saikoroshi "dice-killing chapter"

question arc: n/a

pov character: rika

timeframe: june 1983...

reading time: 08/01/26 - 09/01/26

• rika pov; after the events of matsuribayashi, the kids go to the okinomiya swimming pool in july, the first time rika's reached this far past her death. hanyuu is absent...
• biking home in the evening, the kids fool round; rika is hit by a car
• she wakes up in the school nurse's office; she's greeted by the teacher, satoko and satoshi
• this is an alternate june of 1983 where seemingly miyo's parents never died (continued from matsuribayashi's secret ending fragment?)
satoko hates rika and has a clique that bullies her
satoko landed rika in the nurse's office by hitting her with a ball during recess
satoshi is alive and the houjou kids have a great relationship with their family
rena still goes by reina. she's the only one that offers rika any company, which rika resents
the dam opposition conflict did not succeed, seemingly due to the absence of tokyo/the mountain dogs' interference (domino effect from lack of miyo). hinamizawa is set to flood in april of next year, so a lot of families are moving away
the irie clinic is instead the "takano clinic", founded by hifumi with no correlation to miyo. it seems like he did still study hinamizawa syndrome, but the theory has not had any further research
the elderly do not revere rika
keiichi never transferred to hinamizawa
rika is a loner outcast kid with no friends...
• catching clues of this being a world where "everyone else had better dice rolls", rika starts to spiral. she cannot connect to hanyuu at all
• realizing rika seems lonely, reina walks home with her. rika doesn't want to go home, as her relationship with her parents is kinda strained; she's more used to them being dead, and feels no relief to be reunited with them
• rika sneaks into ritual storehouse to check if hanyuu is there. she finds a small crystal marble bead near oyashirosama's altar, from which she can hear hanyuu, but hanyuu can barely hear her
• in entering this world rika has been split from hanyuu due to a fragment mis-match
• hanyuu explains it as a fragment from the gods' world has fallen into the fragment where rika is now. fragments are revealed to never be accessible to rika as she is now, nor in her deaths...
• rika's last death was gruesome; hanyuu sent her to this world with her (as previously described) extremely waning power, due to how strongly her friends wished for her to return
• rika decides to save what little power the marble has and talk to hanyuu more later. her dad catches her in the storehouse immediately, then beats her (similar to arc3 satoko's account)
• rika's calling herself a witch again. she feels like she's violently stolen this world's rika from her rightful place like a parasite...
• for about a week, rika painfully goes through being alone at school then carefully searching the storehouse
• she calls hanyuu via the bead, who explains she's figured out fragments take the form of strong feelings for humans within a fragment, and the way to send it to the gods' plane would be by burning it
• the fragment's feeling could be in an object, or a person
• in her blurring day to days rika begins to wonder who she is (within her monologue more and more since minagoroshi separating between calling herself "me" and her role "rika")
• one day, an accident leads to a death in the kimiyoshi family; left home alone with access to booze, rika drinks
• she decides to rename herself fredrica bernkastel, copied from the wine label
• my freddy is born!!!!!!!
• rika tries touching things and people to assess if they hold the fragment, but has no leads. as days go by, she feels even more disconnected, thinking of this world and its inhabitants as all fake copies of her real ones, obstructing her return
• one day, it's raining; during lunch rika is poring over shrine documents disguised as a novel in her research for the fragment. satoko interrupts her and passes around her document to bully her
• more and more rika realizes this isn't her satoko at all; she starts beating her with a chair
• in the principle's office, she's scolded a bit. the principle points out she's bleeding from how hard she punched satoko...
• rika and satoko exchange hollow apologies. getting bandaged up, she feels as if her hand isn't even her own, instead hollow and distant
• she realizes the doctor is also a counselor and opens up to him a bit, calling herself bernkastel
• it plays out like a doctor listening to someone describe their delusions; she's fully aware of how her words sound to him, but is so desperate for help she doesn't barr any information, including that she's willing to kill to return to her world
• in his faux offerings, she agrees to help him communicate with hanyuu through the bead as proof during an appointment tomorrow
• after school, the upperclassmen reina, mion and satoshi pull aside rika and tell her they want to start mion's club to help her make friends
• (and off-handedly mentioned, shion is at st lucia's!?!)
• mion repeatedly says rika's isolation is her own fault. scolds her saying (the previous rika before fredrika "took over") acted like a pampered princess above everyone, never actively participating in anything before her friends moved away (difficult to believe as fully objective considering this mion is way crueler)
• reina admits they eavesdropped on her confessions to the doctor; fredrika is torn between knowing the "real" rika of this world would've loved to be a part of club, but she wants to focus on returning to her real post-arc8 world
• she realizes the best way to kill "fredrika" aka the feeling/memory that's making her adamant she must return to a previous world, then that would be like returning this body to rika
• reina compares her situation to a broken cup; she can either mourn the broken/lost cup forever, or try to find a new cup. fredrika leaves without making a decision
• at home, her mom is unusually nice; asks her to come help her make dinner
• fredrika resolves that maybe her life could be ok if she pretends to be rika, that no world is fully "better" than another
• fredrika eavesdrops on a conversation between her parents: the doctor has deemed her case so urgent he wants her picked up and taken to a big city's hospital tomorrow evening
• rika's mom catches her listening in and apologizes for everything. fredrika struggles to accept this as it isn't meant for "her", but eventually gives in and cries
• they nostalge about the village together, as mama thinks rika's problem is not wanting the village to flood; she mentions she was thought of as oyashirosama's reincarnation as a child
• in this world rika is the ninth-born daughter, not eighth-born. suddenly, fredrika feels the otherworldly fragment feeling within her moms embrace
• the fragment premise is "what if rika wasn't oyashirosama's reincarnation". fredrika despairs
• later that night, fredrika sneaks into the ritual storehouse to try and charge her bead
• she pleads for hanyuu's help; the pov swaps to hanyuu's narration, where she explains her human daughter ouka had not wanted to kill her, but this was a sacred duty necessary to deify hanyuu and cleanse humanity of its sins
• hanyuu's daughter promised to fix the world into a utopia where problems are solved via helping one another rather than scapegoating
• hanyuu thus promised she'd return to the human world once her daughter's promise is fulfilled. the daughter took control of the village and constructed the religion of oyashirosama to bolster strong ties of community
• hanyuu in her despair rejected humanity too strongly; this created a specific barrier that did not allow her re-entry into the human world
• a god of higher rank than hanyuu (!!??!) told her daughter that hanyuu may return once a miracle occurs, such as eight consecutive firstborn girls
• hanyuu's 1000 years of self-exile became miserable for her, and right as she began to despair over it, rika was born
• fredrika reflects that maybe the looping has been a sin in of itself
• hanyuu admits that her initial attempt to change rika's awful fate was a grave sin; that rika was meant to be disemboweled. fredrika spirals
• hanyuu explains her plan had been to ascend to the proper god plane after living alongside rika's original lifespan. within fredrika's current fragment, "this world's" hanyuu has most likely ascended, having had her fill of living with mama furude
• an escape from this fragment entails killing all that know rika's mama is blessed; only mama knows
• hanyuu refuses to be part of fredrika's decisionmaking, which comes down to whether she wants to return to hanyuu's company, or live in this world without her (basically if she can let hanyuu go, mirroring how hanyuu never let rika go)
• hanyuu is open to her "ascension" death, explaining it as a peaceful return to the womb. its posited as something fredrika can't understand as she's only 100 years old while hanyuu is instead 1000 years old
• hanyuu explains more of this world's parameters:
keiichi didn't shoot the kids, he got over himself and is working hard in school; his "sin is absent"
reina's parents' company stayed in business, so they had no reason to move to ibaraki leading to the divorce; she thus "has no sin"
the firstborn sonozaki twin was properly tattooed as the heiress; the twins are actually who they say they are. mion is training to be the successor and shion is not rebelling against her schooling. thus they have "no sin" (......🙀🙀)
satoko has no family issues and consequently never committed patricide, so sinless as well
( this is so bullshit )
hanyuu has already left the world, and rika's life remains uncorrupted. it's a perfectly pure/white/blank world
• fredrika assesses how rika's life is improved in this world, and comes to the conclusion that hanyuu is also her family. there's an emphasis on trying to meet her parents in the middle as flawed but doing their best (leaving out how intensely and frequently they beat her)
• hanyuu theorizes this world may be a gift from the god of fate. fredrika is still struggling. hanyuu explains she's bee granted the choice of either enjoying this pure world, or returning to her previous corrupted but conquered one via committing matricide
• presents it as any mother would happily die for their child, even as gruesome as this (bro...)
• fredrika admonishes hanyuu, saying she chose the easy way out of dying rather than bearing the sin of matricide as well as the work of directly improving the world. this is hanyuu's sin
• hanyuu bites back, asking if rika shall abandon the world she fought so hard for in favor of a "cleaner" new one
• hanyuu narration of the gravity of true choice; calls back to the red vs blue boxes (as if the narrator of that tip was not hanyuu nor fred/rika?)
• hanyuu tells fredrika she has until sundown tomorrow to make a decision as the bead is extinguishing and the fragment illuminated in her mama will dissipate
• fredrika realizes how it's been wrong to conceptualize her life as just a series of dice rolls, that her life and the choices she makes in it aren't precious due to them being do-over-able
• fredrika drifts off to sleep, putting "herself" to sleep, to now live as rika. the next day, rika vows to join the club...
• a fredrika poem about rain plays, like a credits roll; she wakes up in the post-matsuribayashi world, having survived the car accident
• through tears, irie proclaims it's a miracle rika has woken up from her month-long coma
• rika is shaken up and trying to confirm which world this is; irie asks, were you dreaming of your mother while you were asleep? (AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU)
• hanyuu appears (ghostly) when called. rika wonders if it was another loop, or just a coma dream; hanyuu plays dumb
• hanyuu sharply affirms it was just a dream, and rika spirals knowing it absolutely was not. she killed her mother then herself, but those last memories before the "jump" became hazy
• rika screams out. she feels as if those memories, "her fragment", is suffocating her; hanyuu suddenly magically calms her down as if ripping the fragment out of her, then conveniently disappears as friends spill in to check on rika
• the kids reunite. rika explains her alternate dream world, which they interpret as a typical near-death experience
• rika thinks about how she chose to return to a tainted world selfishly, ripping her ideal friends out of their ideal world
• rena talks her out of it, with a comparison like reina's: a flower doesn't get to choose if it'll grow up calmly in a greenhouse or under hardship in a field, but neither is "better"; they both bloom
• she tells rika there's no point in imagining alternative "better" outcomes, that this sounds like the perspective of a higher being rather than a flower/human
• rika's still conflicted, so rena has her pick between two hands for candy. rika chooses the hand with only 1 candy unknowingly, where the other held 2
• rena reassures her saying this worry of choosing the best world and outcome is a job for those on higher planes, not humans
• fredrika relinquishes her idea of being a witch, framing it as worrying about the cat in the box's alternate future is not productive; we have to do our best in whatever future we land in
• affirms herself as the human rika, and that fredrika might still exist as the copy of her that's lived those countless worlds over a hundred years
• irie shows up to kick the kids out so rika can rest. hanyuu appears, explaining the next time rika dies, she will let them both die together rather than ever interfere again
• hanyuu additionally mentions this incident lead to her meeting a new friend...?
• hanyuu bids "....rika" good night and sweet dreams...
• hanyuu's narration: this was an exercise in making rika more appreciative and aware, especially when it comes to her dead parents (girl) hopes to make her forget about it when she wakes

All-Cast Review Session

• the club + shion debate the sense of reality vs dream present in saikoroshi. higurashi daybreak is advertized and umineko is teased. the whole drawn cast chimes in to say they'd love for the story to continue where they're given alternate roles, or their story plays out differently

Staff Room

• 07th expansion staff members are represented with edited character sprites. they discuss what inspiration they're keeping in mind going into producing umineko, to ensure it becomes ultra popular
• the inspo points are rozen maiden, sakigake!! otokojuku, touhou (fashion) and dragonball