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tsuisou-no-despair · 3 years

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Higurashi When They Cry: Gou -My “Final” Thoughts

Since we’re getting a second season - and it’s so obvious that Gou was written as the first half of the story - I find it hard to rate Gou at this point in time. Do you remember how when Avengers: Infinity War came out and a lot of critics were like “well, we need to see Endgame before we can really make our judgements”? Yeah, it’s like that - hence why “final” is in quotes.

Even so, I still have some thoughts about Gou, Higurashi as a whole, and my experiences with getting in on something’s fandom. I’ll make a post for what I want out of Sotsu later - right now, here’s what I have for Gou.

What I Liked About Gou

Most of it, honestly! I enjoyed Gou greatly and I’m glad I sat down and gave it a watch. (This may be heresy, but I honestly found it better as an experience than the last airing-weekly anime thing I sat down and watched - that being Mob Psycho 100 Season 2) But as for the stuff unique to Gou thatI particularly liked:

First off, having a new Higurashi anime that’s actually good. We needed something like this after Outbreak, Kira and (to a much lesser extent) the non-Saikoroshi parts of Rei pushed the series deeper and deeper into a trash can.

I love the new art style and the new designs for the characters. There’s a lot of good in DEEN’s adaptation, but a lot of the time the art left something to be desired. Passione’s take on Hinamizawa gave us a cast that can be cute and beautiful and terrifying all while looking good.

There’s also a lot of really good cinematography - the shot used in the GIF above left me going ‘holy shit”.

The new themes are a triple threat of bangers. In particular I loved that they brought in Ayane to really give it a deeper tie to Higurashi as a greater franchise. (The best of these, of course, is Irregular Entropy)

Episode 4′s twist. Just... *chef’s kiss*. I know that people poked it apart and called it ridiculous after the fact but I don’t know if the feeling of dread when Rena’s eyes were hidden by shadow, and I realized that this wasn’t going to end well, is something I could ever really recapture.

Speaking of violence, the ending of Episode 13. The dull red light... the ringing bell... good stuff.

In retrospect, creating Tataridamashi by bringing in Minagoroshi was smart, specifically from a character-introduction standpoint. They needed to establish the existence of Kimiyoshi, Oryou and Akane for later parts of the story and dipping into Minagoroshi’s involvement of them is probably the easiest way to do it.

In general, Gou’s really smart about its character introductions. I didn’t think they’d bring in Akasaka but I’m honestly really pleased with how they did it.

SatoRika was confirmed! And was really cute... until it extremely wasn’t! (But in a good way!)

The fact that Satoko and Rika’s conflict at St. Lucia was so nuanced, with neither of them really being 100% right or 100% wrong. (Of course, this doesn’t last)

I might be slightly conflicted about Satokowashi as an arc, but none of those conflicts are with Eua. (The “FUCK YEAH FEATHERINE TIME” from Twitter was particularly tasty)

The dub! I know a lot of people are ambivalent towards the Gou dub but I for one am happy that we’ve got some great performances, as well as a Higurashi dub that’s actually good. Maybe not great, but far better than what DEEN got in the end.

This Shion face

This is the face of someone that’s going to wreck her sister’s chances with her new boyfriend for fun.

What I Didn’t Like About Gou

Watadamashi in general. This is easily the weakest arc by a long shot, which sucks because I like Watanagashi-hen quite a bit. A lot of the time, it just felt like the animators had chose it as the place to cut costs. As good as the Takano scene in the Saiguiden is, it’s one of the things that makes the least sense in retrospect given the changes to Takano that have been established in Gou. And Episode 8 was rough both from a pacing and a what-happened standpoint. While Watadamashi had some great moments (the above Shion face as well as Rika dressing down Keiichi), overall it was clearly the weakest arc, particularly after Shion left the picture.

The pacing of Gou in general left something to be desired at times - they really should’ve shifted the extra episode in the first cour from Tataridamashi to Watadamashi, and Satokowashi could’ve probably condensed some of its episodes down and gave more room to other things, like...

Satoshi. He really shouldn’t have been as absent from the series as he was - hell, until Ep. 9 I legitimately thought that he might’ve been cut from the story altogether (and honestly, if they did that maybe the story would have been better!)

On that note, Episode 22 just kinda sucked in general.

While I’m not on the “where’s Shion” train as heavily as some meme artists are, I do think that the fact that she had to be written out of the second cour entirely to make it work is one of Gou’s story’s objective faults.

There’s a lot of little details added or addressed in Satokowashi-hen that I feel are either less than good, or are just restrictive. The big two of these is Satoko watching all of the fragments (either Eua should’ve just given her a sample platter, or we should’ve seen more of Satoko’s thoughts and reactions) and the fact that the memories returning means that eventually Hinamizawa would end up “solved” without Satoko’s intervention.

Honestly, Gou’s finale needed a bit more punch - it wasn’t bad but honestly even for a halfway point it could have ended with a bit more of a bang.

The Fandom Side Of Things

First off, I want to preface this by saying thanks for following me, taking my theories into account (it always feels cool whenever I see something I threw into the aether in one of my Theory Times getting adopted and spread by someone else as an interesting idea!) and sticking with me through Gou and hopefully through Sotsu. You are all amazing and I love you all.

After Watadamashi concluded, I decided that my Higurashi bullshit needed its own sideblog, because I recognized that nobody in my other circles was even remotely into Higurashi and I didn’t want to shout into the void. So, I made myself a sideblog, named it after one of my favorite Higurashi console openings, and started posting my thoughts. Quickly I discovered a whole world of theories (”Satoko’s suspicious? I never would have thought of that!” - me, a young and naive fool), hot takes, and a surprising number of Rena kin. (Who are all delightful, I assure you!)

One of the things that stuck out to me was the different schools of opinion that formed. While I ended up as a relatively quiet analyst who overall liked Gou despite its flaws (a camp shared by two of my favorite blogs - @tarhalindur and @thewhitefluffyhat - that you need to follow if you don’t already), there were many others who had much stronger thoughts. Some of them were loudly cheering the story’s turns, while others seemed to decide that Gou could do no right and acted accordingly. Joining a Discord run by one of the larger Higurashi blogs on Tumblr gave me a live view of the process in Satokowashi’s later half, and it made me really realize what shaped people’s views on Gou. Some particular factors that caught my eye:

Whether or not they liked Umineko over Higurashi (mostly a Twitter element - the Umineko fans really enjoyed Eua making her appearance and overall reacted really positively to Gou)

Where they hailed from - honestly I think that Tumblr overall was one of the more positive fanbases for Gou (at least of the big concrete places like it and Reddit), given how the various camps thought of Gou’s eventual villain.

How they felt about Episode 16 - there were a lot of people that seriously felt that Rika learning the “lesson” of “maybe leaving the hometown where bad things happened isn’t the right call” was far, far more abhorrent and objectionable than the part where she got her entrails ripped out!

How they feel about Satoko, naturally - particularly, how much they sympatized with her and how much they didn’t want to see her go down the path she did. Tumblr in particular had a lot of people that related with her and her life situation, and it was never not interesting to see how the sympathy and occasional projection shaped someone’s particular thoughts. (There were some strong reactions to Gou showing an abuse victim becoming an even worse abuser, let me tell you.)

I think I’ll conclude these final thoughts by quoting my IRL best friend’s tags regarding the fandom of her choice:

It really is. And I’m glad I got on this ride and saw it through with all of you.

See you in July.

#higurashi #higurashi when they cry #higurashi gou #higurashi gou spoilers #higurashi gou thoughts #higurashi gou FINAL thoughts #i'll admit I'm still a little sad that satoko never killed anyone with that teddy bear #also i'm 100% going to keep posting and theorizing up to and beyond july don't you worry

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