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I think Ryuukishi is definitely the kind of author that would play "the game of the three cards". The concept is basically:
-show three cards face down
-tell the sucker that one of the three cards is the right one
-keep the real right card up your sleeve.
This is a very good strategy to keep someone wondering about a solution without letting him having any chance of finding the right answer. You basically just make people think about which among three solutions is the right one, while the real solution is a fourth one.
This is basically what I think Ryuukishi planned, except there were only two cards.
From the very beginning, he never gave us any assurance that this story was a mystery. Rather it showed us two cards: anti-mystery and anti-fantasy. So he made us wonder for quite a lot of time if this was a mystery or fantasy, as if these were the only two available options. In the beginning he showed us the evil side of fantasy, so everyone was kind made to react to fantasy as the evil to defeat. However in the Umineko Chiru we suddenly see the evil side of mystery, and the main character switches to the fantasy side.
So is this story a fantasy or a mystery? I say neither. The right solution is the third one. It's all the result of a tragic incident that wiped out a whole family in a single day, and because of some incredible circumstances it gave birth to a plethora of discussions conjectures and theories about crazy murders, conspiracies and even esoteric interpretations.
My main point to support this theory is the fact that Erika never even tried to find a real culprit. In EP5 from the very beginning she tried to frame Natsuhi while being perfectly aware that she wasn't the one. In EP6 she aimed to a logic error from the very beginning.
Why would someone who flaunts so much her brain cells and only lives to prove that she's right would resort to such cheap methods? My answer is: because there isn't a culprit.
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