Quote:
Originally Posted by Wanderer
Here's what I have to say about it:
Logistical reasons to believe pre-incident authorship:
1) Bribing the police should be pretty difficult.
Thematic reasons to believe pre-incident authorship:
1) Eva, who survives in the real world, dies in both of the bottle-stories.
2) Beatrice is supposed to be dead by all magical accounts.
Logistical reasons to believe post-incident authorship:
1) Battler's return was predicted.
2) Ange's absence was predicted.
3) The typhoon was predicted.
4) An accident was predicted. (Well, this just means that either the author is the actual culprit, or it was written after the tragedy)
Thematic reasons to believe post-incident authorship:
1) The way I see it, this situation is kind of like a closed room, except it's bound by points in time rather than physical windows and doors. So I see debating whether these logistical conditions allow the author enough time to write... as similar to debating how long the chain is on a closed room and whether it allows someone to lock it or unlock it from the outside. But knowing how Beatrice rolls, the answer has nothing to do with the chain and everything to do with the witnesses: In this case, it's that random fisherman that found the one bottle and the police that released the other.
So yeah, I believe in post-incident authorship. A lot of people here do, though not everyone.
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A couple of other points:
- We don't know how accurate the endscroll is to facts or merely "what we're told happened." In other words, we don't know if "they found Maria's jaw" is a fact or if it means "a number of identifiable teeth were found that match Maria," which could give credence to e.g. "Maria's baby teeth were used to fake her death." Thus, we don't know if being told "a fisherman found one of the bottles" actually means it happened, or if a bottle was introduced which somebody said was found by a fisherman.
- The works at least appear to be voluminous from the descriptions. If they're only a short summary written in a brief time, then we're getting more text than the message bottles actually had. If they're long works, either they had to have been written with a lot of time to spare ahead of the incident (meaning the author knew a lot of difficult-to-pin-down details well ahead of time), or they were written well after (in which case there is at least a partial hoax going on).
- If the message bottles were believed to be any sort of clue to the incident, why would the police seem to care so little about them? Eva does die in the stories, but that alone wouldn't be reason to reject something as having no useful clues as to potential premeditation or motive.
- It is extremely logistically unlikely that any message bottle would ever be found by anybody anywhere, unless dozens were released (we're told at least that Land may have been; how many others were there?). If dozens were released, it becomes harder and harder to buy pre-incident authorship.
- As Wanderer basically said, it would fit Beatrice's MO more to have the appearance of a message-in-a-bottle confession turn up than to actually do that, especially because there is no guarantee releasing a bunch of bottles will work. Beatrice likes faking miracles with testimony to back it up and relies far less on chance and luck than she claims to. She can't control when the bottles are found either; maybe one will be found a hundred years from now, what good would that be? However, if she fakes it, she can guarantee it will work merely by having sufficiently hard-to-trace stories and a few people willing to lie.
Basically, it's easier to bribe a fisherman and a couple police officers than it is to trust that two message bottles will survive a typhoon and explosion
and both be found and published within a few years of the incident,
and that the finders will actually try to release them. Given that one group who claims to have found one are the police, it seems quite unlikely they'd release it unless someone could convince them to do so. The only two reasons I can think of for that is that they believe the bottle has absolutely no relevance (which is absurd), or someone was sufficiently able to influence that release.
That, or the bottle being in police custody at all was also a lie.