Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaisos Erranon
This. Bloody this.
I brought up a crack theory a while back about how every single thing after the end of Ep3 was a giant troll concocted by Beatrice to make Battler truly believe in witches once and for all, but no one listened.  |
The red is actually severely detrimental to the witch side. The reason it works at all for Beatrice is that she knows what she's doing.
If you think about it, the red is less about magic or any narrative thing and more about an author/reader trust relationship. Acknowledging not just that characters can lie, but also the author, the red creates reliable statements. They can be grossly misleading, just like anything else an author writes, but they must have some measure of truth value to exist at all.
Battler himself realizes this very early. Red hems in the writer. It closes off certain possibilities and makes others much harder to arrange without careful maneuvering around what has already been said. For a side that thrives on infinite possibilities (the witch/the writer), it is actually a very dangerous weapon to wield.
But why use it at all? Well, if you look at witch = writer, and think of this as a mystery (whether it is remains unsettled), just as Beatrice wanted Battler to solve her games, so too does a mystery writer want the reader to solve their mystery.
Creating the "greatest mystery" of all time in terms of difficulty is easy: "A man is dead. No one knows who he is. No one knows how he died. What happened?" This is the hardest possible mystery, because it's unsolvable with the information presented. Who was he? Why did he die? Did someone kill him? Who? Why? When?
But it's not really the "greatest" mystery in terms of quality, as we would probably have it. The greatest mystery would be one that is devious and hard to solve
yet also eminently solvable. The writer - using red - restricts himself on purpose. In a mystery filled with fantasy elements, he must do so if he intends to present a solvable mystery.
This assumes, of course, that the work is a mystery, and that it is intended to be solvable. Just because Virgilia tells Battler he can solve it doesn't necessarily mean the story on the whole exists to be solved.