#the real question is who in the v3 cast watches game theory

[thelyingjoke]

do you think kokichi tsumugi and shuichi all know the entire five nights at freddy’s lore

shuichi isn’t too open about it but he’s got multiple boards for theories. kokichi talks to tsumugi about the lore and purposefully gets things wrong just to annoy her and watches in amusement as she cites his own theories back at him

[ryouverua]

Trial 6 -  Oh, I am one yet many (5)

The above inspirational picture was taken seconds before disaster.

Trial: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

Tsumugi is not the one-trick pony we thought she was ABORT MISSION, ABORT MISSION!!!!

NO YOU AIN’T! NO YOU AIN’T I DID NOT SIGN UP TO BE HAJIMEMED, NO SIR I DID NOT!

i mentioned it during the text hellstorm I unleashed when I was mid-playthrough but the way Shuichi says ‘cosplaying’ here is ADORABLE. I love his VA she is so good -

also

oh no

oh no

o h      n o

I can’t just... express how deeply that feeling of ‘oh no’ pervaded my being. My soul.

“THIS IS JUST COSPLAY“ SHE SAYS - AND GOD, THE MUSIC, THE MUSIC IS SO WACKY LIKE THESE ARE JUST SOME NORMAL FTE ANTICS -

wait no this is the ‘let’s start the killing game music’ -

ah that’s why I’m lowkey terrified right now

W-What in the world are those white smears across Hagakure’s eyes??? And oh god the first game too???

WHAT THE HELL TSUMUGI YOU’VE REALLY BEEN HOLDING OUT ON US TELL ME HOW YOU’RE DOING THIS I-I mean oh no, how dare you, this is so awful...

SHE’S TAKEN FULL OWNERSHIP OF JUNKO!PERSONA

AJSLKDF

TSUMUGI

HOLY SHIT

TSUMUGI

IS THIS YOUR FINAL FORM

ironically this got me thinking ‘this would be a really cool cosplay + prop’ once I got over the sheer terror of the situation and I starting thinking, oh, wouldn’t it be cool if you even had a sort of pinwheel mechanism (with the main body of it being hidden by her long hair) that rotated all of these pieces, and have you ever realized that there is a small piece of you that is the monster

also I just realized... she kept putting her glasses on as Junko. But I’m assuming she won’t ever wear them as Hajime. So it’s true - the moment she actually took off her glasses, we really did get to see her final form..

IS THAT KOMAEDA’S HAIR

ALL OF THESE THINGS, I RECOGNIZE ALL OF THEM OMG

This............ this is terrible, terrifying, and also really, really good

don’t say you’re jealous don’t say you’re jealous don’t say you’re jealous okay I’m a bit jealous FFU --

SHUICHI I THINK THIS IS ONE OF THE TIMES WHERE YOU DON’T WANT TO PURSUE THE TRUTH I HAVE A TERRIBLE, AWFUL FEELING -

oh no oh no

here I was doing mental gymnastics to justify why she’d be able to cosplay as Junko, a real person

but I was over-complicating things as usual

even the egg has been compromised for her nefarious scheme this truly is the worst timeline

What is with me and stumbling into series that just bloody smash their fourth wall until there’s nothing but broken pieces left

thank you for having twogami right after togami it’s not something I realized I needed and among all this heartbreak is a blessing

THIS IS NOT YOUR CUE TO START PLAYING THE CREDITS MONOKUMA

I am only making it through this trial by sheer force of will and the power of Sweetcheeks’ adorable voice.

Dangan.... ronpa....?

oh god she said ‘we’ she said ‘WE’ THIS IS REALLY NOT GOOD

‘Don’t get too whacky with your theories,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to sound like a total crackpot,’ I said. DAMN YOU SELF I SHOULD HAVE LET MYSELF GO ABSOLUTELY WILD AFTER ALL

So this was invented completely from nothing??? My initial theory had them seeing themselves in someone else’s actual memories as themselves, and having their own brains play tricks on them that way - but all those scenes with them being interviewed by Makoto, of applying to Hope’s Peak, and possibly everything else about them - oh god - how powerful are these lights? How much detail was crammed into them? Can this all be done with a mere flash of a light???

‘We.’ Her use of ‘we’ is interesting, here. It really does feel like Tsumugi sees all of her cosplay personas as actual people that she can channel to ‘help her’ as opposed to just mere characters. Like entities fighting along side of her, not just through her...

also hello ibuki I forgot how much I enjoyed your VA they make me hear seagulls in the distance

aaaaaaw look at how much the art style has improved from the first game!!!

Y.......... YES.......?????? wait actually as someone who is lowkey interested in props and set design - BUT NO WAIT STILL THIS IS WAY BEYOND THAT -

How... the hell... do you cosplay the world?! The entire world?!?!

Is that possible?? If the entire world isn’t real - if it’s all being propped up by you - then -

Who - who are we playing this game for then??? Why make us play it??? Who is watching the game???

I KNEW IT

I AND PROBABLY HALF OF THE PEOPLE PLAYING WERE JUST WAITING FOR YOU TO SHOW UP

......

Did. Did you just say it takes place in the real world.

Oh no -

It... It’s real fiction... because they’ve kidnapped actual people... and brainwashed them... and then trapped them in a situation where they were forced to kill each other to get out?? For things that didn’t exist??? For reasons that weren’t ever real???

Wait - so that means they can get out and it’ll be fine?! That’s..... t-that’s not as bad as I thought, but...

‘STAFF’ OH THAT WORD IS SO OUT OF PLACE -

...............................

There are. There are people backstage. It’s not just Tsumugi. This. This is super not good.

insert inappropriately-timed comment about how I love this VA

Okay. This actually took me by surprise. And I’m kinda terrified to ask.

W.... Why not? Is - Is this actually a space separated from reality? Can they physically.... not go back....???

no wait -

what are you doing

PUT THAT KEY BACK RIGHT NOW

oH

OH UNCANNY VALLEY-LEVELS OF COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

NO DON’T THROW REAL FACES UP THERE -

IS THIS A BLOODY COMMENT BOARD

I mean I know in my head that this is a niconico parody but the fact is they have to translate the comments to suit an english audience so -

omfg no I cannot believe what is coming out of the screen right now

wait wait

Kyoko is my waifu

My husbando Shuichi

first

Sakura is my muscle waifu good taste anon

Bring on the spoilers

LOL are you watching?

I feel like I’m participating too!

she’s shaking

Aaaw, Himiko is still alive.

Wow it’s on? LOL!

this is what the creepy kid at the beginning of the chapter was about

this was who that Makoto kid was

WHERE IS HIS CREEPY-ASS FACE I KNOW YOU’RE THERE MAKOTO

Is this the everyone... the real everyone Tsumugi says she represents, then??? That she’s fighting for? Omg was Kirumi’s motive/trial foreshadowing all along -

Anyway, damn Tsumugi is proud of her viewership.

#humblebrag #musclewaifu

EVERYONE???? LITERALLY EVERYONE?!?!?!

SURELY... SURELY THAT IS THE CONCEITED TALK  OF A MANAGER TRYING TO TALK UP THEIR ‘BABY’.... SURELY...

I appreciate the use of Celes here. This is.... damn dark. They’ve achieved such a peaceful world that the have to manufacture darkness and blood-sport for people to get their kicks???

STIMULATION?!

first of all where’s miu when you need her

SECOND OF ALL ARE YOU SURE HUMANITY WAS BEAUTIFUL, KOREKIYO??? ARE YOU SURE?

“It’s simple economics.”

THERE YOU ARE MAKOTO YOU CREEP

oh no he was... literally... using this game to cope with his problems.... and he said that one day he wanted to be a part of it... oh no.....

..... D... Did one of the comments say that it had been years? That they had been waiting for a few years for the sequel?

Does - does that mean something, or is it just a throwaway audience comment? Why years? If Rantaro was in the last one, why would it have been years for this one to happen??? How old is Rantaro? How old is Tsumugi?!?!

FML I had been wondering how ‘Monokuma’ could exist without Junko existing since they’re inextricably linked. FML.

MONOKUMA CAN YOU STOP ROLLING THE CREDITS, THE MUSIC AND THE TITLE CARDS FOR A MINUTE PLEASE I AM BEGGING YOU

Because I don’t enjoy having Saioinji’s terrifying eyes trained on me while she questions my intelligence, so I’ll sum up the next question - what season of this gameshow from hell are we apparently on?

I mean, considering Junko’s title... well...

..... yeah it looks better with a V.

the real answer to why they used V3 even though it’s technically not the correct way to say ‘53′ - it’s the aesthetic.

FFFF

I actually screenshot all the parody!title cards and they’re amazing. I’ll post them just once a bit later when it shows up again because this post is entirely too long, but needless to say, whoever designed them had fun. And the titles of the games, too - Birth of Despair? Dream Danganronpa? Sign me tf up! oh no does this make me part of the problem I’M SORRY SWEETCHEEKS

I can’t believe I was bitching about Junko being the mastermind for the third game when apparently audience members have had to sit through 53 Junkos

You couldn’t have changed it up??? Not even once??? Like, one led by Mukuro as a prologue idea or??? quietly denies the existence of the anime

Oh, speaking of which, I do like the excuse they came up with as to why the drv3 creators didn’t create new characters from the supposed other games why Tsumugi didn’t cosplay anyone outside the first two games - it’s for the class’s benefit, since they only knew those two casts, and y’know. She cares. about shock value

DON’T YOU PASS THE BUCK, GIRL

Ah, so that ‘staff’ you mentioned earlier...

why is this so funny to me

T-Tsumugi, do you have a tumultuous relationship with your managers or something

why are you airing out your dirty laundry on live television

is it all the incest plotlines

I feel like at this point it’s less ‘Tsumugi is trying to rub into the students how completely and absolutely they are boned’ and more ‘okay, it’s time to give a shout-out to everyone who put this production together! Perfect time to slap on that logo, guys!‘

oh my god that was supposed to be a trailer in-meta too alsd;kfj i’m losing it

AND AGAIN, THOSE TITLE CARDS - THEY ARE AMAZING.

SHE IS SHE’S TOTALLY ADVERTISING MID-SHOW

TSUMUGI STOP BEING A CORPORATE SELL-OUT

"NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR YOUR CRAPPY SHOEHORNED ADVERTISING!!!”

oh god oh no

who’s going to tell him -

MONOKUMA DON’T YOU DARE

i’m having an existential crisis alongside sweetcheeks ngl

there are so many layers

....

we need to go deeper

So, just to clarify, there are three layers right now:

There’s us, the players. In a sense, we could be considered ‘equal but different than the tier’, but we do still operate on a plane separate from the metafiction of Tsumugi’s ‘everyone in the world’.

There’s the ‘audience’, the outside world. This is the space that’s been breached at this point. And this... this is the level where the students are from, too - aka the reason I think we and the audience should exist as separate entities.

And there’s the domain of the Killing Game, a space created to play out this story, using real people - a place separated from reality... how? If Tsumugi is talking about a set, it could easily be the real world, which means they’ve been isolated somewhere. At the same time though, when they managed to reach the end of the escape tunnel and saw the outside world, they all started to choke and suffocate. So... could this be VR still? Or no? Can these existences known as Shuichi Saihara, the Ultimate Detective, Maki Harukawa, the Ultimate Assassin, Himiko Yumeno, the Ultimate Robot, K1-b0, the Ultimate Robot, and even Tsumugi Shirogane, the Ultimate Cosplayer, leave this space in any way, shape or form... or not at all? Is them suffocating ^ like that a sign that they literally cannot exist outside of this space?

She is literally throwing the same question back in Shuichi’s face ghdfkgh

NO I’M ON SHUICHI’S SIDE I COULDN’T HELP IT I HAD TO CHOOSE REAL PEOPLE

no!!! no!!!! NO!!!!

no seriously I still chose real people because I am stubborn

sweetcheeks et al. do not deserve any of this

Of course they brought out despair!Mikan for this. Of course.

I have to say, I do like these little character touches - the decisions that have been made as to which ‘cosplay’ says what. I mean, it’s supposed to also act as a way to throw our known and loved favourites in our face too, but having Celes comment on how boring ‘peace’ is? Having Ibuki smashing through the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience, Gundham remarking on their abnormal existence and Leon commenting on how cool the ‘aesthetic’ of the title card is? It’s such a nice touch. also horrifying. butalsonice

Oh we really are addressing the prologue now??? And - I’m assuming Tsumugi is referring to Hajime when she says ‘me’, but is there a chance she isn’t?

Just as I initially suspected, though - they really were normal when they got in. So how did they decide who got what personality/talent, or was that random? I mean, that might be the case - it was potentially hinted by the motive video switch of Chapter 2..

............. Huh.

But..... in what sense? Like the 16 talents were stored in those lights and they were ‘picked up’ by the most suited participant? How could you make sure there were no doubles? Or - and this is possible because of the vague language - did the talents build on what the student knew already? In which case, how would they know what the talents would end up being and plan the labs around them?

No, it would... have to be... the first one. Talents had its own selection in the flashback creating machine, though without verifying what the subcategories are it’s hard to confirm or deny anything... but I also can’t shake what Maki said at the beginning of the game? How it felt like their talents were given at random?

So... so they’re not only back where they started - completely isolated with everyone they’ve ever known and the world they knew completely out of reach (in this sense, dead/not actually existing are functionally the same), but they get a helping of a totally warranted existential crisis on top of that.

And... their bodies are real, so everyone else really is dead. No happy sdr2 ending. Well, unless I mental-gymnastics that to read ‘they have physical bodies to return to, but as manufactured personas it’s pointless.’

Me too, Sweetcheeks.

We can’t go 5 minutes without a WHAM line.

B-But they were kidnapped weren’t they -?!

fujisaki does not deserve this slander

Return of the hat!!!

..... is it bad that I miss his hat. I. I really liked his hat. I know that it was representative of the way he held back and used it to hide himself, but - but I liked his original portrait. And I liked the way it was incorporated into his sprites and all the movements he makes with it and without it, like it‘s a phantom limb. okayI’llstop

Why... are we not getting a name here? Was Shuichi Saihara a made-up name too?

oh -

oh no

D: A... Anything...

H-He’s.... a complete fanboy too.................... holy shit. cute but terrifying he looks like much more of a schoolboy super!fan than real Shuichi

S-So wait, it’s not even autosuggestion then - he asked for it? How - how does this work with the flashback lights? It can be targeted like that??? god I’m going to have so many questions after this is all over

I think this may be the death knell for his psyche oTL I certainly wouldn’t be able to take this if I was in his position.

LOOK I KNOW I GET EXCITED ABOUT CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT TOO

but this is a bit much c-can you please keep that drool in -

asdfkjlsdf w h a t

was

was this omitted or something

I - I swear they were kidnapped they seemed a lot more freaked out?!

Even Rantaro, who seemed to know more than he let on at the time - ?!

I... I think I really need to go back and replay the prologue.

ME NEITHER K1-B0 I FEEL LIKE I’M BEING GASLIT

d-did

did you use it on me too

That... that I can believe. No matter who they were before - if they were consenting or not - it might not even matter, if they can’t return to how they were. In a sense, the Gopher Project story was practically preparing them for it - the idea that everything they knew and loved were gone, and would never come back. Oh... oh that’s bad....

TSUMUGI IS ACTUALLY TERRIFYING

SHUT UP NAEGI

wait why is seeing him say that worse than seeing Junko say her normal despair stuff

it’s the insincerity, probably...

YOU NERFED KAITO?!?!?!

YOU NERFED KAITO!!!!!!!

okay I take back what I said Maki you have my enthusiastic blessing to recklessly murder as necessary

RIP Tsumugi and all of her new depth

“I’m also the one that kept sneaking all of the death flags into his room while you were out training every night!”

Y O O O

YOU NERFED HER CHARACTER TOO?!?!?! YOU GOTTA LET THAT HAPPEN ORGANICALLY!!!

LMAO

Souda will never show this much awareness in his actual every day fictional life and that makes this 100% funnier

Everything has a writing credit.... every single thing? Every bit of development?

Even Kokichi’s coup and Kaito’s cooperation? And Kokichi manipulating Gonta? You just seemed so - so angry about that after the trial. Surely those, if nothing else...

At this point they’re just kicking a sad, beaten-down puppy. What more could you possibly do at this point - ?!

oH GOD I DON’T WANT TO SEE THIS

WHAT THE HELL WHO EVEN SAYS SOMETHING LIKE THAT

nNOOO

NO LET ME REMEMBER HIM THE WAY HE WAS

DON’T YOU CROSS THIS BRIGHT RED LINE SHIROGANE

NO

NO THIS IS ILLEGAL I’M CALLING THE POLICE HE LOOKS ABSOLUTELY MAD -

GHGHGGHGHGHGH

GHGHghghghghhh

ghghgh

sdkflj

n o  o o o oooo o o o o o o o

gggkghk

I-It’s not a lie! Even if it was manufactured, even if it was coded into them - their feelings were real to them! It might be by design, but - oh this sounds so hollow. It’s one thing to talk about ‘fate’ and ‘this was the work of a higher power’, but having it brought down on you in such a trivial way must be absolutely soul-crushing.

this is the saddest iteration of hangover!Shuichi that I have laid my eyes on in the entire game

nihilism.

tbh I never found Izuru that intimidating as a final villain in the last game - but here? Terrifying. Maybe it’s in contrast to Junko here, who has the overbearing destructive personality of a tornado, but the quiet emptiness and lack of a higher purpose, of absolute futility that he stands for here - that scares me a lot.   Maybe it’s just because it seems to bring the concept of DR’s despair to a place that I can personally understand?

I keep saying ‘this is terrifying!’ but I mean, to be fair... it... kind of is. as always, fantastic use of text DRV3!

also can someone please shut up the peanut gallery for five minutes

well damn Monokuma that one felt aimed right at me

It reminds me of what Komaeda would say about his own motivation: it was watching everyone struggle with adversity, or the ‘despair of the killing game’, with the end goal of them ‘reaching hope’ - of seeing them overcome and grow stronger for it, that drove him forward. From the outside that makes sense; seeing other people overcome struggles, even ones so terrible, give us the mental strength to overcome our own problems. But for someone on the inside looking out... how perverse would that feel, to think that your suffering is basically being used as inspiration!p0rn? Knowing that there were voyeurs getting a kick out of your struggle?

What happens to game pieces after the game board is closed and put away?

Do they go into stasis? Do they just... exist, outside of time? Frozen forever, until they’re taken out to be ‘played with’ again; left to rot?

If they ‘win’.... they have no future. There’s nothing for them to move forward to reach. A piece learning that they’re a piece, and knowing their dreams after their trials will always stay just out of reach... how can anyone move foward like that?

“love that reaction” OH SHUT UP LUDENBERGxLUVER37

Fight for yourself! They fought to get you this far - Kaito and Kokichi died to give you this chance, even if they are a ‘lie”!

But Shuichi has never been able to fight for himself, only for the others...

Tsumugi, after spending the last hour verbally beating them down and shredding his and everyone’s sense of self to shreds: wow lol what a weakling

Everything is terrible and yet her saying this still got a laugh out of me, damn it.

S-SHUICHI? SHUICHI?

I-IS HE EMOTIONALLY SHUTTING DOWN -

OH GOD

HIS

H-HIS POV - IS GONE -

And nothing but despair left...

Did - did we just lose Shuichi...?

SWEETCHEEKS!!! SWEETCHEEKS, NO!!!

SWEETCHEEKS I’M SO SORRY!!!!

[usodanee]

Why do you think the History of Hope’s Peak Academy was in Ouma's lab? It's weird how Saihara didn't follow up on this even in the trial

Hey anon, thanks for the question! Let’s dig right in then? Spoilers for V3 below, but since the question is already a spoiler you knew that.

Okay, without keeping this too long, this answer might disappoint you a little since it’s not based on a crazy theory or whatever, but I think it was placed there intentionally, but it didn’t have much to do with Ouma. I’m gonna give you a few theories I think are the most plausible answers. 

First of all, let’s start with Ouma’s lab, which is hidden until the very last chapter. It’s the very last ultimate lab we uncover, minus Amami’s lab, but Amami’s lab would have opened at an earlier point in time if Amami had stayed alive. Ouma’s however was unintentionally uncovered by Kiibo when the entire school was wrecked, and it’s likely to assume that if Kiibo hadn’t started destroying things we would have gotten another treasure from Monokuma to unlock Ouma’s lab as the final area. 

Now as to why Ouma of all people was meant to have their lab revealed after everyone else… there’s no right answer to that. My theory is that it has to do with Ouma’s character and what he was meant to be, as it is very clear that Ouma was always meant to be set up as some kind of villain. With set up I mean, intended by Shirogane and the rest of Danganronpa, which is why Ouma eventually did what he did, as things got more complicated and the group was more and more manipulated by the circumstances presented to them. Ouma, as he acknowledges himself, was going up against forces he had no control over. Nobody was truly able to trust him, and so began to work on his own to stop the mastermind and the killing game, which eventually led to the events of Chapter 4 and 5. However, while I feel like things were intentionally set up to make Ouma a suspicious person (as his personality as a liar was also a set up, and liars are generally hard to trust) what went beyond their planning was that Ouma claimed to be the mastermind in order to stop the real mastermind. It’s a big vague and up to interpretation to what kind of extend personalities and plotlines were set up, but it’s very obvious that Ouma, at some point, went against what Team Danganronpa wanted out of his character, as even the real mastermind, Shirogane, couldn’t see through his trick in Chapter 5. 

So in short, Ouma was meant to be a suspicious person, perhaps even meant to be some sort of fake mastermind, but Shirogane was always meant to be the true mastermind and I do believe that it was also intended for her to reveal the stuff about “everything is fiction” at some point, since it was her main argument to drive everyone into despair in the final trial. What went wrong however was Kiibo blowing the entire place up, since his “inner voice” was cut off, and Ouma and Momota working together to stop the true mastermind in Chapter 5. 

That’s what I assume, so with that in mind I’d like to look at how the game was supposed to go down if none of this would have happened. Let’s say Ouma had survived Chapter 5 because he didn’t try to stop the mastermind, and an entirely different murder took place with an entirely different culprit, motive and victim. Let’s pretend Ouma wasn’t involved in any of these events and Kiibo hadn’t taken damage from Momota’s failed execution.In that case the remaining survivors (now including Ouma) would have likely gotten another item to explore the academy and perhaps found an item to unlock the pathway to Ouma’s lab. 

Let’s say at that point, even if Ouma wasn’t involved in the events of Chapter 5, people were still suspicious of him. And then they found that lab. First of all, it raises questions as to the extend of Ouma’s talent, as obviously the silly wigs and toys and cartoon villain-esque set up would have perhaps given the impression that Ouma wasn’t as evil as he seemed. Perhaps that was meant to be another plottwist? The suspicious guy is actually just a silly little clown boy! But we can’t be sure about it, as even when we discover the lab in the game as it is, it’s not until Saihara checks Ouma’s motive video, we get a 100% confirmation that Ouma’s talent is not what it seems. 

I’m talking a lot, but it boils down to the fact that I think the History of Hope’s Peak Academy was placed in that room at the very beginning, much like Amami’s survivor’s perk video was placed in his lab before the game even started. So let’s talk about Amami for a quick second.

Amami is the survivor of V2 and was allowed to send himself a message he unfortunately never got since he never reached his lab. Monokuma mentions however that since Amami died, his lab has been closed off for everyone so it’s unlikely someone went inside while the game was running. The laptop with the video was placed there with the intention that Amami would eventually watch it, while also letting him know that he himself failed. Amami, before his memories were manipulated at the start of V3, entered another Danganronpa game with the intention to stop Danganronpa. As Amami in the video mentions however, that if he’s able to watch this message, it means he already failed (as the game has been going on already and many people died already) I feel like the video was meant for Amami alone. Giving him the full message and a general idea of who he was and what his intention was before entering the killing game, but placing this message in a place unaccessable until a few killings happened is cruel. It’s like saying “You finally got it, but it’s too late now!” And would have probably gotten to poor Amami. 

Besides, we have to remember what it means for Team Danganronpa, that their survivor from V2 has the intention to stop Danganronpa in general. They wanna keep going with Danganronpa for another 50 seasons and this teenage boy wants to stop them? Of course they’d set it up in a way that the circumstances made it basically impossible for him to succeed. Even if he saw that message, people had already died. Poor Amami man I love that dude. 

Okay, back to Ouma then. So if Amami’s video was placed there intentionally for him to see it if he survives this long, just to let him know his original intention failed, then I can assume that the History of Hope’s Peak Academy was placed intentionally in Ouma’s lab too. Though… I don’t think this book was placed for Ouma in particular, but rather for everyone else besides Ouma. I’m gonna explain.

So, as said, let’s assume Ouma made it through Chapter 5 and his lab opened up normally, however it was intentioned to open up. That means everyone, Ouma, Saihara, and everyone else, has access to it now and can explore it. Unless idk, Ouma was the first one to see it and took the book and hid it somewhere, it’s likely that everyone else got to see it too. Everyone else was already working together at that point too, so if something this suspicious showed up, surely they would have shared it. 

And this is where things get a bit messy because there are multiple possibilities in my opinion.

So all of the flashback lights people got until that point didn’t talk about Hope’s Peak at all. Perhaps for the 53rd game of Danganronpa, they really intentioned the whole weird Gopher Project backstory, but I have my doubts. We see the flashback room in Chapter 6 and get a general idea as to how flashback lights are made. We also get to know that the memories have been made up the entire time, the Gopher Project memories as much as the Hope’s Peak Academy memories. As a quick reminder: They only got the Hope’s Peak Academy memories AS A RESULT of what Ouma did in Chapter 5. Everyone was basically stuck in depression hell because Ouma was revealed to be the “mastermind”, the outside world is dead, etc. The reason they got a new flashback light with Hope’s Peak Academy memories was to motivate the cast and keep going. Basically, because the show must go on. So it makes me wonder if they had gotten that particular flasbhack light without all of these reveals too. Or of they had stuck with the Gopher Project story, as these two clearly don’t mix. We don’t know, but we can assume that Shirogane was desperate for the group to go on after what happened, and that’s why they got the flasbhack light at all. If the contents would have been the same if Ouma hadn’t done what he did? We don’t really know.

We do know however that it’s a possibility either way, as the flashback lights could create basically everything. Whatever kind of memory was convenient at that moment, they could make it. So in the end there’s no real way to tell as to what extend everything was planned and what was improvised because of Ouma’s plan to rebel against the mastermind. As with a lot of things with V3, we just don’t know what’s the truth for sure. 

Another possibility I considered is that there was some sort of way for Shirogane to access Ouma’s lab and put the book there AS A RESPONSE to what happened in Chapter 5. Since you know, it was her flashback light who led everyone to believe Ouma worships Junko Enoshima, and Ouma and Momota both didn’t even know who she was lmao. So if we assume Shirogane only mentioned Hope’s Peak Academy at all out of desperation because everyone was just laying in bed and dying, then perhaps she planted this “evidence” to further present Ouma as a worshipper of Junko Enoshima. 

Lastly, if we put those two ideas together, there’s also the idea that Shirogane planned to mention Hope’s Peak Academy at some point right at the beginning. As I mentioned above, I do believe the whole “Everything is just a story and all of your memories are fake!” was supposed to be the big plottwist in the end. It was always meant to be that way, it’s just that the way that led up to it wasn’t entirely how Shirogane planned. 

So if we assume that, then this was how the game was likely going to be run, according to Shirogane’s plansThe killing game starts, Amami might or might not make it until he can see his own lab and see that he was the survivor of the previous game, everyone keeps getting memories of the Gopher Project, Ouma is set up to be a suspicious person and people start to assume he is the mastermind but he is not, everyone eventually finds Ouma’s lab and the History of Hope’s Peak Academy and perhaps gets a flashback light of it to further “prove” that Ouma is a remnant of despair, the whole Ouma being a remnant of despair being revealed to be a lie by the true mastermind Shirogane and it’s revealed that every memory has been fake and they were part of a show all along.

Something like that. It makes sense in my opinion that the whole plottwist was always meant to be “we’re all in a show” because of Amami’s survivor’s perk and also Kiibo’s entire existence. It also makes them feel very hopeless and powerless but I mean we all know that best boy Saihara didn’t take any of that shit in the end (which also went against Shirogane’s plans, obviously) 

Also, if things really went according to the plan I mentioned above, then Ouma himself would have gotten the flashback light about Hope’s Peak Academy too. We all know that flashback lights are able to change entire personalities, so I do believe Ouma could have ACTUALLY become a remnant of despair if he was hit by that flashback light. And everyone else would have likely believed he’d been a remnant of despair since the beginning, since Ouma was intentionally set up to be at the very least suspicious.

Okay then, long answer short: 

I think it’s possible that the History of Hope’s Peak Academy was placed in Ouma’s lab at the beginning of the game. If that’s the case, I think it was with the possible plottwist in mind that they could make Ouma out to be a remnant of despair, as he himself would have believed so too if he was exposed to a flashback light that made him a Junko worshipper. However we do know the Hope’s Peak Academy memories don’t line up with the Gopher Project story and don’t line up with the History of Hope’s Peak entirely. I think even these “errors” were intended however, to give them a hint to the ACTUAL real plottwist, that ALL memories they’ve been getting were fake. 

So Ouma was meant to be set up as a fake villain, everyone would have been focused on him for a while until it was revealed neither the memories of Hope’s Peak nor the memories of the Gopher Project were real. Shirogane is the real mastermind, not Ouma, and this was all part of a show. 

The other (unlikely imo) possibility is that Shirogane put the book there as a response to Ouma’s actions in Chapter 5 and it was more spontaneously put there than anything else. I believe the other possibility is more likely though. Ouma was meant to be a fake villain, a fake mastermind, and that’s why the memories and the book were placed where they were placed.

I hope this was understandable to some extend lmao this got long and messy but there you all go. 

[oumakokichi]

not meta really, but do you have any headcanons for what the v3 kids were like personalitywise before the brainwashing?? we see a little of them in the prologue but it's very vague, and i haven't seen any headcanons aside from my own so i'm interested in seeing what you think

I have a few, yes! Coming up with headcanons for what theywere like beforehand is really fun in my opinion. I know a lot of people wereupset by the twist because they felt like either they “never really got to knowthe real characters,” or else that the characters we see in-game had theirpersonalities “completely made opposite” from how they were beforehand, but I don’treally feel like that was the case.

I’ve gone over it in a few posts, but I’m pretty sure thatwith most of the characters, their core personalities were definitely leftintact. Ouma was an exception to the rule, and Tsumugi attempted to twist himfurther than anyone else, specifically because she wanted him to be the bad guyin her game—a perfectly manipulated, amenable pawn of despair to her plans soshe could set herself and everyone else up to be “Hope” and Ouma would be “Despair.”But as for the others, who weren’t supposed to be cast into a villainous rolefrom the start, there really wasn’t any need for her to try to twist them thatfar, and I think a lot of their basic interests, hobbies, inclinations, etc.are all very similar to how we see them behave in-game.

The fact that their given likes and dislikes don’t alwaysmatch up perfectly with their given talents is proof of this. Despite thebrainwashing and the fake talents, their actual personalities, and the thingsthey either like or don’t like, are still theirs.Angie, for instance, really doesn’t like moisture—aninteresting thing to note, considering in-game she’s portrayed as being from amost likely tropical island, and is an artist who works with paints and ink, noless. And Tenko’s likes include nunchakus, which have absolutely nothing to dowith aikido but sound very fitting for someone who perhaps before entering thegames was just interested in martial arts in general.

What I think was changed about them for the game per se wasmostly what they wanted out of the game directly. Tsumugi is an otaku at heart;she’s very open about this, really. Even once she’s been outed as themastermind, it’s very clear that she views absolutely everything through a lensof fiction, and this includes wanting certain “tropes” or “genre twists”applied to various characters within the game. This means that she’s reallyjust going to find it boring if she gives them all what they want directly whenthey audition.

And so characters like Saihara, who ask to be a “cooldetective who can get away with closed room murder tricks,” are “subverted” byher instead, and given a backstory based on insecurity, tragedy, and the fearof ruining everyone’s lives with the very thing that a detective seeks most:the truth. But at heart, Saihara is clearly the same person. He wants to be adetective, he enjoys mysteries. He has a natural curiosity about the worldaround him and he likes doing armchair detective reasoning more than anything.He loves novels—and it’s easy to tell in hindsight that he really loved the DRnovels all along.

I’ve talked before about how even seeing that some of the characterssigned up for the audition willingly or knowingly while talking about killingpeople doesn’t necessarily mean that they were a horrible person or a bully. Itall depends on what society is actually like in the ndrv3 universe—and everythingwe know about the outside world and how society must have rebuilt itself afterthose catastrophes suggests that it’s awful. If the killing game reality showhas been going for 53 seasons and is a deeply engrained pastime andentertainment hobby, that’s not something that would ever occur in a normal society. It sounds much moreHunger Games-like to me, where the idea that this is “normal” and that thesekids (kids without talent) “deserve it” is so inherently beaten into societythat it goes unquestioned, even by the kids who sign up for it themselves.

Therefore even for characters like Momota, who was shownsaying on his tape that he wanted to kill people and win the game for money, it’simportant to remember that Tsumugi wanted to use those audition tapes for shockvalue. In my opinion, she wanted to use the tapes to create the impression thatthe survivors were all drastically different people than who they used to beback when they auditioned, because that would be the thing that would breaktheir spirits and convince them that they were little more than “fictionalexistences.”

In any case, a character like Momota, who was actually sickfrom before, would have more reason than most to enter a killing gamewillingly. He was already going to die anyway, and knew he had nothing to lose,and the idea of winning a game so clearly meant for entertainment and prestigeand “looking cool” was probably appealing under those circumstances.

My headcanons for most of the characters is that theyprobably acted very similarly, but with a few subversions. Tenko, for instance,I could easily see being the same very excitable, very easy-to-read emotionalsort of person. I think she must have really had a love for watching martialarts, but didn’t really know a lot about them, and that explains why she wasgiven a title like SHSL Aikido Specialist when she really just thinks nunchakuslook cool. But she was still a person who wants to “be strong” and wants to “protectothers”; she just didn’t always know how to go about it the best way, just asshe doesn’t always know how to do so with Himiko.

Kaede is fairly similar. The Kaede we see in her ownaudition tape describes herself as a cynic and someone who can’t really trustothers easily. Considering the bleakness of the outside world and society inndrv3, and what we see of Kaede’s flashbacks to being kidnapped in theprologue, this fits pretty well. But also she undeniably wanted to be a leaderfrom the start. She wanted to be someone who could trust others, and inspirethem, and serve as a hopeful, reliable sort of figure. This means that even ifshe felt actually putting it into practice might have been impossible for her,because of how cynical she was, she still had those feelings there all along.Kaede would never have made for the “perfect protagonist” figure that she wasif she hadn’t had that kind of potential in her all along.

Miu I definitely see as having been extremely similar to howshe is in-game. Most likely she went into her audition specifically asking tobe some “high and mighty inventor,” and she wanted to be able to invent supercool stuff all the time and have everyone think she was awesome and incredible.But since Miu is ultimately a character who’s almost all bark and no bite, andwho backs down quickly when given the same treatment she tries to force onto others,even in-game she retains this sort of quality, and her genius inventing abilitiesare still subverted by the fact that she really lacks basic common sense abouta lot of other things.

In the prologue, we see her saying things like “Why’re youtalking like someone who’s got talent?!”, implying that talent clearly existsin ndrv3 society and that those without it are regarded pretty lowly, or likethey shouldn’t be giving their opinions about things. And this is definitelyhow the Miu we see in-game acts a lot, so it follows her thought process.

You probably get the idea—most of the characters I thinkfollow this sort of pattern where how they would behave or talk to others isreally similar, except that perhaps they were slightly more or less excitableor confident or jaded. And that’s pretty normal, actually, in my opinion.Rather than thinking of them as entirely separate from their in-game selves,with most of them it feels a lot more like comparing the same person but withfive or ten years of experience in-between, because experience can also changea person and how they think without changing who they are at their core.

With Ouma…the question is a little more complicated, becauseOuma’s situation was more complicated. He was given the most messed up talentout of the bunch, because Tsumugi wanted him to be her pawn more than anything.We don’t see much of him in the prologue to compare to, either—he has exactlyone speaking line, and all we can really glean is that he looks really, reallynervous, and that he has never heard of himself (or the others) having any “sealedtalents” which the Monokumerz keep talking about.

Tsumugi confirms that his DICE group actually existed, andthat they did “laughably small crimes,” meaning that they most likely wentaround pulling pranks and maybe petty theft at most. I’d say this confirms thatOuma has definitely always been mischievous at least, but certainlywell-intentioned.

If my own theory that ndrv3’s society in general is basedaround those with SHSL Talents in the real world perpetuating fiction like DRand running the killing game show in order to take things out on those withouttalent is true, then I would bet Ouma and his DICE group were probably a realpain in the ass. A group of kids running around and pulling pranks andgenerally making these very talented people at the top of society in thissituation where talent is everything and it’s all up to “survival of thefittest” must have seemed like a real slap in the face, moreso if the wholepoint of DICE was that “no one ever got hurt or killed.”

My own headcanon (meaning no one has to agree with it) isthat Ouma looks so shocked and nervous in the prologue precisely because he’dbeen getting away with all these kinds of pranks and jokes before, andeverything seemed like a game and everything was going fine—up until he thoughthe “got caught.” Then suddenly he realized that he was in really hot water and that something definitely wasn’t right aboutthe situation he was in.

His personality being “imbued with despair” even feels alittle more intentionally like a punishment than anything that’s given to theother characters. If he and his DICE group had been making a point of playingthese pranks, getting away with these harmless crimes in order to point andlaugh at a talent-based society that was based around slaughtering off thosewithout talent because really, these super-talented people are not as smart asthey think they are, well…that’s a subversive message.

And it would make sense that Tsumugi and the producers wouldwant to make sure that he was the villain, and that he was given thispersonality and role based around the idea of “hurting others” and “getting offto human suffering,” because that’s what she wanted him to be. That’s whatJunko was, after all. But it speaks a lot to Ouma’s core values as a person,that even when that’s something he was twisted into and to some degree,something he did believe he’d become, he still maintained his hatred forkilling and suffering. He knew thingswere off about the killing game, and about his own memories and talent becauseof how much dissonance there was between what he could remember and the disgusthe actually felt when he saw human suffering.

Anyway, these arejust my headcanons! This got a bit long but it was really fun to talk about. Iknow a lot of people are still tripped up by the misinformation that thecharacters’ personalities are all “completely opposite” from how they werebefore, but knowing that that’s not really the case gives a lot more room forspeculation and ideas based on what we do see of them in-game, and I find itreally fun.

[murasaki-murasame]

Danganronpa V3 Liveblog Part 13 [Chapter 4 - Deadly Life]

I think it took me nearly half of this entire post to actually start talking about the investigation and the murder case as a whole because I got deep into Retrospective Mode [tm], lol. The latter part of this might seem disjointed and confusing because I kept rewriting parts of it, and in general I’ve been writing this post on and off for hours now while doing other stuff so I wasn’t perfectly keeping track of the flow of it.

Thoughts under the cut.

Before I talk about this part, I kinda forgot to actually talk about the plot-related hints we got in the last part. There was so much other stuff to talk about that I kinda forgot to get around to that part.

So now we have a whole collection of assorted vague hints about what happened before the killing game and what the state of the outside world is, and the question is how they interconnect. I might be forgetting some stuff, but to list it out a bit, we have the hints about Rantarou being a survivor from a previous killing game who actively wanted to participate in this one. We have the references to the Ultimate Hunt that was seemingly about hunting down and possibly killing Ultimates, which seemed to lead to everyone voluntarily undergoing amnesia in order to forget their talents and become ‘normal people’ who won’t be hunted anymore. We have the weird flashback to what seemed to be a joint funeral for the main cast, which is strange for a variety of reasons, including the question of why they’d be grouped together if they were all from different schools. We have the memories of meteorites falling to Earth and threatening some sort of apocalyptic scenario. We have the memories of a cult or some such that popped up at the time, preaching that mankind deserved damnation. We have references to a plan called the Gofer Project that was apparently designed to stop the meteorties but somehow failed. And now we have the whole scenario of everyone stuck in this walled-in academy playing a killing game. Which is obviously normal enough for this franchise, but the really weird thing is that Monokuma’s been very consistent in saying that ‘nothing exists outside of the End Wall’, and that because of that point, he’s not doing this out of a desire to broadcast the killing game to the outside world. Which throws a lot of things into question, since the goal of the killing games has basically always been to instill despair in the population by having it be publicly broadcasted.

It’s also worth remembering that the game started with what seemed to be some kind of time loop where, originally, everyone woke up in regular uniforms and no memories of even their talents, but then when they met Monokuma and the Monokubs, things got ‘reset’ somehow, and things started over in the exact same way, but with everyone wearing their more unique and personalized uniforms, and with memories of their talents. Kaede and Shuichi also woke up in classroom closets that were placed right next to each other, which still feels a bit fishy to me. Oh, and I imagine that sometime after this, Rantarou probably found and watched the video that his past self seemingly left for him, and that was probably how he knew about the Ultimate Hunt at the start of the game. I forget if he knew that in the ‘original loop’, though. And on the note of him, we still don’t know what his talent is.

There’s also been all sorts of fairly wild theories thrown about in-story about what might be going on, mostly involving the idea that maybe everyone really did die, and they’re currently in some kind of afterlife, which would at least explain certain fantastical things that have happened.

We also have a mysterious tile in the courtyard with writing on it that fills in more and more each chapter. Not sure what to make of that yet, but it seems to be saying something about the state of the world.

And in terms of various references made to the state of the outside world, it might be important to remember that Kirumi’s whole motive in chapter two involved her remembering that the prime minister of Japan had decided to make her the de facto prime minister in order to have her assist in saving the country. Which, in hindsight, sounds like it might have related to her being called into the Gofer Project, somehow. The question then is what happened to her after that, and how things lead to her being involved in the joint funeral everyone remembers, and her being part of this killing game just like everyone else.

I think that’s a good enough run-down of all the clues we have. There’s certain other mysteries and plots twists in the making that I can already guess about, like Kokichi probably actually being the Ultimate Prisoner, but I don’t know how much that sort of thing relates to the ‘overall story’.

Obviously it’s pretty difficult to piece these clues and hints together coherently, but the thing that keeps sticking out to me the most is that this is apparently intended to be a proper continuation/conclusion to the Hope’s Peak Saga, and not a reboot of some kind. So the question then is, how exactly did the events of the Hope’s Peak Saga set up this game’s story? It’s really hard to tell, especially since things seemed to be on a more or less good path after the DR3 anime, with Naegi becoming the new headmaster of Hope’s Peak, the whole DR2 crew being alive, Junko presumably being entirely destroyed, etc. I’m not entirely sure how that situation could have devolved enough to get us to what sounds like a literally apocalyptic scenario that also involved some kind of mass murdering/capturing of Ultimates. I mean the meteorites could have just been a really unfortunate natural disaster, but the Ultimate Hunt is what really sticks out to me. It kinda sounds like what happened around the time period of DR0 and Despair Arc, with the untalented people lashing out against Hope’s Peak academy.

I can’t really figure out where this is going. There’s way too many seemingly unconnected and wildly different sorts of plot threads to consider. Like, on the one hand you have some kind of literal apocalypse going on, and then you have some kind of revolt against the Ultimates, and then you have the implication that the V3 cast died and are in the afterlife, and then you have the references to some kind of prior killing game we haven’t heard about before, and it’s just really difficult to tell how the heck these things relate to each other. It’s also, as said, difficult to guess what Monokuma’s motive is intended to be this time. I also can’t help but wonder who’s going to be the Mastermind this time. In the last two games it was Junko, but I highly doubt it’s gonna be her. I guess it could technically be Monaca [or however you spell her name], since she’s still kinda a hanging thread, but I prefer the idea of her sticking to being a space NEET.

I should say that even if there’s still one or two spoilers I have relating to character deaths, I genuinely have no idea where the actual story is going to go, beyond the fact that it’s apparently really controversial and polarizing. That’s what everyone seems to be saying, at least. Which still feels weird to me, especially since I’ve seen people say that it’s even more divisive than DR2′s ending, which I thought was already incredibly love or hate because of how it involved plot points like virtual reality simulations and Junko being the villain for a second time. I wonder how this game could top that one. Thankfully it sounds like most people still like the ending even if they acknowledge that it’s somehow divisive, but it all sounds so make-or-break that I can’t help but be afraid that it might retroactively ruin my opinion on the game as a whole.

And on that note, I do really like the game thus far. It’s not perfect, but for the most part it’s really good. It’s really refreshing to finally be playing one of these games for myself instead of just watching LPs of them.

There’s a whole lot of things already that are pretty divisive, especially Kaede’s death, and I can’t blame anyone for being put off by points like that. But I just can’t help but like the game a lot. I think a big part of it is that I really love this game’s cast, especially the main trio [if you want to call them that] of Shuichi, Kaito, and Maki. I’ve talked about them before, but I really truly love them as characters. I get why a lot of people are probably bored by Shuichi as a protagonist, especially after the Kaede bait-and-switch, but I love him. I find his development and his emotional struggles to be really compelling. I’ve liked him as a character from the start, but I also can’t deny that him clearly being gay as fuck also makes me love him even more. It’s just a really nice feeling to be able to play a game with a protagonist who I actually feel like I can identify with on this specific level. But I promised myself I wouldn’t go on another big discussion rant thing so I’ll just cut myself off right here, lol.

I’m not entirely sure how I’d compare this game’s cast to DR2′s, but I think I definitely prefer them to DR1′s cast. I don’t really have any interest in pitting them against each other, but it’s hard not to make the comparison when your feelings toward each game’s casts hugely dictates how you feel about each game as a whole. DR2 definitely had more of a focus on being more fun and light-hearted and friendly than DR1, which I think helped make that game’s cast feel more likeable, but V3 is going for something in the middle. At least by this point I like most of the cast members in V3. I think the only characters who I actively dislike are Kiyo and Kokichi. I wouldn’t really like Miu or Angie as people in real life, but they’re at least fun and interesting enough for me to like them as characters. Kiyo was basically just outright unpleasant from start to finish, though, and his whole presence in the story was capped off with a bizarre and disturbing backstory about incest and ritualistic serial killings. And I just kinda . . . hate Kokichi. A lot. He’s slightly endearing sometimes but oh man especially with how this chapter’s going I just kinda despise him. Thankfully I’m clearly meant to hate him.

Other than that, I think the only characters I feel ambivalent about are Tsumugi, Keebo, and to a lesser extent Gonta and Himiko. But Himiko’s definitely getting up there with her recent development, and I have a soft spot for Gonta even though he really is kinda pointless as a character. So it’s mostly Tsumugi and Keebo who I just don’t feel much of anything for.

I actively like everyone else to anyone degree or another.

Anyway I should finally start talking about the actual specific part I just played, lol.

But before I do that, I wanna say that I decided to get the skill that lets me focus on one conversation at a time in mass panic debates. I still feel a bit hesitant about it, since I haven’t really had trouble with any of those parts yet, and I’m a bit worried that with this skill I might just get hyper-focused on one conversation at a time, and it might take longer to figure out the answer. We’ll see. I might take it off after this trial if I dislike it. I was debating between it and the one about revealing the first keyword in each scrum debate. That would have been really helpful earlier in the game, but as the game goes on those parts get a lot easier since the number of participants decreases. So unless they add in multiple rounds of it, I feel like that skill is just getting progressively less useful.

Either way, let’s just get to actually talking about this investigation segment.

I figured that this case was going to get a lot more complicated in this segment, and that it’d involve the implication that Miu died inside the virtual world and not outside of it, and lo and behold, that’s what happened.

There’s a lot to unpack here about how this case is set up, so I’ll just cut right to the main point and say that I think a major plot twist is going to be that the virtual world is actually arranged so that the big wall is in the middle of it, and the ‘world loading screen’ is actually more of a set-up to do with the edges of the map being connected like a portal. Basically if you just take Miu’s map and swap the two sections then you get what’s clearly meant to be the actual layout. So we actually have a scenario where the chapel and the mansion are relatively close to each other, with a wall between them. This explains why Shuichi and Tsumugi heard Keebo’s voice, because it wasn’t actually being interrupted by the world loading screen since they were well away from it. I guess we just have to assume that sound can somehow pass easily through the wall.

This also explains what happened with the signboard. I think I commented on it seeming a bit odd, but I didn’t think about it too much. But I probably should have guessed what was happening based on the flow of the river, and the fact that the signboard was stuck on the left side of the rock in the river, and not the right side. So instead of the signboard going down the river and then traveling left, it actually traveled right, looped around via the world loading screen at the edge of the map, and continued traveling right along the river until it hit the left side of the rock. I think they also established that objects, though not humans, can travel through the wall, so the signboard wouldn’t have been obstructed by that.

And obviously it also explains how Miu could have been seen near the mansion. With what we learned about the modifications she made to herself, she clearly just moved through the wall and thus immediately ended up near the mansion, where she got seen. Then everyone heard the crash of something hitting the chapel, and her presumably being killed.

One of the major points I noticed with all the evidence we got in this part is that it’s incredibly obvious Miu set this up as an opportunity for her to murder somebody, and that somebody was probably Kokichi. She obviously rewrote and lied about the game’s set-up in order to make it easy for her to navigate the map without anyone else being able to, and the rule about Kokichi freezing if she touches him was probably so that she could stop him from running away or resisting her. It’s also why she knocked away the signboard, to make sure everyone was as isolated as possible.

So I guess the big question is what exactly went wrong with her plan. And that answer probably also lies in Kokichi, who obviously knew what she was planning, and probably used his key card thing, and/or whatever he got from it, to mess with her plans and get her killed instead. I’m not entirely sure how, though. I’m also not even entirely sure if Kokichi is the one that killed her. He just seems too obvious, and as I’ve said before, I doubt he’ll die this [relatively] early. He seems too pivotal to the group dynamic to not stick around longer.

The way Miu’s body ended up makes me feel like she basically slid down the mansion roof on the lattice thing, and she flew through the wall and smashed into the chapel wall. I might be under-estimating the distance between the two buildings, but signs point to her having been up on the roof, and the layout of where her body ended up makes it seem like she crashed into the chapel wall at high speeds while holding the cell-phone and hammer and riding the lattice, and everything ended up flung about at the base of the chapel wall. Which I guess raises the question of how that happened. I feel like either she did it in an attempt to escape that back-fired and lead to her dying upon hitting the chapel, or she was somehow pushed off the roof by the killer. In which case she could have either been alive or dead by that time. It’d seem more difficult to set up that scenario if she was alive, so maybe she got killed on the roof, and then the killer pushed her off the roof using the lattice to make it look like she’d been killed near the chapel.

I guess the obvious conclusion to draw then is that she went up to the roof, met Kokichi, and then got killed by him, and since he probably knew about all the tricks with the virtual world, he set up her body to make it look like she’d been killed by the chapel, which would have seemingly removed him from suspicion.

I at least think that he’s going out of his way to implicate Kaito, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he remotely logged Kaito out in order to make him suspicious. It’s at least obvious that someone used the phone to log Kaito out, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Kokichi did it, and then planted the phone on Miu to make it seem like another thing that he couldn’t have possibly done. He might have needed to steal the phone off her, but that wouldn’t be too hard I guess. Though the whole ‘he freezes if she touches her’ rule might make that pretty difficult. I’m not sure.

It definitely seems like a big part of this case will boil down to whether we believe Kokichi’s or Kaito’s testimonies, but I can’t help but trust Kaito more. Especially since, if we take the log-in/log-out report and the stated time of death at face value, then he logged out over an hour before Miu died. And anyway, she clearly died IN the game, and not long before everyone found her body, so if Kaito really had logged out way before then and hadn’t logged in, I don’t really think he could have killed her. But part of me can’t help but worry that maybe Kokichi set up some sort of plan so that Kaito would somehow end up killing Miu without intending to. Possibly something to do with the ‘avatar error’. Maybe Kokichi tampered with Kaito’s avatar before the program started, or something.

I’m not sure what to make of the detail with the roof door lock, but clearly Miu got up there somehow, and Kaito got logged off early enough that he might have just not seen anyone come up after he left.

The worrying thing here is that, even if Kaito doesn’t seem like he actually did it, I also find it hard to suspect Kokichi, but I can’t really imagine anyone else having done it. Knowing the gist of the trick, I think that Maki, Keebo, and Himiko are free of suspicion since 1: they all seemed genuinely unaware of the trick, and 2: even if they were aware of it, as far as we know at the moment none of them could have moved through the wall of crossed the river, so if Miu really did die on the mansion roof, or get pushed off the mansion roof and die upon hitting the chapel wall, then the killer must have one way or another been stationed in the mansion part of the map. So, ignoring the possibility of someone in the chapel group knowing more than they’re letting on, we can probably write those three off the list, and focus on the five people stationed in the mansion.

We can presumably immediately cross Shuichi off the list, and I feel really hesitant to suspect Tsumugi or Gonta when they seem so innocent and motive-less, which just . . . gets us right back to Kokichi and Kaito. And honestly I’d be willing to expect that the game would prefer to keep Kokichi around so that he can continue being an antagonist, while killing Kaito off in this chapter just to make us all feel miserable. So even if I doubt that Kaito willingly murdered Miu, I wouldn’t be surprised if even via some sort of manipulation or technicality he ends up being the killer. It’d be lame if it was the character who immediately got suspected, though, even if it might play out differently than what we might expect. It’d also feel more than a bit lame for the game to kill off yet another person who Shuichi believes in. It’d just feel a bit too much like a repeat of the Kaede thing, but far less clever and unexpected. And considering how Kaede’s death was emotionally difficult to deal with when she just had like one and a half chapter’s worth of screen-time and interaction with Shuichi, Kaito’s been by his side for the entire game since her death, so it’d hurt a lot more, but in a way that’d feel sorta . . . unnecessarily tragic. Especially if it really is to do with Kokichi manipulating things to basically force Kaito to be a culprit without his knowledge. That’d feel a whole lot more shallow than Kaede intentionally murdering Rantarou in a sincere attempt to save everyone. It’d just seem like a kinda lame repeat of that whole thing with much less of the substance.

I mean, as I said, it’d definitely hurt more because there’s been more set-up and development between them, but it’d just make me more annoyed at the game if that’s where this is going, rather than sad but on board with what the game was doing, like how I felt with Kaede’s death. It’s kinda difficult to explain, but I guess it’s just the difference between something feeling natural and something feeling forced.

I know that in my last post I had my whole discussion-rant-ramble-thing about the prospect of Shuichi being gay, and that I said I didn’t really wanna talk about that sort of thing much since it’s the type of thing I’ve talked about a lot over the last year or so in relation to other fandoms, but on a sort of related note to all that, this whole chapter really feels like it’s heading in the direction of being one big complicated gay love triangle. In the sense of Shuichi being into Kaito, and Kokichi being violently jealous of Kaito because he wants Shuichi for himself. The moment at the end of the daily life part that I mentioned in my last post seems to be pretty bluntly pointing at him more or less being a yandere who’s obsessed with Shuichi, and in this section he got even more aggressive about pinning all the suspicion on Kaito and getting him away from Shuichi so he could replace him as Shuichi’s investigation partner. It’s at least pretty clear that he has an issue with Kaito specifically, which is why he decided to pin all this on him and not someone else.

[Fake edit: I ended up talking about Gay Stuff [tm] again for like three or four paragraphs so if I wind up being completely wrong and all of this is completely pointless to even discuss or speculate about, you can skip past it.]

If that’s basically Kokichi’s motive in setting all this up, then it makes me wonder if/how it might come up during the trial. And, as an extension of that, it’d make me wonder if the game might explicitly acknowledge Shuichi’s crush on Kaito for what it is. It’d be hard not to, if it’s a major part of what made Kokichi want to take Kaito out like this, if that’s what he’s doing. Mostly I just hope that it doesn’t get handled in a way like ‘Shuichi’s feelings for Kaito are ~pure and platonic~, but Kokichi? The crazy evil antagonist who has misogyny issues and probably has a criminal record? Yeah he’s gay’. That’d just be incredibly groan-worthy. It’d at least work better if the game acknowledged that both of them are gay, so the framing of it is less ‘Kokichi is gay and evil while Shuichi is straight and good’ and more ‘Kokichi is just, as an individual, a bad person’. That’d work better. It’d still be all sorts of painful if this chapter really does end with us finding out that Kokichi really was able to set Kaito up for being executed simply because he saw him as a romantic rival, but still. Not that I’m sitting here holding my breath in the hopes that maybe this will finally be the video game that has a gay male protagonist, or anything. I don’t even expect the game to acknowledge him as potentially being bi. In general I’m bracing myself for the worst, if only because it feels like this’ll end with Kaito dying, and that would be fundamentally horrible to sit through.

Even though I can’t help but worry about potential issues with framing and presentation and blahblahblah if Kokichi does end up basically being a gay yandere, it’d be interesting if it ends up showing off a more . . . petty and selfish and child-like side to himself, to crack that facade of him being some sort of cool and calculated manipulator who’s always above everyone else. It’d be messy, but I kinda like the idea of us seeing a more messy and unstable side to his personality, especially in a trial setting.

I didn’t really want to go on another whole spiel about this sorta thing immediately after what I said in my last post, but I guess this is technically about a different character so whatever. And for the most part, if I end up somehow being right about this, even though I almost don’t want to be, then it’s probably for the best that I get my thoughts down before the trial happens so that I can say that I called it in advance. And if I’m wrong then it just preserves my wrongness for posterity, like my glorious fuck-up in Chapter 2 which I still feel embarrassed about.

ANYWAY, that whole topic aside, I may as well wrap this up because this post has been going on for far too long. I’m not really sure I have a solid grasp on HOW the murder happened, exactly, beyond the idea of Miu maybe getting killed on the roof and then getting pushed off the roof and into the chapel wall, but I’m still sticking to the idea that the only real suspects I can think of are Kokichi and Kaito, and specifically I can’t help but imagine that Kokichi somehow things up so that Kaito would kill Miu without even intending to. Somehow. Maybe I’m just being paranoid and bracing myself for the most depressing option. Though I guess the most depressing option would be if Kaito turns out to be, like, genuinely evil or something and is lying about everything. I guess that’d technically be a lot more depressing. But considering how I’m completely clueless about certain pieces of evidence like the toilet paper, the roof door lock, the unique attribute of Kokichi’s avatar, and the set-up with the visors, I’m probably going to wind up confused and overwhelmed by a majority of this trial and it’s explanation of how this murder happened. Oh well.