2013-05-22, 08:28 | Link #32361 | |
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Bear in mind Kyrie considered very carefully all rational outcomes of her actions. She thought about it for a very long time and was aware of what the probable consequences would be if she went through with it. She simply determined, after a very long time thinking it over, that she didn't care. While it's an immoral decision, it isn't an irrational one. She weighed the emotional benefit of murdering a person she blamed for her suffering (whether or not it was Asumu's fault) with the possibility that she'd get caught or punished, and decided "screw it, my emotional well-being matters more than my freedom or the opinions of others, I'mma shank a bitch." If anything, I point to Kyrie's entire Asumu story as proof her portrayal in ep7 is impossible. Kyrie could make a decision to murder... but it would take her forever to agonize over it, she would have to think everything out very carefully, and she would need an extreme level of emotional investment in the outcome. In other words, Kyrie only operates through premeditation, even when her acts are driven by "irrational" desires. If she was the killer, I'd say she'd almost have to have come already prepared to do it.
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2013-05-22, 11:12 | Link #32362 |
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It's glossed over, but:
1) Battler said "See you again" before leaving the 1980 conference, so was still on good terms with his family; at the very least, Rudolf hadn't married Kryie; Asumu might have still been alive. 2) Ange's age during the 1986 conference was given as 6 years old. That is, it is quite possible Kyrie was already pregnant when Asumu died.
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2013-05-22, 11:37 | Link #32363 | |
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It does add a sense of immediacy to Kyrie's behavior, too. But all that does is make her seem less impulsive. She wasn't even ready to act until she was backed fully into a corner.
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2013-05-22, 11:41 | Link #32364 | ||
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Well, yes. That's actually brought up specifically multiple times; I wouldn't say it's exactly "glossed over".
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2013-05-22, 14:41 | Link #32365 | |
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I agree. Kyrie is very calculative. She does not act on impulse anywhere on the story, I'd say the title of miss impulsive goes to rosa or eva. But kyrie is COLD. I mean seriously, she doesn't give a shit. We can argue whether she really is a psychopath or a calculating individual taken a step too far, but personally I can and totally see her as the murderer in prime. Because she is capable of pulling out a murder, if it crosses her interest. Now we can again have the same discussion about if gold actually acts as plausible motive or are the characters retarded or did ryu even consider the possibility of killing for gold having this kind of discussion, but I'd dare to say if we have a way X of converting the money to gold, I can totally see kyrie going for it. Now I don't say way X actually exists, but we can apply that principle to pretty much anything: as far as kyrie sees motive X as something to try and achieve, she could kill everyone and everything on the island without emotion |
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2013-05-22, 17:19 | Link #32366 |
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I don't think Prime went down like Ep7's tea party. That being said, I find Kyrie's actions somewhat plausible in that one, given the circumstances.
One, the bomb is the metaphorical Ring of Gyges. No point in worrying about consequences when there will be no evidence anyways. Two, by the time her and Rudolf start to act, one person is dead and several others are armed and ill-tempered. Chances are, left to their own devices, they'll start to think the same thoughts her and Rudolf are thinking re: killing relatives and letting the bomb sort them out. Three, if they can't put their heads together and explain away Natsuhi's death, both gold and bank card will be sitting in a police evidence locker, of no help to their failing businesses. So, from Kyrie's relatively logical point of view, if they're going to act like spoiled kids, wave guns at each other, and not work together on this, screw 'em, they gotta die. The servants and kids are just another liability at that point. |
2013-05-22, 19:45 | Link #32367 |
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I think the main problem with accepting someone was the culprit for the Rokkenjima massacre is:
it's possible someone thought it was a good plan or was temporally driven to think it was a good idea for random reason X but random reason X is never explained. We probably wouldn't think that Natsuhi pushing the servant off the cliff is plausible if we weren't told her mental state but just that Kinzo told her to adopt a baby. Without knowing how she was feeling back then the idea she would toss a servant and a baby off a cliff would seem insane. But when we're allowed to give a look into her mind and we realized how she felt when she did it we think that yes, it's plausible. Same for Kirye with the addition that nowhere is said that Kirye plans to kill Asumu and then be caught by the police. If she had managed to murder Asumu secretly enough not only she would have gotten free of her rival and cause of pain (and hate is a reason good enough to justify murder) but she might have managed to marry Rudolf. Also, although it isn't said, it seems she found the determination to kill her short before she died, therefore when she was already pregnant. It's likely this was an extra reason that pushed her to wish for Asumu's demise. Back to the Rokkenjima massacre instead what's the general mood? Surely the adults were stressed but as each of them carried his kids along (or let them be on the island) I doubt they went there planning to commit murder in front of them. Even if Ange was at home, Battler came along and, if Rudolf had planned to kill everyone he likely wouldn't have wanted to carry him. Even assuming that things went on like in the Teaparty of Ep 7 and it started with an incident, logic lasts till Rosa gets killed. When Kirye began shooting at everyone like that... well, it seemed irrational. It'll be maybe different if Rosa, after seeing Natsuhi and Krauss die, had a moment of insanity tied with the trauma of seeing Beatrice die and had threatened to kill everyone, maybe really shooting at someone and, out of fear, someone had shoot her back. But then continuing to kill gets stupid when they could have pushed the blame of Krauss and Natsuhi's death on dead Rosa so logic breaks again. I don't know, it's true Eva doesn't get arrested so maybe if someone else did the killing and then Eva killed that person in self defense the original murderer might have planned to do what Eva later did and not get arrested by the police but still... the whole thing seems weak. |
2013-05-22, 22:44 | Link #32368 | |
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Or you could... cover it up and not murder anyone outside the secret tunnels nobody else knows about. You might have to get Genji involved or something, but there's no particularly good reason to kill Gohda or Kumasawa or the children (as far as you know). Heck, if Kyrie were thinking truly rationally she could just tell the remaining adults "Okay, we won't have a problem if we move everybody who died out of this area and somewhere on the main island nobody knows about. We'll dump them all in a room and make it look like one of them killed all the others, then 'discover' it. Nobody says a word to the police about the gold or bank card, because if we do we lose it. It'll be hard on the kids but they'll back up the story." I mean, I like to think that certain canon animosities aside (such as Natsuhi vs. Eva) the adults like each other. They were on the cusp of working together in ep7 before shit went down, the absurd part is that things continued to escalate rather than somebody trying to get a handle on the situation before it went totally batshit. That Kyrie was the agent of this chaos instead of the one trying to work against it seems out of character for her. She can get access to the money and avoid killing anyone else with game theory and blackmail. "Not killing more people than necessary" seems like a perfectly valid motive under these circumstances for most people; why would you rationalize the need to kill more than is necessary? Plus, you know... they have the bomb. Why go murder people? Nobody's going to find that room. If you want to murder people, just flip the switch and leave.
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2013-05-23, 01:41 | Link #32369 |
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Thinking on it, in this particular moment, Kyries EP7 kinda makes sense in a very twisted way - it's an extreme logical (if probably fallacious) conclusion of ROsa's argument in EP2 - other people's behavior is a Devil's Proof, "I can only trust myself,", sorta thing.
Remember how she told Jessica that in a Plank of Carneadas situation, she would push the other survivor off without hesitation? Well, her only reason to kill people beyond those in the Gold Room is "they might use a wireless to summon the police in the morning", which stays true whether they keep the bodies where they are, make the bodies disappear, or set up a situation that makes it look like they killed each other. You might also say, and I guess she runs on this train of thought in EP7, that despite the storm, who's to say the police couldn't SOMEHOW get to Rokkenjima, anyway? It's one of those situations where mutual cooperation leads to the obviously superior outcome, but opens the individual to the worst possible outcome, which in this case would be betrayal by Evayoshi, Rosa, or maybe, uh, Yashkanontrice. I'd also add that from Kyrie's perspective, Rudolf could also potentilally betray her, but whatevs. Thinking this way, literally the only thing stopping her from shooting people immediately are, as she pointed out later, an insufficient number of bullets. Not saying these are GOOD conclusions to make, but hey, the Idiot Ball practically an Ushiromiya family heirloom so everybody deserves a turn at least once within their defined character traits, right? Hell, should've gone full monty and have Kyrie confess to Eva that she would've killed Rudolf, too, had Eva not done it alreaddyyy. Forreals, tho, the only thing that makes me really think Kyrie MIGHT be the killer in Prime is the image from the game data of her holding a rifle from Eva's diary. I saw that and was just like "Aw, really though? COME ON." As for the adults liking each other, well. Kyrie and Hideyoshi seem to be on pleasant enough terms with everybody, but none of the siblings seem to care for each others company at all - I remember being surprised at how infrequently they seemed to involve themselves with each other. Spoiler for unrelated, really:
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2013-05-23, 05:29 | Link #32371 |
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/shrug
Eva : You killed?! You killed everyone?!! Even Maria-chan..?! Kyrie : There was no need to let them live until morning. When morning came, there would be an uproar, and that could prove to be a pain. They might have used a wireless to contact someone off the island and gotten help. .....So, this was clearly the move to take. If you turn the chessboard around and look at it that way, right.....? Couldn't say if she meant a phone, or a radio - those things don't get checked until after the First Twilight in the earlier gameboards, and who knows if she tested the external land line, or radios before going on her spree. For what it's worth, though, Japan's first commercial mobile phone service was offered in 1985, and the Ushiromiya ARE supposed to be super buku rich and all. |
2013-05-23, 05:53 | Link #32372 | |||||
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George is pretty much secretly known to have something with Shannon, so he could also be a liability in terms of her having filled him in at any given point. Quote:
How would they answer questions like "Who killed the last person?" If there is a murderer moving around people would like to find him. It would also highly open up the possibility of the murderer being among the surviving family members. How would they know that the other children would back it up? Jessica would have lost her parents, Maria her mother and George his lover. They are all possible liabilities, Maria even more because she would continue to fuss about Beatrice. They are without alibi during that time and thus clearly a suspect. On using the bomb without anybody knowing. It's like (I think) Eva implied in Episode 7, that they do not know whether anything told about the bomb is actually true. It could be much larger in terms of range than expected or much smaller, it could go off earlier or later than they were told, they don't even know which position switches it on and which switches it off with any certainty. That is the big problem with the bomb, it has to be used by somebody who actually believed without a doubt that it would work and that is how we run into a big problem. It creates both a problem for murdering people and not murdering people. Quote:
Krauss constantly feels belittled by his younger siblings for obvious faults that he still can't admit to. Eva hates her male siblings for being treated with more respect in terms of social responsibilities and treated Rosa bad because it was the only way to vent. Rudolph just doesn't care because he's the second son and basically out of the race, so he only cares about getting some part of the cake and getting out of there. Rosa was constantly bullied by her siblings (the EP8 manga implies they treated her like she's treating Maria down to ripping apart her favorite toy) and basically the punching bag of the family. Natsuhi is hated by Eva and is constantly belittled for not living up to her purpose of the oldest sons wife. Hideyoshi is almost the one who is on best terms, but it is also implied that he is using this "good guy" image to get his way. Kyrie is taking herself back and silently observes. I really never got the feeling that they liked each other at all. They simply went along because they were "the Ushiromiya family". Quote:
I think it's generally important to not think what people would act like if they were real people (because characters in a story are not) but what we know about how characters are characterized during the story and how certain elements would fit into a theme. |
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2013-05-23, 08:39 | Link #32373 | ||||
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The police are coming either way once somebody goes missing. The question is what they will find. Trying to mitigate the damage and blaming someone who is dead (or alive, if you can make it good) at least gives you the opportunity to shuttle things out of the secret area and let the survivors not in the know establish that the family conference seemed to be going about as normal. Maybe you won't be able to prevent the gold from being found, but getting off the hook for murder seems a lot more important as a priority. Killing everyone only works if you intend to use the bomb to cover the whole thing up, but as you noted... Quote:
For Yasu this actually wouldn't be a big deal, even though she can't know it will work either; she's a risk-taker, so she'd probably be okay with the prospect of the activation mechanism failing. It would probably not be sufficient for Kyrie, and in the worst case scenario if she goes around killing people the bomb won't work and she'll have to answer for all of it. Given that she wasn't trying very hard to cover up what she was doing, she's only making her worst case worse without really making her best case any better. And concluding that everyone is a liability is largely absurd. Survivors outside your immediate family deflect suspicion and confuse things. If only Kyrie/Rudolf/Battler survive, you know exactly who the police will look at (and Eva probably only got away with not being charged because she had the benefit of the bomb). Should the bomb not work, congratulations, you're all going to jail and you'll lose the gold. If the bomb does work... you might still lose the gold and go to jail, depending on whether the gold also blows up. Quote:
When you throw a desperate need for money in the mix and boil people down to their component traits for a mystery story, you see them at their absolute worst. But there are plenty of glimmers of them at their best, especially when they fight back in fantasy scenes. Quote:
As a result, ep7's Tea Party only really makes sense to me as the answer to a world that operates along the rules of a mystery story (and not a very good one, since it's just a massacre). Yet that's a fundamental contradiction; you can't give a "what really happened" explanation that assumes people behave like fictional characters. I'm aware they are fictional characters either way, but if there's some Prime that "really exists" in the world beyond then we have to at least pretend there existed "real" versions of the characters who would thus behave somewhat realistically. Thus, while one might believe things like "Yasu could be a mass murderer" or "Krauss and Natsuhi would readily agree to help a killer to save themselves, no matter how vague the killer's promises" in a mystery story, they don't really work in a "realistic" crime drama. I suppose where people go from here is "but Kyrie is a plausible culprit in both instances," which is at least potentially true; however, her behavior in such an instance must match more closely to her behavior with respect to Asumu then her behavior in the ep7 Tea Party or Bern's game in ep8. She would premeditate and carefully rationalize, not go flying off the handle to get money she can't verify even exists or is accessible, murder people who could actually help her or take the blame for her actions, and do so in a manner which paints a big giant I AM A TOTAL PSYCHOPATH sign all over her body in Jessica's blood.
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2013-05-23, 19:24 | Link #32374 |
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Thinking about the prime scenario, I have some theories about it.
The closest of the first 4 novels to "Prime" is the 3rd novel. The key piece of truth from the 7th novel tea party is that there were 2 culprits. Due to the context of the culprit identity in the 7th and 8th novels, their identity is most likely a cruel (yet perfectly in character) act of trolling by Bernkastel. The identities stink of "Rule Z" style red herring. Eva has a body count in "Prime". This is foreshadowed by the 3rd and 7th novel. Eva is NOT a culprit in the 3rd novel due to her motive. The 7th novel indicates that her motive in the 3rd novel and Prime was most likely a vigilante act trying to hunt down and stop the culprits. Eva killed the wrong targets in the 3rd novel, but killed the correct targets in the 7th novel and Prime. The most likely culprits in Prime IMO are George and Rosa. The explanation for this part is a bit long winded. The gold most likely had nothing to do with the murders. The 4th and 6th novels raise some major red flags regarding George (the fact that he's perfectly willing to kill anyone who gets in the way of his relationship with Shannon) which give us an obvious motive. That and he's always acted like a creeper and suspicious to boot. Then there's the "triangulation cover up theory" someone mentioned regarding which character would it make sense for Battler, Beato, and Eva to cover up. George makes sense under this context. George being manipulative doesn't help his case either. Rosa on the other hand is more difficult to place a motive on. If I were a gambling man, I would place my bets on her simply being insane. Rosa is arguably one of the most mentally unhinged individuals on the island. There's plenty of hints throughout the novels that she's severely bi-polar at best. Her heavily abused past combined with the incident involving Beatrice shown in the 3rd novel give me reason to suspect that all the circumstances for Rosa having PTSD are in place. The crap in Rosa's life combined with mental instability is simply a ticking time bomb scenario, and it may have detonated that day. The 7th novel also indicated an irrational outburst scenario, which fits with the theory of one of the culprits being unstable, not actually pre-meditating the murders. Which brings me to the journal and other things. Eva's hiding the contents of the journal from the world is related to the identity of the culprit. Hiding it from Ange has more to do with Battler's fate. Eva (wrongly) believes that Battler died there. Due to the stupid way she did things, whatever good intentions Eva may of had regarding Ange completely back-fired on her. The reason Beato showed the "Last Stand" scenario in the 2nd novel may have been as a warning/hint to Battler. This scene firmly places Rosa as being "competent" with fire arms, but not to the level of Rudolph and Kyrie. Also, Spoiler for 8th novel spoilers IIRC:
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2013-05-24, 15:21 | Link #32375 |
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I always found rosa-culprit incredibly far-fetched. Maybe it is because I never saw her as a culprit, but you are right on the notion that she is indeed very impulsive. So considering this, sort of insane-switch could be plausible. I don't think "violent insanity" acts as sufficient motive for a detective story, but the prime doesn't have to follow the structure of the detective story. However I would still find deus ex PTSD pretty stupid.
However naming George as culprit because he is willing to kill anyone who doesn't accept him and Shannon, I find that implausible. I understand it is implied that he is kind of a dickhead and because I never even liked the guy, I wish I could see him as the killer: but what motive would he have? Kill everyone because some people possible object the marriage? I don't remember chapter 6 closely, but wasn't the part in ep 4 where it was implied he was willing to kill everyone just a lie? Why would he kill? Wouldn't that make him just insane plus total douchebag? Wouldn't it be an total overkill? I don't see how things could develop so far that he decided that killing his family and friends is the only way of obtaining Shannon. Besides I strongly believe the part about Eva covering things up was because she was involved in the happening somehow, or possibly saving Ange from her parentculprits Last edited by Dormin; 2013-05-24 at 15:38. |
2013-05-24, 16:29 | Link #32376 | |
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Spoiler for spoilers for higurashi:
In terms of insanity and its validity as a motive in a mystery novel, your point is certainly true if the novel is using Van Dyne's rules (Van Dyne's 19th IIRC). In a story that uses Knox's rules, insanity isn't forbidden. IIRC, Umineko is supposed to be a Knox mystery. In ep6, I'm assuming you're talking about the love battle right? Just recently read the manga on that one. Not only did George have zero hesitation in his decision to kill, but also had zero hesitation over who his target would be. Contrast with Spoiler for spoilers for 6th novel:
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2013-05-24, 17:13 | Link #32377 |
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So PTSD could work not as a motive but as a additional driving force. As long as we have some alternative motive for Rosa to do the killing, then I could see that happening. Problem here is that about the only motive for Rosa to kill in prime that I can think of would probably be the gold, and we have already spent time discussing whether killing for the gold is actually a reasonable motive. If you have any other motives for Rosa to be the culprit, then I'd gladly hear the theory. I know there is this guy that made, probably about rosaculprit, a video of multiple hours. Never got around watching it though, maybe because it is unbelievable long.
And for George, a big no no from me. Also no motive and questionable capability of killing (even though ep 6 implied it, I recall he fought against eva, and that scene could also be taken as a metaphor for his separation from the mothers care). I don't think we can find a motive from the gold or from the need of money for any of the cousins, actually. |
2013-05-24, 17:59 | Link #32378 | |
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2013-05-24, 18:09 | Link #32379 |
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Do you think it's possible that George found out about Yasu's "love duel" and took it into his own hands to see that "Shannon/George" was chosen by the roulette? And possibly removing naysayers to their love in the process? I could see that happening considering his characterization in the fantasy scenes.
But how would Hachijo Tohya know to characterize George this way? I don't think EP1/2 have any clues about George's devotion/insanity so it's likely that these are embellishments not known to Yasu at the time of the message bottle writings. Hell, maybe George actually FOUND the message bottles and Yasu's manuscripts and took them seriously. |
2013-05-24, 18:27 | Link #32380 | ||
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Hey hey wait a minute guys am I missing something now
George surely packs motivation, but would he seriously even consider killing everyone? If we want to address George as the culprit of the prime, what would his motive be? To get Shannon to himself? Quote:
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Also you must not forget that Krauss has the lever principle somehow helping him in boxing. Not many men can modify the laws of nature with their manly essence. I can't see George topping that any time soon. |
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