#if you spent as much time thinking about sdr2 as i do (25 hrs per day) this should be obvious

[catboyebooks]

if anyone remembers that really long post i wrote about komaeda last year (this one, where i talked about how i think everyone misinterpreted what he was trying to do in chapter 5), i have an addendum to it? this is something i wanted to talk about back when i originally wrote the post but i couldn't make up my mind about it so i ended up not saying anything:

we never actually see the full information reward komaeda received for clearing the final dead room. obviously he was told about their pasts as shsl despair, but we don't get to learn the specifics of what he was told. and i couldn't decide whether or not he'd have been told anything about kamukura. on the one hand, he does say some things implying that he knows about the kamukura project, and on the other hand i just wasn't sure how you'd tell komaeda "the guy you have a massive crush on was selected by hope's peak academy to become the most talented person in the word and bear the title of shsl hope" without making him cum in his pants. again, the info reward for beating max difficulty russian roulette was clearly aimed at upsetting komaeda specifically — nobody else could have obtained that information — so i questioned whether telling him about the kamukura project would be in line with the mastermind's goals here. he might just be into that, right?

but i also talked about how i think people read the kamukura thing wrong and i think this ties into that. like, a good deal of the fandom seems to be operating under the assumption that the kamukura project worked and hinata was in fact given every talent ever via experimental brain surgery his high school did on him, and i really don't think that's the intended read. and thinking about it all again, i also don't think it's what komaeda would have been told. i think one could absolutely, without much difficulty even, present this information to him in a way that would upset him. it'd be easy to make hinata look pathetic for agreeing to the experiment, especially to somebody like komaeda, who believes that talent is innate and that untalented people cannot become talented. it would be easy to make hope's peak look like the villains here because they are. and the experiment was arguably a failure — kamukura didn't bring hope to the world, he became a despair terrorist like the rest of them and is implicated in the inciting incident that kicked off the entire despair apocalypse.

this would fit in perfectly with komaeda's behavior towards hinata in late chapter 4, in particular the lecture he gives about how talentless people shouldn't aspire to become talented — ostensibly this is just about hinata enrolling in the reserve course but i think it's about more than that, particularly given that in the same conversation komaeda asks hinata something along the lines of "were you willing to sell your body and soul to hope's peak academy?" that literally is what hinata did and it seems odd that komaeda would say something so on-the-nose by sheer coincidence. if it were just that maybe i could still accept it as coincidence but there's also the conversation the two of them have right before the fourth trial starts, when komaeda hangs back to talk to hinata alone. in that scene, komaeda tells hinata about a murder mystery novel he read where the twist was that the likable, relatable protagonist was the killer all along, and the book had essentially tricked him into sympathizing with her, and what does hinata think about that? hinata's response is like "what? i can't comment on a book i've never read" (extremely fucking funny i love him) and so komaeda drops it but surely that has to be about the kamukura project too. i guess maybe you could read it as just being about how they're all shsl despair but, like, come on — he's talking to the protagonist in a mystery story where the twist is "the protagonist did it" about a mystery story where the twist was "the protagonist did it" and there's no way that isn't on purpose on his part.

i don't have a conclusion here, just wanted to address this since i skipped talking about it earlier. tl;dr i do think komaeda knew about the kamukura project and i think this further supports what i was saying about how said project was bad and a failure actually