[Game] Umineko - Spoilers, Theories, Interpretations

[UsagiTenpura]

In arc 4 where the conference takes place, Eva I think basically says she'd be ready to comply with Kinzo's obscure ritual thing if it allowed her to gain in his favor.
Arc 5 and 6 shows how the people on the island can be compliant to a lot of absurd scenarios, no matter what reason you accept behind it the fact is hard to deny in arc 6 especially.
We're told from early on that the adults are basically all ready to do pretty much anything to get money.
With all the theories about who murdered their entire family and their servants for whatever reason, and lying about people being two people while they're really one (or being like 4-5 people at times I guess), it's certainly not any crazier.

I agree with Jan on that basically, it's simpler if everything that occurs in arc 4 is a set-up. If you want a mystery reason then everyone's doing it for the sake of having maybe money. If you want to follow the narrative then it's exactly as it says. Yasu won't make any of the adults the heir, but she'll chose one of the cousins (she has special relation with all four of them after all) as the heir. Made the parents walk along in the game and they agreed cause it's the only chance they have left to both keep the inheritance in the family and to have money themselves through their own child.

Adding to that, outside of seeing George's corpse in the field (which I guess could've been a fake corpse), Battler didn't see any corpse before the next morning while all his dealing with Beato occured around midnight. I forgot if the narration specifies when he finds each corpse (and finds Geroge's corpse again) but at the very minimum she'd have like 5-6 hours after seeing Battler to murder everyone, set them up and kill herself.

[rogerpepitone]

Originally Posted by LyricalAura

The nooses were probably part of the faking because of their length, so Yasu would just need to cut the lock off and shoot both of them while they were pretending to hang there with their eyes closed.

The way the shed lock was described in Episode 1, as I understand it:
1) There's an ordinary lock built into the door.
2) There's a place to attach a padlock as an additional lock.

In Episode 1, they use both locks. In Episode 4, there's no mention of getting out a padlock, so they probably just used the door lock.

Also, Battler probably found the first twilight victims within 10 minutes of the end of his trial. If the first twilight victims were still alive fairly late, then when Battler found them, the blood wouldn't be dry. And George was definitely dead before Battler's trial.

[UsagiTenpura]

Originally Posted by Renall

Except she did exactly that. She said "this is how you know I'm telling the truth," and then lied. I'm not sure what planet people are on where "I'm telling the truth... according to a set of definitions of words which are not the standard definitions and which I refuse to explain" is considered honesty. It's a dumb hack that destroys his integrity to justify his dumb gimmick.

The real world does not have red truth, this is a pretty clear part of the rules, again made clear in ep2, when the red was introduced (Beato teased Battler about it concerning Rosa and the keys). The red only applies to the narration, is what I concluded concerning the red. According to the narration she didn't lie any more then Maria when she said Sakutarou was dead.
She didn't break any rules.

Which, lest I remind everyone again, does not solve anything. And has hilarious unintended consequences that make all of the stories completely pointless. I was okay with writing in your fictional characters into your story, sure, we'll go with that. But killing them while allowing a body to stay alive, or just arbitrarily being able to declare them dead or alive when nothing has happened? That can go fuck right off.

And it isn't even helpful for anything. It doesn't teach us anything about the mysteries or the character behind the mysteries that we couldn't already know, save perhaps that she is an asshole who doesn't know what words mean.

What Shkannon is supposed to solve, at it's simplest, is arc 1.
If you push the reasoning of arc 1 to the limit, and try to achieve a single culprit theory, you more or less have no choice but to reach the following conclusions.

-1T corpses are real and really them, except Shannon who Battler never saw with his own eyes.
-2T corpses are also real
-4T is really Kinzo
-5T Battler never saw Kanon dead, and actually he didn't even see him wounded except in complete darkness where he didnt see anything basically.
-6-7-8T corpses are also real
-Natsuhi's corpse is also real

And you can reason that
-Natsuhi can't have murdered 6-7-8T
-Cousins can't have murdered most of them
-Dead people can't kill... uh at least not in the manner most people die in arc 1

So you can conlude that
-Someone faked their death
-Shannon and Kanon are the only two corpses Battler didn't see, furthermore the Tea Party shows them still alive hinting at something.

And your reasoning ends there. You can't make anything beyond that but a wild guess as to Kanon or Shannon as culprit. Shkanontrice solves that, they are one person, or rather there is only one person behind them, and that person is the culprit.

[Renall]

Originally Posted by UsagiTenpura

The real world does not have red truth, this is a pretty clear part of the rules, again made clear in ep2, when the red was introduced (Beato teased Battler about it concerning Rosa and the keys). The red only applies to the narration, is what I concluded concerning the red. According to the narration she didn't lie any more then Maria when she said Sakutarou was dead.
She didn't break any rules.

Yeah she did. The Sakutarou situation has absolutely no relevance to it. The entire point of red is that Battler had come to the understanding that the narrative can lie to him. We'd already seen the potential for people to come back to life in the narrative, and we understood that it could have a deceptive meaning. Then Beatrice is all "oh but hey, I can assure you that this commonly-accepted definition applies in this case and although the narrative can lie, you should direct your thinking along these lines."

And then turns around and is like "lol but actually that was also a lie because I don't use the common definition of words." Exactly the sort of quibbling over semantics that we used to argue can't possibly have been Ryukishi's intention turns out to have been the "trick" behind the red all along. It was a ridiculously elaborate ruse that only fooled people who believed the author when he implied trustworthiness in a particular theater.

And, again, even if we accept all those bullshit rules as true, we run into the Ultimate Kinzobattlertrice Clusterfuck wherein no words mean anything and Kyrie is both alive and dead simultaneously and everyone survived the incident but we can still say they're all dead. All to fix a problem Ryukishi put into the story for no clear reason that doesn't even do anything useful.

What Shkannon is supposed to solve, at it's simplest, is arc 1.

But it doesn't. It's not necessary.

And your reasoning ends there. You can't make anything beyond that but a wild guess as to Kanon or Shannon as culprit. Shkanontrice solves that, they are one person, or rather there is only one person behind them, and that person is the culprit.

I'm afraid you've entirely missed the point of what a "solution" is. A solution explains something that was necessary, and addresses all points in a manner which demonstrates that this solution was the only one possible.

Imagine a scenario in which Shannon and Kanon are different people, and Kanon actually does die when the story says he does. The solution is no different. Moreover, since only two people even claimed to see Shannon in the shed at all, it's a completely different scenario than just assuming Nanjo and/or Jessica are also lying about Kanon, for which ep1 offers no plausible explanation.

It is not necessary to reach the solution "Shannon did it" for whatever function of Shannon you believe exists as the culprit. There is no murder which requires Kanon even exist to come to this conclusion. Shkanon actually makes the murderer's job harder for no reason at all.

It's not a solution, it's a hobble on the solution to make it appear more clever than it actually is. It's not even misdirection, because it leads you to the same conclusion no matter your assumption and it can't be demonstrated that no other solution would work.

For Shkanon to solve something, it has to be an integral part of the mystery. There must be no other solution that works. In ep1-2 you can simply go with "Shannon did it" and wind up with the same practical solutions. In ep3 you can finger somebody else for Nanjo's murder and at no point did the author see it necessary to disclaim this. In ep4 it essentially doesn't matter and actually complicates things needlessly.

The only times it ever explains anything the matter is either completely inconsequential or the entire thing was solely structured to demonstrate that the gimmick is in use. It's not useful, it's not clever, and it requires the author to lie in the one place he said he's not lying just to mislead the people who had figured out his obvious gimmick by ep2.

[Cao Ni Ma]

About the face mutilation. The way Battler describes it it sure doesnt make it seem like its just gore. He specifically mentions that the characters are missing half their heads, Thats something you cant replicate with makeup, at least from the way I picture it.

About the round, it doesnt need to be a shotgun as one has never been shown. I remember doing an analysis about the possible version of winchester used and the closest one would be a trapper 92 or 94, which can use magnum rounds. A round like that at fairly close range would do significant damage to the head.Problem is getting everyone to just take a bullet to the head that would cleanly leave the other half fine. Where they all poisoned first and then shot up?

Re-reading the shed shutter scene, yeah it seems like its just the built in shutter lock instead of a padlock. So really the only possibility is a copy or that Gohda willingly gave out his key.

Finally, the well. Its stated that the gap between each bar was about 20 centimeters. Thats about 7 inches. A rifle the size of that winchester would have to be almost perfectly vertical to go trough. Hell, I'd like to measure the rifles stock, maybe it''ll be physically impossible to fit trough. So if it really was the solution then there must be some sort of time mechanism on the well to open and close it, so Shannon blows up her head, the rifle falls in the well and the well then locks itself.

[Jan-Poo]

Originally Posted by UsagiTenpura

We're told from early on that the adults are basically all ready to do pretty much anything to get money.

Slow down a bit here. There is absolutely no hint that any adult would kill for money. In addition in the case of Eva and Rosa there is actually a hint that they would not kill for money in EP3.

Originally Posted by rogerpepitone

The way the shed lock was described in Episode 1, as I understand it:
1) There's an ordinary lock built into the door.
2) There's a place to attach a padlock as an additional lock.

Here there's the problem of general consistency. Can we trust that Ryuukishi really remembered all the particulars among various episodes? The first twilight of EP3 would suggest otherwise since the fact that a door without a lock in the boiler room exists in EP1 was completely ignored.

Originally Posted by UsagiTenpura

The real world does not have red truth, this is a pretty clear part of the rules, again made clear in ep2, when the red was introduced (Beato teased Battler about it concerning Rosa and the keys). The red only applies to the narration, is what I concluded concerning the red. According to the narration she didn't lie any more then Maria when she said Sakutarou was dead.
She didn't break any rules.

She lied even in the narration since Kanon even inside the narration didn't die. Magic scenes and magic interpretations do not count as what happened inside the "narration", if that was possible Beatrice could say in red that a witch did it (omitting to specify that "witch" according to her vocabulary is a girl with a strong imagination) and you wouldn't have a game. For the same reason saying that Kanon died when the host body was still alive shouldn't have been possible.

Originally Posted by UsagiTenpura

-4T is really Kinzo

I think it's more probable that Kinzo's body was actually a dummy. It would explain why Battler needed to use the golden truth to claim the existence of Kinzo's corpse despite the fact his sorcerer status allowed him to state things in red without proof.
In addition Will used "illusions to illusions" for his case rather than "earth to earth" which is used in any confirmed case where there are real bodies involved.

I'm afraid you've entirely missed the point of what a "solution" is. A solution explains something that was necessary, and addresses all points in a manner which demonstrates that this solution was the only one possible.

Sometimes I wonder if you truly realize that 99% of the solutions of misteries aren't necessary. Unless you exclude solutions that are never hinted, in which case I can argue that no other solution except the blatantly hinted shkanon could explain tricks such as the death of Nanjo in EP3.

[Renall]

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

Sometimes I wonder if you truly realize that 99% of the solutions of misteries aren't necessary. Unless you exclude solutions that are never hinted, in which case I can argue that no other solution except the blatantly hinted shkanon could explain tricks such as the death of Nanjo in EP3.

I never claimed to like the mystery genre or its so-called solutions.

But my point is, to say "that's the only conclusion you can reach" when you can in fact finger the exact same suspect without that conclusion is bogus. I could, in fact, reach the conclusion "Shannon did it" in ep1 and be essentially right without knowing or even considering Kanon's role in the farce at all. If Ryukishi wanted us to both believe in Shkanon and believe in Shkanon's culpability, at least one crime each episode should not have been possible without that duality being a fact.

But indeed, there isn't a single crime I can think of where that's necessary. Thus, the entire mechanism isn't necessary. Faking deaths? Yeah, that's necessary. Faking death as one person then posing as another? From a mere common sense standpoint, that doesn't actually help you in any way.

[Cao Ni Ma]

I get what your saying and I agree with you. But I guess we just have to deal with it, RK07 thought it was clever and then tried to build a story around it to make it about a the internal struggle of a crazy girl with everything she could want for except a functioning penis or womb.

Love is dead.

[rogerpepitone]

I took E1T4 as referring more to Kinzo's disappearance from his room.

And I think that Kinzo's body is real. Battler gets a good chance to study it in Ep 4.

[Renall]

Originally Posted by Cao Ni Ma

I get what your saying and I agree with you. But I guess we just have to deal with it, RK07 thought it was clever and then tried to build a story around it to make it about a the internal struggle of a crazy girl with everything she could want for except a functioning penis or womb.

Love is dead.

Except I'd argue that the evidence clearly demonstrates she cannot be crazy. I'm not sure I even buy that she was lovesick or indecisive.

But it's irrelevant to me within the stories. She can write her stories any little way she wants. But she - and Ryukishi writing these stories as she supposedly wrote them - didn't really do a lot to show something RK07 then turns around and claims is really important.

What advances Shkanon in the message bottle stories of Legend and Turn? Uh... Battler doesn't see them together, and doesn't see their bodies. That's basically it. Not much of a higher purpose to that. If there were some crime that absolutely could not have happened without Shkanon being true, then suddenly we're on to something.

What's the point of having this thematic conflict if it has essentially no bearing on the underlying mystery narrative?

[LyricalAura]

Originally Posted by Cao Ni Ma

About the face mutilation. The way Battler describes it it sure doesnt make it seem like its just gore. He specifically mentions that the characters are missing half their heads, Thats something you cant replicate with makeup, at least from the way I picture it.

About the round, it doesnt need to be a shotgun as one has never been shown. I remember doing an analysis about the possible version of winchester used and the closest one would be a trapper 92 or 94, which can use magnum rounds. A round like that at fairly close range would do significant damage to the head.Problem is getting everyone to just take a bullet to the head that would cleanly leave the other half fine. Where they all poisoned first and then shot up?

The guns only hold 4+1 bullets, so it's easy to believe that she must have reloaded at some point. Five bullets would let her deal with the first twilight victims minus Genji, who is an accomplice, so she could have shot them all while they were playing dead and then reloaded.

But then things get weird, because there are five more magnum wounds, and one of them is her own. So at a minimum it would mean that she started with magnum rounds, switched to normal rounds at least twice (taking into account the victims and the four bullet holes in Kyrie's guest room), and then switched back to magnum rounds. Why would she do that?

Also, if there are magnum rounds, why didn't the adults go for those in EP3 instead of the normal bullets?

Originally Posted by Cao Ni Ma

Re-reading the shed shutter scene, yeah it seems like its just the built in shutter lock instead of a padlock. So really the only possibility is a copy or that Gohda willingly gave out his key.

If we take the Ronove scene at face value, then Genji was busy talking to Jessica at that time, so Yasu would need some way to get the two victims into their nooses before she killed them. The sequence would probably be some variation of this:

1. George locks Kumasawa and Gohda in the shed.
2. Yasu arrives, supposedly to check on things. She's not holding a gun. Gohda passes the key to her through the window.
3. She switches the shed key's tag to a different key, then unlocks the shed.
4. She helps Kumasawa and Gohda set up their nooses and shows them how to pose.
5. She goes outside, relocks the shutter, and passes the fake key to Gohda.
6. Kumasawa and Gohda play dead.
7. Yasu gets her rifle from wherever she hid it, reopens the shed with the real key, and shoots Kumasawa and Gohda before they can react.
8. She relocks the door and leaves.

[UsagiTenpura]

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

Slow down a bit here. There is absolutely no hint that any adult would kill for money. In addition in the case of Eva and Rosa there is actually a hint that they would not kill for money in EP3.

The way I said this was a bit bad, sorry. I meant they would go along with faking a ritual of reviving Beatrice if that was the only way they could potentially have their child becoming heir, not that they were going along with the ritual of murdering everyone.

She lied even in the narration since Kanon even inside the narration didn't die. Magic scenes and magic interpretations do not count as what happened inside the "narration", if that was possible Beatrice could say in red that a witch did it (omitting to specify that "witch" according to her vocabulary is a girl with a strong imagination) and you wouldn't have a game. For the same reason saying that Kanon died when the host body was still alive shouldn't have been possible.

Narration is narration. I didn't say mystery side narration but the word narration, which is what the story tells us rather then what's bellow it. About the "witch did it" thing, they go about that in arc 2 or 3 (I forgot), where Battler tells Beatrice to just say it was done with magic and she refuses saying if she said that Battler would never accept it.
She could do it, she simply chose not to do so, for it would basically break her game with Battler.

I think it's more probable that Kinzo's body was actually a dummy. It would explain why Battler needed to use the golden truth to claim the existence of Kinzo's corpse despite the fact his sorcerer status allowed him to state things in red without proof.
In addition Will used "illusions to illusions" for his case rather than "earth to earth" which is used in any confirmed case where there are real bodies involved.

Battler used gold because he specifically couldn't use red. Dlanor had that "you can't use red thing". I believe Will's illusion is that Kinzo wasn't murdered after all, only burned possibly long after dying. Beatrice created the illusion he was kidnapped or something magically from his room and then was murdered and burned to death, while he was already dead and not from murder.

[haguruma]

Originally Posted by Renall

What's the point of having this thematic conflict if it has essentially no bearing on the underlying mystery narrative?

An essetial problem this boils dow to again is, what was written in which version of which story and what do which characters witness when ...
Yeah, I'm not starting to loose it, I thought about it again and this is what I'd like to portray as the point I arrived recently. Thank you to Jan and Renall by the way, because they inspired this idea.

Consider for a moment that it was Yasu's idea to actually have fun with the message bottles and to muddle the events so far that everyone had to believe in a witch. Even though this might not have been her intention for Battler on the island, but for an unknown audience out there which she could trick.
I'd say her goal was to portray a situation in which actually nobody could be the one and only culprit, by hiding herself so far that she removes herself completely from her own story.
This means: Yasu is inexistent in the bottle stories.

The Beatrice cooked up by Tôya's imagination is basically fuelled by this idea. The magic scenes therefore do not appear in the narrative, they are only what Tôya draws from Yasu's narrative and inserts into the stories he found.
The meta-Beatrice is able to pronounce them dead because within Yasu's story, where Beatrice's existence is actually supported, they are dead. The stories leave room only for Beatrice as the one culprit. Only by knowing who can be Beatrice can you find out whose death was actually impossible and find the weakpoint of the narrative.

Shannon's and Kanon's death in those Episodes are actually happening events and their revival and reappearance can only be explained by magic within the narrative. The trick lies within finding out the way how to not make their reappearance not magic.

This is why I think it is useless to think about Yasu's position within the stories, because she does not exist in the stories...she is merely the key to removing magic from those scenarios.

[Renall]

It's not exactly a new idea. I call that "fictional Shkanon." The problem with your current take on it is that the episodes we got seem to present a solvable mystery, at least if we assume Battler's perspective is the only reliable one (we can blame Shannon, we can blame Kanon, we can blame both, we can posit Shkanon and blame that).

[LyricalAura]

Ohhh, wait a minute.

Originally Posted by LyricalAura

But then things get weird, because there are five more magnum wounds, and one of them is her own. So at a minimum it would mean that she started with magnum rounds, switched to normal rounds at least twice (taking into account the victims and the four bullet holes in Kyrie's guest room), and then switched back to magnum rounds. Why would she do that?

Originally Posted by LyricalAura

2. Yasu arrives, supposedly to check on things. She's not holding a gun.
...
7. Yasu gets her rifle from wherever she hid it, reopens the shed with the real key, and shoots Kumasawa and Gohda before they can react.

Yasu's tricking people into putting on a performance. She can't walk around with a gun and ammunition because she doesn't have a plausible excuse for it. Solution? Hide the four guns where she'll need them ahead of time.

Right after Gohda and Kumasawa were locked up, wasn't there a scene with Siestas hiding out in the bushes nearby?

[Renall]

Sure, why not? It's much easier than constantly hiding the one you have, and if the well is used for disposal with a suicide drop you can always drop the other three guns manually first.

[AuraTwilight]

Right after Gohda and Kumasawa were locked up, wasn't there a scene with Siestas hiding out in the bushes nearby?

Hell yes there was. And it's not like the cousins are going to randomly go looking through bushes in the goddamn rain.

[Cao Ni Ma]

So 3 rifles with magnum rounds and another one with smaller rounds. How many times did the siesta shoot on purpose to scare Kyrie? The total amount fired might be equal to the total amount of rounds available.

[LyricalAura]

Originally Posted by Cao Ni Ma

So 3 rifles with magnum rounds and another one with smaller rounds. How many times did the siesta shoot on purpose to scare Kyrie? The total amount fired might be equal to the total amount of rounds available.

Without reloads it would break down something like this:

Dining room (except Genji): 5 magnum
Kyrie (4 misses + wound): 5 normal
George, Kumasawa, Gohda: 3 normal
Genji, Jessica, Krauss, Nanjo, Shannon: 5 magnum

[Cao Ni Ma]

Yeah, Initially I thought about 2 and 2 but Genji screwed it up. Thats why I thought 3/1. What I meant with misses wasnt that she actually shot the rounds, its more of a symbolic thing.

So we have 13 "Real" people that die from gunshots, 2 "Personas" that die from gunshots, the 4 misses from Kyrie. Thats 19 rounds, the last one goes to Beatrice completing the full load.