Owarimonogatari I

Owarimonogatari I

Owarimonogatari Season 1 anime cover art featuring Ougi Oshino from the Monogatari series
Owarimonogatari Season 1 Cover Art

Overview

Owarimonogatari season one includes four arcs, Ougi Formula, Sodachi Riddle, Sodachi Lost, and Shinobu Mail. All four of these arcs deal with the past and how the characters involved cope with it.

As part of the final season, it’s finally time to start filling in some of the gaps in the story, such as why Koyomi was a loner at the start of the series and why Shinobu only has one servant, Koyomi.

Both of these questions are also answered to an extent in Kizumonogatari, which was originally written near the beginning of the series. However, due to the order in which the anime was released it actually came out after Owarimonogatari season one, with Koyomimonogatari between them.

Ougi Formula

While the Ougi Formula arc is named after and prominently features Ougi Oshino, it’s really the setup for the following two arcs, Sodachi Riddle and Sodachi Lost.

This arc takes us back to the time when Kanbaru first introduced Ougi to Koyomi. Ougi tells Koyomi about a room she’s discovered in the school that doesn’t appear on any of the architectural plans. Suspecting an apparition might be at work, the two decide to investigate.

Once inside the room, Ougi and Koyomi are unable to leave, presumably until they defeat the apparition, whatever it may be. Koyomi then realizes he’s been in the room before and proceeds to tell the story of Sodachi Oikura.

If I’m not mistaken, Sodachi was the class president at the time and she was investigating a case of cheating on a math exam. When nobody comes forward, she proposes the class vote to determine who the culprit was.

However, while she votes that Koyomi was the cheater, most of the rest of the class, including the teacher, vote that it was Sodachi.

Ougi then suggests to Koyomi that the culprit was actually the teacher who let the students see the answers beforehand to increase the average score of her class and that she used Sodachi as a scapegoat. This causes Koyomi to remember why he stopped trusting others in the first place.

With the mystery solved, Koyomi and Ougi are able to leave the room and it disappears.

The OP song for the Ougi Formula arc is “Decent Black.”

Ougi Oshino from the anime Owarimonogatari season 1
Ougi Oshino

Sodachi Riddle

Despite technically being in the Ougi Formula arc, Sodachi Oikura is formally introduced in this arc, Sodachi Riddle.

After she was voted the culprit of the math exam cheating by her classmates, Sodachi left school and only returned on exam days. However, after the mystery was solved in the Ougi Formula arc, the math teacher who framed Sodachi goes on maternity leave and Sodachi returns to school.

In this arc we learn that Sodachi was actually a childhood friend of Koyomi’s, which makes sense when you think about it. She’s a tsundere who has a twin tails hairstyle, the typical description for the childhood friend character (like Eriri from Saekano).

In middle school, Sodachi actually taught Koyomi math so he would pass his exams, but Koyomi had apparently blocked out his memories of her (classic childhood friend character being ignored or forgotten). However, Sodachi didn’t help Koyomi with math for his sake.

Her parents were abusive and so she invited Koyomi to her house to study math so that he would see how her family behaved and tell his own parents about it since they’re police officers.

However, Koyomi never realized what was going on in the Oikura household and so the abuse continued until one day Sodachi’s parents got a divorce and she moved away. Sodachi saw this as Koyomi betraying her and has hated him ever since.

The OP song for the Sodachi Riddle arc is “Mathemagics.”

Sodachi Lost

But wait, there’s more! In this exciting third arc in a row about Sodachi Oikura we learn more about her depressing past.

This time Koyomi goes with Hanekawa to Sodachi’s apartment, where she lives alone, to both apologize for and confront her about the past. It’s at this time that Sodachi tells them the story of what happened after her parents divorced.

The general idea of the story is that she lived alone with her mother who stayed locked in her room with the windows boarded shut. Sodachi was forced to take care of her mother who would eat less and less each day until one day Sodachi arrived home from school to find that her mother wasn’t there.

However, there’s something that Hanekawa doesn’t understand about the story. Sodachi mentioned that although her mother wasn’t there, her door was still locked from the inside and the windows were still boarded.

Hanekawa then figures out that Sodachi’s mother had actually died years earlier, and Sodachi had been caring for her corpse without realizing it, simply thinking her mother wasn’t eating much because she couldn’t accept reality.

While Hanekawa doesn’t want to tell Sodachi the truth, Koyomi eventually does because he knows she won’t be able to move on with her life and be happy otherwise. In the end, Sodachi takes the news better than expected, but then reveals she’ll be changing schools.

The OP song for the Sodachi Lost arc is “Yūdachi Hōteishiki.”

Sodachi Oikura from the anime Owarimonogatari season 1
Sodachi Oikura

Shinobu Mail

Now that the Sodachi Oikura chronicles are complete, we’re back to a Shinobu arc in the form of Shinobu Mail. For this arc I’ll try out a more freeform summary.

Basically, Shinobu’s first and only other servant besides Koyomi has returned as an apparition seeking to exterminate Shinobu. Why would he do this, you ask? Well, because he was originally an apparition specialist before Shinobu made him into a vampire against his will.

While he always felt betrayed by Shinobu for turning him into a vampire, she likewise always felt betrayed by him for killing himself afterwards. In the end he’s defeated by Koyomi who places a seal on his body and Shinobu apologizes to him as he fades away.

Honestly, I don’t remember how much of his backstory was told in this arc so I’ll leave it at that for now and go into a little more detail when I review Kizumonogatari. (Edit: I didn’t go into it at all in my review.)

The OP song for the Shinobu Mail arc is “Mein Schatz.”

Conclusion

As you may be able to guess by now, Owarimonogatari Season 1 is a 10/10 like most of the Monogatari series.

While I don’t particularly like Sodachi as a character, I did enjoy her arcs much more than say, the arcs for Hanekawa. Her arcs reminded me more of how I felt when I originally watched the Mayoi Snail arc of Bakemonogatari.

There was an actual mystery involved that was more than just “it’s all in your head” and it also had a bittersweet ending which is something I like.

Next time we’ll take a look at Koyomimonogatari which is a compilation of individual episodes which take place throughout the series.

4 Replies to “Owarimonogatari I”

    1. If I had to pick one reason why I hate Hanekawa so much, it’s because I just find her arcs to be generally boring. However, I also feel that she doesn’t really have any character development throughout the series. Essentially, “what you see is what you get” with Hanekawa.
      That said, just because I find her arcs boring doesn’t mean I think the episodes that make up those arcs are bad, just worse than the rest of the series. While I don’t care much about the plot of her arcs, I still enjoy the rest of what the series has to offer during them.
      As for Cromartie, along with nine currently airing anime, I’m watching both A Certain Scientific Railgun and Yuki Yuna is a Hero: The Hero Chapter. Since both of those have bad subs, I’m going fairly slowly through them, but I’ll move Cromartie High School up to watch after I finish the first season of Railgun.
      I’ll most likely finish Yuki Yuna first, but I already plan to watch Violet Evergarden after that one. I’m trying to only watch so many non-current anime at once so they PTW list is fairly backed up at this point.

        1. I actually recently heard it be compared to Hinamatsuri which is my favorite anime from this season, so I think I’ll enjoy it.

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