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Oh look at me finally writing the essay I meant to write like a month ago!! My canon is kinda confusing and I want to explain how I'm workin' it. I will probably be very redundant and I have a lot of topics to cover but... you can... always ask for clarification at least.
ok the thing is, one of the points/themes of Umineko is that the story can be interpreted through the lens of either Mystery or Fantasy. JUST IN CASE YOU DON'T KNOW THE FIRST THING ABOUT UMINEKO, the idea is that they're trapped on an island (Rokkenjima) and people start getting killed off. It starts to get implied that A Witch Did It, and before long there are witches all over the place, but there is never any solid guarantee that they have any direct relation to the Rokkenjima massacre. Fantasy assumes that all the witches and demons and magic presented are real. Mystery assumes that the culprit has been someone on the island all along and any magic is only an obscuring illusion. This is actually explicitly referenced in the canon itself. Beatrice's IC point of view is Fantasy: "I am a witch and the master of the night on Rokkenjima. These murders and the events surrounding them are so inexplicable, I must have committed the crimes with magic." Erika is introduced as a detective, and her pov is explicitly Mystery: "The crimes must be a solvable mystery, therefore, they must be explainable without magic." Battler's pov is actually neither of those and is Anti-Fantasy: "Witches and magic do not exist, therefore, the crimes must be explainable without magic." Battler's POV is the most realistic of the three actually, since Beatrice and Erika are sort of playing off of story tropes rather than Things That Actually Happen. But it is a story and the meta-world recognizes that. Within the canon there is another dimension existing on a meta level, where characters can comment on the main story as well as have their own meta antics! Though it's meta, it also operates as its own special kind of universe with its own rules, however flexible. This is where Battler and Beatrice's game to prove/deny magic takes place, with information that can only be obtained on a meta level.
(btw if you are still confused and/or want to read more about the canon take on Mystery/Fantasy/Anti-Mystery/Anti-Fantasy, this has already been written about in depth, so you can go there. I just need you to understand the basic premise so I can explain what I personally am doing!)
In my interpretation--and thus, for the purposes of my play--the "real world" is limited to the Mystery side and Fantasy really is just a fantasy, the willful delusions of lonely and longing minds, elaborate though they may be. When Battler says that witches and magic don't exist, in a certain sense he is correct. However, the meta-world is another story. Within the meta-world magic is absurdly real and witches and magical forces are on all sides. Battler himself experiences this personally, repeatedly, ruthlessly. The game he is playing is not to disprove magic absolutely, but to disprove magic solely as it relates to the Rokkenjima incident. On a broader scale, in my opinion, he does think magic is a product of the meta-world and it isn't in the real world at all. (Note that "magic" becomes a euphemism for many things that do exist, so let me be explicit. In the sense of witches waving their hands and making things appear out of thin air, killing and reviving people endlessly etc., with no tricks, pure magic: Battler doesn't believe this exists in the real world.)
THE POINT THAT I AM FINALLY GETTING TO is I am playing Battler from the meta-world, not the real world. So he has personal experience with witches and demons. He knows that this stuff, in whatever dimension, actually does exist. He has been killed and pulverized violently like a hundred times at least; he is pretty sure it works. However, camp is not the meta-world. No one here understands wtf he is talking about if he refers to things that way. He figured this out very quickly. On the surface it seems like the real world! But it's not the real world either. It's obviously not normal here. People still come back from the dead magically. THERE ARE PEOPLE CONSTANTLY TALKING IN DIFFERENT COLORS (another feature of the meta-world). Perhaps most importantly on a personal level, I don't think it's possible for Battler to... leave the meta-world and enter a real world now that he's within it. Now that he has a copy of himself that is aware of multiple universes and the workings of them on a level no mere human can possess, he can't just reintegrate into everyday society, even if he wasn't currently locked into Beato's game. In all of the "real" universes, he has a real self wandering around anyway.
So Battler, being unsure whether this is the real world or meta-world or something completely different, is having something of a crisis of faith. He believes strongly, 99.9%, that magic does not and must not exist in the real world (at the point I am taking him from). But he also strongly believes that in the meta-world, he must be bound to Beatrice until the end of the game. Camp isn't compatible with either of these beliefs. It isn't either of those worlds. There's nobody here from his canon though, and nobody who understands his dilemma from both perspectives--who else is going to understand someone who is simultaneously concerned that magic exists and that magic doesn't exist here?? No one can adequately explain to him where he is in relation to where he was, and so he's stuck trying to figure it out on his own. His options, as far as he can figure them, are 1) magic and witches exist in the real world now so tough cookies, or 2) he has spontaneously been removed from Beatrice's game without a victor declared so tough cookies.
I took Battler from right before EP5 so here is a spoiler paragraph about his feelings on #2 that I am whiting out since I said there weren't spoilers. [UGH THIS IS SO TERRIBLE BAAWWWWWWW, are his thoughts basically. He thinks this is much more likely than magic existing in the real world (because DUH MAGIC DOESN'T EXIST, DUH) but this still sucks! The conclusion of EP4 was very dramatic!! Battler swore to kill Beatrice himself and give her closure, but he failed. He's now been sitting with the virtually comatose Beato trying to wait for her to wake up so they can continue. But then suddenly he's in camp?! Did he exceed some sort of time limit? Did Beatrice, in her heart, finally give up on him, releasing him? Now he's stuck with a completely different kind of eternal torture: stuck in camp indefinitely, unable to even influence AT ALL how long he is stuck here, bearing a sin that he still doesn't even understand, currently unable to talk to anyone who can help him or forgive him in any meaningful way. In a way, he wonders if this might be poetic justice served upon him; since he spent so much time dawdling, unable to solve anything, he has been sent to another dimension where it is impossible for him to work towards his release or solve anything. Since Beatrice received no closure, he as well will receive no closure. He considers it would be extremely unlikely that he will ever get to see Beatrice again at this point, unless he can somehow solve her mystery, and he doesn't even have access to the gameboards here so goddamn.] So clearly you should app Beatrice, just saying.
All of that is still just a theory though! He is considering it strongly, but he doesn't believe it to be absolutely true or anything. Really he still just doesn't know wtf is going on at all. So... this is why he's not entirely sure how he should act around people. He's sort of dividing people up into groups based on if they seem like a normal person or if they seem to understand meta/magical concepts. Sometimes he will slip up and start referring to events in game terms or to witches or something, and then if the other person responds with "wtf are you talking about?" he goes "HAHA SORRY, I AM PRETTY CRAZY I GUESS." Since he knows more than anyone else that the real world has no business believing in all that crap! And if it were him, he would definitely think it was crazy! He's been calling himself crazy a lot in camp where he doesn't do it much in canon, but in canon he's not exactly in this kind of situation. He's conscious of the position he's in and if he's interacting with people from the real world, he knows that by real-world standards, he should be in a mental hospital. Hey, for all he knows, the meta-world was all a massive delusion on his part and he really is deeply insane.
But surely there is a strong chance that he is simply in a branch of the meta-world? Why does he feel the need to continue to deny all of the supernatural elements and suppress his own knowledge of them when it's basically a tossup where he is? For one thing, even in the meta-world, denying magic was what Battler did. It was his job, basically. He's stepped down from that job before and Beatrice's sadism went out of control! In his eyes, if he doesn't do this, no one will, and humanity will be forced to suffer even more. It's not really clear what would happen if he stopped in a place like camp, but he doesn't want to let his guard down. If this is the real world? Denying magic only makes sense! If this is the meta-world? Why not? If anything, if he can deny magic strongly enough and load enough anti-magic toxin into his words, the magic keeping him here will disappear, and he'll be able to return to Beatrice. So no matter where he is right now, this is his best strategy, not to mention a clear direction for him to go.
In this vein, recently he's met Yuuko. A ghost! He encountered her but couldn't see her, so he rationalized away her existence. Later, he met someone online who seemed to know a suspicious amount about the event... and also claimed to be the ghost. In Battler's mind, it seemed that Yuuko, for whatever reason, was extending a challenge. A very clear challenge that he could understand and counter easily, so he accepted it! ...unfortunately there are EVEN MORE COMPLICATIONS to this!! It's one thing to deny magic in general. It's another to accept a specific game with a specific person, especially when he's already supposed to be in a game. Where he is in canon he gets huffy when someone else tries to play Beatrice's game with him, and while playing a different game isn't quite as bad, it's still obviously... questionable and cheating on Beatrice in a sense. (Their relationship is super special ok.) So even though this seems like a good way to get somewhere and uncover some truth around here (to him), he's not entirely sure whether it will make things worse or better. He's not even sure if his game with Beatrice is still going on and argh feelings, so many feelings!! Even though he accepted he will probably emo a lot over it and make comparisons to Beatrice's game, which he already started doing and had to draw back from, and make a general agreement to make it different on purpose. :(a Battler has never been good at monogamy, but he does take his eternal rivalries seriously, and he wants to proceed with caution as much as he wants to proceed at all. In EP5, he only agrees to play after all since they were wrecking Beatrice's gameboard; he has no obligation to play with Yuuko except that it's something productive to do and she reminds him of Beatrice... :') SO WE'LL SEE WHAT HAPPENS, ANYWAY.
That's not much of a conclusion but... I think I ran out of things to say, or else I just got sick of rambling without proper structure. YOU'LL TAKE MY WORDVOMIT AND YOU'LL LIKE IT
ok the thing is, one of the points/themes of Umineko is that the story can be interpreted through the lens of either Mystery or Fantasy. JUST IN CASE YOU DON'T KNOW THE FIRST THING ABOUT UMINEKO, the idea is that they're trapped on an island (Rokkenjima) and people start getting killed off. It starts to get implied that A Witch Did It, and before long there are witches all over the place, but there is never any solid guarantee that they have any direct relation to the Rokkenjima massacre. Fantasy assumes that all the witches and demons and magic presented are real. Mystery assumes that the culprit has been someone on the island all along and any magic is only an obscuring illusion. This is actually explicitly referenced in the canon itself. Beatrice's IC point of view is Fantasy: "I am a witch and the master of the night on Rokkenjima. These murders and the events surrounding them are so inexplicable, I must have committed the crimes with magic." Erika is introduced as a detective, and her pov is explicitly Mystery: "The crimes must be a solvable mystery, therefore, they must be explainable without magic." Battler's pov is actually neither of those and is Anti-Fantasy: "Witches and magic do not exist, therefore, the crimes must be explainable without magic." Battler's POV is the most realistic of the three actually, since Beatrice and Erika are sort of playing off of story tropes rather than Things That Actually Happen. But it is a story and the meta-world recognizes that. Within the canon there is another dimension existing on a meta level, where characters can comment on the main story as well as have their own meta antics! Though it's meta, it also operates as its own special kind of universe with its own rules, however flexible. This is where Battler and Beatrice's game to prove/deny magic takes place, with information that can only be obtained on a meta level.
(btw if you are still confused and/or want to read more about the canon take on Mystery/Fantasy/Anti-Mystery/Anti-Fantasy, this has already been written about in depth, so you can go there. I just need you to understand the basic premise so I can explain what I personally am doing!)
In my interpretation--and thus, for the purposes of my play--the "real world" is limited to the Mystery side and Fantasy really is just a fantasy, the willful delusions of lonely and longing minds, elaborate though they may be. When Battler says that witches and magic don't exist, in a certain sense he is correct. However, the meta-world is another story. Within the meta-world magic is absurdly real and witches and magical forces are on all sides. Battler himself experiences this personally, repeatedly, ruthlessly. The game he is playing is not to disprove magic absolutely, but to disprove magic solely as it relates to the Rokkenjima incident. On a broader scale, in my opinion, he does think magic is a product of the meta-world and it isn't in the real world at all. (Note that "magic" becomes a euphemism for many things that do exist, so let me be explicit. In the sense of witches waving their hands and making things appear out of thin air, killing and reviving people endlessly etc., with no tricks, pure magic: Battler doesn't believe this exists in the real world.)
THE POINT THAT I AM FINALLY GETTING TO is I am playing Battler from the meta-world, not the real world. So he has personal experience with witches and demons. He knows that this stuff, in whatever dimension, actually does exist. He has been killed and pulverized violently like a hundred times at least; he is pretty sure it works. However, camp is not the meta-world. No one here understands wtf he is talking about if he refers to things that way. He figured this out very quickly. On the surface it seems like the real world! But it's not the real world either. It's obviously not normal here. People still come back from the dead magically. THERE ARE PEOPLE CONSTANTLY TALKING IN DIFFERENT COLORS (another feature of the meta-world). Perhaps most importantly on a personal level, I don't think it's possible for Battler to... leave the meta-world and enter a real world now that he's within it. Now that he has a copy of himself that is aware of multiple universes and the workings of them on a level no mere human can possess, he can't just reintegrate into everyday society, even if he wasn't currently locked into Beato's game. In all of the "real" universes, he has a real self wandering around anyway.
So Battler, being unsure whether this is the real world or meta-world or something completely different, is having something of a crisis of faith. He believes strongly, 99.9%, that magic does not and must not exist in the real world (at the point I am taking him from). But he also strongly believes that in the meta-world, he must be bound to Beatrice until the end of the game. Camp isn't compatible with either of these beliefs. It isn't either of those worlds. There's nobody here from his canon though, and nobody who understands his dilemma from both perspectives--who else is going to understand someone who is simultaneously concerned that magic exists and that magic doesn't exist here?? No one can adequately explain to him where he is in relation to where he was, and so he's stuck trying to figure it out on his own. His options, as far as he can figure them, are 1) magic and witches exist in the real world now so tough cookies, or 2) he has spontaneously been removed from Beatrice's game without a victor declared so tough cookies.
I took Battler from right before EP5 so here is a spoiler paragraph about his feelings on #2 that I am whiting out since I said there weren't spoilers. [UGH THIS IS SO TERRIBLE BAAWWWWWWW, are his thoughts basically. He thinks this is much more likely than magic existing in the real world (because DUH MAGIC DOESN'T EXIST, DUH) but this still sucks! The conclusion of EP4 was very dramatic!! Battler swore to kill Beatrice himself and give her closure, but he failed. He's now been sitting with the virtually comatose Beato trying to wait for her to wake up so they can continue. But then suddenly he's in camp?! Did he exceed some sort of time limit? Did Beatrice, in her heart, finally give up on him, releasing him? Now he's stuck with a completely different kind of eternal torture: stuck in camp indefinitely, unable to even influence AT ALL how long he is stuck here, bearing a sin that he still doesn't even understand, currently unable to talk to anyone who can help him or forgive him in any meaningful way. In a way, he wonders if this might be poetic justice served upon him; since he spent so much time dawdling, unable to solve anything, he has been sent to another dimension where it is impossible for him to work towards his release or solve anything. Since Beatrice received no closure, he as well will receive no closure. He considers it would be extremely unlikely that he will ever get to see Beatrice again at this point, unless he can somehow solve her mystery, and he doesn't even have access to the gameboards here so goddamn.] So clearly you should app Beatrice, just saying.
All of that is still just a theory though! He is considering it strongly, but he doesn't believe it to be absolutely true or anything. Really he still just doesn't know wtf is going on at all. So... this is why he's not entirely sure how he should act around people. He's sort of dividing people up into groups based on if they seem like a normal person or if they seem to understand meta/magical concepts. Sometimes he will slip up and start referring to events in game terms or to witches or something, and then if the other person responds with "wtf are you talking about?" he goes "HAHA SORRY, I AM PRETTY CRAZY I GUESS." Since he knows more than anyone else that the real world has no business believing in all that crap! And if it were him, he would definitely think it was crazy! He's been calling himself crazy a lot in camp where he doesn't do it much in canon, but in canon he's not exactly in this kind of situation. He's conscious of the position he's in and if he's interacting with people from the real world, he knows that by real-world standards, he should be in a mental hospital. Hey, for all he knows, the meta-world was all a massive delusion on his part and he really is deeply insane.
But surely there is a strong chance that he is simply in a branch of the meta-world? Why does he feel the need to continue to deny all of the supernatural elements and suppress his own knowledge of them when it's basically a tossup where he is? For one thing, even in the meta-world, denying magic was what Battler did. It was his job, basically. He's stepped down from that job before and Beatrice's sadism went out of control! In his eyes, if he doesn't do this, no one will, and humanity will be forced to suffer even more. It's not really clear what would happen if he stopped in a place like camp, but he doesn't want to let his guard down. If this is the real world? Denying magic only makes sense! If this is the meta-world? Why not? If anything, if he can deny magic strongly enough and load enough anti-magic toxin into his words, the magic keeping him here will disappear, and he'll be able to return to Beatrice. So no matter where he is right now, this is his best strategy, not to mention a clear direction for him to go.
In this vein, recently he's met Yuuko. A ghost! He encountered her but couldn't see her, so he rationalized away her existence. Later, he met someone online who seemed to know a suspicious amount about the event... and also claimed to be the ghost. In Battler's mind, it seemed that Yuuko, for whatever reason, was extending a challenge. A very clear challenge that he could understand and counter easily, so he accepted it! ...unfortunately there are EVEN MORE COMPLICATIONS to this!! It's one thing to deny magic in general. It's another to accept a specific game with a specific person, especially when he's already supposed to be in a game. Where he is in canon he gets huffy when someone else tries to play Beatrice's game with him, and while playing a different game isn't quite as bad, it's still obviously... questionable and cheating on Beatrice in a sense. (Their relationship is super special ok.) So even though this seems like a good way to get somewhere and uncover some truth around here (to him), he's not entirely sure whether it will make things worse or better. He's not even sure if his game with Beatrice is still going on and argh feelings, so many feelings!! Even though he accepted he will probably emo a lot over it and make comparisons to Beatrice's game, which he already started doing and had to draw back from, and make a general agreement to make it different on purpose. :(a Battler has never been good at monogamy, but he does take his eternal rivalries seriously, and he wants to proceed with caution as much as he wants to proceed at all. In EP5, he only agrees to play after all since they were wrecking Beatrice's gameboard; he has no obligation to play with Yuuko except that it's something productive to do and she reminds him of Beatrice... :') SO WE'LL SEE WHAT HAPPENS, ANYWAY.
That's not much of a conclusion but... I think I ran out of things to say, or else I just got sick of rambling without proper structure. YOU'LL TAKE MY WORDVOMIT AND YOU'LL LIKE IT