English Dub Review: Higurashi: When They Cry – Gou “Village-Destroying Chapter, Part 2”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Rika explains to Satako that she wants to go to a really preppy high school to fully get away from Hinamizawa with her best friend, but it will require a lot of studying, which Satako despises, but she accepts this because Rika wants it. The two spend the next few years in a sweet montage as they go through middle school together in the village and then, with Irie’s help, move on to high school. Rika very quickly makes friends with her stunning beauty and intelligence, though Satako’s rough behavior and struggle to keep up with classes starts to form a barrier between them, driving her into a spiral of despair.

OUR TAKE

So, now the picture is starting to form as to how Satako was put into a position to want to reset the timeline again, and as far as villain origin stories go, it’s not half bad. Like many tragedies, it starts from a well intended wish that comes out of love, in this case being her wanting to join Rika as they take school together outside of the village, but starts to become corrupted once she ends up in a hell of academic pressure while Rika makes bonds with other people. This is also, likely intentionally, similar in some ways to how Satako’s initial arc also began to go down a dark path, though in that case it was Keiichi making bad choices to save her. That connection, while arbitrary and having little significance here, is at least interesting and worth mentioning. We’re seeing the start of a corruption of a strong bond that got these two through hundreds of years of terrible fates, but now being tested with the passage of time now moving forward again. It’s certainly intriguing to try and find out how things went this bad this fast, and only a few years after they were freed from a terrible time loop.

It’s also worth mentioning that, while this a neat way of starting to explain Satako’s turn to her terrible actions later, it doesn’t quite fit these characters, at least based on how they’ve been written up to this point in previous seasons. Satako’s resistance to studying is a quality I vaguely remember from before, but I don’t remember it being this much of a problem (though obviously it never got applied in this way due to not a lot of the murder mysteries requiring much studying on her part). Rika wanting to start school literally anywhere else than Hinamizawa makes sense given that she’s spent over a collective lifetime there, but the request to go somewhere like the school they end up at seems a BIT past what we’ve seen of her. Though I guess it fits as well as anything. She could want to become a lawyer or an athlete or a burger flipper and it might make just as much sense given the nature of wanting to do ANYTHING more with your life after being a child for over a century. But still, something about this feels off. Also, WHERE THE FUCKING HELL IS HANYUU?!