you know, it’s getting real heckin hard to reserve judgment on sotsugyou until it finishes airing the more this drags on. i keep watching and thinking “man, this would work so much better if it were fleshed out in visual novel format or if they re-ordered arcs, or spent less time retreading gou’s ground on sotsu to get us to the conflict faster”

maybe i’ll write out an idea of my sotsugyou fixes sometime. 

on one hand, if we’re gonna be following satoko’s point of view we’re at least in new territory from here on out given she more or less vanished until ooishi decided to try out his infinite ammo hax at the festival. on the other hand... do we really need two more episodes of tatariakashi when we could end it in one and get back to the gun scene in nekodamashi that much sooner?

my first reaction to the satoko scenes were “goddammit”... i really wanted to believe that there was some good left in her and that we were really seeing how conflicted she was about what she’s done and still has to do. i haven’t given up on her yet, but she’s making it really hard... 

... you know, i wonder what’s going on in the matsuribayashi fragment. the rika we’ve been following in gou isn’t the rika from matsuribayashi, right? that rika’s sitting at the restaurant with the adult club, probably wondering why satoko’s taking so long. geez, what if they go looking for her and satoko’s dead in the shrine because she started looping? i... really hope the satoko in that fragment’s okay and that those two specifically can work things out, but... 

i don’t see how this can end happily for looper satoko anymore, beyond becoming lambdadelta and having whatever it is she has going on with bernkastel to look forward to.

that said, teppei being the one to bring ooishi into the fold is actually pretty interesting. i hate the guy but i guess his one redeeming(?) factor is that if he decides to commit to something, he commits. ... he just. generally is an abusive douchebag with that resolve. i figured the satoko situation caught his attention and that he’d go to check it out himself, if only to see what teppei’s doing... but teppei outright groveling and begging for help? goddamn. if he wasn’t... well, teppei, i’d feel bad for him.

we didn’t need that laundry scene though, what the hell. 

and i’m actually really annoyed r07 lied about ooishi going l5 being natural tbh. like. i’m not overly fond of the guy beyond ac memes but... i dunno, i feel like it being natural would’ve been way more interesting? 

the pieces are there, just waiting to fall into place. watanagashi is coming up. teppei’s... actually not doing anything wrong this time? the investigation of the hojo residence he just conducted proved it? he knows they’re still discriminated against because of his history with the dam war and oyashiro-sama’s curse? he knows about hinamizawa’s strong community spirit and solidarity? oryou sonozaki herself is getting involved with the child protection service protest, and he thinks the sonozakis are the ones carrying out the murders???? and given his thoughts about keiichi just moving in and not knowing what the “bullying” really is, he clearly believes satoko’s story.

like. he’s watching the town go on a witch hunt to separate an “innocent” man and his niece; a broken family, yes, but one that he’s personally looked into and can at least see that there’s an attempt at reconciliation going on here. that would be more than enough to send him spiralling, i imagine, but i guess we gotta make the most of that one h173 vial satoko grabbed. sigh. 

...but also i forgot just how much of an asshole ac man could be even without being injected with h173; immediately deciding to throw the hojos under the bus and set them up as the curse’s next targets to catch the sonozakis in the act? goddamn.

i imagine next week teppei’s gonna learn about k1 specifically and decide he’s the bully ringleader, which is why he attacks him at the hojo residence... god, poor keiichi.

overall pretty interesting episode, but i’m still salty about the h173 and that there’s apparently enough of tataridamashi left to “explain” that it warrants two episodes.

The thing abt Higurashi is that in order for it to be a story that would be satisfying for me personally I’d probably have to rewrite everything from Meakashi onwards and possibly more. I think Higurashi has a lot of the foundations to be a story that was very very good but the setup for it was definitely far too ambitious for what Ryukishi was capable of and thus he ended up just leaving a whole lot of unresolved plot threads in favor of just quickly resolving the main one. I’d rather the main plot thread be resolved with the others unfinished than having no conclusion at all, sure, but Rika’s eventual victory seems a little bit hollow when there’s been no sign that any of the other issues involved in canon will ever be resolved.

I ended up sympathizing with Shion a lot over the course of Higurashi, so I ended up focusing on her and the lack of any real conclusion to her arc. She reunites with (still comatose, with no clear path to recovery) Satoshi, but there’s absolutely no indication that she’s made any progress with her family or received any sort of apology from them. Along those lines, Ryukishi does a fantastic job of representing child abuse from the perspective of the child and from those who wish to help them, but his complete lack of nuance in depicting child abusers led to him inadvertently representing literally torturing children under your care as something that can be handwaved away because Oryou has good intentions for the town as a whole. I think the situation with Rika’s parents was handled slightly better, but mostly in the sense that Rika’s parents were already dead for two years by the time most of the events of the series take place.

This particular pattern of representing child abusers as just entirely selfish monsters exposes a lot of the problems I have with Higurashi’s narrative- an excessive focus on individual as opposed to structural causes for problems. I’m not saying child abusers are secretly good people or that there’s ever a legitimate reason to abuse your child, but people don’t come out of the womb thinking “yeah when I have a kid I’m just gonna treat them like shit.” Individual abusers are considered the problem (Satoko’s uncle), not the structural problems that facilitate them (I.E. all of the issues with the Sonozaki family- no, I don’t consider Mion an abuser, and on an individual level I don’t consider anything that happened to Shion to be Mion’s fault, but the fact that not even the Sonozaki family as a concept is criticized at all is... not good.)

The cruel nature of scapegoating is a central theme to Higurashi, and at multiple points, particularly towards the end, is it discussed how humans will allow single entities to take the fall for the sins of many. I agree, it is cruel to blame individuals in vulnerable positions for the sins of others- but Higurashi frames the problem as the presence of blame, period, whether it be against individuals or organizations. At the end, the narrative concedes that what happened in Hinamizawa could not be considered solely Takano’s fault, and that in blaming her for what occurred would be only making a scapegoat out of her, which, yeah, agree. My problem is it then goes on to say it’s just as unjustified to blame Tokyo as an organization, which is fucking stupid. If Takano hadn’t been in Hinamizawa, it’s likely some other tragedy would’ve occurred at Tokyo’s hands. If Tokyo as an organization did not exist... none of this would’ve happened.

That said, though I’m not far into Umineko, it’s apparent Ryukishi has become far better at recognizing that child abuse is not something that occurs just because certain people decide to be monsters. While the narrative undoubtedly sides with Maria in the conflict between her and her mother, Rosa’s plight as a single mother and youngest daughter of four in Japan, a country where one’s status is strongly dictated by your gender, your marriage, and your order of birth, is sympathized with. As an autistic person I see Maria as very strongly autistic coded (the verbal tics, the emotional dissonance, the lack of friends, the obsessive focus on a particular area of study she knows everything about and which is the one thing that makes her consistently happy to discuss) and thus a lot of my resentment for Rosa is personal, but she’s not framed as a monster, which I appreciate. It’s not comforting to me, as a victim of parental child abuse, to see parents who abuse their children framed as unrepenting monsters. People who abuse their children are perfectly capable of showing genuine kindness, love, and remorse to their children. That doesn’t change the fact that they’re abusers.