[Sherringford]

Originally Posted by Mirrored

Well, it depends.

What do you think should be done with the dead? Should we have a funeral for them and try to remember the best parts of who they were? Or should we tear out their guts, read their diaries, and expose everything bad about them to the world.

Yeah there is a difference between "tearing their guts" and revealing they were mass murderers.

EP7 is probably a pretty good idea of what happened. The background scenes from the diary hint that its not too far off. Bern literally exposes all of a corpses insides to the world and shows the worst parts of each of the character. That's the kind of justice you want, the guilt and onus of crime to rest on a pair of shoulders.

As Kyrie says to Eva "You're just a murderer who didn't get the chance." That can be said of most of the characters on Rokkenjima.

We are not what we want to do, we are what we do. If you didn't kill someone you are innocent. If you killed someone you are guilty.

So, what we get offered, is the chance to say "They may be that... but they are also this" and show the best of who they are rather than the very worst.

You don't get to be treated well if you kill someone. You don't get to be remembered for the good things you did if you kill someone.

The moment you pull that trigger, your very soul is escaping that chamber together with the bullet.

If you are asking me, or if Ryuukishi is asking the reader, to feel compassion for a cold blooded murderer and remember him at his best, I honestly find that very offensive.

Imagine you heard on the news that a memorial was held for a rapist, and heard everyone talk about how great he was. Wouldn't that disgust you?

The only people who seem to really be under suspicion for the crime are the Ushiromiya family. Nanjo's son doesn't seem to worry about his family. The same probably applies to Gohda's family.

So, because they weren't shown to worry are we to assume they are sociopaths? Are we supposed to assume that a man doesn't care if the whole world thinks his father is a criminal? Bullshit.

The only reason we didn't see how he felt about it is that he wasn't a main character.

There is nothing dignified about reaching into opening the coffin that is Rokkenjima and there is no justice to be had. The desire to punish evil is no more noble than the desire to spell "Murderer" in piss on one or more of the graves of the dead.

Let's have a bit of a sociology class here:
->Evil is not punished by society.
->Evil stops being seen as a taboo.
->Evil is repeated over and over again.
->Society falls apart.

Justice is to exonerate the names of the innocent and to shame the names of the guilty.

Punishing evil not only makes society work, it gives people a sense of relief. A sense that tells them "It's good to live in a society where evil gets punished." No, let's go beyond that. Are you saying that if a killer commits suicide his crimes should be forgotten?

Dying does not exonerate you of your guilt, it only makes it impossible for you to repent for your crimes.



Really, Umineko comes down to "Truth is bad, escapism is good!" It's the polar opposite of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.

It's just a bad, cowardly, disgusting message. Ryu is either a terrible writer who delivered the wrong message by accident, or he just chooses to focus on a theme that I find disgusting.

There may be cultural differences here, so I can't judge him based on that. But Umineko's final message comes off as stupid, childish, and bad philosophy.

I can't understand how people buy this as valid. It's a repulsive message to me. Exposing the truth is portrayed as worse than murder. It does so with flowery metaphors and all, but it doesn't change the fact of how stupid that message is.

Oh he killed someone? Eh poor guy, had a tough day at work. Must've been Monday.

Oh someone is trying to tell everyone who is guilty and who is innocent? WHAT A HEARTLESS MOTHERFUCKER!