#fuckkk and the emphasis on collaboration is so true

[ultimateinsomniac]

i think that's a perfectly valid way of looking at it too. i think even though kaito was executed, kokichi would have been satisfied with how chapter 6 shook out. i'm sure he thought of as many scenarios as he could, and this definitely wasn't the worst that could have happened. also love your comment that tsumugi cheating would be "boring" to the audience, because we know that's what kokichi was thinking about. to kokichi, being boring is the worst thing you can be, and he knew the audience thought that too.

i do think, however, that kokichi would not have wanted to sacrifice everyone for the sake of ruining the game. (pardon me for picking one part of your argument to harp on, i just love this aspect of kokichi's character). he cared about ruining the game A LOT, but not enough to sacrifice anyone but himself IF he could help it. why else would he make kaito the blackened and himself the victim, and not the other way around? he easily could have taken the antidote and killed kaito for his plan, and it would have worked out the same if not better, but that meant kaito had to die. his plan minimized the amount of killings that had to happen, and he might have even been holding out hope that kaito wouldn't die of his illness.

i think most of his actions throughout the game prove that his number 1 priority was ending the killings, and his number 2 was sending a big permanent FUCK YOU to the mastermind for fascilitating the killing (and perhaps his number 3 was staying alive long enough to make sure that "fuck you" got heard). it's why he took the motives in chapter 2, it's why he was so desperate to live in chapter 4, and it's why he decided to take kaito instead of anyone else. he recognized kaito's illness for what it was: a motive. if he could remove it from the game, he could stop the killing for a while. and, if he made himself the villain, maybe if someone killed him it would prevent them from kiling anyone else. i could go on a tangent about chapter 4, both his motives and the guilt he likely feels from it all, but i'm gonna save that for a different post.

you're right that kokichi definitely forecasted that the canon end to the trial could have happened, and it wasn't the worst case scenario nor was it the best. the blame for kaito's execution is on monokuma, and not on kokichi, or shuichi. the plan was fucking crazy and doomed to fail, and i think its craziness can be attributed to what you're talking about (making sure that no matter what, it made monokuma look bad). the plan "failed," but he baked in failsafes. honestly, the whole plan was a failsafe for if his original one (pretending to be the mastermind) didn't work, so it's a wonder it worked at all.

seen a couple posts talking about the ending of the drv3 chapter 5 trial so here's my personal take:

shuichi and kaito didn't "ruin" kokichi's plan, because it never would have worked in the first place. monokuma had too much control over the whole situation. i think monokuma threatening to kill everyone and kaito stepping out of the exisal was the only way that trial could have ended, regardless of what shuichi did.

it's partially because of kaito's nature and partially tsumugi's as the mastermind. we know tsumugi will do ANYTHING to keep the game going, including breaking the rules, so if there was an unsolvable murder i guarantee she would bend the truth to make it solvable. she's not going down that easy.

kaito didn't completely understand kokichi's plan- he was only doing it as a favor from one dying kid to another. the second it looked like his friends would get killed because of it, he jumped ship. kaito cares too much about others, and not enough about himself, and he would never have risked his friends being executed.

if kokichi's plan DID work, and they voted kokichi as the blackened, i don't think THIS monokuma would have let it slide. it would still be an incorrect vote, and tsumugi clearly doesn't care about the rules the way junko did. she'd kill all of them and have kaito "graduate." i don't think kaito would let that happen, and i don't think he even had enough faith in the plan to GET that far, especially if monokuma started pushing him to reveal himself the way he does in canon. he didn't care about "tricking the mastermind" the way kokichi definitely did- he just cared about making sure everyone made it out alive.

that isn't to say that kokichi DIDN'T care about everyone else (clearly he very much did), moreso that he cared a lot about fucking with the game itself. he hated the game, and he hated the audience, and i think, crucially, he hated the killing. his view on it was different than kaito's, and while they both wanted to "end" the game, that meant different things for each of them.

kaito is headstrong and easy to anger, and extremely loyal. kaito made the conscious decision to murder kokichi, and he did it to save maki. there was, of course, the element of wanting to "end" the game, but i really don't think that was his main goal. it was a killing game, and he chose to kill, even if it was for someone else. kokichi gave kaito a reason to kill him, but kaito still chose to commit murder. i think the guilt of that was eating at his pride, and that's partially why he showed himself at the end.

kokichi and kaito are both flawed people, and they made bad decisions. kokichi's crazy ass plan was a shot in the dark, and it was desperate, and both of them were dying. shuichi did the best he could with what kokichi gave him, and i don't think enough people give him credit for that. he even tries to backtrack when he realized kokichi's actual goal!!!! the plan was just so flawed from the beginning, because kokichi still had no idea who the mastermind was, and he didn't trust anyone enough to ask them for help (you could argue he DID trust them with the plan after his death, in his own convoluted way, but it's behind so many layers of distrust that it was doomed to fail.)

i think we all too readily believed the idea that, if it worked, this plan would end the killing game and everyone would live happily ever after. MAYBE in a junko-run killing game, like ch6 of trigger happy havoc, but not with tsumugi. if they voted kokichi, i think monokuma would have smoked kaito out and then killed everyone. it wouldn't have been a checkmate.