FINALLY, SHE ARRIVES FINALLY, SHE’S INTRODUCED


pictured: A wild Ougi Oshino appears! What will Koyomi Araragi do?

Koyomi Araragi and Ougi Oshino are stuck inside a locked classroom. It isn’t a normal locked classroom – the clock in this classroom doesn’t move, and sound doesn’t pass in or out of the room. It’s a liminal interruption to Araragi’s normal school life - of course, it’s an oddity situation! Classic Nisio Isin. Classic SHAFT. Or is it?

It started as an ordinary October afternoon at Naoetsu Private High School, until Kanbaru brought a strange new girl over to Araragi – a first-year student who sought advice about oddities, and who claimed to be related to the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing-specialist Meme Oshino. Ougi presented Araragi with a paper map of their school and said that there’s something odd about the size of an audiovisual room. Together, they went to investigate. Now they’re stuck inside.

Why this room? Why now? And what’s with Araragi’s memory? Remember that first short in Koyomimonogatari in which he forgot something he’d done in first year? Something about this room is intensifying Araragi’s flashbacks to that year. Is there a reason he chooses a specific desk to sit at? Araragi appears nonchalant about it all. Ougi, however, is interested in what’s going on in Araragi-senpai’s head.


pictured: What will Koyomi Araragi do? Fight Call Hanekawa Bag Run => Can’t escape!

Araragi and Ougi’s situation inside this odd classroom is a simulacrum of an incident in Araragi’s first year at the school. In a specific classroom, on a specific day of that first year, something went down that disrupted Araragi’s sense of normality and he began a metamorphization into the kind of person he is as a third-year student. On that day, Araragi participated in a classroom trial staged by his class, aimed at uncovering who among them cheated on a mathematics exam – and as he steadily recounts the details of that incident through Ougi’s prompts and questions, literal and surrealist scenes from his memory play out in the theatre of the liminal classroom.

Apart from Araragi, who were the major figures in this classroom trial? Not Tsubasa Hanekawa, who doesn’t figure into the tale at all. Nor Hitagi Senjougahara, who hadn’t been a noteworthy classmate to Araragi at that point in his life. Indeed, as per his backstory up until now, Araragi’s student life then saw him almost an isolationist. The only other major character – in both the narrative sense, and in the budget sense because she’s the only other animated character – is the-then class president Sodachi Oikura, who was a mathematics enthusiast, who joined a study group that met the day before the exam, and who had a persistent if unclear animosity towards Araragi.

This double-episode of ‘Ougi Formula’ is the best the series has been in a while. I found it more engaging and enjoyable than the majority of Monogatari Second Season, one on account of how it goes straight to the point about the mystery, two for the fact that we’re finally seeing Ougi as an active participant in an arc from start to finish, and three for the fact that it’s got a straightforward start, middle, and end, without any of the side adventures or hints about adventures ahead whilst Araragi and Ougi work at uncovering Araragi’s memory of the incident. There’s no ‘scene with the sister(s)’ lined up ahead of the main mystery, no overindulgent fanservice moments, and little to no recycling of old monogatari background music. It’s the kind of monogatari anime arc I hadn’t known I needed.



pictured: new mystery, new characters, new weird art style, and though you won’t hear it in this post, new music!

Upon entering the classroom and learning of the impromptu class assembly, Araragi had been assigned as presiding member of the assembly by Sodachi, as he scored better in the exam than those who participated in the study group (Araragi scored 100, Sodachi scored 99, and on average those who attended the study goup scored 20 points higher than those who hadn’t). As Sodachi allows no-one to leave the classroom until the culprit is identified, the assembly goes on for hours, steadily straining all of the students’ attention and patience with one another to breaking point.

Araragi’s memories of the arguments among his first-year classmates on that day is interposed with Ougi’s queries about the incident, and remarks about his character as he understood it. It’s almost as if Ougi knows more than she ought to – it isn’t unsettling to see her act this way when we’ve seen it in other arcs, although it is unsettling that, for this first time that Ougi and Araragi are spending together, they’re stuck in this liminal space together, and he isn’t bothered by her. This goes a step further as Araragi acknowledges that, on the day of the incident, the class together couldn’t conclude who the culprit was – only for Ougi to postulate that the only path out of the liminal classroom they’re stuck in is for Araragi to solve that cold case.

I feel there’s nothing superfluous about ‘Ougi Forumula’ – it’s the tightest that the screenwriting’s been since ‘Hitagi Crab’ at the beginning of Bakemonogatari, and unlike say a trip through an alternate timeline, this is about something that matters more to Araragi, about who he is. This is the core of the arc, and the core of Owarimonogatari – it’s about time we work out who Araragi is, and why he stands in the world the way that he does. This arc delivers on that, and it’s one of the best double-episode openers you could ask for after all of the quagmires of the tease and denial during his arcs in Monogatari Second Season and a minute or two in Tsukimonogatari.


pictured: the implication of this shot is that Ougi is setting herself up as another top to Araragi’s bottom

And speaking of tease and denial, the other outstanding question is the nature of one Ougi Oshino – on the one hand she’s another younger classmate and potential Araragi harem member, on the other hand we the audience have been aware awhile about how she goes on to have a hand in the ‘Nadeko Medusa’ fiasco and also the Tsukimonogatari kidnappings, but before all of that she was all up in the weirdness that’s unfolding here!

As an anime-only fan I have no idea if the visuals of Ougi physically imposing herself over and around Araragi are true to the text or an interpretation on SHAFT’s part, nonetheless it’s true to how Ougi asserts herself and her line of questioning over Araragi’s almost-too-impersonal attitude in this abstract space. She’s arguably the active persona in this arc, as she does most of the questioning – and leading – of Araragi through his memories. And she’s not solely doing it to get out of the room – she’s prodding him, helping him to address his memories. It’s a good dynamic and a welcome break from the normal dynamics that Araragi has with Hanekawa, Senjougahara, and so on.

That the simple brilliance of ‘Ougi Formula’ only came about once Nisio Isin wrote a scenario in which his protagonist and coded antagonist got stuck in a room together I think says something about how self-indulgent he is sometimes. As I’ve said before, it’s as if he has a bit of a bent against ‘killing his darlings’, and so we end up with arcs that take an age to arrive at the heart of the matter, and arcs that take an age to actually arrive (we will eventually both arrive at and skip backwards to the much-telegraphed ‘Shinobu Mail’ arc halfway through Owarimonogatari, and afterwards, skip ahead but back again to the aftermath of Araragi’s death shown in the last Koyomimonogatari short).



In the end, although the arguments in the classroom carried on through the afternoon, Sodachi called for the class to settle the issue through a majority vote on the suspects – herself, Araragi, Senjougahara, and one or two others. Sodachi voted for Araragi. The rest of the class voted for Sodachi. In her despair, Sodachi soon dropped out of school – Araragi doesn’t believe Sodachi to be the culprit, as she called for the assembly and for the vote. Ougi thinks there’s more to it – that Araragi knows. And he does. I’m not going to spoil it – sufficed to say, Ougi identifies the gaps and silences in Araragi’s retelling to unveil the actual perpetrator, and once he's acknowledged who he hasn't included in the story up to this point you understand why he buried the memory of this incident, you understand his underlying motivation in the self-isolating student life he lived from then through to the events of Kizumonogatari.

Having solved the mystery, Araragi and Ougi are able to leave the room.

And that’s the end of the story about Sodachi Oikura, former class president. Except it isn’t the end of the story about Koyomi Araragi and Sodachi Oikura, as the very next day, Hanekawa halts Araragi before he can enter their classroom – Sodachi Oikura has returned to school.

I brought my thoughts on ‘Sodachi Riddle’ and ‘Sodachi Lost’ under one spoiler together for simplicity – they pick up from the scene in ‘Ougi Formula’ which teased Sodachi’s return. In addition, they are also chronologically sequential, which I see as another plus for the first part of Owarimonogatari.

Episodes 03-04: Sodachi Riddle

Initially it might seem counterintuitive to introduce a new supporting character so late in the ongoing narrative arc about Araragi, in the chronological middle of Araragi’s school year. Is the story of Sodachi Oikura close to the centre of what makes Araragi, Araragi? From what we’ve seen, Sodachi isn’t a part of future events in ‘Nadeko Medusa’, ‘Hitagi End’, Tsukimonogatari, or Koyomimonogatari, or even Hanamonogatari – if there’s something to Sodachi’s involvement at this point, it’s about her past, and about Araragi’s past. To wit: I mentioned in my previous post that Sodachi had an animosity towards Araragi, and apart from noting that he scored a point higher on an exam than she had, it happened to go by unexplained.

As Araragi meets Sodachi again, she isn’t about to tell him why she treats him as she does. He attempts to talk it out, but not before she implodes in a bout of angst about how Araragi’s high school life seems to have turned out so well whilst hers hasn’t been happy at all. Araragi has friends! And to top it off, Araragi even has a lover!


pictured: the world of monogatari is about to be served some much-needed High School Drama

I can see the situation from Sodachi’s eyes: it’s heartbreaking to be made an outcast – and harder to come back and see that someone who was around for what you went through is seemingly unaffected by any suffering themselves through the intervening years, and to boot, seems to be incapable of seeing you for who you are. Araragi is perplexed, something’s still missing in his memories about her – however, Hanekawa and Senjougahara interrupt. In a short exchange, Sodachi ups the stakes and slaps Senjougahara – and Senjougahara punches her out.

Sodachi subsequently takes the day and the following day off of school to recover, and Senjougahara takes the days off too, though out of a sense of shame for knocking out a classmate. Araragi will eventually have to see both girls, separately – before that though, he takes the afternoon to investigate a scene from a memory, an abandoned mansion he used to visit one summer as a middle school student, and begins to remember the young girl he would meet there to learn about the wonders of mathematics.


pictured: a window into a more innocent time in Araragi’s life – or are his memories hiding something more serious in plain sight?

Accompanying Araragi on this afternoon through his memories of summer days away from middle school, is Ougi Oshino. It’s a sensitive subject for Araragi, though she shows a steadier hand here, and helps him as an accomplice. Her goals otherwise are still somewhat airy, as she is.

To approach the heart of why I enjoyed these arcs so much: it’s because here, Nisio Isin has stripped away almost all of the side story threads and questionable humour that held back about half of Monogatari Second Season, and instead harks back to the groundwork of Bakamonogatari: this is a story about a young woman with issues that she’s struggling to address on her own, and it falls upon Araragi and co. to investigate and support her through it.

In most monogatari arcs the narrative of Araragi, Oshino, or Gaen helping someone sort out an apparition is allegorical to helping people address the stress or trauma under the surface of their outward lives – in this instance it’s not allegorical, as there isn’t an apparition at all: it’s about Araragi searching for what’s underneath all of the twisted emotion that Sodachi is aiming towards him again after their years apart, and that means uncovering his memories of that one youthful summer he spent meeting with her.



Araragi learns that there’s a mature subject matter attached to his memories of learning mathematics from Sodachi: as Ougi points out that the mansion they’re in – Sodachi’s home years ago – hadn’t been abandoned back then, the implication is that Sodachi had potentially been a victim of domestic violence. Ougi speculates that Sodachi had somehow ascertained that Araragi’s parents were police officers, and that Sodachi invited him over often in an attempt to clue him in to her situation as she was worried about the consequences of asking him for help outright. When Sodachi moved away with her mother, she wrote nothing for Araragi to say why she’d vanished – she had given up on involving him – and they wouldn’t see each other again until years afterward in high school, around which time he’d already forgotten their many hours together, but she had not.

The other mystery Hanekawa points out afterward is how Ougi knew about Araragi’s parent’s occupations.

As an aside before I press on to ‘Sodachi Lost’, I love the OP for ‘Sodachi Riddle’ though I’ll acknowledge that the theming of it might leave an impression that the arc is about Sodachi’s womanhood or about her as a potential love rival for Senjougahara, it isn’t, though it is another possible dimension of her which isn’t explored in Owarimonogatari. Also, ‘Sodachi Lost’ does have its own unique OP that’s available on the Blu-Ray Editions, but Crunchyroll streams the broadcast version, which continues to use the otherwise excellent Sodachi Lost OP.


Episodes 05-07: Sodachi Lost

Araragi has recovered his memories of his clandestine meetings with Sodachi one summer in middle school. It’s now the next day, and as class vice president to Hanekawa, Araragi has to help her out in checking up on both Sodachi and Senjougahara at their residences. In any other scenario, Araragi would go to Senjougahara’s to check on her as he’s her boyfriend, though in this instance, Araragi has a sense of obligation about understanding more of Sodachi’s situation, since he’s affirmed through others that Sodachi knows the occupation of his parents.

According to anyone with their head screwed on properly, Araragi going to Sodachi’s apartment on his own and not to Senjougahara’s house is a no-no. And so Ougi Oshino appears, offering a solution: she’ll accompany Araragi-senpai to see Sodachi, and Hanekawa will see Senjougahara on her own. Hanekawa ain’t having this proposal from the fresh underclassman, whom she knows barely anything about, and who hadn’t been in the picture at all before this week! And so they ask Araragi: who will you pick to accompany you?


pictured: fast times at Naoetsu Private High

Hanekawa and Ougi’s argument over who should accompany Araragi to Sodachi’s apartment is one of the best arguments in the series: it’s a showcase of how the ways in which the young women in the infamous ‘Araragi Harem’ are as much there because he helped them out and became friends with each other as it is because having them around means they perform some of his thinking for him. It’s initially subtle, but as the argument escalates and the traffic goes into gridlock in a clever visual simile that doubles as a callback to a conversation from Season Season, one can’t ignore the truth that it’s so much easier on Araragi when he only has to think about what one girl wants at a time.

Araragi’s stuck in the middle between two assertive but very different young women – Hanekawa is highly intelligent and open-hearted, but Ougi is charming and intuitive in solving mysteries. He’s meant to be the main man in this moment, but he’s taking too long to decide. In the end, Hanekawa takes the decision away from him by appealing to a higher power. Ougi doesn’t have a counterpoint.



Sometime afterwards as they wait outside Sodachi’s apartment, Hanekawa is unhappy that Araragi picked her on account of an offer he couldn’t refuse, and he’s at pains to persuade Hanekawa that he picked her for a pure, wholesome reason. He’s unsuccessful in convincing the class president, but he sticks with the point in his inner monologue.

Anyway, back to the situation at Sodachi’s apartment –



Sodachi Oikura lives on her own in an apartment provided by the government, and as Hanekawa had to pressure her to put on proper attire before she and Araragi entered to speak, it’s apparent Sodachi doesn’t have a good handle on her life. It’s not surprising, and it’s unsettling though not stocking to see her implode at Araragi again (though Araragi stands untouched as Hanekawa intercepts anything Sodachi throws at him!). He knows now through his parents that Sodachi had stayed at their house a while years ago in an attempt to shelter her from her parents (and this is how she knew they were police officers) – but as Sodachi acknowledges now, home life at the Araragi’s had been too happy to handle against the backdrop of her parents’ household, and so she went back to, where her mother was sometimes beaten, and where her mother would beat her as an outlet to the misery. After moving out the mansion with her mother in middle school, Sodachi lived with her mother despite how her mother ignored her and shut herself away. Sodachi survived on social welfare money until one day, her mother vanished.

Here it’s worth acknowledging that the sources of Sodachi’s depression appear to share pieces with each of the other members in Ararag’s harem: she had an unhappy home life and her parents split up (same with Senjouagahara, Hanekawa, Hachikuji), she had been physically abused by one or both of her parents (as were Senjougahara, Hanekawa), she had been ignored / neglected by one or both of her parents (as were Hanekawa, Hachikuji), she is physically frail (Senjougahara was frail while under the influence of the crab apparition), one of her parents is dead (Kanbaru’s mother is also dead), she suffers from low self-esteem and low self-efficacy (as had Nadeko and likely others), and she has delusions about herself and about her situation (as does Nadeko). On that point about delusions, although Sengoku Nadeko deluded herself about her differing desires and personalities, Sodachi deludes herself about how she arrived in her current situation and has suppressed aspects of her trauma.



The disappearance of Sodachi’s mother – who Sodachi states had sealed herself away in a bedroom, until she vanished – is less a practical mystery and more of a matter of the gaps and silences in Sodachi’s story. Initially diverting from the topic to put pressure on Araragi to act as her antagonist and validate her unhappiness, Sodachi sees the wisdom in Hanekawa’s insight that she’s unhappy because she is unwilling to try to be happy – and asks if Araragi and Hanekawa are able to help in solving the mystery of her mother. Away from the apartment, Hanekawa and once again Ougi are able to solve it on their own and begin to quiz Araragi about it, to the point that he has to accept that the most horrible guess is the only possible one: Sodachi’s mother starved herself to death inside the room, and Sodachi ignored this and attended to the corpse for two years.



In light of how real Sodachi Oikura felt as a person through until this instant, the reveal that she’s suppressed the trauma of not only her mother’s death from starvation but her memories of attending to her mother’s corpse is one that’s tested my suspension of disbelief. If you include the events depicted in ‘Ougi Formula’, it’s as if Sodachi is set up to be something of a punching bag of a character – she’s been dumped with almost all of the trauma that Nisio Isin is able to stick to a teenage girl without breaking her as a person.

That said, the audience – and Araragi, Hanekawa, and I suppose Ougi – are able to see how Sodachi is acting out in school and acknowledge that it’s wrong yet still sympathise with how she is struggling to process her traumas. It’s easy to sympathise with her knowing what she’s endured, and that’s why it’s surprising but cathartic to see that is able to accept the truth about her mother from Araragi so openly and so calmly, and sad to know that although they’ve made amends and she’s beginning to turn her attitude around and turn her life around, her social housing arrangement has changed so she has to move away and transfer to another school.



Also, all of this happened without any ‘apparition’ associated with Sodachi – if there was an apparition in ‘Ougi Formula’, it was mostly likely the liminal classroom and Araragi’s associated memory issues, but in both Sodachi arcs if there’s anything approaching an ‘oddity’ it’s Ougi’s ongoing streak of underexplained insights into Araragi’s thought process and the situation(s) at hand.


pictured: Ougi’s shadow looms large over Araragi and Hanekawa’s final year of school

If it isn’t already obvious, Ougi’s persistence to be of use to Araragi in his affairs is an additional sign that there's something odd about her, and it so happens that Ougi’s next move after this is to stand and wait around the public spot where one Sengoku Nadeko will fatefully encounter her. Ononoki already said the quiet part out loud in Tsukimonogatari, so rather than call Ougi a secret final boss, I feel it's fair to describe her as more of a shadow jack-in-the-box that Nisio Isin has been winding up all the while.

As for Sodachi, she has/had a cameo shot in Koyomigatari and appears in the still-somewhat-new Off/Monster Season, though for now, her final note in Koyomi Araragi’s school life is a literal note left for him in his student desk drawer, assumedly in place of the one she ought’ve left for him at her old house all those summers ago. Although the contents of her letter aren’t shown nor articulated in Araragi’s monologue, at the end I am satisfied in the knowledge that they’re both happier and healthier for having met one another again.