Well, this is the conference of the adults in the late night, which was not shown to us in the first two arcs. Maybe Rosa told them about that in those two arcs too, just we didn’t see it.

The object of the game is to find some human/logical means by which the murders could have taken place. And if possible, to prove it wasn’t any of the family members or servants.

If you take Umineko too literally, it’s pretty weak, but understood as a mind game, where none of the characters or plot devices should be viewed as real people or events, it is incredibly fun and clever.

I must say, after I read a few small spoilers, which I wont post, I was really excited for some of the things that I think may happen during this arc. Hopefully it’ll be good. I have high hopes.

The thing that bugs me about Umineko is the way information is being given during the arcs. I remember what I really liked about Higurashi was that each arc brought new revelations, and they intertwined together as the series went on. I don’t think I see that in Umineko, and if anything it seems like it’s contradicting itself. I mean, -suddenly- Rosa says that she killed Beato? But, I suppose it could be just because they’re all different scenarios, so different things happen. Maybe I just need to rewatch the past two arcs..

Also, Beatrice gains nothing from messing with Battler and the red text. What if it turns out to be a lie? Then what? It’s not like he’ll go and accept her - he’ll just deny her forever and nothing changes. The point of the red is to challenge Battler and that if he cannot come up for a plausible human means for the murder to occur then it’s pretty much game over. Just as Beato said during EP 2 (the 2nd episode of that arc I believe) - red text is to give him some sort of crutch to help him make theories, but can easily be the sword that cuts him in the end because if he cannot explain something or figure it out then he has nowhere to run to - especially not his ‘lalalalalamagicnotrealalalalala’ stuff.

Red has to be a fact because otherwise any event could be handwaved with “you made that up/hallucination/etc.” - especially with the track record from Higurashi. It´s used to convince Battler and more importantly the audience aka us. You can imagine “Meta-Battler” as some kind of Representation of the audience so that Beatrice aka the author can directly adress “us”. Half the fun with Higurashi/Umineko is the discussion about it after all. This will become REALLY apparent this round since they start cashing in with some of the bigger setups.

If the red wasn´t true the whole narrative would collapse and even worse it´d be really lame.

There probably is a logical explanation for murders and magic must be either fake or representing something else, such as distractions and illusions that need the power of belief to become real.

If Beatrice is lying while using the red is something we don’t know, there could be such a twist in the unknown future, but I think it’s better to assume there are loop holes in it such as what Battler has tried to exploit.

Now that the translation is out it’s even more intriguing.

The new arc seems to be centered on Eva, so perhaps she’ll end up in Rosa’s position this time? That seems like a valid guess right now.

The new scenes in the OP were nice to look at and although there’s evidently a lot of foreshadowing going on…I’d rather not speculate too much. However, there’s one fairly obvious conclusion that can be made after looking at it, because something seems too much of a coincidence for me. We’ll see how that goes.

Regarding the actual content of the episode, the way they introduced the nature of magic in this show does seem to give more urgency to Beatrice’s goal of getting Battler & co. to believe she’s the person responsible for the murders, when the truth might well be that she’s not.

That twist at the end was quite surprising, if appropriate. I’ve also thought there was more than one person involved in the murders, particularly during the previous arc, so for the time being this is all working out quite nicely given the possibility of adding at least one more person to the cast.

Now if only they would drop the cheesy evil faces *sigh