Amnesia - 3

"III"

If this isn't a time loop, I'll eat my fuzzy new hat.

I think the most important questions we should be asking ourselves after this episode are "can we trust Shin?" and "is Shujinko a reliable narrator?" Before we can even try to figure out the first, we have to think about the second. We don't know enough about Shujinko to truly classify her as reliable or not, but because she's essentially an avatar for an otome game, we should assume, for now, that in terms of the sequence of events so far, she is. However, she's unreliable in that she's an amnesiac, and that she has several versions of the same events clouding her judgement on what happens to her as they occur. The fact that this is so lends credibility to the idea that something supernatural (other than Orion's existence) is in play, and that Shujinko is confused by that factor. The facts as we see them so far are these:

-Shujinko has woken in the hospital on August 1st, the same day that she last woke as an amnesiac with Orion by her side, but this time without Orion and with Shin as her acting boyfriend.

-The cliff accident did in fact occur, but the version Shujinko hears from her coworkers is very different from the one she remembers.

-Mysterious Stalker-san has become kind again (different versions, like with Waka? A split personality, perhaps? Or a twin brother?), and now we know that he's intimately connected with what's happening.

-Shin seems to be hiding something from Shujinko about this new version of the accident. Did he cause it? There is still that lingering doubt about what he told her regarding murder in a "memory".

I think the idea that Shujinko has to restart whenever she hits a "bad end" is the best bet to what's happening here, and it's thoroughly possible that those "memory" flashbacks she's getting aren't directly related to her current run at all, but to alternate time loops, ones she's either already hit a dead end with, or ones she hasn't yet tried. If that's the case, then this arc pertains to Shin (as these games usually go), which brings us back to whether or not he's trustworthy.

I think that for the most part, Shin seems sincere. Clearly, he isn't lying about his feelings towards Shujinko, but we shouldn't forget that Shin has proven himself clever already; out of all the rest of the cast, he was the only one to figure out she was suffering from amnesia, and it wouldn't be that hard to feed ideas into her head, if he were to turn out to be manipulative like that. There's also the fact that in this new version of events, Shin was the only person present when Shujinko fell of the cliff, and that Mine and Sawa are bothered that he was too calm when it happened. If the different versions/timeloops are connected, then Shujinko also has to worry about the admission to murder in her "memory", which leaves Shin on very unstable footing. If he's to be believed, however, then he seems a fairly good ally to keep around; he's an osananajimi, so he knows much more about Shujinko than she does herself at the moment (I wish I were in a band, though I wonder what Kaori Nazuka sounds like as a lead singer?) and he proves himself at least a little understanding when he realizes kissing her out of the blue in her current condition is a bad idea. However, he also doesn't want to make things easier for Shujinko by simply telling her everything, and until Orion returns to explain what's happening, that may turn out to be just as much a curse as it is a blessing.