#I debated not posting it for esoteric reasons

[beebfreeb]

Make AUs of your own OCs. My final message to the world...

[kassandra-the-witch]

Trying to make sense of Umineko while playing it for the first time, essay post-Ep1: The Beatrice lies in the details

0. On games, interactivity, roulette, and chess, or: how to lose at Umineko

Umineko no Naku Koro ni, commonly translated as Umineko: When they cry, also translated as Umineko: When the seagulls cry, also abbreviated as Umineko, also subtitled (I think?) Rondo of the Witch and Reasoning, is a visual novel series originally released between 2007 and 2010 by the group 07th Expansion, under the influential authorship of Ryukishi07, also abbreviated Ryukishi in fandom discussions. Umineko might best be classified as a story[i]. As far as the medium goes, Umineko has, as far as I understand, existed in form of an online visual novel, a PS3 game, a manga, a downloadable visual novel, and an anime, if not more. And yet, as I experience Umineko, I have paid for it and downloaded it from Steam, as well as having installed a massive and wonderful total conversion mod on top of it. The question of “what is a game” is an esoteric one, one that renders “is Umineko a game” absurdly unanswerable. But while categorizing Umineko as a game or not a game is difficult, it is easy to see that Umineko has a loaded allegorical relationship to game(s).

In Episode 1 of Umineko, Legend of the Golden Witch (to be called Ep1 from now on), two different games are brought to the table regularly, both as metaphors and games characters play: chess and roulette. Chess and roulette are very different games, almost diametrically opposite. Chess is a game in which every move can be calculated, at least in theory. While such computers are yet to be created, a computer with sufficient capacity of calculating could simulate every possible chess game, always know a certain path to victory. Humans are incapable of knowing every single possible chess game at once. Humans playing chess at a high level memorize and execute cyclical patterns and try to guide their opponent(s) into patterns and cycles they are unfamiliar with. Despite having no randomness involved, despite seeming predetermined every time, chess is a fascinating and very human game to play. And, indeed, a lot of the humans (and witches) in Umineko Ep1 play chess. When Ushiromiya Kinzo asks his resident doctor and old friend how long he still has to live in the prelude, the doctor points to a chess game they are playing to establish a metaphor. When trying to solve the death of his parents as a crime, Ushiromiya Battler turns to chess and the repeating idea of “spinning around the chessboard” to find the culprit. Who plays chess against whom and with what level of skill is a motive and allegorical theme repeated over and over and over again in Umineko Ep1.

While no character in Umineko Ep1 plays an actual game of roulette, roulette is also a repeated motive in this story. Roulette is random or not random depending on a complex philosophical debate around determinism – but on a well-designed roulette table, no human or computer is able to tell the outcome of a spin of the wheel. To many minor factors, like air flow, friction of minute surfaces, gravitational pulls, and rotational momentum make roulette highly random. In Umineko Ep1, the so-called demon’s roulette is a repeated motive pertaining to the potentially supernatural violence that characters are subjected to as the deaths and murders commence, as well as an allegory for capitalism. One character in Umineko Ep1, a child servant by the name of Kanon, wants to withdraw from this seemingly randomized violence of the demon’s roulette by explaining that he will become the unforeseen variable in this roulette game, the Zero, neither red nor black on the roulette wheel, and therefore a gamble to bet on. I do not know a lot about roulette, but if I recall correctly, the Zero is part of roulette not as a game-breaking but game-enabling mechanism; through the Zero, the house has a statistical edge on a longer and longer series of roulette games.

Be that is it may, both games are referenced and loaded with meaning in Umineko Ep1. Chess, not random and a clash of human minds, versus roulette, totally random, a game of chance without reason; this opens a spectrum through which to categorize any other game. Some characters as well as some of the menus in Umineko Ep1, particularly Lady Bernkastel in the second-order frame narrative, urge the players/readers/player-readers to treat Umineko as a game of chess, one with pieces, invalid and valid, better and worse moves. This framing of Umineko as a chess-like game implies that Umineko could be solved. The question is what it means to solve Umineko. Umineko happens. It happens to the player-reader. The player-reader cannot change the story on any level of the story. Sure, in the first-order and second-order frame narratives, the player-reader can choose to turn the descriptions of characters in the menu that functions as a dramatis personae to their respective dead or alive states, which reflects what happens when the dramatis personae updates during the happenings of the embedded narrative. But toggling states in the dramatis personae doesn’t change anything; the player-reader but sees different text describing characters. Beatrice’s entry into the dramatis personae in the first-order and second-order frame narratives even taunts the player-reader with their powerlessness, the inability to interact, when you try to set Beatrice’s entry to dead. If Umineko is a game, it is not played within the mechanics of the software. Umineko is, if even playable in the first place, played metatextually. Presenting itself on the outset as a murder mystery, solving Umineko means unravelling its mysteries as it progresses. There is no apparent win-or-lose condition to Umineko.

And yet, one does not simply commit to a story as massive and complex as Umineko without prior knowledge of it. I got into Umineko because of @siphonophorus/Ozaawa’s obsession with it. Ozaawa is a cherished discord friend, who has had Beatrice as their profile picture ever since I can remember. I had started Umineko Ep1 with multiple spoilers in mind, such as: “There is a long time loop”, “Beatrice is really queer”, “people die and get resurrected over and over again”, “magic somehow is and isn’t real at the same time”, and “the narrative structure is a mess”. But the most intriguing piece of knowledge is as follows: “you can solve a lot Umineko from very early on”. Apparently someone in the fandom named pochapal had solved large pieces of the puzzle very very early on in the course of the story. Now, since Umineko urges you to treat it as chess, there is an analogy that immediately sprung to my mind: There are ways to checkmate someone in chess in the least possible amount of moves, a common one of these strategies being called a scholar’s mate. Four moves by the player controlling the white pieces lead, under ideal circumstances, to a checkmate and victory. Without knowing the solution to Umineko, you can meaningfully solve Umineko in a (relatively) short amount of story. I call this idea Umineko’s scholar’s mate. I want to explore this possibility, one of the primary reasons why I am writing this essay and plan on writing more of them in the future; to solve as much as I think I can after every episode. Writing this essay is me playing Umineko (I think). There is however a massive problem to me being obsessed with Umineko’s scholar’s mate; namely, that I suck absolute ass at chess and detective/murder mysteries. I am also rather mediocre at literary analysis, and cannot call myself a literary scholar in a great capacity. Congratulations to pochapal for doing Umineko’s scholar’s mate or at least coming close to that, I will not be able to reproduce that achievement. I have invested roughly 31 hours into Ep1 and I still do not know where to start solving the epitaph or who was killed how by whom. I am a historian, and that is about the range of my expertise. I almost did not write this essay and had been moving into Ep2 for roughly thirty minutes before a dumb joke I made on Discord lead to a lot of pieces clicking into place and me being able to synthesize a stable, if a bit tangential reading of Ep1 (more on that serendipitous accident in section 3 of this essay).

All in all, I am obsessed with this story to an extreme level and my brain is constantly trying to crack its mysteries. I invite you to join me on this journey, a delayed live-commentary of my first play-readthrough of Umineko. That being said, given the nature of my approach to play-reading Umineko, I’d like to avoid spoilers for Episodes I have yet to read as much as possible, and I’d hope anyone reading this will respect that wish.

Content warning: Umineko is a horror story that deals with a lot of systems of violence in gruesome detail. So much violence in fact that I fear the content warning in itself could be triggering. The full content warning will be found under the Read More.

Umineko Ep1 contains in varying degrees of alluding, mentioning, and describing: extreme gore, murder, suicide, sexual assault, patriarchal violence, class violence, child labour, grooming, familial violence, intergenerational violence and intergenerational trauma, child abuse, misogyny, psychological horror, colonialism, imperialism, and fascism.

1. On Umineko Ep1, or: Synopsis

The story of Umineko Ep1 unfolds in stages. The first stage to unlock is the embedded narrative of Ep1. It opens with a prelude on the island of Rokkenjima, a fictional, circular island with a circumference of roughly ten kilometres that is part of the real-life volcanic Izu Archipelago of Japan[ii], a short amount of time before Saturday, the 4th of October 1986. A conversation between Ushiromiya Kinzo, patriarch over the ultrawealthy Ushiromiya family and man who bought himself into the title of “owner of Rokkenjima”, and Doctor Nanjo, his attending physician and long-term friend, unfolds in Kinzo’s study in his mansion. Nanjo reveals to Kinzo that the latter is dying and has not much time left, explaining to Kinzo that he might want to settle his affairs. Kinzo reacts, in the presence of a disturbed Nanjo and the much more calm and collected head servant Genji, with at outburst of anger, revealing an obsession with a woman named Beatrice.

On the morning of Saturday, the 4th of October 1986, members of the Ushiromiya family assemble on a nearby airport. Among those assembled are Kinzo’s second oldest child, Eva, her husband, Hideyoshi, and their child, George, as well Rudolf, Kinzo’s third child, Rudolf’s second wife Kyrie, and Rudolf’s son out of his first marriage, Battler, and lastly, Kinzo’s fourth and youngest child, Rosa, as well as Rosa’s daughter, Maria. These seven travel per airplane to nearby Niijima, where they meet up with Jessica, the daughter of Kinzo’s oldest son, and Kumasawa, one of the servants at Rokkenjima. They take a boat to Rokkenjima, arriving around 10:30 AM.

On Rokkenjima, the weather starts to show signs of getting worse. Traversing through the Ushiromiya family estate, the only part of the island that is inhabited by humans, they meet Godha, the ambitious and renowned private cook, and Kanon, a teenager and servant at the household, currently struggling to do heavy labour in the elaborate rose garden. The new arrivals settle into the guesthouse, separated from the main mansion by the rose garden. In the mansion, the final set of characters of importance to the story get introduced. Sayo, working under the servant name of Shannon, another young servant of the household, Krauss, Kinzo’s first child and heir-apparent to the Ushiromiya head family, and Natsuhi, Krauss’ wife and Jessica’s mother.[iii]

The children, i. e. the cousins, staying at the guesthouse, do some catching-up on their lives, while the parents, i. e. the siblings, discuss at the mansion. Between 12:00 PM and 1:30PM, the family and Nanjo assemble in the dining room of the mansion for lunch. Waiting in vain for Kinzo’s attendance, they proceed to eat without him. At around 1:30 PM, the parents withdraw to discuss finances and inheritance politics. Knowing that Kinzo is close to death, the question of who gets which part of the vast family fortune takes centre stage in their discussion. Accusing Krauss of embezzling some of Kinzo’s private fortune, namely the vast amount of it stored in a supposed ten tons of gold, Eva, Hideyoshi, Kyrie, and Rudolf (and Rosa to some degree) open with an offensive, demanding immediate compensation by Krauss. Denying the existence of the gold and shutting Natsuhi out of the conversation, Krauss counters, revealing that Rudolf is in desperate need of money because he is embroiled in legal battles in the United States, Hideyoshi and Eva are in need of money to support the shaky expansion of their business, and Rosa needs money for her fledgling business. Their talks ultimately end in a draw. Krauss later reveals to a distressed Natsuhi that the gold actually exists, showing a bar as proof.[iv]

Meanwhile, the children roam the mansion and later head down to the beach. They discuss a portrait hanging in the main staircase area, one that Battler had not seen since the last time he had been at Rokkenjima many years ago. The portrait supposedly shows the mystery woman, Beatrice, and has an epitaph underneath. Beatrice is known as the witch of the island, a myth Battler denounces as a fairy tale. The epitaph takes the form of a riddle, forecasting much death and tasking the readers with finding the hidden gold. On the beach, the children try to solve the riddle, also reminiscing on Kinzo’s biography and the history of the family fortune. While the Ushiromiya family had lost most of its wealth, means of production, and members in the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923, Kinzo rose to inherit the title of head of the family. By 1950, Kinzo had (re)established the family as one of the wealthiest of the country, having successfully gambled a lot of capital of mysterious origin on the Korean War. The children wonder if this mysterious starter capital might have been the gold, and if Beatrice might have been a mysterious financier that gave Kinzo this money. Maria, autistic child hyperfocused on the occult and dark magic, insists that Beatrice is a witch and had produced the gold using a “philosopher’s stone”.[v]

In the meantime, a massive storm that had been brewing for a while turns into first rainfall. At around 6:00 PM, Maria is still missing after having been hit in the face multiple times by Rosa a couple of hours earlier as a supposed disciplinary measure. The family goes searching for Maria. She is found in the rose garden, holding an umbrella, still looking for a singular rose plant she had taken a liking to when they first arrived at the island, scared that something might happen to the plant in the storm. Going on to look for whoever had handed Maria the umbrella to properly thank them, Maria insists that the umbrella had been handed to her by Beatrice. Furthermore, Beatrice, according to Maria’s description, had handed her a letter, to be read to the family. The letter, supposedly written by Beatrice herself, reminds them to solve the riddle of the epitaph, lest Beatrice collect what is owed to her according to a mysterious contract between Kinzo and her. Distressing over the letter, the adults continue to fight each other with words, up until midnight for some of them. In the meantime, George and Sayo, secretly involved with each other, meet up in the rose garden. George proposes to Sayo.

On the next day, at around 6:00 AM on the 5th of October, the machinery of the household springs to life again, while the storm still rages on. Preparing the breakfast is impossible, however, due to Godha being missing. As more of the guests and residents of the mansion and guesthouse wake up, it turns out that not only Godha is missing, but Sayo, Krauss, Rudolf, Kyrie, and Rosa as well. After Kanon discovers occult symbols written out in blood on the shutter of the rose garden storehouse, several characters rush to open it. Inside the storehouse are the corpses of all six that are missing, mutilated, especially in their faces.[vi] The family attempts to contact the police, but the telephones have failed in the storm, similarly, boats are no option.

Retreating to the mansion, they find the dining room covered in blood. Fearing for their lives, the survivors hole up in the parlor of the mansion at around 9 AM. Afterwards, they find Kinzo missing from his study. Everyone soon falls into suspicion of each other, suspecting a murderer in their midst, but also unable to rule out other parties, namely Beatrice, being involved. Especially Eva and Natsuhi begin fighting, while Natsuhi carries Kinzo’s rifle, the only known firearm on the island. In the meantime, the children, with the help of Maria, try to discuss the occult implications of the murders, and a new letter that had been found. At some point, despite Natsuhi’s reservations, Eva and Hideyoshi retreat to their guest rooms in the mansion.

At 7 PM, the servants discover the door to Eva and Hideyoshi’s room to be painted in blood. Prying the door open, they find the corpses of Eva and Hideyoshi, with strange spikes lodged into their foreheads.[vii] Smelling a strange smell coming from the boiler room in the basement, Kanon runs there. Challenging Beatrice, which he assigns to the darkness in the corner of the room, he tries to harm her, leading only to him being mortally wounded.[viii] It is difficult to decipher his final words, I personally do not understand if he had anticipated or at least accepted the potential of his death in that action. When everyone else catches up with him, it quickly becomes apparent that the smell is coming from the boiler, in which Kinzo’s charred corpse is found.[ix] The survivors retreat to Kinzo’s study, judging it to be the safest room in the mansion.

At around 8 PM, George, Battler, Jessica, and Natsuhi look at the smaller portrait of Beatrice on the wall of the study, when suddenly, another letter by Beatrice appears, in which Beatrice gleefully celebrates her victory. Suspecting those who had not looked at the portrait to contain Beatrice or at least a collaborator, Natsuhi sends out Nanjo, Genji, Maria, and Kumasawa.

At around 11:30 PM, the phone in the study rings, revealing a singing Maria. Sensing that she might have send the four others to their doom, Natsuhi goes looking for them. Their corpses are found in the parlor, safe for Maria, who stands to a wall, singing.[x] Natsuhi runs out to the main hall, when the clock strikes midnight. She challenges the darkness, Beatrice, to a duel, which leads to her being shot with the rifle she is carrying.[xi] The children arrive in the main hall to see a woman standing, half-shrouded in the dark, who Maria identifies as Beatrice, running towards her.

The next bit of story unfolds in the epilogue, written in the style of a historiographical account. The police arrive the next day, finding everyone dead, except the children, whose corpses could not be fully identified in the gore.[xii] An urban legend spawns from these two days at Rokkenjima. Some years later, a notebook fragment lodged inside a wine bottle washes ashore at a beach. It is a fragment of Maria’s diary, reporting on the events of the days, concluding in a cry not for help, but for the someone to solve the mystery at hand.

Concluding this embedded narrative, a new chapter called the Tea Party unlocks in the game’s menu. In the Tea Party, the first-order frame narrative unfolds, in a domain only labelled Purgatorio in the opening slide.[xiii] Kanon, Sayo, George, Jessica, Maria, and Battler converse about the events of the first Episode, fully aware that they are characters in a story. Most of them either believed in magic previously or now concede that magic must have been the murder weapon. Battler, however, resists this reading of events. Beatrice appears, superficially amused by Battler’s antics. Transporting them to the scene of Hideyoshi’s and Eva’s murder, she demonstrates supposedly magic mastery over so-called demonic stakes, with which she murders Hideyoshi and Eva again. Battler still does not concede, vowing to uncover what practical tricks Beatrice uses for her murders. The other children and young adults begin violently unravelling into piles of gore[xiv], as Beatrice magic keeping them alive supposedly fails as Battler is unable to believe in that magic. In her dying words, Jessica urges Battler to resist believing in magic.

Concluding the Tea Party, another chapter unlocks in the game’s menu. In this second-order frame narrative, in some ill-defined realm of witches, Beatrice hosts a witch named Bernkastel in her domain, inviting her to watch another game. While Beatrice is absent for a short while, Bernkastel turns her eyes and attention to the play-reader, giving, out of a self-reported pity for the play-reader, cryptic clues to playing/reading/observing Umineko. This concludes Ep1.

2. On apples falling from family trees, or: cyclical systems of violence

2.1 What the actual fuck, Battler: Rudolf, Rosa, parental violence, masculinity, and the patriarchy

The first thing that one can easily observe when reading Umineko Ep1 is that violence happens cyclically, on multiple levels. The violence Umineko examines is incredibly complex, with multiple threads interwoven into a singular system of power. A very fitting way to try to unravel these threads from one another (at least to some degree) is looking at the branches of the family tree placing allegorical emphasis on different aspects of that violence.

Much sooner than when the shutter is raised on the rose garden storehouse, Umineko Ep1 reaffirms that it is a horror game; more precisely, every third time[xv] Battler opens his mouth. For play-readers who get lulled into a false sense of security by the mundane family conversations at the airport, the harbour at Niijima reminds them of its horror when Battler makes jokes about sexually assaulting his cousin, Jessica. Later, he makes a joke about making Maria, his nine-year old cousin, promise that he can touch her breasts once he has grown up. This joke causes concern by George and Jessica. When Battler only shortly after sets out to touch Sayo’s breasts, Sayo does not resist, until she is directly ordered to do so. The characters around him barely acknowledge Battler’s insistence on semi-seriously performing symbolic acts of sexualized violence, only the joke with Maria leads to Jessica slapping Battler in the face, and the dynamic returns to friendly as quickly as it escalated. This absence of consequences for his violence stands for two things: How fundamental and normalized misogyny and the patriarchy are in the family, and that Battler is his father’s son. Indeed, that Battler mirrors in speech what his father enacts in material reality also stands as a pars pro toto for the fact that children in Umineko perpetuate the violence of their parents, with only minor variation per generation.

The extent of Rudolf’s patriarchal and sexualized violence is cloaked in hushes and whispers in Ep1, but the outline of his actions clings to his character. In his introduction at the airport, Kyrie and Battler joke about Kyrie being the only woman capable of holding Rudolf in his reigns; a metaphor of taming wild horses that seems to be close to common social narratives around particularly sexually violent men. Battler had left the family behind for about six years, angry at Rudolf for what Rudolf did to Battler’s mother, a mystery as of now. After the death of Battler’s mother, it took Rudolf not long to marry his former advisor-secretary Kyrie. Kinzo laments about his children and mentions Rudolf’s inability to control his lust. With a father like that, Battler’s sticking to mostly spoken jokes about misogynistic violence measures the distance the apple ultimately managed to fall from the tree.

That violence is an inheritance in the Ushiromiya family is very evident. This includes physical abuse. Rosa’s beating of Maria, for Maria speaking in a way perfectly normal for an autistic nine-year old, is one example of this. Indeed, this very overt act of parental violence also happens in the context of Maria searching for a singular, slightly wilting rose in the rose garden that she had taken a liking to. Engaging in improper speech patterns (read: making noises instead of using a sophisticated, class-appropriated lexicon) and showing compassion, things that all children engage in in some degree because (I cannot stress this enough) humans are born ultimately compassionate and playful, are met with extreme violence to be eradicated. The kind of adult growing up from such a childhood has to invest a lot of emotional energy in unravelling that violence and the trauma it causes. Those used to violence have a choice to either counter this violence by difficult means and heal, or perpetuate the same kind of violence. It is evident Rosa picked up her parenting methods from Kinzo, who is noted to have hit Krauss often and loudly as a child.

As violence is carried mostly undisturbed from generation to generation, misogyny becomes an integral aspect of the mechanism of violence. Battler notes that the Ushiromiya family places a special emphasis on blood relations, perhaps more than other families, but that focus on blood still includes the patriarchy to a large degree, just in an uncommon variation. Indeed, in parts of Ep1 focusing on Natsuhi, it becomes clear that especially women marrying into this family structure are seen as little more than means to produce heirs.

2.2 Class dismissed: Eva versus Natsuhi, the mansion, Gothic horror, and servants

Upon marrying into the Ushiromiya family, Natsuhi was expected to give birth to an heir to the head family as soon as possible. Indeed, she becomes reduced to her womb, in an incredibly dehumanizing fashion. Still, within the rigid social structure of the mansion, she is the host, the one every servant first turns to. When a servant is unable to perform their labour and present a perfect household, Natsuhi pays in social capital. As the connecting tissue between the servant class and the ultrarich family, as the outsider womb that failed for the longest time, as the silenced and excluded player in the parents’ game of inheritance splitting, Natsuhi takes a fringe position. She is a fulcrum of violence, both recipient and exacter of it. Nominally member of the uppermost class, and a woman, she should find herself on similar station to Eva.

And yet, in the incredibly weird and fully obscene tension between Eva and Natsuhi, Eva manages to mobilize class and blood relations to gain an advantage over Natsuhi. Eva managed to place Hideyoshi into the family registry, maintaining her family name despite that not being common, and upstages Natsuhi in fulfilling the role and purpose of a woman in this family structure, by birthing an heir faster than Natsuhi. Eva envies Krauss and wants to gain his level of power. George is Eva’s ambition grown into flesh, not a son but a pawn and argument, her project to produce a human more fit to the title of heir to the head family than Jessica. Indeed, Eva fully modelled George into that role, and most of the family agrees that he would make a better heir than Jessica. Natsuhi, maintaining a modicum of humanity and compassion despite the family around her, does not manage to exert the same level of violent force upon her daughter Jessica, leading to Jessica being labelled a failure, and Natsuhi in turn as well. Eva goes as far as calling Natsuhi a “lowly maidservant”. Natsuhi’s ambiguous state in the family comes also to be expressed in her not being allowed to bear the family crest, a one-winged eagle. While the servants and all (blood) family members are allowed to carry it on their clothes, Natsuhi is not afforded that status. Belittled over decades, torn from her old family and forced to cut all ties, reduced to a womb, called a failure time and time again, Natsuhi jumps at the opportunity when Kinzo tells her she is allowed to carry the one-winged eagle in her heart. Her desperation to become a full-fledged member of the family comes to a close when she, as the only surviving parent, calls herself heir to the family in her duel with Beatrice. This quest, to become full participant in the violent machinery of the family structure, fails, and she dies by the firearm so closely linked with the head of the family. And yet, the situation of the servants is markedly worse than Natsuhi’s.

While Natsuhi is dehumanized by being reduced to a walking womb, the servants are not even afforded a distant connection to flesh and blood, being reduced to furniture. It is a mantra beaten into them, one they repeat again and again to deny their own agency, to be “nothing but furniture”. The way the servants navigate this lack of agency varies. Genji consigns himself to collected and veiled pride; being most trusted by Kinzo, moreso than Kinzo even trusts his own children. Godha, not unlike Natsuhi, tries to integrate himself into this power structure, but unlike Natsuhi, he is not tied down by regret, pain, and a modicum of humanity. He steals what little social capital is afforded to the servants for himself, assigning them much less prestigious tasks. And yet, he ends up destroyed in the same machinery of power he tried to kiss up to, being one of the first to die. Kumasawa withdraws herself from difficult labour, and tells stories and lies and uses a semblance of a jester’s freedom to protect the young servants as best as she can. Sayo freezes in inaction and despair. And Kanon, the youngest, reacts ultimately in an outburst of righteous anger. One must note the degree of violence of class that is enacted upon mere children. In an act veiled in the narrative of philanthropy, Kinzo recruits little children from orphanages to work at the household. This is praised as a chance for them to make money, and to raise in social status. In reality, Kanon’s introduction, in which he fails at performing incredibly hard labour in the garden, shows that Kinzo employs child labour to upkeep his machinery of family as enshrined by the building of the mansion. Once again, violence is exerted upon children to force them into a new generation of this cycle.

The mansion itself is a symbol that can be read in multiple ways, two of which are yet to follow; but it is a very evident expression of power. The ability to buy the rights to an entire island and build a massive mansion complex on it, one large enough to fit a miniature version of itself – Kinzo’s study being called a mansion inside a mansion at some point – is of course an expression of class. Elaborate rooms in the upper floors assigned to be only walked by the high and mighty, and the utilities assigned down below to be only visited by the servants – the structure of the mansion uses its walls to create and reinforce borders and delineations between the classes. These borders only fall, servants walking main rooms and the rich seeing the utilities up close, when Rokkenjima’s violence becomes unable to be narrated away as actual blood and gore runs through its halls.

A potentially supernatural murder series inside a western style mansion could be read as a marker of genre, even – but Umineko Ep1 resists strict allegiance to a singular genre. It toys with the elements of Gothic horror – of which the mansion as a stage and ordering device is a central one – but also transcends it. The origins of Gothic horror in the late 19th century, from what little I know about literary history, do treat their servants as actually nothing more than furniture, barely mentioned if all, not counted as human. Umineko’s supposed furniture cries, curses, bleeds, resists, gives in, dreams of love, stands together and aside. Umineko’s servants navigate class and agency, and that navigation takes centre stage multiple times, their inability to throw their own humanity and compassion away underlining and inverting the parents’ demand to ignore notions of compassion and humanity. But the mansion, particularly its position on an island otherwise uninhabited by humans, takes on multiple roles at once.

2.3 Pecunia non olet: Krauss, resource extraction, ecology, and the storm

The mansion and its surrounding area are an exception to the typical structure of Rokkenjima. Rokkenjima is densely inhabited and brimming with life, but not of the human variety. It is marked by a dense forest, and its cliffs are home to the black-tailed gulls who mark the text’s title – they are the Umineko, a common seabird found across many Pacific coasts, particularly in East Asia. The absence of their distinctive cry upon the visitor’s arrival on the island is remarked upon in the text, and it is one of the many early indicators of the impending tempest that entraps the island for two days. As the gulls notice changes to the wind patterns, humidity, and air pressure, they instinctually withdraw to safer locations to sit out the storm. Once they cry again, the storm has passed.

The mundane black-tailed gulls are in several ways a counterpart and mirror to the seemingly majestic one-winged eagle. Whereas the gulls have (probably) existed on Rokkenjima since its distinct geo-ecological formation as an island, the one-winged eagle specifically as the symbol of the Ushiromiya family has rested on Rokkenjima only since Kinzo manoeuvred himself into de-facto legal possession of the island. As Battler remarks at some point:

“Buying an entire island is not something that you can ordinarily do today. However, Grandfather was clever. He contacted the GHQ and applied for the establishment of a marine resource base. He acquired this island as a business property, then tossed that project aside and claimed it as his own plot of land. [...] Later, Tokyo made difficulties by telling Kinzo to return the land, but the pushy GHQ intervened. Grandfather, with considerable skill and good luck, managed to weather the stormy seas of that period, obtaining a vast fortune and his own island. [...] A mansion was built on the island soon after. [...] Grandfather, with his love of the Western style, made this once uninhabited island a canvas upon which he could realize his dreams to his heart’s content. He now had the Western mansion of his dreams, overflowing with emotion and atmosphere, and a beautiful garden featuring all sorts of roses. And he had a private beach where nobody other than himself would ever be permitted to leave a footprint.”

There is a lot – a lot – going on this passage, and I will come back to it in section 2.4, but for now, there is one focus point: The island is described by Battler as having been previously uninhabited. This draws, at minimum, a line in which a distinct human presence is conflated with the state of being uninhabited. Rokkenjima, before Kinzo’s arrival, so the narrative spun by Battler, exists as a social and ecological terra nullius, this “empty canvas”, into which Kinzo inscribed his personal vision. This passage continually reaffirms the notion that land can be viewed through the lens of ownership – which far from a neutral idea.

By turning the land into something that can be “obtained”, “bought”, and “claimed” by a singular individual, its ecology is exposed to the logics of neoliberalism. And, indeed, Kinzo’s eldest, the designated heir to the financial empire, Krauss, doubles down on this process. The guest house is a symbol of Krauss trying to extract monetary value from the idea of land ownership: He plans on turning the island into a vacation resort for well-paying customers. As Rudolf comments on Krauss’ plan:

“You were brilliant when you saw that using this island only as a place to live was a waste. I think it was a pretty good plan to turn it into a resort that could use the prospect of marine sports, fishing, honeymoons and the like to attract customers. If I were the oldest son, I’m sure I’d have strained my brain looking for a way to make profit off this island.”

Later, Rudolf adds:

“I’ll bet you want to liquidate but can’t. After all, there’s no reason for anyone to buy such an extravagant hotel on an isolated, empty island without any established sightseeing routes.”

An island existing on its own, as an ecologically closed system by itself, is an impossibility under capitalism. Value must be extracted from everything, even the fact of land and ecology itself, else, it is, as Kinzo’s children seem to unanimously agree, a “waste”. Rokkenjima, so full with dense forestry and filled to the brink with life is “empty” because humans cannot make more money out of it. Establishing sightseeing routes, cutting through the ecology to maximize human access – and human profit – to and from it, is the only way not to “waste” it. The black-tailed gull is not granted any meaningful connection or presence on the island. And yet, on the morning of the 6th of October, the skies clear, and the black-tailed gulls cry again, alive and present on the island, whereas those who previously so proudly wore the one-winged eagle lie slaughtered into piles of blood and gore across the mansion and garden.

Kinzo’s fortune – not coincidentally – is maintained through having invested his money during the Fifties into the iron and steel industry, key actors in material resource extraction and environmental devastation, also given the connection of the steel and coal industries. The influence the economic system has on the ecology is marked by resource extraction. When it is a tropical thunderstorm that entraps the Ushiromiya family on this island it previously called its possession, forcing everyone to meet their violent demise, there is a certain comedic catharsis to it – thunderstorms, their increasing likelihood and extremeness, are a direct result of the economic mechanisms that marked the Ushiromiya ascension to power. For all their money, the Ushiromiyas cannot escape the storm. By exploiting nature they rise, by being unable to control such a large natural event they fall.

The theme of the Ushiromiyas’ fall repeats in the ecology, not only being found in the fauna but also in the flora. The rose garden is part of Krauss’ “development” of the land as well as Kinzo’s self-inscription onto the island. It is a model of making sense of nature – whereas the Ushiromiyas describe the forest of Rokkenjima as uninviting, dark, and imposing, the rose garden is a source of respite, admiration, and a stage upon which their control is played out. But the garden is far from a fitting presence on the island – it is noted multiple times that the yearly thunderstorms devastate the garden, leading to it requiring major repair and replanting every time. Rokkenjima is not a natural habitat for roses – and yet, as a mark of pride and possession of nature, it has to be repeatedly reinstated on it. And yet, after the storm passes, the trees of Rokkenjima still stand, whereas the roses of the Ushiromiyas have been scattered and largely destroyed. It is just as fitting to underline the Ushiromiyas’ relationship to the ecology around them that Maria’s concern for the well-being of a singular rose – an entirely positive process in which two organisms interact in a caring and gentle way – is seen as childish and absurd, whereas establishing a rose garden on Rokkenjima in the first place is seen as logical and meaningful.

Turning from the text to the real world, there is an actual and vast touristic network spanning the Izu islands. There is reason to assume that Krauss’ plans might have been fruitful if it were not for his face being separated from the rest of his body. Then again, the Izu islands also feature a long history of hotel ruins and closed tourist resorts – a very interesting example being the Hachijō-jima Royal Hotel, a project very similar to Krauss’, just some decades prior. Also featuring a sizable hotel complex in the Western style, it is now an abandoned ruin, having closed in 2006 (see Lowe, 2016). More importantly, the Japanese government used to advertise this hotel as the “Hawaii [sic!] of Japan”, a marketing pitch that, according to David Lowe, saw success at the time (2016). Let us put a pin on the mobilization of an image of Hawai’i by Japanese government actors, and turn from the branches of this rotten family tree to its roots and finally fire Chekhov's Winchester M1894.

2.4 How to get away with fascism: Kinzo, imperialism, occultism, cowboys, the nonexistent philosopher’s stone, and (hi)storytelling

This reading of the Ushiromiya family so far has purposefully taken individual members to underline larger system, but of course, this choosing-of-focus is an artificial fragmentation. Eva’s ambition overlaps with Krauss’ neoliberalism. Rudolf’s misogyny overlaps with Eva’s attempts to push Natsuhi down. Rosa’s explicit violence against Maria overlaps with Eva’s implicit violence against George. I cherry-picked aspects of their violence that seemed to stick out as an illustration, but they all orbit around the same centre of gravity, the source of it all: Kinzo.

Multiple times in Ep1, the Ushiromiya family history gets narrated, specifically, surrounding Kinzo’s financial decisions. Every time, the story starts at the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923[xvi], and ends around 1950, with the start of the Korean War. During the earthquake, the family is said to have lost their means of production, having been industrialists beforehand, and having lost several members, leading to Kinzo’s unlikely ascension to the head of the family. Kinzo is said to have acquired some starter capital in the form of a massive amount of gold before 1950, very early going all in on some form of Korean War bonds, being called Korean War Demands in the text. Kinzo is in these descriptions universally praised for his cunning, willingness to take risks, cooperation with the West, and seemingly inhuman foresight. Let’s reexamine this story again: A Japanese former industrialist rebuilds his family’s fortune between 1923 and roughly 1950, by acquiring gold of mysterious origins in between that timeframe. In the text, the adults speculate that Beatrice might have been a mysterious widowed financier willing to support Kinzo, whereas Maria insists that Beatrice used black magic – the philosopher’s stone, specifically – to create gold out of nothing. But this story of the family fortune is painfully familiar to me as a historian capable of speaking and reading German. Now, class, can anyone tell me what might have happened in these less than three decades that a sufficiently violent man could have used to make a small fortune out of nothing?

When I commented in the Discord chat that I use to ramble about Umineko on exactly that fact after the first time the financial history of the family was narrated, and called Kinzo a fascist, Ozaawa confirmed my conclusion. The Ushiromiya family gold – the source of it all, Kinzo’s great legacy – stems from fascist sources. The mysteriously lacking narration of the company history for the Thirties and Forties aside, there is another factor to consider to point towards this conclusion as early as the middle point of Ep1. When Krauss shows Natsuhi an actual bar of the family’s gold reserves, Natsuhi notices the absence of a note of the forge/bank that is customary for high-quality gold bars. All that the gold bars show is a one-winged eagle. Now, of course you can think of the philosopher’s stone all you want, and deliberate how gold bars created from magic might look – but unmarked gold acquired in the Thirties and Forties could be explained by much less magical origins. The eagle itself is a symbol mobilized by many fascists the world over – its role as a symbol for the Ushiromiya family hints further towards the origins of that fortune.

The supposed mystery of the gold’s origin only becomes less mysterious when considering what means of gaining wealth are fully accepted as legitimate parts of the family history. The Korean War Demands – some way of profiting of the Korean War – are seen as a masterful stroke by Kinzo. That the Korean War was an incredibly bloody proxy war between the US-American and Soviet Empires, one fought with a land and population as collateral that had been violently occupied by Imperial Japan for decades prior, makes no difference. Kinzo’s war profiteering in 1950 is a socially acceptable form of imperialism, whereas the source of the gold is not. That Kinzo simply changed which imperialists to support between 1940 and 1950 does not change that he is profiteering of it in some capacity or another. His supposed cunning as a businessman is nothing more than a keen understanding of which empire will win and lose in which conflict combined with a willingness to turn the blood spilled by imperialism into gold.

Speaking of spilling blood, the murders of Rokkenjima are, as elaborated in the introduction, called “the demon’s roulette” in the text on multiple occasions, referring to some obscure black magic ritual. Magic and the occult are, so it is said by several people at multiple times in the text, bound by the logic of miracles. Kinzo explains it as such to Kanon:

“In other words, magic is a game. It is not the case that the one who performs the best becomes the victor. The victor performs the best because he has been granted magic. [...] Of course. I made it difficult. ...But you must try to solve it as well. That will form the seed that summons the miracle of my magic. If every one attempts it and everyone fails, that will be that. However, if the miracles come together and give birth to magical power, it will happen! [...] That is why you must attempt it too. Everyone must attempt it. And in so doing, they will give strength to my magic!! Do you understand?!”

Kinzo’s magic trick requires unfaltering belief in the riddle of the epitaph. Everyone, no matter of which background, can solve the riddle of the epitaph, a riddle that promises those who solve it wealth in the form of gold, and everyone must attempt to do so. The neoliberal credo is that everyone must use their own cunning and skill to strive for wealth, and that everyone can ascend to wealth when they are cunning enough. The demon’s roulette, as a pars pro toto for black magic and the occult, operates noticeably in parallel to the logics of capitalism. The occult as explained by Kinzo, in this reading of Ep1, therefore becomes a mirror to imperialist capitalism – capable of withdrawing it from the narratives that cloak it and obscure its violence, the demon’s roulette embodies and demonstrates the violence necessary to operate imperialist capitalism. It is easy for the characters to think of the gold as a distant, clean commodity and bargaining chip. It is easy for me to describe that the text alludes to the origins of the gold in fascism and imperialism. But when Battler breaks down in tears at the sight of his parent’s disfigured and defaced corpses, when the blood and gore of everyone mixes so much that class distinctions break down just as much as the bodies, when the eldest and most powerful man and the youngest, abused servant both lie in death and dead in the same room, the demon’s roulette unveils what stands behind the Ushiromiya wealth: blood. Rudolf’s negotiation with Krauss features the only mention of roulette in the text that I noticed that is not the demon’s roulette:

“The iron rule of the money roulette is that you bet against the loser.”

The demon’s roulette is the money roulette. Capitalism and imperialism operate like the occult in the embedded narrative of Ep1 does, just with one being more socially accepted than the other. Just as the violence of the occult fails and falls apart when people’s belief in it shakes, so does capitalism.

In the end, the family tree planted by Kinzo bears the fruits he has ultimately sown. Is not Eva as manipulative and emotionally violent as him? Does his obsession with Beatrice not speak the same language as Rudolf’s misogyny? Is Krauss’ money-making not just as random and based on chance as his? Does Rosa not beat her own child like he beat his? When Kinzo laments how horrible his children are, is he clairvoyant enough for that to be self-hatred? The violence that marks the Ushiromiya family stems from imperialism and fascism and capitalism in all their entanglements, made manifest in the structure of the family and mansion.

A perfect illustration of this is the symbol of the Winchester M1894. It is a gun featured in western Westerns, a motive that keeps reappearing. Being the actual gun used in filming some Western[xvii], Kinzo had it bought and retrofitted to his liking. Kinzo, so is reaffirmed many, many times in the text, is obsessed with the West. His ability to schmooze up to the GHQ is just one example of this. Kinzo, the Japanese imperialist, being close to the West, is yet another pars pro toto; Japanese imperialism has historically grown in close proximity to Western imperialism. With the end of the Shogunate and the beginning of the Meiji restoration, the idea of industrialization and restructuring of society after the western model laid the ideological groundwork for building imperial Japan; particularly, the contact point of the Pacific brought Japan into connection with the United States, extending its Empire by the annexation of the Kingdom of Hawai’i. That Japanese government agents used the idea of the US tourist industry in Hawai’i – an inextricable part of imperial control and domination – to promote a hotel resort on an actual island close to where Rokkenjima would be in the real world, ties Krauss’ island development project back to Kinzo and Kinzo’s obsession with the West. He has a western-style mansion, a western-style rose garden, his children have western-style names, and he has a western-style Western rifle. The idea of the cowboy in the genre of the Western is one inherently tied to US myths of westward expansion and manifest destiny. If the rifle then symbolizes the cowboy, and one questions the context of the genre where the cowboy is the protagonist, it becomes a tool of violent colonial inscription. Rokkenjima becomes Kinzo’s colonial playground, one which he violently claims and violently maintains while wielding the cowboy’s gun, one modified to his liking. It is western imperialism with a small twist, retrofitted for the logics and specific situation at play in Rokkenjima. Natsuhi dies, claiming the rifle and the title of head of the family, shot by the instrument of imperialism she could, in the end, not wield properly.

When Battler wishes for the seagulls to cry, he envisions the police showing up at that point, solving the murders logically, restoring sense and meaning and order as it was before. But the murders unsettle the dynamics of the Ushiromiya family, in a way that cannot be undone. They reveal the deeper violence at play, embody that blood and gore which was previously obscured. One can doubt that the police can restore the status quo that Battler dreams of, as the state, of which the police are central actors and agents, is linked to the very imperialism that sits at the core of these murders. And indeed, as the epilogue of the embedded narrative reveals, the police do not do anything of meaning in reaction to the murders. Ep1, in this reading, becomes a story of the violence of imperialist capitalism crashing down on the family it once uplifted. All of this is a nice reading, but that is a story that does not necessitate magic being real. This reading is missing one integral piece: Beatrice, the sexy, sexy ominous demonic presence of the horror story that is Ep1, exists.

3. On Divine Comedies and Worldly Tragedies, or: how did I almost miss this

So far, I have not really said anything that is not obvious from even a superficial reading of Ep1. It does not take much attention to figure out that the Ushiromiya family is deeply fucked up. It does not take much attention to figure out that Kinzo is a disturbingly violent man. The entire second segment of this essay is simply a close reading of something that sits at the surface of Umineko Ep1. Sure, I did that little trick of understanding early on that there is imperialism and fascism at play here – but I can be far from the only one who picked up on that as soon as it was placed down in the text. This essay, for the longest time, was just that second segment, that close reading of the family violence – and I wondered if that even was enough to publish it. It was missing something grander, some reason to give me a seat at the table of those scholars who understand Umineko from early on. Missing that element, that link to make a more complex reading of Ep1 work, I simply gave up. I started Episode 2, broken-hearted, and followed it until it is implied early on that George will be sent into an arranged marriage. And all along I was making jokes about Umineko to the admin of the Discord server where I ramble about Umineko – she has not read the story, but enjoys my commentary on it. I made a joke about the frame narratives being nestled, like wooden dolls – and then I wanted to double down on that joke by referencing the well-known movie Shrek (2001) by saying something along the lines of “or like ogres and onions”. But I felt I needed some other joke, something a bit more weird than a simple and well-known Shrek meme, to mask my devastation at being unable to solve Ep1. And so I said: “Or like the layers of hell in the Divine Comedy. Didn't Beatrice call herself a guide through purgatory in the tea party? Is she the Virgil to my Dante?[xviii]”. The exact line I am referencing is spoken by Beatrice, when explaining the murders of Eva and Hideyoshi in the first-order frame narrative:

“Come, arise, children. I am the guide of Purgatory. Forgive the deadly sins and hold the Seven Stakes.”

A sentence I had glossed over when I first read the tea party, one seemingly inconspicuous. But it had lodged itself into my brain and become the basis of aforementioned joke. My joke, made simply because I was momentarily tired of Shrek memes, had been closer to the truth of it all than I could have ever imagined. It took me twenty-nine minutes to see it, to realize it. I came back to the Discord chat, typing in all caps. Beatrice exists. Boy, does Beatrice ever exist. Beatrice is (not only) the guide of Purgatory. Beatrice is the guide of Heaven. Beatrice is a literary figure that has existed for seven centuries.

3.1 14th century Italian poetry, in your Umineko? It’s more likely than you think

The Divine Comedy, originally the Commedia and then the Divina Commedia, is a long poetic text by exiled and grumpy Florentine author Durante Alighieri, better known as Dante Alighieri, written in the early 14th century. Its narrative is divided into three parts. In Inferno, the Dante of the narrative descends through the centre of the Earth. He receives help in navigating Hell, which is located in the centre of the Earth, by the Roman poet Virgil, who knows the rules and dangers of the nine circles and centre of Hell. Each circle of hell features a specific punishment for sinners. In Purgatorio, Virgil and Dante emerge on the other side of the Earth onto a sole, circular island in the pacific. This island, marked by a mountain, is also subdivided into nine rings and one centre. Souls who wish to enter heaven have to ascend through the rings up the mountain to find themselves in the Garden of Eden atop the mountain. Here, Dante meets a woman named Beatrice. In Paradiso, Beatrice guides Dante through the celestial heavens. The heavens are inhabited by the most virtuous of souls and divine beings. They are also subdivided into nine parts, plus God in their outermost layer. Upon Dante reaching God under Beatrice’s guidance, the story ends, as Dante is imbued with fundamental understanding of God.

Under the eurocentric lens of western academia, the Divine Comedy is considered to stand among the most important works of world literature. It is also considered one of the, if not the foremost entries into the Italian literary canon[xix]. It, that much is certain, played an important role in formalizing the Italian language, and had introduced a very detailed description of hell and demons, something unprecedented given that western church canon[xx] had avoided giving clear descriptions of hell. The tropes established in the Divine Comedy regarding the structure and functioning of hell have received an incredibly extensive reception over the centuries, being integral pieces of the collective imagining of hell and demons, and referenced in much contemporary media. I hold very little knowledge of contemporary Japanese media, but I know that the Devil May Cry franchise has been very successful and in some connection to the Divine Comedy since 2001.

The Divine Comedy features a very extensive range of appearing figures, symbols, metaphors, and narrative systems. From real life figures living and dead to themes spanning such questions as the implications of a round Earth (see Schlingen 2021, p. 386) and human bodiedness in connection to human emotions (see Howie 2021), there is a lot one can take out of the Divine Comedy. And indeed, one can read Umineko Ep1 alongside – or perhaps against – the Divine Comedy. The opening slide of the first-order frame narrative reveals that it is set in Umineko’s Purgatorio – whatever that may mean. This setting of the tea party, and the sentence in which Beatrice describes herself as the guide of Purgatory, are direct hints at a connection between the Divine Comedy and Umineko Ep1. And yet, the most meaningful connection between the Divine Comedy and Umineko Ep1 is much more simple. As Lady Bernkastel explains to the player-reader in the second-order frame narrative:

“First of all, about that girl. She does have the name Beatrice, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she is ‘one individual woman’.”

That begs the question: How many individual women is Beatrice, exactly?

3.2 Into the Beatriceverse

Beatrice Portinari is a Florentine woman that was married to a man named Simone de Bardi in 1287 (see Lewis 2001, p. 72). She died in the summer of 1290 (see Mazotta 2000, p. 18). Her father, a banker named Folco Portinari, died on the 31st of December 1289 (see Lewis 2001, p. 77). That much is something we can say with relative certainty. Church recordings in central Italy were thorough when it came to deaths, births, and marriages. Anything else we know about Beatrice Portinari – well, it is complicated. The most extensive account of Beatrice Portinari’s life was written by Dante Alighieri in the 1290s, the Vita Nuova. Dante Alighieri reports extensively on his lifelong obsession with Beatrice Portinari, a woman he spoke to merely a handful of times, at least to his own accord (regarding the number of direct interactions see Lewis 2001). If we trust Dante to tell the truth, they were about the same age, setting her birth at around 1265, and indicating that she was 25 at the time of her death. Dante’s infatuation with Beatrice Portinari lead him to engineer social situations in which he might be able to see her. The Vita Nuova holds little information on anything Beatrice Portinari ever did out her own accord. We know nothing reliable about her interests, likes and dislikes, or emotions. Most what we know about her life is delivered to us through the eyes and words of a man who held a deeply one-sided obsession with her. If the Vita Nuova was simply the ramblings of an obsessed, grieving poet, Beatrice Portinari might have been drifted out of our collective memory.

But the Vita Nuova is not the only time Dante wrote (about) Beatrice Portinari. Divine Comedy Beatrice is one of the central figures of that poetic work, likely a direct reference to the real-life Beatrice Portinari. Divine Comedy Beatrice is the one who starts the events of the story; Virgil appears before Dante in the name of Divine Comedy Beatrice, who wishes to see Divine Comedy Dante guided to the heavens. It is in constantly referencing Divine Comedy Beatrice that Divine Comedy Dante keeps a focus through hell and purgatory. Divine Comedy Beatrice takes on the role of an angelic being guiding Divine Comedy Dante to God (see Kirkpatrick 1990, p. 101), and performs “the priestly roles of confessor, teacher, interpreter of Scripture, and spiritual guide” (Waller 2021, p. 702). These two Beatrices – Beatrice Portinari and Divine Comedy Beatrice – stand in a complicated relationship. Feminist critiques of Dante taking possession of the memory of Beatrice Portinari and puppeteering it for his own purposes have existed for a long time. To cite a longer passage from Kirkpatrick 1990, p. 101:

“Beatrice has been cited more than once as evidence that the selflessness that the lover attributes to an ideal lady is not so much a manifestation of spiritual nobility as a covert sentence of death. [...] Whether as the selfless object of courtly love or as an angelic being, the lady dies insofar as the historical woman becomes a cipher on which the patriarchal will of the writer - be he courtly poet or God - can exert itself.”

We do not know what Beatrice Portinari thinks of the long poetic text written after her death by a man she barely knew in which he wields the image of her. What we know is that centuries after her death, Dante’s obsession with her is still idealized. His writings are regarded by many as the height of romantic poetry, and allusions to Divine Comedy Beatrice run throughout western literature[xxi]. I agree with the point Kirkpatrick is making, but would maybe extend it by the semantic question if we are faced with a “death sentence” of the historical woman or her unwilling entrapment in a “literary immortality” that robs her of all agency and personhood. In the end, though, both these terms describe the same act of violence.

These two Beatrices, as well as the relationship between the two, are certainly figures at play in Umineko Ep1. We can count the extratextual number of Beatrices as two, which leaves us with the question of how many Beatrices we are dealing with in Umineko Ep1. There is a woman named Beatrice which Kinzo met sometime in the Thirties or Forties, a woman that died at some point in the past, as Genji explains when the survivors barricade themselves in Kinzo’s study. I would like to title this Beatrice “Umineko’s Historical Beatrice” for the time being. We know little about Umineko’s Historical Beatrice, just as we know little about Beatrice Portinari. Kinzo’s entanglement in Japanese imperialism and with the axis powers would certainly leave him with a plethora of opportunities to exert totalizing power over quite a number of women. Then, there is “Kinzo’s Portraitized Beatrice”. Kinzo weaves a narrative around Umineko’s Historical Beatrice, just like Dante did around Beatrice Portinari. The resulting woman, Kinzo’s Portraitized Beatrice, is one he mobilizes as an excuse for his obsession with the occult. It is difficult to tell at this point if Kinzo made that mysterious contract with Umineko’s Historical Beatrice, or if the contract is part of the narrative of Kinzo’s Portraitized Beatrice. Then, there is Golden Witch Beatrice – a myth, whispered by the servants and Maria in awe, fear, and distant hope for liberation, a myth of a second master of Rokkenjima, one who assumes control when Kinzo sleeps, but also haunts the mansion in perhaps some level of agency. There is the Mystery Financier Beatrice, an explanation the adults and Battler come up with for the letters and for Kinzo’s gold and for the murders, a very human, if hypothetical woman – Mystery Financier Beatrice is closely related to Kinzo’s Portraitized Beatrice, perhaps by intention of Kinzo. Both Mystery Financier Beatrice and Kinzo’s Portraitized Beatrice are removed from any actual agency or self-hood, they are stories told and speculated upon. Then, there is Arisen Beatrice – a woman, in the flesh, who we only catch a glimpse of at the end of the embedded narrative, who greets the surviving children, primarily Maria. And lastly, there is Eternal Witch Beatrice, the witch who we see in the second-order frame narrative and, as I assume, the same Beatrice we encounter in the first-order frame narrative.

Now, take this list with a grain of salt. These Beatrices do overlap and may even sometimes be the same person. There is plenty reason to assume that Arisen Beatrice and Eternal Witch Beatrice are the same, as much as there is plenty reason to assume that there is a strong overlap between Golden Witch Beatrice and Eternal Witch Beatrice. Perhaps Arisen Beatrice and Umineko’s Historical Beatrice somehow are the same figure – Lady Bernkastel mentions that she was mortal once, implying that one can ascend to being a witch from a state of mortality. But, ultimately, I mark these Beatrices as distinct because just as much as Beatrice Portinari and Divine Comedy Beatrice, they have the capacity to stand in relationship to one another, and they have vastly different agencies, roles, and limitations when compared to each other. Every single one of these Beatrices is commanded by different forces, used and presented and (figuratively and literally) painted by different people, sometimes by her own, sometimes by individual others, sometimes by collective others. Close attention needs to be paid at how these eight-ish Beatrices, two extratextual and six-ish intratextual, are played out in very different ways. And, as I theorize is integral for understanding Umineko Ep1 – the very relationship between Beatrice Portinari and Divine Comedy Beatrice mirrors the relationship between Umineko’s Historical Beatrice and Kinzo’s Portraitized Beatrice intentionally. When the survivors retreat to the study, and Genji recounts the story of Kinzo’s Portraitized Beatrice, the first reaction that the listeners have is understanding and empathy for Kinzo. It is only when realizing that the murders happening around them are closely tied to Kinzo’s obsession with and hope for a resurrection of Kinzo’s Portraitized Beatrice that they realize that Kinzo had gone too far. In Kinzo, so my reading, Umineko Ep1 satirizes Dante Alighieri. Eternal Witch Beatrice lashing out can be read as a symbolic act of intertextual retribution for the textual violence and entrapment Beatrice Portinari has suffered, just as much as it could be a retribution for the suffering Umineko’s Historical Beatrice had endured. Umineko, so I further theorize, can be read as an inverse Divine Comedy – a Worldly Tragedy, if you will. Let me further illustrate this point by turning our attention to round islands in the Pacific.

3.3 Rokkenjima is other people: Reverse-engineering hell and the omnipresence of guides

Rokkenjima is an interesting stage for the violence of Ep1 to play out. As elaborated in sections 2.3 and 2.4, Rokkenjima can be read through an ecocritical and postcolonial lens, as an ecosystem upon which Krauss exerts capitalist logics and as a space which Kinzo uses as a miniature colony. But reading Umineko as a critical parody of the Divine Comedy, we also gain access to another understanding of Rokkenjima; as a twisted mixture of hell and purgatory. Hell and purgatory in the Divine Comedy have different, more specifically opposite, spatial structures. Divine Comedy Dante goes through hell by descending, going down each ring, narrower and lower than the one before. Reversely, he ascends purgatory by going up each ring, narrower and higher up than the one before, before reaching Eden – and Divine Comedy Beatrice – at the top. Such spatial trajectories also get mentioned in Umineko Ep1, but ultimately and immediately deconstructed. When the visitors arrive on the island, Battler comments upon the sloping path one has to take up from the landing pier to the mansion complex:

“A serpentine, twisting path led through a dim forest. It ran a bit uphill. I’d guess the path was made all twisty so the slope wouldn’t seem too steep, but personally, I’d have been happier if they’d had the guts to make some stairs in a straight line ......No doubt they made the path twist on purpose, to put on airs of distance and importance...”

One might read this path guests of Rokkenjima ascend through as part of the microcolonial architecture that is such an integral part of Kinzo’s and Krauss’ laying-claim to the island. One might also read Battler’s alternative as an expression of that same architectural hubris, as a disregard for the geological and structural reality of that stretch of Rokkenjima, because it remains to be questioned how intrusive a set of straight stairs[xxii] might have been in the context of the local landscape. But this spatiality may also be read in conjunction with the very first lines of Inferno:

“In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.” (Alighieri/Turner 1320/1996, p. 27)

This entry of Divine Comedy Dante towards his journey into hell mirrors Battler’s monologue in a couple of ways. Whereas the difficulty of the paths in the Divine Comedy represent the theological difficulty of salvation, difficulties through which Divine Comedy Dante has to be lead by Divine Comedy Beatrice as the representation of perfected christian belief, Rokkenjima’s meandering paths, at least for now, represent both a nuisance to the characters and their unknowing physically ascent into a hell that will unfold around them soon. Whereas at the top of the winding path in Purgatorio, the Garden Eden awaits with Divine Comedy Beatrice ready to appear and take Divine Comedy Dante to the heavens, at top of the winding path in Umineko Ep1, the rose garden awaits with Golden Witch Beatrice ready to appear and murder everyone.

But this inversion and reconfiguration of spatiality is more than a singular instance of a mirror and parody of the Divine Comedy. Whereas Divine Comedy Dante has Virgil and then Divine Comedy Beatrice to explain to him all the minutiae and idiosyncrasies that govern the realms of the Divine Comedy, there is a distinct lack of a singular, final, authoritative voice explaining the idiosyncrasies of Umineko Ep1. This is not because guidance is absent in Umineko Ep1, rather the opposite: The omnipresence of contradicting, incomplete, and biased guides is what makes Umineko Ep1 so impassable on every narrative and metanarrative level. Battler seemingly guides the play-reader through most of the embedded narrative, but how much competence can one expect from a guide that uses the first moment of introspection the narrative provides to him to whine about how difficult it is to be a child born into unfathomable intergenerational wealth? What ability does Battler have to introduce us to the women of the embedded narrative when the first thing he does on multiple occasions is to joke about harassing them or come very close to actually doing it? When the Ushiromiya adults take over with the narration, how trustworthy are they? Can we believe the ultrarich capitalist to give us a proper account of how the servant’s social space functions? Can we trust the violent imperialist Kinzo to properly explain the functionings and logics of the occult to us? Umineko Ep1 is littered with instances of people speaking for other people, trying to explain what the true meaning of someone else’s words and actions and emotions is. The closest the player-reader comes to gaining a guide through Umineko Ep1 is only after having traversed the story, when Lady Bernkastel gently removes the fourth wall, turns it around, and fixes it in place again. But according to her own report, Lady Bernkastel uses the player-reader as a piece in a game to deal with her boredom; a move made out of pity and amusement. Is she the ultimate authoritative voice which may guide the player-reader through the narrative?

From the constant discussions of murder mystery novels in the embedded narrative, to the murder victims discussing the implications their deaths have on the genre in the first-order frame narrative, to the outright obliteration of the fourth wall in the second-order frame narrative: Umineko Ep1 brims with metanarrative commentary. By presenting us with a plethora of guides through this strange hell-purgatory of Rokkenjima and making each of them untrustworthy in the same moment, Umineko Ep1 engages in a permanent suspension of suspension of disbelief. The player-reader is supposed to engage with Umineko as a fictionalized narrative while remaining very aware that it functions as such. If my reading is to stand any ground, this is where the concept and figure of the witch begins to unravel.

3.4 Darkness, witches, angels, and the absence of a god: How to decipher Golden/Eternal Witch Beatrice as an anti-Beatrice

Reading Umineko as a parody and commentary on the Divine Comedy means that a lot of the motives and symbols of Umineko become very legible from the start, courtesy of the extensive symbolic lexicon employed by the Divine Comedy.Unfortunately, one of the most important symbolic figures of Umineko, the Witch, has no meaningful direct equivalent in the Divine Comedy. If we approach the witches in Umineko Ep1, we gain pitifully little information on what they are. The dramatis personae of the second-order frame narrative informs the player-reader when trying to set Eternal Witch Beatrice’s entry to dead that she can theoretically be destroyed, but not by means accessible to the player-reader. One of Lady Bernkastel’s lines implies that witches start off mortal but ascend to witchhood at some point and then are immortal. When Lady Bernkastel talks about what Eternal Witch Beatrice is, she says the following:

“Get what I mean? In other words, she’s not some Human. Her existence is a personification of the rules of this world. To beat her, you have to expose the rules of this world and unravel them.”

The key to witchhood, then, is closely linked with understanding the truth(s) of Umineko. Witches are also incapable of being harmed by material means (see Kanon’s and Natsuhi’s failed attempts to lash out at Golden Witch/Arisen Beatrice). They exist in a sort of immaterial, half-immortal state, in which they are closely linked to immaterial ideas and truth(s). You know which group of figures in the Divine Comedy exists in a sort of immaterial, half-immortal state, in which they are closely linked to immaterial ideas and truth? That’s right, you have read the title of this subsection: Angels. Alison Cornish explains the theological nature of angels, as interpreted by Dante and introduced into the Divine Comedy, as follows:

“Angels differ essentially from human beings in that they are separated substances—separated, that is, from matter [...] This separated state makes them purer and better receptors of intellectual substance. They are “intelligences” who feed on intellectual fare, namely, truth, and what Dante repeatedly calls the “bread of angels,” to which they have direct access but to which the philosophically inclined may also aspire” (p. 38)

I am not saying that witchhood in Umineko translates one-to-one into the notion of the angelic in the Divine Comedy. But there is no denying that the two direct allusions to Dante that Ryukishi07 placed in the first-order frame narrative are meant to create meaning, and the criticism of Dante’s obsession with Beatrice Portinari through Kinzo’s obsession with Umineko’s Historical Beatrice cannot be a coincidental reading. I also know from being slightly spoiled by Ozaawa that there will be a character named Virgilia later on, and I look forward to seeing what Ryukishi07 does with that character. My point in all of this is that those two texts clearly enter into a dialogue, and that dialogue allows me to use established readings of the Divine Comedy to unravel Umineko. Dante’s angels and Ryukishi07’s witches can be seen as entering a dialogue with one another.

Just as Dante places Divine Comedy Beatrice in close proximity to the angelic (see Cornish 2000, p. 37), Kinzo allows for Kinzo’s Portraitized Beatrice to be regarded as being in close proximity to witchcraft. Both Dante’s angels and Ryukishi07’s witches are complex allegorical figures that fulfill many roles and objectives at once. Whereas Divine Comedy Beatrice in her quasi-angelic state is identified with (reflecting) light as the central motive to stand for God (see Cornish 2000, p. 39), Golden Witch/Arisen Beatrice is associated with darkness. Both when she interacts with Kanon and Natsuhi, and when Sayo observes Golden Witch Beatrice way earlier in the story, the Beatrices stand cloaked in darkness to the point that the darkness becomes them, reciprocally personified. Golden Witch Beatrice is said to be the master of Rokkenjima at night, when the island is cloaked in darkness. Divine Comedy Dante can only ascend through purgatory during the day, when God’s light graces the island. If Divine Comedy Beatrice glows bright and is the light as she – like an angel – reflects God and God’s truth, Golden Witch Beatrice commands and laughs from the darkness in the absence of a God, and stands for a much more wordly truth, that of Kinzo’s violence.

Given that Lady Bernkastel tells us that Eternal Witch Beatrice is a personification of the rules of this world, and that this world of Umineko is deeply metanarrative, I propose a very theoretical early reading of what witches are in Umineko: Witches are allegorical representations of the fundamental forces and properties of a narrative. Eternal Witch Beatrice, so the second-order frame narrative, has the power to kill someone eternally, without fail, and yet fail does not exists in the realm of witches. I cannot explain every aspect of what is said in the second-order frame narrative through this reading, but: Let us reexamine the idea of narrative entrapment in immortality/death that has been explained in subsection 3.2 through the examination of the relationship between Beatrice Portinari and Divine Comedy. Is that constant denial of agency by assuming complete control over someone’s memory not a (metaphorical) way of killing someone over and over, given that death can be seen as the greatest possible loss of agency an individual can suffer through? Eternal Witch Beatrice's power, as explained in the second-order frame narrative, is one she has reappropriated from the abuser(s) of her namesake(s), namely, Dante and Kinzo, now wielding it as her own. In that sense, I find it fascinating how the epilogue of the embedded narrative stresses that the murders that have happened on Rokkenjima turn into an urban legend afterwards. The most important legacy the Ushiromiyas leave behind, the thing that they will always be associated with, is the mystery of their deaths that left them a puddle of gore on the grounds of Rokkenjima. Every time this urban legend is repeated again, the deaths repeat, and the Ushiromiyas are denied agency by becoming reduced to a singular aspect of their memory. If we read Eternal Witch Beatrice’s power as such, then the Rokkenjima murders become the ultimate act of retribution against Kinzo, one that forces him into the same fate as he forced upon Umineko’s Historical Beatrice.

We can further examine the figures of Beatrices in Umineko Ep1 through the lens of the Divine Comedy, as some miscellaneous symbols and points also connect. Kinzo wishes for nothing more than to see “Beatrice’s smile” again before he dies, a point he makes clear in the prologue/first scene and constantly repeats. Divine Comedy Dante is constantly reminded of his path to heaven and salvation when thinking about Divine Comedy Beatrice’s smile, and it is this smile she shows him when he arrives at the summit of purgatory (see the commentary in the translation by Turner 1990, p. 558). Divine Comedy Beatrice’s smile becomes a mark of salvation and the path to God. When Kinzo cries and shouts about “Beatrice’s smile”, it becomes a symbol of that absence of a divine presence, and, as he will not see “Beatrice’s smile” again, he does not find salvation, but death. Indeed, Umineko Ep1 seems to mock the christianized logics of punishment and salvation at multiple turns. The stakes that Eternal Witch Beatrice commands are ascribed to demons that stand for sins more or less appropriate for the people killed by the individual stakes.[xxiii] When finding the corpses of his deeply violent, mysogynistic father and the woman that enabled him at many turns, Battler wonders what they had ever done to deserve such a punishment. He repeats later that no one deserves such a fate. And, as Eternal Witch Beatrice makes clear in the first-order frame narrative, the stakes and the forces that wield them are supposed to forgive the sins – by killing the sinners. In this inherent violence, the Rokkenjima murders withdraw from the logics of christian salvation, just as much as Arisen Beatrice denies Kinzo her smile. There is no salvation, only death. Eternal Witch Beatrice does not seek out salvation for the Ushiromiyas (except Maria), she seeks revenge in the form of blood.

Another symbol to decipher is that of the butterflies. Golden Witch Beatrice is said to appear in the form of golden, glistening butterflies. Butterflies indeed appear in the Divine Comedy, namely, in a metaphorical role in the in Purgatorio.

“O proud Christians, woeful wretches, who sick in the mind's vision, place trust in backward steps, do you not see that we are worms born to form the angelic butterfly which flies to justice without shields? How is it that your spirit soars so high, when you are as imperfect insects, like the larva lacking its full formation?” (Alighieri 1320, as translated in Singleton 2019, p. 60-61)

Here, as explained in Turner’s commentary on his translation of Purgatorio, the butterfly is used in its capacity as an analogy for metamorphosis, a literary tradition reaching back to antiquity. More specifically, Turner further explains, it stands for “spiritual change as metamorphosis” (p. 171).[xxiv] It stands as a warning against pride (Singleton 2019, p. 61). In Dante’s usage, the butterfly stands for a yet-to-be-completed angelic spiritual transformation that is hindered by pride. In contrast, one could read the butterflies of Golden/Eternal Witch Beatrice as meaning that she has already undergone a transformation – not towards an angelic state, but towards witchhood, Umineko’s likely answer to Dante’s angels.[xxv] If Golden/Eternal Witch Beatrice is the swarm of butterflies, she has already metamorphosized; moved by a spiteful pride and wrath against the man who harmed Umineko’s Historical Beatrice, she has transformed by a logic completely opposite to that presented in the Divine Comedy. Once again, Umineko’s register of motives opposes its Divine Comedy counterparts in full force.

The last motive that I want to look towards in its interactions with (or rather against) the Divine Comedy is that of the “Golden Land”. In the Divine Comedy, the exact wording of “Golden Land” is never used, but it explicitly leans on the long-standing motive of the “Golden World” – one that is in Dante’s usage intrinsically tied to the idea of political order and stability acting as justice under the Roman Empire, as Robin Kirkpatrick explains (1990, p. 112-113). In other words, the logics of the Divine Comedy entangle ideas of political hierarchies, rule/ruling, spiritual ascension, justice, and Christianity under the concept of the “Golden World”.[xxvi] It is, also remarkably, situated partially on top of the mountain that is purgatory; the Garden Eden being a part and aspect of this concept (compare Kirkpatrick 1990, p. 112). The political order that houses and props up the mansion complex of Rokkenjima, Kinzo’s private and privatized Garden Eden, is completely unsettled and exposed as unjust by the forces that govern Eternal Witch Beatrice’s Golden Land. As Kirkpatrick once again elaborates:

“In canto XXVII of the Purgatorio, Virgil performs a verbal coronation in which Dante is declared to be at last free, upright, and whole, and thus fit to enter the Golden World.” (1990, p. 113)

Character’s aptitude for entering the “Golden Land” in Umineko Ep1 is indeed a topic brought up, but Dante’s equivalent – Kinzo – is made unfit to enter the “Golden Land” by death quite early on. Whereas Dante’s elaborated and detailed “Golden World” is a symbolic stabilization of spiritual and political practice at the time, Umineko Ep1’s is a vague threat and promise at the same time, one that symbolically destabilizes the ideological and political practice on Rokkenjima. In short, the ambiguous and so far not fully explained register of motives, symbols, and ideas surrounding Eternal Witch Beatrice stands as a rejection of Divine Comedy Beatrice and the literary trope Divine Comedy Beatrice became over the centuries.

3.5 Ave Maria: A short tangent on the role of motherhood and Christianity in Umineko Ep1

Not only the figure(s) of Beatrice(s) unravel through a closer reading of Umineko Ep1 alongside the Divine Comedy. If you are like me, you might have wondered early on what is going on not only with so many of the names being western, but also christian in origin, not even mentioning the crosses littering the outfits worn by several of the Ushiromiyas. One example that comes to mind, that unravels rather neatly, is Eva. Eva, the non-anglicized form of Eve, stands as a crude parody Christianity's human progenitor, first ever mother. Eva is the second human, if you so will, that Kinzo “created”, and is marked by a constant wrath for being locked out of first place. Through being the first to prolong the bloodline, she outperforms Natsuhi in the violently misogynistic structure of the family. Just as Eve makes Adam bite the apple, Hideyoshi merely follows Eva’s quest for the gold. In other words, Eva, a woman wielding misogyny against another woman, mirrors the foundational misogynistic trope of Christianity in name and in some of her relations to other characters.

But even more pronounced is the concentration on the concept of motherhood in Maria and her proximity to Beatrice – both in the Divine Comedy and Umineko Ep1. Mary is but the anglicized form of Maria, patron saint of motherhood, and one of the principal divine figures in catholicism. In the Divine Comedy, Divine Comedy Beatrice's closeness to Mary in the celestial rose, the symbolic seat of saints, underscores her exemplary nature as a pious woman and her allegorical role as divine wisdom and divine truth (for an explanation of this more analysis of Divine Comedy Beatrice and the celestial rose, see Singleton 2019, p. 61). In Umineko Ep1, it is Maria's closeness to Golden/Eternal Witch Beatrice that receives thematic meaning, when we read Beatrice as a marker of the worldly absence of the divine, as I have proposed, Maria's proximity to Beatrice means she is closest among all the characters to understanding the truth of the violence at hand. Whereas in catholicism, Mary is a symbol of divine grace in motherhood, Maria is the inverse, a symbol of the worldly pain in daughterhood. Mary nurtures Jesus, Maria is harmed by Rosa. Even the name Rosa reinforces Maria as an inversion of Mary. Roses have a long symbolic tradition in catholicism to refer to Mary, which is the reason a rosary is called a rosary, as the Latin word for rose garden. Which is the place in which the physical violence of Rosa against Maria takes place.

4. Recurrence, (in)justice, punishment, rage, catharsis, and torment through narrative (im)mortality: Trying to estimate the central themes of Umineko via Ep1

All this being said and analyzed, this leaves us with the question that started this essay, the question I directed at Umineko Ep1: What the fuck is going on here? In the introduction, I explained that I am interested in how much of Umineko you can solve within the information presented in Ep1, or as I named it, Umineko’s scholar’s mate. I also said that I am bad at murder mysteries and that I have no idea what is going on in the epitaph. Now, it has been a while since I started writing this essay, almost two months, and in the meantime, I have acquired the Answers Arc of Umineko on steam. And there, I was presented with a sentence that made things particularly interesting; it said something along the lines of “this will answer most of your questions, but you still have to solve the epitaph by yourself”. Now, I do not know if I read this sentence, this spoiler correctly; but to me, it implies that the canon text will never provide a singular, clear answer on what the epitaph riddle means.

The classical murder mystery systematically opens up several questions for the reader/viewer/player to answer, only to answer them all at the end, in an elegant fashion, perhaps to shine light on the clever detective character. Umineko Ep1 withdraws rather openly from the murder mystery genre. The logics by which a murder mystery novel operates are brought up even in the embedded narrative, where characters seem to be mostly oblivious to the fact that they exist within a story. Operating within these logics, something that Battler calls Game Theory in remembrance of a lesson Kyrie once gave him on chess, Battler tries to solve the story of Ep1 by rational means, and fails spectacularly[xxvii]. In the first-order frame narrative, i. e. the tea party, George concedes that magic must be real and at play, and that this story, which he then consciously recognizes as a story, can not be a classical murder mystery novel. Here is the thing: There is violence at play in Umineko Ep1, a lot of it, and they story tasks the player-reader with uncovering and understanding it; but, as I propose, the player-reader is not (entirely) supposed to solve the murders of the 4th and 5th of October 1986. The violence represented in the murder mystery genre is localized, individual; even in the most brutal crime novels, you have a couple dozen victims at best. When the seagulls cry (again), about 18-ish people lay dead in the embedded narrative. So far, this follows that general system of the murder mystery genre. But even with those 18-ish victims are difficult to fully keep apart; the murders happen in stages, people die in small numbers, one or only a handful at a time, and yet the player-reader has trouble following along. The fact that the number of victims alone is difficult to reconstruct points (intentionally, as I suppose in this reading) to the fact that the underlying violence of Umineko Ep1 cannot be represented in the murder mystery genre. Kinzo ascended to his position of head of the family, sole ruler of Rokkenjima, and multimillionaire by participating in imperialist-fascist projects. The estimated number of deaths associated with the Second Sino-Japanese war is around one order of magnitude larger than the number of words in the entirety of Umineko. In other words, listing but the name of every victim structurally connected with the historical violence in Ep1 would exceed the limits of the text itself. The logics of the traditional murder mystery genre (treating death and murder as localized and individual exceptions to a larger sense of peace and order) are fully incapable of adequately representing genocide, a mode of violence in which murder and death become collective, embedded, and structural.

Umineko Ep1 – and by my suggestion, all of Umineko – then becomes a tale of (meta)narrative violence, or how narratives can be mobilized in support and even creation of material, actualized violence. Multiple times, characters puppeteer the narrative of progress; Battler’s answer to the question how the murders might have happened if it were not for magic is to refer to technological progress. Multiple times, characters affirm the narrative that “modern times” are more logical, enlightened, progressed. All this they do while standing on a family fortune built on blood. It is the narrative of progress upon which the neoliberal ideology that builds up the family rests, an excuse, distraction, denial of the true origin of their status. Whereas Umineko’s Historical Beatrice, a woman harmed to no end by Kinzo, exists, the philosopher’s stone does not. The underlying implication of the epitaph is an alibi, a lie, a myth; Kinzo mobilizes the idea of the witch and magic to deny what he has truly done to acquire the gold. Maybe he has bought into his lies so much already that he has partially started to believe them himself.

The clues that the game lays out in the main menu might then be read as much more allegorical than to be taken at face value. The technical specifications of the Winchester M1894, like its fire rate and ammo capacity, might be less relevant to solving Umineko. It seems, at least to me so far, far more relevant to read the Winchester M1894 as a symbol for colonization and colonial inscription. In that, the detailed contents of the epitaph might become irrelevant to solving Umineko, and thus the epitaph has to be regarded as a clue in form of an analogy, an analogy for the lie of neoliberalism that anyone could gain fortune, an analogy for the nonsensical and empty narratives neoliberalism props up, an analogy for the Game Theory employed by capitalism. Perhaps the future episodes will reveal that trying to solve the epitaph at face value is a losing game. Indeed, maybe, its purpose is to create losers to its supposed game, because it might be this analogy for capitalism itself. As Jack Halberstam put it in 2011:

“Failure, of course, goes hand in hand with capitalism. A market economy must have winners and losers, gamblers and risk takers, con men and dupes; capitalism, as Scott Sandage argues in his book Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (2005), requires that everyone live in a system that equates success with profit and links failure to the inability to accumulate wealth even as profit for some means certain losses for others.” (p. 88)

In that sense, people losing to the epitaph is a necessary component to the money roulette as well as the demon’s roulette. I have no certain idea why Kinzo has put up the epitaph in the first place. Perhaps he genuinely believes he has cracked a dark magic code. Maybe he believes it. Maybe he does not. All I know for certain is that I will not solve the epitaph any time soon; perhaps that is the entire point of it, perhaps not.

Eternal Witch Beatrice claws her way out of (and then back into) several narratives, within the text and outside of it. She is vengeance personified, an answer for Beatrice Portinari and Umineko’s Historical Beatrice, women eternally entrapped in narratives created and maintained by men many times more powerful than them. Both Kinzo and Dante puppeteer their respective narratives of Beatrices to create and maintain their legacy. And in both instances, this violence repeats and echoes in recurrence. Violent systems of control are more likely to transform and stay nearly as violent than they are to dissolve. The Ushiromiya children repeat the sins of their parents, and their parents repeat the sins of their father. Like the musical format of the Rondo that one of the subtitles of Umineko mentions, this violence is going to be picked up again and again and again in future Episodes. Every time, it will be varied a little bit. Move back to the 3rd of October and change a couple of factors, and the violence that is the Ushiromiya family is likely to resurface again, just in a different iteration. No matter which iteration of chess moves one looks at, the players will likely aim to reduce the other’s material advantage and number of pieces; the Ushiromiyas are destined to destroy each other over and over and over again in the gamified violence of imperialist and colonial capitalism. This violence repeats synchronically and diachronically; who even needs a magical time loop when imperialism and the patriarchy and capitalism are so cyclical in nature?

Ultimately, though, I know that Umineko is a hopeful story. Ozaawa told me that the central sentence they see in Umineko is “without love, it cannot be seen”. I do not know the context in which this sentence appears, but there is a thematic equivalent in Ep1, namely, a challenge Kyrie places into the logics of Game Theory:

“Events in the world of humans are normally full of noise. Aren’t human emotions that way? Even if the exact same thing occurs more than once, there’s no guarantee that humans will always act in a predictable fashion.”

Whereas the world of witches – the realm of narratives and their powerful implications – operates on strange but fixed rules and semi-random but calculable probabilities, humans have the capacity to defy odds. Whereas it is likely that systems of violence permute throughout generations, there is always hope to be had that the human heart can ultimately defy these systems. The chance of breaking the cycle is always non-zero. That being explained, I love Eternal Witch Beatrice.[xxviii] Her struggle to defy all the narrative entanglements she was and is trapped in, her incredibly human feelings, her desire for autonomy and agency, are to me the core of the story, and what motivated me to write these thousands upon thousands of words.

5. On chess openings, or: What I still can’t explain

Here is the thing: All of this is a lot, many thousand words in fact, of speculation and half-baked theorizing. This is a reading, not the reading; I can’t even begin to fathom what this story is once the player-reader completes it. Even if I am to be right and the epitaph does not solve in a singular, meaningful, truthful way, there are still so many things I can not explain. Maybe I am completely wrong on many, if not all accounts. It would be awfully convenient for the lesbian that is bad at murder mysteries if solving Umineko under the classical logics of murder mysteries is intentionally impossible; perhaps I have misunderstood so much that I have deluded myself into thinking that such is a valid reading. I still hope this essay is an entertaining practice in trying to closely read Ep1 of Umineko without knowing all too much about the future episodes.

After finishing Ep1 for the first time, I formulated some questions I could not answer, but that I thought important to answer:

- What was the role of Rokkenjima between 1923 and 1945?

- What is the original contract made between Kinzo and Beatrice somewhere in this time? Does it even exist?

- What kind of interest can Beatrice collect on the gold when Kinzo got it from collaborating with imperialist fascism or even engaging in it?

I think they still hold value to ask, though some answers I have already partially established. And, I think this should be added:

- Why did Rudolf rightfully report in advance that he would die during the night?

- What is a witch?

And, this is still a burning question of mine: How did pochapal solve much of this story very early on? What the fuck is even going on?

6. Citations

Alighieri, D. (1996). Divine Comedy: Inferno (R. Turner, Trans.). Oxford UP. (Original work published around 1320).

Cornish, A. (2000). Angels. In R. Lansing (Ed.) Dante Encyclopedia (1st ed., pp. 37-45).

Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Duke UP.

Howie, C. (2021). Bodies on Fire. In M. Gragnolati et al (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Dante (pp. 494–509). Oxford UP.

Kirkpatrick, R. (1990). Dante' s Beatrice and the Politics of Singularity. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 32(1), 101-119.

Lewis, R. W. B. (2001). Dante's Beatrice and the New Life of Poetry. New England Review 22(2), 69-80.

Lowe, D. (2016, April 17). The Rise and Unravelling of the Hachijo Royal Hotel. Ridgelineimages. https://ridgelineimages.com/haikyo/unravelling-of-the-hachijo-royal-hotel/.

Mazzotta, G. (2000). Alighieri, Dante. In R. Lansing (Ed.) Dante Encyclopedia (1st ed., pp. 15-20).

Schlingen, B. D. (2021). The East. In M. Gragnolati et al (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Dante (pp. 383–398). Oxford UP.

Singleton, C.S. (2019). Journey to Beatrice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP doi:10.1353/book.68489.

Waller, M. (2021). A Decolonial Feminist Dante: Imperial Historiography and Gender. In M. Gragnolati et al (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Dante (pp. 701–718). Oxford UP.

7. End notes

[i] Citation needed.

[ii] This overly detailed descriptions is not setting up a point I want to make way later, do not worry about it.

[iii] For anyone still confused, here is the dramatis personae broken down in non-linear order: Kinzo is the head of the family. Krauss is Kinzo’s eldest child, Krauss’ wife is Natsuhi, and their one child together is the teenager Jessica. Eva is Kinzo’s second child, she married Hideyoshi, and they had one son, George, a young adult, together. Rudolf is Kinzo’s third child, he had a son named Battler, 18 years old, and later married Kyrie, his former secretary. Kinzo’s youngest child is Rosa, her child with an unknown person is the nine-year old Maria. The servants are Genji, trusted head servant, Godha, renowned cook and newest member of the servants, Kumasawa, an old woman and long-time servant at the household, Kanon, barely a child, and Sayo, another very young servant. Doctor Nanjo hangs out on the island as well.

[iv] This overly detailed descriptions is not setting up a point I want to make way later, do not worry about it.

[v] This overly detailed descriptions is not setting up a point I want to make way later, do not worry about it.

[vi] Death count: 6.

[vii] Death count: 8.

[viii] Death count: 9.

[ix] Death count: 10.

[x] Death count: 13.

[xi] Death count: 14.

[xii] Death count: Everyone? 14-18?

[xiii] This overly detailed descriptions is not setting up a point I want to make way later, do not worry about it.

[xiv] Death count: Who knows.

[xv] Slight hyperbole.

[xvi] Which in Battler’s internal monologue narration gets placed as follows: “The Great Kanto Earthquake happened in Taisho 13 (1924) [...]”. Now, Taishō 13 is 1924, that much is correct, but the one major earthquake of the era I could identify is firmly located in September 1923, indeed being called the Great Kantō earthquake in many sources. This could mean several things; perhaps I am bad at research, perhaps the translation made a mistake somehow, perhaps it took Kinzo a year to assume the position of the head of the family after the earthquake, or maybe this is intentional by the author to make the reader question Battler’s authority in narrating the past.

[xvii] Frankly I forgot which one. Sorry :(

[xviii] The well-read observer might now think “Kassandra how the fuck did you instantly remember Virgil as a character of the Divine Comedy but not Beatrice”, to which I would like to respond with one of Patrick Star’s most famous aphorisms: The inner machinations of my mind are indeed an enigma.

[xix] “Literary canon”, not to be confused with “literary Kanon”.

[xx] “Western church canon”, not to be confused with “western church Kanon”.

[xxi] I personally remember reading Dan Brown‘s Inferno as a teenager, where in typical Dan Brown fashion, the woman becomes an object to be taken by the wisdom of the middle-aged academic white man; and I am pretty certain the idea of her being “a Beatrice” runs throughout the text as much as allusions to Dante and his work.

[xxii] “Straight stairs”, not be confused with “gay stares”, which is what I do whenever Eternal Witch Beatrice is onscreen.

[xxiii] Eva got killed by the stake of Asmodeous, who stands for lust. The last time Eva is seen alive is when she is very very horny towards Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi, a capitalist invested in the food distribution business, is killed by the stake of Beelzebub, the demon responsible for gluttony. Kinzo, the ultrarich capitalist, is killed by the stake of Mammon, the demon of greed. Kanon dies wrathful, lashing out at the darkness, and is killed by the stake of Satan, demon of wrath. Genji, proud of his servant role and the trust Kinzo places in him, is killed by the stake of Lucifer, demon of pride. Doctor Nanjo, a man who reacted to all the death and blood around him by freezing in place and barely reacting at all, is killed by the stake of Belphegor, who stands for sloth. Kumasawa dies by the stake of Leviathan, who stands for envy – I am unable to fully decipher that one. Maybe she felt excessive envy for the safety that those who were barricaded in the study found themselves in.

[xxiv] You might be wondering why I am using one translation while using another translation’s commentary to analyze the quote. The answer is simple; I liked the one translation more from its poetic execution.

[xxv] The butterfly as a symbol for Eternal Witch Beatrice also takes on another role; I cannot quote this enough, as stated by Ozaawa 2023: “Beato trans.”

[xxvi] This is so tangential I dare not even put it in the main text, but Dante’s fascination with the Roman empire might tie back into his political support of the Holy Roman empire and the figure of the Holy Roman emperor, a political entity that claimed to be a direct heir to the Roman empire. The imperial symbol of the Holy Roman empire and emperors is the two-headed, two-winged eagle. In my deliberations on the symbolic implications on the One-Winged (and one-headed) Eagle, I have yet to resolve a direct connection to any real world symbol, and the Holy Roman empire is the closest node of possible connection my brain can come up with. However, I assume that it is completely unrelated.

[xxvii] Failing spectacularly is kind of Battler’s entire modus operandi, if you think about it.

[xxviii] And not just because its t4t. But also because it is t4t.

[anthurak]

Okay so, thematically speaking, the reason why I think they'll use the Staff instead of Ascension for Summer is because the Hound, while smart, did not have the faculties needed to actually take ascension, and as shown with Alyx, dying in the Ever After just means you end up as a ghost forever instead of ascending, so the Staff is just about the only way they'll be able to de-Grimmify Summer.

(This is also why I'm thinking Summer being saved would mean Penny coming back for Round 3, or vice versa, given Penny's aforementioned thematic parallels with the Grimmified SEW's. If a dignified death is the closest to a happy ending Penny will ever achieve, then they'll have no choice but to mercy kill Summer. It's just a matter of whether Penny's return or Summer's rescue would come first.)

On somewhat a related note (given how my last two asks were combined), I'm also thinking Cinder's ascension would mark a good point to close out the penultimate Volume on, that way the Final Volume would have time to develop her next incarnation alongside Team RWBY, since they'd kind of have to flesh out her new identity.

Regarding Summer, I think the assumption that you’re making is that Grimm!Summer is going to be just like the Hound. And I really doubt that’s what we’re going to see.

Largely because I think Grimm!Summer simply being a raving, mindless monster would not be nearly as interesting, nor hit nearly as hard emotionally, as if she was fully cognizant.

As I’ve gone into in other posts, I think Summer is in fact fully cognizant and self-aware after having essentially become the SAME kind of Light/Dark hybrid that Salem is after a dip in the darkness pools. Though at the same time completely psychologically broken by Salem into being her willing follower. And that the Hound, the other hybrids and even Cinder herself have been part of Salem’s research and experiments into trying to replicate what happened to Summer, and herself.

Again, I think this would hit WAY harder than Summer just being a mindless monster. I mean just imagine Ruby, Yang, Raven, Qrow, etc. expecting a Grimm!Summer to be some raving monster just like the Hound… only for some mysterious armored humanoid grimm to unmask herself to reveal Summer, who ISN’T mindless and straight up says she’s serving Salem WILLINGLY.

For one, this allows Grimm!Summer to be an actual CHARACTER instead of just a big scary monster. It lets Summer be an actual VILLAIN who can have conversations and debates with Ruby, Yang and the rest of her family, rather than just spouting creepy disjointed phrases.

Most importantly, it allows Summer to be a proper antagonist and foil to RUBY. An actual character to properly represent and embody Ruby’s self-destructive hero-complex taken to its inevitable conclusion. A way for Ruby to confront and battle, both physically AND ideologically, this part of herself she struggles so much with.

Finally, it allows Summer to be saved not through esoteric magic, but through Ruby and Yang and Raven and the rest of her family getting through all the pain and trauma she’s suffered and convincing Summer to come back to them. And for Ruby in particular, to save who essentially represent a broken version of herself.

Which in turn, going back to your point, means that Summer is actually fully cognizant and able to attempt ascension herself.

Regarding Cinder, I do more or less agree with you on that. Particularly if we end up getting another volume or two after Salem’s defeat to deal with the Gods. It would certainly be good to have some actual time to explore and flesh out Cinder’s new identity.

[gladstones-corner]

On the Ritual Dagger and Other Tools

Originally this was a very targeted, well-researched post. However, as I started writing, I realized the real point of this article: my difficulty using iron in magic, and what that means for my selection of tools as a general rule. And in all honesty, that's probably more interesting than a scholarly history of the athame. 

The magical community at large tends to accept the position that iron is disruptive to entities of the Otherworld, though the reasons why have been debated for centuries. Theories range from "ferrous metal disrupts subtle bodies" to "iron is symbolic of human industrialization". 

I'm less interested in a mystical reason than a practical one—in other words, I accept that iron disrupts Otherworld denizens, but am more concerned with why it disrupts me. I find it very difficult to channel energy through iron tools of any kind. 

The good news is that I'm not alone. Some practitioners work closely with the Otherworld, and iron tools hinder their work. Others prefer to use more natural material to reflect their connection with the web of life. Still others are just like me—they just find iron hard to use. 

Are these alternatives standard to the Western Esoteric Tradition? No, absolutely not. There are reasons why iron is used for the athame—not the least of which is because of the disruption towards unwanted spirits. Of course, wanted spirits also experience the disruption, so there is that to consider. 

Of these alternatives, bone and stone are the most common materials. Wood is much less common, as the material tends to be associated with Fire more than with Air (the standard elemental correspondence for the ritual dagger). But, if your tradition swaps the elemental correspondence so that the Wand is for Air and the Dagger is for Fire, there's nothing stopping you from obtaining a wooden ritual dagger. 

Other materials that are nonmetallic, like resin, should be avoided on environmental and practical principles. Not only are many synthetics bad for the environment—which can hinder your connection with the living universe—they are usually very poor conductors of energy. That isn't to say you can't use them—I've seen plenty of people use resin wands—but I really don't recommend it. 

So, what did I choose? I'll be honest, I didn't go out of my way to purchase new tools; I examined what I had on hand. And thankfully, what I found were two obsidian knives from a family trip to Cancun years ago. 

Before I could use them, I had to cleanse and bless them. To do so, I decided to use the Druid method of Land, Sea, Sky. So I started by letting them sit in the sunlight for a few hours to cleanse and bless them by the Sky. After that, I waited for a storm and set them outside to be cleansed and blessed by the "Sea" (water). Finally, I wiped them clean and drove them into the soil to cleanse and bless them by the Land. Finally, they were ready for use. 

First thing I did was cast alchemical glyphs in the air before me: invoking pentacle, banishing pentacle, fire, water, air, earth, spirit, etc.  

My initial thought: the knives are very well balanced. One is about 7", the other about 4". I prefer the larger, if only because the smaller one is more fragile. However, they both have solid heft without being unwieldy. They're great for flourishing with. 

My second thought was that the knives hold and channel energy with ease. That was a pleasant surprise—now I know it's the iron in the dagger, not the dagger itself, that gives me trouble (though to really confirm, I'd need to try other iron athames). 

But here's the thing: these obsidian ritual daggers are not athames. Athames are specifically the black-handled, usually double-edged blade. So that raises a new question: where do we draw the line on swapping out tools? 

Let's examine that in some detail. If we are to believe the four tools of the Western Esoteric Tradition are based in ancient sources, then what are those sources and how did they evolve into their current forms? 

In the broadest strokes, the elemental tools of the Western Esoteric Tradition are the Wand, Dagger, Cup, and Disk. 

Some sources speculate they originate from the Four Treasures of the Tuatha de Danaan: the Spear of Lugh, Sword of Nuada, Cauldron of The Dagda, and Stone of Fal. But if that were wholly the case, we would still be left with questions around how the Spear and Stone became Wand and Disk. 

Let's keep digging and examine each tool individually, rather than as a set: 

Wand: traced back to prehistory, but came into the forefront with Egyptian, Zoroastrian, and Greek priests. 

Dagger: traced back to the Key of Solomon as one of several goetic tools. 

Cup: traced back to prehistory as a tool for holding sacred and mundane liquids. 

Pentacle: traced back to the Key of Solomon as a method of summoning entities. 

Okay, so we can now see that these tools came from a few different places and have slowly grown together. Let me fill in some gaps: the wand is relatively the same as it was in ancient times; the dagger used to be several daggers but has since been standardized; the cup is still widely variable and can be a chalice, cauldron, or any other vessel; the pentacle is still widely variable based on tradition. 

So that brings us back to our question: when do we substitute tools out? The "real" answer is whatever your tradition requires. But for those of us without a set tradition, the question becomes more complicated. 

I've implied throughout this article that the tools are directly correlated to the four lower elements. So, it stands to reason that you would have a representation of each element on the altar. 

Let's take the case of the Four Treasures of the Tuatha de Danaan: 

Sword: Fire 

Spear: Air 

Cauldron: Water 

Stone: Earth 

For a more eclectic take, we can try: 

Sage Bundle: Fire 

Large Feather: Air 

Bowl: Water 

Plate: Earth 

You're also not limited to "tools", either. In my Druidic practice, I place four vessels on the altar that contain: 

Fire: Candle 

Air: Incense 

Water: Water 

Earth: Soil 

So really, the answer to the question "when do we substitute" is really "whenever feels most appropriate to you". The important things are that the items on the altar represent the four lower elements, and can be used for energy channeling. That's what makes it a tool, that you can use it to channel energy, not the fact that it's inherently a tool of some kind. 

Thank you for reading. As always, stay safe and stay tuned. 

Blessed be~ 

[warpedlegacywrites]

happy dadwc duchess! a prompt, perhaps for Cullen/Theresa post-Trespasser: "Who can tell me if we have Heaven? / Who can say the way it should be?"

happy writing :3

@dadrunkwriting

Okay no lie, this song literally started playing in my playlist as I was reading your prompt, so I’m taking that as a sign lol. Enjoy some epistolary goodness! Sorry, it ended up not being post-Trespasser, I was just feeling the letters passing back and forth too much and couldn't think of a post-Trespasser reason for it! ^_^

My dearest, 

Looks like you’ve won the bet. The new training dummies didn’t last the week. I suppose that serves me right for underestimating just how much force Cassandra can put into a swing. Lesson learned. I don’t know what’s worse – losing the bet or the knowledge that she’s been holding back in our sparring matches. 

We never did decide on the terms. I’ll let you name them, considering it’s your victory. 

All my love, 

Cullen 

***

My lion, 

I claim my prize as a round for the whole of the Herald’s Rest upon my return to Skyhold, on you. As for Cassandra, trust me – you don’t want her going all out against you. 

Hope to see you soon, 

Theresa

***

Tess, 

Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing. I am perfectly capable of socializing on my own without your nudging. Re: Cassandra, that sounds like a story. I insist you tell it when you’re safely back. Over drinks, at the tavern (see?). 

I miss you. 

Love, 

Cullen

***

It’s a date. I miss you too. – Tess. 

***

My love. I keep trying to read these reports but my eyes keep wandering to the chair you always use when you’re here. It’s currently filled with requisition orders. Do you know, I use your impending returns as motivation to finish them, just so you can have your chair? I’ve never admitted that to anyone. Please don’t tell Leliana. 

And come home soon. 

– Cullen

***

Tess, 

The repairs on the western tower have finally been completed. Fiona and her lot are already making themselves at home. I’ve never seen so many oddly shaped glass containers. But they insist they’re close to a breakthrough on improving the dispersion of the healing mist grenades, so I suppose they must be serving some function. One of them tried to explain the specifics to me, but I confess most of it went quite over my head. You’d have had no trouble understanding him, I’m sure. 

I hope I’m there to see your face when you look at their progress for the first time. I think you’ll be pleased. 

I hope you’re well. Please write back when you can. 

Love, 

Cullen 

*** 

Darling, 

I apologize for bombarding you yet again. If you’ve sent me a reply, I haven’t received it. Are you well? I overheard an interesting conversation today between two of the men out of Hasmal. I doubt they knew I was within earshot or they wouldn’t have spoken so freely. 

They were debating whether it is truly a heaven to walk at the Maker’s side in death, or if that is the punishment. One believed that to spend eternity bathed in the light of His gaze is the ultimate desire, while the other said that the real desire comes in the seeking. That once you have heaven, there is nothing to desire. The first man told him that’s why he’s still single. 

I agree with the first man. 

– Cullen 

P.S. – I worry I get a little too esoteric in these letters sometimes. Perhaps I should stop writing them so late at night. 

P.P.S. – Still not dawn. I long to watch the sunrise with you my love. 

***

I pray this letter finds you safe and well. I’ve seen the reports out of the Emprise. Please. Please. Be safe. Write when you can. – Cullen 

*** 

Cullen: 

I’m alright. Sorry to have worried you. I don’t know why I’m writing this. They’ve told me you’ll be here within days to inspect the progress on the Keep. But I thought at least I should answer some of your letters. 

Please, never apologize for “bombarding” me. Your letters are my small corner of peace in my travels. To see your handwriting after a long day is worth more to me than an eternity in the Maker’s light. 

As for the conversation you eavesdropped on – yes, eavesdropped, my love, don’t think I missed you trying to downplay that – I think both men are right, in a way. Desire does fade once you’ve achieved what you wanted, yes. But what replaces it is even better – peace. 

I relish the anticipation of you as much as the feel of your arms around me. Both are a kind of heaven. 

– Tess. 

[female-malice]

Dear Anthropocene Working Group:

It is with mixed emotions that I am sending this letter to resign from the Anthropocene Working Group. I’ve been a member since AWG began in 2009 and many of my most treasured experiences as a scholar have unfolded with AWG. Over most of the past 14 years, AWG has exemplified the kind of scholarly community that encourages exploration of new ideas and evidence and the spirit of open collegial debate needed to build strong science. Even though, as an ecologist, my professional perspectives and contributions have often differed from the core views of the group, I’ve generally found these to be welcome and productive. For all of these reasons, I feel sadness in resigning.

Nevertheless I must resign, for two reasons. The first is that things have changed within the group, as exemplified by the increasingly corrosive nature of discussions surrounding two recent resignations. AWG has become so focused on promoting a single narrow definition of the Anthropocene that there is no longer room for dissent or for a broader perspective within the group. This narrowing of perspective began to emerge years ago, with the 2016 vote deciding that only evidence supporting a mid-20th century start date would be considered in Anthropocene definition. Looking back, I probably should have resigned at that time. But recent efforts to promote the group’s final GSSP and site proposal have now established beyond doubt that there is no longer any place for broader perspectives on Anthropocene definition within AWG. The group exists only to promote one single narrow perspective, and differing views are no longer acceptable. I clearly no longer have any useful role in the group.

Second, it is no longer possible to avoid the reality that narrowly defining the Anthropocene in the way AWG has chosen to do has become more than a scholarly concern. The AWG’s choice to systematically ignore overwhelming evidence of Earth’s long-term anthropogenic transformation is not just bad science, it’s bad for public understanding and action on global change. This, at a time when broader cooperation to address these grave societal challenges is more critical than ever.

To define the Anthropocene as a shallow band of sediment in a single lake is an esoteric academic matter. But dividing Earth’s human transformation into two parts, pre- and post- 1950, does real damage by denying the deeper history and the ultimate causes of Earth’s unfolding social-environmental crisis. Are the planetary changes wrought by industrial and colonial nations before 1950 not significant enough to transform the planet? The political ramifications of such a misleading and scientifically inaccurate portrayal are clearly profound and regressive. Perhaps AWG’s break in Earth history will simply be ignored outside stratigraphy. But this is undoubtedly neither AWG’s goal, nor is it the way AWG’s narrative is being interpreted across the public media.

I was first inspired to work on the Anthropocene as a geological concept in 2008, in response to the GSA Today article led by Jan and the exciting scientific and societal discussions surrounding it. Soon after, Jan and I organized a session together and met in person at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco in December 2008. I was then asked to join AWG and gladly accepted. Many good years of scientific collaboration followed.

As a scholar who has actively worked within a group now promoting a misleading and regressive perspective on Earth’s transformation by human societies, I feel obligated to respond. First, by formally ending my association with the group, and in the long term, by doing my best to counteract the damage created by this misleading perspective based on the best available science.

I have many fond memories and I retain my respect and admiration for all my colleagues in AWG. I remain hopeful that the Anthropocene as a concept will continue to inspire efforts to understand and more effectively guide societal interactions with our only planet. I no longer believe that the AWG is helping to achieve this and is increasingly actively accomplishing the opposite.

I therefore wish to formally resign from the Anthropocene Working Group.

Sincerely, Erle Ellis

[otosugar]

Heavens' Paradise Lost: Their biblical counterparts part 2

Tumblr couldn't handle my extensive summary because reasons and made me redo the archangels parts again I have pain for this but here is the Beside You part

Fall on me can be found here

Uriel

Uriel, Auriel or Oriel is the name of one of the archangels who is mentioned in the post-exilic rabbinic tradition and in certain Christian traditions. He is well known in the Russian Orthodox tradition and in folk Catholicism (in both of which he is considered to be one of the seven major archangels) and recognised in the Anglican Church as the fourth archangel. He is also well known in European esoteric medieval literature. Uriel is also known as a master of knowledge and archangel of wisdom.

Where a fourth archangel is added to the named three, to represent the four cardinal points, Uriel is generally the fourth. Uriel is listed as the fourth angel by Christian Gnostics (under the name Phanuel). However, it is debated whether the Book of Enoch refers to the same angel by two different names. Uriel means "God is my flame", whereas Phanuel means "God has turned". Uriel is the third angel listed in the Testament of Solomon, the fourth being Sabrael.

Uriel appears in the Second Book of Esdras found in the Biblical apocrypha (called Esdras IV in the Vulgate) in which the prophet Ezra asks God a series of questions and Uriel is sent by God to instruct him. According to the Revelation of Esdras, the angels that will rule at the end of the world are Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael, Gabuthelon, Beburos, Zebuleon, Aker, and Arphugitonos. The last five listed only appear in this book and nowhere else in apocryphal or apocalyptic works.

Uriel is often identified as a cherub and the angel of repentance. He "stands at the Gate of Eden with a fiery sword", or as the angel "who is over the world and over Tartarus. In the Apocalypse of Peter he appears as the angel of repentance, who is graphically represented as being as pitiless as any demon. In the Life of Adam and Eve, Uriel is regarded as the spirit (i.e., one of the cherubs) of the third chapter of Genesis. He is also identified as one of the angels who helped bury Adam and Abel in Eden.

Gabriel

In the Abrahamic religions, Gabriel is an archangel with the power to announce God's will to humans. He is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran. Many Christian traditions – including Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Lutheranism, and Anglicanism – revere Gabriel as a saint. In the Hebrew Bible, Gabriel appears to the prophet Daniel to explain his visions (Daniel 8:15–26, 9:21–27). The archangel also appears in the Book of Enoch and other ancient Jewish writings not preserved in Hebrew. Alongside the archangel Michael, Gabriel is described as the guardian angel of Israel, defending its people against the angels of the other nations.

Gabriel's first appearance in the New Testament, concerns the annunciation of the birth of John the Baptist. John's father Zacharias, a priest of the course of Abia, (Luke 1:5–7) was childless because his wife Elisabeth was barren. An angel appears to Zacharias while he is ministering in the Temple, to announce the birth of his son. When Zacharias questions the angel, the angel gives his name as Gabriel: "10 And the whole multitude of the people were praying without at the time of incense. 11 And there appeared unto him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense. 12 And when Zacharias saw him, he was troubled, and fear fell upon him. 13 But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John. 14 And thou shalt have joy and gladness; and many shall rejoice at his birth. 15 For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother's womb. 16 And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God. 17 And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. 18 And Zacharias said unto the angel, Whereby shall I know this? for I am an old man, and my wife well stricken in years. 19 And the angel answering said unto him, I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God; and am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew thee these glad tidings. 20 And, behold, thou shalt be dumb, and not able to speak, until the day that these things shall be performed, because thou believest not my words, which shall be fulfilled in their season."

— Luke 1:10-20 After completing his required week of ministry, Zacharias returns to his home and his wife Elizabeth conceives. After she has completed five months of her pregnancy (Luke 1:21–25), Gabriel appears again, now to Mary, to announce the birth of Jesus:

"26 And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, 27 To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary. 28 And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women. 29 And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. 30 And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. 31 And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. 32 He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: 33 And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end. 34 Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? 35 And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. 36 And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren. 37 For with God nothing shall be impossible. 38 And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her."

— Luke 1:26-38

Michael

Michael, also called Saint Michael the Archangel, Archangel Michael and Saint Michael the Taxiarch is an archangel in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Baha'i faith. The earliest surviving mentions of his name are in 3rd and 2nd-century BC Jewish works, often but not always apocalyptic, where he is the chief of the angels and archangels, and he is the guardian prince of Israel and is responsible for the care of Israel. Christianity adopted nearly all the Jewish traditions concerning him, and he is mentioned explicitly in Revelation 12:7–12, where he does battle with Satan, and in the Epistle of Jude, where the author denounces heretics by contrasting them with Michael.

The seven archangels (or four - the traditions differ but always include Michael) were associated with the branches of the menorah, the sacred seven-branched lampstand in the Temple as the seven spirits before the throne of God, and this is reflected in the Book of Revelation 4:5 ("From the throne came flashes of lightning, and rumblings and peals of thunder, and before the throne were burning seven torches of fire, which are the seven spirits of God" - ESV). Michael is mentioned explicitly in Revelation 12:7-12, where he does battle with Satan and casts him out of heaven so that he no longer has access to God as accuser (his formal role in the Old Testament). The fall of Satan at the coming of Jesus marks the separation of the New Testament from Judaism. In Luke 22:31 Jesus tells Peter that Satan has asked God for permission to "sift" the disciples, the goal being to accuse them, but the accusation is opposed by Jesus, who thus takes on the role played by angels, and especially by Michael, in Judaism.

Michael is mentioned by name for the second time in the Epistle of Jude, a passionate plea for believers in Christ to do battle against heresy. In verses 9-10 the author denounces the heretics by contrasting them with the archangel Michael, who, disputing with Satan over the body of Moses, "did not presume to pronounce the verdict of 'slander' but said, 'The Lord punish you!'

According to rabbinic tradition, Michael acted as the advocate of Israel, and sometimes had to fight with the princes of the other nations (Daniel 10:13) and particularly with the angel Samael, Israel's accuser. Their enmity dates from the time Samael was thrown from heaven and tried to drag Michael down with him, necessitating God's intervention.

Raphael

Raphael is an archangel first mentioned in the Book of Tobit and in 1 Enoch, both estimated to date from between the 3rd and 2nd century BCE. In later Jewish tradition, he became identified as one of the three heavenly visitors entertained by Abraham at the Oak of Mamre. He is not named in either the New Testament or the Quran, but later Christian tradition identified him with healing and as the angel who stirred waters in the Pool of Bethesda in John 5:2–4, and in Islam, where his name is Israfil, he is understood to be the unnamed angel of Quran 6:73, standing eternally with a trumpet to his lips, ready to announce the Day of Judgment. In Gnostic tradition, Raphael is represented on the Ophite Diagram.

His name derives from the Hebrew root רפא (r-p-ʾ) meaning "to heal", and can be translated as "God has healed". In Tobit he goes by the name Azariah (Hebrew: עֲזַרְיָה/עֲזַרְיָהוּ ʿĂzaryāh/ʿĂzaryāhū, "Yah/Yahu has helped") while disguising himself as a human. In the text he acts as a physician and expels demons, using an extraordinary fish to bind the demon Asmodeus and to heal Tobit's eyes, while in 1 Enoch he is "set over all disease and every wound of the children of the people", and binds the armies of Azazel and throws them into the valley of fire.

The New Testament names only two archangels or angels, Michael and Gabriel (Luke 1:9–26; Jude 1:9; Revelation 12:7), but Raphael, because of his association with healing, became identified with the unnamed angel of John 5:1–4 who periodically stirred the pool of Bethesda "and he that went down first into the pond after the motion of the water was made whole of whatsoever infirmity he lay under". The Catholic Church accordingly links Raphael with Michael and Gabriel as saints whose intercession can be sought through prayer.

Due to his actions in the Book of Tobit and the Gospel of John, Saint Raphael is considered patron of travelers, the blind, happy meetings, nurses, physicians, medical workers, matchmakers, Christian marriage, and Catholic studies. As a particular enemy of the devil, he was revered in Catholic Europe as a special protector of sailors: on a corner of the famous Doge's Palace in Venice is a relief depicting Raphael holding a scroll on which is written: "Efficia fretum quietum" (“Keep the Gulf quiet”). On July 8, 1497, when Vasco da Gama set sail from Lisbon with his four-ship fleet to India, the flagship was named São Rafael at the insistence of King Manuel I of Portugal. When the flotilla reached the Cape of Good Hope on October 22, the sailors debarked and erected a column in the archangel's honor. The little statue of Raphael that accompanied Da Gama on the voyage is now in the Naval Museum in Lisbon.

[hydralisk98]

I posted 17,981 times in 2022

That's 12,280 more posts than 2021!

159 posts created (1%)

17,822 posts reblogged (99%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@colorfulcollectordragon-2f8ee55c

@unixporn

@spongebobssquarepants

@reversetimelord

@olliegators

I tagged 501 of my posts in 2022

#maskoch - 77 posts

#actually autistic - 45 posts

#maskutchew - 39 posts

#art - 32 posts

#vintage - 32 posts

#servitor - 31 posts

#16^12 - 30 posts

#retro - 28 posts

#youtube - 22 posts

#meme - 21 posts

Longest Tag: 117 characters

#i used to collect lego crystals ok i promise its not a homestuck refenrence i promise on my copy of lego rock raiders

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

jw what would you like to see content-wise?

Comrades? I wanna query you all to add a couple of suggestions of your own because I got hired for a regular job coming tomorrow. So I was curious to gather community suggestions as to process them on a weekly basis (writing & scheduling many posts on weekends and basically developing my audience further, a bit outwards of my usual comfort zone too)

I still got my previous many ones but right now, I just want to see what you would prefer as I feel like I should dive deeper onto original & fandom content that's more typical of people all around here. I don't compromise my other ideas so no worries, simply asking for input and feedback of yours all truly.

Sorry and don't mind my ping, I wanna tag a few users to specifically get their honest opinions up there: @makorays @cypopps @thecommunistdm-blog @adri-the-alien @lunar-the-wolf @reversetimelord @goldenwarefox @bell-of-light

The rest of you all are still welcome to write up anything constructive, after all I still have some muddy controversial matters to change up.

Take care my sweeties and cya soon.

\(^*^)/

9 notes - Posted April 18, 2022

#4

BACK TO WEB ~1.0 WE GO [PART 2]

See the full post

10 notes - Posted July 1, 2022

#3

Servitor key of topics, agents and notes

See the full post

10 notes - Posted July 1, 2022

#2

BACK TO WEB ~1.0 WE GO [PART 1]

See the full post

18 notes - Posted July 1, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

*reflexive stance*

Online pseudonym: hydralisk98

Preferred nickname: Klara

Gender identity: Female

Pronouns: she/her

Birthday: August 1st

Citizenship: Canada

MBTI personality: INTP -> INTJ

Mental health details: Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

Education: Full DES, DEP Information Technologies' Support, on-going DEP in 'Graphic Design' and some time into Cegep in Multimedia... and much time spend exploring stuff by myself.

DNI: UPCOMING TOO. However I am still open to criticisms and debate within the norms of civil manners regardless.

Stance on LGBTQ+ things: Totally am part of it and as such I am enjoying each and every wholesome thing that occurs in this wide community for as far as I am aware of. Still humane enough to debate reasonably each side of the arguments and go towards a better future for the many sapients inhabiting existence.

Stance on spirituality: I like it much as I explore new possibilities of what can be, still balance to be made between the two mindset models (rationality and esoterism) as they are NOT mutually exclusive AND even rather complementary. But most issues come from the carthesian radical point. Enjoy your ride into subliminals!

Stance on Libre software and everything FOSS: Totally worth it, there are ofc good things that can come from other profiteering models but I put emphasis more onto Libre for a quite a few reasons both my own and for overall culture.

Portfolio of creative projects I finished: UPCOMING.

Where do you see yourself in five years?: Writing technical documentation, blogging & illustrating and composing multimedia work, printing and collaging media for promotional content, crafting public domain assets and script component libraries, graphic design & video editing of edutaining content, animating explainers, programming explorable explanations, research old technologies for posterity and lively use recycling, maintain a local technological history museum, produce accurate & original analog media materials for films games and books, write modular stories that can be edited around like software toys, record document and update older (computing, operating or whatever workflow) systems for longevity and experimentations...

IDEAS for the portfolio: video rental store full stack project, social history simulations project, CC0 creative editing asset bank project, CC0 recent history of Mascouche as a analog book documentation project, alternate history multilingual technological workflow stack project...

32 notes - Posted April 3, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[serpentstole]

hello there!! (totally cool if u dont want to answer this) but i saw ur post of spiritual/religious red flags and i wanted to ask about the "lucifer is actually roman god" thing and why that would be a red flag? thanks!

Hello! I don't mind answering it.

So first of all, that list was a real spectrum with no clear indicator of severity, which I tried to disclose at the beginning. Some of the things on it are deeply harmful or subtly bigoted, while others are just kind of misinformed. Lucifer as a Roman god tends to fall into the latter, in my opinion.

I don't know your frame of knowledge coming into this, so I'm sorry if I over explain anything.

In Greek and Roman myth, there are a lot of anthropomorphic personifications that exist alongside the gods. Two of them are Phosphorus and Hesperus, the personifications of the morning star and evening star, or Venus as seen at dawn and dusk. That Latin corresponding word/name for Phosphorus is Lucifer, while Hesperus gets Vesper. So in the strictest sense of the word, there is a figure in Roman mythology (though in my opinion not a god per se) that is named Lucifer.

Where this gets messy for me is when people try to say that Lucifer as he is understood in Christian folklore is a Roman god. The only thing that links these two figures is a misunderstanding of an old translation, which I've brought up before here when discussing the actual lack of Biblical presence that Lucifer has by name.

As with many of the ideas on that list, there tends to be a best case scenario and a worst case scenario, and plenty of middling takes in between.

To me, when I hear someone say "Lucifer is a Roman god" in conversations about the Lucifer who's discussed in (most) Luciferianism, or the Lucifer as he's portrayed in Paradise Lost, or any other variation there of, the best I can hope for is that they're misinformed and incurious. It's the kind of take that falls apart with even a little research, so if it's being regurgitated as trivia, it seems more likely to me than not that they didn't actually bother to do any reading of their own.

What I tend to worry about, however, is that the individual in question might be trying to distance Lucifer (as he's commonly understood) from his cultural origins. While the blend and evolution of religious ideas is incredibly intricate and complex, there tends to be a blunt force version that's employed whenever people want to distance Christian or Jewish figures from their religions. I would say the "Lilith is Babylonian actually" crowd is being far more offensive with it, as they tend to debate actual Jewish people with their entire chests despite numerous citations that prove otherwise which they choose to willfully misinterpret. Likewise, it starts getting a bit Weird to me when people will try to claim that the spirits in the Ars Goetia are Old Gods™ just because some of them (and not all, mind you) have names that are taken from or inspired by existing deities. For example, the name Astaroth is thought to maybe be inspired by Astarte (despite belonging to a wildly different entity of a different gender) and Balam shares a name with a Biblical magician.

There is a fascinating web that can be studied picked at. I would love nothing more than to be a professional esoteric historian who's paid to spend all his time trying to suss out how much of ancient Canaanite mythology influenced later religious ideas and stories, or how Mithraism may have influence early Christianity. But when people are simplifying and exaggerating those connections to try and separate the figures that appeal to them from their cultural and religious roots... I have to wonder why. And I'm always hard pressed to think of a defensible reason.

Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions!

[littleeyesofpallas]

Okay buckle up this was a roller coaster...

I was gonna go back to edit in just 1 extra sentence to my Vollstandig post mentioning how [完] means “Complete” but is also the Japanese equivalent to "The End" or "end" or "finis" as a closing card on a film may have been a little word play to parallel with Bankai's translation as "Final Release."  I thought maybe the two terms were written as synonyms with two different words for “final” and two different words for something like “form”

But naturally I wanted to double check the translation on Bankai to make sure the word play was similar, first...

And it was not.

So, for one...  Ban[卍] doesn’t translate as “Final” at all, because it kind of isn't really a word???  I mean, it is a word; it’s a kanji, and it has a few pronunciations, but they don't really "mean" anything translatable?  卍 is what's called a “manji” and it refers to the Buddhist symbol, and is the Buddhist symbol to which it refers(obviously), but the phonetic name manji[卍字] has its own writing, as you can see, which means "manji+character" as in a written-character.  So, the word references the character, which references the shape, but none of them have an attributable meaning.

In fact, in Viz's English translation, the first time this comes up in Tessai's use of bakudou to restrain Ichigo during his hollowification, they didn't translate it at all.  They wrote things out as; "Binding Spell 99 Number 2!!  Ban-kin!!!(Constriction Ban)" and "...Final incantation!! Ban-kin Tai-ho!!!(Constriction Seal)" and the whole incantation has issues, but I’ll tackle the whole of that some other time...

For now, the thing to note is that the -kin[禁] in bankin[卍禁] means "prohibition" and the Taihou[太封] in bankin taihou[卍禁太封] means "Grand Seal" (referring to the giant stamp-like pillar summoned to press down on Ichigo, literally like an ink or wax seal.)  So it would seem like they've translated kin[禁] as "Constriction" and just called ban[卍] "ban" the first time, and ignored it the second.  But in the context of the line it sounds like "(a) ban" which coincidentally would have worked as a translation of kin[禁] "a prohibition"="a ban."  (In the context of the final phrase, it may have even been untranslatable, as it could just refer to the fact that the seal has a 卍 carved into the side of it.)

But there is just one hint as to how this might be read, and that is the fact that the actual word for 卍, manji[卍字] has an alternate writing: manji[万字].  And the same man[万] in manji[万字] and read as ban[万] just like [卍], so in both this case and the case of Bankai (stay with me, we'll get there...) it seems like a safe bet they're synonymous.

Man[万] is the word for "10,000" but it can also mean "many," "myriad," "various," "everything..." you see the linguistic dominos train we're playing with here, right?  Each alternate meaning still brushing up against one another; Even as the meaning or usage drifts around, it all orbits the same idea.  So it's not surprising that it's also a prefix meaning "All."  And its use in [万字] refers to [卍] as the "all things symbol."

This is because the manji has great significance in Buddhism as a symbol of unity (literally where (all) things come together; an intersection/a cross), the whole of creation, infinity, and the revolving sun (hence its association with Ichigo and his Black Sun motif, which itself actually circles back around to drawing from some obtuse esoteric trivia relating to the swastika)  It's even the default icon for Buddhist temples on maps in Japan --I bring that bit up for reasons I'll come back to later-- although I’ve heard that’s been in debate to change in the wake of increased foreign tourist attitudes about the symbol.

Anyway... Point being, bankin[卍禁] means "All Prohibition" or "Everything Prohibition" or "Prohibition (of) Everything," etc... (Alternatively "All Ban"/"Everything Ban")

So, anyway... I went back to plug this into Bankai, and hey wait a minute... Kai[解] doesn't generally translate to "release..."

So I went back and quickly realized that we really didn't get the word "shikai" for quite a while, even as we were being show new zanpakutou and shikai forms left and right.  In fact, we wouldn't get the term at all until Yoruichi used it to explain what bankai was for the first time.

But before we get to that, there's some important context, because we do get a number of words that are related to it...

Kaihou[解放] is the word for "release" that we hear repeatedly in reference to a zanpakutou changing form.  As far back as Renji’s first appearance, he actually uses the word kaijyou[解除] which also means “release” but more like “release (from duty)” as he uses it to seal Zabimaru back into a standard katana, not summon it from...  Yoruichi also specifically uses the term [常時解放型]: “Continuous Release Type,” when talking about Zaraki and Ichigo’s zanpakutou, which kind of solidifies that kaihou[解放] is the specific term to use for zanpakutou.

But we also get to meet Ichigo's hollow self for the first time during the Zaraki fight and he berates Ichgio for how he handles Zangetsu.  He uses the word rikai[理解] specifically, meaning "Understanding," "Comprehension" or "Appreciation," and you'll notice the kai[解] in both those words is the same as in shikai[始解] and bankai[卍解]. 

So, the perfectly reasonable assumption when translating this seems to have been that [解] was basically an abbreviated form of kaihou[解放]: “Release.”  And yeah, that's the most sensible literal reading.  But there's a bigger word play at work here, because technically if it's being used as an affix kai[解] can mean "untie," "explanation," "solution," or "understand"/"comprehend."  Again with the orbital words and one idea, all of these are akin to an "answer (to a problem);" the untying of a knot, the solution to a problem, the explanation of an idea, the understanding of a concept are all "the answer" to something.

In the context of what shikai and bankai actually are, this references how shikai is only to "beginning (of) understanding," and bankai is "understanding everything"/"total comprehension."  It's the first and final steps in understanding a zanpakutou's sword spirit.  And since the sword spirit is a reflection of the wielder, an understanding of the self...

So back us up to the ve~ry beginning...  Vollstandig's kanji [完聖体] means "Complete Eucharist," written as "Complete+Holy+Form" or "Perfect+God+Body" where [聖体]:"Holy+Body" is the word for the christian Eucharist, or the act of Holy Communion...

Which means the Shinigami and Quincy final forms are [完聖体]:"Perfect [consumption of the body&blood of christ]" and [卍解]"Understanding of Everything" --but as I mentioned much earlier the 卍 symbol is synonymous with Buddhism.  So, the two factions' final forms are alternate forms of the same idea: Buddhist enlightenment through “understanding,” and christian becoming one with god via “holy communion.”

So in a really funny round about way my gut instinct in thinking there was some kind of wordplay parallel here was absolutely right, but in no way like how I expected it to be...

[struwwelzeter]

For a variety of reasons, I got into a bit of a rabbit hole about Richard's guitars, and my brain went "oh I know someone who will probably have opinions on this" so essentially, if you feel like it, pretty please talk RZK guitars to me? Favourite? Retired one that needs to come back? (Though I probably already know the answer, that fancy black one?)

Allrighty, buckle up because this is gonna be long. After much consideration I have decided to split it up in two parts because I don’t think I can make it fit into one post that is still vaguely tumblr appropriate, and I really wanted to do it some sort of justice. I still feel like I don’t. But oh well. Full disclaimer, I am NOT a guitarist, but I lived with a few, two of my best friends are pro players and I’m a sponge so I kind of soaked some bits and pieces up over the last 15 years. But in case any lost guitar hero finds this and disagrees with me over the finer points of tone wood: I know honey, I oversimplified, and I am wrong. I tried? 💜 for easier read I formatted everything specific to Richard’s guitars normally and anything general about electric guitars in cursive.

My main sources besides watching about a 100 a month of guitar tube videos (that is youtube for guitarists) with my ex, my main sources will be this interview and this.

Richard Z. Kruspe (of Rammstein and Emigrate)’s Guitars - In Order of Appearance, Part 1/2

Diamant (Les Paul Style)

“I traded the acoustic for a guitar called Diamant, which was like a Les Paul version in East Germany.” - RZK

Now I’m skipping the acoustic he started out with, because it’s basically impossible to know what that was, and go straight into the electric. Now presumably, it would have been something like this, a soviet build Les Paul rip off. The irony is that these still go for several thousands up on reverb today for being historical and collectors pieces. The thing is, that while anything east build might have used cheaper materials, I would assume this thing isn’t worse than any of the beginner/intermediate models sold today, if not better, and kids all over the world do decent stiff with those.

Something general about electric guitars is that you don’t really so much play the guitar, you play an entire system. The instrument doesn’t make the sound, it only influences it. You play a guitar - but you even more so play the amp. Which makes this a bit tricky, because an e-guitar is a slab of wood and a copper coil, and amps are way more complex. You can make the exact same guitar sound so many ways. Still - there are tendencies. The fact how and why and to which degree the shape and wood of a solid body (a guitar without a hollow wood piece) influences the sound is highly debated and can get a bit esoteric sounding to sane people non-guitarists, but there are some differences in how the general set up and build of the guitar changes things, and tendencies how they are traditionally outfitted. Les Paul style guitars are normally humbucker guitars, Stratocasters and Telecasters normally are outfitted with single coils. Usually a guitarist can switch - between using the bridge, the neck, or both (or more) pick ups and depending on where the pick up is located they pick up different frequencies, different aspects of the sound. Humbuckers produce a richer, deeper or fuller sound than single coils. Very roughly speaking, think the Stones vs. Metallica.

Fender Stratocaster

“Then in East Germany, we had this imagination to get one of the great guitars, to me it was always the Fender Stratocaster because it was the Jimi Hendrix guitar. I didn’t know anything about pickups or humbuckers or whatever. So there was this guy that I met in a café in my old hometown and he was buying all these books because he could get all the books out through customs and he would store them in my apartment. So we became kind of acquainted. He would come over and pick up the books. So one time he came over and I asked him if he could get me a guitar and bring it over. In East Germany, if you exchange money from East to West it would be like 1 East mark and 20 West mark. SO everything I had, I changed it to West Mark and I gave him the money and I gave him the money and asked him to please buy me a Fender Stratocaster. I gave him the money and I didn’t hear anything for like three months, nothing. I wasn’t able to call because we didn’t have phones and stuff like that – it was a different time. So I thought fuck, I gave him 1400 west mark and now he’s gone and never coming back. [...] Then my imagination was so high, I thought the guitar would just play by itself and I wouldn’t really have to do anything, which I found out was bullshit. I was really happy that I had the guitar but it wasn’t really the sound that I had in mind.” - RZK

The first time I heard that story, I literally went ��no, no, no, don’t be stupid, don’t give him your money, you won’t even like that guitar, stupid, lost dumbass.” I can not, for the life of me, imagine him play anything other than humbuckers. He apparently does use single coils for some things today again in the studio, but still, it’s so obviously wrong. He did play one again sometime during the late 90s, but I couldn’t find anything on the pick ups he used with that, but can hardly imagine he kept the original, unless he needed it for a specific sound maybe in one or two songs. I get it though. For many, many people the Fender Stratocaster is THE guitar. Jimi Hendrix is the main reason for that, but it’s also the countless idols that picked it up after him for the same reason, people who ended up plastered on the walls of angsty teenagers in their own right. This totally has to do with the whole amp thing aswell. You see your idol play that type of guitar ... but it’s not even half of the sound, and it won’t sound the same. Maybe probably they changed the pick ups, they have an effect rig, the spend hours fiddling with the knobs on an amp you can never afford. It’s never the same. Which is why ...

Fender Telecaster Black Gold

Then I had a guitar that I was very fond of. It was an older black and gold telecaster – there weren’t very many of them made at that point. I put a Seymour Duncan Jeff Beck SH-4 in there, like a humbucker. I remember it was like my beauty guitar and I needed someone to put that pickup in and I was with Paul and he had more experience with that stuff than me so he would get out a hammer and a chisel and he start banging away on it and I was like ‘Fuck! Fuck! Don’t do that!’ but we put the thing in there and it was one of my favorite guitars” - RZK

... this one first didn’t really make sense for me for him. It’s even more a classic single coil guitar than the Strat is, and it only really started making sense for me when I learned he Paul indeed put a Humbucker in there. It’s a stunningly beautiful guitar, and weirdly non-modern for him. I don’t know why and this is completely instinctual on my part, but I find it fitting he played it during that time after the wall came down, which seems to have been a rough time for him generally, it seems like a somehow super emotional guitar, this relic. Telecasters were some of the first electrics ever build, it’s such a pioneer, but it’s also one that alot of punk bands used, possibly because they were old and cheap in the 70s and noisy and people customized it and put other pick ups in. The whole putting a chisel to it and adding a humbucker into it is such a “I’m gonna make whatever I have fit for me, and I’ll love it” move. If you look at it, a double coil pick up is really something you have to force to go in there, you really have to break it open. There is also this:

“... and then I think I had to sell it because I needed drugs or something. I was really sad that I sold it because I was at a very low point in my life.” - RZK

If I would get the chance to do one thing only for him to thank him for his music, I would go back in time to that Richard who is just sad about selling that guitar and hug him, and tell him he doesn’t need to worry, because they will name guitars after him in the future. It breaks my heart so fucking much. But of course, it’s what opens the doors to what happens next, which is ...

ESP 901

“That led me to my very first convention in Frankfurt. With guitars, it is like with women, you have to fall in love. Sometimes you get a guitar and you fall in love later but there has to be some sort of connection with it. So I was walking around that convention and I saw that guitar hanging at the ESP stand. It was a 901 ESP Sunburst and I was looking at it because it was such a beauty. And I was walking around for hours – they probably thought I was some weird guy who wants to steal the guitar. I bought that guitar and that’s how I got connected with ESP.” -RZK

He might have fallen for it because it is pretty, but it did come with a ESP double humbucker set up, with an added condensator to muffle up the sound, although not yet an active one (more on that later). It was a 90s metal guitar, one of those things marketed to the Metallica generation, something loud and heavy and full. Also, and this is where I will put in another general insert, there is something else about the choice of electric guitars that we haven’t talked about yet.

Now, I’ve discussed that you can push or pull the sound of a electric quite far in one or the other direction with what pick ups you use, what effects, what amps. But what this ignores is that especially standing up a guitar is a really shitty asymmetrical piece of equipment. And what that does to your body is that it needs to fit you, your hands, and your playing style. Some people prefer it chunky, others like sender. Guitarists, especially the 80s shredders, like to talk about a “fast neck”, which is another one of those things that get slightly esoteric, but which usually means a slimmer neck and slightly bigger frets, that need less way for your fingers to press until the string gets stopped. Someone who plays very bendy blues might dislike that and prefer something to dig in their fingers more down to the fretboard to get more control over how they bend the string. There are different neck profiles, there are different neck lengths, and all of it contributes to how comfortable someone might find their guitar.

I am mentioning this, because until today, Richard’s guitars are build very similarly to that ESP 901. His Eclipse Model is a tad different (again, more on that later), but the one he uses the most, the RZK I, has the same neck scale, similar frets, and that comfortable ESP slender neck. Even the shape seems to be inspired by turning it upside down. He has said in interviews that he hasn’t got very strong hands, and it makes perfect sense to me. I bought my own electric (again, more on that later) purely because I wanted to own one and not even so much because I ever had any real ambitions of learning to play it, but my friends at the time (10 years ago now) forced me to try out alot (!) of models (despite me knowing what I wanted), and the only guitars that I tried that had slimmer necks were Ibanez guitars, which in turn were wider. Ironically Frankfurt is my hometown, so the place to try a lot of different models is That exact convention Richard went to, and I haven’t skipped a Musikmesse in the last 15 years. I was at atleast one were Richard was too (I just didn’t care at the time, yikes), and it somehow greatly pleases me he found “his” guitar at that particular convention. Things have changed in recent years, but electric guitars always were in Hall 4.01, with ESP being left of center in the middle, and I don’t know, I can just see him walking in circles around it, and it makes me so emotional for him because it’s what musicians do at that place. It’s really loud, everyone is playing, there is someone better noodling around at every corner, and it can be quite an intimidating setting I think. And every year you see that one kid coming back and back again to that same stand, staring at that one guitar until they finally work up the nerve and ask to try it (or the staff takes pity on them and offer). And it’s the same everytime, they think “oh god they must think I am crazy” but really, nobody does. Everyone in that hall who owns a heart knows what those dreams are made of, and all it maybe does inspire is a “oh god, I hope that one makes it”. I digress. I think it’s more common now to look for different neck styles and companies started caring about it, but especially coming from Fender and Gibson guitars, that neck is honestly just very, very nice for weaker hands.

This is where I will stop, because it makes a good moment for a break and this post is honestly getting too out of hand otherwise. There will be a part 2 - where Richard starts using active pick ups, starts playing my favorite guitar in the whole wide world (and stops playing it), and finally, set up his own signature.

This is him with that 901 though: when he must have had it pretty much brandnew, while he used it, and right before he sold it.

[bladekindeyewear]

THE DEVICE

I don’t usually put images from the latest updates on main outside a read-more cut, but I’m getting further people messaging in today saying they think THE DEVICE hidden under a sheet in HS^2′s latest -- the one at the very center of the noncanon singularity, where they believe bringing Vriska and having something too important for Canon to ignore happen will make a difference -- matches the shape of the Hiveswap door.

And it definitely, INTENTIONALLY matches the general SHAPE of the door as well as its “trapped under a tarp” aesthetic, but in Homestuck that’s no guarantee that the device is the SAME, much less even similar.

Plus, as much as a Hiveswap door gives things a “trading between worlds” feel in a story where we’re ALREADY bifurcated between Meat and Candy sides, and as much as Dirk is specifically afraid of Yiffy in a metatextual making-that-story-better-than-mine sense, there’s some reason to believe from Calliope’s language that the goal of the device is a bit more esoteric:

CALLIOPE: as far as everyone else is concerned, we might as well not even exist! JOHN: is there no way we could let anyone know that we're in here...? CALLIOPE: almost certainly not! CALLIOPE: there are very few ways for anything to escape the kind of predicament that we are in right now.

If the device’s purpose were to more or less directly enlist the help of those in Canon -- at the present time, at least -- or pull one of them away while shoving another in their place who could relay the status of their current predicament, then Calliope answering John’s question this way would be pretty weird.  Though, by using the weasel-wording “very few”, she does not rule OUT the idea that this device DOES allow SOMETHING to take place between Canon and Non-Canon.  Especially since, considering their goal:

CALLIOPE: as far as we have been able to sUrmise, the only remaining method for escaping oUr grim confinement depends on leveraging the UniqUe properties of this location to create an event of sUch catalcysmic proportions that it simply cannot be contained within the black hole any more. CALLIOPE: something SO dramatic, so hyper-relevant, that it becomes ontologically impossible for anyone to ignore it. CALLIOPE: for that, we need an individUal of sUfficient narrative cloUt, so to speak.

--could easily be accomplished by forcing all of canon to heavily, HEAVILY depend on noncanon, by inserting some crucial event or extraneous factor at some important time and place, important beyond even the typical canon-centric doomed timeline’s occasional importance to the plot.  Note, Calliope already mentioned, earlier in the conversation:

JOHN: you mean we ended up with the bad possibility. CALLIOPE: not at all! since both possibilities depend on one another's existence, it really doesn't make sense to call them "right" or "wrong". they both just "are".

--that Meat and Candy could not exist without each other.  Which could just have to do with the fact that “choices” matter to Paradox Space, especially the choice to do something Heroic for the sake of reality or to relax and sit back, and that if it weren’t important enough to have required a choice, then it wouldn’t have been important enough at all.  But Terezi had interactions with people across BOTH sides of the coin flip, and Vriska specifically was able to get a message through to her on Meat Earth C from deep in Candy (which Calliope lampshaded she would have been very surprised to find out happened-- another thing that makes Vriska powerful for sending things back and forth even if the "event" may or may not directly involve her, (edit:) not to mention John too with Breath's mail/messages association!).

So, simply sending ANYTHING or ANYONE across the gap, if this tarped machine even DOES that, wouldn’t do on its own-- it would have to be something important, important possibly to all existence.  If you wanted to get super-serious, maybe even the as-of-yet-unsourced final frog sent to young Jade.  Thus proving that without the Candy timeline, Earth C’s universe -- not only the place of the kids’ victory, but the eventual birthplace of Calliope and Caliborn and the origin of Lord English -- couldn’t exist at all, and consequently either forcing the Candy version of Earth C out of the singularity or forcing reality to acknowledge the fact that the WHOLE singularity -- all of “non-Canon” -- has relevance, and thus stability. Alt!Calliope would have made her fanfic-timeline come true.

But, that’s just one theory.  I wrote this post so y’all could reblog and debate other possibilities for both the machine under the tarp and the dramatic act of relevance that they intend to have take place.  Some sort of silly dramatic kiss?  Shoving Vriska into Hiveswap’s timeline?  An “oops, all Vriskas” disaster?  I’ll keep this up to date with some of your theories and addendums under the cut as y’all reply/reblog and send in asks.  What exactly do YOU think is the eventual, silly-serious-or-both purpose of all this bullshit?

titenoute said: “There has been people thinking at the beginning of Hiveswap that the Portal could link the characters of Hiveswap to Earth C. Tbh, knowing that Earth and Alternia are going to be destroyed in Hiveswap no matter what it makes sense to have the possibility they’d survive this way, by going through the portal.”

Anon points out that Dirk could have the other side of a Hiveswap door on his end under the tarp he’s hiding from Terezi, and I had some thoughts on that in the link, including what he might use it for.

[ask-spiderglass]

Heya! Hope I'm not bothering you with this question but on Earth 777 (specifically NYC), how is society relatively made up when speaking of entities and cryptids? Is there laws directly impeding or affecting certain people who posses magical or otherwise unnatural abilities? What's the public's general view on the supernatural?

Amari: Good question! This is … a complex issue that still isn’t really resolved yet. What do I mean by that? This gets long so let me just… drop a read more.

Amari: Well, you see, Magic was not as visible to the mundane people as it is today and for many centuries Magic was a lot more esoteric and Patrons handed out pact deals a far less often. In fact, Magic was so rare that those wield it were highly sought after for their abilities by those who were in the know about it and wanted to use for their own gains.

Amari: In the years before magic became an open secret (anything before the 1980s), Magic was kept somewhat hidden out of the personal interest of the mages of the “pre-exposure” era. The truth is, Magic was (and still is) seen as a powerful weapon that could be used to protect their assets and such. The common reasons behind their actions towards concealment was to prevent other nonmagical people from competing with them, to prevent others from taking assets, and to keep nonessential people away from their dealings.

Amari: During this era, Entities were also typically concealed from the general public, for essentially the same reasons why Magic was kept a secret (though Entities were much harder to hide and were sometimes sighted much to the chagrin of those who wished to keep up the masquerade). Some entities did what they could to assimilate into human societies with the help of things such as glamour, others remained in the untouched wilderness away from nosy parkers, and the unlucky ones were sometimes hidden away in facilities by PLEA organizations as they were considered to be “valuable assets”.

Amari: However, this all would change beginning when Patrons became more open to sharing Magic to more people and soon, the masquerade was beginning to fall apart as more and more unexplainable phenomena and entities became truly visible for the first time. This time period during the 1980s was known as the Breaching. It took some time for all of these surmounting breaches to fully be publicly acknowledged but eventually, the masquerade couldn’t reasonably be sustained as it had been in the previous years. Magic and the entities are now an officially accepted fact of life in a post-masquerade world but even so, there’s still little truly known about either and there’s still much more research needed to truly understand them. Dedicated and important research conducted and/or collected by PLEA organizations are still kinda kept under wraps to this day, particularly information that they deem too valuable for the Average Joe to know. Which is why I am dedicating my grimoire, the Cobweb Compendium, to the education of the public at large. The world needs accessibility in information that can be life or death. And I’m here to provide it.

Amari: As for laws… well, there’s a lot of grey areas involved with the legal system having a lot of catching up to do in regards to legalities of certain actions and the legal status of various entities. There’s still quite a bit of debate and confusion on how to deal with particular issues that are found when trying to convict particular entities with crimes. For example, once a upon a time, the “demonic possession” defense was considered to be invalid but nowadays this defense is in the works for being considered acceptable in a court setting. And there’s the whole ghost legal situation I’ve previously mentioned.. and that’s at the tip of the iceberg of entity/magic legalities and justice. It gets… messy. I’m sure Mr. Murdock is having a field day with this.

Amari: As for public opinion on magic and entities… it’s mixed. Some people are fascinated and wish to learn more, some people are unsure what to make of them, some fear the presence of magic, some want to abuse magic… you can get a lot of different answers to that question. The truth is, right now it’s hard to really generalize people’s feelings about all this because there are uncertainties and confusing aspects about this that make magic and entities both a wonder and a terror in people’s minds. Maybe in a few decades when society has more experience with magic, their views will shift but for right now… magic is weird.

[gladstones-corner]

On Kabbalah and the Western Esoteric Tradition

I'll be honest—I originally had a much longer post planned. It was a chapter-by-chapter review of Llewellyn's Complete Book of Ceremonial Magick, edited by Lon Milo DuQuette and David Shoemaker.  

But something struck me while re-reading the book. I realized that the fundamental study and practice of ceremonial magic is Hermetic Kabbalah. 

Obvious, right? I thought so too, but figured it was going to be easy to divorce Hermetic Kabbalah from the larger Western Esoteric Tradition. 

Unfortunately I found the chapter on Polytheistic Ceremonial Magic underwhelming. This is nothing to say about John Michael Greer. His works on Druidry are arguably second to none. 

But his stab at a system of ritual magic outside of Judeo-Christian imagery only highlighted how difficult it is to create a deep, rich tapestry of symbolism as cohesive and versatile as Hermetic Kabbalah. 

Before we go any further, I want to highlight why I've been calling it Hermetic Kabbalah and not just Kabbalah. This is because the Kabbalah of the Western Esoteric Tradition has been taken from its Jewish roots and modified to fit a new tradition. 

Under most circumstances, we would call this appropriation—I certainly do. However, I feel the need to give our authors and editors fair quarter here to defend themselves. 

According to many ceremonial magicians, Hermetic Kabbalah is not appropriation for two reasons: 

It is studied and practice with respect and reverence to the original Jewish tradition 

It has had enough modifications to be considered its own tradition, parallel to Jewish Kabbalah. 

Obviously these are debatable—if not controversial—statements. I'm not an authority, but it's my opinion that it's not for the ceremonial magicians to decide whether it's appropriation. That's for the Jewish people from whom it was taken. 

So, with all that said, what choices do we have for ritual magic outside of Hermetic Kabbalah? 

I'm going to be honest: I don't know. I've made posts about adapting learning plans or rebuilding rituals, but after reading this book they feel...surface level. 

Don't take this the wrong way—I'm not giving up. I also won't appropriate by going back to study and practice Kabbalah of any kind. 

If anything, it's inspired me to dig deeper and push harder. I want to develop a consistent tradition of ritual magic outside of appropriative practices. And I hope it inspires others to do the same. 

I know this is a bit of a ramble, so if you made it this far I thank you. 

As always, be safe. Blessed be~ 

[tranderas]

My email to Failbetter Games

I rarely see a reason to hide my motivations or actions. I don’t have a lot of regrets in life, because as I got older- I’m 34 now- I came to understand that it’s pointless. Try to learn, grieve things like lost friendships and loved ones as best you can, and be the best person your emotional and physical state allows you to be.

Anyway

To that end, I thought I’d air out my grievances to FBG in a rather long email. It was a long time coming as I wasn’t convinced emails would do anything. Elias on the Failbetter Community discord server suggested I at least try, and I spent a week of proofreading to make sure I was as courteous as I could manage to be despite my feelings. I’m angry, angry because this game was so dear for me for so long and it feels like the current team has taken it in a direction so much in the opposite of what I find fun.

That anger is unhealthy, of course. Art evolves. Bands change their sound because they get bored or they want to make money tapping into a new audience. Painters refine and improve their style. Writers improve the range of their vocabulary and change tone. Everything shifts in this world. The healthiest thing to keep in mind is the fact that the thing you loved was there for that point in time and nothing can take that away from you, from your favorite game as a child to your favorite bands in your teenage years, you’ll always have those moments of joy.

I want to hold onto this moment of joy that I experience with Fallen London as long as possible, so I wrote this email in the hope of convincing them to alter their direction so I can enjoy it a little bit longer. Except for the signature that contained my real name at the end- not that it’s hard to find if you care, as my facebook url is /tranderas- the text is unmodified. Hopefully this shines light on what I want. 

What I don’t want is discussion about my needs. This is my place to explain, to vent, to point people to instead of typing everything out every time someone asks. But enough stalling.

___

Hello, I was encouraged in a Twitter interaction to write in and expand on my thoughts on the game so I figured I would do so now. Since I started writing this email before reading the December balance announcement, I'll address that at the bottom. The sparknotes version of what I'd like is as such: More content in London itself (especially socials), more Zee destinations, a profession uptuning, a fundamental rework of the deck that goes beyond favors, and a non-docks favor buff. From most to least important, the things I'd like to see addressed are:

1. The lack of endgame content within London itself is concerning to me for two reasons:

a. I play FL because it is a social electronic game, and I want to stay in zones in which I can continue to do social interactions. This is the reason I stay in London rather than going to Iron Republic and Port Carnelian, my first and second favorite zones respectively. If I wanted a story rich solo game I'd play Sunless Sea; if I wanted an analogue experience I'd play Blades in the Dark or read one of the books that influenced FL's style.

b. I simply don't like the mechanics of lab or parabola or how they gatekeep content. Because of this I haven't had any free content to pursue since the release of the new heists, and for a much longer length of time before that.

2. I'd love to see the remaining tier 3 professions given something they can do at lodgings. In general I prefer buffs instead of nerfs, especially in story games, and think it would be silly to nerf midnighter/correspondent/crooked-cross downward. Instead, give the others roles, perhaps in special options in the 4/5 card lodgings.

3. With the changes to Paramount Presence and the BDR power creep Notability has been significantly de-emphasized. I'd like that changed. To me the notability grind had the best balance of difficulty to cost-benefit analysis to end reward in the game, and while overcapping removed that, I would like something to use it again to make going above 10 worthwhile more often. Recent BDR items should make going even beyond 15 possible for very lategame players.

4. In addition to more endgame content within London, I'd like more midgame content at Zee. Sunless Sea got me especially interested in Frostfound and Irem, and a roleplay point for my OC is that she'd like to quite literally punch Mt. Nomad to death. Please don't feed us to spiders, though. The ones in London cause enough sorrow.

5. I would enjoy more free spouses that are not seasonal, and more ways to interact with player spouses. Again, it's a social game, and it makes sense to reward a desire to be social with the community. On the other hand, the NPC spouses in the game are limiting in their roleplay potential to the point that I've created a character around the Esoteric Accomplice for one of my OCs to get involved with between one roleplay relationship and another. Now allow me to take a deep breath while I discuss the proposed balance pass. The short version here is that I think it's wrong to release a deck refresh nerf without a fundamental change to what cards appear in the deck, and that the nerf to docks favors and yet another nerf to revs favors is misguided.

Here's the long version: I actually support a removal of the deck refresh mechanic. I got in trouble for calling flash lay resets an exploit on a private Fallen London fan server, and refused to use it until the lab convinced me it was a mechanic intended for use by FBG.

The widespread use of deck resets isn't a problem in its own right; rather, it's a symptom of how fundamentally broken the deck is in its current state. You have cards that are so bad that the narrative acknowledges they're awful and the mechanics give you a way to get rid of them at the cost of objectively worse lodgings. You have story signpost cards that clog up space held by desired cards. It can be nearly impossible to get Portly Sommelier (before deck refreshes i was getting one a month playing 60 actions a day) and dream qualities (my PoSI-ready SMEN alt has DbW3 playing every dream card that comes around). And most lodgings have cards that are objectively bad in a way that no new player can know without reading the wiki or asking someone- the exact problem you claim a desire to address in your announcement.

It's telling that players will do SMEN- a quest chain ostensibly about how much you're willing to sacrifice to some faceless maybe-god- in order to get rid of bad lodgings. I personally only bought back salon (Notability grind), rooftop shack (3 epa wine option), and bazaar premises (5-card potential plus good certifiable scraps/money option) after Trand got St. Beau's Candle, and JanieS only ever got the bazaar premises, her Remote Lodging, and the Orphanage. Even the other 4-card lodgings are only good under specific circumstances, and the rest of the 3s have worse cards with no endgame benefit.

Tranderas and JanieS both use remote lodgings. Trand is stuck with the Advertisements of a New Venture and Devices and Desires cards in his hand. Advertisements is an Abundant-rarity card. Since I have no intention of doing railroad due to disliking its mechanics the card simply sits in my hand. If I discard it, its rarity means it pops back up quickly. I think a way to opt out of story signpost cards such as aunt and railroad would be good progress toward solving the deck problem. There could be a large action or monetary cost involved with both removing it and reactivating it to balance, but without a way to get rid of these story hooks I need to keep refreshing to draw other cards around them.

As for the favors, I consider that part of the change mostly good. However, the docks favors -> Silk expedition doesn't really compete that well with other endgame grinds at the moment. Further, the Revolutionaries favor turn-in was already reduced dramatically this year, and I don't think it needs further tweaking. Rather than tuning docks and revs down, I would prefer to see the other factions tuned upwards, and the cost of earning favors eliminated from their cards (no 10 rostygold donation to the Church, for example). I'd still like to see the faction cards remain in the deck after they're given storylet sources, but made more rare, with the conflict options getting a boost to remain attractive in line with my proposed buff to payouts as they are good for London from a flavor/narrative perspective. In closing, it feels like the current FBG's team has a vision for the game that doesn't mesh well with how I see it and want to play it. Content has consistently moved away from what I want to do, leaving me with only SMEN and cider as goals to pursue (and as mentioned, I've run two characters- Samia R and Tranderas- through the quest chain to its completion). I obviously care about the game enough to want more things I like or else I wouldn't bother writing and proofreading this post or discussing and debating changes on the community discord, so I hope you'll take these opinions and suggestions into consideration moving forward. Regards,

Tranderas

[mavenmemnon]

There's a post on here that talks about your work zona and that's what it feels like it feels like I get up in the morning to work and I put on a person suit. And I respond to meetings that could have been emails and emails that have no purpose at all, I navigate my participants through the process and there's a trite phrase and then on profit world that people who work in nonprofits want to work themselves out of business. But it's true I mean so many of these resources are behind internet dates or reading level Gates or fill out this form and triplicate and mail it to our PO box bs. I know how to navigate these programs because I applied for them myself when I was unemployed with no income. And I was doing it without kids.

understand that the reason why the systems are so opaque and esoteric is so that people have difficulty navigating them and so they don't apply for heap or wic or covid relief funds

But it shouldn't be that hard you should have the people who are filling out the form fill it out as you're creating it if they don't understand what they're signing that needs to be changed if they don't know how to navigate to it on your website change the website

Are executive director released an email on Friday that we're going to be giving our participants gift cards for Christmas just $100 gift card, which is wonderful and her reasoning was that families know how to best spend money that we don't need to buy them a gas card or a gift card to a grocery store

And it revealed the deeply condescending attitude of social services and nonprofits in this country that poor people are wayward children who have just made the wrong choices instead of oppressed masses

I hate it here. I hate these people who are neither interested in Justice order or security. They are interested in indulging in their Petty cultural grievances that have been fanned into fervor by idiots.

I just I can't spend my life having the same narrow arguments with these same narrow people. Chomsky says that Americans allow the very spirited debate in a narrow band of topics. And I just go around and around with these people.

I just want it to stop. The one for everybody to just chill the fuck out for like two weeks. Cuz I don't know how much longer I can keep going.