[haguruma]

Originally Posted by Renall

I think this is an example of how changes made to the story in-progress may have damaged the flow of the narrative. Kinzo being confirmed dead in ep4 and Beatrice lowering the person count is not as elegant as not confirming his death until ep5, introducing Erika beforehand, and announcing that everything is just the same as before. Sure, lots of people already knew, but that's no reason to screw around with it?

It sure would have worked better if Proto-Erika/Virgilius had been introduced around EP3 already. I kind of reasoned around an empty slot being filled by somebody else for quite a long time, basically since they introduced Eva-Beato and made the whole "I stand for somebody, but not necessarily for a definitive person" plot a thing.

I kind of got what Erika was about from the very moment she was introduced somehow, or at least I was thinking in the direction that was decided upon at the end of EP6, so I can't say that I think it's a bad plot element. Still I agree with you that it could have been handled
a) more elegantly and
b) in a way that serves the plot much more

Like this the whole "we are 18 but 17" thing is just like a neat little afterword that either confirms the suspicions you had or has no impact beyond the tension it holds in that very scene. Erika's existence was that of a half-life anyway so, nothing lost, nothing gained...

Originally Posted by qno2

Actually, when did they start calling it like this? Following the incident or after the first bottle was made public?

Well, going by the endroll of EP1:

Many years later.
At the pier of a neighboring island, a fisherman pulled ashore a mysterious wine-bottle adrift in the waves.
Inside, tightly packed and written in the smallest letters, there was a bundle of detail laden pages stuffed inside.
That very thing was….this story.
People first learned of the events, surrounding the mysterious and strange two days that started on the enigmatic 4th October 1986, through these pages.

After this the incident became known as “The Rokkenjima Mass Murder Incident” or “The Killing of the 18 on Rokkenjima”, but among the people with a taste for the fantastic in this world it was passed on as “The Witch Legend Serial Murder Case”.

Lovers of the occult, insisting on it being the remains of this island being plunged into an immoral ritual, kept propagating explanations of these mystery-filled two days, adorning them with grotesque imageries.
But, no matter what explanation it was, not one of them arrived at the truth of this incident.

And the pages from the wine-bottle as well, while they tell of this incident full of riddles, they don’t tell the truth.
No...the author of these pages might not have known the truth either.

So it was after at least the first message bottle was found.