#ah i tried to keep it short but i had a lot to say sadfdsf

[good-beans]

My two cents on lying in Milgram, from a writer’s perspective – I actually don’t think the characters are lying to us at all.

I’m going to preface this by saying I love hearing everyone’s theories and I am still very open to the idea!! I mention a few specific theories here but I’m not trying to come after people who believe them, I’m just giving examples ;--; I won’t be crushed if it’s revealed the characters have been giving us false information, and I’m not trying to push this theory on others. Looking at the project for what it is, I just want to point out that it’s not beneficial to the project as a whole if that’s what’s going on. 

Now, I’m definitely not claiming we are given everything as perfect truths. The Milgram team has certainly had a lot of fun with unreliable narrators, misdirection, and omission of important information. Muu never lied about her role in bullying Rei, it just didn’t come up in t1. Mahiru never lied about the reality of her crime, she was just unreliable because she genuinely saw things in the best light. Characters can keep information and personality traits hidden, or point us to distracting details, or frame things in a very particular tone to maximize upcoming twists.

But why? It all comes down to the fact that Milgram is not a murder mystery story. It doesn’t have the same goals as a mystery, thriller, or even as a story itself. It’s an experiment, or an interactive project at least. There are fun surprises that shift our perceptions of the characters, but no grand twists like you’d find in a normal story. (See this post where I expand on that.) Normal narratives focus on exciting twists and secrets. Milgram, however, is about our decisions. The team doesn’t want to mislead us entirely, because that would make the whole project useless. I’ve seen some posts about Yuno having actually killed someone and the abortion was just a red herring, or similar cases about prisoners hiding their “true” victim – but if that were the case, two-thirds of their whole story becomes absolutely pointless to the overall project. 

Yamanaka has said he wants his audience to reflect on their biases and judgements. Why provide us with completely wrong information to work with? That wouldn’t be beneficial to our process of humanizing the characters, which in turn wouldn’t be beneficial to the themes of the whole project. Also, it would lose credibility if lies are exposed. The minute they reveal a piece of information was a lie, every single interrogation, question, and timeline can be thrown out as unreliable. You can't run a project like this if the audience loses faith in what they can believe.

And, if the nature of the project isn't convincing enough, I think a major point of proof is Kazui. His whole theme is being a liar, but nothing he said in the first trial has been contradicted – if Milgram truly wanted to write characters who lied, he would have been the one to show signs of misinformation by now. And yet, all of Half and his vd hold up strong. The fact that he of all people has always given us the truth (even if it’s extremely limited and hazy) is very telling that they’re avoiding characters actually lying to us.