#the one they call the Ultimate Despair

[suddenlymicah]

Mukuro Ikusaba, the 16th Student, lying hidden somewhere in this school… the one they call the Ultimate Despair, Watch out for her.

[maxences-hat]

Making undisguised Mukuro sprites because spike refuses to

I'm gonna do all of them at some point (and make some custom ones too) but i just wanna share how it looks so far

I used the class picture from dr1, her splash art, and some official merch as reference so i hope i didn't mess anything up (because if spike won't care avout her than I WILL)

Also if anyone wants to rant about how spike needs to stop slobbing her with me, pls do

[crescenttm00n]

"you can't hear pictures!"

Meanwhile people who have played Danganronpa:

[sketchyface]

I got this new anime plot. Basically there's this high school girl except shes got huge boobs. I mean some serious honkers. A real set of badonkers. Packin some dobonhonkeros. massive dohoonkabhankoloos. Big old tonhongerekoogers. What happens next?! Transfer student shows up with even bigger bonkhonagahoogs. Humongous hungolomghononoloughongous

[thatoneluckybee]

tyler’s cosplay is coming along really well!

i saw a meme where someone put the junko pic over the “oh look ive been impaled” olaf thing and…. yeah. i’m not sorry about these anymore i need to be more annoying so i am not apologizing for this

[eggs-can-draw]

Tone is all over the place but oh well lol

[aparticularbandit]

....

what if they're called the cast of horrors

[hopefulindespair]

"You know, I'm feeling left out of all these things. They say to watch out for Mukuro but what about me? So rude."

[moonsidesong]

playing mystery games with a friend who is prone to wild speculation is so fun. just got to the end of dr1 chapter 4 and he hears the name mukuro ikusaba and without hesitation makes the assertion that Thats just kyoko's real name, actually. and everyone else in the call just gets to silently snicker about how wrong he is

[charlotte-buff]

The Implications of Cospox

I know literally no one cares, but this idea has been bouncing around inside my head for a while now and I just need to get it out there.

[Spoilers for the entire Danganronpa series ahead. Stop reading, Moji, I swear to God.]

Okay, so.

The big twist of Danganronpa V3 is that all previous installments of the Danganronpa franchise are works of fiction in-universe. V3 is actually the 53rd season of the ongoing Danganronpa TV series which rather confusingly started out as a bunch of video games and animated shows before transitioning into a live-action format where real people really kill each other for real.

Shirogane Tsumugi, who is part of the production staff, proves this to the survivors during the final class trial by cosplaying as a bunch of characters from the first two games, most prominently Enoshima Junko, the franchise’s main villain. Because she has a condition called cospox that doesn’t allow her to cosplay as real people without breaking out in a rash, this supposedly demonstrates that the characters from previous Danganronpas are truly fictional.

Now.

It’d be easy to assume that Tsumugi is just lying about cospox to mess with the others and plunge them into Despair™︎. Considering all the other stuff that doesn’t quite add up – which is most of the stuff – it would in fact be very weird if she wasn’t lying.

So let’s get weird.

I propose that the only part of Tsumugi’s testimony that is 100% accurate and trustworthy is the existence of cospox. By extension, I also propose that all the Danganronpas before V3 are not just fiction, but rather distorted retellings of actual events.

The first clue that this is the case is the people Tsumugi cosplays as. She only cosplays as characters from Trigger Happy Havoc and Goodbye Despair, allegedly because those are the only ones Shūichi and the gang would be familiar with from the Flashback Lights. But why would Team Danganronpa have decided to only reveal the events of those two games to the participants of V3? If their goal was to prove that all of Danganronpa is fake, wouldn’t it have made more sense to have Tsumugi cosplay as everyone?

Simple. They couldn’t have Tsumugi cosplay as other characters because all those other characters – those introduced in Danganronpa 3, Ultra Despair Girls, and any of the light novels – were actually real people.

So only the following Danganronpa characters are for a fact known to be fictional: Akane, Aoi, Byakuya, Celeste, Chiaki, Chihiro, Fuyuhiko, Gundham, Hajime, Hifumi, Hiyoko, Ibuki, Izuru, Jill, Junko, Kazuichi, Kiyotaka, Kyōko, Leon, Mahiru, Makoto, Mikan, Mondo, Nagito, Nekomaru, Peko, Sakura, Sayaka, Sonia, Teruteru, Tōko, Ultimate Imposter, and Yasuhiro.

You know who this conspicuously doesn’t include, despite visibly being part of Tsumugi’s magical costume vortex? Ikusaba Mukuro, the other half of the original Ultimate Despair.

Why would Tsumugi choose not to cosplay as Mukuro in her Junko disguise even though she already has the appropriate clothes at the ready? Is it simply because Spike Chunsoft has never cared about Mukuro and consistently fucks her over at every opportunity?

Yes, but also no.

It’s because Mukuro was also real.

What does this all mean? Well, we’ve got an Ultimate Despair who is willing to orchestrate a killing game. And Matsuda Yasuke, the Ultimate Neurologist, still exists so erasing the contestants’ memories in preparation would be no problem. Mitarai Ryōta, the Ultimate Animator, also exists so that stupid mind control plot point from Danganronpa 3 is possible to execute as well.

In short: The biggest, most awful, most tragic event in human history actually happened in the V3 continuity, but Mukuro was the sole puppetmaster behind it instead of Junko.

Without the Ultimate Imposter’s positive influence, it probably would have been even easier for her to manipulate Ryōta and use his anime powers to recruit a bunch of random Hope’s Peak students as her underlings. With the exception of Hajime, the reserve course still exists so any one of the students there could have been picked to be the final candidate for the Hope Cultivation Plan in his stead – I’m placing my bets on Kuzuryū Natsumi becoming Kamukura Izuru considering she hated being confined to the reserve course even more than Hajime did – whom Mukuro then made out to be the culprit behind the student council’s mass murder, thus sparking the other reserve course students’ protests. And naturally, Monaca would have been easily available to mass manufacture killer Monokuma robots just like in the prime timeline.

The participants of the Killing School Life at Hope’s Peak Academy were whoever ended up as Mukuro’s pitiable classmates instead of our familiar class #78. While there is no Fujisaki Chihiro to develop Alter Ego, Gekkōgahara Miaya, the Ultimate Therapist, should be enough to still get a Neo World Program rolling. After all, in Danganronpa 2 it is said that programmers were among those who used their talents to spread Despair™︎ during The Tragedy even though the Remnants of Despair didn’t include anyone with programming skills (except maybe Kazuichi?), so someone at Hope’s Peak must have been up for the task regardless. Hell, let’s just say Mukuro told Monaca to develop a strong AI. She’s clearly smart enough.

Without Tōko and Genocide Jill to rely on and no Nagito to mess with the Demon Hunting game from behind the scenes, Komaru probably would have had a much harder time liberating Tōwa City. Maybe she teamed up with Yūta or Kanon or Takemichi or something. I don’t know. Why were all these people imprisoned in Tōwa City despite the reason for their imprisonment – their relationships to the Killing School Life contestants – not existing anymore? I also don’t know. I’ll figure that out another time.

By now you’re perhaps wondering: If all of this makes perfect sense and is definitely canon, why did Tsumugi bother to make up all that other shit? Simply put, because Tsumugi is Tsumugi.

She is absolutely obsessed with The Tragedy, that historic event she missed out on by virtue of being born too late. So she did what every teenager would do in this situation: Write fanfiction.

Junko is Tsumugi’s sparkly, edgy OC created to take the real Mukuro’s spot in her personal retelling of the events surrounding The Tragedy.

Think about it: She’s the secret twin sister of the woman who caused the apocalypse. She is prettier, smarter, bustier and more popular than Mukuro and has such an over-the-top, quirky personality that even the most unhinged individuals around her seem modest and composed in comparison. She is obviously the result of that special kind of flaming hot writing enthusiasm only found in teenage girls who spend way too much time watching anime. That’s why Mukuro ends up dying so early in Tsumugi’s version of the story, usurped by her very special original character who is so much better and cooler than the real deal in every way. That’s why Mukuro is so damn horny for Junko in Danganronpa 3.

Speaking of incest, we know that Tsumugi is into it in a major way. So why do you think she came up with Makoto, the big brother of the real-life hero of Tōwa City, and then had her other OC Tōko insist that they’re secretly in love with each other for the entirety of Ultra Despair Girls? Why did she invent Kanon’s cousin Leon just to claim she had a huge crush on him? Frankly it makes too much sense.

Tsumugi took those unprecedented real events that shook the world to its core and used them as the setting for her creative writing endeavors, replacing everyone involved she didn’t particularly care about, deemed too uninteresting or just inexplicably hated with wacky fictional characters like Sakura, Gundham or Genocide Jill.

The daughter of a yakuza boss who is also an artificially enhanced superhuman possessing every ability ever defeated Alter Ego Mukuro with the power of friendship inside a computer simulation? Nah, that’s nice and all but I don’t really like her vibe. What if instead that superhuman was a hot guy with an ahoge whom the Ultimate Gamer with big boobies immediately falls for and also his second identity had really long hair and red, glowing eyes? Let’s just turn that Natsumi chick into a side character who gets killed off-screen by someone whose first name isn’t even recorded because honestly, who gives a shit about her? I’m gonna write her a brother with a cool eyepatch though; that yakuza theme might not be a complete waste and also he can call her “Ultimate Little Sister”.

Is it any wonder then that a person like Tsumugi would eventually end up orchestrating her own killing game where she has full authorial control over every participant’s personality and behaviour from the get-go? This is exactly what she had always yearned for – a Danganronpa that reality cannot interfere with.

One last point I wanted to bring up: You know how Tsumugi insists that the participants of season 53 are nothing but fictional characters? Well, we know for a fact that she doesn’t actually believe that.

Because she broke out in cospox when she tried cosplaying as Kaede.

These people are real to her and not just simple playthings, whether she wants to admit it or not. Which makes how she treats them even more horrifiying.

[chaotic-and-mind-reader]

“ Come to think of it, we should be more around. ”

“ Ya think? It has been quite some time—Pfft, they hardly know us anymore! ”

“ We should do something to stand out! Setting a house ablaze, robbing a bank, stuff like that! ”

[enoshima-pilled]

I met this Naegi guy, who apparently I knew? He just got threatened by... the ultimate bodyguard. He threatened to kill Naegi, because I was involved with some sort of massacre with the student counci- WAIT, WHO'S THA-

[gingerninja8-2]

That's... quite a big error.

Daily Danganronpa Fun Fact #273

In the epilogue of THH, the English version lists Makoto as the Ultimate Despair. This is a mistake, the original Japanese game has him correctly labeled as the Super High School Level (Ultimate) Hope.

Home | Previous Fact | Next Fact

[alltimefail]

I'm sure someone has already shared these three things, but I'm going to as well:

(Source 1, 2, 3)

I am a realist, and I'm telling you all, with the utmost confidence, that there is hope for saving this show so long as we continue to fight. The cast and crew themselves have given, and continue to give, every indication that there is hope for this show.

As we make noise online and advocate for it, the showrunners are given the ammo they need to fight behind the scenes, so DO NOT STOP.

Worst case? You pour a shit ton of love onto a story that is meaningful to you, and onto people who played a role in bringing it to life. Best case, we drum up enough noise that viewership increases (this is already happening), and the show is ultimately saved.

Many shows have been saved. Ours can be, too. There is absolutely no reason to despair. Dead Boy Detectives was released on two "Best-Of" lists just today. The Sun, the Los Angeles Times, Esquire, CNet, and even the goddamn DAILY MAIL are just a few notable publications that revered Dead Boy Detectives and lamented its cancellation THIS WEEK. Dead Boy Detectives has the best audience score of any DC television adaptation to date; the only one that I found that's even in the same league audience-wise is The Penguin which is new and being called a "Hit..." and IT HAS THE SAME AUDIENCE SCORE AS DEAD BOY DETECTIVES (91%).

Dead Boy Detectives even has a better critic and audience score than its parent show, The Sandman, for fucks sake. Its audience score beats out some of the longer-running DC shows by a mile. It is, objectively, a success.

So keep making noise, keep streaming like the actors are still encouraging you to do. I'll tell you this; it's been two months of silence from Netflix, but that's not a bad thing. They dodged THE NEW YORK TIMES who inquired about the Dead Boy Detectives cancellation by choosing not to give a statement. They know this decision wasn't a good one, and all it takes is the right amount of pressure from audiences to get things done.

I've lamented show cancellations in the past and never fought to save a single one because the numbers were bleak, or Netflix was clear with their reasoning, or even the showrunners themselves told us not to fight because it was a lost cause. That is NOT the case with Dead Boy Detectives. The more we dig, the more we find, and new people are watching this show every day because of the noise being drummed up. The more of us that fight, the better chance we have.

So keep making art and fics, keep making noise, keep recommending this show to anyone who will listen, and believe that we can save this show. The only people who benefit from us giving up are the same ones who canceled it, and why should we give them that satisfaction?

[malkaviian]

you know what's the worst part about seba's execution in the dr au? it had no purpose other than eris' own enjoyment and making golden lose all hope. that's it. if golden ever wanted to become an ultimate despair (for some reason) after watching his son's execution, eris would have denied him that, that he isn't worthy of becoming one of them and if he truly thinks he could ever be one with how pathetic he is

[eggs-can-draw]

Garf