seriously how are you this observant and insightful with umineko? no spoilers but when i read through it i didn't even catch half of what you're picking up on in episode 1. in awe.

thanks i just like to think about media and lose my mind <3

in more seriousness the reason i'm going all in like i am (and this is kind of only barely related to what you're saying but i want an excuse to talk about it lmao) is because i'm like. majorly obsessed with the specific narrative framework that i think umineko is using.

i guess if i'm "picking up on" stuff reading it it's because i'm thinking of umineko as a kind of fractal narrative? not sure of the best term since i learned of it reading about homestuck and not actually in an academic context but it's the idea that a story presents you its entire thesis statement/heart in act 1, and then re-tells it to you a second time throughout the rest of the narrative (with further micro-iterations of the same core thesis spread throughout). in homestuck that's seen where acts 1 and 7 are kind of the exact same thing (a kid trapped under a mundane set of arbitrary parameters breaks out into another medium of more promise) but in act 7 it feels much more symbolic and poignant, even though technically both acts are telling an identical story. everything is an extended iteration of those same core ideas presented at the start.

another way to describe it is like. a story that begins with "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" and you're like oh yeah ok and think nothing of it. then the rest of the story is spent getting you to understand acutely the meaning and importance of foxes, dogs, quickness, jumping, and laziness, so when the final sentence of the story is once again "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" you're like "oh my god oh my god" and then maybe also crying a little? even though you've just spent the last 500 pages reading a bunch of permutations of the same phrase/concept. at the very least this is a very core tenet of my philosophy regarding my writing and i'm always on the lookout for evidence of this structure in things i read.

so like even though i'm definitely missing out on a bunch of finer details, the best time to catch umineko's exposed heart as it were is during the first iteration of the thesis statement in episode 1. i'm guessing episodes 2-7 will then examine and bring to light specific faces of this theme/core idea to really reinforce whatever's going on before we get the "complete" version in episode 8, but it also means that its distilled version is visible somewhere within episode 1. so it's fun to really dig into everything and see what it's all pointing towards!

also if the above is true then that means that if i don't have a thorough understanding of episode 1 future episodes will be much trickier to follow, so this is also in service of making sure that i stay Not Lost while reading this story for as long as i can lol