"Without love it cannot be seen"
This is a motif that is reiterated time and time again over the course of the series. And yet, I wasn’t able to fully appreciate what this actually meant until the end. Over the course of the series, we see the main characters search for their idea of an "objective” truth. However, the idea of an “objective truth” is paradoxical in nature. Oftentimes, due to the nuance of the human psyche and how looking at something collectively in an “objective” manner is near-impossible, discovering such an “objective truth” can be exceedingly difficult. Generally speaking, there usually isn’t any one infallible perspective in any situation.
Take Ange for instance. Ange claimed she was viewing things objectively, hence why she believed for her entire life that Eva is evil, and when viewing the story from Ange's own perspective, it does appear to be the fact. In reality, Ange was just projecting her own resentment and cynicism onto Eva, a woman who was far from guiltless but was also suffering and in turmoil. They're both victims in the end, and it becomes far more easier to empathize with Eva after having learnt the identity of the true culprits, knowledge that we the reader now recognize why Eva went to such great lengths to withhold it from Ange. By never trying to understand the heart of Eva and solely viewing her as a culprit, Ange fell deeper and deeper into her cynicism and pushed their relationship into something irreparable.
“Without love it cannot be seen” signifies that you need to approach situations with “love”, that you need to place your faith in the goodness of people and believe in the love that exists in everyone’s heart in order to shape your perspective and find your own truth. Even when you are feeling dubious and uncertain of things, it's your own love and belief that will define how you view everything. On the flip side, if you view something “without love”, then you will view that something in a darker, more hopeless light, oftentimes distorting the “truth”. This aforementioned idea exists in Erika, who views everything in the light of cold logic and without love. It’s why Erika was unable to find the true culprit in game 5; she was so insistent on the “truth” that, relying entirely on the red truths, she never once contemplated Natsuhi’s own love for her husband and the Ushiromiya family honor. There is always a time and place to consider a person’s love and trust in understanding a situation, and it’s (or rather the lack of doing so) why Erika was entirely wrong in placing the blame on Natsuhi as the culprit.
This leaves the question: why did Battler demonstrate such an overtly saccharine, almost parodic world to Ange? Battler's scenario serves as what is essentially the antithesis to Ange's own beliefs. While Ange's viewpoint on her family, tinged with bias, was that of greedy, terrible people that clawed at each other over the inheritance, Battler shows Ange the complete opposite: a happy, uncomplicated family teeming with meaningful togetherness. Battler did this not because he thought Ange would blindly believe in that scenario, but rather he wanted Ange to acknowledge both sides of the equation and realize that, as mentioned earlier, her own bias is obfuscating the full picture. Neither scenario is correct; rather, the "truth" exists in the space between the two and can't be defined to mere extremes like the scenario Battler presented or the belief that Ange held onto.
Magic is representative of many things: it embodies empathy, happiness, and love, among many other qualities. As is pointed out throughout the series, the "magic" is quite frail and can easily be shattered, but above all, it allows you to understand the heart of people, even those that have done wrong. At the end of the day, all of this comes down to the fact that the complete, "objective" truth is wholly unknowable, gone away with the bomb that devastated the island—it's on Ange to decide on a version of the truth that she's able to accept. By choosing "magic", Ange is able to reject the cynicism that defined much of her life. She understands that her family was far from perfect, but ultimately comes to the understanding that the situation is too nuanced to define her family members to unquantifiable constructs of "good" or "evil". I don't believe that Umineko wanted to answer the question of whether they were redeemable or irredeemable, that's something for the reader themself to deliberate on; rather, I believe it's more imperative to understand the cycle of abuse that everyone was a victim of and why the family members came to do such terrible deeds. Despite all of their sins, they were merely people that were hurt and hurt others as a result. Of course, this doesn’t absolve them of their sins, but at the end of the day, every one of them had goodness in their heart and were capable of being loving people just as much as they were bad, and trying to haphazardly define each and every one of them into spectrums of "good" or "evil" is a fruitless endeavor.
Admittedly, this is a bit of a cloying, even slightly pretentious thematic line presented by Ryukishi07, but I really do believe it works here. Love is truly wise—it has the power to influence your beliefs and how you view the world. It can even triumph over the truth. And this is not to say that the truth is necessarily irrelevant here, but it is showcased throughout the whole series that hyper-fixating on that premise can lead to disastrous consequences, especially in Ange's case where it is clear that she is using her journey of unearthing the truth as a means to provide closure for her planned suicide. Let's bring up Erika again, who by proxy serves as a sort of criticism to the audience as "intellectual rapists". Ange's character in the "trick" ending vividly reflects Erika, becoming a person without love and greatly consumed by the desire to discover the truth, almost dehumanizing her in the process. In the "magic" ending, Ange chooses to view everything that has happened with love. She accepts that terrible and heinous acts have been enacted on the island by her beloved family members, but simultaneously understands that the complete, "objective" truth can and should never be fully realized, locked away forever in the catbox of October 4-5, 1986 of Rokkenjima. There's no use in viewing them in any extreme, considering they are all deceased and gone forever. In the end, it's all up to Ange to accept different parts of the known truth and form the truth that she wants to believe in, and doing so in the process leads her to live a far more fulfilling and happier life, becoming an author and supporting orphaned children.
In my opinion, what makes Umineko so unequivocally powerful is how it challenges the notion of uncritically accepting a single dogmatic truth, and this is the core of what I believe "without love it cannot be seen" really means. I've seen some people claim that the message of the story is that it's fine to delude yourself or remain in denial of reality, but I could not disagree more. The message is a simple "be open-minded" and not allow a single viewpoint to take control of what is a multifaceted truth, to view them "with love" and find meaning in it in the end.
Take an idea like Santa Claus for example. It's true that Santa Claus isn't real in an objective sense, but he's "real" in the sense that his conceptual existence brings joy to countless kids across the world, and that shouldn't invalidate any of the happiness that the kids have had at the time. In the same vein, we have Maria, who chose to believe in optimism and the good of her mother Rosa through magic. Cold logic may tell you that Maria lived a terrible, lonely life, but Maria herself will tell you that she lived a fulfilling life with her magical friends and the mother who also shared a very positive side despite the bad she's done.
Ultimately, Umineko was so influential to me because it told me to maintain empathy and create meaning in my own reality in spite of the many shitty things that may have been dealt to me, instead of spreading misery and creating a burden on not only myself but others around. Sayo could not do that, but Ange managed to do so, which fundamentally represents the core of the parallel between the two that Twilight put so much effort in emphasizing. It's why love can be stronger than "truth", it's not about shying away from reality, but rather having the strength and belief to face that reality and make it a better one for yourself.
64.5 out of 66 users liked this review
