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ultraericthered · 2 months ago

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Moreover, for a Danganronpa fan of 8 years, OP seems intent on misunderstanding the "hope over despair" theme and message. The idea wasn't that "Hope can and does always overcome Despair", like it was that easy - it's that while it's easy to feel overwhelming despair in the face of tragedy and seemingly hopeless circumstances, if you completely succumb to that despair and let it rule your internal self and external living conditions and choices, then there'll be nothing productive or fulfilling or the least bit comforting to your life anymore and you might as well be the living dead, and that's why it's ultimately better, even in the face of all that despair, to hold tight to even the tiniest ray of hope that something can and, in time, will be done to make some positive difference in the world around you, in your life and the lives of others, that will propel you and those others forward towards making more positive changes that, even should they take a lengthy amount of time, effort, and patience to fully realize, can stand as a manifest touchstone that life, no matter how harsh and unfair and despair-inducing as it can be, is still every bit worth living. It's not about straight-up denying the pain and misery of reality and "whitewashing our truth", and it's the exact opposite of "looking away from what we are": it's staring into the dark, despairful abyss of life and all its cruelties, accepting it for what it is, but refusing to let it rob you of your will to keep living on with your most basic functions for living, inallieable human rights, and the pursuit of happiness in-tact, the steadfast belief that everything does not have to be terrible, that even the worst of bad situations can be made better with effort even if just marginally, and that it is never, ever futility to mount a physical and mental resistence against the negative forces of the world that look to sin, to harm people and to tear down rather than build up.

About the Hope's Peak Academy Shelter concept - I touched upon the issue before, and how I believe Jin Kirigiri had the entirely right idea but the wrong way of managing it, while Junko had absolutely the wrong idea (the "killing game") but a more competent way of managing the place, and we see the best of both worlds in School Mode, where one blunder Junko makes changes the whole game.

And while I've not succumbed to total despair, misanthropy, and nihilism like OP, it's partially why there is always this part of me that actually agrees with Junko's side of things and wants her to win. Not because I agree with her ideologically, but because I know that had circumstances been only a very teensy bit different, like if the world outside Hope's Peak was a straight-up apocalyptic and dangerous hellscape rather than post-apocalyptic ruins, I would be for Junko and Despair, and against Makoto and Hope, in that final class vote.

Thoughts about this blog and Danganronpa in light of our current reality

For a long time this blog has been foremostly a Danganronpa blog. I've spent eight years sharing artwork/fic of it, talking theories about it, analyzing the writing, responding to asks about it, and sometimes (all too rarely) posting my own fanfic for it.

I discovered Danganronpa in the back half of 2016. I think that was an ideal time for me to get into it, because it spoke to me on a level that went beyond just its quirky, believable characters and its engaging mystery/puzzle mechanics — it was, after all, ultimately about hope shining through the darkest of times. And in when the end of 2016 hit, things felt pretty dark. Here in the U.S., we elected to power a blatant conman who constantly lied and focused on hate to rile people up. It felt insane to even see this fucker get the nomination in 2016, because I'd grown up in a reality where a man shouting "WOO!" at a rally one time took him from being the frontrunner for his nomination to being a distant loser, because his enthusiasm was "unpresidential" somehow. But hey—at least there were some controls in place in 2016. It's not like the populist demagogue president eight years had the entire government or even his own entire party on his side.

Today, though... Danganronpa's messaging about Hope feels like a very silly sentiment. If I'd only started getting into the series THIS year, I'd have found its messaging incredibly trite and clownishly optimistic.

Over the past 15 years we've seen the entire globe turn farther towards dictators and facism. Look all around: Hungary, Egypt, Italy, Poland, Brazil, and so on. "But there's extenuating circumstances to many of those," someone might say. "Like, Hungary barely had democracy for approximately 25 years, so they didn't really feel a need to fight to keep it." And, I mean... sure? But as a counterpoint, Italy is a country that already endured a dark period of facism that was devastating to them... and felt no need to stop it from returning, either.

Here in the U.S., the man who once seemed like an awful human being in 2016 turned out to be worse than we ever imagined: abducting immigrants' children at the border to be auctioned off for raising by white families, boasting of his dreams of being a dictator, committing almost countless crimes to the point that we couldn't even be bothered to pursue/prosecute many of them. He tore down our early-warning system for infectious agents coming out of China, literally causing us to lose millions to the COVID pandemic. The damage he did to our institutions like Education was going to take my whole lifetime to undo. He was linked to a a child sex trafficker very deeply — and his party didn't care! And despite all this, the people elected him again. This time with NO controls in place. He has the entire government on his side, and he's refashioned his entire party to be 100% loyal to him. His second-in-command is exactly like him. The damage he will do will be far beyond anything we could undo in my lifetime now.

In 2016, we thought people were ignorant. People weren't paying enough attention. That was the opimistic view. It's been 10 years of constant publicity about who this man is now, though, and we now have to accept that the majority of people aren't ignorant: They're disgusting. Awful. There is no way in hell these people haven't seen this man speak out loud after all this time, and yet they still chose him.

The idea that Hope overcomes Despair feels so incredibly dumb now that it's hard for me to keep posting about this fictional reality. Because I can't even imagine ANY alternate universe where human beings are capable of such a thing. Humanity is far too shit for that.

Let me bring up another fictional universe that I find incredibly obnoxious at the moment: Did you know there's a new Superman movie coming out next year — one that is focused on him as a symbol of hope that humanity rallies around? The idea literally pisses me off right now. When I think about someone publishing a fairy tale like that in our current reality, I just can't fathom it. In what possible dimension, what insane timeline would human beings rally around an alien being as a symbol of hope for them? Come ON: We know that's impossible now. Human beings aren't like that. We're hateful little shitbags. We'd throw rocks at an alien like that and call for his death! He's an alien! There's no such tolerance in the nature of humanity. Humanity is a festering disease.

You get the gist. It's hard for me to say much about DR or the fandom on this blog these days, because Hope is a hyper-unrealistic luxury. To pretend otherwise feels like a fundamental failure in our self-understanding—a whitewashing of our truth. You're just trying to look away from what we are. NO. Stare at it until you accept it. Why are we distracting ourselves with comforting, completely unrealistic ideals? I can no longer tolerate that kind of make-believe. Despair is all we've got. It's what we've chosen. It's the only thing we deserve.

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