#yes i voted for mercy. but that wasn't because i thought she should win

[gideonisms]

I keep refreshing the poll to see who's currently ahead in the fight for Ultimate Milf. This is what sports fans go through

[oumakokichi]

Sorry to bother you , i sent a message a few days ago but i think Tumblr or my Internet connection messed up and i wasn't sure you recieved it :( my question was : How well do you think Hajime and Naegi would have fared in ndrv3 if they were in Saihara place, in term of group dynamics and thematic shift (hope/despair->lie/Truth)? Since the others dr are so different from ndrv3, i Wonder how they would have handled it. I'm especially worried for Naegi since he can be very trusting. Sorry again!

You’re not a bother at all! I still have the original message in my inbox and it went through—I’m sorry for taking so long to answer! It’s just that my inbox is very full at this point, and between writing a lot and having to balance real-life stuff, and also still trying to go through every part of ndrv3 very carefully and translate things so I get all the facts, I get a little slow with responses sometimes. But I promise I intend to answer every question that comes my way!

As for this, this is a really interesting and fun question! It’s one thing to look at the ndrv3 characters and wonder how they would actually fare in a hope/despair setting against Junko, but it’s a very unique perspective to wonder about how our previous two protagonists would handle things if they were in Saihara’s shoes, moreso since ndrv3 even raises questions about what constitutes a protagonist.

As ndrv3 is particularly about moral grey areas and finding a middle ground between two extremes, I’m inclined to agree that Naegi would…probably not fare very well. It’s interesting, because while he’s definitely similar to Kaede in the sense of being willing to trust Kirigiri with his life the way Kaede could trust Saihara with hers in the school trial, Naegi lacks the aggressive cunning and willingness to lie that Kaede had. If Kaede is someone who couldn’t trust others until the very end despite wanting to very much, and despite making a big show of telling others to trust in each other, then Naegi is someone who trusts implicitly—too much. And that’s very, very dangerous in ndrv3.

I appreciate what dr3 tried to do (but ultimately…did a very bad job at) in calling Naegi out on this sort of blind, implicit trust, because it’s the same thing that those like Kaede and Momota wanted to do but couldn’t bring themselves to really embrace fully. Trusting people without first doubting or suspecting their motives is, to some degree, just a forfeit of thought. It’s a way of not really trying to get to know them at all, and it’s the reason bad things keep happening.

If too much doubt, suspicion, and paranoia is dangerous, then too much trust is at well, because it’s an unarguable fact that not everyone is going to be at their best in a situation as horrible as a killing game, and that people should therefore be doubted when they’re about to plan something that could get the entire group killed. To put it in Munakata terms, telling everyone to just hold hands and that no one would kill anyone and to trust everyone absolutely with no doubts is just a way of spouting platitudes. (Yes, I’m going to keep making platitudes jokes.)

This kind of thing can and would come back around to bite Naegi, probably. Moreso with how many intentional parallels there are of him with Jin Kirigiri in ndrv3, of all people. Even as a fictional character with no actual connection to the ndrv3 cast, Naegi is very intentionally set up to parallel a character whose ultimate downfall was in being too trusting. His rebuilt Hope’s Peak Academy in the ndrv3 cast’s fake memories mimics Jin Kirigiri’s in almost every way, right down to the cult leader of the Remnants of Despair having accidentally been allowed into the Gopher Plan the same way that Mukuro and Junko were allowed into the Hope’s Peak shelter plan.

Jin Kirigiri’s dislike for the ways in which doubt and suspicion were requirements of being a detective is precisely why he gave up the job and removed himself from the Kirigiri family—and it’s ultimately why he died. I can’t say I foresee Naegi avoiding the same outcome in this scenario, where refusing to doubt gets you killed just as much as refusing to trust does.

The only possible thing in Naegi’s favor though, and the only thing I could see maybe keeping him alive, is that precisely because he is such an embodiment of hope and optimism in the most literal sense of the word, and because he represents such a staple about what the original DR games are about, he might make it through to the end or at least almost the end out of the good graces of Tsumugi’s “mercy,” if you will. If Naegi is the exact thing that the audience wants out of their killing game broadcast, then that’s what they’re going to get, and Tsumugi will bend all rules and cheat like hell to give it to them.

With Naegi around, this begs the question of if Kiibo would still even be an intentional audience proxy or if he’d be given an entirely different personality while serving as cameraman. Kiibo’s “inner voice” that he can hear, which is actually the result of the audience voting and telling him what to do all at once, also bears extreme similarities to Naegi. It’s very clear that the audience wants a Naegi-like protagonist more than anything, because that itself is the whole point of having a hope vs. despair showdown, and if Junko appears in every single season, it would make sense that they’d want at least one character to “be the Naegi,” too. If the real Naegi were there, poor Kiibo would probably suffer quite a few demotions. Basically, Naegi might get to live out of sheer popularity with the audience.

Hinata…now that’s extremely interesting to wonder about. Hinata is extremely complex and well-written in his own right, and is my absolute favorite sdr2 character precisely because he was one of the first characters to succeed in fleshing out the hope vs. despair argument at all. His struggles with self-worth and value in a talent-based society are similar to Saihara’s and the ndrv3 characters’, but also different, and I feel like there’d be a lot of interesting results with having Hinata as the protagonist in this game.

As someone who “can’t remember his own talent,” Hinata as the ndrv3 protagonist would be exceptionally interesting because this time around, the likelihood is that they all are actually completely normal people who never had any talents in the first place. This is still just a theory of course, but if the killing game is some kind of way to dangle talent on a stick and play with the lives of talentless “losers” in a society in which SHSL talents are on the top and people without any are at the very bottom rungs, then Hinata would actually be the best to represent the toll that that sort of sick game takes on normal people.

No one better represents the idea of an individual who has had their self-worth trampled on so much and come to value themselves so little than Hinata, because Kamukura was the ultimate embodiment of what I feel ndrv3 does on a lighter scale. In trying to give Kamukura every single talent imaginable, and making him SHSL Hope, it was a way of saying that normal people, the Hinatas of the world, are extremely worthless. And that’s quite literally what the prologue seems to imply society is like for the ndrv3 characters.

As someone who is ordinary, and who has always been at much more of a middle ground between hope and despair because he was constantly torn between both, Hinata would be much less naïve and blindly trusting than Naegi. Like Saihara, I think he would recognize the need to doubt others in the situation, even if he wasn’t doing so as a detective. And I think his potential for surpassing “the role he was given” and taking charge even when he hardly seemed like the type to do so would interest the other characters, and the audience as well.

The only pitfall Hinata might fall into is with Tsumugi’s remember light in Chapter 5, the one that she used to fool the entire group into thinking they were actually students of Hope’s Peak Academy even though they weren’t, and even though the DR universe is entirely fictional in ndrv3. If Hinata fell for that particular bait hook, line, and sinker, and if he even “remembered” that he was supposed to be SHSL Hope without quite remembering the full extent of the Kamukura Project, he would fall into the hope vs. despair trap very easily at that point even after avoiding it thus far.

And if there were still the big reveal later on about how all their talents are “lies,” and how DR as a whole is a fictional franchise and they never attended Hope’s Peak, the impact this would have on Hinata would probably be far more crushing than on someone like Saihara, who was interested in the pursuit of the truth as a detective, or even than it would on Naegi, who really didn’t think of himself as doing anything particularly special to get into Hope’s Peak in the first place, since he just won a raffle. To someone like Hinata, Hope’s Peak was everyone, and the idea that he was ordinary and miserable and talentless would be absolutely horrifying, precisely because of the way in which SHSLs are this grand unattainable thing that make normal people seem pathetic by comparison.

In sdr2, Nanami remained as a presence of support in order to remind Hinata that he had value as his own person when this reveal happened. But as ndrv3 has a cast that really does lack that fundamental leader figure who trusts in everyone no matter what, it’s hard to tell if there would be anyone around who could actually help Hinata see himself as his own person or someone worthy of respect, or get him to go back into protagonist mode. Tsumugi might very well have a perfect game over by the end, although the audience might not like it too much since it would be one in which “despair” would win.

Anyway, these are just my thoughts on the matter, but it’s really fun to consider! I wouldn’t mind actually seeing this kind of thing in a fanfiction of sorts; it’d be really interesting! I hope I answered it well, and again, I’m sorry for taking so long! I promise I’m never ignoring the messages I get, it just takes me some time to get around to them!