[Game] Umineko - Spoilers, Theories, Interpretations

[AuraTwilight]

Um...Isn't it? Even though Beatrice secretly wishes for Battler to solve her mysteries, she also wants him to acknowledge her as a witch, which he does once he gets a good understanding of her, thus granting her wish.

Plus, making Battler accept witches is her winning clause in the game, which we know she wished to play with him.

I agree, it is roundabout, it is counter-productive to her motive, but Beatrice is a fickle and selfish person after all.

Beatrice blatantly lied about her motive and winning conditions.

Also, someone understanding you and calling you a 'witch' as a code-word for realizing you're the girl he liked as a child is magnitudes different from "Well damn you can blatantly deny the laws of reality with supernatural feats."

The "death" trick only works for the LATTER, not the FORMER.

[Kealym]

"No, no, not lied, at all
No I never lied. Said she took a poison, she DID, never said that she died!
...w-...wait. Shit. Wait."

[Wanderer]

Originally Posted by Renall

Well sure, I did, but I'm not Ryukishi and my conception of it doesn't seem to work too well.

Well, yeah, thinking about it it's pretty silly. Why have red to describe appearances? We and Battler already have that kind of information. The whole point of red is to provide information beyond appearances.

So. It probably requires work, but here's what I'm thinking:

"Death" refers to the death of characters (that's the word I think suits the concept best, but it's basically interchangeable with "personalities", "roles", w/e). It always refers to characters.

Characters may or may not be human (I will postulate that "being human" and "being a person" are functionally interchangeable terms, at least in every case we have encountered them). What distinguishes a non-human character from a human character is that a human character has a physical manifestation through which it can express its will directly in the real world- in other words, a living body. Conversely, this means that non-human characters exist only as an idea (or to put it another way, as a Fantasy character), and as such have no physical location. But, they do exist and can interact with human characters. This is quite important, actually, because it injects an element of the supernatural into what otherwise seems to be a naturalistic world. This is how a human character, say Shannon, can allow their body to be taken over by a Fantasy character, say Kanon. In such a situation their positions reverse, and Shannon becomes Fantasy in exchange for Kanon's humanity.

Now the question of the meaning of bodily death. I will suggest that everything is relative to Yasu's/Beatrice's subjective perspective. To Yasu/Beatrice, the bodily death of another human being is functionally equivalent to the death of the character that uses that body, because as far as she is concerned, the character is gone forever.

Of course the bodily death of Yasu/Beatrice in this subjectified Universe is arguably inconceivable, which I think also suggests that she's still alive.


I wanted to edit this more, and maybe add to it, but ran out of time. There may be amendments to follow.

[Prototype909]

Originally Posted by Captain Bluebeard

Um...Isn't it? Even though Beatrice secretly wishes for Battler to solve her mysteries, she also wants him to acknowledge her as a witch, which he does once he gets a good understanding of her, thus granting her wish.

Plus, making Battler accept witches is her winning clause in the game, which we know she wished to play with him.

I agree, it is roundabout, it is counter-productive to her motive, but Beatrice is a fickle and selfish person after all.

Beatrice blatantly states throughout Episode 4 (And probably even before and after that), that Battler accepting witches and magic is a false win condition (In reference to why she didn't just keep Battler fooled for eternity at the end of Episode 3), and not 'true victory' no matter how convenient it might be for her.

The whole point is that Battler remember the person BEHIND the witch, that's why everything can be solved with mysteries and humans instead of magic - going back to young Battler's whole rant about understanding the heart being so important to mysteries in Episode 7.

Beato wanted me to solve it, so she made the riddles of this game solvable

Which is so ironic since if the first four game-boards really do reflect any semblance of prime, the Battler who showed up on Rokkenjima in 1986 didn't really give a flying shit about mysteries, or the heart, or 'why dunnit' at that point. But at least as far as the first two gamebaords are concerned they were written beforehand by Yasu to reflect 'the Battler she imagined would come back after all those years' - when she had the time to write this is anyones guess but still. We have no way of knowing whether or not the Battler who showed up in 1986 was like he was on the gameboards, if he liked mysteries, remembered his promise, or just decided to brutally murder everyone. We just don't know!

[Drifloon]

Sure Beatrice wanted Battler to solve everything. If it had been up to her, she'd probably have made things a lot easier and not used so many questionable tricks with the red, showed scenes that didn't actually happen, and so on. But it wasn't up to her. The only reason she gets to run the game at all is because of Lambda, and she's not going to accept anything she thinks Bern is going to be able to win without a lot of trouble. So naturally Beatrice had to make the difficulty higher than she wanted to. Even the level of hints she gave out in EP3 made Lambda pretty unhappy, as we saw in the tea party. She had to constantly balance between her hope that Battler would solve it and the need to satisfy Lambda, who wanted it to never be solved.

Bern told you at the end of EP1 ???? that Beatrice's board had a lot of unfair devices in play, even more than Lambda's board of Higurashi, so you really can't say you weren't warned.

[LaplaceNoMa]

I will attempt to bring my point again: if that red is so problematic, why don't we try going with the old good 'Shannontrice' again? Is it impossible to explain some things without going with ShKannontrice?

[Drifloon]

Even if you go with Shannontrice, Shannon still has to be declared dead when she isn't dead, so it's not really any better, is it?

[Kealym]

The big problem with Shannontrice (a much more elegant solution, and what I'd assumed was the truth after Alliance) is that Dawn pretty much spends 5 hours assaulting it with the Shkanon hammer.

As Drifloon says, it still has a "zombie Shannon" problem, but it's better to only have ONE should-be-dead person than TWO should-be-dead people.

[LaplaceNoMa]

I don't really think the 'zombie' thing is a real problem in ep3. The discussion about personalities, death and suicides isn't really productive, because it fits ep6 logic error and doesn't contradict itself anywhere in the story.

The main contradiction of ep3 is the '6 people' including both Shannon and Kanon. No matter how you look at it, the only possibly plausible explaination would be Shannon and Kanon being separate beings. If they're not, this red causes lots of problems and inconsistency with other parts of Umineko.

[Captain Bluebeard]

Originally Posted by AuraTwilight

Beatrice blatantly lied about her motive and winning conditions.

Also, someone understanding you and calling you a 'witch' as a code-word for realizing you're the girl he liked as a child is magnitudes different from "Well damn you can blatantly deny the laws of reality with supernatural feats."

The "death" trick only works for the LATTER, not the FORMER.

Making Battler 'surrender' was the winning clause in the context of the game, regardless of Beatrice's real motives. The 'evil witch' personality of hers is just a facade which she keeps up for the games' sake. The reason she puts him through all that shit is to get back at him a little for forgetting the promise.

Battler does accept witches in the end, which isn't just a code-word for the girl he liked as a child, he really does figure out how Beatrice's magic works, and accept its existence, that's what it means he understood her.

I agree that the 'death' trick isn't really productive in regard to Beatrice's goals, even if we take into account her childish and selfish personality, thus her wanting Battler to understand but refusing to just give it to him. It's terribly roundabout.

[LaplaceNoMa]

To elaborate further, we know for sure that Battler's there are 17 people includes Erika is a real person with a real body. In other words, this red considers Kanon and Shannon to be one "people".

However, that ep3 red uses the same kanji to describe them as two "people". If we don't like it, we have to assume that Erika isn't included in "17 people" which makes things even more grim.

[AuraTwilight]

Making Battler 'surrender' was the winning clause in the context of the game, regardless of Beatrice's real motives. The 'evil witch' personality of hers is just a facade which she keeps up for the games' sake. The reason she puts him through all that shit is to get back at him a little for forgetting the promise.

I would wager that since Beatrice never stated her win-condition in Red, it's entirely valid to say that she lied and her real win condition is "to be remembered by him."

Battler does accept witches in the end, which isn't just a code-word for the girl he liked as a child, he really does figure out how Beatrice's magic works, and accept its existence, that's what it means he understood her.

I agree that the 'death' trick isn't really productive in regard to Beatrice's goals, even if we take into account her childish and selfish personality, thus her wanting Battler to understand but refusing to just give it to him. It's terribly roundabout.

It's more than roundabout! It's directly harmful to what she wants! It's the same as wanting someone to figure out you're cooking a hamburger and telling them this is a ham.

To elaborate further, we know for sure that Battler's there are 17 people includes Erika is a real person with a real body.

No we don't. We really, really don't.

[LaplaceNoMa]

Okay, 'for sure' wasn't a nice way of saying that.

It's just that if we account for red during the logic error, we have to do that at least for that game. Those reds imply that Erika has a body and she, in fact, commited the action of entering a room on the island.

[Xenon_gun]

Originally Posted by LaplaceNoMa

To elaborate further, we know for sure that Battler's there are 17 people includes Erika is a real person with a real body. In other words, this red considers Kanon and Shannon to be one "people".

However, that ep3 red uses the same kanji to describe them as two "people". If we don't like it, we have to assume that Erika isn't included in "17 people" which makes things even more grim.

Originally Posted by AuraTwilight

No we don't. We really, really don't.

To once again state why that red doesn't prove this: personality death. If one takes Shannontrice or Shkanontrice as a possibility, then Erika becomes subject to the same rules.

In other words, it's the Erika-ball theory. Erika is another personality or an aspect thereof that is always present in one of the humans on Rokkenjima. For an extremely radical example, Erika could just as well be another of Yasu's personalities, with Dlanor, Cornelia and Gertrude being a personification (witchification?) of the rules Yasu learned about in all those mystery novels she read throughout the years.

Shkanrikatrice theory, anyone?

[AuraTwilight]

I wasn't even going to get that far. I was just going to point out that it's entirely appropriate to say that Shannon and Kanon count as two people and that Erika doesn't count as one at all since she never existed, Erika-Ball or not.

[LaplaceNoMa]

Erika could just as well be another of Yasu's personalities

No, she can't. According to ep6 red text, Erika, Kanon and Battler are 3 different bodies..

[GuestSpeaker]

The main thing is that if you accept this, you accept that nobody died. You can no longer definitively call any death mentioned in red permanent, as it has no foundation and indeed the only conception of "death" we have in Umineko is fundamentally non-permanent. If you're okay with that, then by all means.

If they were never able to act again after this point, I'd accept them as dead. After all, not only is it more dead than some heart attack victims, but it is because I would also call someone in a vegetative state never again able to act dead too. Besides, even if he did make a red mistake (which I sincerely hope he didn't), you could still solve the story.

Though to counter my own theory, you could almost argue Rosa was depicted as having two personalities (though never hinted one could act independently, unlike Eva..) so technically they could also pull a Yasu, though there is less evidence for it. But in any case, Shkannontrice is partially crushed by Maria's little ep 2 "the mean mama and the nice one are the same person, there is only one mama" speech. I know it is in white, but it sort of flies in the face of Kanon and Shannon being different people. At best, it points to them being facets of the same person.....

In other words, it's the Erika-ball theory. Erika is another personality or an aspect thereof that is always present in one of the humans on Rokkenjima. For an extremely radical example, Erika could just as well be another of Yasu's personalities, with Dlanor, Cornelia and Gertrude being a personification (witchification?) of the rules Yasu learned about in all those mystery novels she read throughout the years.

Let's not forget that while objectively true, reds are true in two contexts. They are objectively true for each game described (ie Rosa died in the parlour, and Rosa died in the guestroom both possibly being red in different games), but these can be crushed by an over-arching prime red. I always thought the reds about Erika were true for the game they were referring, but the 17 people red was basically saying "sure you existed in that little story, but in reality you never came here"

[theacefrehley]

Originally Posted by AuraTwilight

I wasn't even going to get that far. I was just going to point out that it's entirely appropriate to say that Shannon and Kanon count as two people and that Erika doesn't count as one at all since she never existed, Erika-Ball or not.

And how we would fit that red in EP5:
古戸ヱリカが１人増えただけ

That says Erika adds 1 person more to the count?
Unless we say it's true for ep5 and not ep6?

[Captain Bluebeard]

Originally Posted by AuraTwilight

I would wager that since Beatrice never stated her win-condition in Red, it's entirely valid to say that she lied and her real win condition is "to be remembered by him."

Um...That's not any different from what I said, actually. Beatrice challenges Battler in a game where she tries to prove witches and he tries to prove the opposite. Beatrice's goal isn't to achieve victory in that game, however that's her winning condition as far as Battler is concerned, regardless of what Beatrice actually has in mind, and that's the facade she puts up on purpose. I don't see what you disagree with.

It's more than roundabout! It's directly harmful to what she wants! It's the same as wanting someone to figure out you're cooking a hamburger and telling them this is a ham.

I didn't disagree with that. That's just Ryukishi's fault for using the red to troll his readers. Even taking into account Beatrice's fickle nature, it still doesn't make much sense.

Originally Posted by LaplaceNoMa

To elaborate further, we know for sure that Battler's there are 17 people includes Erika is a real person with a real body. In other words, this red considers Kanon and Shannon to be one "people".

However, that ep3 red uses the same kanji to describe them as two "people". If we don't like it, we have to assume that Erika isn't included in "17 people" which makes things even more grim.

The meaning of words can change according to what people have in mind when using them (in the context of Umineko, at least).
Beatrice reffers to them as 'personalties' to make it seem that Kanon-Shannon = 2 people.
In EP6, they're actually reffering to the number of bodies, thus blatantly telling you that there are actually 16 humans on Rokenjima.

[Renall]

Originally Posted by GuestSpeaker

Though to counter my own theory, you could almost argue Rosa was depicted as having two personalities (though never hinted one could act independently, unlike Eva..) so technically they could also pull a Yasu, though there is less evidence for it. But in any case, Shkannontrice is partially crushed by Maria's little ep 2 "the mean mama and the nice one are the same person, there is only one mama" speech. I know it is in white, but it sort of flies in the face of Kanon and Shannon being different people. At best, it points to them being facets of the same person.....

People in Umineko depicted or at least mentioned as having multiple "characters" or "personalities" include:

• Yasu, obviously.
• Jessica (sort of).
• Rosa.
• Maria.
• Natsuhi.
• Hideyoshi (sort of).
• Genji (maybe).
• Eva.
• Kinzo.

If you squint hard enough you can probably find more. If the bar is lowered to "acting or behaving differently," then any one of these people could potentially be dead while still alive. Some more plausibly than others, of course.

But yes, it's more plausible to say Fictional Shkanon is an overlay for the actions of a single, deliberate, sane person who is merely acting (with all the Shannon/Kanon stuff being nothing more than metaphor), and that Yasu, or Beatrice, or however you want to think of the author is herself entirely in control of her faculties. In fact, this is really the only setup that makes any sense, because I don't see a batshit insane person committing murders competently even in a fictional story, and I certainly don't see such a person writing a story.