[CN: Discussion of physical and emotional abuse.]

A disclaimer: These are my OPINIONS. They are not objective fact. It's an opinionated essay for a reason.

I own nothing.

"…Ronove, did you see their game?"

"Just a part of it."

"How was it?"

Ronove lifted the pot high with an elegant gesture as he poured the black tea. After finishing that, he finally said one thing. He let us hear his impression of it.

"It did not… have love."

"…What do you mean, love?"

"My apologies. That's how it would be put if a woman were to say it. …As a man, …perhaps one could say it was dishonorable."

—Ushiromiya Battler and Ronove, End of the Golden Witch

I've got some things to say about Ronove's comment. First, I'm not really in agreement that "It did not have love" is particularly how a woman, any woman, would say it. I don't really expect gender equity from a demon butler, but it still irks me (Though I'm also pleased that the first thing that comes to mind for Ronove is to phrase something "how someone else would say it."). Moreover, I have another opinion of who might be saying this.

Let's back up a little bit, and explain.

Those of you who play Umineko no naku koro ni (most of the readers, probably), and have gotten through End of the Golden Witch probably know the context for this conversation. But for those of you who don't play the game, or haven't gotten as far as End yet, and are reading this despite the spoiler warnings, this is the conversation that Ronove and Battler have when the former comes to inform Battler exactly what Lambdadelta and Bernkastel, in Beatrice's absence, are doing with her gameboard. Ronove got a look at what Lambdadelta, the game master when Beatrice is permanently incapacitated, and Bernkastel, acting as the player seeking to disprove the Illusion of the Witch in Battler's absence, were doing, and though he is diplomatic, one gets the impression that he didn't like it at all, hence the comments above.

Once again, Ronove says that "It did not have love" would be how a woman would put what Lambdadelta and Bernkastel are doing. However, I have another opinion. I think that "It did not have love" is how a writer might say it.

Something Beatrice often says about magic is that "Without love, it can not be seen." In Alliance of the Golden Witch, Ange goes a bit further when says that "Without love, without sadness, without anger, it can not be seen." This is how they approach magic, and here is my personal interpretation of these phrases. The first phrase seems to indicate that without love for another person, more specifically, without being able to empathize with them, you can not see the world through their eyes, and thus anything they claim as magic, you will only ever be able to see as a trick. Ange's phrase elaborates on this: You must not only be able to empathize with a person, but be able to feel anger and sadness on their behalves, before you can see the world through their eyes, and understand their own magic.

"But I don't believe. If she wanted to steal the ring, there were probably many ways for her to do so, and no one knows whether her relationship with her family was really good. It's impossible to prove that the tears at the funeral were the real thing.

"…Anyways, I hated Eva oba-san from the very beginning. So I don't plan on believing her story."

"Hah-hah-hah-ha… How does one view the truth of the crime? You and I are on completely opposing sides. Even though the information we are given is exactly the same, we interpret it in completely different ways.

"…This kind of thing often happens in politics and economics. The exact same enterprise will surely have differing criticism. Do you know why?"

"…Why?"

"It's about whether you have love. …Depending on whether you feel love for the other side, the way you see things is completely different. If a person you like gives to the poor, you can respect them, right? But if someone you hate starts donating, you fiercely protest that it's a publicity stunt or that they're handing out favors. No matter what they do or don't do, you thank them if you have love and criticize them if you don't. That's how the world works."

"Can Eva oba-san be believed or can't she… …You're saying that's the only difference?"

"Those who suspect her will probably take anything she does or doesn't do and view it as truly unnatural. And it works in reverse. …As for me, I think that perhaps, except in extreme cases, truth in this world doesn't exist. No, even if truth does exist, whether you believe it or not is determined by whether you have love or not. …Can you really call truth without certainty truth. Even if Eva-san had been able to show concrete proof, would you have been able to believe it?"

"…"

—Ushiromiya Ange and Okonogi Tetsuro, Alliance of the Golden Witch

Let's provide some context for this, as well. In Alliance of the Golden Witch, Ushiromiya Ange, Battler's little sister and the sole survivor of the Ushiromiya family now that her aunt Eva has passed away, is meeting with Okonogi, a business associate of her late aunt's. They discuss whether Eva committed the mass murder of Ange's family twelve years ago (which Ange, who was six at the time, was spared because she was ill, and hadn't gone with her family to the family home of the island Rokkenjima for their yearly conference) or not. Ange and Eva's relationship was, in a word, horrible. Eva was devastated by the loss of her husband and her son in the massacre, just as Ange was devastated by the loss of her parents and older brother. It was circulated in the media that Eva was the killer, an assertion that was widely believed thanks to her being the sole survivor and turning up in a suspicious place when the police found her. Ange believed this too, and deeply resented her aunt. Eva, in turn, was emotionally and physically abusive towards her.

As a result, Ange, now eighteen years old, (justifiably) has no sympathy for her aunt whatsoever. She believes that Eva was the killer, and nothing can sway her from this opinion. Okonogi, on the other hand, believes that Eva was innocent, and lays out three reasons why he thinks so. One: Eva had the ring of the head of the Ushiromiya family, which signifies that her father Kinzo had recognized her as the true successor to the Ushiromiya family over her older brother, and had led her to the place where she was found, a mansion on the other side of the island that was hidden from the outside world. Two: Eva's husband Hideyoshi and her son, George, were both killed as well. She loved them both deeply; if she had been the killer, she would have spared them. Three: The police did a thorough investigation, and cleared her of all suspicion. Even after all of that, Ange refuses to believe that her aunt might not have been the killer, and the conversation presented above ensues.

What this means is that the "Without love, it can not be seen" philosophy can also be interpreted as applying to views of the truth, and how we see other people. Ange has no love for Eva. It's understandable that she doesn't, given everything that's gone between them, but this does affect how she sees Eva and the things that she does. Because she does not love Eva, because she does not sympathize with her, she can not see Eva in any light but a bad one. (Throughout Alliance, Ange goes on a long emotional journey, and sort of comes to a better understanding of Eva, but for now, this is how she is.) This argues that if we dislike a person, we can potentially be blinded to their good traits (Necessarily, it must argue that if we like/love/care about a person, we can potentially be blinded to their bad traits, though this part is not, to my knowledge, brought up in the text). It argues that we automatically believe the worst of those whom we dislike and can not empathize with.

Applying Ange's "Without love, without sadness, without anger, it can not be seen", you could say that you can not see the world through someone's eyes until you empathize with them, and are capable of feeling anger and sadness on their behalf. Ange knows that Eva was devastated by losing her husband and her son. She even knows that it probably contributed to twisting her personality into the bitter, paranoid, hateful person we see on her deathbed at the ?/Hidden Tea Party for Banquet of the Golden Witch. She also says that she "has no sympathy at all" for Eva's loss, so she can easily come to the conclusion that Eva might have killed her husband and her son in spite of all that Okonogi says. In Okonogi's words, she has already reached "the truth", and that truth is immutable in her mind.

This is all well and good, you say. But how is it connected to writers?

In my personal experience, one of the rules of writing is that you must have "love" for your characters. You must possess affection for them and genuine interest in their lives. You must be able to empathize with them. You must feel sympathy and sadness for their plights, and be able to feel anger on their behalves, feel anger when you see them doing stupid, inconsiderate or evil things. As a reader, or a listener, or a television watcher, and so on, you must be able to feel when you watch the protagonists struggle and go through trials. I think that the only characters you should be unable to feel for are the ones that were deliberately crafted to be unsympathetic. If the characters in a fictional work that you are reading/watching/listening to are just unsympathetic, I think that this is probably a fatal flaw in the work itself. What are those eight deadly words of audience reaction? "I don't care what happens to these people." It's not that you love them, or even that you hate them. It's that they haven't even made enough of an impression on you for you to care one way or another. Apathy is truly worse than hatred, in this case. At least if you hate a character, you'll stick around long enough to see if they get their comeuppance.

So what does it say when a writer has no love for the characters that they have created, in the setting that they inhabit and the plot they are participating in? Here's what I think. I think it says that they don't view their characters as fully-realized people, even those occupying a fictional world. They don't view their characters as people with agency, with personalities that should be adhered to, with strong morals and principles and beliefs (unless they are the sort of character who is designed not to have those in the first place) that they would not break unless in case of some dire situation, or possibly even not at all. They don't view their characters as people who have legitimate choices to make within the framework of the story, and you don't really get the sense that if they had made one choice over another, the plot could have veered off in a wildly different direction. They don't read like people at all.

Instead, characters created by such a writer, characters in a story "that does not have love in it" are very often nothing more than devices, empty vessels. They are ciphers with a thin, transparent human (or non-human) coating that fools no one. They are nothing more than a means to an end, designed to advance the plot from Point A to Point B. You don't form a clear image of them and what they look like in your head. You forget about them the moment you put the book down or change the channel. They either have no personality, an utterly unlikeable personality (which is only appropriate in those characters who are supposed to be antagonists, i.e. not the people we're supposed to root for), or they never have the same personality twice. They have no free will. You get no sense that they might have hobbies or interests outside what we see in the story. You get no sense that they might have dreams of what they're going to do with their life once the events of the plot are over. There is little thought put into them. In short? They are lifeless.

As a writer of fan fiction, I think that love and understanding are still very important in writing about characters that other people created. Obviously, when it comes to characters that weren't intended to be sympathetic in the first place, if you want to maintain canonical characterizations you shouldn't put too much sympathy into the way you characterize them, but unless they were written originally as caricatures or completely unsympathetic, they shouldn't come across that way in your work either. If you've got a "villain with standards" who "wouldn't do certain things", that's how they should be characterized in your work as well. As for protagonists, your "sympathetic characters", I think you must be able to feel for them in order to understand them, and really be able to write them in-character. As a fan fiction writer, I can never have the same level of understanding of the characters of Umineko as does Ryukishi07, their creator. I can only try to understand them, based on the knowledge presented to me and based on what I can infer, and try my best to write them as he did.

Lambdadelta, as the game master of this gameboard in Beatrice's absence, is at the crossroads of writer and fan fiction writer. She has made a story of her own based on the scenario Beatrice created, but that's just it, it's her story based on a scenario Beatrice created. And she has no love for any of these people whatsoever.

She can not go so far as to make them behave wildly out of character. The game master is constrained by some very strict rules, one of which is that she can't make the "pieces", the people on the game board, act out-of-character. (You see, the Ushiromiya family are actually real people, but these beings called Witches, who exist beyond the realm of humans—it's established that humans themselves can become Witches—can create a sort of alternate reality called a game board where people still exist even after they've died. It's complicated.) However, while Lambdadelta can not do anything that Beatrice could not have done, she can do things Beatrice wouldn't have done. And she does. Oh boy, does she, and Bernkastel is as ever her co-conspirator at ripping apart the lives, happiness and dignity of the people they toy with, in the never-ending attempt to escape boredom. These people are not people to them. They are not people with hopes, dreams, grievances, and free will to them. They are merely toys to these two, the better to stave off boredom.

And Natsuhi is their favorite toy. Let's recount the ways Lambdadelta and Bernkastel make life hell for Natsuhi in End, shall we? Throughout the course of this game, the epitaph murders go ahead even though the condition on which Beatrice agreed to admit defeat and not kill anyone has been met. Natsuhi's daughter and husband are among the first killed. The child she abandoned nineteen years ago (never said the woman was a saint; she's not, but the thing about Umineko is that she's still sympathetic despite all of her bad points) comes back for revenge, and is implied to be the true killer. Though it is stated in the red truth (a declaration that is accepted as absolute truth, though this truth is capable of being twisted, and should not be taken at face value) that Natsuhi is not the killer, Furudo Erika (Bernkastel's "representative" on the gameboard, an extra character first introduced in this game, which is another thing Beatrice wouldn't have done), who is in contact with her "master" and is fully aware that Natsuhi is not the killer, still pegs Natsuhi as the killer. She insinuates that Natsuhi was committing adultery with her father-in-law (she wasn't), and Natsuhi is beaten to a bloody pulp by her furious sister-in-law, the aforementioned Eva.

All of this probably makes the way the Beatrice of the gameboard protects and aids her all the more heartwarming. You see, while Beatrice may have been incapacitated (and later dies) in what is commonly referred to as the "meta world", a "piece" version of her still exists on the gameboard. She is depicted as entering into a pact of sorts with Natsuhi to support her. Piece-Beatrice is unaware of exactly what has happened to her meta-self, but she becomes aware in the game, once someone else goes ahead carrying out the epitaph murders despite her having stepped down, that her meta-self has at least been dethroned. She has a feeling that Lambdadelta is the new game master, and from Erika's presence, knows that Bernkastel is involved as well. When suspicion falls on Natsuhi, she does everything in her power to protect her and divert suspicion away from her, and ends up being brutally killed for it.

I've said before that part of the rules restricting the game master is that they can not make the "pieces" act out of character. It is also said that Lambdadelta seems to have a good idea of the rules governing Beatrice's gameboard. However, I would argue that she has only a superficial understanding of the Ushiromiya family and the others gathered on Rokkenjima. She doesn't know what makes them tick. She doesn't really understand (or simply doesn't care about) their motivations. She possesses not so much as a scrap of love or affection for any of them. All she cares about is how they can entertain her. Bernkastel is the same.

And it shows. As far as the games go, End is a very different sort of animal from the first four games. It's still entertaining, through the efforts of Battler in the meta-world and Piece-Beatrice in the gameboard to keep the game as it's supposed to be, but it's a different game. The game master has no love for her pieces, and it shows in the way the characters she most wants to be "entertained" by suffer. On a subconscious level, I think that they can tell that the game has changed.