#(satoko doesnt know the extent of it)

[qualityrain]

shes my collar (i’m the one that put it there)

[anawkwardlady]

(Warning, sleepy rant incoming, proceed at your own risk)

Is it just me me or does wtc just have an allergy to dismantling structural evil. It goes "wow it sucks" but like a lot of stories it never gives a conclusion. Higurashi with how shion is presented as selfish for not "taking responsibility" instead of admitting the family is evil and that their structures of power need to be torn down, instead blaming everything on a secret operation by takano. Like, can't we just accept that the town is a bit fucked up instead of it being some outsider's fault? And accepting the town is fucked doesnt mean ignoring how the goverment fucked over the town, u know?

Without love it cannot be see? Well you can love something and know that it needs to be put down

Umineko to a lesser extent, by sheer virtue of the Ushiromias being blown asunder- but I am still salty about the lion timeline. Like yes we are shown the servants suffering and told to sympathise but there is no conclusion for the servants- only the family, which I guess makes since since the story focuses on the family but it still bothers me. I don't like how the relatives of the kumasawa are portrayed, it reminded me of this one sherlock story we had to read for lit where sherlock says that the poor are gossips and good only for the information they may give. Its more complicated than that but you get the point, they are not afforded the same dignity.

Ciconia is still up in the air cause maybe the narrator is unreliable, or maybe ryukishi is being a centrist, I don't know.

That doesn't mean I dislike wtc... okay I dislike higurashi but that's mostly for other reasons and I still adore rena- but I love umineko and I'm fascinated by it structurally- but I feel like I have to say this to someone or I'll explode

It's not like this problem is unique to wtc, the "return to norm" is the ending to heroes journey in writing, a structural tool that is very widespread and is very easily utilised for centrist storywriting, and I'd go as far as saying the heroes journey is inheritly centrist but I'm too sleep deprived and under qualified to make that argument

(For clarification I'm not saying wtc uses the heroes journey as a basis I'm just saying stories with a centrist basis are common because stories that use the heroes journey are common)

None of this is even probably intentional, but isn't that worse? That centrist thinking is this deeply embedded into the worlds cultural subconscious?

Sorry for the incomprehensible rant, I need to sleep

Okay,

So I don't agree that everything is blamed on Takano. The way the town treated Satoko was very much on them and I believe we were shown how everyone was ridiculous and stuck up on a "We can't be normal to this family because the village is against them therefore I should be against them" mentality and Oryo stubbornness on this. Takano's actions were what they were but she didn't make the locals bully a little girl. I believe we were also shown this during the violent argument Keiichi had with Mion and Rena when they were asking each other what to do with Satoko. Keiichi started blaming Mion for not taking her in, then Rena showed his hypocrisy because he is also pretty well off... and you know whats sad about that : they're all kids fighting about how to save an abused little girl because they're almost all neglected to some point and they can't reach out. Can't really see a better proof that their respective families and the village itself are dysfunctional beside how Takano's plan interacted with it.

And yeah for Umineko the servants were pretty neglected at the end, as you said its because it mostly focuses on the family itself but I get this criticism. I can't say anything about Ciconia, haven't read it. But I also don't think its inherently a return to normal, a lot of them seem to find piece but i'd argue they not unharmed. I think a lot of it is trying to say you have been hurt and still find some kind of balance, which, considering Ryukishi's background I get why he would rather go that route even if it can completely be criticized (I sometimes have some point i'm a bit "meh" about when handling abuse and forgiveness but whatever). I'm not a literary professional tho lol, what do I know about all of that.