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fyeah-bangtan7 · 4 years ago

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The Boundless Optimism of BTS

IT IS THE MORNING OF CHUSEOK, A KOREAN HARVEST FESTIVAL akin to Thanksgiving, and the members of BTS would normally be spending it with their families, eating tteokguk, a traditional rice-cake soup. Instead, Jin, 28; Suga, 27; J-Hope, 26; RM, 26; Jimin, 25; V, 24; and Jung Kook, 23, are working. Practicing. Honing their choreography. In a few days, the biggest musical act in the world will perform in the live-stream concert that, for now, will have to stand in for the massive tour they spent the first part of this year rehearsing. At this moment, they’re seated inside Big Hit Entertainment headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, the house they built, dressed mostly in black and white, ready to answer my questions. They’re gracious about it. And groggy.

Before I’m done speaking with them for this story, BTS will have the number-one and number-two songs on the BillboardHot 100, a feat that’s been achieved only a handful of times in the sixty-odd years the chart has existed. Their next album, Be, is weeks away from being released, and speculation about the record, the tracklist, the statement, is rampant across the Internet. BTS are, to put it mildly, huge.

There is something about complete world domination that can really cement a friendship. What jumps out at me as I connect with the members of BTS is their level of comfort with one another. Tension has a way of making itself evident—even over Zoom, even through a translator. There’s none to be found here. They are relaxed in the manner of family. Lounging with their arms around each other’s shoulders, tugging on each other’s sleeves, fixing each other’s collars. When they speak about one another, it is with kindness.

“Jimin has a particular passion for the stage and really thinks about performance, and in that sense, there are many things to learn from him,” J-Hope says. “Despite all the things he has accomplished, he still tries his best and brings something new to the table, and I really want to applaud him for that.”

“Thank you for saying all these things about me,” Jimin responds.

Jimin turns his attention to V, explaining that he is “loved by so many” and describing him as one of his best friends. Suga jumps in, sharing that Jimin and V fight the most among the group. V replies, “We haven’t fought in three years!” They tell me this distinction now belongs to Jin and Jung Kook, the oldest and youngest members. “It all starts as a joke, but then it gets serious,” Jimin says.

Jin agrees and recounts what their arguments sound like. “Why did you hit me so hard?” he says, before mimicking Jung Kook’s response: “I didn’t hit you that hard.” And then they start hitting each other. But not that hard.

Since the start of their careers, BTS have shown a certain confidence in their aesthetic, their performances, and their music videos. It’s right there in the name: BTS stands for “Bangtan Sonyeondan,” which translates to “Bulletproof Boy Scouts,” but as their popularity grew in English-speaking markets, the acronym was retrofitted to mean “Beyond the Scene,” which Big Hit has described as “symbolizing youth who don’t settle for their current reality and instead open the door and go forward to achieve growth.” And their affection with one another, their vulnerability and emotional openness in their lives and in their lyrics, strikes me as more grown-up and masculine than all the frantic and perpetual box-checking and tone-policing that American boys force themselves and their peers to do. It looks like the future.

“There is this culture where masculinity is defined by certain emotions, characteristics. I’m not fond of these expressions,” Suga tells me. “What does being masculine mean? People’s conditions vary day by day. Sometimes you’re in a good condition; sometimes you aren’t. Based on that, you get an idea of your physical health. And that same thing applies mentally. Some days you’re in a good state; sometimes you’re not. Many pretend to be okay, saying that they’re not ‘weak,’ as if that would make you a weak person. I don’t think that’s right. People won’t say you’re a weak person if your physical condition is not that good. It should be the same for the mental condition as well. Society should be more understanding.”

When I hear these words in October 2020, from my house in a country whose leader is actively trying to make the case that only the weak die of COVID-19, well, it sounds like the future, too.

IF YOU ARE JUST NOW CONSIDERING GETTING INTO BTS, IT IS natural to feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff. It’s a bit like saying, right this second, “Let’s see what Marvel Comics is all about.” In the streaming age, BTS have sold more than twenty million physical units across fourteen albums. Their multi-album concept cycles, The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, Love Yourself, and Map of the Soul, have unfolded over multiple records and EPs. There are collaborations with brands, including a BTS smartphone with Samsung. There is a series of short films and music videos, called BU, or BTS Universe, and an animated universe called BT21, in which they’re all represented by gender-neutral avatars. Their fan base, known as ARMY, is a global cultural movement unto itself.

“Dynamite,” their first English-language single and their first American number one, is pure, ecstatic pop. Shiny and joyful. What sets them apart from many of their peers, and many of the pop acts who achieved worldwide fame before them, is what came earlier. Beneath the sheen and the beats has always been an unflinching examination of human emotion. Their lyrics seek to challenge the conventions of society—to question and even denounce them. BTS’s first single, “No More Dream,” unveiled at their debut showcase in June 2013, concerns the intense pressure South Korean schoolchildren face to conform and to succeed. According to Suga, lyrics about the mental health of young people were mostly absent in Korean pop music. “The reason I started making music is because I grew up listening for lyrics that speak about dreams, hopes, and social issues,” he tells me. “It just came naturally to me when making music.”

Suga’s early ambition of making music didn’t involve him being in a group at all. About a decade ago, in his hometown of Daegu, the fourth-largest city in South Korea, he started recording underground rap tracks under the name Gloss, listening to and learning from the early works of songwriter and producer Bang Si-hyuk, known as Hitman Bang. Bang is the founder and CEO of Big Hit Entertainment. In 2010, Suga, a junior in high school, moved to Seoul to join Big Hit as a producer and rapper. Then Bang asked him to become part of a group, envisioning a hip-hop act with fellow new Big Hit recruits RM and J-Hope. The guys call this “season one” of their development.

“At that time, I don’t think our label exactly knew what to do with us,” RM says. “They just basically let us be and we had some lessons, but we also just chilled and made music sometimes.”

It got more intense. The family grew, occasionally by accident.

V accompanied a friend to a Big Hit casting call in Daegu for moral support and ended up being the person chosen from those sessions.

Jung Kook was signed in a feeding frenzy after being dropped from the talent show Superstar K, fielding offers from numerous entertainment companies before settling on Big Hit because he was impressed by RM’s rapping.

Jimin was a dance student and class president for nine years running at his school in Busan; he auditioned at the behest of his teacher.

And then, to hear him tell it, Jin got picked up off the street. “I was just going to school,” he says. “Someone from the company approached me, like, ‘Oh, this is my first time seeing anyone that looked like this.’ He suggested having a meeting with me.”

“Season two is when we officially underwent hard training,” J-Hope says. “We started dancing, and that’s how I would say our team building started.”

School in the daytime, training at night. “We slept during classes,” V says.

“I slept in the practice studio,” J-Hope counters.

Hitman Bang kept the pressure comparatively low. And he encouraged the guys to write and produce their own music, to be honest about their emotions in their lyrics. Suga is on record saying that no BTS album would be complete without a track that scrutinizes society.

And yet for their new album, Be, they’re putting that aside. Even this has a greater purpose that relates to mental wellness: RM, the group’s main rapper, says, “I don’t think this album will have any songs that criticize social issues. Everybody is going through very trying times right now. So I don’t think there will be any songs that will be that aggressive.”

Though the new rules of COVID-19 mean they can’t come here and promote Be, its first single might not have happened in the first place but for the pandemic. “ ‘Dynamite’ wouldn’t be here if there was no COVID-19,” says RM. “For this song, we wanted to go easy and simple and positive. Not some, like, deep vibes or shadows. We just wanted to go easy.”

Jin agrees. “We were trying to convey the message of healing and comfort to our fans.” He pauses. “World domination wasn’t actually our plan when we were releasing ‘Dynamite.’ ” World domination just happens sometimes. You get it.

MAP OF THE SOUL ONE AIRED VIA THEIR ONLINE FAN PLATFORM and attracted almost a million viewers across 191 countries. The guys say they tried not to think about the enormousness. J-Hope adds, “I felt a little bit more nervous knowing that this was being broadcast live. I actually feel less nervous performing live at a stadium.” Jin replies with a smile, “J-Hope, born to perform at a stadium.”

The graphic layout of the title throws a colon between the final N and E, which makes it look like Map of the Soul On: E, and as I watch it live, as I do in my office at 3:00 a.m. with noise-canceling headphones and a steaming pot of coffee, it feels a lot like I’m watching Map of the Soul on E. It is an explosion of color and fashion and passion, over four gigantic stages, from the boozy swagger of “Dionysus” to the emo-trap introspection of “Black Swan.” Not a step, not a gesture, not a hair is out of place. If there were nerves, they didn’t come through.

There is also, at the end of Map of the Soul One, an intimate version of their 2017 track “Spring Day,” which encapsulates what’s really made BTS stand out. On the surface, it’s about nonspecific love and loss, about yearning for the past. “I think that song really represents me,” says Jin. “I like to look to the past and be lost in it.”

Fair enough, but there is an undeniable allusion, in both the song’s video and its cover concept, to a specific incident in recent South Korean history. “Spring Day” was released just a few years after the sinking of the Sewol ferry, one of the country’s biggest maritime disasters, in which a poorly inspected, overloaded ferry toppled in a sharp right turn. Hundreds of high school students drowned, having obeyed orders to stay in their cabins as the boat was going down. According to some reports, the South Korean government actively tried to silence entertainers who spoke out against it, with the Korean Ministry of Education fully banning the tragedy’s commemorative yellow ribbons in schools. I ask whether it was about a specific sad event, and Jin tells me, “It is about a sad event, as you said, but it is also about longing.” The song kept the disaster front of mind for young Koreans and for the media, indirectly leading to the impeachment and removal of then president Park Geun-hye.

If an overburdened, undermaintained, slow-moving vessel capsizing because of a reckless rightward turn strikes you as somehow symbolic of the country in which BTS are about to explode even further, you won’t hear it from them. “We’re outsiders—we can’t really express what we feel about the United States,” says V. But their actions speak volumes; in the wake of the George Floyd murder and subsequent protests in America, the group made a $1 million donation with Big Hit Entertainment to Black Lives Matter, one that was matched by BTS ARMY.

The fans offer a fascinating inversion of stan culture: Rather than bullying rivals like many other ardent online fan bases do, ARMY have put the positive message of the music into action. Their activism goes deep. Through micro-donations, they’ve regrown rain forests, adopted whales, funded hundreds of hours of dance classes for Rwandan youth, and raised money to feed LGBTQ refugees around the world. Where pop fans a generation ago might have sent teddy bears or cards to their idols for their birthdays, where five years ago they might have promoted a hashtag to get a video’s YouTube viewer count up, for RM’s twenty-sixth birthday in September, international fan collective One in an Army raised more than $20,000 for digital night schools to improve rural children’s access to education during the COVID-19 crisis. ARMY may have even entered the conversation around the 2020 presidential election when hundreds of thousands of Tulsa Trump rally tickets got snapped up online in June. The event’s actual attendance was pathetically low. No particular person or entity claimed credit for this top-notch trolling, but a video urging BTS fans to RSVP to that rally did get hundreds of thousands of views. We have no choice but to stan this fan base.

The relationship is intense. “We and our ARMY are always charging each other’s batteries,” RM says. “When we feel exhausted, when we hear the news all over the world, the tutoring programs, and donations, and every good thing, we feel responsible for all of this.” The music may have inspired the good works, but the good works inspire the music. “We’ve got to be greater; we’ve got to be better,” RM continues. “All those behaviors always influence us to be better people, before all this music and artist stuff.”

Yet for every devoted member of BTS ARMY, there is someone who’s looked right past BTS. Jimmy Fallon, whose Tonight Show hosted the group for a full week this past fall, was one of those people. “Usually if an artist is on the rise, I hear about them ahead of time. With BTS, I knew they had crazy momentum, and I’d never heard of them.”

Here’s a thought that used to be funny to me: There were members of the live audience of The Ed Sullivan Showon February 9, 1964, who weren’t there to see the Beatles. Elvis was in the Army, Buddy Holly was gone, and the three number-one albums in the months before Meet the Beatles! were an Allan Sherman comedy record, the West Side Story original cast recording, and Soeur Sourire: The Singing Nun. America had left rock ’n’ roll behind for the moment, and with the culture aimless and fragmented, it wasn’t quite sure what to pick up in its place. It is possible to imagine that a youngish, reasonably hip, and culturally aware human being might cop a ticket to that week’s show, settle into his seat, and say, “Bring on a medley of numbers from the Broadway musical Oliver! and banjo sensation Tessie O’Shea.”

The instinct is to laugh at that guy, and it’s a good instinct, because what a dope.

And then you become that guy.

Sometimes there is a whole universe alongside your own, bursting with color you’re too stubborn to see, bouncing with joy you think is for someone else, with a beat you thought you were finished dancing to. BTS are the biggest thing on the planet right now, yet the job of introducing them to someone new, particularly in America, seems like it’s never done. Maybe it’s because they are adored by screaming teenagers and we live in a society patriarchal enough to forget that screaming teenagers are nearly always right. Maybe it’s the cultural divide, in a moment when our country is unashamed enough of its own xenophobia to get openly bent out of shape when it has to press 1 for English. Maybe it’s the language barrier, as though we understood a single word Michael Stipe sang before 1989.

Whatever the reason, the result is that you might be missing out on a paradigm shift and a historic moment of pop greatness.

IF BTS SEEM A BIT CAUTIOUS WITH THEIR WORDS PUBLICLY, IT’S because—perhaps more than any other massive pop act in history—they have to be. Shortly after our second meeting, BTS were given the General James A. Van Fleet Award by the U. S.–based Korea Society for their outstanding contributions to advancing relations between the United States and Korea. In his acceptance speech, RM said, “We will always remember the history of pain that our two nations shared together, and the sacrifices of countless men and women,” as seemingly diplomatic and innocuous a statement as he could have made. But because he didn’t mention the Chinese soldiers who died in the Korean War, it didn’t go over well. The Samsung BTS smartphone disappeared from Chinese e-commerce platforms, Fila and Hyundai pulled ads in China that featured the group, the nationalistic newspaper Global Times accused them of hurting Chinese citizens’ feelings and negating history, and the hashtags “BTS humiliated China” and “there are no idols that come before my country” began trending on the social-media site Weibo. The pressure is not small.

Even as the number-one pop group in the world, even with their hard work day in and day out, even with tens of millions of adoring fans redefining the concept of “adoring fans” by literally healing the planet in their name, these guys still suffer from impostor syndrome. RM explains, “I’ve heard that there’s this mask complex. Seventy percent of so-called successful people have this, mentally. It’s basically this: There’s this mask on my face. And these people are afraid that someone is going to take off this mask. We have those fears as well. But I said 70 percent, so I think it’s very natural. Sometimes it’s a condition to be successful. Humans are imperfect, and we have these flaws and defects. And one way to deal with all this pressure and weight is to admit the shadows.”

The music helps. “When we write the songs and lyrics, we study these emotions, we are aware of that situation, and we relate to that emotionally,” J-Hope says. “And that’s why when the song is released, we listen to it and get consolation from those songs as well. I think our fans also feel those emotions, maybe even more than us. And I think we are a positive influence on each other.”

If there’s one thing they’re sacrificing, besides free time and the ability to speak freely without the Chinese foreign ministry releasing an official statement, it’s a love life. I ask about dating, broad questions like “Are you?” and “Is there time?” and “Can you?” and the answer to all of them is pretty clear: “No.” “The most important thing for us now is to sleep,” Jung Kook insists. Suga follows right up with “Can you see my dark circles?” I cannot, because there are none, because flawless skin translates even over Zoom when there’s an ocean between us.

So they’re not, at least publicly, having romantic relationships with anyone. If there is a strong relationship that’s guided their journey into adulthood, it’s with Big Hit. “Our company started with twenty to thirty people, but now we have a company with so many employees,” RM says. “We have our fans, and we have our music. So we have a lot of things that we have to be responsible for, to safeguard.” He considers it for a moment. “I think that’s what an adult is.”

“Our love life—twenty-four hours, seven days a week—is with all the ARMYs all over the world,” RM adds.

In a world that is determined to sand down anything that isn’t immediately recognizable to the average pop-music fan, when it comes to acquainting you with Korean culture, BTS very much do not wanna hold your hand. While the first song on night one of their Tonight Show week was a joyous but expected take on “Dynamite” with Fallon and the Roots, they took some chances during their second performance.

As a friend of mine, a thirty-three-year-old BTS fan in Los Angeles, told me, “The second song they performed was ‘IDOL,’ ” from 2018’s Love Yourself: Answer, “and it celebrated their Korean identity. They performed it in Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul. They wore clothes inspired by traditional dresses called hanboks;it was almost entirely in Korean, so it felt super subversive. As a fan, I read it as: ‘Dynamite’ was an invitation, and this is who we are and this is our home.”

“I was a little concerned that people might not understand,” Fallon says. “I was like, ‘There’s nothing in English here.’ But what you see is just pure star power. Pure talent. Immediately, I thought, Oh, this is everything. If you’re that powerful, it transcends language.”

American popular music in the twenty-first century is more fragmented than it has been since . . . well, since Allan Sherman, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, and the Singing Nun battled for that number-one spot. The monoculture that the Beatles helped bring on has breathed its last breath. Each of us is the program director for our own private radio station, letting our own past habits and streaming-service algorithms serve up something close to what we want. Which is great, except that huge moments can whiz right past our ears. Each of us, even if we’re more clued in than our parents were when they were our age, can miss some era-defining, excellent shit. Particularly if the radio is our Spotify Discover Weekly, or the Pandora channel based on the band whose T-shirts we wore in college. We can let a moment pass us by if prime time is a Netflix binge, and the Tonight Show hour is spent on one more episode before bed. But we shouldn’t. “Honestly, I think it’s history that we’re living through with BTS,” Fallon says. “It’s the biggest band I’ve seen since I’ve started late night, definitely.”

THERE IS ALSO THE SMALL DETAIL THAT, UNLIKE THE BEATLES AND literally every other worldwide sensation to break in America, BTS don’t particularly need to go to the trouble. They are massive all over the world. Thanks to the recent IPO of Big Hit Entertainment, of which each member is a partner, they are all now incredibly wealthy. (Hitman Bang is the first South Korean entertainment mogul to become a billionaire.) What good is a culture in decline to a pop act this much on the ascent? “When I dreamed of becoming an artist, I listened to pop and watched all the awards shows in the United States. Being successful and being a hit in the U. S. is, of course, such an honor as an artist,” says Suga. “I feel very proud of that.”

They’re breaking out in a country that either worships them or fails to notice them. So do they feel like they’re getting enough respect in America? “How can we win everyone’s respect?” Jin asks. “I think it’s enough to get respect from people who support us. It’s similar everywhere else in the world. You can’t like everyone, and I think it’s enough to be respected by people who really love you.”

Suga agrees. “You can’t always be comfortable, and I think it’s all part of life. Honestly, we are not used to getting a ton of respect from when we first started out. But I think that gradually changes, whether it be in the States or other parts of the world, as we do more and more.”

There is, without a doubt, one colossal, unmistakable sign of respect for a musician: a Grammy. They’ve been nominated only once, and even then it was for best recording package. But their sights are set on a big one next year. RM puts it out there: “We would like to be nominated and possibly get an award.” Dragging the hoary, backward-looking, and Western-focused Grammys into the gorgeous, global world of the present through sheer force of will, talent, and hard work? Stranger things have happened. “I think the Grammys are the last part, like the final part of the whole American journey,” he says with a smile. “So yeah, we’ll see.”

The Recording Academy’s seal of approval is one thing. But BTS have already conquered the world, clowned tyrants, inspired individual fans to perform the small and achievable acts of activism that have collectively begun to save the planet, challenged toxic masculinity by leading with vulnerability, and, along the way, become bajillionaires and international idols. Whether the Grammys are paying attention matters about as much as what an Ed Sullivan audience member expected to see that night in 1964. BTS have already won.

#bangtan #jungkook #jimin #v #suga #jhope #jin #rm #o:esquire #o:interview #201123

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commentaryvorg · 5 years ago

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Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Bonus 3.2 - Dangan Salmon Team (Still Kaito Edition)

This is postgame content, so people shouldn’t be reading this without having already finished the main game anyway. But just to be safe: while this is non-canon character stuff, I will sometimes be mentioning events that happened in the main story, so there will be spoilers for the main game.

[If you’ve found yourself here on this post because I linked to it elsewhere while talking about Kaito and friendship, the stuff I was most likely referring to is discussed in the “Hangout invitations” section.]

Last time on Love Across the Universe: Dangan Salmon Team (did you know that SPACE), we covered all of what the game calls “dates” – but that I insistently called “hangouts” because fuck the romantic undertones of this mode – with Kaito. Yes, all forty-five of them. Yes, I had something of at least some substance to say about close enough to all of them that it didn’t feel right leaving out only the tiny few for which I kind of didn’t. Kaito is the best and is almost always being at least an adorable dork but also so often a fascinating and complex character even in silly bonus fluff like this – especially when it involves him hanging out with Shuichi, who is after all the focal point of most of his issues.

This time, we still have plenty more Kaito content from this mode to cover, including the best part!

Let’s warm up with some opening acts before we get to the main event, though. Aside from the actual hangouts we did last time, there’s some other little snippets of dialogue in this mode that may seem straightforward and inconsequential but that I still have stuff to say about. When I said I’d be covering practically everything Kaito says in this mode, I wasn’t kidding.

FTE invitations

So obviously I’ve already done Kaito’s FTEs, and the game remembers that and won’t have them happen again for me in this mode (which is just as well, really, because his final one definitely belongs in its canon context of chapter 4!). But there are still unique lines that Kaito has in this mode for if Shuichi chooses to hang out with him for what would be an FTE.

Kaito: “You came to invite me, right? Well of course! You’re my sidekick!”

- Spend time with Kaito

Kaito: “Today I’m going to tell you about the best places in the universe for adventures. I guarantee it’ll light a fire in your heart for the universe!”

Shuichi: (We discussed the most adventurous places in the universe…)

Look at Kaito excitedly telling Shuichi about SPACE. But it’s also very him that he’s not telling Shuichi facts about space or anything more scientific – this is apparently about the best places in space to have adventures. Which is to say, tiny Kaito who had all his totally-true heroic adventures on sea and on land definitely also thought a lot about what kinds of heroic adventures he would be having when he got into space, and he’s telling Shuichi all about those now. What a dork.

Kaito: “Oh, this is perfect! I wanted to talk to you!”

- Spend time with Kaito

Kaito: “Just what I’d expect from my sidekick! Let’s talk it out, man-to-man! You understand? Don’t tell this stuff to the others.”

Shuichi: (Kaito and I had a heart-to-heart between men…)

This one is really curious. It sounds on the surface like Kaito is referring to something like talking about what girls they like, or some other gendered, stereotypically masculine thing. But since that was never what Kaito’s concept of manliness was ever about, that cannot possibly be what’s happening here.

Based on Kaito’s actual concept of manliness having a focus on being true to yourself and open about your intentions, I’d want to think that his idea of a “man-to-man” talk would involve something along the lines of him and Shuichi being open with each other, and therefore talking to each other about… their emotions and issues and problems? That does fit as something that he’d hypothetically not want Shuichi to tell anyone else about, but, that is definitely not what happened either for obvious reasons.

I honestly don’t think that Kaito ever sees himself hiding his weakness as him compromising his idea of being a “man”, though. The “being true to yourself” concept is less about how you feel and more about who you are, or at least who you want to be. And of course Kaito doesn’t want to be weak and struggling, so the fact that he maybe is is totally irrelevant and definitely not something that a “man” would need to actually open up about, not when he should be focusing on being the inspiring hero he wants to be. It’s kind of like how him denouncing Kokichi for putting a mask over his true face in trial 4 really wasn’t actually that hypocritical – because Kaito may have been hiding his weakness, but he was never hiding his intentions, which were to help everyone around him as much as he could.

So ultimately I’m not entirely sure what Kaito would actually think of as a “man-to-man talk”, especially one that he doesn’t want Shuichi telling anyone else about. Which leaves me very confused as to what kind of conversation he and Shuichi did have here.

Kaito: “Hey, I was looking for you, man! We’re gonna hang out today, right?”

- Spend time with Kaito

Kaito: “A sidekick wouldn’t pick anyone besides the hero. That’s just crazy! Well, now that I’m thinking about it, sidekicks…”

Shuichi: (I listened to Kaito’s thoughts about sidekicks…)

Dammit, don’t fade to black there, game, I am itching to hear Kaito’s thoughts about sidekicks! Obviously I’m already perfectly aware of exactly what he thinks about them, but it’s still not something that Kaito himself has ever explicitly talked about. It’d be really interesting to hear him describe his idea of a “sidekick” in his own words! Why would you tease us by telling us a conversation about this happened but then not show it to us.

Kaito: “Why the long face? You wanna talk about something?

- Spend time with Kaito

Kaito: “My sidekick’s worries are mine. My worries are my sidekick’s! Talk to me about anything, man! Don’t keep any secrets from me!”

Shuichi: (I spent the whole time asking Kaito for advice…)

Of course this is here. Of course there’s at least one instance of Kaito immediately assuming Shuichi needs something and offering support before Shuichi’s even said anything yet.

Given that there’s nothing in the general context of this situation that would make Kaito be super desperate for Shuichi to need his help like in chapter 4, and that Shuichi does end up asking him for advice here apparently without any resistance, I’m going to assume Kaito’s judgement this time was correct and he picked up that Shuichi genuinely was feeling down and needed a boost. But the reminder of Kaito’s tendency to do this before even being asked for help is fun. The line between him being selflessly supportive and him being dysfunctionally co-dependent is a thin line, but both sides of it are excellent.

Also here’s another reprise of “Your worry is my worry; my worry is your worry”, or close enough anyway, which is still every bit as delightfully false and hypocritical as it was before. (Except Kaito is actually just saying “your worry is my worry” twice over, so there’s nothing false or hypocritical about it at all, right?)

Gift dialogues

While I’m here pretending to do FTEs with Kaito, it also means I get to give him presents and it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t like them. His responses for gifts he likes are fairly straightforward enthusiastic gratitude, but it is interesting to see how he reacts when he’s given something he doesn’t particularly care for.

(These bits of dialogue for FTE gifts aren’t unique to this mode, of course, but it wouldn’t have been very canon to bring the negative ones up during the main story.)

Kaito: “Huh? What’s this? Where’d you get it? Well, if it’s a gift from you, then I’ll totally accept it.”

This is a pretty cute response – he doesn’t care about the thing at all, but Shuichi gave it to him out of thinking he’d like it, so he’ll keep it anyway just as a token of the fact that his sidekick wanted to give him something nice. (Or, these lines also apply to Kaede giving him gifts, but he respects her a lot, so it’d be the same sentiment with her, too.)

On the other hand, sometimes you can catch him with a less optimistic outlook about this…

Kaito: “You’ve got a bunch of stuff, huh? You’re not just trying to unload some garbage on me, right?”

It’s really interesting – and kind of sad – that Kaito thinks Shuichi might actually be doing that. Surely he’d believe in how much his sidekick cares about him and that Shuichi would have carefully thought about each gift, even if sometimes he’s mistaken in what Kaito would like? But apparently it can at least cross Kaito’s mind that Shuichi really might callously unload random stuff on him without caring.

Kaito: “Are you kidding me? What am I supposed to do with this? What’s up with you? This isn’t like you, man!”

This kind of reaction, even though it’s a more negative response to the gift, is Kaito being more reasonable. He expected his sidekick (or Kaede) to know better than to give him something he obviously wouldn’t like, but he’s just putting it down to them having a lapse of judgement while meaning well.

Kaito: “Did you really think I’d like something like this? C’mon, man… Are you making fun of me? Nah, you wouldn’t, but…”

But again, sometimes… apparently it’s possible for Kaito to think that Shuichi could just be making fun of him. He brushes the thought off as not like Shuichi, but then he lingers on the “but”, suggesting it’s still what he’s thinking even if he doesn’t want to admit it to himself.

The fact that he’s capable of thinking that really brings to mind his “Aren’t you my sidekick? Was that… just a lie?” from trial 4 that implied a tiny part of him has always been afraid that Shuichi was only ever playing along with the whole sidekick thing while secretly mocking him. Which is a mindset that doesn’t really apply in this bonus mode in which Shuichi hasn’t been effortlessly saving everyone in trials and so Kaito has no obvious reason to feel inferior… but keep in mind that these gift dialogues were originally written for the main game.

(Kaito, if you’re worried about this, just talk to Shuichi about it, he would immediately be more than happy to reassure you that he’d never do that to you. But no, of course Kaito cannot possibly be worried about anything, and so he’d just not say a word and let that worry build up and eat away at him and goddammit Kaito.)

This idea that Kaito would briefly think the gift-giver might be making fun of him also works well enough for Kaede, who is basically as dismissive of his overblown Kaito-ness as anyone else is in chapter 1, and whom Kaito also looks up to and probably secretly feels a little inferior to thanks to her being a better leader than him.

During this bad-gift-giving session, I learned something about the emotional support robot orca which makes me Very Disappointed (see the linked post if you haven’t already for context about this). Turns out it’s not actually a hated gift for Kaito after all; it’s just a neutral one. The third comment of Kaito’s that I just quoted can in fact apply to a neutral or a hated gift, and I guess the chart that I was using for reference got that comment when they gave him the orca and assumed it was hated. I spent a very long time throwing orcas at Kaito to confirm this.

(And yes, you’re welcome for the mental image of Shuichi doing literally that. Maybe he’s trying to not-so-subtly imply that he wants to help and support Kaito with his problems, too. Not that Shuichi would ever realise Kaito has problems without some kind of outside spurring, so this wouldn’t actually happen (yet), but.)

…I am even more sad about the orca not being a hated gift after a reader went and drew actual fanart about this because of me, for what has turned out to be just a totally mistaken assumption on my part. Can we just pretend Kaito hates getting one anyway? It makes so much in-character sense for him to do so, and apparently I was not the only one who really liked being able to think of it as a thing. And it would fit perfectly in particular for Kaito to respond with the fourth and most negative of the above quotes when being given one by Shuichi – because that’s Shuichi implying he realises Kaito needs support, meaning, surely, that Shuichi really was just lying about being his sidekick and actually was secretly looking down on him and making fun of him this whole time? Damn it, writers, why did you not realise this should be a thing when deciding on Kaito’s gift preferences. I’m at least glad that the chart I used hit the one-in-three chance of mistakenly labelling this gift as hated so that I could accidentally make this a thing.

During some other testing I did to confirm this, I also discovered that a gift called the Death Flag gives most characters a reaction even worse than the regular bad gift dialogues. This is more than just something they dislike and don’t want; the act of giving it seems to be taken as an insult. It is, after all, basically as if the giver is callously telling them they’re going to die.

Kaito: “Hey… we can still pretend it was just a joke, so put that away.”

Seeing Kaito’s line for this when I wasn’t expecting it kind of punched me in the gut. It’s more subtly hostile than he ever usually is. He really does not want to get angry at Shuichi, but he’s probably worried he’s about to if they don’t immediately pretend this never happened.

(And, uh, remember this line was originally written for the canon storyline, for half of which Kaito knew he was dying. …Not that Shuichi would ever actually genuinely try to imply that he thinks Kaito is going to die, what the hell, I feel kind of terrible for making him do this.)

Anyway let’s stop being unkind to Kaito in a way that’s obviously out of character for Shuichi just to see how he reacts, and move on.

Hangout invitations

There’s also some more little snippets of dialogue I discovered in this mode – turns out there’s a mechanic in which characters whose FTEs you’ve maxed will occasionally show up at Shuichi’s door on their own to ask him for a hangout. (Unfortunately, the character just appears in Shuichi’s room without there being any kind of doorbell-ringing first, meaning you sadly don’t get to learn that it’s Kaito who’s about to invite you out before you even see him based on how enthusiastically the doorbell just rang.)

Kaito: “You free right now, man? I just really feel like talking to you.”

Kaito was the first character this happened with while I was playing, and it really made me smile. Obviously I knew that this was just a mechanic which could apply to any character, but still. This is Kaito being the one to initiate spending time with Shuichi – but in a way that’s not in the hero-and-sidekick context of Kaito wanting to help Shuichi with his problems. He doesn’t mention that here at all, even though you know the writers totally could have made this bit of dialogue about that, too. Kaito’s realised that he also enjoys just spending time with Shuichi as a friend and wanted to do that! That’s actually a really big deal coming from him.

On the other hand, alternatively (there’s two randomly-picked lines he can have if this happens):

Kaito: “Alright, Shuichi! Let’s hang out! Well, you don’t really have a choice but to spend time with me, right?”

…this one is quite a bit more pushy. (Remember, he has shown up at Shuichi’s door uninvited to ask to hang out here.) It almost seems like Kaito is worried Shuichi might not want to hang out with him as his friend rather than his sidekick and is covering that up by insisting that obviously Shuichi couldn’t possibly want to do anything else.

- Accept

Kaito: “Yeah! No way my sidekick would hang out with anyone but me!”

His response if you accept (which seems to always be this regardless of which initial line of dialogue you got) comes across as kind of needy, too. As does his “A sidekick wouldn’t pick anyone besides the hero” back in the FTE invitations, for that matter. It’s like he’s telling himself that as the hero to Shuichi’s sidekick, he gets automatic Hero Privileges above all of Shuichi’s friends. Which he sort of does, but that’s because them being hero and sidekick already means that they’re particularly close friends. It’s not because it’s a separate thing from a friendship.

But… Kaito seems to kind of think it is. Even though he wants to hang out as friends, Kaito assumes that the only reason Shuichi accepts is because he’s his sidekick. As though, if Shuichi weren’t his sidekick, he’d have no reason to want to spend time with Kaito at all.

- Politely decline

Kaito: “If you’re busy, then it's fine… No big deal… I mean, it happens.”

Also quite needy is Kaito’s response if you turn him down. The first sentence alone would have sounded natural, but the more he adds, the more awkward it gets. This might sound like Kaito being passive-aggressive at Shuichi about being turned down, but he wouldn’t do that. So what it must be is Kaito trying to reassure himself that it really is just because Shuichi’s busy and these things happen and it doesn’t mean that Shuichi doesn’t want to spend any time with him at all.

If this were in the context of chapter 4, I’d be saying something very different about what’s going on here, but this isn’t chapter 4. What I’m getting from this instead is that it’s Kaito being kind of awkward and unsure when it comes to doing regular friendship. He’s fine when Shuichi’s the sidekick who’s having struggles and needing Kaito’s advice and support (so long as this isn’t the main story in which Shuichi has been the real hero in the trials and maybe doesn’t really need him after all). But when it’s not about their hero-and-sidekick thing and Kaito just wants to hang out with Shuichi anyway for reasons unrelated to supporting him? He’s subtly insecure as to whether Shuichi would even want to.

This is a concept that didn’t really come up much in the main story, but that’s because there was mortal peril and Shuichi was having a lot more issues and struggles and so Kaito was very firmly in hero-and-sidekick mode the whole time. It’s only in a context like this where there’s less to worry about and they’re supposed to be hanging out as friends (shush, Monokuma totally mentioned platonic friendship) that this becomes more noticeable.

If you think about it, it does actually make some level of sense that Kaito might not be very experienced in having regular friends. He’s always been kind of an awkward goof whenever we’ve seen him trying to interact with people on a down-to-earth level. His personality is naturally very larger-than-life, and he’d refuse to ever try and mask that because then it wouldn’t be him. That’s fine when he’s having sidekicks and him being this way helps to inspire them, but for regular everyday interactions, he probably comes off as a bit… Much, perhaps to the point that it’s a little offputting for some people.

Kaito’s behaviour towards Shuichi in his earlier FTEs, the ones that almost certainly happened before he started considering Shuichi his sidekick, showed that his idea of how to try and make someone his friend (rather than his sidekick) was to force them to listen to completely ridiculous stories about his own “heroics”. That was not, in fact, a very ideal way to make friends at all – Shuichi mostly seemed bewildered and perhaps just a little bit annoyed by the whole thing – but Kaito didn’t appear to have any better ideas. And his idea of how to make friends with Kaede, upon being excited by how similar they were and wanting her to share his enthusiasm about that, was to ask her for a hug out of nowhere, which definitely was not the right way to go about things.

Plus, that story he told in his second FTE hinted that Kaito might have had a falling out with his at-the-time best friend when he was young, one that never got resolved and that he then wrapped up in his ridiculous heroic fiction rather than think about what actually happened. If that is the case, then maybe Kaito being too offputtingly over-the-top for his former friend’s liking was the reason why. There was also that one bit in a hangout last post where Kaito seemed worried by the idea of being different from Shuichi, like he was afraid this’d make Shuichi less inclined to be his friend – almost as if he’d had this problem in the past. (That’s probably why he was so excited at seeing that Kaede was so similar to him, leading him to be so inappropriately forward in his awkward attempt to befriend her.)

[This kind of thing also incidentally happens to be Kaito being extremely neurodivergent-coded, and I love him for it.]

This could in fact be a large part of why Kaito got so big on the whole sidekick thing. If someone needs his support, then him being ridiculous and over-the-top, like he can’t help but be, is inspiring and helpful rather than weird and offputting, and so he can be more sure they’ll stick around – but also more convinced that him supporting them is the only reason they’re sticking around. Of those former sidekicks he mentioned in his FTEs, several of them were significantly older than him, so it would be very easy for Kaito to assume that they probably didn’t consider him an actual friend beyond their sidekick arrangement and would only be there for as long as they needed his support and advice. Kaito may well have already been a little bit co-dependent even before the killing game in canon made it worse.

(That doesn’t change the fact that he genuinely cares and wants to help those people, of course. The unhealthy part is the part where this may have become Kaito’s only way of forming and maintaining bonds with others.)

It’s a good thing Kaito has Shuichi, then! They started properly bonding over Shuichi needing help and being a sidekick, but he’s more than just a sidekick. Shuichi realised after he started training that he enjoys Kaito’s company not so much because Kaito’s a strong invincible hero, but rather just because he’s a ridiculous impulsive carefree goof, and Shuichi finds that kind of outlook refreshing and helpful to be around. Shuichi has always seen Kaito as not just a hero but a friend. So if anyone could break Kaito out of this cycle, could help him realise that he’s already better at friendship than he thought he was and doesn’t need to cling to the sidekick thing as his only way of keeping people by his side, it’s Shuichi.

Harmonious Heart

And on that note, it’s time for the main event for this mode! The piece de resistance, the reason we’re all here, this game’s single best piece of non-main-story Kaito content that I consider basically Required Reading for anyone who cares about understanding what makes Kaito tick, is his Harmonious Heart event.

…Okay, so I have already talked about this at quite some length in my big general ramble about Kaito’s character arc which I reblogged here. But this commentary gives me the excuse to talk about it in line-by-line detail, as well as to talk about it more as a story in its own right rather than just as a delightful source of vital information about the core of Kaito’s issues. So you can be damn sure I’m going to take the chance to do that.

Honestly, I call this my favourite piece of non-main-story Kaito content, but it might also be one of my favourite pieces of Kaito content in general. Obviously the canon story has just so many moments that are positively dripping with Kaito’s delightful issues, but… this is still pretty up there with the best of them.

I should mention that actually seeing all of this event is even more inconvenient than the hangouts were. It has a small, completely random chance of popping up instead of the regular options whenever you do a hangout somewhere, and then there are four different outcomes, only one of which can be got per playthrough. So I actually had to do four playthroughs of this mode to see all of this. I am very grateful for the people who bothered to record/transcribe all the outcomes of Harmonious Heart events onto Youtube/the wiki, making it quite easy for people to see all of these if they’re interested, because otherwise I imagine far fewer people ever would. And as I have already mentioned, this event is so important for understanding Kaito’s character; everybody who cares about Kaito should see all four of these outcomes and it makes me sad to think there are probably still a large fraction of such people who haven’t.

I managed to happen across this event basically by chance only a month or so after seeing the main game, and I’m so glad it didn’t take me longer than that, because it significantly influenced and improved my understanding of Kaito’s issues and why he so stubbornly hid everything he was going through in canon. This then led to me thinking about Kaito in even more depth than I already had and wanting to put some content out there that really talks about all this stuff, and… long story short, there’s a chance this very commentary wouldn’t be here if this event didn’t exist.

Kaito: “…”

Shuichi: (I wonder what’s wrong? Kaito looks deep in thought…)

Kaito: (Damn it…)

Shuichi: (Huh? That voice just now. Is that…? Is that Kaito’s inner thoughts…?)

Featuring Shuichi’s inexplicable mindreading powers that he spontaneously developed because of the strength of his bond with Kaito, I guess?

Not that I mind how inexplicable this is, because it is vital. The thing that’s so excruciating about Kaito’s problems in canon is how easily Shuichi could help him with them if only he knew about them. But he has no idea, because he idolises Kaito too much to assume there could be anything wrong with him, and because Kaito never talks about any of it. So it is practically necessary for some kind of inexplicable supernatural intervention to bring Kaito’s issues to light in order for Shuichi to help him, and that’s what’s happening here.

(Also, man it makes an interesting change to be using brackets and not speech marks for Kaito. It would have been so, so fun if we’d been able to see inside his head for the whole game.)

Kaito: (What if we really gotta stay here forever…?)

Even though Kaito should know that he’s actively working towards their escape by befriending Shuichi like this, he’s still finding himself having brief pessimistic thoughts about whether things would really be this easy and Monokuma would really let them go just like that.

(And if he can’t help but worry like this about the relatively minor concerns in this AU, then please take a moment to imagine the far worse thoughts he’d have been plagued with in canon, where people have died and he is dying and there is no apparent means of escape for all of them together.)

Kaito: (No, what am I saying…? I won’t accept this! No way!)

Of course, this is Kaito, who utterly refuses to acknowledge negative or painful thoughts, so he immediately shoots it down and pushes himself to stay determined.

It’s very important to note, though, that he’s still having that negative thought and needing to shoot it down consciously. Again, here’s proof that Kaito cannot completely lie to himself about things that are worrying him, even if he still hates dwelling on them and tries to stay as positive as he can.

Which he should! Maybe it’s somewhat less of a good idea for him to shoot down his worries in canon about the whole dying thing when that’s a problem he should really be addressing and not forcing himself to ignore. But most of the time, for most of Kaito’s problems, including this one here, he’s already doing his best to do something about it. And in that case, worrying about something you’re already doing your best to fix isn’t going to help; it’s just going to make you feel bad unnecessarily. Don’t wallow in your bad feelings when you could be doing something to make it better! This is Kaito instinctively following the advice he always gives to others!

Kaito: (Damn it… For me to be this weak… It’s not like me…)

But… Kaito doesn’t realise that.

Really, this part could work if the weak spot was on the word “weak”, because I would very much like to contest the idea that the thought he was having was even weakness in the first place. Everyone has negative and pessimistic thoughts sometimes! That’s human! What should matter is how you deal with them, and clearly Kaito just dealt with his in a way that he ought to consider strong.

Yet the fact that he just did what he believes people should always do and overcame his worry means nothing next to the fact that he had that worry in the first place. Other people are allowed to be “weak” so long as they’re fighting to overcome their weakness, but not him. He’s not allowed to be anything less than invincible.

And suddenly, this has become the thing he’s worrying about – not the fleeting thought that they might not escape, but the thought that he’s being weak and he’s not supposed to be this way.

Kaito: (I can’t let Shuichi see me like this… I can’t show weakness in front of my sidekick…)

Which is especially bad because right now he happens to be in the same room as Shuichi. The reason he isn’t allowed to be weak is because his sidekicks need him to be strong. As a hero, he has to be the perfect invincible pillar of support for his sidekicks, and if he isn’t, if his sidekicks see that he isn’t, then how could he ever do anything for them any more?

Way back before I ever saw this event, I was trying to understand exactly why Kaito was so hypocritically determined to hide his weakness from his sidekicks. The most obvious idea was that it was out of selflessness, but simply in the sense that he didn’t want to cause his sidekicks more distress by worrying them. Another option that occurred to me was that it was more selfish than that, in terms of his pride, because he’d hate to shatter the heroic image he likes to give off.

Of course, the worry thing is very much part of it – but it’s not the main point. This event taught me the real answer: it is about his heroic image, but that image exists much less for himself and more for his sidekicks, to make them feel as if they can rely on him and to inspire them to be stronger. He hides his weakness in order to preserve his image out of selflessness, because he is so determined to support people who need it and so genuinely convinced those people would lose all the support they’ve been getting from him if they ever realised he was weak.

So not only would Kaito rather deal with his burdens alone, but he is adding to his burdens by making himself so afraid of letting his sidekicks down and depriving them of the support they need if he lets them see even the tiniest hint of weakness from him. Kaito acts casual and carefree on the surface when he’s with Shuichi and Maki – of course he does, he has to – but beneath that, this fear of showing weakness specifically to his sidekicks means that he is so often terrified just by being around the people he cares about most. And that’s heartbreaking?

And, again, this is an AU in which even just a very minor “weakness” is something that Kaito is afraid of showing to Shuichi. Just imagine how much more terrified he’d have been in canon when the weakness that he was at risk of showing to Shuichi and Maki was so much worse.

Shuichi: (He seems deeply troubled by something…)

This is a stock line that Shuichi has in every Harmonious Heart event, but man is it incredibly appropriate in Kaito’s case here. A lot of the other characters’ thoughts in these events are about much more superficial things, or just more specific things that are only relevant to a particular event in their past, such that “deeply troubled” seems like a bit of an overstatement. But Kaito’s thoughts right here are the problem that’s at the root of everything that goes wrong between him and Shuichi in the main storyline and literally the reason he dies. We know just how badly Kaito wants to live, but this is worse than his fear of dying. He is so deeply troubled by the thought of showing weakness to his sidekicks that he would rather suffer a slow and painful death entirely alone. Damn right that deserves to be described like this.

I’m going to be going through the four outcomes from worst to best. So, time to fuck everything up and make things almost as bad as they were after trial 4.

Deny “It’s not like me…”

Shuichi: “I don’t know about that, Kaito… It’s okay to be afraid sometimes…”

I love how, despite that this leads to the worst outcome, Shuichi is clearly still trying to help. None of the bad outcomes to this are caused by Shuichi having any kind of inexplicable bad intent; they’re just caused by him saying something with genuine good intentions that happened to set off Kaito’s issues and make things worse.

Shuichi is probably saying this specifically because it’s essentially something that Kaito has taught him. Kaito’s pep talks have never once tried to make Shuichi feel like he should be ashamed of being afraid, just so long as he’s trying to face those fears and become stronger. Really, Kaito should already understand this concept perfectly well himself! But… that’s for his sidekicks. He’s the hero, so clearly things are Different for him.

Kaito: “It’s not like me to make others worry…”

Of course it isn’t. Causing other people emotional pain? Nope, that’s the complete opposite of what Kaito is always trying to do. How dare he ever do that, even if he never meant to and even if his own emotional pain is far worse than the worry he’s causing others by letting them see it.

Shuichi: “I-I’m not trying to ‘worry’ about you or anything…”

But that really isn’t what Shuichi was doing, and even if it was, that’s not the point. This isn’t about how Shuichi feels bad because something’s up with Kaito; this is Shuichi trying to focus on how Kaito feels and find a way to help him feel better.

Kaito: “It’s fine…”

Of course Kaito doesn’t see it that way, though, because Kaito always makes things about everyone except himself. It’s definitely nothing and Shuichi should stop worrying.

Kaito: “What have I done? I’m so embarrassed. I’ve failed my sidekick…”

But despite insisting that it’s fine, Kaito is clearly not fine. He can’t even see Shuichi’s assurance that it’s okay to be afraid as the attempt to help him that it clearly was. All he can see is confirmation that, despite how desperately he was just telling himself he needs to hide it, Shuichi has seen his weakness.

Which is The Worst Thing he could possibly have allowed to happen. How could he have been such a terrible hero? This was exactly what he was so terrified of, and now it’s come true: he’s failed his sidekick. Shuichi is obviously never going to look up to him or be helped by him ever again now that he’s seen how weak Kaito is. All of that support and encouragement he’d been giving Shuichi has been dashed to pieces. Everything is ruined.

Kaito: “Sorry, but can you leave me alone for a bit?”

So he asks to be left alone (while apologising for it, because of course this is completely his fault and something he deserves to feel bad about, right?).

And I really feel like he’s doing this because he’s about to have a rather more minor but basically analogous version of the breakdown he had at the end of chapter 4 after having so obviously (so he believed) shown himself to be weaker than Shuichi in the trial. He Will Not break down in front of Shuichi no matter what, but keeping up that mental barrier while in his presence, blocking out everything screaming at him about how badly he’s failed, has to be mentally exhausting. He probably wants the opportunity to be able to drop that and just let himself fall apart a little bit where nobody will see, just like when he wanted to get back to his room as quickly as possible after coughing up blood at the end of trial 4.

Honestly, it’s a little hard to imagine that Kaito would be able to just casually continue hanging out with Shuichi after this, even though the game mechanics don’t care and allow that to happen anyway. I can very much picture this causing Kaito to do the equivalent of early chapter 5 in which he just awkwardly avoids Shuichi, because surely Shuichi wouldn’t want to hang out with him any more after having seen how pathetic he is?

And a relevant thing to note is that you can’t get the Harmonious Heart event again on the same playthrough after having had it once. I was kind of frustrated to learn that the game doesn’t let you try again to fix how much you screwed it up the first time, but then I thought about it and realised that actually, at least in Kaito’s case, that makes perfect sense. Given what just happened, Kaito is going to be clamming up even more in front of Shuichi, probably even to the point of completely avoiding him. He’d be even more determined not to let Shuichi get even the tiniest glimpse of weakness out of utter terror of making things even worse. There’s no way Shuichi would ever be able to get as far as seeing into his thoughts again in the first place.

At least in this context, Shuichi has a lot less reason to believe Kaito is angry at him – although maybe he’d feel guilty for unintentionally intruding on Kaito’s thoughts, especially ones as deeply personal as this, and might assume Kaito could be angry at him and therefore avoiding him for that reason. That is, however, something that Shuichi actually should apologise for, so he’d probably be able to get himself to do that. I doubt that would help that much, though, because that’s still not Kaito’s actual problem; regardless of whether Shuichi was wrong to intrude on Kaito’s thoughts, that doesn’t change what he heard when he did so. Kaito knows that Shuichi’s never going to be able to unhear how weak he is, so how can he just pretend it never happened just because Shuichi didn’t mean to hear it?

(…Maybe upon realising that he’s not going to get anywhere with Kaito by just talking to him about it, this would be the point at which Shuichi would actually start repeatedly gifting him emotional support robot orcas, in a desperate attempt to communicate that I just want to help you, it’s okay to need support, please stop shutting me out.)

But now let’s move to a universe where Shuichi didn’t mess things up quite so badly. (I say “mess it up” like it was Shuichi’s fault, but it wasn’t. It was really on Kaito’s end for completely missing the point of his genuine desire to help.)

Affirm “I can’t show weakness in front of my sidekick…”

Shuichi: “You never show me your weakness, Kaito.”

First, let’s stop and consider the fact that Shuichi has always looked up to Kaito and assumed he’s basically invincible – if he even did so in the killing game, where it’s way less reasonable to imagine anyone truly being invincible, then he’s definitely also doing so in this AU. Which means that this sudden insight into Kaito’s thoughts would be the very first time Shuichi ever properly realises that Kaito does have weaknesses in the first place. So maybe part of what’s going through Shuichi’s head as he says this is him reeling from the fact that, wait, Kaito has been having worries of his own this whole time and he never told me any of them, despite everything he keeps saying about sharing our worries?

Yet even though he’s probably saying this due to being taken aback by this realisation, Shuichi’s exasperated-but-worried expression as he says this also reads to me like he intends to follow it up with “but I wish you would, it’s okay, you don’t have to be afraid of that”. He is still saying this with an intent to help.

Kaito: “Yeah! No way I’d do that. It’s as absurd as saying you’re an alien.”

But before Shuichi can get that far, Kaito just jumps on Shuichi’s first sentence and insists that yes, of course he’d never do that, that’s utterly absurd, why would Shuichi ever possibly think he would. Showing weakness to his sidekick is The Worst Possible Thing that would ruin everything and obviously he’d never be so terrible as to fail his sidekick that completely, what kind of hero does Shuichi even think he is!?

Shuichi: “It’s not *that* absurd…”

Meanwhile, Shuichi, being on planet Earth and not Planet Kaito, is rather confused by this logic. Showing weakness to someone you trust isn’t absurd, it’s just human. (Does Kaito trust Shuichi? Not in this way, evidently. He doesn’t trust that Shuichi would still look up to him even if he knew about this, despite how obvious that is to anyone else who knows Shuichi even a little bit.)

Kaito: “No, to me it’s a really big deal.”

It really is. Especially since this is why he fell apart at the end of chapter 4 and why he never told anyone he was dying until it was far too late to save him. It’s honestly a little surprising that we actually get Kaito somewhat acknowledging what a big deal this is to him here… but I suppose so long as he does so without actually showing any weakness, then it’s fine; he’s just explaining an important principle of his that he’s definitely never going to break.

Kaito: “But I can’t really shake this mood just yet…”

Of course he can’t. His worried mood started off just being about escaping, but then it quickly turned into him being even more worried about showing weakness to Shuichi, which is exactly the topic that the conversation is still on and that he’s just asserted would be absolutely unthinkable for him to ever do. That worry is not going to go away like that, and it’s also the exact kind of thing he can’t let Shuichi see. This is a positive-feedback loop of his fear of showing weakness being the very weakness that he’s afraid to show. He is still terrified of failing Shuichi as they speak.

Kaito: “Sorry, but could you leave me alone for now?”

So he’s… running away from the situation, as the only way to ensure he won’t fail. He would rather pass up on a chance to hang out with Shuichi than keep risking that. (Also, apologising, because of course. To be fair, maybe an apology for not hanging out with his friend for such an irrational reason is warranted, but that’s definitely not what Kaito thinks he’s apologising for, is it.)

This one isn’t quite as bad an outcome as last time because at least Kaito doesn’t end up believing that he’s already failed. (It doesn’t seem like Kaito realises that Shuichi saw his thoughts this time, or at least he has some plausible deniability to himself about it – Shuichi would totally just make a comment like “You never show me your weakness” out of the blue because that’s just a definitely true statement, right?) But even so, this brought Kaito face-to-face with his fear of letting Shuichi down and made him really think about what he believes it’d mean if he did do that and how terrified he is of that happening. He’s probably not going to start actively avoiding Shuichi from here, because he’s obviously fine and obviously isn’t going to show any weakness to him, but all his interactions with Shuichi from this point on are likely to be undercut even more than they usually would with that constant fear of what if he *does*? What if he *fails*? Again, though he still emphatically did not mean to, Shuichi accidentally made things worse than they were before he said anything.

Before we move onto the better two outcomes, I noticed something regarding these two worst options here. Shuichi telling him “hey, no, it’s okay to be afraid” and Shuichi going “whoa, yeah, you really never do show me your weakness, do you” would probably both come about by Shuichi being very immediately reactionary and saying what first comes to mind when he hears Kaito’s thoughts. And it’s neat that those are the ones that unintentionally mess things up and make Kaito feel worse. This is a very delicate situation that needs to be approached in exactly the right way to get through to Kaito and not make him just shut Shuichi out even more, and to do that, Shuichi would need to stop and think more carefully about exactly how Kaito’s going to respond to his words and how best to get him to see sense.

Affirm “It’s not like me…”

Shuichi: “…That’s true. You never back down from a challenge, do you, Kaito?”

It seems that this time, Shuichi’s decided to try and affirm Kaito’s stubbornness and determination and reassure him that he’s not weak. This still isn’t addressing the real core of the problem, but it seems likely to help on the surface.

This sentiment would perhaps work a little better if it really could be directed at the “For me to be this weak” statement, though. It would be more helpful to specifically tell Kaito that thinking something negative and then shooting it down isn’t actually weakness at all, reassuring him that what he thinks of as weakness in himself really isn’t. As it is, Kaito is liable to think that the only reason Shuichi called him strong is because he overlooked the part of Kaito that’s so weak in the first place. Which leaves exactly the same problem of making Kaito so afraid of showing that weakness after all and ruining that supposed illusion.

That said, Shuichi is still doing better than just a blanket affirmation that Kaito is strong. He’s saying that Kaito won’t back down from a challenge, which is a completely accurate assessment of what Kaito is like! He may struggle with things from time to time, but he refuses to give up and let that stop him!

But Kaito thinks in a far too black-and-white way about strength and weakness, at least when it comes to heroes like himself, so he’s not going to take it that way.

Kaito: “Right!? No way a man who’s gonna explore the universe should freak out about this!”

It’s not that he was freaking out but then didn’t back down and refused to let it stop him – it’s that he definitely didn’t freak out at all in the first place, that’s definitely what Shuichi is saying and definitely what happened and he’s completely fine. Someone like him shouldn’t freak out about anything, because he’s a hero and that is not what heroes do – but at least Shuichi seems to be agreeing with him about that, right!?

Kaito: “Especially to you.”

Kaito is implying here that, if he absolutely had to show weakness at all, he’d actually kind of prefer to do so not to a sidekick of his like Shuichi, but to a stranger, someone who doesn’t have any expectations of him and that he doesn’t have a responsibility towards.

Shuichi: “…To me?”

Shuichi seems bewildered by this part in particular. Which does make sense – surely it’d be easier for Kaito to show weakness to someone he’s close to, like Shuichi, than to a complete stranger? That’s usually the case with most people, after all. Understanding why it’s the exact opposite of that for Kaito is the root of the problem, and Shuichi failed to figure that out in this version of events.

Kaito: “I can’t show weakness in front of my sidekick.”

Just in case you weren’t sure how important this was, Kaito is reiterating it. It’s actually kind of surprising he’s even willing to say this out loud to Shuichi, since it implies that he might potentially have some kind of weakness that he’s choosing not to show. But, again, I suppose that so long as he doesn’t show any, then he can tell himself that all he’s doing by saying this is affirming his Heroic Responsibilities that he would obviously never let his sidekick down by breaking.

Kaito: “Just forget about whatever it was you heard before.”

However, this is interesting, because it implies that Kaito is, to some extent, aware of the fact that Shuichi just heard his thoughts? Which you’d think would send him into the same kind of spiral of “oh god I’ve failed him” as the worst outcome, but apparently not quite. It seems that Shuichi responding by affirming Kaito’s strength is allowing Kaito to convince himself that it’s not that bad, Shuichi can’t possibly have noticed how weak he is from whatever he heard, because if he had then surely he’d have said so.

But Kaito’s still insisting Shuichi forgets about it, probably mostly so that he can forget about it and not have to worry about what might happen if Shuichi thinks too hard about the thoughts he heard. He’s basically just desperately trying to paper over the problem and ignore what just happened, convincing himself that so long as Shuichi didn’t mention seeing any weakness then he obviously mustn’t have seen any at all, and so it’s totally not a big deal that he might have just read Kaito’s thoughts while they were being so weak and negative and everything is fine, right!? Right!!!

Kaito: “I was unsure for a sec, but now I’m overflowing with motivation!”

See, those negative thoughts he might have been maybe having for a second are totally gone now, so they might as well both pretend they never existed! He’s fine! Shuichi needn’t worry about a thing! Everything is fine.

Shuichi: (He sounds like he’s hiding something…)

…But even Shuichi can tell now that he is not fine. Which is either because his glimpse into Kaito’s thoughts just now is letting him realise that these displays from Kaito aren’t as truthful as he once thought they were, or just because this particular display is especially strained and transparent.

The event doesn’t go any further than this, other than awkwardly mood-whiplashing us with Shuichi’s standard “I think this conversation went well” comment that he has for every good-but-not-great hangout outcome. It clearly did not go well! Shuichi managed to notice that! This is nominally a good outcome by the game’s metric, and admittedly it seems to be that way on the surface because look, Kaito is Totally Fine, nothing is wrong at all, and at least he didn’t end up asking Shuichi to leave him alone this time. But this has not remotely fixed Kaito’s problem either and is just perpetuating his desperate defence mechanisms.

In fact, if anything, the possibility that Shuichi might have got a glimpse of what’s beneath them is only going to make Kaito’s façade even more desperate and strained. Since Shuichi affirmed that he’s fine, Kaito can’t make an excuse to leave like in the other ones, because that’d be like admitting that Shuichi’s wrong and he’s not actually fine at all. So he has no choice but to keep hanging out with him and keep desperately pretending to be fine despite how badly he must be freaking out over the possibility of showing Shuichi that he isn’t. Things are yet again just a little bit worse despite Shuichi’s genuine attempt to help.

Shuichi would probably notice that Kaito seems kind of awkwardly distracted and distant during their continued hangouts and figure it has something to do with what happened here. After trying to prod Kaito about it verbally and getting a predictable complete lack of acknowledgement of a problem, Shuichi might become desperate enough to fix this awkwardness and figure out how to help Kaito that, against his better judgement, he decides to deliberately tap into his mindreading powers again. So he looks into Kaito’s thoughts during one of his distant moments to try and figure out what’s really bothering him about this…

…only to find Kaito THINKING VERY LOUDLY ABOUT SPACE, he can’t wait to go to SPACE, here are all the PLANETS HE CAN NAME.

Because Kaito knows now that somehow, inexplicably, Shuichi can hear his thoughts. Even if Shuichi totally didn’t hear anything bad last time it happened, that notion that he can hear them at all is terrifying to Kaito. He can’t even afford to think about the things that are worrying him while in Shuichi’s presence in case Shuichi hears it and becomes convinced that he really is weak. But of course, that very fear of doing that would then become the topic of his thoughts and make him worry even more and make everything even worse and make him even more likely to fail Shuichi and—

…And so, long story short, to avoid spontaneously combusting, Kaito hastily cobbled together a desperate coping mechanism of running mental interference by consciously forcing himself to think about something unrelated whenever he’s in Shuichi’s company. As a result, all of his interactions (SPACE) with Shuichi are awkwardly (BLACK HOLES) stilted, because he’s constantly focusing on (NEBULAS) trying to keep an inner monologue that (JUPITER) isn’t thinking about anything else (THE BIG DIPPER. THE BIG DIPPER!) except space. (While, of course, feeling utterly terrified beneath it of letting it slip for even a second, not that SPACE no he’s not scared of anytHING HE JUST REALLY LIKES SPACE)

…I’m not sure where this story ends. I mostly just wanted to get to the part with Kaito thinking loudly about space to drown out his other thoughts, because that’s a concept I’ve had in my head for ages that I wanted to share.

So anyway, let’s rewind things one last time and actually help Kaito at last.

Deny “I can’t show weakness in front of my sidekick…”

In this one, Shuichi has realised that this is the core of the problem. And that’s all he ever needed to do to fix this.

Shuichi: “I’m your sidekick… but I’m also your friend, Kaito.”

Shuichi’s way of approaching this is adorable. Instead of telling Kaito how heroes are allowed to be weak sometimes and that doesn’t mean they’ve failed their sidekicks or make them any less heroic at all, he just throws all of that out of the window to focus on the fact that they’re friends.

Earlier in this post I got talking about how Kaito is so hung up on the idea that Shuichi is his sidekick that he isn’t even sure if he’s actually a regular friend beneath that. I’m really happy that happened to come up from those bits of bonus dialogue and deliberately went into it so much when it did because it’s a very important point that’s been contributing to his issues here.

The hero-and-sidekick thing is a useful way to frame their relationship in terms of how Kaito is helping Shuichi, but it inherently comes with all kinds of expectations, almost all of them on Kaito to continue to be that perfect and invincible hero, or else… or else Shuichi won’t have any reason to care about him any more? But friendship is so much simpler and with so many fewer expectations. Friends care about each other regardless of how strong or weak they are. Until now, Kaito wasn’t sure if Shuichi even was his friend outside of the whole sidekick deal, but… of course he is, you big moron.

Shuichi: “Maybe you don’t show weakness to your sidekick. But you can to your friend.”

…I’m not sure I like how Shuichi is still saying it’s okay that Kaito insists he mustn’t show any weakness while he’s playing the hero role and Shuichi is being the sidekick. That’s still a totally misguided premise. (And Shuichi should be perfectly aware that heroes don’t need to be invincible to be inspiring, you’d think, based on his comments about fiction in trial 6.) But regardless, so long as what Shuichi’s saying about their friendship gets Kaito to realise that it’s okay for him to show weakness to Shuichi, that’s what really matters.

Kaito: “…”

For once, Kaito isn’t responding immediately with some kind of fervent insistence that him showing weakness would be inconceivable. He’s actually listening to what Shuichi’s saying with a thoughtful expression.

Shuichi: “If you don’t want to open up to your sidekick… maybe you’ll open up to your best friend. How about it, Kaito?”

Heroes and sidekicks may not, at least not in Kaito’s definition, but friends open up to each other and support each other with their problems, mutually, in both directions. That’s just how friendship works. Even Kaito with his possible lack of experience in the subject ought to understand that much.

It’s also incredibly adorable how Shuichi’s not saying “you’re my best friend”, which is the part he’d be able to say with authority. Rather, he’s saying “I’m your best friend”, even though Kaito has never actually said as much (because he’s barely even called Shuichi his friend in the first place). Shuichi is technically making an assumption here to even say that – but of course he’s right about it. Kaito hadn’t even properly realised that himself, but Shuichi could see it anyway. And it was definitely his Shuichi Saihara side and not his detective side that made him so sure about this particular truth.

(they are FRIENDS, I may have mentioned this a few times)

Kaito: “Shuichi…”

Kaito is still pausing, thoughtful. He’s saying Shuichi’s name like he’s impressed or taken aback, as if Shuichi just said something groundbreaking that Kaito would never have thought of himself, but that actually… makes sense?

(Of course it makes sense, Kaito. You were just always being a gigantic idiot about this.)

Kaito: “Thanks. I’m alright now.”

He genuinely means this. This is so much more subdued than all of his over-the-top insistence that he’s Totally Fine, so this isn’t a façade. Shuichi’s words actually got through to him and made him realise that he doesn’t need to be afraid of this. And thanking someone is something Kaito does quite rarely because he usually doesn’t like to acknowledge that he needed help – but he’s doing so here! Shuichi really did help him and he really is grateful, and it’s okay for him to admit that!

Shuichi: “What? Are you sure?”

Shuichi seems surprised that Kaito would suddenly be so okay so quickly, which could seem to hint that he actually isn’t. But it’s not that – it’s just that Shuichi didn’t realise that the fix would be this simple.

Kaito: “Now that I know you think of me like that… All my doubts are gone!”

Shuichi was perhaps still thinking that the main problem was Kaito’s initial worry about not getting out of here and was expecting him to open up about that. But that was insignificant next to the real problem, which was Kaito’s fear of what would happen if he showed any kind of weakness to Shuichi. Now that Kaito realises that Shuichi sees him as a friend and accepts and supports him regardless of his weaknesses, and that this doesn’t mean they can’t also do the hero-and-sidekick thing alongside that… the entire problem has literally just vanished into thin air.

Kaito: “Alright! Let’s escape this screwed up academy together!”

And those initial doubts he had about escaping? Even though he didn’t have Shuichi help him address those doubts, they were already something Kaito was capable of shooting down and overcoming by himself! Damn right he’s not just going to accept being stuck here, not when he’s got a friend as amazing as Shuichi that he wants to escape with!

These outcomes to a Harmonious Heart event have a very limited length – really there should be so much more being said here than the handful of lines we get. Shuichi should still want to discuss the fact that Kaito did feel so afraid of showing him weakness, so that they can explore that and be sure that Kaito really will be comfortable opening up to him in future if he needs to. Despite knowing now in his head that it’s okay, Kaito’s still going to be instinctively inclined to hide his worries, and it’ll probably take him a while to fully unlearn that.

But regardless, I really like that even in this short space, the writing makes sure to carefully show that this does work on Kaito and genuinely gets through to him. It would be very easy for things to still come across like Kaito’s lying about being okay, but his reaction here contains enough clues that he actually means it and that he really thought about Shuichi’s words and took them to heart.

Helping Kaito begin to fix his issues was always going to be this simple. Shuichi only needed to know what the problem was in the first place, and that was the hardest part.

Graduation scene

And now, let’s imagine this brings us onto the final bit of content in this bonus mode, which is the scene you get with Kaito after the ten days are over and they’re going to get out of here because they became appropriately epic friends. (shush, Monokuma DEFINITELY MENTIONED FRIENDSHIP)

It’s a little unclear as to whether everyone else is also going to escape just because two people achieved this, or whether they’re the only ones escaping – I’m pretty sure all the graduation scenes kinda just skim over that topic. But let’s assume that everyone gets to leave, because neither Kaito nor Shuichi would stand for it and be able to have this happy reflection about their time here if that wasn’t the case.

The wiki mentions at one point that successfully getting the best outcome for the Harmonious Heart event is necessary to unlock the graduation scene. Unfortunately, the wiki is wrong. You can very definitely fuck up the Harmonious Heart and still get this scene – heck, you can probably not even happen to trigger it at all. All you need to do is max a character’s FTEs to get five hearts of affection and then do enough successful hangouts to get another five hearts. It would, after all, be kind of unfair for the game to expect you to get the Harmonious Heart right, because you can only attempt it once per playthrough and so getting it wrong would screw you out of that character’s ending on that playthrough.

…I say “unfortunately” because, at least in Kaito’s case, it’d narratively be a lot more fun if you really did have to succeed in his Harmonious Heart event to get this ending. It would be really neat if the kind of close friendship that Shuichi and Kaito needed to achieve in order to be able to leave is a more equal, healthy friendship than they ever had in canon, in which Kaito is also able to open up to Shuichi about his own issues and be supported in return. That’s very much the kind of friendship I like to imagine them having in this AU once they leave and continue to live happily ever after as adorable best friends on the outside. Or in any AU in which they both get to live, for that matter. They deserve it.

(Because, you know, Monokuma and the audience definitely care about emotionally healthy and nuanced relationships showing these complex characters helping each other overcome their issues, since such a thing is a more meaningful and compelling part of a relationship than simply whether or not the feelings involved are romantic and is equally possible when they aren’t. That’s totally what the audience is watching for and not just ARGLFLARGL ROMANCE, right.)

There’s also the fact that in all of the Harmonious Heart outcomes that aren’t the successful one, things would likely become at best subtly awkward between Kaito and Shuichi, and at worst Kaito probably starts outright avoiding him. That wouldn’t be the best environment for this ending to happen in.

Kaito: “I thought I’d be happy about it, but I don’t want it to end… I’m a little sad.”

Shuichi: “It was just for a short while, but we did go through a lot. I’m a little sad too.”

Yeah, all those things they went through that totally, uh, you know, happened. Shuichi’s wording implies he’s talking about things that aren’t just hanging out with Kaito and becoming friends with him, as if there were some actual overarching plot events to this mode, which, ha ha.

Shuichi: “Are you going to go back to astronaut training when you get out of here?”

Kaito: “Of course! No way I’d give up on my dream of becoming an astronaut!”

Obviously! Kaito is going to live happily ever after as an astronaut who goes to SPACE lots of times under normal circumstances and comes back alive each time!

Kaito: “I’m gonna make up all my lost time as fast as I can!”

Shuichi: “That’s true, while we were in here, the other trainees were training every day.”

Haha, yes, those other trainees. Kaito’s going to hit something of a roadblock upon learning that he was never an astronaut trainee in the first place… but like hell that’s going to stop him. It’s still going to be him making up for lost time, just the lost time of never having actually trained in the first place. (His fake memories of training will help a bit, though.)

Kaito: “But, y’know, coming here… I think it was good for me. One reason was because I got to meet you…”

Aww. He’s about to talk about how being here helped with his astronaut training, but he still wanted to mention meeting Shuichi first, because that’s very much the best thing he gained from being here. They are friends.

(Coming here was also good for him because without it he wouldn’t exist. Existing is good.)

Shuichi: (The most important thing for an astronaut…) “Good communication, right?”

Every character’s ending scene asks you to remember something they mentioned during one of their FTEs, and this is the one for Kaito. Of course communication skills are relevant to the time they spent here! Or… at least they would have been if this AU had had any semblance of a story to it.

Kaito: “No matter how great you are, you can’t be an astronaut if you can’t communicate. A fight in a spaceship because of bad communication could be fatal, right?”

You know what else could be fatal on a spaceship because of bad communication? One of the astronauts not telling everybody else when he’s feeling sick, which could potentially endanger not just the astronaut himself but also the rest of the crew. So thaaaat’s a thing they’ll have to train out of him – though maybe the help Shuichi’s given him in this AU has already started to do that.

Kaito: “Being shut away and told to live together… Living together here was probably even harder than living on a spaceship.”

It actually is kind of analogous! Astronauts are stuck with the same handful of people all day every day for months on end while up in space, which is why they need to be able to get along so well. That’s also basically what happened at this academy. Too bad this place contained a few people who are so horrendously bad at communication and teamwork that they’d never have been allowed to become astronauts even if they tried. I guess that’s why Kaito says it was even harder than being on a spaceship.

Shuichi: “Well, you learned a lot about communication here. Living here must have been good training for you.”

Yeah, with all of the communicating among each other that everybody definitely did, it’s not like they just stood unmoving in the same spot in the courtyard for ten days or anything. Gah, this mode’s lack of a story.

The actual canon story would also have helped Kaito learn a thing or two about communication, in theory, at least if he’d lived and had been able to continue to use what he’d learned. If he’d lived, then presumably, during whatever change to the canon events caused him to actually get his illness treated before it was too late, the main lesson he’d learn would be an emphatic tell people when something’s wrong with you, dammit. Important lessons about communication there.

Kaito: “Just how living here helped me in my astronaut training… I think it helped you with your detective work, too. Maybe the time you spent here will be useful for your future, y’know?”

A nice sentiment, but one that definitely only really makes sense for the main story. In this AU, apparently all Shuichi did was hang out with people all day, with no attempt to unravel the mystery of what’s going on here.

Kaito: “Isn’t there something you gained here?”

It’s marred by the lack of any semblance of a story backing this up, but it’s still very Kaito that he’s trying to encourage Shuichi to think about what he’s learned and how he’s grown.

Shuichi: (And above all else… I was so lucky to make a friend like Kaito.)

That’s definitely a thing that we can all agree he gained here, though! And that’s what’s most important – for Kaito as well.

Shuichi: “Thank you for everything. I’m really glad I met you, Kaito.”

Awwww. It’s so lovely to hear Shuichi fully expressing how much he’s grateful to Kaito, while Kaito is there to hear it. Shuichi never quite said anything to this extent in canon while Kaito was alive, which I may have mentioned a few times was kind of heartbreaking.

Kaito: “What are you talking about!? That’s my line! I’m glad I got to meet you, Shuichi!”

So… since this is this AU and not the canon story, I’m going to assume that Kaito brushing off Shuichi’s heartfelt thanks isn’t because he doesn’t feel like he deserves it. Rather, it’s just that, despite that he constantly presents the fiction of himself as this awesome hero who does this for people, he’s kind of awkward and unsure about how to respond to such earnest gratitude acknowledging that awesomeness as the genuine truth. So instead, he does what he always does and turns it around to use it to help Shuichi feel good about himself, too.

Kaito really does mean this, though. He’s just as grateful to Shuichi as Shuichi is to him – especially if we assume that the Harmonious Heart’s best outcome really did happen in this story. They are friends! Not just hero and sidekick, friends, which is such a big deal to Kaito. Shuichi is already the closest friend he’s ever had, and that means the world to him.

(I definitely hadn’t forgotten about this line when I wrote my own thing about Kaito getting heartfelt thanks from his sidekicks and responding with “that’s my line”, so this… probably somewhat influenced that, yes.)

Kaito: “You’ll always be my sidekick, alright!?”

Again, since this is a happier AU with much less messed-up co-dependency going on (especially with the Harmonious Heart having helped to fix that), I’m going to assume Kaito means this in a good way. Not as “I need you to always depend on me”, but just as “whenever you do need me, I’ll always be there for you”. Everyone needs someone else from time to time. You can’t just graduate from being a “sidekick” who relies on someone else’s support into a “hero” who doesn’t need anyone at all. Heroes and sidekicks aren’t that black-and-white. Kaito considered the sidekicks from his backstory only former sidekicks by now, but that isn’t how things should actually work at all.

Once Kaito’s sidekick, always Kaito’s sidekick, because no matter how strong those people are now thanks to him, they’re still going to need help sometimes, and because Kaito is always going to want to be there for his friends.

Shuichi: “Yes, of course!”

Look at Shuichi not even being slightly awkward or put-off at the idea of being Kaito’s “sidekick”! He understands exactly what Kaito means by that here, and it was never about Shuichi being lesser than him.

Shuichi: (Kaito and I beamed at one another and shook hands. We both put all our strength into the handshake.)

They are friends! I love the implication that they both want to get across the strength of their friendship in that handshake, communicating without words.

Shuichi: (I’m really glad I met Kaito. So in at least *one* way, I’m thankful to Monokuma. I’m sure Kaito feels the same way. But we don’t have to tell each other that. We don’t need words. I know exactly how Kaito feels, without them.)

Communication without words! Shuichi and Kaito also kind of did some of this, during trial 5, so it’s especially appropriate for them that this is one of the things the writers put into their scene here. Friends who know each other so well that they can do this is one of my favourite friendship tropes and melts my heart.

I suppose we can assume that Shuichi’s inexplicable mindreading powers have reverted to something less supernaturally intrusive and more realistically just him being able to intuit how Kaito’s feeling because of how well he knows him. Maybe this means he’ll be able to take a leaf out of Kaito’s book and pick up on when Kaito’s feeling down and needs to talk to him about something, even when he’d have hesitated to mention it otherwise? I hope so. They are friends and equals who can support each other, like they always should have been.

#danganronpa #danganronpa v3 #drv3 #ndrv3 #bonus content #salmon team #commentary

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