Umineko: When They Cry - Episode 3: Banquet of the Golden Witch - Visual Novel Informal Club

Japanese Language Book Clubs
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Got super busy all of a sudden and fell a bit behind on my Umineko reading, but I’m hoping to catch up a bit now. Then I was so tired today I couldn’t even read for an hour… maybe tomorrow will be better :weary:.

Finished Skirmish and started 9:00 The Key to the Golden Land, though I didn’t get far enough to have any comments on that chapter yet

I don’t think I’ve commented on this yet (can’t remember which chapter it was revealed in), but it’s interesting to me that Kinzo got burned in the furnace twice, and we haven’t seen him die any other way. Both times, they identified his body by his six toes. Beatrice confirmed in red that he did indeed die, and what we saw onscreen certainly suggested that, but why the furnace? And why for him specifically? I wonder if there’s something he would otherwise be hiding on his body or something…

Also, Battler finally got another one over Beatrice this chapter. Here’s what I commented as I was reading:

What Battler asked Beatrice to repeat was: “６人は全員他殺である”, and she refused to repeat that, but she did repeat (in red): “６人は誰も自殺していない！”. I can’t help but wonder if there is some distinction there that allowed her to say the second one but not the first. Maybe the theme of doubles like I’ve been suspecting? Looking at the Japanese definitions, 他殺 appears to mean “killed by another person” and 自殺 is “ending your own life by your own hands”.

So could the person been murdered not by another person but also not by ending their own life? I suppose something like mind control would result in that scenario, though “mind control” doesn’t exactly help Battler explain it without magic, haha.

Oh, right after I typed that, Virgilia also pointed out that Beatrice changed the wording of Battler’s requested repetition.

Battler suspected the person died of an accident, which somehow hadn’t occurred to me, but Ronove stopped Beatrice from saying it in red and forced her to take a timeout. Then she refused to say it when she came back.

So I’m guessing that Battler wasn’t exactly right, but that Beatrice was about to make a similar mistake and say something in red that would lead him to the correct answer.

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Also, this made me laugh because this was my first time seeing 前哨戦 outside of a pro wrestling context. That word is probably a frequency 1,000 word in pro wrestling, but you never see it in normal life lol.

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Oh that’s a fun bit of trivia, interesting. I think I’ve seen it a time or two before in the context of actual military skirmishes, but certainly not often even there. 哨 is a kanji I’m still a little shaky on. Guess I should be watching wrestling.

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Yeah, it’s kind of a weird one, haha. Usually I translate it as “preview match” in English. In Japanese pro wrestling, they’re typically tag matches that happen in the lead-up to a big show where the champion and the challenger get the chance to face off a little bit as a teaser for their eventual championship match.

Occasionally you’ll see the challenger manage to directly pin the champion in the preview match (or vice versa), which is supposed to add thrill and uncertainty to the upcoming title match (though ironically sometimes it actually does the opposite, because if the challenger is made to look really strong in the preview matches, often that’s setting them up to lose in the title match…).

That’s kind of the sentiment I interpreted the above example in, hahaha. Better to eat a loss in the preview match (where it doesn’t actually matter) than to give away something to your opponent that could help them beat you in the actual title match.

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Finished 9:00 The Key to the Golden Land

The wordplay stuff with the riddle was kind of doing my head in, trying to imagine how on earth they’d even translate that into English if that was the case… It was interesting reading the whole riddle conversation in Japanese while the version of it I had onscreen was in English, haha.

One thing I wanted to flag was what Rosa pointed out about the part about the tenth night. It’s 黄金郷 everywhere else, but on night ten, it’s 黄金の郷. In the English version, it’s “Golden Land” for most of it, then “Home of the Gold” for night ten.

Quick observation on the wordplay front: Gohda’s name has a 郷 in it: 郷田俊郎. I actually noticed that a while ago lol but thought it was a silly observation… It probably means nothing though lol.

Okay, Eva seems to have solved the epitaph, and it appears to be a regular riddle kind of solution because she was able to look it up in a normal encyclopedia. It also does appear to be some sort of wordplay situation where there is significance to it being six letters?? Eva found the solution but couldn’t get it into 6 文字 at first, so my best guess is maybe the solution was to romanize it to make it 6 letters? I dunno. Kind of just spitballing here.

I wondered if maybe this was a Japanese dictionary/alphabetization thing, like maybe as you travel down the 川 you will find 岸 (か is right before き in gojuon order), but then how would they translate that…

懐かしき、故郷を貫く鮎の川。
黄金郷を目指す者よ、これを下りて鍵を探せ。
川を下れば、やがて里あり。
その里にて二人が口にし岸を探れ。
Behold the sweetfish river, running through my beloved home of old.
You who seek the Golden Land, follow its path downstream in search of the key.
As you travel down to it, you will see a village.
In that village, look for the shore the two speak of.

It’s a pretty direct translation… no evident wordplay that I can see.

Hmm, maybe the 6 letters are characters from the first six sacrifices’ names? But that wouldn’t make sense with Eva’s confusion…

I’m at a loss, lol.

Started 10:00 Coronation

WORDS ON THE DOOR WRITTEN IN RED.

Alright, well, Eva found the gold. Game over…?

Apparently not, because she ran into Rosa on the way up the stairs, and after a tense standoff with the guns, they came to a sort of agreement.

I left off at the part where they started arguing in the rose garden about whether they should tell their brothers about this just yet.

I guess I’m confused that solving the riddle didn’t immediately end Beatrice’s game…

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I’m happy to see this is still going, EP3 is as far as I’ve gotten so I’ll probably join once you reach the next chapter!

Eva is my favorite character so this chapter makes me happy :slight_smile: I have no idea what the solution to the epitaph is but I assume it’s crazy wordplay and would also not rely on the English translation to provide any sort of meaningful hint/framework. I have Thoughts on the red truths in this chapter but think they should wait until the end…

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Yep, we’re still chugging along. Excited to have you! I’m enjoying the speculation about the epitaph from @fallynleaf a lot. I never managed to come up with too many theories for it – this has been a fun read but I don’t think this is the kind of mystery I’m cut out for :sweat_smile:

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Most of what happens seems pretty manageable, except for one scene that just makes me go “wtf???”. I think it’s EP3 (not EP2) but it involves Kanon (I think you’ll know it when you see it).

For the epitaph I couldn’t come up with anything about the sweetfish portion, I remember an idea I had the for ‘gouge’ portion was that it involved deleting a certain radical from a kanji. But that’s just a vague idea and I have no specifics

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Finished 10:00 Coronation

???

I’m just as confused as Battler after this, lol. So the child version of Eva is not actually Beatrice?? Er, well, she is Beatrice now, but not at the time I thought she was Beatrice, lol. Why does she have blue eyes when Eva’s eyes are purple? The way that she said 私 and then corrected it to 私たち when talking about solving the riddle also stood out to me.

Well, it seems like we’re not going to get proper answers here just yet, so I guess we’ll see how it plays out.

I imagine Eva Beatrice (I looked at the characters list and this is what they’re calling her there) is probably now going to have to carry out the rest of the murders to complete the ritual?

I don’t trust this 分身 one bit, though. Also, as soon as I saw her new outfit, I recognized her from the opening video, lol.

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This was one of my favorite developments first time through this episode, it’s really unexpected and wild. Fun seeing you go through this.

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This is Evatrice’s world, you’re just living in it

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I keep getting slowed down by IRL stuff that’s sapping a lot of my energy, so I’m not getting through the chapters quite as fast as I’d hoped, but I’m still chipping away.

Finished 10:30 The New Witch

Wow, Battler actually got Beatrice to get genuinely upset, haha! It’s kind of funny that this is what did it. Eva Beatrice certainly seems to be pretty depraved, though… She feels like more of a wild card compared to Beato. It’s harder to reason with her because she seems pretty drunk on money and power and basically already got what she wants… Beato at least wants an interesting game, so everything she does in the service of that and it’s easier to manipulate her, but what kind of leverage does anyone have over Eva Beatrice? What about when her respect for Beato fades, and even that doesn’t work anymore?

It was also really sad seeing Maria get her hope in Beatrice crushed like this… That got to me more than anything else this chapter.

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No worries at all, it’s kind of exhausting to exist in the world in these recent years. As long as you keep at it at some rate. I think where you are now isn’t far from where I stopped in the readathon IIRC so I’ll have to pick it back up before long.

Response

I really enjoy this whole part, how it really upends the usual position Beatrice is in and has us thinking about her character in a new light once more. It’s just a pretty big shock for the whole foundation to change this way, and in episode 3, too.

Maria feels like the emotional heart of this whole thing to me so yeah when something is bad for her that’s the hardest to bear.

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Do not read unless you have finished all of EP3!

And I still can’t tell if Evatrice and Virgilia are just pieces of Beato or not :sob: Those scenes are good but completely change depending…

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11:00 Announcement of Sacrifices

Haha, I stopped reading during a scene change, but when I next opened the VN, it turns out I had quite literally only a handful of sentences left before I finished this chapter, so I really could’ve kept going for like 2 min more and I would’ve finished this chapter days ago… :sweat_smile:

I’m going to take a moment to reply to some things now that I can read your earlier post!

Yeah, when I mentioned I was at this part to a friend who’s a big fan of the VN, they commented that Virgilia basically gives Battler (and therefore also us, the reader) the big key to dealing with magic in this universe.

HAHA I’m so glad you shared the translation, because I was wondering about that lol.

So true… It was kind of starting to get on my nerves, but I realized I couldn’t complain because the actress was just doing too good of a job.

Yeahhh, I wanted to comment on that line as well… It’s really terrible and unfortunately fits in perfectly with everything we know about Rosa’s parenting…

Hmm, it looks like Eva Beatrice’s opportunity might’ve finally arrived, with Kirie telling Rudolph she wants to go outside for some reason. I wonder how that came about…

Started 13:00 Battle to the Death in the Hall

Lol, Ronove referring to guns as the natural enemy of witches and demons kind of surprised me. It surprised Eva Beatrice as well, apparently. Now I’m wondering about Natsuhi’s suicide in episode 1… I wonder if maybe she had gotten kind of possessed by a witch, Eva-style, and she killed herself to kill the witch?

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Had another chapter where I stopped reading just a handful of lines before the start of the next chapter… So I technically started 13:30 The Definition of a Witch, though I don’t have anything to comment on that one yet.

Finished 13:00 Battle to the Death in the Hall

Oh boy, lots happened here!

I thought it was interesting how Rudolph and Kirie managed to survive for a lot longer than I expected. We also got some Kirie backstory, or at least found out some of her personal resentments toward Rudolph’s other flame. Something that I found sad about this part was that Kirie was talking about how she had total faith that Rudolph would come for her and all of that, and then it cut to Rudolph and he was straight up flirting with his opponent… To me that made their relationship feel incredibly lopsided.

We also had Beato basically totally lose any remaining influence over Eva Beatrice. Uh oh! And Hideyoshi died even though he was originally supposed to be spared. Well, I suppose we didn’t quite get a confirmation of his death (we didn’t hear it in red, after all). That makes me slightly suspicious, to be honest.

And we got some new characters! Looks like they’re romanized as Chiester45 and Chiester410 in the characters list. Interestingly, these are listed as “weapons” and not furniture. Also, I noticed that the two Seven Sisters of Purgatory who died (well, presumably they died, lol, if what we saw onscreen could be believed) are not marked as “dead” in the characters list.

Now is Beato going to succeed in getting Battler to take her back as his opponent?

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Battle to the Death in the Hall

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Kyrie aurafarm chapter. That’s actually a pretty big reveal she dumps on us there about Rudolph’s first wife, Battler, etc. Everyone here has quite a history. The “curse” here on 明日夢 is another form of magic we hear a bit about. Really Kyrie is handling things well as far as we can tell with how she seems to get along well with Battler in spite of how she describes feeling.

The sort of automatic recognition people have of Eva-witch as Eva interests me most here. Especially how Hideyoshi sees her and talks about finding the gold changing her, but IIRC (it’s been a few months for me!) she didn’t even tell him about that so it’s something that he shouldn’t necessarily know right now. We’re kind of playing loose and creatively with logic in how the story is told in this chapter, but it still catches my eye…

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Extremely good point! I wanted to mention this, too, but forgot to comment on it when making my post. Yes, as far as I remember, Eva did not tell him about the gold!

Hmmmmm…

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The whole jealousy powerscaling bit always seemed a bit silly to me, but I guess logic is secondary if you can aurafarm hard enough

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Oh I don’t disagree at all, I just think extremely sincere but pushing it far into silly and even a bit “cringe” is default ryukishi mode so the same will apply to 1000 other parts of this VN and Higurashi haha. I basically think the 7姉妹 themselves are over the silly line by default.

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Finished 13:30 The Definition of a Witch and started 17:44 Real Magic.

The Definition of a Witch

Things are getting interesting! Battler is willing to give Beato another chance, but she has to work for it… And it seems like she’s going to try to help George revive Shannon to prove herself to Battler that she understands the value of human lives?

It was interesting to see how quickly George went down Kinzo’s occult rabbit hole, lol. Beato appeared quite soon after that. I suppose that’s the power of belief… I was surprised when he and Beato literally flew out of the house with magic. In a normal circumstance, I’d expect that Beato was trying to lure him away for murder purposes, but she does seem to be honestly trying to win back over Battler.

It’s neat that this part of the story kind of has her working against Eva Beatrice. I wonder what reviving one of the earlier sacrifices would do to the ritual?

Loved that moment where Ronove and Lucifer didn’t give up Beato and George to Eva Beatrice.