[Game] Umineko - Spoilers, Theories, Interpretations

[Marion]

Originally Posted by Azule

Oookaaay. Deep breath.

-about to run through it in japanese to see character portraits and stuffz-

Just because im confused, which one of the new characters is Will and which one is Wright/Leon @_@

Will Wright is the man in blue. Leon is the girl/boy in red. Leon's gender is probably made ambiguous on purpose, like how the 19th caller in EP 5 is either a girl or boy.

[Mic]

I found information about Van Dine Twenty rules

Spoiler for Twenty rules for writing detective stories:

"Twenty rules for writing detective stories" (1928)

(Originally published in the American Magazine (1928-sep),
and included in the Philo Vance investigates omnibus (1936).
by S.S. Van Dine
(pseud. for Willard Huntington Wright)

THE DETECTIVE story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more — it is a sporting event. And for the writing of detective stories there are very definite laws — unwritten, perhaps, but none the less binding; and every respectable and self-respecting concocter of literary mysteries lives up to them. Herewith, then, is a sort Credo, based partly on the practice of all the great writers of detective stories, and partly on the promptings of the honest author's inner conscience. To wit:

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.

[Almazluverdis3]

Originally Posted by Alcindor

goddamit 2chan

Never ever trust 2chan. That's my advice. Anyway, I KNEW IT. I KNEW THAT GUY WAS VAN DINE. I'll stop spazzing out now. So "Leon" can't be a possible culprit?

[Oliver]

Originally Posted by Shiro Kaisen

It hasn't been confirmed that Wright has an objective viewpoint yet, but I don't buy into Leon = Kanon = Shannon until I read it myself.

So far as I'm reading, Wright tries to invoke Spectator Authority to force Shannon to appear together with Kanon before him. Shannon seems to go into an infinite loop which chews up the available CPU and starts stuttering, upon which Wright backs down.

This doesn't prove anything -- but immediately before that Wright tells her that this world is a specially set up stage for demonstration purposes, a "bigger cat box" so that Leon may exist. As such it is not required to be true.

[Axilios]

Willard H wright is the blue one, Lion is the red one. Also yes, there was a false spoiler about some incestuous relationship between Rosa and Rudolf on 2ch, but everything was false.
I seriously hope that Ryu will use Lion's design again one day, it is the best character he has drawn for me.

[Escargotage]

Am I late to the party? Found these through executing Kinzo and choosing Beato's different outfit.

Spoiler for EP7:

[Endless_Witch_Nipah]

Originally Posted by Escargotage

Am I late to the party? Found these through executing Kinzo and choosing Beato's different outfit.

Spoiler for EP7:

Translation please?

[MeoTwister5]

Good lord a bunch of new characters, 23 new music tracks and a bunch of new rules to go with it. Ryukishi better damn well know what he's doing.

If I can borrow my friend's copy I'll probably start on it by the middle of the week.

[Klashikari]

Actually, Ryukishi was vastly more consistent in this episode, considering how it went smoothly like a clockwork.
There are a -lot- of surprise, but they don't seem completely on the left field compared to say, ep5 and 6.

Episode 7 is definitely the "most" unique, and amusingly, blasting the other episodes in term of execution (it is really "cold" straight to a truth, and not a happy go lucky one). The contrast is quite noticeable, as Episode 6 was a meta festival, while Episode 7 was basically the gameboard and the theatre.

[MeoTwister5]

Originally Posted by Klashikari

Actually, Ryukishi was vastly more consistent in this episode, considering how it went smoothly like a clockwork.
There are a -lot- of surprise, but they don't seem completely on the left field compared to say, ep5 and 6.

Episode 7 is definitely the "most" unique, and amusingly, blasting the other episodes in term of execution (it is really "cold" straight to a truth, and not a happy go lucky one). The contrast is quite noticeable, as Episode 6 was a meta festival, while Episode 7 was basically the gameboard and the theatre.

Well with Bern being GM and all you'd expect a smooth mixture of truth and bullshit served ice cold.

So I can at least assume that there aren't excessive transitions between real world, metaworld, metametalworld and whatnot? The thing I hated with 6 was the number of transitions that really broke up the pace of the storytelling and muddled up a lot of the key points, especially for the logic error.

Language wise is it as as technical as the previous 2 episodes or is it a lot easier on the brain?

[Escargotage]

Could I ask someone who's managed to read through the episode a question, please.

Spoiler for EP7 Tea Party:

What exactly happened towards the end? What were those eyes that started popping up?

[Klashikari]

In fact, there is a plot twist, though there is no evidence it is the hard truth:

When we got the climax, Lion begs Bernkastel to stop that mess, but she flately says she is -not- the gamemaster. During this scene, she was poking fun at Lion, wondering if s/he figured out who is the real gamemaster, as if it was plain obvious.

[Used Can]

It certainly is different since you have Will going around and questioning people, like a real detective.

I've got to admit, it's been a bit boring on certain aspects. I'm currently on Jessica's interrogation.

You do get far too many facts in your face in this episode. I'm sure I'm not even half-way through, and the ideas I had formulated from past games have been accepted and denied constantly in this game.

It was rather obvious there was something going on with Lyon, other than she had never been in the game before, when neither Kanon or Shannon referred to her by a title. Will caught up rather quickly on it.

[zRyuu]

I always thought it was a pretty solid theory. The church choice was obvious. Based on Kinzo's background the church was obviously important. There, you get quadrillion and if you know Qilian (Taiwan was a bit hinted in EP5), next is just a word play. And I wasnt expecting a solution that told me what exactly i gotta do with the device or with the letters. We were told we'd need to be in Rokkenjima to know the whole solution anyways.

[Azule]

Originally Posted by Klashikari

In fact, there is a plot twist, though there is no evidence it is the hard truth:

When we got the climax, Lion begs Bernkastel to stop that mess, but she flately says she is -not- the gamemaster. During this scene, she was poking fun at Lion, wondering if s/he figured out who is the real gamemaster, as if it was plain obvious.

Wow...do we know who the gamemaster is?
-really lame understanding of this due to no japanese skills-

[goldenlove27]

If you put it like that... Bern might be trying to say that Lion, (or however you want to name this person) is the Game Master. It might be believable if he was the person Natsuhi talked to on the phone in EP 5 but since I don't own EP 7,(let alone read it), it's up to those who can understand it to draw out the answer.

[Klashikari]

That's what Will thought, after he barged at Lion's rescue (oh boy, Will is definitely badass. All the comments about him from 2ch aren't groundless).
However, it is definitely not Lion.

Problem on my side is that I was particularly tired (4AM) and I was a tad too pumped and shocked by Bern's merciless mess. So I can't exactly tell who was the GM or if it was just Bern lying (which is unlikely, considering her character so far). That being said, I'm 100% certain Bern declared she is not the GM.

Probably going to re-read episode 7 at my leisure, because there is so many food for thought that your brain literally explodes.

[Oliver]

Well, I should say the submarine design is definitely twenty years out of date. In 1943 Italy has no submarines that look like this.

EDIT: Also, it belongs to RSI, which actually got no large submarines at all in the divide, but also, the accident appears to cause the battery to generate chlorine. Which would mean that the battery is HCl based, and as far as I'm aware those don't exist.

[Krystalwitch]

Spoiler for Epitaph Related:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qilian_Station

[ArcticHelm]

Spoiler for Ep7 Character musings/theory:

I think I'll just avoid the gender debate in a different manner and go out on a limb and say Rion/Yasu was/is both male and female. Ryu probably laughs at the reader's inflexibility on that part and specifically draws out the ambiguity. It doesn't seem that the story is excluding such a device since it focused on the twelve toes of Kinzo more than once.

Edit:: I wouldn't be surprised if it went something like this: Kinzo hates women or at least thinks they "have their place." Child taken into family ~>" Medically set as male" as per his ideas of heirship. Child not taken into family ~> Grows up as both ~> Loves battler, but Solves epitaph. ~> Kinzo says screw this, a woman isn't running the family ~> medically set as male two or so years before the conference. Hey that's pretty grim. ` ~`)

The ideas are probably mutually exclusive, but either way I thought it might be a possibility for making sense of some things in regards to the mysterious person.