Live-reviewing Umineko: When They Cry
Progress: End of Umineko Episode 6 + Tea Rooms
In many ways, this is where the fun begins when writing about such a long story. Once one finds their feet and runs past the point where they feel the need to blindly theorise, a wholistic view of a piece of media becomes more and more clear. Indeed, my progress on Umineko has surpassed the point where it is just live-blogging anymore. Instead, I am far enough along that I am able to start offering first impressions on a complete product.
However, this completeness contributes to the awkward feeling which saturates this stretch of episodes. Since we are long past the point where it would be appropriate to pose brand new mysteries, all of the events we see in EP5 and EP6 must elucidate old questions without being so blatant as to steal all of the thunder from the big reveals to come in EP7 and EP8. In this respect, these two episodes failed more than one would hope for. They suffered from the slow pace of a story that was deliberately trying not to go too fast, but still blew their load far too quickly.
No example shows this more clearly than how Kanon was handled in EP6. Throughout the Trials of Love subplot, the genre savvy reader should be increasingly convinced that Kanon and Shannon are in fact the same person. Two facts are established clearly through the Trials of Love: Firstly, magic cannot surpass what is physically possible. Secondly, magic cannot change the fact that Shannon and Kanon must live together. Therefore, Shannon and Kanon must physically live together for reasons beyond social obligations, and without any purely magical or fantastical justification. QED, Shannon and Kanon are physically attached. Once you notice that an objective perspective has never shown Shannon and Kanon in the same room, it is not hard to do the rest of the working out yourself.
Regardless of the fact that I have plenty of criticisms to level at how cheaply under-foreshadowed this trick is, it does make one notice many things about Kanon’s role in EP6. As soon as Erika segments everyone between the two rooms of the guesthouse, and then we see that Shannon is shown in the second room through the objective/players perspective of Erika, it becomes a trivial deduction to realise that Kanon is not actually in the cousin’s room. Therefore, once it becomes evident that Battler is actually heading towards a logic error, it takes a savvy reader about two seconds to comprehend that the false figment of Kanon provides an ultimate trump card that allows Battler an incontrovertible escape from this situation.
Therefore, the plot flow of everything between Erika’s sealing of the two rooms and Battler’s eventual escape from the logic error becomes an exercise in extreme filler: Battler was never in a real logic error for any reader who reached the same truth that Battler knows, which makes it nothing if not bizarre watching the characters act like they don’t know things that they do know. Canonically speaking, it should have been obvious to all who know the truth (Battler, Beato, and Lambda) that the logic error could easily be overcome. Indeed, it might well be a full on plot hole that the Red Truth was even able to declare that Kanon was sealed within the two rooms, and thereby trap Battler in the first place, because Kanon was never in either room in the guesthouse.
This is where the rubber meets of the road in terms of Umineko’s most direct and tangible shortcomings: The best mystery stories offer a high level of autonomy and agency to the reader; regardless of whether they solve the mystery or not, and whether it is the first read or a reread, the story is equally consistent and tightly constructed. The perspective the audience brings into the story simply decides which window into different layers of the narrative they will view it through. This layering of narratives between the perceived world and the actual world is an essential component of good mystery construction. In contrast, while Umineko is not completely incompetent in this regard, it is definitely more railroaded and forceful with its construction than its superior ilk. Sometimes, it is straight out antagonistic to any reading which is not that of an utterly baffled first-timer.
The more aware of the solution to the mystery that one is, the more that the flow of the plot seems willing to make use of contrivances and conveniences which strain credulity. Throughout the Kanon swapping with Battler resolution to the logic error, a simple question was never properly addressed in my mind: Why did Kanon swap with Battler, and then swap into Shannon within the closet — from the perspective of a piece that does not know that it needs to adhere to particular Red Truths? Regardless of whether such an action is permissible within the rules of the witch’s game, it is still a naked contrivance for the benefit of the author and to the detriment of the consistency of the characters. Such a criticism can be repeated for any of the multitude of actions taken throughout this story which have been, seemingly, carried out with the primary intention of fooling the audience and the “players” instead of other pieces. Such moments are akin to when a monster jumps into frame in a horror movie for the benefit of the camera, without any good reason within in regards to the creature’s internal logic. Indeed, it becomes conspicuous how Erika asked Battler to state the Red Truth that “everyone else” was in the cousin’s room instead of individually naming each character supposedly inside, which Battler would have had to decline to repeat on account of Kanon’s absence.
Naturally, it would be appropriate to argue at this point that such a criticism is overblown since Umineko spends a great deal of time demonstrating the mechanics of the witch’s game in EP6, and we learn how the game master can exert control over pieces in order to craft a mystery that fools the players. How can I call something a contrivance if it is so adequately explained by canon logic? Unfortunately for Umineko’s strongest defenders, this line of argumentation is nothing but Thermian arguments all the way down. (The Thermian argument being the temptation to defend poor writing decisions on the basis that they have consistent and canon justifications. To explain briefly, since canon is controlled by the author, they can arrange consistent backstory to explain contrivances to fit in-universe rules, even if that contrivance has a negative impact on the quality of the story.)
While there is more to be said about this subject, I do feel bad about only saying negative things so far. Let’s leave that aside for the moment and talk about some good things, and then we’ll return for the real analytical breakdown on Umineko in final post-EP8 review.
And Then There Were Verfremdungseffekt
Agatha Christie’s masterpiece thriller cum whodunit And Then There Were None has been the envy of mystery writers everywhere since the moment it hit the shelves. Its elegant structure that seemed to capture precisely what readers wanted from the genre enticed the minds of all who came afterwards, and tempted them towards the path of perfecting it: After all, And Then There Were None is an imperfect novel that was still exceedingly compelling. If a writer could capture the balance and elegance of that novel whilst modernising and perfecting it, they would invariably create a masterpiece of the same level.
This has always been a particular fascination of the Japanese shinhonkaku movement. One could very easily argue that the beginnings of the movement was an attempt by more formalist Japanese authors to construct a more strict puzzle box rendition of And Then There Were None, which itself lacked the complex locked-rooms and narrative tricks beloved by these authors. Yukito Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders was a deliberate inversion of And Then There Were None’s broad strokes, and was the launching point of the movement. Alice Arisugawa’s The Moai Island Puzzle, Hiroshi Mori’s The Perfect Insider, and Nisio, Isin’s Decapitation: Kubikiri Cycle were all similarly modern attempts at reviving the And Then There Were None premise with their own particular sensibilities.
It is in this context that Umineko: When They Cry declared its intentions loud and clear with its own premise. In EP1, we experienced the most complete recreation of the And Then There Were None experience out of any of these examples. Like the Christie classic, mystery solving gives way to terror as time drags onward without any answers coming forward, and everyone eventually dies before the mystery is revealed. However, savvy Christie readers will not be worried by this fact, as Christie’s own mystery was not revealed until the message in a bottle epilogue that explains the crime. However, in Umineko’s case, the message in the bottle represents a sudden and complete deviation from this formula. Instead of inviting the return of reality to our mystified minds, the message in the bottle epilogue of Umineko EP1 tells the audience that the murders were all committed by a witch using magic, and that mystery should give way to fantasy.
From this point onwards, Umineko refuses to present a straightforward mystery plot ever again, every episode shows magical happenings and events that defy honest deduction. This is not, as it may be misunderstood, an attempt at subversion, but instead defamiliarisation. Defamiliarisation refers to the process by which poetic texts invite complex understandings that cannot be expressed using literal language. It does so by estranging the audience from attempts to relate to art using their own experiences. It is related to the German concept of verfremdungseffekt, otherwise known as the distancing effect.
Umineko is not anti-mystery in the classically understood sense of subversive mysteries, but instead the defamiliarisation of the mystery structure, by way of presenting the investigative process using poetic rather than practical (or prosaic) literary forms. Of course, Umineko is not actually written in verse like a conventional poem. However, it repeatedly uses metaphorical framing devices to suggest ideas to the audience indirectly, rather than allowing the audience to experience a literal investigation with literal clues. In doing so, it does to the structure of mystery novels what romantic poetry does to the prosaic style love letter. In other words, it cannot be seen without love.
Leaving aside discussion of whether this style of theming and structure “works” for a later date (spoiler alert: it doesn’t fall on its face, but it falls far short of its ambitions of being 1st rate), this is a genuinely innovative approach to mystery structure. Novelty has a certain value for its own sake; whether you love or hate it, there’s nothing quite like Umineko. (This is more than I can say for Higurashi, which is surpassed in almost every way by other contemporaries.) To be clear, Ryukishi07 likely did not understand or intend the formalist concepts he was emulating, as he still describes these parts of Umineko as an attempt at anti-mystery.
However, even as I was being aggressively positive, there’s still criticisms to be made of this approach. If defamiliarisation is Umineko’s greatest weapon, it is also its Achilles’ heel. In pursuit of this poetic mystery structure, Umineko falls prey to the temptation of a devastatingly luxurious sense of pacing. It dives into bizarrely overlong story tangents with shocking enthusiasm, to the point where whole segments of the story can take on the feeling of being a filler segment. For example, it is no coincidence that EP5 was barely mentioned in the entirety of this post.
It has been said that poetry’s strength is its unique ability to say something profound with fewer words than is conventionally required to say it. However, Umineko has exactly the opposite character to its use of metaphor. Long combat scenes, pseudo-literal backstory segments, and figurative representations of character actions (such as the Trial of Love) often grind the forward momentum of the story to a halt. This is done in order to explore Ryukishi07’s fascination with mixing mystery and fantasy tropes together, only for the scene to drag on for twenty or thirty minutes longer than was necessary to impart the important information we are left with at the end of such scenes.
Anyway, as for the live-blogging portion of experiencing Umineko, this might well be the end of that process. It is unclear if EP7 will get its own post, and once EP8 is complete it will be time to start looking at When They Cry as a whole for a monstrous finale post on both of Ryukishi’s mysteries combined. I have deliberately left many things unsaid until that point since I am sure such points will benefit from the privilege of a complete viewpoint on the whole work. So, for now, this is bon voyage to Umineko talk. Have a nice day. See you again.
