/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Do people still believe that Ikuko is the real identity of Featherine and that there is a "real world" in Umineko? Isn't it obvious that it's the other way around?

If Featherine is Ikuko, none of the meta was real, the multiverse doesn't exist and Higurashi is fiction. Ikuko never had to work a single day of her life, discovered the secret of eternal youth, accidentally found both Battler AND the confession message bottle... Truly the luckiest person in history.

If Ikuko is Featherine, everything fits perfectly. She is basically a Creator from a higher plane of existence, above the metaworld itself. For her, the metaworld and everything inside is like a fictional story she can manipulate at will. The Featherine we see during Umineko is just an avatar, in the same way that piece-Erika is controlled by meta-Erika. This is shown in EP8, where she has a short conversation with Bernkastel and decides to give the meta-story a happy ending. Or when she literally rewrites reality IN THE META so she can defeat Lambdadelta.

There's also the fact that Featherine turns her favorite main characters into cat servants. Bernkastel is not a fictional character based on some writer's cat and a fictional little girl. It's the other way around. Ikuko's cat is the form Bernkastel adopts in a LOWER plane of existence, as Ikuko's pet. She is still a witch born from the events of Higurashi.

Featherine wrote herself into reality as Hachijo Ikuko, a rich mystery novel writer with a conveniently unexplained background. She probably didn't even think about the details. She doesn't seem to age, manages to find Tohya and that bottle "by accident" in two separate occasions... She can manipulate reality itself.

-----------------Featherine's plane of existence

-----------------Sea of fragments / Featherine's City of books

-----------------Real world (any fragment can be considered the "real world". For Ange, it's the world where the EP7 tea party happened. For Rika, it's the world where Takano was defeated. The other worlds are not real from their perspective.)

-----------------Fiction


This means that the sea of fragments introduced in Higurashi wasn't retconned as being "fiction" in Umineko. Not at all. The gameboards in Umineko ARE fiction in Ange's world, stories written by Yasu and Tohya. But those fictional stories are possible results of Yasu's roulette, and therefore exist as REAL worlds in a higher plane of existence.