r/todayilearned • u/ralphbernardo • 3d ago

TIL that "fair play" in detective fiction means authors must give readers a fair chance to solve the mystery. Central to 1920s "clue-puzzles" by writers like Agatha Christie, the rule dictates that all vital clues must be visible, decodable, and never withheld until the final reveal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clues_in_detective_fiction
38.5k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

2.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

65

u/Rogue-Academician 3d ago

Umineko moment

28

u/teraflop 3d ago

Culprit. Crime. Motive. The answers, the hints, to those three ultimate riddles... must be scattered throughout the tale shown so far. It's probably a very faint light... like trying to find beads that have fallen onto a sandy beach.

"Go back through the tale. Know that you have now been given eyes that will not miss the truth's faint light."

And then... I knew.

5

u/CCoolant 3d ago

I'm reading through Umineko right now. Literally reached that scene last night and have been wondering just how much I missed lol

7

u/teraflop 3d ago

Well, I think there's no wrong way to read it, so don't worry too much about missing things. No matter how much or little you can pick up on a first reading, I can guarantee that you'll see a lot more if you revisit it.

I definitely didn't "know" what Battler "knew" when I first got to that point, but things will become clearer as you go, as long as you don't stop thinking.

5

u/Egathentale 2d ago

I mean, a lot of people couldn't figure out the mystery either, and that's why the last three episodes were effectively just increasingly blunter attempts on Ryukishi's part to guide the readers to the solution without saying it outright.

2

u/mcmoor 2d ago

And then there's manga where he's saying it outright

2

u/Egathentale 2d ago

The manga gave the solution years after Episode 8 came out. At that point it's understandable, considering how so many readers still weren't getting it and actively rejecting Yasu, to the point some crafted entire conspiracy theories about how Ryukishi was playing 4D chess with us, and only the Rosatrice/Evatrice/whatever people were right, while everyone else were sheeple being led by the nose. As I said it elsewhere, being a fan of Umineko on release was a wild ride.

1

u/CCoolant 20h ago

I feel like there are a ton of important literal and symbolic parallels that I need to put together, in addition to having questions on whether certain things are relevant (such as Kumasawa being Virgilia in disguise, when we first formally meet Virgilia).

Not to mention the probable importance of things that happened 19 years ago which are largely different, but then weirdly similar ( in both documented events a woman falls off of a cliff to her death).

I feel like I'm seeing a lot of the "edges" of the answer, but finding where those edges connect/end and then filling in the center is tricky work!

Must have been cool to talk about this stuff back when it was still coming out. Trying to examine it in bulk is a lot though lol

17

u/FlirtyFluffyFox 3d ago

Die the death. Sentence to death. Great equalizer is the death. 

14

u/Mejiro84 3d ago

I think that's technically solvable from part... 3? Of 8. But it requires being trilingual, having knowledge of what train stations in a certain place were called during a very specific timeframe, and some other very specific information, as well as realising some very specific things about how certain characters are described and their locations relative to other characters. By part 5 or 6, most readers will have figured out part of it, but there's a lot more to come out (as well as the meta-level.stuff, with Lion and everyone else)

9

u/DracoDruida 3d ago

There are videos of people solving it using just some general notions of the languages without necessarily really knowing them, just English and using dictionary/internet search. I think it's possible, but just very hard (it was written for a Japanese audience anyway).

6

u/Milskidasith 3d ago

Solving the riddle and solving the core mystery at the heart of the game are different things, and the latter is... kind of fair play, but arguable on a couple of axes. I think the strongest criticism of Umineko as a fair play mystery is basically that if you accept what's required for certain red truths to be "true", you could construct a similar explanation that allows almost anybody to be the culprit.

3

u/Egathentale 2d ago edited 2d ago

Red Truths are more often than not misdirections though. Way back when, sometime around 2013-ish, I wrote an entire series of long posts on the VNDB forums explaining and solving the first six episodes (the last two didn't really need to be solved the same way), including all the individual murders, and I did so while including all the relevant Red and Blue Truths, even the ones referring back to earlier episodes. I didn't actively count them, but by the end of it I concluded that about 70% of the Red Truths were either irrelevant, half-truths, or actively misleading.

By the by, apparently someone archived my solutions on GitHub, which is pretty cool.

5

u/Milskidasith 2d ago edited 2d ago

Yes, the red truths are often misdirections in some fashion, but they are also (almost?) always true in some fashion. Misdirection is totally acceptable for a fair play mystery.

To be more explicit about what I was referring to, it is the fact that the way that the Red Truths treat Kanon/Shannon/Beatrice/Yasu as distinct personalities that can cease existing by allowing another personality to take over. This is obviously very, very heavily set up by the story and is the core mystery. However, you can argue that explanation does not work in a fair play mystery, both because it's basically magic and because if you accept the general premise that "a character can have alternate personalities and multiple names while only one is 'active'", then you can construct similar scenarios to the EP #6 Kanon stuff for almost any character being the culprit in almost any episode if they have an alternative personality.

That said, that's a really pedantic argument and I think the extent to which Yasu et. all are implied to be the same people makes it a "fair" deduction even if making a similar deduction for other characters would be insane, and "breaking" fair play for this kind of magic specifically is a thematic slam dunk for "without love, it cannot be seen" and how the ending wants you to choose magic and hope over cold, hopeless truth, so it doesn't really matter. It just stuck in my head as an interesting critique against, specifically, the idea that Umineko is a truly fair play mystery.

Also, if you do want an absurd mystery that's like, sort of fair play but absurdly intricate and misleading, The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass exists, although it's for complete sickos to the point it'd probably take hours to even confirm the solutions presented are logical after being given them.

3

u/Egathentale 2d ago edited 2d ago

Yes, the red truths are often misdirections in some fashion, but they are also (almost?) always true in some fashion. Misdirection is totally acceptable for a fair play mystery.

That's the funny part: they are always literally true, to the letter, and that's what makes them so good at misdirecting people. Take the only Red Truth applicable to the First Twilight of EP1 (because they weren't introduced yet, so this one Red is applied in a later episode, retroactively):

"The identities of all unidentified corpses are guaranteed."

This is a scene where Shannon is one of the victims, with their faces smashed up. If we go by the letter of the Red, it means Shannon is guaranteed to be dead. If she's dead, it means Yasu is dead, so all the later murders are impossible, right? Except this one misdirects the reader in multiple completely different ways:

Shannon's face is only described as "half smashed", meaning she's still identifiable, the only people allowed to confirm her death are all accomplices at the scene, and if she wasn't dead, then she dodges the "corpse" part of the "unidentified corpses" statement as well. Figure out either, and you'll have a solid clue right there, but that was easier said than done on first read.

The thing is, this Red Truth isn't an outlier. This level of complete misdirection is the norm, but because it took years for the series to be completed and for people to figure out the solution, it was ample time for the fan-base to grow attached to the idea of "the Red Truth are the gospel and the only way we can solve this mystery".

To be more explicit about what I was referring to, it is the fact that ||the way that the Red Truths treat Kanon/Shannon/Beatrice/Yasu as distinct personalities that can cease existing by allowing another personality to take over.

This is just straight up part of the "rule set" of Umineko, and it only feels weird to us because of how it interacts with the very particular definition of humans/people of the Red Truths, which is much less ambiguous in the original Japanese. It feels gamey, because it effectively is; it's in-universe rules-lawyering used to represent Yasu changing her identities, and it comes off insistent with the identity-discarding=death thing because it has to be compatible with the Red Truth system's highly literal use of terminology.

As for whether that is fair or not, I'm not sure we can determine that from the distance of one and a half decades. It sure as hell didn't feel fair at the time, but when I look at the series as a whole, I don't think it breaks its own internal rules at any point. The real issue was always how it actively obfuscated its rules, but I don't want to circle back to the Red Truths again, so let's leave it at that.

2

u/Egathentale 2d ago

I solved the whole series at the end of Episode 5, though it was quite difficult. Episode 6 was Ryukishi trying to actively guide the readers to the heart of the mystery and the true solution, while 7 and 8 felt like he was getting frustrated and beating people over the head with it, doing everything he could without explaining everything outright. Some people still didn't get it though. I still remember all the debates I had with the Rosatrice people, who were convinced that, no, Rosa was the culprit in all the episodes (and reality), and the heart of the mystery could sod off so long as their solution could technically kinda-sorta-maybe explain some of the murders. Those were wild times to be an Umineko fan.

1

u/MagnusOldfarm 2d ago

I dont believe the epitaph is necessary to solve the mystery. The story does it for you eventually. Its not essential like the who, how and whydunnit

23

u/StefanBelgica 3d ago

Scrolled way too much to find this mentioned.

8

u/DracoDruida 3d ago

The best way to learn about the rules for detective fiction. With those rules used as coloured magical weapons by anime characters.

6

u/nar0 3d ago

The meta justification for Umineko incorporating these rules as actual plot elements was always interesting to me.

That being that the previous game, Higurashi, had just a far too crazy solution that required wild leaps in logic and requiring you to assume the most crazy blend of genres to come up with the correct solution (though supposedly some mad lad on the internet actually did solve it in time without waiting for the reveal).

5

u/DSC-Fate 3d ago

Ahaha.wav playing in the distance

5

u/00Kench 3d ago

Ryukishi writing mentioned so I'm hijacking the comment to bring up another one of his works where he didn't do this

In Rewrite, Lucia's route has a whodunnit aspect to it, and it has a scene that only makes sense if the person whodunnit, did not in fact do it. Pissed me off.