@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 âkilledâ, 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 âfittingâ as heir to the Ushiromiya headship. As weâre 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 Itâs tough to say why Kinzo would go this roundabout route with the evidence present. Weâve only seen Kinzo through narration and through characterâs memories, so itâs hard to speculate what his actual motives were. Hereâs my thought though; the idea that Kinzo would have told someone the answer to let them get the headship doesnât 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 âvictorâ 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.
Iâm pretty stuck as to what the truth of the intent might be because weâre only just now up to witnessing what happened after the massacre in our playthrough, so the truth of Evaâs survival is still in question. We donât even know for sure if Evaâs survival was shown exactly as displayed in Ep3, though it does match up nicely. If the epitaph is addressed to Beatrice, but then Eva âwonâ, 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. Iâm struggling for an initial idea to go off here but struggling to start a theory hasnât killed me yet. Perhaps itâs time to rewatch everything another time through.
Hereâs some spitballing (these were part of a conversation with someone else who has never read Umineko, just so Iâm 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 doesnât 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 didnât 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
Here is another thought, if you claim Kinzo is dead by the gameboardâs 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 âBeatriceâ personality or is there something more to It?
Whilst its possible that it is just a quirk where the âwitchâ personality makes their actions seem like those of a witch, Iâm sure thereâs 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 âendlessâ loop of chessboard turning Battler does in Ep1 after the first twilight, but of course as far as we can tell the culprit doesnât survive the game anyway, at least from the examples weâve seen. The other idea Iâve 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 donât know why that would be. This is what I think the witchâs letters allude to, at least. Despite the letters, it doesnât make a lot of sense considering that the killings continue once Eva solves the epitaph in Ep3. I canât think of much else outside those, at least from the footage Iâve been looking over right now.
Well, I canât 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 didnât know the epitaph was solved ?
If the culprit was determined to kill everyone, why would they stop doing so after the epitaph was solved? Isnât that contradictory? Maybe you should explain this in more detail but I really donât get how this could be possible, especially since even after Eva solved it the killings continued.
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 doesnât 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 doesnât make sense since the killings continue in Episode 3, but what @farispie says, it might work if the killer didnât 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 âsmall golden landâ 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 havenât been able to find any mention of anything specific which would answer that.