Talk:Kouichi Sakakibara/@comment-61.6.56.2-20130723030248/@comment-397235-20140813002420

But they still could've proven, beyond the shadow of a doubt Mei wasn't the extra by explaining about Misaki. This rationale is two fold:

For one thing, as we've discussed elsewhere, she has to be the Misaki Takako knew growing up, meaning Mei didn't come back incomplete at all (so far as I know, Takako is the only one advancing the theory the Extra is externally different; at most, Izumi and Tomohiko acknowledge a rumor the Dead have cold hands). This itself services two ambitions: it gets Mei and Kouichi off the hook for breaking the Countermeasures since Misaki had died before Kouichi even started school, and it also heads off Takako declaring Mei is the Extra, since it'd have either jogged her memory, or destroyed her credibility with the rest of the class; this means at least three people killed at the Inn (Izumi, Yumi, and Takako herself) would probably have survived (well, maybe not Takako; she dies in everything).

It also reinforces how Mei cannot be the Extra, based on a theory I've come up with. The Extra does not have a legitimate connection to class 3 anymore, having been placed their by the Curse and not by the school Administrators themselves (who, honestly, bear responsibility for all the deaths). As such, the Extra's relatives are safe from the Curse (Kouichi is a good example of this: at no point is he placed in unnatural danger, only danger from Tomohiko and Izumi; the closest the Curse comes to killing him is when it went after Aya with the window panes; even Kouichi's lung problems following Yukari's death are treated more as a matter of course than a side effect of the Calamity). Thefore, as Mei's sister, Misaki wouldn't have been eligible for death from the Curse if Mei was the Extra; in a way, her death validates Mei's existence.

As for the effectiveness of the Countermeasures themselves, they're more or less the perfect Catch-22. Ignore this random student the entire year, but you can't tell anyone to ignore her because that means acknowledging her existence. Mei openly acknowledges the difficult position Kouichi has put the class in, but never actually tries to explain things to him herself until after the class starts ignoring him. In this regard Izumi is completely justified to be mad at her, since Mei made no serious attempts to warn Kouichi off, and unlike the others, isn't bound by that particular Countermeasure (she can't, after all, ignore herself, can she?).

She tells Kouichi as far as the rest of the class is concerned, she doesn't exist, and only he can see her; if this is her way of telling him to leave her alone, she's terrible at psychology because it has the exact opposite effect (even more so than Naoya admonishing Kouichi about "things that don't exist" and Takeru telling him to stop filling Sanae's head with nonsense). So in that regard, and knowing what Izumi knows, you can see how she drew the conclusion it's all Mei's fault. That doesn't mean she should've called Mei to task for it in front of everyone. She'd have been better of listening to Takako's early advice: "What's done is done. The important thing is what we're going to do about it." Blaming Mei doesn't do anything other than make Izumi feel better, but Izumi's not mature enough to grasp that (Takako got that immediately; it's a shame she went insane because she was probably the closest thing to a moderating influence Izumi had).

Izumi would've been better off trying to fix things rather than play vindictive games over things that didn't matter, but everything she did was human nature, and it's no more her fault no one explained the entire story to her than it is Kouichi's no one told him everything initially.