moextispicy | Quick essay on Rika's headspace

So Rika is basically a HORRIBLE LIAR who habitually conceals almost everything she really thinks and after threading with her for a bit, I feel the need to organize my thoughts on what she actually thinks about camp so far. Putting it in list form since I'm lazy:

I took her from...my original thought was after the Atonement arc, but that was kinda dumb since I've only watched the anime version and I'm mostly playing her from the games, which haven't been translated that far into English. (Dear Mangagamer, if you're reading this: I will totally buy the last four games from you. But only if you assholes FINISH THE DAMN SERIES. I do not trust this long period of time without an announcement after your idiotic price raise and the negligible sales that had to have resulted in.) So pretty much I'm taking her from an undefined period of time into her personal time loop, before any serious events start happening to break it. This will probably change once I get some later stuff

At this point in time, in canon Rika is, well, tired. Tired of fighting, tired of dying, tired of living through the same events over and over without things ever changing enough to matter.

Camp is a novelty! So she's kinda inclined to like it for that alone. In a sense, camp's as hard to predict as the weather, and Rika loevs the weather for that. In that sense, I think that no matter how things develop with her in camp, she'll always like camp for that.

On the other hand, Rika misses Hanyuu and her friends SO MUCH. Hanyuu in particular because they've never been parted for this long before, and it's almost worse than losing a arm would be for her. On the first or second night she was here, I headcanon that she went off into the woods to someplace completely isolated with a bottle of alcohol and a bottle of really spicy kimchi each almost as big as she was, and ate and drank them until she threw up, shouted at Hanyuu for a bit, and passed out. (For anyone reading this who isn't familiar with Higurashi, Hanyuu is linked to Rika's senses, so that whatever Rika eats she tastes. And spicy food and alcohol makes her baww and flail a lot.) This was both to punish Hanyuu for not being here and to try to summon her. ...Rika and Hanyuu have the weirdest relationship ever. APP HER SOMEONE I WILL BULLY YOU GENTLY

She will totally be eating gallons of kimchi every day until Hanyuu gets here on the off-chance it makes Hanyuu suffer. And the fact that she likes it.

The people here make her wary, but also intrigued. She hasn't met anyone new in centuries, and everyone she's met seem fairly unpredictable, and possibly dangerous. There is no one more painfully aware of how limited she is in a real fight than Rika herself, and she's pretty aware that people can hide LOTS OF DARK SECRETS under innocent faces. I swear to god, sometime I am so going to calculate the number of dark secrets per capita in Higurashi.

At the moment in her threads, Rika is placing a high emphasis on gauging the people here, to see how dangerous they have the potential to be. So far, Zhores, Raidou, and Courtney have struck her as the most likely to be dangerous, which also makes her feel strangely at home.

I'm guessing that she spent a day or two in the library researching her death in the world camp gets its news from. I'm...still debating whether she died (and the Hinamizawa disaster occurred) or whether Hinamizawa just doesn't exist. If she died, she'll probably place a high priority on figuring out a way to contact the Akasaka of this to see if he has any clues he could share with her. Ooishi would probably be a better bet, but she blames him for a lot of the worlds that have gone wrong. If this were one of the worlds where she died and the Hinamizawa disaster didn't occur, I'd have too hard a time figuring out what she knows and figures and how she'd react. If Hinamizawa doesn't exist she'll focus her efforts on camp, to see what use she can get out of the people here. Yeah, I think I'm definitely going with that one.

I really like the fact that once you know about Rika, you can find little signs of her interference in all the timelines, even if it's subtle. I do wonder what happens in the worlds where she doesn't change the lock, or she doesn't bring Satoko over that one night, etc. (Well I can guess what happened in the second one! Keiichi burned his house down trying to cook. o keiichi. APP HIM GUYS) This is probably why I'm feeling the need to write so much about what she's doing behind the scenes.

Rika is placing a much higher priority on not showing her real self in ways she can't deny or evade to the people here than she would in Hinamizawa, even though there's so much weird stuff here that the people here could probably handle it better. The reset button here doesn't erase memories, and being an innocent little girl is useful.

I wish canon would stop contradicting itself on whether it's been a hundred years or a thousand. Seriously I can point at evidence either way. I'm going with a thousand because that makes more sense to me with the way she behaved in the Akasaka arc, but it bugs me.

...so I like Rika don't judge meeee

Oh, and none of my paid journals are getting notifications (Rika, Cielo, Ferdinand), while my unpaid journal is (my real one) wtf LJ so if I drop any threads feel totally free to ping me.