[LyricalAura]

Originally Posted by Wanderer

I'll give several problems with the stories being written before the event:
They predict a disaster at Rokkenjima before it happens. Possible only if the crime is premeditated and written by the culprit (or someone who knows what this culprit is up to), or because the writer has intimate knowledge of the current family dynamic to strongly suspect that there will be a disasterous crime of some sort (and the story is actually just a kind of guess). Or someone wrote these stories beforehand, and someone else read them and made them true.

Beatrice's message bottle stories don't describe an explosion at the end, only a serial murder. The explosion was mistakenly added by future observers who conflated the stories with the real event.

They predict the weather at Rokkenjima through Oct. 6. Possible only with an accurate weather report, which is within what? A week or two at best?

They predict Battler's return. Possible only after Battler's return was decided (remind me when that was exactly), unless the writer was Battler himself, or Battler's return was somehow caused by the writer or otherwise ensured to the writer by a third party.

They predict Ange's absence. Possible only after Oct. 3, unless the writer was six-year-old Ange herself, or her absence was somehow caused by the writer or otherwise ensured to the writer by a third party.

Or any of these possibly be an unlikely coincidence as well.

Is this really so unreasonable? The story actively acknowledges that the Witch's Illusion would not have come into popular existence except for an unlikely confluence of events -- the message bottles were miraculously found, and Eva auctioned off the Ushiromiya occult library.

In Ange's case, she only sporadically attended to begin with because of her stomach problems, so getting her real attendance correct by accident would be something like a 50/50 chance, right?

As for the shrine, it was almost certainly somehow destroyed by Shannon/Yasu-Beatrice. Explosives seem to be the most likely method. Else maybe it was destroyed naturally (or by other people for some reason) and the writer opportunistically incorporated the event into their narrative.

Question. Why is "a maid with no demolitions experience blew it up with old WW2 explosives" somehow more plausible than "a storm caused it to slide into the sea and there was some lightning"? In the first place, what's the reason for testing explosives on the shrine (during a violent rainstorm with the explosives exposed to the rain!?) instead of doing it on the other end of the island?