RD commentary: うみねこのなく頃に (Q618)
Content warnings
- Umineko spoilers
- Umineko is a relatively linear story that is best experienced without spoilers (or very minimal spoilers). There may be full spoilers on this page.
- Once I'm done with this page, I'll hide its contents in a revision link so it isn't as easy to accidentally see spoilers.
I have been told that spoilers matter for this thing. I'm taking that semi-seriously; I saw a couple things about it in a review, but I do not know much right now.
don't read this file unless you have at least watched a video playlist of the game.
hmm... the kanji are way too hard to read on this screen. and none of this line is being read. I think I am looking at the english playlist first and coming back to the Japanese text for reference. the Japanese voice acting may be enough to put things into context.
we've got. a mansion.
the house doctor?
this conversation about Ushiromiya dying from alcohol feels... irrelevant. it's here to be interrupted isn't it
or maybe we're setting up a theme of denial.
> as though it melted the soul
they're playing a chess game each time. so, the theme is that this man's life is an antagonism? between the two players? but what are the sides?
Ushiromiya is gross about his control over the mansion. that's pretty funny. so... what does he want to do instead of write a will?
oh man he's pulling a Dinesh D'Souza. yeah, the mood is set here
not one thing to tell people or leave behind! - oh really. that must be the big thing he's wrong about
"I created everything" - this means something else. like... the entire world he lives in? who knows.
- no tomb, no coffin! those were the witch's terms!
Ushiromiya is annoyed at the butler for not understanding that the contract is actually contradictory with the concept of a will, entirely
it's possible I can guess some of this story having seen Touhou stuff and Deltarune but, no, there's definitely a lot of uncertainty left here, there are definitely going to be things for me to find that haven't been spoiled. I'm excited.
- show yourself to me, Beatrice, before I disappear to the demons
is Beatrice... the witch?
- Beatrice is hidden watching everything. wow, that's familiar
October 4th, 1986 - the first day
another ushiromiya bragging about starting from nothing
and a consistent pattern of them having odd names.
- Grandfather's own name is perfectly normal
- keep her away from the head household
- I have no dreams for the future
why is Maria's name spelled like it refers to reality somehow. the other names are kind of normal, spelled in arbitrary kanji. but this one is not.
Episode 1: Legend of the Golden Witch
- the island wasn't on any map. only the Ushiromiya family came here
- maria frightened by missing torii and cloudy sky
- missing seagulls.
- the plane will fall over, the boat will fall over.
- the wheelbarrow fell over.
it took me a bit to fully catch this. this is a weird word. it can mean to fall off or to crumble inward depending on what it's used for. I guess you could compare it to the English phrase "fall in": you'd say that at the railing of a boat, although you'd say it about the ocean rather than the boat.
Battler picks up the bags before the servant, wanting to be normal. or at least as normal as capitalists are, anyway — there has been ample setup here that George's uncle building up a corporation is what the main characters consider normal. there is some very evident subtext in this first stretch of the story that it might be based on the concept of the aristocracy vanishing or fading into obscurity and giving way to capitalism, but making that weirdly literal. which I love; fiction is great for its ability to create surreal scenarios.
- grandpa still has three months.
- shattered glass moment.
ok I really do not understand the Battler and breasts thing. it doesn't even really make sense as a character trait. when the characters were going on saying dumb things about men and women at the beginning... okay. it's like, you have to set up what the characters think is normal, even if it's a little concerning, even if it's one of those moments of 'are straight people okay?'. when the characters establish that that's what their normal is like, the character designs being rather stylized and having these conspicuous breast shapes to where the silhouettes look a bit weird just feels like it embodies the setting's culture, even if that culture is tacky. if there's the tiniest bit of irony in it, it flies. I really could have overlooked all of it until this moment where it didn't even make sense. that said...
> we are furniture
- Battler questions the deep subservience of the servants and implicitly raises question of whether they're real or actually fabricated
is... ralsei a maid joke, like, actually?
> haven't these people ever heard of a kotatsu?
second big subtext: when everything is 'European-style' including people's names it makes everything seem inherently more fake when you're from Japan and you put yourself in these characters' places for a second. there is this inherent bias for native Japanese speakers to think for a second that a 'Western-style' building "isn't real" and "was suddenly made up" even though they'll quickly realize that isn't literally true and those kinds of things can exist in Japan.
Toby Fox managed to get across the same feeling with Flowery by making this character that because he first reads as a contrived character and then is inappropriately Japanese it makes him feel more fake. oddly, I wouldn't say the same thing applies to the summer festival / castle world, that feels pretty like a pretty "authentic" depiction of Deltarune's version of Japan in comparison to the flower people.
- Beatrice, the witch hidden in the darkness of the forest
- Grandfather ordered a painting of the witch
- Jessica: that portrait is the symptom of his delusions
- Grandfather (Kinzo) is deep into divination through oldtimey drinks.v
absinthe? if I don't have the wrong noun in mind I watched a video where somebody tried to make that with alchemy equipment. it was a rare and expensive thing at the time, and maybe even a bit in the 1980s, no wonder this man is giving it a try
* what you first see in this room is 'alchemy'. what you see second is 'occult' and demons. what you see third is that all of it is European at the same time as being those things.
Grandfather says a bunch of stuff about the family members. I see why there had to be such a long section introducing them, so it could actually be established that everything he says is questionable.
- nobody is fit to succeed me!!
- Grandfather: a risky situation generates the greatest magical power, risk is given to those with power
- Ushiromiya family used to own spinning mills. in 1923 it lost its wealth. Kinzo entrusted to rebuild it
- Kinzo took a big bet, but it is believed the United States occupiers protected him
- during the Korean War he carefully profited from the emergency measures
- he marked out the island under a government program but refused to give it back, and got to keep it
wow. there is a weird amount of history in this
- once he had restored the family's wealth he started the phase of investing in businesses and getting more
- George thinks there is a family legend where the epitaph on Beatrice's portrait leads to buried treasure
I'm laughing. this is a misdirect, isn't it??
- Grandfather did a demon-summoning ceremony, and Beatrice appeared. not ominous at all.
- he said he got the money for his bet in exchange for his soul, though nobody believed him
okay. so like, the reason the Ushiromiya family had to keep earning more money was the starter pile of gold wasn't quite "real". then they rationalize what happened as being all about their own abilities, because from what we're told it wasn't not. so... did Kinzo slowly defraud those people? like, the gold behaves like it's real but it's still going to disappear as far as I know. it's just very advanced counterfeiting in a way
- we thought Grandfather challenged us to a battle of wits
here we go, this is the chessboard. it's Grandfather trying to get more (the witch) without giving anything away, while the family looks for the witch too to try to find the gold
characters discuss the utility of gold bars versus storing wealth in stocks (corporations) or bonds (the government) for an amusingly long time. this is so not what I expected this story to be about before I started reading it but okay. this is fine.
- the rich family's old wrinkled wife?
- beatrice doesn't exist outside this picture
- Rudolf: the president of Marusō corporation brought one of the gold ingots to be examined, and it was 99.99% pure.
- Krauss: it was just an illusion of money
- Rosa, don't tell me you believe this man's lies
- Krauss how are you getting money if you haven't found the gold bars
- fourth condition: sell the gold and distribute the money
well that's impossible
- [S] dark silver rule: if you have not done right unto others I will not do right unto you
- Hideyoshi's company, an owner of restaurants, went public, and its rivals are trying to take it over from the inside
implication: companies are WASP swarms from the beginning with an alliance between "founding" owners and swarms of shareholders that construct together into a stable, expanding pool of wealth
like many things in here the characters' view may be a little optimistic or simplistic. but, if they are even partially right... wow, that's disgusting. it starts to show you how co-op theory is outright connected to existing forms of class society which have an imperialist shape to them, however accidentally. a neocolonial or "micro-" imperialist shape. it's common for people to now act like a network of co-ops is safe or a network of donations going to some particular trunk is safe, but it all resembles a prototypical corporation, it all resembles the East India Company that expanded over India to loot everything in it, and then set up an army and a government. [1]
so this is why I sometimes feel like teaching people narratives is more effective than teaching them philosophy. the East India Company was a complicated period of history and you need a superficially-neutral narrative to delve into it and see what's going on. likewise, a superficially-neutral narrative like Umineko can give a very lucid picture of what a corporation is
Legend
>: direct quote-: statement directly in text*: comment[S]: abstract theme directly in text(no mark): comment