[Khym Chanur]

Again, this is rather long, so using spoiler tags to not take up so much vertical screen space.

Spoiler for Responses to other posts:

Originally Posted by theacefrehley

On Tsumihoroboshi, it's already clear that there was no syringe or needle... It was a crayon in the first case

Ah. I was wondering why Mion and Rena would try something like water filled syringe penalty game on him given how unstable he'd been acting. Question: what delusion/hallucination caused Keiichi to rip out the portion of the note talking about the drugs and remove the crayon from the back of the clock? Or did Irie have that done to prevent the authorities from figuring out just how far Keiichi's delusions had gone? Or did Takano have it done, just for the fun of screwing with the minds of the police? Or (my final theory) the whole scene where Ooishi talks about what was found on the back of the clock was a dream/hallucination Keiichi had as he was dying.

Also, is there a summary/transcript of the Tsumihoroboshi game out there somewhere? I'm pretty sure that this wasn't revealed in the Tsumihoroboshi anime arc.

Originally Posted by Klashikari

the 3 Yamainu men were under Irie command, and was supposed to take care of Keiichi and bring him back home, under Mion and Rena's care, while he was coming with some treatment. (since Keiichi was under L5 state). however, he didn't make in time...

Okay, leaving someone in a L5 state alone with two civilians who have no idea how dangerous he is is really stupid. Why didn't the Yamainu babysit him? I suppose Irie didn't want Keiichi to associate the Yamainu with him, but they could have done something like tie him up and leave him somewhere where Irie could conveniently stumble upon upon him. So for whatever reason he decides to leave Keiichi in the care of Rena and Mion, but he can't warn them about how dangerous he is because he can't reveal anything about the Syndrome... But then how was he planning on injecting Keiichi with the C103/sedative all by himself, and without the girls knowing? If he was going to have the two of them hold Keiichi down for him, he'd have to give them some reason the injection. And why didn't Irie tell the Yamainu to disarm Keiichi? Gahhhhhh...

Originally Posted by Klashikari

every scene with people under oyashiro-sama mode (AKA the "seed mode", cat/lizard eyes) are always delusions

Huh, wasn't Keiichi in oyashiro-sama mode back when Rena confronted him over the fact that he'd lied to cover up his first meeting with Ooishi? Do the delusions start as early as L1? Or was he already in a more advanced state?

Also, is ep 4 when Rena was telling Keiichi how she wouldn't let him be demoned away, was he hallucinating her carrying the hatchet, or was she really carrying it?

And an unrelated question about the first arc: in ep 4, when Rena is apologizing for "taking the joke to far", is the joke her pretending to be all knowing by revealing what Keiichi is eating for dinner, the "trap" ohagi, or both?

Originally Posted by Klashikari

and Watanagashi-hen at the very end, when Keiichi "saw" a "bloody Mion" assaulting him, which was denied by the end scroll

So the psychological trauma of being knifed by "Mion" was enough to send Keiichi straight from L0 to L5? Hmmmm, and is Keiichi infected with the parasite in every world? Obviously, not everyone who visits Hinamizawa becomes infected, so why is Keiichi always infected? Does the Irie clinic infect all newcomers to the area with the parasite? They already have several thousand native inhabitants to study, I would think that they'd want to see how quickly newcomers would be infected naturally, if at all. Or do the researchers think that the native inhabitants might have evolved a inheritable resistance to the parasite, and they want to see how someone with without those genes will react to the parasite?

Originally Posted by Klashikari

and iof course, with the H170, it wouldn't be hard for takano, to force rika's mother into a L5 state, which irie would not suspect at all. (previous queen thing, always next to rika etc...). takano is really smart and cunning ~~

Hmmmm, I don't think that she would inject Rika's mother with H170. First, if someone who was daily in the presence of the queen went as far as L5, it would discredit her queen carrier theory. She could tell her superiors back in Tokyo what she'd done while keeping Irie in the dark, but feeding your chief researcher false information isn't a good way to run a research project, and it would likely get the project defunded. Second, I think Takano would have wanted to compare a pure, untampered queen to a pure, untampered previous queen, and injecting the former queen with H170 would have muddied up the data they would have gotten. So I think that Takano did the research/vivisection on the mother herself, and then presented the resulting data to Irie as a done deal, rather than have Irie do the procedures herself; after all, Takano did say that she wanted to get revenge on the mother herself.

Spoiler for Response to Piece #07:

Originally Posted by kj1980

See Piece #07 which has just been posted as the truth behind that will be uncovered there.

Cool! So, at this point Takano still believes in the queen carrier theory? I would have thought that she would have abandoned this theory when Satoko reached L5 in spite of the fact that she's best friends with the supposed queen and is frequently in her presence (either her dedication to her grandfather is so great that she ignores anything that would disprove any of his theories, or she had no idea that Satoko and Rika hung out together). A while back I'd gotten the idea that Takano had engineered for the great disaster because her research into Rika had eventually given unignorable evidence that the queen carrier theory was false. The death of Rika would prevent anyone else from researching her and duplicating the discovery that the queen carrier theory was false, engineering the great disaster fabricated proof that queen carrier theory was correct, and discovering that her beloved grandfather's theory was false would have made her even further crazy than before. I'd discarded the idea when I thought that Satoko's L5 state would have disuaded Takano of the queen theory, but now I think the idea still has some merit.

Hmmmm, but Takano says that the data being gotten from Rika is invaluable, and acts as the compass for the entire project. If Rika isn't the queen, what kind of invaluable data are they getting from her? Is Rika's imporatnce to the project a delusion of Takano's, and Irie is right that they don't need to do further research on her? Or are the parasites in Rika special, just not special in the way which would make the queen theory true? The only difference/specialness I can think of would be that Rika's parasites allow her to see and hear Hanyuu, but if that's the only difference, then how is that difference invaluable to the research into the syndrome? (Hmmmm, there's an idea for a fanfic: a world/arc/chapter where the research project develops a drug which allows the subject to see and hear Hanyuu.)

And it turns out that Takano grew up in an orphanage. I would think that she would have resented her grandfather for not adopting her and taking her out of the orphange, but instead she reveres him; strange.

Spoiler for About the reboots:

And now I jump to my theories about Hanyuu and Rika's "reboots". One theory is that there are an infinite number of different universe, but only one Hanyuu, because she was born in the space between the universes. She chose Hinamizawa in one of the universes as a place to live and befriended Rika because Rika was the only one who could interact with her. When Rika died, she moved sideways between universes and backwards through time to find another Rika, and gave Rika the memories from the previous universe in the hopes that Rika could prevent stay alive this time around. (While universes do exist where, for example, Takano died in a car accident before establishing the Hinamizawa Syndrome research project, Hanyuu either ignores those universes because their Rikas don't need help, or universes that are highly similar form into clusters, and Hanyuu is stuck in a cluster where the research project is always established, where rules X, Y and Z are always true). While intellectually I kind of like this theory, overall I dislike it, because even if Hanyuu succeeds in changing one universe so that Rika and all her friends survive, there will still be universes out there that she will have never visited and thus could not have saved; she keeps getting weaker with each attempt, and there's no way she can save all the universes out there. It also has the problem that in some universes Rika would have known Hanyuu for almost all her life, while at the other end in some universes Rika would only have known Hanyuu for the few weeks before June 1983.

My other theory on the reboots and Hanyuu is that there was originally only one universe, with Hanyuu born inside of it. When Rika died, she went back in time within the same universe to try to alter history. However, history can't be changed, so when she arrived in the past the universe split in two: one that proceeds from the present, with Rika dead and Hanyuu gone, and the other proceeding from the past, with Rika alive and a Hanyuu with foreknowledge trying to change things. (What happened to the Hanyuu from the past? She couldn't have merged with the Hanyuu from the future, since then Hanyuu's energy reserves wouldn't decrease with each reboot. Or does she merge, and the merger is what weakens her?) When she arrives in the past, her connection to Rika causes Rika to gain the memories of what happened to her before the reboot. Keiichi gains his memories from a previous universe either because he hangs out with Rika, because he's infected with the parasite and Hanyuu has some connection to it, or both. This scenario has the advantages that the Rika in each universe has always known Hanyuu, and that once Hanyuu and Rika succeed and creating a happy ending there won't be any more universes in need of help that remain beyond Hanyuu's reach.

However, the second theory has the problem that, with each reboot, not only does Rika have less and less time to try to fix things, but more and more of the past becomes set in stone. For the sake of the argument, suppose that with each reboot, the amount of time Hanyuu can go back decreases by a day. On reboot N Hanyuu arrives at January 1, 1980. If this reboot fails, the reboot N+1 will land her on January 2, with whatever random events happened happened on January 1 of the Nth reboot being fixed, and also being fixed for all further reboots. If the random events that sometimes lead to Shion going insane happen on January 1, 1980, then it was by purest chance that those events didn't happen on January 1 of the Nth reboot. If they had happened then, then on the N+1 reboot, and all subsequent reboots, Shion would always go crazy. For me, it doesn't fit in with the feel of the story that, as Hanyuu's strength gradually wanes, that the random events of the past that fall from her grasp and become set in stone just by chance happen to be the random events that won't prevent a happy ending.

Spoiler for About Hanyuu and Oyashiro-sama:

I also have some thoughts on just Hanyuu herself. One of the things that I've wondered is if Hanyuu is tied to the Hinamizawa. I would think that, over the hundreds of years of elapsed time in which Hanyuu and Rika are trying to create a happy ending, one of them would have gotten the idea of Hanyuu traveling to other parts of Japan, or even other parts of the world, looking for a priest/monk/shaman/guru/whatever that can see her. Maybe Rika is the only person in the entire world who can see Hanyuu, but I think that Hanyuu can't leave Hinamizawa to find out.

What could tie Hanyuu down to Hinamizawa? It could be that her kind are tied to the area where they are "born", but an explanation like that would have no connection to the rest of the story. The only thing that I can think of that would tie her to Hinamizawa is the parasite, and hence the curse. And if Hanyuu has no connection to the parasite, then she is only Oyashiro-sama in the sense that she is a deity like being who resides in Hinamizawa, and Hinamizawa's deity is Oyashiro-sama; from a story-telling point of view, that's rather unsatisfying. One idea I had was that all the parasites in all of the infected villagers constitute her body, and are connected together by some supernatural means; she would see and hear anything that any of the villagers saw or heard. However, this would only mostly tie her down to the village, since people born to the village do leave, like Rena's family. And even ignoring that, there's something about this I don't like that I can't really put my finger on.

Another idea is that the parasites in Rika alone constitute Hanyuu's body. Hanyuu was born when Rika was born, and Hanyuu ages as Rika ages (which would explain why the village's deity is a little girl instead of a grown woman). Rika is the reincarnation of Oyashiro-sama, which is why Hanyuu is Oyashiro-sama. Rika never leaves the village, so Hanyuu is tied to the village (though Hanyuu must be able to project herself at least several kilometers, since Satoko once heard her apologizing, and Rika probably wasn't present at the government/villager damn meeting (Local Project Meeting (Piece #26)), but Hanyuu certainly was there). According to Research Note II (Ep. 13) in the TIPS:

Footnote 3: Literal translation of this way of spelling "Oyashiro-sama" - The deity of every eight generations

So the female members of the Furude family are "queen carriers", but no in the way that Takano supposes: every eight generations, the parasites of a girl in the Furude family give rise to a consciousness with supernatural powers, Oyashiro-sama. But what is Oyashiro-sama? When demons invaded from the marshes, Oyashiro-sama came down and made peace between them (can't find a TIPS for this). According to Takano, the parasites have grown weaker over the generations, and the Syndrome only becomes activated due to extreme psychological stress (is there a TIPS for this?) I'm guessing that Takano is wrong: it's not that they've grown weaker over time, but that the parasites have some sort of biological clock that wakes them up every eight generations, and every eight generations an Oyashiro-sama is (re)born with the power to put them back to sleep, hence keeping the peace between humans and the "demons".

From Scrapbook I (Ep 06):

What the Onigafuchi village feared the most was Oyashiro-sama's curse.
There's very little left that describes what kind of punishment Oyashiro-sama eventually dealt.

Among the various legends about the village, several disturbing ones that looked like the village was completely destroyed stood out, as "He'll open the gates to hell", "Demons will flow out", "The infernal miasma will come out and kill all of the people in the village without leaving them a chance to escape."

The timing of the birth of the eighth generation Furude girl isn't precise, and the timing of the wakening of the parasites might not be precise either. Thus, sometimes the girl is born long before the parasites wake up, and is there in adult form to put them back to sleep the instant they wake up, so that there is no disaster. However, sometimes she is born late, and isn't matured enough to have the power to immediately put them back to sleep, resulting in the villagers going L5 and almost wiping themselves out before Oyashiro-sama grows old enough to have sufficient power to put them to sleep. Thus, Takano's queen theory isn't entirely incorrect: it's not that the death of the queen causes the parasites to wake up, but that the parasites are due to wake up at a certain time, and if the queen isn't alive when that time comes they'll never go back to sleep. This is why research on Rika is the "compass" for Takano's project. In the universes in which the great disaster does not happen, improvements made to C103 after Rika's death enable parasites to put back to sleep without their queen, while the current C103 only makes them drowsy.

This waking-up-every-eight-generations thing reminds me of the seventeen year locust, insect that spends years and years as nymphs underground, and every seventeen years emerge from the ground, turn into adults, and lay eggs for the next generation. Perhaps the parasite waking up is some necessary part of the life cycle (though I'm coming up blank on imagining a biology that would require this), with the paranoia a side effect of that part of the life-cycle. The queen carrier line is there to put them back to sleep, so that they don't wipe out their hosts due to the paranoia side effect. One nice tie-in for this theory is that the seventeen year locust is actually a cicada. However, it's a type of cicada native to the eastern part of North America, and "Higurashi" is a type of cicada that buzzes when it gets dark.

Spoiler for Speculation about Satoshi's fate:

And, finally, some speculation on what happened to Satoshi. This speculation is based on the anime, which might have changed things or gotten things wrong, so this might be completely off base. Anyways, in the third arc, Keiichi pats Satoko on the head while in the classroom, she has a flashback to Satoshi patting her while smirking evilly, and as a result she panics to a degree which gives her an adrenaline boost that lets her shove Keiichi so hard that he goes flying, then vomits. This struck me as an extreme overreaction to be being abandoned by Satoshi, and thought that maybe Keiichi had started abusing her before she left. Reading the Pieces thread and learning that the Syndrome makes people paranoid, I thought that Satoshi's paranoia could have lead him to believe that Satoko was purposfully being dependant on him so as to frustrate him, and in retaliation he beat her. Then it turns out that Satoko has reached L5 in the past, and most likely killed her own parents. So now I'm thinking that after Satoshi's not-yet-L5 Syndrome led him to beat up Satoko, this triggered her into full L5 and she killed him. Afterwards she repressed the memory of killing her precious Nii-nii (has she also repressed the memory of killing her parents?), and even repressed the memory of Satoshi beating her. Keiichi patting her on the head were starting to bring back those memories, which is why she reacted so violently.