2012-04-09, 19:44 | Link #28382 | ||||
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And does 'blade' can have some other meaning in Japanese? Quote:
So I guess Krauss and Natsuhi were drugged before being killed... this make possible for Yasu to kill them... Quote:
No, I think Eva and Eva Beatrice served as red herrings for this game... though it's possible maybe they were culprit in Toya's book. I've always had the feeling Toya's books were similar and yet different from the games otherwise either no one had ever solved them or Ange would have asked why in them the culprit was Shannon and if that was the truth Hachijo found... Unless Toya's books were unsolvable so no one could figure who was the culprit. |
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2012-04-09, 20:01 | Link #28383 | |
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Actually... interesting line of inquiry: Who is the first person to raise Beatrice's intended interpretation of the epitaph in each episode?
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2012-04-09, 20:13 | Link #28385 | |||
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Which does lead into... Quote:
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2012-04-09, 20:45 | Link #28386 | |
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I think the means of murder of any given arc is relatively vague.
The stakes are at least in most case decoration put after the death. FT in arc 1 is after-damage (at least according to what we can get from it) and FT in arc 2 couldnt have been the means of murder. Its also more or less a given that most peoples death arent nearly as spectacular as the found corpses seems to suggest. On one hand the culprit is trying to make you believe its a witch who did it, sure, but s/he also made it so its possible to understand this is all fiction/a show (hell Battler makes a lot of comments about fiction in arc 1 itself). Arc 3 is mostly different in that many of the murders arent disguised as such. For instance Rosa/Maria's death is opposed to making one believe it was a witch: rather the culprit seems to be going for the "perfect crime" idea where it could be arguably considered an accident (tho a messed up one). The who dunnit doesnt really involve a witch in the possibilities in it. Quote:
Tho to be fair I think Kanon and Shannon always make references to Beatrice/Kinzo's game pretty early on too. |
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2012-04-10, 06:26 | Link #28388 | |
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Stuff like not doubting the red, Ange believing in Tohya's forgeries and even the saying "Without love, it cannot be seen" all encourage you to believe in the author of the story and not to doubt what he says at every turn. Hell, that's even what Will and Dlanor's commandments are based around.
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2012-04-10, 11:33 | Link #28389 | |
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2012-04-10, 13:46 | Link #28390 | |
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2012-04-10, 14:38 | Link #28391 |
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Also, all of Beatrice's first letters of EPs 1, 2, & 3 draw attention to the epitaph as the centerpiece of her "game", so when killings start it's pretty natural for people to see a connection between the epitaph and the murders even without a plant there to guide them.
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2012-04-10, 17:09 | Link #28392 | |
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2012-04-10, 18:03 | Link #28393 |
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She does plan out when to have meta-world logic battles and what red truth she'll use. That doesn't mean the meta-narrative is in the forgeries, but the author was clearly anticipating a meta-level interaction with an opponent, even if that was just Ikuko and Tohya arguing with each other in the real world.
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2012-04-10, 20:53 | Link #28395 | |||||||||||||
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I still don't have an answer for what EP7-8 are. I still like the fact that maybe there's Kakera theory even above it. Quote:
Here is the reason why I think it makes sense for Author Theory to include Meta. (Note: I use females for Yasu for no particular reason.) Each Episode (at least 1-6) are either Yasu's or Tohya's forgeries. Yasu writes three bottles, in which she "confesses". She wants Battler to understand her heart, so she writes a love story. She writes a story in which she confesses her love to Battler, and he realizes the mistake that he made, and they discuss murder mysteries the same way they used to. The third bottle is never found. Tohya remembers. He remember what Yasu was trying to tell him. He starts writing the forgeries, continuing on Yasu's story where Turn left off. He remembers Ange, and the pain of guilt he feels when he denies her visiting. Tohya continues Yasu's story, but also the story of Ange trying to come to terms with what happened October. The Meta we see is all a part of the narrative. I don't quite understand why you're so focused on what the Witch-Hunters see. As far as I'm concerned, the Witch Hunters probably did study other forgeries. If you want me to give an explanation they chose Tohya's because Tohya continues the story where Yasu left off: the heart of the story. But since even that is a part of Tohya's forgeries... Quote:
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2012-04-10, 22:39 | Link #28396 |
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Just wanted to clarify a seemingly common mistake.
"Arc 1 doesn't have meta" I suggest you reread arc 1, Battler constantly breaks away from the narration and start talking to "us" - he even introduce each character one by one - how isn't that meta? And how could that be taken outside of the story? (and how does answering this by splitting hair between obvious meta and subtile meta really solve anything?) There's also simply too many references to fiction. When you have Kyrie telling you more or less "you should try to solve this story as a love mystery" and you have the memory of Rudolf saying more or less "witches and the such only exists in fiction", I don't think you can really claim that there's no meta in arc 1. Also... "Why should we believe in a human culprit when the story tells us there exist these meta-beings?" Hmmm what about us then? No matter what the forgeries says or doesn't say, Umineko, in the form we read it, has these meta-beings in it. Does that makes us unable to chase after a human culprit? Actually this is probably the central point of this : why do you think the people reading the forgeries would react any differently then we do, if the forgeries are exactly the same thing as what we read? Cause I'd put my money on them reacting like us and chasing after a human culprit no matter what. It also is sorta funny that we only know these are forgeries thanks to the Hachijou/Ange scene in arc 6, which makes references to the meta. So you end up having little choice imo but to accept both or to deny both. If I'm to doubt what was said in that scene about the forgeries, I might as well doubt the forgery concept altogether. Beside, arc 5 and 6 are pretty devoid of content if you remove the meta. Last edited by UsagiTenpura; 2012-04-10 at 23:03. |
2012-04-11, 03:22 | Link #28397 | ||
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Such helpful red... Seriously, the games would be easier without the red. Quote:
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2012-04-11, 12:34 | Link #28398 | ||||||||
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Meta-narrative in the same sense as Umineko is Animal Man talking to Grant Morrison as he's writing Animal Man and this dialogue being reflected within the work. It's Huck Finn acting like Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer was an existing account in his world talking about events that actually happened for Huck (and not being entirely accurate besides, according to Huck). It's the odd-numbered chapters of If on a winter's night a traveler telling you, the reader, what you're doing between reading the even-numbered ones. It's the footnotes in Pale Fire and House of Leaves continuing the narrative and forming an integral part of it when they're supposed to be commentary on an extant story. It's Rozencrantz and Guildenstern expressing awareness that they exist in a play and structuring how they view their own existence around this point. This stuff may make sense as a finished work (as each individual Umineko episode generally does, and Umineko does on the whole), but if you ask what the deeper baseline work is you either have to conclude there probably isn't one (e.g. House of Leaves, where Johnny doesn't think the Navidson Record Zampano claims to have seen actually existed), or that it's different from what we, the reader, get as a finished product (e.g. if Johnny Truant "existed" and Zampano's script really existed, the experience of Johnny reading and thinking about it probably differs from the text presented to us as the book House of Leaves). While I wouldn't go so far as to say that the text of any of the individual Umineko episodes simply doesn't exist in the R-Prime universe (if it exists itself), I do think the documents we see are those filtered to us by Ryukishi after piling on every possible layer (including meta-fictional criticism) and fictionalizing the lot of them. By necessity, these are not the ones characters on certain layers read or wrote. Given this, the sole place where this degree of meta-narrative exists in ep1 is the Tea Party. There is no indication anywhere that Tea Parties are part of the "main bodies" of the works presented. There are some instances in which it seems like they probably should be (for example, Battler's investigation in Alliance). It seems entirely too arbitrary. I don't think certain parts are excluded because of their placement in the story, but I do think certain parts are excluded because they're not intended to be part of the story that was read or written, merely part of the entire creative and deliberative process of authors and readers such as Tohya or Ange. The point is this: The stories are described in abstract in endscrolls and 1998 scenes as tales of mystery and witchy murder. Including the meta-narrative just doesn't seem to jive with the way the stories are apparently viewed in the future. It does, however, jive with the notion that the meta-narrative is about people thinking about a narrative they're involved in elsewhere. By general necessity, they can't also be contained within that narrative. Well, okay, they could be, but I think Umineko would be a very different work if they were. Quote:
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She also seems to distinguish the content of her game (board narrative + magic narrative) from her interactions with her opponent (red truth selection + dialogue) without actually planning it out (i.e. she thinks of what she'll say to Battler, but she doesn't dictate what he'll say back). Comparing this to the meta-narrative of Dawn we see similar constructions: Meta-Battler designs a board and fantasy narrative and displays scenes he wishes to display, but while he engages with and relates to Meta-Erika, he doesn't dictate the things she says and does. To say "Yes, but there's another authorial layer above him" misses a lot of what the meta-narrative seems to be about, which is - or at least appears to be - getting inside Tohya's thought process, which is otherwise inaccessible to us. Our Confession is doing essentially the same thing for Beatrice. Quote:
It's a false equivalence. As far as we're shown in the stories, the Witch Hunter community is completely barking up the wrong tree. That Tohya's work is famous seems incidental to the fact that he also happens to be closer to the heart of the story, the part only he was ever meant to truly understand anyway. Featherine speaks of the whole notion in almost mystical terms in ep6, and it isn't a very good explanation as to why his work would be considered more authentic than the work of other people. The meta-narrative, I should point out, is also intensely personal and not really very public in nature. This seems to contrast with how the public at large interprets the story. Painting the meta-narrative as internal self-discovery on Tohya's part just makes more sense generally than the notion that it exists in front of everybody's faces and most of them are just too dumb to notice. Quote:
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2012-04-11, 12:47 | Link #28399 |
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Who said it was? I reread both my post and your post and we only ever both used "meta" and not meta-narrative. Granted I'm extremely tired so I might have missed it...
The simple point of meta is to make you think beyond the limits of the actual story. Breaking the fourth wall is as meta as you can get. If even you agree that there are elements making references to meta "outside of the meta narrative" then I don't see why this is so weird... I mean it's just like the fantasy scenes... Fantasy scenes were always there, they only became more obvious. Meta scenes were always there too, they only became more obvious. In both case it's because without them becoming so fricking obvious, we never would've gotten the point. Maria's conversations with Battler in arc 1 are almost exactly the same sort of conversation that meta-Battler and meta-Beato has in arc 2. I've said this in my previous post, I don't see how splitting hair is actually making a point. So can you see how arc 2's meta is only taking things that already existed in arc 1 and making them more obvious, or are you going to continue to split hair and see differences instead of connections between things? So if "the content of the meta-narrative" already existed for the most part in arc 1, I don't see what'd be weird about keeping the meta in arc 2. It'd be quite the opposite. Arc without meta results in a broken arc. Beside you haven't dealt with my other points. I'd love to understand why you (or anyone really) can doubt that the meta are in the forgeries but believe in the forgeries existing at all, considering the origin of these informations. |
2012-04-11, 13:34 | Link #28400 |
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I actually have, you just apparently didn't read them.
Maria talking with Battler is not the same thing as Meta-Battler and Meta-Beatrice interacting. One of these things happens within the context of a narrative which does not suggest actual awareness that a narrative exists (Maria's statements could be read entirely within the extant context of the "board" narrative, though we have no non-board narrative in Legend to speak of). One of them happens outside the context of an existing narrative by characters who not only are aware of the nature of the narrative, but compartmentalize it as something distinct from themselves about which they may interact, discuss, and even treat as sport. That they are characters in a fiction is obvious, because of course Umineko is fiction. That's not the point; the point is that they recognize that there exists a narrative which they are in some fashion responsible for yet not contained within. I think that distinction is clearly meant to be taken as important. That aside, if the meta is part of the forgeries, then we actually know nothing about the thought processes of the reader, which we were directly told in later episodes we did have. There's really no point in Meta-Ange at all if she exists solely to be an in-fiction character. I have no idea why you would think they are in the in-universe texts, assuming those texts exist. I grant that the texts might not, but I do not see the rationale behind believing the meta-narrative arc which is otherwise so functionally and thematically distinct from the rest of the narrative is in fact a self-contained part of it. It flies against the obvious rules of construction, the supposed information we have about its origins, and the apparent thematic purposes of the meta-world itself.
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