When one looks back on 11 episodes of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni SOTSU, it’s almost astonishing how little of consequence has happened.  Almost nothing, in fact, that we haven’t seen already.  The one real exception was Teppei’s redemption, and that was actually quite well-handled.  But apart from that it’s been creative masturbation, really.  Just a chance to show the same massacres from a different angle and have Satoko vamp for the camera.  Oh, and play a few tricks on the audience.  Does that really justify Sotsu’s existence?

I get that this reboot has always been mainly for hardcore fans, and maybe there are some of them who get off on these answer arcs (though I don’t get the sense they’ve loved them so far). But if you have to be a hardcore fan for the “developments” to make sense, I think that’s ultimately an abdication of anime’s responsibility to stand on its own.  To the extent that I can be bothered to care either way, a lot of what happened here doesn’t really square with what happened in the original arc.  Like the whole K1-Teppei thing being not even a hallucination, but an invention by Satoko that Keiichi never even hears.

Oh well – at least this arc is over.  What happens now is sort of interesting, what with only four episodes theoretically left.  Some fans are convinced the series is going to spring a split-cour announcement or such before it ends, and indeed it seems a stretch to think you’s spend 11 eps repeating yourself and leave only four to resolve everything.  But the name of the next arc is “Kagurashi-hen”. which of course means it’s not an answer arc, so maybe they really are going to wrap everything up in 15 episodes.  At this point I kind of hope so, if I’m being brutally honest.  This is a lot of Higurashi to take in one year.