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a-student-out-of-time · 1 year

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Danganronpa and the Mean Girl Problem

Hello, everyone! I’ve come to once again share my thoughts on something.

With the (as of writing this) recent release of Despair Time Chapter 2, I felt this was an appropriate time to discuss some things. First off, I am very interested to see where this fangan is going from here on out, and even from the first episode, I’m hooked.

I really enjoyed the character moments in the first episode, from Eden to Levi to Teruko to J to one of the subjects of my discussion today: Arei.

Now, I have to admit, Arei’s one of the most interesting characters in DRDT to me. She’s not my favorite- that honor goes to Hu- but she’s the one who I think has the most potential for character development within the narrative of DRDT. And that’s also something that concerns me.

See, that brings us to the point I want to address here is in the title. It’s something I’ve noticed across both the canon games and some fangans, which I’ll call the “Mean Girl Problem.”

(Spoilers for the canon games, DR3, the Another series, Despair Time, DR Antebellum, etc. will follow. You have been warned.)

(Also, this became a long-ass post. You’ve also been warned on that.)

As I’m sure many of us are aware at this point, Danganronpa is a very formulaic series. While we see different stories and character arcs play out, we nevertheless see similar archetypes and story beats across them. Sometimes these are broken in unique ways, but we often have very similar starting points.

Oftentimes, these repeated tropes have been deconstructed and explored in different ways, either in the games themselves or among fan games that seek to go beyond the formulaic writing. Even then, however, there tends to be repetition with a lot of them, mostly in terms of things like my least favorite trope, the double murder in Chapter 3.

What I want to focus on here is an archetype I’ve seen a lot and one that often leaves me thoroughly disappointed every time: the eponymous mean girl.

These tend to be female characters who are presented as bullies, either toward one character in particular or members of their group as a whole. I feel this archetype really got its start with Hiyoko in DR2, and it understandably became a point of contention with a lot of people. And it was later repeated with a lot of characters.

I can’t speak for all fangans, so I’ll stick to the ones I’ve seen. Among them, we’ve got Hiyoko, Ruruka, Natsumi and Miu in canon; Rei, Kizuna and Hibiki in the Another series, Mitsuba in Brave DR, Emilia in Antebellum, and Arei in Despair Time. I’ll leave Mitsuba out of this discussion, since Brave DR hasn’t made it quite as far as other fangans, but we still have a lot we can talk about here.

The Mean Girl Problem is a writing trend I’ve seen where these characters end up not receiving much narrative importance or opportunities for development, particularly in comparison to their male counterparts. And when they do, it’s usually squandered hard.

If you already have objections to this, I understand, but allow me to explain what I mean, character by character.

Now, DR1 didn’t really have a Mean Girl character, which is interesting. There were no female characters who were really openly malicious or antagonistic, unless one wants to include Celeste. However, she isn’t really an example of what I’m talking about. The problem really started in DR2:

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Hiyoko Saionji

As I said, this archetype began with Hiyoko. Her introduction had her crushing ants, making her creepy face and then calling Haime a wuss. From there, she spends most of her time complaining, manipulating and insulting everyone, aside from Mahiru who’s the only one that really puts up with her. Her worst insults are saved for Mikan, which...grr, but I’ll move on.

Now, Hiyoko being a selfish bratty girl is by design. She’s a member of the prestigious Saionji Clan and thus sees herself as superior to everyone else, so it’s at least understandable why she’d feel this way. Even if she plays it off in her Free Time Events that she’d been the subject of “assassination attempts,” which some of my friends have attributed to others getting back at her for her bullying, it’s clear she’s not well-liked in-story.

My point here isn’t that Hiyoko is a bad character. Quite to the contrary. Many people who defend her point out that she does have a lot more going on than just being a bully, and I fully agree. I like how much she loves her nation’s culture, how much she misses her dad and her belief that protecting something is a sign of love. That’s interesting.

The MGP stemmed from me asking a simple question: what purpose does she serve in the story?

It’s a serious question: what does her being a bully contribute to the narrative? What role does she serve, either thematically or in the plot itself other than being a member of Ultimate Despair? How does she actually change as a result of the story?

To all of this, I have to say “Not much.”

Now, I’m not going to say she didn’t have any purpose. Again, there were good moments with her. I like how she tried to make a memorial for Mahiru, but it came off as ominous and creepy to everyone, and she admits she’s not good at anything but dancing.

...Of course, then she turns right around and insults Mikan again.

And this brings me to another point about her: nobody in the story really seems to actually acknowledge Hiyoko’s cruel moments. Sure, they get annoyed with her, but nobody takes her aside and tries to explain why it’s wrong. Hajime makes some snarky comments about in her her behavior FTEs, but all he really seems to do is tolerate her.

Her bullying never really seems to factor that much into the plot, other than it just being something she does. Hell, even her being killed by Mikan had nothing to do with her bullying, but simply because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her being a bully was basically irrelevant to everything that ultimately happened with her in the story.

But here’s the part that really gets me: this moment in Chapter 3 where Hajime claims she’s changing:

Which, I guess I understand. It’s not the same thing as earlier, when she basically raged that Teruteru deserved to die horribly for committing murder, and that she wished she could’ve spat on his corpse.

Like, I guess that’s progress, going from “He deserved what he got” to “We’re only working together to escape because we don’t have a choice.” Still though, jeez.

And what comes off this? Again, basically nothing. Hiyoko can’t get her kimono on, Sonia suggests she use the full-body mirror at the music venue and that’s where she gets shanked by Mikan. Not because she was mad about the bullying and nobody doing anything to help, not because Hiyoko confronted her or she confronted Hiyoko.

No, she just walked in and Mikan went “No witnesses.”

And later on, DR3 confirmed that Hiyoko more or less acted the exact same during her time in Hope’s Peak. The only real progress we can really say she got was the fact that she acts more like a platonic tsundere toward Mikan in Side Hope.

Overall, it really seems like being a bully was the focus of Hiyoko’s character, when the game clearly wanted to acknowledge there was more going on with her. Yet most of the deeper elements with her were relegated to her FTEs.

And if she was bad, Ruruka was even worse.

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Ruruka Ando

Probably the biggest contender for the most hated DR3 character, Ruruka is, in a word, a self-centered bitch. Now, again, that isn’t to say that’s a problem and that there isn’t anything deeper going on with her character.

It genuinely seems like she has trouble with empathy, something that was shown when she and Seiko first met and she didn’t even really address that Seiko was crying over the dog she couldn’t save.

One could attribute that to her being a child, but throughout Seiko and Ruruka’s friendship, it becomes quite clear Ruruka asks her for more and more favors, going from medicines she needs to basic things she could probably just buy herself. This is acknowledged and addressed by the story.

What the story doesn’t do a great job of addressing is Seiko’s side of things, where it kinda seems to blame her for constantly accepting Ruruka’s requests and acts as if this is a “both sides are wrong” situation. I don’t think the story presented it well, and just made Ruruka look incredibly toxic and manipulative toward someone who has trouble saying no. Not quite the same as bullying, but more than enough to meet the standards of a Mean Girl.

The manga actually did one better and worse at the same time, where it brings up the idea that Seiko can’t eat Ruruka’s candies and addresses why she doesn’t make sugar-free ones: she refuses to acknowledge that Seiko even has an allergy and that she’s making it up to spite her. Sounds shallow and petty, but it’s a real thing that’s happened with some people.

If you don’t believe me, look up the woman whose in-laws fed her mushroom soup because she didn’t believe her when she said she had a mushroom allergy.

But again, the story wants there to be something deeper with these two. In the Future arc, Ruruka internally admits that she always saw Seiko as her hero, as someone with the talent and skill to do anything, and she was jealous because all she could do was make sweets. That’s an interesting motivation.

And the story doesn’t do all that much with it. Once again, the way it’s framed, Ruruka is a toxic and manipulative friend who wanted to use Seiko’s talents to cheat in her practical exam, and it was largely Nagito’s fault that things went south, then they had a falling out and were expelled.

There is a good story buried in this narrative. The problem is that Ruruka is presented in far too much of a negative light to really come off as someone with a valid point, while Seiko didn’t really do anything wrong. Izayoi is also barely a character and just follows her around everywhere, when maybe he could’ve been the mediator between the two of them.

But instead, after Seiko and Izayoi die, Ruruka nearly kills Kyoko and gets Koichi killed thanks to her bullshit. Granted, she was under threat of her Forbidden Action, but it was still framed as her being a villainous character, with her glaring evily.

This is not the face of someone who was forced into committing evil for the sake of her own survival.

And what happens after all this? What role does she have in the story? Nothing.

She wanders off on her own, rambling to herself about how she’ll survive, and then she gets killed by the hypnosis monitor thing- very graphically and excessively, I have to say- and then nobody even acknowledges her existence again.

I’ve heard speculation that the story of Ruruka, Seiko and Izayoi is meant to show why it’s important to trust your friends, but she had so few good qualities to her and so little going on within the narrative beyond just fighting with a roided-up Seiko that I could barely glean something like that.

She really just feels like she’s there to be an antagonistic force for a while, and when she’s not needed anymore, she’s shoved off to die. And if the story wanted us to at least feel for her, why kill her off in such a mean-spirited and graphic manner? Were we supposed to feel bad or feel like it was karmic?

Either way, it’s not a good look.

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Natsumi Kuzuryu

Here’s what turned out to be a retroactive example of the MGP: Natsumi, the girl who was originally only known through flashbacks and Twilight Syndrome Murder Case, in SDR2, who was originally just Fuyuhiko’s unnamed sister

DR3 came along and gave us a better look at her, though in a way I doubt we were expecting. From what Fuyuhiko had told Hajime, it seemed as if Natsumi was an Ultimate. Hell, he was sure she deserved the title of Ultimate Yakuza far more than him:

But what DR3 gave us was a girl who joined the Reserve Course, and just called herself the Ultimate Little Sister.

She certainly lives up to what Fuyuhiko was talking about, at least in how she was self-centered and arrogant. Even so, it’s obvious the two of them were very close, especially with how Natsumi looks up to him and dreams of joining the Main Course so she can stand by him as an equal.

The problem is, though, her intense rivalry with Mahiru and Sato, who she’s been in conflict with since Middle School. Once again, a character who we were lead to believe was an Ultimate turned out to also be in the Reserve Course.

Regardless, the two of them had an absolutely bitter rivalry, which as we’d learn would eventually lead to Sato murdering Natsumi, then Fuyuhiko murdering Sato in retaliation. DR3 had the opportunity to tell us a little bit more about Natsumi’s side of things.

And what we learn is that Natsumi fears being left behind with her brother in the Main Course, and wants to be acknowledge not for her talent but to earn a title so the two of them can be equals.

Now, Natsumi’s inclusion this way, while a weird retcon, isn’t pointless. It’s a pretty decent means of reinforcing the idea that talented and talentless people can’t mix, fueling Hajime’s insecurity. But once again, it really seems like it brushes over a lot of things with her cruelty toward Mahiru and Sato, none of which prove relevant for the larger story.

This is especially odd because the anime seemed more than willing to sympathize with Natsumi, while also neglecting to giving Sato a full name. And given that both of them die shortly afterward, it does feel a bit emotionally manipulative.

But once again, no relevance to the larger story. They’re not even mentioned once afterward.

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Miu Iruma

Now, Miu’s an interesting case because she has a huge fanbase. I understand why: she’s vulgar as hell, but also confident and hilarious. I call her a Mean Girl because, again, she often goes out of her way to insult and antagonize people for no real reason.

She’s different than the others, however, because she actually does contribute a lot of important details to the plot with her inventions.

It’s thanks to Miu that they get an overhead view of the first crime scene, she’s the reason why Chapter 4 happens, and she’s the one to provide the group with the weapons they need to take on the Exisals and learn the truth about their situation, both the manufactured one and the real one. So overall, she makes a massive impact on the story of V3.

My question is this: does this make her a character or a plot device factory?

Miu has basically no character development through the story, and is mostly just there for either making devices to move the plot forward, for comedy or for fanservice.

We do hits of greater identity and motivation for her in her FTEs and in Chapter 4, where we learn she received her talent after she was in a car accident that left her in a coma, waking up and finding she had a ton of ideas for inventions. And in Chapter 4, just before she attempts to kill Kokichi, she says the world needs her and her inventions.

This suggests either Miu knew what had “happened” to the world as part of the flashback light, or she didn’t but believed this idea in general. That, despite her crude behavior, she has genuinely altruistic motivations. That’s a good character quality for her.

And we don’t get much of that after this moment. The only memory of her anyone really has is of her and her inventions, and everyone except Kiibo basically hates her guts as a whole.

But what makes all of this worse in its own way is that this isn’t even Miu’s real personality, but a fabrication from Team Danganronpa. I can only go off of what we see here, so it’s hard to say what the real her was like, but the version we get here definitely falls victim to the MGP.

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Kizuna Tomori

Moving over to the fangan side of things, we have Kizuna Tomori, Class 79′s Ultimate Cheerleader from DRA.

Now, Kizuna is definitely closer to the Mean Girl archetype you might’ve thought of, i.e. a Regina George or Heather Chandler type. She acts all sweet and touchy-feely with Yuki, calling him nicknames and asking if he’ll buy her things when they get out.

And it goes on and on in her FTEs, where Yuki eventually wises up to the fact that she’s incredibly materialistic and she gets mad when he calls her out on it. Then she goes on to reveal that she’s the Queen Bee of her school, having boys do whatever she wants, buying her things and basically pimping out her fellow cheerleaders to them in exchange.

And it really seems like she doesn’t understand that this is a bad thing. Not that she knows and doesn’t care, but that she can’t comprehend that this isn’t supposed to be how things work.

Things get interesting in the last one, where she basically tries to have sex with Yuki, and he demands to know what the hell is going on with her.

She did all of this deliberately. She understands that she’s not a good person, but she’s also scared of guys who are only interested in her for her looks. She basically turned every guy who was interested in her into her servant, but in the process, she ultimately isolated herself from everyone else.

And there’s also the influence of her mother, Minako, who also seems to value her appearance. I can only image what kind of situation Kizuna was in to feel this way, where she was scared of being taken advantage of by guys if she drops this facade. One that’s kept her from even having friends.

In the game itself, Kizuna also isolates herself from everyone thanks to Tsurugi’s tyrannical rule, and also ends up quite lonely. Something Akane goes out of her way to help her with after she and Yuki find her crying.

It’s a really sweet and wholesome moment, where Akane assures her that she does consider Kizuna a friend, never saw her as weak and that they can confide in each other. Something Kizuna never really had before then.

And what happens afterward? Well, turns out she’s a fake bitch.

Which inevitably leads to Kizuna attempting to murder Akane.

The thing is, lying and scheming aside, Kizuna actually kinda has a point here.

The motive in Chapter 2 of DRA is, naturally, secrets. The one she found suggested local normal protag Yuki Maede might actually know the identity of the mastermind, and as we learn in Chapter 6, that turned out to be him.

Not only that, but Akane was actually his colleague and fellow Ultimate Despair. Kizuna unintentionally targeted both masterminds, and had she pulled it off, she may have actually ended the Killing Game early on. True, she was only focused on escaping, but it would’ve been beneficial to a greater number of people.

But what really bothers me is LINUJ’s attitude toward her. He created a pretty sympathetic backstory for her, which doesn’t excuse but explain her behavior, yet he admits in her design document that he made her to be the character everybody would hate and wanted to give her the most painful death possible.

Which he did in the form of a stab would in the stomach that took about thirty minutes to kill her. Like...jeez, dude. It’s also kinda hard for me to hate her not only when she’s actually kinda right on repeat viewings, but she also took the time to try and tell everyone it wasn’t actually Akane who killed her via dying message.

I also don’t want to be that person, but the fact that the character with the most sexualized design, the most overtly flirty and outgoing personality, and a backstory about trying to prevent guys from taking advantage of her weakness, is portrayed as an unrepentant villain?

Maybe it was unintentional, but it doesn’t sit well with me.

Really though, once again, I must ask why? What was gained from all this? What does it actually organically add to the story? Is there a lesson to be gleaned with this?

Not really any that I can see. I understand the points LINUJ raises when he talks about how we shouldn’t ignore the wrongdoings of a character because we sympathize with them, but I must also ask if utterly demonizing them for those wrongdoings is a bigger issue.

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Hibiki Otonokoji

Oh boy.

I’ve already talked at length about my problems with SDRA2 Chapter 3, but that was mostly me rambling about Kanade and the story. Instead, I’ll keep it short and focus strictly on Hibiki. Because out of all the victims of the MGP, Hibiki got robbed the absolute hardest.

I’ll start by saying that Hibiki isn’t so much a general bully as she is big sister bully. Her ire is mostly directed toward Kanade, who she insults, belittles, orders around, and harasses for her own amusement. At least it seems that way.

As we learn throughout the game, the Otonokoji Twins really have a mutually toxic relationship. Hibiki bullying Kanade is, according to the latter, because Hibiki’s actually a try-hard who’s jealous of Kanade for being better at her in everything: academics, athletics, even music. She hates losing more than anything.

That setup is at least an understandable motivation, and it could’ve made for some decent development opportunities, which the game actually did take at first.

See, because of SDRA2′s unique setup- there being five masterminds in the group- she understandably doesn’t feel safe trusting anyone except her sister at first. It takes a lot of work to get her to even leave her room and hang out with everyone.

Thanks to Setsuka’s encouragement, she admits that, yes, she wants to be friends with everyone. Hibiki is naturally a social butterfly, and even if she’s scared of what might happen because of the Voids, nothing will change if things stay the same.

And that’s a lesson she actually takes to heart afterward.

She genuinely tries to change her attitude and be more of a team-player with everyone, hanging out with them and trying to cheer up the group when they’re down because of their situation.

Because she takes responsibility for the things that happened, be it Yuri’s death at the party and Kokoro’s death due to the concert they held. And she’s doesn’t want there to be a third one.

She knows she’s not very smart, but she doesn’t want to be a burden on everyone and wants to contribute however she can. And the start of Chapter 3 actually shows her practicing what she preaches, even cracking jokes with everyone.

The disappointing thing is that everything that was going on with Hibiki was far, far more interesting to me than what actually ended up happening.

But instead of focusing on her trying to change and grow as a person, we got to spend the rest of the chapter glorifying another serial killer, turning Hibiki into a background extra and then revealing that her life had been literal hell, her parents are dead and her real personality probably doesn’t exist anymore, capped off with her dying a meaningless death.

A chapter that also effectively made her and her sister’s presence completely irrelevant to the actual story. While I complain about the MGP, nobody got it worse than Hibiki.

She deserved so much better than that.

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HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Rei Mekaru

Danganronpa Another’s original bad bitch, Rei is one of the few mean girl characters who actually managed to not only survive, but also receive development as a result. Good for her!

The thing with Rei is that she’s largely more similar to Byakuya than Hiyoko or Miu, although she dabbles in the Mean Girl archetype on occasion, particularly toward Kizuna. I’ll still include her because it’s an interesting example of slow-burn character development.

Rei starts out as cold, dismissive and condescending toward her classmates, and while she’s clearly intelligent, she’s also more than willing to let everyone try and solve the cases themselves while also insulting them at the same time. This continues on for some time, at least until Chapter 4.

It isn’t until she sees Haruhiko and Satsuki willingly sacrifice themselves, allowing the rest of the group to survive, that ultimately rattles her view on things and gets her to reconsider. She almost seemed baffled when Satsuki gave up any chance she had to escape.

Likewise, in what was a pretty hilarious moment, when everyone basically isolates Yuki when it seems like he might be the traitor, she calls them out on their sense of false righteousness when they talk about the power of friendship. It’s not often you see these sorts of characters touch on something like that : P

Really, Rei’s character development really seems to take place in the second half of the game, which is probably how she manages to avoid falling victim to MGP. SDRA2 hits us with what looks like Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome, only for it to be revealed she survived.

Of course, given that DRA already has Kizuna as a victim of the MGP, it was probably a given. Still sad that, by the end of SDRA2, she and Tsurugi are the only survivors of Class 79.

Emilia Carmine

We now come to what’s probably my favorite fangan thus far: Danganronpa Antebellum, which has its own resident Mean Girl, Emilia. Now, I’m gonna be frank with this: Chapter 3 of Antebellum isn’t finished yet, so I can’t really call this an example of MGP, and I hope I don’t have to.

What I will say is that Emilia does fulfill a lot of the Mean Girl tropes: she insults everyone, antagonizes them, and she’s easily the most foul-mouthed out of everyone. However, in contrast to the previous examples, she also has a genuinely sweet relationship with her best friend Mint, who she considers a brother. She teases him a lot, but it comes off more as teasing than actual bullying.

Even toward Shinku, she gradually goes from mocking him to opening up to him, to enjoying his presence. Emilia herself was raised in a very controlling, heavily restrictive manner by her father, who also kicked out her sister Elodie on account of her being trans. Emilia was very close with her, and would do anything to reunite with her. A motivation that nearly drives her to murder Shinku in Chapter 2, which, if it hadn’t been for Mint and the BDA, she very likely would’ve. Something she regrets immensely.

The sad part is, at the end of Chapter 2, her crime is revealed: burning down her father’s hospital, killing and injuring many people. A revelation that drives a wedge between her and Mint that never ends up resolved. While Emilia wants to make up with him, the group is split in half when the ceiling caves in and Emilia is killed in the game’s double murder, never even getting to see Mint again.

It’s too early to say, but this is feeling more like a genuine tragedy than a case of MGP, and I highly doubt she’s going to be forgotten by the end.

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And that finally brings me to the subject I brought up at the beginning: Arei Nageishi.

Now, I called Arei the most interesting of the Despair Time cast because she has a quality that makes her a bit different from the other Mean Girl characters: she legitimately values friendship.

That might sound bizarre, given that she still openly insults and antagonizes the group. While she does go out of her way to be cruel to Teruko and Xander in her introduction, it seems like she wants to be included in group activities.

And of course, she falls into a self-pitying session of fake crying to get sympathy, which Hu shuts down immediately. Now, one could easily just write this off as attention-seeking behavior, but it’s the small details that interest me.

They shut her down on that.

Xander is, of course, disbelieving that she could be that oblivious to the situation. However, I think her behavior has less to do with her being oblivious and more to do with her having a skewed perspective.

See, when MonoTV shows up to announce the new motive, he specifies that there might be some bad news about their friends and family. Arei’s reponse?

No jokes, genuine concern over the motive.

And another moment that caught my attention was in the wake of the trial and Min’s execution. It was fucked up and horrifying, and everyone is understandably freaking out, but the reactions differ. Most everyone is freaking out about their situation, wanting to leave and being afraid of dying. Others are genuinely sad for Min, and among them?

Yeah, after the girl she’d previously accused of excluding her gets executed, Arei is genuinely upset to see her go. This was also after she’d spent the trial railing against any potential murders, mostly Teruko. She doesn’t make jokes, she doesn’t say she deserved it, she doesn’t shrug it off like it’s nothing.

She’s genuinely sad to lose Min.

Another insightful bit comes from her FTE with J, where she thinks to herself how fun it is to mess with her, and how she finds her cute.

Yeah, Arei has a system for how she bullies people, ranging from just teasing to wanting to utterly destroy their lives if they’re mean to her. A lot of this stems from the fact that she was the Queen Bee of her school, and like Kizuna, she used her looks and status to get guys to do whatever she wanted.

But the most interesting part to me is when J starts ranting about her mother, and Arei has this to share.

We’ll come back to this, but suffice to say, Arei has a very odd idea of what friendship is. She’s under the impression J likes her because she didn’t leave the situation.

Something else worth bringing up are the characters quotes from the tumblr page, both the public one and hidden ones. For Arei, these are as follows:

Public: “If I tell you a secret, will you promise to keep it?”

Hidden: “Because that’s what friends do”

And then there’s a hidden one in relation to the mysterious Mai Akasaki, who seemed to have been a friend to the entire group:

“She doesn’t like when her friends fight.”

For someone who continuously insults and looks down on the group, Arei sure has a lot of quotes in reference to friendship and trust.

Which brings me to the first part of Chapter 2, where MonoTV distributed the group’s deepest, darkest secrets...to the wrong people. And Arei, who’d previously been complaining about the situation, immediately quiets down.

She’s not making jokes, she’s not making fun of whomever’s secret she got. No, she is horrified.

This might’ve been easy to overlook after everyone is confused about not getting their own secrets, but after Arturo reveals J’s true identity to the group, Arei once again drops the jokes and complaints. She makes some pretty good points about their situation.

To me, this feels like a pretty group-oriented approach, subtly hinting she saw something really concerning and thus it’s better that they all start sharing secrets before things escalate in the four days before everything is revealed.

And the comments about having a famous parent like J are compounded here. I’m starting to get the sense Arei might’ve been neglected by her parents. Bullying and attention-seeing behavior like hers often stems from a lack of self-esteem, difficult home lives, and even being subject to bullying themselves. While Arei certainly has a high opinion of herself, what she really seems to want is attention and companionship.

I feel this makes for an interesting potential arc for her, given Despair Time’s themes of trust and betrayal. If her focus is on making and earning trust, it makes for a nice contrast to Teruko, who’s said she won’t trust anyone again and doesn’t want to leave. Like it or not, though, they’re gonna have to work together if they want to survive.

Of course, as interested as I am to see Arei’s development, it’s also a cause for concern. With how many death flags have already been raised just in part 1, both for her and for others, all we can really do is wait and see.

The True Issues With The Mean Girl Problem

Let me just say upfront what this essay isn’t about. This isn’t about how Mean Girls characters should never be made villains, this isn’t suggesting that anyone who engages in the MGP is inherently sexist or misogynistic and this isn’t about how any of the games or fangans I’ve mentioned are bad. DR3 is bad, but for numerous reasons.

No, this essay is me wanting to touch on the existence of a double standard I’ve noticed and how I feel this limits the works in terms of creativity. This isn’t a call-out post of creators in particular, just the acknowledgment of a writing problem.

Broadly, the MGP can be summarized in four points:

Mean Girl characters have sympathetic qualities to them, but they're very understated or left unexplored in the main story. Their defining feature there is being cruel or antagonistic to others.

Despite that, their bullying is often brushed aside and is simply shrugged off as annoying by the other characters. It has no impact on the story, does not catalyze character development and rarely has anything to do with their actual deaths or the death of any other character.

When they do start to undergo any significant character development, especially before Chapter 3, they tend to die more often than not.

Following their deaths, they're rarely mentioned by the narrative again, highlighting their overall unimportance to the story as a whole.

As I’ve said, a lot of these Mean Girls are much deeper than their portrayals within the main stories tend to want to explore, yet they’re often subject to much harsher criticism both in these stories, from creators and from the fandom.

On the other hand, male characters who present these traits are often given the label of The Rival, and I have to be honest in saying that a lot of Rivals end up doing things that are much worse than simply being bullies. Despite that, they all get a chance to develop:

Byakuya: Has a very condescending, classist view on everyone, and is the one who takes the entire concept of a Killing Game completely seriously. Seriously enough that he tampers with Chihiro’s body in the name of making the game more interesting, exposing Genocider Syo’s presence and figuring out who’s his biggest threat. He doesn’t give a damn about anyone but himself, at least until Chapter 4, when Makoto and Kyoko save him from getting everyone killed because he doesn’t even consider that someone might do something altruistically.

Fuyuhiko: Starts off SDR2 as a loud, antisocial asshole, one who wants nothing to do with the rest of the group (sans Peko) and who also contemplates what he has to do in order to win. He also makes threats, however baseless, like selling Mikan to a whorehouse or selling Hajime’s organs on the black market.

Kokichi: The biggest troll in all of V3 at best, and someone who self-identifies as an evil villain. A lot about his character is meant to be ambiguous, but within the confines of the story itself, Kokichi actively antagonizes and even endangers the group, from the Insect Meet-and-Greet to revealing Maki’s identity against her will, to tricking Gonta into killing Miu while believing their situation is a hopeless nightmare in order to save himself, etc.

Tsurugi: Essentially takes a page from Light Yagami in his utter dehumanization of criminals, viewing all those who dissent from his commands as potential criminals as well. His sense of justice is incredibly black and white, where killing for any circumstance whatsoever makes someone human garbage, and he’s happy to say as much. It gets to the point that he’s willing to force the group to commit mass suicide to prevent another murder.

None of this is a complaint about any of them as characters. I happen to enjoy seeing them and the roles they play in the story; Fuyuhiko gets the most development out of them all, Byakuya becomes more of a team player with his fellow survivors, Kokichi dies but is vindicated in that he helped bring an end to the Killing Game, and Tsurugi...well, that’s another matter entirely.

Tsurugi is a prime example of negative character development; not full-on villainization, but progressively becoming worse from his experiences rather than better. He doesn’t become a less violent and morally absolutist figure, but doubles down when he becomes leader of the Kisaragi Foundation, even willing to sacrifice Teruya and work with Syobai to stop Mikado.

The thing is, that’s still a form of development. It still falls in line with the concept of character progression, which the Mean Girls rarely seem to get. For them, their negative qualities aren’t brought on by the circumstances of the game, but are simply part of who they are. They’re rarely even worsened by the game itself, at least not in the same way Tsurugi is. They only seem to exist.

Now, I’ve seen some points raised about this, such as “Some people don’t change” or “They’re meant to serve as a warning about X”, and while I can understand those points, I have to ask why they don’t seem to be applied in the same way to Byakuya, Fuyuhiko or Kokichi, along with what sorts of object lessons rival characters are meant to serve as. Chapter 2 of DR1 has a solid and understandable lesson about the dangers of toxic masculinity, how succumbing to it in different ways ultimately culminated in the tragic deaths of Chihiro and Mondo.

It’s hard to have any sort of object lesson about Hiyoko, given that her death was unrelated to her bullying Mikan. It’s hard to say anything about Kizuna other than “she’s a bitch,” according to LINUJ. The closest you could get to with any sort of object lesson is probably Ruruka, but even then, it was so imbalanced and tried to show there being two sides that it doesn’t work.

Furthermore, if the goal is to show them as awful people, why is it that these characters are given so many sympathetic qualities that get people to like them, only to them cut them down in their prime and tell those audience members they were stupid for getting invested? Are they meant to be characters we hate and whose deaths we should find karmic, or are they meant to be tragic examples of someone not meeting their true potential? You can’t have it both ways, especially when those sympathetic qualities are barely touched on in the actual story.

I can genuinely see both sides of the argument; the ones that don’t like these characters because they’re bullies and the ones who want to see more because they clearly saw potential in them as characters. I completely understand why you might feel one way or the other, and I’m not saying you’re wrong.

If you want to make a character who serves as a foil to another, where both of them have similar flaws and negative qualities but one changes for the better while the other gets worse, you can absolutely do that. You can have characters who are genuinely bad people but who are still engaging. You can have mean girls, you can have rivals, you can have all kinds of wonderful creative characters like we do across this series and its fan entries.

My point with this is to show you why I feel that following the exact same character traits, and then writing them off as bad people simply because they’re bullies, feels not just uncreative, but borders on genuinely toxic and harmful. The idea that people can never change and that only bad people do bad things is not a healthy mindset to hold, especially when we might display these very traits without knowing it.

We can and should always work to be better, both as people and as writers. I love seeing people in stories and the real world learn from their experiences and grow better, hopefully with the benefit of hindsight. That can often come with needing to address the harm that’s done by actions and ideas we regret ever doing or holding, and if we look back and cringe at those moments, we do better for ourselves and others.

So what can we do here? Simple: let the Mean Girls get the same opportunities for development, growth, change and narrative impact as other characters do. As I said, it happens with Rival characters and it also happens with others through the games. Don’t restrict them or yourselves to the archetypical or formulaic writing you’ve experienced. If you don’t want to include a Mean Girl, you absolutely don’t have to.

For those that do, we also need to be willing to acknowledge and accept when mistakes are made by them, realistically approach the problem and see what can be done about it. Do they get better? Are they forgiven? What happens if they’re not? Or only some members of the group forgive them and others are hurt by those that do? Would they change by their own desire or would it be from someone calling them out on their behavior?

I know we love to say things like “X did nothing wrong” as a joke, but sometimes people will jump through mental gymnastics to justify liking a character, inventing stretched-out reasoning for why they’re not really at fault. I’ve never felt that way about any character I like; I fully acknowledge some of my favorite characters of all time have done some horrible things, and I still love them in spite of that.

If we could simply accept the idea that characters we love are and can be fucked-up people, we’d be a lot better off for it. Liking them doesn’t mean you fully support everything they do. Fictional people in fictional settings gives us a chance to explore things we may not be able to in the real world, either as a lesson, out of curiosity or for whatever reason we wish. And doing research for this essay, I can see Mean Girls have that appeal to them too, especially for those who relate to them.

I believe allowing Mean Girls to be more than just bullies is beneficial to both sides: people who want to see them move on from bullying because they don’t like bullies, and those who want to see them grow and have more prominence in the story. The multiverse of DR is rich with story potential for these characters that so rarely gets tapped to its full extent.

After all, in a series with a core theme about the importance of hope, wouldn’t it be best to show that some people do change for the better?

#danganronpa #mod talks #mod rambles #a student out of time #long post #dr1 #danganronpa thh #dr2 #danganronpa 2 #sdra2 #Super Daganronpa Another 2 #dra #danganronpa another #dr3 #danganronpa 3 #drdt #danganronpa despair time #v3 #danganronpa v3

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a-student-out-of-time · 2 years

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Chapter 3: The Worst of the Worst

Hello, everyone. Mod Bubbles here.

I have been asked by some friends of mine, following a few long rants about my least favorite element of this series: Chapter 3. Some of you may already know that these tend to be the weakest elements of any DR game, but it goes beyond just that.

I’m here to explain to you all why every Chapter 3 I’ve seen- DR1, SDR2, V3, DRA and SDRA2- is the worst. I’m also going to be ranking them, starting from the least bad, and explaining why, on every conceivable level, they don’t work.

First off, let me just start off by saying that, if you like these characters or sections of their respective games, more power to you. I am not judging you, I’m not attacking you and I’m glad you could get more enjoyment out of them than I did. This is simply me explaining why I don’t think they work, but why some work better than others. All of this is just my opinion.

Some of this will be me criticizing them for their objective writing problems, some of it will be personal taste reasons, but perhaps you’ll be interested in what I have to say. Without further ado, let’s get into it:

Least bad- SDR2 Chapter 3

Those of you who know who my favorite character is may be surprised to see this one as the least bad. To be clear, it’s still bad, but I think it’s probably the least bad out of them all.

The recurring problem with Chapter 3 is that every single one involves some degree of plot contrivance and character assassination. Someone inevitably gets turned into a parody of themselves or something stupid happens to make the plot possible. You have to take it with the territory when ranking them, as they all suffer from this problem.

The plot contrivance this time around is that of the Despair Disease, which causes anyone infected with it to radically shift personalities- Akane turns into a coward, Ibuki is gullible and Nagito is a liar and he almost fucking died to his disease. This is already ridiculous, but we could accept it as part of foreshadowing that they’re in a virtual world. But then it goes one step further.

MIkan takes it upon herself to help everyone who’s gotten sick, and in turn, she also contracts it. She doesn’t shift personalities, but inexplicably remembers everything about her past as an Ultimate Despair. Thus begins the character assassinations- literally and figuratively- of Mikan and Hiyoko.

As sad as it is to see Ibuki go, it at least serves the narrative, the trope being “Shoo out the clowns” for when things get serious. Her death is thematically appropriate, while Hiyoko is...barely an afterthought. Yeah, Mikan doesn’t even kill her for revenge, she’s literally just in the wrong place at the wrong time and just fucking dies.

As you may know, originally Fuyuhiko was supposed to die here, but the writers realized that it would’ve made Peko’s sacrifice pointless, so quickly rewrote it so that Hiyoko would die instead, a move that feels as cobbled-together as it sounds, especially with the lack of effort in finding her murder weapon. And all of those goes without saying, but it turns Mikan into a deranged lunatic, so why is this one the least bad?

Because, out of all the Chapter 3′s, this one is the most relevant to the story. While I don’t like the path they take with it, Mikan’s transformation is ultimately effective foreshadowing for the truth about Class 77 and why they’re in the simulation, as well as the horrifying levels of their devotion to Junko.

And unlike the others, Mikan wasn’t trying to escape. She was trying to carry on with the mission of resurrecting Junko and wanted to inflict despair on the others along the way. What makes this still a bad chapter is a single question: if the Despair Disease can make someone remember their past, why not use that as a way to make everyone remember?

The goal of the Ultimate Despairs in getting into the Neo World Program was to provide bodies for the Junko AI, so why not have them all remember and commit mass suicide? No handwave is given as to why they can’t, but either way, this one is at least the most relevant to the story. Let’s move on.

Bad- DRA Chapter 3

Again, this one is still bad, but it at least has a more sympathetic motivation. The culprit for this case, Kinji Uehara, is the Ultimate Priest and had a close bond with a large group of orphans under the care of the church. A pretty noble guy...who’s being exploited by the Mastermind to become a mole and to kill if there’s no murder, or else the kids get it.

Now, this is not a new development. We saw this with Sakura in DR1, but while she was noble enough to take her own life instead of sacrificing her dojo or her friends, Kinji unfortunately cracked under the pressure and chose to murder.

What makes this one worse that SDR2′s is how cruel Kinji’s actions are. See, Kinji is not a true Despair. Like I said, he’s just this game’s mole and has to feed info to the Mastermind, but in doing so, he’s trying to save a group of children he believes are in danger. That’s a questionable situation, but paints him in a sympathetic light.

But he loses sympathy points for the nature of the murders he commits: the deaths of Kanata and Kakeru. Not only are the two of them some of the nicest people in the cast, but the ways that he murders them are absolutely horrific- slitting Kakeru’s throat enough that he bleeds out, then electrocuting Kanata so badly that her internal organs were burned to a crisp.

Now, he’d explained that he targeted Kanata because she was always in the infirmary and thus she’d be an easy target. However, why did she need to die in such a needlessly cruel way? Why not give her an overdose of some kind of drug? Why did he feel the need to murder her with a giant blade at first, then place her into a situation that would guarantee an absolutely cruel and horrifying death? And after he’d already killed Kakeru?

What pushes it over the edge for me is the fact that Kinji had already fatally wounded Kakeru, and the man gave Kinji a dying request that he spare Kanata. What did Kinji have to say about it? That it was already too late. I’m sorry, but no. It was not too late. He went out of his way to continue with the murder plot he’d decided on because of the Sunk Cost Fallacy and doubled the body count for the sake of...I have no idea. Tradition?

Either way, he denied Kakeru his dying wish and still killed Kanata, despite already guaranteeing that he did as he was tasked to and killed someone.

And then he goes further and tries to attack both Rei and Tsurugi, just because they were out of their rooms at the time, and add them to the frame-up. Yet all this kind of thing does is leave more evidence for who the killer is every time it happens.

All of that is so utterly cruel and sadistic that it feels wildly out of character for someone like Kinji to do, even if he was under a lot of pressure at the time. It’s a worse level of character assassination, but one mitigated slightly by the fact that he does apologize and show genuine remorse by the end.

And I do have sympathy for him after it turns out the kids he was trying to save were dead all along. As horrific as his actions were, he at least had a noble ultimate goal...and that goal was ripped away from him long before he even realized. It’s tragic, cruel and unfair.

The same cannot be said for our next entry.

Very Bad- DR1 Chapter 3

This one is pretty infamous among the fandom and for good reason. Celeste engineers a complicated and frankly ridiculous plan that involves tricking Hifumi into killing Taka, creating the Robo-Justice suit to frame Hagakure and then killing Hifumi herself. All to claim the huge amount of reward money Monokuma had offered and live out her Goth Fantasy Life.

What sets it here is that the character assassination goes from unnecessary cruelty to outright stupidity. Celeste puts together this frankly ridiculous and elaborate plan, which would be bad enough given that she should be smarter than this, but it goes further. She does so much to push the narrative of the situation that it becomes blindingly obvious who the culprit is even before the first murder.

The Robo-Justice concept is just silly, and maybe that was the point, to be so shocking and baffling that it distracted everyone from all the other details, but Hina quickly points out that the suit is impossible to really move in. That immediately rules it out as even a red herring and turns it into more of a distraction.

Beyond that though, once again, another death is basically an afterthought. Because Taka and Hifumi are fighting over Alter Ego, she uses that as leverage to get Hifumi to help her, so he kills Taka and then she kills him, and Taka’s role in this chapter is so minimal that I can barely remember if he had any lines. And this was after the emotional gut-punch of Chapter 2, when he lost Mondo. Which leads to the other big problem with Chapter 3: sudden character development death syndrome, or SCDDS.

Likewise, this plan, like all Chapter 3′s, was far more elaborate and nonsensical than it needed to be, with so many moving parts and so many factors Celeste had to actively try and control that it became very obvious this was a conspiracy and thus no surprise that it was her.

Really, if she wanted to take advantage of their fight, why not kill one and frame the other? It would’ve been so much simpler, had less moving parts and been far more believable. She instead went with complexity over brevity and set a horrible standard the games could not break away from.

And why did she do it? She says it was to gain the money and live in a castle with vampire butlers. Nothing noble, just something flat-out selfish and stupid, if you take her words at face value. But if you don’t, there’s a lot of room to interpret what she says and she seems to show some degree of remorse or at least regret for what happened.

I hope you enjoyed that, because there’s no regret in the last two.

Terrible- V3 Chapter 3

And here’s a Chapter 3 so bad, it’s become a meme. I’ll admit, I was actually ready to name this one my favorite Chapter 3 of the series when I first saw it. I was impressed that they’d finally broken away from the formula and had to solve a single murder, in this case Angie in the locked art room. There was so much to explore there.

And then Tenko died and I realized this series really cannot break its own formula. Cue my disappointed sigh.

All of the same problems I had with the previous entry are here, but they’ve been ramped up to 11. Korekiyo pushes so hard to do the séance in a specific room, it’s hard not to suspect he’s up to something. Tenko’s sudden emotional speech to Himiko could not have telegraphed her death harder if the pinwheel ribbon tied to her head were replaced with a set of red flags. But now onto the murder plot itself.

“Haha seesaw effect funny yada yada,” let’s get to the real meat of the issue here. Kiyo purposefully arranged for a set of rooms to become traps that he could use during the séance he’d been pushing for, but he did so right outside the room Angie was doing her own creepy rituals in. And when she came in looking for a candle, he clubbed her with a piece of wood, carried her back to her room, murdered her and locked the room behind him.

Do you know what this means? If he hadn’t killed Tenko, Kiyo would’ve won. I’m serious, there was no way the group would’ve been able to fully pinpoint that he was the one who managed to kill Angie and he would’ve not only been able to escape, but guaranteed everyone else would’ve died.

And he reveals his goal by the end was to kill a bunch of girls to send to his dead sister. The obvious conclusion to draw is that he believed that he had to kill a girl during a séance, but since he shanked Angie with the gold katana and sent he believes he sent her to be with his sister at the end of the trial, that means he doesn’t believe that a séance is necessary.

Which ultimately means he went through with the infamous seesaw trap purely because he’d spent so much time setting it up and he didn’t want it to go to waste. That is the only explanation for why he didn’t just call it quits with Angie and let the rest of the trial play out.

And all of that is without even getting into the really grotesque rationale behind his actions: his sister, whom he was apparently in an incestuous relationship with and whose spirit he believes lives on inside of him. His sister was very sick and thus never really had any friends, and it’s likely Kiyo was the only constant presence in her life. There are also very uncomfortable implications that she may have abused him as well, pressuring him to live the life that she wanted, and none of it is really addressed.

And so, when she died, Kiyo was left alone and believed he could send her 100 friends in the afterlife. Thus, he’d gone around killing at least 90 women, given that he says he was close to his goal, before ending up in the Killing Game. While he’s disappointed, he’s satisfied he at least got close and creepily promised to watch over everyone like a ghost.

Really, it’s how shockingly dumb Kiyo’s actions are that bring this one down so far, although the incestuous serial killer angle really doesn’t help. Speaking of which, there really is no reason for it beyond Tsumugi wanting to live out her fantasies.

But as bad as this one is, it still manages to avoid being the worst of them all.

What the fuck?- SDRA2 Chapter 3

How do you get worse than V3's Chapter 3? You try to emulate it.

That’s no exaggeration. LINUJ has stated that his ideas for this chapter of SDRA2 changed after he saw V3′s, which gave him the inspiration for this part of the game. And while I know plenty of people really enjoyed this one, even considering it the best, I have to disagree completely.

Not only is this the worst Chapter 3 out of them all, this is honestly one of the worst pieces of media in anything Danganronpa-related that I’ve ever seen. I mean that genuinely, not out of anger, but out of disgust and disappointment.

First of all, this trial is too long. I can accept that trials would need to go on for a while in these circumstances, but six hours? SIX HOURS?! And most of that time is spent with Kanade arguing with Syobai over small, petty details.

Second, perhaps the worst in terms of sheer, unmitigated plot contrivances. There is so much that goes on here that can only be explained with either heavy-handed exposition or handwaves of “Fuck you, she’s smart” or “fuck you, I’m lucky.” What do I mean by that? The biggest is the crux of why this trial famously has two blackeneds.

When Kanade and Hibiki (in her puppet state) murder Setsuka, they stab her with such synchronized timing, milliseconds apart, that Monocrow can’t even decide which happened first. And this was never addressed or shown at any point beforehand, just vaguely referenced here and there.

This is different from something like Nagito relying on his luck in Chapter 5. Nagito’s luck had been established countless times by then and he used it to his advantage to make Chiaki the blackened, with his goal being to kill the others and allow her to go free. If there had been similar scenes with Kanade and Hibiki demonstrating their synchronization, even just one or two, I would’ve been more willing to believe it.

Likewise, another element of Kanade’s murder plot is that she’s apparently good at throwing. I’m a bit more lenient toward this one, as I recall there might’ve been a scene where she was throwing darts and Hibiki was like “She’s the best at darts!” It’s not much, but it’s better.

My issue is that these are cases of tell, don’t show. You can’t expect me to believe a detail about character that hadn’t been demonstrated until that point simply because I’m informed and not shown how it works. Nagito’s luck at least has rules, while the synchronicity with the twins seems even more ridiculous by comparison.

That then brings us to the murderess herself, Kanade, who manages to be both a ridiculous genius and completely incompetent at the same time. She describes herself as a perfectionist and makes sure to think about every detail of her plan beforehand, from timetables to which handbooks they need, every shot she needs to make, every tool they need, etc.

And yet she leaves behind a bottle of antibiotics. One that proves to be a crucial piece of evidence in incriminating her. If she were really meticulous, she could’ve taken stock of everything she’d brought her medical kit beforehand and then checked to see if she had it all before they left. But she didn’t, and it’s even acknowledged that it was a stupid mistake.

Add to that the pins that they needed that also got them incriminated. Where did they come from? The bags Hibiki stuffed into her shirt to pad her chest and make herself look like Kanade, which contained Setsuka’s disembodied hands. Which...yeah, let’s get this out of the way too.

This chapter also relies far, far too much on shock value. Setsuka’s death is absolutely horrifying and works in the moment, but things like Kanade’s reveal of being a serial killer, while foreshadowed decently, are only really effective on a first viewing. The more you think about it, the less it actually makes sense and the more it hurts both her image and the logic of her plot.

And I’m going to be genuine about this: this chapter is also guilty of serial killer glorification. It doesn’t matter if it frames her in a negative light or paints it as horrific, this was LINUJ trying to make her as shocking and horrific as possible, but also making her into a genius who gets everything she wants at the expense of all the people she’d hurt. The narration goes out of its way to refer to Kanade as a genius multiple times. And the fact that she was the second most popular character in a poll really shows what I’m talking about.

To be clear, I don’t like how much focus Genocider Syo gets in the canon games, especially with how they’re played for comic relief more than anything. However, the difference is that Toko actually has a character that grows and develops beyond Syo, Syo doesn’t actually kill any of the main characters (still highly questionable but given how desperate the Tragedy is, I can accept that) and it’s made pretty clear in UDG that even she has some humanity in her. Syo has a sense of decency and compassion, shared with Toko, that grants her some humanity. That is not the case with Kanade, who is a monster through and through.

Toko and Syo are capable of unconditional love toward Byakuya, one that I can be certain would not turn murderous or cruel, even if Byakuya is not the kind of guy to go for. Kanade, by contrast, is not capable of unconditional love; she’s an incestuous, manipulative, stalking, psychopathic control-freak.

Additionally, Kanade’s death isn’t true justice, it’s her getting to die with a smile on her face knowing that she ruined countless lives and has her sister die with her too. Which then brings me to my biggest point of contention and the conclusion of the objective section of this analysis. I will now start shouting, so prepare yourself.

Fuck this chapter and what it did to Hibiki. She was the biggest victim in all of this, even worse than Setsuka. At least Setsuka wasn’t aware of what was happening and died before she was chopped into pieces. Meanwhile, Hibiki not only learns that she’s partially responsible for it, she gets next to no sympathy from the rest of the cast for what happened, then learns her serial killer sister has been killing and torturing people her whole life to isolate her. And then gets to learn Kanade killed their parents before being dragged off to their double execution, screaming for help the whole time.

And this was after a ton of character growth and development I was far more interested in and impressed with. When I saw this chapter play out, I didn’t see a tragedy with her or an engaging villain, I saw a frustrating shock-baity twist that left me disgusted, confused and annoyed. Two great characters died to glorify another shitty repetition of the serial killer plot beat, and somehow Kanade is the one who gets all the attention and all the popularity.

And let’s get something clear here: Kanade, this amazing mega super genius who killed 60 people and never got caught? She left crucial evidence behind, evidence that she brought herself and didn’t bother to fully clean up. Do you know who didn’t accidentally leave evidence behind in his first ever murder? Leon. He was smart enough to use a lint roller to clean up any traces of his hair and threw his bloody shirt in the furnace. He only got caught because Sayaka wrote his name where she couldn’t see it and the shirt arm burned off in a way he couldn’t control.

Let me repeat that: IN HIS FIRST EVER MURDER, FREAKING LEON WAS SMARTER AND MORE CAREFUL THAN KANADE, A *SERIAL KILLER.*

Even Kirumi’s situation, where she lost a piece of her glove that proved vital in incriminating her, she lost it in the pool at a time she couldn’t get to it. That was bad luck. With Kanade, it was sheer incompetence.

I wouldn’t be making such a big deal about this if it wasn’t one of the key pieces of evidence that got her found out. And to make matters worse, she was actually planning on framing Iroha. Iroha. A girl whose only real method of attack is crying and pushing someone off a balcony. Did she seriously think anyone would buy that she not only killed Setsuka, but dismembered her and set her body up in a weird way?

Not that it matters, since her attempt at framing Iroha- knocking her out with spiked coffee- failed because she doesn’t even like coffee. This girl is not as meticulous or careful as she thinks she is.

And no, I’m not going to say that all of this is retroactively justified by Sora having Divine Luck and that’s why all of this happened. That reveal coming at the end does not justify any of this by any means. Please do not use “Fuck you, I’m lucky” in place of “Fuck you, I’m smart.” Nagito playing Russian Roulette with 5 bullets and winning is not the same as Kanade being incompetent and Sora having a gut feeling that it’s not over yet.

If you want to showcase a character being clever, you show them getting around difficult situations or fooling someone within the confines of established rules. You don’t just let them get away with whatever’s convenient for the moment.

But do you want to know what the worst aspect of this Chapter 3 is? I could maybe overlook all the other details- all of them- if this weren’t the case.

It’s how completely irrelevant this chapter is in the greater story.

Say what you will about the others, at least they feel like they’re part of a larger narrative- DR1′s was another motive, SDR2′s was as well and foreshadowed the Ultimate Despair twist, V3 was part of a reality show and was written by a creep with an incest fetish, and even DRA’s felt more in line with the story. But SDRA2′s? It feels like a completely separate story shoved in the middle of the existing one.

Kanade has no connection to the Voids or Mikado, not to Utsuro, not to the Despairs, not to any outside groups, not to Hope’s Peak, not even the Tragedy itself plays any role in her character. All she wants is to control Hibiki, and she only did all this because she was losing that control.

When you peel away all the shock value, Kanade is ultimately, like every serial killer out there, a painfully flat and boring character with shitty motivations to be a shitty human being. Her entire personality revolves around her creepy obsession with Hibiki; there is nothing deeper there, and LINUJ has even said that Kanade would’ve killed herself if Hibiki died. I don’t find someone like that very appealing nor interesting.

I don’t think I would mind all of this as much if she didn’t feel so completely disconnected from everything else in SDRA2, but she is and it is very apparent when you actually look at the story as a whole. Not even Mikado knew she was a serial killer and brought her in just because she had a vague connection to Tsurugi.

And what happens after the reveal of his girl who’s committed 60 murders? Who brutally butchered their friend, burned her letter and dragged another off to a horrible, unfair end with her and got everything she really wanted? Not much.

I can name about three things: Hibiki’s puppet state foreshadowing Yuki’s transformation, the implication that more time had passed than they’d realized and her burning Setsuka’s note. The latter is the only piece of the story that actually feels like it connects this chapter to the others. But after Kanade and Hibiki are gone, they’re barely even mentioned and it’s clear how little impact they had.

There’s also Iroha being revealed as a Void at the end of the Chapter, but that has nothing to do with Kanade and it really could’ve been placed anywhere, or even just left out entirely. Again, I question what the purpose of its inclusion is, especially since Chapter 4 could’ve done it much better.

Now, one could argue that the relevance of this scene has more to do with themes about trust and sowing mistrust among the group. However, I feel that that’s more of an overarching narrative of any DR story, and one that Chapter 4 does substantially better with its exploration of Nikei as a major player, especially in the wake of Setsuka helping him, and us knowing Iroha is a void and wanting her to admit it so the group can work together.

The problem with this argument is that, for the most part, the concrete events of Chapter 3 are not followed-up on or carry over in a significant way like the reveal of the Voids or the virtual world. Kanade being a serial killer, in and of itself, feels largely like a tacked-on addition to the story, since, you know, it is.

What this means is that this is the only chapter 3 where you can skip it and miss basically nothing. Think about that: 1/6th of SDRA2- a full 16%- is completely irrelevant to the overarching story, all for the sake of emulating the worst part of V3. Granted, I don’t know how much better LINUJ’s original plan would’ve been, but I have my doubts it could be worse.

Ultimately, that’s why I find this chapter 3 to be the worst of them all: all the existing issues, but with the addition of too much shock value, serial killer glorification, Hibiki’s absolutely horrific SCDDS for the sake of a double execution, and just the fact that you can skip this entire chapter and miss nothing vital. I can’t even say that last part about any of the others, and that is unforgivable.

To anyone who genuinely wants to write anything DR-related, all I ask is that we retire the tropes of Chapter 3. Maybe then we can have some that are genuinely good.

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