たりとも with positive sentence / みろ = みるな?

[toejam]

I’ve asked a few Japanese people about this and none of them seem to agree on what’s going on here. I’ve never seen たりとも used in a sentence that wasn’t negative. Someone told me that imperative forms can sometimes mean the opposite (in this case, meaning that he is instead saying “こぼしてみるな”. I could accept that if it weren’t for the てみる here, which complicates it all. The speaker, Zeppeli, is instructing jojo not to spill the wine as a test of his abilities, so てみる meaning “to try” doesn’t make sense to me (“do not try to spill even one drop”, implying that that would be a desirable voluntary action). I’ve seen てみろused as a sort of やれるものならやってみろ kind of thing, but I don’t think that’s the meaning here as one would never doubt if he could spill wine intentionally.

In short, I’m asking if the first sentence is a command or a prohibition. If it’s a command, why is たりとも here? If it’s a prohibition, why is てみる here? I hope this makes sense, thank you

[djcostcosamples]

I think he’s kinda implying like, “screw around and find out”. He’s not telling him not to do it explicitly but warning him what will happen if he does. The command is the みろ part, not necessarily the こぼして part, I think.

Like, “Spill even one drop and see what happens! If you do that (spill one drop), I’ll give up on you regardless of the outcome”

[josh]

たりとも carries the meaning of ～も or ～でも in the sense of “even/even if”. Although I’ve only ever seen たりとも used in negative sentences, I don’t think it’s restricted to negative sentences.

For example, from weblio there’s an example sentence it gives that isn’t negative - ここで釣りをしているところを発見された人は何人たりとも告訴されます

I agree with @djcostcosamples here. To add on a little bit further, てみる is often translated as “try” but in reality it means “to do the prior action (what comes before てみる) and see for yourself (what will happen)” made up of て + みる. The command part is more of “try it and see what will happen”. So all together, you get “Spill even one drop of that wine and see what happens” - that’s what I get out of it.

Edit: I realize I basically just repeated what dj said lol in regards to the てみろ part

[toejam]

After speaking with a lot of native speakers it seems like they all came to a conclusion. This てみろ does not mean てみろ or てみるな, but rather たら. So, こぼしたら in this case. てみろ is a really angry way to say that, so it turns he is not commanding or forbidding anything directly

[djcostcosamples]

Right. To me, it’s very similar to a rhetorical imperative (like how saying, “Tell me something I don’t know,” is not so much a command to be taken literally but a sarcastic statement that something is obvious).

In the JoJo example, although it’s in the form of an affirmative command, it’s actually expressing an assertion–a warning that the listener should actually do the opposite of the command, or something bad will happen (thus the たら interpretation, If you spill, you won’t be my pupil anymore). Since it’s rhetorical, you could say that it has a negative polarity, which is probably why it feels natural to combine it with たりとも (i.e. “Spill it!” = “You better not”).