#ryukishi voice: 'haha when they cry cinematic universe goes brrr'

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Gou Ep21

Ciconia? In MY Higurashi??? It’s more likely than you’d think :)

Thoughts under the cut. Also apparently Ciconia spoiler stuff because that’s the world we live in now I guess lol

It’s kinda funny how over the course of Gou thus far I’ve seen people go from ‘there’s no way this is even going to reference Umineko, people are just reading into things’ to ‘wow I can’t believe Ryukishi’s going out of his way to tie literally all of his visual novel lore together in Gou :/’. It feels weirdly vindicating to see Gou just go the whole nine yards with bringing up unprecedented levels of When They Cry Lore [tm], lol. 

I know people basically thought [or hoped] that Ryukishi was just going to be trolling people who wanted this kind of lore stuff, but I always felt like it was going to be more straightforward and sincere than that, considering that he seems to genuinely enjoy this kind of writing, and I guess I ended up being right. If anything I underestimated just how explicit he’d be with this stuff.

Considering that they tweaked Featherine’s design a bit to be more Higurashi-y, and they avoided using that name for her, I figured they’d commit to having her fit more into the existing framework of Higurashi to avoid bringing up other When They Cry lore stuff, but then she literally just has the exact same personality as Featherine and immediately started talking about Ciconia stuff, so that was unexpected, lol.

The Umineko stuff is one thing, since we’re more or less dealing with a character who came from Umineko in the first place, but the Ciconia references throw like five different wrenches into things and make this way more confusing and interesting.

At the very least, I guess it cements the idea of Satoko being a Lambda expy, if not literally Lambda herself. It’s kinda hard to tell exactly where they’re going with this, in the grand scheme of things. If we’re going full Ciconia lore with this, then it’s possible that there’s basically just one original person who’s now a brain in a jar, and they’re basically being used as a ‘template’ for characters within simulations, which all end up looking similar to each other. 

It also raises the question of what this implies about how the timelines of the different VNs intersect, if Featherine is bringing up stuff from a story set in the future, but if we go with the whole simulation theory then they probably just all exist at the same time.

And on top of all the over-arching lore stuff that’s now being raised, this episode also gets into confusing time travel logic now that Satoko’s officially starting to do her own loops, and we all have to wrap our heads around how that meshes with Rika’s own powers and her personal timeline of events.

My best interpretation of the timeline here is that after the scene at the start of this episode, Featherine directly reset the timeline to an earlier point, rather than moving Satoko to a different fragment entirely. And because of that, the Matsuribayashi fragment played out like it did originally because Satoko was just sent back to an earlier point in that timeline, and Rika didn’t have her consciousness carry over because only Satoko got sent back, so the Rika in the next loop was basically just Matsuribayashi Rika again, and things just played out exactly the same with her.

We’ll have to see how the next episode goes, but since this loop ended with both Satoko and Rika dying, I think this will be where Rika’s consciousness also starts getting sent through the loops along with Satoko, although we know that until Nekodamashi she can’t remember how she died.

I’m really curious to see if Satoko and Rika immediately get thrown into the Onidamashi loop after that, or if there’ll be a whole series of loops that we haven’t seen yet before that. Satoko’s actions in the earlier arcs seem to imply that she has knowledge of how the original question arcs went that she shouldn’t have by this point in Gou, so maybe she spends some amount of time going through the same types of loops Rika did before Onidamashi happens, but it seems like from Rika’s perspective, she goes straight from this episode’s loop to Onidamashi, since she talked to Hanyuu about how the last thing she remembered was being at St. Lucia’s in 1988, and considering how this episode went, I don’t think Satoko would have allowed any loop after this to get to that point again in the first place. So if there’s any loops that happen between this and Onidamashi, they’d have to be ones that Rika retains no memory of. Or maybe her consciousness doesn’t start getting sent to those loops until Onidamashi.

Either way, it would imply that some sort of change might happen in the mechanics of Satoko’s looping. Which I could see happening, since she clearly doesn’t just keep repeating the same Matsuribayashi loop, so maybe at some point she also starts going to different fragments instead of just resetting the same one over and over again. Or maybe she just goes back early enough in the loop to completely change how things play out, but that’d basically just be the same thing as going to a different fragment.

I still think that Satoko’s exact motives and methods throughout the earlier Gou arcs changed over time, but this episode goes a long way to show how she’s already at the point of being willing to kill Rika. But at this point she’s only done it as a way to reset a failed loop, so I don’t think she’s progressed to the point we see in Nekodamashi where she’s literally torturing Rika as a way to try and convince her to stay in the village in the first place.

With just three episodes left [as far as we know, at least], I think we’re probably going to skim over the earlier Gou arcs to explain their individual mysteries before we go back to the end of Nekodamashi and see how that confrontation played out. One way or another it’d have to be pretty fast-paced to cover four arcs worth of answers, so they might just shove the answers all into the next episode and end it by going back to Nekodamashi.

It’d be kinda anti-climactic to spend such little time going over the answers to the earlier arcs, but at this point there probably isn’t much we need to know. We now know the ‘who’ and the ‘why’ of the mystery, so all that we need to be told is the ‘how’, and I think that’s going to end up being relatively simple. At the very least, I think Satoko used the same methods in basically every arc, so just going over one set of answers would solve most of the mysteries in each arc at the same time, and the individual mysteries in each arc would take less time to go over at that point.

Even at this point I’m still not entirely sure about a lot of this, mainly since there’s still the question of how much Satoko actually knows about the pre-Matsuribayashi loops, but I think the general answer to how she did basically everything in each arc was that she just raided the Irie Clinic to steal the syringe that makes people go L5, and then she just made people go L5 in the background of each arc.

In Onidamashi, I don’t think there’s even that much to answer. She presumably ended up doing a murder suicide with Rika at the end of the arc to reset the loop, and maybe she injected Rena with the syringe, but I still think that Rena could have easily just been doing all that without any interference from Satoko. Since that was the first Gou arc [unless there were other loops between this and Onidamashi], maybe Satoko hadn’t started injecting people yet, and only started doing that in later loops. The only other real mystery in this whole arc is what happened to Takano and Tomitake, and that was probably just them fleeing the village like we ended up seeing in Nekodamashi, which is also something that they might have done without any involvement from Satoko. I guess there’s also the question of what exactly made Takano abandon her goals, but that also might not really be directly caused by Satoko. My best guess is that, on the meta level, Lambda revoked her blessing from Takano, and she got given memories of Matsuribayashi, which ended up making her lose certainty in her goals, and choose to just give up and flee the village.

Watadamashi is still kinda confusing, but this might also just boil down to her having injected either Shion or Mion to trigger the same general scenario as Watanagashi. I don’t think it was her that killed Rika, but I think her suspicion of Keiichi was probably an act. Now that we know that by that point she was in the middle of her loops and knew exactly what was going on, I don’t think she’d genuinely suspect him of that, or that she’d even care that much. The Takano and Tomitake situation was probably just the same as all the other arcs, with them fleeing the village. I think a lot of the background stuff was basically just the same as Watanagashi, except for Mion ending up as more of a culprit this time. My biggest question about this arc is probably just why Satoko even bothered going to the Sonozaki estate at the end of the arc. Now that we know more about her motives and her level of meta knowledge, it just seems really weird that she’d bother doing that. If anything you’d think that she’d just immediately kill herself once she found out about Rika dying, since she’d have no reason to continue the loop after that.

I still like the idea that she ended up making Shion into her accomplice to help carry out a lot of the stuff she did in each loop, so that might play into the whole mystery of this arc. And maybe it’d explain why she bothered going to the Sonozaki estate.

Tataridamashi is still kinda strange and confusing, and more than the other arcs I think it really depends on how much she knows about the pre-Matsuribayashi loops. The whole situation of whether or not she was being abused by Teppei in this arc, and how much of an act she was putting on, is still pretty unclear. The stuff with Ooishi at the end of the arc is also still kinda strange. Maybe it was all intentional and she had basically just given up on that loop and used him to kill Rika, but I’m not sure. I kinda like the idea I’ve seen that maybe she was tempted by the idea of just letting the Tataridamashi timeline continue, and that she had genuinely come to some sort of peace with the events of that loop, but then Ooishi went crazy and forced her to reset the loop. Either way I feel like this arc is a turning point of some kind for Satoko, since it’s immediately after this point that her methods seem to get much more desperate and violent.

So I think that maybe she had basically ‘given up’ in Tataridamashi and was willing to just stay in that loop and let it play out, but Featherine decided that would be boring so she forced the game to keep going by making Ooishi go on a murder spree. And then Satoko realized that she’s just as trapped in this loop as Rika is, and is going to keep going through pain and misery until she can properly succeed with her original goal, and so she becomes much more desperate after that point. There’s also the fact that this is the point where Rika is also given the ability to remember her loops, so that might be another aspect of Featherine meddling with the game in order to keep it interesting.

I get the feeling that Satoko maybe ends up having another meeting with Featherine around this point, where she gets it spelled out to her face that she’s going to have to keep looping until Rika ‘loses’, whether Satoko likes it or not. For one thing, Satoko’s talked about how she became Oyashiro-sama’s new miko, but that didn’t really come up in this episode, so maybe she has another meeting with Featherine later on where that comes up. It’d also make sense if maybe Satoko gets told by Featherine at this point that Rika is also a looper who remembers each timeline, since the way that Satoko straight up starts murdering and torturing Rika seems kinda counter-intuitive to the idea of making her choose to stay in the village, but it’d make sense if she learned about Rika’s looping and changed her methods to ‘I’m going to torture her across multiple loops so that eventually I’ll get to a loop where she’s already chosen to give up and stay in the village’.

Maybe she could have found out about Rika’s looping as early as the end of Onidamashi, though, if Rika talked about it before the murder suicide. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t.

Either way, even once we eventually get back to Nekodamashi, I’m not really sure if we’ll get a happy ending or not, lol. It feels like the only way for this to end peacefully is for Satoko to just give up, but like I said above, I think Featherine is actively interfering with things, and is refusing to let Satoko give up before she wins. So I just don’t see that happening. This is also really feeling like an origin story for both Lambda and Bern, and their violently possessive relationship, so I kinda feel like the story might just commit to them going off the deep end and embracing their unhealthy desires. I wouldn’t be surprised at this point if Featherine gives Satoko the ability to become a witch in order to achieve her goal of staying with Rika forever.

There’s also the hanging plot thread of Satoshi still being alive, but with how singularly focused Satoko seems to be with Rika, I’m not even sure if finding out that he’s alive would go much to sway her if she can’t also get Rika to stay in the village. And, again, there’s the whole potential mess of Featherine wanting to be entertained no matter what.

Of course we also might get a whole second season or something, which would open up it’s own whole list of possibilities, lol. I’m not really convinced about it yet, and I’d rather keep my expectations low, but it really does feel more and more like there’s just not enough time to wrap everything up in just three more episodes. I know they can probably go over the answers for the previous arcs in like one more episode, but this whole extended flashback has been going on for way longer than I expected, and we haven’t even gotten to Onidamashi yet. I know that once we get back to Nekodamashi there might not even be that much more that needs to be done to wrap up the story now that everything’s laid out on the table, but it might still just feel kinda rushed to only get one or two episodes of content after that.

Though on the other hand, even though everything with Satoko is being laid out in a way that makes it feel like there’s not much more we need to do to wrap up the story, it’s possible that the story will just shift to having Featherine herself be the new antagonist, so to say. If I’m right about her not being willing to let Satoko just give up and make peace with Rika, then they might have to work together to stop her, but who knows. Maybe she’ll be willing to go along with a happy ending this time.

There’s also still the possibility that this is setting up for some sort of new Umineko anime, which at this point might have it’s own original story that continues on from Gou’s story in addition to Umineko’s, so that might sort of serve as a sequel to Gou in it’s own way, depending on how they spin it. It still feels like a pipe dream, but considering how bluntly this episode threw out references to WTC lore, it’s possible that this is going to be some kind of multi-part cinematic universe thing that’s going to go all the way with tying everything together across multiple new anime projects.

Also, before I forget, we finally got the visuals for the new ED, and I was right about them choosing to wait until now to show it because it had spoilers, lol. They’re more minor than I expected, but it still spoils the chandelier scene, and I guess it also shows Featherine, but in a very subtle way.

Either way, I think the visuals they went with were extremely good. I’m not sure if I like the song itself more than the first ED song since they’re both great, but I definitely prefer the visuals for this one over the visuals for the first ED. The art for them is both great, and they’re done by the same artist so they’re not that different to begin with, but the visuals for this ED feel way more dynamic in terms of their composition and editing. The first ED’s visuals were basically just a series of still images with some slow panning effects, but this one had way more complex images that were designed to feel like 3D panoramas being spun about. So there’s just a whole lot more going on with this one, so I really liked it.

Anyway, now I’m gonna go back to being sad that Ciconia Phase 2 got delayed, lol.