This was interesting. Even the next morning I am still digesting parts of it.
07th Expansion is kind of known for creepy horror stuff, but this is the first time we are getting what feels like a deliberate ghost story. The “Seven Wonders” of the school is a pretty familiar setup for ghost stories - particularly one like the ones told at sleep overs and the like. And this very first story draws some clear parallels to the Legend Of Hanako-san a very common and often appropriated Japanese ghost story.
At the start of the story though Mesomeso-san is very much alive, and the reason she is crying is painfully believable. A week-willed girl who has been essentially entrapped by figure of authority in her life, who abuses her while framing it as salvation. Of course we find out quickly from his turn at narration that he knows he is just taking advantage of her, but in that we also see just what scum he is as he justifies it with things like being a impeccable teacher or more generally a good guy.
So we have living ghost in Marie who is invisible to her classmates, family, and society. As well a living demon in the form of the teacher who is preying on the weak. It is a scary ghost story before anything super natural has happened.
But the serie’s namesake is a supernatural beeing and she lets her presence be known. The meeting between Higanbana and Marie in the library is interesting, as it is called out in the confrontation between Marie and the teacher at the end that this was the moment that sealed her fate. The flower Higanbana (spider lily) has a strong association with death. They are thought to be the flower that grows along the Japanese equivalent of the river Styx (sanzu river). The crossing of the river is metaphor of crossing from life to death, and similarly when Marie meets Higanbana in the library she is about to journey to her death, and the decision to become youkai is the moment she begins her crossing. I am curious if as we move forward will meeting Higanbana always be something we see before one dies or almost dies?
The Teacher then kills Marie, and after killing her and disgracing her body, ends up trying to steal the last thing that had given Marie strength in her final moments the title of Mesomeso-san. Higanbana sets it up so that this will be a fight for the demon title. We get an ending which left me feeling like Higanbana set up the teacher on Marie’s behalf. She abstained from her vote to trigger the showdown, but since it was always a showdown over who was the better Mesomeso-san, Marie was always going to “follow the rules of Mesomeso-san” better than someone like that cocky teacher.
Marie was failed by society, but it was in part due to her lack of participation in it. While I do not think of Marie as anything but tragic, by the end of the confrontation with the Teacher even she realizes that she reached this point because she did not reach out and lean on society. The cold truth of the world is while we want someone to go in and save people like Marie, they often need to be able to muscle the strength to try saving themselves first. In many ways her revenge against the teacher is only realized because she chose to lean on Higanbana and Higanbana took enough of a liking to her to basically orchestrate it for her.
In this way the story is really about human nature and human problems. The teacher is terrible, but in many ways he is better at playing life than Marie is or ever will be. The story acknowledges the tragedy of this, and in this story at least he gets punished, but it is pretty clear that without Higanbana herself he would have gotten away with everything. While reading the teachers POV sections I was struck by that feeling of getting an eye into the minds of people who you see on the news. I don’t want to link to specific stories but the “otherwise really nice rapist” is a reoccurring headline at least in the US, and the Teacher POV gives some insight into the way these people compartmentalize their abusive behavior amid living a normal life. How many pass without getting the attention of the police?
Some final comments - the music for this game really is amazing. The way it triggers dynamically so cleanly really impressed me as I feel like I hit a bit of frenzied page turning pace at a certain point. I particularly wanted to call out the use the school bell tones, particularly in the music in the final confrontation. It was very clever and set the tone perfectly.
Also, I don’t normally do this but I gave both the teacher and Higanbana a voice in my head - I read all of the teacher lines as if he was voiced by Takehito Koyasu and I imagined Miyuki Sawashiro delivering Higanbana’s. I feel a little bad towards Takehito Koyasu for so easily mentally assigning him such a scummy role so easily, but he is the voice of the cocky jackass to me.