Absolutely living for this.
Anyway before I talk about Higurashi episode 2, I wanna give a quick shout to the like 2 or 3 people that either replied or reblogged my episode 1 post with comments about how it’s interesting seeing the perspective of someone who’s not really familiar with the series. Happy to hear people say that, and comments like that make me want to write a lot about each episode in hopes of giving people a unique perspective and not disappointing them, or something. Yeah. I’ll do my best.
So as for the actual episode, I liked it a lot. What prevents Rena from murdering Keiichi as last episode teased is simply him noticing her, though since he’d asked for a saw to help free Sanders anyway, he’s not really sus and nobody gets murdered. I’m quite ready to accept that excuse, and I think a lot of that’s to do with the fact that like, if you’re fuckin, however old Keiichi is, and you’re just hanging in this chilled out village in the Japanese countryside, how likely is it that you’d actually suspect the people around you of being fucked up murderers or something? Rena might make a rather unsettling face, but is Keiichi seriously gonna fucking accuse her of being up to murderous shit? I feel like murder and shit are so detached from most of us that the idea of being so close to it feels unrealistic, and even in Keiichi's shoes where there are context clues, it would still feel farfetched enough to where I don’t expect him to seriously fear for his life or anything. Now obviously we know what’s up, but I do think the setting and tone of the show justify how Keiichi acts here.
I also think that tone is good for allowing certain slice of life scenes to really flourish. So in this episode we play zombie tag, which would honestly be innocuous enough in even the most genuinely innocent slice of life show imaginable. But I mean we do sorta know already that fucked up shit goes on here, that the population are murderers covering up their murders. So even though the zombie tag scene is genuinely a slice of life thing without anything deeper going on under the surface, the characters don’t really want to eat everyone’s innards or something, it still feels quite uncomfortable anyway, and I think that’s cool.
Now I wanna go back to Keiichi and that saw for a second, because this episode does numerous things to basically confirm that this is a timeloop for me. One such thing is that as Keiichi's hammering down on those planks to save our boy Colonel Sanders, he gets a brief flashback of the scene that the first episode opened on of him hammering Rena’s skull in. So that scene wasn’t the show starting at its chronological end or something, that scene happened before where we are now.
Another big confirmation is that the episode opens on Rika being in what I think was called the Shards of the Myriad World or something? Probably should’ve written it down. And she has a conversation with someone close to her whose name was I think Manyuu? Also should’ve written it down. And Manyuu basically tells her “hey you’re going to June 1983 again” and Rika’s all “it’s been nearly 100 years”. Or something to that effect. Maybe I should’ve written that down too. Regardless of the specifics, the scene makes it fairly clear that June of 1983 is the time period that presumably everyone’s looping, and Rika is directly confirmed to know about that fact to some degree.
And I’m assuming we’ll find out some more of the specifics of Rika’s position soon. Because aside from the opening scene being about her, the actual OP of the show features her very prominently too. I guess each girl gets an arc and their own OP for their arc, which is pretty cool. Also, she gets to do some stage performance thing for their festival, which is an important role so like, more evidence that this’ll be her arc. Good looking performance, caught me off guard that it wasn’t CG at all since I’m just used to that this season.
And then moving on from Rika for a second, the last big piece of evidence I have to justify why I think this show is a timeloop is uh
This shot from the ED, which sorta speaks for itself.
And then speaking of ED speculation...
This shot implies to me that Satoko is a victim of some form of abuse. Possibly sexually from a parent or ‘trusted’ adult figure? She looks like she’s being groomed anyway, and she’s definitely not happy with that. We’ll see eventually I suppose.
And what I’m guessing from this is that Rena’s probably dad is a drunk. It’s not clear if he’s on top of someone but he’s definitely elevated from the ground so maybe he’s having sex with someone too. All that alcohol could suggest that he’s drunk, or the woman he’s with is drunk, potentially he got her drunk and is maybe raping her? Satoko’s shot suggests rape to me so maybe they won’t use that plot point twice and instead what’s being implied here is just that her dad’s broadly negligent. Again we’ll find out eventually I asssume.
And I think that’s all I’ve got to say. Good episode, I had fun, all that stuff.
Cute Rena too.
