[Renall]

Originally Posted by UsagiTenpura

Just wanted to clarify a seemingly common mistake.
"Arc 1 doesn't have meta"
I suggest you reread arc 1, Battler constantly breaks away from the narration and start talking to "us" - he even introduce each character one by one - how isn't that meta?
And how could that be taken outside of the story? (and how does answering this by splitting hair between obvious meta and subtile meta really solve anything?)

There's also simply too many references to fiction.
When you have Kyrie telling you more or less "you should try to solve this story as a love mystery" and you have the memory of Rudolf saying more or less "witches and the such only exists in fiction", I don't think you can really claim that there's no meta in arc 1.

That isn't meta-narrative. That's narration. Battler narrates in-character. Narrators talk to readers. Huck Finn talked to the readers. Chief Bromden dropped hints to the greater structure of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Arthur Dent knew he couldn't die because he wasn't allowed to until the narrative brought him to a place he'd never been yet. Misery is about an author writing a story. None of that is meta-narrative; it is meta-fiction, to be more precise, but those aspects of the narrative are not meta-narrative in the same sense Umineko's meta-world narrative is progressing.

Meta-narrative in the same sense as Umineko is Animal Man talking to Grant Morrison as he's writing Animal Man and this dialogue being reflected within the work. It's Huck Finn acting like Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer was an existing account in his world talking about events that actually happened for Huck (and not being entirely accurate besides, according to Huck). It's the odd-numbered chapters of If on a winter's night a traveler telling you, the reader, what you're doing between reading the even-numbered ones. It's the footnotes in Pale Fire and House of Leaves continuing the narrative and forming an integral part of it when they're supposed to be commentary on an extant story. It's Rozencrantz and Guildenstern expressing awareness that they exist in a play and structuring how they view their own existence around this point.

This stuff may make sense as a finished work (as each individual Umineko episode generally does, and Umineko does on the whole), but if you ask what the deeper baseline work is you either have to conclude there probably isn't one (e.g. House of Leaves, where Johnny doesn't think the Navidson Record Zampano claims to have seen actually existed), or that it's different from what we, the reader, get as a finished product (e.g. if Johnny Truant "existed" and Zampano's script really existed, the experience of Johnny reading and thinking about it probably differs from the text presented to us as the book House of Leaves). While I wouldn't go so far as to say that the text of any of the individual Umineko episodes simply doesn't exist in the R-Prime universe (if it exists itself), I do think the documents we see are those filtered to us by Ryukishi after piling on every possible layer (including meta-fictional criticism) and fictionalizing the lot of them. By necessity, these are not the ones characters on certain layers read or wrote.

Given this, the sole place where this degree of meta-narrative exists in ep1 is the Tea Party. There is no indication anywhere that Tea Parties are part of the "main bodies" of the works presented. There are some instances in which it seems like they probably should be (for example, Battler's investigation in Alliance). It seems entirely too arbitrary. I don't think certain parts are excluded because of their placement in the story, but I do think certain parts are excluded because they're not intended to be part of the story that was read or written, merely part of the entire creative and deliberative process of authors and readers such as Tohya or Ange.

The point is this: The stories are described in abstract in endscrolls and 1998 scenes as tales of mystery and witchy murder. Including the meta-narrative just doesn't seem to jive with the way the stories are apparently viewed in the future. It does, however, jive with the notion that the meta-narrative is about people thinking about a narrative they're involved in elsewhere. By general necessity, they can't also be contained within that narrative. Well, okay, they could be, but I think Umineko would be a very different work if they were.

Originally Posted by RandomAvatarFan

Let's reread those Tea Parties Also, if Bernkastel is of a being of a "higher plane", than it doesn't make sense for any of them to mention her.

She's a major antagonist. Nobody is interested in her at all? We talked about her and her influence over the story all the time, but Witch Hunters appear not to care?

Because Author theory. Beatrice on the gameboard/trial is Natsuhi's illusion, but Meta-Beatrice is Yasu's heart.

You don't think it would confuse everyone reading the story in-universe that there are two (or more) Beatrices, one of them dies, and one of them doesn't? Because if I were reading End as a book in a series as presented to me, I would think the author has completely jumped the rails. The contrast between Alliance and End is far too much given the trajectory of the meta-narrative. The matter is cleared up nicely if the meta-narrative isn't in the original works.

I'm still working this out. But End and Dawn are Tohya's forgeries. They're making money on it, dramatic effect? Remember who the author is for this. It's Tohya trying to deal with the fragmented memories of Battler, not someone who is merely writing down forgeries for the Witch Hunter's studies. Requiem and Twilight, I'm still not sure, as there is no mention of these ever actually being written. This supports the fact that there may in fact be Kakera stuff happening above the author theory.

It doesn't really support any facts. We don't know what they are. But that's the point; we don't know if any of these reflect their in-universe pen-to-paper existence. To assume that they do may be missing a point of the story.

This is a good point, one that I haven't completely thought through. How did they decide? Tohya may have started with the first forgeries, possibly even believed it to be another true message bottle text. The serious Witch Hunters turn to him for their studies. But at the same time, remember that these are supposed to be the memories of someone who was actually there (hidden deep inside them somewhere) I'm still stuck on the Land. But... in EP8, we see Beatrice saying that Land was her bottle. Banquet is Tohya's. Tohya picks up the Meta-Narrative where Yasu left off- or where Yasu was thought to have left off. If Land is found, its Meta-Narrative will differ, but it doesn't matter because it was never found, and Banquet was written for the purpose of picking up where Turn left off.

Except:

• That assumes nobody else's forgeries could even debatably be close, which puts excessive importance on the HT forgeries that doesn't seem to have any logical reason except "he sorta kinda barely maybe remembered," which in my mind is hardly necessary to write a good forgery or even to get at what Beatrice wanted.
• We know literally nothing about other forgeries except that they were written. So we can't even judge them against the HT forgeries because we don't have them at all (as far as we know).
• We have no idea where Land would actually fit into a meta-narrative continuity. Nevermind that this doesn't make any sense from the perspective of message bottles being set adrift; the possibility that any one or any number of them could potentially be lost entirely invalidates the notion that they would be written sequentially. Suppose Land did come third, but we lost everything before it? If none of Legend, Turn, or Land have a sequential meta-narrative, they can stand on their own to some extent. If they don't, things become problematic.
• Assuming Land can just be lopped off devalues the importance of Beatrice's intended meta-narrative. It's either part of her overall narrative or it isn't. To not care that much that it was lost suggests it didn't contain anything that was that critical, but if a sequential meta-narrative that builds to a specific point exists, how could it not? Now you can still argue Banquet was an adequate replacement, but it's highly incredible to me that things would just happen to work out like that. Of course, I find it incredible that the message bottles would've been set adrift at all, but that's another matter.

I haven't read Our Confession. But is the Beatrice arguing with Battler and creating the game ever said "well, if I make this move, Battler will say..." Oh wait. There's different levels to Meta. If it's just Beatrice setting up the game, then it doesn't matter.

It matters a lot, because Beatrice in that booklet is being heavily equivocated with the author herself. Meta-Beatrice is the author, not merely a character. The booklet is meant, on a technical level, to show this creative process. If Meta-Beatrice is just a character writing about the creation of other characters, it really doesn't matter.

She also seems to distinguish the content of her game (board narrative + magic narrative) from her interactions with her opponent (red truth selection + dialogue) without actually planning it out (i.e. she thinks of what she'll say to Battler, but she doesn't dictate what he'll say back).

Comparing this to the meta-narrative of Dawn we see similar constructions: Meta-Battler designs a board and fantasy narrative and displays scenes he wishes to display, but while he engages with and relates to Meta-Erika, he doesn't dictate the things she says and does. To say "Yes, but there's another authorial layer above him" misses a lot of what the meta-narrative seems to be about, which is - or at least appears to be - getting inside Tohya's thought process, which is otherwise inaccessible to us. Our Confession is doing essentially the same thing for Beatrice.

I don't quite understand why you're so focused on what the Witch-Hunters see. As far as I'm concerned, the Witch Hunters probably did study other forgeries. If you want me to give an explanation they chose Tohya's because Tohya continues the story where Yasu left off: the heart of the story. But since even that is a part of Tohya's forgeries...

Again, this makes the implication that no one other than him could possibly write a forgery that gets at the heart of the story. It also makes the assertion outright that the Witch Hunter community even knows what the heart of the story is. Remember, the challenge is to "find the truth," and most Witch Hunters appear to be interested in determining - or merely concluding, according to their own biases and interests - what the true events of Rokkenjima were. That wasn't necessarily what "Beatrice" intended at all, at least with respect to her message to Battler.

It's a false equivalence. As far as we're shown in the stories, the Witch Hunter community is completely barking up the wrong tree. That Tohya's work is famous seems incidental to the fact that he also happens to be closer to the heart of the story, the part only he was ever meant to truly understand anyway. Featherine speaks of the whole notion in almost mystical terms in ep6, and it isn't a very good explanation as to why his work would be considered more authentic than the work of other people.

The meta-narrative, I should point out, is also intensely personal and not really very public in nature. This seems to contrast with how the public at large interprets the story. Painting the meta-narrative as internal self-discovery on Tohya's part just makes more sense generally than the notion that it exists in front of everybody's faces and most of them are just too dumb to notice.

It is said outright. That's why I started wondering about this in the first place. The only difference in presentation I believe is the lack of sprites and Magical Gohda Chef in the bottles/forgeries.

How sure are you of what's actually contained in the message bottles? Why didn't any version of Ange ever get to just outright read one? Surely the contents are very easy to find; they'd be all over the internet by 1998. We're rather deliberately told only vague things about what the message bottles actually contain, and their content is kept more or less entirely vague. While I do believe Legend and Turn are most likely the stories contained therein, I'm not 100% positive they are exact mirrors to ep1 and ep2, and in general, I'd argue that the response to them suggests they aren't.