/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Hey everyone. I thought about making my own thread dedicated to this topic (maybe I will in the future?) but since there's already a thread here, I figured I'd check in with you guys first. I consider myself to be something of an Umineko superfan. I'm sure I'm late to the game on this one, and that there have already been countless threads asking "What the Hell happened here?" since Ciconia was released to the public. Therefore, I won't bore you with loaded questions. I earnestly want to like Ciconia. Yet, I cannot help but find myself repeatedly dumbfounded by this rainbow-colored abortion of a visual novel, and question why it is so different to anything that Ryukishi07 has written in the past. I haven't finished it yet for reasons that I think should be obvious to everyone; this is borderline propaganda, and hardly enjoyable except for the space between the many, many Miyao/"Meow"-centric scenes.

What I want to know is this: Did something happen to Ryukishi07 to cause this dramatic change in his writing? Or was the Steam translation effort simply hijacked by left-wing political dissidents?

There have already been plenty of threads over the years (collectively, between /a/, /jp/, and /lit/,) that have attempted to answer the former question, especially back when Umineko's answer arcs came out. Some of these conspiracy theories make references to strange statements, allegedly produced by Ryukishi07 himself, referring to how he became a different person (ie: "died") in the middle of writing Umineko. Some have insisted that he had a romantic relationship with a co-founder of 07th expansion, BT, or else that BT has since died. Some insist, amateurishly I might add, that "BT" is short for 'Beatrice,' and that the games were really about him the entire time. For obvious reasons, I have never taken any of these theories seriously over the years, nor do I believe that an author's personal life should generally ever come under scrutiny when analyzing a work of fiction that they themselves wrote. Generally, it just seems like a way of coping with bad writing and something that is usually done in poor taste. Nevertheless, Ciconia is just so different that I think the question is worth re-asking in a more organized way. Personally, I don't know a lot about the guy, and I'm hoping someone in this thread might have an answer that can help me like this game more than I do now.

>TL;DR - Spoonfeed me your Ryukishi07 facts and conspiracies. Seriously, I can't find anything that puts this game into context.