Took them a long fucking time to figure out that, maybe, they didn’t have to stay together 24/7 for their entire lives. X) But it’s still a good message, I guess. Friends can have different, incompatible aspirations but stay friends nonetheless (or more than that in this case).
I couldn’t help but let out a chuckle when "Bern" and "Lambda" quoted their dialogue from the end of Umineko. I really hope this isn’t just gratuitous teasing.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Umineko’s introduction drags on a lot, probably longer than it needs to, admittedly. Once you get through that it’s worth it though. You’ll probably have no idea what’s going on at first, but the story encourages you to pay attention to the details and read between the lines.
the Original Jetyl
Okay, me and my reading group are done with episode 1.some general thoughts:
then battler's internal narration comments that George is good with children. okay, unnecessary, but whatever. then, another character says George is good with children, triggering an entire back and forth of everyone else in the scene also saying George is in fact good with children with minor changes in wording.
then the characters walk five feet from the beach to the rose garden, and George shows off his character trait "good with children" again, which battler notes in internal narration, again. and then someone in the scene mentions in the dialog, and would you look at that we are having the exact same conversation again, just worded slightly different for no reason!
the story really did feel like an untouched first draft at many points. I swear, a good 20-30% minimum of the word count could be shaved off and nothing of value would have been lost.
the writing itself did improve as the episode went on and the was more for the writing to talk about, but whenever there was a lull in the plot for whatever reason, the writing became painful to get thru. part is the aforementioned amateurish and repetitive writing, but another was that the characters aren't really that engaging as people. like, while I care if they live or not, because in general I don't like seeming people suffer, a lot of the cast just felt painful dull to deal with. this was more the kids in the cast, as the adults tended to be more engaging to deal with.
Special mention should go to Natsuhi, who started off as one the most insufferable characters, and slow and gradually became the MVP of the whole dang episode. that was some good character growth. me and my reading group liked her.
The mysteries that piled up near the end were engaging, and both me and my reading group are down to tackle at least another episode. (after like a break because episode 1 took us ~34 hours to get thru in only 2 weeks or so), and hopefully the story can pull thru salvaging more characters like it did Natsuhi.
I have more thoughts and more minor critiques of the story so far, but i will leave those for another time.
I forgot my password, and I want my old Forum handle back!!!
Its generally agreed that Umineko gets better around the 2nd-3rd novel. The climax of the 4th is something to be seen.
Also, the ending of Sotsu might actually be more brilliant than we thought. See below:
Blue Truth: Lambdadelta was the dominant personality the whole time since Gou episode 1. We get hints of the Lambdadelta personality gaining sentience in the last 2 episodes of Gou.
What Hanyuu did pushed Lambdadelta back into the recessive personality and made her less malicious.
Something bugs me though… If Lambda was born from Satoko, doesn’t that contradict Lambda’s involvement in Tanako’s obsession?
Going by what Eua says when she first meets Satoko, time probably isn't linear in the meta world
Maybe that’s the Logic Error.
That being said, we already see signs of Lambdadelta softening into the Chaotic Neutral being we know from Umineko.
Also, seems that Eua is implied to be an aspect of Featherine and Hanyuu is related to her in a Ventus and Vanitas relationship, if Vanitas is the original body.
From what I understand, every time Rika is sent to June 1983, Bernkastel is shunted in with her.
Leader of the Holey Brotherhood
Thread hop.
Watched some of the old Higurashi anime a few years back.
Caught a clip from that one new story where Rika gets sent to a world where she and Satoko aren't friends, the latter bullies her, and Rika brains her with a chair.
And now I'm familiar with both Sotsu and Gou, but only the clips of the insane cross timeline DBZ fight between Satoko and Rika.
Boy....this series is nuttier than fruitcakes.
But what I realized most from what I've read, and what I remember is that ultimately, Rika wants badly to grow up (after spending centuries stuck as a child) while Satoko is unable to grow up (due to being emotionally stunted from her own traumas).
One wants to move forward after being stuck in place. The other can't move forward and wishes things would stay the same.
.....then it all goes full on Higurashi.
One Strip! One Strip!
That world you saw was Saikoroshi hen. That story line is VERY important to Umineko and confirmed to be canon by episode 14 of Sotsu.
Read Umineko before going into Gou and Sotsu. Umineko is prerequiste knowledge, for Gou/Sotsu is a prequel to Umineko covering the origin story of an important character to Umineko.
Leader of the Holey Brotherhood
I actually know a bit about Umineko and who you're talking about (though I never played that game or watched the anime version).
And to think all this happened because Satoko was poor at studying.
One Strip! One Strip!
It is clarified that isn't really about that near the end.
I don't know that Umineko is required to watch Sotsugou.
Sure you'll go nuts over a few of the things that happen, but its a big ask to commit to a 100+ hour VN for a bit more context to the show.
"But if that happened, Melia might actually be happy. We can't have that." - Handsome Rob
Yeah, you’ll get a few winks at the audience (like Rika and Satoko’s final dialogue) but reading Umi is definitely not required.
Leader of the Holey Brotherhood
Weird.
I always thought Lambadelta was supposed to be Takano, but now that I look at her again after what I've seen of Gou/Soutsu, I see the resemblance to Satoko more clearly. I guess I never really looked at her closely enough.
One Strip! One Strip!
The part about “Have your life back” in the final two minutes screams a split of consciousness just like Bernkastel.
Bernkastel I suspect is forced back into Rika should Rika ever die. Given that Bern never acts up in Gou barring a scary but 100% deserved Nice Job Breaking It, Hero speech in episode 7, this actually adds a lot of nuance to her character.
Basically, the people of Hinimizawa especially the club are Bern’s Morality Chain. As twisted as she is, she still loves them.
Edit: Sotsu retroactively turns Watadamashi hen into the worst arc of the entire series. What a waste of a good idea
How I would have written it differently: Recollection of loops (a big wasted plot point) + H173 = Hinimizawa’s version of The Punisher. Includes seeing past loops of Meakashi AND Miniagoroshi hen hen just as the pivotal moment happens. Attempts to save various innocent people via her vigilante war against the Yaminu go horribly wrong + accidentally killing Rika = culprit crossing the Despair Event Horizon then really going full bat shit culminating in finding the mastermind too late.
Edited by magnum12 on Oct 30th 2021 at 6:27:30 AM
Even weirder is that Eua calls Satoko "Vier", who’s the Takano expy in Ciconia…
So... Satoko apparently got married to a guy and had a kid in the new manga, that's gonna cause some drama after Sotsu Gou paired her with Rika.
EDIT: Apparently every single ship went down in flames, that's one way to start a sequel focused on the kids.
Edited by TheCuriousFan on Nov 25th 2021 at 12:06:57 AM
the Original Jetyl
Oh yeah, so me and my reading group finished episode 2 of umineko a few days ago. might as well update you all on our current thoughts:
Overall: still quick bad. not good. not seeing the hype of this at all and dear god do the steam reviews for this thing hype it up to comical degrees (we took a break to read some spoiler free reviews to compare our experiences reading the VN to the reviews. the contrast made me almost die laughing at least)
that said, for at least a few of the members of my reading group, it has turned into quite the entertaining hate-read. turns out the true gold from Beatrice were the memes we made along the way XD
to narrow down a few specific new thoughts on Episode 2:
- Bad: the writing quality itself continues from episode 1 in being really bad. reading episode 2, it now seems clear, the writing just feels amateurish more than anything else. like maybe this was one of the author first work, and didn't really edit it. this general poor ability to concisely and confidently convey the ideas the story wants to be about make almost every scene a slog and drags down the few genuinely good scenes the story is able to manage
- Good: speaking of a good scene. the scene in the servant room where "Kanon" finger-fucks his own gaping wounds is appropriately disturbing and disgusting.
- Bad: the story and the writing have a persistently bad habit of making weird and broad generalizations of the human experience, especially when it comes to topics of gender. just constant "boys do X" and "girls hearts are y" just said flippantly as if they generally known and accepted truths of the world. it is as annoying as they are incorrect. which is extremely. this also doesn't help with...
- Bad: The romance. Episode 2 seems to have a partial focus on romance, which is bad because the writer for the most part, cannot write a believable romance to save his life. take Kanon and Jessica, a couple with no chemistry, which is impressive since this is a written story, how did he write them with no chemistry. Kanon doesn't even seem to like jessica. in the scene where he is clearly supposed realize he has feelings for her, it comes off more that he's jealous of her comparative freedom on the stage singing, as he is cleanly chaffing under his designation as "furniture", constantly and constantly mentioning it, clearly to more convince himself that he doesn't have any emotional wants or needs, than it is to deny that he likes jessica. the other couple given focus, George and Shanon, is a little better except for the fact
- Awful: George is a groomer. like seriously, they mentioned earlier in the story that Shanon was jessica's age, so 16, and George was like 23-25, i don't quite remember, because the story quite clearly isn't interested in mentioning his age and bringing attention to the the obvious and gross age difference between the two of them. especially because he wants to marry his child bride as soon as he can, and they have to have been dating for quite a while before this, given the whole, once yearly visit (yeah i know they show them going on dates on her days off or whatever, but still, they never specify how long they've been dating, and its still gross even if they only started dating that year).
- Bad: Beatrice's food metaphors are bad. I think they're supposed to be bad on purpose, but being bad on purpose is still bad, and the given the rest of the writing isn't very good, being "bad on purpose" isn't a pass.
- Good: the music has been pretty good for the most part. nice and varied, constantly pulling out new tracks as the needs arise. wish they looped better tho.
- Good: Energy sword Sunday was hilarious. Scene after scene of bad prose and dull conversation, the first scene where Beatrice summons bara butler baphomet to duel kanon with energy swords was a breath of fresh air and hilarious. had our group on the floor laughing at the insanity of it all.
- Okay: overall the plot of episode 2 after energy sword sunday got a lot more bearable. the story went from mostly bad with brief pockets or tolerable, to mostly tolerable, with brief dips in bad.
- Okay: I like the idea of the red texts as a sorta logic puzzle, trying to figure out how a thing could get done while following all the rules given. shame it isn't used effectively, given there is still clearly far too little information to reasonably interpret it as plausible without literal magic being involved (which yes i know is the point, Beatrice's endgoal is to make it seem impossible without magic, but if this story is supposed to be a debate between magic and reason, like I was told it was, its doing a bad job at it.)
- Good: The "Your incompetent" line was genuinely funny.
- Mixed: the meta batter and Beatrice sections. sometimes its funny. sometimes its insightful. but a lot of the time it is needless bantering and repetition, a thing the VN does not need more of.
- Disappointing: Rosa was a rather disappointing GOAT for episode 2. Natsuhi was one of the few stand out parts of Episode 1, and Rosa had a lot of promise as a character to grow and develop. even before the story told us, it was clear Rosa was a very damaged person emotionally, and she took it out on her clearly special needs daughter. but unlike natsuhi, she isn't really given the appropriate focus on her to develop herself. like, the last main scene in EP 2 is her Mama Bear moment killing a bunch of goat-people saving maria, but ultimately failing because she tried to hold onto the gold, ankle twists, ghosts catch up to them, bad end, etc etc. a perfectly fine scene concept in theory. the problem: the scene is entirely an aftermath after the big emotional climax of the episode, which was with Beatrice, kinzo and Furniture-Battler. again compared to natsuhi's duel with Beatrice which was the emotional denouement for both its episode and her personal story. Rosa and her character isn't given the time it needs because the episode is too busy juggling several other things it doesn't need to be juggling, (kanon and jessica, shannon and george, shannon and Beatrice, Beatrice and kinzo, battler and Beatrice, etc). Rosa's arc is failed due to the very structural issues inherent to umeneko's story construction.
- Awful: The Fucking ghost! so apropos of nothing, after the end of a long and frankly bad scene of establishing that jessica is dead and kanon has gone missing, and how Rosa is suspecting kanon killed her, but of course we the audience having seen energy sword sunday know thats not true, and oh look how tragic this is. after that whole rigamarole, kanon and Jessica's fucking ghosts come it, like a fucking greek chorus to spell out the point yet again!
- Awful: Scene construction: no seriously, why the fuck did we need jessica and kanon's fucking ghosts to come in to fucking lament on the fact that kanon is being suspected. they're fucking dead, why are they still here! this scene was so awful it actually highlights a lot of problems with this VN. a reasonable person can intuit when Beatrice dissapears kanon's body why she did that, and that kanon would be suspected later. but it is not enough for the audience to infer that kanon will be suspected as a suspect after his body is taken. It is not enough to feel a little tragic when the characters start to suspect that kanon is the culprit. Its not enough when the fucking ghost come in to start lamenting at the tragedy of kanon being suspected as the culprit. but it is enough when Beatrice comes in to comment on the ghost lamenting that Kanon is a suspect. All for build up to a “spin the chessboard moment” that was the entire purpose of the entire last 15 minutes of wasted line. all so Battler could get an emotional win the story does not need, does not deserve, and does not win.
- Lastly: and to end it off. the tea party. the tea party with rosa itself is another good example of bad scene construction, dragging things along when it could be more efficiently and elegantly expressed the mood he wants to go for, and then when he wants to turn the mood around, Battler comes in on an under aged incest cunnilingus joke. I repeat. our main character comes in on a cunlingus joke, directed at his 9 year old cousin. a joke, proposing that once she is 19, he would ask her to to let him go down on her. that "joke" that fucking "joke" nearly killed out entire read thru. we almost completely stopped it write there. we only continued because i had the time stamps for it on my other monitor so we knew it was almost over. fuck that line, and fuck this games sense of ""humor""
that all said, we are looking forward to getting into episode 3 after a few weeks to detox for all that. so take that for what that is XP
Edited by I-M-THE-Jetyl-1 on Nov 24th 2021 at 9:04:28 AM
I forgot my password, and I want my old Forum handle back!!!
Which contradicts Word of God regarding Mion.
Alright real abridged spoiler talk.
Umineko in summation is one big lie that real-life Battler came up with off-screen to explain away thr trauma he went through. Everything we saw in the anime that never finished, the novels, the manga was basically one big dramatization of what really happened. It is left entirely up to the reader to figure out the "mystery" through all of this nonsense leading to the conclusion that some version of the murders happened, but everything we were seeing all came down to real-life Battler envisioning it all.
Plus something about how real-life Beatrice had a really sad life. The fictional accounts Beatrice goes from insanely sadistic and cruel murderer to misunderstood young woman with a tragic past that blends fantasy and fiction from real-life Beatrice..
All of this ties in later to Higurashi and the new seasons which are sequel-prequels to Higurashi and Umineko, bridging the two. There is a greater cosmic malpractice going on between several witch beings..
I got that so far. I am going to assume that all of this is correct.
The thing I don't get is why fake/main character Battler was trying to disprove that Beatrice was a witch/used magic in the first place. How does his argument have any merit when everything they do takes place in a meta realm where they can observe and study their alternate selves. Just the very nature of the situation he's in confirms magic was real. And on top of all of this none of this actually matters because for some reason real-life Battler came up with all of this to vent.
Edited by FOFD on Sep 22nd 2022 at 7:12:23 AM
Akira Toriyama (April 5 1955 - March 1, 2024).
From the perspective of real Battler, saying Beatrice was a witch means giving up on understanding what actually happened. I don't remember the in universe justification but it may have just been that he doesn't believe in magic.
The mystery (for us at least) was never about whether Beatrice was a literal witch, but rather what her "magic" meant and what it told us about the person behind "Beatrice". Yes, there’s the meta-world with all those sadistic witches, crazy magic and all that jazz, but it doesn’t operate on the same plane. In the real world, Kinzo could not actually summon demons and Sayo could not actually use flying spikes that turned into cute girls.
It’s all summed up by the end of Episode 4: Beatrice’s last question that Battler must answer is not "Am I a witch?" but "Who am I?"
Now about the stories, the first two (and the others that were lost in the sea) were a mix of Sayo making up murder fantasies and "confessing" her future crime, while also secretly wishing to be stopped. Episode 3 and forward were both an attempt from Tooya to reconcile with his memories and continue Beatrice’s "game" while encouraging readers to go through the same mental journey Beatrice and himself went through. Thus inheriting Beatrice’s "magic". I wouldn’t call it "venting", since he does this out of love and respect rather than anger.
That’s my take at least. Maybe I should read the story once again someday.
…Made me want to listen to this again, thanks. 
Pretty much. "A witch did it" means that the truth will forever stay hidden.
Edited by Lyendith on Oct 8th 2022 at 1:14:23 PM
I think that Featherine being the most powerful witch was just symbolic in Ange's POV of how Hachijo Tohya (that is, both him and Ikuko) had a massive influence on how the Rokkenjima Massacre was seen through his forgeries. Not only that, but Tohya and Ikuko managed to get their hands on Eva's diary, which means the perception of the Rokkenjima Massacre was IN THEIR HANDS — they could've easily made a forgery and claimed it was the real deal. In practice, they have the power to crush everybody on Rokkenjima's tale; everybody's "heart"/"riddle". And that also meant they had complete control on Ange. If they had revealed the truth of Rokkenjima, Ange would have assuredly committed suicide in denial.
My opinion is that the whole thing is on two layers:
On the first layer, we have the meta-world characters, who have to look at the various "stories", determine whether they're OK with magic existing or not, understand the real-world characters by seeing them act alternate scenarios and eventually realize what so-called "magic" stands for.
On the second layer, there's us, the readers, who need to do the same thing with the meta-world characters. Just like meta-Battler and meta-Beatrice argue about why their story shows people using magic on the island, we argue about why the story shows us meta-Battler and meta-Beatrice in their big badass meta-verse battles.
Eventually, just like Battler's quest to explain the "magic" of the island led him to really understand the heart of the people involved in order to understand what the magic symbolized, we get to understand what the various meta-world interactions mean for the actual characters of the story, like in Dylan's message above.
So the meta-world battle scenes are part of the story, but are also a guide for us, instructing us to do the same thing to the very same meta-world scenes.
I had the impression that even if you strip away the meta stuff and question whether characters like Lambdadelta even exist, Featherine is still probably a god. Unrelated to what's going on, but still not human.
Ironically, I found Lambda harder to interpret than Featherine. Who is she? Bernkastel is clearly Battler and Ange's fear of the truth and what it can imply.
Sotsu ended: Confirmed Lambdadelta WAS Satako’s Enemy Without. The ending involves a super Golden Ending that sets the clock to march 1987, minus Satako’s abandonment issues. Satoshi woke up.