#even if that canon evidence is 1 sprite and 3 lines of dialogue

[numbnessofthemind]

hiii I’m just wondering btw, not judging just very curious!!, why do you ship Pav and Marina? I haven’t seen anyone ship them before!!!!

oooo okay this is a fun question… waking me from my slumbers…!

for a simple explanation, my favorite trope is generally awful middle aged man x cute young girl. ask anyone and they can confirm.

for a lengthier one, i’d say it was Pavs interaction with Marina upon leaving the bunker is what originally drew me to it, honestly. I found his scumminess endearing… his brazen comments towards her had me clutching my pearls as i screenshotted everything to post to my dear friends on the bird app. The post Pav/Kaiser confrontation scenes only added fuel to my fire, even though there isnt really any character specific dialogue (please miro….. please i need him to call her more cute names…). we don’t get much basis for a dynamic between them in canon currently (i’m so excited for when Pav becomes playable and we can have more unique dialogue between him and Marina hopefully), so most of the stuff you see here is based off of my own headcanons haha.

i must also admit there is some projection going on here. i myself am a transfemme with … eerily similar upbringings to marina, and i see myself heavily in her, so my first move was to ship her with the character i found cutest (at first this was levi, but, evidently, my focus has since shifted).

i hope this brings some insight to my twisted brain… they are just so kawaii to me.

[pandoratheprocrasticreator]

I have a lot of opinions on Shuichi Saihara as a protagonist like on one hand I really liked his arc and think he was a genuinely interesting character and on the other hand the twist in chapter 1 kneecapped a lot of what I thought made him a compelling detective character on top of playing into some sexist tropes but like who cares about that.

What I ACTUALLY want to talk about is the AMAZING energy this guy exudes. He has more eyeliner on than any scene kid from the early 2000's. He's as gaunt as a sheet of paper. He looks like a stiff breeze could knock him over. Probably because he canonically didn't eat breakfast before entering the killing game so somehow the murder teddy bear coliseum has actually IMPROVED his living habits.

Nearly every line of Saihara's dialogue in the Japanese dub makes him sound like he's 5 seconds away from bursting into tears. During some intense moments he does this sprite where he's supposed to be adjusting the brim of his hat in a cool way but after he ditches his hat it just looks like he's doing a really emo peace sign. His character arc is about realizing that he doesn't want to kill himself and the way he resolves the conflict at the end of the game is to turn to the audience and say "You guys all suck. We're going to kill ourselves."

In chapter 6, Shirogane literally says that the concept for his character was her going "Hey what if I made a detective who's just, like, the most pathetic. The most cripplingly depressed poor little meow meow in existence?" He isn't even a poor little meow meow at this point he's like. One of those blind orphans that get run over in those propaganda films from the 40's. He's like if Oliver Twist went through puberty.

All the protags yap a lot but all of Saihara's internal monologue in the Free Time Events makes him sound like a fucking Wattpad fic about getting sold to One Direction. He embodies Komaru Naegi's "uwu im just a normal teenage girl" schtick except unlike Komaru, he'd probably dislocate his ankle running from a Ball Monokuma. Babe at least Makoto Naegi is kind of an extrovert?

He's super smart and observant and when he genuinely makes the effort to investigate the school, he uncovers the mastermind's secret lair on like the second day. And the next time he makes the effort he figures out the mastermind's identity and all of her schemes. Every investigation he looks at the evidence and immediately makes 8 logical leaps and somehow figures out the seesaw zipline toilet paper murder of the week.

But between that he, like, alternates between curling up in a ball and sobbing in his room and curling up in a ball and sobbing in front of Momota and Harukawa so like, it takes him a while to get to it. Kirigiri was busting into boys' washrooms and sneaking into secret off-limits dorms and throwing herself down trash chutes. Meanwhile Saihara sees the girls' washroom and is like "Hhhhhhhh I can't go in there that's cooooooooties" and needs The Power Of Friendship to, like, push over rubble or smth.

Like, oh man, he's a great character and he does get marginally more confident but, like, I think this dude runs on nothing but coffee and anxiety. He probably doesn't get more than 3 hours of sleep a night between Momota's midnight hangouts and whatever the hell the love hotels and the Monokuma theatres are all about. Say what you want about his role in the game but he's definitely a unique protagonist because I didn't think someone like him could narrate for a chapter without having a seizure. He looks like he has tuberculosis. MORE than the guy in the game who actually has tuberculosis.

[salty-dracon]

More YTTD Theories Because I Forgot A Bunch

A continuation of this from a couple of days ago.

More theories, spoilers go up to 3-1A, and also include YTTS spoilers. Also I appreciate all of your thoughts on the matter.

In the previous post I said there were a few reasons to be suspicious of Gin. I forgot to mention one important point:

Remember the locker room and the Discussion there, where Hayasaka and Gin got magnetized to the ceiling and almost hung? According to vgperson, you can win the discussion by letting time pass three times after Hayasaka is magnetized. But after the second turn, Gin gets magnetized as well. And one turn after that, the mechanism is shut down by Midori. He makes sure “those two” are still alive via the intercom, and once confirming that they are, says “oh goodie, we can still play some more!“ and fucks off. Basically, you’ll win no matter what, because Midori doesn’t want them to die.

Midori says he observes all of the floors in the painting room, but he doesn’t really give “instructions” once they arrive or anything similar. Depending on what he’s using to monitor the room, he more or less uses his abilities to mess with the participants and the dolls. Think about how he spooks Sara and crew by saying “I’m not a painting!” if you look at the painting of him, or how he lets the crew get their hopes up about the transceiver until he speaks through it. However, he says he observes all of the floors, meaning he knows what goes on in each one. And though he’s not about losing well (he wants to kill people with the gun if he’s in a bad position, after all), he seemed to be concerned enough about Hayasaka and Gin to try and save them.

Considering he didn’t try to save Hayasaka the moment he could, and seems to have some form of disdain for the dolls, I wonder if it’s Gin he was trying to save. That brings up the question of why someone like him would want to save Gin in the first place. Maybe he’s allied with Gin somehow, whether Gin knows it or not. 

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(Danganronpa 1 and AI: The Somnium Files spoilers in the next paragraph)

One interesting prediction rule when it comes to murder mystery games is that the culprit is “someone who’s been mentioned several times, but who we’ve never actually met”. They almost pulled that twist in Danganronpa 1 with a certain missing student. They mentioned her by name, making us think she was the mastermind for a while, before revealing the truth. The other big example I can think of is AI: The Somnium Files, wherein the serial killer in question is mentioned by name more than once, but we don’t actually meet him, knowing it’s him, until near the end of the game and after we’ve unlocked most of the other routes.

Extrapolating this to Your Turn to Die, there is one character we haven’t met yet who’s been mentioned more than once- that being Sara’s mother. We see her at the beginning of the game, passed out presumably due to an attack by Sara’s kidnappers. She’s brought up again by Sara’s dad in a flashback before Chapter 2, and then again when Kai leaves a message for Sara on the laptop. The password to that file is her mother’s name. Furthermore, we know her rough appearance, as based on seeing her passed out in Chapter 1. And taking the events of YTTS as canon, we know that Sara, or someone that looks exactly like Sara, is somehow involved in Asunaro’s AI experiments. There’s also one interesting oddity about her. As far as I remember, she’s one of two characters to get a background sprite, but not a foreground sprite. Here I’m referring to “background sprites” as the sprites that appear inside environments without black outlines, and foreground sprites as the sprites with different expressions that usually appear when you talk to a character. Every other character, notably all of the Death Game participants, the Floor Masters, and now the Dummies thanks to Chapter 3, have both foreground sprites and background sprites. Some characters, like Sara’s father and the man that Keiji killed, have only foreground sprites. The only two exceptions, that is, the only two characters whose faces we haven’t seen in perfect detail, are Meister and Sara’s mother.

Furthermore, we don’t know what Sara’s mother’s name is. Granted, we don’t know what her father’s name is either, but her name is apparently important. What if her name was also Sara Chidouin? What if she was somehow also Sara- as in, the Sara we know is a clone of her created using a doll? It’s a mystery why she’d be raising a clone of herself, but people are weird like that, sometimes.

Another related theory people have had is that Sara’s mother is in fact a part of the game- she’s just disguised as someone else. That someone else could be Miley. Though in my opinion Miley looks nothing like the background sprite I’m using for reference, a good wig can change everything. This theory might have become even stronger with the release of Chapter 3. There are a couple of situations in which Midori can say something along the lines of “Miley said you were cute when you got angry” to Sara. Though we could just take it as Miley being an asshole (she’s totally an asshole), I think there’s only one situation in which Sara got mad in front of Miley, that being when Mishima was killed. Maybe this was lost in translation, but it’s a rather sweeping generalization and a somewhat weird thing to say about someone if you aren’t familiar with them. Meaning Miley’s really familiar with Sara. Or Miley was just being an asshole.

After looking up Sara’s mother on the wiki the manga only has a picture of her wearing a mask over her mouth. The plot thickens. 

Regarding the other character, Meister... people have made a couple of interesting observations about him. First, he shows up in collaboration artwork. Second, there is a person who looks very similar (albeit with grey hair) in the room above where the monitors were in Chapter 2. His clothing color scheme is exactly the same. Also it’s a big ass painting. Third, with the release of Chapter 3, there’s the entertaining feature of naming Midori whatever you damn well please, unless he makes some joke about it and tells you to pick another name. Most of his responses to you picking something like “Alice Yabusame” and “Tia Safalin” are either “here’s a fun anecdote about that character and/or what I think of them, but I don’t want that name“ and “that’s mean :( pick another name please“. Elect to name him Meister, and he only says “... Pick another name, please”. Considering his personality can be accurately described as “Kokichi if he were Monokuma”, it’s out of character. He fears Meister, or doesn’t want to be associated with him. So yeah, Meister’s probably important. Maybe he’s even the Meister-mind. (Feel free to boo me for that bad pun.)

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Regarding the game’s endings, most people seem to believe there’s two- a logic ending an an emotion ending. I agree with this viewpoint, as “choosing logic“ has been explored a few times throughout the game. With the release of Part 3, the choice of which ending’s which has become a little more clear.

If Alice lives and Reko dies, Q-taro says something along the lines of “The Dummies may be dolls, but they’re human just like us”. Implying that we, the humans, are also supposed to think of dolls as human as there’s no difference appearance or personality wise. Q-taro talks about Doll Reko being almost perfectly human, as a supporting argument, in reference to Alice who was unable to tell the difference between the Doll Reko and the real Reko. Remember also that the only reason we pushed Reko down the Impression Room was our logical conclusion that she was a fake. On the other hand, if we choose not to, Sara comments that despite the logic, she can’t see the Reko standing before her as anything other than real, even though there’s lots of evidence to the contrary. In that ending, the real Reko dies. Furthermore, there’s a little bonus snippet in the “afterlife” scene after Nao’s death, where Reko shows up, but Alice doesn’t appear if she lives.

For this reason I strongly believe that the emotion ending is Alice/Kanna living. Therefore the logic ending is Reko/Sou living. I have yet to test out to see if there’s any changes in dialogue with those two combinations specifically, as most people online seem to be playing Alice/Sou and Reko/Kanna. I’m streaming this game for a couple of friends on Discord, and also all my midterms are over the next couple of weeks, so it’s hard to find the time to play this right now.

I also believe that we’ll soon be facing another path split- maybe at the very beginning of 3-1B- that has to do with logic and emotion. Whatever that consent form is, it scared the other participants- it’s definitely a bad thing. However, Sara now faces the choice between saving Keiji and consenting to Whatever Evil Thing’s Going On, and sacrificing Keiji to avoid it. Logic would be sacrificing Keiji, while emotion would be saving him, in this case. Perhaps that’s not true, as Midori is the kind of person who can and would pull a fast one on Sara for funsies. Perhaps there’s something in his language implying that Keiji’s going to end up dead no matter what. He does seem to want to antagonize Keiji, after all. That, or someone else is going to die instead- probably Q-taro, having just been stabbed by Mai and being in bad shape. Even so, I wonder which will be which- whose death would be considered “logical” and whose is based on “emotion”. 

TL:DR So many mysteries with so many possible answers. I just want to see someone vibe check Midori like he vibe checked us already.