#of if nankidai will actually give shin's route the true happy ending IF WE EVEN GET ONE HONESTLY...

[ozlices]

just sitting here minding my own business and realized shin has abandonment issues........................... it's over bro it's over im doomed i lose-

[sou-ver-2-0]

Shin and Kanna and the blood connection

Yes, let’s talk about this! My old meta post about Shin and Kanna’s relationship has been making rounds; I’d like to comment on it.

Long story short: I like the twist, but only because the writing makes clear to me that it doesn’t matter. Hiyori tried to manipulate Kanna with this “new stunning information,” but the information didn’t change anything from Kanna’s perspective. Blood matters to villains, but it shouldn’t matter to those of us who think love matters more.

Making Shin and Kanna blood-related is not a plot twist that I would have expected to like, but now I do, so I want to explain why that is. Ultimately, this comes down to me viewing the reveal as an “ungiven narrative reward.” I imagine it like an absurd fairytale happy ending for them. Shin and Kanna “deserved” to “win” this connection because they suffered and loved each other selflessly. It’s like how Cinderella “deserves” to marry the prince because she suffered while staying true to her morals.

The “happy ending” goal of the participants in YTTD is to escape and return to normalcy. They want their normal lives back. If Shin and Kanna both survived with the new knowledge that they were biological siblings—it wouldn’t change their own feelings for each other, but it would change how normal society saw them. They wouldn’t just be a young man and girl who experienced a harrowing adventure together and forged a deep bond; they would have “won” a society-approved excuse to live as brother and sister in their normal lives, without any need to explain how they actually met. It provides a “solution” to the stigma they faced of having a seemingly predatory relationship; it’s normal for siblings to share a room, while it’s eyebrow-raising for strangers. However, I want to insist that the entire reason this plot twist works for me is because they lose.

It works for me because they don’t get to enjoy this blood connection.

If they did, I wouldn’t like it. I wouldn’t like it if the story made blood important! I don’t like it when fans act as though the blood connection is what matters. The bond that Shin and Kanna made on their own is what matters!

What I loved about the writing for both Shin and Kanna’s wishes was that even though they technically wished to meet their missing biological family, the writing made clear that they were both already satisfied with the sibling figure they had. After all, Kanna is clearly thinking about Kugie’s happiness when she gives Kugie her wish, and the deeper meaning of Shin’s wish is about his feelings for Hiyori! Shin says he will “become the person [he] wants to be,” and that “person” is obviously Hiyori. Kanna ends her lost memory with words affirming her love of Kugie, and Shin ends his lost memory by saying that he considers Hiyori his family.

I also liked the reveal in Kanna’s route because Kanna is wise enough to recognize that the blood connection doesn’t matter! Her reaction to the reveal is “I thought…as much…” That’s a far cry from being shocked or upset over the news. Kanna reacts to the news in the same way that Nankidai expects us to react. We thought as much. We already knew that they loved each other and that their bond already mattered.

The reason that Midori believes that he can use this blood connection to manipulate Kanna is because he’s a villain! We shouldn’t expect Midori to have a fair grasp on what actually matters.

If Midori was a good fairy granting wishes instead of a devil, he would have reunited the siblings before the Death Game, and they wouldn’t have had to suffer at all. Instead, he brought them to suffer, and then after Shin dies, he cruelly throws at Kanna’s feet that they could have had a “real” sibling relationship in a “normal” life. Since Midori doesn’t understand love, he acts as though this is what matters: the blood connection. Nankidai uses this reveal to show Midori’s foolishness and Kanna’s wisdom. Midori’s words do nothing to Kanna. Instead, Kanna recognizes that both Shin and Kugie already gave her what she needed; she now knows that she is loved and that her life has worth.

I understand why some of my friends dislike this reveal, because the blood connection shouldn’t matter! That’s why it was important to me to write out why I believe the narrative has this same opinion. 3-1B may be messy, but I thought the writing for Shin and Kanna’s relationship was solid.

Before 3-1B came out, it was more popular to theorize that Original Sou Hiyori and Kanna were biological siblings, but this was because people expected Kanna’s relationship with Shin to matter more. By having Shin and Kanna be biological siblings instead, Nankidai was walking a trickier tightrope to deliver the message that “love matters more than blood,” but in my opinion he pulled it off. And I even like the delivery better this way! Because Midori and Kanna never had any sort of connection at all. Now I believe that the superficial similarities between Midori and Kanna’s physical appearances is meant to show them as parallel sibling-figures for Shin.

Anyway. In conclusion, the main takeaway from the “biological siblings” reveal in 3-1B, besides whatever we can theorize it means about the candidates, is that Kanna has matured. We’re meant to take her side. The blood connection shouldn’t matter, but the affection they had for each other was real. They were already siblings in their hearts.

[oumakokichi]

Hello!! Since I saw you were enjoying YTTD, what do you think about Sou and possible parallels to be drawn between him and Kokichi? Love your blog!

Oh boy, that’s a pretty great question. I had a feeling when I started YTTD that it was only a matter of time before Sou wound up being my favorite, and I wasn’t proven wrong over the course of the game. There are definitely some similarities between the two of them—and some differences too!

Spoilers for both games under the cut, so be careful when reading!

Well, to start with the similarities: they both lie. Uh, a lot. In fact, lying is sort of the most memorable thing about both of their characters.

Kodaka has stated that Ouma represents ndrv3’s entire theme of lying on multiple occasions, and I don’t think anyone needs any convincing that lying is Ouma’s entire schtick. With Sou, Nankidai has never (as far as I know) said anything about him representing the concept or idea of “lies,” but it’s still pretty evident nonetheless from the narrative.

Where Sara tries to keep the group united and cooperating with each other honestly, Sou undermines her attempts at nearly every opportunity and lies time and time again, both in and out of the main game. Even his theme song emphasizes how much he lies. Vgperson did a great job translating the title in my opinion by making it “Not So, Sou,” and in Japanese the title is “Sou no Uso”—a play on the fact that his name is a rearrangement of the Japanese word for “lie.”

They even have a few physical similarities as well: Sou is physically taller and older, but both of them are fairly scrawny, underweight (this is lampshaded with Sou in Your Turn to Shine by the fact that he can put off dying from starvation for at least one extra turn), and of course, they both wear scarves.

I have actually seen a few people in the DR fandom call Sou “green Komaeda” when playing YTTD for the first time, probably due to his role as the “trickster” character within the main game, but I honestly think it’s much fairer to say he’s similar to Ouma instead. If anything, it’s kind of hard to not see the similarities between the two when going from one game to the other.

Ouma does, after all, go out of his way to antagonize people within trials as well, and both he and Sou are considerably paranoid and mistrustful of others’ intentions. Both of them are all too happy to play the role of the villain even if it means being hated by everyone else, because they want to make it out of their respective killing games alive and they don’t trust anyone who talks openly about “cooperating” and “believing in each other.”

Of course, that’s not to say that the two of them are carbon copies of each other. Sou is similar to Ouma, but he’s definitely not identical. Their key differences are easier to see when you look past their surface-level personas, as well as their motivations for why they do the things they do.

To put it simply, both of them lie, but for almost completely different reasons. It’s true that Ouma in part does lie because of his own paranoia and lack of trust for the rest of the group—but also, Ouma just really, really loves lying. It’s a core part of his character; he states multiple times that he believes having the ability to lie is the same as having free will, and this shows how deeply he resents the idea of “having” to tell the truth, or well, being “forced” to do anything, really.

He also lies to entertain. He says so pretty explicitly in his salmon mode ending, and it’s absolutely not a lie: Ouma is someone who loves being dramatic, over-the-top, and entertaining. He hates being bored, and he hates the idea of boring other people even more.

After playing ndrv3 at least once, it’s really easy to see that deep down he’s just a clown with a love for funny wigs and really dumb pranks, so I wholeheartedly believe that even outside of a killing game, Ouma would still lie all the time (in fact he does, again, in his salmon mode route). It’s just that his lies would lack any malice or hostility to them.

The thing that sets Ouma apart from many other “bastard trickster” characters in fiction is that his love for lies isn’t some of act or façade that he’s putting on. He enjoys it in the same way that a kid enjoys making a prank phone call or putting a whoopee cushion on someone’s chair. Within the constraints of a killing game, it’s absolutely true that Ouma is cold, calculating, and manipulative—but he’s also genuinely childish, fun-loving, and silly. These traits are honestly the reason I love Ouma so much as a character and find him so interesting.

By contrast, Sou lies out of absolute necessity. Knowing that he has a 0% chance of survival only increases his desire to make it out of the game alive all the more, and solidifies his distrust in Sara with her high rate of survival. He lies out of sheer desperation, willing to talk and act like a completely different person from his true self if it means giving himself even the slightest sliver of an opportunity to stay alive.

Even his name (his real name, that is), reflects this. He took on both the name and, to some degree, the persona of the real Sou Hiyori: a first name that is, like I said, an anagram of the word “lie,” and a surname that means “sunny.” By contrast, his actual name, “Shin Tsukimi,” means “truth” and “moon-viewing.” Before the events of YTTD, Shin Tsukimi was an extremely gentle, timid person who was honest and trusting to a fault, further confirmed when we actually see an AI of him in chapter 3 who acts completely different from Sou as we know him.

Sou might put on an act and pretend that he enjoys lying and being a huge bastard in the middle of the main game, but he’s not nearly as good at keeping up the villain façade as Ouma, and his cracks show a lot easier. Multiple characters, particularly Sara, Kanna, and Keiji, call Sou out on his bad acting at various times, and insist that he isn’t nearly as evil or uncaring as he’d like to pretend. This is a sharp change from Ouma, who remained an enigma even after his death and played the part of the ringleader so well that nearly everyone still believed he was a Remnant of Despair until nearly halfway through the chapter 6 trial.

From what we can see of Sou’s personality, both in YTTD and YTTS, he’s not lying because he likes the fun of it all, or because he’s just a kid who loves pranking people deep down. He’s really, truly scared shitless and eaten alive by his own paranoia for pretty much the entirety of YTTD, and while he’s certainly not the trusting or naïve Shin Tsukimi anymore, he nonetheless tends to still show signs of being quiet, timid, and occasionally even grumpy and closed-off from other people.

For example, Sara has multiple opportunities to tease him or attempt to befriend him throughout the game. When you teasingly insist that you’ve “always been close friends” with him during the second half of chapter 2, he looks completely startled and taken aback, even a little horrified at her persistence in wanting to get to know him after all the stunts that he’s pulled. You can also have Sara bother him while he’s working on the laptop after they get rid of Mishima’s AI, to which he responds with more and more irritation. In my opinion, I get the sense that Sou is more used to being the butt of jokes rather than making them, and doesn’t enjoy feeling as though someone’s poking fun at him, even if people like Sara are doing it with good intentions.

While I called them both scrawny earlier, I do want to clarify that I absolutely, unironically think Sou is weaker than Ouma physically too. Ouma isn’t exactly super strong or anything; he complains when lifting the inugami statue with Saihara in chapter 3, and he doesn’t seem to like PE class from some of his dialogue in salmon mode. But it’s really clear that Ouma does hide some of his aces up his sleeve, and that he can punch a hell of a lot harder than he lets on, like in chapter 5 when he counters Momota’s second attempt to punch him.

Meanwhile Sou… Sou struggles to open cabinet doors and probably pickle jars too. He has weaker physical strength than both Kanna, a middle schooler, and Gin, an elementary schooler, in his YTTS stats. I love him to pieces, I think he’s a fantastic character, but it’s just too funny. Sou is not merely scrawny, he’s essentially the biggest, weakest pushover despite being around 20 years old or so and I think that’s great.

Anyway, these are just my thoughts on the similarities and differences between the two of them! Both of them are absolutely willing to go to extreme lengths in order to try and survive their respective killing games, and they’re both extremely paranoid and distrustful of others. But removed from the killing game, Ouma is pretty clearly someone who aspires to be a clown (both a class clown and a literal, pie-throwing, nose-honking party clown) and to entertain others, while Sou is honestly just an exhausted and extremely grumpy convenience store worker bordering on unemployment who has zero upper body strength and just wants to be left alone.

Thank you for the really fun question, anon! I really love both Sou and Ouma, so I had fun getting to write this meta for them!