natsuhi-did-nothing-wrong

[natsuhi-did-nothing-wrong]

[natsuhi-did-nothing-wrong]

no disrespect to teenagers intended there is just an undeniable Way That Teenagers Are About Things that is palpable in ryukishi's writing about them. at his most paranoid and murderous keiichi is still being really fucking 15 about it. at her most mastermindy and mysterious sayo is so, so goddamn 19

[natsuhi-did-nothing-wrong]

i can't explain to you how funny it was when i first hit the point in onikakushi where keiichi writes out his "by the time you have read this, i will probably be dead. although there may or may not be a body" note and i had to process the fact that it is unambiguous umineko canon that sayo consciously ended her dramatic final message to the world with a really obvious higurashi reference

[natsuhi-did-nothing-wrong]

i'd been kinda torn about the doll for a while just bc it couldn't help but feel like a weak motivation to have sent mion off the rails, but higurashi stresses that that action was the inciting incident. it's about the gesture of not even thinking of mion. for all we know mion might have turned it down but been happy that he'd offered and that would have been pretty much that

can't help but remind me of battler's sin, which has the same kind of indirect quality to it - that's not really about the surface-level understanding of what he actually said and did by itself, but the forgetting about the promise (and sayo herself) that makes it so cruel. in the same sense "forgetting" about mion is keiichi's act of innocent cruelty.........

[natsuhi-did-nothing-wrong]

oh my god and then shion claims to be the one who brought keiichi the bento. even though it really probably was mion at that point. she's stealing valor now

[natsuhi-did-nothing-wrong]

AND THEN HE BUYS SHION THE DOLL. GOES OUT OF HIS WAY TO GET IT FOR SHION. BECAUSE HE THINKS HE'S MAKING IT UP TO MION WITH THAT ACT. BUT IT'S JUST FURTHER ISOLATING HER. "HE EVEN GOT MY SISTER THAT STUPID DOLL AND THEY JUST MET" OH MY GODDDDDDDDDD

[natsuhi-did-nothing-wrong]

finished the question arcs today

[natsuhi-did-nothing-wrong]

Umineko Episode 1 Blog: Tea Party

For the first time since this blog began, I'm covering new content and I'm happy to report that Ryukishi wrote this scene to make fun of me specifically.

This Tea Party was initially framed as some kind of non-canon bonus scene, and of course we can't interpret its events entirely literally, but by the end it seems that this scene is cryptically revealing the fates of the grandchildren, who disappeared at the end of Episode 1. Of course, even when the game is keeping up it's cheerful facade, it should not escape our notice that the 6 people depicted here are Shannon, Kanon, Maria, George, Jessica and Battler: precisely the 6 people who are still alive at the end of Episode 1 (that we know of).

The game's pointed comments about how there's clearly a 19th person because of how Kanon died, and "wow I guess it was magic the whole time there's really no way around it," feel playful. I'm also very amused by the narrator dropping the facade of reliability and constantly mocking Battler's skepticism. We're all in on the joke now, so there's no reason to keep up the pretense that this scene is anything approaching an accurate depiction of events.

Also, we are going full tilt on the meta stuff here, aren't we? I'm sure you're all loving how Battler's constant half-baked speculations sound more or less exactly like me.

We get some new character profiles, an rather interestingly they only confirm the deaths of Jessica and George. Rather gruesomely at that. Maria is merely missing, and we never see her actually die. Presumably this is because she still needs to live long enough to write the message in a bottle. I wonder if this scene shaking her faith in the witch is what inspired her to write the story and beg someone to try and solve it. Battler also doesn't die, so who knows what's going on with him?

I was intruiged by Battler's "if you believe in a lie, it becomes the truth?" line. To me, it sounds like the grandchildren were approached by the "witch," with the resurrections serving as proof that magic is real. When Battler questioned it, the conversation morphed into a veiled threat: if the grandchildren know what's good for them, they will accept that it was magic and never dig into the true story of what happened on Rokkenjima. Battler doubles down and so the culprits decide they have no choice but to remove all of the witnesses, at which point Battler defends himself with the gun.

Something like that could work as an explanation for the grandchildren's fates, although I don't see how this narrative could explain Jessica and George being brutalised so horribly. We were told in the endscroll that their gory deaths really did happen.

The Tea Party is really beating us over the head with Beatrice's symbolic significance. Just like how the servants used to invoke her name, Beatrice is the God of the Gaps (with one 'a'). It's not that anything you can't explain gets blamed on her, but that Beatrice is the inexplicable. Any time you throw your hands up in the air and say it can't be solved, you bring Beatrice to life, and to defeat her you have to solve the case. She's the antagonist of mystery stories themselves.

I'm not sure how this ties in to her supposed power to "kill an individual endlessly". Perhaps Bernkastel's line sheds some light. She describes Beatrice as one who plays a dice game by never letting go of the dice, so whatever the roll could have been, she is not disappointed. Beatrice is a being that thrives off of ambiguity. The moment anything has a clear explanation she's helpless. In this sense, is her "endless" killing of an individual in reference to the seemingly limitless possibilities for how one of the bodies could have died?

Speaking of Bernkastel, the witch who looks a lot like that girl from Higaurashi (which I've never seen, so don't tell me if this resemblance matters), the description of her power reminds me a lot of that famous Sherlock Holmes quote "once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Bernkastel can make any potentiality into a certainty, so long as it is not impossible. In other words, she symbolises the process of elimination, so it makes sense that she's aligning herself more with those of us trying to solve the mystery. This symbolism also ties into her comment about her matchup with Beatrice: once you accept magic, you can no longer rule out the impossible, so the process of elmination doesn't work.

I'm not sure what Lambdadelta's deal is, but then we haven't seen her personally. If we want to interpret her through the mystery genre lens, one guess would be that she represents the point at which we can say for certain that a character is actually dead, rather than just faking somehow? She could also be a play on the anthropic principle: to solve a mystery we must tell a story about what happened, and this story must end with the person dead and the body in the state that it was found in. In other words, we proceed by "making that person's death into a certainty," taking it for granted that they're dead and rearranging all the other facts to fit that truth.

Bernkastel leaves us with some advice which basically amounts to telling us that Beatrice is a metaphor, but she also leaves us with something else interesting:

Umineko doesn't use all caps like this very often. The only other time I can remember is the scene where the narrator wants to make sure that the siblings really needed A LOT OF MONEY RIGHT NOW. I don't know if there's anything to that, but maybe there is.

Bernkastel also has an interesting line about preceiving us like a character on TV, so maybe there's going to be some kind of metaphor with witches standing in for viewers or authors at some point.

That's all for now. I didn't expect to have so much to write about 2 scenes, but they were important scenes indeed. Don't expect me to keep up this pace going forward!

I almost forgot to mention that Purgatorio reference right at the start. What's that about? Is Beatrice's name a reference to the Divine Comedy? I hope that doesn't end up being important, beyond Kinzo's pining after her being a reference to Dante's. If I didn't bother reading And Then There Were None for context after noticing the parallels, then I'm certainly not reading that.

The Main Menu is an aquarium now? What on Earth is Episode 2 even about?

[natsuhi-did-nothing-wrong]

Complete Umineko Timeline

I recently finished my first readthrough of seminal 2007 murder mystery doujin visual novel Umineko: When they Cry. While I was reading I kept detailed notes on both my solutions to the murder mystery puzzles and the backstory timeline that led up to the game. I'm sure plenty of other people have gone over the solutions before but the timeline itself is likely to be interesting so I've cleaned it up for publication. This includes the following

Calculations for how we can derive dates that are never given explicitly but have enough evidence to constrain them to a narrow range (this applies to the years most of the adults were born)

Backstory events stretching out behind the catbox into the past

Post-1986 events stretching out in front of the catbox into the future

For the contents of the catbox itself you'll want to take a look at the solutions (or maybe if there's a demand for it I'll write mine up too)

Discussion

Krauss, Eva, and Natsuhi

Umineko never directly states how old Krauss, Eva, and Natsuhi are. However we have the following pieces of evidence we can use to pinpoint things

Eva mentions that Natsuhi is three years younger than her during one of the parlor scenes in Legend

Eva’s narration refers to Krauss as her older brother of two years during her flashback at the beginning of Banquet

Natsuhi was childless for 12 years before having Jessica 18 years ago, placing her marriage 30 years ago in 1956

The Ushiromiyas moved to Rokkenjima in 1952. Eva’s flashback at the beginning of Banquet takes place while she’s living on Rokkenjima and at the tail end of high school demanding to go to college (ages 15-17)

Eva’s birthday is October 21

This places limits on their possible ages in both directions. The school year in Japan begins in April and students begin elementary school at age 6. Therefore, to have been attending high school in 1952, Eva must have been born somewhere in the range 1936-1938. Since Natsuhi is three years younger than her and got married in 1956 this means she was married somewhere between age 15 and age 17. There’s nothing I would put past Kinzo but the older end of that range seems most likely so for this timeline I chose to make Krauss born in 1934, Eva born in 1936, and Natsuhi born in 1939

Rudolf, Asumu, and Kyrie

Like his siblings we’re never given Rudolf’s exact age but we can get a good estimate from the available evidence

The Ushiromiyas moved to Rokkenjima in 1952. When the siblings discuss the stories of wolves on the island in Banquet, we’re told that Rudolf was in elementary school (ages 6-11) at the time

Kinzo’s flashback in the manga version of Requiem establishes visually that Krauss, Eva, and Rudolf were all born before he enlisted in 1944

Rudolf’s birthday is September 29

Just like for Eva, this constrains the possible years Rudolf could have been born to between 1940 and 1943. Of these 1940 is the most likely because the age difference between him and Eva doesn’t seem particularly large

All we can say about Asumu and Kyrie’s ages is that they went to college with Rudolf and are therefore close in age to him. As a side note Asumu’s family name Akinaka is never given anywhere in Umineko but Ryukishi specified it on twitter in 2013 so I’ve chosen to use it here

Rosa

In a recurring pattern Rosa’s age is never stated exactly but it’s easy to infer

Rosa met the girl who was imprisoned in Kuwadorian in 1967 and was in middle school (ages 12-14) at the time

Rosa had Maria in 1977

Rosa’s birthday is June 3

The possible years she could have been born are then 1953-1955 which means she had Maria somewhere between age 22 and age 24. I’m again most inclined to pick the early date since it makes her have Maria at a slightly more reasonable age.

Unfortunately, this age doesn’t completely make sense with the stories we’re told about her childhood. Her siblings would all have been essentially full adults by the time she was old enough to spend much time interacting with them so the stories we hear about them tormenting her are reframed as adults hurting a six year old. Not exactly impossible in Umineko but it casts everything in a very different light

The Kuwadorian Girl

Requiem refers to Kinzo raping the Kuwadorian girl when she was the same age Bice was when he first met her. For the sake of intergenerational parallels across the three Beatrices, this age is almost certainly 19, placing both her birth and Bice’s death in 1948, but all we know for certain is that she was older than Rosa but not a full adult when she met her

Erika

Erika is described as a few years younger than Jessica. Her backstory sounds like it takes place in college but we should probably chalk this up to the anime tendency to pretend high schoolers are independent adults and treat it as taking place in high school. With nothing else to go on, the best we can do is fall back on Higurashi parallels - Erika is a double for Bernkastel who most closely resembles a 16 year old Rika

Ange

This one’s an actual logic error. We are given the following three pieces of evidence which cannot simultaneously be true

Ange’s birthday is June 17 and she’s six years old therefore she was born in 1980

Battler made a promise to Sayo six years ago at the 1980 family conference in early October

Asumu died, Rudolf married a pregnant Kyrie, and Battler left the Ushiromiya family after that promise

As June comes before October this situation is impossible. We could try to resolve it by saying that Ange was born six months before Asumu died but the narrative is clear that Kyrie was pregnant when she got married, not already raising an illegitimate child. Similarly we could claim that Battler actually made his promise at a non-family conference visit to Rokkenjima in early 1980 but Requiem clearly shows us the first, second, and third family conferences after Battler leaves and has Kanon be created at the third one three years ago so this throws off the entire timeline. The only remotely reasonable solution is to decide that Ange was actually born on June 17, 1981 and is just the kind of little kid who likes to say she’s six when she’s really five and a half (and then keeps doing this for the rest of her life so she calls herself eighteen when she’s really seventeen and a half)

Timeline

1900s:

Nanjo Terumasa is born (April 5)

Ronoue Genji is born (June 10)

Kumasawa Chiyo is born (July 19)

Ushiromiya Kinzo is born (August 17)

1910s:

Genji and Kinzo grow up in Taiwan together. They are both the sons of rich families and they become close friends

1923:

The great Kanto earthquake destroys the Ushiromiya family. The surviving family elders pick Kinzo (20s), a distantly related branch family member to be the new family head ostensibly because he has polydactyly but really because they want to use him as a puppet

1926:

Beatrice Castiglioni is born (September 14)

1920s:

Hideyoshi is born (November 25)

Kinzo (20s) is forced to marry a woman he does not love and spends twenty years as a living corpse, enduring life without really living. His only solace is his love for reading foreign books

1934:

Ushiromiya Krauss is born (February 26)

1936:

Ushiromiya Eva is born (October 21)

1939:

Natsuhi is born (July 30)

1940:

Krauss (6) begins elementary school

1941:

Ushiromiya Rudolf is born (September 29)

1940s:

Sumadera Kyrie is born (November 8)

Sumadera Kasumi is born (September 10)

Akinaka Asumu is born

1943:

Eva (6 going on 7) begins elementary school

1944:

Kinzo (40s) volunteers to fight in WWII. He is assigned to a secret submarine base on Rokkenjima as engineering staff. No Japanese submarines ever actually dock at the base and eventually the navy decides to store an enormous quantity of explosives on the island so it can be strategically blown up if necessary

1945:

An Italian submarine carrying ten tons of secret gold docks at the Rokkenjima base and Kinzo (40s) meets Beatrice (19) who is serving as the Italian translator. Kinzo incites a shootout over the gold which kills everyone else on the island and the two run away together as lovers. He meets Nanjo (40s) as the doctor on Nijima who treats Beatrice’s wounds

1946:

Natsuhi (6 going on 7) begins elementary school

1940s:

Kinzo begins living a double life, spending as much of his time as possible with his mistress Beatrice while maintaining appearances with his family

Kinzo forsees that Genji’s family will meet a horrible fate if they stay in Taiwan during the post-war chaos. Unfortunately he is only able to convince Genji to leave and the rest of them perish. In gratitude for saving him, Genji decides to dedicate the rest of his life to serving Kinzo as his butler

Kinzo takes a trusted business contact, the president of the Marusoo company, to see the gold. He gives him physical possession of one ton of the gold as collateral and has him take back a single ingot to be appraised. With this level of verification he is able to take out massive loans from the business community. He uses his foreign language skills to get in extremely close with the post-war occupying forces and makes vast amounts of money providing supplies for the Korean War. Finally he repays his debts and retrieves the collateral from his friend, leaving him with a single ingot as a commemorative gift

Hideyoshi is left orphaned by the war. He decides to build a company from the ground up, starting with stealing supplies from the occupying forces. Slowly but surely he becomes a powerful businessman

1946:

Krauss (12) begins middle school

1948:

Rudolf (6 going on 7) begins elementary school

Beatrice (23) dies in childbirth. Kinzo (40s) is heartbroken and decides to treat her daughter as her reincarnation, giving her the name Ushiromiya Beatrice

1949:

Krauss (15) begins high school

Eva (12 going on 13) begins middle school

1952:

Kinzo (50s) constructs a secret mansion on Rokkenjima known as Kuwadorian and uses it to house his new daughter. At the same time he builds a secret underground VIP room to store the gold. He comes up with an elaborate riddle to hide its secret and builds a complicated mechanism to open the door. Finally, he repurposes the explosives on the island to build a special clock that will blow up the entire island at midnight if a switch is set. He uses this doomsday device to gamble his life by setting time limits for problem solving and is able to achieve short bursts of brilliant madness that drive enormous business success

Kinzo (50s) finishes construction of his new home on the other side of Rokkenjima from Kuwadorian. He moves his entire family to live there and frequently disappears for long periods of time to visit Beatrice. The two mansions are linked by a secret underground passageway left over from the island’s days as a military base

Krauss (18) begins college

Eva (15 going on 16) begins high school

Natsuhi (12 going on 13) begins middle school

1953:

Ushiromiya Rosa is born (June 3)

1950s:

Kinzo uses some of his wealth to create Fukuin House, an orphanage for children with nowhere else to go. He begins taking ambitious teenagers from the orphanage as young servants in order to give them practical experience and money to start their lives with

Kinzo violently abuses his children and constantly screams and insults them

Kinzo’s wife becomes extremely suspicious that he’s cheating on her with a blonde but is never able to find evidence

Krauss frequently beats and insults his younger siblings to compensate for his complex about not being able to live up to his father’s expectations

Eva becomes obsessed with earning her father’s respect and works as hard as possible to become a good student and achieve great things, even becoming class president when Krauss never became more than vice-president. She loathes Krauss for automatically being the successor simply because he’s a man. In order to fuel her work ethic she creates an alternate self representing her childhood dreams that lives inside her as a witch

Rudolf constantly sneaks off into the shadows for sexual liaisons with the maids

Rosa grows up extremely lonely with no friends anywhere near her age and no one who is willing to pay attention to her. She retreats into a world of playing with dolls and stuffed animals until eventually her older siblings rip up her most treasured friend U-tan the rabbit and declare that she’s dead

Natsuhi grows up in an extraordinarily strict environment, kept isolated from the world as a princess

Kinzo collects a number of Winchester rifles and practices shooting them in the woods

1954:

Rudolf (12 going on 13) begins middle school

1955:

Eva (18 going on 19) graduates high school and manages to go to college against her father’s wishes through sheer hard work

Natsuhi (15 going on 16) begins high school

1956:

Krauss (22) graduates from college

Kinzo (50s) crushes Natsuhi’s (17) family and as a prize forces her to marry Krauss (22). It is not clear whether she is given the chance to complete high school. She is unable to bear a child for a very long time despite trying

1957:

Rudolf (15 going on 16) begins high school

1959:

Eva (22 going on 23) graduates from college

1960:

Rudolf (18 going on 19) graduates high school and goes to college. While there he begins perpetrating elaborate fraud schemes and seducing women. He acquires a large harem of hangers-on but eventually ends up splitting most of his time between Kyrie who is his business partner and Asumu who provides him with emotional support

Rosa (6 going on 7) begins elementary school

1962:

Eva (26) marries Hideyoshi (40s). Due to Natsuhi’s (23) failure to bear a child she is able to have him transferred into the Ushiromiya family register

1963:

George is born to Eva (26 going on 27) and Hideyoshi (40s) (March 19)

1964:

Rudolf (22 going on 23) graduates from college and partners with Kyrie (20s) to found a new company

1966:

Rosa (12 going on 13) begins middle school

1967:

The Kuwadorian girl (19) has an incestuous child with Kinzo (60s) (May 25)

Rosa (14) runs away from home and encounters the Kuwadorian girl (19). She helps her escape but while attempting to get back to the mansion she falls off a cliff and dies. After this incident Kuwadorian is shut down for good

Kinzo (60s) gives the child he had with the Kuwadorian girl to Natsuhi (28) to raise. She treats this as an insult due to her inability to have a child and is so disgusted that she pushes the servant carrying the baby off a cliff. Kinzo is driven deeply into madness by the incident and begins to isolate himself and spend all of his time studying the occult

Kinzo’s child survives the fall but Genji (60s) sends them to Fukuin House and conceals them from Natsuhi and Kinzo. They are given the name Yasuda Sayo. Although the child was assigned male at birth, the fall severely damages their genitals and afterwards it is decided to raise them as a girl. Nanjo performs the surgery that saves their life and at the same time he amputates their polydactyly sixth toe. He ‘carelessly’ leaves a scar, ensuring that Kinzo will one day be able to recognize them

In an alternate timeline where Natsuhi (28) does not attempt to kill the child, they are given the name Ushiromiya Lion and raised as the successor to the Ushiromiya headship with the new birthday November 29

1968:

Kyrie (20s) and Asumu (20s) get pregnant at the same time. Asumu discovers the pregnancy first and convinces Rudolf to have a shotgun marriage. Their delivery dates are on the same day. Asumu miscarries, Kyrie has Ushiromiya Battler, and then while they’re both barely conscious Rudolf (26 going on 27) swaps the babies so that his legal wife will be the one who gives birth (July 15). Asumu almost certainly figures out what has happened but resolves to love Battler as her own son regardless

Kyrie (20s) manages to use Rudolf’s (27) influence to completely escape from the Sumadera family. Kasumi is forced to take on her responsibilities as the successor and marry a man she does not love

At long last Natsuhi (29) is able to bear a child and Jessica is born (August 25)

1969:

Rosa (15 going on 16) begins high school

George (6) begins elementary school

1970:

Furudo Erika is born (October 4)

1972:

Rosa (18 going on 19) graduates high school and begins college. Presumably the battle Eva fought with Kinzo to secure her own education allows Rosa to do the same as Rosa certainly doesn’t have the guts to fight for it herself

1970s:

Genji decides to fake Sayo’s age and claim that she is three years younger than she really is to avoid Natsuhi and Kinzo realizing who she really is. In order to make this work he ensures that she grows up completely isolated within the orphanage. She spends all of her time locked inside and is never allowed to make friends who might notice that she’s not the age she’s supposed to be

Rudolf and Kyrie build a powerful company together, constantly skirting the law and committing serious fraud. Many of their rivals are driven so far into debt that they commit suicide

1975:

Jessica (6 going on 7) begins elementary school

Battler (6 going on 7) begins elementary school

George (12) begins middle school

1976:

Rosa (22 going on 23) graduates college and begins creating a fashion company

Genji (70s) arranges for Sayo (9 pretending to be 6) to begin working at the mansion under the name Shannon. In order to hide her existence from Natsuhi (36) and Kinzo (70s) he claims she is three years younger than she actually is. She treats the Shannon identity as a sort of imaginary friend representing the ideal servant girl she would like to become

Lunon, Sanon, Lenon, and Leion begin working at the same time as Sayo (9 pretending to be 6). They are significantly older than her and do not treat her very well

1970s:

Sayo slowly acclimates to life as a servant. After repeatedly losing things she invents a witch who she calls Beatrice but will later call Gaap as an imaginary friend who takes her possessions. Kumasawa teaches her a series of tricks to not lose things which she frames as rituals to keep the witch at bay

Sayo breaks a vase which is particularly dear to Kinzo. Kumasawa helps her avoid punishment by claiming the vase was broken by a stray cat, teaching her the concept of magic that matches a result

Due to being thrown off a cliff when she was a baby, Sayo does not have normal hormone production and does not go through puberty, remaining waifish and androgynous. She is extremely disturbed by her boyish appearance and lack of periods and begins to hate mirrors. In order to look more feminine she begins padding her chest

Sayo learns that she shares a deep love of mystery novels with Battler and begins to fall in love with him over repeated visits. He tells her about his ideal girl with a description broadly taken from porn magazines. Asumu watches over and supports their relationship

1977:

Ushiromiya Maria is born (March 29). Her father tricks Rosa (23 going on 24) into taking out a giant loan for him and then flees the country, leaving her a single mother

Erika (6 going on 7) begins elementary school

Sayo (9 going on 10 pretending to be 6 going on 7) begins elementary school

1978:

George (15) begins high school

1979:

Lunon, Sanon, Lenon, and Leion graduate from being Ushiromiya servants. Asne, Belne, and Manon begin working as replacements

Sayo (12 pretending to be 9) trains the new servants. Belne doesn’t take the stories of the witch seriously so in order to teach her a lesson, Sayo begins conducting a series of pranks on her. She hides her master key in Belne’s locker, waits for Belne to unlock a room and put her keys down, swaps her keyring without the master key with Belne’s, and then asks Belne to lock the door. This makes it appear as though the key was moved from Belne’s ring to the locker by magic while giving Sayo a strong alibi for stealing it. After many similar experiences, Belne repents and believes in the witch

Sayo (12 pretending to be 9) abandons the desire to become an ideal servant which Shannon represented and instead begins planning to become a witch. She revises her imaginary scenario so that now she is the witch Beatrice and Gaap is a demon who is her close friend. Her witchsona with long greenish-blonde hair and a white dress will later be known as Clair Vaux Bernardus

1980:

Battler (12) visits Rokkenjima for the last time before leaving the family. He promises Sayo (13 pretending to be 10) that when she’s ready to leave the island he’ll come for her on a white horse and whisk her away. He gives her until the family conference next year to decide whether to take him up on his offer

George (17) watches Battler (12) and Sayo (13 pretending to be 10) talking and gets extremely jealous

1981:

Jessica (12 going on 13) begins middle school

George (18) graduates from high school and begins college

Battler (12 going on 13) begins middle school

Kyrie (30s) gets pregnant with Ange and finally gains the certain determination to kill Asumu (30s). However before she can act Asumu dies for unrelated reasons. Rudolf (39 going on 40) marries Kyrie immediately, and Ange is born shortly afterwards (June 17). Battler (12 going on 13) is so offended by this series of events that he leaves the Ushiromiya family and goes to live with Asumu’s parents for the next six years, taking the family name Akinaka. When Sayo (14 pretending to be 11) learns that he has left the family she convinces herself that this is a trial of love and if only she waits for him while believing hard enough he will come for her next year

Battler (13) does not attend the family conference. Sayo (14 pretending to be 11) is heartbroken but tells herself that he’ll come next year

1980s:

A number of important pieces of media come out earlier in the Umineko timeline than in our world. Touhou becomes popular, and Pretty Cure style magical girl shows begin airing on TV including one that stars Bernkastel

Maria meets a priest who tells her about Jesus. This experience convinces her that she too is a child of god with magical powers and she undertakes intense occult self-study

Sayo begins meeting with Maria as her witchsona every time she visits the island. She convinces her that she is a witch by showing her small magic tricks and becomes her best friend

Battler wins a set of cheap plastic hair ornaments for Ange at a fair. They become one of her most treasured possessions

Erika goes out with a boy who is living some sort of double life. She collects circumstantial evidence and becomes convinced he’s cheating on her. It’s unprovable but the core themes of this narrative suggest that the secret is probably actually crossdressing

Rosa gives Maria a cheap department store plushie and pretends she made it herself. Maria names him Sakutaro and loves him with all her heart

Sayo begins actively building the legend of the golden witch by telling ghost stories and playing occult themed pranks on people. Through her hard work she combines the existing ghost stories about the evil spirits of Rokkenjima with the story of Kinzo’s mistress to create an environment where all unexplainable phenomena will be blamed on a witch

Sayo begins to invent more OCs, creating Ronove as a double for Genji, Virgilia as a double for Kumasawa, and the seven sisters of purgatory. Maria gives them all names. In exchange Sayo creates the Chiesters and Sakutaro for her as anthropomorphized versions of her rabbit figures and her favorite stuffed animal

Sayo becomes close friends with Jessica

Rosa rips Sakutaro apart and smashes one of Maria’s rabbits, permanently killing the corresponding furniture

The president of the Marusoo company dies and Krauss manages to obtain the ingot he was given, acquiring physical proof that the Ushiromiya gold exists

Krauss makes a series of bad business investments and is repeatedly defrauded. He attempts to turn Rokkenjima into a resort but the project falls apart leaving him with a newly built guesthouse and no visitors. In his desperation he begins to embezzle Kinzo’s money and makes shady backroom deals offering up ownership of the island itself as collateral

1982:

Asne, Belne, and Manon graduate from being Ushiromiya servants

Battler (14) does not attend the family conference. Sayo (15 pretending to be 12) begins to doubt whether he ever made her a promise at all or whether she merely misinterpreted him

1983:

Maria (6) begins elementary school

Erika (12 going on 13) begins middle school

Sayo (15 going on 16 pretending to be 12 going on 13) begins middle school

Battler (14) does not attend the family conference. He sends letters to his cousins but not to Sayo (16 pretending to be 13). She buries her grief by externalizing her feelings and pushing them onto her witch persona Beato. At the same time she begins experimenting with dressing as a boy and creates the Kanon persona with cooperation from Genji and Kumasawa. By pushing her love for Battler onto Beato and all of her negative emotions onto Kanon she is able to keep Shannon as a purely positive persona

George (20) has a marriage interview with a girl Eva (47) wants him to marry named Ayumi. Eva taunts Sayo (16 pretending to be 13) with the fact that the two of them can never be together

Sayo (16 pretending to be 13) accidentally spills soup on herself while serving Kinzo (80s) and removes her kneesock in front of him. He sees the scar from the amputation of her polydactyly and realizes that she is his child who survived the fall after all. Afterwards he begins to try to get closer to her and teaches her to shoot his guns

1984:

Jessica (15 going on 16) begins high school

Battler (15 going on 16) begins high school

Kinzo hangs a portrait of Beatrice with the witch’s epitaph in the main hall of the mansion in April. Sayo (16 going on 7 pretending to be 13 going on 14) revises her witchsona so that it is now a blond haired beauty matching both the woman in the portrait and Battler’s image of an ideal girl

George (21) and Sayo (17 pretending to be 14) begin to get closer and go on a few outings together. They are not quite dating yet but the possibility of romance is there

Jessica (16) becomes disturbed by the way Maria (7) talks about Beatrice and starts to investigate. Sayo (17 pretending to be 14) tells her a ghost story about the golden witch appearing in the VIP room at 2 in the morning. She then places a creepy doll on the bedside table in the room, gives instructions to Genji and Kumasawa to act as accomplices, and hides under the bed in the dark waiting. At 2 am when Jessica enters the VIP room an accomplice places a phone call to the room and plays a recording of Maria singing. Afterwards another accomplice in the basement shuts off the lights on the circuit breaker. Under the cover of darkness Sayo climbs out from under the bed, grabs the doll, cackles loudly, and leaves the room. After this experience Jessica decides to stop investigating

Genji gives Sayo (17 pretending to be 14) a hint regarding the epitaph by telling her that Kinzo’s beloved hometown is in Taiwan. Over the course of many months she works her way through the entire riddle and eventually on November 29 she finds the hidden gold. Genji dresses her in the witch dress, takes her to Kinzo, and finally tells him the truth about their relationship. Kinzo apologizes for everything, gives her the head’s ring and keels over dead. Afterwards Sayo orders Genji, Kumasawa, and Nanjo to keep these events secret and decides to continue working as a servant while waiting for Battler’s return

Sayo (17 pretending to be 14) is utterly horrified at learning the truth about herself. Her incestuous heritage, her body that cannot bear children, the bloodstained wealth of the Ushiromiyas seized with betrayal and murder, and her unwitting romantic relationships with her blood relatives all drive her to despair

Natsuhi (45) discovers that Kinzo is dead. Krauss (50) confesses to embezzling his father’s wealth and tells her that he may face criminal charges for it. She decides to maintain the illusion that he is alive until Krauss can fix their financial situation

1985:

George (22) graduates from college. He begins working at his father’s company to gain business experience

Gohda is dismissed from his job working at a high end hotel due to a dispute between the staff and the management and his involvement in an affair. He has difficulty finding work in the restaurant industry and decides to apply to work for the Ushiromiyas. Natsuhi (46) hires him

Gohda tells Sayo (18 pretending to be 15) that witches do not exist. In order to force him to believe she sets up a situation where he and Genji are the only two people on the island. After Gohda finishes cleaning the kitchen and leaves, Genji creates an occult sculpture using paint and kitchen supplies then summons Gohda, pretends to have discovered it, and asks for help cleaning it up. Afterwards Gohda does not disrespect the witch out loud again

Jessica (17) asks Sayo (18 pretending to be 15) whether Kanon is single. Sayo is simultaneously overjoyed to be loved and disgusted at the incestuous nature of that love. Despite herself she begins to fall in love with Jessica as Kanon

Maria (8) attempts to teach Ange (4) about magic but Ange rejects her, driving her further into isolation

Natsuhi (46) manages to get through the family conference without anyone noticing that Kinzo is dead with the help of Genji (80s), Nanjo (80s), Kumasawa (80s), Sayo (18 pretending to be 15), and Krauss (51)

1986:

Sayo (18 going on 19 pretending to be 15 going on 16) completes middle school. In her complete despair she does not bother advancing to high school and chooses to drop out

Erika (15 going on 16) begins high school

Jessica (17 going on 18) runs for class president at her mother’s insistence and wins the election. She does not enjoy the position

George (23) takes Sayo (19 pretending to be 16) on a trip to Okinawa. She hopes that the trip will give her an opportunity to confess the truth to him but he doesn’t so much as touch her and the right moment to confess never arrives. He tells her that he plans to propose to her at the next family conference, completely driving her into a corner and leaving her with an unavoidable deadline coming up

Sayo (19 pretending to be 16) sets herself up on a culture festival date with Jessica (18). Afterwards Jessica confesses to her and Sayo rejects her. This is extraordinarily painful for her because she is in love with Jessica but she is convinced that the romance is doomed and too scared to try

Krauss (52) manages to put together an actually profitable real estate deal for once. He becomes convinced that if he can just hold on a little longer he will be able to repay all his debts and hide his criminal embezzlement

Hideyoshi (60s) attempts to list his company publicly. He fails to secure a majority stake and is attacked in a hostile takeover attempt, pushing him into a position where he needs to acquire an enormous amount of money to defend against it

Rudolf (45) attempts to expand his business overseas. He accidentally violates another major company’s intellectual property rights and enters a position where he needs to acquire an enormous amount of money to settle with them

Rosa’s (33) debt comes due, placing her in a position where she needs to acquire an enormous amount of money to pay it off

Battler (18) returns to the Ushiromiya family after Asumu’s parents die

Sayo (19 pretending to be 16) learns that Battler (18) will return and is driven completely mad by her hopeless situation and the combined weight of the family’s sins. She writes out countless murder suicide plans, creating fragment world after fragment world and transcends humanity, becoming a witch. Metafictionally, she becomes a miko of Lambdadelta who guarantees her power as long as her plan continues to have absolute certainty

Sayo (19 pretending to be 16) begins making extensive preparations for her murder game. She tests explosives from the stockpile under the island by blowing up the Rokkenjima shrine and practices firing guns extensively. She converts a billion yen worth of the gold to cash and sets up a series of postcards which will be sent to the families of the victims leading them to some of the money. Shortly before the family conference she places her murder fic in wine bottles and hurls it into the sea

The following people gather for the Ushiromiya family conference:

Ange (5 and a half but likes to say she’s 6) stays at home

Kinzo (80s) who has been dead for over a year but is kept alive as a ghost by Natsuhi’s efforts

Krauss (52), Natsuhi (47), and Jessica (18)

Eva (49 going on 50), Hideyoshi (60s), and George (23)

Rudolf (45), Kyrie (40s), and Battler (18)

Rosa (33), and Maria (9)

Nanjo (80s), Genji (80s), Kumasawa (80s), and Gohda (?)

Sayo (19 pretending to be 16)

Erika (16) falls off a boat near Rokkenjima. With the help of a miracle she could have drifted to the island

The family conference occurs and its events are locked away in a catbox forever when the mansion is destroyed in an explosion

Within the catbox the adults solve the epitaph and reach the room of the gold before Sayo can carry out her murder plans. A gunfight breaks out and Kyrie and Rudolf decide to slaughter everyone on the island, blow it all up, and run away with the bank card with a billion yen. Eva manages to stop them but is unable to save anyone to save anyone but herself and decides to blow the island up anyway to hide the truth. She escapes to Kuwadorian and survives the explosion

In the alternate timeline where Natsuhi raised Sayo as Lion, Kinzo is still alive and he holds a funeral for the two Beatrices in the morning. In the evening during the family conference his children argue with him over Lion becoming the head until he decides to give them the witch’s epitaph and tell them that if they can solve it they can have the headship. His children find the gold and the same events play out with the addition that Kyrie also kills Kinzo and Lion

Sayo survives the gunfight, changes her mind about committing murder suicide, rescues Battler, and confesses almost everything to him. The two of them escape through the secret tunnel to the submarine base and attempt to take a motorboat away from the island. Sayo jumps into the water to drown herself using a gold ingot as a weight and Battler leaps in after her. She dies, and he almost drowns

After pulling himself out of the water in a haze Battler is hit by a car and temporarily loses his memories. He’s saved by Hachijou Ikuko who gives him the new name Hachijou Tohya and functionally kidnaps him. Metafictionally Ushiromiya Battler and Yasuda Sayo drown together and become trapped in purgatory. Sayo decides to begin tormenting him with her witch games until he eventually remembers the truth

In a popular alternate interpretation Sayo survives the suicide attempt, adopts the identity of Hachijou Ikuko, and resolves to live with Battler for the rest of her life without ever revealing the truth to him

1987:

Ange (5 going on 6) begins elementary school

Eva (50s) becomes the Ushiromiya family head and is tormented by police investigations and media attacks. Everyone believes her to be the true culprit. However the police are never able to find any evidence and the massacre is formally ruled an accident

After the massacre, the families of the victims receive the mysterious postcards Sayo mailed out. None of them claim the money

Two of the message bottles containing Legend and Turn wash up and are found by the police. This causes the crime to be regarded as the work of a witch in the public eye. A large majority of the message bottles are lost at sea and never found

Eva takes guardianship of Ange. She desperately wants to love her and become her mother but the two of them are both deeply broken from grief and Ange is unable to trust Eva which slowly poisons their relationship. After a series of episodes where Eva screams and hits her for so long that she forgets why she was originally angry, Eva realizes that she’s going to destroy Ange’s life and decides to send her away rather than hurt her anymore. When Ange attempts to run away and go back to her grandfather’s house, Eva uses it as an excuse to send her to a boarding school

1980s:

Eva writes a secret diary describing the true events of the catbox

The true crime community around Rokkenjima becomes a large community of dedicated witch hunters. People begin forging message bottles to write fan fiction

Tohya slowly adjusts to his new life living with Ikuko and the two of them begin publishing mystery novels together. To celebrate completing their first book, Ikuko shares a third message bottle which she found on the beach containing Sayo’s full confession with him. He remembers his past as Battler but is unable to accept it as his own memories and resolves to continue his life as Tohya. In the alternate interpretation where Ikuko is Sayo she simply writes out her confession and claims to have found it in a message bottle

Tohya and Ikuko begin writing forgeries, continuing the metafictional narrative that began in Sayo’s two surviving games. Tohya falsely believes Eva to be the true culprit and begins his forgeries by writing Banquet, a narrative in which she murders everyone and survives. After reading his work, Eva realizes who he is, pays him a visit, and tells him the truth. She leaves the key to her diary with him in the hope that he might one day share it with Ange if she makes her way to him too

Tohya writes Alliance, End, and Dawn completing his metarrative and laying Sayo to rest. It’s not clear whether Requiem and Twilight are ever written in the real world at all and if so they’re certainly never published

1993:

Ange (11 going on 12) begins middle school

1990s:

Eva (50s) amasses an enormous fortune, surviving the collapse of the Japanese economy in the early 90s and becoming even richer than Kinzo once was. This is made even more impressive by the fact that she started with a small fraction of the capital he did

The witch hunter community unearths Rudolf and Kyrie’s criminal past and begins to accuse them of being the true culprits

Ange is utterly miserable and alone at boarding school where she is constantly bullied. She has Maria’s diary and begins to use it to retreat into delusions, summoning Maria’s ghost, Sakutaro, and the stakes as imaginary friends. Eventually she is attacked in a bullying incident so bad that it makes her want to kill everyone present and she is forced to abandon this coping mechanism when she realizes it provides her no power to affect reality

Eva, alone and dying of grief, becomes extremely sick and begins accusing people of poisoning her

1996:

Ange (14 going on 15) begins high school

1998:

Eva (62) dies, leaving her wealth to Ange (17 and a half but she likes to say she’s 18)

Ikuko acquires Eva’s diary and holds a witch hunter convention to unveil it. At the last minute she refuses to show it and walks out. This permanently defuses the enthusiasm around the Rokkenjima mystery by reminding the would-be witch hunters that what they are doing is nothing more than desecrating the memories of the dead

Ange (17 and a half but she likes to say she’s 18) attempts to contact Tohya (30). Tohya is too scared to see her directly but she meets with Ikuko who gives her the key to Eva’s diary and allows her to read the truth. She is driven completely into despair and jumps off the roof of a skyscraper but survives by landing in the safety netting. Metafictionally she goes on a vision quest to reconcile herself to the truth and become a witch of resurrection

After surviving the fall, Ange (17 and a half but she likes to say she’s 18) gives up the Ushiromiya fortune and adopts the new identity Kotobuki Yukari. She spends the rest of her life writing children’s books to pass on the lessons she’s learned

In an alternate timeline after surviving the fall Ange (17 and a half but she likes to say she’s 18) travels to Rokkenjima while accompanied by Amakusa, a bodyguard given to her by President Okonogi, and hunted by Kyrie’s younger sister Sumadera Kasumi. Shortly before reaching the island she deduces that Okonogi has cut a deal with the Sumaderas and Amakusa plans to kill both her and Kasumi in the isolated location and kills him before he has the opportunity. She embraces the mantle of the witch of truth and sets off on a journey to escape her fate for good, allowing the name Ushiromiya Ange to die just like in the main timeline

Decades Later

Ange uses her wealth from her career as a novelist to reestablish Fukuin House. When remodeling the building, she recreates the main hall of the Ushiromiya family mansion from memory even getting the artist who originally painted the portrait of Beatrice to create a duplicate for her

Tohya finally overcomes his fear of meeting his sister and identifies Kotobuki Yukari as Ange. He reaches out to her and the two are reunited at last. Metafictionally, Battler and Sayo reach the golden land and are freed from purgatory, ascending to heaven

[natsuhi-did-nothing-wrong]

you know something i did realize when rewatching more higurashi yesterday is that. keiichi, thinking shion was just an alter ego for mion, didn't even think to try inviting mion to help out at angel mort. not just didn't call her, but it didn't even cross his mind that there were only four tickets. from keiichi's perspective it makes sense, since he thinks he's just humoring her, but from mion's perspective literally all her friends got together and hung out with shion without her

mion was the only one not to get a present, and keiichi gave the doll to rena assuming mion wouldn't want it. mion was the only person not invited to angel mort to eat desserts and kill those guys. mion is noticeably excluded from the group over and over again in ways keiichi doesn't even realize he's doing. it's not even about the doll or the shitty food it's about mion not being considered, isn't it.

as watanagashi develops, shion starts hanging out with keiichi more and more. keiichi is apparently pretty quickly attracted to her, perceiving her as "mion who's just trying to safely explore other aspects of her identity" when it's evident that mion also, on some level, has some longing for that kind of attention. it must be infuriating how easily shion slots into her life, gets in good graces with her friends, and, from mion's perspective, replaces her outright in the club's dynamic

keiichi is explicitly painted as part of the "in-group" in this arc, contrasted with his sense of isolation and othering throughout onikakushi. the one being othered and pushed out is mion. oh my god

[natsuhi-did-nothing-wrong]

Oh and also (again havent read ep 4) While Rosa is an Overt Furry in thematics, she's actually very Anti Furry as a Character. However Eva is very Covert Furry in thematics and very Pro Furry as a Character. They both have these ideas of transformation ("I'll become a demon"/everything with Evatrice) and conformation (Rosa's attempts to violently mask any behavior within her and Maria that could be seen as deviant/Eva literally saying that maybe she can be "reborn" as a perfect lady (human.))

However, while Evatrice is an (evil) power fantasy. Rosa's wolf stuff isn't. Being a wolf is more squarely bad for Rosa. As much as she enjoys the power tripping it's always under the guise of being a sheep (human.)

While Evatrice exists in this grey area of Dream and Nightmare, because everything with Eva and Evatrice exists within the between of two extremes. It is 2am. I hope this makes sense.

[natsuhi-did-nothing-wrong]

even just broadly i think mion seems to struggle a lot at knowing what she Wants in watanagashi. does she like being "this old man" who's a total hardass club leader and an authority to her classmates, or is that a rut mion is stuck in because it's what people expect? is mion's pull towards things like the doll a genuine aspect of her personality that she suppresses because she'd be made fun of for it, or is it borne out of a desire to be more like the girls who are viewed as legitimate romantic options? i feel like mion is wrestling with this a bit

mion has a lot of responsibility within the family and is also bound by it to this tiny village where everyone knows who she is and what she's like. what an absolute nightmare for someone who's like 15 and trying to even figure out who they are. how do you even begin experiment with your interests and identity in this environment. there's no reinventing yourself

[natsuhi-did-nothing-wrong]

Umineko Episode 1 Blog: Fifth Twilight

A broken clock is right twice a day.

This one's going to get a little crazy.

In Umineko's 3rd murder case, the artifice crumbles. If I didn't reject magic out of hand, then the magic theory would be in serious trouble after these events. The epitaph was wrong.

The section of the epitaph describing the murders has a deliberate and repetitive structure. Namely, the twilights are presented sequentially, with a number attached to each. We've got our first and second twilights, but now we suddenly jump to fifth? Sure, "Kinzo" is in the boiler room, too, so you could argue that the fourth happened already, but what happened to the third twilight?

Honestly, even Kinzo's body isn't doing much to salvage this problem. The murders should really be presented in a way that reflects the structure of the poem: Kinzo and Kanon's deaths were separate lines in the poem, so they should each have their own crime scene and associated mystery. This is to say nothing of the fact that the first two cases happened on separate days, which reflects the literal meaning of "twilight," but past this point the murders pretty much just happen all at once.

Surely, Beatrice the Golden Witch would not have messed up her own resurrection ritual? Why did the culprit do things this way? Did they feel the time pressure of the typhoon? I have another theory: there was a variable that the culprit did not expect.

Let's talk about Kanon's death. Maria tells us that Kanon and Kumasawa were heading to the boiler room when, suddenly, they heard a door slam and Kanon raced off ahead to find the source of the noise. And then:

What are we to make of this? There is a very clear parallel to how Shannon met her end. This is actually the scene that convinced me Rudolph was the culprit.

Kanon answered. There's some important wording here. Kanon is not alone. The scene presents him as being in dialogue with another individual, and yet it is impossible for any living person to be in the room with him. Any living person.

Of course, Maria would have us believe that Kanon is talking to Beatrice, but who knows what is meant by Beatrice in this instance? I'm not sure if I'll get around to writing a post solely dedicated to her, but Beatrice is experiencing some pretty strong semantic overload at this point. Beatrice is a mythological figure from a specific story and also a mysterious backer who gave Kinzo a bunch of gold decades ago and also a supposed concubine of Kinzo and also a stand-in for any event that seems inexplicable and she's also an unknown individual who talked to Maria out in the rain one day but also she's the family alchemist who recently quit and also she's a kind of abstract adversary of the mystery genre itself such that to defeat her is to solve the mystery is to prove that magic is not real and everything happens for rational reasons and also she's an alter ego used by any number of culprits involved in the Rokkenjima murders, or potentially a kind of Gestalt entity constructed from the actions and deceptions of the people of Rokkenjima collectively.

I wonder if Beatrice was also the name of Kinzo's childhood sled.

With all that said, it is rather important that we finally got a scene where someone talks to "Beatrice," although we can't hear her answer.

At the end of the day, someone killed Kanon, so we surely must identify this Beatrice with the culprits. This is somewhat troublesome since Kanon is himself one of the culprits, but there are some other important details to pick at.

The first is that the entire scene is framed explicitly around Kanon's defiance. Kanon is extremely upset by the death of Shannon. This is perhaps the one thing we know for sure about Kanon's character. We see him declare that he's going to ruin the whole plan with the Demon's Roulette, attempt to strike at "Beatrice" and then he is killed for his efforts. Beatrice is described as holding great contempt for Kanon on a personal level.

Maria doesn't seem too impressed with him either.

The second thing to note is that the Beatrice that Kanon sees is the same one seen by Shannon. What are we to make of this? On one hand, they could be completely different Beatrice's, and the repetition of the butterflies is simply to inform us that both manifestations represent one of the meanings associated with the name. I would argue that any supernatural event would do this job just fine, and it's more narratively satisfying if it's the same Beatrice.

Back in the first twilight I said that Shannon's butterflies represent misfortune: Shannon was in the wrong place at the wrong time and met with a terrible fate as a result. We can also view these butterflies as a stand-in for the culprits in the first case, who I have suggested were Battler's parents.

If we try to tell this story with Kanon, it goes like this: Kanon heads down to the boiler room. He was in on the witch conspiracy, and was already supposed to go down here to "discover" Kinzo's body the same way he "discovered" all of the others. However, he dashes ahead of Kumasawa, taking her by surprise. He ends up arriving at the boiler room before he was supposed to. Once there, he meets the culprits from the first case and reveals that he's been holding the death of Shannon against them. While he knew the risk of the Demons' Roulette, after experiencing such loss he decided he no longer saw it as worth the cost. He attempts to attack the killer, but is shot in the chest for his efforts, creating the fifth twilight ahead of schedule. The killer flees the boiler room. We could read Kanon's attack on the witch both as a literal attack on the person in the boiler room with him and as a figurative attack on Beatrice as a concept: by ruining the order of the twilights he has undermined the entire witch narrative.

It is interesting that, when Kanon's body is found, Kumasawa is described as looking confused about the scene before her. I think this could further back up my idea that Kanon wasn't supposed to die here. I also considered the possibility that Kanon somehow stabbed himself, and his attack on Beatrice was purely a metaphorical act of defiance, but it just doesn't line up with the physical evidence. I've been leaning toward George's idea that the stakes are being fired by some kind of weapon, since the story keeps bringing up that it's hard to drive them in so far by hand. The assumption that such a weapon exists means that there needs to be a separate killer.

Which brings me back to the Rudolph and Kyrie theory. Someone killed Kanon, and yet no living person could have killed Kanon. So why not assume a dead one did it instead?

It was only on the reread that I noticed something odd regarding the aftermath of the body's discovery: the entire scene in which Battler gives chase to the killer and ends up in the courtyard, seeing no-one, is written entirely in the 3rd person. I don't think anything like this has happened before. Battler burst through the door, sprinting up the stairs before Natsuhi could follow. We have an entire scene where Battler is the only person present, and yet we do not see his perspective. We only see Maria's guess at what he was seeing and thinking. It is only once he returns that we finally get our first line in 1st person:

This is really, really weird. Why has Battler's perspective been hidden from us? The only reason to switch back at this specific moment is if the author wants to cast doubt on what happened before, but Battler is supposed to be the one we trust. What could he be hiding from us?

What did you see, Battler?

[natsuhi-did-nothing-wrong]

love the way watanagashi introduces this perceived contradiction between "mion the boy" ie keiichi's friend who's brash and commanding and has a raunchy sense of humor and "mion the girl" ie a potential romantic interest for keiichi. it's 1983 (and 2002 when it was written lol) so a lot of the language used is predicated on the assumption that this is a strict, mutually exclusive choice mion has to make and that mion's only path to being thought of in that way is to Be More Of A Girl while watanagashi simultaneously keeps going out of its way to have mion - and a number of people close to mion - reiterate like five different times that mion is regularly saying shit like "i sometimes wonder why i wasn't born a boy"

[natsuhi-did-nothing-wrong]

Umineko Episode 1 Blog: Second Twilight

those who remain shall tear apart the two who are close

This one should be a nice breather after the first case. At the very least, we saw the victims' faces, so we can confidently say that they both died. I dare say it's fairly obvious what the trick behind this locked room is, given our assumptions.

Before that, let's talk about that touching domestic scene between Eva and Hideyoshi that didn't happen. As great as their relationship no doubt is, this scene transparently only exists to justify the idea that these two can be classed as "the two who are close," so that Maria's ghost story will make sense. While Battler thinks that the witch story becomes a lot stronger after seeing this case, I think that this is actually where the whole performance starts to fall apart.

Notice that both Eva and Hideyoshi were killed using stakes. I think this is a little questionable. It makes sense for the later murders to share this commonality, since all of the lines in the epitaph referencing them fit the same "gouge the X and kill" pattern. This one does not. It doesn't even really fit the whole "tear apart" bit. They didn't get torn apart: they got impaled through the skull. You could maybe argue that they were seperated from eachother in the sense that marriage is 'til death do us part, but wouldn't it make more sense to just kill one of them and leave the other alive? Or to sabotage their relationship somehow? To me, it seems like these murders don't really fit the epitaph at all, and those involved in the witch conspiracy tried to hastily make it all make sense, or simply misunderstood what that line was supposed to mean in the first place.

If we want to get meta with it, the phrase "those who remain" is interesting. Who exactly is referred to? Those who are currently alive when the 2nd twilight rolls around? Or those who are left alive from the sacrifices mentioned in the previous line? I wouldn't put it past some mysterious riddle to play with wording like that.

The latter interpretation would seem to support my theory that Battler's parents are the culprits. They would fit the bill for "those who remain". We could speculate that Eva and Hideyoshi knew about the plot to kill Krauss, which is why they discouraged the others from investigating the crime scene in the storehouse too closely, and then told everyone not to come to their room. There, they waited for Rudolph and Kyrie to show up and let them into the room, at which point they ended up getting killed. The idea of all the younger siblings working together with respect to killing Krauss would also serve to explain how the killer got into the room, which should have been locked from the inside, although one could argue that the servants could talk their way into getting the door open. If nothing else, they could claim to be bringing dinner.

Anyway, let's give a big hand for good ol' Kanon. Not only was he the one who suggested finding Maria in the rain, after he unfortunately failed to notice her right next to him on his way to the guesthouse, and not only was he the first to discover the bodies in the storehouse, but now it seems he was also the first one to realise that Eva and Hideyoshi were dead and he went to the Storehouse (the one with the "corpses"? Hmm...) to retrieve the tool needed to cut the chain, which he had already finished doing before Natsuhi or any of the cousins could show up to witness him cutting the chain. Good old Kanon! What would we do without him? I guess we'll find out pretty soon.

It should be clear what I think of this locked room: the room was never locked. Literally the only reason we think it was is because the servants said it, and Maria bought the story and wrote it down, sprinkling in the detail about the magic circle mysteriously appearing to back up her magic theory. There is nothing impossible or magical about this case if we simply assume the servants lied about the chain being in the way and cut it in advance to make the story seem believable.

As a potential alternative to my fake corpse theory, we could argue that Kanon and Genji simply killed Eva and Hideyoshi themselves, since they don't have any kind of alibi. I don't think we can really pin down the exact culprit, unless we try to metagame it with the epitaph.

Come to think of it, did Battler actually see the crime scene personally? The wording is a little unclear. George did see it, though, so I think the broad strokes are accurate enough. The initial scene of the corpses being examined is notably 3rd person. I'm a little more inclined to believe the reality of this scene, given that Maria was there for it and I don't think she's the type who will just lie about things she saw herself, although we ought to doubt her speculations about what everyone was thinking.

I'll leave you with a quote that made me lose my mind on the reread:

Even Maria thinks this guy is full of it!

[natsuhi-did-nothing-wrong]

[natsuhi-did-nothing-wrong]

Umineko Episode 1 Blog: First Twilight

This is the beginning of everything.

The first murder case is the hardest of the bunch. There is such a huge gap of time in which it could have occured, 6 different people died, we are given very little material evidence to pin down the series of events, almost everyone is a suspect, including some of the dead, and the circumstances lead me to believe that the crime is the result of a large number of actors, rather than a single convenient culprit. Narratively, it seems clear that truly understanding the first case provides the key to understanding the "why" behind the murders, and thus to unravelling all of the mysterious events on Rokkenjima.

A few things we can be sure of:

Krauss and Shannon are dead. The story will later call into question the state of the other bodies, and narratively speaking there should be some reason why these two are the ones whose faces are only partially damaged. The story wants us to understand that, at the very least, these two were killed.

The crime scene was deliberately arranged to reflect the epitaph, which mentions six sacrifices.

There is blood in the dining room, so at least some of the murders likely happened there.

To start forming any other hypotheses, let's start doing a bit of interpretation.

Let's start with Shannon's final moments. This is a 3rd person scene, and features explicit magic to boot, so it definitely didn't happen, but we are nevertheless obliged to work out what it means. Beatrice's butterflies are symbolically associated with misfortune. The unnamed servant who was injured before the story began is said to have seen the butterflies, and then been hurt. This description is framed rather passively: it is not that Beatrice attacked them, but that they simply got injured. We see further references to fate throughout Episode 1. Notably, we are told that the 6 sacrifices are chosen by "the key of fate," and Kinzo's scenes make reference to the "Demons' Roulette".

Later on, I want to make a dedicated post to discussing the epitaph and how it relates to the murders, but for now I just want to focus on the first line:

On the first twilight, offer the six chosen by the key as sacrifices.

This line is rather notable in its precise phrasing. While most of the twilight lines explicitly tell the reader to kill someone, this one only says that the 6 must be in some sense "offered as sacrifices". They do not all have to die. More importantly for our current purposes, the epitaph says that the 6 must be chosen by fate, in some sense. In other words, the culprits responsible for maintaining the myth of the witch can't be responsible for the initial killings. They have to wait for murders to start happening naturally and then start carrying out the epitaph's directions.

My suspicion, based largely on circumstancial evidence, is that the initial killings were started by Battler's parents. Here are my reasons:

The story goes out of its way to mention Rudolph and Kyrie both wearing makeup, and then reuses the term makeup when describing the state of their faces. In the moment we're supposed to see this as metaphor, but given the story flagging the possibility of fake corpses later, it seems more like planting a seed.

Rudolph and Kyrie have ample motivation to assassinate Krauss, and we've already seen how the older siblings can bully Rosa into going along with their schemes. They could have had her in on it and then double-crossed and killed her too.

The deaths of the servants on duty are explained as them needing to cover up their initial murders. Under this interpretation, the "misfortune" that Beatrice's butterflies represent is a reference to the fact that Shannon was never supposed to be in the Mansion, but by an unfortunate coincidence she ended up getting killed.

Kyrie, the originator of the "spin the chessboard" metaphor, would absolutely have tried to conceal the true reasons for the murders by disguising them as ritualistic killings to carry out the epitaph. The only other people I could see bothering with this are the servants, but I've already said that I don't think they could be the original culprits, since they have to let fate decide the first victims.

I will mention here that I think the boiler room scenes could potentially back up my theory, but that will have to wait a few posts. I'm excited to get around to the boiler room.

Rudolph tells his family to expect him to turn up dead, the night before the killings actually occur. Kyrie then chases him up to find out what he's talking about. Kyrie herself explains Rudolph's behaviour as him wanting to tell Battler something, but being prevented from sharing it for some reason. If we think from the perspective that I'm wrong, this would indicate that Rudolph suspected the true killers' motives, but if we assume I'm right then it tells us that he was already plotting. He knew the events would be upsetting to his son, and felt the impulse to warn him, but ultimately knew that he could not afford to tell Battler anything.

Rudolph's character profile after death says "he has a right to lament his ill fortune". Rudolph is the only character whose post-death profile talks about him in the present tense like this. It's a strange way to phrase a statement about a dead person.

The bloody scratchmarks on Natsuhi's bedroom door take on a coherent symbolic meaning under this theory. It should be noted that we never actually see these bloody marks outside of a single 3rd person scene. Natsuhi later brings up hanging the scorpion charm on her door, but the blood is only mentioned in an internal monologue written by Maria. Genji only brings up the blood himself in a single scene with the servants in the kitchen, but this is also 3rd person and Battler's later 1st person narration doesn't clarify whether or not he actually heard Genji say this (probably not, or he surely would have brought it up at some point). Presumably, these scenes are Maria explaining her interpretation of events: she thinks the charm protected Natsuhi.

On a meta level, these scenes might be intended to tell us that the culprits behind the initial killings wanted to get rid of Natsuhi as well, but were somehow prevented from doing so. One possibility is that they simply ran out of sacrifices: Kyrie and Rudolph have to fake their own deaths, and kill Krauss and Rosa. They were expecting to have to kill Gohda, who was the only servant on the night shift in the mansion, which would let them kill Natsuhi as their 6th and final sacrifice. However, Shannon, who wasn't supposed to be there, ended up taking the 6th slot instead. They probably bumped into her in the halls when they were looking for Natsuhi's room, which is what the butterflies represent.

My major problem I'm running into here is that I can't understand the role of Kinzo's inner circle in all of this. They surely co-operated in creating the locked room mystery. Kanon was the one who supposedly discovered the suspicious state of the storehouse, and we already know he's Maria's witch. My guess is that he locked the storehouse room himself before reporting it to everyone. Later events will pretty strongly imply all the servants were working to maintain the conspiracy to some extent, and we get that 3rd person scene with Genji and Kanon where they discuss starting their "morning chores," which is probably meant to tell us that they co-operated on setting up the locked room mystery. Since Natsuhi told the servants to replace the locks after she saw the bodies, they had the opportunity to return to the scene and let the fake victims leave before locking the storehouse for good.

I can believe Kyrie and Rudolph killing these people and trying to create the illusion of the epitaph. I can believe the servants would co-operate in creating such a legend, out of their dedication to Kinzo's legacy if nothing else, but my main issue is that I don't understand how they could be co-operating. Why would Kyrie and Rudolph ever think the servants would help them with all of this? There's clearly something I'm not understanding. I really like the theory that Battler's parents are the culprits, but if that's true I would need to do more work to explain everyone's motivations. Maybe this is something I can leave for when I've read more of the story.

Part of me wonders if it's ok to leave things off here when there are such clear holes in my theory, but at the end of the day there's only so much time I'm going to dedicate to figuring stuff out before I want to just read on. Me being wrong about everything is half the fun, anyway

The next post will probably be about Eva and Hideyoshi's deaths.