#i kinda rewrote a part of a fragment from last night in my notes because there's something about this interaction that keeps buzzing around

[nevalizona]

A fragment from an au I will not be giving context for LOL. Probably won't share too much from it either, but oh well!

Pardon any errors, please!

"Humane?" The blond officer scoughed, shooting a look at Dr.Flores.

"Yes, humane. Is there something you don't understand...?" Dr.Flores asked, eyebrows pinching together under her protective gear. The blond and brunette officers cannot see her under all her layers and safety goggles, and for a moment, she's glad.

"I just think it's a little funny that this is where you choose to be 'humane'." The blond officer retorted, earning a look from the brunette. Dr.Flores wished she could remember their names.

"I have to interject here, officer. Dr.Flores is one of the most compassionate scientists I have ever had the privilege to train. She has worked tooth and nail to make this concoction work." Dr.Weber poked at the clipboard he was holding, his voice stern and protective. The blond officer opened his mouth to say something, but the brunette officer interrupted him.

"Look, I'm sure she is. You have to understand where we're coming from. After seeing what we saw, I imagine you can figure out why it's hard for us to believe either one of you would care about doing anything 'humanely.'" The brunette officer explained, gesturing towards the scientists.

"You have to understand officers, we didn't choose th-"

"I would imagine, officers, that you two should be well acquainted with not doing things the 'humane' way... What makes this different to you, hm?" Dr.Weber interrupted, sounding clearly agitated.

The brunette officer noticeably clenched his jaw. This was not the way a first meeting should be going.

"What Dr.Weber means is, in your area of work, you have to do and see things that aren't... good... for the bigger picture. You're doing the right thing, in the... wrong way... we're no different. We don't mean any offense. We're just trying to help make the world a better place. You gentlemen are too, no? We're both going about that in 'unique' ways, are we not? I mean, you two were picked to overlook this experiment for a reason, right?" She explained, trying to deesculate the situation.

The brunette officer nodded his head slowly, still glaring at Dr.Weber.

"You said you were going to show us one of your observation rooms. Maybe you should take us there now." The blond said, inserting himself back into the conversation.

"Ah, yes. I'll take you two to the changing rooms. You'll need to gear up. We'll give you some underclothes to wear as well. Come along." Dr.Weber said, gesturing for the two officers to follow.

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Gou Ep7

At first I was just gonna wait until the current arc ended to do another post, but this episode ended up being more interesting than I expected, so now I wanna write about it before we see exactly how this arc ends, lol.

Thoughts under the cut.

Technically the plot of Watadamashi still hasn’t diverged significantly from how Watanagashi went, and it could still end in basically the same way, but this episode still had a whole lot of changes and additions, which are raising a whole lot of new questions I wasn’t really expecting.

For one thing, the Saiguden scene played out pretty similarly to the VN, but with some notable changes. I thought that maybe they’d have Takano bring up her theory about the virus, but her whole explanation of village’s history was pretty much 1:1 with the VN, as far as I remember. But a lot of what was going on in the scene aside from that played out differently, like how Shion accidentally knocked the Oyashiro-sama statue’s head off, revealing that it was apparently already broken in half. We also got a peek at the hidden slot inside the statue, which from what I’ve read is meant to be where a sword is kept.

I don’t think the statue’s ever gotten broken like this in basically any iteration of the story, aside from the detail of Satoko having broken the statue’s arm some time before the story began, so this is a really weird change, and I have no idea what to make of it. I’m guessing that it’s there to set up the idea that someone had already broken into the Saiguden and stolen the sword, while busting open the statue’s head in the process and then putting in back together again afterward.

I know that the sword’s apparently related to Hanyuu and her whole backstory, but other than that I have no real idea about who might have decided to steal it, let alone why they’d do that. For one thing, if someone knew about it in the first place before going to steal it, you’d assume that they’d know a cleaner way to get the sword than just breaking open the statue’s head and then putting it back into place and hoping nobody notices, lol. I guess it’s possible it was designed so that the only way to get the sword out is to straight up break the statue’s head, but I dunno.

I’m guessing that neither Takano or Shion are involved with it, since I’m pretty sure this is probably Takano’s first time being inside the Saiguden [and I still think that she’s a bit of a red herring], and Shion was the one who knocked the statue’s head off, and I doubt she would have done that if she knew it was broken, since that’d just be asking for people to get suspicious of her. So I’m guessing that it’s someone unrelated to all of them who took it.

My best guesses are probably that either Rika or Hanyuu took it, but I’m not sure. They’re at least the first people I assume would know about it in the first place. It sounds like the sort of thing that’s probably a well-kept secret by the Furude family, so it’s hard to imagine anyone else except maybe the other big families in the village knowing about it. Also there’s the fact that Hanyuu only physically manifested in one fragment thus far, and seems distinctly absent from things in Gou, so I think she wouldn’t have been able to get it in the first place, so I’d lean towards guessing that Rika got it.

My main question at this point is if this is something completely unique to the new Gou arcs, or if we just never saw it until now. I’m assuming for now that it’s something new, since we also saw that the statue’s arm wasn’t broken like it was before, which makes me think that the statue itself might be a different one this time around. Or maybe whoever’s in charge of the new game board basically rewrote the part where Satoko got it broken.

Basically it’s one big question mark for me at this point, but they put enough emphasis on it that I think it’s gonna be a big deal later on, lol. 

And on the note of Hanyuu being even less involved in these arcs than she used to be, there were no indications of her being at the Saiguden getting angry at everyone for breaking into it. Which might not be a big deal in and of itself, but it does contribute to the way that Shion ended up seeming way more calm and collected during and after the festival compared to how she was in the VN, while this time around it’s Keiichi who seems to be really getting freaked out by everything.

Then there’s the new mystery of how, at least going by what Shion said later on to Keiichi, apparently Takano and Tomitake stole a staff van from the festival and fled from the village. Which may or may not have something to do with how Takano decided to go back into the Saiguden on her own after the break-in to ‘take some pictures’, which I think is a new addition. It also came across like after she came back, she was going out of her way to try and get Shion and Keiichi to go away, so I wouldn’t be surprised if something she saw in there made her decide to leave then and there.

Though tbh I don’t exactly trust what Shion said about it. For one thing, I’m still not sure if it was even Shion on the phone, or if it was Mion pretending to be her, lol. The whole conversation did kinda come across like it was Mion trying to get Keiichi to confirm what happened at the Saiguden. I know she brought up the idea of the statue being ‘beheaded’, but if anything it’d be weird for Shion to be hung up on that, since Tomitake had pointed out to her that the statue seemed to have already been broken before they got there. 

It’s also worth noting that it’s only Shion at the moment who’s said anything about Takano and Tomitake fleeing in a stolen van. I think Oishi just said that they’d gone missing. We also didn’t hear anything about the idea of them stealing a van to flee the village in Onidamashi, but maybe things just played out differently there.

At the moment I think that either Shion or Mion killed them, and then made up the story about them fleeing the village to cover it up to Keiichi.

I also noticed that Mion asked Keiichi at the festival if he’d seen Shion, Takano, and Tomitake, instead of just Shion, and that she didn’t say anything about it to him at school afterward. Unlike how in the VN Mion just asks him about Shion, and then Shion disguised as Mion asks him the same question at school. So for one thing that makes me wonder if Mion was already suspicious of Takano and Tomitake by that point, and it also makes me wonder if maybe Shion hasn’t started impersonating Mion yet. If anything, I feel like that scene might have basically been replaced by how Shion had that weird phone call with Keiichi where she seemed to mostly be getting him to go over what happened at the Saiguden. So at this point I’m wondering if things are playing out in the opposite direction this time, with Mion impersonating Shion.

If it turns out that Mion is more or less the killer this time around, I still think it’s less to do with the virus, and probably more to do with her acting as the heir to the yakuza. It’s possible that Mion found out about the Saiguden thing, and ended up being forced to get rid of them, for one reason or another.

I know that one of the fundamental rules originally was that the Sonozakis were never actually responsible for anything and just took the blame for stuff, but Gou’s already broken one of the rules by messing with Tomitake and Takano’s fates, so maybe this is a version of events where the Sonozakis are actually involved in this year’s curse.

I’m still kinda wary of the whole idea of Mion ever being the killer in an arc, but I think that’s where this is going at this point. And it’d at least be a bit more interesting than having this arc basically just be Watanagashi but with some minor changes, compared to how differently the last arc played out compared to the VN.

I think that the whole timeline of things after the festival also got quickened a lot, with basically everything happening over the course of just one night, instead of one or two days in the VN. Which might just be a pacing change, but it might imply that what’s going on behind the scenes isn’t actually the same as what was going on in the VN, even though the same things seem to be happening on the surface.

One hole in my theory of Mion being the killer is that I don’t think she has any real reason to kill Kimiyoshi, compared to Shion, but it might have to do with how he was the one that changed the locks on the Saiguden to make it easier to enter.

Then there’s the big scene at the end of the episode where Rika goes full on Bernkastel mode at Keiichi because she’s apparently just given up on this whole loop now that things seem to be heading straight in the direction of Watanagashi’s ending. I don’t think anyone saw that whole scene coming, lol.

I think that maybe Keiichi was just mildly hallucinating and making her seem more creepy and malicious than she was actually being in that scene, but she still seems to be pretty resigned to how this arc’s turning out. I wouldn’t be surprised if she really does just kill herself in the next episode, considering that this whole scenario is one that always seems to end in either torture or suicide for her. I still don’t think she killed herself in Onidamashi, but if she genuinely believes that this is the Watanagashi scenario, then she’d have a pretty good reason for killing herself before she can get tortured to death.

I know people have been wondering if she doesn’t actually realize that Takano’s the villain and never actually died [at least in the original arcs], but I think she was just indirectly referring to how Takano’s body double corpse is usually discovered around this point. What she said about them mostly just makes me think that she’s still assuming that Tomitake dies after the festival, and Takano sets up her body double and goes missing.

It’s still kinda odd to me that she seems so uninterested in actually intervening with events, especially with how pissed off she seems to be in this episode about how things are playing out, but I still think that the whole question of what exactly Rika’s thinking and doing is part of Gou’s long-term mystery.

Her acting so much like Bernkastel in that scene [even though I think that was just her slipping into her ‘normal’ voice] is also making me think more about the whole question of how Featherine and Bernkastel are going to eventually play into Gou’s story, if at all. 

At the moment my theory with them is basically that, after the original events of Higurashi, Rika ended up getting scouted by Featherine in the real world, and commissioned by her to write a novel series based on her experiences in Hinamizawa. And so maybe Gou’s whole story is basically Rika’s fictionalized retelling of the original loops we saw in the VN, and in the process of writing these stories, Rika [or at least a version of her] is basically getting dragged back into the loop without realizing what’s going on. 

It’d at least make the most sense to me if it’s Rika herself who’s basically the game master this time around, since she’s one of the people who knows the most about what happened in Hinamizawa, and Featherine was never really the sort to be directly in charge of things herself. She prefers to just listen to other people read/write stories.

And on a more meta level, I think it’d just be much simpler to have Gou’s story ultimately just loop back to Rika herself, than to introduce entirely new characters just to have a new villain to defeat, or something.

Also, we already saw in Matsuribayashi how Rika basically created a new game board where Takano’s parents didn’t die, after she started to ascend into the meta plane as a witch. So this would basically just be an extension of that.

I also still feel like the only real reason to even bother doing something like this would be to set the stage for an Umineko remake anime, lol. But that’s still probably just me getting my hopes up.