Why won't you pitch to me, Beatrice? I'm the one you want!
Sorry Batter, but that's three outs! George, Shannon and now Kanon! The inning is over! Ahaha!
No! I won't accept it! Looking at the count, Kanon got three balls and three strikes. But if any one of those strikes was really a ball, he walks to first!
What? That's ridiculous. Doubting the umpire is a desperate stalling tactic.
Then say it in red! "Every pitch directed at Kanon this inning was called correctly!"
…I refuse. For no particular reason.
I knew it!
Don't celebrate yet, Batter. Even if you're right, it's on you to argue the nature of the incorrect pitches.
Ahaha! Yes, listen to your coach, Ushiromiya Batter! If you can't identify a miscalled pitch, we move on to the third inning! So which pitch are you going to contest?
Let's go in order then. Starting with the second pitch, it was extremely curved! From where the umpire is sitting, she could have easily judged it as inside when it wasn't!
Kanon swung at the second pitch! Swinging without contact makes it a strike, regardless of if the ball touched the strike zone!
Hmph. That just narrows down my options. The third pitch was right on the bottom corner… and the seventh was so fast, I couldn't tell where it was.
Let's try flipping the chessboard. How would I try to disguise a ball as a strike? I could throw just barely outside the strike zone, but that requires the umpire to call in my favor. Beatrice would want something more certain. What if…
Beatrice! Here's my theory! The seventh pitch was not a baseball at all! You threw something else, some special effect, and had Lucifer palm one of the previous pitches into her glove! This means that no seventh ball ever entered the strike zone!
The nature of the special effect is, of course, a Devil's Proof.
Sounds like you're accusing me of magic, Batterrrrrr…
Not magic! A special effect! You could have made some sort of hologram or reflection, or something! A baseball going over 170 kph is just a blur, you could fake it easily!
There were seven pitches at this at bat. Each of those pitches involved a unique baseball. No substitutions of the balls were made in their travel from the pitcher to home base.
And furthermore, the umpire did not misjudge any pitch on the edge of the strike zone.
Dammit, it's useless! It's all useless!
Ahaha! Foolish Batter! Don't you know there's no crying in baseball?
"I don't understand. How could the captain be killed in a locked room?"
"It's the Legend of the Gold Imposter! They must have snuck in through the vent! No crewmate could fit through there!"
"I won't accept this nonsense about a never-before-seen alien monster! Nor will I accept that any of my crewmates could do this!
There must be another explanation!"
"Uu-uu! Gold 'exists'!"
if i was abrahamic god i woulda released ryukishi07 before i started my books. so when people asked "why would god want us to believe in him while explicitly not giving any irrefutable evidence" theyd remember beatrice the golden witch, and because everyone loves her theyd be more open to my thing
halfway thru chapter 1 of umineko. idk how meaningful it is to speculate this early, The Real Umineko hasnt even properly started. these arent fully thought out and organized it's just scattered thoughts
battler's gender politics are entertainingly weird. he's like "when i meet a woman, even if she's my cousin or my servant, i NEED to make a big show of grabbing her tits so that she can hit me and everyone will laugh at the Classic Gag and it'll lighten the mood" which is just ridiculous enough to be something a rich teenager in the 80s could convince himself is okay. and then he sees the dinner seating and he's like "damn my family's so patriarchal. thought gained: inexplicable feminist agenda". i'm assuming this is a genre deconstruction thing. also lol that he is right next to maria in grandpa's tier list
maria is awesome btw i hope she gets to infodump about magic a lot more. some goon in the SA thread said the umineko author was once a social worker, so like. even if they don't use the word because it's japan in the 80s she's gotta be Intended as autistic
kinzo's room is so telegraphed to be a locked room mystery. he's entertaining too but i kinda zone out when he's talking about how his magic system works. i get the basic of more risk = more magic power but i worry it's the kind of thing that has Important Clues that my brain autofills with [arcane rambling]
battler constantly gasses up how good george is with kids and then george sees a family member repeatedly hitting their 9 year old disabled child and says, out loud, "not my problem"
assuming the epitaph is a puzzle intended to be solved and not the kind of puzzle that frames all the other puzzles and isn't solvable til the end: until the first butterfly i thought all the death and traveling was metaphorical. it still could be. like the six chosen by the key could be objects. the hands of a clock may be involved because that's in all the promo stuff and chapter start art. kinzo acted like the riddle was totally solvable by the doc or kanon or any of his kids. but if it was unsolvable until People Started Dying, it seems kinda pointless to have put the painting up years ago? but beatrice is a Dramatic Bitch.
Who Took The Rose?! no idea, but i'm sure it's important. if there's a 19th person, definitely them. totally possible the wrapper fell off but they'd still recognize the withered rose i reckon
Who Gave Maria The Umbrella?! again, if there's a 19th person, it's them. if not, natsuhi was my prime suspect because her alibi didn't have any witnesses but everyone else's did (if you really count grandpa and the doctor, like doc could easily say "i was with kinzo" and no one would verify that with kinzo). but then there was a scene right after from natsuhi's pov (migraine and can't sleep without meds, literally me) where she speculates who did it. so either the narrative is heavily fucking with me, it's gramps or the doctor, or it's someone with an accomplice
the narration is from battler's pov except when it's not and it's strange. it even isn't from his pov in some scenes that he's in, like the letter reading scene. this is the type of thing that could Mean Something way later but is just a little confusing sometimes right now
kyrie saying there's a contradiction in beatrice showing herself to maria but hiding from everyone else, failing to consider beatrice may be a Dramatic Bitch. i think there's probably a 19th person even if they are not necessarily a witch with magic powers
the furniture being totally able to break promises but can't disobey orders is the kind of exact words semantic sillies that umineko memes made me expect
goes w/o saying that the way the servants are treated is supremely fucked up. going to servant school and then working in the mansion at age six... george proposing to a girl that he has so much power over is lol. it's nice that umineko cares who the servants are and why they're there, and other logistical human things like how kinzo made his money and what they're all doing with it
at midnight, where was the doctor?
they drop some hints that the non-shannon, non-krauss bodies have their faces disfigured and Could be other people but that is pretty ridiculous and there's no reasons to consider that yet
i wish the LP used the doughy original art but that's the price i pay for convenience
i started with the batter/battler not-really-pun and the post was built around that. theres an Archetypical Umineko Scene of "beatrice does something impossible, battler proposes a theory, but he's been misdirected so she can prove him wrong with red truth."
i'm sure someone who Knows Baseball really well could construct an interesting puzzle but that's not me, so i mostly mashed together whatever baseball terms i know. umineko isn't like encyclopedia brown, the answer to a puzzle can be first hinted at 600 words later or whatever. and question arc battler is incompetent. so it's pretty easy to write a Plausible Single Scene without worrying too much about puzzle construction.
that said though... there is a Particular Trick, that umineko uses in Many of its puzzles, and it's maybe the biggest spoiler. if you're aware of it, then you can see how it'd apply in the baseball post and make the whole thing irrelevant. i'm grateful to anyone who knows and hasn't said it in the notes!
if you finished umineko and don't know what i mean...ask off of anon. if you haven't finished umineko, read it! it's very good! it's ok to read the manga version or the lparchive playthrough too don't let the purists tell you otherwise
chapter 8 is when umineko formally asks you to solve some gosh darn puzzles and i read it while being beset by chronic migraine. i finished reading back when i posted the previous seagull posts, and meant to organize my notes more but no ones reading these anyway so fuck it, raw notes.
i realize only now that i've been providing reactions without much context to what i'm reacting to which surely makes it hard to follow. uu-uu.
so ange Is the pov character now. battlers goal must be more than to show ange that eva didnt do it. bc a version of her learning that was Torture
"Ushiromiya Battler, the man who loses strategically to win in the end!"
so i expected the Quiz Tournament to be About Umineko, not solving age-appropriate riddles for a 6yo lol. not complaining though
[notes written while solving layton riddles are not interesting]. my result was 13/17, which i consider a pathetic showing. kumasawa, nanjo, rosa, and maria beat me. b-but only because i didn't really try some of them.
chap 8 part 2 bernies mystery
i started reading this at work and decided to read it at home where i can easily have multiple tabs visible and that sort of thing.
solved bernie's mystery first try B) though my logic was significantly looser than theirs
i started with "if battler was the liar, what would that imply" and didn't like the results
"interrupting the red" seems kinda bullshit, but ok
literally "you can't handle the truth"
trying to listen to the music for the "ange beato crashes the party" scene and i get 20 seconds into a song before its time for a new one because i read much faster than the VN would display text
time for GOOFY ACTION YAYYYY
sorry battler but im kind of a goat?
YEAHHHH FUCK THE AUDIENCE!!!! KILL US!!
i disagree w battler about the idea of "things youre better off not knowing". his examples are ticks in seats on a train or crap in tap water. sure some people wouldnt want to know that
i guess there are such thing as "truths someone is unprepared for" and its more like that. but that can be "solved" with the right "supplemental truths"
showing a logic duel without giving the reader anything to theorize on is a Big Intentional Shift
man. i love umineko. i really wish 07 had used a different metaphor than shrodingers cat
beato to ange: "Parents have the right to prevent their children from making unsuitable choices." i mean. true to the extent that youd prevent six year old ange from walking around by herself, not true when she's an adult. but yeah you would think that wouldn't you
i think posing "caring about the truth and being sad and living in the past / dying" and "not knowing the truth and being happy and living in the present/future" as a Dichotomy is pretty slimy, so i just gotta hope ange will Take The Third Option
i still contend that Ange's Future is still a fantasy world. look here's a witch (featherine) using the red text in it!
i've heard the manga reveals secrets at the end with much more clarity than the book… that seems to be against the Themes of ch8 lol
"i didnt have surgery after an accident because that felt like it would kill my identity" shut upppp
ikuko's servants arent narratively People and that sucks
"using a computer in the dark is bad for your eyes" Caught
asumu and kinzo's original wife have both been treated really badly lol
ERIKA GOT A SILLY HAT!!!!!!!
theres a frame where beato stands in front of one of the bunnies and it looks like she has ears lol
beato: im tired of the bullshit after ep4
yayyyy erika gets trolled again
"LAMBDAAAAAAAAAAAAAWG"
fiction loves characters who constantly believe in 1% chances
were all these CGs in the original?
medulla oblongata!!!! truly everyone's favorite characters are here!
im not an Action Fan, i like it for the goofiness mostly, but i would like to see kyrie and rudolf In Action
and what a goof this is. let's have a sword duel on the bow of a pirate ship
i had (mentally) written a full analysis of erika after ep 6. yes she appears in episode 8 but fully as a Piece, theres nothing more to her Character to be revealed or discussed? funny hat though
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
yay more taking the piss out of power scalers and crossovers
the Thrust of anges character is that she wants the company of someone who was impacted in The Rokkenjima Incident so she wants someone to have secretly survived but. nanjo and kumasawa's children are still alive. they were affected in mostly the same way she was. i know i know emotionally not the point from her POV
so in the Magic Ending (which im reading first bc i think bad endings come before good endings), ange gives all her money back to the family instead of charity. booooo
and the "trick ending" is She Becomes Erika. bah.
featherine: "I believe one should write a tale to an appropriate point, then leave the aftertaste and opinions to the minds of the spectators." 'it would be a mistake to, for example, write additional chapters just because people want and would pay for more umineko Content'
"we'll meet again when something else cries" Oh Boy Bernie and Lambda Definitely My Favorite Characters Are In The Sequel
ok lol that sakotarou is the star of in universe One Piece
grrrr ange talking about Gods Will! i fundamentally disagree with your philosophy, umineko, no matter how well you're written!
ok well they're bringing me back with trauma induced dissociation stuff. no but theyre doing it in a "truth thats too hard to handle" way. but he's acknowledging that not contacting ange was a mistake at least.
----
so that's umineko. i ended it in a little of a sour mood because i was missing a crucial part of The Point.
i was pissy about the whole "things you're better off not knowing" theme because i dont think thats true in reality. but i had forgotten that umineko is About storytelling before anything else. and in the context of stories, there's plenty of good reasons to leave something as unknown, ambiguous, or only implied.
yeah i think the answer arcs could've lead to an ending that i, personally, preferred more, while still staying consistent with the themes and puzzles and stuff, and i think that it could've even been edited down to seven shorter chapters without losing anything meaningful. BUT that ending would only satisfy me, and a hypothetical editor could have removed scenes i liked just as easily as they could remove things i found redundant. so if there can only be One Umineko for Everyone, better to have a little too much of it.
but- i think it's fun to imagine alternate ways the answer arcs could have gone while still keeping yasu and kinzo's general backstories.
in the same way that it is fun to idly imagine "what if star wars was good".
not to say umineko is bad of course, i loved it. game of the year. book of the year. both it's both of them. just i mean it's a fun imagination space to play in. which was part of what they were talking about with not revealing everything, that i was missing initially.
i'm very curious to see what fanmade Forgeries are like! but that is something to check out Later.
misc thoughts at the end..
hey is yasu nonbinary, or only in the reality where they're not thrown off a cliff and abandoned? everyone uses feminine language for yasu in the ep7 flashback, and in a magic understanding they spend most of their time presenting as beatrice, and more of their identities are female, but kanon is always there, there's no moment of like, Disavowal. and with lion theyre more like "my gender is None Of Your Business teehee" than "i am nonbinary". which, i dunno, its consistent with both umineko and a lot of my friends for yasu's gender to not have an easy one word description, right. yeah it was written in 2011 but i think if it was written in 2021 it would probably be handled the same way.
i saw the thread where people found basically every character's outfit in lolita fashion magazines from shortly before umineko released, and like, whatever. could it be less blatant, yeah, but original release umineko was a writer doing character designs anyway, you've seen the wonderfully wonky original art. it's funny more than anything.
tw for sexual assault in this one again. long post. let's get Political!
i wasn't aware umineko is 55 dollars on steam. i know its a lot of words and they've got music and voice acting and two sets of art but, thats a lot of fucking money for a fiction book. the steam release doesn't even include the side stories.
umineko has a lot of dubiously canon side content released at conventions and promos and such, and of course bundled in japanese Special Edition rereleases. the LP im reading puts all the side stories at the end (all the question arc ones together and all the answer arc ones together) even when they're set and released between episodes. i think they're all fan translated?
in the question arcs, the side stories were pretty superfluous but still fun. there was a little interview with gohda, and a silly story about valentines day and white day so i read some of them now and. man.
there's one, "game master battler", set when he's preparing episode 6. the characters react to an out of universe character popularity poll and they're all asking battler to give them a good part in ep 6 so they become more popular. which is a fine premise, its very muppet show, and the same silly tone the valentines day story had. you can guess the conclusion of course, battler asks everyone for ridiculous favors but then he cant possibly make a story that highlights everyone at once.
but like. when he asks for favors, he asks All of his aunts for sex acts. (as payment for both them And Their Families getting better parts.) and the seven sisters have to massage him or they wont be included at all. and six of them hold lucifer down while he assaults her. he doesn't explicitly rape her but the metaphor is clear. and like. what the hell!
when he perved on jessica it was one thing. he wasn't God Of The Setting at the time for starters. and yeah the seven sisters murdered him repeatedly in eroticized ways, but they're evil demons that were acting as extensions of beato. the idea that battler Would be a rapist or coerce people into sex if given the power is. not funny obviously, not matching the lighthearted tone they're going for, and most unfortunately, in character???
he's a rich boy who comes from a family where abuse and punching down are the rule, who grabs women's breasts so much it's a move in the fighting game. they make a lot of parallels between kinzo and battler and i guess Rapist is one of them.
which is a Real Bummer! he's the protagonist! i think. they might decide in ep 8 that ange is the protagonist. i Want To Like Him and the titty grabbing previously had his Weird Maladjusted Logic that was so ridiculous it kinda softened the blow, and the erotic violence performed On him has the caveat of, in a non fantasy perspective all that happened in his imagination, and in a fantasy perspective its being done by Bad People
you could say "oh its just a side story its not canon" but like. everyone acts roughly in character, in an exaggerated comical way not unlike the valentine's day story. sure this event can be understood to "not really have happened" but it still says something About battler's character.
the very next side story expands on ange's motives, it says that bernie made ange promise not to love or trust eva, and their Beef was entirely because of that. that's tragic and realistic (in an understanding where bernie isnt Real, she can represent a part of ange that blames eva using mystery-logic) and goes together with the ep 7 ending in a really nice way.
i haven't had a place to talk about the Politics of umineko. kinzo and bici's connections to fascism aren't really remarked on by anyone else, but kinzo isn't really portrayed sympathetically. like he talks about how the main family didn't really believe in him and he went to war to die, but this is shown after six long chapters of him being pathetic and abusing Every Other Character. and he was already married with kids when he met bici...
and the adults follow from him, right. like him abusing his kids is echoed throughout the family, yknow cycles of abuse. and someone like rosa is not /excused/ for abusing her kid, but we are still shown the circumstances that allow her to do it. so umineko is "anti family" if you want to be extremely reductive and that's so rare in Popular Media.
umineko isn't really anti capitalist, but you could make an anticapitalist reading of it. like kinzo is a shithead and his treatment of workers is presented as Bad but this isn't shown as a systemic thing. well kyrie's family is also kinda awful. but like worlds where kinzo Isn't a shithead are happy healthy places.
theres a lot of show of Ranks and Bureaucracy in Magic Land but its mostly like, flavor, nothing really comes of it. at least from my reading. another one of the side stories shows one of diana's minions being a hardass about The Law when she joins the magic cops. and trying to get the other cops to practice Law And Order by not drinking or smoking or going to the halloween party, and never using vernacular, which all goes poorly for her and its funny. its not deep social commentary or anything its kinda dilbert level.
all that said... umineko Is, more than anything else, unambiguously pro autism!
ok they explain the epitaph and no way i would have gotten it. short post this time. idk if anyone is still reading these but. posterity!
i went back and read their introductions and shannon and kanon are Definitely the same person. i'm ok with that.
a whole lot of Children In Love and Gender Essentialism. knowing higurashi mostly focuses on kids has turned me off from it, but i know it's not so romantic... i'll still probably read it one day. anyway rich boy sent his letters and he forgot that servants are people!!!!
this is where they explain the epitaph. yknow since realistically i Would Not have ever solved it i'm at least proud that i knew the text on the chapel was key.
willard does an overview of every closed room and gives a poetic one line explanation. the kannon/shannon situation by itself breaks most of them.
at the tea party already. i remember hearing ch7 party was a Big Deal, but so far all of ch7 has been two flashbacks from unreliable people. they explain people solving the epitaph almost immediately after explaining it the first time
idk what the point of introducing explosives Now is. it's gotta be setting up something later.
is "rudolf and kyrie have it in them to Kill family members" a Big Reveal. kyrie not loving ange and eva being innocent in ange's timeline is a Cute Twist. battler not being asumu's kid hasn't been resolved.
i don't care too much about revelations in ange's timeline unless they end up saying that that's the "real" reality which i don't think i'd be a fan of. [how many times have i said "i wouldn't like it if the story went in this direction" and then it goes in that direction. don't take this to mean i'm not having fun heehee]
ep5 & 6 didn't have much Host Beato but they still had plenty of battler, and erika was a fun opponent. but in ep7 both the protagonist (will) and antagonist (bernie as herself) are characters i'm not very interested in and a dump of info i mostly already knew or suspected. made it a quick and easy read though.
someone in transfights (a fighting game discord server i'm in despite not playing fighting games) said "Chapter 7 is pretty important for a lot of people as not everyone get to the same conclusions. but the added context is pretty nice or a bit dull if you are already sure of whats going on" and that's fair
