February Updates

Hello once again!
How’s everyone doing? I just wrapped up teaching for my first semester of my Master’s the other day (how time flies) and have no lectures for two whole months which I’m delighted about. I'm still busy with assignments and my major research project, but my schedule will at least be a bit more flexible for a while. As far as other updates go, I posted my second monthly podcast yesterday where I go over my When They Cry guide video for everyone in the £3 tier and above. Lastly, people seemed to enjoy the most recent video which is great. As I mentioned, it was quite a scary project for me and one I imagine I would've pushed aside had it not been voted for by you guys, so I'm grateful that I was pushed out of my comfort zone and that it gave me an opportunity to prove to myself that I can still succeed with ideas I'm less confident about. It was a nice little project to stave off burnout and I found it pretty soothing to work on, but I'm ready to tackle something a little more ambitious again.

The next video I’m going to be making will be A Guide to Higurashi’s Bonus/Extra Arcs (working title). This is going to be half, well, a guide and half a bunch of mini-reviews. I’m hoping to give people a comprehensive but clear overview of Higurashi as a franchise and how it all fits together, provide some guidance on the path they might want to take through it and shine a light on the many fantastic arcs the series has to offer beyond its core eight and what makes them so great (without spoiling anything). This comes with the caveat that the list of arcs/stories/entry-type-things I've amassed is thirty-seven strong. I’ve included said list so you guys can have a look and let me know if you spot anything I’ve missed (I’m not covering anything that 07th have made that doesn’t explicitly come under the Higurashi title, with the possible exception of Hotarubi no Tomoru Koro ni). Another asterisk is for the Saikoroshi/Gou situation. To briefly explain, I had had plans to make a video on Saikoroshi titled Higurashi’s Real Ending for some time which Gou pretty much skewered as the discussion was going to be framed around how it concluded the series thematically. I still don’t think I’ll be able to cover everything I would want to say about Saikoroshi (or Gou) in this format and it might be that it ends up making sense to discuss them in tandem in a revised version of that video, but I'm going to write the script for this one, see what happens with the rest of Gou and go from there.

I could easily have waited forever to make this video, especially as some of these arcs still lack an English translation, but I feel like I'm at a place now where I’ve got a good enough grasp on everything I want and need to talk about to tackle this project. The last two arcs I can and do need to read in full are Miotsukushi Ura (which I hadn't found the time for yet) and Tsukiotoshi (which I'd willfully avoided) while I start chipping away at the general roadmap for the video at large. I have no real idea what the script will ultimately look like besides that it’s definitely going to be on the longer side. I also tend to find these multimedia type videos the most time-consuming to edit. My hard deadline for myself in mid-April, with hopes but no promises that the video will actually be done closer to mid-March. Once I get to the writing stage everything tends to move fairly quickly with videos, it’s the consuming media/researching/general planning part of the process that takes by far the longest. I have a uni deadline period coming up so I’ll be taking my time playing through the console arcs I still need to and making a rough plan over probably the next few weeks before I go full steam with production. And so I’ll be back in March to give you an update on how things are going (and perhaps some kind of preview closer to the release).

This is a fairly daunting project simply because of its many moving parts and the need to compress them without sacrificing clarity, as well as the challenge, once again, of making it more interesting than your average guide, but it’s also an opportunity to talk about a whole lot of Higurashi-related stuff I haven’t yet which I'm super excited about. So to wrap it up, I hope you're all well and I look forward to bringing you an update soon.

P.S. I’ve also recently been working on some Higurashi fanfiction that I’m desperately hoping won’t end up on my discarded pile, in which case I might just be back on here before March. We’ll see!