#He's secretly plotting against Junko and Monokuma

[brainfilehasstoppedworking]

His room would definitely look like this after becoming a Mastermind LMAO. He's not really driven by despair but more of his own insanity and love for his son. (And thank you @artz16 for adding some ideas to my silly AU.)

[danganronpa-despairslab]

plot summary + spoilers !

Due to how long it’s been since the rewrite was conceptualized, I think it’s fair that people interested in this AU should finally get a rundown of the chronological plot, major spoilers, ect.

This is an incredibly rudimentary and undetailed summary and is mostly just the “why” and “how” behind every chapter of the AU’s story.

Origin of the Lab+ Chapter 0:

________

HPA makes a defunct effort to revive the Student council before the public can learn that they died. This is halted when the tragedy happens, until Junko finds the lab constructed for the project and decides to finish what the academy started. The first prototype experiment, Soshun Murasame, is physically unstable, but manages to escape. He is presumed dead, and Junko continues work on the rest of the council, eager to see what she can create.

The student council is revived with no memory of their deaths. They wake up one by one with new forms and try and work together to escape. However, their memories catch up to them and they remember the killing game and fall into despair one by one. Upon falling into despair, Junko places the Prototype experiments into stasis chambers in an old section of the lab. Kotomi Ikuta is the only prototype who does not fall into despair, because she died before the killing game began.

Throughout these events, Junko is exploring the Lab’s potential and expanding upon it with the help of her following (Ultimate Despair). The council is unaware of this. 

Chapter 1:

________

When the killing school life fails and the 78th class refuses to kill, Junko resorts to abducting and experimenting on her classmates one by one, and then keeping them in the lab. With the help of a now- “human” Monokuma, and her sister, the class is taunted with the fact that something terrible is happening to their missing classmates. 

Makoto Naegi is the last student unscathed and he convinces Mukuro to go against Junko. The two manage to start an uprising amidst staff and their classmates and attempt to escape the lab. They are unsuccessful and both Mukuro and Makoto are experimented on.

Chapter 2:

________

Junko is bored and makes a bet with Kamakura over which of the two can abduct and experiment on the most members of class 77-b (who are currently brainwashed members of Ultimate Despair). The loser will be erased of their memories, given a despair-inducing experiment, and kept in the lab. The game ends at a standstill until Junko takes out a wildcard- and revives Chiaki Nanami. Izuru Kamakura loses the bet.

During the game, a member of the Future Foundation is abducted and tested on, because the lab decides that she is a valuable source of information. The girl is nicknamed “Monomi”, and she was secretly developing an anti-despair formula. She uses this on class 77-b, and when Chiaki is revived, they snap out of despair upon seeing their classmate. Chiaki and the class has no memory of how they ended up in the lab, and Chiaki learns the truth by accessing old data files.

Izuru secretly snuck into the Future Foundation HQ and used a slow-acting formula on Ryota Mitarai before he officially “lost” the bet. Ryota is eventually taken to the lab as well. Ryota’s experimentation is the start of a long term plan to abduct and experiment on all the Future Foundation division leaders.

Chapter 3:

________

The V3 cast exists as class 79 in this AU. They avoided the tragedy by pure luck and are now in various positions in the Future Foundation or other organizations after the fact. Kaede Akmatsu and Rantaro Amami are Future Foundation Division leaders. Kokichi Oma and his organization, DICE, has quietly taken an important role in combating despair. 

Tsumugi Shirogane, a secret member of Ultimate Despair, approaches Junko with a proposition to capture and experiment on class 79 in order to drive Kokichi to despair and make him surrender. Junko is content with the idea and goes along. The class is abducted and placed in HPA, informed of their fate, and then dragged to the lab, one by one. In the end, Tsumugi is ratted out by the remaining students and her plan revealed. Ironically, Kokichi, the target of the ploy, is indifferent to the fates of his classmates but the lab hasn’t lost- Kokichi and two Future Foundation heads are now subjects. 

Chapter 4:

________

Monaca Towa learns that Nagisa is planning to betray the Warriors of Hope and decides to use the lab as a means of punishment. The WOH disappear one by one from their base until only Nagisa remains. He learns that they’ve been taken to the Lab, and decides to create a rescue plan. He brings along Komaru Naegi as “backup”, but she’s really just bait.  The two part ways in the lab, Nagisa is eventually captured. Monaca tricks the Warriors of Hope into “betraying” each other as a part of her revenge. They are oblivious to the fact that Monaca orchestrated the whole event.

 Komaru finds two escaped subjects and the three work together to navigate the facility. They are eventually captured, but the Lab (And Monaca) decides to keep her alive and turn her into an experiment.

Chapter 5:

________

Juzo Sakakura is increasingly suspicious of the disappearances of multiple Foundation leaders and agents. He attempts to take matters into his own hands, but quickly finds out too much, and is taken by Chisa Yukizome, who is acting on Junko’s orders. After yet another disappearance, the Foundation leaders try to find out what happened. One by one, they get too close to the truth, and once they learn about the lab, they’re taken until only one is left. Yukizome finishes the job by surrendering herself to the lab and becoming experiment #65.

[toxicpineapple]

tsumugi was right about one thing.

danganronpa was only ever a television show.

fifty years before "danganronpa v3" was created, the pilot of a tv show called "danganronpa: trigger happy havoc" aired, where teenagers were trapped in the prestigious hope's peak academy and forced into a killing game. the pilot ended with the execution of leon kuwata, the culprit everyone saw coming, but left a wide audience of people wanting more.

the first season ended with the defeat of junko enoshima, and that was going to be all, but there was such wide demand for a sequel that season two, "goodbye despair", was produced. it was acknowledged as much better than the first season, and fans were pouring in from all over the globe. it resulted in a spin-off series about the original protagonist's sister being made, called "another episode", as well as a large variety of side content, touching on other characters and other parts of the danganronpa universe.

the actor who played makoto naegi was enthusiastic about his role, but he was ready to move on to other things, so when the demand became strong for a third season, they made it the last one. it had three arcs, to be watched interchangeably, and told the story of hope's peak before, during, and after the tragedy. it wrapped up loose ends and gave the audience what they wanted: closure.

and then, the series was over. the actors who played main characters like naegi, kirigiri, and togami moved on to other roles. the danganronpa craze had ended. the world continued on, for everyone.

except for a select group of fans.

these fans were obsessed with the danganronpa series. they wrote fanfics, did art, created plushes and figurines and cosplayed (and made tiktoks) of all their favourite characters. they were standard fans, basically, except also? they weren't.

they wanted more. they wanted more killing games, more hope versus despair, more betrayals. they wanted to see more of the heart wrenching closing arguments, the panic time battles, the executions. what they wanted was more danganronpa.

(you can see where i'm going with this, right?)

what these fans wanted was for the show to air again. but what they wanted, perhaps even more than that, was for danganronpa to be real. they wanted to test if the formula would work. they wanted to see real executions, and real murders.

it just so happened that several of the people within this tiny, dark corner of the internet were extremely wealthy. they had scientists working for them who had the ability to create the technology to make such a thing possible. they had the land required to put the game. most importantly, they had teenagers, nameless and faceless, who would be perfect for a thing like this, because if they disappeared, well, nobody would notice, really.

in the beginning they were extremely hesitant to do it, but after a lot of debate, they decided they valued their killing game more than they valued human life. it had been this way from the beginning. none of them felt guilty for it, anymore, because they just viewed it as kinning. they, like junko enoshima, were just hungering for despair. it was all that mattered.

they had to go through several trial runs to perfect their technology. developing things like "flashback lights" and "exisals" and most of all, monokuma- well, it was impossible without a couple test runs. a lot of kids died in the process. but one of them, one of the first kids they took (the child of one of the sponsors, to tell the truth) kept surviving against the odds.

the name they chose for him was rantaro amami. after a couple failed attempts they decided to save him for their perfect game. there had never been an ultimate survivor before. amami would be the first.

their project gained traction in the dark web. humanity was, in their opinion, every bit as beautiful and ugly as they thought it was. they started to be contacted by people who wanted in-

(the one who came to be called tsumugi shirogane)

-by suicidal teenagers who wanted to be test subjects-

(the ones who came to be called korekiyo shinguji, himiko yumeno, and kokichi ouma)

-by teenagers who wanted to be a part of the game.

(the ones who came to be called kaede akamatsu, kaito momota, and shuichi saihara)

they suddenly had a wide variety of people to choose from.

and shirogane, well, she was the perfect mastermind. so plain she blended into the walls, but when she got passionate her eyes sparked and nobody could calm her down. she was as enthusiastic about danganronpa as any of them, perhaps even more so. when they offered her the opportunity, she jumped at it.

people like saihara, momota, akamatsu... they wanted to be in the final game. the polished one. they loved danganronpa so much, it didn't matter to them how, they just wanted to participate. they were even willing to die. excited about it, in a way that both disturbed and delighted the fans who had been a part of this project from the beginning.

those three were given main roles, promised they'd have part.

the ones who volunteered to be killed in testing? some of them were just so interesting, so attractive, so unique, it was hard to put them in a setting where they would most certainly die. they had no need for another survivor, amami would do just fine. but the ones who caught their eye (shinguji, who always wore a mask, ouma, who lied without thinking about it, yumeno, who was adorable in the exact way fujisaki and saionji had been while still reminding them of nanami) were put to the side too, because they were too valuable to sacrifice.

as for the other eight students, well, it turned out that japan had a high population of kids who didn't belong anywhere. who nobody loved.

kids from abusive homes, kids whose parents disowned them, kids who were rebellious and threatened to run away, kids who were so quiet they tended to disappear into the walls... it wasn't hard to find eight

eight teenagers who were perfect for the roles they wanted.

this danganronpa was to be mind blowing. it was to be better than anything the tv series had put out before. it was bigger than the tv series. it was real. everyone was real. nothing was scripted. they had a formula to follow and they knew how to make it happen, what props to use, but otherwise, everything was going to be raw and unedited. no one knew what would happen, and that excited them.

they put in a secret talent, a cult leader, a muscle character with a heart of gold. there was a maid who was secretly the prime minister. a tennis player who used his talent to kill. a misandrist aikido master. a selfish genius with a mind for dirty remarks.

for the sixteenth student, they wanted something extra special. a way of saying "thank you", to everyone who worked on the project. the solution? a robot, through whom the rest of their community could participate too. they created him specifically for the game, a vessel of sorts that had an endearing personality, something to use as a participation piece.

and after testing everything over and over again (over fifty kids died in the final tests) they were ready. their killing game began.

the first chapter was a bit rocky. shirogane (unfortunately) had to get a bit more involved than they wanted to, and then they had to sacrifice their golden boy, amami, which sucked because a lot of them had grown attached to him, as well as their protagonist, akamatsu, which was pretty terrible as well because they really did want her to live for a lot longer.

the rest of the game went without a hitch, though. toujo's reveal in chapter two and the subsequent indifference with which hoshi's death was regarded broke hearts everywhere. shinguji's face reveal did not disappoint, and yonaga's ritualistic body discovery (as well as the tragic sacrifice on the chabashira's part) played out perfectly. everything was perfect.

here's where we backpedal a bit, see. because even though these teenagers were invisible, there were a lot of them. and for them to suddenly disappear off the face of the planet? plenty of people were confused. plenty of people wanted answers. one journalist was brave enough to look.

smart enough, too. see, it all boils back down to the golden boy, "rantaro amami". he was fairly high profile for a time, having such a rich father. then for him to suddenly vanish, just as the other teens had? it was strange.

even weirder was that his father didn't seem to care. that was normal for billionaires, but the journalist thought he should at least pretend. he wasn't, and that was suspicious as hell! so she did some digging.

some digging turned into the discovery of all these genius scientists and other rich people he was affiliated with. some digging turned into the discovery of a plot of private land that nobody could get into, that was for some reason covered by a big blue dome, that was for some reason bought by the very billionaire whose son disappeared.

the journalist dug deeper. she found out about internet forums that required intense applications and surveys to get into. that required scans of her web history, her identity, even. they were so fishy, and no one had ever found them before. the billionaire was one of the people maintaining the servers.

he'd been mia, as of late, though, so it wasn't hard for her to hire someone and hack in. what she found was utterly depraved. she threw up four times discovering it.

thread after thread discussing the murder of children. real children. the ones who were missing, in fact. pictures of bodies. speculation about their deaths. jokes and theories and shipping dedicated to these children who were dead with a capital d.

all of this was happening, and it was being streamed at eight o'clock that night. so though she didn't want to, she watched the live stream, and she bore witness to the murder of the genius, iruma, after she had attempted to kill ouma.

(no way, a comment read, were they gonna kill ouma so soon. he's too popular!)

after a night of fitful sleep, she decided that she was going to infiltrate. and it was ironically quite easy.

a fake identity, bleached hair, a new haircut, contact lenses, and a southern accent disguised her plenty. she played the role of a murder obsessed college student brilliantly. she gushed about how much she wanted to help with chapter five, theorised about who was going to die and how, wrote extensive shipping posts and discourse blogs and-

of course they let her on. there'd be no account of this if they hadn't.

she spied and collected information through the entirety of chapter five, and when she had solid evidence of the murder of two teens, who were named ouma and momota within the series, she got out as quickly as she could, and went to report it to the police.

the police didn't buy it, though. they thought it sounded ridiculous. some kind of secret cult from the deep web that all these huge, rich names were a part of, that was reenacting an old television series? danganronpa hadn't aired in almost twenty years! she had to have been insane.

she was a journalist, though, and she wasn't going to let it end there. when the police rejected her report, she did what she did best: and wrote an article about it.

the "real" danganronpa television series was about halfway through their chapter six when somethijg was finally done.

see, after finishing danganronpa, the actor who played naegi moved on to a wide variety of roles. he enjoyed depicting the villain most of all. he thought it was loads of fun, and it never got old. he kept in close touch with his co-stars, even after all that time, because danganronpa shaped his acting career. he was successful and rich. extremely comfortable and happy with his life.

he had a good heart, too. so when he opened twitter one morning and saw that he'd been tagged in a post, he dropped his coffee.

a fan of his tweeted him saying:

"@[redacted]-- what the fuck, why are you letting this go on? this is fucked up"

and linked the article. after reading the whole thing several times over, scanning descriptions of the premises where the killing game was taking place and swallowing hard over pictures of the dead teens, the actor who played naegi retweeted it with a comment of his own,

("what the fuck. this is the first time i'm hearing of this. what the fucj.")

@/ed all of his co-star friends, and promptly called the police.

that night, the finale of the real danganronpa, which was called v3, aired.

the journalist, who was still very much involved with this case, logged on to her account, had the hired professional hack onto the news, and streamed the episode live.

people. went. crazy.

the cast of all the danganronpas were calling the police (and their agents, and their lawyers) to figure out what the fuck was going on.

they were also tweeting like mad.

hinata: "what the fuck is this??? holy shit this is so fucked up, why would you ever use danganronpa like this?"

enoshima: "WHY ARE THEY USING MY FACE THAT IS MY FUCKING FACE THIS IS MESSED UP"

fujisaki: "oh my god... oh my god."

komaeda: "says in the article she told the cops... bruh."

kirigiri: "those are real fucking kids. look them up theyre all in missing person reports. what the fuck."

naegi: "where the hell are they? im going there and busting them out myself. no cap."

he was a man of his word.

it didn't take long for the journalist to reach out to him, and when she told him the location, he hopped in his car, picked up the actress who played his sister (as well as all of their bodyguards) and broke traffic safety laws all the way there. they were followed, unquestionably, by police, but it didn't make a spot of difference to either of them.

on the tv, meanwhile, saihara was having the final battle. the very same kid who emailed them all those months ago, trying to see if he could take part in this game, was screaming at them about why they couldn't. he argued with such fervour, with such genuine pain, that something shifted in the hearts of the people in this community. they revoked their support, logged off the forum, sat back in their desk chairs and contemplated what they did.

shirogane didn't get the memo, though. remember earlier when i said she was more enthusiastic about danganronpa than any of them? she would never give up on it. on any of it.

and when kiibo destroyed the school...

around japan, people held their breaths. praying as hard as they could that saihara and harukawa and yumeno had survived.

outside, the actor who played makoto naegi swerved to a stop, and he and the actress who played his sister ran to the dome. he pounded on it with his fist while the police yelled for him to step back, but it was too thick to get through.

fortunately, in killing himself, kiibo (the robot who was designed as a puppet) blew a hole in the very top. he did it to save them. just as nanami exposed herself to save her friends in the second season.

the police brought in a helicopter, and minutes later, saihara, harukawa, and yumeno were free. when they saw the actor who played naegi, their initial thought was that it was all real- all of it, who they were, what they knew, but-

it wasn't. they weren't who they thought they were in that game. they were other people, different people.

and later, at the hospital, it was discovered that the neurological damage done to them with those flashback lights was permanent. which meant they would never be who they were, never again.

(startlingly, they were okay with that.)

a manhunt started, for everyone who was in some way involved with the atrocities that had been committed. they were thrown in jail, all of them, for the rest of their lives-

except, that is, for one of them.

the billionaire father of the one they called amami, with all of his money and his power, he managed to escape arrest. the public outcry was unbelievable, but that was hardly the worst of his problems.

no, the worst of his problems was the multi-billion dollar lawsuit he was stuck with from every. single. actor. who participated in the danganronpa project. leading the lawsuit was, naturally, the actress who played enoshima, who was disgusted at the use of her name and image in committing such disgusting acts. he was left billions in debt, bled completely dry, and after that, there was really nothing else he could do but lie down and die. (so he did.)

as for the three teenagers who survived the ordeal? well, harukawa's parents had never been good people, and nobody knew if saihara and yumeno even had parents, because nobody was stepping forward and obviously neither of them remembered, so in the end the three of them ended up being adopted by the very actor who played naegi.

it was hardly a happy ending. they were kidnapped by a massive cult that used its power and wealth to torture and kill hundreds of teenagers. it was a messed up operation from start to finish. and the three of them would never be the same people they once were.

but there was nowhere to go but forward, and saihara knew in his heart that his friends, each and every one of them, would want him to continue on. so he decided that that was what he was going to do.

despite everything that had happened, danganronpa was over. for good. it was the only reassurance going into the future, but for what it was worth... it was one hell of a reassurance.