[Renall]

Originally Posted by Wanderer

However, I'm not convinced that the magic murder scenes are, as they are directly used to explain plot advancements in Dawn's 1986-Rokkenjima story, complete with Gaap teleporting Eva's corpse into the VIP room from outside. Yes, we all know they are not actually killed until Erika gets to them, but that's normal; a false magical narrative is a legitimate gamemaster's trick for trying to convince their opponents that witches exist.

Problem #1: If we accept this, they're woefully incomplete. We're not shown how Battler died. Even the throwaway killings in ep3's First Twilight were briefly explained with a magic solution. The only thing we get is basically BATTLER euphemistically saying he got himself done with, and BATTLER is not a magic character.

Problem #2: Chick-Beato's existence makes no sense in the story outside of a meta context. Therefore any scene involving her fighting Natsuhi can't possibly make any sense. That means, at best, only the Rosa/Maria, Eva, and Kyrie killings are actually explained in the text if the "magical" scenes appear in it and the "meta" scenes don't. So basically either the meta stuff's in there, or the magic stuff isn't. Well... either that or several magic scenes were removed and at least one wholly replaced.

Problem #3: The setup of the First Twilight in ep6 seems to present a narrative puzzle that is more impactful if the successive discovery of the bodies hits the reader just as suddenly as it hits the characters. If Eva is killed outside and then warped into a closed room, the story seems to lose something. I'd argue the same about Banquet honestly, but we know why that magic scene was in there and it was really not for the benefit of Ryukishi's narrative.

In other words, if it was a purely meta-event, why does it go out of the way to create a fantasy narrative logically consistent with the mystery narrative?

It's a valid question. I think it's reasonable to assume that magic scenes probably do show up in the text (I usually lean that way), but there are a lot of problems with that hypothesis even now. For example, explaining why Legend wouldn't have them when Turn does. Had the magic stuff started in Banquet, at least we'd have a different-author excuse. On the other hand, if the magic stuff is fundamental to the narrative, we run into problems with Legend, Banquet, and End, where you could strip out the magical narrative and retain the mystery more or less intact (as opposed to Turn and Alliance, where you really can't). With Dawn I don't think we saw enough of the original narrative to know, and there's no telling how many forgeries, meta-sequences, and random things were pooled together to form Requiem and Twilight.

Remember, we can't simply say Legend is an establishing story with magic scenes to come in later works, because:

• We have no idea if it was the first message bottle story written, located, or publicized, and much more important...
• The author had no way of knowing that Legend would be found first or found at all.

Unless, of course, the author of the message bottles had very strict control over which stories actually got published and could therefore both ensure Legend survived and was the first to get out.

It's a serious problem. Legend would be grossly incongruous with the rest of the series if it didn't come first. But the story we're told about the provenance of the message bottles makes it absolutely impossible to guarantee that it would be read first. It's not merely a question of a story being lost like Land; without Legend, literally none of the other stories make sense. So Legend is both first and, if magic scenes are integral to the text, completely different from every other story in not having any. Something's very wrong with that.

The only other solution is that Legend did have magic scenes, and the story skipped them (as when Shannon sees the butterflies and the story immediately cuts away) or edited them (like Kanon's death scene, which perhaps could have been longer originally).

Earlier on, Erika remarks how boring the love scenes are. After the first twilight she acts as though she's been asleep. Obviously something happened on the game board during the first twilight, which she slept through; she just didn't care to watch it.

That's true, and it does seem to lend credence to that. Erika probably wouldn't ignore something she believed contained an actual hint.

Whoa. Doesn't this pretty much confirm that episode 4's 1998 Ange was Hachijou fiction?

Ohhhh boy... Doesn't this mean the meta-narrative was written too?

It's still a bit uncertain, because it's hard to tell when episode 6 Ikuko/Featherine is truly speaking as "Hachijou Touya" and when she's speaking as Ryuukishi himself.

I don't think you want to take anything the meta characters say about the content of the fiction too authoritatively. After all, there's no way to know that what Featherine reads or writes, or what Bern and Lambda toy with, is actually the R-Prime fiction itself. Bern doesn't see forgeries as forgeries, remember, but as reality fragments. That would be a very different sort of narrative, at least to her perception, than a book would.