#if we vote her inno this round then i don't think she has a shot at being releasable back into society at the end

[thinkin-bout-milgram]

Mahiru Shiina: Trial 2 Synthesis Theory

Hello everyone! For the “I Love You” drop, I’m just going to jump straight into a full-length theory because I have a LOT that I want to cover and it’s much more comprehensive than my initial thoughts posts usually are. This is partially because all four other admins helped me out, as well as our 6th roommate who isn’t an admin!

As always, I will be using the very fast translation done by @onigiriico, which is linked here! I’ll also be using @iaobug ‘s wonderful translation of Mahiru’s 16 step guide in This Is How To Be In Love With You, which I’ll put here. 

T/W: Suicide, stalking, kidnapping/abduction, toxic relationships, murder, hanging, drowning, malnourishment, force feeding a rat. There WILL be images so please read at your own discretion!

Alright, let’s jump into it!

Mahiru’s murder took place in Aokigahara, AKA the Sea of Trees, AKA the Suicide Forest.

This is based on an initial post by @tomoesan, which has since become unavailable. I’ll post a photo of it here, though:

It compares Mahiru’s murder location on her card from Undercover to a real place in Japan: Aokigahara. From the pictures, it’s very clear that this was an intentional move by the artists to place Mahiru’s murder somewhere actively recognizable through some google searches. I firmly believe that the forest that they move through in the MV is Aokigahara. 

That’s not all, though. From this image, you can pretty clearly see that the photo seems to be taken from inside a cave. We’ve determined this specific cave to be Ryugu Cave, or The Dragon Cave.

This article shows the exact same photo in the earlier post, citing it as being from the Ryugu Cave. 

The Ryugu Cave also contains the Seno Umi Shrine, within it. You can read a bit about it here, but I firmly believe this to be the shrine mentioned on Day 15 of This Is How To Be In Love With You; more on that later.

Furthermore, the shrine is to Toyotama-hime. In mythology, this references a goddess who falls in love with a prince at a water well. However, he breaks a promise not to spy on her, which results in him seeing her in a monstrous form. Given the lyrical translation of daisuki (which should just mean I love you repeatedly) in the chorus to “monstrously in love,” “monstrous cause I love you,” “monstrous dilemma”... I think that the writers absolutely knew what they were going for, and they were giving a nod to this specific story and the shrine, with Mahiru being the lover turned monster.

Based on all of this, and the fact that I do believe Mahiru’s lover committed suicide, I think that all signs point to Aokigahara, specifically Ryugu Cave, being the location of the murder. I’ll be using this assumption throughout the rest of my theory.

I’ll follow along with the guide, starting at Days 1-8.

I think that Mahiru portrays Days 1-8 approximately correctly.

Days 1-7 are, I think, completely correct. Mahiru meets this guy, assumes it’s fate, and does small things to try to get closer to him and get to know about him. At this point, things probably seem completely normal to him, so there wouldn’t be any reason for him to reject her jogging with him or whatever.

Day 8 is when she waits outside his work, takes him to the park and presumably confesses her love to him. This is where her first inconsistency is. 

She says that they talked the night away, but she also says that she “chooses not to believe they talked the night away” and that “it felt like no time passed at all.” She also very notably doesn’t actually say what his response was, though she implied it was positive.

I think that it was actually very short; rather than them talking the night away, he probably swiftly rejected her. This, therefore, ends Mahiru’s attempts to get him into a relationship normally. If he won’t love her the way she wants him to, she’ll find a way to make it happen, no matter what.

Mahiru sets a plan into action, starting Day 9.

This is the first page in her journal where the text switches from normal, pristine rows to slanted text. That’s a sign that something is going wrong.

She mentions that her “boyfriend” is really cute when he’s blackout drunk. I think that it’s possible she drugged him, but even if she didn’t, she used this to get some kind of information. It’s possible she brought him back to his house, getting his address, possibly even stealing keys or something like that. 

I’d theorize that, rather than going here together, she followed him to the bar. Once he was pretty drunk, it’d be a lot easier to convince him to go along with her.

Day 10 is her talking to her beautician; I think that’s all correct. The beautician simply heard about the story through Mahiru’s eyes.

Day 11 is, I think, similar to the bar; she probably followed him to the “date” location. She says it “can’t be a coincidence” their tastes are so similar and that she’s become a different person. That indicates that this isn’t actually a shared taste: he went to the location and she followed him there.

On Day 12, Mahiru abducts her lover.

Day 12 is the day when Mahiru goes to his house for the first time, but somehow, she can’t actually seem to remember anything.

While that alone is suspicious, there’s also the mirror. We can see her beautician in the mirror, so the fact that he isn’t in the mirror at all seems to imply that he isn’t within the camera’s view at all. Why is she in his entryway without him there to greet her?

The answer is that she’s uninvited. She enters his home, and she takes him. That’s what I think the shot of her jumping on the couch spreading the flowers in This Is How To Be In Love With You is:

Rather than this being her killing moment, I think that this is her going in and snatching him from his own house. I firmly believe that Mahiru took him to Aokigahara, and I think that this is when she did it.

The scene in the house with the feathers immediately follows Day 12, so it makes sense chronologically. Additionally, for Day 13 onwards, the text switches from just being slanted to being stitched together from smaller boxes; it seems like it’s mimicking a ransom note that’s patched together from magazine or book clippings. This indicates that this is when Mahiru is more actively committing a crime: in this case, kidnapping. 

Days 13-15 are Mahiru moving the body.

If we assume that Mahiru’s end destination is Ryugu Cave based on earlier research, Days 13, 14 and 15 can be interpreted as movement.

Day 13 may seem strange, given that it’s Mahiru seemingly attending a wedding. However, if you pay careful attention to her phrasing, she does not say that she actually attended. She says that she was invited, and that soon, her dreams will come true. I think it’s possible that the wedding location was closer to Aokigahara–it’s near Mt. Fuji, so I’d imagine there could be some scenic locations or something–and she’s mentally using the wedding as a justification for heading that direction. Maybe she even did attend, if it was over that way.

Day 14 is an outdoor date under the stars. She practically begged him to come along. This is her taking him into the woods. I’m not sure exactly how compliant he was being and if she literally dragged him or if he was in more of a “resisting seems like a bad idea” kind of headspace, but I believe that Day 14 is them arriving at the forest and entering. 

It’s notable that, in the scenes in I Love You, Mahiru seems to be leading her lover into the forest. Here’s a screenshot from around 1:37:

At this point, it doesn’t seem like he’s being forced. However, this ends with him groveling on the ground at 1:55.

Comparing that to the image immediately after, we understand that Mahiru isn’t seeing the situation clearly. Given that he’s in this kneeling position in both shots, I think it’s safe to say that the shots with the golden lighting are the situation through Mahiru’s eyes. 

He’s very clearly actually beaten down and miserable, but Mahiru depicts them as a cute and happy couple. In fact, at 1:20, the lyrics support this interpretation:

This too-perfect image of her relationship is captioned with “I actually believed that.” It’s telling us, the audience, that while she actually, genuinely believed that these fantasy segments were reality, we, perhaps, should not do the same. These fantasy segments aren’t real.

Mahiru has already proven her capability of being an unreliable narrator in the past, concealing a lot of information within the text of her 16 Day Guide. I don’t want to completely discount these fantasies, but I’m trusting the side by side comparisons it gives us that they are NOT, in any way shape or form, what she portrays them as. I don’t want to take any of it at face value.

Anyways, Day 15 is the end destination of their journey: the arrival at Ryugu Cave. This is the shrine that she mentions. 

As stated earlier, Ryugu Cave contains a shrine. Though the cave isn’t available to tourists, that just increases the chances that Mahiru could get away with imprisoning her captive there without being spotted by the patrols that go through.

For reference, this cave is very deep: 96 m, or approximately 315 ft. It would be pretty hard for him to escape once they’re there, which resounds with her wish: they’ll stay like that until the end of time, and no one will stand in her way.

Day 16 is… a snapping point.

Day 16 is when we see Mahiru prepare her lovely boyfriend a wonderful meal of all his favorites. I think that this is when the 2:13/2:14 fantasy split happens:

While she sees herself giving him cake pleasantly, in reality, she seems to be… force feeding him a rat?? 

I know some people think that the cake is a metaphor for toxicity, and that because he feeds it to her first in the video, it means that the relationship is mutually toxic. From what I’ve seen, this theory completely disregards both the rat aspect and the fantasy filter over the cake scene. I think it’s far more likely that him feeding her cake was Mahiru idealizing the real events. Maybe she ate the rats, too, and she liked to think he’d feed her, too. It’s them eating together; if the cake can be a rat, him feeding it to her can be a similarly significant misperception. 

In any case, given that this is the last day in the guide, I think that this is the end of the line for him. He can’t take being her captive anymore, and sometime when she’s not away, he commits suicide.

I’m not entirely sure how. Obviously, we see him hanging at several points in the video, most prominently at the end:

But we can also see that he appears to be soaked with water at the very beginning.

There are lakes within Ryugu Cave. They’d also likely be cold enough to give him some form of hypothermia, explaining the blue tint to his skin in the second of the two images (he seems to have dried off by the second). Because of this, I’m somewhat inclined to lean towards drowning because it seems like it would have been more accessible to him. In that case, though, I’m not sure how he ends up hanging. I don’t feel like Mahiru would put him there; it feels much more likely to me that she would jump into the lake with him so that they could be together forever or something. 

So, I’m not sure whether he hangs himself or drowns himself, but the gist is, he ends up dead. That’s what Mahiru blames herself for.

VOTE: GUILTY

I know that she’s currently leaning innocent and many people feel strongly about it, but please hear me out here.

In Mahiru’s audio drama, she very clearly does not grasp the gravity of what she did. If she really did kidnap him, bring him to the suicide forest and force feed him rats… that is NOT loving someone “normally,” as she’s so insistent that she did.

Her current perception is that when she loves someone normally, it’s wrong. That’s what she’s said about her guilty verdict. However, if we switch gears and vote her innocent, what will that tell her? 

I think it would tell her that her love is okay–and, to the delusional Mahiru, that means saying that all of what she did is okay. If she believes this is loving someone normally, then I’d rather tell her not to love anyone like this again. It’s going to be hard for her to accept, and I recognize we might lose her between trials, but I think telling her that this is okay is even worse.

I do meta vote, but I do it in the context of trying to secure as many viable innocent votes for the third trial as possible. I think that, if we vote Mahiru innocent, she’ll go back to her fully delusional self. I think guilty is the only way to make the message stick, and the message has to stick if she has a chance at getting an innocent verdict in the end. I really urge you to consider it, because I think that voting her innocent will be a huge mistake on the fanbase’s part (which is the same exact way I felt about the Kotoko vote in Trial 1).