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heroicspectre · 4 months ago

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I know this is about Makoto, but I want to say a few things in defense of Kyoko surviving DR3.

You are 100 percent correct that a core theme of DR3 is that we must not erase bad memories, no matter how painful. We must hold on to them to move forward and grow. Makoto holds on to the memories of all his fallen friends, and Kyoko would have been no exception.

However, just because we can survive losing our loved ones doesn't mean we wouldn't rather save them if we can. We would much, much, much, rather keep a loved one alive than remember them in death. Kyoko surviving should serve to remind us of that simple fact. We can move forward no matter who dies, but only when necessary. Saving lives is always better than accepting death whenever possible.

So I strongly disagree with the notion that Kyoko surviving cheapens her sacrifice or Makoto's resolve in any way. Both of them still committed. Kyoko proved that she would die for Makoto, and Makoto proved he could carry on without her. Kyoko surviving doesn't take that away. At all.

Why is Kyoko alive? It's simple. She cares about Makoto and doesn't want him to suffer. She knows what it's like to carry on the memory of a fallen loved one. She deliberately chose to keep her hands scarred and disfigured, in memory of her close friend Yui Samidare. She knows how painful it is, and she wants to spare Makoto from that pain if at all possible. Kyoko could have simply accepted her fate and died for Makoto, but she did better than that. She held on to her hope and found a way to live for Makoto. That doesn't weaken her love for him. It strengthens it.

Honestly, I'm sick of people writing it off as "stupid," "fanservice," "cheap," or a "cop out." There's so much more we could say about it, but most would rather have Makoto prove he can power through suffering rather than find a way to prevent suffering in the first place. Which is valid. I don't mean to say that Kyoko dying is a narrative mistake, but Kyoko surviving is also valid. Whether she lives or dies is subjective. Her death and her survival are both valid.

In my opinion, Danganronpa is already filled with enough tragedy. Like this post points out, Makoto has always suffered personally for the good of the world, and Kyoko has also faced more than her share of suffering. Makoto still has the memories of Sayaka and the others to carry, and Kyoko is carrying Yui and the rest of her family. Makoto can move forward even when someone he loves is lost, but he would much rather save them if he can. Makoto and Kyoko both deserve a reward for their hard work. So why not just give these two a break for once and Let. Them. Be. Happy.

Full complete analysis on Makoto Naegi - Last Part - Ultimate Hope

In this last part, we will see that despite symbolizing Jesus, he isn’t perfect, he never was perfect even morally. When confronting the outside world, a world outside a close world defined by rules, his limits are shown to us and illustrate his humanity. I will use some points made in the first part, but these points will be more detailed and analyzed. All sources are used in this last analysis.

Behind the ultimate hope

The killing forced him to become what he already was, but it was not without consequences :

he’s still feel the burden of the loss that the killing game has put him through

And his desire to feel normal or the desire of not wanting people to put him too much in high esteem are disregarded. When he feels himself that he didn’t changed, others do, especially his sister.

Though those consequences aren’t felt in killing game because it was sustainable for Makoto, the reality is often more brutal than games and that’s when we see that he falls, that we see that he is still human at heart, that despite symbolizing light, hope and genuine love, something darker exist inside of him. We see that part of him after his first initial appearance in his short novel, dr2 or dr3.

Normalcy vs extraordinariness

But there is more behind that mask. There is an existing conflict between normalcy and extraordinariness in the character of Makoto. It’s present throughout THH subtly. It isn’t put or shown to us explicitly except in the prologue and the first chapter of the game. Like I said previously, we know that Makoto wasn’t normal from the beginning, even before THH. I already gave these proofs in the third part by taking quotes from two novels (Dr Zero)

and (Makoto’s secret file)

But Makoto himself doesn’t see that abnormality and only views himself as an ordinary person. He doesn’t see the strength that he has inside of him because of that warped sense of normalcy. Though, people find him strong, he dismisses it immediately. It shows that he doesn’t know himself fully, that his strength is an inner strength. We saw that in Chihiro FTE. To go further, when asked by Chihiro to think of someone stronger, he thinks of people who are physically strong like Sakura or Mondo which amplify what I already explained.

But he has accepted his normalcy and tries to live with it and is pride of it. Which is something I have already said in the first part but here, I’ll add more elements and will go deeper.

So even his classmates have remarked that he is indeed not normal and see that he stands out.

What’s more interesting here are the lines that Togami said here. « But I must say, I just don’t understand you. You don’t want to fight, and yet you don’t flee from the battle, either. ». It resumes perfectly that duality he has with normalcy and extraordinariness. Starting from the line « you don’t want to fight » put in evidence his normalcy but also his submissive nature and his tendency to hide his sassy or mean comments about someone behind his thoughts but the line « you don’t flee from the battle either » also illustrates his unshakable will, his grandiosity and especially his weirdness. Those two lines said by Togami define Makoto Naegi: an apparent ordinary person but beneath the surface, an anormal person. But also, someone who doesn’t fight as he doesn’t attack or use force but who stand against adversity.

However, Makoto doesn’t like to be viewed as the ultimate hope, as that exceptional person. He has a low esteem of himself as shown in chapter 1, or in Chihiro FTE, because he compared himself to the ultimate students and him not having one makes him feel that he doesn’t deserve to be here. But his inferiority complex doesn’t mean that he wants to be a hero or that he wants to disregard his normalcy.

I have already talked about this point in the first part but I will give again more proofs that adds to this! In his short novel, Makoto’s secret file, we see that shows us that when put in an alarming situation which requires his help, he snap it and claimed clearly that he isn’t a hero at all and doesn’t want to be one.

« That was the perfectly normal conclusion his abnormally average high-school mind reached. He was no hero, just a regular high-school boy—or at least he was in that moment.

Makoto Naegi wanted nothing more than for the entire incident to tie itself up somewhere he wasn’t. Which is why he just stood there as Jutarou sped away.

« It’s all over, he thought, letting out a heavy sigh. Things can go back to normal now. My boring, peaceful everyday life. » »

Suprise, suprise ! Makoto Naegi, the ultimate hope, not wanting to catch the threat? Yes, indeed! It’s Makoto Naegi. You would think that Naegi would be a hero instinctively even before the story due to him having the same characteristics of the shonen hero, right ? But, no, what’s shown to us is that he clearly does not want to get involved anymore. While he admired talent, he isn’t as obsessed as Hajime who refused to accept his normalcy whereas Makoto accepted and is proud of it like we’ve seen with Togami. In fact, being in a heroic situation isn’t something that he wants and will take 100 times his « boring, peaceful everyday life ». Like he said, he isn’t a hero but just a regular high-school boy.

But that’s when another talent or power comes into fruition: His ultimate luck. I already said that his luck can symbolize many things in part 2 but his luck can also symbolize the will of the world itself. The world itself won’t let him wear his mask of normalcy and want to tear that mask apart while he just wants to live his boring and peaceful ordinary days without trouble. I repeat, the world is relentlessly trying to destroy his wish so as he realizes what he is predestined to be. Thus, him having bad luck is good luck for the world and everyone else but not for him. Once again, just like how Jesus was destined to suffer, Makoto seems to have the same fate as him: He is earth’s punching bag in a way (lol).

So, we’ve seen how this duality exists in his character. But we must see how this duality led him to, right? In the beginning of THH, Makoto didn’t know himself fully and so disregarded his main quality as being optimistic. In the prologue, he uses these words:

« But if I have any kind of "strong point," so to speak... I'd say I'm a little more gung-ho than other people. »

See? In describing his optimism, he uses quotations marks with words strong point to speak of his quality. The use of quotation marks here is pejorative, denigratory and illustrates how for Makoto, it isn’t a strong point at all, it’s insignificant and just a normal thing that he has. As he lacks confidence in himself, he even uses the adjective « little » to describe his optimism as still something trivial. For him this optimism is unexceptional and doesn’t seem to be special. But as we know, he undermines any actions he makes because of his skewed mindset. But as we know Makoto grows and his inner strength is revealed and explored more and more during THH until he recognizes that quality

But why is recognizing his quality important? It’s important because it shows again the growth of Makoto, his acceptance and pride in affirming that his optimism is his only redeeming quality. His description is a positive one. But that acceptance also means that he understands now his strength and actually how strong he is. He finally accepts his extraordinariness and embrace it. However, to do that, he had to grow or more so that the killing game tear his mask apart completely to reveal his true nature that he has from the beginning. And he did. Also, he doesn’t view his talent as the ultimate hope as a talent but rather as a « state of mind », showing again that he understood who he is truly and where his inner strength comes: From within.

But a question remains. Did Makoto fully embrace his true nature and put away his false nature away, him being an ordinary person? Well not really and he stands firm. He views himself still as a normal person.

Even after THH, he denied the words said by his sister in Udg.

He doesn’t see himself as exceptional or anything else and disregard any people saying that he did change. For him, he is still the same Makoto but a Makoto who has accepted his qualities. However, he can’t be normal anymore, not with the world destroyed and in despair, not when he is the ultimate hope

So finally, Makoto doesn’t embrace one or the other but rather tries to embrace both his normalcy and extraordinariness. But as I said it’s impossible. The title of the ultimate hope exists for a reason and has its consequences. By becoming hope, he has already given up any chances of a normal life but that’s something that he is willingly accepting and the pain that comes with it. But with that hope come suffering and pain.

Survivor’s guilt

Finally, that pain that comes with the responsibility of the ultimate hope is big. But what is that pain? It’s his survivor’s guilt. While explaining that dichotomy that exists between the mask of his title, one thing also exists which is his survivor’s guilt. It’s an important piece of his character that is often highlighted but we’re going to see how this survivor’s guilt became his shadow and how it humanizes him and therefore contrasting him with Jesus.

Indeed, Makoto suffers from a hard survivor’s guilt after the events of THH. But that guilt as I have explained in the first part existed within the killing game itself. Though there is a clear symbolism that I have made about him and Jesus, they are still different.

The big difference is how they feel when beating their respective burden. Jesus, though bearing the sins of Man didn’t feel guilty at all. However, Makoto feels like he is guilty and like I said from the beginning.

But why Jesus doesn’t feel guilty? It’s because he is perfect and so perfect morally too. So, when I’ve made the comparison between them I implicitly said that Makoto himself was designed to be perfect in his morals and behavior which he isn’t veritably.

We know that he isn’t and the fact that when bearing the memories is hard and difficult for him. But especially for one: Sayaka Maizono. She was an important friend for him even if she betrayed her and is the first person that he decided to put his trust in her after the first trial by putting the trust of her good will before her death. So, when thinking about her, he has a lot of regret, guilt and nostalgia as I have said many times in other parts. She also represents her first love so it’s normal that he is hurt the most by remembering her. And so even in the others game, we see how important Sayaka is still for him.

For instance, in Goodbye Despair, the reset password used by Makoto was 11037 for the neo world program. Naegi used Maizono’s dying message as a reset password to New World program. In Japanese version, Naegi refers to her as 'some person(ある人)’ while in English version Naegi refers to her as 'someone close to me’. It shows that he still holds his oath, to don’t forget about his classmates but also shows that the guilt is still there and will continue to be there. As long as he doesn’t forget about them, the emotions he had towards his classmates won’t disappear too. Like said before in this post, Makoto makes them lives through him. In addition, the fact that he got the memories of his past two years when he was at Hope speak academy worsens his guilt even more.

But still Makoto Naegi cannot forget them even after the events of THH. In UDG, when talking about the killing game, we see how hurtful and painful it is for Makoto to remember it but he still chose to do it which shows his commitment to keep his promises no matter the cost.

And in Danganronpa 3, with one of its best scenes of the franchise for me with how well executed it’s handled. It manifests his survivor’s guilt very well and even though it was amplified by the video, it doesn’t undermine the actual survivor’s guilt that he has. We see that the two most important people in his life are the people who tells him to die for his sins, to join them. Those two people are incarnate the people that he loved romantically: Kyoko and Sayaka.

There are interesting words said by Sayaka. She said that he couldn’t hold his oath and so to save her. Those words are surely what Makoto felt and still feels.

He couldn’t save Sayaka even with his words. Though she symbolizes his first love, she also symbolizes his first failure. She is the first person that couldn’t save her from her fate. So, he feels guilty and put the fault on him. Kyoko being here is due to fresh trauma as well.

Indeed, before dying, Kyoko put all her hopes in Makoto and encouraged her to keep hoping no matter what happened. Then she dies because of her forbidden action which was “passing the 4th time limit with Makoto Naegi alive” She deliberately hided as she knows what Makoto could have done. After the 4th time limit, Makoto sees that Kyoko is dead and almost shut down in grief. The words of Munakata coming to almost to the same time he discovered her death, almost causes a critical hit.

But from this point onward, he tried to end the killing game by himself and he’s doing a lot of reckless actions to the point it’s almost killed him, with him seeing the suicide video. He is justifying by saying that’s what he must do as Kyoko would do the same, but this action itself is too self-destructive as it could lead to his death. What really pushed him was the hopes that Kyoko gave him but also the guilt that he has, which is pushing him to move forward without worrying about himself.

But his survivor’s guilt isn’t shown only in that episode but also in episode 6, 'No Man Is An Island', where Makoto has a vivid nightmare of Kyoko's death, with Munakata blaming Makoto for her death. Specifically, saying that Makoto was at fault for thinking he would be able to go through the entirety of this game without sacrificing someone close to him. Intense and vivid nightmares that harken back to whatever traumatic event happened or is currently happening, are one of the main symptoms of survivor's guilt.

While those two are prominent figures of his life, his other classmates are in his hallucinations showing that he also cares and feels guilty over their death. But it also shows that he wants illogicality to take the blame for their wrongdoings or not, even if it’s not his fault at all.

Having highlighted his survivor’s guilt negatively, I also have to say that his survivor’s guilt proves that he cares, that he didn’t erase the despair he confronted by rather always trying to fight it as he always accepted to suffer so as to come back even stronger. He accepted that despair and hope is a part of life, and that despair naturally comes but he always chooses the hard path as said by Kyoko at the end of chapter 1.

Therefore, Makoto Naegi while seeming like Jesus is still human being, a flawed human who cannot help but feel guilty for all the horrors he’s been through even though it’s not his fault. All of that has taken a toll on him. But that weight is something that he desired to bear, even if it hurts him in the end.

Bearing the talent of the ultimate hope

So, we’ve seen that being the ultimate hope is not an easy task to do, and it comes with a lot of problems too. Especially when the burden of being one came from Kyoko and not totally from yourself. The outside world is in shambles and despair still exists and causes damage to the world. But being the ultimate hope isn’t something that Makoto doesn’t want to be associated but it isn’t something that he sings like he is proud of it. But being associated with this title is a gift for him gaining what he complained about: talent. After all, he was happy that he could bring hope to the world or at least try to encourage the world to follow hope, at least that’s what he thought to himself at the epilogue of the game.

(1 and 2)

Even though the outside world is a uncertain, he is optimistic as he gained hope to move forward even when there is despair. It’s not for nothing that the ending of the game is sung by the VA of Makoto and that the name of that song is “rebuild”. It amplifies the words said by Naegi « the world can…move ahead ». Since the world can move ahead, it’s time for the outside world to be rebuilt again. To be rebuilt by Makoto’s own effort and hope as he wants to show courage to the world too.

But the remaining questions are how he will interact with the world he has to face to but also how the world will see him.

Idealized by the world

First and foremost, Makoto Naegi became the ultimate hope and so became the symbol of hope for the world itself. He is the antonym to the despair of Junko Enoshima and is therefore idealized by the world. Everyone saw the brilliant and unshakable will of his.

They’ve seen him as a person who will never succumb to despair and will always move forward. But why do people view him that way?

Because he didn't show his emotions or feelings and kept them to himself. Those regrets, grief, guilt aren’t shown to the people and even his friends as he tries to show a strong face to his classmates. We see that in many instances but also know why he doesn’t show it as well: He has an objective now and that objective is prioritized over his negative emotions. How do I know that? It’s thanks to Chihiro last FTE.

We know that surpassing his inferiority complex that he has toward the ultimate students, he throws himself into something hard enough just to forget about it. So just like he did with his inferiority complex, he also did that with his load of negative emotions. He tends to contain them to show a strong face.

For instance, when he investigated the corpse of Sayaka, it’s said that he wanted to cry, to give up and collapse but he stood still. The greatest example of that is when Kyoko died. He didn’t cry in front of Hina or Aoi but cry after, he is alone.

While we can see how much he is hurt through the optional dialogues, it’s not something that the others can find about him. He keeps to himself and isn’t pressed to talk about it to anybody but why is he doing that ?

It’s because, in his class, he is the sole person that acts as that person that reminds everyone to trust each other, to try to make the group united against the mastermind. He is that person. In others cast, there are many people who do this such as Kaede, Kaito in drV3 or Chiaki, Sonia or Twogami in GD.

But Makoto? There was only him. There are two people who don’t care about anyone else (Togami and Celeste), Kyoko who doesn’t want to take the stage and let Makoto be in the light and Taka that tried to this, but he was too rigid and was lacking in charisma. Moreover, there wasn’t one person to suck all the negativity like there are in the two other games like Kokichi (after the chapter 3) or Nagito and the cast of these two games was much warmer than the first one. The only one that succeeded to do this, is Sakura in her death. She was the only one with Naegi, to try to beat the mastermind truly and to trust everyone even though they acted against her.

Naturally, the world has seen this version of him, this version that seems to be invincible to despair. The rest of the world who saw him defeat Enoshima, Naegi is strong and invincible in the face of despair, it's as if "it was easy" for him.

This explains why Munakata thinks he hasn't experienced real despair, and why his words have no weight or force. What he saw was only an idealized version of Makoto. He didn’t see his pain or discomfort because Makoto hid it.

But fortunately for him, he has his friends to support him all along. They are the ones who followed him and still follow him. They care about him, even Toko, which was often dismissive of him in THH, has grown attached to him. We can see it in Danganronpa 3 when Toko and Komaru talked with Monaca or in UDG when Komaru was able to contact him. Those friends and everyone who supports him are…his hope.

Seeing beyond the dichotomy of hope and despair

We have seen that hope in the world of Danganronpa can be seen as being talented. For some reaching true hope is only possible through despair but then it becomes a perpetual cycle or hope as the thing that confront despair and kill it every time until it doesn’t exist. Each of these definitions are based essentially on power.

The definition of hope and how to achieve it varies from one and another

Hope’s Speak Academy: Hope = Talent. It’s their ideology that they tried to push to its upper limits until creating the artificial ultimate hope, Izuru Kamakura. A parallel can be made between Makoto and Izuru. Both are ultimate hope but one is an artificial one with every talent possible inside of him and the other is an innate one with a single talent within him and actually succeeds at becoming a true ultimate hope. But the other didn’t. But it’s normal, the hope that was given to Izuru was never from within but from the exterior. It was not his hope but the hopes of the committee of HPA so it’s not surprising that Izuru failed to become what he was destined to be.

Nagito Komaeda: he seems to follow the same ideology as HPA but with different as he views hope a purpose and so as something that keeps advancing. Only hope and talent matter but not people. Talent is the incarnation of hope and so dying is only a process to reach an even greater hope. But in more so, his hope is linked to his luck. It’s through his luck that he defines hope. His ideology is his coping mechanism that tries to hold to a desperate hope.

Kyosuke Munakata: The sole purpose of hope is to be that force who eliminated all sources of despair. Weaknesses are not permitted and only an unshakable strength would be the one to be able to eliminate all despair within this world. For him hope is for the strong and only those who have seen the terrors of despair can struggle against it. His hope only exists when despair does.

All those ideologies are based on power or at least in accordance with something that can be relied on.

However, Naegi’s hope is based on belief and trust. Its definition is close to what we see nowadays. It isn’t based on despair but belief. Which is weak and also hard, difficult as we have seen in the game with Sayaka, Mondo, Celeste that couldn’t trust their classmates and it’s normal believing is hard, difficult in the situation that they were in, especially when the mastermind’s incentives caused distrust between the cast. Sayaka is after all, the biggest failure of Makoto as she symbolizes his first defeat as she couldn’t believe in him anymore, as she said in the school mode ending.

It highlights the lack of power he has. He has nothing except himself and his optimism. He can falter sometimes as seen in chapter 3, where doubts started to arise on whether his optimism of his should be held in that situation. And his expressions on the different climax reasoning subtly show how hard and difficult it’s for him. It’s not an easy task to be optimistic all the time and Makoto showed us that in various ways, in his dialogues, especially the optional ones or like I said the climax reasoning panels.

But that belief can be strong if multiples people believe in it. It works not as a unilateral power but as a bilateral power. The effects are shown, I’d say at the end of chapter 4 all the way to the epilogue. But it cost the lives of so many people.

However, Makoto doesn’t forget that cost. By memorizing the dead, Makoto gives them a second live. They lived through him and their ambition and will to get out remain still in Makoto Naegi as well their pain and sins. Also, for him forgetting about the pain and suffering of the dead would be insulting to them. Forgetting them as if they were statistics would be as if they didn’t matter, as if they were nothing. But remembering the goods and the bad of the dead, though the choice of doing so is difficult, is much more respectful and pay tribute to them. It’s through suffering and pain that Makoto finds his way to his hope.

He is not erasing or ignoring the pain but accepting it and tries to overcome it.

He isn’t someone who can’t accept reality, we’ve seen in THH where he accepts the betrayal of Sayaka and move on compared to Taka who couldn’t move on from Mondo’s death and ended up dying.

Failure and success

He may be naive but not an idealist. He is a realistic optimist that no matter the problems, will always try to search for the best solution even in dire situations. But preaching hope is difficult and isn’t without obstacles and failures.

GD shows us that example. He made the choice to save the remnants of despair from the future foundation which is morally questionable but shows a clear difference between Makoto’s hope and the future foundation’s hope led by Munakata.

But it’s not him who saved them in the end but themselves. Hajime has decided for himself what solution to choose and convince his friends to choose that solution and to go forward not Makoto. So, his intervention didn’t work.

But in his last confrontation, it worked. It was when he confronted Munakata. Firstly, he tried to establish trust very rapidly by showing his forbidden action and let everyone the ability to kill him. He knows with experience (with events of GD and THH) that his hope works better with trust established right from the beginning. It didn’t work. But it worked later, during their confrontation.

Their confrontation is the confrontation of their ideology but beyond that lies a conflict of power and trust. It is illustrated from how they act and how they cared about the people around them. While both have tendencies to take the burden for themselves, Makoto does take into account his friends and view his hope as not something that comes from his own but from everyone. And in a way it’s true, it’s because people trust him that his hope works. Like I said Makoto’s hope exists when trust exists in both parties.

Makoto is accompanied and refuses to make sacrifices while Munakata’s Hope is based on power. As I said before this is an ideology whose existence is only reactive and exist only because of despair so sacrifices can be made which would only result at him being alone.

Moreover the symbolism within the anime shows that distinction with Makoto’s blooded hand which blood came from Kyoko, symbolizes the his will to keep the memories of Kyoko within himself even if it’s hurt him, while Munakata cutting Chisa even when she is already dead means that he wants to erase Chisa from her memories and shows his will to erase despair at all cost. Though I understand him as Chisa was a remnant of despair and betrayed him, even though it’s not her fault as she was brainwashed.

All that shows that Munakata is trapped in the cycle of hope and despair. His ideology can’t exist outside of despair. It’s reactionary while Makoto isn’t as he can see beyond that dichotomy and tries to move forward and that’s exactly what he does when confronting Munakata in their last battle. He doesn’t go against Munakata’s ideology but against Munakata’s attempts to erase his suffering. It works because both went the same thing, both lost their close companions so there is a level of sympathy, trust that can be created between them.

Though the comparison between Kyoko and Chisa isn’t adapted to the situation, this comparison is more made to convey that one mustn’t erase memories of a dear one, even the bad one, because it’s that pain that will allow you to move forward. And that’s exactly what Makoto does in dr3 or in the game with Sayaka. And in doing so he can be free from being trapped in the cycle of despair and hope.

Final Conclusion

So what? Who is Makoto Naegi and what story does he bring to Danganronpa ? What is the main purpose in the story of Hope’s Speak Academy ?

If taking his character only from THH, it relates the story of a seemingly ordinary boy who has some self-esteem issues who comes to understand and accept his qualities with assurance. But his character also shows us that both despair and hope exist but even in the dire situations, hope exists and to move forward in the future is to have hope.

But if taking his character in its entirety, he is someone caught up between the duality of normalcy and extraordinariness. He comes to accept his extraordinariness but doesn’t want to give up his normalcy as it’s something that he has pride in and doesn’t shy from it. However, his duties as the ultimate hope erase his dream of normalcy.

But what we learn from him is that suffering is inevitable, that suffering from despair isn’t something that we must erase or try to eliminate from. Without those hardships, without those hopeless moments we cannot grow. It’s something that Naegi understands very well and has put into practice when he made his oath at the end of the first trial. He continuously kept the memories of his dead classmates/friends show his will to confront and face the despair face to face and not try to disregard because it’s too difficult. It’s in a way his force but also his weakness.

Naegi also shows that for advancing, we must accept weakness, suffering, vulnerability in order to surpass despair. Again, that’s what he showed us with his battle with Munakata which is the core of their battle. Their battle is a battle between acceptance and erasure.

His hope isn’t made from nothing but made from the suffering that he has to undergo which allows him to empathize with those who suffer with him.

But Naegi’s hope is hard and difficult because it’s based on belief, but it also demands people to accept weakness and despair while hoping for better which is still an hard task to do. But people who have seen him go through hell, are inspired by him and decided to help him in his quest

Therefore, Naegi’s main role in the story of Danganronpa is to be the bed, the backup, the shield. There is no other backup because HE IS THAT BACKUP, THAT SHIELD. The world itself, through his luck, forces him to be that shield, that bed that allows the ones who follow him to stand up, to stay strong. He is like I said the word’s punching bag and so despair’s punching bag. But it’s something that he wants to be after all he is the one that shows the world « courage » to confront despair. He has after all taken the burden of hope just like Hajime has taken the burden of despair.

But that doesn’t make him the danganronpa’s Jesus as he isn’t perfect nor morally or physically and is still human at his core which is what his survivor’s guilt shows to us. Despite him having luck, he draws his strength from within.

Opinion

I love him! He is my favorite character in Danganronpa and though I know that he isn’t the best character of Danganronpa in term of writing, a lot people come to pass a lot of his writing. I’m sure that 3/4 of the fandom never read his optional monologue which is also important to his character. His short novel or danganronpa zero adds depth to his character and shows that he has more layers than he seemingly has. He isn’t as simple as he looks to be and his dynamics or parallels with a lot of characters are great and should be more talked about.

Another thing that I like about him is that duality with his talent and normalcy that he tries to accept both even if it’s ultimately impossible. He cannot reject both as he has pride in its normalcy, but he doesn’t and can’t give up the title as the ultimate hope as even though it’s a curse, it’s a curse that he wants and is ready to bear.

But I have some negative points to say, especially in Dr3. There are things I like about Makoto in dr3 and things I like less. I’ll start with what Iiked. The fact that his survivor’s guilt is shown to us is great and illustrates how difficult it was for him to go through the killing game. Despite some flaws in his confrontation with Munakata, I liked it. People are saying why Munakata compliments him while he hates him. But I don’t have the impression that he hates him at least in the first episodes. It’s Juzo who displays his hatred for Naegi but not Munakata in the first episodes. And the fact that he was willing to argue with Makoto is a sign that he has some respect for Makoto and his belief at the beginning.

But what I disliked is how reliant he is on Aoi as he can’t walk which hurts his screen time and how Aoi does nothing except carrying Makoto. Also why is Kyoko alive? She should be dead; that’s pure fan service and diminish her actions and the words said by Makoto during his fight against Munakata. Also, the comparison made between Chisa and Kyoko works but not totally.

It works because they are the close companion of Makoto and Chisa and are dead, but it doesn’t work completely because Kyoko died by giving her life to him and Chisa died because she was brainwashed. But the essential of their conversation is more about keeping memories of close people even if it hurts you, so Sayaka would have been better to compare with Chisa, but the essence is still there.

But dr3 wanted the ship Naegiri to be made. Not that I don’t like Naegiri, it’s a great ship but the comparison used by Naegi to convince Munakata is ankward like I have said before. Finally, the plot being too focused-on Naegi and the fact that Juzo is used as a plot device and saves Naegi in episode 11. The less I talk about the ending, the better I will feel good. Overall, I’m pretty mixed on his appearance in dr3 has good highs appeared for him but there are some lows, so yeah mixed.

Getting that out of the way, I want to finish by saying that Makoto is in a way a laudation to humanity through his journey and suffering. He is a reminder to me that we mustn’t erase our heads, bad memories or moments just because it affects us. We must keep those bad experiences with us to keep moving forward and to grow. We can always do better.

#makoto naegi #danganronpa #danganronpa 3 #kyoko kirigiri #rant

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deathcage · 3 years ago

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So I was talking to Ash about this last night, but since I adore and write BOTH Mondo Oowada and Juzo Sakakura I wanted to talk about their similarities and differences because this really does sum it up

The similarities are so obvious that most people who are barely into the series can usually point them out - besides the physical similarities, their characters are driven and defined by guilt complexes, enormous secrets, and a crushing sense of responsibility. Both suffer from low self esteem. It’s also worth mentioning that it’s pretty likely that both are gay - Juzo is canon, but Mondo is also literally a gay stereotype in Japan.

( I also still think Munasaka was directly capitalizing on Ishimondo’s popularity let’s be real. )

I usually sum up the differences as Juzo is Mondo if he had a brain and was meaner, Mondo is Juzo if he was stupid and extroverted. BUT I don’t think that ties up all of it.

I’m gonna get the most obvious difference out of the way first. And that’s literally just...fun. Mondo values fun. Sakakura has fun, but only with like...two people. Only doing pretty structured things. Knocking over trash cans and hitting cars with bats and acting a hooligan isn’t anywhere near his wheelhouse.

But that is the most surface level difference, I think.

I wrote before about how Sakakura thinks about Despair:

Despair, for them, is not an interpersonal war. It isn’t a question of losing one person, one more person, or seeing an array of bloody deaths within the confines of a game. You have to remember that the two of them have years of memories that Naegi does not. They were outside the school when the world fell apart. Their perspective is inherently broader.

Is that a good thing? Not necessarily. The loss of that interpersonal perspective on Despair is what drives the core conflict of DR3 between Munakata and Naegi. But I do think there’s a lot of worth in how Munakata and Sakakura think.

Because they aren’t preventing individual deaths. They are preventing extinction.

This perspective of willingness to steamroll absolutely anyone who “jeopardizes” what he believes is the only path to a fixed world is where he and Munakata differ from the rest. And that is the biggest difference between Oowada and Sakakura. What ends justify what means. What matters more - humans as a species, or humans as individuals.

I will give one specific example. Hajime Hinata.

Now, I’ve mentioned before that Sakakura does not actually believe a damn word he says to Hajime. It is solely to keep him out of harm’s way. But what he says, regardless of intent, is vicious. It’s brutal. A line is crossed. And that is a line that Mondo wouldn’t even tiptoe near. Because he can’t turn his empathy on mute like Sakakura can. The end doesn’t justify the means.

There’s also this.

Mondo Oowada is one of the most forgiving characters in the series as a whole. In IF, he is one of the first people to give Mukuro the benefit of the doubt and help her. Even Chihiro is like um are we sure about this. I have absolutely no doubt that if Mondo made it to DR3, he would be unreservedly on Makoto’s side based on ethics alone, even if he wasn’t his friend prior. It’s the principle of keeping them alive is a risk we can’t take vs no more bloodshed, if we have a chance to save them we need to take it. Neither viewpoint is wrong. But they are fundamentally incompatible.

ANYWAY. I really wish we got to see them interact. I think they would have been really interesting foils playing off of each other. BUT this got long as hell so I’m going to stop there <3 if you read this far ilysm

#analysis tag #good LORD this is long im SO SORRY

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bokushingu · 4 years ago

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I want to talk a little bit about Sakakura’s aggression because I kind of...see it differently than a lot of people do. Or at least its cause.

I don’t think it’s necessarily him losing his temper. I actually think a good 90% of the time is is very controlled and deliberate, and born more out of frustration than genuine rage.

( I also know a common interpretation is that he does it to appear more masculine and less...gay, but that can’t be it either, because homosexuality in Japan is stereotyped as traditionally masculine. )

A good hint for what is actually happening underneath comes from the Serial Killer Gambling in Killer Killer. It’s kind of directly spelled out for us by Kenji Tsuruhashi, who murdered the Secretary of Defense in an effort to get Sakakura fired. He revealed that the sixth branch had the highest turnover rate in the Future Foundation because Juzo “worked them like dogs.”

So he’s a shit boss and branch six needs to unionize. Is that important?

Yes. It is. Because Sakakura thinks like Munakata.

Because they aren’t preventing individual deaths. They are preventing extinction.

And that, I think, is what drives Sakakura to be the person he is. He is extremely aware of the stakes of this war. And in his mind, if you’re not giving 200% of yourself to it, you are directly putting the Earth and the continued existence of the human species at risk.

On a smaller scale, this applies to the Hinata incident as well. While there was no extinction threat, he was also very aware of the stakes of letting Hinata anywhere near the school. Sakakura has an ability to set aside his own empathy for what he sincerely believes to be the greater good. Was he kind of a dick about it? Well yes. But it wasn’t completely without reason.

ANYWAY. That’s all I had to say on this tonight <3 hope that made ANY sense at all <3 night night

#analysis tag

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hydeanachronism · 4 years ago

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Hello, Icarus! Please infodump to me about Danganronpa?

okay so! I had written out a whole thing but then tumblr deleted it! so that was fun! /s but now that I know what I'm going to write it's much easier, so that's good 😌

n e ways, I'm gonna do like a basic timeline w explanations and some other stuff that hopefully I'll remember once I start writing!! so let's go :D

a list of everything danganronpa in chronological order (not the order that you should play/watch the stuff in, I'll put that in the explanations)

Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School - Despair Arc (DR3) - second anime, watch along with the Future and Hope arcs after playing the first two games (and UDG if you want to). backstory for the cast of the second game.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc (THH) - first main game, play first. also has an anime that's basically the same as the game, but since there's not enough time to put everything from the game into the anime I definitely recommend playing the game. high school students from a prestigious school trapped in said school are forced to play a killing game, hijinks ensue.

Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls (UDG) - third game, not main. play after playing the first two games. very different game mechanics from the main three, and widely considered not cannon by the fandom. I like it though, and it introduces a lot of really interesting characters along with giving a v underdeveloped character from the first game a lot more character development. it's not necessary to play it (though one of the characters plays a pretty big part in the third anime, so that would make more sense if you already knew her), but I think it's interesting and fun. there are also robot fights.

Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair (DR2 or SDR2) - second main game, play after playing the first game. same basic premise as the first game, except it's a different class (same school though) and this time they're on an island. even more hijinks and plot twists than the first game.

Super Danganronpa 2.5: Komaeda Nagito to Sekai no Hakaimono - (I could only find the Japanese title for this one, sorry 😔) kinda also part of the second anime? watch after playing the first two games (and UDG if you want) and watching DR3. character is woken up from a coma via overdramatic and overpowered other character.

Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School - Future and Hope Arcs (DR3) - second anime, watch along with the Despair arc after playing the first two games (and UDG if you want to). aftermath of the first two games.

Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony (DRV3) - third main game, fourth game in total. I don't actually know when it happens bc they're v secretive about everything, so I'm just putting it last. play last. same premise as the first two, the class is trapped in a school with a courtyard and a huge sort of dome around everything. peak hijinks, too many plot twists to count.

woo!! that's the timeline as I know it, hopefully I didn't miss anything. and I have managed to remember what else I was going to say, so let's move on to section two:

the mechanics of the games

danganronpa is, at its core, a glorified visual novel. every character has a certain amount of sprites for when they talk, as well as voice lines that aren't usually the exact text on the screen but fit the vibe of whatever they're saying. and as I've said before, there's quite a lot of talking. these games have more plot than should really be possible and most or all of it is done through dialogue. cutscenes and class trials are the only parts that are reliably fully voice acted, but there are a lot of those.

as for the parts that are less visual novel-y: you can walk around, and the settings are pretty much as 3d as the 2d-ish style of the game allows. you can also click on things, and sometimes clicking on stuff will get you monocoins, the currency of the game, which means you'll be able to buy presents for the characters!!

"now why do I need presents for the characters?" you ask. well, that's because you're given a certain amount of free time each game to hang out with characters you want to get to know better! the game's ending is fixed, so you won't change the course of the game by who you do or don't hang out with, but you can learn more about characters and become closer to them! giving them presents they like makes them like you more :D

and the most exciting part of danganronpa, what a lot of people play the games for, the true lure of the game.... the class trials!!

so these characters are in a killing game, right? basically, they're faced with a sort of lose-lose predicament: stay trapped in the school forever, or kill one of your classmates to "graduate". but it's not as simple as that, because in order to graduate, you can't be caught. and how do you determine whether or not a criminal has been found out? well, a trial of course!

enter the class trials. every student (barring dead or severely wounded ones) is required to participate in a kind of mock trial- except someone's really dead, and they need to find the murderer or they'll all die too.

(right, did I forget to mention that? only one person can graduate. getting out alive insures that none of your classmates get the luxury of doing the same.)

so, yeah. the class trials are a true fight for life on both sides, because who ever loses will be executed.

and they're really, really fun.

entirely voice acted! enough minigames that the list of them is probably longer than this entire post! the joy of solving the mystery! the... execution, right in front of everyone.

hey, it's a dark game. not like they're trying to hide that. and the executions aren't actually all that gory most of the time, but they're still very much there and onscreen. also as close to fully animated as the games ever get, which is pretty cool.

so how the class trials work is this:

there's a murder. dun dun duuuun. you investigate everywhere related to the murder to get "truth bullets", which are the reason you don't immediately fail at the trials. you don't have to remember all of them, they're all written down in your e-handbook. plus, the protagonists all seem to have really good memories.

time for the actual class trial!! Monokuma (asshole bear running the killing game) introduces everything, explains the rules. and everyone starts talking.

there are a lot of different parts to the class trial, but most of it is "nonstop debates". everyone talks one after the other, and you have to find inconsistencies and shoot the right "weak spot" with the right truth bullet. you refute the lie or mistake and everyone goes back to arguing normally.

there's also hangman's gambit (weird hangman to find a key word), multiple choice things (self-explanatory), and plenty of others.

near the end of the trial (or sometimes only a little over halfway in, it varies), the killer will.... kind of become obvious. there's a specific kind of change in behavior that's the mark of the murderer in these games, but I'm not sure how to describe it exactly. a lot of times there's an accent change, and in general they start acting much more erratic. since it's a trial, though, even after this presents itself you still have to prove your case beyond reasonable doubt.

and once it's become clear to the killer that they're backed into a corner, you have to do the "bullet time battle". it goes by different names in different games, but the basic mechanics are the same: you battle against a student (usually the killer, but not always) in a rhythm-based battle where you have to click to the rhythm to refute your opponent's statements. once you've dealt enough damage, you shoot the final piece of evidence, and that's the end of it.

the murderers react differently different times. sometimes they break down and confess. sometimes they keep denying it. sometimes, they're just calm. however they act, though, the end is the same. they are caught and punished accordingly.

but before that, there's one more thing to do. the closing argument.

your final task is to explain how the murder was committed, from idea to execution (look, a pun! see I can be funny too 😌). and you have to do it... as a manga.

you don't have to draw the whole thing yourself ofc- you just have to fill in the missing panels and then watch as the protagonist narrates it to the rest of the class.

and that's all for the class trial, not counting the long talks after every execution while still in the courtroom.

wow, this is getting...... really, really long. there's only one more thing I'm gonna add, and I promise it will be much shorter than the other two bc it is late and I am officially Incredibly Fucking Tired.

with no further ado, a very short part three:

my general impression of the game. its vibes or smth, I dunno this is just what i think about it

when I first heard of danganronpa, I thought it was a horror game. I can now assure you that it is not. thriller? maybe. debatable. but definitely not horror.

and despite its extremely dark premise, this game is not all doom and gloom. there's so much stuff about hope, and overcoming despair even when it seems impossible... it's not exactly a happy game, but there's a lot more of that in there than you'd probably expect.

all in all, I love this game. so much. it means a lot to me, and I think it's a really good game. thanks for letting me talk about it so much asdhfd :D

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jcmorrigan · 4 years ago

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I saw the tag- I am gonna ask you about the crossover universe- (omg I’m literally gushing about this)

OH, IT IS TIME!

So you can find a lot of this on the “What is the WHAM ARMY?” page on my blog – I’ll try to remember to link it; I’m drafting this in a word processor first so I don’t use it. Essentially, this is the universe I’ve created for my fanfic “Taking Back the Crown,” which is about…basically my favorite villains all moving into the same house and trying to take over the multiverse. And then it got lore. And more lore. Because I cannot write anything normal. The fic is nearing its 150th chapter and I’m nowhere NEAR exhausted of all the ideas I want to put in it – it’s just my big playground for hyperfixation fun. Anyway, here’s a rundown of the major points of it!

THE CAST

The main characters are the eight villains who are the founders of the WHAM ARMY. The faction name is an acronym of their first initials. They’re my ultrafaves, the villains I always get fluttery heart for, and probably the biggest collection of losers you can imagine. I’ll put them in order of the acronym and give you some background on how each entered the team.

Wuya (Xiaolin Showdown) – So the connecting factor between these people is that Mozenrath (his name is a few slots down) is their team leader and the one who decided to build a team in the first place. Wuya was recruited when Mozenrath found her puzzle box in an ancient vault. This is set post-series for XS (and Chronicles is not at all canon), so what had happened is in the big Showdown right after Raimundo was named team leader officially in the finale, the Xiaolin Monks won ALL the Shen Gong Wu to their side and stuffed Wuya in the box. So Mozenrath found her and let her out so they could be pals. A magic potion let her regain human form fairly early on, and her power isn’t even nerfed either the way Chase Young would’ve done.

Huntsman (American Dragon: Jake Long) – ADJL is also post-series in this timeline. Mozenrath has the power to resurrect people from the dead at will because he’s memorized an ancient and incredibly complex ritual that he can execute mentally (note that this means you can remove this ability from him by tampering with his memories). The Huntsman was resurrected so as to show Mozenrath around the old Huntsclan vault (which is where they found Wuya’s puzzle box). No other Huntsclan member survived the purge except Rose (and 88 and 89, but they don’t count and aren’t in this story), so the Huntsman is starting from square one.

Ayam Aghoul (Aladdin: The Animated Series): Basically just got sick of losing. He’d teamed up with a few other rando Aladdin rogues to try and pick a fight with Maleficent, and she sent him packing. So he ended up finding one of the few residents of the Seven Deserts who was powerful enough to match him AND had a similar grudge against Maleficent.

Mozenrath (Aladdin: The Animated Series): The man of the hour and the creator of the entire team. He starts the fic by crashing Maleficent’s KH Disney Villain alliance and trying to add himself to it, but…ends up being such a disrespectful nuisance that Hades just drags him straight down to the Underworld. That moment inspired him to get his OWN band of friends and start making a name for himself.

Archibald Snatcher (The Boxtrolls): Met Mozenrath in the Underworld after his death in film canon. Annoyed Hades one too many times by claiming that he wasn’t actually supposed to die, seeing as he isn’t allergic to dairy (he is), so Hades threw him in the same cell as Mozenrath and…

Roman Torchwick (RWBY): I started writing this fic in 2016, immediately post-V3, so it’s canon-divergent after the last episode of V3 (but I got all the later-game characters to show up eventually). Which means Roman is ALSO dead at the start of this fic. He ALSO comes storming up to Hades insisting he’s not even supposed to be dead. At the same time as Snatcher is already pestering him. Which is how Mozenrath, Snatcher, and Roman end up in the same jail cell in Tartarus and get the idea that maybe they should break back into the world of the living and try to build something BETTER than what any of the three had beforehand.

Mad Madam Mim (The Sword in the Stone): Mozenrath, immediately after breaking out of the Underworld, attempted to take over Arthur’s kingdom by just walking in and throwing magic around. It backfired horribly when Merlin showed up. But then Mim showed up to counter Merlin and realized that maybe she had a potential friend here who was as blackhearted as she.

Yzma (The Emperor’s New Groove): Post-TENG, no KNG or TENS (but I reference things from TENS every now and again). Merlin turned Mozenrath into a rat, so Mim brought him to Yzma’s Secret Lab to change him back. There, they found Yzma as a cat, and she so desperately wanted out of her living situation that she added herself to the team. She was also restored to human form shortly thereafter.

There is a potential ninth member of the core in the form of Vexen (Kingdom Hearts). KH is canon-divergent after DDD and basically ignores almost every game that comes out after Fragmentary Passage. Vexen, as Even, was trying to integrate into life as a hero in Radiant Garden, except everyone annoyed him way too much, so he decided to go be with people that would give right back any insults he dished out. And then realized he was much happier being on the evil team and doing mad science with no ethics. However, he will not be promoted to the upper ranks because 1. it would spoil the acronym and 2. he is unanimously agreed-upon to be the biggest wet blanket of the group and nobody wants him at the founder parties.

(Imagine my disbelief when the actual canon arc for Vexen was THE REVERSE ONE IN WHICH HE JUST DECIDES TO GO LIVE AT RADIANT GARDEN AND NOT BE ANNOYED BY ANYTHING and that’s why JC doesn’t like Kingdom Hearts III)

Anyway, this crew is a bunch of silly friends who enjoy partying, singing, dancing, drag, indulging in vices, causing mayhem, taking over cities, arranging for mass murder, piecing together smear campaigns…but they’re all pretty much ride or die for each other. And that goes double for the ships of the set: Mozenrath/Huntsman, Mim/Aghoul, Wuya/Yzma, and my favorite ship to end all favorites, Roman/Snatcher (RedHatBlackHat is the ship name).

From there, you have a B-Squad of, like, seventy other people based on my faves. Nonnie, I know you saw this because of Vincent Edgeworth, Victor Blake, and Albert Krueger, and they are three of COUNTLESS examples. It’s a found crime family that keeps getting bigger as I get more fave villains and there’s hardly a rhyme or a reason. Currently, they live in a floating fortress designed when they stole Terra Cyclonia (Storm Hawks) and hefted it out into the aether between worlds with crystal technology.

They have a rival hero faction in the form of the Cinnamons: a gathering of people who they’ve wronged who turned out to make pretty good friends themselves. While the WHAM ARMY are the villain-protag team that you feel slightly bad loving the escapades of, the Cinnamons are the rainbows, fluff, sunshine, (secret crippling depression and anxiety), and pep-talkers of the multiverse. They’re the deuteragonist team as opposed to the “villains” of the story. They also have eight “leaders,” but they were picked up a little less quickly than the WHAM ARMY founders, instead coming together over the span of a much longer quest. These people are:

Sora (Kingdom Hearts): Heart of the team and the person who pulled them all together, because Sora loves everyone. He, Riku, and Kairi witnessed the WHAM ARMY wreaking destruction on both Radiant Garden and Disney Castle, and Sora decided no one gets to treat his homes-away-from-home like that and get away with it! Between Mozenrath and the still-looming threats of Maleficent and Xehanort, he’s now collecting pals from all worlds to fight against evil and do as much good as they can do! (While having sleepovers.)

Ruby Rose (RWBY): Before she, Nora, Ren, and Jaune could get into Mistral, Sora interrupted them on their path and directed them right back around to Vale with the news that Roman Torchwick was back in action. After an incident involving the Destiny Trio and Team RNJR having to team up and actually kill the massive Grimm unleashed in the V3 endgame, they all headed out to Radiant Garden together to continue their mission.

Papyrus (Undertale): Sora found him while exploring worlds and they clicked immediately as pals. Then the WHAM ARMY, who was living in Mt. Ebott at the time, sparked an anti-monster racist sentiment through the town, and Papyrus was advised to leave the world for his own safety, so he went traveling with Sora.

Stork (Storm Hawks): Maleficent, who is also an active player in this game, made a power play by destroying the Condor with the entire Storm Hawks team onboard while they were on the Far Side of Atmos (post-series). Stork, believing himself to be the only survivor, attempted to take his own life – only for Sora to show up just in time and offer him something better: hope that his friends survived, and new friends to tag along with until they could prove either way.

Jasmine (Aladdin): The Cinnamons came looking to Agrabah for more information on Mozenrath. When Jasmine heard he was causing chaos, she decided to get personally involved.

Katara (Avatar: The Last Airbender): Post-ATLA, no LoK. Sora made a trip to the Fire Nation to see if he could head off the WHAM ARMY’s latest scheme, and ran into the Gaang along the way. After helping Katara, Aang, and Zuko protect the Fire Nation from a very near miss, Sora invited them to come travel with him. Only Katara accepted at first, the other two wanting to clean things up on their homeworld.

Kazuichi Soda (DanganRonpa): Post-SDR2, no DR3. Xehanort requested Izuru Kamukura be used as a vessel, and Kazuichi went in Izuru/Hajime’s place so his buddy didn’t have to. But the first chance he got, Kazuichi turned and ran from the Castle That Never Was…where Sora had just crash-landed. Kazuichi patched up Sora’s ship, and immediately became part of his crew. (Worth noting: in this AU, the Remnants of Despair were never brainwashed and were completely aware of what they were doing. Kazuichi is basically a redemption story, trying to be a better person to make up for the hell he caused. Also, while on the Despair side, he’d hacked off his leg to sew Junko’s in its place, disabling himself – that leg goes through an arc regarding what prosthesis is in its place.)

Rapunzel (Tangled): After the Vardaros arc of S2 of Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure. Rapunzel was targeted by the WHAM ARMY because she was essentially a living MacGuffin for one of their spells. Sora showed up, and Rapunzel decided to go along with him for safety AND fun, leaving Cassandra to continue the pilgrimage to the Dark Kingdom. (Wrote this before KHIII was out. And before the Evil Cass twist.)

And just like the WHAM ARMY, these folks have a huge B-squad that lives in the Radiant Garden castle and helps them deal with the various tragedies they have to clean up after. Riku, Kairi, and Jaune Arc in particular get a decent amount of stage time.

As you can see, Maleficent (Sleeping Beauty/Kingdom Hearts) and her forces are another big set of chess pieces on the board! After she sent Mozenrath to gay baby jail and it didn’t stick, she’s been trying to continue plans for domination as usual but ALSO wipe the WHAM ARMY off the face of the multiverse. She, Jafar (Aladdin), Ursula (The Little Mermaid), and Hades (Hercules) all came straight here from KH. But I’m working to model that team’s inner circle on the team in “Quite a Glittering Assemblage,” the sister fic by gavillain (it’s basically this premise but Maleficent gets a team to start instead, but similarities end there, his is a whole different, fresh, and fun flavor). I’ve just gotten all these characters intro’d instory, but the other biggies are Loki (Marvel – I based him in the Cinematic Universe but he’s kind of just an amalgamation of Lokis), Dr. Doom (Marvel), Captain Hook (Once Upon a Time), Russell Edgington (True Blood), and Fish Mooney (Gotham). Currently, they operate out of the Forbidden Mountain in the Enchanted Dominion.

There’s also a very new addition as of the 140’s chapters: the Heathens. This is a squad of villains with moral lines in the sand (and some antiheroes or corrupted heroes). Basically, these aren’t your killers for fun. These are the people who steal candy from the gas station and think they’re slick, but the point is they’re enjoying themselves so just let it happen. The four founders of this one are Harley Quinn (DC – based on The Batman but an amalgamation of Harleys that leans sympathetic), Yang Xiao Long (RWBY), Giovanni Potage (Epithet Erased), and Velvet Crowe (Tales of Berseria). Currently, they operate out of the old mansion in Twilight Town.

The Xehanorts are here, and that team is largely who you think it is – though I stripped away Vexen, Demyx, Marluxia, Larxene, and Luxord in order to replace them ALL with Xaldin. More crossover shenanigans to come on this front. This team isn’t very active – they’re waiting for the Keyblade War – but they’re operating out of the World That Never Was.

There’s also another side villain faction: the Morbians, led by Mirage (Aladdin: The Animated Series). These are the demons of fear, the stuff that lurks in your nightmares, and…the villains I really like but who I don’t quite think fit in with the WHAM ARMY or any other more prominent group. But to give you an idea of what the flavor of this team is, she’s recruited not one but TWO Boogeymen – Pitch Black (Rise of the Guardians) and Oogie Boogie (The Nightmare Before Christmas).

There will be more villain factions to come, and I kind of want to splinter the Cinnamons to multiple bases as well. Obviously it’s easier to split villains up because they’re fun to write at war with each other – when I have hero teams come up against each other, usually they end up becoming best buddies instead of fighting, and that’s how I like it, but that’s why there’s just ONE BIG HERO TEAM as opposed to the many villain squads rattling around.

THE SETTING

So as you have probably gleaned, the multiverse setup is largely based on Kingdom Hearts, which is one of my favorite things (in the KH1 through Fragmentary Passage era anyway). There are many worlds that can be visited either by Gummi Ship or Corridor of Darkness. Basically any evil-aligned sorcerer can use Corridors in this ‘verse – they’ve opened their souls to Darkness and have magic, so they can do so.

The implication is that every world represents a separate “story” or part of one. As in if it’s a work of fiction HERE, it’s a world THERE. Some characters are actually savvy enough to know they’re fictional (e.g. Megavolt from Darkwing Duck, Xayide from The Neverending Story). Most of them aren’t built to handle the news, though, and just shrug it off if told. (No, really, the cosmic order prevents them from taking that news seriously if they’re not from something that regularly leans on the fourth wall anyway.)

But sometimes, things get AU’d in without their full worlds. I was inspired by how Final Fantasy is treated in canon KH, and once I started bringing in more FF stuff by the same method, I felt motivated to do that with MORE fandoms if I felt the characters could be divorced from their settings and histories easily. I’ve done it for most Disney Channel non-animated properties as well as Satellite City (ain’t that the worst combo you’ve ever looked at). I’m planning to do it for Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn because I’m coming up on a location I want to delve into the civilization of but don’t have many canon characters for, so guess what, you get the FE cast now.

Major worlds or relevant locations in play are the Cyclonian warship, Radiant Garden, Twilight Town, and occasionally the Enchanted Dominion, but we move from plotline to plotline with journeys to many, many, MANY worlds of things I want to play with the settings and casts of. Also, the Cyclonian warship is about to get replaced with another WHAM ARMY base; we’ll get there.

THE STORY

For the first major “book” of TBTC, the WHAM ARMY has found a spell that they think will let them conquer the entire multiverse by giving them control over Kingdom Hearts itself. All they have do to is collect a bunch of MacGuffins that correspond to twelve elements: fire, water, earth, air, light, darkness, life, death, time, space, entropy, and aether. In order to do this, they visit the worlds of KH, RWBY, Avatar, Storm Hawks, Okami, Undertale, Wakfu, The Legend of Zelda, The Neverending Story, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and many many more. The Cinnamons catch wind of what they’re doing and start assembling. Meanwhile Maleficent is on the hunt for the Book of Prophecies and starts hiring villains on her team as well. After many madcap adventures and some devastating tragedies near endgame, the Cinnamons accidentally put the Book of Prophecies in Maleficent’s hands at the same time that Maleficent finally captures Mozenrath and gets him under heel. The WHAM ARMY and Cinnamons both launch attacks on Maleficent’s forces, and each walks away with what they came for. This is also the part where we slowburn up to the four major WHAM ARMY ships and many Cinnamon ships. In the end, the WHAM ARMY actually gets all the ingredients for their spell, but what they don’t know is it will actually cause the DESTRUCTION of the worlds. So an outside force intervenes (Discord from MLPFIM, who later joins the WHAM ARMY because he wants friends who actually appreciate him as a villain and won’t make him change) to stop them, and the next thing they know, they’re starting from square one.

We’re now in the second “book” of this story. The Cinnamons are gathering up all lost friends – the rest of Team RWBY, the Gaang, the Storm Hawks (who did in fact survive the explosion), the lost KH characters. The WHAM ARMY, on the other hand, is gathering up more villains to bolster their forces for a new evil plan: to conquer the worlds one by one, starting with Atlantis (Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire) and using portals to link to other territories of interest. While the WHAM ARMY is essentially working through a to-do list of what they need before they can launch such a massive invasion, the Cinnamons are finding strength in numbers because the writing’s on the wall that between Mozenrath, Maleficent, Mirage, and Xehanort, things are going to get worse before they get better, and as evil builds, good will need to rise to protect the innocent. As for Maleficent, she’s no longer able to chase the Book of Prophecies, and so, because she’s got Hades, Loki, and Salem (RWBY) there and they’re all like “Even though we’re pretty godlike, we are not that happy with how the gods we knew have run things,” Maleficent’s new goal is to slaughter the gods of all pantheons (minus those in her care) and replace them with her allies.

Anyway, as I had said in the post you saw, Anon – I basically take everything fictional I love and shove it into this AU for daydreams because it lets me imagine my faves having CROSSOVER INTERACTIONS and doing cool epic stuff on a multi-world scale. (But as much as I’ve talked up the epic aspect, a lot of it is just…like…people fucking around and hosting karaoke nights.) Anyway, I hope this gave you a good sense of the madness, and I hope it serves as a reminder to everyone that they can and should just. Make a daydream and/or fanfic universe that’s indulgent as hell. Just do it.

#wham army #tbtc #long post #i considered a read more #but i hate the tiny text on my blog #i need a new blog theme

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21ate · 5 years ago

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i was under the impression that izuru was like. An Actual person being implanted into hajime’s mind but having finished dr2 and am halfway done with dr3, that’s obviously not the case

hajime’s brain is still hajime’s alone, but with his core personality and memories removed in place of retaining all that talent info

this is why its important that hajime was “awakened” during case 6 in dr2 - chiaki was helping hajimes original personality to wake up inside his altered mind, to give “izuru” back the things that make him more than just loved by talent

it makes sense given the duality symbolism even in hajimes own design post-dr2 (with his eyes being heterochromatic). hajime becomes a person not defined by talent or lack there of (though he still has the things ‘izuru’ provides i assume) but by his newfound confidence in simply Being alive again and able to change the future to what he really wants...and not what hope or despair demand of him

is it obvious that i love hajime hinata yet?

#dr blogging #sdr2 spoilers #dr3 spoilers #i love hajime!!!

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a-student-out-of-time · 5 years ago

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((OOC question to the mod: That was a great writing choice, having a character having been unintentionally hurtful to others before, so they can figure out a way to stop Ruruka from going down the same path. My question is, how did you choose Chiaki as that character? Normally Chiaki is the Danganronpa franchise's poster child for kindness just as Makoto is the poster child for hope, she seems like an odd choice of character for "upsetting girls who have depression and anorexia as a child".))

//Thank you very much for your support ^^

//The reason for my decision precisely that: that Chiaki is the poster child for kindness in Danganronpa. It ties back into my desire to give her a bit more depth as a character, as well as my own headcanons that she has Asperger’s Syndrome. Combine a lack of good parenting and a poor understanding of social cues, and you have someone who can have the best of intentions but can still end up saying very hurtful things.

//At the core of it is my belief in writing that characters should be allowed to make mistakes. There’s this recurring trend I’ve seen, both inside DR and out of it, that characters who make mistakes are never actually wrong. That it was a miscalculation, a trick, or they were somehow right all along and everybody else was wrong for misjudging them.

//And I really hate to see that.

//Characters should be allowed to make genuine mistakes. To err is human and it does not automatically make characters weak, unrelatable, unlikeable, or not badass. If anything, it’s a sign of strength and development that they manage to persevere in spite of their mistakes.

//That really was my biggest gripe with DR3 and its retconning that Class 77 fell into despair completely against their own will, when SDR2 framed it as a terrible decision they all made to follow Junko, which I thought gave the game’s story and messages a lot more power and weight to them.

//I like characters that try to do good in spite of their flaws and past mistakes, and instead of retconning them or pretending they don’t exist, they should learn from them and do better from that point on. It’s the direction I’d want everyone to move in.

//And Chiaki’s not the only example. Keep in mind that Hajime in this universe still willingly accepted the Izuru Kamukura Project and he still has memories of being a mass murderer, helping set up the chain of dominoes that pushed the world into despair, and that he (or at least Izuru) let Chiaki die. And he’s doing everything in his power to set things right.

//Bottom line, flawed characters are way more interesting and inspiring than precious cinnamon rolls who can do no wrong in my opinion.

#mod talks #a student out of time #Anonymous

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mochizuke · 6 years ago

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A DR3 ANALYSIS

Sincerely, someone who is sick of people saying that it doesn't match up to cannon.

I decided to take this from a discord server I am in after multiple people asked me to put it online for the world to see, so -deep breath- here is my personal essay using quotes and screencaps from sdr2 as to how dr3 doesn’t stray from cannon, and sticks to the continual lore from the series. Y’all are just mean.

okay so we will start with since that seems to be the main controversial topic. first lets start with people saying it strays from cannon. it doesn't. the statement of brainwashing being what caused the remnants to fall to despair in sdr2 is clearly stated.

there's no mistake that this particular trope is taken from the final trial in sdr2

if you want to say that how the brainwashing is brought up is lazy writing, i can tell you that adding an entire developed character to explain how such a trope found its way into the lore of the into the anime is not lazy. character development takes a lot of time, and is in no way lazy. not to mention it also explains how the brainwashing technology found its way into ultra despair girls in the first place. (ie: the helmets worn by all of the children. With a remnant of despair in the city, it could easily be how Monaca got her hands on that technology.)

if you want to say it takes away from junkos influence as a character and makes her less powerful then i raise her character trait of using every person she comes into contact with. it is in NO WAY out of character for her to use someone else's talent for her own gain. she uses matsudas tech for wiping memory of the kids in dr1 (see dr0), she uses monaca and her position in the towa family to spread technology for the end of the world (see udg), she uses mukuro as her personal bodyguard (see the ENTIRE SERIES), she uses izuru to shift the blame from her for the tragedy so she can fly under the radar in the killing game for dr1, (see dr0 and dr3)

Going to now jump to how the brainwashing does not take away from the remnants had done as far as the atrocities they committed. The whole theme in the hope arc was redemption. The remnants in the ANIME itself go out of their way to say that they dont expect forgiveness for what theyve done. and that they only seek atonement in any way that they can when they are speaking with mitarai as he is debating shutting down the other brainwashing thing that he has set up through the future arc.

I would provide screenshots but the only version of the anime i can find online is dubbed with no subtitles. but you can feel free to watch it yourself? The episiode itself is pretty easy to find.

if you wonder how the brainwashing is undone, watch the ova. World Destroyer is an alter ego created by hajizuru himself modified to do psychodives and repair damaged psych from within the neo world program. its implied that he ran that ai on every student who died within the program who not only patched up their brain from thinking it died, but helped revive them from despair as well.for the survivors of the killing school trip, we already know that they were already on the mend from despair due to awakened hajime glitching out the program for them to create their OWN future at the end of sdr2

going onto chiaki. just rewatched this scene so im going to type this word for word as it comes up in the dr3 dub so that i dont get anything wrong. this is the imaginary chiaki talking to hajime as they are on the boat.

"that day when you entered the neoworld program, a cutting edge ai was built. codename nanami. First, they mined your hippocampus, compiled memories of esteemed authority figures, and the idea was to fuse those memories into a single personality that you could all trust. Imagine the surprise when it turned out they didnt have to bother.one memory overrode the rest. It was the same for all of you. Strange yes, but undeniably sweet. there was one person you'd all give anything to see again."

This explains how chiaki, though previously a real person, was also given an ai version of herself within the neo world program. it also gives a lot more weight to her character in the story in general.

as far as people saying chihiro made chiaki, that is not the case. Chihiros research was used in the development of the neoworld program. as well as matsudas (as the neurologist), and gekogaharas (as the therapist) at no point did it say that they ACTUALLY worked on the program. just that their research was used. ai chiaki likely refers to chihiro as her father and alter ego as her brother because it was chihiros tech that made her life possible within the program. even in her ftes its stated that she does not think of them in the streamline way that a human being thinks of family.

Okay so i've covered brainwashing, chiakis existence in both worlds, and the brainwashings somehow resolving the remnants of blame. (though it didnt) i think the other thing was nagitos despair?

so the thing about the brainwashing that i think gets misconstrued a lot is that it was NOT shown to change their core personalities. but it DID addict them to despair in the same way junko was, and nagitos core personality obviously revolves around hope.

Nagito has always been a character that bordered between hope and despair. even in dr2 hajime makes a point to say that his eyes a swirling with a mix of the two in the first trial. what seems to be the case post brainwashing is that nagito is a walking contradiction. he will do things under the influence of the brainwashing and wont question them until he thinks too hard about it. every time he thinks to hard about it he seems to have a mental break.

like when izuru states in drs "if you hate junko then explain your hand"

and he goes "huh... thats strange... do i... hate her?"

queue: "huh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh"

or at the end of udg where he states that he hates AND loves her more than anyone else.

he cant coherently see what hope used to be to him anymore and for him, his ORIGINAL want for hope was to find someone strong enough to not be killed by his luck

but that got skewed to a MUCH more junko-esque view post brainwashingh. i think those are the main topics that get debated if theres anything else you want me to lay out let me know or i can go more into detail if theres more that you want to know regarding these topics. otherwise i think i got my thoughts laid out now. You can even feel free to message me if you want a more thorough breakdown of the series.

#from the mouth of mochi #dr3 #danganronpa 3 #god i needed to get this out #im REALLY sick of all of the online bashing #so here are some really quick comparisons of quotes from cannon vs issues people seem to have #cant remember any of the other issues #but if you find one #and want to ask #i can and will add a detalied and layed out explanation to this post

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oumakokichi · 8 years ago

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Hello! First off I want to say how much I adore your meta, not only is it the most comprehensive, objective danganronpa analysis I've seen, but perhaps the best overall. Thank you for doing that!! Anyway, I was wondering if there was any canon information about pre-game Gonta? I heard he was a delinquent but with all the fake info you never know... Thank you very much, and apologies if you've gotten this question before. Have a wonderful day!

Oh, thank you so much! This isan extremely nice message and it really made my day! There’s no need to worryeither—I don’t think I’ve ever gotten an ask about pre-game Gonta before.

What I can say with certaintyis that there’s not really any canon information about what he was likepre-game currently. Everything going around is mostly speculation, andspeculation that got started as a result of a lot of misinformation and falserumors at that. People took the idea that “the pre-game characters’personalities are swapped 180 degrees from their in-game selves” and ran withit, even though there’s tons of evidence in both the prologue and even Chapter6 itself that this is decidedly untrue.

I know about the delinquentrumor you’re talking about! That one largely started as a result of similarrumors about Momota. Tsumugi shows only three audition tapes for the castduring the Chapter 6 trial: ones for Saihara, Kaede, and Momota, in about thatorder. She doesn’t play the entire audition tape for any of them, althoughSaihara’s certainly gets the longest amount of screen time. Only a few secondsare shown of Kaede and Momota’s videos meanwhile, as Tsumugi tries to convincethe rest of the group that they all signed up willingly for the killing gameshow because they were all super bloodthirsty, obsessed fans who “couldn’t liveanywhere else but the world of Danganronpa.”

The brief glimpse we’reprovided of Momota’s audition tape in particular seems pretty damning, and it’sexactly what sparked the rumor that he was a “bully and a delinquent” prior tothe killing game. In what we’re shown, Momota talks openly on his audition tapeabout how “money, fame, anything’s fine” as long as he gets to go on the showand kill people.

Whether he’s talking aboutliterally killing people or whether these audition tapes were all for adifferent game altogether and Tsumugi merely hijacked them for her “copycatgame” is unknown still, of course, but even if they are the real deal, I feelit’s important to remember that Momota most likely had an underlying factor forwhy he auditioned that the other members of the group did not.

His illness was most likelysomething he had from before the game started and was something Tsumugi herselfwas unaware of judging by everything we see in Chapter 5; she takes credit forbeing the one who made him sick in Chapter 6, but this is objectively untruegiven that he never had any memories of his illness in the remember lights sheprovided him. Therefore, as someone who was terminally ill and knew he had verylittle time left, it’s easy to see why Momota might have cared very little forhis own life and been willing to sign up for a killing game show if it seemedlike a way by which he might be remembered or earn some kind of recognition orfame.

Since the rumor about Momotabeing a delinquent and a bully pre-game is clearly unfounded and has no realevidence to back it up (moreso since Momota in the prologue doesn’t seem to actparticularly violent or aggressive to the other characters) then we candefinitely say with certainty that the rumor about Gonta is equally untrue.Moreso since no audition tape or claims of Gonta’s behavior are ever presentedby Tsumugi in-game.

People saw the drasticallydifferent sides of characters like Saihara, Kaede, and Momota without theirin-game backstories, as well as the fact that pre-game Ouma seems considerablyshyer and more timid than in-game Ouma, and took this to mean that all thein-game characters are “inverted” from their pre-game selves in some way. Butwhat seems to be much closer to the truth, especially judging by the characters’behavior in the prologue, is that the characters themselves are still very muchthe same core people at heart.

Remember lights can influencethe characters’ backstories and memories, making it more likely for them to actor think in a certain way, but they can’t change who they actually are aspeople. Tsumugi likes to build this claim up in Chapter 6, but it’s entirelyunfounded, just a claim she made in order to try breaking the group’s spiritand crushing their willpower so that the killing game could keep continuing.

She even admitted to them inthe Chapter 6 trial herself that she couldn’t just make them into new peopleusing the remember lights again, especially since they now knew how the theyworked and wouldn’t be nearly as influenced by them. So we can clearly see thatremember lights are much more prone to messing up or just plain not workingthan things like brainwashing in dr3 ever were.

The characters as we see themin the prologue seem for the most part to look and behave very similarly totheir in-game counterparts, despite the fact that they haven’t yet receivedtheir in-game memories. Kaede, who asked in her audition tape specifically tobecome a “leader type figure who could trust people,” still remains fairlyskeptical under the surface. Despite the fact that she was clearly intended tobe a protagonist-like figure for the group, her true nature, the part ofherself she mentions that couldn’t trust people deep down, was still there thewhole time—the fact that she put her plan to kill the ringleader into motionwithout telling anyone about it attests to this.

Most of how the characterslook, think, and act then probably has very little to do with the rememberlights per se. Their backstories and memories are a product of the killing gameshow, to be sure, but their likes, dislikes, interests, and general personalitiesseem to be inherent to them.

This leads me to believe thatpre-game Gonta was probably much the same as the Gonta we see in-game. He mostlikely lacked the ridiculously over-the-top backstory of being raised bywolves, but his sweet disposition, gullible nature, and ability to get alongwell with pretty much everyone was probably just how he always was. Gontascarcely seems like the type to bully or intimidate anyone in the prologue, anymore than Tenko does, so this seems to support the idea that those two inparticular were always very much the type to want to protect others.

There’s no concrete proof toback this up, of course, but there’s even less proof to suggest that Gonta wasever a bully or delinquent. I feel like the fact that Tsumugi actually lackedreally shocking audition tapes for most of the group and failed to show morethan three speaks a lot on its own: surely if she’d had more “damning evidence”of what “horrible people” they’d all been pre-game, she would’ve shown it.There was no reason for her to hold back unless most of the cast’s auditionvideos simply didn’t show her the sort of drastic contrast between theirin-game and pre-game personalities that she wanted to display.

This is just my take on things anyway,but the delinquent rumor is definitely false so I hope I’ve helped to clear itup! Thank you again for the really sweet message, and for always supporting mymeta so much!

#ndrv3 #drv3 #new danganronpa v3 #gonta gokuhara #gokuhara gonta #ndrv3 spoilers //#my meta #okay to reblog #raichs

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ygoreviews · 8 years ago

Photo

Elemental HERO Sparkman ———————————————— 'An Elemental HERO and a warrior of light who proficiently wields many kinds of armaments. His Static Shockwave cuts off the path of villainy.' ———————————————— Can Be Found In: The Lost Millenium (TLM-EN004), Duelist Pack: Jaden Yuki (DP1-EN004), Starter Deck 2006 (YSD-EN010), Dark Revelation Volume 3 (DR3-EN184), Starter Deck: Jaden Yuki (YSDJ-EN008), Legendary Collection 2: The Duel Academy Years Mega Pack (LCGX-EN006), Ra Yellow Mega Pack (RYMP-EN003), Demo Deck 2015 (DEM2-EN011), Starter Deck 2006: Special Edition (YSD-ENS01), Mattle Action Figure Series 3 (MF03-EN004), Yu-Gi-Oh! Elemental Hero Collection 2 (EHC2-EN001)

HERO builds didn't became the powerhouse of Fusion Summons right from their debut as are known nowadays. Starting with a small group of Normal Monsters, the archetype involved several combinations between each Elemental HERO as well some exclusive support for each member. Due they came out during the first stages of improving Extra Deck setups unfortunately they didn't had that many options to become completely efficient, but as more sets were released and more HEROs were added to their card pool soon enough they reached to powerful status are popular for.

"Elemental HERO Sparkman" is one of the original members of the HERO archetype, and probably the only one able to catch up with the times in comparison with the rest. "Sparkman" on his own isn't that outstanding, with average stats when Normal Monsters are often required to compensate their lack of stats with good ATK and/or DEF. However, even though HERO Decks have ended avoiding their original members, "Sparkman" becomes the core material of some of the most effective HERO Fusions available from the first years of the archetype to their most recent additions.

As both HERO and Normal Monster, "Sparkman" obtains a massive pool of supporting cards to become available from early to late game. Spell Cards like "Reinforcement of the Army" and "E - Emergency Call" will add it to our hand without any effort, with the additional help of "Fusion Conscription" and "Fusion Reserve" thanks to the many Fusion Monsters involving "Sparkman" for their arrival. Some searching options work along the Graveyard in the process, like "Elemental HERO Shadow Mist" once ends in there or "Painful Choice" dumping a copy of "Sparkman" as we search for one to add in our hand. On the other hand we can instead summon "Sparkman" directly from our Deck, from simple methods such as "Unexpected Dai" to working along other monsters thanks to effects like "Rescue Rabbit" and "Ties of the Brethen". If we only need "Sparkman" for a Fusion Summon, we can instead use the effect of "Elemental HERO Prisma" to steal his name as is dumped to the Graveyard from our Deck. Since "Sparkman" will often focus arround Fusion Summons we might need some methods to keep recycling it from our Graveyard, from cards like "The Warrior Returning Alive" adding it back to our hand to revival effects such as "Birthright" and "Swing of Memories".

Although like any Normal Monster "Sparkman" has the options to stand out in battles, his main purpose will be arround the many HERO Fusions we can perform as material. His most popular objective is the summon of "Elemental HERO Shining Flare Wingman", as with the help of cards like "King of the Swamp" and "Fusion Tag" we can considerably cheapen its setup. The rest of Fusion Monsters "Sparkman" can get involved into have a big focus on monster removal, going from "Elemental HERO Darkbright" destroying a monster if is defeated to a more direct approach by either "Elemental HERO Plasma Vice" or "Evil HERO Lightning Golem". Others doesn't really need "Sparkman" but is still a viable material thanks to their vague requeriments while also needing another monster of certain Attribute, like "Elemental HERO Absolute Zero" able to wipe out the opponent's field or "Elemental HERO Gaia" and "Elemental HERO Great Tornado" weakening opponent's monsters upon arrival. "Sparkman" can also become the single material needed for "Masked HERO Koga", as thanks to "Mask Change" we will immediately obtain it without any extra requeriments. Finally, "Miracle Fusion" and "Dark Calling" allow us to banish "Sparkman" along the proper material from the Graveyard to Fusion Summon in late game. Don't forget that with the many summoning methods involving "Sparkman" can also become viable for other Extra Deck setups depending of the other monsters we can bring along with him.

While the rest of the original HERO cast struggles to stand out along the rest of the archetype, "Elemental HERO Sparkman" is in a wonderful position thanks to the highly efficient Fusion Monsters it can bring out. With many Fusion Monsters disrupting the opposite field and the shortcuts to summon "Elemental HERO Shining Flare Wingman", "Sparkman" is far from being a powerful Normal Monster on his own but is a vital material for several monsters capable to keep the pressure from early to late game. Although easily overshadowed by many other HERO options, "Sparkman" pretty much leads his own build with an array of supporting effects and Fusion Monsters more than capable of dominating Duels with their cheap summons and disruptive abilities.

Personal Rating: B+

+ Highly supported in many aspects + Material of several Fusion Monsters with disruptive effects + Options to cheapen the arrival of "Elemental HERO Shining Flare Wingman"

- Underwhelming on his own due below average stats - Will mostly work in a material role - Overshadowed by other HERO options and strategies

#yugioh #Yu-Gi-Oh #Yu-Gi-Oh!#yu gi oh #ygo #elemental hero sparkman #elemental hero #hero #sparkman #normal

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oumakokichi · 8 years ago

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Hi! can you do an analisis on Shirogane the same way you did with Ouma? I love reading your posts

Thank you so much! I’m sorry to have left this message forso late, but I wanted to go through absolutely every inch of the Chapter 6trial from start to finish really carefully before answering this, because Ifeel like Tsumugi deserves a really full, well-done analysis, and I wanted tobe able to write one to the best of my ability!

Tsumugi has jumped up in my character rankings since gettingto actually see her in action for myself. She’s a fantastic antagonist,absolutely fascinating as a character, and she is just all around fun to watch in the final trial. There’sso much about her that leaves room for speculation—the entire ending andepilogue is all about speculation, after all, and there’s no way to really besure with her, because like with much of ndrv3, she’s someone who wants to puther entire existence into a “catbox” of sorts and make sure the mystery can’tever really be solved for sure.

I don’t think anyone would be reading this post if they didn’talready know a bit about Tsumugi’s character and the things that happen in thelater chapters, but just in case, this post will contain heavy spoilers forChapter 6, so don’t read past the read more if you’re not comfortable!

So I’ve talked a bit before about how one of the mostfantastic and enjoyable things with Tsumugi is that she’s not Junko. We finallyfor the first time in the core series have a well-written, effective antagonistwho is not the same as Junko, who was foreshadowed very well in advance, andwho was among the group the whole time. Compared to twists like “mastermindTengan,” which was the single biggest letdown dr3 had to offer, the twist withTsumugi is outstanding.

It’s so hard to pin down exactly what makes “her,” becauseher being is entirely comprised of fiction. We see her for the first fivechapters, hiding in plain sight, clearly prone to human error and makingmistakes where she shouldn’t be, and without knowing anything about her as themastermind, it’s easy to buy into exactly the kind of act that she’s trying toplay: that she’s boring, plain, thatshe doesn’t contribute anything, isn’t worth paying attention to because she justflies right under the radar.

I feel like one of the core things to understand aboutTsumugi is this: that while the Tsumugi we see for most of the game, the “boringand plain” one who slips right by without catching anyone’s notice is certainly“the real” Tsumugi, from her own perspective, it’s just one more character that she plays.

Tsumugi is completely marked and defined as a character andas an antagonist by her complete inability to distinguish reality from fiction.The reason it’s so hard to tell how much of what she says is a lie and how muchis true (without catching very specific hints) is because she really, reallydoesn’t care. She makes anything and everything into a “lie” or “reality”according to whatever scenario she’s trying to pull, and she can start weavingnew scenarios from nothing at only a moment’s notice, true to her SHSLCosplayer ability. Tsumugi Shirogane is a person to us as the people playingthe game, and to the other characters around her. But to herself, “TsumugiShirogane” is just one more character she plays among an ensemble of fiction,as she tries to keep maintaining a fictional world in a fictional game for thesake of the only thing that feels enjoyable to her anymore.

In the Chapter 6 trial, it’s easy to sort of fall into thistrap where everything Tsumugi is saying gets taken as a sort of “truth bomb”and even when it sounds horrible and we want to deny it, we brace ourselves toprobably admit it was true, because that’s how things were with Junko. Junkohad a few lies here and there in her own final trial and showdown in dr1, butfor the most part she dropped truth after horrible truth, from everything aboutthe state of the outside world to the fact that the Togami family had fallen,and both the players and the characters in dr1 sort of had to take her at herword at some point because she was such a force of nature.

But Tsumugi is no force of nature, but merely an imitationof one. She is all about imitation. She emphasizes that her cosplays arethemselves “perfect imitations of the real thing.” The only way she canpossibly achieve that result is if she has no “real thing” of her own. Only bydiscarding one’s “true” sense of self and throwing oneself into fictionentirely can one achieve this perfect ability to camouflage and even believe orhonestly feel “what the characters are feeling.” Tsumugi has no real sense ofself, because she relies on Danganronpa, and on fiction, to give it to her.

She’s just absolutely fascinating. Certainly, she admiresJunko. She understands Junko, and she wouldn’t be able to emulate Junko ormimic her so perfectly in the trials without knowing how vital Junko is as acharacter to DR. In some ways, it’s even true that Tsumugi does crave “despair”in very much the same way that Junko does—because despair itself is such aconstant, vital presence in DR overall. Without “despair,” there’s no DR asTsumugi knows it. That’s the entire reason she tried to pull the stunt with theremember light in Chapter 5, and convince the group that they were all tied toHope’s Peak Academy.

But it’s not justabout despair. It’s about “hope vs. despair,” and it’s about the core,essential ideals that make DR what it is. The desire to see that conflict, tosee the suffering and then the climactic resolution, and to see the characters’resolve and how they overcome these things again and again, is precisely whatis being commented on, and it’s those desires that have let the killing gameshow in ndrv3 go on for as long as 53 seasons.

Junko’s primary goal in dr1 was to prove her theory aboutdespair right, to show that even the “hope” of the world with the 78thClass from Hope’s Peak would kill each other and fall into despair with onlythe slightest provocation, and to pull all of this from behind the scenes andget away with it as long as possible. Although she came to accept being “defeated”by hope because it was so despair-inducing, and allowed herself to go to herown execution, getting caught and beaten wasn’t within Junko’s calculations,and it wasn’t what she wanted.

But getting caught is exactlywhat Tsumugi wanted, once the game is clearly getting to its final stages. Itdidn’t have to be her: it could have very well been Ouma, as she trieddesperately to set him up to be the Junko-figure of Chapter 5. It could havebeen “Kaede’s twin sister.” It could have been a million different fictionalscenarios that she kept planning on the spot, lying about, coming up with,because fiction has so much infinite potential to her—unlike reality, which hasnothing at all worth living in.

Once everyone was in need of a mastermind in Chapter 6,Tsumugi was more than happy to step up to the plate herself. She was fine withexposing herself, and leaving extremely obvious clues that would get the gameto that point, because the trial itselfwas her goal, not making her classmates despair or suffer. The trial is part ofthe show, and the show is everything to her. It’s the most exciting, climatic,popular part of the entire killing game broadcast. It’s the reason people reliedon Danganronpa, on the killing game broadcast, and she wanted to put on that show, and was willing to do anything andeverything, and break any and every rule in order to do it.

The reason why she’s so terrifyingly effective as anantagonist is not because she’s a super analytical, super infallible force ofnature like Junko. Tsumugi can be wrong about things, is often blindsided orcaught off guard by developments she didn’t foresee. She’s very, veryintelligent, but she’s not Junko or Kamukura or Ouma levels of intelligent. Herintelligence is very human. But what’s terrifying is that she doesn’t need tobe right about everything or able to predict everything, because she “weaves” a new fiction and a new web oflies at every single turn.

It doesn’t matter if she didn’t see certain things coming,because she knows that within this world which is essentially an unopenedcatbox to the rest of the characters, there’s no way for them to prove that she’swrong. Not objectively, about everything. If they catch her off guard and takeher plans in a new direction that she didn’t see coming, she just takes creditfor it anyway. They’re all just “scenarios” she can put to use and utilize tomake sure that DR and the killing game broadcast continue.

While her words and claims have left a lot of peopleconfused on how much can be trusted, the more I pored over the Chapter 6 trial,the easier I found it to tell when she was lying on at least a few points. Herclaims about Ouma as a “pawn of the mastermind,” for instance, have left manypeople wondering if this was actually true or if it’s just a bluff—and I cansay with relative certainty that it’s the latter.

Ouma’s stunt with the Exisal and all the things he pulledbehind her back and all the ways in which he got in her way were not supposed to happen according to heroriginal scenarios. He was supposed to be compliant, easy-to-manipulate, and alittle puppet on strings for her to shape up into the real mastermind, becauseshe felt his character would have “matched” with Junko’s so well. So when thecharacters begin realizing things about not only her being the mastermind, butabout the truth of the world around them and their memories being implanted,she rolls with it. She retcons his role. She lies her ass off, basically,because that’s her element.

The wording she uses specifically, rather than “pawn of themastermind,” is more along the lines of “he was a blind devotee to a god.” Sheeven says all of this as Junko, still perfectly in character; the rest of thecast by this point were not anywhere near realizing that the world wasfictional or that they were in an actual reality show broadcast. She’s not evensaying this as a producer of the show; she’s saying this from a role in whichshe’s written Junko to be “the realone,” and she was just posing as “Tsumugi,the fake character,” hiding among the cast and pulling strings “just like shedid with the Hope’s Peak killing game.”

Her lines about Ouma are specifically said whilein-character as Junko, who is “like a god of despair” and a force of nature whoshook the entire world. And that makes it surprisingly easy to see that this isa revisionary tactic made to get back at Ouma, precisely because Saihara andthe rest were pointing out just how much he’d gotten in her way. He ruined aperfectly good fictional scenario she had planned, from her perspective, so shegets back at him by revising him and claiming his character was “just areligious acolyte” all along and that he was a “huge fanboy who had Junko ashis idol.” And all of this is so blatantly untrue because Ouma had no ideaabout Junko, or about the Hope’s Peak memories from the remember light. This isliterally just Tsumugi being simultaneously petty and brilliant at revising her own story, and I love it.

There’s at least a few other of these similar points whereit’s pretty easy to tell that she’s lying, in my opinion. One of them revolvesMomota and Maki, and I’m going to save that for a later explanation, becausethere are a few questions about the Momota and Maki relationship in my inboxcurrently. But there are other points in the trial where she switches fromrelatively believable explanations which fit with the objective proof we gotfrom characters like Amami or Ouma, to taking credit for anything andeverything, almost desperately, and those are the points that strike me as theweakest in her claims.

The state of the outside world is just one example. When therest of the characters reflect briefly on how they saw the scene of itdestroyed and horrific with their own two eyes, Tsumugi happily claims that itwas all a “set” prepared by the killing game staff, a perfect imitationachieved by her talent. But when the group immediately rebounds, thinking thatat least if the world is fine and peaceful then that means they actually havepeople and places to go back to, she really, really starts revising her story.She absolutely latches onto trying to prove that they’re “just fictional,” that“all the people and places they remember are fictional,” that they “havenowhere to go back to.”

It’s because to Tsumugi, the last thing she wants is themopening her catbox. With her fictional world exactly the way it is, she can sayanything and have it be considered true—because there’s no way to proveotherwise. It’s the perfect set-up for writing millions and millions offictional scenarios, as opposed to “a single unchanging truth.” But the momentthe group thinks about wanting to get out, wanting to see the outside world forthemselves, that means the catbox ceases to exist, all the fictional scenariosfade, and only the truth remains. If there weren’t very obvious flaws in herstory or things that would immediately come to light and be proven when thegroup got to the outside world and checked, then she wouldn’t try so hard to crush their willpower and getthem to accept staying in the killing game instead.

The things she targets (their friends, their families, theirloved ones, their homes, their emotions and feelings) by saying that they’reall fake, fictional, that they never existed in real life, are all the thingsthat really, truly take away their will to investigate or go on. Knowing thatthey weren’t actually Hope’s Peak Academy students or that they didn’t haveSHSL talents shocked them, sure, but once they got over the initial shock, theywere all sort of back to being excited about the prospect that they had a home.That there might be somewhere for them to go.

Tsumugi immediately noticed that, and pinpointed the thingsinstead that might give them willpower or strength to go on, by claiming all of it was fiction, all of it was her doing. These claimsare so large, so over the top, and it’s precisely why it’s easier for me tothink of it as a lie than her other claims, which actually matched perfectlywith evidence provided from Ouma’s or Amami’s labs, or things other charactershad said or done. If there weren’t actually some real life counterparts orsimilarities with their memories that would give them incentive to end thekilling game, there wouldn’t have been any reason for Tsumugi to have targetedthose things so hard and sospecifically in order to try and keep them from wanting to go out.

Tsumugi is a character who thrives on the fictional in orderto “elevate” it to the level of reality. Fiction is her everything; it’sreality that’s meaningless. As long as she can continue creating new scenarios,new lies, new works of fiction to counteract boring, bland, meaninglessreality, she has her niche, and that itself is her meaning to go on. Butwithout that…there’s nothing. Once it’s all stripped away, she literally wouldrather go straight to her death, because “there’s no point in a world withoutDanganronpa.” There’s no point in a world in which she can’t keep creatinginfinite new fictional scenarios and seeing the same grand climax unfold againand again.

This itself is a terrifyingidea for an antagonist, and I love it. She was absolutely astounding from startto finish in Chapter 6, and watching her come slowly to the forefront, puttingon a spectacular act, and ultimately blasting both the characters’ and the players’subversions out of the water because her objectives were so different fromanything that previous antagonists have done, was so much fun.

The only way to fight against her, an antagonist who thriveson lies and presents them as “truth” because there’s no way to disprove her, isto come up with your own lies, and to accept them as your own reality. Just asthere was no way for the other characters to objectively disprove Tsumugi’s “truths”about the outside world, there was no way for her, in the end, to disprove their“truths,” that their lives had real meaning and that the experiences they wentthrough were very real for them. Once again, the Umineko resemblance was verystrong, and I loved every bit of it.

Tsumugi is always going to be a hard-to-read antagonist,because her entire character wanted to stay in that catbox forever, and shepreferred dying willingly to being dragged out into “the truth.” There’s no wayto ever eliminate doubt and suspicion over all her words. But I think inkeeping with the themes of ndrv3 overall, it’s a safe bet that there are plentyof lies and truths in the things shesaid, because that’s the way it’s been with her every step of the way, and withpretty much every other character in the game besides.

I’ve seen many people so far trying to determine whetherJunko or Tsumugi was “better” or “more effective” as an antagonist, but I haveto say, I think it’s a lost cause. It’s like comparing apples to oranges. Bothof them have different mindsets, goals, processes. Both of them are terrifyingand incredibly well-written in their own right, and I think Tsumugi will get somuch more recognition and appreciation from the fanbase once the English localizationcomes out and people can appreciate in full just how much of a terrifically fun,lying asshole she really is.

#ndrv3 #drv3 #new danganronpa v3 #tsumugi shirogane #shirogane tsumugi #ndrv3 spoilers //#my meta #okay to reblog #thank you so much for asking this and again i'm sorry it took so long!#i'm really thankful for the translations and screencaps you've been posting in the past too! it's a huge help!#arisjonesb

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