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Higurashi.
2011-08-03 07:19:26
edited 2011-08-03 07:21:13 in Media
If you must eat a phoenix, boil it, do not roast it. This only encourages their mischievous habits.
I was not really sure where to put this, so I put it in the Webspace area. If it should be moved to Media or Liveblogging, tell me.
However, there was one thing that did make it hard for me to watch it right through, and has resulted in me only watching it while fairly tipsy these days: The deaths.
Anyway. Onto the purpose of this thread.
I watched Higurashi: When They Cry a while ago. It was before I turned seventeen, so over a year ago now. I think. I should keep track of the date better.
It scared me. I will admit that. The murders are brutal and sadistic, the characters rarely escape their fates, and worse, every time it's over again, everything resets, and everything is happy and cheery again, and you can't celebrate, because you know that if you keep watching those characters you are trying to feel sympathy have a ninety percent chance of dying and/or snapping and going on a murderous rampage.
However, the internet at large seems to disagree with me. Near everywhere I turn, I hear people talking about how great the show is.
So I decided to sit down and watch it again a few weeks ago. I came prepared this time, with a bottle of wine so I could drink myself into a stupor if I found it to be as bad as I remembered it.
It wasn't. It was fairly well-done, and the characters were more engaging than I remembered them being. Watching the second season through to its' conclusion made the mystery through it all make a lot more sense, and it seemed to be much smarter than I remembered it being. It wasn't as bad as I had previously thought of it.
However, there was one thing that did make it hard for me to watch it right through, and has resulted in me only watching it while fairly tipsy these days: The deaths.
This is the only case where I thought my recollection of it all was fairly accurate.
The deaths were brutal, sadistic and painful. There are scenes where I just wished for them to end already because there is no need for you to spend this long murdering them.
And this brings me to my point: Higurashi is often labeled as a Mystery/Horror game. However, I feel (This is just a personal thing though) that there is very little actual horror in the anime. While that is not to say that there is no horror in the show- there certainly is- much of what is often labelled as 'horror' would be more correctly labeled as 'violence' or 'gore'. I feel that the show would lose a lot of what defines it as Higurashi if the violence was less extreme, though.
In conclusion, Higurashi is a very good game and show if you like a show with a strong, complex mystery bent that takes a long time to unravel and requires you to think about everything, you will enjoy this show.
However, if you do not enjoy watching every character you have come to care about die again and again in needlessly brutal and sadistic ways, then this is not the show for you. If you do enjoy people dying in horrific ways, then you will enjoy this show.
Discuss.
(This is probably a bad idea for a thread, I should not make threads after drinking.)
Comments
Is this the only reason you could enjoy the show o_o
This is my addition to the thread
What purpose does this serve, beyond forcing symbolism in there in order to allow them to show more violence? Is there any practical reason for her to slam her head onto the knife more than once, at which point it was pretty clear she would die?
No it's not....well...from what I read (up to chapter 12), and the murders are usually confined to maybe 2 pages, depending on what's happening.
In general I have seen almost no worthwhile anime that goes through so many methods of putting emphasis on "bad ending", and not bad ending as in horrible, I mean bad ending like "game over", where if you don't successfully get the good ending, things go beyond horrible for everyone.
I would still enjoy it even if the deaths were not over-the-top, albeit they would kind of be something to skim over if they were toned down too much since most of the time, it was thinking about those horrible deaths which made the struggle to succeed even more intense. Considering Rika Furude has to relive these moments constantly and remember around 500 years of them, it makes it very emotional to have a moment where everyone doesn't die gruesome deaths, even for at least one moment. Eventually they try harder and harder, and end up avoiding meeting their horrible ends, and that fear that everything will go wrong again is what made the series so emotional for me.
Knowing that if even ONE person in that story failed or was captured by the enemies, that it would lead to a horrible death, made everything have more weight than the regular shows I watched, where you never see them fail and have the world and others absolutely destroy them. In Higurashi, you know what will happen if they fail, and you actually do see them fail, so when they strive to succeed there is always that thought in the back of your head reminding them that there is no absolute certainty that they will succeed because they are the main characters. You've seen them all bleed and get dismembered many times, and wonder will this be the day they all come out alive?
I got attached to the characters very closely in Kai, and watching them fail was very sad, but as the show progressed and they got more closer and attempted to break free from the "destined" fates that would happen to them. Eventually, they all survived, and I felt teary eyed and warm inside when all of that hard work in trying to avoid an eternal death payed off. Even though in the games, Hanyuu actually dies in order to protect Rika from being shot, in the anime that does not occur. This is not a bad thing though in some manners the story would have emotional sting either way.
And while the OVAs may lack the horror, death and mystery that the main series have, and feel a little perverse and pointlessly fanservicey, I am always reminded of all of the brutal shit they had to actually go through to come to a day where they could hang out at a swimming pool with the people that killed them a couple hundred times in the past, and nothing would have gone wrong. They earned their good ending, and to see them subjected to all of that bloody slaughter and despair once again would make that feeling I had at the end of the show feel wasted.