Week 4 Saturday Afternoon (SPOILERS)

[lovedanime]

[well after all That, Mitarai is returning to the dorm. But he has so many notebook pages to straighten out. He's sitting at a table in the common room of the dormitory to get it all sorted. Casually when he notices the other young man:]

Hello, Amami-kun.

Comments

[lovedanime]

...doing the same thing more than once and expecting a different result?

[He's fascinated... He feels really connected to Amami in this moment of discovering they have so much in common, even though there's still so little Mitarai actually knows about him. It's hard to explain.]

assume that Rantaro used Honorifics like someone who isn't in love with Mitarai.

[whatsmytalentagain]

Yep. Now apply that to the metaphorical head-bashing and think about it for five seconds.

[On the other hand, Rantaro isn't really sure about this guy.]

[lovedanime]

Well... as terrible as it sounds, the administration is clearly targeting different psychological areas with each motive.

[whatsmytalentagain]

... Go on?

[lovedanime]

I think the human brain is like... a table.

[he's making loose diagrams on his tablet to help him organize these thoughts. no eye contact]

Any given table might have its own strong legs and weak legs. Each motive is designed to knock out a different leg of a table. Well, when I put it that way, it sounds like a percussion instrument.

[Wow... the talk of music is actually making him really sad. He's learned so much from the death of 2-D. It's a very bittersweet victory and the contradiction between epiphany and grief is evident on his face.]

You know what it's like? A piano!

[whatsmytalentagain]

[Rantaro just stares in bewilderment.]

... What?

[lovedanime]

The core mechanism of a piano is a set of hammers corresponding to a set of strings. Any given piano might have one or two weak strings. Any given song you'd play on a piano would use some notes more than others. If you played that song on several different pianos, only one piano would have a weak string in the same area with the most used note of that song, and the string would break from the strain of so much hammering. But you wouldn't have learned how to prevent strain on every single area of a piano. You just would have observed the physics acting on that one string. To get a more complete picture, you would have to play many different songs that used a wide range of notes. To an extent, the range of notes that actually gets used in music is much smaller than the range of all possible sounds. Just like the range of wavelengths that are visible to the human eye is a much smaller range than the total range of all possible wavelengths.

...I'm sorry if I'm talking too much. You're just the first person I've really trusted with my knowledge about the effects of stimuli on the human brain... I'm sure it's relevant to the tragedies occurring here...!

[whatsmytalentagain]

... Ooookay. Now I get the metaphor. For a second I was wondering how you made the leap from brains to pianos.

[Kinda fishy, but he ain't gonna rat him out just yet.]

Where'd you manage to learn all that stuff?

[lovedanime]

It's... the beating heart of my anime. I study the effect of sound, color, and motion on the human brain. We truly are suspectible creatures, I think—

[but now that he thinks about it, it's really in his best interest to gloss over this]

So I really... I have trouble wanting the "culprits" in this terrible program to die, as much as I don't want any murder to happen and will do what I can to prevent it. I feel very confident it's really just a result of the stimulus from the Administration.

[whatsmytalentagain]

... Yeah, must be.

[Is there a way to lose friendship points? Because Rantaro will remember that.]

[lovedanime]

So, I told you a little more about my talent, Amami-kun... May I ask about yours?

[whatsmytalentagain]

Oh! Right.

[Yeah, this might be a little awkward because...]

I'm called the Super High School Level Adventurer because I tend to travel all over the world to help my dad's business and all, but in that Monokuma game I told you about, I think I forgot my talent somehow.

[He got something else, but he doesn't trust Mitarai with the info.]

[lovedanime]

[Nodding, not really taking it badly]

The same thing happened to Kirigiri Kyoko-san... at first she was known as the Super High School Level Detective, [past tense... melancholic] but they used memory wiping technology - as they had on every participant to an extent - and she went by Super High School Level Question Mark Question Mark Question Mark for a while instead.

[whatsmytalentagain]

Huh... So Shuichi Saihara-kun isn't the only Super High School Level Detective... [If it makes Mitarai feel any better, Kirigiri-san might have a successor. Sort of.]

But if they used memory wiping on that class... And maybe my class too... Then what stops the folks here from using something similar on us?

[lovedanime]

...nothing at all. If anything, it's practically the same as "removing our functions".

The only evidence against it is the assertion at meetings that they didn't intend us to lose our memories and hired a doctor to look into the cause of the problem. Hiring an entire additional person just to mislead us seems like an... unusual allocation of resources...

[whatsmytalentagain]

Hm... That's assuming if the rest of the staff are totally in on what's going on, you get what I'm saying?

[lovedanime]

You have a good point... In particular, incomplete knowledge does make sense for the administrators who act like our "moral support".