Umineko No Naku Koro Ni Goat Headquarters [SPOILERS!]

[Nyanko]

"..."

 

You describe what I believe the big essence behind a story, however it is but one layer of it. Umineko is not about solving the written murder mysteries indeed, it is however written in such a way that they are solvable. It is a fact that the Ushiromiya family is killed/murdered on that island on those 2 days and that Ange is now alone, struggling with the true meaning of "truth". All of the 4 episodes are not the truth, who did it, how it was done, and why it was done, we will never know that truth with certainty. But I believe those stories were written by someone that understood the truth, and it is solvable.

 

What you say about the meaning behind the later episodes (ep 5 specifically), the "control of the games being seized by wicked witches" is what the VN describes as "creating a gameboard without love". I always interpret this as that the before written games ep 1-4, the "gameboards made by Beato", are not without love. For those who want to solve the mystery as a murder mystery, they can do this by looking at these written stories, those 4 games written with love for the truth.

[Funyarinpa]

this is like opening up an onion, seeing all the layers, then realizing all of these are several million cells thick

[Kelebek1]

You mean stories where most of the plot up to a certain point is a huge red herring to distract the reader from the actual question in the plot, followed by an ending that is a lot more upbeat and hopeful than anything the series has had up to that point, including love and friendship allowing the characters to break out of a cycle of doubt and their belief in each other leading them to a bright future?

 

... so he didn't write Higurashi? And no the red text doesn't matter. It's only used for solving the mysteries and the mysteries will never lead you to the real point of the game.

 

Friendship and love? It was Miyo being practically psychotic, being so dead-set on proving Hifumi's theories to be correct, that she even killed an entire town. You may say that "friendship and love" were the things that got them to stop it, but it still happened, they still had to go through the worlds and uncover the truth to then prevent it. There was still a mystery they had to solve. What you're saying for Umineko is the whole thing never happened to begin with and was all a lie. And yes, even his manga are horror/mysteries. Ryuukishi doesn't seem like the kind of writer to pull the "and then he wakes up and realises it was all a dream" type of bullshit, which is what you're saying it is.

[Funyarinpa]

Friendship and love? It was Miyo being practically psychotic, being so dead-set on proving Hifumi's theories to be correct, that she even killed an entire town. You may say that "friendship and love" were the things that got them to stop her, but it still happened, they still had to go through the worlds and uncover the truth to then prevent it. What you're saying for Umineko is the whole thing never happened to begin with and was all a lie. And yes, even his manga are horror/mysteries. Ryuukishi doesn't seem like the kind of writer to pull the "and he wakes up and it was all a dream" type of bullshit, which is what you're saying it is.

please spoiler anything Higurashi

[Kelebek1]

Then don't quote me.

[Funyarinpa]

Then don't quote me.

 

I just want to say that people could accidentally read all that, like how I nearly did, and this topic permits Umineko spoilers only

 

Wanted to warn you so I quoted you, and for no other reason

[Nyanko]

Friendship and love?

It was Miyo being practically psychotic, being so dead-set on proving Hifumi's theories to be correct, that she even killed an entire town. You may say that "friendship and love" were the things that got them to stop her, but it still happened, they still had to go through the worlds and uncover the truth to then prevent it.

What you're saying for Umineko is the whole thing never happened to begin with and was all a lie. And yes, even his manga are horror/mysteries. Ryuukishi doesn't seem like the kind of writer to pull the "and then he wakes up and realises it was all a dream" type of bullshit, which is what you're saying it is.

This is not what he is saying though, what he is saying is actually the underlaying meaning of the story. There are however many layers and it depends greatly on interpretation how you WANT to see those. It's not that the murders never happened, they didn't happen in a way that is described in ep 1-4 but they did happen. The written stories, ep1-4 are just there for you as tools, if you are a person that wants to solve the written murder mysteries you can, but that will be your own truth, not Ange's. Trying to solve the murder mysteries is a lot of fun, but it is not the main goal of the story. The main goal of Umineko is to learn you about feelings, interpretations and the significance of truth. - As many of Ryukishi's novels did.

[Getsuya]

...

Ohh, no see we're having a misunderstanding here. If you read the Umineko manga it makes it a little clearer. Everyone really did legit die because Shannontrice blew them all up with the bomb. That's actually correct. However that in and of itself was not the point of the story, which is why it goes on after revealing that to move to the point where Ange comes to love her family again. When I say that the murders are made up I mean the murder stories are stories Shannontrice wrote herself, whereas what actually happened in the 'real' world (the one Ange lives in) is everyone got blown up by Shannon aside from Eva who survived because she was in the safe room with the gold. In the manga you see that Shannon actually calculated it all out, coming up with plausible-sounding reasons for everyone to kill each other which she then put in bottles and threw out to sea (I was mistaken about them being mystery games with Battler... they sort of were, but only in her head, it's not like she actually ever gave them to Battler).

Heck in the video I linked Beatrice says 'Sorry Ange, because of those bottles I caused you a lot of pain in your world'.

 

I mean seriously, just watch the video I linked and you'll see where I'm coming from. This isn't a fan theory, it's literally how the series ends in game 8.

 

Sorry if you thought I was saying that it was all made up and everyone was still alive or something. They most certainly are not. There IS a real solution to the mystery and it DOES click with the version of the story I gave you: Shannon is Beatrice, Shannon blows everyone up after putting out a bunch of made-up murder mystery stories about the family, Ange has to live with everyone being dead (except Eva) and the mystery letters in the bottle cause everyone to throw doubt on the Ushiromiya family. It's actually all very neatly wrapped up.

 

Edit: And, regarding Higurashi:

While you're correct that Miyo CAUSED the story, the story isn't about her and she isn't the main point. Higurashi is a story of a group of friends trying to break out of a cruel cycle of fate. At first they can't because they doubt each other and have secrets, but as they draw together they gain the power to break out of the chain of fate wrought by Miyo's powerful will. The mystery revolving around Miyo is just the outer layer of the story, the core of the story is about friendship and not giving in to fate.

[Funyarinpa]

Wait... Wasn't Kanon also Beatrice too? 

[Wonderfullyevil]

Friendship and love? It was Miyo being practically psychotic, being so dead-set on proving Hifumi's theories to be correct, that she even killed an entire town. You may say that "friendship and love" were the things that got them to stop her, but it still happened, they still had to go through the worlds and uncover the truth to then prevent it. What you're saying for Umineko is the whole thing never happened to begin with and was all a lie. And yes, even his manga are horror/mysteries. Ryuukishi doesn't seem like the kind of writer to pull the "and he wakes up and it was all a dream" type of bullshit, which is what you're saying it is.

While the theme is important in a story, the author himself is not. And let's not go to Higurashi.

At the very least, discuss the points of why you think Getsuya's interpretation doesn't work, but something like, "The author wouldn't do that!" is simply far-fetched as we aren't the author. Also, what Getsuya is trying to say is that the themes in When They Cry are presented with Red Herrings. In Umineko's case, the established facts are basically everyone except Eva and Battler is dead. Rokkenjima went boom. Majority of the red truth applies to one specific game, but none of those games contain the Single Truth. The only red truths that apply to everything are pretty much, "There are no more than 17 people on this Rokkenjima!" and "Kinzo is dead." Umineko's mystery is a red herring not in the sense that it didn't happen, but because none of the mysteries contained that Single Truth.

[Kelebek1]

Ohh, no see we're having a misunderstanding here. If you read the Umineko manga it makes it a little clearer. Everyone really did legit die because Shannontrice blew them all up with the bomb. That's actually correct. However that in and of itself was not the point of the story, which is why it goes on after revealing that to move to the point where Ange comes to love her family again. When I say that the murders are made up I mean the murder stories are stories Shannontrice wrote herself, whereas what actually happened in the 'real' world (the one Ange lives in) is everyone got blown up by Shannon aside from Eva who survived because she was in the safe room with the gold. In the manga you see that Shannon actually calculated it all out, coming up with plausible-sounding reasons for everyone to kill each other which she then put in bottles and threw out to sea (I was mistaken about them being mystery games with Battler... they sort of were, but only in her head, it's not like she actually ever gave them to Battler).

Heck in the video I linked Beatrice says 'Sorry Ange, because of those bottles I caused you a lot of pain in your world'.

 

I mean seriously, just watch the video I linked and you'll see where I'm coming from. This isn't a fan theory, it's literally how the series ends in game 8.

 

Sorry if you thought I was saying that it was all made up and everyone was still alive or something. They most certainly are not. There IS a real solution to the mystery and it DOES click with the version of the story I gave you: Shannon is Beatrice, Shannon blows everyone up after putting out a bunch of made-up murder mystery stories about the family, Ange has to live with everyone being dead (except Eva) and the mystery letters in the bottle cause everyone to throw doubt on the Ushiromiya family. It's actually all very neatly wrapped up.

 

But you said:

None of the murders actually happened.

 

And then I took this part

back to the truth: that the Ushiromiyas may have had their faults, but they weren't really bad people and they certainly weren't murderers.

to mean that no one was a murderer, but I suppose Shannon isn't a Ushiromiya. But you did already say they didn't happen. (@Nyanko too, he did say they didn't happen)

[Nyanko]

to mean that no one was a murderer, but I suppose Shannon isn't a Ushiromiya. But you did already say they didn't happen. (@Nyanko too, he did say they didn't happen)

I believed he referred to ep 1-4. Those didn't happen irl, but they are tools for you to understand what happened. The Ushiromiya family was murdered but not in one of those specific ways.

[Getsuya]

to mean that no one was a murderer, but I suppose Shannon isn't a Ushiromiya. But you did already say they didn't happen. (@Nyanko too, he did say they didn't happen)

No you're correct I did originally say that. Actually when I first wrote this I was under the impression that the bomb that killed everyone in the real world had gone off on accident and that the mysteries Shannon wrote were just light-hearted games with Battler. However the manga makes it much clearer that she wrote the mysteries out of hatred and self-loathing and she deliberately blew everyone up. That was my mistake.

 

Edit: This actually puts it even more in line with Higurashi because

 

Just like how in Higurashi we are reminded that, even in the good ending, there were still sacrifices and people who had died that were not saved, Umineko also reminds us that Shannon really did legit kill everyone and it was mainly Battler's fault for leaving her alone which caused her to go crazy and start hating herself.

 

Edit2: Though we can't really blame Shannon either. She was a 2nd generation incest baby. She could have been saved with a little love, same as how Ange and Eva could have saved each other with a little love, so again everything comes back to how people should love and trust each other more.

 

Edit3: As we see in Ep7, which is all about what would have happened if Shannon had been loved.

[Wonderfullyevil]

But you said:

And then I took this part

to mean that no one was a murderer, but I suppose Shannon isn't a Ushiromiya. But you did already say they didn't happen. (@Nyanko too, he did say they didn't happen)

Everyone except Eva and Battler died in Rokkenjima Prime, that's the only established fact. The "murders" may or may not have happened, and if someone was murdered it doesn't have to be the way on one of the forgeries.

Welp, I need to read the manga.

[Funyarinpa]

the only thing I do not like about this is now everything will feel SOOO DIFFERENT I do not even know.

 

On the flipside, that will make it a VERY enjoyable reread.

 

I almost took everything at nearly face value in my initial run

 

this is gonna be fun

 

and I do plan on solving all murders

[Getsuya]

Okay back to the murder mystery side of things here's an important clue that I think helps with a lot of the early murders:

 

The rifles are obviously all over the place in the story, but do you remember that Kinzo was fond of trick-shooting contests?

 

... could perhaps his children have also learned the art of trick-shooting?

[Wonderfullyevil]

Okay back to the murder mystery side of things here's an important clue that I think helps with a lot of the early murders:

The rifles are obviously all over the place in the story, but do you remember that Kinzo was fond of trick-shooting contests?

... could perhaps his children have also learned the art of trick-shooting?

They were portrayed as such, so it wouldn't surprise me. Also, didn't Kanon mention that Kinzo taught him how to use a Winchester during his EP6 soliloquy?

[Funyarinpa]

First game, first twilight.

 

The storehouse is in a place where it is not visible to most people, and visitors are not intended to go there.

 

I am planning to check who noticed the mark on the shutter in the first place. I think it was Kanon in the morning.

[Nyanko]

It's pretty hard to solve each twilight on its own (especially this one), because you need other hints from other episodes to form some theories. But let's give it a go.

 

The victims were supposedly killed in the dining room because there is a remarkable amound of blood in there. There is only 1 key to the shed, which was in the servant's room and was brought by Kanon to unlock the shed after the corpes were discovered. Kanon says he was the one that discovered the mark on the shutter indeed.

 

1st twilight murders: Rosa, Shannon, Krauss, Kyrie, Rudolf and Gohda

Gohda, Rosa, Kyrie and Rudolf are completely unrecognizable because of their smashed faces.

Beatrice about this twilight (mentioned in a later episode): In regards to the unidentifiable corpses, I guarantee their identities. That is, there's no body-double tricks!

This means we got the unrecognizable corpes of 4 people, but they are really those people, either alive or dead.

 

It sounds cruel but its not impossible to make your face unrecognizable like that if you take the torn off skin (or half of it) from one corpse and place it on your own. Nobody will touch it in the first place to check if the wound is real. After everyone left the shed, it was not viewed that anyone reopened it. The life/dead status of those corpses in unknown since they had no physical wounds beside their faces being crushed, they'll deal with that in other episodes). On the gameboard with humans we would assume someone is dead if their face looks like that, so no thorough examination was done. Outside of the gameboard they were never proclaimed dead in red. If you look at the events in the rest of that episode it's very likely someone in that shed was actually alive.

[Silvz]

I'm loving to read everything. Getsuya is like god.

 

But something that bothers me the most is: Umineko is a "sequel" from Higurashi. Frederica Bernkastel IS Rika after the centuries of ressurrection. We know this simply by knowing her name at the end of Higurashi.

 

What I'm trying to say is: the magic can be just a plus, just the imagination of Ange, but for us, readers, who know and love Rika and the world of Hinamizawa and even about the existance of different dimensions, is it acceptable to say just "we should ignore the mistery because it never happened"?

 

Do you really think that it didn't really happen?

 

Edit: because Frederica appears to Ange a lot, so she isn't just a "story", so her and all magic is real...

[Getsuya]

As Nyanko has pointed out, Umineko is full of layers. The layer that I'm focusing on, Ange's story, is what I consider to be the core of the game, but it definitely isn't all there is to the game. Bernkastel has two roles, one that she plays in the meta-game of the war over the mystery game she fights with Lambdadelta and others, and then she also exists in Ange's reality to push Ange toward discovering the truth.

 

In the meta-game she is an antagonist that always insists that all the truth be revealed. However, remember that she and others always refer to the game as if it was dead. They talk about pulling the guts out of a corpse, basically taking the games that Beatrice left behind and tearing them apart to reveal the secrets of the mystery. None of this has bearing on the real world because the mysteries are just stories made up by Shannon, however for the reader we get to see an epic struggle as Battler and others try to protect the secrets of Shannon and the rest of the family because they love each other and don't want all the skeletons in the Ushiromiya closet getting dragged out for everyone to see. All of them have done things and acted in ways they aren't proud of, and it's shaming for an unrelated person to drag that all out into the open (in the real world this is all symbolic of the mystery stories getting spread around and dissected by mystery fans who don't care about the Ushiromiyas). But, while Bernkastel comes across as cruel and evil from our perspective in the meta-game, the truth is she really is just playing with a corpse. Nothing she does will have any effect on events. Everyone is already dead. Besides, the things she digs up about the Ushiromiyas are true, it's not like she's making things up or lying about them. She just wants a good mystery story, much like most of the readers.

 

BUT let's take another look at Bernkastel in Ange's world. Bernkastel sends Ange on a quest for the truth. She doesn't tell Ange which truth to pursue or what to believe, she merely encourages Ange to discover it all for herself. This leads to Ange digging up a lot of bad things about her family, yes, but it also leads Ange to Eva's Diary. Bernkastel tells Ange that she has the power to choose which truth is 'hers' without forcing Ange to believe one way or the other. This leads to Ange being able to make the choice to reject the truth the world is trying to force on her.

 

Bernkastel's involvement in the story could be summed up as: 'I want to know the truth behind the mysteries because I am bored and want a good story, I don't care what dirt I dig up while finding the truth because none of this matters in the long run. However, i will not force this truth onto others. Everyone should pursue their own truth, and decide for themselves what they believe.'

 

Like every other character, Bernkastel is full of layers and good and bad points. Focusing on any single part of her involvement in the story will cause us to lose focus of other things. We have to look carefully at each layer and decide where it fits in to the puzzle.

[onorub]

Here's what i understood from my barebones knowledge of literature:

-The games are more akin to writers with completely different philosophies trying to write a coherent story, which leads to the conflict between mystery vs fantasy.

-Battler's story is just a plot point for Ange's story, therefore it doesn't really matter if it turns out to be a mystery or a fantasy, since it's a doubt that is not really meant to be fulfilled (since i'm brazillian, i'll use the "Dom Casmurro" story for reference to that kind of doubt).

-It makes me wonder: what would happen if the genres discussion was more explored in some spin-off for the series? Maybe make it so the characters start having crazy discussions about Ange's story being mystery (because of the Ushiromiya killings), fantasy (because of magic events and Ange's strong belief) or Drama (because of the doubt being more relevant than the mystery and the possibility of Ange's belief being mere unreliable narrative).