Me, poking Gou's school arc with a stick: Hey remember when Satoko had a highly diverse skillset and technical knowledge for days?
June 10th, 2021
The art of trap-setting was a complex and intricate one. It wasn't just simply setting up and tripwire and hoping for the best.
No, Satoko knew that to achieve the things that she had achieved –to soar to the heights that she had reached– you needed to be more than merely good at traps. To become the God-Sent Master of Traps herself, you needed complex planning, a firsthand knowledge of the laws of physics, a smidgen of math, and heaps and heaps of social psychology.
Take Keiichi, her favorite victim. Now, it'd be satisfying to fling a tripwire his way, hang an eraser in the gap of the carefully-cracked sliding door, spread an inkstone under his area of impact, but she couldn't be so sloppy. For one, Keiichi was learning to expect her traps, so she'd have to outfox him, throw a series of bluffs and double-bluffs his way until he was thoroughly bewildered and bewhuthered. Then she could spring her final, actual traps, the ones she meant to catch him in.
But it wasn't as simple as even that, oh no!
After all, she shared this classroom with everyone else, and they all used the same door. If Satoko wanted to avoid drawing the anger of everyone else in class, she needed to avoid catching anyone except the person she meant to catch in her traps –which very often meant leaving them until the very last minute, which included an element of time pressure on her setting up and cautious testing. After all, even though her traps rarely involved moving elements, it'd be so horribly embarrassing if she couldn't nail her victim due to a switch fail!
No, Satoko worked with snares and springs, things that were pressure-activated or that were simply empty holes covered by a deceptive veneer, things that were arranged just so, like mudpits and inkstones –simple, easy things that a child of eleven could build and arrange. She hadn't gone to a fancy city school like Keiichi, after all, and she didn't have a fancy city degree. Satoko worked with stuff that she had experimented with hundreds of times on her special trap mountain, stuff that was very low-tech, because those sorts of traps were the easiest and quickest –and least expensive– to throw together.
After all, she had to get her materials from somewhere, and even though she went dumpster-diving with Rena often enough in the trash heaps, there were still things –like rope– that she didn't want to get secondhand, things that might be weakened by exposure to the elements. She had to get those things out of her own allowance, because the people in Hinamizawa weren't about to lend a neighborly bit of this or that which was floating around their garden shed, not to a Hojo. And besides, Satoko hated asking for those things, since she was using them for her traps and not anything long-lasting or important.
Not that traps weren't important.
A finished trap was a masterpiece of timing, forethought, physics, and psychology, and there was a reason she got so tetchy when Keiichi dismissed her work as mere pranks. As if any prankster could even come close to what she could do!
No, Satoko had built her throne as the God-Sent Master of Traps out of blood, sweat, tears, and the bodies of her fallen victims, and she would not tolerate any insinuations otherwise. She was diabolical, a devil in little girl's clothing, and anyone who stepped into her hellish domain would soon regret it, if they were not her friends. Satoko might be small, just a little child, but she could fight tooth and nail with traps rather than any other kind of weapon, ensnaring her foes and making them dance to her tune like little puppets.
Satoko had her place in the Hinamizawa Club, and it was no exaggeration to say that they all would have fallen apart in defeat without her, when the Yamainu came calling.
11.06 AM, USA Central Time