anon-chan · 3mo
I'm curious. Do we have confirmation that Kinzo really betrayed and killed the italians to take Beatrice? Or was it just what Sayo thought? Some stuff said by Kinzo in EP4 apparently support that idea, but then again, EP4 was written by Tohya in reality and by Beato in the meta world. Neither should know the real truth and could have been biased by their feelings of hate and disgust to Kinzo. Although he was undoubtedly terrible as a father, the Question Arcs paint Kinzo as a very cruel person that doesn't care about and even loathes his grandchildren, but Ryukishi confirmed that in fact Kinzo truly loved his grandchildren and acted around them like he was in EP8. So that was likely something Sayo wrote wrong because of their conflicted feelings??? there's also that part of Confession where they ask Genji about the corpses of the soldiers and if it was Kinzo who killed them all, but Genji is unable to answer (he wasn't there after all) and Sayo just assumes he did, hating themselves even more for having his blood.
All of this leads me to the famous red screen scene in tea party of Ep7. When Bern cuts Clair and her blood covers the screen, we see 3 scenes that were mostly seen as "red truths", but since it comes from Clair (Sayo), it's her blood, what she hide, maybe the weren't really red truths but what Sayo thought happened. After all, she wasn't there to know what Kinzo did, she only made a supposition.
This isn't about defending Kinzo. He's the character I hate the most and nothing excuses what he did to his children. But I was wondering if his relationship with Bice was truly like he told Will, who shouldn't have been able to see nothing but the truth with what Bern gave him, and the other version was actually what Sayo thought had happened.
We don't have 100% proof, no. In the end it's never stated with the red truth, so while we have hints that Kinzo did it (EP4 Kinzo, the EP7 Clair blood scene, the EP8 manga) we can't take them to be 100% truth. As you mentioned, everyone who writes about or brings up this possibility is someone who has reason to be biased against Kinzo, and no one was actually there at the time.
While it's a strong possibility that he did kill the soldiers/incite fighting, it's not confirmed. Though I do think that what Will sees can be tampered with: he does see Maria with Beatrice in her segment, which we know is Maria's perception of events rather than 1:1 with 'reality'. So it seems that if it matches how someone perceives an event, he might see that instead of the 100% unvarnished, objective version of events. Witnesses are allowed to be subjective and biased, after all.
In the end it ties into what a lot of Umineko is about: the subjectivity of it, of speaking about the dead from one's own limited memories or knowledge of them, the difficulty of knowing everything about someone, especially someone who has passed. And that applies to Kinzo especially. He was an abusive and terrible figure, but he also liked playing pranks, sometimes was kind to Shannon/Kanon, and, if we believe Episode 8, he may have even doted on his grandchildren at times, which can coexist along with EP1's Jessica's testimony about him spanking her.
