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ladies and gents, this is the moment you’ve waited for…
(1/2 dionysia boys!)
Screenshot redraw!!! 🦄💊🕊️
Alright here we go... Ep 22 and trying to organize my mess of thoughts
(Disclaimer: I probably forgot a lot of details from previous eps so this is just me working mostly with what I currently remember)
oh arknights the beautiful women you entrap in npc jail...
Okay, I have a fever, I'm bored and I need some more Benkei in my life. So let's ponder him and Clementia a little.
Okay, so I may or may not have gone through episode 21 again (definitely not because I’m anxiously waiting for episode 22 (˵ ¬ᴗ¬˵)...), I then decided to take another look at the nursery rhyme "Who Killed Cock Robin" a bit more closely and digging a lil around, it turns out it actually has roots in a much older poem called Phyllyp Sparowe by John Skelton:
Very briefly, the poem follows a young girl named Jane mourning her pet sparrow after it’s killed by a cat — more specifically, the convent’s cat, since Jane is a schoolgirl living in a nunnery... What makes it so striking isn’t just the sadness, but how Jane turns that grief into something sacred. She doesn’t just cry over her sparrow; she creates a wholeee ritual around its death. She prays for its soul, calls on saints and angels, and basically holds an elaborate funeral. It’s not a simple lament — it’s worshipful. She transforms her loss into liturgy (meaning a sacred ceremony or religious rite), treating her sparrow’s passing as something holy and worthy of remembrance.
Throughout the poem, Jane’s voice moves between tenderness, despair, and even humor. She remembers every small detail about her sparow, but her grief quickly becomes all-consuming. At times, it’s theatrical and exaggerated yet beneath the dramatics, her emotions are deeply sincere. Jane’s devotion is both touching and a little over the top. The poem really feels like it’s exploring how grief can blur the line between love, obsession, and worship. And because it all happens in a religious setting, it’s like Skelton’s showing how personal loss can start to look like real church ritual — this young girl turning her heartbreak into something holy. It ends up feeling both innocent and eerie at the same time: a small, simple death made grand, almost divine.
The poem explained a bit more thoughly (from what I understood, cuz poetry is hard (꒦ິ꒳꒦ີ)) :
"Placebo! Who is there, who? Di le xi! Dame Margery. Fa, re, my, my. Wherefore and why, why? For the soul of Philip Sparrow..."
Right from the start, it reads like a church service — “Placebo” and “Dirige” are chants from the traditional funeral prayers for the dead. Jane is holding an actual mass for her sparrow, turning her grief into something holy. This instantly sets the tone: it’s not just about loss, but about sanctifying it — giving ritual, structure, and voice to pain. She’s trying to immortalize her bird in the same way saints or martyrs are remembered.
(If you think about Clementia, the way its name literally means “mercy” or “forgiveness,” fits this exact framework, grief that turns into devotion.)
"When I remember again / How my Philip was slain, / Never half the pain / Was between you twain, / Pyramus and Thisbe..."
Here, she compares her grief to tragic lovers like Pyramus and Thisbe. It's a veryyy dramatic, almost exaggerated level of mourning. But it’s intentional: Skelton’s poem mixes heartbreak with satire. Jane’s sorrow is sincere, but it’s also too much — it blurs the line between love, obsession, and devotion.
"Whom Gib, our cat, hath slain. Gib, I say, our cat / Worrowed her on that / Which I loved best..."
The killer appears — the cat, Gib. It’s ordinary, but she treats it like the ultimate villain. Jane’s anger turns cosmic; she curses the cat as if it were the devil himself.
(This personalization of grief — giving it a face kinda feels like how the game always has a “culprit”, no? Every anomaly, every curse, has someone/ something to blame, even when the real cause is deeper.)
"Would God I had Zenophontes, / Or Socrates the wise, / To shew me their device / Moderately to take / This sorrow that I make..."
Jane acknowledges her grief is too much — she knows it, but she can’t stop. She wishes she could take it rationally, but emotion often overrides intellect. There’s something deeply human here tho: she’s aware of her loss becoming self-consuming.
(In the game, the Kyklos might represent that same inability to “moderate” grief — it festers until it reshapes reality itself.)
"It was so pretty a fool, / It would sit on a stool, / And learned after my school..."
This part is pure tenderness. Jane lists all the sparrow’s tiny habits. It’s almost maternal. Her love makes the sparrow more than a bird — it becomes a symbol of innocence, of something she nurtured cherished, protected, then lost — a symbol of purity corrupted by the world’s cruelty.
"That vengeance I ask and cry... On all the whole nation / Of Cattes wild and tame..."
Now her grief explodes into rage. She doesn’t just want the cat punished — she wants the entire race of cats cursed. It’s emotional overkill, but that’s the point. Mourning turns to divine wrath.
"The serpents of Libany / Might sting thee venomously! / The dragons with their tongues / Might poison thy liver and lungs!"
The poem gets vividly vengeful here. Jane imagines legendary beasts punishing the cat — like she’s invoking cosmic justice. Her words themselves feel like a curse.
"Was never bird in cage / More gentle of corage... / Death hath departed us twain!"
Finally, it softens again. After all her fury, Jane circles back to heartbreak. She calls her sparrow “gentle,” mourns the separation, and ends with a prayer — “Our Lord, thy soul rescue!” It’s cyclical: grief, anger, curse, grief again. It’s not resolved. It loops endlessly.
Looking at Who Killed Cock Robin (the rhyme episode 21 is clearly based on), the tone completely changes. Instead of one girl quietly making her grief sacred, we have a whole group accusing, confessing, and taking part in Robin’s death. It’s no longer private — it’s collective, public, and full of blame. Everyone shares in the responsibility. Which feels really in line with the game where the Institute, the Academy, the staff, even the ghouls all feel tangled in each other’s guilt and consequences. It’s no longer about one person’s loss — it’s about the whole system being complicit.
In Phyllyp Sparowe, Jane takes her personal grief and transforms it into something ritualistic and sacred. Clementia (being a cathedral) almost echoes the same thing. A place where grief took place. Before the Clash, it was just another house like the others, but something terrible clearly happened there. Was it a sacrifice? A battle? A failed ritual? ...Whatever it was, it clearly left something behind. Its ruins feel steeped in that same kind of sorrow and sanctity Jane expressed in her mourning.
And then there’s the cat. In Phyllyp Sparowe, the cat is what kills the bird — the act that sets everything in motion. Initially, that immediately made me think of the Chancellor and his cats in the game. Maybe that’s not random & that the cat imagery is deliberate. The Chancellor could represent that same destructive, controlling force — the one who “kills the sparrow,” intentionally or not, sparking everything that follows. Symbolizing that same cold inevitability of death or control, like his quiet surveillance over everything. But the ghouls have cat versions of themselves as well, which could be another reflection of that same symbol repeating in different forms?? Who could be the actual cat — our culprit?
What if the Kyklos is actually mirroring Jane here? Maybe she isn’t just some distant, unfeeling entity, but someone mourning someone she lost — someone she refuses to let disappear. If she’s actually the witch Humpty refers to — the one behind the hidden world — then maybe everything happening there is her way of retelling what happened to her own “Robin/Sparrow”. Maybe the riddle is her accusation, her grief being replayed and reinterpreted. This kind of ties back to other theories I wrote about before like the one about the one-eyed sleeping beauty possibly being the current Kyklos. If she truly was transformed (referring back to the theory I mentioned before — the idea that she could be the current Kyklos, trapped in her own looping memory) then maybe she went through a failed ritual or sacrifice? Perhaps her “sparrow” is herself and now she’s stuck replaying her own story again and again, just like Who Killed Cock Robin retells tragedy through different voices.
The game might actually fuse both poems together. Phyllyp Sparowe could represent the Kyklos’s beginning — the moment of grief that started it all, when her “sparrow” was taken from her and she tried to make that loss sacred. Like Jane, she might’ve turned her sorrow into ritual: praying, cursing, and reshaping her pain into something else. Then Who Killed Cock Robin (Who killed Robin in ep 21) becomes the ritual itself — the illusion she builds, much like Jane’s imagined ceremony. The single voice of mourning splits into many: accusations, witnesses, culprits. Maybe that’s what’s happening inside Lockburn Castle where the Kyklos’s grief is fracturing into all these different figures. It’s like she created her own eternal “mass for the sparrow,” replaying her loss again and again through them. Jane’s grief lives in her mind; the Kyklos’s lives in her illusions.
I'm afraid that if so, then MC might be following a similar path... It’s not necessarily a literal repetition of events, but more like a recurring chain of grief and transformation. Someone experiences loss, mourns it, gets cursed in some way, becomes a Kyklos, tangles someone else into that same fate by cursing them until they too become the next Kyklos and so on. A continuous cycle of sorrow and remembrance, each time taking a different form but echoing the same pain.
But then again, there’s these lines from the prologue the kyklos tells MC:
That’s what makes me hesitate.... If the Kyklos already knows her (or of her), then maybe it’s not a new cycle starting but something personal. Maybe the MC is the sparrow — the person the Kyklos once loved, lost & is now unknowingly drawn back into her world of illusions. That Phyllyp sparrowe is mirroring MC's possible story, MC is the sparrow and the kyklos Jane??? There's this post on Reddit that kinda mirrors a similar idea. The kyklos could be like the Barometz and MC could actually be someone the kyklos held or holds dear for some still unknown reason!
Also, for those who know of Puella Magi Madoka Magica it's kind of the same thing as well, in this reading, MC is Madoka and the kyklos Homura, (the culprit/the cat could be kyubey 👀) — where one character keeps looping time out of grief for another.
It actually draws some really striking parallels to PMMM. In that story, Homura’s entire existence becomes a loop of grief and obsession — she keeps rewinding time to save Madoka, refusing to accept her loss. But every loop erodes her humanity a little more, until love and despair blur together. Madoka, meanwhile, starts out as an ordinary girl, she's kind, selfless, and unassuming (*cough*MC*cough*) yet she’s burdened with immense potential, destined for something divine but tragic. That dynamic feels eerily similar to what could be happening between the Kyklos and the MC.
Even the cat motif connects them all: in Phyllyp Sparowe, it’s the convent’s cat that kills the bird, setting off the cycle of mourning; in Madoka, Kyubey, the cat-like incubator, manipulates girls into endless suffering under the guise of granting wishes. In both, the cat represents a kind of cold inevitability — fate, or divine mechanism, that doesn’t care about human emotion. If we carry that idea into Tokyo Debunker, the Kyklos’s illusions could be her way of fighting that same inevitability, trying to undo what can’t be undone.
Although, I'm still very unsure of the actual link between the Kyklos & MC because by those lines it seems as if the kyklos doesn't know her personally but knows about her in some way?? Idk! 😭
Well, there's still many links and theories I could make but I've already yapped a lot so I'll stop here! ૮ ˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶ ა
I don’t know what to make of this honestly 😂, the game might not even end up making a link between the two poems or PMMM but it’s wild how much all these pieces line up when you start looking at them side by side!
!!This is all just speculation please do not take it a 100%!!
Etymology of the Characters Not Yet Introduced
Tokyo Debunker really cares about names and meanings. In fact, each house has a certain theme when it comes to names (e.g Hotarubi and the imperial regalia of Japan) of course it’s also related to their designs/appearance.
I decided to share this so you could speculate their roles and designs.
things i drew recently
