Preview:
What you will meet...
...the cost of kindness.
Where you will fall...
...the maze of sadness
What will burn...
...vengeful thoughts.
Okay, so this arc actually makes sense in combination with the last one. Basically, it's what happened before, and then what happened after. It still doesn't fit with the first two arcs though. In the first arc, everyone except Rika and Satoko are killed, in the second, they're alive again. My first explanation was that the second arc took place before the first one. Later, this was falscified, since Mion kills everyone in the second arc, while in the first arc, she is killed by Keiichi. So from that I concluded that there was no real connection between the two. Both dreams or hallucinations, different timeplanes, alternate storylines... Something like that. However. In the previous arc, apart from all the Satoko-stuff, eventually Rika-chan is killed, in the same way they showed here. And the the volcano-gas-disaster, which they mention again in this arc, occurs. In the previous arc, Keiichi was the only survivor, so that kind of made me expect him to pop up somewhere in this episode. x'D Anyways, the only relation the rest of the arcs have had so far, is that in every arc, the watanagashi-murders occur al in the same order with the same victims. To think that Rika foresaw everything. And she seemed so innocent. Though in Higurashi, you know that means the opposite. Well at least neither Rika nor Satoko turned evil, I wonder if that's still gonna happen. I wonder what the next arc will be about. Initially, I wasn't too fond of the idea this series consisted of a bunch of totally unrelated arcs, only with the same characters. Espially after the first two arcs. But now, I get the feeling all these stories are all somehow related, and that it all somehow will make perfect sense in the end. The first arc was pretty much concluded, but the second left me with a What-the-fuck-feeling. The third one too, which was partly concluded with this one, but still not entirely. I still got questions, like what happened to Keiichi after that? How come he was the only survivor? I would already have thought he died from falling of that bridge? And why did Satoko's uncle not die, while the bat was gone. And who killed Rika? And what happened to Satoko after that, did she die too, or? And something else has been bugging me too: In the first chapter, Ooishi was a good guy. In the next one too. In the previous arc he was a total evil jerk, but in this one he turned good again, while this seems to be the same timeplane/storyline! Weirdweirdweird. AAAAAHH! This series is fucking with my mind, but oh, how I love it!
