#shsl puppeteer

[fixateforonce]

Day 15: AU- @shsl-islandmode-eventsI've had this on my mind for awhile, and I've drawn sketches of it in the past. I'm glad I got to draw it for this! I'm really proud of how Keebo came out! Tsumugi is the "Phone guy", and owns this particular establishment in this AU. Kokichi is someone who sneaks in at night and pretends to be a puppet/animatronic to investigate and look into the shady stuff that the place has going on. Disappearances, murders, cover ups ect. Kaito was the only one who got the job originally, being required to work 5 nights minimum. After the first night, he brings Maki and Shuichi as moral support. Shuichi after learning about the places history now also wants to figure out what's happening. He befriends Keebo, who has no knowledge of what's going on, but wants to help and make a good name for the establishment named after him. <3

[itsbenedict]

Bullet Proof: Postmortem

Waaaay back in the day, when I was 19 and I'd just discovered Dangan Ronpa (back when we put the space in the title, because all we had was the Orenronen LP and we called Ultimates "Super High-School Levels"), I decided to do my own. That was the heyday of forum adventures on the MSPA Forums, and there were no standards. I didn't know how to draw, but I decided to learn. I wanted to make a thing!

I got a good ways into it, honestly! It went through a few format changes, skipping over a couple cases in the middle in an abridged format on Tumblr, but I'd finally found my groove for the fourth case, playable from the perspective of the murderer. It was going well!

Then the MSPA Forums got hacked and the admins didn't keep any backups and everything was lost.

So that sucked! And once it became clear they were never going to recover the forums due to a mix of security incompetence and not giving a shit, I didn't really have a choice but to try and reboot it. I'd lost all the text, apart from a few garbled pages from a corrupted archive snapshot.

But... I've got way too much else I want to do at this point, and it's not looking too likely I'm going to have the time to come back to it. So if you want to know everything about what happened and where it was going...

You've clicked the readmore. So you do want to know all that. Here goes! Activate theme music.

You remember how it opened, right? It was a forum adventure, and at the time, I asked the readers to select an SHSL talent and gender as the protagonist entered the American branch of Hope's Peak Academy.

That was diegetic. "Alice Bayko" was an SHSL Impostor, or- I actually kinda waffled on having her not technically be SHSL anything, as she infiltrated the school with a false identity. She has, however, forgotten this, and her original identity and mission, leaving her with nothing but the mask. I believe there was a scene planned, or maybe a scene that did happen, I forget- where Alice would be called upon to demonstrate some sort of stage magic trick... and completely not know how to do any of that.

But what was she up to?

Well, that's a good question, with a complicated answer. Let's start pulling back the layers, here.

Seventeen students, and of the seventeen... somewhere between six and nine of them could be considered secret masterminds. Hilariously, I seem to have ordered this old banner issue in order of who's the most technically the ultimate mastermind, which was very cheeky of me. Would've been fun if someone ever caught that.

Let's start with...

Mastermind Level 1: Disguise

This creepy kid, SHSL Prodigy Billy Bookerton, was supposed to be the original secret mastermind in charge of the school. As came up in the adventure proper, this iteration of Hope's Peak was intended to be a safehouse from the ongoing despair apocalypse pictured in the Danganronpa canon. The son of the headmaster, he would control their Monokuma puppet and be in charge of faking to the outside world that this Monokuma-themed airship was in fact a murder-happy despair cult (like everywhere else on Earth somehow.)

This was not supposed to be a secret to the student body. And this 27-year-old man was not supposed to wake up in the body of a malnourished child and pose as a student. After events occurred, he found himself like this, with a note in his own handwriting instructing him to lay low and play this role.

What events occurred?

Mastermind Level 2: Blackmail

Also explained in the adventure proper, since these two were culprit and victim of the playable case 4: Gwendolyn and Ursula Schultheiss, SHSL Sysadmin and SHSL Retro Gamer nothing at all. Gwen was admitted to Hope's Peak on the basis of an actual talent, and pretty quickly gained control of their computer systems, sneaking Ursula in under the guise of Sakura Aran, and learning about the plan to escape Ultimate Despair by disguising the school and taking to the sky.

She thought that plan was really stupid.

Specifically, she thought Ultimate Despair was a flash in the pan, and it was ridiculous to think that some student riots all the way in Japan posed some sort of apocalyptic threat. (In her defense, this is a reasonable thing to think! It is ridiculous! Danganronpa's worldbuilding is fucking nonsense! But unfortunately for her, we're rolling with it.)

So she and Ursula hatched a plan to get rich. Hope's Peak is full of the progeny of the super-rich, like the Bright conglomerate. Obviously people like this would have loads of incriminating secrets, with which they could be blackmailed, and by which they would deserve to be blackmailed because screw those nepo babies. The plan was to run a Deception Game, not a Killing Game- they'd steal Billy's remote-control scary apocalypse terrorist, and pit everyone against each other in a contest to uncover each other's darkest secrets.

Once they had the dirt, they'd pretend to lose control and land the ship somewhere safe and sound, and Hope's Peak could deal with the scandal of the Monokuma hijacking and the consequences of their bonkers overreaction to some airhead fashionista's trendy protest.

If you recall, their plan went like this:

Each of them assumed that the other had somehow betrayed them and hijacked the school's systems on their own- Ursula retained control of the damaged Monokuma puppet, and Gwen retreated to her secret closet base to try and wrest control of the systems back from whatever super-hacker Ursula found to compromise her control. It took Gwen a few chapters (and accidentally murdering her sister) to realize that there was a...

Mastermind Level 3: Reality TV

It all started with SHSL Heir Henry Bright, heir to the Bright Conglomerate and active vice director of the company. Specifically, he directed vice. The Bright Conglomerate, in his opinion, did things too by-the-book, and were passing up big opportunities for growth in the organized crime sector. He was fostering connections with the Hit Deck (which led to the altercation that led to his and Dominique Martine's deaths in case 2), and...

Unlike Gwen, he didn't think the emergence of Ultimate Despair was nonsense. No, it was a growth opportunity. His plan was to invite a film crew to the airship and broadcast an exciting (fake) killing game to pander to this emerging despair-based market! With illicit funds provided by his contact in the Hit Deck (in exchange for his help securing a place on the ark for the Hit Deck's boss and trusted confidantes, posing as students), he assembled a team. Bribed some students, located an SHSL Doctor and some effects artists for realistic murder effects, did some networking, and...

...well, word gets around. The team he put together had bigger ambitions. A creative vision. One that had no room for executive meddling. They cut him out of the production team and forced him into the cast.

(I'm honestly not sure if this layer of convolution was necessary- I was on the fence about cutting him from the cast. The show's team might've found out about the school just because Gwen and Sakura screwed up the school's stealth measures. He's gotta kind of be there to explain the Hit Deck's presence, though, since aside from Dom none of them were actual Ultimates.)

Realer Reality TV

Before I reveal the members of the final mastermind tier, let's go over how they did this.

I never ended up using this portrait, but this is Davi Rossi, SHSL Doctor, though he prefers "Ultimate Necromancer". He's a graduate of the original Hope's Peak in Japan, and his technology is the cornerstone of the whole setup here- underneath the school, in the restricted areas in the body of the ship, he has a whole secret lab with vats of glowy chemicals and fancy futuristic surgical tools.

He can bring back the dead.

Well, sort of. He can do all sorts of repairs on ordinary tissues- lose a limb, get a vital organ mashed up, bleed out, he can fix that. He can make alterations to the body, too- such as surgically reverting someone's apparent age, or implanting remote-control death chips, or strategically weakening someone's skull.

He can even fix a certain degree of brain damage- the kind of stuff that might occur if you suffer blunt force trauma or total deoxygenation, where the brain is still mostly intact.

As a result, most victims are recoverable. When someone dies, he can bring them back again and again. However: he can't fully reconstitute the brain, and he has a number of limitations when it comes to working with it:

If the brain is completely torn apart or otherwise destroyed, he cannot revive the victim.

He can't directly mind-control anyone, nor can he insert false memories.

He can delete and rearrange memories, but not read minds, and memory deletion is episodic- he can't mess with specific facts, only spans of time.

I think I... also made an exception so he could delete specific people? Which is clunky and doesn't really make sense in hindsight.

There's still a lot you can do by cutting up and rearranging the filmstrip of someone's memory- but except in one specific case, he only ever really used it to delete the last loop.

In case it wasn't obvious, this isn't the first killing game. This show has multiple seasons. It's been going a while- and while injuries that destroy the brain are rare, they're not nonexistent, and so there's quite a few students who died before the story began. There used to be a lot more students! That's why all the dorm rooms have bunkbeds!

And there's also unfortunately the one who received a fatal injury in this loop by blowing himself up with an improvised explosive device. Sorry, Mill!

(There's actually only a few people physically present running the show, since the show's been running for years now and they found that they really didn't need more than a skeleton crew to run it- Davi and some student plants, along with Monokuma drones and countless hidden cameras, are all that's necessary for production on the ground. There's no adult film crew present on the ship.)

(♪ Kids with guns. Kids with guns. Taking over. But they won't be long. ♪)

Davi is also responsible for rigging up the masterminds with the mental control rigs for the two Monokumas- and has a third Monokuma of his own, who was going to show up to treat Martha's injury during case 4, I think in literally the very next update planned before the forums exploded.

So who are the people in control of these Monokuma knockoffs?

Mastermind Level 5: Case 5

All that I just mentioned about Davi? You learn about this in the fifth case, after case 4 in which you play as either Sakura or Gwen after killing their sister and trying to avoid getting caught in the trial. You can't win case 4, but you can successfully stall and bullshit long enough for the trial to be interrupted by a sudden explosion before you can be executed.

Prior to case 4, Billy has disappeared into a secret passage, trying to track down the mastermind. Likewise, Flopsy-Turvy, Alice's rabbit, has also disappeared into a secret passage. Billy remains missing during case 4's trial.

After the explosion, the Monokumas call off the trial and lead the whole class to Davi's secret lab, which is the site of a set of murders.

Davi has been murdered via various small lacerations all over his body, including a slit throat.

Billy has been blown to bits by an explosion.

If Gwen or Sakura was executed during the trial, their corpse is found on a table in the lab.

Flopsy-Turvy, who was a robot all along, has been reduced to mechanical smithereens.

Violette, not dead anymore, but unable to speak aloud due to an incompletely healed throat injury

Some completely unfamiliar redhead kid, who doesn't know jack about anything and doesn't know how he got here.

The two survivors of this scene are naked save for some towels they found, and appear to have been spilled out from a couple of big glowy specimen tanks which were broken in the explosion that killed Billy and Flopsy. More on them later.

The subsequent investigation reveals all that stuff I just told you about Davi, blowing the setup wide open. In the course of that investigation, two of the masterminds find themselves confessing their involvement. After all- Davi's dead. There's no way they can run another season without someone to bring people back to life!

One in particular confesses before the other one- she doesn't care anymore, and she's happy to watch her co-conspirator squirm to try to avoid revealing his evil machinations to the people he desperately wants to think he's cool.

Lilakali Bhallu and Raymond Rizzini are my favorites. They suck so much. They hate each other quite a lot, and have gotten together and broken up like three different times. Their collective theme song is No Children by The Mountain Goats. They're like 25 at this point, stuck in the bodies of the teenagers they were when the show started filming and they fully agreed to be part of the production.

Why? Well, Lilakali hates everyone and enjoys seeing them turn on each other like rabid wolves repeatedly- and Raymond craves acceptance and is using his memory privileges and surveillance abilities to try over and over again to be Popular In High School (to no avail.) They're both pretty pathetic people.

Notably, they are both real students who're supposed to be here. I don't remember if I ever had Lilakali make any predictions, and she'll insist she's just making shit up, but I was gonna have her predictions all come true, because the Fortune Teller thing is a real talent. And Raymond really can make a pretty mean burger. (Cheekily, that old Tumblr post was supposed to have taken place in a previous season- you might notice Gwen in the background, who in this iteration was never convinced to leave her room for meals, instead sneaking out at night to raid the cafeteria.)

Lilakali also has an Edgy Backstory- she grew up in the circus, apprenticed under her grandmother, who refused to let her socialize with kids her age. She was supposed to learn the family divining techniques, not dance around like some harlot with a pack of urchins! Her grandma taught her to hate the world, and herself, and accidentally also her grandmother. One day, in a moment of perfect nihilist clarity, she took a Sixlizard cigarette lighter out of the trash, wandered amongst the tents, and burned down the entire circus, killing her grandma in the process. She looks back on that moment fondly as the happiest she's ever been.

Anyway. Those two are my favorites, but they're not the ultimate masterminds. In fact... they're quite sure there's supposed to be a third mastermind, and they suspect this third mastermind of having erased their memories of them and killing Davi. They can tell their memories were edited- they're fully aware of how the tech works and what the signs are, and they can tell there's big ugly gaps and gashes in their recollection of the past. Someone was missing, and Davi was being all cagey and weird about it. And last loop...

Well, what happened last loop is the direct cause of case 5. And at the end of the investigation... the two Monokumas go dead, and one giant Monokuma shows up, furious that Davi is dead and forcing the students to go to trial one more time. This will be the final execution- catching Davi's murderer.

Mastermind Level 6: Sailing No More

It doesn't take long into trial 5 for the identity of this giant Monokuma to be revealed- it's a mechsuit with a living person in it, not a robot, and he unmasks himself during the trial without too much objection once people start questioning... that confused redhead kid who they found at the crime scene. That character introduces himself as... the Super High-School Level Pilot, Nolan Cubbins.

Wait. What?

Didn't that guy die?

Well, you see--

--oh, shit, I forgot Tumblr has an image limit of 30 images per post. Uh, gonna have to break this up into two posts. Continue reading here!

[ultimateplaylistmaker]

Who's your SHSL Puppeteer OC?

Well he's less mine and more a shared OC with one of my friends

Nene Sei is a seventeen year old chubby autistic boy with curly brown hair and green eyes, he wears a beanie and a lot of browns, his best friend is a cloth doll he made named Mimi who has a matching dress and she's his best friend. Since he always struggled to make friends the dolls and puppets he made became his friends, being given rich stories and personalities. Over time he learned how to puppet them better and better to both make them seem as alive to everyone else as they are to him and to also start doing puppet shows at the local library for younger kids, happy to be able to share his friends with them. While very shy and introverted he loves stories and adventure and is endlessly curious.

He often uses Mimi as a way to communicate with the world more safely as Mimi is loud kinda brash and confident, everything he's not. If you say something mean to someone Nene may not have the guts or courage to say anything but Mimi does, and that helps him do a lot of things.

[jade-gemstone]

Ok, tell me, how did each of the characters get their talent?

HELL YEAH THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR SENDING AN ASK ABOUT DESPAIR'S FLAME!!!

So, I'm only going to discuss the characters I made (the other co-creators can reblog with their characters if they so choose), and I'm going to say how I decided on their talents and how they canonically got their talents.

Just for reference, the game takes place post tragedy.

Hisomu Isei, SHSL Roboticist: I thought of their talent while listening to a song. Canonically, they and their father assisted with the creation of the megaphone neutralizer guns used by the future foundation to dispose of Monokuma robots during the tragedy. Due to Hisomu's promise and their contribution, they were promised a spot as the SHSL Roboticist when Hope's Peak reopened.

Sae Yamamori, SHSL Bunraku Puppeteer: I actually got her talent from a random talent generator while I was on an OC making kick a few years ago. After deeper research in Bunraku and several years developing her, she quickly became one of my favorite OCS I've ever made. As for in canon, she simply honed her talent until she was the most well known and respected puppeteer in Osaka Prefecture. It also didn't hurt that her wealthy family made many financial contributions to the future foundation.

Katsumi Shinohara, SHSL Primary School Teacher's Assistant: I honestly don't remember how I came up with this talent, as Katsumi was made a long time ago. I think I made her design and personality first, then gave her a talent that fit that (as I did a lot when making my first few OCS). Similarly to Hisomu, she canonically has her talent due to helping a parental figure. They and their adoptive mother - a primary school teacher - helped house hundreds of children in a bunker to keep them safe during the tragedy. Due to her bravery and willingness to help in the face of almost certain doom, she was offered to be a student at Hope's Peak when it reopened.

Ixia Carter, Ultimate Ballet Dancer: I'd always wanted to make an Ultimate Ballet Dancer, and saw my chance with an archetype needed for the Despair's Flame story to properly develop. In canon, she was the most talented and most successful young ballerina at the School of American Ballet. Her first performance post tragedy helped create new interest in the arts in New York and show the persistence of art through despair.

Hensoku Shuwaka, SHSL Cryptologist: One day while I was just sitting around, a quote (that no real person has said as far as I'm aware) popped into my head that made me think "Hm, that would be a great thing for an Ultimate Ghost Hunter to say." After further thought and development of the idea, I settled on Cryptologist as the talent. In canon, Hensoku preserved and pioneered legends and myths across the world through many notebooks, an internet blog, and the power of hyperfixation/memorization. The preservation of cultural history was what awarded him the title.

Atlas Aetos, Ultimate Vinyl Record Collector: I thought of his talent while coming up with characters for a DR AU for another fandom that I never actually made. I liked the talent, though, so I kept it and made a wholly different character out of it. In canon, he preserved and found music that could have been entirely lost during the tragedy due to how closely he protected his records. After the tragedy, he amassed the largest (still existing) record collection.

Emmett Anouilh, Ultimate Physicist: We needed another academic Ultimate. I'm in a class at school where I'm doing a lot of physics work right now. Write what you know, bada bing bada boom Ultimate Physicist. In canon, he is the son of a well respected physics professor. He helped to improve upon the work of both his father and other prevalent modern physicists. His extreme intelligence at a young age as well as heavy contributions to a complicated scientific field caught the eye of a certain prominent member of the future foundation, who scouted Emmett when Hope's Peak was set to reopen.

Fushigi Akarui, SHSL ???: I wanted to make a SHSL ??? for this game, and sort of built her around the title. As for in the story? She wishes she knew how she got to be there. She really does.

[non-sequitur-ocs]

Wait, what would your SHSL Puppeteer and Ventriloquist think of eachother?

They're going to put on the best fucking puppet show of all time thats what

[mythgirlimagines]

Tsumugi Shirogane (She/Her)

Super High School Level (SHSL) Puppeteer

This reminds me of a couple fanarts with her with the other characters as tiny puppets on strings

Puppetry was unfairly looked down on, in her opinion. It was a lot harder than it seemed, and she put in a lot of work to learn the craft. Puppets were a lot cooler than people thought.

While she dabbles in all kinds of puppetry, puppets on strings were her favorites to work with. She’s extremely good at controlling their movements, even several at once.

Yeah, she’s used to a lot of her classmates viewing her puppets as “creepy” just because they’re puppets. She keeps trying to show them that they aren’t, but it’s hard to convince them.

Whatever, she still works on her own pop-up puppet shows for children, which they love. Occasionally she’ll even help out on more well-known shows that have puppets for characters.

She really wants to give puppets and other puppeteers a good name for more than just a specific kind of puppet. All of them worked too hard to be ignored by the public.

[heibon-hiroo]

And lemme just leave this, I was practicing chibis and these came out. Remember those fangan ocs I posted some time ago? They’re back, and wishing I actually think something good for their story-

[marenwithanm]

Mari: SHSL Puppeteer by @cenistar

[cenistar]

Danganronpa OC: MARI

I wanted to draw my girl again!! + add new info about her (´ ∇ `)

[fanganronpa-aesthetics]

[pinkeeybelly-blog]

SHSL Puppeteer! 

Sasayoki Hayashi <3

[danganrebirth-voices]

”He’s a little bit shy… But he’s brave enough to tell you his name!” Fine. My name is Mitsunari Koga. I am the Ultimate Puppeteer.

Mitsunari Koga VA: Jesse

MUSIC: Yume 2kki OST: Mary’s Theme For IB (Puppet)

[selagilou]

Talking to his puppets...

[dangankinthings]

💅🎎 ~ Aesthetic for a non-canon SHSL Puppeteer who loved Junko Enoshima ~ 🎎💅

[bobadeer]

revenge for my dear friend Taby-CrazyKat of their Ultimate Puppeteer, Mortia Susumu! 

acct is https://artfight.net/~boba-deer , team spice!

[m8chan-dontfollow]

commission for @mahoumenhera!! had a lot of fun making this ^^

ko-fi