Quote:
Originally Posted by LyricalAura
And which game board would that be?
It's been established throughout the story that red truth can be applied to individual boards without being universally true across all boards. We also know from Maria's example and various other clues that human pieces can become game masters and create their own game boards, which can then have red truths stated about them in turn.
Erika is the eighteenth human on Rokkenjima.
Even if she is welcomed, there are seventeen people on the island.
Contradictory red truths can't exist on the same game board without creating a logic error. Therefore, these two statements must apply to two different game boards. One is the board created directly by Battler, and the other is a nested board created by one of his pieces. Erika and her actions exist only on the inner board, exactly as described by the coin puzzle early in the story.
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The "contradiction" that those two red truths create is easily solvable, just like any of the Closed Room puzzles that Beatrice has tried to trick Battler with. It's probably no coincidence that one statement refers to "humans" and another to "people."
Anyway, the contradiction here is a red herring from Ryukishi07, since it can't actually apply to Erika:
There are 18 humans on the island.
"Erika is the eighteenth human on Rokkenjima."
There are 17 people on the island.
"Even if she is welcomed, there are seventeen people on the island."
"At least one of the people on the island is a human, but not a person."
Erika is a human:
"Erika is the eighteenth human on Rokkenjima."
Erika is a person. Referring to the "count of people on the island" in Episode 5, it's stated that:
"Furudo Erika only increases it by one person." The introduction of Erika introduces the count of people by 1.
"Erika is both a human and a person. Therefore, one of the other characters on the island is a human, but not a person."
How to solve this contradiction? Well:
"Maria is in a vegetative state, and is pushed around by the other characters in a wheelchair. Therefore she is a "human", but not a sentient "person." Rosa has the delusion that her daughter is fine, and everyone else humors her. None of the red truths in any of the games are contradicted if we assume this to be true. They only mention Maria being at or leaving locations (at the same time as others leave them), not taking actions, or being killed: i.e., all things that would be possible for a mentally vegetative person in a wheelchair."
or,
"One of the two humans on the island is actually a single person." (Basically, Shkannon or any similar theory.
or,
"'Person' only applies to people with the legal rights of personhood. Genji is legally owned by Kinzo as a slave, so while he's a human, he's not a person."
etc, etc.
I think the "they contradict, so they refer to different game boards" reasoning is a bit suspect. I think we should assume, by default, that all statements apply to the gameboard of their current game. Because if any statement could apply to another gameboard without explicitly stating so, we could ignore any inconvenient truth by saying, "That applies to a different gameboard."