I stand by my statement
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Haha, I’m impressed you’ve read so far as to see that part already 
One of the things that I noticed in coming up with this theory was how the evidence seemed to cascade in to itself. All of the clues we got in episode 3 before Eva solved the epitaph were relevant, and whilst I don’t remember it explicitly, it’s probable that the ‘boy toying around’ comment actually led me to the mechanism idea, amongst other things.
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I’m glad to see you’re doing your homework, I hope the witch rewards your efforts. If you manage to reach the Golden Land alive, that is. And thanks for the early access
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Well it seems nobody is brave enough to step up and try debunk me yet 
Does that mean I’m right? I guess I’ll just have to keep reading
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Why would we? If we’re throwing you off from a cliff anyways it’s better if we let you climb a bit higher first.
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Now this is a perfect response
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We can neither confirm or deny it, like your friend loves to say.
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Very interesting read. Whether you’re wrong or right, I’m impressed at the thought put into this.
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Well I’ll naturally attack the weakest part of your reasoning, which would be why Kinzo wrote the epitaph- this idea of returning the family and uniting them once more. Based on what we know of Kinzo, he sure as hell hasn’t shown much love for his family, and seems to be more interested in Beatrice. Do you really think that Kinzo would write an epitaph for his family’s sake?
I think the idea of resurrection would be something more tied closely to Kinzo’s .love for Beatrice than anything. Granted, by episode 3 we know not exactly what the extent of their relationship is, but there are some interesting tidbits Beatrice talks about in episode 3 by that point no? Something about hommulci, a human cage and how Kinzo played a role in all of this ?
As for the rest, while I cannot confirm or deny, I will say you kinda lucked it out in making that connection between a shore and a train station and happened to find the exact train station that fits your theory of the epitaph in that link :P. Are you sure you aren’t a demon with the luck befitting the devil?
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I think definitely getting in to the third part of the Epitaph where I do suggest Kinzo’s motive for writing is weak. My thoughts have changed on it a bit since I wrote it up, largely because I’m beginning to question how much of Kinzo we see is real and not just unreliable narration (and at this point I’m fairly certain he’s just dead when the gameboard starts). I don’t know what I have left to go off, and this narration problem certainly doesn’t help.
My main thinking behind it is a parallel I theorised between Battler not accepting witches, whilst Kinzo cannot accept Beatrice’s death. To further reflect this, I think it would make sense that if Battler cannot accept one of the people he cares for is the culprit, (despite all evidence to suggest it must be the case), then it would make sense that Kinzo also reflect this in that he could not accept his family as his own, despite a natural familial bond; so maybe the epitaph does reflect what care he has left for his family.
Of course, if the epitaph is addressed to Beatrice, it seems, by the closing line, so my immediate thought to your suggestion about resurrection is this; perhaps Kinzo has projected the image of Beatrice on to another person who the epitaph is actually addressed to. This may explain the idea of homunculi and human cages, by reflecting that Kinzo has forced this personality on someone else. If I bundle this in with the idea of a multiple personality culprit, as I suggested here, it would also make sense that Beatrice is one of the personalities.
This actually gets me thinking, if Kinzo did know about this other personality of the culprit, perhaps he also knew what they intended to do? Maybe then the Epitaph was trying to show them how they could get what they wanted without killing everyone. I recall that there was a suggestion that the epitaph was intended to let an illegitimate heir claim the Ushiromiya headship. I’m currently looking through our footage to see where that was.
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I think the latter half of this post makes more sense than the first, b/c while the novel does make a point of the similarities between Kinzo and Battler, I don’t think that means we can use that as evidence for what the purpose of the epitaph itself has. The only evidence we know is that it is addressed to Beatrice, and therefore maybe we should look into Kinzo-Beatrice connections.
I do find your ideas of Kinzo projecting Beatrice onto someone else very interesting, but the question then becomes why would Kinzo pick that specific person ? Or if this personality existed from the beginning, why would Kinzo be so readily willing to accept such a person imitating his apparent beloved? Curious isn’t it?
And Kinzo’s dead or alive status during the start of the game board is irrelevant because we know at the very least wrote the epitpah some time (ie: during the six years Battler was gone).
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I don’t think Kinzo’s status at the beginning of the game is irrelevant; you were saying my reasoning was weak because of Kinzo’s personality, I was saying our understanding of Kinzo’s personality may be unreliable, thus motives are questionable when involving Kinzo’s personality. Nonetheless let’s not get in to that, the question was why Kinzo would pick this specific person.
I did mention in the video that a logical motive alone wouldn’t make sense for a massacre on such a scale; so it’s likely that if we are accepting this multiple personality culprit, some traumatic incident caused this divergence in personalities. Thus I wonder what could have caused this trauma?
Perhaps it was mistreatment by Kinzo and/or his public family? I believe it was Jessica that was first in the story to suggest that Kinzo had an illegitimate child. This to me shows that the main family was at least somehow aware of this child. It’s not as though such a child would be ancient legend, so perhaps the fact it has become rumour is that the family is covering up what they do know? If this is a cause for regret in the main family, perhaps it is evidence of mistreating this supposed illegitimate child.
Perhaps the showing of Beatrice falling off a cliff in Episode 3 alludes to the truth of it? To accept this theory I have to assume that the red truths in ep3; “Shannon is Dead” and “Kanon is Dead” do not necessarily mean that the person portraying those characters is dead. Thus it is not too far-fetched to suggest that “It’s definitely dead” and “In 1967, in a hidden mansion on Rokkenjima, Beatrice-sama existed as a human” are questionable, right? This whole time I’d been thinking that the Beatrice of 1967 represented an adult Beatrice, Kinzo’s concubine, but what if it was actually a child and this was the trauma that triggers having multiple personalities? This might also explain the odd wording of “It’s definitely dead”. Of course then it would seem that the culprit would be far older than Shannon or Kanon seem to be, which is odd but not impossible. Of course the other possibility could be that perhaps the Beatrice who died in 1967 was indeed the adult, and thus the child grew up motherless, though that alone would unlikely be enough to cause so much trauma as to induce having multiple personalities.
Of course neither of these ideas addresses why Kinzo would be so willing to accept this person as his heir, or that they were impersonating his beloved. My suggestion for that is that maybe he loved the child seeing as they were the child of his ‘true love’, and/or perhaps the delusion the child was his beloved was originally his, and the child grew to accept it. Regardless of the reason, the result is the same; the epitaph seems to be addressed to this person. Perhaps in this case, as I did propose, the “resurrection of lost love” might refer to some forgiveness of a member of the family; in this case for what was done to this child.
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As you’ve mentioned, if Kinzo is deceased at the start of the game, then Kinzo’s personality as portrayed in the game is inherently unreliable. However, he distinctly has a poor attitude towards his entire family, even in flashbacks such as in Ep3’s opening with Eva, and generally doesn’t seem to like anyone except maybe Genji and Nanjo, though he lent support to Natsuhi in Ep1. The epitaph defines the “resurrection of the love that was lost” and as it was written by Kinzo would surely indicate that this is referring to Beatrice.
So I suppose I’m wondering… why does he love Beatrice so much? Why set up such an elaborate riddle that supposedly involves going to freaking Taiwan to solve? If the culprit that you’ve put forward is the person Kinzo is addressing the epitaph to, then they’ve been on the island for a good while. In early Ep4 Okonogi and Ange discuss a theory whereby Kinzo put forward the epitaph so that he could secretly tell Eva the answer and secure her place as the Family Head, so why not do this with this ‘Beatrice’ person to circumvent the rest of his family?
And if your answer is “Of course, that’s just what Kinzo would do” I won’t accept it.
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Well, as an aside, on the multiple personalities thing, do you think if this person did have multiple personalities, they would be able to plan out such murders? They’d have to be quite self aware of each of their personalities to be able to carry out these murders? Or, perhaps all the personalities agree to commit the murders and they each have their own individual murders?
As for the rest of your line of thought, it is a bit odd to say that the main family would be aware of this supposed child, assuming that they are in fact the Beatrice of 1967- they’d be much older than either Jessica or George, so an hier dispute shouldn’t be a problem. And the fact they were not born from Kinzo’s wife shouldn’t be a problem considering how much Kinzo valued Beatrice over her wife- I’d imagine Kinzo would openly made them hier. Of course if the child is Beatrice’s (1967) child, they’d be ~21 years old by the family conference rolled around- again older than Jessica, and if Kinzo knew about this child, wouldn’t he have made an announcement about it proclaiming them to be heir? Of course I admit this thinking of mine is a bit weak since it is contingent on Kinzo valuing Beatrice’s “blood” as it were so much more over his family’s.
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@farispie Regarding the multiple personalities, I think the personalities are aware of each other, considering they actively converse with each other at several points, particularly in the beginning of episode 2. As for being able to carry out murders; if we are already suggesting that the red truth saying the personalities are dead is bogus in some regard, that may mean that those personalities are no longer able to control the body, so regardless of what the other personalities think of the murders, once they are “killed”, the Beatrice personality is in control.
I think the easy way to debunk this second problem is that an illegitimate child defines the problem here - it is illegitimate, thus would not be “fitting” as heir to the Ushiromiya headship. As we’re shown in the beginning of Ep4, the Ushiromiya family falls under public scrutiny a fair bit, so it would be tough to let an illegitimate child to be accepted, both internally and externally, as head of the family.
@MagusVerborum It’s tough to say why Kinzo would go this roundabout route with the evidence present. We’ve only seen Kinzo through narration and through character’s memories, so it’s hard to speculate what his actual motives were. Here’s my thought though; the idea that Kinzo would have told someone the answer to let them get the headship doesn’t really make sense on its own, because the epitaph has been present for some years before the 1986. I could speculate as to why the “victor” would be told to wait, as Okonogi said, such as to ease suspicion of cheating, or in order to let someone actually have a chance.
I’m pretty stuck as to what the truth of the intent might be because we’re only just now up to witnessing what happened after the massacre in our playthrough, so the truth of Eva’s survival is still in question. We don’t even know for sure if Eva’s survival was shown exactly as displayed in Ep3, though it does match up nicely. If the epitaph is addressed to Beatrice, but then Eva ‘won’, what does that mean for the intent of the Epitaph? This mismatching between the epitaph and the outcome seems to suggest a different intent to me. I’m struggling for an initial idea to go off here but struggling to start a theory hasn’t killed me yet. Perhaps it’s time to rewatch everything another time through.
Here’s some spitballing (these were part of a conversation with someone else who has never read Umineko, just so I’m being transparent):
- Maybe the motive actually was to have one of his children prove themselves, but he hoped it was the illegitimate child thus why it was addressed to Beatrice
- Maybe the illegitimate child doesn’t actually know who they are (thus why they seem to have no personality that is an Ushiromiya), and this was to try draw them out
- Conversely, what if Kinzo knew he had the child but didn’t know who the child was and this was to try find them (or this and the previous)
- If his legitimate children know Beatrice has something to do with the Epitaph, maybe they will try uncover Beatrice to solve it, thus revealing the child to Kinzo
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Here is another thought, if you claim Kinzo is dead by the gameboard’s start, then naturally the culprit is using the epitaph for their own purposes. Why do you suppose they are killing using the epitaph as a guideline for the murders? Is it simply a weird quirk of the “Beatrice” personality or is there something more to It?
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Whilst its possible that it is just a quirk where the “witch” personality makes their actions seem like those of a witch, I’m sure there’s something more to it; the question is what is what.
My immediate thought is that the culprit was trying to make things complicated; so that they might avoid persecution once the event is over. This definitely seems to the impression given by the ‘endless’ loop of chessboard turning Battler does in Ep1 after the first twilight, but of course as far as we can tell the culprit doesn’t survive the game anyway, at least from the examples we’ve seen. The other idea I’ve had is that for some reason maybe they are trying to direct someone to the epitaph; perhaps in an effort to unveil the truth and stop them, though I don’t know why that would be. This is what I think the witch’s letters allude to, at least. Despite the letters, it doesn’t make a lot of sense considering that the killings continue once Eva solves the epitaph in Ep3. I can’t think of much else outside those, at least from the footage I’ve been looking over right now.
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Well, I can’t confirm or deny, but in regards to episode 3- Eva never actually announced she solved the epitaph, right? IIRC only Rosa and Hideyoshi knew. So maybe the culprit simply didn’t know the epitaph was solved ?
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If the culprit was determined to kill everyone, why would they stop doing so after the epitaph was solved? Isn’t that contradictory? Maybe you should explain this in more detail but I really don’t get how this could be possible, especially since even after Eva solved it the killings continued.
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Well, the thought was more in regards to why the murders follow the Epitaph; it would seem that making the killings partially predictable would be a more risky way to go about these things. As well as this, as I said, the scene in episode 1 where Battler keeps spinning the chessboard over and over again, it doesn’t seem to make sense that the killer is making these murders easily visible. My thinking then was; why would you want the killings to be visible and follow a pattern? My guess was that you wanted to provide some way for people to stop you, or to direct them to the Epitaph. As you and I both said, it doesn’t make sense since the killings continue in Episode 3, but what @farispie says, it might work if the killer didn’t know that the epitaph was solved.
I do actually wonder; maybe that was the intent of the set of numbers we saw at the end of episode 3? Was the “small golden land” some sort of repayment for not stopping the killings once the epitaph had been solved? I wonder what, then? I had suggested it was some password or pin, maybe to a supply of money, or some of the gold, but I haven’t been able to find any mention of anything specific which would answer that.
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