[Renall]

Originally Posted by Wanderer

I'm kind of curious as to why you seem to accept "personality death" over this, though.

What are you talking about? I think personality death is ridiculous.

Originally Posted by jjblue1

Well, Battler's incompetence in EP 1 is weird in a fashion. He says all that had happened should be a trick and, if they were to look into mystery books they would find it, however we'll later find out he's a avid mystery reader but he can't offer a single decent solution. So either he forgot the mystery books he had read or searching through mystery books wouldn't help us to get the solution to the tricks or he has no other choice but being incompetent.

Alternative Solution: The author of the message bottles is not familiar with mysteries, but is familiar with Battler's familiarity with them. In other words, he or she would know that Battler would probably be able to pick the puzzles out of books he'd read... but didn't actually know what any of them are, because the author had never read any themselves.

This is counter to what we're told about Yasu, of course, but it's one way that Battler's stupidity could be explained.

Originally Posted by GuestSpeaker

Also Also, what was the major significance to Jessica's asthma usually being faked to get out of awkward situations, I can see sometimes she used it to stop fighting/accusations directed at Natsuhi, but there must be more to it...

Dropped plot thread. I don't recall it coming up in any meaningful way after a while. It certainly never mattered for any of the mysteries as far as we've seen. Red herring?

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

Anyway discussing whether the solution of the final EP6 is shkanon or not is kinda moot at this point, because shkanon is widely accepted for a plethora of others unrelated reasons. And since shkanon is practically a certainty there's no need to find another explanation for that riddle.

But it's so much fun.

The fact that my joke solution doesn't even address Shkanon is my favorite part, because I actually wasn't thinking about it in any way when trying to be as funny as possible. In fact, the Shkanon equivalency would be a red which could instantly destroy the Battler Joke Solution. Kind of funny, that.