#sorry this one got long its one of my biggest gripes with v3

[danggirlronpa]

8, 9, and 14, maybe?

Already did 14!

8. Who is your favorite protagonist?

Komaru!! Really, in terms of the games themselves, I love Komaru and Makoto pretty equally. But Komaru gets pushed over as the winner for out-of-game reasons. Her birthday is also the anniversary of my admission to the suicide ward, so every time it passes, it feels like we both made it another year. And that make me really happy :')

9. Who is your least favorite protagonist?

It's Shuichi........I'm so sorry I know y'all love Shuichi but he's just. Firstly he's not a good detective, and that bums me out. But secondly, there's no, like, reason for him to be the protagonist. Y'know? Everyone else is the protagonist because they have a narrative reason for it. Being the protagonist BUILDS to something. Makoto becomes the Ultimate Hope TM, Hajime's backstory reveals something stark about the existence of Hope's Peak that is completely unique to him, Komaru is the protagonist specifically to challenge what being a protagonist even means and finally buck the shackles of the narrative by the end.

Shuichi's arc doesn't build to something. There are several other characters who would have been much more meaningful as protags (spoilers for the rest of this paragraph) - Kiibo, who could've not just been controlled by the audience within the fiction, but literally controlled by the audience in that the player controls him; Tsumugi, who could've built to the subtle discovery that she's the mastermind and the reveal regarding fiction, making it so we question the truth through a much longer con than we got with Kaede.

Kaede's time as a protagonist was short, but even it served a purpose in the twist of the twist - that everyone was expecting music girls to die, but she can't because she's the protagonist! But surprise she does anyway! Subversion in such a way that you are challenging an audience's expectations but ultimately still appeasing them the same way they expected.

On the other hand, there's no meta reason for Shuichi to be the protagonist. Of course it's beautiful that Kaede handed off her vision to him, but he doesn't have to be the protagonist for that to work. Twogami handed off his vision to Chiaki, and neither of them were protags. There's nothing unique about Shuichi's relationship to the story that sets him aside as The Protagonist. They just, like...wanted him to be. And there really isn't even an in-universe justification of it, like appeasing V3's fictional audience, because we know they were looking through a different character. It's just a really odd choice.