Fatal Frame Iv - Explained! part 2 - Why sakuya bloomed and the kiraigou failed

Hey guys, its exorsizzle! Screw writing a long intro this time, you already know why I'm here, lets just start. After Souetsu messed up his Mask of the Lunar Eclipse and used it in the homecoming, the vessel bloomed. When someone blooms, they basically die but they're still alive in a way. They pretty much enter a coma that they will literally never wake up from and yet they can still get up and walk around, and they still have that basic instinct to get as close to the moon as possible, because they're trying to "reset." They want to return to area zero. In terms of lunar melody, when someone blooms their own personal melody becomes so distorted from what it once was that it ends up breaking or I'm assuming becoming something entirely different from what it once does. This is a little bit off topic, but in the final boss fight with Sakuya, a really distorted bagpipe version of the Tsukimori song is playing and I wonder if this is actually the culmination of all the lunar melodies that have broken all across the island. If you pay close attention to it, you can actually hear many different sound layers... as you can with most music... but if it is all the souls yelling at once thats pretty neat Anyway, in summary when a person blooms they are technically still alive but permanently unconscious. Their lunar melody is so messed up that its not even their melody anymore so the people basically lose their souls because they can't remember who they are at all anymore. In my opinion, the souls detach from the blooming bodies and become ghosts, and the bodies those souls once belonged to just wander around blooming and separating more souls. I'm not sure if that makes sense or not, let me know if it doesn't, and I will try again! After the maiden that wore Souetsu's mask bloomed, she wandered around the island causing more people to bloom, but thankfully not everyone. I really want to know how they stopped her though because the game never really says how to stop a blooming person, its just like "eh put a mask on it and play the piano??" Maybe thats it though, maybe she instinctively made her way up to the Tsukiyomi lighthouse to be closer to the moon just like Sakuya does at the end of the game, and one of the Tsukimori Shrine maidens played the piano to make her feel better, and ta-dah everyone who bloomed stopped and passed on. Anyway, Souetsu was never seen nor heard from again, and as I said in my last video, the islanders burned everything relating to him that they could find. The Homecoming was banned and was pretty taboo until two generations later when one of Souetsu's descendants, Sougen, made a tourist version of it called the Kagura. The Kagura is almost the exact same thing as the Homecoming. The preparations are the exact same and the way its done is the exact same. I'm almost 100% sure that what makes them different is the mask of the lunar eclipse; the Kagura doesn't have one probably because Souetsu's mask was extremely taboo even after the Kagura made the Homecoming a little less scary to think about. The kimono the vessel wears could also be a key difference but its never confirmed in game so it could also just be a personal choice. As you can probably imagine, not sending the souls off to the other side and clearing out the lunar noise from all the dead people for over 100 years kinda sent the island into a really bad downward spiral. Getsuyuu Syndrome, the disease that comes from not being able to hear your own lunar melody when there are too many dead souls on the island, became so common that Rougetsu Hall was built on top of an old inn just to house all the new patients. Rougetsu Hall and Haibara Hospital were both owned by the Haibara family, who I guess you could say were a very troubled bunch...? Prior to the first Day without Suffering, they were a group of priests that helped out with various rituals but after Souetsu screwed up they decided to open up the Hospital and then Rougetsu Hall to start trying to cure Getsuyuu Syndrome with medicine rather than rituals. Sadly this medicine was not always the most pleasant medicine, or even the most effective. Shigeto Haibara, the head of the family, and his staff would literally drill into various parts of the brains of patients and often kill them in the process all in the name of finding a cure they would never actually find. We don't know anything about Shigeto's ancestors unfortunately but we do know that his wife contracted Getsuyuu Syndrome and couldn't deal with the guilt that came from her violent outbursts towards her loved ones so she threw herself off the roof of Haibara hospital. We don't know when this happened though. Shigeto had two children with his wife, Sakuya and Yo. We don't really know a lot about how Sakuya was before contracting Getsuyuu but based on how she acted during cutscenes where she wasn't flipping the *** out and how Yo describes her, she was a very calm and soothing person to be around. She had a healing spirit. And she was also a medium, just like her mom which unfortunately made her 1000x more susceptible to Getsuyuu syndrome and probably made her disease progress a lot faster than most people. Something that really REALLY bothers me about Sakuya is that we don't get the year she was born in and yet we get her brother and their creepy *** baby's birth year. Also, apparently Yo impregnated Sakuya, his OLDER sister, when he was 13 years old. Yo was born in 1945 and Ayako was born in 1958. What the ***. Ayako isn't super important to this part of the story but I will talk about her soon, I promise. Anyway, when Yo got a little bit older, he decided to follow in his dad's footsteps and became a doctor. He went to the mainland to open up his own clinic and experiment on people presumably with the hopes of finding a cure for Getsuyuu syndrome but maybe not he seems like he's probably a pretty messed up guy. He killed some people and unfortunately ended up running back to Rougetsu Island where he and his father started working on bringing back the real Homecoming, not the touristy Kagura, so they could hopefully cure Sakuya's Getsuyuu Syndrome. The Tsukimori song was another part of the Homecoming that got almost completely erased over time so Yo's first task was to find the musical sheets containing it. He found some sheets and tried to "adapt them into a contemporary style," which was probably a very bad idea. Whatever song he created, it was not the Tsukimori song and when he would play it for patients for "music therapy" it would make them even worse; it actually confused them even more because it added to the noise preventing them from hearing their own lunar melody. it literally took away people's souls rather than giving them back like the tsukimori song was supposed to do. - ding - First mistake. Yo's second task was to pick the five accompanists for the ritual! Its unknown exactly how he did this, but at least 3 out of the 5 girls he chose appear to come from spiritual families; Misaki is a descendant of Dr. Asou, the inventor of the camera obscura, and Ruka and Madoka are part of the Tsukimori family, although its unknown exactly how Ruka and Madoka are related. We still don't know why he chose Marie and Tomoe. Ruka, Madoka, and Misaki and probably Marie and Tomoe too all had Getsuyuu Syndrome at this point so their lunar melodies were pretty weak. If you watched my last video, you know that accompanists are actually supposed to have an even STRONGER lunar melody than most people so Yo really screwed the pooch here too. - ding - Second mistake. The Haibaras believed that having Sakuya become a vessel was the only way to cure her Getsuyuu syndrome even though they could have picked literally anybody else and it would have helped just as much. We only really find one kinda weird note in game talking about the selection process for a vessel but it appears the main requirement is that the woman can meditate and return to area zero while still alive, and then come back from it like nothing even happened. If the woman can't do that and not all of her soul returns, she cannot become a vessel and if she does, she will probably bloom. Heck, she might bloom even if she doesn't become a vessel. Sakuya was DEFINITELY not healthy enough to become a vessel! She had her own isolation room because her Getsuyuu syndrome was so bad that it had become contagious, a stage known as resonating! Her distorted lunar melody got so "loud" that it started distorting other people's lunar melodies too, causing them confusion and slight amnesia when they were around her. I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure that's not a good sign of a quality vessel. - ding - Third mistake. As you probably remember from the previous video or from playing this game yourself, the vessel and her accompanists were supposed to meditate together with their masks in the Hall of the Unconscious Mind for 100 days. Either to not draw suspicion of the 6 women going into the mysterious ritual room everyday or because of time constraints, Sakuya and her accompanists did not meditate at all! - ding - Fourth and final mistake. probably. let me know if you can think of anything else I don't know how they thought all of this would be okay, but they were really really desperate. The chance at performing a Homecoming only came once a decade, and Getsuyuu syndrome was only getting worse and worse by the year. Once again, it had been around 125 years since they had cleared the lunar noise; they probably weren't even sure if there would BE an island in another 10 years if they didn't perform the ritual. The entire island stalled for too long and they acted too late. Either Shigeto or Yo enlisted Souya Yomotsuki, a descendant of Souetsu, to make the Mask of the Lunar Eclipse for the Homecoming and contrary to what I thought pretty much up until just now, Souya didn't actually mess things up. It wasn't his mask that did it, it was everything else! My reasoning for this is that the mask DOES work at the end of the game so long as its combined with a girl with a strong lunar melody playing the actual Tsukimori song, not Yo's terrifying reconstruction. The Homecoming is a machine and without every gear turning perfectly, it will not work. On the night of the Homecoming, the five accompanists secretly chosen to participate were kidnapped from the audience of the Kagura and brought down along with Sakuya to the Underground Lunar Hall where the Homecoming was performed. The accompanists were very uneasy prior to putting on their masks but entered a somewhat peaceful somewhat disturbing trance afterwards, in my opinion providing even more proof that Souya made the masks right. They played their respective instruments but whatever they played sure as heck was not the Tsukimori song so the souls they were guiding into Sakuya probably got pretty confused and even more distorted and irritated than they were previously. Sakuya did go to Area Zero but her soul never came back; her mask broke, she lost her connection to earth and she could no longer send the now even more pissed off spirits to the other side. Sakuya was kept alive in a coma of sorts in the Shrine of Mourning where they waited for her to hopefully wake up and be cured. The Homecoming also somehow caused the vessel and her five accompanists participating in the Kagura directly above the Homecoming to collapse and die instantly. The reasoning for this is that when watching the Kagura, the viewers and participants' souls would leave their bodies for a few minutes and then they would return sometime after the climax hopefully cleansed. When the Homecoming failed, it also shut off the link that allowed the people's souls to return to their bodies, so the fake vessel and her accompanists just straight up died instantly. Many people in the audience contracted Getsuyuu syndrome if they didn't have it already, and if they did have it already, it got worse. Some people lost so much of their soul from not being able to hear their lunar melody that they decided to kill themselves! Sakuya's accompanists all passed out and lost their memories, and after reading about how the moon reflection well has the power to restore memories over time, Shigeto and/or Yo kept the girls there for TWO WEEKS until Choushiro Kirishima, a detective from the mainland looking for Yo, found them. The girls were returned to their parents who made the very smart decision to get them the heck away from the island. God bless. As I said, Getsuyuu syndrome got a lot worse and there were more suicides, but nothing too eventful happened over the next two years. It was kinda like the calm before the storm. There were a few bad signs that Sakuya was going to wake up soon though: 1) this beautiful painting Yuuko Magaki made accompanied by a lovely poem. Here's an excerpt: "Look at the woman's flower! The face that is overflowing with beautiful destruction! The face without a face! The flower of extinction! Come into existence! Arise! Arise!" 2) Sakuya's nurse wrote that she kept having a dream that she was standing in front of the door leading to the mourning shrine where Sakuya's comatose body was kept. She could hear Sakuya very softly singing and then the door would creak open a little bit, pause and then swing open at which point she couldn't help looking at Sakuya even though she knew she shouldn't. This is sadly exactly what happened to the nurse on the two year anniversary of the failed homecoming! The nurse was quite possibly one of the first people Sakuya saw, the first one being the mourning shrine guard. Sakuya made her way all throughout the island, causing everyone to bloom although we don't know how long it took. She moves pretty slowly when she's chasing the player down in game, and in cutscenes she seems to be pretty slow but people just have to look at her to bloom and shes pretty attention getting what with the super loud static-y lunar noise that follows her every where she goes. I'd say it took a week tops for everyone to bloom. I think the reason nobody had the ability to stop Sakuya was because everything surrounding the homecoming was so censored after the first Day without Suffering that no one really knew how to stop a blooming person, only how to prevent it. Like I said earlier, I believe a blooming vessel will instinctively make their way up to the Tsukuyomi peninsula Lighthouse to be closer to the moon where a Tsukimori shrine maiden can play the Tsukimori song for the vessel to hopefully calm them down and stop their blooming so the vessel can finally send the souls off to the other side and clear the lunar noise surrounding the island so everyone living can get their sanity back! In 1972 when the second day without suffering happened, there were hardly any Tsukimori shrine maidens on the island. In fact, if Ruka and Madoka's mothers were really the only Tsukimoris left and they were already gone, then there was nobody who even knew the actual Tsukimori song so its not like somebody could just go up to the lighthouse, avoid looking at Sakuya and play the song for her. Not until 8 years later at least, when Ruka a Tsukimori descendant shows up with the properly reconstructed Tsukimori song and the mask of the lunar eclipse. She tries to exorcise Sakuya's spirit with the camera, but either because the camera is too weak because in my opinion, its the first camera obscura prototype, or because Sakuya is somehow the easiest to fight boss with the most resistance to being exorcised, it still doesn't really work without the mask and the song. Sakuya disappears for a little bit, kinda asking you very politely to play the song but if you mess it up, she comes back and will play very aggressive queen of the lighthouse with you one more time. Play the song correctly, and it STILL isn't enough; Sakuya continues blooming until Choushiro shows up, grabs the mask from Ruka and puts it on Sakuya FINALLY allowing the doorway to the otherside to open up; the mask was fine all along, it just needed the right preparations for it to do its job. All the spirits of the islanders as well as the lunar noise surrounding the island clears up, presumably making it inhabitable again but I don't think anyone would really want to live here and if they did, they'd probably be screwed because once again, the only remaining Tsukimori shrine maiden left; Unless Ruka left detailed notes on how to fix things in case the lunar noise does start becoming a problem again, after a few hundred years, maybe even less Getsuyuu syndrome would probably be just as bad as it was before everyone bloomed and died, and nobody would have any idea what to do. Everyone would be screwed again. If I missed anything in this video and you'd like me to go over it in the next part of the Fatal Frame IV videos, then let me know! I plan on there being one more part where I go over everything I didn't quite get to in these past two parts, such as interesting plot elements and the various ghosts so subscribe if you don't want to miss it! Thank you for watching, have a great day and remember! You'll be suffer (you'll be supper? you can only suffer?)