Umineko: When They Cry/Analysis

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


This is the Analysis entry for Umineko no Naku Koro ni. Spoilers are unmarked ahead.

The Power of Love

Actually, Umineko no Naku Koro ni goes much deeper than the power of love. Repeatedly, readers are told: "Without love, it cannot be seen". What exactly cannot be seen without love? In End of the golden witch, Battler has an epiphany: in a mystery novel, there has to be a trusting relationship between reader and writer; it is exactly the same as being in love. Without a guarantee that the mystery is solvable, the reader won't be interested, and without readers, the writer will not write.

"Without love, the truth cannot be seen." But Erika expounds on that. Because of love, we also see things that shouldn't exist. I quote from Umineko's WMG page:

[Beatrice is love] "Love is the cause of Kinzo's madness. (...) Love is the impetus behind the grisly murders."

Just as love can bring great things, it is also the cause of tragedies. There are things that humans can see because of love, but love also hides things from their eyes.

The Divine Comedy symbolism

Beatrice, in Dante Alighieri's epic, is the symbol of divine love. In a similar vein, we have Beatrice III, the Endless Witch. The WMG that says "Beatrice is love" is valid. Love is fickle and doesn't necessarily follow human reasoning. Because of love, there are things that are hidden from view, and truths that are exposed.

Virgilia is Battler's guide to reason, just as Virgil was Dante's guide. Without Virgilia, the illusions born out of love wouldn't have been dispelled. He would have given up by the third game if it wasn't for her. However, just as reason can guide, it can also mislead.

The place where Battler is trapped in is called Purgatorio. Beatrice wanted Battler to remember his sin of six years ago, and this is where "love" will purify the sin within him. Battler must suffer first in order to see the truth, just as Dante had to recognize, and then acknowledge his sins before ascending to Heaven.

Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Mystery Genre

The Question arcs set up Umineko as if it was a fantasy. Come the Core arcs, more characters appear in order to slowly peel off the illusions and show the truth behind it.

End of the golden witch gives us Erika Furudo, a person who uses the mystery genre in order to sneer at people who are "weaker" than her in solving mysteries. On the other hand, in the same Episode, we are shown the reason why the rules of mystery were formulated; they're not there to say that "there's no need to do this or that", instead, those rules are there as a guarantee that the mystery is actually solvable. The Arc Words, "Without love, the truth can't be seen", come into play here. The mystery genre is likened to love: if the author doesn't reciprocate the reader's desire for the novel to be solvable, the reader won't read it, just like how people won't reciprocate love until the other side says that they love them back.

Requiem of the golden witch is a blatant reconstruction of the genre. Instead of a self-proclaimed intellectual rapist, we have a Badass detective who protects the innocent truths and unveils the destructive lies. We are shown how Mystery becomes Fantasy: by removing the last few pages which reveal the answer. And we are shown the importance of the motive in the mystery: by searching for the person who has the heart to commit murder, we find the true culprit.

The view of truth

On the Higurashi analysis thread there is an analysis on how our sympathy for a murderer changes from person to person. There is a similar point in Umineko but here it is instead how the truth of an event changes from person to person and that there can be no real truth since it varies so much. This point is reinforced time and time again especially in EP 4 with Ange's stubbornness with both Maria and Eva.

But in the end, what is it that Ryukishi wants to tell the readers? What he wants is to show us is that when we have to look at everything from all perspectives. This is even reinforced with Kyrie's chessboard thinking where she looks at a problem not only from her point of view but also the culprits.

But at the same time what he also seems to say is that you can go with any view as long as you think about it and therefore creates your own truth. This is probably the reason for Ryukishi's rather nasty Take That in Ep 8. He did that because those people who demanded the truth didn't understand it. They only wanted to be told which would mean hearing one person's truth instead of creating their own, the opposite of what he wanted to tell us.

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