Higurashi Gou - Pre-Finale Character Analysis

Posted March 5th, 2021

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I guess I should express a few of my own thoughts about HiguGou's recent characterizations, since we're starting to hit the climax.
I've been a fan of Higurashi for about 14 years now, these characters have been in my head for almost half my life.

Now, I don't generally make a habit of imagining the future of these characters (post-Matsuribayashi), but it has crossed my mind a few times over the years.
I've always appreciated Matsuribayashi as a strong finale to Higurashi from a story perspective, but have always felt that there was little resolution to the personal issues of some characters. But that's generally fine since they were explored in other stories anyway.
Because of that, for many characters, it became possible to vaguely imagine what kind of futures awaited them.

Most abundant of all of course being Rika's drive to someday get out of Hinamizawa and live her life. But even Keiichi, Rena, and Mion I could picture some plausible futures. However, whenever I imagined things like this... I could never really picture a future for Satoko.

I remember a few years ago a friend asked me what kind of adults I thought the characters would be, but nothing either they or I said felt right for Satoko imo.
Like I said, it wasn't really a topic I thought about much, so I never gave much thought about why I felt that way.

But these recent HiguGou eps have me thinking back to things like that again, and I'm starting to understand why. Satoko as a character was so chaotic & dependent on others that it was impossible to imagine a proper future for her without information on her life circumstances at any given time.

And this is especially true of a Satoko post-Matsuribayashi, a story where all she really got to do was show off and bamboozle some Yamainu. She wasn't even given the privilege of learning the truth about Satoshi.
Minagoroshi was the end of the Satoko character arc we experienced as an audience, but that was swept away for Matsuribayashi where Rika finally got her victory, so any growth Satoko could've had due to the village gathering to save her from Teppei never happened.

Now, Keiichi and Rena's personal troubles aren't things that prevent them from growing as people, so by understanding them through the story it's easy to imagine their futures. Mion's similarly a self-assured constant. And Shion learned about Satoshi and made peace with it.

Satoko's sense of self is very heavily defined by her relationships. Her attachment to Rika is what saved her when her mental stability was a wreck after her aunt's abuse & Satoshi's disappearance. So much of her family has died or vanished from her life, so all she has is Rika.

This is why I've always had the feeling that Rika and Satoko would have some friction as they grew up together if there ever came a situation where they had to part ways or something. But as an audience member, imagining stuff like that hurts, so my image of Satoko's future just becomes "it's hard to imagine."

Thus, we get to HiguGou and we're actually starting to see the future of some of these characters, and it's... basically exactly the kind of things I imagined or would expect of them, but with two key twists: St. Lucia & Satoko becoming a looper.

Rika wanting to attend St. Lucia makes perfect sense. She wants to experience a lifestyle totally different than what she has thus far, and St. Lucia is probably the most prominent environment she knows of to achieve that goal.
I don't think I need to explain this much further, just that the environment of the school is perfect for someone like Rika, and terrible for someone like Satoko.
It's natural for them to drift apart in a place like that, & Rika's position only amplifies that. Rika went to St. Lucia to have an escape from dealing with things related to Hinamizawa.

Getting lost in the sense of freedom and pride she gained from finally escaping those years was always something I worried about with regards to Rika's future, because it's such a simple mentality to fall into in her position. And at St. Lucia, it becomes so much worse. She may express concern for Satoko on the surface, but she otherwise isn't giving it the serious effort she otherwise would, because taking care of Satoko is something indicitive of her life in Hinamizawa, which she's only at St. Lucia to get a reprieve from in the first place.

"Oh, we're not in Hinamizawa, so it's fine." "Her Syndrome's cured anyway, she'll be fine."
Rika shrugs off worries like this, because as far as she's concerned, she's already won and is past the "finish line."
But that's just not how reality works.

Furthermore, Satoko going through these rough experiences at St. Lucia, after dedicating years of her adolescence, the most formative years of a person's life where they're supposed to be discovering their self-identity, towards studying to go to this fancy school just for Rika's sake... The end result hurts. It crushes her inside. Someone like her, who spent her whole rough childhood depending on Satoshi, only to have him vanish and then get saved by Rika being there for her. Dedicating the entire rest of her youth to Rika, only to get locked in the traumatizing environment of St. Lucia, with Rika not even seeming interested in going the extra mile to try and help?

This experience broke Satoko down to her core. The club reunion came at the worst time, only serving as a harsh reminder of times she'll never get back: the one time in her whole life that she was actually happy.
Satoko meeting that god and gaining the ability to loop came, similarly, at the worst time.

This is the point where Satoko really would have eventually started to reflect on her life and try to move forward. Probably going into a real troubled/brooding teen phase or something. Maybe lashing out at Rika a few times, due to everything she'd bottled up or something.
But no, the possibility of that died immediately, when at her most vulnerable, Satoko got the ability to attempt a redo of the direction her life took.
All of Satoko's grievences and fixations converged on a single point, and she was given the means to attempt to make things go her way. Initially, she tried desperately to make sure things go right. She wanted to believe in Rika, and believe that if the same things happened, Rika actually would be there for her. Of course, the circumstances were the same, and resulted in the same thing. But to Satoko, who had just experienced this twice, it FELT like a personal betrayal. This betrayal was only possible, because she allowed herself to gain the expectation that she could "fix" how things turned out. Satoko was not in a position to address the actual issues here reasonably, because she could just try again. And again. And again. Until her fixation distorted into what it is now.

Learning about Rika's previous looping experiences at this point was also hopelessly terrible timing. I don't think the anime was able to fully express the magnitude of Satoko experiencing 100 years of Rika's struggles, and what that did to her deteriorating psyche, which was already running on a fixation to overcome Rika's desired future. But even so, I think the character work at play here is shocking and powerful for me personally, because it fits in perfectly with my interpretation of these characters and addresses the worries I've had for their future, on top of throwing in a whole wrench that turns the whole thing into a tragedy on a level I couldn't have even imagined. I won't claim it's done a perfect job telling this story, but at its core I believe it's brilliant.

So when I see people who are upset about how the story is developing, who refer to what Satoko's going through as "character assassination", I can't help but feel an instinctive urge to shout "What the heck are you talking about?!", because of how well I believe it works. But then I thought about it more, and realized it isn't that simple. Higurashi has been a story that's existed for a very, very long time. Just like me, there are people who hold these characters and their memories of the journey they took with them dearly. But the way different people recieve and interpret a story changes from person to person. There are many things that can be looked at as basic parts of a character's identity, but beyond that, a lot of what we feel or think about a character comes down to how we as an audience interpret them personally.

Satoko is a chaotic character, there are so many aspects to her that shift from circumstance to circumstance that it's hard to get a full grasp on who she is as a person. Different people will internalize and prioritize different aspects, and create a Satoko of their mind that's consistent with the Satoko presented in their formative experience with Higurashi. That inner-image they have of Satoko has been with people for a long time, especially if they're a long-time fan like me. It could be a decade-old understanding of the character.

So to see Satoko break down and develop into the kind of person she has in HiguGou can be very, very difficult to swallow if your interpretation of her character is just a bit different. I'm actually lucky that this story happened to hit my concerns/fears so perfectly, and then take it beyond my expectations. But if you're someone who believes Satoko's personality to be a very specific way, this entire story could very well feel like a slap in the face, or an insult to what Satoko's role in Higurashi meant to you.

This is why the reactions have become so split. On top of how much people are able to understand the character breakdown that just occurred, there are people that will either agree or disagree with it vehemently depending on their personal interpretation of these characters.

Anyway, I wrote way more than I planned, but this is all I wanted to say. The When They Cry community is in chaos over these developments, but honestly what else is new? lol (I've had my own personal issues with many WTC fans in the past, so I can't help but feel a little bitter about, even if I can understand where the various different opinions are coming from, lol.)

I will say, I think creating these kinds of striking and debatable works is one of Ryukishi07's biggest charms as a creator, lol. There's no experience quite like being a WTC fan.

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