#once again legends origin on top

[jewishcissiekj]

as much as I like Cavan Scott and Dooku: Jedi Lost I can not wrap my head around Ky Narec willingly staying on Rattatak with A FORCE-SENSITIVE CHILD HE SHOULD'VE TAKEN TO THE TEMPLE for like about 20 years because he thinks he should be in exile??? I might have misunderstood it but that's such an insane concept. What would make him do that.

[pen-and-umbra]

FFVII Rebirth introduces something never extensively explored in the original game or in the compilation of Final Fantasy VII: Sephiroth's anger towards Professor Gast’s experiment and the contempt he came to harbor towards ShinRA as an organization.

(Herein lurk spoilers.)

While the latter is something the fans have glimpsed on and off throughout previous installments, the second part of the Remake amplifies it ever so more. What began as admitting that the company had fabricated his legend and expressing a desire to live a normal life in Ever Crisis gradually transforms into a lack of clarity regarding his reasons for fighting in Before Crisis (as prompted by Elfe), followed by an open disgust towards Hojo's and Hollander's experiments when confronted with Mako pod entities during the hunt for Genesis. Sephiroth and Zack's ordeal during Crisis Core events appears to undercut his willingness to stay, as he famously considers leaving the corporation right before embarking on the ill-fated Nibelheim expedition.

FFVIIRb picks off where we left off, painting a more complete picture of Sephiroth's dissatisfaction with ShinRA overall. Interestingly, one of the discarded sequences from the original game featured Sephiroth hinting at his lack of affection for his employer as early as the truck ride.

Narratively, the sequence spans the gap between OG and Crisis Core's departure cutscene, implying that Sephiroth used the time on the road to reflect on his current and future connection with ShinRA. His companion, however, does not appear to understand why he is bringing the topic up. What distinguishes Rebirth is the suggestion that Sephiroth came to view the entire ShinRA system as a problem, rather than just a few rotten apples. He no longer singles out Hojo, but rather the entire ShinRA branch, indicating that something's wrong with the system. When "Cloud" casually inquires about the problem with the Nibelheim reactor, Sephiroth responds that it is "people who run it," adding that this particular site is controlled by the Research and Development department. In addition, in response to "Cloud's" fair comment regrading the lack of transparency in company's operation, he rather sarcastically suggests to bring the issue with the President, thus implicitly conveying the futility of the endeavor.

When the party encounters Mako pod residents, one can detect genuine rage in his voice. While Sephiroth had previously shown bitterness for the test subjects during CC, it was tinged with disgust/pity rather than wrath. And once again, I’m grateful to Tyler Hoechlin for broadening his range in this particular segment.

"Cloud's" reaction to the contents of the pods, however, came off a little weird. The confusion appears out of place, because Zack had seen it all before — he had been there to watch the aftermath of Hollander's work; is it really odd that ShinRA's chief R&D scientist spearheaded the entire thing? Perhaps, unlike Sephiroth, Zack treated it as a rotten-apple issue, rather than a systemic issue. Or maybe this is an example of Cloud being an unreliable narrator, having conflated his own experience with that of Zack, which also explains Zack being sort of too green for the First Class throughout the Nibelheim portion of the game.

The shift in Sephiroth's perspective, from singling out Hojo's misdeeds to viewing ShinRA's itself as a systemic problem, is further highlighted during the mansion segment. This is no longer a strictly Hollander or Hojo issue. Human experimentation formed the fundamental core of what ShinRA is now, and those were approved from the very top. As Sephiroth puts it with barely concealed disgust, as soon as the company realized what had fallen into their hands, they became ambitious.

The wording also strikes a contrast to how he used to refer to the company in the past; as such, when Angeal deserts, Sephiroth states that Angeal has betrayed “US”, which points at both his personal connection to the person and the fact that Sephiroth likely saw himself as part of ShinRA circle. In the library, however, he distances himself by referring to the company as THEM, thus no longer perceiving himself as a part of it.

More important still is the rage he expresses when quoting excerpts from Gast's notes. The anger is new, never before seen touch. Sephiroth has been portrayed in the moment differently throughout earlier installments — dejected, perhaps overwhelmed, but never angry enough to snarl and nearly flip the table.

And it's wonderful. It's authentic, and it makes sense. It makes you question how much of that rage has been bottled up, compartmentalized, and never fully processed throughout the years. That rage should have existed, but was suppressed by ShinRA, before becoming internalized and sealed.

The scene is extremely on point on another level as well. As the flash of rage passes, and Sephiroth looks away, hiding eyes behind bangs — a gesture previously briefly appearing in Crisis Core.

One could interpret the body language as being ashamed and unwilling to show his composure cracking. Even in this state he KNOWS he wasn't supposed to let anyone see hurt or anger, wasn't supposed to lose cool. The "wonder child" and the "poster boy" is not to be seen as something other than “efficacious” and “collected”. The habit of suppressing displays of emotion or physical/psychological ailment had apparently become a part of himself. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to deduce why the habit persists. The internalized compulsion to live up to the expectations placed on him by ShinRA and the myth it imposed on his character, as well as the internalized imperative not to reveal to someone like Hojo — anyone— the extent to which their acts or words affect him. There's also another layer to this shame — one of being an artificial creation, but that's for another write up.

The anger towards Gast differs greatly from the way Sephiroth went “Why didn't you tell me?” in previous iterations of the Nibelheim incident. In retrospect, Gast's supervision of the project, involvement in Sephiroth's life, and unexpected departure seem like a betrayal. Gast had not only abandoned Sephiroth, who had likely come to see him as a salient figure in his youth, but had also been lying to him all along, until finally discarding him, as Sephiroth might believe. Gast therefore falls from grace, becoming yet another person who misled, attempted to exploit, and eventually abandoned him to deal with the consequences on his own.

[the-anonmaton]

Over the Edge, or Not

Relationships : Sevika x Reader Characters : Sevika, Original Female Character Rating : Explicit Tags : Smut, Oral Sex, Cunnilingus, Vaginal Fingering, Strap-Ons, Rough Sex, Top Sevika (Arcane: League of Legends), Light Dom/sub, Dom Sevika (Arcane: League of Legends), bottom reader, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Orgasm Delay, Overstimulation, Edging, Safewords, Soft Sevika (Arcane: League of Legends), Sadism Words : 4,847 Summary:

What about Sevika not letting you come?

**********

You are lying sprawled on the bed, hands gripping the sheets, knuckles turning white, back arching every few seconds, trying to keep your head up to look but always ending up falling back on the pillow, legs open, occasionally wildly thrashing on the mattress, thighs shaking. The cause of it all, the woman lying down between your legs, the Brute of Zaun, Sevika.

She’s been licking and sucking and eating your pussy for only the Gods know how long. For you it feels like hours have passed. She has her hands on your thighs, gripping them hard and forcing them open, so she can have you as open as she can, only for herself. Her tongue is everywhere, dipping inside you, collecting the evidence of your arousal, licking your pussy lips, flattening against them and spreading them, circling your clit, forcing it out of its hood and sucking it. Hard. You are once again at the end of your rope, feeling your orgasm approaching, but you know what’s coming. Every time it seems like she’s going to let you finally come, she’s slowing down. Your grunts of frustration only making her chuckle, kiss your thigh and get to work once more like nothing had happened.

"That's my good girl."

"Please…"

You're not coming… yet.

**********

It’s been a while since she added her fingers to her play. She now has her metal arm under your thigh and over your stomach, putting force with her cold palm just below your navel, holding you down. Her warm hand is at the point of her attention, two fingers knuckle deep inside you. She's mostly favoring gentle strokes, putting light pressure on your front wall, but every so often she will push harder against you, dig deeper inside you, accompanying her move with a hard suck on your clit, trying to bury herself in you.

So when it happens again you can only gasp at the sudden move, still your arched back, grip the sheets tighter and hope that she gives you your release. But she knows your body perfectly by now and she is able to keep you just at the edge, avoiding pushing you over it. You whimper when she stops, again. She stills her fingers and takes her time licking and biting your thighs with closed eyes as she's waiting for you to come down, hearing your deep breaths, feeling your thigh shake on her lips, and your walls flutter around her fingers. She waits just so she can begin her onslaught once more. She also thinks spending the time taunting you is a good idea.

"I love you like this."

"I could hear the sounds you make all day."

"Do you want to go all day, sweetheart? I sure can."

"Hmm… You take my fingers so well."

"You're so wet, I don't think two are enough right now."

"How about another one, baby?"

"Please… Let me come…" Your only response.

You think your whispered pleas have been answered as she adds another finger, starting to build you up again with her gentle movements. But you know...

You're not coming… yet.

**********

And once again she pulls back and you gasp, whimper, grunt and swear. You don't know how much more overstimulation you can take and she's going to be the death of you. What a way to go though.

"Fuck!"

"What was that?"

You shiver, heart racing, and you close your eyes so you can focus on steadying your breathing.

"Please, baby, make me come."

"But you're so beautiful like this. Besides, I don't want you coming on my fingers and mouth. I'd much rather looking at your pretty face."

Suddenly, you feel her moving from her position between your legs and off the bed. You lift your head to see her walking to the other side of the bedroom where your double dresser is. Her words are just now registering in your brain. Fuck. You know what she's about to do and you can't help the excitement, and also the dread, that are cursing through your body. Judging by how the night's been going, you are in for one hell of a ride.

You watch her mesmerized, still in her bra and boxers, as she pulls a black harness from the first drawer and starts putting it on, making sure all the leather straps are hugging her tightly. She also pulls her dark jade strap-on out of the drawer without any thought. Looks like she had a lot of time to think about which strap she wanted to use on you while she was eating you out. You watch her secure it onto the harness and turn to you with a smirk on her face and lust in her eyes. She's walking towards you and you can only think about how a hungry predator would circle its prey in the wilderness.

"I know I made you really wet, but how about we be sure, huh? We still have a lot of work."

The first part of her sentence leaves you confused for a second, until you watch her squeeze a hefty amount of lube on her palm and start applying it to the length of the strap. For all her rough handling and serious demeanor she sure as hell makes sure you always feel comfortable. A warm feeling settles in your heart and you forget about your exhaustion and overstimulation, willing to let her take anything she wants from you.

Then the second part of her sentence hits you and your eyes widen, just in time to see her reach the bed and crawl towards you and over you, the smirk never leaving her face. She's caging you, your head is trapped between her arms and your legs are forced open to accommodate her body between them. She's slowly leaning down to steal a kiss, which you happily offer. You open your mouth to allow her entrance and you feel her tongue immediately dominating yours, the taste of your arousal still on her. Your arms come up to her sides to pull her down, to feel her skin against yours.

Her bra is a nuisance though, and throughout your kissing you try to slowly glide your hands over her back with the goal of reaching the clasp so you can unfasten it. Suddenly, you feel her snatching your hands and pinning them above your head. She watches your dumbfounded expression with an infuriating smile as she brings her hips down and grinds the strap against your sensitive pussy. You gasp, arch your back and jerk your hips from the sudden stimulation.

"Must you be this cruel?" You ask breathlessly.

"Hmm, I think I must."

She accompanies her words with a squeeze of her hands that hold your wrists, with her nose tracing your cheeks and jaw, with another grind of her strap, this time pushing harder on your clit, and you can't help but close your eyes, moan and shudder. The next moment, she stills her movements and you feel her breath tickling your ear as she's whispering to you.

"You know what to say to make all of this stop, but my guess is that you want this. You want this so bad because you know how good it will feel. Am I right, baby? What do you say?"

It's true. You know the word. It's your safeword. You can say it now and you'll be coming in the next minute. It is almost tempting. But you'd be a fool not to let her have her way with you, because she's right and she knows what she's doing. You're longing for the pleasure she can give you. She's done it before and those were the hardest orgasms of your life. You only have to lie down like a good girl and let her take you in whatever way she pleases. You'd be lying if you said that her holding you down and forcing your legs apart while fucking you didn't turn you on. So you open your eyes, look up at her and see her patiently waiting for your answer, a knowing smile on her face as you swallow hard.

"Please, take me."

"Good girl."

She tightens her grip on your wrists and her hips come down again to grind on you. She keeps moving and pushing against you while watching you squirm underneath her body with a hungry expression on her face.

But you're not coming… yet.

**********

"Please…."

The friction she's providing is not enough, and she knows that. It only makes you gasp and jerk at the stimulation she's causing on your abused clit. Your legs are unable to close and you'd be a fool to think you could escape her grip on your hands.

"What was that, love?"

"Fuck me, please."

"Am I not?"

"Please, inside…"

Unexpectedly, the weight on your wrists disappears, the pressure on your clit ceases and her shadow over you vanishes. You miss her immediately, even though the air around you is a lot clearer and you feel you could breathe a little better. After a few deep breaths you open your eyes.

She's sitting on her knees between your legs, her hands stoking and spreading your thighs and coming down to your pussy, where her eyes are focusing. She opens you up with a warm thumb, purposely dipping it inside you and guiding it back up to your clit. You jerk and you make to close your legs, but she puts her metal hand on them, stopping you. After you settled down again she inches closer, the hand that was torturing your clit now gripping her strap. You shallow hard as your eyes meet.

"How about we get this party started, huh? I think you're ready for me now."

You close your eyes as she leads the strap to your clit and slides it down to your entrance. For a second you think that she's going to push inside and you moan at the prospect, but she only slides it back up to your clit. She repeats the motion a few times, toying with the pressure of each slide, making your head spin. Even though she released your arms you kept them up, holding the bars of the headboard, needing something solid to hold on, to ground yourself, lest your frustration gets the better of you.

In your haze, you only have a moment to react when you feel her finally sliding inside you. She's moving agonizingly slow, making you grip the bars harder, squeeze your eyes tighter and hold your breath. You try to push back at her, to make her bury the strap faster, but her strong hands cease your movements and you whimper.

"Please! Sevika, please, faster!"

"Patience, love. Don't be bad. Now I've got to start over. Try not to interrupt me this time."

She pulls out of you and you whimper at her punishment as she starts once again sliding the strap up and down your soaked pussy and over your clit. You're at her mercy, forced to lie down and let her take her sweet time. After a few excruciating minutes that feel like hours, she finally positions the strap at your entrance and begins pushing inside you once again. You grunt, trying not to move and only begging her to go faster. Unfortunately for you, she is literally and figuratively a rock.

"Don't worry, sweetheart, I'll get you there."

It feels like she's mocking you. She will get you near your orgasm only to take it away from you. Maybe it's not even yours. Maybe they are her orgasms to give to you whenever she wants. If she wants. Her words swirl in your head, and you lie down patiently enduring her torture, until you feel the strap fully buried inside you. With a hum you open your eyes only to meet hers above you, smirk gone, concern evident on her face.

"You okay, baby?"

Another check-in, Gods, you love her so much. You leave the bars to bring your hands to her face, tuck her hair behind her ears and bring her down for a gentle kiss and a whisper.

"Please, fuck me, love."

You punctuate your response with your legs coming to encircle her waist and push her against you. Her smirk is back as she gives you another sweet kiss. She pulls back, settles once more on her knees between your legs, grips your thighs to keep them open and starts slowly and gently moving her hips causing the strap to slip in and out of you. You moan at the much needed friction and grip the sheets.

"You're taking me so well, baby."

But you're not coming… yet.

**********

Sevika's still fucking you at the same rhythm she started with, not once losing her momentum. You are either lucky or cursed to have a girlfriend with a stamina like hers, you still can't decide. You feel her torturous slow movements bring you closer to your much needed orgasm. You decide to open your eyes and the sight before you makes you tighten around her strap. She has her bottom lip between her teeth, her eyes are glued to the point of your connection watching the strap burying in your pussy and her muscles contract with the effort she's putting into slowly fucking you senseless. You let your head fall back as your whole body shivers.

"Baby, please, faster..."

You feel one of her hands leave your thigh and the next moment pressure is applied on your clit. You gasp again, your thighs shake at the pressure and you loudly moan as you feel your pussy squeezing harder on the strap that's still slowly fucking you, never faltering. You're not surprised that she has the strength to keep going at same pace, pushing through the resistance of your walls. Maybe you're lucky after all, you still can't decide.

"Please, don't stop..."

She's not stopping, the pressure is still there and you feel yourself ready to crash.

"Please, please…."

You can only gasp out your pleas.

"I love it when you beg so well, sweetheart."

You arch your back, your grip on the sheets tightens.

"I'm gonna…"

Your leg not held down by her metal hand is thrashing on the mattress.

"Such a good girl for me."

And the pressure is no longer there.

"N-no, no…"

And your walls clench around nothing.

"P-please…"

A shiver is washing over your body and you're on the verge of tears.

"No more, please…"

"But you're doing so well, baby."

You don't dare to open your eyes. You know you'll see her smug face.

"P-please, I want to…"

A cold hand is stroking your inner thigh, a warm one your hip.

"I think this strap is not enough to make you come, how about I bring something bigger for you, huh?"

She's off the bed again and you're left lying down and panting, trying to control your breathing. Maybe you're cursed. You're inclined to make your decision right now, but something's holding you back.

You aren't coming… yet?

**********

"You know, I didn't give your tits the attention they deserve, don't you think?"

She's tracing your left nipple with the tip of her tongue, before she goes in to suck it gently in her mouth. She alternates between hard and gentle sucks, nips and licks all over your breast before moving over to pay her due diligence to its twin, while bringing her right hand to play with the one she leaves behind. You know your chest will be a canvas of bruises and teeth marks the next time you look in the mirror.

She's already buried inside you with a larger strap, the light blue this time, and she's letting you adjust to it by taking her sweet time ravishing and marking your neglected breasts. You have one hand on her shoulder feeling her strong back, and the other is threaded in her hair following the motions of her head as she's having her fun on your chest. Every now and then the strap would move, drawing a gasp out of you and causing you to jerk your hips.

"Please, Sevika, move."

"You think you're ready for me?"

"Hmm, I'm so wet for you, baby… Please…"

She chuckles as she pulls back from your chest to hold her weight up with her hands next to each of your shoulders and your arms fall to your sides from where they were holding her. She drags the strap slowly out of you and gives an experimental thrust. Your legs come up to lock behind her lower back and your hands fly to her harness to pull her deeper. You're definitely feeling the bigger size of the strap stretching you to accommodate her.

"Ahh, y-yes…"

She keeps a slow pace for a while, and then you begin to feel her picking up speed. She hasn't been like this since the start of this hellish night, when she was using her fingers and pushing roughly against you. You only dare to hope that she's leading up to giving you your much needed orgasm and you beg for good measure.

"Please, keep going, please…"

She keeps going, gradually increasing her speed and you can hear her panting over your heavy breaths. You jerk against her when she hits a particular spot on your walls and you close your eyes as a shiver runs through your spine.

"The-there…"

She hits is again, harder this time. You shout and your hands fly to grip at her triceps.

"Fuck!"

Her speed picks up again and you hear her chuckle. It's not her fastest, but you can only hope. The delicious friction she provides and the hits she's delivering on that one spot make your head spin and your eyes roll back behind your eyelids. You can hear the grunts of her effort and the sounds your wet pussy makes as she fucks you.

"So wet for me…" You swear her raspy voice just made you wetter.

Her speed picks up again and your hands are back to her sides, nails digging to pull her closer. You feel a warm hand on your breast, fingers pushing down on a sensitive bite mark, right before pinching your nipple. You moan, arch your back and push against her hand.

"So needy for my fingers…" You hear her words between her pants.

Her speed picks up again, the pressure on your nipple disappears and she shocks you by moving it on your clit. The overstimulation gets to you and you jerk your hips causing the strap to hit you in a new delicious angle and you huff out her name. You unlock your legs from behind her back and move them so you can push down on the mattress with your heels and lift yourself up in search of that angle, all the while pleading for her to give you more.

"So greedy with my cock…" You hear her words between her grunts.

"P-please, I ne-…"

Her speed picks up again and the words die at your lips. You can only howl at her brutal pace as the plunges inside your worn out pussy and at the rapid motion of her fingers on your overused bundle of nerves. You feel a knot forming in your lower stomach. She's getting you there and you think your heart is about to explode with all the exercise she's putting you through. You're panting, and moaning, and huffing, and humming, and thrashing, and gasping, and arching, and dripping, and clenching, and you're…

"H-uhh…"

She stills. Again.

"P-pl…"

You're not coming… yet.

**********

Two seconds have passed since she stopped. Through the fog that clouds your mind you register the strap still buried deep inside you, her bent body over yours, her face hidden below your chin, her lips kissing the point at your neck that's pulsing like crazy.

"What is it, baby?"

"I… Plea-" You pant as your chest is moving rapidly up and down.

"Take a breath, doll." She murmurs against your neck.

You squeeze your eyes tighter, your mouth a thin line as you swallow hard and a trembling exhale leaves your clenched teeth.

"Please… let me… please…"

You push down with your heels again but she's not budging an inch as she keeps kissing the same spot on your neck and you whimper, feeling tears gathering behind your eyelids.

"Please, baby, I need… Please…"

"What do you need?" She says before she licks your wild pulse point.

"I can't… hold… any longer."

"I think you can." Another kiss on the same spot and you feel like she's trying to burn a hole through you.

"Let me come, please…" You dig your nails harder on her back, but she only moves her mouth to kiss at your throat.

"Oh, you want to come?"

"Y-yes, please."

"How bad you wanna come, baby?" She is a fucking sadist.

"Really bad, please…"

"Really bad, huh? I wouldn't have guessed." Her tongue is gliding agonizingly slow over the length of your throat.

"Please, I'll do anything, please, move!"

"That's sounds promising. What would you do for me, honey?" She's murmuring against your collarbone now and you swallow again, your breathing only now starting to calm down.

"Whatever you tell me."

"Hmm… I don't think you understand how dangerous your offer is, baby." She licks another path with her tongue over the collarbone she's worshiping.

"P-please… Anything… Take it…" She chuckles as you try to arch your back, but a hand on your waist denies your movement and you whine.

"How about I use the spreader bar the next time?" You feel her teeth gently graze your heated skin.

"O-okay."

"And maybe bend you over, head down and ass up for me?" A kiss on your collarbone.

"Yeah, okay…"

She's moving to your other collarbone, licking and kissing wherever she can reach.

"How about tying you up, too? I don't want you moving all over the place, like tonight. What do you say, baby?"

"Y-yes, to all."

"And maybe I'll use the hexstrap, it's been a while."

"Mhhmm."

"And this time you'll be begging for me to stop."

"I will…"

"But I won't."

The thought alone makes your walls flutter. She hasn't made you cum yet and she's already thinking and planning about your next time.

"Yes, okay, p-please…"

"And you'll let me take everything from you. Isn't that right, baby?" And now she's staring at you hungrily, her face a few inches over yours, and you can feel her breath over your lips.

"Yes, everything…" You swallow hard, unable to look away.

If she was the devil you would already have sold your soul to her.

"That's my good girl."

In a blink of an eye she straightens between your legs, holds you firmly by your waist and pulls you towards her as she pushes hard against you. The strap buries deeper inside you and you gasp at the unexpected move. The repeats the motion a few times, each thrust harder than the previous one, just so she can hear the guttural sounds you make.

This time she doesn't need to pick up her speed. She's already pistoning her hips with a punishing speed, forcing you, without a warning, out of the calm state she brought you with her sweet kisses. You scream at her sudden onslaught and lift your bent legs from the bed to bring your knees towards your sides and hold them against your body with your hands. The position gives Sevika more room and you howl as she sinks herself impossibly deeper.

She's fucking you deep, hard and fast and you walk that fine line between pain and pleasure. You feel once again the knot in your stomach and your toes curl as she hits all the right spots.

"I-"

"Take what you need, baby."

And that sweet pressure is back again on your clit. She forces it out of its hood, pushes down hard on the bundle of nerves and you feel a fire engulfing your whole body. You're shaking and trying your best to keep breathing through all the moans, grunts and cries that are leaving your body. She knows what she's doing. Her rhythm doesn't falter and her movements don't show any intention of stopping.

Your senses are overloading. You feel her metal hand gripping your waist harder, her strap sinking mercilessly inside your wet heat, her fingers ruthlessly moving on your clit, your walls clenching even harder around her, and you can only pull your knees further apart with your hands and offer yourself to her. And she delivers, like she promised, like she's done all the other times.

It happened without a warning. You were feeling yourself getting closer to the edge, but it took you by surprise when she finally pushed you over it.

And you crash. Your head falls back and push hard against the pillow. Your eyes roll back behind your eyelids. Your breathing stops for what feels like an eternity. Your mouth opens in a silent scream before you inhale with a loud gasp. Your whole body shudders and spasms. Your hands move to sink your nails to the backs of your thighs, before your thrashing forces them to fall back on the bed. Pleasure consumes you from head to toe, a haze clouds your brain and you try to squeeze your breaths in between your gasps as she brings you down from your high with a steady rhythm of her hips.

"So beautiful… How about another one, huh?"

You hear her as if you are underwater. Your senses catch up to you just in time to open your eyes and see her determined face and her wild smile as she's looking down at the point of your connection.

"Wha-"

But before you can ask her what she said, she once again cuts you off with a hard thrust and you gasp.

"I thought you wanted to come, baby."

"I'm…"

Your walls are sensitive, your clit overstimulated and your exhaustion evident.

"So, how about another one?"

She repeats herself, now that she has your attention while stroking your trembling thighs, the strap still as she waits for your answer. You're trying to come down from your first orgasm, still feeling your walls fluttering around her strap and you can't but give her anything she wants. So you close your eyes, inhale through your nose, bite your bottom lip between your teeth and nod.

"That's my good girl."

She smirks, and then she moves, and then you scream again. She immediately starts pounding against you with the same speed as seconds before your first orgasm. You bring your hands back to the bars of the headboard, trying to pull and bring yourself away from her, but you're too weak and she's too strong.

"Don't."

She growls her warning and you shudder, feeling yourself getting wetter and you whimper as you're once again at her mercy, and you wouldn't have it any other way. Fueled by your disobedience she stops momentarily, so she can leave your waist, bring your thighs up and force them down towards your face, folding you in half, knees touching your chest. She keeps you there, trapped, with no way to escape and continues to fuck you as if not even a second had passed.

It doesn't take long for you to feel your second orgasm approaching and when it hits you you're coming harder than your first. You try to arch your back, move your hips and thrash your legs, but she's a mountain above you and you can only clench harder at her cock and scream. She doesn't stop her movements so she can prolong your pleasure for as long as you can take.

You grunt and moan at the shivers that are coming over you in waves. All your muscles and nerves scream at the overstimulation and you reach a hand towards her to tap at her knee.

"I got you, beautiful."

In an instant your legs are guided gently to the bed and the strap is out of you, somehow without causing any more stimulation. You hear the sounds of the harness and then a thud when it hits the floor. You feel the bed dip beside you and you half open your eyes. You see Sevika's face, eyes full of adoration, leaning towards you to give you a kiss on the forehead, her warm hand coming to gently stroke your cheek and wipe away an errand tear. You hum at the gesture, thinking that this moment was worth the night she put you through.

"Hey, baby. Are you with me?"

"Hmm… love you…"

"I love you, too, sweetheart. How about a bath?"

"Hold me first."

"Anything for you, love."

You might let her take everything from you, but you know you can have anything that is hers. So you steal her hugs and kisses until your breathing and heart rate calm down, so she can lead you to a nice bath and pamper you for the rest of the night and the following day.

**********

taglist : @opropheticsoul @archangeldyke-all

Thanks for reading! :)

[sixteenseveredhands]

Medieval Hermitage atop Katskhi Pillar, in Georgia (South Caucasus), c. 800-900 CE: this church was built during the Middle Ages; it sits atop a limestone column that has been venerated as a "Pillar of Life" for thousands of years

Known as Katskhi Pillar (or Katskhis Sveti), this enormous block of limestone is located in western Georgia, about 10km from the town of Chiatura.

The church that stands atop Katskhi Pillar was originally constructed during the 9th-10th century CE. It was long used as a hermitage for Stylites, who are sometimes referred to as "Pillar Saints" -- Christian ascetics who lived, prayed, and fasted atop pillars, often in total isolation, in an effort to bring themselves closer to God. This tradition originated in Syria during the 5th century CE, when a hermit known as Simeon the Elder purportedly climbed up onto a pillar and then stayed there for nearly 40 years, giving rise (no pun intended) to the Stylites. Stylitism managed to survive for about 1,000 years after its inception, but it gradually began to die out during the late Middle Ages, and by the end of the 16th century, it had essentially gone extinct.

Researchers don't really know how the monks originally gained access to the top of Katskhi Pillar, or how they were able to transport their building materials up to the top of the column. There's evidence that the Stylites were still living at Katskhi Pillar up until the 15th century, but the site was then abandoned shortly thereafter. This was the same period in which Georgia came under Ottoman rule, though it's unclear whether or not that may have played a role in the abandonment of the site.

The hermitage continued to lay abandoned for nearly 500 years after that. No one had been able to gain access to the top of the pillar, and very little was even known about the ruins that lay scattered at the top, as knowledge about the site's origin/history was gradually lost. There are many local legends that emerged as a way to fill in those blanks.

The site was not visited again until July 29th, 1944, when a mountaineer finally ascended to the top of the column with a small team of researchers, and the group performed the first archaeological survey of the ruins. They found that the structure included three hermit cells, a chapel, a wine cellar, and a small crypt; within the crypt lay a single set of human remains, likely belonging to one of the monks who had inhabited the site during the Middle Ages.

A metal ladder (the "stairway to Heaven") was ultimately installed into the side of the pillar, making it much easier for both researchers and tourists to gain access to these ruins.

The hermitage at the top of Katskhi Pillar actually became active again in the early 1990's, when a small group of monks attempted to revive the Stylite tradition. A Georgian Orthodox monk named Maxime Qavtaradze then lived alone at the top of Katskhi Pillar for almost 20 years, beginning in 1995 and ending with his death in 2014. He is now buried at the base of the pillar.

While the hermitage is no longer accessible to the public, and it is currently uninhabited, it's still visited by local monks, who regularly climb up to the church in order to pray. There is also an active monastery complex at the base of the pillar, where a temple known as the Church of the Simeon Stylites is located.

The Church of the Simeon Stylites: this church is located within an active monastery complex that has been built at the base of the pillar; several frescoes and religious icons decorate the walls of the church, and a small shrine containing a 6th century cross is located in the center

There are many lingering questions about the history of Katskhi Pillar, particularly during the pre-Christian era. There is at least some evidence suggesting that it was once the site of votive offerings to pagan deities, as a series of pre-Christian idols have been found buried in the areas that surround the pillar; according to local tradition, the pillar itself was once venerated by the pagan societies that inhabited the area, but it's difficult to determine the extent to which these claims may simply be part of the mythos that surrounds Katskhi Pillar, particularly given its mysterious reputation.

Sources & More Info:

BBC: Georgia's Daring, Death-Defying Pilgrimage

CNN: Katskhi Pillar, the Extraordinary Church where Daring Monks Climb Closer to God

Radio Free Europe: Georgian Monk Renews Tradition, Lives Atop Pillar

Architecture and Asceticism (Ch. 4): Stylitism as a Cultural Trend Between Syria and Georgia

Research Publication from the Georgian National Museum: Katskhi Pillar

Journal of Nomads: Katskhi Pillar, the Most Incredible Cliff Church in the World

Georgian Journal: Georgia's Katskhi Pillar Among World's 20 Wonderfully Serene and Secluded Places

[nutty1005]

Xiao Zhan | The simpler is more complex

Original Article: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Zkps0vHvP89ZrMWQIUZ3NA Original Author: JIAWEI This article was originally published on 10 August 2024 on ELLE’s Weixin Official Account 世界时装之苑ELLE.

Xiao Zhan believed that truth brings simplicity. But in performance, he is starting to like multi-sided and complex characters more, or rather, this is the true and real state of human existence. At a time when everything is being simplified, to be willing to admit the difference between people, to seek the possibility of communication, to be sensitive and defend complexity, this definitely requires passion, as well as courage.

ELLE September Issue Vintage Denim Jacket Acne Studios Quatre Classique ring Quatre Classique series bracelet All are Boucheron

ELLE September Issue Black Sleeveless Vest, Black Shorts All are Gucci 2025 Spring/Summer Men’s Collection

Two black curtains reached the top of the studio ridge, neatly separating the shooting area from the surroundings, there was a need to go through a maze of them to enter the small core space. Pure white, plenty of air conditioning, and the camera shutter sound was high-frequency and continuous.

Xiao Zhan wore black clothes and rarely made any unnecessary movements. For a while, the lights broke down and photography was suspended, so he maintained standing in the dark with one foot on the wooden box; when the staff and the photographer were discussing the photographs, adjusting the styling, he stood alone in front of the display screen, and the weak screen light enveloped his body. Very occasionally, he swayed slightly to the background music, his legs lean but muscular.

#01 I’m afraid of becoming dull

After entering the entertainment industry, these things quickly became part of his daily life – cameras, spotlights, monitors, and barriers. Because of his career and popularity, he had fissioned into countless “Xiao Zhans”, such as giant portraits on the facades of high-end shopping malls, the projections of an astonishing number of fans, or the appearance of characters in successive movies and TV series.

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Currently, in the dressing room after the shooting, Xiao Zhan was carrying his box of whole grain salad, vividly imitating the scene of meeting director Zheng Xiaolong.

“I was a little bit hesitant, so I asked the director if he wanted me to be thinner or stronger? He said, thin, of course thinner, so good looking, sharp.” After a while, Zheng Xiaolong saw him again while taking final costuming photographs, “He said, hey, you’ve done well.” From then till now, he has lost more than five kilograms.

Xiao Zhan, the source of all of this fission, was presentable and relaxed, to him the glamor seen by the outside world was a supplementary value. Sometimes he even forgot about it and said, “No one really cares about you.” Then he continued to talk about his work.

Recently completed was the 5-month filming of “The Legend of Zang Hai” in Hengdian. The previous film, also shot for 5 months, was the film “The Legend of the Condor Heroes: The Great Hero” directed by Tsui Hark. This was often the case for large-scale movies and long-running television dramas, it took four or five months once you joined the group. In 2022, his filming work was mainly “Where Dreams Begin / The Youth Memories” and “Sunshine By My Side”, in 2021 it was “The Longest Promise”, in 2020 it was “Ace Troops”, in 2019 it was “Douluo Continent” and “The Oath of Love”.

Endless filming appointments. Hence, it was sometimes impossible to decide whether the interval between filming should be lengthened or shortened.

Black Sleeveless Vest, Black Shorts All are Gucci 2025 Spring/Summer Men’s Collection

In the second half of 2019, during the filming of “The Oath of Love”, Xiao Zhan was filming during the day and recording the variety show “Our Song” at night. Both sides were very challenging. The former was his first time playing the male lead in an urban drama, so he had little experience and was under great pressure; the difficulty of the latter lies in the harmonizing, “I had to memorize all the harmonizing that were different from the song’s tone, and not to be led astray. “

“Then, I thought it didn’t matter. I slept for an hour or two and woke up a good man again. But now, while my mind says it doesn’t matter, my body will make some protests.”

This year he was filming in Hengdian. Later, one day, he discovered that his tonsils were inflamed and it was painful to swallow, but he went to work as usual. Until the director came over and asked him, what happened to your eyes? Only then did he see his own swollen eyes in the mirror, held on until the afternoon, “completely like a frog.”

He had to go to the hospital, the symptoms themselves were very common and could be stopped by taking medicine. What can’t be done was exactly what doctors advised the most: you need to rest.

More importantly, “Perception will become dull. I am really afraid of this, afraid of becoming very mechanical and formulaic.” When saying this, the emphasis was on the word “really”. When he chatted with seniors, “They also said that you have to live life, you need to experience life.”

Black Sequined Shirt CFCL Black Knitted Turtleneck JIL SANDER

The fact is that the life in the limelight is somewhat contrary to the life of ordinary people, but the profession of an actor requires him to be in touch with as many folds of life as possible.

A while ago, he watched a one-man show on a variety show, describing the current workplace situation of contemporary young people. Xiao Zhan had opened a studio and worked before entering the entertainment industry. He could understand the gloom caused by going to work, but the new vocabulary and tools that appeared in the workplace made his sense of resonance weaken. He found himself gradually uncoupling to a certain extent.

#02 The flavor of life lies in the details

In early June, Xiao Zhan took a short vacation and returned to his hometown of Chongqing. He loved walking very much, and one night he walked for several hours, visiting old streets, People’s Liberation Monument, and even around the place where he used to work.

In 2014, the 23-year-old Xiao Zhan graduated from university and worked as a designer in a design studio. Every weekday morning, he transferred from Line 2 to Line 3 at Niujiaituo Station, pushing through the crowds and squeezing onto the light rail, and several times he had been squeezed so hard that his face was pressed against the glass windows.

He simply stuck against the glass and looked at the Jialing River below, seeing the strange rocks exposed in the dry season and various people, including winter swimmers, joggers and fishermen, with a rather optimistic spirit.

Black Sleeveless Vest Gucci 2025 Spring/Summer Men’s Collection

He still loved to observe the people around him——

“Why are you still here so late?”

“People walking in a hurry must be people who have just gotten off work and are rushing back, their behavior is just like when I was trying to catch the subway, when it’s the last train and you want to run, in a panic. Some food delivery guys are rush forward undauntedly. There are also some very leisurely people, sitting there drinking beer, then going home and starting a new day.”

“Everyone has an exciting story happening, and it is everyone’s life that makes up our society. So it is wondrous, everyone is the protagonist, we are all filming our own biographies, how will tomorrow’s story develop?”

At that moment, mixed in, he was like all those who have been busy working in a foreign land for a long time and finally had the time to go home, and discovered that “it had been a long time since I came here, and there had been quite a lot of changes.” “Actually, I’m not particularly happy or have any other feelings. I’m living, that’s all.”

Two and a half days later, Xiao Zhan left Chongqing and returned to Beijing due to work, then rushed to Shanghai, and then in turn to France. This time he brought his parents too. This was a long in coming family trip, within a week, they traveled from France to Switzerland and back to France. Every detail of the trip was magnified, they were happy, bickering, or just walking for a while, “it was all very vivid.”

On the day they parted, they had dinner at a restaurant in the south of France, the car to pick him up arrived and he had to leave first. Before leaving, his mother hugged him and told him to take care of himself. In a rare move, his father also hugged him awkwardly.

Retro Denim Jacket, Jeans All are Acne Studios Quatre Classique Series Necklace (as a belt) Quatre Classique Series Ring Quatre Classique Series Bracelet All are Boucheron

The flavor of life lies in the details.

“I used to think that work was everything and life was not that important, it was nothing more than having a place to sleep, then getting up, going to work, finishing work, and resting. But now, when my parents have grown older, and I have not been with them for a long time, you will feel as if each other’s lives, even your family’s, would become further and further apart. “He especially did not want this to happen.

The way to avoid suspension and regain the real sense of life is not difficult. “When you have time, go out and see more. The important thing is to feel life and feel the world. Even if some of the things are bad and cruel, they are all life, and will burst out with energy when you need it.”

Black Sequined Shirt CFCL Black Knitted Turtleneck JIL SANDER Quatre Classique Series Ring Quatre Classique Series Bracelet All are Boucheron

#03 Stay innocent, stay complex

Halfway through the interview, Xiao Zhan suddenly said that he was ambivalent about long interviews. On the one hand, he was worried that he had not grown up enough and would show ignorance in the conversation, but on the other hand, he wanted to explore some subtle feelings through the conversation because he felt that he was not good at using words to record them.

Observation, feeling, understanding and expression are the essentials of why actors can bring creativity.

“Dialogue is also muscle memory.” Xiao Zhan said, “Although I am very introverted, I am not antisocial. Because I think actors need to learn to express, express your inner thoughts, and digest the content conveyed to you by the other party.”

Before the filming of “Sunshine By My Side” started, he met with the main creators and held several script meetings to deepen his understanding of one another and the characters. In the early stages of “The Legend of Zang Hai”, the producer also mentioned that he would discuss the script in detail and talk about a scene with a lot of his own understanding.

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Xiao Zhan is not an actor with a professional background, when he first entered the industry and filmed “Battle Through the Heavens” and “The Wolf”, he had strong doubts and asked himself, am I suitable? The constant negativity and self-refuting made him lose self-confidence.

Sometimes he would be asked what he would be doing now if he had not participated in the talent show, debuted, or entered the entertainment industry at the age of 23. He had thought about it, but did not look back.

If he was not good at acting, then he needed to spend extra time taking acting classes, review more in the monitors, and ask more advice from his seniors. He put his head down stubbornly, and with hard work, he slowly found the knack.

Later the filming of “Where Dreams Being / The Youth Memories” started, Xiao Zhan played Xiao Chunsheng, a young man from the military courtyard in Beijing, who was completely different from him, and even his accent was completely distinct. He felt insecure. Before filming started for many scenes, director Fu Ning would run over and whisper to him, “Don’t be afraid Zhanzhan, just speak bravely, if you feel it, just say it, the audience actually can feel your emotions and what you want to express.” .

He also gradually gained more self-awareness: “Techniques may not be my area of ​​expertise, I rely more on feelings. Only when I feel it myself then I can have the confidence to interpret it. If I rely solely on some techniques, I don’t think it is sufficiently moving.”

It had been 8 years since Xiao Zhan first acted, and his resume included leading male roles in films and television dramas of various themes. But he still felt that he is a newcomer and hopes to cooperate with more experienced production teams if there is an opportunity in the future.

Retro Denim Jacket, Jeans All are Acne Studios Quatre Classique Series Necklace (as a belt) Quatre Classique Series Ring Quatre Classique Series Bracelet All are Boucheron

He would not think too much, he actually did not know his work plan divided by year. He only cared about the work arrangements for the next stage, rather than “asking about things that are too far away.”

“I still feel like a child now, but in fact I am not anymore. It seems like I am still in high school, but in fact I have grown up.” The nature of a child means curiosity, desire to explore, and power of imagination.

He placed the curiosity and desire to explore into his characters, “I mean, for myself, when I dig into the character’s background and past, I explore the complexity and contradiction of the character as a person, and present it. Only in this way can some of his choices and motivations be understood by the audience, and the work may then be good, and only then can you have the audience you have now, right?”

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#(Q&A)

ELLE: During the break, will you think about anything on the set? Xiao Zhan: Of course, I remember that just a few days after filming was completed, I was still dreaming that I was still filming, and the director and I were still discussing how to say that phrase on set? How to handle that scene?

ELLE: Do you actually miss the atmosphere on the set? Xiao Zhan: I like it very much, because I like the feeling of everyone creating together and working together to get something done.

ELLE: When you first entered the entertainment industry and your popularity grew very quickly, you said you felt it was a bit unreal and magical, but now you seem to be quite relaxed. How did this change occur? Xiao Zhan: Rather than being unreal or magical, after so many years, I feel that I hadn’t had time to adapt to such a fast pace at that time, so when I woke up from sleep, I was like where am I today? What am I doing? I think it is a process, just like when you first enter the workplace, you will be very excited, “Work here I come, please take good care of me”, “My highness is here, everyone get out of the way”, “I can do it, I will do it”. (Laughs) But after experiencing a lot of things, you will feel that it seems that everything needs to be considered in the long term.

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ELLE: In several interviews, you mentioned that you like to play roles that “can convey energy.” Why do you have such a preference? Xiao Zhan: Because I think this is the life of the character. The kind of energy I’m talking about is not just a single, generally understood positive energy, I’m talking about nourishment that can subtly influence and moisturize. I believe that every character has a complete storyline inside, this is what I like very much, and as long as you dig deep, you can move people. I don’t really like to call the villain a “villain”, as it seems to be a bad character from the beginning, but in fact it is not, he may have his own difficulties.

ELLE: It sounds like “transmitting energy” is just a general term, but is it actually about understanding different people through performance? Xiao Zhan: Yes, if you break it down to each character, what they convey is different. But if you want to talk about “good people” and “bad people”, then I don’t think it’s interesting.

ELLE: So do you think performance is a form of communication? Xiao Zhan: Yes, you can say that, I think it’s great to say that, (performance) is a bridge to communicate with the audience. Just like when a drama is broadcasting, I will read some of the audience’s comments and impressions after watching it, and I feel that they have a very rich feelings about the work. When I see some comments that are exactly the same as my thoughts during the filming, I will feel very amazed, as if the bridge is really connected, we don’t know each other in life and have never communicated with each other, but he suddenly understands my thoughts then, I’ll just feel that, oh, acting is a beautiful and magical thing.

ELLE: Do you watch some science fiction movies, TV series, and literary works? Xiao Zhan: Yes, I used to like watching “The Three-Body Problem”, I have actually watched some science fiction movies recently, the American drama “Constellation”, and recently I am watching “Dark Matter”, which is about infinite flow and parallel time and space. Because I think maybe there really is a parallel time and space. Every choice you make will split out a different parallel time and space.

ELLE: Then will you imagine Xiao Zhan in parallel time and space? Xiao Zhan: I will really wonder, for example, is he still an actor? Maybe yes, but is he still filming now? Is he still singing now? Or is he also a designer? Is he an employee or is he his own boss? (Laughs) Really, I will.

ELLE: As for the future, what do you think it will be like? Xiao Zhan: Wow, I feel that the world may return to its original nature when the time comes instead, maybe the world will become a better place, and people will return to very essential communication.

ELLE: This is very interesting. Why do you think so? Xiao Zhan: Anyway, at least now I have a little aversion with this kind of ubiquitous Internet, when we were young, there were no mobile phones, everyone just chatted during meals, my friends would all come downstairs to play, hide and seek, and play various games, I feel that that time was very precious instead.

ELLE: Will there still be an actor career by then? Xiao Zhan: I think there will be. I believe that as long as life goes on, drama will continue. Because everyone needs an outlet, emotional resonance and sustenance, be it images or sounds. So I feel that even if the world is destroyed, as long as there are still people, drama will definitely exist.

[pancakeke]

The comic store had a sidewalk sale with $1 bins today. I found a couple single issue Viz manga releases from 2003ish. This was back when they were mirroring manga so it would read left to right. Some fun examples of how this caused problems under the cut.

These first two sets of comparisons are from Ceres Celestial Legend. Original Japanese manga caps are on the left, my pics of the Viz English release are on the right.

A big problem with mirroring manga was that any text within artwork got reversed. Above you can see a character's shirt in panel 2 containing the letter "E" above the word "ELLE".

The English release edited this panel to cover the original artwork with a nearly identical design that faced the correct direction once mirrored, though the new text is inside a rectangle. I'm guessing the rectangle was a quick and dirty way to cover up the old text and avoid shading folds for the new text.

If you look on to panel 4 you can see that the English version did not bother to edit the same character's shirt. The top half of a backwards E is visible. Both the edited and unedited shirts make additional appearances later.

Sometimes certain panels were not mirrored, but I don't fully understand why. Choosing NOT to mirror select panels can easily lead to continuity errors or other issues.

Above you can see that the English release kept panel 1 facing it's original orientation. Note how the blonde character and the character in the portrait are wearing kimonos with the left side wrapped over the right. This is the traditionally correct method to wear a kimono (unless you're dead and it's your funeral).

Panel 4 of the English version is mirrored which makes it appear as though the character in the center is wearing a kimono incorrectly. All kimonos in following pages appear to be worn incorrectly as well, since they're mirrored too.

I also saw a few instances of weird choices made when translating Japanese text within artwork. It's unrelated to mirroring, so I'm skipping that stuff.

This next series is Silent Mobius, or as Viz called its issues Silent Mobius Blood and Silent Mobius Hell.

This series has the same problem with select non mirrored panels creating inconsistencies. Here you can see panel 1 of the English release maintained its original orientation while the remainder of the page was mirrored.

The same building appears again a few pages later here in panel 1. The English version is mirrored, so the positions of its towers in relation to each other don't match the other page.

Bonus weird translation direction here btw. I noticed a lot of signs in the Japanese version that originally contained both English and Japanese, but the English release replaced them with awkwardly stretched text in English only. There wasn't even anything on this page to justify mirroring it in the first place. You'd think they could have left it and kept the original signs.

I hit the image limit so I'm going to see if I can reblog this from myself and add another cut. There are two more side-by-sides I want to share.

[mintytealfox]

*carb walks in*

*holds up a question*

*yeets*

What the au where norton is big and alice(and melly) are tiny like did they found kurt book but don't know how long it last and norton is now stuck being the babysitter till the their normal size again or is it drugs?

MUAAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHHA AAAAAAAAHHHHHHAHAHAHHAHAHA MUAAHAHAHHAHHAHA

THE AU HAS BEEN ASKED ABOUT MUUAAAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAAAA 🤌🤌🤌🤌🤌🤌🤌

Perfect timing too honestly cause I was feeling sad about Netease being emo as frick with the Norton stuff lol (there is an ask in the inbox about it and I am gonna go so wild once I collect my thoughts 👀)

-rubs hands togetherrrrrr-

so this one with Melly:

was a little one off thing cause I love Navi from Legend of Zelda and I imagine she is so tired of Link and I had Da Capo on the brain and was like 'aw yea these two' LOOOOOOOOOOOL

----------------

The other one with this stuff:

is super MaCross coded 👀🤌 if you are familiar with Zentraedi then you got a gist of what is going on here lol but here is a link to a intro to the au: here Then this one has the links to everything I have written for it so far: here

I am more of a report writer rather than creative writer anymore these days. So, if its bad then my bad LOOOOOL! If you don't want to read all that then here is this to get the gist of what is up with the world

"Some background:

Two species of humanoid now inhabit the same planet. One from another dead planet and seeking refuge and a new place to live (the humans). This was met with hostility from the original habitants (the larger one). A war broke out for 10 years, for the humans to come on top in the end. The larger species are now used as a sort of work horse in most cases. Some manual labor, others protecting the area and hunting, etc. there are still Nobels and high ups in politics but the less well-off tend to be put to difficult work and conditions. Even though the humans have the tech to make it easier, just don’t want to waste resources.  It’s a political way to keep them down, busy and obedient basically. 🙃

Norton, of course, works in the mines." ----------- BUT I LIKE WHERE YOUR BRAIN IS GOING -rubs hands together- a thiirrdddd au cookin I seeeee~ LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

Knowing Alice, its probably DRUGS that did it -WHEEEZE- Then Melly having to get involved trying to be like "oh my gosh stop sniffin D R U G S" and tries to take it away but it just gets all over~ nice and cliche 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

But I can see Melly having fun with the size change cause talk about an entire new perspective for her research of insects lol -can pet beetle like dog- "who would have thought they liked little pats on the head" So much new research to be done 🤣🤣🤣 Her command of insects is broadening LOOK OUT -WHEEZE-

Now for Alice, there is no stopping her now, every nook; every cranny is now hers to explore LOL no locks can keep her out now!! No document/letter/sensitive information can hide from her -WHEEZE- No drawer or box left un-sifted through PFF No conversation left un-eavesdropped! She is more of a danger to society's secrets now than she was before IM DYING LOOOOL

Yea Norton is definitely gonna have to babysit these two MY GOSH! Good L U C K BRO LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

(THANK YOU FOR THE ASK!! I L O V E talking about this stuff HA! And needed the distraction honestly SO THANK YOOUUU)

[detailtilted]

Ode to AgtSpooky, SPN Con Videographer Extraordinaire

Ode to AgtSpooky, videographer extraordinaire, She’s so very stealthy, you'd never even know she was there. She casually moves her monopod, innocent as you please, And you’d never even guess she’d just fooled the video police. “Oh no, oh dear, Jensen has once again decided to pace! How ever will we keep our cameras on his handsome face?” But AgtSpooky, she’s not fazed, she casually flips her wrist, And now fans for many years to come will see his every twist. The video police, they look so hard, but somehow they can’t see That AgtSpooky recorded it all to share with you and me.

Her activities put her at risk of getting kicked out, Yet still she shared with other fans, her files freely about. Videos are now permitted, but fans like her led the way, For how could one see such fun and not also want to come play? Her videos spread far and wide as diverse fans flocked to watch. In time Creation learned that free publicity was top notch. If you laughed at the J2 antics from back in 2007, You likely have AgtSpooky to thank for that piece of heaven. Her breakfast videos on YouTube have fifty thousand plus views, But that they originated from her, to many may be news.

Fast forward a couple decades, to 2024, Some crazy stranger came knocking, and she didn’t slam the door. DetailTilted, a newer fan, found her dead video links, Then she hunted her down and sent an e-mail of excessive length. It may not always be wise to answer the pleas of strangers, Doing so may sometimes lead to some unexpected dangers. Her secret footage of Jim Beaver's dancing has now been leaked abroad. To the witness protection program she goes, her courage we laud. Dear AgtSpooky we hope you fare well, whatever you may do, But your skills shall remain a legend; they’re surpassed by very few.

Terrible poetry aside, AgtSpooky really is awesome, both in regard to her generosity and her video skills. Below are two screen shots from my VANCON 2009 editing process to demonstrate why I suddenly went off the deep end and started composing poetry for the first time in my not-so-short life. 🤣

In these screen shots, I had four video sources synced up to the same moment in time, arranged so I could see them all at once to decide which ones to use at which times. Her video, the one in the top left, was frequently the only one with a clear view of Jensen and/or Jared.

Jensen started pacing in his panel, making it difficult to keep the camera on him without getting caught, but somehow AgtSpooky was able to stay on top of his movements where others often lagged behind. In the J2 panel, they were sitting further apart and most people had trouble getting both of them in their video frame. AgtSpooky was at an angle that worked much better and she was the only one able to consistently get both of them.

Her footage from these two panels never made it onto YouTube as far as I could find, so I’m really excited to share my next two enhanced videos. Her coverage is better than what’s on YouTube today. I still have more work to do, but I’m on track to have Jensen’s solo VANCON 2009 panel up on YouTube on July 5. The J2 panel will probably follow 3 weeks or so after that. There wasn’t a solo Jared panel at this con because they ran out of time.

Video Editing Screen Shot from Jensen's Solo Panel

("Video C" made up for recording so much footage of the curtains by adding some on-screen text that made me laugh. 😂)

Video Editing Screen Shot from the J2 Panel

[the-path-to-redemption]

Once again I am begging for help on how to upload a better resolution please-

I wasn't confident in the coloring at all and gave up halfway. But after spending too long on this piece, I just wanna get it out.

Some design decisions:

The cloud design on her qipao jacket is a reference to Qrow, who wears feathers with his cape. Originally, I wanted to have her wear a similar, fluffy material, but that would've made her too top-heavy.

The red string is a connection to Summer and Ruby, something she made herself.

The pattern on her purple sash is emulating fish scales, specifically of the carp fish. It's a reference to the legend of carp fishes jumping into Longmen (Dragon Gate) and the one who passes becomes a dragon. Since Yang is starting her Huntress career at Beacon, she has the scales and clouds for her design here (carp and dragon respectively).

Tan Yang >>>>>>

I'm going to work on portraits and sketches in the upcoming months, just to practice the fundamentals some more. Hopefully, I will know how to color by then lol.

[artist-issues]

Hi, I wanted to say first off I love your analysis on films and storytelling! Second, I'm curious on what your thoughts are on the movie Moana?

Thank you!

I like Moana. I think it’s a really fun movie and it’s enjoyable to watch over and over again. The main character wants something relatable, she’s flawed, and she’s believable. The visuals are probably what keep people coming back, because Disney flexed so hard with animating the water and the sand and the glowing monsters.

I will say, there are some pacing moments I think aren’t great, some filler stuff in the movie that I don’t think add anything to it. Like, for example, Pua. Pua doesn’t add anything to the movie. You could take him out and lose nothing. Also, the entire scene with the Kakamora.

They are appealing and the giant-boat thing is interesting, but that whole sequence doesn’t really tell us anything about the characters or the world or the story that we don’t already know. It’s just an action sequence. In it, you learn: Moana is capable and committed to keeping the Heart safe, Maui is capable but a show-off, and there are monsters that are drawn to the heart. You already knew all that stuff without that scene. See what I mean?

But that doesn’t mean the movie is bad. It’s just not airtight, and that’s okay, because it still gets it’s point across.

I think the Main Idea of the movie is: “Who you truly are is a combination of where you’ve been and where you choose to go next.” Something like that.

Moana has to pick who she’s going to be and what she’s going to do from the first moment we see her.

She’s already a character “born with” some traits that the other characters don’t have: she likes to explore and she’s not as afraid of the ocean and it’s dangers as everyone else. You could say she “inherits” those traits from “where she’s been;” her tribe and their Voyager Heritage.

So while Moana is figuring out how “where she comes from/where she’s been” applies to “who she’ll choose to be now,” you have other characters doing the same. Her grandmother is an example of “getting to make that choice regardless of what your community is doing; you don’t have to be a product of your environment.” Meanwhile, her mom is just a “product of her environment.” And her dad had the same fearlessness Moana has, once, but after something bad happened in his past (where he’s been) he lets that bad thing inform who he chooses to be for the rest of his life: the chief that won’t take chances.

Then meanwhile, Maui is letting his origins define who he chooses to be. He has to be a hero, and earn everybody’s love, because he came into the world Unloved. Ironically, the gods and the ocean helped him. But their love isn’t enough for him.

See, just like Moana’s dad, Maui has a choice. He can look at the parts of his past that are good, (the ocean chose me/I’m descended from voyagers) and choose to move forward based on that, OR, he can look at the parts of his past that are bad (my own parents thought I was worthless/being a voyager killed my best friend) and choose to move forward based on that. And how you move forward, combined with where you’ve been, is what the movie says your “identity” is.

I mean, think about Tamatoa, obviously. His song describes how he didn’t always used to be a living-legend monster. But now he finds his identity in the literal treasure he piles on top of himself, like trophies of conquest. Then think about Te Fiti. She’s stolen from, and misused, and lets that fact of her history turn her into a monster. A monster who can’t be calmed down enough to be transformed until Moana reminds her of “who she is.”

And by the end of it, Moana ultimately decides who she’s going to be, based on the things that are true about her. Is she a powerful goddess or demigod, like Maui? No. Is she a good-enough navigator to get past Te Ka on her own? No. Is she bulletproof because the Ocean chose her? No. Does she want to be chief of her island and stay there forever? No. All of those things are true. But, what’s also true is that she wants to do something to help save the world, she does love her island at the same time as she loves the sea, and she’s willing and able to keep trying even after she fails. So she’s going to act on those things that are also true.

Same thing with Maui. He’s made mistakes and he’s ruined things, including his own reputation, and he’s finding his identity in his powers, which get jeopardized. But by willingly sacrificing those things, he re-defines what his identity is. “Maui” is not a hero who has the power to do anything for mortals, and deserves their adoration. “Maui” is a good guy who’s going to keep trying to be self-sacrificial even after he makes mistakes.

There’s other elements in it too, that I think deserve analysis. I mean, the movie is saying you have inherent worth. You have an identity, objectively, regardless of what you choose for yourself. Hei Hei is funny but he’s a prime example of what the movie is saying about that. He’s a stupid rooster who seems completely useless, but by the end he shows that he was worth taking along.

Also, when Moana calms Te Ka, she does say “who you truly are.” And all the problems with her village stem from the fact that they don’t know, or have repressed, a part of their history and cultural identity. Her dad is ignoring something that is true about himself: he has Voyager in his nature. So the idea in the movie is that you can choose the right identity, one that lines up with “who you truly are, whether you like it or not,” or you can choose the wrong identity. What puzzles me is how “the gods” and “the ocean” fit into all of that.

I don’t love that Moana insists that the gods “don’t make you Maui. You do.” Truth of the matter is, Maui would be dead if not for the gods—never mind his powers. So in one sense, he would not have anything he has without them, including his life. Additionally, Moana would not be Moana without the ocean. She wouldn’t have the Heart of Te Fiti. She wouldn’t have found Maui in the first place, because she sucked at navigating. She wouldn’t have made it to Te Fiti if not for supernatural help. So what Moana should have said, to be accurate, is, “The gods made you Maui, and you can choose to agree with them or live a lie.”

Of course, the movie doesn’t set Moana herself up like that. She’s not dependent on the gods or the ocean for her very existence, like Maui was. But you see what I’m saying. There’s this tension between what you can choose, and who gets to decide what’s right to choose. Tamatoa probably wasn’t right to choose to be a grandma-eating, mortal-killing monster, but that’s what he chose to identify as. Te Fiti definitely wasn’t right to choose to try and melt everyone who came near her; she’s supposed to be a goddess of life, not death. That’s her “right” identity.

But Moana? Of course the most satisfying choice for her was “be the hero and keep on trying.” But the movie does set up the grandmother’s ghost, there to lead her home in case she wants to give up. And it sets that up as if it would be an okay-thing to do. Not necessarily the wrong thing—even though, if she had chosen to give up and go home, she would essentially be exactly like her father. So why is it hinted that the Chief was wrong to want to burn the voyager boats, hide from the rest of the world, and act on fear…but if Moana wants to give up, that’s okay? Because she tried? The Chief tried to be brave and be like Moana, too, and someone died because of it.

So I think some of that portion of the narrative is sloppily handled. It’s not smart to have both ideas in your movie: “You are meant for something” AND “you can choose who you want to be, and whatever you choose is what you’re meant for.” If not for Moana herself, that last part, in bold, wouldn’t be in there presenting a problem. But that scene where the Grandmother is willing to let her choose the wrong identity, yet it’s not portrayed as the “wrong” identity, messes it up.

The idea presented by all the other characters (Maui, Grandma, Te Fiti) is, “you have an identity and worth that is assigned to you by something bigger than yourself. You can either agree with it, or suppress it, live a lie, and try to find identity/worth in something else.” But Moana’s grandmother, gently allowing her to give up and acting like that’s okay, sort of ruins it.

But I’ll dive into that more another day, if you’re interested.

[yamayuandadu]

I realized I forgot to post my second critical evaluation of Touhou-adjacent Matarajin hot takes meant to be a followup to this ask response a few months ago. Sorry. Time to remedy that.

My current lack of enthusiasm for Okina = Hata no Kawakatsu fan material comes from a somewhat similar place as my disdain for the reddit hot takes about Okina being Okuninushi (though it is obviously less severe). However, I’ll stress that this idea actually goes back to ZUN, instead of being a weird fanon invention - Kawakatsu comes up in the interview. 

More under the cut.

ZUN calls Kawakatsu “part of her [Okina’s] true nature” (as a side note, 0 idea what the interviewer means by claiming Kawakatsu has some special connection to komainu; I guess everything at least vaguely Korean is interchangeable?). The fact he refers to Okina “a god of silkworm breeding” in her bio and the dupion spell card seem like Kawakatsu nods, too - Matarajin has nothing to do with sericulture. ZUN’s statements, and the references to the tokyo no kami episode in the game itself, led to a common fan idea that Okina is Kawakatsu outright - I’ve even seen weird theories about Okina being deified Kawakatsu. 

In reality there is no source presenting Matarajin as a deification of a real or at least legendary person; he might be a yaksha, a dakini, a “regular” Buddhist deity, even a fox (in a single relatively late source, but hey) but evidently not a deified human (the closest you can get is the speculation about Matarajin being perceived as a tengu). There is also no source directly equating Matarajin and Kawakatsu with each other save for one specific oddity. Konparu Zenchiku in Meishuku Shū identifies Kawakatsu as one of the manifestations of an universal deity he refers to as shukujin, a label which is sometimes applied to Matarajin elsewhere. However, he at no point mentions Matarajin. His disciple Zeami then went further, equating Matarajin with Daikōjin, who is in turn identified as Kawakatsu, but, once again, we are dealing with fundamentally supernatural Kawakatsu, not with the deification of a person. The references are essentially implicit, and we’re dealing with “both might be aspects of a single person’s highly personalized idea of an universal deity”, not “it’s widely agreed figure a is figure b”. For what it’s worth, much more recently Sujung Kim did suggest a network encompassing Matarajin, various Silla-related deities (like Shinra Myōjin),  the okina mask, the Hata clan and Kawakatsu specifically in her dissertation (Transcending Locality, Creating Identity: Shinra Myōjin, a Korean Deity in Japan; p. 204-205) but I haven’t really seen other authors bring this up, and she didn’t include a similar section in her subsequent Shinra Myōjin monograph if my memory serves me well. In her case it’s also not as straightforward as “Kawakatsu = Matarajin”, and crucially Shinra Myōjin, Matarajin’s actual Korean connection, is acknowledged; ZUN never brings him up and neither do any fan theories.

My other problem is that most of the Kawakatsu stuff is, frankly, boring. This is a bigger issue I have with the Asuka period Touhou aus though, tbh; nobody is adapting the stuff with immortal monks with laser eyes, immortality elixirs and Mononobe no Moriya being Devadatta, even though THAT’S the core of Shotoku legends. The equation with Kawakatsu essentially takes the complexity of Matarajin away since nobody interprets him the way Zenchiku and Zeami did, he’s consistently just a guy in Touhou hcs as far as I can tell. And that’s a bit boring. Especially when it effectively overshadows entire networks with liver-eating demons, underworld clerks, star deities, and Susanoo on top.

There’s also the question whether there is all that much Kawakatsu material to adapt in the first place. Can’t really do anything with the menreiki origin legend because it’s been done already, without Okina (I do think that was a mistake, but I doubt ZUN has even a slight idea that Okina will exist some day when he wrote Kokoro’s arc). The popular Edo period legend casting him as a reincarnation of Qin Shi Huang, while really fun, is not exactly easy to reconcile with any Matarajin background. There’s more promising material like legends considering him a manifestation of Bishamonten or Kōjin (under the name Ōsake Daimyōjin) but these require acknowledging the Matarajin connection is basically nonexistent.

[flymmsy]

on the scale of 1-10 delulu, how likely do you think some new evil gortash ending being made is?

I think it's 50-50, so I guess that converts to a level 5 Delulu.

Why I think it might be happening

1. The Dialogue Bug - I think it’s suspicious that a relatively simple bug (that has been confirmed as a bug) has gone unfixed through so many hotfixes.

EDIT: It’s a common misconception that Hotfix 18 removed all Gortash dialogue changes but that's not quite the case. Here is a rundown of what's missing.

Now, it really is possible that it is really just extremely low priority for Larian. I just think that this, paired with other things, is suspicious.

2. New Evil Endings - we know Larian is working on new Evil endings but we have no details on what those are. However, the fact that only Gortash’s alliance dialogue has changed (edit: there's a small change in his Boss Fight scene too but its tied to the same file. See link above for a full rundown) and gone unfixed is what makes me think maybe there’s more in the works. Like I’ve said before, the dialogue file that this addition is in is the entire file for that office scene. If they wanted to beef up a Gortash alliance as an Evil Ending, they’d most likely have to edit that file again anyway. So why work on something twice when you can just roll it out all at once?

3. Getting Gortash to the end of the game is not as complicated or involved as people think - Gortash dies once the endgame has already been set in motion. You wouldn’t have to actually add that much. All you’d have to do is have the Emperor suck him into the prism too and have them duke it out, or have the Emperor leave him and come up with some narrative explanation for how he got away from the Netherbrain. Then he’d probably have to have a few lines in your little Endgame Pit Stop to speak to your allies - and that’s pretty much it. The rest, if they really had to go bare bones, can be added via mentions of him in the Epilogue. There’s already files that make some mention of calling on the Steel Watch in the final fight.

4. The Extra Delulu point- Larian has always been responsive to fans. They need to set boundaries, and clearly aren’t going to be adding a lot, but I don’t think the fact that Durgetash has risen to one of the top spots on AO3 counts for nothing. That’s something that is clearly measurable data of fan interest. At the very least, I’m certain it’s made them aware of it, we just don’t know if they’ve made the decision to act on it.

Why I think it might not be happening

1. Larian will only be adding limited content from this point forward - my hopes for any Gortash ending were immediately dashed when I first heard this news, but then revived with skepticism when they mentioned the evil endings. We don’t even know if a definitive edition is still on the table, which is where I initially thought they might add Gortash content. It’s very possible that because of this decision, no new Gortash content will be added. They may have also originally intend to add content, but ultimately chose to reprioritize with this new direction.

2. The Absolute Legend that is Jason Isaacs- It’s always been said that having such an incredible voice actor is a catch-22, because it makes calling them back in to record anything new that much harder due to both budget and scheduling constraints. Now, as I said above, not THAT much would need to be recorded, but even if it is only a little this is a very clear reason why it might have to be a no-go.

3. Gortash’s other content - it’s clear that Gortash was a victim of the cut content stick. We find out way too much about him from only letters and mentions that feel really out of nowhere, but ultimately accomplish the job. I could also understand the writers feeling like if they had to pair down his story to what it is, adding it without any additional backup would feel weird.

TLDR; it’s a total toss-up.

The only people that actually know shit are Larian themselves, and no amount of speculation can actually be definitive. Assume the worst, dream of the best, and hope that it lands somewhere in the middle.

[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.

[peacerisendove]

Once again I’m complaining about Bernard’s current characterization and random decision to make him a chef of all things/how he is currently a watered down milquetoast white boy. I still don't think it makes sense for him as a character, but I am suggesting my own solution on how Bernard being a chef could work while also rewriting how Tim and Bernard reconnect.

At the least if you want to make him a chef and still pull from his original (and honestly actual) personality at-least make a bit of an unhinged and maybe depressed chef as he tries to find himself. Like give him a bit of The Bear energy.

One of the things about Bernard was that he was a social chameleon. He could make himself fit in, in a lot of places, but that also opens up him to not really knowing who he is in himself. Which plays so well with being a chef. While in culinary school you might think you’re on top of the world, but beyond that you have to find yourself, you question your skills, whether your cooking is up to snuff, how you compare to other people/chefs, their skills, and their food constantly, and of course there’s multiple strong egos in a kitchen which you have to contend with.

I feel like chefs are fraught with identity issues and that could work so well with Bernard because he would also be searching for himself concurrently as he pursues Tim or figures out his sexuality/attraction towards Tim.

I think instead of the cult angle in Batman: Urban Legends that brings Bernard and Tim back together and them already knowing definitively that they are bisexual and pretty much immediately jumping into a relationship in subsequent comics, I think it should have been more exploratory and organic on both of their parts, and that while Bernard what sort of chef he is and his basis for cooking, he is simultaneously figuring out himself and who he is. His lack of knowing himself is reflected in his cooking, and that while he's figuring out himself his sexuality, and reconnecting with Tim (and they're going through a reconnecting period and dancing around flirting with each other) this development of himself and beginning notes of knowing who he is as an individual is reflected in his food.

So, yeah, my answer is basically make Bernard a bit depressed and and have him in an exploratory state where he's trying to find his own identity not only as a chef, but in his own personal life (which in turn is reflected in his cooking). And instead of things being all cookie-cutter neat and him having an established relationship with Tim, we instead get to see them both in an exploratory state of figuring out who they are as people, their sexuality, and their feelings toward each other as they reconnect.

[lokisasylum]

Jimin's 'LIE' is a masterpiece of K-pop.

(Top Star News Reporter Hwang Seon-yong) BTS Jimin’s ‘Lie’ was once again highlighted as a ‘K-pop masterpiece’ on classic broadcasts, demonstrating global popularity and the appearance of a world-class superstar.

On April 8th, the ‘You already know classical music!’ corner of KBS Classic FM’s ‘Living Classics’ covered Jimin’s first solo song ‘Lie’ in detail.

'Lie' is Jimin's solo song included in BTS' 2nd full-length album 'WINGS', released in 2016, and is a song from the opera 'La Vida Brave' by Spain's best contemporary composer Manuel de Falla. It has been evaluated as a 'K-pop masterpiece' due to the combination of Jimin's powerful yet deeply emotional voice and the classical melody sampling 'Spanish Dance No. 1'.

In addition, ‘Rye’s unrivaled, high-difficulty performance, which passionately and desperately expressed the inner self of a boy caught in a lie, along with Jimin’s outstanding facial expressions, can be considered the beginning of the ‘Jimin genre’ that sublimated the level of idol dance into art.

On this day's broadcast, with 'Lie' playing as background music, "This song, which begins with an unsettling melody, is the solo song of BTS member Jimin, who is best suited to the title of K-pop star. Jimin himself participated in writing and composing this song. “It was called a ‘K-pop masterpiece’ by fans at home and abroad, and the cumulative number of streams exceeded 200 million times.”

In addition, it is said that Jimin's 'Lie', which "the galloping minor melody matches exquisitely with the lyrics about wanting to escape from lies," was also performed as an original ballet at Crescendo, a music school in Kansas, USA, and "a ballerina in a red dress. “The sight of them dancing to K-pop music was an unfamiliar and beautiful scene that felt unique and elegant,” he said.

In this way, 'Lie', which has influenced other genres and raised the status of K-pop performance by showing outstanding musicality, is called the 'Idol's Bible' and has produced cover stages for many juniors, but in fact, it is a song that only the original singer can pull off, selected by fans. Jimin's irreplaceable image was engraved in the song by ranking first in 'Stage', and it was also ranked first in 'Best Idol Sampling Song', making the public realize its powerful topicality and popularity.

Jimin's 'Lie' exceeded 239 million streams on the global music streaming service Spotify, sold more than 500,000 copies in the United States and received gold certification, and as of April 11 on the domestic music platform Melon, the 'WINGS' album and ' YOU NEVER WALK ALONE' album version achieved a combined sales of 49 million, and even 7 years after its release, it is still loved as a K-pop legend song.

[dndhistory]

495. Tracy and Laura Hickman - I10: Ravenloft II: The House on Gryphon Hill (1986)

Although the Hickmans' name is at the top of the module and they are credited as authors, in the inner cover you get a better credit when it tells you that the module is "based on an outline by" the Hickmans. In fact, the real authors, loosely basing themselves on the Hickmans' ideas, are David "Zeb" Cook, Jeff Grubb, Harold Johnson and Douglas Niles. This is the case because, as we saw when Tracy Hickman gave his farewells at the end of the Dragonlance Legends series, the Hickmans have by now left TSR and started following their own careers in fantasy fiction.

Well, with a title like Ravenloft II, you would presume that this would be a straight sequel to the original Ravenloft... you'd be wrong. Firstly the module feels the need to bring back the most iconic thing of the first module: Strahd. But, if you played the first module, Strahd is dead... so how do you do that? Well, you throw away everything that happened in Ravenloft and make it into a dream. Feels a bit cheap, and it is a bit cheap.

However, the sheer fun of returning to Ravenloft and facing Strahd once again might be enough to make this attractive to a DM and their player, if that is so then you could do worse that this... but really there is enough replayability in the original Ravenloft, with the randomized Tarokka system, that you'd probably have more fun running the original again, then settling for an inferior sequel.