Umineko Episode 1: Chapters 1-3

[luciferous]

• I am assuming this scene with Kinzo actually did happen at some point. Since the game doesn't even bother specifying a time period there's no reason to think it didn't, really.


• Kinzo is never going to stop drinking, Nanjo, just give up and move on.


• Kinzo's insane ranting takes on a very different meaning here when you realize the reason he wants to see Beatrice so desperately is so she can forgive him for the horrible things he did. He says there will be no peace for him after death because he already knows he doesn't deserve to have a very nice afterlife, so his only chance of achieving peace is by something happening before he dies. This whole bit fits in very well with his scene with Yasu in Episode 7, really.

Arrival at Niijima Airport

• Battler should go hang out with Lucy from Servant x Service, they can exact vengeance upon government workers together.


• "I'd imagine a man with your looks would leave girls crying left and right." You don't even know, Eva, you don't even know.


• "George-aniki's family seems to get along just fine" ohhhh Battler.


• Ange exists for a whole 30 seconds!


• "We had some trouble making our train connection." Because beating your kid properly takes time, dammit.


• Maria is just a sweet, normal girl on the inside, really.


• ROSA IS A KIND AUNT WHO'LL ALWAYS BE ON THE KIDS' SIDE I can't even with this


• Battler I highly doubt a six-hour boat trip would've been less painful for you than a 20-minute plane ride.


• You have no idea how desperately I want Eva to actually drag Battler on a plane to Egypt, okay, they could sell tickets to that shit and make enough money to pull ALL their companies out of debt.


• George is having entirely too much fun torturing Battler with all this travel.


• Rosa isn't the kind of person who would forget or break a promise!


• And yet Rosa is the only one nice enough to actually to something to help Battler with the boat instead of just laughing at him, which is interesting.


• There is nothing on Rokkenjima except a harbor and a mansion. Nothing at all.


• Kumasawa playing up what happened to the shrine is kind of amusing when you realize she knows exactly what happened to it. Not sure if she's trying to play up Beatrice or just messing around with the cousins. Or both, it could always be both.


• Battler is actually not wrong about Maria going on about omens because of her "childish, sensitive nature"; that's the whole reason she can talk to Beatrice and has such strong magic, after all.


• I do wonder what Kumasawa was going to say about Rokkenjima before Jessica stopped her.


• Maria's behavior doesn't make a lot of sense to me in this scene; considering Maria likes black magic and ill omens and all of that, the fact that she's cheered up by reassurance the other cousins will protect her from them seems odd. It feels more like she's being used as a convenient foreshadowing device than actually doing something in keeping with her character.

Arrival at Rokkenjima

• Rosa and Kyrie discussing the upkeep of Rudolf's penis makes me laugh more than it probably should. And then Kyrie suggests cutting it off entirely and it gets awkward. (And Rudolf says it's "withered" already, which seems distressing for Kyrie...)


• Man, the music even changes when Kanon appears. HINT HINT HINT.


• Kanon is just the epitome of awkward in general here. You can attribute a lot of it to just him being unsociable, but it's fairly clear there's good bit of "Battler's back what do???" mixed in there.


• ".........No. .........Because we...... are furniture." More hinting, since it doesn't make a ton of sense for him to be including Gohda in that "we".


• I assume his relutance to say his age is being uncertain as to what age to give, rather than Battler's projected explanation.


• Jessica being so desperate to make sure everyone likes Kanon is really cute. She just wants Battler to understand how awesome he is!


• "It was the face of one who would never have thought to receive help from a guest." No, Battler, it's the face of Yasu finally seeing you again at the worst possible time and being really flustered about it.


• Constant emphasis of how small and weak Kanon is, also a hint.


• Gohda when Eva is telling you you're a dick you may want to dial it back a bit.


• "It was extremely difficult for an outside observer to guess what emotions that favor had stirred up in Kanon." UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE YEAR


• My interpretation of Kanon's "Even I........." at the end would be that Yasu specifically chose to greet Battler as Kanon because he was less likely to get flustered over it than Shannon, but then Kanon got flustered too so Yasu's just like "well fuck this really is a problem."


• "What's the head of our family's mood been lately?" "Hm...... Same as last year, I guess." Yep. Exactly the same.


• And Kinzo is "stinking up the house". And Jessica "wishes he'd never come out of that study again". Jessica's pointed comments here are amazing.


• Just a casual mention of how Kinzo used to beat his kids with swords, nothing important here.


• Battler and Maria's interrogation of George is basically the most hilarious part of this chapter.


• Hideyoshi is the only one of the adults who seems to have any idea how parenting works.


• "Do you really have to force her into becoming the successor? Women have to find their own happiness." christ Eva are you serious with this shit


• While Natsuhi is pretty mean to Shannon in this scene, at least you can chalk it up to her being stressed out about the others being so against her and how they're just going to count the servants being slow as a further strike. Eva, on the other hand, is incredibly bitchy to Shannon just as a way of jabbing at Natsuhi some more, which is obnoxiously rude.


• This is the first scene with Kanon and Shannon together, and it illustrates their positions pretty clearly: Kanon's "job", as it were, is to voice all the complaints Shannon suppresses due to her personality.


• Shannon's presence is the only one Genji actually notes when he arrives, so it's unclear how many of Kanon's comments are actually said out loud. Genji's responses work equally well regardless of whether he hears Kanon say anything or not, though, which is a nice bit of writing trickery.


• Kumasawa has several comments here about Shannon and Kanon being "not allowed" to sympathize with Natsuhi, and Natsuhi being harsh to them for reasons even she doesn't understand. HMMM...

Guesthouse

• "I'd like to point out that I don't suffer from some strange disease that makes my lymph nodes itch until I scratch my neck open..." Go go Higurashi references!


• Shannon's utter lack of resistance to Battler touching her boobs makes significantly more sense once you know what's going on; on a first read-through this part really just makes her seem like a doormat. When you realize she half wants Battler to touch her boobs and realize the truth, though, her actions are more understandable.


• Battler's comment about how Shannon doesn't match his memory because "her body had changed radically" just makes me wonder how she was presenting herself six years ago. It's unclear if she looks different because her body's actually changed noticeably, because Shannon's appearance altered after Yasu moved her love for Battler to Beatrice, because Battler just sucks at remembering, or what. The image of Shannon six years ago we see in Episode 7 is the same as usual, so it's most likely the retroactive application of how Yasu pictures Shannon now rather than an actual indication of how Shannon looked then. (Really that's true for all the personalities; it's highly likely their actual appearances are fairly different from the sprites and are portrayed this way because that's how Yasu visualizes it, so we don't have a lot of information about how distinguishable Shannon/Kanon/Beatrice actually are to the other characters.)


• Though obviously she didn't get the fake breasts until later. I'd assume Yasu picked up the big ones when she created Beatrice, but that just makes me wonder how the sizing worked before that, logistically. It would look pretty damn weird if she suddenly went from no boobs to huge ones, so there must have been intermediate sizes...


• And this whole discussion makes the comments I've seen that Yasu "didn't know about her body" until solving the epitaph look extra stupid, because how the hell would she not know?! I mean maybe she didn't know the reason for it or the extent of it, sure, but I can't see how she could have possibly gone through puberty without noticing something was off and probably freaking out about it.


• BUT BACK IN THE GAME, Battler has found the portrait and he thinks it's hot.


• I wonder if Genji's rebuking Jessica for saying Beatrice doesn't exist was intended to defend Kinzo or Yasu? Jessica certainly takes the "don't say that in front of Kinzo" request in stride, considering.


• I still wonder if Krauss and Nanjo actually stood at Kinzo's door knocking on it for this bit. Though they couldn't stimulate Kinzo's responses very well, so if anyone else got too close it would sound odd...


• "My father is already dead. ......All that's here is a phantom of what Father once was." Krauss is the best at subtlety.


• I wonder if the "sweet smell" from the absinthe Krauss mentions actually is there; it's pretty clear Genji's been in there drinking it if nothing else, and it would be good for covering up corpse smell.


• Kinzo's change in demeanor is so abrupt between the scene with Krauss and the scene with Genji that I'm going to assume the first one was Krauss's "projection" of him and the second was Genji's; obviously Genji's going to see Kinzo in a far better light than Krauss ever will. (Though, considering it was Genji's version that went on a rant about how incompetent the rest of the family is, I have to wonder what Genji really thinks about some of them...)


• The mental image of Genji getting completely sloshed in Kinzo's study all by himself remains hilarious.


• Kinzo's explanation of how magic works doesn't seem at all relevant on a first read-through, and then you go through it a second time and you realize he tells you at the very beginning exactly how Beatrice's roulette works. Goddammit Ryukishi.