Quote:
Originally Posted by haguruma
The question is, do we need to be told?
For Ange's emotional journey it is merely important that the crime remains unsolved. What leads the police followed upon and what not are an interesting fact, but they are neither important to the understanding of the core story nor to the understanding of the characters.
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The problem is, they're fairly important
to Ange. She asks a number of strange people about the incident, but doesn't seem to know much about the police investigation and certainly doesn't speak to anyone who was involved in it. This seems like it would be one of the first places you go, to "see if they missed anything" if nothing else.
It's possible there was a reason why she didn't, something that is common knowledge in the future but unknown to us as readers. For example, maybe Ange is aware that at almost every press conference on the matter, whoever was speaking for the police was suspiciously nervous and dismissive, convincing her that Eva bought off the police to stop looking. Thus, she believes the police are a worthless source of information. However
we don't know that, and Ange doesn't tell us that specifically, so it's less a catbox around the investigation and more a catbox of Ange's own making for no particular purpose but to inconvenience the reader.
We know that common knowledge exists that is often hidden from us. For example, the explosion's assured occurrence is well-known in the future but was carefully sidestepped in
Alliance. But the difference here is that anything that happened before the explosion is permanently lost and there are no known witnesses subsequent to Eva's death. There are
plenty of witnesses and remaining pieces of information in the world beyond Rokkenjima, most of which probably weren't destroyed. If those things still exist, it should be possible to check them, but we can't. If those things
don't exist, that's interesting and highly suspicious information, but we'll never know what it is.
It's not a catbox because of the actual circumstances of the investigation. It's a catbox because the author doesn't want to tell us. I don't see how that's in any way equivalent, given that Ange has no particular reason to avoid or hide information that might give her the closure she's seeking. She was willing to "share" with the reader special information known only to her (Maria's diary); why would she deliberately ignore information that could help her?