[ChaosDimension]

The problem I approached however is this: which are clues and which are red herrings? To this day, even with red text, there is still the matter of ironing out what to consider as empirically valid and which can be taken with a grain of salt. As you have said, we must dance to the tune of Ryukishi's clues, but that's more of necessity than habit or somesuch. As of Ep5 I still have no idea which to take as trues clues and which must be tossed out. With that in mind, I still find it difficult to seek the implications of his clues when I still don't know which are clues with vital implications.

But that's the beauty of this game, no theory is exactly the same as another person. Ryukishi is basically telling us, "tell me and everybody else what you think." Share and figure this out together. I think Ryukishi believes that there no wrong answer here, everyone has their viewpoints. Some people trust the red other people think its a tool that's advantageous to the witches. Myself, I believe the red is all a sham, language is pretty easily manipulated and with the right amount of word-twisting it can easily mean something different than what it really is trying to convey. Not to mention lost in translation(no offense to the translator).

This is why I'm willingly letting myself be led by the nose. As it stands I find that there is still not enough to go on, very few clues who's validity can be ascertained. I cannot as of yet seek the overaching implications of current information because we'd have an assload, then the problem of sorting them out from the false ones. With what we have we still need to stick to our metaworld assumptions because that is all we have to go with as of now.

So what you're basically saying is that you want the picture to on auto-mode and put it self together piece by piece then when it gets to about 90% then we should start theorizing? Isn't the whole point of the mystery novel getting clues and clues and trying to put it all together even if you only have 1% of the puzzle to work with? Sure the difficulty is about 7 episodes long but that's just an analogy for a huge ass puzzle. I think instead of holding back and waiting for your theory to be proven/disaproven(then reveal it or not) you should just throw it out there anyway. Who cares if you're wrong, I mean I had crazy ass theories every episode and they were disproven on the next one. But who says that I can't have a new theory when episode 6 hits?

In my opinion, seeking the implications of what Ryukishi is giving us is premature because... well he hasn't given us enough to work with yet. We are still dependent on what he brain produces, and we haven't been given enough definitive content to work it out.

See I thought that before pre-episode 5 but now, he's definitely giving us hints, real hints. By using Dine,Knox he is referencing great mystery authors, that probably means this story would be of the same caliber as theirs. And by referencing their commandments he is saying this will fullfill mystery fan's expectations. But technically saying that there's too little information to deduce the real culprit from what Ryukishi has given us is like looking down on the Ryukishi himself. Here Van Dine's #15

The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent — provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. By this I mean that if the reader, after learning the explanation for the crime, should reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in the face-that all the clues really pointed to the culprit — and that, if he had been as clever as the detective, he could have solved the mystery himself without going on to the final chapter. That the clever reader does often thus solve the problem goes without saying.

Basically what you're saying is Ryukishi is showing us a picture of a duck for 6 Episodes then bam Ep7, it really was a cow. I do not think Ryukishi would do that. So have more faith in the guy, the story could be solvable at episode 1 as it can be on episode 5, we don't need epsiode 7 and a half before we can truly know the culprit. We knew it from episode 1, he just threw some crazy shit at us to throw us off but he includes factual stuff too. It wouldn't be a mystery novel if he just gave us true facts and not throw curveballs at us wouldn't it?