Considering how Ryukishi is a master at character writing and how his works focus a lot on aspects of life/what makes us human, I think that a lot of the fanbase would consider at least two characters from WtC to be relatable in some fashion.
I’ll start, I used to be similar personality wise to Maria/Sayo when I was younger, but now I’m more like Ange/Erika.
Also, Ryukishi considers Keichii to be a lot like him personality wise.
Well, I’m probably similar to all of the cousins in some way, which one depends on mood. Also Kanon when I’m feeling edgy.
There’s some characters I definitively would identify with, but from 07th… hmmm…
I guess I could be like the weird mix of Ange and LambdaDelta, of all things!
Heh, this is difficult. I guess I am a bit like a weird combo between Mion and Shion. And, in a slight way, Maria (the whole making every situation seem better than it is part).
Gaaaaaasp, yes, great topic!!!
'Cause I can easily answer this one.
I’m most similar to Yasu and all her different personalities. 'Cause I also have like personifications of parts of myself that I talk to and they interact with each other. I sort of call them my defense mechanism characters, since they usually help me get my head sorted out by thinking about their mindset.
Not to mention that I’m also a witch irl. I mean, I don’t have fancy glowing butterflies around me, but the magic in umineko is honestly similar to magic in real life so… at least in my opinion.
Also the fact that I’m usually awkward and shy like shannon at first, but deep down I’m literally a cruel person like beato who doesn’t care about anyone, but even deeper down I actually want to be understood and stuff and I actually care about others like Sayo… yeaaah…
This is sounding like a paragraph an edgy 11 year old would write, I apologize. Buuut it’s some similarities that I notice between me and Yasu. Yasu is my child, protect them pls.
Alsooo, I guess I am also similar to Battler, especially since I’m sort of rude and say the dumbest things and am rather incompetent about semantics, despite being good at it. And I cry easily when I don’t understand something, haha.
I could go on and on honestly, but I’ll leave it at this~
oooh yes! What a great topic!
Higurashi-wise I think I’m more of a mix of Rena & Hanyuu. I’m in love with cute things especially cats and like Rena’s “Hauu” I do little cat noises instead. It’s hard for me to talk to new people as well, but when I really get to know people is when I really open up hehe.
Umineko-wise I’m pretty much Shannon. I fumble a lot with a lot of pressure in the room, I’m shy and can’t really talk to people, but I do try my best to do things right.
It might be kind of weird because the way they present themselves to the world is pretty different but I relate most to Rena and Ange.
With Rena I relate to being the one who’s perceptiveness is usually underestimated, especially in face of how much I like cute things. I also reflexively tend to stay quiet and let people figure out things for themselves unless I think I am able to provide a different and needed perspective.
With Ange you have more the manifestation of someone who doesn’t want to be alone, but is really good at isolating herself both by choice and circumstance. The way Ange is rough around the edges but really sensitive to what others say about her is another thing that I really relate to, even when she knows she should not let that kind of thing bother her.
I might as well elaborate since everyone is.
I consider myself similar to Ange because while I’m initially quite emotionally distant and rough around the edges on the surface, on the inside I’m a huge sap and I care about people/things way more than I should, and I’m quite the nice person once you get to know me. Like both Ange and Erika I tend to get fixated on things I can’t understand or that bother me.
Another thing I have in common with Ange is that I’m an amatuer writer who has a very creative imagination but has trouble expressing it. I also enjoy starting shit and acting way cooler than I really am. I also have no true friends irl, but it doesn’t bother me. And like Ange, I’m quite perceptive and realistic, but I like to be positive and embellish my life/make connections to others. I also despise giving up. Also like Ange, I hate shaking hands and am not a smiler.
What I have in common with Erika is that we both can be intellectual snobs and like Erika, I get extremely jealous when someone upstages me, because I’m rather insecure and I sort of like to bully others a little despite being bullied myself.
Tldr, I have Ange’s distance/dorkiness and Erika’s smarts/being sort of a dick.
EDIT: Ange is very lucky to have a boyfriend like Amakusa. Hope I meet someone like him one day…
I consider myself to be like Rika. I say this because I always try really to be hopeful, even in the situations when hope seems useless. Perhaps this is because like Rika, I’ve gone through what I consider to be some life changing experiences, and holding onto that hope for a better world is sometimes all I have.
Edit:
Can I just… Hug you, @BunnyAdvocate?
Anyways, you opening up about yourself has inspired me to do the same.
(Minagoroshi and Matsuribayashi spoilers)
During my last year in middle school, one of my best friends at the time committed suicide. To this day, we still don’t really know WHY she decided to kill herself, other than she hated the world and everything in it. Anyway, once I lost my friend, I lost a lot of the hope I had in humanity. For the longest time, I just went through the motions of the days not really caring about the impact I left on other people. I spent most, if not all days in complete lethargy. And most nights I wouldn’t sleep because I was beating myself up over the idea of "What could I do differently to get her back? What if I could have saved her?"
Around this time I happened to stumble upon the Higurashi anime after finishing Mirai Nikki. I needed the distraction, so I watched the entire thing and quickly fell in love. Shortly after, I read the VNs and my love grew even stronger. Watching Rika fight through all those time lines asking herself, “How can I save my friends?”, it mimicked my own journey grieving over my friend. Once I got to the end of Minagoroshi, I saw that even in the world where everything was going perfectly for Rika, she still failed. Watching Takano individually shoot her friends reminded me that even if I was able to go back in time, I would not be able to save my friend. As sad as it is, death is permanent. Higurashi reminded me of that.
But Higurashi taught me one last thing too. At the end of Matsuribayashi, Rika is finally able to save her friends, through the power of trust, love, and friendship. It is then I realized that the only way to truly get past my own grief was to share it with others who knew my friend, and to move on together. Rika showed me that no matter how big the battle may seem, you never have to face it alone. So,
I thank her for showing me that when I needed it most.
I’m really inspired by Irie.
Higurashi played a big role during my last days of high school, and inspired me to learn more about the human brain, and human psychology.
Now I’m trying my best to get into Neuroscience in university.
Really great written character. I love how passionate he is.
I like to consider myself like an IRL Rika since I too look younger than I really am, drink wine a lot to cope with issues, enjoy messing with people, and I attempt to be optimistic in spite of life coming down on me often.
Anyone else care to comment? I think this is a pretty interesting topic.
I’m bored so I’ll act like I care to, I suppose.
Hmm, I’m not very sure who I am most like. Higurashi-wise, it’s probably Shion. I am independent like her and I make decisions by myself rather than working with a group of people and I’m not always around my friends and I appear more infrequently like her, though that’s the case with Shion cause she goes to a different school and in Minagoroshi, in which she went to the same school, she was much more present. Anyhow, I’m also witty like her and rebellious too. Also, very sharp and can easily and quickly see all the options in a situation and know how to use them, which makes me a bit like Rika too, with her cunning personality. As for Umineko, I’m not really sure, maybe Beato, cause I do act pompous at times, Berkanstel for the aforementioned Rika qualities and her aloofness and maybe a little bit like Ange and Eva, the former for her rebellious attitude and the latter for her ambitious outlook on life.
What makes R07’s VNs so engaging is how you can see a little bit of yourself in all his characters. They have the same motivations and action rationalisation we all do, just slightly skewed by their personality or events. I could write a paragraph about how I saw myself as any of his characters, but there’s one that’s special, one that really spoke to me… Yasu.
(Umineko spoilers)[spoiler]Perhaps the reason I’m so ferocious in defending Yasu and her actions is because I went through something similar myself, even to the extend of “blowing up” my little world.
Yasu’s plight with her identity mirrored my experience with being transgender. The uncertainty about who you are, the feelings of being worthless, that there’s something wrong with you and that you’ll never get a happy ending, that you’ll forever be doomed to live as “furniture.” I couldn’t see any hope for myself in this world. I couldn’t ever see any acceptance.
It was only in my “golden land” of the internet that I ever felt I was truly myself, where I could be who I knew was inside. I had my multiple faces just like Yasu, my Kanon and Shannon. My real-life mask where I hid being transgender, and my online persona where I portrayed myself as female.
I could catch small fragments of my golden land in this online life, I could almost taste happiness. But then I met my George and Jessica. Those I cared deeply about, that I loved in a way I thought would never be possible for me. It was never supposed to be possible, nobody was ever supposed to care for me, but they did and it made me so terribly afraid. They didn’t know I was transgender and I was frightened to tell them. I was scared they wouldn’t accept me. I was scared to imagine a happy future. I lied to them about my feelings, denied I cared for them, pretended their affections were unwelcome. It tore me apart inside and led to my own Rokkenjima incident.
Believing I’d only ever be a source of pain to those I loved, that they’d never accept me as I truly was, and this limbo state was too painful to bear, I left them a note explaining everything and then tried to kill myself. I tried to destroy my little world, my little Rokkenjima, in the hopes that I could exist in a happier dream.
When my suicide attempt failed, in my delirious and confused state, I thought it better my friends to believe I’d succeeded and therefore fly loose from my web of despair. I lied to them about it. I led them to believe I was dead. By the time I escaped my pit of self-loathing a few days later, the storm has moved on, but it was too late. Those friends never forgave me, they wouldn’t even speak to me to say goodbye and I’ve had to live with that bitter regret ever since.
So I can sympathise with Yasu’s dilemma of being caught between different identities, not feeling a happy ending is possible, and choosing to end it all in an extreme fashion. Not that I condone her actions, but I understand.[/spoiler]
I really don’t know how I managed to forget Battler the first time I answered this topic. I am like Battler in that I don’t really believe in supernatural things and my worst fears are always associated with humans (murder, theft, kidnapping etc.) - as are my worst nightmares. Horror stories don’t really scare me since I don’t believe in them… but give me a good murder mystery/thriller and I am hooked. I guess what I mean is that I always try to find the rational explanation behind odd things and tend to be very skeptical of things that sound shady.
In terms of Higurashi, I guess I’m more like Hanyuu. Like her, I’m usually get the sense of helplessness over being unable to help both myself and others out of difficult situations, and only being able to provide hollow advice and words of comfort. I’m also usually quite pessimistic about situations and I rarely ever actively try to approach people, although I’d attribute that more to my Bernkastel side.
Since the Umineko characters have more in common with my darker side, I spoilered the below. Also since the characters come after Ep 4.
Putting an Umineko match is difficult, since like all of you said, there’s a little bit of you in all the characters, that said, I’ve found myself to be similar to Erika in the past, but I’m more like Bernkastel now. Like Erika, I used to love to make people feel terrible about themselves with the apparent logical contradictions in the way they would try to portray themselves, so much so that I faced as much adversity IRL as the character did in the VN. When I realised however, that the people around me were so sensitive that they couldn’t handle such treatment however, I suspended the act. Thereafter, since so few people could stand the idea that I was constantly judging them, as soon as I transferred for my high school, it was like Keiichi having to transfer to Hinamizawa, I actually got really bored with the syllabus so I ended up subconsciously becoming like Bernkastel and I would either ignore the people that didn’t interest me or play mind games with the ones that did. Especially since in the school I transferred into, so many people heard exaggerated stories of my past and wanted to best me. I never ended up falling prey and was always one step ahead. At the end of the road, though, I guess I ended up in a situation in high school similar to Ange’s (i.e. no friends, no one to trust, excessive periods of loneliness, reading random books, etc.) I don’t blame myself for what happened since everything I did was a measured response to what happened to me. If that’s the price of being disbelieving of the sycophants and climbers around me, so be it.
I can’t believe I forgot to mention this, but I’m also pretty similar to Natsuhi. Like her, I hold myself to pretty high standards and often get frustrated with myself when I don’t achieve them.
I also tend to get easily irritated at times and am put off by “common” behavior.
I’d say I’m most similar to Satoko in Higurashi, we both try to grow up to fast and yet we’re both childish.
I’m probably most similar to Kinzo in Umineko, because we’re both sappy and romantic. Or Battler, he works too.
If I have to pick one it’s going to be Keiichi, I went through a period of depression in my High School years and I distanced myself from my friends because I thought they were assholes while they were trying to help me. That whole part about not trusting your friends in Higurashi honestly strikes so close to my experience that it’s eerie. And I did learn that I have wonderful friends eventually since they started talking to me after I said a lot of horrible things to them and didn’t talk with them for a year. They also didn’t talk about my depression afterwards even though we normally make fun of each other on every occasion for which I am very grateful.
Also, I have some Lambda in me I guess since I tend to be quite neutral in a lot of arguments people have and also I’m trying to get along with as many people as I can as of late.
I went through a time a lot like young Kinzo’s ‘just go along with it’ phase. I can relate to that, although I haven’t found my Beatrice. I also like his attitude of giving absolutely zero shits about what people say about him. Kinzo is gonna Kinzo, and if you don’t understand what’s going on in his head he really doesn’t care. That’s not really where I am though. Which is good since that leads to places which are… less than desirable.
I feel like the character I’m most similar to is probably George, although I’m not really proud of that. Maybe Hideyoshi since we have similar tastes in women. Who can say? We never really got to know too much about how Hideyoshi looks at things or what makes him tick.
On the Hinamizawa side, though, I feel a lot for Mion. Not quite in the know as much as people think she is, trying her best to measure up to the leadership role she is basically expected to inherit. Feeling that responsibility without having the power she would need to actually fulfill it is so infuriating.