#just to be clear this isn't ironic I find it really funny when everybody's wrong

[adobe-outdesign]

I love it when leak/speculation season is just completely and utterly wrong

[jimintomystery]

A Recipe Written in Mama's Ragu

I got to feeling restless, so I started a re-watch of the Game Grumps playing Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc. I guess I'll run through my thoughts on Chapter 1 (episodes 1-15).

[Above: She's only happy when she's helping a complete idiot, and he's...well...]

It's remarkable how much smoother the story begins when you already know everything. In my first go-around two years ago, nothing made sense and by the time Monokuma showed up, it felt like a fever dream. Like Arin and Dan, I was interrogating the dialogue for clues about how everything got this way, which was frustrating when the kids mostly focus on understanding (and re-stating) Monokuma's rules.

It's also clear that the game loses Arin very quickly. Arin's whole mindset about playing games is to skip the tutorial, let the environment show him what he needs to do, and then figure it out because he's The Video Game Boy. So once the Grumps find Sayaka's dying message, Arin wanders off to look for how he can present his evidence and start the trial. But in Danganronpa the trial can't begin until you click on a predefined set of hotspots to get all the evidence items, whether you understand their significance or not. Whether the player can solve the murder has very little to do with how Makoto solves it, which leads to Arin shouting "IT'S LEON!" for half the trial to no avail.

Ironically, the most damning evidence in the trial isn't explicitly identified during the investigation. The case against Leon would be circumstantial, if not for the question of whether he unwrapped his toolkit to disassemble the bathroom doorknob. And even so, Makoto is exonerated too easily--the kids decide he wouldn't have bothered unscrewing the doorknob since he knew how to jiggle it. The kids just assume Makoto wouldn't be crafty enough to go to such extreme lengths to frame Leon, which is incredibly naive. I have to think Celeste picked up on this and and realized she could run circles around these rubes.

I have a special place in my heart for the Grumps' voices for all the characters, so it's pretty funny watching these early episodes where they still haven't worked it all out. Dan's take on Kyoko and Byakuya really carries this series for me, but at first she's got some kind of stuck-up Valley Girl thing going and he's all over the map. And of course, it's not until episode 3 that they hit on "Maizono = paisano" and give Sayaka a silly Italian accent.

This part of the story focuses almost exclusively on Makoto and Sayaka, which really swerved me. Everybody else comes off as superficial assholes, and the whole "Sayaka is the one kid who knew you in junior high" angle felt very contrived to me. I didn't have high expectations for the plot or the character development in this story. So I never saw it coming that Sayaka was the first to die, or that she got killed because she was the first to attempt murder, or that she'd be ruthless enough to frame Makoto. That's when the plot slapped me in the face and told me there's more to this story than watching the dumb hijinx of shallow teenagers stuck in a dating sim gone wrong.

It's probably not a coincidence that I got into the story just as Kyoko emerges as a major character. I cannot overstate that the kids in Danganronpa are constantly saying really stupid things. During the trial it is proposed that Sayaka was killed with a sword and the killer wanted to remove evidence she was in the room, which is absurd since her corpse is still there with a kitchen knife in her belly. In my first watch, Kyoko stepped up to cut through the bullshit just when I needed it most. Before long, when anything dumb was happening I would start wondering where Kyoko was, and hoping she'd show up to advance the plot. As she might say, I fell right into the mastermind's trap...

(Oh, there's a reference to Frank from House Party in episode 4. I lol'd)