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Originally Posted by DaBackpack
EP2 is really an interesting case. It is the intersection between "message bottle" and "forgery". In other words, the themes of the entirety of Umineko and the Shannon/Kanon deal is directly addressed in EP2. I think that EP2 is actually a "forgery" directly based on the message bottle.
Think of it this way: if EP2's message bottle made any mention of Shannon and Kanon's love troubles (the beginning of EP2) then the 1998 characters would have a strong lead of Yasu as the culprit or would at least make special mention of them. Because this does not seem to be the case, I think EP2 is also a forgery in some sense. That is, EP2 is just a "story" built into the events of the second message bottle. EP1 is straight mystery, but since Beatrice/Battler make explicit mention of EP1's events in the later Episodes, maybe EP1 is a forgery too?
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This is one of the elements that I see as a huge hint toward Yasuko.
Something that strongly differentiates EP1-2 from EP3+ is the way Meta-Battler interacts with the narrative. Starting in EP3, he witnesses everything that happens on the gameboard and argues with Beatrice about it as it happens, and Beatrice in turn directs the events on the board in response to his arguments. But EP1-2 are totally different from that.
In EP1, Meta-Battler doesn't exist until after the game board story is over, and there are no outright fantasy scenes until Beatrice reconstructs the second twilight with magical stakes during the tea party. In EP2, we do see fantasy scenes, but Meta-Battler apparently doesn't -- we don't hear a peep out of him even when demons and goat butlers start popping out of the woodwork, and later during the first twilight of EP3 he acts as if he's witnessing magic on the game board for the very first time. What we do get, though, is a scene of Beatrice at the very end saying to Battler that she's going to explain how she did everything using magic, and since she's standing next to a living Kinzo at the time, the scene can't be part of the original game board story.
Based on that, I think it's likely that the message bottles underlying EP1-2 don't actually contain any fantasy at all. Instead, Meta-Battler's behavior mirrors how Tohya is reading the text. For EP1, he read it through first and then talked to Ikuko about it. For EP2, she started a back-and-forth with him while he read through the original message bottle, then
after he finished she presented him with an augmented version of the story with fantasy scenes. Then EP3 and onward were written with Tohya's active participation, and that's reflected in Meta-Battler's more active role.
Backstory scenes like Shannon's date with George or the culture festival actively clash with the presentation of the message bottles being excerpts from Maria's diary, but if they were tacked on later, we can resolve that inconsistency. But then, how could those scenes be written, if they didn't come from Yasu in 1986? From Tohya? Is it really likely that, with corpses scattered everywhere and the island about to explode, Yasu sat Battler down to tell him all about a random culture festival she went to with Jessica?
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Originally Posted by Renall
You can't merely remove that part, because scenes like Kanon fighting for Jessica and so forth don't make a lot of sense with those bits removed yet are definitely part of the October 4th/5th narrative. So those parts would also have to be removed or changed... meaning that, well, how do we know which parts are added in and which parts were "originally" in the Forgery?
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It may be impossible in principle to look at any scene and tell whether it was in the original or not. However, I think we can safely exclude scenes that Meta-Battler should have reacted to, but didn't. And by extension, anything that narratively depends on those scenes is probably also out.