A Child’s Self Perception (Spoiler Warning)

Using the model of Jean Piaget's Cognitive development, We try to understand the child characters of Umineko.

#07threads #Maria07 #Ange07

Jean Piaget’s stages of development, is a psychological study of cognitive development that divides a child’s brain developing into four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.

The concrete operational stage is the third stage in Piaget's theory of cognitive development, which begins around age 7 and continues until 11. Piaget determined that children in the concrete operational stage were fairly good at the use of inductive logic (inductive reasoning)

Inductive reasoning was actually introduced in umineko at first in the form of hemple’s raven, which is a thought paradox aimed at illustrating a contradiction between inductive logic and intuition, so we can present our opinions but still fit them in a logical context.

Inductive logic, in short, assumes that children come up with their own general truth on a matter, instead of determining a specific outcome of an event using only present clues and deductive logic,like you can be allergic to cats, but can’t understand that the cat is the source

The concrete operational stage is also marked by decreases in egocentrism. While children in the preceding stage of development (preoperational stage) struggle to take the perspective of others, kids in the concrete stage think about things the way that others see them.

This long introduction is to explain how Maria perceives the world. She was egotistical at a younger age, believing herself to be a child of god, then bit by bit her views started to change in shape, upon a sudden meeting with beatrice, and her old world stopped being enough.

This is a bit different from ange, who was younger at that time, and at an earlier development stage, so she struggled to understand that other people have different perspectives, thoughts, feelings and mental states. Her brain was not developed enough to perceive it.

This plays well into the narrative of the Black Witch. From Maria's eyes witches appeared just as beato described them and didn’t think about witches in general . Kids at this age become more logical about concrete and specific things, but they still struggle with abstract ideas

Also she thought everyone else aside from her was stupid for not reading the bible or not believing in witches, while not actually thinking about abstract thoughts like how does knowing these fit into the situation at hand? It is still a child’s ego at work despite her age.

Like how she perceives sakutaro as dead but can’t grasp that it was just a doll, or when she converts her humming into a magic spell for happiness, without trying to understand why was her mother actually happy that day, and that it wasn’t because of this specific spell.

This is why Beatrice attacks ange for being a six year old child despite her actually being old, and that's because she was still trapped in her young egocentrism, unable to understand multiple perspectives and truths and come up with her own answers.

Ange’s psyche was dominated by her own perception, instead of trying to reason through it. She thinks of her own perspective as objective and absolute, while negating the reality, and this is why she couldn't trust her assessment of her own memories in twilight.

All of this fits into the main puzzle known as Umineko, and why it's so long and confusing, because it was made literally for a person with so much self perception due to the traumatic accident, unlike normal readers who interact with the plot normally, Ange was too hard headed