2010-08-29, 22:23 | Link #16801 | |
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Battler#1 is the detective for the murder mystery of Episode 1 Battler#2 is the detective for the murder mystery of Episode 2 Battler#3 is the detective for the murder mystery of Episode 3 Battler#4 is the detective for the murder mystery of Episode 4 BATTLER is the detective for Beatrice's game which includes all scenarios Episode 1-4. BATTLER cannot finish his job with any of the singular Episodes alone, his object of reasoning is the complex of <Episode 1<->2<->3<->4> in a logical chain of reasoning.
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2010-08-29, 22:24 | Link #16802 | ||
Back off, I'm a scientist
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: In a badly written story.
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I have failed to find a satisfying reason to keep it at all for the people who are supposed to have done it, Natsuhi in particular, which is why I dismissed that option altogether. It runs contrary to her goals, which remain remarkably constant throughout the text. All solutions heretofore offered assume that Natsuhi must have been in on Beatrice's nefarious plans from the very start risking everything she says and narrates she believes in for... what? Quote:
I think you're misinterpreting the situation in this particular case, there's hundreds of students and only one professor, very few of those I know care to remember faces.
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2010-08-29, 22:39 | Link #16803 | ||
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What if it happened with students whom you spend about 4 hours a day, 5 days a week together. You talk with them, you socialize with them and still, after 2 or 3 years they manage to mix two people up. I think you are trying to force to much scientific stability onto something that is not only staple within mystery fiction, but also happens in real life. Brushing of something, that has been implied often enough during the course of the story that the premise of 'necessary implicatures' is fulfilled, it borders onto obstinacy. You're only argument left is, they cannot be the same person, because I cannot imagine people not noticing the difference, but it has to be true unless you want anybody else from the circle of George, Hideyoshi, Kumasawa, Nanjo to be Kanon. Quote:
Yet why then does Battler see an unresponsive Kinzo in the study during Episode 2? If he was fully hallucinating, which would be a misrepresentation of facts towards us, how can he be the detective?! If he is not the detective, how can Dlanor claim in red that he has been the detective so far. While your idea is a probability within the boundaries of the story, it does in the end create more conflict than it actually solves. Or maybe, your basic idea is to cause conflict in other theories while not even constructing a proper theory of your own?!
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Last edited by chounokoe; 2010-08-29 at 22:52. |
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2010-08-29, 22:39 | Link #16804 | |
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2010-08-29, 23:15 | Link #16805 |
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Or their death means there's no point in Kinzo turning up, as it can't act as a warning to them, a threat, or a way to make people suspicious. Alternately, since it can no longer hurt them to have the body discovered, the Corpse Fairy doesn't solve their little problem for them.
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2010-08-29, 23:22 | Link #16806 | ||
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Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: In a badly written story.
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Mind you, I don't want anybody to be Kanon. Except maybe Kanon himself, but I'm not sure he's really necessary. If he doesn't have a bodily existence at all in some plausible fashion, I can accept that just fine and would actually like it quite a bit better. I don't treat a story as hyperrealistic, unless it claims to be a puzzle with context beyond just being a story or just being a puzzle. Your average murder mystery does not. Your average fantasy does not either. Umineko does. Vocally. It really cares about engaging the reader. Well, it got me engaged, if it doesn't match up now that's not my fault. Quote:
In Ep5, the plan is clearly stated that Kinzo is to be reported missing. Keeping the body around does not in any way help this, and actually prevents such a report, whatever state the corpse is found in. As reporting him missing only produces a legal death seven years later, this plan suits Krauss+Natsuhi's goals perfectly. There are numerous ways to dispose of a corpse, and most of them are readily available to the conspirators. All that is required is giving everyone unaffiliated with the plot a holiday for any plausible reason (say, Golden Week. And send Gohda off to supervise Jessica on a trip to Delsneyland.) so you have the island to yourself. That's how I would do it -- but if you can create the illusion of Kinzo being present and running around the mansion for an entire day without getting caught, you should be able to create an unobserved path for the body to leave the mansion even if potential witnesses are present on the island. Then you can incinerate it and scatter the ashes across the ocean, bury it somewhere deep inside the island where people never go, encase it in concrete, fry it into nothing with potassium permanganate, dissolve it in lye, in feed it to the fishes -- I could go on. While keeping it around securely is possible, not only it's terribly inconvenient and unusually morbid, it entails a lot of trouble if it is ever by any chance discovered -- but getting rid of it is perfectly safe once you get it out of visibility range. Of all these methods, burying it deep in the forest is the least secure, but also the easiest and the most obvious. It also involves people knowing where it is, and theoretically allows them to dig it out. Only, if they weren't too stupid and didn't bury it in the rose garden, but dragged it off into the forest first, you basically can't dig it up at night and in the rain, it will take you most of the night to do that if you can even find the place. And when you get back, you'll be covered in mud and barely walking. So if someone dug Kinzo up, they have done it in the morning of the 4th or immediately prior to that -- to minimise the chance of it being discovered in it's temporary hiding place. Most probably the 4th, because if anyone can cover for your absence, there's also a time span between all the nonessential servants leaving and guests arriving when there's no likely witnesses. At least, that's my logic. It's either that or the bathtub, and I can't find a rationale for the bathtub. I tried.
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2010-08-29, 23:34 | Link #16808 | ||
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Well, ok, here's a gesture of good will for you: The base-11 theory is actually not viable because of a single textual clue. I originally proposed it as a joke because it seemed to me exactly as absurd as the Shannon/Kanon disguise. It is. Can you find the textual clue that prevents it from working? P.S. Non-decimal numbers are actually a school subject in Germany, as my German friend attests. 5th grade, he said, definitely no later than 7th grade. Well, if he's actually ashes, he can be an urn on her bedside table...
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2010-08-30, 01:25 | Link #16809 |
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While we're playing hide-and-seek with Kinzo's corpse: in episode two he doesn't get burned, but he does get "eaten by demons." Either he's still buried, or he's been stored in his temporary hiding place, but whichever, he's still within the blast radius.
A thought: Kinzo does have that whole chapel thing right behind his giant mansion. Perhaps he already had some kind of tomb built for himself, and since access to that location can be controlled relatively easily, his body was placed right where he wanted it? It would be very risky, but Krauss doesn't strike me as the brightest crayon in the box, and Natsuhi could be persuaded through an appeal to respect for the old man. Last edited by kaitwospirit; 2010-08-30 at 01:31. Reason: I can spell really |
2010-08-30, 01:52 | Link #16810 | |
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Note that it wasn't the imaginings of fantasy stuff, but rather seeing something that had been stated as utterly impossible by the red text, therefore, he saw wrong. The detective would not have seen Kinzo. Period. Therefore, the fantasy hallucinations are largely irrelevant, precisely because Erika was blatantly proclaimed the detective, but still saw supernatural stuff while on the game board. |
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2010-08-30, 05:52 | Link #16811 |
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What if Erika has an objective viewpoint... but only for herself? Perhaps she has no obligation or need to show BATTLER this, and instead creates a sortof "illusion of the detective" to throw him off. Under this logic, I'd say the tape is more like a theoretical "deployable red text" rather than anything physical.
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2010-08-30, 07:10 | Link #16812 | ||
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: forever lost inside a logic error
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But my point is that "detective" is a concept that only makes sense in the limited setting of a mystery novel unless we are talking about real detectives. I can agree that Beatrice's games are murder mystery novels, but I don't agree that Umineko as a whole is a murder mystery novel. In the end what is the major thing that we were supposed to understand after EP4 and that Battler definitely understood? That's Beatrice, the truth about her, her heart, her love, her story. What the hell does all of this has anything to do with murder? Maybe there is a murder in the picture but it looks like it's the side dish and not the main course. Meta-Battler probably acts as a "detective" in this regard, but this is a stretch of the definition and most certainly he isn't the detective Dlanor is talking about. Quote:
The ability to recognize a person from his face is not a standard in every human, there are people that are more perceptive than others, and there are some that totally suck at it. I once heard about the story of a shepherd that could recognize and clearly distinguish each one of his 500 sheep but he couldn't tell the difference between his sons. This is an extreme, but there are people who find difficult to recognize a person after she changes haircut and they are not so uncommon. Now let's consider these facts. We only need Battler to explain shkanon, all the rest might be part of a conspiracy of some sort. Battler never met Kanon before, and he met Shannon 6 years before when she was definitely different than now. So he's not very familiar with neither of them. The kind of disguise is a major one, from female to male, plus it is quite possible that Shannon herself is a disguise. I argue that the vast majority of people in Battler's place wouldn't understand they are the same person.
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2010-08-30, 07:18 | Link #16813 |
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I'm afraid only an experiment with real people will conclusively settle this, and this isn't something any one of us can readily do. Maybe if I get some failing students to torture this year...
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2010-08-30, 08:06 | Link #16814 |
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that would be an interesting experiment, but hard to recreate to be actually complying to the situation described in Umineko.
-We need to assume that the original persona is androgynous to the point where you wouldn't understand his/her sex if you were to see her on his/her natural outlook. This is a quality that isn't very easy to find in a human. -In order to minimize the noise in the experiment, both the person in disguise and the subjects should be asian. -The subjects and the person in disguise should not be familiar with each other, or at the very least they shouldn't have met in the last 6 years. -The person in disguise must be around 19 years old. -The level of make up used is a variable we are not sure of. As long as we don't know what kind of "tools" shkanon used this experiment would be impossible unless you try all the different possible combinations. Wigs for example would definitely make a difference. also -The subjects shouldn't be aware of the experiment's objective. You can't just show them a person then soon afterward the same person dressed as the opposite sex and then ask them if they think that was the same person. Battler wasn't actively trying to notice resemblances, so neither should be the subjects. -the presences of other people treating the two disguises a different persons would greatly affect the result. There's been psychological experiments before that showed how people tend to be affected by the judgment of their peers, even when they are blatantly wrong.
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Last edited by Jan-Poo; 2010-08-30 at 08:16. |
2010-08-30, 08:24 | Link #16815 |
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Well... I guess the fact that most faces in the series are fairly similar anyway probably helps a lot. Assuming the voice can be changed to a satisfactory degree and with consistency... and you can find a vaguely convincing wig... and you always keep a couple of grapefruits close to hand, I don't see any problems.
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2010-08-30, 08:27 | Link #16816 |
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Yeah but forget all that for a second... where are the clues? "They're never seen together" isn't a clue for a disguise. It's roundabout rule-breaking logic:
Now, if it were to be confirmed that they were the same person, the only logical conclusion we could reach is that a disguise (or disguises) exists, as otherwise we're asking Battler to see the same person twice and recognize them as utterly different people. The problem is, that's not a clue; that's a conclusion. And reaching that conclusion would appear to violate the prohibition on solving things with clues not presented. Alternately, the Logic Stickler can make the argument that, since it is a conclusion and not a clue, no clues were needed to establish it as it is something which logically follows from another set of clues that make it a logical necessity. That's bad writing, but I can't really dispute it on a semantic level. * Note how utterly ridiculous this sounds, but in fiction it's actually the more commonplace and, sadly, possibly accurate reasoning.
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2010-08-30, 11:10 | Link #16817 |
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Well this is a completely different matter.
To say that successful disguises can only be achieved through supernatural means and are flat out impossible in the real world is a lot more questionable statement. Anyway Renall I think we need to assume that whatever are the clues necessary for a disguise to be acceptable in umineko, apparently the one that justify Beatrice's disguise are good enough. So once you find the clues that justify the Beatrice disguise you automatically know what kind of clues you need to justify shkanon. I could also add the Shannon disguise in the picture since apparently Lion doesn't look like Shannon at all and I don't think you can explain that with the fall. Shannon is a disguise Beatrice is a disguise Where are the clues? If we accept subtle clues, then subtle clues exist even in the case of Kanon.
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2010-08-30, 11:34 | Link #16818 |
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I'm not comfortable with that, though. Maybe ryukishi is, but in my mind "Some disguise exists, therefore sufficient evidence exists to demonstrate that any disguise is possible" just isn't good enough.
No question there is evidence of a Beatrice disguise. Absolutely not disputing that because the "hint" was that somebody claims to have seen such a person, and no such person is expected to exist. The thing is, Kanon and Shannon are both expected to exist, so we shouldn't have any reason to believe either is a disguise. Moreover, say we believe that Evidence Of Any Disguise = Evidence For Any Disguise. Which of the following can't I say?
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2010-08-30, 12:53 | Link #16819 |
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Well... the fact that they never appear at the same time, and that the other normally has an extremely shaky alibi would seem to give a clue. I mean, in episode 2, Shannon's excuses are "I was looking after a guest who doesn't exist" and "I was talking to a man who is already dead". Kanon just vanishes into thin air, meanwhile.
And the fact that only one of them can have their love fulfilled is another clue... Well, I guess the disguise is the final one to tackle. You could say it gets around Knox by technically being the same character (so no evidence is needed) but... it isn't really possible to present evidence of it (beyond "They look kinda similar"). |
2010-08-30, 13:12 | Link #16820 | |
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Evidence of a Shannon and/or Kanon disguise would be a large affirmative piece of evidence in favor of their being the same person. Even something very vague, like a spare set of Kanon's clothes in a closet in a guest room where it doesn't make sense for them to be, or something to stuff Shannon's bra, or a set of work assignments for the day with a bunch of scheduling work juggled around on it. All of that would be evidence that a person is disguising as another person assumed prior to have an independent existence. Instead, what we have is an assumption based on missing evidence which, if true, necessitates that a person be disguised. The difference there is clear. One is evidence, one is a conclusion reached through completely different evidence. But this is cheating on par with the no-servants rule evasion. It violates the letter of the law, and possibly the spirit of it as well. Evidence of a situation which can only work if a disguise is employed is not evidence that a disguise actually exists. The absence of evidence could just as easily be read to conclude that no disguise exists. That just isn't the answer everybody seems to want to hear.
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