Oh my god… This episode… It felt like it was a thousand goddamn hours long… X_X
First off, holy shit, the beginning of this game is still as whiplash-inducingly out of the left field as ever… -.-‘
It is a horrible way to start off the episode, and wost of all, it completely contradicts later details of the story, where it turns out the entire “logic error” thing was just a giant Batman Gambit by Battler to get Beato back, a genius twist that is severely undermined by all the pointless and stupid “locked in a room and freaked out” scenes that belong in a Saw/Hostel style torture-porn flick… and then to top it all off it immediately jumped over to Ange and Ikuko, who are insufferable in her first scenes. A pretty damn bad start all around…
As for the Episode overall, like the other Core Episodes it has very little actual murder mystery to it and much, much more heavy on allegories, symbolism and subtle (or not so subtle) clues about the grand mystery of Yasu, so I will be spending a lot of time unraveling those this time around.
This one also dedicated a ridiculous amoutn of time explaining things like what magic, witch, miracle and a lot of other things meant in the setting, leading to a really slow and ponderous episode that sometimes really felt like a chore to read, something that really wasn’t helped by the Ikuko/Featherine + Ange duo’s oftentimes insufferable musings.
I get it Ryukishi. You are fed up with your fanbase refusing to think on their own and being obsessed with the Red Truth. I get it. Did it really need a dozen scenes to explain this? A little author’s note would have worked just as well, you know? -.-‘
Beato is reborn, however she lacks her old personality and calls Battler “Father”, which depresses and enrages him to no end.
The entire situation mirrors the Kinzo/Beatrice II relationship, with Battler taking Kinzo’s place. In fact it might go even further, as it is quite conspicuous how it’s Genji and Kumasawa who are around the two instead is Ronove and Virgilia, meaning it is possible that at least some of the scenes are -direct- reflections of what happened with Kinzo/Beatrice II in the past. To elaborate:
The one big difference, however, is that Battler (thankfully) doesn’t up and rape her, instead Beatrice goes on a vision quest kind of thing in order to become the Beato Battler desires.
An interesting note: Right after Beato “disappears” upon the completion of the duel between Shannon and Kanon, there is a flashback scene with a young Battler and an unseen person telling Beatrice to embody all the things Battler liked in women. This could be interpreted, and was probably intended, as a flashback to when Beatrice was born, when Yasu created the persona and pushed all the emotions related to Battler upon her.
Shannon and Kanon both express their love to their partner (George and Jessica, respectively) but declare that one and only one of them can achieve happiness.
Upon witnessing these exchanges, Ange and Featherine deconstructs why the need for magic and their furniture status makes no sense in face of the presented facts.
Well then, some facts have to be unpresented, right?
Since Shannon and Kanon are both personae of Yasu, something they address as being “furniture” and “not having a complete soul”, it only stands to reason that if one of them enters into a romantic relationship with one of the cousins, the other cannot, since they inhabit the same body.
This duality, and the fact that Yasu’s body have been disfigured by the childhood accident and leaves her gender questionable poses the “unknown barrier” Ange theorizes.
In a meta-event, George, Jessica, Shannon, Kanon and eventually Beato enter into a fight for a single miracle that would allow them to fulfill their love through the reforged magical brooch introduced in EP3.
It all comes down to Yasu again. Shocking, I know.
This entire setup is an extremely blatant clue towards Yasu’s identities, though I have to admit I didn’t get it at all when I first read the VN years ago and I was actually quite bewildered because the entire situation made no sense whatsoever. The core conflict of “If Shannon gets George, Kanon leaves for some arbitrary reason, and if Kanon gets Jessica, Shannon stays for some arbitrary reason, and then there is even Beato in this picture somehow” makes absolutely no sense as it is presented through the meta-events, and the best the in-meta-universe justification they get are the ridiculous amount of “furniture-talk”. Thankfully Beato later dissects the insanity of the presented situation as well,and the lines pertaining to how the duel would only make sense if only three people were involved in a love triangle gives possibly the biggest clue in the entire series thus far.
However, it all makes sense once we consider that Shannon, Kanon and this episode’s Chick-Beato are all just facets of the same human being. Therefore if one wins this “duel” and enters into a proper romantic relationship with one of the cousins, it would mean that Yasu would have to either discard the other personae or at least reveal them to the “winner”. Either way, the romantic affections of the two losers would be ultimately rejected, and even the “winner” is questionable, as that relationship has to deal with Yasu’s mental and physical issues, hence the need for “magic” and a “miracle”.
So yeah, Ryukishi once again condensed a ridiculous amount of clues and symbolism into a neat package and then proceeded to make it obscure enough that one literally needs a sudden revelation to make heads and tails of it. Shocking, I know.
Rosa’s and Maria’s bodies were found in the parlor of the mansion, with the door barred from the inside by a wooden hat stand. Natsuhi’s body was found in her own room, Kyrie’s in Krauss’ study, Eva’s in the VIP room and Battler’s in one of the guest rooms.
Later the “survivors”, following Erika’s advice, hole up in the guest house, dividing themselves into two rooms designated as “the cousins’ room” and “the next room over”. Erika, Hideyoshi, George, Shannon, Kumasawa, and Nanjo are in the next room over while the rest are in the cousins’ room.
After some time Erika leaves the ‘next room over’ and seals the doors of both rooms as well as the windows from the outside. She also finds a letter which declares that Battler’s body was hidden. She then goes around and decapitates all the “victims” except for Battler, whose room she sealed down “retroactively”, meaning the seals took effect from the time the room was locked up after the discovery of the body. Upon returning she undoes the undisturbed seal and discovers that Battler’s body was indeed missing, so she locks the door from the inside with the repaired door-chain and searches the room. Upon entering the bathroom she gets sprayed with burning hot water by a wired-up faucet which takes her considerable amount of time to turn off.
No. I am not going to do it. Since this was the one and only closed room in the entire episode, it means that almost all the Red Truths are dedicated to this one. All SIXTY-ONE of them! There is no way in hell I am going to copy all that here, so I will point you at the UmiWiki’s Red Truth page instead and will only cherry-pick the ones that are absolutely needed for the explanation. You can find the rest over there.
Oh boy, this is a big one…
Okay, first off we need to be clear on a number of factors for this to make any kind of sense: Yasu=Shannon=Kanon. You literally cannot solve this locked room without grasping that, which should not be that hard taken that the entire episode was dedicated to it to the point of nausea.
Next are the name games. There are two threads there with two bunch of red truths.
The first one is about the people in the guest house rooms. The relevant Red Truths are #1 and especially #2. The word “everyone” is presented in the meta-events as a loaded word because it appears to severely limit the moves on the witch’s side, but in reality it is quite the opposite. By not declaring the presence of each person by name, Battler avoids revealing that Shannon and Kanon are not at two different locations at the same time. By saying “everyone” he presents a technical truth, since Kanon was not the acting persona at the time therefore he could leave him out of the “everyone else” group. To put it from another perspective: if Battler conveniently switched his definition of “everyone” to “human bodies” instead of “persons we know” before he spoke, this simple wordplay sidestepped the entire issue.
The second one is about the “people can only use their own name” conundrum that appeared to throw quite a few people off the right track. The relevant Red Truths are #3 and #4, and they state that no one can use names that do not belong to them and no one can use the name of another person when being identified by the Red Truth. This would, on the surface, mean that Shannon cannot be the same person as Kanon.
However, if you look closely, there is a very important Red Truth missing: There is no Red Truth declaring that “one human cannot have more than one name that actually belongs to them”! The reason why Yasu can use multiple names is because all those names actually belong to her and are acknowledged by others.
Now, let’s get to the main course: the mystery of the disappearing Kanon!
Let me give you the solution Beatrice provided to the closed room in a nutshell: Erika enters the room and locks it with the chain. She enters the bathroom and has to mess around with the faucet, allowing Battler to get out of his hiding place in the closet, open the door and let Kanon in, who in turn “magically” got out of the guest house despite the seals Erika placed on the doors. Then he leaves while Kanon locks the door from the inside with the chain and hides in the closet in Battler’s place while Erika is still busy with the faucet, then magically disappears from the room.
Let’s take the elements of this mystery one by one. First off, the problem of how Kanon got out of the sealed cousin’s room. As the relevant Reds of #5, #6 and #7 show, the seals on the doors of the guest house rooms were unbroken. However, there are two very big flaws in the seals: First off, most of the arguments focus on the cousin’s room’s seals, as that is where Kanon was supposed to be at the time. However, in reality “Kanon” was actually in the ‘next room over’ as Shannon, so that entire line of reasoning is pointless, since while we get some Red Truth regarding the cousin’s room windows, there is none regarding the next room over’s windows. More importantly, even if they were sealed properly and the seals were undisturbed (which is, again, not stated in red), they actually don’t prove anything because of a simple reason: Shannon could have easily left through the window right after Erika left the room, before she even had the chance to get outside and set up the seal on the windows.
In short I propose this: Shannon got out through the window right after Erika left and ran over to the mansion where she changed into Kanon. During this time Erika set up the seals and killed the victims of the First Twilight who were playing dead, then she went over to Battler’s room while being followed by Yasu/Kanon, after which point things happened as described by Beato… well, to a degree.
So, the disappearance of Kanon. The relevant Reds are #8-12.
What happened was practically the same as Beato’s explanation up until Kanon’s disappearance. I admit, before I finally wrapped my head around the whole Yasu thing this mystery kicked my ass as I had literally zero idea about how it could be solved. In fact I am actually tempted to look up that godawful Rosatrice video just to see what kind of insane mental gymnastics the guy had to perform in order to make sense of this any other way than the very simple “Yasu hid herself in the closet and then stopped being Kanon, therefore fulfilling #11 and #12.”
I would once again quote Ange’s musings about multiple personalities, since it is very relevant to the whole Yasu issue and it was said during one of the Featherine scenes which are unabashed author-inserts:
Ange:
If a personality is what makes a person a person in our eyes…
You could probably say that a second personality represents a different person entirely, even if it inhabits the same flesh body.
After her defeat, Erika staggers towards Beato and Battler and delivers her introduction in Red one last time for a dramatic exit.
Okay, simple math time. Early on one of the biggest Red arguments in the story was about how there is no Mysterious Person X or 19th person on the island, limiting the number of people on Rokkenjima to 18.
Then it was revealed that Kinzo was dead all along, which lowered the number of humans on the island to 17.
Then we got Erika entering the game as the “uninvited guest”, bumping up the number of people to 18.
And finally, in this declaration, we get the following: -EVEN- if Erika joins them like she declared (setting up a hypothetical scenario), there would still -ONLY- be 17 people on the island. If we turn it around, it means that if Erika -DOES NOT- joint them, like in the first four games, then there are -ONLY- 16 people on the island.
Since we have 17 named characters, this means that one person plays two roles, and as we all know, this person is Yasu/Kanon/Shannon.