Knave's Umineko Blog

On my first Umineko Day, I decided to finally get around to reading Last Note, the sort-of epilogue to Umineko. Like the other side-stories, it's nowhere near as good as the main story and it's for the best that it's optional, but unlike the others, it's not entirely a gag.

In the narrative of Umineko, the 18-ish people who take the secret of the Rokkenjima murders to their graves are treated as if they have been locked in their own seperate reality, disconnected from the real world. When I read Episode 6, I commented on the games becoming increasingly twisted and self-referential to the point of collapse. It sort of reminds me of how fandom operates: taking the small snapshot of a few characters' lives that is canon and blowing it up, flanderising their traits, reifying the events of the original story "stations of canon," recognisable parts of a shared myth that must always repeat. Appropriate for a story that is, eventually, a series of fanfics about itself.

One result of this is a few characters who lurk in the background of the story, vital to shaping events and influencing the cast, but never directly seen. To my mind, the biggest victim of this is probably Kinzo's wife, who is so sidelined that her own kids barely mention her, despite her foundational role in establishing the legend of the witch, haunted as she was by the spectre of Beatrice long before Sayo ressurected her. Asumu is not far behind her.

We only know about Asumu from other people's impressions of her. Her influence on Battler is sort of implied to be the source of his redeeming traits: his flexible thinking when it comes to solving puzzles, his sometimes overflowing empathy for the people around him, even the part of him that wants to believe in magic ("I believed there was a society on the back side of the moon!!"). Last Note goes as far as presenting a narrative in which Asumu's presence alone solves everything. In-universe, this is a ploy by Piece to upset Ange, but I think it also speaks to the family dynamics at play. Of the parents, she alone is spotless, because being dead makes her beyond reproach. No wonder Kyrie is still seething 6 years after the funeral. How is she supposed to compete with that? All she can do is cope with her conspiracy theory about Asumu's secret machiavellian machinations, which always struck me as projection on her part.

Piece is not actually Asumu. Based on her description as a kind of placeholder character, I suspect Kinzo's wife would also be Piece if we met her. It still feels like we don't understand the real Asumu. Battler's description of her as mysterious, fickle, and tending to rely on flashes of inspiration only reinforces the roles we already understood: the redemptive influence that counters the Ushiromiya blood, the foil to Kyrie. It also makes her sound a little bit like Ikuko, which is funny in a way. I wonder if we could read this story as the post-canon Tohya and Yukari reflecting on where things went wrong, and what Asumu would think, if she could see what became of her family.

The only thing we can truly tell about Asumu from Piece is that she's apparently the most annoying person to ever live.

On an unrelated note, I love the way the gag with Ange not liking her brother's relationship foreshadows the eventual reveal that the whole story is Beatrice meeting her disapproving mother-in-law. Also, Ryukishi is a coward for caving to his readers and not giving us the hard mode version of Episode 3, but in exchange we got the Eva Episode and Erika, so I guess he's forgiven.

Episode 5's metaphor about the relationship of the author and reader being that of two lovers implies a two-way street. Like Battler, the author always writes with certain intentions in mind, but once they've cast their message bottle out into the sea, it's out of their hands, and they don't have any power to decide what the reader takes away from the story. Even Sayo has to admit that for someone out there to take away exactly what she wanted to convey and truly see her through her work would be a miracle. Ikuko's insults toward her audience were always at least a little tongue-in-cheek, and much of her needling is aimed at people who praise her as a genius despite her, in reality, being a bit of a hack. None of Umineko's authors are so unassailable, and the all-powerful Featherine is notably not the witch of storytelling or writing; she is the witch of theatergoing. There are, after all, two people needed to create a universe: one to send a message and another to listen and decide what it means to them.

It is this framing that necessitates the final choice being left to us. Choosing the magic ending means consenting to a fantasy that prioritises the message at the expense of the plot completely collapsing in on itself. From that point onward, questioning what's really happening is largely missing the point. For most stories, this would be jumping the shark, but I guess if you write a million words to justify it you can get away with it.

All this is to say that Tohya is a pretty stupid idea for a character, but in a way that I like a lot. He kind of feels like Battler managing to weave his way around the red truth with a nonsense argument one final time, which is appropriate, since Battler's moments of triumph from even the first episode have always been the ones where he made up an excuse to protect someone he cared about. In that sense, Battler has always come off as an inversion of the standard protagonist for one of these mystery VNs. If he was in Danganronpa, he'd be a rival character who pulls some convoluted stunt in Case 5, if that means anything to you.

Tohya's existence echoes Sayo, not only in that he is a man with a shattered sense of self whose practice of posting stories online is compared in the text itself to the act of tossing a message bottle into the sea, but in that he allows Ryukishi to reintroduce the big twist of Episode 1, this time applied to the whole of Umineko: the text being a fiction filtered through the lens of its author, whose nature can be understood by how they chose to tell the story. If you're one to be skeptical of whether Tohya actually exists at all, which is not an unreasonable perspective given Episode 6's conversation between Featherine and Ange on the question of whether she prefers a miraculous happy ending, then this version of the twist is particularly neat in that it inverts Episode 1's conclusion and frames reality as a story being written by fictional people. You could also argue that the name Tohya both refers to the writer formally known as Ushiromiya Battler and to the persona created by the Hachijo's to publish their stories (I tend to think Featherine represents the latter, rather than being a stand-in for Ikuko alone, as evidenced by her memory device and status as Reader referencing Tohya, combined with the obvious visual and personality references to Ikuko) which adds some more meta layers to him.

Previously, I wasn't entirely sure of whether Purgatorio was supposed to directly correspond to anything in reality. It seemed unlikely that Beato and Battler's red truth battles were written in the message bottles themselves, since it would break the stated format of a diary entry by Maria, and these segments interact with Ange's character in a way that I don't think would be possible for its author to pull off. I thought of them as a connecting narrative that exists only for us as readers.

Now it seems they can be read as allegory for Tohya's growing comprehension of October 1986. Episode 1 ends with Battler declaring that a mundane explanation must be possible. Episode 2 features him struggling to actually fit such explanations onto the kind of story being told.

Depending on how seriously we take Ikuko's claims of being able to solve the stories, we might consider her the source of the red truths. Umineko portrays mystery stories as something you should discuss with another person: Sayo and Kumasawa, Sayo and Battler, Battler and Beatrice. We can consider the ongoing discussions between Tohya and Ikuko to form part of Purgatorio. Ikuko even displays the ability to use red truth outside the catbox of Rokkenjima. I like the idea of her providing a stabilising presence when Tohya's mind is spiralling with possibilites, and quietly nudging Tohya away from an overly literal reading of the stories, toward understanding what she feels is the point of them.

Episode 3, I suppose, would be the result of Tohya learning of Eva's survival and deciding she's the culprit. Episode 4 ending with Battler's crisis over not knowing who he is and thinking that he might be responsible for the deaths himself feels pretty pointed, as does Episode 5's death of the person he most wants to tell that he found the answer.

Tohya's final story is the only kindness he can do Sayo after their permanent seperation: writing a fairy tale ending for the fantasy versions of them. Battler and Beatrice were always the same kind of being. Like her, Battler is an imaginary person, partially formed from stories of a person who lived in the past, but with later legends and the feelings of his creator mixed in. Like her, Battler carries the love that his creator will not fulfil, and wishes not to hold onto anymore.

Episode 8 is the worst episode in Umineko. Fortunately, it is the last episode in Umineko, and so it does not suffer too much from this fact, but since you asked so nicely I'll go ahead and whine about it for the next 2 paragraphs.

Umineko is a literary work with pretensions of being a shonen anime. Works of such pedigree have occasionally been known to end on a "War Arc," which serves two primary functions. First, it's a plausible way to find something to do for every member of a bloated cast of extras who the author has no interest in developing but is unwilling to write out. Second, it tries to wow the audience with sheer scale to imply that this conflict is the most important one, which the rest of the story has built up to. As a result, such an arc runs the risk of the story devolving into interminable fight scenes, often between characters whose presence doesn't matter beyond making sure no-one is left out, so it all just feels like noise. But enough about MHA. I don't think the big action setpiece works for Umineko at all. It's not a climactic escalation in scale because the very nature of Umineko is that all episodes are narratively self-contained, so the fight between Rokkenjima and the goats can't possibly matter to me unless it says something interesting on a thematic level. Unfortunately, while the concept of Rokkenjima being torn apart by goats is interesting, most of the scenes of it happening aren't doing much with the idea. As far as the "no-one left out" motivation goes, I think it falls a bit flat because, while I like these characters, they are mostly interesting in the context of the setting and plot they exist within. Strip that away, and there's no point in them being here beyond Ryukishi doing a victory lap. I'll tolerate a bit of patting oneself on the back after writing over a million words, but I'd like that to be secondary to an actual story, instead of a series of references to the story I already read.

Speaking of the story, most of what passes for a plot in Episode 8 consists of Ange repeating the same inner monologue about how much she doesn't want to have the character arc until, after a dozen cycles, Ryukishi hits his wordcount and Ange can decide to have the character arc.

As much as I don't like Ange's emotional arc in this episode, I did think the choice to bring back Erika so that they could interact was a smart one. I wouldn't have made that connection between them, but between the rotten personalities, random english phrases, and origin story about being unable to bear not knowing something, they're fun to see bounce off eachother. I kind of like the idea that Erika is Tohya's commentary on Ange in particular, based on him giving her those traits, and the mean-spirited caricature came out of the same feelings that led him to refuse to ever meet with her, although I don't know if Tohya could find out enough about Ange to give that commentary. It's a bit unclear when exactly the later forgeries were written (Episode 6 implies that they were complete by the time Ange left on her journey, but depending on your ending this journey may not have even happened, and Ange explicitly flags her own presence in Episode 6 as a continuity error). I enjoy how the final choice rejects the framing of whether to find the truth or give up on it. Regardless of ending, the Ange of the meta world has already read the book of one truth, and regardless of the player's choice, the truth of how the magic trick was performed is clear to them. The difference is only in the story told to themselves to make sense of the truth they've discovered, and their place in the world in light of it. Very funny to have even the "trick" ending include Ange declaring that the right answer doesn't really matter beyond being a means to an end, just to make sure you got it. I'd like to think that Umineko is not a story that is in favour of ignorance and self-delusion, as could be misinterpreted from it's fantasy/mystery dichotomy, so it's good that the final choice isn't about any real statement of fact. It's two ways of saying the same thing.

Ryukishi's talent for making the protagonist's arc parallel the reader's, with Battler in the Question arcs functioning as allegory for the reader's own process of learning how to engage with the story they are currently reading, returns with Ange letting Rokkenjima go at the end, the same way we will. A story this long, which underwent so many dramatic shifts in tone, genre, and the reader's basic assumptions of what the story is even about, can lean on the sheer ordeal of finishing it to provide emotional weight by itself. This is what I mean when I say that it doesn't really matter that Episode 8 is the worst one, because it's also the last one. Ryukishi had his last few gut punches prepared, and the rest of the text didn't really need to do anything beyond being an obstacle that the reader has to get through so that the ending doesn't feel too abrupt.

It's funny, then, that the first third of the episode is a literal obstacle to the reader's progress. It's also really, really funny that half of the riddles are complete BS that use word tricks to actively punish you for thinking too hard about them. The readers at the time must have really hated the arcs leading up to 8 if Ryukishi wrote this in response. It was fun, regardless, and it was a good excuse to bring back the characters who matter and tie up a few loose ends. Kyrie being Battler's mother really didn't matter at all, did it? One of the few plot points that betrays Umineko's episodic and reactive writing process. Definitely felt odd that we never really resolved it, instead having Rudolph bring it up out of narrative obligation before we pan away. If you want to make it intentional, I suppose you can say that Rudolph's confession basically means nothing as far as Ange is concerned, 12 years after their deaths, and part of the tragedy of Rokkenjima is that Kyrie died without ever thinking of Battler as her son, and these revelations cannot have any consequences for those who are already dead.

I enjoyed how Bernkastel's game was constructed. I think it's clever that Bernkastel designed this game under the guise of a logic puzzle to trick you into choosing Ange's family as the culprits, the same way she wants to trick Ange into opening the book of one truth, and in theory you could realise this and defeat the puzzle entirely by spinning the chessboard around and considering who Bernkastel would want to culprits to be.

Bernkastel's attack on Rokkenjima through the goats revisits Episode 4's commentary on scandal. Umineko usually remains inward-looking it its themes: it's primarily interested in empathy between individual people, the relationship readers have with a text, and using those two themes to reinforce one another. Themes about gender or class are touched on mostly for the way they inform characterisation. The thread of the metatextual theme is not lost: the goats do make fun of Umineko's readers, although Ryukishi pulls his punches and only really comes down on people who would dismiss his work as entirely meaningless and imply that he wrote a mystery with no solution as a cynical ploy for intrigue (also, while I like the concept of a story inherently at war with its own readership, who can not help but destroy it by reading it, this idea feels a bit muddled in a story that obviously does want you to think about it and come up with theories); however, as Umineko draws closer to its conclusion, it invites us to apply its themes to public discourse. Ange's enemy is not the witch who killed her family, but the people afterward who weaponised the idea of "truth" as an excuse to indulge their worst impulses, while she was too young to even understand what was happening to her, and so she accepted the interpretations she heard from everyone around her. It is truly anti-Reddit media, or at least, I'm reminded of the goats when I see one of those posts dedicated to pointing and laughing at how stupid an allegedly real individual is, as the commentors begin writing forgeries about the miserable existence of the sacrificial fool. To be fair, this only makes up maybe 80% of Reddit, and by extension, the internet, and by extension, the entire literary output of humanity.

Even though I had absolutely no concept of what the story was actually about at this point, I've decided that this means I was Right The Whole Time back in Episode 1, which means I officially win at Umineko.

Almost as soon as the "true" sequence of events is revealed to us, Ryukishi throws it into doubt again by interrupting Bernkastel midway through her red truth that might have confirmed it. Still, the story as told feels more realistic than the episodes that preceded it. The adults aren't intimidated by a childish riddle and solve it easily. Beatrice's elaborate plan falls apart immediately. The killings are opportunistic and have a straightforward motive. Sayo's despondency makes her look for the first time since Episode 4 like a girl wearing a witch costume, rather than an actual witch. It's reinforced by Will's loss to Bernkastel, too. He keeps trying to bring up rules and clues and she doesn't even know what he's going on about. This is not a mystery. It's not even a story. It's just a series of events.

On the other hand, the anti-Umineko themes in the Tea Party's fragment draw attention to those areas that still employ significant artistic license. Rudolph and Kyrie are presented not just as bad people, but as Villains, to the point where the story itself points out how Rudolph is basically LARPing. Such things are not unheard of, I'm sure you can find plenty of examples of gun nut types who convince themselves that they're the main character in an action movie as a pretext for violence, but then you have Eva's miraculous survival and Kyrie's dramatic irony bordering on breaking the fourth wall.

Despite what Bern implies, there is still some suggestion that the events she's showing are a fiction, but a fiction of a fundamentally different sort. If it's not reality, then it's still mutable. Battler promises that this is not a sad story, and his complete disappearance after being called out to meet Rudolph offers enough wiggle room for another Devil's proof.

One of the ways Ryukishi lends the Tea Party fragment authenticity is by reintroducing narrative elements from previous Episodes. Rudolph's references to Westerns are a callback to Episode 3, as is Eva shooting the other adults. The phonecall to lure out the children is from Episode 4. The adults all going to the chapel while solving the Epitaph parallels the adults all meeting with the witch in the chapel in Episode 2. There's an implicit suggestion here that the events we're seeing in the Episode 7 Tea Party are the prototype for the episodes, that these stories literally contain "fragments" of the truth.

But this creates a paradox. The first two episodes were written by Sayo before the killings even happened. The rest were written by Tohya Hachijo. I'm willing to believe that someone smarter than me who works as an author and became fascinated by the mystery could solve Umineko's major plot twists just from the first two bottles. You could probably even guess Shannon/Kanon in Episode 1 if you metagamed it, the way I did with Kinzo's death, and realised that Battler never sees them in the same place at the same time. I am not willing to believe that Tohya is such a genius that she managed to randomly guess specific events like the phonecalls that were not alluded to anywhere in the original bottles, and, indeed, could not have been alluded to, because they weren't part of Sayo's plan and they hadn't happened yet. As much as I like the idea of Tohya as this mysterious stranger who happens to have just the right kind of mindset to understand what Sayo was getting at, she really does need to have a source for some of what she's writing. Admittedly, the story is deliberately vague on whether Ange's meeting with Tohya ever happened at all, but someone has to have written the forgeries in any case.

This ties into Battler's disappearance, and his promise to Ange that he wouldn't let the story have a sad ending. I think the twist is going to be that, even though Battler's death seems like the most plausible turn of events, it is still possible to construct a theory in which, by some miracle, he gets off the island. Maybe this will finally resolve that Chekhov's gun about Battler being afraid of falling in the water. How else do you escape the island if you don't know about the hidden passage? Maybe it will be a case where they never confirm if Battler is actually dead or not (otherwise you have to get into why he didn't contact his family), and Tohya guessing parts of what happened really could be a coincidence, but Ange gets something out of the construction of a story with a less bleak ending? That would be one way to pay off the magic angle.

The Sayo stuff this episode was everything I was waiting for, but not quite how I expected it. What I was really surprised about this time was the humanisation of Kinzo of all people. Despite the Battler/Kinzo identification, I never quite thought of Kinzo's relationship with the original Beatrice as something real. Just knowing that Kuwadorian was built to support Beatrice II and not to imprison Beatrice I changes things a lot.

I don't entirely know what to make of the wartime scenes. Is this another example of Ryukishi leaning on Otaku culture, which has plenty of roots in both militarism and taking inspiration from conspiracy theories, or is the story making a point about the Ushiromiya family? For his part, Kinzo doesn't seem to care about the war one way or another, but he still adopts a fascist symbol as his own and maintains a personal mythology that justifies his absolute authority, even as his wealth and success is objectively derived from him murdering a bunch of people and taking their shit.

In any case, we don't know too much about Beatrice Castiglioni as a character, which sort of makes since she doesn't have all that much to do with the events of 1986 directly, but it also ties into a feminist theme about how Kinzo has kind of subsumed the lives of the Beatrices. Bice doesn't get to be much of a character, because she only gets to matter insofar as she's important to Kinzo. The Kuwadorian Beatrice barely even gets to be a human being: once she died, it seems it was easy enough to replace her with a painting on the wall. The story is barely even willing to acknowledge her rape without Bernkastel tearing it out of Clair's guts. Sayo spends years trying to escape from her circumstances by constructing various identities that let her feel good about herself, only to find that those identities were all roles she was essentially tricked into adopting by the adults around her so that she could be more useful to the architect of her misery. No wonder she needs Kanon.

Kanon himself hardly appears in Clair's version of events. Most of his life happens in the 2 year gap we don't get to see. Even at the end, she's a liar.

I suppose Erika's talk about love alluded to this, but the catbox seems to be not only Rokkenjima, but the inner lives of the people on it. Their deaths cut off any possibility of us seeing them unclouded. Beatrice gets her revenge in the end. We can only see the Ushiromiya family through her interpretations of them on the island, and through records of how they might have acted before the massacre. It very much parallels the crisis that led to the introduction of red truth: if we want, we can choose to reject everything we've heard about everyone as lies. We'd enter an endless stalemate that cuts us off from empathy and renders the entire novel Not Even A Story, but it would technically be a consistent reading of the story. The reader has the choice of what exactly to take on faith, out of empathy or out of a desire for the story to be satisfying. It ties in with the Death of the Author theme that I'm avoiding talking about because I want to come back to it in Episode 8 after seeing it resolve.

There's a risk in leaving so much of Sayo's characterisation unspoken, in that it might be seen as lazy storytelling to get so far in just to say "I guess there is no answer! Make up your own explanation for why everyone had to die!" but on the other hand Ryukishi basically wrote like 10 books about her already, so it's probably fair to ask the reader to do a bit of work here.

What does Lion have to say? They don't seem to have a whole lot in common, which makes sense: if Lion is wish fulfilment for Sayo, then they should naturally have as little of Sayo in them as possible. Shannon already occupied a similar role, and the only apparent traces of Sayo in her are the occasional uncharacteristic flashes of cynicism, like when Kanon's resentment of Gohda bleeds into her. One link they do have is that Lion and Sayo are both people who have an identity pushed on them by others, which they try as hard as they can to embody until they pay the price for it: Sayo in the form of everything Shannon represents and Lion in the form of their role as the heir. Lion's arc is largely about reckoning with their family's past and resolving to carry the regrets of their other self, instead of Kinzo's. In this sense, they heal eachother. Compared to Kinzo's other children, Lion is pretty much an ideal candidate for the head. Their only mistake is wanting to think highly of their family. Through Lion, then, Sayo can appreciate the unrealised potential within themselves, and recognise that throwing their life away was a waste. Through Sayo, Lion can, in a very roundabout way, accomplish what Sayo never could by deciding to live for their own sake.

Because, ultimately, Sayo's situation was not a desperate one. There would probably be problems with Kinzo's children, but I think we're meant to see that, from the moment of Kinzo's death, Sayo has effectively infinite power. She can go anywhere and do anything, but she chooses to die instead. There was a 2 year gap, and we might imagine that the plan was only formed once she found out about Battler's return, but the choice to stay on the island at all is essentially a rejection of life. Kinzo's self-centred attempt at making it up to her comes too late. He doesn't dare to see the person before him. He will not do anything that demands anything of him on a human level. Easier to bask in the embers of Beatrice, drop dead before Sayo can ask him any questions or form any kind of relationship with him. How characteristic of a man in Kinzo's position to use Sayo for his satisfaction and then throw some money at her and hope that deals with it. But Sayo has already become a person who has no use for his gifts.

Why the murders? It's not for revenge, and not to scare anyone. The murders are as worthless as the gold collecting dust in some hidden room. The only part that matters is the form. The game is played for its own sake. Like her father before her, Sayo is caught in an impossible dilemma, and starts the countdown to annihilation that will only be halted if a solution is found. For her, the dilemma is about whether she has a future, and what form that future will take. The murder mystery scenario is chosen because it's her connection to Battler. Entrusting everyone's lives to a miracle, Sayo hopes that her last cry for help will be understood, but even in the scenarios she wrote herself, Battler never understands anything. The Witch of Miracles is the witch who understands that miracles do not happen. In the bottles written by Sayo, right at the very end of the stories, Beatrice appears before Battler, and he finally just sees her. But it's too late.

There's a running gag in Umineko in which the magic side of the plot draws heavy inspiration from Otaku culture. There are a lot of superficial references to the occult, the Stakes are right in that grating, childish territory that manga writers seem to think it funny, and the bunny girls talk like they walked out of Nanoha. In keeping with this, the magic side of the plot is filled with yuribait, representing a diverse range across the "basically canon but they won't say it explicitly for some reason" to "if you ship this I assume you believe in chemtrails" spectrum. By juxtaposition with the heteronormative romances of the mundane side of the story, Umineko might accidentally imply that LGBT people are an aberration, enjoyable as a quick gag or piece of fanservice, but intolerable as soon as they become too real. Not really a good faith reading, but such is the kind of unintended side effect you might run into when you only explore queerness through the lens of non-human characters.

Or is it an unintended side effect at all? I'm still reeling from the fact that Battler trying to grope his cousin (I guess twice, if I'm right about Sayo's parentage) turned out to be important. I've been thinking of Kanon as more or less a disguise for Sayo, and maybe it even started out that way, but the entire conflict in the Love Trial is ultimately over which of the identities gets to become a real person. Kanon picks out a real name in this chapter (I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't have one before, since he only exists when Sayo is on-duty) and it would seem as though his existence is linked to the question of whether Sayo would prefer to prioritise Jessica, in the same way that Shannon practically exists to be George's wife, and Beatrice is explicitly a coping mechanism for unfulfilled feelings toward Battler.

We shouldn't forget that the world of magic is one formed mostly from the mind of Sayo. To Sayo, marriage is when a man and a woman have a wedding, the man works and the woman stays home to look after their kids. To Sayo, the choice to commit to Jessica is synonymous with the choice to live as a man, and vice versa for George. To Sayo, a choice between the two is absolutely necessary for life to go on. Only one can survive the trial.

The characters ask over and over: why is a miracle necessary for two people who already love eachother? What can stand in their way at that point? It's not just that Shannon, Kanon and Beatrice are all the same person. Kyrie alludes to it with her comment about marriage being something very different from a childhood crush. George is very clear that he wants to have a lot of children. Natsuhi seems to be under the impression that the baby from 19 years ago was a man. The reason Sayo needs a miracle is because of her body.

Back in Episode 2, when Kanon fights the goat (I can't believe this ended up mattering) there's some phallic subtext being thrown around. I recognise "sword = phallus" is an uncouthly English Major thing to forward, but in this case I'm not just grasping at straws (another phallus! Freud was right!) I think Beatrice literally refers to Kanon conjuring his blade as "whipping it out." Kanon has a line about how he didn't want to show it to Jessica, and Beatrice mocks him for "exposing his subhumanity."

I've already said before that Shannon avoids being physically intimate with George, and goes as far as sleeping in a separate room when they vacation together. Again in Episode 2, we get some suggestive dialogue during Beato's crashout. She says that Shannon wanted George to "teach her the joy of womanhood," insists that their relationship is meaningless if they can't sleep together and tells her that their relationship will be over the moment George tries to sleep with her.

Zepar and Furfur are pretty one-note characters, but their existence itself is a huge hint: they look completely identical but are opposite genders. Pretty weird that Ryukishi didn't write anything else in their character bios.

I wonder if the backstory is going to be that Sayo was raised as a girl initially because she was supposed to be Kinzo's newest Beatrice. I feel like I broadly understand her background, but I don't really understand the specific sequence of events. I still can't decide if Sayo was ever actually at the orphanage or if she was just at Kuwadorian the entire time.

For now, I think I'll stick with she/her for Sayo, since the name was originally linked with Shannon, and it seems like the Shannon identity has been around continuously for much longer than Kanon, and has yet to be dropped in favour of it.

Through the lens of the meta plot, it seems the true purpose of the Love Trial was not to create a miracle for Shannon or Kanon, but to create a miracle for Battler by returning his lost love to him. The trial had to drag in Shannon and Kanon, because those identities are as much Beatrice as the witch of legend was, as much as Sayo presents them as separate (it's Kanon, after all, who teaches the new Beato how to be a witch). Way back in the 1st Episode, Kanon has his soliloquy about the big strong Battler coming along to save him from the work he's not strong enough to do himself. The scene ends by cutting him off as he says "even I..." This could be read as an indication of Kanon being insecure about his status as a man or as Kanon noticing that some residual attraction to Battler even exists in him, even though that's not meant to be part of his identity. It could also be both at once, with those feelings feeding into eachother. The same episode also features Shannon not caring at all about Battler making passes at her right in front of George. The implication here seems to be that Sayo's feelings toward Battler are the truest of them all, to the point where they seep into the other identities. It's interesting that Shannon "wins" the Love Trial, but Beatrice is clearly the victor regardless. Sayo's feelings toward Jessica were never all that developed, because she could not allow herself to accept them, but she was prepared to move on and marry George before Battler showed up out of nowhere. "Because of your sin, people die."

As for Beato's part in things, we're doubling down on the parallels between Kinzo and Battler to an unambiguously disquieting degree. Battler is constantly conflicted between his desire to get the original Beato back and whatever responsibilities he has toward her "daughter," and so he bets on the miracle of the new Beatrice becoming the old one. One might even speculate that the entire Logic Error was some kind of ploy on his part to make this happen. After all, the solution to the Logic Error requires you to understand who Beatrice is. He has some inner narration suggesting that he's genuinely stumped by the problem, but then again Beatrice was maintaining her "change of heart" act in Episode 3, even in scenes that Battler presumably couldn't observe.

After Episode 6's ending, I have no idea where Umineko is going to land on the question of magic. In Episode 4 we had a conflict between Ange and Maria over the latter's attempts to explain away her own abuse. It seems that this wedding is a more extreme example of the same tension. It is certainly wrongheaded to evaluate two people's "truths" with the goal of figuring out which one is "right," (those of you who found this blog through JADS might recall that infamous user who was asked to stop using a slur, and uttered the famous last words "define a slur") but at the same time the magic scenes are often used, not just to cover up or interpret, but to perpetuate a horrible reality. I was thinking that the story might conclude by arguing that the reader ought to accept the existence of magic, in a complete reversal from the beginning, when such a thing was unthinkable, but now I wonder if in the long run we're going to get some kind of synthesis of the two perspectives that I'm not expecting.

Beatrice has always been a composite being. I wondered if this nature of hers might be an allusion to the Holy Trinity: she does, after all have 3 major personalities who are sort of all her but also none of them are really her, and she's already an allusion to the Divine Comedy (I need to wrap this blog up soon, or else the next April Fools post is going to need a lot of background research). This is to say that it's reductive to simply say that Battler married his daughter, but at the same time that is literally what happened on-screen. The final scenes of Episode 6 are trying so hard to distract you with the flashy fight scene and the big romantic wedding applauded by everyone and Beato's aura farming, but the rot underneath it all goes unaddressed. Are we just commenting on Kinzo's attempts to beautify his actions, or are we also questioning the value of Sayo's "love" for a man who has never, and will never, do anything to save her no matter how long she waits? The same guy who, in her own story, tries to assault her the second he sees her after a lapse of six years? Battler is a member of the Ushiromiya family, in the end. Given what happened, it would seem that the real Battler, who we have yet to see, and may never see, was far from the miracle she was hoping for.

The story opened with some cryptic statement from Bernkastel. I'm not sure how much my meta-knowledge from Umineko will actually help me here. I feel like Umineko was probably intended in some ways as a response to the Higurashi, so I would hope that what I know about witches at the very least doesn't actively mislead me. Also, it's really funny that her first name is literally "Furudo Erika"

Under Bernkastel's name reads "Depicting him as a real good guy is important gotta make him into a very dirty criminal again huh" with weird spacing to encrypt it. I'm not sure what this means yet, but it ties into my theory about Keiichi.

The first scene proper appears to be a first person passage from the perspective of someone performing a murder-suicide. The scene is juxtaposed with Keiichi waking up, as if to imply this is some kind of flashforward, introducing a tension to the carefree slice of life scenes, which we now know will inevitably end in bloodshed. The reason behind the murder is unclear. We have some undercurrent of being betrayed in the narrator's words, but that's about it.

Once Keiichi wakes up, he has a little beat on the idea of forgiveness.

The two obvious reads of this scene are that Keiichi is an incredibly naive person who believes that people should just get along regardless of what disagreements they've had, or that he is a self-centred individual who has done something terrible in his past and is trying to escape his guilt over it. The following scenes seem to back up the latter interpretation. Every time he brings up his life in the city, it's in the context of regretting the person he was back then. In his interactions with Rena he leaps between enjoying teasing her and beating himself up for doing it. We don't know whose funeral he went to, but I could imagine it coming up again as some kind of big reveal.

As far as the other characters go, they seem very much like anime girl stereotypes, but Ryukishi is a good enough writer that they probably have actual characters underneath it, and the generic anime fluff in the way of the story is the "Comiket Tax," so it's worth trying to take them seriously (one might say that you should try to view all stories in good faith and give them a chance to impress you instead of writing them off as weeb trash. Is this what is means to look at a story with Love?).

I don't really understand Rena's deal. Even in-universe, her demeanour is marked as unusual, and after Maria I don't think I can write it off as cutesy anime girl bullshit. It would be very Ryukishi to sneak in some commentary on neurodivergence through a character that initially looks similar to the work of much worse authors who don't bother giving female characters interiority (did you know he used to be a social worker?) One thing I liked about Maria's storyline is that, in what I read so far, they don't assign her any specific diagnosis. Steins;Gate pulled off a similar trick with Luka. When you start throwing around labels, the text can start to feel more like a pamphlet than a story, and refusing to give the audience any label they can use to pigeonhole a character can force them to try and understand that character as an individual and empathise with them. Sometimes that's just as important as more direct ways of "raising awareness." This isn't specific to Rena or anything, but I'd be surprised if Ryukishi doesn't bring in any social commentary after seeing what he did in Umineko, especially now that we're in more familiar turf for him.

Mion feels similar to Jessica so far. I don't have much to say about her, besides that she seems very casual about the responsibility she supposedly carries, and I wonder if her tendency to talk "like an old man" is supposed to indicate the sort of people she has to mingle with when she's not hanging out with her classmates.

Satoko is the most cartoonish character of the bunch. Those traps of hers are such a bizarre trait. Maybe it's the fact that the story is describing them as "traps" instead of "pranks" that makes me feel that way. I'm also not really clear on how old some of these characters are supposed to be, so I'm not sure how believable I find the rube goldberg machine thing. It's not breaking my suspension of disbelief or anything, though. The traps are certainly some kind of Chekov's gun, in any case. As for the girl herself, there's this slapstick routine going on where she acts out until the older kids jokingly threaten her, at which point she immediately panics and looks for comfort from someone around her, before returning to normal once the situation is resolved. Seems like one of those things that's being presented as a joke, but is actually kind of concerning if you look at the scene more seriously. There's also that line about how Rika has to make lunch for her, which reads to me as a shorthand for saying that her home life isn't great. The slapstick gimmick could act as forshadowing for physical abuse. Ryukishi has set up gutpunches like that in Umineko, after all.

Rika is the character we know the least about. Keiichi just seems to see her as quiet and well-behaved, but a character this unassuming surely has more importance than we might think. Of course, I already know she's Bernkastel, so I'm kind of cheating there.

Umineko's 7th Episode is a dramatic shift in both tone and structure. I knew that Ryukishi was never much of an artist, but now he's completely abandoned the "visual" part of "visual novel" in favour of packaging his work as a traditional book. Is this a sign that Ryukishi has grown sick of being forced to pander to weebs to keep the lights on, and now has ambitions of leveraging his niche fame into a career as a serious author? It's certainly in-keeping with the metafictional nature of Umineko that he chooses to introduce such a jarring change in genre 3/4 of the way into his story.

Indeed, we can see that he intends for his audience to think of Episode 7 as, in some sense, seperated from the rest of his work, simply from its title, which eschews the traditional "of the Golden Witch" suffix (I'm told that this was actually the result of some kind of controversy over the original title, but regardless I can only review the work through the lens of my own experience with it, post-name change, so I won't harp much on that point). It was surprising to me that, despite how far into the story it is, Episode 7 is somehow the most popular Umineko episode by a mile, to the point where most of its readers have not even read any of the episodes preceding it.

"And Then There Were None" offers a very different perspective on the events of Rokkenjima, shuffling around the setting and reinterpreting many of its primary characters. In Ange's words, seeing from multiple perspectives allows us to get closer to the truth. In that sense, Episode 7 is the one that truly deserves the name "Answer Arc," as it more or less gives away the entire plot, once properly interpreted. I'm sure you all had a good laugh at my ridiculous Shannon/Kanon theory, but with the reveal that there were only ever 10 people on Rokkenjima, even I'm not dense enough to continue denying Nanjotrice. In hindsight, all of the foreshadowing is there. We knew right from Episode 1 that Kinzo and Nanjo were "good friends," and with Ryukishi commenting on self-insert fanfiction in Episode 5, it was only ever a matter of time before he explored mpreg, thus explaining the existence of Beatrice II in the secret mansion.

(spoilers for And Then There Were None, if you haven't picked up on it by now)

It's sort of fascinating to see the idea of a closed circle mansion murder mystery from first principles. The preface in my version of the book indicates that the author was greatly motivated by the challenge of executing such an extreme premise without making the killer obvious, and while still keeping the sequence of events believable once revealed. I think when you read from a naive point of view, the book is very effective in this respect. The cleverest trick it pulls off is making the character's slow realisation of the situation they're in, and their growing suspicion toward eachother, gripping enough to carry the story by itself, to the point where a casual reader can simply enjoy it without worrying about what the solution is. Once you're invested in the story as a thriller, the culprit can sneak in false assumptions that have even the reader nodding along. Probably the most enjoyable part of the solution is looking back in retrospect and seeing how the culprit plays the characters psychologically (establishing the idea that someone who has already died can't be guilty, gambling on the idea that his victims would do his job for him once there were few enough left, smartly being honest about his lack of an alibi because lying will just make things worse).

Perhaps this represents something of a contradiction at the heart of the mystery genre: they're usually more fun if you don't really think about them. The original murder mystery, The Murders In The Rue Morgue, has a solution so insulting that I fear it may have launched the orthodox mystery genre simply because the readers' outrage inspired a desire to see "fair" mysteries. From the "along for the ride" perspective, the reveal can still be exciting from the sheer drama of it, and there's a dark satisfaction in seeing the plan play out from the killer's point of view, which I imagine is why people play Among Us. You might say that the real innovation Umineko makes is in turning the genre on its head. Instead of presenting a mystery with the false promise of a satisfying solution, only to frustrate the audience with a worse answer than the one they thought of themselves, Umineko's surface level story manages to be so stupid that the reader is forced to actually think about it in order to salvage the experience.

As for the reveal of the killer, I must say that while I was able to predict the killer without any real issue, I was frustrated by his alliance with the Doctor. My joke about Kinzo and Nanjo being secret lovers would legitimately have been a better answer than "The Doctor is an idiot who blindly trusts a complete stranger when he knows someone is killing them off one by one, and gets everyone killed as a result, instead of grouping up or staying locked in his room until the storm ends." In the earlier episodes, this is justified by the pre-existing relationships between the characters. Jessica isolating herself with Kanon in Episode 2 is not a 100% rational thing to do, but it doesn't feel frustrating because we know enough about her to understand that it makes sense from her perspective. Ryukishi cares enough about his characters that it generally doesn't feel like they're just doing whatever for the sake of the plot.

It's possible that the author's insistence on keeping to the structure of an orthodox mystery genre held it back. The first half of the story is packed with social commentary, but it ends up being reduced to set dressing for the game between author and reader. I acknowledge that I'm probably biased by how much I loved Episode 1, but I can't help but think the story would be better if it didn't reveal the answer at all, and instead the story became a kind of Rorschach test, providing some kind of payoff to the theme about prejudice. I suppose it would have made a lot of readers at the time angry. Still, the ending we got was certainly better than the alternate ending in the stageplay, where the last two survivors turn out to be innocent of their crimes and then survive and get married. Awful.

By Episode 6 the events on the gameboard have been twisted so far away from the original message bottles that they're nearly unrecognisable. Erika already breaks verisimilitude by existing, even if you can technically justify all of her actions without her having explicit meta-knowledge, and now she's actively trying to break the universe. It's definitely wrong to think of the Episodes as timelines or parallel universes, even from a magic perspective, now that we've seen it from the gamemaster's point of view and we know that there is nothing underneath the facade, and everything left unstated is in complete flux.

There's some suggestion of an actual story with the development of the Jessica/Kanon and George/Shannon couples in ways we've never seen before, but once Erika gets going it mostly gets relegated to the love trial and the characters are reduced to being purely functional. A game without love, just as she likes it.

What I suspect is the canon answer to the logic error - that Shannon snuck out the window before Erika set up the seals, then changed over to Kanon, followed her to the mansion and switched with Battler, then became Shannon again after walking into the closet - barely even makes sense from an in-character perspective. Given the existence of the letter, they would have had to plan this manoeuvre before Erika had even set the seals on Battler's room, based on them randomly guessing that Erika would repair the chain and that she would split up from the rest of the group so they could give her the letter in the first place. What were they going to do once Erika opened the closet? Maybe Sayo was planning on killing her at that point, but in Battler's game it's unclear if Sayo is even planning any murders.

I wonder if Erika's defeat will be marked by a turn away from all the metagaming and toward a story that's more concerned with the characters. Even this late, we have quite a few members of the cast that have never gotten much focus, especially those in Sayo's inner circle, not to mention that we probably need to get the payoff with Battler's parents at some point.

There weren't really any new mysteries to solve on this occasion, since the story does most of the work for you in the locked rooms that do show up, but I thought those of you who only know of me from Tumblr might still find my live reaction amusing:

We did, however, get a huge reveal that was bizarrely stuffed inside the Tips menu instead of being mentioned anywhere in the story itself.

We have an answer to what kills everyone at the end of the story now, as well as an explanation for the lack of evidence the police could find at the scene. The catbox is set up by obliterating the gameboard, making it truly impossible to reconstruct what happened on the island. This potentially ties into the backstory given in Episode 1, in which Kinzo made a lot of money off of procurement during the Korean war, and originally acquired the island under the guise of developing a naval base. Does this mean that Kinzo secretly kept a stockpile of explosives on the Rokkenjima all this time? I'm sure his family would say he's crazy enough to do so, but it'd be hard to get away with it, and I'm not sure what he'd use them for.

Bombs existing on the island would also explain where the torii went. The scene of Sayo travelling there to smash the mirror was alluding to her testing the explosives there. Makes more sense than a "purple lightning bolt."

Battler's characterisation has undergone quite the shift with Lambdadelta controlling his piece for most of the story. In particular, the story keeps drawing parallels between him and Kinzo. He's being used as a puppet by the adults who think they're better off with him in charge. He has this "madness" to him (I believe someone remarks that Battler leaping from the window to prove a point is the sort of bizarre action that inspired the legend around Kinzo). He's consistently presented as being on the same side as Kinzo, although this is open to interpretation, since it is generally clear that he's allying himself specifically with Natsuhi's illusion of Kinzo. He's being called the Golden Sorcerer. Of course, he's also drawing from Kinzo's Dante parallel in that his shift in demeanour was prompted by the loss of Beatrice.

These parallels are unsettling, in that Kinzo is the kind of man who should prompt some serious reflection if you find yourself relating to him. Battler's triumphs are exciting in the moment, but are they actually a sign of positive change for his character, or is he also going to end up a lunatic pleading for a smile from a portrait that offers only a cold glare? We'll have to see what he's like as a gamemaster. If nothing else, the witches acknowledge that Battler has discovered the truth of the game and seen into Beatrice's heart. It seems doubtful that Kinzo could say the same.

Battler's comparison to Kinzo is not without precedent. I don't believe I went into this in my Episode 4 post, but you can draw comparisons with Ange as well: made new head of the family after a disaster wiped out every other candidate, constantly fighting against the adults who don't respect her and want to use her new position for their own ends, a self-styled user of magic to the point of delusion. The connection has only been strengthened by having Battler take a page out of her book and jump off the 3rd floor. Are we going to get to Episode 8 and get a Kinzo backstory where Beatrice tells him he can have a stack of gold as high as he can jump from without dying and he has the original Ushiromoment?

Battler's ascendency to the Ushiromiya Family Head is paralleled by him reaching the position of gamemaster, and with his understanding of Beatrice's game board, Battler has gained a new power: the gold truth. Ryukishi has decided to withhold an explicit answer about what gold truths are thus far, but after 5000 hours in the Ange Torment Nexus there's no excuse to give up on thinking whenever one sees new magic.

We know explicitly that gold truths are something quite distinct from red truths, and that neither can completely defeat the other. Rather, which of them might win out is contextual. In some sense, this was true of blue truths as well. It would seem that gold truth is unmistakable to those who understand Beatrice's game at its core, and Battler's ability to use it is proof of his right to take control of the game.

Battler's specific gold truth was used to confirm that a certain corpse was truly Kinzo's. (This scene is rather vague. Are we to assume that the Battler on the gameboard is revealing Kinzo's corpse as the trial in the meta world occurs?) Regardless, this statement is notable in that it does not directly contradict any factual statement made in red. If Knox had said in red "this corpse is not Ushiromiya Kinzo," the gold may have failed to counter it. Instead, the gold has the ability to override the Knox's 2nd as a storytelling convention and establish a fact through completely irrational means.

It would seem thematically resonant for gold truths to represent faith. A statement in gold is taken as true simply because the user insists upon it on an emotional level. That being said, the nature of the gold truth has to tie into the rules of the game somehow. Then, perhaps the ability to use the gold truth comes down to understanding not just the mysteries, but the themes of the narrative and the hearts of its characters, to the point where you can reject a proposition, not on any factual basis, but simply because it being true would completely miss the point of the story. Kinzo is dead because him being dead is a basic premise of the narrative. The conflict between the siblings, and the servants' shady manoeuvring, don't make sense in a story where Kinzo is still alive to fill the power vacuum. Hence, even without the red, we can declare him dead.

I have a feeling that if you're willing to stretch the red truths as far as I have already, then you could probably turn anyone you want into the culprit. I bet you could even make Battler the killer, if you suggest that he's an imposter the entire time so any statement about Battler not being the culprit doesn't actually apply to him. Still, if the culprit turned out to be Jessica or Nanjo or something, then Umineko would probably be a pretty awful story, since the ending wouldn't be properly supported by anything that came before it. In this sense, red truths are by no means the be-all and end-all of reasoning.

Did my earlier claims in this blog that Maria can't be the culprit, because she's fundamentally an honest person who tries to share what makes her happy, even when it constantly results in her getting hurt; or that Kinzo is certainly dead, because that's the kind of trick an author like Ryukishi would pull given the framework he chose to tell the story through, constitute gold truths in their own way? Probably not, since I certainly didn't understand much about what the story was going for back then, but perhaps it's a similar sort of thing.

Ryukishi opens the Answer arcs by using the structure of Beatrice's game to present a parody of the murder mystery genre, presumably with the intent of highlighting how his own story differs from it. Erika is not only the best character in the story, but also pulling this double duty of both reimagining the detective character as an antagonist and chastising readers who engage with Umineko incorrectly.

Erika maintains the tradition of the detective as an outsider, but her investigations are framed as voyeuristic and bad-faith. I wondered if her story about Natsuhi's motives was meant to be some kind of commentary on female culprits in golden age detective fiction, but I don't have the background in the genre to know what the tropes are. As far as the fan commentary goes, we obviously have the quote where she misses the solution completely because she only pays attention to red truths. I also found it funny the way Ryukishi tries to make you hate her by deliberately painting her as a self-insert Mary Sue: she's super smart and everyone likes her and she's insane in the exact way that would be useful if you're in a detective story so I'm technically not metagaming and she's also a forensics expert too.

What it is that makes Lambdadelta's game a game without love? Probably the fact that Battler became an accomplice. The whole point of the murders is to show them to him, so it doesn't make any sense to have him in on it. It's interesting that this apparently isn't a rule break. I've been thinking that the way Sayo is so willing to butcher even those she genuinely cares for might be a function of the story-within-a-story gimmick. Sayo generally tries to keep everyone in-character, but because she has to play the culprit, she's able to write her own character as doing whatever the plot demands, even if it's not something she'd go through with easily in real life. It would fit the description of the fifth game being something she could have written, but would not have chosen to normally.

Episode 5 plays around with the boundaries between the real world and the meta world so much that it can be difficult to reconstruct what's actually happening on the gameboard. We never actually see Erika's perspective a single time in her own story. What is actually happening in her head when she declares her Detective's Authority to Battler and it actually works? Who is the Bernkastel Erika mentions on the gameboard. Does she conveniently have a delusion of the witch that created her?

My theory on what Erika's Authority actually means in-universe is that everyone is letting her play detective because having a neutral 3rd party accuse Natsuhi carries more weight than one of the siblings doing it. It became clear during Hideyoshi's death scene that the murders were being faked, although I'm not sure to what extent Sayo is involved. She probably killed the fake victims at the end of the story.

I wonder if the scene of the letter arriving is meant to represent Sayo disclosing her identity to everyone. I'm assuming Sayo is the baby from 19 years ago, if that baby isn't a total mislead, and disclosing this fact might be enough to get Battler on-board with a plan to pressure Natsuhi into a confession. The adults, I assume, just want to wrestle control away from Krauss. They probably even kidnapped him from his bed. In that case, what was the window thing about? Battler could have said nothing and Natsuhi would be in a lot of hot water. Is he conflicted on the plan?

Of course, the baby from 19 years ago being real would present a pretty major plot hole, in that it would imply that Natsuhi did something wrong, which I've been reliably informed is not possible.

Gohda and Kumasawa

Gohda and Kumasawa were seen through the window of the storehouse, apparently hanged. The only key to the room was on Gohda's person, and the storehouse was locked by Battler. When Battler returned, he realised that the ropes allowed their feet to touch the ground, and they had now been shot in the head. The key in Gohda's pocket is still there, and it's noted to be labelled.

Spinning the chessboard around, the most obvious reason to do this is to obscure when they actually died. Gohda and Kumasawa being servants makes them suspect, especially since they're telling crazy stories about magical murders, so I think they would comply with setting up a fake crime scene, and even with letting the culprit in later, leading to them getting double-crossed. It seems a little odd that the culprit would bother with this. It's not like they normally have issues with killing their accomplices. Maybe they were too busy with the test this time? The profiles also state that Gohda tied the rope around his own neck. Of course, the profiles don't have to be reliable, but why even make up that detail instead of writing nothing?

My answer is that Gohda and Kumasawa tied the ropes around their necks to give the illusion of being hanged, and then later they let the culprit into the room by passing the key through the window. The culprit then double crossed them, shooting them both in the head. The storehouse key was switched with a different key, and their labels were swapped, explaining how the key can be locked inside the storehouse.

The Show

The Rokkenjima killings usually have a theatrical element to them. The culprit is very much engineering a horror movie scenario. This time, with Battler not leaving the guesthouse, the culprit was free to invent whatever series of events they wanted, through phone calls. This makes it difficult to work out what happened from physical evidence. The best we've got is a red truth stating that Kanon died first out of Kyrie's group, and was the 9th victim overall. This actually gets us pretty far, since Battler and Maria died very late, and we're assuming that Gohda and Kumasawa died late by chessboard thinking. There are then only 8 people left to die before Kanon: George, Jessica and the 6 sacrifices. This does not necessarily mean that they died in the order,or at the time, that we're assuming. Ronove is a fantastical version of Genji, in the same way that Virgilia is Kumasawa (does this mean that Gaap is Nanjo by process of elimination? Nanjo's backstory is going to go crazy in Episode 6), and yet Genji supposedly died before he could meet Jessica.

It really seems like it was all a con. I could believe that maybe Jessica and George's tests at least happened in some form, but the rest would be fiction. The question then becomes how the culprit secures everyone's co-operation. I think the main mechanisms available are bribery (which fits some of the people involved in the con but not all of them), the culprit's unknown means of killing Battler from beyond the grave (this would work, but I have no idea how they could have the means to kill anyone from anywhere. Everyone got poisoned during dinner and they have the antidote? Tiny bombs? A really big bomb?) , or trickery (not everyone understands that they're participating in a mass murder? Seems like you'd have some sense of danger, but if Jessica walks to the mansion and sees that everyone is still alive maybe you could convince her to play along and nobody gets hurt?). George's corpse is the only reason we know that murders were actually going on at some point. Otherwise, I might posit that Beatrice just Hotline Miami's the entire mansion while Battler is grabbing the keys from the Chapel.

The Test

The test works as a way to lure the kids outside, but by now we should know that the culprit isn't some rational actor whose sole motivations are getting everyone killed. Besides, they already had hostages, so it's not like they needed any other reason for the kids to do what they were told. There's surely some other personal reason why it was done.

Battler's test is fairly straightforward: the point is to make him remember his sin. The blanked out name implies that he wronged the killer in some way. The thing that finally makes Beatrice give up is realising that Battler genuinely has no idea what she's talking about. Under the Sayo culprit theory, this is probably the "white horse" thing. In that case, giving the other kids a similar test might relate to their own failings in their relationships with her? That could contradict the red truth about the murders only happening because of Battler, though. Maybe whatever she's mad at them over wasn't as big a deal, but Sayo still wasn't satisfied with their answers.

Lock It In

At the end of the Question Arcs, I will take this opportunity to state my best guess at the truth of the mystery.

All events preceding the family conference happen the same exact way, in all episodes. These events are outside the typhoon which cut Rokkenjima off from the outside world, and so they are not subject to the witches' meddling.

Kinzo somehow obtains a large sum of gold from Beatrice I, and when his pursuit of her fails, he imprisons her on Rokkenjima, eventually fathering Beatrice II. Beatrice I commits suicide and Beatrice II is groomed into her replacement, culminating in the birth of another child, Beatrice III. Beatrice II died from falling off of a cliff, as witnessed by Rosa.

Beatrice III is Sayo. She was secretly raised in Kuwadorian, without Kinzo's knowledge, by the servants, and potentially seen to be Nanjo for her medical needs.

Sayo grew up hearing Kumasawa's stories, and magic is a big part of her worldview.

When Sayo is old enough, she becomes the servant Shannon, and the servants trick Kinzo into thinking she's from Fukuin house. It's the best they can do for her since they can't exactly hand her over to her family. This kind of secrecy from a young age might have had quite a strange effect on the way she thinks. Maybe Shannon is even something like an imaginary friend who she acts out.

Sayo does not take well to life as a servant. Since she doesn't actually have much training, she's unusually bad at her job and faces harsh criticism from the family.

During this time, she gets along well with Battler, whenever he shows up to the family conferences. Shortly before becoming estranged from the family, Battler makes his childish promise to take Sayo away from the island, and she resolves to wait.

Kinzo dies before the conference, and Krauss and Natsuhi conspire to pretend he's still alive. The servants go along with it on the surface, but they also take the opportunity to inform Sayo of her personal history, if she didn't know already, and Sayo is considered the real head of the family from then on.

Around this time, Sayo first comes up with the idea for the game around the solving of the Epitaph, and invents the Kanon character as part of the scenario. When Sayo isn't scheduled to work as Shannon, she shows up as Kanon instead. If they're scheduled at the same time, her confidants work to ensure her identity remains hidden. She also may have started writing the message bottles around this time.

Sayo secretly meets with Maria during the family conferences and plays with her in her witch guise, teaching her about magic.

Sayo finally starts the game for real when Battler shows up on the island.

The magic circles are from Kinzo's books, and were chosen so that Maria could recognise them.

Episode 1:

Sayo approaches Eva and Hideyoshi and bribes them into becoming accomplices.

Krauss, Kyrie, Rudolph, Rosa and Gohda are shot dead. Their faces are mutilated to hide that they were shot in the head. There was never a 6th body. This was a lie maintained by Kanon and Hideyoshi's false testimony.

Eva knew about Kinzo already being dead because Sayo told her. She does the receipt thing to mess with Natsuhi by calling her out on her lies, and because she's iconic like that. Afterward, she and Hideyoshi head to their room to await further instructions.

Sayo is let into Hideyoshi and Eva's room, then kills them both and inserts stakes into the bodies. The chain is then cut to create the illusion that the door was locked when the servants first found it.

Kanon runs to the Boiler Room, makes up his chest to fake stab wounds, and then drops a stake next to him. The door leading out into the courtyard is left ajar, making it seem as though the killer fled through there.

The letter in the study was placed by a servant, to create an excuse for them to leave the room.

Sayo kills the servants in the parlour and locks the door.

Natsuhi is shot, and then her gun is switched with her killer's, so it looks like she fired.

Episode 2:

Rosa is an accomplice, and is convinced to kill by leveraging her desperation for money and her grudge against her siblings.

The 6 are killed, probably by either being shot in the chest or poisoned, and then the Halloween display is created.

The Chapel locked room is solved by assuming the accomplices are lying about the Chapel being locked in the first place. All of the red truths about how the Chapel could be entered are simply irrelevant. Red herrings, even.

Kanon murders Jessica and then locks the door. The fact that Jessica had his master key doesn't matter, since Kanon has Shannon's key as well.

Gohda and Genji lie about Kumasawa and Nanjo being killed by a Kanon lookalike. This is why they aren't in the servant room. Later on, Sayo actually kills them and leaves the bodies in the courtyard.

Sayo kills Gohda and George, but it seems that Shannon's feelings for George bled through a bit too much (or maybe she's just that dedicated to the bit), and locks the door from the inside with Natsuhi's key before committing suicide.

Rosa stops Battle from investigating the crime scene too thoroughly, which stops him from finding the murder weapon.

The letter in the parlour was placed by Rosa.

With the mastermind dead, and perhaps feeling disturbed by the suicide, Genji decides he might as well go tell Battler what's going on before he dies.

Episode 3:

The locked room chain was designed in such a way that Shannon will always be found first, and Kanon last.

Nanjo lies about Shannon being dead, then Sayo opens the door with her master key, changes into Kanon, and gets ready in the chapel.

Eva killed Rosa and Maria.

Eva ambushes Kyrie and Rudolph to kill them once they figure out she's the culprit. Kyrie or Rudolph may have shot Hideyoshi during the fight. Alternatively, Eva could have killed him when he rebelled against her.

George tries to find Shannon's body and is killed by Sayo. He may have been lured out of the guesthouse by her in the first place. The window was probably locked by Nanjo.

The numbers written outside the room are the PIN for one of the deposit boxes that Sayo set up. The PIN is Battler's birthday and her own.

Rudolph and Natsuhi are killed by Eva.

Nanjo is shot by Sayo, and Eva kills Battler.

It is unclear who murders Jessica. There's even a remote possibility that Sayo takes Jessica off of the island with her somehow and she survives, although it hardly seems likely.

And of course I just got done talking about the Episode 4 murders.

I'm not entirely convinced by Sayo's motivations at all points here. I think she's the best culprit thematically, though, and when you view the story through the lens that she's the killer then a lot about how the murders are set up seems to line up conveniently for her. The first twilights in Episodes 1 and 3 are both set up with her distinguished in some way (either she's the only one we don't see, or the bodies are arranged so that she's guarenteed to be the first found). I also find it hard to imagine Battler's sin being anything else that was foreshadowed. I think I'm probably not understanding her reasons that well.

Finally, Episode 4 is done. I think the updates to this blog will remain slow for the next week or two, and then they'll probably speed up again, although not as fast as before.

While we're here, I'll drop this character tier list since it probably doesn't deserve it's own post. I will not elaborate on my opinions here. If you want to know why I placed someone somewhere, please direct your hate comments about my GOATda slander to the comments.

The aspect of the killings that remains ever-illusive is the motive. Episode 1 was such a barrage of confusing happenings that anyone who reads it will naturally be thinking, "What on Earth just happened?" You can tell that Umineko wants you to engage with it this way because of how it writes Battler. His emotions and growth generally reflect that of the reader themselves, although, naturally, he's pretty slow on the uptake so that we have a chance to think about it ourselves. However, once you get far enough in, you realise that just constructing a series of events that could have happened isn't good enough to "solve" the story. If your explanation requires people to act against their nature inexplicably, or you don't really have an explanation for why someone did something beyond the fact that they must have for the set-up to make sense, then your explanation won't be satisfying.

In Episode 4, this is keenly felt. The murders are mostly trivial to explain away since we have so much freedom to construct a sequence of events. We don't even know if anyone besides George was dead by the time Battler left the guesthouse. However, the phone calls require everyone involved to be lying to Battler, including Krauss, Kyrie, and Jessica. Why did they do this? Under duress? If they knew they were getting killed anyway, I could see Krauss going along with it just to keep his daughter alive. Kyrie has more mixed feelings toward Battler, but I could see it. Jessica feels really weird to me. No one is left to hold hostage for her if we take things at face value. I kind of feel like, even under duress, Jessica would fess up just to ruin the killer's plans at that point.

Episode 4 ends by highlighting the motive more keenly than ever. It was confirmed in red that the killings happen because of something Battler did 6 years ago, which he's failed to remember (sounds like the Sayo promise from Episode 3 might have been it after all. Otherwise, I can't think of anything that's been mentioned.)

What sort of person is "Beatrice"? We know that she secretly met with Maria and taught her about magic, and that she wrote those 2 (or more) message bottles which in some sense predicted the murders. Based on all of the talk about risk, it seems likely that she wrote a lot of these stories, and the two we've heard about explicitly are the ones that happened to make it to shore. Battler has that line about how he won't be able to understand the killer as long as he keeps thinking of them as just a greedy human. The initial letter always claims that solving the epitaph is somehow important, but in Episode 3 everyone and their mother was solving the epitaph and there was still someone besides Eva killing people. She seems to genuinely want people to solve her murder mysteries, considering she ended the first one by telling the reader to find the truth.

I wonder to what extent the fantasy Beatrice is accurate to what the real "Beatrice" is like. It seems like Ange's character arc is probably meant to answer this, given it ends with her committing her own murder spree with "magic".

Here's a crazy theory. I've been thinking a lot about Kanon. He doesn't make a whole lot of sense, does he? Dying and coming back, always vital to the killer's plots, but he doesn't get nearly the backstory that Sayo does. Plus, the fourth wall break with Shannon and Kanon sort of implies that the two of them are fictional characters on the same level as the demons. The end of Episode 4 is pretty clearly telling me that I should be thinking about Kanon, seeing as his body went missing again. It's hard to imagine that Kanon was on-board with a plan where Shannon commits suicide, and then, what, he just wanders off into the woods and does it too? Or Shannon kills him and hides the body so he won't mess up her scene? It's weird.

Back in chapter 1, I called Kinzo being dead by thinking about the set-up of the whole story being written by the killer, and considering what kind of twists such a framing would be designed to support. An obvious idea was that it would allow the author to mislead the reader with a character who doesn't really exist, but there was also a possibility I briefly thought of, but dismissed, when I was thinking about EVA's red truths at the end of Episode 3: the checkmate wouldn't work if two characters were the same person.

What really got me going down this rabbit hole was Beatrice's "at most 17 people were on Rokkenjima" Red Truth. It's possible that it's a double bluff and I'd kind of love if Ryukishi just made fun of me for assuming that there'd turn out to be 16, but it seems like I'm supposed to at least think about it. Kanon's the obvious suspect for a trick like this, since he's the only one Battler has never met previously, but Battler has seen everyone but Kinzo at least once, so there can't be another completely fake person. The only thing left is to cross-reference everyone and see if there are pairs of people Battler has never seen simultaneously.

It took a while, but after going back over the openings of the first 4 episodes, it seems that Shannon and Kanon are never once seen in the same place at the same time, except in third person scenes where they're surrounded by accomplices. Circumstantially, Beatrice says 5 people can be spared by the game, so it's odd that there are supposedly 6 survivors of Episode 1, two of whom are Kanon and Shannon. There's some weirdness regarding how Kanon keeps getting described as hard to notice. In the chapel scene in Episode 2, Shannon just kind of vanishes in-between the bodies being discovered and Battler showing up. We're told she's helping Kinzo write his will, which pretty clearly wasn't true at this point. In the Episode 3 locked room chain, the rooms are set up so that Shannon's has to be entered first, and Kanon's last, so Shannon could, in theory, just move while everyone is upstairs. She has a master key, after all.

It definitely seems like the sort of twist this game would do. The biggest problem is that it would require George and Jessica to be the stupidest people alive, which actually isn't that big a problem, honestly.

Ange's storyline didn't go in the direction I expected. I had thought that, as an observer from the future, her perspective might pin down Beatrice, in the sense that any evidence she finds regarding the case forces Beatrice to tell the story in a way consistent with that evidence. Instead, her perspective explains a lot more about how magic works, culminating in her performing her own mass murder with the Stakes (or rather, Amakusa's gun). I get what they were going for with this storyline, but they just took too many scenes to do it, and while I like magic conceptually in this story, the actual moment-to-moment experience of reading the sisters' interactions is a little painful.

On the other hand, I was really surprised by how much I liked Maria's backstory scenes. Reading it really brought back memories, which might sound a little concerning, but that's not how I mean it. As someone who also had stuffed animals for a bit longer than perhaps age-appropriate, and had a tendency to disappear into my own head in response to negative emotions, to the point of being something of a loner, I was able to feel Maria's magic, instead of just thinking about what it meant. I think I would have found Sakutarou pretty annoying if not for understanding so deeply what he is. It's great characterisation for Maria to watch how she shapes his personality into the person she needs: he argues for the naive perspective so that Maria can maintain her faith in her mother, and takes all of Maria's anxieties about the world around her so she can be brave by inserting herself into the mature adult role. How is she already a better mother than Rosa is?

The conflict between Maria and Ange's perspectives sometimes reads a bit uncomfortably, perhaps because I align more with how Ange sees things. It felt like the story maybe leaned a bit too hard on Maria's side, despite the fact that it's pretty hard to take her side without making excuses for her abuse. I imagine this is because Ryukishi understood that readers would be more aligned with Ange, and he needed to get across that she does have something to learn from Maria's perspective, instead of rejecting it while pitying her.

That being said, the payoff when their perspectives finally reach synthesis is fantastic. Ange understands Maria as someone who, as if by a miracle, found some way to turn her pain into something positive that she could share to make others happy, and in turn was despised by everyone until she gave in and used that coping mechanism more spitefully. Every scene with Maria reads so differently after properly understanding her perspective: the evil laugh as she imagines the people hurting her dying, and the way their continued denial of Beatrice must have felt to her. It's cathartic to see Ange redeem her, or perhaps put her to rest, through the resurrection of Sakutarou. It's a clever way to reflect the "turning a negative into a positive" motif: the fact that Rosa lied about Sakutarou being handmade is the same thing that allows him to come back to life.

As far as the actual game goes, it's the most interesting we've gotten since Episode 1. I'm still curious about if 3 and 4 are also written by the Rokkenjima killer, but in any case I'm glad to see how inventive we can get with the format now; having Battler confined to a single room for the entire incident and unable to learn any information beyond a series of phone calls that only tell him what Beatrice wants him to believe, feels appropriately climactic for the end of the Question Arcs.

It also sets up the ending, which made me more tense than I've felt since 1. It's so eerie to watch Battler's weird as hell "test," followed by him wandering around for an entire day trying to find out what happened. It's got that paranoia-inducing quality of implying there's some greater truth about these events that's staring us in the face. This might be the first time we've seen the killer's real personality, and after all of that they gave up halfway through the conversation and presumably killed themselves right after. At least Battler finally bothered to investigate any of the crime scenes.