/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>46249183
Many people that disregard the work will tell you it's a shallow motto, but it really is hard to deny it doesn't hold a lot of meaning to many people, and it's incredible central to Umineko's whole narrative to the point it's hard to have a discussion about it without mentioning it. One of the first dialogues about the concept in the vn is that without love, Kanon sees a gray ocean. With love, Shannon sees a blue one. It's meant to represent that seeing life itself with love is what makes someone able to attain happiness, which is what Ange and maria discuss in EP4, however Ange can't recognize said happiness because she is too focused on being stuck in her own misfortune. She doesn't realize that there can be both happiness and misfortune in her life and she is stuck in a binary wordview without love.

How I interpret what Umineko means by looking at things without love is that you stay stuck in one specific view of something without considering other perspectives, mindlessly forcing what you think is right on other people without taking into account the person. A perfect example is how Erika accusses Natsuhi in EP5. It's blatantly obvious that we as the reader know that Natsuhi would never be able to murder her family like that. However, Erika refuses to take that into account, stuck in her own view of the single truth and falsely accussing Natsuhi because of it, believing that she has to be right because she can't see another way and refuses to take other people's view into account. Battler learns that different interpretations and wordlviews should work together to see the whole story, he dissolves himself of the mindset that human explanations have to be good and that they must refute fantasy explanations, which surely have to be bad, and it's how he reaches the truth of the mystery Erika was never able to reach. Ange learns this too at the very end. There can be happiness with misfortune and misfortune with happines, that's why EP8 is called twilight.

When Ange faces the sadness of her family's death, believing that they loved her until the very end, she's able to see happiness beyond it. Without love, she is stuck in a cynical mindset focused on that there is only a single truth where one or more people in her family must be absolute villains that ruined her life. With it, within the infinite perspectives, she attains the love to see the blue in the ocean. Without love it cannot be seen has many different interpretations but Umineko's argument with it is that you can only see a person's true intent if you look at them with empathy and consider why they do the things they do. If you merely judge someone for what you believe their actions to be, without considering how things came to be in the first place, you will never reach an understanding.

(Also, don't misunderstand that Umineko believes itself to be absolutely right in this regard. Many people claim Umineko isn't for everyone because this mindset won't work for absolutely everyone; Not everyone can conform to the same idea, that's how philosophy works, but it's the stance the work itself takes. Higurashi has many of these themes also, but Umineko doubles down on them.)