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Common Room S3E9: The Crysis of 2020
🕑 Added 2020-06-04 20:31:42 +0000 UTCWith Liz's computer out of commission again and no Witching possible, we dig into more Umineko (spoilers up through episode 5!)
Comments
caelum
also the best character in all of fiction is beatrice. erika is second
caelum
i love to be posting on extremely old episodes but i put the (janky, unsupported, fan port) android version of umineko on my tablet and it's been the coziest possible umineko experience so i fully relate to xeecee reading a book on the tv
Heatth
The "razor line" when reading EP5 of Umineko ressonate so much with me. Back when I first read, if I am remembering right, this was the latest episode released and it was infuriatingly frustrating. I didn't quite grasp what the story was trying to say so I was mostly just annoyed with the Erika nonsense, I kinda hated it. But, at the same time, I also kinda loved it? A lot of stuff still worked somehow. In particular the ending, I was still very lost on what was happening so it wasn't fully satisfying, but the emotion of the moment resonated with me anyway. Of all episodes, this is the one I had the most conflict feelings about. On the Knox' rules, I imagine you were reading the the abbreviated version (basically one line per rule). The original version had a paragraph of explanation for each and it makes a lot more sense then. Like, the 5th rule, for instance, is more about a criticism of the common racist trope of the time of having an obvious yellow peril bad guy. In basically every rule there are caveats and even examples of good books that broke it. So the rules are less a prescriptive guide to how make mysteries and more of a tool to analyses what make mysteries good. In that sense I think they hold up reasonably well. I think you can make a case Umineko follow the spirit of the rules while breaking pretty much all of them (except the 5th, which is both outdated and irrelevant for the context).
