Discussion Alice in Borderland

I will say that to a character we have yet to be fully introduced to.

 

Also will resume reading tomorrow.

 

Mira

 

She kinda looks unhinged and maybe I am misremembering but she was there when the body was found wasn't she?

 

I thought the friend was the one with Usagi, but idk my brain is fried.

 

Yeah, it's a bit weird, but one of them might tie into the current thing.

Yeah, it seems like if you are confident in the answer, you'd want to go with pick otherwise it's safer to just go with majority. Stupid expanding rules for punishment though.

Side story chapter 1 was good. So it's set during the four blanks days after Arisu and Usagi arrived at The Beach. Seems like the main character for this is Dodo. He's an incredibly shy individual and seems like a bit of a go with the flow kind of guy. Before borderland, he lived with his grandmother and his mother was in hospital. He also seems down real bad with a female classmate, Shiina. His friend Ninomiya was going to "set them up" but he and Shiina ended up together, and it seems like their friendship ended as a result. I wonder if that line of thought wish of travelling to a strange faraway land had anything to do with ending up in borderland?

I have to say, I feel bad for Dodo, after ending up in borderland and accidentally stumbling into a game, no one bothered to give him any information around it, just a vague word of if he didn't play the game, he'd definitely die. The game involved each player picking a platform of the type used for people cleaning sky scraper windows.

The game is 4 of hearts and the rules are to answer questions and the time limit is 60 seconds. If they get to the top, they clear the game. If they end up at the bottom floor, the game is over.

They got the first few questions right, before getting one wrong. For being wrong, not only did they drop down a floor, they were also shocked. Damn, it keeps getting worse with hidden rules. Wrong with Majority = down a floor and shocked and wrong with minority = instant death.

 

Side story chapter 2 was good. The next question the silent hooded guy knew he answer and the others all guessed incorrectly, so he moved up 2 spaces due to being correct as the minority. For the next question, they wanted to cooperate. The girl studied French, and gave an answer which was seemingly purposefully incorrect and changed her answer at the last moment. As a result, another player died and she went up 5 floors due to the lie. Now she seems addicted to lying, trying to convince Dodo of the answer for the next question.

So his grandmother (presumably maternal) said to blame his mother for not being able to live with her or his father when she ended up in hospital, presumable some sort of psychiatric care. It seems his father cheated on her, she got addicted to gambling and it spiralled from there. But as a child, Dodo saw through that. He felt the same betrayal when his best friend got with his crush too.

Damn, Dodo put on his villain mask having enough of everyone's shit and decided to put on tears and say he knew the answer due to his hospitalised mother only to trick them. Even so, he still shed tears of turmoil from his decision.

It also looks like Ninomiya actually did speak to Shiina about the crush on her, but she confessed to him, so they ended up together. I assumed it was something like that.

After Dodo regretted his lying choice, he tried to provide the correct answer, but the girl didn't want to believe him even preferring death. She died because he wasn't lying. For the next question, it was about Borderland (the company's motto) and the hooded guy gave the answer. Dodo decided to trust him after some debate, and he was being truthful. To repay him, Dodo grabbed a company pamphlet to help with the remaining questions, which were all centred around the company. As a result, they both cleared it.

Turns out, the hooded guy with Arisu. Didn't expect that, I thought he didn't participate in a game since going to the beach? He encouraged Dodo by telling him to bear the guilt by keeping on living and surviving the games.

The most interesting take away is that it seems a company runs Borderland.

 

I'm so confused it said there were 3 side story chapters but I only saw 2 but back to the main story @Phenom

 

Chapter 23 was good. Arisu got a quick rundown of the game. 42 minutes and 39 players remain. We got a bit of a snippet of Last Boss' backstory. Seems like he has severe anger issues. He seems like a real sociopath explaining how to make corpses lighter by draining their blood.

We also got a bit of a small view into Suguru's past too. He was bullied a lot, including being physically assaulted, which sparked his larger personality change into what we see now. He seems at the end of his tether with Borderland.

Aguni also had a rough past. His father was a violent alcoholic, and even when he was younger, he'd provoke him to spare his mother, but even so, she left. When he was 12 he left too. At 17, Aguni returned for some form of revenge, only for his father to have already been dead. It was six months after he lefts his father died due to acute alcohol intoxication. It seems that he was going to kill himself when he was teleported to Borderland.

Arisu thinks they were all brought there due to being "easy to hurt" and thus are "hungrier for love". To me, it almost seems like it's because they all claimed to be done with life and seemingly wanting to end their own lives, so this world or whatever has brought them to the realization they want to live. Arisu wants to stop the killing and clear the game without anyone else dying.

Kujou is now coming forward and saying she wasn't with her friend the victim when she died. How convenient. Apparently, the guy also didn't see her body in the lobby an hour before the game. Usagi seems to rule out the militants that were "with her" prior to the game. They're also raising the point that the lobby may not be the scene of the murder, and it might have happened a while before the body was found.

Arisu has concluded the witch is on the side of whoever is responsible for the games. It's an interesting thought that there may be a separate group of "players" in the games. In this case, their rules are likely to kill the girl and trigger the witch hunt, then survive the timer.

The suspects they've outlined so far are Niragi, Last Boss, Aguni himself and the guy that switched to the militants, but honestly the guy with the hat is seeming a bit suspicious himself.

An's group is planning on gathering finger prints to compare between the ones from the knife and ones from items like cups. But Last Boss has closed in on their location and killed the guy with them. Kuina asks An to run as she sees her as the hope to clearing the game.

Looks like Suguru and Chishiya are about to have a showdown. Looks like Arisu has head a breakthrough in working out who the witch is.