#you don't have to egregiously adapt the real horror stories of real people's lives! you can simply write your own story

[thewingedwolf]

it is funny that the new menendez show has started people on the “are they making erik gay/is erik menendez gay” thing as if his sexuality wasn’t a key part of the hoopla surrounding the trial bc it was the 90s and the idea that erik menendez was ~turned gay~ by sexual abuse or was secretly like some sort of gay freak and that’s why he murdered his parents, was way more digestible to the general public than the reality that being sexually abused by both his parents for his entire life might have massively impacted the way he views sex and relationships

[96percentdone]

if you don't mind me asking, what problems do you have with the Higurashi anime adaption? I also prefer the visual novel but can never really articulate my criticisms with the anime, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts

Well first for a start it’s just ugly as sin. Let’s just get that out of the way. Season one in particular looks like it was made on a budget of ten dollars. It looks bad even for 2006 standards, but y’know I could live with an ugly adaptation if it was at least faithful to the source material. But that’s just it…it’s not. 

The Higurashi anime isn’t unfaithful in a technical sense. Many of the events that happen in the original visual novel do happen in the anime in some form (even if enough was taken out that they had to add a new arc but WHATEVER). That isn’t the problem. The problem is the entire focus of the anime adaptation, particularly in the first season, is centered on making higurashi into super horror, that in doing so it cuts out the emotional core. This will be long, so under the cut.

Let’s use Onikakushi as a case study. Now if we go by steam achievements, the original visual novel is around 12 chapters, although chapters are usually split in halves. Each chapter, for me and most people I know, takes about an hour to read, so about 12 hours of content. The anime adapted all of onikakushi in 4 episodes. Twelve hours of content shoved in four 25 minute episodes, give or take. That is 3 hours worth of content expected to be in one episode. You are already seeing the start of a problem.

Now, to be fair, a lot of the length of the higurashi vn can be attributed to the fact that it is a book. Much of what you read is just Keiichi’s inner monologue where he describes events or his own thoughts and feelings, and in adapting those in anime, you can show them taking much less time. But even with that said, three chapters of onikakushi is still too much to reasonably shove into a 25 minute frame, and it shows. 

Let’s start with the prologue of Onikakushi in the anime. It’s 30 seconds and already everything is wrong about it. 

That is obviously Keiichi. See, in the original vn, the prologue is a monologue that starts in complete darkness before cutting to a shot of the evening sky. We never see who is killing, or who they’re killing. We can only infer that’s what’s happening based on the sounds of a baseball bat and some of the phrasing in the monologue. 

This first scene is entirely ambiguous in the original VN, which works in it’s favour. You start off confused and concerned, and gradually forget as it progresses and more things start happening, until finally Keiichi wakes up from a dazed trance later in the arc to find Rena and Mion on the floor, and you realise “oh fuck so that’s what that scene was.” Everything you experienced was building to that, and it makes so much sense now.

But again, this is obviously Keiichi in the anime. And there’s shots of Rena’s hat, or her hair, or her and Mion’s dead bodies, and there is no ambiguity. The start of this scene is alright, as it’s entirely silhouettes and the room is dark, but shortly after you just see everything. Immediately after this scene when you meet Rena and Keiichi for real you realise “okay he’s gonna kill her” and there’s no suspense. You already know how it ends. 

But that’s not even the biggest problem. The problem is the focus of this scene has entirely changed. You see everything he’s doing, you can hear his heavy breathing, and get shots of his crazy eyes–emotionally it’s just “wow look at this crazy guy kill some people.” It’s entirely horror centered.

But the original visual novel was not like that. Take the first two lines of the whole thing:

This is entirely about how Keiichi feels in that moment. Sure, Keiichi is behaving like someone insane, but the scene wasn’t about that at the start. It was about the emotions he felt. His despair and his regret–all of his turmoil. It’s an emotional scene because the only sounds you hear at the bat and cicadas, and you know a murder is happening, but it’s also tragic just from the narration alone. Unnerving, and sad.

This doesn’t just set the tone for the arc, this sets the tone for the series. Higurashi is not just a horror visual novel, it is largely a series of tragedies. Of friends who fall so deep into their paranoia they start killing each other despite how much they care. The center of Higurashi as a series, is the emotional investment the core cast has in each other. Higurashi is about bonds, and tragedies, and overcoming them, with a horror setting. It is not about horror. 

And from the opening scene of the anime, I get no sense of tragedy whatsoever. Nothing about those first 30 seconds reads as tragic. I don’t get the sense Keiichi cares about the people he killed, I don’t get the sense I’m even supposed to care. Immediately I’m told to treat this like a horror gore fest, and so I do. The anime starts by setting the entirely wrong tone, and then continues with it.

Immediately after this they skip the “someone is apologising” scene, which yeah sure anime, go ahead and skip a scene vital to clueing us in to Keiichi’s mental state and sets up the big words of the arc sure why not, and cuts to happy fun shenanigans. Except club games and the like in the anime adaptation are either severely cut down for time, montaged like every watanagashi, or skipped entirely.

In Onikakushi, the only club event we even see in any meaningful way is the Old Geezer game, and that’s abridged to hell and back. We hardly spend any time actually getting to know or having fun with the characters. Sometimes events are fun events are fused together too, so the character introductions for Rika and Satoko happen on the day Keiichi is getting his tour, vs earlier in the narrative in class.

And hell those introductions are also egregious, because Keiichi monologues in them. His internal monologue describing how he just moved here is fine, but instead of like seeing the attributes of Rena and Mion like he describes, he just…talks over scenes of them actually doing the things. In effect, the anime has both show and tell happening, but tells you to focus on him telling you about Rena and Mion etc. Again, it’s hard to get invested in Keiichi’s friendship with the club if instead of showing it to you, they just tell you about it.

In the visual novel, Keiichi’s monologuing about the kind of person his friends are for a bit was fine, because it’d spend waaayyy more time actually showing them as people and their dynamics. Him telling you that was backed by scene after scene after scene, except the anime abridges, cuts down, or cuts out entire scenes for this, so again, how am I supposed to care when things go badly?

The anime priorities the horror aspects of Higurashi. Most of the run time of the second episode is focused on the horror scenes. The festival shenanigans are montaged, the president club game was entirely skipped, and the clue one (which granted much of it didn’t happen) was made even shorter to prioritise Ooishi. Again, this makes the show feel like it’s not about the characters and their connections, but it’s about creepy shit and horror, and none of that was ever the point of Higurashi.

Season 2 is better than season one, because they aren’t trying to cram 6 arcs in 26 episodes but 3 in 24, which gives them more time to expand on characters, but the damage is already done. Six entire arcs were already adapted with the entirely wrong priorities, so it ends up feeling unbalanced when suddenly in Kai what matters is how good friends they are and how much they want to fight fate and all that. It’s already far too late.

Even the horror scenes in the visual novel, have a level of emotional turmoil and conflict you don’t see in the anime because the anime is too focused on scaring you, like the scene in the prologue. You never get the sense Keiichi is conflicted about how to view his friends, that he’s hurt by it. You don’t see him cry, or debate if his friends are just possessed, or if they care about him at all or not. In the anime, when Keiichi killed his friends for real this time, I didn’t feel sad. I didn’t know I was supposed to care, because no time was spent making me care by showing who they are when it’s not creepy, or even making me even think Keiichi cares through his reactions.

That’s why it fails as an adaptation.  The Higurashi anime is bad because it gives you the entirely wrong sense of what the show is about. It’s not about the horror, or even about the mystery: it’s about the people in it, and the emotions they feel. And those people, those emotions, that connection that is so essential to why Higurashi works and the story it’s trying to tell, is lost through a reprioritizing. 

And honestly I could go in harder about how this affects pacing, because shifting the focus to give more time with the horror messes with the balance of how the horror is even supposed to hit you. Or how they cut out key details to the mystery through poor adaptation choices, or how the lack of time and budget seriously hampers it’s potential, or it’s crimes against specific characters like Satoko just because of how it’s adapted, but I don’t really need to. Those are all just a result of changing what the focus of the series is. That’s why the anime is bad. Because it doesn’t actually carry the essence of what makes Higurashi Higurashi.