Quote:
Originally Posted by Renall
- Shannon's presence in the shed in ep1 is constructed solely by a lie.
- According to Will, the chain-locked room of ep1 is constructed by a lie.
- Kanon's death in ep1 is a lie.
- Most of ep3 is presumably genuine, at least in the sense that something other than a lie holds the puzzles together.
- The door to the chapel in ep2 may have been locked solely because someone said it was.
- As you said, essentially all of ep4 except the shed murders is basically a lie, or at least Battler has no means of distinguishing whether that is so.
- The knock in ep5 is (apparently) a lie.
- The solution to the Logic Error is predicated on misinformation, which is like a lie.
So while, yes, a number of the scenarios were constructed through actual creation of a physical mystery or use of sleight of hand, or a construct embellished into a mystery through lies, a goodly number of the mysteries were made to seem important or complicated, and the solution is simply that they didn't happen at all except in someone's lies. They may as well not even have talked about those in the meta-world, as the whole thing could've been dispensed with using Battler's ep3 garden battle logic: "That shit didn't happen." |
If we go by the assumption that "illusions to illusions" means that no one actually died and "earth to earth" means that the corpses are actually dead people, all of EP1 is nothing but a charade. This would help explaining why Hideyoshi lied.
Conversely anything from the second twilight onward in EP3 was a real murder, and the murderer was Eva.
This is even more anticlimatic because Eva was hinted to be the culprit since... before the murders even occured!
In EP2 no one died until the very end. Probably Shannon killed the ones who previously faked their death before killing herself in the last room.
The same is probably true for EP4.
And Kinzo's corpse is probably just a dummy.
Anyway in the end the difficulty of the mysteries of Umineko solely rely on the sheer amount of lies that are told to ther reader.
This is not much different from the classic joke/riddle that asks you how many eggs can lay a rooster.
The trick here is to ignore the well constructed trap that is meant to make you assume that there is actually a complex problem to solve while in fact you must simply realize that there is not a problem to begin with!
That's basically Genji's riddle in EP8
The problem is... this kind of stratagem is usually done "for the lulz" and not to propose a serious challenge.
EDIT: Actually it's possible that in EP3 the killer is "yasu", that way you don't even have the problem of Nanjo's murder. But in that case... what about the letter that claimed the the ceremony would end if someone solved the riddle? Was that also a lie? Meh...