Well, I said I would write down my pre-trial thoughts for chapter 4… They just turned out a bit longer than I expected. Writing down your thoughts is a great way to move forwards in your thinking, so I opened notepad and started typing away. Here’s what I wrote down, in case anyone is interested enough to actually read through that wall of text that I didn’t bother to edit:
Miu was planning a murder. Many reliable pieces of evidence support this. The target seemed to be Kokichi. However, somehow Miu ended up dying instead.
Miu’s death happened around the time of the loud crashing sound was heard. Since the people inside the chapel described the sound as something crashing into the chapel, I would expect this noise to come from Miu crashing into the chapel wall, dying from the impact. As for how she crashed into the wall, she slid from the snowy roof of the mansion on the lattice that was found near the chapel. She picked up enough horizontal speed to crash into the chapel, though the vertical drop was what killed her, I’d assume.
Oh, the wall of the map loops. This is suggested by the geography and proven by the signboard floating in the river, and Miu’s additional wall appearing in two places. This begs the question of how loading zones work, however. If loading actually happens in the middle of the map, one would expect it is impossible to walk through the edge of the map to the other side of the loading area without encountering a loading screen. So, I suppose one could conclude that there is a loading line where Miu’s wall is, as well.
Miu being sighted on the mansion side is not a problem because Miu could’ve simply looped to the other side, but Keebo’s voice being heard on the mansion side does present a problem, as the loading line should block all sound. The voice they heard was probably from when Keebo found the body. This issue could be resolved with Glitch X caused by mixing the headset cords. We know someone had an avatar glitch, so it might as well be Keebo. The glitch could have caused Keebo to not unload from the mansion zone when he left it through the loading area, causing his voice to still be heard in that region. The coordinate data of his avatar would cause him to still be a bit far from the mansion, meaning only a loud shout would actually be heard in the mansion. No other unusual occurrence comes to mind that could be explained with a glitch, so I’d consider it likely that this is what the glitch was about.
Miu invited Kokichi to meet her on the top of the mansion roof. To this end, she either told Kokichi to make sure Kaito was investigating the roof and logged him out with the phone herself (unlikely, because Kaito could have refused and someone else could have been on the roof instead), or she gave Kokichi the phone and had him remove the person on the roof. Or, Kaito being on the roof was never a part of Miu’s plan.
Speaking of Miu’s plan, what exactly was her master plan? Killing Kokichi on the mansion roof after removing the bridge to give herself the perfect alibi. However… why the mansion roof? Would it not be easier to tell Kokichi to meet her near the looping boundary to minimize the risk of her being spotted? I can’t think of anything about the roof in particular that would make Miu want to commit the murder there. Perhaps, once again, this was Kokichi’s idea. He insisted they meet on the mansion roof, and Miu complied.
I suppose that theory requires Kokichi to have the phone. Since Miu’s objective was to kill Kokichi, the next time they met after Kokichi left the chapel, they met on the roof, as otherwise Miu would’ve just killed Kokichi. Thus, Kokichi had no way of informing Miu that Kaito was on the roof. Someone had to log Kaito off before the meeting could take place, however. As only Kokichi would’ve known of Kaito being on the roof, it would have to be him. However, if Miu’s plan was to kill Kokichi, there’d be no point in giving him the red phone.
The red phone itself is quite strange. It doesn’t seem necessary for Miu’s murder plan, unless she wanted to frame someone, I guess. Why would it even exist, let alone be in Kokichi’s possession? One far-fetched possibility is that the motive card given by Monokuma was actually this item for the killing game simulator. So, it could be the red phone was actually an unknown factor to Miu. This seems a bit unfair, though, since no actual evidence points to this being the case.
In any case, setting aside the matter of Kaito’s disappearance for the moment, Kokichi and Miu would’ve met on the roof. I suppose Miu could’ve climbed to the top using the unbreakable toilet paper? I wonder if the avatars have enough physical strength for that. Then, somehow, Kokichi managed to kill Miu. This, too, could be explained with the motive card being some kind of god mode in the simulation or whatever, but as no evidence points to that being the case, once again, feels unfair. One other possibility is that it was Kokichi’s avatar that was all glitched up, and Miu’s paralyzing touch thus didn’t work. Kokichi then somehow managed to overpower her, perhaps stealing the hammer and striking her in the head, and launched her off to the other side with the lattice as an improvised sled.
I suppose Kokichi wanted to frame Kaito for the crime, which is why he suggested he take the roof, and logged him out. Likewise, he probably placed the unused bottle of poison on his chair to badly frame himself for the crime. If someone seriously wanted to frame him, they would’ve used a poison that actually fit the condition of the corpse, suggesting the attempt to frame him was never intended to succeed.
I’ve also entertained the thought of Miu’s plan actually being to convince Kokichi that they would cooperate to kill Kaito, which would explain the phone thing and all. Miu, being an idiot who easily folds under pressure, could’ve been stupid enough to think Kokichi would fall for it. Even if that wasn’t true, she would’ve had to just trust Kokichi would do as they agreed so that she could kill her. In any case, I’m not too confident in the cooperation theory, but it is something to keep in mind.
There are a number of weak points in the theories above and there are a couple of curious things unexplained - what Miu was doing during the two minutes it took her to log in after everyone else (plant the poison on Kokichi’s chair? Why?), why was Miu’s corpse grasping her neck (was she actually strangled? Shouldn’t the body remain unmoving during the simulation, anyway? Does this mean Miu didn’t actually die in the simulation…?), why was the toilet paper left on the outside neatly rolled, and why would Kokichi agree to anything proposed by Miu since she was obviously planning a murder (maybe he really did have admin rights or something?).
However, this is getting long enough already and I don’t have an endless amount of time to sink into pondering these questions, so I might as well continue to the class trial. I’m a bit worried about how obvious the idea of Kokichi killing Miu is, but I don’t really have a culprit theory for anyone else, though I do have to confess I didn’t really even try to think of one.