Why the low score?

OofSeaRchGoo-Kun said:
I'm an anime only watcher and i didn't touched the source material (Visual Novel) at all...

It was a pretty good ending tho in my opinion maybe 7-8 score for me...

I think the reason why the score dropped is because it didn't meet the expectations or it was rushed(?)...

What do you think?

Chargecoulomb said:
Theres something worse about pieces having to always be in character.

Satoko relives all of Rika's loops. It unclear whether she does this as a ghost viewer like Hanyuu, or if shes actually there.

Since pieces HAVE to be in character. What if Satoko in all the fragments that we saw in the OG Higurashi Oni, Wata, Tatari, Tsumi etc.. were all Gou Satoko?

Since time is not linear in the Sea of fragments this is truly possible and kind of sad.

Chargecoulomb said:
Since pieces HAVE to be in character. What if Satoko in all the fragments that we saw in the OG Higurashi Oni, Wata, Tatari, Tsumi etc.. were all Gou Satoko?

ssjokg said:
I honestly dont care.

If Ryukishi wants to treat every story he wrote as a joke then I can just ignore the bullshit that do that.

Gou and Sotsu and Mei dont exist and that is fine.

KuroNekoAlchemy said:

Like I don't even see what's the problem with redeeming satoko or teppei or whoever. The entire point of umineko is that "if you have heart, anyone can be redeemed". Yasu was written to be a mentally ill psycho, and the narrative made a point of making Yasu relatable to prove the anyone can be redeemed if you try to understand their point of view.

Anyone who ever thought that Yasu is redeemable in Umineko, should also think that Satoko is redeemable in Sotsugou.

Vell- said:


These two are definitely not comparable.
Umineko says nothing about redemption either, it just wants you to learn to understand.
Ultimately, Yasu met a shitty end as a consequences for their own actions.
Which in the end she didnt even do much of anything at all other than hand over a group of desperate adults a ton of gold, guns and a bomb.

If she still did and were to have taken murdering the family in her own hands, her motive perfectly aligns with that action which makes you be able to understand that action even if its a horrible one, and perhaps even empathize and feel pity for them. thats the point of umineko.

With Satoko, the motive doesnt align with the action in the slightest.
With Yasu you can argue all of the characters involved deserved what they got to some degree, umineko makes a point of what kind of shitty family it really is where all of them contributed in some way to yasus long mental degradation. How is that in any way comparable to how satoko abused and tortured her own friends canonically countless times over none of whom actually deserved it and dont even have anything to do with her motive in the first place? With the motive just being that one of her friends started to grow apart from her because thats just how life works.

And all Satoko got from her actions is she has live apart with rika for 3 years, while actually having satoshi be healed and awakend and also her abusive pedophilic uncle just not be that anymore. So if anything she got rewarded for all of this??

Saying these two situations are equal is a rather ridiculous claim, even if we were to say that yasu did get some kind of redemption.

KuroNekoAlchemy said:

The moral is the same- no one should judge the messed up person for what they are or do. The fact that in one case we have a suicide and in other we have a wish fulfilment is merely an afterthought.

Vell- said:


The core idea is the same, yeah. But with just like with anything it shouldnt be made into a black and white situation to this degree.

As you said, he did it better in umineko, which is the whole point. Execution is the most important thing when writing a story or creating anything really.
You can have a similiar message be the point of two seperate stories, but with one that message can come across successfully due to how it is presented, and in the other it can come across entirely disingenous and the flaws of the execution will distract from that message and not make it be able to be taken seriously.

Thats where we are at with GouSotsu.

I dont know what kind of thing possessed ryukishi to just give up on the execution part of writing.
Even if from the author perspective these two stories technically appear to be the same, that kind of viewpoint ignores all the nuances and complications that go into the subjects you want to portray, you should never ignore those especially not as an author who writes about them.
He used to know this, after all umineko is infamous for just trying too hard at times to go into too much detail of its subjects, but I prefer that over just not caring at all.

Vell- said:
I dont know what kind of thing possessed ryukishi to just give up on the execution part of writing.
Even if from the author perspective these two stories technically appear to be the same, that kind of viewpoint ignores all the nuances and complications that go into the subjects you want to portray, you should never ignore those especially not as an author who writes about them.
He used to know this, after all umineko is infamous for just trying too hard at times to go into too much detail of its subjects, but I prefer that over just not caring at all.

VidiaPhoenix said:
Extremely late, but I came across Sotsu again while looking at the Avant Garde tag (which is bs, how is this show Avant Garde in any way? How is this show comparable to Evangelion or Paprika in style?). But, I’ll give my thoughts anyway since this still remains one of the worst shows I’ve seen even months later. Warning: Very Long.


It is unnecessary. The original ending was perfect. It wrapped up everything from the plot points to the character arcs to the themes and messages. The fact that a story so soundly concluded was continued is a clear cash grab. The simple existence of this series bastardizes the feel-good ending of the original (which wasn’t just a feel-good ending for no reason, the characters fought like Hell for it, and it was so satisfying as a viewer to see them overcome fate. Yet, all of it is undone and made pointless in Gou and Sotsu).
It is 80% recap. I can hear the people crying out, “B-But it is an answer arc!” Tell me: what does it answer that we needed to know? That we couldn’t figure out on our own? In the original series, the answer arcs genuinely explained things we would have no way of knowing or figuring out. Not just that, the answer arcs were used to further character and world building. What does Sotsu answer? That Satoko is the killer (which we know from Gou’s ending) and how she went about killing all her friends. …Did we really need nearly the entire anime to explain that? Good God, there was a point towards the last episode where we had a flashback/recap to a scene that happened just a few minutes earlier. Then there were times we had recaps within recaps. Every “recap” can be summed up as “Satoko drugged her friend. That went crazy and killed people.” It added nothing to the story and very little would change if the majority of them were removed.
Satoko’s Character. Holy crap, Satoko. The single worst character I have ever had the displeasure of seeing on the screen. It isn’t enough that she is one of the most depraved and evil characters to ever exist, she also has to be a completely nonsensical mess. Apparently going to a fancy school, doing bad at studying, and Rika making new friends (but still being friends with her) is enough for her to torture Rika for hundreds of loops. No, not just torture Rika, but all of her friends who never “transgressed” her the way Rika did and a whole town of innocent people. She drove Rika to the point of a suicide attempt. She murdered hundreds of people, if not thousands. She saw Rika’s hundred years of torture and laughed at it, getting a kick. She never felt a single shred of remorse during the entire series, except for her physically abusive uncle (not her friends or innocent people, but the person who abused her so horribly it drove her insane in the og series). All because Satoko hated her school and resented Rika for going there. Also, all this is ignoring the fact that Rika was the one in the original series who couldn’t live without Satoko and would even experience panic attacks without her. It is so hard to sympathize or even understand her character when she screeches at Rika she “Hates studying!” when asked why she did all that shit. It is genuinely painful to watch a character who is so evil and acts so evil that Griffith would blush, and all she can do is cry about how awful her life is because she has to study and go to fancy schools, ergo she is justified. Ugggggh.
Satoko’s intelligence. Another thing, the whole premise of the idea that Satoko can’t do good in school, no matter how many times she loops and repeats it is so stupid (which she and Rika confirm in the last episode that, as part of trying to get along, Satoko constantly repeated school to try and pass but never succeeded). You mean to tell me the girl who could break into a top-secret government facility, acquire a gun in Japan, manipulate and trick an entire town, and fool Rika who has hundreds of years of experience, is not smart enough to pass school? BS! Also, anybody should be able to pass school if they have spent a hundred years taking the same lessons or, at the very least, memorize the lessons, but supposedly Satoko couldn’t even do that? The only way this would be possible is if she had a severe mental disability which we know she doesn’t because she wouldn’t be able to pull off all the things she did in the series if she was. Like, she can figure out and remember the passcode for getting the drugs she needs, but not remember the answers to her test?
Everyone but Satoko and Rika are pointless. In the original series, everyone was important. Everyone got their own arc, and everyone played a role in bringing about the Miracle in the og series. In Sotsu and Gou though, they are nothing but expendable meat-sacks for Satoko to torture to upset Rika. No other purpose. They are no longer characters, but tools for Satoko’s brain dead revenge plot. This could be excused if Rika and Satoko could carry the show but they can't. Satoko is a tyrant sadist who makes no lick of sense while Rika is a shell of the character she was and exists purely to suffer.
Gore/misery porn. All the violence in this series is nothing but over-the-top edgy gore for the purpose of simple shock value and nothing more. This is a horror series predicated on its shock value, so it fails as a horror. The amount of blood that comes out of characters is completely comical, so the “horror” scenes come off as hilarious rather than scary. I remember one scene where Rika slits her throat and an absurd amount of blood spurts everywhere. The entire kitchen was covered in blood. Not just blood splatters, no, but so much blood it looks like somebody took red paint to the entire room and covered it. An eleven-year-olds body doesn’t even hold as much blood that came gushing out. And every scene is like this. The show seems to think that the more blood there is, the scarier it is. Yet, compare it to the original series. The og was so much more horrifying because it relied on suspense and mystery. Not the tv equivalent of jump scares. Think of the nail scene from the og. There wasn’t even any blood in that scene, yet it still remains one of the most horrifying scenes of all of Higurashi, maybe among one of the most horrifying in all of anime. As for the misery porn, it is how this entire sequel series seems predicated on the suffering of Rika, but in a different way from the original. While the og was about a girl in difficult circumstance overcoming them, this was just senseless violence enacted against her for the sake of purposefully making her suffer cause Satoko is the worst. In Sotsu/Gou, the entertainment comes from the countless points misery Rika goes through while the original’s entertainment came through the mysteries and Rika’s attempts to overcome fate.
The ending. One of the worst endings I’ve ever seen in an anime. The DBZ fight was totally out of place in the very grounded reality of Higurashi. You might say it is because they are witches and that was how it was in Umineko but it really wasn’t. In Umineko, nearly every “fight” was a battle of wits and intelligence. Besides the comical shonen fight, Hanyuu should have never been able to even injure Featherine, sorry. Also, Rika forgiving Satoko so easily and Satoko not suffering a single consequence to all the bs she put everyone through is one of the single most infuriating things I have ever watched in anime. Imagine Guts and Griffith talking it out like, “Hey Guts, I don’t regret what I did to you at all and wish I could hurt you more, but it’s your fault I act like this because you are a shitty friend.” “You’re right, Griffith. I am such an awful friend, please forgive me!” And that was how it went. Except throw in “I HATE STUDYING” along with the reasons Griffith acted the way he did. The worst part is the fact the characters end up in the exact same spot they were in before the series began. Still friends, but with witch powers now. As such, you can’t help but wonder what the point of it even was. Even worse is that all of this was solved by them simply talking it out WHICH THEY COULD’VE DONE TO BEGIN WITH! This entire series would have never happened if they had sat down and talked earlier. I simply can’t stand fabricated drama which depends solely on the characters being idiots and not having a conversation with each other. Satoko tortured the Hell out of Rika and everyone in an entire village for hundreds of time loops when a simple conversation would have solved, and DID solve, the whole problem. “Oh, we can go to different schools and still be friends!” No shit, Sherlock! People have been screaming this since your “motives” were revealed. The fact that the solution was so transparently obvious, but they dragged out this torture porn anyways is borderline offensive.
No lessons or themes to be seen. The original series had so much to say about friendship, miracles, fate/destiny, and the strength of the human spirit. What can we take away from Sotsu/Gou? Nothing. It is simply torture porn. The purpose of the show is to see what creative ways Satoko can torture her friends. There is no overarching message or theme to be gleaned from this shitshow. So, if you aren’t into mindless torture porn, there is nothing in this series for you. Shows fall into three categories: 1) entertainment, 2) art with a message or 3) both. The og was number 3, while Sotsu/Gou is number 1… or tries to be but it fails to even entertain due to being nearly entirely pointless recaps. This is the type of show where you have nothing to discuss about it beyond the shallow “this scene was so cool!” or “that scene shocked me!” in stark contrast to the original when there is so much more to discuss with its themes and characters (and no, there is not any good discussions to be had about the characters in Sotsu beyond: Satoko is an irredeemable piece of shit, Rika is suffering, and everyone else is obsolete).


I can’t remember much else at the moment besides these points, as I have blocked a lot of it from memory. But this is long enough anyways. Those are my reasons for hating it, if you bothered to read my wall of text.

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