#it's satoko taking advantage of rika's tendency to be dismissive of her friends' struggles bc she associates them with the syndrome

[onewholivesinloops]

one of the most interesting things about ep16 of gou is that rika assumes everything satoko is doing is bc of hinamizawa syndrome and satoko is deliberately playing into this with all of the neck scratching even though she's quite lucid and is being vulnerable with someone else for the first time in so long, venting emotions she's been circling around all this time, so the emotions she's expressing are real and they're hers, and the way she's trying to reach out while still not revealing her entire hand by hiding those emotions behind the syndrome and oyashiro-sama is a lot like magic and beatrice in umineko. satoko's whole attitude to looping is a lot like yasu and maria's killing people with magic to "play out their fantasies and vent their feelings" and this is something that can be seen in the show from how satoko views the fragments as 'dreams' with the only final one truly mattering and even her fight with rika in the end where they constantly swap fragments only to end up back in the river as their high school selves when eua's influence is gone feels very surreal, but the venting stuff is also explicitly confirmed in the afterparty of hou+ and it's described as "a story within satoko"