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first of all the fact that im alive proves that god is a pussy. second of all im going to contract a terminal illness and die in the mountains to create a mystery that will haunt you for the rest of your miserable little life. third of all i have a medical license the sexy nurse thing is just for kink reasons

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what i really liked abt umi and probably my fetish for any sort of literature in general is being constantly pushed to read beyond the page, to doubt the characters, to understand the limitations of any narrative, to think about how easily i could be fooled by lies & my own human biases in any given scene. although the tone for a scene may be presented a certain way, and that tone is definitely intentional and related to the “true” meaning, you really have to use the full scope of your problem solving and interpreting to reach the truth of any given event

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natsuhi my wife natsuhi

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When he brings up the moon

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in search of a deeper meaning

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sinless

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I was at a drink&draw this evening, and the theme suggested by the barman was « The Missing Piece ».

The first idea that came to my mind was to draw a headless Beatrice, which in my opinion is pretty fitting to the whole mystery of Umineko.

Plus, the other artists really liked my drawing and I had the opportunity to rend about Umineko yipee :^D

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umineko is riveting so far

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Umineko Episode 7 Blog: Earth to Earth

Let's try to get to Episode 8 some time this century.

Even though I had absolutely no concept of what the story was actually about at this point, I've decided that this means I was Right The Whole Time back in Episode 1, which means I officially win at Umineko.

Almost as soon as the "true" sequence of events is revealed to us, Ryukishi throws it into doubt again by interrupting Bernkastel midway through her red truth that might have confirmed it. Still, the story as told feels more realistic than the episodes that preceded it. The adults aren't intimidated by a childish riddle and solve it easily. Beatrice's elaborate plan falls apart immediately. The killings are opportunistic and have a straightforward motive. Sayo's despondency makes her look for the first time since Episode 4 like a girl wearing a witch costume, rather than an actual witch. It's reinforced by Will's loss to Bernkastel, too. He keeps trying to bring up rules and clues and she doesn't even know what he's going on about. This is not a mystery. It's not even a story. It's just a series of events.

On the other hand, the anti-Umineko themes in the Tea Party's fragment draw attention to those areas that still employ significant artistic license. Rudolph and Kyrie are presented not just as bad people, but as Villains, to the point where the story itself points out how Rudolph is basically LARPing. Such things are not unheard of, I'm sure you can find plenty of examples of gun nut types who convince themselves that they're the main character in an action movie as a pretext for violence, but then you have Eva's miraculous survival and Kyrie's dramatic irony bordering on breaking the fourth wall.

Despite what Bern implies, there is still some suggestion that the events she's showing are a fiction, but a fiction of a fundamentally different sort. If it's not reality, then it's still mutable. Battler promises that this is not a sad story, and his complete disappearance after being called out to meet Rudolph offers enough wiggle room for another Devil's proof.

One of the ways Ryukishi lends the Tea Party fragment authenticity is by reintroducing narrative elements from previous Episodes. Rudolph's references to Westerns are a callback to Episode 3, as is Eva shooting the other adults. The phonecall to lure out the children is from Episode 4. The adults all going to the chapel while solving the Epitaph parallels the adults all meeting with the witch in the chapel in Episode 2. There's an implicit suggestion here that the events we're seeing in the Episode 7 Tea Party are the prototype for the episodes, that these stories literally contain "fragments" of the truth.

But this creates a paradox. The first two episodes were written by Sayo before the killings even happened. The rest were written by Tohya Hachijo. I'm willing to believe that someone smarter than me who works as an author and became fascinated by the mystery could solve Umineko's major plot twists just from the first two bottles. You could probably even guess Shannon/Kanon in Episode 1 if you metagamed it, the way I did with Kinzo's death, and realised that Battler never sees them in the same place at the same time. I am not willing to believe that Tohya is such a genius that she managed to randomly guess specific events like the phonecalls that were not alluded to anywhere in the original bottles, and, indeed, could not have been alluded to, because they weren't part of Sayo's plan and they hadn't happened yet. As much as I like the idea of Tohya as this mysterious stranger who happens to have just the right kind of mindset to understand what Sayo was getting at, she really does need to have a source for some of what she's writing. Admittedly, the story is deliberately vague on whether Ange's meeting with Tohya ever happened at all, but someone has to have written the forgeries in any case.

This ties into Battler's disappearance, and his promise to Ange that he wouldn't let the story have a sad ending. I think the twist is going to be that, even though Battler's death seems like the most plausible turn of events, it is still possible to construct a theory in which, by some miracle, he gets off the island. Maybe this will finally resolve that Chekhov's gun about Battler being afraid of falling in the water. How else do you escape the island if you don't know about the hidden passage? Maybe it will be a case where they never confirm if Battler is actually dead or not (otherwise you have to get into why he didn't contact his family), and Tohya guessing parts of what happened really could be a coincidence, but Ange gets something out of the construction of a story with a less bleak ending? That would be one way to pay off the magic angle.

One more Episode to go.

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Happy birthday to the woman, the scrunkly, the sufferer, the abused and abuser, — Rosa Ushiromiya 🎉🎉🎉

idk what i like better so I'll post this one here too

cptsd flag

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I am one yet many

based on this qifrey

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Umineko parallels 5

Keep reading

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