uminekos compassion

published: 15-10-2025

short essay i put out in one draft on tumblr... i feel like it fits in here though !!

its really beautiful what umineko manages to achieve in its compassion, to me.

sayo is definitely the most obvious example. an overarching, devastating culprit of murder on this scale would in classic detective fiction be approached with an uncovering of Truth; a restoration of some implicitly understood status quo.

not only is sayo seemingly as far outside the ushiromiya status quo as ryukishi could manage (misogyny-affected, genderqueer, plural, bastard child, servile), but this confusion of their - and i imagine in many cases the readers - norms of society and the genre is never fully resolved.

the brutal metaphor of “ripping out guts” is a perfect way of summing up ryukishi’s defensiveness of his fictional world and inhabitants. he doesnt want to deliver one Message, one Meaning, one Truth to the reader, and spends much of umineko in teaching that such a thing cant logically even exist. for me this is reminiscent of roland barthes’s writing (think “death of the author” if youre unfamiliar), where he often takes issue with literature’s relation to a Truth and advocates for writing as signifier; writing for interpretation without a God Author and broker of Truth.

the result of this is characters with more life to them then maybe any other fictional work ive engaged in before.

you cant ever know what the ushiromiyas are “supposed” to be like. you cant ever know what “actually” happened. you cant ever know who sayo, who battler even (in being detached from tohya), “really” were and what occurred between them.

all you can do is read the echos they left behind, and the fractured memories of a man desperately piecing everything together from logic and emotion.

you can still feel compassion for the “real” people that existed outside your network of signs though. they were people and they felt things, whether or not you were ever privy to it. and really, this is the case for anyone. i talk about barthes in this post, but would he really agree with me? im just invoking a ghost. maybe he could speak in red for me?

you can love, and that love can be total, complete, fulfilling; and this can be independent from truth. love, isnt logic. if it were, i dont think we’d ever love.