Board 8 > Umineko Playthrough Topic Part 7

(+) Yeah! (+)

looking back at my notes from episode 1, it's clear that battler barely had any reaction to shannon at all - and shannon herself also didn't show any reaction to him being back.

she was pretending to not care...

and he... had just forgotten

kind of awkward though that 3 years later she's still holding on to it

this is around when she should theoretically get over it

but i suppose, as umineko says, the heart is a powerful thing

especially when you're a servant with a boring life and no one and nothing else to look forward to

oh my god.

i'm not ready for this brutality.

kyrie says that battler wrote letters for everyone.

my god.

is she going to... hadn jessica and george letters...

but there won't be one for shannon?

because if so.

my god.

that's painful

oh my god, even maria and ange got letters?!

oh my god, this is brutal

no fucking wonder she murdered 18 people

that said, if this is the case, why does battler end up loving beatrice and saying he's the one who did something wrong?

like, even 18-year old battler now should be like "okay, wow, i am sorry i forgot about that promise, but you just murdered my entire family, so, like, hell no"

granted, that's meta-battler and not real battler. meta-battler has so many weird magical things going on and that universe works so differently from the real world, the "morality" of it can change.

if white-beatrice at the chapel with will and lion is meant to be a "stand in for the culprit, if you haven't figured out who they are yet", why is she just talking as if she is shannon

anyway, i don't really know what's up with yasu, tbh.

my best guess is that yasu really did do all those things we saw, but then he/she died and shannon sort of "kept up" yasu's imaginary witch stuff?

either that or shannon just was yasu all along, not sure.

i mean, there's certainly a little bit of "i had no way of knowing this motive" here

like, yeah, at one point in episodes 1 to... something, shannon was like "i actually sort of liked battler for a bit in the past hehe, before i fell in love with you george" but man she really understated it

interesting. so shannon is definitely the original, and kanon is a creation of hers.

and, well, shannon must be yasu...?

and theoretically, that means yasu is a girl, because battler did seem to like shannon...? and shannon, like, has boobs.

but how can shannon create kanon?

how can she pretend to be an entirely different person, even to the point of fooling jessica?

so, shannon creates a new mental image of beatrice

and it just happens to look like kinzo's dead mistress?

and she's gonna see the portrait and be like "whoa, i created basically the same person?!"

i guess though, the portraits have different styles, and beatrice's face in the portrait isn't like her sprite anyway

here's the thing though, i still don't get it. if the killer is yasu/shannon/kanon, how does that even make sense with the end of episode 4? how does that person kill battler when he's alone on the island, y'know? i guess a "trap" is possible there, but meh.

ah right. the epitaph.

kinzo wrote it, apparently.

why? why did kinzo write an epitapth about murder and shit?

oh, i guess it was just to lead someone to the gold one day.

chapter 8 of 9.

interestingly enough, the "elder beatrice" we met in episode 6 had no idea about anything about battler. but in this episode, it shows us that when shannon created beatrice in the schoolgirl outfit, she was always created to love battler.

i doubt this contradiction even means anything at this point,it's just meta silliness. but maybe.

hm. shannon and kanon appear on screen together here talking to gohda and kumasawa, but i'm not sure what it means.

probably just an imaginary friend at this point... idk?

god, if you're going to give me answers, give me answers. i get that kanon was invented by shannon, but how tf does she just convince everyone there's a new servant boy when there isn't?!

genji tactfully tries to ask kinzo if he feels bad about raping his daughter

kinzo says yes he feels bad so he'd want to apologize

that's the answer genji wanted - so will genji introduce kinzo to his granddaughter? but where is his granddaughter? what happened to yasu? was it just shannon all along?

moment of truth maybe?

i see. so shannon/yasu/kanon/whoever will be "led" to the gold by genji, since genji believes they are the rightful heir

and this will mean that our killer has access to 10 tons of gold

when you combine heartbreak with the power to do anything (which you have if you can control people with money), maybe it starts to add up...?

lucky gaap, she finally gets a name

even ronove is here. turns out his name is a "coincidence".

but where's virgilia =(

ah, there she is. cool.

the web of who invented all this magical stuff was always complex

but it looks like the answer is that shannon invented part of it, BUT maria got involved and was really into studying the occult, so she could bring in more

i don't think i ever posted about this but back when i started theorizing about shannon as the mastermind, i had some thoughts about, like

if shannon is the culprit, then it's just "the maid did it"

which, you'd think most murder mysteries would try to avoid

but i think umineko did a really good job at sort of... setting up its web of a characters in a way where you really didn't know if the culprit would be a servant or a family member. and it gave shannon and kanon very strong arcs (mostly romance plots, but also all the stuff with beatrice in ep 2) and very strong links with the cousins, so that shannon isn't really "just the maid", she's a clearly defined character like all the rest

so ultimately, this doesn't feel like "the maid did it", even though that's basically what it is. because she's so much more than that.

https://snag.gy/O6kxuy.jpg

insert some smart words about how magic can be just as "real" as real things, etc etc

"My apologies to Maria, ...but she is not the second person I want to create a universe with."

lol

savage

i mean i did wonder in episode 4 why beatrice was best friends with maria of all people, and seemed intent to spend all of eternity with her. was kinda pathetic lol

"Beatrice" is in the lobby thiking about the epitaph, when she feels humans drawing near. Then Genji, Shannon, and Kanon enter.

God, I don't get it. Is Beatrice Shannon? is Kanon Shannon? lol. it's like the game has given me the answer but it still doesn't make sense.

I guess it's just that Shannon and Kanon are the same person and are Beatrice, and Genji is feeding her the answer right now

Dels posted...

i don't think i ever posted about this but back when i started theorizing about shannon as the mastermind, i had some thoughts about, like

if shannon is the culprit, then it's just "the maid did it"

which, you'd think most murder mysteries would try to avoid

but i think umineko did a really good job at sort of... setting up its web of a characters in a way where you really didn't know if the culprit would be a servant or a family member. and it gave shannon and kanon very strong arcs (mostly romance plots, but also all the stuff with beatrice in ep 2) and very strong links with the cousins, so that shannon isn't really "just the maid", she's a clearly defined character like all the rest

so ultimately, this doesn't feel like "the maid did it", even though that's basically what it is. because she's so much more than that.

Well, let's talk about "the maid did it" a bit. This really calls back to Van Dine here, with his rule #11, which can be summarized as "a servant cannot be the culprit". Now, this isn't trying to avoid writing tropes, it's because Van Dine is not a very nice person. It can't be a servant, because "The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person--one that wouldn't ordinarily come under suspicion; for if the crime was the sordid work of a menial, the author would have had no business to embalm it in book-form."

Basically, servants are worthless and commit crimes normally, and a culprit must be someone of actual value who wouldn't do that.

something that flows, but isn't a river

meh, i'm not good at riddles

onward

interesting. tbh, i'd never heard of van dine.

i just assumed that you generally don't want it to be "just a servant" because it's boring and cliche. hence my saying that if the servant in question has been developed being being "just a servant" (as kanon and shannon have been, but gohda and kumasawa haven't really been, for example), then it's a fair answer

but that is interesting. this game may be trying to reject van dine's rules - after all, someone who believes servants are just menial, lesser human beings, goes against umineko's themes, which tell us that all people are valuable.

ah right, the danshui railroad line. darn, if i had just thought about it more, i coulda solved it! duh!

I sure am glad to have studied all these kanji LOL

not that i can grasp the wordplay as well as a japanese speaker, but i have a rough understanding of how this word puzzle is working, i'm familiar with the concepts being talked about

I wonder, did people try to solve the epitaph for real by using a real world Atlas? I imagine it was designed to be possible?

like how people solve ARGs

oh. at first glance i thought if you removed qialian from quadrillion (or w/e) you'd get Lion =P but that doesn't actually make sense

sort of interesting that the riddle involves transcribing a chinese word to english letters? and using quadrillion in english...?

chapter 9 of 9

Dels posted...

I wonder, did people try to solve the epitaph for real by using a real world Atlas? I imagine it was designed to be possible?

like how people solve ARGs

I recall hearing that the solution to the epitaph was being floated around the JP community as a legitimate possibility before Ep 5 was translated (I cannot speak to before that, since I hadn't read it yet)

IIRC the English community just assumed it was wordplay that required Japanese knowledge and never really cared much.

https://snag.gy/CjfsIT.jpg

this was mentioned once, wasn't it? i can't remember if it was... in episode 2 when we first went there...?

Reg posted...

IIRC the English community just assumed it was wordplay that required Japanese knowledge and never really cared much.

smart of them

it doesn't look like the epitaph has any actual signifance to the murder mystery, it's just wordplay that leads to a location

tfw when you come up with a brilliant wordplay riddle, but it has to use the word quadrillion, and you remember it has two Ls

"oh i'll just have the character solving it pick an L at random, its fine"

how can the 5 letters U D R L O be used to praise a name?

obviously just spell "u lord", as in, "you are my lord". that's praise!

oh. i was right? lol