/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>27522040
Matsuribayashi and Saikoroshi are the happy ending for human Rika, the one we follow in Higurashi. This doesn't change with the new anime.

Frederica Bernkastel is a separate entity from Rika, having split off from her LONG before the Onikakushi fragment, as an accumulation of failed Rikas. We see her theorizing in the sea of fragments, writing poems and even messing with fragments to create the Matsuribayashi world. The person who talks to future Akasaka in the dojo and thanks him for remembering isn't piece Rika, it's Frederica Bernkastel identifying as Rika now that she has hope and a clear goal in mind. The Rika we follow during the story is unaware of what happened after arc 6 when Matsuribayashi starts. The whole "joining the fragments" section is experienced by Bernkastel, not Rika herself. She is the one that makes this lucky world possible by manipulating the starting conditions and variables.

Rika's true personality is similar to Bernkastel's, but less jaded and confined to a human brain with limitations on her amount of memories and the speed of her thoughts. These limitations don't exist for Bernkastel, she remembers every torture, every boring repetition of each event and can think at the speed of light like any meta creature in the series, she's not limited by a brain.

Bernkastel's personality changes a bit from Higurashi to Umineko, because she's several hundred years older, has experienced countless worlds and stories and is friends with a sadistic witch. She also doesn't think of herself as Rika anymore and drops the first half of her name. There is a section in Umineko where Lambda explains how humans that obtain eternal life become cruel as fuck eventually, when they get bored of playing nice for thousands of years. There is also a section in Ciconia where Gunhild explains that the human mind cannot tolerate eternity without becoming a bit insane, assuming you have no way of deleting old memories. All of this explains Bern's changes.

Rika has never met Bernkastel except for a weird manga page where Rika is barely conscious anyway and is simply in the process of going to the Minagoroshi world. In the VN, this scene only has Frederica Bernkastel talking to the reader and explaining how she can experience the fragments from the perspective of each protagonist (basically theatergoing power) and knows Shion's thoughts during Meakashi.

I repeat, Rika has never met Bernkastel and doesn't know of her existence. In Saikoroshi, Rika realizes that she's very different from that world's Rika and from the original Rika too, so she decides to call herself a different name fitting for a dimension-jumping body snatcher. So she chooses Bernkastel looking at a wine bottle, this is probably how the real Bernkastel got her own name in the past, in of the countless pre-Onikakushi worlds that Rika can't possibly remember due to the sheer number of them.

Saikoroshi ends with Rika deciding to drop the whole witch personality thing and live a normal life without resetting her life at the slightest inconvenience. Then, she ASSUMES that the "witch" part of her probably exists somewhere, but that's not her. She just happened to be right and Hanyuu confirms it, saying she made a new friend. This is NOT where Bernkastel splits from Rika, that happened before Onikakushi. This only means that Rika is deciding to regain her original personality and live as a human. "Creepy Rika" and "Bernkastel" are similar but not the same character. During the time of Higurashi, Bernkastel considers herself to be Rika at times in the meta, which is no longer the case in Umineko.

Everything above is just information from the Higurashi VN. From this point forward, I will be discussing theories, nothing confirmed:

This new anime is probably Bernkastel's story after the Matsuribayashi ending (she is mentioned in Saikoroshi by Rika, who deduces she probably exists somewhere, but she never appears in the story or anything. By that point she's playing around with the fragments, free of her shackles. She eventually decided to go back to being Rika in the lower plane but preserving her identity as Bernkastel, with no intention of solving a game that she's not shackled to anymore (Rika is already safe in her happy world) and that's when this anime starts. She probably meets Lambda in her human form as a teen Rika after surviving and ending up at St. Lucia (Rika stated that she could survive alone hiding in the forest until july and just didn't do it again because she wants her friends to survive too. Bernkastel isn't that attached to them anymore, so she might have done just that and survive while they go insane and kill each other).

This is where Lambda meets Bernkastel in Rika's body. She probably came down to the game to meet the new witch and congratulate her for her victory. She never expected a wish she granted on a whim to develop into a game between Takano and Hanyuu/Rika. Much less that a cute witch would be born.