higurashi no naku koro ni 13 (tatari goroshi-hen 5)
Categories: anime, episodic review, higurashi
Tagged: higurashi
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When you wish upon a star…
(Caution: ZERO Rena nad ZERO Sonozaki. You have been warned. This will be a crappy episode. Unless you prefer nakkid lolis to killer lolis, then it will be a fabulous episode.)
“It’s time to finish this fight.”
Thinking that Satoko’s uncle is still alive, K1 decides to drop all pretenses of any perfect crime and just go axe murderer. If his brain were still functioning, he’d know that if Satoko’s uncle were really alive, wouldn’t he have reported his beating to the police? Unless he was too proud to admit that he was owned by a 14 year old boy with half a brain.
K1 tresspasses into Satoko’s house looking for blood. Why is his axe bandaged up? Did K1 “kill” it too?
While walking through the house with his mind on murderin’ and murderin’ on his mind, he stumbles across an ultra steamed Satoko who has been in the bath a bit too long. I can only imagine the animators giddy as they take Higurashi no Naku Koro ni in a new, exciting loli-filled direction. “We’ll make a bundle off of the otaku who hang around the doujinshi shops in Akihabara!”
K1 tries to revive Satoko… I’m out of words. Well, I have plenty of words, just none I feel appropriate to share right now.
I wonder if K1 is more interested in helping Satoko or is he too enamoured with the nakkid female body. Why hasn’t he wrapped her up in a towel yet?
After seeing Satoko so helpless and after seeing her seemingly punish herself over her uncle, K1 loses it. “So that’s what I could have gotten from Mion and Shion!”
“No!!!!! I really fucked up!!!!!”
Actually, he’s emo-ing over the possibility that Satoko’s pseudo-dead uncle could be doing this horrible act to Satoko. He kinda screams like a girl… this is what I would expect from Lacus when she catches Kira in bed with Athrun.
He goes emo and starts taking apart Satoko’s poor house with his axe. Dude wants to be in the Emo Facial Contortion Pantheon (with new summer hours!) but the Emo Facial Contortion Pantheon doesn’t want him. “No losers please” says the curator of the pantheon.
After K1 calms down, he does the sensible thing and takes Satoko to the clinic. Actually, none of it has been sensible. Would a sensible person opt to settle a dispute with murder? Or then trying that murder again by visiting said house with an axe? Why not just go on Jerry Springer? Would a sensible person not immediately clothe or at least cover up a nakkid loli? Would a sensible person carry a half-nakkid, dripping wet loli across a forest? If anyone had seen him with Satoko here, wouldn’t they be screaming “OMFG K1 is a sexual predator!!!”?
“Going down to South Park / Gunna have myself a time /Friendly faces everywhere /Humble folks without temptation / Going down to South Park / Gunna leave my woes behind. Timmie!!!”
Satoko’s quote says it all: “You’re leaving a lady here with nothing but a bath towel with all these imageboard lurkers around?”
But the cops, minus Ooishi, are there ahead of him at the clinic. While leaving Satoko behind is kinda ungentlemen-like, I’m not sure getting seen with a half-nakkid, very defenseless loli on his back (not to mention an axe) is the best coarse of action. Actually, nothing K1 has done recently has made any sense to me.
I’m creeped out.
Oh my Oharuhi… I’m really, really creeped out. Not only has this episode been geared for the lolicon, Satoko looks like a cross between a South Park character and any of malnurished children on a Christian Children Fund commercial.
Satoko and K1 find out that Irie killed himself with an overdose of sleeping pills. Ooishi has also gone missing (?!?). It’ll be the first deaths for both of them, though I never liked Ooishi. Irie was so nicely filling in Itsuki’s role.
K1 has a small breakdown thinking that he killed Irie by wishing that he would die the previous episode. Why can’t he use his powers for good… “I wish for more Sonozaki fanservice goodness!”
“Can we please get me some clothes now? All those bloggers are taking indecent screenshots of me!”
He takes Satoko to Rika’s shrine where Satoko can finally get a change of clothes. It would be too logical for her to get dressed before leaving for the clinic. K1 starts getting mentally unstable again thinking about Satoko’s uncle, and Satoko asks him to stop. He eventually confesses the murder… for someone who was talking big about the perfect crime, he sure has a big mouth afterwards.
I’m sure some really bored person out there will splice together a MAD video of this episode that will make it seem like K1 and Satoko are… nevermind. Forget I typed anything.
Satoko becomes afraid of K1 and pulls away from him. I don’t blame her… he’s a serial killer armed with an axe and half a brain. She’s a 60 pound nakkid nalnurished loli. She runs away to Rika’s place and grab some clothes.
Meanwhile, K1 looks around the shrine and finds some scavangers picking at a dead body… oh boy.
Fun times. My reaction also. Can you imagine this anime being screened by some parents association? It would cause a Jack Thompson-like backlash against all forms of Japanese pop culture. (BTW, google “video game annoying florida lawyer” and almost all the first 100 links point to something about Jack Thompson.)
I feel sick. Then I realized that they’ll probably un-black this scene for the DVD release and use that as a selling point for the DVDs. I feel even sicker. I hope I can make it to the toilet…
No more woo-woo or bow-bow…
Seeing Rika eviscerated like this, K1 snaps and starts to try to chase the crows away with his axe. Uh, bad bad bad bad bad move. He thinks that he can curse people to death, seeing how he wished it on Takano, Irie, Ooishi, and Satoko’s uncle, but he’s positive that he didn’t wish it on the innocent Rika. He drops his axe into Rika’s blood…
… OH SHI-
Too bad it’ll be another 20 years before CSI can bail him out of this mess with their high tech sleuthing. In 1984? If anyone sees him…
… OH DOUBLE SHI-
Now that’s an emo facial contortion. Too little, too late. K1 has already butchered this arc.
“It’s a big misunderstanding!”
“ggkthxbyebbq.”
K1 chases Satoko through the wood and unto a bridge, all while carrying his bloody axe. When I started watching this arc, never did I think that it would end up like this… and by “this” I mean that we’ll get a story about child abuse, K1 fueling an idiot plot, loli-crazed animators, Mion/Rena acting somewhat normal, and zero killer lolis. I am disappointed.
After K1 ditches the axe (nothing good has come from the axe… it’s like the time when Homer buys a gun…), Satoko starts opening up to him and tries to calm him down saying how it’s the demon’s fault. How K1 is possessed by a demon because of her… and cue an even lolier flashback. Apparently, when she was even younger, she was playing hide and seek with Rika, and she snuck into the forbidden Oyashiro-sama storeroom.
She breaks Oyashiro’s hand when she leaves, and she has been cursed since. All her loved ones drop off like flies. Oyashiro is fearsome.
Instead of fessing up, Satoko lets Rika take the blame. I can only imagine how Higurashi no Naku Koro ni‘s core audience has shifted at this point. If it weren’t for the possibility, the tease, the hope of Sonozaki fanservice, I would have given up on this series by now.
Satoko cries about how she has lost everyone close to her and how she’s now ruined for marriage. She thinks that the demon now has taken hold of K1… which actually explains a lot. If the demon wanted to screw up K1’s life, it did a mighty fine job.
Satoko, though, pushes K1 off of the bridge.
K1 manages to grab a hold of the suspension ropes, but it’s not enough, especially considering that…
… Emo Satoko is doing her best to try to dump Demon K1 into the water.
Before he plummets into the water, K1 wishes for Hinamizawa to disappear.
(He sees visions of Hinamizawa from previous arcs… which is odd since if those things happened, like him being at the Watanagashi festival breaking into the storeroom with Shion, it would completely discombobulate the story into a Mai Otome-class mess.)
And it does in an deus ex machina ending where toxis gas erupts in the middle of town somehow and kills everyone… except K1 who is found alive. The final kill count: K1 a shitload. Everyone else: just Rika. Now we’ll just wait for Oharuhi-sama to reboot the world for the next arc. Sigh.
I’m very frustrated in that they turned a very servicable premise and intriguing story into a disjointed mush. While I was told that the stories are Rashomon-like, they really haven’t been with stories that heavily contradict and supercede each other. At least in Rashomon, there were enough connections to piece together the truth… now it just seems like an incoherent mess. Pity too since all of the characters (especially the four killer loli girls) are very workable. I know I complained a lot during this arc, but this series had some major potential. I hate to see it go to waste.
How to save the story with the remaining episodes? I think it’s too late now to try to have some serious wrap-up to this series… I think the only hope is to focus in on what Higurashi does best and pander pander pander. Lots more Emo Rena and Emo Mion. Lots more Sonozaki fanservice. Lots more bow-bow and woo-woos. A lot less Emo K1. A lot less awkward loli scenes. I hope that the series can find its way… but I wouldn’t count out father-daughter incest at this point with the final credits pulling off its Scooby mask revealing that Sunrise was the real production company.
21 Responses to “higurashi no naku koro ni 13 (tatari goroshi-hen 5)”
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Stopped watching this show at ep.9 too f’d up for me in terms if continuity and IQ/EQ deficiency. But never fear, i’ll continue downloading this until complete, burn to DVD, and pass it on to my oniisan who loves mindless horror/gore flicks.
So how does she push him off the bridge anyway? Let’s grant her the super-strength (as evidenced in the classroom) to launch K1 wherever, which would make sense if it were a wood bridge: super strength pushing him to break the rail and fall off. Except the railing here is CABLE and is clearly intact after he falls off.
So maybe he went over? That doesn’t look like the case because 13_35.jpg shows her clearly pushing straight ahead and there are no other indications of him going up before going down. And she really would have to be pushing upwards for him to go over because 13_30.jpg shows that the cabling is pretty high–like as high as K1’s head (and Satoko’s even shorter). And the spacing between cables seems to narrow for him to easily slip between.
When I watched it, it seriously looked like Satoko turned on a no-clip cheatcode and he passed right through.
>>The final kill count: K1 a shitload. Everyone else: just Rika.
You don’t think that Keiichi killed Rika? I think it’s fairly obvious that he did…
Aparently the next arc will be two episodes long, so if it sucks it won’t last long. Then we get the Answers which (hopefully) will bring back the fun. (I want to know how Higurashi ends, but it would be more enjoyable with more Sonozaki screen time)
Let’s review how each arc has wrapped up so far, shall we?
Arc 1- There’s some big funky conspiracy, involving demonic possession and/or drug enduced politically motivated murders going on. Great. Lots of things for me to wonder about, and hope to learn more about in the future.
Arc 2- Mion goes and answers pretty much every single one of those questions in a pretty straight forward manner, and murders K1 with the oh-so-believable motivation that he gave someone else a doll. That’s all rather lame, but more importantly doesn’t leave us with much to wonder about (unless you want a better view of her tattoo I suppose). Still, the possibility exists that there’s some new wrinkle in the plot to be revealed and recharge the mystery angle of the show, or maybe we can shift the focus onto making less mistakes each time and maybe get an ending with a lower body count, or at least better reasons for people to snap.
Arc 3- K1 is crazy and can evidently kill people with his mind. OK. This leaves us with two basic possibilities. Either K1 has always been totally crazy, and nobody at all has ever been at all murderous, or there is absolutely no connection between arcs at all, and we’re basically just watching a collection of short murder stories as performed by the Hinamizawa Players.
If we assume everything is in K1’s head, I can reinterpret the first arc well enough, because really, he does all the killing there, but the second arc doesn’t work like this. K1’s being all nice and friendly, and everyone acknowledges it’s all about Mion.
So… we seem to be stuck with the unrelated story angle and uh… without any larger context to place them in, and with such poorly rationalized character motivations, and willingness to get into the sort of territory we’re moving into with this last arc, I for one don’t particularly have much faith in future episodes.
Except the railing here is CABLE and is clearly intact after he falls off.
I noticed that as well, and just chalked it up to crappy animation. After all, there’s no shortage of THAT in the show.
I think I enjoyed this arc more than previous arcs simply because there was a bit more action. Still, the show has clearly jumped the shark. That’s fine, I suppose… now I can just give in and enjoy it for the trainwreck it is. Don’t know if I can last for another 13 episodes, though.
(no comment on this arc)
I’m hoping the next arc is much better, or I’d have to stop watching this series.
My 8 year old cousin is a better killer than K1… hmm… I think I’ll give her an axe for her birthday and observe. :P
One of the mostimportant parts of the story was cut off –
http://forums.animesuki.com/sh.....038;page=4
check “Maebara Keiichi’s Interview”, other tip which you should check is – “Research Note II”, which explain a motive for Rika being Watanagashi’ed. I think with those two and with whole Mion’s explanation about Hinamizawa’s history (don’t remember where was itposted) whole story is getting much more coherent. It’s a shame that animation here was that medicore ;/.
I hate to admit it but I believe lolikitsune could be right about K1 killing Rika. (I can’t believe that I said lolikitsune might be right.) I can understand where he is coming from. Because it would make sense with the fact that Satoko’s uncle was not killed. K1 probably was in a muderous rage he did not know what he was doing and didn’t see who he was killing because his mind was clouded.
Jason, I’m sorry if I sound rude. I don’t mean to be. But what is your obsession with emo faces? It that a fetish of yours?
I think he killed Rika because he’s an unstable psychopath, as demonstrated in the first arc where he randomly kills Rena and Mion for no reason.
I wanted to add that when I first saw this episode I thought K1 didn’t kill Rika. I’m not 100% sure he did kill her but I understand lolikitsune’s reasoning even though I don’t totally agree with him. Maybe its because I want to believe that Rika was killed by someone else.
Rika was Watanagashi’ed – her entrails were pulled out. Don’t you think even Keichi wouldn’t be able to pull something like this with his basebal bat?
…. starts planing a MAD video.
amazing ep to make funny comments about. now let’s hope the next arc will have content. not that this arc wasn’t a ride, just one i didn’t like.
Well, Arc 4 is only two episodes long, and is the last question arc. Episode 14 was enjoyable, I like Rika third (after Mion and Shion). I can’t wait for episode 16 since we’ll be starting the answer arc Meakashi-hen, which corresponds with Watanagashi-hen. And that = lots of Sonozaki. Yay~!
>>Rika was Watanagashi’ed – her entrails were pulled out. Don’t you think even Keichi wouldn’t be able to pull something like this with his basebal bat?
Keiichi is Watanagashi as surely as Nagato is love.
Notice that the uncle never showed up, even once, after K1 killed him and he supposedly returns.
All we have is people acknowledging that he’s still around. But is he really? We don’t know.
K1 has to be the dumbest character of any medium — book, film, play, whatever — that I have ever seen. In strange way it’s like the schadenfreude of watching American Idol. I don’t like that show, and thus I don’t like watching K1.
Episode 14 has been out for a day or two now.
>> or there is absolutely no connection between arcs at all,
That’s pretty much it. There is a connection that it’s the same world with the same characters just with minor changes that can make a huge difference in the outcome. Each arc is to be viewed on it’s own with no direct connection to any other arc. There is a reason for all these similar yet different worlds, but the arc that explains it has yet (as far as I know) to be announced to be animated.
It’d be too bad if people gave up on this anime now. Especially those who have the wrong notion of what this show is about.
I like the show. Yes, every story arc is completely independant (though they must be seen in order to appreciate how different each character’s role is in the story from each arc.) This story arc (3rd) isn’t quite as freaky as the other ones. While watching Satoko freak out from traumatization is a little crazy, the arc is plain confusing and doesn’t explain what the hell happened with the uncle. Or why everyone saw K1 at the festival.