#meta world

First of all no, Beatrice wasn’t based on Kinzo’s child.

She was based on the legend of the Akujikijima, and how Kinzo claimed he received the gold by a witch named Beatrice (who was no one else but Beatrice Castiglioni), whom he also claimed was the witch of Rokkenjima and his alchemy advisor.

More in specific the Beatrice Battler is interacting is the soul of that Beatrice after she died, her soul was forced into an homuncolous which also died leaving her soul free again.

The Golden Witch Beatrice is fundamentally a fictional creature, a fantasy, an alias. She doesn’t exist in the real world.

But I get you two are actually thinking at Beatrice = Yasuda Sayo, who was the daughter of Kuwadorian Beatrice (aunt of Battler and daughter of Kinzo) and Ushiromiya Kinzo (grandfather of Battler).

So let’s clear up some things.

In Umineko we see the Battler and Beatrice interacting when they’re in the Purgatory. Not only they’re reduced to souls, but the bodies they have are... I don’t even know how to define them, they’re just a shape that contains their soul, a shape that can go destroyed and rebuilt at will and that can take any form it pleases them, even a storm of butterflies.

In this setting is genuinely possible what we call Beatrice’s body, which isn’t definitely the same as Sayo’s (as it could develop on its own secondary female sexual traits and, very likely, was created with primary female sexual traits, things Sayo’s body didn’t have), doesn’t even share a single drop of blood, a single gene with Ushiromiya Kinzo.

I’ve said I’ve lost count of many times that in the meta world, rules that matter in the real world doesn’t work.

Lambda and Bern can litterally tear each other apart and then sew themselves back together and it’s cosindered perfectly okay. Here it would be murder.

We don’t have an useful handbook on how the meta work... but I get the feeling it would be capable to easily erase the incest business with ease.

Of course Ryukishi didn’t really bother to develop this issue so if you want to insist that, it doesn’t matter if the body isn’t genetically related anymore, since the soul in life was, it’s still incest, it’s up to you.

Now, what will be good to wonder is:

would Battler/SAYO be incest in the REAL WORLD?

Rules according to what constitute an unacceptable degrees of consanguinity vary from country to country and from time period to time period. Some countries are stricter, some are laxer.

I’ve no idea in which country you are and therefore what your country decided was an unacceptable degrees of consanguinity and honestly, I’m not going to force a country’s standard on all the world, not even my country’sso, sorry, but the only thing I’m going to consider in this is Sayo’s country and time.

Umineko helps us in this which is why I tend to remark the importance of reading the manga.

What’s a 3rd degree blood relative?

A first-degree relative is defined as a close blood relative which includes the individual's parents, full siblings, or children.

A second-degree relative is defined as a blood relative which includes the individual's grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces or half-siblings.

A third-degree relative is defined as a blood relative which includes the individual’s first-cousins, great-grandparents or great grandchildren.

Long story short Sayo is at the same time Battler’s second-degree relative (since she’s Kinzo’s child she’s his aunt) and a third-degree relative (since she’s the daughter of Kinzo’s child she’s also his cousin).

In both cases she’s not allowed to MARRY him or to have sex with him as you commit incest when you do one of the above. Just loving him platonically doesn’t constitute incest so, as long as they stop at loving each other and never try to get further, no, they aren’t committing incest.

Maybe they would be committing incest if they were in your country, I don’t know, but that’s up for you to know. You’re responsible for knowing your country’s laws and respecting them. Battler and Sayo are responsible for knowing their country’s law and respecting those.

Is this ‘disturbing’?

What is disturbing can vary from person to person and no one should force it on others but just respect how others feelings in this regard.

If for you it’s disturbing then for you it’s disturbing. You don’t need me to agree or disagree for your feelings in this topic to be valid. They are your own so I can’t really help you here.

First the ‘easy’ part as this is, more or less, clearer in Umineko.

Let’s start with:

Prime: Prime is the supposed ‘real’ world. Why the supposed ‘real’ world and not just ‘the real world’? Prime is the ‘real’ world for MetaBattler, MetaBeatrice/MetaSayo and MetaAnge. As Umineko asks us to care for those characters the most, the world they come from is the world we focus on, and we discharge all the others as possibilities that didn’t happen. Note how Lion’s world isn’t in Prime. From MetaBattler, MetaBeatrice/MetaSayo and MetaAnge’s perspective, Lion’s world isn’t real, it’s not Prime. From MetaLion’s perspective though, the opposite is true, His world is the real one, Prime, and MetaBattler, MetaBeatrice/MetaSayo and MetaAnge’s world is just a possibility.

Lion’s World: Lion’s world is the world in which Natsuhi didn’t reject Lion. It’s in a catbox that’s bigger than Beatrice's catbox.

Purgatorio: It’s the land that hosts the wandering souls of Sayo, Battler and then Ange. It’s not quite our afterlife as it can be reached by souls whose body is still alive but that are temporally ‘wandering’ on the borders between life and death. The borders of this land of souls aren’t well defined but, it seems that, if you solve the issues that are tormenting your soul, you can either go back in the living world (if your body is still alive) or move to the next step, heaven/the golden land.

The Golden Land: The supposed heaven. It’s unclear if it’s on a higher level than the Purgatorio or if it is on the same level but, since you can reach it only after going through the Purgatorio I placed it above it. Note that in Umineko places that are the equivalent of heaven on Earth for some characters (for example Beatrice’s imaginary world or the room of gold) are also called Golden Land. It's the place where everything is possible, negative feelings are left behind and nobody is unhappy and also the place that Sayo wants to reach with Battler and all the others who died during those fateful day.

Beatrice’s catbox: Fundamentally it’s the name given to the whole amount of possibilities for what could have happened during the 4th and the 5th on Rokkenjima. It contains the real world as well as the gameboards, the forgeries, the messages in the bottles and… everything else that could have happened. It helps to remember that although the games we saw being played present similarities with the messages in the bottles and Tohya’s forgeries, they also present differences so THEY AREN’T THE SAME THING and similarities are COINCIDENTAL.

Bern’s larger than Beatrice’s catbox: The ‘borders’ of this catbox aren’t clearly defined but it’s easy to speculate that starts in 1967, with Natsuhi being handed Lion and ends in 1986, with the island exploding and creating the catbox. As a result this catbox contains Beatrice’s catbox.

Ange’s catbox: As Ange disappeared in 1996 her fate was trapped in a catbox, spawning various possibilities among which: the one in which Ange went to Rokkenjima without meeting ‘Hachijo Tohya’ and died there (Ep 4), the one in which Ange managed to meet a person claiming to be ‘Hachijo Tohya’ (Ep 6), the one in which Ange killed Amakusa and Kuwabata (trick ending) and the REAL one in which Ange became Yukari Kotobuki (magic ending).

Sea of fragments: Basically the whole amount of endless possibilities that likely contains ‘words’ like ‘Higurashi’ and ‘Rose guns days’ and so on (no, I'm not going to explain what are 'Higurashi' and 'Rose Guns Days', all I say is they're other works from Ryukishi and that, if I didn't add in the graphic all the other works from him, it's just for space reasons, as they probably would all fit in the 'sea of fragments').

The Meta World: This term started, like ‘Prime’, as a term used by the fandom only and was used as a name for the Purgatorio since in the Purgatorio the characters were discussing what was going in the tales (which are in the lower levels). However not just the Purgatorio is a Meta World as Featherine’s world is a Meta world as well. It had been later used in official sources as well as the name of the ‘world of the witches’, so it can be considered ‘official’.

Featherine’s world: so far the highest level known. Who is in it can control everything in regards to the beings of lower levels, making who resides in the purgatorio a mere piece compared to them.

This for what regards the universes. Now… the characters.

Prime characters: The so called ‘real’ characters, alive and kicking and residing in Prime.

Piece characters: While this term is occasionally used by someone to refer to a person or to a fantasy character he’s using, in the Umineko universe this also usually refers to the alternate versions of the Prime characters that appear in games, forgeries and messages in the bottles. They’re considered characters of a lower level compared to Prime characters as Prime characters can control them.

Fantasy characters: Characters that were made up by someone else, and that might or might not have a body (usually called ‘vessel’) but that fundamentally do not exist (the Chiesters, Gaap) or aren’t living beings (Sakutaro) or are imaginary versions of real people (Kinzo after he’s dead, the 7 sisters, Virgilia, Ronove)…

Meta characters: They’re souls. They might be souls of deceased people or souls that are temporally ‘wandering’ in the land of souls or PERSONIFICATIONS of various things (in Japan even objects can have souls...). They’re considered being of a upper level compared to the Prime characters. It helps to remember that the one we call MetaBeatrice is actually the soul of a deceased Sayo, that MetaBattler is the part of Battler’s soul that ‘died’ when he lost his memories, that MetaAnge is living Ange’s soul that’s wandering after she tossed herself off a building. Dlanor instead is the personification of the Knox’s Decalogue.

Now, if you thought I explained till now wasn’t easy… well, take a good breath and prepare yourself for a headache because we get to the REALLY difficult part or, to be more specific, to Lambda, Bern and Featherine.

Although they’re generally grouped with the Meta characters, Lambda, Bern and Featherine are actually of another league.

Lambda and Bern are WANDERING WITCHES, that can move through ‘words’ or, more likely, through the various purgatories of each world. The Purgatorio we see is the one for ‘Prime’, but if we consider Prime as merely a possibility in the sea of fragments, well, each possibility likely has its own Purgatorio and Bern and Lambda seem to be able to visit those Purgatorios and, from here, to look down at the fragment that generated it. It seems they come from a specific fragment (the Higurashi one) but are apparently ‘cut’ from it and now look at ALL the fragments as if they were gameboards, fantasy stories. Due to this they can take someone residing in that fragment and make it ‘their piece’, ‘their alterego’, controlling it. It is speculated that actually that someone is their own alternate version in that fragment but as everything is left VERY vague we can’t be sure.

Featherine is… on a level higher than Bern and Lambda, a level that’s even less explained. For being of that higher level the land of souls are the equivalent of gameboards. To interact with Featherine you’ve to either reach her higher level or she can send her own piece version of the land of soul level.

It is unclear from which fragment Featherine comes from, if from the Higurashi one as well (being somewhat an ‘evolution’ of Hai-Ryūn Ieasomūru Jeda or of Hanyu as the manga seems to hint) or from the Prime one (where she would be a combination of Tohya and Ikuko’s souls or, if you prefer, the soul of their writing duo) or from a fragment we hadn’t seen yet and, due to unknown circumstances, she managed to move to a level higher than the land of souls or if she’s something completely different.

The time in Prime works differently compared to the time in the other levels so it doesn’t matter if in Prime Ikuko and Tohya are alive and well, Featherine might have had birth when Ikuko and Tohya died, or split ways or decided to stop writing as Hachijo Tohya and be around taking advantage just of this, so we can’t even say if she’s the soul of a living or of a deceased or of a ‘personification’. Really, we know way too few about her to tell for sure from where she came from.

Despite those many question marks about her, there are some things we can say in her regard.

First of all Featherine isn’t the same person as Ikuko or Tohya. Ikuko or Tohya are Prime characters. Featherine is a character of a higher level with a version of herself also having access to the… let’s call it middle level. Featherine is likely a soul, Ikuko and Tohya are living people. While they’re somehow connected, Ikuko doesn’t transform into Featherine like Tsukino Usagi transforms into Sailor Moon.

So what about the times in which she seems to do it?

What we’re seeing are actually gameboards. It’s a little like when Battler in Ep 8 all of sudden wears his cape to face Ange and Ange grows up from her 6 years old self.

The Ikuko we see in Ep 6 and also in the first part of Ep 8, is just a piece, not the real person and is placed on a gameboard that lies in the Ange’s catbox. We know that in Prime Ikuko’s meeting with Ange went differently from the one we saw in Ep 6 or at the beginning of Ep 8, so those two meetings are just two possibilities, not the real thing.

Featherine clearly has control over Piece Ikuko… but we don’t know if she has control over Prime Ikuko. Meta Battler doesn’t control his Prime body anymore after all and, while Meta Ange remains in the Purgatory, her Prime body is unconscious. When she wakes up she seems to be able to bring back memories of her adventure in the land of the souls… but in the moment she wakes up Meta Ange leaves the land of the souls so this isn’t exactly helping us to understand how the connection between Featherine and Ikuko/Tohya works.

What now about the Featherine in the Land of souls? We see she can stop time and write off Lambda as being killed.

Very likely the Featherine who stops time is the one in the upper level. The one Lambda was fighting off is the Featherine in the ‘Land of the Souls’ world or middle level… in short the equivalent of a ‘Metapiece’ to the Featherine of a higher level.

So… is Featherine writing Umineko?

Well, actually Umineko is being written by Ryukishi and, unless we speculate that Featherine is his piece and self insertion, she’s just a character in the story… but I get what you want to ask, are we just reading a gameboard that Featherine is writing?

The Featherine in the Land of the soul level comments many times that she’s just RECORDING Ange’s story. In short yes, she’s writing it, but she’s not making it up, she’s just writing down what’s going on.

In short Ange is taking her own decisions and this is her story and Featherine is just writing a… ‘biography’, not a tale. So, back to Lambda, why could Featherine stop Lambda?

Even though this is Ange’s story, it’s possible that Featherine can embellish it as she sees fit. We can see the fight between Featherine and Lambda as a metaphor. Featherine represents Ange’s story that must go on. Lambda can’t stop the story from continuing, hence she certainly dies because the story must certainly continue toward its resolution. We know that Featherine is just a ‘spectator’ in a sense, as she doesn’t plan to stop Ange from doing this or that, she just watches and records. She will watch and record as Ange will come to her inevitable face off with Bern, or better with the truth that A MIRACLE CAN’T HAPPEN and that her family won’t come back to her.

So in Ep 8 Featherine is likely only transcribing what’s going on. Ange remains her own person with her own freedom of choice and is not Featherine’s piece and therefore moved by her. Featherine can, at best, influence her, but, ultimately, it’s up to Ange to decide.

If Ange were a mere puppet in Featherine’s hands the story of her struggles would have no purpose. She wouldn’t be struggling because she’s still finding inside herself the strength to fight against a sad fate but just because ‘the writer wants her to do so’. Even though we, as readers, know that Ange is a character, as long as Ange is a real person in the Umineko world and in control of her own life, we can see her as a person and take her as a model. If she’s just a puppet without will… the theme of the story would fall apart. If the purpose of the story was that Ange is a puppet that fights and win because Featherine says so, we wouldn’t empathize with her.

Ange needs to be like us. On her own, fighting the only way she knows how and writing, with her own actions, her own story.

At least... this is my interpretation of the chaotic universe that is Umineko. As the canon is REALLY unclear on many things I’m not afraid to admit I might have made mistakes in understanding how it works.

As the canon doesn’t really gives us many info, many things remains unexplained and we can only speculate on them.

I’ve seen theories of all sorts to explain Featherine and her ties with Higurashi (same goes with Bern and Lambda) but as long as Ryukishi doesn’t give us confirmation... we’re all making speculations and everyone is free to choose the theory they prefer.

I’m sorry for who’s confuse as I have no idea how to explain things better and I’m not even 100% sure my explanation is 100% right.

I tried my best but I’m just me and so this was all I was capable to do.

Please, don’t stop to just my explanation but keep on reading Umineko and trying to figure things on your own.

I don’t really know if the fact he’s fine is merely something that requires our suspension of disbelief (as he actually would have no reason to be fine but less gloss over this for the sake of the story) or it’s something tied in the way Japanese people represent the "land of souls” (as in Japanese media part of the souls ending up there are presented as unaware of being there but ‘all right’ with how odd the place is). or it’s just a hint for us.