app for deer country

[thewhydunnit]

Character Base

• Character Name: Willard H. Wright
• Age: Looks roughly late-ish twenties; actual age is "some level of ancient". Umineko is a canon where "time is fake" is not just a shitpost joke tbh.
• Canon (Date/Year Released)/Canon Point: Umineko no Naku Koro Ni, Episode 7 (end of the Tea Party), 2010
• Items Coming Along:
Canon outfit (heavily damaged)
The silver ring of the successor to the Ushiromiya headship

• Content Warnings for Character: Violence, gore/limb loss, implied torture, death, murder, suicide by proxy, references to incest and sexual assault of a minor (although this character is not directly affected)

Character Background

• History: https://07th-expansion.fandom.com/wiki/Willard_H._Wright

Little is known about Will's personal background, due to the dual nature of many "meta" characters in Umineko; Will is simultaneously a literary trope (detective who comes out of retirement for One Last Case), the anthropomorphic personification of the "Twenty Rules For Writing Detective Stories" laid out by real-world mystery writer S. S. Van Dine (seen in the fact that the "repentance enforcement agency" is also known as the SSVD) whose real name was Willard Huntington Wright, and a fully realized individual with a personality and a history he's private about. However, various things about how his mentality has developed and how he interacts with the world can be extrapolated from his dialogue, character profile within the visual novel, and comments made by other characters, which will be elaborated in the following sections.

• Core Relationships:

Due to the nature of this character and of Episode 7, there will be spoilers for the solution of the mystery all through this app

SSVD/Great Court of Heaven: A major concept in Umineko is the blurred lines between the mystery and fantasy genres; at one point, a character describes reading mystery novels as like playing a game with a witch, trying to find the truth behind how the crimes were committed before the solution is revealed at the end, and suggests that if that solution was removed from the ending, the novel would basically be a fantasy story. As part of the canon's playing with metanarrative, in-universe there exists a layer of reality in which this concept of playing games with witches is extended to a "Great Court of Heaven", in which Inquisitors of Heresy hunt "witches" (i.e. humans who have committed crimes and tried to get away with them) by solving their mysteries.

Will is one such Inquisitor, who is said to have once had a reputation for being particularly ruthless and efficient, having been known by such names as the "Wizard-hunting Wright". He was highly respected and feared for this reason, as seen in the side material "Cornelia the New Priest". However, at some point Will began to have doubts and dissatisfactions about the way in which the SSVD operated, to only care about the "whodunnit" and the "howdunnit", with no interest in the motive, the "whydunnit". In the prologue of Episode 7, we get a sample of this typical modus operandi of the Great Court—the Inquisitors are at a mystery in which one maid has been caught with a false alibi; the maid, despite having no motive for the murder, is assumed to have to be the culprit, and they express their intention to interrogate (torture) her until they "squeeze out the truth", with the Great Court having already approved her arrest.

Will bursts in on this scene, demonstrating the maid's innocence (she lied about her alibi because she was with her boyfriend, her relationship with whom is implied would cause a scandal) and lambasting everyone for ignoring the heart in the mystery. The reasons motivating his retirement become rather apparent in this scene, where the other Inquisitors get frustrated with him, telling him his obsession with motives is "embarrassing", while Will derides the Great Court as mistaking their "overconfidence and conceit" as wisdom. This is particularly notable given his former position as Chief Inquisitor of his division and his reputation for having been particularly merciless— it is likely the other Inquisitors at one point looked up to him as an example and cannot understand why he no longer looks for the most supposedly logical explanation of a mystery, while Will shows intense disdain for them because they remind him of how he used to be. However, he seems to still have a positive relationship with Dlanor A. Knox, another Inquisitor of Heresy who shows compassion and respect for witches despite it being her job being to hunt them.

Lion Ushiromiya: Lion Ushiromiya began their acquaintance to Will as an enigma. They are introduced as the successor to the Ushiromiya family headship, slated to become the Head when they turned 20 years old. Bernkastel offers them up as a partner in the game she corners Will into playing on her board, and they have to work together to solve the mystery of "Who killed Beatrice?" in order to be able to escape from the zone of compressed time within the chapel that serves as the game board. However, Lion did not exist in any of the previous game boards that Will had read about, and initially, Will sees them as no more than a puzzling curiosity who doesn't seem to fit on the board. Indeed, if Will had been asked before stepping onto Bernkastel's game board whether he would be willing to throw his life away for a piece on it, he probably would've found the notion absurd. The first time they interact, Will barely pays them any mind, speaking to Bernkastel about them as though they aren't even there, and responds to most of Lion's repeated expressions of bafflement and frustration with brushoffs along the lines of "Don't try to understand. You'll get a headache."

Lion refuses to be ignored, however, and they quickly make it clear to Will that while they are amenable to helping him solve his strange mystery because it benefits them both, they expect Will to recognize they are on an even footing as partners in solving the mystery. Despite being a piece from a "lower plane of reality" in Will's words, they rapidly not only demand but command respect, even getting Will to act a bit less brusque and dismissive to the other Ushiromiyas by pinching his butt when he says something especially rude. Will comes to affectionately refer to them as his Watson on occasion during the game.

In actuality, Lion is an alternate universe version of Sayo Yasuda, born of Kinzo's rape of his daughter, Beatrice, whose mother (Beatrice Castiglioni) died in childbirth. In this "miracle" fragment, Natsuhi Ushiromiya raised Lion as her own instead of having the infant thrown from a cliff in humiliation when she was pressured by Kinzo to adopt them due to her fertility issues, and they have grown up as a full member of the Ushiromiya family as opposed to a servant. Will successfully reasons out their identity as core to the mystery Bernkastel asked him to solve, as they are an existence that "kills" the concept of Beatrice, who has no reason to be born due to Lion leading a comfortable life as the Successor to the Ushiromiya family. They are the dead cat in the catbox of the Rokkenjima massacre, never having had the opportunity to exist in any timeline they were thrown from the cliff and grew up as Sayo Yasuda.

Once he learns the details of the life Sayo led in every timeline but Lion's, he becomes fiercely protective of that "miracle", the dream of a happy ending that was held by two million versions of Sayo who threw themselves into the witch fantasy of Beatrice to cope with their misery. He tells Lion that they must not accept Bernkastel's cruel notions of an inescapable fate, and that they must define their own, that they must never give up or stop striving toward their own happiness. Will defies Bernkastel to rescue Lion from a reality in which they are shot dead by Kyrie Ushiromiya and knowingly chooses to throw himself against the gauntlet of Bernkastel's powers in order to give Lion more time to flee. Throughout this, Bernkastel repeatedly reminds Will he has nothing to do with her payback against Beatrice, and offers several times to let him go should he leave Lion behind, and he repeatedly refuses, even when his arm is ripped off and his body is left in such tatters that he is described as like a bloodied scarecrow. He insists that he and Lion will make their own miracle and survive, even if he gets his legs ripped off too and has to crawl to escape from Bernkastel. His unshakeable determination to save Lion buoys their spirit as well, restoring their own will to struggle and rail against a miserable fate and not give up on the miracle of a happy ending.

Clair Vaux Bernardus: A temporary form of the true culprit, Sayo Yasuda, provided by Bernkastel. A tragic woman, lost and desperate to be understood above all, to be seen, Will is the only one to figure out the solution to her mysteries and she is brought out onto a stage for the Witches of Theatergoing to tell her story. Will shows a great deal of compassion for her, refusing to let Bernkastel drag out the grittier, nastier parts at the end, and when he acquiesces to laying her to rest by destroying her witch's illusion once and for all, goes out of his way to preserve her dignity by cloaking his answers to her puzzles in riddles of his own to avoid exposing the truth too nakedly. There's also a strong sense that he chooses to do this out of a sense of reluctant mercy and duty since Battler did not reach the truth in time to do it himself, as he asks her several times if she is sure, and if she wants him to completely destroy every part of her illusion across every game, or if exposing the only the critical central parts of her role as culprit would be sufficient. When Bernkastel later defiles her "corpse", exposing some of those nastier bits he'd tried to allow Clair to take to her death (e.g. the truth of her genital mutilation from the attempted murder in her infancy), and digs out the grim details of the "actual truth" of October 5, 1986 from within Clair's memories, Will is furious on her behalf, and he asks Bernkastel if she truly hates Beatrice so much, using his access to the red truth of the Van Dine rules to try to preserve both her dignity and Lion's future, refusing to accept such a heartless mystery as what she displays.

Bernkastel: The high-level witch who summoned him to her game board to solve her mystery for her. Although the Great Court of Heaven hunts regular witches (i.e. humans who can be culprits in mysteries), there are witches that transcend the level of these witches and become fully aware of and able to move between various Fragments or are capable of Creating their own, and form a Senate, which appears to be some manner of sister institution to the Great Court of Heaven, though no details are given in canon. In terms of the in-universe lore, it seems to be implied that a witch on a Human/culprit level like Beatrice can become a higher level witch like Bernkastel or Lambdadelta by winning a witch's game–i.e. against someone who cannot solve their mystery and acknowledges them as a witch. Bernkastel invites him to her board, traps him on it, and later tears him apart for daring to defy her. Will is initially surprised when it seems Bernkastel will allow Clair/Beatrice's funeral to close on a tasteful note, and returns to the Fragment because he couldn't shake the feeling she would ruin it later. He openly disdains her as a miserable person when she admits she has chosen to defile Clair's corpse and humiliate Beatrice as payback for losing the sixth game against her and Battler, and he makes his last stand against her out of disgust with her cruelty in seeking to kill Lion and shatter the one final hope of two million incarnations of Beatrices who dreamed of a fragment in which they could have lived happily.

Character Personality Through Key Moments

(2+) Positive Experiences:

Above all else, Will is compassionate and empathetic. When he comes to the defense of the maid in his introductory scene, he pats her head and tells her he's certain she and her boyfriend will be happy together. Even when he first arrives on the game board, when he mostly sees the Ushiromiya family as pieces on a game board, he has a knack for understanding what makes them tick and despite his overall bluntness, treats their insecurities kindly. For instance, he tells Rosa that the Beatrice in Kuwadorian was likely very grateful to her for showing her the ocean and would not want Rosa torturing herself over her accidental death for twenty years. Similarly, he humors Maria in her belief in magic and that her father is the Holy Ghost as in the Christian bible, and even goes out of his way to reassure her that she can be whoever she wants to be, regardless of who her parents are or what anyone else says about her. He's also careful not to be unkind to her unnecessarily, keeping quiet both on what he had puzzled together about how the magic Maria tells him about was done as well as her wish to have her "nice" mother back, using Maria's terminology of a "black witch" when referring to Rosa's abusive behavior instead.

When he reasons out the nature of Lion's identity and Bernkastel proceeds to mock them about it, Will immediately snaps at her to have some respect. He's particularly gentle with Clair, reassuring her that he understands her truth and there is no need for her to say any more when she reaches the end of her story, even as Bernkastel presses her to get to "the good part", and even trying at first to avoid causing her more pain than necessary when he agrees to lay her to rest.

Will is also protective and justice-minded. Even though he had already submitted his resignation and had it accepted, he storms in on the Inquisitors trying to arrest the maid because he cannot abide the injustice being done. He does not expose the identity of her boyfriend who could prove her innocence, either, loudly proclaiming that although Inquisitors are given the right to expose the truths of witches who have committed crimes, nobody, not even God, had the right to the truths of humans who were innocent. Early in the episode, after Will demonstrates that the chapel is cut off from space and time, Lion reaches out to touch the rose he threw out past the boundary line, and Will physically blocks them from doing so to protect them, even though he'd mostly ignored them up until that point. After the game, he comes back solely on a hunch that Bernkastel intends to ruin the peaceful note Clair's story ended on, and fights with everything he has to protect Lion and keep them safe, picking them up to keep running away from Bernkastel when they are no longer able to, despite himself having his body in tatters and down an arm—even though this meant he would no longer be able even to raise a sword to defend himself. He has no reason to be involved and is given multiple outs, but he is infuriated by Bernkastel's arrogance to define Lion's fate for them before they have even lived it, and disgusted by the cruelty of attempting to deny the happy miracle that Clair had gone to her death dreaming of. Even knowing that he can't win, he goes into it with fire and passion, the determination to wrest a miracle from Bernkastel's grasp simply because he believes there should be one.

(2+) Negative Experiences:

Despite his compassion and empathy, Will can frequently be dismissive, often ignoring everything and everyone deemed irrelevant when he is focused on a particular task. At the beginning of Episode 7, when he first steps onto the game board, he ignores Krauss' introduction simply to express confusion about Lion's existence, before proceeding to largely ignore them, brushing off their repeated requests for an explanation as to what is happening with vagueries and all but dismissing Lion as a real person while inquiring whether they were a piece invented by Bernkastel or not.

Even when Will is not being intentionally dismissive, he is often tactless with people, saying very rude or blunt things without giving much thought to social niceties or politeness. For instance, he says things like "Who cares about that" when receiving polite introductions to the family, and launches immediately into his questioning about Beatrice. Early on, he outright ignores attempts to introduce him to Kyrie, Rudolf, or HIdeyoshi, saying "I have no interest in anyone but Rosa." He also doesn't seem to show any particular concern for how unsettling it is for a complete stranger to be able to spout off highly specific Ushiromiya family facts like how the Beatrice portrait was hung in April of 1984, or that Rosa met a woman named Beatrice in the Kuwadorian mansion in 1967. Similarly, even after accepting Lion as his "Watson" for solving the case, he tells them to their face that they are perceptive enough that it "hardly feels as though [he is] speaking to a piece from the lower plane", and that he's surprised they're more than just a pampered rich kid.

Will can be a bit of a busybody, inserting himself into matters that aren't really his concern anymore, such as showing up to stop the maid's arrest despite having no jurisdiction over the case, or coming back to Bernkastel's game board on a mere suspicion that things were liable to turn sour after he left, even knowing that a Game Master has full control over everything on their board and she could not only tear him apart and put him back together as much as she wants, but she could subject him to any number of worse fates, such as being left to rot in oblivion, unable to die or live in an in-between state of non-existence as a piece metaphorically put away on a shelf.

He pays no heed to this danger because he is often reckless, particularly when something has inflamed his temper. Even though he knows he is not capable of defeating Bernkastel or disproving the version of events on October 5th, 1986 that she shows to Lion, he's willing to throw his life away in order to make his stand against her, despite having known Lion for less than a day. He doesn't think about it or hesitate, or even give himself time to really make any kind of plan, simply throwing himself at her to buy time for Lion.

Deer Country Attributes

• Canon Powers: Will is a sort of metaphysical existence called a "Piece" in the meta-universe of Umineko, essentially a character that exists on a game board and can be manipulated according to the Game Master's will. However, Pieces that are from the Great Court of Heaven appear to have their own independent existence beyond the game boards, and are aware of the existence of multiple layers of reality, unlike Human pieces. It is implied that the Creator of these pieces is literally God, though their existence as metanarrative tropes suggests that God is both literally God and a metaphor for the whole of the literary canon and the mystery genre particularly. As seen in Episode 6, Pieces that are damaged can only be repaired by their Creator or are otherwise doomed to die. In Deer Country, this will be mitigated by the "reincarnation" process of sorts that new Sleepers go through, but healing will still be of lower effectiveness than it would be on an actual human. Despite this, his existence as a Piece means he will be able to take overall more damage than the typical Sleeper, able to survive the majority of injuries without losing consciousness or going into shock.

In canon, Will also has a sword described as being able to cut through fiction and reality, and he is able to kill Clair by dispersing her witch's illusion with his sword. Later, he prevents Kyrie Ushiromiya from shooting Lion by cutting into the Fragment before she could do this. Since this kind of thing largely only makes sense within the context of canon and mostly serves a function of narrative convenience, he will not have it in Deer Country at all.

Another ability that he has in canon is access to the red truth, in the form of the Twenty Rules for Detective Stories written by Van Dine. Similar to the Decalogue wielded by Dlanor A. Knox, these are used in canon to argue against theories about the mystery on grounds such as "it is forbidden for there to be a crime without a corpse", etc. This specific application of the red truth will be largely irrelevant to Deer Country, which is inherently fantasy. However, the ability to speak in the red truth as a larger construct within canon will be available to Will in game as a Darkblood.

As described in canon, a red truth is simply truth, with no need to provide proof or justification. This is generally used by witches in game boards to confirm or deny facts about the crime scenes and the locations of pieces on the boards (e.g. "Natsuhi's death was a homicide; the corpses were not moved from the parlor", etc). However, it applies more broadly to other truths, and comes with conditions. A red truth cannot be spoken if it is not true, whether or not the speaker is aware it is not true. In the fourth game, Battler is physically unable to state in red that he is Asumu Ushiromiya's biological child, though he is able to state that he is Battler Ushiromiya and he is Kinzo Ushiromiya's grandchild. Further, a witch cannot find themselves in a situation in which they have provided contradictory red truths, or it will create a logic error that will obliterate the witch instantly. One such situation in canon is when Battler states in red truth that his piece did not exist in a room, but the chain of the door was set, which could not be done from the outside. He was then forced to come up with a logic in which these two facts were compatible.

The red truth is extremely literal; it is possible to construct seemingly contradictory or unsolvable red truth puzzles by playing word games. For instance, if someone states in red that the Ushiromiya head was present in a location, it is not a contradiction to also have the red that Kinzo Ushiromiya was already dead at the start of the game, because Kinzo had previously passed on the title of Ushiromiya head to Sayo Yasuda. Similarly, a common loophole for red truths involving Shannon or Kanon is that they are both alternate personalities of the "real" person, Sayo Yasuda.

Since red truths are simply truth and do not require proof, they can also be given to guarantee otherwise unprovable statements, such as when Virgilia tells Battler that Beatrice designed her games intending for Battler to be able to solve them. The application of these powers to Deer Country will be described under Blood Power Manifestation.

• Blood Type: Darkblood
• Omen: His cat, Diana
• Blessed Day: July 15, Battler's birthday (significant because he becomes the one to kill Clair/Beatrice in place of Battler; in many ways he is Sayo's "ideal" detective, and represents much of what Sayo wanted from Battler in the real world and the gameboard)

• Patron Pthumerian: The Reckoning - Will would have mixed feelings about this patron as someone highly justice-minded, but who came to be dissatisfied with brutal and extreme methods of achieving such justice.

• Blood Power Manifestation:

Red Truth - The ability to speak in the red truth will be available to Will in Deer Country. He will both receive the privileges associated with red truth—a red truth cannot be directly argued or defied except by competing red; at the end of Episode 7, Ange is so wracked by denial when Bernkastel reveals the actual truth of the Rokkenjima massacre and confirms it in red that her entire body is destroyed—and be bound by its conditions. For instance, if he tells someone in red that he will never repeat a certain secret to anyone, and then attempts to violate that red, he will be racked with intense agony, and if he persists trying, his body will be torn apart and he will die. However, if he instead states he will never speak of it to anyone, he is allowed to get around that red by writing it down instead.

He will not be able to state things in red that he does not icly know for a fact. For the purposes of the game, material on the info pages that can be icly learned will qualify for the usage of red truth, but ooc dynamics will not. For example, Will can state in red that Deer Country is the waking world that resulted from the collapse of Julia Sodder's dream, or that a certain character has returned to the ocean, but he will not be able to state, for instance, the date of that character's return even if one is known oocly. This power cannot be used to infomod in any way, as it relies on Will personally knowing things or otherwise being able to guarantee them (e.g. his own actions).

Blue Truth - The ability to speak in blue truth is another core construct in Umineko. Will is never shown using it in canon, so it is not listed in canon powers, but he is implied by Bernkastel to be capable of it and will have access to it in Deer Country as well.

In canon, the role of the blue truth is so that witches cannot simply refuse to offer any red for the solution of their mystery; if any theory made with the blue truth is left unanswered by the end of the game, the detective side wins. Since there are no witches or game boards in Deer Country, the blue truth will have a similar but distinct purpose within the setting itself. Essentially, the blue truth will be able to be used in situations of uncertainty to make theories that can rise to the level of truth if left unchallenged. For instance, he might say in the blue truth that a bridge will hold his weight if he walks over it. In Umineko, provable facts can count as red truths even if not spoken by a witch, so a person who has examined the bridge closely or previously attempted to walk on the bridge and fallen from it would be able to counter that statement by saying the planks are rotten. However, until such a counterargument is made, the theory will count as truth. Similarly, if someone is seriously injured he can make a blue truth statement that they will survive the injury, and the individual will remain alive unless something changes the situation (e.g. receiving a new injury or being killed in another way).

Additionally, with player permission and pre-plotting, he can make blue truth statements about individuals' actions or motivations. These will not affect reality or the other character's state of mind directly, but the individual will feel increasingly compelled to respond to it over the next 48 hours (the length of time of Beato's game boards), at the end of which they will be forced to give an answer. This application of the power is unlikely to be used except in extreme situations (e.g. if a Sleeper has been murdered and the culprit has not identified themselves) or if Will is suffering from severe Corruption.

Confession - An additional ability will be accessible (with player permission & plotting) to Will in Deer Country, paralleling his solution of Clair's mystery: the ability to influence reality to reveal evidence for truths an individual most wants known about themselves. This will be affected by the belief rules in Umineko. A common theme throughout canon is "without love, it cannot be seen"; the ability to do magic is hampered by the existence of an "anti-magic toxin" that exists within all humans. Those with lower amounts of toxin (i.e. those with greater belief in the occult, like Maria, or bought off as accomplices to lie) are able to "witness" magic. So this power will work simultaneously on two levels — the more an individual wants Will to know their truth, the more likely it is that he will be able to "see" it. For example, if a character was hiding that they weren't human by wearing a hat to cover horns but desperately wanted someone to know what they were and accept them anyway, and then became friends with Will, they could become subject to this power, in which Will "sees" them as they really are, "by magic", but in reality the individual's hat flew off in a breeze, or Will stumbles across them not wearing it because they forgot to lock a door, etc.

Writing Samples

One: TDM with Ange
Two: TDM with Adaine

The Player

• Player Name: Batty
• Player Age: 30
• Player Contact: goodluckmodes
• Permissions: Here

Other Characters

Qrow Branwen

Link to Character 1 overall AC: Here