Characters / Umineko: When They Cry - Rosa Ushiromiya

WARNING: Major spoilers ahead (This is a double warning).

Rosa Ushiromiya

Voiced by: Ami Koshimizu (JP)

"Just try laying one finger on Maria in front of me. I'll show you just how lukewarm the hell you came from is"

Kinzo's youngest daughter, mother of Maria and fourth in the line of succession. Although Battler describes her as a calming figure, her relationship with Maria is very troubled. In the Meta-World she's known as the Black Witch, an infamous figure the residence fear.

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A-D

• Abusive Mom: The relationship between her and Maria is complicated, to say the least; when Rosa isn't being extremely protective or overindulging Maria, she's slapping Maria across the face and yelling at her.
• Action Mom: Compared to the other parents (aside from Kyrie), Rosa sees the most action during the fantasy sequences across all eight EPs. Her action moments are so iconic that the general fandom has given her the title of Rosa Musou (in addition to the famous reputation of best mom ever), to the point that there's a fangame specifically about her. It is recognized that when she fights to protect Maria, Rosa is the strongest human character of all.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Krauss, Eva, Rudolf, and even Kinzo and her mother treated Rosa like this (as well as abusing her both physically and emotionally) all her life as she was The Baby of the Bunch and her siblings and their spouses, albeit in a very subtle way, still treat her like this because of her being a single mother and Maria's quirks.
• Almighty Mom: Maria invokes this in the eighth arc when Rosa proves capable not only of keeping up with a really dangerous witch like Erika (who is on par with Eva-Beatrice), but even manages to dominate and almost kill her several times. And Rosa herself implies afterward that the only reason she didn't succeed in killing Erika was due to her own sense of mercy.
  Rosa: ....If you say that again, I'll have to get serious.
• Always Second Best: Always suffered when she was a child because she did not particularly excel at school like Eva, and could not even distinguish herself from her older siblings for a particular dowry like Krauss and Rudolf. Eva-Beatrice points out the fact by saying that Rosa is only a shadow who has always hidden in theirs.
• Anti-Hero: She finds herself playing this role in Episode 2 as the only surviving parent of the family, and takes full responsibility for protecting the survivors (in a manner similar to Natsuhi before her in the previous episode). She immediately shows open distrust and hostility towards all of the servants, and is quick to accuse them of committing the murders and threatens them with her rifle. She also isolates them from the family, which puts them in danger.
• Appeal to Force: Ironically, despite being known as the kindest and purest of the Ushiromiya siblings, Rosa is actually the most prone to blackmail, threaten and verbally assault her interlocutors, as well as being quick to respond by using physical violence whenever she experiences any kind of difficulty.
• The Baby of the Bunch: Being the youngest of all the parents of the family, she is constantly underestimated and barely taken into consideration by her siblings.
• Badass Longcoat: She's never seen without it.
• Badass Normal: The reason why her action scenes are so spectacular is because Rosa is one of the very few members of the family whose background of knowledge and skill with weapons or with some martial art is not mentioned or suggested. It's reasonable to assume that she may have learned some fighting techniques from Krauss or Eva, and that she has some experience and passion in using firearms like Kinzo and Rudolf, considering:
  • At the end of the second arc, she takes on an army of goats with a rifle, a pen, and a gold ingot. And she is awesome.
  • Continues badassing it up in Episode 8 as well.
  • In the fighting game, she can fight evenly with both skillful human characters like George and also with immensely powerful witches of the caliber of Lambdadelta and Bernkastel.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • In the Tea Party of the second arc, as the last survivor, she is physically forced by Beatrice and the goats to feed on the blood and flesh of her siblings, while the witch forces her to hear their cries as they die continuously throughout eternity. Beatrice thinks she's doing Rosa a favor, considering how much she hated their bullying.
  • In the third arc, Eva-Beatrice tortures Rosa by granting Rosa's childhood wishes in the most sadistic ways possible. Such wishes include "drowning in a sea of delicious jelly" (by literally drowning her in jelly while her entire body is crushed and pressurized by the pressure of the jelly's depths), "flying away from the island like a seagull" (summoning a hurricane to whisk her into the sky, then stopping it so the fall kills her), "being buried under mountains of cake" (literally dropping a giant cake on her) and "becoming a butterfly and flying everywhere freely" (turning her into a butterfly, only for her to be caught and Eaten Alive by a spider).
  • Some point Rosa wish to become a Witch in her childhood for freedom and power. Unfortunately, she gains a hidden witch persona in adulthood, consider more powerful then even Erika. Sadly it only comes out to abuse or neglect her daughter, fulfilling her wishes in the worse way.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Despite remembering her meeting with Beatrice II and the consequent trauma of unintentionally inducing her to death, Rosa maintains a highly positive opinion of what she remembers about her. Beatrice II showed her genuine kindness and compassion by welcoming her indiscriminately to have tea and chat despite the fact that they had just met, shortly after Rosa had heavily quarreled with her mother and felt (rightly) mistreated and unloved from her family to the point of running away from home to spite them all. Considering that the two are half-sisters, it is not careless to think that Beatrice was a good sister and friend to the young Rosa in just 2 hours or so of knowing and bonding with each other than Krauss, Eva and Rudolf in a entire lifetime combined.
• Beneath the Mask: When she is with other relatives, Rosa almost always does her best to remain calm when her older siblings harass her or Maria presses one of her Berserk Button until she stays either with the latter or alone, so she can feels free to vent off her suffering.
• Berserk Button: Rosa has so many, she may as well have an entire Berserk Keyboard and it seems that Maria has an extraordinary talent for typing most of the keys.
  • "Uu-uu-uu-!!" Maria, you're very cute, but it seems your "happiness charm" has the opposite effect, sorry.
  • Likewise, she can't stand it when Maria enters her Creepy Child mode.
  • She absolutely hates it when her daughter starts talking in front of their relatives about occultism and mysticism, which results in both of them being mocked by her siblings. It also reminds her of her own father Kinzo, who has the same obsession with these topics that she finds disturbing.
  • Do not point out that her daughter seems to be very slow to grow and mature.
  • Don't take Maria's side or scold her educational methods if you don't want to draw her wrath on you, too.
  • Accusing her of planning to run off with someone else's money like Maria's father did to her is not a wise decision. That almost took her to shoot and kill Eva, her own sister, in Episode 7.
  • She doesn't want to hear constantly the name Beatrice because this slowly reminds her of Beatrice Ushiromiya and her death.
• Berserker Tears: In the finale of the second arc, immediately after having cried bitterly at the prospect that she and Maria will never be able to escape together from Rokkenjima and thus avoid their death, an emotionally charged Rosa lashes out against the horde of Beatrice's butler goats armed only with her Winchester rifle loaded by her daughter.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Rosa's default mood is pleasant and gentle, giving the impression that she's the nicest of the adults in the Ushiromiya family. As Rosa's character is further explored, it's revealed that while she can be nice, she also faces many problems that lead her to vent all of her stress and sadness on her daughter Maria. Later arcs show more than once that Rosa can be unstable and outright deadly to anyone who gets on her bad side, ''especially'' if they threaten Maria or accuse Rosa of not loving her daughter.
• Big Brother Worship:
  • The second Tea Party reveals that when she was very young Rosa actually idolized Krauss, Eva and Rudolf to the point of yearning to be like them by imitating them. However, as a result of their cruel bullying towards her when she was grew, that admiration quickly vanished, replaced by a constant, deep and unhealthy combination of resentment and contempt that she habitually suffocates in during the family conferences.
  • She also seems to especially admire her sister-in-law Kyrie due to the fact that she is apparently the only one among the rest of the parents who tries to make her feel comfortable during heated inheritance arguments. Particularly shown during their open-hearted dialogue in the second arc and once again in the sixth when Rosa, speaking to Kanon, openly demonstrates that she admires Kyrie's fortitude in persevering through the years of her troubled relationship with Rudolf just like Rosa herself is now doing the same with the absence of Maria's father. All of which makes it very sad indeed when the seventh Tea Party reveals that the killer of both Rosa and her daughter in Rokkenjima Prime was Kyrie herself.
• Black Blood: Used to chilling effect when Maria kills her.
• Black-and-White Morality: Minimized. In the second arc, Rosa begins to take inspiration from an old puzzle she used to play with Maria, called Wolves and Sheep, to determine the alleged guilt of the servants and Nanjo based on their motives for killing, and concluding that they were all either guilty or otherwise accomplices. She justifies this to Battler and George stating that the only sheep you can trust is yourself. One can't blame her for this train of thought given the situation, but she herself is literally A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing as one of the major accomplices in that arc.
• Blatant Lies: During the fourth arch, thanks to Ange's reading of Maria's diary, we get to know a little bit about the domestic life that Rosa and her daughter led before dying in Rokkenjima. Unfortunately for Rosa, what is reported in that diary is not very flattering, since it portrays her constantly lying about her work in order to travel to various hotels and spas around Japan. Even in the face of evidence that highlights all her lies, Rosa phyisically threatens the social worker who brought Maria back to the house into leaving her alone.
• Black Sheep: She describes herself this way in the third arc in the Ushiromiya siblings group when she and Eva meet outside the gold room and her older siblings certainly do nothing to not make her feel like one.
• Born Unlucky: Being born into a socially influential and economically rich family seems like an advantage, but these are the Ushiromiyas, which include shitty parents like Kinzo and shitty older siblings like Krauss, Eva and Rudolf. Rosa also has to deal with the trauma of seeing Beatrice II's death, which was partially her fault and occured hours after their first meeting. She's also abandoned by Maria's father while still pregnant, who also shafts his debts onto her on top of her own. At every family conference, she has to passively endure the constant torment of her older siblings, who are all Happily Married while she can't seem to find a partner to help her raise Maria. All of this, combined with being a living magnet for both The Many Deaths of You and Cruel and Unusual Death, paints Rosa as the most unfortunate of the siblings.
• Brainy Brunette: Despite not being considered as such, Rosa is one of the more lucid and cautious characters who proves she knows exactly what to do, both in situations of constant tension and which require high concentration. She is one of the only characters to solve the Epitaph on her own (the other being Eva) and indirectly helped Battler solve it (along with Erika) with her clues in the fifth arc. Even her performance as the hidden accomplice during the second game demonstrates her ability to carry out a strategy (which she conceived by drawing inspiration from a puzzle she used to play with Maria) of separating and conquering, that allows her to isolate the culprit and all other accomplices among Nanjo and the servants from her group and subtracting all the main keys in order to haved an added advantage over all of them. Moreover, although in the first games Rosa herself admitted that as a child she was not a model student like her siblings at school, the last games show her quite capable in mathematical calculations. Even her riddle to be solved for Ange and Eva in EP8 is basically a math exercise.
• Breakout Character: Although her actions make her a rather controversial character overall (or perhaps because of it) in the eyes of Umineko fans, Rosa is considered the most popular character among adults (so much so that she was present in all 3 top 10 polls for the most popular character, even reaching the fourth position behind Beatrice, Battler and Ange in the first) due to her complex characterization and her numerous iconic, genuinely heroic moments. She's the only character on this page to have been included in the cast of the fighting game spinoff.
• Break the Haughty: Minimized (except in the second game where she practically spends her time constantly making anyone uncomfortable with her own suspicions and paranoid threats) in the story-universe as Rosa is temperamentally one of the most calm and friendly characters, however her several abusive and neglecting habits towards Maria, especially after the possible revelations of the fourth game, had turned her into this one in the eyes of many of Umineko's readers (mainly western ones). So the fact that she is Umineko's main punching bag apparently serves to compensate and justify the contempt she earns (not that she actually deserves it when you finish all 8 games and realize that compared to a lot of other characters, Rosa is by far one of the most redeemable).
• Brilliant, but Lazy: While she did poorly in school (by Ushiromiya standards), it is implied that Rosa is actually the most gifted of Kinzo's children with regards to puzzle solving and strategic planning. She's the one who first noticed the key detail to solve her father's Epitaph and communicates it to Eva (who used it to find another vital clue in Kinzo's library) in the third game. In general, Rosa is prudent enough to take into account all the details of situations (even when she witnesses a murder) before acting.
• Broken Bird: At first glance, Rosa appears as a kind and quiet young woman who tries to do her best to take care of her only daughter Maria, often being unfairly taunted or silenced by her greedy, aggressive and selfish siblings. It is not until she is shown separated from them that her true nature of an emotionally and psychologically damaged human being emerges, which shows an extremely cold, manipulative, rancorous, distrustful and paranoid attitude towards other people.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • Maria (both alone and through Sakutaro's point of view) tends to idolize Rosa a lot, always describing her as a very good mother who works hard to give her a good life, even coming to justify her mother when Rosa herself forgets her own promises several times, stays away from home more and more often, or gets violently angry towards Maria, citing her work as her main source of stress. It is only when other people around them (like Ange) expose the truth about Rosa's trips or remind her that Rosa tore Sakutaro to pieces, that Maria is unable to deny the truth.
  • She becomes one for Battler, George and Jessica when she exposes her violent nature towards Maria in the first arc, and when she immediately turns on the servants in the second.
• Brother–Sister Team: In the manga version of EP8, she protects Krauss and Natsuhi from Erika's charged attack by throwing a bag of gold bars at her.
• Butt-Monkey: Being among the first to die in the first arc is getting off easy compared to the hell she goes through in later arcs. Rosa has only survived past the second twilight once (she is among the few victims of Episode 5 and 6), and that's just things involved with the murders. Outside of that, Rosa's life is practically a personalized hell for her: She got picked on by her older siblings, according to Rudolf. In addition to that, if EP3 is to be believed, then she watched Beatrice II die and blamed herself for the incident, which both ends up being what drives Kinzo off the edge of insanity and is something she has to be reminded of every time Maria references Beatrice. And then Maria's father runs off to have a family of his own while burdening her with debt, leaving Rosa to raise Maria by herself while taking up a management job she never wanted. Rosa's life is the most screwed up among the main adults bar none.
• Cain and Abel: She, along with Krauss, usually represents the Abel in almost all the narrative arcs, except for the EP2 which instead sees her as the main accomplice of the murderer.
• Can't Take Criticism: Don't you dare to tell her that she is a bad mother or even just teach her how to manage her daughter, otherwise at that point the constant tension that Rosa feels will result in a verbal outburst against both you and Maria.
• Cassandra Truth: In the third arc, shortly after Maria has finished reading Kinzo's letter that she got from Beatrice, Rosa speculates that whoever wrote it and sent it to them may not even be Kinzo. Eva quickly attacks and berates her for suggesting so. Come to the next arcs and it turns out that she's right.
• The Chain of Harm: Flashbacks show that much of the abuse she inflicts on Maria was the same type that her parents and siblings did when she was a child, including Rudolf tearing up her doll.
• Character Tics: Rosa has a habit of violently banging her foot on the floor to accompany her shouting when she's particularly nervous.
• The Chew Toy: Rosa is the favorite target of Beatrice and the other witches' immense cruelty. She is practically the only character who always dies in all games (which is partially due to the fact that she is one of the family members that Sayo hates most).
• Chronic Self-Deprecation: Rosa was constantly and cruelly belittled and derided by her entire family, as well as abused for her apparent inability to replicate the same patterns and achievements of Krauss, Eva and Rudolf both at home and at school. This in her adulthood, combined with the abandonment of her daughter's father and her current financial situation, has clearly led to a very serious case of lack of self-esteem, exacerbated by the fact that she is a single mother in the 80s of Japan where she is not even allowed to ask for help without being misjudged by the whole of society, as well as by her older siblings and Kinzo. This is particularly reflected in her inner monologues and her dialogue with Battler in the fifth arc while she helps him solve the Epigraph.
• Classy Cravat: Part of her classy Ushiromiya attire.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: How her entire narrative path within the story can be described in a nutshell.
• Color Motif: While every other mother and aunt in the family wears at least one shade of purple (Kyrie's shirt, Eva's qipao and especially Natsuhi's Gorgeous Period Dress), Rosa mostly sports a long black coat along with her white tie with the family crest (and with the implication of a white shirt under it), completing the look with black boots and a long and showy dark red skirt. While hard to notice, her clothes and their colors symbolize her passivity and submission towards older siblings and her more conservative nature than, for example, her sister Eva. However (in special cases such as the second game), Rosa manages to emerge overwhelmingly as soon as none of them are no longer around to blur her or when she has the knife on the side of the handle.
  • Her casual PS3 sprite instead sees her wearing a white shirt with a navy blue striped vest over it paired with her pants and communicates her efforts to look like a Glamorous Single Mother in the eyes of society.
• Combat Pragmatist: She will exploit anything that she can reach to fight off attackers.
• Control Freak: Due to a general lack of control for most of her life, whenever Rosa takes charge of a situation she quickly becomes overbearing.
• Cool Aunt: She seems to be Battler's favorite aunt, at least at the beginning of EP1 where he describes her as a pleasant, calming person. However, it's later revealed that she has a lot of issues which she mainly deals with by taking out her frustrations on her own daughter.
• Cosmic Plaything: Really, if there is a character in the whole When They Cry series who surpasses Rosa in terms of suffering, it's Rika Furude but this doesn't minimize the horrors that Rosa finds herself facing.
• Cowardly Lion: Since she was a child Rosa has always lived in constant fear of incurring the wrath of her parents and her older siblings have essentially molded her through bullying and intimidation into a shy young woman who will not even dare to respond to their worst insults towards both her and Maria (preferring then to vent all the repressed anger accumulated on her daughter later). However, in situations of real danger you can be sure that Rosa, although fearful, will always be among the firsts humans to try to fight back and will not think twice about trying to protect at all cost Maria's life at the expense of hers.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Oh, boy, she does deserve a special entry for this for quantity alone.
• Curtains Match the Window: Has both brown hair and brown eyes.
• Cute and Psycho: Like mother, like daughter. Rosa can switch from the sweetest mother of the world to the most abusive one with such ease...
• Dark and Troubled Past: Rosa is in serious competition with Sayo herself for who of the 2 had the most miserable life (see Troubled Abuser and The Tragic Rose below).
• Deadpan Snarker: She doesn't show it very often, especially when she is with the other parents, but Rosa can be very ironic and sarcastic when she wants to be, and even enjoys a bit of black humor. Particularly seen in Episode 2 when for example Battler questioning her alibi and Rosa has no problem answering (smiling) that if she were the culprit she could have simply shot at him and George and then come up with an excuse with the servants. Then she jokes that younger sisters' brains work faster than their older sisters' and even implicitly admits that she's grateful that Eva is no longer there with them, which annoys George.
• Death by Falling Over: According to the official logical explanation of her death in EP3, she ended up on the pointed ledge of the rose garden fence when Eva pushed her.
• Death Glare: Of all the characters in the series, counting witches and furniture as well, Rosa is the scariest when she starts looking at you like this, as poor Maria knows very well.
• Death Seeker:
  • During her long and grisly torture at the hands of her own daughter in the fourth arc, Rosa doesn't hold back from yelling at Maria and Beatrice furiously that if it weren't for her public image she would have gotten drunk and killed herself long time ago.
  • She admits that she wants to die after everything she went through when she was alive (especially after her lover abandoned her), and feels guilty for dragging not only herself but also Maria into what she considers a true hell. Kanon (and by extension Sayo) empathizes with her situation, and gives her a Mercy Kill in the sixth arc, as opposed to the violent deaths everyone else suffers.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Of Mood-Swinger and Tsundere. Rosa tries her best to be a kind person and loving mother to Maria, but all the stress from the cruel treatment she got from her parents and siblings, as well as the abandonment from Maria's father, leads to Rosa frequently taking it out on her own daughter by hurting her both physically and emotionally. Very often, when she calms down after punishing Maria and venting her frustrations, Rosa immediately feels guilty and tries to make amends by hugging Maria and asking for forgiveness.
• Defiant to the End: Although this is not always the case, there have been unique moments in which Rosa has surprisingly shown an almost supernatural grit against those who threatened her:
  • The end of the second arc is practically her who, despite knowing that she has no chance of survival for both herself and her daughter, decides not to go down without a fight by lashing furiously against Beatrice's horde of goats.
  • In Maria's dream of revenge, in which she is tortured, killed and resurrected in a painful and horrible way countless not unlike what happened in the past when her executioner was Eva-Beatrice, Rosa (or rather the anthropomorphic projection of the black witch who Maria sees in her mother) this time does not pray and beg and cry for her life as happened in the third arc, on the contrary she almost encourages her daughter to do her worst by insulting and cursing her every time Beatrice revives her.
  • In the real world, Rosa was not in the least intimidated when Eva, out of desperation and panic, pointed at her gun at her to force her to cooperate and hide the accidental killings of Natsuhi and Krauss. On the contrary, Rosa's tone of voice and her facial expressions while she tries to convince her sister to turn herself in communicate all the time pure scorn, absolute contempt and desire for revenge against Eva for how she always treated Rosa since the later was a child.
• Demoted to Extra: She goes from being probably the most in-depth and better characterized parent of the Question Arcs to having just a few important scenes in the Answer Arcs.
• Designated Victim: Despite all the variations between arcs, you can still be 100% sure of one thing: poor Rosa will always suffer, through either an awful death or torture.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Rosa is often on the receiving side of this. As horrible as her treatment of Maria is, it seems unfair that Rosa is the punching bag of games once it turns out that she has a lot of reasons to be the way she is. Most of the other parents get off with far easier and dignified deaths than Rosa's, regardless of their own crimes.
• Does Not Like Men: If the alleged flashback of Rosa's last lover in the hotel room is to be believed (in which he reproached Rosa for neglecting Maria too often to be with him). Rosa is very resentful in general of her status as a single mother in a bigoted society, but also specifically against men, since she deeply envies their complete freedom to have all kinds of romantic and sexual relationships with whoever they want without being judged and with the possibility of running away from any responsibility without being punished, unlike women like her. Considering her personal experience with Maria's father, past lovers, and even her own family, it's easy to understand where this resentment comes from.
• The Dog Bites Back:
  • Becomes this towards Eva when she finds herself with any kind of leverage against her.
  • The enigmatic nature of EP2's Tea Party could suggest that Rosa played an important role in the death of her older siblings in the first twilight.
  • Her fateful encounter with Beatrice as a child occurs because she wanted to make her parents worry by disappearing on the witch's forest.
• Double Standard: If Eva has to deal with Heir Club for Men (which puts a damper on her ambitions) and Natsuhi with a horrible Stay in the Kitchen treatment (which essentially alienates her from the rest of the family), the combination of being both The Baby of the Bunch in the parent group and the Struggling Single Mother, in a society and in an intrinsically patriarchal and mentally closed historical period, it's forcing Rosa to have deal with this every day whenever anyone starts judging her for every single thing she does (as opposed to a man of her own position who gets away with it much easier, like her brother Rudolf who regularly cheats on his wives for example).
• The Dreaded: Rosa is, for the most part, a defenseless pawn who is easy to catch off guard and kill. However, her Meta-World counterpart, known by the infamous Black Witch title, is this for a bunch of fantasy characters. The Chiester Sisters fear her in particular, as she is the evil witch responsible for the death of 556 (represented in reality with the destruction of one of Maria's ceramic bunnies). She's also responsible for Sakutaro's tragic death, which even Beatrice could not fix.
• Driven by Envy: It's less pronounced than Kyrie, but Rosa deeply hates her siblings and their spouses (except perhaps Kyrie herself) for their happy and stable marriages, while she has to manage entirely on her own without anyone's support. She also hates Maria's father because she fears that he has abandoned her to start a new family with another lover. Part of the reason she takes out her frustrations on Maria is that she can't stand when people start scolding her and/or defending her daughter, because when she was a child, she never had someone to defend ''her'' when she was the one suffering.
• Driven to Villainy: Although she may seem like a stable woman who has had to make herself strong and resilient against the adversities of life as both a single mother and the owner of a fashion company, Rosa is an individual deeply marked by a childhood full of trauma thanks to her whole family. She suffers from possible mental disorders and illnesses not adequately treated as she lives in a society that does not take mental health seriously. Compared to all the other characters on this page, Rosa has the most understandable motivations for becoming an accomplice, which happens in EP2. This is recognized and hideously used as a form of torture against her in that EP's Tea Party.
• Drunk with Power: Happens in EP2 when she becomes the only parent left alive on the island, and the servants begin to refer to and depend more on her and her orders. As Rosa has always suffered from a clear imbalance of power with her siblings due to her age, she quickly starts abusing and pressuring pressure both servants and her own nephews with her suspicions (with Battler compares this behavior to that of to Eva and Krauss).

E-M

• Enemy Within: What the Black Witch is implied to be, Rosa's self-hatred manifested in to a another being. In a mirror match in Golden Fantasia Rosa confess she sees it in her reflection, and she fight it regularly for control, whether to protect Maria or deciding who takes her to the park.
• Evil Counterpart: She is this for Natsuhi when comparing the first 2 Episodes of the VN, which see the cousins as the main characters and only one of their parents as one of the final survivors. The key difference that sets them apart, however, is that Natsuhi was innocent in the first game while Rosa was an accomplice in the second.
• Extreme Doormat: Subverted. Rosa usually acts like this around her father and her older siblings, especially with Eva as she never reacts when the latter provokes her, insults her and generally acts like a Big Sister Bully towards her. Eva-Beatrice and Kinzo in Episodes 3 and 4 explicitly accuse her of being a coward who has always fled and hidden from her battles instead of fighting them, and Rosa herself admits that she never rebelled for fear of the consequences. She is more than capable of letting this façade fall as soon as she is in a position of power.
• Fantasy-Forbidding Mother: A more literal example in that she disapproves of Maria's obsession with magic and the occult. Considering that her father himself is a witch-obsessed old madman who raised her by traumatizing her with the stories of an evil witch who lived in the island's forest, it's quite understandable.
• The Fashionista: Not only is she the fashion designer of the family, she is also one of the few characters that we see wearing multiple outfits, both within the main series and in the manga spin-offs.
• Fatal Flaw: Her tendency to suppress her stabbing resentment towards her family and her constant attempts to forget her troubled childhood have prompted Rosa to become violently unstable towards Maria and anyone who makes her even slightly angry. As is often pointed out in the first four arcs, if Rosa had found the courage to vent openly on her family for the abuse she received instead of letting herself be blocked by her own fear, she would probably have become a woman free from her wounds and been able to continue on her own path without regrets.
• Flower Motifs: Roses, and not just because of her name. Roses are often known as an emblem of floral beauty and carry many passionate and romantic meanings, but they are also flowers that must be collected and treated with caution due to their thorns. Similarly, Rosa is normally a very kind person (compared to her siblings) who will treat you politely, but if you start annoying her, treat her badly or giving her a reason to doubt your intentions, especially if she thinks they could potentially harm her daughter, rest assured that she will not hold back.
• Foil:
  • To her niece Jessica; both are daughters born to a Straw Misogynist father in a rich patriarchal family, which bases both its economic and legal power on an antiquated monarchical system despite living in a democratic era. Both are judged by their older relatives as failures because they have failed to match their absurd standards of model students, and always unfavorably compared to other siblings/cousins. To deal with these difficulties, Jessica ended up developing a rebellious attitude and, together with her friends at school, focused on her passions such as music, giving little importance to the opinion of her parents, her grandfather and her uncles and aunts. Rosa, on the other hand, spent her entire childhood passively enduring all sorts of abuse and trying to adapt to the expectations of her parents and siblings because she feared the repercussions, eventually becoming the psychologically unstable and emotionally fickle young adult she is today.
  • She is also this for Chiester 556, her victim ironically, as both represent the Four Is Death trope in a bunch composed of four people where they were respectively teased; even if Chiester 556 (according to her own TIPS) endured gentler teasing than Rosa. Furthermore, both are described as having the worst luck in their respective category.
  • To Kasumi Sumadera, as both are young women born into a wealthy family of vast social power in the shadow of their respective elder siblings, which played a big part in their slow psychological decay that led them to become unstable in their subsequent years.
  • Her childhood flashbacks constantly emphasize that as a child she was exactly like Maria once.
  • To Sayo Yasuda, the true identity of Beatrice. Sayo suffered constant bullying as a child, had no friends and felt abandoned and forgotten by Battler. Rosa similarly had to endure a lot of punishment, mistreatment and injustice from her family growing up. She was also unable to make friends with her peers because of her siblings and her father, who forced her to live most of her life in Rokkenjima island all alone, and was abandoned and swindled by Maria's father. They are also the two most important people in Maria's life.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: During the boat ride to Rokkenjima at the start of most Episodes, Rosa takes on the role of the responsible sibling whenever Eva and Rudolf openly act like the foolish siblings, obtaining further esteem from the cousins.
• Force Feeding: Beatrice forces Rosa to eat a meal made of Maria and her siblings' body parts in the EP2 Tea Party.
• Four Is Death: She is the fourth and the last child Kinzo had with his wife and is also the character with the highest total of nasty deaths.
• Freudian Excuse: Her parents and older siblings abused Rosa as a child, and her siblings still bully her as an adult. She also suffered a lot of loneliness because she had no friends thanks to Rudolf taking them away. Her father was obsessed with black magic, and he terrified her with stories of an evil witch who lived in the island's forest to scare her from ever going into them. When she met the aforementioned witch , she witnessed her death within hours of meeting her (which occurred due to Rosa's own suggestion). Rather than be surprised why Rosa became an Abusive Mom, it should would be surprising why Ryukishi07 never chose her as a killer in games where Sayo wasn't the culprit.
• Friendless Background: Rosa grew up in Rokkenjima where there were no children she could befriend, and her older siblings didn't let her play with the young servants. Even as an adult, she doesn't have friends nor time for a social life because of her stressful status as a single mother.
• Generation Xerox: In the EP8 manga, it's revealed that as a little girl she had a stuffed rabbit named Uutan that she loved very much, rather like Maria with Sakutarou. Unfortunately, similarly to Sakutaro, Rosa's rabbit was torn apart by her older siblings. When they're hiding in her old room during the game of hide-and-seek, Rosa even makes the badly-repaired Uutan "talk" to Maria the same way Maria makes Sakutarou "talk" to other people.
• Girlish Pigtails: Flashbacks show Rosa with her hair tied into pigtails when she was a child.
• Glacier Waif: In fantasy scenes, not only Rosa is able to run carrying a bag containing 3 large gold bars with one arm, but she is able to use them as a weapon with enough force to kill a goat by breaking its face. The manga version of EP8 even shows her capable of accurately throwing them into Erika's stomach when she's charging against Krauss with enough force to make her completely lose her flight path.
• A Glass of Chianti: Beato has Rosa drink this. It's actually Krauss' blood.
• The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry: Although she has a bad relationship with all of her siblings (and according to the second Tea Party, hates Rudolf the most), her antagonistic relationship with Eva is given much more attention throughout the series.
• Gold Fever: Aptly demonstrated in Rokkenjima Prime. Rosa was arguably the most materialistic and gold-obsessed of all the adults. Part of the reason why she refuses to agree with Eva's plan to blow up the island to cover the deaths of Natsuhi and Krauss is because by doing so, almost all the ingots would be involved and lost. She also states that with her share she would gladly quit her job and live on income because she would not find the sense to continue working with a mountain of money at her disposal, seeing it as a stupid waste of time.
• Gollum Made Me Do It: Played With. While Rosa acknowledges that she's responsible for her cruelty towards Maria and feels bad about it, when Maria blames her mother's actions on a hypothetical evil witch who owns her, Rosa tends to give her rope.
• Good Girl Gone Bad: In the past, she was the kindest and sweetest of the 4 children of the Ushiromiya family and sincerely dreamed of getting married and building a happy family with Maria's father. In the present, she's become an abusive mother, and has no qualms about showing coldness and general insensitivity towards her older siblings and their families (when she has an extra card to play against them) after all the shit she's been through (and continues to suffer) because of them.
• Guns Akimbo: In Ougon Musoukyoku X and Cross, Rosa's Meta-super move involves Maria giving Rosa and extra gun so that Rosa can launch a mega-combo against her opponent like this.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: With the abnormal amount of stress she is subjected to, it should come as no surprise that even the slightest disobedience from her daughter (such as not returning a candy given to her by an elderly lady) immediately angers her. Also accusing her and Maria of lying or/and wanting to prank the family with the story of the letter will trigger an assured aggressive response from her.
• Half the Woman She Used to Be: How she is killed by her daughter at the start of her very long torture in the fourth arc because Rosa did the same thing to Sakutaro.
• Haunted Heroine: She is far from being truly heroic but it must be said that in games where she survives long enough to actually come face to face with the supernatural, Rosa is actively pursued by the Meta-World creatures compared to all other human characters. Especially considering that her only nine-year-old daughter is clearly their boss's best friend.
• Headache of Doom: It occurs whenever Beatrice becomes the main topic of a conversation because it involuntarily forces her to remember what happened when she met the "witch" as a child.
• Hidden Depths: Rosa is most likely the epitome of how the characters in the When They Cry series aren't always what they seem on the outside.
• Hidden Disdain Reveal: Played With. In EP4, during Maria's dream where she and Beatrice torture Rosa, Rosa declares that she hated Maria from the moment she knew she was pregnant with her. Beatrice/Sayo also think so with conviction, and goads Maria to kill and maim Rosa even more, with crueler methods each time. However, this is definitively Deconstructed by her niece Ange (who was originally convinced of this thanks to Maria's diary) - she realizes that her aunt's life was not a happy one, and that although she vented on Maria, she did not stop loving her. During Chiru, Rosa begins to make amends for her abusive tendencies and to treat Maria much more lovingly to show her that she is deeply repentant.
• Hime Cut: She has blunt bangs, chin-length sidelocks, and mid-back length straight hair, to denote her position as a member of a high-class family.
• Hoist by Her Own Petard: Fourth arc, when she's torn apart by her own hands.
• Hypocrite: In Episode 2, she yells at the servants that they have been bought off by the culprit and are blinded by the gold. Never mind that she was bought off herself, and is probably the one most motivated by greed in the lot.
• Idle Rich: It is implied that if Rosa obtained more gold than necessary to pay off her debt from her father's inheritance so that she and Maria had everything they needed to live on income pay for the rest of their lives, she would be this.
• I Just Want to Be Special: According to one of her endings in the fighting game and Eva-Beatrice's words in Episode 3, one of Rosa's childhood dreams was to become a witch, just like her daughter.
• I Just Want to Be You:
  • It is never definitively confirmed but in EP2 Battler points out more than once that Rosa's behavioral and social patterns emulate those of her older siblings and, more specifically, those of Eva. Rosa herself in the next arc, arguing with her sister about her decision to hide their mutual discovery of gold from Krauss and Rudolf and also about the sacrifices of the first twilight, gives her credit for teaching her some of her strategies. In the fourth arc, in the scene in which she harshly reproaches Maria for having gone out of the house alone while she was not at home and just before Sakutaro's "death", Rosa quotes directly to the same insults and the same horrible words that Eva in turn yelled at her in the third game when Rosa pointed out that the letter might not have come from Kinzo. Considering that Rosa deeply secretly envies the family, love and professional life that her sister and their brothers lead and how the verbal abuse and bullying Eva subjects her to on a daily basis almost every time they interact, it is only natural that she subconsciously bases her own personality and life style by trying to behave and look like a cunning and accomplished woman like her older sister.
  • In EP6 she reveals to Kanon that she feels this with Kyrie for being able to persevere through the years of her troubled relationship with Rudolf and hoping to imitate her example by doing the same with Maria's father by trying to extinguish all debts.
• I Let Gwen Stacy Die: She blames herself for the death of Beatrice Ushiromiya. After a violent dispute with her mother (which occurred because some of her tutors confided Rosa's secrets to Ms. Ushiromiya), she decided to run away from the mansion and into Rokkenjima's forest. There, she found her father's secret villa where she met Beatrice, her secret paternal half-sister. When she found out that Beatrice was completely ignorant of the world due to living in the mansion her whole life, Rosa proposed that they flee together, only to see the poor girl die in front of her because Rosa innocently advised her to climb down the ravine to descend, which involuntarily lead to her death.
• Image Song: rimaneggiamento which perfectly sums up her nature as a tragic character of the entire series.
• I'm Not Hungry: In the EP2 Tea Party, when Beatrice presents her a meal made of the body parts of her siblings and daughter, she tries to pull this. Unfortunately, Beatrice forces her.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Her final death in the third arc when Beatrice telekinetically lifts her off the ground and then impales her through the nape of her neck on one of the rose fence ledges (actually it happened when Eva pushed her in an argument).
• Improvised Weapon User: Although in the second arc she has a rifle, some of her other defensive moves when she wasn't armed included a pen and a chair, to varying degrees of effectiveness. There's also the basket of gold in the Battle of the Golden Land.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Much like her brother Krauss, Rosa has struggled since her youth to adapt to the Ushiromiya family's overly rigid and severe expectations. As she apparently lacked the unhealthy ambition of her older siblings and a particular talent or dowry that could distinguish her from them, she is repeatedly reproached and defined as a stupid and useless misfortune for the whole family, and all relatives except the cousins look down on her. This is one of the many reasons why she snaps at Maria when her daughter becomes or makes her the object of ridicule from her siblings.
• It's All About Me: Rosa's real problem with her daughter is not so much that she doesn't love her (as Rosa proves more than once that she would give her life for Maria), but that she is selfish and tends to put her needs and desires ahead of Maria's when she needs to take a break from her many problems, which happens often. She feels justified in doing so both because of her current condition and because she is constantly being judged and harshly criticized regarding her own dual identity as woman and mother.
• Kick the Dog: When she tears up Sakutaro and breaks her relationship with Maria for good.
• Knight Templar Parent: To some extent as evidenced by her numerous acts of Mama Bear, although there are a few questionable things she does that just don't seem to fall into that category.
• Lady Drunk: A good glass of wine and saké is certainly one of her favorite drinks, along with tea and coffee.
• Lady of War: Rosa is one of the most graceful and sophisticated people you could ever meet but, if you try to harm her and her daughter, she will show you how lukewarm the hell you came out of is.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Discussed. The main reason she's The Chew Toy, at least as far as her deaths in the main story goes: Beatrice probably resents her both for her poor treatment of Maria and the death of her mother. It's most direct in the second arc. In truth, it is very difficult to say from an objective and external point of view whether all the punishments that Rosa suffers are deserved, or a case of Disproportionate Retribution (especially when you compare her to many other island residents and meta-characters who are as cruel as she is, or worse, who make her look like a saint by comparison).
• Laughing Mad: While Maria kills her over and over again. At some point they actually laugh mad together. What a happy family!
• Leitmotif: Worldend Dominator is used in her action scenes, and has more or less become "her" theme tune.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Normally Rosa is The Chew Toy of witches and their minions, because most of the times she is killed it is because she is quickly taken aback and overwhelmed by their magic. However, make the mistake of giving her the time she needs to realize how to defend herself and stimulate her Mama Bear side, and she will be able to brutally kill any magic creatures, making her a living nightmare for any demon and witch that comes within her range.
• Lonely Doll Girl: According to the EP8 manga, much like Maria with Sakutarou, Rosa had a stuffed rabbit named Uutan that she took everywhere with her when she was a child because she didn't have any real friends. After she remembers this, Rosa feels horrible for tearing up Sakutarou when she should have known very well how Maria felt, since her older siblings did the same thing to her rabbit.
• Lonely Rich Kid: Rosa's childhood was a very lonely one. Her parents and siblings either ignored or abused her, there were no children for her to play with at the island, and she wasn't even allowed to play with the young servants. She comforted herself by playing with her stuffed bunny, but that only made her older siblings yell at her because they considered a disgrace for a child of the Ushiromiya to play with toys.
• Love Hurts: Let us seriously ask ourselves what the family life of Rosa and her daughter would have been like if Maria's father hadn't abandoned them, definitively throwing an innocent young Rosa into a self-destructive spiral of family abuse and secret casual relationships.
• Love Martyr: The reason that Rosa is in debt is that she cosigned a loan with Maria's father. She is hoping that if and when she pays off the debt, the man will finally agree to marry her and become a proper father to poor Maria, even though he's already said he won't.
• Mage Species: It has been subtly hinted at several times but never widely explored that Rosa may also have a witch counterpart herself through the imaginative interpretation of Maria and the TIPS on the deaths of Chiester 556 and Sakutaro. It is most mentioned in Umineko: Golden Fantasia through some of her epilogues and dialogues with magical characters (including Lambdadelta who even accuses her of being a witch who denies her own nature as a witch and Bernkanstel who clearly knows when Rosa asked about it). The nickname given to it is "Black Witch" Rosa and it's potentially seen in EP8 of the manga in the fight against Erika.
• Mama Bear:
  • Her last act in the second arc is to mow down goat-headed butlers with a rifle and Maria at her side. Rudolf also explicitly describes her as "a quick-to-anger mother bear".
    Rosa: Just try laying a finger on my daughter. I'll show you how lukewarm the hell you came from is!!
  • Then comes EP8, where Erika has the guts to tell Maria her mom doesn't love her. Guess who shoves a rifle barrel down her throat?
• Manipulative Bitch: Under her facade of Shrinking Violet which Rosa shows to the other adults on the island, she is actually an ambiguous and deceptive woman who is more than capable of using words as a means to manipulate and irritate others as soon as she perceives that she can take advantage of them. In Alliance of the Golden Witch , in Maria's diary, she is often shown to lie to Maria, her daughter's school, her neighbors, her employees and even social workers about her travels, and always orders Maria to always stay at home and not go out for days when she is away. Once the truth behind the Turn of the Golden Witch events is explained, it is clear that Rosa was Sayo's main accomplice throughout that Episode, successfully manipulating Battler's trust and, at the same time, isolating the servants by accusing them of being guilty. During the scenario of what actually happened during the events of Rokkenjima shown in the seventh Tea Party, both Eva and Hideyoshi are clearly shocked to some degree by Rosa's ability to use their accidental murders of Krauss and his wife to get them to do the right thing is to turn themselves in, barely masking a genuine sadistic pleasure from their disadvantaged situation and their suffering, as well as her clear greed.
• The Many Deaths of You: Of all the human characters in the franchise, she is undoubtedly the one who suffered the most physical torture and countless deaths (in the witches' record for each game, Rosa is shown to have the worst luck). Eva-Beatrice "playing" with her and Maria in EP3 and Maria's violent revenge dream in EP4 particularly stand out.
• Maternally Challenged: Played with. When we first meet her, Rosa seems to be an attentive and loving mother who knows exactly how to educate her daughter Maria and adapt to her moods, even allowing her to gain some respect from her siblings-in-law and their children. Then Rosa has reveals herself as a Troubled Abuser who uses her daughter as a physical and psychological outlet for all her problems with both family and her job when Maria makes the mistake of disobeying her and challenging her authority. Unfortunately for Rosa, this flaw of her is one of the main reasons why she is the most penalized character of the entire series despite the fact that she generally has her moral compass in the right place otherwise.
• Mean Boss: Played for laughs in the eighth arc when, after getting drunk, she literally takes Lucifer under her arm and gives her tips on how to get respect from her younger sisters as their boss.
• Meaningful Name: If you think about it very carefully on a symbolic level, Maria's obsession with the most damaged and fragile of the roses in the garden of the villa does not seem to be so casual.
• Misery Builds Character: It could be said that the only thing that can be even remotely defined as positive about everything Rosa has had to endure (both when she was alive and now that she is dead thanks to her own family and Beatrice) is that she and Maria have finally dealt with their personal tragedy, thus being able to permanently repair their mother-daughter bond and ultimately establish that they love each other deeply when Erika and the goats personally try to question their relationship.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal:
  • A possible explanation for why Rosa was willing to become the culprit's accomplice in the second game, even knowing the gravity of the situation. Because of the abuse and verbal digs that she constantly suffers at the hands of her siblings, she's fine with letting them die with their spouses without regret.
  • It also applies in the real-world Rokkenjima massacre. After Eva and Hideyoshi mistakenly kill Natsuhi and Krauss, both Rosa and Rudolf show no hesitation in looking down on the two with cold eyes. Rosa takes another step forward when she announces that she does not want to put herself at risk to help her sister avoid jail, and even proposes to Eva to turn herself in to the police, outright admitting that she doesn't care what happens to Eva's family. Considering the way Eva's treated Rosa up to this point, it's hard not to cheer for the youngest Ushiromiya sibling.
• The Mole: By far the most efficient accomplice and at the same time the hardest to get rid of for Sayo when you compare her performance in the second game with those of the other parents.
• Mood-Swinger: Depending on how you decide to approach her and the type of relationship you have with her, Rosa can quickly go from a relatively peaceful state to a state of disruptive fury in moments.
• Ms. Fanservice: She is a very beautiful woman and considerably much younger than the other mothers of the family. In the TIP Game Master BATTLER, to give Maria an important role in Dawn of The Golden Witch, she is forced to wear a swimsuit that shows off her figure, and is specifically forced to bathe with Battler by washing his back. In addition, in the manga version of the TIP Labor Thanksgiving Day Gifts, she is shown completely naked while fantasizing about her new boyfriend Akihito. Even her ending with Beatrice in the fighting game that sees her bathing with her daughter at the spa certainly portrays her as such. In addition there is also this image.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Her general reaction after beating or neglecting Maria. (Doesn't stop her from doing it again). This is actually Truth in Television, as it's rather common to have abusers of all kinds regret their actions upon seeing the consequences they bring to their victims, and try to compensate the abuse by acting nicer. Sadly, it's also very common to restart the cycle of abuse with one little mistake...
• My Greatest Failure: Rosa really wanted to help her half-sister Beatrice Ushiromiya out, having felt sorry for the poor young woman who lived imprisoned inside her mansion by their own father. She failed and witnessed her death. A lot of guilt over the incident torments Rosa's heart.
• Mystical Pregnancy: Maria believes that Rosa got pregnant with her by the will of God like her namesake in the Bible with Jesus, since Rosa never talks about her father and refuses to acknowledge him.

N-T

• Nerves of Steel: Perhaps the only positive aspect of having been raised with Kinzo as a father, Krauss and Rudolf as brothers and Eva as a sister is that Rosa ended up developing a much smarter mind than theirs and a very high ability to remain calm (except when Maria angers her), even in particularly stressful situations. In addition to maintaining control of the situation in EP2 and being able to effectively blackmail her sister in the next one, her ability to remain calm and try to convince Eva to going to jail for the deaths of Krauss and Natsuhi while the latter holds her under fire with a rifle promotes her definitively to this. However, this is also one of her most risky weaknesses, as it leads her to become arrogant and reckless when she thinks she has the situation under control and makes her more vulnerable to literal and especially deadly backstabbing.
• Nice to the Waiter: In EP1, she brings a gift to Kumasawa that she promised to make her during the previous family conference.
• Nightmare Face: In EP8, Rosa has a terrifying when she pins Erika with the gun, hinting it's the Black Witch.
• Not So Above It All: For someone who until then at the beginning of all games has tried to be as balanced and quiet as possible, it is pleasantly surprising to see Rosa letting go momentarily drunk and having fun during the party of EP8, even considering after all that that the witches, the other creatures of the Meta-World, and the rest of the family put her through.
• Not So Weak: Despite her submissive behavior towards her older siblings, she is capable of extreme distrust and coldness towards them when she publicly expresses her doubts, and questions their true intentions.
• Old Maid: In some of the EP4 flashbacks, whether she's marriagable due to her age seems to be a large concern of Rosa's (she's 35), especially because any potential husbands would need to be okay with a daughter who isn't theirs. Though if we take what's revealed about Rosa's husband in EP6 into account, this may not be true at all.
• One-Woman Army: She is more than capable of standing alone against an entire horde of butler goats once she is really pissed, and can easily dominate an Erika who at her peak crushes all the other members of the family (except Krauss).
• Only Sane Woman: The reason why Kyrie quickly kills her after Natsuhi and Krauss' accidental deaths was because she refused to cover up the murders of the two by blowing up the island, and instead suggesting to change the crime scene by moving the bodies from the gold room to the rose garden of the villa and get Eva and Hideyoshi arrested. While it was mostly to pocket a larger piece of gold and because, understandably, she hated her sister, her plan was the best.
• The Paranoiac: As shown in the second arc when she takes a cue from a game which she once played with Maria, Rosa sees the world as full of wolves in order to justify her lack of trust in others. Considering all the information that surfaced about her childhood, her story with Maria's father and especially what happens to her and her daughter when she makes the mistake of trusting her siblings or Beatrice during the various arcs, it is difficult to blame her. It is implied that this paranoia is the result of the many years of repeated betrayals and deceptions which both Eva and Rudolf subjected her when she was a child.
• Parental Neglect: When she's not abusing Maria, she leaves her on her own, often for days at a time. Depending on how much faith you have in Rosa, she's either working hard to pay off her debts or secretly living it up in hotels and spas with new boyfriends.
• Parental Substitute: Subverted. In the second game, she invites the recently orphaned George and Battler to see her this way as she vows to protect them. But in the truth Rosa doesn't really care much for the children of her hated siblings and has made a deal with the culprit so that only her and Maria can save themselves.
• Passive-Aggressive Kombat: Although she is quieter and more polite than the other parents in discussions, Rosa knows how to get under her siblings' skin when necessary. She gives credit to Eva for teaching her through verbal abuse.
• The Pen Is Mightier: As an Improvised Weapon User, one of her defensive moves against witches and demons is to pull out her fountain pen, equip it with her fingers in her fist and try to use it to pierce the eye of her attacker. This is her grip in the fighting game.
• Practically Different Generations: All of her siblings were in their late adolescence or already adults when she was born, causing her to have a very lonely childhood while she was growing up. Even worse, one of the main reasons why she was constantly subjected to verbal and physical abuse was because everyone expected her to think and behave just like her adult siblings.
• Pride: Thanks to her upbringing and many personal tragedies, Rosa essentially sees her entire life and herself as a constant failure. Although she is capable of being very self-critical regarding her inability to be a better mother to Maria, she '''will never accept''' when others are the ones bringing up these criticisms.
• Proper Lady: When calm, Rosa is probably second only to Natsuhi as the most feminine, courteous and graceful of the Ushiromiya women. The manga version of Episode 8 shows a flashback of Maria putting one of the garden's roses in her mother's hair, then commenting that she looks like a princess.
• Psychological Projection: As she was raised on an island with no friends and in a highly dysfunctional family context, where everyone abused her simply because she was a child who reasonably behaved like a child and suffers enormously from the stigmatization of Japan 1980s towards women (especially working single mothers like her), Rosa is highly inclined to project her childhood and trauma onto Maria. Precisely for this, she's perpetually disappointed not only that her daughter is a Kiddie Kid who knowingly estranges herself from her companions because they do not share her interests and faith in the existence of magic, but also because Rosa probably, involuntarily and tragically sees Maria as the representation of her own failures as a daughter, student, friend, girlfriend, woman and mother.
• Rage Breaking Point: After Eva hit one of her Berserk Button by openly accusing her of being "Not So Different" Remark from Maria's father, Rosa's tranquil and self-confident mask crumbles completely, giving way to a murderous fury which is promptly stopped by Kyrie.
• Really Gets Around: The fourth arc sows the doubt that, despite her difficulty in finding a stable partner because of her job and her daughter, Rosa still presumably dated several men and was spending her time with them rather than working. However, there is also the subtle sad implication that traveling to these places with these men is part of her optional job when considering her serious money problems.
• Relative Button: Questioning and denying Rosa's love for Maria earns Erika a gun barrel stuck into her mouth.
• Repressed Memories: She forgot about her meeting with Beatrice II, and the latter's death because the trauma and guilt were too much for Rosa to handle. This is part of the reason why she always reacts so badly to Maria talking about Beatrice.
• The Resenter: She hides it very well, but the torture Beatrice inflicts on her in the second Tea Party and her change of behavior towards her siblings when she's in a position of power subtly highlights all the hatred she feels for her all abusive family.
• Resentful Guardian: Maria definitely imagines that this is the case, since being a single mother has made Rosa's life a lot harder and she can't find a stable relationship because of her daughter. While it is true in some part of Rosa's psyche, it's still pretty apparent that she genuinely loves her daughter. It's complicated.
• The Runaway: She tried to do this as a teenager shortly after suffering a violent verbally burst from her mother and fled to the witch's forest, hoping to disappear forever as a way to punish both Mrs. Ushiromiya and Kinzo for their abuse. Instead, she ended up stumbling upon the villa where her father was raising her illegitimate daughter, Beatrice Ushiromiya, by pure chance, and then Rosa, after convincing her to flee with her, ended up accidentally leading her to her own death.
• Sadist: Probably a trait that was unintentionally passed on to her by her older adult siblings (Eva in particular) whenever they abused her when she was still a child. There have been moments in which Rosa, even if only for a moment, has felt genuine pleasure in causing suffering to the people she hurt (as a way to punish them for what she perceives as crimes or even just threats against her); in particular it's better to remember the event that led to the "death" of Sakutaro (which literally traumatized her daughter), the second arc which sees her turn against everyone of the other survivors because of her paranoia about the identity of the culprit, and especially, when just before being killed by Kyrie, she was in pure ecstasy of finally having power over Eva and Hideyoshi thanks to their accidental killings of Krauss and Natsuhi, continuing to persuade them and subtly taunt them in following her plan and getting arrested for their murders. Eva herself is even completely shocked to see this side of her younger sister (who has always seen her only as stupid, weak and useless), with the narrative of the seventh Tea Party scene is quick to point out that she was totally unaware of it.
• Shrinking Violet: She does not speak very often unless asked, and in debates she tends to be very quiet during the heated discussions of the family conference. Her siblings believe that she doesn't understand anything they say, but in reality she finds their childish quarrels a waste of time.
• Sibling Murder: Subverted. If Rosa was not been treacherously killed by Kyrie and Rudolf in the seventh Tea Party, she probably would have been on the verge of truly shooting Eva out of hatred for her sister after the latter provoked her by essentially accusing her of being a thief as Maria's father due to the fact that her rifle held a bullet.
• Silk Hiding Steel: At first, Rosa is presented as the sweetest and most delicate daughter of the patriarch of the Ushiromiya family when compared to her siblings, who underestimate and look down on her. When she has power, however, she's even worse than Krauss, Eva and Rudolf put together, and can effortlessly manipulate and terrify others into following her orders.
• Single Parents Are Undesirable: One of her many issues is her inability to have a stable relationship because she is a single mother. As a result, she is implied to regularly get new lovers, only to break up with them shortly after. Since she can't find a new man, she keeps clinging on to the futile hope that Maria's father will take her back if she pays off the debt he left her in.
• Slasher Smile: She showcases one in front of her daughter as she tears her favorite toy to pieces and declares his death.
• Slave to PR: One of the main reasons that Rosa easily gets angry with her daughter is because she gives a great weight to the way in which society views her and her family. During a flashback to her childhood in EP8, it's implied that it was upbringing that instilled this sense of preservation of her good image into her head.
• Smarter Than You Look: Despite being frequently called the dumbest of the siblings, she solved the riddle of the Witch's Epitaph before Eva, but didn't pursue her suspicion until later. In Requiem of the Golden Witch, after the death of Krauss and Natsuhi, she's the first to come up with a plan that would put Eva and Hideyoshi behind bars while solving the rest of the family's financial problems, with enough money left over to live in luxury. Unfortunately for her, Rudolf and Kyrie consider it a naive plan, and quickly kill her.
• Smug Snake: In the second arc, after calming down from the initial shock of seeing the corpses of her older siblings and their spouses, Rosa feels only the barest touch of sadness for their deaths, and has no problem mocking Eva in front of George. She also provokes both him and Battler on more than one occasion. She's also pleased by the thought of having Eva and Hideyoshi arrested for the accidental murders of Krauss and Natushi, and tells them so with a mocking smile.
• Society Is to Blame: One of the main reasons why Rosa is so unhappy is because she feels constantly and negatively judged for being a single woman in her 30s who is raising a problematic daughter on her own. Even her own family judges her through Maria, consequently fueling her violent tendencies towards her.
• Spanner in the Works: She was killed first by Kyrie precisely to avoid the possibility that she would become one due to the fact that her sawed-off shotgun still contained a bullet, unlike Eva and Hideyoshi's guns.
• Split Personality: The way Maria interprets Rosa's behaviour towards her (whenever her mother becomes abusive, it's because she's being possessed by a "black witch"), not being able to understand the idea of a Troubled Abuser.
• Stealth Insult: Subtly insulting Eva's intelligence by calling it slow and implicitly admitting that her sister's death gives her relief in front of Eva's son in EP2.
• Stepford Smiler: From the Tea Party of the second arc, it is strongly implied that she secretly feels hatred and deep contempt for her siblings but she always hides this by adopting a tranquil attitude accompanied with a slight smile. It becomes even more evident in EP7 after the accidental deaths of Krauss and Natsuhi.
• Struggling Single Mother: Maria's father abandoned her in the middle of her pregnancy without marrying her. As if that wasn't enough, he left Rosa with a huge debt she struggles to pay off. Despite being the owner of a design company based on selling occidental clothes and accesories, she's still in debt. She usually works all day, causing her to neglect her daughter Maria. In addition, Maria is a rather difficult child to deal with. All of this, coupled with the fact that neither her father nor her siblings seem to be interested in giving her a hand, Rosa ends up phyisically and verbally discharging all her stress on Maria when the latter does not obey her and makes her nervous.
• Successful Sibling Syndrome: Part of the reason why everyone in her family verbally and physically abused Rosa throughout all her life is mainly due to the fact that, despite her age, everyone expected her to behave as her more grown-up siblings did. Said siblings often bullied, marginalized and offended her, with Eva being particularly cruel in this regard. It's no wonder that Rosa severely punishes her daughter Maria for acting like a child when Rosa herself as a child wasn't allowed to do so.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Despite her horrible past and the horrendous way in which she is treated by her family, she is by nature a very sweet and caring woman. However, depending on the situations or provocations she undergoes, all that kindness vanishes, and her cruel, calculating, cold and domineering personality surfaces.
• Sure, Let's Go with That: Maria rationalizes her mood swings as Demonic Possession by a black witch, which Rosa will sometimes accept as an excuse for her behavior. Maria also decided that she must be a virgin birth after learning about the similarly named Mary in Christianity, which Rosa accepts so she'll stop asking about her father.
• Take Me Instead: Rosa tries this move in vain when, after both she and Maria have been killed and resurrected over and over by Eva-Beatrice, Beatrice shows up to give them a final Mercy Kill in the third arc.
• Tears of Blood: She sheds these in the sixth arc.
• Tempting Fate: Rosa really pushes it by taunting Eva in EP7 with her plan to land her older sister in jail for the accidental murder of Krauss and Natsuhi.
• Throw the Dog a Bone:
  • Rosa's role in EP8's battle in the Golden Land is the closest she comes to compensation for all the shit she's gone through in the previous episodes.
  • In a general context, the fact that Rosa was both the only survivor among the parental group and one of the accomplices in the second game is the most of as close as possible she managed to get as a personal revenge against her father and all her siblings for their repeated abuses against her.
• Title Drop: Rosa is the only character to do so twice:
  • Once in the second game while she was greeting the servants separating them from her group.
  • The second one is when she blackmails Eva with her silence regarding the discovery of gold.
• Too Much Alike: As much as Rosa hates to admit it (and gets upset when someone points it out to her), not only she is much more like Krauss, Eva and Rudolf than she thinks, but in situations in which she feels both powerful and in an advantaged position, she looks even worse than all her siblings combined when she deliberately lets her dark side take over her (again, this is a very common case in bullied and abused victims who are not helped in time).
• Took a Level in Badass: In EP2 and EP8 she is given the opportunity to defend herself and Maria and react and both the time she does it in a spectacular and emblematic way.
• Took a Level in Jerkass:
  • In the second arc, her mistrust, hostility and contempt she feels towards the servants and Nanjo, however legitimate they may be, lead Rosa to behave in a tyrannical way like her siblings and consequently to lose even total support she had from Battler and George.
  • Also in the fourth arc, her abusive and negligent actions towards Maria, which culminate with the destruction of Sakutaro and Maria's dreams of revenge, have led her to be seen like this as both In-Universe by Ange and Out-Universe by several of Umineko's fans.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Crabs and sushi.
• The Tragic Rose: The name Rosa is Spanish and Italian for rose. Even removing the fact that, of all the human characters present on the island during all the games, Rosa is the only one who always dies (and often in very horrible ways) and she is by far the most tortured and violated character both physically and mentally. She already falls into the trope for having been abused by her whole family as a child and having witnessed the death of a person which occurred partly through her own fault, but she's also tricked and abandoned by the father of her daughter, and suffers from the stress of being both a single mother and a working woman in a judgemental society.
• Tranquil Fury: At least every Rosa's interaction with Eva when she is in a position of power towards her sister results in this because, although she does not cause her any verbal offense (contrary to Eva with her) and uses a series of apparently peaceful words (without any shreds veiled with provocation), her condescending tone of voice and facial expressions ends up betraying a tinge of sarcasm stemming from a deep, barely controlled resentment, which ends up exploding in the seventh Tea Party when Eva makes the mistake of comparing Rosa to Maria's father. She also highlights this in her brief but iconic confrontation with Erika in Episode 8.
• Trauma Button: Mentioning Beatrice's name ends up provoking an angry reaction or a very strong migraine from her. This is because she actually met Beatrice Ushiromiya, only to witness her death not long afterwards.
• Trauma Conga Line: Considering that, of all the human residents on the island, Rosa is by far the most tormented person during the seven games of Sayo and Tooya, she certainly falls into this. Even her entire childhood and adolescence count if you takes into consideration the numerous and repeated abuses suffered by her own family, as well as the tragic incident involving Beatrice.
• Troubled Abuser: Considering all the information that emerged about her past during the various episodes and from the fact that when she scolds or beats Maria and shouting at her the exact same horrible words that Eva in turn screamed at her in the previous arc ^note "Why are you so stupid? Idiot, die you brainless moron!!!", it is not wrong to consider her as the most accurate portrayal of this in the whole VN. Rosa's Dark and Troubled Past perfectly explains her Abusive Mom status:
  • First of all, she is Kinzo's daughter, and from the little we know of their relationship, Rosa has always seen him as someone to fear and still fears him even now, a common symptom in victims of abuse. To make it worse, he raised her on an island with no other children to play with, forcing her into a solitary childhood and perfectly explaining why Rosa herself as an adult is so obsessed with Maria needing to stop playing with toys and go out to make real friends.
  • One of the only things we learn about her mother is how harsh she was with Rosa, which both Rosa and Krauss recall - she continuously pressured Rosa over her school grades, and even went so far as to call her the disgrace of the Ushiromiya family.
  • Rosa was also actively tormented and abused ever since she remembers it by her siblings. Krauss used to scold her even when she did nothing wrong, and punished her by beating her up enough to make her spit blood. Eva always considered her stupid, repeatedly tricked her into getting in trouble, and continues to bully her as an adult. Rudolf was the worst of the three, since in addition to subjecting her to the same abuses as their older siblings, he constantly betrayed her trust and broke her toys.
  • As an adult, her life did not improve. Maria's father convinced her to co-sign a loan with him, ran away with money, and left her both with a huge debt to pay and a child to raise alone. Her older siblings did not care about her struggles, and continued looking down on her while focusing exclusively on their own problems. In addition, living in Japan in the '80s as a single, working mother was unpleasant on all counts. In the end, it's not a surprise that Rosa gets very easily and very violently angry at her daughter at the slightest nuisance no matter how much poor Maria doesn't deserve it.
• Tsundere: A non-romantic, highly troubled example of a Sweet (Dere) type which is Played for Drama. Normally, Rosa is a very friendly and sociable person. However, Rosa has a lot of issues that make her prone to violent mood swings at the slightest provocation.

U-Y

• Underestimating Badassery: While plotting against Krauss, Eva and Rudolf see Rosa as little more as a pawn to be deceived and discarded, rather than a valid ally. Needless to say, as the story progresses, Rosa proves that she is just as and more cunning than they are, and she is also dangerously unpredictable if you give her a reason to become your enemy.
• The Un-Favourite: Even though being unloved and abused by Kinzo is a general problem that all four siblings share, Rosa takes the cake as she has the most estranged relationship with Kinzo, due to the choice for Maria's name, her unknown father, and Beatrice II's death. The fourth arc (if there is some truth in Rosa and her latest lover's alleged flashback during Maria's dream of revenge) seems to hammer the trope further by implying her habit of dating men, very close in age to her older siblings than to her, as a subconscious action of earning all the love and attention she never received from Kinzo when she was a child, further establishing her to be a Womanchild.
• Unstoppable Rage: She enters this mode in EP2, when she's fighting to the end against the goat butlers to protect herself and Maria. She does it again in EP8, when Erika criticizes her for mistreating her daughter and tries to convince Maria that Rosa hates her.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: According to Battler, Rudolf said Rosa was very good and nice in her childhood, and multiple flashbacks from all of the siblings support this. Because of the age difference between her and the rest of her siblings, she got treated pretty nastily by them a lot of the time. Now, of course, she treats Maria quite harshly.
• When She Smiles: On the rare times she is genuinely happy, especially towards Maria, you can tell that she really does seem like the sweetest and kindest mother in the world. [1]◊
• When You Coming Home, Dad?: Rosa usually has to work all day and hardly spends any time with Maria, leaving her all alone in the house. EP4 brings into question how much of this is true given some implications that Rosa does have some free time and uses it to spend time with her boyfriends instead of Maria, but if what's revealed in EP6 is to be believed, Rosa really is working hard so she can pay off the debt Maria's father left her in and he can come back to both of them (although he's already said that he won't).
• Who's Laughing Now?: In EP2 Rosa seems to be feeling a bit of this after the death of her siblings. She's also clearly happy to imagine Eva in prison for the deaths of Krauss and Natsuhi in the seventh Tea Party.
• Why Couldn't You Be Different?: She's very displeased with Maria's obsession with the occult, creepy tendencies and childish behavior, which is why she is constantly scolding and abusing her to get her to start acting her age and make some real friends.
• Wicked Witch: Her daughter Maria sees Rosa as being replaced by a "black witch" whenever Rosa is angry at her, since in her mind a person's change in behavior means they've been possessed. In this state, from Maria's point of view, ROSA definitively killed Chiester 556 by literally breaking her up and decapitating Sakutaro with her bare hands.
• Willfully Weak: Rosa implies this when she challenged Erika to say again that she hated Maria and wished her had never been born shortly after Rosa almost managed to kill Erika several times.
• Womanchild: She's not the most blatant example of this trope, but she does have some moments where she acts quite a bit like a child, since the harsh treatment from Kinzo and her siblings essentially deprived her of a normal childhood. At one point in EP1, she even laments that she still doesn't feel as though she's really grown up. Golden Fantasia reveals Rosa secretly still wants to be a Magical Girl, and becomes with Eva-Beatrice in their ending.
• Workaholic: In the 07th Expansion All Character Settings Collection it is revealed that, ironically, although too much work was one of her biggest problems when she was alive, Rosa prefers to spend all her time creating various patterns for new outfits, as the Golden Land itself inspires her and stimulates her creative side (considering that the alternative is to spend her eternal time with the rest her family responsible for her misery and both her and Maria's death, she cannot be blamed). At least she has goat butlers to help spread some of the stress this time...
• Yank the Dog's Chain: After a childhood beign subjected by traumas and the lack of any form of love on the part of her parents and siblings, Rosa seemed to have finally found some happiness with Maria's future father, only to be convinced by the latter to sign a loan to finance his overseas business trips and be left by him in Japan all alone with the responsibility of both paying off the debt and raising a child on her own. Nine years later, Rosa is still grappling with those debts as she faces the fact that her fashion design company struggles to grow due to lack of customer interest and, at the same time, has to deal without no one support, including her own family, with a little daughter who has obvious motor difficulties in adapting to the excessively rigid and judgmental expectations of an extremely pretentious society. Then the games of Beatrice starts and Rosa becomes practically her favorite target, being subjected to disgusting and humiliating both physical and mental torture (which each time ends in an equally gruesome death) only to appease the sadism of the witches. Suffice it to say that being Rosa sucks.
• You Are Too Late: Rosa's practically made of this one. In Episode 2 she and Maria reconcile... just in time for them to die. In Episode 3 she solves the epitaph first, but doesn't act fast enough and Eva arrives before her. In Episode 4 she almost takes out Goldsmith, but hesitates a little too long.
• You Are What You Hate: As much as Rosa tries to move away from her family as she understandably resents towards them for the domestic abuse she has suffered, she has unfortunately internalized their educational and social schemes.
• Youngest Child Wins: Inverted to the extreme. One of the reasons why Rosa does not get along very well with her older siblings is that she did not do well in school compared to them, which resulted in constant fights with her mother. Her adulthood is no better. At every family meeting, Rosa continues not only to suffer from inferiority complexes in regards to her work, but also in terms of her parenting skills and lack of a lasting marriage. She was forced by circumstance to become a Struggling Single Mother who tries with all her strength to give a decent life to herself and her daughter Maria, who can be a difficult child, while her siblings can rely on support and kindness from their respective spouses, and have well-adjusted kids.
• Your Worst Memory: Implied that it happens in the second arc after her meeting with Beatrice together with Maria followed by a sharp pain in the head. It also happens in the third arc when she starts to involuntarily remember her meeting with Beatrice II and is forced by the other parents to tell of that meeting. At the beginning of the seventh arc when Will and Lion question Rosa, they help her to come to terms with her sense of guilt for Beatrice II's death by inviting her to forgive herself.
• You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry!: Try to hurt Maria in front of her, press her Berserk Buttons or tell her that she is not a good mother and that she hates her daughter to the point that she never wanted to have her, and you'll see what happens next.