Hm. Frankly I expected this thread to have moved a bit more while I was gone. Anyhow:
Anything above the middle is the Creator realm, per Lambda's explanation. Her self-insert (or true self, for Ovy7) isn't in said realm.
Sure Feath's super strong for a witch, but she is still one. Lambda knows about Featherine and didn't made any differences.
Lambdadelta herself says that what she lays out in her memoirs are just her personal views of things, and is open to the possibility of there being an unknown world which even she doesn't know about (And which she'd expect Beatrice to reveal to her), so that already creates a precedent for her explanation not covering the full picture.
Even the Creators are also directly stated to still be Witches of a sort, just ones that rank above both Voyagers and Territory Lords, as seen in the TIP you quoted in the OP. So, again, I don't think "She is still a witch" is the strongest of arguments here, since the term itself can be divided into multiple different ranks and categories
If anything, given how "great witches" that returned from the forbidden heights like Featherine did are stated to be indistinguishable from Creators and directly called "gods" by Erika (When she describes the stories they oversee as "
the tale of the gods"), I think it's pretty safe to assume they're a category of their own, which Lambda doesn't belong to, and Featherine existing apart from Witches much like Witches exist apart from Humans just hammers that point home, since you can notice that, in her memoirs, Lambda makes a distinction between "our world" (The world of witches, since she always uses "we," "us," "our" and etc to talk about herself and fellow witches) and what she calls "the physical, human world." If Great Witches see Witches like Witches see Humans, then it's all but natural that a similar distinction also exists between the former two, no?
Granted, that specific use to the term "Great Witch" (or "
great one") is only ever brought up in Episode 8, and beforehand, it's thrown around a lot and used to refer to far lesser people (Hell, going by the
definition given in the prologue of Episode 3, Sorcerer Battler is a Great Witch), so, I admit it's pretty slippery and context-specific.
Besides, unless the two scenes contradicts themselves (which they don't, narration even emphasis the fact that Lambda knows all that stuff which is why she's stressed, can't choose to win nor lose, knows about Featherine's weakness and even the past incident with it) there's no reason to reject additional infos from two perfectly equal canons.
So Lambdadelta perfectly knows all the stuff about Featherine so far.
Given the angle I showed up there, I came to half-agree with this, since Lambda obviously knows about the "great witches," but given how it's also mentioned that they're pretty much impossible to distinguish from Creators, in spite of everything else pointing to a lower status (Them being conscious, active entities that
returned from that realm, the whole existence of Featherine's Study, and the deal with Beatrice going through a process of evolution in their world), I think it's pretty reasonable to say that this is just a matter of them being so high up and having so few restrictions that, from the perspective of lower beings, there's hardly anything that practically separates them from outright Gods.
Which doesn't apply new hierarchies or anything, just that they are much higher.
It does, at least, imply the existence of a third world, given that Beatrice evolves specifically by constantly ascending through layers. And like I said above, this world would just be where the great witches who returned from the Creator World make their homes.
I consider that there's only one infinite ladder; not two infinite ladders that scale to each others and are the only reason for anything beyond 1-A.
How it changes stuff is pretty obvious.
Yeah, but your whole argument against the "no endpoint" statement meaning an infinite set of layers seems to be that Featherine managed to reach the World of the Creators, which is a bit weird to me, given you still consider the Voyagers to be capable of going beyond an infinite hierarchy through a gradual ascension given enough time.
It does seem to translate to "endpoint", but I would say it is definitely no proof of infinite heirarchy. The conclusion that the heirarchy is infinitely layered from "having no endpoint" internally assumes their journey involves continuous ascend to deeper parts of the ladder, which isn't true as Lambda directly says she is a coward who may never reach the deeper parts, seemingly due to her fear of the creator.
She also states that there are other Voyagers who are far ahead of her within the hierarchy, because they are not afraid of losing their footing or growing closer to the Creators, something which she also alludes to in other parts of the text. For instance, when recounting her meeting with Takano, she talks about how people who climb the ladder are either cautious, slow and timid or anxious and excited for new heights (Or depths, I guess):
You could descend all nervous and timid, wondering how much longer there is to go until you reach the depths, or you could plunge down in excitement and hurry.
And later on, she also mentions that her own journey did involve going down the layers of the ladder, just slowly and one step at a time over the course of several millenia:
No... On the contrary, her composition formula is too deep.
While I've been climbing down the well on the ladder one rung at a time over the course of millennia, it's as though she opened up a parasol and used that as a parachute to swoop down to the depths... and at what speed...!
So, yeah, it seems pretty clear that the travels of the Voyagers do indeed involve ascending towards higher and higher layers, just at different speeds, and given that Lambda specifically notes herself as being just a cowardly type, I don't think applying that statement to all Voyagers is very accurate.
Well, in a way it would be the same result as what's being argued, since the two combined would just be one infinite ladder.
Although my stance is more than while there's an infinite ladder for sure, it only stops at Creator realm, per Lambda's world
and even if we ignored that added a second hierarchy it wouldn't be an infinite one and would result in a single infinite ladder, hence would come back to the same thing.
I'm aware of that, which is why I called it a counterargument to my points. I'm not defending the 1-A+ rating so much as I am defending the existence of three separate domains that stand beneath the World of the Creators. The first thing is just in the periphery to me, pretty much.
Then it would have nothing to do on any Voyagers page, and just be them being able to draw from it.
Which actually makes more sense given how both Battler and Bernkastel are Sorcerer of Miracles and are fundamentally different.
Voyagers being a secondary existence and all isn't what's currently on the profiles, which consider the concept as their true self, which is what I was arguing about.
However, if we just consider it as "flowery" talk (not every case of "embobidment" have to be litteral, after all) to say that they hold control over this kind of concept, then I'm fine with it.
In that case, it appears that Lambda just feeds from the concept of certainty or only has control over the portion that is available to her. I sure as hell don't see the point of giving a concept a tier, so I think that key should be removed
You can certainly argue that, yeah, but I don't particularly agree with it. The whole idea behind the concept of a "Witch" in Umineko is that they aren't really individual people, but
large-scale phenomena whose effects in the environment could be attributed to a supernatural entity, hence why Dlanor states that
mysteries and riddles are the only spaces in which they can exist, and why the name "Beatrice" doesn't necessarily address only the woman which Battler bickers with during the story,
but also the very rules and environment defining the gameboard, which,
when exposed and unravelled,
cause the Territory as a whole to collapse.
Given the above, I do believe those concepts have a strong enough association with their embodiments to be featured on the profiles, as well as a solid enough connection to the existence of the realms they permeate to be tiered.
