[Captain Bluebeard]

Originally Posted by AuraTwilight

So Renall and I were talking about crazy forgery ideas we want to do. And I just need to share with all of you how absolutely insane we are. This is long as shit (nine pages in OpenOffice) but I personally think it's worth it.

Spoiler for TL;DR:

Renall: THE KILLER IS KINZO'S WIFE WHO JUST WANTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
auratwilight: DAMMIT I HAVE A NAME YOU KNOW
I DIDN'T DIE, HE DID.
Renall: Oh wait, we can make this work
She's not a person for purposes of the count
Not because she's not here
auratwilight: She's like Arthur Dent on steroids.
Renall: But because she's been reduced to non-personhood
By forces that make her anonymous.
auratwilight: She's there, but everyone ignores her to such a pathological degree that they don't even know she's alive.
Renall: This would have to be metafictional of course.
auratwilight: Everyone whispers Beatrice when they see her in the halls at night.
Renall: Since she'd be exploiting the notion that lack of characterization = non-presence.
auratwilight: "Oooooh ghosts took a sandwich from the kitchen holy shiiiit"
She kills someone with a hammer and eyewitnesses are like "holy shit that hammer just floated up and killed Rosa!" "GODDAMMIT YOU FUCKING IDIOTS"
Renall: I want like
A nonsequitir killer and motive that has nothing to do with the Kinzo/Beatrice thing yet somehow interweaves with it to make perfect sense.
auratwilight: Or maybe everyone is ignoring her on purpose as the ultimate cold shoulder
Renall: Like the episode of South Park where Cartman thinks he's dead
auratwilight: Because the Ushiromiya family is neurotic about grudges and all the siblings have fought with her at some point
Renall: Because veryone but Butters is ignoring him
Like the killer isn't USING the legend, it just happens to help them.
auratwilight: A dead husband everyone pretends is alive and a living wife everyone pretends is dead.
The Legend of Beatrice started up because people saw her around at night and pretended she was Beatrice's Ghost just to spite her with the concept of Kinzo's mistress.
Renall: Short forgeries I would really like to write:
1) The one where Erika is a normal girl and the Ushiromiyas are a creepy cultlike family dedicated to their unseen Father.
2) A collector in the semi-future (like 2050) buys Eva's Diary, learns the Truth of Rokkenjima, digs deeper and discovers that the entire thing was a forgery perpetrated by eccentric writers the Hachijous, and there never was a Rokkenjima or Ushiromiya family.
So he knows the Truth of an event that doesn't exist, but WHAT WAS THE DIARY?
auratwilight: BUT WHO WAS MESSAGE BOTTLE
Renall: He'd find out the Hachijous hoaxed the early history.
The police wouldn't comment on an event that didn't happen.
They got so annoyed by it that they eventually stopped commenting which just fed speculation.
auratwilight: You know what would be a good silly Forgey?
Renall: It crossed the ocean and mutated in America, though it eventually died off in Japan.
auratwilight: Erika washes up with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
Renall: But the Americans just took on faith that the incident was real because lost in translation etc.
But the diary he finds doesn't resemble either of the Hachijous' handwriting according to the expert in Japan.
Did somebody make it up as a fake real artifact of a fake real event?
And it should be, like, super clear that he is 100% certain this is the Truth according to the parameters of the stories.
That reading the diary is an absolutely convincing answer that MUST be true.
auratwilight: You know what would be really great, too?
Renall: So if it's speculative fiction, somebody somehow nailed it. And if not...
auratwilight: If someone bought the diary, opened it, and it's just ahaha.wav written on every page.
Renall: IDEA:
"Erika Furudo" is the penname of the time-traveling daughter of Touya and Ikuko
Alternately her literal penname and she's writing herself into her parents' stories.
auratwilight: like that Shkanon idea where the two are twins of Yasu's who are writing themselves into the story?
I always liked that variant of Beatrice 4
Renall: I really wish I could do something with Beatrice-4 and Maria being alive.
I just don't have a good idea and without portraits it's not as good.
auratwilight: George raped Yasu in 1985
BATTLE OF 1986: BATTLER VS GEORGE
Renall: That would actually mesh with the "the incident would be different a year before or a year later."
auratwilight: George is the embodiment of Kinzo's worst traits and Battler the most noble.
Renall: If Battler had come in 1985, it might not have happened. If he'd come in 1987, the baby would already be born.
auratwilight: yup
and of course George would try to kill Battler if he's already crossed the rape line
....
imagine preggo-Yasu still managing to ninja Shkanon
"Kanon what's with the gut?" "Oh, Gohda, your fabulous cooking is just too much~"
Renall: Yasu is driven to suicide after George kills most of the family in his battle with Battler, but she basically entrusts Maria and Beatrice-4 to Battler first.
He gets them to the safety of Maria's father, then loses his memory.
Maria's father takes them to Europe and they grow up there etc.
Then they come back in the early 2000s looking for Battler and Ange who have fallen off the map.
auratwilight: Metal-Jaw Maria is the best nanny-aunt in the world
Imagine like this action movie thing where adult Maria is protecting the kids with a shotgun Taken-style.
"How'd you learn to fight like that?" "I had a great Mom."
Renall: I like the idea of a much more mature and adjusted Maria and a bright-eyed Beato and ther are meta-sequences where Maria is the elder witch instructing her pupil as they go over the mysteries between them and Battler/Ange.
Like a non-competitive Battler/Beatrice battle.
auratwilight: I did see an awesome fanfic once where Ange never showed up so Battler was tricked at the end of EP3
Renall: I can't find any art of a Maria in her 30s. Shame.
I mean I imagine a lot like Rosa
But that'd be lazy
auratwilight: Maria has Gary Coleman's thing.
She's 38 and still gets asked what she's doing this early on a school day.
Then they see her metal jaw and back the fuck off
Renall: Oh also 3) the heist one
auratwilight: Oh god yes the heist one
Renall: I just love the idea that the whole thing was an amazingly complex Ocean's Eleven style means of faking their death with a bizarre mystery so they can knock off Tokyo's major banks on Monday the 6th and disappear.
auratwilight: I can see Maria as the getaway car, smoking a cigar. "C'mon, get a fuckin' move on!"
Goldsmith's stash is a metaphor for the cache in the biggest bank in Japan
Gold Storehouse
It's right there in plain sight.
Renall: The epitaph is actually his plan.
auratwilight: There never was a Kinzo. He's just a metaphor.
Renall: Kinzo is the briefcase from Pulp Fiction.
auratwilight: The Epitaph is how you crack the safe.
Renall: Ahahaha okay this is a good bad idea:
Instead of Erika, the person who washes ashore is Jules from Pulp Fiction
auratwilight: Battler wasn't cooperating so they knocked him out and threw him in the sea but he washed up with amnesia miraculously.
Renall: Ikuko is a cop
She's trying to crack his memory and crack the case
He knew the plan but his memory has twisted it into a series of weird stories
auratwilight: Ikuko is a crooked cop
Bought off by Eva
and she's giving him false information to "crack the case" with a false solution
and ruse all of Japan with a fabricated mystery
Renall: Anyway the idea I like for the "Erika stumbles upon a cult" is it gives the epitaph an entirely new meaning and she becomes convinced they intend to use her as a sacrifice to their "Father."
But as the night progresses they seem to be the ones dying.
auratwilight: that would be brilliant
Renall: And she discovers to her terror that she is the "Witch" and this whole thing was a fucked-up devotion to an already-dead patriarch.
auratwilight: Yasu's the cult leader chosen by "Father". No one calls Shkanon because it's part of the religion.
Renall: They were killing themselves because they believe Erika is the Witch to be revived.
auratwilight: Erika comments on some weird tells but everyone treats her like she's mad.
Renall: And Erika finally stumbles upon Yasu and Kinzo's corpse in the study.
auratwilight: "How come the those two won't be in the same room together?" "You ask a lot of questions. ^_^"
Renall: And she's like half-dressed as Beatrice
And utterly insane
And she blows her own head off going "NONE SHALL BE ALIVE!"
auratwilight: Maria's "training" is to coach her to be the next cult leader.
incase someone like Erika didn't show up
Renall: And Erika kind of collapses in terror and the next morning she wakes up and it's a bit like the ep4 TP and then she goes and solves the epitaph realizing it was actually Kinzo's bequest and she wonders what the fuck was wrong with that family.
auratwilight: To parallel how George is always so sinister, maybe he's the most normal one and his conscience has him try to warn Erika before he's killed off.
Renall: Oh and the "Key" is interpreted to be some action Erika takes that unwittingly selects the first six sacrifices.
And she realizes they're killing according to what they THINK she intends them to do.
auratwilight: Like the first six she talks to or something
Renall: Or better
To parallel ep8
She's asked to serve the cake at dessert
And the first six people served
Are the sacrifices
auratwilight: or there's six walnuts
and whoever she hands those pieces to.
Why is Ange left at home?
Renall: Erika doesn't know.
They mention an "Ange" who isn't there
auratwilight: But what is your planned answer?
Renall: And she thinks that's really weird.
So maybe at the end she resolves to find out
auratwilight: "You left a sick six year old at home without her parents or anything?"
Oh god
No one is watching Ange
They're doing Faith Healing
Renall: They think her sickness would disturb them.
So they just ditch her.
auratwilight: At the end, Erika finds her, saves her life from death by neglect, and then Eva shoots Erika dead.
Ange is so traumatized she represses the memory, but always feels really uncomfortable malice from Eva that's not aimed at her.
"Did you...kill my family?" "No, honey."
The end has Eva see that Ange is still wearing Battler's hairpins, which is some other cult thing, and then she laughs, hands over the ring, and dies.
Renall: Also this would actually work as an official spinoff but something like a 1920s version of the earthquake scenario that killed most of the family.
auratwilight: I would really dig that 1920's thing
Renall: With a bunch of really weird parallels
auratwilight: Have a servant girl who really liked Kinzo and never admitted it and shit
Renall: Was Kinzo actually there?
auratwilight: I don't think so.
Renall: I got the impression he wasn't living near the main family and so he'd be like Ange.
Oooh, idea:
auratwilight: But Kinzo=Battler. It's just Battler didn't come home that year.
Renall: Since Kinzo = Battler, the 1920s protagonist could be a female Ushiromiya who resembles Ange.
Also there's an Erika-ish character who is a European.
auratwilight: or Chinese
"CHOPSTICKS!"
Renall: There'd be a different foreign legend instead of a western-style witch.
Or maybe a traditional Japanese one but then you're getting some Higurashi overlap
auratwilight: ....but Higurashi overlap would be kind of totally brilliant
given the earthquake thing
Renall: Perhaps
Also instead of WW2 and gold there'd be something related to the Russo-Japanese War.
Something that someone is hiding from the family that they're trying to get.
Imply many of the characters are reincarnations cursed to the same fate
Like the George analogue is cursed to have a complicated servant relationship, the Jessica analogue is destined for unwanted power (probably a powerful arranged marriage), etc.
auratwilight: but it's a magic/trick who knows thing
The maid is a more innocuous Yasu
She only likes Kinzo, she has an imaginary friend but isn't psychotic, and she started/propogated the legend to cover up some sort of mess-up and it snowballed.
Renall: Comedy "is an actual twin too" Option
auratwilight: oh man
The Maid is Other Kinzo
From the head's first wife
everyone else in the family is from the second wife.
Renall: Though I'm not sure what the THEMATIC point would be here
auratwilight: if you can't think of anything by the time you finish writing, add an epilogue where it's just some asshole Witch Hunter just conjecturing with no respect or message.
Renall: I think you could work a discussion of predestination in there, have the Erika-analogue be a nun or something.
Or just a missionary who happened to have been given shelter for a night on her way somewhere else.
Who is only sort of tolerated and her love for asian culture is kind of quietly mocked because they find it silly.
auratwilight: oh god that's a great idea.
Weeaboo european nun.
Renall: But maybe have her discuss whether things are predestined and have that flatly rejected as their discussion turns, suggesting that "even if the same thing were to happen a dozen times, it's not fate and it's not a curse. Only people's choices could lead them where they end up."
Sort of saying "Yeah all these people RESEMBLE the victims of 1986. So what? They're not."
auratwilight: "But....if people make their choices based on what came before, isn't that still predestination?"
Cue serious discussion
Renall: "Believing that nothing could change is to deny that God permits a miracle."
auratwilight: "But does that mean we can only live on God's grace alone?" The nun then laughs, "That'd be true even outside of this predestination talk, sir."
And then she tries to steer it into a religious thing and everyone tunes out...
right before she says something insightful no one catches and she doesn't realize is important
Renall: But if they're going to give us miracles as a motif (fuckin' magnets man) we might as well use that
With a character who literally believes in them
auratwilight: Yea
Renall: Sister Erica Frome
auratwilight: YES
Renall: Also the demon's name sounds like "beatrice" but Japan'd up
auratwilight: Baya-to-rii-sii
I could probably do better but I am eating an amazing stuffed chicken oh my god
Renall: Also Sister Erica should reference the part in Job where the house collapses and kills all of Job's sons and daughters without realizing the irony.
auratwilight: YES
Oh god I was trying to think of some Bible thi-
Renall: In fact all of her prayers should reference the stuff in the OT where God promises to destroy Israel but save one part of it.
auratwilight: oh my god
what if she's hired to exorcise the youkai because everyone else gave up on trying
Renall: She should be kind of unsure if she's being taken seriously
Or if they're just doing it to fuck with the white woman
auratwilight: it's the latter
Renall: I think the Ange character sort of suspects this
And tries to break it to her
But she's sort of already aware
And just wants to show her conviction.
auratwilight: oh no Ange dies this time
Renall: But then MURDERS
auratwilight: STAY HOME SICK OH GOD NO SHIIIT
Renall: Well she can ambiguously die
auratwilight: comedy bonus: There's a character who escapes with amnesia but no Ikuko ever finds them so they just die homeless
Renall: Like she and the nun can be alive to the end when the quake destroys everything and the endscroll can confirm only that the nun died for sure.
Because her body was easiest to identify
auratwilight: maybe they only find like the nun's jaw or something
no way there's gonna be a second white woman in the area.
Renall: You could IMPLY Ange's survival but it'd just be left at that
Since obviously she didn't show up in the future and Kinzo never knew about it.
ahaha oh ad
auratwilight: THE ANGE GREW UP TO BE KUMASAWA DUE TO THE AMNESIA
Renall: After the disaster the rumor is that the nun messed things up with her Christian magic and somebody writes a poem or story about it.
But most "modern Japanese" just believe it was an unfortunate natural disaster and such speculation is silly.
...oh shit
auratwilight: Kumangesawa
Do it
Renall: Tie this into the 2050 thing
In Japan the guy finds a poem about an Ushiromiya family that was wiped out in a great disaster.
Which is itself fiction.
And he's like "Okay now either the Hachijous knew about this and modeled Kinzo on that or something is FUCKED UP here."
auratwilight: Kumangesawa.
Renall: Put enough seemingly independent confirmation of the Ushiromiyas' existence in that you can't tell what's real anymore.
Also a common butterfly motif and the guy sees butterflies sometimes.
auratwilight: No man.
Moths.
Renall: Casting doubt on whether he made the whole thing up himself or is himself a character.
auratwilight: or caterpillars
oh, the guy
I thought you meant someone in 1920 lol
Renall: I like the idea of a 1920s caterpillar motif though
auratwilight: Caterpillars in 1920.
Renall: Like the youkai is a caterpillar demon thing?
auratwilight: Yea
Renall: ...idea
auratwilight: She needs to devour enough human flesh to sustain her pupal stage.
Imply that she hatches into Beatrice.
Renall: Sister Erica has the butterfly brooch which she gives to Ange after a discussion of the whole caterpillar thing, and Kumangewa gives the brooch to Yasu
auratwilight: Yessss!
Renall: Also
According to her, the brooch is reputed to have belonged to a witch who was hanged at the Palazzo Castiglioni in Mantua in the 1600s
auratwilight: oh goddammit I love you
Renall: (I'd say 900 to make her 1000 years old but I don't think there's a place named that in Italy that far back)
auratwilight: the thousand years thing is a metaphor anyway
Renall: Yeah I just like the idea of all of this stuff being confusedly metafictional for some reason.
auratwilight: If you need to justify it maybe the 600 year old witch reincarnated as the caterpillar
implying an ouroburos loop
Renall: Mysterious murders apparently committed by an AI named EPITAPH in the Hachijou-Castiglioni Research Facility in the South Pacific in 2286
And they're studying the butterfly effect
auratwilight: "That's preposterous. Everyone knows AIs aren't advanced enough to act autonomously yet! Zen zen dameda!"
Renall: The meta-world is VR
And in an Asimov-esque twist, the Battler character wants to prove the AI is not capable of malfunctioning so the culprit must be a human.
Asimov meets Umineko
And the experiment works and the AI is able to see near-infinite potentialities of reality and describes it as a dark swirling sea full of mirrored fragments.
auratwilight: Oh god.
Renall: "If you could suffer in this place for a thousand years, you would only just have attained the mastery to call yourself a witch." "What do you mean a witch?"
auratwilight: Btw the facility was founded by a company Krauss invested in.
Renall: Yes it gets power beamed from the moonbase
auratwilight: Damn right it does
Renall: Which was "a truly visionary idea that would never have been possible without the faith of some truly brilliant investors."
In the future, ALL of Krauss's investments are considered sound and visionary and he's viewed as a tragically-killed genius who saw the future.
auratwilight: After the AI story just have an epilogue that's like "Mental Waveforms Obliterated by mysterious quantum canopy domain in the 9th Dimension last Epoch."
Renall: NO, WE MUST CONTINUE
auratwilight: A thrilling and emotional mystery story about cosmic energy beings from the 9th dimension
Renall: A trader in the year 20860 encounters a "witch," a strange native humanoid species on the distant planet of Krauss III.
And learns of a strange ancient poem handed down by the human settlers about how you can find the Golden Land of the Witches which no human has ever found.
And he finds a perfect replica of the entire Ushiromiya mansion and the people in it.
And he's Battler somehow
auratwilight: Tragically, 18,000 robots were terminated in an excursion of the planet.
And then the sun of that solar system blew up.
Renall: And the final epilogue is a transcendent consciousness at the final moment of the universe contemplating whether the universe will be rekindled in a "miracle" when everything ends, knowing it is impossible to observe.
And declaring itself the Final Beatrice
auratwilight: It declares itself such after being the first and only being to understand what connects all these incidents
and it can only laugh. Madly and darkly. "We've all been fools."
Renall: And lamenting there is nothing to tell it to
auratwilight: "Come...try to remember...."
Big Bang
Renall: Yesssssss
Ryukishi should write some really stupid sci-fi
Also I can't tell if this Cloud Atlas movie looks cool or really fucking stupid but it has Tom Hanks in it so I'm guessing stupid.
auratwilight: Also ultra prequel. Duchess Beatrice cries "A pox on both your houses!"
Renall: "And also on some houses in the distant Orient!"
Actually you could do an ultra prequel where Maximus Proelius Syrius returns to his family's villa in barely-settled Gaul and are set upon by the spirit of a druidess.
Well there might not be druids in Gaul so perhaps Britain
Also Beatrice is the Lady of the Lake and Roman Battler is King Arthur
Some dude sets out to prove Umineko is the monomyth.
auratwilight: cave drawing of a yellow-haired female
or a gold dinosaur or something
the legends of which cause the myth of dragons in every human culture
Renall: Hahaha no wait
A story that's set where a son is returning to his family and there's a legend and a great disaster
And then at the end THEY WERE DINOSAURS
IT'S 65 MYA
auratwilight: ice age
even further "Uwoooah Beatazoan!" "Sorrrryyy Battlerium!"
18 single celled organisms died that hour.
Renall: We have to go deeper
Umineko is Inception
They're trying to convince the Ushiromiya children to share their father's legacy.
Battler, Beatrice, Shannon, Kanon, and Erika are the dream agents
auratwilight: ....in 2080
The Beatrice curse of that generation
The incident leads to the Virtual Reality that is the foundation of the Hachijo-Castiglioni Research Institute
The Beatrice phenomena has guided all of human history ever.
...my god we're hilariously bored tonight
We were talking about a plausible and serious 1920's thing
and look at it now
Renall: It's all a monomyth plan in the mind of a lunatic
auratwilight: no, man, it's real
but the connections are only made by a mad transcendent god-mind.
If you arrange all the stars in the universe it pans out to a zillion-star constellation of Beatrice's troll face.
Renall: Indeed.
auratwilight: simultaneously they're also all the fragments in the sea of kakera
Renall: Which is being run on the computer
auratwilight: which is inside a universe where everything is Beatrice.
Recursive Reality
Every universe and every possible universe is part of the curse
Reality cannot BE without it.
Renall: OR IS IT A MIRACLE
auratwilight: it's not really a miracle...
more like...
Certainty
OH HO
I just one upped your ass bro
Renall: to the transcendent mind, they are the same
auratwilight: Which is why the two concepts keep lezzing out
Renall: Apparently almost all Umineko porn is Ange... or Battler yaoi
auratwilight: duh
anyway you realize only 10% of what we came up with in this idea is at all usable right lol
We're insane
Renall: More like 0%
auratwilight: the 1920 thing is legit
shut up yo face
Renall: Well it ain't like we're gonna do it
auratwilight: Yea, of course. *deletes document and shifts eyes shiftily*
Renall: Well okay, I won't.
auratwilight: post the log on Animesuki
Renall: I don't care what YOU do.
auratwilight: DO IT
Renall: Nah
auratwilight: I'll do it then
Renall: Whatta dick
auratwilight: wutwut

My brain's on a mental orgasm! You guys are just inspiring! Just quit your jobs and get down to some serious writing already!