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Wow. That was a roller coaster ride. Some thoughts. 1. gently caress Kinzo, etc. It's almost preferable that he stays an enigmatic monster rather than also having that Goofy Grampa side. 2. Shannon/George is doomed outside of Shannon's identity issues. "I've literally murdered people so that we can be together" is hell of an emotional baggage to be carrying into a relationship--consider how, in that very same episode where the lovers are tried, EVA-trice flipped out on George for merely parenting him (and mostly for her own sake, I might add). 3. "Life is sweeter when you're looking for reasons to be miserable," is great self-help advice, but Ange also needs drugs to un-gently caress her brain chemistry (given the family history of mental issues) and also years and years of therapy. She has at minimum epic levels of survivor's guilt that no amount of pep talks from her quantum cat big brother can fix. 4. Gender presentation is not gender identity. Gender role is not gender identity. Lion straight out tells us to unask the question of chromosomes, genitalia, or even headspace. Whether or not this points to Yasu being a particular gender, non-binary, intersex, or transsexual is therefore irrelevant to the story* and not worth a "Believe [Whatever] About Yasu, or You Are Not a True Fan" debate. * Note that I say to the story. Yasu's drive as a character is that Yasu does not believe Yasu to be worthy of a happy ending, and Kinzo's weird hypocritical beliefs about gender roles certainly colored Yasu's outlook, but it is not the only factor. 4a. Yasu is Yasu, and Shannon, and Kanon, and Beatrice (and Lion, but only in an alternate universe). Yasu is also a fictional character, so it's not possible to ask Yasu how to address Yasu in the third person. If you believe in the Word of God, then accept whatever "God" has stated on the matter. If not, then whatever. 5. Mass murder is not insane in the legal sense that a person committing such a crime can be ruled incompetent to stand trial if they knew what they were doing was wrong. "If I'm going to hell, I may as well take all of these bastards with me" is a perfectly logical (in the strictest sense of "logic"--that is, you can argue the point from a purely rhetorical point of view) conclusion to come to, even if most of us would find that train of thought horrifying and to claim Yasu's actions purely as a result of mental illness is Not Cricket. 6. Battler is goddamn incompetent, to the point of exasperation. Some of us smarties would like a slightly more savvy character to identify with, please. It's a little disheartening that, in the sea of shonen protagonists, the one dude I actively cheered for to succeed was motherfucking Light Yagami from Death Note, who is a murderer with a monumentally stupid philosophy of justice, but at least he was clever(ish) about killing people and not afraid to play dirty when he needed to.
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Oct 20, 2017 03:54
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Oh, yeah, one more thing I forgot: 6a. Yasu may "blame" Battler for the killings, but I don't. Yeah, he shouldn't have carelessly made a "promise", but he was 12 freaking years old trying to look cool in front of his crush. Perhaps if Battler didn't exist, or was less of a stubborn idiot, or any number of other what-ifs, he wouldn't have been the "inciting incident", but by the point Yasu planned* murders, even if Yasu didn't execute them, Yasu bears the primary guilt, no matter how sympathetic Yasu's situation is/was/would have been. * Note I said "planned". I don't mean a Christian-style "murder in your heart=actual murder" philosophical argument, but once someone has crossed that threshold of deciding "I am going to make a murder; here is how I will carry it out" this fulfills Motive and Means, and all that lacks for actual prosecutable murder to take place is Opportunity and Action. Of course, the law will not step in until a murder is committed, but there's a reason pretty much every religion and every secular psychological institution tells you "be mindful of your thoughts".
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Oct 20, 2017 15:31
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My theory: 0. Kinzo makes leaves the revolvers in the treasure room and sets the bomb (via orders to Genji, most likely), expecting his children to kill each other for the gold if they solve the epitaph or for the bomb to blow up if they don't. This, in his mind, clears his debt to Beatrice. 1. Yasu solves the epitaph, turns off bomb, becomes Beatrice, originally planning some way to save grandkids (or at least Battler), hence leaving the letter about the epitaph. 2. Beatrice kidnaps Krauss, threatens Natsuhi and either fake-murders or real-murders Hideyoshi to force Natsuhi's confession, and fakes the deaths of Shannon and Kanon to make it easier to move around and commit closed-door murders. 3. Eva (and possibly Natsuhi) find the gold and accidentally turns the bomb back on, believing the mechanism to be lying. 4. Beatrice real-murders Dr. Nanjo and Genji, the two most complicit in Beatrice's current state; any other deaths, if they happen, are because Eva (and/or Natsuhi) need to hide secrets. 5. The bomb goes off, killing everybody except Beatrice (who was running around pretending to be corpses and/or the witch) and Battler (who survived through sheer dumb luck, but was severely injured). 6. Beatrice takes Battler to the hidden mansion to treat his injuries. While he recovers, she claims responsibility for all of the murders and writes the two bottle stories as a "confession". 7. The other stories represent the various theories the public come up about what happened on the island, not actual published stories; Ange imagined the Witch Game scenario as she contemplated the bottle stories and the various theories. 8. Twelve years after the incident, Ange went to the island, got shot at, but Beatrice and Battler saved her before she was killed (she may or may not be shot in the stomach). The shock of nearly being killed and seeing her big brother alive and well but side by side with the so-called Witch of Rokkenjima has made her effectively catatonic. The last episode is Battler and Beatrice making one last desperate attempt to get through to her. 9. The story doesn't have a happy ending because Ange confuses forgiveness (not holding hatred for wrongs done to her) for reconciliation (trusting the person who did the wrong to not do it again and restoring the previous relationship), refuses to do either, and dies of her wounds.
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Oct 21, 2017 03:42
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resurgam40 posted:And hope is incompetent. I would quibble with that. Hope that is not rooted in real, certain Truth (capital T truth, not Red or Blue or Gold or whatever color text in a visual novel) is incompetent. For example, a child growing up in a loving home Knows that they never have to worry what to eat from meal to meal, but they have real Hope that the meal will contain something they like (even if they have to scrunch up their nose at the inevitable dish that's Good For Growing Children) because Mom and/or Dad always try their best to make good food. A child growing up with an abusive home has less certainty, but still hopes anyway because the alternative is literally unthinkable--if they Know every meal is poison and is killing them slowly, then they might as well die (literally or metaphorically). Ange's current position is that Battler's Truth is hollow wishful thinking, while Battler is (ineptly, as always) arguing for that his Truth is true enough so long as Ange is willing to believe in it (without love etc.). Not helping the situation is that the Ushiroyama household is BOTH a loving family AND an abusive one--so what can be certainly Known, and what can be realistically Hoped for?
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Oct 23, 2017 19:24
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Going to sidetrack a bit and talk about (stage) magic. In Ye Olde Times, when "a witch did it!" was a plausible scientific* explanation of the world, all sorts of people went around performing various acts of wonder and amazement. By the 19th and early 20th centuries, the worldview had become more and more materialistic**, with old school "magic" being slowly debunked by even the magicians such as Harry Houdini (who, ironically, did believe in the afterlife but was burned by so many fake mediums that he made it his mission to expose their lies). Modern performers usually style themselves as "illusionists" or "mentalists", and while some still act as if they are performing true magic, most go into an act with the knowledge that the audience will be looking for the tricks of the trade. When Erika de-mystified how Beatrice made candy appear at the bottom of the cup, my mind immediately jumped to the Penn and Teller version of the Cups and Balls Trick. For several years now, Penn and Teller have made a career out of deliberately breaking the rules of stage magic to show the artistry that goes into making the trick work, usually by performing the trick as is, and then again with all of the obfuscation removed. The message of this story, at least withing the meta-narrative, seems to be building up to the moral "explaining the magic destroys the magic". While this is true in the sense that explaining the tricks of the trade exposes them as narrative sleight of hand, as someone who reads a lot of stories and writes them myself I still gain something out of dissection and analysis, namely: how does the author get me to care about an (ostensibly) fictional world with fictional characters? Sure, most people don't like it when That Guy interrupts storytime to ask seemingly inane questions, but storytelling has always been a collaborative effort between the tale-weaver and the audience (it takes at least two people to create a world, after all), and if it's the audience's job to listen and believe, then it's the tale-weaver's job to spin a good yarn. And for me, at least, it's not disrespectful to ask the question "Is this a good story, for whatever definition of good one cares to use?" because doing so helps me to become a storyteller in my own right. *Defining "science" here as "any heuristic that explains how the world works"; science based in rational deduction and empirical verification is an extremely recent paradigm shift, so to dismiss a position that doesn't fall under those categories as "non-scientific" is, while acceptable in common parlance, not technically correct. **That is, the philosophy which believes that the purely physical realm is the only one that exists, and that the metaphysical is simply a product thereof. The other kind of materialist usually acquire stuff as a means to display wealth and/or power, and so ironically does not fall under this definition. dotchan fucked around with this message at 13:01 on Oct 28, 2017 |
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Oct 27, 2017 20:50
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idonotlikepeas posted:
We can't possibly be goats, because we have no interaction with the story outside of writing fanfiction*, and even then, so long as the original story still exists, that does not affect it one whit. *And I count "speculating on who the real culprit is" as part of that fanfiction, since we are technically creating our own narratives that may or may not be supported by the Red Text when we do that.
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Oct 28, 2017 20:30
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Doc Hawkins posted:Maybe it's only meta-battler who is incompetent. Wasn't it stated that pieces can only act in character compared to their true selves? So, yeah, piece-Battler is still incompetent.
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Oct 28, 2017 20:39
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ZiegeDame posted:Are we so sure that Bern is wrong here? Endlessly hanging on to the vain hope that Battler might return sure didn't work out for Yasu. Bern's throwing the baby out with the bathwater though. "False hope is bad, therefore any hope at all is bad" is poor logic, especially for a so-called Witch of Miracles.
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Oct 30, 2017 23:32
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Ah, yes. The point in the game where I started getting mad at what I saw as an author tract against fan speculation. I was especially mad, because by playing coy and releasing the story in installments, the author was the one ultimately responsible for the speculation to begin with. Now that I've calmed down and thought about it more rationally, I do understand why the dialogue was written this way. Some day, this story will be lost to the mists of time, and all that'll be left are whatever managed to hang around through years of Nth-hand information and speculation, and the goats will have won because there'll be no more red text to compare their versions of the catbox against. Still, my reaction is the same as before: so the gently caress what? The true events of the incident of Rokkenjima (as in, what actually happened in the bottom-most layer of reality) are unknowable--any evidence has been erased, and the only people who can attest to what happened are dead. I agree that speculation in that level of reality is pointless, because nobody's left to be persecuted for any crimes, and Ange shouldn't have been held "guilty" of anything, but Japan's infamously hosed up shame culture wasn't about to let her "off the hook" for being related to such a dysfunctional group of people. The riddle that Beatrice set up in the meta games is solvable with a very small set of solutions, but it depends on which rules you're operating under--the fairy-tale world of witches and magic (in which Red Text is queen), or the logical world of deductions and evidence and witness statements (in which Knox and possibly Van Dyne is king). Speculation at this level is fine, so long as you honor the rules of the game. In the world of fanfiction/speculation, though, anything loving goes. Here, the author is dead (in the metaphorical sense), so nobody's interpretation is automatically more valid than anyone else's. Personally, I've become more strict about being canon compliant as I've gotten older (mostly because, now that I've written a bunch of stories, I sure as heck would like my readers respect my source material!), but any particular version of events only adds to the potential number of events, not takes away from them. dotchan fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Nov 3, 2017 |
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Nov 3, 2017 13:30
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EagerSleeper posted:Perhaps just figuring out if it was an intentional series of murders started by someone or just an accident gone horribly wrong would be enough. From what we've been shown so far, looks more like an intentional series of murders gone horribly wrong (right?).
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Nov 4, 2017 02:11
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Some goats like analyzing every nook and cranny, some goats just like to have a good story told to them. I'm not going to begrudge either type of goat.
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Nov 9, 2017 00:16
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Beato you great big idiot. I understand why you did it, but you really could have had your happily ever after with Battler. 
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Nov 27, 2017 16:57
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Congratulations! Your Battler (and yes I'm calling him by his old name for a reason) has upgraded from incompetent idiot to cowardly idiot! How ironic that his dumb heroics would cause him to lose his memories and then, once those recollections slowly trickled back to him, he couldn't accept them. How could anyone? Even Ange almost committed suicide over the idea that she was the sole survivor of a big hosed up family who murdered each other, her parents being the primary culprits. Battler not only would have to live with that, but that he wasn't who he thought he was (not only was he not Hachijo Toya, he was also not Ayumu's biological child). On top of that, he realized that he survived only through dumb luck and the childish infatuation of a severely unhappy person who couldn't live with the tragic circumstances of their reality and clung onto the idea of being rescued by someone, anyone (and latched onto him because of a careless promise he made as a 12-year-old), but it was this very same person whose despair had driven them to plotting and inciting murder, culminating with obliterating the island via explosives. Even so, even thought I emphasize with him 1000% percent, I still want to slap him upside the head. For all his boasting and desire to show off, Battler failed to live up to his promises in the hour of Ange's need. He should have sucked it up and gone to her, even if doing so really did kill "Hachijo Toya". It was not his fault he became Toya, but it is absolutely his Sin that he stayed Toya. For who is Toya but the persona of a severely unhappy person who couldn't live with the tragic circumstances of their reality? Being Toya almost literally killed Battler because he couldn't reconcile being two radically different people. At this rate, the alternate universe where Ange (literally) jumped the gun, murdered a bunch of people, and ran off to live a life of Cool Crimes is almost preferable to me, because then at least that version of her doesn't have to find out that her big brother ran away from his issues rather than, I don't know, go talk to a therapist and/or counselor.
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Nov 29, 2017 17:46
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Tired Moritz posted:Battler died in the ocean, please don't bully Toya. In so far as "not coming back, ever", no. Battler disappeared because of circumstances beyond control and Toya took over for the body to keep it going. Once Battler reawakened Toya was supposed to take a back-seat because he was just a stopgap. That he didn't, that he almost killed the two of them because he couldn't handle reality intruding on his pretty little illusion, is repeating the same sin that created him in the first place.
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Nov 29, 2017 22:56
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MonsterEnvy posted:Brain Damage can't be helped. I thought it was implied that Toya/Battler's later issues (being afraid of disappearing if he spoke to Ange) where more psychological, not physiological. i.e., the brain damage lead to memory loss, but the rejection of the old memories to the point of almost dying was 100% Toya.
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Nov 30, 2017 01:06
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Fates End posted:Behold, the real truth of October 5th, 1986. I shouldn't be laughing at this, but drat, that thousand-yard-stare on poor Ange's face at the end. "I suffered my whole life for this nonsense?"
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Nov 30, 2017 05:34
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PoorWeather posted:Ultimately, in spite of the release, the original Japanese fandom continued to hold a relatively poor perception of Umineko's ending that largely persists to this day. So I wasn't imagining things when I whiffed a scent of spite from the whole goat thing, or from the (manga only?) scene in the library where it's claimed that opening the catbox would release the story to the public domain, who would mercilessly slaughter the inhabitants of the island for all eternity! (My answer, as before, remains the same. So the gently caress what? Some goats were never going to be pleased because they'd gone in expecting a fairly straight-forward mystery--except all of the mystery got wrapped up fairy tales and meta layers and meta meta layers and maybe if the author wasn't so obsessed with being clever and allowed themselves to be more fair with the clues the goats wouldn't have revolted en masse. "You just didn't get it!" only goes so far as a defense--I used to attempt that defense myself, back when I was a newbie and terrible at writing, before one of my more trusted friends gently pulled me aside and explained to me that I can't possibly expect my readers to also read my mind. If it's not in the text, and barely there in the subtext, then it's too obtuse for it's own good--see also the plot of Final Fantasy VIII, another story about memory loss and witches and a big hosed-up family.) dotchan fucked around with this message at 07:11 on Dec 3, 2017 |
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Dec 3, 2017 04:26
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