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Originally Posted by Drifloon
Yeah, I hadn't watched the part about the motive when I wrote that. That's pretty stupid.
Oh well, it was still a kind of neat solution. I think Renall's is probably better, though.
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Actually as silly as my solution is, I think a point I raised in it - and one Wanderer pointed out - is something that all but has to be true. The room sealing must be retroactively coterminous with the location check, otherwise what possible good is the location check?
There's several issues you'd have to consider that make this seem reasonable:
- The obvious "Kanon just left after the check" solution. This is so simple that it seems stupid and clearly unintentional. It would make Erika beyond stupid to never consider that possibility, and it would make Battler and Beatrice stupid for not just going with that super-obvious idea.
- Erika and Dlanor made a big to-do about the other First Twilight victims being unable to rescue Battler. Clearly, movement after the location check is presumed possible (merely rendered impossible by Erika's murders for the FT victims), because it would have been possible for the people in unsealed rooms to do so. If Erika isn't accounting for the people in sealed rooms, clearly she believes that everyone she put in the rooms are going to have to stay there for some reason, and the only reason she has is the seals.
- There wouldn't even need to be an argument about the window in the next room over if Shannon could just leave before Erika sealed it. The emphasis on the window seal being actually broken suggests that, to leave the room at all, Shannon would have to leave after the sealing.
The problems are evident in some of what I jokingly touched on though: If this is true, why doesn't Erika explicitly disclaim herself as well as Kinzo, and how did she construct a "closed" room, which is different from a "sealed" room, from outside of it? Read a certain way, Erika puts herself in a Logic Error long before she can ever entrap Battler by rendering it impossible for her to enter Battler's guestroom... unless you accept my silly argument that "the cousins' room" actually is defined as "the room containing 'everyone else.'"
You could argue that Erika knows her own location, but she explicitly isn't the detective, so her own understanding of her piece's position is
theoretically up in the air. Battler would most likely be sporting in that respect, but then again, Erika's blatantly cheating with her perspective so I don't see why Battler should feel inclined to keep playing along (unless he's just humoring her because Genius Battler).
I'm inclined to think this was just oversight on Ryukishi's part. I imagine that, had he revised this, or perhaps in the manga if it were pointed out before that volume came out (like the boiler room door), he'd just have Erika say "since Kinzo is confirmed not to exist, please exclude him. And of course, please exclude me as well, since my location is outside the room."