Theory for Banquet of the Golden Witch

Welcome to our episode 3 theory, suddenly the end doesn't look so far anymore, does it?
Special thanks go to Grande Nero for grammar checking all three theories so far (they desperately needed it).

For a refresher on the main points of the previous two you can check out the theories TLDR.
But before we even begin, a correction.

This is from the credits at the end of Legend of the Golden witch. Notably, the police concludes that the chances of survival for any of the 18 were hopelessly dim. 18. If this is the future, like we originally thought... then why is the 18th person dead? Has Eva not come back from Rokkenjima?
Since we'll have much more to talk about in relation to this in Alliance, we'll delay explaining this to then.

But regardless of our mistakes, let's dig into Banquet.

Part 1: The Witch of the forest

The episode opens on a flashback of a young Beatrice, here just called "princess", talking to Virgilia (who, of course, is Kumasawa) who at that point in time goes by the name Beatrice herself. The girl asks the previous endless witch to repair grandfather (Kinzo)'s broken vase using "magic".
The princess here is X Beatrice, and if you don't remember who she is, don't worry cause you will in just a little bit.

It's worth restating that magic in Umineko is the power of crafting narratives, so Kumasawa is using magic as a framing device to communicate and play with the girl. In reality the magic amounted to blaming a cat for the broken vase and convincing the other servants to play along.
She made everyone believe it, so it became the truth.

The scene takes place in Kuwadorian, or at least in a mansion we are pretty confident is Kuwadorian.
The console remake backgrounds explicitly show the same building where Rosa's story is set but it's not so clear cut in the original. That said, it makes perfect sense when you think about the context, after all she's being raised to believe she's a princess and a witch apprentice, of course in secret and far from the sight of the rest of the family in a mansion they don't even know exists.
Old habits never die huh?

We're shown Eva's tragic backstory, but we'll touch on that topic in a bit so let's skip it for now.

After some bloody banter between Battler and the stakes of purgatory the game can begin properly.
The story speedruns through the now familiar day one sequence of events, so we'll just quickly mention every notable detail.

On the boat ride to Rokkenjima, Rudolf and Hideyoshi are the only people we see smoking, and Hideyoshi can't turn on his lighter due to the strong wind.

Apparently six years ago Battler promised Shannon that he would come for her on a white horse or something. This would be meaningless, if one of the greatest mysteries didn't hinge on Battler committing a sin by forgetting a promise he made, and while this specific promise probably isn't the sin, it's worth noting. We'll explore the promise as a whole in alliance though.

Maria implies she knows Bernkastel, just a throwaway reference?

Beatrice (she could be X or Sayo) spots Maria crying about her rose and gives her the letter and umbrella as usual, but this time she takes a page out of Kumasawa's book and makes Maria close her eyes while she ties a golden thread to a different flower and says she fixed it with magic.

Because Rosa wasn't with Maria she doesn't get a letter like in Turn, and the dinner scene plays out like it did in Legend. Maria reads the letter, and the siblings go meet Kinzo in his room, who of course doesn't answer, because he's dead.
Then they chase the kids off to the guesthouse and the discussion around Beatrice and the letter heats up as usual.
But! This time Rosa is put on the spot, and she can't fake being calm anymore, so she freaks out and says it.

Thus begins the story of how she happened to reach Kuwadorian and how a naive Beatrice fell off a cliff under her supervision, but who was this girl?

Now would be a good time to recap the many incarnation of the Golden witch up to this point.
Originally, Kinzo was given a large sum of money by a woman that he became obsessed with. She's at the beginning of everything so we'll call her Alpha Beatrice.

There's almost no information about this person but we do think she at least existed. In one scene of Legend Genji indirectly places her death before the construction of the mansion in 1952, and we get a pretty good idea of Kinzo's feelings toward her, but it's unknown what exactly their relationship was, or if Beatrice was even her real name.

It's possible Kumasawa knew her as well, after all in the prologue she was using the name Beatrice for herself, and she mentioned a master who taught her magic.

At some point Alpha Beatrice died by some unknown cause, and Kinzo, who like we said was really obsessed with this individual, decided to raise some girl as the golden witch Beatrice. To distinguish her from the the original, we gave her the code name 0 Beatrice.
Btw, it's canonically pronounced as "not Beatrice".
I have no idea why Hound decided to call her "not Beatrice", I was not consulted on this, I disavow.

Ronove provides us with the following red truths about her and the flashback.

A hidden mansion called Kuwadorian does exist in the forest of Rokkenjima.
the pair actually had a conversation like that in that place. (Referring to Kinzo talking to 0 Beatrice)
This is the world of 1967 (19 years before the murders in 1986).
In 1967, in a hidden mansion on Rokkenjima, Beatrice-sama existed as a human.
Finally after we see her fall Beato adds "It's definitely dead"

All of this is corroborated again in Alliance.

Beato says that she was created in vitro as a homunculus, this might mean that she was adopted, or maybe she was simply the daughter of Alpha Beatrice, it's totally possible timing wise.
Either way, assuming she lived in Kuwadorian ever since the mansion was completed, she was stuck in there from 3 to 5 years old until she died at around 20, never being allowed to leave. It appears like for all that time 0 Beatrice was being indoctrinated by Kinzo and it makes him look really horrible, especially given how little she knows about the outside world.

All her supplies were shipped to the mansion in secret by captain Kawabata, and the year Kinzo stopped requesting this service is only off by one from the year of her death. Good enough, considering he was ballparking it. Outside of him and his crew, we know some servants served in Kuwadorian when they weren't employed at the mansion so they were aware of the situation, although maybe not the Gohda tier servants.

Apparently the mansion has been there since way before Kinzo bought the island and settled in with his family, because Rosa mentions they had only moved in recently, but she finds an opening in the gate caused by an old root breaking it.

At some other point (ideally before her death), 0 Beatrice had a daughter. You already know her, she's the often named "person X" in Rokkenjima outside of the 18 characters we know, thus X Beatrice.
She looks very similar to her mother, which is why Rosa mistakes her for 0 and is taken aback when she first sees her in Turn. Of course, it's also possible that there is no family relationship, and they just happen to be two look-alikes, but it makes more sense this way.
Either she or 0 Beatrice are the model for the golden witch portrait in the main hall. It showed up long after 0 died, but of course photos exist.

It's possible X was raised, like her mother, to be a replacement Beatrice, and that is why Kinzo would have a portrait of her made, but while she definitely spent some of her time at Kuwadorian, she probably wasn't locked there full time, after all we just said that the supplies stopped being delivered around 1967.
Maybe Kinzo grew a conscience, or maybe he saw that the experiment didn't work, he might even have assumed that the captain was involved in the accident. That's why X more likely grew up in Fukuin house, the orphanage funded by Kinzo to raise furniture children who will work as servants in his house........ hold up old man! That's not better at all!

Technically there isn't any hard evidence to confirm that the orphanage actually exists, only what Kanon and Shannon say, but there's not much of a reason to doubt it and it supports our theories.

At this point you might be wondering, where does Sayo fit in all of this? Didn't we say she and X were sisters last time? Did we change our mind about her being Beatrice?

Not at all! Or at least not in the present of the games.
Sayo is still and will remain our main culprit, she who took on the role of the Golden witch and is acting out the ritual according to the epitaph; this separation is necessary to avoid a contradiction related to Battler's sin, and the red truth related to it.

That being said, we do have to back up on the notion that she also is 0 Beatrice's daughter.
You see, we noticed a pretty big oversight. When getting all the notes together we thought we remembered Shannon being 16... but couldn't find the source anywhere. So we eventually assumed we had gotten the information mixed up with Kanon's age, since he also claimed to be 16, and decided not to include that fact in the data.

Except it was literally there the whole time and we just missed it over and over.

Now, wouldn't you agree that it's unlikely for someone who died 19 years ago to have given birth to someone who is currently 16 years old? Yeah. We do too.

Sure, we could suppose this information is fake and they're lying about Sayo's age, but the theory isn't worth the stretch, not alongside the counter arguments to it already discussed in the Turn theory. Both 0 and X Beatrice can fit the role of the princess better than her, and saying that Shannon and Kanon are both 16 because that's Sayo's age works just fine (except if you're George then it's the opposite of fine).

In practice this changes the date of the scenes in Rokkenjima at the start of turn to be 1 to 3 years ago, but more importantly it makes it harder to justify the two of them convincingly passing for each other. That's not too damning though, there have always been solutions that didn't require a switcheroo, and it saves us the trouble of explaining why nobody ever comments on Shannon looking like the portrait.

Keep in mind that Sayo was also an orphan at Fukuin house and a servant from age 6, so she would have grown up around Kumasawa and X, and that can explain her involvement with Mariage Sorcière.

That being said. I'll say I still really, really, want the twins theory to be true because it would be very satisfying, so I guess It's on the table in virtue of me being very stubborn.

Alright, hope you're following since so far we've already outlined five distinct humans who have used the name Beatrice and we're not even done, cause by the end of Banquet Eva and Ange will bring the total to seven, but at least all of them have their neat place on the timeline inside the chessboard.
There's one we still haven't addressed though.

The witch in the tea party, who we lovingly refer to as just "Beato", seems to defy this theory, after all she reminisces about both flashbacks as her own backstory. How is that possible if they're all different people? We submit two possible interpretations.

As Battler's opponent maybe she represents Sayo exclusively, but the claim of the witch side is that she is the Golden Witch who has lived for a thousand years, and that all the incarnations we see of portrait Beatrice are the same witch, so obviously she would act accordingly.
This interpretation would help solidify the distinction between Sayo and X Beatrice.

Alternatively, we can take the easier route and say that by virtue of the meta nature of the tea party, she really is all of them! That is to say the traits and memories of every Beatrice discussed coalesce into this character.

Part 2: The absolute nightmare that made us bang our heads against the wall

The rest of the first day is quite straight forward. As always George proposes to Sayo and she accepts the ring like in Turn, the siblings discuss, the children sleep in the guesthouse, so let's skip ahead to the huge mess that they find the following morning. It's time to discuss the 6 linked closed rooms.

These six are all dead: Kinzo, Genji, Shannon, Kanon, Gohda, Kumasawa!

Now this is a tough nut to crack. How the hell can we explain all of our long standing Sayo accomplice candidates dying on the first twilight with the exception of Nanjo, who was sleeping in the guesthouse? Who attacked them?

It's possible some kind of disagreement sparked between the conspirators that night. After all we see several magic fights in Kinzo's study and in the garden which could represent infighting like in one of the readings we gave in Turn.
Kumasawa might have had a change of heart, and attempted to dissuade Sayo from going trough with her plan, and it's hard to say whose side Genji would be on, but we imagine the discussion got really heated... until eventually somebody fired the first shot.

Ok... but how was the closed room produced? The red boxes us in.
The status of the six rooms as true closed rooms is settled.

Furthermore, all of the doors and windows on the six rooms are normal. No device exists which can lock them without a key, such as an auto lock.
———
All five master keys were discovered, each in the pocket of one of the servants! The individual room keys were found inside envelopes alongside the corpses!
———
In short, all keys related to the linked closed rooms were locked inside the linked closed rooms!!

And there isn't any space for some other person we didn't know about.

There is no one hiding in the six rooms!

And that's not all, because a certain spot later or all but requires Kanon to be there, and

No one else can go by Kanon's name!

We argue that despite being shot, Sayo was the only survivor of the shooting, she is wounded but it's not life threatening.
Yes, we are once again using a semantic trick like in Turn to explain why Kanon and Shannon are declared dead by the red truth. They are false names, so they die as soon as that identity is discarded. It's not the best, and technically not the only answer, but the alternatives were even worse.

Wait, but doesn't it still not work? After all

Only the victims are inside the rooms, and no other people exist inside the rooms!

If she survived she's not one of the victims, is she?

Well, remember, in the shooting Sayo got wounded too, therefore making her technically a victim. And to be honest, there are a million ways in which you could say she's a victim of something at some point ¯\(ツ)/¯.
Either this, or when Beato says "victims" in red she is referring to the six characters involved without any other implications. Let's not forget that Kinzo was already dead by this point, so he definitely can't be said to be a victim of this incident. Even Beatrice herself has to exclude him from the reds after this reveal.

When the five other than Kinzo were killed, the killer was definitely in the same room as them!

Well then, after the plan almost goes completely off the rails, Sayo is still determined to stage an occult murder scene, so she spends the rest of the night setting up the rooms on her own with the corpses of her allies in place of the intended victims.
She lures out and shoots Gohda in order to pad the numbers and she turns on the incinerator where Kinzo's body was hidden, she dresses a dummy as Shannon and finally she closes herself inside pretending to be a dead Kanon.

This is all very close to the setup to fake Kanon and Shannon's deaths in our Legend theory. The discovery of the corpses is overseen by Nanjo, who examines the bodies and declares them dead, while George and the other kids aren't allowed to look at Shannon's corpse whatsoever.
Sayo herself is free to just walk out of the Chapel at a later point, after all the adults leave.

With this solution on the table, let's see if we're forgetting anyone.

Let's state this: in the context of Banquet of the Golden witch, there are at least 16 people in Rokkenjima.

Ok, but why "at least"?

In this game, we don't have any need for a 17th person. Now, that doesn't mean that someone else isn't on the island... for example a really good question would be "where's X Beatrice in all of this?"
Like in Legend, one can imagine any number of fates for her. She could have died earlier in the day, or during the shootout. Depending on the definition of victims, her corpse could even have been disguised as Shannon's (granted, it's harder to argue this after retiring the sisters theory).
Or well, just because she never appears there is literally no reason to assume she is dead! Maybe she wasn't at the shootout, or maybe she was only lightly injured like Sayo and perhaps she too is just acting dead!
How convenient! Now we can have a person X running around with Sayo and we can pull her out of the hat in case she is needed to explain something!

Actually, here's a bonus for you, let's say Sayo absolutely cannot be alive because Kanon and Shannon are declared dead, here is the best possible explanation we could find going off of an airtight literal interpretation of every red truth. Have fun with this one.

Let us present a mysterious 17th person Y! Who is this tricky fella? We couldn't just spoil the surprise! During the night, person Y jumped the conspirators and killed all of them, including Sayo who was currently acting as Shannon.
For some reason Y agrees that the murders have to look occult, so they setup the rooms in order. They're just done placing a mannequin of Kanon in the chapel and about to call it a day... when by god, they slip! They slip and hit their head... but lucky them, they roll just below a bench in the chapel, just near the fake Kanon that Nanjo is going to inspect later on, but completely out of sight. Just out of frame.

Of course, in this case, These six are all dead: Kinzo, Genji, Shannon, Kanon, Gohda, Kumasawa!. And of course, Only the victims are inside the rooms, and no other people exist inside the rooms.
This person is truly a victim of their own circumstances, we're sure you'll agree once you know who they are...
Naturally, All five master keys were discovered, each in the pocket of one of the servants! The individual room keys were found inside envelopes alongside the corpses! In short, all keys related to the linked closed rooms were locked inside the linked closed rooms!! No key could have been returned from outside the room using the crack of the door, the crack of the window, vents or any place of the sort!!
Well, surely Y had a way to leave the room but didn't get a chance to use it! So the red still works! And naturally, There is no one hiding in the six rooms!. Duh, they are not hiding, they fainted after slipping, and now they're sleeping below a bench!

Oh, and by coincidence, this person happened to have some voice recordings of Sayo as Kanon that they will splice to have a conversation with Jessica near the end. Good thing they came prepared!

Hopefully it's clear why we would rather stick to the first solution with 16 people.

So after fighting tooth and nail to come up with a human solution, let's see how meta Battler is doing over in the tea party.

Since the game started he has met Ronove, a magical abstraction of Genji, he traveled to the past with Beato to witness Rosa's flashback, and he saw Virgilia burst out of Kumasawa before the two witches engaged in a Fate/Stay Night battle (which of course made no noise at all and didn't alert anyone in the mansion).

This is in stark contrast to the previous game, where he never gave the impression that he saw all the overtly magical scenes, what gives? Why is it that over the course of the games magic becomes more and more "visible"?

We could take at face value the explanation that he can see it because in Turn he submitted to Beatrice and now he's one step closer to being defeated... but with our current understanding of the mechanics of the game, it would make more sense if Beato deliberately didn't show it to him before to avoid a stalemate.

In discussing that closed room, initially Battler is so overwhelmed that he "pushes out" Beato, and it's visualized with a barrier. We believe this is meant to represent Battler's so called "anti magic resistance", more specifically his absolute refusal to believe in magic even after he is unable to create a counterargument for the witch's attack. Call it stubbornness, call it reasonable dogmatic rejection of something that is defined by working in non naturalistic ways, it's the stalemate scenario that was discussed beforehand.

Of course this makes it impossible for Beatrice to win, so Virgilia must talk to Battler and give him some tips on how to strike back... but whose idea was it really?

See, we need to discuss one thing, especially given Beato's apparent loss of control followed by the heel turn at the end of Banquet. Are Virgilia and Ronove (and by extension the whole tea party) just Beato's puppets following her script, or are they more independent?

In multiple instances we see scenes outside of Battler's view in which Beato, Virgilia and Ronove discuss and disagree. For instance Beato has to be told about the "northern wind and sun" strategy as if she had never heard about it. The only reason to stage such conversations would be to sell this narrative to Bernkastel, the incarnation of the reader and Beato's other opponent.

It would be tempting to say that everything, including Battler, is a magical creation of Beato as the sole author of the tea party. Her "golden land". But we need to confront the fact that outside forces can influence it, namely Lambdadelta and Bernkastel, with Ange's intrusion to be blamed on the latter.
Then, we can't forget Maria's involvement. It's strongly suggested that without her contribution none of this could ever have manifested. Heck, the chiester sisters are even based on her toys.

The Witch of Origins, who will live for one thousand years in the future. She holds the motherly magical power to give birth to 1 from the sea of 0.

She is loyally protected by Beatrice, who understands her true worth. The two of them are members of the same alliance.

~ Maria#Alliance#Future

It's probably safe to say that the formation of this alliance allowed Beatrice to gain the endless power in its truest sense.
~ Mariage Sorcière

So it would be more accurate to say to say that "The tea party", or "Purgatory" as it is also called, is a framework with rules defined not just by Beatrice, but by all of Mariage Sorcière, and the various characters that appear within it have their own independent agency within the character traits given to them by their creators.
Some of them are based on real people, others on objects, but only Virgilia sticks out for being given the title of witch and not furniture. This could be because Kumasawa herself played into these fantasies, unlike Genji who just executed Kinzo's will with no beliefs of his own, that said she IS a character on the same level as Ronove, the stakes of purgatory, or even Kanon and Shannon in a sense.

So our conclusion on the matter is that these people are only partially under Beato's control. They act towards her benefit even if not strictly towards her goals, and sometimes they help her overcome her own shortcomings, like Virgilia does here.

Battler realizes that this is a rhetorical battle to establish a narrative. There's not even strictly a need for him to be right, as long as he denies Beato's narrative it can never be "manifested into reality". Which is good for Battler since he isn't exactly good at not being wrong about everything.

Contrary to how it may look, this is good for Beatrice as well. After all, even Beato herself repeatedly held back in Turn in order to tutorialize Battler on how the red truth works.
Her win condition is not merely having her narrative not defeated, and it isn't having Battler admit she's a witch either.
I mean, who could think she was serious about using the over the top magic battle as her attack? How the hell do you even explain the sound outside? What if Battler asks any questions?

This is also where Battler figures out how much getting Beatrice to actually use the red works to his advantage, so after the skirmish Beato hastily withdraws, or rather, she is withdrawn by Ronove. If she were to repeat that none of the six died an accidental death, prolonging the confrontation, she would get dangerously close to being asked again if the 6 deaths were homicides... which she can't repeat, because Shannon and Kanon are categorically different from a normal homicide.

Part 3: Quantum theories

We have only talked about the recurring suspects so far, but in each theory there is someone from the Ushiromiya family collaborating with Sayo. In Legend it was Eva and Hideyoshi, and in Turn it was Rosa.

Considering how many parallels the first twilight of Banquet has with the first twilight of Legend already, it shouldn't surprise you to hear that Eva and Hideyoshi are once again in on it too. Not as murderers themselves of course, but as supporters who will benefit once they are the only targets of the inheritance.

If everything had gone according to plan, all the adults of the family except for them would have died, but that's not what happened. Now their co-conspirators are all either dead or wounded except for Nanjo, and all the planned victims are armed and barricaded in the guesthouse.

Lucky for them there's no way to blame them for anything, all they really did was team up with Nanjo to make sure the discovery of the corpses went smoothly and no one got to have a good look at Shannon's face, but at the same time, they are in a situation in which they are completely unable to act. Hideyoshi tepidly suggest grabbing some food from the kitchen in the mansion, but it's a non starter for everyone, and Nanjo just excuses himself to his own room.

Eva is thinking about the letter they found in the Boiler room urging them to solve the riddle.

She pulls out the epitaph, and since the adults on the first floor are bored to tears, in no time they're all discussing it in detail like they never had the chance to do in the other episodes.

After dozing off for some time Eva gets a flash of inspiration, so to verify it she checks the archive where Kinzo kept all the non occult books, and she finds exactly what she was looking for.

Next thing we know, she's walking down a set of stairs to a secret underground location, where she finds a door with the line of the 10th twilight written on it leading to the hiding spot of the gold. All ten metric tons of it.

But wait! Didn't we argue before that the gold shouldn't actually exist?
It's not hard to assume that the massive amount of gold bars couldn't possibly be real and that the few ingots shown over the course of the first two episodes must have come from the outside as part of somebody's plan. After all, the description of golden witch described the gold as imaginary.

The title of Golden Witch has its foundation in "the Realization of Magic", a magical power that can materialize imaginary precious metals, providing the miracle of manifestation to all less tangible forms of magic.
~Beatrice's Titles

The perpetrators definitely have access to a large fortune stored in bank vaults, we know part of that money was given to the families of the victims in the form of PIN codes, and that same cash could be used to bribe Nanjo and the Ushiromiya family members into cooperating, but it's nowhere close to the actual monetary value of all that gold and definitely not in the shape of solid ingots.

So this scene where Eva finds it is allegorical, and she's actually being offered that bank money as her prize, right?
Well, the thing is that reading over this scene again... it kinda looks like she's just seeing 10 tons of gold..... There are none of the telltale signs of a fabricated scene, nothing magical is really going on, Eva is reacting to it in her human version using unambiguous language, and after a little bit Rosa (who we argue is totally innocent in this episode) shows up and sees it too.

We can still make the rest of the argument work if we just say that Sayo and the rest simply didn't know about it. Kinzo put the gold in there, and they had no idea it was real until Eva went and found it by being the first person to solve the riddle.

Before moving on to the next scene, we feel like a tangent on the epitaph is obligatory at this point.
This theory will not contain a solution to the epitaph, mainly because we didn't find one... but from how other people have talked about it we really get the sense that this bonus challenge of Umineko gets a lot harder without a decent understanding of Japanese so we won't knock ourselves too hard about it.

What we do have is a couple guesses that come from the hints given by Eva, logic by exclusion, some pattern matching, and a fair amount of "just simply calling it".

The room with the gold ingots is probably in Kuwadorian or in the hidden tunnel leading to it that we see in Alliance, which Battler was unable to open the entrance to. So in that case the key to the golden land might be the key to open this passage, and solving the six characters riddle that Eva figures out at the library could be how you're supposed to find the location of the tunnel.

From a very amateur analysis of the kanji at the start of the epitaph I came up with a possible argument for the key being hidden behind the painting, so here it is as a blue truth.

Of course this ignores the hint about the sea being relevant and other important keywords like the village, so even if it was true it's not the full picture.

As for what specific book Eva might be looking for, we noticed how Kyrie focuses on the epitaph being divided in 3 parts, so we tried to come up with some books that also come in 3 parts and are famous enough that they would show up in most libraries and wealthy high class people's homes.
The only decent idea we floated was Dante's divine comedy, which is a little obvious in retrospect. Like, it's really hard not to notice the many references to that book in Umineko:
There are a Beatrice, a Virgilia and a Maria, the first time we see the tea party world it's named purgatory, and the seven stakes are named after the seven deadly sins.

The idea that it could hide the secret of the epitaph was compelling enough that I even read part of it. And like, very early on... we reach a river! Acheron, the river of hell! Except... that's where the track ends. Maybe there is a message to get from that parallel, and I just couldn't see it. That said, looking at Eva's thought process it doesn't really look like she remembered a literary reference does it? It's supposed to be a silly word riddle that a child could figure out.

The verdict on this is that it's a motif put there by the author but probably not the solution Kinzo had in mind. In other words, we might just be getting Evangelion-ed with the christian references.

We made it this far without acknowledging the witch in the room, but now that she's getting crowned as the new Beatrice let's actually talk about her properly.

EVA Beatrice (often shortened to Evato for our convenience) is both a character in Beato's world of the tea party and the personification of an aspect of Eva's personality. Whether she really hallucinates a younger version of herself or it's a narrative device doesn't change much about the theory.

She first appeared in the flashback at the start of this episode where we learned how much Eva was repressed by her family, especially her father who won't even entertain the thought of letting her succeed him even when Krauss is so incompetent.

Evato is that repressed part of Eva, she takes the form of an egoistic rebellious teenager that talks and behaves in a way that would have made Kinzo furious.

Since getting married and having a child, Eva has stopped dreaming as often about a future she will never have and instead she has projected all the expectations she held for herself on George (ironically becoming a toxic parent herself), but when she reads the letter of challenge promising her a fair chance of obtaining everything she always wanted Evato is back and here to stay.

After the real Eva finds the gold, Eva Beatrice is crowned a witch in the tea party world and she inherits the titles of golden and endless and the name Beatrice, in other words she is officially absorbed into the witch narrative, fancy dresses and all. She even gets her own portrait.

Inheriting the name alongside the title is remarked as an uncommon thing for witches. In this case it might be a plot device to facilitate Beato's redemption arc by shifting the negative moniker of Beatrice to a third party. Or maybe not. We haven't quite nailed down what the names mean.
The fact that this succession is mostly a pro forma one makes sense when you notice that nothing about the last part of the epitaph remotely mentions one becoming the next witch and the whole thing comes off as improvised, as if it's trying to retrofit an explanation that goes along with the real events.

Rosa was beaten to the gold by a margin of minutes, and now she's trying to find an agreement with Eva that will ensure she gets her fair share. The fact that the setting of the scene shifts from the staircase to the rose garden supports once again the idea that the hiding spot was somewhere outside the main buildings and they're having to walk through the garden on the way back to the guesthouse.

Eva has picked her side by now. She chooses to put aside her adult responsibilities and accepts the risk of playing into Sayo's plan. She will not share her reward and tell the siblings about the gold like Rosa is telling her to do.

If only they could all just give up and die.

Rosa is obviously a threat, not just because she knows about the gold but because she is smart, if the whole deal with Sayo were to be discovered it would be the end of this opportunity.
Rosa was already able to catch on to Nanjo's bad acting during the victims discovery sequence, but for now she seems to think they were all fake so she assumes they're in less danger than they actually are, and Eva is happy to humor her.

Soon after this scene, Eva and Hideyoshi are in their room planning how to take Rosa out, which is easier said then done. Luckily enough for them, Maria starts complaining about wanting to go check her Rose.

Crime scene in the rose garden

• Rosa and Maria died. The causes of death were as Nanjo diagnosed.
• Rosa's and Maria's deaths were homicides.
  ———
• (Hideyoshi's ghost) I was in the room the whole time. For the whole stretch of time surrounding the crime

Maria obviously doesn't feel threatened by the possible murderer on the loose, she knows everyone will die and be revived, and Rosa is so desperate to make her stop that she agrees to take her outside, after all she's still mostly convinced that the murders were fabricated.

Only Hideyoshi sees them leave and he tells Eva, who sneaks out from the window, kills the two of them, and meets up with Sayo who had been hiding and tending to her wounds all this time.
As quickly as possible, she climbs back up to her room to create an alibi for herself, no time to prepare an elaborate murder scene because the others might notice Maria stopped screaming and come looking for them at any time.

Considering Eva turns into Evato in front of the two and the scene that follows is as magical as the battle against Virgilia, we're more willing to dismiss the dialogue in this scene as fake. Namely we don't believe the part where Rosa and Maria are asking if she's really Eva.
Well, it definitely wasn't Sayo, because the way they were murderer is far too pragmatic, first Rosa's neck was impaled on the fence, then Maria was strangled. There aren't even any stakes on the bodies for Christ's sake!

The tea party commentary of this scene marks the moment where Beato has completed the north wind phase of her "north wind and sun" strategy. She really plays up her sadistic cruelty and her "black witch" tendencies (as real or fake as they might be) in a way that she wasn't really doing before in order to get Battler to reject her. Then she changes her mind and shows mercy for Maria, thus kicking off the sun phase.

This line would make you think Eva is in charge of the murders from now on instead of Sayo, and that's not quite the case, but it's true that if Eva wanted the murders to stop she was in the position to stop them. Beatrice keeps her promises, but the chance to fulfill the promises in the third section of the epitaph has gone to waste.

Instead she is going to use this 19th person nobody knows about to get rid of her siblings and have the gold to herself, while making sure that she and her family are not on the list. And then she can always betray Sayo after she isn't needed anymore.

The way Evato reluctantly goes along with the occult theme from now on of course represents Eva trying to accomodate Sayo's methods.

Not long after, Rosa and Maria are found dead, the adults check all the rooms thoroughly, and then Eva retreats to her room exhausted.

When it comes to the crime scene in the hall, we think Battler's theory about why Kyrie and Rudolf left the room is pretty much spot on. Kyrie noticed that Hideyoshi had been smoking while Eva was supposed to be in the room with him and deduced that she temporarily left. When she tells Rudolf about this they decide to lure out Hideyoshi with the excuse of going to the kitchen and question him about it. Hideyoshi doesn't initially suspect that they have been discovered, so he goes along with them in the hope of creating a situation for Sayo to attack them.

Hideyoshi previously didn't have a gun, but he was given the one recovered next to Rosa's body after it was tested for traps and reloaded. The suspicion is founded, after all Sayo should have wanted to take the gun away from them if she had the chance, unless...

Our claim is that all ammunition available to the Ushiromiya are actually blank rounds and only Sayo has access to real bullets. It would make a lot of sense from the perspective of the culprit to make sure only they have any real firepower, and if you've never handled firearms before you could easily mistake blanks for real bullets even when you check them.
Rudolf Kyrie and Hideyoshi learn this the hard way when all three of them get attacked by Sayo in the mansion, and when they try to defend themselves their bullets have no effect.

Evato being shown as the villain in this scene is full blown witchaganda, Eva was in her room at this time and they couldn't be having those conversations.
On the flip side Rudolf and Kyrie have a cool scene where they each own one of the stakes of purgatory one on one and we even get some Kyrie backstory that will be useful for the next episode.
Also, new characters!

We mentioned already how the bunny girls are heavily implied to be inspired by a set of toys Maria used to own, but the assonance with the word "winchester" is also notable, and their attacks leave wounds suspiciously similar to being shot with a bullet.
There's something to be said about such an originally innocuous concept being reworked and combined with a murder weapon in the current Mariage Sorcière, but this isn't the time for that.

There's a reversal of this solution that we want to at least mention.

Do we have a good reason not to suspect Kyrie and Rudolf for the role of accomplices instead of Eva and Hideyoshi? After all, Rudolf is the person who went out to check for Rosa and Maria, he could also have been the murderer! And when Kyrie suggested going to the mansion what if her ulterior motive wasn't questioning Hideyoshi but killing him? Then, if Nanjo lied about their death they would even get to roam as free theory pieces up to the point when they're declared dead after Nanjo's murder.

We really could follow this line of reasoning and get somewhere with no contradictions, and maybe we ARE being misled by the narration that tries to put all the blame on Eva to the point of completely fabricating Eva beatrice just to mess with us and Battler, but the main theory rhymes a lot better with the magic side and it plays into the "black witch" theme of becoming violent to cope with one's situation, and how it's self destructive and toxic.

So, to reiterate:

• We have an Eva and Hideyoshi Theory.
• We have a Rudolf and Kyrie Theory.
• Parallel to those Sayo, X, or both, could be the survivors from the 6 closed rooms.
• On top of it there's technically the culprit Y theory to more closely follow the red.

That was a lot to distill down. Now back on the main branch.

Part 4: Forsaking the golden land

To kick off this part we have to mention an oddity we found.
In the original visual novel, while the kids are discussing Kinzo's obsession with Beatrice, the portrait used as background is the one from Turn depicting X Beatrice instead of the usual one.

Its inclusion here is so out of left field that we considered the possibility of a mix up in the game's code, but if it's a deliberate choice it could hint at X having met and killed Kinzo some time prior to the family conference, perhaps as revenge for raising her to be the third incarnation of Beatrice.

Cut to Eva waking up in her room. She comes out and is freaking out because Hideyoshi left without telling her and hasn't returned. She didn't want him to take any risks and she's worried that Rudolf and Kyrie could have confronted him about being a wolf.

After they find the three of them dead Eva could have figured out that Sayo betrayed her, but she isn't at her sharpest right now and instead she assumes that a gun fight broke out between him, Kyrie and Rudolf, something that from her point of view would be just as likely.
Let's not forget that between all the stress and the walking in the rain, Eva probably really does have a fever, limiting her ability to think coherently.

Eva falls asleep again in the first floor of the guesthouse and she dreams of Evato defying her.

Now that her choices have caused Hideyoshi's death she's deeply regretting them, but that won't change the state of affairs, and her alter ego leaving and acting on her own represents how the situation is spiraling out of her control.
This is why even though Sayo pulled the triggers, the previous magical scene showed Evato as the villain and not Beatrice. It wasn't her but it's still her fault.

When she wakes up Eva decides that she still needs to continue carrying out the plan, after all, she still has George to protect.
She strongly insists that the kids don't come down to the first floor of the guestroom because that way she could be alone with Krauss and Natsuhi and backstab them at the first opportunity. It's not strange that they would lower their guard around her when they could personally confirm her alibi for the previous murder.

The two bodies show signs of being strangled with a rope and even though the they had rifles with them the children just a floor above don't seem to hear any gunshots (even blanks would make noise) or screams. This implies they were probably both attacked at once, so we need to throw Nanjo in as a second perpetrator. Then they were brought outside in order to setup the crime scene according to the epitaph, much to Eva's distaste.

Other less appealing solutions include the two of them being lured outside, maybe by Sayo showing herself, and Sayo helping Eva with the ropework instead of Nanjo. Kyrie and Rudolf are still technically on the table too, despite their deaths being pretty corroborated by this point.

As for the physician himself, we know he retreated to his own room on the second floor earlier in the day, so he could have come down and helped Eva with the murder without interacting with anybody. Or at least almost anybody, because in the preceding scene to Eva falling asleep we see George leave the room to get some coffee, and in his narration he mentions talking to Nanjo before he... floats down from the second floor window with Beatrice????

George's disappearance from the Guesthouse
George did not go down the stairs of the guesthouse.
———
All windows and doors leading to the inside were locked from the inside. Furthermore, it is impossible to lock any of those from the outside!

The real version of this scene very likely involves Sayo (and/or X Beatrice) luring him out by using Shannon's appearance, which we see as Beato asking for his help and leading him out with the promise of letting him meet Shannon again.
How she managed to get his attention and convince him that yes, he absolutely had to use the window to sneak out, can be partially explained with Nanjo being there to help.
This isn't as incriminating for Nanjo as the only alternative theory, where he would have had to quietly incapacitate George and hurl his body from the window and let a wounded Sayo drag him all the way to the main mansion. You could even have a combination of the two theories where George is lured to the window by Shannon and Nanjo pushes him down.

At the end Nanjo locks the window from the inside fulfilling the second red truth, he goes down the stairs to help Eva, and George has magically vanished from the first floor without the adults knowing about it. It's an extremely simple trick, so simple even Battler gets it right on the first shot.

When Eva comes back, she's crushed that George is missing... But how could she assume it's Nanjo's fault when he was with her setting up a murder scene? She didn't immediately think about the window, instead she might imagine that he went out in the span of time when they left the first floor unattended. Plus, Eva at this point is high on copium thinking that George won't be killed because she completed the twilights.

However, George's body is still found near the corpse of X dressed as Shannon, which-of-course-could-be-anyone-or-anything-dressed-as-shannon-but-we're-trying-to-go-with-the-narrative-that-makes-the-most-sense.
This could have been Sayo who finally succumbed to her wounds, except we still desperately need her for the scene with Kanon.

We know exactly what the numbers mean. It's the combination of the safes full of money that we learn in Alliance were indirectly mailed to every known surviving relative of the victims (except Kyrie's sister, we don't know if she received any because Ange isn't exactly on great terms with her). Those letters had the same handwriting as the accounts of the games in the bottled letters and the passage that "Beatrice" wrote in Maria's diary, so they can all be attributed to one of Sayo or X Beatrice. We won't make a definitive call on this yet.

What isn't immediately clear is why the combination appeared here and who is it meant for, but we can guess.
We theorized that getting a large sum of money for his granddaughter's medical expenses is Nanjo's main motivation for playing along, but his family will receive that money even without him staying alive. If Sayo left a reward here only meant for the survivors, it might mean she's not actually trying to end the day with everyone dead?
She could be so wounded that she figures she won't make it to the end and decided to rethink the plan, or maybe more likely, in this game someone has earned the right to survive, perhaps the person who actually solved the epitaph.

George's post mortem charachter profile coupled with the fact that the PIN was written on the door of his murder scene give us the context to settle this matter. This is Eva's rightful share of the consolation prize for the survivors. Very macabre, but also in line with Sayo's pattern obsession, after all Beatrice said it in red:
"I keep my promises."

Eva's hope is crushed by George's death, her pretense of being able to predict and control Sayo backfired spectacularly.
After Jessica attacks her she fires a blank by mistake injuring her eyes, then she storms out probably looking for Sayo, with Battler following after her. It's possible she fired with the intent to kill thinking the gun was loaded with real bullets, but why would she want to produce more victims at this point?

We could ramble on for paragraphs about different interpretations of the following scene, if keeping the motivations consistent isn't a requirement and we just care about the red, then having a free roaming joker card like Sayo completely bypasses Evato's web of red truths. Let alone by considering X might also be there.

This leaves a ton of room to come up with scenarios for how Nanjo was killed, how much of the scene with Jessica and Kanon actually happened vs how much of it was the magic narration, and why she was left alive for the time being only to die later. For the sake of brevity let's try to put forward one sequence of events with as few assumptions as possible.

After Eva and Battler leave, Sayo simply shows up and shoots Nanjo as he begs for his life. Then she uses Kanon's name and voice to take Jessica away to a different room; this is why Jessica is still alive when Evato lists all the victims in red in the tea party.
Notably, Kanon in this scene doesn't want to be touched, she probably doesn't want Jessica to notice Kanon is a girl through physical contact, or the clothes.

The main question is, why do this instead of killing her outright? What is the conflict that rhymes with Beato and Evato's conflict over on the magic side?

Nothing too concrete here. Maybe she can't find it in her to kill Jessica directly and would rather do so indirectly with the big finale. Maybe X is there and has something so say, but that opens up such a can of worms. Would one of them be chickening out now? If so, why?
Let's say we don't have enough information to get more specific than this and move on.

Let's now focus on the tea party, and let's check how the whole the "north wind and sun" strategy is going.

All throughout the second half Beato has been stringing a narrative around her change of attitude, that's why Ronove, Virgilia and even Eva Beatrice seem to genuinely engage with this new personality of hers even in scenes where Battler isn't there. Beato is performing magic, and by selling this tsundere transition to Battler, she can make it her reality.

This is all very convenient for Beato, she gets to use her servants to dodge a lot of questions about the mysteries, and ultimately she might just be able to create a shared narrative with Battler, a "golden land", also known as "paradise".
After all she did promise Battler that if he accepts her he can leave purgatory and reach heaven.

And it's working so well that Battler even makes this incredibly stupid claim at a point.

Of course, Beato would NEVER use vague truths to make you think she's implying something she's not. Nope! Never happened!

Over the course of the debate Beato gains even more of his sympathy by helping him solve the deaths of Kyrie, Rudolf and Hideyoshi, but Battler is helpless in front of Evato's barrage of repetitive red truths bordering on gaslighting. As explained any character not accounted for can solve them all.

Notably, if what we theorized earlier about the tea party is correct, Beatrice here is a creator, but not a god. She is not fully in control of the situation. That is to say, Eva Beatrice is a real entity manifested by her magic that is antagonistic to both her and Battler.
In order to break the spell she has to deny it using her knowledge of how the murders really happened and explain, but she convinces Battler to cover his ears.

After Evato is supposedly unmasked the tea party breaks apart and we get an out of context scene of Eva confessing to the murders and shooting Battler.

Even if this exact exchange happened (and it probably did?) its meaning could have been strongly altered by the unreliable narration and the omission of its context.

Let's say the two of them find Sayo after she was done playing Kanon for Jessica. They have a confrontation and Battler learns of Eva's role in the murders.
According to our best guess of Sayo's goals and motivations, she is not interested in surviving the second day, and she likely wants Eva to survive because she solved the Epitaph, so she hands Eva her loaded gun and allows herself to be shot.

Now we would like to argue that this is the gunshot we see, and that she actually has no reason to shoot Battler, but after relying on the profiles so much it's hard to ignore this one. Not so much for the text that could technically be a big fat lie, but for the bullet wound on the chest.

It's honestly not too implausible for Eva to "just go craaaaazy lol" and decide to kill one extra person to make sure there were no witnesses to her committing murder.
After not being able to find Jessica, or not thinking she could make a case against her, Eva uses the secret passage to reach Kuwadorian, where she is found the next day.

Jessica's body is listed as missing unlike Battler's. She was probably killed by whatever happens to the survivors at the end of the second day each episode, a large explosive in the mansion is still our best guess because it can be set to detonate at a specific time and it would explain why the bodies of these people are consistently blown to pieces. And like... they never explicitly say the mansion was NOT found blown up.
Eva survives because she was in the secret gold room in / in the tunnel to Kuwadorian.

When the dust settles meta Battler finds himself in the golden land and we have this peculiar sentence from the narrator.

While of course it could just be part of the deception, you can read it as Beato seeing herself as Sayo because she broke character for a moment. Meanwhile to Battler who didn't hear, she is the same as always.

The previous game ended with Battler submitting out of despair. This one ends with him explicitly accepting Beatrice out of his own will, however not even THIS is enough to definitively close the game in favor of the witch. But it's enough for Sayo to regain her form as Beatrice.

Even though the "golden land" has materialized it's no different from a stalemate, a fictional world for them to retreat into, where every character is reunited, real or fake, alive or dead, and there is no more conflict.
Here they can reach a "pretend peace", in which Battler doesn't remember what sin he's guilty of, or even that there is a sin, but in the end Beato doesn't have it in her to keep going with this lie, and we see that she and Virgilia are about to drop their act on purpose.

But right at that moment... Ange literally breaks into the golden land and forces them out of the stalemate (this is sort of her specialty as we'll see), coincidentally giving Beato the perfect excuse to unmask herself and go back to playing the villain role.

Part 𝑖: The tea parties

Let's conclude by talking about sponsors. Not our sponsors, but the witches's sponsors. We learn that Ange's sudden entrance was orchestrated by Bernkastel. She couldn't allow the stalemate to continue, nor could she rely on Beato ending it herself, so she was forced to counter with a move of her own.

Skipping over the delightful banter, we see Lambda drastically changing her attitude as soon as Bern leaves. She seems to be very ticked off by the fact that Beato often throws intentionally to help Battler understand the game instead of trying to win.
Having already finished Alliance we are of course aware of Lambda's (most likely for now) actual motivations. She wants the game to stay a close head to head battle for as long as possible, never actually ending, but also never getting so boring that Bern will lose interest and leave, so here she's just being disingenuous for the sake of keeping control over her subordinate.

And yes, it's clear from this interaction that Beato is subordinated to Lambda, who at the highest level of abstraction is "sponsoring" her, as in, she is responsible for "Sayo the human" turning into "Beatrice the golden witch".
Thanks to Lambda recounting the event in Memoirs by lady Lambdadelta, we can get more context on this dynamic.

Lambda: "...Make you a witch. Huh... Do you want to fly through the skies on a broom? Or do you maybe want to try putting a biscuit in your pocket and multiplying it to two?"

Beato: "It's obvious that a witch could do things like that... As a witch, I can create anything I want. People, hearts, everything. And now, there's nothing I can't do... Because I am already a witch."

Lambda:  "What a loudmouth. You're already a witch...? Can you assert that you are someone can stand side by side with me, the Witch of Certainty, who holds the title of a Lady? Know your place, you puny and meager human...!"

Beato: "Yes, I am already a witch. There's only one thing I want: a recommendation from another witch, acknowledging me as a witch."

When witches acknowledge and believe in each other, their existence is solidified. That's all a recommendation really is, a one sided version of the principle behind Mariage Sorcière.
Whether Lambdadelta could really destroy Beato's tea party world by negating it or she's just being extra manipulative is a matter of interpretation, but seeing what happened with Eva Beatrice at the end makes the threat sound more plausible.

We should mention that going off the reading where Beato represents every incarnation of Beatrice, in addition to Sayo the human girl could also be X Beatrice, her mother, her grandmother, or all of them combined, and at least X definitely counts as being miserable. We focus on Sayo mainly because she is our primary suspect and she can't be said to have lived a happy life either.

We stand by the claim that the two voyager witches only exist in the outermost meta layer of Umineko (at least as far as the question arcs are concerned), so we won't try to map this to a specific encounter in Sayo's life.

Finally, we get a sneak peak at the future and at Ange's encounter with the witch of miracles.

The question of which past 1986 corresponds to this future 1998 is still an open one. As mentioned at the start, initially we hypothesized that it was the continuation of "Legend of the Golden witch", but the credits of that game report that all 18 people are dead or missing, directly contradicting her safe return even as a fake body double.

We will expand on how our understanding of the matter evolved in alliance, but even now it's worth knowing that if we restrict the scope of the "No one escapes, all die." red truth to episode 4, then Eva could have very realistically survived here in Banquet and that would make it the top candidate for a true timeline so far.

In this world, Eva has spent the rest of her life grieving the deaths of her son and husband which she could have prevented had she not been so reckless that day, and she mistreated Ange as a coping mechanism.
Now on her deathbed and clinically paranoid, she comes up with one last curse to place on her niece by forcing her to inherit all the money of the Ushiromiya family and the hateful moniker of golden witch that she had become known by.

While the possibility that she might not really be the same Eva can't be ignored, it would undercut most of the strength of this ending and require some new previously unknown character to consistently pose as Eva for decades, to the point of perfectly completing her character arc for her, but alas the red is still the red, and this answer is still on the table.

Ange's current state mirrors Sayo when she had her "encounter" with Lambdadelta. She is at her lowest point, and she's already identifying as a witch, and all she needs to officialize it is an acknowledgement.

On top of a skyscraper, Bern appears to Ange to recruit her. In exchange she offers nothing concrete, just the promise that she will do her best to find a timeline Ange can be satisfied with. Nevertheless, even a tiny chance is enough to shake Ange out of her despair and kickstart the events of Alliance as she jumps from the roof.

And there you have it. All the mysteries of banquet fully explained to the best of our ability... wait what's Crunter doing with that megaphone?

Don't tell me you forgot about our mysterious person Y, we still have not disclosed their identity have we?! Plus you know, who would actually believe that Eva Beatrice is simply just Eva? It would be so boring indeed, wouldn't it?
If only there was someone else we could suspect. Someone besides Eva and Hideyoshi that the cigarette hint could be referring to. Do we know about anyone else that smokes in this story?

Well, I can think of someone... Someone one would never suspect... Someone with a good reason to exterminate the Ushiromiya family, as a way to spite her own sister and gain access to Kinzo's wealth trough Ange... Someone who is LITERALLY SHOWN WITH THE GHOST OF EVA BEATRICE BEHIND HER!