Higurashi no Naku Koro ni – 28

If you’re wondering why I haven’t picked up any new series apart from Higurashi for the Summer season, then don’t worry. The really good stuff just airs relatively late for this season. I’m definitely going to blog Mononoke and Baccano!, with Miyori no Mori as a wildcard. The other good series may have been good, but they didn’t seem worth blogging. Especially since my blogging-list already is huge. If there ever was a polar opposite of the previous episode, it’d be this one. It seems that the previous episode wasn’t the seventh arc at all, it was just an epilogue of the sixth arc. It’s too bad, because I would have loved to see more attention spent on it. The people who watch Higurashi because of the “killer lolis” probably disagree, but now that I think back at the episode, I really liked it, especially the flashback Rena had, at the end of the episode. So this episode was the obligatory introduction-episode of the real seventh arc, original to the anime. Since most of the episode looked a lot like the first half of episode 22, I won’t be giving a summary. But there were still lots of interesting details in this episode. But first I wanted to talk about the new animation, which definitely is different from the first season, and it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. The budget has really increased for this show, and it shows. Chie-sensei finally looks different from a blue-haired Rena-clone, and overall, the characters look more detailed than before. This should make the scenes with the distorted faces more bearable. On the other hand, this episode had more distorted chibi-figures than the entire first season combined. This just doesn’t work, and it distracts from the ‘feel’ that the first series established. These drawings look really out of place, and I hope they’re limited to the comedic moments. The main character for this arc: Rika! I suspect that the missing plot-holes that the first series left (like the rather major event that happened in Keiichi’s past for example), the remaining TIPS will be revealed, and hints will be given for the eighth arc. I’ll also refrain from reading any more TIPS from now on, because of this. One question this episode really asked was the following: to what extend do the different arcs influence each other. The fact remains that Keiichi has become closer to his friends with every successive episode. This could be because of pure luck, but I’m really beginning to think that he subconsciously remembers the fun times he had with them. In this episode, for example, Satoko came with a line that Keiichi used in the previous arc. The thing that will distinguish this arc from all others starts with Satoshi, who asked Shion to take care of Satoko. The question now remains: what happened? It’s been a bit too long since I saw the fifth arc, but if I had to guess then it seems that Shion’s feelings for Satoko are different for the different arcs, and may be one of the reasons of why they turn out so differently as well. In the first and sixth arc, she was completely absent, suggesting that she decided to forget Satoshi. A similar thing happened in the third arc, but she then ran into Keiichi for the sports-tournament (the tournament was a baseball-tournament, wasn’t it? I suddenly realize she became manager because of Satoshi$, and she decided not to blame Satoko. For arc 2 and 5 she went berserk, and blamed Satoko for Satoshi’s suffering. In the sixth arc, she actually listened to Satoshi’s request, and she was willing to change her entire life for it. The big question now remains: up to what extend was the disease responsible for this? The syringe also makes another appearance in this episode. By now, we’ve already established that it’s used to cure the disease, but it remains interesting to wonder why Satoko is using it. The third arc showed that Satoko also suffers from the disease, and Keiichi awakened that one early during that time. I think that this is another sign that Rika is trying ut random things. I suspect she somehow tricked Satoko into taking the cure for the disease, to see what happens. I’ve also been wondering about the two Rikas. Are there really two people living in her body, one grown up and one little girl? Or is the little girl-Rika just an act of the grown-up one. I suspect it’s the latter. The times in which we saw Rika in “Oyashiro-sama”-mode she probably stopped caring about hiding her cute self. At one point in this episode, we also see her drink a glass of alcohol, which seems to enforce this theory. In any case, I wonder who it will be, where the disease activates too early. Every arc so far has had three main characters, one infected by the disease, one major character who isn’t affected by the disease, and tries to help the former, and a major side-character, who provides a bit of background information on the story (at least, that’s been the general pattern I discovered, with a bit of imagination). Arc 1 had Keiichi, Rena and Oishi, Arc 2 had Shion, Keiichi and Oishi again. Arc 3 had Satoko, Keiichi and Irie, arc 4 had Rika, Sakisaka and Oishi (okay, not exactly, but you get the idea), arc 5 had Shion, Mion and either Satoshi or Mion’s grandmother, arc 6 had Rena, Keiichi and Takano. For arc 7, the supporting character will be Rika, the main character for this arc. We should probably get our first clues about the diseased character and the major side-character in the next episode.]]>