[Renall]

Originally Posted by haguruma

Regarding all the ongoing talk about how shitty it is not to have a solution, I found it funny to go overthe Anti mystery vs Anti fantasy TIP again and comparing it with what was said about Mystery literature over the course of time.

I recommend everybody to read it again and consider it.

Him talking about it doesn't make it less shitty. Explaining what the Later Queen Problem is doesn't mean it becomes okay to write a story where you intentionally don't provide information. To say "Well, I could change the answer any time I want by writing something new" doesn't necessarily raise meaningful points, nor does it excuse lazy behavior, nor does it necessarily have philosophical relevance. What do I mean by this? I feel it does warrant my explaining further, so...

What he seems to be saying (or hinting at) in the TIP is something along the lines of "Suppose I wrote an answer, and later I changed it. Obviously, that might be right. But suppose I wasn't the one who wrote the new answer. What if some fan came up with an answer that seemed better than mine and everyone became sure that was what I really meant and that answer became 'truth?' Since that can always happen, can you really know 'the answer?'" He's right about this, but he's also wrong about its specific application to Umineko and he's ignoring a very important issue from a literary standpoint.

He uses the example of Higurashi. It should be immediately apparent that the difference he's discussing while writing about his prior work around the time he was partway into writing his current (for the time) work is that, at the time of that writing, Higurashi had an ending. Moreover, it had a rather definite ending; he points out that by the end of the final arc he's revealed who the culprit is and gone over most of their motivations. What he's suggesting is that later he could introduce "undiscovered evidence X" which suddenly proves the culprit's innocence and convicts a new culprit. He suggests we can go on doing this forever because of the uncertainty of truth in an anti-mystery setting.

He is wrong on two points:

• His conclusion is nihilism. "Truth doesn't exist, therefore you must either reject the ability to know anything or at least partially embrace fantasy," which is essentially an argument for faith as the only counter to nihilistic thought. This is immensely narrowminded as it discounts the entire point of scientific rationality being about eliminating impossibility through self-correction with the understanding that you get increasingly closer to the most probably true outcome over time. In other words, the Later Queen Problem isn't actually a problem; it's the goddamn Scientific Method. Learning that Relativity is a better model than Newtonian physics does not make Newtonian physics a waste of time, nor does the possibility that something will replace Relativity make learning about it a waste of time. Should we learn in 2050 that the true culprit of Higurashi was Satoko all along... who gives a shit? Now we know. Of course his counter-argument will be that he could then prove she isn't the culprit and keep doing this forever. He's wrong, because...
• Even a work of fiction is ultimately limited in this capacity in two critical ways. The first is that there is normally a finite amount of source information, so at some point it becomes impossible to keep revealing a "new" true ending. The second is that literature faces an insurmountable plausibility and credibility issue when it does this too often. The audience may tolerate a twist in the resolution, or even several... but if you go to great lengths to eliminate every subject and bring in a new character to blame... then do that again... then do that again... at some point the audience says "You know what? I don't care anymore." How long an author can keep doing this is highly dependent upon his own skill and the expectations of the audience. The author of a very silly comedy battle manga can probably pull it off for a long time, but sooner or later even his audience will grow bored.

Ultimately, every story is beholden to this, even the ones that aren't challenging the readers with obvious questions. Traditional-style mystery writers do not create a sporting "arithmetic" puzzle because of any particular belief that the world ought to be that predictable, but as an assurance to the reader that what is being read is worth bothering with. Promising self-contained evidence and a definitive answer is essentially not a factual conceit, but a literary one.

Authors who make fewer promises, who raise fewer questions, have a right to answer less and are subject to less scrutiny about ambiguities. "Truth" is not necessarily their objective. In a story about a man's trip to the bank, a mysterious woman he runs into along the way isn't necessarily something that demands an answer. It can act as a source of wonder of course, but it isn't a literary necessity that the author actually identify this person.

Where Umineko runs afoul of this is in cloaking itself in mystery trappings, making affectations of facts and truth being important, touting the value of rationality, and then refusing to actually follow through on confirmation and then reveling in the unsatisfactory approach it took to these things. Had it not styled itself in the manner it did, some of these things would not be that important. Ultimately, a lot of the things I do care about are things I would not care about if the story presented itself philosophically and thematically as something different. You can kill a man in front of the narrator in a war story and not expect me to want to know where that shot came from, because the story is asking me to think about its meaning in a context other than a rational exploration of causes. If you have the narrator rant about those causes immediately after it happens, of course I want to know! And more important, I'm trusting that you as the author are going somewhere with that point.

Resolution itself isn't even necessarily the point. I'm okay with No Country For Old Men. It's a matter of execution and expectations, and I think Ryukishi is trying to hide behind this notion that he was somehow doing something philosophically when I don't believe he actually tried very hard at that kind of thing. I know exactly where he could have taken his points, and I am obligated to fault him for not doing so properly. That's literary criticism and you can disagree, but I don't think my point is invalid and I do think there are significant weaknesses in the story from a literary standpoint, primarily in the second half.

I might have been kinder on Chiru had it been hammering home from the start something along the lines of: "So, you've seen all the evidence already... yep, that's all of it. Can you guess the culprit? You can? Are you sure? After all, there are a number of explanations and there are many things missing. You don't even have a motive. ...You're still sure? Then there's something I want to show you... not facts; we don't have any more of those. But there is still something you haven't yet seen, and it may change your mind..." Essentially, had Chiru been a true "anti-mystery" bookend to the first series's "anti-fantasy" segment, providing an answer to a different question and not concerning itself with the mystery themes it had already tread, I might be inclined to think "Hmm, maybe he's right that saying 'you need to answer X' isn't really the point here, because that was all to make a greater point he's shown me in Chiru."

Now, some of you might well say that what I described is what Chiru is. I think at times it tries to be this, and I think those are the better moments in it. But I do believe it's too hung up on the elements that were laid out before, too focused on information that it really didn't need to give us, and ultimately it feels a bit halfassed and wastes a lot of time. If he didn't want us to have a certain answer and wanted us to be okay with this, Chiru is the point where he can say "OK, I want to present to you this thought through the second half of the story, and see if by the end 'what I want out of this story' is different than it was at the end of Alliance when you were cheering for Battler to strike down the witch." That's essentially Battler's transformative arc between the end of Alliance and the midpoint of End... but the journey becomes muddled and interrupted and distracted. I really, really wanted to follow Battler through the rabbit hole from anti-fantasy to anti-mystery (and maybe to some other point beyond both), but Ryukishi made him too unapproachable, too dissociated. Losing the meta-level dynamic that had carried the series so well ultimately harmed it greatly.

So I don't really want an "arithmetic puzzle game," as he puts it, but I do want a work of literature that is actually worth my time to read and that walks with me to a satisfactory conclusion. Episodes 1-4 gave me that and a ton of promise for what was to come and episodes 5-8 did not deliver. I wouldn't fault Chiru for being "something else," as long as it led me to a coherent and clear point (not necessarily a factual one) using ep1-4 as a proper contrast. It didn't do that; in fact, it toyed with those very same expectations pretty much the whole way through. I'm dissatisfied because it was neither a meaningful explanation of facts and proofs nor a philosophically interesting meditation on the importance of truth in a situation where critical facts are unrecoverable. Either would've worked; treading a middling ground does not.