[Game] Umineko - Spoilers, Theories, Interpretations

[Renall]

I'm not disagreeing with you now.

However, I was not able to dissociate "existing intelligence creating Shannon and Kanon" from a given authorial layer in any existing theory. Most people seem to have had the same issue. The main difference here is that there is no "core personality" existing on the same tier of fiction as either Shannon or Kanon. Both bear marks of the author's personality, and carry out the equivalent role that she herself carried out, but neither is actually her. Thus, each can be a fully-realized independent fictional character of his/her own without worrying about physical problems, mental hangups, or prior attachments to Battler.

For instance, if Yasu/Lion believed herself physically incapable of love, we would not have to conclude that Shannon is likewise (whereas a Physical Shkanon would basically necessitate this). George's corny desire to have a lot of children with Shannon - who could do so - could be her way of projecting that sort of happiness. Likewise with Kanon. It's kind of odd that he's the only male Fukuin servant, isn't it? Are there even male Fukuin servants? Well, regardless of whether there were, now there is one, and Jessica's loneliness can be alleviated.

If anything, that should please the shippers, as any form of Shkanon starts making things a little... weird on the relationship front. And if people can like Battler/Beato, which doesn't exist anywhere but the meta-world as a couple right now, no reason they can't like Second Order Fiction Shannon/George and Kanon/Jessica.

[Kylon99]

Originally Posted by Renall

However, I was not able to dissociate "existing intelligence creating Shannon and Kanon" from a given authorial layer in any existing theory. Most people seem to have had the same issue. The main difference here is that there is no "core personality" existing on the same tier of fiction as either Shannon or Kanon. Both bear marks of the author's personality, and carry out the equivalent role that she herself carried out, but neither is actually her. Thus, each can be a fully-realized independent fictional character of his/her own without worrying about physical problems, mental hangups, or prior attachments to Battler.

I have to agree. A lot of Shkannon theories before made it into choosing who is real, Shannon or Kanon, when it was never really a binary choice.

This was probably what Ryukishi meant when he said people didn't think further as to what it *could* be.

In fact, with Renall's theory, it's not Shkannon at all. In the same way that Sherlock Holmes and Watson being fictional doesn't imply that they must be one real person sharing the same body. They are simply two fictional characters woven into a semi-realistic 1800's England and the real person is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with the possibility that the two characters are based on traits of people he may have known.

[Jan-Poo]

Well in the beginning I certainly tried to either claim that either Shannon or Kanon existed while the other did not. But after the first discussions of Ep6 I think I clearly expressed my idea that considering all in all there were no more reasons to believe Kanon was an lillusion than Shannon was. The main point here is that they are all called furnitures, they are all defined as "less than humans". So in the recent days I started using words like "person x" or "original persona" due to a lack of any other clear name (now it seems that this original persona is Yasu/Lion).

Now the main difference between Renall's view and mine is that I believe that shkanon must exist as an illusion in Rokkenjima prime, while Renall seems to think it doesn't exist.

Also so far I always believed that even inside the fiction of the games Shannon and Kanon are one person.
And okay on this point I admit that Renall's new interpretation creates some interesting scenarios.

The problem I have with this, is that if Shannon and Kanon are indeed existing characters in this fictions and therefore count as humans, then what about Erika? There are even more reasons to think she does.

But in that case we'd have 18 humans on the fictions, and 16 humans on Rokkenjima prime.
So what that "17" is supposed to refer to?

[ameskitty]

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

Anyway, why suddenly everyone accepts Renall's version of shkanon? It is still a shkanon theory and it's even more hard on what concerns Jessica's and George's love relationships. I thought most people didn't like shkanon because it would destroy the two shipped couples. Not what Renall proposes is that they never existed in the first place.

No, the problem I (and I'm sure others) saw was that with plain Shkanon you had a single character who was...basically ridiculously talented at attracting people, at disguising, and at working. If I'm understanding Renall's theory correctly, it doesn't have any of those issues - Shkanon and the two existences represented by it are just a fictional lie. At least for me, it makes that type of solution a lot more satisfactory.

I'm sure there were some upset shippers, and I'm not saying that I don't like the pairings made non-existent, but you can't say that it's the only reason people were disappointed about it.

Now I'm not completely sold on it (you could definitely make some grumblings about it not being a "proper" mystery, not that that was promised in the first place), but I do like it better than vanilla Shkanon.

[Renall]

Shippers like Bat/Beato. That couple is essentially "non-existent." There is no on-board Battler/Beatrice romance, and the meta-world is assuredly not "reality" even within the fictional sense of the term. So what's the problem there? If you start getting into degrees of "reality," technically Shannon/Kanon still have more "real" relationships than Meta-Battler/Meta-Beatrice do, and nobody seems to have a problem there.

The romance is not necessarily hollow or meaningless simply because it appears in a fiction. Otherwise all the great love stories are pointless lies. I hardly think that's what most people would instinctively believe.

[Jan-Poo]

I didn't say it was the only reason, but that certainly was one of the reasons. And many times the criticism has been that shkanon was "loveless" because it destroyed the couples.

My answers to those criticisms were in no way different from what Renall is proposing now. And therefore I'm baffled at the fact that at that time my answers didn't seem to be accepted by anyone, while now suddenly they are accepted.

But well this is just ranting from my part, don't mind, it doesn't really matter.

[ijriims]

Renall. Now I have to ask, from an in-universe perspective, are EP3 and EP4 also the work of Yasu (who you said the author of EP1 and EP2). If not, then I wonder what the point of Yasu's writing was, since none of the three couples (BattlerXBeato, GeorgeXShannon and JessicaXKanon) were having a good ending at all in EP1. You can say EP2 fared better, but then what was the point of writing EP1. And really why Yasu had to resort to throwing out letters-in-the-bottle which was definitely uncertain. To me, the focus of EP1 and EP2 seemed to be on, Maria actually.

And do you really think the EP1, EP2's tea party and ??? were written in the novel? Did they exist outside the realm of Yasu's novels?

[Used Can]

I like the theory, and the possibility of some people being merely fictional - as Erika apparently is - is something I had thought before. In fact, I tried to follow that line of reasoning to try to deny Shkanon at some point, but I always failed to answer why Battler or any of the detectives never saw them together. The hints they are the same person are all over the place. Yet, if they are merely fictional characters, then I think there's no need for them to be the same person.

The way I tackled this issue, whilst keeping Shannon and Kanon as fictional characters yet real, was to have a core person impersonate them both (this was before EP7). This person played both roles, and in this fashion, anyone could say they came to life. If this were to be thought as a play, then George and Shannon's and Jessica and Kanon's relationships do exist. However, these relationships can only exist for as long as the core person wants to keep this play. Of course, this is all part of the roulette I mentioned before (in either this thread, or the EP7 one).

Now, as for the Red. I believe there are several ways to tackle them, but I wouldn't know if any of the ways to deal with it are satisfactory. One could be that they die whenever the core person (i.e. Yasu/Lion) decides to stop playing their roles. Another could be that Shannon and/or Kanon used to be servants in the mansion, but they died before this game started. The last idea I came up with was the possibility of either Shannon or Kanon being real, and this person was working alongside the real Beatrice (i.e. Yasu/Lion). So, if we assume that, prior to October 4th, Shannon was herself and that Yasu was Kanon, then the existence of Shannon and Kanon would be established. By the time the game began, Yasu had to play the role of Beatrice and had to do other things; thus, she couldn't be around, and because of this, Shannon also played Kanon's role. This could explain why Suit-Beatrice only shows up whenever Kanon dies and his body is not found, I think.

[Oliver]

As a side note.

Remember the cups and coins puzzle? Think of cups as fiction levels.

That is, story X which contains characters A and B also contains story Y (written by character A) in which, beside characters A and B, characters C and D also feature...

[RockReborn]

Wow, Renall. Just wow. This is easily the best theory I've seen thus far.

We're still left with the question of the culprit, however, if there actually is one.

[Oliver]

It seemed to me some people didn't quite get it, so I decided to make a diagram.

[Renall]

Originally Posted by ijriims

Renall. Now I have to ask, from an in-universe perspective, are EP3 and EP4 also the work of Yasu (who you said the author of EP1 and EP2). If not, then I wonder what the point of Yasu's writing was, since none of the three couples (BattlerXBeato, GeorgeXShannon and JessicaXKanon) were having a good ending at all in EP1. You can say EP2 fared better, but then what was the point of writing EP1. And really why Yasu had to resort to throwing out letters-in-the-bottle which was definitely uncertain. To me, the focus of EP1 and EP2 seemed to be on, Maria actually.

And do you really think the EP1, EP2's tea party and ??? were written in the novel? Did they exist outside the realm of Yasu's novels?

There are several questions at work here in your post.

Who Wrote Which Episode?: I don't know for sure. Oliver has some interesting theories for potential ep3-4 writers (Rosa, Maria, Ange). Who, if anyone, Hachijou Tohya is is also in question, to say nothing of the writer of ep5-ep7 (The culprit? Battler? One after the other?). My baseline theory is that the True Servant, who would become known to us as the True Beatrice, wrote 1-2. I have no backup for this. It's just a hunch. I'm like 60-70% sure the writers of subsequent (3-7) episodes were not this writer, unless she snuck back in later. 3-4 definitely weren't her though. This isn't new stuff, it's just old Author Theory ideas.

What Parts of the Stories Exist in the In-Universe Fiction? This is a tougher one. There's a couple ideas:

• Everything we see was in there. This has several consequences, notably that Ange's existence must be fiction (though it could be based on an Ange-Prime), and that stuff like Bern and Lambda exist in the text too. The big consequence, though, is that anachronisms date the story to after 1998 if everything in the text of an Umineko episode also appears in-universe.
• Only the meta-world is absent from the main text. Here we get the idea that 1998 and 1986 and flashbacks and the like are in the text, but the meta-world isn't. This reading would hold that the meta-world is someone (possibly Battler) grappling with the text of the stories to reach the truth, which he eventually does. The meta-world narrative is then first-order fiction and all the rest is there. A consequence of this is that Ange is almost certainly the author of ep3-4. If you think about it, it becomes immediately obvious why.
• Only 1986 appears in the text. This would explain a lot of odd reactions to the stories, and make slightly more sense of Ange having read Alliance without finding it weird that she read a story about herself doing things she had (at that point) not done yet. It might also suggest that Ange's universe is the Prime universe, but ep6 refutes that pretty strongly. Another consequence is that ep5-6 are totally different stories than we've been led to believe, because they must contain a full 1986 board narrative and nothing else.
• Only Battler's narration appears in the text. Sort of a restricted-1986. I don't know what the consequences of this would be.

Originally Posted by RockReborn

We're still left with the question of the culprit, however, if there actually is one.

I'm certain there is one, or we wouldn't have a very exciting climax. But who? I don't think the foundational concept of Author Theory ever addresses that, unless one of the authors is the culprit. If so, we should be able to figure that out from his/her work, but then we also have to guess who the writer is. In theory, if the writers are trying to shield someone from the culprit, or trying to shield the culprit from exposure, there should be evidence pointing to that in the fictional construction of the story.

For instance, if somebody believed that Battler was the culprit and wanted to incriminate him, they'd offer some kind of evidence that would lead us to think he's the culprit. But if they wanted to protect Battler as the culprit (whether he was the culprit or not!), they'd do something like...

...I dunno...

...put him in the one role in a mystery story guaranteed to always be innocent?

But I'm having a hard time reading in the objectives of the writer(s).

[LyricalAura]

Oliver, how do you explain Meta-Battler interacting with Meta-Ange in your model?

[Renall]

Originally Posted by LyricalAura

Oliver, how do you explain Meta-Battler interacting with Meta-Ange in your model?

Ange is the author of ep3-4. Battler realizes this at the end of ep3, so Meta-Ange appears.

Well, this only works if the meta-universe is separate from the text, mind you.

EDIT: Alternately, it's someone Battler initially thinks is Ange, but isn't, which causes Meta-Ange to disintegrate once he realizes what the "true" Ange would want (the red text she offers when she identifies herself).

[cmos]

Or could it be that if Battler is Amakusa, then when he meets Ange, that also seeks the truth of Rokkenjima, she appears in the meta-world, i.e. in the "visualized thought process".

[Oliver]

There's a very good argument to say (within the boundaries of that theory) that Yasutrice is shielding Battler, possibly not directly thinking he is the active culprit, but thinking that he is responsible.

Namely, his sin.

This sin is not between Battler and Beatrice.
Later episodes converge on the idea of broken promise to Shannon, but Shannon did not exist on Rokkenjima-Prime, Yasu did, had to have been the object of that promise, and that Yasu is quite unambiguously Beatrice. Ep7 essentially absolves Battler of responsibility for breaking this promise because of how conditionally it was worded.

But nothing stops Battler from having more than one sin, and it is quite probable they are connected. The sin is described as Battler rejecting his responsibilities as a member of Ushiromiya family quite literally in Ep4. THAT is the cause of the tragedy. Hurting Yasu is just it's immediate side effect. It is quite true that Battler hurt Yasu by making a promise he subsequently forgot, but that was not in any way the cause of the tragedy by itself.

So she writes her stories with the intent to paint Battler completely innocent and take the entire responsibility herself, even though she is completely aware he is not quite. Ep3-4 author finally smacks Battler over the head with it.

[Renall]

What is the consequence of such an abdication of responsibility, though? It's not like he's the heir apparent, nor does it appear he really has any duties to the family at all, as such.

[Erisette]

Woah, great theory! It explains why Kanon got so much development and it gives a whole new meaning to EP4 and EP6.

Originally Posted by Renall

...and that stuff like Bern and Lambda exist in the text too.

Maybe Real-Yasu was a Higurashi fan? After all, most of the Higurashi references are in the first two episodes.

[Oliver]

Originally Posted by Renall

What is the consequence of such an abdication of responsibility, though? It's not like he's the heir apparent, nor does it appear he really has any duties to the family at all, as such.

Not sure. We have multiple options related to him leaving the family, however, I am not sure that leaving was actually the sin itself, rather, it was what exacerbated the problem. Notice what Beatrice says about the sin:

...However, no matter who your father remarried with, that wouldn't change the fact that his blood runs in your veins, correct? I can somewhat understand your childishness which led you to resist your father's remarriage because you wanted him all to yourself. However, was throwing away the Ushiromiya name as a means of resistance not a disgrace to your family and blood? ...You were born and raised Ushiromiya, were you not? Do you think you were qualified to forget that debt and throw away the Ushiromiya name? [...] I have no interest in matters concerning your immediate family or your home. Where are we? Rokkenjima. The main residence of the Ushiromiya head family. ...Isn't there a sin you should remember, fitting for this place...?

A guess:

• Battler's sin did not concern Asumu or Rudolf (they are his immediate family and Beatrice clearly rejects this possibility) or Yasu (that's personal between him and Beatrice and is a result of Battler leaving the family) but the head family, which would be Kinzo, Krauss, Natsuhi or Jessica.
• Abandoning the family was not his sin as such, though it was the cause of hurting Yasu -- the sin was something that happened on the island itself.

Beyond that guess, I don't have a clearer idea right now.

Oh, and unrelated note:

Episode 1-2 culprit is Double Shkanon, because they were written by Yasutrice. Episode 3-4 culprit is someone else, because they were written by someone else. That fixes the problem of no personality death during Ep3.

[Leafsnail]

Renall's hybrid theory with no name looks awesome. Pretty much perfect, in fact.

I'd like to add a few suggestions:

- Shannon and Kanon were written in in order to see more of what Jessica and George are really like. The author thought that Jessica and George could've both been good people, but they never had a chance. Giving them fictional love interests to fight for and care for helped show Jessica's determination, and George's courage, as it were.

- Also, using a different from normal Zepar/ Furfur interpretation, I'd say this actually fits ep6 better than most other theories. I mean, they have the whole "farcical actors" thing going, and are summoned to inject love into the story.