Umineko: When They Cry - Episode 2: Turn of the Golden Witch - Visual Novel Informal Club

[Daisoujou]

Home Thread Here!

Pace

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

[Daisoujou]

I used the manga cover for part 1, but for part 2 the image I was finding seemed a little spoilery to me, so we’re just getting the nice portrait to gaze at now.

[Daisoujou]

I wanted to let you all know I started this today! I’m going to be a little on and off with it, there’s always a lot I’m doing and planning, but I don’t want to outpace people too much anyway so that’s probably good. Might read more later but for now I read the prologue, about ~7500 characters, so let’s get started with some reactions! Fun to be back.

The difficulty level is first-rate

I love that he gives chapters an arbitrary difficulty rating that applies to the mystery, more or less.

So first off, George and Shannon are clearly meant to genuinely care a lot for each other and they’re sweet but definitely a バカップル . That said, the way George thinks just kinda bugs me all the time. He feels condescending. I think it’s intentional in the story that he is, and also that he doesn’t mean to be? I mean this story very clearly is interested in how women are treated by men.

All the talk about magic making them be able to be together has me totally thinking about fallynleaf’s prior thoughts on how magic works via people’s strong feelings putting meaning into something – it fit very comfortably into what Shannon was saying.

But of course then we get to that scene with the little 祠 and the way this VN has me on edge for mysteries I was ready to suspect it was anyone but Shannon there, given how it’s obviously implying it’s her, but we learn at the end of the scene it really is her. So the implication here seems to be that through a deal with Beatrice, she’s able to have this date with George and not just be in a secret relationship at best, if not held totally at a distance.

In the first chapter, the whole shrine was destroyed, if I recall right? It’s different but similar, and gives us a hint that messing with the shrine benefits (frees?) Beatrice, maybe?

[Daisoujou]

Quick thought I had, about 5k characters into Furniture

I remember fallynleaf took note of this with Battler talking about Maria, but there is so much talk in this VN about people knowing something bad is happening and convincing themselves that they are unable to do anything about it. So what they do is either intentionally witness it or don’t. It happens here with Shannon (and the servants broadly) about Klaus being abused by Kinzo, just as it did with Rosa and Maria, and off the top of my head there’s also Kumasawa remarking on watching Natsuhi from the shadows. I’m sure there were others. I recall Kanon being kept in line by other people because he specifically hates watching Shannon’s treatment.

[fallynleaf]

(7,423 characters in (288,551 total))

I have officially started! So far, even with some new settings and new associated vocab, it’s not too bad; I mined 75 words in roughly 7,500 characters. This chapter seems to have substantially less unique words than the previous, anyway, so I expect things to pick up once we get settled in.

Prologue

@Daisoujou

That said, the way George thinks just kinda bugs me all the time. He feels condescending.

BIG MOOD. I found the date part kind of hard to get through, honestly. I was like “ugh can I fast-forward through the heterosexuality?” . And yeah, I think George has an issue where he’s both condescending and also seems totally unaware of the power difference between them… Some of the ways he teases her or like jokingly threatens her bug me because Shannon really doesn’t have any choice except to play along…

Even the choice to love him or not, is that really something that she has the free will to decide?

We got George’s perspective, which was just emphasizing how ridiculously lovey-dovey they were and showed not even a surface awareness of Shannon’s position, and then we got Shannon’s perspective, which was emphasizing how little control she has over anything in her life (and also her lack of faith that George would even believe her, anyway). She’s a shark stuck in a tank that is all she’ll ever get for an ocean.

And yeah, there is some dramatic irony in how George dismisses the magic stuff as like girly woo-woo superstition that men know better than to believe, but obviously Shannon very much does know more than him about how the mechanics of this world operate.

@Daisoujou

All the talk about magic making them be able to be together has me totally thinking about fallynleaf’s prior thoughts on how magic works via people’s strong feelings putting meaning into something – it fit very comfortably into what Shannon was saying.

Yeah, I felt very validated, hahaha. We’ll have to see how this develops…

@Daisoujou

But of course then we get to that scene with the little 祠 and the way this VN has me on edge for mysteries I was ready to suspect it was anyone but Shannon there, given how it’s obviously implying it’s her, but we learn at the end of the scene it really is her.

@Daisoujou

So the implication here seems to be that through a deal with Beatrice, she’s able to have this date with George and not just be in a secret relationship at best, if not held totally at a distance.

I can’t help but wonder if the deal isn’t specifically for the relationship with George, but actually for something else that just so happens to let her also have the relationship with him…

@Daisoujou

In the first chapter, the whole shrine was destroyed, if I recall right? It’s different but similar, and gives us a hint that messing with the shrine benefits (frees?) Beatrice, maybe?

Yes, “ない！ない！” Though, now that I think about it, I’m not sure if it was the whole shrine or just the torii that was gone… But I had the same thought, yeah, that something like this probably happened to it in the first episode before Battler and co. reached the island. I wonder if it was a different person who broke the mirror then… (I’m still not sure yet where this episode fits in, like if it’s an alternate timeline or what.)

Interesting, too, the theme about how to gain something, you have to be prepared to lose something. That seems to be a recurring component of how magic works, with Kinzo’s whole thing about bigger risks equaling a bigger reward…

Curious to see where things go from here!

[fallynleaf]

(14,658 characters in (295,786 total))

Lol I just found out from a friend that George is older than I thought (I must’ve glossed over or forgotten his age when he was first introduced), which makes his relationship with Shannon grosser than I thought…

Some thoughts from Furniture

Even putting the problematic age gap relationship aside, I think part of why I hate George is because I feel like out of all of the cousins, he’s the one who most perpetuates the rot at the center of the Ushiromiya family.

Like, I feel like you can see how the family is breaking all three of the other kids, but George is the one taking to the Ushiromiya way of doing things like a duck to water.

@Daisoujou

I remember fallynleaf took note of this with Battler talking about Maria, but there is so much talk in this VN about people knowing something bad is happening and convincing themselves that they are unable to do anything about it. So what they do is either intentionally witness it or don’t. It happens here with Shannon (and the servants broadly) about Klaus being abused by Kinzo, just as it did with Rosa and Maria, and off the top of my head there’s also Kumasawa remarking on watching Natsuhi from the shadows.

Yeah, I thought about that as well…

Also just the fact that the parents kick their children out of the room because they don’t want their kids to see them getting abused by their own dad…

At least with Shannon and the servants, there likely isn’t much they can do about it because Kinzo and his kids (and his kids’ kids, honestly) are all in a position of power over the servants. Though the idea that it’s part of Shannon’s job to not be present for those moments of abuse is…

[Daisoujou]

I hadn’t paid any attention to exact ages, oh no. I actually read part of Furniture today as well, after neglecting Umineko for a bit.

On the word, broadly

I don’t think I’ve said it but whatever is going on with the furniture concept itself makes me very sad! I assume eventually we’ll find out where that comes from, but as I recall Kinzo owns an orphanage (could be just heavy influence but I think it was owns?) that he gets servants from. Which was really casually dropped in like one line in Episode 1, considering how extremely awful that is. Anyway on top of basically hand-selecting his child slaves is he the one teaching them that they are subhuman or what exactly is going on there?

In the more meta sense stepping outside the story I think it’s an interesting choice because within the boundaries of that sort of relationship it’s not wrong; they are a tool to be used and it’s unwelcome for them to act like a real person. You can look at a rich person’s servants and – well with you being the main person reading this I think your reaction would be different from the average person’s but you know, it’s a normalized kinda thing. But with the furniture talk, I have to imagine just having a little basic empathy is going to make anyone automatically recoil the way I do.

[fallynleaf]

@Daisoujou

I hadn’t paid any attention to exact ages, oh no.

Yeah, George is 23 and Shannon is 16, apparently… Big oof

Though to be fair to us, the narrative kind of treats him as like roughly the same age as Battler and Jessica, haha, so it’s easy to accidentally overlook that detail if you missed the exact number…

[Daisoujou]

@fallynleaf

Though to be fair to us, the narrative kind of treats him as like roughly the same age as Battler and Jessica, haha, so it’s easy to accidentally overlook that detail if you missed the exact number…

For sure. I think there are pretty significant differences between Kinzo’s kids’ ages too IIRC, but in my mental model of this everyone is just thrown in a generation bucket right now, haha.

[fallynleaf]

(23,160 characters in (304,288 characters total))

Oh hey, I passed 300k characters total! Nice!

Some more thoughts on Furniture (boy this chapter is a long one).

Wow this chapter is brutal to Shannon… Really tough to read how Eva and Natsuhi treat her… And the fact that she fantasizes about George rescuing her by just saying some clever things to get the heat off of her… It’s sad to me that that’s as far as her imagination can go (and even that is too much for her), like she can’t imagine him doing more than that to help her, and even that alone is enough to make her feel like she loves him…

Some things of note in this part: we learned about the existence of another servant, Ruon, who is good at tricking Natsuhi into thinking they did a good job at cleaning.

We also learned that they have Kanon doing some sort of “dirty work” that seems to be more than just a euphemism for working with manure in the garden, lol, because he talked about it like it sullied his soul itself.

And of course, Beatrice appearing in front of Shannon and telling her about love being the original sin and saying that it made her human now and then offering to make her wish come true… Hmm… Now that sure would be a plot twist, if George was never really in love with Shannon by his own volition in the first place…

I had to stop for the night at kind of a cliffhanger (right when Beatrice broached that idea to Shannon) lol so I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.

[Daisoujou]

End of Furniture

I like this bit, a real way with words. Now that I’m a bit better at Japanese, reading Beatrice’s musings in the fancy way she talks is quite fun.

The 「人」たりえた part had me looking around and there’s a good explanation here 日本語の【たりえる】とはどういう意味なのか、教えていただきたいです。... - Yahoo!知恵袋

Could’ve pieced that together because I’m familiar with たる, but it’s a tricky form without 得る in kanji to make that clearer. Considering they use 人 in the question it’s very possible they were also reading Umineko, haha.

Love how she starts with “you can’t eat soup with a fork!” and then immediately associates it into this. Beatrice is so fun. I was going to say she’s great because she’s telling Shannon that she’s a human being and not furniture, but as the scene goes on, to twist the knife in she turns into Eva. She tries to start off acting friendly and then as soon as Shannon shows any resistance to the idea it’s full on malice. Kanon is great though; we already have a case in both episodes of him standing up to Beatrice regardless of what’ll happen to him.

Anyway that’s mostly all I want to say. I did look into 妾 a little as well because I don’t see it too often and it’s for women in the samurai era, especially those related to those families: 武家時代、身分のある女性、特に武家の子女の自称

[fallynleaf]

(37,586 characters in (318,714 characters total))

Spoilers for the end of Furniture and the start of the next chapter

@Daisoujou

Beatrice is so fun. I was going to say she’s great because she’s telling Shannon that she’s a human being and not furniture, but as the scene goes on, to twist the knife in she turns into Eva.

Hahaha yeah, same…

Though, to be honest, their interactions over the tea at the beginning of the next chapter have me shipping Shannon and Beatrice a bit, hahahaha. If we’re gonna do a problematic age gap relationship, might as well go all the way .

It’s cool to see Beatrice humanized a bit here. Gives a lot more dimension to her character.

@Daisoujou

I did look into 妾 a little as well because I don’t see it too often and it’s for women in the samurai era, especially those related to those families: 武家時代、身分のある女性、特に武家の子女の自称

Yeah, I was a bit taken aback when I saw that pronoun and looked it up and saw the other meaning, haha.

It’s an interesting choice for a personal pronoun…

[Daisoujou]

Same spot

Very good Jessica expression.

Yeah Beatrice and Shannon actually mellow out a lot getting to this tea scene now, it’s cute. It’s very pleasant to see Shannon having a good time finally in this VN.

Coincidentally, since making that last post, I’ve come across characters using 妾 a little more and you can feel the role language part of it; they have the same arrogant energy and even talk kind of similarly to Beatrice, with the pairing of a slightly more archaic vibe to their speech.

[fallynleaf]

(59,484 characters in (340,612 characters total))

Sidenote: ironically, the Steam version of Umineko seems natively Linux-compatible, so I could theoretically play it totally painlessly on my new Linux Mint computer, but since I needed to do so many modifications to get the game to play nicely in Japanese with the texthooker, and since textractor seems a bit complicated to run in Linux, I decided not to even try to get it working in Linux.

One of my friends said there are a bunch of things that are really interesting in this VN to revisit after reading through the whole thing once, and they recommended I play through it again afterward, so maybe I’ll play through it in English and actually get Steam credit for playing it haha after I complete it in Japanese…

I ended up reading a fair bit more without having the time to update this thread. Let’s see if I can remember my thoughts.

Thoughts on the School Festival chapter

Umineko is a funny VN because there will be horrible murders, and then in the next episode there’s a scene where Jessica just casually has brass knuckles and brandishes them at her classmates like this is a comedy manga.

The pretend boyfriend situation with Jessica and Kanon in this gave me secondhand embarrassment, haha. I’m a fan of that trope normally, but it’s less appealing when it’s heterosexual and also the way she’s obviously lying about it jkgfhg.

I did laugh upon discovering that: 1) Natsuhi is president of the PTA (of course she is…), and 2) that the word “PTA” exists entirely unchanged in Japanese??

I found it interesting how Jessica urged Kanon to basically create a double self… It reminded me of Maria’s double personality, especially in that both cases, the other personality sort of serves as a refuge for the person and a way for them to escape their terrible life.

I feel like there was some comment I wanted to make on how magic worked in this world, haha, but I don’t remember it anymore!

Thoughts on the train scene at the start of the Chessboard Preparations chapter

Oof the scene with Maria and Rosa… Their interactions never get any easier to read.

It was really sad to read, but I was intrigued by the way that Maria first begged her mom to save her even though her mom was the person hitting her, and then Maria told her to “come back”, and greeted her with “welcome back!” when Rosa returned to her right state of mind again. It was as if Maria viewed Rosa’s body as housing two different people, one who hurts Maria, and then a mother who saves her… She talked about it like Rosa was possessed by a “bad witch”.

That gets back to the theme of doubles that I mentioned earlier (it’s kind of similar, too, in that the double is used as a refuge, or at least for Maria, it’s a way to mentally separate the aspect of her mother who abuses her from the aspect of her mother who loves her).

It made me suddenly wonder if that’s how someone did it (the murders, I mean): they created a double of themself somehow and then killed their double to satisfy Beatrice’s riddle, while allowing them to go on to commit the other murders.

[Daisoujou]

Oh yeah, I bet there’s a lot to notice on reread. Big commitment but I’d definitely be curious to hear about how that goes if you do end up doing it.

Thoughts up to the same points

It’s that line everyone on the internet is always posting! I forgot it shows up here, figured it was a later game thing. A lot of focus on subjectivity of perception here, and like you said, identity too. Compartmentalizing but made particularly physical and literal. And the “without love, it cannot be seen” line especially seems to relate to seeing something beyond its default state, with the example of the water being blue despite the narration letting us know in some way Kanon is correct.

It’s so painful for me to read Krauss and Natsuhi talking sometimes . I saw this important person at the school festival! They are working on this project and want me to convey insincere well-wishes to you! Their conversations are like business meetings and they’re so painfully stuffy even in practically every scene with each other and Jessica. It’s fitting but so offputting haha.

There’s not a lot more I can say about the Maria scene, you pretty much covered it, but it’s so particularly painful how this VN doesn’t just Rosa out to be all bad (to be clear of course what she’s doing is very bad), but has her full of regret and thinking about how much Maria means to her and all that in between the outbursts of abuse. Awful situation. That line she slips in where she blames Maria for her father being gone forever is terrible and probably pretty telling of where some frustration comes from too…

[fallynleaf]

(78,491 characters in (359,691 characters total))

Got slowed down a bit by a Rudolph section with some more financial/legal vocab, lol, but then my last reading session was actually really easy (I read almost 8k characters and added only 30 words), so things have been going smoother.

Thoughts on Guest of Honor a little ways into the chapter

It’s interesting to get some alternative perspectives on some events we already watched transpire last chapter. The abuse against Maria continues to be very hard to watch…

My dictionary didn’t have an entry for サヴィン (looks like wikipedia has it as サウィン? Dunno if the word’s a misspelling in Umineko or what), but I’m pagan and so I knew immediately what Maria was talking about during that section hahaha.

I felt extra empathetic for her getting dismissed so harshly by Rosa for talking about her interests there, because I’ve definitely felt like I couldn’t talk about some of my beliefs around my own parents…

I’m glad that Maria had Kanon looking out for her, at least. Though he doesn’t have much power to do anything to help her, either…

With how Rosa treated that candy, it got me wondering if maybe she was the one who destroyed Maria’s rose. I guess we’ll just have to see what happened to it, assuming the VN tells us.

I didn’t like how Hideyoshi and Rudolph were like ogling Shannon. Eugh. All the men in this VN are so gross toward her .

I left off when Beatrice appeared in the garden (she has a tendency to show up right when I’m trying to wrap up a reading session lol), so I’m curious to see what happens next.

[Daisoujou]

Same spot

It really is a shame how the Maria part ends, because it’s so cute she wants to do mock trick or treat and then give everyone candy, and also it was nice that people were earnestly listening to her for once. She’s like crazy knowledgeable for being a kid, just about the specific thing she cares about.

I feel like to some degree Rosa’s treatment of Maria is an open secret (Jessica and George seemed to already know last chapter IIRC) which makes Eva needling her over the way Maria is acting particularly awful. Anything to get in some jabs at her siblings, and her saying that seemed to be what really tipped Rosa over the edge. Because they’re totally fictional characters I have fun watching some of the really toxic people being messy and ridiculously mean, mostly Eva and Kinzo (fantastic voice work for them both too), but yeah every scene Eva is in she’s really just here to make everyone feel worse all the time.

Agreed about Kanon, he can’t really actually change much but he’s always trying to help people who are getting pushed around.

Agreed about Rudolph’s legal troubles being the hardest part. It’s occurring to me over time that Kinzo’s speech is getting easier and easier. I think because I play so many videogames in Japanese he’s got the same vibe as a pompous villain or something, with his more pretentious old man forms fitting well enough with fantasy settings and the like. It’s the modern day villains (businesspeople) you have to watch out for.

I think it’s a nice setup for episode 2 that we’re launching in Beatrice revealing herself more readily after being a presence talked about but almost never seen in the first. Will be fun to see (in my case jog my memory…) how this changes things.

[fallynleaf]

(82,875 characters in (364,003 characters total))

Only read a bit more, but I finished the chapter, haha, so this seemed like a good stopping point to comment on a few things.

Not a whole lot of new vocab in this session either, so I’ll be back reading more really soon probably.

Thoughts on the rest of Guest of Honor

I actually had this part slightly spoiled for me, or at least a friend had mentioned to me that other characters hinted that the relationship between Genji and Kinzo was romantic in nature. Though rather or not it’s actually true or if Genji is merely suspected of it, I’m not sure.

After my friend told me that, I randomly remembered this comment I’d made extremely early on:

@fallynleaf

Kinzo offering the rest of his weird drink to Genji… indirect kiss. I’m sorry, that’s all the commentary I have in me for this part lol

I was onto them without even knowing it .

Though man, if Genji really is in love with him, I feel bad for him… Kinzo is clearly obsessed with Beatrice. Though Kinzo’s wife had it the worst of all, huh? If she was indeed jealous of both Genji and Beatrice.

Kinzo’s wife is still the biggest mystery of this VN to me lol. We know so little about her…

Beyond the Genji stuff, this scene threw a pretty big wrench into everything we thought we knew from the first episode, huh? Rosa and Kirie both definitely know Beatrice exists, despite everyone besides the servants making it seem like they didn’t believe in her last episode.

I guess I’m still not entirely clear if episode 2 is the exact same canon as episode 1 or if it’s an alternate universe of some sort. I was trying to match up the timelines, but naturally could not remember when exactly the events of the previous episode occurred.

Rosa, Kirie (and Shannon, for that matter) were also among the first people to get murdered. So I wonder if the killer was systematically taking out the people who had interacted with Beatrice? Besides Maria, whom no one would believe anyway. Or I’m about to find out that this is an alternate universe with a different order of murders anyway hahaha.

Honestly, Rosa should really seriously apologize to Maria for not believing her about the witch stuff, because Maria clearly knew what she was talking about.

And my memory is a bit hazy now, but wasn’t Kirie one of the people who fed Battler doubts about the existence of the supposed 19th person? Though I suppose that depends on where exactly in the timeline we are, lol, like if Kirie encountered Beatrice before or after that other conversation.

[fallynleaf]

(96,161 characters in (377,289 characters total))

Finished another chapter!

Thoughts on 13:00 The Witch's Move (gonna start putting the time in there too)

My main thought here was that Eva’s strategy of absolutely refusing to recognize Beatrice’s legitimacy no matter what documents or proof she tried to present was remarkably similar to Battler’s whole approach, hahaha. Though obviously Eva doesn’t seem to have any concept of magic even potentially being real (or she’s really good at faking it).

Another observation I made was that Hideyoshi really plays up not being as smart as others, huh? I still feel like he’s hiding something…

But with this, we now have Rosa, Kirie, Rudolph, Eva, and Hideyoshi at least aware of Beatrice’s existence. So the only people who don’t know appear to be Natsuhi, Krauss, Battler, George, and Jessica.

I’m curious about Rosa’s letter from Beatrice, since Maria was the one who read the letter at dinner in episode one… I still can’t quite tell if this is an alternate perspective of the same events or if we’re in fully alternate canon territory.

Maybe I’ll find out soon…

[Daisoujou]

Those two sections

I noticed Beatrice reading 誘う as いざなう, that’s one of those that might sometimes be read with this alternative but I don’t think there’s a good way to tell. Feels fitting with her speech style though. I had also never noticed うつしよ was an option for 現世.

@fallynleaf

Kinzo’s wife is still the biggest mystery of this VN to me lol. We know so little about her…

Yeah no one seems to have a single thing to say about her, except in passing in relation to Beatrice. Kinzo is Kinzo but it makes you wonder why she seems to have left no impression at all on her kids.

@fallynleaf

My main thought here was that Eva’s strategy of absolutely refusing to recognize Beatrice’s legitimacy no matter what documents or proof she tried to present was remarkably similar to Battler’s whole approach, hahaha.

Just say no to everything all the time, no matter what. You’re very right. Battler is so funny about it too; I’m excited to get back to some of the moments I remember with him. At first when Kirie was insisting she didn’t know anything about this plan a little heavily, I wondered if they were just lying because Rudolph didn’t want to seem like he needed the help of a woman but it pretty quickly started to feel genuine… which to be fair is probably because he tried to not need the help of a woman. Though there’s also the feeling that he is kind of embarrassed about whatever business situation he’s gotten himself in, and hiding that from his wife sucks in its own way, but it’s slightly different haha.

@fallynleaf

Another observation I made was that Hideyoshi really plays up not being as smart as others, huh? I still feel like he’s hiding something…

Yeah you’re absolutely right here. We already know from something Battler mentioned that Hideyoshi does this in his business, like he puts on the kansai talk to seem more friendly and less calculating. It could just be reflexive with the family, but it certainly shows he has the capacity to be hiding more right now.

The structure of what’s going on is one thing I definitely still remember well and know the answer to for sure, but I’m excited for you to find out soon

Also, poor Kanon. The furniture thing, whatever the truth of that is, is weird and fucked up, and now he’s made to overtly finally submit to Beatrice in this vague hope of protecting Shannon and being released from the life they’ve been stuck with. It’s interesting wondering how much of Beatrice’s behavior is entirely an act, given how friendly she was at times with Shannon and how that is all about giving her some happiness to make snatching it away even worse. She seems to genuinely like Maria, but who knows…