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Originally Posted by Drifloon
There's something I've been wondering about lately, which probably has no answer but I think warrants some discussion at least; how many people here actually believe that a multiverse exists in Umineko? Leaving out the meta-world for the time being, I'm just talking about the idea of 'Fragments'/parallel universes existing in Umineko, in the same way as Higurashi.
I think that most of us would probably say that the idea of Fragments is part of the magical layer, and is a metaphor for the various interpretations and possibilities inside the cat box of the single Rokkenjima incident; in other words, that there is only one reality. Well, obviously. This is where the whole notion of 'Prime' comes from, after all. And it makes a lot of sense; we're initially led to believe that each episode takes place in a different Fragment, but we then learn in Episode 6 that each episode in fact corresponds to a fictional message bottle story written about the incident.
But what do we actually take as 'Prime'? We would say "the 1998 narrative", but there seem to be at least three different versions of that. This is actually something KNM mentions in his videos, and though his explanation for it is even more incomprehensible than the rest of his videos, I think he is right that it's something that seems to get conveniently ignored a lot of the time.
Basically we have three versions of the 1998 narrative:
--Episode 4's, starting with Ange jumping off the skyscraper and culminating in her death on Rokkenjima.
--Episode 6's, which seems to be identical to Episode 4's but with the difference that Ange was able to meet "Hachijo Tohya" (or rather, Ikuko).
--Episode 8's, where Ange doesn't jump off the skyscraper and eventually meets Tohya and Ikuko.
So we have a case where, just as Chiru thoroughly debunks the notion of parallel universes in 1986, it seems to introduce parallel universes into 1998 at the same time, which is pretty bizarre. What is interesting is that even though we would generally assert that there is only one single reality, we tend to take information from all three of these incompatible timelines as being from the 'real world', even referring to each of them as "Prime" at times.
For example, we would probably say that all of the following scenes contain reliable information about Prime:
-Ange's conversation with Nanjo's son in Episode 4, where he talks about the money he mysteriously received after the incident.
-Ange's conversation with "Hachijo Tohya" in Episode 6, where she talks about writing the Forgeries entitled Banquet, Alliance, End and Dawn.
-Ange's meeting with Tohya and Ikuko where she learns that Tohya is Battler and that the two of them wrote the stories together.
How exactly do we do this without rejecting the claim that there is even a single true reality to begin with?
Now, it is completely possible to dismiss two of these three timelines as fictional, which would give us a single reality. But then we run into more problems. For example, if we say that EP8's timeline is the truth (which we would have to in order to believe in the existence of Tohya-Battler at all), then we could say that EP4 and EP6's timelines are part of the "Alliance" and "Dawn" Forgeries. This does make sense to a point, until one asks the question: 'Where is our belief that the "Alliance" and "Dawn" Forgeries even exist actually coming from?' Because the passages that confirm their existence are entirely within EP6's 1998 narrative, which has been relegated to part of the "Dawn" Forgery. So the only reason to believe that the Forgeries correspond to the episodes is inside one of the Forgeries themselves, one that we have no way of knowing exists besides evidence that is contained inside itself. So we end up with a paradox where we say that "Dawn" exists because "Dawn" says so!
This is all basically a meaningless thought exercise, of course, but I'm still curious as to what other people think about this.
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As far as I'm involved Prime is the universe in which officially, only Eva survived, Ange was entrusted to her but, after Eva's death she disappeared and the public knows there's a writer that write popular forgeries about the Rokkenjima incident, Itouikukuro, as well as a writer called Hachijo Tohya.
Ange's destiny and Hachijo Tohya and Itouikukuro's real identities are in a different cat box from the one of the mystery of Rokkenjima but are in a cat box as well... which allows Ange to have more than one ending.
In short the true Prime is only what is publically known. Ange's history that didn't make in the newspapers can be true (Ange might have become Kotobuki Yukari for all we know) but might also be a 'forgery', people's speculation or wishful thinking (if Tohya is Battler) as I've no idea if people write forgeries about the Last Ushiromiya who misteriously disappeared.
Mind you, that's what I call/consider Prime as it seems that's the post Rokkenjima universe the novel wants us to focus on.
In itself nothing stops Lion's world or Ep 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 to be real... although apparently Umineko could care less about what happened after them.