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Pastebin Theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4nHWXDdYRA

== Ivan's Tea Party [1] ==

Dear guest, welcome to the tea party for those who are not human.

All theatergoing witches are invited to read these musings.
However, I shall try to refrain from giving away any of Beatrice's secrets.
It wouldn't do to hand you the answer to her riddles for nothing, after all.

In an effort to produce more frequent pastebin mondays, I'm embarking on a journey to catalog various things I find interesting about Umineko, the content, meta-discussion, or the esteemed author of these forgeries. This will continue as long as the disease permits. As we both know, boredom is the disease and death of witches, and it is impossible to stave off eternally. However, I shall try.

Today's subject, dear friend, is that of adaptation. I've found myself musing as to whether or not there could possibly be a "good" Umineko anime. After all, the author's other work, Higurashi, has been adapted rather well.

No small effort has been made to adapt Beatrice's tales and the various forgeries to a number of different formats. Some seem to have functioned better than others.

I think the major problem with this matter is that of Umineko's story structure itself. The narrative is split between literal events, metafictional events, and symbolic events. More on this in a bit, I would like to touch on the adaptions themselves first. Obviously, with a focus on text, this is not a problem, the source material is able to make the distinction abundantly clear. The issues start to come in when you try to adapt it to a more visual medium.

The manga succeeds fairly well from the panels that I've seen. It's able to strike a balance between the right level of abstraction while still making sure events are conveyed appropriately. It does get too literal sometimes, though. Metaphorical or symbolic scenes are represented literally, and I think this probably leads to a great deal of confusion.

The anime fails horribly. I place most of the blame on the studio that undertook this task. It's the same studio that adapted the author's other work, Higurashi. However, Higurashi is more grounded. The events, however gruesome, are realistic. Even the main character's delusions *should* be represented realistically, even if they *don't* occur in reality.
With Umineko, the animators represent everything literally, and this makes for a horrible experience. Everything makes less sense, even though I think the intention was that a more literal adaptation might make things simpler.

Let me give an example. One good one is from the third tale, the infamous Web of Red Truth.

Here's a rough description of the scene in the original format:

The witch is trying to make Battler think the only explanation for a murder could be magic.
In order to do this, she lays out the facts of the murder, step-by-step. The undeniable, irrefutable facts. In Umineko, these are written in Red.
The thing that makes this scene so powerful, is previously the Red Text has only been used in one or two sentences at a time before, it's essentially the witch's trump card, since they don't have to explain anything.

Over the course of the scene, the screen fills with more and more spiderwebs as this witch just goes on and on with more Absolute Truths as she backs Battler into a corner, obviously the symbolism here is he's being cornered into a web from which he might not be able to escape. Here's a picture of some screenshots to better explain: https://i.imgur.com/eeXowoQ.jpg

Here's how it's been adapted in the manga and anime:
Manga: https://i.imgur.com/uDjovxN.png the scene is shown symbolically, he's being show as trapped in a web, but the panelling and spacing leaves it vague enough that it's still relatively obvious that it's not a literal event
Anime: https://i.imgur.com/X35SyVB.png here, the scene is just literally represented. The witch is saying words. The screen's tinted red to represent that the words are in red. They barely even tried to convey the symbolism.

I could list some other examples in the opposite direction, where the anime represents symbolic events outright. They're presented with no doubts as to whether or not they happened, even though the novel makes it fairly likely they didn't.

In something like Umineko, where doubt is an central mechanic for understanding the truth behind the tale, this simply should not be done. But, in something like an anime, where there is no direct concept of "point of view", and no easy way to present something abstractly, how can you even handle these scenes? It's necessary to show them, things like the "Demon Kanon" in Episode 2, or the Chiester sister scenes in Episode 3, but it's just confusing in the anime, it's one of the major problems.

It saps away all ambiguity, incorrectly I might add, sows confusion, and turns the events into a muddled mess.

I'm just not sure you can adapt Umineko into film or television. The gory descriptions become some sort of comedic farce when you try to animate them literally, such as the scene that's supposed to be terrifying at the end of Chapter 2, but is just hilarious in the anime.

I really wish the Umineko anime defied the odds and was amazing, I would have loved to see how their approach such a daunting task.