Umineko Episode 1 - Full Series Spoilers General

[Karifean]

The blood is fake, as is the reaction to it. Everyone who “discovered” the FT knew exactly what they were going to find and where they were going to find it. Kumasawa’s reactions are highly suspect at basically all times ever.

There’s a technique in stage magic (and con artistry) called misdirection. The point is to create a situation that appears to match obvious conclusions so that people don’t notice what’s really going on. The “discovery” of blood in the dining hall after the discovery of the FT literally leads Battler to the conclusion the six must’ve been killed there the night before. So we don’t realize that’s not the way they were killed (if they were killed at all). You said yourself you believe it was poison (from somewhere or other); obviously there are not going to be blood puddles in the dining room if people were poisoned. It’s a plant. Nobody walked in there and shot five people. Didn’t happen. Couldn’t happen.

I did consider the idea of the blood being faked, and it being misdirection is a rather intuitive and easy interpretation, but the problem is, misdirection why? Why would Yasu put in that bit of misdirection, what would she accomplish with that? So far I haven’t been able to come up with a plausible reason. And as long as I don’t find one I’m not going to assume the blood is a fake just because it could be.

George is not a POV in that scene and most certainly is not a reliable POV, and he never sees Hideyoshi (no one sees Hideyoshi except allegedly Natsuhi/Kanon/Genji before the cousins even show up; the shower is off and the door is shut). And yes, there is every reason to doubt a story of a scene that was allegedly discovered by the supposed culprit and which Battler barely experienced before everyone was hustled out. This is elementary stuff. If you have any suspicion of Kanon at all then everything supposedly seen from his perspective should be viewed as little more than it almost certainly was: A story.

My point is it’s not a story about how they were killed, but a story that they were killed at all.

George is not a POV but he talks about the ‘ice picks’ in his parents’ skulls later on, and he definitely saw Eva’s body himself so that’s not second-hand information. And since I don’t believe George is in on it (his reactions are WAY too genuine to believably be from a script) I’ll take his word for it.

There’s a lot to doubt in Kanon’s story, hell that very scene has a lot of obvious fantasy in it, but even so I still question whether individual details are unreliably narrated, and if so there must be a reason for that.

In response to this part in particular:

If you have any suspicion of Kanon at all then everything supposedly seen from his perspective should be viewed as little more than it almost certainly was: A story.

A story is still told for a reason. There’s a lot of scenes in this episode basically told from Kanon’s perspective (albeit by a narrator) that contain a lot of very important bits of truth in them. Dismissing everything that’s seen from his perspective as ‘a story’ and not thinking deeper into it is pretty destructive.

So you admit that you do not have textual evidence from Legend to demonstrate that the culprit possesses a gun in Legend. Wounds are questionable if they exist at all, supposedly necessary gunshots go unheard, “Beatrice” does not appear to be in possession of a weapon at the end. Why should your take on events be treated seriously? You’re materializing poisons and guns out of thin air. My solution is simpler: There was no need for them (in Legend anyway).

My problem with your argument is that all of what you want me to support with evidence is incredibly obvious and apparent if you don’t assume it’s all fake. Like there being more than one gun; it’s unmistakably proven by Natsuhi being shot at the end. And because I don’t think it’s fake, that’s that! It’s direct textual evidence that the culprit possesses a gun! ONLY barring the interpretation that it’s all fake, which again, I don’t share. Why don’t I share it? For reasons from all over Umineko, which I’ll gladly elaborate on as we go through the Tea Party.

I don’t think it’s as easy as you’re making it out to sound, particularly given the state of the scene. Your logistics are hard to swallow. Even something like “they pretended to fake it and Nanjo got taken out first and the other two accepted it” is more reasonable than this notion (but still unreasonable). I think if you’re going to lean on the “not killers” red you’re going to put yourself in a really uncomfortable place by using Genji as a get-out-of-rational-physically-possible-explanations-free card. Genji is not actually a suicidal robot; that’s his character, but we know it isn’t his true and full self (based on Yasu’s observations of him and Ronove’s characterization).

He’s not a suicidal robot but he’s more than aware of the fact that they’re all going to die at midnight anyways and feels incredibly indebted to both Kinzo and Yasu. He’s already been willing to help Yasu with murders, and he continues to do so in Turn.

Maria is also not a freaking robot and she does get scared and doubtful at times. She’s trusting and a little naive, but there has to be a limit and this would be it. You cannot with a straight face attempt to argue that you can be in the same room as somebody firing no fewer than 6 rounds of live ammunition and messing up a body in some fashion and not be unsettled by this even a little bit. Or that the culprit, being the witness’s ostensible friend, wouldn’t stop and think this might be taking things a little too far.

All I can say is… no it wouldn’t be the limit. Like I thought of writing a lengthy argument, but that’s basically what it boils down to, so there.

Gross details like that are among the easiest things to fake because they create a sense of revulsion. Totally reasonable if you can accept the premise, and the onus is frankly on you to explain how in a series where basically every FT appears faked why this one wouldn’t be (HINT: Because this one is also faked, at the very least in initial premise; if nothing else it’s the easiest way to get everyone to the shed).

It’s funny when comparing this to the previous quote exchanges we just had, because I find this to be a lot less reasonable than you make it out to be. The idea that Battler describes the bodies like that and fails to notice that it’s all fake is very hard, nay pretty much impossible for me to swallow. And neither of the following two episodes’ first twilights are faked so I fail to see how I’m in any obligation to explain why “this one in particular is not”.

And again you’re dodging the question of why this keeps being repeated. Themes do not exist in isolation or for no reason. The magic symbols don’t repeatedly get referred to as a “weird paint” or “blood-like substance” if they’re just blood. They’re almost certainly not blood anyway – did Kanon meticulously drain blood out of people into a bucket to paint stuff with? – so we have evidence right in our faces of blood-like fakery going down. You can’t find an extra gun, but I can find “blood makeup” right there in the text painted on the shutter.

I apologize if I dodged a question without realizing, it wasn’t my intention. Basically the reason I believe that this wording comes up repeatedly is because that’s the narration style Battler uses to describe something unbelievable. Like he can’t believe this is actually happening so he narrates it as something not real. Consequentially, when he actually stops calling it makeup like one or two lines later he essentially acknowledges it as being real which is a much bigger deal to me.

As for the evidence thing, I went into this earlier. A lot of the evidence is implicitly present if you accept that the murders are real.

I think it’s fairly important to consider Legend and Turn together when looking at the progression of the meta-plot. I think you’re not giving enough credit to the idea of what things were “supposed” to be like in the original (i.e. Yasu-authored) stories vs. what the stories of Rokkenjima became under other authors, and how this influences the development of the Meta-Battler/Meta-Beatrice interaction.

I’m a bit at a loss what you actually want me to explain here. The meta plot hasn’t even really started at this point in Umineko yet - at least there’s nothing for us to observe - but I’ll just say that I think that from the perspective of the meta plane the change in authorship from Yasu to Tohya is, in fact, trivial and unimportant. What’s much, much more important in the meta plane is the change in game master from Beato to Lambda to Battler (which didn’t come with a change in authorship for the forgeries). But again I feel like later episodes provide a better opportunity to discuss this, partly too because I want to reread the episodes before I end up constructing a flimsy argument based on possibly wrong memories that makes our discussion lead to nowhere.

Yeah that wouldn’t make any sense if they all knew Kinzo was dead and were working off some kind of script. Wait no that’s exactly the sort of situation that would arise if they were doing so.

Except that Natsuhi trying to hide Kinzo’s death is a prevalent issue both on October 4th and 5th, and I see no reason to doubt the legitimacy of any of it. She reacts exactly the way she would if it’s not staged, even to the point of getting defensive about her own magical coping mechanisms. Not to mention we actually get a scene narrated from her perspective where she “tries to convince Kinzo” which goes entirely against the idea of it all being a script, unless you reject literally everything about that scene.

She never wants to be “stopped by somebody.” She wants to be “stopped” by Battler. The entire thing is for his sake. She claims she will leave this to fate whether “somebody” stops her… just like Beatrice claims that fate chooses her victims. Guess what? One of these statements was definitely bullshit. The other one… well, what do you think I think? There’s a reason one of Beatrice’s patrons is a Witch of Certainty. Creating a “certain miracle” is a thing Battler does in EP6 to demonstrate his understanding of her game. Battler heavily employs a misdirection to create that miracle, and was actually doing the whole thing for Beatrice’s sake and not the sake of the witches.

The intended miracle was that Battler would appear to beat the odds. Appear to. The deck was supposed to be stacked in his favor but look like everything was against him. The Battler of the stories (and/or Meta-Battler) failed at this for a long while. The Battler of reality (probably) succeeded, but other factors complicated the outcome (as suggested by episodes after Turn).

This quote in particular indicates to me a fundamental difference in our understandings of how Yasu’s mind works. First off, I think neither of the two claims you paraphrase are bullshit. Secondly, what does she want to be “stopped” from, exactly? Or better yet, what was her most basic goal in the first place? Thirdly, does the motivation of (Meta)-Beatrice align with Yasu’s game board motivation in your interpretation? There’s a lot more in your interpretation I can’t quite wrap my head around just yet.