higurashi...

Some tierlist thoughts...
S tier:
All these characters own nothing to say here.

A tier:
Oryou is actually the character who surprised me and interested me the most at the end. I thought it was interesting that she decided to take all the sins of the village upon herself without asking or trying to find out the truth (even if this plan completely backfired on her). I don't really think I would call her a good person by any means, but I did think her character development across the arcs ended interestingly.

ACAB including Ooishi but he was really cool at the end.

B tier:

Rika is ok, she just wasn't really there for me (due to being almost completely irrelevant for over half the story). I like the juxtaposition of her Bernkastel and regular Rika personalities in the last two episodes which brought her up to B tier. Also her friendship with Satoko was the most well developed friendship.

Mion has a lot of potential to be an amazing character, but I think since she never develops Hinamizawa syndrome she is essentially put on the backburner as a main character unless Shion is involved. You get to see small flashes of her real personality (eg. being upset over not getting the doll, coming up with a sick super power for the main character of Rika's "comic", etc.) but it's just not in your face as much as the other characters, and it left her feeling sort of empty. I really, really enjoy characters that follow Mion's trope so I'm kind of disappointed by how she ended up.

Akasaka is a good character cursed by being completely irrelevant for 90% of the story. Don't really like the idea of "as soon as Akasaka actually made it we got the good end"

Chie is chill. Nice teacher. I enjoy her curry quirk. Not much to say.

C tier:

Both Tomitake and Okonogi are just whatever to me. Tomitake is really bland, I'm not surprised he forgave Takano in the end, it's whatever. Okonogi is also just kind of there.

D tier:

Hanyuu really didn't add much to the story for me. I understand I was supposed to get the feeling of "she was there with us the whole time and now she has a physical form and is included" but I just really didn't get that. She just feels thrown in in arc 7 and I don't have any kind of emotional connection to her whatsoever, she felt like a plot device that existed purely for rewinding time. I could live without her in the story.

Fuck Irie. Do you guys realize how good of a character Irie would be if he wasn't a fucking pedophile pervert? Jesus fucking christ way to ruin a fucking character.

F tier:

I feel like Higurashi would be essentially the same if Rena was dropped from the story completely. The only thing she does is progress Keiichi's character development, but I feel like that spot could easily be filled by Mion.

Keiichi is annoying as fuck for 40 fucking hours and I can't get over that even if he's cool or whatever at the end. Jesus christ he was annoying as fuck. And his backstory made me hate him more.

Worse than F:

In the end I can't forgive Shion for arc 2/5. I have no empathy for her whatsoever. I don't really buy Shion becoming an older sister figure to Satoko, it feels like she only did it because she knew she would disappoint Satoshi otherwise not because she genuinely cared for Satoko. I also found it funny that she was almost completely irrelevant in the last episode and then suddenly you find out she can wield machine guns. It was very anime.

Teppei speaks for himself.

Conflicted:

I could probably write an essay about this, but I'm not going to bother. The short of it is I feel like Takano had the potential to be a really good villain who you could sympathize for but it was essentially ruined by the lack of insight into her character before episode 8. I understand that they didn't want to give away she was the villain, but I feel like it was possible to add some of the backstory about her grandfather and childhood before episode 8 without screaming SHES THE VILLAIN. Higurashi has a really bad problem of making someone out to be a complete villain for x amount of time and then throwing things at you that say "this is why you should empathize with them" and Takano suffers from that very badly. I'm sure that a lot of people probably like that type of story, but it really doesn't vibe with me at all. It feels sort of like creating excuses for what they've already done. The mystery is if she really did have Hinamizawa syndrome or not, and I assume that's what Ryukishi was going for - you get to decide if Takano's sins are forgivable. On that point I'm conflicted. I really haven't personally made a choice of whether or not she had Hinamizawa syndrome, but I also don't know if I would forgive all of her sins even if she did have it. I think she had a lot of potential to be a good villain character, but I feel like the first 6 arcs of Higurashi hurt its overall story a lot. Well, I ended up writing an essay anyways...