/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>41119210
Tendentious interpretation with maybe the exception of Higurashi and RGD. Higanbana never depicts daydreaming as strictly bad but simply as a coping mechanism in a lawless environment, even implying that Midori will probably grow up to be a great actress once she passes through this purgatory. It also portray *youkai*, not just dead people (an example of a merely dead person in Higanbana is Tomoko, who is actually happy and at peace in death), and doesn't strictly depict them as powerless but as necessary nocturnal counterparts to humanity who show them something about how they should live. The dead Ushiromiya family are not youkai, and Umineko ends with an assertion about truths that are beyond the reach of empirical observation. It rejects the attempts of the resentful goats to besmirch the legacy of the family, but it never comments on escapism as such or equates inward truths of creation and imagination with mere escapism. It affirms the mental acts of creation as real and transformative in a large-scale analogy for creation in general (the creation of the world or of a mystery story, made out of love). 'Escapism' is just how people interpret it, wrongly. Midori is maybe 'escapist' because she just entertains a self-serving fantasy fed to her by a youkai where she's at the top of the heap instead of being bullied, which is not the same as the creative facility—again, she's implied to grow up to be an actress, not a writer like Ange.

It's true that Umineko roots creative acts first and foremost in the suffering of the characters. This may be intentional or for ironic effect, and along with the metaphysical emphasis on love as the first principle of creation, is one of the reasons that Umineko has a somewhat Christian feel at times. But to talk about Maria/Ange's inwardness as only escapism is to miss the larger structure of analogy built around the facility to 'create a world'.

>>36820125
With love, they will be able to see us...