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Toalpaz posted:in umineko witches aren't real. only if you can prove it in a series of increasingly convoluted ways
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# ? Sep 5, 2020 14:45 |
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# ? Apr 20, 2024 03:37 |
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The highlights of today's episode were Minerva, Daphne, Echidna's smugness and Surprise Satella ASMR. In the WN (web novel differences) Subaru plays fetch with Daphne by throwing her cookies Echidna left. She also mentions her coffin uses up her mana so she doesn't expend calories in return, and that she cares not for what becomes of her monsters as they have nothing to do with her hunger. Somebody fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Sep 5, 2020 |
# ? Sep 5, 2020 14:56 |
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So Minerva has healing punches. How can that be twisted into something bad, exactly? Did she go around punching corpses and it was super weird, or something?
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# ? Sep 5, 2020 16:44 |
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Wars that never end, because she went around punching all the fallen soldiers so they would just get back up and start fighting again.
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# ? Sep 5, 2020 16:51 |
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The healing only seems to apply to living things. She made a crater on landing and stomped on the earth hard enough to cause an earthquake. In life she was probably a walking natural disaster that would destroy your town but would make sure to fix up anybody who hadn't died.
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# ? Sep 5, 2020 16:58 |
sirtommygunn posted:The healing only seems to apply to living things. She made a crater on landing and stomped on the earth hard enough to cause an earthquake. In life she was probably a walking natural disaster that would destroy your town but would make sure to fix up anybody who hadn't died. Or, she would heal everyone up including those who died but leave them without a house or fields to farm and they would starve after she left.
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# ? Sep 5, 2020 18:25 |
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Grouchio posted:WN stuff Make sure you put web novel stuff in Spoiler blocks.
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# ? Sep 5, 2020 19:19 |
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sirtommygunn posted:The healing only seems to apply to living things. She made a crater on landing and stomped on the earth hard enough to cause an earthquake. In life she was probably a walking natural disaster that would destroy your town but would make sure to fix up anybody who hadn't died. I assumed that was because she was superhero landing from a zillion feet up in the sky. Presumably that was not her primary mode of transportation when she was alive? Hmm... maybe it's like... too good at healing. She supercharges your cells, so you die of "cancer in every part of your body" or something.
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# ? Sep 5, 2020 23:28 |
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Sankara posted:I assumed that was because she was superhero landing from a zillion feet up in the sky. Presumably that was not her primary mode of transportation when she was alive? I'll admit that if I could do this it would be my primary means of getting to and from work.
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# ? Sep 5, 2020 23:56 |
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Yeah, why take the land dragon when you can just jump?
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 02:20 |
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it's weird that everyone in here is assuming the witches are actually all evil? like in real life, "witch" traditionally just meant "woman who learned more than people think she should have. like, echidna says she did things she regrets to get knowledge but are those things like, imprisoning someone to find out exactly what happens if you don't feed a human, or like, secretly exhuming a body to find out what the structure of a heart is? like, minervas wrath is towards the concept of death, so she'd be declared evil based on her loudly decrying any king who ever declared war. otherwise she's just crazy diamond
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 02:41 |
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Daphne at the very least is indubitably a monster.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 02:51 |
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egg tats posted:like, echidna says she did things she regrets to get knowledge but are those things like, imprisoning someone to find out exactly what happens if you don't feed a human, or like, secretly exhuming a body to find out what the structure of a heart is? or injecting chemicals into the iris of a living subject to see if eye color can be changed or freezing naked prisoners to see how hypothermia affects the body, you know certainly not evil just greedy for knowledge I suspect the witches are all going to be revealed that they were driven by their core principles such that they had no practical empathy when it came to whatever drove them.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 03:11 |
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egg tats posted:it's weird that everyone in here is assuming the witches are actually all evil? like in real life, "witch" traditionally just meant "woman who learned more than people think she should have. Mostly we are viewing the witches as beings who seem to operate outside of what normal people see as normal. Anyway you listed the two witches that seem the most benevolent but it is important to remember that their number also includes Daphne, Satella and Typhon who are all terrifying in their own way.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 04:13 |
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Yeah I am guessing if Daphne was still active she would have created more and more monsters.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 04:43 |
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MonsterEnvy posted:Yeah I am guessing if Daphne was still active she would have created more and more monsters. I mean, in many myths the creator deities seem content with what they made initially. There isn't any reason to believe Daphne would keep making more.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 05:07 |
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Raenir Salazar posted:I mean, in many myths the creator deities seem content with what they made initially. There isn't any reason to believe Daphne would keep making more. O, well if she's stopped at three horrifying monsters then it's fine. Four would have been unconscionable. V I'm just being glib relax. MagicBoots fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Sep 6, 2020 |
# ? Sep 6, 2020 05:14 |
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MagicBoots posted:O, well if she's stopped at three horrifying monsters then it's fine. Four would have been unconscionable. I'm not sure what you're responding to. But it seems like the author is taking their cues from myth, and in myth generally there's like a limited number of things that get made usually in the Very Beginning. I.e when the greek gods made the clouds, animals and then finally last was man and so on; look at it from a Jungian perspective. We're sorta supposed to look at the Witches as being somewhere between Fey and Gods, but instead of creating humans it's more like they happened to come upon mankind and granted them two sided boons.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 05:20 |
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I think it's pretty safe to assume at this point that witches have a reputation for being evil for more reasons than just patriarchy since, you know, one created monsters that devour people alive (and can the very memories of them), one of them tears people apart if they feel guilty about something, and one will kill people by crushing their hearts if they get in the way of their love. Sure, that's only three of the seven. Maybe the rest are paragons of virtue and not living embodiments of the worst vices like their titles suggest. Maybe the cult that tortures and murders people is all a big hilarious misunderstanding. Maybe at the end of the story Subaru frees all the witches and they can all share a big laugh about everything.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 05:53 |
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I think the idea we're arguing is that the witches are beyond good and evil, they're a weird sort of divinity that you have to respect simply because there's no alternative. Like, the sea. The sea kills tons of people. It also has a lot of tasty fish in it. But you wouldn't call the sea evil, nor would you call it good. It just is what it is. And if you happen to be a religious person in a seafaring culture you would probably pray to the sea gods before every voyage, because it can't hurt to get on their good side, can it? In other words, the witches are not people in the normal sense. They are forces of nature. Clarste fucked around with this message at 06:00 on Sep 6, 2020 |
# ? Sep 6, 2020 05:57 |
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I think we should wage war against The Sea, personally. For too long it has been one of the natural predators of mankind, drowning us at nearly every opportunity. Sending strange, tentacled beasts after us. Giving safe passage to hurricanes onto our shores. Stranding deserted sailors on isolated islands where they starve to death. This has gone on long enough. I won't stand for this anymore- its time we take back our planet from our watery master The Sea and embrace true freedom.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 06:09 |
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Though Daphne's Mabeasts have not done anything good for the world. Honestly they probably should have swapped her name with Echidna's as Echidna was the mother of monsters in greek myth. Also given that Daphne is gluttony I doubt she would have ever stopped making monsters had she not died.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 06:10 |
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Raxivace posted:I think we should wage war against The Sea, personally. For too long it has been one of the natural predators of mankind, drowning us at nearly every opportunity. Sending strange, tentacled beasts after us. Giving safe passage to hurricanes onto our shores. Stranding deserted sailors on isolated islands where they starve to death. Hilariously there was an ancient King of babylon (I want to say Hammurubi?) actually did declare war on the sea because a tsunami or something destroyed a major bridge. MonsterEnvy posted:Though Daphne's Mabeasts have not done anything good for the world. Honestly they probably should have swapped her name with Echidna's as Echidna was the mother of monsters in greek myth. Again, I point out most mythology which the author is drawing from there there is usually some sort of implied limit. Some mythologies are quite explicit about it, i.e there's only so much "clay" lying around to mould into creatures and so on and whatever left over was used for humans and so on and so forth. Depending on how long the history of the world was Daphne may have been around for thousands of years with only three major beasts to show for it (but maybe a larger number of lesser beasts). I'm inclined to let existing mythology and jungian analysis of the text trump simple induction in this case. Otherwise by that logic whats to stop god from making 8 days of the week because he's made 7 so far? Clarste posted:I think the idea we're arguing is that the witches are beyond good and evil, they're a weird sort of divinity that you have to respect simply because there's no alternative. This. They operate on Blue and Orange morality alien to our own. Some, like Echidna, are basically like the Nyarlehoteps who can meaningfully interact with us, but others like Daphne are presumably more alien.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 06:25 |
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It's not difficult to see why their labeled 'evil' when their Blue and Orange morality leads the to the suffering of hundreds if not thousands of people. Just because something's a god doesn't mean it's not an evil god.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 06:28 |
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Well, as far as we know the only thing that's ever managed to kill a witch is another witch, so either way you'd better get used to them being around?
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 06:32 |
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8one6 posted:It's not difficult to see why their labeled 'evil' when their Blue and Orange morality leads the to the suffering of hundreds if not thousands of people. Just because something's a god doesn't mean it's not an evil god. Again though as Clarste mentions you can apply this thinking to many things we can trivially see as pointless to label as evil. The sea kills a lot of people, via drowning, via storms and hurricanes, but it also provides boons. It is an amoral force of nature. The Witches are presumably along these lines, letting in our contextual symbols regarding real life historical mythologies and religions inform our understanding of them. Then you get into nebulous concepts like, "the State" which maintains a monopoly on legitimate violence to enforce its authority which also results in a lot of people dying in order to exist and maintain society. It is beyond good and evil. Amoral destructive things exist both in nature and as a result of human society; the Witches, like Gods in our own contemporary or ancient mythology are not any different.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 06:37 |
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Raenir Salazar posted:I mean, in many myths the creator deities seem content with what they made initially. There isn't any reason to believe Daphne would keep making more. Considering she appears to have only stopped because she died, personally I'd go with yes, she probably would have. She's not some primordial deity; she became active around 400 years ago, and it is during this period that she created the mabeasts. For that matter, yes the intent seems to be to interpret the witches as beings with a twisted sense of morality or lacking in common sense, but ultimately they're still just people, and little different from the Sin Archbishops we've seen - varyingly deranged individuals wielding abnormal power.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 06:42 |
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Clarste posted:Well, as far as we know the only thing that's ever managed to kill a witch is another witch, so either way you'd better get used to them being around? I think Satalla was stated as having been sealed or something. Also to go to the Sin Archbishops for a second. Batenkaitos stated that the Whale was his pet. I wonder if inheriting the Gluttony Witch Factor gives him control over Mabeasts. MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Sep 6, 2020 |
# ? Sep 6, 2020 07:28 |
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Conspiratiorist posted:Considering she appears to have only stopped because she died, personally I'd go with yes, she probably would have. First of all, I don't recall when in the anime where it says they became active 400 years ago, somewhere before in the thread I think I read that they died 400 years ago. And we should be careful to leave novel spoilers out of this discussion because I'm not sure where that information is coming from. Even if we take it as true though for the sake of the argument, I don't think that contradicts the point being made. What does it matter if they only became active 400 years ago? When the implication is that they were reacting to very real threats to humanity that existed? Poverty, War, Famine, Ignorance and so on. Again I don't think it serves any use to apply real world logic to a text that is ultimately referencing myth and the trappings thereof. It's like complaining when the characters split up in a horror movie; they don't know they are in a horror movie anymore than the characters know they are a part of a story either with its own mythological context. After all if we were watching a TV series set during the Trojan war saying that "Well Zeus was only acting 500 years ago" (from point of view of the story) doesn't make Zeus any less of a mythological and primordial figure. It's a story, and a story that borrows heavily from myth. Don't look at it like you would real life, look at it with the same tools we would any other story. The way I see it, the Witches represent the flip side of these "sins", you can't have ambition without pride and without ambition people remain content and unwilling and unable to advance to improve themselves. Without greed, they have no desires, and those no economics or trade, or prosperity which depends on people wanting more than they currently have, especially for knowledge which requires a desire to continue poking at things to learn more. Without anger there is no desire to defend yourself, only hapless, defenciveless people. And so on, the Witches come in and represent these desires that are essential for civilization. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Sep 6, 2020 |
# ? Sep 6, 2020 07:31 |
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Raenir Salazar posted:First of all, I don't recall when in the anime where it says they became active 400 years ago, somewhere before in the thread I think I read that they died 400 years ago. And we should be careful to leave novel spoilers out of this discussion because I'm not sure where that information is coming from. The White Whale is stated to have been plaguing the world for 400 years, and Daphne died 400 years ago, therefore she made it shortly before she died. This is all in the anime: popular belief is that the Witch of Envy created the mabeasts, but what we're learning is that Daphne created at least the three Great Ones and possibly the rest as well - with all of it being latter attributed to Satella since she became de-facto the Devil after she killed half the world around that time. Raenir Salazar posted:What does it matter if they only became active 400 years ago? When the implication is that they were reacting to very real threats to humanity that existed? Poverty, War, Famine, Ignorance and so on. Again I don't think it serves any use to apply real world logic to a text that is ultimately referencing myth and the trappings thereof. It's like complaining when the characters split up in a horror movie; they don't know they are in a horror movie anymore than the characters know they are a part of a story either with its own mythological context. What implication? Threats to humanity? What we've seen so far is girls who saw the world through twisted lenses representative of their own very human impulses. Consider instead that perhaps the narrative's intent is to concretely humanize these figures which otherwise we would only hear of as part of the retelling of stories from that world. You know? Peeling back the myth to show the historical truth.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 09:21 |
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Conspiratiorist posted:The White Whale is stated to have been plaguing the world for 400 years, and Daphne died 400 years ago, therefore she made it shortly before she died. The implication of which is that she stopped being active 400 years ago and was active for an unknown amount of time prior to that. While it's not specifically stated, they do seem to be kind of immortal-ish so until otherwise stated I think her being a few centuries old prior to her death is a safe assumption, possibly even thousands of years. I mean this is a setting with elves and stuff so a godlike magical being that lives for thousands of years or more and whose soul persists even in death seems pretty normal to me? Clarste fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Sep 6, 2020 |
# ? Sep 6, 2020 13:04 |
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I'm going to throw out a completely unfounded (and probably unanswered because it isn't really important to the story) guess in that the Witches were merely the first mortals to inhabit/represent the specific traits associated with the seven deadly sins, but those forces of nature were causing real, quantifiable chaos before the age of witches. Edit: Also, holy gently caress that episode. With Echidna asked for the handkerchief as payment, I am wholly expecting something to happen to Petra. Like, after Subaru manages to fix the current situation and finally gets around to saving the mansion, he gets there and the post-credits scene is going to be Petra being all indifferent to him or hates him or something. AlternateNu fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Sep 6, 2020 |
# ? Sep 6, 2020 15:10 |
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Witches are lands of contrasts, methinks.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 15:51 |
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witches be crazy
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 17:11 |
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Witches just have no sense of right and wrong.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 17:27 |
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They only have a sense of right and left.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 18:35 |
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I've been watching Slayers for the first time and whenever Rezo talks I feel like he's about to break out into that rhymey whimsical voice that Roswaal does. And I'm disappointed every time he doesn't. I never realized it before, but clown and his clown voice is good.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 21:03 |
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egg tats posted:it's weird that everyone in here is assuming the witches are actually all evil? like in real life, "witch" traditionally just meant "woman who learned more than people think she should have. I'm just going off the show. Perhaps I'm not remembering the scene correctly, but wasn't there a montage of the witches where "she cared so deeply about X, but that resulted in Poetic Bad Consequence Y"? I don't think it covered all seven, but it covered enough of them that the implication, at least to me, was that this was the case with all of them. Perhaps it is simply what makes a witch a witch. Hence my confusion how "healing punches" could have negative consequences. But, I'm not the writer, so, who knows! And maybe I'm just remembering wrong. There's so much to keep track of in this show.
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# ? Sep 6, 2020 23:54 |
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The montage is as follows: Now what would you like to ask me? About the Witch of Gluttony, Daphne, who created beasts that defied the will of God to save the world from starvation? About the Witch of Lust, Carmilla, who granted emotions to non-human beings in an attempt to fill the world with love? About the Witch of Wrath, Minerva, who struck people to heal them as she lamented the state of her war torn world? About the Witch of Sloth, Sekhmet, who drove a dragon past the Great Waterfall just for a chance to rest? About the Witch of Pride, Typhon, who, out of youthful innocence and cruelty, judged criminals one after another? About the Witch of Greed, Echidna, the embodiment of the thirst for knowledge, who has done things she regrets, even in the realm of death, all in the pursuit of all types of knowledge? Or the Witch of Envy, who killed all the other witches and used them as sustenance while she made the whole world her enemy - the most detestable of them all
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# ? Sep 7, 2020 00:11 |
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# ? Apr 20, 2024 03:37 |
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Oh, well. I guess she's just a good one. That matches my confusion over how it could be misconstrued, but I can't help but think there's a catch of some kind. Or maybe the catch is simply she's Wrath? Typically depicted as big angry fight demon, instead is a herbo? Hm.
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# ? Sep 7, 2020 05:32 |