June 20th, 2020
I think what I really love about Higurashi is how it layers things. I knew it was a murder-horror anime before going into it, but even then, watching Higurashi for the first time was a treat. We're introduced to your typical moe anime cast –tough tomboy leaderish girl, demure average schoolgirl, feisty mischievous child, cute small child, token male lead– but Higurashi takes that a step further, giving a logical reason for all these wildly unalike people to be in the same friend group –they live in the back end of beyond with only 18 children in the class, themselves included, and this group has a game club.
Of course, as the series progresses, we slowly get to know more about the characters. Keiichi isn't just the dumb token lead, he's a former school all-star that blew off steam by shooting kids with a fake gun, and moved to Hinamizawa to start over. The story introduces his crime, Keiichi's obvious regret, and then a confession from his perspective. (Or at least, in the manga it does. I was dumbfounded when I rewatched that episode of the anime and realized they just left it at "he used to shoot small kids.") Mion isn't just a tomboyish leader, she's also the heir to a complex and tradition-heavy family organization. Rena isn't just a smiling ditz, she's a intuitive girl with a history of mental issues and trauma. Same with Satoko, and Rika's deeper characterization, of course, needs no words.
What really invests me in this series (and gets me through writing all these prompts every June, lol) is how deep you can dig and keep finding things. The framework for Higurashi is amazing just in itself: the plot is solid, the characters are ever-growing and almost all of them achieve the completion of their character arcs, even minor characters like Oishi and Akasaka. Oishi's so gung-ho about the murders because the first victim was a father figure to him: he's introduced as a suspicious, pushy cop that gets Keiichi into trouble, but as the series progresses Oishi's deeper motivations are revealed, and he changes to a proud, desperate man who isn't afraid to put his nose to the grindstone and deeply cares about protecting the citizens of Hinamizawa. Oishi's hatred of the Sonozakis is also resolved, and he even has a friendly conversation with them. In the manga, he laughs and cries with relief when Rika tells him that the Sonozakis aren't actually behind the murders, and Hanyuu delivers a very moving line about how not having anyone to hate anymore is a good feeling, rather than a bad one. There's even a postcredit snippet in the manga where Oishi and Mion and Shion's mother start playing mahjong together after everything's resolved (and the riot police "may or may not" have been deployed to keep an eye on that).
The plot, characters, and lore of Higurashi are well-knit and constructed, and the story itself is genuinely moving and endearing, and a fascinating take on human morality and decision-making. The time cycle lets us see things from multiple angles, the consequences of various decisions, in a very interesting way.
You may also notice I say "but in the manga" a lot, in both author notes for other prompts and in this explanation. Actually, for new viewers (aka not the people reading this, hehe) I'd suggest watching the anime first. In my opinion, both the manga and anime adaptions have some serious good and bad points –I have yet to play through the games, but its on my list. The anime, in my opinion, creates the larger flow of the story better –Rika's whole secret protagonist-dom, the time cycle, etc. are all mostly under wraps until the very last second, something I feel adds to the story rather than detracts from it. For the first few arcs, lets say Abducted by Demons up until Time Wasting, the audience really just needs the knowledge that these are all different scenarios or time loops, and that's it. Rika is suspect, but not obviously someone who knows things, and its not clear just how much she's aware of. By jarring contrast, when I first read the Abducted by Demons manga, at the end after everyone dies Rika comforts a crying Satoko and stares off into the middle distance while saying they'll see the others again in the next world. It was so abrupt and contrary to the entire tone of the manga thus far –Rika and Satoko were barely featured– I feel a new viewer would have their experience with Higurashi spoiled. Higurashi isn't about Rika until much later: initially, it's a murder-mystery series to be solved, and the addition of Rika's much-more-obvious cycling distracts from the mystery the author, at the time, is trying to draw our attention towards.
However, I also say "in the manga they did this" a lot because the anime basically cut that out and simplified the plot. A lot of stuff in the manga is not in the anime, and while some lines might make it in, generally these scenes are cut for brevity –something I don't always agree with, but then again, I didn't animate the series. Keiichi's explanation of his crimes in Atonement is a good example: while I wouldn't ask for a flashback sequence like in the manga, a voiceover or something would be nice. Just a line dropped in there to counter Rena's statement of "ew pervert who used to shoot small girls." Contrarywise, stuff like the full (fuller?) scene where Rika tells Oishi about the truth behind the murders in Festival Music, which is longer in the manga, I can completely understand why they cut it down. While the extra information was nice, it was not vital to the plot.
Hence, by my logic, the Higurashi manga is better served as supplementary material after you watch the anime, but that's my opinion, of course.
Anyways, my Higurashi muse. What I love to do, and what all of everything above this serves to construct for me, is dig deeper into characterizations and lore. Rena had her mother leave her and went briefly crazy due to Hinamizawa Syndrome –she also seems to be coded for depression, or at least depressive episodes, to a significant margin in both the anime and manga, especially in Atonement. How can I play with that? How does that affect her? How can I expand on it?
Rika is one of my favorite sandboxes for this, so to speak. She's lived hundreds of years, what kind of experiences must she have had? I like to follow the lore, clues, and character traits to their logical end. For example, even though Rika is hundreds of years old, she's been a child that whole time. We know this because (in the manga) she sees and reacts to Hanyuu as an infant being held by her mother, and that Time-Wasting showed she was cognizant of her full range of reincarnated memories five years before 1983, because she has asked Akasaka for help multiple times, enough so that she can form contingencies around him trying to use a phone and cut multiple lines before he can do so. This is also why, unlike most translations, I always say she's hundreds of years instead of a hundred years, because Rika is ten years old. Arguably she's being reincarnated back to the beginning of her life every time, but for minimalism's sake I'll say she's being turned back five years, to just before Akasaka showing up. So every time she reincarnates and lives through her failed world, that's five years.
100 divided by 5 is twenty. By the Rika-is-only-100/110-years-old argument, Rika would only have gone through twenty world cycles, and if she's reincarnated way back to the beginning, she would have only lived through ten cycles. This, obviously, is impossible, because between the anime and manga there are ten cycles she is involved in directly: Abducted by Demons, Cotton Drifting, Time Wasting, Beyond Midnight (manga-only), Eye-Opening, Atonement, Disaster Awakening (anime-only), Massacre, and Festival Music. This list disregards the worlds introduced in the OVAs, such as Outbreak and Dice-Killing (though Dice-Killing was in the manga), and Rika also talks about other world cycles we don't ever see, such as ones where Keiichi never moved to Hinamizawa. (She mentions that that world doesn't happen often, and calls it desolate.)
Point being, for Rika to have experienced all of these worlds more than once, which she says she has and evidence obviously shows she has, she would have hit multiple hundreds in age-experience a long time ago. Like, the most conservative estimate (five years) says that experiencing the worlds just twice would hit one hundred years, and for Rika to memorize things so precisely she knows the day and sometimes even the time things happen, it would probably be more towards ten repetitions of each cycle, perhaps even dozens.
Arguing against this, of course, is the fact Hanyuu only reincarnated her about a month back in Festival Music, but again, Rika had been reincarnated all the way back to 1978 multiple times, and she also expressed considerable alarm and shock at the "shortness" of the time this go around.
See, this right here is my general mode of operation when writing Higurashi, when I'm not adapting scenes or doing fun little AUs. I like to investigate things and figure them out, foil them like a weird math equation and then present my findings to the rest of the fandom in some hopefully interesting way.
I hope whoever reads these and reads down this far is inspired to write some Higurashi stuff on their own. It'd be nice to have some comrades, though I'll keep on rowing this boat myself if I have to!
10.29 PM, USA Central Time