Higurashi still holds up as the best Horror Anime

The Studio Deen adaptation from 2006-2007 primarily but most Higurashi content has some value.  I rewatched it for October of 2025 for the first time in a few years and it more than holds up.

This post will contain spoilers for the entire franchise and maybe even also other When They Cry stuff.  

There is no single central thesis here, I want to talk about a number of Higurashi related thoughts I’ve been having lately.

Higurashi is at the forefront of VN Anime being irrationally hated by VN purists.  In a way it’s the most actually contentious as shows like Steins;Gate and KyoAni’s Key adaptations are the ones even the strictest VN purists have trouble denying are good Anime.  Shows like Tsukihime, Chaos;HEad and Umineko have a seeming lack of defenders other than me because only fans of the VNs watched them at all.  Then there are the truly niche VN based Anime that it feels like only I care about one way or the other like Robotics;Notes and YU-NO. 

Higurashi meanwhile is an Anime that when most of the casual Western Anime Fandom didn’t even know what VNs were was un controversially deemed the Greatest Horror Anime, if there is any one Anime general Horror Fans should start viewing as required watching for the Genre it is Higurashi. Now wider VN awareness has made people more aware of the critiques of it as an adaptation which combined with a generation of Zoomer Weebs who think 00s Studio Deen Anime hasn’t “aged well” has weakened its legacy. 

I have a playlist on YouTube called Anime Defined.  

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4CWxmx4wepj2gZet-357KQT3bgJjLErC

None of the videos in it are my own but they together help educate people on how Limited Animation is the Feature not a Bug. Over the course of the 2010s it became increasingly more common for some TV Anime to be able to seem like they aren't limited Animation.  Which has bred an increasingly common generation of Fans who refuse to see the Artistic strength of TV Anime of older eras.  Studio Deen in particular having their entire legacy denigrated like this I think is because in the late 00s and 20tweens they were making the last truly Tezuka/Dezaki style Anime.

When it comes to Fate/ there was a time when I myself shamefully agreed with people who thought Deen’s versions looked bad. But I’ve come to appreciate how aesthetically they suit the original vision of the Nasuverse far better.  I still prefer UFOTable Anime for their overall handling of the story itself and their Animation/Arstyle is far from bad either in general or for the Nasuverse specially, the Nasuverse is flexible enough to modernize while still maintaining its true spirit. 

With the history of Higurashi Anime however the more modern they get the less they feel like Higurashi to me.  The Kira OVAs were already a downgrade visually but still essentially true in spirit.  The Last Period guest appearance was fun but I’d hate an entire Anime of them looking like that. And the very Goopy approach to Gou and Sotsu is very off putting, conveniently enough though I found it most tolerable for the very characters that those shows ultimately focused on the most. 

There is more to what makes an Anime work visually then just Animation, Artstyle and Character Designs.  There are also all the things a Live Action Director also needs to consider, the staging and framing or scenes, which in this case the Source Material gave the Anime little to work with. Deen’s Higurashi adaptations also excelled in this department and again comparing Gou and Sotsu really makes that clear. 

It is particularly the revisiting of scenes during Satokowashi that I find Gou’s staging objectively inferior in every possible way.  This is ironic because narratively Satokowashi is the part of Gou I actually like (well the first 5 episodes of it at least).  

Its revisit of the final confrontation between Takano and the Game Club is just in a completely flat setting with the Club members all standing next to each other like they’re posing for a picture.  In Kai this is on a slope with the victorious protagonists looking down on the defeated antagonist, and by the time that Shot is fired Hanuyp is standing in front of Mion who’s standing in front of the rest.  It is so incredibly Cinematic yet Gou just lazily has them standing around.

That’s the most egregious example but I feel essentially the same about all of them, from when Keiichi first remembers Onikakushi to Okunogi giving Takano the gun. It is so comparatively uninspired. Maybe the only reason I’m not similarly critiquing these elements of this Arc’s original scenes is because there is nothing to compare them to.. But it’s equally possible they were just lazier with the scenes that had been done before, or worse yet afraid of being accused of plagiarizing Deen.

For the VN Purists the core critiques of the Deen Anime is what it left out. Since I originally watched the show blind and followed everything just fine and understood all the nuances and subtext and didn’t feel anything was missing you aren’t going to convince anything left out was necessary. And honestly the more I’ve come to know about what was left out there are indeed some scenes I do wish could be animated some day, but there are others I honestly prefer being dropped.  

In the core story of Higurashi Frederica Bernkastel is an unnecessary complication, the Lore fact that Rika is kinda technically a different character when she speaks with the deeper voice is something I’d honestly rather not be the case, I prefer it to just be a matter of Rika showing a hidden side to herself. When Bern showed up in the Umineko Anime I knew she was a form of Rika somehow just from seeing her character design, I didn’t need the name itself to have already been in Higurashi. 

I’m also not a big fan of the cliche twist of revealing two twins had been permanently switched at some point in their childhood. We can debate endlessly whether or not this adds anything to Mion and Shion’s story but to suggest that it’s necessary to understand why Shion goes down the path she does in Eye Opening is absurd to me, what the Anime gave us was sufficient for me to understand her descent into madness when I watched it blind and it’s still sufficient now. At any rate it’s also not contradicted in the Anime, it just isn't brought up. 

Because of the nature of what kind of story Higurashi is, there is a fan theory that when it comes to the smaller detail differences every adaptation of Higurashi can be equally Canon because we know some of these Arcs played out more then once but with small differences. 

This works mainly for the Question Arcs.  The last two Answer Arcs are the last two fragments in a way that makes it so even their basic sequence right from the beginning can only happen once each. They are the Ten and Ketsu of the Higurashi Kishotenketsu. The ambiguity is the first two Answer Arcs.  

The Atonement Chapter in its entire final act is equally unique.  But the gist of everything up to the moment that Keiichi fully remembers the ending of Onikakushi could have played out more than once and then led to worse endings. 

Eye Opening on the one hand definitely is a variation of Cottondrifting, However it’s very final moment, everything Shion is thinking as she falls to her death in the VN and Manga is meant to to Metaphysically mark her Soul and ensure she won't go down this path again. But interestingly enough that’s one of the things the Anime left out, there is a brief moment of her wishing she could do it again, but it’s nowhere near the same. So perhaps Anime Eye Opening simply is a different Fragment and is perhaps what Shion’s death usually looks like in Cottondrifting Fragments.  The implication of this metatextually is that perhaps Shion’s spiritual salvation is dependent on that Fan briefly breaking her fall, which is the kind of random arbitrary Deus Ex Machina I like actually.

Another way in which what the Anime leaves out could play into this Fan Theory is that at the start of Onikakushi Keiichi in the VN is implied to be subconsciously remembering a prior version of these events because of the “I’m Sorry” bit.  This being left out of the Anime could mean that Anime Onikakushi is that earlier Fragment. 

With both Rei and Kira I don’t care much for their heavily fanservice opening episodes but I enjoy the rest of them.  Outbreak is my least favorite Higurashi Anime by far. Gou and Sotsu I have incredibly mixed feelings on. 

When Gou was first airing I was not into it for the first Cour and a Half and oddly felt alone in that looking at the online discourse I was exposed to.  Then Episodes 18-22 I did find a genuinely compelling story and felt maybe this could all prove worth it.  I was then mostly bored by the last two episodes of Gou.  For Sotsu I was right back to feeling how I first felt about Gou for 13 episodes.  But I then really enjoyed the last two episodes only to find that they were what the broader fandom hated, turning on what came before only because they now think it ends badly. 

I then spent 4 years mostly ignoring the existence of Gou and Sotsu except to clarify their exclusion from what I meant by calling Higurashi my favorite Horror Anime.  Which was exasperated when the Deen Higurashi Anime were dropped from HIDIVE and Gou-Sotsu became the only legally stream able Higurashi Anime.

This October I rewatched much of Gou and Sotsu including what I had failed to watch Dubbed before and it softened my overall opinion somewhat.  I have come to accept this new English Cast for Higurashi but I’ll always prefer the original Dub cast.  Then after letting that rewatch sit for a few days while watching a lot of Higurashi YT content, both Video Essays and Abridged Parodies, I decided to sit down and do a rewatch that was of just specifically Gou 18-22 and Sotsu 14-15. And it turns out I enjoyed that experience with no notes, those 7 episodes work great as a 2 and a half hour movie. They tell the core story of Gou-Sotsu, everything else was needless at best, skipping over the specifics of what Satoko did during these loops makes it much easier to digest her villainy. 

I think for five episodes Satokowashi did a good job of building up this conflict between Satoko and Rika.  And I relate to Satoko now more than ever before. Others before me had said she can be read as having ADD or ADHD in this story and as someone with ADD myself (a factor in why I prefer Dubs and can’t read Visual Novels) I very much see it.   And that’s why all the Fandom the mocking of how much emphasis is put on the Studying bugs me, Satoko is undiagnosed so doesn't have the actual medical terminology to explain her problem, but even if she had many Neurotypicals would still fail to understand how much more difficult this can be for someone with a learning disability. And I don’t know if any schools in the 80s knew how to help someone like Satako but it certainly wasn’t a rigidly authoritarian meritocracy obsessed conservative one like St Lucia.

The last two episodes of Sotsu are where others turned on it mainly because they hated the very Genre of this story suddenly changing, and that’s exactly where I’m the opposite, I never needed a Higurashi sequel to be another Mystery, and certainly not to be Horror.  The most highly regarded Higurashi OVAs are the ones that were just Slice of Life fun with maybe a little drama sometimes. I don’t want the franchises I like to have Genre consistency, I want them to have Character consistency. The actual core story of Gou and Sotsu does justice to these characters while taking two of them in a new direction. It’s the rest of it that hurts the characterization for the sake of forcing a new mystery.

It’s easy to dismiss enjoyment of the last two episodes of Sotsu as purely superficial, yes it’s objectively a “well animated” fight, but if that was all it had I wouldn't have kept loving it so much even on the 3rd time watching it. 

There is a moment in Lindsay Ellis’s video on Guardians of The Galaxy 2 where while showing the fight between Gamora and Nebula she says “maybe you haven’t been in a literal fight like this with a family member…. but you’ve probably been in a fight that felt like this”.  And that is why this fight between Satoko and Rika works, especially when watched soon after watching the first 5 episodes of Satakowashi, for all the timeline-universe jumping fantastically Dragonball Z madness the underlying core emotion behind it feels real and raw and relatable.  That’s exactly what I come to Anime for.  It’s what actual Battle Shonen Anime I feel fails to live up to, but when their visual language is borrowed in these more Emotionally driven kinds of Anime it works perfectly. 

However, Gou when viewed in its intended watch order is a crappy sequel.  Why isn’t Rika’s first move to try and recreate the last Fragment? or at least make a move against Takano? Instead the focus for three arcs is on recreating a classic Arc but SHOCK it ends differently this time. Cat-Deceiving chapter hints at actually new scenarios only to rush through them to end on the big reveal.  Sotsu spends 13 episodes revisiting those events from different POVs with the only things close to actually new ideas being ones I never wanted.  And the answer to the question of why so many things happened differently is basically just someone pushed a magically make you insane button on a different character each time.

I don’t see the value in a “what if Mion went full Level 5” scenario to begin with.  But having her mostly just do again everything Shion did only sometimes slightly differently is the most unimaginative way you could do that. It did make me laugh how she even repeated the blunder of accidentally killing Oryo with the Taser before she could question her. 

A Mion scenario as the second fragment of this new Loop could have fit into the real story at hand if Rika had ever actually gotten to react to it.  Instead Mion kills her instantly and given the preconceptions Rika entered this with she probably assumed that was Shion the entire time she was being choked out.  Maybe the fact that Mion went Level 5 could have been the thing that truly revealed to Rika how different this new game board is, certainly a more emotionally impactful character to do that with then Oishi.  Instead it happened solely because Satako was morbidly curious. 

A lot of my issues with Gou scenarios are that they should have had Rika be the primarily POV character from the start for the Question Arcs.  That would be a true inversion of the original structure where we don’t get her perspective till the Answer Arcs. But that wouldn’t have lent itself to the marketing gimmick of being able to allegedly be both Remake and Sequel at the same time. 

I’m really not qualified to explain in depth why it was so problematic to revisit the Teppei abusing Satoko storyline this way. As a Universalist Christian I do not have a problem with the basic concept of redeeming Teppei, in fact I like how his new Dub actor plays this more cheerful version of the character at the end. But creating this scenario where Satako fakes the abuse this time really sours the legacy of what once was one of the most powerful and effective depictions of this issue in Anime.

So yeah, I don’t think there’s any Anime I have more truly conflicted feelings towards then Higurashi Gou and Sotsu.

Shonen and Battle Shonen

Shonen is a Manga Demographic term that sometimes gets mistaken for a Genre term in the west.  What people typically mean when they mistakenly use Shonen as a genre term is Battle Shonen.  But even what that means can be itself a bit arguable and I suspect another case where that’s not what they call these kinds of Manga in Japan.

I tend to refer to Battle Shonen as a genre I’m not very into with Dragonball Z being the only Battle Shonen Anime I’ve watched to any significant degree.  The shows I’m intending to tell people I haven’t watched when I say that are Naruto, One Piece, Bleach, One Punch Man, My Hero Academia, Black Clover, Demon Slayer and JJK.  Interestingly I know that at least one of those isn’t even technically Shonen but Seinen. 

Most of the Shonen Manga based Anime I’ve completed are shows I didn’t even originally think were Shonen but rather Seinen.  Death Note and Future Diary are in particular the shows that forced me to rethink what I assumed Shonen meant when I learned their Manga were officially Shonen.  I was associating the term Shonen exclusively with kids shows, that’s not why I’m not into Battle Shonen, I absolutely love watching some kids' shows like Classic Mahou Shoujo and Pokémon. If there is a show other than DBZ I’ve watched that can be considered a Battle Shonen it’s probably one of these “I can’t believe it’s not Seinen” shows. 

And there are a few Shonen with enough female perspective Melodrama to make some at first think they're Shoujo like Karin aka Chibi Vampire and Shattered Angels.

Pokémon not being considered Battle Shonen isn’t because of the Shonen part, it may not be a Manga original franchise but it has Manga and they are Shonen and there is no dispute the target age demographics of the Pokémon Games and Anime originally was principally Shonen.  It’s not a Battle Shonen because even though Battles are a part of Pokémon's appeal it’s not the structural foundation the same way it is in a Battle Shonen. 

The other important Shonen I’m into is Detective Conan and the kinda same universe series Magic Kaito. In order to call them Battle Shonen you’d have to get pretty abstract about what it means to battle someone. 

Maybe some of you think Detective Conan should be part of the could pass for Seinen category, and I’m not saying it can’t pass for Seinen. But I do not see it as difficult to pass for a kids show.  For all the desire some have to deny that it’s a kids show it really doesn't do much more murder and violence than Batman The Animated Series did. 

There is also Full Metal Alchemist.

OVAs were a big part of why the Anime industry is different from Western Animation.

The technical definition of OVAs do exist in Western Animation as well.  OVA stands for Original Video Animation, it refers to Animations that were directly released to home video.

However straight to video releases in Western Animation are usually feature length, with 70 Minutes being the standard for the line of Direct to Video DC Animated movies that started in 2007 but 90 minutes for the 2008 Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight movie. 

The Anime OVA industry that started in the 80s and reached its height in the 90s had some OVAs of comparable runtime to those, like Lupin III The Fuma Conspiracy. But the standard was getting something basically the length of an episode of a TV show or maybe just a little bit longer, maybe a full 30s minutes like TV episodes pretend to be but really aren’t due to commercials. 

And that’s what I think the western mindset has trouble relating to, paying the full price for a VHS tape or DVD and only getting one single episode feels unthinkable to us.  Remember Video Rentals never became a thing in Japan, no one was renting these before deciding if they were worth it, and largely because of that the standard price to buy a VHS was a lot more expensive in Japan than it was in the US even factoring in the Yen v Dollar exchange rate. So these Otaku were willingly paying a lot of money for just 30 minutes of content.

English localized releases of OVAs when they happened at all usually came later when they could put multiple episodes of a series on one tape or disc. So even Americans who got into Anime through bargain bin English Dubs of 90s OVAs never experienced what following OVAs was like in Japan.

I at first thought the one thing that could be a true Western OVA was Pryde of The X-Men, but then I learned that was a TV special first.

So when recommending an Anime from that era to someone not versed in how the Anime Industry works, they may ask if it’s a Movie or a TV show even though many really are neither but something harder to explain the concept of. 

Today the OVA is basically dead.  They still exist only for Hentai and the occasional bonus episode of a TV series included with its BluRay Release which fits the technical definition but isn’t being distributed the same way. However when they died is difficult to pin point, they lasted longer than I initially thought. 

One could argue they ceased to be the same as what they originally were as soon as DVDs replaced VHS as the standard format of Home Video releases.  I wonder if that is something that took longer in Japan then it did in the US or happened sooner?  The youngest movies I ever watched in a VHS format were from 2002 (Spider-Man and Attack of The Clones) but I'm pretty sure Return of The King had VHS releases in 2004 however I recall by 2005 at least all my local Video Rental places only had DVDs. 

But while their golden age was past plenty of original OVA releases happened in the 00s like Studio BeeTrain's Murder Princess.

I had in a few Blog Posts proclaimed Tenchi Muyo: War on Geminar from 2009-2010 the last OVA series. But I kinda knew that was not quite true even at the time.  Code Geass Akito of The Exiled and Gundam The Origin were OVA projects of the 2010s I was well aware of, and while they are part of established franchises they really cannot be dismissed as mere bonus episodes.  

However they are series where every episode has about a 70 Minute Run Time. So in that sense they are OVAs technically but not quite the same as the Classic OVAs I’ve been talking about. The Gundam Unicorn OVAs are close to that but a little shorter.  The War on Geminar Episodes were 45 minutes per episode, also a little longer than what the average originally was but not feature length. 

The last of the Detective Conan OVAs came out in 2012.  While all of those OVAs fit the “bonus episode of a TV show” description in terms of their content, the way they were released does seem to have been like classic OVAs.  Then there's the Rei and Kira OVAs from the Higurashi franchise (and Outbreak which I don't recommend).

Today the role OVAs used to play is now filled by ONAs, but many ONAs are also functionally the same as a TV Anime in how they come out, plus the full season binge releases. 

RetroCrush now has Anime as recent as the 2010s on it.

Any time you create a place dedicated specifically to old nostalgic stuff there will inevitably be disagreement on what’s actually old and nostalgic enough.  The older you get the less significant a passage of time a single Decade feels like.

So here I am in 2025 objecting to 2014 shows like Terror in Resonance (which I do like, this is not about hating on it) being seen as remnants of a bygone era even though in 2005 I absolutely did see 1994 stuff that way. 

However this is justified by the connotative differences I see between the different words we use to convey this idea. 

A Classic is something a piece of Art can become instantly, Frieren is a good example of a contemporary Anime gaining Instant Classic status in the eyes of many. We associate the term with old stuff mainly because the Classics of older eras have stood the test of time and so there is less dispute that they are indeed Classics.  But then people call anything of a certain age a Classic even if it was never highly regarded at the time or in hindsight thus diluting it's meaning. 

Retro however to me implies more than just age in a very different way.  

As a Millennial I don’t know if this is unique to me or not but the first time I heard the word I was under the impression it specifically meant the 80s, as in something could be too old to be Retro just as much as it could be too young. I now realize that was never officially what it meant, it was just a product of living through an era when that was the most popular Decade to be Nostalgic for. Strangely that era seemed to begin while we were still in the 90s and hasn't fully gone away. 

However what remains in my perspective is that to be Retro implies not just being old but being old in a way where what’s coming out today isn’t even made of the same stuff anymore. 

Anime has in a lot of ways stagnated (In a way that Western Entertainment media has not.), the trends that are defining Anime now are for the most part the same trends that were defining it in 2014. Both in terms of popular genres and artstyles.   I can absolutely see what someone might mean by looking at 2014 American movies and TV shows and saying "they don't make em like that anymore", I would disagree with that making them inherently superior or inferior but I can see how one would say that.  With Anime however they definitely are still making them like they did in 2014.

I could show Terror in Resonance to someone who hadn't heard of it before even though they are fairly versed in Anime history and tell them it came out last year and they would have no reason not to believe me. However that same hypothetical person in 2015 would not be so easily tricked by a 2004 Anime. 

That said it’s not like I can give a solid objective explanation of what it is Anime I consider Retro have that the rest do not. Being Cell Animated rather than Digital helps, but plenty of Early Digital stuff feels Retro now too thanks to how early Digital Animation hadn't standardized how it worked yet. 

I'm glad Terror in Resonance is on a Free Website, but it’s also on Tubi.Tv where I feel it fits in better. 

Lex Luthor is proving a surprisingly difficult character to get right.

I like James Gunn’s Superman movie.  But I’m a bit annoyed by how over half the discussion of the film is about the film’s Lex Luthor with many saying it has the most perfect understanding of the character, when for me how the film handled Luthor is what I liked the least. 

First of all, as someone who likes the CEO Lex Luthor, it bugs me how many modern takes seem to feel forced to include the CEO element when they really just want to do the Mad Scientist.  This is what the Zach Snyder and James Gunn's takes on Lex Luthor have in common, to them the time as a CEO is just a step in the origin they want to get out of the way as quick as possible.  

I want years, maybe even over a decade of Lex Luthor secure in his CEO position before any type of downfall or prison time happens, that’s what we got in the 80s-90s DC Comics and Superman The Animated Series.  Lois and Clark is an interesting middle ground where I’d ideally want multiple seasons in a TV Series but at least getting a whole 22 episode season is better than only one single movie.  For comparison David Xanatos in the Gargyles Cartoon is a good way to handle things. 

However there is another issue I have with this take on Lex Luthor that would apply whether it’s a CEO or Mad Scientist take on the character.   Which is why I still prefer Batman V Superman’s Lex to this one. 

I dislike the very thing so many people are praising right now.

I don’t want Lex to be single-mindedly obsessed with Superman in the way The Joker is with Batman. He should hate Superman only because he’s in the way, Superman currently takes up a large percentage of his energy, and it can over time become somewhat personal.  But this desire to make destroying Superman the only real goal he actually cares about is something I hate.

Gunn cited Allstar Superman as an inspiration and yeah that comic is largely where this way of characterizing Luthor comes from.  And I honestly don’t mind it so much in that story as its own stand alone thing.  But as the primary characterization of Luthor in what’s supposed to now be DC’s main Cinematic Universe, it’s really dull and short sighted. 

In the early history of the CEO Lex Luthor I prefer the way he was written by Marv Wolfram over John Byrne, making him a CEO was Wolfman’s idea in the first place and Byrne it turns out was a Right Wing Conservative so always out of touch with why most Superman fans think Superman’s best enemies are Corporate War Mongers and Slum Lords.  After that I again liked how he was handled in season 1 of Lois and Clark and STAS. I liked Lionel Luthor on Smallville (at least the first 3 seasons) as a glimpse of what a fully developed Lex Luthor could be like. And interestingly enough I liked the take on Luthor in season 2 of The Joker Blogs which is not official but an internet Fan Film project taking off of The Dark Knight universe. 

Ya know what story originally with a non CEO Lex Luthor that could easily be rewritten as a CEO Luthor story?  Superman IV The Quest for Peace.  Luthor’s plot in that film could easily lend itself to a corporate War Profiter, and then you could also make him the guy buying the Daily Planet as well. 

Low Church Fantasy

I’ve noticed a trend lately of YouTube videos analyzing how fictional religions in Fantasy settings often don’t feel authentic to how real Regions function, including one focusing specifically on the lack of Schisms. 

So I want to talk about something that perhaps only I care about.

Fantasy religions Aesthetically based on Christianity are always specifically based on High Church Christianity, usually quite specifically Roman Catholicism. More disorganized local spirituality in Fantasy stories are usually more inspired by Animist polytheism like you’d see from Indigenous Tribes of North America or the Sami or local Shintoism. 

This probably has to do with the simplified understanding of Christian History where there is no Protestantism till the Middle Ages are over so therefore it’s assumed Baptist or Quaker inspired communities would be out of place in a Medieval Europe inspired Fantasy Setting.  

However I have seen plenty of Fantasy settings that extend their real word inspirations into the Renaissance, Enlightenment or even Victorian period. Like all those Otome Villainess settings, or really any with a Magic Academy element.

But besides that Medieval Proto-Protestants of different kinds did exist, most relevant here would be the Waldenses/Waldensians. Talking about the Waldenses as Low Church Proto-Protestants is made more controversial than it should be because of how they factor into the imagined revisionist histories proposed by Landmarkists.  I do not believe in the core Doctrine that often lies behind Baptist Successionism theories (that being in the “True Church” requires an unbroken chain of Believers Baptism back to the Disciples), so whether or not there is direct continuity between the Waldenses and 15th Century Anabaptists doesn’t concern me. However I am convinced there is plenty of solid evidence that many Waldenses (they were probably not always all the same) were Credo-Baptists who practiced Congregational Polity. 

There's also the Lollards from English History, some of them were more Low Church then the others, Wycliff himself was certainly not a Credo-Baptist but I think some later Lollards did come to that conclusion.

George MacDonald was a Congregationalist Minister who was a huge player in the origins of the Fantasy Genre being a cited influence on both C.S. Lewis and Tolkien.  The way Goblins tend to be depicted in Fantasy began with him and he also arguably wrote the first Isekai. Unfortunately his influence was filtered through a Catholic and an Anglican. His position on Church Polity is not the deviation from the Established Church of England MacDonald is most well known for, and indeed Universal Salvation is also something I’d like to see in the Fantasy Genre more often.

The major impact this could have on both the Mechanics and Lore of a Fantasy Setting is the question of Apostolic Succession.  High Church denominations believe the Spiritual Authority Jesus gave the Apostles is only truly inherited by the Clergy, while Low Church Christians believe strongly in the Priesthood of All Believers.  Today most major Baptist denominations are Secessionist on the question of the Spiritual Gifts meaning they believe the more explicitly Supernatural Manifestations of that authority don’t really happen anymore. However most Pentecostal and Charismatic denominations are also Low Church in form, and the Quakers have their Inner Light doctrine. 

So you could easily still have your Catholic Church like institution be the one wielding the most political power in Society, seeking to restrict the knowledge and use of Healing Magic (and other forms of what a Final Fantasy player would call White Magic) to the Clergy, even having most Adventurer Guilds refuse to give proper Healer licenses to anyone the Church doesn't approve of.  While the Low Church Schismatics are teaching that such Magic can be called upon by anyone who has Faith. 

People also criticize how passively Pro Monarchy the Fantasy Genre often seems. Well I’ve written before about how Congregationists were the harbingers of modern Democracy and Socialism, so perhaps having some Low Church Schismatics is also how to bring about a Revolution in a Fantasy World. 

Baptists and Quakers also have a long history of opposing Slavery, the Southern Baptist Convention were the exception not the general rule. A Fantasy story inspired by the history of The Baptist War in Jamaica could be interesting. 

Maybe Fate/Stay Night is supposed to be a little confusing?

I’ve come to an epiphany lately about the nature of Fate/ Watch Order disputes (and perhaps the same applies to other franchises), a lot of it is about which Fate/ project to start with will leave a newcomer the least confused for the shortest amount of time.  Which Anime is quickest to get to some kind of accessible explanation of what the Holy Grail War is and how the Nasuverses’s Magic System works. 

No one is willing to consider that maybe being confused is a deliberate artistic choice, that maybe part of the fun of this entire genre is being thrown into a world you at first don’t understand. People have gotten so invested in hating on J.J. Abrams style Mystery Box story telling that they are overcorrecting into rejecting any kind of story telling that doesn’t explain as much as possible right away. 

In my last Fate/ Watch order post I’d already softened my past advocacy for starting with Fate/Zero.  What I did say was that even if you want to start with the Studio Deen Anime because it’s the only adaptation we have of the first Route, you still should start with Episode 0 and Episode 1 of UFOTable's Unlimited Blade Works because they are the most faithful adaptation of how the VN starts regardless of Route, then you can start Deen/Stay night with episode 3.

A recent video about Fate/ Watch Orders I stumbled upon, (that I think may be AI at least in it’s Voice Over), specifically said Episode 0 was too confusing, it was a bad place to start because it seemingly expected them to already know all this stuff.  But the original VN also began by being from Rin’s pov over that exact same period of time but probably taking even longer to get to the end of it. That is always how we were meant to be introduced to this world. And I think that was a very bold choice that fans need to start having more artistic respect for. 

Maybe the people who can’t handle being out of the loop for that long simply aren’t this Franchise’s target audience. 

Episode 0 of Unlimited Blade Works shouldn't have branded as specifically Unlimited Blade Works, it's 100% before the point of divergence between the routes, and then so is 99% of episode 1. 

And honestly thinking about all this has made me care less about Watch Order correctness in the first place.  Maybe recommend your friend to start with whatever Fate/ Anime you think they would like the most. If they’re a Magical Girl fan who doesn’t mind the lewder takes on that genre then have them start with Prisma Illya, it actually was the first Fate/ Thing I watched and I was not confused in any way that made it hard to follow. 

Maybe there is even a kind of person for whom Fate/Apocrypha would be the Fate/ Anime they’d enjoy the most even if they jumped into it with no prior Nasuverse context. 

There are certainly people for whom Lord El Meloi’s Case Files would be the best Genre for them to enter the Nasuverse through. 

My past advocacy for starting with Fate/Zero was never simply because it was Chronologically first but because as a story bout Adults rather then High Schoolers it will be more accessible for many potential viewers.  And that theory has been vindicated by the vast majority who have watched it first.  The only thing that's come to bother me is when Video Essayists come to conclusions about what the show has to say about Saber's character and ideals when they haven't seen how her story concludes.