2010-10-08, 19:55 | Link #17921 | ||
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Join Date: Aug 2010
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I don't think anyone is near Carr as far as locked rooms go, but what I meant was more of a comparison about their themes than about their skills. They are the same kind of writer, though Carr is miles ahead. To explain what I mean with a comparison, if mystery writers are fencers, then both Ryuukishi and Carr fight with a foil, even if Ryuukishi barely made junior varsity while Carr is the Olympic champion. Quote:
A mystery is a mystery when the reader has a fair chance of making "the summation" all by himself without the help of the detective. As for the difference, yes there is. A book intended not to leave the answer in the end is more likely to have clues than the other way around. |
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2010-10-08, 20:07 | Link #17922 |
Back off, I'm a scientist
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: In a badly written story.
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I think a distinction should be made between a story that is complete and a story that is not. A mystery that misses large numbers of pages can by itself be Knox/Dine compliant - when available in it's complete form. Umineko, however, is definitely not available in it's complete form anywhere.
See also the Later Queen Problem.
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2010-10-08, 20:10 | Link #17923 | |
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2010-10-08, 20:20 | Link #17924 |
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Join Date: May 2009
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Yes, and that is true.
I think it would have been better had he approached it on the level of criticism. As a meditation on the mystery genre, what makes a mystery "solvable," what makes a mystery "complete," etc., it can be quite interesting. He's just made certain promises that I think may have been ill-advised for him to say.
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2010-10-08, 20:36 | Link #17928 |
Back off, I'm a scientist
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: In a badly written story.
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It's a love-hate relationship, if you ask me. Reading Umineko has been an intellectually stimulating experience, however, it consumed more time than it might deserve.
Speaking of the red and interviews in particular, I am fairly sure that at least one of R07's interview statements about a solution to a particular puzzle (07151129, that is) is mathematically impossible and therefore not true. It does seem like he wants to you read between the lines, but while reading between the lines, there's no way to convince the majority that what you see there is not just speculation.
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2010-10-08, 21:40 | Link #17929 |
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@Will: True; Ryu and Carr liked doing the mystery / horror mix. I'm very surprised that Ryu hasn't mentioned Carr
I found this site many years ago; it might be a good starting place for those interested in some of the writers mentioned: John Dickson Carr / Carter Dickson / Carr Dickson S. S. Van Dine Ellery Queen Agatha Christie Father Ronald Knox Soji Shimada Sakaguchi Ango isn't included, unfortunately. Also, I think _Cat of Many Tails_ by EQ edges out _Ten Little Indians_ for body count. (Also, I think the medical definition of serial killer requires a cooling-off period between crimes, which makes 10LI and UNNKN mass murders, not serial murders.)
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2010-10-09, 00:10 | Link #17930 |
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Join Date: Aug 2010
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@rogerpepitone:
I'm not sure whether to thank or curse you for that website, for I am bound to spend days reading all of it. It is delightfully written, and its Van Dine section is wonderful. Most shockingly of all, it taught me that I'm not the only person to doubt the authenticity of the novella. Thank you very much for this, I loved that website. |
2010-10-09, 00:56 | Link #17931 | |
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Join Date: Feb 2008
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If I were to make an analogy, I think you could say you have a door, and from EP1-4 you're looking for pieces to be able to make the door's key. By EP4 you have all those pieces. If you're intelligent and/or lucky enough, perhaps you can put up all those pieces together and make the key. So, technically speaking, you can open the door at that point. However, in Umineko's case, R07 didn't expect readers to be able to do that. At best, perhaps, you could put several pieces together properly, but never get the full key. Maybe you could even have had the right idea on how to made the key, but you thought that the process you thought of wasn't correct - for a or b motive - and discarded it. So, until you went through EPs 6 and/or 7, you had no idea or certainty on how to build this key.
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2010-10-09, 01:04 | Link #17932 | |
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2010-10-09, 02:05 | Link #17933 | |
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Alternately, it's possible to arrive at "the answer" without having any capacity to structure an explanation for the answer. People were saying "Shannontrice" by ep4. But to say you could construct the scenario as has been presented (assuming for the moment that it's authentic) would be absurd or, should you touch upon it somehow, guesswork. Certainly the form it takes is different then to now.
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2010-10-09, 02:42 | Link #17934 | |
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Join Date: Feb 2008
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I think that, when R07 said the game was solvable by EP4, he simply meant that there were enough hints to be able to do it - as in, it was potentially solvable ("potentially" being the keyword here). However, that never meant the vast majority of fans would be able to. For example, Umineko is a story in which you do not only need the clues, but also a particular mindset in order to be able to interpret the clues properly. We got the "Without love it cannot be seen" line shown to us several times during the first four episodes, but, no matter how much it was shown, barely anyone took it seriously. It wasn't until EP5 that most fans (of course, this whole example comes down to what I've seen on the Internet, and some people I know) started taking it seriously. And the "love philosophy" (for calling it that way) is not all you need, but also being able to take the story for what it is. For example, a big issue many fans (myself included) had with Umineko was the idea of ShKanon. There was simply no way many of us wanted to accept that sort of answer, no matter how much it may have been hinted and how it may have been presented; so, we decided not to even think about that possibility. So, even if you had "love" and tried to understand the characters, if you weren't willing to take the story for what it is, and leave your own tastes/prejudice aside, you wouldn't be able to solve this story either. Of course, there's also the chance you thought of and/or accepted the idea of ShKanon, yet you were unable to see the big picture, perhaps because some things seemed unreasonable, or you plainly simply couldn't see it. Umineko, by EP4, has enough clues and enough information (including the proper mindset to be had) on how to piece those clues together. However, how the reader process all this information is unrelated to R07, since he can only do so much. So, this is why he probably thought most readers wouldn't understand the answer until EP6 and EP7, in which you get a lot of rather obvious information regarding the answer.
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2010-10-09, 03:07 | Link #17935 |
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I disagree. You may be right that all the "bricks" existed, so to speak, to build the "wall" that is the solution. However, the "mortar" didn't exist, and to a certain extent still doesn't exist (or is a pasty substance we're told is mortar, but could actually be a wholly unsuitable product). And you can't build a wall without mortar. You can mix up your own batch, slather it on the bricks, and build a wall, but you're basically throwing together what you have and hoping your "mortar" mixes up well enough to hold up the wall. And as far as we know, there are several substances that will work to stick the bricks together in the shape of the wall as Ryukishi intended it.
But we don't know that one of those mixes is the "mortar" he intended to be used, if indeed he intended one to be used at all (which would be cheating if not, but...). It's a big difference between "you can arrive at a solution" and "you can arrive at the solution." There is no confirmation feedback like most classic mysteries. We can set up our wall, but we don't have the benefit of a hammer to test whether it actually holds up. Metaphorically speaking, and I know this metaphor is belabored, we can lather together the bricks we got from ep1-4 into a thing that has the shape of a finished wall, but we have no idea whether what we've pasted it together with was the mortar (the "right answer") or peanut butter (a valid and non-disprovable, but wrong answer).
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2010-10-09, 07:22 | Link #17937 | |
別にいいけど
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: forever lost inside a logic error
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That's why I don't think it is even worth it to try to solve umineko to the minimal details, that isn't even meant to be done. What the Episodes from 1 to 4 provide are only a lot of hints about the "what", but for what concerns the "how" you can only use a lot of guesswork which isn't really an intellectually stimulating challenge in my opinion. I think you agree with the assertion that a complete solution of umineko starting from EP4 is not possible, and yet Ryuukishi said it was solvable, and he also said that a lot of people got close to the truth. So I think the inevitable conclusion is that the solution Ryuukishi expects the readers to reach is not the kind of complete solution you are aiming to. I could make a list of stuff that can be easily predict from various hints in EP1-4 but yet lack any substance to make us understand "how" they came into play. Kinzo's death before the game start: easily understandable, but the whole story that led to its concealment was not. Shannontrice: tons of hints, but the bit about her being the child of 1967 Beatrice, the bit about her being 3 years older than what it's been said, the bit about Natsuhi refusing her when she was a baby, and indirectly or directly causing the incident that led to her allegedly death, all of this was absolutely not predictable. Battler as Shannon's first love: It could be seen, but there was a total lack of details. The only thing you could say was "Shannon loved Battler", but how it started, how it developed, what kind of relationship the two had, nothing of the sort was ever mentioned. Rokkenjima incident: It could be deduced that a major destructive force engulfed a big chunk of the area around the mansion, but the nature of this "force" was everyone's guess. Sure no one ever thought about the ridiculous idea that the tragedy was caused by 900 tons of explosive setting off. And in the case EP8 will reveal that it's a volcano eruption, then I could tell you that it could be deduced but not the how this fits with the rest of the story (the fact that Beatrice apparently knew the tragedy was coming). Supposing shkanon is true: Then this was definitely deduced very early. But the how? We have seen a lot of different interpretations, a lot of attempts to explain it, but none of them actually grounded on some definitive facts. I think I don't need to go further. Unfortunately I fear there's really no way to solve umineko completely without recurring to guesswork, because there is clearly a lack of vital informations to understand every particular in the minimal detail. The only thing that we can hope to do is to deduce the general facts, but the how they happened is outside of our grasp.
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2010-10-09, 07:33 | Link #17938 | |||
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So, by the end of EP4 you have a lot of bricks and random info on how to hold the bricks together. However, if you do not understand that information, or even worse, if you missed some of that information (especially, the most crucial parts of it), then you're going nowhere. Quote:
The confirmation/hammer you're asking for is in Chiru. From EP5 to EP7 we've been receiving many things: 1) Additional information on how to put our wall together (this time, in a much more blatant fashion than before) and 2) We've also started receiving some hammers to test our "walls". Quote:
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2010-10-09, 11:57 | Link #17939 | |
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That is exactly one of the points, why detective fiction has been discriminated against so often throughout it's existence. Many classical orthodox mysteries are technically not real literature, at least that's what's claimed by critics at their times, because many had no real plot, no real plot curve, because they were sticking to the mystery rules of their time, like flies to honey. I would agree, many of the great works of the Golden Age are fantastic puzzles, but as stories they often suck big time. That is one of the many points that changed in the 80's in Japan in terms of mystery and detective fiction. And I can't imagine, that there aren't some parts of the shinhonkaku-movement and even those novels that came after in Umineko... So I think approaching it just from the angle of the rules of classical, orthodox, Golden Age mysteries is something that is backing many people into a corner.
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2010-10-09, 12:57 | Link #17940 | |
Dea ex Kakera
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Sea of Fragments
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"The exercise of pure logic is often comparable to working out immense sums in arithmetic and finding at the end that we have somewhere forgotten to carry one or multiply by two. Every one of a thousand figures and factors may be correct except that one; but the difference in the answer to the sum may be disconcerting." To extend the comparison, saying the story is "solvable" just means that all of the figures and factors are available to you. There's no requirement to tell you if you've done your math properly until after your test is graded, although you might have the opportunity to check your answer by talking to other students in the hall.
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