#anyway the point of this is to say that satoko's game mirrors beatrice in the sense that. it mirrors it in a lot of ways but i digress

[onewholivesinloops]

satorika disembowelment scene is a literal take on the metaphor described in the beginning of minagoroshi, because it's the allegory of satoko taking the pain she's been feeling all this time and reaching into rika and pulling her insides out to make her feel it too. that's basically the type of metaphor satoko would use to express the torture her love for rika has made her feel, so she's cutting open her torso and pulling out her intestines before intimately embracing her and sobbing the feelings she's been circling around all this time by conveying them through hidden messages in the form of murders, with the hope that inflicting this pain on rika would finally make her capable of understanding her, as her feelings of love, hatred, anger and atonement all mix together in a very visceral way in every sense of the word.

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Gou Ep16

I know I’ve said this before, but I hope everyone who complained about the first half of Gou not being gory enough is happy now, lmao.

Anyway, thoughts under the cut [plus some spoilers for Umineko, probably]

I probably should have expected this episode to be even more brutal than the last one after how suspiciously happy the preview images were, but I don’t think anyone could have guessed just how this was gonna go.

There’s a lot to say about the plot of this episode and what it says about the overall mystery, but one way or another most people’s reactions to this inevitably tie back to the question of how appropriate the horror content and it’s framing was, so I may as well give my two cents on that first.

Basically I thought it was fine, lol. It served a very clear purpose. It’s entirely valid for people to genuinely dislike it or want to skip it, but the very fact that it caused such a strong reaction in people is kinda also the entire reason why the scene existed. And why all of the other notably violent parts of the whole franchise existed in the first place. So at some point it kinda just feels like the whole argument is about the merits and ethics of gory horror in general, especially when it happens to children, which is it’s own whole broader topic.

Either way, I think it’s interesting how this whole episode’s approach to horror contrasts with the last episode, and how they both set out to do similar but different things. Ep15 was about brief flashes of intense, shocking violence to create a sense of suffocating confusion and isolation, and to hammer in the fact that Rika is truly stuck in an eternal loop of death, while this episode was more about one act of violence being dragged out over a horrifically long time that makes it feel more like outright torture than just murder.

It’s also kinda interesting that it was themed around the ritualistic murder of the Watanagashi festival, since this is the first time in Gou we’ve actually seen it like this.

Anyway, even though this episode feels like it basically laid out the entire story, I still feel a bit skeptical about a lot of it, lol. It feels almost too good to be true, with how thoroughly everything seemed to get laid out, and we already know that we have like eight whole episodes left to the show. So I doubt things are that simple.

It at least comes across now like this whole loop is Satoko torturing Rika as punishment for leaving the village, after probably getting time looping powers by someone who at least claims to be Oyashiro-sama, but even if we take all that at face value, I don’t think it answers everything about the story. If anything, Satoko’s side of the story makes it sound more like she’s being used as the tool of a greater mastermind, and we also already saw in this episode how she was going L5 in her own way, so she doesn’t exactly seem like she’s entirely in charge of the situation.

If she’s at least telling the truth about everything, and she really did start this loop after watching Rika leave the village as a teenager, I guess what probably happened is that Lambda decided to give Satoko her blessing by posing as Oyashiro-sama, as a way to ultimately get Rika/Bern trapped in the loop again. I still think it might be kinda unsatisfying if that’s basically all the culprit’s motive boils down to, but I do like the idea of this tying in Lambda as well.

I do think that Satoko probably really has been looping this whole time, and been the one to set up at least most of the new tragedies, but a lot of it still feels kinda iffy to me. For one thing, in this episode she seemed to have no problem with killing Rika herself, which seems to disprove the idea that Satoko might have been making different people go L5 in order to avoid being discovered by Rika. Even if she only changed her methods after Rika started being able to remember her deaths, this episode still happens well after that point, so if Satoko’s aware of all that, she doesn’t seem to mind having Rika remember being killed by her. So it makes me wonder why exactly she’d bother going out of her way to make random people go L5 if she could just do it herself this whole time. There’s always the option of ‘Lambda/Oyashiro-sama told her to do it that way’, but that’d just be kinda lame, lol.

It also makes me think again about Satoko’s suspicion toward Keiichi in Watadamashi, and how even after Rika died she ended up going to the Sonozaki estate and dying for some reason or another. If Satoko was responsible for Rika’s death in that arc, and her whole goal is just to punish her, I don’t really get why she’d bother trying to pin the blame on Keiichi afterward, and what reason she’d have to go to the Sonozaki estate afterward. I also still doubt that Satoko could have even killed Rika in that arc, since she was playing dodgeball with some of the other kids [and maybe Keiichi as well between episodes], who could have all said so if she had just randomly left to go kill Rika in the middle of their game.

It just feels like her whole goal should have already been fulfilled by that point in Watadamashi if she’s the one that killed Rika, and she shouldn’t have had any reason to bother with anything else afterward. Even if she tried to blame Keiichi for it just to direct the immediate blame off of herself, I really don’t see why she would have bothered going to the Sonozaki estate. Unless it was literally just some random unfortunate coincidence like what happens to Satoko in Watanagashi/Meakashi, I guess.

I also have to wonder what reason she’d have in Tataridamashi to lead Keiichi to her house to get attacked/murdered if her whole goal is just to punish Rika. A lot of her actions in that arc in general are just kinda weird, if you assume that she is indeed the main culprit.

Onidamashi is also kinda interesting, since there’s no real reason to assume that she had much of any involvement in like 99% of what actually happened in that arc. In theory she could have been pushing Rena to go L5 behind the scenes, but with how closely that whole arc seemed to mirror Tsumihoroboshi, I don’t think she even really needed to go out of her way to make things end up the way they did. Which makes the idea of her involvement in that arc seem kinda irrelevant at the end of the day.

It seems pretty likely at this point that she killed Rika at the end of the arc, but that also just happened at literally the last minute, and we can only guess how exactly what whole scene must have played out. The murder method is at least different to the one in this episode. I’ve seen some speculation that maybe Satoko tried to talk things out with Rika and things just went really badly, and that ended up being the start of Satoko getting more and more violent with her methods, which might make sense.

I just can’t help but feel like there’s more to the mysteries going on than just what we got shown in this episode, especially since we don’t know what exactly the deal is with Satoko getting divine messages from Oyashiro-sama. It just feels like there’s a higher mastermind manipulating things.

There’s also still the whole question of why the statue seems to be in a different state to how it was in the VN, and why the sword got stolen from it. It’d be easy enough to explain how Satoko could know about the statue and how to access it, but nothing she said here indicated anything to do with that. Her motives seem to be entirely about punishing Rika for leaving the village, so I’m not sure about the idea of her going back in time to avoid breaking the hand on the statue to avoid getting cursed by Oyashiro-sama.

It also sticks out to me even more after this episode that the sword hasn’t actually been used for anything, in spite of clearly being stolen by someone. If the culprit wanted to use it for ritualistic murdering purposes, this would have been the perfect opportunity for that, but Satoko just used the ceremonial hoe thing from the festival.

I also doubt that Satoko would even know anything about the sword and it’s purpose. It could just be another case of ‘the real mastermind is telling her what to do’, but there’s nothing concrete to really point at that.

Even though I could see Lambda being behind this, I’m also still really suspicious of Hanyuu. She’s basically the only person we’ve seen who actually talks about knowing what the sword is, and it’s entirely possible that she was the one to reach out to Satoko instead, considering that Satoko said that she was contacted by Oyashiro-sama, who we already know is more or less Hanyuu. I can at least imagine how this might be some elaborate move on Hanyuu’s part to try and bring Rika back into the village to stay with her longer. But who knows.

Anyway, the whole debate introduced in this episode of whether or not Rika should leave the village, and how it was a ‘sin’ for her to want to leave, reminds me a lot of basically everything from Umineko, with Battler constantly struggling with the question of whether or not to give into the idea of witches existing, and the mystery of what his sin was that he’s being punished for. But in a lot of ways this feels even more cruel than Umineko’s whole gameboard. Beatrice genuinely wanted to give Battler every opportunity to solve the mystery, and she set up the gameboard accordingly, but it feels like Gou’s whole ‘gameboard’ is just designed to beat Rika into submission in the most forceful way possible. The culprit doesn’t seem particularly interested in letting Rika ‘win’, they just seem to want to torture her for her sins.

The last episode was it’s own whole example of Gou feeling much more sadistic toward Rika than Umineko ever was toward Battler, but this episode’s loop seemed to take things another step further with having Rika get screwed over as soon as humanly possible. It’s not 100% clear, but it comes across to me like Rika literally woke up in that loop for the first time at the start of this episode when Satoko had already drugged and disemboweled her, which would really just go to show how Rika’s not being given any time at all to try and win. Matsuribayashi was described as a chess board where she got to start with all of her pawns advanced to the final row at the start of the game, but Gou is quickly feeling like a chess board where her king has been knocked out before she gets to make her first move.

I guess if the culprit’s motive really is just to torture Rika for her sins, it makes sense that they’re not even trying to make this into a ‘fair game’ of any kind, but it still feels noteworthy.

This episode also ends with Takano showing up to talk to Rika about stuff, so I guess that whole part of the plot is about to get delved into once and for all in the next episode, lol.

For better or worse this episode seems to confirm that Rika has remembered Takano’s whole role in things from the very start of Gou, but I still think that it’d be genuinely bad writing to have that be the case, and to then have her just . . . not act on any of that knowledge on-screen until now. With how much they’ve focused recently on Rika being completely confused about her situation and why people keep going L5 and killing her, it’s hard to imagine why she wouldn’t at least assume that Takano’s still behind it, and do SOMETHING to try and deal with her. But instead it just comes across like Rika’s spent this whole time being like ‘wow, I wonder why people keep going L5 unnaturally . . . . . where has this ever happened before . . . . . . . . guess I’ll just die lol’. At the end of the day I know it’d just be due to them not wanting to immediately spoil new fans about Takano, but if they were going to get to this sort of point anyway, it just seems like them hindering the storytelling for no good reason.

But that also just gets into the whole fact that trying to set this up like it’s a remake that’s accessible for new fans is ultimately kinda pointless since that’s turning out to not really be the case, so they could have just avoided issues like ‘Rika isn’t allowed to actually act upon any of her knowledge about the entire mystery and solution of the story because it’d be a spoiler for new fans’ by just committing to treating this as a sequel from the start.

Which is why I’ve been hoping that we’d find out that Rika actually hasn’t been aware of Takano’s whole deal this whole time, since it’d explain why she hasn’t acted upon it, but at this point I may as well accept defeat on that one, lol.

If the next episode does end up spelling out basically everything to do with Takano’s involvement in the plot, which seems to be what they’re setting up, I feel like it’ll be a real make or break point in terms of what Gou is even trying to be, and whether it’s writing decisions up to this point have been worth it, or if it’s been trying to have it’s cake and eat it too.

Anyway, since it’d be boring at this point to have Takano be the villain again, she’s probably going to be innocent this time around. Though I dunno if that’d be due to her having a genuine change of heart as a result of Matsuribayashi, like how Shion’s character development carried over after Meakashi, or if she’s just been getting stopped from completing her goal in each of Gou’s loops.

Mostly I just worry that she’ll wind up info-dumping lots of stuff on the audience that alienates new fans super hard by making it obvious that she used to be the villain, and she had her own entire character arc and stuff, but she’d already been dealt with and now things have changed and she’s on Rika’s side now. But I can’t really imagine how else it’d go.

One way or another it seems pretty likely that the next episode will be the end of the current loop, unless Nekodamashi is going to cover the entirety of this second cour. If we have another arc left after this, that’ll probably be it’s own loop. Which makes me wonder if anything that happens between Rika and Takano here would carry over into the next loop, or if she’ll just use the info she gets from Takano in this loop to do stuff in the next one.

I’m not even entirely sure what they could do with another whole seven episode arc after this one, since it kinda feels like we’re quickly barreling towards the endgame, lol. I’m still hoping that Gou gets into Rena and Shion’s backstories instead of just leaving them in the VN, but at this point I think the rest of the show is probably going to be centered more around Rika, Satoko, and Takano.

Also, since we have another whole eight episodes left to go, I’m pretty sure that the whole deal with Rika basically getting Stockholm Syndrome toward Hinamizawa isn’t the final message we’re going to leave on. It feels more like she’s giving into what the culprit wants, and Takano will probably end up motivating her to fight back against her fate.

I think it’s probably not going to be quite as black and white as ‘it’s entirely good that Rika wants to abandon Hinamizawa as soon as possible’, but I also don’t think it’s trying to push the idea that she deserves all this punishment just for wanting that. It feels more like Ange’s whole character arc in Umineko, and how she has to find a healthy balance between acknowledging the good parts of her family and also acknowledging their crimes. Rika has a lot of completely valid reasons for wanting to ditch the village as fast as possible, but Satoko probably still felt genuinely abandoned by her because of it, without Rika realizing how it’d affect her.