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

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Finished a chapter, so here’s another post.

Thoughts on 18:00 'Furniture' and 'People'

The Gohda stuff in this one was interesting to me. The dynamic between him and Shannon and Kanon became a lot more clear. It’ll be interesting to learn more about him after he barely featured at all in the first episode.

Shannon’s “resistance” to Beatrice was also interesting. I’m curious to see if she makes a different decision with the ring this time, because…

We appear to be fully in an alternate canon! I was pretty sure I remembered something like that from Higurashi, so I was expecting it a bit here, but I doubted my own memory so much, I just couldn’t be sure… It’s pretty undeniable after the open conversation about Beatrice during the dinner, though. That was 100% different than the previous episode.

It’s fun to have everyone openly knowing about Beatrice though. Makes for a totally different dynamic this time around with solving the mystery.

But they sure did tease us by cutting to another scene right when Genji was getting grilled about Beatrice…

I haven’t gotten very far at all yet in the next chapter, but there was one small thing I wanted to comment on that has nothing at all to do with Umineko:

Started 22:00 Wedding Ring

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The word 鵜呑みにした stood out to me because I actually learned this one from, of all things, a gimmick quiz wrestling match in Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling where they asked the wrestlers “elementary school level Japanese, arithmetic, science, and social studies questions”, and Miyu Yamashita got the question about this word wrong, HAHA.

Here’s what it was (sourced from this fan transcript):

Q.「彼は話を鵜呑みにした。」さて、「鵜呑み」どういう意味ですか？
A.山下「『彼』ってことは男性ですよね……。丸飲み！丸飲み！」
（正解:そのまま信じること）

It was just really funny seeing this one in the wild after seeing it come up as a difficult vocab question for elementary school level Japanese, which an adult pro wrestler totally failed to understand dfjkghdfjkg

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Furniture and People chapter

Yeah Gohda is in an interesting position, low on the hierarchy here but he feels (probably rightly) that he’s better at his job than the younger servants. When I think about it it’s pretty much the impression I have of Eva relative to Kraus, too.

I was thinking a lot about Shannon’s resistance and what exactly that means for Beatrice’s power/existence in a literal sense and what she’s here to do, too. Definitely seems like Shannon is onto something. The 黄金郷 talk and what that means for them as furniture, how it’s going to “free” them feels like something to come back to that we can’t fully solve til we get to what the ceremony and 黄金郷 REALLY are or even what there is to the furniture vs person thing. Though clearly by having real human relationships and volition they graduate beyond furniture.

Another little scene where Kinzo is showing that occasionally he can be nice to a person! Someone needs to get him on those chess turn timers, though.

Yeah that’s cruel, and I’m over here the whole time like “Hey what about the notes though! Read the notes!”

God every time Kraus just responds to everything Natsuhi says telling her to stop talking. :neutral_face: . I did “enjoy” the dinner argument a lot, their characters are so well expressed in how they react to these things. I like how Eva just flies into a rage as soon as something unexpected is introduced. She’s really good at controlling things and beating people down until the moment it’s not going exactly how she intended.

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It’s happening…! The Real Umineko… 2!

Gonna put a bit of a content warning for this one, actually (for “Halloween” specifically): there’s a kind of gnarly description of vomiting, though we don’t actually see it, and the audio is basically just dialogue and not super realistic sound effects or anything. But it got to me a bit, so maybe make sure you’re in the right mood for it before starting that chapter…

Finished Wedding Ring and got a decent chunk of the way through 6:00 Halloween

I don’t have many comments from Wedding Ring, though George was starting to annoy me, so I was like, “Can George PLEASE get murdered this episode?? Beatrice please I’m begging :folded_hands:” and then right after I said that to a friend, Shannon might’ve just sealed his fate by accepting the ring, hahaha.

Also, the chapel suddenly getting introduced feels like kind of a huge detail to suddenly just drop into this story?? Like, I feel like it’d be really easy for someone to hide out in there…

Getting to the important stuff, though, we now have a totally different tableau of murders: Krauss and Natsuhi, Eva and Hideyoshi, and Rudolph and Kirie. Time for famously bad mother Rosa to have to step up…

It’s interesting that Beatrice pointed out to Battler that she left their faces undamaged this time so that it left no room to doubt their identities.

As mentioned above, I had a bit of trouble (for emetophobia reasons) reading the description of Rosa finding the bodies, though I do ok with just text descriptions now. But one thing that was kind of interesting to me about this was the use of onomatopoeia in that scene. There were multiple points where it was a bunch of them just smushed together without actual grammar or real vocab or anything. It gave it a more visceral, instinctual revulsion feeling, like kind of tapping into the part of your brain that only processes sensations, not words.

Of course, for me as a language learner, I don’t have that same instinctual awareness of onomatopoeia developed at a young age, so I had to take a bit of extra time to parse it all, but it’s a neat property of onomatopoeia that lets them do that, describing physical states as sounds, basically.

I’m curious how they adapted that in the English translation. I suppose if I ever do replay the whole thing in English, I’ll try to remember to pay attention to that part and see how they describe it. I don’t think it’s really possible to capture that same feeling with English, because even if you try to replace the onomatopoeia with equivalent sound words in English, I don’t think they have that same descriptive power that they do in Japanese.

The meta interactions between Beatrice and Battler are interesting.

Also, it’s kind of funny how the vibe of this murder is so different from the previous episode. Last time, the characters immediately started pointing fingers and doubting each other. This time, it’s just, “yep, it’s definitely Beatrice!”. Though I’m sure the doubting and finger pointing are going to happen in this one, too.