#meguri

Satoko at her darkest. She was from a "Happy End" fragment, but the circumstances of Rika's own happiest ending were very hostile to Satoko.

Rika's happy ending was Satoko's worst nightmare. Two best friends separated by differing points of view. The princess and the black sheep.

Beautifully tragic.

I wonder how Rika views the Looper Satoko. Does she prefer the human Satoko, or the Witch that can understand her experiences? Or does she see no difference between the two?

Following up from my last reblog, I want to really specify all the ways in which the Gou/Meguri manga has been doing far more justice to Satoko as a traumatized victim of abuse than the Gou/Sotsu anime, which just went for the stupid, cartoonish Enfant Terrible route with her. Most impressive is how for the most part, it’s all in the artwork.

Firstly, look at this part here:

The TREMBLE there as Satoko has bruised her own hand is telling. Bruises on her body are such an old, familiar sensation for her given how her aunt and uncle used to treat her. This is the first time in ages she’s felt it and while Looper Witch!Satoko finds it pleasurable, the traumatized human child she is deep inside is trembling with pain. And the choice of words, “appeal to uncle”, is interesting. Satoko understands how Teppei thinks and how physical violence is such a core part of who he is, even now. It wouldn’t be enough to just claim to him that she’d been hurt by bullies at school; her uncle would need to SEE the bruises, the aftereffect of violence that are so familiar to him, in order to be sold on the threat to his niece’s well-being. 

Then we have this part:

Method acting at it’s finest. Looper Witch!Satoko is pulling from not only the memories of human!Satoko (who the witch persona now looks at as simply a character she’s play-acting as for “the game” she’s in), but the emotions that accompany those memories which they may still evoke. She’s willing herself into the mindset of a child who has been horribly abused, traumatized, and wants to be saved. The child she was. The child she, way deep down, still is. (Also fuck Teppei, he is indeed repulsive and deserved that headshot he got.)

She actually fucking gags herself to bring out all the bile and vomit that was rising up in her thanks to her “acting technique.” The look on her face and in her eyes as she’s panting and going into a nervous breakdown, followed by the brief smirk and mad giggling, encapsulates the self-harming, masochistic nature of what Looper Witch!Satoko is doing and her own psychology towards it versus how it makes her feel on a subconscious human level. She hates it because it’s unpleasant, emotionally and mentally scarring and draining to be put through, but she loves it because herself on the brink of destruction makes her so pitiful and worrying to her dearest friends and found family in Hinamizawa, brings out a fierce desire to protect her and treat her with love and compassion. Satoko has long felt like she’s only deserving of love and warranting of her friend’s time and care when she’s an object of pity, a damsel in distress to be saved, a “tragic heroine”. Looper Witch!Satoko is that externalized.

This picture here really is worth a thousand words on what I just said:

Is it, Satoko? IS IT REALLY?

And then we see a specific reaction from her at two different points:

The FLINCH. First that, plus her horrified expression and trembling, is at the sound of her uncle roaring in rage, a sound that forever haunts her and shakes her to her core. Yeah, Teppei thinks he’s protecting his neice from bullies this time, but he’s applying the same wrath, intimidation techniques, and threat of violence he used to use on her in order to do so. The next time she flinches is when Rika is shouting encouragement to her to take her stand against her uncle, and brings up Satoshi. The talk of her brother who “always fought back” and “stood up against the abuse” is hitting Satoko different this time - because Satoko, deep down, recognizes that she’s once again suffering in silence and allowing her own abuse to be perpetuated, this time not by her aunt and/or uncle or even others in Hinamizawa, but by Eua and her own witch persona. She’s again lost in darkness.

Earlier into Rika’s phonecall, Satoko was smirking, so some who have a colored perception of Satoko at this point may have the interpretation that she’s faking everything and has her hand over her mouth to hold back laughter. But that’s not what ends up shown:

That clench. That squeeze. The deliberate artistic choice that, just as when she flinched back there, her upper face is darkened so that we cannot see her eyes. There is an internal struggle going on her. This is Satoko’s buried humanity acting up and trying to break back out to the surface, all while the witch persona tries to “get into character” without letting that “character” overtake her and mess up the whole performance she’d wanted to put on. Ultimately, we see the witch eyes and a smirk return to Satoko’s face, meaning the witch persona won out...except for one tiny detail. The tears. And had those tears stayed like that, it’d seem fake....but then Satoko cannot stop them.

Those tears are real, and the cry for help, those words “HELP ME!”, now ring true with an extra meaning. Satoko wants to be helped and saved from herself. She wants to leave the darkness of her warped psyche and subconscious and the metaphysical embodiment of her mental breakdown and the malevolent demon who empowered her with the looping ability all behind so that she can return to being the person she was, the person she needs to be, with the friends and family she needs to be with. And what really signifies that this is the inner human Satoko crying out from Satoko’s very subconscious? 

There’s the precedent established earlier. It’s happened before, when Satoko was not intending to really cry in the moment, yet still did because she’d been touched. She’d been reached. She’d been felt.

So this has been a great portrayal of a traumatized victim of child abuse who has willingly put herself on a self-destructive course by seeking comfort in her own trauma and stability in her would-be eternal childhood by controlling her own victimization and how the narrative of events and responses of others plays out from it, rather than seeking comfort, control and stability in what and who provided her the means for salvation and release from all that pain years ago.