#Teppei Houjo

[ultraericthered]

Something else that’s really grinding my gears? This goddamn story arc currently running in the Higurashi Meguri manga, and that ran in the Higurashi Sotsu anime in 2021. I mean, questionable pervert-bait panels of underage Satoko aside, it seems strange to say this since I recently remarked on how well Meguri did with Teppei, and now with its recent update it’s continuing to do well with Ooishi too, and all throughout, our main star Satoko has just been an absolute delight, being very funny and endearing while also a deep, tragic character.

But those are all effective parts and pieces of a larger whole. In the anime, those parts being as surprisingly strong and effective as they were by Gou/Sotsu standards made Curse Revealing the highlight of Sotsu. In the Meguri manga, it and its earlier question arc are the weakest arcs in spite of the parts that work. In both versions, this question and answer arc pair falls short of full potential because they are, at the most fundamental level, not what they should’ve been.

It’s something I’d stated before: Again, neither version of this story arc got it 100% right, as it was doomed from the offset by being chained to callbacks to the original Curse Killing AND Massacre Chapters that have to be done twice and with a very, very gross and unsettling subversion at its core.

The “very, very gross and unsettling subversion” is, of course, the fact that Satoko, a canonical victim of child abuse from the OG story, is now lying about being abused to two separate parties who believe her and take the abuse/bullying allegations dead seriously and fight to protect her because they love and care about her so much...all set against a backdrop that mirrors the story arc from the OG story where the abuse was really happening to her and her friends really fought for her by rallying the entirety of Hinamizawa to the cause of helping her save herself from the abuse at the hands of her uncle, who in this new story is one of the many dupes Satoko is decieving.

It just does not work as a premise and is not only spitting in the face of Ryukishi07′s earlier (and far better) writing, but in the face of real life child abuse situations where the victim is suffering in silence, needs to speak out and needs to be believed, helped, and defended from their abuser. If you look at any such situation with the mindset of “well, what if the child is lying about getting abused and bullied so horribly and is just playing folks against each other for the lulzs?”, rescuing children from bullying and abuse that unreliable adults and systems enable and allow to befall them becomes that much harder.

For a “subversive take” on what went down for the bulk of the Massacre Chapter of OG Higurashi, this is all that was needed:

See, the latter is the reverse of the former, not a gross distortion of it. Satoko gets to lie and decieve and play others for suckers in her game against Rika while not having to rely on being dishonest about something that was very real and very serious in the original work.

[ultraericthered]

I think it's extra difficult for those who came over to Umineko from Higurashi, since that series had a similar litmus test with Satoko. Satoko too was frequently seen as just an annoyance, and if people weren't saying outright that her behavior grating on their nerves was reason enough to "deserve" getting terrorized, abused, and murdered by others, they were at most apathetic and did not care that Satoko was getting treated that way. Now in spite of this, empathizing with Satoko's abuse and seeing her as a victim of abhorrent treatment was incredibly easy because the character who treated her worst, Shion, while very well developed and humanized in her POV, is very blatantly succumbing to Hinamizawa Syndrome at the time she does her most despicable abuse and murder (making absolution of her sins easy), and also because Satoko's main abuser, her uncle Teppei, is depicted the way abusive people are typically depicted; nothing about him to like and nothing about his own perspective that's sympathetic and humanizing in the slightest. It's so easy to condemn horrific child abuse when it's committed by the most utterly loathsome character you could concieve of (and yes, later Higurashi works have made Teppei more conflicted and repentant of his old ways so that you pity him, but he's still not a guy you really like or find yourself empathizing with much since his deeds usually don't match his words, rendering his self improvement attempts shallow).

Rosa, meanwhile, is not Uncle Teppei, nor is she afflicted by any abnromal ailment like Hinamizawa Syndrome. Her backstory and perspective are sympathetic, there are qualities worth liking in her, and she, the (second) youngest of Kinzo's children, has consistently been given the rawest of deals in her life to the point where she's very lonely, distrusting, and seems to struggle with depression and bipolar disorder. So there's an incentive for some to want to make excuses for her, to make her abuse of her 9 year old daughter out to be less horrible than what Teppei does to Satoko. But the truth is that it's every bit as horrible, and it coming from a person who in other stories and scenes we might feel something more than hatred, fear, and disgust for does not soften it up or make it something that should not be condemned any less fiercely. Who the child abuser might truly be on the inside is irrelevant; what matters is the child abuse they inflict upon their child victims, and that it's unquestionably foul and wrong, and the victim never, under any circumstance, deserves it.

I feel like Maria Ushiromiya is Umineko's litmus test for not only your general empathy towards children (because let's be honest, society doesn't regard kids as people deserving of respect) but also your reading comprehension and how far you've gotten into Umineko.

Anime onlies even from episode 1 have always notoriously applauded Rosa beating Maria for exhibiting "abnormal" or "annoying" behaviours and there's SO many meme gifs of a 9 year old being slapped (Rose garden scene). And even when they reach the adaption of Maria's backstory arc, you'll always see people yet again claiming "She deserved it" or that Rosa was valid. These types of people generally dont believe in a child's autonomy, nor have empathy if that child is in some way irritating.

And for those that completely changed their mind and realised that Maria was actually someone that was a victim, they too aren't excused from their previous opinions of how Rosa treats her daughter. They still thought that since Maria was annoying, she deserved to be verbally and physically assaulted.

However when you talk to Umineko readers, you find that "population" of Maria haters remains niche or in consistent decline. This only becomes further cemented through the backstory arc in the novel (which imo was done far better than the anime), but this is also where the reading comprehension comes in.

Alot of the time, readers miss the point of Ryukishi's writing concerning Maria and settle on the idea that there's some sort of "grey area" regarding Rosa's treatment of her daughter. The novel explicitly explains that what she does is abhorrent and that it ISNT a morally grey subject matter.

I will also acknowledge that Ryukishi also explores Rosa's problems and perspectives too, of her own trauma that leads into the abuse of Maria, but never once does the narrative seek to excuse it or paint the situation as something other than truly cruel. It is a perfect expression of the cycle of abuse within families and as difficult it is to read/watch Rosa internally struggle with her guilt over her violence, she never actually changes her behavior.

If you cannot at least empathise with Maria, how on earth will you be able to understand the struggles of Beatrice, and the meaning behind the narrative itself?

[witch-of-illusions]

🥺

[pinkie-satan]

fucking Teppei is getting some kind of redemption arc while Satoko became the main villain

i have questions

[robbyrobinson]

How to Get Rid of Teppei Hojo

1) Kill Teppei

 2) Chop him up to little pieces then burn him.

 3) Mix the ashes with hot chocolate then have someone drink it. 

4) Let nature run its course and then grind it. 

5) Boil it into a stew.

 6) Take the stew and feed it to pigs. 

7) Take the pigs and drown them in the river.

8) Turn the pigs into bacon.

[ultraericthered]

I'm getting flashbacks....

How is this guy…

The same character as this absolute piece of shit?

[thadeeliv]

i will beat teppei houjo to death with my bare hands

[ultraericthered]

Same energy.

Even more so if we compare Tuco with live action TV Drama Teppei.

[ultraericthered]

Virgin Teppei Houjo VS Chad Enji Todoroki Redux

Actions will always speak louder than words, and right here in this moment of truth, Teppei showed us that all he had was words. That his idea of overcoming his natural cowardice and being brave, strong, and protective of Satoko...was flipping his lid and shouting angrily at someone with a temper so volatile that it can easily turn violent. AKA the same damn problem he’s always had, that he put Satoko on the recieving end of in the past so to Teppei’s knowledge, it should be a trigger to her that he should want to avoid. And then Satoko just settles the phone call herself, so Teppei has done nothing for her other than reinforce to her that he is the absolute most worthless person to be given any part in her life. Even when he’s no longer her abuser, there is nothing he offers that Satoko cannot recieve from others elsewhere. Which made his life expendable.

Much as I don’t care for the overall execution of this moment and think Enji’s words should’ve come sooner, he gets it: he alone was the overbearing abuser and poisonous influence of his entire family, and that while living on as an atoning hero to make amends for the years of wrong he’s done, heavy a burden as it is, seemed like the right path to take for a while, he’d somehow still not shaken off all his selfishness and had approached it as an “all about HIM” thing, for the good of easing HIS guilty conscience and making the most shallow  “amends” to the family members still around that he could, all while still forgetting and neglecting his very first victim, his eldest son Toya, now the insane supervillain Dabi. And seeing as neglect due to Toya not being good enough a “creation” to use against All Might was what led him down the path to villainy to start with, that’s not a very good look for the repentant Endeavor. So now he sees he has to make amends to Toya too, even if that can only be done in a way that extinguishes Enji’s own life or at most leaves him in traction for life. So he atones for his sins against his family in actions rather than just words, and even at the end there, he is profusely apologizing for absolutely everything he ever did to them without even expecting a “it’s OK, we forgive you” from any of them since he encourages Toya’s to keep hitting him with those angry, hateful words about him; they’re valid and he knows full well that he deserves to hear them.

Enji Todoroki/Endeavor is the best case of a monstrous abuser taking full ownership of their deeds as they repent and atone for them since Fruits Basket’s Akito Sohma. Teppei Houjo in Meguri (and in anything other than that one time in Sotsu) is a lost cause trying as much as he believes he’s able to, as sincerely as he can manage, to do the same thing only to fail miserably because he is indeed a lost cause.

[ultraericthered]

...In fact, “Teppei Houjo can never reform and find any redemption or happiness” seems to have always been an unwritten rule for the WTC Higurashi franchise, and it’s still in place but now modified into  “Teppei Houjo, even if he actually wants to, can never reform and find any redemption or happiness EXCEPT in a Golden End miracle fragment made by Hanyuu”. Because in every fragment that has featured so-called “good Teppei” or atoner Teppei has his story end up as a huge Heel-Face Door-Slam. First we had all the loops seen in the Gou/Sotsu anime (Satokowashi-hen, Wataakashi-hen, and Tataridamashi-hen /Tatariakashi-hen), then we had his character story in Mei, then recently both the Gou/Meguri manga versions of Tataridamashi-hen /Tatariakashi-hen and his Dark Awakening event in Mei (pictured above). All follow the same pattern - Teppei wants to break good but ends up achieving nothing but more bad.

I guess this makes him to Higurashi what Kinzo is to Umineko - that one asshole who, in all fragments of reality, just can’t ever be a good guy, and only special supernatural/spiritual/metaphysical occurances (Hanyuu’s miracle fragment, the Golden Land) can ever purify them.

[ultraericthered]

Something in the analysis video linked to in the last post I reblogged really stuck out to me - the idea that Teppei in the original story not only cared nothing for his niece Satoko (obviously, given the beyond cruel way he treated her and just how hateful he was in his abuse), but he did not view her as a person, only an object for his pleasure, to use, abuse, scare, inflict violence upon, and even fuck in a few years time since he’d decided he’d groom her as his “new girl”. Because he’s a boorish misogynist and a misanthrope with only enough room in his tiny heart to care for himself and no others.

Which got me to really notice this interesting contrast between Teppei’s run in with Satoko in Hinamizawa that we see in the Gou anime VS what we see in the Gou manga version of Tataridamashi.

In the anime, he gets THIS look:

Satoko is still an object to him. Literally nothing has changed except for the way in which he intends on using that object (how he’ll treat Satoko). Rather than use her as an outlet for personal pleasure, Teppei realizes he can make nice with her and hopefully win her over to letting him stay with her so he can use her as an outlet for his idea of personal atonement (play the doting uncle without any apology for or even acknowledgement of his sins, and expect all to be fine), recieving care, and avoiding a miserable, lonely karmic demise. He doesn’t now care about Satoko for Satoko, he cares about Satoko for himself. A craven, opportunistic, self-interested bastard, even now.

In the manga, he gets THIS look:

It’s the exact opposite here - this is Teppei, for the first time in his life, looking at his niece and recognizing her as a person. As a human being like himself, young and afraid and vulnerable like he himself once was, not remotely deserving of the way he’d treated her in the past or the way he would’ve gone on treating her had he not had his nightmare-induced ephiphany of needing to change his ways. So it’s thus no wonder his instinct is to, once back home with her, let all of his remorse pour out and apologize profusely for how horrid he’d been to her, for all the vile abuse he alongside his deceased wife had ever put her through, and to commit himself to becoming a better man so that he doesn’t hurt her or anyone else that way ever again.

Again, this is why I wish Meguri could have its own take on Gou Episode 23, so that we could’ve gotten the sense of the Teppei Houjo we know and loathe ultimately becoming this new man through later loops, with the manga then going on to tackle the new Teppei’s arc of struggling with the growing pains of doing good by his family even when it’s not as easy or second nature to him like being a violent, abusive thug and money-grubbing grifter was. It could’ve been great!

[ultraericthered]

What I’m pretty sure happens here is that Satoko has made this exact crime scene - Teppei lying dead with Satoshi’s baseball bat on the ground and all that blood splattered over the room that way - an absolute certainty rather than simply one possible outcome of events. And using the reality-warping witch powers she got from Eua in tandem with her own memory, she rewrites this fragment so that the events leading to that certainty are changed; now Satoko goes to the Watanagashi Festival with her friends, takes Keiichi home with her partway through, and since Teppei is still there due to his arrest being a lie, he naturally recognizes Keiichi as one of Satoko’s classmates who’s been “bullying her”, one of the villagers who conspired to rip him and Satoko apart, and who he believes is conspiring to make him a victim of Oyashiro’s Curse, so he flies off the handle and has a total relapse into being his old, violent thuggish self and tries to bludgeon Keiichi to death with Satoshi’s bat, only for Keiichi to turn the tables and bludgeon Teppei to death with the bat instead. And the real kicker here? Judging by her sincere reactions to this, the Satoko in this split/revised fragment is human Satoko. This is where she has been banished to.

So I decided to look up the scene where Teppei attacks Keiichi at the end of Tataridamashi because I wanted to look at Teppei's red eyes. At first I thought that it might have been a sign that Teppei was reanimated, as a result of Lambda flexing her powers over the fragments thanks to shedding her weaker human shelf. (That probably isn't Umineko-compliant but I was theorizing).

The truth is far more interesting.

First off, I forgot how good that scene was, god that bell rules. More importantly, though, I got the idea to look at the bloodstains because I started wondering if the Tataridamashi and Tatariakashi stains are the same, and maybe the room was covered in blood beforehand.

Turns out I'm wrong, all of Teppei's blood came from Keiichi's impacts and there wasn't any beforehand...

But at the same time...

I'm completely right...

...and the blood splatters are exactly the same.

[ultraericthered]

When They Cry - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27.

1. It's not exactly an "OTP", but I'd not get anyone's decision to ship Keiichi/Shion. Rena and Mion are viable options for him, but Shion??? She was only ever attracted to the shadow of Satoshi that she saw from him, never to him. Also, she killed him thrice over that one time. 2. Eva/Natsuhi is apparently a thing? Uh, they're literal family, so them as Brotps is easier to swallow.

3. Not that I know of.

4. Sayo Yasuda/Maria Ushiromiya. It's not a fandom OTP from what I've seen and thank Heavens 'cause that'd be creepy as fuck.

5. Surprisingly not.

7. The Meta World and all the magical feats performed by Witches who inhabit it was cool in Umineko, but much less so when shoehorned into Higurashi. (Bern VS Lambda feels like a legit epic clash of superpowers compared to Rika VS Satoko in the penultimate Sotsu episode, which felt like comedy/parody.)

9. Teppei Houjo in Higurashi 'cause he's a violent, criminal scumbag, Kinzo Ushiromiya in Umineko 'cause he's a toxic, demented madman, and Rena's dad in Higurashi Meguri 'cause what the actual Hell, man!?!?

10. The Curse Killing Chapter in Higurashi, Turn of the Golden Witch in Umineko, and pretty much all of Higurashi Sotsu except for the Curse Revealing Chapter 'cause that actually had some amazing shit in it.

11. Kyosuke Irie. He's got more depth in the original work and the anime did him so dirty with the excess of "lolicon/pedo" jokes with him. The guy's a skeevy creep with an attraction to minors and a maid fetish, but NOT an active perv or child molestor!

12. Again, the Curse Revealing Chapter in Sotsu. I get the turnoff of "Satoko faking her own abuse to both her friends and her former abuser" as a premise, but whenever the focus was on the Houjos, Ooishi, and the Witches, it was surprisingly solid and emotional.

13. Erika Furudo barely did anything wrong. Yes, even the objectively terrible things she did were all part of the role she was meant to play, don't hold it against her.

14. Some of the really need to try and read deeper into the work they're engaging with. WTC BEGS for its fans to read deeper, otherwise the whole "game" between Ryukishi07 and the fans is uneven and out of balance.

15. That said, Ryukishi07 really did need to minimalize his involvement in the franchise after Umineko. We've seen it can be done in a good way with Meguri, and in a bad way with Gou/Sotsu.

16. I can't answer this! Whatever fixes I might propose, the franchise usually makes all those fixes for me!

17. Similar answer to the above.

19. Ableists, misogynists, child haters, abuse apologists, and just hateful people in general who really have no place in this fandom.

22. None. Popular characters earn their popularity here!

23. "Unpopular" is a stretch, but...SATOKO. I loved her in the OG series, I love her in the spinoffs, and I still love her as a gaslighting gatekeeping girlboss Lambda prototype witch, particularly in Meguri. Fuck all the haters!

25. I like the idea behind the ending of Sotsu, but it really needed a ton more work to refine it and I hope that Meguri will eventually deliver next year.

26. Sayo Yasuda, obviously! She's got more than one persona for it!

27. Kinzo. What he did to his secret daughter is a dealbreaker there.

[ultraericthered]

Random Higurashi Thoughts

In spite of Higurashi Gou/Sotsu’s many, many, MANY faults, I did surprisingly like its ending and appreciated the ideas behind it. And while I think Satoshi got robbed and that they needed to make time for him, one thing I did like seeing is that after Rika and Satoko parted ways, that so easily could have been the last we saw of either girl. But Satoko gets a final scene...and it’s shared with her uncle Teppei and her “Nee-Nee” Shion. Witch!Satoko’s not feeling it with these two so she takes leave, but to human Satoko, they’re family.

There’s just something super wholesome about that considering what these two characters, in prior diverging world fragments, were quite particularly known for in terms of how they interacted with Satoko. 

Y’know? Like this:

and this:

It’s admitedly not as much a surprise with Shion, who’s not only still young (and was so when she abused and killed Satoko in those fragments) but showed her capacity for growing close, loving, and protective towards Satoko before in the original story. Teppei, on the other hand, is a full grown man who in every fragment has wasted years of his life estranged from his family and becoming this horrible person living a horrible life, being horrible to himself and to others. Think about that: years consumed by isolation, rage, petty crime, achohol, drugs, gambling, a loveless marriage, and abusing his adolescent nephew and niece whenever they were in his care. Wasted time he can never take back since his life took that course in all realities. And in most realities, he stuck to that course and was beyond all hope of salvation. So the idea that all of a sudden, first consistently across several consecutive fragments thanks to Satoko’s looping and then in the final Miracle World that Hanyuu made from all the broken fragments, Teppei had an ephiphany that wised him up, chose to turn his life around, and successfully rehabilitated himself into a model citizen of small town society to the point where he now deeply loves the family he has and would do anything for them, Satoko in particular? There’s just a certain beauty in that, a great way of sending the “sins can always be repented for and forgiven, and it should never be too late to realize your errors and make a change for the better” message that When They Cry has always stood by.

Granted, we could’ve used a little bit less of Teppei than they gave us and definitely much more of Shion. Here’s hoping that the Higurashi Meguri manga manages to find the balance that the anime missed.

[ultraericthered]

Galaxy Brain Moment

Teppei Houjo is honestly kind of like a younger Stanley Pines who never taught himself the most basic stuff for living beyond what’s useful for a life of crime, and went even further and deeper into the criminal world down a much darker path that turned him into a much darker person with a wider cruel streak and without a functioning conscience. It’s implied that up to a point, his life in the Houjo family was very similar to Stanley’s in his family, where Teppei was the underachieving slacker next to his more respectable brother, and eventually he got kicked out and shunned by the rest of the family for being seen as a degenerate low-life (which OK, fair, he was.) But Teppei’s life veered in a very different direction from there, shaping him into a selfish, cowardly, immoral excuse for a man whose self-serving instincts overrode his ability to give a damn about anyone else, let alone his own family members over in Hinamizawa.

So the Teppei we have by the end of Sotsu is actually one who got out of that dark place and became a more Grunkle Stan-esque figure, one who still has his faults and is a big doofus much of the time but would fiercely fight and even lay his life down for his family who he loves. Whereas the Teppei we had beforehand was more along the lines of Stanley Ponds, Stan’s Amphibia counterpart who took his life and career in a darker direction, didn’t have anyone he cared about, and ultimately met a grisly demise with no redemption.

(Side note: even Teppei’s change of outfit in the last episode is oddly poignant, as it’s the first time we have EVER seen him wearing something other than that red Hawaiian shirt. It’s like a signifier that yes, this Teppei Houjo made it back over the morality line and is a good man, like what Teppei became in the Curse Revealing arc but sadly was used by the machinations of villains and got his life cut off right before he could begin to really make good on his change.)

[ultraericthered]

I have to admit that for this one episode at least, I found how Teppei was humanized to be legit kinda fascinating. Beforehand he was always irredeemable and never interesting, more of a plot device and a pure Hate Sink than an actual character, but here we see that while he’s a disgusting, repugnant, unsalvageable wreck of a human being, he still IS a human being with a life of his own just like anyone else. He’s got a lonely, pathetic living situation that’s shut off from most other people (especially those who are actually decent and not crooks like him), he doesn’t take good care of himself, and if given incentive (like he was here) he is actually capable of just enough self-introspection to want to make adjustments to his life, adapt to those adjustments accordingly, and “reform” himself without actually truly changing from the self-serving, opportunistic, and always wanting creature of habit he still is at his core even when on good behavior. He is absolute scum and I want him kept as far away from Satoko and the rest as possible, but I’m a sucker for being able to truly know and at most understand even the most detestable and unforgivable of villains, and it’s pretty clear that Ryukishi07 is as well.

All right, what did we think of today’s episode?

I actually quite liked it. Completely not what I was expecting, and I’m not sure I need that much Teppei screen time in my life, but I appreciated how it subverted our expectations? I’m wondering what this new development in the Houjou family affairs might mean for my theory that maybe Satoko will start to doubt herself in Tataridamashi, and get forced into a bad ending by Not!Featherine/Eua as a result.

I still don’t feel any sympathy for Teppei, but considering that Higurashi is all about sin and forgiveness, I guess it’s not totally out of the bounds that they’d want to explore the humanity of even one of the most irredeemable characters?

I do need more Takano, Rena, and Shion next time round, though!