2012-03-25, 12:31 | Link #28241 |
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Another issue:
EP3 makes it clear that the characters need to act in ways that match their personalities, and that there must be some evidence in the story for why they do what they do. Otherwise, the characters are controlled by "magic", and Battler's game against Beatrice was unwinnable from the start. I'll pass over the fact that this makes insane Yasu hard to accept, since there's a simpler problem raised. In EP1, Eva and Hideyoshi inexplicably decide to camp out alone in a guest room that is very far away from the parlor. We're supposed to assume, and the core arcs make this even plainer, that a room sealed by a chain is basically an unbreakable fortress. Eva and Hideyoshi will also lock the door, so they should be as safe as it's possible to be, right? Well, what are the few facts that they must know about the culprit? 1. At least one culprit has knowledge of the servant room keys 2. At least one culprit is not Gohda 3. There were probably multiple culprits to kill so many people 4. The faces of the victims were crushed It would take a complete idiot to miss any of these points, and Eva is supposedly intelligent enough to make the family business prosper spectacularly after the explosion. Those first 3 points prove that, unless their own son was the culprit or one of the cousins murdered their own parents for no apparent reason, at least one loyal Kinzo servant (I'm counting Nanjo) or Natsuhi was involved. In fact, if a servant was in on the murders, they'd have no need to befriend and then betray Gohda, so multiple servants were probably in on it. In short, when she and Battler are talking about who the culprit is, Eva must either have proof that her son or Jessica is the culprit, or else she basically knows that the servants did it already. She's beyond the point of mere suspicion. But what does Eva do? She does that whole receipt trick on Kinzo's door, when she must know that all the servants and Natsuhi have gone to great lengths to fake Kinzo's death. In other words, she's directly challenging the same people who, to her knowledge, must have murdered six people last night. After proving that she's a threat to their apparently continuing plan to hide Kinzo's death, and in the full knowledge that she's the current successor and the most valuable person on the island, she decides to go to an isolated locked room with Hideyoshi. Well, think about how stupid this is. She knows that the culprit has access to a master key, so she might as well leave her door unlocked. She knows that the culprit had something that could tear through face bone, and she must have noticed all the tools in the garden shed. Sure, Natsuhi had the only key to the shed, but Genji was the one who told her it was the only key, and why would Eva trust Natsuhi anyway? And any non-moronic culprit could easily hide a chain-cutting device away, since, well, most of the rooms in the mansion have chains. But wait, maybe this makes sense if Beatrice is the culprit and she threatened or bribed Eva. Well, it's clear that Beatrice has gone to great lengths to hide the time of Kinzo's death, and Eva was very obviously trying to expose this lie after the crimes were discovered by everyone. Unless Beatrice has suddenly decided that she'd like to screw Natsuhi over, Eva cannot be acting on Beatrice's orders. Remember, the whole point of Beatrice is to stop the blame from falling on any human, so making Natsuhi look like the culprit is impossible for her. So Eva trusts a known murderer to keep her end of the bargain, even after Eva starts attacking the murderer's secrets. She then hides unarmed in a room that she knows the culprit can enter easily, in a place so far from the other survivors that any struggle or noise she makes will be completely useless.
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2012-03-25, 12:56 | Link #28243 | |
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If someone like that claims to be the heir to the family's wealth, and then says that she'd like to pretend murder the family members, is it really likely that Eva would believe her? Especially after getting a very clear look at all the corpses with their faces literally smashed in?
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2012-03-25, 13:00 | Link #28244 | |
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Though yes, maybe no one would think Yasu would kill for real so, even though they would think 'hey, those fake bodies look damn realistic, if I weren't to know they're fake I would bet they're real', they might be tricked. The same however shouldn't apply to Nanjo... he exhamined them... it's way harder he didn't notice they were real... |
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2012-03-25, 14:53 | Link #28245 | ||||
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2012-03-25, 17:37 | Link #28246 | |
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As far as the EP1 goes, I am not really convinced that Beatrice/Culprit cares about the timing of Kinzo's death. The main motive is like you said to make sure no human can be blamed. Kinzo's alive or dead status goes against that goal as he can also be blamed for the murders. He has the means and motive to carry the murders out. As well that burning of the corpse was not meant to hide Kinzo's time of death but that a slow burning was necessary to carry out the next phase of Beatrice/Culprit's plan. However the burning had to be lukewarm so a smell could spread without turning the corpse into ashes. As well that the smell couldn't spread too far before the discovery of the corpses within the shed. How it was burnt was necessarily meant to hide time of death. Also when Kanon "confronts" the culprit due to be lured into the boiler room by the smell, people are convinced that Beatrice must be on the island since everyone's location was accounted for. This makes sense from the perspective on why Beatrice/Culprit would burn the body in such a way of their motive was to convince people that they are a witch. More so that the discovery of Kinzo's corpse also leads to them discovering the two keys of Kinzo's office which makes them stay in there which of course was accounted for in the Beatrice/Culprit's plan. I do wonder if there are cases where Nanjo was entirely innocent. It just seems easy to explain most things if you think that Nanjo just lied. Given his complicit role within hiding Kinzo's death, he is an experienced liar. |
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2012-03-25, 17:54 | Link #28247 | |
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Well Meta!Beato did say in EP1TP that she "knows all of Battler's moves now". But were the "moves" really all of Battler's actions or does it only refer to his internal-monologues where he shows his thoughts about "what could have happened"? |
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2012-03-25, 20:13 | Link #28248 |
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Greetings fellow anime, manga and game fans . I am NasakenaiMono. I am doing a research on Umineko no Naku Koro ni for a class in the University and I was wondering whether someone here who has played the games or seen the anime, would be willing to take a questionnaire I made for this particular class.
Since this course is part of my study of Japanese in University, the questionnaire is in Japanese. Although it is in Japanese everyone is allowed to take part. You can use a dictionary if you would like to. Those who are interested in taking part in this research are more than welcome to do so. It would be a great honour if someone took part in this. I would like to thank you in advance and thank everyone from the bottom of my heart for reading this topic whether they take part or not. Thank you very much. Here is the link to the questionnaire: http://www.efeel.to/survey/umineko/ NasakenaiMono |
2012-03-25, 20:50 | Link #28249 | |
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And to be fair, Beatrice, if anything, totally encouraged Battler to suspect these people, like, alot. |
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2012-03-26, 17:33 | Link #28251 |
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Strangely i only started to think about Nanjo when i got to EP8's mystery board. His purple declaration about "Anyone can correctly check someone else's Alive/Dead status." was one of the key points in solving it. Because if he was 1 of the culprits, then the game would become very hard, as checking people's Live/Death status would just be restricted almost only to the narration. Only after that I realized Nanjo's importance in the previous games.
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2012-03-26, 17:35 | Link #28252 | |
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This is, as far as I know, impossible for Beatrice to plan for unless Battler is somehow in on it too. She has no idea whether Battler will step in to defend Kinzo and Natsuhi, or whether he'll come up with a good idea, or whether anyone else present will accept it as a reasonable explanation. Suppose one of these things were to fail to play out. Now what? Everyone starts focusing too much on Natsuhi. Now true, having Kinzo turn up incinerated later does somewhat defray suspicion from him and from Natsuhi, but depending on timing it may not; if his body had to be in there quite a long time, then they're just going to assume Natsuhi did it before they caught her. How does Beatrice recover from this situation? "Kill Natsuhi" is the obvious measure, but if they treat her like they did in ep5 and put her under guard, it may become impossible.
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2012-03-26, 17:57 | Link #28253 |
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Well there are many parallels between LEGEND and END. And we know that Battler must have been on it in END at least, but most likely not in LEGEND. This is probably due to the "Detective" position switching over to Erika in END.
-- Framing Natsuhi is acually a bad thing for Beatrice, because at least in the first 4 games her goal was to make the culprit the "magical witch" with impossible crimes. If a human becomes a suspect, the focus on the witch weakens and i doubt that Beatrice does that on purpose. I really don't understand why Eva would be bribed to use that receipt. Without Battler's intervention, Eva could probably convince some people to suspect Natsuhi. This just doesn't add up. |
2012-03-26, 18:00 | Link #28254 | |
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Beatrice: Eva and Natsuhi are dead. Those two were "close", right? Ahaha.wav.
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2012-03-26, 18:02 | Link #28255 | |
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Though it's possible he feels blackmailed. She might have told him: If you cooperate I'll hand you money, if not I'll say you lied about Kinzo being still alive and about my life or death status and that you were bribed by Kinzo in helping Beatrice Castiglioni. Though still: Yasu is a teenager who's making a crazy mass murder. If I were in him I'll take my chances, tattle her out and say she's mad and not to believe her accusations (plus that she killed Kinzo and hid his body so I wouldn't have to explain what happened of Kinzo). Basically the weird part that not even Our confession explain is how everyone let himself be bribed so easily by an apparently mad, mass murderer teenager maid who claims to own some gold and might add she's Kinzo's illegittimate grandaughter. |
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2012-03-27, 00:23 | Link #28256 |
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The actions of the accomplices are always much easier to explain with Murder Game Theory, that they were under the belief that no one was actually dieing.
Although this doesn't mean that there weren't real deaths, nor does it mean that the accomplices were fooled into thinking real murders were fake ones. I think the explanation is more meta. It's like motive was written into the story from the standpoint of a murder game, while the results of the game were written as real. This is why whenever we try to understand the motive in terms of the end result that we always get nonsense: It's because the motive for murder only exists in fantasy and the outcome (mass death) only exists in reality. Well, there could be some real intrigues happening too, but they are not the work of Beatrice. For example, it seems likely that Eva and the other adults really did want to reveal that Kinzo was dead. In Legend, if you imagine Eva sees the murders as just a game but sees Kinzo's life/death status as serious business then her slip of paper in the door makes perfect sense. It's also interesting to note that it would mean Eva used the game for her own ends. It parallels End pretty strongly, as well as the idea that someone possibly hijacked the murder game to commit real murder. |
2012-03-27, 01:25 | Link #28257 |
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Join Date: Jun 2006
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If you start from the idea that Piece-Beatrice understands that she's a fictional character in a mystery, you get roughly the same effect. It's actually really elegant; the biggest barrier to having the culprit do complicated things to mess with the reader is justifying their actions, so removing it opens up a whole new class of tricks. Combined with the ability to control any accomplices she wants, she has a really terrifying level of deceptive power at her disposal.
And it makes all of the Shkanon mechanics work out too, which is a nice bonus feature.
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Last edited by LyricalAura; 2012-03-27 at 01:38. |
2012-03-27, 04:27 | Link #28258 | ||||
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-when Kanon gets "killed" in the boiler room(impossible for Natsuhi or any other human as everyone's location was determined) -when the letter was placed in such a way that Natsuhi would drive everyone out(she does have the most authority as the only adult and parent Ushiromiya), the way that it was planned by the culprit that only Maria, Kumasawa,Nanjo and Genji could have placed the letter -everyone who left the room aside from Maria was killed where it was impossible again for Natsuhi to be blamed for it Quote:
If Nanjo was forced into being an accomplice either by monetary compensation, threaten his life or the well being of his grandson into aiding her murder plans. Look at from Nanjo's perspective that he might not know all of the other accomplices as well in the games when "Shkanon" dies which makes it even more unnerving to make a move. Basically making a move against the culprit and accomplices could result in him falling out of graces of the culprit and getting murdered himself. Also the another possibility is that Nanjo might believe that certain murders like the one that Jessica was killed was not by Beatrice. Lets say if Genji or Shkanon told him that someone else was committing those murders. For example in EP3 it was implied that there are two murderers. That would make it even less likely to confide in others or make a move on his own for fear that he would get killed by either culprit. A final possibility is that Nanjo feels guilt tripped into helping Shkanon. Keep in mind that the whole "furniture" complex originated with Nanjo saving them as a baby and telling them the truth about their condition. Quote:
Last edited by goldendust; 2012-03-27 at 06:12. |
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2012-03-27, 16:03 | Link #28259 | |
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Nanjo is an accomplice; there's no doubt about that. He wasn't fooled into thinking some murders were fake. It's just that his motive for lying about them is based on fantasy. It doesn't make realistic sense, but that's just how the stories were written. |
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2012-03-27, 16:51 | Link #28260 |
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Now i understand Virgillia's words from EP3, that both mystery and fantasy side exist at the same time.
The gameboards have actually 2 stories running in parallel that were mixed up and had a quite confusing result. To make it more specific: If we break the story up in who dunnit how dunnit and why dunnit, it probably looks like this: Why dunnit: Fantasy exclusive element. As we see with Nanjo, who helps Yasu, although there is a high chance that he gets killed by her. He is "her piece". How dunnit: Mystery exclusive element. No kind of magic was really used to kill anyone on the gameboard (aside from extreme luck in winning gun fights). Or better said: It is FORBIDDEN for magic to be used, as the Knox decalouge is in effect for this part. Who dunnit: Mixed element. Metaphora are allowed for people, and personalities can have "names", but only if it is possible to interpret them as such. For example (not in the game, I just made it up): In this room Shanon and Kanon died. Only one corpse is present. No corpse was carried out of the room. And to make sure no one pulls a EP5 Ronove here: A corpse is a dead body and nothing else. As you can see the meaning of "Shanon and Kanon" can be interpreted in many ways, but the "number of bodies/corpses" can not. |
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