#danronposting

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Decided last minute to make Maizono a birthday essay yay!!!

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kazuichi souda for the ask meme 😏

absolutely!

sexuality hc: the b in souda stands for bisexual. souba gender hc: transgender shark boy ship: hajime and ibuki! brotp: mann there’s a few of those... biggest ones are probably like, fuyuhiko and nekomaru. and chiaki too. i feel obligated to say kaito too because heehaw same eng voice actor notp: gundam... as friends maybe, maybe but as a ship? no thanks, sorry gamers. same goes for sonia too but i think that’s a given random hc: adhd king. definitely smells bad, always general opinion: love this guy! always was one of my favorite sdr2 characters

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WOOOO the first slide looks a bit weird and IDK what to do about it but otherwise pt 1 of 3 is DONE baby

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understanding fujisaki chihiro’s personality via her talent (thereby explaining her actions in the killing game)

I’ve been having some thoughts swirling around in my head recently about Fujisaki My Beloved, so I’m trying to explain them in a stream of consciousness. Sorry if this is a little incoherent.

Fujisaki’s programming prowess was born out of necessity and adversity. Because she was too weak to play outside, and other kids terrorised her for being feminine and weak, she spent her time alone inside. This led to her messing around with her father’s laptop, and discovering she was actually a computer genius.

They say necessity is the father of invention, and you could arguably apply this to Fujisaki’s character. However, perhaps it would be better to word this as “adversity is the father of potential”. When faced with all these challenges in childhood – bullying, disadvantages, and eventually having to repress a major part of her identity* in hopes of being accepted – instead of completely shutting down, Fujisaki found one thing she could call her own – a programming hobby – and mastered it. In other words, when faced with adversity, as much as she may put herself down and see only her weakness that other people harassed her for, Fujisaki Chihiro rises up in some way or another, making something beautiful under the pressure. This programming genius is something uniquely Fujisaki. It is a core part of her identity, she is known for being the best in the country at what she does, she lights up when she gets to talk about the subject, she pours her heart and soul into her creations - so much so that her ultimate invention, Alter Ego, was made in her image (but we’ll get to that). Remembering that Fujisaki had to repress and hide one of the most important parts about herself – her “gender identity”* – in order to get by, it could even explain why she fell so in love with her programming. 

Her ability to code was the one thing about her identity no one could really take from her, because for once no one had a problem with it; hell, it’s even notable that Fujisaki assumed Taichi was going to get angry at her for messing around with his computer (in a similar way to how Fujisaki was terrorised by her peers for everything she did, if not for the fact that it’s typically not very nice to mess with someone’s computer without permission) and her pleasant surprise at being supported and admired by her father for her skill gave her room to continue to hone her skills.

The TL;DR of all this is that it was only due to Fujisaki’s problems that she ended up falling into programming, becoming the best programmer in the entire country (at least for her age group, but she is hired by big companies so we can assume she does well among adults too), and creating all these amazing things. No matter what you make Fujisaki face, she will somehow make something incredible out of it. She will deal with hardships in surprising but often beautiful ways.

This is all a preface to the statement that Fujisaki’s actions upon being faced with the secrets motive, then, should come as no surprise. It’s tempting to view her choice to tell a trusted friend the truth about herself in such a possibly dangerous situation when faced with blackmail, as opposed to simply panicking and falling into despair, as her make-or-break moment, the decision in which her personality does a 180 and she changes forever. However, I feel this is doing a disservice to who she always had been, though she doesn’t really give herself credit for it. Fujisaki always had a tendency to take the bad situation she found herself in and produce something good out of it. It happened the moment she turned a computer on due to having no other options, so it obviously happened the moment the mastermind threatened Fujisaki with an outing that could ruin her life and she chose to subvert the Mastermind’s desires and take matters into her own hands. This ability is what granted her the metaphorical strength that towered over basically anyone else who ever held her physical weakness against her, and is an ability that, say, Oowada didn’t possess (but this isn’t about him).

And this is not only subtle but ever-present. Even after she dies. When she finds a broken, good-for-nothing laptop in Hope’s Peak, she (obviously) tinkers around with it and creates Alter Ego. What’s first of note, though I won’t expand on it too much, is that it was made in her own image - the only main difference is that it uses 僕 for itself, in a way Fujisaki could not due to wishing to conceal her true identity**. I’ve already mentioned how programming was basically the one part of Fujisaki’s identity she wasn’t terrorised for or needed to hide and how this most likely contributed to why she liked it so much – and Alter Ego is a demonstration of how Fujisaki therefore used programming as a means of being her true self*; creating a version of herself that she desires to be that lives behind the screen. And Alter Ego’s existence, especially in the Killing Game, is further proof of how she rises up against hardship. Some have theorised that Fujisaki made Alter Ego and put it in the locker that night because she knew she wouldn’t be alive much longer, and I’m inclined to agree. Her desire to help lives on, her desire to help her friends out of the KG lives on beyond Fujisaki herself. Through the bad situation – that is, her impending demise – she built something that helped her friends rise up against the Mastermind.

This disposition of Fujisaki’s is a direct juxtaposition to whatever the hell despair is (though Danron’s writers have a habit of forgetting that despair isn’t just, like, anything that hurts). Despair, being defined purely as “the absence of hope”, is the feeling that there is no longer anything that can be done is an undesirable situation. Fujisaki has been pushed into all sorts of corners and faced with constant ridicule from her peers just for being herself, but has always found some way to shine through. This is why it’s only natural that instead of hitting a brick wall when Monokuma announced the secrets motive, she used it as motivation to change and work towards being the strong person she had wanted to become since the beginning. This disposition surprised the Mastermind almost as much as it pissed her off, only being satisfied again when things turned sour for Fujisaki due to not fault of her own. Of course it would surprise the Mastermind, a brain so hooked on despair that anything which denies it power simply doesn’t add up.

And now we come to the obvious conclusion; that this is why Fujisaki is the character chosen to be “the one that lived on after death”. This one actually comes from an interview with the creators (which I reference a LOT)***, in which they state that Fujisaki’s programming talent was used as a means of making her a “revivable” sort of character. Knowing that what granted the other six survivors their right to survival was to battle against the despair of the KG, its motives, and the truth about The Tragedy, it makes sense that Fujisaki should survive alongside them somehow. It makes sense that Naegi having hope is how Alter Ego managed to save him. It makes sense that she’s a crucial part of the Future Foundation. Fujisaki cannot give into despair by design.

* as portrayed in canon, different to how it is perceived here ** however 僕女 exist *** warning for brief transphobic sentiment in interview

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making this unlocked new emotions that i didn't know i had the capability to feel

GOUGTOIHYTH5R3QEKRT65U7U6T42R3Q4T354IR3E5TY6R THEO,

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Another week, another Danganalysis! This one's Saionji, a big favourite of mine.

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Uploading this early to Tumblr because I love you all :] And cuz I wanted to thank @dr-transparents for the awesome transparent of Ikusaba with leggings! It's gorgeous!

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Danganronpa x Insaneppltweets

(Nakajima sprite by @kinningharmonies !)

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WHEEEE!!!!!! IT'S MY BEST BOY'S BIRTHDAY TODAY YOU GUYS!!! FUCK YES!!!! I WROTE HIS BIRTHDAY ESSAY SO ENJOY THIS AND REMEMBER STAN BEST BOY

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AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH anyway here you go

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helloooo!! if you don't mind i have a little question. so i was thinking about how mondo refused to take his clothes off in the sauna and how it references kiyotaka's quote about baring "soul and body" and i just CLEARY remember you talking about it either on here or on insta but for some reason i can't find the post?? i also know you talked about it in your sauna essay but i have feeling it was a separate post. i may be wrong but if not can you PLEASE leave a link to the post about it? thanks!

Hi hi, yes I know what you mean! Is it this?

There's also this:

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Shirogane Tsumugi essay!! Hope you lot enjoy :]

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if youre up for it, do you think you could explain how imposter is coded as a trans man? ive honestly never thought of them that way before and im really interested about your thoughts on the matter

sure! whether it’s coded is hard to know, but considering all the evidence, it appears the only logical conclusion is that imposter is a transgender man, or a weirdly secretive cis one. there are multiple parts to this, so i’ll split them up...

part one: imposter is not nonbinary. his gender is confirmed. he is male.

the idea that imposter is nonbinary, ironically, came from a transphobic sentiment.

this is all the wiki has to say about it, and this was enough for the fanbase to take it as gospel. i totally understand wanting to take the scraps of nonbinary rep one can claim, when there’s so, so little, but this so-called rep is based entirely on the idea that sex = gender.

seeing someone’s CAGAB tells you a grand total of nothing about their gender. i’m sure you don’t need me to explain that sex =/= gender and that implying otherwise is transphobic. also, if you’re wondering, this is the quote where imposter refuses to strip:

some could put this down to insecurity about his body type, but if the way he acts at any other time is anything to go by, he isn’t insecure about his body at all. therefore, we can assume that it has something to do with his CAGAB.

basically, the writers of this wiki page have seen that imposter considers himself, presents as, and wishes to be seen as male, but won’t accept it until he proves it via his CAGAB and until that happens he is genderless. that’s a little... hm.

“wait, since when was it proven that he identifies as male?”

in his final fte! he refers to his “true self” in the third person as a man. twice!

“男” means man. in the above screenshots, he’s saying “what if i was a more handsome, disagreeable man?” and “let me tell you an interesting story. a story about this man.” not to mention that “イケメン” means handsome man exclusively and can’t refer to women.

this is decidedly not when he’s talking about togami byakuya. in fact, he told hinata this story under the impression that hinata wouldn’t be able to realise that he was talking about himself under his disguise. if anything, he should have a motive to obscure the gender of the story’s subject so that hinata doesn’t put two and two together! but no, imposter refers to himself in the third person as male. if you don’t believe me, he does this in the english too.

he even uses he/him pronouns, and i assume that if japanese used pronouns regularly then imposter would have used 彼 for himself as well.

i’m obviously not an expert on the ins and outs of transphobia, and if anything i’ve said here is wrong any corrections are extremely appreciated. but as i understand it, if someone tells you what their gender is - especially in an intimate moments such as this fte where imposter’s telling hinata as a close friend - you should believe them no matter what. what someone’s true gender is can only be confirmed by word of mouth from the person themselves. whether their CAGAB matches their claim is simply not relevant.

imposter identifies as male, so he is male. that’s it.

and before people ask, of course you can hc imposter as nb. i hc hagakure as nb, who also refers to himself in the 3rd person as a man -

and there are nonbinary men/male aligned nb people who are okay calling themselves men as well as nonbinary. but saying he’s canon nb is basically equating gender and birth sex. he’s canonically male.

part two: is imposter trans?

this part is far more just a theory. but considering how all the facts about his character line up, one has to wonder if he was written to be a trans man.

for starters, his voice. while he can impersonate togami’s voice fine, when he relaxes, his voice sounds like this.

it’s kinda masculine, to be sure, or at least since he says “俺” if i were hearing it totally out of context i would definitely know it was a dude. however it shows that 1) he’s extremely good at impersonating male voices that sound nothing like his normal one, and 2) it’s.... kinda feminine. remember this is in the same language where a cis woman can voice naegi and komaeda, and a cis man can voice fujisaki, and have zero problems. (even i find this when i speak; for some reason, in japanese changing your voice “gender” is surprisingly easy.)

this changes in the anime, though this could just be because he’s decided to put on a new voice for himself. if that’s true, then this means he’s decided to work on making his voice more masculine that it is naturally and is in and of itself some pretty solid proof that he might be trans. 

another part of it is of course that screenshot i’ve used already - imposter reaaaally doesn’t want people to know his AGAB. he literally says he will “never, ever” wear a swimsuit. no ifs or buts or any potential for him to change his mind later.

considering that imposter only ever impersonates men (togami, mitarai, kyousuke), with the exception of one time he dressed as kirigiri for an anthology, it would be a little strange for him to obscure his AGAB like that. if he were AMAB, then putting on a swimsuit wouldn’t... break the togami facade? nobody’s researching togami’s dick size. i can’t believe i just typed that...

it is possible he just doesn’t want people to see his CAGAB so that he could dress up as a woman later if he so pleased. however, all canon evidence suggests he isn’t really into that idea, and he also says this:

once imposter gets spotted as an imposter, he simply disappears and moves on to other things. to go impersonate someone entirely different, i would imagine. he’d leave everyone he’d known as “togami byakuya” behind, and so it reaaaally wouldn’t matter if they knew his AGAB.

considering all these things, the only logical conclusion i can come to is that he doesn’t want people to know his AGAB because he is CAFAB.

there’s also how his backstory and identity very clearly mirrors the trans experience to the point where it could be an allegory. again, i can’t say i know the complete ins and outs of this experience, and so corrections are appreciated if required. but to be fair, neither do danganronpa’s creators. they too are coming from a cisgender perspective of how being trans works (unless there’s a trans person on the team i’m unaware of but lbr considering fujisaki’s arc that’s highly unlikely!), so if there’s any “mistakes”, assuming this coding is actually intentional coding, it’s probably just because they are cis.

the first thing is unfortunately... kind of transphobic, but it would be foolish to not bring it up. he’s the “ultimate imposter”.

trans people are often called “imposters” for simply wanting to be treated as their real gender. it’s transphobic and horrible, but is the unfortunate reality of how they are treated. imposter is referred to as 詐欺師 which means “swindler” or “imposter”. the word implies someone who is a master of lying and deceit.

i know how horrible it sounds, but again we have to understand that this is the same people who wrote fujisaki chihiro. him being the “imposter” before even getting a name could very well be the writers trying to say that he’s a trans man.

imposter is of course called this because he’s a 偽物, which means “imitation”. this is actually the word used to refer to him by the majority of the jp fanbase instead of 詐欺師, which is a lot nicer. he’s not called an imposter because he doesn’t want people to know his AGAB; he’s called the imposter because he pretends to be other people. but again, the parallels are there.

not to mention the parallel about how there are no records of his existence beyond who he pretends to be. there are no baby photos. his birth certificate is god-knows-where. he doesn’t have a family and if he does he certainly doesn’t talk to them.

again, trans people often go to lengths to ensure that any records of their birth sex are destroyed or ignored, and if things go sour post-coming out they may simply act like they don’t have a family. imposter’s story takes this idea literally in that he genuinely has no family or name or birth records. it’s very possible this was also an allegory.

all of this leads me to believe that imposter is either:

implied to be a transgender man OR

a cisgender man who is super secretive about his AGAB and also has a lot of allegories for being trans in his design for some reason.

i have genuinely no idea if this was an accident or not. if i could ask the writers ONE question, it would probably be about that. but until then, as the evidence leads me to believe he is transgender, this is how i have decided to see him. i hope this helped.

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which do you believe had the better resolution to kiyotaka's character? the stage play or the game?

ooooh, that's a REALLY interesting question. you'll have to get a cup of tea for this one, apologies...

the in game conclusion "ticks all the boxes" to put it crudely. i've made a couple of posts about it before and i’m sure everyone’s sick to death of hearing it, but the way ishimaru’s death played out was basically identical to ishimaru toranosuke’s downfall. the scandal, the naivete, the failed leadership, the way nobody even looked twice at his corpse. the idea, at least how i see it, is that it was the ribbon to wrap around the way ishimaru’s despair played out. i talked here (LOL i do so much self promo smh) about how the fact that oowada was the guilty one was the beginning of ishimaru’s despair “arc”, i suppose, because it basically destroyed ishimaru’s belief system. from there, ishimaru basically loses sight of himself. at first it occurs in that his being “fired up”, which he said he’d never falter in no matter what,

he actually does falter in by becoming totally speechless and expressionless.

this then is amplified in his transformation as ishida, which makes sense symbolically because his belief system was a massive part of his identity. from there, he acted in a way one could only describe as “corrupt”, in that his personality was corrupted by his own grief. not only did he not fulfill his duties as a fuuki iin anymore, he treated his classmates in ways a leader never should, and he almost jeapordised the utility of alter ego for his own benefit against kirigiri’s wishes. then, of course, he dies, and like i’ve said already, the way that death played out was exactly like toranosuke’s.

but of course, another factor in that despair that i’ve neglected to mention is that oowada died. like, there’s no symbolism there, it’s just that oowada died. oowada was effectively ishimaru’s soulmate, as evidenced about how just about all of their personality traits are made to compliment the other in some way and their design matching yin and yang. the difference there is that ishimaru didn’t play a passive role in that. the despair didn’t happen to him; he actively pushed against it. i can only assume because it’s a part of his identity that’s being stripped away from him that he is obviously far more aware of.

there are quite a few things we can take away from ishida’s characterisation. the first more obvious one is that ishimaru’s feelings for oowada were romantic (well... sexual) in nature, and the second is is that ishimaru physically cannot bring himself to live in a world without oowada in it.

it’s kind of funny in a way. while he gets really upset whenever it’s brought up, he seems to have done alright for the first 17 years of his life without anyone close to him, let alone someone like oowada. however, the moment oowada becomes a part of his life, there’s no way for ishimaru to go on without him. this is in a normal sense - it appears they’re more or less glued at the hip after becoming friends, and also in the darker sense after oowada’s passing.

ishimaru becomes soulless after oowada dies. basically all the life has been sucked out of him, and the only way he ever becomes responsive is if you actually bring oowada up. when he actually gets some sort of life back, it’s when both his and oowada’s souls become “one”. granted, this was all a delusion on ishimaru’s part thanks to his hallucination, but as they say, seeing is believing. my point is, ishimaru cannot survive if he believes oowada is dead, and has to trick himself into thinking oowada’s alive to convince himself to keep living.

now for the stage play. first starters, the way he dies is basically the same as ishida in a strange way. since ishimaru can’t live in a world when oowada is dead, his only option is to make sure he dies at the same time as oowada. so in this sense, there is basically no difference. the premise remains in both conclusions. you get the point.

however, except for the way oowada’s being guilty doesn’t really align with ishimaru’s just world fallacy, skipping ishimaru’s little despair trip in chapter 3 means that it doesn’t examine the rest of his story as much. it hinges basically all of ishimaru’s despair on oowada’s existence rather than everything else he spent those 17 years of his life working towards. not to mention, you only understand ishimaru’s connection with the just world fallacy when you see these lines

or these lines

or watch his ftes and learn about his political beliefs, which you can’t do in the stage play for obvious reasons. 

so there’s pros and cons. on one hand, it doesn’t bring his character justice, because it makes everything start and end with oowada and doesn’t bother with everything else. on the other hand, it’s nice because it means ishimaru doesn’t have to experience that. he gets to duck out early and die with his soulmate without having to pay too much mind to everything else he worked for. and besides, if you’re making a stage play and can only focus on one part of ishimaru’s character, it makes sense to focus on oowada. he’s literally his other half and completes him, so it’s certainly not a cop out. it’s just not as multifaceted.

the thing is, though... ishimaru effectively commiting suicide only cuts so deep and grants that level of satisfaction, for me at least, because we know what’s coming if he doesn’t.

ishida more or less confirmed ishimaru’s romantic feelings for oowada. you could infer it just from how he acted before the switch, but you kind of have to have a Gay Bias. ishida is the true moment where his feelings become undeniably beyond platonic. not to say it’s not necessarily tragic to lose your best friend, but the simple matter of fact is that it’s sadder when there’s a romantic stake involved. you could argue that ishimaru voting for himself in the stage play alone is the action that confirms those feelings anyway, but considering that ishimaru’s final words are “we’re kyoudai, aren’t we?”, it shows that either a) that wasn’t exactly how the writers wanted it to be perceived inherently, or at least wanted to keep it open to interpretation, or b) he hasn’t realised how he actually feels about oowada yet.

so if you watch the stage play and nothing else, you don’t know that ishimaru has these unrealised feelings. and you don’t know the absolute hell ishimaru goes through on the down low, how literally ever aspect of himself is torn to shreds by the killing game, before he finally, meaninglessly, hops the stick.

basically? these two endings of ishimaru’s life are intertwined. they carry more meaning than they appear to do at face value because we know of the existence of the other possibility.

ishimaru becoming ishida means a million times more because you know that in any alternate universe ishimaru still doesn’t want to live without oowada. you can repeat the story as many times as you like but ishimaru will always have the same premise. it’s tragic and beautiful.

ishimaru dying in such a dramatic way in the stage play means a million times more because we know of how distraught he was in the very short span of time he was alive when oowada was not. the way ishimaru acts when he’s dying by oowada’s side is far more meaningful. we see his expressions, the bittersweetness of it all; in comparison, his death screen in chapter 3 is so blank that even the artist for the game said it was a little boring and wishes he had made it a bit more gorey. knowing how things played out in the game, we can feel a small comfort in knowing ishimaru probably preferred it this way.

i guess what i’m trying to say is that you can’t have one without the other. their emotional impact is amplified when you realise what the other possibility could have been. neither is “more satisfying”.

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Aaaand some Hagakure posts cuz his birthday is gonna be during exam stuff and I don't wanna forget to make them