#I'M SORRY IF I TALKED YOUR EAR OFF THOUGH AKJASGDJKSG;

[sg2tiger]

If you were stranded on a deserted island, would you rather read Seacats or Danganronpa?

Seacats, for sure. Without hesitation.

There have only ever been two fandoms in my life that have completely absorbed me to the point of obsession - the first was Dragonball, which got me into Japanese media in the first place, and was literally my everything all throughout middle and high school. Around my senior year I said, hey, why not branch out and leave ol’ DB behind and try to get into new series’? In the time since then I’ve had many that I really enjoy, from things I’d consider personal ‘classics’ to flavor-of-the-month things I move on from within months or a year at most…but aside from Dragonball, the only thing I can ever recall being over-the-top obsessed with is Umineko.

(YOU DIDN’T ASK FOR THIS but I’m feeling nostalgia-y now so rambling time)

I got into Umineko via finding the EP1 manga by hitting the ‘random’ button on one of the old manga reading sites, and said ‘oh hey that’s the guy who wrote Higurashi’…at the time there weren’t a lot of chapters translated, and I think it left off around the time Natsuhi gets her gun by the time the anime started airing. Once I found out there’d be an anime I grabbed the free EP1 demo and read through that in a weekend, then immediately went and bought a copy of EP4, which I think had JUST been translated, so I had pretty good timing there. I was actually reading the VN at the same time the anime was airing (though I was always ahead in the VN…think I managed to finish EP4 JUST before the EP3 portion of the anime started), so I was at Ground Zero for Seacats discussion both on /a/ and AnimeSuki. Discussing Umineko was what I spent practically all of my time doing, and I can distinctly remember going to the library between classes and getting caught up on everything. 

I watched the anime, caught up on the manga and started doing my own crappy ‘translations’ of the raws of the EP2 manga (at the time the scanlations had just barely started and were super slow) because I wanted to get a friend into the series but she was turned off by the VN’s art style (once we ran out of manga she did go VN because by then she had to know what would happen next!!), I made really crappy videos for Umineko Hell which still get faves on YouTube for some reason, ended up collecting All The Umineko Music (literally) and listening to it all the time…I spent untold numbers of hours taking notes and making my own theories and even had at least one significant AU ‘Episode’ thought up by me and the aforementioned friend. 

Umineko was pretty much my life for those two years between EP4′s English release and when EP8 came out in Japan. At that point, like many other fans at the time, I was a bit…er, disillusioned, I guess, by the way it had apparently ended. The fandom just exploded into this huge angry ball of rage with people rejecting the ending entirely, hating Ryukishi for stringing us along and not giving us answers, and his smug attitude in Answer to the Golden Witch was just the icing on the cake. That was the last straw for me, and I basically threw up my hands and said ‘fuck Umineko’. I took a break from /a/ and /jp/ because I didn’t want to see the threads anymore. I stopped paying attention to Witch-Hunt’s progress because I could have cared less about EP8…I don’t even know how long it took to translate. I basically just removed myself from Umineko entirely after that, feeling extremely bitter about how much of my time I’d devoted to the series for those two years only to ultimately have no rewarding payoff to show for it. 

I was Very Upset, and that lingering resentment tends to show up in my posts from time to time even now. I often wonder how the newer fans perceive my posts sometimes, because I’m clearly dedicated to rereading Umineko and still make a lot of theory and discussion posts and am (hopefully) obviously having fun with it, but then I go off on tangents about how much I hate Ryukishi and complain a lot and I wonder if people are like ‘does this person actually like Umineko at all?’ when they read my stuff. But basically after like two years of cooling my head off a bit I started to miss the ol’ seagulls…I think my breaking point was the fact that I had just finished the Higurashi VN for the first time (was anime/manga only before that) and I wanted more but of course there was no more…according to the oldest post in my SG2 Rereads Umineko tag it was September 2013 that I finally cracked and decided to reread Umineko. At least, I told myself, the old EPs, before it got crappy. Because I did have a lot of good times and I thought it would be a shame if I couldn’t enjoy those anymore just because it had a shitty ending.

So I ended up rereading some of EP1, though I don’t think I finished it. Going back into something I had such negative feelings about was harder than I thought it would be…and I think I didn’t actually finish EP1 until a year later. Then I tried EP2 and the same thing happened - I got through a little, then quit, then went back a few months (not a whole year though) later, read a bit more, rinse, repeat. It wasn’t until LAST YEAR (by which I mean October 2015) that I FINALLY went through and finished the EP2 reread I had been dragging out for so long…and then actually pushed onward to EP3. I think I wasn’t even gonna do EP4 at the time, but people seemed to like my posts and I was getting replies and starting discussions about some of my EP3 theories and stuff…I ended up remembering how much fun it was to talk about Umineko with people, so I went on and did EP4, too. Then this year I picked up on EP5, then did 6…and here we are. My posts got way more attention than I ever imagined they would (I think I was surprised at the fact that the Umineko fandom was still alive at all) so I ended up getting really caught up in the reread thing that, at the time, I hadn’t even expected to get as far as EP4.

Also I think at some point between my slugging through EP2 and finishing it was when I found out the EP8 manga was done being translated, and since I had already known that it would actually give answers (one of the main reasons I was so mad in the first place), and I learned about Confession of the Golden Witch…I actually cheated and went and read Confession despite not having read EP8 yet, and I feel like that was the final key I needed to let go of a lot of my resentment. I felt like Confession did a much better job of selling Yasu to me as a pitiable character than the VN had…where EP7 felt very whiny to me, and I was extremely bitter about the ending and how Ryukishi seemed to be excusing all the bad things Yasu did in Answer. I just saw her as just a stupid girl who took Battler’s words the wrong way and decided murdering his family was the best way to deal with that. She wasn’t believable to me and I couldn’t accept her suffering at all. I guess you could say I just didn’t have enough love. But Confession painted her struggle better for me in 3 chapters than I felt the whole VN did (without the magic of Hindsight), and I think that’s what made me say ‘okay, I’m finishing EP2 for real this time, and going to give this reread another shot’. 

Fastforward to now…and I think this past year of doing the Reread, and seeing things in the old EPs in a new light than I had the first time around…and through the discussions here on Tumblr with people who still love Umineko the way I used to, has helped me remember my own love for the series. Don’t get me wrong - I still take issue with various things, and I’m still not all that fond of Ryukishi and his attitude…but I acknowledge that he made an effort to appease the fans who felt like I did by writing the manga and giving out those answers he had wanted to keep sealed inside the catbox. If he was willing to do that, then…well, the least I can do is be willing to let go of my stupid grudge and sense of entitlement I had back then for feeling that I was ‘owed’ a certain kind of ending from him. I understand now why he wanted his story to end the way he did, and I appreciate Yasu and her struggle a lot more than I did 6 years ago, when I was super resistant to the ‘Shkanontrice Theory’ because it just seemed like a stupider version of Shmion. The fact that awareness of transpeople has increased a lot since Umineko ended in 2011 is another factor, I think, because back then I honestly was very ignorant about the subject and couldn’t really appreciate Yasu’s struggle on that level, either.

A lot can change in 6 years - that’s a fact at the core of Umineko itself. The me of 6 years ago is very different from the me of now, and I’m honestly glad I decided to give Umineko another chance, because I remember now what drew me to it in the first place. There’s just some kind of almost mystical quality to it that nothing else has…Higurashi had a feeling all its own, but somehow Umineko managed to take that quality and improve upon it. I was really engrossed in the Higurashi VN when I finally finished that, and I remember thinking to myself ‘this is actually a better and more complete story than Umineko, fuck Umineko’ (paraphrasing, probably)…but since rereading Umineko my feelings have reversed. Higurashi is great, but Umineko is just this one-of-a-kind experience that can never be replicated. 

Dangan Ronpa…was a Hell of a ride, and I enjoyed it a lot. I’m pretty excited for V3. It’s also an experience all its own, but I don’t think it can really measure up to Umineko. DR is really self-aware of how wacky and over the top it is, so it’s hard to take it seriously even in the serious moments. You make favorites, and you’re sad when they die, but like…I dunno, somehow compared to Umineko it feels almost hollow. Umineko tricks you into thinking these chars who die all the time are just gonna feel like cannon fodder after a while and you never expect to fall in love with each and every one of them, no matter how screwed up (and sometimes even irredeemable) they all are. I love the dangans as characters, but I feel like the seacats are my family. Huge worldwide despair incidents are like ‘whoa, that’s a thing’, but the inescapable tragedy on Rokkenjima is something I feel like I feel on a personal level. 

DR is a ridiculous story that somehow manages to draw you in with colorful and engaging characters that have more depth than their stereotypical talents would lead you to believe, and it definitely makes you feel invested in their struggle and cheer them on to escape and grab a happy ending. But Umineko…is fundamentally a story about how there is no happy ending. There is no escaping. Your favorites aren’t gonna pull together a miracle and come out alive against all odds in the end - they’re dead. Everyone is dead. And compared to that, I feel like…who even cares about hope vs. despair anymore? Umineko is a dumb story about a dumb family who could have prevented all this shit but they didn’t because they’re all so fucking dumb and underneath the shiny coating of red vs. blue magic battles and closed room murders and ass-neechans and memes by the bucketload it’s the most hopelessly despairful story of all. 

Maybe it’s just because I’m still a relative newbie to DR (having only gotten into it this past May) and I have such a deep history with Umineko, but if I had to wind up in a situation like the hypothetical desert island where I only had access to one…it’d be Umineko. I’d miss the hot fresh DR memes, but Umineko’s memes are tried and true. If Umineko can still make me laugh and cry 6 years later, especially after I spent so long hating it, I think I could live with it being my only form of entertainment for as long as I was trapped on the island.

Especially if it’s an island with seagulls, because then, well…