[Renall]

Originally Posted by GuestSpeaker

Sigh, to summarise:
Re personality death and Kinzo:
Ryu defined personality death as meaning "never to act again", assuming that applies to all games, then it is valid in my opinions as a form of death ONLY if the characters are viewed as truly separate (and I believe that Ryu intended them to be, whether that is valid or not) and it was proved that personality exists. Kanon was known by Battler to be a thing, and Kinzo was never proved separate to Goldsmith. He was also never shown to have a body which acted after his declared death in any proven fashion.

Shkanon was never "shown" either. Battler saw Kanon and Battler saw Shannon, but neither he nor the reader ever sees the one becoming the other, and in fact the fantasy scenes in ep1-4 try to show us the opposite.

Also, and I just have to keep pointing this out: You can't define personality death as a personality "never acting again" or never being able to act again, because in literally every instance we have of personality death it's possible for a personality to come back and they do come back. If you can (and do!) come back, your personality isn't really dead. Dead things don't come back to life. Calling it "death" is cheapening death. "Death" is when Shannon kills her body. Shannon personality-dying is just going to sleep. At best, she's dormant and could return under some circumstances, but may not; when she shoots herself in the forehead, she's D-E-A-D. There is a difference, so it's unfair to describe both as the same thing.

And it's doubly unfair to go to lengths to describe (inadequately) how Shannon/Kanon/Beatrice functions and when and how it is personality-alive or personality-dead, and then turn around and say "and also if a person gets amnesia, their original personality is dead too, even if their memories could come back and do." It's the same thing; Tohya may well be a distinct personality from Battler, but Battler isn't dead. Tohya describes his relationship with Battler's memories as if to suggest that Battler is dormant within him, not that Battler is an external force imposing himself upon Tohya. If Battler is dormant, and parts of him can resurface, and merely talking about things only Battler would remember cause Tohya psychological distress (he doesn't remember Rokkenjima on Oct. 5 1986, so it shouldn't harm him in any way), Battler is still there. If he's still there, and still capable of influencing Tohya, then he isn't dead.

He might not be fully alive either, but he isn't dead. We need to use... you know... a word other than dead to describe it. But if we do that, we can't call someone dead in red. And that's ultimately the sole reason Ryukishi did say "dead:" to cheat. He could use other, better words to describe Shkanon's dormancy or Battler's amnesia, but doing so would force him to not say "dead" and give away the game. That doesn't justify misusing a word for dramatic license, and believe you me I give dramatic license a lot of leeway.

As for resurrection with magic:

I always assumed they were either lying about it, or someone was just pretending. If Kanon truly is separate from Shannon or Yasu, even the best impersonation is not truly him. I can paint a forgery of a painting on the same canvas, and it can be impossible to distinguish them, but it is still a forgery. This is only a valid move in Umineko because if I declare in red "This painting is destroyed" and then show it to you, you have the ability to know something is up. Besides which she never even had to look like Kanon, because blind people have no resistance to magic (I wonder if you can say in that game she stayed with Jessica until the bomb went off)

Ship of Theseus Paradox. Also...

...How can you distinguish Kanon from an individual who looks, acts, and behaves exactly like Kanon, when Kanon has no individualized self to begin with? What is the difference between "Kanon" and "Beatrice dressed as Kanon using Kanon's voice," particularly when the audience has no clear way of knowing one from the other? Before you go so far as to try to counter "Well Kanon behaves differently from Beatrice-Kanon sometimes," bear in mind that I could always argue that Kanon never exists and Beatrice-Kanon just sometimes behaves differently to avoid suspicion. There's no independently verifiable way to know the difference.

In the Jessica example, it isn't actually possible for Jessica to distinguish between Kanon and not-Kanon. I would argue, then, that in this case there is no distinction. Ergo, Kanon did in fact return, because Kanon is nothing more than an arbitrary social construct whose existence is solely based on perception of his existence. If one believes Kanon is present, Kanon is present. So again, it's wrong to say "Kanon can never come back to life" when in fact he does. If you turn around and say "Well it's somebody else acting exactly like Kanon under the perceptive parameters Jessica has available to her to tell that sort of thing, and the two just happen to be exactly the same but are distinguishable," I'm going to laugh at you, because there's no goddamn difference.

As for Evatrice being a valid example of a proven personality:

Yeah she had a lot of development, but by all reliable perspective she never actually existed. She was a fantasy, and therefore is not a valid part of this argument.

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Shannon and Kanon are a fantasy that by all reliable perspective never actually existed and I was under the impression they were a rather valid part of this argument.

If you mean "was seen by Battler," you're not really making a point here because absence of evidence to a reliable perspective is not evidence of absence; that is to say, Battler's perspective alone cannot prove Shannon and Kanon are the same person, only that we can't say they're different people. However, there is other evidence which supports that conclusion and we have to supplement the one with the other.

Likewise, we can't prove that a potentially criminal personality of Eva doesn't exist because Battler never saw her (except it's possible he did see that personality at the end when she shoots him, y'know), but we have evidence of all these bodies piling up and the narrative presents Eva with motive and opportunity to commit those crimes. We thus can theorize the existence of a "culprit Eva," even if it's possible that she didn't do it. In that sense, the possibility of an Eva-Beatrice is sufficient to create an alternate personality we could discuss in red, at least theoretically.