Furude Rika (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moextispicy) wrote2010-04-13 07:32 pm
moextispicy) wrote2010-04-13 07:32 pm
Entry tags:
Rika, religion, and her role in the village
Rika is the destined reincarnation of Oyashiro-sama, the god of her village, and known to be such in the village. I'm...not going to deal too much with her personal relationship with Oyashiro here because it's complicated enough to deserve its own essay, and I want to save that until someone apps Oyashiro (HINT HINT). What I do want to talk about is her role in the village and the way it affects how she thinks.
To the believers in the village, Rika is a god and an adorable child they wish to protect curled into one. It would possibly not actually be exaggerating to say that Rika could probably get away with murder in broad daylight in the village, and she gets away with some pretty amazing stuff. She addresses most people in the village with their first name and she never uses honorifics. She's encouraged to treat the candy store like her own personal candy bowl. She's allowed to live on her own after her parents died, and even allowed to bring her best friend to live with her despite the fact that said best friend is the last survivor of a family ostracized by the entire village. I once joked that if Rika tried to commit a bank robbery in the village, the entirety of the bank would help her and tell her how adorable she was as a bank robber. She's just... well. The living incarnation of their god!
And of course, as the series goes on, it becomes obvious that they have very good reason for this, since there's evidence that Rika (and the women she's descended from) are what's stopping a disease mostly dormant in the village from going active and causing disaster. Of course, this is also wrong! Probably. My impression is that she has a helping effect in stopping the disease from going active, since the cures created from studying her did largely work, even if they weren't exactly perfect, but that it's not an absolute thing. But to be honest, I'd have to wait until the entirety of the games are translated to be sure of that and even then I'm not actually sure the games clear that up. But even an incomplete effect is extremely beneficial to the village at large, and considering how long most the families have been in the village, the fact that they all have learned to protect and worship the women in her family, and doubly so for the reincarnation of Oyashiro, isn't exactly surprising.
Obviously, this treatment could very easily have created a monster. Hell, I'm not entirely sure it hasn't. Certainly, it's canon that in timelines where she wasn't destined to die and got trapped in a time loop of murder and death, and never had to learn any brutal truths, she was a horribly spoiled brat. No one ever telling her no will lead to that kind of thing! I mean, I'm sure her mother tried, but considering it's canon that the believers in the village will heavily disapprove at her for telling Rika no because she's the reincarnation of Oyashiro...yeah good luck with that.
As it is, I think Rika's centrality in her village is one of the things keeping her sane, and also one of the factors in her occasionally being kind of a horrible person. It's given her great confidence in herself, of course. Rika never really doubts her importance, and only questions the fact that she got all the extra time in the time loop to avoid dying that most people don't get when Oyashiro calls her on...well, mostly other things. She just...accepts it as her due. Part of this is that she's been doing it for so long, since she was so young, that it's hard to really question it. But partially it's the serenity of a spoiled child.
Rika has a diamond-hard level of selfishness, where maybe all she really wants is to live happily past the date of her destined death together with her friends, but she'd be entirely willing to do some pretty terrible things to get there. In order to escape the peaceful world where nothing had ever gone wrong, but her friends wouldn't be there, Rika was willing to seriously contemplate killing her mother (and if what I've heard of the sound novel version of that is correct, actually did in some versions of canon. Granted the canonicity of the entire arc can be argued, but I mean. Rika killed her own mother for entirely selfish reasons and it got endorsed as canon by the series' creator. This says a lot about Rika really.)
I also think that Rika sees very clearly that it's...well, not about her. It's about the 8th generation Furude girl who's been destined for generations as Oyashiro's reincarnation, who happens to be Rika. She's a symbol to them, but not really a person in her own right. She can get all the candy she wants, but she can't get them to stop ostracizing her best friend. The villagers can adore and worship their Rika-chama, but very few of them know her, and none of them know anything about Oyashiro by Rika's standards. Most of them see her surface adorableness and leave it at that, and Rika is just as happy that way.
On the other hand, I think it's served as a stabilizing factor as she's been trapped in the time loop. The fact that the entire village worships her and wants her to survive isn't that important to her, but it's probably a factor. Of course, she also realizes that the fact that the village will die if she dies is probably why she's getting killed so...maybe not.
On the minus side, it traps her in the village. As far as she knows, her leaving the village for very long will cause everyone to die. And Rika may be kind of a psycho bitch on occasion, but she just wouldn't allow that to happen. She might not always care for the people in the village that much, but she wouldn't let them die by her absence. (...This part is something I might be jossed on by Umineko.) Considering the way Rika craves novelty and the unexpected, I do think that's bad for her. I mean, I think she loves Hinamizawa and probably wouldn't ever permanently leave it, but I also think she could really use a vacation away from it. One of the reasons she loevs camp so far (and she really does) is that she never thought she could really leave, and oh look, a new place she's never been to that's full of lots of chaos and interesting things! I don't know that Rika would want to stay here forever (though I can see her choosing to if her friends were all here), but camp is new and fascinating and changes a lot and the fact that its danger is less predictable than home's is pretty much counterbalanced by the moogles, and so for now she loves being here.
Saying to what extent she feels responsibility back to the village is...kinda hard to say. Overall, I'd say she has some, but it's not exactly the end-all and be-all of her existence. On the practical level of what actions she takes regarding that, I think she finds her biggest responsibility to be surviving in order to keep the disease from becoming active. She fulfills her religious duties with care, taking care of the locked shrine and practicing hard each year for the Watanagashi ritual. But the believers probably do as much of the prep work as they can. For the people whose lives affect her, she can and will jesus the hell out of them. But other people? Meh. Basically, on the whole, most the village is background noise to her.
Really I kind of love the way Rika balances jesusiness and selfishness. She's usually more selfish than jesusy, but that just makes her more fun to play.
To the believers in the village, Rika is a god and an adorable child they wish to protect curled into one. It would possibly not actually be exaggerating to say that Rika could probably get away with murder in broad daylight in the village, and she gets away with some pretty amazing stuff. She addresses most people in the village with their first name and she never uses honorifics. She's encouraged to treat the candy store like her own personal candy bowl. She's allowed to live on her own after her parents died, and even allowed to bring her best friend to live with her despite the fact that said best friend is the last survivor of a family ostracized by the entire village. I once joked that if Rika tried to commit a bank robbery in the village, the entirety of the bank would help her and tell her how adorable she was as a bank robber. She's just... well. The living incarnation of their god!
And of course, as the series goes on, it becomes obvious that they have very good reason for this, since there's evidence that Rika (and the women she's descended from) are what's stopping a disease mostly dormant in the village from going active and causing disaster. Of course, this is also wrong! Probably. My impression is that she has a helping effect in stopping the disease from going active, since the cures created from studying her did largely work, even if they weren't exactly perfect, but that it's not an absolute thing. But to be honest, I'd have to wait until the entirety of the games are translated to be sure of that and even then I'm not actually sure the games clear that up. But even an incomplete effect is extremely beneficial to the village at large, and considering how long most the families have been in the village, the fact that they all have learned to protect and worship the women in her family, and doubly so for the reincarnation of Oyashiro, isn't exactly surprising.
Obviously, this treatment could very easily have created a monster. Hell, I'm not entirely sure it hasn't. Certainly, it's canon that in timelines where she wasn't destined to die and got trapped in a time loop of murder and death, and never had to learn any brutal truths, she was a horribly spoiled brat. No one ever telling her no will lead to that kind of thing! I mean, I'm sure her mother tried, but considering it's canon that the believers in the village will heavily disapprove at her for telling Rika no because she's the reincarnation of Oyashiro...yeah good luck with that.
As it is, I think Rika's centrality in her village is one of the things keeping her sane, and also one of the factors in her occasionally being kind of a horrible person. It's given her great confidence in herself, of course. Rika never really doubts her importance, and only questions the fact that she got all the extra time in the time loop to avoid dying that most people don't get when Oyashiro calls her on...well, mostly other things. She just...accepts it as her due. Part of this is that she's been doing it for so long, since she was so young, that it's hard to really question it. But partially it's the serenity of a spoiled child.
Rika has a diamond-hard level of selfishness, where maybe all she really wants is to live happily past the date of her destined death together with her friends, but she'd be entirely willing to do some pretty terrible things to get there. In order to escape the peaceful world where nothing had ever gone wrong, but her friends wouldn't be there, Rika was willing to seriously contemplate killing her mother (and if what I've heard of the sound novel version of that is correct, actually did in some versions of canon. Granted the canonicity of the entire arc can be argued, but I mean. Rika killed her own mother for entirely selfish reasons and it got endorsed as canon by the series' creator. This says a lot about Rika really.)
I also think that Rika sees very clearly that it's...well, not about her. It's about the 8th generation Furude girl who's been destined for generations as Oyashiro's reincarnation, who happens to be Rika. She's a symbol to them, but not really a person in her own right. She can get all the candy she wants, but she can't get them to stop ostracizing her best friend. The villagers can adore and worship their Rika-chama, but very few of them know her, and none of them know anything about Oyashiro by Rika's standards. Most of them see her surface adorableness and leave it at that, and Rika is just as happy that way.
On the other hand, I think it's served as a stabilizing factor as she's been trapped in the time loop. The fact that the entire village worships her and wants her to survive isn't that important to her, but it's probably a factor. Of course, she also realizes that the fact that the village will die if she dies is probably why she's getting killed so...maybe not.
On the minus side, it traps her in the village. As far as she knows, her leaving the village for very long will cause everyone to die. And Rika may be kind of a psycho bitch on occasion, but she just wouldn't allow that to happen. She might not always care for the people in the village that much, but she wouldn't let them die by her absence. (...This part is something I might be jossed on by Umineko.) Considering the way Rika craves novelty and the unexpected, I do think that's bad for her. I mean, I think she loves Hinamizawa and probably wouldn't ever permanently leave it, but I also think she could really use a vacation away from it. One of the reasons she loevs camp so far (and she really does) is that she never thought she could really leave, and oh look, a new place she's never been to that's full of lots of chaos and interesting things! I don't know that Rika would want to stay here forever (though I can see her choosing to if her friends were all here), but camp is new and fascinating and changes a lot and the fact that its danger is less predictable than home's is pretty much counterbalanced by the moogles, and so for now she loves being here.
Saying to what extent she feels responsibility back to the village is...kinda hard to say. Overall, I'd say she has some, but it's not exactly the end-all and be-all of her existence. On the practical level of what actions she takes regarding that, I think she finds her biggest responsibility to be surviving in order to keep the disease from becoming active. She fulfills her religious duties with care, taking care of the locked shrine and practicing hard each year for the Watanagashi ritual. But the believers probably do as much of the prep work as they can. For the people whose lives affect her, she can and will jesus the hell out of them. But other people? Meh. Basically, on the whole, most the village is background noise to her.
Really I kind of love the way Rika balances jesusiness and selfishness. She's usually more selfish than jesusy, but that just makes her more fun to play.