[Jan-Poo]

Originally Posted by Kealym

There was a service door implied? Where?
All I remember was the implication from End that one MIGHT stumble upon the entrance near the chapel by mistake, though it would be unlikely.

We don't even know how that door is made, hell we don't even know if it's actually a door rather than a trap door, since there was no mention of any building (and a building would be hard to hide). At any rate the door is supposed to be locked and impossible to open unless you solve the complicated mechanism of the chapel.

As for the implied service door:

`......Also, take this key."

`"......What is this?"`\

`"It is a key to the underground VIP room. If you use this, you won't need to use the more complicated device."

Thi is said By Genji after Kinzo dies in front of Beatrice in EP7.

Well you could argue that it's the same door... anyway the important part is that you don't need to move the golden letters everytime to go to the underground.

Originally Posted by Renall

Yeah but this is the problem with Kanon narratively. He exists solely as a gimmick at worst and as an explanatory aspect of Yasu's personality at best. He may have been seen all of one time ever by anyone off Rokkenjima. But he's in the stories and he's prominently featured. So one of two things is gonna happen with him: Either he's going to turn out to have existed in Prime somehow but his existence is sketchy and suspicious (meaning it's a sign something's up with him in-story too), or he's going to turn out to have never existed in Prime and be even more suspicious.

He's underdeveloped to the point that there's no way you couldn't immediately find him suspect if you were an outside observer.

Frankly at this point I can only assume that "the servant Kanon" doesn't exist in prime, or at least he's never been a regularly hired fukuin servant.

There's an interesting bit in EP8 where the goats claim that Kanon doesn't exist. Jessica "defeats" them by saying that there are people who saw Kanon at the school's culture festival.
This tells us that in prime Jessica actually made Yasu pose as her boyfriend. But this also tells us that if this is the best she could do to prove Kanon's existence, then I guess there really isn't anything else.

There must be an official list of the victims who went missing in the Rokkenjima Incident, and obviously neither "Shannon" nor "Kanon" are in it. But there should be the name of the young maid who attended school for years in Niijima (probably Sayo Yasuda), and that people can testify was named Shannon.
Kawabata for example, there's just no way he doesn't know her. He supposedly ferried her back and forth from Rokkenjima to Niijima and viceversa for years on an almost daily basis.
The complete lack of interest in Shannon, Kanon and Yasu from Ange's part in 1998 is absolutely appaling and can only be explained by narrative manipulation.


At any rate it is almost inevitable to conclude that for everyone from outside the catbox Kanon is someone that isn't supposed to exist in those stories.

Originally Posted by Renall

This is, I think, kind of an issue with the writing. It's manipulation of information to the audience that the in-universe audience isn't dealing with. They would know this, but we're misled into assuming Kanon was some kind of real person because no suspicion is raised about him in non-1986 segments that reasonably should be. Even if we're supposed to be following along from the perspective of Battler/Toya somehow, and he doesn't know this for whatever reason, he could find it out very easily. So him not doing so is just kind of odd.

It's not some fatal flaw or anything, but it's kind of sloppy.

I don't think this is a flaw per se. Strategic cuts in the exposition, distorted perspective and such are pretty common. Movies like "the sixth sense", "the others", "fight club" and so on made use of selective expositions to what the characters are going through, because it would be pretty easy to spot what's going on if you saw them in those parts of their everyday "life" that couldn't have an ambiguous interpretation

But what really bothers me about this is that it defies the only justification (which is still weak imo) for not telling the readers what's going on: "In the story people will never know what happened, so you won't either, it's a catbox". But there's a lot of stuff, including this important bit, that is actually common knowledge in prime and Ryuukishi still doesn't explain it years after the end of the story. In others words he makes a mystery out of something that in the story itself isn't a mystery at all.