Owarimonogatari: Season 1/ Episode 3 “Sodachi Riddle – Part 2” – Recap/ Review (with Spoilers)

The riddle of why Sodachi despises Araragi gets partly solved though, in Hanekawa’s mind, there may be more to the riddle’s answer than what Ougi helped Araragi come up with.

Characters & Story (with Commentary)

We jump back 5 years in time to 7^th grade Araragi. Someone who is partly defined by his parents being cops, as well as not being good at math, no matter how hard he tries. However, one day Sodachi, through the oddest of methods, the whole note thing mentioned last episode, invites him over. Something which he does and it leads to many days of math cramming. Of which, she asks only a few things. The first being, they will only study within the attic, he will keep the fact they are studying between them, and he doesn’t ask any questions about her. An odd agreement, especially for someone their age, but he goes along with it.

That is, until she disappears. Now, as for the reason for her disappearing, Ougi makes it seem that, in the grand scheme of things, it is because her parents were violent to each other. Which leads to why Sodachi even contacted Araragi in the first place: both his parents were cops. So, in Ougi’s mind, she expected Araragi to say something so that the violence would end and she wouldn’t have to directly deal with the consequence which comes for telling on your own parents. However, all Araragi did was end up getting good at math, and didn’t give anything in return.

Thus leading to their relationship in which the student surpasses the teacher, and then, to add insult to injury, the student utterly forgets the teacher, and then betrays them. Though, while that seems to answer the problem at hand, upon telling Hanekawa the theory of why Sodachi hates him, she thinks there is more than it appears. First off, Araragi hid the fact his parents were cops, so how in the world did she learn that? Well, and this is just my opinion, it could be because she heard their last name when they investigated things, but didn’t find anything. Secondly, she adds, on top of the mystery of how she knew about his parents, maybe something else is missing from his memories. After all, he did pretty much forget her existence once before, and his memories dealing with her have large gaps, so maybe, be it during the cram sessions, or even before, something happened. Hell, maybe between the end of the cram sessions and before the trial something happened?

Either way, this topic is bothering Araragi to the core for it once again brings question to him being a righteous individual.

Highlights

I found the reason for Sodachi’s hatred to be quite satisfying, well at least the theory Ougi has. For rather than it simply being about him forgetting his great teacher, it is about an unspoken desire that seemingly she didn’t want him to know, but still wanted fulfilled. She wanted someone to see what was going on and to say something to someone, anyone, and even with Hanekawa saying she may not have known his parents were cops, Araragi says he always has been a bit about being righteous because of them. So, maybe, she thought he would help? Perhaps how like he does now when, often times, he isn’t always explicitly asked to help, nor waits to be asked, but just does so.

Low Points

The show did a terrible job at hiding the fact the supposed “mystery girl” of the house was Sadachi. They kept the same pigtails, and damn near the same clothes she wears in modern times, and arguably didn’t take full advantage of this idea that Araragi doesn’t fully remember what happened.

On The Fence

Being that Ougi created such a quality answer for Sodachi’s hatred, Hanekawa throwing a wrench in that gives me pause. If only because sometimes the Monogatari series digs a hole for itself which, more often than not, is ridiculous to understand both in terms of why they aren’t going with the clear answer and why did they pick the solution to the problem they overcomplicated? So I hope, as they dig further into this Sodachi riddle, it doesn’t lead to it seeming they should have went with Ougi’s original idea rather than come up with some convoluted theory of which the answer requires more time to explain than it did to investigate the problem.