[Game] Umineko - Spoilers, Theories, Interpretations

[LyricalAura]

I'm paraphrasing here, but he didn't say "gold butterflies mean someone is crazy," he said "someone would be crazy if they really saw gold butterflies." A whole group of people wouldn't randomly go crazy at the same time and all hallucinate the same specific thing that just happens to be convenient to the fantasy narrative. The butterflies showing up means that the scene is false.

[Asuka0NK]

Alright thats what he said. This sorta does confuse me though because don't the butterflies appear before 12:00 AM in Ep 1 or do I just have a terrible memory? What I mean by this is does Battler see the butterflies before 12:00 AM.

[Drifloon]

Battler doesn't see the butterflies until the very end of EP1.

[haguruma]

Originally Posted by Renall

It's not some fatal flaw or anything, but it's kind of sloppy.

I thought about this for a while and I would say it basically comes down to the "stupid public flaw" that many historical mysteries have. It's actually pretty funny that Ryûkishi brought up Shimada Sôji's 占星術殺人事件 (Tokyo Zodiac Murders) in EP5, because it basicallz has a similar flaw if you ask me.

Spoiler for Zodiac Solution:

The culprit basically faked her death by very obviously rearranging the chopped up body parts of her siblings to make it appear as if there was one corpse more.

It always ends up begging the question why nobody in all these years except our protagonists and ourselves (the reader) had the rational thought of questioning some very easy things. This is something that plagues Umineko as well, though you could explain it away by "that theory just wasn't popular enough".
Sure, it would have been problematic for the mystery aspect of the story to cover such elements to early and by Ryûkishi's stance of not committing to one definite solution he would never actually do so. But you are right when you say that this costs the story some points because it rips you out of the narrative by asking for a little too much suspension of disbelief.

Originally Posted by Asuka0NK

Alright thats what he said. This sorta does confuse me though because don't the butterflies appear before 12:00 AM in Ep 1 or do I just have a terrible memory? What I mean by this is does Battler see the butterflies before 12:00 AM.

Well, Battler comments during the Tea Party how they met with somebody in front of the portrait at midnight and then everything went blank. I think this just describes the narrative getting hazy and less easy to comprehend.
The butterflies always seemed to imply, to me as well, how a scene is taken over by a fantasy explanation over a rational one. Genji's action of actually destroying one of those in EP2 kinda seemed to me like Ryûkishi wanting to point out that the fantasy has no control over Genji because he actually knows the full extent of the plot, yet he is not the one actually controlling and spreading the deceptions.

[Renall]

Originally Posted by haguruma

It always ends up begging the question why nobody in all these years except our protagonists and ourselves (the reader) had the rational thought of questioning some very easy things. This is something that plagues Umineko as well, though you could explain it away by "that theory just wasn't popular enough".

While you're right that such an excuse could work, the problem is that he goes and creates this notion that there's a niche of people who are obsessed with the whole thing. And basically, if it's "common knowledge" to one of them, it should be common knowledge generally, and it certainly should be known to Ikuko (who is following the niche group) and thus should be known to Toya/Battler unless she has some particular reason not to mention it at any time. While she may have some reason to do that, we don't really get enough to say that for certain, so it ends up a bit muddy.

The point is, as you said, somebody must have taken an interest in the life histories of the victims. Even if it's just one person investigating, that information presumably exists in some form. It might not be complete information; a couple Witch Hunters might've tried to inquire about Kanon's background from the Fukuin records and been mysteriously ignored by whoever is still keeping them, or found nothing conclusive about Kanon, but not enough to definitively know if he existed or not. Still, if they did even that much, someone should know about it.

Ange spoke to an expert on the subject, and he never noted any such character inconsistency. While it's possible he just doesn't know, the point is more that by structuring the story that way, the author causes us to make assumptions about characters that the world as presented appears to back up. After Alliance, we had no reason to think Kanon was a nonexistent person except inasmuch as we may have suspected Shkanon. But if we did suspect that, we assumed that there must be some explanation as to how "Kanon" can have existed and not have it be questioned by readers of the stories in 1998, since it was never brought up in Ange's sequences. That's somewhat misleading; it seems like, having reviewed all the information, it should have, but it didn't.

A similar issue I think was the explosion, but that was somewhat less of a concern. It is still kind of odd though that Alliance dodges the subject entirely in the 1998 parts. Ange never once thinks about how it happened? She and everyone else even remotely aware of the incident knows that an explosion happened, but we have to figure it out by implication until Chiru because no one confronts the occurrence directly. Even Amakusa, supposedly a seasoned soldier, doesn't get to hear about what happened (or see it) and remark "Man, that would take a ton of explosives." Nobody talks about it. Nobody.

[Jan-Poo]

Originally Posted by Renall

Of course that's assuming Yasu isn't Genji's child to begin with...

Or Nanjo's granddaughter.

Wait... she could be both!

[Asuka0NK]

Kinjo is the best thing I have ever seen in my entire life.

[RandomAvatarFan]

Yeah, The Kinjo theory from Kinjo's Seacats was actually kind of interesting. The motive that was set up was actually plausible. In fact that read less like a parody and more like the actual thing at that point. It could explain how "they all acknowledged Kinzo's existence" and "Nanjo is dead."

More so on topic... but yeah, the epilogue of EP1 says "The Rokkenjima Mass Murder Incident" or "The Murders of the Golden Witch" but in EP6 it's just like "Yeah, Explosion incident." which is something it should have been more commonly referred to.

I believe the true mystery was solved in Prime. Nothing that resembles Prime is in the Episodes. The Episodes are the forgeries.

[Asuka0NK]

Well Ryukishi probably just called it that so he didn't give away the mystery too early or else Beatrice's final mystery would've been too easy for the readers.

[Cao Ni Ma]

How is that red about everyone recognizing Kinzo even written in japanese? I always felt Kyrie just coming out and saying that his Goldsmith name would probably be better as Gold House/storage kinda odd.

[LaplaceNoMa]

Hello everyone,

I didn't check the last ~500 pages of this thread (that's the amount of pages I've missed by not coming here for a while) to see the latest speculations, but I have one question for all of you:

1. Third game: Shannon and Kanon are dead - first twilight
2. Sixth game (and many other occurencies in the game): Even if you join us, there are 17 people.

Now I remember that the most theories were circulating around the 'person!=body' wordplay, but this has been bugging me for a while.

If Shannon=Kanon=Yasu=Beatrice, than one body should account for 4 (or possibly 3 if Yasu=Beatrice from the start) 'people', not two. And if Shannon and Kanon are dead in the first twilight of the 3rd game (as well as some other moments in the story) then Yasu (Beatrice) must be dead too. And if she is, who the hell could tell Eva about the bomb and everything else?

It's not the only thing that bothers me really, I grow very untrustful towards the whole Shkanontrice resolution. There's way too many things that contradict this idea as well as the 'people/personalities/bodies' shennanigans.

[LaplaceNoMa]

And another thing I wanted to ask: I've seen a hurtful lot of theories back when eps 6-7-8 were actual material and, well, lately too (including THAT youtube theory)

Each of them has its great points and great flaws, but the problem is - I've tried listening to their explanations of every single murder in games 1-6 as well as every single 'questionable' scene (there are things that look fishy and need explanation from various theories' POVs which aren't murders or even related to murders) but each of them has at least 1 murder that can't be explained without jumping to ridiculous tricks which serve to try and 'fit' the murders to their theories.

So I wonder, did any of the great minds here on forums (there certainly are people here who I endlessly respect for their bright minds) come with a plausible step-by-step explanation of every murder in every game? I've tried checking everyone's signatures but didn't find anything except Renall's logic error explanation yet.

[Kealym]

Regarding the number of persons, Yasu effectively does not exist on the Gameboards. And I believe the consensus is that Beatrice doesn't "count" because 1. Her victory is dependant on her not being a human, anyway 2. She has to leave a human-only solution possible, which her existence would definitely not and 3. how she can still state "No more than 17"

On the other matter, not to my knowledge, no - just about every theory has you make a few assumptions to get from one good talking point to the next. Even with plain ol' regular Shkanon, laying out not just what happened, but WHY it happened is a good way to end up in a mental clusterfuck. (mostly when trying to map out Banquet)

[Wanderer]

Well, my take on it is that the Yasu entity is simply one person. However, who that person is at any given time changes. These personas can "die" without Yasu's body dying, in which case a different persona can fill its place. This way Yasu's body always amounts to one countable living person, even though it can account for multiple "dead" people.

It's not perfect, though. My theory denies the possibility of the simultaneous existence of multiple Yasu-personas, but, as Renall once pointed out, in EP3 Shannon and Kanon were killed by other people and their killer was in the same room when they killed them, which seems to require simultaneous existence of both the victim and murderer. The only way it could work, then, is if Shannon and Kanon were killed by a non-Yasu persona, which doesn't fit the narrative at all.

As for a comprehensive theory of all the murders, we can assume ShKanon for whodunnit and theorizing a plausible howdunnit is actually pretty easy for all of them. It's the whydunnit that's hard.

[Drifloon]

I still maintain that like the cheese puzzle shown earlier in the episode, the question of how many people are on the island has several different answers depending on how you look at it and all these answers are equally valid, and can thus be said in red. I'm not sure why everyone seems to think the red has to be entirely consistent with itself with all the talk of multiple truths existing at the same time and all.

So I wonder, did any of the great minds here on forums (there certainly are people here who I endlessly respect for their bright minds) come with a plausible step-by-step explanation of every murder in every game? I've tried checking everyone's signatures but didn't find anything except Renall's logic error explanation yet.

Didn't people do this not long after EP7 came out? If you don't consider the Shkanontrice explanations plausible, then you probably aren't going to find anything better, if that's what you mean.

[LaplaceNoMa]

Nono, don't get me wrong - I'm not a KnownNoMore's fan who will blindly deny everything Shkannon-related.

It's just that I never really saw anyone applying the theory to explain everything. When I re-read all 8 eps with the 'Shkannon' mindset, I had a lot of questions remaining. Hell, I still have no complete understanding of ep6's ending and the exact way we should interpret the windows' sels being broken and Kanon disappearing.

While these are not the only questions I have, they are probably the most important ones:

- As I already said, I can't see how Eva could know about the bomb and the hidden passage to Kuwadorian in ep3 when Shkannon ended the first twilight with her suicide.
- To be honest, I can't really understand the point of this suicide at the very beginning of the game. I can see how Shkannon suicide might work in ep2, but not in ep3.
- Logic error. Shannon is confirmed with red to be in the cousin's room, her 'body' is there and the room is perfectly sealed. But even with the windows' seals being broken, I still can't understand the final part with Kanon actually 'disappearing' from the closet.
- Hideyoshi's death in ep5.

These are just some points that bother me the most, but I'd like to see a full explaination of all games anyway. There's a lot of other strangely-done murders in other games (let's say Gohda and Kumasawa in ep4) which need to be explained without jumping to ridiculous attempts to simply 'fit' them to the theory. Most explainations I've seen consider most of the characters to be completely unbelievably retarded. That or simply using metaworld decisions for explaination. Even though ep6 is clearly too meta to begin with, I just can't see Kanon going inside the closet, changing into Shannon clothes and then killing him/herself just so that things would work out in metaworld battle.

[Jan-Poo]

My interpretation is more or less the same as Wanderer's.

There is a "Joker" body who can alternatively become Shannon, Kanon and Beatrice.
For the sake of this theory you can consider Yasu the same entity as Beatrice they are the same being. So Yasu actually exists in the gameboard but only when she's not Kanon or Shannon.

So in other words at any given moment there are only 16 persons in the island but one of them switches between three different persona.

In EP3 Shannon and Kanon were "killed" by Beatrice, meaning that she made an incontrovertible choice of abandoning those persona ferever. That means Beatrice was still alive and free to move in EP3.
The personality death was explained in EP5 when Beatrice herself was shown as "dying".

in EP6 our Joker was Shannon when she was closed inside the room, and there was no Kanon inside the other.
Shannon then became Kanon (for absolutely no apparent reason), he ran to the room where Battler was supposed to be dead (still for absolutely no apparent reason). He switched place with Battler (still for absoluely no apparent reason, since then Erika would still find someone inside the closet), and then finally stopped being Kanon by becoming Beatrice or Shannon.

in EP3 Shannon and Kanon were killed by other people and their killer was in the same room when they killed them,

When the five other than Kinzo were murdered, the murderer was definitely in the same room!

Well this is yet another stretch but this red doesn't actually say victim and murderer were inside them same room at the same time. It only says that when the victim was murdered, i.e. when the victim ceased to exist, the murderer was in the same room as they were when they were alive.


All right this is ridiculous logic, do I like it? No seriously. But considering the various evidences and through the interpretation of the story I am moderately confident that this is the logic R07 used.
And this is just one of the questionable gimmicks he used, there's also the one about Erika in EP5 being in the same room with Shannon and Kanon and then there's Erika claiming she's the 18th person in red only to be denied in red that including her there are 17 persons.

Yeah you can explain that with some kind of lame logic, but it's not neat.

[haguruma]

Originally Posted by LaplaceNoMa

- As I already said, I can't see how Eva could know about the bomb and the hidden passage to Kuwadorian in ep3 when Shkannon ended the first twilight with her suicide.
- To be honest, I can't really understand the point of this suicide at the very beginning of the game. I can see how Shkannon suicide might work in ep2, but not in ep3.

There is nothing actually pointing to Yasu/Shannon's death that early in EP3. It is basically just Shannon waiting in the parlour (she chose this as her place because it is the ONLY place the people who found her could easily enter), then after being examined the in-narrative Shannon got up, went to the chapel und changed into Kanon until people went there.
Beato says it in Our Confession, had somebody checked the parlour after she (in that theory Kanon) had left, she could have just given it a magical explanation of the witch stealing the body or something like that.
During the time Shannon is found and George revives Shannon she acts as the ghost of Beatrice on the gameboard (approaching people like Eva and George). Considering the fact that there is even somebody leading Jessica to safety we have to assume that she was even alive at that point. The only question that this actually begs is, "who was the Eva Beatrice that killed Shannon and George?". The fact that "Beato" witnessed the murder of the lovers implies to me that Yasu actually witnessed somebody (under the guise of Eva-Beato within the narrative) killing George and thus her Shannon persona (which existed solely for George at this point) died with him. The fact that the anime depicts Kyrie's and Rudolph's corpses as having moved during those events raises the question whether it wasn't them who killed George which led to them being killed in turn by Yasu...at least Kyrie's corpse already raised questions in the VN (being mentioned as not having a fatal wound).

EP3 is less difficult regarding the who and how, the when is actually the only thing that makes it a pretty difficult game.

- Logic error. Shannon is confirmed with red to be in the cousin's room, her 'body' is there and the room is perfectly sealed. But even with the windows' seals being broken, I still can't understand the final part with Kanon actually 'disappearing' from the closet.

Shannon never even had to actually leave the room, though of course if we take Battler being locked in the room literally then she would have at least had to reach the door to his locked room.
The answer is pretty simple nobody was in the closet. Erika was fooled into believing that there was a Kanon among the people she locked into the second room. By him not existing in the first place Battler could simply leave the room because a figurative placeholder in form of the "Kanon-slot" had been placed into his room. It's basically the same trick as Kanon vanishing from Jessica's locked room in EP2.
I think Kanon entering the closet and vanishing in it was simply a narrative means to imply that he is nothing more than "clothing put on a different character". Once you return him to the closet he ceases to exist.

- Hideyoshi's death in ep5.

If you don't want to go for the it was a rouse route, it can be simply explained by the "the murderer was in the room" solution also applicable to EP1's locked room in which Eva and Hideyoshi were killed.
We never actually get definitive descriptions of every character's arrival. It is not impossible that "Shkannon" were already in the room when Natsuhi entered and hid in the bathroom until the wire was cut and everybody ran inside. Everybody was drawn to Hideyoshi imediatly and by Erika not entering the room directly when it was opened we have no objective source of information who entered when and how.

These are just some points that bother me the most, but I'd like to see a full explaination of all games anyway.

I always start doing this but get frustrated because I tend to go into to many side-discussions along the way. Maybe I should just force myself to do it...at least I know there would be people who'd read it. I'd like to get some constructive criticism regarding my ideas.

[LaplaceNoMa]

Shannon never even had to actually leave the room, though of course if we take Battler being locked in the room literally then she would have at least had to reach the door to his locked room.
The answer is pretty simple nobody was in the closet. Erika was fooled into believing that there was a Kanon among the people she locked into the second room. By him not existing in the first place Battler could simply leave the room because a figurative placeholder in form of the "Kanon-slot" had been placed into his room. It's basically the same trick as Kanon vanishing from Jessica's locked room in EP2.
I think Kanon entering the closet and vanishing in it was simply a narrative means to imply that he is nothing more than "clothing put on a different character". Once you return him to the closet he ceases to exist.

Wasn't the chain set after Battler left the room? If I recall correctly, that was the main problem there.

[haguruma]

Originally Posted by LaplaceNoMa

Wasn't the chain set after Battler left the room? If I recall correctly, that was the main problem there.

But wasn't the problem rather that Erika set the chain after she entered the room and the logic error was created by Battler not being (or according to his theory not supposed to be) in the room when she entered it? There was no person in existence who could have removed his body from the room, unless he was alive -or rather actually admitting he was alive - and left the room before Erika entered it.
At least that was how I remember the problem of the logic error.