I love the how YTTD follows along the same delema of the Ship of Theseus.
For context, the ship of theses is a popular thought experiment about a hypothetical ship that thesesus. It's an old ship, so it slowly receives repaires and part replacements. One day they replace a floor board or mend a sail. And this continues until none of the original aspects of the ship remain.
The question it poses is this.
Is it the same ship as the one Theseus sailed? If not then when did it become a different ship. When none of its original components remain, or when teh first was replaced. Somewhere in between maybe?
What if someone collected all of the original components and rebuilt the ship. Would the reconstructed ship or the repaired ship be the original?
YTTD has several occasions where this comes into play.
In the room of lies reko is replaced. Like the ship, her original (and outdated) parts (old memories) are put together to make ¡not! Reko. Like the reconstructed ship she is made from a discontinued version of herself. And her claim to be the original is valid. When you save our reko you choose to save the reconstructed ship. You save tye most recent version of her, the one that's has healed and had time to repair itself.
In this way YTTD says that the repaired Verizon is still the original.
But then there's the banquet and the matter of the dummies.
In the dummies all but one part is replaced. Only their memories of who they are remain. Their bodies however are fundamentally unhuman. They are not physically the same being who was alive, but instead share their memories and consciousness.
In this case we pounder if we can call them human. And in the case of the game ,we don't. We acknowledge that they're alive, but at the end of the day they remain unhuman in nature.
Then the banquet happens. We learn that parts of people have been replaced with non biological parts. And that (as with the rest of the game) majority rules. YTTD determines that as soon as you are majority replaced parts, you are no longer the original being.
But this is not cut in stone. The dummies while not physically the same are mentally the same. They are mentally human. I doubt midori is counting their consciousness in their human or not equation. Weighing each part of the body against the non biological parts isn't the most fulfilling solution.
How we determine humanity within yttd is important to how we move throughout the game. Especially with how we view the characters.
I still don't know how to really feel about all of this. But it's fun to examine.
Note: I am going to post this on Tumblr and amino.
