the man's quest for atonement

the male guilt to savior complex as explored within umineko (and twin peaks)

*This post will include MAJOR spoilers for the entirety of Umineko!!! Also, some minor Twin Peaks spoilers, but none too grave if you have yet to watch. Read at your own risk.*

This summer, I’ve been going on a fun little journey of watching every David Lynch movie after watching Twin Peaks in January and falling madly in love with the show. Twin Peaks captivated me as it was a story following the complex ways in which the patriarchy gravely leads to the suffering of women. The placement of men in society inevitably leads to the oppression of women, even when it is to the man’s despair. In Twin Peaks, Dale Cooper is a man who sees the cruelty that men enact through his job as an FBI agent. Upon arriving in the small town of Twin Peaks, Cooper follows the mystery of Laura Palmer’s murder as her death haunts the entire town. And in watching the fallout of how the people in this town, specifically the men in this town, failed Laura, it reminds him of his personal failure to save the woman he loved. He feels responsible to be the man who avenges Laura, to break the cycle of men’s abuse toward women. In a way, Cooper is on a quest for atonement, whether he realizes it or not. Cooper becomes trapped within the Black Lodge as it represents the fact that he could not reach atonement; no matter how many damsels in distress he tries to save, he’ll never be able to atone to Caroline or to Laura. He is living within a mysterious other world of his pain and suffering, because in the end, he is not a savior; he is nothing but another man. And if you know anything about me, you know that as I digest and explore all these ideas, one pesky thought rings through my little one-track mind, “Wow! This is just like Umineko.”

Atonement is something deeply ingrained into the fabric of Umineko’s narrative, and nowhere is it more evident than it is within the family line of Kinzo, Rudolf, and Battler. It is no secret that Battler is a direct parallel to Kinzo; hell, Tohya’s sprite is literally just young Kinzo’s sprite in a suit. However, I’d say Battler mirrors his father quite deeply as well. It was Battler's mindless attempt at emulating his father that caused his empty promise. Yet, what connects all three of these men so deeply is the simple fact: these three men have sinned, and because of that sin, people die.

The sins of these men go as follows: Kinzo’s exile of his own daughter and eventual rape of said daughter leaving her pregnant, Rudolf’s adultery leading to the labor of two children at once and his subsequent paying off of doctors to falsify the birth records of one child after his wife had a stillbirth, and Battler’s flippant false promise that he’d be a young girl’s prince leading to the chain of events that caused her suicide. Something of note is that each of these sins directly led to the death of the woman they harmed: Kuwadorian Beatrice, Asumu Ushiromiya, and Sayo Yasuda. However, these sins not only caused these deaths, but all collaborated in shaping the events of the complete obliteration of the Ushiromiya family during the Rokkenjima Massacre. What makes this much more interesting is that these events weren’t just fallout from the sins themselves, but the result of the guilt these men faced due to their involvement in the death of their poor “damsel in distress.” It was each of these men’s quests for self-righteous atonement that caused their demise.

Throughout the bulk of the story, Kinzo’s quest for atonement is apparent. The first scene of the novel opens with Kinzo’s desperate pleas to see the mysterious Beatrice once again, to see her smile. This, of course, is written off as an old man’s delusions as he sits upon his deathbed; he’s a madman calling out to a fictional witch he seems to worship for God knows why. Episode 7 then unravels the truth behind this man’s anguish; he has been living with the fact that he, in fact, killed his daughter through acts of his greed and selfishness. He knew what he had done was deplorable; he knew he was an unforgivable and cruel man. The guilt of robbing his daughter, a creation that stemmed from his one true love, of her entire autonomy and leaving her to become a dead body at the bottom of a cliff, tore him apart. His guilt drove him mad because he became fixated on wishing to see her yet again and be granted her forgiveness. Nobody else in the world would be able to forgive him for his heinousness, but for a moment, he could rewrite the story, and she could be his daughter again. He could erase his sin.

In Requiem of the Golden Witch, Kinzo gets his dream come true. The child born by his dead daughter has inherited her soul. She appears in front of him, and he can apologize, and she can call him “father.” Kinzo is forgiven, and he can finally pass on. He has saved the damsel in distress, and he has created Happily Ever After. Or did he? Now, the orphaned maid girl with her head in the clouds, Sayo Yasuda, has become aware of the circumstances of her birth. She now knows the pain that her mother suffered, which directly led to her conception. She now knows that she should never have been born at all. The awareness of this along the the mutilation of her body leaves Sayo unautonomous and empty, similarly to the doll-like state Kinzo was in before he met Bice. What functioned as atonement for Kinzo, a way to retrieve his soul, sucked the soul out of another, causing an endless spiral of despair. It was this meeting with Kinzo that turned the daydreamer maid into a true witch. The creation of the fully formed witch allows for the events within the catbox to commence, as Beatrice, the vengeful Golden Witch, can now use Rokkenjima as her playground. Now, Kinzo is stuck within a Black Lodge of his own creation, playing the role of BOB and forcing his ways into the minds of the men that follow his bloodline.

This then leads us to the next in line, Rudolf Ushiromiya, Kinzo’s third son. Early on in the story, Rudolf is seen as the less extreme sibling. His older siblings, Krauss and Eva, are constantly at each other’s throats, deeply embedded in their own greed. His younger sister, Rosa, is weak-willed but angry and physically abusive. Rudolf is a known womanizer and serial cheater, sure, but he’s also lighthearted and silly at times. Many of his scenes deal with his lighthearted, fun-loving nature, like his gun duel with Belphagor. His quest for atonement is much more hidden than it is with Kinzo. Early on in Episode 1, it is apparent that Rudolf has some sort of secret that he wishes to confess to both Battler and Kyrie, he states as such. It isn’t until we reach Requiem again that his true motives begin to shine through. For the first time, Rudolf is showing remorse for his adultery and the loss of his wife, Asumu. When reflecting on the loss of Asumu, Rudolf states:

"Almost as though... Asumu knew that, and stepped down from the stage of her own choosing. Did I kill Asumu...? If so, then how long has it been since I started killing her..."

He is cognizant of the pain he has caused the woman he had promised to love forever. It is not just sorrow, but an all-consuming guilt. Rudolf, like Kinzo, is aware that he is the one who killed Asumu. His guilt is only built upon in Episode 8 when the entire truth comes out, the truth of his sin. Due to his adultery, both his current partner Asumu and his secretary Kyrie Sumadera got pregnant. To save face, he quickly married Asumu so as not to defame the family for having a child out of wedlock. Both women went into labor on the same day, and his wife had a stillbirth while Kyrie gave birth to a healthy baby boy. And again, to save face, he paid the doctors off to falsify a stillbirth for Kyrie and give the born child to Asumu. Rudolf then lived the the guilt of the action, which he feared Asumu had seen right through. Because of said guilt, Rudolf kept his relationship with Kyrie, eventually getting her pregnant yet again, right before the death of Asumu. His attempt at atoning to Kyrie had directly led to the death of Asumu Ushiromiya. Rudolf’s sin has left him a shell of a human being, and he must atone.

This brings us to the infamous Episode 7 Tea Party, the truth behind the events of the Rokkenjima Massacre. The human Sayo Yasuda has begun her murder-suicide plan, set into motion by the aforementioned sins of the men in the family line. When the adults are able to solve the epitaph and defeat the witch, they also become aware of the hidden gold on the island. In a deeply unsettling sequence, greed takes over all of them until first blood is drawn by an accidental gunshot. It is within this chaos that a plan is being drawn by the two seemingly least bloodthirsty people in the room, Kyrie and Rudolf. In a plan drawn by Kyrie, they both agree to kill the remaining visitors on the island, potentially minus Battler, and escape with the gold. Rudolf knows this plan is cruel, but his judgment is completely clouded by one thing: his ever-present guilt. Looking at Kyrie in this moment, he knows that she is doing this because he led her to it. He sees she, too, is dead inside, and he wonders how long has it been since I started killing her? He has no choice but to follow through with this plan, because for him, this is his final chance for atonement.

This begins the famed Rokkenjima Massacre, where Rudolf aids Kyrie in the murder of every last being on the island. Unluckily for them, Eva miraculously survived by the chance of getting hit by a blank. When Eva confronts Rudolf for killing George, he tries to trick her, because in his quest for atonement, “Rudolf had already determined to play the part of the evil murderer who kills for money...” By playing the part of the bad guy for Kyrie’s sake, his lies can be absolved, and he can be forgiven. By allowing himself to be shot by Eva, his soul can finally rest, as he has given Kyrie what she wanted. But was he really saving the woman who loved him? Because in Rudolf’s quest to atone to Kyrie, he left the little girl who loved him more than life without a father, completely and utterly scared and alone. And by killing George, the one tie Eva had to her own humanity, he left that little girl without the love he could have given her, leaving her empty. Rudolf believed that by saving the damsel in distress, Kyrie, he could also atone for the negligence that killed Asumu. He plays the greedy and spineless businessman who abandons his role as a father until the very end, living a life deeply reflective of Twin Peaks’ very own Ben Horne. And just like Mr. Horne, without ever truly becoming a vessel of BOB, he enacts BOB’s exact plan, playing into the essence of BOB’s misdoings, the evil that men do.

And finally, we have reached the end of this family line, Umineko’s protagonist, Battler Ushiromiya. While reading about the sins committed by the men before him, Battler’s sin may seem insignificant. How can making an empty promise be as bad as the severe crimes against women that the men before him have enacted? And to a point, I agree, Battler being a dramatic preteen and flirting with his crush is not anywhere near as horrific as what his father and grandfather did to the women in their lives. Instead, his sin lies in something that stood at the core of both Kinzo and Rudolf’s sins: negligence. While never being outwardly malicious or cruel, while trying to escape the patriarchy and the harm toward women, men become negligent of how their actions of defiance may also contribute to harm. Sadly, even despite trying to escape them, patriarchal standards are so ingrained into social structures, they cannot be escaped easily. And Battler, just like Dale Cooper, feeds into that harm directly by trying to escape it.

Battler’s sin in the most basic terms was not coming back to the island and saving the damsel in distress, like he said he would. But the reason Battler never returned was not because he didn’t want to save his first love from a dreary life, but because his father got another woman pregnant at the exact same time that his father basically drove his mother to death. To Battler, his removal from the family was noble; he was escaping the evils of the family, escaping the evils of men like his father. Battler was different; he wasn’t a fake man who abuses women’s love like his father. He was a real man, one strong enough to walk out and carve a life for himself. But, in his defiance against the patriarchy, in his negligence, he left someone who was counting on him completely alone. Just like his father would do to his sister in 6 years, Battler, in an attempt to atone for his mother, left another woman to despair. The despair of being forgotten by the one person she trusted left Sayo Yasuda full of doubt and deeply lonely. This despair served as a catalyst for the splitting of her personality and cynical nature that would then be exacerbated by Kinzo’s selfish attempt at atonement.

After all the fallout, the tale of Umineko leads us to its climax, The Magic Ending. In Umineko’s only branching route, if the player decides to believe in magic, a scene is unlocked of Battler and the Golden Witch Beatrice escaping the island after the massacre. This scene directly parallels the scene in Kinzo’s backstory from Episode 7, where both Battler and Kinzo swoop their Golden Witch off her feet, and keep her as a souvenir from the Golden Land. Battler becomes a vessel of Kinzo, and Beatrice here is a vessel for all the Beatrices that had come before. BOB has gotten hold of Laura Palmer yet again. But Battler and Beatrice don’t escape the island like Kinzo and Bice did. Instead, Beatrice, being an illusion, must fade into oblivion; she cannot live in the world of light that Battler wishes to bring her to. This light will only burn her, so she dives deep into the ocean and becomes one with the darkness. And as Dale Cooper follows Laura Palmer and Annie Blackburn into the Black Lodge, Battler follows Beatrice into the Abyss. He holds her close, refusing to let her go, because light cannot exist for him if he cannot save the damsel in distress. Battler and Beatrice drown in the Abyss, trapping them in the shadows of the Black Lodge eternally.

However, a body emerges into the world of light. One that was completely blank, empty, and doll-like. The body of a man who would soon be named Hachijo Tohya. But, as Battler’s stubbornness refuses to let go of himself, and of his beloved Beatrice, he clings to life in an attempt at atonement for his sin. Both Tohya and Battler feel deep guilt for their sin of leading a girl to suicide and not being able to save her. They both become obsessed with trying to save the poor damsel in distress from oblivion. Beatrice wanted to exist; she wanted to be loved, and writing her into existence is the only vessel in which these men can atone to the Witch. But the trend that has been seen through the sins of the bloodline that came before, in writing their atonement, they were negligent. Tohya, obsessed with understanding the contents of his creation and the world of the enigmatic witch, and obsessed with absolving himself of the blame of her death, works to publish his and his partner’s forgeries of the Rokkenjima Massacre. In avenging Beatrice, in a desperate attempt at atonement, he is negligent of the Beatrice of the future, Ange Ushiromiya, and only pushes her further into isolation and despair as the death of her family becomes enigmatic itself, the talking point of the town. And with Battler’s soul still holding on to bring life to his beloved Golden Witch, his holding on to her keeps him from being able to return to his sister. He cannot yet escape the Black Lodge. Yet again, in attempts to save the damsel in distress, the prince only forces another woman into that role.

There is an inherent selfishness to this bloodline’s attempts at atonement, and within their negligence, they only perpetuate the cycle of abuse, making way for themselves to be the tortured hero, while the women suffer in silence. This is the bleak reality Dale Cooper must face as he sits within the red curtains of the Black Lodge: the fact that he is not a savior, but simply a man. Battler is trapped within the same dilemma, facing the fact that he cannot save the final Golden Witch, the final damsel in distress: his beloved sister. Battler cannot pass on to the Golden Land, and he is stuck in limbo, while the rest of his family and his beloved Beatrice wait for his return.

However, Umineko at its core is a story of overcoming. The world is unfair and cruel, and the patriarchy functions as a cycle that even the most noble of men harm the women they wish to protect. This is all true; however, despite all of this, love is the world’s core. The final Golden Witch, Ange Ushiromiya, steps off the ledge of a building when she realizes that fact; she is not going to let the cruel setup of this world cage her any longer. She will not let guilt for not being there with her family lead to negligence. She transforms her emptiness into creation, creation that does not exploit others, but brings magic into their lives. Ange Ushiromiya beats her own fate and frees herself of the damsel in distress label by offering atonement to the most important person that needed it, herself. By forgiving herself for her family’s death and for letting life pass her by, she can blossom and go on to atone for the sins her family went on to create. By reforming the orphanage that her grandfather opened to breed servants, she goes directly to the source of pain and redefines it. She gives children like herself a place to belong, a place to feel love, and a place to believe. She offers them what she learned for herself: that you must atone to yourself before the guilt eats you alive. And she does this while still being painted as the damsel in distress by her brother.

When Battler finally gets to meet her, after being unable to for all those years, he sees all the work that she put into rebuilding herself. It is when he sees this that he finally realizes the truth that had been hiding from him this whole time: that he is not a savior, but just another man. Furthermore, Battler sees that Ange was able to atone not just to herself, but the sins of her family. And, she was able to keep the memory of Beatrice alive, not through exploitation, but through genuine love. In the end, it was Ange who avenged Beatrice, and then Ange saved him, too. And then… he knew that the person he needed to atone to was always himself, and to let go of the patriarchal standard that he is some sort of savior. In the end, he is just like his beloved witch, he is love. And by finally forgiving himself and atoning to Ange by viewing her progress and offering her peace, he is free from purgatory, he is free from the Black Lodge. He can return to his love and be surrounded by love forever. And Tohya frees himself of Battler’s soul and comes into his own, with no more need to exploit the trauma she worked so hard to overcome in his quest for self-definement. The men in Umineko never truly escape the patriarchy that binds them, but there are steps provided to show them how to break these chains. It explores exactly how these acts of violence are committed, even by well-meaning people, and how they can be prevented. The women are also empowered through the story, gaining back what they’ve had stolen from them, and redefining the label of a “damsel in distress.”

To all the women who may be reading this, I see you, and I celebrate you. The world is set up in a way that systemically tries to bring us down, but we are not weak and meaningless. While we may live within these confines, we can find ways to break free and work together to liberate those who may still be suffering. And to both the men and women out there, know that we are not saviors, but human beings made up of love. Follow the path to forgive yourself for the ways in which you may have failed the people you love. And through that newfound acceptance, be aware of the harm you may cause others. Do not fault yourself for your own selfish desires, but have the power to overcome them. If you stop being negligent and lead with understanding, you can atone with genuine remorse, and not because you want to selfishly absolve yourself of your sin. As human beings, we are made to sin, but also made to love, so lead with that.

Love you always,

The Golden Witch

(little author’s note I have yet to watch The Return, so I know my full knowledge on such things as the Black Lodge and the conclusion of Twin Peaks is missing. I mostly used the idea of a mysterious other world as a symbol in this piece based on the information I have from the first two seasons. Twin Peaks fans pls don’t crucify me)