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A Higurashi Gou & Sotsu Post-Mortem
🕑 Added 2022-07-30 11:00:09 +0000 UTCHi everyone!!!
After almost nine long months, it’s finally, finally, finally here: A Higurashi Gou & Sotsu Post-Mortem.
What can I say? I thought I’d be really emotional to finally be putting this video out there, but it hasn’t hit me yet. I can’t believe I’ve spent such a big chunk of my life on this project — far, far longer than I ever intended — but I don’t regret it. I’m very, very, very proud of this video. It was both extremely challenging and extremely cathartic to make. It started off as a way to get a few of my miscellaneous thoughts on Gou and Sotsu out there, but before I knew it, I was somehow doing a full retrospective, not just on the shows, but on what they meant for Higurashi, and what they meant for me. If you thought I must’ve been running out of things to say about Higurashi by now, I thought so too, but apparently not. This really is my definitive reflection on and, in many ways, tribute to the series. Even though I speak much more about the original story and what I love about it in other videos and even though this isn’t the last time it’ll show up on my channel, under its surface (and then increasingly less so) this is a video about Higurashi’s place in my life right now, something I can only properly talk about in relation to its most recent entries. So even though I certainly don’t go easy on Gou and particularly Sotsu here, I think you’ll find it’s not a “negative” video. Having managed to strike that balance is also something I’m really proud of. I didn’t know where this video would go when I started it, and I had no intention of forcing a positive conclusion, but… well, I’ll leave you to find out what I have to say!
Thank you from the very bottom of my heart for your immense patience and support over the course of this project. I’m sincerely happy I got to share the journey these shows became with you all through my channel — in so many ways, this video wouldn’t have been possible without you. I’m really excited to hear what you all think and really, really, really hope you enjoy the video.
P.S. I’m going to be collecting questions about the video and the process of making it to answer in a podcast — I’ll make another dedicated post as well but feel free to comment them here!
Comments
Zero
Congratulations on finally getting the video out, must feel extremely elevating to have it out after half a year. I wanted to watch the full video before saying anything and I want to thank you for giving me more perspective as well as putting my thoughts into better words
Alicia
Hey! I just finished watching the video! I made up a patreon account and everything for this video bc I have been waiting for so long and didn't want to wait an extra day for it haha. I am a relatively recent WTC fan, I believe I read Umineko around mid 2020 and Higurashi late 2020/early 2021. I enjoyed Umineko a lot but the series that ultimately stuck with me the most was Higurashi. I truly fell in love with the characters and themes and have re-read the story and some console arcs since I keep returning to it over and over. By the time I finished Higurashi for the first time, Gou was airing. I think it was about on Nekodamashi by the time I finished Higu, but it took a while for me to catch up because I find the pseudo-redux arcs very dull as someone who just finished the vn very recently, and I wasn't very impressed with most of the show up to then honestly, so by the time I caught up they were starting the Satokowashi... and then my opinion of Gou actually went up a lot! I liked the St. Lucia conflict, I could relate to how Satoko was feeling and with being dragged into other's wishes, etc. I even recommended to some other friends Gou at the time. But it then started to feel like every single episode was showing it's cracks more, with the rushed development of the events, and Satoko's rapid descent from depression to utter cruelty, and I think the episode that really made me wary of the direction of the show was the Teppei redemption ones. I just did was very opposed to the idea of redeeming someone whose internal monologue mostly consisted of inflicting various kinds of violence towards a child, all just being done across a single episode. Then the wait between Gou and Sotsu happened, and in that time I read Saikoroshi and I was honestly baffled by how it dealt with similar themes to Gou but so much better done. By the time Sotsu came out and having thought more of Gou, I wasn't very excited for it. I watched every episode as it came out and I hated every single episode of the Answer arcs, for their repetitiveness, the unrepenting cruelty it showed in Satoko, and I was specially angry that the *first* relationship where Satoko shows any kind of guilt over is Teppei, and I thought it was ridiculous and showed the series was more interested in gore and shock value than anything else that they even bothered to recap the mini-arcs where Rika just dies by every minor character. And then the show just... ended. A very brief and disappointing conclusion to with about 13 episodes that I thought actively made the series worse by being shown preceding it. By this time, I was very disappointed and angry at GouSotsu as a whole, and it made me very wary of any future r07 series as it felt to me like he was willing to sell out the characters I fell in love with for a show that to me felt souless and that it just apealad to people that saw Higurashi as nothing more than a shock show about High Schoolers killing each other. I've cooled down my view on Gou since then, as mostly a show that had really interesting ideas but was terrible at giving them a suitable conclusion. And the various quotes by r07 in this video have shown to me r07 still respects these characters, it's just that... due to a variety of circumstances from a different medium, to passione's and several others conflicting with each other, it ended up like it did, but it did give me hope that future r07 and wtc content won't necessarily fall into the same traps as this show did. I've since then also enjoyed several side arcs that aren't exclusively r07's vision such as Miotsukushi, the Advanced story, etc that I have truly fallen in love with as much as his personal work so I still have confidence in the series to be able to move forward positively in the future.
