Umineko Episode 5 Full Series Spoilers General

07th Discussion
#84

With the scene laid out I’ll put some non exhaustive examples of how dunnit (culprit may not refer to murder, ie culprit of a prank):

  1. Everyone there was involved, they all lied to Erika (under the assumption the detective’s authority can’t force the culprits to speak the truth) and Erika did not examine the corpses.
  2. Above, except Erika did look at the corpses and was fooled because of movie makeup, fake corpses or an illusionist trick
  3. Some of the people were culprits and lied to Erika, and some didn’t hence they witnessed the corpses and were fooled
  4. The victims weren’t culprits but were unconscious and not dead

The point about the how dunnit is the implications:

If the solution is used were they all lie to Erika, then automatically everyone involved has to be a culprit. However that means a motive has to be assigned to all these people and a time when they met and conspired for this scene.
If only some lie, then the innocent must have witnessed and been fooled by the corpses.
The preparation time and materials for making a corpse realistic enough to fool someone is much longer then the time to just lie to Erika.
If someone somehow can create a valid theory of the victims being actual victims, then explaining the disappearance requires more detail.

This particular mystery allows for the simplest solution, but my point is that each how dunnit has implications that have to link together with all the other mysteries in the game. All culprits will need a motive and all plans will need preparation. Waving off a mystery as accident reduces the implications one can gather to piece together the entire thing.

#85

Another question: Pieces aren’t allowed to act out of character, but does this count for Kinzo’s “ghost” as well? Or is that exempt due to being in Natsuhi’s head?

#86

That depends on your interpretation of Bernkastel’s mocking statement
[color=red]“Natsuhi. When did Kinzo ever say it was okay for you to engrave the One-winged Eagle into your heart? Those were just the words of the Kinzo from your delusions, weren’t they? …You know, the real Kinzo… Not once in his entire life did he ever trust you from the bottom of his heart, and not once did he ever consider letting you bear the family crest!”[/color]

#87

I always fond the “Pieces aren’t allowed to act out of character” statement really weird, because no one actually knows the true character of these people, hence why you can have theories like Black Battler or ep. 5 as a whole.

#88

I don’t think that’s a problem at all, I see 2 different ways that Kinzo’s ghost behaviour could be acceptable:

  1. Kinzo’s ghost is not Kinzo, so we can’t say someone’s imaginary friend is “out of character”
  2. Even though Kinzo never did those things, he was capable of it. I personally prefer this one since it ties nicely with Black Battler.
1 Like
#89

I agree with that take as well. Also remember Eva being a culprit in episode 3 despite not being either the intended culprit nor the one in the real world. Of course, Tohya just wanted to go with theories the readers were already familiar with when thinking up the episode, but it strikes as odd that someone as optimistic as Tohya would think murder is in-character for Eva. It is just far less troubling an implication when you go with ‘capable’ as the intended meaning like you do.

#90

Well, Eva herself admitted she would be capable of it, didn’t she? Of course Ep. 3 is really more complex than that, Rosa’s murder was basically an incident and things spiraled from there… which is really similar to Ep. 7’s Tea Party.

#91

But Eva only admitted that in the episode 7 tea party… which I find somewhat problematic especially after the episode 8 manga revealed Battler never met with her after Kyrie’s death but spent the entire day with Yasu in the underground base. Therefore there is absolutely no way that Tohya knew the exact words of the exchange Eva and Kyrie had, if there was any at all. Both women’s allusions to the catbox and Eva being taken aback when Kyrie says the roles could be reversed seem to be mostly insertions made by Tohya himself to allude to both the purpose Umineko still had for Ange and of course as a throwback to episode 3 itself. The dialogue and the choice of words is just too suspicious to be anything that really happened, in my opinion…

#92

Hmm, I’m not sure I understand what you mean. The Tea Party is from Eva’s point of view. Even in Ep. 8 we get the confirmation that “there is no game master”, so I take it as a biased view of the events from Eva’s pov. Of course Eva doesn’t know what Kyrie is thinking, but she sure as hell knows what she’s capable of herself.

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#93

I’m just looking at it from outside the narrative. The story still is written by Tohya and he is the one writing Eva’s POV. He was not present in almost any of the events described in episode 7 and in fact made them as cruel as possible in order to prevent the real Ange reading it from accepting it too easily.

Isn’t it also said that a diary of Eva doesn’t exist or that even if it exists, Tohya hasn’t read it?

All I’m saying is that I take Bernkastel very seriously when she’s saying in red that the depicted events are the truth, but only after a fashion. There is still the bias of the author involved, and Tohya has good reason to invoke a flashback to episode 3 there, one that doesn’t necessarily needs to be rooted in stuff Eva would be willing to do for real.

#94

Oh I get it now. Personally, I don’t think the forgeries had any meta in them and honestly I can’t imagine Tohya (Or anyone) writing Requiem (Which basically only exists to torture Beato and Ange and is all meta), especially the Tea Party. But in the end, when Ange opens the diary in episode 8 Manga it seems like she really is forced to watch again Ep. 7’s Tea Party (Hence the “I told you over and over there was no game master”), so that would mean Tohya wrote about Eva’s personal diary and experience without having read Eva’s diary which is… a paradox.

Anyway the bigger discussion was how pieces cannot act out of character, wasn’t it? Do we know for sure Eva wouldn’t be capable of murder? Especially given the crazy circumstances? We do know she “accidentally” shot her brother’s wife and refused to take responsibility, triggering the incident. And if we assume everything is fiction then, why wouldn’t pieces be able to act out of character? Isn’t one of the points of the story that no one actually knows what happened, and these people?

#95

Yes! Yes! Doubly yes! That was the entire reason why I brought this tangent up! Because it shows that even with that statement of pieces needing to act in-character, it’s not really all that restrictive because the author still decides what is in-character and what is not. Therefore ‘capable’, like TsukiyoAlex stated, seems to be the better definition, because it still forces the author to come up with a justification that respects the heart of the characters involved.

From my point of view, a game master just means there is a character on the purgatory-level involved who designed the gameboard to make it a logic battle. ‘No Game master’ means that the tea party isn’t intended as a mystery. But it’s still a fictional document written for the purpose of being read, therefore the bias of Tohya still applies. He isn’t a game master, he’s just the author after all.

#96

This should go into EP7 discussion. Who wrote EP7 then or what does it represent?