Walter's question for me (yes me, specifically, though he didn't have the manners to address me by name lol) was the whole conversation about caring about 'characters' vs. caring about 'real people', and whether that can provide a motive, right?
I think it's a bit backwards to describe whether someone feels empathy for the characters or not as a pass/fail for the reader. To my point of view, an emotion is something you feel when reading in the same way that 'wet' is something you feel when swimming. If the author fails to elicit in the reader appropriate feelings at the various points in the story, blaming the reader is like blaming the basketball hoop for not leaning over to you when you try to do a layup. I will grant you that every reader will have a different pov and life experiences they bring to reading, so readers are not as uniform as basketball hoops, but that is no different from games having different 'difficulty levels' or 'option settings'. to return to my analogy, if you try to go for a swim but don't feel wet, it must have been a pretty shallow pool. If you entertain yourself with a story but don't feel any emotional resonance for any of the scenes, it must have been a shallow tale.
Is a lack of sufficient empathy for characters sufficient motive to kill someone? Could some Star Wars fan freak out at someone speaking ill of wise old Ben Kenobi and set out to murder the blasphemer? Not unless we're dealing with a very, very sick individual. Someone like that is so messed up in the head that they are blurring the line between 'culprit' and 'undiagnosed patient for lengthy therapy'. Frankly, I think murder is an unlikely reaction for a lack of empathy to 'real' people as well, though I believe it does happen with some exceptionally passionate people, so fictional characters even more so. None of the characters are that far gone as portrayed thus far. I freely acknowledge that my current Jeroboam culprit theory will fall apart if he really had nothing to do with the Ushiromiyas, because that's really the only reason I can believe a westerner took so much offense at the Witch-con and such as to commit murder over it.
Walter still hasn't really addressed my most pressing questions about 96. How many bodies did the police find, who were they identified as, and what were the wounds? I mean, lack of motive or no, it's hard for me to believe that any police force said 'well, this guy was obviously stabbed to death with a knife and it's a bloody mess, but no one has a motive to kill them so they must not have been murdered...' That feels kind of wrong to me. And yet, the kind of wounds required by the plot, where the police would be willing to write it off as an accident because no one had motive, and yet Walter, an amateur is sure they are indicative of homicide... That discrepancy does not compute. I think I'm misunderstanding something.
I vote we nickname the summoner 'Cassitrice', because my gut tells me to.
There is a certain similarity of spirit that I can't quite express with words or logical explanaions, but I think I can sense it...