So uh, about that anthology comic series,
Kataribanashi-hen? You know, the one where artists literally drew out submitted fanfiction from 2007 to 2009?
Turns out the chapter titled
Satokoishi-hen is a Teppei redemption one-shot, and
it'ssssssssssss kinda decent? It's still infuriating because we have proof from the sound novel that he's a monster who never actually cared about Satoko and wouldn't hesitated to abuse her in any way, but the one-shot made it to where he came into the picture wanting to put on a ploy to deceive Satoko into thinking he's changing, though what his original intentions were for it never really came to fruition because he's coming around to somewhat liking the change, and Ritsuko pretty much thwarts his plan. Yeah, in order to make Teppei look
good in comparison, Ritsuko
has to be the monster Teppei confronts when she kidnaps Satoko to force him to comply with her basically using him as the offering to the Sonozakis, but she was going to kill Satoko anyway because she's a cunt. And we get this image of Keiichi upper-cutting her after Teppei took the blow for Satoko.
So Teppei is injured so badly he ended up with amnesia, and Satoko decides to call him "father" as a way to start over with him. That world apparently ends happily as Rika ponders that perhaps Teppei actually had some scars of his own and he needed to be given a chance. Oh, and Teppei still mentions before he succumbs to his amnesia that he had been having bad dreams, but it wasn't of him dying alone, it was of him beating the shit out of Satoko. Oh, and he apparently was raised in a single-parent household.
So I'm thinking Ryukishi may have stolen this fanfic's basic idea for his own, but fucked it up (I guess?) by inserting it into the series where Satoko becomes a murderous vengeful witch because she didn't want to study. He wasn't given an actual proper chance to
have any kind of atonement that wasn't him being the asshole victim. Which is why his heel-face turn at the end of the series is extremely uncomfortable and undeserved because he did
nothing to deserve it due to contrived circumstances. Ryukishi's end "canon" result is
that much of a failure,
fucking fanfiction is the superior take on the idea that could've potentially won me over to the idea of a Teppei redemption arc despite the stupid amnesia trope.
I'm left here speechless by this discovery. I had tried years ago to find
Kataribanashi-hen scans, but only found a scant few of these one-shots that I didn't bother digging around for more. Apparently this particular chapter only got translated early last year according to this
site I'm using, so only a
very small handful of Higurashi fans ever knew about this prior to the beginning of 2021, and I don't think any one of those brought it up before.
I hate this. I hate this because I don't know how to process this after having spent energy two years ago (
holy shit) getting pissed off over it. I probably would've had something to say back then if I had known about this potential act of plagiarism because I'm autistic like that to have remembered something like this.
Fuck.