10 Second Anime - Owarimonogatari - Episode 2

Araragi meets Sodachi for the first time in two years and is surprised at how angry she is at him. He and Ougi investigate an abandoned house from his and Sodachi's past.

"Sodachi Riddle"

Heh.

Are we at the part of the timeline where Araragi is supposed to avoid using his vampire powers to heal yet? Because he should know that he can't just take a nonchalant attitude toward some crazy girl and hope for the best. Not in this show. Not with all the girls around him. He should know better. Any one of these girls is liable to stab in the hand... uh.

We're in the middle of the chapter titled "Sodachi Riddle," and the mystery involves how much she hates Araragi, how ambivalent Araragi feels about her and some missing memories from when they were kids together. Since they were both math nerds, this is going to be just a little bit more interesting to me.

And there it is. Getting the head tilt out of the way.

Most of the girls giving Araragi grief have had some oddity based on an animal spirit of some sort. Will that be the case with Sodachi too? The title of her chapter appears to point to a negative on that, but I'll be looking for clues.

Hanaekawa still has the goods for the head tilt.

A pivotal moment in the episode was when Senjougahara saw Sodachi for the first time too. Interesting how a catfight had the actual "cat" trying to stop it. Hanekawa should know that nothing gets between Senjougahara and her man.

And Senjougahara's head tilt for the season is checked off the list too.

Obviously, Sodachi has not been hitting the gym, or much of anything, for the two years that she hasn't attended school.

Sodachi's rage here appears so irrational, which adds to the riddle. Why would she be so provoked to anger over Senjougahara wanting Araragi to attend the same college as she? There were also some clues of their shared backstory in the short conversation about how Sodachi used to take care of Senjougahara because of her illness, which I assume is the crab spirit possession that Araragi helped solve. Is part of Sodachi's anger caused by not being relied upon anymore?

Well, Senjougahara is not the type of girl to take a slap without giving some of it back. Sodachi's power output was only 15 dmg but Senjougahara's was 1479, almost 100 times stronger. Critical Hit!

Yes, this show knows it's a cartoon.

Very much so. I wonder why Senjougahara feigned passing out. To get out of trouble? Keep up appearances that she's still ill?

Of course, the main monster is still Ougi. The confrontation in the classroom was supposed to be flashback which explained why Ougi and Araragi were at his old middle school, but that actually wasn't answered. And then Ougi waved away his lack of memory in a very similar way that she got Nadeko to become a snake god.

This middle school is also the same one that Nadeko attended. I got chills at the reference from seeing her name on a shoe locker.

They Monty Hall paradox of changing a 1:3 choice to a 1:2 choice after the door with the goat is opened up is always a fun one to show the power of setting up a statistical problem properly.

Again, it's not explained why envelopes for Araragi from 5 years ago are still in the shoe locker that he had from back then. Araragi is just going with Ougi's flow, which has never turned out well for him or his friends. 

Hmm.

One device that always felt like a narrative cheat is the unreliable narrator. Agatha Christie was most famous for using this for a first person narrator in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Most of the time, in a third person narrative focused on one person's perspective, like we're doing with Araragi, the unreliable narrator can be used as an important plot point. Recovered memories, psychologically manipulated or some other magical circumstance can add to the tension and thrill.

In this particular case, with Araragi being our first person narrator at the start of each episode, the unreliable narrator device adds a few obvious red herrings which I think are being used as foreshadowing. If you've already seen Nadeko's case, you're familiar with how Ougi works. I'm intrigued because I'm hoping we get a definitive answer on how Ougi does her power of suggestion and if Araragi was able to figure it out. But first, he has to solve his own riddle of what his relationship with Sodachi used to be.