we can fill in the details our self. It gives a fan infinite freedom to customise the experience however they want. What this has resulted in is a large community of differing opinions about everything, with everything being technically valid which some consider bad but i just consider fascinating. It’s the best of all worlds really. I hate how vague things are at times when i want a canonically pure origin point for an argument, but i really shouldn’t complain. It’s beautifully done to be honest. And if you never asked these questions you’d never even know how sneaky it is. That’s how good it is. 

So yeah. Time. Undertale seems to have an issue with it.