[Renall]

Originally Posted by haguruma

The answer is pretty simple nobody was in the closet. Erika was fooled into believing that there was a Kanon among the people she locked into the second room. By him not existing in the first place Battler could simply leave the room because a figurative placeholder in form of the "Kanon-slot" had been placed into his room. It's basically the same trick as Kanon vanishing from Jessica's locked room in EP2.
I think Kanon entering the closet and vanishing in it was simply a narrative means to imply that he is nothing more than "clothing put on a different character". Once you return him to the closet he ceases to exist.

Kanon's body physically entered the room, per the Logic Error red:

Of course. Three people--in other words, three bodies--went in or out. Only you and Kanon entered, and only Battler left. It has already been said in red that all people can only use their own names. Therefore, the names Erika, Battler, and Kanon can only be used by those people.

Erika explicitly asks that Battler refer to the number of bodies that enter or exit the room. Therefore, Kanon's body must enter and presumably remain in the Logic Error room even if Kanon himself ceases to exist.

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

In EP3 Shannon and Kanon were "killed" by Beatrice, meaning that she made an incontrovertible choice of abandoning those persona ferever. That means Beatrice was still alive and free to move in EP3.
The personality death was explained in EP5 when Beatrice herself was shown as "dying".

Except it's not incontrovertible. In fact, it's never incontrovertible, and Banquet itself demonstrates that very thing! The whole thing is nonsense, even though I agree with you it's what the author probably intended.

However, it's impossible to "irrevocably kill" something which lacks an external enforcement mechanism to actually make the act irrevocable. Killing a biological entity is irrevocable because the very act of biological death is itself irrevocable, such that when you kill something it ceases biological functionality. You can decide to un-kill it, but you aren't physically able to un-kill it, so it stays dead. That's what irrevocable or incontrovertible means, you can't change it or go back on it.

With "personas," there is absolutely no mechanism which prevents Yasu from "reviving" Shannon or Kanon at will or simply creating an exact copy of Shannon/Kanon from before they were "killed." Philosophically, of course, these two actions are exactly the same thing. In other words, she can't make an irrevocable decision to kill Shannon or Kanon, short of killing her physical body. The nature of "existing" for Shannon and Kanon precludes the possibility that they can ever truly die for as long as their host body and/or creator entity lives.

But Beatrice/Yasu can't exist in the stories because then her master personality would be an additional person. Which creates the phenomenon of Zombie Shkanon I went over a while back and the whole thing just collapses on itself. Ryukishi isn't allowed to have it both ways, but he tries anyway.

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

When the five other than Kinzo were murdered, the murderer was definitely in the same room!

Well this is yet another stretch but this red doesn't actually say victim and murderer were inside them same room at the same time. It only says that when the victim was murdered, i.e. when the victim ceased to exist, the murderer was in the same room as they were when they were alive.

Permit me to get a little Gilbert Ryle up in this bitch: How is this actually possible?

We are told that this crime must have a human solution. Therefore, if "multiple personalities" are going to exist and be counted they must be an observable human phenomenon. For the sake of argument, let's assume all the dumb stuff about Shkanontrice and on-demand persona switching is entirely scientifically accurate, observable, and fully human process, such that it doesn't violate any ban on the supernatural.

Okay. So. How do personalities actually switch? There are three options here:

• Personalities are always active at all times and one simply takes control of the body. This would appear to violate the person restrictions if more personalities than Shannon and Kanon are present, and violates the notion that either can die because no personality ever actually "dies" (goes inactive). It would also somewhat violate the Logic Error, but only sort of.
• Some personalities are dormant and others are active. At least two personalities may be active at the same time.
• Only one personality is active and existent at a time. This seems consistent with issues like the Logic Error.

Of these, we can immediately dismiss the first as if true, it renders all the red tricks that Ryukishi supposedly used to make a non-dead person dead irrelevant, as the person never "died" anyway. So let's focus on the other two, as the philosophical problem with them is basically the same.

And that problem is this: What is the initiating physical action which causes a personality either to surface or to switch? To use a solution like "Beatrice became dominant and replaced Kanon," it must be explained how a personality that doesn't presently exist (and therefore cannot apprehend anything) can emerge in response to any form of stimulus. "Not existing" is a pretty high bar to set. It doesn't mean you're asleep. It means you do not exist. A thing which does not exist cannot choose to appear because it doesn't exist to perform an act of choosing. It cannot "awaken in response to a memory" because it's not sleeping and sensing, it doesn't exist at all and therefore can sense nothing.

Indeed, for a personality to be invented or recalled it must be acted upon by an external force. But if that external force exists, say as "the brain of Yasu," which regulates the "minds" of each personality and creates and destroys them as necessary, this external force must take up a person slot unto itself. The only way around this is to argue that the "body and brain of the host Yasu" is merely a physical apparatus and "personhood" is contained solely in the mind, and that Yasu's brain which operates as a sort of server or switching board for her myriad minds is not a person. And that's bollocks.

In short, you pretty much have to be a Cartesian Dualist to even accept the functioning of Shkanontrice in the first place, and Cartesian Dualism is for nerds and arguably violates the spirit of Battler's "human truth" claim since a dualist believes that minds are non-apprehensible non-physical entities, and therefore equivalent to Witches.

The only other way to resolve this issue is to suggest that all personalities voluntarily shut themselves down in order to transfer control. I would submit that voluntary sublimation of one's consciousness in this manner is "suicide," and therefore impossible under the red in Banquet. The other option would be that stimuli acting on the active personality can cause it to sublimate, but the problem there is that forcing Kanon to stop existing cannot create Shannon, and Kanon cannot simply be transitioned into Shannon because that violates the notion that the personalities are distinct and not merely a single personality voluntarily acting them out. So neither Shannon or Kanon was able to voluntarily sublimate themselves, and no external force exists which can cause them to be sublimated, therefore Banquet of the Golden Witch contains an irresolvable Logic Error.

...Well, alright, you could also technically argue the personalities arise entirely at random due to comprehensible biological processes, but that makes everything Shkanontrice does remarkably convenient, given that sublimation never randomly occurs at an important point in time (such as mid-murder). Therefore it violates even the suspension of disbelief I have granted Shkanontrice as a premise for this thought experiment and means the writing is even dumber than I am quite literally giving it credit for.