Tsukimonogatari Episode 4 Reaction
Added 2025-07-31 14:25:07 +0000 UTCNot Ononoki too..
Comments
I was locked in reading this and lost it at "suicide by loli" lmao
Russell Gambardella
2025-08-02 11:59:51 +0000 UTCYou can honestly watch the Tadatsuru scene over and over and pick up new bits of information each time. it's one of the most unsettling scenes in the entire show for me. Monogatari at its core is ALL about identity, and I think the most important concept to pick up on from Tsukimonogatari (also touched upon quite notably in Koimonogatari) is the concept of 'acting like yourself' or 'staying true to your nature'. Kaiki's biggest risk in Koi is said to be 'not acting like himself', and now Tadatsuru makes similar comments about how displeased he is at the idea of being forced or 'cast' into a specific role, one that's much too perfect for his nature.
Bowsber
2025-08-01 05:46:15 +0000 UTCIn the past, you have caught a lot of the moving parts of the overarching plot, but in this episode, I feel like you might have forgotten things you had already picked up on, or perhaps stumbled over some preconceived notion. It might also be that you missed some of the subtitles. This would be an excellent episode for you to rewatch. Chillih: “I’m gonna be honest, I’m not reading that.” Spoopy girl was just finishing the last page of Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella “Die Verwandlung” (The Metamorphosis), indicating great taste and a sage use of her spare time. Kafka’s work often deals with surreal and nightmarish scenarios in which individuals are helplessly exposed to the machinations of forces beyond their control or understanding—often, but not always, of a social, bureaucratic, or legalistic nature. Such situations have come to be called Kafkaesque. Taking Tadatsuru seriously, let’s say, for example, you find out you’ve been placed by some unknown, shadowy entity into a bizarre stage play, where the only option to assert your free will is suicide by loli. But is it? Or was your decision already factored in? Araragi seems to think so: “Looking back on it, I believe this story only existed to let me bear witness to the adorable pet doll Ononoki Yotsugi killing a human being due to her own inhumanity. The story of how, even though I understood why she did it, I couldn’t stop myself from being instinctively repulsed by her.” Insert: “I played along. An act, charade, deception.” Araragi: “I believe the darkness(!) meant for a rift to open between us after we had so nonchalantly become acquainted. First was Hachikuji Mayoi. Then came Sengoku Nadeko. Now it has taken Ononoki Yotsugi from me.” […] Ononoki: “These past events were designed to drive a wedge between us. Gaen and Sister decided to rebel against that.” PS: Your understanding of Araragi's character is on point, by the way. Our boy does not care for himself at all. And yes, he is greedy. All the time. PPS: Araragi grabs Ononoki’s skirt when she talks about herself as a bargaining chip, a mere object of barter, a pawn. On the one hand, his actions illustrate her self-objectification while also chastising it. Araragi: “This is punishment for saying dumb things.” On the other hand, he is quite literally holding on to a friend whom he senses might be about to slip from his grasp. PPPS: Aww! After beating her in the snowball fight, she calls Shinobu “nee-san” now. PPPPS: Even beginning to probe the depth of Ononoki’s choice in this episode would take pages, so I’ll leave it at a simple statement of conviction: I believe that killing Tadatsuru, rather than being (just) the act of a monster as Ononoki claims, is an act of self-sacrifice (as Nesa correctly pointed out) in order to protect a friend. PPPPPS: This post may or may not contain red herrings.
Russell's teapot
2025-08-01 01:14:47 +0000 UTCGood questions, it's apparent that someone is planning something behind the scenes. Is it Gaen or someone else? Or both?
Jaron Clark
2025-07-31 19:54:38 +0000 UTCWelcome back! I think it’s harder to piece the information together when eps are paced out but personally I looked at tadatsurus lines more literal. But I think it’s fun to get a conclusion on our own lol.
Lark
2025-07-31 18:31:38 +0000 UTCExcellent comment and you said basically everything I was thinking from the discussion portion. Like you said, it sets up *so* much that isn't immediately apparent, but the fun comes in solving the puzzle. While there's a ton of stuff to "get", its like you'll be lost in future chapters if you don't. I had even just typed out a few more sentences, but really any kind of finger pointing is basically spoilers at this point. While yes, its all been said, its also not necessarily obvious. "Now, dear reader, you have all the clues" as the Great Detective would say. The animation on this episode is also weirdly one of the best? Idk why, but its like understated but really nice to look at.
Tony Wegner
2025-07-31 18:16:01 +0000 UTCAll I could think while reading this was that Monogatari is the answer to the prompt: "Chat GPT, justify anime panty shots in 100 episodes + 3 movies or less." Personally I viewed it just as his typical deflection thing. Just "I don't want to confront this reality right now, so let's distract ourselves with this gag instead." And about the last part of your comment, I just wanted to highlight what Chillih and Nessa said about her "not really losing anything" by killing Tadatsuru. I think on one level yes, that's technically correct, however, if we think back to the absolute meltdown he had when seeing Kiss-Shot eat Guillotine Cutter's face (lmao), we can here see that same disillusionment ("like seeing a cute kitten kill a mouse"). To bring that into the end of the episode and "why would they have parted", I would say that it would be sure to cause a huge rift given how Araragi would feel he enabled that.
Tony Wegner
2025-07-31 18:08:21 +0000 UTCThis is one of my all time favourite episodes of the show, but it's also one of the most difficult to understand. Explaining a large part why this episode is great would have to include spoilers. Without spoiling though I can say the main idea here is playing with character motivations. What Tadatsuru realises is the way things happened and the events leading up to this confrontation were so "convenient" and "perfect" that they had to be somehow set up. Our POV example of this is the situation Araragi's in. Among other things, he was just told that his 2 sisters and a friend were abducted by an exorcist that wants to exorcise him and his sister. Thus we can see that there is no action for Araragi to take here, other than going to fight and save them. You can already infer that something similar might have happened to Tadatsuru as well and the only logical action for him is to do what he's doing right now. The twist here is that Tadatsuru realises this and refuses to act along with the story he's been "cast" into. Tells Araragi that something isn't right and to find Oshino, since that's the only person that could stay outside of the bounds of effect and help resolve the things here.
arspop
2025-07-31 18:00:53 +0000 UTCMy personal interpretion of the panty thing is that it's a metaphor for Araragi trying to see into the "inner" or deeper parts of someone else. Trying to look deeper into someone is an inherently intrusive and perhaps even embarassing thing to do, which I think is why NisioisiN chose this as a representation of it. I think Araragi's trying to understand Ononoki, and choosing to then portray it like this to the audience. The previous time I think the panty thing was used this way was back in Kizu and in Neko Kuro. In Kizu, Araragi happens to see Hanekawa's panties and they're pure white. Araragi thinks he saw the deepest part of Hanekawa and found only pure whiteness (get it?) and pure good, which is also how he sees her throughout Kizu, as an angel and a saviour. Fitting for the way he puts her on a pedestal from then on. Then, on Neko Kuro, he instead sees black panties, revealing Hanekawa's hidden darker emotions and pain he hadn't seen before, black panties therefore Black Hanekawa and all that. This time, however, the audience doesn't get to see the panties, representing that Araragi doesn't actually know what to make of them, how to interpret them. He doesn't understand Ononoki, and he very specifically knows he doesn't understand her (unlike Hanekawa, who he thought, incorrectly, that he understood.) That's why he regrets letting go of the skirt, because, if he tried a little harder to understand her, he might have realized what she was going to do. Araragi puts humanity in a sort of pedestal, he thinks that killing takes away from one's humanity, even though, as Ononoki says, all serial killers are also human. Killing is not really a inhuman act, since its really humans that do it. Nonetheless, Ononoki's killing of Tadatsuru works to "taint" her in Araragi's eyes. He instinctively feels repulsed by her, which is what he's talking about when he speaks of the "rift" created between them, it's not like an actual full separation, but the inevitable emotional distancing that would usually happen after such an event. However, Gaen and Kagenui suspect that that was the end goal of whoever the "enemy" is, so they counteract it by forcing them to be in the same home, making the emotional distancing a lot more difficult.
ATableWithPants
2025-07-31 17:51:47 +0000 UTCWatching the first few minutes of the episode again would probably help answer some of your questions...
magnificent_owl
2025-07-31 15:59:37 +0000 UTC
