Quote:
Originally Posted by Captain Bluebeard
I'm not sure what logic leads to that conclusion. Battler could be anywhere in Japan, therefore, it is possible for a strange novelist like Ikuko to encounter him. The fact that encountering THE Ushiromiya Battler is improbable, does not mean he won't be encountered by anyone. Improbable does not imply impossible.
And after all, Battler IS a stranger to Ikuko. Anyone else could have found him by pure chance, it just happened to be her. No matter how improbable, it's not that hard to accept.
Plus, of all the astronomical coincidences in Umineko, is that really the one that bothers you?
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...yes, kinda? Or rather, I think it makes more sense if there's a reason and it wasn't as coincidental as it seems (such as Ikuko looking for him specifically, whether she's Yasu or not).
But you're kind of... not very good at probability here with that reasoning of yours. The point is what Wanderer noted: It's not [relatively that] unusual that Ikuko would meet an amnesiac stranger, and it's not [relatively that] unusual that someone would find and help amnesiac Battler. It is
exceedingly more relatively unlikely that Ikuko would be the one who finds Battler, purely by chance. The chance of two unlikely events happening at the same time is extremely low unless the scenario is designed such that happening simultaneously is the only way those events
could have occurred. It's still
possible, it's just unfathomably less possible than one of the two events happening by itself.
To wave your hand and say "Well, it
could have happened, just like I
could be the person to win the lottery this week, ergo there is nothing wrong with the writing" is missing the point of willing suspension of disbelief. A reader of a fiction can expect and accept coincidences; ultimately, small to moderate coincidences are necessary to drive a story forward. We accept that, in a love story, the fated couple is just going to bump into each other or come into each others' lives at some point, even if they aren't set up with the best reason (though if they are, so much the better). We accept that, in a story about a guy who happens upon a fortune and loses it in a series of hilarious and unfortunate mishaps, the guy stumbling upon the money is going to just happen to be the one who does so and not some other guy we're not reading about.
The coincidences we're asked to accept in Umineko are stacked to the ceiling, but we accept that for one extraordinary and magical weekend in 1986, bizarre and magical things happened. Even that is pushing it, but for the sake of entertaining the mystery-versus-fantasy battle most people are fine with it even if they have reservations about some of the execution (such as the killer getting away with incredibly risky maneuvers without leaving any evidence or risking being caught).
And then the veil lifts, and we're back in the "real" world, and... oh massive coincidences just keep happening. We'll accept that Battler lived. We'll accept he was washed up on a foreign shore without memories. But seriously, now he's just coincidentally stumbling upon the one person who can help him? And she's just coincidentally stumbling upon him? Right now, at this very moment? And everything just mostly works out fine? Really?
It makes a mockery of Bernkastel's role in the story if miracles are literally a dime a dozen. And given some of the story themes about creating miracles by fostering appropriate circumstances, it would make more sense if at the very least Ikuko had calculated where debris from Rokkenjima might wash up and regularly visited that area looking for information when she stumbled upon an actual survivor. At least then the encounter would make sense, fit with her motives, and not seem like an unfathomably unlikely coincidence, even though it is still a coincidence.