Umineko: When They Cry - Episode 3: Banquet 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]

Again, lots of images for episode 3 are just a giant spoiler for a character. Enjoy the picture in the original artstyle to go with the thread. Back when I was first getting into these I thought there was no way I’d be able to take them seriously with that art, but over time the ryukishi07 original style has gotten increasingly charming to me. Maybe one day I can reread Higurashi in Japanese and do it with the ham hands.

[fallynleaf]

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Alright, here we go!

Finished the Prologue

1. Wait a minute! That’s not Beatrice!!

2. I think she might’ve just confirmed my prediction for how magic works in Umineko? It relies on belief, and if there is no belief in it, it can’t manifest.

Interesting start to this episode, in any case. I like it better than the last one so far. I assume our Beatrice is the little girl talking to the grey-haired “Beatrice” that we meet here, and that she eventually grew up and took her master’s name and became the evil witch we all know and love. But I dunno, I might be misunderstanding.

It’s interesting how the attainment of a level of power (the ability to resurrect anything) that should’ve brought eternal happiness instead brought her torment because it came with boredom. When I was an edgy teenager, I stirred up trouble at my family’s church by saying that I didn’t believe Heaven existed because happiness could only exist in contrast to other emotions and if you had only happiness forever, it would quickly fade and you wouldn’t be happy anymore, so therefore eternal happiness was impossible and thus Heaven could not exist. Seems like Beatrice’s experience aligns with my edgy teenage self’s theory lol. I probably would’ve gone nuts over this if I’d read it as a teenager.

[fallynleaf]

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Finished Days as a Young Girl

Oof the sexism in this… It really makes me feel for Eva, and it makes me hate Krauss and Kinzo even more. Krauss totally uses it to get one up over her, too, probably because he has no power when it comes to his dad so he takes it out on someone he does have power over.

Also, we have another double!! This time of Eva’s younger self.

The part where her younger self told her that even though her own life was messed up by her father and Krauss, she’s trying to mess up her own son’s life by forcing her dreams on him, and “それが大人というものなの？”… Oof.

It’s also really sad that Eva plans to take advantage of Jessica being a woman to put George ahead of her in the inheritance race…

Also, considering how much of her own hopes that Eva has pinned on George, I can see why she doesn’t take the Shannon thing well at all, lol. But that is her own fault, giving up on achieving her own dream and putting it all on her son… If she wanted to get what she wanted, she should’ve found a way to do it on her own terms and not Kinzo’s. Now she’s just playing the patriarchy’s game.

Also, there are some recurring themes here about magic and belief:

I get the sense that child Eva is in fact telling her actually real things about magic…

Hmm, wait a second, the child version of Eva has blue eyes?? But Eva herself has purple eyes… Wonder what that’s all about.

Okay, now I’m paying attention to the characters’ eyes, lol. Maria also has purple eyes. In the characters menu, Beatrice’s eyes are blue. Uh oh!

Just as I typed that, I got to the point where “Eva’s child self” welcomed her back home to the island. Uh oh!

Alright, I finished the chapter, so I’ll do an eye color check to see if there’s anything else worth noting.

Battler’s eyes are blue! Fascinating. Kinzo’s eye color is… not visible at the resolution I have the game at from the characters menu. The same is true of most of the other characters, so I guess I’ll have to wait until they reappear properly before I can check. I can see that Jessica’s eyes are also blue, though. No idea if this actually means anything or if it’s just significant in the case of Eva specifically, but I have my eye on things now .

It seems obvious that Eva was actually speaking to Beatrice and not her child self, but maybe the VN is swerving us here. Guess I’ll find out eventually.

It’s refreshing to have Eva as sort of the “protagonist” of this episode because as terrible as she is, her character is a lot more sympathetic than Rosa. I wonder if each episode is going to focus on one of the parents? Maybe we’re going to get all of the women first, and then their husbands for the last set of episodes?

[Daisoujou]

Nice progress! I think I’m going to be a little longer before I start up episode 3 – had two more clubs start at the beginning of November and I’m in the midst of too much already, but there’s a thing or two I’m trying to mostly focus on finishing to free up a little more attention. I’m sure I’ll be able to catch up so no worries anyway, just saying it since I might go quiet here briefly.

[fallynleaf]

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Finished My Preparations Are Already Complete

It made me laugh when I moused over シーユーアゲイン with Yomitan and saw that it had a pixiv dictionary entry thanks to Umineko: “シーユーアゲインとは、同人ゲーム『うみねこのなく頃に』の１シーンに対するファンからの俗称。” Battler’s embarrassing moment lives on even in fans’ memories, lol.

It’s nice to see the focus on the cousins bonding for this scene, though the way they’re stressing that they’ll always believe in each other and get along seems kind of foreboding…

It kind of reminds me of my aunt’s funeral that I went to a few months ago. My dad was trying to ensure that I got my cousin’s contact information, and I realized that he was being so insistent because my dad and I both knew (though I’m not sure that my cousin knew. He certainly didn’t know that we knew, at least) that my cousin’s dad was suing my dad over the inheritance left by my grandpa, and I could tell that my dad was worrying that I might not be able to see my cousin ever again at any sort of family-arranged event like this, so he was hopeful that we could potentially connect up outside of family events so that we could still be in each other’s lives even if our parents never spoke to each other again… The scene with the cousins in this chapter of Umineko felt painfully similar to that.

Well, I hope it works out okay for the cousins in Umineko, and I hope it works out okay for me and my real-life cousins .

Omg, we have a new character! A demon butler who proceeded to immediately flirt with Battler in the kind of in-between meta world. He seems fun, lol.

Also, Beatrice told Battler that he’s giving in little by little, which is what has allowed her to summon more of her goons…

A big change this time around is that Eva has realized that if the letter is real, that could be her big ticket to win the inheritance and become the head of the family despite her gender, so now she’s insisting that it’s real rather than doubting its provenance.

So far, I’m liking this episode the best, I think.

Curious to see if the mackerel thing comes up again this time around or if that was just a red herring…