Owarimonogatari Episode 1: Ougi Formula [First Impression]

Anime is saved.

Kizumonogatari

KIZU CONFIRMED, IS THIS REAL LIFE?

For some reason, I think they’re doing a Peter Jackson and splitting the single Kizumonogatari novel into three movies, but that’s not even important at this point – what’s important is that it’s here, and that it’s finally happening. I didn’t even think I’d get to see it within the next ten years or so! It was a relic, just like the Hunter x Hunter manga! It was more alive as a meme than anything else! It might as well have not even existed, like Index III, Spice and Wolf III and everything else affected by the Half-Life curse! I don’t care that it’s not going to be available in any form in the West for months at least, given that the first movie is in Japanese theatres on January 8th 2016 – it’s finally a thing, and after so long I’m happy with that. Anime is saved, guys. I feel like the karmic price for finally getting Kizu was the death of Manglobe, but OH WELL.

Ougi Formula

I feel really reluctant labelling this a ‘first impression’, because it really isn’t – the never-ending adaptation of Monogatari has been around for over half a decade now, and this is more like a continuation of the TV anime after a two-year break. And even within those two years, we had movie-style adaptations of Hanamonogatari (which I didn’t cover) and Tsukimonogatari (which I did cover). Suruga Devil was about this time last year, and Yotsugi Doll was at around Christmas, if memory serves me correctly.

So initially, I was going to start this off by calling the one-hour Ougi Formula arc a promo for Kizu, and after actually watching it I’m divided – it kind of is, because this is also an arc that deals with Araragi’s past, and at the same time it isn’t, because it was way too interesting to be simple fodder material. It did take a while to get going, though – I was only fully hooked when Ougi suggested that the locked room’s existence and the way it was acting was due to Araragi himself. All that stuff about Euler and mathematics at the start made me groan a bit, but it was standard Araragi exposition in the end. A lot of this was standard for Monogatari, really – it’s just that this standard is already really high. SHAFT were the same as usual, too. In that flashback scene, the only animated characters were Oikura and Araragi – and everyone else was just their name in kanji!

As I said above, I found it a misnomer that this was called Ougi Formula – because if anything, I’m even more confused about Ougi than I was before. I’ve always found her creepy, even before she became the fault of practically everything ever in the story – and I’m going to call her a ‘she’, by the way. I think she became a ‘he’ to someone in a past arc, it might have been Kanbaru or Sengoku, but I’m really not sure. I don’t know why she was depicted as the god when Araragi talked about the possibility of a god existing, but what I do know is that there’s no way in hell she’s actually related to Oshino. I know she knows a lot about him, but she seems to know a lot about everything and everyone – by the end of this arc I felt like Araragi was telling his story for our benefit more than for hers, because she sounded like she already knew it all. And this was supposed to be their first meeting. Araragi even told her he thought that she was the one who locked him in there – there’s no way she didn’t already know about everything. I could easily see her as someone (or something) who lies without technically telling a lie, or who deceives people to trap them. She doesn’t even have pupils in her eyes!

In the end, all that happened was that two characters talked to each other in a classroom for one hour. And yet, it was one of the best episodes I’ve seen all week. I did find the existence of this arc odd, though, because I’m not sure how important this is to Araragi’s development as a character – I’ve always believed that things began for him in Kizu, when he first met Shinobu. It’s interesting to know that his personality went through a change before he entered third-year, but when he met Hanekawa it changed again – so surely that initial change can’t have mattered all that much? I also can’t see this as an arc for Ougi, because we’ve learnt pretty much nothing new about Ougi – it’s like how Mayoi Jiangshi wasn’t actually about Mayoi, and how Shinobu Time wasn’t actually about Shinobu. Or how Hitagi End should really have been Kaiki End. If I had to find a purpose in this arc, it would be that it introduces Oikura and gives her some background – because after all, the next arc is Sodachi Riddle.

I like twintails, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I like Oikura. At the moment I’m fairly neutral towards her – though I feel a bit of pity as well, given that she was so unfairly denounced by her classmates and teacher. I do hope she doesn’t end up being a tsundere, and just feels hate and nothing else for Araragi – we already have a self-aware tsundere in Gahara-san, and it’d be a breath of fresh air if there’s a cast member who is outright antagonistic towards him. To me, it was obvious the entire time that Oikura couldn’t possibly have been the culprit – because as both Ougi and Araragi said, it wouldn’t make sense for her to take the time to gather everyone and say something like ‘no-one can leave until we find out who the culprit is’. In fact, if I had to pick the most suspicious person, it would be the guy who got full marks – we know Araragi wouldn’t do something like that, but from an objective point of view, he is clearly the shadiest one despite not having attended the study group. Senjougahara nearly got full marks too, and didn’t attend the study group, but that’s just because Senjougahara is perfect. I next thought that the culprit could have been someone not in the study group, who collaborated with someone who was, in order to raise everyone’s marks – Ougi said that there would be no benefit in the score deviation being lower, but I could believe that some (who didn’t care about class in general) would do that so that all their friends would do well.

I felt like I was watching an episode of Rokka no Yuusha at one point – it was basically an hour of talking heads, and I was trying to solve the mystery as the episode was playing. Ougi did break the fourth wall and question ‘the reader’ to try to solve the mystery, but I don’t think it was intended to be something truly solvable by the average audience in such a short period of time. I thought it was Gahara-san, by the way, which would then explain why she was always alone at school – but of course, she didn’t attend the study group, and on further thought there’s no way she’d go to all the effort to do something as random as that. It was very clever to insert the line ‘all the seats were filled’ – and of course, Araragi spent the entire assembly standing, with Oikura never having told him to take his seat precisely because it was already filled by Tetsujo. I think this is where it helps to have the entire class be lines of kanji instead of people – if they were people, it would have been much more obvious that someone was in Araragi’s seat, because he’s supposed to be in this class as well.

I think they also did the ‘majority rule’ theme really well – it’s not that they never figured out the culprit and could never go home, it’s that they just assigned someone to be one in their frustration. It’s like how, if everyone in the entire world except you is insane, it might be more apt to call you the insane one instead. During the acid trip ‘argument’ scene, I was actually wondering whether I’d be finding out the hard way whether I’d suffer a seizure as a result of flashing lights – I’ve never tried by exposing myself before. I think being headache-inducing was intentional, as if to highlight the tension and drama the class were going through at that point – and to imagine, it was the teacher’s fault all along. All this was her fault. She destroyed Oikura’s life to make her career go smoother. Which is already bad enough, but she’s a teacher – doing that is the exact opposite of what she was employed to do! And it’s not that she just sat there, she put her hand up for Oikura too! What a slimy bitch!

I’m looking forward to seeing Oikura next week. I can’t remember the last time a character was introduced, given that we’ve just been through a second cycle of all the main girls with Monogatari: Second Season. I guess the latest new character would be Ougi, but she’s less of a character and more of a… whatever the hell she is. That would make the last proper characters Yozuru and Yotsugi, and they appeared all the way back in Nisemonogatari. So yeah. I hope twintails will be fun.

Possibility of Watching: Forever
Possibility of Blogging: Forever