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ricordandoilpassato · 5 years ago

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@yasuda-yoshiya, please have my firstborn, that was one of the most insightful posts on Umineko that I’ve ever read

It's certainly interesting considering the different perspectives fans of Umineko would have depending on whenether they were along for the ride, or started after it ended. Though I can't really say if I agree with that betrayed mindset. It was a little frustrating yeah, but to me, all the clues were there. And there was really nothing in 1-4 that indicated the answer would be handed on a silver platter. If anything Higurashi betrays the genre after building up the mystery part so much in 1-6.

Well like I said, I feel like the betrayed feeling is something that people who started Umineko after it had already ended won’t really understand. You have to realize the perspective of people who were reading the series while it was still coming out, literally waiting 6 months between releases. I only got into Umineko during the time before EP5′s Japanese release, but even for me that meant two years just to get through Chiru. When you’re waiting excitedly for that long to read the next installment of the story, and it hits and the spoilers come out of the floodgates only to be told ‘yeah the ending doesn’t actually give any answers’…well, if you weren’t there at the time, I don’t think you could understand. Especially since now, years after it’s happened, you have tons of people who have come together to try and make sense of the EP8 ending, and now we have the EP8 manga to boot.

I don’t think EP8 is even a fraction as polarizing now as it was when it first came out - I mean, again, I’m not just talking about my own personal feelings, here. People were quitting Umineko in droves when they found out how EP8 ended, people started shitting on Ryukishi like crazy, and everyone either felt betrayed or was laughing at the people who took the story seriously enough to feel betrayed in the first place. It was a pretty universal sentiment at the time…it’s just one of those ‘you had to be there’ sorts of things that I’m not sure anyone who didn’t experience could really understand, even if I try to explain it.

As far as Higurashi goes, though - I can’t agree. Higurashi was never presented explicitly as a mystery series. It was certainly mysterious, but it was presented as a horror and supernatural-themed story right from the start. It challenged critical thinking, but it never outright said ‘this is a mystery, try to solve this’ to its readers. There also wasn’t really anything to be betrayed because Higurashi pretty concretely answered all the questions it presented. When I say ‘betrayed’ I don’t mean ‘because the answers weren’t satisfying’, I mean ‘because there literally were not answers’. Because, remember, the EP8 VN leaves the details on a LOT of things in the catbox that were only later given concrete details by the manga. The betrayal part is the fact that we were told to solve a mystery, and at the end, we weren’t given the sheet to check our answers against despite the story often reinforcing the very fact that people like to know that a mystery is, in fact, solvable (see EP5 ???? tea party scene with Virgilia and Dlanor specifically).

Higurashi didn’t betray anything, though. Not only because it never presented itself as an explicit mystery, but because it did answer all of its questions (aside from maybe some minor things). Matsuribayashi-hen’s puzzle segment of putting together all the kakera alone answers almost every lingering mystery from the series since Onikakushi-hen, going all the way back to the initial conflict over the dam and covering every incident until the present time. If Higurashi were a proper mystery, that would be the ‘answer sheet’ - like saying, before this point, get your theories together, because this is your last chance. And then the kakera puzzle goes through all the questions you may have had and answers them. And at that point you can say ‘oh hey, I guessed that right!!’ or ‘aw man I was totally off’. But the answers are given. To everything. Whether you were satisfied by ‘lol brain parasites’ is another matter entirely - that’s not what I mean by betrayal. It’s the fact that, prior to the release of the manga, Umineko’s ending decided not to even give us those answers at all.

Again, you have to put into perspective just how much discussion took place over even just the two years that I was into Umineko - let alone the four years for those who got into it from the time of EP1. Go to AnimeSuki sometime and check out the old archived Umineko forum, and look at the sheer number of pages each individual Episode’s discussion thread has…and that’s not even counting the general spoiler for all EPs discussion thread, all the anime discussions, manga discussions, or all the discussions that happened on other places like 4chan (unfortunately most records of those were lost when Foolz died, RIP original Pony Theory thread). People spent countless hours of their lives putting together theories to try and solve the individual Episodes and their mysteries, and at the very least, in the end, were expecting some closure more than just the cryptic solutions given by Will in EP7. People wanted that answer sheet so they could check to see if their theories were correct, or oh so wrong.

And they weren’t given that. Despite Umineko repeatedly going over mystery tropes and reinforcing to the reader that it was, in fact, solvable as long as they had their Critical Thinking Hats on…it never delivered on the chance to let us see how right or wrong we were. That was the core of people’s dissatisfaction with the ending, and Ryukishi’s smug attitude in that infamous interview just rubbed salt in those wounds by him basically going full Featherine and insulting his readers, basically telling us that if we couldn’t see the truth already we didn’t deserve the chance to check the answer sheet, mocking us for not liking his brilliant twists, and just all sorts of rude-ass shit. Have you read Answer to the Golden Witch? Check it out sometime and try to think from the perspective of people who were already feeling dissatisfied by the lack of answers in EP8…and then feeling that the mighty King Ryukishi was sitting high on his throne looking down on them and mocking the pathetic peasants who couldn’t grasp The Heart without someone holding their hands. Suffice to say, a lot of people lost respect for Ryukishi after that - hence, that feeling of betrayal.

But I do feel that Ryukishi has at least somewhat redeemed himself for that old attitude. The fact that he chose to release the EP8 manga the way he did at all shows me that he maybe realized how people like me felt about having the answers shut away in the catbox…which, while thematically appropriate, was not at all satisfying for the loyal Umineko fans who had devoted so much time to trying to solve the mystery. I’m sure there were a lot of mindless goats who just wanted the answers served on a silver platter - but we were not them. We worked out asses off trying to tackle the mystery from so many angles over the course of years. And I think he finally realized, once the dust had settled, how that inconclusive ending must have made us feel.

I read a thing here on Tumblr that was a snippet from a different interview or post or something by Ryukishi at the time when he decided to release the EP8 manga…anyone happen to have a link to that? I’ll edit this post if I find it. But basically it shows just how hard it was for him to make that ultimate decision, between keeping the thematic ending of shutting the truth up in the catbox, or releasing that truth to the people who grasped so hard for it for so long. And I appreciate the fact that he ultimately did decide to reward us for our efforts by giving the answers in the form of the EP8 manga. Reading what a difficult decision it was for him eased a lot of my old hatred…I’m still not terribly fond of the man, but I don’t hate Ryukishi anymore. As much. I just tend to have trouble getting over grudges. But I do respect and appreciate him for releasing the EP8 manga, because it shows at least some part of him doesn’t think all of his fans are stupid goats who want to be spoonfed. That was the part that hurt people like me the most, you know - we really did work hard at trying to actually solve the mystery. We did not want to be spoonfed the answers. We wanted to do the same thing Featherine wanted Bern to make EP7 for - to check our answers and know whether or not the solutions we found were true.

So yeah…maybe that helps explain a bit better what I mean when I say that so many people felt betrayed by the way Umineko ended. But I do think that it’s probably hard to understand if you weren’t there at the time. The current Umineko fandom is very different from the one back then, simply because the environment is so different now. We even have blogs like Ramblings of the Golden Witch that go through all the evidence in the existing material and analyze lingering questions.

But again, that’s only possible because the answers exist now. We actually have a complete set of all the novels + all the manga + the extra content of the EP8 manga in front of us that we can sit down and compare and dissect. That’s a luxury that didn’t exist in ‘my time’. We had the visual novel, the PC original without even voice acting, and we had a disjointed collection of partially-finished manga (the EP7 manga would have just scarcely begun at the time EP8 was released in Japan when this shitstorm broke out)…and we had our theories, and our discussions, which colored a lot of perceptions and further clouded the line between canon and unconfirmed. There was a lot more speculation than answers back then, which I feel has reversed now - there’s still a lot about Umineko that’s vague or inside the catbox, and that’s why we can still enjoy discussing it even all these years later. But there are also a lot of concrete answers provided by the EP7 and EP8 manga that did not exist back then. And more than the fact that they didn’t exist, Ryukishi was insistent about the fact that they wouldn’t exist, and shame on us for wanting them to, because obviously we weren’t worthy of them.

People who got into Umineko after 2011, and especially after the EP8 manga existed…they got to experience a very different Umineko than I did. One where there were answers and spoilers and people willing to sit down and analyze these things and try to make more sense of them. A world where, even if you’re the type who avoids spoilers and doesn’t want to confirm anything until you’ve read it for yourself, you could then go online and look it up or ask someone to help clarify the solution for you if you felt confused. A world where we could say concretely things like ‘Yasu’s reason for committing the crime was more than just being lonely because Battler didn’t come back, as seen in Confession of the Golden Witch’. And you can say, oh, I see, that makes sense, because you have actual factual evidence clarifying the mystery and making the foreshadowing more obvious in hindsight.

People who got into Umineko before 2011 didn’t have that. All we could say was ‘so, uh, she killed everyone because she took a kid’s promise too seriously? That’s it? We’re supposed to accept that as a motive? What is this shit?’ because the VN did a terrible job of exploring the other conflicts that pushed Yasu to her breaking point. That’s just one example, of course. But for basically everything you now have concrete evidence to back up, from the identities of Yasu’s accomplices in each arc to the solutions of individual closed rooms? We had nothing but speculation, speculation, and more speculation. And that speculation varied wildly. You think Rosatrice is as bad as it gets? Don’t make me laugh. I’ve seen some shit theories in my day. But because everything was shrouded in mysterious catbox mystery, even the shittiest theories couldn’t be denied. I’m talking literal goat-tier shit with a flimsier basis than small bombs that completely disregarded The Heart, not just of Yasu, but multiple characters. But people clung to these theories because ‘b-but there’s nothing saying it’s not true, devil’s proof, devil’s proof!!’. They were great times and I wouldn’t trade them for the world, but damn was the 2009-2011 Umineko fandom a shitshow.

TL;DR I don’t expect you to understand that feeling of betrayal because I think it’s fundamentally based on the circumstances of the time. Reading through all of Umineko in one go and being able to check your answers afterward is just too wholly different from the experience of reading an Episode at a time, with 6 months of waiting before the next, and then in the end being told ‘yeah you’re not gonna get a real answer lol sorry’.

I’d be curious to hear the perspectives of other people who were there at the time as well, assuming any are still in the current fanbase. I do know that every October when someone makes the annual Seac/a/ts thread you get a lot of people who pop in to say things like ‘do people still like this shit? I dropped it because DID Meido’ or to talk about how much Chiru sucks compared to the old EPs, and other things like that. And it often feels like the only people who stuck around did so because they want to deito Lucifer or fuck Erika, and I think there’s still a regular circlejerk general on /jp/ with all of like 5 people who still talk about Umineko. On the Tumblr side of things I get the impression that a lot of the more active blogs are people who got into the fandom later, and have a very different perspective than me (which I actually find refreshing and fun) who probably also don’t understand why I’m often so bitter about Ryukishi and how I still have yet to read EP8 for myself.

I’m like the grizzled old adventurer walking through a town full of fresh-faced younguns as I mutter ‘I hate Umineko, fuck Ryukishi’ under my breath. And they’re like ‘why does that person keep going into the dungeon if they hate it so much…?’ and I’m like ‘you wouldn’t understand, you’ll never understand the things I’ve seen’ while I venture into the darkness. But also we can sit down at the local tavern and swap stories of our own experiences and realize how different they are, and how they’re still fun to talk about, and every time I feel like I know the dungeon like the back of my hand someone comes along with a fresh perspective and I see it in a different way.

I think the analogy got away from me, but yeah, something like that. Somehow, after all these years, I’m still finding new things to discuss about Umineko with people from a different perspective, and I think that’s part of what makes it fun, even if they don’t always understand where my mindset is coming from :P

#umineko #this post is gold

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