When the Sea Catcadas Cry

Hi, I'm rereading Umineko EP 1 and in spoiler retrospect this is the funniest line in the entire episode.

Spoiler

 

LAST NOTE OF THE GOLDEN WITCH IS FINALLY AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH ;________; (as is the Saku VN adaptation of Confession, which I will be sure to revisit and enjoy thoroughly once I've read Last Note)

(Major spoilers if you haven't finished Umineko, naturally, since this is a post-canon bonus episode)



I'm so happy..........................

EDIT: By the way, if you happen to have made it this long without having spoiled yourself on Last Note, and you're going into it with nothing...can you pls tell me what your experiences are with it, how solvable you find it, what your feelings are reading it, that kind of thing...................

('cuz I got impatient and spoiled myself several weeks ago, and thus have stolen from myself the ability to read this episode with "first time reading it" eyes)

 

Does anyone have links to some Umineko liveblogs (or equivalent. I don't mind twitter threads)? I want to popcorn.gif with my reread.

 

here's one I'm following! still in-progress and slow-updating, though

 

That's the one that gave us this masterwork in the comment section:

Spoiler: big

 

Assuming you're looking for first-time readers...I know a few Twitter liveblogs, but I don't know any that make it all the way through as a single, linkable thread. I think people either get tired of liveblogging and just start reading instead, or they drop Umineko for a while and then forget about their liveblog, or they lose the link to their liveblog thread...various things like that. Twitter as a platform is bad, and it's a travesty that it's the only one I'm really checking right now. (What's frustrating is that I'm pretty sure I know someone who did complete a full Umineko liveblog on Twitter...but I don't think they threaded the tweets. I think they used some sort of hashtag instead...but I forgot the hashtag. T___T) But here are the ones I have:

• @spacetwinks/@catboydetective: goes up to the end of EP2, inactive since April
• @insertdisc5/@peapodgallery: goes up to about mid-EP3, inactive since February
• @daintyprotag: starts at EP2 (pre-EP2 livetweets are unthreaded and Lost Forever), goes up to the end

Also, when it comes to liveblogs from non-first-timers (i.e. full-spoiler liveblogs), Goats Reading Seacats is a fandom classic. If you haven't tried reading along with it before, it's a fun experience. Fun in kind of a very depressing way, though. Because it's Umineko.

 

Spacetwinks tweeted today that they hope to resume their livetweeting when their new computer is finished this week :0

 

Aside from the ones already mentioned, there's canmom's liveread, which is so-far incomplete (up to EP3) but sometimes hilariously accidentally-almost-psychic.

The SomethingAwful LP threads (original thread - Chiru thread) are also a lot of fun to read through, if you enjoy watching a whole crowd of unspoiled readers flail at the mysteries and/or each other's theories with all their might. Not to mention the quadrillion-to-one miracle of

Spoiler

one of them solving the epitaph.

 

I read through the SA LP threads along with my first playthrough! (Long live chimpatrice)

 

So the manga seems worth visiting.

 

Oh wow the SA thread is the first time I've made it out of Chapter 4 on my own legs. I've spoiled myself on the whole thing but apparently the plot twists are just so extreme that my poor Human brain can't keep up with them the majority of the time.

Spoiler: Thread spoilers, minor Episode 1-4 spoilers

I was drawn in by someone having actually solved the epitaph and lo and behold, it's exactly the kind of thing I couldn't have figured out because I hate having to solve mysteries with extracurricular research >_>); But I'm interested to see how the game provides the solution during the Answer arcs. I'm a little dubious on the insistence that magic has to either be a binary real/not-real when Ange herself says that the "truth" of magic is dependent on the person experiencing it. Especially if you tie the experience of magic to active and passive coping, it's not like people who freeze and withdraw as a trauma response never lash out, and the other way around. Ultimately taking yourself out of an abusive situation would be counted as white magic, in the universe's own rules.

I'm broadly aboard the "Ryukishi07 writes good, paces bad" train, especially b/c VNs are more temporally locked than reading a novel would be, and require way more brain commitment than raw text. That being said, having voice acting for the VN really elevate it to that experience of watcing a play helped me approach some of the characters -- nuance that was left out of the stage direction but was clearly deliberately injected into the vocal performance kept me broadly on top of certain characters I found extremely hard to follow just in the text. So that's Clue 1 that I should really play the VN myself, as long as I can find a cleared save file that allows me to skip around from word go.

Something I wish the SA thread would have done more is show their work, I feel like Lambda's letter is kind of forgotten as a clue to the Shkannon/Beatrice/Kinzo connection.

Onto Chiru ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

 

Hey, are y'all participating in the official 07th Expansion character poll going on right now? You can give one vote per day to your favorite character from the entire Ryukishi-verse (i.e. every When They Cry, Rose Guns Days, Higanbana, and Trianthology). Not that you're required to vote for the same character every day. You can split up your votes if you want.

Poll will be open until September 30th (although that's presumably in Japan time, so expect to be locked out of the poll sometime during the 29th). Personally I'm pouring all my votes towards Maria. I only wish I had heard about the poll sooner so I could've gotten those votes in on the days I missed ;_____;

 

If I open it in an incognito window can I stan Dlanor extra times?

 

at last. i can satoko stan. officially.

 

Finally, we can settle once and for all who Did Nothing Wrong.

 

Y'know, the longer I look at that character poll, the more I start wondering about some of the...Choices made. About like, who counts as a separate character and who doesn't. Umineko does make that question really complicated in some places, but...

Spoiler: full-game Umineko spoilers

• Kinzo and Young Kinzo are treated as two separate characters. No other character is given this treatment - there's not an option to vote for "Old Eva" instead of Eva, for example, even though I feel like she got about as much screentime. (But if you wanted to vote for "Young Eva", I guess you could vote for EVA-Beatrice?)
• A vote for Beatrice can be interpreted as a vote for Meta Beatrice, Piece Beatrice, Beato the Elder, Beato the Younger, Chick Beato, and even Beatrice Ushiromiya or Sayo...but not Beatrice Castiglioni. Beatrice Castiglioni requires a separate vote. Every other Beatrice gets lumped together. (Unless you count a vote for Clair as a count for Sayo? I feel like the fandom tends to treat Clair as an independent character though, with her own personality and life. I never really understood why.)
• Oh, and speaking of Beatrices, and EVA-Beatrice...of the various non-Beato Beatrices, I can understand why you can't vote for MARIA-Beatrice separately from Maria, but you also can't vote for ANGE-Beatrice separately from the human Ange. I feel like there's a case to be made for EP4's Ange to deserve her own vote...at least, if young Kinzo deserves his own vote. (Although I admit that I, too, started to get pretty confused about differentiating the human and witch Ange around EP8. I'd probably have to lump all Ange scenes in Chiru under ANGE-Beatrice just for lack of a better separation point.)

...Look, I understand that the only rule behind these character decisions is "characters with sprites count and characters without sprites don't", but I'm kind of compelled to over-analyze the Beatrice issue at the very least. Why does Beatrice Castiglioni get an out of being Another Beatrice? Are we saying that she doesn't have enough to do with the Beatrice Mythos to count? That the Beatrice who really lived and the Beatrice that Kinzo created in his head after her death have nothing in common?

(Also, this was just a mistake on my part, but for a minute there I thought Gohda wasn't on the list at all. But he is. Woulda been really funny if he wasn't though.)

 

re: umineko spoilers above

Spoiler

From the "magic doesn't exist" perspective, though, every Beatrice except Casti and her daughter is the same person. So I feel like there's at least SOME level of sense in that decision when you look at it through that lens.

anyway time to go vote for Lion

 

Spoiler: continued Umineko spoilers

I mean, yeah, but that's why it's so surprising to me that Casti counts as a separate character but her daughter doesn't. It seems inconsistent. Surely either both of them are separate characters or neither of them are.

...Also, now that I'm looking at that post I made yesterday, I'm not actually sure that Maria's witch name had the -Beatrice at the end. I don't remember her being part of the official Beatrice Line Of Succession the way Ange was? Maybe her witch name was just MARIA in katakana. I'm a Fake Maria Fan.......................

 

Spoiler: Umineko spoilers

MARIA was a "Witch of Origin" rather than a Golden Witch, so she wouldn't have even had the Beatrice title, I think :D Only Golden Witches get called "Beatrice".

Then again, I can't actually remember if Ange was only ever Ange-Beatrice or if she ever got to be just ANGE.

 

Spoiler: more of the same

ANGE is a Beatrice, yes. The way I interpret it is that inheriting Beatrice's name means being the person who arbitrates what the meaning of that name and the narrative of Rokkenjima is. Hence why it goes from Kumasawa/Virgilia/Predecessor Beatrice (who spread the rumors of the witch haunting the island) to Sayotrice to Eva to Ange.