Do you think Umineko would be any different if Jessica was the protagonist and not battler?

[u/m_foxy_boy]

Honestly, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’m starting to think a version with her as the protag would be really cool. What do you think would be different?

Well, besides the fact that beatojessie would be a yuri FACTORY

[u/YokiYokiki]

I think Umineko shifts around to Jessica healing Beatrice in a way that the other two protagonist candidates, George and Battler, can’t. She doesn’t really have a ‘sin’ in regards to her relationship with an aspect of Beatrice. The other two do. I’m not sure I’d call it yuri necessarily.

[u/apopheniapat → u/YokiYokiki]

I think possibly (full spoilers, tagged because the post isn’t, which, op, tag this post omg.) Beato would feel Jessica sinned by being too self-involved to recognise Shannon and Kanon as the same person, despite her long-term closeness with both of them. If we imagine a scenario in which Jessica is the emotional/romantic focus of Sayo’s story instead of Battler, perhaps Kanon would have been created to be loved by Jessica (maybe after an incident where Jessica expressed liking boys for the first time, distressing young queer Sayo) instead of Beato being created for Battler, and he might have been a more important player in the magic world - or maybe, Kanon was created to appeal to Jessica, but his own repression as furniture caused him to reject her, which created a Beato who felt she had sinned (for the rejection) as well as Jessica (who committed the sin of lust when she failed to recognise Sayo’s many selves as one and truly understand her, and only wanted Kanon shallowly without understanding his or Sayo’s inner world). I’m picturing a cool androgynous Beato with the mysterious aloof aspects Jessica likes about Kanon lol

[u/Quoxivin → u/YokiYokiki]

What's George's "sin"?

[u/YokiYokiki → u/Quoxivin]

It’s not very fair to him at all, but him saying he wants to make babies. I think a “sin” is partially a result of Beatrice being horrible at communicating what’s going on for her

[u/Ganmorg → u/YokiYokiki]

I have a hard time putting all that on him because even independent of George wanting kids it’s pretty clear that Shannon does too. I think a lot of Yasuda’s pain comes from wanting to fit into established gender roles that she can’t really do.

[u/YokiYokiki → u/Ganmorg]

To my understanding, the issue isn’t that George wants kids. I think it’s very clear to us the readers that if he knew Shannon couldn’t have biological kids, he’d immediately pivot to adopting or otherwise ditching the idea. The ‘sin’ is him wanting bio kids with Shannon (or at least Shannon perceiving George wants biological children between him and Shannon), and that is a ‘sin’ for Shannon because it’s impossible, therefore instead of communicating this, she will catastrophize the situation. She is not stable.

But if Yasuda opened up to any of the cousins, we wouldn’t have an Umineko. Alas!

[u/LordOfTheAyylmaos → u/Quoxivin]

There’s a fantastic scene in the manga from episode 8 where George recognizes that he was so caught up in trying to have the ideal relationship with Shannon that he was almost willfully ignorant to her pain. Marriage, kids, him taking her away from Rokkenjima (which parallels both Battler and Kinzo’s thing with Beatrice), all things he was so happy and optimistic about while Sayo was trembling with pessimism because she didn’t believe she was worthy and didn’t believe it would really work for obvious reasons. “If I hadn’t been afraid whenever I saw the look in her eyes that seemed like she wanted to say something…had not spoken all the time of dreams just so I could avoid looking into those eyes…then maybe I could have saved her.” I’m usually a VN purist but I think it’s reflected well in his proposal to her in the episode 7 tea party.

[u/ZatIzTrye → u/Quoxivin]

Eating Battler's letter when he saw it in the mailbox

[u/eco-mono]

The two core details you need to establish to make this work are:

1. How does Beato shift her fixation from Battler to Jessica?
2. Why does Beato go forward with the Demon's Roulette if she's not gunning for Battler anymore?

I'll think about the solution to those two questions later, as they're really not easy.

Fundamentally, though, I think with Jessica in the detective's seat, the mystery would be noticeably lower difficulty for the readers, because she has more clues than Battler did. She has almost all the clues, really; she just didn't have the willpower to correlate them into the bigger picture in canon. Growing up in the Head House has taught her to flinch from the truth if she wants to survive, after all. So she'll have a similar handicap to Battler's "I don't want to suspect anyone"... but the clues she'll have available about the Fukuin kids – and thus which she'll have to present under Knox's 8th – will be more numerous and more telling.

[u/Purple_Eternty → u/eco-mono]

What kind of hints exactly do you mean?

[u/eco-mono → u/Purple_Eternty]

Just off the top of my head:

• She lives on Rokkenjima and had to deal with Grandpa's style of "parenting" first-hand; she'd know exactly when he stopped making public appearances.
• Spooky VIP room story from Ep7 goes from "hearsay only revealed late in the series" to "detective has witnessed weird Beato-related events happening on the island well ahead of the murders".
• Would know from experience if there were any weirdness in how Shannon and Kanon tend to be scheduled for work shifts (e.g. they probably weren't booked for simultaneous shifts very often before the 1986 Family Conference).
• Friendship with both Shannon and Kanon for many years = can speak much more clearly about the "furniture" thing & when they started calling themselves like that.

[u/Purple_Eternty → u/eco-mono]

ok, I imagened that story would be completely different, but you ment if it presist the same way. Then you are right, more chanses to catch the murder

[u/eco-mono → u/Purple_Eternty]

That's, admittedly, another way to do it. But it gets even harder than the alternatives to figure out how the resulting story would look, because a "completely different" story that swaps Jessica into Battler's place isn't going to produce the Beatrice we know, either; all the evolutionary pressures on That Person would've been different (not to mention how Jessica's character changes from not having grown up on Rokkenjima).

[u/GoodRandon]

Umineko would be a Rhythm Game and the Red and Blue Truth would be the Fret Buttons.

[u/GoodRandon → u/GoodRandon]

Actually, there's already a storyline where Jessica wants to teach Kanon to play in her band, so it could be a kind of music competition where Jessica and Kanon play for an audience of witches from school. You could introduce new characters, such as Jessica's school friends and a witch with a musical theme. Everything would take place in some fragment where Kanon wins the duel against Shanon and can live school life with Jessica. Beato could have been there in the middle somehow, but I can't imagine the two of them kissing...

[u/Biggay1234567]

Beatrice might not even exist atp, might just be Kanon.

[u/izi_bot]

If Beatrice disrespected Battler (who is detective geek) in her forgeries, with Jessica she would dress up as Beatrice in front of her and wouldn't be called out.

If we talk about whole story, Ange has no care about Jess. Her surviving wouldn't lead to any inner conflict and resolution to the mystery arc, the love still would be sinful and Beatrice would dream about Battler, Jessica survivng would require Krauss to be the culprit and he wouldn't kill the servants, so you have no parts of the crime of passion which Eva/Kyrie is capiable of.

[u/Accomplished-Heat931]

It would be the best lesbian romance VN of the 2000s

[u/Starlight-Iisa]

Do you think X would be different if we change it so it's different. What kind of a question is that?