Quote:
Originally Posted by Patchwork Chimera
I'm not satisfied with how Yasu's motives where put. But let's say, there's an episode about Kyrie, just as exhaustive with all her backstory and everything else as 7 was with Yasu's. And she's refered as 'culprit'. One. Entire. Episode.
All that development, 'confesion', gathering of stories and testimonies...Then it's like 'alright, that's her. But she's not the culprit, you know?'. What the hell was I doing there, then?!
EP7 was basically a huge mine of answers and posibilities, and the last half was all Yasuyasuyasuyasu...Beatrice. And she didn't do it. So the real core of Umineko, the whydunnit, is never adressed? I don't want to see EP7 as a huge troll. So I have to think at least that, even if Yasu didn't kill anyone directly, she was responsible for starting the massacre. Or just forgot to switch off the bomb and had weird fantasies of murdering in cold blood 16 people.
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That really is the problem with Umineko, from the point of view of seeking the culprit. Yasu gets loads of attention, but her motive is weak and doesn't fit with the themes of the story and Battler's reactions. However, if it's not her and there is a sole culprit, that culprit has not had the right attention to them paid by the story. (In fact, many of the characters have hardly been paid any attention at all...like Hideyoshi, Genji, Gohda, etc.) We don't know who they are. And they don't have a satisfying motive either. I think there's some consensus that based on what we know, none of the characters has a good motive to kill
everyone on the island. They might have the motivation to kill some, but not all.
It's possible that from Ryukishi's point of view, the "whodunnit" is just the "whodunnit" of the gameboards, and that the "whydunnit" for the gameboards is just that Shkanon were the puppets of meta-Beato as she wrote her stories. As in, Shkanon had no real motive other than a meta-motive.
So...maybe in the end, Ryukishi didn't even mean to tell us the culprit, and the mystery was the mystery of "who is Beatrice", which episode 7 and the rest of the series
did tell us. The mystery of the culprit of the gameboards and the mystery of Beatrice's heart and Yasu. It could even be what LyricalAura suggested, and that proving the innocence of Yasu is the true mystery to solve even if we'll never know the real culprit.
Yes, it's weak from the traditional mystery perspective. I wanted to know the culprit and why they did it...but it seems that's not the story Ryukishi wanted to tell. I think the only way that the story Ryukishi wrote could have told us the "real" culprit is if the theory of there being no deliberate mass murdering culprit but a tragedy of misunderstandings is correct. He's shown us that the Ushiromiyas are flawed people who could potentially shoot someone if the circumstances were right. Something like the ep 7 tea party only without an "I'm randomly and stupidly evil" motive from Rudolf and Kyrie could work.
Actually, with the fake murder game thing, as has been mentioned by others before, if that game was what happened, I'd feel rather uncomfortably as if Battler is the best choice of culprit; after all, he's the one the game would be aimed at. Nearly everyone else could potentially have been an accomplice to Beato, but not him, the target. The person in the best (...worst..) position to freak out with paranoia and start shooting people once he thought a mass murder was occurring.
Although...were the characters really as bad as the stories say? Ep 8 had everyone being fluffy and nice. Ange had to question what the truth was, and that was either a forgery (maybe Tohya's) or something in Ange's imagination. The thing about the games is that they were written by Beatrice, and as has been mentioned up the page, although Beatrice went on about love existing in everyone's hearts, "Her true tragedy was that she couldn't see it". Yet at the same time it seems she's making herself the scapegoat for the very sake of those people. So many contradictions!
Even assuming Yasu didn't kill directly, there are certainly ways like the ones you mentioned where she could have had a hand in it. Those can even work if she has no intention whatsoever of killing anybody. With fake murder game theory + accidental murders theory, she provided a stage where things could go wrong. But that one doesn't automatically make her a culprit, just a cause.