[Kylon99]

Originally Posted by LyricalAura

@Kylon:

Your theory reminded me of something in another novel I read recently.

Spoiler for Kokoro Connect vol. 1:

One of the characters in Kokoro Connect grew up with a single mother who had a string of abusive boyfriends. To protect herself, she learned to put on completely different personas according to who she was with in order to keep them happy, but as a result she lost all sense of having a core identity outside of her physical appearance and her acting ability. When that physical identity was also undermined by events in the story, she had a complete nervous breakdown because she couldn't tell who she was anymore, and she started desperately relying on one of the other characters to act as her anchor.

If you start from the premise that Yasu had this kind of problem, and then she received the additional shock to her perceived identity from Genji etc.'s revelations, then I think a similar sort of breakdown and seeking for someone to tell her who she's supposed to be is not out of the question.

That said, I don't really feel comfortable ascribing mental health problems to Yasu to explain the murders because I don't think she planned to commit any in the first place.

Hmm, that's very interesting about that other story. Certainly there are probably other ways to develop into this same situation. However, I'm not saying that this has to be a psychological or mental health problem, but I'm leaning more towards a physiological problem with the brain stem. This is only because I was watching a TED video about recent findings of the interaction between the brain stem and the cortex, where, as I said before: "damage to the periaqueductal gray area of the brain stem" results in loss of consciousness. (TED video at around 11:57 ... http://www.ted.com/talks/antonio_dam...ciousness.html ) Maybe in Yasu's case it was some kind of partial damage. And it seemed there also exists psychological conditions where people feel they are losing their self.

Note that none of this suggests that she is driven to murder by some kind of psychosis or mental illness; just that she's realizing how disabled she is for the first time in her life. The post prior to that post of my theory talks about how people become suicidally depressive after similar or even lighter (like in Battler's case) brain damage. So she would be driven to murder through 3 years of real despair, a real sense of loss and tragedy that she only realized when she thought she had gained everything.

And I think the key is that, if then she cannot express these emotions, since to her, 'she' does not exist, then she can't express her happiness or anger, except through her personas. (But of course this tragedy didn't happen to her personas; Shannon, Beatrice, nothing like being thrown off a cliff by your mother happened to them. It's this non-entity Yasu that suffered the tragedy, and yet this Yasu has the inability to express it.) And so it is Beatrice that expresses all the anger and Shannon expresses all the love. And Kanon all the pessimisim; he always gets the short end of the stick, poor guy...

Anyways, I'm not 100% clear on how this developed, but I'm starting to feel certain that she lacks the ability to actually have a self. More below...

Originally Posted by Toku

What do you mean by exactly what the thing was that changed her, though? I don't think we're quite on the same page there.

Just what I mentioned above... that she never really had a self but didn't realize this until she inherited the Gold and the legacy. While she had been happily living out her dreams through her personas before, she was told where she came from by Gensawajo and what she had lost. Personally, I wouldn't deal with it in such a way, but I can imagine for some people the sense of realizing what you have lost, or what you could never have in the way normal people can can be devastating. Like being told that you lost your legs, but worse. Basically in the post prior to the link I have, I indicated how suicidally depressive people who have had brain injuries can become.



And also, I've been discussing this with some friends and it just seems to answer more and more things. Or at least it provides a concrete way of viewing things:

Like look at this discussion that George and the cousins are having about Maria and her dual personalities. (This is from Judoh's George Culprit theory.)
http://img826.imageshack.us/img826/2...orgepoint3.jpg

Now, since Yasu was writing this episode, imagine it's not the cousins having this discussion... because it most likely is not since it's written. Imagine this is all Yasu working out her identity problem. 8) This is the Pessmisitc, Self-Deprecating Adult Yasu talking, that learned of her disability and is now looking down at the child-like naive Yasu that she used to be mere months before. At least if you keep in mind my theory while reading it, it totally reads like it.


Other stuff keeps fitting too. Genji had an eagle too but I assume this was Kinzo's doing. So why did Shannon and Kanon have eagles? If Shkannon was truly a trick that Yasu was intent on hiding, putting eagles on those two would have been a dead giveaway! Yet the eagles are there. Why? Because in the end they are not mere roles she was playing. They, along with Beatrice are considered by her to be *real* parts of her, not some mask. (Discardable roles would be like the Man From 19 Years Ago.) So, my opinion is that she could not not put eagles on them; it would be like if she didn't put an eagle on herself after being the head of the family. (But she can't put an eagle on herself, because there is no herself.)

I'm talking about Shkannon wearing eagles in the stories of course. I have no idea about Rokkenjima Prime. 8)
Basically it's a dead giveaway in the story that she could not not have placed out there; it would be similar to us disrespecting ourselves.

I'm about 60% sure on this last one. 8) But at the very least, I'm starting to think she views Shannon and Kanon not as discardable as we thought them to be. And if she is so serious about Shannon and Kanon though, I could imagine when she DID discard them, it would be like cutting off a limb. That limb effectively dies. It is literally death of a piece of her.


Anyways, it's an idea that I think has merit and seems to provide answers. The mechanics of the physiological brain damage or psychological problem I haven't fully worked out, yet. But this truly feels like The Answer, and that almost all the dialogue and scenes in the game were about it. And I am seriously seeing why Ryukishi wouldn't want to just fart it all out at the end like the end of Psycho the movie where some psychologist comes out and explains it all to the audience in a soliloquy. (I guess 1960's audiences were more accepting of something like that.)