#umineck

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comedy: the ep8 purple text puzzle game was meant to demonstrate multiple culprits being logically possible, with battler's family being the "official" culprits but george's fam being possible if you twist the interpretation of one rule just a little bit, as some sort of gotcha to the people who were poking at the holes in his own reasoning in the main story, very much a "ha ha i meant to do that!" sort of thing...

but then the audience went and pointed out a completely different alternate culprit in george, maria and rosa. it's not even a difficult thing to find, because george and maria are the ones mutually confirming each other's inability to kill. if they're both culprits and are thus able to lie... then there's no limit anymore on who they're able to kill and they can just kill whoever. not even an off-island george kill is necessary anymore, he can just go ahead and kill one of the adults. like, this should not have been hard for ryukishi to notice.

even more hilarious is that this lines up with the typical rosatrice solution, which has rosa and george working together as culprits. and because of how ryukishi is, he definitely did this entirely on accident. what a hack

also comedy option, george couldn't have killed shannon but he could have killed kanon

(it’s actually pretty fucked up that george can’t kill shannon because muh loooove but shkanon can kill george and jessica without a smidge of remorse but we’re supposed to take xer love the most seriously of all)

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Exactly nothing happened. See the waifu with love and eat the poopoo, you fucking goat.

Really one of the most amazing things to me about this shit is the evaporation of Beatrice’s character from the too cool and le evil abusive psychopath but it’s cool when she does it because she’s a witch (and also a female abusing a male barely registers; it’s all nothing compared to a guy having the gall to have his own life outside of returning to some girl on an island... ahem) to this boo-hoo baby-ass feel sowwy fow me bweee did nothing wrong but simultaneously Battler deserved to be horribly tortured and watch his family be gruesomely killed over and over again and also it was good for him, because a woman who wants his dick did it to him and wow he should really just give her the dick. Was that sentence run-on? Fuck you too bad. Beatrice does all sorts of horrible shit and is never called out on it, because she’s just such a sad pathetic slop of shit. I don’t know how much of that is the story shifting over time (Beatrice is set up to be a witch on par with Lamb and Bern at the start and only becomes their toy later on) and how much is gynocentrism... I was going to do a big master post about this that I never got around to, come to think of it. Whoops I can’t be fucked in the slightest to go reread any of this shit (or read it in the first place... never mind that) but I have a post somewhere around here noting that Battler ended ep 2 being horribly tortured by the stakes on Beatrice’s command but ep 3 somehow started with him having funsies with them, getting his breakfast croissant stolen and threatening to rape one of them (?????) like nothing ever happened. We do know a big shift happened because of Land (which I’m still suspicious of how much of it actually ever got written), but still...

thanks renall

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This is something that was never made sense of, and never really made sense, unless Battler and “Beatrice” were actively writing bottle stories on Rokkenjima before things blew up (the ep 2 1st twilight thing). Now we just wonder if Ryu had a plan that fell through or if it was just random shit riffing on Higu’s endscrolls that never was supposed to make sense but was treated like it did because lolmeta.

Worse yet, Confessions shows Shatsu writing eps 3 and 4 for some god damned reason. She wrote an Eva culprit episode before Eva survived to be a significant suspect, amazing. what the fuck

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it occurs to me that the locked room battle... things in ep8 are a microcosm of the entire solution- or at least, of what the solution became after a certain point. there, the characters being challenged effectively had to spout random guesses in blue until they just haaaappened to light upon the solution- there's no ceiling! no walls! a window! you've turned down all of that, but we haven't mentioned... aha, the chain is very long! there's no actual evidence to pick at, nor is there anything cleverly hiding the answer (except maybe ange's but there the solution is that the culprit did literally nothing). compare the shkanon solution in episodes 3 and on. it's literally just, everyone can be declared dead in red, guess who has the special rule that lets them break all da rules, there's no actual indication that shannon and kanon stand out among the others. eps 1 and 2 got it right with shannon at least- her non-death in ep 1 is covered up and her death in ep 2 with the stake just being nearby is enough to guess she died last, by her own hand. you know until like ep 4 where nanjo and shannon are found dead together and neither is staked properly...

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the ep1 natsuhi thing always bothered me, and it's hard to untangle why. okay, so yasu left things up to "rooooolette", but wrote them into her story as though they had gone off without a hitch (remember, we're getting this story through the message bottles, though we never find out what the bottle stories actually contain)- okay, fine, she's writing an idealized scenario where everything goes right basically by necessity. but, natsuhi getting the scorpion charm went against her expectations, and she had to adapt to it... but... she wrote that into the message bottle story. so either she wasn't surprised by it and intended jessica to give natsuhi the charm (which would be in the same category of roooolette as battler touching her boobahs before it and george not getting to see her not corpse after), or intended to paint natsuhi's door regardless and the charm was just a happy accident* (remember that in ep2 natsuhi's door ends up marked up despite no scorpion charm being present, which there was never really a good explanation for... gohda standing there futzing with the lock is equivalent to a scorpion charm apparently), OR, she wrote into her story something taking her by surprise and her having to rework the story, even though by the very act of her writing it into her story it's entirely under her control... ??

*actually this doesn't make much sense either because she's still writing something happening that she didn't know happened, somehow, it's just a much more minor event... fuck it i've confused myseld

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episode 5: the crime in battler's room must have occurred between 12 and 1am. rosa didn't get back to the room until 1am, apparently not sloghtly before but on the dot. so, there's no time for the crime to be committed, because no "crime" really occurred! (which no one in-story actually comments on or seems to notice) but in that case... when the fuck was the fake crime scene set up? doing things doesn't just magically (ha ha) make no noise because it's not criminal in nature. erika would have heard them shuffling around setting up whatever scene she was supposed to end up seeing (or else battler just screams in the morning for no reason, not even a fake reason just nothing); if they can do all that quietly enough to not happen to wake her then someone could do the murders that quietly as well.

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Checking the 2nd twilight scene for Eva feet pics and find this:

My dude in Christ, there’s a fucking reason why Knox had a rule against seeing the culprit’s PoV (a rule which was specifically changed in Umiunko because of course). It’s because having someone lie from their own fucking point of view is just fucking beyond the pale in terms of fucking with your readers. something something heavy rain, fucking hell

The worst part is it would greatly improve the scene (and word count) to just have these characters speak these thoughts out loud. More room for characterization, for the other characters present to react to the information even if just a little bit...

This single example is a little bit better because it’s describing what Kanon looks like he’s thinking to an outside observer. Yeah it’s a bit hard to describe why an entire fake scene is fine (if handled correctly which Umineko mostly does... mostly. not here lol) but describing thoughts, or prescribing thoughts to the people who exist but aren’t actually in the scene as described, feels too weird. I guess it’s in part a question of how this scene is being delivered to whoever it is who’s perceiving it (in later episodes it’s clearly meta-Battler but in ep 1 it’s... who the fuck knows). Is Beatrice narrating someone else’s thoughts? Is she showing this to him like a movie, in which case internal thoughts should be impossible to portray?

As a side note Jessica is portrayed as being surprisingly intelligent here:

But this whole scene feels like Ryu using the cousins as mouthpieces, as one might put opinions in the mouths of characters to pretend they’re objectively right, except instead of opinions it’s logical reasoning.

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Criticisms that are very salient but which wouldn’t be accepted as such by the shit-eating audience because, well, they just aren’t ok!! Umiunko said it was a good work in the work itself so that means I’m smart if I like it!!!

A very interesting statement that makes me wonder about whatever the fuck happened to Shkanon in the process of it being canonized. Though oddly I would say the promise itself was almost certainly present from early on... perhaps the form of it changed to either dodge or accommodate the expectations and predictions of the audience. My current theory is that a similar thing happened with Shkanon, actually. ... Wasn’t the promise already established as some pony shit in ep 3 though? Was that definitive enough for this to be kind of a retcon?

The Orient reviewer talks about this in his ep 5-6 review, calling it the Thermian argument (though the guy he links to is some turbocuck getting offended over goblin slayer or some shit). You need to create rules to explain the story, but only certain explanations are allowed to have rules wildly made up to support them because, uh, reasons. When ideally the story should be solid enough that the rules needed to explain it are fairly simple and self-contained, with few exception clauses. Especially in something like a mystery story where the answer is supposed to be deducible by the audience, ie fair play. That is, the true solution should be the one that shines through the muck by fitting with what’s being answered with not just the minimum amount of this sort of chaff, but almost none, because it should just work. And Shkanon does not, at least in its final implementation. I feel the problem is that since the answer was changed partway through publication, valuable info that would have been transmitted in eps 7 and 8 (and possibly earlier) has been rewritten to serve the new answer, meaning that even if you hit on the original solution it won’t fit these newer installments. (Let’s not even get started on Land.) And the episodes prior to a certain point don’t offer enough information to secure the solution as being the only solution, despite claims of solvability by 4 (Land, man from 19 years ago, ...)

In the Orient’s case he talks about attempting to explain the solution to the lolgic error by saying that, oh really good game masters can influence the actions of their pieces! Which is something that would have changed the games so far wildly if it had actually been true. In general things like retroactive moves and the lolgic error itself are things that weren’t mentioned or implied to exist prior to 6, outside of the insinuation that Beatrice designed ep 2′s first twi to address Battler’s complaints about ep 1′s, which isn’t even the same because she still could have written the second game before playing it out. Whether they’re part of making things more complicated because it’s more kewl or part of twisting the story to support a new answer somehow I can’t really say.

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durrrrr i can’t believe you still care about the work that told you to keep thinking forever more than one femtosecond after it spoonfed you the shitanswer, i bet you stopped thinking too you farm animal

I get the feeling that the exact same people claiming the game never called you a stupid goat for disliking it are the ones going around calling people stupid goats on those exact instructions. Plus, y’know,

This guy blocked the guy he was arguing with after a while and then bragged about it, by the way.

> he thinks 90 fucking percent of the work actually fucking mattered lol, the only thing that matters is the heeeeeeart most of which was thrown out in that 90% anyway leaving us with a pile of connective tissue and also the rectum

ree

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The part of the thread I’m reading now has this absolute schizoposter completely convinced that he’s solved Umineko, bragging about it and refusing to elaborate except to call everyone else morons basically. The worst part is, despite what the post above implies (it’s just funny)... he’s actually mostly right. Well, when he’s not either being a complete schizo who thinks Shannon being fucking insane is all just fine and dandy. Or busy having an actual explanation for Shkanon, which canon, you know, didn’t.

“I don’t literally mean that I’m so genius I’ll spoil the entire rest of the series if I post my manifesto!! Just most of the rest of the series. Gawsh, I’m not arrogant~”

Schizo talks directly to Ryukishi

you’re not my mommy you can’t make me do anything reeeee

It’s funny because this is basically what ep 6 did for Shkanon. We’re all sitting here asking “but how?? what relevance does this have?? WHY??” and ryukishi’s all “and then kanon turned into shannon because kanon is shannon ooooooo ok i’m done”

hah

Anyone convinced that the “magic” scenes actually meant anything is a complete coping schizo in my books. This guy has the exact same problem I do- the whole “hurr durr magic scenes” shtick means Ryu doesn’t have to bother keeping internal consistency, because aside from some very minimal, strictly cultivated scenes (ones seen by Battler, and even then not always) everything can be discarded at any time. Internal consistency is probably one of the most vital things for making a believable fictional world. If your spacemen need magic macguffin rocks to power their spaceship and spend a significant amount of time and effort obtaining them then later their ship doesn’t need power at all, readers are gonna be like, fuck is this shit? And if the author them comes out and says “the first scenes were fantasy scenes, they just needed an arbitrary reason to go here and there, after all only the space detective’s viewpoint is reliable! And in the later scene their ship worked without any fuel at all because it was also a fantasy scene!”, then you’re reading Umineko Harder 2: Die in Space and the author is a complete hack with shitty meta justifications.

based

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OH NO NONO ONONONO O NO NO NO NO NO NONO NO

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Renall hits on the actual, eventually given solution for ep 1, but immediately discards it for being too fucking retarded, as he should.

As much as I generally dislike the Rosatricers and so on, I’ve gotta admit this is a very good point. Honestly my hot take is that after a certain point Umineko no longer had a solution. BT (the actual author lmao) dying is likely the final blow, but it was probably coming since Land was discarded, though sometimes it seems like there was no actual solution from the very start and Ryu was just making shit up as he went along and lying about it. This is why Shkanon was suddenly pushed so hard in ep 6 (right after BT was no longer there to... do whatever it was he was around to do) as the final answer despite explaining nothing, not even itself- it’s a Baravian fire drill of an answer, where it’s just presented with such... I don’t even want to say confidence because the whole thing seems like desperate flailing, but with such blatancy that it can’t be denied despite whatever holes it has, and so shallowly because there really was nothing behind it at that time- if there was something it had had to be discarded by then, and the shit given in the manga is incoherent, generic and doesn’t even line up with what was given in the games, making it seem like some post-hoc cope.

As an example, the purple logic manga- there was supposed to be a whole contest around finding out the true culprit, but some error in the narrative made it impossible to solve, so the whole thing was cancelled. Note that the only reason we likely know about this is because of the contest, there was a level of accountability that needed to be met. Thus, we were actually told that the mystery had no solution, though it still seems like they did the absolute bare minimum before sweeping it under the rug (we never found out what the error was or what the intended solution would have been). Additionally this was just a little spinoff, so having it collapse isn’t that important. By contrast, the VNs are the main project, so admitting the thing got fucked somewhere along the way and could no longer be completed probably would have been a significantly worse look than just forcing something and pretending it was brilliant. Conversely, there’s no outside accountability aside from the trust of the audience, which even without looking at the bigger picture was already betrayed by how shitty of an answer we were ultimately given. Arbitrary definition of “death” in red text, arbitrary standards for which “unreliable” scenes are complete fantasy and which are embellished (so simple things like Rosa unlocking the cathedral are fake while things like the locked room chain or Kanon ‘becoming’ Beatrice to give Maria the candy needing elaborate autistic explanations when they could be discarded just as easily as Virgilia’s autistic battle against Beatrice...).

> Umineko is the same genre of mystery as LOST

wheeeeeze

> TIME GAS

hey where’d you get my fanfiction script from

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still got some shit in my drafts tho

thanks renall

renall solves the beatrice error Jokes aside, “sit down shut up and accept it” is about how it sounds to me, too.

oh nonononononononono

I’ve become vaguely convinced that time in Umineko’s backstory runs on soap opera aging logic. You know, like how a newborn baby will be a whole-ass kid in however many episodes but time won’t seem to have progressed nearly as much for the adults. Hence, Eva and Krauss were only a couple years older than Rosa when they were kids, but as adults the gap is measured in decades.

ha ha

This sort of thing unironically would be a better usage of Author Theory than the internal consistency-denying clusterfuck we ended up with... perhaps exactly because it’s so blatantly in opposition of internal consistency.

I actually had some half an idea of how to improve Umineko’s structure by changing how the meta works. Then I forgot half of it. So here’s like a quarter of an idea: Between the mysteriousness of the incident and the bizarre message bottles, Rokkenjima and the people who died on it enter the public consciousness and become a phenomenon- this itself is the metaworld, or is what causes the metaworld to come into being. Basically it’s some collective consciousness thing. The stories of the metaworld have no direct connection to the reality of it but can still reveal things, because of the principle of believability/verisimilitude- if some fact is known in real life it must be reflected in the forgeries/the interpretations of the original message bottles, otherwise they just don’t “click”. As compared to whatever the fuck canon is where the two layers have a pointless connection where each devalues the other until nothing happens for any actual reason on either end. And there’s no need to worry about the actual culprit because the forgeries have essentially spun off into their own mythology, so no “I know your whole family just died but ignore that and think about meeee” shit. Though attempting to divine the truth from the message bottles and the forgeries might be a trap some fall into. This has some interesting effects like, Shkanon might not have been true in reality, but due to some happenstance of the original message bottles it’s seen as plausible and could become a leading theory in the collective consciousness, thus making it “true” in the world of the forgeries. Or it could be used to defeat Erika without even being made definitively true- as essentially an unfinished piece of fiction, multiple interpretations can coexist and there’s nothing to deny any of them as there’s no underlying reality (or well there is but it’s disconnected). This could even result in the “canon” forgeries coming from multiple authors, rather than just a Tohya-informed Ikuko.

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This is a very obvious point that I’m amazed I hadn’t thought of. You had people preempting the reveal of Kinzo’s death, and also Shkanon as a joke (at least in the west, but I have to assume the Japanese audience could also see how obvious it was as well as be completely unable to take it seriously). His audience was walking all over him, apparently. But he discarded a plot because it was too hard?... Really makes you think.

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you just need heart