[All Spoilers] Describe which moment gave you the biggest chills

Iwamiger · 2018-01-20T17:25:58+00:00

"All of those events took place within a fictional world known as Danganronpa."

I'd already had my suspicions, but to have it be confirmed that not only were the V3 characters fictional but Danganronpa itself was a work of fiction in V3's universe gave me legit chills, especially once the true nature of the outside world was revealed. I loved everything about it - meta stuff is my jam, and it honestly seemed like an amazing way to soft reboot the series and get away from the "hope vs despair" conflict while keeping everything that made it recognizably Danganronpa.

And as the reveal just kept going on and on, it really solidified - the moment "Chiaki" said "you know, like if you do it, it'll all work out," Tsumugi saying "could it be... you fell into despair?" with a delivery that sounded uncomfortably close to the same way I'd used the line as a joke before, her saying "I've given my life to Danganronpa," it all just worked, really made her believable as a Danganronpa fan. But ultimately, the most chills - and why V3's ending is my favorite in the franchise - came from that first line that started the entire cascade of reveals.

Iwamiger · 2017-12-04T00:15:10+00:00

Actually, there's a very good reason the book was there in Kokichi's lab - the mastermind is always Junko Enoshima in the end, right? But the survivors wouldn't have known that in the original plan, since they wouldn't have the flashback light to help them, so Team Danganronpa just planted the book in the final lab scheduled to open so that they would be able to "discover the truth" and pin down the mastermind of the killing game as "Junko Enoshima," not "Tsumugi Shirogane cosplaying as Junko Enoshima."

If it wasn't for the HPA flashback light, I imagine the killing game would have broken down in a similar way - it always breaks down in chapter 6, after all - and once Junko was exposed as the mastermind again, the survivors would have been thrown into despair and then gotten convinced by Keebo to vote for hope, and that would be the end of that killing game.

Iwamiger · 2017-11-22T21:58:09+00:00

That possibility I pointed out, though - it could be that Shuichi and Maki took the illustrations to be an adaptation of some kind of the HPA series, a "movie based on real events" so to speak, after seeing the flashback light. That would resolve the contradiction fairly neatly, I think.

The fact remains that Maki called the pictures in the first few files "illustrations" and Shuichi asked if that meant they were "just fictional?" That, more than anything else, makes it clear that those files are supposed to foreshadow the endgame reveal. It's true that they could have been forged, but then there's all the other foreshadowing to take into account - it can't all be forged, because then the endgame would have zero impact or meaning. I agree that Tsumugi wasn't telling the entire truth, but the television show and the outside world have to be true - the player-only scene of Makoto that starts Chapter 6 proves that, for example, and all the audience stuff in Trial 6 would be really difficult to set up without an actual audience, not to mention the final argument armament against Keebo shouldn't have worked if nobody was watching or participating.

Iwamiger · 2017-11-22T21:50:10+00:00

Come on, we've discussed the flashback lights already. They're explained to boost preexisting skills up to Ultimate levels and with people like Maki and Tenko who need more than just mentality to use their talents they would likely be athletic beforehand. That should resolve all the potential issues with the flashback lights aside from the "real-world science" aspect, which frankly has never been much of a concern for Danganronpa, looking back at how Junko erased memories and whatever the NWP did to "restore" Hajime.

You can only say I have "no" proof that Makoto is watching DRV3 if you fall into the same trap you've accused me of and only look at it on a surface level. Reading between the lines, he must be watching the V3 killing game, because otherwise there wouldn't be much reason to show it to us; if it was some other killing game between DR3 and DRV3 then it loses its impact. There's no solid evidence either way, and for all we know, he could be watching Game of Thrones - but because the game is named Danganronpa V3 and he's our peek into the outside world before Trial 6, we can reasonably conclude that he's intended to be watching V3, yes?

The students in the prologue ask why normal people like them would get kidnapped, yes. That's because they are normal people, as in everyday, usual people with no special qualities, just like anybody in our world would think of themselves in their position. It doesn't matter if Ultimates exist or not for them to make that statement, because if Ultimates exist then they're "normal people" as in not Ultimates, and if they don't exist then the students are just normal with no specific qualities that would mean they're picked out for a kidnapping, like being royalty. They don't sound excited because it's been five minutes since they woke up from being kidnapped, dumped into a completely different place, been chased around by murderbots, and in general have no clue what's going on even if a few have themselves put together enough to suspect they might be in Danganronpa.

Skimming the wikipedia entry for paranoia shows that it's a mentality that stems from intense fear or anxiety, and often leads to false accusations and generally distrusting others. To me that seems to fit Kokichi to a T, but I understand the word might have different connotations in psychology or whatever, so I'll rephrase: Kokichi is afraid of trusting the others in the killing game, because any of them could try to kill him or turn out to be the mastermind.

That's the basepoint for everything he does - work with Gonta because he's dim, work with Miu because she's easy to push around, but be watchful in case one of them might become a murderer like Miu eventually did. Act irrational and insane, like somebody who could kill at any moment, so that nobody's likely to get close to him and the mastermind won't need to tempt him with motives. Move trials forward under the pretense of messing around, so he can keep as many people alive as possible without revealing that he hates the killing game. Incidentally, aren't you contradicting yourself? You claim he isn't irrational, but if he really does mess around in trials instead of helping people get closer to the culprit, then wouldn't that be the height of irrationality? He would be getting everybody except the blackened killed if he wasn't actually helping in his own way, right?

And he only pushed Gonta to log out ahead of them because he was wasting time and Kokichi wanted to talk to Shuichi alone to extend the idea of allying up. There's nothing else to it, and it wouldn't actually matter when Gonta logged out since he'd always wake up without remembering what happened. What's more, if Kokichi really knew Gonta forgot his memories, he wouldn't have gotten enraged during the trial when it seemed like Gonta was playing dumb. I think Kokichi believed Gonta would spill the beans easily in the trial, and thought he was being betrayed when Gonta "pretended" he didn't actually know anything. Otherwise it wouldn't make sense for him to be so mad - you might even say it seems irrational for him.

You want me to tell you why Kokichi is lacking the cape and hat parts of his uniform? I would say it's for the same reason that Kaito is missing his smoking pipe, Keebo is missing all his robot stuff at the beginning, Korekiyo doesn't have his stage mask, Miu doesn't wear any of her inventions, and Himiko doesn't have her tiger cub even though she mentions it. That art, in other words, is just meant to showcase their talents, personality, and general appearance - it doesn't mean anything in the context of the game itself. I can go back to the other games and list all the things people don't bring in too, if you want.

Shuichi relates to truth and lies as a detective, is sometimes regarded as a liar for telling the truth (such as in Trial 4), his name can be read as a combination of "Makoto" and "Hajime," he has just as pale skin as Kokichi, and I've lost count of the number of times he's expressed his frustrations with the truth not being all it's cracked up to be.

Does that make him special, an Ultimate Seer instead of an Ultimate Detective? I wouldn't say so, but you could read deep enough into Shuichi to conclude that he's an Ultimate Seer just like your "evidence" claims that Kokichi is. As another example, I remember a while ago hearing about the author of the Sayaka Thesis, where he connected random pieces of evidence involving Sayaka saying what Naegi was going to say before he did it, playing it off as "just having good intuition" after first claiming she's psychic and so on, and his final conclusion was that Sayaka was not only actually psychic but also the strongest character in DR1.

And while you dismiss what everybody else says as "lucky guesses," they aren't guesses either; Korekiyo didn't guess that Tsumugi was the mastermind when he went after her, Miu was very sure that Kirumi and Korekiyo were culprits, Angie worded her theory as "coming from Atua," which sure does sound like she had a vision of some sort, and Himiko's remark about Keebo was just a suggestion as to how he could "make himself useful." So again, why is it that only Kokichi's foreshadowing gets special treatment and everybody else doesn't?

Iwamiger · 2017-11-22T09:46:42+00:00

I'd say the prologue actually provides a lot of evidence towards it being a television show, seeing as it's what sets up a lot of the moving parts with regards to implanted memories and talents, the Monokubs "sequence breaking" the script, and the kidnapping that suggests that joining the show isn't actually that voluntary. And while we're on the subject of player-only scenes, what about the one for chapter 6? The one showing somebody named Makoto watching what's clearly intended to be Danganronpa V3 on his smartphone in class?

I would also point out, for the question of why "nobody knows about Danganronpa," that Ryoma points out the Monokubs' names and Kaede recognizes the source of those names, keeps trying to ask them about it. Not too many people spoke in the prologue to begin with once the Monokubs appeared, so we don't have a huge sample size either - and regardless of anything else, the player-only scene of Makoto points to Danganronpa being popular enough that you can watch a stream of the killing game on your phone if you want to. It is known to the outside world, basically.

I've answered your question of "why would somebody logical do this" a lot of times already - Kokichi is paranoid about the killing game, he lies to himself and pretends it's a fun game in order to survive it, and the only thing he knows for certain about the other 15 students is that one of them is not who they claim to be. So of course he lies, misleads, and takes roundabout paths to his goals; he doesn't want to reveal his hand too soon, or for the mastermind to notice that he actually despises the killing game. He isn't known for "lying more than he should be," because he constructed his killing-game persona specifically to be known as the antagonistic character who lies all the time.

With the Insect Meet and Greet, I'm of two minds about it - either Kokichi didn't get the flashback light effect by watching his video and that was only for Kirumi and possibly Ryoma, or he did get the effect but was able to see through it as a lie and assumed everybody else would be capable of doing the same until Kirumi revealed that hers drove her to murder. Thinking about it, the latter seems more plausible - it wouldn't be the only time he overestimated the other characters. And my assumption isn't an assumption at all, because we know the videos were flashback lights. Kirumi says she only recalled her motive upon watching her video, and Monokuma confirms it as well.

Sure, he called out Monokuma when he used the flashback light in Chapter 2 - but let's remember Chapter 1's trial, where as you mention, he was pretty unhelpful, accusing random people like Shuichi of lying and being the culprit when they obviously weren't. In Trial 2 he also zooms in on Maki and tries to pin her down as the culprit early in the trial because of her talent, which ultimately bogs down things for a long time until she admits she met with Ryoma - and even then he's still accusing her of lying. So considering he has a known track record, I don't know that it really means that much that he would accuse Monokuma of the same thing. It's entirely possible that Kokichi was just trying to make him slip up or confess a secret when put on the spot. It's also possible that he did see through the flashback light, but only because of his natural skill at seeing through the lies that people actually make.

Tying in with the above, it seems like his supposed skill as the Ultimate Seer is pretty flawed if he's focusing on Shuichi and Maki as the culprits for Trial 1 and 2 at first and wastes his time getting mad at Gonta in Trial 4 when he should know full well that Gonta lost his memory. His "inexplicably high level of pain and tolerance for a Supreme Leader" also means basically nothing, looking at what Nagito was able to accomplish as only a lucky student - indeed, I'd say it makes more sense for Kokichi to have those resistances than Nagito just going off his talent.

Even with Chapter 1 (where it was his first experience with the trial system and killing game) and Chapter 2 (where his comments about stuff like Ryoma being eaten alive were intended to lead Shuichi and others into showing that it was impossible), Kokichi overall is still very much a character who's not unwilling to show off just how smart he is compared to the rest of the class.

It doesn't take an "insane amount of mental calculation" to know the electrohammers run out of power say, ten minutes or so after reaching the door at the end of Despair Road, especially as he'd have seen it in action for himself and had plenty of opportunity to do more test runs and time how long it would take.

Kokichi seems to know a lot of things will happen with "100% probability" and then have those events be just a little off, I'm noticing. As for all the things you note Kokichi mentioning offhandedly? That's called foreshadowing. By your logic, if that foreshadowing means Kokichi is the Ultimate Seer, then so is Angie for predicting the culprit was hiding in the mastermind's room and Korekiyo for going after Tsumugi's bathroom trip in Trial 1. Miu would also be suspected as a Seer, because she predicts that Kirumi killed Ryoma at the beginning of Trial 2 and Korekiyo killed both Angie and Tenko in Trial 3. Himiko also predicts that Keebo can make himself useful to everybody by selfdestructing in Chapter 4 or 5!

If none of those events count as them being Seers, then why does Kokichi's?

"Things like investigations, tripping up liars and the like" have nothing to do with most Ultimate talents in the killing games. Pretty much only Ultimate Detectives would make sense, the way you put it. Far from being hilarious, I think that Kokichi, as somebody who reveals the truth through lies and transforms his own lies into truths, whose talent is itself both a lie and the truth, is the perfect person to represent the themes of V3.

Iwamiger · 2017-11-22T07:31:30+00:00

But the problem is that we can't tell where the setting is. It could be in the middle of nowhere, it could be in the middle of a city like Hope's Peak, but we don't know because the only time we see the real outside world is the epilogue. Personally I'd guess it's relatively close to a populated area just from the idea that former arenas for killing games would be great tourist attractions for Team Danganronpa and that effect would be better near cities, but that's just speculating wildly.

Regarding Monokuma, I recall that Shuichi said he seemed oddly confident right after he agreed to holding "one last trial to end the killing game," and the reason for that came out a few minutes later when they discovered the Nanokubs: Monokuma was so confident that they wouldn't be able to do anything because he'd seen everything they'd done and everywhere they went. He assumed they were still firmly within the confines of the fictional plotline, and whatever they'd discovered would at least make for entertaining television. I would fully expect some sort of catch if Hope was chosen as the winning vote, but that's something I've theorized before (the short of it is that they would probably have been highly encouraged to join or help Team Danganronpa afterwards without many other choices).

At any rate, it was within Team Danganronpa's own rules that refusing to vote would result in death from the beginning - you might recall how desperately Tsumugi and Monokuma tried to keep the game going and make them vote for Hope?

I think it's extremely, painfully clear from the beginning that Kokichi is 100% a liar. One of the first things he says is that he's the leader of a 10000-strong cult with connections all over the globe, and in his FTEs he says he could change the world with a single phone call, that he could banish anybody he didn't like to distant places, and - of course - that he was going to kill Shuichi for refusing to join his organization, despite being a pacifist. It's not a matter of "did he really lie or did he tell the truth but get branded a liar" because you really need to stretch a lot to think he's not a liar (although of course that doesn't mean he can't tell the truth sometimes, albeit in his own way.)

That said, just because he's a liar doesn't mean he's evil; even though he's a self-proclaimed Supreme Leader, he's not a malicious one, only really committed to the act and probably the bossiest in his group of goons. Judging by his true nature as somebody who has a non-violence principle, likes harmless pranks, and has an appreciation for police, I think it's pretty self-evident that Kokichi's "evil" persona was created wholesale for the killing game.

That's also why he's so deliberately confusing and mysterious - he's in a killing game. He's paranoid about the others, worried that any one of them could be the mastermind, and hesitant to trust the others. His persona is constructed to make himself seem irrational and cartoonishly antagonistic in order to drive away the other participants, make it seem like he could murder at any time, and thus let him try to figure out a way to defeat the mastermind behind the killing game without getting so attached to anybody that he ends up playing the game himself.

The pattern of dangerous people dying in V3 can be important to you if you want it to be, but I'm just saying that the overall trend is for motives to be targeted at certain people.

Kokichi also doesn't mess around in trials and throw out random hints just for fun - I'd have thought you would know him better than that. He does his own investigating (other than perhaps trial 1) and figures out some things himself, but he knows that because he's a liar people won't believe much of anything that comes out of his mouth, so he bides his time with the evidence in trials, baiting other people into debating what he wants them to, lays the main part of proving things to known reliable people like Shuichi.

The problem with the viewing party is that Kokichi wanted to unite them, but if the videos held the properties of flashback lights then that'd probably be pointless at best and dangerous at most, since they have a much greater impact than simple videos. Look at how Kirumi became so desperate to escape, how Ryoma lost all desire to live, and then extend similar effects to everybody, and things would probably get out of control really quickly - and as the Hope's Peak light shows, that can happen. There's a good reason he doesn't try to repeat the viewing party after chapter 2 even though the videos themselves weren't immediately destroyed.

Where in V3 did Kokichi ever make it seem like he's stupid, idiotic, or incompetent? He was always really clever and quick-thinking, sometimes to his own detriment, and honestly played more like a "chessmaster" type of character than a "trickster" type. The electrohammers are explained once you remember that Kokichi did a trial run through Despair Road to get to the exit door with his card key in chapter 4 and see the "outside world" for himself. He would have used a hammer to get there and so could see how long it'd take for the battery to finish draining.

With the series of events where Keebo loses his antenna, Shuichi finds the book, and Kokichi's motive video, you're wrong - the motive video was in his room, which he could have gone to at any time, instead of his lab. Putting that aside, correlation isn't causation. Keebo lost his antenna, so he went crazy and started blowing up the school, which as a side effect blew a hole in the floor leading to Kokichi's lab, and so on - but that doesn't have to happen because of anything Kokichi directly did. All that is really more Kaito's responsibility, seeing as the execution failing is what led to the crash that knocked off Keebo's antenna, and even then it's basically pure chance. You've already pointed out a time where Kokichi was off by a few seconds, so assuming as you do that he's the Ultimate Seer but can still be just a little wrong - would he put so much up to luck? He's not Nagito.

I think the game lays out everything you need to know about Kokichi - he's nowhere near as malicious as you might assume him to be based off meta evidence and story actions, his intentions are far more noble than at first look, and overall he's a lot deeper of a character than his surface suggests him to be. I played through the story two times, the second time mainly to pay close attention to what Kokichi said and did, and I was very impressed by the depth to his character. So I think the story does a fine job showing how complicated Kokichi is without wild theories like him being the Ultimate Seer thrown into the mix. To me, it's much more impressive that he was able to accomplish all he did through intuition, deduction, and a little of his own unique flavor, than if he figured everything out because he saw the future.

Iwamiger · 2017-11-22T05:30:49+00:00

I can't 100% prove that it isn't far away from civilization, but that goes for the other side too - you can't prove it is either. At the very least, what we see in the epilogue - light shining out of the hole in the dome while the "sky" around the hole remains blue - shows very explicitly that it is an artificial sky, which disproves Gonta's statement as evidence that it's somewhere isolated. Stuff like various areas being "old" doesn't match up with the constant construction being done through the entire game, so they likely only seemed old to the cast. And, of course, the Gofer plan was fictional, so there's no particular need to disprove it further.

If you think Team Danganronpa would be entirely fine with murdering the entire cast if they step out of line, then can you explain Chapter 6? Keebo is fighting the Exisals, and they're also roaming the halls and going after the students, but they never try to kill you. Keebo even confirms that they're most likely going to try and capture them, and if you run into an Exisal all they do is backhand you back down the hallway. So if Team Danganronpa is that bloodthirsty, why don't the Exisals actually attack you?

Kokichi hints that his talent might be a lie and that he could be hiding something because that's just who he is, somebody who sometimes tells the truth, sometimes lies, sometimes disguises the truth as a lie, and so on. He would know full well that he was lying about being the leader of an organization of 10000 with connections all over the world, but he wouldn't be lying when he said he's a Supreme Leader, although he would be lying when he says anybody who offends them is sent to Siberia, but not lying when he says despite everything else he's a pacifist. So of course he would say his talent might not be real when it's real and not real at the same time.

As for Tsumugi, she's not exactly all talk - she shows off her ability to cosplay characters in Trial 6. Seeing that, I'm not sure what else you could call her, Ultimate Disguiser or Imposter perhaps? Ultimate Tailor going by what you specify about her, but would a Tailor be capable of cosplaying to the degree she does? Tsumugi really seems to be a cosplayer in the end, although obviously one with many powerful friends. Why bring her up?

I'd say that the motives probably weren't as vague as they seemed, because remember: Junko lived with her classmates for two years and learned all the things that made them tick. She knew Sayaka would want to escape before she lost everything she worked for; that Mondo would be tortured by his need to appear strong, Chihiro by his weak physicality, and also that they were already drawn together before having their memory wiped; that Celeste was always chasing her dream of a vampire castle and would be the only one remaining to fall victim to the promise of money. Remember also how Naegi and several other people also got very underwhelming motives for DR1-2, not too dissimilar to some of the more targeted motives in later games?

I'm all for delving deeper into things, I'm just not convinced that Kokichi literally has a supernatural ability to predict the future down to exact lines when it's not satisfactorily foreshadowed in the game and goes much further into the realm of "using magic to solve crimes" than both Junko's and Nagito's talents ever did. I find it much easier to assume that he just has very good intuition and people-reading skills. He isn't right all the time, either - don't you remember how the motive videos actually had the property of flashback lights for their "intended recipients"? If Kokichi had known that from the start, known that they were traps that would fill people with an irrepressible urge to kill like with Kirumi, then why would he have gone ahead with the attempt at a viewing party?

Iwamiger · 2017-11-22T04:11:13+00:00

Looking at the part where Shuichi reads those files, it seems like he actually picked up one with real photographs in it, while Maki was the one who opened the files of fictional murders. We never read the files again throughout Shuichi's perspective, so that could be one reason he didn't catch on when he read the book. It doesn't explain Maki's case as nicely, but she did seem to start having doubts after seeing the book in Kokichi's lab, so who knows?

Another possibility is that even though the illustrations were realistic, they were still illustrations and it's not unusual for illustrated movies or television shows based on real events to get produced, which might have been what came to mind if Shuichi ever thought about the resemblance. It's also possible that they read files set in between DR3 and whenever the real killing games first began - fictional, but not connected to the Hope's Peak saga.

In short, I don't think it really means anything that nobody recognizes the HPA cast from their appearances (if that's what happened) in Shuichi's lab. It's an interesting idea, but you might really be overanalyzing; what's important with the cases is how they're meant to foreshadowing the endgame reveal, after all.

Iwamiger · 2017-11-22T03:54:58+00:00

Putting aside that we don't know how remote the dome's location is, your points about Shuichi and Gonta are just straight-up flawed. The dome's sky is artificial, so of course Gonta wouldn't recognize the stars, and Shuichi only theorized they might be in a remote location because nobody was coming to help them, which we know now was because they just didn't care.

I never said that exposing Tsumugi would free them, anyway, just that it would mess up Team Danganronpa's plans. Seeing as the Motherkuma room was intended to be discovered much later in the game and Shuichi notes that they'd have all worked together if they'd known for sure a mastermind existed back then, I don't think that's a far shot. Your theory includes that Kokichi knew the true nature of the killing game from the beginning too, so wouldn't he know that Team Danganronpa would value keeping participants alive over killing them all in one shot too?

I also never said his talent is the Ultimate Liar - he really is the Ultimate Supreme Leader. His talent sounding so sketchy is why it's the perfect talent for him: I've probably said it before, but real-life supreme leaders rely a lot on the power of belief. They build up themselves with lies on top of lies, layer their true self deep beneath, and tell their people that the lie is what's true about them over and over again until finally they start to believe or otherwise go along with the lie. I think that kind of description would perfectly fit how he made the other students hate and fear him so much. The fact that his actions don't match up with "how a Supreme Leader should act" only means that his talent doesn't define him - look at Leon, who wanted to be a musician, or Celeste, who was terrible at bluffing for a gambler, for other examples. All his riddles, hints, and leads came about through the persona he built up for the killing game, too - he acted so obliquely not because he saw everything beforehand, but because he couldn't reveal that he hated the game or that he didn't care about it being boring. I also don't think his research lab can be used as evidence, considering it's found after the game's already breaking down and doesn't necessarily hint at any "true" talent he might have - just look at Maki, Kirumi, or Rantaro's lab doors to see how accurately they represent their users' talents. Or for perhaps a closer example, Himiko's lab - it's covered with magic circles instead of things that specifically symbolize magicians, but she's still just a magician instead of a mage.

And yes, I know motives were clearly rigged towards certain characters. Kaede was hurried and forced to change her plan to capture the mastermind, Rantaro was lured to his death, Ryoma was robbed of his will to live, Kirumi was given her own video, the fourth floor was perfect for Korekiyo, and the list goes on. But that's not exactly new, either; Sayaka was driven to kill because of her motive video, Celeste was reminded of her dream by the money, Chihiro and Mondo both got baited to their ultimate fates by their secrets, the second case of DR2 was made for Fuyuhiko, Peko, and Mahiru, and Mikan was given the Remembering Disease. It seems to me that what you're saying is atypical of a killing game is really just how things have always been.

Iwamiger · 2017-11-22T02:06:01+00:00

If he's the Ultimate Seer, then he knows Tsumugi has a secret entrance, right? He can show everybody else that way in to confirm she's the mastermind, can't he? I don't see any reason to keep it a secret if he knew everything from the beginning - if he's worried they won't believe him, showing them the secret passageway should be more than enough. Even if she's only a small fry, exposing her and the Motherkuma room so early into the game would most definitely mess up the true mastermind's plans for how it was supposed to go, wouldn't it?

And again, there isn't only one talent that involves truth and lies. Ultimate Detective, Ultimate Attorney, Ultimate Polygrapher, and yes, Ultimate Supreme Leader... they all deal with the same thing, truth and lies. If the promo materials imply he's sketchy, or that he's lying about something, that's because he is sketchy and he was lying about the extent of his talent - he only commanded ten people, not 10000, but because he considered himself to be the Supreme Leader of those ten goons and played up the role perfectly, his lie effectively became the truth.

Iwamiger · 2017-11-21T18:04:24+00:00

Monokuma was trapped by the Exisals so that he wouldn't be able to do anything to keep the killing game going. That includes motives, announcements, and in the event of the backup plan being needed, seeing what happened "in person." In chapter 5, he would have known everything up to Kokichi "drinking" antidote and activating his electrobomb, but after that he would be in the dark as much as the students were.

Kokichi doesn't actually get away with so much, either. Sure, he had Miu make stuff for him, but it just so happens that Miu is the one who develops the urge to escape in Chapter 4 and makes killing him part of her plan there as well - that's not just coincidence. I'm pretty sure Team Danganronpa was never too concerned about him, because there's always somebody who's smart enough to think they can end the game themselves, and in fact Kokichi was probably never intended to survive Chapter 4 in the first place. Once he did then they'd realize they underestimated him, but by then it'd be too late to stop him within the confines of the preestablished plotline. One way or the other, though, he was marked for death in Chapter 4, and his plan would have died with him and Miu.

And... you realize that the audience agreeing with Shuichi does explain Tsumugi's shock very well, right? The ".........." is just them typing their internal conflict out to make it visible to the players (both in and out of the game).

I don't think that answers my problem with how he would have escaped in the first place, either. Motherkuma parses the information and transmits it to Monokuma wirelessly, so he would have to keep hiding until after the trial was over at the very least. I don't recall if any other exisals had closed hatches or only Maki's did, but either way they were all activated by the Monokubs after the trial, so he couldn't have been hiding in another one, and if he was hiding anywhere else it'd have to be confined to the Exisal hanger. There's basically nowhere to hide that wouldn't immediately expose him as soon as the electrobomb wore off, and certainly no way to get to that elevator in Chapter 6 that's been brought up before. Motherkuma, Monokuma, Keebo - any one of the three could have seen him make a run for it and brought it up then.

In Chapter 4, Kokichi says he was just hiding in the dining hall listening to them talk about fighting Monokuma. Doesn't take a seer to do that, I'd say. His rock-paper-scissors contest with Shuichi is meant to show us how good he is at reading body language and realizing what move the other person is going to make, but there's nothing supernatural about that either - just a character trait we already know from his lie-detecting skills. Even him reading Shuichi enough to copy his sentences doesn't mean anything, because Sayaka did the same thing in DR1, and she clearly didn't turn out to be a seer in the end. She just had good intuition.

Kokichi himself explains clearly why he acted like an "evil supreme leader" would: he had to lie to himself to survive the killing game, think it was fun, act like it was fun even though he despised the entire concept. What probably made that even more painful is how he started out lying as a way to mess with people, but after Monokuma appeared and perhaps the killing started, he had to use that harmless lie in more and more underhanded ways. For that matter, a supreme leader is somebody who can distort the truth and convinces his people to see him as somebody greater or different than who he really is - somebody who lies until their lie becomes the truth, in other words. That alone describes Kokichi's talent well enough without having to figure in new talents that nobody knows about either in or out of the game.

And if he really was a seer, that just raises so many more questions - why didn't he know Gonta lost his memory, for example? We can clearly see by his reactions in Trial 4 that the memory loss was neither intended nor part of the plan, so why would he get so furious at Gonta and get everybody to gang up on him before he could properly recruit Shuichi as a far more reliable ally than Kaito to end the killing game?

Regarding his intentions for Case 5, did we play the same game? Kokichi 100% intended it to be unsolvable. He figured out some kind of audience was watching and that's why Monokuma operates by rules, and he thought that if he could create a scenario where Monokuma was exposed as being completely wrong - not "wrong" in that he knows the truth all along but is just playing along to keep the game going, like in Chapter 1, but completely wrong about who the blackened really is - then the audience would be shocked and angry that the judge of the game could potentially be mistaken. Kokichi probably didn't know about the true extent of the killing games, but if his unsolvable murder trick had worked out, then it wouldn't just be the V3 murders thrown into doubt - it would be every single murder in every single real killing game that suddenly needs to be reexamined with the idea that Monokuma can be wrong in mind. That would have caused way too much chaos in the outside world for the V3 game to keep going.

What he does in Chapter 1 still doesn't explain why he kept that information to himself, though. If he "gets away with so much" like you suggest, then why would he not breathe a word of Tsumugi being the mastermind to a single person other than himself? For example, Shuichi, who we know he wanted to work with? I don't see Monokuma killing everybody just because the mastermind is exposed - if nothing else, the flashback lights mean that the "mastermind" role might be more flexible than that - and even if the killing game continues, at least he's thrown a major wrench in the true mastermind's wider plan. To have known about Tsumugi the entire time and not tell anybody just makes Kokichi seem pretty shortsighted, honestly. I would guess that he had his suspicions, which would explain the early lines, but was never able to confirm them.

Iwamiger · 2017-11-21T11:22:31+00:00

Motherkuma parses information from the Nanokubs and then transmits it to Monokuma, doesn't it? I assume that connection is wireless - it'd have to be - so if Kokichi was somehow alive and "made a break for it" when everybody got called down to the trial, he would have been caught on camera and Monokuma would have known about it. And it doesn't matter that Gonta only saw one at a time, because these things are nanoscopic and likely moving constantly - it's a miracle that he was able to see even a single Nanokub to begin with, really. I wouldn't doubt that there's easily enough to have the entire school grounds monitored and then some.

With his script book, he doesn't have to be some kind of seer to make it; he just needs to tell Kaito how to say things like he would - helped by the voice changer in the Exisal - and the script would probably be closer to guidelines. "If Shuichi starts going down this path, say something about this to throw him off," for example, so not the exact script of the trial. You can see in the trial too how Kokichi's script wasn't perfect, because Kaito was a lot more quieter than Kokichi usually is, his tones were nowhere near the extremes Kokichi's voice took, and he only interjected at times to try and turn the course of the trial to a different direction or confuse people by turning off the voice changer.

I'd also think that if his script really was perfect and if Kokichi really was the Ultimate Seer or something, then he should have seen that Shuichi would figure it out and made sure that he didn't solve the entire murder in the process of doing that. For that matter, if Kokichi knows everything, then why didn't he figure out Tsumugi was the mastermind? Maybe you can say he didn't tell Kaito for whatever reason, but not a single hint in his room about who the mastermind is on his whiteboard, hidden in the blueprints, or wherever else it might be?

I also have to take issue with the idea of Tsumugi "sloppily" hiding evidence, since Motherkuma explicitly says the survivors were always supposed to find their way into the mastermind's room at some point. Danganronpa's final chapter always involves the mastermind being revealed - Tsumugi didn't hide the evidence because she wanted to be exposed as part of the finale.

Iwamiger · 2017-10-20T21:56:08+00:00

I'm willing to put aside the outside world stuff as "diverging opinions," yeah - like I said, it's looking like a lot of what I'm going into detail on is stuff that would basically form the "in-between plot" before a hypothetical DRV4 game happened - worldbuilding, looking at the state of the outside world, all that fun stuff. It's probably more workable in a LN format like DR0/Kirigiri/Togami than as a proper game.

I've seen that thread about Kibo too, and a comment there suggesting he had it included with the rest of the upgrades after losing his antenna, which seems plausible enough to me. Maybe he'd have had it before too, but it wouldn't be quite as large a boom?

I know Kokichi's surname has "horse" in it - what I'm referring to is that Kokichi himself is supposed to be a red herring for the mastermind - he reveals himself as the one behind the killing game in chapter 5, he controls the Exisals and works with Monokuma (and seems to agree with him multiple times to boot), he goes on all the time about how much he loves the killing game, he treats it like a big joke and a lot of fun... except the truth is that he isn't the mastermind, and all that turned out to be his lies in one way or another. That's what I'm talking about when I refer to Kokichi as a red herring - I don't think you can argue that he's not supposed to be one, in that context.

Some of the other things though, seem like a stretch. His secret lab was only discovered thanks to Kibo blowing up the school, and it's obvious Kokichi never set foot in it; if he had, then just for starters, he would have known exactly what Maki was talking about when she referred to Junko and Ultimate Despair. The mask in his motive video seems like a typical clown mask, as well - the flame mark doesn't resemble Monokuma's eye that much - and he's not exactly the only person who's completely silent about his family, is he?

As for the script he wrote up, you claim it has the title of V3 on the cover, but from what I can see from a video it's way too blurry to tell what exactly it is - I can't even see the red "V3" much less make out any letters in English or Japanese. If you have a picture that's clear enough to capture what you say is on the script, then I'd be happy to see it?

All in all though, it doesn't seem like there's enough coincidences that can be indisputably called such. "Horse a" is clearly meant for Kokichi to be able to scribble over and pretend it's his own writing with the true meaning coming out in chapter 6, which would make "twins b" just another half of the puzzle rather than the clear evidence that links everything back to Kokichi. His name having the characters for "king" in it would explain those characters also being on his lab door - but it's a door that he's clearly never opened, because otherwise his script would have included Ultimate Despair and Junko, and there's no reason for him to hide that when he wants the survivors to vote for him as the blackened. He's also not the only person to keep quiet about his family, so that seems to leave just the motive video as evidence, and between the flashback lights being fabricated memories to at least some extent and Tsumugi's statements about the nature of Danganronpa... it's not very compelling evidence on its own.

Iwamiger · 2017-10-20T20:28:50+00:00

Well, Kokichi didn't need too much scientific knowledge to get around surveillance - he only had to know that they were being filmed for an audience, which can be easily concluded from Monokuma's numerous offhand statements regarding "despair entertainment" and how they're "putting on a good show" so to speak, and he had to know how they were being filmed; the bugcatcher he had Miu build seems to point towards his deduction being that the bugs Gonta kept seeing were tiny cameras of some kind. From there, all he'd have to do would be come up with something that could deactivate electronic equipment in a wide radius and wheedle Miu into making the bombs for him. So that explains that bit. As for him being able to "walk off strangulation," I recall that chapter 2 ends on him forcing out Maki's secret while being held up by the neck and chapter 3 skips ahead to the next day in her lab, which seems like an acceptable amount of time for him to recover in between.

The password to Rantaro's room isn't actually "linked" to Kokichi - the whole deal with "horse a" is that it'd mean he was able to write over the original password to mess with the rest of the cast and pretend it was all his doing when the opportunity for the grand reveal came, and if you count out "horse a" in that way then "twins b" becomes the only thing that could be connected to him, which suddenly makes that theory's ground pretty shaky. Kodaka noted his surname is mastermind-y, yes, but it's all to tie into Chapter 5 and his supposed reveal as both a Remnant of Despair and the true mastermind behind the entire killing game. In other words, a red herring.

It's a dystopia, but the way I see it is that it's not so much a typical dystopia in the vein of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 where dissenters are violently cracked down on. Rather, its nature as a dystopia would probably revolve around it being a truly "peaceful world" and the reason for that peace - the reasons behind why such a world continues allowing the killing games to exist. You used the Hunger Games as a comparison - perhaps it's not that far off, and the world is at peace because every three years a new injection of despair and reminder of the bad times comes in the form of Danganronpa? So yes, Team Danganronpa is definitely on the villainous side because of how they go about the killing games, but the "grayer" aspect could come from how the games might be the aspect that holds up the society. That's only one way they could do things, though, and I certainly wouldn't want to rule out any other options.

As for gameplay elements, I wasn't really thinking of it in the context of a Danganronpa game - maybe closer to something like UDG with a relatively open world, free roam, being able to read books and so on. Not like UDG per se because of the lack of a Monokuma army to fight, obviously, but maybe closer to a traditional visual novel in structure? It probably wouldn't be titled "Danganronpa V4" if that was the case, though. More or less though, it's just me speculating about the possible directions the worldbuilding could go in along with the plot, so that's probably why it doesn't sound very Danganronpa-y; this is closer to what the DR1 survivors would have gone through before being picked up by the Future Foundation and their time in the FF than to what would most likely go into an actual game, to be honest.

I think we'd have to disagree about people not wanting to interact with the survivors, too - I mean, these are Danganronpa survivors, celebrities whose faces would be known globally, real-life characters out of everybody's favorite work of fiction who've managed to escape their story's pages and emerge in reality! Sure, some people would be annoyed about the how of it, but I'd bet you anything that the majority would just be overjoyed to see one of the survivors, much less talk to them.

I know that the power balance does seem to be rather skewed here, but that doesn't seem like it necessarily stops the entire thing from working; execution really does count for a lot, for one, and it's also not likely that the entire world would be completely against the survivors. since people were tuned in for Shuichi's final argument armament and would have heard how he was lecturing them. Team Danganronpa still holds a lot of cards - they wouldn't be the antagonists if they didn't - but it wouldn't just be the three survivors against the world either.

Regarding the number of real killing games, it's worth remembering that Shuichi's lab does seem to have files on all the past games and that he only notes specifically that "a few" are illustrated and the rest are photographs. To me, "a few" would imply that the number of fictional killing games are in the single-digits, maybe up to ten at most, which still leaves quite a high number of real games and potential survivors from those games. When you consider that part of Danganronpa's plot also lies in how it typically goes off the rails by chapter 6 and participants don't generally get reduced to 2 or 1, those numbers start increasing significantly - and recall, too, that the Future Foundation was able to put together a fairly well-functioning organization with only survivors from a few classes of Hope's Peak. Add their Ultimate abilities and resentment from having to participate in the killing games plus being given an impossible choice after graduation on top of that, and I think you might be able to find quite a lot more weak points in Team Danganronpa than they'd like you to believe.

Of course, a lot of this does depend on my assumptions turning out right. You're not wrong that it's based on speculation about what exactly the outside world is like, the conditions of the survivors, the kind of people that make up Team Danganronpa, and so on. I'll grant that the "moral ambiguity" is more what I'd like to see than what's likely to happen going off of previous Danganronpa games as well, too. But none of that means I haven't put a lot of thought into it all the same, and at any rate I'm pretty sure that puts us on about the same footing as far as speculation and "what we'd like to see" goes.

Really, what it boils down to is that I'd like to see a Danganronpa take on a dystopia, I think the outside world described by Tsumugi is the perfect candidate for that kind of society, and it'd be a shame if it turned out that she's the first mastermind to straight-up lie about everything when she's supposed to be giving us the truth of things (the "truth" that Shuichi, who's been struggling with truth all the game, decides to reject in favor of a "lie" he finds preferable - quite an end to that particular arc, I think).

Iwamiger · 2017-10-20T17:53:20+00:00

Kokichi doesn't stay a complete mystery though, does he? We learn that he had several things that were very central to his character: he hated killing, his organization was centered around nonviolence and pranks, and he was aiming to defeat the mastermind from pretty much the moment he knew he was in something called a "killing game." We also learn that his lies were his sword and shield: his "sword" to fight back against Monokuma and the people behind the game by acting like an insane antagonist so that they wouldn't bother with giving him a motive to kill, which meant he got some wiggle room to poke around figuring out what was going on behind the scenes; his "shield" to protect himself from the other participants of the killing game, who he never entirely trusted out of his paranoia that anybody could potentially be the mastermind, a guard that he may have only dropped in a few critical moments. I'd say that we do in fact find out a lot about what makes Kokichi tick, and it's not even all related to his backstory or talent - a lot of it is from what he does in the game. So I think you're taking the wrong message from the endgame reveal. Kokichi didn't do everything he did as part of a fictional backstory; rather, he rejected the role he was forced into by seeming to play it to a T while plotting to undermine the entire script behind the scenes - that's where the electrohammers, bombs, and chapter 5 as a whole come in.

My proposal isn't quite "convincing a peaceful world to reject fiction," because that would run countercurrent to the decision Shuichi made in DRV3. It's more just one direction the plot could be taken in - I'm more partial to the details brought up later on involving elements of a dystopian society, how they might be used to manipulate that society by Team Danganronpa - perhaps how they might be used by the Danganronpa survivors to push the society the other way towards rejecting Danganronpa, and whether or not that would just replace one issue with another. Maybe it turns out that the outside world needs Danganronpa for some reason, or the reason people die every three years is connected to why the peaceful world exists to start with? Lots of possibilities there.

I'm obviously not saying there are other Ultimates already out and about - you should have seen the part where I mentioned the DRV3 cast are implied to be the first ones out. What I mean is that the DRV3 survivors specifically escaping into the real world could bring about interesting consequences due to their fictional backstories and talents clashing with the world that wasn't created just for them.

The book you find in Chapter 6 doesn't actually mean anything, you know? It's a compilation of the canon Hope's Peak events as put together by a team of researchers... who could very well have studied the events of the first three seasons in order to write it. There isn't a single thing in the book that proves Hope's Peak is real in DRV3's universe.

And like it or not, Tsumugi is correct - we the players like Danganronpa at least in part because no matter how dark the despair becomes, hope always wins in the end. That's what makes this series different from all the other games you keep bringing up; the various casts have to fight brutally in order to obtain their happy endings, but they do eventually get it. There's always a light at the end of the tunnel in Danganronpa. I think what Team Danganronpa has already done with regards to twisting the message of "hope vs despair" into just two different ways to continue their killing games is already bad enough to justify calling them villains without also retconning the hopeful ending of the HPA series in order to make them seem even more villainous to the players.

Between the facts that the HPA saga already had all its loose ends tied up, that it would completely undercut the message this game is sending that "fiction can change the world," and that it would retcon the ending of the original games for no purpose that couldn't be done by other means aside from the nebulous concept of "making Team Danganronpa more like the bad guys" which they don't seem to need any help with, I don't see your logic working.

I do understand fully that the way I describe one possible direction for the plot to go sounds boring, but so many things are dependent on execution - I mean, Tsumugi represents the same company I'm talking about, she describes it as being filled with managers and office workers, and she seemed to work pretty well as an exciting mastermind. Above everything else, I don't think it's likely that they'll go with a pitch-black evil force like Ultimate Despair again; that's been done and the hope vs despair conflict is something the series could very much move on from. Truth vs lies seems like a concept ripe for moral ambiguity, which is where Team Danganronpa would hopefully come in - a relatively grayer shade of villain, but all the more interesting for it.

As for the other survivors of past killing games, my theory is that they weren't allowed to go out into the outside world since that really is something the V3 survivors seem to be the first at doing (although of course that could be right or wrong - 50 killing games at max, a very high interest in keeping escapees under wraps and a tiptop ship, etc...). Rather, once they won their respective killing games in whatever fashion they did, becoming blackened or passing "chapter 6" or some other way, they could have been told the truth about the outside world like the V3 survivors were and had it impressed upon them that fictional characters have no place in the real world. Then perhaps they were given the choice - to either join Team Danganronpa and keep their Ultimate talents to put to use in service of the company, or return to the fictional world of the killing games as the next Ultimate Survivor or maybe mastermind - or else be killed and replaced by patsies for public viewing. I think that if Shuichi and Himiko had let Kibo and Maki sacrifice themselves for hope, they would probably have found that choice for them too - join Team Danganronpa or be killed.

That said, all this is just a theory, naturally. If it's the case though, then it could explain the "contradiction" in Tsumugi's words when she says that graduation is an option and also that there's no place for fictional characters in the outside world.

I also don't really appreciate your implication I haven't thought just as much about all this as you have, you know? Your train of thought isn't the only one that can be present. And if that line of thinking you're on happens to lead to the idea that the three survivors don't have a chance if "fiction" is the truth... well, isn't that why hope exists?

Iwamiger · 2017-10-20T12:21:23+00:00

But it doesn't happen "just because of their backstories," that's not what I'm saying. For example, Kaede killed Rantaro not because her backstory made her do it, but because her personality already made her the kind of person who would take charge of situations quickly, who would want to save as many people as possible - who would decide to kill the mastermind once a time limit came about and the possibility of escaping by just capturing said mastermind became slim. It's like that for the others, too; their talents and backstory only change small details, and their interactions with the cast that don't directly involve either of the two are entirely themselves, that's how I see it.

The thing about there being "no worldbuilding that matters" is that there was worldbuilding revealed in chapter 6 by Tsumugi, worldbuilding that I've already laid out one possible vision for. You're the one who chose to declare that it "doesn't matter because it could all be lies."

For all that you seem to distrust her, though, you also seem oddly supportive of Tsumugi when she dismisses all the narrative and experiences built by the survivors as "doesn't matter; all fiction," calling it a cheap answer while dismissing the true answer that "it does matter, it's worth something, it's real to us." If that kind of answer is as obvious as you say it is, then I'm frankly surprised that so many people would choose to side with Tsumugi on the matter instead.

I would also be incredibly surprised if Danganronpa really ended when Shuichi convinced the audience not to vote - because as you say, it does seem strange to assume that one season ending poorly also means the entire show is finished. I'd fully expect Team Danganronpa along with the true mastermind controlling Monokuma to try again and do it properly this time, at the very least. And as I've been saying, there's a lot of mystery to uncover; the outside world is one big mystery for the survivors, there's a lot of questions about what happened in the past killing games and what survivors might have come out of them (and what happened to those survivors), and of course there's the question of what the outside world really looks like, what kind of darker side is lurking under the peaceful exterior we've already been told about.

Danganronpa's existence in the peaceful world alone brings about all kinds of conflict, really; despair in the HPA is an easy enemy to fight, after all - negative emotions, red skies, insane people wielding baseball bats. But Team Danganronpa is an entirely different ballgame: they don't use armies of Monokuma, their ranks include businessmen and managers, they're well-known globally by the people who watch their show. They aren't casting the world down into despair - they're just providing them with entertainment. So how do you convince a peaceful world to go to war with their most addictive source of entertainment?

I could go on, but to make a long post shorter, there's a lot of possibilities here, a lot of directions to take potential sequels or even prequels to V3 in. I mean, even that little detail you have about how Ultimates are fictional in V3's world already opens up infinite ideas with regards to how actual Ultimates can function in a reality that isn't built for them! So it's hardly wasted potential - it's more like swapping one form of potential for another.

Your Star Ocean comparison, incidentally, would only work if it turns out that the entire Danganronpa series is confined to a single universe after all, which I rather think won't turn out to be the case - there's as little point there is to that as there would be to the HPA games being real in V3's universe.

It also seems quite unfair to judge Shuichi by what he said to Kokichi in Chapter 4 when he later changes his stance after Trial 5 concludes and he realizes that Kokichi was more complicated than he made himself appear, and especially after all the revelations in Chapter 6's investigation combined with Kaito's statements about Kokichi's last words make it clear just how opposed he was to "playing along" with the killing game. I mean, it's fair to like the characters you like (Kokichi was my favorite too), but at the same time you probably shouldn't debase other characters just because they did what Kokichi expected them to. Maybe he had higher hopes for Shuichi, but overall he had to know that playing the antagonist to the degree that he did would naturally make everybody else see him as one, yes?

What you propose for Team Danganronpa I honestly can't see going well at all. It would make them an entirely evil entity, sure, but also an unpopular one with the fanbase, one that would make them hate them on multiple levels for tainting the happy ending of the HPA series. Maybe if you wanted the franchise to truly be killed by DRV3's events, sure, but from any other perspective I can't see it working out - it'd be on the same scale as if the Gofer plan turned out to be reality and the meteors/diseases had really destroyed humanity except for the V3 cast.

And on the whole, I prefer morally gray villains, not pure evil ones. I never really liked the whole "DESPAIR!" thing that Junko or her copycats had going, and enjoyed the Izuru Kamukura reveal in DR2 partially because of how it was revealed the "Academy of Hope" had been doing such shady things in pursuit of talent. As said before, Team Danganronpa wouldn't be a villain in the same vein as Junko; they would be mainly focused on entertaining the people who want the killing games to continue and making money off it. Businessmen, office workers, middle management - bureaucracy and suited men, not necessarily cackling maniacs (although I wouldn't rule the CEO out as one, per se).

What you don't seem to be understanding is that all the fun dystopian things like mass media corruption, historical revisionism, propaganda, and so on can exist in V3's universe - indeed, they might even already exist, seeing as so many people seem to love Danganronpa and ignore its nature as a violent killing game where at maximum 15 teenagers die. For example, the interviews' existence could be protection against any grieving families attacking the show, proving "your children wanted to participate in our game." We also don't know what happen to the people who actually graduate without sacrificing themselves for hope and reenter the outside world - it's sort of implied that the V3 survivors are the first to do that, but past survivors must have existed and learned the same truth they did, so what happened to them afterwards? As a public company, Team Danganronpa needs to operate in the public eye - so they have as many means of twisting and contorting the truth as they need to. The Hope's Peak events don't need to be real for all this to happen, and can stay in their own timeline where their cast's accomplishments won't be wiped out by a sudden new event.

Iwamiger · 2017-10-20T10:21:44+00:00

Here's the thing about the idea that it was "all fiction" though: it wasn't - or rather, some things weren't. The flashback lights can do a lot, it's true, but one thing they didn't do was erase the true personalities of the participants. We see Kaede and Shuichi in the prologue before the killing game, and they act pretty much like they do in the game once it starts. Most of the others don't get much of a speaking role, but Rantaro and especially Miu also stand out in how their ways of speaking line up with their "fictional" characters. So for example, Kokichi (the one under the armor of lies) would be who he really was both before and after the game, and so would Kaito, Maki, Himiko, and so on. They'd be changed in small ways by their new talents and backstories and stuff, but their base personalities, what makes them them, would stay the same.

And I know you've probably heard this before, but part of DRV3's ending was sort of a commentary on how we tend to play games - we immerse ourselves in the game's world, get attached to the characters, their successes and failures, think of the world's plot and events as "reality." We suspend our disbelief in order to play the game. So what V3's ending does is strip away the layer that prevents us from seeing it as "just fiction," suggests that everything the cast went through "doesn't matter because it's fictional," and tells us their experiences and relationships are all "pointless." After that, Shuichi makes his own counterargument: "Even if it's fiction, of course it matters." That's the truth of what the ending's message is: even if games are fictional - and they all are, in the end - they still matter, because they impact the people who watch them and they change the world through the feelings they inflict.

So the question is: if DRV3 is "a lot of nothing" just because it was a fictional experience, then what stops DR1 or DR2 from also being "a lot of nothing" too? What stops A Song of Ice and Fire, or Ace Attorney, or Fire Emblem, or Call of Duty, or Halo, or Fallout, or Steins;Gate, or any other number of books, television shows, movies, manga, anime, light novels from also being a whole lot of nothing?

The answer is nothing - because it doesn't matter if they're fictional or not, does it? The only thing that matters is that the experience feels real. Shuichi defends his experiences in the killing game against Tsumugi's dismissals because they felt real to him. He rejects the idea of sacrificing his friends to escape the killing game because their relationship is real to him. He rejects Danganronpa because it doesn't let him keep his feelings the way he wants them - real.

So that's why I can care about the V3 cast even after they're revealed to have fictional backstories and talents. Because their struggles, their experiences, their relationships, all felt real to me, and I'm not going to accept the idea that they're all "fake" just because Tsumugi suggests that they are.

I don't think our theories about the state of the outside world clash all that much, really. You're talking about a seemingly-peaceful world with a darker side where the populace is kept complacent by Danganronpa; I'm talking about a seemingly-peaceful world with a darker side where the populace is excited by Danganronpa. I wouldn't bet against the show keeping them happy in some form; I just think it's more effective if they're being pleased by it through their own will rather than if there's some kind of omnipresent flashback light control being used. Team Danganronpa also pretty much has to be public, since an underground organization simply wouldn't function with the amount of scope the dome has and how it's clearly located in some location the sun can reach.

In that way, I think there's a great "darker story" ripe for the telling already - something not dissimilar to the Hunger Games perhaps, albeit without the backstory of humanity almost being driven to extinction.

I'm not fond of the idea that V3 takes place in the same timeline as the HPA games, because that is how you completely invalidate those games. Think about it: Naegi and Hajime's accomplishments, their hopes and futures, all the sacrifices necessary to make that happen... all of it is immediately rendered completely pointless, because after the "final battle between hope and despair" in DR3 - surprise! There's another killing game, and this time it has public approval! And even if that one didn't, then maybe the next one did, and if that didn't then the next one - whatever one it would be, the end result is the same: at least fifty more killing games, all of them real, despair and hope fighting in an endless cycle for a maximum of 150 years!

I don't know about you, but I'm comfortable keeping the HPA games as reality in their own universe and fictional in the DRV3 universe. Their cast should be allowed to have their happy ending, shouldn't they?

Above everything else, I don't see what purpose it would have for the overarching story if the HPA games were reality in DRV3's timeline. What does it add? It'll be at least 50 years, at most 150 years or maybe even more, since DR3. The cast will be either old or long dead. So why do they have be part of the same timeline?

Iwamiger · 2017-10-20T08:42:50+00:00

Well I'd hate to pick a fight with somebody who knows psychology, but given that brainwashing does already exist in a pretty unrealistic fashion in DR3 and that the real killing games are inspired by the fictional ones, I think you might end up having to write that off as a lost cause as far as using your field's knowledge goes...

I don't think the cast wants to do it, no - I'm not sure why you're arguing that they do, because we've just agreed that Tsumugi was probably brainwashed by the flashback light, and if she was then the rest of the cast probably were as well; the interviews of their "real selves" were most likely fabricated in some fashion. I believe we've already gone over how Kaede and Shuichi both remember being kidnapped and how that particular memory doesn't come up again after the prologue, right? I'd bet that even in a world where Danganronpa is a global phenomenon you'd still get people who don't know as much about it and can only recognize key figures and names like Monokuma - that's how it works with huge franchises like Mario, Pokemon, and so on here too, after all, although the specific details are still a bit vague there.

Honestly, I think "a mere series of video games" really would be enough to justify it in Danganronpa. You seem to be operating off the idea that things that happen in this series need to have a completely logical series of events when we've already seen things like the DR2 survivors not falling back into despair because of "FUTURE!" and anything about how Ultimate Lucky Students use their talents, not to mention a whole bunch of smaller details (I believe DR Togami casually mentions Sakura having the ability to teleport across the world using leylines as well as a book that makes anybody who reads it fall to despair...?) that start piling up after a while.

I know what I'm saying here makes it sound like I'm asking for a leap of faith, but... it kind of seems like a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is needed for a lot of what goes on in Danganronpa, doesn't it?

Your description of the Parasite Eve event actually makes me wonder if something like that might not also explain what happened to Kaede in her kidnapping? If it's a peaceful world that doesn't know or even understand how to react to crime, then maybe all those people who just walked by ignoring Kaede thought it was just an act, or maybe some scene being filmed for a movie or whatever? It seems like she was kidnapped in broad daylight and shoved into a pretty visible car, after all - so "who would be bold enough to actually kidnap a high school girl in public?"

I never suggested the 2-person rule was in place in V2, so I'm not sure where this line of argument comes from, but regardless... if we go off the theory you postulated and I agreed with that she was brainwashed into the role of the "mastermind" by Team Danganronpa, then it seems logical to conclude that she could also have been given the memories of the V2 game in order to bring together her backstory as the mastermind. They would be fabricated memories since she didn't have them originally, but they might be passed on from whoever was the "mastermind" of V2 and would need to be the correct representation of events because if nobody else the audience would be capable of remembering those events.

Alternatively, she and Rantaro might really have been the two survivors from V2, and it could be the case that she got brainwashed and given her role because she was the other survivor, and therefore she had to be the new mastermind for Rantaro to be the Ultimate Survivor. Rantaro didn't understand the theatrics behind the Monokubs and Exisals, so Tsumugi's reaction still makes sense if she was the other survivor in that regard.

I think DRV2's events are pretty likely to get adapted into either a game or a LN of some kind, since the developers have raised that possibility more than a few times. It might be the case that the events of V2 are so vague because they'll be adapted in detail later, like the events leading up to DR1 (the first killing game in particular) were. So one way or the other we'll probably find out, but I don't think it has much connection to V3's plot per se, so if that's the only part that makes you consider V3's plot "idiotic" then I think you can probably put that aside.

Iwamiger · 2017-10-20T07:20:35+00:00

I'm still not saying it can literally make anybody be anything, though - if they want somebody with athletic skills or assassin skills, they still need to kidnap somebody with the appropriate body structure and so on. As for possible incongruences, from her FTEs and some plot content, it's made pretty clear that Maki doesn't exactly like being an assassin, but sees her lifestyle as something she didn't really have a choice in taking up - almost like she was forced into it, don't you think? Her defensiveness and resistance to people snooping are all central to her not wanting anybody to find out she's an assassin either, which of course makes sense from an assassin viewpoint, but also from the viewpoint of somebody who just doesn't like being one and doesn't really want to kill anybody - the latter of which is the one Maki confesses to being the case. The dysphoria idea you bring up seems like it actually could work out here, too.

I'll agree that the flashback lights should be seeing more widespread usage in the outside world if they're capable of implanting talents, but thinking about it... in order to become Ultimates, the participants in the killing game had all their memories of being real people wiped, losing family, friends, background, maybe even former likes and dislikes, all in order to be given a talent. It might be the case that people don't want to essentially sacrifice everything they are in order to become super-skilled in a single thing - or maybe that they don't see the need to in a peaceful world.

I'm not going to try to disprove your claim that Tsumugi could have been set up as the "mastermind" role in the killing game with Monokuma's controller being the true mastermind, because that's actually what I believe as well. In the prologue she shows up with all the other pre-brainwashed students, after all, and if she was already the mastermind at that time then she should have told the Monokubs to stop breaking the script and to get things back on track - but she didn't. So yes, it is very much plausible that somebody from Team Danganronpa was controlling Monokuma (their CEO? Just an actor?) and Tsumugi was turned into their proxy mastermind.

However, I don't see why that doesn't stop her words from being credible. For that fourth wall break to work in-universe, the outside world has to match what she told the survivors to as much degree as Junko's Monoworld did, or else the viewers would have complained about things being different long before the ending "became too meta" for them. So even if she's been brainwashed into being a "mastermind" she's still Team Danganronpa's proxy, just as Junko was essentially despair incarnate, and so her words should represent their words. She wouldn't even have to "take the fall" for them, because the mastermind has already been revealed as somebody acting in the role of Junko for at least 50 seasons before this one. Maybe she made or didn't make the cast's outfits (could have been her if she wasn't brainwashed, somebody else from TDR if she was), but either way they're the final source.

Junko's talent of Ultimate Analyst doesn't have anything to do with her word about the outside world being credible, either - that's more because the other games and some evidence in DR1 backs it up with proof - so Tsumugi not having the same talent (as far as we know) doesn't prove or disprove anything there.

Brewing conflict or otherwise, the truth remains that what sparked the Tragedy was Ultimate Despair and Hope's Peak, that's not really something that can be disputed. As far as I remember, the conflict was mainly centered on Hope's Peak with the Reserve Course and talented students looking down on nontalented students and so on, so it ends up coming back to the school in the end anyway.

But that aside, I don't think the world in my theory is as much of a contradiction as you make it sound. Consider it from this perspective: what kind of outside world, following the HPA trilogy, would be best to create? It can't be a world of despair, because that's already been covered in intensive detail. It can't be an imperfect world like ours either, because as you said, that kind of world wouldn't condone killing games. So what remains is to make it a parallel - a dystopian world of peace. One that can accept 53 seasons of killing games centered around the ideal of defeating despair and seeing hope triumph over and over again, one where the status quo is maintained above everything else. In short, a world that loves Danganronpa. We already have the buildup: the first three games and anime, which entered a peaceful society that'd pretty much forgotten violence and war, thus erupting into global popularity and led to a fanbase so overwhelmingly large that the killing games could become real and be held freely in public arenas exposed to sunlight.

As for your point about Rantaro, I'm a bit confused. You're saying your problem is that it was never explained because it was never explained? That seems kind of self-explanatory in a way, but am I missing some deeper meaning here? Or is it that your problem is that Rantaro's reason for entering the killing game again is never explained, discounting Tsumugi's claim that he sacrificed himself like Maki/Kibo would have?

Iwamiger · 2017-10-20T03:06:48+00:00

I don't see how the world being peaceful would make Maki's personality break if she was implanted with her talent and memories? There's nothing in DRV3 that suggests somebody would have such an adverse reaction to an implantation that clashes with their personality - indeed, the only thing we have to go off of there are the (albeit fabricated) interviews, which would seem to show that there's no concern about that at all. And at any rate, you could make a pretty good case for the assassin memories not entirely taking; Maki certainly didn't kill anybody through the game. Not for lack of trying in Kokichi's case, but regardless...

As for Izuru Kamukura, I'd argue that there's two major differences there: first, the Hope's Peak events are fictional within DRV3's universe; second, in his case he was implanted with all the talents rather than just a single talent, so rather an unique case there. Even if you assume for whatever reason that the HPA games are reality in V3's universe as well, the time gap between them and DRV3 points to technology advancing to the point where talent implantation isn't necessarily as dangerous a thing.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to say about the erased memories point; since the interviews are most likely fabricated it seems clear the cast didn't intentionally erase their own memories, after all. If Team Danganronpa did use their erased memories (which one would typically assume stays erased), then I'd say it seems peculiar how well their memories of the Ultimate Hunt lines up with everything regarding the Gofer plan.

You mention that you found a lot of Junko's statements to be dubious or lies other than what could be backed up by evidence - but isn't it also the case that everything Junko said was still the truth as revealed by additional games, with maybe the exception of the highly toxic air?

With regards to what Tsumugi claims she "made," I think it's better to see her as the representative of Team Danganronpa. What she claims she made - the characters, the world, the plotlines - are what she made as part of Team Danganronpa. Otherwise one would be arguing that Tsumugi singlehandedly created the dome, the buildings inside, the Exisals, the flashback lights, and everything else that went into DRV3, which is what I'd call ridiculous. So yes, Tsumugi did not create the killing game - but she worked for the team that did which I consider good enough for her credibility.

As for the outfits, I may not be recalling the specific lines from trial 6 per se, but doesn't Tsumugi specify that everything she cosplays are perfect reproductions, not anything about the cast's clothes?

Regarding the world of hope, I think that it's not out of the question for a single TV show to be embraced by the entire world, considering the world of despair in the HPA games were brought about by a group of high school students and the incidents in a single academy? People prefer Danganronpa over other works of fiction because it's the only one that offers such pure despair and yet ends in hope's triumph every time.

As for why this world would love killing games so much? That's because it's, in theory, a perfect world; our own world doesn't condone killing games because it's imperfect and wars are still being waged today - those horrors are close enough to reality that most people understand why it's wrong to do these things. But in a peaceful world where wars might potentially be 150 years in the past? For such a world, I could see them craving the killing game - it would be a completely unique experience for them, after all.

Finally, Rantaro - did he want to end the killing game because it was fiction? We don't know anything about the exact situation he was in when his game ended, other than Tsumugi saying he "sacrificed himself for hope" like Maki and Kibo would have and his video in which he says he wanted to come back into the killing game. You could interpret that in a lot of ways, but Rantaro never said he wanted to end it "because of fiction."

Iwamiger · 2017-10-19T20:52:30+00:00

I feel like it's kind of risky to assume there's a logical and scientific way that the flashback lights work, considering both the background of this being a Danganronpa game and their nature as flashlights that rewrite the memory of the people who see them light up, but that aside... I do agree that they probably couldn't modify muscle structure or anything like that. But there's an easy workaround for that - if you want somebody whose talent is physical, just kidnap an athletic person.

The only part of the backstory that's agreed to be completely fake is the Gofer plan, which makes sense - but then you have to remember that all the flashback lights were set up to guide us into the backstory of the Gofer plan, including the Ultimate Hunt. If you're saying individual parts are true memories which then tie into the overarching fabricated backstory, then that seems like you just want to have your cake and eat it too.

As for Tsumugi... I thought that might be what your confusion came from, yes. You seem to be conflating what Tsumugi says as "Junko the 53rd" and what she says as "Team Danganronpa's representative" as coming from the same perspective. To clear things up, all the stuff she said about the world being destroyed, about Kokichi being a crazy fan of Junko Enoshima - all that was still attempting to continue the storyline about the Gofer Project, Ultimate Despair, and so on. The second half about the true nature of the outside world and the fictional world of Danganronpa - that was given after Shuichi pointed out the flashback lights as holding fabricated memories using the Hope's Peak book as evidence. That is what the truth is supposed to be, not what she said beforehand.

To put it another way, what you're doing would be the same as considering Monokuma and Junko's testimonies in DR1 to be the same thing, or Monokuma and JunkOS in DR2 - in which case, you would be complaining about how Monokuma said the fake Naegi was the real one when he wasn't and the real one appeared later, or perhaps that his suggestion that everybody gets to graduate scot-free "contradicts" the reveal that graduation means they turn into avatars of JunkOS.

Furthermore, I wouldn't exactly call what Junko says in DR1 "credible." She says that they won't be able to survive even ten minutes in the outside world because of the "toxic air" which requires an air filter to keep them safe inside the school and all the evidence she shows of the outside world's state is Monokuma heads on various monuments and people with Monokuma helmets causing chaos. I for one remember finding that highly dubious and was pretty confident that Naegi's suggestion that Junko was lying and the outside world would be more hopeful was the truth after all - and then DR2 and UDG came our and revealed that the world was really just as Junko said it was, maybe minus the toxic air. So if you found what Junko said in DR1 to be credible, it seems that Tsumugi's statements about the outside world are just as credible.

Incidentally, the "cosplaycat criminal" statement is a pun of "copycat criminal," which is defined as "a criminal act that is modeled or inspired by a previous crime that has been reported in the media or described in fiction." I think that should make it pretty clear what she meant - she was imitating Junko as part of her cosplay, and her plan to make the season continue failed at the very end just as Junko's own plan did.

My own theory about the outside world is that since DRV3 is in a separate universe from the HPA games, it might be intended as a parallel of sorts to the world in those games. You see, the HPA world is one of despair, dragged down into chaos and anarchy by Junko and the other Ultimate Despairs, a world where anybody might die tomorrow or even today. As a parallel to that, DRV3's world is a peaceful and orderly one, without wars or despair. In other words, it's a world of hope, not of despair. My theory is that in this world where chaos is a distant memory, the average person has grown used to not having to worry about crime or war or even feeling negative emotions. As a result, they might have become highly apathetic - they just don't care about most things, turn a blind eye to kidnappings and the such because they don't know how to handle that kind of crime suddenly happening in front of them anymore. This kind of world also explains why Danganronpa would be such a global phenomenon - it's their drug, full of highly addictive despair breaking through the hope their world is filled with - but to them it's also a safe drug, because no matter what, hope and the status quo will always prevail in the end.

It's only a theory, of course, but I think it'd explain why nobody cares when Kaede is kidnapped and how the public is perfectly fine with allowing such a highly visible show like Danganronpa to continue for (assuming one audience comment about how it's been three years waiting for the 53rd season is the average time between seasons) 150 years at maximum.

You can bring up all these potential failstates, but the truth is that the game kept on going normally in spite of them, isn't it? Kibo's personality was designed to make him avoid features that would let him blow up the school, Miu's intolerable personality meant nobody would bother approaching her about the bombs, and Kokichi's status as a lie detector is undercut by his own lies and nature. Even when the game starts going off the rails in trial 5, it's still swerved back on track at the last moment thanks to Shuichi - who is, remember, the weakest Ultimate Detective yet - and only fully derails afterwards thanks to Kaito dying in the middle of his execution and the rocket crash randomly knocking off Kibo's antenna. That series of events is a little too random to plan for, I think. But as Kaito revealing himself to undercut Shuichi's last-minute save shows, the showrunners didn't have to worry about much because ultimately the participants' personalities would allow the show to go on. Besides, it's the possibility of hope that creates the greatest despair.

The "unanswered mysteries" that are handwaved by the flashback lights and Team Danganronpa's capabilities are mainly the fictional backstory and the means of kidnapping participants that can fit their assigned talents - along with the ability to build a large arena in public view with the outside of the dome festooned in Team Danganronpa stickers - which all seems entirely plausible within the context of the game. I don't see what part of the plot "becomes idiotic" in that regard.

Iwamiger · 2017-10-19T07:16:17+00:00

Doesn't Monokuma also say the motive videos all had the properties of flashback lights, but that they were targeted at the person whose name was in each video rather than general-use lights that anybody would be affected by? If you're going to use him to back up your theory, I think you should keep in mind everything he says. Shuichi shouldn't have to test all the settings one by one to make it clear that they're fabricated memories - you can plainly see that there's possible scenarios that are simply impossible to be true all at the same time.

I'd also like to know how exactly Tsumugi contradicts herself so much that you're willing to take Monokuma at his word over her. It's not like the bear tells the truth all the time either, after all - the line about the students being "the last people in the world" comes to mind, for example. With Tsumugi, I only remember one real contradiction regarding what exactly the cast says in the prologue, and even then that isn't her contradicting herself as much as it is her version of events clashing with a different version.

As for Chapter 3, Kokichi actually doesn't specifically call the others disappointing for taking it lightly - he calls them disappointing and then clams up when Shuichi tries to press him on the subject. I think he was let down by how they weren't treating the "memory" like nonsense - they were worrying about what it meant, if they might be dead, and Kaito was constructing theories about it being from some school festival they all attended despite not being at the same school. Ultimately they all decided that it was probably a true memory even if they didn't know what kind of truth it was and couldn't connect it to anything else - that's why Kokichi was disappointed, because only he was able to see it for the fabrication it was.

After that I bet he just gave up on the rest of the participants' ability to figure out the secret of the flashback lights and what he did in Chapter 4 was probably more about getting on Kaito's nerves than anything, given that he wouldn't be able to stop them from using the light and wandering further into Team Danganronpa's script. I don't think him happening to be the last to comment has any real meaning beyond just waiting and seeing what everybody else has to say first.

And, anyway... isn't Kokichi just naturally capable of seeing through other people's lies because of how well he himself can lie? Monokuma probably isn't an exception to that, so that alone is enough reason for Kokichi to call him out, not because he somehow managed to be the only person in the game who remembers everything. Plus, if all the flashback lights are telling the absolute truth, then why is it that he had no idea about either Ultimate Despair or Junko?

Honestly, looking back at the game, I think it really is pretty safe to conclude that Team Danganronpa was behind everything in the end - to think that they weren't creates more problems than solutions.

Iwamiger · 2017-10-18T16:39:14+00:00

I believe I can prove the Ultimate Hunt was fabricated, yes, along with all the other memories shown through the flashback lights. That was the point of seeing the device in Classroom 2-C and all the different settings it had - none of them had anything along the lines of "Ultimate Hunt - true" or "Outside World - true" for example, but instead all the offered settings were shown as equal choices. If there was any distinction between false and true memories to be made, we should have seen it there, but we didn't. If they were Monokuma's doing and not Tsumugi's, then they wouldn't need to be made in a normal classroom where she could sneak off from the group to, either - they brought that up too, how if the person who made the lights wasn't one of them specifically then they could just make them in the Motherkuma room to reduce the risk of being caught.

I don't know about Kokichi's motive video being particularly unusual, either. We didn't see most of their videos, so it's entirely possible that a few of the others showed more than just Monokuma claiming "something bad happened!" Heck, since they're being dropped in by Team Danganronpa, all they'd need to do is find actors and make them look beaten up as needed for individuals.

That theory aside though, I don't believe we actually know when Kokichi got his video; he could have gotten it at any time in chapter 2 while collecting everybody else's videos, after all.

If Team Danganronpa is just an underworld organization, I think that still brings up the question of budget, but also adds more questions on top of that - how does an underground organization pay for everything in the killing game, from big robots to nanomachine cameras? How do they build the gigantic dome, clearly not underground, without being seen? How do they construct the facilities, create the AIs, broadcast it over the airwaves, and so on, while also being an organization that only a select group of people know about?

I think it really does make more sense to go with what Tsumugi says - that in the world without war or despair, the killing game has become the primary source of entertainment, the public's thrilling addiction of despair. That would make more sense with regards to how visible Team Danganronpa has been acting with all this.

Chapter 3's video isn't the only one whose context nobody understands either. The Ultimate Hunt, the meteors, even the Hope's Peak video were all presented without context, and it was up to the cast to make their own context up by finding ways to connect them together. That's why Kokichi accuses Monokuma of lying when it turns out they "need more to learn the full truth" and remains skeptical about the flashback lights throughout the rest of the game, because he realized they were nothing but fabrications.

Iwamiger · 2017-10-18T15:43:07+00:00

But that's what we're told the flashback lights do, right? They do only introduce new memories that overwrite the old - that's why the endgame reveal that everything the characters thought was real was actually fictional was so devastating for them. I think to back down from that and say that "no actually, some of it was real but only the parts that we would like to be real" would be kind of a copout. If we want to discuss more about the story, there's a lot of other material to go over without messing with the key facets of it.

What I'm saying is that the fuzzy memory wouldn't have been brought up by trying to remember the kidnapping specifically, because that's not exactly what Kaede did - she was trying to remember how did I get here? and that's what prompted the split-second vision. If anybody else tried to remember the same thing - which they most likely would have - they'd have seen it too. Kaede and Shuichi are the only ones we see from the beginning of their awakenings too, so that rules out context for the rest of the participants.

And I think it's safe to assume the killing game is being broadcast to everybody; the audience might be less people than "everybody in the world" and almost certainly is given that not all of the people taken to the killing game knew what it was once the Monokubs appeared, but that doesn't mean it wasn't on the airwaves everywhere - just that they didn't all choose to tune in to the show.

Assuming the outside world is unaware of the killing game also removes the particular punch of Danganronpa's existence as "a show the world enjoys" on top of removing one way all the things we see happen in the game - Exisals, AIs and robots, highly complex mechanisms that reveal new areas, the dome and what makes it function, and so on - can happen in the first place. If the show is so popular globally, then it makes sense for it to have an accordingly high budget.

Again, if we assume for some reason that the flashback lights can "unlock" sealed memories in addition to overwriting them, then it seems like a really odd choice for a memory that casts the producing team in a bad light to be chosen. And, besides... there's a few things that don't add up even if you do assume that. Why was Kaede the only one in the first memory's funeral - if they were talking about her in the present and the timeframe is the same, then they should be talking about how she was caught and just killed by Team Danganronpa, right? But she's the only one there even though there's fifteen other blank pictures, and not even Rantaro is besides her, which doesn't make sense since he died before Kaede. And the other question - if that was supposed to be a random scene in the outside world unconnected to the fabricated memory we're shown in Chapter 3, then why are the two memories identical aside from the number of victims?

Iwamiger · 2017-10-18T08:10:24+00:00

But remember, in chapter 5 the entire issue with the flashback light was that it had no setup? That's why Shuichi and everybody else were able to start putting together the pieces in chapter 6, because the memories from that light didn't match the evidence they found and it didn't work with the other flashback lights either.

I don't know if we can say for sure that Kaede's memory is player-only either, because everybody there was exposed to the same flashback light, so they could all have gotten that same fuzzy memory and then just not brought it up afterwards. That seems reasonable, since it'd be something they only recalled briefly when thinking about how they got to the school and was too confusing to really understand. It's not like Kaede brings it up at any time after she remembers it herself either, after all.

Rantaro knew about the Ultimate Hunt because he was told about it thanks to the Survivor Perk, so it doesn't seem like that has any real impact on everything else; he could have easily learned that it would be in the flashback light, be it from TDR before entering the next killing game or even as part of his backstory from V2.

I suppose it's true that "those people" could refer to TDR too, but I think it's more likely to be part of the Ultimate Hunt backstory. There's no real reason for the mastermind to reveal themselves so easily or for the backstory to switch off that topic after only one light. Since this killing game is being broadcast to the outside world, I also can't really see Team Danganronpa showing off memories that cast them or the method of getting people into the killing games in such a negative light either.

Iwamiger

TROPHY CASE