2012-01-16, 23:54 | Link #27081 | ||
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Join Date: Dec 2011
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Not to mention that you can make a totally reasonable mystery story out of it. The idea of something like this: "by restricting the room for Kanon to exist as much as possible with red truths, and still presenting evidence that he does exist in red, you can present yet another mystery by finding clever ways for Kanon to actually exist, no matter how incredibly improbable it would be." And then you throw in the hilarious segments of him sneaking around, in white text. ^Which is just the kind of thing Umineko loves to do. Quote:
[As far as the Erika debate goes: I think the question is really very simple. The only thing that needs to be asked here is "if Piece!Erika was supposed to see both of them at the same time in EP5, then did she?" And certainly, I think that it would be completely OOC for her to fail to notice that someone is missing. Even if this person is hiding behind someone's back, in her eyes, it would be the same as that person being missing. She would need to notice this. Of course, you could doubt Erika's competence if you want; that would be perfectly valid. Even so, Meta-Erika has to take into account that "the people in this room = everybody on the island" which means that if she noticed someone was missing, she would definitely want to have her Piece confirm that either 1. This person is gone and therefore doesn't physically exist, or 2. This person was just not in plain sight, but was in fact in the room. If it's #1 and she confirms that Kanon does not physically exist, then she would need to understand that Kanon is not a physical existence, which should have allowed her to find the answer to the Logic Error. From what I'm reading here, it seems like Piece!Erika's perspective was never actually given to us in EP5 (I don't remember whether it was or not, but for the sake of this argument, I'll assume that you guys are correct). Thus, we never had the benefit of using her Detective's Authority to provide objective evidences for our interpretations. She does. But to us, the entirety of EP5 shouldn't be something we can take at face value. There is no Episode that contains a scene we should be able to take at face value. After all, Piece!Battler never had Detective's Authority either, and we can prove this by simply looking at the various fantasy scenes he saw, as well as the fact that Meta!Battler never went around getting Reds from his Piece's perspective. And after EP5, no one ever had Detective's Authority. I do think it's reasonable to expect that "Erika was unable to solve the puzzle Beato created out of the Logic Error, and was therefore defeated" is the truth, or at least, truth of a sort. If I don't doubt that, and I don't doubt Erika's competency, then there is simply only one solution: Kanon has a body in EP5. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that the physical body in Kanon's place, that was using his name, was Kanon, or even looked like the art of Kanon that Ryukishi shows us. If I said that "the person who was acting like Kanon is actually the Mysterious Man from the phone calls and is not a member of the family or a servant, but Yasu bribed everyone except Erika to say that he is and therefore Erika accepted it," could you refute this? Even though it's totally ridiculous. But being able to make ridiculous theories is one of the fun things about Umineko, isn't it? I'm free to interpret it however I want, within reason.] |
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2012-01-17, 00:15 | Link #27082 | |
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Join Date: May 2007
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You know, I was thinking about Erika. She seems to be described as the perfect detective, i.e. hard working, knowledgeable, photographic memory, etc, etc. But in the end she failed to solve EP5 correctly. Remember when I was talking about detectives that fail to solve the mystery do not function as typical detectives; they are in my opinion, totally opposite. Because they come up with a false solution, they're actually serving to obfuscate the solution for the reader some more! Battler was like that, often coming up with misleading solutions. I think Erika falls into the same nice boat. I really do view Erika as incompetent, maybe worse than Battler. For example, she failed to solve the Midnight Knock and Letter and she technically failed in EP5. Maybe not as bad as Battler, but definitely a detective that leads us astray. Basically to answer your questions, I think a lot of her failures were due to her, Bern and LD scheming to frame Natsuhi in EP5. Bern and LD definitely knew by then, but I think they purposely didn't let Erika know about it for laughs. Bern liked to torture Erika as well. So basically, I think she had her 'solution' handed to her in that episode and nothing else was really important to her. That doesn't explain why she forgot it in EP6 though, unless she really isn't as 'good' as she thinks she is. In other words, she's not as photographic memory as we're led to believe. In some way, this reminds me of Higashino Keigo's stories. In The Devotion of Suspect X, Spoiler for Slight spoilers without spoiling too much...:
Uh... anyways, I'll stop rambling here... |
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2012-01-17, 00:21 | Link #27083 | |
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Join Date: Dec 2011
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And there are plenty of clues which could lead us to conclude that Bern and LD were just leading her to that interpretation intentionally in order to toy with her, so I think that's perfectly reasonable. After all, they definitely did toy with her a lot throughout EP5. |
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2012-01-17, 00:42 | Link #27084 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Sep 2010
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Small comments.
About Witch trolling in EP5 : Lambda was almost certainly trolling - she, by definition, knows Natsuhi was innocent, but never defended (or even really presented) the fantasy side. For her it was likely a combination of her seeking amusement, and possibly ... possibly hoping to stir Battler back into playing the game. Bern, however, doesn't like losing. She enjoys mistreating Erika, but I'm pretty sure she would rather Erika were a winning piece than a failing one. About Erika not solving the EP5 : I, and I think most people, arrived at "there was no knock, the letter was either an illusion, or it's method of revealing lied about". Personally, I found it odd Erika DIDN'T solve this one - it's the sort of "question the premise" problem that she demonstrably excels at. I read the scene as Ryukishi wanting to mess with her a bit. About Readers : To be frank, I've always been confused about what Ryukishi seems to think Reader's do. I can't imagine they'd add anything to an already written tale besides tone of voice, and commentary on the story. EP8, however, gives the impression that a Reader can choose to just ... make stuff up instead of reading what's on the page before them. It wouldn't bother me, really, if not for Bern's "a reader will just slip lies into the words I wrote", as it conflates external commentary with the narrative that's written. To put it another way, many read Romeo and Juliet as a great romantic tragedy about fate and all, yes? But many also read that play and say "what a bunch of stupid rich kids." That's what a Reader sort of feels like, to me - they comment on what's written, and have a particular slant on the events ... but they can't just change what's there. If I say "Romeo slew Tybalt in the streets like the cur he is", that's my commentary, but that's not me "reading the tale as written". I'm probably just being more literal than Ryukishi intended, but that's my take on it. |
2012-01-17, 00:58 | Link #27085 | ||
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Join Date: Dec 2011
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That said, I acknowledge that this looks a little OOC. Quote:
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2012-01-17, 01:01 | Link #27086 |
Dea ex Kakera
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Sea of Fragments
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Even a simple interpretation can distort a story severely. For instance, take this sentence: "The culprit stood over Natsuhi's body and giggled." If I don't write a single other thing about the culprit, what is your first impression of their gender?
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2012-01-17, 03:21 | Link #27087 | |||||||
Goat
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Gnawing away at Rokkenjima
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But we would never be shown only 2 people. If we were shown only 2 people, that would be because the RMP for some reason assumed that "everyone on the island" consisted of only 2 people (which is nonsense by any stretch). We were shown 18 people in the room because the RMP assumed that "everyone on the island" meant 18 people. The only reasonable possibilities that the RMP might assume are 17 or 18 (I would even argue that 18 is the more reasonable option with the RMP's knowledge up to that point, since ShKanon is pretty dumb). Quote:
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Anyway, it's a valid point that may warrant some reassessment of my theory. But regardless of whether "Player"="Reader" or not, it's plainly shown that the Meta-Character with the role of "Reader" influences what we see on the Game Board. Honestly, I have no particular impression of the culprit's gender, but I do wonder whether Natsuhi is about to be killed or is already dead. |
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2012-01-17, 03:50 | Link #27088 | |||||||
The True Culprit
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Given that the information base between player and character should be as close to 1:1 as possible (which should be perfectly achievable in the Meta-World), or else it's like the following D&D scenario: "My character looks around." "You see a Gazebo." "Okay. I interact with it." "You can't. It's not actually there." "So, was it an illusion spell?" "No, you just saw wrong." Quote:
Ange is the Reader of EP6. She is not the Reader of EP5. Both Episodes are, in a semantic, literary sense, the same. Ergo, there is no causal relationship between a Reader's vocal embellishments and the actual text contained in the tale. Quote:
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For instance, Clair doesn't seem to HAVE a subjective perspective, since she isn't actually a person, so why the hell isn't she prattling off proseless facts like in Bern's EP8 Gameboard? Because, imo, the Reader isn't about subjective embellishments or interpretations. They just READ what's there. They're Readers, not Interpreters or Analyzers. Without one all you have is a Wikipedia summary article, not a narrative story. Ditto for Ange. She's not really changing anything, she's reading the words written on a piece of paper. Otherwise why isn't Featherine commenting about Ange adding shit she didn't write, or somesuch? You know how Ange DOES embellish, though? She stops and asks questions. She gives her personal interpretations of the story without actually changing the text, like YOU AND I DO. Quote:
This contrasts your idea because your model insists SOMEONE ELSE'S misconceptions and misinterpretations onto OTHER READERS (us), defeating much of the purpose of the exercise.
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2012-01-17, 05:00 | Link #27089 | |
Ars Magica Translator
Join Date: Oct 2010
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She claims to read Agatha Christie (in the Battler-owned-Erika scene) but it seems she didn't read all of her novels, since there's one that use pretty much the same trick. Well it's the same "detective" that trust the family doctor in a mystery novel, maybe I'm not so surprised...
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2012-01-17, 07:20 | Link #27090 | |
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Join Date: Dec 2011
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People almost always refer to Beato as a person, even though she's actually a personification of the rules. It's the same thing. Therefore, as you can see in Clair's story in EP7, she can and certainly does add her own embellishments. Otherwise what on earth is Gaap doing there? And that's just the start of it. |
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2012-01-17, 09:24 | Link #27091 |
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I have never interacted with Ryukishi and he has never seen my comments. I'm fairly confident in that. I'm also fairly confident that he never did anything to Umineko in response to anything that I said or did; a likely fact even if he would have read anything I wrote, as I was at least a year to six months behind the Japanese releases until ep8 making it physically impossible for anything I said to alter the next episode.
Thus, I can demonstrably prove that the author-reader dynamic between Ryukishi and myself was non-interactive. He wrote things, I read them, and by the time I'd said anything about it he'd written something else. He had no way to know or anticipate my reaction to what he was writing and could not therefore have changed anything based on that. There was no "game" because there was neither interactivity in the creative process or any answer (which the genre he apes provide in finished works). Thus, I couldn't really engage him and it was non-interactive as concerns my own personal impressions of the work. Argument by counterexample: The process was non-interactive for at least one reader, ergo for at least one person ep5 could not possibly be justified in anticipating a responsive interpretation and presenting it to that person according to your theory. Which means that, if you are right, Ryukishi guessed wrong for some undefined number of slower or foreign readers who had no interactive access to him. The same could be said of somebody who picks the story up now that it's already finished. Is this person's response to ep5 also anticipated to be predetermined? They have no way of interacting with a completely finished work, other than to read it and think about it. If their interpretation wasn't correctly anticipated, are they just out of luck in going two ways with the author?That's not really the issue. We've always had to deal with narrative interpretation in Umineko, as much of it has been first-person or third-person-speculative. The issue is that we have no way of knowing the difference between "the original text" and "a given reader's interpretation, if there is one for any given text." But none of this matters for the ep5 sequence, because even if it is an interpretive issue, it should have been noticed, or else we should have been told how that interpretation is permitted to change what we see, without actually telling us.
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2012-01-17, 10:15 | Link #27092 |
Zero of the roulette
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: Finland
Age: 30
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I thought of some kind of solution to the Kanon issue, though I don't remember if it's clearly contradicted somewhere.
Maybe in EP5 there was only Kanon or Shannon in play. They never switched places or anything. Piece-Erika always supposed there was only one young servant, and didn't suspect an extra servant appearing. Everyone was in the parlor, Erika saw everyone she ever met on Rokkenjima there. I checked the red truths of EP5. Kanon and Shannon were both mentioned in them exactly once. Kanon was confirmed to break the seal of the servants' room with Kumasawa when the First twilight victims were discovered. And Shannon was only mentioned by Natsuhi, as the only one who she told she liked fall. So it seems Kanon is more relevant to have existed on the EP5 gameboard, though these two create some kind of disrepancy of Shannon being told about Natsuhi's favourite season while she doesn't exist there. The thing I don't remember is if the part Piece-Erika narrated (I think there was at least one occasion) mentioned either of them. Or if Meta-Erika spoke of them in EP5. If they didn't mention both of them it might mean that neither Piece- or Meta-Erika knew about an extra servant, which would make their sharing of information much simpler. This might be an example of a loveless game, as Shannon and Kanon are reduced to the single servant she is. But it doesn't solve the issue of Meta-Erika's knowledge of the extra servant in EP6 at least. About Reader techniques, maybe it means how Tohya might have read the message bottles and added his own interpretations and speculations into the mix. At least after being baffled by Legend and then trying to deny the image of a witch. While reading EP5 Battler added Shannon or Kanon where they weren't before, perhaps a sign of seeing things with love. Maybe after Ange read Dawn, her speculations were added to the story as a talk between ANGE and Featherine. A rewrite to the stories might have happened after Ikuko heard Tohya's interpretations of the raw version, or it's all happening in Tohya's head, without getting to a concrete form. |
2012-01-17, 13:51 | Link #27093 | |||
Goat
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Gnawing away at Rokkenjima
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"My character looks around." "You see a Gazebo in the front yard of the house next door." "Okay. I interact with it." "You can't. It's behind a fence." The GM assumed that the Player would know that there was a fence surrounding the yard. However the Player didn't think there was until he tried to interact with the Gazebo. If, for some reason, the Player never decided to try to interact with the Gazebo then the Player would never have learned that the front yard of the house next door was surrounded by a fence, even though his Character observed that the house next door did, in fact, have one. By the way, I've played plenty of table-top RPGs, and I've experienced this kind of thing countless times. Quote:
"......A Reader miko can use her own voice to embellish or distort the tale." "......Even if there was no cheap trickery in my game, by having a Reader, any amount of trickery could be added." "If there is no Reader, ......doesn't that mean there will be absolutely no falsehoods contained in the narrated text?" What else could all this mean? Quote:
I'm saying that what we see on the Game Board is the result of a two-way process between two fictional characters. Of course this result is reported to real life readers in a one-way process. |
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2012-01-17, 14:59 | Link #27094 | |
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Forgive me if I find that completely unbelievable.
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2012-01-17, 15:51 | Link #27095 | |
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I don't recall a time where we were shown the exact process leading up to the scenes that we, the ones reading the sound novels, are shown. There have, of course, been many interactions between the GM and the Player, but these were usually just fights between the people trying to solve the mysteries already posed by the GM, and the GM who wants to make those people surrender. Even so, it could have always been going on, behind the scenes, and we just weren't shown it. |
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2012-01-17, 16:08 | Link #27096 | |
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2012-01-17, 16:14 | Link #27097 | |
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2012-01-17, 16:24 | Link #27098 | |
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We have seen these interactions and how they shape the narrative, even if the actual "story" is not actively shaped by people's collaborative actions (there are in fact more cases of the narrative not visibly changing than the opposite). The commentary, however, always is, and in almost every circumstance I can think of, we see that commentary. But that isn't even the point, which several people here keep intentionally evading. The point is that even if we accept as true that the ep5 parlor scene is some kind of byproduct of an unseen interaction which is not in any way described or outlined or explained, the actual byproduct remains inherently contradictory and saying that it is what has been described here does not fix the contradictions. The inherent discrepancy between what the narrative says, what we know as readers is true, what Erika should have seen, and what Erika believes to be true are things which cannot be wished away by a vague and poorly thought-out notion that we're just looking at the aftermath of a process which smoothed out all those contradictions, except without actually doing any work intellectually to determine what that process was or how it came about. It's laziness to the extreme, and attempts to dismiss rightful criticism of it are downright insidious.
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2012-01-17, 16:55 | Link #27099 | |||
The True Culprit
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She is not a person, but a tool. Disagreeing with that is disagreeing with Ryukishi. Quote:
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2012-01-17, 17:42 | Link #27100 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: Dec 2011
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@Renall: My point was merely that we never see what it's like when the GM is reading the stories to the Player. The debates afterward, yes, but not the reading.
But I guess it's true that, even so, this doesn't seem to clear up the fact that Detective's Authority apparently didn't help Erika as it should have here. Quote:
Maybe it's better to say that the doll, Clair, is merely the form Bernkastel gave to Yasu for the sake of the funeral. But when that doll is acting as a vessel, it takes on the personality of the one it's channeling. So Yasu is there in EP7, but speaking to her through Clair is like speaking to her via phone. I guess that's the same as both admitting that I'm wrong and stating the obvious, though. |
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