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

Japanese Language Book Clubs
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A lot of Higurashi referencing here.

Alright well as I’ve mentioned elsewhere I’ve been going through some health stuff and kind of exhausted so reading has been hard, was tough to focus and really internalize what was being said, but I went through the extras. I have a few thoughts, if it’s incoherent and stupid please remember I am extremely fatigued right now :melting_face::

Mysteries

What really caught my attention this time was Rosa’s all you can eat family buffet and specifically how Beatrice talks to her. Rosa’s ashamed of it and denies it but this is also what she wants. She has so many bad memories of being pushed around by her siblings that she wishes they weren’t around or worse, and as sad as it is being a single mother is definitely hugely binding on what you can do as an individual so Maria is similarly a burden. But that’s the point where she truly refuses and says no, she does want Maria. She just, somewhere deep down, probably wants Maria to be more of a perfect prop than a child, because the hard work that comes along with the kid not being exactly what you want is what’s tiring.

So I started thinking, she kind of gets what she wants in this episode? I’m not sure how hard I’m just forcing the Maria point and my brain is hazy these last couple weeks so it’s hard to even remember but I’m pretty sure once the murders happen her relationship with Maria is certainly… less abusive, like Maria is still in character and not the perfect doll for Rosa I’m sure but she’s obedient enough. But that aside, like I’ve said before, the siblings are out of the picture and Rosa is the one with all the power. She gets to do what they did, belittle, degrade, and manipulate the servants. And she doesn’t have to act meek and deferential anymore, she gets to lash out at everyone and let the world know what she thinks of it.

So if I follow this whim more… what about episode 1 and Natsuhi? I can at least invent a way to say something similar happened :sweat_smile: . It’s similar but a little different. I feel like I have a less complete picture of what Natsuhi wants, but what we see when she’s with Krauss is that she’s lacking autonomy and recognition. With Krauss dead at the start, he’s no longer there to tell her to stop when she’s doing her best to manage a situation, and she gets to take her place as the head of the group. In that episode Kinzo even directly praises her for what she’s done. Notably the one Ushiromiya who survives is Eva, and she has her schemes to undermine Natsuhi… but it doesn’t REALLY change anything, does it? Eva is left specifically to see that Natsuhi is taking over, and even with her gotcha moment all she can really do, as I recall it, is ultimately storm off with Hideyoshi, to then die knowing Natsuhi is down there in control. Ultimately no one’s self defense works in this story but her moments of vowing to protect Battlerたち are way more genuine than Rosa’s, and in the end she disappears to duel Beatrice or something. She’s taking ALL the responsibility onto herself.

In a twisted sense, both episodes sort of feel like a wish fulfillment for these two characters who can’t get it any other way, I think? So the killer is the ghost of feminism :innocent:

Ok when it comes to “who is doing killing” and very concrete locked rooms and stuff, hell if I know. But structurally I’m enjoying trying to think about the story in the above way and see if I can mostly square it all away like that. I have this gut feeling, at this stage, that it’s not one of Kinzo’s kids. Like, I think they are all on very equal ground in this situation, broadly speaking. I’d probably wrap their spouses into that as well. But I feel similarly not inclined towards the servants, for some reason. If anything at this point my random guess would be Battler because he makes for the most wild answer :sweat_smile: . There’s a lot we don’t know about him. As I recall it he had some big problem with Rudolph and that’s why he’s been gone like 6 years? I have to wonder why exactly he’s battling Beatrice, besides nominative determinism :innocent: . Like yes, it’s in his character that he is extremely stubborn and won’t recognize witches, but it feels like he must be selected for some grander reason related to what’s going on with his and Beatrice’s characters.

They really wanted near the end to hammer in that Beatrice takes unnecessarily weak positions to confuse you, but I can’t at all figure out what that’s supposed to mean for us. I get that she probably, on some level, wanted Battler to make his return and not end her game so quickly, and was tormenting Rosa for that reason in part, but when it comes to the mystery setups… no idea.

Unrelated but you just reminded me, didn’t Rosa once say something like “what if you aren’t Rudolph’s son” then it got awkwardly played off, or something like that? In the context she was saying it like “you actually aren’t Battler and are just sneaking here” and maybe the way she said it doesn’t square away with this thought, but given all this emphasis we’re getting on Battler being like Kinzo… it’s not impossible he’s actually Kinzo’s son, maybe? Or he’s a new piece of furniture for the purpose of playing this game :person_shrugging:

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Spoiler reply

I have only a hazy idea of chess strategy, but my understanding is that the way high-level chess works, there are a number of established, recognized strategic positions and moves, and there are general strategies that are widely understood to be the most strategic (like, if you take an expensive piece from your opponent but sacrifice a weaker one of yours to do it, like your rook takes your opponent’s queen but you lose your rook in the process, that’s generally considered a strategic move on your part and a loss on your opponent’s). So because of that, high level players can predict what their opponent is going to do with a certain level of certainty. You generally wouldn’t take your opponent’s knight with your queen if it would mean losing your queen the next turn, for instance. So if that knight is in the queen’s line of fire but is protected by a pawn, it’s probably safe.

But if your opponent decides to throw established strategy out the window, you no longer have certainty. Like if your opponent takes the knight with their queen anyway and basically throws away their most valuable piece for seemingly very little reason, that’s on the surface a really bad move on their part, but it can throw a huge wrench in your plans if you can’t count on your knight to be protected in a scenario like that. So intentionally acting erratic is itself a strategy.

I took it to mean in the context of the murders that Beatrice is prone to excesses that exist just to torment and confuse Battler even though they’re strategically bad moves for her in the context of the game. Like, maybe she sacrifices more people than she needs to (I thought about Natsuhi’s suicide), or she kills them in particularly dramatic ways that leave her more exposed (I thought about her obsession with those locked room mysteries that kept repeatedly happening until it reached a point where it felt truly excessive). I imagine somewhere in all of that, she’s revealed more than she needs to because she just couldn’t help herself. So the question for us then becomes sorting out the stuff she did that was necessary and the stuff that’s actually excessive, which is serving as a distraction.

I dunno, though. That was just how it came across to me.