#spoilers for higurashi gou after this point

[pinkopalina]

things about higurashi that just hit different after you've watched everything a few times: (major spoilers lol)

the way mion has to play shion and the way shion has to play mion. true-shion is so soft and gentle and got SUCH A RAW FUCKING DEAL!!! the way she took her older sister's role and it was an accident! the way they switched later in life so their personalities were set when "mion" got the tattoo! the way "mion" is a tomboy who has a cute side but that's just because she's shion! the way true-mion plays shion as a sweet soft lady SO WELL but then gets SO HARDENED bc she's so crass and has that attitude. i feel like true-shion has a harder time playing mion than true-mion has playing shion lol.

the way gou has two whole arcs with a different perspective and then the second season, sotsu, completely spins both of them on their heads because satoko was a secret looper the whole time. the way it makes you question if satoko was secretly a looper in higurashi 2006!!! the way it was always aliens, always, from the start, so it makes you wonder how far in advance some of these plot twists have been planned. the way every time they release a new iteration in japan, they change something, so you're experiencing countless loops the way rika does. hundreds of the exact same event but sometimes itty bitty little things change.

the way everyone starts remembering their old timelines. the way i WONDER if they could all ever become loopers some day!!! let rena loop!!! AAAAAAAA

the way rena knows the truth and tells you it's aliens but she sounds crazy so you never believe her. the way they tell you everything at the end of higurashi 06 but they're unreliable narrators bc they don't know the truth and they call the aliens demons. gooooooddddddddddddddddddd

the way satoko endlessly tortures rika because the in-canon reason is . fuck how do i even explain umineko. or ciconia. i havent even experienced those things but i know the author of higurashi has like 5 different works that are all converging universes, so satoko and rika in higurashi are lambdadelta (satoko) and frederika (hehe. rika) bernkastle in umineko and lambda is a witch and she used her powers to change universes bc of her obsession with rika (bernkastle) bc she's still just as competitive and manipulative there and it's crazy like ITS FUCKING CRAZY.

i cant even think a sentence ahead and ryu07 is out here thinking like 2 decades in advance

THE WAY THE WATANAGASHI FESTIVAL IS BEFORE SATOKO'S BIRTHDAY. HER BIRTHDAY IS JUNE 24!!!! SO RIKA CONSTANTLY DIES A DAY OR TWO BEFORE HER BEST FRIEND'S BIRTHDAY, OVER AND OVER AGAIN. HOW MANY TIMELINES DO WE KNOW ARE DOOMED BECAUSE WE NEVER GET TO HER BIRTHDAY! THE WAY THE STORY IS ABOUT CHILD ABUSE. IF SATOKO ISN'T OKAY THEN NOBODY IS OKAY. AND SHE'S NOT OKAY BC WE FAILED CHILDREN!!! IM FUCKED UP

the way the story and perspective changes between arcs, so you're just as confused as the characters are. the way some of them remember some things over time so it's not just the fragmented world that starts converging, it's also the worlds within those fragments. something fucking HUGE is gonna happen in higurashi i just know it

the way satoko is angry with rika for leaving her, and uses their friends as a reason rika shouldnt leave, but satoko murders her friends and doesnt care when the friends she doesnt murder get left behind and have a ton of traumatic cosmic debt because theyve been sole survivors for hundreds of years. the way satoko is a total hypocrtie but she does want to stop at some point but she cant because of lambda. god im torn over this

[akajulester]

further thoughts on Higurashi Gou/Sotsu (spoilers for Higurashi and Umineko ep3)

warning: long rant incoming haha

I think my two biggest problems with these seasons is how they focused way more on the supernatural/magic elements of the When They Cry franchise and less on the original Higurashi’s emphasis on natural explanations, and how the characters were completely devoid of the life they had in the original.

I’ve only just started getting into Umineko and I understand it also leaves a lot of room for a non-magical explanation, but you can’t deny it focuses way more on magic than Higurashi ever did.

The thing I found most interesting when I first watched Higurashi was how the mystery had a very human and realistic explanation. While a mystical divine curse is cool, the whole plot being the result of a human character taking advantage of a fictional parasite and medicine to essentially create the mystical divine curse is far more compelling - the audience is allowed to piece together the mystery along with the characters and isn’t shut down by “a wizard did it.”

And that isn’t to say Higurashi is completely devoid of magic or the divine. Hanyuu is some kind of mystical deity who gave Rika a supernatural power (looping) and is able to manifest in the real world and directly affect the course of events (such as making Takano miss her shot). Higurashi is just a perfect blend of supernatural and more realistic storytelling.

Gou and Sotsu, on the other hand, went much harder on the supernatural/magic aspect seen in Umineko. Not only is it a worse magic vs human mystery than Umineko, it’s just completely different from what Higurashi is at its core. The complex, interweaving mystery that at first seems unsolvable but later makes sense was replaced with a much simpler “whodunnit” where the answers were obvious, especially after Satoko was revealed to be the second looper. The introduction of straight-up magic and powerful witch entities dumbs down the story, in a sense.

To be fair, Gou and Sotsu do have a human explanation as well, specifically in the vein of the human explanations seen in Umineko. Just as Eva-Beatrice in Episode 3 can be interpreted as a personification of Eva going crazy and murdering her family, Rika and Satoko’s big magical-girl fight could be interpreted as a metaphor for their fight. However, this rings a little hollow when the last episode essentially says “nah, they definitely turned into Bernkastel and Lambdadelta.” It feels like there’s almost no room for a true human explanation.

The other thing I found most compelling about Higurashi is the characters, more specifically how they interacted with each other and felt like very real people. I want to read the sound novels at some point mainly because I’ve heard the anime didn’t fully do the characters justice by cutting out small but important moments. Mion and Shion especially were amazing, their dynamic as twins was probably one of the best I’ve ever seen in storytelling. Also, the main message of Higurashi is literally about the power of friendship, and it portrays it in such an amazing way you forget the sentiment is a bit cheesy.

And yet, Gou/Sotsu ignored every single character who wasn’t Rika or Satoko (except maybe Hanyuu and Eua). While I can understand the decision to focus on them since the only point of the show was apparently to set up Bernkastel and Lambdadelta, it actually makes them feel more hollow and lifeless, to me at least.

Keiichi’s lack of presence was especially baffling in this regard. He was arguably the main reason Rika was able to break out of the loops at all, as he helped inspire her with the idea a miracle could happen if their entire group of friends worked together. And with Satoko, he became her big brother figure! The fact that Gou/Sotsu not only push their relationship off to the wayside but also have Satoko get Keiichi murdered in horrifically brutal ways AND purposely inject him with Hinamizawa Syndrome without any shred of remorse or guilt is disgusting. Are you seriously telling me Satoko had a massive internal struggle over taking advantage of Teppei (y’know, the guy who abused her and her brother and severely traumatized them), but felt absolutely nothing over torturing Keiichi, the boy who she knows has fought to save her from said abusive uncle in multiple worlds and would literally kill for her??? Wtf???

The same thing goes for the almost non-existence of Shion in Gou/Sotsu. Shion also has a very strong relationship with Satoko (except for the worlds where she goes crazy and brutally murders her lmao) and has ALSO threatened to kill that abusive uncle for hurting Satoko, something Satoko would know full well after watching all of Rika’s loops. It’s reasonable Satoko would have more ambiguous feelings about Shion (since, again, Shion has killed her in Watanagashi arcs), but I find it bizarre she would be this willing to brutally murder, torture, and directly cause events leading others to murder/torture her surrogate big sister and surrogate big brother.

The whole story in general is baffling when you consider Satoko’s character. Are we seriously supposed to believe her drifting apart from a close friend is somehow more traumatic to her than the isolation and exclusion she experienced from her entire town and the literal abuse she went through from her aunt and uncle? You can’t even really use the “oh the town didn’t actually want to persecute her family tho” argument because that doesn’t negate Satoko’s experience of living through it. It’s especially dumb when you consider Gou/Sotsu somehow make Satoko’s argument “I don’t wanna study waaahhhhh” as if it makes any sense when you know these characters.

Don’t even get me started on how nobody even reacts to Satoko’s bullshit. The original Higurashi had characters sometimes remember past arcs/worlds, and Gou explicitly stated Satoko’s loops meant characters would remember even more. And yet, all that happens is Takano and Teppei reforming. What??? I expected the ending to involve Keiichi, Rena, Mion, and Shion realizing what Satoko had done to them and getting rightfully angry with Rika over what Satoko did to all of them. The show should’ve ended with the group cutting her off for being so fucking awful to them. Jfc...

In the end, I think Gou was fine and Tatariakashi-hen in Sotsu was cool, but this show just felt so empty compared to the original Higurashi and Umineko. Both stories are focused on the CHARACTERS, and while there are main characters in both who get more focus than the rest of the cast, every single character’s interactions with each other are vital to what makes their stories compelling. Dropping all of that to hone in on 2 specific characters actually robs even those characters of their depth and vividness.

#higurashi #higurashi sotsu #sotsu #higurashi no naku koro ni #umineko #umineko no naku koro ni #anime #Julie being a weeb #rant #higurashi spoilers #umineko spoilers #spoilers #warning: long post #ugh

[thewhitefluffyhat]

Ryukishi Pulled a Beatrice Again

The interesting thing about how Gou struggled to convey Satoko’s motivations is that it’s almost exactly the same as the difficulties many people have with understanding Beatrice’s heart.

(Major spoilers for Umineko’s main mystery!)

...And by Beatrice I mean Sayo.

See, when I first read Umineko, I found Sayo’s motivations to be super disappointing and underwhelming.  That was because I was only paying attention to the surface narrative, which you can trivialize as “Sayo had a sad because Battler didn’t love them back.” “Why didn’t they just leave Rokkenjima, if they hated it so much?” I thought at the time.

We can see a direct equivalent to that with Gou - the common trivialization that “Satoko just didn’t want to study.” And then the followups - “Why didn’t she just drop out and go to another school?” Or, “Why didn’t she just use her looping powers to do well at St. Lucia?”

If you’re asking those questions (as even I have!), I think that might already be missing the point.

With Umineko, I went on to read fan analysis that explored everything going on under the surface with Sayo and OH. Now I really love them, and what Umineko was doing as a whole!

Because the thing about Sayo is that Battler and whether they can leave Rokkenjima are just the tip of a giant iceberg.  If anything, I’d say that their issues with their body and their horror regarding their origins are much more crucial to sympathizing with them and understanding what pushed them over the edge.  Despite that, Ryukishi glosses over those aspects of their motivation very quickly in the VN - just one quick flash of their despair - and leaves it to the reader to tear out those bleak guts.

And I think the same thing happened with Satoko in Gou.  St. Lucia is just the surface problem - what’s festering under the surface is that Satoko discovered Rika isn’t who she thought. Now she believes the real Rika looks down on her and is a selfish liar only concerned with herself.  And as with Sayo, the scene portraying this ugly underbelly is extremely brief and underemphasized: it’s Satoko watching all of Rika’s Fragments.

A knowledgeable viewer can connect the dots - before this scene, Satoko was still mostly trying to reason with Rika, but then after the Fragments, she’s completely changed her tone. And if you think about Rika’s actions during OG Higurashi, it’s not hard to see why.

Outside of Minagoroshi (which was 90% Keiichi anyway), has Rika ever intervened to help Satoko during the loops?  She had many chances to prevent Satoko and Satoshi from destroying their family, and never did.  She had many chances to save Satoko from her uncle, and never did.  She could at the very least have warned Satoko about Shion or Rena or the mystery assassins who ended up being the Mountain Dogs… and never even thought about Satoko also being in danger. And so Satoko gets blown up, tortured to death, or used as a lab rat by Tokyo when Rika might have saved her.

And if that somehow wasn’t enough, Satoko now knows that Rika was constantly, shamelessly lying to her about critical aspects of her own life, from Satoko’s brother, to Satoko’s own health, to the fact that there was another person living in their house… to even Rika’s true personality and the nature of their imbalanced “friendship.”

After all Satoko has seen, what reason would she have to trust Rika any more?  

Now that’s a motivation that explains Satoko’s desire to reconstruct the Hinamizawa birdcage.  It may even be the “karma” of Gou’s title - Rika is reaping the reward for her callous passivity, not just at St Lucia, but in all timelines.

If only Gou had properly conveyed that!  

I wonder, actually, if Ryukishi won’t regret his vagueness in Gou just like he did with Umineko.  Umineko’s manga is a lot more explicit about the other half of Sayo’s motivations - perhaps the Gou manga will do the same elaboration for Satoko.  Everything I’ve heard about it suggests the manga is doing the anime arcs even better, so who knows?

#when they cry #higurashi #higurashi gou #umineko #umineko spoilers #higurashi gou analysis #higurashi gou critical #gou cour 2 analysis finale #my ramblings #houjou satoko #furude rika #satokowashi #beatrice #oh geez I need a tag for the character I discuss in this #UHHH #heart of beatrice #sure that's kind of cute I think #my higurashi gou sotsu meguri thoughts

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Sotsu Ep15 [FINALE]

For better or worse I think Ryukishi achieved exactly what he set out to do with this series, and I guess everyone’s just gonna be forced to reckon with how they feel about his own perspective on this franchise versus how they feel about it, lol.

Anyway, thoughts under the cut, plus Umineko spoilers.

I’m not entirely sure where to even start with this, but I guess the TL;DR is that I honestly think Gou/Sotsu was ultimately just fine despite it’s issues, and part me of can’t help but be like ‘I told you so, lol’ about how this really did end with this episode, and also committed pretty hard to the Umineko prequel elements.

It’s not like all of my theories were correct in the end, but I at least think I was pretty spot on in my prediction last week that this would end with the miracle of them side-stepping the sword issue entirely and choosing the third option of forgiveness and reconciliation. And also them ending it with an epilogue where we go back to the Matsuribayashi timeline and get a happy ending for Rika and Satoko that provides a ‘non-magical interpretation’ for the story while also giving us an idea of how Bern and Lambda formally split off into their own entities and start the relationship we see in Umineko.

I didn’t quite expect them to go down the route of having them agree to just spend a few years apart and accept that they don’t need to literally always be together, but I think that was a really good way to wrap things up between them. It’s pretty much the healthiest compromise to their conflict that doesn’t come across like it completely invalidates one of their dreams. I get why it feels too anti-climactic and convenient for people, but when you pull at that thread you get into wider topics of what the entire story is about, since this was always going to end with Satoko being redeemed and forgiven. People might not have taken him seriously, but Ryukishi was 100% genuine about his regrets about Matsuribayashi’s ending, and how part of why he came up with this new story was to create a better ending, while also doing more with Satoko as a character.

Basically I think a lot of the fandom negativity towards this boils down to people fundamentally disagreeing with the idea that Matsuribayashi was even ‘flawed’ in this sort of way to begin with, or that Satoko was badly written. It’s valid to disagree on this stuff, but at the very least we all have to grapple with how Ryukishi has his own specific relationship with this series.

People like to focus on how he’s a troll who likes to mess with people, but I feel like this is a bit of a wake-up call for people about how he’s actually extremely sincere, almost to a fault, and he likes to use his stories as a vehicle for expressing his personal philosophies and ideals. 

This whole story is also a good example of how he just sees this as ultimately being a fictional story about fictional characters, and not literally a matter of real people who need to be sentenced for their crimes or whatever. As early as the original VN he was almost being outright preachy about the message that nobody is irredeemable, and that philosophy carries through to this. But to be more specific, nobody *in this story* is irredeemable. He’s pretty open about the fact that in practice you can’t apply this sort of ideal to real life, but fictional stories are their own separate matter.

I think this whole issue of how he views this as a story first and foremost is also the central reason why this ended in a way that comes across as Satoko being let off too easy for her crimes. One way or another, Ryukishi’s made it clear that he sees this as being no different to how other characters had arcs where they committed crimes but still got forgiven, or how Takano is basically a straight up war criminal who also got forgiven for her crimes.

Anyway, this episode at least committed to the Umineko stuff, so that was satisfying. Sure there’s people that still want to deny it, but at this point I think a lot of people are just being stubborn, so it’s not like anything would have really convinced them, lol. I’m also genuinely not sure what people even would have expected them to do beyond what we saw her, aside from having the two of them literally put on their gothic lolita outfits and turn to the camera and go ‘we are literally Bernkastel and Lambdadelta from the video game series Umineko When They Cry’. I almost feel like there’s some kind of misunderstanding from people who aren’t familiar with Umineko when it comes to the idea of what it even means for this to be ‘an Umineko prequel’, or ‘a Bern/Lambda origin story’. I mean, this is quite literally exactly what I expected and hoped for in that regard. It’s not like I was expecting them to incorporate anything related to, like, Beatrice or the Ushiromiya family.

I think this is also one of those things where you just have to decide for yourself whether or not you want to earnestly engage with the story that’s being told, or if you want to assume that there’s some level of malice or trickery going on.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting them to literally have Rika and Satoko recite part of Bern and Lambda’s final conversation with each other word for word, lmao. Combined with the scene at the end where ‘Witch Satoko’ talks to herself about how she’s going to give her body back to Satoko while she goes chasing after Rika, it was literally just the exact origin story of their relationship as it’s depicted in Umineko.

I still feel like this would all only really be ‘worth it’ if we actually get something like a full on anime remake for Umineko, but at this point I can’t help but feel satisfied with this part of it all.

It’s not like I think Gou/Sotsu as a whole is perfect or anything, though. I don’t hate it as much as basically everyone else does, but I think Ryukishi’s the sort of VN writer who really struggles with the shift to writing for an anime. I think a big part of the frustration people have is just from how this is formatted as a weekly anime series spread across basically an entire year, instead of being something like a stand-alone VN chapter that you can read at whatever pace you want, even if it ultimately takes the same amount of time to read as it would to watch all of Gou/Sotsu.

There’s also the whole issue of this being a sort-of-remake, which snowballed into a whole list of structural problems. They absolutely tried too hard to have their cake and eat it too, and they should have just committed to it being made for old fans only, instead of trying to sincerely incorporate elements from the VN that old fans don’t care about anymore because they’ve gone over it already.

And as I’ve said several times before, it was a major issue for them to decide to put Nekodamashi in the middle of Gou and then spend like 20 episodes on flashback answer arcs until finally getting back to that cliffhanger. I’ve been waiting until this all ended to decide exactly how I feel about that, and now that it’s all over I still think it was a really bad idea. I don’t think it was an issue for them to reveal that Satoko’s the culprit that early, but having the gun cliffhanger specifically happen that early just gave people misguided expectations and tainted the answer arcs because people were just impatient to get back to the cliffhanger. And then the cliffhanger itself ended up being somewhat anti-climactic, which is what I’d been fearing would happen. It would have worked fine if they shuffled it around so that the cliffhanger happened right before Kagurashi and was followed up in the very next episode, or if this was a VN where you could binge your way through the flashback stuff, but spending like half of an entire real-life year to get back to that point only to have the resolution be ‘Satoko just shoots Rika and the death loops keep going’ just didn’t really work properly.

I’m a lot more generous towards the Akashi arcs than most people are, since I think they really over-estimate how much re-used content there is there, but they still suffer from the central issue of the show trying to be accessible for new fans. It could have been heavily condensed otherwise, without losing anything in terms of Satoko’s whole character arc.

On the other hand I think the first half of Kagurashi was awful specifically because it highlighted how bad of an idea it was to put Nekodamashi so early in the story. They still ended up having to go back to that arc and repeat it anyway, in the most 1:1 recap-y way in the whole show, but that wouldn’t have even been an issue in the first place if that was instead the first time that arc happened in the show.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I would rearrange the story to make it flow better while still following Ryukishi’s intentions, and I think they could have condensed it into a 2-cour season with this sort of structure if they did something like this:

-First arc where Rika gets thrown back into the loop and quickly figures out that somebody intentionally caused this to happen, and it’s not Takano because at least in this idea of mine she’d try and investigate her only to find out that this version of Takano regrets everything and is planning to flee the village with Tomitake.

Basically I think this could tie into the idea of Satoko initially wanting to just concoct an idea world for Rika so that she won’t want to leave this time, but sort of like what I think happens in Saikoroshi, Rika would still reject it, and this time around there’d be the additional layer of her knowing that somebody did this to her for an unknown reason. Maybe they could even initially market it as a new adaptation or a remake of Saikoroshi, and then reveal that it’s a sequel, to keep that whole element to the series. Either way I think this would end with everything going to shit when Rika rejects that fragment and wants to go back to St. Lucia’s, and Satoko basically snaps and kills her, and that way the audience can find out about her being the culprit without Rika finding out about it yet.

Maybe there could even be some dramatic irony where Rika’s attempts to meddle with certain ‘trigger events’, and her displaying her looper side, inadvertently triggers people around her to get paranoid, and the whole fragment would start to spiral into tragedy from there. I think they could at least use the whole conflict in Tatariakashi about Teppei actually being good this time as a starting point for that sorta thing.

-Second arc, rounding out the first cour, which is basically just Satokowashi. I don’t think there’s much that you’d need to change here, but like I said above I like the idea of her initially trying to just invent a perfect world for Rika and her to live in, instead of jumping straight to murder. But maybe instead of her literally just watching Rika’s loops, she could instead just be stuck using her looping powers to try and figure out how to create that ‘perfect world’ in the first place, by personally investigating all of the different tragedies and how to prevent them.

-Staring the second cour, a third arc where we basically just get to see those loops Satoko goes through, and her whole process of solving the tragedies and ‘purifying’ characters like Teppei and Takano, until we eventually see her perspective on the first arc, and how she reacts to Rika ultimately rejecting the world she tried to make for her.

-A fourth and final arc which is basically just Nekodamashi + Kagurashi, where she just totally snaps and tries to just torture Rika into never wanting to leave the village again, and eventually Satoko gets exposed and they have their direct confrontation with each other.

With that sorta story structure, you’d keep all the relevant bits of Gou/Sotsu as it is now, while being more focused on Rika and Satoko instead of doing kinda half-assed reruns of the Rena and Shion arcs. It’d also push the big cliffhanger between them until near the end of the show, while still revealing to the audience relatively early on that Satoko’s the culprit.

I’d also like them to do more with Satoshi and Shion, so maybe like with how Teppei gets redeemed and Satoko almost gets to have a happy life with him in Tatariakashi, the central question arc of this hypothetical story could also involve Satoko making sure that Satoshi wakes up from his coma, and Shion also gets to have a good relationship with all of them. You could probably do something interesting with the idea of Satoshi and Shion being in the camp of not trusting Teppei and his whole redemption arc.

Honestly I could spend a long time talking about how I would have done things differently, lol. For one thing, I think the Akashi arcs would have been much better if they just changed it so that Satoko used psychological tactics to make people paranoid, and we completely cut out the whole syringe plot device. I get how it fits with Satoko’s whole certainty gimmick, but it made those arcs way too predictable. Even if we knew the outcome, it’d at least be entertaining to see exactly how Satoko might go out of her way to set up the different tragedies. We kinda got glimpses of that sorta plot point in Wataakashi when things seemed to go outside of her control, but they didn’t really do much with it.

Anyway, this is a whole lot of words to say that I think that in spite of the serious structural issues going on, I think Gou/Sotsu as a whole is fine, and was at least working with a lot of perfectly good ideas that could have been executed much better.

Also, on a side note, that one scene during their fist-fight at the start where the art-style changes a bit was kinda weird, but I really liked how it looked, and part of me almost wishes the whole show looked like that, lol. I like Akio Watanabe’s character designs, but I feel like that sort of stylized, almost TWEWY-ish art style would have been really fitting for this series, especially in the horror/action parts.

Oh, and the new rendition of You was so good it almost felt emotionally manipulative, lol.

#murasaki rambles #higurashi #higurashi sotsu #this got kinda long but I still feel like there's so much more I could say about this if I wanted to

[baconwaffle2016]

HigurashiGOU Theory: Satoko’s Motivations

[WARNING: BIG SPOILERS for Higurashi no naku koro ni GOU, ep 17]

EDIT, thanks to @thesleepyfreshman

==

Okay, so this is something people have probably already come up with BUT

I have a feeling something happened in the happy ending timeline, five years after everything happened and everyone more or less grew up or at least older. Something that made the Hinamizawa Syndrome act up in Satoko, who we know is especially sensitive to it, since she had to get regular shots to regulate the syndrome (if they even worked ofc) as a kid.

Keichi, Rena and Mion are likely in their 20s already and living their own lives, so they’re probably too busy to hang out with either Rika or Satoko.

Rika is on the verge of leaving Hinamizawa behind and getting her own life started, because, well--in her mind at this point, the village is a great source of trauma.

And where does that leave Satoko?

Satoko is **15 at this point, since Rika is trying to apply for St. Lucia’s Academy. She’s grown up physically, but hasn’t really gotten around to maturing mentally, and so she probably does what she can to hold onto her friends and family. She probably never really worked through the trauma from her past, and it might be really catching up with her. In the meantime, she has her friends to rely on--Rika, especially.

She can probably live through all her older friends moving on with their lives, even without her being there as much. But Rika? Satoko probably depends on Rika the most, and feels more emotionally connected to Rika more than anyone else.

am i projecting my old satorika feels? mayhaps, mayhaps

So when she learns Rika is planning to leave Hinamizawa, to leave her, something previously held at bay inside Satoko snaps.

And someone--Featherine? Lambdadelta? Someone else?-- takes notice, and they take full advantage of the situation and “helps” Satoko in her scheme to make sure Rika never leaves or forgets her. 

Even if she has to stab it into her.

#Satoko Hojo #Higurashi no naku koro ni GOU #Higurashi GOU #higurashi #when they cry #spoilers for ep 17 #ep 17 spoilers #spoilers #Rika Furude #tl;dr: Satoko is the True Yandere in Higurashi

[doublelsatan]

Coming close to ending Sotsu [pretty big read and some spoilers from games and recent episode]

So this week’s episode once again filled in missing pieces from Gou. The current arc Kagurashi-hen or God Entertaining chapter follows after Tatariakashi-hen/Curse Revealing and leads into Nekodamashi-hen/Cat-Deceiving parts.

Gonna say this now, some spoilers will be mentioned from the current episode and past games.If you wanna continue then by all means, go at your own risk.

There were two things that made this episode interesting, Hanyuu giving context to the Furude family and her past along with Eua saying a specific line. To start off, Hanyuu explaining the Furude family and her role playing into that is super important. It connects the games more to the storyline of what Gou/Sotsu is trying to tell. In Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kizuna/When the Cicadas Cry Bonds, we get an arc that focuses mainly on Hanyuu and the Furude family. The arc I’m talking about is Kotogushi-hen/Congratulating chapter. Long story short, Hanyuu loves a priest from the Furude clan, they get married, have a child, things go well up to a point where they don’t, Hanyuu goes evil, and her daughter has to kill her in order to stop her rampage. The weapon to stop her was the Onigari no ryuou/Demon-hunting willow cherry tree sword aka the looper ending sword. That was a lot of context but I feel like I need to say it so people understand that I have knowledge from the franchise. It’s interesting that this episode introduces back Hanyuu like this because it solidifies that this storyline arc might just be Higurashi based only. Too early to confirm it since the series hasn’t ended yet but it’s a good guess. And since we’re in the God-Entertaining arc right now, Hanyuu is going to square up with Eua which is going to be a dope battle.

But another thing that strikes me odd but in a good way about Hanyuu is that she destroyed different fragments to gain power from them. By doing that helped Rika be able to remember who killed her in order to move forward and find the looper later but I feel like its a bad thing. She basically took the good memory based fragments to restore herself back to a more stronger form. That itself is pretty telling which I’ll go into later. Just Hanyuu doing that is going to lean to her downfall later in the series.

Now, Eua on the other hand is for sure something super fascinating. So you guys remember in Tatariakashi-hen, we saw Satoko fight with herself and the evil version won? That witch evil baddie Satoko is now the one in control? I feel like that one episode and scene are important to piece Hanyuu and Eua together as two beings. It’s a guess though but it does make some sense. The reason for this is by Eua looking down on Hanyuu a lot and being more powerful than her too. Also, the last thing she said in the recent episode was “If it isn’t my darling failure.” That could mean two things, Hanyuu is the original good and Eua is the bad that was split from the looper sword or Eua is the God of Gods to their universe. So with the split theory, I saw that because Hanyuu’s daughter kills her since she went full rage demon mode. That could’ve split the two when it comes to Gou/Sotsu story since they hinted at the daughter using it but not actually killing Hanyuu. Which would be neat cause it would mirror the good and bad Satoko’s having their moment. But its a guess. Now as for Eua being the God of Gods could also work too. She’s powerful, arrogant, watches the events from the outside for entertainment value, and plays into the events for her own benefits. Well she doesn’t really “play the events for her own benefits” completely, she just moves the pieces accordingly to reach a certain ending. Reason I say it because her calling Hanyuu a failure is out of nowhere and odd. Like as if Eua has superiority over Hanyuu when it comes to ranks. But again, just a guess from dialogue and what we’ve seen in these past 12 episodes of Sotsu.

These are just my guesses and solutions from what was given from the series. The next episodes for sure are going to have somethings that’ll blow us away both in a good and bad way. Cause the Gods are gonna fight, the main friends are going to remember, and Rika is going to lose it same with Satoko. Like I always say it, every Thursday, I can’t wait and I’m excited.

#there are spoilers so this is a warning #higurashi sotsu #thoughts on episode 12 #hanyuu has entered the ring #eua could be evil hanyuu that was split maybe? #still hyped for how this series will end

[robbyrobinson]

Higurashi Gou Theory: Satoko is Lambdadelta’s New Piece (SPOILERS)

Since it was speculated that Lambdadelta was the one who influenced the core events of the Higurashi series, I kind of have the slightest idea that perhaps that she was the one who decided to pick up the gameboard once again likely to play against Bernkastel (or some other godlike witch). 

The idea is that Lamdadelta, the Witch of Certainty, wanted to grant a special wish and how she went through the sea of fragments until she came upon a girl who wished to be god and said that with certainty, that wish would come true. Said girl was speculated to be Miyo Takano and at that point, the 1983 world of Hinamizawa became apart of the gameboard. 

But if that is the case, why would Lambdadelta pick up the gameboard again since Rika and her friends won? I feel it has to do with her obsession with Bern. What I have been noticing frequently with Satoko is how, for two episodes now, she was bent on making Rika realize that she didn’t really want to leave Hinamizawa...even though Rika had suffered for hundreds of years because of her being made into a game piece. After all that, Rika more than earned a peaceful, long life free of pain and endless suffering. 

But...what if Satoko began to realize that by her going to St. Lucia that would imply that she would be around more people? Sure, there’s Hinamizawa, but it is a small village and more of a tightly knit place. But St. Lucia would introduce Rika to new people that Satoko would feel afraid that Rika would lose interest in her? A relatively understandable overreaction, but that is what it is: an overreaction. 

So, perhaps when Rika finally attended St. Lucia (and come on, she would not leave her BFF judging by a silhouette of what could be an older Satoko in the OP), Lambdadelta presided over the sea of fragments and was likely expressing an interest in resuming the game likely to satiate boredom, and she just so happened to hear Satoko’s wish. And in that instant, Takano was removed from the board -- thus her certainty was also stricken from the record -- and Lambdadelta focused all her efforts onto Satoko to make her wish - to be with Rika forever - into a reality? 

#higurashi no naku koro ni #higurashi gou #higurashi when they cry #higurashi when they cry gou #gou #satoko hojo #satoko houjo #hojo #houjo #takano #takano miyo #miyo takano #miyo

[sukinaru]

Another higurashi gou theory ( few spoilers of the original in there )

So with a new arc finished we are getting closer of not understanding anything until we do. Yeah. Thats higurashi for ya. But i do think they keep insisting on a few details ( like in the og story ) that could mean a few things, explanation ( also note that i am stating those facts and theories with only two arcs in my pocket, a lot will still happen in the question arcs, i promise ) :

- first, takano and tomitake always disappear but no corpses found. They seems pretty chill this time about not being part of the story, and actually if Ryukishi pulls the Takano card a second time i am going wild.

- Rika always dies. Yeah. No wonder.

- The girls seems to know something about some constructions workers and curse, and a greater evil that we dont know.

- Keiichi somehow survives ( on screen ) and dont get hinamizawa syndrome ( but we know its a rule to not rely on keiichi for narration purpose )

- Satoko always seems to die ? At least her corpse is found for zero reason ? At all ??

And thats the last point i wanted to talk a little. We know that she is a very versatile child that can snaps and invent things because yeah, she has a sickness that gives her persecution syndrome. Okay not really the point ( but beware of her when she seems out of way ). We see in Gou a high school Rika who seems to be thrown away a second time from her happily ever after by someone. Someone she knows. And i want to redirect your attention to this shot from the opening.

Okayy who that wonderful lady is ? Any idea ? A young Takano ? Or maybe an high school Satoko ? What is making me think the latter is the seemingly color palette we can already get out of the shot : a light ribbon with a darker shirt and light hair. Could be the blond / green / yellow of dear Satoko ( since Rika seems to keep her color palette with her high school uni ). At one color shot the ribbon seems to be yellow, but that entirely speculation on my part.

We also know there will surely be a Featherine sometimes somewhere in the story, and that Takano was Lambdadelta piece, and Rika / bern another piece on the board. And if this world is a new board game, an older Satoko could also be a piece that is here to pull Rika from the game, by killing her.

Episode 4 told us that they both died at the same place from the same weapon for no reason with no one out for their blood. Episode 8 had her putting immediately the suspicion on Keiichi, even though we had another view of the scene one episode ago. She seemed cold and chill on that, like how Rika is sometimes her Bern counterpart. She was also at Mion's house for no reason.

And another shot from the opening made me wonder about all that :

When she finally get all the way to the top and open the door ( the run scene is a reminder of her from Kai trying to escape her fate ) she is met with someone, and first she seems surprised to find them here, and second those hands are not friendly at all, almost seems like they are here to strangle her.

Anyway i could also expend on the scene where Satoko win and Rika gives her a " bad present " ( since Ryukishi likes his games hot and premonitory ) but well i dont really know it could just be here for the moe.

I am pretty sure this is a bad theory because i dont really have a reason for Satoko being a villain ( and also thats ridiculous as hell ) but those shots and scenes strike me as weird.

Dont hesitate to prove me wrong i would love to hear more theories about mystery girl from opening ( that is maybe not mysterious at all )

Take care !

#higurashi spoilers #higurashi gou #higurashi #satoko houjou #rika furude #spoilers #big spoilers #opening #theory #i should sleep sometime

[good7luck]

Hifumi’s letter in Higurashi Gou ep24

** contains the old original series major spoilers

I personally think Gou!Takano changing her mind quite makes sense. Even before reading Hifumi’s warm messages with sincere concern about her future, Takano already had the vivid memory of what could happen - such a miserable future. I feel it’s implied she had never considered anything seriously about her future further after the “great plan” for 100 years (until Tomitake “suddenly” disappeared against her plan in Matsuribayashi arc), as long as Hifumi’s work could get “acknowledged” at all costs, literally.

BUT now in Gou, Takano 1) “knows” the possible future by the flashback 2) knows Hifumi’s true wish for her by the secret personal letter. So, it’s understandable both factors together made her “certain/absolute” willpower gone/weakened, as she would’ve started to look at her surroundings more objectively, similar to Matsuribayashi but even better.

That said...

...apparently, there’s this theory that Hifumi’s letter in Gou is completely opposite to it in Minagoroshi arc DDD: Original!Hifumi wanted Takano to become a God / leave some great achievement (which I believe is one reason she was that desperate; she was really just following his words), while Gou!Hifumi wished her to simply live her own happy life, even out of his work. Hifumi died super long ago, much before Gou!Satoko’s loop point, so...Gou might be really some fundamentally “reversal” universe? :O

It might be that Hifumi wrote two different letters in two different moods idk XD

You can check Hifumi’s original letter at 47:36 from the video above!

#higurashi #when they cry #higurashi no naku koro ni #higurashi gou #higurashi 2020 #higurashi no naku koro ni gou #higurashi spoilers #when they cry spoilers #higurashi no naku koro ni spoilers #spoilers #good7luck

[tarhalindur]

Higurashi Gou final thoughts pt. 1

(Spoilers go under a cut:)

Taking this by arc:

Onidamashi-hen: The best executed first cour arc by a significant margin.  Probably not coincidentally, it stays the closest to the structure of the OG arc and thus keeps more of OG’s tension ratchet than the other Gou arcs.  I have two main issues, and I’m pretty sure both of them can be firmly pinned on the anime staff rather than Ryukishi07 himself.  First, it pulls its punch on the stealth sequel aspect.  I’m not entirely sure that going for a stealth sequel was the correct decision (it’s a cost/benefit tradeoff), but if you do you’re going for the wham of the sequel reveal, and the anime undercut this by putting the Rika/Hanyuu scene at the start of episode 2 rather than the end of the arc.  Second, it overdoes the final Rena fight, making it so over-the-top that it’s difficult to take seriously.  Neither of these issues exist in the manga (which has a believable amount of stabbing and has the Hanyuu scene at the end of the arc where it should be), and in the former case we also have a Ryukishi07 interview indicating that this was a change requested by the anime staff, so this goes on them.  (Interestingly, by way of contrast I think this approach might actually work well for the Mieruko-chan adaptation that Passione has coming out later this year.)

Watadamashi-hen: The core issue here (above and beyond fridge logic after Satokowaski-hen) is the finale, which landed like a wet fart.  It both escalates from zero to 100 *way* too fast and has the worst case of “tell don’t show” in the neo-question arcs - we learn about every single dead body in the arc from Ooishi’s end-of-arc narration.  That’s relatively defensible for three of those bodies, which we only learn about secondhand even in OG Watanagashi-hen (though IIRC in OG two of those bodies have foreshadowing from rumors earlier in the arc, and unless I’m forgetting something that’s absent here), but all five?  Yes, keeping Keiichi locked away from the final showdown removes fridge logic issues, but you have prominent security cameras - you can at least have him see the aftermath of the showdown on the screens (and freak out because of it).  Adding insult to injury, the Keiichi vs. door scenes are also so over-the-top as to damage willing suspension of disbelief.  The 0-to-100 issue is harder to fix, because the one thing Watadamashi did right was put the Rika-loses-it scene as an end-of-episode cliffhanger, and “Keiichi et. al. are about to enter the Saiguden” probably wanted an end-of-episode cliffhanger as well for discussion purposes (it might have been able to get away with using the commercial break).  The simplest fix is the same one @tsuisou-no-despair​ floated: cannibalize an episode off of another first cour arc.

Tataridamashi-hen: Amusingly, I think Gou has retained OG’s tradition of having the Tatari- question arc being the weakest question arc.  As I see it there are two interlocking core issues here which boil down to the same issue.  Tataridamashi-hen goes for a very unconventional method of building tension: it doesn’t, instead relying on the viewer’s realization that something bad has to be coming to do so for it (the old “that can’t be right, we’ve still got twenty minutes left in the episode” reaction I more commonly associate with things like police procedurals).  The problem is that this runs into the Endless Eight lesson: even flawless metatext should not be used at the expense of enjoyability of the actual text.  And while the arc got some leverage out of “when exactly is this going to diverge?”, there’s a point much like Endless Eight itself when you realize where it’s going to diverge (i.e, not until the end) and that until then you’re sitting through the same events you remember from OG.  It works about as well as it did for Haruhi.  (Unless you’re a new viewer, but in that case staying too close to Minagoroshi-hen has other issues.)  Worse, unlike Minagoroshi-hen itself (which did something similar to build tension but a) non-source readers hadn’t seen it before so it wasn’t foregone the same way and b) you had several more episodes after the subarc for the main event) the arc ends almost immediately after this.  (The simplest fix here might have been cutting down on the arc time by speedrunning Minagoroshi events, reducing the amount of time you’d have to wait.  You could even have a couple of obstacles collapse faster than expected; this late in the first cour it would serve as foreshadowing for Satokowashi-hen, and would also deal with unfortunate implications concerning the village’s prejudice considering that the staff knew Satoko was going to be the culprit.  Trimming an episode would also neatly solve the issue of where to get an additional episode for Watadamashi-hen from!)  The good news is that the final confrontation is the best of the first cour arcs (it’s somewhat more realistic than the other two, actually not that far behind some of the more memetastic OG moments except for Teppei’s eyes, and not showing Ooishi’s rampage is forgivable given that they knew they would be actually showing it in Nekodamashi-hen), but that’s damning with faint praise.

Nekodamashi-hen: The best Gou arc.  The episode 15 jump cut is the stuff of legends and the best scene in the show by a sizable margin (the one thing the director does well is black humor, it seems), while the rest of the arc isn’t as good, it’s far shorter on demerits than the rest of the show.  The one really, really obvious demerit is that they really didn’t need to spend half an episode on the intestines-ripping scene (if Ryukishi07′s comments are to be believed, once again we’re pinning this on Passione), but effects on my stomach aside there are worse issues to have.

Satokowashi-hen: And here we have the other side of the coin; this is the worst Gou arc, and it’s the one spot where I’m pretty sure Ryukishi07 himself gets some of the blame.  There’s a few issues here.  First, the single most obvious dangling plot thread from Matsuribayashi-hen (Satoshi’s fate) is effectively dropped despite being directly relevant to the other dangling thread that was picked up (how Rika treats Satoko and vice versa); this includes missing an opportunity to show Satoko’s character arc through different responses to learning about Satoshi’s condition.  Secondly and compounding, Shion is also dropped along with the Satoshi thread; AIUI this is kind of understandable given final Satoko/Shion interaction in the Matsuribayashi-hen VN (which IIRC never made it into the anime), but dropping her without explanation still leaves something that looks awfully like a plot hole since a single conversation with Shion is potentially enough to stop the events of this arc from ever happening.  (”Character X had information that would have stopped the tragedy but never had an opportunity to tell anyone” is a classic tragedy trope, but you should really have a *reason* for that character never having the opportunity as opposed to just having them vanish without explanation.)  Finally, there’s just the general issue that while the ending points for both Rika and Satoko are reasonable the path they take to get there just doesn’t quite add up.  I can kind of get there via a combination of “blame the director” (the loops montage could and should have easily shown Satoko’s deteriorating mental condition as she watched - using interlaced cuts to her face with changes in facial expression is a classic method) and mind caulk (Rika was exaggerating for effect when she described her desire to go to St. Lucia’s as a long-time thing and it only really kicked in after Matsuribayashi-hen, Satoko originally only planned to suicide in Matsuribayashi-2 and only took Rika out with her as a crime of passion after feeling betrayed, hence the next few loops lacking her murdering Rika) but being mind-caulkable is not the same as actual good execution.

I mean, I’ve banged on this drum before, but... the basic concept works.  Really well.  Satoko’s abandonment issues and Rika’s treatment of Satoko are two of the major dangling plot threads from OG Higurashi (*eyes both Minagoroshi-hen and anime-only Yakusamashi-hen*).  It makes perfectly good sense that the latter comes back to bite Rika, especially in a sequel literally titled “karma”.  I already suspected Satoko was on the autism spectrum based on OG, her being ADHD in addition to or instead of that makes perfectly good sense given those conditions often overlap.  Rika’s desire to escape the well morphing into a desire to escape Hinamizawa entirely?  Sure, just present it as that.  Satoko steadily losing her support network as her friends are torn away from her by changing life circumstances, then going to a boarding school that she hates, that strips the rest of her support structure for her and starts to take even her one remaining friend (her childhood friend, no less - and one that Satoko is at this point attracted to romantically in true osananajimi fashion) away from her, and then starting to snap with some prodding from a certain witch?  That’s a compelling story idea!  But as present it just doesn’t quite work, and that’s on the execution.

(Side note: I wonder if some of what went wrong with Gou was just the kind of production issues endemic to modern anime, amplified by the pandemic.  I remember at least one comment/blog post somewhere in the wake of WEP’s issues noting some of the effects that production issues can have on an anime, and one of the things they noted was excessive slavishness to the source material as a time-saving measure; that sounds awfully similar to some of Ryukishi07′s comments about how he didn’t expect Passione to take his script quite so literally, and to my admittedly untrained eye it sure looked like there were a bunch more other animation studios than usual mentioned in Gou’s credits...)

Final score: depends on your exact rating system, but given the range I’m looking at I can’t see how I can give it any score other than 3.4/5 for obvious reasons.  (Pending Sotsu, anyways.  It’s possible that Sotsu will resolve some of these issues - in particular, Ryukishi07 always has struck me as the kind of author who would get a kick into baiting us into falling for the same twist twice; it’s not impossible that the apparent lack of unreliable narrators so far is a double bluff, and that could affect the “question arc” scores in particular.  More on this in a forthcoming solution space post.)

[notsosuperkonoha]

Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni Gou Ep. 17 Thoughts (Spoilers!)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

WHY?? WHY? WHYYYY??? WHY IS SHE DOING IT?? HUH????

Okay. Okay. I have taken a second to get a grip on my emotions.

-So, first of all, before we get to the big issue, I would first like to say that I have been a firm believer in Looper Takano theory from the moment we realized that there was at least one other looper, and even with this episode’s big reveal, I still believe in that

-So, the way I see it, we’ve got three loopers. Obviously, we’ve seen Rika’s whole journey, and now we’ve got the big reveal with Satoko as well, which I’ll give my thoughts on in a moment, but I believe that the beginning of this episode pretty much all but confirms looper Takano as well. Between how weirdly she’s acted in the small bits we’ve seen of her in the previous parts of Gou, and how remorseful she feels in this episode, the conclusion I’ve reached is that she’s been through plenty a hardship herself through the various loops of Gou as well, and that perhaps she believes it to be some sort of divine punishment for the things she did/tried to do. Whatever she’s been through, it seems to have resulted in some new feelings for her.

-I believe some people may think that the memories she seems to have of past loops are like when Keiichi remembered Onikakushi-hen during Tsumihoroboshi-hen, but I disagree with this notion, mainly because she seems to be recalling the past and changing because of it every single loop. Keiichi only fully remembered during Tsumihoroboshi-hen, while Takano has clearly been remembering her past actions and acting differently in every timeline, judging by the lack of interference from her and, from what small bits we’ve seen, different actions such as taking the truck with Tomitake in Watadamashi

-The line that most strongly has me thinking she must be a looper is the “I don’t think you’d understand, even if I told you” line. If Takano is looping, but she believes that it is simply some form of punishment for her crimes, she wouldn’t consider the idea of Rika being in the same situation, and would thus not consider attempting to explain her situation to her, assuming nobody could understand

-Am I stating the obvious? Or is this something that is only occurring to me? I have no idea!

-Alright, carrying on past the stuff with Takano, literally nothing in anything has ever made me as afraid as I felt while nothing bad was happening in this episode. I was literally hyperventilating for at least half the episode because I was so sure that tragedy would happen at any moment. The dread, the suspense, it was fucking killing me! No anime has ever done that to me before.

-Oh and one more thought before the big reveal, is it just me or did Tomitake feel kinda off this episode? It might’ve just been because I was really on edge the whole time and was considering every possible person an enemy, but something just seemed weird to me whenever he was around.

-AND THEN THE BIG REVEAL. SATOKO IS FUCKED UP AND EVIL??? I really have no theories as to WHY. I just keep asking that question, I’m trying to come up with something, but I really just don’t get it. I’m legitimately completely lost as to why Satoko would be doing this. I mean, I’m pretty sure that someone (or something) else is manipulating her into all of this, but even that explanation still leaves me totally confused as to why the fuck she’d just. Pull out a gun in front of everyone

-I mean, if her reasoning was just that she didn’t want Rika to leave Hinamizawa again, and she just didn’t want to be abandoned...then why the fuck pull out a gun in the middle of a seemingly perfect timeline? I just feel like there’s definitely something more to it, but I have absolutely no clue as to what that could be. 

-Maybe someone/something isn’t just manipulating her, but controlling her directly sometimes?

-I do find it interesting that she dropped to the floor in fear in response to The Punch Box. It shows that for whatever reason she’s doing these things, it’s not because she’s completely heartless or whatever - there’s definitely some kind of fear going on within her.

Overall, that episode was fantastic, especially with how on edge it managed to keep me the whole time, again I reiterate that I was hyperventilating for at least half the episode, and that isn’t an exaggeration, @roseluck-sky watched the episode with me and she can testify to the fact that she had to help me breathe normally at one point in the middle again. Oh and also, one more thought, assuming looper Takano theory is true, perhaps we’ll be seeing a Takano + Rika teamup against Satoko (or whatever is controlling her) in the near future? One episode ago that would sound like total crack, but it feels possible after...all of that.

#Higurashi no naku koro ni gou #higurashi spoilers #higurashi gou spoilers #higurashi when they cry gou #higurashi

[itadaki-italy]

 Not sure if anyone will see this, but here’s some thoughts on Higurashi Gou so far...  (up to episode 8 right now; spoilers for the original anime & vn)

(Note that I’m watching the Japanese version and some of the videos don’t have subtitles so some of the quotes are essentially paraphrased translations.) When it was revealed that the new Higurashi anime wasn’t a remake but actually new content, I think a lot of people initially assumed it must be a sequel, especially because of the scene with Rika and Hanyuu, where Rika seems to be implying that this is taking place after Matsuribayashi and that the cycle has started all over again.  Hanyuu says that she’s only a “remainder” of herself and explains that they’re in the sea of fragments.  When Rika asks what the fragments are connected to, Hanyuu says that it’s connected to June of Shouwa 58, to which Rika gets upset and says ���You mean it’s happening again?  Was 100 years not enough?”  Then she says “I’m different from the Rika who could only roll the die of fate without knowing anything of the truth..  I know everything - the rules of Hinamizawa, and who might kill me.  So I’ll definitely take back the future that we won!” At first glance this definitely sounds like post-matsuribayashi..  but as the episodes have gone by, it’s become abundantly clear that Rika has no idea about Takano.  Or if she does, she seems intent to sit idly by and do nothing to stop her.  However, she does seem to know the “tricks” that we see in the answer arcs to “fix” the problems in the different arcs.  She convinces Keiichi not to doubt his friends, and she also convinces him to give the doll to Mion instead of Rena.  And yet, unlike in the original answer arcs, these new arcs show us alternate fragments where horrible things still happen, despite Rika plugging in the “answers.”  As everyone probably already knows, so far all of the arcs have been derived from the original arc names plus the word 騙し (damashi), which means “deception.”  From *Onikakushi* we have *Onidamashi*, from *Watanagashi* to *Watadamashi*, and in the next episode preview it’s revealed the third will be *Tataridamashi* - from *Tatarigoroshi*.  Demon deception, cotton deception, curse deception...  In addition to all this, it seems we have a new “rule” out of nowhere.  In addition to one death and one missing person, it seems that there’s a new rule of a pair of apparent double suicides, so far of which we know absolutely nothing about except that Satoko was involved with both. Getting back to the point about Rika, we seem to have a problem.  If this is after Matsuribayashi then why does Rika not seem to know about Takano or the fact that she is going to destroy Hinamizawa?  If it’s some kind of alternate retelling then why does she know *any* of the answers, and how come we see Keiichi recalling memories from previous lives? And after thinking about it, this is my theory: Higurashi Gou is not actually a sequel, but rather it takes place after Tsumihoroboshi.  This fits with everything we know so far, which I’ll go over.  First of all, recall that at that point in the story, Rika had been through an untold number of cycles, had seen the 4 original question arcs, and had also been through Meakashi.  In Tsumihoroboshi, Rena tried to burn down the school and kill everyone - and Rika and Keiichi managed to stop her and bring her back to her senses.  In Rika’s mind, she must have thought she won!  She’d stopped her friends from killing each other, so surely she must be safe right?  And she probably thought the cycle would end there.  That’s why she’s confused when she wakes up and sees Hanyuu.  What happened?  Didn’t we win?  How did I die again?  She must have been thinking those things.. and of course, Takano killed her and carried out her plan and that’s why she died again.  But Rika doesn’t know any of this.  Remember that in Minagoroshi where Rika finds out that Takano is behind everything, Takano was the *last* person she suspected.  In fact, she actually thought that Takano would be a great person to go to for protection.  So if this is taking place directly after Tsumihoroboshi, it would make sense that she wouldn’t suspect Takano at all.

Secondly the “100 years” thing.. remember that Ryukishi uses this phrase in a very metaphorical way.  It’s a phrase he uses to express an unbearably long amount of time spent enduring unspeakable horrors.  It’s the same phrase that Bernkastel uses in Umineko to describe the amount of time it took to turn her into a witch.  And Rika uses it in Higurashi to describe the unknown amount of time she spent in her “endless June.”  So because this number doesn’t actually represent a specific amount of time, this means that it tells us nothing about where we actually are in the timeline.

Next up I just want to mention that Tsumihoroboshi was the first arc where we see any character remember events from previous fragments - so if Keiichi is remembering the fact that he killed Rena and Mion in Onikakushi, it would make sense that this takes place after Tsumihoroboshi.

Finally I want to talk about Hanyuu for a bit.  I get the impression that people think that Hanyuu showing up again and only being a “remainder” of herself is an indication that this is after Matsuribayashi.  After all, we learned in Minagoroshi that her power was running out, and in Matsuribayashi she said that she wouldn’t be able to turn back time anymore.  (Well, she said this in Minagoroshi too but she managed one final reset.)  Presumably the final reset, not to mention stopping time in order to save Rika from being shot by Takano, used up the remainder of her god powers.  This is just my personal interpretation, but I thought that the ending of Matsuribayashi kind of implied that Hanyuu had used up the last of her powers by the end and was “only human” at that point.  That’s why she was able to stay and live out the remainder of her now-mortal life with Rika and her friends.

Another thing to remember is that Hanyuu never appeared in the original arcs (at least not directly) until Minagoroshi.  So Hanyuu not being around is consistent with Tsumihoroboshi timing.  I think that her appearance here in Gou is the first time in a long time that she’s spent her power on appearing before Rika to communicate with her.  The fact that she hasn’t shown up again is probably because she’s trying to conserve her energy, which she’s probably running out of if we’re building up to Minagoroshi, since that’s the point where she believes she only has one reset left.  (But of course she ends up having two). So basically my theory is that this is like a set of alternate arcs that take place between Tsumihoroboshi and Minagoroshi, and the anime is actually building up to a Minagoroshi + Matsuribayashi remake finale because Ryukishi07 loves trolling us.  Either that or it could be an alternative or new ending, I don’t think that’s out of the realm of possibility either.  But I’m kinda hoping it’ll be Matsuribayashi ‘cause I love that ending and from what I’ve heard of the console arc endings I’m not sure I’d really be satisfied with anything else. Also I gotta say, was really sad to see Mion actually kill people in this last arc.  They’re making my fav look bad.  :(

#higurashi #higurashi no naku koro ni #higurashi gou #text post #long read

[akajulester]

thoughts on Higurashi Sotsu episode today (spoilers)

wtf was this episode???

this was probably the most unsatisfying ending to a story I’ve ever watched

This cannot be the final fucking episode, it’s only episode 15! I can’t believe how much they rushed the ending!

WHAT WAS THE POINT OF “WITCH SATOKO” KILLING OFF SATOKO’S CONSCIENCE/GOOD SIDE IF SHE JUST FUCKING GIVES UP AT THE END????? It seems like Witch Satoko gave back her body to the real/good Satoko, which seems pretty fucking absurd when you remember she fucking destroyed that part of Satoko like 5 episodes ago.

Gou and Sotsu both had huge implications that this sequel to Higurashi was serving as a sort of prequel/backstory for Bernkastel and Lambdadelta in Umineko. From what I understand, Bernkastel beat Lambdadelta at a game, which is implied to be Satoko forcing Rika back into the loops. But how in the hell could you say Rika/Bernkastel won this “game” when Satoko/Lambdadelta just fucking gave up at the end?

While I’m glad Rika and Satoko didn’t really make up and become friends again (how could they have???), I’m baffled as to how the show basically overlooked the fact that Satoko forced Rika back into torture despite witnessing what the 100 years did to Rika, and LITERALLY MURDERED her in extremely gruesome ways. Rika should’ve been horrified and furious with Satoko, and extremely rightfully so! And not only did Satoko do that, she also willingly ABUSED and GASLIGHTED Rika with absolutely no regret or guilt.

The crux of their argument being “I want you to come to school with me!” vs “I don’t want to study!” was the fucking dumbest shit ever. It’s extremely hard to take a fight (that, again, caused one girl to send another girl who’s closer than family into fucking torture and murder) seriously when THIS is what they’re fighting over. Give me a fucking break. Could it not have had more depth, like “I don’t want to be alone” vs “I don’t want to leave the safety of our small town”?

This season’s opening had such an ominous shot of Mion, Shion, Rena, and Keiichi as young adults, but they played absolutely no part in the climax and resolution of Rika and Satoko’s fight? What was the point of that shot???

The “““climactic””” fight between Hanyuu and Eua was soooooo stupid and bizarre. Why did Eua turn into a child after getting her horn chipped? Why was she beaten so easily?

This episode felt like the writers were just ticking off boxes of what needed to be done for a happy ending. “Have Rika and Satoko reconcile somewhat”, “show Teppei is now a good uncle”, “have Satoshi wake up for no reason with not even a hint of Shion or Satoko finding out”, “have Satoko become more morally good.”

#higurashi #higurashi sotsu #higurashi no naku koro ni #sotsu #anime #Julie being a weeb #rant #anger #wtf #I'm so mad rn #umineko #umineko no naku koro ni

[thewhitefluffyhat]

Bernkastel’s Umineko Origins

What is this guide?

<< Previous (Bernkastel)

(Profile continued) “In theory, she holds the strongest power of any witch, but in practice, that is no more realistic than saying a piece of paper can reach the moon if you fold it a hundred times. And fold it a hundred times she did.”

Since “Gou is a Bernkastel origin story” is quite a widespread theory, I figured it might be useful to compile every single piece of information Umineko gives about Bernkastel’s past in one place.

This is meant as more of a comprehensive reference post, so if you’re not interested in that theory, feel free to skip this section! 

Next (Lambdadelta) >>

[Also, spoiler warning for part of one character’s plotline from Umineko Episode 4/Alliance in here.]

From Umineko Episode 2/Turn:

Bern was probably once (a) Rika. Hard to get more definitive than using Rika’s catch phrase in the ??? Tea Party.

Bernkastel: “...Umm, in times like this, what did I used to say again? ……...Umm, uh, ……...Fi-Fight o~n. Mii, nipah~☆ ...It's so embarrassing, doing this. I've done this much for you, so quickly stand back up.”

Bern is a witch born from being trapped in a game against Lambda.

Bernkastel: “You are now just like I was in the past, when I was imprisoned inside Lambda's world. Shut inside a labyrinth of cruel fate, tormented by a witch, in a manner of speaking. I am a witch who was born from there. So maybe I'm like an older sister to you. So I decided that I'd lend you my power.”

The last time Bern and Lambda played against each other, Bern won by using pieces that started in their most powerful state.

Lambdadelta: “…...W-well, last time, I felt just a little pity and said that she could start her pieces anywhere she wants, and then that idiot Bern totally didn’t pick up on compassion and started with aaall of her pawns promoted on the eighth rank!!”

(Source: https://lparchive.org/Umineko-no-Naku-Koro-ni/Update%2062/)

From Umineko Episode 4/Alliance:

According to Lambda, Bern has experienced being denied a happy ending herself due to being a witch’s piece, rather than the one who actually experienced the ending she found.

Lambdadelta: “You aren't Ushiromiya Ange. You're a witch's piece with that name. Strictly speaking, the name ANGE Beatrice belongs to a completely different person. Know what that means?"

Ange: “I’m... starting to think I don’t…… ...Huh? Huh? Who... am I? Huh?”

Lambdadelta: “...And thaaat's why I think Bern's cruel. No, I think she's a meanie. Especially since it's not like she hasn't gone through the same thing herself."

Ange: "...Am I... being tricked... somehow...?"

Lambdadelta: "Yeah, but please don't blame Bern, okay? After all, depending on how you look at it, that kid isn't lying. If Beato is defeated, your family will be returned. Returned to Ushiromiya Ange. But she probably didn't say that this Ushiromiya Ange would be you, right...?"

(Source: https://lparchive.org/Umineko-no-Naku-Koro-ni/Update%20116/)

From Umineko Episode 6/Dawn:

Bern was once a human piece, but after being abandoned by an unnamed Game Master (implied in the manga to be Hanyuu), she became a witch by solving a logic error in place of that Game Master.

Erika: "...My master was also... a witch's piece?"

Lambdadelta: "Yes. That kid's master... was another bad one. Though she created the game herself, partway through, she lost sight of what her goal was. She ended up creating something like a broken game of backgammon, where the start and goal were connected like a donut."

Erika: "What do you mean, she lost her goal...?"

Lambdadelta: “I'm talking about a logic error. In her backgammon game, she was unable to draw up a line of logic describing how to reach the goal she desired. So, the game remained broken, with no goal at all."

“...In that case, she should have quieted down and thought of an answer herself. Instead, she despicably left even the thinking entirely to her piece, Bern.”

[insert long metaphor involving cats, monkeys, and typewriters]

Lambdadelta: “If she wasn't a witch... no, if she hadn't been able to become a witch, she would probably still be a black cat strapped to that typewriter for eternity. That child was blessed by a miracle, succeeded in typing out a 'miracle', became a witch, and returned from that hell alive.”

“That hell was so long and harsh... that her mind was completely broken. That's why she became such a mean and heartless witch.”

(Source: https://lparchive.org/Umineko-no-Naku-Koro-ni-Chiru/Update%2065/)

At some point prior to Umineko, Bern was Featherine’s longest-serving miko, trained by her to tear out the “guts” of stories.

Featherine: "...A cat who has learned to eat meat and choose its own path. It has been a long time..."

Bernkastel: "It's a path I'd never have to have noticed if you hadn't told me. You're the monster who taught me the taste of flesh. So, you've come back to life. Featherine Auaurora..."

Featherine: "...Augustus Aurora... You never learn no matter how often I tell you that…”

“...Very well. Even that brings back fond memories... I have heard the rumors... It seems you have taken the name Bernkastel, Witch of Miracles, and have been playing a far from praiseworthy Fragment game..."

Bernkastel: "I'm just imitating you. Though I could hardly match up to your level. If the rumors you've heard about me are bad, that applies a hundredfold to you."

Bernkastel sat unreservedly in an antique chair, as though she was already familiar with the place.

Featherine: "...What are you afraid of? I am merely celebrating my reunion with my longest-serving miko so far... Did you really find my messenger cat so displeasing?"

(Source: https://lparchive.org/Umineko-no-Naku-Koro-ni-Chiru/Update%2075/)

From Umineko Episode 8/Twilight:

An alternate explanation for Bern’s origins: she was Featherine’s pet cat who revived her master.

“Featherine Augustus Aurora. …...The legendary Great Witch. It is said that she surpassed the level of witches, becoming a Creator, and that, upon reaching this forbidden plane, she was cursed with a deadly ailment. However, in life, she once turned her pet cat into a witch. They say that this second witch wanders the sea of Fragments endlessly, searching for any Fragment that can revive her master from the pits of death called boredom, if even for a moment. And so, the cat revived her master. Revived the sacred witch who had reached heights none should reach…”

(Source: https://lparchive.org/Umineko-no-Naku-Koro-ni-Chiru/Update%20156/)

There’s also this little tidbit from Last Note of the Golden Witch, where Bern outright says she was once in “Higurashi.” That being said, in context she’s referring to the “All Cast Review Sessions” from the Higurashi VN, so… unless you also consider those to be canon, I wouldn’t advise thinking too hard about this. (See the section on Lambdadelta for another good example of this kind of reference.)

(Source: https://youtu.be/ZoIEID02sxI?t=7890)

.

...And that’s it. So, the question is, what was the game that Bern was trapped in?

It’s possible (and before Gou, not uncommon) to interpret all of these scattered bits of information as references to the original Higurashi. In that configuration, perhaps Higurashi was a game where Featherine/Hanyuu was a Game Master playing against Lambda, with Lambda using Takano as her piece. Rika/Bern won that game in Hanyuu’s place by manifesting a miracle, defeating Lambda and ascending as a witch after Saikoroshi (which then denied her Rika’s happy ending).

But now with Gou in the mix, it looks like the fandom’s long-held assumptions may be due for some reexamination...

Next (Lambdadelta) >>

#when they cry #higurashi #higurashi gou #umineko #bernkastel #furude rika #my ramblings #higurashi guide to witches #your fun fact of this bern post is: #in all of umineko #I couldn't find anything that suggests #bern *wouldn't* chase a laser pointer...

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Gou Ep22

All of this ‘the culprit’s motives are super shallow and they’re just unhealthily obsessive’ discourse is giving me war flashbacks to . . . . basically every other part of the entire When They Cry franchise, lol.

Thoughts under the cut. [Plus spoilers for Umineko]

I feel like at the end of the day we’re all just gonna have to agree to disagree about how we feel about how Ryukishi is handling Satoko as the culprit here, since I don’t really think any amount of social media posts detailing our interpretations of her character are gonna change anyone’s minds, lol. But I’m still gonna give my thoughts on her anyway because it’s fun, even if I’m basically just preaching to the choir.

To be honest, this feels pretty much in line with how Ryukishi already wrote characters like Takano and Beatrice, in terms of them having unhealthy obsessions that lead them to mass-murder. The amount of violence Satoko has caused is arguably worse than either of them, but they’re all pretty awful if you think about the reality of what they all did as villains.

Sorta like with how a lot of the old-school Umineko discourse went, I think people are too focused on the whole idea of Satoko hating studying, and ignoring everything else about her character and her circumstances. Although even then I feel like people are being kinda unfair toward Satoko about how strongly she feels about academics, but maybe I’m just biased because of my own history with schooling and the intense levels of anxiety and self-hatred that can go along with it.

Plus the fact that Satoko already has a long history of sever abandonment issues, and has basically always had HS that amplified her feelings of paranoia and persecution. It’s pretty obvious at this point that she never really got ‘cured’ in the first place, though it’s less important to think about HS as an in-universe fictional disease with it’s own rules, and more important to just think about it as a representation of real-life mental illnesses which aren’t bound by the rules of made-up brain-worm parasites and aliens or whatever.

Also, the Satoko that started all this looping in the first place was one who never dealt with Teppei returning to the village, and thus never went through her whole character arc related to that. The series is kinda ambiguous about how it handles the idea of people’s character development carrying over between loops, but it explains a lot about Satoko’s attitude here if you go with the idea that she never really had to overcome any of her trauma or coping mechanisms in the “good ending timeline”, and this is the consequence of that taken to it’s logical extreme. The idea of her view of the world being skewed by the fact that she only remembers the “good ending timeline” is also kinda lamp-shaded by the part where she hears about Rika’s looping and is like “oh yeah, that’s the month where we had that cool action movie stand-off with the Mountain Dogs :)”. By the time she really got to understand exactly what was going on beyond the specific timeline she had experienced, she was already way over the edge.

I get why people don’t like the idea of Gou ‘tainting’ the VN’s happy ending, but I honestly like the idea that it’s examining the consequences of how Matsuribayashi was such an overly-specific timeline where basically nothing bad happened and everyone just banded together to beat Takano. It kinda glossed over a lot of the personal problems that the main cast had in the rest of the series, and this really goes to show the effects of some of that stuff not getting properly addressed. It also reminds me that Minagoroshi is a timeline that even in the VN, Rika completely lost her memories of, so I can see how even post-Matsuribayashi she might have never let Satoko know about the details of that one timeline where she overcome her abuse.

I also feel like it only really got to this point because of Featherine’s meddling. In the original Matsuribayashi timeline, Satoko just started drifting away from Rika and ended up wandering into the Saiguden and meeting Featherine before anything actually serious happened in that timeline. I think that if she had just been left to her own devices and that timeline had just kept going, Satoko probably would have either found a way to reconnect with Rika, or they would have just slowly drifted apart for good. But then Satoko got given the power to time travel, and only started going off the deep end after going through another five years of identical suffering.

And on that whole note, it reminds me of how in Umineko, Lambda had a whole conversation about the idea of an abused person becoming an abuser themself if they’re given the power to lash out. Which is basically what’s happening here. Satoko is being given the tools to completely detach herself from reality and try as many times as she likes to get what she wants.

Which also reminds me that this episode in particular REALLY lays the Umineko parallels on thick, lol. Particularly the whole ‘Satoko is turning into Lambda’ thing, which feels just about 100% confirmed now. They straight up have Featherine bring up the exact same ‘monkeys using a typewriter’ analogy to explain Rika’s situation that Lambda uses in Umineko to explain Bern’s situation.

I know a lot of people don’t like the increasingly blatant Umineko tie-ins, and that a lot of people still think it might just be misdirection, but considering how much stuff in Gou has been surprisingly straightforward and predictable, I think it’s pretty much exactly what it seems to be.

Though to be more specific, this is probably more about the start of Lambda and Bern’s relationship, and their appearances in Umineko, rather than the very first origins of them as individuals, if that makes sense. Obviously the concept of Bernkastel as an identity has been around since Higurashi itself, and we’ve known for a long time that Lambda was the one who originally gave Takano her blessing of certainty, but we’ve never known the full details of how those two started their relationship, and Featherine’s whole series of name-drops in the last episode makes it seem like Lambda as a meta individual more or less already exists, with Satoko being an iteration of her. So I think they both technically already exist, but this is how the two of them come into contact and start their whole unhealthily obsessive relationship.

I guess it’s still possible that, even if she’s already existed for a long time as a meta individual, she hasn’t actually come up with the name ‘Lambdadelta’ for herself yet, and this might be where she does so. Even with the list of names Featherine referenced, she didn’t technically bring up Lambda’s name directly. So in that sense this might be ‘Lambda’s’ origin story, even if she already exists.

Considering how basically the entire story at this point seems to be acting in service of setting up the whole LambdaBern relationship dynamic no matter what, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that this will end with Satoko and Rika fully embracing their codependency and mutually ascending to the meta plane so they can stay together once and for all. There might still be human versions of them that stay behind in the real world and continue living normal lives, though.

At the very least, it feels like that’s the logical outcome of the whole Chekov’s Sword Fragment plot device that’s been hanging in the background for ages now. I think it’ll just be the in-universe explanation they use to show the mechanics of how exactly that process works. It’ll probably be used to ‘sever’ Satoko and Rika’s meta consciousnesses from their physical bodies and allow them to basically become witches.

Mainly I just can’t really see this having a ‘happy ending’ at this point, aside from the whole idea that maybe the severing process leaves behind ‘normal’ versions of the two of them who stay in Hinamizawa and go back to their normal lives. I dunno if that’d make people happy, but it’d at least be a way for Ryukishi to have his cake and eat it too, lol.

I just don’t think that there’s any real chance of this ending with them just talking to each other and agreeing to put an end to all this, though. For one thing that’d just feel kinda anticlimactic and honestly make Gou’s story feel even MORE pointless, if it just ends with literally the exact same ending as the VN with nothing really being changed. But I also feel like Featherine wouldn’t be willing to just let Satoko ‘give up’ without having one of them definitively win their current game. In general I just feel like Ryukishi should just commit to the story he’s setting up at this point, instead of just backing out at the last minute and circling everything back to the same ending we already had like nothing in Gou ever happened. If we’re gonna have this whole new story to begin with, it should at least have some lasting consequences.

Anyway, I think in the next episode we’re finally going to loop back to the Damashi arcs and see how they played out. At this point I don’t care too much about getting answers to the ground-level mysteries of those arcs, and I doubt the story will spend much time on that, but I’m curious to see how it progresses Satoko’s whole development through these loops, since I think she goes through some changes with her motives and methods over the course of them.

Specifically I think that the actual experience of being physically present in her own set of loops and causing so much pain and suffering started to get to her, and she might have almost given up in her own way during Tataridamashi and wanted to just stay in that arc, but things went south anyway. Maybe, if that’s what happened, Featherine basically let her know that she won’t let her give up, and will force her to keep looping until one of them ‘wins’ no matter what. Either way, I think that arc was a turning point for her. Like how she asked Featherine to arrange things so that Satoko can make sure that she and Rika’s loops are synced up, she probably asked Featherine after that arc to change the rules again so that Rika will start remembering the details of her deaths. At this point it’s pretty obvious that the Hanyuu fragment Rika was talking to earlier in Gou was more or less just Featherine putting on an act and manipulating her, so the scene of Hanyuu giving her the power to remember her deaths was probably just Featherine telling her about the rule change.

And going by how the Nekodamashi arc went immediately afterward, I think that rule change was related to Satoko becoming increasingly desperate to put an end to the loops as soon as possible. And considering how she was willing to spend so much time reviewing Rika’s hundred years of looping just to prepare for this, it’d make sense to me if she becomes desperate because she basically gives up, but realizes that she isn’t actually allowed to give up, so she has to try and make Rika give in as fast as possible. Either way it’s pretty obvious that Satoko’s methods start becoming more violent in that arc, and she basically tries to brute-force Rika into submission, leading up to the loop where she just spawn-camps her and straight up starts screaming at her to just stay in the village while tearing out her guts. It’s still possible that her attitude in that loop was just one big act, but I think that was the result of her being genuinely desperate to just have Rika give up once and for all, and her starting to crack under the pressure of doing all of these things with her own hands across so many loops. 

So now we’ll just have to see how the confrontation between them at the end of Nekodamashi plays out once we get back to it. In the long run I just think it’ll lead to the ending I talked about before, with them using the sword on each other. The exact nuances of how that sorta ending might play out are up in the air, though.

Either way, I think there’s probably enough time to wrap up all that in two more episodes, but there’s still reason to believe that there might be some kind of sequel in the works. I don’t really want to bet on it, though, so I’m just gonna assume that there’s two episodes left and base my theories on that. In which case I think the next episode will go over the Damashi arcs and end with Rika and Satoko’s confrontation at the end of Nekodamashi, and then the final episode will wrap everything up. Considering that they both more or less know exactly what’s going on with each other by that point, there isn’t really that much that needs to be wrapped up. I think that will be the final loop we get, so it’ll all just come down to how their confrontation plays out, and what decision they come to about how to handle each other.

I honestly don’t really know how I think a full sequel would go, if it’s at least one cour long. Assuming that it’s not just a new Umineko anime that more or less continues Rika and Satoko’s arc via Lambda and Bern, but is a straight up ‘Higurashi Gou Season 2′. It just feels like there isn’t really that much that needs to be done to wrap things up, now that everything’s being laid out in the open, and Rika and Satoko are both aware of each other’s looping. They might switch it up so that they both end up teaming up to take down Featherine, but I kinda doubt that’ll happen.

I’m still hoping this is leading into some kind of new Umineko anime though, lol. That feels like it’d be the main reason for putting so much effort into this whole elaborate LambdaBern origin story we’re getting here.

I’ve heard rumors that there’s been listings for a 25th episode of Gou, so it’s possible that rather than another full season, there’s just one extra episode at the end. I’m not exactly sure what the point of doing one extra unannounced episode at the end would be, though. It might end up being a bridge between Gou and a new Umineko anime.

At the very least, if it’s just ‘Satokowashi Part 8′, it makes me wonder why they haven’t announced it yet, and why they didn’t just split that arc into two BD volumes with four episodes each, instead of having it be one big volume with seven episodes, and one random episode at the end for some reason. But if it’s more of an epilogue or a bridge of sorts between Gou and something else, with Gou’s story concluding with episode 24, then I guess it’d make some sense to do it that way.

We also know there’s gonna be a panel for Gou at a convention around when ep24 comes out, so if anything gets announced it’ll probably happen there.

Anyway, this whole episode can be summed up as “Satoko does a gay little psychological torture that pisses Rika off”, in the most morbidly entertaining way possible, lmao.

#murasaki reblogs #higurashi #higurashi gou

[earthenterran]

(higurashi gou, post ep 18)

I think this show could’ve been a sequel and newcomer friendly in a way but from these last handful of episodes it wasn’t done well. 

there needed to be a decent summary to explain the important points from the og plot. if this is a sequel that has to let newcomers in as well you need to give them basic info. not *everything* but enough they can follow without wondering parts of the og plot instead of current plot

(og plot spoilers and gou up to ep 18 mentioned)

the thing with Takano is... there could’ve been a couple lines explaining the last cycle was focused on Takano’s will, that lead to the same end no matter the other events that took place. 

BUT because gou doesn’t wanna linger on that stuff early on we get some scenes but more questions. Why is Hanyuu there? Where did she go after? What lead her to being there? Why was Takano part of this? How did the group stop them? Why did Takano’s bullet miss? What were her documents about? Etc.

There’s also the issue that Hinamizawa Syndrome isn’t quite explained properly, which I feel is important for the current cycle and newcomers. To see that something is abnormal even when taking HS into account. It’s triggering people who wouldn’t be expected (Akasaka, Ooishi). But it doesn’t quite fall in line with how it worked before, and that’s.... that’s not an ‘easter egg’.

There’s definitely a pattern of people targeting Rika specifically (at least further in), but no one has mentioned the details that would make that newcomers understand a bit better (being a Queen from the Furude line, being *immune* to the HS, etc)

At the moment the theme of this cycle is about staying in Hinamizawa. And Satoko is now roped into pushing that message. A new Oyashiro-sama has told her to be the new priestess and to punish those (read: Rika) for committing the sin of wanting to leave. And because this is assumed to be the same Satoko that lived those five years between cycles, for *actually* leaving.

There’s change after the first cycle is broken. Ep 18 feels more like the 1st part of 2-parter episode to explain the contents that leads to Satoko getting involved, with 18 being the reveal of Rika planning to leave and asking Satoko to leave with her. Ep 19 will probably cover why Satoko *can’t* leave with her or why leaving seems to spiral down a ‘bad’ path. 

This is especially highlighted with Mion gone with a new club, not having time for her old friends plus the shift that Keiichi’s done with the clubs rules. 

The only thing I could think of that hasn’t been mentioned about OG is the Hinamizawa disaster, which is a good call because it doesn’t seem relevant and so doesn’t have bearings to newcomers of the series  (unless it does in the next episodes but we’re not there yet).

I had glanced at the manga for Gou in the beginning, and I know there’s more content there so there’s more information, and I’m wondering if the way the gou manga is going if it explains better the content we’ve gotten in the anime.

#terran talks #higurashi #higurashi gou #higurash gou spoilers #higurashi meta #meta #alternatively if gou had been done as a VN arc first #it probably would have a more welcoming pacing for those to give the proper information about what newcomers dont know but og watchers do #max dont look #my meta