I could fuck this post off if the only information I had was some random story special passive and sitting around sniffing Ryōshū 9 times a day like someone who hasn't touched grass in 9 years.
But no, my brain is just going to go back to that specific line from that specific Canto and start drumming. And if my hands don't type this post out, my brain will make me regret it for the rest of my life every time I see a random Ryōshū theory post by saying "You could have written a wilder theory than this" every time I go to bed.
I/ Proving the theory
II/ Storytelling techniques that PM can use to torture you extremely effectively
a) Unreliable narrator
b) Breadcrumbs
c) Rashomon effect
d) How this combo tortures your brain neurons
Canto IV, Episode 55, 4-54
When I first read this part, I felt like she was exploded just like the moment she heard Aeng-du say that her Oodachi was on par with Kurokumo's pile of rust (although that's not what she meant). Or in LoR terms, like scratching Xiao's reverse scale, it was sensitive you know.
If she simply treasured her memories, I'm pretty sure the other from the gang "hot-tempered" like Heathcliff did, too, and he didn't flinch as much as she did, to put it bluntly, she was the only one who objected.
What Alfonso wanted to clear up was what Limbus knew about the Singularity of the K Corp, and I don't think the memory of this was important to Ryōshū. Artistic inspiration? The number of words she ejaculated when she encountered the Pallidified Thing in Canto V was more than the round zero when she saw the Tearful Thing.
If we say that Ryōshū absolutely hates someone messing with her memories, then we have to ask what the motivation for this hatred is. While we don't need a reason to dislike someone erasing data from our brains, the difference here is the "emotional level" expressed. It's pretty certain that everyone who knows is afraid of Great Lake to some extent, but to the point where Ishmael is a mental patient who only lacks a mental hospital, then surely she have experienced Great Lake and gone through an extremely haunting experience that left a psychological trauma can produce such a peak emotional display.
Applying the above, we can deduce that Ryōshū must have had a memorable experience of having her memory touched.
Everything would have stopped here if Canto IV was the only clue. And then PM, in a moment of genius, decided to insert the next clue into a combat passive in a stage at the end of Canto whose number, if divided by 2, would become Canto IV.
Two-years. Through three Cantos. While everyone was still high on Lei Heng's 6 red coins.
Because I was fooled by EN so many times, I lost faith, until I verified that it was not lying this time through some of my friend who is Korean native, then this article finally saw the light of day. Even if you used machine translate for the Korean and Japanese lines, it will be like "memories of being slashed", but obviously I will trust a Korean person more than a machine translation.
Memories are slashed into many pieces. The verb used is quite strong.
It's not like deleting. Memories, if slashed, will make them lose their connection and become unclear, even scattered everywhere and messy. And the only one who suffers is the reader. Or in the game, it's the whole group of Sinners on the bus because thanks to someone's resonance ability, they can broadcast it live for everyone to see.
II/ PM storytelling techniques that can be used to torture you extremely effectively
Instead of asking myself "So what was the reason and purpose of interfering with Ryōshū's memories?", I will tell you what PM can cook using Ryōshū's "multilated memory" as a tool. If it is really something and not because I sucked too much weed.
That is, unlike usual, I do not guess what PM will cook, but I guess what method they will use to cook it. Through this, I will, somehow, know what the upcoming dish will taste like even though I do not know what it will be.
a) Unreliable narrator
This is how "Hell Screen" is told. Among the 12 works Limbus selected, Wuthering Heights and Jigokuhen chose a narrator to guide the reader through the story from a third-party perspective.
The difference here is that Nelly of Wuthering Heights does not try to seduce the reader into believing in a subjective truth, or rather, does not puzzle and deceive the reader like the lord's servant in Jigokuhen.
However, Akutagawa also seems to have no intention of making the narrator seem any more trustworthy because we can easily recognize his "suspicious words" and his efforts to seduce the reader are like a blatant lie created to meet KPI. As a result, there is not a single moment when the reader can be led by the narrator.
An unreliable narrator becomes dangerous when they gain the reader's trust. Take Humbert in Lolita for example. Unlike the servant's half-hearted efforts, Humbert uses all his flowery words and poetic writing to make the reader believe that the story between him and Dolores is a legitimate love story. And if the reader is not careful, they will easily stumble into the pinkized truth he paints.
b) Breadcrumbs
Break an important piece of information into small pieces and then hide them in paragraphs and dialogues. Readers who want to understand the essence of the problem must pay close attention, pick up each piece of information and put it together, to truly understand the essence of the matter.
In the case of a game like Limbus, it is not only in the story but everywhere, including the gameplay.
People often call it the art of foreshadowing. However, using foreshadow is not what I want to say, because foreshadow is like scattering hints about Don Quixote's notable characteristics (breadcrumbs) and then leading to the future event of revealing Don Quixote as a Bloodfiend. Foreshadowing leaves clues to tell the reader that a certain event/truth will happen.
Instead of announcing an event/truth in advance, important information is broken into bread crumbs and scattered everywhere, every-fucking-where. The reader has to play detective, constantly picking up these pieces of information and then having to sit and assemble them into complete information. It gets even worse if the reader is missing just one detail, or assembling it incorrectly, and they will misunderstand the truth in a disastrous way.
You can easily find many works that apply bread crumbs, but the cruelty to the reader that impressed me so much (or scared me) through a gentle lament from someone I often follow is probably Fate/Stay Night Visual Novel. The information about Sakura's fear of self-harm is mentioned 8 times, and if you miss even one piece, it can lead to a misunderstanding of the character's personality and the nature of the fear. Unless I'm wearing dozens of helmets and mentally preparing to pick up bread crumbs, I don't think my gaming and chill session needs any more complexity.
c) Rashomon Effect
When I thought the two things above are more than enough to destroy the reading ability of most people in the fandom, guess what I just found.
It is like an upgraded version of the unreliable narrator. What are you trying to think of maybe even more terrible than an unreliable narrator? Why don't we issue the number of narrators?
And so we have the Rashomon (羅生門) effect.
5 seconds Explanation: The Rashomon effect originated from the film adaptation of director Kurosawa Akira in 1950, it was adapted from Akutagawa's short story In a Grove (Yabu no Naka), not the short story of the same name Rashōmon in1915. This adaptation only takes the name and frame story from Rashōmon 1915.
By recounting an event, the case of murdering and "graping" in bamboo forest, the reader experienced the subjective truth through the 4 perspectives of an incident. Each person is because of their own selfishness, so the truth through them was distorted: the bandit was not as talented as he said, the wife was not completely innocent, the Samurai lied about his own death to keep the honor, the woodcutter hid in the case details because he did not want to be involved.
The Rashomon effect emphasizes that in many cases, the "truth" is not a simple concept, but a collection of subjective perspectives, sometimes contradictory, about the same event.
d) How to combo this holy torture
By resonance, Dante can see the past of a sinner. It could be a complete monologue (like Gregor describing his life after the war) or a glimpse of a moment (like Ishmael when she saw the whale).
And what is more wonderful when the remaining 11 of them can see it too.
In this way, people will see the past of a certain sinner through the perspective of that sinner. But in the case of Ryōshū, her memory is not complete.
We have the following cases.
Case 1: Unreliable narrator - Ryōshū, optional to upgrade the effect of Rashomon and spread a little bread crumbs
Ryōshū assorted the pieces of bread and created a story that she thought was right, whether she was aware or not. And because people will read the story through her perspective, they will be caught up and believe in the narrator's guidance.
By the end of the story, everyone will realize the unreliable nature of the narrator they trusted and there will be a plot twist. It can go two ways:
Thought it was very bad and could not be saved, but it was actually not that bad.
Thought it could be saved, but in fact it was beyond saving.
I don't know how to use words to describe it, but there are so many types of plots that can bring out the same feeling as above that it's impossible to describe it accurately. For example,
If we look at it from a moral perspective: Direction 1 is to think that Ryōshū is evil and wicked but it turns out that she is not that bad, it can turn 180 degrees and make her a good person (which means to kick in za balls of the original work but Canto VIII dared to do so so what is this level). Direction 2 builds an image of Ryōshū that is not that bad, she can be like a victim but then it turns out that she is the culprit and is even worse than what people have known about her.
If we look at it from a hope perspective: Direction 1 builds a story that is as bad as hell but gives you a light at the end of the tunnel, direction 2 builds a story that is the same as direction 1 but will cover up the damn light because there is nothing worse than giving people hope and then extinguishing it.
Add in the Rashomon effect, and people are given additional perspectives and must search for the truth through clues from those perspectives. Or simply choose the truth they want to believe.
Or they - the Sinners and the players - give the middle finger to the pre-packaged truths and hunt for breadcrumbs from the perspectives provided. Then we come to case 2.
Case 2: Play the detective game with the Rashomon effect + bread crumbs
People can only see memories at different times and they will pick up these pieces and assemble them. Applying the effect of Rashomon, each sinner will be affected by their selfish bias and assembles the pieces of bread into the facts "they think is right". This may be due to their relationship with Ryōshū or to protect their own point of view about Ryōshū.
For example, sinners like Sinclair, Don Qixtote, Yi Sang (and perhaps Hong Lu) will pair the bread crumbs into "beneficial" to Ryōshū based on moral scale. For example, "she has good reason to do this", "that's inevitable", "A regrettable adversity"…etc.
As for people like Meursault, Faust, which is probably both Ishmael and Outis will pair the pieces of bread into the most similar truth to what they know and see Ryōshū show, a "most objective" truth they can pair. Their truth may be affected if there is another clue from a third party.
In this way, Canto IX will make you feel as if you are lost in a detective stories.
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