#it's been a long time since i did an ouma analysis about this particular topic

[oumakokichi]

Do you think that Ouma's hatred of killing and deaths were genuine or fabricated? Why do you think he auditioned for the killing game?

Every single shred of evidence we have in canon says hishatred of killing and deaths was 100% genuine. That’s a fact about hischaracter that can’t be denied. Whether people love or hate Ouma, or anywherein between, he’s still undeniably one of the characters in all of Danganronpawho was the most morally againstkilling another human being.

This fact, of course, makes Chapter 4 that much moreinteresting, and also that much more tragic. A character with such a strongmoral code against killing being literally cornered into a situation wherekilling was unavoidable is both an interesting development, and a sad one. Hewas still willing to do what it took to stay alive in the end, of course—even thoughhe didn’t resort to killing Miu directly, he definitely manipulated her andGonta into dying. But that usage of underhanded tactics took a huge toll on himand is a large part of the reason why he decided not to do the same thing allover again in Chapter 5, even when he had a perfect opportunity to stay aliveby throwing Momota and Maki under the bus.

I’ll discuss all the reasons why Ouma absolutely, undeniablyhated killing and deaths, but it’ll probably get pretty long. It’ll involvespoilers for the entire game, too, so please only read at your own risk!

The first and most obvious reason is, of course, his motivevideo. We uncover this video in Chapter 6, after Ouma’s already died. At theend of Chapter 5, Ouma remains something of a mystery to us: even though wecertainly hear from Momota’s retelling of events that he hated the killing game,the chapter leaves it as a sort of catbox where you can choose whether you wantto believe him or not. Even the characters themselves are divided on whether hewas telling the truth. Momota and Himiko think he was lying; Kiibo, meanwhile,seems fairly certain Ouma had no reason to lie when he was about to kill himself.

But if the game had actually wanted to leave it a completelyambiguous mystery as to whether Ouma was telling the truth or not in thatflashback, then we wouldn’t receive such blatantly important information inChapter 6 about him. His motive video details his relationship with DICE a bit,describing the 10 of them as “the most important people in his life,” “friendswho were closer than family to him,” and stipulates without any room for argumentthat they had two mottos. One of these mottos was to go around committinglaughable crimes—the second was “don’t kill people.”

DICE and Ouma were a group of pranksters. It’s unspecifiedexactly what kinds of crimes they did, but there’s no room for doubt that theywere pretty harmless pranks where no one was supposed to get hurt. They neverkilled anyone, ever; probably the most they did was petty theft, consideringhow much of Ouma’s character is coded in phantom thief terms. He’s skilled atpicking locks, a talent completely unrelated to being a “Supreme Leader” (andwe know his Supreme Leader talent is fake, because his “secret organization” isliterally a group of 10 other people who run around in clown masks pullingpranks for fun). Not only that, but his love hotel lampshades the whole “phantomthief” trope that he embodies. We can assume from the fact that his motivevideo mentions he and DICE “took the world by storm” with their pranks to meanthey probably travelled, a lot, tricking people and setting up heists, all tohave a good time where nobody got hurt.

One of the most important rules associated with a phantomthief is, in fact, a personal moral code of conduct. This is something that Ifeel gets overlooked with Ouma’s character a lot, but it’s pretty common withalmost every famous phantom thief character in fiction. “Not killing” is themost well-known and important of these moral codes, and the most universal.Ouma absolutely hating killing and death isn’t really a surprise when you analyzehim the way you would any other phantom thief character. He loves games, he loves outsmarting people,pranking them, teasing them, not hurting or killing them. A phantom thief livesfor the challenge of a heist well done, and longs for an intellectual rival whocan chase them and keep up with them—and that’s Ouma to a T.

But even before he could’ve seen his motive video and “remembered”things about DICE or himself all the way back in Chapter 2, it’s clear that hehated killing even before that. The second reason we have to believe that hewas telling the truth is the fact that he’s pretty openly disapproving towardsthe other characters that kill, right from the start.

Even back in Chapter 1, when pretty much everyone is willingto give Kaede a free pass for “killing” Amami (even though she didn’t actually kill him, but she andeveryone in the cast thought that she did back then, since Tsumugi framed her),Ouma was the only one in the group who still told her outright that he couldn’tcondone her actions. He pretty much tells her “cool motive, still murder” whenshe says that she only wanted to kill the ringleader, and calls her out on havingtalked about “cooperating with everyone” and “everyone trusting in each other”even though she put a plan to murder another person into action behind everyone’sbacks without consulting anyone about it.

He’s still sad about her inevitable execution, of course.Right before she dies, he drops the act entirely and, completely blank-facedwithout any over-exaggerated emotions or crocodile tears, he looks her in theeye and tells her goodbye, and that she “wasn’t boring”—high praise, comingfrom Ouma. The only other characters he says “aren’t boring” are the ones hetruly respects, like Saihara throughout most of the game, and Momota in Chapter5 after he protected him from Maki’s second arrow. But just because he was sadthat she was going to die didn’t mean he could just automatically condone orforgive her for trying to take a person’s life.

Another example of this point is his hatred for Maki. Themoment he finds out about her talent as the SHSL Assassin in Chapter 2 bystealing her motive video, he begins treating her considerably more harshlythan he did in Chapter 1. Before, she was an enigmatic presence who clearly washiding something; once he knew whatshe was hiding, specifically, he considered her a threat whose identity had tobe exposed to the group at all costs in order to keep her from acting on herown in the shadows and killing any of them.

As early as Chapter 2, he exposes her in front of everyoneby provoking her into lunging for him so that he can show the whole group whatan actual, honest-to-god threat she is. He wanted to highlight her recklessimpulsivity, the fact that despite looking so cold, Maki is someone whoabsolutely acts before she thinks. She’s been trained to act, not to question,after all. It’s not an assassin’s job to sit there and think things through, it’stheir job to take orders and point and kill. The fact that she tries to killOuma on impulse by choking him on more than one occasion is pretty clear proofof this.

He brings up the fact that she’s killed people for moneyagain and again, whenever possible. Unlike Ryouma, who did kill people in thepast but was never actually trained to do so and had no interest in killinganymore after already having killed off all the mafia members who murdered hisloved ones, Maki is still a threat because her assassin training is somethingthat defines her as a person. He’s as harsh on her as he is on the actualculprits who kill, like Kirumi and Korekiyo, because he knows she’s a potentialthreat and he wants the group to take her seriously as one.

…Of course, sadly, no one actually does so. Chapter 5 prettyclearly shows that everyone’s blind optimism and unwavering faith in oneanother was actually every bit as dangerous as Ouma said it was. While his ownactions and provocations are a certainly responsible for why things turn outthe way that they do in Chapter 5, there’s no way to deny either the fact thateveryone turning a blind eye to how dangerous Maki was also contributed tothings.

Even when Maki was clearly itching to go save Momota, evenwhen she talked openly about wanting to kill Ouma while everyone else justwanted to “talk him down” the same way Naegi and the other dr1 survivors “talkeddown” Junko, Maki was talking openly about murder. But everyone assumed thatbecause she said she wouldn’t do so, they could trust her implicitly. Even whenshe shows up at the cafeteria the morning of the fifth murder without herelectric hammer and only a knife in hand, everyone still seems somehowconvinced she isn’t an actual serious threat towards anyone’s life, at all.

It’s this cold disregard for human life that makes it reallyimpossible for her and Ouma to ever see eye-to-eye. When she breaks into themachinery bay in Chapter 5 to torture him first for information about theRemnants of Despair, then kill him, he’s literally just astounded. Not onlydoes he not know anything about Hope’s Peak Academy or the Remnants because henever used the remember light that Tsumugi planted, but he’s honestly 100%taken aback that she would try and kill him after he specifically told everyonethat “the killing game was over.” He asks her point-blank, “Do you really lovekilling that much?” in shock andhorror. And he was definitely not faking that reaction.

Ouma was someone who never wanted to kill or hurt anyone, ifpossible. He was willing to do cold, practical, horrible things if push came toshove—because it was a killing game, and he tried to rationalize these thingsto himself with “the ends justify the means.” But he never really could believeit. Even manipulating Miu and Gonta into getting killed, even knowing that Miuwould have killed him if he hadn’t killed her, and even knowing that the realculprit to blame was the killing game itself, the loss of human life in Chapter4 impacted him so strongly that he really was tired and cynical and frustratedwith everything by Chapter 5.

As for why he auditioned for the killing game, we can onlyspeculate for now. I have no doubt that if he’d had any bad intentions or saidanything condemning in his audition video, Tsumugi would’ve showed it, though.She was pretty set for a long time even in Chapter 6 on setting him up (Ichecked again the other day and it’s literally not until 5 hours and 15 minutesinto Chapter 6 as a whole that they even disprove the whole “Ouma is a Remnants”thing).

I know at least one popular theory among Japanese fans who’veplayed the game is that he entered it from the beginning intending to stop it.I personally think this theory is highly plausible. We know for a fact that thecharacters’ pre-game selves aren’t too different from their in-game personas attheir core. Kaede, for instance, entered the killing game wanting to becomesomeone who could trust people—because, according to her audition video, she “couldn’treally trust or believe in others.” And despite having been molded into aseemingly perfect, outgoing protagonist figure, a part of Kaede was stilldistrustful and suspicious at her core.

Therefore, if Ouma hated killing and death at the core ofhis character (and we know from all the evidence I’ve already discussed that hedid), then we can also assume he was probably like this even before the killinggame. It wouldn’t be the first time someone entered wanting to put an end tothe killing game—Amami does the same thing, after all, although his reasons aremore to do with having participated in a previous game already. Still, I thinkit’s highly possible that Ouma tried to enter the killing game wanting to stopit, though that’s a motive he would have to have played very close to the chestor else I doubt he would’ve been selected as a participant.

But in a society like ndrv3’s where children and teenagersseem to be almost entirely desensitized to killing and violence, it makes sensethat someone like Ouma who is deeply empathetic at his core would hate thekilling game and everything it stood for. The idea of people getting off onother people’s suffering was something he honestly detested, even as hisin-game persona—his post-trial villain speech in Chapter 4 is half-parts apointed jab at the audience and half-parts a bitter and self-deprecatingtirade, because he felt he was no better than the real ringleader after what hedid to Miu and Gonta.

Anyway, this is very long by now, so I’ll stop, but I hope Iwas able to answer this question in full. People can like or not like Ouma’scharacter; that’s really up to them. But I hope I can provide a deeperunderstanding of his motives, at least. Regardless of where Ouma stands oneveryone’s personal preferences, he did notenjoy killing, or death, or suffering. This is a pretty solid fact supported byevery single piece of canonical evidence we have on him, and not just mypersonal bias. If people can at least understand that fact about him, I’ll behappy—he’s a character who makes it very hard to know his real intentions andyou always have to read between the lines, but the hints and clues aredefinitely there if you’re looking for them.

Thank you for asking, anon!