/jp/ - Otaku Culture

(Whoops. Forgot my picture. This is an imageboard after all.) As promised here is my unsolicited blogpost on Minagoroshi-hen. So, since this is one of the actual canon Ryukishi arcs and not one of the console arcs I'm sure it’s been discussed to death and you all won't have very many new thoughts on it, irregardless I am still going to type out a long post (or two) on it. As a quick preamble I watched the Dean anime a decade ago so while I remembered the major plot details, many of the more subtle details I either forgot or weren’t implemented in the Dean adaptation. I’ll also be spoiling it without abandon, because I assume everyone who frequents these threads has read (or at least watched the 8 main Higurashi arcs). I’ve spoiler tagged some console arc details before out of courtesy, but I figure that isn’t necessary here. Anyway, without further ado, here are my rambling thoughts on Minagoroshi-hen. First of all, despite all of the goofy schizo stuff in these threads and the character assassination in Gou/Sotsu, I still feel bad for Satoko and am sadden by her abuse both here and in Tatarigoroshi-hen. Ryukishi’s experience as a social worker really does lend him the ability to effectively write about the abuse of a child, even if Teppei is a bit of a caricature. The introductory sequence in the world of fragments where Rika? (Bern?) is discussing the rules of each fragment was superb. Was that in the Dean adaptation? If not that’s the second worst exclusion behind not explaining that Mion and Shion switched places on the day that “Mion” was supposed to get the tattoo, changing both of their lives irreversibly. Anyway, I found Akasaka’s inclusion to be odd? I guess it was just to give Rika false hope and to tease what he does to actually help in the next arc. As a quick aside this is the only arc so far where I’ve had glitches/technical problems and since I am using the 07th mod (it could very well be my setup or the mod itself causing the problem and not the original Minagoroshi program) I won’t dwell on this point too much, but I did have two crashes and a couple of instances where the console sprites froze on one expression. Back to the story stuff, it really was inspiring and wholesome seeing Keiichi and the rest of the club rally more and more people to petition the child consultation center with the Oryou confrontation being the highlight. K1 taking a chair to the face over his ideals was also great. I also liked how he both consulted with his parents in this arc and how Keiichi’s dad supported him wholeheartedly. Skipping to the conclusion, the reveal that Takano is the culprit was also excellent and I have to commend Tomitake for not being a simp even though it might have saved his life. (Or maybe not, given that killing Tomitake was one of the objectives of their operation so they probably would have killed him anyway.) Takano killing everybody in the club one by one, taunting them along the way is still as rage inducing as it was the first time I watched it when I was a preteen, what an absolute cunt. I actively dislike the first half of the next arc (at least the Dean adaptation of it) because Ryukishi genuinely tries to get the audience to feel a degree of sympathy for what is essentially a Unit 731 member. I do not pity her, I do not feel bad for her, I do not care. She deserves to be raped by a pack of wild dogs. She deserves to have all of her limbs cut off. She deserves to be covered in gasoline and set on fire. She deserves to be cut 1,000 times and slowly bled to death. She deserves to be boiled in oil and have her fat sold for soap. Kudos to Ryukishi for making one of the most hate able antagonists I have ever encountered in fiction. There are several interesting callbacks to prior arcs in this concluding sequence that I feel are worth bringing up. Satoko being listed as missing at the end of Tatarigoroshi-hen implies that Takano’s threat here of having her shipped off to Tokyo to be vivisected, was realized in that fragment. Also, was Tomitake in the fucking truck when Takano picked Keiichi up in Tatarigoroshi-hen? That’s wild. My only real complaint with this arc is that the first half is slow and being given the POV of a protagonist who has completely given into despair for a good portion of it is demoralizing, but honestly those are nitpicks. I don’t want to suck Ryukishi off too much, I want to be as objective as possible, but I really like this arc. This will be the last one of these I do (unless something in a future console arc really spurs me into writing about it). Blogpost owari da.