boxupallthebutterflies | to beato, or not to beato

I found this VERY SPOILERY INTERVIEW and while a lot of it talks about the technical aspects of the mystery, I feel like preserving and commenting on the things that give me confirmation and vindication as a roleplayer!!!1 Which will ALSO HAVE VERY SPOILERS. Rambling about canon Beatrice vs. Aather Beatrice etc. etc.

K is KEIYA, a fan who I think published his own book with his interpretation of Umineko?? and R is Ryukishi.

K I thought about this just now when we were discussing the events in Natsuhi’s room, but would the piece Shannon really be able to kill George? That is something that really bugs me.

R While the body is Shannon, it’s worth thinking about whose body this was originally. Because in the end it is just a question of software. Even though the clothes belong to Shannon, if what’s within is another being then that person would surely be able to kill George. Clothes are not a personality. And so, even though the cloths and the hairdo might be Shannon’s, but there is the possibility that it was another person, when she started asking questions about George.

This much was pretty obvious, but it's a pretty succinct way of explaining how she views herself. And this is the way she's playing it out in Aather, since she doesn't have her disguise skill back yet!! It's the way she's ICly explaining it, too. Even though she looks the same and wears the same Peridot uniform and so on, she considers her selves separate people. Enough that she will sabotage herself under a different personality :'Da as commented on above, in casually killing George and Jessica, and also in Aather where Kanon gave out hints and information that Beatrice was trying not to share. Beatrice understands that she is taking this risk when she switches personas, since her own rules require each personality to stay consistent. It is way way more important to her that people recognize them as separate people than to preserve the interests of one or another of them :T Having them occasionally opposed to each other only proves her POINT!! Actually there's a quote on her crazy rules too:

R The real culprit created so many rules, also in connection to the murders. And there were many rules which were selfmade and also restricting.

THAT IS... pretty much how it goes for Beatrice. She is pretty twisted, but everything she does is pretty orderly and systematic and calculated according to very clear internal guidelines, even if she isn't always open about what those guidelines are. It results in her painting herself into corners where there should not even be corners though :( I think she is starting to run into this kind of thing in Aather, as she remembers more and more of her own rules and her hands become tied... In a way, in switching her purpose to focusing on Peridot, she fabricated a new personality with new rules, in order to subvert her own restrictions. This feels like cheating and being dishonest to herself though and because of this she has a lot of Feelings on the subject that she finds it hard to tell people since she doesn't want to give away that much about herself. For example she got back her love for Battler pretty early on, with no context whatsoever except for the fact that she was in unrequited love and it sucked, and immediately went "This is awful, I would fall out of love with him if I could. I think I'm just going to try to forget about him and move on." In a way she views Aather as a paradise, a Golden Land where she can be fulfilled and find happiness and start anew. Then a lot later she gets an EP6 memory that tells her explicitly that Beatrice was made to carry that burden and it's already been passed around and there's not really anyone to pass it onto. I guess... that is what her problem is :|a "Should I abandon the old Beatrice and let her continue to carry her burdens while I do whatever the fuck I want, or must I keep true to that in order to stay consistent as Beatrice? Should I become someone entirely different??" For most people this would not be that big of a deal but you know...

K And it’s definitely a fact that Shannon has some conflicts within herself.

R And I think it is plenty possible to arrive at the solution, that George’s idea of their life after marriage pained her quite much.

K To have many children in a happy home…

R „I want to spend my future surrounded by many grandchildren!“, said George recklessly, already cementing a future with children. But it’s his desire to have children, right?! And I think you can guess that this put a lot of pressure on her.

K Yasu said in EP7 that she has „a body that is unable to love“.

R If you take this expression as a basis, you can imagine her sad fate of a having some kind of imperfection on a sexual level. I think it’s possible to get to that point.

K At first I was thinking that it was maybe a terrible wound that chained Yasu to the bed. But that does not seem to be the case at all.

R It is a pretty adult topic, so I had to obscure it’s depiction.

K Because there were expressions like „I hate it to even look at a mirror“ [...]

---

R [...] How scary must it be, to be told that your partner „wants children“, when you have a body that cannot make love. That’s why Shannon couldn’t speak honestly. Because she thought she would be hated if she were honest. [...] his comment about children, must have kept haunting her in silence.

K Then I think it is also a clue that nothing happened between them, while they were staying at the same place in Okinawa.

R It is a clue. To just blurt it out spontaneously was more than Shannon was ready for. „I will reveal it sometime“. Because she was so scared of herself, she couldn’t confess. If it had been because of one action that George took, she wouldn’t have had any choice, that was the balance of passivity she upheld. While she did not hide it actively, she also wouldn’t talk about it openly. Because of that thinking, going on that trip to Okinawa was an experience to her like being a carp on a high slope, „He prepared separate rooms for us *twitch*?“ *laugh*. That knightly George came all the way to Okinawa only to dare and prepare separate rooms? Shannon must have been like „What?!“. But there are many scenes like that which show how Shannon left the decision to fate. [...] if Battler had actually squeezed Shannon’s breasts, he might have noticed that they are fake. Shannon was in a state of mind that said „if it comes to light, let it“.

Have I actually explicitly essayed on Yasu's sex/gender outside of my app...?! IDK but. I AM SO GLAD THAT I MANAGED TO DODGE BEING CONTRADICTED... anyway. From those quotes I hope you will agree that it is not a stretch to interpret her as having been born physically male, who then suffered the loss of those reproductive organs during her accident in infancy. I don't actually know all of the medical repercussions of something like that and I have tried to Google it a few times but it is a RATHER FINICKY THING TO GOOGLE since it is not every day that babies fall off of cliffs and lose their genitalia and then survive into adulthood so you can see the effects that that would have on them physically and so on. So uh... yeah. I ascribe some of her androgyny and frailty to that loss of testosterone? But Lion also is rather androgynous despite NOT falling off a cliff, so some of it is just... natural... and well, that was also for narrative purposes to conceal the truth I think. IN PART. I still see Lion as MtF but :X Lion and Beatrice are different characters despite being from the same source and I'd like someone to app Lion sometime and they should get a say in interpretation too...

Innnnn Aather, again thanks to her lack of disguise skill, she is not putting effort into appearing female. She is not putting effort into appearing male either! Going off the above kind of thing, the passivity and "leave it to fate" attitude, she is just letting people assume what they will about her. And it doesn't affect her identity that much, since her official stance is that this isn't her body (which is SORT OF true-ish in Yasulogic World, seeing as Yasu and Beatrice are separate) and if someone asked her flat out, she would confirm that this body is gender-neutral. But she still won't let anyone see her undressed, and she always wears her jacket to make it less obvious, and she is very very antsy about people touching her too intimately. I guess partially it's because Beatrice is way less passive than Shannon? Shannon is okay being self-effacing, but Beatrice generally has strong opinions about things. So she's... really awkward about how to deal with her Feelings on this issue too. Beato really loves being a woman and identifying that way (there's that quote where Kinzo refers to her as the "king" in chess and she's like "haha at least call me queen :V") and does enjoy being sexual and stuff which is at conflict with her physical identity as something that she considers cannot physically be a sexual being. Also this is partly why Sharon got on her bad side really quick; she kept going on about what a "lady" should be like, and Beatrice has a hair-trigger reaction to that as denial of her own identity :|!! Mukuro did it too in a thread once. IF PEOPLE IMPLY THAT SHE IS NOT A LADY. She gets kinda :E or anxious or both. It's something that she didn't have to worry about in canon so much since "Beatrice" mostly appeared in a meta-context where she did have her more ideal body. Eventually somehow someone in Aather will probably expose her situation but it hasn't happened yet... It might take a heart game sometime in the future.

R I have this feeling that most of the people who arrived at the truth were women, because the key is being able to imagine Yasu’s feelings. Umineko is something that cannot be read by people who never fell in love with somebody. It is something that people who have no experience in love and relationships have trouble understanding. „Love can become a motive that has more power over you than life or death“, that is something which is pretty hard to explain to people without this experience. Most of them will think that it’s just „an overdone motive“. But for people who have known love and experienced how much it can make you suffer, they understand that love can turn your world upside down. If you are told „I will come for you again!“ and for 6 years there is nothing, it can make you go crazy, but people who have even slightly suffered due to love will say „those 6 years must have been hell“. But people who no nothing of that pain will probably wait for nothing less than a dramatic gadget to appear, like the heroic story of „at age X her mother and father were brutally murdered“.

[...]

K Love is really a sufficient motive even for murder, isn’t it?!

R And I think people who do not know that, will sadly never understand Umineko. Because Umineko is „the story of a single girl who arrived at that point because she imagined an incident because of the love and madness in herself“, no matter how much I express that, people who don’t share that feeling will never do so. If I had to compare it, it’s similar to a kick in the crotch or menstrual pain. No matter how much more I pile up on my writing by explaining it, it won’t reach the people who don’t know the feeling.

sssssssob. This is kind of why Beatrice feels like... idk. IN AATHER there are normal people with morals who think killing people is always wrong. And she doesn't belong there; she's too crazy for that. And then there is like the No-Feelings Sociopath Club. She doesn't belong there either, because she is ridiculously emotional, she is motivated entirely by the strength and weight of her feelings. So she's like... :|;;; MY LIFE JUST SUCKS??? ngl on some level, she is legitimately afraid of sociopaths that show no signs of love, because she can't even imagine what kind of weaknesses someone like that could have, or how their motivations work, how they might act or what they might do. Despite being crazy and destructive she shares a normal person's aversion to people that are heartless. In her opinion they're like... INVINCIBLE. And she tries to not let this show but sometimes she's just like "gosh I will always lose in this fight because I actually care about people." Then again given the memories that she currently has, caring for people is somewhat the GREAT FAILURE OF HER LIFE. There's a definite trend of "if I never had feelings for anyone, my life would have turned out okay." I ONLY SUFFER BECAUSE I LOVE etc. The sole thing acting as a counterweight to that for the Beatrice personality specifically is the EP3 memory where she tries to be a good witch. And she has weird mixed feelings on that now since she figured out that she probably changed her mind back away from that. So thanks to that she is pretty bitter and cynical about romance, even more than she is in canon. This is also why her reaction to Peridot + romance is a big (UNSURE)!!

K Will called that walking on a tightrope.

R And it really was just that. She had no intention to create the perfect crime from the very beginning. And that is how, even without turning the chessboard over, we return to the question „Why did the culprit send a letter announcing the incident?“. If somebody wanted to commit the perfect crime, it would have been better not to send an announcement and to murder everyone in their sleep. In the end it shows that the culprit had the internal longing to be discovered.

K No matter how you look at it, it seems like she was already accepting death. Both the letters before the incident and the message bottles seemed very much like a will.

R While there was enough desperation to actually carry out the incident, there was also the wish for somebody to stop her. Many criminals sending out announcements of their crimes might actually be screaming „Somebody, please stop me!“. Even though of course they can not be forgiven.

K That is why she painted herself as the sole culprit and wanted for Battler to solve it, right?!

R Yes. In the end, concerning those two who had a bond through mystery fiction, wether it was „I will construct those mysteries with all my might“ or „I will fight those mysteries with all my might!“, as long as they didn’t trust each other, they wouldn’t be able to do it.

Hahhh I love Beatrice. LIKE SO she tries so hard to be seen as evil when really all she wants is to be understood. :x It's the paradox of wanting to be understood and yet thinking that people won't love her if they truly understand her! As long as she preserves herself she can always imagine that people would love her or hate her or whatever but if she is exposed then THE MOMENT OF TRUTH HAS COME. Schrödinger's Cat is a recurring theme for multiple reasons and THIS IS ONE OF THEM. Anyway that's why she puts up a fight and tries to get people to work hard to understand her, so that you can only reach the truth if you are honestly searching for it.

R For Kinzô, Beatrice is a human being which might truly still exist in his world, not a witch. What turned Beatrice into a witch was not him, but rather the ghost stories told about her. It were Kumasawa and Shannon who turned her into a witch. If you exclude the fantastic depiction of her, then Kinzô’s Beatrice is just pointing to a human who might be his daughter. And when he talks about „his most beloved Beatrice“ he means his lover and not any kind of witch. That is why the magical charms are just magical charms to Kinzô, but within Shannon it was already incorporated into the setting that „the witch is weak towards magical charms“. That is why for Shannon it becomes „Though you are ‘my most beloved Beatrice’ you cannot enter my study“.

[...]

K So to Kinzô the magical charms held no special meaning?

R For Kinzô himself they had no special value, but they were extremely important for Shannon. That is why it was always such a trouble, but important, to lure the people out who were shutting themselves up in Kinzô’s study. Because in Shannon’s way of thinking it was clear that „if murder was to occur in this mansion, the safest place to lock oneself in would be the study“. That is why she thought up so many different tricks to lure people out of the study. If you just try it once you will understand it, but a story about a serial murder becomes difficult to write once all the surviving characters lock themselves up in a safe place.

K Because you cannot destroy that safe haven.

R To destroy that, the golden phrase, „You are in such a place? I will make you return to your room“ is really important *laugh*.

...I'm getting lazy so I'm just copypasting this to express Yasu's way of thinking more :V EVERYTHING IS WITCHES AND MAGIC

K [...] Bernkastel said at the end of EP1, that Beatrice „does not limit herself to being one woman“.

R That is one of the hints that Bernkastel gave. Yes. Because in the end it’s not like you can’t call her an assembly of multiple personalities. And she is also a construction, recreated several times in the form of the ghost stories or the Beatrice legend.

K But there were also several scenes hinting towards Shannon. So it’s not wrong to see her as just one girl in one body as well. Especially in the scenes depicting events before the incident.

AND THIS. Beatrice has multiple sides and personalities! And there are multiple people who have taken the name "Beatrice!" Even though the first name she remembered was Beatrice and she learned that very early on, she had no idea at the time how vague and expansive both herself and Beatrice as a concept really were. In trying to preserve Peridot as a concept she is also trying to create something similar. If one were to give a name to her Aather personality it really might just be "Peridot" :x because that's who she's trying to be.

K The last question. In your story the word furniture came up quite often. The scene where Yasu started the selfapplication of that definition was also shown within the story, but it’s not only Kanon and Shannon, even Genji calls himself furniture. Does it imply knowing the truth? Or is it some kind of concept administered by Kinzo himself, where everyone has to pretend to be furniture? How is that?

R I a book I can’t seem to recall there was this line that „Servants have to be like furniture“. And I thought, „wouldn’t it be fascinating if servants would not just call themselves furniture but become them and thus completely devoid of humanity?“. Beyond that there is the attitude pointed at by the word furniture, as it can be understand as Shannon being seen as something less than human. This is because she likened herself to something inhuman because of her body, unable to love, and that is why she sarcastically called herself furniture. I assume the term furniture must have created several images.

K There were also many magical scenes depicting Kanon and Genji as doing spy work. It really relates to the stealth work as a servant.

R Maybe that is Shannon’s view of their image as „being always present but cloaking their presence“ *laugh*. But it doesn’t lead anywhere when I say too much.

- Shannon often imagined things excessively, didn’t she?!

R The first and most powerful spectator of this world is Shannon. This also counts for the worldview as well. So whatever Shannon sees or hears, what she thinks of it starts deforming her view of the world. For example the fact that Beatrice cannot enter Kinzô’s study is something that Shannon added to the setting. What Shannon had heard from Kumasawa about evil spirits and witches, as well as the ghost stories whispered among the servants, mixed together and became the basis of her beliefs.

K Many of the things appearing in the story are a reflection of the heart, aren’t they?! Someones filter has been set over everything.

omg I really am becoming lazy but actually this was just supposed to be copypasta of relevant quotes from the beginning I just accidentally rambled on top of it...

OKAY THAT'S IT THOUGH. THE END OF MY RAMBLING!!! Mostly I'm just like "awww yeahhhh interpretation mostly supported by longass interview!!"

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