#Teppei Houjo

[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]

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]

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]

Same energy.

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

[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]

Meme based on the last two episodes of Higurashi Gou.

In Sotsu, however...

[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]

I wanna make this perfectly clear

This is someone being SINCERELY remorseful and repentant:

This, by contrast, is NOT:

(And then when he happens upon Satoko, he gets these looks:)

(Thoughts translation: “Yes. My little niece who I always treated like garbage, YES. She’s my second chance. If I just do better by her, she can be my ticket to a better life for myself!”)

(Without any semblance of apology for his past abuse of her, he starts acting nice and tries to insert himself back into Satoko’s life.)

(And when later asked why he’s acting like a decent person now)

(All the things he says, tactics he uses, and subtle insistence that Satoko should accept his offer to let him back into her life so that they can play happy family together even after all the traumatic shit he put her through further shows that Teppei seeks self improvement not because he’s TRULY sorry and wants his victim to be better off, but because he’s afraid of karma and wants himself to be better off. Fuck Teppei Houjo, always.)

[robbyrobinson]

Brief Thoughts on EP 23

Huh. So at the least I guess it makes sense why Takano did not go along with her plans if Satoko’s unwittingly influencing the fragments. 

Teppei’s change...kind of out of left field after he had been nothing but an abusive asshole for a good decade. If there is actually some good reason for it, like perhaps Teppei being “good” here is supposed to be the key for Satoko to start letting things of the past go along with Rika, I would be less critical. 

And Eua? Come on, Ryukishi07, it is obvious that is Featherine; just admit it.

[ultraericthered]

When They Cry

Higurashi:

blorbo - Shion and Mion Sonozaki. Damn, what is it with me and super precious twin sisters?

scrunkly - Hanyuuauauauauauuu Furude, of course! Though Rena Ryugu would have to be a very close second.

scrimblo bimblo - Dr. Irie. I blame the anime exaggerating his perversion and fetishes to stupid levels just like what happened to Battler in the Umineko anime later on.

glup shitto - My man, Tetsuro Okonogi!

poor little meow meow - Both the evil curse masterminds, Miyo Takano and Satoko Houjo.

horse plinko - Rika Furude! Wait no, that's the answer I'd give if I was Satoko in Gou/Sotsu. Uuuh, no one?

eeby deeby - The fucking Orphanage Staff Leader from Takano's backstory. Vile, inhumane bastard. And most loop iterations of Teppei Houjo prior to Sotsu can join him there, too!

Umineko:

blorbo - Lambdadelta. Super Paper Witch of Certainty!

scrunkly - Primarily Maria, but it's pretty close when Shannon, Erika Furudo, and Dlanor A Knox also exist.

scrimblo bimblo - Jessica Ushiromiya. She rocks!

glup shitto - Ange Ushiromiya and all 7 Sisters/Stakes of Purgatory, with Willard Wright and Lion Ushiromiya coming in close behind them.

poor little meow meow - Beato, Bernkastel, and Erika.

horse plinko - Battler. I love the guy, but how can I NOT say him when Beato makes tormenting him look like such fun?

eeby deeby - Kinzo Ushiromiya. Shut up about your "BEATOOOORIIIIICEEEE!" already, you sick geezer!