#and then hanyuu but nope she’s a god

[lemonthepotato]

[anchorshots]

...that sure was an ending! as disappointing as sotsu has been... it’s been fun, keeping up with everyone’s reactions and theory crafting and even just throwing my own thoughts into the ring. i’m definitely gonna miss higurashi thursdays, even if the product in question was... well, not the best quality? 

the stuff i loved about the ending: 

that gorgeous rendition of you playing at the end

the beauty of springtime hinamizawa (those cherry trees, oh my god???)

okonogi looking smug as hell because he's off to start a food distribution company and get in with the ushiromiya family

smol eua was very smol

SATOSHI WOKE UP HOLY SHIT

SHION GOT SCREENTIME HOLY SHIT

the message from the club that it’s okay if friends grow apart and don’t see each other all the time; they’re still friends at the end of the day, no matter where life takes them. 

the stuff i didn’t love: 

... a lot, honestly, but a lot of my issues with the last episode have to do with my issues with sotsu as a whole? so much of it just felt... rushed and kind of unearned? i think a lot of my feelings can be summed up as “cool ideas, awful execution”. 

this could’ve been really good, but either r07 yeeted the ball down like 34 flights of stairs when it came to giving passione his outline, or they did while adapting it. something went wrong there, and i think the push to market sotsugyou as newcomer friendly shot the entire project in the foot; we spend so much time retreading old ground that the new material barely has time to breathe and stand on its own, and any newcomers were just told “you really wanna go back and read the vn/read the manga/watch the anime before starting gou” anyways, so like... why bother with that?  

in any case, i really like what tomato akase’s been doing with the gou manga, so i have higher hopes for higurashi jun. hopefully its conclusion will be less of a trainwreck than sotsu! as it is, unless jun pulls off some gotdam miracles, i... am still not considering this canon to OUR matsuribayashi. maybe some other matsuribayashi fragment had all this happen, but the one we saw in the original series? nope. (there are happy st lucia timelines in mei, after all, so like... yeah.)

i think that’s all i really have to say, but i’ve rambled a bit more under the cut just... i dunno, to clear my head and process what i watched?

i was all for redeeming satoko in the end, but... one (1) round of looper thunderdome, a dbz/touhou inspired miko battle, then punching the heck out of each other in the river... does not feel like enough from what they’ve shown us?

if they’d built up to this moment more in the answer arcs by showing more of satoko’s hesitation, her guilt, any horror at what she’s doing to her friends, her desperately assuring herself that none of this will matter when rika finally, finally stays and they can all be happy... then led up to the tatariakashi breakdown and teppei murder where she kills off all of those conflicting feelings to win the game as quickly as possible so all of this can stop... i dunno, i feel like it’d be easier to stomach her being forgiven without question? like, the teppei and sea of fragments scenes were clearly meant to convey she’s been feeling like this the entire time- but when we actually saw satoko on her own, we got one scene of her being sad she pushed rena into murder, then it was all mustache twirling villainy from there on out until teppei?

or, hell, i’d have taken seeing her having to account for unexpected problems in her plans and adapt on the fly more. like... the biggest problems she encountered apart from the teppei guilt situation were to do with mion taking longer to go off the deep end ( requiring needling on her end to push mion into a more fragile state where she’d act out ), then having no idea whether mion had killed rika or not once the tragedy was kicked off. apart from that... there was nothing? she was totally in control the whole time? everything went according to plan 95% of the time? i get it, i get it, certainty(tm), but certainty isn’t an instant win button. certainty is perseverance. certainty is overcoming every single setback thrown at you and clawing your way to the top in the face of adversity. hard work and an iron will go rewarded. you know... takano’s entire thing? 

also... uh... how’d they get yeeted back into the original matsuribayashi fragment from the miko battle fragment? and... after the advice session from the club, did they just off themselves to do it over and go their separate ways properly? or can they just hop at will now without dying? huh??????????? 

lambda 100% split off from satoko in the ending, though, that’s for sure. i guess time is wonky in the sea of fragments, or as someone on reddit put it, lambda existing before bern was misdirection??? 

i guess my big question is where exactly bern split off from rika. saikoroshi was supposed to be the big split, but sotsugyou being where lambda split - and rika’s actions throughout the series, as well as their parting words - suggests that bern was still in there somewhere. maybe it was an incomplete split in saikoroshi, then sotsugyou finished it off? i dunno. 

also what the hell was that final eua-hanyuu battle. like, you go hanyuu, but... it was so anticlimactic, she deserved better.  

also kind of sad we didn’t get to see the satoshi-satoko and shion reunion but like,,, that makes sense. he just just woke up, boy’s not stepping out of that clinic for a while yet. still, i wish they’d done his scene first with irie in the room, then while irie was idk, stepping out to get something he needed, saw takano and tomitake come in and said something about how happy satoko would be to hear this... i dunno. just to allude to the fact that satoko has more in her life than rika. nii-nii’s back! once he’s confirmed safe to be around, she’ll be able to come see him! shion can, too!

god. i just. s i g h. 

it just sucks seeing my favourite series of all time treated so carelessly. maaaan...

i don’t think i hate sotsugyou. it had great ideas, but its flaws... hoo boy, they were flaaaaaaaws.

[doublelsatan]

So that’s how it ends... I didn’t expect anything less. [Spoilers]

Sotsu is finally done, it has ended. And what an episode that was... Boy, what an episode. Let’s dive into that.

So Rika just tosses the sword into the river like trash to beat up Satoko. What? You mean to tell me Rika just abandoned all of her suffering, hate, memories, countless efforts for a good end just to smack some sense into her best friend? The answer is yes. I guess Rika is more mature than I expected and really cares about her friends as much as she does. Huge props to her honestly, that’s a lot of will power to have in order to make sure you can have a perfect world for yourself.

But how in the ever living space of time did Hanyuu know Rika would do that in order to use it on Eua? Seriously, how? She called upon it like mjolnir which was both cool and dumb. Cool cause I can’t deny dope weapon summoning when I see it. I’m a sucker for it. Dumb because I really didn’t think she would be linked to it like that. Though, it would make sense her daughter used it on her so it might be linked that way or it is her true weapon of sorts. I don’t know. Just was a meh moment. However the fight for it was so disappointing. Was a matter of seconds and done. With the result of Eua bailing cause the miracle happened. Sure, I’ll take it but I don’t like it. But small Eua is the best thing to come from it. True form, Gremlin God.

Also, Keiichi, Mion, and Rena being the voice of truth to resolve the debacle of our two main loopers was nice but felt empty. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good lesson to use with life. A really good one. Just having those three explain it felt so weird. Since the fact of their story of being around each other forever and having the wisdom to know about separate ways is good for you. It would make more sense if it was Akasaka or Tomitake since they pop in and out of Hinamizawa but still have a good relationship with certain people there. Then again Mion would be the best example because of Shion. Separated twins but still have a good relationship between them. Either way, just a weird lesson given by them.

The last thing that made it me “I’ve seen enough miracles today,” was Satoko and Satoshi. Man, Satoshi got the worst of it here let’s be honest. In a coma the whole time, basically forgotten by Satoko so she can get what she wanted, and comes back once the perfect world has been set. Damn, that’s so messed up. It’s gonna be neat to see him engage a reformed Teppei though. Sadly that won’t be an arc for us to see here. Missed opportunity. As for Satoko, the good/real one is back now? Okay... Sure, thanks evil version for this miracle. So many hecking miracles in this one episode is more than a Disney film. And those run on miracles only. Geez, I just can’t deal with the evil version just dipping because of all the wholesome energy. Plus, we saw the good version get shot straight to the head up close. That was done for convenience sake of everything being good in that world. It had to be perfect. Because the hero’s won so they get that fantastic ending they’ve been striving for since day 1.

Honestly, this episode was just a rushed mess and we can all see it. I’m sure they had more plans to do different things with the series but only had so many episodes. I was straight up hoping for Mion, Shion, Keiichi, and Rena to remember everything and be against Rika and Satoko for having them suffer due to looping. But nope, missed opportunity. But I can’t fully complain since the team was able to produce the series to its best with their limited resources. Overall turned out really nice and I enjoyed it. So thanks Ryukishi07 and your team for bringing us another Higurashi to enjoy. We got a happy graduation.