Discussion topic for Ange Ushiromiya, Battler’s younger sister. Feel free to discuss the entirety of Umineko without [spoiler] tags, but please tag references to outside works, providing adequate context in parenthesis. This topic will contain massive spoilers, so if you have not finished reading Umineko yourself proceed with caution.
I am now going to sum up Ange’s entire character in EP8 with one image:
I believe Ange is there to be what Sayo failed to be. She is the living cat while Sayo is the dead one. With Umineko ending in death, Ange is needed to show off the tiniest bit of hope in the story. Her realisation is for me the most touching thing in the entire series. To end the story with her character arc is probably the most beautiful thing ryukishi ever did in my opinion.
I can’t remember if the VN had it or not, but I believe Beato says pretty much exactly this in the Ep8 manga. IIRC, when she says that, yes, she’s the one who stole Ange’s family from her, she goes on to talk about how she and Ange were in very similar situations - no one to listen to them, no hope for a better future, nothing - and asks Ange to live on, for her sake as well.
Hell, even her description up there (From Ep4, right?) parallels Sayo towards the end - “her heart has been laid to waste,” “has a bad habit of […] throwing [cash] out to whoever comes first.”
On that note, does anyone else really love Ep4 Ange in particular? Goats Reading Seacats does a great job of wording it that I don’t think I could, but I love how in the end, not only is Ange fully aware that her goals are different from Battler’s, but instead of using her understanding of magic and witches to sympathize with and understand Beato, she uses it to tear her Golden Land apart and drag her back to her game.
The way she understands that her own goals are at odds with everyone else’s, and how she understands the kind of person Beato must have been to become a witch, and yet she’s unapologetic about fighting for at least one version of herself to have a happy life, to the point of manipulating Battler into killing the woman he’s fallen in love with for her sake… I really love that about Ange. I can’t think of many other characters in other works with similar motives like that.
EDIT: Huh, does the reply arrow thing only show up on top of other people’s posts? I don’t see it on my own here…