[Renall]

Originally Posted by Zork

Spoiler:

1. Interesting to compare the snippets that Virgilia was able to read with the story as Andy is telling it. The bit with Krauss talking to Battler completely vanished, and now he's dead so I guess it's safe to say that the details of the story can vary greatly depending on who tries to read it. Makes me wonder if maybe some of the other scenes that she read can be mapped directly onto scenes that Andy presented.

2. The whole Asmo-stealing thing was rather amusing, given that "I Am Not Beatrice" literally took down Rudolf with his own Lust. Might actually be significant, though. I guess I'll be more confident in that if it continues to be a one-time thing (not stealing Ronove or Satan was a bit curious, since it seemed like she had some opportunity to).

3. The "I Am Not Beatrice" bit pretty much killed any Cassatrice thoughts for me. Too conflicting for the same character to go to a convention pretending to be Beatrice and then suddenly insist that no one call her by that name. Or maybe that's the trick, but I still think I'll wait for a good reason before I start to doubt my initial reaction.

Thanks, that's really cool. I want to clarify that one part about the reading though.

Spoiler:

All those scenes "happened," in that they're capable of being read from the Fragment, so Andromalius didn't change the story or anything. He just didn't feel it necessary to repeat them, even though they were pretty heavily distorted. This is because he is a dick. I left enough context in that it should be possible to get the point of each of those bits, though.

While he suggests he's "turning back" in time, that's more of a dramatic flourish on my part to rewind the narrative temporally to midnight when Kinzo was also doing his summonings. If you imagine an actual story, obviously two scenes set at the same time that aren't woven into one another are going to have to come at separate points in the story. I suppose it's arguable that the summoning scene was actually "earlier" in the narrative and Virgilia just couldn't see it, but I wouldn't take it to mean that Andy can like... go back and add Ange in the story or anything. Only the author could do something like that.

Think of it like Featherine suggested in Dawn: Virgilia and Andromalius are both reading the story, but putting their particular spin on what it means. Hers is a lower-key reading, and his is a bit more spectacular, but neither of them is seriously altering the actual plot or knowingly changing up the characterization (although as Battler points out, he might know more about characters like Rudolf than they do, so one imagines Battler would read it differently too). Now whether the plot of the story = the plot of the Fragment = the plot of the Forgery = what Walter is reading, I'm not gonna say... that's meant to be a bit like the regular Umineko episodes, where it's unclear.

That said, Andy can speak of the story in red. Does that mean he's more trustworthy than Virgilia? Probably not. She wasn't as capable, but she was sincere, and has no particular reason not to reveal anything she can actually see. Andromalius gives assurances that he can read the Fragment in full; will he? Battler's never met him before. He doesn't know why he's there other than a flimsy reason he was given. He's not worried about him, since he can basically kick him out at any time, but he does seem to be pretty annoyed by him. And since Andy seems to enjoy being annoying, who knows what he'd do to keep that going.