[haguruma]

Originally Posted by jjblue1

I'm not sure what your actual theory is. Yasu was the culprit and killed everyone? MetaBattler is Tohya? Something else?

I won't commit to whether Yasu was the actual culprit or not but I am quite sure that MetaBattler at least examplifies the struggle a part of Touya went through, while trying to recover Battler's memories of Rokkenjima. I don't see him as Touya though, as Touya is a new personality (seperate character) who struggles with the dilemma of being both drawn towards the solution and wanting to discard the memories of a stranger (Battler) altogether.

My point was more in pointing out the deliberate separation and cherry-picking of theories depending on the situation. People seem less inclined to find one straight answer, but try to twist elements around to work out the perfect solution for one aspect of the scenario. In this case it is the separation of Touya and MetaBattler in one moment, while arguing for a metaphoric representation of Touya's internal struggle at another point.

Tohya is writing the book so, in the Prime layer the author is the equivalent of the gamemaster, the one who wrote the tale. And yes, according to my theory all the Meta was created by Tohya therefore he created Beato, Battler, Lambda and Co.

But wouldn't that imply that he knew the entirety of the answer from the very beginning, even if only subconsciously? And isn't that only possible if he is also the culprit? I'm against creating a clear hierarchical order of reality＞fantasy , I am for an intertwined relationship between both, in which events within our reality are at the same time occurring on the meta-plane.
Let's take the TIP Witches' Tanabata as an example. Bernkastel is taking influence on Ange's attitude towards Eva by promising her mother's definite death as soon as she accepts Eva as a substitute. This tells us more than just the struggle of Touya himself, but also reveals other characters' problems.

I would actually say that within the context of Umineko the gamemaster and the author are to be regarded on different levels. Some scenes simply don't make sense to me if they are simply creations of the mind, so at least to a certain degree, the metaworld is as real as the reality Touya and Ange exist in. The meta beings act out what is written but then again these changes in the metaworld influence what is written.
So the gamemaster (if not all challengers in the metaworld) is representative of the attitude and thought process with which that particular gameboard is approached. In that sense the author is more the gamemaker.

Originally Posted by Wanderer

Incidentally, the above 'rule' about Beatrice not existing in the future is also part of the reason why I'm inclined towards post-incident authorship.

I was finally to find the passage relating to my critique of the post-authorship theory.

Narration (Ange): However.

Later on, it was confirmed that a similar message bottle had been recovered from the nearby ocean on the day of the accident by the police in their search for lost articles, and this caused a sensation.

Ootsuki: "It seems that, due to evidence from the surrounding area and the fact that the bottle was sealed, the police had decided that its likelihood of being a fabrication was low, and that it had been abandoned within several days before the accident. And the handwriting for both matched.
This caused the credibility of the scraps of paper discovered by the fisherman to rise.
It seems that magazines and the like have reported on the contents of that message bottle repeatedly, but do you require an explanation?"

Like Kealym already pointed out quite sharply regarding a Yasuko theory, a post-authorship theory also requires us to discard given information without any reason to doubt it beyond the general possibility to doubt anything.

I found it also quite interesting to reread this passage because it led me to another striking element that I had almost completely forgotten about: that is Eva's role in the rise of the occult craze.

Narration (Ange): In other words, until Kinzo's library was leaked to the public by Eva, Rokkenjima had been nothing more than a nameless island that no one could remember, ......and it definitely hadn't been a witch's island.

However, when knowledge of the Ushiromiya Library spread across the world, Rokkenjima's image immediately took on an occult twist.

Ootsuki: "And so, what happened next was that case with the message bottle. It is what turned that island into a witch's island. A nameless island in the Izu archipelago began to transition into an occult island, and the island of the mysterious witch, Beatrice.
You could say that, lacking either the Ushiromiya Library or the message bottle, the Rokkenjima Witch Legend would never have been established."

It wasn't even the message bottle that gave the initial spark but Eva selling Kinzo's collection to the public. Probably, without this incentive, the fisherman would have also never come out with the story about him discovering the message bottle.
But considering that Eva did not sell the collection until she was in dire need of money, doesn't that hint towards the events of the forgery craze being even less controlled than many people seem to assume?