Helloooo Uminekoheads, it has been a minute. A whole lot has happened offline for me/us, some pretty significant changes to the old self-conception and so on, lots of demoscene activity, working to finish the game… and then, horribly, someone died in real life. Outside of noting it here, I’ll try not to let all of that intrude too much into the Umineko liveblog.
But, I finally have a combination of some time and the right headspace to read some more Umineko, so let’s get back on the mystery-solving horse!
In other news, this liveblog is back to running on Linux, this time CachyOS! This means I might actually have a chance to fork OnScripterRU to add some new features to make liveblogging easier. I won’t do that this month, since it’s a bit of a yakshave, but it’s a possibility.
reader comments roundup
Let’s respond to a few comments that have accumulated since the beginning of this year. I’ve been lucky enough to get a few new readers drop by, and I’m grateful for every comment! One drawback of using Staticman is that I can’t notify people when I approve or respond to their comments, so I hope this ‘roundup’ format is good.
Reader comments time!
reader ‘no’ came by in February as of Episode 5, Chapter 4 and accused me of having read ahead or looked up solutions. I wrote a response there, which I won’t repeat here. Suffice to say: I have received a small amount of spoilers. They are vague and I’ve tried to avoid picking up too much extra information beyond what I glimpsed by accident. If I use that information, I will let you know about it.
zoe jay, ep 5 chapter 7
I’m in the midst of catching up with this liveblog and just wanted to put my hat in the ring and say I’d love to see you try to tackle silent hill f some day if you ever end up feeling compelled to go through with that! I’ve been incredibly curious about what the game would be like since news came out that ryukishi would be writing it, but I’ve got a migraine condition that means playing the game myself or even watching footage of it is completely off the table. getting to see someone as thoughtful as you liveblog it would probably be the best secondhand experience possible.
I’ve really enjoyed this umineko liveblog and have had a lot of fun dipping my toes into your side tangents about game design and ttrpgs more specifically. not really a space I’ve ever been personally involved with myself so getting to see something I do have firsthand familiarity with it through a lens I wasn’t really capable of applying myself is definitely giving me a fuller picture of the work. that’s the nice thing about works that are as much of a behemoth as this one I suppose! you can’t ever run out of new ways to look at them
Well, no promises, you can see how hard it has been to even stick to this project lol. I am not sure what sort of format would work for a real-time game like Silent Hill. Perhaps I could record videos, or write a commentary after each chunk of game, or both? In any case, consider it a thing I would like to cover “at some point”; we’ll see how it goes.
felix wrote on ep 5 chapter 12:
where did you go? :o
saisai wrote in the same place
hi!! i know its been a while since you’ve updated this, but i just wanted to say that its really reassuring to see someone else who’s been reading umineko over a long period of time ^^
while i haven’t read too many of your posts, i really like your interpretations of what’s going on, especially as someone who’s been focused more on the emotional “drama” (that doesn’t feel like the right word but i can’t think of a “correct” one right now) of the characters rather than trying to figure out the mysteries themselves. i honestly feel a little guilty about it, but mysteries have never been my strong suit ^^;
your posts have also been a good resource for looking back on some of my favorite moments so far (especially appreciate the inclusion of specific lines from the chapters!!), and your comments on what happens also serve as some nice food for thought on them. i hope you enjoy reading the rest of umineko!! (OuO)/
Hi felix and saisai! Thank you for reading, and I’m sorry for the extended hiatus! I’m very glad you’ve been enjoying the blog. I wouldn’t worry too much about solving the mysteries; Umineko is a wonderful work that has many different appeals and as much shit as Battler gets, the mysteries are pretty damn hard. Hope to see you again here sometime!
andrew came by in April-May with some comments.
on ep 3 part 20
(frame of reference: have read higurashi, am currently through ch. 3 of umi)
it is really interesting to see you run into things that were established in higu-the fragment stuff was a huge part of higu and this was honestly more of a reveal than it was an introduction!
This is cool context to have! I suppose Ryuukishi must have had both audiences in mind, and I wonder at what point significant numbers of people were starting with Umineko instead of coming in from Higurashi. But we have these two parallel reading experiences. Because I’m me, I think about how NieR Automata hits different if you’ve already played NieR Replicant/Gestalt.
on ep 4 chapter 14, in which I discussed the possibility of recompiling the game…
speaking as someone who has done more research than is sane on the onscripter/ponscripter/onscripter-en/onscripter-ru/onscripter-insani/whathaveeyou lineage (primarily for the purpose of pestering a guy who ported it to android and then took it closed source to comply with the GPL smh-to his credit he did send me a tarball)…that codebase is a certified dumpster-fire of international scale and its lowkey a miracle that umiproj exists at all.
(i am playing on the modded switch port, which is its own mess)
lol yeah it seems pretty fiddly, though admittedly I haven’t the greatest amount of experience with OpenGL C++ projects (most of my graphics programming has been in Rust + wgpu lately, moving in the direction of dealing with Vulkan directly). All the locking to old versions is a pain though. If I have any luck with getting it compiling on Linux, I’ll fill in the liveblog.
on ep 5 chapter 2, referring to witches talking about peeling fingernails:
the “classic gory witch metaphor”? You guessed it, a higurashi reference!
Oh! Yes, that completely flew over my head. I wonder what context it has in Higurashi… one day I’ll find out.
and on ep 5 chapter 3
worth noting that bernkastel’s avatar in higu is “furude rika” so “furudo erika” is…honestly hilariously uncreative from an in universe pov, although I guess its less so when you write it in japanese
古手 梨花 -> 古戸 ヱリカ
Haha, that’s great. I wonder what reading Higurashi after Umineko will be like? If I live that long.
On ep 3 part 19, where I mentioned in passing the use of the ‘dream bubble’ concept in Harrow the Ninth, Lilien noted:
Funfact, one of the inspirations for The Locked Tomb was Umineko. The author mentioned it in one of their Reddit comments
Full circle, then. It’s a very fruitful concept!
‘necro lol’ (fair) wrote on ep 3 part 7:
I don’t know if it’s polite to leave comments on old shit like this but I’m reading this liveblog because I just finished Disc 1 and I wanted to see someone else’s perspective. I just wanted to interject some thoughts I had re: shannon in this scene because there weren’t any future notes on it.
To me, Shannon’s aggressive gendered performance of heterosexuality is meant to emphasize the exaggerated narrative tropes at play. As ‘less real’ and ‘less human’ members of the cast, the servants embody narrative tropes much more strongly than the family members. Shannon is the overly maiden-like ‘ideal female love interest’ type of servant, where Kanon is more of a ‘ideal male love interest’. They’re sort of tailored to be ‘of use’ to jessica and george in the wider narrative by being their stock romance options.
I responded…
Hi! Comments on the old stuff are welcome, but I do appreciate the recognition that it’s old haha.
I appreciate this angle because I think I was kind of taking the opposite perspective: that George is an idealised love interest for Sayo: he’s rich, upstanding (supposedly…), generous, and of course willing to defy his family to be with her. He feels almost like a romance novel guy. But you’re absolutely right, Sayo is equally the archetype of the shy, clumsy moe girl (and literally a maid!).
I don’t think I really get into ‘author!Beatrice’ interpretations until a fair bit later in this liveblog, but I definitely came to suspect by the end of Episode 4 that neither of these characters is ‘real’, and they might instead be composite characters of some sort…
Weirdly I ended up writing nearly exactly the same comment before I realised I’d already responded at the time. (I am reading these off Github.)
Branwen
I got a particularly thoughtful series of comments from Branwen on various parts of the site, thank you so much for these! Some of them concerned Umineko.
As far as I’m aware, the earliest more or less correct solution to the epitaph with a verifiable date was posted after game 5, and frankly its insane to me that anyone solved it even with that.
OK, I shouldn’t worry too much then. It’s fun to try, though!
On episode 3, part 1, a scene in which Battler made sexual remarks about the Sisters of Purgatory when he’s being tortured. This is where one of the infamous ‘notes from the future’ was inserted, and this led to Branwen writing a really thoughtful comment on how Battler is characterised across the novel.
Regarding future Bryn’s comments: I find these meta scenes (this one and the one with him interrupting the previous tea party) specifically with Battler being uncomfortably sexual absolutely fascinating in the way they contrast Battler’s dual positions as an undeniably powerless victim and a young, rich man who holds tremendous implicit social power over the women in his life.
Like he is powerless to the point that escape even through death is unimaginable, objectified in a sense far more literal than its often used. But rather than this leading him to empathize with, frankly literally any of the women or servants in his family and the power dynamics they’ve spent their lives subjected to, he doubles down on his socially implicit male role as the objectifier, as the person who gets to feel powerful, in control, perhaps even funny and charming! Certain I knew plenty of teenagers back in the day, especially boys, who were undeniably popular and considered funny for making uncomfortable transgressive “jokes” about women, children, poc, etc. And I think its probably true that victims by and large don’t become better people for suffering. Personal growth is hard, and its only made harder by feeling vulnerable and afraid. Most people just lash out and double down in that situation, Battler included.
That’s also fwiw a framing I really like for Battler’s behavior around his cousins. He hasn’t seen them in a third of his life! Its so easy to imagine him feeling insecure, out of place, vulnerable from his fear of planes and boats, unsure of his position in the social hierarchy of a deeply hierarchal family. So what does he do? He acts up, he makes himself the center of attention. Maybe’s done that in class a dozen times, acting the rebellious class clown who made his peers laugh with inappropriate jokes, the kid who was a little too rich and not quite disruptive enough for the teachers to ever do more than tell him off. He hits his baby cousin when she says things he thinks are wrong, because he’s the adult now and that’s what her mom does, isn’t it? He needs to show he’s mature now, after six years. He doesn’t hit her hard, he doesn’t want to hurt her, its just a little reprimand, he’s just trying to teach her better behavior so she doesn’t get bullied. He doesn’t even realize that his actions are just as potentially hurtful and damaging to Maria as Rosa’s were when he was the only one to rightfully call her out in game one.
It’s such a compelling characterization to me bcuz not only does it make him a really nuanced protagonist, someone who cares deeply about his family despite their flaws, who feels strongly enough even as a child to renounce his family name and cut off his own father over a perceived abandonment of his dead mother! But it also paints a really believable picture of the way the shitty little things about patriarchy and abusive power dynamics continue to propagate. The microaggressions, the ways smart, empathetic men who it seems like should know better will often double down and get defensive when their behavior is challenged, the way people who explicitly reject the power dynamics of their parents can still recreate them in subtler ways, an example of how victims can and do become abusers in their own rights even without realizing it.
Not to mention that like. It’s honestly really relatable! I’ve personally felt the urge many times to lash out with words when I feel powerless to try and assert that I have some say in things still. I used to make nasty, self-effacing jokes when I felt insecure or out of place, for reasons that feel much the same as I imagine Battler’s to be, and I have friends who still haven’t broken that habit. I still struggle with feeling like an “adult” around my parents sometimes, despite the fact that I first moved out over a decade ago, in no small part due to financial dynamics and having had a really rocky relationship with them growing up. I’m sure pretty much anyone with friends around my age (especially trans friends!) has heard similar things.
I think it can be tremendously effective writing for exactly that reason. If (or perhaps when!) one can look past the shock value and the discomfort with Battler’s behavior to ask “Why might someone act like that?”, they’re placed in the perfect position to recognize that the small (but difficult!) step they’ve taken towards kindness and greater cognitive empathy is exactly the same skill that Battler is struggling to master. And its a skill that can do so, so much good in the world.
I wrote:
This is such a fantastic comment! Really good analysis of what’s going on with Battler, and with Umineko in general—it’s so much a story about learning to understand the Other, the ‘why would someone do that’.
With the benefit of a few more years’ hindsight, I feel like I can understand both the version of me who wrote this part of the liveblog originally, and the version who wrote the ‘notes from the future’, with sympathy to both. It’s kind of funny, really. Both ‘Bryns’ were trying very hard to play up to some ideal, not unlike what you say about Battler. When I edited in all these notes I was feeling this strange sense of shame about what I saw as my overly moralistic younger self, but now it’s evident how much at that point I was also trying to perform like ‘I’m cool now, I’m into edgy guro stuff’ to some other imagined judgemental viewer. Kind of cute in a way.
Cadence then wrote:
With love, it can be seen.
Which, not to get too much into the introspective shit, really is the thing, isn’t it? I have been trying to hold to that principle.
Anyway: Branwen, I cannot overstate how much it means to have such thoughtful comments appear in my inbox. While I was checking to see if I hadn’t missed anything, I realised you’ve been commenting on the liveblog since 2020. I deeply, deeply appreciate it. Makes this whole thing feel worthwhile.
I should add, for any future commenters, a quick technical note: after you click submit, the bot will make a PR on Github to add your comment. You should see it appear here after a few minutes. (If I manage to migrate this site to another Git forge, I’ll need to fiddle around to get that working.) Assuming it’s not spam (the honeypot catches nearly all spam, but I want to be sure), I will probably merge it sometime in the next day or two. So if you want to see what happened to your comment, check that page. I know it’s a bit crude! At some point I might consider coming up with a more bespoke comment submitting system, and also port the site to a faster SSG, and all sorts of other things. Very much depends where my brain ends up.
a mystery allegedly solvable
J commented on Ep 4, Chapter 20
been playing while reading this and finally caught up to where the blog stops! hope u keep playing it this year. theres a big hint about the last riddle thats kinda lost in translation - when the ghost beatrice asks “who am i” she uses the pronoun watashi instead of her usual warara. not to spoil too much but it’s definitely solvable! there are hints to the answer all over this episode
Ooh, I could maybe have picked this up in the voice acting, but I did not. That’s very interesting… of course ‘watashi’ is more or less the default polite first person pronoun in Japanese (feminine in casual contexts). So if I did a search of the episode text for 私 I would find a lot of examples. I’m not sure whether it’s wise to try to solve it now, but I could do with rereading the Episode 4 liveblog at some point and seeing if anything new comes to mind. Not right now, though. I’ve kept you waiting long enough…
Chapter 13: Closet
It’s been a long time—not the longest hiatus this liveblog has experienced, but still, oof—so let’s reorient. Midnight came on Rokkenjima. We spent most of the last chapter trying to figure out who knocked at the door and left a mysterious note for Battler and the rest on the night before the murders started. A slightly ridiculous back-and-forth ensued on the ‘player’ plane. My solution was that this is a ‘truth’ that’s proper to the people in the dining room: they are working together to maintain the fiction that somebody knocked on the door, so that is what the game presented us. Meanwhile, Erika crashed out a bit and declared that she had ‘solved’ Battler’s stunt at the window. The game world had to paper over her weird behaviour.
Earlier, Natsuhi has received instructions from Phone Man to hide herself in a closet at a certain point in time. So while the jokes write themselves in a chapter called ‘Closet’, presumably that is what is about to happen.
We open with Erika, who is going about attempting to establish a timeline of events during the night and figure out everyone’s alibis. She establishes…
- Battler came back at 3am.
- at about 3:30am, Eva says that the rest of the group split up and went to bed.
Meanwhile, Ronove, Gaap and piece!Beatrice are also talking strategy. Beatrice is back to feeling confident, saying that Kinzo has escaped ‘off the chessboard’ through the window. Gaap assures her that she has also hidden away the bodies from the First Twilight.
Ronove quotes the one line of Sun Tzu everyone knows…
Ronove As they say, if you know your enemy, you need not fear the outcome of a hundred battles.
…except he leaves out the bit about ‘knowing yourself’, notable omission?
The narration informs us that wherever Gaap put the bodies, it is a place outside space and time:
Every single place led to here, but no place could be reached from here.
Furthermore, all times connected to this place, but no time could be passed to from here.
So in the game’s spacetime location graph, it is a sink with outdegree zero. OK. The bodies are in Rome! But we could read this a different way: currently ‘where did the bodies go’ is an undefined, floating variable.
Virgilia pops in, remarking that there are as yet only five bodies for the First Twilight. Beatrice seems happy to see her.
Not a particularly interesting screenshot, I just wanted to iron out the screenshow flow on the new platform…
Virgilia seems to be aware of the broader context, referring to Beato as ‘the version of you that’s here’. Beato completely misses the subtext and says some unfortunately painful lines…
Yeah, bet. (interesting that ‘body’ is in English!)
Immediately Virgilia throws out a bit of red.
Virgilia So, anyone looking at George, Jessica, Maria, Rosa, or Genji’s corpses could confirm at a glance that they are dead.
Beato is confused (she is really cut off from the context a witch would normally have, huh) but goes ahead and confirms:
That’s right, at a glance, anyone could confirm that these corpses are dead, so it is absolutely impossible that they are just people playing dead.
Virgilia on the other hand has full context and must have some play in mind with this. Since as far as I know the events of this game are railroaded until the opening scene where Erika accuses Natsuhi, was she here the first time, or only on this run? Since piece!Beato is in a nebulous state of ‘reality’, perhaps Virgilia can talk to her on this run and not the other.
In any case, by establishing this in red, Gaap’s effort to hide the bodies has been negated. They had predicted that Natsuhi was being set up as the murderer, and thinking ahead, were trying to give her an alibi so she can’t be cornered into admitting Kinzo doesn’t exist. A surprisingly narrow goal, all things considered.
Beato says, since red truth doesn’t exist in ‘the human world’, even though it’s been confirmed very hard that the bodies are dead, Natsuhi has some leeway to insist otherwise. And perhaps more importantly, since she knows Natsuhi isn’t the culprit, she has ‘both truth and illusions’ on her side to protect Natsuhi.
(Now, is it possible for piece!Beatrice to be wrong about who the culprit is..?)
Smash cut (literally, Natsuhi smashes a cup) to the parlour, where is Erika demanding Natsuhi prove her alibi. The other adults are in attendance as well, and apparently their alibis are pretty solid. Even though they’re literally accusing her of murder, the dynamics are pretty similar to the family conference scenes: Eva snaps out an accusation, and Hideyoshi gets her to rein it in.
The narration keeps reminding us how narratively awkward Erika’s role as the detective is in this episode. More interestingly, it includes a first-person segment from a ‘witch’ point of view…
………It may be a bit late to mention this, but—well, no, this happens every time.
As usual, the phone couldn’t connect to the police.
Natsuhi said the police would come, but that wasn’t exactly true.
Strictly speaking, the boat to pick them up would come tomorrow, and they would be able to use the radio on that boat to contact the police.
Well, ……it’s not like I’ll let everyone live that long anyway.
…giggle.
This seems to be confirming rather explicitly that in this game, the narrator is literally just Lambda. Perhaps, like a GM, she is reciting this story to Battler and Bernie. It’s unusual to see the first-person pronoun in narration though!
Natsuhi goes to her room, and the point of view follows her. As usual, her internal monologue stresses the One-Winged Eagle. She ponders whether Phone Man might be waiting for her. The narration mentions that she knows how to use a naginata, if not well—what, there’s just gonna be a naginata lying about? That would be pretty funny. Surprisingly many martial artists in this family, huh.
Anyway, nobody is waiting. She considers locking the door, but imagines the others discovering the locked room and freaking out, and concludes it might put her in a position where she has to tell on Phone Man. So she elects not to. Interesting—we teased the possibility of a locked room and then rejected it.
So Natsuhi goes in the closet and has a think. She thinks about punishing Jessica in this exact way, in fact. Dang. She tries to figure out how Phone Man knew her favourite season was autumn (not realising, I suppose, that he could have hedged his bets pretty easily). She notes that the only person she ever told this information (people in this story have a shockingly good memory, huh) was Sayo, and therefore she must be an accomplice. This actually gets confirmed in red:
Natsuhi: I never told anyone but Shannon that I like autumn.
Really feels like a red herring but OK.
Unexpectedly, Hideyoshi enters the room. We get a POV shot for Natsuhi, I guess for the sake of visual representation she opens the door a crack…
Natsuhi still fears observation by Phone Man (girl is so panopticon-brained) so she doesn’t come out to explain the situation. She lurks in there as Hideyoshi has a good cry. A new(?) track, Spiral, with slow, wordless, mournful operatic vocals, starts playing as she contemplates the end of the Ushiromiyas. (Good riddance.)
Of course, someone then comes in and attacks Hideyoshi. He says…
Hideyoshi: Wh‐who are you…?!
Hideyoshi: How did you get in here……? ……Wh‐…what’s that…? ……W‐wait a second…! Wai………ngahh, ……mmpph—
So: if we can believe this narration (whose narrative is this?), whoever it is, it is not someone Hideyoshi recognises at a glance. Even now, Natsuhi is immobilised by the thought Krauss could be harmed. As if they’re ever going to let him live!!
Anyway, Eva shows up and tries to open the chained door, but she can’t open it. Hideyoshi gets got!
Cut to Eva’s POV, with Natsuhi never having left the closet. Eva gets Gohda to cut the chain with little ceremony.
So, Lambda’s ploy here is to contrive a scenario where, at least by the presented narration, someone is hiding in the room but they are not the killer. Why, though? This whole game has been about Natsuhi’s ‘truth’, and also piling suspicion on her at every turn. Is this all a setup so that Bernie can have a blue truth that Natsuhi dunnit, Lambda can shoot it down with red, and then Bernie’s spent the whole game taking the bait around Natsuhi so she doesn’t have a hypothesis B left in the quiver..? That seems weak, there’s got to be more to it.
We get a death screen for Hideyoshi:
- Ushiromiya Hideyoshi
-
Corpse discovered in a guest room on the first floor of the mansion.
He had been pierced through the back with a demon stake. Its tip reached as far as his lungs.
Because he was lying face-down on the bed, suicide must be ruled out.
The survivors quickly figure that this is a locked room. Kyrie further observes that there is no line of sight from the crack in the door to the bed where Hideyoshi died where someone could fire the stake.
Of course, it’s time to start probing this locked room like you’re Deviant Ollam at a hacker conference. Erika confirms that the shutters can’t be opened from the outside, and it’s time for her and Battler to start shooting again. Eva insists on moving Hideyoshi’s body so that it won’t be spirited away like the other ones. They wrap him in the bedsheets, which presumably serves to establish that there is no culprit hiding under the bed..?
Kyrie, rather too late, tells everyone to stop splitting up and going off alone so damn much.
We get what almost feels like a speedrun of the beats of episode 2: it’s a locked room, so the servants say at once it must be Beatrice. Erika goes to open the closet door, but Battler pulls her away to travel back to the parlour with the rest. Which means… Natsuhi isn’t discovered? And there is also a window for the culprit, theoretically hiding elsewhere in the room, to slip away as well? The door isn’t locked, so Natsuhi can leave, although perhaps Erika put one of her famous anti-tamper seals on it.
As a locked room this seems like it’s leaving some very obvious loopholes. But Natsuhi doesn’t make it back to her room without running into Erika. It’s not as damning as if she was caught in the room, but, OK…
Natsuhi invents a quick lie about turning back to check the lock on her room on her way to the palour, earning another +30 sus points. She does nevertheless manage to keep her cool on letting slip that she knows what happened. But she can’t escape being dragged to the parlour for another Parlour Scene from Erika, invoking once again her detective rights… I guess we’re almost at the in media res opener already.
Nevertheless, Erika/Bernie declare ‘checkmate’. Hmm. Feels premature, there’s got to be more to Lambda’s game than this.
A layer below, Team Piece!Beatrice note that they have a difficult fight ahead: they need to not just defend the existence of witches, but also Natsuhi’s innocence and Kinzo being alive. Which is notably not Lambda’s goal, just the goal that piece!Beatrice was hired by Natsuhi to do…
But before we can see the alleged checkmate, we get a quiet rain scene with Virgilia and the true Beato. She confirms Battler will no longer surrenderer, and further, that we now have all the information to solve the game as a whole:
Virgilia: You gave him every message he needs by the end of the fourth game. ………That is to say, ……Battler‐kun possesses all the tools to reach the truth at any moment. ………However, he has a weak side. ……Because of that, even if the game goes on to repeat a hundred times, he will never solve it. He’ll just wander forever like someone trying to find the blue bird.
Hey, it just occurred to me, the Road Runner is a blue bird, isn’t it? What the coyote wanted all along… was happiness…
Anyway, Virgilia remarks, because of Battler’s weakness and Beatrice’s own flaws, she will never get the answer she seeks. That’s why, Virgilia says, Beatrice ‘called them here’, even if it seems the game has been stolen.
They need these asshole lesbians to get anything done around here, seems to be the gist.
Whether this brings victory or defeat, Virgilia says, it will be one ‘filled with compassion’. Which is kind of funny, because compassion is the last trait I would attribute to either Bernkastel or Lambdadelta. You have to see what’s missing, I guess.
The Purgatory allusion is made explicit, as Virgilia closes out the chapter with a little soliloquy.
I am Virgilia. I have guided him through Purgatory and brought him to you at its peak. ……And you are Beatrice. You must choose whether to take his hand and rise up to heaven, or embrace him and fall into hell.
‘Him’ could be Battler, but it seems like she is calling back to their namesake. In Purgatorio, the second volume of the Divine Comedy, Dante is guided by the Roman poet Virgil (I did not make the connection before but it’s so obvious looking up the reference!), until getting handed over to Beatrice for the last four cantos. So Virgilia is getting literary with it. The narration elaborates: in Hell, you must famously abandon all hope, but the denizens of Purgatory still have it, which makes their suffering worse. Supposedly. So Beatrice must be willing to jump off the mountain and (mixing mythologies a bit) open Pandora’s Box.
In short, Virgilia is saying… don’t die wondering? ;P
The nekobokusu comes up again. Virgilia says it is, in effect, cruel to leave the cat in a superposition. Bury it or take care of it, but don’t leave it in the damn box. Fun way to spin the quantum metaphor, I’ll give her that.
And, for a suitably dramatic note to close the chapter, the clock zips right up to midnight and we begin a chapter called The Great Court of Illusions. Which seems to be taking place in an enormous marble hall. More on that, soon!
Despite all the drama, I kind of suspect we won’t simply be killing off Beatrice so decisively at this point. At least, not in any simple way. There are three-and-a-bit entire episodes to go, after all.
OK, I’m back. Will I last a bit longer this time? I’m going to various things in June—among them, the Nova demoparty and Annecy film festival—and I’ve got a game demo to finish, so time is pretty tight these days. I would like to get Episode 5 wrapped in the next couple of weeks though.
Since we seem to be about to have the big parlour scene reveal, who do we think dunnit? The narrative so far has been rigged to point at Natsuhi in a comically overt way, with barely any effort to construct a plausible ‘witch narrative’. Given what we know so far, there is absolutely no difficulty in saying Natsuhi dunnit all. Which of course means she certainly did not, so the question is, who did?
If it is the case that everyone involved has alibis except Natsuhi, we do not have a lot of room to manoeuvre. But we don’t actually have a ton of red text about the latest murder. It wouldn’t be too hard to pin the blame on Krauss, right? Although he is allegedly a hostage, we have no outright proof of this, he’s simply missing. Admittedly, a complicated scheme to frame and emotionally torture his wife with multiple moving parts doesn’t seem like a very Krauss thing to do. Like, I’m not saying he wouldn’t try, but he’d comically fail at it.
Since Erika is The Detective, we can at least trust that scenes where she is present took place more or less as depicted. So there was some sort of locked room in which Hideyoshi was murdered, and Erika did encounter Natsuhi on the stairway right after. We do not actually know for sure that Natsuhi was the one who was hiding in that closet. We know very well that somebody could have been hiding in the closet, but it could equally have been Krauss.
If that was the case, we can’t disregard the narrative where Natsuhi was hiding in the closet entirely. It has to be ‘somebody’s truth’ that Natsuhi was being coerced into hiding. Not necessarily Natsuhi’s, mind you! If Krauss is playing dead, but had been forcing Natsuhi to cooperate with him, perhaps it would be legitimate to show a ‘truth’ in which Krauss was absent and Natsuhi was being coerced by a hidden third party.
With so many moving parts and openings still available, it’s hard to guess where exactly this is going. ‘Whodunnit’ in this scenario isn’t really the main thing; the main thing is, what does it reveal about Beatrice? It is too late now to speculate on that front, so we can pick this thread up in the next chapter. Briefly though, in this story, Beatrice is rather mercenary, and offers her services in narrative coverup to Natsuhi; this feels like it’s pointing to how someone else used the Beatrice story to cover up their own deeds. But that doesn’t actually tell us a great deal! So there’s got to be some other, more important dynamic to note here…
Until next time, friends.
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