Regarding the Red (Umineko Full Series Spoilers)

[Renall]

You misunderstand my point then. I’m not denying that red speaks to the truth value of statements. I’m saying it can have multiple meanings at multiple levels of the narrative because of its fundamental decontextual nature and the ambiguity of its construction.

Also that’s… really not how Red vs. Blue battles work. It’s the way they’re presented as working, but Beatrice (1) didn’t actually want to win, and (2) had an ulterior motive that she wanted to accomplish beyond simply being defeated. That ulterior motive is precisely the thing I’m talking about here. Just because a character tells you they’re playing a certain game doesn’t mean they are. That’s the whole reason Battler “wins” at the end of Alliance but doesn’t truly “understand” until the end of End.

There is actually an example of a bunch of red referring to things that aren’t things by the by, it’s much of the red in End (the knock, and the “deaths”). Is it unfair that Lambdadelta referred to an event that didn’t occur by stating things that weren’t true about the event? It certainly creates the impression that there is an actual thing there that she’s talking about, but at no point does the red necessarily require that.

Umineko Episode 1 - Full Series Spoilers General

Hmm, it’s a valid interpretation I can’t argue against with any basic premises, but that interpretation is heavily at odds with my own understanding of what Umineko is about. My interpretation is that rather than the fantasy and mystery narrative being both more or less at odds with the third narrative, it’s instead the narrative you get if you converge them back into one full story; the subjective embellishments (the fantasy narrative) and the cold hard facts (the mystery narrative), combined into one. That’s what the ‘third layer’ is to me. And the core message of Umineko is that this is the narrative worth seeking. Not just the illusions, not just the facts, but rather a combination of the two. You might say “looking at the facts with love”.

Mystery and Fantasy, as genres, can never synthesize into a true story. They are, by their very nature, embellishments that follow certain fictional tropes and rules. One of the points of Erika existing is that she is as absurd as a detective as Beatrice is as a witch. Confronted with the full power of a stereotypical murder mystery detective, Erika comes across to a reader as Mary Sue-ish and overpowered and downright inhuman. That most likely isn’t an accident. Battler is a poor detective for a Mystery story because he wasn’t a murder mystery detective; Erika is, and seen for what she is she’s just as hard to swallow. The fact she’s wrong about the truth or looking for a truth that “fits” further demonstrates that Mystery isn’t the answer either. We see how useful “cold hard facts” were in “proving” Natsuhi’s guilt.

What Mystery and Fantasy can do is dress up a true story by latching on to elements that play to their respective strengths and diverge from the truth into their respective genres. And then someone could certainly slam the two back together into a single narrative, but it’s not about seeing through one to the truth of another; the “cold hard facts” don’t exist in reality. The entire case surrounding Rokkenjima is unknown and unknowable. Testimony is limited and colored by interpretation and distorted by unintentional misdirection (message bottles etc.). Red truth does not exist in the real world.

Umineko Episode 1 - Full Series Spoilers General

Of course this in turn means that I believe the mystery narrative is very much exactly what happened and not a game that was never real. It’s the story Erika considers important; the facts without love, made of pure unfiltered anti-magic toxin. The narrative the red truths have to be aligned with lest you find yourself in a Logic Error.

You know Battler might’ve put himself in that Logic Error on purpose right? He had a particular objective and he accomplished it in spite of what Erika believed, and in many respects in direct contradiction to Erika’s expectations about how the game was supposed to work. There’s more to that reading than might be immediately apparent.