#umineko episode 4

[nirvanaida]

caught up on the joe umi streams

[knaveumineko]

Umineko Episode 4 Blog: Witch Trial

It's time to begrudgingly discuss the actual murders so I can read the Answer arcs some time this year.

Gohda and Kumasawa

Gohda and Kumasawa were seen through the window of the storehouse, apparently hanged. The only key to the room was on Gohda's person, and the storehouse was locked by Battler. When Battler returned, he realised that the ropes allowed their feet to touch the ground, and they had now been shot in the head. The key in Gohda's pocket is still there, and it's noted to be labelled.

Spinning the chessboard around, the most obvious reason to do this is to obscure when they actually died. Gohda and Kumasawa being servants makes them suspect, especially since they're telling crazy stories about magical murders, so I think they would comply with setting up a fake crime scene, and even with letting the culprit in later, leading to them getting double-crossed. It seems a little odd that the culprit would bother with this. It's not like they normally have issues with killing their accomplices. Maybe they were too busy with the test this time? The profiles also state that Gohda tied the rope around his own neck. Of course, the profiles don't have to be reliable, but why even make up that detail instead of writing nothing?

My answer is that Gohda and Kumasawa tied the ropes around their necks to give the illusion of being hanged, and then later they let the culprit into the room by passing the key through the window. The culprit then double crossed them, shooting them both in the head. The storehouse key was switched with a different key, and their labels were swapped, explaining how the key can be locked inside the storehouse.

The Show

The Rokkenjima killings usually have a theatrical element to them. The culprit is very much engineering a horror movie scenario. This time, with Battler not leaving the guesthouse, the culprit was free to invent whatever series of events they wanted, through phone calls. This makes it difficult to work out what happened from physical evidence. The best we've got is a red truth stating that Kanon died first out of Kyrie's group, and was the 9th victim overall. This actually gets us pretty far, since Battler and Maria died very late, and we're assuming that Gohda and Kumasawa died late by chessboard thinking. There are then only 8 people left to die before Kanon: George, Jessica and the 6 sacrifices. This does not necessarily mean that they died in the order,or at the time, that we're assuming. Ronove is a fantastical version of Genji, in the same way that Virgilia is Kumasawa (does this mean that Gaap is Nanjo by process of elimination? Nanjo's backstory is going to go crazy in Episode 6), and yet Genji supposedly died before he could meet Jessica.

It really seems like it was all a con. I could believe that maybe Jessica and George's tests at least happened in some form, but the rest would be fiction. The question then becomes how the culprit secures everyone's co-operation. I think the main mechanisms available are bribery (which fits some of the people involved in the con but not all of them), the culprit's unknown means of killing Battler from beyond the grave (this would work, but I have no idea how they could have the means to kill anyone from anywhere. Everyone got poisoned during dinner and they have the antidote? Tiny bombs? A really big bomb?) , or trickery (not everyone understands that they're participating in a mass murder? Seems like you'd have some sense of danger, but if Jessica walks to the mansion and sees that everyone is still alive maybe you could convince her to play along and nobody gets hurt?). George's corpse is the only reason we know that murders were actually going on at some point. Otherwise, I might posit that Beatrice just Hotline Miami's the entire mansion while Battler is grabbing the keys from the Chapel.

The Test

The test works as a way to lure the kids outside, but by now we should know that the culprit isn't some rational actor whose sole motivations are getting everyone killed. Besides, they already had hostages, so it's not like they needed any other reason for the kids to do what they were told. There's surely some other personal reason why it was done.

Battler's test is fairly straightforward: the point is to make him remember his sin. The blanked out name implies that he wronged the killer in some way. The thing that finally makes Beatrice give up is realising that Battler genuinely has no idea what she's talking about. Under the Sayo culprit theory, this is probably the "white horse" thing. In that case, giving the other kids a similar test might relate to their own failings in their relationships with her? That could contradict the red truth about the murders only happening because of Battler, though. Maybe whatever she's mad at them over wasn't as big a deal, but Sayo still wasn't satisfied with their answers.

Lock It In

At the end of the Question Arcs, I will take this opportunity to state my best guess at the truth of the mystery.

All events preceding the family conference happen the same exact way, in all episodes. These events are outside the typhoon which cut Rokkenjima off from the outside world, and so they are not subject to the witches' meddling.

Kinzo somehow obtains a large sum of gold from Beatrice I, and when his pursuit of her fails, he imprisons her on Rokkenjima, eventually fathering Beatrice II. Beatrice I commits suicide and Beatrice II is groomed into her replacement, culminating in the birth of another child, Beatrice III. Beatrice II died from falling off of a cliff, as witnessed by Rosa.

Beatrice III is Sayo. She was secretly raised in Kuwadorian, without Kinzo's knowledge, by the servants, and potentially seen to be Nanjo for her medical needs.

Sayo grew up hearing Kumasawa's stories, and magic is a big part of her worldview.

When Sayo is old enough, she becomes the servant Shannon, and the servants trick Kinzo into thinking she's from Fukuin house. It's the best they can do for her since they can't exactly hand her over to her family. This kind of secrecy from a young age might have had quite a strange effect on the way she thinks. Maybe Shannon is even something like an imaginary friend who she acts out.

Sayo does not take well to life as a servant. Since she doesn't actually have much training, she's unusually bad at her job and faces harsh criticism from the family.

During this time, she gets along well with Battler, whenever he shows up to the family conferences. Shortly before becoming estranged from the family, Battler makes his childish promise to take Sayo away from the island, and she resolves to wait.

Kinzo dies before the conference, and Krauss and Natsuhi conspire to pretend he's still alive. The servants go along with it on the surface, but they also take the opportunity to inform Sayo of her personal history, if she didn't know already, and Sayo is considered the real head of the family from then on.

Around this time, Sayo first comes up with the idea for the game around the solving of the Epitaph, and invents the Kanon character as part of the scenario. When Sayo isn't scheduled to work as Shannon, she shows up as Kanon instead. If they're scheduled at the same time, her confidants work to ensure her identity remains hidden. She also may have started writing the message bottles around this time.

Sayo secretly meets with Maria during the family conferences and plays with her in her witch guise, teaching her about magic.

Sayo finally starts the game for real when Battler shows up on the island.

The magic circles are from Kinzo's books, and were chosen so that Maria could recognise them.

Episode 1:

Sayo approaches Eva and Hideyoshi and bribes them into becoming accomplices.

Krauss, Kyrie, Rudolph, Rosa and Gohda are shot dead. Their faces are mutilated to hide that they were shot in the head. There was never a 6th body. This was a lie maintained by Kanon and Hideyoshi's false testimony.

Eva knew about Kinzo already being dead because Sayo told her. She does the receipt thing to mess with Natsuhi by calling her out on her lies, and because she's iconic like that. Afterward, she and Hideyoshi head to their room to await further instructions.

Sayo is let into Hideyoshi and Eva's room, then kills them both and inserts stakes into the bodies. The chain is then cut to create the illusion that the door was locked when the servants first found it.

Kanon runs to the Boiler Room, makes up his chest to fake stab wounds, and then drops a stake next to him. The door leading out into the courtyard is left ajar, making it seem as though the killer fled through there.

The letter in the study was placed by a servant, to create an excuse for them to leave the room.

Sayo kills the servants in the parlour and locks the door.

Natsuhi is shot, and then her gun is switched with her killer's, so it looks like she fired.

Episode 2:

Rosa is an accomplice, and is convinced to kill by leveraging her desperation for money and her grudge against her siblings.

The 6 are killed, probably by either being shot in the chest or poisoned, and then the Halloween display is created.

The Chapel locked room is solved by assuming the accomplices are lying about the Chapel being locked in the first place. All of the red truths about how the Chapel could be entered are simply irrelevant. Red herrings, even.

Kanon murders Jessica and then locks the door. The fact that Jessica had his master key doesn't matter, since Kanon has Shannon's key as well.

Gohda and Genji lie about Kumasawa and Nanjo being killed by a Kanon lookalike. This is why they aren't in the servant room. Later on, Sayo actually kills them and leaves the bodies in the courtyard.

Sayo kills Gohda and George, but it seems that Shannon's feelings for George bled through a bit too much (or maybe she's just that dedicated to the bit), and locks the door from the inside with Natsuhi's key before committing suicide.

Rosa stops Battle from investigating the crime scene too thoroughly, which stops him from finding the murder weapon.

The letter in the parlour was placed by Rosa.

With the mastermind dead, and perhaps feeling disturbed by the suicide, Genji decides he might as well go tell Battler what's going on before he dies.

Episode 3:

The locked room chain was designed in such a way that Shannon will always be found first, and Kanon last.

Nanjo lies about Shannon being dead, then Sayo opens the door with her master key, changes into Kanon, and gets ready in the chapel.

Eva killed Rosa and Maria.

Eva ambushes Kyrie and Rudolph to kill them once they figure out she's the culprit. Kyrie or Rudolph may have shot Hideyoshi during the fight. Alternatively, Eva could have killed him when he rebelled against her.

George tries to find Shannon's body and is killed by Sayo. He may have been lured out of the guesthouse by her in the first place. The window was probably locked by Nanjo.

The numbers written outside the room are the PIN for one of the deposit boxes that Sayo set up. The PIN is Battler's birthday and her own.

Rudolph and Natsuhi are killed by Eva.

Nanjo is shot by Sayo, and Eva kills Battler.

It is unclear who murders Jessica. There's even a remote possibility that Sayo takes Jessica off of the island with her somehow and she survives, although it hardly seems likely.

And of course I just got done talking about the Episode 4 murders.

I'm not entirely convinced by Sayo's motivations at all points here. I think she's the best culprit thematically, though, and when you view the story through the lens that she's the killer then a lot about how the murders are set up seems to line up conveniently for her. The first twilights in Episodes 1 and 3 are both set up with her distinguished in some way (either she's the only one we don't see, or the bodies are arranged so that she's guarenteed to be the first found). I also find it hard to imagine Battler's sin being anything else that was foreshadowed. I think I'm probably not understanding her reasons that well.

Finally, Episode 4 is done. I think the updates to this blog will remain slow for the next week or two, and then they'll probably speed up again, although not as fast as before.

While we're here, I'll drop this character tier list since it probably doesn't deserve it's own post. I will not elaborate on my opinions here. If you want to know why I placed someone somewhere, please direct your hate comments about my GOATda slander to the comments.

[artalfons]

The worst person ever holy fuck, i get that your life sucks but god damn. Uryu

[mikash91]

Awww, she's so worried about Battler

My idiot ass about to get duped again

[sophosthewisebunny]

I’ve been saying it for four episodes Krauss

[aeroplanestouchthesky]

People talk about how Ryukishi excels at multi-dimensional characters and poignant dialogue but when are we gonna talk about how funny he is.

Idk maybe I'm just too weak to Steiner math, but this killed me

I think he shows good control in using comedy sparingly, especially once tensions are up, but man it hits when he does.

[yurisorcerer]

this is normal for girls

(as of me posting this I am done with Episode 4 + its tea parties / whatever people generally call them. Ask me stuff, I guess? If there is an Umineko fandom on tumblr for this post to reach, anyway.)

[kuuhaiyu]

beatrice motivational posters :) first one was a request that i had so much fun with i decided to do a second one.

based on the neopets motivational & april fools motivational posters thank u to my friend who suggested them!

[gremlingirlsmell]

i swear this game is fucking trolling me rn what the hell is happening

[simkjrs]

umineko witches & the problem of the scapegoat

info: i have not read past episode 4, and am currently on a re-read through the question arcs to try solving the mysteries before challenging the answer arcs. contains spoilers for episodes 1-4.

upon rereading episode 1, i was really struck by the scene where battler refutes eva's reasoning that "proves" that natsuhi must have killed kinzo.

he comes up with a ridiculous possibility for how kinzo could have escaped the "closed room" that eva set up. and it's stupid. but, battler argues, "you cant prove this stupid thing didn't happen, so there's still room to believe in someone i want to believe in."

sound familiar...? it's because that's the reasoning beatrice uses to argue that magic can exist. you can't prove that magic didn't make it happen, therefore, it's not wrong to believe in magic.

let's called this "witch style reasoning."

why did battler argue? not because he really believed what he was saying, but because he just didn't like the situation.

witch style reasoning is not about "reason," it's about emotion. because battler doesn't want to doubt his aunts, he argues to establish that he doesn't have to. notably, emotion is tied to "red, the color of passion," in opposition to "blue, the color of truth."

since beatrice and the witches are the users and representatives of the "red truth," one would think that battler, as their opponent and the user of the "blue truth," should embody the merits of the blue truth.

but he doesn't! his goals are set by his emotions in the moment, and as exemplified in his argument with eva, his "argument" is not about finding the truth, but about making room for what he wants to believe.

in many ways, battler shares the virtues and thinking style of the witches. this naturally leads us to our next question...

what role do the witches play?

the obvious answer, of course, is "the antagonists."

however, i think the more important answer is that the witches are scapegoats.

battler wants to believe in beatrice so he can blame an outsider for the deaths that have occurred, instead of suspecting people he knows and cares about.

maria believes in the existence of the evil witch in order to explain why her mother, the one she loves so much, could be so cruel to her. in order to love her mother, she needs the witches to blame.

ange is able to see eva, her abusive guardian, as a hurt and traumatized woman, but only after she "realizes"/"blames" the black witch who has been making eva act that way:

(thank you @/demonanata for posting screencaps from your manga readthrough so i could use them instead of rereading 500,000 words for the scenes i needed)

to the characters, the reason why witches "exist" is because they can then be blamed for all the evils of the story, instead of the people close to them.

by scapegoating witches, battler, maria, and ange are all able to see natsuhi, rosa, eva, etc. as the flawed and hurting humans that they are. it makes it possible for them to love & reach out to these people who have deeply hurt them, and ask, "why did they do that?"

by blaming the witches, you can see the people who have hurt you as human.

but wait a moment...

yes, you may have noticed the problem.

the witches are also flawed & hurting people who are hurting them!

once you start seeing the humanity & suffering of these family members who have done terrible things, you must also ask yourself: why can i not do the same thing for the witches?

with the way the game has been set up, to believe in the witches is to blame them for everything. conversely, i believe that to love them & accept them, you must refuse them as a convenient scapegoat, & thus, deny their existence. you must, instead, face the people around you not just with love, but with truth; and you must not just face them with truth, but also with love.

we can see the limits of witch style reasoning in the episode 1 argument between battler and eva. battler declares that he defends natsuhi for the same reason he would defend eva -- that he doesn't want to doubt either of the people he knows!

this emotional appeal is enough to reach the hearts of two almost certainly guilty people*. his faith and love has touched their hearts. however... it's not enough to erase what has been done.*

to deal with what has been done, you need the truth.

for that reason, i think that the emotion vs truth dichotomy set up in the question arcs is a false dichotomy, because you need both in order to love & understand someone who is difficult, and hurting you.

the witches' desires

this is the explanation that ange gives for why people can become abusive, but obviously, it also applies to the characters blaming the witches for their suffering. thus, the witches cause suffering, and they exist because of the way people try to escape their suffering. this makes them a symbolic stand-in for cycles of abuse.

beatrice,necessarily stands for the suffering passed down from kinzo, to his children, and then to his grandchildren; she professes to care for characters like battler and maria, but they suffer under her game just the same as characters she hates, like shannon. she immerses herself in a family that has caused her much pain.

bernkastel and lambdadelta, though lacking a "real world" counterpart, clearly keep reenacting toxic patterns with each other; their "love" for each other involves torture, abuse, confinement, and so on.

notably, the witches exist as "timeless" and immortal entities, which means that... they are playing these kinds of games forever.

the witches are powerful. they are in control of the repetitions of suffering they are in.

but are they happy?

the witches want battler to accept them, which means fully embracing their world, their magic, and their style of living. it also means embracing the endless cycles of hurt that they inhabit, inflicting suffering on both others and themselves.

but let's go back to the question of what it means to love the witches. if you see them as people who are suffering, who are deserving of love, then the right answer isn't to accept their existence and be drawn into their rhythm. instead, you should refuse to scapegoat them ("accept them"), stop them from reenacting the cycles they are in, and bring them back down to earth where the games stop and they must move forward.

i think this is going to be battler's biggest challenge, because he's totally a "red" passion person, so as soon as he opens his heart to the witches, he would be totally led around by his nose and just dive into the witch style of living without understanding that... what makes the witches "happy" is not good for him OR for them. if he cares about them, instead of accepting them as-is, what he should do is to stop the cycles from continuing.

battler is a great witch-style thinker (important note: i think he'd make a great witch), but with all the parallels being set up between himself and kinzo, he's also a perfect stand-in for the mistakes of his family. as someone who is bad at "blue truth" thinking, he's sort of fucked because emotionally following either the witches or his family will lead him down a bad path no matter what.

though of course, i don't think a pure "blue truth" path would be good for any of them either -- it seems like it would be a path without enough love or compassion for the people who are involved.

in the end, all these things come back to the question of how to love a difficult -- and indeed, bad -- person. i'm excited to see what the story will do!

*an abridged summary of my episode 1 first murders theory: i think natsuhi conspired with the servants to kill her husband and the other ushiromiya heirs so she could take control of the estate & blame kinzo's death on someone already dead; whatever happened, i think the siblings all started suspecting each other and killed each other due to a mix of paranoia/greed/fear, with eva & hideyoshi emerging as the survivors; then, believing that they had already killed the killers, eva & hideyoshi let down their guard, & were thus murdered by the servants.

[emm-illustration]

[teratomatica]

[knaveumineko]

Umineko Episode 4 Blog: More Questions Than Answers

It's been a busy few weeks, and this was a really long episode, but I finally reached the end of the Question Arcs. This one was good! Probably the best since Episode 1.

Ange's storyline didn't go in the direction I expected. I had thought that, as an observer from the future, her perspective might pin down Beatrice, in the sense that any evidence she finds regarding the case forces Beatrice to tell the story in a way consistent with that evidence. Instead, her perspective explains a lot more about how magic works, culminating in her performing her own mass murder with the Stakes (or rather, Amakusa's gun). I get what they were going for with this storyline, but they just took too many scenes to do it, and while I like magic conceptually in this story, the actual moment-to-moment experience of reading the sisters' interactions is a little painful.

On the other hand, I was really surprised by how much I liked Maria's backstory scenes. Reading it really brought back memories, which might sound a little concerning, but that's not how I mean it. As someone who also had stuffed animals for a bit longer than perhaps age-appropriate, and had a tendency to disappear into my own head in response to negative emotions, to the point of being something of a loner, I was able to feel Maria's magic, instead of just thinking about what it meant. I think I would have found Sakutarou pretty annoying if not for understanding so deeply what he is. It's great characterisation for Maria to watch how she shapes his personality into the person she needs: he argues for the naive perspective so that Maria can maintain her faith in her mother, and takes all of Maria's anxieties about the world around her so she can be brave by inserting herself into the mature adult role. How is she already a better mother than Rosa is?

The conflict between Maria and Ange's perspectives sometimes reads a bit uncomfortably, perhaps because I align more with how Ange sees things. It felt like the story maybe leaned a bit too hard on Maria's side, despite the fact that it's pretty hard to take her side without making excuses for her abuse. I imagine this is because Ryukishi understood that readers would be more aligned with Ange, and he needed to get across that she does have something to learn from Maria's perspective, instead of rejecting it while pitying her.

That being said, the payoff when their perspectives finally reach synthesis is fantastic. Ange understands Maria as someone who, as if by a miracle, found some way to turn her pain into something positive that she could share to make others happy, and in turn was despised by everyone until she gave in and used that coping mechanism more spitefully. Every scene with Maria reads so differently after properly understanding her perspective: the evil laugh as she imagines the people hurting her dying, and the way their continued denial of Beatrice must have felt to her. It's cathartic to see Ange redeem her, or perhaps put her to rest, through the resurrection of Sakutarou. It's a clever way to reflect the "turning a negative into a positive" motif: the fact that Rosa lied about Sakutarou being handmade is the same thing that allows him to come back to life.

As far as the actual game goes, it's the most interesting we've gotten since Episode 1. I'm still curious about if 3 and 4 are also written by the Rokkenjima killer, but in any case I'm glad to see how inventive we can get with the format now; having Battler confined to a single room for the entire incident and unable to learn any information beyond a series of phone calls that only tell him what Beatrice wants him to believe, feels appropriately climactic for the end of the Question Arcs.

It also sets up the ending, which made me more tense than I've felt since 1. It's so eerie to watch Battler's weird as hell "test," followed by him wandering around for an entire day trying to find out what happened. It's got that paranoia-inducing quality of implying there's some greater truth about these events that's staring us in the face. This might be the first time we've seen the killer's real personality, and after all of that they gave up halfway through the conversation and presumably killed themselves right after. At least Battler finally bothered to investigate any of the crime scenes.

Ange's scenes complicate the meta-plot significantly. I had thought of the first message bottle being authored by Maria as artistic licence, but now it seems we have two conflicting accounts both written by the killer, before the crime even took place, meaning we have absolutely no idea what really happened on the island. It's not even clear that Ange's world is actually the real one. It's originally implied that Ange comes from the future of Episode 3's game specifically, but that could be misdirection and she's actually from the "real" timeline, or maybe it will turn out that this whole story was written in Ange's diary, discovered after she commit suicide by jumping off of the hospital roof. Nevertheless, confirmation that the first two episodes, and possibly the later ones, are written by the killer at least means that what's written in them is important to understanding the killer's perspective. If there's ever going to be a hope of deducing the events of October 4th and 5th, it's in understanding Beatrice's intentions when they wrote those stories.

[artalfons]

Iam a good chunk now into episode 4 of umineko (i think lol) and like every scene with Maria and Ange kills me on the inside 🫠

[mikash91]

Just finished Umineko and the main thing that's burning a hole in my brain is the parallels Willard & Lion have with Tohya & Ikuko, basically being their magic counterparts, and thus implying Ikuko is Sayo's second shot at happy life.

[tetsuhaato]

episode 3