LogFAQs > #910139034

I do see what you are saying but for me it just comes back to that scene with Dlanor and Erika against Battler in the scene you were talking about earlier. not that I bring that up because you recently finished it, but for me that's actually one of the specific scenes I'd bring up anyway.

yeah certainly lines like "I WOULDN'T PUT IT PAST KINZO" are a lot more entertaining, but for me I can't get over what is really happening there; Battler is spouting a bunch of dumb nonsense because he's so invested in refusing to look at reality. he abuses the power of rhetoric to try and make unbelievable scenarios sound like they could be plausible, and yet we as the reader already know that none of what he is saying is true. for me that's the kind of person I hate in real life. scumbags who will lie and knowingly spin yarns just to avoid admitting the truth, all while refusing to admit that, in their hearts, they know even they don't believe any of the crap they are spouting.

it's much easier for me to side with erika. at the very least, even if she's not right, she's making decisions based on the best information she has available at the time. every scene where battler is acting cool in the first four episodes is just the same thing; a major hypocrite who refuses to accept that magic is real, but also won't use even one brain cell trying to solve the mystery and would rather keep denying the idea that anyone on the island could possibly be a culprit.

GANON1025 posted...

Yes, because she's 'logical' she is willing to ask the hard questions. But does that make a good character? At that point, her worth is as a device to move the plot forward. Which I will admit she can do well at.

and to respond to this specifically I'll just say, no, that's not what makes her a good character. what makes her a GREAT character is that ryuukishi so desperately put all of this effort trying to make her unlikable because he wanted to write a deconstruction of the mystery genre, and yet at the end of the day the results were still very controversial. the strength of the mystery genre, and the stability provided by having logical rules and detectives that behave in a fashion that makes sense, provides so much value that it was very difficult for him to get every reader to simply throw that away just by making Erika act like a brat.

even as bad as she is, even as annoying as her personality can be, even investing so much time and effort into making her "unlikable" the mystery genre itself is represented in erika as the detective. and for a lot of people that is still better than whatever the hell else ryuukishi is trying to do at times. to me, that is a fascinating thing that is rarely seen in any other works. it's like he unintentionally made a very strong argument against the entire point of his story while attempting to make a strawman. erika was supposed to be strawman and she instead turned out to be the personification for why the rules of the detective are needed to arrive at a real conclusion in this story.
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