Let’s read Umineko! - episode 4 - chapter 17

On we go! Full steam ahead! Let’s hit the end of Chapter 4 by Halloween!

Chapter 17 is portentiously titled Cause of the Tragedy. We open with Battler taking out his frustrations by yelling at the small child who may be the only other survivor (I don’t feel good about Kumasawa and Gohda’s odds…)

Maria is expecting an invitation to the Golden Land any minute now… at which point she can resurrect a good Rosa who exists only to take care of her.

Maria: …and she’ll fight all the time against fearsome enemies for me. Kihhihihihihi…!

You’ll have fearsome enemies in the Golden Land? Hmm. Not sure how Golden that sounds.

Battler storms off to go and stab anyone who presents themselves, and Maria scoffs at him for not waiting for the witch’s resurrection. Isn’t the whole thrust of the last chapter that passivity is anithetical to magic? Did Maria not get that memo?

He can’t storm off for very long though, because there’s another phonecall. Maria picks up, and hands the receiver over, declaring she’s leaving for her test. Guess we’re still on that, although with all hostages killed already, it will have to be a different test..?

Of course, on the other end of the line is Beatrice. Who else would it be? Anyway, we get a new BGM track called Happy Maria, a carnivalesque tune which distinguishes itself by having lyrics—I find them a little hard to make out but it sounds like a mix of English and Japanese? Maybe? Many Youtube commenters are also struggling to figure out what they’re saying, so it’s not just me. Maybe it’s a made up language like Chaos Language.

Beato addresses Battler in English, like a mocking variant of Ange’s bit. She claims to have Kinzo captive.

She and Kinzo are enjoying cheese and wine, and a game of chess. She gloats to Battler about the usual stuff, being embodied and so on. She claims this is the first time she and Battler have spokeon ‘on the board during a game’—though notably over a phone, with no overtly supernatural stuff going on.

Beatrice: He opened it, the maniac actually went and opened that vintage wine that’s expensive as shit!!

The absolute madlad. What a legend. etc. (Amused by a surprisingly British translation, don’t mind me.)

She jokes about having an affair with Battler, who she is now going to test. How, then? Well, perhaps she will offer a similar choice, with the options representing resurrection rather than sacrifice..? Curiously, she cracks a lot of jokes about Battler keeping her prisoner much as Kinzo did, should he become the head. Curious because well, she doesn’t seem to have a lot of hard feelings…

It’s convenient that Japanese has a lot of English loanwords, so Battler telling Beatrice he has some ‘hot punch’ (熱いパンチ) for her works just fine in both languages.

Anyway, this means piece!Battler will go face to face with Beatrice, which is an interesting development. What will he see? Just throwing a flashy magic VFX show in front of him feels against the spirit of the game.

Before going in, Battler goes to pick up Gohda and Kumasawa, so we’ll get to know their fates. They don’t answer, so, looks like they didn’t make it? Even though they’re not needed as sacrifices… We get a CG of it, all the same.

Hanged, huh. It’s possible this could be a suicide? Battler also notes the possibility. This seems entirely gratuitous on Beatrice’s part. Battler manages a miserable ‘dame da, zenzen dame da’ before going to his confrontation. Curiously, the character screen does not update at this point to confirm the deaths, perhaps because Battler has not viewed them up close.

Battler also confirms George’s corpse in the gazebo (which the game insists on calling an arbor, even though that’s a different thing, considerably less resistant to arrows). This one does get an update:

Corpse discovered by the rose garden arbor. There was a single hole right in the centre of the forehead. It seems reasonable to think that he was shot with a gun or something.

It was a brand of humiliation, marking his loss to Gaap.

It doesn’t seem like Beatrice is particularly trying to set up mysteries thus far, but who knows. Onwards to more dead bodies.

Damn, look at me poring over this to identify puzzles and clues, Battler’s grief at losing his best bro is not even registering anymore. Guess the whole ‘repeated death desensitises’ thing was onto something…

Battler finds a mysterious box just as the clock strikes midnight for October 4th. This might mean something, so I’m noting it. And then… from a distance, he lays eyes on Beatrice.

So, we can add to the Official Battler Observation List: there is a woman who looks like the portrait hanging out on the roof of the mansion.

We actually get a whole bunch of closeup CGIs on different sides of a splitscreen, because this is evidently an important scene.

Beatrice reels off a list of supernatural things that aren’t present: demons, magic, gold butterflies, magic circles, summoners etc. Presumably to underline that this is a scene we are obliged to take as canon, both because Battler is present and because we’re allowed to ignore scenes that explicitly portray magic stuff.

Beato explains that this is because Battler’s press-square-to-doubt acts as a toxin protecting him, preventing him from directly seeing her. She likens this scene to advancing a bishop to directly threaten Battler. So, supernatural scenes are black squares, and mundane scenes are white, or vice versa. Now, having softened up Battler’s defence, she is able to send in a ‘queen’ who can act in both types of square.

Battler: …Now, you not only control the black squares that are the witch illusions, but have also been able to encroach upon the white squares of the human world at will…?!

Did meta!Battler suddenly download into piece!Battler’s head? I’m glad we don’t have him just going ‘this makes no sense’ all the time, but he seems surprisingly context-aware here.

But yes, although this is apparently officially a ‘white square’ or mundane scene, this conversation would make no damn sense without awareness of the wider context. Hopefully we don’t have to explain away their lines of dialogue too.

We get some first-person narration from Battler, who seems to be in some sort of collapsed state:

Battler: ……She can kill me instantly while rolling around giggling, just by snapping a finger.

Whether we interpret the result of her snapping her fingers as magic flying at me or underlings showing up to shoot me, it doesn’t matter.

So, here’s the game at hand: the mansion is fully locked up and Beatrice has the high ground, Anakin. To reach her, Battler needs a key. Beatrice says that if he passes the test, he will be the head, and therefore have the right to harm her as the family’s furniture. (Seems a bit of a downgrade from consulting alchemist, doesn’t it?)

Beatrice says some Kink Stuff:

Beatrice: “Scary, scaary… But it’s not like I mind being controlled by violence, you see? Grab…onto my head! Make my face twist in pain, violate me in the same way a hawk tears apart and scratches at its prey with its talons…!!”

“Aaah, remind me of Kinzo in his younger days once more…!! That single time in my thousand‐year life! Remind me of that day I was taught the joy of being controlled, of submitting and being reduced to furnituuuuuuuure!!”

So Beato’s officially a switch who likes doing brat scenes or something, is that the right terminology? I’ll be real, I am barely in the scene and can count the number of kink events I’ve been to on one hand.

Battler’s test is… the same as the others, except with a fill-in-the-blank slot for the loved one entry. I guess Kyrie wasn’t considered sufficient to count. But that kind of makes the whole thing… not work? Like, if there isn’t a designated special person on option 2, Battler could just put Beatrice or Kinzo on it, or you know, literally anyone else he wants dead. I guess we’ve established that he’d still have to kill them himself.

Battler immediately recognises the exact same exploit and names Beato as the sacrifice. She brushes this off… well, she’s setting the rules, I guess she can say ‘that doesn’t count’. But that leaves us with a pressing question: who is Battler’s love interest? Battler reasonably refuses to answer. This has been a bit of a damp squib of a test, I guess we just wanted to shiptease Battler/???…?

Battler makes a crack about preferring flat-chested girls because I guess he’s Battler, he has to talk about boobs. Beato retorts by calling him a… breast sommelier? Yeah OK, I have to look that up in the JP script. おっぱいソムリエ oppai somarie… damn, it is literally exactly that, English loanword and all.

Moving on…

So the real test is going to be some questions and decide whether he deserves to be the head. Question 1 is his name. (So… 2. favourite colour, 3. capital of assyria?) Beato challenges him on abandoning the name, and summarises his fraught parent relationship.

Beatrice: However, was throwing away the Ushiromiya name as a means of resistance not a disgrace to your family and blood?

She browbeats him with whether he’s betraying the oh so sacred family name and his debt to them and like, who cares man lmao. Perhaps predictably, I feel pretty strongly that children intrinsically owe nothing to their family. (This despite the fact I actually get on really well with my family, kind of an exception to the trans girl rule there. But you know, has to be earned!) Still, I guess if you’re trying to determine eligibility to play family head, you do need to make sure someone actually cares about the game.

Beato seems to think of it in stronger terms, though, speaking repeatedly of Battler’s ‘sin’ (罪 tsumi). We get a ‘come, try to remember’. Battler doesn’t reject the ‘children owe their parents’ thesis, and he concedes that he was being “childish and rebellious”. He’s still pissed off at Rudolf for having an affair and another kid, which he calls a betrayal of Asumu’s devotion. (I wonder what Asumu is like…) But he says over time, the anger cooled. He said he’d forgive Rudolf with an apology, and got one, and started over…

Hard to disagree with his closing statement…

Battler: “You aren’t qualified to judge that to be a sin, and I have no duty to show repentance to you! If there was anyone I should have done that for, you’ve already killed them!!”

Like yeah I dare say all the murder does pretty decisively outweight all this purely symbolic shit.

But Beatrice is actually obliquely driving at some other shit. And the fact that he doesn’t remember is what counts as the ‘sin’. On both the ‘board’ and ‘meta’ layers, Battler insists he has no idea what she’s talking about, given Beato was not even around back then. We’re clearly well out of the realm of any meaningful ‘test’ at this point, and I don’t think there’s any way we readers could reasonably guess what she’s on about, unless it was like, some interaction with Maria or something?

Whatever this is, it’s serious enough to motivate a redtext:

Six years ago, no person called Beatrice existed for me. [where ‘me’ is Battler, but when it comes to redtext I want to quote the game verbatim.]

Beato insists that this ‘sin’, whatever it is, did not directly involve her—despite apparently mattering to her a great deal. So what else might Battler have done? Well, given the whole ‘furniture’ theme running throughout the entire story so far, my guess is that it has something to do with one of the servants on Rokkenjima—perhaps the mysterious author of the texts in Ange’s timeline. Perhaps, as a result of his anger at Rudolf, Battler took out his frustrations on someone else on Rokkenjima?

Battler gets it spelled out in red, just to be sure.

The sin I am demanding that you remember is not between Ushiromiya Battler and Beatrice. [this line is spoken by meta!Beatrice to meta!Battler.]

The distinction between ‘I’ and ‘you’ in the first clause and ‘Ushiromiya Battler’ and Beatrice in the second seems significant. In Japanese, the same is true:

妾が今、そなたに思い出すことを要求している罪は、右代宮戦人とベアトリーチェの間のものではない。

I didn’t twig this before, but Beatrice’s personal pronoun here is 妾 warawa, a very unusual and archaic choice; the kanji 妾 can also be used to write the word mekake, meaning “kept woman, mistress or concubine”. Because of how Japanese grammar works, the pronoun ‘you’ can be omitted; in English you could potentially use an awkward passive voice construct to omit like, “The sin I am demanding be remembered is…” to reflect this nuance, but I don’t think the omission of the ‘you’ means anything.

OK, enough grammar lessons. Beatrice also takes a moment to assert that there definitely is a sin to remember. Also, it’s quite a serious one…

Ushiromiya Battler has a sin.

Because of your sin, people die. [Spoken by meta!Beatrice to meta!Battler]

Due to your sin, a great many humans on this island die. None will escape, all will die.

The last sentence is just… a fact, everyone dies eventually. Grammatically it obviously follows from the first sentence, but… the fact a white full stop appears between the two statements is a loophole. (Also, we know that at least Eva is supposed to survive in Ange’s timeline, so… not all will die? Unless the circumstances of Eva’s eventual death are also Battler’s fault somehow?)

What could Battler have done? Well, the obvious interpretation is that he accidentally did something that, chain of dominos style, precipitated the mass murder incident. A second possibility is that he like, accidentally opened the radioactive storage vault or something. But somehow I don’t think that’s it. Beato spells out (though not in red) that it’s an indirect consequence that took six years to play out, and that she is indeed talking about the mass death incident.

Battler interprets this as saying that coming back to the island caused the murders to happen, but I don’t think Beato said that? It seems to be implied that he did something six years ago, which was the first domino.

OK, let’s spitball here. A huge theme running throughout Umineko is that the rich people treat their servants as literal furniture, less than human. And Battler is, for all his positive qualities, still a rich kid. So, suppose he mistreated one of the servants, kicking off a breakdown in someone that ultimately snowballed into the massacre during which this person (or someone else!) adopts the identity of Beatrice, or forms a Beatrice headmate ala Eva Beatrice, or something along those lines.

And, if Beatrice is currently representing that person’s point of view (perhaps because they are the implicit author behind the story), that incident would matter very much to her, but she could also say that person had not yet become Beatrice, so the above redtexts could be true.

Finally, why she’s pressing Battler so much to remember it, rather than just telling him—the disregard expressed by Battler would be part of the offence here. So, the fact he considers whatever it was beneath his notice and doesn’t even remember it is a mark against him. (For him, it was Tuesday.)

As to why she’s articulating this as an offence against the Ushiromiya family rather than an individual, well, furniture mindset, right? If you’re indoctrinated to believe you are not a person but property, then harming you is a crime against the owner of the property, not you.

That’s my theory. I wonder if we’ll get answers just yet?

Beatrice converses on Battler’s failure to remember with an unseen voice—one that sounds a lot like her, if a bit older? …yep, it’s her. We now have two different Beatrices talking to each other…

Both Beatrices are named Beatrice in the dialogue box header, and have identical talksprite faces. I guess, for want of a better description of how they relate to each other, I will call them dress!Beatrice and jacket!Beatrice.

Jacket!Beatrice remarks that she now basically knows all she needs to know and intends to withdraw from the field, allowing dress!Beatrice to take over from here.

Checking my archives, I find that jacket!Beatrice was first seen in Episode 2, which I first read back in… 2017, even longer ago than Battler’s ‘sin’. Well, at the time, I simply chalked it up to an outfit variation, but I did note an animation where the portrait changed to show this new Beatrice. So it was marked as significant in the game. Also, that seems to suggest that jacket!Beatrice was the main player in Episode 2, but dress!Beatrice came back in Episode 3, and this episode we have also mostly been dealing with dress!Beatrice up until this one scene.

So how do these two Beatrices relate? One seems a lot younger than the other, so I think it may be a sort of ‘younger alter’ thing, similar to what went down with Eva? Let’s find out.

Dress!Beatrice tells jacket!Beatrice to go and rest and she’ll take care of everything. She silently has her avatar withdraw from the balcony without granting Battler the key.

Inside Kinzo’s office, the demons are celebrating…whatever it is they’ve accomplished here. Resurrecting the witch again for the fourth time or something. Which I guess is about to be negated unless Battler accepts the witch, which he doesn’t seem anywhere close to doing..?

Kinzo declares Maria passed his test offscreen, much to his surprise. He’s in great spirits… up until Beatrice fucking incinerates him. There’s a whole animation for it!

By the time she returns downstairs, Beatrice is back in the dress ingame as well. She’s done with the game. Anyone who asks too many questions gets a similar treatment. Gaap gets turned to glass (by making her sprite transparent, no flashy effect here), and the demons are rushed out and party magiced away.

Beatrice addresses meta!Battler (while piece!Battler is apparently still stuck outside in the rain.) He can tell she’s pissed. She tells Battler she’s done, like done done. Battler is like, wait, you’re resigning?

He is, at least, astute enough to tell that whatever the redtext above was about, it’s some sort of wordplay and it really is personal. But Beatrice won’t be drawn. Battler acts as if he’ll get to advance in time now but… no, I don’t think it works that way, Battler. I’m pretty sure that if the game ends, you’re just gone. You’re a figment of the game, or narrative construct, right? Like a save file sitting on a hard drive for over a year, or a book that you never finish writing. Luckily for Battler, I decided to pick this suspended game up and continue.

Indeed, Beatrice explains, if she doesn’t make a move, the game is just abandoned forever in a suspended state. We go back to Beatrice’s purple room, and Bernkastel and Lambdadelta are there to clarify.

Bernkastel: No match can reach its conclusion without two oppositng sides.

This is where we can get into an interesting (to me) little tangent about game state, and what it means for a game to be suspended right? Like, above I spoke about a save file being left on a hard drive, or an unfinished novel… but there are many ways a novel could be finished, and many ways a game could develop. And furthermore, that data and the physical material holding its state is only made ‘the game’ by a kind of active identification by the players—a part of the famous ‘magic circle’. Supposing someone copied my Umineko save data and started reading the story where I left off… well, my game would still be suspended.

Where this gets really squirly is where you start considering the mind of the players a part of the game state. Let’s say Kinzo and Nanjo sit down to resume a game of chess, as happened at the very beginning of the story. They will play out the game in a certain way—a way that is likely different from if they had sat down at a different time, in a different mood, with different things on their mind. If they agreed to it, they could roll back to an earlier game state and branch out in a different direction. Both of these could have claims to be ‘legitimate’ continuations of ‘the game’.

And while Umineko the program effectively tracks only one linear dimension of ‘game state’ (how much of the story you’ve unlocked)… had I continued to read Umineko a year ago, I would have had different thoughts and written different things in this liveblog than I am now. I am not the same person I was in 2024, and certainly not the same person I was in 2017. The remaining liveblogs that 2017!Bryn could have written are simply not available to us in this timeline, since 2017!Bryn’s state has been overwritten by a succession of future Bryns, any more than if I had died in 2018.

All of that is in a sense moot here because Beatrice is declaring that she will not progress any version of the game, ever, and she’s the one with the password to the ‘gaming PC’ I suppose.

However, Bernie and Lambda aren’t having it. They demand Beato continue the game. Battler also says he won’t run away and intends to see this through. Even Ange says abandoning the game is irresponsible! (Much to Battler’s confusion, since he still hasn’t twigged who she is.)

This is getting into the subject of being a spoilsport vs. being a cheater, famously discussed in Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, and how the spoilsport who simply ignores the game being played threatens the existence of the magic circle altogether…

It is curious to note how much more lenient society is to the cheat than to the spoil-sport. This is because the spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. By withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others. He robs play of its illusion - a pregnant word which means literally “in-play” (from inlusio, illudere or inludere). Therefore he must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community.

This is the nature of the accusation levelled against Beatrice! I mean, obviously. I just think it’s a fun connection to make. (Just you wait until I get into Bernard Suits.)

But it turns out this is all… a gambit? Or perhaps Beato’s improvising. In any case, she suggests that Battler is equally irresponsible for the thing he did six years ago, to the point that he might not qualify to be her opponent… in which case he will disappear.

So he has to do a red repetition request. It turns out Battler can do red text all along. (In fact, he did it not long ago, but I guess he didn’t notice/do it intentionally.)

Battler gives us the following axiom:

My name is Ushiromiya Battler.

Neat! Now try ‘The real part of every nontrivial zero of the Riemann zeta function is 1/2’!

Ange has apparently predicted where this is going, and tries to get her to stop. No such luck, Beato sweeps her aside. So if Battler is not qualified to be her opponent, he just disappears. I guess he gets demoted to a game piece at that point.

I kind of think she’s going to do it. This feels big enough to be a last act twist. And we’ve introduced Ange to potentially step into Battler’s shoes as protagonist..?

So, it’s a red-off. Beato opens:

I am the Golden Witch, Beatrice. And I opened this game in order to fight Ushiromiya Kinzo’s grandchild, Ushiromiya Battler.

Are we gonna have to start tagging the red statements to note who the author is? Not necessary in this statement.

Anyway, this is all coming back to my ‘Battler doesn’t exist’ theory which I proposed back at the end of chapter 6 of this episode. If that turns out to be right, I am gonna go nuts. Beatrice seems to be attempting to prove that Battler could not actually have existed: that the premise of the scenario was faulty from the outset.

Battler is able to safely repeat:

• Ushiromiya Battler’s mother is Ushiromiya Asumu.
• My name is Ushiromiya Battler.
• It was from Ushiromiya Asumu that Ushiromiya Battler was born.

But he chokes on:

• It was from Ushiromiya— [Asuma that I was born.]

Later if he tries to assert this sentence, it does not come out in red. At one point he gets the red again, but cuts off at Ushi—.

So we have a referent ambiguity problem. But what’s the source? Are there multiple Ushiromiya Battlers? Is Meta!Battler too distinct an entity to original!Battler, piece!Battler or some other Battler to be able to refer to himself as ‘I’ here?

Beato then offers a syllogistic argument in blue—this is in essence her ‘legal theory’ to be validated by the court:

Due to the previous repetition request, and the refusal to repeat, I proclaim that you are not qualified to be my opponent.

After all, Beatrice opened this game in order to fight with “Ushiromiya Kinzo’s grandchild, Ushiromiya Battler”.

This gave you the responsibility, as my opponent, to declare in red that you are “Ushiromiya Kinzo’s grandchild, Ushiromiya Battler”.

You declined to repeat that.

This means the loss of your qualifications.

Uh oh, we’ve got statements referring to other statements here. That’s going to open a whole can of circular reference worms. For example, we could create a liar paradox now.

One hypothesis for Battler’s ‘sin’: Battler swapped identities with someone—someone else adopted the name Ushiromiya Battler and came to Rokkenjima, fully believing themselves to have been the original Battler because of retrograde amnesia or something.

But how could that be?

Beatrice spells out the multiple reference theory in blue:

People’s names are not exclusive. It is possible for multiple humans to have the name Ushiromiya Battler.

What it comes down to is this. You are a different person with the same first and last names as Ushiromiya Asumu’s son, Ushiromiya Battler.

No, it’s literally the ‘Battler is a fictional character’ theory I advanced in chapter 6 isn’t it. Since we now know in red that there is an Ushiromiya Battler who was the son of Asumu, we can say that the character ‘Battler’ we’ve encountered in the story so far is a fictional creation of someone on Rokkenjima, who has not encountered the real Ushiromiya Battler in at least six years. In their attempts to spin various stories of what happened on the island, they imagined this version of Battler suddenly coming back. But their fictionalised Battler is not the same as the original man, who is off out there in the world somewhere living his life.

According to this iteration of the theory… Battler is a real person, but he never went to Rokkenjima and was not murdered.

But in that case, why did Ange go around believing that Battler had died on the island? Well, perhaps someone, assuming the name of Ushiromiya Battler in any documentation, went to the island in his place… and maybe even carried out the murders?

In that case: there was someone who the author believed to be Ushiromiya Battler, but he was actually an imposter. This leaves room for an additional person to sneak into all of the ‘18 people on the island’ puzzles in previous episodes. Let’s check Eva Beatrice’s ‘checkmate’ in chapter 3… red axiom #26 declared “Of course, Battler-kun isn’t the culprit.” Well, we’ve just introduced this tricksy reference ambiguity. ‘Battler-kun’ may here refer to the original Battler-kun, who never went to the island and therefore obviously isn’t the culprit. However, an imposter calling themselves Battler did carry out the murders..?

Shit, that’s crazy. But it might just work..? Ah, but Eva Beatrice 27 says

He wasn’t forging an alibi for her, and he took the possibility that she was the culprit into account, watching her actions carefully.

It would be hard for Battler to take her being the culprit into account or watch her actions if he was not on the island.

On the other hand, we can just say Eva was the murderer, and imposter!Battler is just there to… pretend to be Ushiromiya Battler for their own mysterious reasons.

In that case, we can hypothesise that real!Battler’s ‘sin’ was… to smuggle someone off the island six years ago. Here’s a yarn: that person returned to the island, convincingly assuming the identity of Battler due to personal acquaintance with the man himself. Why? Well, if we assume this person was one of the ‘furniture’ servants, they maybe intended to help the others escape? In that case, real!Battler ‘sinned’ against the Ushiromiya family by stealing their furniture.

OK, let’s suppose that there are two servants in a Sayo & Kanon type relationship. Real!Battler takes one of these servants away, leaving the other in hell without any support—this is the person who will ultimately become author!Beatrice. Later, the one who left returns to Rokkenjima, assuming the identity of Battler, this is imposter!Battler. The author believes them to be the original Battler, and has so far been writing the fictionalised Battler on the assumption that he’s the original, and only now deducing that he can’t be…

However… the Battler we meet in-game, being imposter!Battler, would obviously know about being smuggled off the island six years ago.

So, this doesn’t add up, because whether they are the original or an imposter who originally came from the island, if we’re working with this theory, they would certainly know what happened six years ago.

Let’s go back to what we actually know before we explore the tree of theories too much.

• Asumu had a son called Battler. we’ll call this one real!Battler
• our characters meta!Battler (and presumably piece!Battler) do not derive from real!Battler, but some other person assuming the name Battler

From there, possible theories include:

• that there was a real person pretending to be Battler, who inspired meta!Battler/piece!Battler
• meta!Battler/piece!Battler are fictionalised versions of a six-year-old memory of Battler created by author!Beatrice.

We can also consider theories where Battler could incorrectly think he’s “Asumu’s son”:

• there was some kind of baby swap shenanigans, and unbeknownst to them, the boy raised by Rudolf and Asumu was not actually their biological son. (This requires that the biological son is still called Ushiromiya Battler.)
• there was an Ushiromiya Battler who died young, and Rudolf and Kyrie had a second child, who they also called Battler, like they used to do when a baby died in Victorian times. In that case, Kyrie actually is Battler’s mum. However… she’d know that, so her dialogue wouldn’t make sense.

All right, with these theories in mind, let’s see Beatrice complete her attack.

She is able to declare, in red:

You are not Ushiromiya Asumu’s son.

And she has concluded that his lack of knowledge of the ‘sin’ is sufficient proof. But if that’s the case, why does he believe himself to be real!Battler? Anyway, here’s how Beatrice sums it up:

Battler would not commit a sin? Hold on, what? OK, I thought the whole point was that Battler did commit a sin, that he ought to remember, so… OK, well, anyway.

Six years ago, ……the true Ushiromiya Battler, qualified to be my opponent, was already dead. You were involved in a plot by Rudolf having something to do with distribution of the inheritance… a body double set up in Ushiromiya Battler’s place.

So Battler died as a result of his sin? OK, I didn’t consider that possibility, but yeah, that’s logically consistent. So, Beatrice suspected that Battler was involved in this ‘sin’, but she has now concluded that he was not involved, he was instead (presumably) a victim. Why her special interest in Battler, though?

Bernkastel seems convinced by all this and admits defeat. (But hold on, what about Ange? Defeating—or in this case, eliminating—Battler is only half the battle now.)

But, wait…

Wait…

I think I’m making a big mistake here in conflating Beatrice the character with ‘Beatrice’ the author. Maybe the author knew all along whether or not it was the real Battler, but part of the development involved getting the character Beatrice up to speed with this revelation, perhaps a mirror of her own process of discovering that Battler wasn’t real.

Or maybe it’s a metafiction thing and Battler’s about to retort that he’s fictional, i.e., the author is admitting to herself that she’s writing a fictionalised version of Battler…?

Well, if any such a thing is going to happen, not yet. Battler is erased; Beato tells Bernie and Lambda to fuck off and disappears herself. Oh well, I guess that’s Umineko, what a strange ending—

Haha, yeah, of course not. We have four more chapters to go in this episode alone.

Bernie and Lambda head off, but Beato has a soliloquy to round out the chapter. Magic, she says, should only have been used within Mariage Sorcière. Which is… the game that Maria and Ange concocted..? No, Maria and Beatrice, originally; Ange and others were a later addition and they are now agreeing (this is the witch version of Maria so presumably she can just show up whenever) they should have kept it to just the two of them. Beatrice questions what it was she wanted to do at the outset, and concludes she doesn’t want to remember. She ends the chapter crying to Maria.

so. Battler isn’t real

Haha wow we deleted the protagonist. Not exactly in the way I predicted but I’m amazed that anything like my crazy theory from chapter 6 would come true.

It seems likely that the Beatrice we’ve encountered in the story so far was a creation/persona of someone on Rokkenjima, no doubt inspired by the Golden Witch mythology, in collaboration with Maria; this shared secret world was the Mariage Sorcière. They invited other people to participate in this game, notably Ange—however, Ange eventually rejected the game. (Perhaps other witch characters, like Eva, also became involved at various points? That said, Eva Beatrice seems to have been ‘born’ a great deal earlier, so she’s probably unrelated, or a temporary concoction of the Episode 3 scenario.)

Six years ago, something happened on Rokkenjima which led to the death of Battler, and later led to the massacre. At first, Beatrice believed that he would have survived, with memory of participating in this sordid event. When he does not, she uses it as a reason to conclude he must actually be an imposter, and the real Battler died at that time—but at least he is innocent of whatever it was! Presumably, then, she did not actually see Battler die, or she would never have believed the imposter was real in the first place. Since a large part of the purpose of the game for Beatrice seems to be addressing the memory of this incident, she loses interest in the game.

Meanwhile, significantly prior to the main events of the story, Kinzo abducted the original Beatrice and held her prisoner in Kuwadorian on Rokkenjima, but she died a long time ago. Now we can say…

• character!Beatrice’s backstory is a reincarnation of this prisoner
• author!Beatrice is presumably not directly related to this person, beyond being aware they existed and using their story as inspiration?

On top of that, we have two Beatrice designs, with an unclear relation between them. What is author!Beatrice hinting at with these two versions of the character?

Whatever this incident was, it led to the massacre six years later. If Battler was not involved, and instead was killed, perhaps other members of the family were involved. It seems to be the key to the interpretation of everything else that follows… quite late to give such a crucial piece, but then, we are still in the ‘question’ arc.

The real question is whether we will be told what this event involved before the end of the episode. They’ve gone to some pains to only hint at the nature of this event six years ago. Whatever it was, it was a deeply traumatic event that somehow led to the massacre. Another occult ritual? Something to do with the creation of ‘furniture’? If Battler can be assumed to have died if he was not a perpetrator, that suggests murder was certainly involved. Who else might have been killed?

On the other hand, we should note that it seemed plausible that Battler might not remember his role in the event. Perhaps Beatrice was simply testing whether he was an imposter, but the fact her first thought was that he didn’t remember, and that this to deeply upset her, suggests it was not something so lurid as an occult murder. After all, there’s no way he wouldn’t remember that. Instead, it has to be something personally significant to (the person who became) Beatrice, that she would hope is personally significant to Battler too.

If Battler is dead, it doesn’t seem to make much sense that an imposter sent by Rudolf to scam Kinzo would not be aware of this. Battler’s seemingly genuine amnesia is the hardest part to explain, whichever version of the theory we go with.

Next chapter will see Ange reach Rokkenjima at last, and perhaps we will get something which will address the mountain of questions raised by this chapter. I’m stoked.