#I think my Kokichi hit piece is long overdue

[tsukumosanaappreciationblog]

Kokichi Ouma: How Not To Write A Sympathetic Villain

Kokichi has been a persistent fan favorite character in the Danganronpa fandom which to be fair on a surface level he has a lot of appeal but surface level appeal doesn’t make up for the fact that he’s a fundamentally broken character. I think he’s an absolute failure of character writing and is a perfect example of how not to create a sympathetic villain.

I think Kokichi's biggest mistake is having a deliberately inconsistent characterization which was a creative choice to reinforce his two faced nature however it was implemented very sloppily. The foreshadowing for Kokichi’s true motive is almost nonexistent and any actions that he takes that can be seen as him showing his true motivations can just as easily be read as him acting out of sheer boredom and malice. Let’s take a look at a scene that Kokichi fans see as him displaying genuine emotion of him crying at Gonta’s death. Ignoring  the hypocrisy for now despite the fact that it could be genuine emotion he outright states that it was a lie which is totally believable considering how much he lies and the fact that he was the one who killed Gonta in the first place. The Audience is supposed to fully buy into that because his good intentions were meant to be a shocking twist. It’s like a reverse crappy Disney twist villain where instead of a  good guy being comically evil for no reason a comically evil character becomes a good guy for no reason. It really doesn’t help that his worst actions are immediately before his only good actions. Which leads into another point is that Chapter 4’s reveal of Kokichis true nature was a lot more convincing and had better foreshadowing than Chapter five’s revealing of Kokichi’s true nature. Him being a sadist with no regard for human life like he says he is in Chapter 4 would actually line up with his actions a lot more than his Chapter 5 motivation because it actually had room to establish it. At the beginning of the game he is established as a harmless prankster but throughout the course of the game his action began to seem a lot more sinister like how willing he is to show everyone movies that would cause them to commit a murder or the fact that he says he murdered Angie which shows he’s all to comfortable mocking the dead and purposely interfering with the class trails words are one thing but if his action also line up with his façade then they do with there true motive then we start to have a problem with characterization. You could say these actions are to truly reinforce his façade but that leads into my next point. His actions are so extreme that  no rational person would think they would be okay under any circumstance and we don’t understand him as a person enough to understand his justification for his actions. Take a look at someone like Komaeda who we have a very clear  understanding of  his black and white views of hope and despair so we understand why he would commit such extreme measures now let's take a look at Kokichi’s reasons for committing his crimes. He hates murder so he wants to end the killing game which is literally the same motive as almost everyone in this game but they didn’t take such extreme measures to do so and we have no explanation for his past even in his Free Time Event’s which is the entire point of FTE’s most of the time. A rather subjective point on why I hate him is that I find to be insanely obnoxious which is a completely subjective reason for disliking him but I think I should at least make it a footnote. When it comes to positive I think his design is good and that's about it in terms of positives.

In conclusion Kokichi is nothing short of an incoherent clusterfuck of a character and I honestly couldn’t tell you why people like him.