#But even so my fangan and my fangan ocs are really special to me and in a way having my struggles projected onto the characters

[toxicyurituesday]

talk about ur ocs, now. this is a threat

Hi Anon bot I’m gonna assume is one of my mutuals onsite or offsite do you even know what you’re asking me to do

Adding cws as I go, someone tell me if I missed something

A lot of this is word vomit

Spoilers for my fangan except idrc because I’m never doing anything with it

Fallen Cards [ Danganronpa ] 3/16

CWs: Murder, strong language, child abuse, alcohol, abandonment, hospital, death

Suki Hikosaburo

Okay so I think I use she/her/clove/clover for this bitch maybe idk.

Clove’s the protagonist of Falling Cards‼️ Yunno despite me not using her like ever because honestly I don’t find her that interesting to roleplay with

Anyways clove originally started off as just Kiyo’s love interest who didn’t go to Hope’s Peak but somehow ended up in the killing game bc she’s special

Now she’s the Ultimate Private Investigator 👌 She gathers information for her brother Chinen to use in court cases

She’s really desensitized to murder and comes off as really insensitive during the investigations

Suki is very headstrong, it’s her way or the high way

^ That actually ends up nearly killing Hoshi ( and indirectly kills glooms if she fucks up during Chapter 4 )

Backstory stuff timeeee

Clove grew up in an upper class household

Has the whole picture perfect family ( 1 mom, 1 dad, 1 brother, and her ) going on here

Anyways her mom runs a private investigation firm

Suki went to a private school

During her second year one of the teachers was murdered

This bitch stuck clover nose where it shouldn’t and ended up getting 2 students and another teacher arrested

Homegirl is fucking ecstatic that she got it right and somehow convinces her mom to let her intern at the private investigation firm when she’s 14

Good job ig 😥

Just realized Maru might be reading this hi Maru don’t tell anybody in the Discord about the Hoshi stuff please and thank you

Anyways

She’s 16

Originally I was gonna put clover in a poly relationship w/ Kiyo and Sonoda but that’s on that backseat burner rn cause fuck love more murder

Friends with: Chinen, Kiyo, Sonoda, Umeko, Umeda, and Aoki

Chinen Hikosaburo

Ooooh we do not talk about why he was created in the first place

Anyways he’s straight now bc of that

The only cishet guy ever

He has the fattest crush on Kiyo ( who acts like they don’t know because they’re not willing to lose a friend and does not at all like him in that way )

Honestly the only reason I ship SuKiyo nowadays is so that I can say Chinen got cucked by his sister lmao

Hi Maru if you’re reading this SatoKiyo4lifers

He has so many friends what

Ladies’ man ( apologetic )

He’s persuasive! And kinda manipulative but we don’t talk about that

Is it weird to call your own oc hot cause if not 😁

I’m kidding he’s just well dressed

I have a twisted view on what frat boys act like and that is exactly what Chinen is

Anyways he’s Suki’s twin‼️

He’s the Ultimate Lawyer

Guy won a shit ton of debates AND got something in his town’s law changed

He says he’s hot shit and he means it

Friends with: Suki, Kiyo, Sonoda, Mizuki, Takeshi, and Aster

Kiyo Watanabe/Brooke Allen

“Koro do you ever shut up about them” Of course I do how do you think I catch my breath? Through my nose? Anyways

Kisses them on the cheek then throws the box I put them in into the ocean ( affectionate )

The only reason they’re the Ultimate Florist is bc at the time I was obsessed over Flowershop AUs

It ended up working out really well so

Their hair is dyed brown, natural hair color is black

They’re nearsighted and cannot see out of one eye completely

Anyways I wanna talk about their backstory

Their actual name is Brooke Allen ( they never had it legally changed to Kiyo Watanabe for some reason??? They’re fine with being called Brooke btw, they actually kinda like it better than Kiyo [ bonus points for Brookie /j don’t call em that ] )

So anyways they’re white British and lived in England for the first 12 years of their life

Their dad was named Remington [ Remi for short ] and he ran a somewhat popular business

Their mom’s named Heather and she had no job

Remington was uh,,,,an alcoholic

Honestly he never did anything to Brooke when drunk cause he always passed out, but it was annoying for her to have to drag him from the couch and to his bed

It was when he was sober

He wanted Brooke to take over the business when he retired so he pushed their education to the extreme

Whenever they got a question wrong, he would drag a needle across their skin just enough to draw blood

They have a lot of fading scars bc of this, and are very ashamed of them

One day he kinda punched Brooke in the eye while they had their glasses on

And ended up breaking the glass and completely scarring their left eye, hence why they can’t see through it present day

He actually hugged Brooke after that but that’s like the only “”””affection”””””” he showed them ever

Heather doesn’t do jack shit because she’s normalized this behavior

Fast forward to when they’re like 13

The family is in Japan for a year bc Remi got a contract

During this time Brooke meets an old man named Akira who runs a flower shop

Neither Remington nor Heather really cared about where Brooke went as long as they weren’t dead

So Brooke went over to this flower shop every day

Sometimes Akira would give them candy for helping move pots around for him

Most of the time they would just hang around his kitten Ultra Gurl Strawberry ( or Ugs for short )

Or some of the regulars ( specifically Alicia, Daku, and Chinen )

At the end of the year Akira closed his shop down for the day and took Brooke out for ice cream and they said their goodbyes :)

Yunno until Heather collared them to a bike pole in some fit of desperation to keep them in Japan bc she’s seen how much happier they were

Brooke was stuck in the rain until the next day

Alicia, her boyfriend Daku, and some friends are in the area and find this drenched 14 year old passed out on the floor and chained to a bike pole

They can’t break the chains and none of them have charged phones so they pound on the flower shop’s door because it’s like the closest shop

Akira drives to his shop to get ready for the day and sees this group of teenagers panicking

Brooke’s still asleep/passed out despite all the racket

Akira ends up breaking the chains off with a plier ( wasn’t able to break off all the chains w/o hurting Brooke )

Brooke ended up in the hospital and didn’t wake up until the next day

A bunch of this is emotional stuff and I cannot put that into words so we’re skipping to the adoption 👌

Daku’s moms ( Akira [ a different Akira ] and Amai ] adopt Brooke

Remington is paid off to fuck off

Alicia is still Brooke’s best friend

Also while Brooke is helping old man Akira run his flower shop, Chinen offers to find a new name for them

Brooke is reluctant but decides to forget their past entirely

They’re Kiyo now

Old man Akira dies btw

Kiyo is devastated

He ended up passing his flower shop onto Kiyo

Anyways Kiyo dresses goth because Amai and Daku do it

I’m gonna come back to this w/ more characters because this alone took me a shit ton of time to write and my phone’s at 10 percent

[luckcycler]

May I just ask how you come up with designs for your heartbreak characters? I'm having a hard time with coming up with designs for my fangan characters.

this is a very vague question so I wasn’t sure how to answer. So I quickly designed a danganronpa oc and I’m gonna go through how I designed them here (this may be a very long post. :0c) Before that tho, this might be a good watch on character design! [LINK]

Making a dr oc is like the best plausible character design exercise because it basically gives you a prompt to base your character on AKA a talent.

Choose talent:

So first I asked my friends to give me a talent and whether the character is androgynous, feminine, or masculine. I got an androgynous demolition expert as my prompt. Even tho I’m not going too in-depth with the character outside of visuals, I’m going to refer to this character with they/them pronouns.

Make a reference/mood board:

Next, I read a bit about what does it mean to be a demolition expert and googled what your average demolition expert looks like. Basically, a demolition expert is a construction worker specialized in taking down structures and handling explosives or hazardous materials. Then I started making a reference board from what the information I just got made me think about. 

This was my reference board:

There’s a lot of yellow in there since the profession made me think of safety and those caution signs. It also contains a lot of protective gear.  Looking at this board, I decided the character’s palette to be black, yellow, and orange and the character to have protective gear on. Later on, I would make the characters palette more detailed with some more colors that didn’t deviate from the original three too much to keep it cohesive.

Brainstorming

I started thinking about what motifs could the character have. A motif can be a pattern, a concept, an animal, an object... Basically anything the rest of the character will be designed around on. It’s something that should make this specific character memorable, meaning none of your other cast members should have that. For instance, any dr fan knows what character I’m referring to when I mention a checkered pattern.

For this character, I really liked the idea of them having a welding mask, mainly because it would make their silhouette more interesting. I decided to give them also a pattern to be recognized by which is these arrows 

Personality and Silhouette

At this point I finally start thinking about who this person is.  Knowing what kind of personality you are designing at the start is important. People should know right away what they should expect from interacting with this character unless it’s plot specific. With a demolition expert character, I have seen designers go two ways about it. Either very energetic disaster (Demo man from TF2)  or very calm person but still a disaster (Vinny Santorini from Atlantis). For this character I decided to go with “haven’t slept for 6 months with a devil may care attitude”. With this in mind, I started to think about how I could communicate this personality to the viewer. I decided to give them baggy, laid back clothing which you can see in the initial silhouette I gave them here: 

Then I started finally making the end result

Details

So here is our demolition expert. Underneath I’m explaining the details of the character and why I decided on them.

and I’m done. This is kind of how I go with it. I hope I was able to be somewhat clear haha. I’m very much self taught so my methods might not be for everyone. Good luck with your character!

[illusionsofcontrol]

are there any tropes you wanted to stay away from with each character or the setting of danganronpa? its a pertty formulaic thing but you made it probably 10x more interesting than the usual game. maybe its because of the depth in charcters or the stakes but wh just seems more engaing than most real dr games! i love your works btw!

I'm really honored that you feel that way about my story! Thank you!

I should warn that my response is going to be somewhat critical of Danganronpa. I want to clarify that I still enjoy the games and it's perfectly fine if anyone disagrees, but these are my opinions and I feel they are important to my response.

First off, I guess I'm not sure if there's any setting tropes I mind in DR. The settings are actually pretty unique to each game and tie into the murders decently. WH obviously has a different setting, but that's more to fit the story rather than avoiding DR tropes.

There are, however, a lot of character tropes I intentionally avoided in WH:R.

Singular Buff Character Who Dies in Chapter 4

WH:R has two buff characters (formerly named Jerome and Ryan) and without going into spoilers, they may or may not have anything to do with Part 04. I don't know, this trope is just so overdone that I saw Gonta's design and instantly predicted that he'd die in Chapter 4. I thought it had to be a red herring, but no. That indeed happened just as expected. I don't want people to be able to predict deaths just by looking at a character design.

Girls Must Wear Skirts

Fun fact, there are only three female Danganronpa characters who don't wear skirts. They would be Aoi Asahina (wears shorts, much like an athletic swimmer would outside of the pool), Hiroko Hagakure (Yasuhiro's mom, wears jeans), and Ruruka Ando (Confectionary girl from DR3, wears very, very short shorts-). Unless there's someone I'm forgetting, every other DR girl wears skirts. Now, I'm aware that this is because most Japanese school uniforms require girls to wear skirts. But given how... bizarre everyone's outfits already are, do all the girls HAVE to wear skirts??? Given the weird fanservice of the games, I feel like it's more to make the girls reveal more skin/slim figure idk :/

I'm getting carried away here. Anyway, WH:R doesn't take place in a Japanese school so I made sure that the women aren't all wearing skirts. And while we're on the subject...

Sexual Fanservice

I'm not against it, but I personally feel like sexual fanservice in a Murder Mystery game (especially involving teenagers) is really uncomfortable. Every game has certain female characters designated to making fanservice moments (DR1: Aoi, DR2: Akane, Mikan, v3: Miu) (Junko for all three I guess-) (Also yes I'm aware that Mikan's fanservice is part of her character/backstory but it doesn't change the fact that the CGs are there for shameless fanservice. They could've drawn the scenes where her back was to the screen or something and conveyed the same message but they made sure to show Everything.)

There's also plenty of designs that are overly revealing; obviously anyone can wear what they want and a large chest is not inherently sexual but it's pretty clear to me that a lot of the revealing designs are for fanservice. Once again, these are mainly teenagers, and the older I get the more it unsettles me.

Anyway, I really wanted to avoid doing sexual fanservice for WH:R. Even though all characters but one are adults, it's just not something I want to write in a story like this. It's not my style.

The Rat

I mentioned this in a previous post, but I ended up avoiding the Rat Character trope. It's not that I dislike it, but I quite enjoyed having the characters all mean well (except for the Puppetmaster, of course.)

(But if I were to have a rat character in WH:R, they'd be the Super Diamond Level Griefer haha)

Resident Dumbass

Yasuhiro, Kazuichi, Kaito, and Akane come to mind (yeah the middle two aren't actually dumb but they tend to fall into this trope regardless). Having to do an entire minigame just to convince Yasuhiro that Kyoko wasn't a literal ghost comes to mind... Idk, I guess I just feel like characters like Kazuichi and Kaito are actually smarter than that but because it's "funny" they have to say illogical stuff throughout the games? Perhaps in a game with voice acting it can be a funny aside, but in a novel that kind of stuff would just slow everything down.

I don't know, it's not like everyone in WH:R is super smart, but that's a trope I tried to avoid.

Rude Characters (?)

Okay this isn't really a trope but Danganronpa tends to always have abrasive characters, but given that WH:R has a main cast of friends, it wouldn't make much sense for there to be much rudeness. I guess Ryan would be the closest to that but he still genuinely cares about the group.

This isn't a bad trope, it's just more natural to exist in Danganronpa because the characters there start off as strangers.

Conclusion

I can't really think of other tropes at the moment. Maybe if I think of more I'll reblog this. But I want to clarify that most of these "tropes" are avoided because of personal preference and differences in media, not necessarily because they're inherently bad.

This next part isn't exactly answering the ask, but I'm assuming that I get these asks from people who are interested in making their own fangans. So here are my two cents.

I've seen fangans that are made out of love for DR and I've seen fangans made out of spite and dislike for some aspects. Both reasons are valid (mine is mostly the former with a slight hint of the latter that's grown over the years). Kodaka's writing is definitely flawed; however, making fangans purely out of spite is dangerous. I don't want to name names, but there is one fangan in particular where the writer admitted to hating Danganronpa and only focused on adding what they wanted. But they neglected the most important part: having a solid story and cast.

Whether or not you love or hate Danganronpa, if you're writing a fangan, it is important to consider the many subjective reasons people are drawn to/away the series. I'm a firm believer that every story has something to teach a writer; even if the lesson is simply "I really don't like these tropes", considering why is insightful.

It mostly boils down to style, in my opinion. Danganronpa has a much different tone with its wacky characters and dialogue and scenarios, but that's Kodaka's style. My style is more grounded in reality, with each character having their own depth that comes up in the main plot and not just in Free Time Events. This is because my stories are more character-driven, and I personally dislike important character information that is sidelined to bonus content. I'm the kind of writer that never makes an OC that's not part of a story, cuz my style has every character play an important role.

(However, one can argue that in a visual novel, having more character depth in Free Time Events adds greater meaning because the player gets a special insight from choosing to interact with certain characters. In a regular novel, there isn't really that kind of interaction. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the media you're working with is also important.)

I think one of the biggest lessons I learned while writing WH is that forcing yourself to imitate any writer's style when trying to take inspiration is going to fall flat. It's kind of apparent in the beginning of WH, but I used to be feel like I had to follow the Danganronpa style even when I had my own desires for the story.

In reality, every writer is different and has their own quirks that they enjoy but other writers might not. There are many things I dislike about Kodaka's writing, but I know those things are definitely appealing to other people. Likewise, I know my style is not for everyone. It's fine to try and branch out if you want, but one has to recognize what one is comfortable with.

This lesson is still hard for me to absorb sometimes because I don't have much confidence in my storytelling abilities, but I'm gradually accepting that this fangan is my own. I am doing my own spin on the Danganronpa story and that's okay.

And honestly, that's what every fangan should be; a writer's own spin on the Danganronpa plot concept. So while here are the tropes I made sure to avoid, that doesn't mean other writers need to do the same. Figure out what works best for you and what YOU want to see in a Danganronpa story.

(Holy crap this was so long I'm so sorry-)