[Renall]

Originally Posted by Ssol

Yeah. Because I have no faith in his writing ability I have followed this story for a few years now and I think there's only a 50/50 chance. Right.

Well, I'm sure there were some Higurashi fans who were unpleasantly surprised by how that turned out, and they'd been following it for a while themselves. Never underestimate the capability of a promising VN author to torpedo themselves in sight of the finish line.

When I saw the Taiwan epitaph theory for the first time I knew it was probably the answer because it was so much better than any other epitaph theory I had seen. After seven episodes why is there no culprit theory that is a clear frontrunner? Do you believe that his 'answer' is that good/bad?

Whatever. I don’t care for the ‘no culprit theory’ either but it seems to be the direction he’s heading considering how Battler began telling the tale to Ange at the end of EP7.

People are always telling me that having some amount of doubt regarding the information in ep7 is "wasting" the episode. But one could make the same argument about the "no culprit" theory. Why waste our time presenting that there could be a culprit, twice in one episode, and assert that the matter is a crime, and then pull the rug out from that? Nobody is being fooled here; they just don't want to consider the "tragic accident" theory that's been mainstream thought in-world since ep4 because it's... well, obvious and kind of silly.

Is it pointless? Absolutely not. There's definitely a statement you can make about it if you say there's no culprit. In fact, you could make a very valid statement, one I've long ruminated on (per sig): "These people are dead. If you say there's a crime, you have to finger one of them as a criminal. They can't defend themselves from that. Leave them alone already."

But I don't think he's thematically set himself up for a meditation on the inadequacies of the mystery genre compared to real-life ambiguous pseudo-criminal incidents. Just about everything he's presented has been encouraging, even demanding that his reader not accept Okonogi's assurance to Ange that it was an "unfortunate incident." We've been asked to find the truth; there's a certain elegance to the "the truth was always in front of you" answer, but in this case I just don't think it's been properly established as a theme. Certainly there's some mystery criticism going on in Umineko, but to subvert the fundamental ideas of knowability and criminality after the fact... that takes a particular foundation. He hasn't really set it.

I think it will just be an underwhelming or forced-sympathetic culprit. I actually expect to be disappointed. And again, that's not necessarily a poor ending... I just think it would be given what he's worked towards all this time.

How about the wedding with everyone present at the end of episode 6? "Oh hey, I know you killed us all but we can be friends now." Awkward.

Meh. I've seen nastier family conflicts at weddings.