[Game] Umineko - Spoilers, Theories, Interpretations

[Renall]

Originally Posted by Pikumin

Don't forget the crap-loads of fake spoilers and character graphics that will bombard us the moment the game comes out.

You'd be pretty amazed at how many of the "fake spoilers and character graphics" for ep7 actually turned out to really be from ep7.

[Pikumin]

Originally Posted by Renall

You'd be pretty amazed at how many of the "fake spoilers and character graphics" for ep7 actually turned out to really be from ep7.

Well anyone would raise their eyebrows upon seeing Clairtrice and Battlerzo.

[CrystalStarlight95]

Lol, I forgot about teh phonies. But I dunno if there will be any new characters, do you think? I mean, they may make a sprite for Yasu. *shrug*

[Keriaku]

I think people that are calling it just a love story are greatly downplaying what Yasu is trying to do and what actually happens in the arcs. It's only a love story in a very tenuous sense. What I see Yasu trying to accomplish, with her wide scale murder mystery, is she is trying to engage Battler on a once in a lifetime intellectual level. It's like instead of just playing a game of chess or discussing a mystery with him, he/she is putting him in a game of chess or in the mystery and letting him experience it for himself, while still giving him the ability to fairly challenge him/her.

Calling this just a love story is very, very weak. It's disregarding the whole set-up basically. And this is not even touching upon everything that led up to being able to orchestrate this, the stray feelings between other people involved, and all the reasons that things could not go as planned. I think this is a story of Yasu trying to accomplish something great, and it's a tragedy through the many factors that break down the Ushiromiya family.

I believe a good end for EP8 will be that Yasu's murder mystery is carried out successfully. In the end, no one actually kills anyone and Battler works together with the family and solves the epitaph. Yasu reveals self, everyone becomes happy.

[Jan-Poo]

Well if there are new characters this time Ryuukishi didn't want to foreshadow them.

I expect at least one or two new sprites. Hopefully we will finally see Asumu? Damn I'd be really disappointed if we will never get a full account of Asumu's story from her perspective. Of course I'd also like to see how she looked like...

I've been waiting for this to happen since... I think since EP5...


EDIT: as Keriaku said. This isn't just about a "love story". And as I said many times, you are mistaken if you think that Yasu's master plan was done with Battler in mind. EP7 in my opinion shows in many ways that Battler's return was actually the unexpected event that messed up the plan.

[Cao Ni Ma]

Small question, where there any hints of Battler ever discussing mystery genre titles with anyone other than a meta character in the first 4 games? Like in a flash back or something?

[Jan-Poo]

I remember Battler talking about that "higurashi no naku koro ni" novel he read, which apparently was a mystery novel of some sort. That apart I can't really remember anything on the top of my head.


@Renall: I'd be actually surprised if there hasn't been a novel, movie or something on those lines which depicted a murder that ended up being just an accident. I can however confirm the existence of a movie with a clear mystery plot with a detective, suspects and all, which in the end showed how the victim actually killed himself with the intention of framing one of his many enemies.
That's actually where I got the idea of the "gun tied to a rope tied to a weight".
And I even liked that twist. Maybe the movie didn't respect the "mystery rules" but it did respect the rules of realism and plausibility which many other stories of this kind tend to ignore.

[Keriaku]

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

I remember Battler talking about that "higurashi no naku koro ni" novel he read, which apparently was a mystery novel of some sort. That apart I can't really remember anything on the top of my head.

Just thought I'd mention since the Higurashi novel was brought up again, at the end of Himatsubushi-hen, it's stated that Akasama and Ooishi write a novel based on the unexplained curse of Oyashrio-sama (+ Rika predicting it etc.), called Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, in hopes that others would contemplate the mystery and that it wouldn't end with the Hinamizawa Disaster.

Wouldn't this be the novel Battler says to have read?

[Cao Ni Ma]

I remember a detective novel that had the actual murder being a suicide and someone making it look like a murder to frame some one else. Regardless there was a culprit that intended to ruin someone's life, the only difference was that the killing would have taken some more time to accomplish and it would have been sanctioned by the government.

I can't really accept the idea that everything is being set up as murder mystery for Battler if he was never shown to be apt (at least in the earlier chapters) in the ways of mystery novels. A riddle maybe, as there have been continued moments of a character making Battler and everyone else for that mater, solve riddles however benign they have been.

e- I remember mentioning Higurashi but it was Lamda speaking with Bern and Bern threatened to spoil the ending for her.

[luckyssol]

Originally Posted by Renall

Well, I'm sure there were some Higurashi fans who were unpleasantly surprised by how that turned out, and they'd been following it for a while themselves. Never underestimate the capability of a promising VN author to torpedo themselves in sight of the finish line.

I’ve actually been surprised by what he can accomplish in such a short window of time. He barely made the deadline for episode 6 yet I thought it was one of the better episodes of the series. It drove all of us up a wall.

Originally Posted by Keriaku

I think people that are calling it just a love story are greatly downplaying what Yasu is trying to do and what actually happens in the arcs. It's only a love story in a very tenuous sense. What I see Yasu trying to accomplish, with her wide scale murder mystery, is she is trying to engage Battler on a once in a lifetime intellectual level. It's like instead of just playing a game of chess or discussing a mystery with him, he/she is putting him in a game of chess or in the mystery and letting him experience it for himself, while still giving him the ability to fairly challenge him/her.

Calling this just a love story is very, very weak. It's disregarding the whole set-up basically. And this is not even touching upon everything that led up to being able to orchestrate this, the stray feelings between other people involved, and all the reasons that things could not go as planned. I think this is a story of Yasu trying to accomplish something great, and it's a tragedy through the many factors that break down the Ushiromiya family.

I believe a good end for EP8 will be that Yasu's murder mystery is carried out successfully. In the end, no one actually kills anyone and Battler works together with the family and solves the epitaph. Yasu reveals self, everyone becomes happy.

The line at the end of episode 7 clearly states that this story will not be given a good ending but I’m hoping for the best as well. I wouldn’t call Umineko just a love story either. Why can’t it just be a story to find the answer to the question Ange posed to Eva at the end of the third episode?
“On that day, on Rokkenjima, what happened?”
Maybe there is a culprit and maybe there isn’t.

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

I expect at least one or two new sprites. Hopefully we will finally see Asumu? Damn I'd be really disappointed if we will never get a full account of Asumu's story from her perspective. Of course I'd also like to see how she looked like...

I've been waiting for this to happen since... I think since EP5...

Well, for me, the question is more along the lines of: “Has she already appeared in the story or not?”
I don’t have any expectations for her anymore after episode 7 though. It’s a shame really. I could make a pretty interesting character out of her if I were writing it.

Originally Posted by Cao Ni Ma

I can't really accept the idea that everything is being set up as murder mystery for Battler if he was never shown to be apt (at least in the earlier chapters) in the ways of mystery novels. A riddle maybe, as there have been continued moments of a character making Battler and everyone else for that mater, solve riddles however benign they have been.

Well, she knows that Battler has the strongest magic toxin in him. So you would have to plan for the possibility of his arrival with the most complicated fake mystery plot to convince him. Just in case he actually does show up. And he does.

[Ayu-ayu]

Originally Posted by Keriaku

Just thought I'd mention since the Higurashi novel was brought up again, at the end of Himatsubushi-hen, it's stated that Akasama and Ooishi write a novel based on the unexplained curse of Oyashrio-sama (+ Rika predicting it etc.), called Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, in hopes that others would contemplate the mystery and that it wouldn't end with the Hinamizawa Disaster.

Wouldn't this be the novel Battler says to have read?

This occurred to me too, but then I realized, the book that they wrote in Himatsubashi-hen was well after 1986.

[rogerpepitone]

There's _Trent's Last Case_, an early deconstruction of the mystery, in which the detective's reasoning is ultimately revealed to be completely wrong.

There's another book in which, after everything was out, one character remarked the detective had unmasked the conspiracy, had the detective reply, "There was no conspiracy. And I uncovered it by accident."

A Father Brown story had a death by natural causes be disguised to look like a crime so that the detective would be distracted from a planned robbery.

[Renall]

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

@Renall: I'd be actually surprised if there hasn't been a novel, movie or something on those lines which depicted a murder that ended up being just an accident. I can however confirm the existence of a movie with a clear mystery plot with a detective, suspects and all, which in the end showed how the victim actually killed himself with the intention of framing one of his many enemies.
That's actually where I got the idea of the "gun tied to a rope tied to a weight".
And I even liked that twist. Maybe the movie didn't respect the "mystery rules" but it did respect the rules of realism and plausibility which many other stories of this kind tend to ignore.

Originally Posted by rogerpepitone

There's _Trent's Last Case_, an early deconstruction of the mystery, in which the detective's reasoning is ultimately revealed to be completely wrong.

There's another book in which, after everything was out, one character remarked the detective had unmasked the conspiracy, had the detective reply, "There was no conspiracy. And I uncovered it by accident."

A Father Brown story had a death by natural causes be disguised to look like a crime so that the detective would be distracted from a planned robbery.

The difference here is that we'd be dealing not with a mystery that deconstructs mysteries, but a non-mystery that deconstructs the very lens of interpretation employed by mysteries.

Here, it's not that a non-crime is set up to look like a crime, or even that a non-crime that could be mistaken for a crime is so mistaken. Instead we have a simple non-event (x people enter, ?????, those people are now dead/missing) which is only a crime because outside entities have posited and constructed the possibility that a crime did occur. The police of Ange's world don't seem to think there was a crime, yet there is a flourishing degree of speculation about it. And perhaps there's something to be said for that.

The problem is, the message "a mystery novel's interpretive structure cannot apply to a realistic crime" is... well... self-evident. Nobody's saying otherwise. Nobody ever was saying otherwise. So what conclusion are you trying to make us reach (if that were the solution), ryukishi?

There's a certain synchronicity to "in the absence of information we prefer to believe in rules and rhyme and reason even if we must sacrifice the fundamental humanity of our subject" as it essentially applies to both the fictional layer and the meta-fictional layer, but that really isn't where the series has been going. It's been presenting itself, if not as a mystery, then as something within that genre's sphere of interest. We have been taught to expect rules and structure even as we are taught to question them, but only within a proper framework. In a way, that's all a mystery is.

To lack not only a murder, not only a crime, but any semblance of criminality or guilt - even a suicide has a certain culprit guilt angle to it - just seems to be sacrificing the preceding work for a thematic conclusion that no one was ever really disputing. Of course we'd like it if everyone was innocent; that was why we cheered for Battler in ep2 in the face of impossible odds and a seemingly inevitable realization that he couldn't defend everyone forever. However, that's not what we expect, and if we were led to this expectation by the author, it isn't because he fooled us, but because he lied about the very premise of his work.

[Jan-Poo]

Well if that's the real point then I can make another example.

Where the night begins - 1991

There the basic known facts are that a girl killed herself due to the disclosure of an affair she had with the main character's father. The whole movie is constructed to question that thesis showing many different hints and witnesses claiming that that girl is in fact still alive.
The main character therefore makes several researches in order to find the truth, in order to find the proof that the girl didn't kill herself and lived with his father since then.

But guess what? In the end he finds out that the girl actually died. So everything that you were made to question until that point was real. But there's still a plot twist: the girl was killed by the main character'smother to "save the marriage".


Okay this is sort of the opposite of what I'm speculating about umineko, but it still proves the point that it isn't anything knew in narrative to make the reader distrust and question a generally accepted fact only to show up that it was all real. It works provided that you then show another completely unexpected plot twist.

[Used Can]

I think there's a difference between having a plot twist in a common novel, as opposed to doing it in a detective novel, though. I do not think you can have plot twists in the latter, unless there were hints toward it - for example, the final chapter on the first volume of Zaregoto.

[ijriims]

Originally Posted by Used Can

I think there's a difference between having a plot twist in a common novel, as opposed to doing it in a detective novel, though. I do not think you can have plot twists in the latter, unless there were hints toward it - for example, the final chapter on the first volume of Zaregoto.

The twist is that it is not detective novel at all!!

[Renall]

Originally Posted by ijriims

The twist is that it is not detective novel at all!!

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and commits ritual murders like a duck...

[Jan-Poo]

Well I don't even consider that a twist.

I could point out that from the 1998 perspective this whole story blatantly breaks the Dine rule about the necessity of a clearly identifiable corpse.
In fact one of the earlier opposition to the "explosion theory" back after EP4 was precisely that if the theory was true then there wouldn't be any crime scene to speculate about.
That's exactly this kind of "it must be a mystery novel" mentality that prevented some people to accept the blatant truth of the Rokkenjima accident.

[Keriaku]

I'm no kind of expert on mysteries, I would actually say that Umineko is the only thing even close to one I've read before.

But what's the problem with viewing the 2 days as a game. Literally, like engaging in a game of chess with someone, but more wide scale with everyone being involved and not necessarily aware of what's going on? Is this somehow a bad way for the situation to turn out? In the end, there never was any kind of intended crime, we as the readers only followed through with Battler's perspective who interpreted the situation this way, who multiple times comes to the conclusion they shouldn't have been worrying about a culprit or anything and trying to solve the epitaph anyways. If you reread the letters signed by Beatrice the Golden, this interpretation seems to fit perfectly.

To me personally, this seems like a fine premise, and it's all the more excellent that we've all been led along by Battler's personal conclusions through the whole series. I think this fits with Battler forgiving Beatrice when he realizes the truth, and that there doesn't need to be a culprit. If anything, the culprit is the emotional instability of the adults. The culprit is the emotions of greed, envy, and suspicion. For a complete story, I'm more than satisfied with this answer.

[Judoh]

I don't think anyone has a problem viewing it as a chess game, but that people want a winning resolution. It being an accident, while you can guess it, feels like a compromise, not like a fierce game between a reader and writer. If it happens it doesn't actually feel like Ryukishi07 won or the readers won. It's just there. And I'd argue if you play a game without knowing what's going on you were never really playing to start with.

Us english speakers never had a good chance at solving the epitaph anyways.