First of all, I just want to say thank you for this topic. Figuring out the meta-world of When They Cry has always been one of the most intriguing topics of the series for me. Hopefully I’ll be able to give a new perspective on this topic.
That said, I’ll admit I haven’t actually read through Minagoroshi-hen or Matsuribayashi-hen proper, so I only have the general jist of how Higurashi uses them and a lot of thinking about Umineko itself. I’d say my rough interpretation is that from the perspective of the witches, these fragments are an objectification of reality. From this higher plane, the space is afforded for there to be multiple realities. To the people living ‘within’ these fragments, they may as well be parallel realities. I think it’s possible for these multiple selves to be woven togetther, which is how someone ‘transcends’ them and becomes a higher entity like a witch. With Higurashi, we see this through Rika becoming Bernkastel. With Umineko it becomes murkier by having the idea of these parallel realities (fragments) be interwoven with the concept of fiction/imagination, which itself has a lot of interesting implications. This almost implies that our ability to imagine worlds has a hand in creating them, which would fit with the ‘possibility’ idea (since our ability to imagine does seem intimately connected to the introduction of possibility to reality). That’s a quick run down of my reading of how fragments work and what they are, but there’s more to the story.
Ever since Umineko’s fragments captured my imagination, I’ve been interested in figuring out the ‘crystal’ as a symbol. It just so happens that crystals show up everywhere in japanese media. Most notably is the Final Fantasy series. This is significant, because Ryuukishi has actually said he gets that handle from Final Fantasy V (Dragon Knight). I can look up a source if people are interested. Knowing this, I’ve kind of always seen When They Cry as expanding on the crystal mythos from the earlier Final Fantasy games.
From what I can gather, crystals in Final Fantasy have a couple aspects to them. I think some of these aspects are retained, some are expanded upon, and some are revised. In Final Fantasy, the crystals’ true nature is left fairly ambiguous, just as in WTC, but there’s a fair bit more information to work with. Generally across the FF series, crystals seem to be sentient entities with connections to the deeper fabric of reality, usually being connected to the ‘balance of the world’. Later games (such as FFXIV) seem to have something of a ‘mothercrystal’ which may represent that reality as a whole. When these crystals are destroyed, their shards or fragments seem to retain the memories (and skills) of past heroes, whose abilities are then bestowed upon the warriors who are destined to save the crystals. A notable feature is that these warriors are ‘burdened’ with this fate of saving the world, which is something the Fabula Nova Crystallis games have been focusing on.
There seem to be many parallels here to WTC, but WTC makes the whole affair less mythological and more personal. Instead of the Warriors of Light being burdened with fate, we have Rika trapped in this tragedy. Instead of ‘past warriors’ bestowing abilities on the warriors of light, we have Rika retaining memories from her past selves. From here I think things get more interesting and could potentially gleam some light on the prior discussion in this thread.
How I’ve always interpreted the fragments, especially in regards to Umineko’s ‘many truths’ angle, is that they are a record of a perspective. In this case, Rika’s perspective. This is where the ‘crystals being sentient’ idea is basically revised to instead be much more personal, rather being a record of an individual’s memories (recall the events of EP7’s Tea Party in the Meta-Theater and their connection to Eva). This also connects with the idea of a ‘mothercrystal’ being representative of an entire reality. If the ‘truth’ of a situation is the sum total of everyone’s perspectives (no matter how varied they are) then it makes sense that each fragment of this whole would be representative of an individual perspective within that reality.
This may not help much in figuring out the exact lore on how fragments work in Higurashi or Umineko, but I hope this added perspective on the lineage of fragments is interesting to you guys. Crystals are a symbol that I find super intriguing, especially the many varied but similar ways they show up across multiple different storiess.
) should be suspended, until all the paradoxes (like Hanyuu’s divine intervention) are resolved.