[AuraTwilight]

I won't claim to be a mystery veteran. I would agree as much that, reading both sets of "rules", they do seem to carry different intentions. The Knox rules seem more concerned with "fairness" to the reader, and the Van Dine rules, while also concerned with fairness, are more concerned with avoiding literary cliche'. I don't want to just completely abandon the literal definition of the words, though. Shannon IS a servant, and a theory with her as culprit violates that rule, whether she'd been given narrative weight or not.

You're not grasping the fact that literal definition is not why Van Dine wrote those rules. For instance, the Knox rule of "no Chinamen" doesn't mean that you can never have a story where a Chinese person is the culprit, merely that you shouldn't have a story that blames the mysterious foreign guy no one cares about. Same with the servant rule. People care about Shannon, she's important to other characters, and she is a figure that can be played for tragedy and dramatic impact. It's all about avoiding the use of SCAPEGOATS.

Really? Most of them seem fairly straightforward. Umineko even simplifies the rules to avoid the nonsense that would've arisen from the original wordings in order to serve it's plot better. What are people mistaking with them? (No, really, I'm asking, because I dunno if I'm guilty of it, too...)

It's not necessary how they're worded so much as how they're applied. People thoughtlessly use them as proscriptive rules that can never be broken and never think about the SPIRIT of the rules, instead focusing on their WORDING. A mindset encouraged in us in the Red Truth, so not entirely the fandom's fault. Ryukishi also fails to properly explain a lot of rules to people not familiar with them.

On the one hand, I mostly agree with that. On the other hand, maybe it WAS a mystery! Just ... a bad one, and Bern fashions her fantasy scenes with "and then she went CRAAAAAZY" instead of Beato's "Magic circle lasers pew pew!" because she still has the bitter taste of Higurashi in her mouth. XD

But it's literally not a mystery. There's nothing to solve. We watch the culprit going "Bang bang bang".

Eh, thats essentially my idea of what happened as well. But that doesn't make Eva the culprit. My issue is that Ange (like most of the people in japan in the story I guess) would think that Eva was the culprit already. So coming out clean about the issue would just be a net positive for her.

I wasn't saying Eva was the culprit; read me again. I'm saying that EP7 Tea Party is basically what Eva BELIEVES, but not the TRUTH.