#this is just further in the game spoilers and slightly more cryptic in delivery

[bambeebirdie]

Me: I’m going to try to not look at any Totk fan art! Avoid as much as possible until I beat the game! Absolutely no spoilers of any kind!

Totk Fanart: how would you like dramatic ass pictures with dragons and swords?

Me: well shoot I would love dramatic ass pictures with dragons and swords so please give me more actually

[oumakokichi]

Nice to have you back! Have you come to any new thoughts or conclusions about Ouma since you were last here?

Thank you, anon! Hmm... interestingly enough, I would say my thoughts on Ouma as we see him in-game for most of ndrv3 are probably more or less the same.

This isn’t as long as some of my other meta, but I’ll still put it under the cut just in case for spoiler reasons!

Even after replaying ndrv3 a few different times, I still reached more or less the same conclusions and have the same opinions: that I think Ouma’s Supreme Leader talent is probably a lie, that he’s fundamentally a pacifist, and that he most likely retained some of his memories throughout the game in spite of the flashback lights (hinted at very strongly in one of his earliest FTEs with Kaede, as well as chapter 3 where he implies he knew Maki’s SHSL Assassin talent before he ever watched her motive video, then cryptically changes the subject when Saihara tries to pry).

I still feel just a little sad that some of these things about his character were sort of lost in the localization, particularly the pacifist part. I have another ask in my inbox about the changes between the localization and the original, so I’ll go further into detail when I answer that one, but suffice to say that a lot of things were sort of drastically changed about Ouma’s delivery and lines, and some lines were even omitted entirely from his motive video.

If anything has changed, it might be my opinions on pre-game Ouma though! We know very little about the pre-game kids as it is; Ouma himself has only one or two lines in the prologue, and these are hardly enough to gauge what his personality might’ve been like before entering the game.

Popular fan interpretation on the pre-game characters has been... interesting, to say the least. Because of the motive videos that Tsumugi shows for Saihara, Kaede, and Momota, most people in both the jp and western fandom tended to interpret this to mean that the pre-game characters’ personalities were drastically different or even total opposites from their in-game counterparts.

As a result, the most common interpretatiions of pre-game Ouma (commonly called “Bonkichi” in the jp fandom) were of him as a timid, possibly abused or bullied kid who is terrified of saying no to people and essentially lacks Ouma’s more negative flaws. This was likely in part because the few lines we do get from him in the prologue sound considerably more fearful and hesitant than most of Ouma’s in-game lines in terms of delivery, as well as his more timid body language in the prologue CG, which doesn’t look anything like Ouma’s over-the-top and arrogant promotional art.

At first, I was inclined to agree with at least some of this--I do think it’s true at least that Bonkichi acts more timid on a surface-level, and that he avoids intentionally pissing people off the way Ouma does. But after having seen so many other interesting fan interpretations since then of what Bonkichi might have been like, plus the fact that Ouma does imply that he remembers everyone from before the game so many times, nowadays I’m less interested in the fearful or timid Bonkichi portrayals, and a lot more interested in his potential similarities to Ouma.

Nowadays I really enjoy the idea of Bonkichi as being more or less the same as Ouma, or at least still having the core traits of his personality, only toned down a notch or two. If Ouma is the type to antagonize others in a conflict and gloat about it, Bonkichi strikes me as the type to keep it to himself, but to still completely and absolutely believe that he’s right and everyone else is wrong.

We can tell from Bonkichi’s uniform that he’s probably quite smart academically, as he’s wearing a gakuran-style uniform typically associated with elite students in Japan. I like to joke that Ouma thinks he’s the smartest person in the universe and that the whole world revolves around him throughout the course of ndrv3--and I could see Bonkichi still having a bit of that arrogance.

I also quite like the fan theory that Bonkichi may have auditioned from the beginning in order to try and end the killing game from the start. There’s no way to tell for sure of course, especially since we’re never shown Ouma’s audition video, but I think it’s definitely possible, especially for someone who’s confident in their own intelligence and also, say, happens to be a pacifist who hates murder.

Anyway, this was really fun to think about! It’s pretty interesting that I still feel more or less the same about Ouma even years later, but my opinions on his pre-game self have shifted slightly towards other theories and interpretations because we still know so little. Who knows, maybe one day Kodaka will actually release more concrete information about the events prior to ndrv3 and my opinions will shift again!