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ultimateplaylistmaker · 11 months

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How do you think Makoto`s and Nagito`s luck work?

*deeep breath*

*Slams my ruler onto the whiteboard* ALRIGHT

To understand Makoto and Nagito's luck, we must first understand Luck in the Danganronpa universe.

First off their are multiple types of luck, and not all luck talents are built the same. That's the first thing you need to understand, every luck talent is a unique personal talent to each individual. Luck talents can't really be compared because they're so different from each other and can even create other talents.

Case in point the true second luck talent we had in the series...CELESTIA LUDENBERG. While not the ultimate lucky student, her gambling talent is NEAR COMPLETE LUCK, something she FREELY ADMITS.

While this kind of thinking is more associated with Komaeda, it is actually CELESTE who first brings up luck as something beyond just chance, but instead as something more akin to religion. She even compares it to fate, Celestia will tell us in her FIRST free time event exactly what she thinks of luck. Which correlates well with Komaeda’s thinking. First of all the immutability of it, that you are simply born with that luck and nothing can ever change it, then there is the thought there is no inbetween luck it is only Good luck or Bad luck and it’s those two things that determine basically everything. Celestia and Komaeda have a very similar worldview, the only difference is the fact Celeste’s luck is only good and has such given her a much more positive view of it. Celeste seems to have spent a lot of time thinking about luck, and has a lot of faith in it, seen how in another free time events despite not knowing how to even play, she won a Shogi gambling competition.

While Celeste has a habit of exaggerating and dramatics, I think she’s telling the truth about this story, it matches up with her beliefs after all. No skill or talent carried her through to the end and to victory, just pure luck, her gambling luck that is the basis of her talent.

From this we learn that luck talents are much broader then just ‘lucky student’ and can make up a lot of different talents based on how it presents themselves with everyone having unique sets of luck and activation requirements. With both her and Komaeda sharing similar views on luck, it’s clear that those with lucky talents tend to find luck to be immutable and simply just a piece of ones self that can never be changed. Luck is everything to those with powerful enough luck, to the point it becomes almost blinding and overshadows skill, though Celeste seems to feel a bit ashamed that she didn’t at least make an attempt at having skill at Shogi. A little dog can’t become a big dog, and someone with bad gambling luck can never have good gambling luck and vice versa.

This isn’t true.

As you may have noticed if her gambling luck is that good that it overrides skill completely, then how did she lose? By how her talent works as long as it’s a gamble, she wins. Period. Nothing to be done about it. How did she lose the gamble of her life?

Easy, Makoto’s luck works as a luck nullifier.

You may be asking what the hell I’m talking about and I redirect your attention to the short story of Makoto Naegi’s Worst Day Ever.

“People often say that men are defined by their names, and indeed, in his thirty-two years on Earth, Jutarou had never once thought of himself as unlucky. In fact, he had been blessed with abnormally good luck. By the very nature of his work, he had found himself in a number of dangerous situations in the past, but every time—without fail—a series of fortunate flukes guided him to safety.

While his luck could be considered one of his strengths, he wasn’t fond of admitting it.

Rather, allowing himself to end up in situations where the outcome was in fate’s hands was unacceptable to him. He knew good and well that, in his line of work, even the smallest of slip-ups could mean disaster.

Jutarou was a thief.

The most important thing to him when he was on a job was reducing the potential influence of forces outside his control—luck, other people—to an absolute minimum. In his mind, a thorough, well crafted plan was the cornerstone of any job. He always formulated and executed his plans by himself, and any job for which that wasn’t possible, he wouldn’t take. There was nothing worse than being betrayed by a partner who let his greed get to his head, and besides, Jutarou didn’t need anyone slowing him down. And he especially didn’t need to be asking for help from on high.

Naturally, his current job was no different. He had planned everything and put that plan into action all by himself. His target had been a small jewelry store in a nearby shopping district. Jutarou had received information that, despite looking run-down, the store had a hidden stash of extremely valuable jewels. And to top it off, the owner was a bit of a penny-pincher, so security was light.

It was an incredible opportunity—the kind that you only ever got once or twice.

So Jutarou crafted an intricate, but bold, plan, and then he went through with it. Naturally—as far as he was concerned—everything went without a hitch, exactly as it was supposed to. His plan was perfect, leaving no room whatsoever for outside interference. And there had been none.

Spoils tucked away in his bag, he calmly stepped onto the bus. Jutarou liked to make use of public transportation as much as possible while on a job. It was easier to blend into the crowd in a bustling city by riding a bus or train than it was driving a car or motorcycle, and by dressing like a businessman on the job, he practically disappeared.

The disguise worked, too. Not a person on that bus gave him a second look as he took an open seat at the front.

Finally certain he had completed his work, Jutarou let out a small sigh of relief. As the bus vibrated gently beneath him, he silently basked in the satisfaction of a job well done.

And then, a sick twist of fate made quick work of everything he had accomplished. Only, it wasn’t his luck that laid everything to waste—rather, he was just caught in the crossfire of some teenage boy’s misfortune. Some boy who just happened to climb onto the same bus as him. It was a stroke of bad luck so overwhelming that even Jutarou who, up to that point, had been blessed with such incredibly good luck, was helpless to prevent it”

Meet Jutarou who appears to have a luck talent of his own, the main antagonist in the short story. While he doesn’t like purely to rely on it, he notes that he is a very lucky man and multiple times in the story comments about how his luck never fails him. Until it does. Makoto Naegi’s bad luck was so strong, it had OVERRIDDEN his good luck, giving Jutarou bad luck to give Makoto WORSE luck.

This trend continues throughout the story, despite Jutarou’s best efforts and best luck to get himself not arrested, Makoto’s sheer bad luck is enough to dissuade EVERY attempt as the situation only gets worse and worse for Makoto until it ends up with the groceries that Makoto was ORIGINALLY SENT TO GET ending up basically exploding.

This incident directly leads into Makoto getting into Hope’s Peak, as his luck is SO BAD that in that same explosion the original lottery winners invitation gets destroyed and they do a new drawing, this time pulling Makoto’s name.

Luck talents have no effect on Makoto because his luck counteracts it, it doesnt matter how good your luck is, if Makoto’s luck wants to involve you, you have no control over the luck in the situation anymore. From this we learn Luck talents interacting with each other can have odd effects, especially if Makoto is involved.

There is a second piece of evidence that Luck talents aren’t quite as straightforward as “you’re born with it” and his name, is the mortal god himself, Izuru Kamukura

As Hajime Hinata, his luck is well, it’s not great, but I wouldn’t call it bad either. He’s average, very plainly average. Then he got a lobotomy and became Izuru, and suddenly something has changed. Izuru DOES have good luck, and he has an intense amount of control over his luck that he can even can beat Komaeda in a gun fight. Which means not only is Luck a real talent despite how Komaeda bemoans, it has some way to quantifiably measure and implant it as his Luck talent is just as artificial as the rest of his talents. Luck isn’t just chance or fate, it’s a legitimate part of someones body that can be implanted into someone else with the right tools. Which is, SO MUCH TO UNPACK.

We don’t learn HOW they implanted luck, so we can only guess where luck resides within a human body. Wherever it is though, this implies while people are indeed born with a specific luck pattern that is otherwise immutable this pattern can be tampered and changed by an outside source with the right know how. Celeste is essentially correct in the fact humans are born programmed with the luck they have, but we lack the specifics. I am pointing a gun at the hope cultivation program if you’re going to break the geneva convention at least LET ME KNOW how you implanted fucking LUCK!

Luck is beyond just how we view luck in our world, luck is an inherent part of them, I’d dare to even call it another sense. Like a sense of sight or sense of direction, everyone has a sense of luck. Some don’t have much of it, some of them have little, and some of them have enough of it that it almost seems like a magical power.

Of course now that we have a loose understanding of how luck just works in this setting, this tells us little on how luck works for those two specifically.

Makoto’s luck is known to be the most confusing even in universe, as his luck is a liar. Bad luck often is good luck often is bad luck. It is impossible to tell if something is good or bad when it comes to his luck until like three years later after all the dominoes and butterfly effects have mostly settled. Celeste says there is no in-betweens but Makoto’s luck LOVES its grey areas. Making things be both bad and good at the same time, Makoto’s luck cannot be divided into good or bad because it’s always both at the same damn time. The only think about his luck that’s in any way clear is that it refuses to let him die. No matter how bad his luck seems, the moment he could genuinely die, his luck swoops in to grab him from the brink.

Like yeah he lived thats good but now he has trauma and thats bad and now he can help and thats good but that helping is also being used as propaganda and that’s bad. Makoto lives in a state of greys, his luck refuses the black and white views of Celeste or Komaeda, everything his luck does will be both bad and good, creating mostly just confusion. It’s easy to see how Makoto just kinda shrugs it off as just unfortunate and moves on with his life, his luck keeps trying to be good and bad at the same time.

Then there’s Komaeda, who has only bad luck. Which you may be saying “what? But his luck can be good!” and I ask you how good his luck really is? His luck constantly kills the people around him and even killed him. Sure sometimes he gets paltry rewards like money or freedom, but in reality, the scales are NOT balanced. An inheritance can’t make up for dead parents, winning the lottery doesn’t erase the trauma of being kidnapped.

Even moments where his luck seems to work in his favor only makes him miserable, winning russian roulette wasn’t a triumph or good luck for him really, it only drove him insane.

If I had to name Komaeda’s luck I’d go for something like short term benefits with long term consequences. The bad effects of his luck always echo farther and go on for longer then the good effects which are often quick distractions or quick victories. However Komaeda lets himself settle for this, pretending like the scales actually have any meaning, letting himself have bad luck and thinking the small rewards of it measures up to the sheer amount of bad luck it took.

Komaeda’s luck can give him the things he needs in the moment, but there is always consequences for it’s use. Komaeda pretends like it's an equivalent exchange, but actually looking at, even the 'good' parts often brings him suffering. Like yeah he's rich and has freedom, but he's lonely and unable to connect to people. Even the best parts of his luck are only good short term before also becoming more akin to bad luck.

His luck is basically a deal with the devil, he receives pain and suffering, and he receives... a whole bunch of sodas! Just ignore the fact the scars will last longer then the soda and you can pretend it all balanced out.

It’s easy to see how he fell into the viewpoints he did when he basically has to lie to himself to make his luck more tolerable or seem fair. Especially because unlike Makoto's, his luck seems perfectly willing to kill him if he's not careful.

Of course these are only my current views on their luck cycles, my mind and thoughts are CONSTANTLY changing on this, because it’s just, so nebulous. One of these days I’d love to do a luck deep dive on all the characters and see what other talents are secretly luck talents.

#LUCK IN DANGANRONPA THE FUCKS YOUR DEAL #makoto naegi #danganronpa meta #trigger happy havoc #goodbye despair #danganronpa 3 #meta #goodbye despair meta #trigger happy havoc meta #danganronpa 3 meta #musings from the music manager #nagito komaeda #celestia ludenberg #izuru kamukura #hajime hinata #anon chaos

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