26 y/o, INFJ, 459. This is primarily an Umineko textpost blog and place to cry about Yasu. I also talk a lot about The House in Fata Morgana lately. Enjoy your stay!
(1/2) I re-read Umineko Chiru and felt like Maria was moved to a side-character after EP4. It felt like the Maria in EP4 was the real Maria and her happiness amounts to, "she truly left not just the Golden Land, but the entirety of the gameboard as well". Sure, she's still an existing human/piece, but I felt that specific Maria truly left to be happy in a "Fantasy"-like manner. All that's left of Maria is the piece/human Maria who plays her role in the gameboard and died in that island.
(2/2) Sure there's EP6 with Erika and EP7 with Will, but those refer to the Maria as an already established piece with little to no experience as to what ultimately happened to Maria in EP4. Erika can trample on Maria's truths all she wants, but regardless of the red and blue thrown, it ultimately doesn't affect Maria in meta who left the gameboard. Erika in that battle is similar to a person trying to kick a graveyard. It's painfully disrespectful, but also ultimately missed the point.
i also noticed maria got really sidelined in chiru! and it always makes me pretty sad since i felt like she was really important to the point of being sort of an honorary third protagonist alongside battler and beato in the question arcs, and her relationships to beato/yasuda and to ange could both have warranted quite a bit more emphasis in the latter half given the places where chiru goes imo
i think you can definitely think of ep4 as a sort of emotional resolution to mariaâs arc though, itâs true! obviously everything about the meta is sort of more metaphorical/intuitive than concrete but it i think it is an accurate observation that the piece maria seems to play more of an incidental role from that point
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Hello, I would like to ask you a seemingly random FataMoru question. Who do you think is the most terrifying in the whole series so far? My personal pick is Giselle/the Maid in the short story "II. Pain". Michel reveals a hole in Morgana's PoV, with her hatred into something constructive for the three men in the original game. However, Pain is Giselle using that hole to seal everyone (or at least Morgana) in an irreversible emptiness that would have extinguishes everyone involved in that house.
oh i never actually got around to reading the ps4 short stories i feel like a fake fatamoru fan lol
i think michelâs mother struck a pretty horrifying spot to me, the juxtaposition of her total and utter rejection and disgust towards his true self in the end contrasted with him just uncomprehendingly repeating how much he loved her and drew comfort from her was incredibly sad, and i could totally buy that being the breaking point as far as michelâs soul finally shattering altogether
i also find the maid pretty frightening in some of the alternate endings where she sort of shows that ice-cold willingness to reject michelâs truth and force him to live in her story whether he wants it or not - part of my disappointment with the resolution their relationship is that i never quite felt like we really felt the weight of how horrifying that attitude would have been from michelâs perspective and with his particular hangups i think
morgana/WHG also scares me a lot in the ending where she expresses that desire to sort of merge with michel and erase him completely, that sense of needing someone so much that you try to completely subsume them into you sort of always hits a particular spot as being one of the most frightening human capacities to me, probably because i can sort of recognise it in myself in some ways
(geez i guess all of these are about people victimizing michel i guess i am just very protective of him huh)
idk i donât have a strong opinion on this question but these are vague possible answers that spring to mind i guess!
Just re-read EP2 with the Beatrice vs Shannon scene and the aftermath of it. It was saddening, but I wonder how it was from Maria's perspective. With the room so bloody and messy that it wasn't anything ritual-like, and perhaps, she might even subconsciously recognize her friend Yasu dying in that room. How would she communicate with the stakes there? Sure, Maria acts "creepy", but for many reasons I feel for her whenever she's subjected to look at dead people just because.
that part of ep2 makes me really sad because i think maria sort of takes it on herself to be very supportive and reassuring to battler in that situation, and to tell him that everythingâs going to be ok and that beatrice will revive everyone in the golden land - i think mariaâs way of coping and reassuring herself in that situation is sort of to be able to position her as an authority to someone who she sees as more vulnerable and confused and less âin the knowâ about beatrice and magic than her, to sort of distract from her own doubts and fears about the reality of what might really be happening, which was sort of the function sakutaro played for her as an imaginary friend as well? i think maria draws a lot of strength from feeling in that position of someone else emotionally depending on her, like with her framing herself as ârosaâs only allyâ and as the only person who can really understand beato, and it kind of breaks my heart
Hello! I would like to ask you an EP7 related question since I'm reading the manga: What do you think happens to Beatrice Castiglioni after Kinzo took here away. Will, Lion and Nanjo's convo mentioned that she was taken to Odawara to be hidden away in one of the Ushiromiya family's unused homes, and from the manga, she does not look happy at all about it. Nanjo mentioned that she lived happily with Kinzo at the Villa, but might it be possible that something went wrong during her days in Odawara?
i think biceâs perspective is one of those things that really is more or less completely in the catbox at this point and thatâs very sad - all we really know about her comes from kinzo and people who are very personally invested in him and biased toward his narrative so we canât honestly say how she felt about things in the end. itâs entirely possible she wasnât as happy with the situation of being kinzoâs hidden mistress as nanjo et al would portray it but she really doesnât have a voice to tell us either way. yasuda certainly took the initiative to portray her as an unwilling captive of kinzoâs by the end but thatâs wrapped up enough in her fantasy narrative of all the beatrices being the same person that it would seem to reflect her own feelings on kinzo and his fucked up legacy and her place in it more than anything i think
Legend and Turn of the Golden Witch are written by BEATRICE (ushiromiya lion), Banquet and Alliance of the Golden Witch are written by Hachijo Touya (Ushiromiya Battler), End and Dawn of the Golden Witch are written by Hachijo Ikuko (FEATHERINE AUGUSTUS AURORA), but i don't know if there's any evidence anywhere of who wrote Requiem or Twilight of the Golden Witch?
wait i just had a thought, what if requiem and twilight are actually written by Kotobuki Yukari/Ushiromiya Ange, she IS an author by the end.
requiem and twilight arenât ever established to exist as stories in-universe and thereâs probably not much reason for them to? since requiem was sort of about the core truth of yasudaâs heart that tohya and ikuko were deliberately choosing not to explicitly reveal to people, and twilight is more about angeâs personal journey, so there wouldnât be any particular reason for them to be released to the public as message bottle stories. i guess you could headcanon yukari writing them as a sort of private personal project that was never released publicly if you wanted to? (though the idea of ange taking it on herself to write intimately about yasudaâs heart through something like requiem kind of weirds me out tbh stay in your own lane ange geez)
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normalise refusing to call the culprit in umineko by their hated name "Yasu". normalise refusing to call them "Sayo" and ignoring the significance of their other selves, Yoshiya and Beatrice (or Lion, if we assume she accepted Kinzou's intended name). normalise addressing each persona/self of the culprit by their respective name when they undertook a given task. hell, normalise just calling the culprit "beatrice" since their identity as the culprit IS beatrice regardless of their other names?
given the commentary Ciconia Ep1 has on multiple selves/dissociative disorders, i feel like it's especially topical now to discuss why referring to the culprit by a hated name or a name which does not describe their role in a given situation would be insensitive and hurtful towards that person. of course, we can always say they're fictional so it doesn't matter, but as long as we are discussing the bounds of said fiction, if we aren't to be gut ripper goats, we should respect the culprit's heart
i definitely understand peopleâs reservations about it, but i think the name âyasuâ originally caught on as sort of a matter of associations - as a way to refer to the âperson behindâ shannon, kanon, beatrice, etc, the first time we really hear the unfiltered voice of that person is in ep7 and the name we immediately see them called by is âyasuâ, so it just sort of stuck? especially since i seem to recall ryukishi sort of set the tone of calling her by that name in the immediate post-credits interviews and such (idk if he still does that or not). i tend to prefer it because it immediately brings to mind the voice and profile of that bright and creative and thoughtful kid we see in the ep7 flashbacks, which i see as sort of the essential core of the character, compared to something like âsayoâ which immediately just makes me picture the shannon persona and associates with the manga confession, which i am not a fan of - similarly something like âbeatriceâ would evoke the beato character which is also sort of important to differentiate from yasu as the person behind her, to me
iâm far from an expert on this subject but i think itâs important to differentiate between full-fledged dissociative disorder and the sort of very conscious, self-aware persona-crafting and role-playing that yasu engages in - the case in ciconia seems pretty different as that seems to be something much closer to actual DID/multiple personalities so iâm not sure itâs really comparable, whereas umineko feels like it stresses very much that there is a single person behind shannon, kanon and beatrice who desperately wanted to be seen and understood for herself, in the same way that the game sort of cautions against seeing mariaâs âwitch personalityâ as separate from her, or compartmentalizing rosa into the âgood motherâ and the âbad witchâ - resolving those kinds of seemingly disparate aspects of a person into a coherent picture of a single individual seems pretty core to umineko as a project, so itâs important to be able to have a name to differentiate that core âperson behind the charactersâ from the individual crafted personas themselves, if that makes sense
i do definitely get why people feel uncomfortable calling the character by a nickname she explicitly says she hates in text, and itâs unfortunate that the fandom trend turned out that way - i think in some ways it would make sense to use something like âyasudaâ over âyasuâ to avoid that connotation and if i actively engaged in fandom more outside my immediate friend circles iâd probably be making more of an effort to try to do that, so i donât really disagree with you and admittedly me calling her that is more just from ten years of habitual reflex at this point than anything for me; i apologise if anyone has taken offense to it
I have a bit of a longer question to ask you, but the Tumblr ask question won't allow me to, is there any other way to contact you?
hmm well you can send me an ask with your discord tag or some other means of contacting you, and i can get in touch? i prefer not to post contact details publicly but that should work
(donât use an email address though iirc tumblr tends to flag those as spam)
i have screen headaches and am trying to limit my internet time in general right now, so i canât promise a particularly prompt response, but i will do my best to get around to it when i can if itâs important to you!
Hello, it's the anon that asked you on the most recent times. I am not sure about your response that the ask had been deleted might come from me, but after visiting your blog and saw that you deleted an ask (times are tough and I have difficulty getting online), I feel like I have to apologize for bringing such a topic in relation to privileges at such a bad timing. I had no idea about what is going on in USA (living on another country) but I hope BLM receives the support they need.
Oh no, itâs not remotely a problem at all, please donât worry about it! I really appreciated your ask and the feeling behind it and it did get me thinking constructively about a bunch of things, I just felt that my response could have been read in a really bad way at the particular time I ended up posting it. But Iâve been feeling a lot of weird conflicted things lately about having repressed and avoided addressing genuinely serious personal issues on the basis that other people have bigger problems than me, and itâs definitely come to me more clearly over the past few months that, at least for me, it was a toxic and unhelpful mindset that didnât actually do anything to help other people and was just hurting myself unnecessarily. I feel a very strong aversion to the idea of âputting myself firstâ for various personal reasons, but Iâve basically come to realise that there are times when I really do need to help myself first to be able to effectively help others and itâs not wrong or selfish to acknowledge that, in a general sense (and absolutely not in a âfeel free to use this sentiment as an excuse to disengage from the current political situation and avoid having to have difficult conversations around privilege and confronting your personal responsibility and accountability in racismâ sense, which was how I worried that my post might have been read at the time).
Really though, thank you for getting in touch, and for taking the time to offer your support on my personal stuff. Iâve been going through a lot of difficult things and Iâm still honestly in a kind of crisis mode where I donât feel able to put thoughts together coherently, so Iâm mostly taking a break from being public on the internet for the time being. Maybe I will feel more able to talk about things once I can get into a more stable mental state. But I am glad to hear from you and itâs very kind of you to be concerned for me! I hope youâre coping okay in these difficult times too.
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After some consideration, I have chosen to delete the post I made on this blog earlier today.
For anyone who did happen to catch my post within the few hours it was up, to clarify: although I only finished it up and posted it today, the ask I was responding to was received about a week ago, and most of my response was drafted and written around that time. Nothing within my post was intended as any kind of commentary on BLM or the current political moment in the USA, nor was it remotely written with the events of the past few days in mind.
However, given the state of current events, I have decided that any kind of messaging that could potentially be read along the lines of âitâs okay for relatively privileged people to stop worrying about their privilege and just focus on their own problems sometimesâ is in extremely poor taste and not remotely something that people need to be hearing right now. I donât believe the sentiments I was expressing were wrong or invalid in a generalised context, and the specific experiences I was talking about remain very valuable and important to me, but now was not the time or place to be talking about them. I may or may not repost at a later date, but if anyone did see my post and read it as a comment on current events specifically, I sincerely apologise for any offense caused and take full responsibility. It was severely tone-deaf of me to go through with posting something like that at this specific time.
Please support Black Lives Matter in any way you can, whether through donations or direct action or simply sharing resources, whatever is in your power to do. This document is a good place to start looking for resources. Thank you for your time.
Havenât really had the time or energy or concentration to post here in a while (apologies to those whoâve sent asks in, canât really say when Iâll get to them at this point), but hereâs a thing Iâve been trying to tell myself a lot lately:
I think - if youâre living in a state of chronic, persistent discomfort and pain thatâs having a serious debilitating impact on your life, whatever the reason might be,
then you have a basic right to pursue anything within your power - or at least, anything that doesnât cause direct material harm to another person - that you have reason to believe could help you to better cope with or alleviate that pain.
It doesnât matter if you feel like you could manage to live with the pain if you just tried harder;
It doesnât matter if you think you could be more productive or of more use to the world if you pushed through it and tried to divert your energies elsewhere;
It doesnât matter if you genuinely believe that the pain might be your own fault or may have been caused by your own actions;
It doesnât even matter if you feel like it might be easier on other people if you could just learn to live with it;
Even so - it just doesnât matter.
Even if all those things were absolutely, definitively, objectively true - it still wouldnât matter.
Hey! I had decided not to read your review before finishing mine, and my review is a bit⌠dryer, so I'm pleasantly surprised to see you express a lot of my unsorted feelings â and also that you had the same gripes as me with that middle portion, haha. You didn't really mention the adults characters like Okonogi, Toujirou or Jestress, though. Any thoughts about them? Or about the unsung hero Keropoyo? X)
Hello, itâs good to hear from you! I really enjoyed your review as well, especially your observation about the idea of âparallel processingâ being the unifying theme behind Ciconia! I hadnât connected it in that way myself, but it makes a lot of sense to me, and... yeah, I think that feeling of sort of living in two different contradictory realities at the same time is a very relatable concept for the time weâre living in right now, honestly. Thereâs so much about the world right now that I think a lot of people feel like they have to more or less have to dissociate from and compartmentalize and basically act as if it isnât the case in order to keep functioning because we feel powerless to do anything about it, and thatâs probably not a good thing - I know that objectively there are material things we can do to try and fight back against the tide and it frustrates me that âdistract self to copeâ is what I mostly end up falling back on, but I think itâs also hard to blame anyone for feeling like our efforts just arenât going to change anything at this point. So I do really appreciate the amount of compassion and understanding Ciconia shows in terms of giving weight to the reasons that young people feel like shutting out reality and rejecting the world is their only option.
On the characters, I honestly donât feel like weâve seen enough of them for me to have much of an opinion at this point? Okonogi really is weirdly endearing in this game though; this is definitely my favourite version of him lol. Jestress and Vier are both excellent (more Takano is always welcome!), but I feel like we still donât really know anything about their PoVs and what drives them yet, so Iâm mostly just curious to see whatâs going on with them. My working theory at the moment is that Jestress might be a CPP of Miyaoâs mother (based on Tojiro acting weirdly intimate with her and wanting to see her face etc, but Jestress seeming mostly uncomfortable with it and not really reciprocating), but weâll just have to see what happens! I think Iâm kind of past the phase of my life where I can muster up much energy to extensively theorise on this stuff, so Iâm mostly content to just go along with the ride this time.
All is in the name of guiding humanity down the right path...
This should be obvious, but there will be plenty of spoilers below, so please donât read if you havenât finished the game yet!
While I was reading, I felt like I had a bit of an up and down relationship with Ciconia. I felt really excited and impressed by the first few hours of the game - the setup of the intro with the whole military propaganda was intriguing and effective, Miyao and Jayden's dynamic was immediately super endearing and adorable, and the whole plot with Meow and her date with Jayden had me absolutely bursting with joy! I still can't quite process how happy I am that Ryukishi committed so hard to "gender weirdness" as a permanent WTC fixture here and that Yasu's story absolutely wasn't a one-off at all, and the whole framing of the plot was so heartfelt and sincere and sympathetic - Meow's gender ambiguity and her relationship with Jayden is completely accepted and celebrated by both the narrative and the entire cast, and the whole situation is framed as something totally sweet and wholesome without a single joke at their expense. Meow herself was incredibly cute, and Jayden's initial surprised reaction to her and his whole phase of overenthusiastically trying too hard to be accepting with Miyao about it in a way that ended up making him uncomfortable ("Yeah, I have a female alter, but I'm still ME, just treat me the same way you always did!") hit the perfect spot of how an awkward but totally well-meaning person really would react in that kind of situation - on the whole, I was and still am delighted that Ryukishi went so far with this!
I can definitely understand people having reservations about some of the specifics of the execution, and there are definitely valid concerns to be had with some of the CPP stuff to be sure - but at least for me personally, just the broader picture that Ryukishi chose to spend so much time having his characters explicitly working through and talking over gender issues in such an unambiguously accepting and humanising way made me so happy; I hadn't remotely anticipated that from Ciconia at all, but I genuinely felt that he did it with a lot of heart and the dynamic between Miyao/Meow and Jayden is still probably my favourite part of the VN overall! (And I also really appreciate that Miyao and Jayden were still definitely framed as being extremely flirty and gay as hell even after Meow entered the picture, since I was afraid we might end up losing that part of their dynamic at first! But no, Jayden's really obviously super in love with both of them and it's adorable.)
Unfortunately, after the very strong opening, I kind of felt a bit let down by the next ten hours or so running so hard into PLOT PLOT PLOT, with Meow almost completely disappearing for no obvious reason and the emotional core that had been originally set up being basically dropped for a lot of RGD-style political intrigue and mysterious apocalypse cults that I felt weren't really given enough context for me to get particularly invested in. It felt to me like there was a very long stretch where the plot basically amounted to a series of increasingly large-scale disasters interspersed with very samey and insubstantial discussions between Miyao and the other faction leaders about how powerless they are and agonising over whether there's anything they can do; since the whole plot takes place on such a macro scale and doesn't really take much time to meaningfully develop the faction leaders as individuals all that much beyond their basic personalities being likable on a surface level, it felt to me like the whole big series of incidents and disasters weren't really fleshed out enough or given the personal and emotional grounding for them to be individually interesting, so it all just sort of blurred together and started to feel kind of tedious.
So, around that point I was feeling more than a little disappointed by Ciconia! And yet... somehow, by the end, I felt like it genuinely did manage to gradually win me over, and the whole ending sequence hit me really hard in a way that I honestly hadn't expected it to. While I do still feel like that whole aforementioned section definitely could have been handled better and not been so dragged out (even just interspersing some of the cute character stuff from the postgame tips would have helped break it up a bit... which I kind of strongly suspect was originally the intent ala Higurashi, and I'm not really sure why they didn't go through with it), after a while I found I was genuinely won over by just how sincere and determined Miyao and the other kids were to avoid fighting each other and to find a peaceful solution, even with all the obstacles in their way. (I think I specifically remember the part where Miyao took over the COU newbie kette's gauntlets to help them intercept his own missiles where I found myself getting genuinely emotional and realising that, huh, I guess I really do care about these kids and this plot after all!)
It's funny, for a long time I felt kind of bemused - from a storytelling perspective - by just how solid the alliance between the kids was and how it totally lasted to the end. There were a whole bunch of incidents like the issue with the ABN/ACR conflict over the crop supplies that I was sort of expecting to lead to the group inevitably falling apart from distrust or suspicion or paranoia in the typical WTC fashion... but they never did! At first I was genuinely confused - like, you have the perfect setup to finally set up some conflict here and let things start to get interesting, Ryukishi! Why are you just sticking with the status quo! - but after a while, I sort of got the feeling that that was kind of the point; that these kids really did earnestly believe in each other and respected each other's common humanity and *did not want* to fight under any circumstances, and how tragic it was that even with their resolve being that strong and lasting through all those rough moments, that they ultimately weren't given any choice in the end. I felt that the game genuinely did sell me on the idea that the image of them all holding hands and chatting with each other to the end in the public bath VR room was their "real selves" - that that really was their true nature, and that those were their true feelings, that ultimately said much more about them as people and meant so much more than the arbitrarily tragic road they ended up being forced to go down entirely against their will.
I think I was kind of thrown for a loop with Ciconia because I generally expect Ryukishi's stories to follow a trajectory where the characters gradually reveal their flaws and their inner "ugliness" as the story goes on (albeit generally in a way that's still very sympathetic and humanising, of course) - but while that did sort of happen at the end here with things like Chloe and Ayshaâs turnarounds (and may well happen some more in the future given that we know there were traitors in the order), in this case I honestly felt like the purpose of the story was more about bringing out the kids' inner goodness. They really were good kids! None of this was their fault! They really deserved better! And while I think I normally wouldn't be all that into a story with that kind of straightforward message (you know, me generally being a cynical loveless husk and all), in this case specifically I felt like Ryukishi really managed to convey that specific sort of feeling of loyalty and connectedness and breaking down of boundaries that comes from Internet friendships in a surprisingly touching way.
And I think in that context, even the fact that we don't ever get to see the different factions getting to know each other all that well or forming any particularly deep connections or relationships with each other beyond their political solidarity... also sort of works, honestly? Even just that very casual kind of connection, of these kids just screwing around in an improvised chatroom with a dumb name and babbling at each other about things that don't even particularly matter, the kind of interaction we've all probably experienced at some time without even thinking all that deeply about it - even just that is enough for those kids to meaningfully connect with and humanise each other, to understand on a deep level that the kids from the other factions are basically the same as them, and to want to value their common humanity over everything else. Even something that simple is enough for these kids who don't even know each other all that well to form a strong sense of solidarity that lasts through a hell of a lot of difficult times that could easily have driven them apart - to form a sense of loyalty and shared understanding with each other that feels more real and matters so much more to them than any arbitrary national loyalty possibly could. Maybe I'm just being overly sentimental, but I honestly think that message is kind of beautiful, in its way.
It also feels very relevant to me in... I guess, capturing that unique contemporary feeling of being a young person in the current political climate, and that frustration of the Internet generation being the most interconnected and least bound by national boundaries that we've ever been, and yet being forced to watch mostly powerlessly as the people in power push more and more towards stupid narrow-minded nationalism and xenophobia at a time when humanity most needs to unite against serious existential threats to the planet? So I think in that particular political context, I honestly ended up feeling really moved by just how unambiguously compassionate and sympathetic the narrative was towards these kids - that Ryukishi ended up so firmly deciding to emphasise their "goodness" and how real and precious their bonds were with each other, over anything else. It's not really the kind of story I expected from WTC, but I was legitimately touched by how much the kids' feelings around the bonds they made over the Internet being more "real" than their material reality were treated as being so totally valid - like, yes, the idea of the factory future is treated as a viscerally disturbing one, but the narrative also completely holds up the feelings that led the kids to idealise that future as 100% legit, with genuine emotional truth behind them! It doesn't feel dismissive or patronising at all, and it honestly did give me a bit of that same feeling I got from Umineko and Yasu's story from EP7 in the sense of that totally accepting and non-judgmental message of... "Even if some aspects of what you feel might be ugly, even if some people might be disturbed by you idealising something like that - it's okay to feel that way. Your pain matters. The things that led you to feel this way, to see the horror of a future like that and still long for it on some level, are completely valid. You're seen. You're understood."
And that's honestly come to feel genuinely precious to me as I've had time to reflect on Ciconia and the response it inspired in me; that it did make me feel "seen" in some deep way, maybe on a broader generational level rather than on an intimately personal one like Umineko did, but that still has a lot of value to me too. Ciconia feels very different from Umineko or Higurashi, but it's really got a lot of heart, and I personally felt in the end that the earnestness and overwhelming good nature of the intention behind it was enough for me to forgive any awkwardness in the execution. (Ryukishi is such a good guy! I love him!) So, all in all, I really appreciated Ciconia, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing where it goes from here!
(1/2) One thing I really loved about Reincarnation is how Morgana's parental issues being brought up again, and given critical thoughts this time. I remember playing Requiem's Fragment about how she doesn't want Jacopo to get angry at her father and give him a piece of his mind, even if it's for her, and that's immensely disturbing to me. I know it's partially because Jacopo is an emotionally violent person, but...
(2/2) The whole how her familyâs abusive towards her in some way or another, and then covering it up with vague but generally acceptable âgreater goodâ excuses like being religious, and how Morgana ultimately feels about it, and how it contributes A LOT to her anger and refusal to forgive, especially as a witch, clicks to me as an person who experienced family abuse. Iâm glad this game exists for its approving, sympathetic and surprisingly emotionally realistic portrayal of abused people.
Ah, yeah, thatâs another really good angle to look at Morganaâs character from! Itâs definitely true that Morgana always had a hang-up around avoiding the idea of hating or cursing her family in particular - Novectacle have actually talked about that here as well, and how that probably informed a lot of her projecting on to Michel and her persistence in trying to get him to curse his own family.
In that light, it does make a lot of sense that so much of Morganaâs arc in Reincarnation was around her not feeling able to stand up to her parents and wrongly holding herself responsible for their treatment of her, since that was something she never really addressed in the main game! In that respect, it was really nice to see Reincarnation ending with her taking Jacopoâs advice to stand up for herself and not be ashamed of her anger toward her parents, and also deciding she doesnât want to try and make contact with her birth father in the end as well; I think that definitely reads as her making real progress on that front compared to the place she was at in the main game and Fragment, as you pointed out. I hadnât quite made those connections myself until I read your thoughts, so thank you for the insight!
Like Umineko, I feel like Fata is really good at portraying that sort of internal wrestling with what kinds of ugly emotions are âokayâ to feel and what feeling those things says about you as a person. Morgana especially is a really strong portrayal of how those kinds of impossibly rigid religious standards being imposed on people can be completely self-destructive, with her so deeply internalising the idea that feeling any kind of selfishness or resentment would turn her from a âsaintâ to a âwitchâ in her mind. I think itâs great if Fata has helped to give you any kind of understanding or catharsis on your own experiences of that, and I really appreciate hearing the perspective of someone with such a strong personal connection to it! Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
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The fascinating thing about those people (and generally every background character with horrible personality), becomes a stern exploration about people whose beliefs and ideas molded into culture, hurts and isolates others in ways plausible to reality. "Forced marriage" (Nellie & Giselle), "What you should be." (Michel), "Family above yourself" (Jacopo), "Religion & Usefulness" (Morgana), is held so tight that the agency of the person being projected to it is just... not existing to them.
Thatâs a really good way to put it! I think youâve touched on something here that I was also thinking after I answered your other ask - that between most of the characters with abusive parents in Fata, I feel like the series sort of tends to frame their family problems as just one part of a wider culture that isolates them and fails them, rather than necessarily honing specifically in on the parental relationships themselves as the main focus, if that makes sense? So, yes, Morganaâs situation was originated and facilitated by her mother, but it was also enabled and reinforced by the rest of the villagers choosing to accept and embrace her role as a saint as well; likewise Nellieâs isolation wasnât just about her family being individual bad actors but also a symptom of a much wider cultural problem around girls being forced into marriage at a young age for political gains at that time, and so on.
Itâs grim to think about, but the sad truth is that people like Michel and Nellie probably wouldnât have fared much better with any other average family in the time and place they were living in, unfortunately. Of course that doesnât remotely make their parents any less accountable for being individually shitty, though; awful behaviour being the norm doesnât make it any less awful! But I feel like Fata shows a lot of insight into the causes of isolation in this respect, and how those kinds of situations where people come to feel totally hopeless and isolated tend to have complex causes involving a lot of the people around them having various degrees of complicity in enabling the situation to continue(both consciously and unconsciously).
Rewatching Court of Illusions in EP5 somehow feels like reading a metaphor to Yasu's most bitter feelings towards Natsuhi rejecting Lion out of her pride (pushing the baby off), which in turn, had that pride stripped off from her ("Kinzo never gives a damn about her!"), or turn that pride into the most disgracing of her ("It can be implied that Kinzo and Natsuhi did 'that' in bed!")! As empathic Yasu can be towards Natsuhi, it's no wonder she can hate her that much.
Haha, I seem to get a lot of asks about this particular scene! Well, it is a really interesting one, and the Man from 19 Years Ago is a really interesting version of Yasu. I think you can definitely read the Court of Illusions that way - the whole conspiracy to frame Natsuhi in that episode was explicitly Yasuâs revenge plot, after all, and the trial segment is just an extension of that, even if you could argue that the more extreme parts like the adultery accusation were more specifically Bern and Erikaâs doing.
I really do appreciate the sheer force of hatred you can feel from the Man from 19 Years Ago in the way he treats Natsuhi, because yeah, Yasu absolutely has a lot of very, very good reasons to hate her! Even beyond pushing Lion off the cliff, itâs made clear that she was a horribly abusive employer to Shannon as well, casually doing things like withholding food from her as punishment for talking back. And of course Yasu is in a position where she canât express her anger over any of those things without repercussions, so itâs only natural that that leads to a lot of repressed hatred buliding up - and yes, that frustration of knowing that Natsuhiâs whole fixation on her pride and honour is a lie, and part of her wanting to just shove that knowledge in her face and see how her facade falls apart.
I very much appreciate that even if Yasu can empathise deeply with Natsuhiâs circumstances at times (with EP5â˛s Beatrice showing respect for her âmagicâ and determination and fighting so hard to protect it), sheâs also equally capable of deeply resenting her to the point of dreaming up elaborate revenge plots and writing gruesome fantasies about murdering her too! Yasuâs writing is very good about making both of those sides to her feelings come across so strongly, without one negating the other at all. Itâs one of many things that makes her such a wonderfully human character.
