#I have more ideas for v3 characters will post them hopefully soon

[glazeliights]

furryronpa continues

[rwbyconversations]

Why has Adam proved controversial after Volume 6?

Fandom is a culture that is constantly changing. It’s a culture effectively built around self-sustaining itself through fanart, music videos, fanfiction and discussion theories about the content the fandom is built around to tide them over until the next big release. Taking the RWBY fandom for example, it’s a fandom that’s really only alive for less than two fifths of the average year, from October to January when the volume itself airs. The rest of the year, RWBY’s fandom has to keep itself afloat through self-generation of ideas and the sharing of the aforementioned means of content to tide people over until October comes back around and the season starts anew. Headcanons and fan theories become commonplace and can become exponentially more popular than ever intended thanks to the gap in seasons giving it time to form and gain weight as a theory before canon can prove it wrong. 

What that long period of downtime means is that you can see previously loathed characters come back from the brink and gain a lot of fandom support and approval in the turn of a season. Or alternatively, popular characters can take a swan-dive in popularity, being reduced to joke status that they never recover from. People who swore up and down that “this character is trash and I don’t care what they do with them” suddenly next hiatus are on the other side of the trenches. One season can do a lot for a character in either direction is what I’m saying. 

Because that’s what’s happened the past two years to Adam Taurus. 

Adam after Volume 5 was a turbulent wreck of a character. Humiliated at the end of the season and forced to run with his tail between his legs, while his character lost much of the appeal that it had garnered over the prior four volumes, making him resemble a whiny child LARPing as a doomsday villain. It was a pathetic display for his character, one so infuriating it inspired me to begin writing analysis essays after a heated Discord discussion, and that essay struck a note with many of the people who read it and agreed with the contents therein, especially in regards to how much Haven damaged Adam’s threat factor. People simply weren’t scared of him appearing like they were prior to his smack from Blake, several comments even derisively writing off Blake and Yang’s rematch against Adam in advance because “they made him job before, they’ll do it again.”

 And yet interestingly, within the span of a year, the tides partially turned. With Volume 6 Adam wasn’t widely derided as a joke anymore, but in spite of that, the discussion around him was just as heated as it was last year. Adam was still the core topic of the argument but now the battle lines had been redrawn thanks to his death in the climax of Volume 6. Now it’s become commonplace for RWBY’s discussion communities to deride many of the dime-a-dozen posts about Adam and his “wasted potential” that have been arriving nearly daily like reinforcements to batten at a wall. But why? What changed in just one year that changed the entire argument around Adam? Why are his fans and critics embroiled in a new war to enter the hiatus?  

That’s what I’m trying to set out and accomplish in this essay. I am going to hopefully explain the primary reasons for why Adam is a controversial character following Volume 6, in particular why his fans are dissatisfied with the way his characterization was taken over the course of the show. Keep in m ind that parts of this essay touch on Adam’s abuse so if that’s a thing you’d rather not see, avoid going further. 

1) Headcanons were proven wrong

No one likes being wrong. Just look at students who get fail grades in exams, they’re usually despondent. It’s never something you lose as you grow up, in fact, Being wrong just sucks, to put it bluntly. 

Remember how I mentioned at the beginning that because of the content droughts fandoms experience, headcanons and theories can grow far further than anyone intended? Adam is an example of that happening for three years. 

Adam’s first appearance was in the Black Trailer, released on March 22nd, 2013. He wouldn’t make a significant appearance in the show until Heroes and Monsters, the penultimate episode to Volume 3, released on February 6th of 2016. His only significant appearances between those two dates was a cameo in the Volume 2 finale and V3C7, Beginning of the End, released on January 2nd. 

Adam’s initial appearance left much of his personality vague, barring that he was Blake’s superior, a stoic swordmaster and that he was fighting to liberate the Faunus from humanity with the full intent of taking a pound of flesh from humanity for what they’d done to the Faunus- to quote From Shadows: 

From Shadows, we’ll descend upon the world, take back what you stole, from shadows, we’ll reclaim our destiny, set our future free.

As such, the mental image of Adam that the fandom was given had nearly three years in real life to set in stone, that he was Blake’s former mentor who had fallen into extremism and terror attacks. Some even suspected going off Oobleck and Blake’s interactions in Volume 2 that Adam would receive a redemption from his wicked ways to show as an example of how Blake would redeem the White Fang from its own muck-filled past, or that Adam would need to die in an alternate variant of that story to show how far down the dark path he’d gone. Tauradonna was even a fairly high-profile ship in the early days of the show, being on roughly the same level as Blake/Weiss.

The headcanons were only given further room to grow thanks to adaptations of the Black trailer and early RWBY not taking the time to more properly setup Adam’s true character, in particular the Shirow Miwa adaptation. Miwa’s version of the scene, or at least the localized version, was released across two chapters in April and May of 2016, with the full book getting a physical print in the West in August 2017. Adam in the Miwa adaptation is far more talkative than his canon counterpart and even makes several dry quips throughout the fight:

When they first see the AK-130 guards (”Looks like we’re doing this the hard way” in the trailer): “Looks like all the seats are taken Blake.”

When asked who they are (Adam doesn’t have a line here): “We’re thieves.”

Upon seeing the Spider Droid for the first time: “Tch! He’s one serious baggage clerk.” 

Adam’s dialogue is also softened from his original dialogue to boot: 

“Buy me some time!” “But-” “Do it!” instead now is “Blake, buy me some time.“ “But that’s-” “I just need a second.” Blake also gets to make a quip that “You know... You’re fairly high-maintenance.” 

When Blake’s barrage ends, she says “I did all I could,” and Adam thanks her with “It was more than enough, get back.” All Adam says in the animated version of the scene is “Move!” 

The manga makes a significant addition to the aftermath of the battle, where Blake chides Adam for the ambush being sloppy. Adam initially just smiles as “that’s what you’re here for,” before Blake quickly rebukes him, cutting the train car as she says that the White Fang “not lower itself to bloodshed.” The last we see of Adam in the manga is him standing on the train carriage, pondering to himself “You think this is wrong Blake?” 

A similar change is And “Perfect. Move up to the next car, I’ll set the charges,” is now “There’s at least 5,000 cases. All right, let’s kill the engine.” “What about the crew?” Adam is silent and when Blake presses him for information, the Spider Droid attacks 

Prior to the train attack there is a scene added by the Manga where Blake says that the Dust will be redistributed to Faunus in need. She asks Adam to confirm this and he looks back over his shoulder, lips parsed, and says “Of course.” However the next page has a black box of him saying “Don’t overthink it Blake.”  

The point of this extended summary of the Black Trailer in Miwa’s adaptation is to show that even in adaptations of the trailer, RWBY didn’t do much to dissuade people from forming the headcanon that Adam was simply a fallen revolutionary. In fact the manga smooths out Adam’s rougher edges, making his dialogue less harsh and more sarcastic. Remember as well that these were initially released soon after Volume 3 wrapped and before the commentary confirmation of abuse, meaning that these gave Adam fans one last bit of material to bolster their ideas of what Adam was. 

Obviously, all of these ideas and theories went out the window with Volume 3 Chapter 11 and the subsequent reveal by Miles and Kerry in Volume 3′s commentary track that Adam was in fact an abuser. A lot of his fans didn’t take to this reveal well, which I’ll return to in a future section of this essay, since in part it shot down all of their theories about Adam and made him an irredeemable monster. Adam’s potential redemption was destroyed the moment he slapped Blake. 

It is telling that most of Adam’s more passionate fans are from the early generations of the RWBY fandom who were around since the early trailers, since there’s a sharp divide between those fans and the more common Adam fan reaction of “I like him in spite of the abuse or explicitly only work with AU stories where he isn’t as bad.” Again, no one really likes being wrong, especially when it means accepting you were wrong for nearly three years.

2) The abuser twist

Something that I’ve never liked about Adam’s turn as an abuser was how looking back at Volumes 1 and 2 for evidence of the twist in advance, it’s difficult to find anything concrete. I had this discussion on a server lately where looking at all of Volumes 1 and 2 along with 3′s first half, there was really only one agreed upon sign of abuse prior to V3 in Volume 2- Blake’s flinch when Yang goes to hug her in Burning the Candle. But the problem with that is that even this can be taken into a different context, as one of my friends pointed out. As she reminded the chat, Yang had already shoved Blake several times by that point in the conversation and Blake may have flinched instinctively when she saw Yang’s arms raise again. 

Of course given the context of Adam’s abuse, Blake flinching may in fact have been foreshadowing, or it may have just been her instinctively preparing for another shove. We just don’t know, and that vagueness around Blake’s past and the abuse twist is partly why a lot of fans argue that the abuse twist was never planned in the early stages of the show and was an idea introduced during production. This is not a concept new to RWBY- Monty came up with the Maidens one day while working on Volume 3 after all- but it does mean that for sudden character turns like Adam’s abuse, the question will be raised of “was this always planned or was it just something you added as the story flowed along?” 

Much of the cited evidence that Adam was planned to be an abuser from the early show is in a similarly murky place. Blake speaks of Adam in Volume 2 as a mentor (”I had a partner... more of a mentor actually”), Monty himself called Blake the “apprentice” in an interview after the Black trailer, and much of her subdued behavior compared to her more affectionate self seen in Volumes 5 and 6 can be simply explained as Blake keeping a low profile to avoid Faunus discrimination and the attention of the White Fang. 

Even in Volume 3 Chapter 7- Adam’s last scene before Chapter 11 and the confirmation of his abuse- things are kept vague. Adam even sharply rebukes his Lieutenant when he offers to hunt Blake down following the Black Trailer, saying “Forget it.” Adam’s plan is to go to Mistral without a care for Blake, which goes against his obsessive behavior seen later in this very season. 

Much of the evidence given for Adam’s abuse- him gaslighting Blake in the Adam short, Blake talking about him in Volumes 5 and 6 to Sun and Yang, his dialogue during the Volume 6 battle- is all retroactive evidence, which does not solve the initial problem of the initial seasons poorly setting up Adam’s turn. Much of the evidence for and against the twist is shady at best, and reaching at worst due to how vague the wording is around Adam. Blake only ever speaks of him as a partner or mentor, never belying a romantic connection outside of the volume 2 premiere with the drawing of him in her notebook. Certainly with the benefit of hindsight some may find evidence in Volumes 1 through 3, primarily that Blake is simply an unreliable narrator, but I still feel like the lack of clean foreshadowing to such a large part of Adam’s character it weakens the twist, and some of Adam’s fans remain bitter that his character underwent a drastic 180 out of relatively nowhere.

3) Simple preference

Being blunt, a lot of Adam’s fans just prefer the Adam shown in the early seasons to the one the show closed out on. This idea is often mocked by some that his fans just wanted to see a Vergil knockoff, but for some of Adam’s fans it just came down to wanting to see cool fights. After all, RWBY was built on the initial idea of well-designed characters having well-choreographed fights. The show advertised itself initially as “From the maker of Dead Fantasy and Haloid,” which to surmise, weren’t shows that lured people in for their narrative quality. Monty’s loyalist fans who followed from his freelance work and from Red Vs Blue followed for cool fights, and Adam’s fighting style and design made him an instant fan favorite. It has only been from Volume 3 onwards that the show has advertised itself more as a drama than an animation showcase, and as such some of Adam’s fans don’t care less for his character turn other than that it makes him whiny and edgy and they’d like to see him swing his sword a bit more.

While the idea of preferring Adam as a revolutionary over his Yandere self seen from V3 is also a mocked concept as it tends to be used by people less well-versed in expressing critique of Adam’s character and makes for a popular strawman tactic, a morally gray villain may have worked well for RWBY. Especially as Adam and Cinder both show in different ways that the series should stay away from villains with no redeeming qualities. 

Though I suppose at least unlike Cinder, Adam actually has a backstory, so I should count my blessings. 

To surmise, for some of Adam’s fans it was a purely physical love affair

4) Adam’s death and its connection to Bumblebee

Blake and Yang’s final confrontation with Adam in Volume 6 marks a significant step in their relationship, which means if you like Bumblebee then the emotional climax of the volume hits home for you. If you shipped literally anything else then at least the choreography was good, but if you didn’t ship Bumblebee and never liked the Adam abuser turn... hoo boy. 

Being blunt, a fair few Bumblebee shippers don’t mind the abuser twist since in the long run, it helped their ship and gave Blake and Yang plenty of angst to work through both alone and as a pair. I’ve said before that Blake’s recovery arc made for some good content in Volumes 4 and 5 barring the Sun slaps, and Yang’s PTSD arc, while bare-bones in Volume 4, was some of the more consistently good material that year when shown. And as such, Adam being made a one-note psycho who wanted to kill Blake suited them well, as it gave a clear villain for Blake and Yang to overcome while developing past their respective traumas. The problem of course being, Adam’s fans not appreciating this turn and definitely not appreciating the names they were called when they expressed this dissatisfaction.

This led to a litany of hot takes- “Adam’s fans only cared for the show and the character as an outlet for a male power fantasy,” “Adam’s fans were entirely made of sexists who just hated women,” “Adam stans are abuse apologists.” (Like 40% of the Adam fans I know are actual abuse victims so fuck yourself on the front of trying to use their trauma as a low blow) And to be fair, Adam’s fans responded with their own disappointing share of bad takes involving the dreaded words “wasted potential,” alongside murder and nerfing, but I go over those later. 

(also you know genuine homophobics but trying to avoid braindead reasoning here for my own sake)

Getting back on topic, I quite obviously detest this lumping in of all criticisms. For one it means that simply shipping something that isn’t Bumblebee and disliking the fight can get one labelled with accusations of homophobia. A disgusting tactic on its own, to say nothing of how some people use it just to deflect criticism. Liked Adam? Then you’re an abuse apologist now. It’s interesting to compare the response to Adam last year and this year, where suddenly the fandom went from dismissing Adam after Haven to suddenly being very insistent that his death was well done and that only bigots opposed it; a naturally insulting statement to any members of the LGBT community or racial minorities who took umbrage with the handling of the Faunus.

And speaking of, my largest gripe with Adam’s turn personally is how it overshadows his previous commitment to the Faunus. Even though Adam’s short shows him fighting for the Faunus, to the point where Lionized and From Shadows are both expressly about how the Faunus are subject to inhumane treatments, it all gets tossed aside for the sake of Adam’s obsession with Blake and I’ve always found the almost-retcon of “Adam only truly cared for his own equality” a bit.. hard to get a read on? Since the original reason for his fall was because of his rabid devotion to his cause/getting vengeance on humans. Adam in-setting had been prepped as a Malcolm X style analogue before most of these traits were pushed over to Sienna. I feel like there is a lot that could be said about how RWBY handles its racism narrative, especially when it pertains to Adam given his own placement in the narrative, but that such a thinkpiece would likely be hit with accusations of homophobia or abuse apologism likely curtails that idea in anyone’s head. Some voices in the fandom have even come forward and expressed their dissatisfaction at how the arc depicting racism got curtailed for a romance. Adam rather sadly could have been part of a cornerstone on a narrative about the natural consequences of violent extremism, but instead the writers went with a far shallower option in my opinion.  

Also being blunt the whole “Adam was just a secondary character for Blake and Yang’s arcs” feels a bit like revisionism of weak writing. 

5) Damaged goods

Adam lost a lot of fans thanks to Volume 5. You can argue about this all you want but the facts don’t change that the volume was overall one that shot his character in the leg. Alongside having him go completely bananas out of nowhere with the “THE BELLADONNA NAME HAS BROUGHT ME NOTHING BUT GRIEF” scene, Adam’s humiliating head smack from Blake that knocked him out for an entire episode and his Naruto run escape from the Battle. Put bluntly, people didn’t give a shit, especially after CRWBY’s own attitude was to mock Adam, further undermining any threat factor Adam was meant to have.

It’s quite obvious in hindsight that Adam’s short was made quickly, and was almost certainly damage control made to counter the backlash from the Battle of Haven episodes. Sienna’s inclusion has eve been admitted by Miles on RWBY Rewind to be done as pure fanservice for the fans who wanted more from her design, and it shows with how Sienna dominates the back half of the short. But the short’s nature as damage control, while ultimately well received, still marked it as a fix job for Haven. Even last year fans wondered what was the point of trying to hype Adam back up as a threatening villain given he would almost certainly lose any future battles he fought in. 

Ultimately, a lot of people just didn’t care about Adam. The damage had been done by Haven, and even a lot of his own fans wrote off him being allowed to be even half as competent as his Volume 3 self again. With even his own fans having written off his chances of being a fearsome combatant again and the crew openly reviling Adam, not to mention his own voice actor despising him, a mood of “why should we care if the crew don’t?” began to settle in for Adam’s fans. Some even looked forward to his death since it would mean at least in death, Adam was free of being written as a psycho Yandere. For some of Adam’s fans, his writing had been so schizophrenic that death seemed like the only way forward instead of dragging it out.     

6) “Wasted potential”

This is a point I don’t entirely agree with myself, but as this is an essay about why Adam has been controversial after Volume 6 I only feel it fair to include it, even if solely for the purposes of rebuttal. Wasted potential has become a set of dirty words to portions of the fandom thanks to the many, many, many arguments about Adam post-season. 

A rather large complaint is that Adam “jobbed” for Blake and Yang, despite neither of them really having gained much experience onscreen since Beacon. I disagree with this notion since it does take some details out of consideration for this angle- B&Y were both tired from earlier fighting in the day, Blake was shocked to see Adam out of nowhere and that’s why he overwhelmed her, Adam still actually defeats Blake at Argus and it largely comes down to Yang to win the fight, and V5 had actually set up her changing her fighting style to better combat Adam’s own style. 

One idea of potential for Adam that I will admit to liking is the idea of Adam as an ideological villain to Blake. Adam and Blake could have both represented the differing sides of the Faunus debate and how to achieve results, perhaps even going for a scenario where neither side was truly correct or wrong. Such a plot would have even had the benefit of tying the Faunus narrative into the wider stakes of the show while also humanizing it on a base level through their struggle. But at this point, this is becoming me wishing the show was something else. I’m sure a great fanfic could bloom from this idea in the future and I hope I get to see it one day. 

There’s also the entire idea that Blake and Yang “murdered” (it was self-defense) Adam since apparently this is a big deal. I dunno fam, you just ignoring all those White Fang goons RWBY killed in V2 by leaving them in the tunnels? The ones they smacked around during V3? All those people Yang probably killed in the Yellow trailer? Now seems like a bit of an odd time to draw a line in the sand about the RWBY girls killing someone. 

7) Conclusion

To conclude, there’s a lot of controversy surrounding Adam, and a lot that will surround his character for years. I feel like arguments around him will still be going by the end of the hiatus, if not for years to come. Adam has attracted a fandom from varying walks of life, but one thing I’ve noticed with some regularity is how many of of them themselves have histories with abuse. What unites a lot of them in their reasons for liking the character is the tragedy of how Adam is a person who has been persecuted then gained the power to bite back, but in his blind rage winds up lashing out at someone he is supposed to love. With permission, they let me share their accounts so I could put them here:

Be it purely visual/choreography appreciation, falling for fan theories and headcanons, his allusions to the Beast, the mystery of his mask and later branding, his potential as an ideological rival for Blake or for personal reasons, Adam gained a fan following from all walks of life over the past six years, who may not have learned everything they wanted to about him but who wanted to learn more regardless. Even if they only liked him just to watch him fight, Adam has a small if passionate fanbase, and I hope I’ve explained some of their grievances with the show as a whole now, particularly following Volume 6. Adam might have been a scumbag, but ironically his fandom has actually been quite pleasant to talk to, so I hope I’ve presented their more accurate or personal issues in a fair light. 

Thank you for reading. Please consider sharing the post around if you enjoyed it or think someone you know would. 

[starswake--archived]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Dreamin’ Sun v3

This took a bit longer to get to than I would have liked, but here we go. I’m still not entirely sure if I’ll keep up with this series in the long run, at least in terms of continuing to write about it on my blog, especially since apparently after about v5 we’re gonna be getting new volumes every three or so months rather than every two months, but I’m still really liking it for the time being, as a general tl;dr for my feelings on this volume.

Before I put the rest of this post under a cut, I want to take the time to recommend Ao no Flag to anyone that enjoys the themes of unrequited love and dreams for the future that are present in this manga, but want to see it done in a more serious, bittersweet way, and with a cast that has some gay characters in it. Even though Ao no Flag is done in a shonen magazine, and has some emphasis placed on a sports sub-plot happening in the mid-ground, it’s written in a way that I think would still appeal to people who like shoujo manga. So if you like this manga and want to see the same sorts of ideas handled in a different sort of way, please check it out. [I imagine that most people following me right now are already reading it, but still].

Anyway I’ll just put the rest of this under a cut, like always.

I guess I’ll just start with the bad stuff first and work my way up to the good stuff, just to get the negatives out the way.

I’m just gonna cut right to the chase and say that I hope the manga isn’t seriously setting up a Shimana/Taiga romance. I don’t know at this point whether or not that’s how this will end, but I hope it’s not. I don’t think it’d make me outright drop the series, but still. I just don’t like the idea of it. I’m fine with the basic concept of her developing a crush on him since that’s understandable, but it’s the idea of them hypothetically ending up in an actual relationship that grosses me out. I mean, on top of the age gap, there’s the fact that Taiga is Shimana’s landlord, and even if she could easily move back in with her parents if she needed to, that’s still a level of power imbalance that really doesn’t sit right with me. And then there’s the fact that the story puts a fair bit of focus on how he has a fatherly sort of relationship with her at the moment, so that kinda puts me even further off this whole idea. I’m holding back my reservations for now since we’re only a few volumes in and this might be a short-lived subplot and not an endgame thing, but I’m still keeping an eye on it. Though on the one hand, I guess that at the very least, continuing my trend of mentally comparing Taiga to Shigure from Fruits Basket, I’d technically be less angry at this potential outcome than I was about who that guy ended up with.

[Also just to be clear, me talking about my fears about how this might pan out aren’t an invitation for spoilers. I know this manga’s been finished for several years but I don’t know how it ends and I’d rather not be spoiled if I could avoid it]

On the topic of negatives, I don’t really mean this as a serious complaint, but the relative lack of Asahi screentime and complete lack of Miku screentime was kinda sad. I want to see more of those two.

I’m really not sure how I feel about Ken as of now. I feel like I got a bit of a wrong impression of him based on the bonus pages at the end of v1, so his actual personality really threw me off. I don’t think he’s a horrible person or anything, but I at least dislike his creepy attitude toward Shimana. It’s just kinda gross and unnecessary. I appreciate that he isn’t as bad of a brother to Zen as he seemed at first, mostly in that he’s trying to push him away in order to keep him from throwing his life away for his sake, rather than because he just hates Zen’s goals in life, but it’s not really enough for me to like him all that much. I hope he’ll grow on me. I’m curious to see how the whole subplot with him getting back into boxing and fighting his old friend turns out, but it kinda started right at the end of the volume so there’s not much to say about it.

Getting into the stuff that I really, truly liked about this volume, the rest of the content of this volume was basically just Zen 24/7 which I was kinda afraid of, going in, but this volume really made me love him, even more than I already did. I still have ambivalent feelings on him as a love interest for Shimana, but as an individual character he’s adorable and I love him. As soon as I saw him in the rain with his hair flattened down I was like ‘oh no he’s cute’, and basically it just went from there.

He’s just a complete tsundere dork in all the ways I love in a character. He can be kinda genuinely shitty at times, but there was a fair bit less of that in this volume. Most of it was spent with him being flustered and/or crying and/or angry at his brother, all of which I enjoyed seeing.

I knew that he had some sort of an unrevealed dream in life, but I wasn’t expecting him to want to be a manga artist. On the one hand it doesn’t quite fit his boyish, sporty attitude, but at the same time he’s drawing sports manga so it kinda balances out. It’s pretty cute, but also kinda sad, that he’s obviously basing his boxing manga idea off of his brother. In general, I hope he can eventually come to embrace and pursue his interest in it.

Which kinda tangentially gets me into the whole romance development [sort of] that happens between him and Shimana in this volume. I really like how, even if it didn’t really play out like Zen wanted, Shimana still wants to be there to support him in pursuing his dream. I just like that even after the events of this volume they’re still friends. I expected the whole kiss by the river to lead to more drama and avoidance between them, but it played out in an almost weirdly casual way. I still really do love how much the characters in this communicate their feelings to each other, as I’ve said before, but the two of them seemed to be a bit unrealistically transparent with each other in that whole scene.

Also on the note of positive communication between characters, I like that Shimana apologized to her friends about her outburst at them earlier, and I really like that they all apologized back to her and acknowledged that they were being pushy and rude. Even if it did lead into one of the many, many ‘characters assume that Shimana and Taiga are dating’ jokes in this volume, which was . . . certainly a thing that happened several times.

Back on the note of Zen, I find it weirdly amusing that he’s really skinny, considering that he seems to enjoy exercising. It’s endearing in a way that I can’t quite explain.

I have a feeling that even though he and Shimana came to a pretty clear ‘let’s just be friends’ agreement at the end of the volume, he’s probably going to keep trying to win her over, which I have mixed feelings about. I kinda just want him to move on, especially since I still think he’s the least likely of the main three guys to actually end up with her, and so him continuing to be framed as a love interest/rival would feel a bit pointless. We’ll see.

I hope that the story hasn’t completely dropped Asahi as a potential love interest. I get that they also came to a similar sort of understanding that they won’t end up together, but still. I’m just kinda biased because he’s my favourite guy, in terms of them as love interests. So it’d be kinda sad if that just sorta got dropped after two volumes. And even more so if he got dropped in favour of setting up an uncomfortable age gap romance, if that’s where this is going.

I’m curious to see where the whole background plot with the whole legal case is going to go, since that’s still a thing that’s happening. Hopefully they can successfully challenge the ruling.

I don’t think I have much to say about Taiga in this volume other than everything I’ve said about the idea of him being framed as a love interest. But I like that we’re slowly learning more about him, and seeing some more of his old friends. There’s clearly meant to still be lingering mysteries about what his deal is, though I’m still not entirely sure what to expect from that.

I’m also kinda worried that the whole subplot of sorts about him ‘having a fear of women’ is gonna be resolved in a really boring and generic way, and that a large part of his backstory and ‘mystery’ might just be tied up in him having some kind of angst over, like, an ex-girlfriend that made him get all scorned and bitter about women in general when she left. I’m kinda bracing myself for something like that. And that it’ll probably be resolved by him ‘finding the right girl’, and/or maybe getting some sort of petty revenge on the hypothetical girl who hypothetically hurt him. Who knows. It won’t really bug me much one way or another, but I feel like I’ve seen this sort of subplot a thousand times before and so I feel like I can see it all in advance. It’s not an inherently bad thing, it just feels a bit predictable and lame.

I feel like this post ended up more negative in tone than I expected, but oh well. I did really enjoy most of this volume. Mostly all of the adorable scenes with Zen.

For the most part this manga still feels like a more diluted and light-hearted version of other stuff I’ve read, but that’s not really a bad thing. I tend to gravitate toward things that are kinda heavy and depressing, so it’s nice to have things like this that are just cute and fun. I have a big soft spot for fluffy shoujo rom-coms like this, and so this is kinda exactly what I wanted from it.

But yes I’m going to reiterate my Ao no Flag recommendation for anyone who wants to see more of a serious and heavy take on ideas like unrequited love between teenagers. I mean I’m not gonna deny that for the most part I just want as many people as possible to read that series in general since it’s great, but you get what I mean.

In terms of things that are more similar in genre and tone to this, Fruits Basket is still basically the quintessential shoujo rom-com, but it’s such a long-standing and well-known part of the genre/demographic that it feels almost pointless to recommend it to anyone. It’s still worth reading though, if you want something like this series that’s more lengthy, more emotional, more supernatural, and with a larger cast than this series, while still being a shoujo rom-com through and through.

Hopefully I enjoy v4 when that comes out. Which I guess won’t be too far from now since it took me a while to get the time to read this one.

[jinjojess]

Jess’s Thoughts on V3 Chapter 3

I’m halfway through the game now so I figure I should check in with some thoughts and theories and junk.

My liveblog should have finished its queued posts by now, so this post itself should follow that up shortly.

Character Rankings

Maybe I should start with an updated character ranking?

HaruMaki

Akamatsu

Toujou

Hoshi

Gonta

Chabashira

Yumeno

Iruma

Momota

Shirogane

Ouma

Angie

Kiibo

Amami

Shinguuji

Saihara

1-9: The Actively Like Range

HaruMaki has eclipsed Akamatsu ever so slightly thanks to sheer badassery and how much I love her FTEs, but you can consider them to be pretty much equal.

Toujou and Hoshi are about even too--they both hit my “exhausted hard worker just trying to hang on” and “duty before self” buttons.

Gonta is still wonderful, and I love him about as much as I love Chabashira and Yumeno, both of whom should technically be on the same line. Those two got boosted because of how their relationship evolved--I love that in the end Chabashira shows a degree of maturity in respecting that Angie is important to Yumeno, and I like that Yumeno went from gag lazy character to character struggling with guilt and regret.

Iruma is still hilarious, but she hasn’t had a lot of character-building to do yet so she’s dropped some spots, and I still like Momota a lot, though he’s starting to border on being irritatingly shounen protag-y, and I’m super disappointed in how poorly the game handles the set up for his relationship with HaruMaki. (Famitsu mentioned at one point that HaruMaki had an interest in space, so I thought they’d bond over common interests like actual human beings, but Kodaka decided to take the Stairs of Anime Troposity instead.)

10-13: The You’re Fine But... Range

Shirogane is really adorable and good at stealth snark, so I’m ready to like her, but she just...never gets anything to do. This is why I want her to be the mastermind so badly (more on this below)--I feel like she needs something to elevate her from “meh, I like her” to “wow, she’s great.”

Ouma’s antics were fun in the beginning of the game but are now starting to grate on me. I still find it really interesting that he tells lies often to help the group as a whole, but the fact that he’s constantly at odds with everyone is getting a little tiring.

I’m going to miss doing Angie’s voice on stream. She was never really high up in my ranks to begin with and she hasn’t moved much. I like that she was doing the patented student council president move of seizing total control in the name of public safety, but I would have liked to see a little more variation in her character.

Kiibo’s fine. He’s amusing enough, I just find him to be kinda bland? Hopefully he’ll get more character development going forward.

14-15: The I Don’t Really Care Range

Like I said before, I don’t have anything against Amami really and I think the mystery surrounding him is kind of interesting, but I just overall don’t care much about him. Nothing really draws me in.

Shinguuji was more of a disappointment. I was expecting something really big from him and it just didn’t really measure up. I wanted his talent to be really used to its fullest and while the Kagonoko thing was cool enough, everything about him was just kind of a let down. Even his execution isn't on par with the others we've seen so far (music's good though). Plus after reading DRT2, the reveal about his sister seems kind of tepid in comparison. I get why people are really put off by him, but I can’t care enough about him to really summon a lot of hatred. It’s very similar to how I feel about Haiji--yes, he’s objectively a worse person than the characters I actively dislike, but I will forget he exists after this chapter is over.

16: The It’s Complicated Range

I’m fine with Saihara when the narrative isn’t focusing on him. When he’s just being one of the cast, doing FTEs and hanging out for shenanigans and stuff, he’s totally fine. It’s when the game tries to make me care about his boypain that I need to check the fuck out.

Being clear, I don’t think his story so far is being handled especially poorly (except for the Akamatsu thing, which makes me wonder about Kodaka’s romantic experiences irl), I just find his character type to be really frustrating and annoying personally. I have seen this exact story before, many times, and the sucker punch of being given this yet again when I was offered something I actually wanted is not going to get forgiven any time soon.

Fingers crossed that the ending twist will justify this somewhat, though when it comes down to it, this game is way less enjoyable for me by making me follow around a character I don’t give a flying fuck about at the expense of one I really liked.

Thoughts on Chapter 3 Overall

Okay, onto my thoughts on the Chapter itself.

Like I said, I liked the whole student council angle, though I would have preferred if it got a little more actively oppressive. In Chapter 2 when Gonta is gathering everyone up for the Insect Appreciation Party, that was some intense shit, and I feel like the student council never really reached that level of threat. There’s never a point where Saihara and HaruMaki have to like, make a plan on how to creep around the school without being caught or anything.

Loved what this chapter did for Chabashira and Yumeno as characters. Took this background gag relationship and elevated it to something tragic and character-defining.

Would have liked the victims and the culprit to be less glaringly obvious. This is a common complaint about this game so far, barring Chapter 1.

Liked the murder tricks--this was the first chapter where I didn’t go into the trial with a solid idea of how the murder took place.

In conjunction with that, the trial was way harder, and I enjoyed that a lot.

I hate hate HATE that Kodaka insists on still replicating patterns from the first game--I wanted Shinguuji to get away with killing Chabashira while Angie’s killer got executed, meaning that Yumeno’s character arc would still have some ways to go and not be tidily wrapped up at the halfway point of the game. That would have lent some sense of overall progression, instead of every case being neatly confined to its one chapter (except for the first one I guess).

Also as a result of this, I now have to assume that the next Chapter will involve some heroic sacrifice (which will likely not measure up to Sakura’s, because they never do), the fifth one will touch on the questions left by Amami’s murder, etc. Making your murder mystery series that started by undermining tropes of the genre into a predictable formula is not fun, Kodaka.

Apparently a lot of people have a problem with the motive but I’m pretty whatever about it. I thought it was just silly enough to be a fun red herring, and I assume this discussion about bringing back the dead will resurface later in the game’s climax. Plus it gave me so many opportunities to incorporate Obakematsu.

The way Monokuma and Monodam temporarily switched places was pretty interesting, and I liked the parallel between Monodam’s getting along rhetoric and Angie’s student council thing as oppression through legitimate good intentions.

Mixed feelings on Monokuma lamp-shading the references to the previous games. In a world before DR3, I feel I’d be overjoyed and would use these to look for ways this game connects to the Kibougamine series, but I live in a post-DR3 world (specifically a post-Kibou-hen world), and I am desperate to get away from that series and its baggage.

I think that’s it?

Theories

Right, last up, a lot of people have asked me about theories I have for the rest of the game, so here are some.

Theory #1: Mastermind

So when the character designs were first revealed back in like September of last year, I pegged either Shirogane or Angie as the mastermind. I still am super suspicious of Shirogane based on a few very subtle things:

she’s the first character Akamatsu and Saihara run into in the prologue

she’s suspiciously normal and plain

she doesn’t seem to be affiliated with any kind of in-group other than the student council

hers is the very first secret scene you access in the game (provided you played the demo)

Junko panties, man

when you break for a Scrum Debate, she’s the first to rise (with Amami on the bottom)

HOWEVER, based on how the game doesn’t use 黒幕 (puppetmaster/one behind the curtain) for the mastermind any more, instead opting for the more straightforward 首謀者 (lit. mastermind, one behind everything), I can’t help but suspect that it’s Saihara behind it all. I mean, everyone keeps going on about how the story has to focus on him, so it’s very likely that he’s responsible for this situation and Shirogane ends up being a fake-out mastermind or something.

Theory #2: What the fuck is going on?

I have a few ideas for what exactly is happening here--most of them involve it not actually happening. In other words, the game events themselves are fictional in-universe, either because they’re a literal story reflecting how DR is a fictional property in our world, or because Saihara is just making it up.

Maybe he’s had a psychological break and is hallucinating this. Maybe this is a Shinsekai-esque program generating things to help with his inner issues? Maybe this is all a very long movie (or a TV show, or a game)? Maybe the events of the game are playing out in reality, but Saihara’s such an unreliable narrator that his account is radically different from what is actually happening.

My two favorite theories though, which I’d love to have be right, are as follows:

V3 is a giant rp campaign (not super likely)

V3 is a giant Duel Noir Saihara has set up to get revenge or something (slightly more likely)

If the latter is true, that opens the door for Shirogane to be the “mastermind” who’s actually working for Saihara. His main motivator seems to be guilt and self-hatred, so it’d make sense that rather than pull the strings, Saihara would want to participate and suffer along with all the other sinners.

It’s also possible that the events of the game are presented to us through the lens of Saihara relating what happened to someone else, like the authorities, or the public, or the loved ones of those who died. I’d love that kind of ending because holy shit Heart of Darkness much? Like he feels so awful for whatever reason that he set up this killing game, but then loses his nerve during it, is the sole survivor, and finds that he actually can’t be honest, resorting to a “his final words were your name” kind of lie.

If that happened, it would redeem my faith in Kodaka quite a bit. (I’d still rather play a game not about Saihara, but it would feel like all my suffering would have been worth it.)

As for the glimpses we get between Chapters and from the Memory Light, I kind of feel like a lot of it is fabricated. Maybe not the funeral, but I highly doubt the SHSL Hunt exists, at least not as it was presented in Chapter 2, and this horrible incident Toujou references could very well just be the SHSL kids rebelling or something--i.e., the impetus for Saihara to want to punish all of them to begin with.

Maybe it’s an alternate timeline where society reacts to Junko’s coup by punishing the talented, as I posited way, way back in the day?

Time travel is still on the table too, meaning that it’s possible that all of the characters inevitably die at the end, but Saihara has arranged it so that their consciousness just replays the game over and over in his own self-imposed purgatory.

There’s lots of possibilities.

Theory #3: Future Deaths and Survivors

Momota ain’t making it out of this game, sorry. I thought he might earlier on, but he’s leaning too hard on the “Ishimaru Stock Shounen Protag” button, and Kodaka needs a cheap, easy way to push HaruMaki through the last bit of her character arc, so I doubt he’ll hang on. Not now that he’s gotten involved in motivating Yumeno and stuff too. Sorry, dude, I like you a lot, but the only way you’re getting to space now is via execution.

Also yeah, I think he’s totally going to end up a culprit. It will be in self-defense, or an accident, or some convoluted sacrifice thing like with Gundam, or for some other excusable reason like that, but I just feel like Kodaka isn’t going to give up the change to a) fuck with Saihara again, and b) have another space-themed execution.

I think Yumeno will live to the end, if only because Kodaka has that dumb idea that if someone dies for you you deserve a Get Out of Death Free card. The only way she won’t live will be if Saihara’s the sole survivor.

HaruMaki I think will make it to the end since she’s filling the Main Female Character role. Ditto about the caveat being if Saihara’s the only one to get out.

Iruma is going to get so murdered. It’d be interesting if she’s the heroic sacrifice.

Kiibo is also going to die. I don’t know if he’ll get murdered or if Ouma will goad him into killing someone, but I can’t see him making it out alive. (Also he needs to step it up--Momota and HaruMaki have now been key players in this game, and Kiibo’s the only one from the initial reveal image to not be important).

Ouma I feel like is the type who could accurately fake is own death just to fuck with everyone/flush out an actual killer (we kinda got this a bit in Chapter 3, which could be foreshadowing). Ultimately though I think he’ll die one way or another.

Gonta is up there with Yumeno and HaruMaki. I get the feeling he’ll survive except in the case of Saihara being the only survivor.

Shirogane...uh...if she’s the mastermind, she could die after the culmination of Saihara’s plan, or she could not. She could just ride off into the sunset or something. Otherwise, I think she’ll fly under the radar with Gonta.

Okay, I think that’s everything I had to say about Chapter 3 and the game so far--looking forward to Chapter 4!

[jinjojess]

Jess’s Thoughts on V3: Chapter 1

Sorry I lapsed on my liveblog, but until my girlfriend headed home I didn’t have a lot of time to play so I was getting outstripped by the stream. Speaking of, I should probably get this post done before tonight, on the off-chance we finish the trial (HAHA).

Will try to resume liveblogging starting with Chapter 2.

Beware of spoilers!!

Still feeling pretty fuzzy and blah in the head, so going to do this bullet point style like the good ol’ DR3 days, haha.

First, the ivory (and ebony) in the room: yeah, I’m pretty pissed that instead of a character way more relatable to me, I’m once again shackled to some wimpy loser boy with insecurity issues. Kodaka, I get that that’s how you were in high school but come on, man. I’m here for newness. I am also neither a boy nor a wimpy loser (my insecurities manifest through overachieving rather than uber moe shyness) so I’m getting awful tired of this trope. RIP Akamatsu Kaede. You had just a touch too much personality to be a DR protag.

That said, I do think that the case was really well designed and even though I figured it out pretty soon into the trial (I was sitting there for most of it screaming 自動的に！じ・ど・う・て・き・に！！！ while they were discussing how someone could have killed Amami), the mystery itself was set up really well.

I also liked that the game took care to actually address the question of “Why didn’t you confess immediately?” and “Why tease the answer out of us instead of just admitting it?” since those were also things that bothered me in the so-called “heroic” cases in games past.

I’m also pretty annoyed that my favorite Monokumar is gone now too, but Monodam is quickly endearing himself to me anyway so it’s fine. RIP Monokid. I will scream HERU YEAH! in your place for the remainder of the game.

Man, you know what would have been really great? Changing the protag to Hoshi. Then you could drop the first person view to the weirdly short one from DR1 and SDR2 and it could be like an in joke. Take notes, Kodaka.

Oh right, I didn’t say anything about Amami being the victim yet. Since he was toward the bottom of my character ranking I wasn’t too broken up about it, and I accept the sacrifice of Green Komaeda as payment for me giving up Akamatsu. This at least seems somewhat fair.

My other faves though (HaruMaki, Hoshi, Toujou, Gokuhara, and Iruma) are all still alive for the time being, so yay!

Damn, dat execution though. I loved it--it was brutal and more realistic than most of the others, but still with some of the grandiosity you’d expect from DR-style executions.

I don’t hate Saihara, but I do find him pretty bland so far, especially compared to the rest of the cast. I liked when he went to the piano room to listen to the CD, but other than that I know next to nothing about him despite him being attached to my hip for most of the game so far. I was hoping that his hat was like a treasured gift from someone but no, it’s just because of his guilt over essentially solving a Duel Noir once. His hang up is not being confident in himself. Pretty yawn-worthy. So far he feels like a waste of a really cool design and a fantastic seiyuu. Hopefully he’ll get better as the game goes on.

The part post-trial where someone (HaruMaki?) asks if Monokuma hates them and Monokuma responds “Hate you? Hrm, who knows” reminds me a lot of Junko’s “I love you all so much I wanted you to share my exquisite despair” motivations so I’m pretty excited by that.

On that subject, I found Shirogane’s allergic reaction to cosplaying real people hilarious, and it makes me wonder if the Kibougamine-verse counts as real or fictional in the V3 world. Fingers are still crossed for Junko cosplay.

Chabashira isn’t too bad with her misandry, actually, which is a relief. It’s way more toned down than I thought it’d be.

Kinda want to see what would happen to either Ouma or Kiibo if one or the other died. I get that I’m supposed to take the Monodam killing Monokid thing as foreshadowing, but it feels kind of red herring-esque to me.

Momota is pretty damn likable.

I loved the Monokuma Theater segments this time, especially the backdrops. The fact that the old timey one had a tiny image of Celes on the card was fantastic.

Am now the not-so-proud owner of several gyouza in the shape of Naegi’s face. No really, I have SO MANY.

I imagine some people will take/have taken this chapter really hard because of their shipping walls and to that I say: who cares, ship what you want. I plan to. Don’t worry too much about your ship not being canon because seriously people, it doesn’t really matter.

tl;dr, I’m disappointed in that I lost two characters I like and they’re forcing me to play as the living character I’m least invested in, but the writing is still solid and I’m interested to see where things go.

BOLD PREDICTIONS!

It’s still possible that this is all just a dream or a hallucination. “It was all a dream” is a stupid twist right up there with “My evil twin did it” and “The Matrix” from previous games after all.

Still nothing to suggest that the new cast aren’t reincarnations or relatives of the existing cast, which if things go in that direction, I hope they choose to do it in an interesting way at least.

I am crazy suspicious of both Angie and Shirogane. The former because she’s a ditz and you first find her in the Altar of Judgement, and the latter because she has this uncanny ability to pop up right around when discussion of the mastermind is happening. Like, Saihara says that he was wrong in his deduction and Shirogane is immediately like “So the mastermind isn’t someone among us???” Stuff like that. In addition, there was that bonus scene with the nail brush you get for having played the demo, which yes gives both Akamatsu and Amami more screentime, but it also randomly involves Shirogane?

Still think that all these kids could have been picked up from various points in time and possibly space.

Also kind of thinking it’d be funny if it were like...Junko writing fanfiction or something. That’d be pretty fantastic.

Oh yeah! My “it’s an rp” idea is still on the table as well.

Anyway, that’s about it I think? Thanks for reading!

[murasaki-murasame]

Danganronpa V3 Liveblog Part 11 [Chapter 3 - Trial]

I probably should have left this for tomorrow but oh well, here we are.

Thoughts under the cut.

First of all, I basically failed this trial at least three times because I kept running out of health, but APPARENTLY the ‘retry’ option just takes you back to the start of the section you were stuck on and gives you most of your health back. That sure would have been nice to know back in chapter two. I could have avoided replaying half of that case’s trial if I knew that. I thought that the retry option reset the entire trial, especially since I’m pretty sure the ‘prepare and retry’ option takes you back to the start of it. At least, it takes you back to the screen you’re at right before the trial starts. Maybe I was wrong, since in chapter two I just backed out and reloaded my save instead of making sure whether or not I really was being reset to the start of the trial, but still. Oh well. It’s not a major complaint.

Anyway, that aside, this sure was a trial. I don’t know if it’s because I decided to do it at 1am again instead of just waiting until tomorrow, but in terms of logic difficult, this was probably the hardest trial thus far. I’m not kidding when I said that I ran out of health several times, even with the skill that gives me the max amount of health.

The weird part about it is that I was more or less spoiled on this chapter in advance. Or, well . . . it’s not that I knew Kiyo was this chapter’s culprit, but I knew that he was going to be a culprit at some point, since before I even played the game, youtube decided to recommend me one of those ‘all murders and execution’ videos that had his face on the thumbnail. Well, I guess it was his sister’s face, but you get what I mean. Same difference. So I knew that he was going to be a killer eventually, I just didn’t know when. I had to awkwardly keep it a secret this whole time just in case anyone was reading these posts without having played the entire game.

Just to get it out in the open, there’s one other character who I know dies at some point [not sure if they’re a victim or a killer for sure, though], and I think I may have gotten more or less spoiled by what was labeled as a ‘spoiler-free review’ of the game, but I’ll keep quiet about that one until it comes up. I’ll continue to dance around those two spoilers I’m aware of in these posts, but I’m pretty sure that those are the only two spoilers I’ve read in reference to deaths in this game. Every other death should hopefully be a surprise to me.

But back onto my main point, I knew that Kiyo was going to be a culprit eventually, and it was a major reason why I suspected him immediately [though he was pretty suspicious anyway], but somehow this entire trial was still genuinely difficult for me to get through. I ran into so many points where I was completely unsure what the answer was, or what the game expected from me. And since I didn’t know which exact chapter Kiyo was a culprit in, I had the lingering doubt in my mind that maybe he wasn’t the killer yet. This is why I also got thrown off by the possibility of there being two killers involved, since it kinda partially invalidated by spoiler, or at least it seemed to at the time. I guess in the end there wasn’t a second killer, and my initial instincts were right, but this trial really put me through the motions of doubting those instincts to the very end.

It may have been because I held back on thinking too hard about the mechanics of the case since I didn’t want to work it all out in advance, especially since I probably knew who the killer was, but basically every aspect of the actual mechanics of how these murders happened was a real surprise to me.

I guess my main issue was that since Kiyo was so immediately obvious in every way, with the katana being from his room and the seance being his idea, and him being one of the first suspects pointed at, I just kinda assumed that he was being set up as an innocent scapegoat. So basically I got stuck in a loop of metagame-y logic, yet again, and it made me spend the entire time agonizing over whether or not my instincts were right. The game sure picked the perfect time to deviate from the pattern of the true culprit only being suspected in the second half of the trial. I got so used to that set-up that I started immediately ignoring any character who gets suspected early in the trial. But it makes sense that at least one chapter would involve a killer who’s obvious enough to be guessed at the start.

It also lead to me inaccurately doubting Kaito for a second time, but at least this time I was never super confident in suspecting him, since absolutely nothing in this entire case directly pointed at him, aside from him being kinda shady and reclusive lately. So I don’t feel TOO bad about suspecting him a bit.

Even though it’s always sad to feel like this sort of thing got spoiled in advance, I’m happy that Kiyo was the culprit. Now I don’t have that spoiler hanging over my head for the rest of the game. I would have been horrible if he ended up, say, being the chapter five killer, in which case there would have been no doubt about him being the killer then, since chances are there won’t be any murder mystery cases after chapter five. So it’s better that it happened when there was still a chance of my instincts being incorrect. Which worked out for the best, since in spite of me being sort of spoiled about it, this chapter ended up being incredibly difficult for me because of that possibility of being wrong.

Of course there’s still that one aforementioned spoiler that may or may not be pretty directly spelling out one of the final killers, buuuut let’s not talk about that one for now.

I really did get put through the motions of genuinely suspecting a wide variety of people, especially in the context of if there had been two separate killers. I suspected Keebo until they spelled out why his flashlight wouldn’t have worked, which was a concept that I hadn’t really considered, I even suspected Miu for a fair bit, I almost got caught up in the idea that Tenko killed herself, which made me wonder if maybe she’d killed Angie, and I even seriously wondered whether or not Himiko really was the one to kill Tenko, though I feel pretty bad about that one now. And obviously I always suspected Kaito in the back of my mind. Kiyo just felt way too obvious for most of the trial.

I’m not really sure how I didn’t guess the whole trick with the identical rooms, and the purpose of the missing support beam. I think that if I’d given myself more time to think about it, I maybe would have figured it out, but I didn’t.

I still feel a bit . . . iffy about the seesaw trick, since I find it hard to believe that Kiyo wouldn’t have, for example, tripped over and messed up the magic circle, or broken the floorboard. And unless my memory is wrong of how it was laid out, it’s surprising that having the entire floorboard move didn’t displace any of the salt. So that part of it still feels weird to me, but I’m willing to suspend my disbelief on that one. The crimes can’t all be perfect. And at least to balance it out, I’m totally on board with the logic behind everything surrounding Angie’s death. That was all surprisingly easy. I dunno how I didn’t figure out the really simple way Kiyo set up the sword to push the lock. Maybe it just seemed too . . . simple? I dunno.

So the actual mechanics of how the case worked were a bit of a surprise to me, and that lead to the logic part of the trial being really difficult. It’s hard to remember all of it, but a lot of the different sections gave me a lot of trouble. For example, both of the hangman’s gambit games were weirdly difficult [at least the seesaw effect one was], I fucked up twice on the psyche taxi part, the rebuttal showdown parts were all kinda difficult in general, and I lost once at the scrum debate part. Though really, from what I remember, the most difficult part was when you have to lie about Tenko’s final moments. The idea of lying in trials is still so . . . weird to me, I basically never even consider it. I tried literally every single possible usage of every truth bullet they gave me, and lost all my health once, before realizing that the game expected me to lie, after I’d done every other option available to me. I kinda thought I was going nuts. But it worked out in the end, I guess.

Also I still suck so much at the Argument Armament, even with two skills dedicated to making it easier. Rhythm games are my worst enemy. Oh, and on the subject of skills, I also managed to squeeze in the one about making truth bullets faster, since I managed to get enough levels right before heading into the trial. That was good.

Oh, and before I forget, Keebo’s image recording function felt a little bit asspull-y, but oh well, it’s not a huge deal. And also I’m not even gonna comment on the reason why Miu designed it for him.

Before I talk about Kiyo, I just wanna say that I’m happy Himiko’s getting some actual development out of this. That’s good. Hopefully she doesn’t get killed off immediately after this. I’m starting to like her.

Anyway, onto the whole elephant in the room known as Kiyo. I was definitely expecting to get a killer soon who would be unanimously ‘evil’ in motive, to balance out the more sympathetic first two killers, but man was I not expecting how nuts he ended up being. His whole motive reminds me a fair bit of Tsumiki’s from DR2. It also helps that they were both the chapter three killers of their respective games.

I still kinda dislike it when murderers in games like this are ‘just crazy’, but I guess I can’t expect all of them to be sympathetic.

It was still a surprise to hear that he had no real desire to leave, and mostly just wanted to kill. That certainly was disturbing.

And on that note, jesus christ I wasn’t expecting this game to get into incest territory, and Kiyo’s delusional murder spree. Wow. I did not see that one coming at all. I don’t even know what to say about it. They really did everything in their power to make him unsympathetic and evil, huh?

In terms of that little post-credits scene of sort, I really hope that isn’t blatant foreshadowing for Kaito becoming a killer in a desperate attempt to escape from the school before he dies from whatever illness he seems to have. I was suspicious of his illness this entire time, since it obviously wasn’t just him being spooked out by ghost stories. It’d be lame if they signaled the idea of him being a killer so far in advance though, and in such a blunt way. We’ll see, I guess. Maybe it’s intentional on the game’s part, that it’s so obvious. If he does end up being a killer, maybe it’s not meant to be a surprise. Who knows.

In general, I have no real idea what to expect from here. Technically we still have nearly half of the game to go, which is weird to consider. And then there’s bonus stuff. I think I’ll probably continue liveblogging through all of whatever bonus post-game stuff we get. Depending on how it goes, I’ll try and avoid using any spoiler-y post titles.

Overall, this was a really bizarre chapter. I kinda sorta knew who it was in advance, and their motive [plus a few details of the crimes] felt a little weak, but at the same time this was undeniably the most difficult trial in terms of how much I fucked it up. It’s a weird situation. I’m not sure how to feel about it.