[[quote=“ctom42, post:13, topic:183”]
I could make that claim about any character in any story. Even the human characters in Umineko are all there for a purpose. They each have a vice or two that they represent, there are lesson to be learned from them. The only reason there is a difference between the humans and the meta characters is because you decided there was. The reason you could not related to them as human was because you chose not to.
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I will openly admit that I do not view them as such. Whether it is because I choose not to or whether it is a subconscious reaction from my understanding of the story, I can’t quite say. But assuming I do view them as actual characters and not as representations, I find them 10 degrees less interesting than the cast of Rokkenjima, and for one main reason: they lack a backstory. Yes Dlanor is supposedly doing the work of the Eisene Jungfrau, and Will is from the SSVD, but we have absolutely no information about these organizations. We don’t know how these organizations work and, as such, we won’t be able to relate to these characters own gripes towards the organizations they work for. We only see a small part of their internal struggle, but because of the lack of a background, we can’t see the factors affecting this struggle.
So even if I view them more as genuine characters and less as representations, they still remain uninteresting characters to me, the same way I feel disinterested with characters from other series that lack backstory. And when a large chunk of the story involves uninteresting characters in an equally uninteresting setting, having them fight against each other to try to answer the questions, then I will naturally feel that they retract from the story.
So at this point, how should I even go about viewing the metaworld? The two options shown to me are that I either look at it as a representation of the thoughts and emotions main story (which I dislike because it pulls away from analyzing the characters in Rokkenjima from a human perspective), or I look at it as a separate story, with characters and a conflict that exist and progress away from the original story (which I dislike because of the lack of background towards the world that was constructed for it).
See, Beatrice is an exception; she has a genuine backstory. While there is a big disconnect between “Beatrice the witch” and “Beatrice the human”, the fantasy side of hers is still connected to the human side. So I will say right now, when she started turning into a lifeless being at the end of Episode 4, I felt absolutely nothing for her, not even remorse; only after I learned her backstory could I truly empathize with her desires as a character.