Everyone is welcome to read at their own pace and post any impressions, theories, or questions at any time within this thread. Those of us starting together may loosely informally stick together, but please feel free to chime in any time!
Guidelines
Please use spoiler tags or collapse where needed and describe, indirectly, what point in the episode they are a spoiler for! We’re collapsing a lot of writing into one thread.
When asking for help, do your best to provide context. Pasted text, screenshots, descriptions, etc. Unlike book clubs we can’t flip to relevant pages, so we may need a little help identifying exactly what is being discussed.
Feel totally at ease to ask questions or give your thoughts, any time! Clubs live and die by participation, and asking whatever question you have, no matter how silly it may seem, helps others who are reading it and even the answerer themselves.
Have fun, and do your best to interpret anything said with as much good faith as possible
Participants
I’m reading along
I have finished this part
I plan to read but will start (significantly) later
As I said in the home thread, don’t let me scare you off by launching right into this, just figured it’d be good to have the thread up because I know fallynleaf has already read a tiny bit, and thus it’ll be here if anyone else manages to start soon and wants to talk about anything early.
Since the club was a bit of a last minute decision I have a 42k character head start, but in a bit I’m going to take a little break and see how getting started is going for everyone.
While I love the opening scene with Kinzo (ベアトリーチェェェ）, since I’ve read a few episodes a while back in English, I will say this VN is setup heavy, and we’re reading slower in Japanese, so if you have any issues, try to hang in and I promise the excitement is coming! The talk of names, the travel, the character drip feed and sorta awkward anime-style jokes (IIRC mostly frontloaded; this VN isn’t TOO bad about that stuff as I recall) take up some time, but it is building to a whole lot more.
Alright, in my memory I forgot just how long getting where I planned would take, but I’ve read the first ~50k characters and I think I’ll wait a bit here to see how it’s going for you all. Just made it to the point where the family is about to eat.
There are some real difficulty spikes here and there with the descriptions and Kinzo’s speech – I’ve followed pretty much all of it, but sometimes I really don’t know several words. Especially when Kinzo breaks out stuff like 阿僧祇. He’s so dramatic in a way I find really entertaining. The big things are still to come, but I hope you all enjoy the early time
Currently about 7,454 characters in! I’m in the middle of the scene where all the family members are getting introduced. Not having too many troubles understanding what’s going on so far, though yeah there’s quite a bit of new vocabulary for me as well, and the Kinzo scene was more difficult than the rest.
Something kind of funny to me was I could tell that “battle” was in there with the ばとら reading of 戦人, but somehow didn’t make the connection that his name was supposed to read as “Battler” until a friend started talking about the character in English . In hindsight, it’s so obvious… I like that the name is basically the same in Japanese and English, haha.
I said I didn’t think my knowledge of pro wrestling vocab would really help me out here, but guess what? It came in handy after all!!
(Extremely light spoilers, but spoiler-guarded it just in case)
I’m actually not great at identifying specific moves, but I believe a 後回し蹴り is what Miyu Yamashita does! And yes, a professional martial artist can do them with the level of precision described in that screencap.
Here’s another (extremely inconsequential) line where my pro wrestling vocab came in handy! I’m cherishing every single one of these moments because I know there won’t be many .
I think basically what she’s describing is Miyu Yamashita’s Skull Kick, hahaha.
I’ve mined 159 words so far, though a handful of those are name readings. I’m still not quite sure what kind of pace I’m going to be reading this at, but I might take it a bit slower at the start to give the words a little more time to enter circulation.
I love that this happened so early. We’re already getting a different dimension on this, haha. I mean I could picture the general idea of what she was doing but we have references now! Eva is so cool; though I definitely have some attachment because her voice actor is shared with a Higurashi character and I just enjoy her work a lot. But every word she says is SO exaggerated heh, love it.
Those naming conventions are wild, huh! When I read some of this in English it’s funny how the translators gave up and still just went “Here are the kanji, bet you can’t read this huh?” and I’m sitting there like “nope, you got me, sure can’t!” but now it’s funny understanding where these readings come from to fit them into pseudo english.
Finally picked this back up for a bit! Read nearly 8k characters in one two hour sitting, haha. Mined like another two weeks of words. I’m 19,281 characters in, and the characters are on a boat currently.
Just a heads up, the boat scene has a lot of shaking, so it’s a bit rough to try reading the text with that happening behind it. I hid mostly in the texthooker window for that part. Thankfully, it wasn’t too long.
Yeah I think the boat effects were added with the PS3 version (and one mod includes them while other versions wouldn’t). They’re a LOT; I did the same thing.
Finally had the chance to read a bit more! Logged another 8.7k characters (and mined 131 words); current total is around 28k characters. So I’m more than 1/10th of the way through the first part, haha.
We’ve finally reached the guesthouse! Boy there have been a lot of ominous warnings, though… Surely everything will be fine!
I also finally found out what an うみねこ is! My brain kept saying “sea cat” and, well, the kanji bears me out, haha: 海猫. I’m guessing they’re called such because they sound a bit like a cat? At least, the onomatopoeia used when the characters were talking about them was a meow sound.
Fantastic! I’m planning to get back to it before long, but I’ve gotten really into Chaos;Head anyway so prolonging the break a bit has been no issue.
I think when my cat’s voice is particularly rough I can kinda hear the comparison, but yeah I’ve always thought that was a funny name. And ひぐらし are a type of cicadas, for anyone who doesn’t know that one.
Everything is definitely going to be completely fine.
I’m about 39.6k characters in (so I guess almost 15% of the way through this episode?), and just got through the part in the drawing room with the aunts and uncles, and now we’re back to the cousins’ room.
Wasn’t a fan at all of the part where Battler was trying to touch Shannon’s breasts… The power dynamic stuff there made me really uncomfortable. But I’m trusting everyone that says that that stuff is kind of front-loaded, and the rest of the VN doesn’t have as much of it, haha.
For folks who are vocab mining stuff from this VN:
Did you also mine “air defense identification zone”?
Alright I finished Chaos;Head, so I’m back to Umineko now! I might balance it with a few things, who knows, but I’m starting back. This is noticeably harder to read than the other VN, oof, haha. I can do it, just slow with all these words. Especially today. The save (at least on my version…) notes the current in game date and time so I’m going to use that to mark the spoiler:
Small spoilers at 4/10 13:30, dining hall
Tough with all the reading about how Kinzo rebuilt the family’s assets.
Battler is very, uhh, carefree. Oh how amusing, they were tossing around trying to convince grandpa as a threat because he used to beat people with his fists a lot so all our parents are scared of him
I resumed Umineko after a loooong break and finally got off the boat—all that shaking and loud voices really put me off lol.
Also, as fallynleaf said, the convo about “wanna touch my sister’s breasts” and joking about each other’s genitalia really weirded me out ugh. I was super uncomfortable reading that part.
But other than that, I find it much easier to understand the sentences now than when I read before the break - my brain’s truly doing its own thing.
Glad to have you back working through it! Yeah that stuff is so frontloaded – there’s a little more of Battler acting that way coming, but it will fade away soon as things get more serious.
Also super excited to hear that you’re having an easier time!
On my end I’ve been doing tiny reads because the amount of new words is staggering; this VN has such a broad vocabulary. I’m hoping things start recurring but I don’t think it’s going to settle any time soon. Maybe in the long run, but…
That said, I’ve hit what feels like one of the first major scenes, so I want to talk a little:
Spoilers 4/10 13:30, adults talking before location change to epitaph
That whole argument really is something. We’ve already heard plenty bad about Kinzo, but people sure aren’t showing many feelings about his health, just his money. We learn Kraus has been struggling a lot and some accusations of embezzlement!
It does a good job showing everyone’s characters (at least how they outwardly project?): Rosa is trying to be as unnoticed as possible threading between her siblings even when she has chosen a side, Rudolph is pretty snide but has a whole persona he kinda plays it off with, Eva is constantly mocking in every single thing she says but still flies off the handle when someone shows resistance, Hideyoshi keeps up his warm friendly tone even through accusations that really don’t match. On the other side, Natsuhi is clearly exhausted from taking care of the family from her position while Kraus thus far just maintains this friendly host aura, as if nothing they can say can bother him at all. It’s good stuff.
The monologue from Kumasawa puts into perspective how brutal the whole thing is – Natsuhi is in a terrible position by nature of being a woman and the expectations of 男尊女卑, which Eva exploited to jockey for her own position (because she was admittedly already at a disadvantage for being a woman), but now she’s further poking that wound throwing her family status around. The whole family structure is so psychologically damaging for everyone, no wonder they turn into this when the kids are gone.
Just wanna add I’ve always loved the voice acting work of Miki Itou (Eva), and today was a really good example of that, but it only gets better from here.
Haha, yeah, this is THE main reason for my pretty slow pace…
Looks like there are 9728 unique words in episode 1. I have 817 in Anki now (8% of the total) and am about 16% of the way through the episode, so I guess I already know about half of the words I’m seeing (or they contain new-to-me kanji and I’m ignoring them for now), which still leaves quite a few… I max out at 10 new ones a day (though occasionally a word coming in from pro wrestling also helps me out here), which puts me at just 3,650 a year, lol.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes me like 3-4 years to finish this VN because it’s literally like half the vocab size of an average adult’s passive vocabulary. But on the plus side, the episodes should get quicker and quicker to read, so I imagine by the end, I’ll be tearing through them.
Looking forward to reading your spoiler thoughts after I get a little further!
Yeah that will really do it haha, the content of the scene drastically impacts the difficulty in this VN, and so can the characters. I’m in the midst of financial discussions right now and getting overwhelmed with new words too quickly, heh.
Yeah, I was at like 4/10 12:20 in the dining hall, and I was like “yes I can almost read about the part Daisoujou talks about above!!” and then I walked right into a Kinzo scene where the VN drops sentences chock full of WK level 50+ kanji that are all in words I’ve never seen before in my life .
Picked up another 70 words from just under 4k characters of reading, so it’ll probably be another week before I get there, haha.
I had to slow down a bit during the explanation of the dining table pecking order during the dining room scene because I was trying to keep track of the family relationships and make sure I understood the dynamics there…
I ran into a Kinzo scene today and it felt like a break from so many new words, so that can tell you how all the financial discussion is going
This isn't commentary from me, but I made 3 screenshots of the epitaph to easily refer back to. You can see the epitaph in the tips, though the way my version works with mods that stuff is in English, heh.
Things are really picking up where I’m at so expect more posts
Spoilers for 15:00 Sandy Beach -- rose garden scene
I’m realizing as child characters go I really like Maria’s characterization and the handling of her because so much of what’s going on in a Maria scene revolves around people managing her moods, feels realistic enough to petulant children.
Once Rosa shows up and starts hitting her though, god, this scene is tough to read / listen to. No doubt everyone is coming away from the money arguments feeling like shit in some way, so her patience is low, but it’s not even a single slap and then regret, she just keeps going and going and even gets a little physical with Battler until ultimately leaving because she knows she has no control over her emotions at all at this point. The characterization feels pretty real, but uhh, some people shouldn’t be parents.
I know I’ve brought this up somewhere before, but the author of this has experience working in social services, and every work feels like he brings a lot of that in.
Like I’ve said, I’ve read beyond this point substantially (like a little ways into chapter 5) in English before so I have more detail on the characters, but impressions of most of the adults of the family can’t be very good, huh?
Also, I want it to be clear that I’m going to definitely be working hard to not spoil anything – but for the record, the point where I reached honestly hadn’t solved many mysteries because the way it’s structured we’re going to spend a long time getting more questions before anything else. There’s one big plot point I at least think I know the truth to, but it’s about the only thing. So any musing I do is on matters I’m just as in the dark about.
With that said, I just wanted to point out how in one line it mentions Rosa was leaving the mansion, headed in the direction of the garden and possibly the guest house, and it reads to me like the sort of line the VN might want us to see in passing and not think much about. Battler himself casually writes it off. And it may very well be nothing, but knowing that this VN is going to pile up 100 mysteries, I’m paranoid about little lines like that on this semi-reread. Did she just want to go outside and get some air, get away from people after that big fight? Quite possible! But maybe she had something else she wanted to do? Who knows.
. In hindsight, it’s so obvious… I like that the name is basically the same in Japanese and English, haha.
.
