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I wanted to tangent for a second because I wanted to get back to a thing we were on a page or two ago and got away from.
Namely, I'm a bit perplexed by Ryukishi's thought process with respect to the Battler/Kyrie/Rudolf-as-culprits thing and whether we're supposed to believe it or reject it as him being a tease and a troll.
He loves teasing this theory, perhaps more than he likes talking about Yasu even. There's the ep7 Tea Party, Bern's game in ep8, Eva's behavior, BLACK BATTLER (*funk riff*) in an extra TIP, and all of it seems designed to throw the idea into our face, yet with so many questions and problems attached that it's almost like we're not really supposed to believe it.
Yet at the same time... he's not really offering us any evidence that we're not supposed to believe it. The only thing telling me Battler WASN'T the culprit is that the narrative has given me no good reason to believe he had a motive and the only reason I don't believe Kyrie is the culprit is that her stated motive makes no sense given her prior characterization. The facts themselves don't seem to exonerate the theory Ryukishi keeps pushing, only the meta-fictional notion that the narrative is somehow "wrong" if we accept it as true, leaving us with too many questions that aren't adequately answered. As dumb as Yasu's stated motive is, it is at least a motive. Battler isn't even given one. Why should I believe Ryukishi's teasing that he's the culprit?
Yet at the same time, why is he teasing me with something he knows I have too many problems with to believe? Who does he think is actually being fooled? Is his goal to fool anyone? What the hell is his goal with this whole branch of Umineko's endgame?
Is he trying to generate a dichotomy between "Yasu culprit" which has too many problems of fact and "Battler culprit" which has too many problems of motive, and expecting us to choose between them? Are we supposed to reject both and settle on a third answer? What's the evidence we're meant to use to discern and prove that, then? Certainly we've not been able to do it so far, and we've tried.
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