#but at least compared to dr2

[ovidiomedes]

i actually think the reason THH was so scary the first time around is bc makoto's involvement in the first trial made me realize the game was most likely not above having characters trying to kill makoto. even if he was the protagonist.

like yeah. he was most likely going to survive just bc he's our eyes and ears but i spent most of the first trials walking around hope's peak genuinely TERRIFIED i was going to get jumpscared by someone trying to kill makoto from the back.

[shiut]

Both danganronpa and even rain code have this underlying but incredibly persisting theme of the cognitive dissonance between one's personality vs their own nature that I can't help but think about a lot.

In my head I tend to call it the "Leon paradox" because he's the first and most obvious character I think of in regards to this, though he's far from being the only one. Despite being an effortlessly talented baseball prodigy, he dislikes doing it and his actual passion is becoming a musician. However, he's pigeonholed into doing something he doesn't enjoy simply because he's good at it and it's a means to an end since it's his only way of getting anywhere.

This gets expanded in dr2. Imposter's dissatisfaction with having to always be someone else. Akane not caring about being a gymnast much at all aside from the perks it gets her. Nagito's disdain for his luck talent that brings him constant misery while also acknowledging that it's the one thing about himself that he can count on the most.

It even becomes a focal point with Hajime, who did everything to fight his nature of lacking a talent. However, Chiaki points out that it's the fact that he has no specific talent that gives him more freedom than any of the ultimates that he admires. Turned out, gaining every talent put Hajime into his own prison, and it's his loss of personality that made him essentially useless.

Even in V3 you have Kaede who actually loves her talent so much that she feels like it's an obsession that affects her ability to socialize normally. Kokichi also seems to have brief moments where he acknowledges that his talent is a huge barrier to being able to actually connect with people and causes his loneliness, but decides that it's a compulsion that's too troublesome to change so he just accepts it.

Shuichi sticks out to me when it comes to this theme. He's extremely good at detective work and will often do it on impulse regardless of reward. However, even just stumbling on his first murder case and solving it before the police could even touch it, he could not cope with the results of the person he'd affected. His emotional sensitivity traumatized him into being avoidant, even using a hat as a literal blinder. He was prepared to die in the first trial in fear of revealing the truth. His compulsion to do detective work even kind of ruined Kokichi and Kaito's plot in ch5, as he got so ahead of himself with revealing the truth that just kind of blurted everything out before realizing that he shouldn't have. His compulsion with detective work even seems to make him comparatively calmer and more focused during investigations than the other protagonists, despite easily being the emotionally weakest-willed out of all of them. He repeatedly keeps falling back into his talent despite the emotional toll it has on him because he just can't help himself. He kind of acts as an example of one of the reasons why Kyoko was trained to be emotionally detached.

Jin actually is very much like Shuichi. He tries to actively avoid detective work because he despises the emotional detachment required for it. You wouldn't even know that he's actually really good at it, but you see glimpses into his skill in the novels where he'll end up figuring things out before even Kyoko does on more than one occasion. I can talk a lot about Jin, but I do get the feeling that one of the reasons why he works at Hope's Peak is because he knew more about what would end up happening there than he let on. He probably could have gotten quite a few things done if he wasn't so insistent on fighting his own nature as a detective.

Very honorable mention to Yui, who turned down an invitation to Hope's Peak for her high-jumping talent in order to pursue her passion as a very mid detective. She might've even lived if she went to Hope's Peak because I'm pretty sure she would've graduated by the time of the tragedy, but at least she died in the most based way possible by rejecting them.

And of course, Junko is a prime example of the detrimental effect of talent. Because of her analytical abilities, she can practically guess everything that's going to happen. Her obsession with despair is a desperate attempt at being mentally stimulated in a society that has let the status quo stagnate to such a critical degree that it's the reason why the very concept of talent had been rotted to this point. Sorry to Kodaka, who has repeatedly said that Junko is meant to be a truly evil villain with no motivation, but he did kind of accidentally give her a motivation in dr0 where we're shown for a fact that without her memories and ability to analyze, she's relatively normal and tame. That is her nature, just a kind of weird girl who wants to be a tradwife and go grow corn somewhere. However, I think it can be argued that what is meant by "pure evil with no motivation" is that she doesn't have any sort of tangible tragic backstory. You can even say it's not her analyst ability alone that caused her madness, since there's plenty of normal non-world-ending analysts. It may simply be that her personality happened to mix terribly with her talent, and that's the nature of what makes her pure evil, because both of those aspects of her are part of her nature that she can not (nor does she even want to) control despite the misery it causes her. She simply learned to love the misery.

Makoto himself is very clear about being bitter about his luck. For the most part, what's apparent to him is that it causes him constant trouble and the good that it actually does for him is so subtle and disjointed that he doesn't even realize it's his luck. However, I think what makes him different from people like Nagito or Junko is his personality. He doesn't obsess like they do, and his optimism makes him bounce back easily. I think his luck even feeds into his personality and, inverse to Junko, it's the unpredictability of his luck that makes him hopeful and optimistic. Since he never knows what's going to happen to him, he had to develop a way to roll with the punches.

The aspect of personality vs ability also carries over to rain code. The master detectives are people who have innate psychic abilities that are seemingly based on their nature, and then it gets refined and specialized based on their personality. Not only does their personality help to refine these powers, but you see that their personalities and abilities often have detrimental impacts on each other.

Halara can't see living things in their postcognition because they aren't good at looking at people. Pucci's ability makes her hearing so sensitive that it's at least partially caused her emotional detachment. Melami not only likes fashion so much that she must wear the clothes of someone to use her power, but she also has to actually like the clothes too. Vivia is constantly fatigued and has depressive tendencies due his tenuous attachment to his spirit.

Former Number One/Makoto are a great example of this sort of destructive feedback loop of cognitive dissonance. You can infer that their empathy and obsession with helping people is what gives them the ability to use coalescence and share anyone's abilities, yet it's the fact that they can do anything that makes them feel like they must do everything. Ironically, the fact that they've convinced themselves that they must do everything makes their ability essentially useless because they end up only working alone. As a result, Former Number One became detached with every emotion except for his obsession, and it's what caused Makoto to ultimately spiral.

[markerofthemidnight]

Danganronpa Settings And Why They Work

(and also an analysis on Blackened Skies and Project: Eden’s Garden’s settings because why not)

I’ve had a pretty long day today and I’m currently nursing a mental headache that’s slowly over time evolved into a physical headache. What better way that to try and help with that then to get my brain working in an analytical way?

So, Danganronpa settings are cool and interesting. There’s a lot of different ways you can take them, but- as we’ll soon see when we get into this analysis properly- most take the form of some kind of prestigious or fancy area that’s been twisted into a mockery of itself.

Another thing they have in common is that wether a school like in DR1 or a chain of islands like in DR2, Danganronpa settings are secluded places closed off from the outside world, naturally as the goal is to get out. If it would be possible to escape it in normal circumstances, it isn’t now.

So without further ado, let’s talk about them:

Hope’s Peak Academy - Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

Hope’s Peak is the main standard that all DR settings meet, as it is the first in the franchise. As to be expected from such, it’s rather straightforward when you get down to it, but there are a few interesting details:

Hope’s Peak is a prestigious academy for Ultimates that’s been turned and twisted by Monokuma into a frightening, almost claustrophobic nightmare.

And boy, is its appearance good at nailing that frightening feeling down and making it feel even more oppressive.

The school- specifically around the ground and first floors- is filled with these bright colours all over the walls and floors, in a way that, in any other case, would probably feel bright and happy, but now taken to such an gaudy extreme that it circles back around to being uncomfortable. It’s really dark, too. The shadows feel unnaturally strong.

Why, exactly? Well, if you ask me, that’s because we know that schools aren’t supposed to look like this. Colouring in real schools, to my experience anyways, tends to be quite muted. There might be a splash of colour here and there, but nowhere near like the way it is in Hope’s Peak where you’ve got countless colours being thrown at you and none seem any more overpowering than the other.

The best part about this effect is that, as I specified earlier, it’s most noticeable in the first two floors: ie, Chapter 1. The chapter where finding a way out of the school, no matter the cost, was at its most important: the rest of the game seemed to be more focused on why it was happening, and as soon as that was resolved, the issue of them being stuck there was fixed almost immediately after.

Also, is it just me, or do the rooms in Hope’s Peak either feel incredibly claustrophobic or incredibly agoraphobic?

The 2D rooms feel claustrophobic, since they all open up with the little cardboard cutout props appearing into the room, either popping up by themselves or scuttling in from offscreen.

The 3D rooms feel agoraphobic, since they’re rooms that, unlike the rest, you can move around in, and often tend to be incredibly big compared to all the rest.

Either way, there’s a sense of dread following you wherever you go in Hope’s Peak, and that does a lot to add to the overall feel of the game.

Setting Ranking: 8/10

Jabberwock Island - Super Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair

Now, Jabberwock is where things get interesting. This actually might be the most interesting setting on the list, now that I think about it: first of all, it’s the only entry on the list to be set outside rather than inside.

Secondly, and less obviously, getting off the island wasn’t really that… important in DR2? The game, at least the first few chapters, was more focused on getting it back from Monokuma.

However, there is one thing of interest about Jabberwock Island that I feel like I need to bring up: the sheer uncanniness of it.

It’s not as obvious as it was it Hope’s Peak, for multiple reasons (the game’s on an island so it feels more open, the sun’s almost always shining so there aren’t any strong shadows, and while there are still a lot of different colours, they don’t contrast each other and instead come together in a beautiful tropical aesthetic) but that’s all balanced out by Hajime repeatedly stressing, in the prologue, that something is wrong with the island.

And I have to say, I can’t blame him. Jabberwock, specifically the first island, feels almost… too perfect. The sky feels too blue, the beach too yellow, the whole situation is just too good to be true.

Rocketpunch has just about everything you could ever want, even if it shouldn’t realistically be found in a supermarket, like night-vision goggles. The hotel has personal cottages for everyone- all separate buildings no less, not different rooms in the same building- and its own restaurant.

Just like Hope’s Peak, there’s a sort of uncanniness to Jabberwock. An uncanniness that is repeatedly stressed by Hajime, specifically near the beginning of the game.

Admittedly, that uncanniness sort of… dies down after the first half of Chapter 1. I feel like SDR2 probably should have leaned harder into it, but I realise why it didn’t.

The uncanniness is replaced with a more desolate feeling in the 3rd and 5th islands, not to mention… you know what? This deserves its own section.

The Funhouse

Admittedly, there are times in the game where you come to appreciate the fun island aesthetic. The soundtrack, specifically Beautiful Ruin, really nails that feeling: it reminds you that, no matter what Monokuma and his killing game leads you to think, you were originally supposed to enjoy the school trip.

So naturally, the Funhouse segment says to you, “Hey, you know that fun feeling you’ve been appreciating while you can this whole game? Let me hold that for a second,” rips it straight out of your hands before you can even answer, and throws it out of the window for the rest of the chapter.

The Funhouse is everything I described earlier about Hope’s Peak but amplified to 11. The bright, eye-burning colours are back with a vengeance: but whereas Hope’s Peak at least had different sets of eye-burning colours, here, it’s just the same two dumbass patterns on bright lime green and pink wherever you go.

Also, since the Funhouse seems to consist mainly of 3D segments, you’d think it leans harder into Hope’s Peak’s agoraphobia, right? No, actually, it manages to flip that concept on its head: somehow, the 2D rooms seem too big and the 3D ones seem too small.

The fact that the entire cast are slowly starving whilst having to look at images of strawberries and grapes wherever they go just add to that feeling.

Setting Ranking: 7.5/10 (The Funhouse: 4/5)

The Ultimate Academy for Gifted Juveniles - Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony

Now, I’m probably gonna say this a lot in this analysis, but the Ultimate Academy is… interesting, because it doesn’t really feel like the first two.

It doesn’t have the same uncanny vibe that Jabberwock and Hope’s Peak have: rather, it feels more desolate. The sort of dreary aesthetic it has, and the overgrowth everywhere, adds to that feeling. That your life ends there.

But then, there’s the more futuristic aspects of it. The technology in the school feels high-end, like it takes place a few decades in the future.

Sure, it can be written off as the futuristic parts being Monokuma’s renovations and that the school itself is ancient… but you can never really tell.

And then there’s the Ultimate labs. I don’t know about you, but they’re probably my favourite part of the setting: they’re just so interesting!

We never got anything close to a talent lab in any of the other games… and for good reason, because I couldn’t see it working in any of the other ones.

I think we can all agree on this: if there wasn’t a Killing Game going on, and the place was cleaned up a little, the Ultimate Academy would be a really good place to stay, and the talent labs are part of the reason why this is, wouldn’t you agree?

The characters certainly seem to agree. The only ones who seemed to outright dislike their labs were Ryoma and Maki, who never liked their talents themselves to begin with.

All of the above come together to create a sort of… conflicting feeling about the Academy. Do you like it, or do you not? Is it futuristic, or is it from the past?

Which, I’d say, is quite fitting for a game about the relationship between truth and lies. It makes you question the reality around you…

And then there’s the End Wall. I… honestly don’t have much to say about it. It’s certainly interesting, but probably the most I could add to how it makes one feel is that really pins down the feeling of being trapped, and its sheer size makes you feel a part of something bigger than yourself.

Setting Ranking: 6.5/10

The Despair of the Seas - Blackened Skies (AO3)

(I’m including this because I think it’s a really good an interesting setting. If any of you would like to read it:)

The Despair of the Seas is much like the Ultimate Academy for Gifted Juveniles in that it’s unlike anything else we’ve seen in the list so far… but mainly because it’s actually a blend of the previous three, in its own ways.

The logic behind making it a cruise ship didn’t make much sense to me until starting this analysis, but now I start to realise: Blackened Skies takes characters from all three of the games, and what do you get when you take two prestigious schools and merge them with a tropical island? A cruise ship, obviously.

The Despair of the Seas, as described in the fic, is a very large ship. And, additionally, a ship with a very nonsensical layout. Now, it’s quite difficult to tell how this would make the player feel if it was a game, because it’s not, but… if I had to guess, I assume it would be similar to the feeling of uncanniness DR2 had.

The inconsistency of the ship, and the strange way it seems to be laid out, would make you feel almost… detached from it. Whereas Jabberwock Island felt simply odd in a way that was difficult to keep your mind off of, the Despair of the Seas would feel outright liminal.

Much like, say… purgatory.

It’s also interesting how the outside of the ship is described as just being a dreary ocean painted by grey clouds (or should I say, BLACKENED SKIES?!) It adds to the uncanniness the ship has, and amplifies the feeling of there being no escape.

And not to mention, when you start to think about it… it also highlights the themes of guilt and sin that the story has.

Rough seas are perfectly normal. Unpleasant, but common. And yet, despite your desperation to escape the ship, when you look out the window, suddenly you decide you want to stay?

Naturally, you would. Of course you would. And yet this feeling doesn’t do anything but make you feel worse about yourself.

It’s like you want to stay there, almost. The Despair of the Seas is an incredibly fancy ship, and not even in a gaudy or tasteless way: again, if they weren’t stuck there, the cast might actually want to stay.

But what I have to stress is that it’s like that on purpose. In just Chapter 3 of the story, it’s stressed that the protagonist feels as if the fanciful nature of the ship is Monokuma’s way of rewarding them all for killing.

So it makes you feel… tainted, almost. Like you’re in on the joke. Like you’ve been consumed by pride and greed, and the only reason why you want to leave is your weariness of all the other selfish murderers around you.

Of course, that’s just my interpretation of it. Anyways, the Despair of the Seas is cool and great and go read Blackened Skies if you haven’t already!

Setting Ranking: 9/10

Eden’s Garden Academy - Project: Eden’s Garden

Eden’s Garden Academy is… I dunno, it feels very down to earth in comparison to all the rest.

Of course, I can only go off of what little we’ve seen of the academy in the prologue, but… the best I can describe it is like a cross between the uncanniness of Hope’s Peak and the dreariness of the Ultimate Academy.

Hope’s Peak managed to feel both claustrophobic and agoraphobic depending on the area. Somehow, Eden’s Garden Academy manages to feel like both no matter where you are.

As soon as you wake up in the academy, it feels desolate. Like it’s been abandoned for a long time, and only recently renovated for the sake of the Killing Games: much like the Ultimate Academy except less obvious.

The entire school has a haunting feeling not made much better from the portraits scattered all over the walls. It feels almost like a horror game in that regard, like something’s going to jump out at you.

Another thing that adds to that feeling is how we’ve never actually seen the outside. We’ve been tricked into thinking we were outside, but we’ve never even encountered a window.

What results from that is a feeling of separation from the outside. You could be anywhere right now, and you have no way of figuring out where.

It also really adds to the feeling of being trapped. If the recent teaser is anything to go by, there’s also a fake exit somewhere in the new area, which if anything adds onto that feeling by a long shot.

I don’t really have much else to say since we’ve only seen so little of the academy so far, so… yeah.

Setting Ranking: 6.5/10 (but only because I haven’t seen enough of it)

Thanks for reading!

[the--artist]

Patterns in Leg Expression over the Danganronpa Trilogy

Wait, I know this is a weird title, but please bear with me for some time. **Spoilers for sprites AND death order for all three games

I'm going to be defining "leg expression" as different leg movements in sprites. Dr1, has by far, the highest amount of different leg movements, while V3 has the least amount of various leg movements. Dr2 is in the middle, with certain characters.

Danganronpa 1: Trigger Happy Havoc:

Example: The Gothic Princess

I chose Celeste because of her expressive head sprites (plus being my favorite DR character...shhhh). Overall, Celeste has three varied leg sprites. The bottom two mainly show up during her trial and during her breakdown, so it makes sense to see these different leg movements. On the other hand, calmer characters like Chihiro don't have any "new" leg sprites besides their standard. However, the general trend of characters in DR1 tends to be multiple leg expressions for each character. It's still a common occurrence - especially if they tend to show a wide range of emotions. In general, in DR1, there were more 3/4 body sprites where that turn their back on you (Sakura, Kyoko, I'm looking at you)

Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair

Example: The Glorious Bastard of Danganronpa

Nagito is one of the most expressive characters in DR2, but most of his sprites involve only small positional changes with his legs. Even characters such as Ibuki and Gudhum tend to have 1 or no different leg expressions. After going through the DR2 cast's legs (what a weird sentence to say..), a common occurrence was in mirroring the legs. However, compared to Dr1, the leg variation has slightly gone down. Of note, Kazuichi has some good variation, while Mikan has two versions of her leg that are distinctly different! Sonia also surprisingly has some really good leg variation!

Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony

Example: The Junko Kinnie

Danganronpa V3 has the least amount of leg movement by far. Very vivid characters who tend to be very expressive (Kokichi, Angie, Tenko, Miu, Korekiyo, Maki, Kaito) don't get ANY new leg movements. Tsumugi has the most by far with three distinct leg movements while another character might maybe have a second version. Compared to Dr2, a lot more mirroring of the legs happens in V3 - and definitely compared to Dr1. For V3 in particular, so many of the characters are so much more vivid and eccentric that maybe more of the budget could have been spent on their top halves - this would lead the legs to not be changed as frequently between sprites.

Conclusion

This isn't a perfect analysis with perfect statistical analysis! But it was so much fun to go through the sprites of such a huge cast.

[a-student-out-of-time]

Besides the double murder stereotype. What are other things you dislike about danganronpa/fangans in general, when it comes to writing?

//There's a lot I could say about that, but I think the biggest one for me is the fridging. Dear lord, I hate fridging.

//On the off chance you're not familiar, fridging comes from the trope "Stuffed in the Fridge," which comes from "Women in refrigerators" by Gail Simone, which was a response to a Green Lantern issue where Kyle Rainer's girlfriend Alexandra was killed by the supervillain Major Force and shoved into the fridge for her to find. Quite a journey, I know.

//Fridging refers to the tendency for characters to be killed, harmed, traumatized, de-powered, or otherwise made to suffer not for the advancement of their own stories, but to affect someone else entirely. It's only ever about the character feeling sad or mad in response to these things, often briefly and shallowly.

//For another prime example, Barbara Gordon, aka the OG Batgirl, was shot in The Killing Joke and subjected to humiliation, but not for the advancement of her own character. No, it was entirely to upset her father, Jim Gordon; she is gone from the story after one last scene in the hospital with her. Barbara was left traumatized and paraplegic in a story that wasn't even about her. It was only thanks to the work of other writers later that she became her new identity of Oracle.

//I bring all this up because fridging is an inherently bad trope. It's not one that's often done wrong but can work in certain situations, it's one that is simply bad writing. It's on the same level as Bury Your Gays or R*pe as Drama, bad conceptually and worse in application, because it trashes one storyline or arc for the sake of changing another

//I know what you may be thinking in regard to DR here, and yes, Kaede is definitely a good contender. She was set up to be the first female protag of a canon killing game, only to be caught up in a murder situation and die, leaving local sad boi Shuichi to take up the role in her wake.

//The thing is, while I can certainly see the argument there- an interesting female lead being killed so we can have another sad boi learn to be confident- a lot of people go too far and wish harm on Shuichi and fans of his. This is not the acceptable response to fridging.

//Likewise, I can see the other side of the argument, where Kaede's actions were in line with her personality, how she was willing to go further than other protags and was thus done in by her own actions. No, Tsumugi killing Rantaro and framing Kaede doesn't mean she did nothing wrong; she set up the trap and was willing to crush someone's head. True Fridging rarely comes from a character's own actions, usually outside forces that just want to hurt someone else.

//And while I did enjoy Fuyuhiko's storyline in DR2, I can't help but feel that the deaths of both Mahiru and Peko to get us there feel...iffy. Not true fridging, but maybe fridging adjacent? Peko's death is understandable, but the actual murder of Mahiru and both of them dying for a dude's storyline always did rub me the wrong way a bit. It at least aims for tragedy rather than exploitation in that regard.

//Idk, maybe Hibiki and Kanata's deaths are so comparatively worse that I've softened on the canon examples a bit more. Those two were pure emotional manipulation in every respect, and otherwise had no bearing on their stories.

//And yes, male characters can get fridged too, but it happens far, far more often with female characters. The essay was called Women in Refrigerators for a reason.

//The thing that truly boggles my mind is that I've seen so many fan theories for fangans like Despair Time or Antebellum, usually victim or killer predictions, and their arguments have ultimately boiled down to fridging them for someone else's development, or sometimes purely for the feels. "Charles will die so Whit can learn how to mourn properly" and the like.

//People get annoyed when it happens in the stories themselves, yet theories are oddly rife with it and I don't understand why. As I said, fridging is an inherently bad trope. You cannot do it right, so you simply should not do it at all. And no, the argument that "this is a death game" is no excuse.

//"Anyone can die" is not the same thing as "dying for stupid, contrived reasons is acceptable." Especially not when the reason is "you're in the way of my preferred ship," but that's a whole other iceberg to deal with.

//Bottom line, keep the fridge clear for milk, juice and frozen pizzas, not the corpses of characters who should have arcs of their own

[carnyreborn]

Random not porn question if you don't mind. I happened to see at least some of the Danganrompa games are on sale on Switch so random question occurred to me. How do you rank the games? Like as games, best to worst, I feel like for smut Junko carries 1.

Uh, as games, ignoring your final bit, I do feel it is 1>V3>2 for the mainline. One I feel is the best DR experience, three has the better mysteries, and DR2 kinda lacks a bit when compared to them all. But it's still a great game, just my least favourite protagonist and all of that!

[pyropsychiccollector]

Of course. I wasn't just talking about the Hope Universe but about fiction in general.

Alright, so here's my other question. I know I asked before, but just to be specific : what's your least favorite pairing with Makoto in each game? (DR1, DR2, NDRV3 and the fangame Another)

Hmmm. Always the least favorite. XD I'll list them, but I'm just stating my preferences here. lol

THH: Naegiri. I'll just put that one because it's mainstream, and canon Naegiri got the other ship options nuked to become a thing... Despite Kyoko being "just as bad" as the other girls when it came to betraying Makoto. XD

GD: Naewari. GD is just harder to pin down a least favorite; it's not like I even hate Owari or anything. I just think compared to the other girls, she doesn't have as much depth.

V3: ... I'm gonna go with NaeYonaga, just because Angie's character has always frustrated me when she gets her switch flipped. Like, she's a fun character most of the time, but then she descends into making cults, and well, I don't like Angie very much anymore. (❋•‿•❋)***

Fangan: ................ Screw it, I don't like NaeKanade if Kanade-chan hasn't been reformed. (❋•‿•❋)******** Kanade-chan really pissed me off.

[sinkat-arts]

Semi-professional data-science-y thoughts from a UX designer re: 10% kudos to hits ratio ahead.

tl;dr: As everyone has already said, it's Not Great. Just read the tags and summary to decide if you want to read something.

tl;dr2: ... and I took that personally.

Alright, no one asked for this, but the post of someone saying they only read fics that have 1 kudos per 10 hits is floating around twitter. Since it's part of my job to pay close attention to analytics to evaluate the success of my designs and user flows, I figured I'd just... info dump. It's aggravating that at least one person is out here using a terrible metric based on a misleading piece of data to ignore whole swaths of amazing stories.

"Hits" is raw data, and that's pretty useless! In the case of AO3, it shows any entity accessing the fic, once per 24 hour period (so if you hit a fic 4 times in one day, it'll only count the first time as a "hit". It will restart your count the next day.). It does not weed out junk/irrelevant data. This includes: - People who keep the tab open for weeks at a time so it refreshes when the tab is focused. - People who visit often to reread. - People coming back every time a new chapter is released. - Authors visiting often to reread / edit. - People who were never going to read because they weren't the target audience based on the tags / summary. - Web crawlers. Bots. Etc, etc, and on and on. What you want are good faith hits from your target audience.

You can only leave kudos ONCE, regardless of how many times you visit.

Which means that a better measurement to get accurate conversation would take into consideration only UNIQUE visitors who spent a significant amount of time on the page, indicating that they read at least enough of the fic to indicate that they are actually part of the target demo. THAT'S the number you compare to the number of kudos received. (Note that this is still a bit of a gray area since someone can open the story and just leave it open without reading. Short of looking over someone's shoulder, this is the best you can do... unless AO3 adds heatmaps to our stats page, which I don't see happening any time soon, haaa.)

EVEN IF the data itself were good, a 10% conversion rate is astronomical as a KPI (key performance indicator, a measure of success). So we're clear, a "conversion" is an instance of a person seeing the thing (your fic) and doing what you want them to do (leaving a kudo). Not that you can really compare fic satisfaction to an ecommerce funnel, but your average conversion rate on, say, a marketing splash page is LESS THAN 3%. If you hit 5% on your campaign, you're having a pizza party in the office, guys. And marketing campaigns can be incredibly sophisticated affairs, fueled by massive research efforts, seo work, algorithms based on user behavior and all kinds of creepy ass data collection, etc. Fic promos are... you know. We chuck them up on social media and pray people see them.

So not only are hits as shown in AO3 a very poor metric to calculate conversion, a 10% conversion rate as a MINIMUM bar for entry is just ridiculous.

Clearly, I've thought about this a lot. I've gotten stuck watching my "conversion rate" go down as hits increased but the kudos didn't move. I've felt badly - so badly - about my proudest moment (where writing is concerned), go nowhere after I finished it. Thinking about it in terms of realistic conversion rates helps me, so I'm mostly sharing this information for anyone else out there it may help.

Super cool that that person is happy with their method of finding fics to read. They're depriving themselves of some really awesome stories, though. A far better way to decide whether or not to read something is to use the search function and filters to narrow things down and then simply read tags and summaries.

And if you start reading and don't like the style... nothing is keeping you there. You can bounce (which, hey, a bounce rate is another metric that would be far more handy than a raw hit counter).

Anyway... behold, my absolute failure of a fic (which resulted in wonderful comments that have made me cry because folks were moved or took the time to leave interesting related information or drew things for me or still periodically send me really cute bears).

[siriusanotherside]

I've been thinking again and again "Why the dead characters of SDRA2 died while the ones in SDR2 didn't, when both killing games happened in a virtual world?", but then, I thought about the motivations of the AI masterminds:

AE!Junko wanted to steal the bodies of the "dead" students, so the bodies needed to be at least somewhat alive, even when their avatars died.

Meanwhile, AE!Mikado wanted to steal the Divine Luck and escape to the real world through Akane's body, so the only persons he needed alive were himself, Yuki and Akane.

I agree with your in-character perspective.

As you said, AE!Junko needed their bodies to be alive and their brains to be functional in order to be able to take over their bodies and use them effectively to take over the world. Whereas AE!Mikado only needed one body and brain to be functional (Akane’s) from the get go, and in fact, would actually prefer everyone else to be dead, since it would mean there would be no one to compete for the Divine Luck.

Notably too, whereas AE!Mikado only needs to watch out for the life of Yuki (who is currently a brain) and the body of Akane for his plan to suceed, AE!Junko needs everyone’s bodies to be functional to use, and so AE!Junko can’t take the same type of risks or heavy measures that AE!Mikado can, since if AE!Junko damaged one of the bodies, it would mean one less body for her to hijack and take over the world with, which would make the task harder.

All of this means that it makes sense in a way, the reason as to why there are more survivors in DR2 than in A2, if only because their mastermind goals actually did take into account the preference towards a participant being dead or not.

Regarding also the Out-of-Universe reason, I think it is possible that what also influenced this number is the slightly different tone of the another series when compared to the canon series. Both series do bittersweet endings, but whereas the canon series seems to lean towards the sweet side of the bittersweet endings, Another seems to, instead, lean towards the bitter side of the bittersweet endings.

[danganronpa-theories-v3]

I'm interested in the role Monokubs actually play in the story. They're presented as antagonists but I believe they're actually one of the good guys, at least partly.

The first thing that comes to mind is one parallel between DR2 and NDRV3. Usami, an AI whose role in the story is to help the protagonist, confronts Monokuma in the beginning, but he quickly defeats her and infantilises her to humiliate and diminish her value in the eyes of the main characters. Do these scenes remind you of anything?

The obvious point is Monokuma's ill-concealed dislike for the Monokubs. In this, they can also be compared to Usami. In general, this dislike can be caused in particular by the fact that the Monokubs do a very poor job as the antagonists - for example, their constant "mistakes" could be interpreted as intentional attempts to help the main heroes. I still don't understand what the point of the "mixed motive videos" was, but if Kirumi had actually seen the video intended for someone other than her, the murder could have been avoided. So if the real idea behind mixing up motive videos was to avoid murder, it almost worked. In any case, Monokuma seemed extremely displeased with that part, as if it was really "off-script". If you look from a meta viewpoint: the whole in-game point of NDRV3 is to be appealing to the viewer, and what do the Monokubs do? They dedramatize important moments, don't participate in the plot even where they should, discuss deliberately repulsive topics, etc. In essence, they represent all the things that the hypothetical viewer of Danganronpa doesn't want to see. So it seems to me that this group of characters plays a very different role from Tsumugi or Monokuma.

[hopeymchope]

How would you rank the 18 Class Trials from THH, DR2, and V3 from worst to best?

This is... virtually impossible for me, lol. Comparing the trials from each game to each other?

How about I just rank them within each game? That'll make it a little easier for me to deal with...

DR1

6) 5th. It's driven by lies and ultimately rushed to its end before the characters can draw any solid (pointless/meaningless) conclusions. So of course it's last for this game, and it’s probably last for the entire series as well. If there are any saving graces to this trial, it’s the surprise when your closest ally is willing to let our protagonist die... and that this trial contains the fake/bad ending route.

5) 3rd. Although the main culprit is pretty obvious from the jump, it requires some surprising twists to explain how everything got to be the way it turned out. But did I always find those twists plausible? Errrrm... not really. 

4) 2nd. Pretty good trial that's hurt for me by the fact that there'd barely be any need for a trial at all if a certain third party didn't dick around with the evidence for no reason. Also, the dual nature of Toko is an incredibly predictable reveal. Without those two aspects dragging it down, though, this could easily go higher.

3) 1st. Sure, the major hint given and, subsequently, the eventual culprit are pretty obvious, but this one establishes so much about how the trials work and how much the details you observe will matter that it’s still pretty fun that first time around. The initial surprise of the first victim makes for a great way to keep you invested in the trial experience. This trial is damn near iconic now, so it feels almost mandatory to respect it.

2) 6th. DR1 still has the best "final trial,” easily. SO MANY great reveals, and they all totally work for me. Nothing rings false or disappointing, and it also features Makoto finally coming into his own and taking the lead. I nearly labeled this my top pick for DR1, but...

1) 4th. It's easily the most emotionally dramatic/satisfying for me, and there’s something weirdly inspirational for me about Hina’s incredibly harsh stance during it. This one GOT ME IN THE FEELS, and in part that was because I saw so little of it coming. After the more predictable elements of the first and third trials, this felt like the writing was firing on all cylinders. 

DR2

6) 2nd. You have to accept a couple leaps of logic to make this trial keep flowing, and the fact that trial is ultimately reliant on someone noticing a candy that’s very small and hard to see while the person is also in a stressful situation and they are groggy from being drugged/asleep and it necessitates the person retaining this seemingly useless detail inside their brain .... that’s always bugged me.  The “escape route” conversation even retroactively raises questions about the first trial. Oof. On the upside, the reveals it brought us about Fuyuhiko and Peko were incredibly important, satisfying, and legit surprising turns. And it’s pretty cool how it’s basically a two-for-one combo trial because you have to solve the Twilight Syndrome case before you solve the current case. 

5) 3rd. Other people have pointed out the leaps of logic and missing pieces of this trial, but at the same time, the candlelight hanging is so intense and the ultimate reveal of the culprit is such a brutal turn that I have to give it some props. The culprit’s primary plan is ultimately one of the most ingenious in the series, IMO, and definitely one of the most twisted/fucked-up, which earns it some points. 

4) 4th. This is probably the single murder case in the franchise that I understood the absolute least about when entering the trial, for better or worse. On the one hand, that made it really fun to see the mystery gradually unfurl, but on the other hand, it made it tough for me to provide the right answers at certain points in the trial, leaving me fumbling. A big part of those issues was how it was initially hard for me to wrap my head around the nature of the funhouse via the provided 2D graphics... but once I eventually got there, I had to respect the creativity that went into devising such a “weapon.” Also, it can be hard to tolerate Komaeda in this trial. He’s even more of a know-it-all-but-reveal-none-of-it jackass than ever before, and his turn towards overt cruelty towards the others (and Hajime in particular) left me raging. The culprit reveal is good, but the motive does beg the question of why he didn’t just come forward from the jump.

3) 6th. There are a lot of great reveals in the final trial that totally reframe how you see the characters, and some of them are deliciously twisted. There’s also a ton of great dialogue provided, and in retrospect, it’s actually sort of neat to have one endgame mastermind reveal in this franchise that doesn’t involve the “They were hiding among us this whole time” trope. All that plus the surprise return of our surviving heroes from the first game! However, this is also where they officially reveal a core element of DR2 and its setting that I've never liked. This knocks the trial down a few pegs for me. Of course, by the time you reach the trial, I'm sure 99% of players have already figured that particular "twist" out. There’s adequate evidence to predict it in the first freaking chapter, and I know this because I DID predict it in the first chapter of my initial playthrough... which further hurts the supposed “reveal” of the island’s true nature when it comes around. 

2) 1st. Probably my favorite of the “first trials,” there are lot of components that go into this one. There’s a combination of two premeditated killers plus one spur-of-the-moment accidental victim, there’s a satisfying (though admittedly maybe too easy) reveal of the killer being one of the most unpleasant people to be around during the first chapter, and I really dig how audio became a very important component of the mystery due to the total blackout. This is also the part of the game where we learn just how twisted Komaeda really is, which is HUGE both in terms of its immediate shock factor for a total newcomer and in terms of its impact on the game as a whole. Of course, since it’s a “first trial,” it can’t be too complicated... but they still manage to confuse so many of us with “MEAT ON THE BONE” :P

1) 5th. Again, I will almost always give the most emotionally intense one the top slot. The “traitor reveal” is obviously THAT MOMENT in DR2. I also love how this one used the strange internal logic established early in the game RE: Komaeda’s luck to develop the eventual solution. And forcing us to make use of evidence gathered in multiple locations outside of the immediate site of the body/murder? That more complexity of that type that I see relevant to a trial, the more I appreciate it, and this one has loads of that stuff. Although I guess the investigation isn’t technically part of the trial itself... but it’s still very relevant to it. 

DRV3

6) 4th. I found this whole trial to be just... extremely predictable. Maybe it’s because I was so far into the series that I’d gotten used to its tricks by this point, but this was the most predictable trial for me since the first one in the first game. The whole looping/rollover map setup of the VR? Obvious. The murder weapon? Obvious. Our culprit’s ongoing confusion at everything discussed? Obvious. There were only a couple of points I didn’t have already figured out when I walked into the trial room, and those turned out to be basically irrelevant (such as the bottle of poison). The eventual motive is at least a surprise, but I also found it hard to accept that this culprit would really kill people over it. Overall: Super lame. 

5) 3rd. Another double murder trial, and once again one murder overshadows the other. The séance murder is definitely clever. Sure, you know the culprit pretty early on, but the methodology is the good part. However, the real fascinating one for me is the art lab “locked room” murder. Going into the trial, I couldn’t fathom how they were going to explain that one, and I found the answer both smart and satisfying. It’s funny to imagine how many times the culprit had to try that stunt with the lock before it actually worked, heh. This is probably the best of the three “double murder” mysteries in the series, but the trial isn’t as emotionally affecting as the 3rd trial in DR2 to me. Moreover, the trial loses points for the most infuriating Hangman’s Gambit of the series and especially for the motive reveal. When the killer’s motive can be boiled down to “they’re basically just a psycho serial killer,” it’s not very interesting.

4) 6th. The first part of the trial, which deals with re-assessing the first case? It’s pretty damn on-point. That leads to the mastermind reveal, which... isn’t great, really. It’s not a terribly interesting character to make the mastermind, they have no interesting motives or characterization to unevil, and they’re ultimately just a pawn behind another, off-screen group of masterminds. But then things get uproariously funny to me. The metatextual stuff is just so goddamn ridiculous. It’s frustrating and annoying how much of our not-mastermind’s explanation is clearly full of lies and half-truths that we’ll never have complete answers on, but that’s also part of what makes it all fascinating. We get to swap protagonists like four times! There’s a fake-out Game Over! These are really cool things. But it all leads down the road of our protagonist arguing that fiction does affect reality (yes, good), that fictional people can still matter (definitely) and that... fictional lives are equal in value to real ones? Uhhhhh slow down there, champ. That only works for YOUR universe, where fictional people can be made out of living, breathing individuals. But in light of the metatextual stuff you’re surrounded by, you kinda sound silly AF right now?

3)  2nd. Look, this is still incredibly irritating to me. Also, if you go down the alternate “lying” route at one point, you are forced to accept that these piranhas were somehow trained to only eat dead things, which is just... so deeply dumb.  But what is good is the entire ropeway conceit (which is a very significant part of the trial!) and the idea of the partition inside the tank. This was a murder with an elaborate, intelligent plan that is very well-executed. And the motive reveal? It’s one of the best in the series! I respect that stuff. (If I had the right to toss the execution in as part of the soup, I’d say that it’s also one of the series’ best. Let’s call it the icing on the cake.)

2) 1st. The writing that made this trial work is undeniably clever. The way the narration told us exactly what was happening without really telling us what was happening? It was a masterstroke of both great writing and perfect localization coming together. When it becomes clear during the trial what is about to happen, it’s a huge shock. The transition to another protagonist with the lights flickering out and back on is beautiful. Even the core concept of a protagonist who was willing to step up and try to kill the mastermind immediately is just deeply interesting. And obviously this one made my emotions run high. HOWEVER! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Kaede Akamatsu was a more interesting, unique, and compelling protagonist than Shuichi Saihara ever was. Ultimately, the protagonist-swap, no matter how well-written, was a mistake because they shifted us from a unique character with an interesting new perspective to a character who is, in many ways, “Makoto Naegi with even less self-esteem.” Yes, I know he has aspects that make him distinct as his own person, but there’s still just too much there that feels like we’ve done it before, and he never fully escapes from that. It feels like a massive waste and a huge missed opportunity to ditch Kaede like this. Now, if they had just done the protagonist swap in reverse — making us start out with Shuichi before flipping things over to Kaede — we could’ve had ourselves something amazing here.

1) 5th. I know I decided that I couldn’t rank all among each other, but if I did do that, I feel confident that the 5th trial in DRV3 would rank very high indeed. You go into the trial unable to even determine who the victim was due to the fact that two people are missing and there was nothing left of the body that spoke to an identity. Going into it, you naturally figure that one of the two missing parties has to be the victim and the other one is probably the culprit. But even with just two friggin’ suspects, the amount of turnabouts in the case that made me rethink all my assumptions was insane. Sure, the explanation for how the person inside the Exisal can maintain “character” is pretty damn thin, but once you get past that, I don’t think there’s a single false note in the trial. It even breaks unprecedented ground by continuing into another Non-Stop Debate after everyone has already voted. And of course, it culminates with a lot of intense emotion. Even the execution is emotionally satisfying! ..... although I’m not sure if I should count the execution as part of the trial, but hey, still. As far as Dangan trials go, the fifth one in DRV3 is basically a masterpiece.

[giveamadeuschohisownmovie]

Hot take: Now that I’m rewatching Danganronpa 1...I really feel that Kyoko Kirigiri should’ve been the protagonist

First off, I don’t hate Makoto Naegi. He’s a good guy and, aside from his occasional perverted comments, a likable person. However, I feel that he was the wrong choice for the protagonist. He’s just too passive; he never understands what’s happening around him and most of the major story progression comes from the other characters. Makoto’s role is mainly to just react to the people around him.

I mean, this is a mystery game, right? So wouldn’t it make more sense to play as the character who is actively trying to uncover the truth behind Hope’s Peak aka Kyoko? Wouldn’t it be more satisfying to play as her, making your own discoveries and deductions instead of relying on someone else to do it for you? 

Now, the counter-argument to that would be if we were to play as Kyoko, there’d be no mystery, we would just know everything. But I don’t think that’s right either. Kyoko is smart but she’s not omnipotent. She still has to do the investigations and she also has no idea what’s happening in the school. Also, just the fact that she has amnesia is good enough to show that the game’s overall mystery wouldn’t be ruined with her as the lead. 

Also, just from a writer’s perspective, there’s more reason to be invested in Kyoko’s story than Makoto. She’s trying to find out what happened to her dad and what memories she lost. 

Meanwhile, Makoto’s character progression came to a grinding halt when Sayaka died. At least with Sayaka, we got to learn more about him and he grew as a character from their interactions. When she died, Makoto becomes a passenger in the story, especially when Kyoko takes on a more active role in the story. It really doesn’t feel like Makoto actually contributes to the story until the last two chapters. 

Also, this is why I feel the trial sequences are really awkward compared to DR2′s trials. Makoto has to be led on by the others and, for no good reason, Kyoko has to have Makoto speak for her. Like...why? Why can’t she just say it herself? While you can argue that it’s a game mechanic in order to help the player, it comes off as stilted and ruins the immersion. Plus, it takes away from the experience since it doesn’t feel like you deduced the clue yourself. You’re just picking up on what someone else found out before you. 

Here, take this for an example. Imagine if in Ace Attorney, instead of playing as Phoenix Wright, you played as Maya Fey. Instead of Phoenix just coming out and saying what he found out, he has to turn to Maya and get her to say it for him. But obviously, Maya has no idea what to say, so Phoenix has to drop vague clues in the hopes of her figuring it out. That’d be counterproductive and yet, that’s what Danganronpa did. 

And yes, I acknowledge that Mia Fey did the same to Phoenix. But let’s be real here, Mia wasn’t the main partner. Plus, there are a lot more moments where Phoenix has to prove himself as a competent investigator in comparison to Makoto. 

This is why I feel Hajime Hinata was a result of the writers course correcting from Makoto. I think they realized just how weak of a protagonist Makoto was that for the second game, they made Hajime the most observant, overly cautious person who is also the one actively pushing the story forward. And, unlike Makoto, Hajime was the best possible choice for the protagonist role among his cast. 

True, you have Chiaki and Nagito who seem to know more about the island than him, but at least you know for sure that those two shouldn’t have been the protagonist. If Chiaki was the protagonist, the whole twist would be ruined while Nagito was better off as an antagonist. Plus, there’s a better reason for Nagito to hide information from the group since he is portrayed as a villain for most of the game. 

[mozillavulpix]

thinking about hajime and nagito again, and not in the bitter salty way

in the way of realising that nagito never really ‘hid’ his true character from everyone in the prologue and bits of Chapter 1. It was always there. The reason Hajime feels so betrayed come the end of Chapter 1 is realising just how much they have in common and yet not being able to articulate why and how they’re different enough for him to loathe his actions.

my reasoning, at least right now, is that it’s because Hajime does believe his life has value, while Nagito does not.

Like, sure, you can say “Hajime signed up for the Kamukura Project to become a different person, clearly he doesn’t think his existence has value either”, but that just doesn’t seem to fit what he’s like in-game. Heck, it’s the very idea that he will cease to exist once they exit the virtual world that mentally breaks him near the end.

It makes me wonder if either (at least in the context of DR2 alone) he didn’t know exactly what the Kamukura Project would be signing himself into, or that (with the context of DR3) a lot of stuff happened in his time in the Reserve Course that made his self-esteem get dangerously worse compared to his self before he arrived there.

The way I see it, it’s like, Hajime is under the impression that since he’s talentless, his life has no value, but at the end of the day he can’t bring himself to give up on himself. Because he does have a self-preservation instinct and believes he can be cool one day. He’s ashamed of thinking like that, because he doesn’t have any evidence for it, it’s just wishful thinking. Whether he’ll get a talent through hard work, or he’ll one day meet someone who explains to him how he was cool all along. He just doesn’t have enough confidence to be loud when he thinks these things.

So when Nagito says things along the lines of “I’m ready to give up my life for Hope, so I’m fine with you killing me”, Hajime gets the feeling that it’s wrong to say that, but also that *he* should be thinking like that and he should be ashamed for not being able to share that sentiment.

“I have that feeling that I don’t have anything that makes me special compared to these people, so why aren’t I able to die for them like Nagito can? Am I just a coward?”

And the whole thing just makes him incredibly uncomfortable and that’s why he has trouble talking to Nagito for long after that.

(my ideal scenario is post-game he realises the reason he wasn’t like that was because he believed in himself even a little, and now he knows that and doesn’t want to give it up, he can dismiss those feelings of shame as being wrong.)

[morphogenetic]

im segmenting this off into another post because me comparing dr and p4 is inevitable

tbh i think after playing dr2 my expectations were so low that I got into the actual meat of p4's plot and went "oh wait, this is actually interesting and I WANT to play it" instead of it feeling like a fuckin slog. but then again I like the persona slink/battle gameplay loop lol

even though both dr and p4 have their share of massive writing problems, p4 at least knows it wants to be a wacky mystery story, dr is so afraid to commit to being a mystery that it has shot itself in the foot by not foreshadowing TWICE. idk i know k0daka hates detective stories but if thats the case....why are you writing a fucking mystery? you don't have to do that? its like if I wrote a pure romance (note: I don't usually like those) and then killed off the love interest in the last page bc haha!! fuck you!!!

also i totally said this before but slinks only fucking work if its not you talking to a single character in a bubble, which is what dr does with free times ,

really the problem is that dr wants to try to appeal to everyone at the same time and throws a bunch of shit at the wall to try and make it stick, while i think persona has close to perfected the social system/battle feedback loop and it just....knows what it wants to be

[troloyunu]

Spoilers for DR2 and “the end of hopes peak”;

chiaki being a “marry sue”, as i’ve seen people call her, makes total sense in universe (at least in DR2). she was such an important person to her class that when she died they literally became part of the ultimate dispair and in DR2 they admit to her being the way she is because it’s how they remember her. they remember chiaki as this smart, reliable, sweet girl who’s doing her best to help those around her and yes she’s a little sleepy but that’s okay! and that makes the whole “she’s an AI and died years ago” so much sadder, they adored her so much, they saw her as such a good person they couldn’t even think badly of her even after joining Junko. so i can never quite agree when people try rewriting her to be more realistic, it kinda takes away to what makes her character so emotional and important to the rest of her classmates to me.

strongly agree | agree | neutral | disagree | strongly disagree

Okay I think I need to first say that I haven't watched dr3 because based on what I read about the plot, I think it's stupid and the few episodes I watched were pretty boring. I think the whole "they were brainwashed" plot point completely ruined sdr2.

And anyways, Chiaki is a super sweet girl and that's how they remember her, yes but I wouldn't say she is completely perfect. She is especially slow at taking social cues at times and she is not very informed about the world (though this also could be due to her being an AI) And um. I don't think Kodaka is the best at writing multi dimensional characters all that much. I don't think he focused on Chiaki's character as much as he should have, considering she has a pretty important role. Like. Compare her to Kyoko. We get Kyoko's backstory as a part of the main story and she faces conflict about her father a lot. Kodaka literally created the "perfect" waifu in Chiaki, as he admitted before if I remember correctly, so of course you don't see any strong personality aspects in her that could turn people off, like Miu for example. I think giving her some more depth, like it doesn't even have to be a tragic backstory or anything, just make her get super competitive/aggressive when she is up against someone or make her get super annoyed by x, that actually makes her more interesting? Like yeah that's not exactly the Chiaki you see in sdr2 buuuut that's the point! Her character falls flat when you consider her to be the "main sidekick"

Send me an unpopular opinion and I'll rate it.

[commentaryvorg]

Anonymous asked:

Hi! I finally finished reading through your DRV3 playthrough, which was great. In particular, I think your stance on the executions is interesting? I’ve never heard of a DR fan disliking them before. Could you maybe elaborate on that for me?

Thanks for reading the commentary! It's so lovely to still see people who are willing to slog their way through this whole ridiculously long thing.

As for the executions, it's pretty much just what I said while commenting on the ones in chapters 1 and 4: that it bothers me when executions forget that the character is a character and treat them basically just like an object to be horribly killed.

How much I dislike versus like an execution tends to line up pretty directly with the sliding scale of how much the victim is portrayed as an object versus as a character still having an interesting narrative. It just feels tasteless and disrespectful to the character if they spend their final moments as essentially a faceless puppet in some twisted glorified deathtrap rather than as themselves. I get that this kind of callousness is what Monokuma and the masterminds are like, of course - but for some executions, it feels like the narrative is also treating the blackened this way. The rest of the time, the narrative focuses, as it should, on the characters and how they deal with and try to fight back against Monokuma's flippant disregard for their lives, so it shouldn't stop doing so for (some of) the executions.

That's me trying to dissect this on an objective narrative level, but a lot of it's also just down to my completely subjective personal tolerance for this kind of thing. The executions are generally the most horrifying things that happen onscreen, by quite a fair margin compared to everything else. My threshold of tolerance for violent and horrifying things in fiction happened to be safely above everything else that happens in these games but just a little bit below the executions, such that I comfortably watched through most of DR1 and DR2 but had to skip the executions because I just couldn't. And I didn't miss much! Most of the time, all you need to know is "and then the blackened died horribly and everyone was horrified". (Though, as I said, I grew desensitised to the executions eventually through familiarity, and now they are below my threshold and I can watch them - I didn't skip over any when watching V3 for the first time - but the ones with less of a meaningful narrative going on are definitely creeping a lot closer to that line.)

You sound almost kind of surprised to hear that I feel this way, which in itself is a notion that's somewhat surprising to me. I feel it's quite reasonable that not every Danganronpa fan necessarily has to like the executions just by virtue of being a Danganronpa fan. They're a very distinctively Danganronpa thing, sure, but, ultimately, they're not what Danganronpa is about. They don't have to be part of why I'm here.

I like Danganronpa because I enjoy seeing fictional characters fighting through awful situations, snapping under pressure and doing terrible things for painfully human reasons, which the killing game setup facilitates plenty of. But people being killed in horrifyingly ludicrous ironic deathtraps isn't necessary for that. The fact that they get executed is an important part of the killing game that's stressing everyone out, sure, but not the methods. If some fans dig the creative execution methods too, cool - I'm not saying they can't! - and then that's an extra thing they can like about Danganronpa. But it's just not the main point.

(Like, as another more extreme example of this idea: the tiresome levels of fanservice and SEXUAL INNUENDOS EVERYWHERE are apparently also something that Danganronpa insists on having be a part of its brand. That also absolutely should not be expected to be what I'm here for. I came here to see high-schoolers being pressured and manipulated into murdering each other; I did not need this nonsense. It's quite reasonable for me to be a Danganronpa fan who nonetheless could really rather do without this particular part of it, is it not?)

I'm willing to wager I'm not the only one who feels roughly this way and that there's at least a small portion of DR fans who also aren't hugely fond of most of the executions. Said people probably just don't talk about it that much, because they'd rather talk about the parts they do like instead of being negative about something they know is an obligatory Danganronpa thing. I'd never have mentioned this either if not for the fact that I did this commentary in which I expressed my thoughts on pretty much everything in the game.