#I had to erase most of the original screenshot because it had kanna and keiji in it and part of midori's body was covered by keiji's hand

[whyrubuyingclothesatthesoupstore]

I thought it would be funny if there was an option for shin to pick up the gun instead of keiji during this fight, my friends agreed so I decided to make a quick edit and then the quick edit took me literally two hours. moral of the story there should be more high-quality playthroughs of 3-1a logic

[liquidchocolatecake]

second try here we go

oookaaaaay let’s try and get my thoughts back from before tumblr decided to ruin my entire everything

so i tried to ramble about this before but it got deleted so this is not gonna be as good as my first try but

i really want to know what the deal is with original sou hiyori

because like

as the information is presented to us right now (and i have not played the chapter 3 demo) he was seemingly brought back to life after being murdered by alice

and i have an au where sou is brought back as a doll shortly after alice murders him but i’m pretty sure that he also was/is going to be brought back as a doll in canon? like. i’m fairly certain that he’s the person in the bed who sara and keiji see through the glass in 2-2 when they find the room with the security footage. and that’d be the only way to bring him back from the dead, as the information from kai’s laptop points towards. the only difference between the two is that in the au he’s brought back after like a day or two and in canon asunaro waited almost 3 years

and they can only update the ai’s personalities every 3 years

so either the doll technology wasn’t developed enough at the time of the murder for them to be confident bringing him back right away or bringing back the version of sou from 3 years before the murder would hinder the plans for the death game in some way

so??? what happened? how much did sou change in those 3 years? did he only agree to help shortly before the murder? would the past version of him have actively tried to stop the death game before it started? he’s almost certainly tied up with asunaro and incredibly important to the setup of the death game, so did alice find out about that and kill him to try and stop the game before it could start?

and how did he get tied up with asunaro in the first place? and why? was he willing to help out with the plan or did they have to manipulate him in some way? did he do it for money? did he want to be a part of the doll research? or did he have a more personal reason, like i’m pretty sure sara’s dad does? everyone finds him familiar but no one knows why, shin has his scarf (or sou had shin’s scarf, depending on who it belonged to first) and he chose sou’s name to use as his new identity for the killing game, but (iirc, i still need to replay 2-2 to gather more information and clear up stuff i’ve forgotten since my first playthrough) he says it was just a name he came up with and nothing more, so clearly sou knew most, if not all, of the candidates and there’s some memory erasure stuff going on somehow.

i’d also say that he was probably close to sara and maybe reko and alice (which is where that post about alice and sou possibly being good friends before the murder came from) because when alice asks sara if she knew what reko’s band was called she can’t remember and a point is made of the fact that sara struggling to remember is weird

it’s not a “i don’t realy remember, i don’t keep track of this stuff” thing, it’s a “i can’t remember and that’s really weird” thing. something is actively keeping her from remembering. i know this bit probably has more to do with joe than with sou, but this happens in 2-1, before kanna’s possible death can push sou to erase sara’s memories of joe

and going back to the “person in the bed” thing

if i’m right and that is sou, why is he there??? next to the security room??? are the kidnappers monitoring him? if he’s a doll at this point, then i see no point for there to be an iv drip, so did the kidnappers find some way to keep him alive after alice tried to kill him? is he in a coma? and why start the death game without him if he’s so important to it that they went out of their way to either keep him alive or make him into a doll?

idk what my point with this is, i just really want to ramble about original sou. partly because he’s definitely important and partly because i’m really curious about the murder, but also just because like 99 percent of the time i immediately latch onto any character who gets little to no spotlight in canon

i really want to believe that original sou is a good person at heart and i could probably try back that up, but i also can’t shake the feeling that he really is a bastard through and through like gashu

once i replay 2-2 i might come back to this with more screenshots

also you have no clue how hard it was to not slip a sou pun in here somewhere