Judgment Commentary! | Owarimonogatari | Episode 4 "Sodachi Riddle, Part 2" [Reaction + Discussion]

I firmly believe that Araragi's perspective is less reliable than Kaiki's lol

deli

A lot of the details in Araragi's conclusion were cut in the anime and they help us have a better understanding of our protagonist. There were 2 major instances of that: Why Araragi thought the house was an abandoned building; and why he forgot about Sodachi at that time, just 3 years before encountering her again in high school. -Firstly, in the novels it goes more in depth with how Araragi was in his middle school years: a kid always correct and with a strong sense of justice, just like his sisters, like you pointed out. He quite literally did the same things the Fire Sisters do today, going out of his way to impose his justice on others, even by violent means sometimes. To him, the idea that a house like Sodachi's existed and was the home for a family was completely inconceivable. It wouldn't be right for a kid to live in such conditions; it wouldn't be right for parents to let things get to this point; it wouldn't be right for parents to be the reason things got to this point. As someone coming from a loving family in a fairly normal household, he just never thought anyone would ever be living in such a place, so he saw the house as just an abandoned building. It is also mentioned that he never crossed paths with her parents, so when discussing with Ougi he assumes that while he was there, they were always in some other room in the house, ceasing their violence and abuse while another kid was there, that's why one of the rules Sodachi set was that their meetings would ALWAYS be in that specific room. Though Araragi also concluded that the violence that would take place after he left the house would come in higher intensity because of it. -Now for why he forgot about her: because he was afraid. He wanted to forget about her. The girl had the same uniform as him, but after summer break ended he never met her again, doesn't matter how much he looked. He searched in all classes from his year, as well as the ones from one year above and bellow his, but never found anything about her. Even if he had heard her name before at school during some sort of rolecall or things of the like, he wouldn't know it was hers, because they weren't from the same class and had never directly interacted before. He also didn't have a good network of acquaintances to ask for information, so for the most part he just wandered around and looked in other classrooms. The school transfer idea hadn't crossed his mind, because it had been so sudden, so with time he started getting afraid of her. A girl that suddenly vanished never to be seen again that he only ever met in a derelict house. The idea of an abandoned house morphed in his mind to the ideia of a haunted house, and that girl was it's ghost. He was afraid of it, that's why he would never think about her after that, trying to avert his eyes and forget that he had been meeting a ghost in a haunted house every day for over a month. Along with the name change, that was enough for him not to remember her when meeting again in high school, but it's just like he said: he still knew the math he had learned, it's not like those memories were deleted from his mind. If Oikura had said anything to him, he would surely remember her. Great character development, he evolved a lot since that time, going from being a boy who is afraid of ghosts in abandoned houses to being someone who helps dead girls find their way back to mama's home xD