English Dub Review: Higurashi – When They Cry: Sotsu “Cotton-Revealing Chapter, Part 2”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Mion starts trying to get closer to Keiichi by using Shion as a cover, but when Shion starts teasing her by getting close to him herself, Mion’s boosted Hinamizawa Syndrome activates, leading to her strangling Shion to death in a fit of rage and paranoia about her and Keiichi going into the shed of sacred tools during the festival.

OUR TAKE

I’m afraid I’m going to be a broken record this week since this episode has the same problem as a lot of previous episodes…namely that it’s just going over things that have already been done before. As mentioned last time, the main twist that this version of this story arc seems to be doing is that while it was Shion who was the one who went insane and started slowly killing a bunch of people, all over her love for Satako’s brother Satoshi and her fear of the Sonozaki’s seemingly controlling who was “killed by Oyashiro”, this time it’s Mion being overwhelmed by Satako shooting her up with syndrome booster. So, instead of getting a well paced story of someone’s good intentions and attempts to break away from her family and futility save her crush…we just have another example of how much Satako is just awful, which I think they have made pretty goddamn crystal clear as a point in these thirty episodes so far. The “Meakashi-hen” or Eye-Opening Chapter was the first arc from the perspective of the girls, specifically Shion, to show her point of view during a previous arc and showing how much darker the story really was.

I see that this is the approach for this whole season for the arcs from last season but it only ends up belaboring the point of, once again, that Satako is totally irredeemable and is ruining everyone’s lives repeatedly just for her own stupid plans. Again, sorry if you’ve seen me say all of this before, but I have yet to see this string of episodes do anything different. If anything it makes me relate to Rika and the rest of the kids more because I feel stuck in a time loop saying the same things over and over forever and waiting for Satako to just put me out of my misery by restarting time again so that we can just go through the cycle again. At the ABSOLUTE VERY LEAST, there is some minimal new information next time to conclude this arc once and for all, so I can go into that to some extent when that episode gets dubbed, but for now I just get to watch Mion do a worse version of Shion’s plan by wanting to interrogate someone but not noticing she’s killed them first. She strangled Shion to death while questioning her, she killed her grandma by tasering her (although they didn’t make that apparent yet for some reason), and she’ll do it again later. This is really just the arc from the first season but way worse.