I decided that since the Massacre Arc is such a long, progressive one that tends to take its time developing (as well as noting that it’s the longest arc of the series I’ve watched thus far), I’m going to just go ahead and summarize the events of the arc and my thoughts about it without going into too much detail. Overall, I thought this was a great arc , but it took its fair time developing, and while I could break this down into pairs, it’s progression is far too sluggish to simply break it up, a lot of the episodes revolve around the same thematics, all culminating to one goal. Yet, like previous arcs, it does juggle negative events with ambitious pursuit.
Satoko is the central focus of this arc for quite some time-and if you remember the previous series-she’s victim to her abusive uncle. This particular arc does not go the same route as the previous however, and ties into the previous episodes in terms of the importance of changing fate. What I liked about it-it showed each of the characters taking a proactive role, and even showed Rika a bit more in terms of her gradual change to the optimistic. Of course, it also shows quite a bit of the characters in their “freak out” statures, running dangerously close to breaking point. Yet…as you can probably tell without even reading further into spoilers, there’s another story yet to be told-it also reveals a rather unlikely villain this time around.
It also marks the first time that Rika explains the Hinamizawa Syndrome in full respect-and makes the events that supposedly occur in the “volcanic disaster” make a lot more sense. Let’s say that Rika is similar to a “queen bee”-and if the “queen bee” dies…everything falls out of place.
Reflections of the arc under the cut. Instead of doing episode by episode screenshots, I included various collection of caps. Some episodes may not be represented in these caps, but I did my best to be inclusive enough to give a general idea of the events and also give something different that other anime blogs may not have covered with this series. I did end up changing fansub groups with respect to watching the remainder of the episodes, for the sake of completion.
Please, please don’t read unless you’ve seen the whole arc, because I’m not marking spoilers under the cut-it’s more collective.
