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Old 2011-01-06, 12:59   Link #21321
Renall
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Originally Posted by musouka View Post
Gender ambiguity needs to exist because it's a huge part of Beatrice's motive and why she feels she can't be happy in love.
There are millions of reasons why a person can feel this way that don't involve spinning an already sensitive and poorly-understood issue into cheap characterization.

More to the point, Beatrice's motive never needed it. Which is the point I'm making here. It was never necessary. Necessity means the narrative cannot work without it. That's simply never been true. Throwing it in our faces does not suddenly make it necessary. It was a bad decision on his part that weakened the story. And, by this reasoning unto itself, Kanon himself was a bad decision.

That's certainly not an argument I'd like to make, but it certainly seems like Ryukishi doesn't consider him to matter all that much.
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Old 2011-01-06, 12:59   Link #21322
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Originally Posted by immblueversion View Post
They really weren't kidding when they said Rokkenjima was such a box way back when.
But wasn't constructing a narrative lengthier than War & Peace to illustrate that idea a bit of an overkill?
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Old 2011-01-06, 13:06   Link #21323
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Originally Posted by Dr. Akagi View Post
But wasn't constructing a narrative lengthier than War & Peace to illustrate that idea a bit of an overkill?
Well, we could have seen it coming...

Sucks to be us, doesn't it?
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Old 2011-01-06, 13:10   Link #21324
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Sucks to be us, doesn't it?
I wish I could argue with that one.

But it's all useless, anyway.
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Old 2011-01-06, 13:11   Link #21325
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What if Ryu07 is just trying to tell us that we can't find the truth for everything, and that if the cat box can never be opened, don't try to?
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Old 2011-01-06, 13:14   Link #21326
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Originally Posted by immblueversion View Post
That's Schrodinger's paradox for you: a bunch of conflicting theories are hidden within the box known as Rokkenjima, which is forever closed, allowing all these accounts to coexist regardless of their irreconcilability with one another. That is, of course, until one chooses to open the box...

They really weren't kidding when they said Rokkenjima was such a box way back when.
Oh that's for sure. I thought the box would open in the end. I think it was a very reasonable expectation. But in the end the cat box remained a cat box.


But now I can add another catbox:

Alive cat: Ryuukishi knows the solution to every riddle and has an answer to every question.

Dead cat: Ryuukishi couldn't find a good way to fix every holes in his story and decided to create an inconclusive ending so that this embarrassing truth will never be exposed.



The funny thing about this catbox is that if the dead cat is true, then this catbox is convenient for Ryuukishi. If the alive cat is the truth, then Ryuukishi his being masochist for letting an insulting doubt coexist with the truth of his genius.
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Old 2011-01-06, 13:23   Link #21327
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There are some interesting points you can make about the "cat box" metaphor (ignoring for a moment that it has nothing at all to do with the original thought experiment at this point). Discussion of these concepts could have significantly deepened the work. However, he only really scratched at the surface of this. For example, consider all of the following positions:
  • Nihilism: The truth can never be known, so it's pointless to even think about it.
  • Absolutism: There is only one truth within, and we can find it.
  • Relativism: Any truth which might have existed in the box is equally valid compared to any other truth.
  • Relative-Moralism: There are many possible truths, so we should choose the "best" one.
  • Future-Egocentrism: The truth we establish in the present for what happened in the past is the truth.
  • Denialism: Nothing happened inside the box.
  • Dignity Moralism: We must not speculate on what happened, out of respect for the dead and our own lack of knowledge.
  • Historical Approach: We should draw conclusions only based on the actual evidence we have. Anything that didn't survive is something we can't know.
Mind, some of these positions may sound like things certain characters have advanced in the story. The problem is that there was relatively little philosophical reflection on the ramifications of those positions. Bear in mind, this is entirely within theme; Beatrice's entire modus operandi in ep2-4 was forcing Battler into a conflict of paradigms so that he would understand precisely how complicated the situation was.

It would be very interesting to have known more, for example, about the camps the Witch Hunters of the future place themselves in, rather than sort of characterizing all of them as detrimental or destructive forces (though one can argue that).
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Old 2011-01-06, 13:45   Link #21328
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Originally Posted by Jan-Poo View Post
Oh that's for sure. I thought the box would open in the end. I think it was a very reasonable expectation. But in the end the cat box remained a cat box.

But now I can add another catbox:

Alive cat: Ryuukishi knows the solution to every riddle and has an answer to every question.

Dead cat: Ryuukishi couldn't find a good way to fix every holes in his story and decided to create an inconclusive ending so that this embarrassing truth will never be exposed.

The funny thing about this catbox is that if the dead cat is true, then this catbox is convenient for Ryuukishi. If the alive cat is the truth, then Ryuukishi his being masochist for letting an insulting doubt coexist with the truth of his genius.
Bridges have been burnt here.

I enjoyed reading your posts the most Jan-Poo and anticipated this kind of reaction.

The beauty of this game was that it could bring forth all kinds of theories and discussions. That game held far greater value than the actual game itself.

I think he left the ending open because he didn't want the discussions to end. He said many times that it's a thinking game. Thinking ends when the true answer is revealed.
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Old 2011-01-06, 13:52   Link #21329
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Sometimes I wish it was Renall who really wrote Umineko.

What a wonderful place would it be, a place where ideas and paradoxes fight for ultimate dominance as if in a Dostoevsky novel simultaneously interpreted by Bakhtin, and different genres parade to their death in the meat grinder of righteous criticism ala that famous Pink Floyd video.
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Old 2011-01-06, 13:55   Link #21330
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At first I wondered whether Ryu07 went a little too far and made up a bunch of things just to discover there's no way to explain it. Like the dead-cat thing Jan-Poo mentioned. I made those mistakes many times when I first starting writing fanfics.

But yeah, I really love mystery, I love watching crime shows (even if they're mediocre compared to the real world) and I love reading all of your theories and pitching in stuff myself.

What got me upset at the end was over the fact they literally THROW IN YOUR FACE in the EP7 Tea Party that Kyrie and Rudolf are the culprits. Sure, the story never went the right way considering their fate at the end, but still!

And then the most ultimate culprits for it all was Kyrie and Rudolf---WTF, wait a minute, didn't we just go through that possibility to torture Ange and it turned out to be TRUE?!

Geez, I'm complaining too much here >_<. Anywho, they should've put George as the culprit in Ep7 Tea Party. Would've been hilarious and then we'd turn around and see who it really was xD
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Old 2011-01-06, 14:31   Link #21331
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What got me upset at the end was over the fact they literally THROW IN YOUR FACE in the EP7 Tea Party that Kyrie and Rudolf are the culprits. Sure, the story never went the right way considering their fate at the end, but still!

And then the most ultimate culprits for it all was Kyrie and Rudolf---WTF, wait a minute, didn't we just go through that possibility to torture Ange and it turned out to be TRUE?!
Uh...no. That's not what happened at all. Stop reading spoilers from /2ch/ and /jp/. They're only the culprits of Bern's game with the Purple Truth and such, they're not the TRUE, REAL CULPRITS as far as we know. We were never told that.
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Old 2011-01-06, 14:36   Link #21332
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I think he left the ending open because he didn't want the discussions to end. He said many times that it's a thinking game. Thinking ends when the true answer is revealed.
I don't know about that. I mean, y'know, science and stuff.

Plus he can be ambiguous and still give answers. "Answers" being the key there; for instance, he could use his answers to pare it down to a slim handful of interpretations and leave us to fight it out. "It's whatever you want it to be!" doesn't inspire debate, as has been said... it just sorta allows people to talk past each other forever.
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Old 2011-01-06, 14:37   Link #21333
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They're only the culprits of Bern's game with the Purple Truth and such, they're not the TRUE, REAL CULPRITS as far as we know. We were never told that.
And that's, like, better? More satisfying? Less insulting to a general fan of the work?
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Old 2011-01-06, 15:28   Link #21334
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Um...sorry, but what's /2ch/ and /jp/? o_o I just gathered the Rudolf and Kyrie as the true culprits information from this forum so I thought it was true...?
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Old 2011-01-06, 15:29   Link #21335
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I don't know about that. I mean, y'know, science and stuff.

Plus he can be ambiguous and still give answers. "Answers" being the key there; for instance, he could use his answers to pare it down to a slim handful of interpretations and leave us to fight it out. "It's whatever you want it to be!" doesn't inspire debate, as has been said... it just sorta allows people to talk past each other forever.
If I were to assume that we was dishonest in his interviews and he didn’t have good answers then he took an unnecessary risk. I don't understand this line of thought but I'll entertain it.

It’s a doujin game but consider everything linked to this franchise. What if an entity linked to 07th Expansion, who relied on the game to have a somewhat satisfying conclusion, called his bluff?

Some possibilities:
  • He doesn’t care. (makes him look really bad / credibility)
  • He does care. He had answers but they sucked. (grossly unsatisfying answer is revealed)
  • He notes that Umineko Rei will be coming out shortly. (Be patient until the work is completed. The answers he gives are better than what we have now.)
  • He notes that many people just do not fully understand his story yet. All of the answers aren't necessary for the purpose of understanding what he wanted his story to convey. (Everyone will learn the truth in time)
Other possibilities?
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Old 2011-01-06, 15:43   Link #21336
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I think he left the ending open because he didn't want the discussions to end. He said many times that it's a thinking game. Thinking ends when the true answer is revealed.
This is something I argued over with chronotrig. But I really don't understand this.

It is as if you told me that, I don't know, that Final Fantasy VII or MGS were better off not having an ending at all because when you reach the end the game ends...

Well duh... of course, ending means that it stops there, but why is it wrong?
Rather... I think it's a lot worse when there's no ending.

A game that doesn't have an end isn't a good game in my book. A game needs to have an objective. If there is no end then there is no reachable objective. If there is no objective then there is no game.

And then again why discussions about umineko must last eternally? They most definitely won't last eternally, so why you want them to die when the people will inevitably get tired of them?

This is actually something I hate about western series. The logic of profit makes it so a series is (99% of the times) continued until people get so disgusted by it that they stop watching it. So what was originally a great show and could end and be remembered as a great show, ends up being remembered for how bad it became in the last episodes.

This is what truly is sad. Lucky this won't happen with umineko, but I wonder why people find it so difficult to understand that if an author doesn't write the word end to his story, the story will almost certainly degrade and rot.


To conclude you said that if umineko ends the thinking stops. That's not true.
My mind isn't limited to umineko. If umineko ends I stop thinking about umineko and start thinking about something else. Maybe the next When They Cry series, for example, or something else completely.
Why you want to think about the same thing for the rest of your life? I want to move on and get newer stimuli.

As far as I'm concerned I already reached "my truth" on 95% of umineko. The only other truth I'm interested in is Ryuukishi's truth. At this point I have absolutely no interest in any other truth.
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Old 2011-01-06, 16:01   Link #21337
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Of course I didn't mean to stop thinking altogether.

But I understand your point. You understand his story but you want finality. You want to move on.

I tried to solve it as a mystery just as hard as anyone else. Sorry, but I am just a different person than you. This story has already given enough to me. I'm satisfied with everything I got from it. More would be nice, but I don't need it.
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Old 2011-01-06, 16:17   Link #21338
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Um...sorry, but what's /2ch/ and /jp/? o_o I just gathered the Rudolf and Kyrie as the true culprits information from this forum so I thought it was true...?
It's best you don't know.
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Old 2011-01-06, 16:23   Link #21339
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If I were to assume that we was dishonest in his interviews and he didn’t have good answers then he took an unnecessary risk. I don't understand this line of thought but I'll entertain it.
His interviews have always conveyed to me one of three things:
  • A guy who simply overestimates how smart his audience is or how closely their thinking aligns with his (e.g. "I'm surprised nobody found the answer yet, I thought it all totally added up now!")
  • An impulsive liar who tosses out ideas and fishes for a response to see what to do next.
  • A master salesman who knows exactly what to say in interviews to make as little commitment as possible while generating maximum audience speculation and interest.
The man's no fool, and he knows he has credibility (even if he's forever "the Higurashi guy," being the Higurashi guy is good enough by itself to sell things), so I'd lean toward suspecting the lattermost. Which means I really don't consider his interviews to be much more than sales puffery meant to sell me the next part of the series. And I'm okay with that, but I don't think mining his statements for nuggets of information will get us far. He knows what he's saying and doing.
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Old 2011-01-06, 16:29   Link #21340
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Of course I didn't mean to stop thinking altogether.

But I understand your point. You understand his story but you want finality. You want to move on.

I tried to solve it as a mystery just as hard as anyone else. Sorry, but I am just a different person than you. This story has already given enough to me. I'm satisfied with everything I got from it. More would be nice, but I don't need it.
Well Ssol, but you got Featherinne's avatar, didn't Featherinne herself said that she wanted to see her "truth" being finalized in a game?


Anyway part this stuff... I wonder....
Will Ryuukishi actually manage to never answer the many questions left unanswered?

I'd be very surprised if he could. History teaches me that many authors who tried this in the past had to yield the the readers' requests.

For example, thanx to Will (the user not the character) I came to know about a short story called "the mysterious card".
The whole story revolves around this mysterious card with something written in French on it that would cause several people to react in an inexplicable manner. The main character, who can't read French, becomes therefore obsessed by it and tries to find out what's the meaning of those French words, but to no avail, because everyone that read them becomes shocked and refuses to tell him.

This story had a great impact on the public because of the tension that it could create, but at the same time it made everyone become extremely curious about the content of the message. The problem is that logically speaking there is really nothing that could explain in a satisfying manner all those reactions, and the story was never meant to give an answer.

In the end the author was somehow forced to write another story that would finally unveil the mystery.
The problem is... it sucked. And I read it, it really sucks. it didn't really satisfy anyone. It sucked so much that another author decided to write his own solution.


Another example I can make is the Dark Tower. Stephen King didn't really want to write an ending that would explain what Roland finds at the end of his journey. He made it quite clear. The book in his mind was supposed to end without a proper explanation. However probably because he already knew that his readers would be pissed about that, and maybe under his editor pressure, he ended up writing an ending, and it wasn't anything spectacular of course.



So does this prove that it is actually better if an author doesn't write an ending? Well in my opinion it's bad either way you look at it. The best possible scenario is when an author can wrap everything up nicely in the end. There are cases when obviously the author can't. But the option of leaving an open ending doesn't really eliminates the flaw.

At any rate what I wanted to show is how authors who tried this ended up being forced in writing an ending that of course couldn't be right.

Ryuukishi has a strong feedback with his readers, so it's even less probable for him to avoid the questions. It is also inevitable that some questions will be asked in interviews, and at that point what will he answer?
So far he could avoid them because the story wasn't finished but now he has no excuse.

Well I don't know... let's say that I'm still waiting for at least a few additional answers, although I don't expect anything groundbreaking. Because if he really had an awesome answer, he would have wrote it.


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[*]A master salesman who knows exactly what to say in interviews to make as little commitment as possible while generating maximum audience speculation and interest.[/list]The man's no fool, and he knows he has credibility (even if he's forever "the Higurashi guy," being the Higurashi guy is good enough by itself to sell things), so I'd lean toward suspecting the lattermost. Which means I really don't consider his interviews to be much more than sales puffery meant to sell me the next part of the series. And I'm okay with that, but I don't think mining his statements for nuggets of information will get us far. He knows what he's saying and doing.
Well... when he said that the manga made stuff too easy to understand compared to the novel, I smelled a promotional message.
As of now, I still have no clue on what makes the manga so much better to understand.... to understand what exactly?
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