Expect­ing Ookami Kakushi to be like Higurashi/Umineko would almost be like expect­ing Sora no Woto to be like K-on, just a smaller mag­ni­tude of wrongness…

How dare you com­pare me to Rika or Beato!

I remem­ber how, at the begin­ning of win­ter sea­son, many peo­ple were look­ing for­ward to Ookami Kakushi being one of the bet­ter ones of the sea­son, as it was the adap­ta­tion of a visual novel crafted by the sto­ry­telling bril­liance of Ryukishi07 (Higurashi/Umineko) and char­ac­ter designs by Peach-Pit (Shugo Chara). Then, once the series began, peo­ple began to dis­like it because it wasn’t what they expected: the mys­tery was shal­low, the story was slow, and not to men­tion that series of ques­tion­ably dis­turb­ing scenes with Issei and Isuzu’s cling­y­ness. Also, peo­ple weren’t dying left and right, or at least the main and sup­port­ing char­ac­ters weren’t.

Must every­thing Ryukishi07 writes be dri­ven by mys­tery and blood and yan­dere lolis? I don’t think that was the goal of Ookami Kakushi at all. Both Hig­urashi and Umineko had a com­mon approach that defined them as a mys­tery series: we know very quickly what hap­pened, what we don’t know is how or why it hap­pened, and hence most of the series was spent piec­ing together infor­ma­tion to under­stand that. It’s drama dri­ven by the quest for infor­ma­tion. But Ookami Kakushi isn’t that way. Even some­one who doesn’t really like mys­tery series like me real­izes very quickly that this isn’t a mys­tery series, not when an ama­teur could guess very early why every­thing is the way they are. No, this is a much more stan­dard­ized ver­sion of drama, one pro­pelled by the esca­la­tion of mood, by the forg­ing of rela­tion­ships, by a desire to know what hap­pens next and how will they resolve this. It was meant to be a grad­ual approach, and not one full of sud­den sharp turns like Hig­urashi was.

This may not be what you were look­ing for as a viewer, but it’s what it is. From this per­spec­tive Ookami Kakushi did an admirable job. It’s nowhere even approach­ing being per­fect, but it has been nev­er­the­less very enjoy­able. At least a grade of two above aver­age I’d say.

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Before I get labelled as some Yan­dere the­o­rist like meflo­raine: no, I’m not a Yan­dere expert. Heck, I’m not even a Yan­dere fan, even if Kaede from Shuf­fle sits on my MAL top 10 favorite char­ac­ters or that I tend to like a lot of yan­dere char­ac­ters or that I argue for them when— okay not help­ing my case.

Of all the char­ac­ter archtypes lying about out there, Yan­deres seem to be the most mis­un­der­stood and hated, far more than even the most sadis­tic vari­a­tion of tsun­deres. Obvi­ously, I can’t judge other people’s pref­er­ences on the mat­ter, but I always felt like peo­ple are tak­ing Yan­deres the wrong way. When most peo­ple think of yan­dere they instantly think of “they will mur­der you! Nice boat style!” Uuu­uuu— I feel bad for them already. After all, they just wanted to be your bestest friend for ever and ever and ever. That box­cut­ter busi­ness? It’s not going to hap­pen unless you cheat on or betray them, and in some cases you might be just a bit deserv­ing of what’s com­ing… I mean, Makoto (School Days) sure does.

But even then, it’s not quite that sim­ple. I knew that Yan­deres (and Yan­gires for that mat­ter, see their MAL club for word break­down) were on the extreme ends, but even I didn’t quite under­stand the issue involved until I read this TIME mag­a­zine arti­cle on Bor­der­line Per­son­al­ity Dis­or­der. Yeah, psy­chol­o­gists once thought of this as a fatal dis­ease, how’s that for you sick-girl Moe lovers, not to men­tion all the Dam­aged Goods and Katawa Shoujo fans.

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Over the past two weeks my life’s free time had been almost entirely con­sumed by pho­to­shop, as the Tarot Project is finally com­ing together. I only have three things to say on the mat­ter — I’ve never taken pho­to­shop to be such seri­ous busi­ness before; I can finally say I’m more than just a noob to pho­to­shop thanks to the picto-editing skills I’ve acquired; and I haven’t felt so proud of my goods for a long time.

Before any­one asks “why all girls?”, it’s to cut down on the com­pe­ti­tion between char­ac­ter and more con­sis­tency in art style. Not to men­tion — the deck is cuter this way.

I might think about mak­ing a bishie/GAR deck later, maybe, if I feel like throw­ing away another week+ of free time.

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