#SG2 rereads requiem

[sg2tiger]

The EP7 Manga Yasu

Eyyy long time no post!! I’m actually gearing up for my upcoming EP8 read (October sure crept up fast...) so I thought I’d finally go through and finish the EP7 manga, which I was reading alongside my EP7 reread last year...but if you’ve followed my liveblogs thus far you’ll know I find EP7 rather boring, so reading through all those flashbacks again kinda killed my interest and I dropped the manga somewhere around 1983.

ANYWAYS here’s a prelude to my upcoming return to seacats liveblogging. Spoilers under the cut.

So as I’m making my way through catching up on that I noticed something interesting. You may remember this post I made previously about how well I believe the manga handled the transition in POV from ‘Yasu’ to ‘Shannon’. 

Now, I know a lot of people give the EP7 manga grief for the whole ‘blonde Yasu’ thing (I’m not a huge fan myself), since we know that’s not how she really looked. But consider the fact that this is the adaptation of a visual novel, wherein most of these flashbacks were shown from a first-person POV...and a big part of the whole mystery that Ryukishi didn’t want to just spoonfeed readers would have been ruined if Yasu was depicted here as she’d have realistically looked. Instead, the manga opted for a similar sort of ‘veil’ over the character (who HAD to be depicted due to the visual nature of manga) as Clair - remember, Bern gives Yasu the appearance and name of Clair specifically as a last sort of safeguard for the culprit’s true identity. On the meta (meta-meta?) level, Clair was Ryukishi’s means of depicting the culprit without DEPICTING the culprit. The blonde Yasu of the EP7 manga is essentially the same thing...yet you never hear people complain about Clair in the same way. I feel like this nuance is lost on a lot of people, who take the EP7 manga’s portrayal of Yasu in these flashbacks far too literally, when we should be seeing it simply as an equivalent to the fact that you ALSO don’t actually see Yasu in those parts of the VN.

Anyways, this technique was used to interesting effect when Yasu ‘modified the world’ in order to become Beatrice, separating that identity from that of Shannon (as seen in the above-mentioned post). Well later on, when Yasu is working on solving the epitaph, I noticed that the same sort of technique was used again.

So first it’s important to note how ‘Beatrice’ behaves during the majority of the epitaph solving segments. Essentially, she behaves like Beatrice - boisterous, mocking, confident, sneering at all the lowly humans as she’ll surely solve the epitaph before them and achieve her true resurrection.

It’s the usual shit we expect from when Yasu is absorbed in her Beatrice identity. This is just another game, another means to assert her existence over the humans of Rokkenjima. Of course at this point Yasu has no idea what’s in store for her, so this is really just a fun diversion she can escape into, away from all those cool cool insecurities that would have been piling up around this time. Unlike the siblings (WHO ALL NEEDED A LOT OF MONEY RIGHT NOW), for whom this was a huge deal and a very real chance for them to get out of their various debts, Yasu’s goal wasn’t the gold - just solving the epitaph in itself, and awakening as a true witch, was what she sought.

So despite the various frustrations upon realizing the epitaph was tougher than she thought, Yasu basically behaves as her Beatrice persona throughout, indulging in the whole ‘local witch participates in own resurrection ceremony’ thing. And once she gets over the tougher hurdles, she seems to be thoroughly enjoying the challenge.

In fact, right up until the point she actually enters the gold room, Yasu is riding high on the feeling of actually being able to solve this seemingly impossible riddle. 

That all changes as soon as the reality sinks in that she’s standing in front of a real 10 ton pile of gold...and that’s when things get interesting (and when I get on with my original point, apparently).

She’s quickly brought back to reality as Yasu/Shannon, a servant of the family that owns this mansion, and not an ancient and powerful witch that rules the night. But the most interesting part to me is the fact that this page will be the last one where you see Beatrice’s facial features for the duration of this scene.

This faceless figure with the long blonde hair sure looks familiar, doesn’t she? While the ol’ ‘face obscured for dramatic value’ thing is common in manga, I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that the artist explicitly chose to draw Beatrice faceless for the remainder of this scene (up until she puts on the dress and wig and meets with Kinzo). That’s because this isn’t ‘Beatrice’ anymore. Ironically, the very moment she’s being told that she is, in fact, the true Beatrice...she couldn’t be feeling less like her Beatrice character. She’s been fully yanked back into the reality that is Yasu - at first terrified that she’ll be scolded for entering this secret room (not exactly something a thousand year old witch would fear), and then feeling overwhelmed and, ultimately, undeserving of the prize she just won. This was just a game she’d made with herself to solve the epitaph...she never imagined it would honestly lead to all this gold, the headship, and a whole bunch of revelations she never asked for. She’s timid and nervous and almost definitely dropped the Beatrice-style of speech the second Genji entered the room (I don’t care enough to double-check with the voice patch).

Yeah, she’s still being drawn as ‘Beatrice’ the same way she had been for this entire epitaph solving extravaganza...but merely by obscuring her face behind her bangs like that, it takes you immediately back to the way she was portrayed in the flashbacks as a child. To the fragile, vulnerable, Yasu.

Even the chapter’s title page invokes this image.

So I’m pretty sure this was 100% deliberate. And I thought it was quite a nice throwback to the previous depiction of Yasu, while further emphasizing her shift in personality as soon as the reality of solving the epitaph actually hits her.

So yeah - blonde Yasu was never meant to be taken literally. Of course she doesn’t really look like that. We know Li’l Yasu was just Li’l Shannon. But the manga’s depiction wasn’t out of ignorance - it was simply an effective means of portraying a character who purposefully had no graphic in the visual novel, whose existence is meant to be veiled in illusion.

[sg2tiger]

Over 7 years later, I finally realize the true meaning behind Bern’s whole ‘tear out the guts’ philosophy...and I feel really silly for not noticing it so long ago.

Watanagashi.

Tearing out the guts is Bernkastel’s specialty...because it’s something she watched happen to ‘herself’ countless times in the past.

I cannot believe.

[sg2tiger]

ARE YOU HAVING FUN YET?!

[sg2tiger]

I’ve been planning to make this post for some time, but wanted to reread the scene in question first before I did it.

Basically, I have a lot of problems with the idea that the same incident took place, and pretty much in the same way, in Lion’s world as it did in Prime.

First let’s take a basic look at the events as they happen in Prime.

-Beatrice sends letter saying ‘solve epitaph or else’ -Against all expectations, the adults do band together and solve it -Adults get to the chapel, do the thing, and find the gold -[theatre segment*] -'Beatrice' appears in the gold room and explains her 'game' - this includes telling the adults the gold belongs to them, showing them the rifles and bullets piled on the table, explaining the bomb, and providing the cash card (in that order) -The adults begin to argue over how to split the gold and the cash on the card - TL;DR converting gold to cash isn't easy without connections and it is said that Krauss is the only one here with such connections, so without his help the siblings are basically reliant only on the cash on the card (important) -Violence breaks out, Eva accidentally shoots Natsuhi; Hideyoshi accidentally shoots Krauss -Rosa and Eva argue over covering up the murders; Rosa doesn't want to play along with Eva because she gains nothing by blowing up the island and losing all the gold -Kyrie shoots Rosa, the only one who hadn't yet fired her gun -Kyrie shoots Hideyoshi, Eva, and 'Beatrice'; their plan is to use the bomb to blow away all traces of the murders and escape with only the cash card -Not wanting anyone to make a fuss about missing people for the next 24 hours, Kyrie and Rudolf begin to massacre everyone else on the island

What happens after this part is unimportant, since the issue regarding Lion's world only goes as far as 'Kyrie kills everyone'.

*Theatre Segment: Unlike most 'games' that typically go on pause during meta scenes, the show of Prime that Ange and Lion are watching seems more like a movie that doesn't stop playing in the background while our lens switches to them. There are a few gaps here and there that indicate this, and as a result we don't actually get to see how much happens between the adults entering the gold room and Beatrice appearing. HOWEVER - at this point, Lion is still being optimistic because Clair appeared on stage, and believes this will be a game without any crime since Clair already cleared all her regrets away. That tells me that, before Beatrice shows up, the adults probably hadn't yet begun to bicker over the gold, or Lion might not be able to be quite so positive about the outcome of this 'game'.

Now, let's compare this to what we know about Lion's world.

From the screencaps I posted above, we see that the adults still had their usual arguments during the family conference concerning the inheritance and headship. Unlike Yasu's world, however (where Kinzo is dead and 'Beatrice' sends a mysterious letter), this world has a clear successor already chosen by Kinzo (alive) himself - Lion. But we're told that the adults don't all agree with this decision, and even Krauss believes he's still too young (about to turn 20). So Kinzo, realizing his shit-ass kids will never be satisfied, proposes the epitaph riddle he thought up long ago (evidenced by the complex epitaph device that had to have been built when the mansion was first constructed). He doesn't think anyone can solve it, of course, but it's one of his classic Kinzo-style bets to risk everything on anyway.

And just like in Prime, the adults manage to band together, solve the epitaph, and discover the gold. So far, so good.

The problem is that Bern says:

"After that, everything happened exactly like the truth you just saw. The siblings solved it right away, and there was a quarrel over the pile of gold. Then, Kyrie and Rudolf decided to prevent any chance of the crime being discovered the next morning and an outcry being raised, they carried out the late night murders [sic]."

There's a bit of a gap here, isn't there? We go from 'the adults quarrel over the gold' to 'Kyrie and Rudolf decide to hide the crime'. What crime? Well, Bern says it's exactly the same as the truth about Prime they just saw. Except...that doesn't make any sense.

There’s nothing wrong with the idea of the adults quarreling over the gold, of course. The basic facts of Prime are all still true in Lion’s world, including that the adults all NEEDED A LOT OF MONEY RIGHT NOW. There’s also the usual Krauss vs. The Other Three mentality, where Krauss/Natsuhi believe the gold is theirs by right because they live here (and in Lion’s world, since Kinzo’s still alive, Natsuhi arguing that the gold still belongs to Kinzo would hold more weight; also I can see Krauss backpedaling once the gold is found and agreeing that his son should be the successor because Kinzo already decided it). The other siblings, of course, will argue that since Krauss alone didn’t solve the epitaph, he has no more right to the gold than them, and it should be split among the siblings. This arguing would probably still come to blows...

...but there’s an important factor that should be missing, here, to prevent it from escalating beyond a fist fight. That being, it was Yasu who provided the guns and bullets and brought them down into the gold room ahead of time as part of her game.

“B-but Kinzo could have done this!!”, you argue, “they were his guns in the first place!!” 

Okay, but would he? Let’s think about the Kinzo we know. And I don’t wanna hear no ‘b-but he’s dead in almost all the games we don’t know what he was really like’ bullshit, because the Alive Lion’s World Kinzo in EP7 + memories of the Alive Kinzo and testimonies from literally everyone indicate clearly that the Kinzo illusion we know from previous games is accurate to what he was really like. It’s also said in EP5 that pieces cannot act in a way that goes against their true personality, and there’s nothing indicating this should be any different for the dead, so...the Kinzo we think we know = the real Kinzo. 

That Kinzo we know is a mad lunatic who had built up the family and fortune with insane schemes and bets all his life. Proposing an ‘impossible’ epitaph to his children is just another one of those bets...he’s confident that they will not solve it, and thus Lion’s future as the head of the family is secured. But knowing Kinzo...if they did, by some miracle, manage to solve it? Then that just means he lost. The miracle slipped through his fingers, and their magic ended up being stronger than his. He’d concede the gold to his shitty kids, and probably the headship, too. He’d laugh madly about how he failed Beatrice again by failing to make her true child the successor. And I almost feel like, under that madness, he might even be a bit relieved for Lion’s sake - after all, Kinzo knows what it was like to have the headship forced on himself against his will. Lion doesn’t really seem like he objects to becoming the head (he’s got that very dignified Natsuhi-esque personality about the family honor and all), but I can see Kinzo saying ‘oh well, go live life and be free, Lion’ if the adults solved it. ‘A bet’s a bet’, and Kinzo bet the gold and the headship on the adults not being able to solve the epitaph. It’s his loss - and Kinzo just isn’t the type who would take back a bet like that and make his ‘magic’ meaningless, IMO.

Kinzo also proposed the epitaph on a whim at the conference as the adults were arguing...and had no reason to believe or hope that they would solve it (whereas Yasu set up her game a few days in advance and had many contingency plans, and did in fact hope they would solve the epitaph and stop her). Would Kinzo honestly pull out his old gun collection and a bunch of bullets, then bring them down into the gold room just in case the adults did something he wholeheartedly didn’t expect them to do? I highly doubt it.

Without the guns there, the violence would never have escalated to the point of someone getting accidentally shot (obviously). And as we can see here, the fact that we already had at least one accidental death was what ultimately sealed the deal on them being able to kill everyone. No guns, no accidental deaths...no massacre. 

So even if the adults left the gold room and still had greed and murder on their minds (say something like Eva and Rosa in EP3, who leave the room and plan to tell the others and decide what to do later...but Eva grows increasingly paranoid and is driven to kill), and manage to get up to Kinzo’s study (much harder to do in this world since he’s alive mind you, and the adults are all kinda fucking terrified of him) and grab the guns for themselves, the ‘conditions’ that lead to Kyrie shooting Rosa in the first place would be absent.

“But what if they had something on hand they could stab with?”, you might say. “Rosa stabs a goat in EP2 with a fountain pen, and the women could have had their purses on them with something sharper, like a letter opener.”

Okay, sure. Let’s say that, as the argument gets more and more heated, Eva grabs a letter opener from her purse. Natsuhi jumps at her...and just like her finger reflexively slipped on the trigger, she instinctively reacts and stabs Natsuhi in the neck. Natsuhi falls dead. Krauss flies into a rage and charges at Eva, planning to strangle her with his bare hands. This might be possible, as he is a large man and Eva is a slender woman, but Eva is also a martial arts expert and would likely be able to defend herself much more easily against an unarmed Krauss. Hideyoshi would probably, just like Prime, also jump in to shield his wife. The two men would struggle...but how far would they really get before someone broke them apart? Without a gun in the mix making people less eager to jump in, I feel like a scuffle like this would probably not actually lead to one of the men strangling the other.

“But what if Kyrie also had a letter opener--”

Okay, this is just getting silly. The reason the massacre was able to happen so easily in that room is because two people were already dead and Kyrie had a gun she was skilled at reloading while the others were not. Kyrie was able to shoot before anyone else could reload and shoot back. Without guns, how likely do you think it would really be for Kyrie to stab the other four (Eva, Hideyoshi, Rosa, Krauss)? Could Kyrie easily overpower grown men like Hideyoshi and Krauss with just a letter opener? Okay, she hands it to Rudolf - could even Rudolf tackle two men at once + a martial arts expert? 

Stabbing one person to death is one thing, but being able to take out everyone else in that gold room without them A) fighting back or B) fleeing to get help is virtually impossible, even for people like Rudolf and Kyrie. In short, without the guns, this situation could not escalate in the same way it did in Prime. At most you’d have one person getting killed in a crime of passion, like a stabbing or strangulation...but it wouldn’t get beyond that level before someone managed to go alert the rest of the family and measures could be taken to restrain the accidental murderer. 

“But would they really go get the others and bring them to the crime scene where they’d see the gold?”

In that example it’d still a majority of people trying to hold the would-be killers at bay, as mentioned above. Alternatively someone could still summon at the very least Kinzo or Genji, both who already knew about the gold (I don’t think anyone would question that Genji would know about Kinzo’s gold honestly). No matter what example you think of, there’s simply no way any massacre is going to kick off without those guns.

"But even without killing anyone beforehand, there’s still the bomb, right?”

Oh, of course. The bomb obviously still exists in Lion’s world. Yasu tells us that it was Kinzo who set it up, after all, and the 900 tons of explosives from WWII would still be on the island.

But again, there are some factors present in Prime regarding the bomb that should not exist in Lion’s world.

First of all, Yasu is the one who explains the device to begin with. Without her there pointing it out to them, surely it would be ignored because it’s literally just a grandfather clock. It’s just another fancy fixture decorating the already-opulent room.

Now, it’s worth noting that Kyrie does mention, when ‘Beatrice’ explains the device, that the epitaph reads more literally like a serial murder and that ‘none shall be left alive’ would indicate some kind of massive accident enough to take out the rest. However, even Kyrie doesn’t have magical Scooby Doo deduction powers to where I think she’d make the clock = bomb connection without the puzzle pieces clicking into place, first. In which case, it’s ‘Beatrice’ saying ‘I was going to use these guns and commit a 13-person serial murder’ that made her connect it to the epitaph, and think more deeply about the ‘none shall be left alive’ part of it. Without someone coming along and saying that they were going to follow a literal interpretation of the epitaph, I don’t feel as though Kyrie would start to analyze it in a literal way - after all, they already solved it on a metaphorical level, where the ‘sacrifices’ and ‘none shall be left alive’ were referring to the device at the chapel. The fact that it reads like a creepy murder ceremony was just a Kinzo-like decoration to conceal its true meaning. Without Yasu actually saying that she was going to also take it literally, I don’t think that Kyrie would look at that clock and make the supposition that it could be connected to a bomb...especially since the other adults even only vaguely seem aware of ‘rumors’ (not even confirmation) that Rokkenjima was once a military base. It would seem as though even the siblings were never privy to the true history of their long-time home.

There’s also the fact that the explosives are more than 40 years old. Don’t forget that the entire reason Yasu blew up the reef with the shrine was to test the explosives first and ensure they still worked. In Lion’s world, that shrine would still exist...and no one would have actually tested the explosives. Not even Kinzo, who we’re told would probably come down here and think about things with the bomb set to ‘on’ because he is fucking crazy. So even if the adults did somehow magically guess that the clock was a bomb...they’d be dubious as to whether the explosives even still worked. Of course, they’d still have a 50/50 shot by flipping the switch to find out, but would Rudolf and Kyrie really risk committing a mass-murder on a ‘maybe’? The only way to find out if the bomb worked or not would be to set the switch and get as fucking far away as possible...imagine killing everyone on the island only to find out the bombs were a dud after all. Whoops. Pretty sure you’re not gonna get away from the police for this one, even if you change your names and leave the country (and if you did that, I don’t think the yen on the cash card would do you too good). It’s simply not worth the risk without a guarantee that the explosives work - and Yasu blowing up the shrine was that guarantee. It was an immediately visible image to all the adults in that room that the explosives did work, and that 900 tons of them would wipe out the entire island. A world without Yasu means a world without that guarantee...and a world in which mass-murder would simply not be worth the risk.

So Lion’s world has no guns, and no bomb. Rudolf and Kyrie aren’t just evil psychopaths - they are cold and calculating, both experienced with business and dirty deeds. They’re not so stupid that they’d start killing everyone without a surefire way to hide the evidence. You’d have two people trying to get away with killing 15 others without guns, first of all - and I don’t think even the biggest knives in Gohda’s kitchen are gonna let you do that without some painful screaming alerting the others before you get too far. Furthermore, you don’t have a magical switch that’ll blow the evidence sky high to cover up your tracks. But if even that’s not enough to convince you, there’s one more thing that absolutely guarantees Kyrie and Rudolf would have no reason to murder:

The cash card does not exist in Lion’s world.

Yasu converted that gold to cash. She did this in advance, knowing already that she was going to be making a game of this. She even sent out the pin number to the relatives who would survive the family members in the event that no one solved the epitaph and everyone died. This was pre-planned by the mastermind who was going to commit the serial murders. Yasu. Yasu Yasu Yasu.

Again, Kinzo proposing the epitaph was something he did on a whim. He invented the epitaph years ago, and it was easy for him to just say ‘okay if you don’t like my decision what about this’ and whip it out for them to solve. But if they solved it? All they’d get was gold. Kinzo didn’t convert any of his gold to cash and plan to give the pin number to his shitty kids. And as I said above, it’s pointed out that Krauss is the only one of the adults with the connections to convert that unmarked, illegal gold into cash. The way that scene tells it, no one else in the room can argue with Krauss when he mentions this. So no matter how many shady types Rudolf and Kyrie know (and I’m sure there are many), even they, apparently, do not have any easy contacts that would be able to convert this gold to cash.

I wouldn’t put it past the two of them to find those connections, though. They could do it. Except, oh wait, their entire plan hinged on blowing up the island and the gold with it. Without a cash card, literally all they have is a mountain of gold sitting on Rokkenjima. They could make like EP2 Rosa and try to escape with an ingot or two, but would they really blow away the rest of that money? And it’s not even like they could kill everyone and come back for the rest later!! You’d be hiring a crane or something to come haul it away for you...even with illegal connections, it’s probably not gonna be easy to convince someone to come to an island full of corpses and do this for you. They see those corpses, and they see that pile of gold? They’re gonna try to milk at least half of it from you to ‘buy their silence’. And can you really trust that this person isn’t gonna spill the beans even if you give it to them? Okay, so track him down and kill him, too. Just keep racking up the bodies. Not like that is ever gonna be traced back to you. I’m sorry, but all the yakuza connections in the world do not make me buy this as something they could realistically transport off the island without things getting even more messy.

So let’s review. Lion’s world has:

-No guns in the gold room -No one to explain the bomb -No proof that the explosives still even work -No means of hiding the evidence of a massacre -No cash card -No easy way of leaving the island with the gold

??????????????????????????????????????????????????

And Bern expects me to believe that Lion is stuck in a dead end of fate where even he gets shot to death by Kyrie in the parlor and caught up in a large-scale massacre? Sorry, Bernie, but I call bullshit on that one. Whether it’s your bullshit, or Ryukishi’s bullshit, it’s bullshit. Without Yasu there to provide all the necessary ‘ingredients’ that lead to the incident in the first place, it just can’t happen. 

Prove me wrong. Hint: you can’t.

[sg2tiger]

Her time has come.

[sg2tiger]

Yes.

[sg2tiger]

I don’t want to spam up the tag with such a pointless collection of posts, but old habits die hard...so while I know that we now know the truth behind these answers thanks to the manga, and it’s all probably really obvious to most people now, I still want to go through all the mysteries myself before ‘confirming’ the solutions with the manga. Maybe it’s because I just finished that rambling post about what things were like back before we had such answers...but I feel like I can’t just...read this section without actually analyzing it on my own. So I’m just gonna dump them all here in one post under a Read More. Honestly this is more for my own satisfaction than anything, so feel free to ignore.

Episode 1: Legend of the Golden Witch

Starting things off super obvious. Illusions to illusions = something that was complete fantasy and didn’t happen. There are of course only five corpses in the shed - Shannon is absent, with Yasu instead as Kanon standing over the spot where Shannon is supposed to be. Hideyoshi, the only other witness, was bribed by Yasu in Episode 1 and asked to play along with the ruse to convince George not to confirm Shannon’s corpse with his own eyes. It was left to the roulette whether or not George would listen to his father, but ultimately he did, and Shannon’s true fate remained undiscovered.

A chain of illusions. The chain was never set in the first place. Kanon and Genji were the ones who discovered the crime scene - both accomplices in the crime itself. Yasu went to Eva and Hideyoshi’s room as Kanon after the commotion in the parlor about the receipt. As Eva and Hideyoshi were both bribed in EP1, they undid the chain (assuming they even set it to begin with) because it was someone they believed they could trust. Whether they knew Kanon = Beatrice or simply were told that the servants of the one wing were trustworthy, it’s hard to say, but they did invite him in willingly. Of note is the fact that there were no signs of struggle in that room - so the fact that Eva, a martial arts master, would not have put up a fight against her killer, is one hint to the fact that the killer was someone she trusted enough to turn her back to.

Eva let Kanon in and returned to her position relaxing on the bed, turning the volume on the TV low while they discussed the next step in the plan. Hideyoshi was most likely in the shower at the time and hadn’t even heard Kanon enter over the sound of the running water - after all, all the mansion’s guest rooms have roughly the same design, and from EP6 we know that Erika didn’t notice the sound of Battler leaving the closed room and exchanging places with Kanon while she was distracted by the trap. We also know fromConfession that Yasu hid the guns around the mansion at places she would need them in advance, so most likely there was already one inside Eva and Hideyoshi’s room - Kanon would have thus been a lot less suspicious entering the room without a weapon (otherwise it’d be weird that Eva sat back down on the bed, right?). With Eva’s guard down, Kanon grabs the rifle and shoots her in the head. It’s unknown whether or not Hideyoshi heard this and attempted to leave the shower, but he was also shot before he could even get dressed. Kanon then placed the two stakes into the gunshot wounds of their heads, left the room, and drew a magic circle on the door...and finally, placed the Third Twilight’s letter underneath it. They could then have cut through the unset chain at their leisure to maintain the story that it was set and they needed the chain cutters to get through. By the time the others were summoned everything was already set up, so the story about the chain being set when Genji and Kanon arrived was swallowed easily. No one would ever doubt Genji, who had been such a loyal servant since before most of the survivors were even born.

Kinzo has been dead for two years. His body was grabbed from the freezer in his study and stuffed into the boiler where it was set to burn slowly, so the smell didn’t reach the others too quickly. Of course, Natsuhi already knew he was dead, and the servants were playing along with the ruse that he wasn’t (while simultaneously playing along with the murder game), so it came off as a ‘surprise’ after the whole receipt situation talking about how he could have left the study. What interests me about this is why Natsuhi would then continue to willingly stay in the group with the servants. Surely seeing Kinzo’s body stuffed in the boiler would be a sign to her that says ‘whoever did this is someone who knew he was dead and where to find his body’, right? Based on EP5 and how she began to suspect the servants after finding Shannon’s card in her room, I would certainly think Natsuhi is astute enough to start finding them suspicious. Was she really just that confident that they wouldn’t make a move if they stayed together, and had faith in her gun...? Only the catbox knows.

The witch and stake of illusions = there was no one there who attacked Kanon. The illusion they pierced = Kanon himself. Basically Kanon runs down th the boiler room to stage his own death. It’s debatable (especially since EP1 is just a story) whether or not his argument with Beatrice really happened, though I personally like to believe that was a sign of Kanon’s self trying to pierce through the ‘fate’ that his creator (Yasu) and Beatrice were trying to force him into. This is the side of Kanon that was moved by Jessica’s words after the cultural festival and wants to live his own life...the Kanon that is refusing to simply go along with this farce of a roulette, hence his speech. That’s what I believe. However, he’s not strong enough to win against the roulette, and ultimately ‘Kanon’ is sacrificed - Yasu either stabs herself (shallowly, just enough to bleed a bit and be convincing) or uses fake blood (less likely IMO) and stages the whole thing.

Kumasawa does her part and screams to get everyone else’s attention so they see that Kanon is down. Oh, and Yasu already opened the courtyard door before the stabbing to make it seem like the culprit got away. Nanjo, who is also in on it, comes along and says ‘oh no we better take him in for emergency care’. However neither of them probably expected Jessica to cling on and follow them, so Nanjo ends up taking Kanon into the servant room and closing her out so he can die ‘offscreen’. This leaves Yasu’s two personas on the board dead, giving her an alibi to move around freely as the others head off to Kinzo’s study.

[Kinzo’s study is skipped here, but let’s cover it for completeness’ sake. Of the four people who could have placed the letter on the table, three are possible candidates - I’d rule out Maria because she wholeheartedly believes a witch is doing this. Most likely it was Genji, but it could have been Kumasawa or Nanjo as well. It doesn’t really matter. Either way, Natsuhi was correct in her reasoning, and thus the four were booted from the room. But of course this too was part of Yasu’s plan...as we see from the Discord circle. The entire purpose of the letter was to stir up chaos and cause someone to get kicked out of the room. I don’t think it mattered who got ousted, since it was just a coincidence that Battler, Jessica and George had alibis (though I think Jessica would have been safe from suspicion no matter what since her mom is the one calling the shots), but all that mattered was that at least one person got kicked out by the others. She just happened to get three sacrifices in one go to finish the twilights, but assuming less than three got kicked she probably still had other tricks up her sleeve to get through the 7th and 8th twilights too]

I’m not entirely sure of the meaning to ‘illusions are the blind girl’s song’...but ‘illusion of a closed room’ is the same deal as the chain. The room was never closed. Yasu’s own accomplices were the ones inside the room, and they let her in willingly. Since she only needed three and didn’t want to kill Maria until the end if possible, she had her fuck off to the corner of the room and sing loud enough that she didn’t hear what was going on. Is that what ‘illusions are the blind girl’s song’ means? just the fact that it kept Maria from knowing what happened?

Anyway then she was all like ‘okay time to die’ and what followed is pretty much what Maria said. Kumasawa and Nanjo protested - after all, they never knew the full extent of Yasu’s plan or that they’d be getting killed off for real in the end - but Genji was like ‘yeah sure I’m ready’. So she shot all three of them dead while Maria just kept singing her song, and then stuck stakes in their wounds. Then she called the study and left the phone dangling there so they could hear Maria singing...like a more twisted version of the prank on Jessica in the VIP room (man can you imagine how that made Jessica feel though? Talk about an unpleasant way to be reminded of that experience). Then she...uh...I actually can’t remember if the room was locked when Natsuhi and co got there...actually, wasn’t the parlor not even supposed to have a lock on it at all? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Either way, by the time they got down from the study, Yasu had already left her letter there and made her exit.

[...and now we’re onto EP2...but I swore the ending with Natsuhi’s duel came up at some point. Hmmmm...well, I’ll cover it anyways. We don’t ever find out the contents of the letter as far as I know, but it’s not hard to imagine. It was probably written for Natsuhi specifically (unlike the one Jessica got in EP2 that was written vaguely enough that any of the cousins could have picked it up and gotten provoked by it) and said something like ‘if you want to settle this in a duel meet me in front of my portrait, alone’. So she leaves when the kids are distracted and barricades the door so the others can’t follow her.

I have to wonder...we know Lambda’s game took a very different perspective as a more human revenge than a witch fantasy, but is it possible that Natsuhi had reason to suspect the culprit was the baby from 19 years ago? Would certainly make it more personal, and EP1 definitely feels very personal against Natsuhi and may have been some form of Yasu venting her grudge against her. Either way Natsuhi doesn’t seem to buy into this witch bullshit at all, and raises her gun against the darkness - in which she probably really does see the figure of another human raising a gun against her (and not a magic pipe). They shoot simultaneously, but...from EP7, we know that the guns all had defects. It’s possible that Natsuhi got the one that jammed, and wasn’t able to fire when she tried to pull the trigger (not like she tested it beforehand). So Beatrice shoots and that’s the single gunshot that is heard. Yasu then switches the guns, leaving the warm, smoking one next to Natsuhi, and hides.

All that’s left after that is to wait for the clock to strike midnight...and the bomb to go off, taking the rest of the survivors, including Yasu herself, with it.]

Episode 2: Turn of the Golden Witch

A more difficult Episode, but not impossible. However, I’m not referencing anything but my own memories here, and EP1 is actually more vivid in my head (I blame dragging out my EP2 reread for two years) so I’m probably more likely to make a few mistakes here.

What stands out to me here is the use of ‘the gold truth’ which Will uses again later as well. I don’t recall ever getting a concrete explanation on the gold truth - all I know is that it can sometimes be more true than the red, but at other times not as powerful. Two statements we see in gold are the factual guarantee of Kinzo’s corpse in EP5...but then in EP6 when Big Sis Beato calls the candy in the cup trick a splendid magic. There’s a pretty clear difference in the veracity of both of these statements...so based on that, and Will’s statement here, I’m going to take it like this. The red truth (though it can be used within loopholes) represents objective, factual truth, but the gold truth represents a subjective truth. The Umineko mantra is basically ‘a lie that everyone believes in becomes the truth’, a sort of ‘truth in the eye of the beholder’ sort of thing. Though that’s not completely satisfying either because it makes me wonder why Battler guaranteeing Kinzo’s corpse was somehow truer than red, but...this is what I’m going with right now.

As for the lock of illusions, it’s just the same tired trick again - the door was never locked in the first place. This one is funny to me because I remember back in the day how furiously people debated over the issue of the chapel door and its key...like, I remember the arguments about that one issue going on for pages and pages, more hotly debated than any other one particular mystery that I recall. And yet I don’t really remember anyone considering that the door may not have been locked in the to begin with - the simplest explanation was completely ignored in favor of much more ridiculous theories!!

In any case, the adults confront Genji about the Beatrice situation and that’s her cue to show up in the flesh and wow them all with her spectacular golden magic (read: cold, hard ingots). They ‘acknowledge’ that she is a witch because thEY ALL NEEDED A LOT OF MONEY RIGHT NOW and she’s waving all this golden bling in their face, telling them all they have to do is play along with her little murder game. Only SURPRISE it’s not a game at all, and she kills them all for reals.

One point I have always been set on, though, is that Rosa didn’t know this would happen until she saw their corpses the next day. She reacts with quite realistic revulsion when she realizes they’re actually dead and I just don’t buy that she was that good an actress that she was vomiting on cue and everything. So it was probably agreed that, since Beatrice had given the letter to Maria the previous day, Maria’s mother should be the one to ‘discover the corpses’ while the other adults stayed there to play dead. Rosa leaves, Yasu...I dunno, I guess just shoots them all in the stomach? Their guts were hanging out and all over the place so I’m pretty sure whatever she did was pretty damn fatal, and I think they even made a point of how there were no other wounds and they just looked like they were sleeping (so she didn’t shoot them in the head and then disembowel them after they died). She probably poisoned them beforehand to make it easier, considering she did have to kill a whole six adults which may have been not so easy if they were fighting back...so she invites them to the chapel where they agree to play dead, poisons them, waits for them to pass out and then, uh, ‘decorates’ the scene. 

Just like Eva and Hideyoshi’s room in EP2, the one who first discovers the magic circle on the chapel door is Yasu herself - Shannon, who claims she saw a note that said ‘chapel’ on it. So she and Genji go to wake up Rosa because they ‘couldn’t find’ anyone else, and what follows is basically as seen. Rosa, who thought this was just gonna be a harmless prank, is shocked, but she’s also in too deep at this point and can’t easily go against the person who bribed her, so she ends up playing along for most of EP2.

While I think that any one of the siblings could have found the provoking letter, it’s Jessica who ultimately gets riled up and runs off. Kanon and Gohda follow after her, and Kanon asks Gohda to leave them alone so he can comfort her, wink wink, nudge nudge. He manages to calm Jessica down and get her to drop her guard, then shoots her in the back and shoves a stake in her wound. Then, having finished his job, ‘Kanon’ dies in that room and his corpse is ‘erased’...Yasu becomes Shannon, exits the room, and locks it with her master key while leaving Jessica’s own key inside her pocket.

Rosa’s argument for Kanon being the culprit ends up being correct, though how much of the ensuing argument is genuine and how much is scripted is something I’ve always had trouble really picking apart. I’m pretty sure I’ve even got a whole page of notes just about that particular conversation in Jessica’s room from when I was doing my on-again-off-again EP2 reread.

This was always the hardest mystery for me in EP2 for one reason - I did dispute that the closed room was a coffin. I never imagined that the culprit actually did shut herself up inside the room and killed herself...even when I knew the culprit was Yasu. I don’t think it was until I read Confession that I actually understood this, despite Battler himself seeing the gaping hole in Shannon’s head.

But it’s that simple. Shannon, George and Gohda enter Natsuhi’s bedroom and lock the door behind them. I’m not sure what order things happen in next, but let’s say she kills Gohda first. George is all WHAT THE FUCK SAYO and they talk. Maybe she tries to convince him to run away with her but he’s like DUDE YOU JUST KILLED THE CHEF and none too happy with her as a result. Maybe she’s trying to work up the courage to tell him about her body and that’s what the argument with Beatrice represents as she convinces Shannon to feel awful about herself. Either way, whatever happens, George is having none of that...so she realizes that her roulette didn’t land on Shannon and George after all and kills him.

Confession shows how distraught she is over having to do this. I feel like that’s probably why the magic version of their scene is so flowery and romantic...she paints a beautiful picture of them dying together, though still kills them before George can honor her last request and say he loves her (I actually like the anime version of this better where Beatrice outright interrupts them) because of the part of her that’s still unconvinced. Ditto the scene with Kanon and Jessica, probably - she tries to give them a tragically romantic goodbye, but it still ends on a bittersweet note. Once she finishes writing this, she sits herself down in front of the mirror and does that trick with the gun, shooting herself in the head and letting the gun ‘hide itself’. Since the room was already locked and the culprit herself is now dead, the locked room is nothing but a coffin...but even after her death, the mystery game continues.

Earth to earth - Nanjo and Kumasawa were killed in the same place we saw, in the same manner (necks sliced) we saw. Illusions to illusions, no illusion can create a corpse - Phantom Kanon was not the one who did it. It was probably Genji, who shows us that he’s actually quite skilled with a knife, hint hint. Yasu and Genji are totally cool with this because they’re in on this murder plan together...but Gohda...???????? The scene in Jessica’s room earlier tells me that he and Kumasawa are both terrible liars were both playing along already at that point in what they believed was a murder game. But seeing Genji slash those two before his eyes was just ‘2hardcore4me’ so he’s just literally flabbergasted by what the fuck just happened. Hence his incredible confusion and realistic fear when he tries to describe it to Rosa - but also, he’s probably (understandably) terrified of Shannon and Genji now and none too eager to betray them and risk his own neck, literally. So he plays along when they’re like ‘we thought it was Kanon but it also wasn’t Kanon’ and he’s just like YEAH YEAH W-WHAT THEY SAID PLEASE DON’T KILL ME. He realizes he’s in a little too deep but can’t exactly get out either, so he has to play along.

I think also at this point Rosa is in the dark on what’s been happening and whatever extent her alliance with Beatrice was is starting to fall apart, and she starts acting on her own instincts - like confiscating the master keys, which IMO was probably not inherently part of Yasu’s plan. Rosa in hindsight was probs just not the best choice of a potential accomplice because she’s not the type who can easily be bribed into following orders now that the siblings that always kept her timid are out of the picture. I feel like Yasu maybe didn’t count on that, but still managed to make it work so it was all good.

[What follows is also not covered, but we basically know the rest. Battler and Rosa fight and end up splitting apart while Genji is still off doing whateverthefuck...does he know Yasu is even dead? He must, right? Rosa probably tells him when he calls them to see Nanjo and Kumasawa’s corpses? Did he know her plan was to kill herself in that room all along? Why does he continue to carry out her plan even after her death? Just because he’s just...that loyal? It’s so hard to see inside Genji’s heart and I honestly would love an Umineko Gaiden that shows us some of the key events of the various Episodes from his POV...but in any case Battler goes and gets drunk and literally everything after that from his POV is super unreliable. Meanwhile Rosa and Maria are trying to run away because Rosa must know about the bomb, which is what the goats chasing them represent. But she was so fixated on the gold that she twists her ankle and they can’t escape on time...she regrets her decisions and I do like to believe she and Maria reached that little understanding there, in the end, before they were taken to the Golden Land.]

Episode 3: Banquet of the Golden Witch

By this time I had started getting more serious in posting about my reread, so I actually tackled a lot of these crimes in posts last year. I’ll summarize but also link to my older theory posts where applicable.

It’s funny how the most impossible closed room if you don’t know the truth about Yasu came from one of the forgeries...but once you do know, it’s not only one of the best closed rooms, but also one of the easiest. 

Shannon ‘dies’ in the most obvious and visible room in the mansion, the parlor. She does this so her body can be seen easily from the big glass window outside...where the adults are forced to go, because she’s locked the doors all over the mansion. Since Nanjo is in on it, it’s easy for him to say ‘oh yeah, she’s dead’. Then they open the letter and get the key and begin following the trail she laid out for them.

Kanon is at the very end of the loop, giving her plenty of time to change clothes and go play dead in the chapel while the adults are busy investigating the other rooms. If I recall, all the other rooms are also in the mansion...giving her plenty of time to slip away to that out-of-the-way building. And just like the shed in EP1, if the adults for some reason decided to double back and return to the parlor, and see that she wasn’t there any more, that’d just be the way the roulette fell. But it didn’t, and they followed her trail perfectly, winding up on Kanon at the end. Thus the chain of closed rooms is perfect and unbreakable...and is an illusion where the end and the beginning overlap.

Earth to earth = they’re actually dead and it basically happened the way we saw it. Likewise, no falsehoods. Rosa gets fed up with Eva for still not having told the others about the gold and they have a bit of back-and-forth...then Eva shoots Rosa. I’d like to believe that Eva hadn’t completely fallen to The Dark Side at this point, and this was probably the same sort of trigger slippage that lead to the disaster in the EP7 tea party...but of course, it happened in a lot less isolated of a location than that. And then you have to worry about Maria screaming her head off about MAMA MAMA UU UU!!! and well...someone has to shut that brat up before everyone comes running out to see you with a gun in your hand standing over Rosa’s bleeding corpse, right?! So she strangles Maria and lays her down next to Rosa, then zooms back to her room where she has to explain to her husband how she just accidentally murdered her sister and on-purposely strangled her daughter. 

I also think that the scenes of Hideyoshi trying to comfort and calm Eva down make a lot more sense if you consider that these deaths were a lot more accidental/spur of the moment and she was freaking out about what she’d just done and where they go from here. Of course, a good husband stays by your side in sickness, in health, and apparently in murder, so...Hideyoshi ends up covering for Eva and trying to give her an alibi for the time while they wait for someone else to discover the crime. And after all, they were all together all night long when the first series of murders happened, so since we already know there’s another killer hiding on the island (and no one else knows about the gold yet now that Rosa is kill) no one really has any reason to jump to suspecting Eva just yet.

...that is, until Kyrie finds the cigarette butts and starts to formulate her theory for why Eva should not have actually been in that room as they claimed. She comes up with her plan to get the three of them to leave the guesthouse where she and Rudolf plan to question Hideyoshi. As for what follows, I made a theory post about it last year, which you can find...here, and also here (note the ‘keep reading’ tags all over because I was trying to truncate the post so you might have to click a few to see all the things). It ended up becoming a chain of back-and-forth reblog discussions (I think it was before Tumblr added the conversation system to posts) so it’s a bit disjointed, but I’m pretty sure I still believe in, uh...whatever it was I came up with to explain this last year. I’m honestly too lazy to reread these posts right now but I don’t currently have any new info that would likely contradict what I came up with a year ago, though once I reread the EP7 tea party that may yet change.

[these solutions also skip over George’s death in the parlor, which is funny to me because it’s one of the few crimes in EP3 committed by Yasu, who is the one Will is supposed to be showing he understands...but basically I believe that Yasu and Nanjo had been in touch throughout EP3. Nanjo is actually the one who locks the window behind George after he escapes, and then he goes to the mansion where OMG SURPRISE SHANNON IS ACTUALLY STILL ALIVE WHAT ARE THE CHANCES. Only unlike when they’re alone in EP2, George is just so elated to see that she’s still alive that he drops his guard entirely, and she shoots him. 

I wonder if she was more resentful to him in EP3 than EP2, because she isn’t distraught enough to kill herself after killing him this time around...and she had to have called Nanjo and specifically told him to let George come over to the mansion herself. Though to be fair (as I mention in one of the above posts) she also shouldn’t have yet known that Eva solved the epitaph, otherwise she would have kept her promise not to kill anyone else...so George was probably originally meant to be one of the twilight sacrifices. Hence, when she realizes she fucked up because someone solved the epitaph, she leaves the bank code behind for Eva as compensation (because nothing says ‘sorry I murdered your son’ like fat wads of cash).]

The ‘mutable blade’ is either a rope or a wire or whatever is being represented by the Siestas’ gold thread...and the ‘obvious culprit’ is Eva, because at this point, she is the only one who could have done it. But I remember being bothered by this because I can’t figure out a real good reason for why she killed them, and my thoughts and discussions thereof can be read here (mind the ‘keep reading’) and here.

[we also skip over the finale of EP3 here, which is extremely funny to me because of the huge emphasis put on Nanjo’s death in the other arcs. But I suppose once Will has proven he understands this much the matter of ‘who killed Nanjo’ is trivial. It’s Yasu. Since ‘Shannon’ and ‘Kanon’ are both dead, we get to play fucking hopscotch with loopholes in the red, and Yasu is the only entity who is still alive and alibi-less that is able to kill Nanjo at that time.

Then at some point she realizes that Eva solved the epitaph and she shouldn’t be killing people anymore in the first place...so she leaves the bank code behind on the door. And then, when Eva shoots Jessica in the face...she can’t let go of her lingering feelings, so she ‘revives’ Kanon and tries to guide her to ‘safety’. The reason Kanon warns Jessica not to touch him is obviously not because he’s a ghost, but because he’s not a ghost and she’d realize that immediately if she felt his physical body right there. Also she probably had no intention of being Kanon anymore once Kanon was kill so I’d imagine she’s still dressed as Shannon after having met George like that, so it’s a damn good thing Jessica is blind right now...either way, she knows they’re all about to die from the bomb real soon, so I think it’s more of a last-minute comfort sort of thing at this point, not only for Jessica, but also for Yasu. Final, lingering regrets as Kanon, much like we see in EP6, about not deepening his relationship with Jessica while he still had the chance.

Then Eva shoots Battler and fucks off to Kuwadorian, escaping the blast, while Kanon and Jessica stay behind and die. The end.]

Episode 4: Alliance of the Golden Witch

Like EP3, I already covered some of these in more detail when I did the EP4 tea party last year and will link to those posts when applicable.

EP4 is just one big farce so the fact that there was a massacre at all is the illusion. Didn’t happen. And in accordance with my personal interpretation of the gold truth from above, the fact that ‘everyone agrees that it’s true’ (since they’re all collaborating on the lie) makes it true. They all tell the same story of Kinzo showing up and summoning bunnygirls in the middle of the dining room table (rude tbh) and everyone getting their heads shot off, then getting sucked into magical pitfalls and trapped in a dungeon. I can imagine Krauss and Kyrie rolling their eyes at such a ridiculous story, but when someone offers you 10 tons of gold to play along with their script, you do it. My post from last year can be found here, though I haven’t reread it myself.

I have a problem with this because Will labels similar cases of thinly-decorated-but-ultimately-true scenes as ‘earth to earth’ (ex. Rosa and Maria’s EP3 death, as well as Kyrie/Rudolf/Hideyoshi’s EP3 deaths). If those interpretations get labeled as ‘no falsehoods’, why is this considered an illusion with the gold truth spinning a false tale? Seems really inconsistent to me.

Either way, the cousins are the only ones who aren’t in on this little prank of Yasu’s, and are convinced to go to their respective locations for their ‘test’. I went into more detail on my thoughts about what happened here in my post from last year. The test is legit, though - not an illusion - so perhaps the illusion is that they don’t actually die simultaneously the way we’re shown in the magic scene? Because otherwise I don’t feel as though the gold truth line really applies to this scene as well as it does to the first twilight.

[Then Yasu dresses up in her Human Beatrice outfit and goes to test Battler. At the time she’s drunk as Hell and in a pretty cheery mood - my belief is that she needed to give herself enough courage to test Battler and thought getting wasted was the best way to do so. It does not go so well, and she just completely gives up at that point, ready for the roulette to take her away...]

This is both earth and illusions because they are dead (silent corpses), but it didn’t happen at all the way we’re shown (adorned by fiction). And also because Kanon obviously didn’t leave a corpse behind. 

I made posts last year going through each of these twilights individually:

Kyrie

Krauss

Nanjo & Shannon

Kanon

This isn’t specifically a question about Kumasawa and Gohda, but since they’re in the picture and not otherwise covered specifically here’s my post from last year covering them. 

As for what we’re being asked here specifically, it’s the same reasoning that applies to the end of all of Beatrice’s games - the answer is the bomb. The bomb that kills everyone and wipes out all evidence without a trace at midnight, October 6th, without fail. Earth to earth is the fact that none are left alive (except Eva in EP3 and Prime). Illusions to illusions is the fact that the truth is sealed away by the bomb, inside the catbox, with Eva as the only surviving witness...who dies without telling a soul of the truth. The message bottles sent out by Yasu, of which only two were ever discovered, represent possible truths that may have happened on those two days, but are also just fictional possibilities. It breeds an environment where any fictional forgery based on the Rokkenjima incident may become the truth, forever shrouded in illusion.

And finally...

I originally thought the answer to this was ‘the bomb’ (just like when she asks this in EP4) but that’s the answer to the last question...and also, ‘regardless of the witch’s will’ doesn’t really make sense when realistically Yasu could have shut the bomb at any time if she so chose. 

The promised reaper, then...is Kyrie. Or in theory, any of the adults who could have taken advantage of the situation to spark a massacre (like Eva in EP3). The fact of the matter is that the adults solve the epitaph...and once that happens, the tragedy is inevitable. The one outcome of the roulette that Yasu least expected to happen is the one that did. The fact that, despite Yasu being the one who masterminded the whole crime, she ultimately did not end up being the actual culprit. The real culprit is whichever one of the adults takes advantage of the confusion and murders everyone, sealing the truth away inside the catbox. In Prime, and apparently also Lion’s world, this is Kyrie. 

Or maybe it really does mean the bomb. I dunno. Neither of those is really the answer to who Clair is, though, so much as the answer to ‘then what killed everyone’, anyways. But by solving all the other mysteries, Will proves that he understoof her heart, so I guess it’s all cool in the end. 

What matters is that the tale of those two days is destined to end in tragedy, ‘regardless of the witch’s will’. By the time we reach October 4th, all those complicated factors have piled up so much that a happy ending is pretty much impossible. It could have been prevented so many times, in so many ways, but by the time it gets this far it’s basically too late. 

[sg2tiger]

Oh, okay, so they’re just opportunists who thought this up once the bodies had already started dropping. I guess that’s somewhat bett--

[sg2tiger]

Wait a minute.

White and purple color scheme.

Sliced at a strange angle

By a cool guy with a cool sword

And a badass jacket.

Responsible for a genocidal explosion incident and the death of many innocent people.

Does terrible and evil things, but is very calm, composed, and polite about it.

?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

[sg2tiger]

I really like the way the manga handled this scene. Before Yasu says goodbye, we see Shannon’s face as normal...but then after the whole Beatrice worldbuilding thing, we go back to Shannon, and her face and even most of her body is obscured. Plus, in a few panels, you can sorta even tell that she suddenly looks a lot shorter than ‘Shannon’ had previously...

I think it’s a really good way of depicting that ‘switch’ of Shannon going from Yasu’s imaginary friend into Yasu being Shannon, and showing ‘yeah this is the same person as before if that wasn’t obvious by now’. 

[sg2tiger]

He had to ask.

[sg2tiger]

Why is he so best?

[sg2tiger]

[sg2tiger]

[sg2tiger]

RIP

[sg2tiger]

Thanks, Hideyoshi. If you hadn’t said so, I would have had no idea

That all of the adults

Needed a lot of money

Right now