I think we have to accept that truth if we accept that her other personalities can die in the red midgame.
Which we know to be an extremely fleeting image of her childhood before she started using “magic” to split up her feelings.
Of course Yasu is dead, she committed suicide to stay in the cat box and to hide the truth of her body.
If you’re talking about the meta, no.
I definitely do agree that Yasu is quite abstruse and well-hidden amidst everything going on in Umineko. About what @midsummer said, there definitely is that question of whether she was serious about carrying out her scheme, and that would tell a lot about her true personality. I believe that she had made up her mind, quite frankly, since she presented herself in front of the adults and all, though if we take into account the scene in Episode 8, in which she helps Battler escape and then drowns herself, her mindset has changed by then. I think it could be a mix of both, of wanting to do it yet not wanting to do it at the same time. I mean, at the beginning she was probably determined to carry it out but after her confrontation with the adults and after seeing Kyrie and Rudolf cold-bloodedly kill most of the adults and after being shot herself, she probably came to realise the reality of what she was going through with. That is, people being murdered in spite of any real reasons and herself being shot too, maybe, akin to what happened to Kinzo during the war, when the Italians were trying to murder the Japanese and he realised he didn’t want to die after witnessing death and massacre firsthand, maybe that’s what happened to her too, which would also make for an interesting parallel. Or maybe she just decided that she wanted to protect just herself and the cousins that she loved, thus her change of mindset. Well anyways, I do hope to hear more of what you all have to say and I’m looking forward to your post @lobotomyprince.
If you accept Yasu is dead at the beginning of all games, then this explanation does not work. If you do not accept, that is a different story indeed.
This is an interesting topic that I actually keep going back to whenever I feel like thinking about Yasu.
The way I see it, each “role” they play is just a sub-personality that they have, to help them cope and defend themselves throughout certain difficult situations. And these sub-personalities can interact with each other, whether they are actual living separate consciousness or just simple characters that Yasu made up, so it’s easy for me to rule out the DID explanation here. (This is mostly based around my experiences with my own characters and how I cope with certain situations, as well as experiences that I’ve observed on another person with similar issues, so this probably already went into headcanon territory, I apologize.)
And as always, each persona represents a part of Yasu. So really, it’s hard to say that one of the personalities is their true self because in most of the cases (except for Gaap, I believe she was simply an imaginary friend or something close to that) they are a part of Yasu, but they’re not Yasu themselves.
The one I believe is closest to their true self is Kanon. Especially after Yasu created him, so in that I kind of agree with @Sapphire. I think this because it was through him that Yasu could vent their frustrations and anger, despite being the silent type, they could be the most honest with themselves through Kanon. But even then it wasn’t enough.
Who Yasu wanted to become however is easy. Shannon. At least before she stopped being an imaginary friend for Yasu. They believed her to be kind, hardworking and dedicated to work, a maid that anyone could respect despite being shy. A motherly figure if you can say that. I’ll get back to this later.
Yasu originally was just a little kid who kept losing things, and had a hard time working as a maid without being mocked about it. Somewhere down the line, they started believing in magic, became a little more confident about themselves, and started loving reading mystery novels and thinking hard about them. And then one day they decided they wanted a family. To have someone to fall in love with, to raise children, to have a happy normal life. They wanted to feel the love of having a family. It’s understandable that they wanted this, especially since they’ve never had a true family, aside from kumasawa and genji and her imaginary friends. This is what Shannon originally represented to her I believe, the desire to have a family and work hard for it, to become a motherly figure as I said before.
(Also, you can tell why they fell for Battler really easily with this in mind. They wanted a family, thus,they had to fall in love with someone and took everything related to love wholeheartedly)
…But with the whole gender identity issues, disphoria, and then finding out that they couldn’t ever have kids AND are a product of incest, that dream, the dream that kept them together, that they wanted to fulfill with their entire being, got shot down. Destroyed. Utterly ripped and shattered to pieces. Her worldview and mentality broke because of this, because it was the one thing that kept Yasu being Yasu. They lost themselves and lost their will to live. They were disgusted with themselves for falling in love with Jessica and George. And Battler coming back was the final nail in the coffin. Three cousins/nephews that Yasu fell in love with. They believed they would never ever be able to fall in love with anyone else other than family.
Their sub-personalities of Shannon and Kanon weren’t affected by this. They have their own dreams or lack of them. Their own loves. Plus Yasu had given Beatrice their love for Battler, so there’s that. With Yasu losing hope and falling to despair, they were trying to figure out who they were and what they actually wanted. Become George’s wife and try to have a family and let him eventually find out that they couldn’t have kids? Not having any hope for the future and forever remain a servant in the Ushiromya household and live for Jessica’s sake? Or run away from all of this and love Battler, from the back of a white horse?
I concluded that Yasu just didn’t know who they were anymore. Which is why it’s hard to define who they are. Yasu became a person with no dreams, no goals, no will to live. They couldn’t really be a real person without having a goal to work towards. They became apathetic. And straight up suicidal. And they simply wanted someone to save them and give them a goal to live for, or at least punish them for falling in love with family members. This is who Yasu is in my eyes. I guess with this interpretation they are most similar to Clair.
Now something interesting to note. I think Beatrice for Yasu is just that part of themselves who is capable of being cruel, confident, bold, be the typical villain. Be someone who would commit such atrocious crimes that they described in the message bottles. It’s their love for mystery, for magic, and a part of Yasu that wants to dominate and be the cruel ruler of Rokkenjima after Kinzo.
And I think Yasu didn’t feel capable of becoming that. They decided that they wanted to be cruel, to commit a massacre, to force a mass suicide, but… until Battler came back, they didn’t feel capable of doing that. As much as they wanted to be cruel, they couldn’t bring themselves to do it. They still cared about certain members of the family and it hurt of even thinking of doing terrible things to the people they loved.
tl;dr: Yasu first wanted to be like Shannon, then maybe be cruel like Beatrice after terrible revelations, but her truest self is closest to Kanon or even Clair.
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I’m just going to compile all of my responses to various points already made on the thread to avoid double posting.
@Baelzaron I really do not know what you mean by ‘dead’ at the beginning of all games. Do you mean her true self was obscured so thoroughly that she was ‘dead’ in a metaphysical way? I really think you need to clarify this point.
@PocketyHat pretty much summarizes how I feel about Sayo. In order to avoid posting about things other people have said, please refer to that post. I’ll only add other things I feel are worthy to say.
However. … While some believe she was most like Kanon from 1984 up until her death, I disagree. Sayo was fully operating under her Beatrice persona when she heard Battler was coming back. She was only hiding through a veneer of her usual actions taken up by Shannon and Kanon. This isn’t made clear in the visual novel because she isn’t play acting. That gets back to my original point: Sayo shifts into certain mindsets, but can choose whether to represent them visually. She is willingly able to act along by wearing costumes and changing her voice.
After she heard Battler was coming back, she went into full Beatrice serial killer mode. Beatrice was the part of her to shoulder her love for Battler, after all. This provided Sayo with a near seamless transition to her play acting as Beatrice in the meta world, wearing a costume of magic skin. (if you believe in the fantasy layer)
I’m led to believe this because Shannon and Kanon give into the witch. Shannon is even eager to commit to her plans to massacre her family while Kanon resists with not much vigor. He represents the small, unheard voice in the back of Sayo’s mind that says “this is wrong”. In episodes 1 and 2, we have scenes of Kanon fighting against the witch only to surrender each time. Sayo lets go of his persona like shedding weight.
Bernkastel said herself that episode 4 was a method for her to gather information about Beatrice and the nature of magic. Besides episode 2, episode 4 is the best tool we have to decode Sayo.
Something I realized upon the re-read is that Ryushiki wanted us to use other characters to draw conclusions about Sayo’s personality. The two characters that serve as her models of behavior are Maria and Ange. Maria explains how she developed her magical identity at an early age and represents the part of her that cannot abandon childish games. Ange explains how she developed as a teenager. Ange and Sayo have parallel experiences but different fates. This blog post lists some notable examples of how Ange is Sayo’s foil concisely, so give it a look if you’re interested.
Knowing this, we can sort of extrapolate from scenes which suggest what Sayo was like during her life.
To understand her, you have to think of Sayo as one person, not a three in one person. Sayo is just Sayo. Shannon, Kanon, and Beatrice are imaginary friends with distinct personality traits and appearances. They are characters who have become flesh and blood through “magic”.
Remember the importance of acknowledgement? Kanon and Beatrice cannot exist unless someone acknowledges them.
Sayo commits to elaborate farces of deception to bring her fantasies into reality. She is totally consumed by the possibility of creating a scenario where 19 people could have existed on Rokkenjima during the two days of the family conference (more if we count her fantasy creatures). As the story progresses, it becomes apparent that Sayo created the Rokkenjima cat box in order to maintain a devil’s proof; no one can confirm or deny Shannon, Kanon, and Beatrice co-existed because the the handful of Ushiromiya survivors will not disclose the truth.
Sayo was only play acting to keep up the illusion that there was one more human on Rokkenjima (Kanon) and a witch (Beatrice). She used fantasy to cope, and she wasn’t willing to let that go.
To put it simply, she is a single person with a fairly consistent (if not complex) personality. She only became erratic in 1984 when she cracked under the weight of the truth of her birth circumstances. In the games Beatrice, Shannon, and Kanon are portrayed visually because of the fantasy narrative, however this is only to visualize her internal feelings of conflict. One of my absolute favorite aspects of the manga is how it uses story parallels to reveal that many of the scenes written into the games are only embellishments painted over a seriously twisted and ugly scenes Sayo did not want us to see. It was easier to write in her own truths rather than face her torturous reality.
Reading Confessions makes this obvious. It decodes multiple aspects of episode 2 and offers a glimpse into what Sayo’s life was like in prime.
RED TRUTH: her life was bad.
I’ll now dive into disproving the theory that Sayo has multiple personalities.
CW: This section involves diagnosing fictional characters. If you’re uncomfortable with these topics, you can switch until the next line break.
Sayo is just a social chameleon.She changes her behavior in accordance with her environment to meet the standards of certain situations. Take a look and compare this experience with Sayo’s:
‘… I had never truly developed a unique sense of self. Instead, I took on the mannerisms, behaviors, and even the beliefs and values of whatever company I was keeping at the time. And, while we all metaphorically wear different masks in different social situations … some with BPD seemingly become entirely different people from one setting to the next… This is often why people confuse BPD with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly Multiple Personality Disorder or “split personality.”’
Because of miseducation, people can’t see that Sayo has another mental illness mistakenly confused with DID, borderline personality disorder. Usually people throw up their arms as soon as they hear someone has BPD, but we should consider that most people develop personality disorders to cope with years of childhood trauma and abuse. Sayo is a sympathetic character. We can empathize with the abject cruelty of her situation, and while I wouldn’t defend her actions, she was never given an opportunity to seek help.
((( If you have interest in exploring mental health and mental health symptoms I associate with Sayo, I would also suggest you take a peek at Schizotypal personality disorder It certainly explains more aspects of her behavior. )))
I interpret Sayo through the lens of the social chameleon.
For instance, her work persona, Shannon, was formed because she needed to fit in at work. She later evolved into her projection of what an ideal woman would be like. When this persona was accepted by George, she fell further into a role which was not authentically herself. George didn’t treat Shannon too well; he is condescending and does not seem to care about her comfort. Whether George realized it or not, he caused Sayo pain by never truly considering her feelings and desires. He’s also said some pretty cringey things about women and seems to have a ‘nice guy’ complex.
BUT he also promises a way for Sayo to get off the island. She becomes attached to him. The persona becomes integral.
We also need to keep in mind that her personas have been created with the intention of fracturing her personality. Sayo is weighed down by crushing and overwhelming truths about her body and by her own insecurities. From the VN’s we know that the Beatrice’s were created to embody her prankster spirit in order to bully servants into respecting Shannon. We also know that Kanon was created to shoulder her daily discontent and oppressive feelings of depression and suicidality.
The manga reveals the truth of Kanon’s creation to be an attempt for Sayo to align with her birth sex as a result of dysphoria.
I want to talk on this at another time so I can give the topic the respect it deserves, but the subject of Sayo’s biology and gender identity is really, really important to figuring her out-- but it gets glazed over because how we speak and conceptualize those things is super complex. At least from my American perspective, we do not talk about people whose biology (genitals) do not align with ‘female’ or ‘male’ outside of very specific academic fields.
It will probably be a long post. I have trouble with concision, as you all have noticed by now hahaha.
In conclusion, Sayo is only a lonely girl with an extremely poor opinion of herself. Her abysmal self esteem was a product of bullying at the hands of her peers. When she was given power through “magic”, she then turned into a bully herself.
Because she was never able to develop a strong sense of self, Sayo created various personas to fulfill specific roles in her life. She was unable to consider herself a whole person due to conflicts of conscious and behavior, so she used Kanon to vent her daily discontent and Beatrice for a variety of shifting purposes. The evolution of Beatrice is quite clear: she begins as a prankster and gains and air of nobility, but once 1984 come and passes, Beatrice slowly evolves into a monster. The Beatrice in Episode 2 is most close to what Sayo’s vision of Beatrice was like. Abject cruelty. A sadist. Someone who tortures her conscious constantly and ultimately leads her to give into her desire for retribution. Beatrice will absolve the sins of Rokkenjima which Sayo considers worthy pay back for the disturbing actions committed there.
Sayo is an extremely unstable person. Even in prime, she doesn’t seem to have fixed morality. Although she loves George, Jessica, and Battler, she believes she can give into her “witch side” and commit the massacre. I mean, during the mirror scene, Sayo compares Beatrice to the devil taunting her to taste “forbidden fruit”. Beatrice was clearly the darkest, most recessive side to her.
She is a complex person, but the hatred within her warped Sayo into a monster.
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I was actually thinking of mentioning that there was a chance that Yasu had BPD, but I didn’t really want to make my post too long, plus everyone and their mothers throws that disorder around at fictional characters, as it’s really easy to relate to those disorders. And I didn’t want to add more psychology tidbits as I already threw sub-personalities into the mix there. (Which I still wholeheartedly headcanon because seeing more of myself I guess, ahaha)
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I always waffle around with how I feel concerning diagnosing fictional characters. However, I think interpreting Sayo as possibly having BPD is useful when considering aspects of her personality-- which is quite convoluted. I also decided to include the term to dispel rumors that she could have DID because there is a more precise term to describe what she’s experiencing and that’s BPD. BPD is often mistaken for DID, as I said, so I thought the addition was helpful. This topic is also personal to me, so I hope people learn some stuff ^ ^
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This topic seems to have drifted off the original question quite a bit, which is about which of Yasu’s personas is the most true, and which she wants to be like the most. Allow me to move the factual theorizing to our Umineko Spoilers General topic.
I think @PocketyHat and @lobotomyprince have already done a great job explaining how Yasu’s different identities interact and what that means, so I’ll just concentrate on the original question myself.
I’d say Kanon is the most ‘true’ of Yasu’s personas. He carries all her raw feelings and fears and complexes. He is always there to bring Shannon and Beatrice’s idealistic magic back down to reality, and as a result I feel his actions and reactions are most reflective of the conflicts that play out in Yasu’s mind.
As for who she wants to be like the most, initially it was the idealized version of Shannon we see in Episode 7, as she embodied the ‘perfect servant’ in her mind. However, when she uses magic for the first time, that changes. That prank she played on the newcomer servants was not just a simple prank, it was arguably the first thing Yasu ever did that she decided on and went through with on her own. The Beatrice persona that was born from that event feels less like an evil prakster but more the embodiment of Yasu’s own agency, her capability of deciding things for herself. That’s why I’d say she’s the persona she wants to be the most. Kanon is the one who always reminds them that they can’t do anything. Shannon is the one who tries to convince herself it’s okay that they can’t do anything. But Beatrice embodies the idea that they actually can do something, be more than what she was born as, proactively decide things and make things go not the way anybody else decides, but the way she wants them to go.
Even if that decision ends up being to commit mass forced group suicide.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I’ve never considered it before, and I think you’re right. I could write more about this (but I’m very busy these days), so I’ll just say my main tip off is that Beatrice was the only persona who shows any sign of liking mysteries which is integral to Sayo’s character. I feel if she grew in a normal environment, she would have been quite like Beatrice. I know people use Lion as an example, but I have a lot of feelings about Lion that I won’t go into in this thread for obvious reasons.
EDIT: I wrote about how I don’t think Lion is a real interpretation of Sayo because of the nature of the meta-world. Besides, be can’t exist in a mystery explaination anyway.
https://golden-witch.tumblr.com/post/165100683982/hello-hello-in-a-new-segment-of-laurel-ruins
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You know, I don’t quite understand why some people on here think that who Yasu wants to be the most like is Shannon. I mean, only because that’s the only time she expressed wanting to be like one of her roles, doesn’t make Shannon the one she wants to be most akin to. Besides, I think wanting to be like Shannon is more of a childhood wish of hers, at a time when she was always fumbling and didn’t perform her duties as a servant well, and with the passage of time, she gradually got better at it, so I don’t think a few years later from the time she expressed that wish she cared too much about being like Shannon. Though you can say that she also wanted to be like Kanon at the point she created him too, you know, to be outspoken, blunt and to live as a boy.
I do agree with lobotomyprince though, on how Beatrice is close to Yasu’s truest self due to her love of mischief and mysteries, I didn’t think about that when I posted on how her truest self is most likely Beatrice. As for whether if she were brought up as Lion, who doesn’t have much of an affinity for mysteries, it wouldn’t be true to her character, you raise an interesting point there, but we’d better discuss this in another thread.
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For a different perspective, how about considering Yasu through Magiere Sorcere. On the surface it appears to be a game or club, but notice that Virgilia was not invited even though she fulfills the requirement for being a witch (using magic). The members are all lonely, bullied girls that lost parental love who rely on magic to improve their lives. Hence you could consider them foils or three different faces of the same woman.
Maria brings magic into her reality. Ange keeps magic outside her reality, but allows its existence elsewhere. Yasu leaves reality (to be suffered or enjoyed by his personas) to exist within magic. From this angle Yasu can be seen as an escapist and all her personalities mere constructs instead of reflections (like Maria and Ange’s magic friends). This can be argued by the ability of Yasu to grant a Shannon brother whom she can talk to.
This perspective allows Clair (the distant observer) to be one of her “true” personality candidates. Different reasoning but similar conclusion to @PocketyHat
That being said, what I feel and what I can reason are different.
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I’m not sure if it’s useful talking about which persona Sayo is most like. If you want to make a pie chart, her personas are just herself neatly split into 3 distinct selves due to conflicting ambitions. They are each 1/3.
To those who think Shannon is Sayo’s strongest personality, I’ll stress that Battler notes in episode 1 that Shannon doesn’t resemble the Shannon he knew 6 years ago. The only commonality they share is anxiety. Battler is confused because he hasn’t adjusted to Sayo’s splintering which George and Jessica seem to have just accepted. He’s thrown off because she’s missing the other 2/3rds.
I’m going to push back on this because Clair is a doll who can’t emote. She’s just a story teller, a Yasu devoid of heart brought to the stage only to dehumanize Beatrice further.
Being an escapist and an observer does not negate a personality. The problem with Sayo is that she had too much personality which was overwhelming to her frail mental state, so she created fantasy outlets to cope.
I think pocketyhat’s point was to suggest that Sayo was closest to the original Beatrice (later given the name Clair by Bernkastel), but I’m not sure about that. Clair was an imaginary friend Sayo groomed into “reality” by playing pranks. I don’t think she became a persona until she inherited the bud of love for Battler. In Sayo-Speak, love is what makes a person human, so she only became real to Sayo when she came to shoulder aspects that were integral to her relationship with Battler (mystery novels, bawdy humor, etc.).
Beatrice first began as a projection of the Rokkenjima witch, but I don’t believe she was truly an outlet comparable to Shannon or Kanon until she shouldered the bud of love.
srry for stalking this thread so much, but I really love Yasu/Sayo’s character and I enjoy talking about her ^ ^
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That’s the thing. Sayo can’t emote properly unless they’re driven to a point of breaking down. And to flush the emotions they felt, they created fantasy outlets and became apathetic to reality and would rather either someone stop her murdering everyone or die. That’s why I said she’s more similar to Clair, which was the point of the discussion. She has a difficulty expressing herself. So she relies on storytelling to express herself (writing the message bottles, which also serve as planning the massacre) and being really cryptic about it. Also, the “who am I” narration that kept popping up: Sure, this is not unique to Clair, but for me it’s easier to refer to this part of Sayo as Clair.
Just because something is a doll, used for storytelling, doesn’t mean it doesn’t represent something of Sayo. In fact, I can even point at the Beatrice from EP5, because she also has the doll-like qualities at those points in time
I actually like @Baelzaron’s line of thought better about Clair. Being a distant observer and all. But that’s mostly because I experience something similar as the “main” personality, while my defense mechanisms are the more active ones.
Hm… there was actually a point that I wanted to argue against
I disagree. They’re perfectly aware that what she’s doing is horrible. Sure, Beatrice herself was one who was confused on why Battler would be so terribly upset on seeing his family members murdered over and over again, but I believe Sayo has a good view on what is good to do and what is bad to do. They wouldn’t have regretted loving their cousins/nephews as much if they didn’t have a good perception of good or bad.
They’re aware that what they want is not ok. Killing someone is not okay, especially someone you care about, incest is not okay. Even Kanon is considered a moral compass for Sayo… Mostly. Not entirely.
“And so, I cannot atone for my sins. I’m the sort of witch who can cackle over hundreds of deaths…!” -EP8 Magic End
My point here is this: They knows what’s good or bad. They knows that it’s not okay.
But they gave up being strong and trying to be good.
Their body was already unsightly to them. They couldn’t ignore how they felt for the cousins. But they couldn’t deny that the blood that flowed through her would deny her the happiness.
So they gave up. They went for the ‘easy’ route. They decided to follow through their desires, despite KNOWING it was bad, that it was wrong. They are aware that they became a witch. So they went with the bad route.
I wish I could show off panels of the manga to show off this point, but right now I am at work, and don’t really have the time to get the pics. So I’ll leave it at this.
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Nah, you don’t have to use proof or anything if you don’t want to because it’s a highly interpretable topic, and I feel like we’ll reach a point where we will be talking in circles! (Besides that’s a lot of work!! If you want to do it, I encourage but pls do not feel like you have to :((( )
Now that you’ve given more clarity as to what you mean by the state of Clair, I understand why you’ve reached that conclusion. It’s personally not my interpretation, but I get the argument and I like it. It’s well thought out. .
My reasons for claiming Sayo doesn’t have a fixed morality is because, in the story, there are points of conflict between her personas regarding murder, manipulation, and death. Society tells Sayo murder is bad, but Sayo tries to warp society around her goals by re-writing reality through “magic”. Shannon and Beatrice are heavily invested in the fantasy of reverting everything to zero and taking it to the Golden Land. Kanon is invested in the reality that murder is bad.
Having morality doesn’t necessarily mean your actions are good. Having strong morality just means you stick to a code of values. I argue that Sayo doesn’t have a strong sense of morality because she argues with herself constantly about what the right decisions are. She’s inconsistent.
Sayo spends a really, really long time establishing lore to create her Golden Land ideology. Beatrice’s background was used to disguise the ugliness of Sayo’s reality. It was a coping mechanism, but it extended beyond that when she tried to use it to justify murder. Sayo tries to create her own standard of ethics where erasing Rokkenjima’s sins becomes an almost religious conviction.
Yet, she can’t commit to that because she knows it’s fake, and she knows the Golden Land is just a land of the dead, and she knows its a code she established to serve as an excuse-- Even so, she wants desperately to make herself believe.
Kanon versus Shannon is a magical interpretation of Sayo fighting between her own made up morals and the morals society gave her.
This is my reasoning.
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-Shrugs- I don’t even recognize any of the three as being “personalities” in the typical definition of the term. I’m not entirely certain my vision has much place in this conversation, but for my two cents alone…
Anyone at times has inner conflicts. Sometimes it’s more complicated than just weighting in two options as well, and that’s where it gets messy.
The fantasy story of Umineko exists in order to, primarily, depict the inner conflicts of Yasu as the interactions between various beings, independently of whatever prime reality are or aren’t attached to them.
The mystery side exists primarily in order to lead us to understand that these three beings are a single one. Then we can begin to understand the “true identity” of the writer through the interactions depicted between the three. The fact that Shkanontrice is the key of Umineko is not the key of the murder mysteries as much as it is the key to understanding the heart of the author.
The prime reality behind this situation is for the most part unknown and of no consequences on the matter. What we’re shown there is a writer pouring her heart into a fiction but “hiding” it as the interactions between three people. I suppose a very simple form of this kind of logic is the typical “angel vs devil consciousness arguing with each other when a moral dilemma arises” but in this case this isn’t very related to morality at least not directly and it’s a far more complex matter. In any case, I doubt anyone would consider that viewing the inner debate of the “angel vs devil consciousness” as we’ve seen in various story is telling of a psychiatric disorder or the existences of various personalities wether they are merely roleplayed or not.
Obviously this is merely my own opinion on the matter.
I believe especially considering the heavy Jungian tone of most 07th stuff that a better key to understand these three would be to read up on the jungian archetypes, specically the Anima (Shannon), the Animus (Kanon) and the Shadow (Beatrice).
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For these reasons, this isn’t the type of topic that can be conclusive as this was meant to be ~100% subjective (whether it was fully intentional by Ryukishi or not is somewhat unclear to me). However it can be interesting to build a framework for reasoning:
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Using EP4 as the key, we are given the idea that truth is the subjective interpretation of presented facts
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We are shown major decision points in Yasu’s life and the immediate reaction, but everything before and after is left in the dark
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Therefore, how we interpret Yasu’s response and extrapolate it into the unknown period determines what we will believe to be his personality
IE. Yasu finds out that she’s infertile. Appears angry and calls himself furniture. I could possibly extrapolate:
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Yasu is optimistic and realistic. Eventually accepts her problem and expects a rocky future without kids, but will live with it. Becomes Shannon
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Yasu is pessimistic and realistic. Gives up the possibility of love and family, but not life. Remains unhappy and cynical. Becomes Kanon
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Yasu is innocent and idealistic. Ignores this, befriends Maria and works on magic instead. Becomes the Good WItch Beatrice
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Yasu is spiteful and manipulative. Digs deeper, holds grudges, lives for revenge. Becomes the Baby Boy from 19y ago or Evil Beatrice
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Yasu is escapist. Gives in to fate, loses all hope, creates personas and lets his original fade away. Becomes Clair
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This is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone tie Beatrice specifically to the man of 19 years!! Interesting comparison.
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