[Game] Umineko no Naku Koro ni Chiru - Ep. 6 Dawn of the golden witch

[LyricalAura]

Originally Posted by GreyZone

And: exclusivly in this game the number of "people" is equal to the number of "bodies".

A dead body is still a body, be it as a corpse or as a living human, therefore by your logic, Kanon cannot leave the room and must still exist inside it.

Dead bodies do not "exist", regardless of whether they are present or not. Besides being noted in previous games, Erika also accepted that in this game by asking that Kinzo be excluded from her body location checks "because he doesn't exist."

This is a quirk of Japanese, which distinguishes between "animate existence" and "inanimate existence" with two different verbs.

Originally Posted by GreyZone

and even if you deny that, then:

When Kanon "doesn't exist" in the guest room, There were 17 people., that means before Kanon died, there must have been 18 people. No more than 17 humans exist on Rokkenjima. This applies to all games! Adding Erika to the number, as it was done in EP5, did NOT happen here yet! Therefore there is 1 person too much on Rokkenjima and this theory fails!

You cannot pinpoint the time referred to by that red. It's a response to Erika's red, which was specifically said to be her self-introduction and states two things that are impossible on the EP6 gameboard. If they applied retroactively to the beginning of the EP5 gameboard, then we can equally propose that Battler's response applied retroactively to the beginning of EP6, when everyone was still alive. Therefore, there is no contradiction!

[Toku]

Originally Posted by LyricalAura

Dead bodies do not "exist", regardless of whether they are present or not. Besides being noted in previous games, Erika also accepted that in this game by asking that Kinzo be excluded from her body location checks "because he doesn't exist."

This is a quirk of Japanese, which distinguishes between "animate existence" and "inanimate existence" with two different verbs.

This is interesting. Can something similar be said about the status of Shannon and Kanon being "dead" in previous games? In other words, is it possible to get rid of the supposed contradiction that they were dead in Red Text and yet there was no actual corpse for them nor any physical process of dying involved, if we know about a quirk of the Japanese language?

[GreyZone]

Originally Posted by LyricalAura

Dead bodies do not "exist", regardless of whether they are present or not. Besides being noted in previous games, Erika also accepted that in this game by asking that Kinzo be excluded from her body location checks "because he doesn't exist."

This is a quirk of Japanese, which distinguishes between "animate existence" and "inanimate existence" with two different verbs.

Knox's 8th. It is forbidden for the case to be resolved with clues that are not PRESENTED...!!

How did he commit suicide? he didn't have too much time to switch with Battler, hide and then commit suicide, before Erika came back from the bath room! A Winchester gun would be too loud and any method that would make him lose blood could give away his position and suffocating would proably take too long.

Originally Posted by LyricalAura

You cannot pinpoint the time referred to by that red. It's a response to Erika's red, which was specifically said to be her self-introduction and states two things that are impossible on the EP6 gameboard. If they applied retroactively to the beginning of the EP5 gameboard, then we can equally propose that Battler's response applied retroactively to the beginning of EP6, when everyone was still alive. Therefore, there is no contradiction!

I can pinpoint it! The time "froze", when Erika left the bathroom! Any red truth that did not have specified another time, applied to that moment!

Also Erika's red truth was about being the "18th" human, a positional number, while Battler's and Beato's red truth was about "17" people, which is a quantitive number. And unlike Beato's red truths about the number, this is a specific number and not an upper limit!


[Regardless, who wins this, it was a nice fight until now. I wish such fights would happen more frequently^^]

[LyricalAura]

Originally Posted by GreyZone

Knox's 8th. It is forbidden for the case to be resolved with clues that are not PRESENTED...!!

How did he commit suicide? he didn't have too much time to switch with Battler, hide and then commit suicide, before Erika came back from the bath room! A Winchester gun would be too loud and any method that would make him lose blood could give away his position and suffocating would proably take too long.

What suicide? He was murdered with a gun by Erika, exactly as depicted. Really, what did she think would happen when she shot him five times?

Also, I made a mistake in my last post. Although Japanese does distinguish animate and inanimate existence, the red truth in this case didn't use either of those verbs, but a third one that can be used for both. The blue truth is still valid, though, just not linguistically motivated.

Originally Posted by GreyZone

I can pinpoint it! The time "froze", when Erika left the bathroom! Any red truth that did not have specified another time, applied to that moment!

Erika was "welcomed" onto Battler's gameboard at the beginning of the game, so I claim that another time was in fact specified.

Originally Posted by GreyZone

Also Erika's red truth was about being the "18th" human, a positional number, while Battler's and Beato's red truth was about "17" people, which is a quantitive number. And unlike Beato's red truths about the number, this is a specific number and not an upper limit!

If the count applies to the beginning of the game, then there is no problem with it being a specific number. Also, Erika can't be the "18th human" unless there is a separate "17th human" as well, and we know this is not true on the EP6 game board.

(Well, unless you count personalities as "humans". There was a scene in EP4 where Shannon and Kanon called themselves humans, so it's not like there's no precedent. Still, this is a non-Shkannon theory, so I'll ignore it for now.)

Originally Posted by GreyZone

[Regardless, who wins this, it was a nice fight until now. I wish such fights would happen more frequently^^]

See if you can dig up my old Kinzotrice posts in the Spoilers thread. I bet you'd get a kick out of those.

[GreyZone]

Originally Posted by LyricalAura

What suicide? He was murdered with a gun by Erika, exactly as depicted. Really, what did she think would happen when she shot him five times?

The time "froze", when Erika left the bathroom! And she couldn't shoot him before she went to the bathroom. So there was never any chance for her to kill him!

Originally Posted by LyricalAura

Erika was "welcomed" onto Battler's gameboard at the beginning of the game, so I claim that another time was in fact specified.

If the count applies to the beginning of the game, then there is no problem with it being a specific number. Also, Erika can't be the "18th human" unless there is a separate "17th human" as well, and we know this is not true on the EP6 game board.

The term "human" include human corpses! Kinzo was only excluded from the "everyone else" for the cousins room, HOWEVER it was never said that his corpse doesn't exist! Therefore Kinzo's corpse was the 17th human!
That way Erika can be the '18th human' at any time. As there have been no clues for other human bodies/corpses, they are forbidden to exist.

18 human bodies exist on Rokkenjima and as she is the last one who "joined them", she cannot be "someone else" or a "personality"!

Originally Posted by LyricalAura

See if you can dig up my old Kinzotrice posts in the Spoilers thread. I bet you'd get a kick out of those.

I'll take a look if i got time.

[Renall]

From the Spoiler thread...

Originally Posted by LyricalAura

I wonder what the Schwarzchild radius of the cousins' room would be if all living things in existence were trapped inside it? Gravitational collapse would certainly account for Erika's blathering about stopped time.

Well, there's a number of critical factors here: How many things are there in the universe? Who constitutes a member of "everyone else?" Can they be defined to exist in the room even though there is no way for them to be in there or any way for them to fit? If the wall of the cousins' room had a hole in it, could the definition of "the cousins' room" include all areas not otherwise defined bounded by the accessible physical space of the area, thus encompassing the entire universe and making "everyone else" a true statement?

...wait a second. The definition of what constitutes a "room" is arbitrary. When Battler referred to "the cousins' room" he referred not only to the actual cousins' room, but to the cousins' room and the entire universe except those rooms which had already been defined (the six victim rooms, the next room over). At the time of the sealings, Kanon's location was "somewhere in the universe that isn't one of the predetermined rooms," thus he counted as being in "the cousins' room" yet was not actually in the room itself and thus could move around without breaking any window or door seals. Battler acknowledged that "The definition of closed room implies that it is impossible to construct from the OUTSIDE." Erika constructed the seal on "the cousins' room" from the outside of the physical room. Ergo, either the room was not a closed room (had a hole in the wall) or Erika's position at the time she constructed the seals was part of "the cousins' room." As she was not in one of the predefined rooms at the time of the sealing, I posit that the latter was the case and Erika and Kanon were both "in the cousins' room" but not in the cousins' room. Both were free to leave the room and enter any of the other predefined rooms so long as it was acknowledged that some seal was broken to do so; as Erika deliberately reconstructed a broken seal after the fact in Battler's room, this condition is indeed met and transfer between the two rooms is possible.

EDIT: Wait no, I can do one better: "The cousins' room" encompasses the entire universe and all rooms previously mentioned. I'm pretty sure this doesn't violate any reds, implied or specific. Battler was in his room and "the cousins' room." The five people in "the next room over" were in the next room over and "the cousins' room." The cousins' room is the universe itself, and Erika sealed it perfectly, such that no one entered or left the universe during this time.

EDIT EDIT: Lest someone commit the exclusionary fallacy, I can demonstrate that these statements are entirely logically consistent with an abstract example using numbers.

Consider the following statements:

The set of {1,2,3,5,7, ... n} are "prime numbers."

The set of {2,4,6,8,10, ... x} are "even numbers."

I acknowledge that "all other numbers" are "numbers."

Obviously, I am not excluding prime numbers and even numbers from the definition of numbers merely because "all other numbers" are being defined as numbers (as this would make only non-prime odd numbers numbers, which is not true).

Replace the first set with the names of the people in the next room over and "primes" with "the next room over." Replace the second set with the victims and "evens" with their room definitions. "All other numbers" swaps for "everyone else" and "numbers" for "the cousins' room." Clearly, we can easily determine that Shannon is in the cousins' room is, or could be, a true statement, if "the cousins' room" is read to define everywhere that exists including the subset "the next room over" into which Shannon is subdefined, in the exact same way we could say that 17 is a number even though it's not part of "all other numbers" (it's a prime), because it's still a number.

Logic error, meet formal logic.

[RandomAvatarFan]

"The cousins' room" encompasses the entire universe and all rooms previously mentioned.The cousins' room is the universe itself, and Erika sealed it perfectly, such that no one entered or left the universe during this time.

This is the most beautiful, vibrant blue I have ever seen. Someone paint a picture.

[GreyZone]

oh there was a victim in the next room over? I mean "2" is in both sets



Ok... well nice theory, really! Battler would be ashamed for "only" coming up with small bombs, or a "hidden mechanism that enables high towers to rise in the rose garden", however i take the red sword out and say: There has been NO clues that the universe is inside a room, therefore by "the name of god", I FORBID you to use that argument. "DIE THE DEATH! SENTENCED TO DEATH! THE GREAT EQUALIZER IS DEATH!"

well that's it... oh i was just citing the last part. And this behaviour is because in this thread i am used to this. (see blue/red/black walls of text above)

[Renall]

Originally Posted by GreyZone

oh there was a victim in the next room over? I mean "2" is in both sets

Ok... well nice theory, really! Battler would be ashamed for "only" coming up with small bombs, or a "hidden mechanism that enables high towers to rise in the rose garden", however i take the red sword out and say: There has been NO clues that the universe is inside a room, therefore by "the name of god", I FORBID you to use that argument. DIE THE DEATH! SENTENCED TO DEATH! THE GREAT EQUALIZER IS DEATH!

Aha! But hold a moment: It's very clear that Erika received specific information about the physical makeup or formal definition of a room only when she asked for such specific definitions. For example, Erika asked, and had it confirmed for her, that "the guest room" contains "the bathroom," "the bedroom," and "the closet." It was possible to say Battler is not on the bed even though Battler was inside the room; it is possible to subdivide a room while remaining a part of a larger room! Ergo, it is possible to subdivide the definition of a room, and unless that room is more specifically defined, it is only possible to speak about the room in general terms. Battler exploited this by simply failing to define the cousins' room or its contents with specificity, leaving open the possibility that everyone who isn't Kinzo could be defined as being in that room.

It is possible that, had Erika asked for a more specific subdivision of other rooms and a more concrete description of what they contain, Battler would have been forced to compartmentalize "the cousins' room." But because Erika never asked, he's free to define "the cousins' room" arbitrarily as any space he wishes, so long as it can be sealed by Erika's fiat seals! Clues are not necessary; the definition of "the cousins' room" was never asked for, and prior narrative precedent makes it specifically clear that Erika had to ask in order to be sure!

Moreover, it was not addressed how Erika could make "the cousins' room" a closed room unless she was inside it! If "the cousins' room" is an inclusionary substitution for the entire universe, it is possible for her to have sealed it while remaining inside! In fact, "the universe" - or some arbitrarily-sized segment of the universe larger than the room itself and at least encompassing the hallway - is the only definition of a "closed room" that can be permitted to describe "the cousins' room!"

A neverending seal of duct tape envelops the entirety of creation! Nothing may enter or leave the universe so long as this seal is in place! "God" transcends the universe! "God" is separate and distinct from the universe! Because "God" is sealed outside the closed room, he cannot interfere! The name of "God" cannot touch this argument!

[GreyZone]

Can you define where "universe" starts and where it ends? If you can't, then your argument is invalid, because a blue truth must contain all specifics of a theory and not just parts of it.

Also a room of unknown size is a "hard to understand device". Well considering this I could even say that it's impossible for it to exist, even with an explanation...


EDIT: The power of the seal IS "God", so if you exclude "God", then no closed rooms even exist. Or in other words: You break the rules. But as a player of this game you accepted the rules. If you break them now, you'll be banished from the game.

[UsagiTenpura]

I'm going to confuse this debate even further by adding that "room" can refer to the people in it (ie: the whole room did "x") and has a figurative sense as well (ie: there is no room for such arguments in this conversation).

Furthermore, considering that Umineko itself brought foward the idea that furniture = people or the other way around, then saying that "the bed is in the room", you can't be sure that bed doesn't refer to a person a la Kanon.

But really the use of such arguments (at least seriously) is usually rewarded by the words "smartass".

Edit: Okay now I can't get out of my head the idea/image of Erika duck taping everyone.

[GreyZone]

Well, you can say that easily... but until now I could counter them all

[AuraTwilight]

If you can't, then your argument is invalid, because a blue truth must contain all specifics of a theory and not just parts of it.

This red isn't actually valid. See: all of EP4.

[GreyZone]

"entire universe" is like saying "the number of master keys is unknown", because no one actually knows how big the universe really is, right? And the later was confirmed to not work as blue truth, which must instead be "there are acutally 6 master keys".

But you know what? I don't care anymore, because I am not the game master. If I was allowed to make specific red truths, then I could easily refute all theories of Renall, UsagiTenpura and LyricalAura... well since that is not the case i tried the same as Erika tried in Kinzo's study in EP5... But as we all know, if we are not GIVEN the necessary red truths, then it's impossible to deny these theories (just as it was with Dlanor's "The window was closed the whole time", which was probably blocked by Lambda, but which on the other hand also has no basis...)

So make as many theories as you want... i won't stop you anymore... it was fun though^^

[Drifloon]

If that had actually been the solution to the logic error, EP6 would probably go from being my least favourite episode to the best episode ever.

Seriously, that is brilliant, and it obeys all the red too.

[GreyZone]

Well, except that it does NOT deny the witch... an universe in a room is like saying "yes the existence of a witch, that can create fireballs and other magical attacks out of her hand, is possible".

[Drifloon]

There's nothing magical by referring to the universe by the name "the cousins' room". It's just redefining a phrase, which has already been shown to be allowable by Umineko's rules (hence how Beatrice can redefine 'insant death' as 'they were unable to perform any action between the time they received their fatal wound and the time they died', even though they didn't actually die the instant they were attacked).

[GreyZone]

Well I could go on like this, but as I said, it's pointless without game master status

[Azule]

I tip my hat to you, Renall. That is some of the most beautiful logic I have read in the history of Umineko, and truly worthy of applause.

[RandomAvatarFan]

I say we confront Ryukishi with this new theory. Renall hit all the points pretty much.