I’m a bit late to the party, but a few weeks ago I read Phase 1 of Ciconia When They Cry, the newest visual novel (or sound novel?) from 07th Expansion and the 5th entry in the When They Cry (WTC) series. Even as the first Phase of the planned four, there is already a lot to chew on both thematically and in terms of the mystery that has been presented to the reader. If an early interview with Ryukishi is to be trusted, then Phase 1 of Ciconia is packed with most of the ‘questions arc stuff’ which would in previous installments take up 4 parts — this means a good chunk of the mystery that readers will be presented (before answers are drip-fed to us) should already have been included. As always, just based on part 1 the future of the series is unclear: but there are already plenty of things to speculate on.
When I tried to sort out my thoughts on basically everything I thought was important to the mysteries of Phase 1, it shaped up to be a gargantuan document in point form. Originally I wanted to chip away at putting it into a more readable (and more concrete) form over the summer… and I realized quickly that I had nowhere near enough motivation for that. The plan? Partially as a writing exercise, mostly to just give form to my thoughts, maybe 3-4 blog posts covering 4-5 topics each, based on the number of sections I had in my word doc at the time of planning. After stepping back for a few weeks that seems next to impossible for me, especially now that school is back on. So, for now I’m just going to push out as many small posts as I feel like, on one topic each, in the order that makes the most sense to me. The most involved parts of any theorycrafting I’ve done are super circumstantial and require a lot of assumptions, so unfortunately those will be at the tail end of the posts that I will make and chances are I’ll never get there. Phase 2 should be hitting before the end of the year which will throw a wrench in anything I’ve thought of so far, and it’s likely I’ll run out of steam even disregarding that.
Since my first reading I’ve combed through the screenshots that I took as I read (screenshotting basically every line which I thought might be important to the theming or as keys to the mystery) and reread some important parts, so I’d say I’ve read Ciconia ~1.5 times. I’d hesitate to say that I have anything (let alone everything) figured out and a lot of my theories are probably wack, but I think sharing readings of the mystery is part of the WTC experience. Putting yourself out there and trying in earnest to solve the mysteries is a great part of the fun! I’d say my approach to the mystery is based in anticipation of thematic delivery as well as rational deduction from the clues we’ve been given. If that doesn’t sound interesting to you, it probably won’t be, this post especially since it’s mostly just piecing together things we’ve explicitly been told and is in many ways a warm-up.
This post is about deducing the hierarchy of the key organizations we’ve seen in Phase 1, no matter how obvious that seems. In this post and all subsequent ones you should expect full spoilers for Ciconia When They Cry and possibly for the rest of WTC (Higurashi, Umineko), but this one in particular doesn’t really make reference to the other entries in the series and should be relatively safe for any Ciconia-only readers (if they exist???). None of these posts will make any sense if you haven’t at least read Ciconia (Phase 1) though.
This is pretty casual spitballing of ideas all things considered, but for now and in the future I’ll try to give credit where it’s due if I know an idea is not my own — one of the first things I did when I finished reading was looking through fan theories, as I’m sure was the case for many. The idea is for me to share my own theories for the “solutions” of the mysteries that I either came up with during reading or after, but when interacting with the broader community in discussing the story it’s difficult or impossible to draw the line between “my idea” and “not my idea”: the safest assumption to make when in doubt, then, is that anything I write in these theorycrafting posts is not actually my own idea. It isn’t my intent to just compile other people’s theories, but I think at this point anything I could possibly come up with someone else has as well so it’s not like I’m trying to take ownership of these theories either. For now I’ll just shout out the 07th Expansion Central discord: I wouldn’t really consider myself a part of the community there but I read a lot of interesting theories there and they seem like cool people. I’d recommend checking it out if you are passionate about WTC and are looking for a place to discuss the series! I have no specific references to make to discussions that were had there and for this post I would say the vast majority of the ideas were things that I came up with independently, but keep the previous disclaimer in mind.
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