umineko blog 1

Last night I finished my first foray into the world of Umineko- Legend of the Golden Witch! This blog is a way of recording my thoughts so it's not a comprehensive review and I won't be theorizing or anything like that.

Time to tuck into my morning coffee and sort my thoughts. Legend of the Golden Witch reminded me a lot of the game board setup parts of Matsuribayashi-Hen, the final novel in the Higurahi series. It seems like Ryukishi07 has grown into creating a perfect atmosphere and excels at setting up fascinating mysteries.

Legend of the Golden Witch was lean in a way Higurashi often isn't. Higurashi often has multiple scenes establishing the same concepts and suffers from an issue where it feels like the writer can't not write every moment to moment dialogue exchange or observation. In Umineko, it feels more streamlined. This is not a slight on Higurashi, which is, to me, a perfect imperfect work full of the blunders and growing pains of a writer starting on their journey.

While Umineko thus far has been a technical improvement on the methods of storytelling and game crafting in Higurashi, I do not yet find myself drawn to it in the same way. This may be unfair as Higurashi was so important to me as a teenager dealing with symptoms of a mental illness I didn't understand. Umineko is full of characters who are interesting but not loveable which means it exists in a different realm from the compassionate, emotional world of Higurashi.

However, this does not mean that Ryukishi07 has moved away from the kinds of themes and characters expressed in Higurashi. Childhood trauma is one of the pillars of Legend of the Golden Witch. It effects every character in some way, but is most obvious in Maria, the neglected girl who is refused her mother's love because she displays "creepy" neurodivergent behaviors. Her morbid special interests and "childish" stims clearly irritate her mother, Rosa, who certainly has a martyred "Autism Mommy" complex. I'll be interested to see more of this relationship, even if it is painful.

Maria was often played up for horror in Creepy Little Girl scenes, with other characters theorizing on the reasons for her behaviors. I hope that we can get more of her perspective as Ryukishi07's portrayal of neurodivergence in Higurashi was so vindicating and humanizing.

There was also a strange message at the end describing a letter that Maria supposedly wrote begging people to find out "the truth of what really happened to her," which I find mysterious as it does not match with her previous motivations. She knows the witch Beatrice killed all of them, why would she call people to action to solve the mystery when she doesn't view the events of the story as a mystery? When she laughed at Battler's attempts to play detective? Does she want the world to discover witches? Did she even write the letter? Am I off base focusing on such a random detail from the epilogue?

I think it's obvious that Maria is one of the most interesting characters to me but there were also several mean adult women, which fucking ruled.

Umineko is a different beast from Higurashi but has similar stripes and spots. I'll be interested to see what kind of story Ryukishi07 has woven this time. Ah, to catch a glimpse of the witch spinning her golden tapestry!