[Game] Umineko - Spoilers, Theories, Interpretations

[UsagiTenpura]

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

Is there a way to work out a scenario that would work in both cases? Or do we need to think there are different reasons for those cases which would bring us into a "final destination" set up where if it has to happen it has to happen no matter how and why?

Hm that's something actually.
Arc 7 is the only arc where no one dies before the end.
The "game" is already "over", but the red "everyone dies" still has to be fulfilled, no matter how and why?
This is also interesting in the light that in arc 3, Eva survived (so broke that red) but died during the tea party showing the future which technically still made everyone on the island die "during the course of arc 3".

And yeah, the gold is a stupid motive.
It's like assuming that throwing a steak in the middle of a bunch of hungry wolves would result in all of them killing each other until only one is left and able to eat the steak.
As it currently stands, this is the "gold motive" theory.

[Renall]

Originally Posted by Wanderer

An accident doesn't explain why Eva and Battler survived.

Is lolgold really such an unbelievable motive? Especially for Kyrie and Rudolf who were already involved in shady financial stuff. It wouldn't take all that many changes to make the EP7 Tea Party believable.

The issue is that it's super duper stupid to do what something like the ep7 Tea Party suggests if it's money you want.

First of all, the gold is based on a very precarious situation. In game theory terms, it's pretty much a loss for everybody if anyone dissents. They state, flat-out, that there's money enough to cover everybody's problems and then some. From the perspective of the adults, the answer is simple: We'll give you a piece, you split the rest four ways with us, you can keep the house and the headship and the family name and none of us is ever going to say a single word about this ever again. Hell, the adults have enough leverage to demand practically everything from Yasu if they want it. She probably won't even fight over it.

Killing people and/or detonating an explosive that might not even work (as far as you know) means one of two things. Either the gold is going to blow up too - and how can you be sure it won't? - or the extent of the destruction will make it incredibly hard to extract and make use of the gold. So you're looking at the distinct possibility that the gold simply will not be worth anything at all.

Okay, what about the bank card? A billion yen is a lot of money, especially in the 80s, sure. I'd argue it isn't enough to kill your entire family, but let's assume somebody is really, really desperate. So hold on... how do you know that thing is real? There's not a goddamn ATM on Rokkenjima. You can't call a bank on a Sunday at 2am. It may not be worth the plastic it's made from. Even if you accept that the billion yen might be worth murdering everyone you love for, how could you possibly be so stupid as to do such a thing before you know for sure that it's even real money? To say nothing of how suspicious the bank will get when you show up after a disaster that killed over a dozen people, including the account's original owner, and ask to withdraw a couple hundred million yen. Banks aren't idiots.

Also: Do we know that the gold even existed/was real in R-Prime? I mean Lambda said it was assuredly real in a game, but she's the only authority we've ever really had. Even if Yasu actually found "the gold," which remains questionable anyway, how is she to verify it's real? If indeed she believes it to be real in the first place and not a metaphor for Genji explaining Kinzo's tricks. If the gold doesn't even exist, or isn't real, the entire lolgold motive collapses flat.

[jjblue1]

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

If you don't make that distinction how would you reply to someone who says you should let him rape children because you don't have the right to impose your moral values on him?!

Are you really comparing Battler witholding informations he deems harmful for his little sister with someone raping a kid?

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

We are discussing here about someone (Battler) who is acting against the will of someone else (Ange), not someone who makes decisions about his own life. This latter case applies to Ange and that's the one that should be respected.
Let us not forget that Battler and Beatrice actively tried to prevent Ange from getting and opening Eva's diary.

If we're making an argument merely about freedom's rights we should consider Battler has the freedom to keep what he knows for himself for whatever reason he has.

Ange's wish to know the truth clashes against his wish to keep the truth for himself.

If this is all a matter of freedom we can't say Ange's freedom is more important than Battler.

As for the diary:

- In the meta Eva's diary is never Ange's possession. The one in the chapel seems to be owned by Battler (or left into his custody) and the other is owned by Hachijo. Ergo neither is Ange's. She can't claim the right to read them as she doesn't own them and, in order to read them, she should ask permission to the owners... who can deny said permission.

- Battler was also the one who owned the key to open the book. He handed it to Ange but evidently he wanted her to use it according to certain conditions to which she agreed at first. He didn't hand her a fake key. To me this means he was planning to have Ange opening the book, sooner or later so I don't really see Ep 8 as him denying Ange the truth forever.

[UsagiTenpura]

Beside for Kyrie.
She was jealous of Asumu for 12 years.
12 long years. And only then did she decide to plan murdering her. And yet she didn't get to do it in the end so we don't even really know if she'd have really done it when it came down to it.

And now instantly and very coldly deciding to just murder everyone without a second thought? That's breaking her established personality and story from A to Z.

[Renall]

Originally Posted by UsagiTenpura

Beside for Kyrie.
She was jealous of Asumu for 12 years.
12 long years. And only then did she decide to plan murdering her. And yet she didn't get to do it in the end so we don't even really know if she'd have really done it when it came down to it.

And now instantly and very coldly deciding to just murder everyone without a second thought? That's breaking her established personality and story from A to Z.

It doesn't help that Kyrie's supposed to be the smart, non-impulsive one. If Rosa suddenly snaps and starts gunning people down for money, at least we'd have some excuse for things that might drive her over the edge (her natural bipolar nature, "Beatrice" standing right in front of her, etc.).

Kyrie's supposed to be the kind of person who questions whether the gold and bank card are even worth anything. To have her of all people say "The hell with it, let's roll" just doesn't make any sense.

[Uberzaki]

On the subject of the whole unbelievability of the murders, we also have to factor in the supposed plan of faking, at the very least, six initial murders.

If you plan to murder a ton of people, how exactly would such a scenario (one that would take a lot of preperation and secrecy (as Renall gives a hint of game theory to)) make this goal any easier? Also, why do it on Halloween? I don't know about the whether such a thing is popular in japan or not, but it almost sounds like some crazy murder ritua- oh, wait.

[jjblue1]

In Meakashi-hen the motive for which many people are killed is that the culprit believes them to be responsable for a person's death.
In Ten Little Indians the motive is 'justice' (whose people are guilty of crimes and the killer thinks he's making justice).

I guess you can find other books in which many murders are committed for a reason or for multiple reasons... though the problem in Umineko is that the number of people to kill is really rather high (also I personally found the culprits in Meakashi-hen and Ten Little Indians to be insane) and it's hard to find a common denominator for them all.

Character X can claim some characters hurt him or that he hated some others or that some were guilty of a crime but to deem them all deserving to die is... well hard.

I remember writing a post in which I discussed each character's possible motivation for killing other characters but, even stretching things, I couldn't find a character who would have a 'logic' reason to kill everyone.

So in my eyes the most logic explanation to Umineko is that actually no one planned to kill everyone. It was a chain series of fact that spun murders and possibly incidents that escalates until Eva and Battler were the only survivors.

So we would have possibly more than one culprit, 1 or more 'accidental deaths' (In the games it was implied various times people might have died due to an incident [Eva shooting Jessica by mistake in Ep 3, Natsuhi and Krauss's deaths in Ep 7 but also people calling from a cliff...]), some might have been killed because someone believed them to be a threat (either because he was being paranoic or because he was right [Rosa in Ep 2 was planning to shoot Battler believing him to be a 'wolf', Eva in Ep 7 shoot Kirye because she was a murderer]), some might have killed in an argument (Ep 4 has a duel and so Ep 6), some might have witnessed something they shouldn't (it was suggested by Kumasawa in a Tsubasa episode), some might have been killed out of hate or interest and it's possible someone committed suicide.

It's a theory that fit with one of the three descriptions of serial murders Battler gives:
- killing many to hide the reason for which one wanted to kill another
- killing many to cause another to feel fear
- many people dying but their deaths aren't actually connected

We don't know if the murders in RPrime actually followed the epitaph. The assumption they did might have been made merely due to the tales and have no real connections with the murders taking place on Prime.

[Cao Ni Ma]

If it's so easy to follow, then explain why both of these "villain who are really good guys" ends up in opposition and that Beatrice and Battler ends up basically killing Erika.
Since the two sides are saying and doing pretty much opposite things, I don't see how both could be right. If Erika is right, then Beatrice and Battler pretty much are wrong by default. That puts a weird spin on arc 1-2-3-4.

Sorry, I Sholdn't have used "followed" , " led" is more accurate. RK07 led us to hate Erika. Its easy to know why he did it though, he wanted us to hate Beatrice so that we could later feel like how Battler felt during ep5. For that to happen though he has to create a characters that we despise even more than Beatrice and thats Erika and Bern. Of course this is ok on first glance, but once you start going deeper into it, it kinda falls apart. Unless RK07 actually goes around and explain himself over this we can always chalk it to improper execution.

[AuraTwilight]

If we're making an argument merely about freedom's rights we should consider Battler has the freedom to keep what he knows for himself for whatever reason he has.

ACTUALLY, no. Because the truth he's withholding is about more than just himself. It involves his parents, his relatives, some servants the family hired, plus a friend of his father's. Battler does not OWN the truth about those people, so Ange deserves to hear it for the same reason anyone is entitled to know why their entire fucking family is dead.

- Battler was also the one who owned the key to open the book. He handed it to Ange but evidently he wanted her to use it according to certain conditions to which she agreed at first. He didn't hand her a fake key. To me this means he was planning to have Ange opening the book, sooner or later so I don't really see Ep 8 as him denying Ange the truth forever.

The key can be used for other things, though, Battler says. The key effectively represents Ange's decisions, and he wants her to make a very certain decision.

And he got MAD when she approached the Truth-book, not even sure what it was.

[Wanderer]

Originally Posted by jjblue1

So in my eyes the most logic explanation to Umineko is that actually no one planned to kill everyone. It was a chain series of fact that spun murders and possibly incidents that escalates until Eva and Battler were the only survivors.

Yeah I agree. I don't think anyone woke up on the morning of the 4th planning to kill anyone.

I think the gold played a part in pushing things over the edge. A combination of greed and fear (exacerbated by a murder game which people took for genuine) lead to paranoia and panic. Then someone got killed for real in a struggle for control of the situation and it snowballed from there into a mass murder to cover things up.

[LyricalAura]

Originally Posted by AuraTwilight

The key can be used for other things, though, Battler says. The key effectively represents Ange's decisions, and he wants her to make a very certain decision.

And he got MAD when she approached the Truth-book, not even sure what it was.

Other things like opening the sealed story he wrote for Beatrice in EP7 and stored in the chapel, the one that was never supposed to be defiled by anyone for all eternity?

I'm not sure if the chapel book has that meaning in EP8, but it was in the back of my head the whole time. It would be the kind of dick move Bern would do to conflate that book with the Book of the One Truth to trick Ange into opening it.

[Kylon99]

I don't know how logical it is to think about whether or not it is reasonable whether people will murder ... in mystery murder fiction. I would assume that the characters are capable of murder, period.

In reality, I doubt people would go to such lengths all the time without some kind of criminal background. But the genre seems to be replete with people who don't have this kind of murderous background... committing murders. 8)

Of course, as some of us have speculated before, it may just be that no real murders took place in Rokkenjima Prime other than the bomb and this is only a product of the various Episodes.


EDIT: Oh yeah, don't you guys get the feeling though that the siblings were from EP1 targeted to be capable of murder as soon as the story said they were all very desperate for money? But at the same time, I got the feeling that they were all just a bit of the sideshow murders. i.e. murders committed by them would be 'noise.'

[AuraTwilight]

Other things like opening the sealed story he wrote for Beatrice in EP7 and stored in the chapel, the one that was never supposed to be defiled by anyone for all eternity?

The Book of Truth and the Book of Beato's Special Tale are both represented by the same meta-book and put in the same coffin. The implications of that are certainly unnerving, and make it very easy to argue that Battler decided to lock up the truth.

[jjblue1]

Originally Posted by Kylon99

I don't know how logical it is to think about whether or not it is reasonable whether people will murder ... in mystery murder fiction. I would assume that the characters are capable of murder, period.

Well, in mystery murder fictions not everyone is capable to murder or to murder for certain reasons.
I guess we can all accept that certain characters would be capable of killing other characters.
The logic however seems to break down when we've to accept they were capable to kill everyone both in will and ability and chose this option as the best available, all to get a credit card all for themselves without even knowing if there was real money on it.

Though it's real that, if someone died, this might have set a chain reaction that caused everyone else to be involved.

Let's pick up the scene in Ep 7.
Eva and Hideyoshi by mistake shot at Natsuhi and Krauss.
Now... how do you deal with this?

They could admit it to the police (maybe saying the shooting took place somewhere else so the gold would be safe) but Eva and Hideyoshi refused.

They could have arranged things so that it looked like an incident in which they weren't involved. For example all the siblings could say Krauss shoot at his wife and himself due to the shame of hiding Kinzo's death (let's assume their wounds would allow such thing) or in some other way.

Let's assume they agree with this plan.

Such an agreement imply trust between who agrees to it because:
- Kirye, Rudolf and Rosa might not believe it was an accident
- Eva and Hideyoshi might not believe the other will keep their mouth shut
- Kirye, Rudolf and Rosa might believe that Eva and Hideyoshi won't trust them to keep their mouth shut and try to kill them also and then go on with blowing the island.


Now... if the agreement between the siblings is broken and another sibling is killed it becomes even harder to explain things to the police.
Maybe with 5 people giving the same version they could have believed in Krauss and Natsuhi's suicide/disappearence. It gets harder to trust the siblings when you get more people dead.

And how do you explain things to the others?
What if they don't believe you and tattle you out to the police? What if they witnessed something? What if they think you dangerous and try to kill you, either to protect themselves or to steal the gold from you?

You might either be paranoid at this point or feel yourself cornered.
Here it would be a good moment to decide if to confess everything to the police, insist in your version, hoping they'll buy it (it was Eva and Hideyoshi who killed Krauss and Natsuhi and then they tried to kill us too! Our actions were merely due to self defence!) or you'll start to seriously consider getting rid of whoever can be a potential danger to you either because he can kill you or send you to jail.

However, to take the last choice, I think you should be insane. It will require you to kill in cold blood a huge amount of people, some of which you might have been fond of, including a 9 year old kid.

That's true, Kirye and Rudolf are described mostly as amoral (starting from minor things like Rudolf sleeping around and switching Asumu and Kirye's babies to their business being dirty ones and they causing the ruin of many people to Kirye being willing and ready to kill Asumu or so she said) so they are the best candidates.

I still like to think though that killing so many would be a big step, one they couldn't make as easily as it's shown in Ep7.

[Kylon99]

Back in EP1 and 2, I tended to think that it was more like Clue (the movie). Everyone killed one other person, just that there were a lot of murderers and it made it look like a massacre. (Although this kinda turned out not to be true for EP1-2... heh)

Anyways, I don't put much stock into EP7 as showing the truth, of course. Like I said, I believe more that in Rokkenjima Prime, there's a high chance that no one really murdered except Yasu flipping a switch, which is something easy to do, in a fit of insanity.


What I mean is, in the episodes, it's easy for people to murder, because they are fictional characters in a murder mystery. Their purpose is to murder, sometimes willy-nilly, despite how thin their excuse can be sometimes. And in a way that their crimes are detectable too; you can't have the perfect murder in detective fiction or else nothing really happens in the last chapter but the detective slinking away from a failed case. And that would really suck. 8)

And their motives and methods can be strong or weak, depending on each episode too. I believe EP7 was intended to portray a poor motive on purpose, so that's why I don't put too much stock into it...

[ErenselTheJester]

Originally Posted by Kylon99

I believe EP7 was intended to portray a poor motive on purpose, so that's why I don't put too much stock into it...

Actually, if you know how to apply EP7 to the past murders (trust me, its a more subtle process than you think), everything sort of makes sense. Personally, I believe that Yasu isn't the culprit but the writer of the original stories and that these stories are only written to cope with her various identity and love issues. With that, some of the narrative aspects of the stories are easier to figure out as well as create a good motive for the characters, like maybe Shannon (being the prime representative of Yasu in the story) could've gone mad from the love of two men and went crazy.

[Renall]

Originally Posted by Kylon99

I don't know how logical it is to think about whether or not it is reasonable whether people will murder ... in mystery murder fiction. I would assume that the characters are capable of murder, period.

Is Umineko mystery fiction?

EDIT: Oh yeah, don't you guys get the feeling though that the siblings were from EP1 targeted to be capable of murder as soon as the story said they were all very desperate for money?

No, actually. In fact, I became immediately suspicious of exactly the opposite when Ryukishi emphatically allcapsed their most obvious motive... in ep1.

[UsagiTenpura]

Originally Posted by Renall

Also: Do we know that the gold even existed/was real in R-Prime? I mean Lambda said it was assuredly real in a game, but she's the only authority we've ever really had. Even if Yasu actually found "the gold," which remains questionable anyway, how is she to verify it's real? If indeed she believes it to be real in the first place and not a metaphor for Genji explaining Kinzo's tricks. If the gold doesn't even exist, or isn't real, the entire lolgold motive collapses flat.

Actually I've been thinking that since the story talks about how you cannot use red text for reality, most likely then not any red truth that concerns "the gameboard world" (all of the games rather, and not just a single one) almost has to be untrue of Rokkenjima Prime. I'm not entirely sure if that's right but it seems like it would fit with the themes of the serie. A few examples of what it would change.

-Kinzo wasn't "dead" at the beginning of october 4/no hiding Kinzo's death.
-There isn't 10 tons of gold.
-Beatrice 2 didn't exist in the hidden mansion Kuwadorian in 1967.
-Battler's "sin" is not what resulted in everyone's death.

Hmmm that world seems to make a lot more sense then the Rokkenjima we've seen.
Oh and also, I have really no reasons to believe Prime follows a "mystery" logic, cause if it did we basically have next to no information to solve the "crime".
Also if I'm to consider "Ange" the detective of prime she's breaking most of Knox in various ways so even should it be a mystery, it's by no means anything close to a standard one.
I think Ryuukishi's intend is that "prime" follows rules that are closer to real world rules then literacy rules of any kind.

Originally Posted by Kylon99

Anyways, I don't put much stock into EP7 as showing the truth, of course. Like I said, I believe more that in Rokkenjima Prime, there's a high chance that no one really murdered except Yasu flipping a switch, which is something easy to do, in a fit of insanity.

I've been playing with the disturbing scenario where, akin to arc 3 Eva solves the Epitaph by herself, and when Beatrice appears to explain stuff to her, Eva doesn't believe her about the switch, and turns it on thinking she'd save everyone and boom everyone dies.

It'd be so ridiculous and tragic.
"Because she lacked love, everyone died".
... Wait... doesn't the first few arcs always says something like "because Battler didn't believe". Maybe he's the one who didn't trust her and blew up everyone.

Originally Posted by ErenselTheJester

Actually, if you know how to apply EP7 to the past murders (trust me, its a more subtle process than you think), everything sort of makes sense. Personally, I believe that Yasu isn't the culprit but the writer of the original stories and that these stories are only written to cope with her various identity and love issues. With that, some of the narrative aspects of the stories are easier to figure out as well as create a good motive for the characters, like maybe Shannon (being the prime representative of Yasu in the story) could've gone mad from the love of two men and went crazy.

Mad in the stories or mad in the world where she wrote these stories? The former makes sense especially if it's a more "figurative" sort of mad.
If I take arc 1 as example of an arc most people can accept (no matter what they believe) as being very close in message bottle form and the form we see it as to create no confusion between "Ryuukishi" and "Yasu", I can see that the writer is actually very sane. Objectively speaking about a broad of topics that always turns around the core of the story, but always in a very lucid way with insight over these various topics. In a way it's as if Yasu is pretty objective about her "Shkanontrice character". I don't think a truly nuts writer would portray themselves in such a way in a story.

[Wanderer]

Originally Posted by UsagiTenpura

I've been playing with the disturbing scenario where, akin to arc 3 Eva solves the Epitaph by herself, and when Beatrice appears to explain stuff to her, Eva doesn't believe her about the switch, and turns it on thinking she'd save everyone and boom everyone dies.

But why did she survive then?

You seem to think that the gold is near the Kuwadorian or something, and safe from the blast radius. It's not.

[Kealym]

Oh my god, you leave the internet for a few days to write term papers, and the thread explodes into discussion. It's a bit of a pain to try quoting specific posts, so if I may offer my two cents (and gross over-generalizations) on recent topics:

On the matter of whether we should bother seeking the R-Prime truth at all ... there seems to be a sentiment that, in lay terms, sounds to me like "Yeah, so this house blew up, and 16 people died. But we really shouldn't bother looking into the matter, because they're already dead and that's just their dead-people business." And I can't eloquently say why, but that doesn't sit very well with me.

On the matter of what the hell happened on Prime... well, we HAVE to acknowledge a situation wherein Eva at least knew there might be an explosion, and at LEAST George and Hideyoshi were certainly already dead before she went to the Kuwadorian.

There also seems to be this assumption that "Gold motive = Mass murder", and that is just not the case. It's entirely possible that any number and combination of people solved the epitaph, and may or may not have quarreled. Alternatively, as the gold requires cooperation to be of use, perhaps the group turned against a single obstinate person, and things awkwardly, violently snowballed. If it were a single person standing between someone and even just a billion Yen (which is not an amount of money to scoff at), well, otherwise reasonable people have killed for less. Also, Renall's idea of Krauss committing suicide opens a potentially interesting line of reasoning, where perhaps his death is mistaken for a regular murder, thus absolving the other adults from the problem of "Who started shooting first?"

On the matter of Erika being a "good guy" - UsagiTenpura equated Erika's theory against Natsuhi with popular George / Kyrie theories, yes? I won't deny their equivalency, actually. However, I don't begrudge Erika for her desire to wipe away lies. I think she became an evil character not because she sought truth, but because she was such a bitch about it. I believe there certainly MUST be people concerned with factual truth who aren't assholes, but similar to these mythical "Slytherin students who arent dickweeds", we never get a chance to see them. Ryukishi's choice, as that sort of character wouldn't fit into his personal Aesop, likely.

Lastly, on whether any of the Gameboards reflect the real events at all - well, it's all Meta and stuff, but I'm of the opinion that Ryukishi wouldn't have included certain narrative elements if they didn't reflect SOME aspect of what he feels happened in Prime. As in, I feel little desire to reconsider Kinzo being dead, George proposing, the adults being douchey to each other about money, etc. etc.