There will be unmarked spoilers for the entirety of Umineko in this topic.
So do the game pieces in Umineko have minds of their own? If so, how is it that they’re also controlled by a player at the same time?
I think the story is pretty explicit that the pieces are mindless. They get into it a lot in episode 6, especially with the scene of Battler talking to piece Beatrice.
That said I don’t think them being pieces invalidates them in any way. It’s all about perspective.
On the board itself they are people. From the perspective of the players on the meta level they are mere pieces. However on the level above that they are merely part of a story being written by Yasy/ Hachijou Toyha. And on the level above that even those characters are simply part of Ryukishi’s story that we are reading.
The pieces are just as valid as any other fictional character. Just because they are several levels deep does not make them any less of characters. The restriction that they can only perform actions they specialize in helps with that as well. It keeps them consistent as characters despite changes of GMs.
That said there is still a distinction that must be made between piece-meta- and “real” versions. For example piece Kinzo changes a lot from game to game because his range of acceptable actions is rather wide. His presence is often larger than life and this is because of how his family and the world in general view the mysterious Kinzo. We don’t get to see what “real” Kinzo was like, but Battler reminds the viewers in episode 8 that what we did see was only an interpretation of Kinzo.
That’s why when viewing any character in the story it’s important to consider them from all angles, how they are presented in all stories. Things that change between different GMs or different authors as well as things that stay the same are clues that lead to a clearer view of the actual person.
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I would say that they have some form of consciousness. Mainly with the way Virgilia acts after she is eliminated in EP 3. She still holds some information with what happened and helped Battler with how to fight against Beatrice. Maybe that was because she was a witch, and the author saw her as a being who had enough power to remain conscious of her actions as a game piece after she left the board, like the GM.
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Actually, the GMs can make them act out of character. It only says that the pieces are especially good at actions that reflect their original personalities, not that they’re incapable of other actions. Also, I believe that it’s specifically stated in the manga that Lambda caused Beatrice to act out of character on the EP5 game board.
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True, they are not completely incapable of acting out of character. However that’s no different from an author writing something out of character for one of their characters in a story. The gameboards can very directly be compared to D&D style roleplaying games, as they have a GM controlling most of the cast while a player gets to control a single character. The characters in your RPG games are still plenty valid to you as a player, even if an inexperienced GM may make them act differently. But like I said, there is a difference between the piece characters and the “real” characters
I am assuming this is about the way she acts with Natsuhi. The only other thing I can think of was her flirting with Battler, but that was definitely completely in character.
I see this as something very different. Virgillia is a being on a higher level, she exists on the level of the witch’s game. Kumasawa was a piece Virgilia was controlling, and turned into the Virgillia piece. When the Virgilia piece was killed Virgillia could no longer appear on the game board.
This is the same as with Beato later in that episode. When she gets killed on the game board she can still challenge Evatrice on the higher plane of the meta-world.
It’s sometimes ambiguous whether characters in the metaworld have their own will or are simply an elevated piece. Evatrice in episode 3 was likely an elevated piece because Evatrice’s whole role was part of Beatrice’s north wind and the sun strategy. The characters in the trial in episode 5 were explicitly elevated pieces, they only moved when they were allowed to. However in episode 8 the entire cast truly exists on the meta-level.
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I get what you’re saying about all the characters technically being mindless puppets controlled by the author, but I guess to me there’s a difference between that and characters being mindless even in their own universe.
The characters are certainly treated as “having their own mind and will”; it’s just that said mind and will is written and dictated by their authors. Same for all fictional characters.
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Now does this mean that anyone that is a being on the same level as Virgilia and such characters have some control outside the GM’s design for the pieces? Or are they limited to what that design? My guess is the latter, to a certain extent.
But their universe is the boardgame. Everyone is mindless to the levels above them. To the Jessica in game 2 Kanon’s death was a truly tragic thing. One of the points of the story is that Battler sees them as people, and Beatrice and the other witches saw them as mere pieces. It’s about whether you have love for your characters or not. Even when Battler is GM he can’t bring himself to write a tale where everyone dies.
Think of it like a D&D style rolelplaying game. If the GM invited you to make a guest appearance as an antagonist in his game and gave you guidelines of what to do, you would follow those guidelines, right? If you started ignoring them and abusing the authority you were given, you would be kicked out of the game and not invited back.
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Makes sense. Makes me laugh thinking of Umineko as one big D&D game with a bunch of extradimensional beings.
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It’s basically what it is though. You’ve got a GM controlling all the NPCs plus the world itself, and a player controlling a single character.
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You say their game board is their universe, but to me their universe is the ‘Umineko’ universe. So while I know that all fictional characters are mindless, it just messes with my suspension of disbelief when we don’t even ‘pretend’ that they aren’t mindless in-universe.
The issue is that there are embedded stories in this story. Most people ignore the highest level of the stories being written by Yasu/Hachijou Tohya but even without that we still have the clear distinction between board and meta-world. To me it’s not a matter of pretending, its a matter of perspective. If you are a layer above the layer below is mindless. If you are on a layer your layer is not mindless.
Umineko is a brilliant piece of fiction, but it’s also meta-fiction. It has things to say about the mystery genre and stories in general. About the interactions of author and reader, and even of author and characters. The fact that you can view say, Kyrie in episode 3 battling Leviathan as a valid character moment, and also view Kyrie in episode 8 fighting in the golden land another valid character moment is part of what makes it impressive
Umineko simultaneously draws clear distinctions about the levels and blurs the edges together. Many people find this confusing, but when you get a grasp of it it creates a really beautiful way to view the whole story.
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Also, I don’t know if this distinction in clear, but the ‘Gameboards’ of Umineko specifically refer to the different fragments that scattered out from the mysterious Rokkenjima mass murders, the ‘forgeries’ if you will. We’re not talking about the entire universe these characters were born into. These fragments aren’t any kind of objective reality; they’re merely representations of ‘possibilities’ conjured up by the witches for the purpose of their game. It’s like taking a chunk of the universe and copy-pasting it a bunch of times to play with. The original is what it is, but the copies are the witches’ playground.
That’s not to say that all fragments work this way, merely the Gameboards of Umineko. But that’s a discussion for another time.
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It is also worth noting that the gameboards are fragments crafted by the GM from the infinite possabilities. Episode 6 briefly touches on Battler constructing his gameboard. Episode 7 is a bit odd because it is described as being multiple fragments that Bern stitched together. I believe this is mostly referring to the events prior to the gameboard that are stitched, while the events in the chapel itself are constructed by the GM as normal.
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I think that the only characters with mind by themselves inside the story are the ones that exist outside of Rokkenjima. As Aspirety said the gameboard of Rokkenjima is a bunch of copypastes of the mass murder that occurred there, and a lot of possibilities about the murders put together.
The pieces inside rokkenjima and the characters in the meta-world are, after all, writed by Thoya, that makes them act and think just as Thoya wants or thinks. They are not more valid than a character in a book, thecnically all of them are like that because they are writed by Ryukishi but not inside the story. And the pieces in the gameboard are moved as mindless not because they dont have a mind of there own, because they have strictly the mind that Thoya establishes for them. The characters in the metaworld are more like a narrator in a book or like Thoya himself arguig about the murders so they are less restricted. They are more like lectors trying to solve the mystery with the autor.
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You do bring to mind something interesting here, and that’s the role of Battler as a piece. In Episode 1, we’re lead to believe that Meta;Battler doesn’t exist yet, since it’s from this fragment that Meta;Battler was born in the Tea Party. In that case, is it safe to assume that the Batter of the Episode 1 Gameboard is in fact just another of Beatrice’s pieces?
But then what about Episode 2 onwards? It’s made clear in Episode 6 that the challenger (Battler through eps 1-5) has control over his own character on the Gameboard, while the rest are controlled by the Game Master. But isn’t that weird?
We have two conflicting interpretations of what the Episodes actually are: forgeries from the bottles, or ‘gameboards’. The former interpretation leaves no possibility that the Battler featured in the forgeries has any free will; surely, they must be following the script of the author. But the latter interpretation, on the Meta layer, strongly suggests that Battler as a character is controlled by the will of Meta;Battler. Thus, he is acting outside of the author’s (Beatrice’s) understanding and influence.
How can we hope to resolve this apparent paradox?
I like to defer to a particular scene in Episode 5 for this matter. Specifically, when Dlanor thanks Battler in the rose garden for the duel they had earlier on. Battler remarks that that was not him, just the piece version of him that Lambdadelta wrote, but Dlanor responds that pieces specialize in actions appropriate to their original personality, therefore it was certainly something Battler himself was capable of.
I think since the game boards / tales themselves are acknowledged as fragments on the meta plane, it’s not off the mark to assume the characters are accurate representations of their real counterparts. Saying “it isn’t real” isn’t getting us anywhere fast.
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Not that paradoxical at all: Meta-Battler is not Ushiromiya Battler, Meta-Beatrice is not Yasu. That’s part of Beatrice’s characterization, even; “who am I” and such. We also know that Forgeries are not completely devoid of manipulation because a Reader or Game Master can embellish elements (and if the message bottles are briefer summaries of tales, what we see by necessity must’ve been so embellished).
It is entirely possible that the meta-layer doesn’t exist at all until Legend concludes, bizarre as that might sound. Beatrice is literally revived by the “ritual” of the EP1 narrative, and Battler is literally elevated to the meta-layer by his challenge to her. It’s weird, but it’s the meta-world, which is explicitly magical and potentially nonlinear to a huge degree (Meta-Ange being contemporary with Meta-Battler, e.g.).
So basically: “Battler” as we know him is the elevated meta-construct of the Battler of Legend, who is a character in a story presumably written by the RL Yasu but not the actual “Ushiromiya Battler” who existed in Yasu’s real world (if there is any real world). Likewise, “Beatrice” as we know her was born from the possibility space of the witch being real as an answer to the stories, but with only as much information as Yasu imbued into her own characters; since she was deliberately obscuring that information, not even Beatrice necessarily knows everything about her source. The two of them then go on to engage other Forgeries/Fragments and Battler’s position there can be seen as almost a sort of secondary Reader to Beatrice as Game Master. The story is formed by their back-and-forth on the layer of interpretation, with tweaking pushes of the story taken by each (but more by Beatrice than by Battler).
The degree to which these Game Masters and secondary Readers choose to manipulate their roles intensifies in Chiru for various reasons.
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At the end of episode 8 in the second to last chapter in the manga, Battler jumps after Sayo who tries to kill herself. After she presumably drowns she immediately enters the meta world, while Battler also enters the Meta World at the same time with no memory, and Sayo regrets bringing Battler with her. Then after that they immediately play the game Legend of the Golden Witch which is episode 1 because Sayo wants Battler to recover his memories. Thats how it happened chronologically in the manga (at least thats how it is drawn and shown to us). So shouldnt that mean that the meta world existed before Legend of the Golden Witch? Which would then mean that the Meta world Beatrice and Meta Battler were in fact the “prime” real world souls or spirits or whatever you want to call it of the real Yasu who died and real Battler who had amnesia? So the meta characters should not be just written fictional characters in the forgeries.
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