Let’s read Umineko! - episode 5 - chapter 14

Hello everyone! I really appreciate the warm welcome back for this liveblog. You are all very, very sweet and all currently active flavours of Bryn appreciate it.

1. Chapter 14: The Great Court of Illusions
   1. the murder of Hideyoshi
   2. the murder of the four in the guest house
   3. the murder of Genji
   4. did Krauss do it?
   5. a verdict?
   6. Battler’s turn
   7. Knox% speedrun
   8. can we solve it for real?
   9. battler’s last gasp

Branwen wrote another wonderfully big comment, this time with some excellent analysis of Natsuhi:

On Tumblr, starry-carousel wrote:

Hello! I‘ve been reading your Umineko blog and since the solvability of the epitaph has come up a few times, I thought I‘d tell you that I think you can solve it! It‘s really really hard without hints, I think there‘s at least one piece of information you need to have in order for it to be solvable, and I‘d suggest trying to solve it with that in mind, trying it without that is basically moot. (There‘s something I‘d like to say here that‘s mostly based on stuff you already know, but I‘ll hold back just in case.) I have mostly solved it in the Flower discord and while it took me a really long time to get there, it was also very very fun and I really suggest trying to solve it with people who know the solution and can give you tips when you‘re stuck and point you in the right direction, I think you could enjoy it and I‘d also love to hear your theories.

I said I wanted to keep trying without handholding for now (although that does sound like a fun game), but I would definitely be amenable to being told when I have all the hints I’m going to get, and when the solution reveal is imminent.

Last time, Natsuhi was stuck in the closet while Hideyoshi got murdered. She narrowly avoided getting found in there, but she was caught in the corridor by Erika, who is about to make the case that she dunnit all.

There are a couple of outstanding mysteries—besides the epitaph, the significance of ‘who am I’ in the last episode could apparently do with a revisit, and it may be worth collating some thoughts about what Lambda’s game expresses about the ultimate Beatrice question as well—but for now I am feeling it would be best to press on into the episode. Without further ado, then…

Chapter 14: The Great Court of Illusions

We appear in a big marble room—the same marble room, perhaps, where Eva Beatrice was bestowed her title of Beatrice in episode 3. A sculpture of a plant with a glowing white orb at the centre stands at the centre of the room. Everyone, even the ‘witches on an even higher level’, is apparently here, and they are not allowed to think this is at all strange. The background is actually quite tall, scrolling up for a couple of screens.

It’s kind of gaudy—reminds me of Napoleon’s tomb in Paris, which is truly ridiculous if you’ve never seen it. Someone is going absolutely wild on an organ and choir synth on the background.

Well, she might stand to lose, but Lambda evidently won’t miss the opportunity to put on a big show.

Bernkastel remarks that outside of ‘the 18’, everyone must be illusions. Beatrice—this must be piece!Beatrice—retorts…

In Japanese, 「それを認めさせるのが妾のゲームでな。」 the verb used is 認める (mitomeru) which also has senses of recognising, noticing, allowing, observing and carefully observing. A versatile word!

For various personal reasons I (we) have been thinking a lot lately about the ‘reality’ of things that exist inside someone’s head: from the widely recognised ones like ‘thoughts’, ‘beliefs’ and ‘memories’, through abstract objects such as ‘sets’, ‘numbers’ and ‘computer programs’, and all the up to more elaborate and nebulous constructs such as ‘countries’, ‘the law’, and of course ‘plural systems’, ‘headmates’ and the related jargon.

Since you can’t directly physically interact with these things the way you might a physical object such as a ‘chair’, their ‘reality’ is somewhat more open to interpretation—but it seems that you would have a hard time understanding the world and the behaviour of the creatures that inhabit it without modelling their ‘existence’ somehow. ‘Acknowledging’ them, in other words. So seeing this presented in this light is quite interesting.

In any case, this is a ‘witches’ coven’, called in response to Erika requesting one: the Great Court of Illusions mentioned in the chapter title. Which is interesting, because I had sorta wondered if it was going to be run by Dlanor’s inquisitor court.

Lambda declares that the ‘lives and roles within this game’ of the pieces are officially over and this is the 24:00 showdown already. She gets everyone to introduce themselves. Notably Beatrice asserts her goal as:

Beatrice: I am the Endless Witch, Beatrice. My goals are to assert my own existence and to protect Natsuhi and Kinzo.

Battler—who apparently ranks just under witches in whatever hierarchy is operating here—simply says he’s here to fight ‘Beato… no, the witches’. Chiester00 informs him that he can’t initially speak, since he joined the game later than this point. Does his piece also get to participate? Erika is next, as the detective.

Next, the rest of the Ushiromiyas rapidly introduce themselves starting with Kinzo. Starting to hit ‘pronoun circle’ kind of vibes. ‘My name is Ushiromiya Kinzo, my pronouns are he/him’. Who’s gonna do it/its, come on. Anyway, each relative says where they are claiming to be in the narrative…

• Kinzo says he’s alive and is in hiding after escaping the window
• Krauss says he’s been kidnapped
• Eva, Rudolf, Natsuhi, Kyrie, Nanjo, Sayo, and Kanon say they’re alive
• Rosa, Jessica, George, Maria and Genji report that they died on the first twilight. Maria cracks a joke about it
• Hideyoshi says he was killed ‘a short while ago’
• Gohda and Kumasawa say よろしくお願いします (pleased to meet you)

The witch pieces Virgilia, Gaap and Ronove report in from a separate, equally ostentatious section of the room.

Remarkably my PS4 controller vibrated when Gaap appeared. I’ve not seem the game activate rumble before (though it may be that it wasn’t able to on Windows). Spooky!

Lucifer reports that she ‘served in the murder of Hideyoshi on the second twilight’, and the Seven Sisters report in.

The Inquisitor group report in, with Dlanor identifying herself as Erika’s assistant. So there’s a few layers to this hierarchy! Erika says that Dlanor’s main responsibility is ‘tricky word games’, like the ‘miracle’ in the study.

Finally, Chiester00 says that the Chiester Sisters Imperial Guard have been tasked with ‘management of proceedings’, and helpfully offers the sum as 38 ‘people’. (I guess the goats aren’t along for this one.) Breaking that down:

• 2 ‘player’ witches
• 1 ‘piece’ witch (Beatrice)
• 2 special human pieces (Battler, Erika)
• 11 humans who claim to be alive, of whom one is in hiding, and one is allegedly kidnapped
• 6 humans who claim to be dead
• 10 magic pieces backing up Beatrice
• 3 magic pieces backing up Erika
• 3 Chiesters overseeing

The goats seem to be along after all, since the witches immediately call for drinks and popcorn from them. But they evidently aren’t ‘people’ as far as Chiester00 is concerned. (I guess they’re the ones with the #notaperson it/its in the pronoun circle lmao)

Erika is also plenty happy to showboat, calling silence very dramatically (and apparently suspending everyone’s consciousness) to declare…

Notably the earlier scene simply took place in the parlour, without all the ceremony—even if the events of the game are the same, it seems like the presentation can be different with Battler here?

In this context, Beatrice is able to step up and act as Natsuhi’s defense. Although this is a rather unusual court, because the defense is trying to prove that they did the crime, against Bernkastel’s claim that a human, and specifically Natsuhi, did it.

This is a pretty specific claim for the ‘mystery’ side (I can’t exactly call them the human side.) They can’t switch to some other potential culprit after this, right? Instead of “Beatrice Dunnit” and NOT(“Beatrice Dunnit”), we have disregarded a lot of the possibility space.

They make clear that if Beatrice loses, she will be destroyed along with the witch illusions of this game. She is fighting for her life. Also, this would be true of any previous games. (Battler briefly comments that Erika has nothing to lose, but Virgilia assures him that it will be anything but a good time for her. It really is a thunderdome situation right here.)

So what have we got?

the murder of Hideyoshi

Erika says everyone besides Natsuhi and Hideyoshi were in the same room, the parlour, at this point. This… on the face of it, is kind of obviously not true? Nobody knows where Krauss is, they only know he’s missing.

Anyway, Beato starts with the locked room. Erika says we’ll get to that later, and actually uses the ‘dunnit’ language!

It seems that ‘-dunnit’ has made its way to Japanese: ハウダニット (haudanitto) and フーダニット (fuudanitto) for how- and whodunnit respectively. (Since Japanese doesn’t really have a ‘hu’ phoneme, it has to adapt to the nearest, ‘fu’.)

After a moment consulting with her legal team, Beatrice says that it would be less confusing to proceed chronologically. Bernie immediately objects. Beato counter-objects. Both say ‘objection’ if the pointing pose wasn’t enough earlier…

Battler has a little first-person-narration soliloquy suddenly: this, he thinks, is ‘how the tales of Rokkenjima are created’: by both sides putting forward claims.

the murder of the four in the guest house

Erika sighs and gets on with it. She says Natsuhi had no alibi from when she left until when she returned; a point that apparently merits a text card to declare it.

Beatrice’s counters also get nice little summary cards, each one appearing with a dramatic impact. These continue throughout the scene to tell us the main points of each argument.

I won’t copy out these alternative hypotheses because I suspect that they will get struck down in short order. Indeed, Bernie and Erika promise to do just that.

Erika gets Gohda and Kumasawa to say whether they were in the guesthouse. Gohda confirms he was on duty, Kumasawa says she went to bed in the servants’ quarters there. Natsuhi seizes on this, but Erika says she saw them both go into the servants’ quarters from the lounge and stay there until morning. How’s she going to prove that? Presumably the anti-tamper seals come into play now.

Beato demands proof of the alibis in question. Since her opponents don’t answer to a repetition request, and Erika insists she can fight back on her own without Dlanor, Beato drops a blue:

Beatrice: Gohda and Kumasawa have no alibis. The two of them were in the guesthouse and could have reached the cousins’ room to commit murder at any time. Unless you can eliminate that possibility, you cannot treat Natsuhi as the culprit.

It’s interesting that Beato is arguing for a mundane explanation here. She isn’t claiming to have done the murder by magic. But I guess that wouldn’t be consistent with her narrative of working for Natsuhi this game; if she committed the murders on Natsuhi’s behalf, that would still be Natsuhi’s fault, right?

Curiously, Gaap and Ronove say that Erika, as a human, can’t use the red. This seems to contradict the fact that she’s already used it, e.g. to declare herself the detective..? Ah, well, I guess she can’t here at any rate.

Instead, it is indeed the anti-tamper seals. She explains how she sealed the door to the servant quarters after Kumasawa entered. Despite all they said about not using the red, Bernkastel goes ahead and declares it in red anyway:

Bernkastel: ………. A wonderful alibi. Absolutely airtight. Kumasawa returned to the guesthouse with Erika, went to the servants' quarters to sleep, and never left the room until morning. In other words, after Kumasawa returned to the guesthouse, she never went to the second floor until morning.

This red means we can’t quibble about other exits to the servants’ quarters. That has probably been established at some point anyway, and we have Knox forbidding secret doors. (‘Morning’ is slightly ambiguous, mind you, but with the broader context we can probably take Erika’s seal to be decisive..?)

Erika says she sealed Gohda in the servant room in the same way, and when she saw Rosa get back at 1am, informed Gohda she was present. At that time the seal was intact. Afterwards, Gohda hung out with her until 3am, and Erika was watching upstairs after that. (So… she just stayed up all night? Or she’s a very light sleeper?)

This one also gets confirmed in red:

Bernkastel: ………In other words, after Gohda returned to the guesthouse, he never went to the second floor until morning.

Is it meaningful that ‘in other words’ is in red? It is a red truth that the red claim is a rephrasing of the information in the previous dialogue?

We are progressing through the checklist. I’ll have to check whether I agree it’s exhaustive but let’s get through this first.

She decides to summarise the positions of everyone. She saw three of the kids alive at midnight, and this gets to be red as well:

Bernkastel: ………At 24:00 in the guesthouse, George, Jessica, and Maria were alive, and they were in the second‐floor cousins’ room. Nanjo, Gohda, and Kumasawa were on the first floor.

And also:

Bernkastel: George, Jessica, Maria, Rosa, and Genji—these five really are dead.

Though it’s not clear where this is scoped on the timeline! We have that it is impossible to mistake their dead bodies, and that as of this point in the storyline they are dead. However, we don’t actually have that they were dead on the morning when Battler found them. How could that be? Well, maybe the ones who discovered the bodies conspired to deceive Erika about the identity of the bodies. I do not believe she personally got the chance to inspect the bodies up close!

More interestingly, we get a confirmation of the location of some of the others…

Bernkastel: at 24:00, Natsuhi, Krauss, and Genji were in a corridor on the second floor of the mansion. All the remaining people were at the family conference in the dining hall. Of course, at that point in time, no murder had occurred. Genji was also alive.

So officially whatever happened happened after midnight—but also we can confirm that Natsuhi, Krauss and Genji were not running about anywhere other than where we saw them at the time of the knock.

Lambda notes this is kind of a freebie, since Erika was not able to observe who was in the mansion.

Battler, silently observing, notes in his first-person narration that Beato must have been going easy on him in the earlier games, being very generous with the red truth repetition requests even when it was ultimately to her disadvantage. Beato (possibly privy to what Battler is thinking?) brings up the ‘incompetent’ line and promises she can handle it.

Nanjo is next up for elimination. He confirms he was with Erika between 1am and 3am, and it gets elevated to red. (Hey, is red truth a monad?)

Bernkastel: From 1 a.m. to 3 a.m., the trio of Erika, Nanjo, and Gohda… spent their time in the lounge on the first floor of the guesthouse.

Outside of that? Beato shoots a blue:

Beatrice: Even so, he shouldn’t have an alibi for the time period before and after you were in the lounge! It was possible for Nanjo to commit the crime too.

Erika says she met Nanjo on the stairs and talked to him about mystery novels (of course) in the archive until 1am. (Conveniently leaving a window in which she wasn’t watching the guesthouse for the crime to take place?)

Bernkastel: After 24:00, Erika was with Nanjo the whole time until 3 a.m.

After 3am, she put one of her seals (she made a lot of them!) on Nanjo’s room. But hold on a minute, what about the window? We know from the events of other episodes that the windows to the guest house can be opened, and unlike the servant quarters, it seems less likely that Nanjo was in a windowless room..? Well, put that on hold for now, because it looks like we’re up to eliminating ‘Battler dunnit’, and this should be interesting.

The window theory ultimately doesn’t matter because we get it in red:

Bernkastel: Both your seal and your red truth are perfect. Nanjo had the alibi of being with Erika until 3 a.m. And he didn’t leave his room after 3 a.m. until morning.

Wow, a ‘perfect’! Erika’s really raking in the Good Girl points.

In fact, the question of ‘Battler dunnit’ is raised by the man himself! (Who appears to be operating from the POV of player!Battler rather than piece!Battler right now.)

He gets smacked with the Chiesters’ weapon for speaking out of turn, but Beato does take the suggestion. She doesn’t seem to particularly like it, though.

Beatrice taunts Erika, suggesting that she might have watched Battler sleep to confirm his alibi. Erika calls her bluff, saying that she could hear that nothing significant happened in the guesthouse until Battler woke up and screamed, thanks to the thin wall. And she stayed up all night to do so. The absolute madlass.

I love how contorted the detective’s actions are having to become here.

Bernie explains that she ordered Erika to do this (so she does have a direct line to her pieces in this instance!) and ordered her to listen all night in case Battler was a victim. And of course she’s a ridiculous minmax build with hearing ability ‘on par with a tape recorder’… which isn’t actually that big a boast, really? Tape recorders have pretty crap sound quality compared to the human ear. Well, whatever.

This time, it falls to Lambda to confirm it in red; she says this is an ‘accepted power of the detective’s authority’.

Lambdadelta: Ushiromiya Battler returned to the cousins’ room at 3 a.m. and fell asleep. After that, until the discovery of the crime, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened in the room!

Bernkastel: In other words, it was impossible for Battler to commit murder or damage the corpses.

They sure seem to be working together against Beato at this point…

So, that leaves theories involving the group in the mansion taking place between midnight and 3am. We know Erika was not watching the lounge between midnight and 1am. But first we cover the possibility of climbing in from the outside.

Beatrice: For example, what if someone placed a ladder against the outer wall of the guesthouse and snuck in through a second‐story window?! There must be a way to reach the second floor without passing through the lounge! If this is the case, it would be possible to reach the crime scene without you seeing it…!

We confirm that there is no stealth route in the building in red pretty quickly:

Bernkastel: It is impossible for someone to reach the second floor of the guesthouse without anyone in the lounge noticing it. ……Though of course, this only refers to reaching the second floor from inside the building.

We can have a second ‘of course’ statement add an exception to a previous red statement? Huh.

Erika says she was able to prevent all entry on the second floor. What, did she put seals on all the windows? Feels like we’re getting ‘the devil’s anti-tamper seal’ at this point. Virgilia says that, for a human, this would be ‘an impossibly dubious action’, but as a witch piece… Erika doesn’t have to worry about such trifling matters, I guess, as motivation or plausible behaviour. The narration starts increasingly calling her a spider.

Erika makes a slightly deranged declaration that, for detectives, someone will die wherever they spend the night, and only third-rate detectives would not prepare this thoroughly. She really is something else. The idea of detectives going about knowing that they have some kind of Elric-ass death curse on them is really funny. And hilarious as an alternative to ‘magic is real’.

All this effort earns her another red statement from Lambda:

Lambdadelta: It was impossible to reach the second floor of the guesthouse without passing through the lounge, and impossible to reach it at all without Erika, who was in the lounge, knowing about it!

I feel like there’s a possibility that is missing from the checklist. I don’t believe we have had it confirmed in red that the deaths were homicides, right? Let me check… yeah, we didn’t even have the bodies confirmed until later. So, let’s say for example that Rosa killed the three kids between 1am and 3am, and then killed herself. That does leave open the question of where the weapon is, she wouldn’t exactly have time to hide it after cutting her own throat. But this should be on the list…

Erika takes a moment to declare in blue her conclusion so far:

Erika: Therefore, the time of the crime is limited to the single hour between midnight, when they were confirmed to be alive, and 1 a.m., when our party in the lounge started!

(I didn’t catch on to this until later in the chapter, but Erika’s argument is contradictory! If Rosa was in the mansion until 1am, and the crime could only have been committed in this window, there would be no opportunity to kill Rosa at this time. More on this later.)

Bernie repeats the line about the locations of mansion people at 24:00, and also adds:

Bernkastel: Of all the people in the dining hall, not one of them left the dining hall until 1 a.m.

Notably she doesn’t use any red in relation to the mysterious knock at the door.

Beato demands to know how that can be proved, and gets reminded that red truth is axiomatic:

Bernkastel: The red truth is simply truth, and there is no need to provide evidence, proof, or room for a counterargument!

But as we’ve seen, there are restrictions on when you’re allowed to use the red truth if you aren’t the GM. Lambda could freely declare this, but how can Bernie?

the murder of Genji

Well, evidently she can, and she is not challenged further. So, Genji then. There’s no argument for this one: Bernie just redtexts it by fiat.

Bernkastel: When Genji finished transferring the call, he immediately returned to the servants’ quarters.

This refers to ‘the call’ in red, which suggests there was in fact a call? If not necessarily from Phone Man…

Now, Eva gets called to the stand. (And credited with inventing the seals.) Eva declares that when Rosa left at 1am, Eva put the seal we saw earlier on Genji’s quarters—so either Erika’s signature was a mistake in the art, or she used one of Erika’s spare seals from her apparently unlimited supply. Also red:

Bernkastel: At 1 a.m., Eva sealed Genji’s sleeping quarters, and that seal was broken by Kanon and Kumasawa in the morning when the crime was discovered

Bernkastel: During the short break at 1 a.m., the first two to leave the dining hall were Rosa and Eva. Until Eva returned, everyone in the dining hall remained there. After seeing Rosa off, Eva went to the sleeping quarters and sealed it. Of course, she did not enter the room at all at this time

Erika also adds, as if in answer to my earlier concern, that these are not ‘baseless red truths’ but she got them from the people involved. And apparently she took fingerprints and stuff besides relying on testimony. I immediately start wondering ‘with what equipment’, and…

Sure, we’ll just Devil’s Proof up a forensics kit while we’re at it. The narration lists a few of the alleged investigations: aluminium powder, ‘composition analysis’ on mud, ‘various chemical reactions’ on rainwater. I am reminded of a memorable passage from a book called Mastering Erotic Hypnosis by James Gordon and Rebecca Doll (yeah we’ll just put that cite in here :3), which talks about how a hypnotist establishes their narrative sense of authority in the process of building a ‘hypnotic modality’.

Which is to say, there is no scientific argument here. Erika is simply gesturing at the epistemic authority which science claims in order to bolster her rhetoric, without doing any of the work by which science (ideally…) earns that cred. The narration highlights that she used Kinzo’s gear without asking—transmuting, in a sense, her abstract ‘detective’s authority’ into a more concrete scientific sense of authority.

So we have now in red:

Genji never left the mansion after 24:00

which is presumably spoken by Bernie, though it doesn’t actually get put in a speech box.

did Krauss do it?

Which just leaves Krauss, and the murder-suicide theory.

Bernie invites Natsuhi to put the blame on Krauss. She refuses. Battler observes that Erika is pretty much just writing the story at this point, and getting it immediately approved by the GM; Virgilia confirms this is indeed how it works. In other words, this is, right now at least, a ‘quantum’ game more than a ‘blorb’ game. But the ‘final truth’ here may not be the ‘real truth’.

Virgilia has a little lecture that, even if Erika came by it in a ‘cowardly’ way, her truth is self-consistent and plausible, or it wouldn’t have been able to see so much confirmed in red. But Battler is not in a hurry to accept it this time (even though he was willing to point to various Ushiromiyas as potential culprits at the end of the last game.) It’s kind of an emotional thing:

………Even if Erika has accused Aunt Natsuhi of being the culprit, ……and even if everyone else here believes that, ……that’s exactly why I want to be the one person who trusts her…!

‘Stick up for the underdog’ is something of Battler’s ‘inner law’, here. But also by genre convention, it would be unsatisfying if Natsuhi turned out to have dunnit, so I think Battler is likely to be right. (It seems Krauss is also getting covered by this logic, mind.) But who’s left?

Battler contemplates the difference between truth and consensus. He decides this is just a kangaroo court designed to frame Natsuhi. And he criticises Beato for fighting too defensively, and failing to present a strong counternarrative as an alternative to Lambda. What’s he planning…?

It’s interesting because ‘failing to provide a good story’ has never really been Beato’s problem in the past. Indeed, her magic stories are all so sparkly and full of fun drama that you want to believe in them. She’s really been nerfed in piece form!

Battler, feeling that there should always be someone to argue the opposite case to any belief, contemplates his childhood belief that there was a society on the far side of the moon, a belief he abandoned after ridicule. He starts getting pretty hardcore empiricist with it, saying we should only believe if we’ve seen it ourselves. He further insists that no matter how many red truths are stacked against Natsuhi, he won’t believe she did it.

I feel like this one’s really hard, right? Without going into too much depth, an acquaintance in the sakuga fandom was recently convincingly accused, with extensive evidence, of sexually abusing a young person over a period of years. In a matter of hours he went from a respected member of the subculture to a pariah. The whole affair really threw me for multiple reasons (trust, judgement etc.) which this liveblog is not the place to elaborate. But one is this: I very much do not believe in absolute exile, yet in social spheres, when things break down, people must decide what to do: trust and defend their friends? Cut ties? Try to intervene somehow? People make their choices and the results tend to resolve to schism, exile or apologism, all of which suck. After all sorts of ugly situations, we have not found any generally robust principle. There probably is not one. A lot of infrastructure we might like does not exist.

But Battler’s right about one thing: we don’t have a proper ‘Natsuhi story’ here, and the sente is entirely with Erika right now. Apparently impressed with his resolve, Virgilia steps in to offer him a freebie red text, as a finite witch and former Beatrice…

Virgilia: Ushiromiya Natsuhi is not the culprit!

Oh dang thanks. OK. That does make things a lot easier…

Meanwhile, back in the courtroom, Bernie’s offering Beato a ‘plea bargain’: if she pins it all on Krauss, then Bernie will stop trying to pin it on Natsuhi. I had raised Krauss theories before so this is interesting.

Beato muses that the ‘cat in the box’ is the source of the endless possibilities of an Endless Witch’s power. Body without organs??? Ahem. Anyway because Krauss’s state is so nebulous it’s pretty compatible with witch theories and the game could be a draw.

I don’t think she’s gonna take it, guys. Natsuhi certainly isn’t in a hurry to let her.

Natsuhi: If you wish to insult me, go ahead! If you wish to ridicule me, do as you please!! But none of you can damage my honor with fiction!!

Beato has to decide whether to betray her. Ronove and Gaap advise her to do it. Beato raises the question of what will happen to the ‘Natsuhi of this fragment’.

Gaap mentions Deep Blue vs Kasparov, the match that famously established that computers could beat the best human in 1997, which was indeed won 3.5-2.5 by Deep Blue. An interesting example, because in the following decades, computer chess engines kind of left humans in the dust. In any case, Beato alludes to someone (Kinzo?) who stubbornly stuck to their guns…

Beatrice: …………My apologies, ………but I cannot do that. ………I know the strength of a man who believed even though everyone said he was wrong, ……and I know the suffering he went through when he was forced to abandon that belief…!

She makes an impassioned speech about truth, saying if she can’t defend this truth there is no point to her at all; she certainly has the mindset for a defense lawyer. But I get it. ‘Beatrice who accepted a plea bargain to hold onto “existence”’ would not be Beatrice any longer.

In response, Bernie officially rule out Krauss.

Bernkastel: By the name of Bernkastel, Witch of Miracles, I speak with the red truth. Ushiromiya Krauss is not the culprit. And he was killed long ago. Shortly after you heard his voice over the phone, in fact.

We do in fact get a death screen to go with this:

Ushiromiya Krauss

Murdered sometime after the early morning phone call by which Natsuhi learned he was still alive. His corpse has not been found, but his death has been guaranteed by Bernkastel with the red truth.

Very interesting! So that leaves wide open the question of who killed Krauss, because it certainly can’t have been Natsuhi if she was listening to him over the phone. So even if she did some of it (and we now know she did not), that rules out Natsuhi as a sole culprit.

Which means… what? Everyone has an alibi (except for the murder-suicide theory), and we also know Natsuhi didn’t do it. There is no room for Phone Man to exist, since we know from chapter 4 that

Lambdadelta: Besides [Erika], the number of people on this island is exactly the same as it was in the previous games

Admittedly, there are much fewer alibis for this.

a verdict?

Anyway, Lambda declares the verdict: Natsuhi killed all six, and since a human dunnit, the court can deny Beato’s existence.

Did Lambda intentionally lose the game to Bernie/Erika, writing her narrative to position the ‘magic side’ to have to disprove a mundane story? Beato never really got much of an opportunity to come up with a decent magic story in this game. And, supposedly, in failing to protect Natsuhi, the witch illusion is dispelled… because, I guess, we’ve ‘proven’ that the story was in fact a mystery all along.

I don’t really buy this. Admittedly, overtly magical acts have been rather thin on the ground in this episode (the bodies disappearing notwithstanding), but that just means that very little about the Beatrice narrative has been put to the test at all. It really doesn’t seem like Lambda was trying very hard to create a magical mystery. On what basis can this game deny Beato’s existence? At best, it shows that Lambda is a pretty weak GM. Given her goal was supposedly to prolong the game indefinitely, throwing it here seems very strange.

Natsuhi and Beato both give speeches about how they still have their honour and so on (the one-winged eagle carved into her heart). Bernie scoffs at her ‘bluster’, and declares she will send a final red truth to crush it. This should be good…

Bernkastel: Natsuhi. When did Kinzo ever say it was okay for you to engrave the One‐winged Eagle into your heart? Those were just the words of the Kinzo from your delusions. ……The real Kinzo? Throughout his entire life, not once…did he ever trust you from the bottom of his heart, and not once did he ever consider letting you bear the family crest!

Oh, so that’s what we’re doing.

Appropriately, the music drops out as Bernie delivers this line.

Kinzo (in this case, I suppose you would say introject!Kinzo?) tells Natsuhi not to listen.

Kinzo: No one can defile the crest engraved in your heart!!

Kinzo: そなたの心に刻まれた紋章は、誰にも汚されぬ！！

So of course Bernie keeps firing.

Bernkastel: The real Kinzo would never say such a thing. Begone, you fantasy of Kinzo inside Natsuhi’s mind, beautified by her to suit her own purposes.

Pitiful woman. Now is the time for you to face the truth that you never gained Ushiromiya Kinzo’s trust as long as he lived.

The narration repeats and emphasises the point: in this game, we only saw Natsuhi’s fantasy of Kinzo. Keep kicking her while she’s down, I guess. She flashes back to the few good times with her family in her shitty life, deciding she no longer has a right to them. Kinzo just sucked that much and yet she can’t take away his authority in her head anymore.

Erika chooses this moment to drop her catchphrase. Everyone claps, though the narration hardly dwells on it.

So… when does Battler get the right to speak up? Because I feel like there is at least one possibility we haven’t played (murder-suicide theory), not that it will do much for Natsuhi now that her entire life has been officially deemed illusory with the full force of narrative authority. Well, we leave the Court and go back to the parlour, where the relatives have accepted that Natsuhi was the culprit. Eva is hit hardest, and she lays into Natsuhi, demanding to know why. Only Battler tries to stop it.

Erika tells Natsuhi that, by the rule of the mystery genre, now the who- and how-dunits have been solved, the whydunit must be provided.

Erika: Natsuhi‐san. I’ve solved two of the three riddles. The whodunit. The howdunit. The final riddle—the whydunit—must always be confessed by the culprit herself. Please follow the rules of the mystery genre and confess.

If you’re wondering: ホワイダニット (howaidanitto)…ooh, that one’s really interesting, ‘why’ becomes two syllables here.

Beatrice, invisible to everyone except apparently Erika, protests; she is overruled, because she is not the truth ‘chosen by this world’. On the witch plane, Lambda sneers:

Fuck you I am a witch whether you say so or not, says Beato (paraphrasing); Lambda says something very interesting in retort…

Bernkastel: You wouldn’t even have been capable of believing that if I hadn’t become your guardian in the first place…!!

The word ‘believing’ is interesting, here. What does ‘guardian’ mean in this context? Going with the theory that this all goes back to Kinzo’s creepy orphanage somehow, and the theory of witches as people who hold elaborate fantasy ‘inner worlds’, could there be a real-world counterpart to Lambda who introduced the real-world counterpart of Beato to the practices of ‘witchcraft’..?

In any case, Beato lost, so by precedent it’s goat time. If you’re gonna do anything, Battler, now would be a fantastic time! There’s a cute little exchange:

Bernkastel: Let me hear some nice screams. You’re a bottle of wine we’ve been saving for this day.”

Beatrice: ……Then remaining silent will be my final strike back at you…

Bernkastel: Yes! I made her say it! Uhihihahaaah!! The screams of those who gift me that line as their parting shot are the most gratifying of all!

Ha, remember when we thought Bernkastel was the nice witch?

Battler’s turn

Suddenly someone cuts through the goats as they’re all chewing Beato… Battler? Nope. It’s… Dlanor!! Well, well, well…

Dlanor announces that someone—Battler, of course—has an objection. She warns him, though, that the court does have a time limit. (I’ve been reading this chapter all day lol, so probably quite a long one…)

Battler still feels like he has no idea what happened and it will be hard to present a counter-truth… but he has to improvise somehow. Bernie is pretty thrilled about this turn of events, evidently expecting him to go down quickly.

Despite intervening to let him join the fight, Dlanor is going to be his opponent. She gets all catte with it…

Battler’s initial line of attack is the seals. Of course, since we have had most seal evidence confirmed with red truth by this point, it doesn’t seem like there is a ton of point arguing the seals could be replaced.

But, let’s see, some options: first up, Eva. It took me a second to notice this, but we already know that she received some seals of her own from Erika and is aware of Erika’s seal-based plan, so she would have the opportunity to replace broken seals with intact ones. It’s the confused deputy problem… or in this case, the evil deputy problem. Indeed, Eva might have intentionally told Erika about the idea of seals in order to set her up to exploit them for alibis.

Battler’s initial blue doesn’t quite go that far. He suggests that someone noticed the seal and replaced it.

Battler: Can’t we doubt the reliability of these seals of Erika’s?! Something like wedging some paper in a door can’t create a perfect alibi! It might be that someone noticed by chance and happened to put it back in the same place

Erika counters that the seals are made with perforated duct tape and signed personally by her, consistent with the one CG we got of them. So, yeah, I think I’m onto something with the Eva thing. Anyway, let’s get the initial exchange, a red-blue volley:

Dlanor: Due to the above, the seals are guaranteed to be perfect. Miss Erika’s seals were not broken by anyone, and deception is impossible!!

Battler: I’ll acknowledge Erika’s seals…! However, Auntie Eva’s seal on Genji‐san’s room should be different!!

Dlanor: Eva’s seal was of the same type as Miss Erika’s. That is because this method of sealing was one that Miss Erika and Eva conceived of together after dinner.

‘The same type’ huh…

Battler: Erika fished through the chemicals in Grandfather’s room saying she’d use them for forensic testing, right?! There might have been some kind of solvent among them!! If you used that, you might be able to tear off the duct tape without leaving fingernail marks!!

Gertrude: For your attention: I beg to inform you of the following: It is impossible to tear off any of the seals by any method without leaving marks

Cornelia: FYAIBTIYOTF: There were no suspicious marks on any of the seals

Very carefully worded. If you put a fresh untampered seal where a broken seal was, you would cover up the marks left by the previous seal, I think? Though Bernie takes it a step further:

Bernkastel: All of Erika and Eva’s seals… were not tampered with in any way that hindered their ability to act as seals, such as being scraped off.

Taken literally this would probably rule out removing and replacing a seal.

Battler says he has something, but he left it ‘at home’. He says he would never break his promise to kill Beato; that he never breaks promises. Beato says that’s a lie. It seems it might be time to address the ‘sin’, then?

No, Beato just loses her shit and tells the other witches to finish the job.

Knox% speedrun

Battler starts getting desperate. He fires off a rapid series of challenges, all of which go against one or another of Knox’s rules. Since basically every line of dialogue in this section is red or blue I have to quote the lot. In between we go through just about all the red/blue VFX clips in the game’s entire library.

So we’ve scored Knox 3, 10, 1, 4, 8, 6, 7, 8, 9, 8… sorting that, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. That leaves 2 (no supernatural effects) and 5 (the racist one). Using 2 would amount to conceding the game, and the less said about 5 the better, so I think this is a reasonable 100%.

The important additional clues here are:

Gertrude: FYAIBTIYOTF: All deaths were homicides.

That rules out Rosa killing everyone and then herself.

We have a few more ‘Umineko versions’ of the Knox rules.

Dlanor: Knox’s 1st: It is forbidden for the culprit to be anyone not mentioned in the early part of the story!!

Knox put this as:

The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.

This would actually rule out Natsuhi as the culprit, since we’ve had a few scenes from her first-person perspective already! I’m not sure if the latter clause was purposefully elided, or if it just doesn’t apply to Umineko.

Dlanor: Knox’s 6th: It is forbidden for accident or unaccountable intuition to be employed as a detective technique!!

Knox originally put this:

No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.

So this one’s a pretty close translation for once.

Then there’s this exchange:

Battler: Th‐this story is full of malicious fiction!! The story itself is a trap designed to frame Aunt Natsuhi! We should reconstruct the story from impartial truths alone!!

Dlanor: Knox’s 9th: Observers are permitted to put forward their own conclusions and interpretations!

Knox put this:

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

We don’t have a “sidekick” character per se. Our main POV character, Battler, does constantly get told he’s stupid and incompetent, but he’s not really in a Watson role at all. Then again, the convention is definitely that Battler will not solve a mystery within the episode in order to give us time to figure it out ourselves. But who knows…

can we solve it for real?

So, with all that, the dust is settling. Battler says he has one last thing. Let me pause him a second… because I feel like we should have enough to come up with a solution for this episode now. A positive truth that can make sense of the whole affair. Let’s take stock…

• Natsuhi does insist that she was being blackmailed
• by all accounts there was no possible way for the knock to happen at the door at midnight, but perhaps everyone there could be implicated in a conspiracy to claim someone knocked
• it is possible, if a little of an edge case, that Eva is able to duplicate Erika’s seals.

Despite a redtext that comes pretty damn close to denying it, the last one stands out to me, since it feels like it was a clue that was set up earlier in this chapter. We know Eva knows about the seals, we know that she knows what Erika’s seals look like, and the art for that scene very clearly showed Erika’s signature and not Eva’s.

Let’s check what actual red text we have about Genji.

Bernkastel: When Genji finished transferring the call, he immediately returned to the servants’ quarters.

Hold on, now… when was that? That sounds like it was before 1am.

Bernkastel: At 1 a.m., Eva sealed Genji’s sleeping quarters, and that seal was broken by Kanon and Kumasawa in the morning when the crime was discovered

Bernkastel: During the short break at 1 a.m., the first two to leave the dining hall were Rosa and Eva. Until Eva returned, everyone in the dining hall remained there. After seeing Rosa off, Eva went to the sleeping quarters and sealed it. Of course, she did not enter the room at all at this time

Genji never left the mansion after 24:00

So when did ‘Genji finish transferring the call’? According to the narration, which we seem to have had confirmed by the red text placing him in the hall upstairs at midnight, Genji was presenting Natsuhi with the phone just as the clock struck midnight.

OK. Genji returns to the servants’ quarters after that. He has an opportunity at this point to move around and do other stuff, as long as he’s back in there by 1am and does not leave the mansion. For example, he could abduct Krauss. It would be difficult for him to play the role of Phone Man, though, if we believe the narration that showed him passing the phone to Natsuhi in person.

There’s another problem here. We’ve spent this whole chapter establishing the murders must have happened while Erika wasn’t in the lounge, which is the period between midnight and 1am. But we’ve also established that Rosa went back at 1am and met Erika on the stairs, right? And from that point until 3am, Erika was watching the lounge? So when was Rosa killed? Even if a culprit had entered the building while Erika was in the archives, and carried out the murder between 1am and 3am, they would not have had the opportunity to slip away.

When was Krauss last heard alive? Significantly later than the others: in Chapter 10, around when the bodies are being discovered. On top of that, someone must be playing as Phone Man at this point.

OK, so we shouldn’t assume that there is only one culprit. here’s some ideas. we must assume, since we’re playing for Beatrice, that neither Natsuhi nor Krauss killed anyone. but anyone else except Erika is fair game, even Battler.

• for some reason, the group of relatives in the hall decide to carry out a series of murders. probably something to do with the inheritance
• Rosa is dispatched to deal with the group in the guest house. She meets Erika on the way in, and goes upstairs while Erika, Genji and Nanjo hang out in the lounge. Rosa kills George, Jessica and Maria. but then who kills Rosa?
• Eva is dispatched to deal with Genji. we know she does not enter the room and it wasn’t a suicide. it is possible she opened the door, attacked him across the threshold, and then closed and sealed it afterwards?
• it is also possible that someone else entered the room prior to 1am and killed Genji. while Gohda and Kumasawa are sealed away, and the rest were in the dining room, it is entirely possible for one of the kids to leave the guesthouse while Erika is talking to Nanjo, enter the mansion, kill Genji, and return with Erika none the wiser.
• who didn’t show up at the body discovery scene? mostly the servants in the mansion it seems like (Kanon, Gohda, Kumasawa and Sayo) who all seem to have left the mansion prior to Battler waking up. and Natsuhi and Krauss of course.
• at some point after the body discovery scene, the bodies are moved to an unknown location by an unknown party. this is so far entirely unaddressed.
• there was no noise until Battler screamed at 7am. shortly after this, people came running, and Erika ran off to check the whole guesthouse for anti-tamper seals. in this period, there is a small window where someone (Battler perhaps) could carry out murders

Hang on, when did the servants get up? clearly prior to the bodies being discovered. if Erika was listening closely at the wall until Battler screamed as she claims, how could she also be verifying that the seals were unbroken?

Here’s another oddity. In describing the bodies, the game often uses modal constructions with could. For example, we have

anyone looking at George, Jessica, Maria, Rosa, or Genji’s corpses could confirm at a glance that they are dead.

Which doesn’t mean that anyone did look at the corpses and confirm they are dead. It’s possible they looked at something else and pretended. Even in this episode, we have:

Cornelia: no examination of any corpse is ever mistaken!

How would this work exactly? Well, let’s say the “corpses” are playing dead in the morning at 7am when Battler wakes up. He pretends to scream in fright. This is part of a pre-planned conspiracy, designed to keep Erika busy. The other relatives from the dining hall are in on it, same as the knock thing.

So while I don’t have a conclusive counter-narrative yet, here are some points to use:

• the murder of Rosa, at least, cannot have happened before 1am. if there can be no murders after 3am, someone must have entered the guesthouse and waited for Rosa to come upstairs.
• it is possible that someone left the guesthouse as well as entered it; this may account for Genji’s death.
• where is Krauss being held when Phone Man calls Natsuhi around 7:30am? and by who?
• the anti-tamper seals and corresponding red guarantees last until a nebulous ‘morning’. it seems that the servants leave the guesthouse prior to the bodies being discovered, perhaps to kidnap Krauss
• who moved the bodies? during the 7am to 8am period, there’s a lot of running around and perspective jumps, so I’m kind of hazy on where everyone goes

Since moving four bodies would probably require a few people to be involved, especially to do so without Erika noticing, this would also suggest a big conspiracy. Possibly a close reading could confirm where Erika’s POV is.

With this in mind, here’s a really convoluted counter-narrative which nevertheless accounts for more of the events than Erika’s story:

• the relatives in the dining hall aren’t confident of their claim on the inheritance. they conspire to make up the story about the knock, and this sets the ball rolling for further conspiracies.
• some or all of them decide that framing Krauss and Natsuhi for murder would be a good way to get them out of the way.
• the conspirators—whoever they are—kidnap Krauss during the night, and take him to an unknown location.
• to stitch up Natsuhi, Eva conspires to introduce Erika to a ‘foolproof’ way to guarantee alibis.
• Genji may also be playing dead, or else he caught wind of the conspiracy and had to be killed. after killing him without entering the room, Eva seals the door.
• meanwhile, Rosa enters the guest house and informs the kids that they need to play a trick on Erika. (alternatively, she kills them.) Battler is already in on the plan. perhaps they use the betel nuts, established early on as resembling blood.
• in the morning, Battler wakes up and ‘discovers’ that the room is full of dead bodies. he pretends to panic, causing the other relatives to come running. everyone already knows who (if anyone) is actually dead, so nobody is ‘mistaken’.
• Erika does not examine the bodies as noted, so she does not know they are faking their deaths.
• everyone moves to the mansion after the alarm is raised. after they’ve gone, the ‘dead’ bodies get up and start moving independently. someone pretends to be ‘phone man’ in order to terrify Natsuhi into compliance.
• they assist Erika in running around establishing everyone’s alibis, feeding her a consistent set of yarns in order to point the finger at Krauss and Natsuhi.
• at some point prior to Erika’s parlour scene, the group who faked their deaths actually die for real. maybe the conspiracy collapses, or it’s an accident. maybe Krauss breaks free and they all kill each other.

That still leaves a pretty big question: why did they kill Hideyoshi, and why arrange for Natsuhi to be in the room when Hideyoshi is killed? I don’t have a great answer for that.

battler’s last gasp

Lets see which Battler uses. We get some buildup. He doesn’t have an alternative truth to present, but he can at least prove it was not Natsuhi. The way he’s talking, he’s about to do a heroic sacrifice.

He declares the red truth that Virgilia gave him: Ushiromiya Natsuhi is not the culprit. Unfortunately, Dlanor pops out her caestus and hits the parry window without skipping a beat.

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

So we do get Knox 2 after all. I kind of thought we’d already done ‘using the red as evidence’ in the volley above, but I guess this is subtly distinct from the previous rule that framed it as an intuition.

This feels a bit odd: we have been forming all manner of inferences based on the red, which is without a doubt using ‘supernatural agencies as a detective technique’, but I guess most of those inferences were not declared in red, and that’s when Knox kicks in.

So Battler’s gonna like, die?

We get a whole CG of Battler getting impaled on a big two-pronged red spear like the good old Lance of Longinus…

And Dlanor gets to wrap things up with her version of Natsuhi’s ‘whydunit’. With her authority(TM), she broke the locks on Natsuhi’s diary (how convenient, not at all ‘third rate’).

Natsuhi’s marriage, she says, was more like a hostage situation; Natsuhi described it as such in her own words. Kinzo, we are told, economically crushed Natsuhi’s noble family as a way to force them to agree to a marriage, in order to raise his standing as an ‘upstart’ among the rich. Natsuhi, we are told, was raised by Shinto priests, and they would have been utterly humiliated by the affair.

Natsuhi protests: despite this fucked situation, Krauss was kind and understanding. Erika quotes her diary back at her, saying she didn’t trust it. Natsuhi protests she came around, and just didn’t write it down.

Erika’s response is comically… Erika.

I can see why she called herself an ‘intellectual rapist’. Natsuhi isn’t even being allowed authority over narrating her own thoughts and feelings anymore.

Erika: Nothing can be trusted except for red truth…!! Statements that aren’t red don’t count as evidence at all, and they can’t be trusted at all! All text that is not red is a falsehood that exists to deceive me!!

…which seems like it’s directly aimed at the attitude the reader has probably reached by this point (certainly expressed at various points in this liveblog), of assuming that all the narration not directly verifiable by the presence of Battler (or now Erika) or backed up in red is probably a smokescreen of some kind. So, well played, Ryuukishi…

As if to reassure themselves, everyone expresses their pitying thoughts on what a sorry thing Natsuhi’s life has been—never mind what she thinks about the matter. Even Battler—now presumably severed completely from his player—starts to wonder if Natsuhi was the one that dunnit.

But then Erika throws us a little surprise. She says there’s one person that could still have done it… Kinzo. Because, on this level of reality, it is not yet proven that he’s dead. Which means Natsuhi could try to pin it on Kinzo—at which point Erika can of course reveal that Kinzo is already dead and ‘prove’ that Natsuhi is a liar who hates the Ushiromiyas, right? Of course, if she refuses the bait, Erika can spin that as a confession.

Abruptly, we are back in court. We already have Kinzo’s death down in red, but Bernkastel wants a perfect victory, which means Natsuhi must resign.

Bernie says:

“Lambda. I’m going to make Kinzo’s location from midnight until the morning absolutely clear. ……From midnight until morning, Kinzo stayed in the same room.

Lambda decides to let her cook after a moment of confusion. So, defining ‘Kinzo’ to mean ‘a living Kinzo’, Bernie continues:

Bernkastel: Kinzo does not exist anywhere outside the mansion.

Are you about to tell me she searched the entire damn island? Apparently, yes: Erika searched, and because she is the detective she must necessarily find any relevant clues per Knox, but there weren’t any, QED. I feel like if you’ll fall back on that you might as well just plonk Erika down anywhere and not bother with all the running about sticking tape on things… the detective in a mystery story has to at least justify their discovery of clues by some effort to make it plausible.

Anyway, they drag it out a bit, eliminating every location Kinzo might be one by one. Once again I can’t help but think of Green Eggs and Ham.

Bernkastel: Kinzo is nowhere outside the mansion. Kinzo isn’t on the third floor. Kinzo isn’t in the basement. Kinzo isn’t on the first floor. Therefore, the only place Kinzo could possibly exist is the second floor.

Then, after a room by room search:

Bernkastel: Kinzo does not exist outside Natsuhi’s room.

The contrapositive comes up (as Hempel’s raven, we won’t get into all that again.) Erika mentions that he might have left again by the window… but couldn’t he use the classic hide-and-seek strat of moving around behind the searcher, e.g. down the stairs? Lookouts have yet to be mentioned.

Hey, you know, since we’ve observed that Kinzo’s quantum location is limited to Natsuhi’s room, that leaves his momentum highly uncertain! We’ll find him shooting through the mansion like a bullet! …ok yeah nevermind

Since we have the arbitrary declaration that he did not change rooms, and Erika was apparently checking for evidence of where he’d been, we get that…

Bernkastel: For the entire duration of the night between midnight and morning, a living Kinzo could not have existed anywhere outside Natsuhi’s room.

And then, after one more refusal… they go ahead and accuse her of incest (or something akin to it). Quite explicitly. Jesus lmao.

Bernkastel: For the entire duration of the night between midnight and morning, a living Kinzo could not have existed in any place except inside your bed.

Bernkastel: For the entire duration of the night between midnight and morning, a living Kinzo could not have existed in any place except inside Natsuhi’s bed. And last night, Natsuhi also slept in that same bed.

Bernkastel: Therefore, we can conjecture that Ushiromiya Natsuhi and Ushiromiya Kinzo had sexual relations with each other. Why else would a man and a woman share the same bed all night long?

There is a great deal of cruelty in Umineko, but it is kind of impressive how far these two can take their vindictive games. This Natsuhi humiliation train just doesn’t stop. And for all that Erika makes big talk about solving mysteries, she is evidently extremely willing to use selective evidence to tell whatever story she damn well pleases (if all the ‘scientific’ evidence she pulled out of her arse this episode weren’t evidence enough of that.)

Natsuhi is stubborn to the last, so Bern adds…

Bernkastel: “He’s not one of the dead. We’re talking about the honor of a convenient delusion inside Natsuhi’s head. ……The real Kinzo never once ordered Natsuhi…to do anything like protect his honor.”

With that, Bernkastel gets declared the victor—and apparently gets the right to write the ending for this fragment out of it. And that’s the chapter end, so I guess we’ll see whatever cursed epilogue she has in mind next time.

Bloody hell.

Umineko can get pretty damn mean with it at times, huh.

Battler and Beato are both…dead? This is not the first time Battler has died, but this seems a bit more final. Obviously, the story isn’t over, but maybe this pirate dude is gonna come in and replace Battler for a while? I was discussing Umineko with someone IRL recently (at the Glasgow Leatherdykes pub night, where else) and she implied there would be some kind of major twist still to come, so I am kind of wondering if this might be it.

I’ll save further comments on Natsuhi until after the next chapter, since it seems like there is more to come here. But I definitely feel things about someone getting overwritten with some other narrative of their life than their own (she says, transgenderly). Poor Natsuhi. This chapter has just been gratuitously brutal towards her.

I’m not confident in every detail of the counter-narrative here. I do feel like I may have caught some of the tricks, though. I’ll be quite interested to find out what the real solutions are in a couple of episodes.

Also seems notable that if I am right about this counter-narrative or anything similar, it wouldn’t be much good for Beatrice getting to exist, because it’s also a mundane narrative. The problem is, the magic narrative has almost nothing to go on in this episode. We get too many POV scenes of Beatrice and co. floundering to come up with a next move. Where are the incredible plays we saw in the previous games? Well, of course, the actual player!Beatrice is no longer in control here. Without omniscience, it’s a bit harder to pull that kind of thing off.

OK, well, this has been a lot more of an Umineko day than I ever planned, but I’m glad to be through that monster chapter. We’ll see you soon, there are only a few chapters left in the episode now (going by the numbers on the script files, which go up to 17, so presumably one more regular chapter and two tea parties). But we have a lot of work to catch up on so we’ll see.

Catch you soon~