Great to see you finally stepping up to the plate, @EisenKoubu. I might just like to have you on this podcast!
You raised some very good points. However, I feel like your judgements about Beatrice might be a little off the mark. I don’t believe she’s a failure of a villain. I think she deserves more credit than you give her.
Anyway, I’d like to talk a bit about Umineko’s philosophy of magic. This is my own perspective, so don’t take it as a declaration from Ryukishi himself. Let me know if I lose you at any point.
Magic in the context of Umineko isn’t literally a force we can properly define as magic. Like, if magic WAS real, then it would still be a mystery. If magic is real, then we can reason that it must follow laws. Killing somebody with a fireball is no different to shooting them with a gun, it’s just a different method of killing. You’d still need to explain how she was able to shoot them with a fireball and escape the room, yknow?
What magic really means in the context of Beatrice’s game isn’t a matter of accepting magic as an explanation. It’s using magic as a representation of ‘the unknown’. Since magic is something beyond our comprehension, it exists only to satisfy the requirement of a ‘cause’ of the incident without the need to provide comprehensive proof. The term ‘devil’s proof’ describes the existence of magic in this context perfectly. It exists to provide an explanation to that which we cannot explain ourselves. How convenient.
Therefore, since this is not a rational system of magic we can calculate and predict, but rather a representation of the unknown, a witch isn’t a being which necessarily has to ‘exist’. In reality, a witch occupies the darkness of the world which can never be observed. She is both everywhere and nowhere. Therefore, representing her as an interger of 1 or 0, like we would a human or any other thing with a physical existence, is a fallacy. It doesn’t matter if there’s only 18 people on the island, and it doesn’t matter if other life-forms have any bearing on the game or not. The witch is more of a concept than a physical existence.
The witch’s win condition is not to have the challenger accept the existence of magic (even from an epistemological standpoint, it’s illogical to accept the existence of magic). Rather, it’s the witch side’s win condition is to force the opponent into a state where they cannot form an answer. Accepting magic exists is equivalent to not thinking, it’s accepting the illogical as an explanation for the unknown.
Having said all this, this is only from the perspective of a human in the human world. What’s great is that Umineko exists on mulitple layers of reality, and what may be true of one world doesn’t have to be true of another. As we know, in the meta plane, witches and magic physically exist. Likewise, on the layer of the gameboard as presented to Battler (the reader), magical interpretations of unseen events are everywhere. Beatrice and Virgilia had an epic magic battle in the courtyard, after all! Then, from the perspective of the greater narrative, do these scenes serve any purpose other than to misdirect us?
Discuss~