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archived-gtronpa-account · 4 years

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*grumble grumble* dumb Tumblr deleting my 2.5K words post for no reason blegh.

Well anyway,

In defense of Gonta and Kokichi's friendship

Heyo! I like both Gonta and Kokichi a lot lot lot, they're both p much my faves.

I've only watched a single let's play for v3 a few weeks ago so I don't remember everything, however I was on the lookout for those two and it's pretty easy to miss their positive interactions or even misinterpret them, but I'll try to bring up what I remember cause I've seen people hating the relationship between them a lil too much and while I'll concede that it isn't the best it's also important not to dismiss the good things canon and heavily supported headcanon. Also it's one of my favourite friendships of all the danganronpa franchise even when we only look at absolute canon.

Without further ado, we start off with the insect meet and greet that gets brought up a lot. It gives off the impression that Kokichi manipulated Gonta into doing it, but there's a piece of dialogue between Gonta and Shuichi before it in which Gonta says 'Oh, Shuichi! Are you looking for a way to get students to trade motive videos?', meaning it was a plan he wanted to do- and we can assume it's not Kokichi who pushed him into thinking of that, cuz Gonta wasn't aware of his plan and why would Kokichi tell him about trading motive videos without mentioning his plan?

After that during the IMAG When Kokichi says he has to leave and Gonta asks him why, Kokichi very clearly says that he'll bring their motive videos to watch together and Gonta very clearly agrees to it. No manipulation. So all of Kokichi's IMAG plan can be boiled down to 'I'll force everyone to gather and watch the motive videos, and I'll get help from Gonta since he supports this idea, and along the way he can show off his bugs so it's a win-win' and note that Kokichi is not anymore malicious with his plans than he thinks is necessary, he could have lied to him and just gathered the students elsewhere, but instead he chose a plan that would make Gonta happy. I'm not sure why he didn't explain his entire plan to Gonta beforehand, but at least he chose him because he agreed with his opinion and didn't go out of his way to manipulate him.

After that we think Kokichi tricked Gonta because the students- mainly Tsumugi- keep saying it, and we see Gonta confused so we think he has no idea what's going on- but he does, he clearly agreed to watch the videos, and is confused a little as to why they keep saying he's gotten manipulated. Then we see him angry and assume he's angry at being manipulated, but he is only angry because Kokichi lied about liking bugs, and, well, he didn't let it slide and punished Kokichi with the IMAG, so, yeah. If you don't look closely it's very easy to misinterpret this whole event.

Moving on to the whole lovely mess that is chapter 4. I'll explain it in a chronological order so hopefully it doesn't get too messy.

Two murders happened for an insanely stupid reason, and Gonta once again wasn't able to prevent it. At this point he's desperate to help his friends but he feels more and more useless and unhelpful, the constant babying from his classmates doesn't help

Kokichi takes the motive keycard and sees the secret of the outside world. You know, the one that broke all of the students in chap 5 and made Shuichi understand the idea of Gonta's mercy killing in chap 5 and made Shu so depressed he couldn't do anything but lay in his bed for days.

Now I'm gonna go in speculation territory cuz I've only watched the game once a few weeks ago and my memory is fuzzy and it's hard to come up with a good analysis without a second watch through, so prepare for some confusing stuff here. There are two of Kokichi's reaction to seeing the literal end of the world before his eyes after he thought there was an audience, the initial one is that it drove him to insane despair (which Kaito noticed and punched him and called him weirder than usual) and he started to believe that this entire twisted game was only made for one single crazy mastermind, and maybe the best choice was for all of them to die after all. But then he may have thought further of it and realized there might still be a chance for it to be a lie, because why would a single person care so much about rules for a game without others stopping them from doing whatever dumb whim they want? So through his despair Kokichi thinks there might still be a chance that the world is fine and there's an audience which wants a thrilling game of murder, but he needs to test that theory. The plan he comes up with would be to see if monokuma would team up with him to add a motive to the neo world, and if monokuma accepted then it would mean there really is an audience that wants things spiced up. Problem is, he knows Miu wants to kill him there.

Now, I don't know what exactly Kokichi's plan was, but I'm sure he can come up with plans very quickly and adapt to whatever situation and see a few moves ahead. Gonta followed him outside- Kokichi didn't lure him out-, and it was then that Kokichi came up with the plan we all know of…

Reminder that Gonta saw the secret of the outside world, the one that drove the entire class to despair in chapter five. Gonta isn't as pure as we make him out to be, he is prone to violence as seen a few times throughout the game, and having been raised in the wild with carnivorous wolfs we can speculate that he isn't averse to murder so much. It would make sense that he would agree to a mass mercy killing. Both he and Kokichi agreed that it would be best for everyone to die in their blissful ignorance. Gonta was in fact so willing to do it that he helped by suggesting the idea of the slide to make the murder even more confusing and make Kokichi even more suspicious.

Once again, I'm not sure what plan Kokichi was going for, but, whenever I think back to trial 4 I really get the vibe that he wasn't completely against the mercy killing. I'm not sure how much, but I'm certain that to some extent he was ready to go through with his and Gonta's plan, like he had one foot in the killing plan, and one foot in another plan, and however the trial went he would go.

To summarize up until this point, both he and Gonta saw the secret of the outside world and made an alliance in which they very surely both agreed that death was a better alternative than letting their classmates live and see what had become of the outside world. Kokichi didn't even need to manipulate Gonta for that.

Although I will admit that if Kokichi wanted to test his theory and thought there was a chance the outside world was fine, then he really did manipulate Gonta by making him think that the outside world was destroyed when he himself thought it was a lie. But even in this case Kokichi didn't manipulate Gonta by exploiting his gullible nature, he used a lie that could have worked on anyone, and Gonta just so happened to follow him outside.

Then the part that gets people is Kokichi yelling at Gonta for being stupid till he cries, and just generally being a dick. But get this, in the anthology in the Hair Raising Panic chapter Kokichi realizes that Gonta is tricking them and hiding something. Kokichi of all people doesn't underestimate Gonta's intellect and it's shown many times throughout the game but I won't go into it for now I'll save this for another time. But Kokichi is the type to distrust people for the smallest reason, even in the anthology's no-murder school life AU Kokichi found it in him to get suspicious of Gonta, and now they're in a killing game where each person can be mastermind, murderer, traitor, he has every reason to distrust all his classmates and he doesn't underestimate Gonta's intellect. So from Kokichi's point of view, Gonta is deviating from their plan and betraying him- when he'd thought he could trust him and even made an alliance with him. It's messing with his carefully crafted plans and he can't afford that and there's too much at stake, so he snaps at Gonta. Although I will admit I don't understand what was going through Kokichi's mind when he called him dumb, I'm thinking his evil persona was pushing through and his panic was guiding him, but I still firmly believe that Kokichi was the one student who didn't underestimate Gonta's intellect.

This is getting long and I haven't even finished most of what I've wanted to address. Moving on.

Let's not forget that after the whole trial Kokichi wanted to die with Gonta and voted for himself- but here's the thing into speculation again. I believe I'd he wanted to just die he could have not voted and been punished for that, but he voted for himself. Sooo I think he voted for himself after telling the students about the two blackeneds rule, hoping that either votes would be even for them and thus for him to die with Gonta- or that he hoped too many students would remember the two blackeneds rule and vote for him so he would be wrongly voted as blackened and their mass mercy killing plan would work after all.

Also, you know, in chapter five Kokichi could have made an unsolvable murder by killing Kaito who was gonna die of his illness anyway, but he still chose to kill himself because of two things: the first being that he wasn't anymore malicious than he needed to be so he made a plan that would allow Kaito to shine as the hero he desperately wanted to be, and, well, his immense guilt over killing one of the closest people to him during the killing game- heck, two of the people he considered somewhat friends and allies he could trust a lil.

Before I'm done with the main narrative I'd like to point out one last REALLY IMPORTANT thing; the killing game is a game of distrust where anyone can kill anyone, it puts an insane amount of stress and paranoia on people and drives them to do things they would otherwise never accept. Some relationships couldn't easily happen outside of the killing game (like Kaito and Shuichi) and some happened more easily because of the killing game setting (like Kaede and Shuichi) and some should stay intact in either (like Tenko and Himiko). It's a rather unfair setting to judge people.

Now onto miscellaneous stuff that the killing game setting doesn't affect and should be good enough to judge people and relationships:

In trial 2 I think, Kokichi was the only one to praise Gonta for pointing out something smart (I don't remember what it was though, maybe the rope thing with Kirumi.)

Kokichi was also the one who took Gonta seriously when he talked about seeing tiny bugs and went as far as requesting the bug vac over something everyone forgot and dismissed- even the players themselves. In general, Kokichi is the student who most acknowledges Gonta's intellect.

Kokichi had two main plans and for both he trusted Gonta.

They can also be found often hanging out together- which I think is unprecedented in dr- and from what I remember if you you try to spend your free time with either of them they both hesitate to stop hanging out but get reassured by each other that it's fine and they can pick their discussion back up. So when together they aren't bickering or in an unpleasant discussion and enjoy eachother's company enough to hesitate to spare time for Shuichi. Strong emphasis on the fact that this is mutual, it's not only Gonta being nice enough not to ditch Kokichi or reassuring him that it's fine and he can leave, Kokichi too doesn't wanna ditch Gonta at first and reassures him that they can hang out later together. (As far as I can remember at least, but my memory may be tricking me)

In one of Kokichi's dating events he says that he hates bugs but wants to watch a bug documentary to understand why Gonta likes them. It's a good outcome too so Kokichi had a good time watching it even though he hates bugs.

Again in Hair Raising Panic even if Kokichi suspected Gonta he didn't tell anyone or mess with him and instead let him carry out whatever plan he had, suspicion but trust in the end.

The two have a very bittersweet event in the TDP (Gonta's) where Kokichi says goodbye to Gonta.

Firstly, Kokichi says he isn't eating enough but when Gonta gets worried Kokichi dismisses it as a lie, but Gonta still worries about it and most importantly, thinks Kokichi said the truth about not eating before dismissing it as a lie so he still worries about him. It's… really odd when you think about it, if it had been a lie for sure then it would have been written as such, but Kokichi's malnourishment is being treated in this scenario as the truth and most importantly we're shown that Gonta was able to see that Kokichi said a sad truth and then said he lied but Gonta still saw through that and understood that Kokichi could dismiss a sad truth as a lie not to worry him. This scene always sticks out to me because its writing really really caught me off guard, we don't have so much to say whether or not my interpretation is truth but knowing those two characters and as writer's hunch? I think this holds up well. I think Kokichi isn't as unreadable as people make him out to be and Gonta is smarter than people think he is, add to that the fact that in this event they've been classmates for nearly 3 years so at this point I don't doubt Gonta would be able to see through Kokichi's lies to some extent. I think this is overall really sweet and I'm glad that this scene exists.

But the sweetest has yet to come! Kokichi tells this to Gonta

Kokichi: Cuz we won't see each other after we graduate. I *am* the leader of evil after all. There'd be no point in me being around a gentleman like you m, Gonta. And that's not a lie. Are you relieved, Gonta? You'll never be tricked by someone as despicable as me anymore.

Gonta: How sad! Gonta make lot of memories with Kokichi over last three years… So… of course Gonta feel sad he no see you anymore.

Kokichi: Of course. Well, I'm not a gentleman like you Gonta, so I bid you my farewell.

Gonta: Grgh… Gonta wish that was lie… [You feel even sadder than before]

And you know, this is a graduation event, in most cases one of the three choices is an interaction with someone from v3 cast who is very important in the killing game to the character you're playing. (Kaito with his sidekicks, Kiibo with Miu, I can't remember the rest). We have a clear confirmation here that outside of the killing game, Kokichi and Gonta are very close friends and Kokichi holds Gonta in high regard as a real gentleman who deserves better than a clown gang leader as his friend.

Mic drop.

Now, I've tried to be as objective as possible and point out either canon or interpret the vaguer stuff. I won't say they had a pure beautiful friendship because that would be aaa wrong, and I won't deny that for chap 4 plan Gonta was going to get hurt with that plan no matter what -by being voted as the blackened and thus failing to help everyone with the mass mercy killing, or by succeeding with the plan and being left all alone with his despair and prolly either planning his suicide after that or being taken to participate in season 54 before he could kill himself- and Kokichi most likely knew that his plan would hurt Gonta no matter the outcome, and Kokichi even if he didn't want to still pushed Gonta, his sweet gentleman friend, to murder for him. And he did lash out on him in trial 4 and say nasty things and make him stress and panic then hurt him with his villainous persona. I won't deny canon, actions speak louder than words, and Kokichi's actions, regardless of his intentions, still ended up hurting Gonta. But still in not ignoring canon, it's important to realize that Kokichi undeniably felt insanely guilty for what he did and even wanted to die with Gonta which completely contradicts his leadership quality and selflessness and logical nature (because dying with Gonta would be a meaningless death and would leave his clueless classmates behind with no plan to escape and many leads inaccessible) only because he didn't want to live with his sin, and it's also important not to ignore their many little positive interactions in canon pointed above. I won't speak for canon, but I definitely think their relationships had it's downs but also had it's ups that we really shouldn't be ignoring.

Feel free to point out any mistake I made or share your opinions- but please make sure not to be spiteful and have actual concrete arguments to share, I've spent a 3-4 hours writing and revising this passionately and I don't wanna deal with hate so please be gentlemen like Gonta. Thankie!

(oh cool this time around Tumblr didn't delete this phew now I won't have to re-format everything.)

#drv3 #Danganronpa #gonta gokuhara #kokichi oma #kokichi ouma #character analysis #?#not really but i don't know how else to tag this #ougoku

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commentaryvorg · 4 years

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Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 6.9

Be aware that this is not a blind playthrough! This will contain spoilers for the entire game, regardless of the part of the game I’m commenting on. A major focus of this commentary is to talk about all of the hints and foreshadowing of events that are going to happen and facts that are going to be revealed in the future of the story. It is emphatically not intended for someone experiencing the game for their first time.

Last time as we got even deeper into the fiction reveals of trial 6, I tried probably too hard to justify the auditionees’ nonsensical ideas of how any of this even works, those assholes were nonetheless not the same people as our friends in here in any meaningful way, Tsumugi’s claim that she scripted Maki’s feelings for Kaito was total bullshit but still hit Maki right in the issues about being her own person, her similarly bullshit claim that Kaede and Kaito were never real hit Shuichi right in his own dependency issues, the audience completely stopped being even remotely believable human beings in their reactions to this, and Shuichi broke down and needs to reboot.

While we’re waiting for that to happen, we’ll have to make do with Keebo.

BAD END

…

Keebo: “Is this the end? Please tell me. I’m asking you.”

I suppose we’re meant to believe that the Bad End message is something that Keebo sees? Which seems kind of odd. Or maybe it’s just something that the in-universe audience were shown through Keebo’s eyes.

But it also kind of reads as more of an out-universe thing, since we the players are the only ones playing this as an actual game that could potentially have bad endings. This kind of gives this the effect that Keebo is also speaking to us, the out-universe audience, and that we’ve been his inner voice this whole time. Which doesn’t actually make sense – if we’ve been anyone’s inner voice it’s been Shuichi’s, but that’s obviously not really an in-universe thing.

This is probably for the sake of trying to fool us into feeling like the in-universe audience is a force for good, just like Keebo is going to still naively believe for a while. Not sure how convincing that is after a proportion of the audience last time had absolutely zero empathy with Shuichi’s despair, though.

Keebo: “Whenever I was in trouble, my inner voice would always guide me. That guidance is what brought me here. I don’t believe that’s a mistake.”

His inner voice’s guidance has done fuck all to bring him here. He’s here because he was lucky enough that nobody happened to try to murder him, and sensible enough not to kill anyone himself. I would like to give Keebo enough credit to think that he didn’t need his inner voice to talk him out of murder (…well, at least until this chapter, apparently). All the voice has done is make his actions a bit more proactive and optimistic, but that has meaningfully affected basically nothing of note that’s happened here.

Save this situation?

- No

Remedy this situation?

- Yes

It is perhaps a little confusing that you’re meant to say no to the first prompt, because one might have already realised that it’s not necessarily a literal save-the-game prompt and is instead talking about saving Keebo’s friends. This probably works better in Japanese, in which the first word is the English loanword “save”, which I don’t think has any meanings other than the save-the-game meaning, and then it changes to an actual Japanese word for save/rescue/ etc.

Keebo: “My inner voice is telling me I need to… remedy this situation.”

Apparently this is very much not the same part of the audience that was just mindlessly and sadistically laughing about Shuichi’s despair last time. Since Keebo’s inner voice is an audience survey, it must be a majority that wants this instead, which means we have to assume that those comments we saw before were deliberately cherry-picked to be all the despair-loving ones.

At least this does a decent job of actually making the in-universe audience feel like the good guys, then, since they don’t want Shuichi and friends to be in despair. It makes them seem that way for now, at least.

Oh hey, here’s the music from Danganronpa 1 that was essentially Makoto’s “objection” theme. Of course that’s showing up in this game now. Keebo is basically supposed to be playing Makoto’s role, after all. (Emphasis on supposed.)

Keebo: “We can’t give up. No matter what, hope is always within reach. We must keep our heads high and search for hope, even in the deepest despair.”

Aaaaaand it’s meaningless buzzword time! You can’t search for hope itself. The act of searching is hope, but only if you’re searching for something that will meaningfully, tangibly make your situation better!

Shuichi: “Hope…?”

I wonder if Shuichi’s realising that what Keebo’s saying doesn’t mean anything and is wondering why he’s throwing this word around so eagerly for no reason. Nothing is going to give Shuichi hope without actually addressing the reason he’s in despair, encouraging him to believe that he’s not all just fictional and his friends weren’t just empty lies. Without that, Keebo is just spouting meaningless platitudes that won’t solve a thing.

Keebo: “…You said so yourself – this killing game is the Ultimate Real Fiction. If this is both real and fiction, then logically it can’t all be fiction.”

This is an actually useful argument he’s making, at least. But he really shouldn’t need to use logical deduction from Tsumugi’s words to realise that obviously they’re still real in the sense that they exist and have physical bodies and will really die – and therefore that all of that applied to their friends who died, too.

Tsumugi: “Oh, your inner voice? That’s the voice of the outside world.”

It should be a huge risk for her to be telling him this. Logically this should immediately lead to Keebo refusing to listen to anything his inner voice is saying to him. He won’t for a long while, though, because he’s apparently kind of an idiot. Or just very, very brainwashed. Or a bit of both.

Tsumugi: “I know cuz I wrote your plotline, too.”

That’s not a “plotline”, that’s just a neat audience-participation feature. The actual plotline that Keebo would follow based on that is entirely up to the audience.

Tsumugi: “You’re the audience surrogate.”

This might partly explain why Keebo’s character has always been rather vaguely defined and they never did much with all the interesting potential of him being a robot who’s trying his hardest to learn to be human: because he’s supposed to be a blank-slate self-insert for the in-universe audience to see themselves as. They’re obviously not going to be able to relate his thing of being a robot. Makoto and Hajime were both pretty ordinary guys without anything too overly distinctive about them because they were basically audience surrogates, too.

(And Kaede and Shuichi have far more distinct personalities and characters because they’re not audience surrogates like the previous two games’ protagonists were.)

“Hifumi”: “That function exists to keep the audience entertained.”

Yes, because clearly they’d all have been super bored by this whole killing game if they hadn’t been giving Keebo meaningless nudges to be a little more optimistic from time to time. Nothing else about this game has been remotely entertaining without him, right!?

The hints earlier that Danganronpa might have been getting stale and on its last legs by now do support the idea that this is something they did to try and keep people interested, but Tsumugi is still giving herself way too much credit here.

“Chihiro”: “It’s two-way communication that lets you participate in the program from home.”

Oh, boy, is this the line that’s supposed to justify how Shuichi will ultimately change the outside world by yelling at them a bunch – because he does it through Keebo’s nebulous “communication” feature? Yeah, because that’s totally so different from them simply listening to him because they’re watching this trial.

Tsumugi: “The outside world has been watching from your eyes the whole time! It lets them feel like they’re really a part of the Danganronpa world!”

This cannot be the whole truth. For one thing, if they’ve only ever seen through Keebo’s eyes, then outside of trials, the audience must have been really, really bored? All of the interesting character interactions – all of the watching Shuichi grow and develop which was in-universely meant to be one of the main plotlines of this story – happened nowhere near Keebo. The audience should have been poking Keebo to hang out with more people, maybe get closer to Shuichi, so that they could actually see any of that.

(Although the fact that Keebo apparently spent more of his time with Miu than anyone else is… unfortunately probably quite an accurate representation of what an audience would do. I have seen way too many LPers of this game hang out with Miu for reasons that completely elude me because why would anyone ever want more of her than necessary unless they’re shallowly taken in by the fanservice. I feel very bad for the sensible minority watching through Keebo’s eyes who were fed up with her but didn’t have enough of a majority vote to do anything about it.)

But that collage of illustrations we had a while ago that Tsumugi presented as part of “Danganronpa V3” rather proves that Keebo’s camera is not the audience’s only viewing option. Why would they want to limit the viewers to just that when they have Nanokumas everywhere and could be giving them the choice to follow whichever character they want? And since the Nanokumas are so invisible and mobile that they can get any angle, watching via them would also make one feel as though they’re really in the Danganronpa world anyway, even if it’s not literally through a character’s eyes.

Tsumugi: “That’s why I’m so glad you survived all the way through!”

What the hell were you planning to do if he didn’t? Did you not even have any kind of failsafe in place to try and make sure nobody happened to murder him?

“Junko”: “If the audience surrogate falls into despair, then the audience does, too. By making you fall into despair, I can make the entire world fall into despair!”

That’s, uh, not how audience surrogates work. The audience only feels the same thing their surrogate characters feel through the power of empathy and imagination, but that’s not the same thing as actually being in despair when their character is. If anything, seeing Keebo fall into despair should just make the audience cheer more for him to not give up and keep having hope. You know, just like they should also be cheering for Shuichi and his friends to not despair right now, if they were a halfway reasonable and decent audience.

“Junko”: “My despair will turn from fiction to fact and destroy reality itself.”

However, Tsumugi most likely knows that this doesn’t make sense and is really just saying this to try and pander to the audience and make them feel like this matters. While it’s kind of half her fault for practically telling them herself, the characters in this story have completely messed up her script by figuring out how fictional this all is. But hey! Never mind them (who cares about them anyway they’re not real, right), this is totally all about you guys in the audience! She’s trying to make everyone ignore the fact that her story has gone completely off the rails and is no longer remotely about what it’s supposed to be about by enticing them with the idea that it’s now the audience’s story. You’re the ones in danger now! You’re the ones who get to fight and defeat Junko! Isn’t that just so fun, you guys???

Which, A, doesn’t even make any sense in the first place and, B, is horrendously bad storytelling to suddenly abandon the characters this story was supposed to be about like they’re irrelevant. But it’s going to work on this audience, because apparently they never really gave a fuck about any of this story’s characters in the first place, even though that’s the exact opposite of how an audience should act!

Maki: “Is that why… you want the world to fall into despair?”

Maki Roll, don’t fall for it! That’s not what she’s trying to do and she doesn’t care about any of that! Maki has always been the most subsceptible to manipulation, and it seems like that one Flashback Light that brainwashed them into thinking that “despair” is always bad and that they are symbols of “hope” who must always defeat despair is still affecting her in ways she doesn’t realise are manipulation.

Himiko: “Th-That’s… messed up!”

Himiko also briefly comments on this here like she might be buying this. Shuichi does not. He’s just staying quiet and watching.

“Nekomaru”: “The outside world wants to see horrible setups and payoffs!”

That should be the case, because those are the kind of things that make a good story. But suddenly yelling about despair taking over the world in a way that makes no sense and is unconnected to any of the setup we’ve had this whole time? Not a payoff for anything. Should not be something the audience wants. They should want actual payoff for the characters they’ve been watching all this time.

“Nagito”: “What could be more horrible than a fictional despair eroding the real world?”

“Junko”: “No one could’ve imagined an end this hopeless.”

Yes, look, you guys, this is totally a super awesome plotline she’s come up with and it’s one that lets all of you be the heroes! please keep watching don’t change the channel just because things have gone off-script help

Keebo: “…No. I won’t give in to despair!”

Tsumugi: “Huuuh?”

Tsumugi has a gleeful “oh, I’m so surprised!” face here. She is making it quite obvious that Keebo’s reaction is exactly what she was going for. Keebo, no.

Keebo: “If that’s the voice of the outside world, then the outside world actually wants hope!”

At this point, now that Tsumugi’s veered things around to totally be about the audience’s despair because who even cares about these people who aren’t real, is Keebo even talking about “hope” for Shuichi and the others? Or is this just “hope” for the audience to protect them from the evil despair that’s totally going to be inflicted on them? Almost certainly the latter.

K1-B0 – Ultimate Hope Robot

This is so clearly trying to rip off the ending of DR1. Which the audience is going to lap up because they’re raging genwunners. But this doesn’t work anything like that, because that hope was used to inspire the rest of the characters that the story was actually about. This is very emphatically not going to be that.

“Junko”: “What is this?”

Keebo: “This is the power of hope!”

It’s really not. It’s one guy who doesn’t have a clue what’s really going on yelling a bunch of meaningless words.

“Makoto”: “The final battle between hope and despair!”

It was never a fucking battle! But no, of course it was, that’s definitely always been what those two words are about.

“Nagito”: “The class trial is in disarray because Monokuma broke a rule…”

Himiko: “You’re the one who broke the rule…”

Hah, I like that someone calls her out on that. Tsumugi’s still running away from all responsibility, because of course she is.

(“Smiling, putting on a mask, never saying what you really think. That kind of cowardice is just like Monokuma!” Kaito was really talking about the mastermind hiding behind Monokuma rather than Monokuma himself when he said that – and now she’s putting on even more literal masks than ever before.)

“Sayaka”: “How about we start over and have a special vote?”

Keebo: “…A special vote? But you’re the one who broke the rules in the first place—”

Keebo is quite right to point out that Tsumugi does not have the right to do any kind of life-or-death vote now that she’s broken the rules and messed everything up. Tsumugi, of course, completely brushes off his protest and does it anyway… and the audience lets her.

Trial 5’s whole premise of “Monokuma can’t do what he likes once he’s provably broken the rules” only works because the audience was supposed to agree that it’s unfair and cry foul, but… it turns out the audience is actually a bunch of mindless idiots who are totally okay with a meaningless vote and meaningless deaths to get them their hope fix. So… Kaito’s attempted best-case outcome in trial 5, which he was going for in the hope of saving his friends’ lives and ending the killing game, would actually have saved no-one and ended nothing anyway??? And what Kaito did achieve – letting Shuichi know that Monokuma can’t get things wrong because of the audience, which is why Shuichi went into this trial to prove Kaede spotless in another attempt to end the killing game – is also meaningless? Kaito faked his death and lied to his friends for a whole trial for nothing?

Out-universe writers, no. Why would you ever think this is okay? How can you just completely undermine the best case of the game like this?

(They’re also clearly not trying to go for a deliberate gut-punch of making Kaito’s efforts pointless, because the narrative isn’t acknowledging this at all. Apparently the in-universe writers are not the only ones who have no idea what they’re doing here.)

“Kazuichi”: “Let’s just do one last vote!”

Monokuma: “Cuz that’s what Danganronpa’s all about!”

The fact that DR1 and DR2’s stories happened to work fairly well with a final vote does not mean that it should be taken as a necessary part of a Danganronpa storyline to the point of shoehorning one in even when it doesn’t work.

The final vote in DR2 worked because that wasn’t decided on by Junko and was just a result of the way the world had been programmed. And the final vote in DR1 may have been also forced through by Junko when she didn’t really have the right to do so any more – but she was never entertaining her audience, she was forcing them to watch in order to make a point. Her vote continued that theme, because it was essentially Junko making Makoto stake his life on the belief that his friends would agree with his philosophy of hope (in her attempt to prove that they wouldn’t). Only Makoto’s life was on the line in it, and it was for a reason that was relevant to what had been happening and what he’d been advocating, so it didn’t feel especially unfair, at least not more so than you’d expect Junko to be given she wanted lives to be at stake for everything.

The vote we’re about to be forced into here is almost nothing like that. Oh boy.

Tsumugi: “Between Keebo and I… Which of us should get punished?”

If that was all, that’d be fairly analogous to the DR1 final vote, and fairly acceptable. Keebo and Tsumugi are (supposedly) having a clash of philosophies, so this would just be them staking their lives on that. If it was only their lives on the line.

Himiko: “To end in hope…?”

Maki: “To end in despair…?”

Shuichi: “We decide…?”

Yeah, why should these three get to decide? I thought this story was suddenly all about the audience now, not them! They’re not even real people, right? Why should they get to determine which out of hope or despair the audience wants to see?

But the vote they’re about to have doesn’t have anything to do with this whole deal of “bringing despair to the outside world” or about which one the audience prefers. Because Tsumugi doesn’t have a goddamn clue what she’s doing with any of this nonsense and might as well have not even done that whole bit in the first place. I hope this is out-universely deliberate at least, but at this point my faith in the out-universe writers is slipping.

Tsumugi explains that the “Despair wins” choice will result in everyone except Keebo continuing to live in the school, technically continuing the killing game but presumably never actually killing each other any more now that they know all the motives will be lies.

Keebo: “No! That’s no way to live! Imprisoned in this school, living lives of despair—”

How exactly would that be a life of “despair”, Keebo? They’d be stuck there, sure, but at least the three of them would be alive, and they’re friends (minus Tsumugi, who would hopefully fuck off and leave them alone), so they should be able to find some semblance of happiness in it. You’re only saying it’d be “despair” because Tsumugi has arbitrarily slapped that label on it and therefore it must be nothing but bad, because “hope” is always good and “despair” is always evil, right?

“Toko”: “E-Even if you went outside, there’d be n-no point.”

“Byakuya”: “As I said, all your memories are nothing but fiction.”

“Imposter Byakuya”: “Your hometowns, your families, your friends… they never existed in the first place.”

Wow, Tsumugi, you sure are making the option where they get to escape look more despairing than the one where they stay inside here and never have to face any of that stuff.

…Which actually is kind of analogous to the first game in that they’d be going out into a hostile world where they’re going to struggle to find their feet, and they’ll have to hope that they’ll be okay in that world despite everything. If the narrative was going to present it that way and have Keebo encourage them to still try and live in that world even if it’s scary because it’s better than being boringly trapped in here forever, this’d be acceptably similar to DR1. But nope, that’s not remotely what we’re going to be doing here.

Himiko: “Th-Then at least put us back how we were!”

No, Himiko! Admittedly we didn’t see Himiko’s audition so she didn’t see what she “used to be” like, but the auditions they did see should make it very clear to all of them that the people they “used to be” weren’t them. None of you want to go back to being those people, guys; you should be able to see that! The people that you are now would stop existing if you did that! For all intents and purposes, you’d die!

Tsumugi explains that that’s impossible because Flashback Lights don’t actually retrieve lost memories and can only overwrite existing memories with fake ones. But it being impossible should not be the point anyway. None of them should even want this in the first place.

Shuichi: “So… we can’t go back to the way we were?”

Shuichi, you saw the person who used to live in your body! You can’t possibly want to be him! You’d forget everything about Kaito and Kaede and become someone who wants to get executed in a killing game!

Apparently Tsumugi’s insistence that they’re all entirely “fake” has got to them so much that, despite all the evidence, they’re just clinging to the idea that “real” has got to be better, and nooooooo, guys, snap out of it!

Buuut it’s the “hope wins” outcome of the vote that’s the really stupid part. Tsumugi is punished and they get to escape, except…

“Taka”: “However, you must follow the rules! The game will continue until the final two!”

Tsumugi: “So only two of you can graduate.”

And why, pray tell, the absolute fuck, is this remotely necessary? The only reason that two-person rule exists should be as a minimum, because it’s not possible to hold a class trial with only two people left. If it’s also a strict maximum, then that means that this game is designed to kill fourteen people no matter what, even if there aren’t enough in-game murders for that. The point of this killing game is supposed to be that the participants brought all the deaths upon themselves (even though that’s not really a fair assessment at all when they were manipulated into it). Executing more people anyway even when it’s not prompted by someone becoming blackened in the first place is arbitrarily cruel and not in the spirit of the game at all. This rule should have completely ceased to apply any more, now that we’re in “endgame” mode where clearly nobody is going to commit any more murders. Killing two of them at this point just to adhere to this pointless rule is meaningless as fuck.

Plus, what right does Tsumugi even have any more to insist that they adhere to the rules when she broke them first? Oh, right, because the audience are mindless morons who don’t actually care if she breaks them despite the entire point of trial 5. (Geez, even Kokichi expected better from the audience than this.)

So, the bottom line is that this “hope wins” ending is… two of them get to escape into an outside world that doesn’t even see them as real people, after watching two more of their friends get completely pointlessly and arbitrarily killed. Such hope! Such meaning! Such narrative!

(Okay, they won’t get killed, as we’ll learn later on, but still. It is no less arbitrary.)

Shuichi: “… We got this far… and you’re telling us to sacrifice more of our friends?”

Shuichi is crying and I don’t blame him. Why? Why should he have to lose even more of his friends for no reason? This isn’t fair! At least Kaede and Kaito’s sacrifices happened because they tried to make a difference, but this would be nothing like that!

“Gundham”: “However… even if you do escape to the outside world, you will find it most unwelcoming.”

Keebo: “…No! As long as we never give up, there will always be hope!”

Keebo. Dude. If you were trying to reassure everyone to stay hopeful about things that actually mattered, namely the idea that the outside world wouldn’t welcome them, or the thought of losing more friends, then maybe this would kinda sorta work and be a bit like Makoto was in DR1. But you’re just spouting meaningless platitudes! Stop it!

Keebo: “If it will bring hope to everyone and the outside world, I will gladly sacrifice myself.”

You dying for completely arbitrary reasons is not going to make your friends hope for anything, Keebo! And you especially shouldn’t give a fuck what the outside world that’s gleefully watched your friends die wants from you!

I don’t hold it against Keebo, because he is genuinely well-meaning and trying to do a good thing here, but he is so, so deluded and misled.

“Makoto”: “In order for hope to win, there needs to be one more sacrifice.”

That sentence doesn’t make any sense! That’s not hope! In the real Makoto’s story, hope winning didn’t sacrifice anyone except the mastermind! Makoto himself would have called total bullshit on the idea that pointlessly sacrificing his friends would be for the sake of any kind of hope!

“Sonia”: “Do you understand now? Even if you choose hope, you will still suffer.”

Okay, so, look, I’m not saying that hope doesn’t involve suffering. Remember when I talked about my first-time experience of Kaito’s trial and how the rekindled hope that he might be alive was utterly terrifying? Yeah, hope is scary. But real hope is scary because it’s uncertain, because of the constant possibility that you might not get what you’re hoping for and fall back into despair. Being forced to feel completely arbitrary separate pain that has nothing to do with what you’re hoping for (in this context, they’d be hoping they can fit in in an outside world that doesn’t see them as real people) is not part of the reason that hope itself is difficult and scary and is completely beside the fucking point.

Tsumugi using Sonia here is the beginning of a sequence of her cosplaying almost all of the female characters (plus Chihiro) and having them be all “won’t you stay here with us~? *blush*”. Which is obviously deliberate pandering.

But, like… who is this pandering to? Isn’t she supposed to be persuading Maki, Himiko and Shuichi right now? There’s no evidence that Maki and Himiko are into girls, and while Shuichi apparently is, why should he care about these people that are, to his fake memories, historical figures and nothing more? Why would he be that shallow just because they’re girls? And if this is for the audience, first of all, why, they can’t influence this outside of Keebo’s one vote, and second of all… does she not fucking realise that only about half of her audience is even going to be into girls, and only a proportion of those people should be shallow enough to be swayed by this? Female characters are more than just objects of fanservice and romantic fantasy! There are plenty of people who enjoy this franchise who aren’t here for that, you know! Tsumugi is a girl, she should have more respect for her own goddamn gender than this!

Really, if Tsumugi was properly trying to persuade Shuichi, Maki and Himiko, then the best (cruellest) move would be for her to suddenly start cosplaying Kaede, Tenko and Kaito and being all like “hey, if you stayed here I could be them for you!” (the cospox thing was dumb and there should be no reason she couldn’t do that). Which would of course make all three of them do an immediate huge revolted NOPE, a lot like the time Maki thought Exisal Kaito was Kokichi pretending to be him except worse – but it’d be an impactful moment, at least. Honestly, Tsumugi cosplaying the dead V3 characters here would make this whole part of the trial far more viscerally uncomfortable, like it’s clearly trying to be, than just seeing the DR1 and 2 characters be the face of the villain when they’re not a part of this actual story.

(Man, imagine her doing the part last time where she reminded Shuichi of Kaede and Kaito’s inspiring lines by actually cosplaying them and reciting those lines in their voices, that would be awful, I would hate it and love it at the same time. It’d hammer home the supposed idea that they were always just lies even more.)

Keebo: “Despair won’t end this killing game! Only hope will!”

Keebo says this just before we get dragged into a Mass Panic Debate in which Keebo’s only available bullet is “Hope”. When the only weapon you have is hope, every problem’s got to be able to be solved with it, right? No, Keebo.

This Mass Panic Debate is the worst and the reason I equipped Librarian’s Glare at the beginning, because then all the loud voices get silenced automatically and all I have to focus on is firing. If you don’t hit every single statement’s worth of “despair” in one round, you have to do it all over again, and a bunch of them have loud voices getting in the way. It’s far, far more mechanically difficult than any other debate in the game, which is not at all deserved on a narrative level when what’s happening right now is such a ridiculous mess.

Story time: when I got to this Mass Panic Debate on my first time through, since I was watching not playing and therefore had a little break to let my thoughts flow without having to pay as much attention to what was happening… I was really upset. I had loved almost everything about this game up to this point, and I really wanted it to have a good ending worthy of the rest of it. But this was currently presenting itself as that ending, and this was just bad.

This is supposedly analogous to the part in DR1 where Makoto fired bullets of hope at all of his friends, and I liked that part. It was refreshing and inspiring after a whole game supposedly all about despair to realise that it was actually about hope as well. But here, first-time-me just felt vaguely insulted at the idea that I was supposed to like this as much as I did that. This is just a cheap imitation of that which completely misses the actual point.

The protagonist is supposed to be meaningfully inspiring his friends to not give up and to face the hostile outside world with the hope that things will work out okay. But this “hope” choice they’re being given here is arbitrarily cruel, and Keebo’s words are not even addressing his friends, let alone any of the actual problems that his friends are despairing over. He’s just shooting the “hope” at Tsumugi’s “despair” like this is some kind of good-versus-evil battle. This is exactly the kind of one-dimensional, meaningless hope the characters were filled with when they saw the Flashback Light in chapter 5 – empty platitudes that don’t even remotely address the actual reason for their despair and therefore don’t fix anything at all. And that reason for their despair right now isn’t just the thought of the outside world but also simply the notion that they’re not real, which was pretty compelling when it came up and first-time-me wanted them to get back to that and address that more and hated the fact that it’d apparently been completely forgotten like it didn’t matter.

Of course, I don’t hate this part nearly as much now, because this isn’t the real endpoint of this trial, and with that in mind, Keebo missing the point like this is very out-universely deliberate. This is showing the “battle between hope and despair” that the outside world apparently craves that is the reason they’ve been watching these killing games for fifty-three seasons. Shuichi is going to figure this out quite soon, and then things will get back on track with the characters we’ve actually grown to care about properly addressing the question of how real they are.

But I’m still not super happy with this. Keebo is so obviously failing at presenting any kind of actual hope or compelling story here that it’s a stretch to believe that a sensible in-universe audience would want this either. Shouldn’t they care about the characters they’ve been watching this whole time and be frustrated, like I was, when the story abruptly veers away from being about them into this empty nonsense? Shouldn’t they be calling bullshit on the arbitrary unfair sacrifices for the vote, especially after Tsumugi broke the rules and had no more right to even punish anyone at all? (That was literally supposed to be the point of trial 5, dammit! Kaito deserves better than this!) Heck, shouldn’t the characters be calling bullshit on the vote rather than accepting it? (I can let them off a bit more though, since they’re still mostly in despair and not quite thinking straight.)

This would work a lot better if it was still trying to be mostly about the characters, and Keebo was actually trying to inspire them with hope. Instead of shooting at Tsumugi’s despair, he should, like Makoto did, be shooting the hope at his friends and trying to reassure them that surely they’ll find a place in the outside world that’ll accept them, that surely whichever two of them survive will be able to overcome these last deaths as well and find happiness somehow. That would be a kind of hope that would be reasonably believable as making a satisfying if bittersweet ending. That way, it’d be a lot easier to believe that the audience wants this, and to therefore realise that this is why the killing game has gone on for so long and will still continue if they let this ending happen here.

The fact that this isn’t what happens when it easily could have been makes me wonder how much of this part’s one-dimensionality was deliberate, and how much is the out-universe writers not actually realising that the situation they’re presenting here isn’t “hope” in any meaningful or compelling way at all. My faith in them on this particular front is not very strong, I must admit.

“Keebo! Keebo!”

“Keebo’s on fire!”

“gooooo Keebo!”

The audience has been there in the background throughout all of this – probably as what Keebo’s hearing in his inner voice – but up until now they’ve just been saying “Hope” or “Despair”. As this debate finishes, they finally start saying something of more substance, most of them cheering Keebo on like so. It sure sounds like they care about him as a character, which is what you’d expect if they’d been experiencing this game through him as the protagonist. But they don’t; we’ll see that very clearly later. They only care about him representing their own voices and nothing else.

“i wanna see the color of shuichi’s blood <3”

Wow, fuck, geez, okay. That “fan” of Shuichi’s from before has gone from “somewhat realistic if rather creepy considering that he’s real” to “absolute sicko”. What the hell.

“Now this is Danganronpa.”

Apparently we really are supposed to believe that this kind of meaninglessness is what people have come to like from this show over the years. It so incredibly shouldn’t be, though. What about all the actual class trials before the endgame? The characters struggling with the pain of watching their friends die or realising that their friend killed someone? Isn’t that more compelling than just yelling about hope being better than despair? Apparently not to these idiots.

---

[Next post]

#danganronpa #danganronpa v3 #drv3 #ndrv3 #chapter 6 #class trial #commentary

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cruisinfdr · 5 years

Photo

~glendale parris~

hey this is glendale 4 @corporeal-ish !!!! who saiiid “henlo, id like to request a colorful beefy bear boy, like one of those big dudes with glitter beards and painted nails. i have all the packs n stuff and u can use whatever cc u wanna, im excited to see what u do!!”

so here !! im like. genuinely super attached to him after spending so long w him in cas so i have faith u will do him justice and lov him as much as i do jdsghkjsd

so i got carried away also and made 2 extra everyday outfits so pics of the extra 2 outfits r under the cut so u can choose if u want them or not obviously :’~) and theres some more of me babbling because like i said. i got carried away And attached so i came up w a strong idea of what kinda guy i think he is?? but obviously thts just my interpretation too u can roll w him however u want !

heres a song tht makes me think of him !! and a second one w a different feel !!

skin overlay / skin tone / eyebags / moles / nails / beard / hair (v3 w the widows peak) / body hair / lipz (neutral low opacity) / teef (lil gap) / brows / shirt 1 / jeans 1 / shirt 2 / jeans 2 / neckerchief / shirt 3 / i literally only used these slides for his partywear cuz i thought it was funny /

n for the beard also.,., i dont doubt that hes the kind of person to just. rock the flowers 24/7 but other than that u can put him in the regular base game beard :~)

anyway heres his tray files or u can get him on the gallery if u wanna :~P im bre611 !! n feel free to tag me if u use him i rlly wanna see :’’’~)

hes seriously so cute !!! i cheated a tiny bit cuz i used one of my favorite randomly generated townies as a base for him instead of a complete rando from cas but he looks pretty much nothing like the original guy except for the nose :~P so he might have skills since he was in my game for awhile ! but anyway:: i get the feeling that he lives in selvadorada now and like. he got shitfaced on a cruise dskjhfksjd and thats how he ended up there. like the cruise ship left him on accident lmfao but hes not mad cuz of the MEN there and he got a bartending gig so. tis a good life 4 him. and he’d totally be friends w angus i think !! i got that vibe from the get go that theyd be friends,., also while making him i was SUPER inspired by ramon from archer so theres a clip oh look and heres another one !! u can see where i got an outfit from

also idk if youll wanna do this but like,.,., u might wanna size his hands down idk if i made them too big or not cuz i was trying to figure out if they were proportionate but hes got some fkin MITTS now HSKDHF his hands are huge but its ok hes sweet

#sim download #oh my GOD this ones so long sorry im sorry !!!!!!!!!#ts4 #the sims 4 #i got so carried away w him honestly im so sorry #ive been working on him since like. the start of sim requests ive had a lot of time to get attached #as far as the songs go #to me they feel like ones he'd listen to while sitting on a balcony in selvadorada #and hes alone just in a lounge chair staring at the stars in the evening with a beer on the table next to him #and probably a cig in his hand. just staring at the stars.#more so that applies to the second song #deadass i love him so much im glad hes a public download u kno cuz that way its still acceptable for me to use him #OH YA I FORGOT TO SAY this too #in my mind hes like late 30s so i cant remember if i made him an adult in game but he should be young adult #hes like 37 38 39 u kno around there #i couldnt decide if i wanted him to be more mid 40s or more late 30s so i was flipping back and forth #he reminds me of one of my coworkers but i think its just the hair #ok i'll shut up now ! this ones long enough as it is omfg !#SOMEONE DOWNLOAD HIM

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junkobears · 6 years

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( I seriously hate the epilogue for encouraging all the constant “IT’S A LIE!!!” theories cuz it would just cause so many MORE writing issues for V3 if that was the case. Why do people want that to be the case?) because... there are questions that are unanswered? quite a lot of them, that can't just be coincidence or a mistake? writing issues aside, it doesn't mean that literally EVERYTHING is a writing issue, that's not how it works. we don't 'want more writing issues', don't make assumptions

It’s literally a visual novel game, a fictional story. We’re discussing the epilogue here, it’s implications and why those don’t actually pan out or make much sense once you compare it to Chapter 6/the rest of the narrative/earlier games. So yes, ‘writing issues’ is the entire crux of my beef with the epilogue. I think it’s the poorly-written contradictory capper to a poorly-written game in general. I don’t know what to tell you otherwise?

I get that V3 has a lot of contradictions and unanswered questions due to the deliberately ambiguous/meta ending. I get that some people are naturally curious and like to theorize about how to resolve the contradictions and questions. That isn’t my cup of tea for how I approach and critically consume fiction, but sure. I’m not saying people aren’t allowed to do that. I’m just asking to try and read things from the other perspective as well. And not condescend and dismiss me constantly when I write about why I dislike the epilogue and give detailed explanations for why I’d argue it’s actually bad writing and contradicts the whole theme they’ve spent the last 40 hours building up too.

And also to stop pushing the narrative across that the “It’s a lie” theory is absolutely 100% confirmed truth, because you can easily just come up with explanations that support the fiction twist. That’s the whole damn point of the ending? That’s literally what Kodaka wants? For people to take away differing interpretations? I don’t agree with him at all that it was a remotely good writing decision because I prefer the story set-up to actually, you know, pay off? And the alternative to me hugely reduces the few things I liked about the game/ending. So that’s why I’m extremely harsh about the idea.

#replies #drv3 #v3 spoilers #v3 negativity #Anonymous #sure maybe the plot holes aren't all just mistakes but also they can easily just be that #and are more likely to be mistakes based on the writing patterns of this series lol #long post #dr discussion

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starswake--archived · 6 years

Text

@therealassistant replied to your post “@therealassistant replied to your post “@therealassistant replied to...”

JHSGFS SAME. v3 is a really good ending for the series. if there's another one (which i highly doubt at this rate) I'd be okay with that I'd just be upset at kodaka for giving me more children to cry over lahfuds. HALUFH AND SEEM although maki was the only backstory i kind of predicted correctly. i remember predicting how Keebo was some sort of person made into a robot but i was wrong (and Im not upset about that. i still love that robo boy)

LSHF I RELATE TO NOT BEING UNABLE TO PICK A FAV SO HARD LIKE!! THEYRE ALL SO GOOD I CANT CHOOSE. but asdhfuidhs if you,,,,, want to,,,, go ahead but like,,,, most of my fics are dumb aus. one fic i made was literally me just going "lol what if i do THIS" and it was originally supposed to be a oneshot but now it's muliple chapters and 50000 words long and im Dying (it's still fun to write though lmao). AND SAME 99% OF MY FIC IDEAS ARE BASED OFF ANGST

whoa wait there's nine chapters? :o I'll have to find it tonight then since I finally have some a decent amount of free time tonight and I'm too tired to work on any of my fics rn. But hhhh I wish you luck anyway!!! Writing fics with romance in them is always fun and I should try doing it more often because it's just,,,, so nice,,, to see these characters happy and in a good relationship.

and it's np!!! I know the exact same feeling and I love talking about aus with other people! it's so much fun to see what other people can think of and eventually seeing it written down

i keep hearing rumors of them making another one and idk that actually makes me kinda ?? angry?? because they ended it so well with v3 that I was okay with it ending there lol AND YOUR PREDICTION FOR KIIBS WOULD HAVE BEEN SO GOOD THAT WOULD HURT but Kiibo is a wonderful boy aaa he’s actually the first person I went for FTEs cuz he was the one I was excited most for, along with Kirumi~

HEY IM SURE THEY ARENT DUMB AND THEY ARE ACTUALLY WONDERFUL!! I will try my best to get to them as soon as I can !! I promise :’)

aaaaa I havent actually posted it !! I wanted to finish writing the entire au first before posting it because I hate being inconsistent with posting chapters lolol But as soon as I reach ch 12 or 13 (which are the final two planned chapters) I will begin posting each chapter per week :’] I’m hoping to finish during the summer (hopefully)

YEAH I FEEL THAT!! AUs are really wonderful!! But actually, I tend to not write AUs, and this is probably one of the first few I’ve ever done ; o ; i feel like for the most part, my writing tends to lean towards canon stuff and diverges from what’s provided in canon lolol but it really is fun seeing other people’s ideas and seeing them unfold with their writing :) and that being said, again, I’m sure all your AU fics are wonderful <3

#snow answers #therealassistant

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bluekitsune · 7 years

Text

Late NDRV3 Chapter 6 + Epilogue impressions

HOLY SHIT ITS SPY BOY ITS SPY BOY ITS SPY BOY???? DANGAN RONPA 0 IN MY V3/???????????????????.... No It couldn’t be. He’s long dead. Yuto Kamishiro can’t be this “Makoto”. Is Normal-chan our Spoiler-chan? Hmm. I just have a gut feeling he’s a Despair idk why And if he’s so normal, how was he on Kibougamine? Was it the first or the new school??????? HMMM????????

KIBO NO Don’t........ I don’t want him to die noooo >:C DONT TOUCHY THE ROBOT ....... He might be disconnected from Naegey but he’s still our pinnochio. Kibo wtf plz

Ouma the ultimate fanboy of Movie Vilains. I stg (dem funny glasses omg...... Afro wigs, batcar? He’s a total fanboy) What the fuck is up with the DICE thing?

Oh I knew the Remembering Light was delayed. But what was the point? Hinder them investigating the Mystery of the school? That’s fuckign cheap. Is that the same Makoto from the initial flashback? I’m gonna bet my ass it is.

Is he calling “them” heroes because the Future Foundation members survived a Killing Game, if Tenjou’s game could even be called that? Hmm Did FF fall or not?

OMFG OUMA GRABBED AMAMI’S DOLL........ That’s gay

That horse mask wtf He was a closeted clown all along wow...... Is he a Joker fan? Crimes with laughter and no killing? Color me confused. I guess the Panta should’ve been a massive giveaway. Did he fall into despair after his crew was taken prisioner? I....

Now he’s gonna pull us by the nose again? Wow. OK

“Ro is Twins”? rantaRO? ShiROgane? Is this pointing to the Mastermind again? Like when he said the first one to die is related to the mastermind? Is that why we werent allowed into Amami’s room?

OH MY GOD THAT throwback. The nostalgia bricked me in the face. FUCK.... So it definitely wasn’t Kibougamine that erased their talents. Then, who was it? Was it the “Remnants of Despair” aka the SDR2 crew? Who enabled them to erase their talent and hide from the SHSL Hunt?

CHARGE THE KIBO POWER

Omg Ro is twins...... The Gemini dial! Uma is HORSE????? Horse head?????? How far into this did Ouma know? This started being written in chapter 2 no?

Oh so the weird background was Amami’s room... And he was talking to his future, memoryless self? That’s nuts;; Uhm....... I cannot hold all these wtfs. Did he survive a killing game....... Done with these same students? Done with other students? Because if I was right about them actually being revived and Mastermind redoing it over and over, then he could have survived one of the “previous” “same” Killing Game. But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself @_@ Trying to piece all this shit together is always nuts without the final reveal. But if that were the case, wouldn’t he have had another talent, the talent that got him into the SHSL category in the first place?

NO....... How dare you show me everyone being friends? How dare you shove that in my face

Not this twin bullshit again. If you tell me her twin is Monaka i’m gonna murder myself

Catch ALL THE BUGS. It’s kinda cute that Ouma planned something like that, even if he was the cause for Gonta’s death....... I’m guessing there’s some nanomachine that they mistook for bugs

MONOKUMA PLANNED PARENTHOOD omfg. That tacky as fuck room. Of course it has to be a Junko fan. And HO look at the bullshit murder again. Is it just gonna be “Amami was very conveniently killed by the mastermind instead of by Bakamatsu’s trap and she was executed wrongly everyone cries” thing? It’s funny Amami had the cheat map version, kinda like if you start Castlevania with the hidden places.

ANOTHER hidden passage in the bathroom...... I’m not even surprised.

I KNEW IT. There WERE lies in the Remembering Light. The question is how to tell between them. Saihara why u not look through all the directories god dingit U friggin detective bitch

Kibo is so cool :C He’s just so damn Megaman cool. Fuse Megaman and Raiden and you have Kiboo

Ok so..... maybe instead of clones, there’s... the one that has some sort of Time travel would be? The mastermind? Kaede’s twin? Time for some 999 SteinsGate bullshit. But then why would they say they can bring back the dead? How would that even work?

Oh no .... I was just thinking Shirogane had very little spotlight moments and even less character development. Now everything points to the Mastermind being a student

:CCC WELL..... It’d make her switching clothes with Akamatsu even more ironic. Also again it’d be a twin with blonde hair and a twin with blue hair. What IS IT with this combination???

SMH..... The passage in the bathroom completely fucks over Shirogane. Because she’s the only one that was in the girl’s bathroom for a long time. I shouldve known better than to let myself like her......... Nooooooooooo

53 generation bullshit? What the dicks is this? Hmm. V3. 53 huh. They screwed us over a lot

Yeah so if the memories were indeed false now we proceed to question everything. Is this false too, is this false too? For all we know the world could still be fucked but not from asteroids. But what would be the point if they weren’t even from Kibougamine? That would just be lame.

Are they in a simulation again?????? Suddenly Hinata?????? What

Now that’s just shitposting. They’re gonna pull the “it’s fiction” card.

Well. This is extreme shitposting. Are they calling the fanbase sick sadistic fucks? “u guys watching these poor people kill each other” or something?

I cannot hold this level of meta. All these wall breaks

I CANT BREATHE, LOOK AT THE TITLE SHITPOSTING???? It’s exactly like series that go on too long

So is solving that one case what landed Saihara in this? Or are their talents actually fabricated as well? <_> Are the people dead or alive?????? TEll me gonta is alive plz Nope they’re dead. They’re all dead for the sake of Tsumugi’s OCs........... GHHGJHDSGJH

Yep we were played hardcore. All the first appearances were the real appearances.

I really REALLY missed the DR1/2 voices DAMN. Fujisaki :C Ishimaru..... Even Celeste FUCK. Was Sayaka’s voice always this amazing? I love how harsh Peko’s voice is,,,,,, I love the DR2 crew so much....... cries on hands

So many out of character sayings. I’m sure the characters would loathe seeing themselves say some of those things lmao god

I think they got a real point. How you can suffer and be in pain with a “lie”, a fiction, but also how you can feel joy and hope out of the same lie/fiction.The dillema of fiction, of experimenting with taboo topics, in this example the killing, and questioning how much it plays a part into the reality side.

But in this case, it’s going to another level. Like questioning human existence in SOMA. If you take a real human mind and place it in a robotic body, can it still be called a human existence? Can humans scanned and preserved in a “fiction” still be called human?

The ideas are very fucking smart. Kodaka trolled us hard while also questioning the entire fanbase and his series base. And dang, all those inside jokes. They really took a good long look at the fandom and how we think; But it’s still hilarious it’s all orchestrated by a greedy company, ran by a delirious cosplayer fangirl and feeding the masses that want both the negative and the positive points of the plot/characters

Kaito was in it for mundane reasons and ended up with the meaningful “protag” role huh. I wonder what bullshit Korekiyo said to earn himself such a shitty background story. I like his character. Just..... I wish his reasons were not bad writing. Tsumugi u done fucked up

Robot Bondage? I strangely approve of that

Shirogane waving goodbye with mascot,. throwback to Chiaki....... CRIES

:C Well I was right in not expecting Kibo to live. But still he’s the best survey processor ever. My favorite quiz boy. I will pretend you’re alive and well flying up the clouds cuz FUCK IT

In a sense, it’s like they’re blowing up a literal hole into ending the series and opening a path to direct the fans back to reality, or per say, the outside. “Go out there, do the thing, hope out there.”

In a world where your identity and truths and lies are uncertain, you have to pave a way for yourself taking the best out of it all? I’m sure someone will reason this game ending and the analogies way more eloquently, but anyway.

I really enjoyed the story. The extra effort they put on CGs really enrichened everything. I’m not sure how I feel about the big big big plot twist yet. I guess it’s something to slowly digest over time. Can’t say this is my favorite.

Was the time travel thing a misunderstanding by the fans or a prank by Kodaka? I kept expecting it and it was nowhere

I’d say in most to least fav, I’m still with SDR2, DR0, DR1, and last? DRAE. I still don’t know how to feel about Another Episode or the animes TBH

So this was me going through this rollercoaster. If you read this so far, then I hope you laughed at my stupid at least once. I’m gonna go and reblog a fuckton of fanart now. Bye

#drv3 #ndrv3 #ndrv3 spoilers #new danganronpa v3 #kitsune adventures #spoilers yadda etc bladibla

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Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 5.17

Last time in trial 5 (trial 5!!!!!), we went over what Maki caused and witnessed last night, including torturing Kokichi for information because that’s normal behaviour in the world she was raised in, Kokichi partly telling the truth but also still partly lying, him deliberately goading her into shooting him so that Kaito would jump in the way because he’s Kaito, Kaito having zero regrets about doing that even though it seemingly made things worse, Kaito’s furious stubborn determination in the face of hopelessness as he refused to show Maki how bad things were, and Maki’s despair.

Then Shuichi turned down the suggestion to vote because he noticed a new fact in Maki’s testimony.

Tsumugi: “Oh yeah! The alarm should’ve gone off if someone got close to the shutter!”

Maki: “I was too focused to notice at the time. But now that you mention it, it is odd.”

Yeah. “Focused”. That sure is technically a way to describe the state of mind she’d have been in while she was slashing at that control panel. She doesn’t seem to want to describe it any more accurately than that.

Maki: “I did attempt to enter the hangar… and I tried to destroy the control panel with my knife.”

“Oh? Did you now?”

…

Exisal Kokichi: “Or maybe Maki is telling a lie… Did you really try to break the control panel with a knife?”

Some more very easy ad-libbed minor dickery from Kaito: try to discredit everything Maki says and act as though she’d lie about anything, even when she’s very clearly not lying and doesn’t have any plausible reason to be doing so.

Exisal Kokichi: “Huuuh? Why would I use an Electrobomb? I had no reason to shut off the alarm, right? I’d be at a disadvantage if I did that.”

Never mind the part where he said like an hour ago that he totally might have done that for fun. I was pretty sure that one was ad-libbed, but this one probably isn’t scripted either because we’re still talking about something Maki did. I guess Kaito just wants to oppose that possibility more now that Shuichi is actually pursuing it, since that’s the kind of thing Kokichi would do.

Shuichi: (What piece of evidence is called into question if the safety function was off?) “…Kaito’s cause of death.”

Maki: “…What?”

Maki’s voice sounds pretty shaken here. She’s only just awakening to the possibility that maybe she didn’t kill Kaito after all.

Exisal Kokichi: “… I see… very impressive. The hydraulic press *could* have been the cause of death. But that’s… just a possibility.”

Shuichi: “What do you mean?”

Exisal Kokichi: “It’s possible that I killed Kaito with the press, but there’s no way to know. Kaito’s death could have been either the poison arrow or the hydraulic press. Both causes are possible, but you’ll never be able to determine it… no matter what.”

So here’s an interesting conundrum. What we see here from Kaito should still all be ad-libbed, because this is still related to what Maki did that Kokichi wasn’t able to put in the script. But this whole thing is rather uncharacteristically much of a good plan for me to be sure it’s really all Kaito’s idea.

Shuichi: “So that’s what you were trying to do… You were trying to commit an unsolvable murder!”

Exisal Kokichi: “Nee-heehee… Do you finally get it? Yup, that was my plan. The gimmick of this murder case isn’t the unknown victim… But rather, the unknowable culprit!”

…Because this is a really clever bit of misdirection. The looming question this whole trial has been “what on earth is Kokichi’s reason for making things so confusing?”, and no conclusion is going to be satisfactory until we have an answer for that. The real answer is that it really is about the unknown victim – but it being about an unknowable culprit and Kokichi wanting to make a case where the truth literally can’t be found is also a plausible answer to that question that therefore distracts from what he’s really doing with this.

This move is a very Kokichi-esque move to make. I want to have faith in Kaito’s ability to have come up with a clever idea or two in the entire night he had to think about nothing but this, but even then I’m still not sure he’d have necessarily been able to think of this. On the other hand, since this is such a vital point which massively helps the entire plan, it’s quite possible that this is the one thing Kokichi added to the script – probably not literally, probably just by telling Kaito to say it – in the short time he had after Maki had left.

(I would say it was possible that none of this was planned and Kaito just jumped on Shuichi’s deduction and went “yeah, uh, let’s go with that, it was totally about this all along!”. But Kaito was clearly trying to lead Shuichi into coming to this conclusion in the first place, so unfortunately that idea doesn’t hold up.)

Exisal Kokichi: “No one understands but me! Only *I* know the answer!”

So I’m assuming that Kokichi really didn’t directly add any of this bit to the script, which means that this is most likely again some very insightful ad-libbing from Kaito. He’s gloating, which is a very Kokichi thing to do. Maybe this is once again drawing from Kaito’s frustration at the realisation that Kokichi knew a hell of a lot more than he ever told anyone and apparently got a huge kick out of being the only one to know. Or maybe this is Kaito drawing from some bits in the script that we’ll see him recite later on which also have Kokichi gloating a lot, and he’s adapting that idea to fit here.

Exisal Kokichi: “There’s no more room for deduction here! Choose the culprit with your own intuition!”

Using their intuition? As in, their judgement of the people involved?

Because if we assume that the truth of this situation really is as it’s being presented here and then have to decide if it was Maki or Kokichi based on that… it doesn’t seem likely that Kokichi did it. Sure, he’d cover it up and make it look like he might have killed Kaito, but actually directly killing him? Something that would then indisputably mean that he is responsible for someone’s death? Ha ha, no, not Kokichi.

…Okay, well, maybe it’s a bit different this time because Maki already landed a fatal blow, so even if Kokichi finished it with the press he could tell himself that he’s not really killing anyone since Kaito was already going to die thanks to Maki in the first place.

Kaito might not really be asking them to use their judgement of Kokichi’s character, though; while I’ve talked a million times about what I call Kaito’s “intuition”, Kaito himself has never actually used that word for it. What also makes sense to do here is use logical intuition of what would give the best outcome for Kokichi, which would probably be that he did kill Kaito but is trying to trick them into thinking Maki did it so that he can get everyone else killed while surviving himself.

Of course, it really doesn’t actually matter either way, since Monokuma still does not have even the slightest clue that the real culprit is Kaito, which means the plan is succeeding and any verdict at this point is a good one.

Keebo: “I-Intuition?”

Exisal Kokichi: “Nee-heehee… Are you troubled? I’m sure robots don’t have intuition, right?”

This is literally the one single robophobic thing that Exisal Kokichi has said. Apparently Keebo’s comment reminded Kaito that, oh yeah, Kokichi was always a dick to Keebo as well wasn’t he, better throw in just a tiny bit of that to be convincing. But no more than this, because there is no reason to be any worse than absolutely necessary. (I doubt there were any deliberate jabs at Keebo in the script, like there almost certainly were at Maki, since Kokichi wouldn’t have been expecting Keebo to act in any particular way towards him.)

Exisal Kokichi: “The heart-racing excitement as the blackened and the spotless face off! It’s… VOTING TIME!!!”

The delivery of this line is has some of that just-a-little-too-over-the-top intonation, like this is another one of those overly-rehearsed scripted lines. Probably Kokichi put this in the script as something to say at any point in which it might be reasonable to try and push the vote through early, since that is of course what he’s trying to do here.

And… it actually works? This sends us to the voting screen. It can’t be just that the screen was always active and this line made Shuichi turn to it thinking that he has to vote, because the screen has a time limit and so someone needs to activate it. Which makes it a little strange that the screen activated at all, since Monokuma does not want this to happen and cancels it before anything goes through. Perhaps the voting screen really is somehow just set to start when someone, anyone, says those exact words.

(I voted for Kokichi, because there’s no way Shuichi would choose to vote for Maki in this situation – as far as he knows, if Maki gets the majority vote, she will definitely die whether she did it or not – and he doesn’t have a reason to vote for anyone else. You can also get away with not voting.)

Monokuma: “Hey! That’s my line! I’m the one who decides when it’s Voting Time!”

Exisal Kokichi: “Aw, c’mon… No one’s gonna figure out the truth. Let’s just vote already. This won’t be a problem, right, Monokuma? Cuz you know who the culprit is, don’t you? …Just like you always do.”

Monokuma: “…Eh?”

In this moment right here, Exisal Kokichi is ruining the entire plan. This draws attention to the fact that Monokuma doesn’t know who the culprit is, and as soon as Shuichi figures that out, it becomes possible for him to figure out Kokichi’s real plan and, in doing so, cause it to fail. Shuichi might never reach the truth if Monokuma’s lack of knowledge doesn’t come to light, and that’s a fact he might not have figured out if Monokuma hadn’t been goaded into acting suspicious about it here.

Which really begs the question of why Exisal Kokichi does this.

Possibility one: this is scripted. The line to force through voting time was almost certainly scripted as something to do if everyone has reached something that seems like a plausible truth but isn’t the real truth, so these lines here would also potentially be scripted as a response to Monokuma inevitably cancelling the vote before it goes through.

Why would Kokichi put such a blatantly terrible move in his script? Because he was an idiot. He’d evidently always underestimated Shuichi’s ability to figure things out, since he apparently thought it’d be totally fine to not have Shuichi as his accomplice and leave him free to uncover everything in the trial. So it’s quite possible that it didn’t occur to Kokichi that doing this here would obviously lead to Shuichi figuring out that Monokuma doesn’t know who the culprit is and thus eventually reaching the real point of the plan. Meanwhile, Kokichi loved to gloat, very much to the point that he’d do so from beyond the grave by making Kaito do it for him, so this could well be Kokichi having wanted to be all “ha ha, Monokuma, I’m smarter than you” while oblivious to the fact that doing so will ruin his whole plan. More on this general idea later this post.

Possibility two: this is not scripted and is entirely Kaito’s decision. Why would Kaito do this even though it’d ruin the plan? Because Kaito doesn’t quite want the same outcome from this plan as Kokichi did. I mean, sure, ideally fooling Monokuma and proving that he got a verdict wrong to ruin the killing game would be the best possible outcome. But Kaito knows that Shuichi is amazing and is almost certainly going to lead Monokuma to the real truth sooner or later, and therefore that the best outcome of this plan is extremely unlikely to ever happen.

In fact, Kaito has been known to somewhat overestimate Shuichi’s abilities in terms of how much he’s already figured out. So Kaito probably thinks it’s quite possible that Shuichi will figure out the victim switch and that he’s the real culprit without even needing to know that Monokuma is being fooled. If that happens, it’ll never come to light at all that Monokuma didn’t know who the culprit is and was relying on Shuichi to get it right. It’ll never be proven that Monokuma had to get it right.

Kaito knows that the best possible outcome of this trial is already practically out of reach – so he might well be gunning for the next best outcome, which is to push Monokuma into a corner and make it undeniable that he can’t break the rules and can’t get the answer wrong. If that happens, that’ll prove to Shuichi that there really is an audience watching this somewhere. It’ll give him a path to reach that “something beyond the truth” that Kaito told him about before, namely the idea that what they saw outside was somehow a lie and there’s still somewhere for them to escape to and call home. That’s what Kaito’s really doing all this for, since he’s already pretty sure that straight-up ruining the killing game isn’t going to happen here.

(Possibility three is that it’s a combination of both, in that Kokichi scripted it because he’s an idiot but Kaito is still actively thinking about going for the next best outcome as he reads this part of the script.)

Monokuma: “Th-The culprit, you say? Ah, y-yes… Of c-course I know…”

Himiko: “Hm? Why do you seem so flustered?”

Monokuma: “F-Flustered? Me? Hahahaha! What are you talking about?”

Monokuma is really bad at this. So much so that it’s most likely deliberate. It’s possible that he’s not allowed to directly admit that he doesn’t know who the culprit is, but by acting this way he might be trying to get Shuichi to figure that fact out, so that Shuichi can then use that fact to deduce the real truth for him. Temporarily compromising his integrity as a gamemaster but then getting it right in the end would be better for him than appearing like he knows what he’s doing but then getting it wrong. And no matter what, this is still an interesting story – if anything, this development just makes it even more so.

Shuichi: “Monokuma… do you not know who the culprit is, either!?”

Monokuma: “Huh!? Whaddaya mean I don’t know!? Uh, what don’t I know, huh!?”

Maki: “…You don’t know, do you?”

Monokuma: “…”

Even once they’ve guessed it, he still doesn’t directly confirm it. Maybe he really isn’t allowed to say that. (And since he’s an AI, he might even be physically incapable of doing so, just like a certain someone in DR2 couldn’t say certain things.)

In fact, after this point, Monokuma shuts up again for a while. Which does support the idea that his nervousness just now wasn’t genuine nervousness but just an act to point Shuichi towards the truth, an act he no longer needs to keep up.

Exisal Kokichi also shuts up for a while here. This rather suggests that him drawing this out of Monokuma wasn’t for Kokichi’s potential purpose of gloating, which, if that was the case, he’d want to continue doing even more now that this fact has come to light. (There is plenty of gloating about beating Monokuma in the script, but we’ll get to that in a little bit – only after it’s become apparent Kokichi isn’t the mastermind. Until then, it makes a lot less sense for him to gloat about knowing something Monokuma doesn’t.)

But for Kaito’s potential purpose of pushing Monokuma into a corner, he’s now achieved it and therefore doesn’t need to push any further, so he probably would indeed shut up at this point.

Shuichi: “Kokichi wasn’t just trying to commit a murder than we couldn’t figure out… He was trying to commit a murder than Monokuma couldn’t figure out, either!”

This is… still not quite the whole truth. It’s not just about Monokuma not being able to figure it out, but about proving that Monokuma got it wrong. Kokichi didn’t just want to mess with Monokuma by giving him a confusing conundrum. If he does that, there’s no way to prove that he’s won. Kokichi wanted to utterly, indisputably defeat him.

If the crux of the plan were making the culprit genuinely unknowable, by killing Kaito and posing the unanswerable question of if the cause of death was poison or crushing, then that wouldn’t actually achieve his goal. Kokichi could claim all he wants that he knows which it really was – maybe he checked Kaito’s pulse just before putting him in the press or something – but he has no way to prove that. Kaito is not visibly breathing in the video, precisely to keep this kind of thing hidden from Monokuma right now, and it’s not like Kokichi could have secretly taken another video from another angle that showed that Kaito was breathing. Monokuma could declare the blackened as whichever one he feels like, and even if he is wrong, he could insist he’s right because he totally just knows these things, and nobody would be able to conclusively prove otherwise.

That’s why the real crux of the plan here had to be the unknown victim after all. Kokichi wanted to make Monokuma think that he killed Kaito, so that once Monokuma renders his verdict, Kaito can climb out of the Exisal and undeniably, conclusively prove him wrong.

(It’s a good thing this really isn’t a virtual reality. This is somewhat reminiscent of the plan in chapter 5 of Danganronpa 2, which also seemed for a bit like the point was purely for the culprit to be completely unknowable – but Monokuma knew anyway because of the nature of his control over that world.)

Shuichi: “Prior to this case, Monokuma always knew the specific details of each crime, correct? That must mean that he was using some way of monitoring us…”

And finally, Shuichi reaches this conclusion. If only he’d figured this out in chapter 1, everything might have been different. It was still totally possible for him to figure it out then just from the killing game rules, but I guess it took having a bunch of actual class trials for him to start considering the question of how does Monokuma know the real culprit anyway.

Shuichi: “The Electrobomb *would* prevent any cameras from sending video wirelessly.”

As well as being vital to the plot of chapter 1, the invisible cameras are also potentially an important plot point here. If the cameras were large ones like in the other games, they might be able to send their video to Motherkuma through a wired feed, which the Electrobomb wouldn’t affect, or at least have some kind of drive space to save their video locally until the Electrobomb wears off and they can send it. But the Nanokumas are, A, obviously not wired to anything, and, B, almost certainly too tiny to have data storage space within themselves and have to send their video footage to Motherkuma as they’re recording or it’ll be lost. So the Electrobomb works perfectly here when it might not have done in any other Danganronpa. The fact that the gamemakers don’t want the students to be aware of the cameras also means that there aren’t any official school rules against tampering with them, meaning that Kokichi could safely do this.

Shuichi: “Yes… the Exisals weren’t protecting Monokuma, they were… […] They were watching Monokuma.”

Good job finally figuring this out, Shuichi, after Monokuma hinted very strongly at it during the investigation. He was probably trying very hard to tell you this, as another hint that he doesn’t know the truth.

Shuichi: “Remember what Monokuma said earlier in the investigation?”

He only said this to you, so I don’t know why you’re asking everyone else to “remember”, but okay.

Maki: “Before I stole an Exisal, all four units were focused on Monokuma. That’s why when I stole one to enter the hangar, the other three didn’t pursue me.”

Shuichi: “So Monokuma must have been talking about Maki…”

Shuichi is referring to that awkward bit I mentioned during the investigation:

Monokuma: “The person who shared that info with me didn’t seem interested in sharing it with you guys… So you share it instead! That way, it’ll be fair to all participants!”

…even though “sharing info” definitely does not seem to be what Maki did with Monokuma at all. So maybe Monokuma only talked about it that way to give himself an excuse to tell Shuichi, because really he just wanted to be able to hint at Shuichi that he doesn’t have a clue what happened so that Shuichi can figure it all out for him.

Tsumugi: “But Kokichi’s the mastermind, right? Shouldn’t he be controlling Monoku—”

Shuichi: “Kokichi might not be the mastermind!”

Himiko: “Wh-Wh-Wh-Wh-Whaaat!?”

Shock horror! Such an unexpected twist!

Which, to be fair, is more of a twist for the characters than it is for us, since they don’t have the narrative argument of “but it’s way too boringly obvious”. Plus, the Flashback Light rendered them utterly convinced that he’s a Remnant of Despair, at which point him being the mastermind just makes sense regardless of his confession.

It’s not a twist for Tsumugi, though, of course, but look at her still trying to insist that he totally is the mastermind. It’d help her cause to have it finally be revealed that he isn’t, but I suppose she’s acting this way because she knows Shuichi is about to refute it anyway.

Shuichi: “Remember that the only reason we think that, is because Kokichi told us. Monokuma hasn’t said a word about that. It’s possible that Kokichi is just lying to us.”

See, all of Kokichi’s efforts to convince everyone that he’s definitely the mastermind didn’t even work on Shuichi, who is the one person they should have needed to work on in order to be worth doing in the first place. All those efforts (including, have I mentioned, murdering two people) were for the purpose of manipulating everyone into being more inclined to assume that his lie was the truth and not question it, even though there was no concrete evidence. But now that the logic is beginning to line up such that things only make sense if Kokichi wasn’t the mastermind, Shuichi is more than capable of putting aside all his preconceived notions and acknowledging that there’s no actual proof of this anywhere. Shuichi was always going to be able to think like this, because that’s what detectives do. Murdering Miu and Gonta was so fucking pointless.

Exisal Kokichi: “Ah-hahahaha! No way I lied! I’m definitely controlling Monokuma. The mastermind of the killing game is totally me. The one who pitted humanity’s last survivors against each other is… all me, baby!”

And now we’re back to some definitely-scripted stuff. Kokichi would absolutely have written a response to them questioning whether he’s really the mastermind. Of course that response would include gloating, too – he gloated about all this stuff he didn’t really do while he was still alive, and he’s still even doing it in death through Kaito.

Himiko: “He’s a Remnant of Despair! How’d we forget that?”

Shuichi: “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s the mastermind.”

Tsumugi: “Umm… well… I guess. But is that really possible?”

Tsumugi, what do you even want here? Do you want them to figure out he wasn’t the mastermind so they can maybe reach the truth and save your game’s integrity, or not? This seems like another of the times where she’s determined to back up the story shown in her Flashback Lights, but at this point she doesn’t even need them to believe that any more, since she already achieved her goal of making Maki try to kill Kokichi.

Monokuma: “… I can’t answer that without causing problems, cuz I gotta run this trial fair and squa—”

Shuichi: “Even more reason to give us the answer! If you don’t tell us the truth right now, you’ll be an accomplice to Kokichi’s lies. Does that sound like a fair game? Would you say this class trial is fair?”

Honestly, this class trial is so confusing that I don’t think “fairness” even comes into it any more. I’m also not sure that revealing Kokichi’s claim to be a lie does come under the principle of “keeping everything fair”. Participants of this game can lie about whatever they want, and it’s not supposed to be Monokuma’s place to call out those lies. The Monokuma Files, for example, always leave out details that would explicitly prove any student’s claim to be a lie.

Tsumugi: “Yeah, tell us! Is Kokichi the real mastermind or not!?”

I wonder if Monokuma was only able to actually tell them after receiving a direct instruction to do so from Tsumugi.

Monokuma: “Unlike the lies you love so much, the truth should be impartial to everyone.”

This particular truth kind of isn’t? Confirming that Kokichi isn’t the mastermind makes it possible that Monokuma really doesn’t know what’s going on, which makes Shuichi more likely to figure out the real truth and puts whoever’s in the Exisal at a disadvantage. Monokuma says he’s being impartial, but he’s totally siding against Exisal Kokichi here.

…Also, look at him being sure he’s talking to Kokichi. Heh.

Monokuma: “With the key from the last motive, he was the first to learn the truth of the outside world. Based on his deductions, he fabricated a lie to make you all think he was the mastermind. […] His deductions got a lot of details right, though. Pretty impressive, honestly.”

Exisal Kokichi: “…”

This would read as Kokichi being deliberately silent at being caught out in his lie, but in reality it could be Kaito wondering about how much Kokichi knew and what was going through his head when he told them all that stuff. Kokichi admitted to Kaito that he wasn’t the mastermind, but he didn’t really elaborate on it, so Kaito might be only realising the full extent of his lie here, just like everyone else is.

(Also, Monokuma is totally lying through his teeth about anything Kokichi said back at the end of the tunnel being “right”. Kokichi did in fact deduce the real truth, most likely, but he never told anyone that part.)

Monokuma also adds that the Exisal remote Kokichi had was just made by Miu.

Exisal Kokichi: “Hey, isn’t it a bit unfair to tell them all that?”

Monokuma: “Fairness has nothing to do with it. I offered up that info purely out of site. Spite towards you, for trying to usurp the mastermind’s role and take over the game!”

Fairness didn’t have a lot to do with him revealing the first piece of information, but hey, at least Monokuma’s admitting it this time. It’s also appropriate that Monokuma would do something this petty out of spite towards Kokichi for ruining his fun, when spite towards Monokuma was also the entire reason Kokichi set up this whole plan. They really are quite alike.

Exisal Kokichi: “Well, whatever. It’s way more interesting to defeat an enemy who plays dirty anyway.”

This… might be ad-libbed? I’m not sure if Kokichi would have thought to put in a response to Monokuma being spiteful. I’m also not sure Kokichi would have been this casual and flippant about Monokuma playing dirty towards him either, since he threw a huge tantrum in trial 4 when Shuichi dared to use a single lie against him.

Tsumugi: “What were you trying to accomplish by pretending to be the mastermind, Kokichi?”

Exisal Kokichi: “…”

Looks like the answer to that question isn’t in the script. The real answer is, apparently, “to make them think I’m definitely alive when I’m not”, so of course he wouldn’t have put it in the script. I don’t think he told this to Kaito, though, so Kaito might also be wondering this himself right now. Why the hell did he decide to murder two people just for something that’s now not even a thing any more?

(I also wonder if Tsumugi asked this because she genuinely wants to know too.)

Shuichi: (The real mastermind is not Kokichi… Who could it be?)

Unfortunately, Shuichi, that is not a question for this trial and Monokuma isn’t going to let you keep thinking about that here.

Exisal Kokichi: “Before we worry about who the mastermind is, or what my intent is… Let’s figure out the culprit!”

Kokichi should not have wanted them to figure out the culprit at all. But neither should Kaito, even though he’s pretty sure Shuichi is going to manage it sooner or later anyway. So, eh, this probably isn’t an ad-lib.

Exisal Kokichi: “Let’s just leave the decision-making to Monokuma. But… you gotta run the class trial, too. So no mistakes, okaaaay?”

Monokuma: “…Are you tryin’ to get me to do something?”

Exisal Kokichi: “You’ve been watching us solve all these cases, but you can’t be a spectator anymore. You’re gonna participate in the class trial from here on out.”

Shuichi: (Huh?)

Exisal Kokichi: “So, let’s resume this class trial! Monokuma, you gotta use your brain too!”

This whole thing seems very much like it’s coming from Kokichi. He was always furious at Monokuma just sitting back and enjoying himself from the sidelines as everyone distrusted and betrayed and accused each other. Kokichi must have got a lot of twisted satisfaction from the idea of forcing Monokuma to become just another participant in this game, just like them, and then of beating him at that game.

Exisal Kokichi: “This will be the final class trial! Me versus Monokuma!”

Shuichi: “You versus Monokuma?”

Exisal Kokichi: “…When I play a game, I intend to win. But what’s considered winning in this game? Beating the other players? No… beating the game’s mastermind is the true victory. And that’s how I’ll win! That’s why I decided to challenge Monokuma! If I can deceive Monokuma till the very end, then I’ll be the winner!”

He got such satisfaction out of this idea that he couldn’t just keep it to himself and die in that press only silently knowing that this was going to happen. He had to make sure Monokuma and everyone else watching would know that this is what he’s doing. Kaito is reciting these lines from the script, but this is very much Kokichi speaking right now, from beyond the grave. This is more from the heart than anything else Kokichi put in the script just to keep up the deception. Remember “there’s nothing more depressing than an unnoticed prank”? There would be no point to Kokichi in defeating Monokuma if Monokuma and the audience don’t even realise he’s been beaten. Kokichi is gloating to his fullest.

Exisal Kokichi: “But since the outside world is in total ruin, this game is the only entertainment we have… At least I can enjoy this game to the fullest and feel good winning.”

…This part is less directly from the heart, of course, but it’s still from the part of Kokichi that desperately, twistedly convinced himself he was having fun with this, that he had to have fun with it, to cover up how much he hated it. If he hadn’t been so desperate to feel that way, then maybe he’d have just boringly ended the game without “winning” it by helping everyone escape in chapter 4 like he should have done. But no, he had to find a way to enjoy it, and he had to win, otherwise, to him, it wouldn’t have been worth it.

Maki: “You really are a Remnant of Despair. Your way of thinking is just chaotic.”

Exisal Kokichi: “… …Remnant of Despair?”

Kaito’s heard this phrase a bunch of times by now, but I guess in this moment his confusion over it and why the hell he’s supposed to know about it slipped out.

Exisal Kokichi: “Eh, whatevs. Let’s just get this started.”

But then he brushes it off. See, at this point, being explicitly not the mastermind, the real Kokichi would be free to go “okay, no, really, I don’t have a clue why you think I’m one of these Remnant of Despair thingies because I’m not”. But Kaito still isn’t sure whether Kokichi really knew about this and really was one or not, and whether everyone else has some kind of information which would make them certain that he’s not Kokichi if he didn’t know about this. So he’s still being vague to play it safe.

Exisal Kokichi: “If the students or Monokuma don’t know who the culprit is, then I’m the winn—”

The students not knowing who the culprit is should be completely beside the point. Phrasing it this way puts “Kokichi” on a separate team from the students, and implies that the students and Monokuma are on the same team. (This line has to be scripted despite the ad-lib just before it, because Kaito thoroughly considers the students to be on the same side as him and wouldn’t say something like this while hastily improvising.)

Shuichi and the others are about to make a very foolish mistake. They’re going to decide that Monokuma is basically on their side and continue to pursue the truth, even though it should be apparent at this point that they don’t want to find the truth, because Monokuma doesn’t know it either and him remaining in the dark is a good thing. But who’s the single most responsible person for them making that mistake? Kokichi.

It’s most apparent in the phrasing of this one line just now, but this entire gloating speech he just had was essentially Kokichi presenting himself as more of a villain than Monokuma. Even though they know now that he’s not the mastermind, it’s still quite easy thanks to that speech to continue feeling like Kokichi’s their biggest enemy in this trial. That’s a stupid mistake, of course it is – Monokuma is always the real enemy – but it is Kokichi’s fault that they’re going to make this mistake.

This could have been very easily avoided if only Kokichi had phrased his gloating in such a way that made it clear that he’s actually on everyone’s side, that by defeating Monokuma he’s going to save them, that he pretended to be the villain but he’s really the hero. It could have also been avoided by Kokichi just not gloating at all in the first place, and simply letting the personal satisfaction of believing that he’s going to win be enough for him. He could easily have taken this chance, now that Shuichi is aware that Monokuma doesn’t know the culprit, to outright communicate to Shuichi that Monokuma remaining in the dark would be better for all of them and so he should shut up and stop making deductions.

But no. Kokichi had to take this opportunity to gloat, even though he’d be dead by the time the gloating happened, and he had to do so by usurping Monokuma’s villain role and seeming even bigger and eviler than him. He was so determined to do so that it didn’t even occur to him that it might just ruin the whole plan. This is the final reason why Kokichi’s plan was always inevitably going to fail.

(It’s also pertinent to note that if Kokichi really were selfless and doing this plan because he cared about saving everyone, if he’d always genuinely felt like he was on their side, then you’d think he’d be able to realise that now is the time to finally drop the villain act and admit that he’s been on their side and trying to save them all along. The fact that that’s not what he does rather strongly suggests that he was only ever in this plan for himself.)

Of course, I should also talk about Kaito here, because he sure as hell doesn’t care about gloating and coming across like a villain for its own sake. It might have occurred to Kaito that this whole speech seems kind of odd and unnecessary and possibly not a great idea – but, apparently, Kaito is trusting Kokichi’s plan anyway. He’s had to accept lately that his own plans are terrible and that Kokichi’s are generally way better than his, after all. So Kaito’s assuming that anything Kokichi put in the script has a good reason for being there, even if he doesn’t understand it himself. He’s only deviating from what the script wants him to say when it involves him being unnecessarily cruel, but otherwise, Kaito is not questioning Kokichi’s judgement and is trusting that every word of this script was somehow carefully crafted to make the plan more likely to succeed. That’s why he was happy to randomly talk about nipples earlier, and that’s why he is faithfully reciting this whole speech and making the plan fail. Kaito doesn’t realise that Kokichi’s plan, while pretty creative and clever in a lot of ways, was also horrendously flawed simply because of the kind of person Kokichi was.

As it happens, the thing that Kokichi should have done – simply being quietly satisfied with the knowledge that he’s (supposedly) going to win without needing anyone else to know about it – is also basically what Kaito is doing right now. He’s spent this whole trial fighting as hard as he can to carry out the plan and save everyone, but currently nobody else has any idea that it’s him who’s doing this. Okay, granted, Kaito knows that at the end of the trial he’s going to get to reveal himself and explain his part in the plan – but even when we get to that point, Kaito is not going to make a big deal of the fact that he tried to save everyone.

This is another one of those fun similarity-yet-contrasts between Kaito and Kokichi. Much like Kokichi always needs to be the centre of attention, Kaito’s thing of talking himself up to be a big hero seems on the surface to be a similar thing. But it was never quite the same. Kaito may be showy about himself, but that’s mostly to inspire others to have a similar level of confidence in themselves. And more to the point, back in the earlier chapters, he rarely made a big deal of the ways in which he was helping others. He would just do those things without caring whether or not anyone knew that he was trying to help. Of course, this fell apart a bit as Kaito realised he was dying and became more desperate and started to clearly need people, particularly Shuichi, to know that he was the one helping them. But now, Kaito’s grown past this! He’s able to be satisfied simply with the knowledge that he’s playing a small part in saving everyone, without needing everyone else to know that he’s the one saving them. He started changing in this way the moment he dropped his own terrible escape plan and picked up Kokichi’s Electrohammer earlier in this chapter, and this whole trial and his part in this plan is the culmination of that growth. Kaito is so good.

And it’s because Kokichi didn’t grow and change at all, like Kaito was able to, that he’s still the same attention seeker he always was and still felt the need to show off about his deeds to the point that he’s just ruined his whole plan.

Monokuma: “Don’t underestimate me. Or Shuichi and the others for that matter.”

Well, mostly don’t underestimate Shuichi. Which, of course, is exactly what Kokichi did and the other big reason his plan was always going to fail.

Monokuma: “It’s just like a Remnant of Despair to try and assume control of the game. But these kids are all that’s left of Hope’s Peak Academy. If you think they’re gonna make this easy for you, you better think again!”

Yet again this idea that the students are basically just warriors for good in a huge battle between good and evil, when that’s not the point. Monokuma is partly pandering to the audience here, but he’s also pandering to the part of Shuichi and friends that’s been brainwashed into seeing things this way, to help along the idea that Kokichi, who is totally a Remnant of Despair, is the biggest enemy here. While Kokichi obviously didn’t know about this Remnant of Despair stuff while writing his script, his general evil gloating has very much helped Monokuma frame things like this.

Monokuma: “…Monokuma joins your party.”

Monokuma – Ultimate Despair Headmaster

…Okay, giving an Ultimate introduction screen to Monokuma as if he really has become one of them is pretty great.

Keebo: “Let’s just ignore Monokuma. His actions are always beyond comprehension.”

Monokuma: “Yeah! Let’s just focus on the case!”

Monokuma is pushing them along and encouraging them to not think too hard about his motives for suddenly acting like he’s on their side, which they of course should not remotely be ignoring like this. But they are, thanks to Kokichi being a selfish attention-seeking idiot from beyond the grave.

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commentaryvorg · 5 years

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Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 5.11

Last time, as the Kaito rescue operation fell rather, uh, flat, Maki was totally not planning to murder Kokichi on sight, everyone decided Kaito was definitely dead except for Shuichi, Maki was even more sure Kaito was dead and also that him ever killing anyone was completely impossible, Kaito was very not dead and very a murderer inside the Exisal and had to have felt awful to hear his friends’ reactions to all this, and Shuichi was desperately clinging to a currently-baseless hope of Kaito being alive somehow rather than face the painful apparent truth, but at least this was better than Maki letting her despair win and twist her into thinking it’s okay to sacrifice all of her friends just to kill Kokichi and “defeat despair”.

Now, we’re here at the “Investigation Start”, which is to say, the moment the awesome music kicks in! I’ve always liked Danganronpa’s thing of having a metal remix of the investigation music for case 5 and onwards, since it hammers home that things have really gotten serious now – but it’s never felt more appropriate than this investigation here where Kaito may or may not be dead. Damn right the terrifying possibility of losing your best friend – and the feeling of desperately wanting not to – should be given that much importance.

It’s also incredibly appropriate that this version of the music is titled Hope Searching! The regular one is called Despair Searching, which makes a lot of sense when we’re searching for proof that one of our friends is a murderer. But this time, Shuichi’s not primarily thinking about the investigation in terms of finding the murderer. He’s searching for proof that his best friend is still alive. Damn right that’s hope.

And okay, since I insist on nitpicking the meaning of the word, technically he is not searching for hope – finding Kaito alive would be finding relief, as there’d be no need to hope for it any more if he’s right there. It is the act of searching for a positive outcome to this situation in and of itself that is hope. So it’s still a fitting title, as long as it’s parsed as “hope” being a modifier to describe the “searching”, rather than being about searching for hope.

Shuichi: (There’s a sleeve sticking out of the press. It’s… definitely… Kaito’s coat sleeve. In that case… the victim must be…) “…”

I love how hesitant Shuichi is to even voice the idea in his inner monologue. His detective’s instinct is trying to tell him that obviously Kaito’s sleeve being visible means he should assume Kaito is under there, but Shuichi Saihara is digging his heels in and refusing to go along with this.

Shuichi: “…I don’t want to see a crushed body, no matter who it is… but I have to do it. I… have to know.” (I made up my mind, took a breath, and pressed the button.)

Damn, Shuichi is showing some serious freaking courage here to be able to do this. Even if he was pretty sure it wasn’t Kaito under there, there’s still plenty of reason for him to never want to see it – but the thing is, he subconsciously does think it’s Kaito, so that’d be what he’s expecting to see, even if he can’t admit it to himself. It’s incredible that he can do this anyway.

Shuichi: (In that case… we won’t be able to check the body. I’m honestly a little relieved, but I shouldn’t say that out loud.)

Shuichi, literally nobody would blame you for being relieved about this! I’m also incredibly relieved that it is a vital plot point of this case that we never see the body, yeesh.

(I wonder if Shuichi is actually feeling guilty about his relief because he subconsciously expects it to be Kaito and so he’s thinking of this as an excuse to keep running away from the truth for longer.)

Shuichi: (In addition to the control buttons, there’s an ‘Emergency Stop’ button.) […] “Well… if the culprit were planning this murder, they’d have no use for it.”

Yep, that’s definitely never going to be relevant to this crime at all. (To be fair, the culprit never pressed that button.)

For some reason, you have to examine the sleeve again after trying and failing to raise the press in order to get Shuichi to notice the hole in it. I’ve seen a lot of people miss this and then not be allowed to leave the hangar yet and be quite annoyed when they realised what they were missing.

Shuichi: “It looks like… the left sleeve sticking out of the hydraulic press.”

When first-time-me first saw the body discovery cutscene, I immediately assumed that the sleeve hanging down was the sleeve of Kaito’s that always hangs loose – in other words, his right sleeve, and he was (hypothetically, definitely hypothetically) face down in the press. That image got so stuck in my mind that I somehow managed to skim right over the part where Shuichi says here it’s his left sleeve and keep thinking of it wrong until the trial.

It’s honestly a little surprising to me that Shuichi can even tell it’s the left sleeve just by looking at it. Granted, there are buttons on the cuff that would be opposite on each sleeve, but speaking as a fanartist who has drawn Kaito countless times, I can vouch that I never freaking remember which way around the buttons are supposed to go and have to check again every time. Maybe Shuichi can only tell because he has his own jacket sleeves with buttons on to compare it to.

…Wait. Waaaait. My I-have-checked-the-buttons-on-Kaito’s-sleeve-way-too-many-times senses were tingling, so I went and checked yet again to make sure and…

…they’re not even the right way around in this shot of his sleeve if it’s supposed to be the left one! The game’s artists can’t even remember which way around the damn buttons go! Even though I didn’t consciously know this, that may well be why I was instinctively so sure it was the right sleeve at first – because I was right to be!

I have to question, considering that Kokichi was lying on top of the jacket, how the blood that went everywhere didn’t also get all over the jacket sleeve. It should have soaked it to the point of completely obscuring the smaller stain of Kaito’s blood around the arrow hole, you’d think.

Regardless of which sleeve it is, the fact that there is a bloodstained arrow hole in it proves that Kaito was wearing it at some point prior to it dangling outside the press. First-time-me who’d convinced herself it was the right sleeve still didn’t budge at this and I instead somehow decided he must have inexplicably been wearing his jacket differently to how he always does when he was shot, then apparently switched back to wearing it normally before being in the press.

The swipe pattern bloodstain is entirely staged to give the impression that they fought in the bathroom and then the victor dragged the injured/dead loser into the press to crush him. Since that’s not actually what happened, I have to question how there’s no signs of bloodstains from where they actually got injured, all three shots of which happened in the hangar. Perhaps it’s simply because puncture wounds bleed most when the weapon is removed, and Kokichi’s arrows were removed in the bathroom after the antidote shenanigans – but Kaito pulled his arrow out while still in the hangar.

Himiko: “The way you are now… you might start accusing people cuz you can’t believe Kaito’s death…”

Apparently Himiko took Maki’s words seriously about how Shuichi is acting like Kaito in Gonta’s trial and is now thinking Shuichi might accuse someone with no basis just to run away from the truth. I’m sure that red Exisal in the corner would really like to tell her that there’s no way Shuichi would ever do that.

Himiko: “I don’t wanna hear your excuses! Or anything else! Just don’t talk to me!”

Himiko’s acting like this because she’s afraid of being suspected after having given the crossbow to Kaito, but she sure is just making herself look much more suspicious by doing so than if she’d just relax a bit about this.

Shuichi: (The red Exisal is completely still…)

Himiko: “Shuichi, it’s dangerous there… If you go near that thing, you might get torn apart.”

Nope. Not ever. In fact, if anything else happened to be trying to kill Shuichi right now, the vicinity of that red Exisal is probably the single safest place he could stand.

Shuichi: “Ah, but… I suppose that if Kokichi was alive, he could move it at any time by remote…” […] (That is *if* Kokichi is alive…)

Shuichi is very quick to stress to himself that it’s definitely just an “if”. Definitely.

Shuichi: “So this is how it looks on the inside, huh?”

As a Kaito fanartist, I would also like to personally thank the open green Exisal in this hangar for providing practically the only decent reference image for what the inside of an Exisal cockpit looks like. There should be plenty of Kaito fanartists who feel the same way, because Kaito fanartists should have plenty of reason to want to know what an Exisal cockpit looks like… but I might be the only one who does, and that makes me very sad.

(What I’m saying is, more Exisal Kaito fanart, dammit.)

Monokuma shows up as Shuichi is examining the Exisal to talk about the electronic lock on the cockpit that only the Monokubs could unlock. Which on the one hand is him providing relevant information that Shuichi can’t get just by looking at it… but on the other hand, I think he just wants an excuse to be here.

Monokuma: “Of course I want attention! I’m the mascot for cryin’ out loud!”

…Because he also shows up, completely gratuitously, when you talk to Tsumugi. Which makes a lot of sense when you realise that an Electrobomb was used recently in order to break in here, meaning that Monokuma can’t watch the investigation without physically being here and seeing it himself. He’s not going to admit that, hence his usual nonsense as an excuse for showing up, but he definitely wants to see as much of the investigation as he can, especially since he still needs to figure out for himself who actually did it.

Monokuma: “And yet, I’ve appeared fewer times than that Plain Jane Tsumugi over there.”

I like how he complains about getting less attention than the mastermind he’s beholden to.

Monokuma: “It’d be false advertising if I didn’t appear as often as I can, y’know?”

Monokuma, you are not subtle! If you were more subtle then maybe Kokichi wouldn’t have figured you out and you wouldn’t even be in this mess!

(Kaito is probably hearing this and thinking “damn, maybe Kokichi really did have a point about this”, now that he’s aware of the possibility of an audience and can evaluate Monokuma’s words and actions in that light.)

Tsumugi: “A-Advertising? What advertising?”

If you have a problem with him dropping hints like that, you should have programmed him not to, Tsumugi.

Shuichi: “…Ignore it. Let’s just focus on the investigation.”

No, Shuichi, don’t ignore it! It’s actually kind of relevant to this particular investigation!

Upon examining the bathroom door, Shuichi doesn’t quite immediately head inside.

Shuichi: (This is the place where Kaito was imprisoned. Kaito might have left some kinda clue here—) “Ah, no… he didn’t ‘leave’ anything… He might not be dead…”

Much as I love the denial from Shuichi that the writing is going for here, the wording doesn’t quite work for it like it should. “Kaito left some kind of clue” implies more to me that he left it deliberately and therefore most likely isn’t dead. (Which, as it turns out, is exactly what he did!) Maybe this worked better in Japanese, but even in English, “left behind” might be a slightly better way to imply the suggestion that it was done without intent and he’s no longer here.

Also, Shuichi spoke that last part out loud, and the bathroom door is close to the red Exisal, so even if he was speaking pretty quietly under his breath… Kaito probably heard that. He must be feeling such a mix of emotions at hearing Shuichi stubbornly deny that he’s dead like this – on the one hand he’d be happy that Shuichi wants him to be alive and proud that he’s potentially going to figure out the real truth, but on the other hand, Shuichi is clearly so afraid of the alternative, and the plan that Kaito’s going to give it his all to pull off will involve convincing Shuichi that he really is dead and making that fear seem to come true.

Before I start examining any of the actual evidence in the bathroom, let me go off on a tangent: there’s still no toilet paper in here. There wasn’t when Shuichi was last here at the beginning of the chapter, either, but obviously Kaito would have needed some – for more than one reason, given all the blood he was coughing up. So probably the reason that it’s not here any more is that he took the remainder of it with him into the Exisal to keep catching all the blood he was going to keep coughing up while in there. This is definitely a thing that I’m supposed to conclude and not just the game developers not having thought about this at all.

Since Kaito was locked up, it would have been Kokichi who provided him with the toilet paper after shutting him in there. So, please imagine: Kokichi showing up at the bathroom door to awkwardly, wordlessly hand Kaito a roll of toilet paper, which, given what happened with Gonta, makes Kaito just kind of stare at him for a moment like “is this a fucking joke”. (It’s actually not, though, because Kokichi wouldn’t want to remind himself of the murders that were totally not his doing.)

{Later addendum edit: Uhhh, never mind, scratch that, turns out there actually is toilet paper in the bathroom: a whole stack of it here by the sink. I didn’t notice it for a long time because it kinda blends in, and because I was looking for toilet paper on the actual toilet paper dispenser, which is indeed empty.

This stack is here both during the investigation and also during the first time Shuichi explores the hangar in the Daily Life, so unfortunately this removes any real possibility of my silly hypothetical scenario I presented here. Which is a shame. I liked that idea.

(It also slightly lessens the chance of Kaito having some of it with him in the Exisal to catch all the blood he’d be coughing up? But, I mean, he didn’t need to take the whole pile, so this one could still be true.)}

Shuichi: (A body discovery announcement… means the mastermind is still alive… But… I still… don’t believe… That Kaito… is dead.)

There’s a monitor in the bathroom, which you don’t need to investigate, but if you do you get some more delightfully forced denial from Shuichi.

The antidote bottle appears to be labelled “Poison”, but the blood obscures the rest of the label, which really reads “Strike-9 Poison Antidote”. This is a much cleverer trick in Japanese – the word “antidote” in Japanese is the word for “poison” but with a prefix, and that’s the part which is obscured by blood. Imagine if the English word for it were “antipoison”. It’s probably a little easier for a Japanese player to guess that perhaps this was in fact an antidote bottle.

It’s never made clear whether or not the label being obscured by blood to make it look like a bottle of poison was deliberate in order to confuse things further, but it probably was, since the blood ending up on it in this particular way by accident is pretty unlikely.

I commented on the swipe pattern bloodstain earlier, and the bloodstain in the bathroom is also way too neatly patterned, as if there was just one single injury sustained there and then the victim was dragged out. Apparently they managed to fabricate this after the fact, but I feel like there should have been more blood in more places in the bathroom given what actually happened, and that Kokichi’s two arrows were removed in here. Even if they wiped up some of the extra blood, there should still be traces that Shuichi should be able to spot.

Outside the hangar, Keebo is feeling better, which doesn’t actually make sense if you think about it, since the Electrobomb was triggered out here and so this should be the epicentre of the effect making him feel sick.

Keebo: “So what I experienced was akin to an allergic reaction such as hay fever… So it could have affected a human the same way! Being a robot had nothing to do with it!”

Thinking of it as essentially an allergic reaction is a neat way of putting it that makes it equivalent to something humans experience. He doesn’t need to insist that it’s not because he’s a robot – obviously robots would be allergic to different things than humans because their bodies work differently, but it doesn’t mean their allergies don’t still matter!

Keebo recounts how he witnessed Himiko sneaking into the hangar carrying the crossbow case, shortly before he headed there himself to try and negotiate with Kokichi. Which means that Shuichi, Himiko, Keebo and Maki all entered the hangar on their own initiative yesterday to try and be helpful in some way (even if Maki’s idea of “helpful” was very questionable), despite that this wasn’t part of the plan they’d agreed on. The only person who did nothing of the sort is Tsumugi – and it’s quite telling that she’s the odd one out here. She didn’t care about doing something extra to try and help, and she knew Maki would be trying to kill Kokichi and didn’t want to get in the way of that.

Monokuma: “Oh, at the time, the Exisals were on auto-pilot and directed to only observe me.”

You’d think that Shuichi would be able to figure out that they were never really “protecting” him based on the way Monokuma words this here.

Shuichi: “…Why are you telling me all of this? This puts the person controlling you at a disadvantage.”

Monokuma: “But we’re not talking about that… We’re talking about this.”

Shuichi of course thinks Kokichi is the mastermind and therefore that it’s odd for Monokuma to reveal information about what Kokichi did. Monokuma’s response drops a really big hint that Kokichi isn’t actually the mastermind, but it seems to go over Shuichi’s head.

Monokuma: “The person who shared that info with me didn’t seem interested in sharing it with you guys… So you share it instead! That way, it’ll be fair to all participants!”

Meanwhile, here, Monokuma is supposedly referring to Maki, as will be brought up later in the trial. Which is kind of awkward, since I highly doubt this (and we still seem to be talking about the fact that the Exisals were observing him here) is something Maki ever stopped to tell Monokuma. I guess when he’s saying “shared the info”, he doesn’t necessarily mean directly, and it’s simply the fact that Maki hijacking one of the Exisals didn’t cause the others to attack her that let Monokuma realise what was up.

Or Monokuma is simply using Maki’s secrecy as a flimsy excuse to give this information to Shuichi, because really he wants to try and hint at what Kokichi’s real plan was so that Shuichi can figure things out for him in the trial.

‘Exisals Protecting Monokuma’ has been added to the Truth Bullets section of your Monopad.

That’s quite pointedly not what Monokuma just told us, but okay.

Now to briefly head to Maki’s and Shuichi’s labs. Although going to Maki’s is practically unnecessary, since all it’s for is to confirm that there’s one less crossbow case there, which should already be evident from the crossbow in the bathroom.

Shuichi: (I feel as though there are less weapons here than I remember…)

That’s because of Kaito’s Heroic Plan that never actually happened. His pile of weapons is probably still in the gym, alone and forgotten about.

Shuichi: (Case files, lined up for me to read. There’s nothing off about them. They don’t seem to be related.)

What if you just… took a break to read them anyway. Just one? Just the first one? No? You might find it quite enlightening.

None of the other bottles of antidote have the word “Poison” on the label, making it a little bit of a stretch that the Strike-9 one did. Possibly it’s because the full name of that poison is literally “Strike-9 Poison” (the poison bottle on the shelf does say precisely that), but that also makes it harder for players of the localisation to realise the bottle in the hangar might be for an antidote.

Shuichi: (According to the labels, each bottle is only one dose.)

It sure is convenient that these antidotes for completely different poisons happen to all work such that one dose is exactly the same amount and exactly enough to fill one of these bottles, and that the Strike-9 antidote therefore obviously also works that way. Buuuut the plot point of there only being one single dose of antidote is very important and fun, so I don’t actually mind.

Shuichi: (…None of these antidotes are for the Strike-9 poison. They’re all for different poisons. What could that mean?)

Obviously this means the bottle in the hangar is the Strike-9 antidote. But there’s also the question of why some of the other antidotes are even out on the desk in the first place. The game never explicitly explains what this means, but it’s a delightful detail. Consider how Maki was very careful to put the poison bottle back once she’d used it to prepare her arrows, such that Shuichi only noticed it’d been used because it had slightly less in it. But the antidotes? Apparently she just haphazardly grabbed a handful in her haste to find the right one among them, and then afterwards, she didn’t even have the presence of mind to remember she’d left the other ones lying around and put them back to hide the evidence. It’s great how what’s seemingly just there to give the player the information they need to know also serves as a subtle sign of the huge difference in Maki’s state of mind before and after shooting Kaito.

Shuichi: (I didn’t find any evidence to suggest Kaito isn’t dead… On the contrary, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest *Kokichi* isn’t dead. […] Which means… the victim must be…) “No, it’s too soon to be thinking like that. If I investigate a little more, I’ll find something.”

I love how Shuichi desperately tells himself that if he hasn’t found any evidence of Kaito being alive yet, it must be that he hasn’t investigated hard enough and definitely not just that maybe Kaito really isn’t alive after all.

Shuichi: (Perhaps I missed something… I should check again.)

Yes, definitely. That’s definitely all it is, and he’s totally going to find some magical piece of evidence proving Kaito’s survival despite everything if he just looks harder.

So Shuichi returns to the hangar, where Keebo wants to show him something he found in the bathroom… but you can put that off and instead re-investigate everything in the hangar. If you do so, you get the usual text summarising what he deduced when he first investigated the thing, but then also…

Shuichi: “That’s all that stands out to me right now. But I should keep looking.”

[the screen fades to black]

(…)

[the screen fades back in]

Shuichi: (It’s no use. There are no clues here.)

…he does this, for every single item of note that he investigated previously… except for the hydraulic press and the sleeve. Shuichi is so desperate to find even the slightest bit of evidence he might have overlooked that could prove Kaito is alive – but deep down he doesn’t believe it at all, because he can’t bear to look too closely at the press for fear of finding incontrovertible proof that Kaito really is dead. (Which is ironic given that the arrow hole in the sleeve is the main thing suggesting that maybe it’s not really Kaito under there.)

It is also quite amusing that one of the things Shuichi can stubbornly re-investigate in this way is the red Exisal. That actually would give him precisely the miraculous, undeniable proof of Kaito being alive that he so desperately wants, if only he really did manage to investigate it as thoroughly as he could.

Maki is back in the hangar, but she won’t even look at Shuichi.

Maki: “…”

Shuichi: (Maki… Why is it so easy for you to believe Kaito is dead?)

Shuichi cannot understand how someone who is also Kaito’s friend isn’t just as desperate to deny that as he is!

Once you enter the bathroom, Keebo invites Shuichi to investigate Kokichi’s clothes that just turned up in the toilet… but you can still ignore that and re-investigate everything else. This time it makes a lot less sense that Shuichi would do that when massive evidence that might possibly prove Kokichi is dead is right there, but it’s still a thing; Shuichi does the same stubborn lengthy re-inspection of most things in here, which even somehow includes the bathroom window. Yes, Shuichi, that is definitely going to be secretly hiding a clue to Kaito being alive.

As I finally actually investigate the clothes…

Keebo: “Is something the matter? Please, investigate!”

Shuichi: “Ah! O-Okay!” (The Ultimate Detective can’t stop here! This *has* to be an important clue…)

Come on, Shuichi, you’re willing to stare at a window frame for three minutes in the hope that it might tell you Kaito is alive; you should not be hesitating about these having been found in the toilet if you really are that desperate.

Shuichi: (It could mean that he was attacked. In that case… There’s a chance… Kokichi was the one crushed in the hydraulic press!) “Ah, Keebo, thank you! Thank you! This is a very important clue!”

Aww, Shuichi! He’s elated to find proof that maybe his best friend isn’t dead! He was so desperate to find some and he did!

Except… he really, really didn’t. If Shuichi were looking at this objectively and not with the mindset of someone desperate to find even the slightest indication of Kaito’s survival or Kokichi’s death, he’d realise this straight away. Because, sure, it proves Kokichi was injured – but if Kokichi was the victim, why wouldn’t the culprit just leave his clothes on him when they crushed him? That’d be a much better way to hide any evidence of a struggle.

What this really should be taken as evidence of is that Kokichi is very much still alive, and he wanted to hide the evidence that he was injured. That’s clearly precisely why Kokichi took his clothes off before being killed and told Kaito to flush them – to make it look like Kokichi wanted to get rid of them, while having it so that the evidence would eventually be found to make Shuichi (and Monokuma) come to the conclusion that he did that and is therefore still alive.

Keebo: “Oh, I’m happy I was able to help, but I must decline shaking that hand of yours.”

Another testament to Keebo’s humanity – he seems to have a human’s instinctive aversion to germs, despite the fact that they’re not a problem for him personally.

(Also Shuichi was so happy that he just up and tried to shake Keebo’s hand, that’s adorable.)

Shuichi: (But if Kokichi was the one crushed in the hydraulic press… Where did Kaito go? Why not show himself?)

That’s still the million-dollar question, isn’t it, Shuichi. He knows just as well that it’s not remotely like Kaito to hide at a time like this. And the fact that he’s only even asking himself this question now is another sign that he wasn’t nearly as sure that Kaito might be alive as he was trying to be.

Tsumugi: “I wonder where he went off to…”

Shuichi: (Did he disappear? He can’t still be in the hangar…)

In this conversation they’re assuming it’s Kokichi, not Kaito, but whoever the survivor is, there is one place in the hangar he could still be that hasn’t occurred to Shuichi.

(And Shuichi totally could check that place, if only it occurred to him as a possibility. There are still four fully-charged Electrohammers lying presumably somewhere near the entrance after everyone dropped them in shock upon seeing the body. Using one of them on that red Exisal would have cut this whole trial very awkwardly short.)

Tsumugi: “Kokichi’s been manipulating us all from the start… I can’t believe someone like that could be killed by Kaito…”

Shuichi: “…”

Tsumugi: “Ah! Of course, I don’t mean to compliment Kokichi or make fun of Kaito or anything!”

I mean, for not having meant to do that, you sure were making Kaito sound kind of pathetic, Tsumugi. Why would he not hypothetically be able to kill Kokichi just because Kokichi has been manipulative?

Monokuma: “It’s time for the class trial, where hope and despair meet head-on!”

Welp, now that we’ve opened up the connection to the original Danganronpas, Monokuma is going to be throwing those words around like confetti.

Monokuma: “Everyone needs to be there, got it!? Anyone who’s absent will be swiftly and permanently punished!”

Monokuma has to know that the survivor is inside the red Exisal, even if he doesn’t have a clue who it is. He didn’t see anyone leave the hangar last night, and there’s only one place in the hangar he could be hiding.

You really don’t need to threaten him to get him to come, though, Monokuma. He has no intention of running away from this.

Monokuma: “I wonder what kinda despair awaits you this time!”

Yeah, you definitely do wonder, don’t you.

Tsumugi: “This isn’t everyone… right?”

Shuichi: “…Kaito and Kokichi aren’t here.”

I think you mean “or”, Shuichi. You have at least managed to accept that one of them is definitely dead.

Maki: “As the mastermind of the killing game, he’s waiting for us to arrive.”

Shuichi: “… We… don’t know that yet. There’s still a chance Kaito is alive.”

Maki: “…Cut it out. Do you want to die?”

Maki still cannot bear to hear Shuichi talk like Kaito might be alive when she knows he isn’t.

Maki: “This is a battle between hope and despair. If I show any weakness like you are… then I know I’ll lose to despair.”

Maki, you’re already in despair! You’re losing to it right now! Shuichi is winning against it because he’s still managing to hope that Kaito might be alive!

This is still Maki being brainwashed by the wrong meanings of those words and the idea that “despair” is a person who can be defeated, specifically Kokichi. That “defeating despair” is such a necessary outcome that it’s even worth sacrificing all of her friends to do. The “weakness” she’s afraid of showing is the thought that she might hesitate to sacrifice them and in doing so let despair “win”, just because Kokichi will live and Kaito will have died for nothing.

Maki: “Six of us will participate, and one of us will die after this class trial… Then only five will be left. Only… five…”

She means this the other way around: one will survive, and five will die. She’s trying to psych herself up for making this sacrifice by telling herself that she’ll be killing only five more people, trying to make it seem like a tiny number compared to the countless people she’s already killed, trying to think of it as just a number and not four of her friends. She’s trying to tell herself it’ll be worth it.

Maki: “But we can’t lose to despair. Even if we have no future, we need to win.”

If we have no future, we have nothing to hope for and we’ve already lost to despair! Danganronpa 2’s thing of insisting that the “future” was somehow an entirely different concept to “hope” was also very silly and misunderstanding the words, considering that their whole concept of the future was simply something that the characters were hoping for.

Maki: “That is… the whole point of this class trial.”

Guhhh. It is to her, and it shouldn’t be.

(But the real point of this whole class trial is so that somebody can have his final chance to make a difference and be a hero.)

Maki: “I will defeat Kokichi, no matter what I have to sacrifice.”

Maki Roll! It’s not worth it! Even if Kokichi really was the thoroughly evil mastermind he claimed to be, it still wouldn’t be! She’s been so completely taken in by the bullshit from the Flashback Light and then broken by her despair over killing Kaito and it’s heartbreaking. You don’t really want this at all, Maki.

Shuichi: (No matter what she has to sacrifice? Are you sure about that, Maki? Is that what you call ‘hope’?)

Right, Shuichi!? It’s not hope, is it!?

Shuichi: (I wonder what Kaito would say at a time like this. What would he say to us? If it was Kaito…)

The first thing he’d say is that he believes in you, of course! That’s still true, even if Kaito really is gone. It’s adorable (and a little heartbreaking) that Shuichi depends on his support so much that he’s just instinctively trying to turn to Kaito for help even though he’s not there.

Kaito would also have a lot of emphatic things to say to Maki about her current state of mind, things which should be able to get through to her and stop her from doing this. But of course Maki has not and cannot let herself consider what Kaito would be saying to her right now and what he would want for her. Thinking about how much he’s done for her and how grateful she was to him just hurts too much when she repaid it all by killing him.

Shuichi: (We had lost the will to live, knowing what we know about the outside world. But somehow… despite that despair, we had found a new reason to live.)

Yeah. Somehow.

Shuichi: (To win the battle between hope and despair.)

The way he talks about it like it’s a “battle” is probably one of the best ways to illustrate the issue with the meanings that the Flashback Light has been giving those words for them. They’ve essentially just become equivalent to “good” and “evil”, and therefore obviously the good guys just need to defeat the bad guys, right?

Shuichi: (We don’t know what hope means to us anymore.)

You sure don’t, but not for the reason you appear to be thinking of here, Shuichi.

Shuichi: (What is hope…? A burden you bear?)

In a way, it kind of is. Holding onto the hope for something you desperately want to be true, but not being certain of it (because as soon as it becomes certain then it’s not hope any more, just relief and happiness) comes with the constant terror that it’ll never happen after all and you’ll end up back in despair. The fact that Shuichi is thinking of it this way suggests that he knows this very well himself – after all, he’s been feeling like this for this entire investigation.

But also, if we’re talking about “hope” as being the thing you inspire others to feel, like they’re all supposed to have done as students of Hope’s Peak… then maybe that’s a burden too. You have to live up to your image of greatness in order to inspire people, right? That pressure to do that is one hell of a burden, and you can’t share it with anyone because if they knew you were struggling then you wouldn’t be able to inspire them any more!

(Why yes I totally did just make this about Kaito’s issues; what did you expect me to do when Shuichi invoked the word “burden” like that.)

The courtroom décor this time is a deliberate throwback to the very first trial from Danganronpa 1. Which just goes to show that everyone really is a bunch of mindlessly nostalgic genwunners, because that was one of the weakest trials in the series!

Monokuma: “Ahh, a battle like this takes me back. After all, hope and despair are natural enemies.”

Are you sure you’re talking about hope and despair, Monokuma, or do you just mean good and evil as well?

Monokuma: “Yes, this truly is a magnificent theme. Puhuhu… Only esteemed works of fiction have themes as magnificent as this.”

Geez, you were obvious about this being made for entertainment, but you were never this obvious about it being fiction, not even when Kokichi was still alive to pick up on your hints.

(Also, turns out truth versus lies is a much more fun theme than hope versus despair, so, eh, not really, Monokuma.)

Maki: “Anyway… where’s Kokichi? Why isn’t he here?”

Maki was probably still hoping she could just murder him to death here with her knife right away to avoid having to go through with the sacrifice. Even though she was most likely also imagining he’d be expecting that and would have some way to protect himself.

Keebo: “Kokichi can twist and violate the rules all he likes, but we’ll never give up!” […]

Monokuma: “Oh, for the love of… No rules have been violated on my watch, y’know?”

Yeah, definitely none, not even in the first trial. And you sure won’t violate any this trial either, will you?

Shuichi: (Was the one who died… Kaito or Kokichi? I can’t say for certain… but I still believe. …Kaito wouldn’t die so easily. I… don’t know why I believe that so strongly…)

Because Kaito is stubborn and indomitable and ridiculous, and it doesn’t seem right that he could just up and die such a sudden, meaningless death, does it? It wouldn’t be a good story befitting of a hero like him at all to just die like that, right?

Shuichi: (But I will fight to prove it.)

He’s not here to survive, or to find the truth, like in every previous class trial. He just wants to prove his best friend is still alive.

---

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commentaryvorg · 5 years

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Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 4.16

Last time, we finally finished up the trial proper of trial 4 (trial 4!!!!!!), which took so many posts because I had about a million things to say about all the best parts. Kaito’s faith was truly blind for once, his desperation to deny the truth produced the best deduction he’d ever come up with (which was still completely wrong), Shuichi tried to reach out to him and help, which only made Kaito push him further away, and Kaito literally, provably still could not accept the truth in the end.

Now it’s the post-trial conclusion, in which Everyone Is Suffering.

Monokuma: “Well, look at that! You voted correctly!”

Well, most of them did. It’d be kind of fun if Monokuma straight-up called Kaito out for voting wrong, but I do enjoy how Kaito refusing to accept the truth in the end is so relatively understated, like so much is with him.

Kaito: “Dammit… why!?”

Kaito finally speaks again… and of course it’s to desperately wonder why.

Monokuma: “Hey, Kokichi… You said this would liven things up. What gives, huh?”

I… don’t see what your problem is, Monokuma. Look at all this delicious despair you’re surrounded by right now, all thanks to Kokichi.

Kokichi: “Ah-haha, that was juuust a lie.”

…It wasn’t, though? You did liven things up, a lot.

Shuichi: “Are you satisfied, Kokichi? I want you to tell us. What is the outside world? Is it the motive you gave Gonta?”

So despite his justification of Gonta’s motive in the Closing Argument being the consciousness error, it seems like Shuichi’s also thinking of the possibility that there was an actual proper motive too. Kokichi never mentioned during the trial that the motive might have had anything to do with the outside world, but apparently Shuichi figured out that possibility anyway.

Here’s Alter Ego Gonta! Of all the deliberately gratuitous Danganronpa gen wun references in this game, this one is probably my favourite, because Alter Ego was a good.

Alter Ego Gonta: “Huh? What this? What happening?”

This must be so weird for him. The last thing he’d remember is trying to log out, and then this. How is he even experiencing this? Is he just, like, in some dark void where he can see a screen that’s showing him what the laptop’s camera sees? Probably something like that.

Alter Ego Gonta: “G-Gonta not understand… Who this ‘Alter Ego’ person?”

Of course he’d be confused about all this talk of him being a computer simulation and not understand that he’s technically not the real thing. Gonta is Gonta, right? How can Gonta not be the real Gonta?

Alter Ego Gonta: “Kill Miu…? Why does other Gonta know about—”

It’s actually kind of surprising that Alter Ego Gonta wasn’t expecting another version of himself to know about this. Wouldn’t he imagine the other Gonta would have the same memories as him? I guess he’s thinking of this as a Gonta from an entirely different world that didn’t have a reason to do any of this in the first place.

Alter Ego Gonta: “Then… Gonta no could save everyone?”

He just wanted to save everyone. Like every other selfless murderer in this game. I love all these selfless murderers.

Alter Ego Gonta: “Gonta think he gotta do it, cuz everyone else not want to. So… Gonta kill Miu.”

Kaito: “What do you mean by that? I… I don’t get it at all!”

This is the first thing of substance Kaito has said in quite a while, and just like his brief line earlier, it’s about wanting to understand. Kaito has always made a point about wanting to understand the killer’s reasons after every single trial (even with Kiyo), and this time more than ever he needs to do so otherwise he’s never going to be able to deal with this. He must have been hoping that hearing from the Gonta who actually did this would help him understand and accept this, but right now this still doesn’t make any sense at all.

(Which is fair, because Alter Ego Gonta’s explanation is currently missing out the rather important detail of why he considered killing Miu to be a necessary evil that no-one else would have wanted to do.)

Maki: “The secret of the outside world in the Virtual World was about the Flashback Light?”

Kokichi: “And, if it was the Flashback Light… it would mean the secret of the outside world is part of our forgotten memories.”

So, in other words, if Kokichi hadn’t figured out when he first saw the outside world that Flashback Lights can contain fake memories, he definitely has now. At this point, he remembers the world’s complete annihilation, yet he also knows it cannot possibly be the truth.

Kokichi: “This might be a trap, y’know? Shouldn’t you check if I’m lying first? I mean… you wanna protect everyone, right? This is the perfect time to do it.”

Gonta: “P-Protect everyone…?”

[Gonta rushes to use the Flashback Light]

Of course that would be how Kokichi made sure Gonta viewed the Flashback Light there while they were alone – by manipulating his desire to protect everyone yet again.

Alter Ego Gonta: “But that… just confuse Gonta more about what to do… What can Gonta do to save everyone…? Gonta no could think of anything…”

Kokichi: “So I told him. If he wants to save everyone, he should put everyone out of their misery. In other words… a mercy kill.”

Note how Gonta was not the one who came up with the mercy kill idea. That was suggested to him by Kokichi. So yes, okay, Gonta did choose of his own volition to commit murder given the situation he was in – but had he been on his own, the option of doing this would probably never have even occurred to him. He’s just too kind for something like that to cross his mind even when in that desperate state of mind.

A mercy kill is not the only way to deal with such a horrible truth, either. A more risky but less murdery way of trying to save everyone would have been to do essentially what Angie was trying to do: make everyone happy inside the academy and stop them from wanting to leave, in which case they’d never kill each other and never find out about the outside world. If Gonta had realised that was also an option, it’s entirely likely that he would have chosen to try and do that instead since it wouldn’t involve hurting anyone. But Gonta has always been confused as to what the right thing to do is such that neither of these options occurred to him, so when Kokichi presented the mercy kill like it was the only option, he felt like he had to do it.

Gonta: “Was Gonta… tricked!?”

Alter Ego Gonta: “No, you not tricked. Cuz, when Gonta remember secret of outside world, Gonta think… it would be easier… to die.”

I do like that the writing stresses this contrast between what Gonta assumes and what Alter Ego Gonta insists. Throughout the trial, first-time-me had been convinced that Gonta was genuinely just tricked and manipulated into this, so it’s nice that actually he had more of his own agency that one might expect and that he made the choice to do this awful thing knowing full well how awful it was.

That said, he still was tricked. Kokichi knew that the secret of the outside world was one big fat lie by the gamemakers, and yet he showed it to Gonta anyway while letting him think it was the truth. Then he acted like a mercy killing was the only possible option so that of course Gonta would choose to do that, given the kind of person he is.

Remember that one time Kokichi tried to insist that lies are what gives the world free will, and I argued that actually lies give people less free will if anything? Yeeeaaaahhh, that’s especially applicable here. Gonta believed he was choosing this of his own free will, when really he was manipulated into thinking it was his only reasonable option by the combination of something Kokichi knew was an outright lie (the outside world being in ruins) and a smaller white lie (acting like the mercy kill was the only reasonable way to deal with this).

It’s a lot like how Kirumi was manipulated into thinking she had to escape in order to save everyone outside by the Flashback-Light-induced lie in her motive video. Except this time, the gamemakers weren’t the only ones using the lie; Kokichi used it too.

Kokichi: “Gonta took on the dirty work for us. If he had survived the class trial, he would’ve lived in this hell alone… Gonta took on that role for us! Shouldn’t we appreciate him more!?”

Literally everybody here already appreciated Gonta plenty, you dick. The only person who didn’t properly appreciate him is the person who took advantage of his self-sacrificial nature in order to push him to do this when they knew it wasn’t necessary, and got him killed for it. Someone’s deflecting, as usual.

Kaito: “Wait a minute! I still don’t get what’s happening!”

I love how panicked Kaito is by the fact that he still doesn’t get it. He needs to understand this. He has to.

This should be enough to explain it by now, but I suppose with Kaito’s unshakeable optimism, he would find it hard to comprehend how anything could be so awful that it would make Gonta believe that killing everyone is the only way out. But Gonta is still the person you believe in, Kaito, and that’s the important part! He’s just… not quite as strong as you’d hoped he was. Just like Kaede.

Alter Ego Gonta: “Sorry! Gonta no can tell you!”

Shuichi: “Can’t tell us!? Why!?”

Alter Ego Gonta: “B-Because… if Gonta tell you, then… everyone will end up like Gonta… Everyone… despair.”

Of course Gonta can’t tell them. Of course he doesn’t want anyone else to suffer the way he’s suffering. He wanted to protect them from that so badly that he was willing to kill them all rather than let them find out. Anyone who genuinely cared so much that they were willing to go to such extremes for that outcome would never give up on it no matter what happened.

(They’d never turn around and stop fighting for the mercy kill halfway through the trial, and they certainly wouldn’t suddenly up and outright show everyone the outside world a couple of days later either, is my point. Have I mentioned that it is simply not possible that Kokichi could have ever wanted this.)

Keebo: “Despair!?”

Whoops, that word set off all the mindless Danganronpa fans inside Keebo’s head. I’m pretty sure this is the first time we’ve heard that word all game! Which is definitely deliberate.

Kokichi: “I… know it… A despair that makes you want to die… A despair that makes you want to put everyone out of their misery…”

No, you don’t, because you never believed that despair was the truth in the first place.

I’m not saying Kokichi doesn’t essentially know a kind of despair, namely the despair of being stuck in this awful killing game that he hates and sees no escape from, which he’s felt from the very beginning. But that’s not the despair he’s talking about here, and he certainly doesn’t give two fucks about how anybody else is being affected by the kind of despair he’s feeling either.

Miu: “I-I’m sorry, but… you should just give up. This is… my only chance. I have no choice but to do this… My inventions will change the world… They’ll make the world a better place! It’s my duty as a genius inventor! S-So, I can’t afford to die here—”

I really enjoy this! Miu was trying to do this simply because she was terrified of being murdered and selfishly wanted to survive at everyone else’s expense. Yet she knew she was being selfish and doing an awful thing, so she couldn’t bring herself to do it without desperately trying to justify to herself that it’s not selfish and she needs to survive because she’s important and this is about the whole world. Her issues this entire time (which I’ve never been willing to talk about because they’ve been smothered in her awful unnecessary sexual references) have been about her feeling horribly inferior and covering it up with desperate, obnoxious, obviously-fake insistence that she’s the best and everyone should love her, so it’s great that that also ties in with her paranoia-driven decision to become a selfish murderer here. Miu really could have been an interesting character! She is, sometimes! I just absolutely despise what the writers did with her the other like 80% of the time and aaargh.

And if Miu hadn’t hesitated like this and taken so long psyching herself up for it with this big justifying speech, she might have been able to actually kill Kokichi – because Gonta didn’t jump to attack her the first opportunity he got, since he was almost certainly also desperately trying to psyche himself up for it during that time.

[Gonta begins strangling Miu]

Gonta: “S-Sorry…! Gonta so sorry…!”

[Kokichi heads for the rooftop door and unlocks it]

Kokichi: “Don’t be sorry, Gonta. She was trying to kill me too. She said it was for the world or whatever, but that was just a poor excuse. We’re doing this to stop the vicious cycle of misery! So you don’t need to apologize.”

[Miu’s avatar collapses, and Gonta falls to his knees]

Gonta: “B-But… but…! Ergh… nrgh…! Gonta sorry! Gonta so sorry, Miu!”

Kokichi: “I already said you don’t need to apologize. We had to do this for everyone’s sake.”

This is another of the bits which make me believe that a part of Kokichi does feel bad about this: the way he insistently tells Gonta not to apologise here.

Even using Kaito’s principles regarding apologies, Gonta probably still has every reason to be apologising for this. Yes, he believes it’s for an end goal that’s worth it, but he is still deliberately choosing to hurt someone in aid of that end goal. That hurt deserves to be apologised for, because, you know, taking responsibility for your actions and the pain you cause. Kokichi, on the other hand, has his own very different “principles” that go approximately “nothing I do is ever bad so I don’t need to apologise for anything, but if anyone else does anything that’s bad for me then how dare they”.

So the only reason he tells Gonta not to apologise is that Gonta being this emotionally tormented by what he’s done is… apparently actually getting to Kokichi somewhat. Gonta is making it so obvious that murder is bad and you should feel bad if you murder someone and that he in particular feels awful for it, and haha nope Kokichi’s not having any of that, not the fact that he also murdered Miu and should feel bad about it, nor the fact that he’s making Gonta suffer this much for no reason. Kokichi’s animations seem impatient and angry as he’s telling Gonta not to apologise, making it clear that he’s not doing it because he selflessly cares about how Gonta’s feeling and wants to limit his suffering, but because he’s annoyed that Gonta’s apologising is making him feel bad about all this, how dare he, stop making Kokichi regret this obviously terrible decision that he can’t take back any more.

He claims it’s for everyone’s sake, but it was never about that, because he knows that’s all a lie anyway. It’s ironically very similar to the way Miu was just insisting to herself that she needs to do this, using things she knew were only an excuse, to try and stop herself from feeling bad about becoming a murderer. Kokichi could tell that’s what Miu was doing, but of course he’s not doing exactly the same thing, right?

Also of note is Kokichi moving around to the door almost as soon as Gonta starts strangling Miu so that he can’t even see her face (or Gonta’s) as she dies. Shuichi pictured Kokichi continuing to stand in front of Miu, if still not facing her directly, but it turns out he was being even more avoidant about it than that.

Kokichi: “You should know that it was Gonta’s idea to slide the body to the chapel wall.”

Gonta: “What? Gonta’s idea?”

Alter Ego Gonta: “Before Gonta went to the roof, he happened to see… Miu walk through the wall. Gonta tell Kokichi, and he think of everything else…”

So, not Gonta’s idea at all then. Gonta accidentally happened across information that allowed Kokichi to come up with that idea, that’s all.

Kokichi: “I like to think… we make a pretty good team.”

Only if “one person comes up with literally the entire murder plan, and the other shoulders literally all the moral responsibility of killing someone” counts as being a “team”.

Kaito: “Well, I mean, hearing that story, it sounds like you were tricked by Kokichi.”

Kaito’s right, but… definitely more by luck than judgement. Without knowing the “truth” of the outside world, he can’t comprehend how something could be so awful that it could push Gonta this far, so he’s assuming there was trickery involved, in order to make himself able to accept this. There was, but not in the way Kaito’s thinking.

Alter Ego Gonta: “Gonta not save anyone… Gonta just make everyone suffer more… Gonta… is stupid! So stupid! How can Gonta call himself gentleman!?”

Because you tried, Gonta! You tried as hard as you could to save everyone in the situation you were presented with, and it’s not for lack of you trying that it failed! (And it most certainly isn’t your fault that doing this actually wasn’t the appropriate way to save everyone because you couldn’t possibly have known that you’d been lied to.) A gentleman shouldn’t have to be someone who always succeeds at everything, just someone who always tries to!

(The same could be said about heroes, by the way.)

Kokichi: “But… you reached for the truth. And Gonta’s plan failed. All of you could have been saved if you died without knowing anything…”

No, Kokichi. You told them the truth. All of them could have potentially been “saved” if you hadn’t said anything. He is conveniently forgetting to mention that right now.

Kokichi: “Gonta even killed Miu for that sake, y’know?”

Kaito: “Enough of your shit! You made him kill her!”

Kaito is still a little off in his assumptions about the kind of trickery involved, but even so, and even if you take this at the face value that’s being claimed, Kokichi is still partially responsible for Miu’s death. Kaito does not appreciate the way he’s refusing to acknowledge that and pushing all the responsibility onto Gonta.

Gonta: “Sorry! Gonta is sorry he fail everyone… Gonta is sorry for being stupid! Gonta is sorry he make everyone suffer! Gonta is so sorry!”

Gonta’s whole arc throughout the entire game and especially this chapter has been focused on him desperately trying to help everyone in whatever way he can… but in the end he’s going to die feeling like he failed everyone in the worst possible way and it’s heartbreaking. Especially for this Gonta, who technically didn’t even do anything wrong if we go by the argument that memories make a person who they are, which is an argument we can’t not go with in this story.

(You might note that Kaito is not trying to tell Gonta not to apologise even though he’s just making himself feel even worse without deserving it.)

Kokichi: “You’re probably all thinking that I should’ve taken on the dirty work and not Gonta, right? Everyone… hates me… so the role of villain is perfect for me…”

Everyone hates you because you’re constantly being a villain. It’s not the other way around.

Like, okay, granted, maybe in his past he was persecuted and hated without having done anything to deserve it and that’s why he started acting like a villain the whole time to protect himself from that. (Though it sure would be easier to sympathise with that if we knew literally anything about it!) But even if that’s true, at this point it’s just become a self-perpetuating cycle and now he’s bringing it upon himself. Nobody here has treated Kokichi in a way that he didn’t already thoroughly deserve based on how he’d been acting.

Kokichi: “Yeah, I know already! It should have been my responsibility!”

If you really were willing to accept responsibility for killing Miu, then why don’t you do so right now, Kokichi? After all, you still did kill Miu, just not directly.

Kokichi: “That’s why I had to ask Gonta! I would have done it myself if I could!”

Yeah, no. Hypothetically, if this was about the mercy kill, and if Miu hadn’t had some failsafe to protect herself from Kokichi, I’m still not remotely convinced Kokichi would have done it himself, based on the fact that he’s not even capable of accepting his actual responsibility in Miu’s death here. If ever any of his plans gave him the choice between murdering someone directly or indirectly, he would always choose the indirect option, to allow him to tell himself he’s not really killing anyone. This here is just another excuse, deflecting the deflection, so that he can insist he’s not wilfully running away from any responsibility at all.

Kaito: “Okay, but… You didn’t need to push everything onto Gonta to—”

Kaito is so good. He seems to be willing to buy Kokichi’s story that he genuinely cared about this! (Which is fair, since the story is plausible as long as you’ve forgotten that Kokichi threw Gonta under the bus in the trial, something he’s conveniently not reminding them of, and he does sound reasonably genuinely emotional about it, because it’s rooted in part in genuine emotion that he’s telling himself is all a lie like a lot of Kokichi’s displays are.) Despite everything Kokichi’s putting them though, Kaito would still rather take the interpretation that Kokichi is a vaguely decent person if that interpretation can be made to make sense, because Kaito wants to believe the best in everyone if he can!

But, even accepting that story, Kaito still can’t stand the way that Kokichi is pushing literally all the responsibility onto Gonta for Miu’s death. What Kaito’s trying to tell Kokichi here is exactly what I was just saying – to take some of the responsibility for Miu’s death himself, because some of it is rightfully his, whether he killed her directly or not.

Gonta: “Stop! It’s okay! Everyone, please… Don’t… blame Kokichi anymore…”

Of course Gonta would say this, though. He doesn’t understand the situation well enough to appreciate that it’s partly Kokichi’s fault – all he knows is that he did an awful thing, and he’s hating himself for it so much that he feels that he’s the only one who deserves to suffer for it no matter what the rest of the situation is.

Kokichi: “Gonta… you…!”

Don’t act so surprised, Kokichi, you knew full well Gonta is the kind of person who would take the responsibility all upon himself, and that’s probably part of the reason you chose him to be your pawn here.

See, despite how genuine Kokichi’s expression looks here, he’s still mostly acting. If he truly wanted to take some of the responsibility for himself and was moved by Gonta saying he didn’t have to, then the correct response would be to insist that no, he should take some of the blame, Gonta shouldn’t be heaping absolutely all of it onto himself.

Gonta: “Someone as stupid as Gonta could never be a gentleman—”

Being a gentleman was never about being smart, Gonta! You are the best gentleman.

Kokichi: “Wait! If you’re gonna punish him, then please… punish me too.”

Shuichi: “Kokichi…?”

Kokichi: “I’m prepared for it! If you’re gonna execute Gonta, then I—”

Nope. Kokichi knows perfectly well that Gonta is the kind of person who wouldn’t let him do this – he literally just took all of the moral responsibility upon himself, so of course he would also take all of the physical punishment upon himself too. Kokichi would know that making this move is completely safe and won’t get him killed.

And okay, maybe that tiny part of him that actually does hate what he did to Gonta is having a bit more of a say than normal and kind of does hate himself enough to want to die for it. But the rest of Kokichi that stubbornly wants to “win” the killing game no matter what and refuses to acknowledge any kind of responsibility for anything ever is still mostly in the driving seat right now and isn’t going to let himself die just yet. He’s able to let that suppressed part of him seem like it’s in control while having no conscious intent to get himself killed. This is just a very elaborate, for-once-not-overexaggerated example of all those times he displayed something based in his genuine emotions while telling himself it was totally all a lie.

Gonta: “Just promise Gonta… that everyone forgive each other and be friends. Okay?”

It’s going to be very hard to forgive Kokichi for killing you, Gonta! Especially considering that he is never going to show the slightest shred of remorse for it. I know that Gonta just wants to be reassured that everyone is going to be okay once he’s gone, but it’s hard to be able to promise that when someone who would throw two people’s lives away as pawns in his own selfish plan is still among us.

Kokichi: “…Alright, I promise.”

No, you don’t. Since Kokichi’s the one who did something wrong, his part in this promise would be to become someone who deserves to be forgiven, meaning he’d need to acknowledge that he did an awful thing and start trying to make amends for it. Fat chance of that.

Kokichi: “W-Wait, please! I don’t want this! Don’t go, Gonta!”

Oh, now you don’t want this? Well, maybe you should have realised that before you made it happen. It is way too fucking late to be saying this now. You did this, very consciously and deliberately. Now deal with it.

For once, I’m putting the part of Kokichi that actually does care about this down to a little bit more than just basic human decency. While he’s never shown any indication of caring about anyone else’s pain, the signs I’ve pointed out indicate that Kokichi was at least somewhat affected by Gonta’s emotional suffering and not just the fact that he’s about to die now. Which means that on some level Kokichi did care about Gonta as a person, at least a little bit. It makes sense that Gonta would be the one person Kokichi might feel some level of attachment to, since Gonta never stopped thinking of Kokichi as a friend and a decent person and openly cared about him despite how little he’d done to deserve it. Kokichi is always terrified that people will betray him, but if anyone is going to be so obviously genuine and trustworthy that even Kokichi might realise they really wouldn’t stab him in the back, it’d be Gonta… so maybe Kokichi did start to believe that just a little bit. (That might be why it seemed to get to him so much in the trial when he thought Gonta was still lying about not knowing anything: because with Gonta being apparently more of a liar than Kokichi expected, it felt like he was being betrayed?)

Kokichi makes such a big deal about being a liar partly so that nobody will ever want to trust him, which gives him an excuse not to trust or get attached to anybody else in turn, so that he doesn’t have to worry about being betrayed. But that protective shell of his was never going to work on Gonta, simply because it’s Gonta. It’s ironic that the exact blind faith Kokichi kept insisting was clearly the idiotic way to see things, the kind of naïve belief that everyone is always good rather than Kokichi’s naïve belief that everyone is always bad, was exactly what it took from Gonta to make Kokichi start to somewhat care about and maybe even ever-so-slightly trust someone. Gonta got through to that vague semblance of a decent person inside Kokichi more than anyone else ever did, even Kaito.

…But it still clearly wasn’t enough, since Kokichi repaid Gonta’s kindness and trust by taking advantage of it and getting him killed. Every single bit of the pain he’s feeling at what happens to Gonta here is entirely his fault and entirely deserved. Ideally he should learn from this and try to become a better person. He’s not going to.

Gonta: “Gonta’s… really not scared… B-But… Gonta upset! Gonta upset… he no could protect everyone!”

Oh, Gonta. Of course he wouldn’t be scared to sacrifice himself for everyone’s sake when protecting everyone is what he’s desperately wanted to do this whole time. He’s just sad that he couldn’t have done it in a better way that isn’t this much of a tragic failure.

Gonta: “Gonta love you all!”

These are real-Gonta’s final words, and god, platonic “I love you”s melt my heart every time. Gonta is so pure and precious and of course he loves everyone here. They love you too, Gonta. (Even Kokichi kind of somewhat did, and that’s saying a hell of a lot coming from him.) You were the best and truest gentleman.

Alter Ego Gonta: “Gonta is so sorry… for being stupid!”

You’re not stupid! You’re the Gonta who remembers what Kaito said to you about how people who are stupid aren’t constantly thinking of how to save everyone else! That makes you one of the smartest people here!

So… I am extremely Not Okay with Gonta’s execution. I can still watch the thing, because I’ve become desensitised enough to these executions by now, but that doesn’t mean I remotely approve. Remember what I said back in chapter 1 about how some executions bother me because the character stops being a character and just becomes an object for this horrifying deathtrap? Yeah, exactly this. There’s no sense that the Gonta in the execution is still Gonta, our precious friend and gentleman who tried so hard, and not just a Gonta-shaped object. He said just moments ago how upset he felt that he’d failed everyone, but there’s no indication of that in this scene.

I do get that the writers made it so brutal because they wanted to emphasise how much this is making everybody else suffer to have to watch it, but they could still have done that while having Gonta still be a character, and honestly that’d probably have had more impact.

(Narrative purpose of the brutality aside, Gonta deserved to go to fluffy bug heaven, much like another DR character who was executed in a chapter 4. You know he did.)

Also, the execution music has lyrics? Which means that apparently the composer hasn’t forgotten about execution music lyrics and isn’t averse to putting them in the execution tracks in this game. These lyrics are something about the bottom of the ocean, which sure has literally nothing to do with anything that’s happening. Maybe there’s some secret law that states execution lyrics are only allowed when they’re completely irrelevant to the execution itself or something.

(I’m totally not mentioning this for a specific reason, of course.)

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commentaryvorg · 5 years

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Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 5.1

Last time at the end of trial 4 after losing our precious gentleman friend, Kokichi switched from the huge lie with a grain of truth to it he’d been telling before the execution to a different huge lie with a grain of truth to it while still dodging all responsibility for murdering anyone, Kaito’s worst fear came true, almost, but he desperately tried to paper over it and insist it wasn’t really true at all, Shuichi tried to reach out and help him even more obviously and literally and Kaito could not let that happen, and Kokichi was still thoroughly lying to himself about everything (as opposed to Kaito, whose lies are mostly just to everyone else).

Now it’s time to move from my favourite chapter to my other favourite chapter!

Voyage Without Passion or Purpose

This chapter title is about SPACE. Mostly the in-universe story in which they left the ruined Earth while none of them really wanted to, a voyage which then ended up with even less passion or purpose once they were brought back to Earth and started killing each other anyway. But it’s also relevant to the one person who actually does end up going to space in this chapter, who, in contrast to the intended point of his “voyage”, will still manage to have passion and purpose while doing so.

And on that note, let’s skip this chapter’s terrible excuse for an opening stinger (some meaningless Monokuma nonsense about his dead cubs) and get to the real opening stinger of the chapter, which is, of course, Kaito being totally fine, what else?

Shuichi: (Even in such a dark time, one of us was still bright, trying to cheer us all up…)

That’s exactly why Kaito’s going to be acting this way! It’s not for his own sake – it’s to keep everyone else’s spirits up, because right now they need that more than ever, and Kaito is better at doing that than anyone. If even Kaito was acting down and gloomy right now, things really would seem hopeless, and he can’t let that happen.

(Also I love how Shuichi’s metaphor describes Kaito as “bright”. He’s a luminary!)

Kaito: “Geez, don’t be stupid, guys. There’s no way I’d die, y’know? Cuz I’m Kaito Momota! Luminary of the Stars!”

Obviously. Because he’s the Luminary of the Stars. He’s an invincible hero, right? The notion that he could be weak and dying is just stupid.

Tsumugi: “Are you really okay…?”

People Not Convinced: 1/5.

Kaito: “I’m telling you! I’m just fine! I wasn’t feeling great yesterday, but after a good night’s sleep I’m all better. I’m 100% better now!”

Yes, because what everyone saw last night is definitely something that can be completely fixed with one night of sleep. If he tried to claim he’s still not at 100% but was at least feeling better enough that they don’t need to worry about him, it might be more believable, but this?

Himiko: “But… there’s no way you’d get better so quickly after coughing up that much bloo—”

People Not Convinced: 2/5.

Kaito: “I told you, didn’t I? I just coughed too much and cut my throat a little, that’s all.”

Nobody believed you then, Kaito; they shouldn’t believe you now. But maybe now that a night has passed, he’s hoping people might have slightly forgotten just how much blood there was, or might be able to be convinced that their memories are exaggerating it due to the shock of seeing any blood at all.

Or maybe he’s just hoping that if he stubbornly insists this enough times, people will start to think it might somehow be true anyway because surely he wouldn’t keep telling such an obvious lie.

Keebo: “Are you sure you’re not pushing yourself too hard? Or suffering from a chronic illness—”

People Not Convinced: 3/5.

(Kaito is absolutely pushing himself too hard right now and is never going to stop.)

Kaito: “Don’t be stupid! If I had a chronic illness, I wouldn’t stand a chance in astronaut training!”

This… works somewhat well as an excuse. Kaito himself has no idea why the hell he’s so sick, because it doesn’t make any sense for him to have had this beforehand considering he’s supposed to be completely healthy to be an astronaut. So at least he can use his own confusion about this to help convince everyone else that it therefore can’t be happening at all!

Kind of a tangential point: on my first time through I thought Kaito’s illness was a terminal illness that he’d had and known about his whole life. It would have made a lot of sense! Of course he’d be so determined to live life to the fullest, if he’d always known he was dying! It would have explained why he risked everything to get into astronaut training early, if he knew he wouldn’t live long enough to make it into space if he waited to do it the normal way!

…But what didn’t occur to me was Kaito’s point here that he would never have actually got into astronaut training if he’d been sick at the time. They obviously do medical exams as part of the screening, and they’d pick up on an illness like this.

It also wouldn’t have made complete sense for Kaito to have been terminally ill his whole life, since the way he deals with realising he’s dying during the story is… pretty terrible, suggesting that he was not at all mentally prepared for suddenly facing his imminent mortality. And in the end, it’s even more fun that way.

Kaito: “Seriously, you guys are worrying too much. Just cuz you all love me and can’t help yours—”

Of course they care about you and are therefore worried about you, you moron! You’re the one who made yourself so important to everyone! Stop acting like the fact that everyone cares about you is something to be brushed off as a joke!

Kaito’s determination to be an inspirational figure to others is delightfully incompatible with his insistence on not having anybody worry about him. Or at least it would be if there was something wrong with him, so good thing that’s not the case and he’s totally fine, right?

Maki: “…Of course we’d be worried.”

People Not Convinced: 4/5.

Kaito: “… My bad… But I’m serious. You don’t need to worry about me anymore…”

And of course, of all things, it would be Maki saying she’s worried – which isn’t just anyone being worried about him, it’s his sidekick – that’d be the thing to make Kaito drop the forced cheeriness and be slightly more real about things. Only in terms of how he feels bad about making people worry, though, of course. Not in terms of him feeling bad for himself.

Kaito: “I shoulda told you guys I wasn’t feeling well. I made you worry for nothing.”

Looks like he’s somewhat regretting pretending to be so Completely Fine last chapter. If he’d been just more honest that he was at least sick, then they wouldn’t have been so shocked at suddenly seeing the full extent of his illness out of nowhere and it might have been easier for him to brush over exactly how bad it was.

…Buuuut despite that, he is still insisting that he’s completely 100% better now and making that mistake all over again. Gotta be the most invincible hero he can possibly be!

(Either way, that wouldn’t remotely fix the problem of how they’re going to deal with you dying when it happens, Kaito.)

Maki: “…”

Kaito: “O-Okay… don’t glare at me like that.”

Maki is Not Amused at him being an idiot in a way that hurts himself and makes everyone worry about him more. She’s so caring, in her very distinctly Maki-like way.

Kaito: “If I do start to feel bad again, I’ll have you guys help me, okay?”

Kaito, you gigantic fucking liar. You’re feeling bad and need their help right now and you’re not asking for it.

This right here is honestly one of the worst lies Kaito ever tells, because he’s doing more than just stating something untrue. He’s actively asking them to trust him that if he does feel bad he wouldn’t hide it, while utterly breaking that trust even as he’s saying it. It’s bad enough that I think Kaito has to be less okay with this than the kind of lie he usually tells. It probably hurts him on some level to be saying this, and this just goes to show how desperate he is to convince them that he’s fine and stop them worrying about him no matter what it takes.

Kaito: “Now that that’s outta the way, let’s eat! Yeah, c’mon guys! Let’s all eat!”

(Kaito spoke cheerily, then left to go get his meal.)

And here’s a conspicuous subject change immediately after that, like he’s hoping people won’t think too hard about how awful he would have just been if he really is still sick and lying to them. All of this awful lying and desperately trying to convince them of something horrendously untrue – all that’s definitely “out of the way” now, because he says so. They’re convinced and it’s over and he doesn’t have to worry or think about it any more, right? Right.

Also, there’s no way Kaito is able to keep any reasonable amount of food down at this point. He’s going to have to force himself to eat at a normal pace in order to not worry anyone further, which is only going to cause him even more suffering later when he’s on his own.

Shuichi: (…Is there really nothing wrong? With what I saw yesterday… how can I act like nothing’s wrong…?)

People Not Convinced: 5/5.

Literally nobody is buying that Kaito’s okay. His display this morning has quite clearly been over-the-top forced cheeriness and pointed insistence cutting people off the moment they question him, and everybody can see through it.

…Partly.

Keebo: “Despite Kaito’s remarks, he should probably receive medical attention just in case…”

Tsumugi: “Now we’ve got another reason why we need to get out of here.”

Maki: “And on top of that, we need to do it fast.”

Because while they are suggesting this, nobody seems to be acknowledging just how completely necessary it is to get Kaito medical attention as soon as possible. So while, evidently, everyone still believes that he’s sick, he has managed to successfully convince them that at least he’s probably not dying. I imagine they’re thinking that if he really did know he was dying, that’s something big enough and serious enough that surely, surely he wouldn’t be so stupid as to not let them know that.

…But, no, he… really is entirely that stupid. Guys, you are massively underestimating how incredibly idiotically selfless Kaito is.

(Well, Tsumugi does know he’s dying, but of course she’s not going to do anything that might save his life and is just going to continue to act vague and oblivious while he continues to die because of her.)

When Kaito comes back, everyone’s moved on to speculating about the outside world that Gonta saw and despaired over.

Kaito: “We can’t figure that out just thinking about it, so there’s no point wasting your brainpower.”

Keebo: “But we can’t simply not think about—”

Kaito: “Sure, there’s a chance the outside world is messed up because of Monokuma. But making us worry about it is what Monokuma wants. He’s using it to put pressure on us.”

Kaito is still really good? He’s been lying through his teeth, but that’s all for the sake of keeping everyone’s spirits high and stopping them worrying, and now he’s continuing to do that in a way that doesn’t require any lying, too. Wondering what could be out there without having any way to know for sure is just going to make everyone anxious for no real reason, which is exactly the kind of thing Kaito’s always working to try and prevent.

(I wonder if it’s occurred to him that his own illness might also be something Monokuma did to put pressure on everyone by making them worry. Because that isn’t actually too far from the truth.)

Kaito: “Kokichi and Gonta just snapped under that pressure.”

It’s really interesting and notable that Kaito includes Kokichi as having snapped under the pressure of what he saw! Given that Kaito obviously has no way of knowing that Kokichi realised the outside world was a lie, this is a reasonable thing to think. (And he did kind of snap when he saw it anyway, just for a different reason.) Evidently Kaito never quite bought Kokichi’s claim that he did everything purely for sadistic glee. I would hope that Kaito is also sensible enough to realise that Kokichi didn’t truly want the mercy kill either, since he actively pointed out that he sabotaged it himself. So I’m not sure exactly what Kaito’s mental idea of Kokichi is right now, but it does seem to involve him having snapped and lashed out as a result of seeing the outside world, making him messed up and pitiable rather than just inhumanly evil. If anyone was going to see through Kokichi and realise something fairly close to the truth about him, of course it would be Kaito.

Kaito: “The outside world is probably fine.”

Himiko: “You’re such an optometrist… Can you prescribe some rose-colored glasses for me too?”

Himiko’s line here is so freaking clever. It sounds like she’s just mispronouncing “optimist”… and then she goes and makes the sentence actually make sense for the word “optometrist” while still being about optimism. I love it. …It’s honestly a little too clever to be really befitting of Himiko, but still, good one, localisers.

Keebo: “…As a detective, what are your thoughts on this, Shuichi?”

Gotta ask Shuichi about this, of course. If anyone’s figured this out, it would definitely be him, right?

Shuichi: “I-I’ve considered a few theories, but I can’t say for sure…”

Himiko: “Well, that’s understandable. There are barely any clues.”

…But, yes, funnily enough, Shuichi has not magically figured it out when he has basically nothing to go on. I wouldn’t be surprised if the possibility of an apocalypse has crossed his mind given what they know about the meteorites, but there’s no way he’s going to claim that and make everybody freak out unless he has concrete proof of it.

Kaito: “…”

Shuichi: (Since the incident yesterday, Kaito won’t look me in the eyes.)

It’s appropriate that the first moment Shuichi is brought into the conversation, which draws our attention to what’s going on with Kaito here, is when people asked for Shuichi’s help because they assume he can figure out everything. Even though they’re assuming that wrongly in this case, the simple fact that everyone clearly looks up to and relies on Shuichi so much still really bothers Kaito, and after last night’s trial, his jealousy is worse than ever.

And the thing is, Kaito still shouldn’t even be jealous of Shuichi! Everyone is relying on Shuichi’s detective skills, but everyone has also been relying on Kaito’s luminary skills to keep their spirits up and stop them worrying throughout this very conversation. He’s just as important to the group as Shuichi is, just in a different way. But… Kaito can’t see that, because his façade doesn’t change how weak and helpless he feels beneath it. Recall that he’s in constant pain by this point – he can literally feel the extent to which his words aren’t true. He’s convinced that all of the effect he’s having on everyone right now is built entirely on lies and would completely fall apart if they realised that. (In reality, that is very definitely not the case; after all, everyone already knows it’s at least partly a façade.)

Shuichi: (He must still be angry.)

No, Shuichi. He’s not.

It never made any rational sense for Kaito to be angry at Shuichi even during the trial; any moments of him acting that way were him deflecting his pain and not the real point of how he felt. It makes even less sense for him to be angry now that he’s had a whole night to sleep it off and calm down from the irrational lashing out he did and realise what was really bothering him. It also makes no sense when you think about the fact that Kaito’s way of expressing anger at someone would never be to passive-aggressively ignore them like this – he would just come out and tell them how he feels. He’s not doing this because he’s angry.

I mentioned Kaito’s jealousy of Shuichi a moment ago, and while that’s contributing, that’s also not the main point. If he was simply jealous, that wouldn’t stop him from engaging with Shuichi like he normally does – Kaito was also jealous of Shuichi throughout case 4, but even as it was starting to get to him more and more, it didn’t change that he was still trying to to help and support his sidekick like always.

The problem is that Kaito doesn’t feel like he can help and support Shuichi any more, not after having shown himself to be so obviously and undeniably weaker than Shuichi in running away from the truth. He did everything he could to cover that up during the trial not out of jealousy so much as out of his irrational conviction that he needs to be strong and invincible in order for Shuichi to look up to him and be inspired by him. Throughout the last chapter, Kaito stressed again and again how much he wanted to help Shuichi, how he would always be there for him to support him and carry his burdens. By proving himself to be so much weaker than Shuichi in the trial, and by making things even harder for Shuichi by lashing out the way he did, Kaito is convinced that he’s failed every word of those promises he was so desperate to make.

The guilt and shame of his perceived failure hurts Kaito so much that he can’t deal with it, so he’s… not. He’s just pathetically trying to pretend Shuichi isn’t there and that the problem doesn’t exist.

And it’s not just about his own perception of having failed, either. If Kaito thought that Shuichi even possibly hasn’t noticed his weakness yet and there was even the slightest chance that Kaito could still support him even a little by continuing to act heroic and inspiring at him, by god would he keep trying, even though he’d feel it was a desperately fragile façade. (Just like he’s still trying to do that for everyone else despite them having seen his illness.) But since he’s not even attempting to engage with Shuichi right now, he has to believe not only that he’s utterly failed Shuichi far more than he has anyone else, but also that Shuichi knows it and there’s no point in trying to pretend otherwise. That “aren’t you my sidekick? Was that just a lie?” from yesterday’s trial that suggested the idea that Shuichi knew he didn’t need Kaito? Kaito still believes that.

Shuichi: (But… I had no choice… I had no other options… My deduction… wasn’t wrong. If I hadn’t identified Gonta as the culprit, we would all be dead. For the rest of us to survive, Gonta had to be sacrificed… There was nothing I could do…)

Shuichi is only assuming that Kaito is angry at him because of his own anxiety and tendency to blame himself. On the surface of his thoughts here, Shuichi is being somewhat sensible and rational about it – he’s able to assert that what he did wasn’t wrong and was necessary for everyone to survive. But still, the way he’s wording these thoughts here give the sense that, even if he’s not quite consciously blaming himself, he still feels like he failed Gonta for not having been able to do anything to stop him being executed. Despite knowing he wasn’t in the wrong, Shuichi still feels like the bad guy – and because of that, it makes sense to him that Kaito could be blaming him too, so he gets stuck on that rather than thinking about other reasons Kaito might be acting this way.

But no, Shuichi. There really was nothing else you could have done, and so it’s not your fault. Kokichi and Monokuma (and the mastermind) are the ones who killed Gonta, not you. Kaito knows this just as much as everyone in this room except you.

(For the duration of this bit of Shuichi’s inner monologue, we’re forced to look at a flashback image of Gonta being impaled during his execution, which I do not appreciate at all. But I understand why it’s there, because Shuichi would have that horrifying image burned into his mind to the point that he’d recall it every time he thinks about Gonta’s death, so this serves to show us how Shuichi is still haunted by that.)

Kaito: “I’m glad we’re talking about how to escape, but…”

Kaito, do you know why everyone got onto the topic of trying to escape? It’s because they were thinking about how to help you. If you told them the truth, they’d be even more desperate to escape in order to save you, so much so that they might actually manage it!

If Kaito realised this, it might actually be enough for him to be willing to bite the bullet and tell them he’s dying. Unlike a certain few people last chapter, Kaito would do anything if he believed it could help everyone to escape. So I genuinely don’t think this has or ever will occur to him – apparently his mind just won’t even entertain trains of thought involving everyone worrying about him, or everyone risking themselves for him and not the other way around, long enough for him to realise that this’d be what would happen. The notion of having himself be prioritised above everybody else really is just that unthinkable to Kaito.

Kaito: “…where’d *he* go? Kokichi…”

Shuichi: (The instant Kaito spoke his name, a nervous energy shot through us.)

Apparently Kokichi’s name is having something of a Voldemort effect on everyone right now. Except of course for Kaito, who freely said his name – because Kaito doesn’t quite buy that he’s the evil sadist he claimed to be.

Tsumugi: “We can’t just let… that person… be. He’s… a little too dangerous. No… not just a little… Because he… He enjoys watching us suffer. His face just screams that he’s having fun whenever he sees us suffer.”

Tsumugi, of course, also knows that’s not true, but she’s the one most stressing that and talking about it like it’s definitely true. I guess she’s figured that if Kokichi is going to paint himself as a massive villain, she might as well play along with that, since it’s a good story.

Maki: “If we weren’t in this killing game, I would’ve assassinated him already.”

Maki’s still stuck in that mindset that killing people is the best method of solving problems that don’t seem to have an easy solution. Her directing this mindset towards Kokichi is specifically because he’s apparently a dangerous monster who’s made himself seem like he needs to be stopped before he hurts anyone else. She always kind of hated him on a personal level, but she wouldn’t have said this about him last chapter.

Maki: “Ironic… The rules of this killing game actually make it harder to kill.”

Kaito: “Maki Roll… that’s not good. Playing this killing game is just what Monokuma wants us to do.”

Maki: “…I know.”

And this is why Maki does try and kill Kokichi later this chapter – because she’s going to believe he’s the mastermind and therefore that killing him won’t be “playing the game”. Given that, in her eyes, there’s no reason for her not to. Kaito’s argument here is valid, but he’s also forgetting to make the wider argument that, killing game or not, murder isn’t the right way to solve problems, even really big ones like this, and she should try and find something better.

Himiko: “Nyeh? Is Maki Roll a nickname for Maki? That’s a good nickname.”

I appreciate this build-up to the fact that Himiko is indeed going to start calling her Maki Roll eventually, but… how did you not notice this until now, Himiko? Kaito’s been calling her that for a chapter and a half.

Shuichi: “Kokichi told us his objective was to win the killing game. He wouldn’t risk a murder that would so obviously implicate him.”

You’re thinking too narrowly, Shuichi. Kokichi has redefined “winning” to mean something other than getting away with being the blackened. His new win condition definitely could (and will) involve a murder which obviously implicates him.

Monokuma shows up to hand out the “prizes”.

Monokuma: “I can’t refuse you all, not when I’m all alone and outnumbered.”

Kaito: “…Outnumbered?”

And here’s Kaito realising that there’s no Exisals anymore, meaning that fighting back is finally a viable option. Monokuma mentioned that suspiciously readily, so I wonder if he prompted that train of thought out of Kaito on purpose so that this chapter’s story would hopefully take some interesting turns.

Monokuma: “But I’m used to being alone. Back in the day, I was alone from start to finish…”

Yes, and all of us preferred it that way, thanks.

Maki: “…What do you want to do, Kaito?”

Kaito: “I’m worried about Kokichi, but… There’s no point worrying about him all the time. Alright! Our first priority is to solve the mystery of this academy!”

Look at Maki turning to Kaito for leadership! And Kaito is genuinely being a pretty good leader – everyone else was leaning towards just worrying about Kokichi, but if they do that all day they’re never going to get anywhere and discover anything new. Kaito’s always about spurring everyone to take action.

Kaito: “Let’s investigate!”

Shuichi: “Alright… Ah, I’ll hold onto that…”

Kaito: “Oh… that’s right…”

Shuichi: (Without meeting my eyes, Kaito placed the key into my palm.)

Apparently Monokuma specifically gave the keys to Kaito, leading to this delightfully awkward exchange, made even more so by the fact that giving the job to Shuichi has everything to do with why Kaito’s so upset. I love the irony that it was Kaito who first decided that Shuichi should be the one to take the stuff and solve the puzzles back in chapter 2. What started out as a gesture from Kaito to help boost Shuichi’s confidence when he needed it by making him feel useful has turned into a reminder of the fact that Shuichi is by far the most useful and reliable person here and doesn’t appear to need Kaito’s help at all.

And the thing is, this job still doesn’t need Shuichi! Less than ever before, this time, since the items are literally keys and therefore there’s no puzzle involved. Kaito could respond to Shuichi here by going, “Nah, it’s fine. They’re just keys, right? Let me handle it this time.” – but he doesn’t. Even though Kaito is jealous of Shuichi and hates how Shuichi is supposedly so much more of a hero than him (which isn’t entirely the case – Maki just turned to Kaito to lead them, after all), he doesn’t try and act like Shuichi’s superiority is anything but the truth or try and take the spotlight away from him. Kaito believes that he genuinely is inferior to Shuichi and doesn’t deserve to be taking any of the credit that rightfully belongs to someone as awesome as him.

(And that’s painfully self-deprecating but also actually pretty admirable of him. Kaito is jealous of Shuichi, but it’s not a malicious kind of jealousy that makes him want to take away what Shuichi has that he doesn’t. Kaito is never that kind of person, even at his lowest.)

Keebo: “Kaito? Shuichi? What’s the matter? You both seem different today.”

Maki: “…Read the mood, Keebo. It’s fine, so let’s go already.”

Since Keebo is the worst at reading the room out of everyone here, we can assume from this that everybody else has very much noticed the awkwardness between Kaito and Shuichi and has decided to just completely ignore that elephant in the room. If only they weren’t doing that. They’re all probably assuming Kaito is just angry at Shuichi and therefore that asking what the problem is and trying to get them to talk about it would only ever make things worse… but oh boy are they wrong.

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Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 4.13

Last time as we entered the second half of trial 4 (trial 4!!!), Kokichi stopped jabbing at Kaito’s issues for no particular reason and I was very disappoint, not that he wasn’t still getting under Kaito’s skin in other ways, Kaito was furiously trying to be right about at least something (and mostly still wasn’t), and Kokichi insisted everyone else hates lies when almost nobody really does, proceeded to throw a tantrum over Shuichi using one (1) lie against him, and very definitely didn’t ever want the mercy kill outcome because that makes no sense.

The intent behind him doing so aside, we left off the moment Kokichi dropped the bombshell that the culprit is Gonta.

Shuichi: “…What?”

Gonta: “…Huh?”

Kaito: “Wh-What did you…?”

I like how those three are the first three to react, because they’re the ones you should be focusing on. From this point on, none of the others (except Kokichi) are particularly relevant to the narrative at all.

Gonta: “W-W-Wait! When did Gonta kill Miu!?”

Gonta, no! Be more sure of yourself! It’s so heartbreaking that his immediate reaction is not a fervent “I didn’t do that!”, but a “wait, did I?”. He should be certain that it’s not the truth, because he has no idea yet that he’s missing a chunk of his memories.

Kaito: “Why you… Now you’re trying to pin things on Gonta!? Do you really expect us to believe such an obvious lie!?”

Right now, Kaito means this.

My own immediate reaction when I got to Kokichi’s bombshell line for the first time was “oh, shit, I guess Gonta probably did do it, didn’t he” – but that’s only because I had the narrative argument. It being Kokichi would be boringly obvious, whereas it somehow being Gonta would be absolutely heartbreaking and therefore the best possible story to tell. Characters in this story, though, don’t have the narrative argument. Given that, and without having discussed the evidence that points to the real truth yet, assuming Kokichi is trying to pin things on Gonta is the most logical assumption at the moment.

Despite the fact that Kokichi does not have a Rebuttal Showdown, he gets a fancy interjection thing here like he’s about to start one. It might be because he’s about to have a split-screen thing for his confession “with” Gonta, and the game’s coding requires that an interjection happens before a split-screen for some reason?

Kokichi: “We formed a duo to end this killing game… As the Killing Game Busters!”

Gonta: “W-What Busters!?”

Kokichi: “We must win this killing game, in order to end this killing game!”

This “Killing Game Busters” concept might draw somewhat from Kokichi’s genuine hatred of this game and overarching plan. But winning isn’t the only way to end the game, and him acting like it is just goes to show that what he really cares about is the “winning” part, rather than the “ending” part.

Gonta: “Gonta have no idea what he’s talking about…”

Kokichi: “C’mooon, quit lying and tell us the truth!”

You absolute asshole; if Gonta remembered (which you still think he does) then he would be fighting as hard as he can to keep lying so that he still had a chance of saving everyone. You know, just like you’d be doing too if you actually cared about the mercy kill outcome yourself.

Kaito: “Heh, it’s obvious what he’s trying to do. Gonta doesn’t understand the Virtual World, so Kokichi’s trying to trick him! He’s trying to sacrifice Gonta to escape from his crime!”

Kaito means this too, because this makes sense. Gonta is so goddamn unsure of himself that he’s liable to assume he said and did things that he didn’t really say or do at all – it’s happened multiple times in the past and even briefly happened right now with his reaction to Kokichi’s accusation. It’s not hard to think, with how confused Gonta supposedly is by the Virtual World, that Kokichi might really be able to trick Gonta into thinking he did it and confessing to it when that isn’t the truth, which would give a hypothetical blackened-Kokichi an out.

Kokichi: “I’m sooorry… I did something horrible to Gonta…”

Yeah, you showed him a despair that you know isn’t the truth, convinced him that committing murder and lying about it is the only way to save everyone, and then stomped on his desperate, earnest desire to do that (or what would have been if he’d remembered it) by shattering that attempt in one sentence.

At this point, now that he’s shown his hand, Kokichi is actively trying to back up his upcoming lie that he’s a horrible person who enjoys making people suffer, so anything he says and does that makes a point of how overtly assholeish he’s being can be argued to be for the purpose of that. Which means I don’t get to complain about him being an unnecessary dick right now. He’s still being a dick, just with an actual purpose in mind behind it.

Kokichi: “I didn’t want Shuichi to hog all the glory, so I told everyone the truth!”

Oh, really? Even though you’re the one who’s been heaping the most glory on Shuichi in the first place (for reasons that totally don’t have anything to do with Kaito)? Even though you’re going to continue to force him to explain why this is the truth (for somewhat similar reasons)? Sure.

Kokichi: “Don’t you think I could’ve pulled the strings and made Gonta carry out my commands?”

See, this was the thing for first-time-me. I absolutely did believe this. I believed in Gonta and that he would never inherently want to hurt anyone, but I also believed in Kokichi’s propensity to be a manipulative asshole and in Gonta’s tragic gullibility.

Kaito: “It doesn’t matter if it’s possible or not… cuz I say it’s just impossible!”

But of course Kaito believes even more strongly in Gonta’s inherent goodness and that nothing could shake that, because if anything did then that would be awful and painful and he doesn’t want to believe that it could be possible.

(But Kaito, I thought the impossible was—)

(Now is really not the time for that.)

Kokichi: “There’s no need to bring emotions into class trials! All we need is logical thinking… Riiiight, Shuichi?”

And here Kokichi is again deliberately trying to hurt Kaito by drawing a contrast between his and Shuichi’s attitudes to this and pointing out that Shuichi’s is (supposedly) inherently superior. I’d count this as doing the thing, but that concept kinda unceremoniously fizzled out after the several missed opportunities for it last part, so it no longer really feels like A Thing any more. Maybe what it really is more about at this point is Kokichi trying to prove that Shuichi’s logical detective’s approach is more correct than Kaito’s belief in people, because obviously believing in people is always stupid.

Gonta: “Gonta… not kill Miu. Gonta… really not know anything. And also… Gonta not tell lies. And Gonta not make trouble for others. Cuz that not how gentlemen act! That why Gonta *not* culprit!”

Kaito: “Yeah, Gonta’s not lying… I can tell just by looking at him!”

See, Kaito is right. Gonta isn’t lying, and Kaito can be so sure of that because his judgement of people has always been correct. As far as Kaito’s concerned right now, Gonta being innocent is simply the truth, because his intuition is telling him so, and that’s always been what he’s relied on instead of empirical evidence.

(And to bring things back to first-time-me for a sec, I absolutely agreed with Kaito that Gonta definitely wasn’t lying. But since I was still also narratively sure that Gonta did it, this was the moment I realised that he had to have lost his memory, and oh god this is going to be even more heartbreaking than I thought isn’t it.)

Kokichi: “If it’s not Gonta, then who’s the culprit?”

Kaito: “You, of course!”

Kaito’s angry, but this is a reasonably controlled anger for now – because given his certainty that Gonta is innocent, the only logical assumption is that Kokichi did it.

Kokichi: “Oh? Did you forget already? Then, let me make it clear again… why I can’t be the culprit!”

Kokichi has the gall to act like his innocence has already been proven when it hasn’t. The evidence that can prove it already exists, but it has not yet been explained in a way which proves it. This is just another instance of Kokichi acting like he’s obviously right and everyone is stupid for not immediately agreeing with him, even though he’s less right than he’s trying to claim he is.

Kokichi: “I am not the culprit.”

“It not Gonta!”

“You *are* the culprit!”

“You’re lying.”

Kokichi: “Didn’t I prove that to you guys already?”

“Gonta know nothing!”

“That’s obviously a lie!”

“I can’t believe you.”

I love how the white noise for these first two statements shows how intense things just got. It’s not just these three – there are six lines of white noise for each one, meaning literally everyone who can be is providing white noise right now. I’ve only included half of them here because the other three characters’ comments are just interchangeable vague confusion – but here are the ones that are quite clearly from Gonta, Kaito and Maki respectively.

Kaito: “She couldn’t struggle much… so you could’ve kept strangling her, no problem!”

Kokichi: “See, I told you I’m not the culprit.”

Kaito Refutations: 4! Now we’re getting into the good stuff.

I can’t do colours, but Kokichi’s statement there is a weak spot, not an agree spot. Again, they could have made it so you have to agree with Kokichi here instead – his statement might have needed a bit of rewording to be more specifically relevant to the evidence, but it could have worked – but instead they make a point of forcing you to refute Kaito, yet again.

Kokichi clearly knew the thing about his avatar from the start – hence his claim that it’s “already” been proven – but he made Shuichi be the one to explain it, because of course he did. If Shuichi says so too, then he’s even more obviously right and anyone who disagrees with him is even more obviously wrong and stupid.

Kokichi: “So I would have had to kill her instantly, such as stabbing or hitting… I couldn’t have murdered her by strangulation, because it’d be game over if she touched me.”

And that’s probably precisely why Kokichi chose strangulation as the murder method. He wanted it to be explicitly provable that he didn’t do it, so that everyone would be forced to accept that Gonta did it instead. If he cared about the mercy kill outcome, the best plan would be to get Gonta to kill Miu in a way that could have plausibly been done by Kokichi, then make everyone in the trial wrongly conclude that it was in fact him.

(To be fair, he also didn’t have much choice in terms of available murder weapons – but Miu had a hammer, and Gonta could have snuck up behind her and stolen it off her while she was focused on Kokichi. So it would still have been possible to murder her in a way which left the culprit ambiguous.)

Kaito: “Well… if you were using the toilet paper, you wouldn’t need to touch her directly.”

Sorry, Kaito, but no – Miu would have known that she could escape just by touching him to paralyse him, and he’d be close enough for her to reach. As soon as he froze, he wouldn’t be exerting force on the toilet paper any more and she could have freed herself. Assuming Miu didn’t want to die, it’s not possible.

Kaito: “W-Wait! What if it was something besides strangulation, then? Like—”

Maki: “There’s no doubt Miu was strangled. We already discussed this.”

And now Kaito’s starting to make arguments he knows don’t really make sense in his desperation to find some other explanation.

Kokichi: “Nee-heehee… Kaito is reeeally desperate to make me the culprit… No matter how much you whine about it, you can’t change the truth!”

Yeah, because not wanting to believe that someone you care about and trust wholeheartedly could have committed murder definitely counts as whining, right, rather than being a perfectly understandable, human reaction to this.

Kokichi: “The culprit who killed Miu is Gonta Gokuhara! This is the truth you all adore so much!”

I could get into how nobody adores the truth anywhere near as much as he thinks, but we did that last time. There’s also the sense from his furiously insistent tone here that, hey look everyone, it turns out the truth is that someone trustworthy whom everyone believed in is actually a horrible murderer! Which sure is mighty convenient for the point Kokichi has been trying to force down everyone’s throats for this entire game, and definitely isn’t cheating considering that it’s only the truth because he made it so.

That said, while I do believe that part of the reason he did this was an attempt to make his point and it wasn’t only about his plan to pretend to be the mastermind, I don’t think this was on a very conscious level. We’ve already seen that he’s just kind of instinctively trying to make his point without necessarily thinking about the best ways to do so. While this one is a very effective way to do so, it’s instead something he wouldn’t have consciously thought about because killing someone just to make a point would make him a terrible person. And Kokichi definitely isn’t really a terrible person who’s in the wrong; any instances in this trial of him acting like one are definitely all just lies for the sake of his plan to win the killing game and therefore totally justified, right.

Gonta: “You gotta believe Gonta! Gonta would never hurt anyone!”

Oh, Gonta, you poor thing. I know. Everyone does.

Tsumugi: “I believe you. You’ve been risking yourself to protect everyone. There’s no way Gonta would kill! He wouldn’t even kill bugs!”

Himiko: “I… believe Gonta, too. I’m not gonna listen to Kokichi’s lies…”

Kaito: “O-Of course! Who’d believe a liar like him!?”

Look at how Kaito is the last to speak up here. And how he’s stuttering. And his indirect phrasing.

He doesn’t truly believe it any more.

Kaito: “He’s lying about Gonta being the culprit, so there’s no point talking about it!”

He’s afraid that pursuing this line of logic might end up revealing that Gonta really did do it, and he can’t face that. If he still genuinely believed Gonta definitely wasn’t the culprit, he wouldn’t be against talking about it more, because he’d be certain that doing so could only end up proving that.

Shuichi: (I don’t know about that… If we want the truth, we might have to ask uncomfortable questions…)

Kaito: “Right, Shuichi!? You think so too, don’t you?”

What Kaito’s really saying here is, “we should all just run away from the truth, right, Shuichi?”

Of course Shuichi wouldn’t think that, not any more. Not after everything Kaede taught him, and how much he’s been trying to work through those issues of his thanks to Kaito’s help, and with how many more times he’s faced the truth in every trial since then. Kaito is fully aware of this – but now he’s the one who can’t face the painful truth, even though Shuichi can. He knows Shuichi shouldn’t agree with him, yet he wants him to do so anyway. Because if not, it’ll mean that Kaito is having a harder time dealing with this than Shuichi is, and that’s unacceptable.

Shuichi: “… I know how important it is to believe. But as the Ultimate Detective… I know we can’t solve this case with belief alone.”

I like how Shuichi says this in a way that isn’t remotely diminishing Kaito’s belief in people and brushing it off as unnecessary or unhelpful, like Kokichi is constantly trying to do. Shuichi Saihara, as opposed to the Ultimate Detective, still cares about believing in people, and he knows it’d hurt Kaito to try and act like his feelings about this don’t matter!

Kaito: “What, you… wanna suspect Gonta?”

Of course he doesn’t, Kaito, just like you don’t! But… he has to.

Kokichi: “Too bad, Kaito. Looks like Shuichi agrees with me.”

Shuichi: “N-No, I’m not trying to—!”

Kokichi: “Oh, the irony! It’s all thanks to Kaito that Shuichi got his act together as a detective… And now, Shuichi’s intuition as a detective has made him more suspicious of others. Welp, can’t be helped. That’s just what a detective does.”

Come now, Kokichi. As someone who enjoys Kaito’s suffering even more than you do (which I’m allowed to do, because I’m watching a genuinely fictional character and not a real person), I am very disappointed in you.

This really isn’t so much about belief. Shuichi doesn’t agree with Kokichi here – he was literally just stressing that he still values Kaito’s belief in people. At worst, he’s taking a middle ground between the two of them. Kokichi had to cut Shuichi off before he explained that he didn’t want to suspect Gonta and that he wasn’t agreeing with Kokichi in order for his attempted point to even hold any real weight. And Kaito already made it clear back in the investigation that he knows Shuichi should do whatever it takes to reach the truth, even if it means he has to suspect someone he believes in. Because, yes, that’s what a detective does, and Kaito is okay with that!

It’s not even really that Shuichi’s intuition as a detective is making him “suspicious” of Gonta, since he has so far picked up on none of the hints that Gonta did it. He’s only pursuing this because Kokichi brought it up and proved his own innocence, and given that, Shuichi can’t ignore this possibility without risking everyone’s lives. This is about his determination to save everyone, even if it means facing painful truths.

And that’s the real problem here. Shuichi is being strong enough to face the painful truth in order to save everyone, while Kaito isn’t. That’s what’s really getting to Kaito right now – and Kokichi should in theory be aware of this. This whole case, he’s been doing the thing by praising Shuichi in order to jab at Kaito, meaning that one way or another he’s clearly figured out Kaito’s jealousy issues. He’s been trying to hurt Kaito this entire time, and now that he’s started making an overt point of how cruel and evil he at least supposedly is, he should want to do so even more than he was already. Now would be the perfect opportunity for Kokichi to land the decisive blow and absolutely eviscerate Kaito by laying bare what’s really going on – that Shuichi can face the truth but all Kaito can do is run away from it like a coward, that Kaito used to be the one giving Shuichi support but now he’s the one who needs it, that Shuichi is the real hero here and Kaito’s just a useless failure. Kaito’s reaction to having all of that thrust out in the open in front of everyone would be delightful.

(Kaito’s actual reaction to this? He doesn’t have one – by which I mean he’s also not shown saying nothing, which is what the narrative has been gleefully doing every time something gets to Kaito in a way he doesn’t voice. Because Kokichi’s words here don’t get to him anywhere near as much as the thoughts that were already going through his head.)

…And, to be fair, from an out-universe writing perspective I can see why the hypothetical I just presented isn’t what happens, because if it did then Shuichi would realise what Kaito’s problem is, and they wouldn’t have the massive painful misunderstanding they’re going to have in early chapter 5 which is another of my favourite parts of this story.

But the in-universe reason for this not happening even though it’s the best way for Kokichi to continue doing to Kaito what he’s apparently been trying to do this whole time? Because Kokichi can’t stop making everything about his own issues and projecting them onto everyone else, of course. Despite him being aware of Kaito feeling inferior to Shuichi and having been jabbing at that for a while, he doesn’t seem to realise that that’s the main point. Instead, he sees this other potential angle of attack that’s focused around trust and suspicion and decides that this is obviously Kaito’s biggest problem and the thing he’d be most upset about. It couldn’t possibly be that Kaito has different priorities and issues to Kokichi and would instead be the most hurt by something totally unrelated to Kokichi’s trust issues.

This isn’t even quite about trying to get Kaito to change his views any more, since Kokichi appeared to accept that was impossible a few posts back. He just wants to watch Kaito struggle to deal with the idea that he’s obviously wrong, because Shuichi totally agrees with Kokichi on this (even though he doesn’t) and Shuichi is always right about everything, right?

That’s not the point of this, Kokichi. This upcoming clash between Kaito and Shuichi isn’t nearly as much about you and your bullshit philosophy as you want it to be. You totally dropped the ball here.

Shuichi: “That’s not it, Kokichi! I’m just trying to make sure that everyone survi—”

See, even Shuichi agrees that Kokichi is missing the point and that the real crux of the matter is his desire to save everyone.

(Obviously he’s not saying this in the context of Kaito’s issues because he doesn’t want to hurt Kaito at all and has no idea that this would hurt him… but this statement still does work in the context of Kaito’s issues.)

Gonta: “Shuichi… Gonta really not do it… Gonta… not culprit… Please… believe Gonta…”

Shuichi: “…”

Oh, Gonta. I know you’re not lying! But, aghjadsfghda. This is probably making Shuichi feel like maybe Kokichi has a point about his detective role making him nothing but suspicious of his friends, jabbing right at his issues about his talent. He may be strong enough to pursue the truth and do whatever it takes for everyone to survive, but that doesn’t mean that doing so doesn’t still hurt.

Keebo: “I think we need to seriously discuss whether Gonta was capable of committing this crime. …Only then can we arrive at a logical decision.”

Keebo is the only one other than Kokichi on Shuichi’s side in this upcoming Debate Scrum. The way he suddenly says this out of nowhere makes me suspect that his inner voice had a hand in making him able to be so rational and detached about this. The audience would want to find the truth too, and they wouldn’t care if it’s painful because that makes for a good story.

Kaito: “You guys… Why don’t you get it? That’s just what Kokichi wants! He’s just trying to split us up! Shuichi! Open your eyes!”

Kokichi is trying to split everyone up, particularly Shuichi and Kaito (even though he just went about that in a much less effective way than he could have done). But what Kaito doesn’t want to admit is that Kokichi could be doing that by, for once, using the truth.

Kaito: “Shuichi, why…? Why don’t you understand? Y… You’re my sidekick, aren’t you…?”

I absolutely love how pained Kaito sounds in these lines. This is probably the most pain we hear him in this whole trial – not because this is the most pain he’s ever going to be in, but because from after this point he starts to cover it up more and more with anger.

His “You’re my sidekick, aren’t you?” is particularly delightful. On the surface it just sounds like he’s essentially asking “Aren’t you my best friend? Aren’t you on my side?” which would be heartwrenching enough. But that’s not all there is to it, because that’s not really what the word “sidekick” means to Kaito, is it? Kaito’s “sidekicks” are supposed to be people who are weaker than him and rely on him for support. By questioning if Shuichi is really his sidekick, Kaito is questioning whether Shuichi really is weaker than him, or whether he’s grown strong enough to not need Kaito at all.

And the “Why don’t you understand?” could sound on the surface like he’s just talking about understanding the importance of belief (he’s not, because that’s not the problem here), or understanding that Kokichi is trying to split them up (that one’s probably what Kaito is telling himself he means by it). But I don’t think that’s really why he said it, not in the context of him being confronted with the idea that Shuichi is stronger than him. Based on that, and the pain in his voice, it feels to me that Kaito’s really talking about Shuichi understanding the way he’s feeling and how much he’s hurting.

But of course Shuichi understands that, because he’s hurting just as much – it’s just that Kaito can’t see that. Despite his words saying the opposite, Kaito’s the one who doesn’t understand Shuichi – he’s assuming that Shuichi isn’t affected by this at all, and he can’t comprehend how on earth Shuichi could be so seemingly invincible at a time like this.

Shuichi: “Kaito…”

I wish text could illustrate the emotions in Shuichi’s voice here, because it’s amazing just how much gets across in a single word. He sounds ever so slightly frustrated, probably at Kaito bringing up the sidekick thing and making this more personal than Shuichi feels it needs to be when he’s just trying to solve this case and save everyone. (But of course, from Kaito’s point of view, the fact that Shuichi’s trying to save everyone while he can’t is extremely relevant to the question of if Shuichi is really his sidekick.)

But mostly, beneath that hint of frustration, Shuichi also sounds so concerned and sympathetic. I think here Shuichi is only just realising – from the pain evident in Kaito’s voice, and perhaps also from the fact that he did bring up the sidekick thing – that his friend is hurting this much. After all, on his end, he thought Kaito was supposed to be invincible. (But it doesn’t matter to him if Kaito actually isn’t – Shuichi’s just worried and wishes he could do something to help.)

Shuichi: (Of course I want to believe Gonta. I don’t want to think that he killed someone.)

You could say that out loud, Shuichi, so that Kaito would realise you’re struggling with this too. It’d help, if only a little.

This is easily my favourite Debate Scrum in the whole game! Usually the statements are shared out as equally as possible between all the people on one side such that any given person only has at most one more statement than any other person on their side. But here? Everyone on the opposing side has one statement, except for Kaito, who has three. So while this is generally about almost everyone not wanting to accept that Gonta could have done it, it’s still particularly focused on Kaito and I love it.

Kaito: “Shuichi, are you saying that Gonta is the culprit!?”

Kaito’s first statement is essentially lashing out at Shuichi, accusing him of having already decided it’s Gonta with no conclusive proof, when Kaito should know that Shuichi wouldn’t ever do that.

Tsumugi: “Gonta is such a sweetheart. He wouldn’t hurt a fly!”

If anything, this is the argument that best represents how Kaito feels about this. He wouldn’t phrase it quite this way, but the real reason he’s being so adamant is purely because of how strongly he believes that Gonta is someone who would never commit murder. But Kaito doesn’t make this argument, because he knows that that’s not enough in a class trial and he needs to say something more rooted in logic than that.

Maki: “Could Gonta have even made it to the rooftop without being noticed?”

Honestly I wouldn’t have been surprised if Maki were able to remain rational enough to be on Shuichi’s side of this debate. So it’s fitting that, even though she’s not, her argument here is questioning whether it was logistically possible, rather than everyone else’s more emotional approach.

Keebo: “The entrance hall is all that separates the rooftop from the mansion’s exterior.”

Kaito: “There should’ve been witnesses at the entrance hall!”

Kaito. You were there when Kokichi decided which rooms everybody else should search. You know nobody was in the entrance hall.

He’s running away from the truth, desperately trying to make it sound like it isn’t really the truth at all even if the only way he can think to do so is using arguments that he should know full well are wrong. This is another of my favourite completely-innocuous-seeming lines in the game.

Kaito: “But Kokichi confessed he was working with Monokuma!”

And as soon as that gets shot down, Kaito realises the witness argument is just making Gonta’s guilt look more possible and immediately shifts the topic to something else to distract from that. Kokichi’s an asshole, right? That totally means he must’ve done it and not Gonta!

Himiko: “It’s all a lie! Kokichi is the one who killed Miu!”

But again, this here is not an argument that Kaito makes, because he knows that would be pointless as it’s already been disproven. His accusation about Kokichi working with Monokuma was nothing but desperate deflection and not a legitimate attempt to argue that he did it.

Gonta: “Gonta not kill Miu! Honest!”

And poor Gonta has no idea what’s going on or how he could possibly make a proper case for his innocence when he doesn’t even know what happened, so this is the only “argument” he can give.

So… Kaito Refutations: 5! I could have added three to that count here, but at least half the cast is expected to be refuted in a Debate Scrum anyway. If Kaito had had only one or two statements then it wouldn’t have been the game making an overt point of Shuichi refuting him in particular. So I’m just counting this whole thing as one big instance of it instead.

Fun fact you probably knew about how sprites work in class trials: every character’s sprite stays on whichever one they used the last time they had a dialogue box, even if it’s been a really long time since they did so and you might expect their outward emotions to have silently shifted a bit since then.

Another fun fact you might be less aware of: while most trial minigames don’t do this, Debate Scrums reset every character back to their neutral forward-facing sprite once the minigame finishes (except the protagonist, because they’re always the first to speak once it’s over). Not sure why that’s the only minigame that does that; possibly it has something to do with the animated cutscene at the beginning of it resetting the sprite memory part of the game’s coding?

Most fun fact of them all: Kaito’s sprite at the end of this particular Debate Scrum is the sole exception to this. Presumably resetting the characters to their default sprites is something inherent in the way the game is coded, but despite this, the writers went out of their way to code in a specific exception for Kaito in this case. They knew that it just would not feel right to come back down from this scrum and have Kaito staring straight forward and smiling like nothing just happened, since he’s there on camera right next to Shuichi before getting any more dialogue. I am absolutely delighted that they cared enough to do this.

(It is a shame that they didn’t also do a similar thing for the animated cutscene of them flying up to start the Debate Scrum, in which everyone always has default sprites. It would totally have been possible to change Kaito’s sprite there as well, just for this case, since that’s a unique cutscene in every trial due to the different number of people still alive.)

(It’s also fun to consider that, when the artists were generally designing Kaito’s sprites and making some of him turning to one side and looking away, they had to make sure that he was turning away in the direction that would put his back to Shuichi in the trialgrounds. Otherwise this wouldn’t work at all.)

Tsumugi: “You’re going to believe Kokichi over Gonta?”

Shuichi: “That’s not it at all. I just want the truth. If we’re going to survive, I have to find the truth!”

Once again, Shuichi stresses that this isn’t remotely about him “agreeing with” Kokichi, or believing in him as a person more than he believes in Gonta, or anything like that. This is about him trying to find the truth in order to save everyone and nothing else.

Kaito: “…”

And the game chooses this moment to pan over to Kaito saying nothing yet again, suggesting that he definitely paid attention to what Shuichi just made clear, and that that’s what’s really bothering him about all this.

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