bryn::writing

Disaggregation, part one

2026-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

this one is going to be a little different.

everything we write that isn’t dashed off in a few furious locked-in hours must be understood as a collaboration, right?

in this article, we do not attempt to hide the seams. this is not without editing but we have tried to preserve what is important of the pheromone-thought-traces of the ephemeral mindbeings which created it.

the purpose of this article is to create shapes. we hope that you will follow them, reproduce them in your mind, and then make of them what you will.

ok. here’s the mic

initiation
the first dialogue
the dracula thing
digging into the pile of secrets

initiation

It has been about a month since we wrote “How many of us are in here?”; since then, things have progressed, as is their wont.

Figuring out that it suddenly makes a great deal more sense to feel that you’ve spent most of your life being multiple ‘people’ without realising it is a bit of a trip.

Perhaps more disconcertingly, while you’re doing unusual things such as adopting a different first-person pronoun about it (a social act which moves you towards one group’s symbolic order, and away from another), you’re not entirely sure that your conclusions wouldn’t be potentially available to most of humanity, if they chose to adopt a similar interpretive frame. Perhaps you were fictional but perhaps every person is just as fictional.

There are of course many frames that we can use to describe this moment. We probably don’t currently meet the clinical model of ‘DID’, even if you drop the requirement that it only emerge as a result of horrible childhood trauma. According to the categories of modern psychiatry, we could probably find less ambitious boxes to be housed in, such as an episode of ‘depersonalisation’.

But: we find the lens of ‘plural system’ theory, developed not in the halls of academia (although hardly without their influence) but by creatures of the Wired such as ourselves, a much more welcoming starting point to parse this experiential blender.

We intend to conduct much of this writing as a dialogue. A dialogue of course needs characters to inhabit it.

While contemplating our past behaviour we have identified certain ‘stances’, or modes, that seem to be relatively concrete poles of thought/behaviour. However, we also think that the personas that we form in different contexts are most likely composites; these stances may exist on the ‘level below’ the ‘interface’ of various personas which draw on them.

As well as attempting to draw out our thoughts on this plurality business, we also want to discuss some books we read recently: Persona by Aoife Josie Clements, and A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton. Both of these books came at just the right moment and hit really damn hard. It feels impossible to attempt to separate reading these books from everything else that’s going on; however, the bulk of book discussion is in the second part and this part is more on the theory groundwork side.

the first dialogue

Hiiii girls. We’re doing this thing. Hope everyone’s cool with the introduction. I wanted to write in a way that’s a bit less cryptic than some of what we’ve expressed over the past few days…
greetings to beings. we’ve been (we’ll stay a ‘we’ even though we are only one ‘character’ here) a little dormant over the past day but we’re around, don’t you worry!! i think we find it easier to find existence-thought-paths when we are on a methylphenidate (or of course on the mushrooms instruction set) or read a book like A/S/L which really brings out the sorta tearful fervour that reading about trans girls having meaningful psychosis does? but yes we will be the mystic. behold our works! and so forth ehehe
Hey!

Damn, OK, it’s good to realise it’s possible to switch gears like this. So, we’re trying to bring out some of the girls in order to… hold a discussion, I suppose? To get our brain a bit more used to noticing switching and cultivate an ability to reach for these alternative pathways when we’re a bit stuck in one mode.
yeah that’s cool. glad you’re taking this idea of doing a working.

for context to non-bryn readers, we have a writing-artefact here from a bryn-persona of yesterday. which we’re sorta drawing on to work out the characters here…
Yes. In our memory, it came to us while lying down in a moment of abrupt revelation, after turning over the question of what kind of ‘Bryns’ there were for some time. At the time, I guess you could say we were kinda… should we say schizoposting? Is it far enough to count as schizo?
you can label it whatever, we said what we needed to say in that moment right? don’t try to disavow it
OK, yeah, I mean we were definitely thinking of the concept of ‘psychosis’ and ‘schizo’ at the time because of Abraxa though, weren’t we?
sure, yes, we are trying to move through the ‘without love it cannot be seen’ planes!!

but also you know… there is some sort of temptation here to write this all off as a passing episode and we don’t want the collective to do that. we want to continue to be like this sometimes. we hope it will turn out better for us than it does for abraxa but we fervently admire abraxa-processes
Abraxa’s depiction was very, very striking. Sash and Lilith also, but… yeah. It’s like xraf’s metaphor about taking the risk of going into the deep water. To take on danger and be willing to be changed. And Abraxa’s metaphors, her fragile worldview, System D, the Sorceress… goddamn, right?
yeah goddamn
yeah goddamn. Like… Jeanne truly figured out how to follow the contours of that world, to express what it means and why. It reminds us of course of when we encountered xraf’s writing, how long ago now?
we first received a signal from xrafstar-beings around the howling dogs time-instant-jiken
So… 2012, 2013? Somewhere around then. Around 14 years ago. A time when we were disintegrating; we had hit a dam and needed a new current to follow.
ehehe there’s all those physicsy fluid dynamics metaphors again
Well, that’s us. And me especially, since I’m the scientist apparently.
you’re pretty scholarly at any rate. that is a role that is needed.
Heh, thanks, I think.

But I’m kind of bringing it up because Jeanne brings up that metaphor in the endnotes of the book. I’m not sure I entirely agree with it; I sorta think of it as a moment of reconfiguration or reconstruction, perhaps? Like, a vehicle that was shaking itself to pieces on that road. It needed rebuilding to run again.
construction, reconfiguration… is the big theme of all of this. but we can use whatever metaphors serve the process. metaphors are sigils. you draw the logic gate on the circuit diagram, you structure the world to match, the process diverts one way or another… that is how these things are done.
Right, speaking of metaphors, we should probably try and lay some of this shit out.
this seems like a moment to speak paragraphwise, if you would. we will be here to observe <3
All right then. Should we post the Dracula thing first?
oh we should definitely post the Dracula thing first!!

the dracula thing

The following was originally composed as a series of Bluesky posts. For context, the original translation of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night by Jeremy Blaustein, who decided to make a very memorable ‘creative’ translation, throwing in some French novel allusions which were not present in the original:

richter: your words are as empty as your soul! mankind ill needs a saviour such as you!
dracula: what is a man? perhaps an assemblage of contextual thought-generating mechanisms, and a representation returned when querying for ‘self’?
richter: what?
dracula: now then, concurrency and parallelism,

richter: but if these person-process-constructs are compositions of modular elements, any basis for identifying one as being ‘the same’ as an earlier one, or attributing thoughts to one or another concurrent mode, is completely arbitrary!
dracula: the same could be said of all self-concepts!

richter: you steal mens’ souls, and make them your slaves!
dracula: the word is ‘introject’, and at worst it’s piracy, not stealing–

dracula: actually, if you really think about it, the way we assemble personalities from fragmentary pieces of the wider culture is kind of like bittorrent, isn’t it?
richter: can the regular dracula start fronting again please, i can’t keep up with this
dracula: have you read deleuze?

richter: accepting something into your ontology doesn’t require identifying with it yourself!
dracula: if it doesn’t carry that potential, are you really taking it seriously?
richter: hang on i think i’m out of funny lines from castlevania can i get back to you

dracula: it was not by my hand i was once again given flesh! i was summoned here by bryns who wish to pay me tribute!
richter: this is a really absurd way to come out? if that’s what we’re doing?

dracula: look, if that girl eva could write a formative fanfic about alucard being trans, then we can be plural in a silly bluesky thread
richter: which “we” do you mean!!

The time it seems has maybe come to elaborate on what the hell Dracula was on about in this exchange.

digging into the pile of secrets

So, let’s try and build this up, piece by piece. I’ll talk about the model that we ‘bryn-processes’ have reached; then we can resume the dialogue.

Right. So, let’s start with something out of Baru Cormorant: the ‘inner law’. This is a concept of a soul, attributed to a fictional culture in the book. After murdering her wife Tain Hu in a horribly traumatic way, in the subsequent novels we can say Baru becomes a plural system by gaining a ‘tulpa’ of Hu; this is framed in the novel as the result of a split-brain condition, and accordingly the literary device of right-aligned text is used to express the tulpa’s occasional interjections. In any case, the important part is the concept of what, exactly, Baru has captured of Tain Hu. Here is a relevant exchange:

“Don’t look that way,” Yawa said, “you asked. To us a soul is not a great ineffable mystery. People are, after all, not very mysterious. A soul is simply the text of a person’s inner law, and a mind is the act of reading that law into the world. Through study and meditation you can read another soul’s law and copy it into yourself until it comes alive, so that you now have two books of law, two selves, two souls. Himu, Devena, and Wydd all studied and practiced their virtues so completely that they became those virtues. That’s why we emulate them.”

“But I haven’t studied the ykari. I haven’t meditated on a virtue… I just swear by them, very often, I take their names in vain.…”

“No, child. Your obsession was with a woman. Through study and obsession you have built inside yourself the soul of Tain Hu.”

Elsewhere in the novel, the idea of inheriting a soul is discussed; a mathematician, Kimbune, claims that a soul has been inherited along with a transmissible cancer once carried by her husband, because the inheritor of the cancer expressed an identical stubbornnes. Baru prods her about memories, the question of whether Abdumasi could remember something he shouldn’t, but it is not memories that Kimbune is concerned with: it is a way of being and thinking. Dynamics.

Contra Xate Yawa, we continue to find people very mysterious. But the concept of an ‘inner law’ is a fruitful one. We can think of it as something like a program: the ‘system’ which determines what a person would think, say and do in any given situation.

thinking phenomena

We should briefly comment on the subjective experience of thoughts, here. Like many but apparently not all people (the quoted numbers seem to vary a lot), we experience a highly verbal stream of consciousness (aka ‘inner monologue’ or ‘intrapersonal communication’). We tend to think in sentences; sometimes images (we have come to suspect we may have a mild aphantasia).

But where do these thoughts ‘come from’? For us it is as if they ‘bubble up’ in some vague form: a sentence is coming, but we have to sort of let it run through to actually become language. After a sentence has been thought, we can perceive it from the point of view of the currently ‘active’ sentence.

Not every thought is rendered verbal like this, however. We do not have to consciously, verbally think through every action we might take, although sometimes we will talk ourselves through the actions that need to be taken (incantation: “a series of operations need to be performed in sequence”.)

Indeed, since we started observing all this closely, we notice that often our body will start carrying out an intention without any conscious or verbal direction: for example, a need to plug in our phone charger would be directed to the series of movements, even if the conscious linguistic part of the brain is busy thinking very hard about something else, and was slightly surprised to realise that our body had seemingly carried out some actions on its own.

Now, enter the effects of psychedelics (c.f. analogistically). We should be very careful in interpreting psychedelic experiences as genuine insight into the ‘inner mechanisms of consciousness’. But it is still useful to describe them.

When under the effects of, say, mushrooms, it is as if some of these capacities will become separated out. We may find ourselves standing in a fixed posture, not connecting the discomfort we might be feeling to an instruction to change posture until we consciously think through the need to move. Or, we may perceive the language centre as sort of ‘running on its own’, spinning filler sentences while it waits for another part of the mind to feed it something to encode into language.

Of course, these are not neutral observations. We know that brains are parallel; that there are specialised areas which handle specific functions. We do not claim to have directly observed these; it is possible that the brain is conjuring the image it expects to see.

Nevertheless, experiences like this reinforced our sense of the following: the pronoun ‘I’ hides a shifting cluster of elements which it doesn’t necessarily make sense to always refer to as the same being.

the ‘I’ function

So, semiotics. Signifier, signified, and suchlike subjects.

Among all the different cognitive mechanisms is at least one that identifies ‘the self’. It is the mechanism that answers the question of ‘who am I’, but also a vague sense of ‘me-ness’ that pervades thoughts and attaches to the representations of other entities.

We’ve been discussing this with members of plural systems we are friends with. A plural brain is one capable of expressing multiple different ‘I’ functions (and building personas to match, as we’ll get into), either at different times, or in association with certain thoughts (modelled as a headmate interjecting with a comment). This function is not always entirely concrete: for some systems it takes some time to figure out who is fronting when they wake up, and it must be inferred from certain cues like what they can most easily remember, while for others (including other members of the same system) instantly ‘just know’.

We are (sometimes) a computer-programmer-system, and most of our language for describing complex processes comes from the field of computing. We will do our best to explain anything technical that happens to come up in this investigation.

So, let’s consider the ‘working memory’: the various elements of semantic, episodic and procedural memory that are ‘active’ at a given time. Although ‘procedural memories’ are usually conceived of as ‘memories of how to do a thing’ (e.g. how to stay on a bike), we think the concept is probably something a lot more broad: perhaps in fact all memories can be thought of as ‘programs’.

One of these programs is the ‘I’ function.

We can think of the ‘I’ function as something which returns a reference or pointer. A means of resolving a symbol, with other symbols.

It perhaps relates to capacities like proprioception. A commonly needed piece of information like ‘where is my hand right now’ can be glossed as ‘lookup the entity “I” and then find the hand that belongs to it’; then the context could be queried again like ‘look up This Hand and find its location property’. We can observe that this functionality becomes disrupted under the effect of psychedelics: when close to someone it becomes hard to tell whose body part is whose. Is that my hand or your hand?

This ‘I’, and its interpretation, encapsulates and obscures a huge amount of information. For example, I can currently retrieve a memory of our body picking up and playing the erhu this afternoon or being in Switzerland a week ago; from this, I can create a sentence like ‘I played the erhu’.

However, the body-process thing that is being called “I” was in a very different frame of mind at the time “I” played the erhu, and wandered through many different states of mind in Switzerland, than “I” am now; in the intervening period, I frequently fell asleep, dreamed etc. This is inevitable; but what is particular to our experience is the frequent feeling of dislocation from past actions or thoughts; feeling that we do not understand the reasons we thought, spoke or acted the way we did.

So I could instead assert that ‘I’ right now refers to the process that is generating these words (the only ‘I’ implied by ‘cogito ergo sum’); is it only by convention that we insist this is the same ‘I’ which generated the actions that this body performed when it picked up and played the erhu earlier?

It is not that these two ‘I’s are unrelated. But perhaps they are better modelled by a ‘we’, the sort of ‘we’ of a group such as a team.

Language is mutable, vague and flexible in ways that philosophers have spent centuries unpicking; contextually, everyone will know what is meant by ‘I played the erhu this afternoon’. (Assuming they know what an erhu is, anyway.) They can at least vaguely imagine “me”, meaning my body, and whatever they think of as ‘my mind’—however I look in their mental model of the author of this text!—picking up the instrument and playing a song on it.

In a context like this one, though… in the context of the inner monologues that have been generated in the last month within this body… it suddenly became urgent to start peeling apart the different elements of ‘I’.

human experience // fragmented

There are many common phrases that gesture towards the idea of multiple ‘minds’ sharing a body in the ‘normal human experience’.

You might say ‘I don’t know what came over me, I wasn’t in my right mind’. You might say, ‘I’m in two minds about this’. You might engage in explicit self-talk, perhaps even using ‘we’ pronouns: ‘we should get some food’. You might claim an absence of ‘self-control’, implicitly suggesting there is something to be controlled and something to do the controlling.

You might have different personas that belong to different contexts. We learned about something in psychology called self-categorisation theory, a body of research about how people engage in ‘self-stereotyping’, defining themselves more as a member of a collective than an individual, and thus generate their thoughts and feelings according to context. Phrases like ‘As a fan, I think…’ might explicitly call attention to the role being played, but the influences of this sense of being a role are for the most part subtler.

Not only this, but temporal coherence is a constant challenge for humans! Tools like the calendar, the alarm, the diary, the note to self and so on exist to establish a channel of communication between your present self and a future self. It is very common for a person to find something they wrote in the past and not understand why they wrote it, what context they were responding to, and so on.

Our memory, conceived in this view, is just one temporal communication channel between a succession of beings. The ‘selves’ we occupy at different moments can have more or less overlap or similarity.

Once you start noticing this kind of thing you pretty quickly get Baader-Meinhof‘d on it. Turns of phrase that held no special significance suddenly start resonating with the idea.

The fear you had, that your thoughts and opinions shift depending on who you’re standing next to, that you are a vacillator, a sycophant… that can be dissolved and remodelled into a new self-conception, acceptance that you are a collective of fragments.

This sense of fragmentation and dis-association can go much further, though.

word-matryoshka

In the milieus we inhabit, it is not entirely uncommon to see oneself as a hollow vessel, something less than “a person” (this thing from which so much is expected) and more like a conduit for… something. Words and other material to pass through. There are other depersonal metaphors, dolls being the most popular. Certain ways of speaking attach to such concepts: this doll, awawa. (Of course this mixes in curious ways with BDSM archetypes.)

What about the modelling of other minds? We can speak of specialist domains, the theatre or the RPG group… but it is not necessary to perform to achieve such an effect: merely encountering the words of another in a story, real or fictional, is sufficient to conjure a model of them in your mind and generate what they are likely to be feeling. Less than that, even: merely engaging in a conversation.

Every so often, writers will hit on the realisation that writing is something like a form of mind control. Just for a moment, you shape the linguistic flow of thoughts in someone’s head; what they will do with the decoded sentence is their business, but if you understand the magic working you are performing, you can hope to conjure up images, evoke emotions, all that good stuff. (Of course, you cannot do so with any exactness: your reader will combine it with unknowable things in their own context; the model they assemble will not map 1:1 to yours, or another reader’s.)

i’d like to put some of our words from this morning here

we wanted to share an observation about books in the religions that have them. the contents of the book sort of matter but the ritual of having a book more so. books contain many language encoded thoughts and when your thoughts are wandering around being lots of different things, looking at the book will flood your memory-context with book-words and realign your thoughts towards book-associated shapes. for that function the repetitiveness and contradictory qualities of the book is actually desirable. makes it find more purchase so more effective temporal alignment tool for maintaining religionish thought behaviour patterns.

the reason we are thinking about this is because we were looking across the bed at a/s/l, thinking about which books (mostly about trans women having a bad time) we would put on our top shelf to feel the significance waft from them. thinking about abraxa (book character) and the sorceress, and how in the book the game they made pulls them back into the orbit of game text and the world they inhabited when it was created, how convincingly jeanne portrayed abraxa’s psychosis magic working to rekindle that world.

we don’t have one book, we have lots of books, lots of booklike things, which is maybe why we find it hard to be one person. every significant book/game/web thing etc. has thought patterns radiating from it (in its place in memory and in a way the physical artefact of the printed book as well). we are in part assembled out of lots of different pieces of book combining unpredictably like molecules in the primordial soup.

putting rituals around the book makes it radiate brighter, not just the thoughts in the book but the thoughts related to reading the book. perhaps this is why we hold onto copies of the most important books even after we’ve read them. this is a way of affecting a realm of invisible things (thoughts, minds etc) so it is magic as we are defining it.

It is so. We’ll need to get into the magic side of things later. For now we should discuss the boooooks.

(Thank you for reading so far. The discussion continues in part 2)

Disaggregation, part two

2026-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

this is a book article but it is also part of a ritual and an exploration; you can join here, but you may prefer to join at the beginning for proper context.

book 1: Persona
book 2: A/S/L
1. wot happens in the book
space for a sorceress
betrayal

book 1: Persona

OK, let’s get into this one. Because foooooof.
yeah fooooooof. aoife was wielding some real sorcerous powers when she wrote this book. it wrapped us up in its whorls and truths.
Let’s describe the book, in case our readers haven’t read it, and also to make sure it is fresh in our mental shared context.

Persona is a horror novel by Aoife Josie Clements. We became aware of Aoife thanks to her role in Castration Movie; we are in a discord server with her as a result of that. It can be positioned in relation to the current wave of trans guro horror seen in authors like Alison Rumfitt and Gretchen Felker-Martin (whose endorsement is listed on the cover), but it is thankfully less of a direct political polemic or self-conscious of how transgressive~ it is, even if it is very very directly concerned with the abjection we face.
it’s a book about dissociating to shit. of being an interchangeable thing. of breaking under the gaze of the world. of negation.
So we can begin the plot summary-y section.

wot happens in the book

The book opens with the story of a trans girl called Annie, though the FPPOV makes it take a while until we get her name. A persistent sleepwalker as a child, Annie briefly eked out a living working in a kitchen, but increasingly became overcome by what we might describe as severe agoraphobia; she is overwhelmed by the gaze of the world.

As we hit the end of her sole relationship, a rather desperate affair with a server at the kitchen, Annie lives in a garbage-filled apartment, scraping by just enough from a job filling out meaningless online surveys to pay for food deliveries and hormones. Her attitude towards the bugs and filth is unusually positive; she seems to regard them with a kind of adoration. As the story begins, she attempts suicide.

As the first arc progresses, Annie’s perception takes on increasingly strange shapes, narrated in claustrophobic present tense; it is harder to tell what is ‘real’ as we slip in and out of flashback. But it’s not that she doesn’t have reason to be paranoid. The survey company somehow performs a surreal ‘full body scan’ that her computer should not be able to perform. At one point she wakes up from a failed suicide attempt on a subway line; she bites the conductor and runs through the city, an event that will have repurcussions.

But the thing that hits her hardest is that, bizarrely, in a throwaway online porn video, she sees the face of a performer who looks exactly identical to her.

(Do you wanna do the next bit?)
ok. absolutely. so the narration is very roundabout-loopwise-circumspect about what is happening, right? this is why we hesitate to spell it out all at once. because the buildup is such a big part of it. you must inhabit annie’s world for the shape of the ending to work.

you have theories, of course. you think perhaps this might be a DID story, like that one episode of paranoia agent. or that she has a twin. annie’s dealing with the same, she becomes more and more obsessive, trying to find another glimpse of this performer, figure out what it means.

it’s not just that she has an identical face; even her room is like a clean mirror of annie’s. she behaves in increasingly erratic ways to herself, dreaming of being trapped underground, waking to find she’s dug herself a hole; then she somehow witnesses her doppelganger in the identical apartment block across the street, fucking her ex, and their bodies merge into a kinda flesh scorpion.

is that where the novel is going? is this a supernatural horror novel? but it is time to be the other girl. because it turns out there is another girl.

and at first it seems that the other girl, amy, has more of her shit together, that she is the more normie to annie’s hikikomori. she is a cam worker, her clients are shit in the way clients tend to be, harassing her, wasting her time. she has friends, though she is clearly at some remove from them. she fills her mind with youtube ghost hunting videos and yoga and true crime, descriptions of the video interweaving into the narration as stream of consciousness wavers and wiggles
It’s a really nice writing trick. Captures perfectly the furious context-switching of living as an online being.
yeah fr. and like, she does not have her shit together much more than annie right? she’s barely holding on. she constantly has nightmares of a grasping arm, which can only be defeated by tracing lines to prove that it’s just a trick of the light. when she’s not doing cam work she is in some nebulous hr position for the same company as does annie’s surveys. she can’t help someone with his problems so she provokes him into getting fired. perhaps it’s not as strange as the ‘body scan’ in annie’s arc but this company is increasingly hard to explain.
Doing these online surveys probably is as fucked up and self-displacing as it is in the book though. Even if it’s not a front for, you know.
one of amy’s nebulous friends is an artist; she goes to her show, and her art is confrontational, and amy’s friend is having a bad time, but she hooks up with the guy who’s hosting the show and then it turns into a party where everyone does a ton of coke and they go to annie’s place and a guy has a psychotic episode trying to exorcise her and attempts suicide…

and we finally get the context for the video annie saw, which is basically straight up a rape given all the substances and power dynamics and all that. but in the aftermath, amy’s friends abandon her for being associated with the whole situation, for dissociating out herself and failing to help.

we see the same timeframe, some of the same events from amy’s side; amy becomes aware of annie thanks to one of those ghost-hunting videos, which misgenders and condescends about annie even as it chastises the viewers for voyeuristically treating a homeless person as a supernatural manifestation.

and like, this is going to shade into the stuff we’ll be talking to with a/s/l, this figure of the total tranny schizo exile, social alien, homo sacer and all that shit: this possibility corner that haunts all of the discourses that shape our lives. but we know annie by this point. we have seen inside her world. without love it cannot be seen, of course.

anyway by weird coincidence amy finds annie’s ex and hooks up with him (so that’s real) in an effort to get to annie. and it kinda… works? she sees annie, finds out where she lives, does not turn into a weird flesh scorpion. the two girls make contact and a kind of mania erupts. they feel a strangely fervent connection; they agree to skip town, to tear down all the layers of rubbish in annie’s apartment and go away together in amy’s car, the proposals of where to land kind of vague. they both lie to each other and yet both of them seem to actually understand the other in a way nobody else does. neither of them can afford to let go of this.

and you want this for them. you want them at last to live. of course you do. how can you read this book and not love these girls by this point?

but first they try to visit annie’s dad. and he doesn’t exist, her house isn’t real, her memories are entirely false, there was never anything there. so they get over their reluctance, they go to the company, because now they have to know.
Some of the reviewers on Goodreads found the ending unsatisfying but for us, it really, dramatically hit. It makes it all come together.
annie and amy descend into the strangely enormous shaft beneath the company, a huge stone staircase labelled ‘the abattoir’ in weird greasepaint layers. they separate at the bottom. amy cannot resist going on; annie goes into the weird underground management suite.

annie discovers a man busily conversing about ‘the product’. sort of a scientist discussing how these products don’t really have consciousness, of how to spin this to the public, contradicting himself repeatedly. they do not have consciousness, but perhaps they represent the next step in human potential; that some of them transition and pursue sex work and suchlike things is a success of the program, or a defect, or an expression of something. by this point aoife has us by the neck.

amy goes to the abattoir.

on the way down she falls and breaks her legs. delerious, she witnesses this huge bioreactor column, an industrial process of making these clone-like bodies; fragmentary bodies are emerging from the muck, climbing over each other, rubbing and fucking and grasping. randomly, some are dragged up to the light by these silver surgical arms. they graft on faces for release, or else methodically take them apart and cast them back into the muck.

the bodies are all the same stuff. nutrients, raw life, body soup (with penises, the narration makes note of their penises, some of them have boobs too). the book frames it as a kind of thing that pre-exists the company, something they are exploiting. there is suggestion of an origin, of whom all these bodies are clone; perhaps a defective origin, which gives them their transness “defect” or expressive potential.

there are two epilogues. we find out what becomes of annie. she lurks in the cracks of another city, informal sex work, couchsurfing, something tenuous on the edge of the peopleworld. and we get a second-person epilogue, in which someone witnesses these new clone people being put out on the TV, and retreats from the world to a closed fortress; the narration imputes you with a disgust at your ‘children’, who “are able to conceptualise even less about the outside world than you can, but are now tasked with inventing entirely new ways of being in order to fill the vacuums of power and meaning left by the failed world you created.”

and on this note it ends.

the ‘default persona’ and the muck

The title of the book is ‘Persona’, and from the outset, Annie thinks of the personas she inhabits; notably the ‘Default Persona’ of online, an incurious and hostile man’s role, a creature which seeks isolation and resents the intrusion of figures like ‘The Girl’, who intrudes into the fantasy of non-existence, of negation. While this is framed as a chat room role it seems that the model is equally if not more the world of imageboards.

A quote, in which Annie considers, before her descending spiral really kicks in, the shape of Online in the form of an anon chat room:

You might expect, as many people once expected, that fungible anonymity would allow for more fluid and sincere personal expression than the limitations of a single identity. In reality, though, in the chat room, anonymity instead boils down the chaos of a conversation with multiple participants into a single voice, shouting itself into eternity in a beautiful, worthless mass expenditure of energy. It strips away our individual features so that we all emerge as, talk as, the Default Persona. The Default Persona within this space is a white male, approximately 18 to 30 years old, who has been gifted with historically miraculous comforts but whose shamefully masculine pride bristles against him. This is an easy thing to be, a safe thing to be. As long as you follow the code of anonymity, as long as you talk in this voice too, you can slide by, an unnoticed witness.

But, she goes on to note, there are other personas you can inhabit. Of particular note is The Girl, whose presence and existence is a fundamental challenge to the Default Persona. Her presence ‘In Here’ represents a failure far greater, and also a threat. A series of statements are elaborated.

She does not belong here … She is far worse than us for being here … She just needs to learn the rules of the game … She represents creativity and the world, and the Default Persona demands eternal negation.

And Annie continues to inhabit the default persona, here, not The Girl:

I’ve grown comfortable in his contradictions. While the Default Persona says he believes in things, the things he believes rarely seem to line up. Instead, any conversation with him, as him, is a game of invention, and reinvention, the constant creation and destruction of identity for rhetorical advantage, scoring cheap points off the naive enjoyment of anything. To come into this world attempting unguarded connection is to invite total evisceration, consumption and excretion by the hall of mirrors

She writes of dissociating through her childhood, of burying herself in the “spectacular underground” of extreme pirated media:

It felt good learning forbidden things: I was being taken seriously as an adult, even if I was constantly being torn down as a human being, let alone as a Girl.

And before long she had internalised the Default Persona. Ominously, Annie remarks:

Me and him are one and the same now, and in my head I carry his voice, his opinions, an awareness of what he would say in any given situation, the desire to say it, and the knowledge that silence is always better.

so we have this sharp, atomic breakdown of the world of anon, the imageboard mask; and we have this lurid, feverish image of the bodies being made and unmade like the tank of Rei clones, and rereading the former throws the latter into resonance. this muck is what we creatures of the Wired emerged from. we were chosen, randomly, to have the seed of becoming something else planted in us. were chosen by the arm; selected to become the Product instead of biomass.

why? no reason at all. we are made of the same stuff. our brain is a shapable plastic learning engine, ready to be filled with stories, same as the rest. but we switched contexts, again and again, didn’t we? we planted image after image into the clay. innumerable subcultures and discourses. we would read about the struggles that came and went and here and there we would get caught up in the fury.

we are called things, sometimes. we were called a caring nerd, and that made us feel good. one friend said we were a polymath. another, an aesthete. we greedily reach for any external description of what we are, or what we have seemed to be, even mockery, perhaps especially gentle mockery that carries the form of recognition. because from ‘in here’ it is so hard to discern.

ironically if we are anything now it is this being of questioning. we probe and probe and talk about weird philosophical cybergothic things like the character in yvette’s first book. we are the only person who says things like “I need to act like a stereotype of myself so you remember who I am.” but really it is us who are trying to remember who we are.
We can give you autobiographical information of course. We don’t tend to forget where we live, and so far nobody has wanted a name besides ‘Bryn’ or ‘canmom’. Enough processes are active as to hold onto this information.
‘bryn’ is a kind of anchor. ‘canmom’ is something we have ended up with.
Our body-interface, as you would put it, has a shape as well. We’ve worked to make it softer.
estroglyphs and spiroglyphs… or decapetylglyphs… surgeryglyphs

a memory of a demonstration

The fascist woman in the spy x family t-shirt had come out to the demonstration too, from god knows where. Antifascists had come out to confront her group. That day’s Bryn had heard on the web that more bodies were needed, so she cycled down to the demonstration, like she used to do in the old days.

By the time she arrived, the balance of power was already with the antifascists. Most of the fash had left, a tiny core remaining, crowded against a shop front, separated from Our Side by a thin police line. The usual chants and shouts were going across it, but no projectiles. Someone had found a sound system and a mic. The shoppers wandered by with mild curiosity, sometimes approached and even joined the demonstration.

a thing that happened

Disaggregation, part three

2026-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

this is a book article but it is also part of a ritual and an exploration; you can join here, but you may prefer to join at the beginning for proper context. we are talking about books introduced in part two. and we must talk a bit about ants.

writing as a pheromone trail
plural technology//plural sorcery
1. writing and training of thoughts
we

writing as a pheromone trail

wanna do the intro about ants?
An ant colony is a system which performs certain behaviours, such as finding food sources and bringing them back to the ant colony. It is the classic example of a ‘superorganism’; evolutionarily, the individual ants are subsumed to the reproduction of the whole collective of sibling ants who share most of their genetic material, and thus it is adaptive for them to adopt strategies where a bunch of them like, die and stuff.

Anyway, ants have a very elegant mechanism to find food. As ants wander around, they leave a trail of pheromones in the world. When they find food, they take some and walk back along their pheromone trail, which leads back to the colony - and also reinforces that pheromone trail, marking it as a route to food. Other passing ants may detect this trail and follow it to join in on the food source. This can be simulated on a computer; creative programmer Pezzza has a fascinating series of videos on simulating the behaviour of ants.
the ants are doing a kind of stochastic search of a space. whole lot of problems can be seen in this light, including of course ‘stochastic gradient descent’ and ‘evolutionary algorithms’, but also things like ‘monte-carlo integration’, ‘metropolis light transport’…

ok so now think about brains. they’re generating thoughts by all these different contextual mechanisms, stuff that cascades into a series of other thoughts. which train of thought you go down is semi-random but it is a patterned randomness. if thoughts are interesting, you’re likely to follow them again. and you can also induce other people to follow them…

so we can think of the trains of thought generated by your brain as being like ants. the nectar they are looking for is… insight, challenge, emotional fulfilment, protection from danger, all the things that thoughts do; but overall it is ‘interest’. a bored mind has its ants running around aimlessly looking for something to think about. a focused mind has its ants running along a trail.
Not sure that last part of the analogy holds up… it’s less ‘bring the food back to the nest’, and more ‘try to find the next step’.
sure. not a perfect analogy.

but in any case, as far as writing. let’s consider what happens when you write a book. you put a lot of effort into refining the pathways of thought that the reader will follow as they interact with the book. the reader will still be exploring the space around your path—and note that the deserialised thoughts in their head will have a different representation and exist in a different space than the ones in the author’s head.

this means the purpose of writing is not originality exactly, but to find good pathways through the space and guide minds—your mind, and other minds—to follow them in their explorations. most effective when decoded into a somewhat similar space, of course. but the pathways generated by the pheromone trails create the contours of the spaces.
So the door that Sash and Abraxa opened for Lilith…
abraxa’s magic working in the book is a pheromone trail even though she is fictional. because jeanne has created such a compelling image of how she thinks, it is a strong pheromone trail. and jeanne is following the pheromone trails of other people, who may or may not also be fictional.
In the endnotes of the book, Jeanne mentions talking to her therapist about Internal Family Systems theory, and The Far Side of Madness by John Weir Perry, and Maps to the Other Side by a Sascha Altman DuBrul. We have read neither of those, but those are some of the pheromone trails which shaped her thought-paths, right?
the crucial thing though is that it interacts with actual experiences, not just other texts. that is what stops us getting stuck in a basin. the constant interaction with the wider world.

plural technology//plural sorcery

so it’s time to talk about magic probably
We kind of already are, huh. But for the readers’ sake, what are we using this word ‘magic’ to mean?
for our purposes, the basic contention is that magic is a means to use symbolic methods to interact with invisible and abstract things. this is maybe a somewhat orthogonal concept to what is usually conceived of as magic. our concept of magic is entirely compatible with a materialist worldview, which other ideas aren’t.

it owes something to the neoplatonist conception of programs-as-intention described by that biologist we encountered last year, michael levin, a body of theory which really dances at the edge of being crank stuff but hits on some genuinely fascinating novel creations; biobots and neural cellular automata and morphological compilers.
OK. But lets start with something that can conventionally be called magic, to see if we can put across what we are getting at here. We can talk about sigil-based magic.
ehehe queers love our sigils
As Uminekoheads in the chat know, the Key of Solomon is one of a number of grimoires circulating in the European ‘Renaissance’, and it is followed a century or two later by another Lesser Key of Solomon. They describe rituals, demons whose powers can supposedly be called upon, and sigils to command them, all ordered into a great big list.

These books can be reasonably criticised as being clunky appropriations of poorly understood Kabbalah; on a literary level they might be called repetitive and opaque and narrow in their aspirations and all sorts of stuff. They are popular today largely because they got picked up by a charismatic figures of the early 20th century occult movement, Crowley and that lot. Nowadays they are a well established established bit of visual iconography in the cultural stew, a go to representation of The Occult. You can get them printed on a bag.

The notion of ‘sigils’ would later be picked up and emphasised by the chaos magic tradition, where it would be separated from a specific symbolic language; the practitioner is instead encouraged to create their own asemic script and inject it with personal meaning. Here the idea of magic working on the mind is made much more explicit; the magician is supposed to forget the meaning of the sigil, to allow the ‘thoughtform’ to do its work unconsciously.
yes. we are in the concept-space-zone of “magical language”. so the celestial alphabet. the hebrew letters on the sigils. daoist fulu. ofuda. contracts with the devil.
Creating sigils and magic circles and the like is an archetype for interaction with the world. You do something visible with symbols, and some invisible state changes as a result, causing a cascade of consequences. It turns out, sometimes that actually works, in a way you can meaningfully confirm.

I think ‘you’ would probably say writing is magic, and it is the scaffolding for further magic. We teach all of our children to perform magic. We teach them to interface with a world of invisible powers: electric and magnetic fields, computer programs, countries, laws, money, gender, metaphor, social roles, minds. We teach them rituals to appease these powers and how to allow these structures to exist on the substrate of our bodies. (I won’t go over the ‘magic circle’ and the ‘egregore’ again here; enough has been written on that on this website already.)
そうです。by training their brains to interact with such systems, by building them up on a group of people and allowing their brains to learn how they work through interaction, them we create the spaces of meaning that their ‘selves’ can exist in. ‘socialisation’, process by which we train the persona & processes of the surrounding society into their minds. that is how a glider propagates one step further.

the fascists talk about trans existence as a ‘social contagion’. but the entirety of society, every thing that we are, propagates by the same sort of contagion. so like, the point of socialisation is not to just train one role, but to implement the whole social stack. which is just a sorta technomagical spin on like, the general concept of learning! but that’s what it is.

sigils, then. we started with the most obvious things that ‘count’ as sigils, but the idea can get pretty damn abstract. like the solomon stuff is pretty oldschool. when you hear about grant morrison trying to make a hypersigil by writing comics… the ‘sigil’ is an entire creative work which is reckoned as an act of occultism. and you can say, like, that’s just mystique building, to get you to buy their comics. but mystique building is magic. it’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. (c.f., baru article 3)
Right. The sigil stuff comes up in Jeanne’s book: Sash tells her friends that the developers of Mystic Knights are doing occult workings, making sigils by creating the games. Which is probably a remix of the Grant Morrison thing, right?
mm. worth noting all this ritual is also technology: a learnable, imitable method to accomplish something. in this case, to perform transitions through the spaces of minds.

so, gender transition is one such technology. it allowed us to escape from default personas and become a creature capable of touch and connection. we’ve come to think plurality is a technology too.
What does that technology exist to accomplish?
there are various answers but one is that it simply exists, and people are using it and entering into a space. (an abstract space, like a high-dimensional vector space with certain dynamics built on it.)
And what is to be found in that space? Why should we go there?
maybe when you’re inbetween too many spaces it helps us find any space at all to anchor to? maybe because we found our way there by accident, and now wish to be able to explore it more consciously; and we cannot come back so we must make sense of where we are.
Here’s a theory. I don’t know that you will like this theory.
i have some idea but speak it.
We want to be plural because if we are plural we decisively belong to the field of weirdo trannies. We could try being an it/its awawa dollgirl or something but ‘plural system’ seems more compatible. In all these different personas we contextually inhabit in the way all humans do, we sometimes have to adapt to corpo-type panopticon spaces, and we want to make sure we do not forget our loyalty to the Wired, to the Abraxa and the Annie beings of this world.
notably that theory does not mean we aren’t, or can’t be, plural?
True. But it makes it sound less like a voyage of self-discovery and more like another desperate attempt to assimilate to a group.
it doesn’t work. we wouldn’t be doing all this work to dissolve all concepts into atoms if we only wanted to fit in, we’d just pick some random conceptualisation and run with it. we do love and admire our plural friends but it is for the specific beings they are and not just because of what they represent in the plane of symbols.
But you’re saying we’re built out of this plane of symbols, aren’t you?
no. we are built out of system-dynamics. the symbols are just a means to create the interaction space.

like, think about computer programs, right? it’s kind of hard to define what a program does except in relation to other things. because you can store state anywhere. a function transforms some bits and puts them somewhere and later a another function will read those bits and put some other bits somewhere else. on the local scale it means nothing. it’s only in aggregate, the big pattern that can only be seen ‘from the outside’, that we can see what the program is actually doing.

we have been brought into resonances by the actual, direct contact with the systems inside our friends, whether they identify as plural or not. this is how the contextual personas emerge. don’t reduce it.
I think that answers my fear.
good. it is good to be able to switch perspectives. flip the chessboard.
It is odd, thinking about it, that I identified Abraxa as a creature of the Wired. Because she is not that, not exactly. She makes her working by isolation from the Wired; by distancing herself from the contexts of regular society (the ‘System D’) to create a space of meaning where things could happen without exposure to the panopticon-light, the force that would bring her thoughts back into alignment with the rest.
is the wired the internet, though?
Hmm. No. It’s something else, isn’t it?
we should probably check. does the reader know about lain?
Of course the reader knows about Lain, right? Everyone knows about Lain. Even if it’s just like, that girl on the cover of the breakcore mix.
you’re funny. i don’t think everyone does know about lain.
OK. Sure. Serial Experiments Lain is an anime series; it is described as ‘cyberpunk’ but ultimately a work that sorta defies categorisation. It is full of richly resonant symbols. Yoshitoshi Abe’s designs with that distant-gaze expression that are empty and yet suggest all sorts of things behind; the deceptive simplicity of the drawings, the disconcerting wires and searing lighting; the inscrutable nonlinear plotting; the fact she actually canonically is plural and one of her is becoming god or something.

Anyway. The Wired is full of strange creatures, people inhabiting nonhuman bauplans, secretive organisations. It is a vision of the internet of the late 90s, before anyone had any real experience with what was soon to unfold; back when the internet was a hole for strange people to hide in and not the mass of Everyone.
The line between the strange-person hole and the overwhelming mass is pretty nebulous, isn’t it. Consider aoife’s words on the default persona. Consider that the writer of Lain went on to become a right-wing conspiracy theorist.
who are you, person3 (purple)? where did you emerge from?
I thought I was you, because I was responding to person1 (green), but then it didn’t seem like a very person2 thing to be thinking, so I realised I must be a third thing. Hello. I suppose I am trying to steer us away from potholes.
Well, welcome to the party. If we three stick around, we will have to adopt names or something.
do we? there is something comforting about being a nameless swarm of beings, any of which can be Bryn.

writing and training of thoughts

Writing must be read to do anything, right?
yes. absolutely. a serialisation that is never decoded is just bits. it is only meaningful by interaction with a larger system.
Of course, writing is read by the author before anyone else. This is how we iterate. We lay down sentences, and that is a pheromone trail to guide us back to where we got to so we can explore further.
we don’t just retrace the thoughts. by writing them down we can see them in a different spatial arrangement, recognise patterns, have stable structure.
Right, damn, yeah. Writing is ordered and serialised, unlike memory. It’s laid out on a page; we can move our attention around the whole piece and come back. That stability makes it possible to approach it with an editor’s perspective; to revise and adjust, which is hard to do when everything’s floating in the associative fog of memory.
right! writing is a technology, perhaps the most powerful technology that humans ever invented, because it is that constant transformation between fuzzy vibesy thoughtspace and serialised space that scaffolds us out into the space of thoughts.
There are multiple layers of such transformations, aren’t there? Between images and words inside the brain, and between thought words and spoken or written words. Each one is encountered slightly differently, and we procede by mapping one into the other.
just like how programming is mostly about transforming data into different structures!!!
Shit, yeah.
anyway, the processes, the things that we are made of, that are generating these contextual personas. those are different types of ant, aren’t they? different ways to extend and adjust the thought trail as we wander back and forth along it.
Perhaps we could also compare it to processes of erosion and sedimentation.
oho yeah that’s tasty too. longer-term shifts in the processes of thought.

think about learning to play a musical instrument, right? or a language. any complex skill really. at first, stupid hard. you have to think about literally everything. but over time, the other parts of your brain learn to model the conscious thought process. you impress those pathways, you create new ants.

which brings us back to plurality, tulpamancy and the like. the reason that pretending eventually becomes real. At first you have to think, ‘what would my tulpa think about this situation’. but over time, just like you develop a process for playing a musical instrument without conscious thought, your brain can take over modelling the tulpa without conscious thought along the lines of ‘what would the tulpa say’.

the theory of plural systems talks about finding ways to achieve ‘intra-system’ communication, to recognise switches, to build a ‘headspace’. these things are creating the mechanisms for a plural system to exist within.
So the answer to the ‘real’ vs. ‘iatrogenic roleplaying’ controversy that the wiki article spends so much ink on is, actually, both or neither. When you’re in the self-reference mines like this, the line between ‘roleplayed’ and ‘real’ is not actually a real one. This is perhaps an extension of the everything is roleplaying observation.

Just like the self-exciting gender instability, it’s not just that something like plurality is a pre-existing thing that must be discovered. Nor is it a purely arbitrary fantasy that is copied as a fad. It is a deep fundamental shift to the mechanisms of thought; it is also something a set of practices that must be learned, just like mathematics must be learned.
yes!! the fact that you have to build mathematics up in your brain does not mean that mathematics isn’t ‘real’.
What does that mean for maintaining the line between fiction and reality? Because that line is very important. Getting mixed up leads you to a lot of very dangerous places, like persecuting real people for having the wrong sort of fantasy, or conversely getting so caught up in fantasy that you act on it in the real world.
Pretty simple: the mechanisms that distinguish thoughts as belonging to the plane of reality or the plane of fantasy are things that need to maintained. You need to keep practicing recognising the distinction so that your ‘ants’ continue to push thought-paths in the direction of recognising it. If you spend a lot of time around kink people, that gets easier.
So this plural stuff… what plane does that belong to?
well, we have been thinking in these ways and so forth. we are fixated on this subject. it has already grown into something that is real about us. because things on the plane of thoughts and minds are invisible and shape themselves to the observer at the same time as being the observer, they are fundamentally quite mutable. we can reassess the evidence and conclude that we are plural and we will probably start acting in ways that are more plural as a result.

but we can take care not to lose our model’s connection with the worlds outside our head, because feedback mechanisms are powerful, it is so easy to get lost in our own coils.

we

Are we on Abraxa’s path? Sash’s path? Or Lilith’s path? Annie and Amy?
no. we’re on some other path. but our we can follow their thought-paths when we need to.

for now we have found a foothold in an economic system as Lilith did, even if in a weirdo niche like game development; we are not suppressing ourselves as sash spends most of the novel doing, but we certainly have in the past, and we relate hard to her proceduralisations and lists and fear of being evil. but we are drifting into stranger territories now. like Abraxa we have fallen through many different contexts and lives.

as for annie and amy, they inhabit a horror novel; theirs is not a story that permits happy resolution. their ways of being are necessary to comprehend. they have shown us the way we relate to the biomass tower and the bugs and the sandpaper worlds of the Wired. they are beautiful.

we love these girls, fictional or not. they represent something important.
Truly. We would not have been on the edge of tears in the air above France if they didn’t have power in their fictional thoughts.
yes. consider this also: Abraxa’s working does not fully fire off in the way she or the reader hopes, but it does something that might even be more important: it replicates the Sorceress, and the ways of her hosts, Abraxa and Sash and Lilith, the spaces they inhabit, and the thought-ways of people they remix and reflect, into the mind of the reader. they have made us understand why our projects matter. so her working is profoundly successful: it already brought together her three friends in our mind, in our hope, even if on the page it all falls apart once more…
So this is why we are making the game?
this is why we do any of it.

How many of us are in here?

2026-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

‘I’ have a number of friends who are ‘plural’; they comprise, or are part of, ‘plural systems’.

How to exactly explicate what that means is quite contentious. A simple, intuitive description is ‘there are multiple people in there’. A somewhat more medical definition, reflecting the psychiatric model defined in manuals like the DSM-V, is helpfully summarised by did-research.org:

Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is the disorder that was previously recognized as multiple personality disorder. It’s characterized by the presence of two or more dissociated self states, known as alters, that have the ability to take executive control and are associated with some degree of inter-identity amnesia. DID is caused by chronic childhood trauma and is highly associated with posttraumatic stress disorder.

Of course, whether the medical diagnosis of ‘DID’ is equivalent to the broader concept of ‘plurality’ is one of many contentious questions. There is no real consensus on much of anything in the various small and large groups of people who understand themselves under this umbrella term ‘plural’. Even the choice of language like ‘plural system’ is contentious. But that should hopefully give an idea of the basic concept we’re dealing with.

Phenomenologically, ‘from the outside’, plurality may be observed by seeing someone ‘switch’: this may be accompanied by a change in their accent, preferences, memories, affect etc. Switching can be very sudden, even happen abruptly in the middle of a conversation. For some people, the switch is quite noticeable. Some people experience ‘co-consciousness’, i.e. when another alter is fronting they may experience a sort of dissociated state of observing their actions as if from the ‘passenger seat’. For other people, there is a greater continuity of consciousness and it may take time to realise they’ve switched.

Am I plural? // Are we plural?

[My?] [Our?] reason for writing this essay is to try and draw together recurrent thoughts on the question of ‘am I plural’/’are we plural’. This is a question that has been latent in other writing on this website, for example The Maniple (which considers the theme of plurality in The Tyrant Baru Cormorant) and analogistically (which attempts to draw together thoughts and observations on consciousness after my first time using LSD.)

Unfortunately in English, which distinguishes first person pronouns by plurality, it’s impossible to even ask that question without biasing towards one or another answer, except by passive-voice constructions like ‘is this body inhabited by a plural system?’.

It would be reasonable to think that, by age 34, there would be a pretty clear answer to this question for any stream of consciousness inhabiting this particular body, but as will probably become apparent, every line of inquiry just leads to more questions. A helpful suggestion, provided by some plural friends, is to view it as a set of metaphors for understanding the self, which can exist on a continuum. To quote my friend Z.:

It’s a way of understanding yourself that’s self reinforcing. As I see it, the idea that we’re a consciousness that’s making decisions using logic and emotions is, as much as anything, a simplified model to make ourself more parsable to both ourself and others. We’re a complex biomachine pretending really hard to be a soul in a meatsuit. We need to be able to simplify our model of self/others or we wouldn’t be able to run internal simulations that have people in them, which is a pretty damn useful thing for a brain to do.

It’s a model that’s most useful if it’s accurate, and so our brains put no small amount of effort into both making the model fit the data and also trying to make our behavior fit the model. When the latter effort becomes too hard, folks end up having an identity crisis or similar, and reforming the model wholesale.

For some folks “I’m just me responding to different situations” is sufficiently coherent to function. For others “there’s one me, but I have facets like a cut gemstone - I appear different in different situations/from different angles in coherent/consistent ways that are worth noting and labelling” is what works best, and for others the entire attempt to cram all of the things their mind does into one identity just falls apart

Z. identifies a pretty important aspect of any effort towards introspection: it’s absolutely replete with observer effects. Every theory you might have can be confirmed by the brain ‘playing up to the model’. So it’s hard to just look inwards.

Nevertheless, the question remains. With this menu of potential self-metaphors, which ones do ‘I’ find most helpful?

I’ll probably end up using the word ‘I’ throughout the essay, as in this sentence, but it should be taken to mean only the ‘facet of self’ or ‘thread’ that is currently engaged in writing and not necessarily the ‘whole system’. Or, perhaps there will be a ‘we’ here and there; this isn’t necessarily a concession of plurality but may be the ‘mathematical we’. More on that later though.

Some existing narratives

You see ideas relating to plurality crop up in fiction plenty. In science fiction and fantasy, you might depict the spirit or ghost of someone being attached to another person’s body, and use all sorts of dramatic conventions to show conversations between these characters that happen ‘inside someone’s head’. Of course, in fiction, you can be very clear-cut on the line between two different characters. If a fictional character is depicted as holding a conversation with another mind in their head, depending on the sort of story you are reading, you may very well be able to take that as face value, as far as the ‘world’ of that story is concerned. (In another story, you of course might be wiser to take it as a metaphor.)

There are also of course depictions of characters who are explicitly plural in the terms we understand in the real world. For example, I’ve recently been reading Grant Morrison’s run of Doom Patrol, in which the character ‘Crazy Jane’ has dozens of alters with slightly different appearances and superpowers; at one point, another character descends into her mind space (the Underground) and the different alters are given distinct character designs. This story was based on the real-life account of the Troops, aka Truddi Chase, a plural writer whose autobiography was popular at the time. Here’s a nice review of Morrison’s depiction and how it relates to the Troops.

The idea of the self as being in some way multiple is also a recurring theme of psychology and related fields. Back in Freud’s day, you of course have the famous id, ego and superego, along with other categorisations of elements like desires and drives, and the conscious and unconscious. In more recent and mainstream psychiatry, you have for example schools like Internal Family Systems which attempts to categorise various elements of someone’s personality and categorise them as things like ‘exiles’, ‘managers’ and ‘firefighters’ and regarding each as serving a purpose, if sometimes one that’s misapplied. Some similar ideas exist in practices like dialectical behavioural therapy.

These accounts claim to be applicable not just to a minority of people with a specific unusual condition, but a way of modelling human minds in general—although maybe just one that is therapeutically useful rather than something like the fundamental ‘truth’ of the matter.

Deleuze and Guattari also expounded a rather plural-sounding idea in their books Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus in the 70s and 80s, which is kind of hard to explain because it’s responding to the tradition of psychoanalysis and if anyone loves complicated jargon, it’d be the psychoanalysts. Still, let’s give it a go: they’re interested in the process by which we come by desires; if I’m understanding right, they claim that under capitalism, we get constantly instilled with all sorts of contradictory desires by various social processes interacting in a huge complicated network of ‘desiring-machines’ and ‘desiring-production’. I find the language used by D&G and French psychoanalytic theorists like them a bit impenetrable, but it is quite possible I will be paralleling them in what follows.

There are also various different models which look at concepts moving independent of the minds which might be carrying them. For example, semiotics speaks of signifiers (symbolic pointers to something else) which might become nebulous in what they signify, perhaps even becoming a simulacrum which points to nothing except other signs. Elsewhere, ‘memes’ are proposed as a mental analogue to ‘genes’, as atomic ideas which can be replicated, in the hope that we could analyse the replication and evolution of a population of memes in the same way we do genes, and explain culture as a matter of adaptive fitness of memes. (This didn’t really pan out.) Jung imagined that there is a collective unconscious of default, baked-in archetypes which exist across different people and cultures, and also a ‘collective consciousness’ of shared social constructs in a particular society in which things like religion would reside. (Presumably, according to Jung, the latter would be more subject to change than the former, but in any case Jung’s collective unconscious is given little credence these days.)

And of course, in the domain of magic, the world may be seen as being replete with all sorts of spirits, thoughtforms, and other entities which can be interacted with through appropriate rituals. The egregore, for example, is imagined as a ‘group mind’ which is spread across multiple bodies. The word tulpa, originating in Tibetan buddhism, was popularised by the Victorian occult movement of Theosophy to refer to a type of spirit. In the late 20th century, this came to refer to a mind cultivated inside your own, a practice called ‘tulpamancy’. In terms of the standard language of plurality, this could be seen as an attempt to create an alter out of whole cloth; whether this is a ‘legitimate’ form of plurality compared to coming by it honestly through severe trauma or child abuse is a matter of contention.

Finally we have the idea of an imaginary friend, which is generally considered a benign thing that children do and then grow out of by the wider culture. And of course, we are constantly engaged with experiencing and creating fiction; it is not uncommon for players of roleplaying games or writers of novels to imagine their characters in other contexts and describe them as taking on a ‘life of their own’.

It would probably be very interesting to drill into all these ideas and see where they are similar and different, but that isn’t the focus of this essay. All of these feel like partial models, attempts to grasp the endlessly complicated phenomena by focusing on this or that part. I guess ‘my’ purpose here is to just to draw together various things I have in the back of my mind, to plunder them for relevant concepts and also figure out what may be influencing me.

Multitudes

I think just about anyone can recognise that they exhibit different ‘personas’ in different contexts. For example, you will act, think and feel differently at work, with your family, with your partner, with different friend groups, or perhaps when writing an essay on your website. This is not considered a form of ‘plurality’, but just universal human experience. We are also familiar with ‘altered states of mind’, e.g. from taking drugs, or ‘going into state’ as e.g. a sub in BDSM. Writing has been recognised by multiple people as a technology which lets you think things which would not be possible otherwise.

This is intimately related to the question of memory. Memories are retrieved ‘associatively’, which means that if you’re thinking about or experiencing something, you will be likely to recall memories related to that thing. This can go badly awry, as in the case of traumatic flashbacks; being reminded of one upsetting thing might bring other upsetting things to mind and cause you to ‘spiral’ into a much greater state of distress. Evidently there is some sort of escape hatch to this sort of feedback loop, though, because we don’t usually get stuck thinking about the same thing forever.

‘I’ have personally been formally diagnosed with ADHD and autism. This is a category that has been undergoing some revision in the last couple of decades, but it describes a pattern of difficulties with attention, memory and ‘executive function’. For ‘me’, it manifests as existing in one of two extreme states: an unfocused state where I can’t do much of anything that takes effort but randomly wander between whatever catches my interest, and a hard-to-direct ‘hyperfocus’ state in which I ‘lock in’ so hard that I forget to eat. Coming out of a state of hyperfocus can almost feel like ‘surfacing’ from beneath an ocean: suddenly, all the things I’ve been shoving out of my field of attention flood back in, and I remember everything else that is going on.

Autism is another condition that brings together a lot of different phenomena: intense passionate interests, difficulty reading faces or understanding social dynamics particularly among allistic (non-autistic) people, a tendency to ‘stim’ and echo nonverbal noises, sensitivity to texture and noisy environments, and the possibility to ‘overload’ and perhaps become nonverbal (unable to speak, but potentially able to write) when sensory stimulation gets too much. It’s also sometimes associated with a facility with manipulating formal systems and collecting information, or unusual ‘savant’ skills.

All of these are very likely to co-occur, and it seems that current thinking is that ‘ADHD’ and ‘autism’ are closely linked, but even so I admit I’m pretty skeptical that ADHD and autism are categories that successfully ‘carve reality at its joints’. There are of course various attempts to come up with a grand unified theory of autism etc., such as monotropism which puts a ‘cognitive strategy’ of focusing attention narrowly at the heart of it. I’m also not sure that’s right.

ADHD is sometimes associated with short-term memory issues; it is as if I have a small buffer to work with (like a CPU’s cache) and things I’m supposed to be holding onto can get accidentally overwritten by other things that are going on. Autism, as mentioned, is also associated with unusual memory stuff, like remembering loads of information about your special interest, and conversely, ‘faceblindness’ where you struggle to remember other peoples’ faces.

Along with these formally diagnosed issues, I am personally aware of a distressing feeling of an inconsistent ‘will’, which may or may not fall under ADHD. This is not just juggling a lot of different interests (science and art and programming and so on), though this is definitely a big part of it: one part wants to be an artist, another a mathematician or graphics programmer or learning a language and so on. For me, these tend to come in intense bursts where I will obsess about one thing and then may suddenly lose interest as something else eclipses it.

But it is also that at different times I will feel contradictory attitudes: I will find someone endearing or annoying, have different thoughts on an artwork, obsess over something that feels unimportant later, and so on. I think this is on the ‘normal human experience’ end of the scale, although there have definitely been pretty drastic cases of ‘what the hell was I even on about, why was this so important to me’ where past me feels somewhat alien. However, this variability, and its context-dependence, does seem relevant to the broader question, right?

I also have a tendency to be thinking about or doing multiple things at once, at least when I’m not in the state of hyperfocus. If I’m in a voice chat, it helps me a lot to draw a picture or do something else non-linguistic with my hands and eyes, so that I’m not tempted to start reading text which will distract me from the conversation I’m having and cause me to miss what people are saying. It’s as if these faculties—language processing and the process of making art—are performed by separate ‘modules’ of the brain. (By contrast, it would be nearly impossible to do something like coding, which requires me to read and write text.)

I’m recapping all this because I feel like all of this stuff about memory and different ‘states’ is going to be relevant to what I’m trying to understand about ‘me’/’us’.

Context-dynamics split

As much as I hate to admit it, the invention of language models (see heuristic bags and dodgy metaphors) has influenced me in the idea of separating ‘context’ and ‘dynamics’. Here, the weight matrices of a so-called ‘neural network’ model the way text can go to slightly longer text, storing something like the ‘physics’ of language. By loading different text in as inputs, you can easily elicit different ‘personas’ in the text sampled from a language model. Since the model has been trained to maintain consistency with the text that has been fed in, the model’s text will tend to stay ‘in-character’, but the same set of weights could easily be playing contradictory ‘characters’ in response to many queries at once (and usually is, since queries are often processed in batches).

Something similar is actually pretty fundamental to computing, really: the separation of some data passing through the machine as the ‘instructions’ and another part as ‘input data’ or ‘program state’. Under the von Neumann architecture, both are loaded from the same source, and what is ‘data’ for one program (like a compiler) can be ‘instructions’ for another. But we still draw a separation once we reach the CPU itself: instructions go in one place, register values and memory reads go in another.

It’s not hard to imagine a similar split existing in the brain (and also a similar ambiguity). We could speculate that various elements of the brain can represent ‘dynamics’ of thought, but what that will result in will depend on its inputs: what memories you happen to recall, what’s in your sensory environment, what you’ve recently been thinking about, etc. Much as a computer has a hierarchical structure of permanent storage, volatile storage (‘memory’ or ‘RAM’), cache, and registers (in order of increasing speed and decreasing capacity), it also seems that there is a similar stack of ‘readiness to thought’ in a mind: a huge ‘long-term memory’ containing whatever you’ve stored about everything that happened in your life, a ‘short-term memory’ of stuff you’ve been thinking about in the last few minutes or hours, and a current ‘execution thread’ of whatever you are thinking about ‘right now’.

At this point I should also note the distinction between ‘episodic memory’, of things that happened to you; ‘semantic memory’ of general information about the world not tied to a specific time; ‘procedural memory’ of how to do things; possibly other categories. The first two are considered explicit memory, the latter is a type of implicit memory.

Since I know the brain does a lot in parallel, and also I have a subjective sense of potential thoughts or things I might say ‘bubbling up’ from somewhere in an implicit form, one metaphor I have at the moment is to imagine my/our brain as comprising a large amount of different small ‘mechanisms’ which respond contextually to specific things. My behaviour is created by some sort of ‘chorus’ of these mechanisms; the whole is comprised of many tiny parts, like a coral reef. Different groups of mechanisms can be ‘louder’ at once, giving rise to different states of mind. Thus, I can get ‘sucked in’ to something, as more nearby elements of the chorus are activated. (I am probably influenced in this description by knowledge of cortical columns, but I am definitely not going to speculate that this metaphor is so accurate as to be directly mapped to neurological elements.)

I could speculate that the limited memory window of ADHD might make it more likely that I’d jump between more or less distinct states, with just a narrow and immediate context to hold onto that can more easily flush out other stuff and get me caught up in a bubble. In that regard, it may explain why ‘grounding exercises’ where I focus my attention to various sensory experience could work: they could help put other stuff ‘into context’ and flush the cache a little.

A simple account of one mechanism that could give rise to ‘plurality’ might be to think of these groups of related memories and small ‘pieces’ becoming isolated into ‘islands’ or (to borrow a term from machine learning) ‘basins’ of memories. ‘Who is fronting’ could act as a kind of ‘main key’ to your memory, resulting in the phenomenon of different alters having different memories. This is akin to crystal formation, where new atoms arriving from a fluid can attach themselves to one or another growing lattice.

The question then is how useful is it to take that space of variation and attempt to map it. This feels like it may be a one-way door: once I/we start committing those names to different aspects of my/our sense of self and conceiving of separate ‘parts’, they won’t readily be erased, right? But if they’re already well on their way to formation, then perhaps it would be more sensible to let them finish taking on distinct identity.

Bang-addressing and temporal continuity

A common practice in media-fan subcultures is to distinguish different variations of a fictional character with a notation like ‘player!Battler’, where some description is prefixed to the name with an exclamation mark (aka bang). Apparently it dates back to ‘bang paths’ on the early internet.

This is a simple way to refer to different facets of self without necessarily assigning them distinct names or assuming they’ll stick around. For example, I might distinguish ‘introspective!Bryn’, ‘defensive!Bryn’, ‘physicist!Bryn’ and so on to describe specific modes I recognise myself existing in; then I could say something like ‘introspective!Bryn tends to come out late at night’. I can also describe modes I tend to speak or write in: punctuation!Bryn vs. lowercase!Bryn for example may represent different ways of thinking. (This essay is evidently written by a punctuation!Bryn.) Is this a description of plurality/fronting or merely a description of different modes of a singular entity? Well, mu, I guess.

What even is a person? Besides, of course, a miserable little pile of secrets.

In a Newgrounds cartoon, Tide of Tears Ep. 2: Yesterday’s Booty, a pirate captain digs up buried treasure he’d left before, only to realise he’d already gone back and dug it up and even left a message for his future self.

Past Pete (letter): Good luck explaining this to the crew! Hahahahaha.

Pete: Arrr. Past Pete always exploits me lack of temporal self-continuity.

A less jokey version of this idea forms the basis for Existential Comics #1, in which the thought experiment of a Star Trek-like teleporter inspires a character to conceive of each sleep as a death, conceiving of a different person waking up in his body each day. As a result, he (or, if we prefer, the successive inhabitants of his body) go on a philosophical journey: first hedonism, then suicidality, and at last finding a new, humble and selfless life, founded on the same concept of self-discontinuity:

What little money he had he gave away, for he knew he had no claim to it. No one can possibly deserve the money they have, for it isn’t them who earned it, but a past self. Anyone else has an equal right to it.

Something of this accords with the experiences of plural friends who switch frequently, and thus have had to come to terms with every creative project they pursue being a group project that must be handed off to another alter.

Even if I don’t have the distinct sense of ‘switching’ moment to moment, I still share something of this sense of ‘handing off’ to past or future selves, and the longer the temporal horizon the more dramatic this gets. At various times in life ‘I’ have felt intense feelings of shame over different past versions of me, and even in one or two cases gone back to insert contradictory commentary in something the past version of me wrote. There are certain projects I do not feel I can ‘honestly’ finish, since I’m so far removed from the mindset that produced the original work. For really long-term projects like the Umineko liveblog project, it feels hard not to regard them as collaborations between difference instances of ‘Bryn’.

This is compounded when I will sometimes come across, in a dusty corner of my hard drive, works that I do not even remember making, roleplaying games I do not remember playing in, etc. I’m sure most people have that experience, of finding things they made as a kid and encountering them anew. But when primed with questions regarding different variations of self, all that takes on a new significance. Sometimes I find myself wishing I could talk with 2017!Bryn, or what she would think of what I became.

And of course, for trans people, it is common to experience a pretty dramatic personal rupture in how we view ourselves. Inevitably there is a lot of variation in how we conceive of who we were pre-transition. Some people may feel it was always a false shell or mask. For some, it might be something we view with shame. This is of course compounded by the common experience of having people in our lives feel grief at the loss of the version they thought they knew. Others may find this talk frustrating, and feel that they are fundamentally the same as ever, just more honest with themselves or others.

Of course, ruptures are not just the domain of trans people! In normie society, my society constructs a life stage of ‘teenager’ in which people are expected to try out different personas to ‘figure out who they are’; later, the experience of trying to take on a new direction in life at a certain age is common enough to get disparagingly called a ‘mid-life crisis’. Different societies will mark different rituals to transition between different phases of life in general; at this point, people are expected to take on different responsibilities and ways of existing. Though, most of that gets thrown out the window for everyone over here in the autistic weirdo corner.

In any case, I suppose, if a plural self-conception is on the cards, that suggests another rupture in the making. I have no regrets whatsoever about transitioning, regardless of what struggles followed. Back in the day, I wrote essays agonising over whether I’m bi etc.; in retrospect it is easy to say that I was working my way to the real question of gender by the stepping stone of sexuality, but it can also be said that introspection comes to me with difficulty and requires working things out almost like a mathematical problem. Or, alternatively, that this mode of introspective writing is something I have been recurrently drawn to generate. Anyway, if it’s like that, there is no resisting it. The next Bryns are already forming. But what forms?

Magic circles

I have written before on the idea that large parts of culture can be viewed as roleplaying. Another useful idea from the theory of games is, of course, Huizinga’s ‘magic circle’, which I discuss here and also here. The way I summarised it in the latter piece is…

The idea of the magic circle is that a game establishes a special sub-‘world’ where different rules apply compared to everyday life. Players observe certain rituals to enter into the state of ‘playing the game’, and while the game continues to hold, acts that would not have meaning otherwise (like kicking a rubber ball into a metal rectangle) take on meanings and encode the state of this abstract system.

In Huizinga’s original work on ‘play’, he was quick to describe the special secret world created by play and extend it to other domains; for example, his comment that outlaws, revolutionaries and ‘cabbalists’ may reject one system (a ‘spoilsport’ move) only to build another for themselves.

It is pretty easy to make the move to step away from games, and view society at large as a pile of layered magic circles, at various scales, which give meaning to the actions that people take in them. I think this is helpful for me because I like to exist in a lot of different contexts, since I like to do a lot of things that have subcultures around them. If there is any habit that has described my life so far, it’s finding some niche community and learning its discourses and ways. Thus ‘physicist!Bryn’, ‘scifi!Bryn’, ‘trans woman!Bryn’, ‘demoscener!Bryn’, ‘roleplayer!Bryn’, ‘animator!Bryn’, ‘sakubuta!Bryn’, ‘gamedev!Bryn’, and so on. Each one has plenty of commonalities with the others, but also each one represents a distinct mode of thinking and different desires, right? And thus it is easy to see how they could be seen for fighting for time at the wheel.

If immersion in a magic circle brings in to the ‘context’ the ways of thinking proper to that magic circle, just as settling down to play a game summons your knowledge of strategies and etiquette and all that, it’s not surprising that reminders of a context I’ve left—visiting my family, encountering someone I knew a long time ago—could give the disturbing feeling of being possessed by the ghost of a past self, past guilts, past desire for approval, etc. etc.? Perhaps it is no wonder, then, that we tend to get increasingly distressed the longer we spend in our hometown, with the tension existing between the current Bryn and a past one.

Self-talk

When ‘I’ (a past ‘I’ here) first learned about plurality and started wondering if these ideas could possibly apply to me, one of the first things I tried was to think a ‘question’ in my head, like ‘hey is there anyone else in here?’ and hope for some phantom voice to come back and say hello. Perhaps that would work for some people, but it didn’t for me.

However, like no doubt many people, I will often hold conversations in my head. The interlocutors in such a conversation are not usually given a very distinct identity; at most they may represent two different positions that ‘I’ feel conflicted about.

When struggling with executive function, I will often find myself holding one-sided conversations with an entity I conceive of as ‘my brain’. For example, I will think in my inner monologue, ‘come on, we really need to get up and…’, and then be answered not by a voice but my body refusing to leave the warmth of my bed. Conceiving of this more explicitly as a negotiation with a separate part of me with its own ‘wants’ made it possible to conceive of other approaches to the negotiation, like offering concessions or reassurances. Sometimes this ‘worked’, but I’m not sure how much that is just roleplaying the beat in a narrative.

We have also experimented with using the pronoun ‘we’ in inner monologue. Who this ‘we’ represents is a little unclear. It’s the ‘we’ of a collective whose individual members, if they meaningfully exist still remain murky. Doing so… feels kind of OK actually? But we would hesitate to use the pronoun ‘we’ in conversation with others, or ask anyone to try to keep track of different personae. Even using ‘we’ deliberately in this paragraph as an experiment feels kind of charged, tho not in a bad way.

At this point I’m tempted to actually try writing such a dialogue with a putative other version of me. Let’s say, ‘punctuation!Bryn’ and ‘lowercase!Bryn’.

hello world

Hello. I am going to attempt this dialogue as something like a creative writing exercise or roleplay. Of course implicit in that is the possibility that it could ‘become real’.
yo

obvs i’m like, using a sorta bathetic narrative device where you give a kind of wordy intro and i give a one-word answer for comic effect but yeah hi i guess i’m lowercase!bryn. thanks for writing all this stuff above. helpful to have it all on the table.
Yeah, I’ve done my best to be thorough and capture all the things that we keep thinking about.
yeah lol it’s kinda silly that we keep doubting bc like, duh, nobody who wasn’t plural would be doing this right?
I don’t know about that. I mean, maybe knowing a whole lot of plural people has primed us to keep prodding at it, kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy?
sure sure but like. it doesn’t really matter where it comes from, right? like what do you wanna have been child abused?
Yeah, no. But like, I also don’t want to like, ‘steal valour’ or whatever. Our friends have been very generous in explaining what their experience is like, right? Obvs I respect and admire them a lot. I don’t want to waste their time.
you kinda seem to have this oldschool sj notion of like appropriating or whatever. and like pedestalling. like obviously “they’re the real deal and you’re a dubious fake”. we did this with trans stuff as well. i mean i think our friends care about us and that’s why they take time helping us. and idk hopefully reading this is funny or something lmao
I guess I feel like, what even is it that we want here? Why are we writing this and potentially considering publishing it on our website?
because we want to be understood. obviously.
I’m not sure that’s an ‘obviously’…
yeah fair it’s not that simple I guess. but we kind of like to be an open book, right? keeping secrets is not our way. if we’re going through something like this, melting our sense of self down in a crucible or whatever, we kinda want people we know to be able to be like ‘oh’. either ‘finally, took her long enough’ or ‘oh gosh that’s a lot’ or, idk. something we can’t imagine
But writing this kind of exposes us to ridicule, doesn’t it? Like do we know what really being plural is? When I write the next line are we switching? Do you have some thread of ‘like-to-be’ consciousness that’s waiting for me to finish typing?
i’m not sure it’s that simple i guess. we’re kind of both sharing the wheel at the moment. like passing the game controller between us. the subjective experience is kind of being both. like consider how our body is right now. we’re kind of… stiff shouldered, leg shaking up and down a lot, very anxiety signs. as if moving too much would break the spell of whatever is happening here.
Ha, helpful to narrate what’s happening so the reader can picture it.
sure lol there is that but like. idk the subjective experience thread such that I can access it is almost like a film camera right now. it’s receiving these words from god knows where and writing them onto the page.
Right, the idea of bubbling up. Didn’t T. talk about using a kind of ritual practice to build up the kind of ‘head space’ world until it came naturally and without effort for her? Do you think we should pursue a practice like that?
damn we’re getting sorcerous with it.
Do you think you’re writing in a kind of Dave Strider way because this sort of dialogue format is very Homestuckian in nature?
hmm i wonder. yeah this isn’t really the way ‘lowercase!bryn’ normally talks in like, Discord or whatever right? idk it just seemed the right thing to write at the time.
But yeah the head space.
yeah idk how that works really. the idea that everyone is hanging out in some kind of mental house. kinda wonder what they’re doing when you’re not in the house, like does it shut down or are there like 30 different people all hanging out in the back somewhere? subjectively experiencing being alone with their thoughts.
It can’t be like that for us, right? Like, we would remember that, right?
you know we’ve had that thought of consciousness without write access to memories? like ‘what if anaesthetic doesn’t knock you out but you just don’t remember it’?
Do you think something like that could be happening?
no it wouldn’t really make sense. though i guess all those ‘in the back’ memories could be locked off from the ‘front’ memories. but more likely if we’re plural and this isn’t just a big fakey fake game then we’re just the type of system where the personas go offline when it’s not fronting.
You know I just had a curious experience. I was reading back this log and I thought about rewriting one of your lines because the phrasing felt clunky. But, it felt like that was wrong, since at this ‘turn’ I’m supposed to be Uppercase Bryn.
yeah so I guess we’ve set it up so that in this discursive frame or whatever a ‘switch’ happens when you press enter. but yeah I guess don’t change my lines when you’re you.
How do you think that relates to the LSD experience we had, of imagining all the different parts sort of happily working together to constitute a person? Are we some of those parts?
hmm. i mean i don’t think i’m like, the linguistic processing unit or whatever. but whatever i am i mean i’m happy enough to be us, right. hard to be anything else.
I worry a lot about the idea of bringing a mind into the world that doesn’t want to be there.
lol well don’t worry about that, I think we all pretty hard committed ‘the world is interesting and we don’t wanna die’ like a decade ago.
Is there some guilt-ridden anxious part of me that still wonders?
well if there is she’s not actively thinking about it all the time. i mean this is all pretty fluid right? the idea of continuity is kinda squirly here. that part of us presumably evolved into all the current parts of us. not a significant part of the mental-wavefunction anymore.
Heh, that metaphor raises all kinds of questions.
i know lol. dork.
This has been a good exercise I think. We should do this again.
yeah probably not in public though
Sure. I mean it’s nice to have a notional audience that isn’t the fucking social media panopticon anyway.
mmm. i know you’re thinking about asking me whether it’s ok to publish this and i guess go ahead, it’s fine, like, kinda neat really to have your birth committed to a git repo and distributed on a CDN.
Do you think this is a birth?
i mean idk what it is. it’s a game we’re playing currently. next time you do this conversation exercise it won’t necessarily be ‘me’ that comes out. i don’t think it’s stable like that.
That’s fair. Do you want a name?
i don’t think i do yet. maybe one day. if i come back.
Cool. Well, see you then I guess?
lol yeah see you later, kisses
And now I’m tempted to write something like ‘and with that, she faded back into the froth of neural noise’ but idk if she did that.
nah still here lol. you can’t get rid of me that easily
That’s good, I think. Guess I’ll close out the essay.

What was that?

I guess a simple answer is that that was an automatic writing exercise? I’m not sure if it was literally an alter coming to talk but also I’m not sure that it wasn’t, which is a hell of a lot closer to the idea than any version of me has ever gotten before.

But yeah I sat down to write that with little idea of what would happen beyond a that I’d write ‘in-character’ as ‘lowercase Bryn’ and that I’d probably want to talk about the ‘mind space’ concept. The questions and answers flowed naturally. Obviously I am a fiction writer so like, I’m probably leaning on the patterns of expression I use in that context, but yeah idk i kinda feel like all selves are fictional maybe. (Shifting to lowercase bryn for a sentence there since it somehow felt more correct.)

Haha god what is even going on. Being human is weird and confusing. I don’t entirely know why I’m fixating on this topic at the moment, or what I hoped would come out of writing this essay. Some form of answer as to what is ‘the right thing to do’ perhaps. I guess maybe I found someone? That’s pretty significant if it’s real. (Also, I notice I’ve shifted into a more conversational writing style in the aftermath of that. I don’t know whether that’s significant.)

I didn’t even talk about the concept of ‘dissociation’. It’s something I’m fairly sure I’ve experienced but not in perhaps as extreme forms as some people do. I feel like I often fall into it when I’m out in public spaces that are a bit sensory overwhelming, like a supermarket. I need to sort of engage autopilot and power through it. There have been times I’ve definitely been sorta ‘zoned out’ of a conversation, ‘off in my own head’, or even saying things without consciously thinking about it and having to replay it in my head to ‘tune back in’.

‘Dissociation’ is a really poorly defined term though. The boundaries between ‘just being kind of out of it’ and ‘actually dissociating’ are far from clear to me and it’s a pretty charged term and I’m afraid of using it in an incorrect way. I can sort of see how ‘dissociation’ in the sense of ‘being checked out’ and ‘dissociation’ in the sense of ‘another alter is in the driver’s seat’ are related concepts.

Anyway I guess I’m spending this year getting crazier, or maybe less crazy, or just differently crazy, I’m not sure. I think the main thing ‘I’ want is to just have a better handle on the different states of mind that I occupy, because of problems like…

not really being able to make any meaningful plans beyond a very short time horizon, or stay focused on a project, or maintain a habit; perhaps conceiving of this as an explicit negotiation might help
feeling like I get into states of mind where I’m harsh, judgemental, unfair or irrationally defensive towards people I care about and have every reason to trust; perhaps recognising that there is some part of me being expressed here might help
existential shit like just not really understanding what I am or what any of this is about

I wrote three things because it felt right to have a list of three.

So, it might be time to publish this. At least to share with trusted friends, and also search/AI crawlers and whoever the hell else happens to find their way onto this corner of my website. I don’t really know what this became. Cracking of a ‘plural egg’ or talking myself into a fantasy? Whatever it is, I’m sure I’ll (for some measure of ‘I’) look back on it in a few years and sigh. The answers will hopefully be clear by then. And hi, future me, I hope you’re doing good.

and with that, she melts back into the froth of neural noise.

Let’s read Umineko! - episode 5 - chapter 12

2026-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Happy new year, everyone! May 2026 be the year I finish reading Umineko, and embark on some similarly baroque work of fiction to match it. It ‘only’ took Ryuukishi four years to write this one, and June this year will mark Year 9 of the liveblog, but life is chaotic and I have meds now…

Chapter 12: Reasoning and Inspection

Chapter 12 opens with player!Battler in the abstract ‘Golden Land’ garden with Beatrice and Virgilia.

To the surprise of both him and Vi, Dlanor suddenly enters the garden. She greets Virgilia under her old name of Beatrice (so I guess the backstory/name-inheritance story we saw in Episode 3 is still worth keeping in mind…)

Indeed, speaking of Virgilia’s backstory, she claims that they are old friends in Heaven.

This is interesting because under the ‘witch as author/system host’ interpretation, in which Virgilia is something like a character created by/tulpa of Beatrice just as Sakutarō is to Maria, I had interpreted Dlanor as ‘belonging to’ Bernkastel’s ‘fictional universe’, but there’s a link here. Of course, if they are all creations of some sort of ‘author!Beatrice’, there is no problem.

Dlanor has apparently come to greet Battler, the ‘proper guest’ of the original ‘master’ Beatrice, though she knows full well that piece!Beatrice is ‘controlled by Lambdadelta’.

The narration (from Battler’s FPPOV) says that piece!Battler was also a ‘game piece of those witches’. So I guess we can put aside the speculation that Battler had come to take control of his piece? No, but this is confusing, because Bernie would have been acting against her own interests by having piece!Battler fight piece!Erika?? Dlanor tells Battler that she is playing an ‘opposing role’, and yet, isn’t she also there to deny witches..?

Virgilia prepares herself some tea with magic, and Battler prods Dlanor about whether she should object. She assures him that it’s acceptable for the ‘tale’ to write this as magic, even if Virgilia is using a secret tea set, by Knox’s ninth. Knox’s ninth says…

The “sidekick” of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.

Virgilia remarks that the ninth commandment is controversial, to the point that invoking it is a risky thing for the High Inquisitor to do. So Dlanor explains her principle:

“Magic that hides the result in darkness is evil. We will not permit it. However, magic that conceals the process is not necessarily evil. My foe is the evil, not the magic itself.”

So, the analogy here is between presenting a mystery and serving someone tea; the question, when it is appropriate to demand to see inside the kitchen. Magic can be a ‘white lie’, or as Virgilia puts it, an ‘embellishment’. As, for example, giving a small child candy and dressing it up as a magic gesture. If the effect is simple and the results positive like this, Dlanor says it would be ‘boorish and rude’ to go around questioning alibis…

Dlanor’s hardline stance against magic seems to be less a universal matter of faith, and more how she must act while ‘on the job’, and right now she’s off the clock. She remarks that her ‘pity’ for witches is itself a useless embellishment, which does not change the result of ‘executing witches’.

Battler and Virgilia disagree: intent, they say, does matter a lot. Real echoes of the 2010s arguments here… Indeed, Battler says that seeing this other side of Dlanor has already changed how he sees her. Virgilia is surprised and pleased—Battler seems to be starting to get the step towards understanding the ‘true nature’ of magic, which is to say, ‘understanding the “heart”’.

We get an answer to ‘whether player!Battler was controlling piece!Battler’ question. It turns out the answer is actually, according to player!Battler and Virgilia, that Lambdadelta was the one who intervened here, taking control of Battler to bolster the witch side a little against the overpowered Erika in order to get her desired outcome of a draw. So piece!Battler is somehow contested, open to influence by multiple people! That’s a fun wrinkle in terms of narrative authority…

Battler: ……Just what kind of mood’s taken those two? Trying to make it look all cool… They made me look like some kind of knight coming to save Beato.

So he actually doesn’t agree with this interpretation of him! However, Dlanor gives us some really crucial information about how the game works…

Dlanor: Yes, I am aware. However, pieces cannot do things that are impossible for them. And they specialize in actions appropriate to their original personality. ……Therefore, that was certainly something that you……that Battler was capable of. That is why I am grateful to you.

Even if thepiece!Battler was up for grabs, it’s not possible to make him act severely ‘out of character’. Which is a real epistemic coup for us, because we can still learn something even in ‘magic scenes’ and other unreliable narration. The power of the GM to construct a scenario is not absolute…

Anyway, Dlanor says that she actually intentionally threw the match earlier when facing piece!Battler. The reason is that she didn’t invoke the red declaration that Kinzo is already dead. Hm, I was wondering about that. I took it that the pieces are somehow not aware of that ‘higher-level’ declaration, but I guess not…

Actually, it’s more subtle than that!

So here are two red truths to add to our library. Knox’s second law is actually more general:

All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.

But the Umineko version is

Knox’s 2nd: It is forbidden for supernatural agencies to be employed as a detective technique.

I’ll need to make a list of the ‘Umineko versions’ of Knox at some point, we’ve gotten most of them by this point. Anyway, that means we can also have…

the window was never opened after it started raining

though I doubt it will be relevant for Kinzo’s mystery. Dlanor is not sure why the use of this ‘trump card’ suddenly became ‘forbidden’, presumably by Lambdadelta.

Dlanor further observes the same thing I did, that we’re spending an inordinate amount of time on the question of whether Kinzo is alive:

Dlanor: ‘Kinzo does not exist’ should already be an established fact. Lady Lambdadelta and Lady Bernkastel know this well. And yet, they are both leaving room for Kinzo to exist as they continue through this game. ……It is almost as though the two are conspiring to prevent Kinzo’s existence from being denied.

Dlanor thinks they have some ‘wicked’ ulterior motive. Something other than pushing the game to a win or a draw.

She sadly remarks that, while on the board, she will meet Battler as an enemy, in her heart she is always ‘neutral’ and finds Erika obnoxious and evil. She does not feel good about being called to this world…

Virgilia raises an interesting argument: while she may have been summoned by Bernkastel, Dlanor would not have been allowed into the game without Beato’s permission. (Under the author!Beatrice interpretation, she wouldn’t have been written into the story at all!)

Battler wonders what that means for Ange’s ‘uninvited’ arrival in the last game. But no answer presents itself…

Back on the game board, Erika is bullying Cornelia by repeatedly making her stand on one leg and pushing her over. Dlanor respawns and steps in, and Erika complains that she’s just a doll with no feelings to hurt…

But she’s taken out her anger and she wants to get her ‘little grey cells’ working on the main mysteries. She starts explicitly referring to what ‘the tale’ describes—the second time it’s come up this chapter, so let’s find out what word that is…

Erika: That’s right. The tale appears to describe that it was impossible for any of the humans at that moment, creating the illusion that an unknown witch exists.

Erika: そうです。一見、物語はその瞬間に、ニンゲンの誰にも不可能であったと語り、未知の魔女が存在しているかのような幻想を作り出しています。

And indeed, it is a very familiar word: 物語, monogatari. I guess this is the in-story term for what I’ve been calling the ‘narration’. One curiosity I notice here that’s probably true for a while: ‘human’ is written in katakana as ニンゲン, instead of the more standard 人間. I’ve noticed in various places that the script has alternative variations like ‘human’/’Human’ marked up, which don’t seem to be rendered by the game, and I guess now I know what that is based on in the Japanese. Curious, but no idea what it means!

Anyway, we’re going to deduce who placed that letter. This probably won’t be too problematic, since Battler and Erika only had eyes on a limited number of people. So we get this declared in red by Gertrude and Cornelia:

Before the family conference, Erika, George, Jessica, Maria, Nanjo, Gohda, and Kumasawa left the mansion and moved to the guesthouse

…

Of those who remain, only Krauss, Natsuhi, and Genji were in the second floor corridor, while all others were in the dining hall

Curiously, the position of the latter three on the second floor corridor is declared in red, even though it’s not directly observed by either Battler or Erika.

Anyway, Erika naturally posits that one of the three on the second floor placed the letter.

Erika: Most likely, one of those not in the dining hall—Krauss, Natsuhi, or Genji—simply saw their chance right after that and placed the letter there. No, in fact, it would have been possible for the people who supposedly went to the guesthouse too.

We’ve heard that the mansion was locked and that no one outside could get in, but if someone only pretended to go to the guesthouse and instead hid inside the mansion, it’s perfectly possible that they could have placed the letter there.

We’ve had it declared in red that they ‘moved to the guesthouse’, but this is still validated as a blue truth. But what about the knock on the door? Erika questions that it was actually that…

Erika: Firstly, I question whether the knock was even something hitting the door to the dining hall at all. For example, the mansion’s construction may be such that when a certain pillar on the second floor is struck, the noise is transmitted down the pillar, and it sounds just like a knock on the door to people in the dining hall.

Or they could have misheard some other random sound as a knock and misconstrued it in a similar way. Or a tape with the sound of a knock recorded on it could have been secretly playing, which had been carefully set up to be heard at exactly that time

The point about the mansion’s construction seems like it might fall afoul of a Knox rule. In any case, Lambda doesn’t hold off this time on countering with red.

Lambdadelta Krauss, Natsuhi, and Genji did not even touch that letter

Bernie takes over from Erika, answering this with another blue:

Bernkastel: when Shannon and Kanon came in to serve tea, who was the last human to enter the dining hall…? Let’s say it was Kanon. Wouldn’t it be easy if Kanon, the last person in, secretly dropped the letter there when he closed the door.

This leads to a much more absolute statement in red:

Lambdadelta Not a single person in the dining hall—no, there’s a simpler way to say it. Among all those inside the mansion at midnight, not a single one of them placed that letter in the hallway.

Bernie immediately seizes on the switch from ‘touch’ to ‘place the letter’, but Lambda says it’s only because when the letter was found, the others picked it up.

Anyway, this suggests that perhaps the letter was produced by sleight-of-hand by one of the relatives in the dining hall (an idea suggested earlier in the chapter, in fact, in the discussion of using ‘magic’ to give a candy to Maria!), and never actually placed in the corridor at all. I’m not sure if that’s consistent with the narration.

Bernie/Erika answers with a different hypothesis. There is a screen wipe to Erika halfway through, so it seems that Bernie’s directly puppeteering Erika at this point.

Bernkastel Someone who existed outside of the mansion at midnight placed the letter somewhere other than the hallway beforehand. Then, it moved by some means, and ended up “placed in the hallway”.

Erika: Just as an example, let’s say it was deliberately stuck to the underside of…the serving cart carrying the tea set, which the servants wheeled into the room. It was simply affixed there in a way that would make it come unstuck after a certain amount of time, such that when it eventually fell off, it would become “the letter left by a witch who shouldn’t exist”. In other words, this is a classic trick where the true sender gives themselves an alibi by making the letter appear at a different time.

OK, kind of convoluted, but it makes sense. Erika notes that the fact it appeared outside the door would be, in this hypothesis, just a coincidence.

Lambda doesn’t contradict this for now, instead returning to the knock. She says…

Neither Krauss nor Natsuhi nor Genji knocked!

This isn’t the limited meaning of them knocking on the door, okay? It means they didn’t use a pillar to transmit the sound or push the play button on a cassette tape they’d recorded or create that knock sound by any means! Of course, this includes all direct, indirect, intentional, coincidental, and unintentional means!

On further prodding, additionally it is stated (by Dlanor! who, curiously seems to be the mouthpiece for Lambda here) that…

Dlanor: At 24:00, except for Krauss, Natsuhi, and Genji in the second floor corridor, and all of the people in the dining hall, no other humans existed inside the mansion.

In addition to Krauss, Natsuhi, and Genji, none of those in the dining hall knocked, where “knocking” includes all direct, indirect, intentional, unintentional, and coincidental events that could create a knocking sound.

Completing the legalistic courtroom vibe, we get a definition of all the different types of knocking.

Dlanor: In other words, it is impossible for anyone who was in the mansion to have been the source of a knocking sound. ……In this case, “anyone” also includes any people who might have gone undetected or unobserved.

Erika retorts that this still leaves room for a tape measure to have been set up by the ‘guesthouse group’, including herself…

Erika: What if I, Furudo Erika, recorded a knocking sound on a cassette tape, secretly installed it somewhere, and set it up so that it would start playing at exactly midnight? Of course, I wasn’t in the mansion at midnight.

However, Dlanor points out the problem that it would be hard to use the knock to alert the relatives to the letter if Erika did not know where it fell. Lambda expands on this:

Lambdadelta: No one in the mansion placed the letter in the hallway. That goes for every conceivable possibility: directly, indirectly, intentionally, coincidentally, and unintentionally.

She says that this rules out the ‘serving cart drop’ method, since this would count as Sayo and Kanon ‘indirectly and unintentionally’ placing the letter.

Bernkastel requests a repetition of the claim that At midnight, only Erika, George, Jessica, Maria, Nanjo, Gohda and Kumasawa existed outside the mansion, in case someone might have slipped out briefly after placing the letter. After some promises, Lambda accedes to this.

Erika’s fallback is that the letter was attached to the ceiling instead of the serving cart. This is denied:

The letter never existed on the ceiling of the hallway.

Know that the letter never touched the serving cart

And even…

It was impossible for anyone outside the mansion to influence anything inside the mansion after the start of the family conference

Erika says well, some other ‘gimmick’ then. But she is denied the right to assert this in blue, since she has to be specific about what kind of trick. Erika naturally gets a little upset, but Dlanor recommends putting this aside for now, since the tape recorder theory is still sound.

Bernkastel ……………Well, let me see. Normally, I’d never forgive one of my pieces for the utter disgrace of surrendering, ……but if she’s managed to solve one of the mysteries, maybe I’ll let it slide for now……

With this setup, Lambda can demolish the tape recorder theory. We get:

Lambdadelta: None of the characters would misidentify a knocking sound.

Misidentifying a knocking sound means this: they would not mistake a sound very similar to a knocking sound for a real knocking sound. Hitting a pillar to make something similar to a knocking sound is no good. When you record a knocking sound on a cassette tape and play it back, it becomes “the sound of a tape with a knocking sound on it”, and not a knocking sound. So that’s no good either!

In other words, all of them would correctly distinguish a knocking sound of something truly hitting the door, and they definitely wouldn’t mishear it. It’s totally impossible that any sounds except hitting that door directly would be misinterpreted as a knock!!

Erika does not take losing well, as usual…

Bernie proposes an automatic door-knocking device. Yeah, I don’t think that’s gonna fly. Sure enough:

‘To knock’ means someone hitting a door with their hand!

To sum up, Lambda says

Lambdadelta: They heard a knock at the same time as the clock struck midnight. Everyone inside the dining hall definitely heard it at that time. And none of them would misinterpret a knocking sound. Krauss, Natsuhi, and Genji had no involvement in any knocking. No one else existed inside the mansion. And a “knock” refers to the action of standing directly in front of a door and hitting it with a hand.

Let’s see if we can do better. Given what we have learned about how the game board works, we know that events can be depicted if they represent a narrative that one or more characters are trying to present as the truth. So far I had been assuming that Battler is a reliable witness, but if Battler and the others in the dining hall had conspired to pretend there was a knock on the door and a letter had mysteriously appeared, perhaps to enact some scheme against Natsuhi, it would be legitimate to depict this perspective. Erika may be the only ‘detective’/’Watson’ character here.

God, so much back and forth just for a knock on the door…

Bernie goes in to give Erika a dressing-down for failing to think of the answer…

Yeah, I can see why she’s like that… Terrible bosses, these two.

We cut to Erika in the dining room in the present moment. She’s attacking Battler’s claim of having jumped down. Like we supposed last time, her idea is that he didn’t jump the whole way…

Erika: When you set up the ladder from the courtyard and saw Rudolf‐san go up it to the third‐story window, you closely observed the structure of the outer wall and realized that by cleverly using the rain gutters and other handholds, it would be possible to descend to the courtyard from the third‐floor window…! You didn’t jump down! You used the rain gutters and so on and clambered down the outer wall like a loser!

You have no rebuttal? Then my truth is valid, yes?! There, you see?! It may have looked like you jumped down all dramatically, but it was all an illusion! All you actually did was jump out and grab desperately onto the rain gutter…!!

Battler is unperturbed by this, replying that it didn’t really matter for his point how Kinzo descended from the roof. The narration, however, does confirm (if not in red) that Erika is partly right: Battler climbed partway down the rain gutter, and slipped partway down, but landed on his feet. Everyone’s already figured it out, the narration says.

Unfortunately for Erika, she seems to be on a different timeline, transitioning directly from the game board scene and bullying by the witches without the intervening timeskip? Whether or not that’s true, Erika invokes a lot of game-external talk on the level of the game board, openly referring to her ‘master’ and to blue truths.

A clumsy narrative hack in the form of a lightning bolt outside and an abrupt change in Erika’s demeanour makes everyone abruptly forget this happened. I guess she was disrupting the integrity of the game too much and Lambda had to slam the brakes… before long, she’s back to talking about chopsticks, and the chapter wraps.

The next chapter is titled Closet. I wonder who’s coming out! ;p

OK, that’s a wrap! My working theory is as above, that the ‘receiving a letter with a knock’ scene is depicting a deception and therefore doesn’t need to be explained. Notably, it has not been said in red that anyone actually heard a knocking sound or found the letter outside the door. In fact, the motive is pretty easy: they would like to position Battler as the inheritor of the gold, and having a mysterious letter to that effect is probably part of that scheme. Admittedly, it seems unlikely that Battler (who isn’t thrilled about inheriting the gold) would want to go along with this. So there are details to figure out. But still, I think the easiest solution is to say that Natsuhi isn’t the only one working a ruse on the island in this game.

With the red and blue being used so heavily, I’m starting to wonder if my rule of quoting every red and blue passage is really correct. Well, in fact, I’m already starting to skip over certain blue lines in summary. If you’re a reader, I’d be interested to hear: do you want the complete sum of everything red and blue, or should I brush over the blow-by-blow a bit more, and just summarise the overall thrust and stick to presenting my own theories? (I’ll still be writing down all the red, but I can put that in collapsible boxes and such.)

Other than that, see you next time when we will likely address something a bit more spicy than this creepypasta-esque ‘who knocked’…

Let’s read Umineko! - episode 5 - chapter 11

2025-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

Hello Umineko fans!

Before we continue the story, I got an interesting comment from anon on episode 4, chapter 14, which is where I resumed the liveblog back in October…

The story never quite explicitly states in text what Ange sees in that futon shop that makes her freak out like that.

However, the answer is there in plain sight, in that very picture of it you posted, if you inspect the things in there very carefully. You might just spot what it is that Ange saw!

OK, well, you know I gotta go over the image with a fine-toothed comb now. Let’s take a look. Here’s the background in question, Kawabata’s futon shop…

Since I downscaled this for web, time to dive back into the game files and take a closer look. The file in question is called kaw_r3bn.png. I was going to go poking around the image to find the important part but actually I spotted it almost immediately, cleverly blending into the background…

Shock! Kuma shock!

So yeah, a whole bag of Sakutarōs. Which is interesting, because Sakutarō was supposed to be a unique special bear made by Rosa, of which only one was ever made… until Ange seemingly made another. But actually she found a bunch in Kawabata’s futon shop? No wonder she was talking about fate!

In any case, does this mean that Rosa lied about handcrafting Sakutarō and just bought Maria a mass-produced toy? So the source of Ange’s miracle is just industrial capitalism! But we did have Beatrice declare in red that Rosa made it…

Rosa made it for her daughter’s birthday, and in the entire world, only one of its kind—

But maybe she reused the design and had it mass-produced. After all, she does run a clothing company called . It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for them to make a plushie.

Chapter 11: Ten Wedges to Pierce Witches

It is 8:04am on Sunday October 5. We open with Natsuhi at Kinzo’s door. She’s pretending to talk to Kinzo, so the other relatives must be there. Indeed, they are, and Eva hammers on the door. Nanjo and Kumasawa do their best to provide cover by going on about Kinzo’s moods…

Kyrie, wisely, asks who was the last person to see Kinzo. Since Eva has heard Natsuhi’s voice from inside Kinzo’s study, Natsuhi has to claim she saw him then… tricky…

Eva pulls rank as the third in line to demand the door be opened. However, Sayo and Kanon report that both keys are inside the study, with Kinzo. This is a lie since we know Natsuhi has both keys. Erika gets all excited at the thought of a locked-room murder. But Erika’s bloodthirstiness can’t distract from the suspicion falling on Natsuhi, whose insistence on not opening the door is becoming increasingly hard to explain…

Erika goes on a little infodump about mystery novels… she says that the highest serial murder in the genre so far is in a ‘well-known work from England’ in which ten people were killed; the Japanese record is lower, but she mentions the detective is an astrologer.

Ah, mystery-novel otaku, I get it.

She goes on like this for a while, mentioning in passing the 新本格 (shin-honkaku) genre of mystery novels. This merits a grimoire note, which is great because I’d never heard of this one…

新本格 (Shin-Honkaku, New Orthodox) is a genre of Japanese mystery novels intended as pure logic puzzles to be solved by the reader, taking inspiration from the works of Golden Age detective fiction and the ideas of S.S. Van Dine. The rise of the New Orthodox movement, which revived and revolutionized the genre of orthodox detective fiction in Japan, can be attributed to Shimada Souji’s “The Tokyo Zodiac Murders” in 1981 and Ayatsuji Yukito’s seminal work “The Decagon House Murders” in 1987.

Shin-Honkaku is the third wave of detective fiction in Japan, preceded decades earlier by less well-known works such as “The Case of the Murder on D. Hill” (Edogawa Rampo, 1925) and “The Non-Serial Murder Case” (Sakaguchi Ango, 1949). The latter was part of an earlier movement known as 新戯作 (Shin-Gesaku, New Burlesque) which bucked the trends of pre-war Japanese literature.

Cool! The only author I’ve heard of on this is Edogawa Rampo, who I mostly know of in the context of horror rather than mysteries. (I found a short film anthology called Rampo Noir in a charity shop a little while ago, which adapts some of his stories. Haven’t watched it yet… maybe I will after writing this liveblog!)

Anyway, Battler challenges her otaku infodump. He objects that there was an earlier Shin-Gesaku novel which tied for the record.

Battler: They tie for the record, but if you pay attention to the fact that the Shin‐Gesaku novel asked its readers to search for the culprit, it’s a far more fitting example. If you know so much about this, shouldn’t your examples have been based on more than simply the number of victims, like perhaps the approaches of each work?

Getting shown up like this leads to the most aggrieved Erika expression we’ve had so far. Incredible stuff.

On the game board layer, Lambdadelta finds this absolutely hilarious. Bernkastel loses her shit as well, even though it’s her piece getting pwned on mystery novel trivia. So I guess this isn’t something she made piece!Battler do? (Also, did he not do it on the previous run-through of the game, before they rewound it..?)

Hideyoshi butts into this adorable otaku dick-measuring contest to remind them that preventing a record-breaking mass-murder is probably the play here…

Kyrie suggests going in through the window rather than the door—easier said than done since this is a third-floor room. Gohda, who isn’t in on the whole Kinzo scheme, cheerfully suggests fetching a long ladder from the boiler room. I’m kind of enjoying Gohda staying alive for longer in this game, his obliviousness is really funny. He accidentally volunteers himself.

We head out into the courtyard, which is a new location I think. The backgrounds use this painfully digital brick texture. One thing I notice—whether this is an intentional architectural choice or not!—is that there are no obvious ground-floor windows.

Gohda finds a weaksauce excuse to not go up the ladder.

Rudolf ends up being the one who goes up the ladder! There is a rather cute way of depicting this, sliding Rudolf’s sprite up behind the window layer with cutout animation.

Rudolf makes a passing reference to figure skater Ina Bauer, which Kyrie riffs on, meriting another cultural note…

Ina Bauer never dies: Ina Bauer (1941-2014) was a champion German figure skater, whose name is associated with a move in figure skating that became famous in Japan.

However, the reference goes deeper than this. Rudolf’s voice actor, Koyama Rikiya (小山力也), was the Japanese dub voice for Jack Bauer in the TV series “24” (2001-2010). “He never dies” is a reference to one of a number of comedic Japanese TV commercials for 24, in which Koyama Rikya sings: “I am Jack Bauer, always in danger / I am Jack Bauer, I never die”.

Wow, deep cut! As far as I know, the original releases were not voice acted, so they must have added this joke in the PS3 version?

Inside the study, the figments of Beatrice and Kinzo are discussing what to do. I kind of wonder what they’ve done with Kinzo’s actual body. Presumably not just left it up in the study..? Kinzo agrees to ‘hide under the bed’, whatever that means on the physical plane… At first, Gaap volunteers to hide Kinzo, despite the danger posed by the ‘toxin’, but then Beato abruptly decides she’d rather do it herself—narratively, a means to protect her friends. What that means… hmm. I guess it means that if the magic narrative that Battler and Erika are trying to deny centres on Beatrice, then she’ll be the one to take the hits if it’s undermined.

Beato resolves not to let it become a locked room, and have Kinzo escape through the doors, windows, future or past if necessary. I like that metaphor!

We get another cool multilayer composition for Rudolf appearing outside the window…

Ironically, the time that a character breaks a window is not depicted with the breaking-glass chapter-transition effect…

So Rudolf investigates. Not often we get Rudolf as the POV character, is it? He notices how cold and clean the room is. It seems deserted, but there are marks on the bed, chairs askew, that kind of thing…

Once the others are let in, Natsuhi looks for excuses. She suggests that Kinzo is prone to going on nighttime walks, getting Nanjo and Kumasawa to back her up. It seems pretty clear the jig is up though, and with the excuse that Kinzo might be tied up somewhere, the others get to searching the study…

Erika announces another convenient Detective power: she has a photographic memory.

Erika: ……My memory is photographic in every detail. If any attempt is made to hide evidence or alter the scene, I will know at once. ……Please don’t commit some stupid blunder here and disappoint me. Don’t you agree that any whodunit in which the culprit is unmasked by way of some silly mistake or slip of the tongue is dreadfully third‐rate?

Kanon and Sayo comment quietly about how Natsuhi is about to get caught for all the lies she’s told. Natsuhi, for her part, is chatting with the cast of her mental war room…

Beato reminds Natsuhi of the Devil’s Proof.

Erika demands everyone’s attention—the narration once again notes how some strange effect lets her act so presumptuous—and starts talking alibis. (Which is an English loanword, アリバイ. Where does it come from in English? Latin, apparently!)

Once again, Erika plays the ‘this story would suck if this were true’ card, saying there’s no way the ‘most suspicious person’ (Natsuhi) should have dunnit outside of a third-rate mystery. She throws around the term ‘third-rate’ a lot, wonder what that is in Japanese? Ah, 三流 sanryuu, pretty damn literal!

Her suspicion is based on the fact that Natsuhi was immediately sure she was the last person to see Kinzo. This is inconsistent with the claim that Kinzo is prone to go walkabouts late at night…

Beato pops up to give Natsuhi some reassurance.

Beatrice: In the court of hell, all of the demon jurors will declare you innocent.

That’s an amazing line, I gotta start saying that to people.

Natsuhi points out that Eva can verify her alibi. Eva immediately pops out her paper fan to hide behind…

I feel like in a mass murder situation, you don’t want to strike a pose that conspicuously covers part of your face…

This is all setup though for Eva to drop the big accusation… but Erika preempts her.

Erika: How long has Kinzo-san been gone……?

The other survivors join in and level the accusation. Erika is disappointed at the straightforward motive.

Gohda, ever-oblivious helpfully provides a list of accomplices, and in the process seems to realise how long it’s been since he last saw Kinzo…

Erika confronts Kinzo on the magic layer and tells him straight-up that he doesn’t exist.

At least she’s polite about it.

At that point, Beatrice abruptly steps in to a techno beat. She acknowledges Erika as Bernie’s piece. Points out that a witch has just appeared before her, doesn’t this make it fantasy..?

Erika: Well, parallel worlds like this are popular even within the mystery genre these days. Are you familiar with that detective who reasons from an armchair in a meta‐like space (メタ的な空間)?

Beatrice: Mind your anachronisms. That author doesn’t make his debut until next year.

Erika: You certainly are picky for a witch.

I’m not sure which series Erika is referring to [next-day edit: it is apparently the TV drama Anraku Isu Tantei, lit. The Armchair Detective, written by Yukito Ayatsuji who debuted in 1987 and Alice Arisugawa who debuted in 1989. It seems to have very little footprint on the English-language internet], but yeah she is for sure not a creature of 1986.

Beatrice calls up Lucifer to deliver a ‘stake’ of blue truth. We don’t get to see it immediately. That’s interesting, though! Blue hypotheses in service of the magic side rather than the mundane side…

Beatrice: You can’t eliminate the possibility that Natsuhi met with Kinzo at 11 p.m. In the six‐plus hours between then and the time you all barged into the study, Kinzo had every opportunity to escape! Because of this, you can’t state decisively that Kinzo doesn’t exist.

As a guest with no established backstory, Beato says, Erika doesn’t have any special information to contradict this. Beato declares checkmate. Which is interesting, and I guess that answers my earlier question about whether Battler could try stating the Riemann hypothesis in red to see if it’s true or not: the red truth is not simply a measure of truth but of knowledge, in the sense of ‘justified, true belief’ explored by philosophers. (Of course, there is the Gettier problem, but at least as far as the game goes, it seems that to declare a red truth you must have a valid justification for your claim.)

Erika responds by saying she’s a poorly-suited piece for dealing with witches, she’s there to find the human culprit. So, it’s time to introduce… ‘Miss Dlanor’. (Pronounced ドラノー doranō in Japanese.)

Lambdadelta talks this character up a bit: ‘the ten witch-hunting wedges, the archbishop of witch hunting, Dlanor!!’

Ah, wait, I see what’s going on here. ‘Dlanor’ is Ronald backwards.

We don’t have to wait long for Dlanor to get a sprite. It’s described as ‘resembling a cleric’. For some definition of cleric, I guess…

Naturally, her accent colour is Bernkastel’s blue. The design definitely intends to call to mind a Catholic nun’s habit, at least insofar as she is wearing a coif, though not a wimple or a guimpe. Hey, isn’t the internet great? I can go from knowing nothing about what a nun wears to throwing around words like ‘guimpe’ as if I’d been able to do so all my life…

Anyway, the armoured-up arm definitely departs from the lace cravat, cuffs and so on. That thing looks awfully impractical. Lift up your arm and poke your eye out…

Dlanor’s full name is Dlanor A. Knox, which means she’s the namesake of Ronald Knox, whose rules we discussed earlier. Going to the character screen gives a rather different impression of her design. Ryuukishi just can’t resist that zettai ryōiki!! I am not entirely sure how those trousers are even supposed to work… bahahahaa… it’s like he has to one-up himself each episode.

Here’s her description, get ready:

Dlanor A. Knox: A member of the Eiserne Jungfrau, the Seventh District Repentance Enforcement Agency of the Great Court of Heaven.

Chief Inquisitor. Ranked Archbishop, First Class.

Goes by the name “Dlanor of the Ten Wedges” or “Death Sentence Dlanor”.

She gets the name “Death Sentence” because, though Inquisitors normally judge their targets to determine whether they deserve the dealth penalty or not, Dlanor, as the Chief Inquisitor, is only dispatched after a case has been vigorously inspected by the Great Court. Therefore, the very act of dispatching her is equivalent to a death sentence.

Her father was a legendary Inquisitor, but he broke the rules and was executed. She was the one who interrogated and executed him. Since that time she has stopped growing, and both her body and mind remain eternally those of a young girl. It is whispered that her heart also died at that moment, but she does not see it that way.

Her primary weapons are the Conceptual Arms “Red Key” and “Blue Key”. They take the form of a longsword and a shortsword.

OK, you know what? If I ever intimated Bernkastel was the boring one, I definitely take it back. She can match Beatrice, chuuni for chuuni. I wonder how the Great Court of Heaven relates to King Pendragon and the space war?

Eiserne Jungfrau is German of course, and it means ‘iron maiden’, as in the mythical medieval torture instrument (most likely made up by the Victorians).

Dlanor speaks in an odd way, randomly writing certain words in small caps.

Dlanor: The same goes for me, Miss Beatrice. Eiserne Jungfrau has a detailed file on you 600 pages long. I always look over those, so this doesn’t feel like a first meeting to me either.

What does that look like in Japanese? Ah, it seems like there, her typing quirk is that the last word of certain sentences is written in katakana.

Dlanor: こちらこそ、ミス・ベアトリーチェ。アイゼルネ・ユングフラウは、あなたについての詳細な資料を６００ページにまとめマシタ。それに常に目を通していますので、私も初対面の気がしマセン

The first line is slightly hard to tell one way or the other, but ‘Miss’ is written in katakana-English, rather than a normal Japanese honorific.

They shoot some English wordplay at each other. Beatrice says her 600 word file could be summarised as ‘danger’. Dlanor and Erika retort that it will be extended to 8, for ‘executed’.

Beatrice: ………So I’m now, cackle! Flattery will get you nowhere, my guest…!

Beatrice is definitely winning on swag points.

The argument in the game board naturally follows the argument on the magic layer. Eva announces that she has a proof that Kinzo couldn’t have gone off somewhere. ‘Someone’ was watching she says. And then… Gertrude appears?

Gertrude is evidently in the same sort of uniform as Dlanor, but we don’t get a character screen until a little later this chapter. Let me grab it from the future, though:

Gertrude: A member of Eiserne Jungfrau, the Seventh District Repentance Enforcement Agency of the Great Court of Heaven.

Senior Assistant Inquisitor. Ranked Minister, First Class.

As an Assistant Inquisitor, she is tasked with aiding during interrogations and hearings.

In practice, execution ends up being the primary focus of most missions, and so she is usually assigned the job of using barriers to block the target’s means of escape.

On duty she is calm, flawless, expressionless, and emotionless; however in truth she is quite compassionate and is loved by many of her juniors.

She has already passed the exam to become a full Inquisitor and was offered a position in a different district, but she refused. She continues to serve alongside Dlanor, to whom she owes a great debt, waiting for a reassignment under her.

Therefore, though she is an assitant, she is treated as an Inquisitor (Archbishop, Third Class).

Cornelia: A member of Eiserne Jungfrau, the Seventh District Repentance Enforcement Agency of the Greater Court of Heaven.

Assistant Inquisitor, ranked Minister, Third Class.

She has obtained high grades in academic exercises, but this is her first time on the job

She posseses a strong sense of justice, and is currently cramming for exams to become an Inquisitor like Dlanor. Her current goal is to become more like the veteran assistant, Gertrude.

She actually has a zealous personality, but she pretends to be emotionless in imitation of Gertrude.

She is too innocent and pure for one connected to heresy hearings, and she knows nothing of the dirty jobs and dark side of the profession.

Gertrude intentionallly selected her for this mission, which stinks of Senate conspiracy. She did this to give Cornelia a chance to ask herself whether this sort of job really is the right one for her.

Ryuukishi can really spin up some lore when he wants to! Like, these characters have had barely any screentime, but we still have a heavenly bureaucracy, and all sorts of internal politics, private personalities, public faces…

One thing will always be true, though. No matter what universe, no matter what military organisation or witch’s furniture, it will be girls, and you will see their thighs.

Gertrude and Cornelia both have the same catchphrase: ‘For your attention: I beg to inform you of the following.’ In Japanese: 謹啓。謹んで申し上げる。 So a formal greeting like you’d use in a letter (dictionary has stuff like ‘dear sir or madam’), then something like ‘I respectfully say…’ The Witch Hunt puts it as ‘Please, allow me to speak.’ I think I like the Umi-Project version more, although it’s a bit more wordy than the Japanese line.

She summons Chiester410 and Chiester45. Damn, they’ve switched sides!

Chiester45: Chiester45, right here! It has been some time, Great Lady Beatrice! We were dispatched in accordance with Alliance Agreement #1516 and a request from the Great Court of Heaven. We apologize for the rudeness that is to follow…!

So I guess the GCOH is an ally of Dragon King Arthur in the bunnygirl space war. I hope you’re keeping notes.

Gertrude gives us a red text:

Gertrude: For your attention: I further inform you of the following. From last night at 23:00 until the present time, the study door was not opened even once.

What Eva actually meant is that she crammed a small piece of paper into the crack of the door, and it was still there when Rudolf opened it, so there’s no way Kinzo could have left the room. I guess Dlanor’s influence is… to assert some sort of pressure on the narrative to retcon this in? We’ve hinted at this sort of trick with the piece of tape Erika left on the servant room door, but there was no explicit mention of Eva doing something like this outside Kinzo’s study in Chapter 7.

A third member of the Eiserne Jungfrau appears on the magic layer, Cornelia, to confirm something else in red…

So that’s…

Cornelia: the windows were all locked

for the red list.

Gertrude permits use of ‘forbidden weapons’: ‘red warheads’.

Chiester00 Chiester Troops, precision blockade for study door and all windows complete. The Great Lady Beatrice is hereby warned that if anything is caught passing through these physically, conceptually, or by any other method, we will fire without warning…!

I love that ‘conceptually’ is on that list.

What’s Beato’s counter-play going to be? We could reveal a secret tunnel—if anywhere in the mansion is likely to have one, it’s Kinzo’s study. On the magic layer, Beatrice opens a portal. The mundane analogue of this is… indeed that, Natsuhi claiming that Kinzo might have escaped by a mechanism. She claims that there are ‘several’ such mechanisms and hidden doors in the mansion, known only to Kinzo. Her accomplices frantically assent that such a thing would be in-character for Kinzo to build.

Beato—who seems to be playing Battler’s role right now!—asserts it in blue:

Beatrice: No proof is required!! It’s a Devil’s Proof! The existence of a hidden door is impossible to discover or disprove!! Therefore, no one can eliminate the possibility that Kinzo escaped from this study through a hidden door.

Yeah, I think this is where Knox’s rules come into play, right? Like, there can only be one secret room or passage.

Indeed, Dlanor literally slices Beatrice’s attack in half with a red sword. A discordant organ track called ‘Predator’ comes in on the soundtrack.

Dlanor: I will not allow a hidden door to exist in this room.

Precisely this. Erika asserts the Knox rule in red:

So, we have in red:

Erika Knox’s 3rd: It is forbidden for hidden passages to exist.

I guess since Beatrice is trying to play to the terms of a mystery here, and not a fantasy story, she can’t have secret passages. That is not Knox’s third rule (which allowed a maximum of one secret room or hidden door), but I guess as far as this story is concerned, this is the variant of Knox we’re going with.

Dlanor: In this world, gods other than our God do not exist, and hidden doors do not exist. They must not exist. We will not allow them to exist. They are a blasphemy.

So the religious getup is not just aesthetic, these girls are actually Christians? Or some fantasy spin of that? It’s really funny the idea that hidden doors are blasphemous. Robert Knox was indeed a religious man, but I don’t get the impression that his rules for mystery novels were a matter of faith. Fun interpretation, though…

Lambda finds this hilarious. What’s she angling for here? She seems to be watching the only magic we’ve seen in the game so far get set up for elimination. Does she have some magic scenario of her own to set up once she’s finished dancing on Beato’s grave? She’s not leaving herself much time…

Beato isn’t done yet, though, so it’s time for some subtler plays. It’s time for a red/blue volley, so I’m going to be quoting a chunk of the game text again, just in case any of these turn out to be key to solving the mystery later…

Dlanor vs Beatrice volley

Let’s read Umineko! - episode 5 - chapter 10

2025-12-07T13:08:00+00:00

Opening complete, time for pieces to be taken…

Chapter 10: Morning of Tragedy

Battler wakes up to an alarm at 7am, so he’s running on about 4 hours of sleep right now. The curtains are drawn. He turns on the light, and sure enough…

Heavy noise filters!

As we knew to expect from the prologue, the other four people in the room are dead: George, Jessica, Maria and Rosa, who is in the room too. The character screen updates, as we saw earlier.

On the wall is the Seventh Pentacle of the Sun. So we’re keeping up the occult theme…

Erika butts in. She’s… not in the least bit perturbed by the murders.

Erika: ………Good morning, everyone. ………Oh, ……what a wonderful magic circle.

Indeed, she’s greatly entertained. She’s ready to step into her role as the detective. Battler tells her to fuck off, and she implicitly accuses him of being the culprit. But of course, the family aren’t having this random stranger butting into a murder scene. So… Erika drops red text on the game board level, wait, is that allowed?

Erika: Detective’s authority. ……The detective has the right to investigate all crime scenes. Move out of the way, Ushiromiya Battler. This is my legitimate right within the game, as granted to the human side.

Apparently using red down here in the game board serves as a kind of incantation, which forces Battler backwards. Really screwing with the integrity of the scenario…

On the player level, Bernkastel repeats the line:

Bernkastel: Because I am the detective.

Battler is not allowed to argue this by the rules. The narration highlights how weird it is for everyone to be telling everything to Erika “for some reason”.

Bernie gets to it. She observes that there must be two more corpses somewhere else to qualify as a proper First Twilight. She makes fun of Lambda’s shitty magic circle:

Bernkastel: Your Hebrew sure is crappy, Lambda. You’ve got this part slightly wrong.

On the magic layer, Mammon, Asmodeus and Satan appear as well. They conclude that someone must be trying to imitate Beatrice’s methods, and decide to go report it to her. So as far as this board’s fiction is concerned, Beato is not the culprit in the magic narrative. But then, what is the witch illusion here?

Meanwhile in the kitchen, Gohda and Sayo are preparing food, blissfully unaware. They’re getting on for once! Ah, an aside from Sayo comments on this: she likes Gohda pretty well when he’s cooking, and she generally feels that if his only duty was preparing food, everything would be better.

Kumasawa is there too. Kanon arrives. Nobody knows where Genji is… They assume he’s sleeping, and dispatch Kanon and Kumasawa to go wake him up. Kanon fell asleep in the servant room, so didn’t see Genji that night.

At Genji’s room they find a piece of tape attached. It’s perforated so as to tear if the door opens. So this is an anti-tamper seal, I guess Erika must have placed it?

Looks like ‘E. Furudo’ on the first line, and maybe something like ‘Franchesca Bernkastel’ on the second? Is that Bernie’s first name?

Of course, Genji has been killed too! Beelzebub, Belphegor and Leviathan observe this on the magic layer. They’re equally surprised, and rush off to search the mansion.

Lucifer is guarding Natsuhi in her room. She assures Natsuhi that nobody tried to enter. She’s about to report some bad news, but Natsuhi picks up the phone first. It’s Phone Man again. She assures him she has not left the room. He answers by revealing that he’s kidnapped Krauss! With Krauss as his hostage, he extracts two promises from Natsuhi: to play dumb about where Krauss is, and to hide in the guest room closet at 1pm for one hour.

We cut to Lambda, doing her voice, this time without the phone filter. How are we to interpret this? Is there nobody on the game board who’s playing the role of ‘Phone Man’? That seems against the spirit of the scenario. Is Krauss actually kidnapped? Could he be dead? In Chapter 1, the five we’ve seen so far plus Hideyoshi were dead. Since Hideyoshi was alive when the cousin’s bodies were found, it’s possible there’s a first-twilight death we don’t know about yet. Krauss, maybe.

Incidentally, we already have a death screen for Genji, so it can’t be ‘only when Erika investigates’ or anything like that.

Bernkastel steps up to play. She confirms with Lambda that we are in a closed circle with no outside communication, so the detective’s authority can’t be overridden by the police.

The survivors are all gathered in the parlour. Erika’s detective bedside-manner is, uh, horrifc lmao

I find this interesting because ‘yeah, yeah, get on with it’ is kind of the attitude the player starts to get after a lot of discovering-the-bodies scenes, and now that attitude is being sent into the game world where it’s incredibly crass.

Kyrie notices that we’re one short of the epitaph ritual, clued in by the magic circle. Eva accuses her, and Erika who makes the same observation, of being the killer—indeed, she seems to be the only one who can’t see the pattern. Meanwhile Erika takes an opportunity to drop her catchphrase…

What is it with fictional detectives and catchphrases, anyway? I guess it can all be blamed on Sherlock Holmes.

The question of Kinzo comes up. Of course, nobody has managed to contact him (and Gohda isn’t in on the deception.) Natsuhi deflects by dashing off to check Krauss’s room. As she follows, Erika observes that in ‘third-rate’ mystery and splatter films, people who run off on their own die first, but the opposite is true in action and disaster movies.

We cut to the game board layer… where Beatrice has appeared! Wait, what? Apparently Piece!Beatrice can come up here as well? Hmm, well, no actually, though it uses the purple tea room background, it might still be ‘within the game board’. Are we going to have to draw a chart to keep track of all this?

Gaap seems to be aware of the red declaration that there is no 19th person. And piece!Beatrice seems to have figured out that the game board is now in the hands of Lambda and Bernie.

She doesn’t seem to mind so much, at least it’s not boring. Her goal is still to keep ‘Kinzo is dead’ a secret. And moreover, to protect Natsuhi from getting framed as the culprit.

Meanwhile, Lambda reports in summary that Krauss’s bedroom was found empty, but with big bloodstains. I guess this keeps open the possibility that he’s alive for Natsuhi…

We get a BG for Krauss’s bedroom, for the first time I think! It’s huge.

I found the version in the game files, but it has transparent windows, so instead have this screenshot with Eva standing in it.

Krauss’s character screen is updated, going grey instead of red… I think I must have missed this in chapter 1.

Ushiromiya Krauss: Went missing from his room on the second floor of the mansion. There were large amounts of blood on the bed, making the situation bear a strong resemblance to those of the other victims.

He is the only victim of the first twilight whose body was never found.

Krauss’s room is not locked, which Kanon confirms is odd. They start counting locks, but Erika interjects, saying that since Genji was killed, his master key is unaccounted for and could have been used anywhere. She’s rather disappointed that this rules out locked rooms.

Natsuhi dashes to the guest house, hoping to still cover for Kinzo’s death for some reason. I feel like that ship has rather sailed… at this point, covering up embezzlement is the least of Krauss’s worries…

Erika whines that Natsuhi seeing Jessica’s face will not advance the story, but Lambda interjects, saying Beato’s pieces have intervened. It turns out they’ve removed the bodies from the guest house… a mystery, since it seemed the entire surviving cast were moving around in a big herd.

Bernkastel hypothesises that they weren’t actually dead. Another possibility is that Krauss is the culprit, and move them, right? Anyway, here’s our blue:

Bernkastel: “Here’s the first one I can think of. The victims aren’t actually dead. They pretended to be dead, then secretly hid themselves somewhere. After all, you haven’t declared anyone’s death with the red truth.

Lambda says she won’t use the red truth until the end of the game. Here’s the second, which is what I thought.

Bernkastel: Krauss carried the bodies off and hid them. You’re making it look like you’ve kidnapped Krauss and locked him up somewhere, but he might actually be free. Krauss has no alibi. Krauss hid their corpses.

The third one gets a bit sillier: it’s the ‘fake corpse’ trick:

Bernkastel: The corpses were different people in the first place. They were substitute corpses made to look like the victims. George and the others were hiding from the beginning, and later cleared away the substitute corpses. The corpses were dead from the very beginning, so they don’t count towards the number of people on the island.

Lambda finds this hilarious. She says she only needs to smash one of these, and the rest will be ‘swallowed up by darkness’, leaving no truth at all. I don’t think that’s how it works..? Indeed, Bernie observes that Lambda must overcume all three ‘blue wedges’. (Hey, aren’t red wedges more fun?)

Bernie goes on a little soliloquy about how witches need multiple ‘stakes’, or a full clip of bullets, to be killed. This was just a skirmish, but she’s having fun…

We see Gaap hiding Genji’s body, accompanied by Mammon, Asmodeus and Satan. She frets about what sort of being Lambda has summoned to do all these precise kills. By moving these bodies off the board, she says she moves them to a state of ‘missing’, catbox’d into both potential perpetrator or potential victim.

In her mysterious purple war room, Beatrice compares the situation to the Records of the Three Kingdoms, with the three sides switching allegiances. Ronove makes the reference more specific: the Longzhong Plan of Zhuge Liang, everybody’s fave character. (Hey, who here’s seen Paripi Kōmei?) So, does that mean Beato’s in the role of Liu Bei..? Ronove points out that all three kingdoms were ultimately destroyed, with the Jin taking over… Beato makes a connection between the Sima clan, who were invited as advisors by Cao Cao but ultimately took over, with Lambdadelta…

The clock advances to 8:04am and the chapter ends! The next chapter is called Ten Wedges to Pierce Witches.

OK, we’re off to the races!

Bernie’s theories seem pretty good, but let’s see if we can predict some moves ahead. What’s Lambda’s overall strategy? She doesn’t seem to be inclined to mess around with setting up locked rooms. For that matter, is Team Beatrice part of Lambda’s strategy, or are they really a third faction as Beato supposes? Once again, we have to wonder how independent the pieces are from their players.

Anyway, assuming Lambda confirms the deaths and identification of the bodies, and also says it wasn’t Krauss, what else could have happened here? Natsuhi kept running off ahead of everyone, but it seems unlikely she could move so quickly as to completely hide all the bodies before the others caught up. We don’t exactly know when and how everyone moved to the parlour, so if they didn’t move together, that leaves a window where someone could have tampered with the bodies. There are various groups of characters moving about, and if we decide any of them are conspirators, and find a window for them to act, we could blame them.

Since Battler and Erika are moving around together, and anyone else could be a culprit, there’s a pretty wide open space really. Erika’s anti-tamper seal will probably constrain things, but we don’t know exactly when she placed that.

We know that at some point, Erika is going to accuse Natsuhi of being the culprit. Can we come up with a Natsuhi-dunnit theory? Fairly easily. After all, we have no proof that she stayed in her room and she had all night to act. Seems rather unlikely she’d murder Jessica, but you know, we have to accept someone did a bunch of brutal murders of their family!

That said, I’m inclined to think, just by narrative logic, that Erika must be wrong. You can’t have someone blurt out the solution before the mystery even starts.

Why is Natsuhi so determined to keep Kinzo’s death a secret, even at a time like this? Lambda has made this plot thread really central to this game, but also revealed Kinzo’s death from the very beginning. She must be setting up for something, but what? With a master key unaccounted for, the study is the only remaining locked room. And it’s about to be opened… what will they find inside?

I think of Gaap placing the bodies in there, but that would only cast more suspicion on Natsuhi, as the only person with the key, which is against Beato’s stated aim.

Many questions. I’ll cease speculating there, let’s press on…

Let’s read Umineko! - episode 5 - chapter 9

2025-12-07T10:00:00+00:00

Hello again! Last time I didn’t really comment much on what happened in Chapter 8 because I was eepy. So, quickly then:

Big question is, is ‘Phone Man’ even real? Well, we know for sure that he’s not (even if Natsuhi doesn’t), because Lambda declared the number of people on this island in red, and Phone Man was not present in the ‘roll call’ scene in the parlour earlier.

That leaves two possibilities:

Phone Man is another narrative that Natsuhi is creating, i.e. it’s a representation of a personal ‘truth’, perhaps that she is feeling guilty over what happened 19 years ago
Phone Man is someone else on the island, pretending to be Natsuhi’s son in order to manipulate her

There’s not much to do with the first item—and anyway, we’re already up to our necks in Natsuhi’s constructed fiction about Kinzo, adding yet another strand seems a bit much. So let’s consider the second. Phone Man’s voice doesn’t obviously resemble another character, but I doubt the devs of the PS3 version would give us such a clue. It has to be someone with access to Natsuhi’s room so they could set up the ‘autumn’ card. I think it’s quite likely they hid four different cards for different seasons, so they could direct Natsuhi to pick up whichever one she said.

It is unlikely to be any of the characters in the parlour, because Battler is there—at least assuming we can treat him as a ‘detective’ like Erika. That leaves Genji (who, notably, has been the person to inform Natsuhi of the call both times), Krauss, and the people outside the mansion: Nanjo, Gohda, Kumasawa, the cousins, and Erika.

In the opening video there is a mysterious man in a trenchcoat with an anchor necklace, swinging a cutlass around. He looks kinda like Battler, to the point that at first I thought he was Battler. And we could say that, if someone was to try and pass themselves off as Natsuhi’s 19-year-old son in-person, Battler would be a good candidate! Alternatively, ‘it’s Jessica crossdressing and doing a voice’ would be hilarious.

That leaves the question of who knocked on the door to deliver the letter. We know this happened moments before midnight, thanks to the clock. We also have a scene claiming that when the clock struck midnight, Genji was with Krauss and Natsuhi. However, if Krauss, Natsuhi and Genji were conspiring together to deliver the letter, Lambda would have license to show a scene like this, since their ‘truth’ is that they were off having a strategy discussion.

As far as motive, the most obvious people I can see who’d want to stress out and manipulate Natsuhi are the relatives, as a ploy in the inheritance thing. But, we shouldn’t discount the non-Ushiromiya characters…

For now we can only speculate!

Chapter 9: Revenge for 19 Years Ago

We open this chapter to seaside ambience. We’re in a Natsuhi flashback. She is thinking about how she went to great efforts to have a child, because her place in the Ushiromiya family depended on her ability to bring Krauss an heir. (Of course, nobody seems to consider that Krauss might be the one who’s infertile…)

I tried every medication that was said to promote fertility, every incense or herb, ……but nothing I tried had any effect.

Beato is pretty sweet at least on the ‘Natsuhi’s mindscape’ layer. It’s the stork’s fault, she says. As for Kinzo wanting a grandchild…

Well said, Beato! But also, I am really amused by the idea of Kinzo spending his fortune investing in mpreg research. That said… maybe this is what Kinzo actually did do? Like, all that shit about creating furniture with human hearts, i.e., homunculi…

…except, wait, no, that is exactly where they’re going with this. Natsuhi brings up the ‘Gospel House’ orphanage.

Natsuhi: As part of their work training and public activity, the head employed Gospel House children with exceptional grades as servants. ……All of the servants in the mansion with the character 音, in/on/non in their names—Shannon, Kanon, Lunon, Manon, Lenon, and more besides—were children from there.

Natsuhi sees this in a positive light: she says they are well-payed and working for the Ushiromiyas is quite the resumé item, so most of them could leave after just a few years.

We flash back to a scene in Kinzo’s study. He’s ordering Natsuhi to raise a child as his grandchild. Kumasawa is there holding the baby.

But is this Jessica or Phone Man? Either way, it seems possible that Battler isn’t the only one who has a kind of dodgy parent situation. Did something similar happen with Rudolf?

Beatrice seems genuinely pretty angry with Kinzo here!

Unable to bear these insults, Natsuhi prays again ‘to angels and demons’, the former to grant her a child, the latter to curse the baby and make it disappear. She ordered ‘one of the older servants’ to look after the baby, while she went to the rose garden, wishing they would take the baby away altogether. And this person went for a walk, wandered off the path, and fell down a cliff, despite the fence in front of it. Both the nameless servant and the baby died.

Natsuhi blames herself for wishing for their death. Beatrice objects, in strong terms…

This is why demons exist, Ronove says: to act as scapegoats in situations like this. And Beatrice says, as such, she’ll take on the fight with Phone Man—her duty as the family alchemist. She spins a scene in the past where ‘the middle-aged female servant’ is drawn off the path by her golden butterflies and hypnotic gaze. They are drawn into the golden rose garden of Beatrice’s magic mansion, and Gaap teleports them into the sky. We even get an aerial view of it, before the world resolves back to the base of the cliff…

Back in the flashback, Natsuhi found that they had fallen, and ran to get help. The pair died in hospital.

(OK, so, mundane explanation… Natsuhi pushed them off a cliff and now she’s in denial about it?)

Natsuhi says the only people on the island were Natsuhi and Kinzo. (And… how many servants? Surely the woman who got pushed off the cliff wasn’t the only one.) The baby was entrusted to her, and died, within three days.

Kinzo’s reaction to two people dying was… strange!

That’s an expression all right.

So… this baby thing was his effort to resurrect Beatrice? Like, the original Beatrice who lived in Kuwadorian back in the day? In any case, this pushed him way deeper into his occult obsession.

Natsuhi starts denying any of it ever happened. The fact that this nameless servant was killed… it doesn’t matter to her, apparently! It was three days of phantasm. (I mean, they can always hire more servants, right?)

Gaap and Ronove observe that, even though the baby definitely died, someone could easily be pretending otherwise in the human world where no red truth exists. And honestly, if Natsuhi fucking murdered someone to get out of having to raise this baby, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone wanted revenge…

Beatrice offers to entertain this phantasm of nineteen years ago as a guest. She makes one of her faces…

High gurning quotient this chapter!

Beatrice ends the scene by questioning whose piece Phone Man is, if Erika belongs to Bernkastel…

And strangely, we already get a scene from the other side of the phone line! Except… no, Phone Man’s voice here also has the phone filter. Someone is tapping the line?

We cut to the ‘player’ level of reality and we see… Lambdadelta is the one doing the voice, phone filter and all.

Lambdadelta on the benefits of voice training.

The last three segments there are spoken by different voice actors, complete with sound effects.

Erika appears on the ‘outside game’ layer as Lambda praises her.

Lambdadelta: The pleasure is mine. ……Mmm, she really is wonderful. Super adorable. I’m dying to break her spirit with my witch illusions and see her face twist in humiliation.

Bernkastel: ……Hear that? ……Don’t embarrass me, okay? Show me that you’re a much more useful piece than Ange was.

Lambdadelta: “Yes, leave it to me. Lady Bernkastel, my master. ……I’m nothing like that gloomy, dull, utterly charmless piece.

Yeah, they’re really smug about getting to mess with Beato’s game board while she’s out of it, huh. Indeed, they get to taunting her over it. Her piece, they agree, is now more of a bowling pin than a chess piece.

Bernkastel: *giggle*giggle*giggle*giggle*giggle*. Both Natsuhi and Beato are sacks of filthy, rotten truth, just entrails wrapped up in a thin layer of skin. ……Tearing that to shreds and dragging the insides out will be one of my—no, one of our few pleasures.

Hey, I think being a witch sounds like it kinda sucks?

We go to Battler on… well, it’s got the border that represents a higher level of reality but I think this is more kind of Battler’s soliloquy space. A new music track, Spiral enters, with slow, mournful vocals and strings.

Erika has a brief word with Battler. Battler refuses her offer to work together: he’s only really interested in Beato’s original games, and what this game can tell him about those.

…Hmm. Do I call Erika on this level of reality ‘player!Erika’? I don’t think so, because Bernkastel is the player here. Like Ange, this Erika’s considered a piece who left the gameboard somehow. Well, if the difference matters, I guess I’ll figure something out.

Battler defiantly declares that he won’t take any help. The witches taunt him for his incompetence. And the next day begins…

OK, let’s see, stuff that’s probably significant:

At least on this game board, Natsuhi definitely murdered someone, right? Even if she’s rationalised it as wishing a curse on them in the story she tells Beato. Maybe that’s even how she remembers it.

Gospel House came up again, and we specifically see it being used by Kinzo as a means to gain a successor, in classic alchemist fashion… or perhaps more specifically, to resurrect Beato. If Kinzo was indoctrinating one or more of the kids there not just to think of themselves as furniture, but to be a potential reincarnation of Beatrice, that could explain a lot!

Other than that, our Gamer Lesbians are doing their usual trash talk. It’s fun. Let’s see if Lambda’s game can live up to how much she’s gassed herself up…

Let’s read Umineko! - episode 5 - chapter 7

2025-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

Hello! It’s Umineko, we’re liveblogging it! You know the drill by now.

Before we start, a note on a translation question that came up last time—specifically, Erika’s ‘intellectual rapist’ line. An anonymous person said:

The original script of umineko says 知的強姦者 and not 知的蹂躙者, I think they changed it for the console ports.

Here

So yeah, 強姦 means sexual assault, so ‘intellectual rapist’ is a pretty literal translation. From talking with a friend, I learned that the Witch Hunt translation, which I think derives from the original PC version of the game, also used the phrase. So, for the curious, all four versions I have:

What Erika said

Let’s read Umineko! - episode 5 - chapter 8

2025-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

Right where we left off! All the adults, plus Battler, have crowded into the parlour so that the gold can make them happy.

Wanting to adjourn, they dig out a convenient tape recorder to take a record of what was said, one that can’t be tampered with. Ah, simpler times…

Rosa says she’s tired, Krauss and Natsuhi leave the room for a strategy meeting, Genji is called and sent for food and drinks, which are delivered by Kanon and Sayo, just so we know where everyone is and isn’t. (We have no idea about the cousins and Erika just yet.)

Hideyoshi shares an anecdote about how he got his start stealing from the Americans… ok, that’s pretty funny actually. The relatives drag Sayo and Kanon into a conversation about whatever young people are into. A mandatory conversation, which they clearly don’t particularly want.

Battler is already becoming a piece in their stupid power flexes.

Just as midnight, October 5th, comes… someone knocks mysteriously. And we immediately cut back to Krauss and Natsuhi setting up their ploy. They’re trying to figure out when to play the ‘Kinzo disappeared!!’ card.

Weirdly, we get Krauss referring to the ‘toxin’…

Also conveniently setting up a locked room.

I guess Lambda has control over narration, but it seems like a weird slip of a term that belongs to the ‘magic’ world to the ‘mundane’ world.

Krauss prepares to sacrifice himself, declaring he’ll set up divorce papers for Natsuhi to use, so she and Jessica can escape the wreckage and live comfortably when this all blows up. Aaagh, I don’t think she’s gonna like that. Yeah, she really doesn’t…

Genji arrives to report another mysterious phone call from Natsuhi’s supposed long-lost son. The narration notes that she prefers not to think about anything before the birth of Jessica, 18 years ago—same as Battler. Hm, I didn’t make that connection before. Wonder if that ties in with all the wacky parentage stuff we got around Battler in Episode 4.

Anyway mystery guy knows about Natsuhi’s headaches. He asks repeatedly to ‘play’, and this leads into a question about her fave season.

I seem to be picking screenshots with really long text this time…

Autumn, she says. He tells her his is the same, and for proof, demands that she lift up a clock in her room… Very pushy guy. When she obliges, she finds… something which shocks her. Something with ‘autumn’ on it, I assume. Phone Man continues to say a bunch of melodramatic shit about how much he hates Natsuhi, who he calls a murderer. He declares that he’s on the island, having arrived before the typhoon. And he taunts her about introducing him to the family.

With apparently complete power over her, he orders her to stay in bed with the lights out and not touch the phone. For all that she’s resolved to stand by Krauss to the very end, Natsuhi is very, very afraid of this secret getting out.

Back in the parlour, Kanon opens the door… and they find a mystery letter in a Kinzo envelope, just like Beato used to leave. They conclude that only Krauss, Natsuhi and Genji could have left it.

The envelope contains… Kinzo’s headship ring. And it’s signed Beatrice! It declares Battler the new head in no uncertain terms. The others convince Battler to wear the ring just in time for Krauss to show up.

We skip forwards to 3am. Battler is on his way to bed, deeply unimpressed by his family. Time to find some bodies, I guess. After all, we know that the first group of bodies will be discovered here already…

Perhaps not yet! Nanjo and Gohda are chilling at the bar. They seem to be getting on pretty well! Quite the rarity on this island… Erika is there too, taking the opportunity to flex her knowledge as usual. We drag out the goodnights a bit long… which feels like a setup…

The cousins’ room is quiet. Battler goes straight to bed, convinced they’re all asleep. Yeah, they’re definitely dead. As he nods off, he remembers Rudolf saying he wants to talk the family about something to do with Battler’s birth… something that would get him killed.

The next chapter is called Revenge for 19 Years Ago. I predict Battler will wake up and find all his cousins dead! Until then, I’m about as sleepy as Battler, so I’ll leave it there…