A Spoiler-Filled Fan Review of Higurashi: Sotsu

Now that I have finished both Gou and Sotsu, one thing I can say for certain is this meeting could have just been an email. 39 episodes just to showcase a squabble between Satoko and Rika was way too much.

Sotsu has gotten a lot of flack from other fans for being “basically just the same as Gou with a few more details thrown in,” but Gou’s arcs are the same as the original series with predictable twists that didn’t have any impact on the stories until the last few minutes of their episodes. The most significant changes are exposition dumped on us at the very end. It’s not necessarily a bad thing that the story beats are predictable, but they failed to use that predictability to their advantage. Since I knew this was a sequel going in, I could guess Rena was going to become an antagonist in Onidamashi and I could similarly guess Mion in Watadamashi. I admit I didn’t guess we were going to see Ooishi, Akane, Akasaka, or Kimiyoshi become antagonists, but the only one of those storylines that’s worthwhile is Ooishi’s- and that one doesn’t evolve beyond “shock value” until Sotsu. One of the ways Higurashi did so well at balancing its cast was by using the characters’ breakdowns to reveal more about them- their personalities, world views, home life, backstories- and I can’t imagine characters who could be more intriguing to learn more about than Akane and Kimiyoshi. They could have been used to give so much more context to the state of Hinamizawa by the time Keiichi moves in. Instead, they just have breakdowns that generically fit the menial characterization they’re given and have little impact on the story except for a couple minutes worth of shock value. What wasted potential.

I was surprised to find out how many fans loved Gou but hated Sotsu; my experience has been the opposite. At least Sotsu gave us something more than a few uninspired episodes where the goal looks like “eh, try not to have to do too much more animating than we already have” followed by expository dialogue. This is an unpopular opinion, but in terms of story arcs, Gou and Sotsu should have just been Sotsu. We didn’t need to see these stories in Keiichi’s POV. They also really over-estimated how interested people would be in watching a story that really just boiled down to “these two friends are in a quarrel and need to have a conversation about it.”

The solution for this whole thing is really just for them to hear each other out through the blows of a shounen-style battle.

In either case, there seems to be a general consensus that including both arcs resulted in a net negative to the viewing quality. Even I can’t say I was particularly excited to watch Sotsu; it took me over a week to watch just 15 episodes, and Tatariakashi was somehow both the most different from its source material and presentation in Gou and the most boring to watch. The most interesting aspect of it is the ending, because we find out in Sotsu that the ending we saw in Gou was not what actually happened- Teppei was well and truly dead by the time Keiichi showed up and it was Satoko who bludgeoned him to death- which led me to think they were trying to tell us that not all the scenes reflected reality, similar to how Umineko worked- but they went nowhere with that. It added nothing but doubt on the other “unconfirmed” endings. Did Keiichi really survive all those arcs? If so, why? If not, why did Satoko want us to think he did? Until I watched her gleefully beat him to a pulp, I thought she let him live because she was sentimental about him as her surrogate older brother. This speculation also adds nothing.

The epilogue for Matsuribayashi-hen could have been a good opportunity for wish fulfilment and redemption. I wanted to see Satoshi come home more than anything, but if the 7th expansion wanted to work in redemption arcs for characters like Teppei and Rina, I would have been excited for that. Instead, I felt like both the characters and myself were robbed by having those stories presented in these arcs.

The more I think about the ending, the more I’m convinced we weren’t supposed to care. We were meant to see the ending resolution of Rika and Satoko pursuing their separate interests independently with the comfort of knowing they’ll meet again under the span of their eternal lives as a happy ending without them having paid any respect to what Satoko did whatsoever. While neither of them were entirely in the right, Satoko didn’t just retaliate against Rika. The rest of the games club squad doesn’t get to “just go to another Hinamizawa,” and she caused their deaths, dismemberment, and trauma in an untold number of worlds. At least Rika gets some self-awareness about that and she wasn’t even the one causing it throughout the main series. Not to mention- this was such a counter-productive way to make Rika fall so in love with Hinamizawa that she’d never want to leave again, by making more horrors occur there. I can see why Satoko was failing at St. Lucia’s.

The only sense I can make of this is that they were going for a more light-hearted slasher- but it feels so disrespectful to be given all the lore of Gou and Sotsu in a story we weren’t otherwise meant to take seriously.

That said, there are some reasons why I might recommend some fans of Higurashi and Umineko watch the series, not the least of which is the lore. There is plenty to speculate about who Eua is and whether Satoko truly did give rise to Lambdadelta- not to mention, there are a couple of worthwhile stories mixed in with the rest of this mess. If this really is the story they wanted to tell us for Lambda’s backstory, it is disappointing but no less cannon. However, it seems they’re too afraid to fully commit to this concept. Ryukishi, not explicitly telling us the identity of the culprit but going far enough in using impressions and symbolism worked for Umineko only because you put a lot of effort into that alternative story-telling style, but you’re eventually going to have to start confirming identities and story-beats if you’re not putting that work in. It’s starting to feel like you’re only leaving things ambiguous to hit us with a twist later on, and after the ham-fisted twists I’ve seen from Gou and Sotsu, I no longer trust you to handle those twists respectfully.

Unfortunately, if these arcs do not provide us with Lambdadelta’s backstory, they’re pointless.