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Okay, so, as basically anyone who’s talked music with me in the last 10 years can tell you, I’m massively into Deco*27 and if he composed a melody for a phonebook I would listen to it. Thus, despite the fact that I was deeply uncomfortable with the prison setting and the straightjacket aesthetic of the costumes, I ended up getting into Milgram anyway. Like, really into it. And now I have theories.

This one, rather than being about any of the prisoners’ actions, is about Es, who I’m going to be referring to as S from now on (they’re called that several times in the English text on the official website). I think what we know about them gives us a lot of valuable hints about the overall story and the creators’ endgame for Milgram.

So far, we know S is in charge of Milgram, a strange prison with 11 cells, ten of which we know to be occupied. They do not remember much about themself, but they seem willing to accept that life as a prison guard is normal for them. Their behavior towards the prisoners is erratic; at times caring and at times violent. Jackalope probably knows more about them than he has shared with them.

It’s not a lot. But it’s enough to work with.

As most of you probably know, the name “Milgram” is probably a reference to the Milgram Experiment. In this experiment, volunteers were instructed to inflict pain on “other volunteers” (actually actors). During the experiment, many volunteers followed instructions to the point of supposedly inflicting fatal electric shocks. This seems to promise ominous things down the line for the people trapped in Milgram. And it may indeed become relevant. But it’s worth noting that there’s another experiment that’s often mentioned in the same breath as the Milgram experiment—another unethical psychology study that took place in the US in the 20^th century (about a decade later, to be precise): the Stanford Prison Experiment.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Stanford Prison Experiment was an experiment conducted by a Stanford University professor using college students. He randomly broke the volunteers up into “guards” and “prisoners” and gave the former group control over the latter. The experiment ended after six days because the way that the “guards” were treating the “prisoners” became too extreme, and the professor, Philip Zimbardo, claimed that his work demonstrated the damaging effects of perceived power on those who held it. Later investigation indicated that the study itself was flawed and that Zimbardo had actively encouraged the guards to be tough and cruel toward the prisoners.

Is any of this sounding familiar?

My theory is that the name Milgram is, if not a complete smokescreen, then at least a partial one; this project is based more on the Stanford Prison Experiment than on the Milgram Experiment. To that end, the name we are given for the audience proxy character, S, is probably short for Stanford. This is likely as not a codename or title given to every guard at Milgram, rather than S’s birth name, but I still think I’m right about this one. If the way that Jackalope encourages us to vote for whoever we’d like, whether we actually think they’re guilty or not, isn’t enough, look at the translations of the audio drama CDs helpfully provided by @millgrammer. S repeatedly reasserts their authority as guard, separating themself from the prisoners and placing themself above them. They use physical violence with the prisoners to make points, and even swear at Futa. S is more than a simple audience surrogate; they’re an example of the risks of placing oneself in authority above others.

However, we have to remember that the results of the original Stanford Prison Experiment were rigged. And just as the original volunteers had Professor Zimbardo telling them to behave badly, we have Jackalope encouraging us to vote however we want, even if it’s based on attractiveness. Also, as I’m sure everyone has noticed, Jackalope has conveniently omitted the actual consequences of being found guilty in the final trial.

Make no mistake, S is as trapped as any of the prisoners, an experimental subject just like all the prisoners, and since they’re our surrogate, we’re being experimented on too. We’ve already seen the fandom argue over various fine points of culpability: “If Mu was a bully before her friends turned on her, does that make her more guilty?” “If Haruka is mentally ill, can he be held responsible for his actions?” And that’s what the creators want, but also, it’s us behaving in a way that’s as dangerous to S as it is to any of the prisoners. Deco*27 and the others gave us a few fictional characters to judge and we all appointed ourselves experts in morality even though we still don’t know what any of them did for sure, and we don’t know what the punishments will be if they’re found guilty.

I don’t know if the prisoners will be killed, ultimately. But I have a feeling that the 11^th cell is for S, and it’s my personal theory that they’ll end up there if we as the audience condemn the characters to an unknown punishment that may or may not be death—because, given the loose interpretation of murder that some of the MVs released so far seem to suggest, isn’t “condemning a prisoner to death” also murder? How different is what S is doing from what Futa did—even if we don’t know the exact nature of his crimes, we know that Futa thought he was doing the right thing, and S does too. But frankly, S knows as much about the actual situation as Futa did—they aren’t getting direct confessions, they’re trusting a weird machine to extract them in abstract form and then cross-referencing them with other conversations in order to actually make sense of them. We have reason to believe that Futa may have at least witnessed some of the things that he bullied/cyberbullied people over, even if he didn’t care to get the full story; S is working with much less.

So yeah, there are characters that I think are guilty. But I don’t want to vote to condemn them, not until I have a way to defend S’s actions in doing so. This kind of twist feels just like Deco*27, and given the votes so far, I’m bracing myself for it.