#tagging this with that because this works really well as a chapter intermission ramble!

[commentaryvorg]

Reading your latest post it kind of made me realize that the third chapter in these games are usually viewed as pointless or disappointing. In 1-3, they wasted Taka, removed potential for Hifumi to ever change, and Celeste was kind of dumb with her plan (and Ultimate Gambler could have been a fitting rival). In 2-3, Hiyoko never gets to change, the motive was a disease, Mikan dies unceremoniously. And then 3-3. Do you think anything's going on here (despair of unfairness?) or just bad writing?

Yeah, there does seem to be something of a pattern with chapter 3s, doesn't there? Given that the more obvious pattern of there being two murders is clearly deliberate, it does make me wonder if there was something deliberate about the rest of the pattern as well.

I don't know if I would quite say that the point is showing the despair of unfair deaths, though. In 3-3 they at least try to make that something of a point, what with Himiko lamenting how pointless and unfair it was. But in the other two, nobody left alive particularly cared or was particularly sad about the victims to even be able to complain that it was unfair (even if a couple of those victims may have been fan favourites). So it doesn't really feel like that was ever intended to be a narrative point back then. It's possible that V3 made something of a narrative point of it because the writers were aware that fans felt this way about 1-3 and 2-3 (especially with how meta V3 likes to be), but I don't think that can be what they were going for originally.

To me, the pattern (aside from the double murders) is more of just... a pattern of lazy writing? Which seems like a really stupid thing to consciously make a pattern of, but it does appear potentially deliberate. I mentioned when complaining about Kiyo that one point of Danganronpa is to see what it takes to turn a decent person into a murderer, which is wasted when the culprit is a terrible person who would have done the murder without the killing game, and... that's basically true for Celeste and Mikan as well. I kind of get the feeling that Celeste would have killed someone if you offered her enough money even outside the killing game because she’s that self-absorbed (meanwhile 1-1 and 1-2's killers (or attempted killers) only snapped under their motives because the killing game was already stressing them to breaking point). And Mikan suddenly shockingly turns out to have always been someone obsessed with despair who kills for the hell of it.

Of course, in Mikan's case, there's more to it than that which connects with the overarching plot twist. There's also more to the Despair Disease motive, since it turns out that Monokuma cheating just to get someone to die is precisely what he's doing because he doesn't care about making a point this time, and the idea of a disease that can arbitrarily change someone's personality (or return their memories) suddenly doesn't seem so wildly implausible when you realise where they are. This is a thing in 3-3 as well - the lazy writing of Kiyo's blatantly murderous backstory and obviously scripted plan is precisely the point, not to mention the whole deal with Kaito's phobia. So both 2-3 and 3-3 (though sadly not 1-3) have a common theme of their apparent lazy writing actually being connected to the real truth of the situation and something that you can look at in a new light once you know the whole story. Now that's a pretty cool theme! But unfortunately, doing that inevitably means that the chapter comes across as disappointing the first time around, and even when you're replaying and can appreciate the narrative point of it better, it still doesn't stop the actual events that happen during the chapter from being kind of lackluster.

(It also appears to be part of this common theme that the reveals in the chapter 6 never actually explicitly link back to the chapter 3 and point out what was really going on; we’re just left to figure that out for ourselves. That’s objectively a cool thing - I’ve said a lot how much I love it when there are things about a story that are clearly true even though they’re never explicitly addressed - but also, because of that, I’ve not seen anyone else realise that Kaito’s phobia is an in-universe attempt to nerf him and this makes me sad because I am So Sure it’s true and it should be talked about more.)

The other thing that disappoints me about the writing of 3-3 in particular is it having basically no connection to the overarching themes of the rest of V3 (selfless murderers! the truth is painful!), but that isn't something 1-3 and 2-3 could ever have in common with it because DR1 and 2 didn't really have a clear overarching theme with their other cases in the first place.