[Game] Umineko no Naku Koro ni Chiru - Ep. 5 End of the golden witch

[DKnight768]

He understands everything, or at the very least, Beato's intention, the riddle, and the culprit. Which means we can, too, because the detective has proclaimed he knows the truth. That means there are enough clues now.

[Avisch]

Just finished it all last night.

The fact that piece Battler had figured out the mystery (at the very end of the main episode) was foreshadowing that meta-Battler knew as well correct?

and how does he even manage to get all this "power" just because of the knowledge about this love?

Is this Answer he found during his "death" really as simple as this "love"?

And didn't Battler in theory lose this game because he accepted the witch (himself being the witch?)

My interpretation is that Battler has found the core of everything. He knows the truth, how the truth can interpreted, the idea of accepting magic, and his "love" between him and Beatrice.

The "love" part is not literally love. It's more like a faith in understanding a person. They show compassion for each other in hopes of finding the truth. Beatrice made the game playeable for Battler whilst Bern simply crushes any idea of a fantasy approach and Lambda's antics provide only suffering for Natsuhi.

[incko]

but didn't battler understand the concept of "co existing truths" really early in the story?
during the time when virgilia told him about the "braun tube" thing?


and what about this strang idea about the conection between higurashi and umineko? I got the idea from

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcqczgpv_4ccmhmwdp

which I often used as reference for many ideas about this series.

[Knicknevin]

When Battler was closing in on solving the mystery, he realized that since Beatrice wanted him to solve it, so she made the riddles of the game solvable. If the mysteries of the game are solvable, then reasoning is possible. And for reasoning to be possible, the crimes can't have been committed with magic.

All the key Knox rules were gone over in the ??? Tea Party. Battler just needed to take a new perspective on things.

Also... during that same Tea Party, Virgilia and Battler are talking about how the readers of mystery novels can't really get truly motivated to solve the mystery until the point that the detective makes his or her cliche announcement that they have solved the crime. This is the definite announcement that at this point in the story, all the clues needed to solve the mystery have been revealed. Battler clearly stated he solved the crime. So at this point, the mystery should be solvable by us as well.



But, I'm not so sure about the 'love' talked about is trying to describe something like a symbolic trust between Battler and Beatrice. Notice the fact that in the hardest of the games, Episode 2, Beatrice makes a number of negative statements about love, and even states she set up Shannon and George just to enjoy watching their relationship fail. But as the games progress things slowly shift, and in Episode 4, when Battler meets with Beatrice, what was her first question for him?

It wasn't "What was your sin?". Before talking about that, she first had him open up that letter, and told him to fill in the blank on that page.

It was "Who do you love?".

[AngryDango]

There are some hints about the Dine rules, I think they will be useful in resolving the mystery, and check rule 11.

1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.

2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.

3. There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.

4. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit. This is bald trickery, on a par with offering some one a bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece. It's false pretenses.

5. The culprit must be determined by logical deductions — not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession. To solve a criminal problem in this latter fashion is like sending the reader on a deliberate wild-goose chase, and then telling him, after he has failed, that you had the object of his search up your sleeve all the time. Such an author is no better than a practical joker.

6. The detective novel must have a detective in it; and a detective is not a detective unless he detects. His function is to gather clues that will eventually lead to the person who did the dirty work in the first chapter; and if the detective does not reach his conclusions through an analysis of those clues, he has no more solved his problem than the schoolboy who gets his answer out of the back of the arithmetic.

7. There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader's trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded.

8. The problem of the crime must he solved by strictly naturalistic means. Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic se'ances, crystal-gazing, and the like, are taboo. A reader has a chance when matching his wits with a rationalistic detective, but if he must compete with the world of spirits and go chasing about the fourth dimension of metaphysics, he is defeated ab initio.

9. There must be but one detective — that is, but one protagonist of deduction — one deus ex machina. To bring the minds of three or four, or sometimes a gang of detectives to bear on a problem, is not only to disperse the interest and break the direct thread of logic, but to take an unfair advantage of the reader. If there is more than one detective the reader doesn't know who his codeductor is. It's like making the reader run a race with a relay team.

10. The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story — that is, a person with whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest.

11. A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person — one that wouldn't ordinarily come under suspicion.

12. There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed. The culprit may, of course, have a minor helper or co-plotter; but the entire onus must rest on one pair of shoulders: the entire indignation of the reader must be permitted to concentrate on a single black nature.

13. Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story. A fascinating and truly beautiful murder is irremediably spoiled by any such wholesale culpability. To be sure, the murderer in a detective novel should be given a sporting chance; but it is going too far to grant him a secret society to fall back on. No high-class, self-respecting murderer would want such odds.

14. The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be be rational and scientific. That is to say, pseudo-science and purely imaginative and speculative devices are not to be tolerated in the roman policier. Once an author soars into the realm of fantasy, in the Jules Verne manner, he is outside the bounds of detective fiction, cavorting in the uncharted reaches of adventure.

15. The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent — provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. By this I mean that if the reader, after learning the explanation for the crime, should reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in the face-that all the clues really pointed to the culprit — and that, if he had been as clever as the detective, he could have solved the mystery himself without going on to the final chapter. That the clever reader does often thus solve the problem goes without saying.

16. A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no "atmospheric" preoccupations. such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude.

17. A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story. Crimes by housebreakers and bandits are the province of the police departments — not of authors and brilliant amateur detectives. A really fascinating crime is one committed by a pillar of a church, or a spinster noted for her charities.

18. A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide. To end an odyssey of sleuthing with such an anti-climax is to hoodwink the trusting and kind-hearted reader.

19. The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal. International plottings and war politics belong in a different category of fiction — in secret-service tales, for instance. But a murder story must be kept gemütlich, so to speak. It must reflect the reader's everyday experiences, and give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions.

20. And (to give my Credo an even score of items) I herewith list a few of the devices which no self-respecting detective story writer will now avail himself of. They have been employed too often, and are familiar to all true lovers of literary crime. To use them is a confession of the author's ineptitude and lack of originality. (a) Determining the identity of the culprit by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the brand smoked by a suspect. (b) The bogus spiritualistic se'ance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away. (c) Forged fingerprints. (d) The dummy-figure alibi. (e) The dog that does not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar. (f)The final pinning of the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks exactly like the suspected, but innocent, person. (g) The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops. (h) The commission of the murder in a locked room after the police have actually broken in. (i) The word association test for guilt. (j) The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unraveled by the sleuth.

[Knicknevin]

Originally Posted by AngryDango

15. The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent — provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. By this I mean that if the reader, after learning the explanation for the crime, should reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in the face-that all the clues really pointed to the culprit — and that, if he had been as clever as the detective, he could have solved the mystery himself without going on to the final chapter. That the clever reader does often thus solve the problem goes without saying.

R07 seems to be breaking or has broken a number of these rules, but this one jumped out at me. I've had the feeling for a long time now that the answer was staring us right in the face and we just didn't want to see it. Battler's reaction after he solved things seems to underscore this as well. The solution might not be blatantly obvious, but it's probably not as complicated as we think.

[Tyabann]

This is what gets me the most... if the solution is obvious in retrospect, then someone brilliant should have solved it completely by now.

To my admittedly limited knowledge, no one has.

My theory is that Ryukishi is making all this up as he goes and that there is no real solution. God, I hope that isn't true.

[Knicknevin]

Originally Posted by Kaisos Erranon

This is what gets me the most... if the solution is obvious in retrospect, then someone brilliant should have solved it completely by now.

To my admittedly limited knowledge, no one has.

My theory is that Ryukishi is making all this up as he goes and that there is no real solution. God, I hope that isn't true.

Ever watch The Sixth Sense? If not, do so. And don't look at the spoiler ahead.

If you have, did you figure out

Spoiler for End of the movie:

Bruce Willis was dead the whole time?

Just because the answer is 'obvious' after you've been told it, doesn't mean you will easily deduce it on your own.

Anyway, if you really believe that, I'm sorry... Ryukishi talked about that quite a bit in the ??? Tea Party. Go re-read it. If you can't trust the author, Ryukishi, then you'll never find the answer in a million years. R07's placed his trust in us to find the answer, so we have to trust him back that he's given us what we need to do it.

[Marion]

I agree with Knick. I do think the game is solvable by EP 4. The answer just isn't completely obvious like it was with Higurashi.

[AmyElizzabeth]

Originally Posted by Marion

I agree with Knick. I do think the game is solvable by EP 4. The answer just isn't completely obvious like it was with Higurashi.

Higurashi's answers to me were "friendship".
Which didn't help at all.

[Marion]

Originally Posted by AmyElizzabeth

Higurashi's answers to me were "friendship".
Which didn't help at all.

Higurashi wasn't as much of a mystery as a horror however.

[Tyabann]

Originally Posted by Marion

Higurashi wasn't as much of a mystery as a horror however.

Psychological horror thriller with mystery elements.

Technically.

[TeeHee]

Hey, I want to make a (fake) bet...

Spoiler for EP5:

I know that Beatrice is not only "dead", but now "dead-dead" (supposedly) at the end of EP5, but...

I am willing to bet ONE MILLION MONOPOLY DOLLARS (**cough**) that somehow Battler the Endless Sorcerer will somehow resurrect Beatrice by the end of EP7. He's game master now, right? I think it's in his power.

Who's in?

[TsundereCake]

Originally Posted by TeeHee

Hey, I want to make a (fake) bet...

Spoiler for EP5:

I know that Beatrice is not only "dead", but now "dead-dead" (supposedly) at the end of EP5, but...

I am willing to bet ONE MILLION MONOPOLY DOLLARS (**cough**) that somehow Battler the Endless Sorcerer will somehow resurrect Beatrice by the end of EP7. He's game master now, right? I think it's in his power.

Who's in?

Maybe he'll resurrect two Beatos?

*cough*

[TeeHee]

Originally Posted by TsundereCake

Maybe he'll resurrect two Beatos?

*cough*

Did I tell you about the time I revived Aerith....?

Edit: It's true! I used a Phoenix Down. Granted it was a bit early in the game...

[Knicknevin]

I'll admit I didn't solve Higurashi completely before the series ended. Granted, I only watched the anime and read some of the TIPS on these forums, so I wasn't in the best position to solve it.

But still, I did vaguely grasp the 3 rules that dictated events in the story, and at least got far enough with my thinking to realize that Takano was highly suspicious. I wouldn't have guessed in a million years that the clinic was a front or what the people working there were really trying to do.

But magic works in Higurashi. That pretty much excludes it from the proper 'mystery' genre.




Anyway. I'm taking Gertrude and Cornelia's advice and going back through the tale a little at a time. I'm not sure if I'm going to read every Episode completely, or just skim through, but I had a sudden flash while I was taking a shower a few minutes ago. I know there is a theories thread, but that place is already getting flooded with spoilers. They're marked, but still it's not very helpful for those who don't read Japanese and want to discuss things without being spoiled. So I'm gonna keep posting here for now.

Well then... Knox's 8th: The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader. Granted, Virgilia warned Battler that Beato's game might not follow the rules. But Battler decided to assume that it did, went over things in his mind again, and reached a conclusion, solving the mystery. So I think we can safely say that there are no unrepresented clues.

I mentioned Battler's encounter with Beatrice in Episode 4 earlier, focusing on Beato's first question for him. Now let's talk about the second. She states that Battler committed a sin 6 years ago, and demands that he remember it. By introducing Knox's rules into this, I say we can conclude that the clues to Battler's sin have already been presented, and we just have to go over the few things we know about Battler from 6 years ago.

We know only 2 things about Battler from 6 years ago: First, that after Asumu died and Rudolph remarried, Battler left the family for the next 6 years, only returning when Asumu's parents passed away. Second, that Battler loved making grandiose statements and mixing bits of English into his speech.

When Battler was questioned about this, naturally his thoughts fixed on the first option and he went on for some time talking about his reasoning. But after everything he said, Beatrice wasn't satisfied, and even went as far to say that the sin she wanted Battler to remember had nothing to do with his immediate family. Since the first option has been eliminated and we haven't been presented with anything else, logically Battler's sin must be related to the second option. And we only have been shown one specific example from back then...


... Yes, it is sappy. Battler's own reaction when he realized it was "You...... idiot!". But I got nothin else. Beatrice arranged this game to make Battler understand something. And it definitely relates to his sin. A while back I tried to solve Episode 4 under the same pretenses here and it worked out pretty much. My thinking has changed a bit. Without love, the truth cannot be seen, right? The details might be off. And I'll admit that trying to solve the crimes without understanding the killer's motive is just banging your head against a wall. But for Episode 4 at least, I think I'm pretty close.

[TeeHee]

Originally Posted by Knicknevin

We know only 2 things about Battler from 6 years ago: First, that after Asumu died and Rudolph remarried, Battler left the family for the next 6 years, only returning when Asumu's parents passed away. Second, that Battler loved making grandiose statements and mixing bits of English into his speech.

Hmm. I was ready to question why you specifically mentioned his graindiose English and not why he was using it to begin with.

**ahem**

Spoiler for My blue truth:

You should've mentioned that it was because he was apparently in love with Shannon.

There is a recurring theme of love, isn't there? These come to mind (feel free to add more):
1) Battler is constantly pestered as to why he doesn't really have a girlfriend.
2) George and Jessica actually had an option #2 in arc 4.
3) The breaking-point hint for finding the golden truth was "love".

We also know that Battler could have prevented all of the murders on the island by avoiding this sin.

Here's my blue truth from what little I know... feel free to say it's dumb (this doesn't adress the "how", just the "who" and some of the "why"):
By abondoning the Ushiromiya family for six years, Battler eliminated any chance of seeing Shannon for a full six years, who he was (to whatever degree) apparently in love with. Shannon, who was secretly in love with Battler in return, was distraught when she found out that Battler will not be coming back. For whatever reason, she lays out various plans that she destroy the entire Ushiromiya family; the rejected plans got thrown in wine bottles out to sea.

For whatever reason, she is the mastermind of this ultimate elaborate revenge to Battler for his return. In short, Shannon is "Beatrice".

My theory seems too ridiculous for me to take seriously, but at least it's a love-driven answer.

[Knicknevin]

Originally Posted by TeeHee

Hmm. I was ready to question why you specifically mentioned his graindiose English and not why he was using it to begin with.

Well, I didn't really consider that maybe he only spoke to Shannon like that. But now that I think about, she was the only one to remember this. Good catch.

[rogerpepitone]

What we know about 1980 Battler:

From episode 3: I see, she really fits well with George-aniki, nothing I can do about that. ...Goodbye, my fleeting first love of six years ago...

[TeeHee]

Originally Posted by rogerpepitone

What we know about 1980 Battler:

From episode 3: I see, she really fits well with George-aniki, nothing I can do about that. ...Goodbye, my fleeting first love of six years ago...

Just for the sake of adding a bit of context...

Spoiler for It's just lengthy. That's all...:

Actually, six years ago, I remember taking notice of her just a bit.

I see, she really fits well with George-aniki, nothing I can do about that. ...Goodbye, my fleeting first love of six years ago...

...Which means that, the collection of my embarrasing lines that Shannon-chan had just held back on, .....probably had something to do with that...
Aaaaaaaaaaarrghh, I can't take it...

**snip**

Battler: "...Six years ago... That's a long time. What did these six years mean to me? I've just gotten taller. It was just a waste of time, six years I spent obstinately fighting with my dad."

Jessica: "What about you, Battler? Have you gotten a girlfrie-nd?"

Battler: "Hmm, I wonder. There's a lot of girls that I play with. But there is no 'only one'. ......I'm just like a kid. I think it's more fun to be noisy with a large group of people than being alone with one person."

Jessica: "Aah, that's so you, Battler. But take your relationships with your female friends seriously. A community of girls with the wrong impressions can be scary. They could have some secret feud behind your back, and hurt someone or make them cry without you noticing it, right?"

Battler: "That's so weird. I think I got the same bit of advice from one of the girls in my class just last week. ......What did she say? Why not have fun together with everyone? Did they really want to hook up with me that much?"