Danganronpa Ultimate Categorization
Welcome back to another episode of: Jade is a nerd about something absolutely useless! Today's topic: Talent classification in Danganronpa/Fangans.
In the process of making my own fangan/s, I've created a classification system for the types of talents you can give characters. These classifications are...
Arts: Talents that are involved in the visual arts, performing arts, or fashion. Encompasses performers of all types, any type of visual artist, or anyone involved in fashion. (Ex. Actor, Abstract Artist, Model)
Practical: Talents that focus on a specialized skill or work with your hands. Also includes any talents that are religious or spiritual in nature. (Ex. Mechanical Engineer, Detective, Shrine Maiden)
Academic: Talents that are recognized by how much knowledge or experience a character has in an academic field. Covers most science, literature, math, and research based talents. (Ex. Chemist, Theologian, Archaeologist)
Sports: Talents relating to athletic skill. (Ex. Footballer, Kickboxer, Bowler)
Novelty: Talents given to a person who is special simply by existing. Can also be given to characters who win a contest for their talent. Includes Lucky/Unlucky Students, royalty, and non-human characters. (Ex. Lucky Student, Student, Princess)
This system of classification was based on my experience in the community over about three or four years, seeing many other people's original characters as well as creating my own. I found many fell into these categories. My "perfect" ratio, which my friends and I used as a guideline for making our fangan casts, is 4 arts : 4 practical : 4 academic : 2 sports: 2 novelty. I felt this ratio kept things even and grounded.
A few months ago, I began to wonder if my "perfect" ratio was more of my own creation than an actual pattern I saw. I thought, in the event it was, that I would come up with a mathematically accurate ratio that better represented the talent distribution of Danganronpa and its fan projects. This was my attempt at doing just that.
Data Collection
For this, I tried to collect as varied of a sample as possible. I included the three mainline Danganronpa games and sixteen fangans, ranging from very popular ones to very obscure ones. The fangans sampled for this analysis were...
Danganronpa Another
Super Danganronpa Another 2
Danganronpa Despair Time
Brave Danganronpa Coward's Paradise
Project Eden's Garden
Danganronpa He(art)less Deceit
Danganronpa Hushed Whispers
Danganronpa Muave
Danganronpa Despair's Revival
Danganronpa Re:Birth
Danganronpa Twisted Truths
Danganronpa Survivor's Guilt
Danganronpa Despair's Flame (my fangan! also the one where the talent ratio originated)
Danganronpa Cyberspace
Danganronpa Akeda Amusements
Danganronpa Lost Paradise (my other fangan that isn't released anywhere but I'm counting anyway)
I figured out the talent ratio for each individual game by looking through their casts and sorting them with my classification system. Ultimate ???'s were thrown out if possible (such as in the case of Akeda Amusements, where Hanari was thrown out due to the fangan having seventeen participants) and if not, they were counted as novelty.
Also, shout out to Yuki Maeda and Teruya Ōtori for managing to count for two different data sets despite my best efforts at finagling a way to keep them confined to one.
Observations
The first thing I noticed in looking at the ratios for canon Danganronpa was that Academic ultimates are underrepresented compared to what I initially remembered. It had been a while since I revisited the mainline games, and it was a shock to be reminded of that. I was also reminded, but not quite as shocked by the greater emphasis on practical ultimates.
In fangans, the focus on practical ultimates continues to be heavy, with none having less than two. There was also less focus on sports ultimates, with the majority having only one or two compared to the three that the mainline games had a majority of the time. They also tend to have more academic ultimates.
I think that this could be explained by looking at the types of people who make fangans. The majority of people I know who make fangans have very particular knowledge about certain fields due to experience or heavy research, and more often than not these fields do not include sports. They are more likely to make characters based on their experiences and knowledge that they can then insert into the story to make it seem more authentic.
I also, unsurprisingly, found that my "perfect" ratio was not reflected in many of the fangans I looked at. There was only one besides my own that followed that ratio.
Now, if my "perfect" ratio is not the mathematically perfect ratio, then what is?
According to the data collected for the canon games, this is.
This just so happens to also be the ratio for Trigger Happy Havoc.
According to the data collected from the fangans, this is the perfect ratio.
The only fangan that followed this ratio exactly was Akeda Amusements. V3 also had this distribution.
When considering both mainline and fan made games, the perfect ratio was this.
Ironically, not a single mainline game or fan game followed this ratio.
Out of curiosity, I also calculated the standard deviation for each data set.
Canon Danganronpa has little to no variation, conveying that talent ratios are quite consistent between games. The biggest variation would be in the novelty category, making sense as V3 scaled down the amount of novelty ultimates compared to the other two games.
The fangans are shown to have a much larger variation. Though I can't be surprised by this, as perhaps it is an unfair comparison. The mainline Danganronpa games were written by mostly the same team and had less to sample from, while the fangans have not only a larger sample size in which to deviate, but many different writers that think differently about talent distribution.
Final Thoughts
In putting this all together, I found that my classification system, while not perfect in any sense of the word, has some validity to it. If I wanted to, I could definitely make some improvements to it (especially in distinguishing between certain academic and practical fields from novelty), but as of now it works perfectly fine as an aide in cast creation for me.
My ratio is also not perfect, which was an expected outcome. Really none of the ratios I found are perfect, with none of them representing more than one or two of any mainline or fan made game. While ratios like the ones I found can be good for making sure you have a balanced distribution of talents, they aren't required to make a good cast. Personally, I'll continue using my personal "perfect" ratio as a baseline for any cast I make in the future.
I also had a lot of fun making this, and hope I can find a way to make more posts like this in the future. Thank you for reading this.
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Who are all of these people who are drowning in pro-Izzy content to the exclusion of all other characters and have they been in a fandom that actually has a ridiculous overrepresentation of some shitty guy? I see posts like this:
And the problem sounds a lot more like they are objecting to any Izzy content. Because I certainly can't find this overwhelming dominance. So fine. Let's see how popular Izzy is...
There are 12072 OFMD works on AO3 as I type this.
"Israel Hands" is character tagged in 5393 of them. That's 44.7%. Lower than I would expect, seeing as that includes every fic where he's the choice of villain as well as simply present or a focus. 122 of those are tagged "Major Character Death" (out of 225 in the whole fandom), and I suspect that's undertagged by people who don't think Izzy's fate is that important.
Comparably we have Lucius at 3560 (29.5%), Jim at 2226 (18.4%), and Oluwande at 1935 (16%). Lower than Izzy, yeah, but how many of those Lucius fics have him tagged just to get violently killed off or verbally wrecked and sent away for everyone else's happy ending? How many times does the crew show up untagged individually? I'm guessing the numbers of positive fics are probably a lot more equal... But let's see if we can look at this another way.
How about ships?
Izzy's ship fics are probably more likely to be pro-Izzy / significant content, yeah? So I'll break those down.
The most popular ship in the "Israel Hands" character tag is - to no one's surprise - BlackBonnet at 3183 (so 59% of "Israel Hands" character tagged fics, and 26.4% of all OFMD fics are tagged BlackBonnet + "Israel Hands"). I'd guess that number includes a lot of the "villain Izzy getting defeated" stories. Ships that actually have Izzy in them go:
Edward/Izzy at 1287 under "Israel Hands", 1374 (11.4%) total
Stede/Edward/Izzy at 762 under "Israel Hands", 812 (6.7%, probably with a good amount of BlackHands overlap) total
Stede/Izzy at 482 under "Israel Hands", 509 (4.2%, with overlap again) total
Izzy/Lucius at 477 under "Israel Hands", 514 (4.3%) total.
Lucius/Pete btw? 746 under "Israel Hands", 1188 (9.8%) total. Oluwande/Jim has 579 under "Israel Hands" and 1023 (8.5%) total. They both outrank every non-Edward/Izzy ship inside Izzy's tag, and are not far behind Edward/Izzy in total.
Another consideration I can attest to as a BlackHands reader... a lot of those Edward/Izzy fics are labeled "one sided" in various ways (which gets tag wrangled as the ship). 107 are just plain tagged "Unrequited Love". 94 have "One-Sided Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Israel Hands". Or they are toxic / abusive with a different ship endgame - BlackBonnet (tagged on 656 of them, with 389 as SteddyHands) or Izzy/Lucius (tagged on 70) or a negligible ship like Izzy/Frenchie or Izzy/Sam Bellamy.
These numbers are just NOT an overwhelming surge of fan attention. Izzy is not a third protagonist, no, but he's the most developed antagonist with easily 3rd or 4th most screentime / characterization. Having maybe 1/5 or less of the fandom content that you could call "focused" on him is not much or unusual or proof of bias 🙄 (the tag "Israel Hands-centric" is on 341 fics, or 2.8% of OFMD fics, "POV Israel Hands" on 176 so 1.5%, "Soft Israel Hands" on 107 or 0.9%... These are not big numbers).
Do people want to know where all that attention they think is owed to Jim or Lucius or Frenchie or Ivan and Fang is going?
8705 works tagged as BlackBonnet. That's 72.1% of all OFMD fics. Running the "otp: true" search for BlackBonnet ONLY fics pulls up 5764 results, so still 47.7%! Almost half of this fandom's content is ship fic that only covers the OTP without even tagged background ships.
"Blackbeard | Edward Teach" is character tagged in 9698 OFMD fics at 80.3% and "Stede Bonnet" is next in 8889 at 73.6%.
In the 1188 Lucius/Pete fics, BlackBonnet is tagged in 936 of them. That's 78.8% of all Lucius/Pete.
In the 1023 Oluwande/Jim fics, BlackBonnet is tagged in 788 of them. That's 77% of all Oluwande/Jim.
Those BlackBonnet numbers are insane. Fucking Destiel - the biggest ship on AO3, in a show insanely hostile to side characters - is tagged in 107526 fics of 268568 in the Supernatural fandom. That's 40%. You read that right. Less than half. Maybe some more recent tumblr darlings?
Catra / Adora from She-Ra hit 10248 out of 16141, so 63.5%. And they are canon.
Newer, but I've seen Dream / Hob Gadling surging and it's at roughly 500 (the tags need wrangling) out of 1743 in the Sandman (TV 2022), hitting 28.7%
Never watched The Owl House, but Amity Blight / Luz Noceda is the top ship at 7650 of 16277, so 47%. Pretty sure that one is canon too.
Stranger Things has 51424 works, with top ships Steve/Eddie at 10266 (20%) and Billy/Steve at 9046 (17.6%). Again, I don't watch, but I'm pretty sure these are a lot more accurate examples of minor character takeover ships, and Billy especially is the shitty white guy breakout with barely any screentime. Who has been dead for multiple seasons. And it's still beating Edward/Izzy's percentage significantly.
I'm sorry that your fave isn't getting the content you want. It sucks. But this supposed unfair focus on Izzy just does not exist at any level that would actually be impacting other character content.
Anyone complaining about it is not making a complaint about fandom bias grounded in reality.
And anyone who is proposing "solutions" for this lack of content (a questionable proposition already) better have the bulk of their list as "More BlackBonnet writers need to try branching out" or they are just making up reasons to complain about minor content focused on a character or ship they don't like.
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