Perhaps to elaborate, what if I try to use character arcs and show things from a character's perspective?
I'm not familiar with Higurashi, but perhaps you can write different chapters or parts of your story from different character PO Vs. There are a few popular series that have done this.
To develop the theme, you can show through each point-of-view how the characters' perceptions of a situation are influenced and informed by their knowledge, beliefs, and experiences.
edited 18th Feb '11 11:38:04 PM by apassingthought
Perhaps you could write the thing from a first person perspective, and have the narrator be someone trapped in a groundhog day loop of their own volition because they liked playing a slice of the world again and again like an extremely visceral visual novel?
You could spend each loop having the protagonist focus on a different character, trying to understand them better, or trying to avoid specific events or manipulate certain outcomes just because they can. Well, there's a lot of potential if we start off with a premise as vague as this.
But it would also give a more centralized character to muse about what every individual each time around is thinking about from their own perspectives, working on how put themselves into their shoes in order to come up with a different ending scenario every time.
In Higurashi as well as some other series of that nature, there is always a theme of perspective. How do I use this a theme and go further than that?
edited 18th Feb '11 11:11:40 PM by G.G.