See you guys again next June!


June 30th, 2021

This is yet another sort of "author's thoughts" rather than an actual story (sorry about that), but even with how good I am at writing and how much I like Higurashi, it is getting harder and more tiring to write these prompts. Granted, with this I'll have written 120 prompts solely in the Higurashi universe, which is 132,442 words. That's a whole heckin' lot of words. That is a lot of material to drag myself through, and there does come a point where I have to start scraping the bottom of the barrel. Like, what are scenes I haven't done? Things I haven't thought about? Things I haven't expressed? There is only so much story to go through.

And its kinda hard to do AUs of the characters and things when I have to conform at least loosely to these prompts. Now, I am absolutely going to keep plowing forward and writing these in the future –don't worry about that. I'll keep writing until I physically can't anymore. Once I run out of material to cover, I'll start writing poems, maybe, or the same scenes from different perspectives. Hopefully someday I'll get my hands on the games, and pry more bits of interesting material and story ideas out of that.

Its just that right now, its, well…exhausting. Even the prompts that are only 1,000-ish words, which is most of them, take several hours and a lot of mental juice to create. I care about the characters a lot, and when I have to weave in canon dialogue, that does slow things down quite a bit.

Still, it is worth trying, and Gou aside –and I have a lot of opinions on Gou– I still haven't lost faith in the series or the creator. After all, looking at the original series run, we know better than to trust an obvious fact, or our gut reaction to an obvious bad guy. (Minus Teppei and Rina, of course.) It's entirely within the realm of possibility that the next season of Gou, which hasn't aired at the time of writing this, will entirely flip my opinion around, in which case I'll have a lot more stuff to work with.

And it's not like I absolutely loathe Gou and everything in it –its just the overarching story that I really don't like, and even then, its less bad writing and more personal discomfort. I've talked about this before, but I don't like how Gou basically throws away all the bonds between Rika and her friends, especially Satoko. I don't like how Satoko is suddenly sapped of any mercy towards everyone else. I especially don't like how the narrative is treating these events as not only inevitable, but somehow the way that things should be –like this is an answer we should find acceptable. I super don't like that.

But again, aside from redeeming Teppei and treating Satoko like a yandere, none of the writing decisions in Gou have been, academically, wrong. Satoko is an abuse survivor with a heavy dose of an abandonment complex: even if I don't like it, it makes sense that she would react very badly to losing the club she made with her friends. Rika's ties to her friends are one of the most important parts of her character, but the Rika at St. Lucia's is one in a completely situation, one she's wanted for a while: it makes sense that she isn't acting the same, even if I don't like it and personally find it unrealistic. While I don't like Satoko's rationale that none of the worlds she goes through are actually real and valid, and thus none of the horrific things she does to her friends and other people are actually wrong, I can understand her perspective.

Anyway, see you all when that next season comes out, I suppose, and then see you again in Higurashi Month 2022!

9.12 AM, USA Central Time