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ProfessorProf posted:I'll video it if someone seconds the request. I'm going through medical stuff myself, for the first time in my life, and it's been eye opening how fragile your health can be.
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Apr 22, 2017 04:50
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I dropped away from this thread to reread the previous one, and have come to the firm conclusion that this thing is really, really long. And that's about the only firm conclusion I've come to. There were some theories I came in with that I wanted to find clues for, but I couldn't. First, that Asumu is actually alive. She'd make a great villian, but I can't find any hint of that anywhere. Second, that the riddle was already solved. The only hint there is the one time we see three bars of gold, but there's no hint about who found the gold. If it was Krauss who found it, basically nothing changes. Some people talked in thread as if they were sure Shannon found it, but I didn't see any evidence for that. Third, that the red text about the number of people on the island is broken by somebody living on a boat in the secret harbor. They're only "on the island" for a few minutes to carry out their part of the scheme, and so aren't counted at the time the red text is given. Alas, a beautiful theory slain by a complete lack of clues. There's actually one thing I did find out: Beatrice is Shannon (sort of). I came to this conclusion because we do know a little about Beatrice, and only Shannon can fit. We know Beatrice didn't exist six years ago, but was still sinned against by Battler, who forgot his promise (I'm paraphrasing the red, which I know I shouldn't, but it keeps this readable) We also know clues must be presented, so there needs to be a clue about the promise. And there is, exactly one, from the start of Ep 3, when people have just arrived on the island: Jessica: "Shannon. By the way, what was Battler like six years ago? Remember any interesting episodes?" Shannon: "Let's see... I'm sure that he said something like this when he left. 'I'll be back, <see you again>. I'll surely come for you riding a white horse'." And then he didn't come back for six years. Six years that Shannon spent on the island, where she says she feels trapped. I'd call that a forgotten promise that'll upset her. But that promise isn't tied to Beatrice. Well, we've seen how a witch gets created: a person is very, very unhappy in real life and needs to believe in magic as an escape, to keep themselves sane. We see this in both Ange and Maria. With Ange, we even see it end, then see her slide back into it when she's under the pressure of being hunted. Shannon, after the broken promise, would have been in the right situation to create a witch herself. Instead, she borrowed one (which Kinzo and Natsuhi do as well), the legendary witch of the island and Kinzo's past, Beatrice. Servants seem to have thought Beatrice existed for long before Shannon, so just as when Natsuhi was pressed hard enough she started having tea with imaginary people, Shannon started seeing Beatrice, who she may have already believed in. I should stress this isn't speculation; at the start of Ep 2, from Shannon's point of view, we see her having conversations with Beatrice and even making a deal with her. Of course, Shannon isn't Natsuhi, so instead of believing she's Beatrice's equal, she sees herself as furniture, a servant, who follows orders. And Beatrice tells her to kill. The other servants, and even Nanjo, who believe in Beatrice, listen to her. I'm not saying she's the source of all murders, except maybe Ep 1; it's clear there are other killers and even other plots going on. And in Ep 5, it's clear the change in game master changed the game entirely. What about George? Would this newly engaged, and now very happy, girl still need Beatrice around? Unfortunately, yes. If you go the flashback giving us the first look at their romance, Eva makes a point of grabbing Shannon and telling her that no servant girl is nearly good enough for her son. George never defies his family, but Battler has, by breaking off with them. One promise means a lot more than the other.
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May 10, 2017 16:27
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ZiegeDame posted:Point of order, the red truth is Six years ago, no person called Beatrice existed for [Battler]. Right, you remind me of a point I wanted to make: in Ep 1 when Battler is asking everybody if Beatrice exists, they always says "Beatrice 'exists' " with single quotes around the 'exist'. Beatrice has no physical body, but people's belief in her makes her 'exist' and effect the world. She's still a piece, I guess you could say. The opposite of your example of stopping posting and appearing dead: actually being dead but still able to post. ZiegeDame posted:I sympathize with all your points, believe me. However, at this point it is all but certain that alternate names/identities/personas are involved here. The only way to break EVA's web at the end of EP 3 without violating Knox's 1st is if Shannon is dead or Kanon is dead (or any [Name] is Dead really) does not preclude the named person's body still being alive under a different name. This doesn't have to mean an actual split personality, though it does imply a certain level of compartmentalization. Say for example that I stopped posting forever, never used the internet again, and lived the rest of my life in the woods. You might be able to say in such a case that 'ZiegeDame is dead' yet I would still be capable of murdering unsuspecting wildlife for lunch. On the side, I'm not sure you need an alternate personality to break that red (it would do the job, of course). The harder one for me is when Kinzo, and there can't be a mistake about it being him, shoots people, when we know he died over a year ago. Either somebody rigged an animatronic killing machine out of his corpse or the name has moved on.
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May 10, 2017 23:24
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EagerSleeper posted:Reads to me as Maria doing a 'wink wink nudge nudge' sort of deal with the person that she knows is actually Beatrice. I thought the same thing, though I'm trying not to find confirmation bias in every line now.
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May 11, 2017 00:25
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Jessica is my second choice for Beatrice: somebody on the island six years ago, who would care about a promise Battler made, so they can be sinned against. Not many characters actually fit that. This thread hasn't nearly as much time to pick apart the stories, particularly once they're complete, so I'd expect different theories. On the other hand, that big dump of red text by Lambda, that hit every past arc, must have dynamited a bunch of speculation when it first came out. The last episode almost felt like the author striking back at Natsuhi theories.
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May 16, 2017 01:53
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CottonWolf posted:We're missing a possibility there. It's possible that Battler's promise wasn't to whoever is now Beatrice, and they're acting on behalf of the promisee. It's hard to see how that would work (outside of Shannon acting for Kanon or vice versa) but I'm pretty sure it's not been ruled out. I thought we had red that Beatrice was sinned against, or Battler's sin personally hurt her, not that she was outraged by a sin against somebody else. If that restriction is lifted, Kanon becomes a candidate. A really good one. A related point: when Battler tells Beatrice to say that people only died because of his sin, she can't. That tells us there are multiple murder conspiracies. Just in case somebody thought they might get out alive.
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May 16, 2017 23:00
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ZiegeDame posted:Declining to answer is not the same as being unable to answer. Five minutes later she flips the game board and tricks Battler into negating his own existence, so she'd clearly run out of patience with helping Battler figure poo poo out. They aren't the same, but she's trying to hammer on Battler there, and I'd expect her to say it if she could. And cackle. I think it's enough to count as a Clue.
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May 17, 2017 00:09
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Erika just likes punching people, even when there's no point to it. I'd guess the elder sister is the Beatrice legend, the one put forward by Kinzo and conflated with the island's reputation for evil spirits. The younger one is Kinzo's illegitimate daughter, the 1967 Beatrice. However, I'm not clear if they're supposed to be sneaking around a real world mansion, or in the meta world the witches watch from, or in some other side dimension between the two. Neither should actually be alive at this time. And I have no idea who's point of view all that was supposed to be from. The two Beatrices, I guess? Shannon's personality is really changed in this arc. It's almost like Battler, as game master, is trying to force a happy ending on everybody. Except that would be entirely out of character for the story, and we have to get some murders soon, right?
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May 17, 2017 16:10
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Cyouni, that's exactly my episode 1 theory, though I haven't gone through and tested it. It bothers me that it could be Shannon or Kanon; Kanon's death is easier to fake, so I prefer him. And honestly, I think Shannon = Kanon has only been visible with the eye of faith for some time. But the servants are an unambiguous group of five: Kumasawa, Genji, Shannon, Kanon, Gohda.
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May 19, 2017 23:57
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ZiegeDame posted:To me, the fact that his name is so unremarkable means the fact that it was withheld until now was supposed to be a hint to think about what Kanon's real name could be. And I took the same evidence exactly the other way: the author was just demonstrating Kanon's personality, not dropping a clue. Or maybe the author hadn't decided at that point, and ended up not making it special. Given how long these things took to come out, it's hard to believe no plans changed along the way. So if we're more or less happy with a solution to Ep 1, what about Ep 2? That one seems harder.
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May 21, 2017 21:30
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For the chapel, I'd rather mess with the time frame, attacking this: From the time Maria received her key to the instant Rosa unsealed the envelope the next day, the key passed through no one's hands!!. Nothing says the first time that Rosa opened the envelope was the time we saw her do it. She could have committed the murders, gotten the key, locked the chapel, then put the key back. In the morning she's told of the murders and again gets the key. I prefer that to a second chapel key, because the murderer would have no reason to destroy an duplicate key, except to set up a puzzling red statement. Option 2 works, but I'd like to keep the murder conspiracies as small as possible, and I'm not sure why the servants would work with Rosa. For Jessica and Kanon, as you say, there are a number of keys floating around. Not really a locked room. For Kumasawa and Nanjo, I think there are larger problems. While we don't have to accept what we see in the servants' room, we do need to accept Battler's view. And he does see servants run in and lie about seeing supernatural stuff. Why? Maybe I'm being forced back on all the servants (aside from the already dead ones) being in on the plot. It also solves the (less important) problem of how the chapel scene was set up - the servants helped. But it raises the question of why they'd work for Rosa, who they don't really know or like. As Rosa is our chief suspect, her having the keys to Natsuhi's room solves that room. Do we accept the death of everybody by the end of the story? Do we need to explain who kills Rosa? A servant, getting revenge? Battler, with his viewpoint hidden from us? Maria, in a shootout with Mommy? After that, how does the last person die? I'd be tempted by "a wounded Kanon, who dies later, after a murderous rage to avenge Jessica," but we have red that he was killed in Jessica's room already. If you twist "killed" to "fatally wounded" he could do it, making me wonder if the original Japanese was more ambiguous. There's one additional puzzle. At the beginning Kyrie sees somebody who looks like Beatrice, as do the servants. I don't trust the servants' viewpoint at all, but Kyrie isn't one sucked into the legend of the Golden Witch. Is her viewpoint untrustworthy? Was somebody dressed up as Beatrice? Why? If we're making Rosa the main killer, then possibly Rosa? It would be hard to arrange an 18th person, so it's got to be somebody in disguise, and that's something I wouldn't want to try to pull on Kyrie - she seems to easily be the smartest person on the island. I suppose the Beatrice we see could be Rosa, trying to fool the servants, only accidentally seen by Kyrie. She wants the Beatrice disguise to convince them to kill for her. Hard to believe anybody could pull off that impersonation, but it pretty much has to be somebody in disguise.
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May 21, 2017 23:33
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I missed Natsuhi's door being locked from the inside. Then somebody hiding does seem the best solution. But whom?
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May 22, 2017 04:16
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Under the bed would be ok, right? The room wasn't searched (I think).
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May 22, 2017 05:18
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Qrr posted:I don't really understand what the limits are on Knox's 8th. For example, when we see someone "unlock" a door in the narrative, and we later theorize that they were pretending to unlock it and it was never really locked, is that a violation of the 8th since we don't have evidence that they were lying? How far can we go outside of the story as we saw it? Especially when most of the evidence we were presented with is unreliable, due to unreliable narrator/Knox's 9th. I think back to Knox's original intention: a mystery has to be fair (which underlies most of the rules). This one is, I think, no SHOCKING TWIST! that comes out of nowhere. You've got to give the reader a chance, so they fail by making their own mistakes, not because they weren't given critical information. If that's right, then the door unlocking is fine: everybody knows a door can be locked and unlocked. Saying that Krauss has learned to throw a silver stake with perfect accuracy and such strength that it can crack a human skull is not ok.
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May 22, 2017 14:49
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I'm not going to argue against anybody's pet theory, but I don't see the point of Shannon = Kanon. Does it solve any of the mysteries?
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May 23, 2017 01:24
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Anybody who thinks Kinzo, Krauss, and Natsuhi are live and let live free thinkers hasn't been reading the same story as me. Natsuhi in particular worships at the altar of tradition, even when it sucks for her. That itself doesn't disprove S=K, but you need to do better than "everybody knows but pretends they don't."
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May 23, 2017 16:52
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EagerSleeper posted:There's been a lot of back and forth in between characters (I think it was Meta Battler and Beatrice?) about the face issue. It was determined possible that a person pretending to have a smashed face could be hiding amongst the truly dead bodies. We have red that all dead bodies belong to whom they seem to belong. The "body" can be a person playing dead, but it can't be somebody else's body made up to look like them. Beatrice said it first, and Lambda extended it to all games. I have a meta suspicion that there won't be any correct answers where one revelation solves a large number of mysteries. I think the author wants us to work through problems in ones and twos, not just say "Oh, same solution."
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May 23, 2017 21:58
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I took the payments as evidence of a second conspiracy, rather than a larger single one. Eva feels bad that she's going to murder everybody..... But maybe Shannon found the gold and turned some into cash. A larger problem: the code for the safe deposit was 11280715, right? That's Battler's birthday paired with another, cliff baby's I assume. Who knew that?
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May 24, 2017 01:03
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ZiegeDame posted:That's a pretty big assumption there, buddy. Yea, I'm just guessing. But it's not just somebody's birthday; we ruled out everybody's birthday, even Ange. Cliff baby is the only person left I could come up with. No, I suppose it could be 1967 Beatrice. Beato doesn't get a birthday, I suppose. You forget stuff over a 1000 years.
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May 24, 2017 04:02
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witchcore ricepunk posted:Is this scene a hint towards Kinzo and Beatrice 2's relationship? Regardless, it's all really unsettling... I can get why Battler would be creeped out, but if the Kinzo parallel holds I'm more creeped out by him. I thought this too. Apparently that's the cape of bad judgement he inherited from Kinzo. Maybe even creepier if, as I suspect, Beatrice 67 is Battler's mother.
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May 24, 2017 16:23
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There's a random Kinzo portrait that I think should be Kanon. Now that would be a plot twist: Kanon=Kinzo.
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May 26, 2017 13:49
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I had assumed Erika was created by Bern just for the occasion, that she wasn't a real person. This presents her as a real person who, what, was found by Bern and magically teleported to the island? It probably doesn't matter for mystery solving purposes, and if I had read the earlier works, it might make more sense. Once again, the author is very good at taking a nasty character and giving them understandable, even sympathetic, reasons for being the way they are. If Erika admits that she's not a great detective, then she needs to admit she might have been wrong to push her boyfriend away. And not to reignite gender debate, but is Erika talking about two unhappy affairs, or did "girl" flip to "boy" during that story?
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May 28, 2017 18:46
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It's interesting to see how Battler sets up a game with murders, something the character back in the first arc would have never done. That's assuming this does represent a murder that'll show up for real in the morning. If it isn't, Eva may kill Shannon tonight. As for Jessica, eesh. I don't like her chances. First, her romance feels like Kanon was the only available option, not love. More importantly, George is finished with college, employed, and has a father who wasn't upset last time Shannon got an engagement ring. Jessica has um, yea, nothing. Kanon even beats himself up as furniture daring to think about love. Chick Beatrice has no chance, since that romance is one sided. I doubt Battler has a clue.
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May 29, 2017 15:26
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My only question is why Kyrie got so hung up on Rudolf.
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May 31, 2017 16:05
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ZiegeDame posted:The oldest Rosa can possibly be is 34, as she was still in middle school (grades 7-9) when she met Beatrice in 1967. Something I picked up on a re-read: Ronove gives the 1967 date for the conversation between Beatrice and Kinzo in the hidden mansion. We're given none for Rosa's meeting with Beatrice, other than Rosa's vague "about 20 years ago". Exactly 20 years ago would be 1966, which clearly couldn't be right, so it was probably 1967 or not much after that, but no date is given in red. Edit: which is why I now suspect Battler is Beatrice's son, and cliff baby. No real evidence for the first, other than "drama." I laid out the second in a previous post. BurningStone fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Jun 1, 2017 |
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Jun 1, 2017 14:26
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You have to assume Ericka lost the detective's role so Knox's rules can be violated somewhere. Unfortunately it's already too easy to say "that didn't really happen" and losing our one objective viewpoint doesn't help. S=K looks in serious trouble to me, with red that they're in different rooms. And even if you dodge that, you need to explain why everybody thinks they can be in different rooms.
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Jun 14, 2017 17:40
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The "everybody's pretending" explanation is in trouble, I suppose I should say. Since Krauss, Hideyoshi, and Erika talked about putting Shannon in one room and Kanon in another, you need to explain why they think that's possible. If there's really only one person, why isn't anybody wondering why the other one isn't in their room? I'm sure there's a way around it; I hope it's better than throwing out entire scenes.
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Jun 14, 2017 21:20
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tiistai posted:It's almost as if EP6 is trying to make some kind of a point by taking away the only objectively accurate viewpoint, literally the only thing you can trust Then EP 6 consists of Battler saying "Acknowledged", what, four times in red and nothing else. Even what he's responding to isn't trustworthy. I know you've read this before. If that's the level of small bombs logic the author has to stoop to in order to keep puzzling his audience it's not worth following this. So far I've been reading with the eye of love, as this story would say, trusting that the mysteries can be reasonably solved by a reader. If what Eager Sleeper says is correct, and you're implying he is, this might be a story, but it can't be a mystery.
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Jun 15, 2017 15:39
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Why do you think Rudolf and Krauss are accomplices instead of fooled by the fake death? The text made a big deal of saying that even Erika's examinations weren't perfect. Nanjo has been notably absent, even though he was immediately called every other time there was a body. That suggests a change from previous games, right?
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Jun 16, 2017 22:09
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Cyouni posted:The specific line referencing that: I try to forget about that, since the witch side would win trivially: don't say anything until the deadline, forcing the detective to pick their blue blindly. Then break as much of it as possible with new red truths and have time expire before the detective can get replacement blue theories out of their mouth. Honestly, given enough time and tries, the detective side should always win. The best the witch can do it frustrate them into giving up.
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Jun 16, 2017 23:49
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"Then allow me to impose the same rule on you. At the time the game ends, the human side will be granted one minute to counter the mysteries it has been given. If even a single mystery has not been countered within that time, it becomes the witch's victory, and that game is over. It would be such a killjoy to have the game stopped for lengthy consideration, right?"
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Lisonfire posted:Maybe... just maybe you can find meaningful information from non-objective viewpoints? Since there's no such thing as a perfectly objective viewpoint, I should hope so. It's a lot harder when you're presented with outright fabrication or delusion, which has been the issue this entire story. Which is why everybody has different theories here, right? There are, for instance, lots of scenes that go against S=K; everybody needs to decide if they believe them. I'm hoping that at the end there are answers, but I'm increasingly suspicious that we just get a lot of fan theories and little about the author's intended solutions.
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Jun 17, 2017 03:52
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Lisonfire posted:I think "he (an krauss, and Nanjo, and everyone else) conveniently behaved irrationally in such a way that he didn't realize his son was alive despite him having no wounds and being breathing, such that he could later get out and presumably confuse Erika, and yet this was not planned at all and Just Happened" is ridiculous, yes. Sure, I can't actually prove with hard evidence either way, but don't you think, if that was the solution, that it would be in bad faith for a mystery story? Battler wasn't treated any differently than any of the other five. Nanjo wasn't called for any of them. No inspection of any of the bodies was mentioned. No obviously fatal wound was described. Not even a single cause of death is given. If such behavior can only be explained by accomplices, shouldn't you be extending to all the deaths being fake, not just Battler's? I really doubt that I could fake being dead well enough to fool even an ordinary person, but it's a common conceit in detective fiction (particularly locked room stories). We can be virtually certain that there are fake deaths in some of the earlier episodes, and apparently nobody but Nanjo can detect them. Why is it just this episode that's so unacceptable? I agree that Krauss and Rudolf may very well be accomplices, but these episodes backload their information so heavily I've learned to go easy on the theories until we get all the information. Right now, unless you're going to say "because witches", a lot of what we've seen people do makes zero sense, which is the way all the episodes have worked. Personally, my guess is that Battler is bad at playing the witch side too, and is making an utterly muddled game board, where lots of things won't make sense, until he hopelessly tangles himself in a logic error. At some point we'll probably have the witches run through his errors and laugh at him. But that's just playing off our running theme of Battler being earnest but incompetent, and thinking the author had a reason to pick this episode to start talking about logic errors.
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Jun 17, 2017 07:24
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ZiegeDame posted:Only that, as on of Kinzo's orphans, it would not be unreasonable for him to be on Kinzo's island. Especially during the family conference when they would want to have more servants on hand. Or maybe they'd just want to ship in a few extra non-servant kids to keep Jessica and Battler entertained while the adults do their adult stuff. (I literally just thought up that one while writing this post.) And that super awkward meeting between Kanon and Battler at the start of Episode 1 suggests that they have met before and Battler doesn't remember. Sorry for the double post, but I tried the same line of reasoning and rejected it. In that same meeting Jessica says Kanon only came to the island two years previously. (Two? Less than six, at least). Everybody agrees Shannon has been around for ten years, and she's able to quote Battler's promise from memory, so I don't think we've had an identity swap either.
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Jun 17, 2017 07:29
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Battler is the best toy a witch could ask for. Twist him however you like and he comes back for more.
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Jun 17, 2017 17:32
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I'm puzzled by the red saying the chain can't be set from the outside, when just a few posts ago the game told us about devices that can do exactly that. The wire and pliers needed to make one are even in the room. Alternatively, if Battler just wants to be out and doesn't care about being subtle, the typhoon could put a tree branch through the window or even rip the entire roof off. But no, Battler has to be Battler: stupid and determined. Charges head first at a wall then complains it's unfair that the wall didn't break. I will say Erika has a novel way of finding the murderer: making sure it's you. Battler should claim that, as the one committing the murders, she's really playing the witch side now, and he's the detective. A post a little bit ago said something about liking the characters. Uh, no. Would you want to spend a weekend with the Ushiromiyas? Or go to a witches' tea party? The author does an excellent job of making unpleasant characters understandable, but they're still unpleasant. A thing that occurred to me after the discussions of the last week: who's telling this story? It comes up in literature sometimes: when you read something written in the third person, are you directly seeing events, or is their a narrator standing between you and the story, telling you about it? I'm in the latter camp, but it seems different interpretations are built into different readers and it's hard to change that feeling. Usually it doesn't matter, but here it does, because it makes you ask "If I'm lied to about a scene, who's doing the lying?" For me, it's the author. When Krauss punches goat-kun, I think the author is lying, not that Krauss is having some type of delusion or trying to fool me. On the other hand, we had a scene where Natsuhi is drinking tea and sees Beatrice with her, but the narrator switches to another viewpoint and shows she's alone. For that, I believe Natsuhi is delusional. It may not sound like a big deal, but a couple pages back somebody said that everything from the point of view of an accomplice is a lie. That took me back because, to me, the characters never present any information to me: the narrator/author does. So there's nothing inherently untrustworthy about the point of view character, but there is about the narrator. On the flip side, even if we have red text saying somebody isn't a killer, I don't trust information presented from their point of view. (Unless they're the detective. The author made that rule for himself and I'm trusting him to stick with it). I do think the story is best if the lies are minimal and detectable, so I try to trust as much non-supernatural stuff as possible. Likewise, I think the story is best if the number of accomplices is also kept to a minimum, so I can't swallow theories where the murders require a dozen of them. But I understand all that is my personal bias, my feelings about what would make the most entertaining and least cheating story. If anybody (everybody) disagrees, I don't see how I could possibly convince them. Even the position "Red truths can actually be lies," for instance. I think that would ruin the story and nobody would bother with an LP of it, but I can't prove it.
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Jun 19, 2017 17:48
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This episode sure seems to push S=K, and my trust in the author just took a huge drop. This is starting to feel like Lost, where the authors threw out mystery after mystery, until the audience realized they didn't have any coherent way of wrapping things up. Because S=K makes a lot of what we've seen nonsense. Here, from the red archive, is the red from Ep 3's first twilight murders (the chain of six locked rooms): "...Hmph. The same as last time. There are five, one for each servant." (Referring to the amount of master keys in this game.) "In other words, the six closed rooms form one massive closed room, and all of the master keys as well as the individual room keys are shut up inside it...! Furthermore, all of the doors and windows on the six rooms are normal. No device exists which can lock them without a key, such as an auto-lock. *cackle*cackle* What do you think? It's beautiful, isn't iiiiiiiiiiiit??? Uhhyahhyahhyaaahh!" "Kinzo, Genji, Shannon, Kanon, Gohda, and Kumasawa—these six are all dead!" "I'll answer. There is no one hiding in the six rooms!" I can see how you could count a person with two personalities as a double kill. But there's still only one body to be in a room and carry a master key so all the other numbers are off and the red is a lie. Maybe not a big lie, or a critical lie, but a lie. The diagram explaining the murder shows six rooms, so that's a lie too. This is without worrying about smaller problems, like how Natsuhi could ever tolerate anything but traditional gender and behavior (or non-traditional anything, really). So the author might very well say S=K. I'm kind of expecting it after this update. But it greatly drops my opinion of this story when viewed as a mystery.
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Jun 21, 2017 17:05
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resurgam40 posted:Is this such an enormous stretch, though? Because there is a way that one body can register as two corpses, the way the game presents, without supernatural shenanigans. Recall the order that the corpses were found- Shannon found first and Kanon found last- and no guards were left in the room, so the party of discoverers moved as one, and none of them being designated detectives, all of them had to depend on Nanjo's word that the corpses were corpses. Thus a potential plan to perform these murders mundanely emerges: after Shannon is discovered with her key and the party leaves the room, Shannon gets up and leaves the mnansion while everyone else farts around with the Mansion doors, changes into Kanon and picks up the chapel key (or had it all along), books it to the chapel, locks that door and plays dead. Voila: "two" people dead, with one live body. That's fine for fooling people, but red is supposed to be objectively true, not true for one person's perspective. Otherwise "witches are killing people with magic" is a red truth.
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Jun 21, 2017 17:32
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Lisonfire posted:The person holding the keys is two servants and therefore holds two keys. They literally have two jobs and both jobs are servants. This follows the red just fine. No, because they can only be one servant at at time. They get to pick, but we never see ShKanon walking around in a beret and dress at once. If it's Shannon right now, she can hold a key, but she can't be holding two at once without violating the red. So the 5th key would be held by nobody. But we still need five people to hold the five keys. And I don't think the keys are even the hardest part, the murder rooms are. I realized there's some more relevant red for them: "The six died instantly! By instant death, I mean that as soon as they were attacked, they became incapable of action." "Well, it might still have taken them several seconds or minutes to die in the complete sense of the word. But regardless, it was completely impossible for them to take any actions of their own will. In that sense, I can confirm that they suffered instant deaths!" To be clear, I didn't hunt through the story to find a case where S=K causes problems; this one just occurred to me off the top of my head. For instance, Shannon dies well before Kanon in Ep 1, so there may be problems there. I'm sure you can find some way around all these objections. What disappoints me, if S=K, is what it shows about the author's priorities: the locked room murders aren't as important as being able to shout "Plot Twist!" I understand some readers won't care, but for me it hurts the story quite a lot.
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Jun 22, 2017 03:10
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oath2order posted:There are better and worse arguments for and against SnK that I've read in this thread, but this is by far the worse on any side. "It's not true because if it's true the writer must be lovely" is just a cop out, plain and simple. You misunderstand my objection. I never said it was lovely or pointless. I said it damaged the mystery. That's allowed; this story is a lot of things (arguably too many things) and there's no law that the part I care about has to get priority. You could say the story is really about abuse, and S=K (and =B) is great for that. Certainly the most powerful scenes are about abuse. I personally don't find them fun to read, even if I admire the skill required to create them. I'm following this, and even reread episodes, for the mystery. If S=K (and the tone of the witches' discussion here pretty much confirms it) then I suspect the author has fallen into a mystery trap that isn't on Knox's list: characters should not act unnaturally just for the sake of making the mystery mysterious. I'm particularly thinking of the people who have been living with ShKanon for an extended period now, not just a weekend. When S=K was first proposed, I tried rereading, to see, if that were the case, would everybody's behavior make sense. And I just can't see the characters acting as they'd have to. Remember this story is set thirty years ago, with characters from upper class and even aristocratic backgrounds. And they're all supposed to be kind and open minded about gender switching? This pack of bastards? Really? Aren't they supposed to be the ones who dished out the abuse in the first place? If the Ushiromiyas are so nice, how'd we get multiple personalities to start with?
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Jun 22, 2017 06:55
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 13:52 |
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The best I can see for Battler is a bluff: say in red that Kanon isn't in the locked room where he's supposed to be, then say in regular text "so he can switch places with me." Basically what Erika did to put Kinzo in Natsuhi's bed. It's pure bluff, hoping the detective side won't ask if the switch is possible, but it worked for Erika.
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Jun 22, 2017 22:02
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