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charlotte-buff · 2 years ago

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The Implications of Cospox

I know literally no one cares, but this idea has been bouncing around inside my head for a while now and I just need to get it out there.

[Spoilers for the entire Danganronpa series ahead. Stop reading, Moji, I swear to God.]

Okay, so.

The big twist of Danganronpa V3 is that all previous installments of the Danganronpa franchise are works of fiction in-universe. V3 is actually the 53rd season of the ongoing Danganronpa TV series which rather confusingly started out as a bunch of video games and animated shows before transitioning into a live-action format where real people really kill each other for real.

Shirogane Tsumugi, who is part of the production staff, proves this to the survivors during the final class trial by cosplaying as a bunch of characters from the first two games, most prominently Enoshima Junko, the franchise’s main villain. Because she has a condition called cospox that doesn’t allow her to cosplay as real people without breaking out in a rash, this supposedly demonstrates that the characters from previous Danganronpas are truly fictional.

Now.

It’d be easy to assume that Tsumugi is just lying about cospox to mess with the others and plunge them into Despair™︎. Considering all the other stuff that doesn’t quite add up – which is most of the stuff – it would in fact be very weird if she wasn’t lying.

So let’s get weird.

I propose that the only part of Tsumugi’s testimony that is 100% accurate and trustworthy is the existence of cospox. By extension, I also propose that all the Danganronpas before V3 are not just fiction, but rather distorted retellings of actual events.

The first clue that this is the case is the people Tsumugi cosplays as. She only cosplays as characters from Trigger Happy Havoc and Goodbye Despair, allegedly because those are the only ones Shūichi and the gang would be familiar with from the Flashback Lights. But why would Team Danganronpa have decided to only reveal the events of those two games to the participants of V3? If their goal was to prove that all of Danganronpa is fake, wouldn’t it have made more sense to have Tsumugi cosplay as everyone?

Simple. They couldn’t have Tsumugi cosplay as other characters because all those other characters – those introduced in Danganronpa 3, Ultra Despair Girls, and any of the light novels – were actually real people.

So only the following Danganronpa characters are for a fact known to be fictional: Akane, Aoi, Byakuya, Celeste, Chiaki, Chihiro, Fuyuhiko, Gundham, Hajime, Hifumi, Hiyoko, Ibuki, Izuru, Jill, Junko, Kazuichi, Kiyotaka, Kyōko, Leon, Mahiru, Makoto, Mikan, Mondo, Nagito, Nekomaru, Peko, Sakura, Sayaka, Sonia, Teruteru, Tōko, Ultimate Imposter, and Yasuhiro.

You know who this conspicuously doesn’t include, despite visibly being part of Tsumugi’s magical costume vortex? Ikusaba Mukuro, the other half of the original Ultimate Despair.

Why would Tsumugi choose not to cosplay as Mukuro in her Junko disguise even though she already has the appropriate clothes at the ready? Is it simply because Spike Chunsoft has never cared about Mukuro and consistently fucks her over at every opportunity?

Yes, but also no.

It’s because Mukuro was also real.

What does this all mean? Well, we’ve got an Ultimate Despair who is willing to orchestrate a killing game. And Matsuda Yasuke, the Ultimate Neurologist, still exists so erasing the contestants’ memories in preparation would be no problem. Mitarai Ryōta, the Ultimate Animator, also exists so that stupid mind control plot point from Danganronpa 3 is possible to execute as well.

In short: The biggest, most awful, most tragic event in human history actually happened in the V3 continuity, but Mukuro was the sole puppetmaster behind it instead of Junko.

Without the Ultimate Imposter’s positive influence, it probably would have been even easier for her to manipulate Ryōta and use his anime powers to recruit a bunch of random Hope’s Peak students as her underlings. With the exception of Hajime, the reserve course still exists so any one of the students there could have been picked to be the final candidate for the Hope Cultivation Plan in his stead – I’m placing my bets on Kuzuryū Natsumi becoming Kamukura Izuru considering she hated being confined to the reserve course even more than Hajime did – whom Mukuro then made out to be the culprit behind the student council’s mass murder, thus sparking the other reserve course students’ protests. And naturally, Monaca would have been easily available to mass manufacture killer Monokuma robots just like in the prime timeline.

The participants of the Killing School Life at Hope’s Peak Academy were whoever ended up as Mukuro’s pitiable classmates instead of our familiar class #78. While there is no Fujisaki Chihiro to develop Alter Ego, Gekkōgahara Miaya, the Ultimate Therapist, should be enough to still get a Neo World Program rolling. After all, in Danganronpa 2 it is said that programmers were among those who used their talents to spread Despair™︎ during The Tragedy even though the Remnants of Despair didn’t include anyone with programming skills (except maybe Kazuichi?), so someone at Hope’s Peak must have been up for the task regardless. Hell, let’s just say Mukuro told Monaca to develop a strong AI. She’s clearly smart enough.

Without Tōko and Genocide Jill to rely on and no Nagito to mess with the Demon Hunting game from behind the scenes, Komaru probably would have had a much harder time liberating Tōwa City. Maybe she teamed up with Yūta or Kanon or Takemichi or something. I don’t know. Why were all these people imprisoned in Tōwa City despite the reason for their imprisonment – their relationships to the Killing School Life contestants – not existing anymore? I also don’t know. I’ll figure that out another time.

By now you’re perhaps wondering: If all of this makes perfect sense and is definitely canon, why did Tsumugi bother to make up all that other shit? Simply put, because Tsumugi is Tsumugi.

She is absolutely obsessed with The Tragedy, that historic event she missed out on by virtue of being born too late. So she did what every teenager would do in this situation: Write fanfiction.

Junko is Tsumugi’s sparkly, edgy OC created to take the real Mukuro’s spot in her personal retelling of the events surrounding The Tragedy.

Think about it: She’s the secret twin sister of the woman who caused the apocalypse. She is prettier, smarter, bustier and more popular than Mukuro and has such an over-the-top, quirky personality that even the most unhinged individuals around her seem modest and composed in comparison. She is obviously the result of that special kind of flaming hot writing enthusiasm only found in teenage girls who spend way too much time watching anime. That’s why Mukuro ends up dying so early in Tsumugi’s version of the story, usurped by her very special original character who is so much better and cooler than the real deal in every way. That’s why Mukuro is so damn horny for Junko in Danganronpa 3.

Speaking of incest, we know that Tsumugi is into it in a major way. So why do you think she came up with Makoto, the big brother of the real-life hero of Tōwa City, and then had her other OC Tōko insist that they’re secretly in love with each other for the entirety of Ultra Despair Girls? Why did she invent Kanon’s cousin Leon just to claim she had a huge crush on him? Frankly it makes too much sense.

Tsumugi took those unprecedented real events that shook the world to its core and used them as the setting for her creative writing endeavors, replacing everyone involved she didn’t particularly care about, deemed too uninteresting or just inexplicably hated with wacky fictional characters like Sakura, Gundham or Genocide Jill.

The daughter of a yakuza boss who is also an artificially enhanced superhuman possessing every ability ever defeated Alter Ego Mukuro with the power of friendship inside a computer simulation? Nah, that’s nice and all but I don’t really like her vibe. What if instead that superhuman was a hot guy with an ahoge whom the Ultimate Gamer with big boobies immediately falls for and also his second identity had really long hair and red, glowing eyes? Let’s just turn that Natsumi chick into a side character who gets killed off-screen by someone whose first name isn’t even recorded because honestly, who gives a shit about her? I’m gonna write her a brother with a cool eyepatch though; that yakuza theme might not be a complete waste and also he can call her “Ultimate Little Sister”.

Is it any wonder then that a person like Tsumugi would eventually end up orchestrating her own killing game where she has full authorial control over every participant’s personality and behaviour from the get-go? This is exactly what she had always yearned for – a Danganronpa that reality cannot interfere with.

One last point I wanted to bring up: You know how Tsumugi insists that the participants of season 53 are nothing but fictional characters? Well, we know for a fact that she doesn’t actually believe that.

Because she broke out in cospox when she tried cosplaying as Kaede.

These people are real to her and not just simple playthings, whether she wants to admit it or not. Which makes how she treats them even more horrifiying.

#Danganronpa #Danganronpa V3 #Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony #Tsumugi Shirogane #Shirogane Tsumugi #cospox #I wonder what the cospox tag has been used for before #DRV3 #Junko Enoshima #Enoshima Junko #Mukuro Ikusaba #The sixteenth student lying hidden somewhere in this school... The one they call the Ultimate Despair... Watch out for her.#sorry old habit #Ikusaba Mukuro #NDRV3 #anything I forgot?#I hate putting the names in reverse order for the tags but what can you do?

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yeonchi · 3 years ago

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Kisekae Insights #24: GJ Club - how a spinon became a spinoff featuring Kyōya and Kasumi Shinomiya

(Art by 結城辰也)

The Kisekae Insights series has allowed me to bring the spotlight back on Waifu Network animes that I haven’t posted much about in the past due to lack of fanart or lack of interest. Like Hidamari Sketch in the last instalment, GJ Club will be no exception until I continue posting the usual content in my anime posts. Honestly, it was good while it lasted.

While Hidamari Sketch is a fairly popular and notable anime, GJ Club, sadly, isn’t. The anime was adapted from the light novel series written by Shin Araki and it only received one 12-episode season in 2013 and an OVA in 2014. Since it is a slice-of-life series, not much is known about the characters’ histories, which made it very easy to adapt into my personal project. All these factors coinciding with it being the 50th anniversary year of Doctor Who made GJ Club the perfect anime to adapt and expand on.

Background information

For some reason, the light novel has been a bit hard to find. In short, while you are able to read it online, the sources are unfortunately scarce.

From 2013 to 2015, NanoDesu Translations posted translations of the light novel. They published a PDF and EPUB of the first volume (which is available on archive.org) and translated up to Chapter 17 of the second volume. It was then abandoned for two years before Haraguro Scanlations picked it up. As of September 2018, they only finished up to Chapter 3 of the third volume (with the first chapter being translated by Shadowys on Baka-Tsuki) and there are no further updates after that, with the exception of a one-off chapter released in November 2020.

As of August 2021, however, all the original translations by NanoDesu seem to have been deleted from their site. All the translations are available on AsiaNovel, but there are no illustrations because the reader doesn’t seem to support images. If the images weren’t discarded in the code of the novels, then all they would need to do is add support for them and then they would appear.

There are 9 volumes and two special volumes for GJ Club along with 8 volumes and a special volume for its middle school spinoff. It’s honestly telling how popular the series was when the translators have all but abandoned it.

Shin Araki also wrote an additional spinoff to GJ Club, namely GE: Good Eater, and a sequel, namely KB Club. GE is set in a fantasy world with the characters being based off the characters of GJ Club, while KB Club turns everything meta by having both series be the creations of a high school light novel club, with the characters of GJ Club being based off the members of said club, right down to their names. Honestly, I’m not a big fan of that approach given how I’ve adapted GJ Club into my personal project. In the end, I guess we’ll never really know what happens in the novels, but at least we have this.

Watching the anime and listening to the character music was how I first realised that anime was sexist to males because of the female-centric focus in most animes. Kyōya only gets one character song in the series, and even then it’s a duet with Megumi. If that isn’t sexist to you, then I don’t know how I can convince you that a lot of animes are sexist.

In January 2015, I published two posts outlining my idea for an English dub of the series that also fits with GJ Club’s depiction in my personal project. The setting would be changed to London, England, specifically the areas of Chiswick, Ealing and Acton (where their school is located) and the characters would speak with British accents. The images in the original post are dead because I idiotically copied the images from the site instead of saving and reuploading them to the post, but since I’m grubbing for content anyway, I’m going to repost my character details as follows:

Kyōya: The protagonist of the series. When he started Year 10, he was kidnapped by the girls when he walked into an old school building, hoping to find the Culture Club. He moved to London from Manchester just before he started Year 7. His best friend outside the club is someone named Tesshin Yokomizo (横溝徹心) who is a local and not seen in the anime. In the GJ Club, he is nicknamed “Kyoro” and despite his spinelessness, he seems to have talent in dealing with the girls around him. His birthday is December 18. Due to a crisis involving his family during his childhood, he and his sister Kasumi were left in the care of a family guardian just before they moved to London, but she left when Kyōya started Year 10. It might have been that childhood incident that emotionally scarred him and left him spineless…

Mao: The Year 11 president of the GJ Club. Her family is rich and they live in a mansion in Ealing. She has a habit of biting and picking on Kyōya when she is bored or angry. She always reads books and watches shows without kissing scenes.

Shion: The only daughter in her family, Shion is an expert chess player with many brothers, all experts in some kind of activity. She speaks in a Birmingham (Brummie) accent because her mother and a few of her brothers were born in Birmingham. It is unknown if Shion was born in Birmingham herself.

Megumi: The calm and nice middle sister of the Amatsuka family. She likes knitting and she is always seen making tea and cakes in the club room. In the same year level as Kyōya.

Kirara: Born in Swansea, Wales, Kirara is the tallest and strongest member of the club. She speaks English in simple, monotone sentences. Welsh is her first language. Kirara can be seen eating meat, sometimes sharing it with Kyōya, but not with anyone else. She is afraid of spiders and has little tolerance to alcohol.

Tamaki: (voiced by Karen Gillan!) The newest member of the GJ Club when Kyōya becomes a Year 11 student. Like Kyōya, she is kidnapped and forced to join the club. Her nickname is “Tama”. Her family is from Glasgow and they run a Shinto shrine in Acton. She has several younger siblings.

Kasumi: Kyōya’s younger sister, who was born in Manchester. After a visit to the GJ Club, she becomes inspired to start a middle school division when she starts Year 7. She has a brother complex and she mistook Mao for being a primary school student when she met her. Her proficiency in Welsh is better than her brother’s, who can probably speak at a beginner level.

Geraldine: Shortened to “Jill”. She moved to Chiswick from Swansea to be with her sister, Kirara. She first met Kyōya at Ealing Broadway Station when she had difficulty buying a Tube ticket. She didn’t really understand how to use the ticket machine, so Kyōya went to help her. After this, Jill considered Kyōya her “samurai master”. Jill doesn’t speak English fluently, so she relies on her whiteboard to communicate with the others. She is as strong as her sister and she joins Kasumi’s GJ Club when she starts Year 7 in Chiswick.

Seira: The youngest sister of the Amatsuka family. Though she speaks in a typical London accent, she sometimes talks through her cat clip in Received Pronunciation (the Queen’s English/RP) using ventriloquism to state her true feelings to Kyōya, who she has a grudge against.

Mori: The maid of the Amatsuka family. She likes to ride a motorcycle. A running gag is her twirling before Kyōya much to his pleasure and annoyance to the rest of the club members. Sometimes, her mother takes her place without the family even noticing due to their identical appearance.

Kyōya, Kasumi and Momoka: The Brother, the Child and the Yandere

Normally in previous instalments, I would have described each character separately, but because their backstories are heavily intertwined, I will introduce them all at once in this section. Most of the backstory takes place around the Battle of Koshi Castle in December 2013 and during the Manchester Campaign of 2005-2013, which I have already covered in #15.

When Hiroki Ichigo’s twelfth incarnation was killed at Koshi Castle, he managed to escape in his TARDIS, where he regenerated into his new prototype, namely a four-year-old Kyōya. The TARDIS crashes outside North Manchester General Hospital on 11 December 2005.

Earlier, Hiroki and Akari’s gametes (along with those of Hiroki’s brothers and their families) were taken by Reona Yukawa and placed in the Progenitor so that they could breed super-soldiers out of them. When Takumi Kamijō and Kyōko Sakura manage to escape from their cells (saving Nodoka Manabe and Azusa Nakano in the process), he changes the destination of the baby about to be released into the Progenitor’s time portal. That baby was Kasumi, one of the super-soldiers grown from Hiroki and Akari’s DNA. She ended up at the same hospital as well and was about to be taken home by a couple when Girl Power killed them, resulting in Kasumi being taken by Akari and Shaun.

What remained of Hiroki was contacted by the spirit of Walpurgisnacht. Making a deal with her, Hiroki regenerated into his thirteenth incarnation, the female Momoka Mizutani. No, Momoka is not an OC for GJ Club, but she is based on the character of Apple Lam Chung-yan from the TVB drama A Great Way to Care II, played by Tavia Yeung. Momoka takes Hiroki’s TARDIS and heads to Salford, where with the help of Walpurgisnacht, she establishes a cha chaan teng café in the middle of a trading estate and hires a group of red drone Daleks as her workers, hiding their identities by having them disguise themselves as humans.

Over the next eight years, Momoka gets close to the new Shinomiya family by influencing them through Kyōya’s dreams to come to her café. Eight years later, on 11 December 2013, the Fourth and Fifth Doctors come in with their companions. When the Shinomiya family come in, a confrontation with Ayaka Kikuchi and her army ensues before Momoka transmats the Shinomiya family to a Dalek spaceship, where she prepares to execute them using the Yashio’ori. However, the Yashio’ori is sabotaged by the enemy army so that the laser beam would not charge.

As Ayaka and her army attack the Dalek ship, Momoka uses the Dalek-enhanced machine guns to fend them off. While two Doctors confront the Master, Momoka is killed by Girl Power officers, resulting in Walpurgisnacht taking over her body as she regenerates, maintaining her current appearance. Read #15 to find out what happens after this.

Once the Battle of Koshi Castle and the Manchester Campaign conclude, the Fourth Doctor helps Kyōya and Kasumi move to Chiswick in 2008. Five years later, the events of the GJ Club anime take place. During his time in Chiswick, Kyōya gets a job at the post office there and later, studies a double degree in Japanese Studies and Politics at SOAS in the University of London while also learning Cantonese, Mandarin and Welsh in weekend and evening courses (apparently he also wanted to learn Taiwanese but they weren’t running any courses, but that’s alright, he can always learn it somewhere else, which he presumably did).

On a side note, I volunteered myself to be Kyōya’s English voice actor, so I’ve practiced my Mancunian accent by watching actors like Christopher Eccleston, Stephen Tompkinson, Karl Pilkington and maybe a bit of Peter Kay as well. The only problem was that I’m not even sure that my accent is even Manc because I can’t tell if I’m getting it wrong and sounding like someone from Liverpool, Yorkshire, Newcastle or even Scotland. Oh well, that’s what happens when you really get into things.

I don’t buy expansion packs, I make my own (budget allowing)

So as I said, GJ Club only got one season and an OVA to go with it. Do Kyōya and the GJ Club make further appearances in the series? You bet your ass they do.

After being absent for much of the Next Gen Series in 2014, Kyōya and Kasumi receive a letter from their aunt, Narutaki, asking to meet in Hong Kong after their mother, Akari, went missing following the Siege of Ōsaka, only to be followed by Mao and the rest of the GJ Club, who learnt where he was going and managed to get on the same flight as them.

Narutaki, who had taken her Girl Power friends and established a rogue faction separate from the main group, takes the GJ Club to Nijō Castle, where she explains the background behind the Manchester Campaign and the events of Series 8 and 9. Soon after, Girl Power’s commander, Daniel, sends his brother, Nathan, out to find Narutaki. Kyōya tries to contact Hiroki, but he is unable to get through to him. Luckily, the TARDIS arrives and the Doctor and Hiroki help Angela and the others repel the attacking Girl Power forces. Some more things happen and by the end of the story, we learn that Kyōya and Mao are dating.

That Christmas, Kyōya and Kasumi head up to Manchester, but the Doctor briefly takes them and their friends back to Hong Kong for a picnic with Hiroki and the rest of the Zhuge family.

A few years later in 2018, the GJ Club and Momoka get a cameo at the start and end of the Gokaiger TV movie special. By this point in time, Momoka’s café in Manchester has expanded to many other branches around the UK and in Hong Kong.

The next year in 2019, Kyōya, Kasumi, Mao and Megumi are featured in a four-part adventure in Soulbound Series 3, helping the cast solve the mystery of Parker’s past and Shinbu’s origins. Two years after in 2021, Kyōya and Kasumi move to Hong Kong (along with the GJ Club) and join the Superhero Project as the new ShinkenRed and ZyuohTiger. You’d think Kyōya would be against violence given his harmless tendencies, but I suppose his character has developed over the years despite having abandonment issues.

So this has been the involvement of GJ Club in my personal project. It’s a shame the series wasn’t more popular or it could have gotten a second season, a manga, more (and frequent) translations of the light novel or hell, even a licenced release. This series is just like Sea Princesses in how popular it was, but despite the number of episodes the anime got, at least Shin Araki hasn’t abandoned the series (by putting it in a spinoff no less) unlike Fabio Yabu, who hasn’t made anything new for Sea Princesses since 2010 after getting more animated episodes than GJ Club did. On the other hand though, neglected series with little material has been good development fodder for my personal project as it allowed me to bring awareness to the existence of those series while also developing backstories and afterstories for them.

#kisekae insights #gj club #doctor who

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