Let’s read Umineko! - episode 4 - chapter 19

Hello, I’m back from loving anime in Scotland at Scotland Loves Anime and caught up on work, time for a little more Umineko!

Firstly, a couple of notes: since last time I decided that, if I’m going to cite them for my visual novel liveblogging project, it would definitely behoove me to actually read through books like The Grasshopper and Rules of Play. I’m not going to get too into it here (more likely a substantial blog post of its own lmao), but if this subject happens to come up again I’ll hopefully have a clearer idea of who said what and why!

Another, minor technical note: in the last article, I started using lossy webps to encode the images. Although webp usually does pretty good compression, I noticed in this episode that it was screwing up some of the colours, most noticeable on red text. From this point on I will stick to lossless compression.

Anyway, Umineko! Battler isn’t real, Ange can kill people with tulpas… any other major twists to drop at the end of the arc Ryuukishi?

Chapter 19: Ushiromiya Ange

We open with a lurid picture of the golden-ified version of the Ushiromiya mansion. Since Beatrice’s original game has been declared null, this cannot be the usual Golden Land, surely?

This time, there’s no big party being thrown for the whole cast. Just Maria and Beatrice. The latter of whom demands to know how Ange even got here.

She had closed off her heart, and shut herself up in a world where she was alone with Maria onee‐chan.

So this is perhaps… the Beatrice mind palace? Like if we are interpreting the behaviour of the character Beatrice as reflecting somehow the mood of the author “Beatrice”, either as she is writing or inspired by something she felt in the past…?

With regard to Ange here—originally, I thought there were two Anges, a ‘real’ Ange who went on her crazy adventure, and a ‘witch’ Ange who went to play the game with Battler. But the last episode seems to make clear that the ‘witch’/’player’ Ange is simply the same Ange in the aftermath of the adventure..? In essence, we had the backstory interweaved with the ‘present’.

(In the ‘mundane’ interpretation, Ange became involved in the ‘game’ much as we did—by virtue of encountering the writing of author!Beatrice, and in pursuit of trying to figure out what became of her family, which is to say, to figure out what happened on Rokkenjima. Though without Ange actually meeting author!Beatrice, it’s not clear why author!Beatrice would write her into the ‘game’, so… hmm. This interpretation needs some work.)

Maria seems keen for Ange to join the pair and play, but Beato would rather it just be Maria. In light of the… author!Beatrice reading… well, trying to parse everything through this lens is probably gonna get tiring, but we can probably say that author!Beatrice has gotten tired of playing out different scenarios and just wants to imagine hanging out with her dead friend Maria.

In that regard, taking this as perhaps too overtly a roman à clef, perhaps the sudden appearance of Ange is inspired by… ok, so let’s imagine that author!Beatrice has remained on Rokkenjima, writing her stories in secret. (We could question what she would eat, since nobody goes to the island, but that’s also a good reason she might remain hidden.) Ange suddenly shows up on the island, and has some sort of altercation with Kasumi and her goons. I don’t think it would make sense for author!Beatrice to have met Ange, but perhaps she secretly observed Ange from afar and this is what she imagines Ange must be like…? And this sudden appearance of someone from the Ushiromiya clan causes her to revive her writing/PTSD-processing project?

I’m really going out on a limb here lol. The problem is I’m not sure exactly how much of the story should be interpreted as being written by author!Beatrice. There are lots of personal details of Ange’s life that she could not know… unless Ange is mostly an invention? That would explain some of the fanciful skyscraper-jumping action if so but, idk, you’ve got to assume that something we’ve been told about the Ushiromiyas is true with the ‘outer’ fiction lol.

The narration reiterates the theme of the creation of a ‘small universe’ between two people who needed each other. But, as precious as that may be…

Beatrice demands to know why Ange would do such a thing. Ange says that her obligation is to either defeat Battler and create the world she truly wished for, or release everything swallowed up by her magic. Pretty interesting articulation of the stakes. Everything now is stuck in epistemic limbo? No closure can be had until we know what happened and why?

Ange questions whether this particular Golden Land is the real deal. Maria demonstrates that it can have whatever: even a nice version of Rosa! Wow, now we’re really pushing it…

But Ange asks about Sakutarō. And… that’s apparently too raw for this Maria still. Ange rhetorically asks why, and presses the point even as Maria goes into PTSD flashback hell. Beatrice attempts to explain the magical logic why Sakutarō cannot be revived. Ange retorts by calling into question the whole magic fantasy…

Beato immediately changes her tune, and claims to be able to spawn as many Sakutarōs as she likes. (Makes me think of one of those Youtube videos where someone spawns thousands of physics objects in a game.)

Anyway, Ange’s point is that the Sakutarōs that Beatrice summons are no good for Maria. They exist only for Beato. Intersubjectivity, I guess, is what grants ‘real’ magic. And the threshold to be a witch, for Ange, is pretty much outright omnipotence.

Beatrice is reduced to the ‘well why don’t you try’ answer. Well, ok, let’s think about what the difference might be. If magic is ultimately about making up compelling stories, Ange would need to convince Maria to go along with the idea that Sakutarō has come back. Obviously she’s been imagining Sakutarō herself along the whole way, while studying Maria’s diary, so… perhaps she could? Though if Maria is also a character being ‘summoned’ by Beatrice, that means… Beatrice is unable to imagine a convincing version of Maria that would accept Sakutarō coming back, or…

So, Ange says she’ll revive Sakutarō if Maria will leave this Golden Land. “The minimum amount of humans it takes to create a universe”, the narration says, “is two.” But Ange immediately contradicts this: a real witch can do it solitaire.

Beatrice counters with the ‘you have no power in my Golden Land’ play. Unfortunately, Maria overrules her. So Beatrice fires… red text!

This is my Golden Land…! A world where magic that isn’t mine certainly cannot exist!!!

But is Ange’s ‘magic’ not ultimately derived from Beatrice’s magic, since it is a derivative of the original Mariage Sorcière game..?

Ange recites a come, try to remember incantation. It’s pretty sweet so lemme quote it.

「……………さぁさ、思い出して御覧なさい。真里亞の親友のさくたろう」
「………あなたがどんな姿をしていたのか、思い出して御覧なさい」
「………あなたがどんなに愛くるしいぬいぐるみだったのか、思い出して御覧なさい」

“……………Come, try to remember. Maria’s close friend Sakutarou.”
“………Try to remember what form you had.”
“………Try to remember what a lovable stuffed animal you were.”

The language is pretty similar to the previous incantations.

There’s a line where Ange’s voice shifts directly into Sakutarō’s voice. I wonder if it’s the same voice actor doing it? If so, I did not realise!

Ange: “……It’s alright. Sakutarou…won’t disappear. ………… ‘Uryu, Maria. I’m back.’”

The difference is marked in text with single quotes inside the outer double quotes for Ange’s line. (If you’re wondering, in the Japanese script it uses 『double hook bracket quotes』 (二重鉤括弧 ,nijūkagikakko) inside regular 「hook bracket quotes」.)

In the narration, the revived Sakutarō is also at first described pretty explicitly as a stuffed animal—not the anthropomorphisation of Sakutarō we’ve encountered. Though the latter does appear shortly after.

Maria asks the obvious question: why were you able to do that? Beatrice asks it more forcefully, repeating the red text, and adding one more…

And my magic was not able to revive Sakutarō…!!

It seems rather notable to me that the red text only begins after ‘my’. If we take the red text as axiomatic, that means Ange revived Sakutarō by some other means—for example, recreating the Sakutarō plush herself and imbuing it with the personality of the original Sakutarō in her personal narrative?

Beatrice tries to continue, and chokes on a red line for the first time!!

In text:

Beatrice: “There’s no way it could!! That stuffed animal was a special stuffed animal! Rosa made it for her daughter’s birthday, and in the entire world, only one of its kind—………—……………u………………hh……”

So, that seems pretty cut and dry.

Pretty quickly, Beatrice seems to realise what Ange’s up to. She could undermine the claim that that’s the real, original Sakutarō… but what would that do to Maria? So she plays along as Ange declares herself the Witch of Resurrection.

Ange is drawn with tears in her eyes throughout all of this incidentally.

As Maria vanishes from the simulacrum, Ange addresses a ‘you’.

“……Goodbye, …Maria onee‐chan. And be happy forever. …………It’s alright, I’m sure “you” exist in Onee‐chan’s world as well. But that doesn’t refer to you.”

Bit of an odd line to parse… I guess she’s addressing Beatrice. ‘“You”’ as in the character of “the witch Beatrice” exists for Maria. But the person Ange is addressing here is not the fictional witch, Beatrice. Who is she then?

Ange now offers an extension of the line:

Without love, without sadness, without anger, …………magic cannot be seen.

But OK, so, we’ve seen that we can be willing to go along with a magic story for the sake of not hurting a child like Maria. But for adults like Ange and Beatrice, are we saying that can’t be enough..?

In any case, this is enough to pull Beatrice back from her little pocket escape dimension, back to the game. Ange berates Beatrice and tells her she will not be allowed to try to abandon the game again. Beatrice, for her part, resignedly calls the game unwinnable.

And if that’s not enough, Lambdadelta shows up again to lock her to the game table (and explain that she’s here for all eternity).

What about her opponent? Well, it seems Bernie is also here to get this show back on the road, for she returns, declaring that she’s ‘found Battler’… albeit with a doll-like affect, lacking ‘the one pillar that established his soul’. She says not even he wants to run away… though Battler is pretty much in vegetable mode. Notably, we do not see any of his talksprites…

How can we bring Battler back? Well, we need to establish a new basis on which Battler can be involved in this story.

Battler(?) ……I am not… …Ushiromiya Battler…………

We also do not see Battler’s name in the dialogue boxes. Ange tells this figment of ‘Battler’ to rebuild his own personal ‘world’

Ange “No matter who else admits that or denies that, make sure you believe it yourself…!! You are the only one who can create your own world, you know. Don’t lose the world where you are Ushiromiya Battler!”

What does this mean, exactly? Like, is there a person behind ‘Battler’ having an identity crisis? Is this author!Beatrice’s uncertainty in how to define this character..? Battler say’s he’s not “mum’s kid”, which was a curious enough phrase to look up—he uses お袋 ofukuro, a colloquial way to refer to your own mum (which literally uses the kanji for ‘bag’, although usually it’s just kana).

Ange acknowledges the following red truth:

Ushiromiya Battler is not Ushiromiya Asumu’s son.

But Ange has apparently seen through a trick, and demands repetition of

Ushiromiya Battler is not Ushiromiya Kinzo’s grandchild.

So it seems like we’re not creating a referential ambiguity between the fictional construct version of Battler, but actually it’s that Battler’s mother is some other person.

Here’s a theory that I really should have considered while I was getting all excited about the metafictional implications: either Rudolf had an affair he wants to cover up, or one of Battler’s parents was some other member of the Ushiromiya family and Rudolf and Kyrie agreed to raise him and pretend that his mother was Asumu, in place of someone else called Ushiromiya Battler—perhaps the original Battler died in childbirth? That neatly solves the dilemma and it’s just the sort of shit the Ushiromiyas would pull.

Ange goes with the ‘Rudolf was still his dad’ variant, with the following blue:

The one who is qualified to be Beato’s opponent is “Kinzo’s grandchild, Ushiromiya Battler”, and whether that person is “Asumu’s son” or not is not an issue.

In other words, you can be Kinzo’s grandchild even if you are not Asumu’s son.

As long as you are Rudolf’s son!

“What a stupid word game” says Lambdadelta. Honestly… but I guess I fell for it (and went for some absolutely cracked nonsense instead), so fair play.

This play from Ange is enough to get Battler back his talksprite! Ange reminds him that blood isn’t all that, so far as family relations go:

But then she takes an unexpected tack to extend this, and asks Battler to repeat in red that Ange is his sister. Which… he successfully does!

Ange is……my little sister.

Somewhat to his surprise haha.

Ange has a little speech to remind him how Asumu was such a good mother, and the importance of the emotional truth over something so trivial as a biological technicality, which seems thematically relevant beyond you know, affirming adoption. But also: Ange needs Battler to find the resolve to come home to his little sister… Even if his identity crisis has been resolved, he’s still losing heart in the game. Ange gives one of her classic merciless pep talks.

I wonder if he’ll finally figure out who ‘Gretel’ is…

Ange concludes that Battler’s weak performance so far in the game is because he lacks the proper motivation; not simply to win or punish the witch, but… to go home to his family and Ange. Alas, Battler is still so ground down that he starts to view her with suspicion too. He declares…

I can’t trust anything, I can’t trust any words that aren’t red…!!

We were working on that assumption already, but it does raise an interesting question… the red text alone would not make for much of a visual novel. To understand the meaning of the red sentences, we have to refer to a context beyond them. We can’t just treat them as symbols in a logic puzzle!

Anyway, seems like Ange may have to red-declare her own identity at this rate. Well, almost… we get a CG for it.

Ange: Hurry up and come home, Onii‐chan!! Don’t leave me all alone!!!

This is wild! These red sentences are not declarative sentences that would normally have a truth value, they’re in the imperative mood…! …hmm, maybe you’re not as excited by that as I am. But, they do imply information: Ange referring to Battler as Onii-chan implies she is his sister, and “Don’t leave me all alone” implies she could be left alone by him. In any case, he’s still a big dummy, so she has to come out and say it anyway, in an impassioned blizzard of red:

Ange: “It’s me, it’s Ange…!! No one’s coming back home, Onii‐chan, not you, not Mom, not Dad!! I’m so lonely!! Please, hurry up and come home!”

Ange: “That’s right, I’m Ange!! The Ushiromiya Ange of a world where no one comes home…!!` ………My entire family…never came home from Rokkenjima that day…!!”

“The witch before your eyes stole away my whole family, even you…! ………Only you can finish her, Onii‐chan!! Finish her…!!”

“And take your family back!! And then………come home to me……!!!”

Curiously, Ange’s red text here makes explicit reference to the idea of ‘a world’. That doesn’t necessarily imply the whole multiverse construct. It does, however, firmly name ‘the witch before your eyes’ (目の前のあの魔女, it’s a literal translation), whoever she may be, as being responsible for ‘stealing Ange’s family’. This may suggest that author!Beatrice (or her avatar) is indeed the killer, and not just a witness. But there other possibilities, for example that she covered up the murders.

Red truths do seem to be world-relative—that is, I don’t think red truths in different games seem to apply in subsequent games (although I wonder, if you take only the red text, whether they are actually contradictory…?) so it is possible that we can’t necessarily conclude anything about the world beyond the game from all this. In Ange’s world, it may be a red truth that Eva killed… hang on, wait, I went back and checked, it was never declared in red that Eva killed anybody… only that at some point in time, she, Battler and Jessica were alive when everybody else wasn’t. We only got that ‘a human’ killed Nanjo.

Beatrice does not deny it: Battler and the rest, she says, are simply her toys, and she won’t be giving them back.

Ange, meanwhile, has broken the rule… she’s not allowed to reveal her identity to Battler so she starts dying (bloodily, as people in Umineko so often do). Damn!! I was really excited to see Battler and Ange team up for real. I went back over my previous liveblogs to see if this rule had been mentioned previously, but if it was, I didn’t take a note at the time. In any case, this Ange has enough time before she dies to tell Battler that he can still go back and save another Ange. She explicitly says she is just a ‘piece’, and here she is making a sacrifice play! (It seems the Japanese term for a ‘sacrifice’ play in Chess is an English loanword, サクリファイス).

Battler, bless him, tries to find some first aid supplies for this supernatural injury. But of course it can’t be done. This Ange, Ange Beatrice, calls herself “A being created to bring Ushiromiya Ange’s voice to him”… and her dying wish is to see Battler at his ‘coolest’ as he resumes the game. Well, he doesn’t: he immediately turns round to find her and she’s been mashed into pulp.

Goldenslaughterer enters the soundtrack and Beatrice tells Battler that she watched her get torn to pieces by ‘red hot pincers’. She gets quite grand-guignol with it. The other witches chime into confirm her account.

Beatrice, mockingly, says a similar pain is being experienced by bereaved Anges across the multiverse… but why should Battler believe it, without the red? Is she gonna… ok, she does not confirm the multiverse in red, but it’s enough to get Battler fired up anyway. He says there’s no longer any need for ‘stupid tricks or deceptions, no need for interacting with each other weirdly or acting all friendly’…

Hmm. Wasn’t the whole point of this episode that we should try to understand where the person behind Beatrice was coming from…? Hmm.

Beatrice, in fact, seems convinced that with a declaration of willpower this strong, Battler has an absolutely certain miracle (絶対の奇跡 zettai no kiseki) that will give him the game? She concludes in a soliloquy (presented as narration but acted by her VA) that there is no way she will win; she must either lose or prolong a draw until she loses heart. Wow, the shoe really is on the other foot… Battler has ‘chained her’ to the game, along with Lambdadelta’s chain.

Despite this, she intends to die with dignity, fighting all the way. OK! She tells Battler as much… but then…

Beatrice: “Are you capable of doing that? ……Yes, I’m sure you can. I know you can. Now…come kill me. ……………… …………………Am I making you uncomfortable? Then let’s go with something more familiar. …………………”

“Hyahhaha!! Like hell I’ll be killed, even if I can’t win, I can still frustrate the hell out of you by not giving you the victory, riiiiiiiiight?!”

“Hoh, that’s a good look on your face! ……*cackle*cackle*cackle*, uhhyahhahahahahahahahaha, aaakkyakkyakkyakkyakkya!!”

And, will to continue reaffirmed, I guess we can wrap up this game.

The chapter—and in fact the episode (except of for its Tea Party, of course)—ends with a rapid blizzard of red text at varying sizes! What does it say? You can find it in the game files at graphics/locale_en as ep4last01.png through ep4last09.png, and the contents are as follows:

• Please kill me quickly.
• Try to stop me (cropped)
• If only you had never come b[ack]
• I wish I had never been born.
• Why am… unable to… love anyo[ne] (heavily cropped)
• Please, I don’t c[are]… what conclusion… just kill me and… my story to an e[nd] (cropped)
• If you won’t do that,
• you die… instead
• I will kill you

Fascinating!!

So…

RIP Ange!! =(

OK, so my whole metafictional ‘Battler the player is a fictionalisation of Battler the man’ theory was completely off-base… or at least if it’s true, it’s not the reason for Beatrice’s attempted disqualification. Ahaha.

I mean, I am mixing levels of reality here, I suppose. But for now we can continue to identify Ushiromiya Battler the character with Ushiromiya Battler from the ‘real’ world, and in fact it was just some classic parentage shenanigans. (The fact we didn’t get Rudolf as Battler’s father confirmed in red, merely as a blue hypothesis of Ange, keeps me wondering whether there’s even more to it though…)

It also seems that the red truth is generally relative to a given game… or is it?

A weird thought that I had above is that maybe we are actually being fed the red truth piecemeal over the course of this game. Let’s gather every single red statement from every game. Because I am a fucking maniac apparently. But I am pretty sure I have copied down every red truth over the course of this entire liveblog, so let’s see what we can do.

I’ve included context of who said what, and who they were speaking to if they address another person, but otherwise deliberately elided the context. So for example, if two statements refer to ‘the six’, while in context they may have been referring to the characters who were murdered in that game, they might instead be referring to a different six who were murdered together on Rokkenjima Prime.

My reason for doing this is in part because Eva Beatrice gave us a long list of characters who were alive and dead, in which Battler, Eva and Jessica were alive. Since we seem to be angling for Battler at least, if not anybody else, to come back to Ange at the end, and we want a magic-free justification for that, we do require that Battler is alive. And Eva Beatrice explicitly declared, without any explicit timeframe, that “Battler is alive” (Episode 3, Axiom 41). So this could mean that these statements should be interpreted in the ‘present’, which is presumably Ange’s time, and Battler and Jessica might still be alive and able to return..?

With this ‘context-elided’ approach in mind, can we observe any explicit contradictions between these red statements? Yes, there is one in fact. Episode 3, Axiom 43 declares “Jessica is alive.” but Episode 2, Axiom 22 declared “At the time of Jessica’s corpse discovery, only Battler, George, Maria, Rosa, Genji, Gohda, Shannon, Kumasawa, and Nanjo were in Jessica’s room. The corpse of Jessica is also included, of course.”

Without a rather abstruse interpretation of the phrase “Jessica’s corpse”, it would be impossible for Jessica’s corpse to be found and also for her to still be alive in the ‘present’. Now, I’m not going to rule out an abstruse interpretation, but the more likely interpretation is that red statements can be scenario-relative… though I won’t necessarily assume they always are.

Another alternative is that the context-elided approach is valid, but red statements are bound to a specific moment, so there was some point when Jessica was alive… and perhaps the remaining people on Eva Beatrice’s list were dead/alive as she says, at the same moment.

I don’t actually think this is the right way to read the story, but since it came up, I had to see if it worked.

Moving on… I’ll save final thoughts on episode 4 for later, but that was a very different sort of story! There were very few magical mysteries for us to solve: instead, it all seems like a setup to feed us the wider context ‘outside the game’.

on the author!Beatrice interpretation

I am thinking perhaps I should put the author!Beatrice interpretation on a shelf for a while. But let’s give it some final consideration.

The big question is whether Ange’s arc in this episode is itself ‘part of the game’, or if this is really what’s going on ‘outside’ the game bubbles on Earth Prime. Though the fact we are repeatedly told that Ange belongs to the bubbles suggests the former.

Let’s suppose that Ange’s arc is entirely part of the story that ‘author!Beatrice’ is telling: perhaps she learned of a surviving relative of the Ushiromiya family, and this inspired her to revive an old project of trying to come to terms with the horrific events of Rokkenjima by writing stories about them. The whole thing about dripping previous versions of the story out into the world in messages in bottles is a fanciful device to bring Ange into the story. She never saw Ange suddenly appear on Rokkenjima and suddenly do battle with a bunch of armed goons, Ange may not have even come to Rokkenjima. Though perhaps she did in fact send the means to access Kinzo’s gold to the surviving relatives of the dead, and in Ange’s story she imagines how those people would have received them..?

If we follow this interpretation further: we could say that the game between Battler and Beatrice reflects author!Beatrice wrestling with herself about whether to come clean and contact the surviving Ange with the truth about what happened on Rokkenjima, or to keep it to herself and allow the story of magic to continue to obscure it.

However, I’m not really sure I like that interpretation, because it all the mystery-solving stuff is sort of melted into the thought-terminating answer ‘this is a fictional device deployed by author!Beatrice’. It’s just way too reductive and weak, like an ‘it was all a dream/purgatory’ interpretation, which does not really engage with the specifics of the story except to cram them into a readymade template. And here, I’m selectively assuming that we can take things like ‘the Ushiromiya family getting killed on Rokkenjima’ as still being ‘true’, but if we’re going to throw out that much, why not just say “well, obviously, someone made this whole story up to sell at comiket”? I’d have spoilsported myself out of the game.

Still, let’s try and figure out what is being heavily hinted to be true as far as Rokkenjima Prime…

• witch!Beatrice maps to someone who was present at the Rokkenjima massacre, and survived to write messages
• whoever she is, she was part of the Mariage Sorcière game with Maria, and at one point, Ange
• something happened involving her and Battler six years before the massacre
• Battler coming back to the island precipitated the massacre
• this person, whoever she may be, used the mythology around Kinzo’s former prisoner at Kuwadorian (the original Beatrice) as inspiration for her persona
• for this person, there is an internal conflict between an escapist world of magic and a painful mundane reality
• this person feels tortured by their situation, and only finishing this game could give some resolution
• Ange is alive in the real world and seeking to find out what happened on Rokkenjima

who dunnit and why

That still leaves the massacre itself to explain.

At this point I’m not sure there was a single culprit who dun all of it. Instead, perhaps violence broke out and rapidly escalated until nearly everyone died. The person I’m calling author!Beatrice may have precipitated it, so perhaps she feels responsible. And perhaps Eva did in fact survive by running away to Kuwadorian through the tunnels, though she may know more than she’s letting on.

Battler being Kinzo’s grandchild also seems to be important; “If only you had never come back” alongside this emphasis suggests that his potential as a successor may have inspired Kinzo or someone else to act, resulting in the massacre.

I don’t think it played out anything like we watched in this episode, with Kinzo getting everyone together at dinner and opening fire. And if it was Kinzo, I also don’t necessarily think Kinzo dunnit in every case, though I would bet he dun at least some of it, unless of course he’s been dead the whole time! That hypothesis was explicitly raised during this episode and it does make a nice loophole in the ‘only 18 people’ stipulation. We have never had direct confirmation in red that ‘Kinzo is alive’ at the time of the massacre.

If Kinzo is already dead, Nanjo was certainly in on it. Genji probably was as well.

Since the killings following the epitaph ritual seems to be a pattern in every version of the story we’ve seen so far (though Episode 4 is pretty damn borderline), I think this may well be a factor in the ‘actual’ story—perhaps someone attempted to pursue the ritual.

I do not feel any closer to a solution to the epitaph than I was at the end of Episode 3. I won’t consider it in detail until I’ve read the tea parties, though.

this episode’s mysteries

Despite the introduction of the long-awaited blue truth, there weren’t actually very many mysteries to solve in this episode. Pretty much all the red text we were given concerns the question of Battler’s parents, and that mystery has already got some promising solutions. In fact, we got almost no death screens in this episode, since most of the bodies weren’t found. Only George… and his death is trivial to explain since he’s found out in the open with a simple head injury.

Perhaps we will actually try the mysteries out in the Tea Parties. After all, it was declared that there would be a final moment in which Beatrice would be forced to overcome Battler’s blue claims with contradicting red statements. It would seem odd to set that up and not follow through.

I guess we’ll find out next time! See you soon.