In Things That I Was Doing This Weekend...
I finally finished the last Umineko story, Twilight of the Golden Witch.
It's really more of a very extended epilogue. Requiem of the Golden Witch went into the most of the how's and who's of the Rokkenjima incident. Twilight was more about resolving dangling plot threads with Ange and Bernkastel that were left over after Requiem.
The general theme of the story can be summed up as "Get over yourself and move on" on several levels. I'm surprised that more fans didn't take offense over the author framing obsessively speculating and debating the same facts over and over again as a mindless, destroying mass of evil that corrupts all that it touches. It's framed as more of an attack on tabloids and online conspiracy culture in the story and, arguably, the author doesn't have a good answer to counter that nebulous antagonist. The one he presents is to deny a single answer to them and therefore force them to question why they care so much about something that really won't directly impact their lives.
By the same token, I know there's fan forums with people still fighting over the details of stories. Which is strange, because the author's point really was that the truth of Rokkenjima incident didn't matter.
The story was about the two siblings who were part of a eccentric family that gained power after WWII through secret Nazi gold, clearly suffered from functional levels of mental illness, left illegitimate kids all over the place and had odd fetishes for the occult and strange parts of Western culture. And for all the mistakes that family made (and there were many - these weren't really good people), they weren't evil, soulless people. They were just a very eccentric family who made really questionable choices. In the end the search for that eccentric familiarity is what drives the siblings after the incident, but takes them both in very personal and separate directions. When they find each other again, it's not as family but as peers - they're both authors who have moved on, built their own lives and accept that the familiarity that they were looking for isn't going to be found within each other.
And I'm okay with that.
It's really more of a very extended epilogue. Requiem of the Golden Witch went into the most of the how's and who's of the Rokkenjima incident. Twilight was more about resolving dangling plot threads with Ange and Bernkastel that were left over after Requiem.
The general theme of the story can be summed up as "Get over yourself and move on" on several levels. I'm surprised that more fans didn't take offense over the author framing obsessively speculating and debating the same facts over and over again as a mindless, destroying mass of evil that corrupts all that it touches. It's framed as more of an attack on tabloids and online conspiracy culture in the story and, arguably, the author doesn't have a good answer to counter that nebulous antagonist. The one he presents is to deny a single answer to them and therefore force them to question why they care so much about something that really won't directly impact their lives.
By the same token, I know there's fan forums with people still fighting over the details of stories. Which is strange, because the author's point really was that the truth of Rokkenjima incident didn't matter.
The story was about the two siblings who were part of a eccentric family that gained power after WWII through secret Nazi gold, clearly suffered from functional levels of mental illness, left illegitimate kids all over the place and had odd fetishes for the occult and strange parts of Western culture. And for all the mistakes that family made (and there were many - these weren't really good people), they weren't evil, soulless people. They were just a very eccentric family who made really questionable choices. In the end the search for that eccentric familiarity is what drives the siblings after the incident, but takes them both in very personal and separate directions. When they find each other again, it's not as family but as peers - they're both authors who have moved on, built their own lives and accept that the familiarity that they were looking for isn't going to be found within each other.
And I'm okay with that.