Kakera Theory [Higurashi and Umineko Spoilers]

07th Discussion
#102

@qno, I’d be interested to hear if you have a take on the Eternal Question. (Which is, of course, the question of why other characters besides Rika and Hanyuu can vaguely remember other worlds if the worlds are completely separate.)

In the Keiichi Maebara thread, I hinted at a new theory I have when I said

Depending on how the worlds work, [Rika] might even be “dragging” [Keiichi] from world to world.

If we assume that Rika is, indeed, dragging Keiichi from world to world, then we could kill two birds with one stone: we could reconcile almost all of the contradictory evidence concerning whether the characters are the same people from world to world, and simultaneously explain why Keiichi has more memories than anyone besides Rika and Hanyuu.

Because I realized that almost all the evidence supporting the characters being the same people is referring to Keiichi in particular. (If asked for, I can provide examples.)

As for the other characters’ memories, you could look at it as Hanyuu transporting Rika, Rika dragging Keiichi, and then Rika and Keiichi eventually dragging everyone else. (I’m including Mion and Satoko even though they don’t have any memories of other worlds (that we know of), because the ending of Minagoroshi strongly implies that it’s at least the same group of people in Matsuribayashi as in Minagoroshi.)

As for Akasaka, him remembering other worlds seemed to be due to something Frederica did in the sea of fragments, so I consider him an exception.

As for why and how Rika would be dragging Keiichi, I already went into that in the Keiichi Maebara thread, so here I’ll just say that Keiichi is basically Rika’s piece.

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#103

I am afraid there is little I can say about this, it has been way too long since I last read Higurashi.

Though I’d doubt that Rika would be dragging them around, if anyone does it would probably be Hanyuu. At least as far as I remember Rika was quite surprised when Keiichi remembered.

I wonder whether this situation could be compared to something in MuvLuv Alternative. I’ll spoiler it, butfor the argument it is kinda necessary to address it: The main character also travels to an alternative world, but ends up affecting that world as he carried with him the memory of casualty, that some characters are dead or missing. So soon after he arrived, people start dying, in a similar way to how they died in the world he came from.

Of course, for Higurashi this wouldn’t completely work*, but the idea that the ones travelling between worlds can cause something, or rather bring something with them that isn’t limited to the travellers themselves, might apply. Therefore, your theory is sound to me, although it might not be necessary to drag Keichi or the others around actively (aside from EP8 which can be a special event trip for teens and children), but is just something that they carry with them from world to world; strong emotions, regret, that kinda stuff. So, the worlds themselves are separate, but the fact that there are two always jumping from fragment to fragment of course also creates a link between more and more worlds.

About Keiichi claiming to be the same person: personality wise he stays the same. But yeah, maybe Hanyuu is carrying a bit more in regards to him than others. She doesn’t even need to carry his body, his soul and heart would be enough to consider him the same - although then it is more a question why he doesn’t always remember, like Rika.

*Or maybe it does? For all we know this is how Hanyuu and Rika made sure that the world they jumped to ends up roughly the same by 1983, with roughly the same (important) people.

Edit: alright, made multiple edits already, but thinking about it, does your theory address why Keiichi usually doesn’t remember? Like, what is the difference between Rika being carried from fragment to fragment to Keiichi? Because in the last episode, when everyone got an express trip, everyone remembered, right?

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#104

Well, despite not reading Higurashi in a long time, you do offer some interesting views here! I thought the stuff about the memory of casualty was especially intriguing.

Ah, sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that Rika was purposefully dragging anyone around. If she did drag Keiichi around, it was unknowingly. Or perhaps she had a sort of subconscious inkling of it, which is why she sometimes talks as though Keiichi was always the same person, as opposed to, say, her attitude towards Rena in Tsumihoroboshi (“I have no more interest in ‘this’ Rena Ryuuguu. I’ll make sure things work out with the ‘next’ Rena Ryuuguu.”)

I’d also like to clarify the difference between “memories” and “soul” (in my mind). The way I see it, someone can have the same memories but not the same soul, or vice-versa. To me, a soul is a single “stream” of consciousness. So Keiichi could have the same soul through all the worlds even if he didn’t remember it. (So it would be as though he experienced a world, forgot it, then experienced the next world. While picking up memories on a deep-seated level, of course.)

As to why he didn’t remember most of the time, that seemed to be because he was never supposed to remember in the first place. Even Hanyuu called it ‘impossible.’ If we want to bring Umineko into it, we might say that Keiichi was the piece of a piece (Rika), and it seems like only witches are capable of bestowing meta-awareness on their pieces. But maybe the fact that Rika was in the process of becoming a witch, coupled with Keiichi’s own powerful desire to learn from his mistakes, made it possible.

This might seem unfair to the other club members, but don’t blame me! If it were up to me, everyone would be the same through all the worlds. This theory is actually my compromise.

Oh yeah, and I don’t think everyone remembered with the ‘express trip’ (I like that term, it’s pretty convenient to describe the phenomenon of the characters moving from Minagoroshi to Matsuribayashi–It made me chuckle, too), but like I said with Keiichi above, I don’t think memory transfer and soul transfer are exactly the same thing.

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#105

Ooops, did I write ‘memory of casualty’? I meant causality.

Well, aside Mion and Satoko everyone remembered their past deeds, right? Or am I remembering wrong?

So now we have four groups:

  • Rika (same soul, same being, remembers everything except her many deaths)
  • Keiichi (same soul, doesn’t remember by default, but gains awareness)
  • Shion, Rena (different soul, don’t remember by default, seem to gain memories)
  • Mion, Satoko (different soul, never remember)

Is that according to your view of the situation?

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#106

Oh yeah. They seem to remember their sins from previous worlds. I thought you meant they had their complete memories of the world of Minagoroshi.

Yes, pretty much.

#107

Maybe we can think of it the way another “time traveler” experiences it, ala Steins;Gate? (I’m only tagging the major thing as a spoiler since the main concept advertised about the game) Rika and Okabe are both the ones who are jumping from world/fragment to world/fragment. What is transferred isn’t themselves but their memories, and their memories, and from there, they have the chance to back several days to try to prevent their deaths as well as their loved ones and the destruction of where they live. What facilitates the memory retention in Steins;Gate is a headphone device created by one of the main heroines that lets the person using the PhoneWave (the time machine) to keep their memories without the world fixing the memories to fit the world. The PhoneWave is limited in that it can only send messages and memories so far back in time. Okabe also has an ability he calls the Reading Steiner (he’s Chuuni) that came to him when he nearly died of a fever as a child, and that initially lets him remember other timelines after the first time jump. So basically, Hanyuu is the PhoneWave and her abilities are like the headphone device and the Reading Steiner, but Hanyuu’s abilities are limited in that she can only get them to a different fragment only so many times. Maybe what makes the ones who retain their memories is just protagonist (and god) status? After all, Mion and Satoko were never the main protagonist in their arcs (the anime only arc doesn’t really count since Satoko never killed anybody in that arc and wasn’t tied to Hanyuu). It’s a bit kind of a letdown that the memory stuff is probably that, even though the characters in both series who don’t remember go through the same stuff.

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#108

Hanyuu seems to really only be connected to Rika, though. I’ve thought maybe the Hinamizawa syndrome had something to do with people keeping memories (since the virus and Hanyuu are obviously connected), but in that case it wouldn’t make sense for Satoko not to remember.

Maybe, but I was hoping for more of an in-universe explanation. Otherwise we could just say ‘They remembered because Ryukishi needed/wanted them to.’

#109

Oh yeah, there’s something I’ve always wondered about in Saikoroshi.

(Saikoroshi spoilers) [spoiler] Rika says that she “forced her friends’ sins on them” by choosing her original world. But how does that work? Rika’s friends in her original world would still have their sins whether Rika chose to stay in that world or not, right? Unless the worlds, like, merged or something?

I mean, yeah, you could just dismiss the “perfect” world as being a dream, but that doesn’t explain why Rika would think like this. [/spoiler]

So what does this mean in the context of how the worlds work? If anything? Any takers?

Sometimes I think Ryukishi just wanted to have his cake and eat it too when it came to how the worlds work in Higurashi. He wanted for there to be worlds of infinite possibilities, but also for the characters to be the same people across worlds. Somehow.

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#110

I have a theory about this. I think this goes to the catbox theory, and why “observation” tends to be the greatest power. Think about Featherine’s title: the strongest being in the meta’s ability is watching. Because observing the contents of the catbox collapses the waveform and its state becomes definite. Virgilia talks about this, the Braun Tube Trial references this in a way as well.

In this case, Rika is the one who chose which reality to acknowledge, or observe, the course of reality by her presence. Maybe similar to a game master.

Tenuous but interesting further evidence- Pre-Holder does a ton of official music for Umineko, and this is one of their albums.

Observer ~ Witch Who Lives

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#111

In the very first scene that Lambdadelta appeared, she stated that Bernkastel won because Lambda let her put the pieces wherever she wanted on the board, and that Bern made them all kings to begin with. This seems relevant.

#112

I might be misunderstanding you, but are you saying that Rika’s original kakera and the “perfect” world kakera were drawn into a catbox situation and one that Rika didn’t choose stopped existing?

I guess that could make sense.

But even so, that would only go for the last game (Matsuribayashi), right? Otherwise there’s no way Lambda could have been taken off guard. But the characters remembered before that.

Also, in the “fragment-weaving” portion of Matsuribayashi, it looked like Akasaka was the only one whose remembering other worlds was “manufactured” by Rika. And that was only possible because there was a piece missing from the Himatsubushi fragment that Rika restored.

Plus, we don’t even know for certain (haha) if Lambda is telling the truth here.

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#114

I see. That still leaves us with Keiichi remembering in Tsumihoroboshi (not to mention the bits and pieces he remembers in other arcs), but if we combined this with my aforementioned Keiichi theory, we might actually have something workable.

Well, I’m not saying she was definitely lying, but does she ever bring it up again? (This isn’t a rhetorical question; I honestly can’t remember whether she does or not.)

#116

Well, this probably belongs more in the ‘Higurashi in Umineko’ thread.

#117

Okay…so I read the postscript of Tsubasa, and I can’t believe I apparently never read it before. It’s short but very interesting:

"There sure are a lot of kakera.

The catbox is bottomless.

Probably someone could find many more if they stuck their hand in and scrounged around.

For now, these are the kakera I have collected.

If you still want kakera, then you should go search this time.

Jump into the catbox and look for kakera yourself.

If you have the courage to go on a journey in search of kakera, then you’re one of us.

My companions will probably call you a voyager witch.

Land witches can only sit on the shore and wait for kakera to wash up.

But we’re different.

We set out on the sea of kakera, into the catbox, find kakera no one else can find, and put them into our pocket as our own.

And it isn’t just kakera floating in the sea of kakera.

There are also many forgery kakera created by forgery writers.

Sometimes they’re funny, other times they’re shocking.

Sometimes they’re inflammatory, and sometimes they even give you chills.

It’s our right to collect kakera that would never drift onto land.

Not only that, but we can write new forgeries on the boat and throw them into the sea.

If one of those is lucky enough to make it to land, then I wonder if the shore witches will scramble for my forgery and read it?

That thought is very pleasing.

I hear there are witches who have more fun writing forgeries than fishing for kakera.

Beatrice’s game board is already over and closed.

And yet, those witches among you who haven’t left your seat in the audience…

Are you land witches who wait for kakera to wash up on the shore?

Or are you voyager witches…?

Of course, either one is fine.

If we meet again, I hope it’s on the great kakera sea.

Well then, that’s all the presents I have for now.

Goodbye, land witches.

Goodbye, sea witches.

See you again soon."

On the one hand, I feel like the whole ‘forgery kakera’ thing helps clear some things up (for example, it explains how Frederica could create her own ending kakera for Higurashi, and yet Rika was the only one who could truly create a kakera where she defeated Takano).

And yet, I feel confused. Assuming that in this case ‘kakera’ are a metaphor for stories, games, etc, and ‘witches’ are a metaphor for readers/players/writers, then what’s the difference between waiting on the shore for a kakera, setting out on a journey to find a kakera, and writing a forgery kakera?

Your metaphors are getting confusing, Ryukishi…

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#118

You make a fair point. Like, Bern can be both a land and sea witch (Bern, when did you become Wadanohara?) based on her Umineko characterization alone, and falls into all three of the types of having kakera. And Beatrice herself can be considered all of those kakera searchers, since she wanted a kakera where she could be happy, waited desperately for a kakera, and churned out many forgeries. Ryukishi is definitely the kind of author who likes to try to answer questions with more questions, so we might not get an answer for this addendum for a while, and at that point, we’ll have more questions.

Ryukishi, why must you make your established witch world so confusing to put together.

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#119

Another thing I’ve been wondering about is…

In Umineko, it turns out that Higurashi was a meta gameboard, like the one being played by Battler and Beatrice. But in Higurashi, it seemed that Rika and Hanyuu were just jumping from one kakera to another. It was very simple. Yes, the whole thing is talked about as a ‘game’ at times, but I just always saw that as a metaphor. For example, a “meta opponent” playing against Rika/Frederica is never mentioned or even implied.

Also, we run into more problems, because Hanyuu (who many believe is Featherine) came to Hinamizawa a thousand years ago. So does that mean the Higurashi “game” started a thousand years before Hanyuu’s opponent was even born? What kind of sense does that make?

EDIT: This kind of goes with the above paragraph, but another thing that gives me a headache is the question of how witch interference affects Fragments.

The most intuitive way for it to work would be if the witch interference only affected the single Fragment the witch was dealing with.

This seems to be the case with Rokkenjima Prime. Lambda made Prime Yasu into a witch in this Fragment, and Yasu became Meta Beatrice. (Why Lambda chose this Fragment when Yasu apparently acted the exact same way in every other Fragment (except the Lion one) is anyone’s guess.)

Then there’s Higurashi, where things get confusing. Whether Hanyuu is Featherine or not, she obviously has (limited) access to the meta world. So assuming Hanyuu exists in all the Higurashi worlds (which she would have to, since the history of Hinamizawa would have been completely different without her), the Hanyuu of each world would want “her” Rika to survive, right? So each Hanyuu would try to move “her” Rika to a different kakera each time Rika died. So, logically, there should be a myriad of mutually independent meta Rika-Hanyuu pairs jumping around the sea of kakera.

But wait. Umineko says that Higurashi was a meta game, like the one in Umineko. So it seems like there was only one set of kakera-traveling Rika and Hanyuu. So what, did Hanyuu just let Rika die in all the worlds that weren’t part of the game? Why would she do that? I’m pretty sure the Hanyuus aren’t controlled by some hive-mind.

Really, the only way I can think of that this could work at the moment is that maybe Hanyuu did not
originally have the ability to world-hop. Maybe Featherine granted that ability to Hanyuu in a single world (Rika’s original world), and Hanyuu “carried” that ability to every world she and Rika jumped to after that. That would explain why there’s only one set of meta Hanyuu and Rika, and also why there’s only one game board.

So these two cases both involve a witch messing with one fragment (although in the latter case it ends up affecting more).

But!! Apparently Takano was able to accomplish what she did in Higurashi because Lambda lent her her
power. But in order for Rika to be doomed in all the Higurashi worlds, Lambda would have had to grant her that power in every single world. Right?

#120

Yeah, that seems to be the case with Takano. Lambda lent her the power to try to become god, and Takano would work on her own to achieve it.

But your theory for Hanyuu’s ability really seems to be the only one that works with the conflicting info we have on Umineko and Higurashi regarding the kakera. I never understood why Hanyuu up until the final arc was so hellbent on having Rika give up and accept her death, especially with the knowledge that Hanyuu was essentially a replacement mother to Rika (like, dang, Hanyuu, you DESERVE being forced to experience wine and kimchi for that). But that really seems to be a huge issue with Hanyuu’s characterization. In Matsuribayashi and beyond, she’s selectively human-bodied sometimes, sometimes, she’s invisible to all but Rika, she’s sometimes Rika’s mother figure trying to be kind, sometimes she is a god, sometimes she’s acting exactly as old as she looks, sometimes all three at once… And with Hanyuu all but outright being confirmed as Featherine’s Higurashi equivalent and Featherine being proud of being a monster, it opens up a whole new unfortunate perspective on Hanyuu. Hanyuu really seems to get the most mismatched characterization on all of Higurashi, and even her powers are kinda “shrug emoji” at times.

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#121

I actually didn’t have any problem with Hanyuu’s powers or personality as shown in Minagoroshi. It seems like it’s in Matsuribayashi and after that we get into “anything goes” territory.

#122

Personally, how I have always viewed the sea of fragments and fragments themselves is tied into a subfield of Logic called Modal Logic. It often is used to describe what is essentially multiverse theory. It’s rather long and complicated to explain in absolute detail, so I will try to distill it down here.

  1. In Modal logic, there is a primary world, much like the world of 1998 in Umineko which is referred to as Alpha at times, other things at other times. Essentially, it is the world in which we currently occupy, and that is what true false statements tend to represent.

  2. In Modal Logic, there also is the element of a sort of dimension in which different possibilities arise, each of them called a Possible World. I posit that Kakera can be called a fanciful name for a possible world, as a kakera seems to be an alternate possibility or story.

  3. Possible worlds are classified as near or far from each other based on how many variables are similar. For example, the fragments of each game of Umineko would be close to each other, and the higurashi fragments would all be close to each other, but the higurashi and umineko fragments would likely be a bit far from each other.

  4. Each possible world is essentially a full alternate reality, and the rules of these realities are vastly different from each other, with the only real defined similarities are what is logically necessary, which are very few things and are rather argued about, and things that are logically impossible, which are pretty much only things that are self contradictory, such as a square circle.

In essence, I would argue the sea of fragments is a sort of philosophical space in which the possible worlds of Modal Logic exist, and that the kakera themselves are sort of a representation of that.

Feel free to comment on it, and I’m sure theres probably a few things I need to work on how these things apply to, but I would say that it is a rather interesting interpretation of what exactly the sea is.

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#123

so with the hotarubi no tomoro koro ni manga being out, how would you guys include it in the multiverse of this series?