Quote:
Creating the "greatest mystery" of all time in terms of difficulty is easy: "A man is dead. No one knows who he is. No one knows how he died. What happened?" This is the hardest possible mystery, because it's unsolvable with the information presented. Who was he? Why did he die? Did someone kill him? Who? Why? When?
But it's not really the "greatest" mystery in terms of quality, as we would probably have it. The greatest mystery would be one that is devious and hard to solve yet also eminently solvable. The writer - using red - restricts himself on purpose. In a mystery filled with fantasy elements, he must do so if he intends to present a solvable mystery.
This assumes, of course, that the work is a mystery, and that it is intended to be solvable. Just because Virgilia tells Battler he can solve it doesn't necessarily mean the story on the whole exists to be solved.
|
Yes, and this is not just something that relates to umineko, it's an universal rule.
Making an impossible to solve riddle or mystery is extremely easy. What is really hard to do is to create a riddle that completely looks as something impossible to solve while it's actually totally solvable.
This is a factor that should be considered whenever you try to find the solution to a riddle or a mystery. Sometimes I see theories that totally disregard this fact and propose scenarios taken out of the blue which, if were true, could have never been found logically.
This tells a lot of the esteem you have on the author.
If you think that the solution is something completely impossible to reach with the given hints, then it's as if you claim that the author just created an impossible to solve riddle, which is something extremely easy to do. And you don't need to be a great author to do something that easy.
However if you think that the solution can be reached through a reasoning grounded on the hints given, then you acknowledge that the author really thought it through a lot.
The best riddle is the one that makes you resign in frustration after many many times you've uselessly tried to solve it, and then when you learn how it is done you "facepalm" yourself and scream "OF COURSE!"
A not so good riddle is the one that you can solve easily, or the one that when you learn the solution just makes you think that it was lame and doesn't make you feel stupid because "really... that wasn't solvable".