Umineko Thoughts: Episode 2, Chapters 1-5

Uh woahh aaaa chapter 2 is scary and I understand even less this time

• So this is a… different… timeline? game board? to before? I’m sure everyone will end up dead all over again but the events so far appear to be subtly different. Maria still ends up meeting Beatrice but this time Rosa sees her too, and Maria gets given a completely different letter…. the contents of which are unknown. I suppose it could be possible that this is one of the later letters that we see, which doesn’t exactly look good for Maria.
  • Also Beatrice’s new look is great.
• There’s a bit more discussion of if Kinzo had any other children… My current working theory is that today’s Beatrice is the secret daughter of Kinzo and Old Beatrice, and at some point it’s going to be shown that she has the hereditary six toes that Kinzo has…
  • They also made it clear that Kinzo’s office had enough room for her to live pretty independently…
  • Seemingly all the servants on Rokkenjima seem to have met Beatrice, which would also suggest that she’s been here before.
  • This doesn’t explain….. a lot…. but in particular things such as the doorknob burning her or most of the ‘miracles’ are still unexplained by this line of reasoning.
  • The more major one is… why does Kinzo speak of reviving Beatrice when under this theory she’s already here… unless he has deluded himself into seeing Young Beatrice as Old Beatrice’s ghost, but that seems… unlikely.
• I think it’s safe to rule out Krauss as the ultimate culprit, regardless of the above. Under the information I currently know, he really has nothing to gain from this. His hotel on Rokkenjima appears to be his best hope of getting money, but nobody is going to want to come to the mysterious unsolved murders island.
  • And in fact I’m not sure how money could be a motive for this at all… (except potentially in a mysterious secret child scenario) because everyone is presumed dead… It’s not like you could just pop up and start spending your vast fortunes when you’re supposed to be dead. And even if you faked your death I still don’t see what you have to gain.

• I love what they’re doing with this. It’s so interesting seeing the events from a slightly different starting point. I wonder if Kinzo’s beloved roulette will land on something different this time and he’ll last longer…

• I’m treating the purple swirl game board land characters as a kind of one way information barrier, for my own sanity. Under my current model, the characters in metaland are aware of what’s happening and happened to their ‘real’ counterparts but not vice versa. I think that’s the only way to make this make some tiny amount of sense.

• I’m still a little uncomfortable about George and Shannon’s relationship… there’s such a clear power dynamic, both by the age difference and servant role, and George seems… only very mildly aware of this.

• Maria’s constant abuse by Rosa is … horrible. Rosa is rapidly becoming one of my least favorite characters.