Owarimonogatari Episode 6: Sodachi Lost, Part Three

How long can a human corpse keep its shape?

Impression

This arc had a really sad ending.

It would have made things slightly better if Ougi hadn’t showed up, but ultimately nothing would have changed for Oikura. At the risk of beating what must now be a very dead horse, I’m ever-creeped out by how Ougi has spent the entire arc talking as though she knows more than she should – and she wasn’t even there with Araragi and Hanekawa when they went to visit Oikura! This isn’t even Gaen Izuko-level any more, it’s just ridiculous. As ever, when she starts speaking all the other characters just clam up and listen to her whilst looking really uncomfortable, as if they’re lost for words and have been backed into a corner despite this girl(?) supposedly being two years younger than them. In the space of a couple of minutes, Ougi:

• Implied that she was better than Hanekawa;
• Insulted her boobs;
• Planted thoughts within Araragi of how things would have turned out if Ougi had been picked;
• Implied that she’s known the answer all along; and
• Asked Hanekawa to apologize and admit her inferiority.

Hanekawa did nothing wrong. I’m so glad she didn’t apologize over her boobs. I like DFC, I really do, but in this case personality totally wins over breast sizes. Fuck you, Ougi. And she even used it to try and hook Araragi away from Hanekawa and towards her – like with the initial choice Araragi had to make between them, I think there would have been really, really bad consequences if either of them sucked it up and apologized to Ougi. And in the end, all that stuff she told Araragi about underestimating him made it seem like this arc was just a game or a test to her – in fact, the past three arcs feel like Oikura’s entire character was used as a stepping stone for Ougi to worm her way into Araragi’s life. And that makes me sad, because I think Oikura is precious and needs to be kept safe.

My initial guess was that there was no mother, and Oikura has been hallucinating it for all these years. And I was only semi-right, because she did exist – up until the point when she lost the will to live and slowly decomposed until Oikura couldn’t even recognize her as a corpse any more. That’s pretty rough. There must have been an element of hallucination in it though, because from her point of view there were responses from her mother – and if she didn’t open the door to check how she was doing after the dinners she made stopped being eaten, there must have been an element of wilful blindness in it all. I don’t know how long it takes for a corpse to decompose, but if she didn’t check on her for so long that the corpse was no longer recognizable as a corpse, that must be a hell of a long time. I wonder if this is worse than if her mother was killed by her father? It wasn’t as morbid a solution as Hanekawa kept saying it was, but it’s not exactly rainbows and flowers either. Of course, Ougi reacted to it as if she was talking about the weather, but somehow that’s no longer surprising. At least she has good taste in VAs though, Inoue Marina really is top-tier.

It was a really bittersweet ending. I wanted Araragi to save Oikura, or at least protect her smile, and in the end it felt like he didn’t achieve either. I hope she comes back in a later arc to save him from a time of crisis, because she’s wasted as someone who’s not a permanent addition to the cast. What did the letter say, in the end?