I’ve been following the discussion about the message bottles being sent after the island blew up and, although it has some interesting points, I find hard to accept this theory maybe because I’m looking at things from another angle.
Let’s face it, I know if the messages in the bottles were sent after the Rokkenjima incident it would be a lot easier to explain how they could be so accurate (they had the storm and didn’t have Ange) but still, to me, it doesn’t sound like the right answer.
First there’s this bit in Ryukishi’s interview:
Quote:
R And it really was just that. She had no intention to create the perfect crime from the very beginning. And that is how, even without turning the chessboard over, we return to the question „Why did the culprit send a letter announcing the incident?“. If somebody wanted to commit the perfect crime, it would have been better not to send an announcement and to murder everyone in their sleep. In the end it shows that the culprit had the internal longing to be discovered.
K No matter how you look at it, it seems like she was already accepting death. Both the letters before the incident and the message bottles seemed very much like a will.
R While there was enough desperation to actually carry out the incident, there was also the wish for somebody to stop her. Many criminals sending out announcements of their crimes might actually be screaming „Somebody, please stop me!“. Even though of course they can not be forgiven.
K That is why she painted herself as the sole culprit and wanted for Battler to solve it, right?!
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First, it implies that, although she wanted Battler to stop her, she would have accepted it even if someone else were to do it.
Second, for the message bottles to seem like a will, she had to have assumed she would die after sending them.
Going on. In Ep 7 Tea Party Yasu said he had envisioned any possible scenarios. It’s possible she wrote them down and those scenarios became the messages in the bottles. We know only of three messages in the bottle but it’s possible there were more, with different scenarios, even ones with Battler dying on the first twilight or with Ange being present or with the weather being sunny.
By coincidence the ones that were found didn’t have Ange and had a storm. It might be that she assumed those scenarios were more plausible so there were less scenarios with Ange coming or a storm not happening or that she had tossed away the scenarios that didn’t fit with the situation. If the bottles were abandoned in the sea the day before the family conference by then she would have already known about the storm and Ange’s extremely low chance of coming.
George Simenon was capable to write around 80 pages in a day. Maybe even Yasu is a fast writer so she wrote really a lot of them. Maybe she started writing the possible scenarios as a joke, a way to have fun, then a plan formed in her mind and they became what we know.
Maybe Ryukishi didn’t really care about going for the more plausible possibility but went for the one that was still possible and more useful for his story.
Yasu said she thought the Ushiromiya had a really low chance to solve the epitaph but still it’s what had likely happened in Rokkenjima Prime. Sometimes the roulette stops on the 0, even if it’s easier to get an even or odd number.
Evidently Yasu’s roulette likes the number 0 (Her grandmother was an Italian who ended up in a rather unusual situation and died after giving birth, Kinzo believed her mother (who was the split image of her grandmother) to be her grandmother’s reincarnation and made her pregnant, Rosa found her mother and this caused her to fall from a cliff, Yasu also fell from a cliff but survived, once she fell in love with Battler and seems she could leave Rokkenjima with him he leaves the Ushiromiya family, Yasu solves the epitaph and just after she does Kinzo dies, Battler comes back into the Ushiromiya family just when she was considering leaving it with George, the island has a auto-destruction mechanism, during the conference a storm happens closing off the island, the family solves the epitaph but somehow they’re nearly all wiped out anyway… and I’d like to point out it’s possible despite planning to die there she managed to survive… talk about always picking up the hardest to get outcome).
But there’s more that makes me think that’s hard that the messages were written after the incident.
Now let’s consider possibilities:
Possibility number 1.
Ange’s travel is real. If the messages in the bottles were sent after the incident either the police was wrong or Otsuki was wrong. They’re spreading info that are false. Let’s start from the police.
If the police made a mistake in deciding the first message had been sent before the Rokkenjima incident it showed incompetency. If it spread a false info on purpose it showed conspiracy.
If Ootsuki is reporting a false info either he had been misinformed (because the police made a mistake), he is incompetent (he didn’t really know if the message had been written before or after the incident, he’s just reporting a info he hadn’t checked carefully or in which he had decided to believe with no proofs) or again he’s lying to Ange for unknown purposes.
Now, let’s analyze the chance the false info was spread by the police. Although I like the conspiracy theory to assume there’s the Umineko version of Yamainu interfering with the police work is not supported by any clue. It’s possible but it’s random. The police can make a mistake in deciding the message was sent prior to the incident, it’s still made by human beings, but I’d like to think that, before they’ll dismiss something that could be a clue to find out the culprit of so many deaths they would check it carefully. Again, it’s possible but I’d like to hope it has low chances of happening.
Now let’s move to Ootuski. If he’d been misinformed by the police the blame shift on the police. If he’s incompetent Ange made an error going to him. I’d like to think Ange didn’t pick up a random witch hunter but tried to go for a knowledgeable one since she wanted info. Ootsuki seems an expert, he could even notice the resemblance between the message and the writing on Maria’s diary, if he’s not we can’t even trust him to recognize the writing. Again, it’s possible but I think it’s more probable Ange would pick up a competent one. The conspiracy theory has no support. He doesn’t seem to know Ange is hunted by the Sumadera and even if he knew he would have probably slowed her more if he had talked with her about the possibility the real culprit was alive and writing message bottles.
So, if Ange’s travel is real the possibility that the message bottles were written AFTER the incident is pretty low.
Possibility number 2
Ange’s travel is fictional. Be it meta created by Toya or narrative that was in the ‘Alliance’ wrote by Itouikukuro Reigonamu what happens in it is the result of a decision made by Toya or by Itouikukuro Reigonamu (I’m keeping Toya and Itouikukuro Reigonamu as two separate being because I’m not sure if under the name Itouikukuro Reigonamu there’s only Toya or there’s also Ikuko and they are writing in tandem).
Now usually in fiction nothing happens without a purpose. In the books that explain how to write a story you generally find stuffs like ‘don’t waste your time and bore your reader writing random facts that has no use whatsoever for your story’.
Yes, real life is an endless sequence of details, but you won’t write them all in a fic.
If person A was incidentally pushed in real life and this had no consequence whatsoever nor this might help a reader to understand something about person A, even if you’re writing a bibliography, you generally wouldn’t mention this.
Now… which narrative relevance might have the fact that someone lied about when the message bottles were sent or spread a false information by mistake? Or, since they are at it, which relevance might have the fact that in the narrative is included the existence of the message bottles? Because since this is fiction the messages might not have existed for real…
Let’s analyze the hypothesis we considered before.
If there was a conspiracy, there’s no mention of it, nor it has effect on the story. Apparently there’s no real point in having the police being dumb or Ootsuki being incompetent or Ange being a mistake in choosing with whom she should talk.
Ange-Beatrice has already decided to fight the witch. She didn’t need to know that there were message bottles written prior to the incident. Real Ange can’t fight the witch, she doesn’t even plan to. In Ep 4 she goes on Rokkenjima, toying with the idea of dying there. Although she talks with Ootsuki and other people she doesn’t really seem to think she can track the culprit down. In Ep 4 & 8 it’s implied in her heart she’s rather firm in the belief it was Eva who murdered everyone and, by now, Eva is dead.
Saying the message bottles were written prior to the incident doesn’t shake her belief that much.
Ange-Beatrice and Ange would have acted the way they did regardless of when the messages were written.
Although the existence of witch hunters was aided by the message bottles it’s possible they would have birth even without them, just with Kinzo’s library (that would likely cause info on the epitaph to spread). Maybe they wouldn’t be so enthusiast but since Kinzo’s library raised a big interest is likely to assume we would have ended up having a smaller group of witch hunters but still a group of them.
The existence of the forgers was tied closely to the one of the messages, without the messages we wouldn’t have forgers but we could still have fictions. In real life there’s plenty of people that write fiction about real facts. If the messages existed solely to promote the existence of people writing fiction about the Rokkenjima incident well the reason is a bit low. Sure, without the messages people wouldn’t try to write tales that would copy it but they would still write and Toya might still chose to write his tales in exactly the same way he did. He can make a mystery out of the Rokkenjima incident just the same and can write his mystery as if it was a message in the bottle written by Maria. The messages written by Maria are inspiration for the writers but it’s not like they were the condition sine qua non a certain type of tale couldn’t exist. And although their existence inspire the writers, the fact they were written prior or after the incident, doesn’t really have to influence the writers that much.
Again, lying on the existence of the message bottles or on when they were written would be pointless.
Now, let’s assume the message bottles aren’t related to Ange/Ange-Beatrice’s actions or to the forgers but are supposed to be clues for the readers. In short misinformation isn’t spread to push Ange to act in a certain way or writers to exist or Toya to write in a certain way, but to give us a hint.
What’s the first hint they give? Well, if you connect their existence to the info given in Ep 6 you get that while Ep 3, 4, 5 & 6 were likely connected to the ones written by Itouikukuro Reigonamu, Ep 1 & 2 were made by another author, possibly using the messages as basis.
So we’re informed that, although the game master for the first 4 games is always Beatrice, actually she can be the narrator only for the first 2 episodes at best (and likely her narration was filtered by Toya). The messages become also the ‘incident’ that draw Toya’s attention on Rokkenjima, spreading the creation of fictions and pushing Toya to write his own.
Would it make a difference for him if the messages in the bottle were written prior or after the Rokkenjima incident? Likely no. Also, although Ep 1 implies it is based on a message in the bottle we can’t know if Ep 1 is one of the messages in the bottle or a forgery written by someone else that’s not Itouikukuro Reigonamu, maybe just Ikuko or maybe even a random author. It would make more sense if Ep 1 &2 are based on the message bottles because in this way they wouldn’t be just mystery that Toya elaborated in his mind adding meta to them, but something that’s directly connected to someone in Rokkenjima Prime.
Would Toya/Itouikukuro Reigonamu have a reason to hide that Ep 1& 2 were written by him?
None I can think of.
Would Toya/Itouikukuro Reigonamu have a reason to hide that Ep 1& 2 are based on what another forgers wrote?
None I can think of.
Of course ‘None I can think of’ doesn’t mean someone else can’t think of a reason. Just allow me to state that, although Toya might have had reasons to invent the story of the fact that existed some messages in the bottles, I think the possibility is low.
Sure, Umineko is full of misleading information, but they exist for the purpose of making more difficult to find out the truth, they aren’t just randomly tossed in. Then something improbable, impossible is randomly tossed in (like people not getting wet) it’s there merely because you must not think at it too deeply.
So let’s go back to the story.
In short, Toya or Itouikukuro Reigonamu, talking about the messages in their story, informs us about the connection Ep 1 & 2 have to someone else that’s not Toya, someone that’s apparently ‘Beatrice’ and not Maria, who’s obviously not the culprit, although she likely had ties with ‘Beatrice’.
Would it matter if the message bottles were written them prior or afterward the Rokkenjima incident? In terms of establishing a tie with ‘Beatrice’ no, not really, though the purpose for their existence would change.
If they were written prior they’re a will of some sort and a request for fate to help whoever wrote them, like Ryukishi and KEITA said. Who wrote them was trying to get our attention, as Beatrice did with the Ushiromiya sending them that challenging letter. If they were by some miracle reach someone and push that someone to stop the Rokkenjima incident, they would fulfil Yasu’s request for help. If they didn’t they either would insure Beatrice would survive as a legend or would cause someone to understand Yasu and therefore fulfil the ‘last will’ hope.
If they were written afterward, they would prove the person who wrote them, Beatrice, was still alive after the tragedy. Now, Toya/Itouikukuro Reigonamu would have reasons to try and cover this up only in order to protect that person.
In short, if they were written prior to the incident they gives you hint about Beatrice (their existence and when they were written is a fact solely connected to ‘Beatrice’ that Toya merely reported) but if they are written afterward they gives you hints about Toya/Itouikukuro Reigonamu (he decided to hide the truth for his own reasons). I like the idea of Toya covering up for Beatrice however, unless he had already recovered his memory, he had no reasons to cover up for her.
Also in Ep 5, 6, 7 and 8 it’s implied that Beatrice died. She wanted to die and Yasu killed her. It doesn’t mean Yasu necessarily died but I think it’s safe enough to bet that the Beatrice persona died just after the Rokkenjima incident. Sending the messages, that basically keep Beatrice alive, doesn’t really fit with Yasu’s idea of letting her die.
So, due to all this, I’ve problems believing the messages were sent after the incident.
As far as I’m involved the fact that it was more difficult to write the messages prior the incident than afterward it’s merely a case in which Ryukishi chose to ignore probable to got for improbable but still possible. In short Yasu’s roulette stopped again on number 0.
Les jeux sont faits, rien ne va plus. Le numéro gagnant est 0.