[Renall]

Originally Posted by haguruma

I'd say that it is less likely, yes, but less realistic is something I can't really claim. We are not dealing with unrealistic elements here, just very unlikely elements. Nothing is decidedly fantastic, it's more like a very weirdly thought out "what-if" story that still keeps very much to the ground rules of our universe.
I know it's nitpicky, but I think it's important to keep these things apart when you criticize on a high level, like you are doing.

No, I stand by it. Unlikely events happen all the time in fiction, but a confluence of every possible unlikely or unfortunate event solely for the purpose of making a character's life suck harder becomes unrealistic when it becomes ubiquitous. People do things that are irrational with flimsy motivations solely because a tragedy of greater escalation is needed. At least, that's how things appear to be; it's entirely possible the manga will change the perception of these events, since it isn't finished yet. But as it stands I do think it's something that just doesn't work anymore, and I have a lingering suspicion that it's not supposed to break like that. If it is and the point was to find it "off," great, but I don't really have any faith that that'll be so.

I think we were supposed to see this as the sincere and real backstory to the actual events, but seeing it as-is just comes across as silly. I can't take it seriously anymore. He took complaints against the lack of information as reason to go so overboard on things that he forgot to leave necessary ambiguity in place, and that leaves him vulnerable to someone taking him at his word and rejecting it as too ridiculous to accept. As I understand it, that's not even a new criticism for his work.

Originally Posted by haguruma

But for me that is kinda exactly the point about it. I find it interesting how before this everybody was complaining that Yasu didn't have enough agency to be a believable villain, because she couldn't even get herself to do simple things like write a letter, now it is explained why things weren't that simple and people are still dissatisfied. Maybe I just don't get it.

You don't. She's still not credible as a villain, because we both know that she didn't actually do anything and strongly suspect that she actually wouldn't. Or at least I do. Nothing that's been presented so far in the manga has changed my mind on that. She isn't a villain, and the entire point of the story has been to make us agree with that. All the manga is doing now is reveling in her pain by piling on more and more of it. I already got the picture. I was okay with the ambiguity in this particular case. And if you had to fill in what was missing, did you have to do it in such a ludicrous, melodramatic, overblown way?

Plus, the overblown nature of it sort of robs her of agency and dramatic importance. "Why couldn't she just write a letter?" is certainly a valid criticism of the VN as it stood, but when the manga reveals the answer is "Because literally everything that ever happened to her in her entire life was the most horrible thing you can possibly imagine" it doesn't work because it's basically pushing it to the point of "couldn't" (in the sense of inability) rather than "didn't" (in the sense of could have, but had reasons to choose not to). She's not a character tragically but believably flawed and unwilling to do what would help her because of her inability to trust that the outcome will be what she desires, but a sad clown ground beneath the boot-heel of life who really has no reason to expect anything good would ever come of her actions because so little ever has.

I had trouble with her character before and I won't deny that. I always found her implausible and melodramatic. But I accepted it for various reasons, not the least of which that I was always pretty sure she was innocent of actual crimes. I still think that, but the way I'm being asked to read the rest of her character is just too much and I've slid from "I can't empathize, but I can feel pity" to "this is just silly, does everything really have to be that bad?" I've lost connection to the character and just see the story structure she's designed to support.

In general the manga has at this point so marginalized the actions of Battler and Yasu that I have to think there's still something left to be told about their activities on that weekend. If they both basically barely did anything while a tragedy happened around them, it will be a genuinely terrible resolution. The obvious path from here would be to show what Battler actually did, and reveal the truth we've never gotten and that Eva wouldn't have known. But as I said above, I don't have a lot of hope for this anymore. I'm starting to think the author is just a pretty cynical person. See below.

Originally Posted by haguruma

I really don't know if our perceptions of evil are just so inherently different - well yes, they obviously are - but I still can't call Genji a "completely ridiculous monster". He is insensitive, has probably largely given up on live, is fanatically caught in the past, loyal to promises to a fault, and yes, he hurts people with that. But what he is doing is obviously not coming from a place of hate, but from a misguided form of loyalty. Over the whole story we are told that he really believes in his role as a servant, that this isn't an occupation for him, it is his life and his reason to live.

His actions don't make sense even given the portrayal you have presented for him. His actions don't make sense by any metric. He's had a bunch of plot resolution issues shoved onto his back to tie together issues the manga has raised, and it's turned him into a completely unbelievable character. Not just beyond redemption in a moral sense (although he comes across like that and I'd judge him such if I could buy him as a character at all), but beyond redemption in a characterization sense.

I suppose the intention was to sacrifice his character to try to salvage Yasu's, but it ends up breaking Genji to just make Yasu less believable. And Yasu already required some suspension of disbelief and acceptance of genre convention. That's gone now. Could this be fixed? Yes, maybe, if it turns out a lot of stuff here was just overdramatization on Yasu's part. Should it have gotten this bad in the first place? No.

Originally Posted by haguruma

The thing is, life doesn't suck, which is shown when Yasu is with the cousins, people aren't always terrible, which is shown in a lot of scenes during all Episodes, there is a point and there is an escape (that is not death), the problem is that it sometimes takes courage and understanding. When people don't attempt to understand each other, tragedy occurs.

Right, except tragedy did occur, which sort of suggests that the author's intent is to tell us that understanding is impossible. Battler lost Beatrice because he couldn't understand her in time. For the story to refute this, to have a moral in line with what you're suggesting, something has to have happened that revives hope within the tragedy. We haven't been shown that yet. We still might, as there's ep8 manga remaining to go. I'm not passing final judgment yet, but neither can I say that this form of the ending is definitely better, which is where I disagreed with you in the first place.

Ep4 had this revival of hope with Ange. There was a moment of understanding there and a degree of critical character growth. She made sense of tragedy, empathized with those who had hurt her, forgave them, and changed. Presumably either Battler needs to have gone through this sort of moment or Yasu did with Battler observing and assisting it. If we lack that, if we aren't shown that, then a non-cynical reading of the text seems like wishful thinking. Particularly when the VN version of ep8 features an Ange who has completely forgotten that growth. I mean I won't hide that I think ep1-4 are better, but this is one of the many reasons why they are. It will be quite difficult to salvage a decent ending out of Chiru, and while I had hope in the ep8 manga in the first half of the run it's fallen pretty flat on its face right now and needs to get back up and really blow everything away.

But that assumes that the author wants us to draw that conclusion, and at this point I just don't know. He has to put a refutation in the story to make the notion that he intends to say understanding and love can come through believable. The narrative must rise to a new high point in order to show us that this section was a low point. It has to make the Battler who begged Beatrice to live out to be more than a chump who thinks people are better than they are and capable of more than they can really do.

Originally Posted by haguruma

What else about "Prime" do we know so far? The rest of Confession still contains things that Yasu assumed about them, those were the characters in her story, which were based on her perception of these people...and if Umineko should have one message then it is that our perception of people never paints the whole picture.

There's perception and then there's facts. There are certain things Yasu observes that, assuming she isn't lying - and if she is lying nothing in that section is reliable, so I'm assuming she's not meant to be taken as lying, just potentially exaggerating in reaction - simply are true. And the immediate and apparent consequences of those things she knows are staggering in their audacity.

It's one thing to argue that she's drawing the wrong conclusion from Battler's behavior, because we know she doesn't have all of the facts. It's another thing to see Kinzo's skeleton pile and Genji's seeming indifference to it and not think that your father was at least a crazy asshole and at worst a mass-murdering asshole, and his best friend an amoral enabler. A number of conclusions she draws are histrionic and unreasonable, but others seem completely reasonable given the not-insignificant information she actually has. If we take her observations as true (and we have no reason not to), even if we filter out her conclusions, it's hard to draw different ones about some facts she knows.

And what we get seems, well, completely ridiculous for what we're told is "reality." You might be able to accept it and roll with it but the story was already pushing it for me with bomb clocks and Yasu's ep7 backstory. To believe that things were actually not merely worse, but that much worse, and that Genji was basically too stupid and insensitive to grasp even the importance of basic human dignity... now it's tumbling over the edge. It'll take a hell of a rope to haul it back up.