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commentaryvorg · 4 years

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Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 6.7

Be aware that this is not a blind playthrough! This will contain spoilers for the entire game, regardless of the part of the game I’m commenting on. A major focus of this commentary is to talk about all of the hints and foreshadowing of events that are going to happen and facts that are going to be revealed in the future of the story. It is emphatically not intended for someone experiencing the game for their first time.

Last time in trial 6, Tsumugi was very clearly just cosplaying Junko despite no-one properly figuring this out for ages, Danganronpa trivia was really not necessary to prove everyone’s memories are fake, Tsumugi kept insisting that Shuichi called this trial because of her backstory when really it has nothing to do with that and everything to do with Kaito, Maki was very distressed to learn even more how she was just being controlled and manipulated like always, Tsumugi was a literal fucking shapeshifter, everyone was more upset than they should have been over Hope’s Peak being fictional for something they’d only known about for two days, but at least that meant that the outside world was…

Well… about that.

Monokuma: “Puhuhu… Forget about the world. It wants nothing to do with you.”

Oh boy. It sure doesn’t, even though it should. Here we fucking go.

…Does anyone have any idea what “kumafarre”, the word plastered all over the trial background from this point on, is meant to mean? Because that’s always stumped me. It has to mean something for them to have put it there. Kuma is bear, obviously, but “farre” can’t be Japanese, so… ???

“first!”

Pfft, of course that’d be the first message to show up. But it also proves that everyone in the audience can see their messages showing up here, so they should know that the characters can see what they’re saying.

“Bring on the spoilers!”

How does this even make sense? You can’t have spoilers for a reality show that’s happening live. The only possible spoiler is who the blackened is during a trial, but we’re way past that now.

“Kyoko is my waifu.”

“Sakura is my muscle waifu.”

“Chiaki #1 waifu”

Ugghh waifu culture. And also, I told you everyone was a bunch of genwunners in this audience! No-one mentions anything like this for any character outside of DR1 or 2. And yeah, obviously seasons past 3 don’t exist in the out-universe, but the out-universe writers could totally have just thrown in some random names we’ve never heard and expect us to assume that they’re talking about unknown characters from other seasons. Fifty other goddamn seasons they could be choosing from! But nope, it’s all gotta be mostly season one with some two, that’s all that counts.

“My husbando Shuichi!!!”

And of course Shuichi gets that shitty treatment too, even though he’s a real goddamn person who never asked to be famous and nobody is entitled to anything from him.

“Wow, Himiko is still alive…”

Seriously, that’s the first thing someone wants to say when their messages are getting displayed in a place where Himiko can see it? Lovely.

“Viewers get to participate now!”

“I feel like I’m participating, too!”

At least these couple of people are currently being fairly reasonable – they’re just excited to be a part of it in some way!

…The first two characters Tsumugi cosplays after this moment are Kyoko and then Sakura, and then Chiaki pretty soon after that. She’s pandering to those people whose messages she saw, isn’t she.

“Sakura”: “Of course, those you see here are only a fraction of our total viewers.”

I. Should. Sincerely. Hope. So. Because that’s the only thing that makes this even remotely believable – the idea that the majority of the fanbase are somewhat more decent human beings than this (you know, aside from the watching real people kill each other thing) and we’re just seeing the vocal asshole minority right now.

…That’s really not what the narrative is going to be going for with this, though. If they actually wanted us to think that this audience we see is just the asshole minority and everyone else is more decent, this topic should get addressed in more than just this one throwaway line, and it is not. So probably the only actual reason this line is here is to establish that the number of viewers is way higher than suggested by just these commenters, and not that the attitude of the rest of them is significantly different.

“I believe in Keebs.”

This is a little early hint to the Keebo deal, since a lot of the audience should be thinking about him the most.

“You can do it, Shuichi!”

I like this person! This person is the most decent and realistic person we’ve heard from so far! Yeah, cheer on Shuichi just like I’ve been doing throughout this commentary! They care about him and want him to succeed! It is of course more twisted in this person’s case because he’s not actually fictional, and becomes even more so now that Shuichi can actually hear them and any pretense that he’s just fictional can’t be maintained, but at least this is otherwise a realistic and relatable response to this.

Shuichi: “W-Wait, why would a peaceful world need a killing game like th—”

“Taka”: “It’s *because* the world is so peaceful that this killing game is necessary!”

“Celeste”: “It is so very peaceful… And so, it is so very boring.”

“Kyoko”: “With so much peace, people have become bored. They need stimulation…”

That’s… kinda bullshit. First Shuichi’s assumption that only a world full of strife could possibly create a reason for a killing game, but then also the idea that peace would make people bored. Humans don’t start wars for entertainment, you know. World peace should be the least boring thing for humanity, because without having to spend so much effort on survival and equality, everyone would have more energy left to make all kinds of technology and art, including entertainment which should not have to involve killing real people to be entertaining!

To be fair, Tsumugi is probably exaggerating somewhat, given that she’s part of Team Danganronpa and is trying to sell the idea that her product is so necessary for the world. But it would seem that we are in a world where one way or another it’s become socially accepted to watch real people kill each other for entertainment… which doesn’t seem like a peaceful utopia at all, really.

“Chiaki”: “Every person in the outside world watching this is a huge Danganronpa fan.”

We get a demonstrative image of people all over the world apparently excitedly watching Danganronpa, most of whom are vague and faceless. If it were just them then it could be possible to imagine that Tsumugi is lying and this is just a hypothetical image of what she’s talking about rather than the truth. But… Makoto’s also there. The kid that we, the out-universe audience, very definitely saw at the beginning of the chapter in a context that had no connection to Tsumugi and no reason to be a lie. Which gives this image a lot of credibility.

(And if this is the truth, again, it really doesn’t look like it’s a shady hidden thing only accessed on the darkest corners of the internet.)

I will say one thing in this world’s favour. I’m not remotely trying to defend the part where they watch real people kill each other, but Danganronpa really must be hugely popular among absolutely everyone for this to have somehow ended up not extremely illegal. Which means, given the fact that the audience are basically telling themselves it’s fiction and treating it as such, this is also a world in which it’s socially accepted, not just in niche geek subcultures but in mainstream culture, to get really excited by and invested in fiction. If you took all the awful murderiness out of it and made sure it was all actual fiction, man I’d love to live in that kind of world. As it is, in our world, only children are really socially expected to get super-excited about fictional stories all the time, like it’s something people are meant to grow out of as adults. Among adults, only very few extremely mainstream fictions get even close to that kind of widely-accepted level of importance in people’s lives. Which is disappointing to me.

“Chiaki”: “This killing game is for everyone… So it’s everyone’s killing school semester.”

That’s the Japanese subtitle of this game, which actually turns out to be very meaningful! The general sense of it she’s talking about here would have applied to every season up until now, but there’s also the more specific sense that this season in particular has audience participation, which is apparently the first time it’s happened, making it even more “everyone’s” than before.

And the localisers just decided to nope on that subtitle and change it to the meaningless “Killing Harmony”, which is honestly a shame. Maybe the Japanese subtitle is a bit too long and too much of a mouthful for western standards, but they could have at least changed it to something which kept that relevance.

“Killing Harmony! I just got it! LOL”

Haha, no, that doooeees not work in the localisation.

“I’ve waited three years for this.”

“I thought the franchise was done.”

Huh, this is some juicy info. It’s taken three years since season 52, long enough that some people thought there wasn’t going to be another one? (And a lot of the rest of the chatter at this point is people applauding, perhaps being happy that they got another season.) That… suggests that Danganronpa might have been already on its last legs even before what happens in this trial comes and puts the lid on it all, which maybe makes things a little more believable. That’d also potentially explain why this is the first time they tried the Keebo gimmick, if they were trying to keep things fresh after worrying people would be getting bored of the same old thing.

Also, even if it’s usually less than three years between games, you’ve still got to imagine it’d be at least one year or so, which means it’s been over half a century since the Danganronpa franchise began. A lot of people who worked on it while it was still pure fiction wouldn’t even be alive anymore at this point.

Plus, geez, how long did they keep Rantaro in limbo between games? Was he allowed to live a relatively normal life for the time being while knowing that if they ever did get around to a season 53, he’d be forced into it, meaning he lived dreading that day and desperately hoping it’d never come? Ouch, poor Rantaro. Or possibly they do in fact have real cold sleep technology in this universe and they just stuffed him in one of those for three years.

“Shuichi, look this way! <3”

That’s… rather entitled but also kind of believable as something someone might do, since it seems like a lot of the audience have forgotten that these characters don’t just exist to perform for them.

“Get to the punishment already!”

Aaaand here’s someone who’s barely a believable person. Do the audience really just watch this to see people be horribly executed, rather than for all the character drama that happens in between those parts?

The opening theme music for this game starts playing… and apparently this is being played in-universe, based on the fact that Maki reacts to it.

Maki: “What is this…?”

“Fuyuhiko”: “Can’t you tell? It’s the title of the current Danganronpa you guys are doing.”

God, that has to be incredibly disturbing and wrong, being told that you’re hearing the theme music for you and your friends’ suffering and death… and it’s just this chill jazz tune, of all things. This probably hammered home more than anything else the awful sense that all of their struggles have just been entertainment.

“Chihiro”: “Danganronpa’s gone on so long because the whole world enjoys and supports it.”

No mention of the fact that apparently some people thought there wouldn’t even be a season 53? Of course not, Tsumugi wouldn’t want to admit that the franchise might be on its last legs.

“Makoto”: “What season do you think we’re on? You should be able to tell from the logo.”

So she claims. But you know what I thought when I first heard her say this? Since I already figured it was probably season 53 from Junko the 53rd, I thought the clue in the logo was the negative space between the V and the 3.

It’s actually kinda shaped like a 5 if you look at it that way! But nope, that’d make way more sense that what it’s actually supposed to be.

(I bet Shuichi figured it out from the Junko hint and not the logo, too.)

“V is the Roman numeral for 5.”

*deep breath*

That is not how Roman numerals work!!! In Arabic numerals, “5” can mean five, or fifty, or five hundred, etc, depending on its position within the number. But Roman numerals do not work like that! “V” only ever means five, and its position in the number does not change that. V3 cannot possibly mean fifty-three. It’s combining two number systems that work completely differently and do not make any sense being combined, but if one were to try and make a number out of it, it’d simply mean “five-three”, separately. Or maybe you’d add them together, so it’d mean eight.

In Roman numerals, fifty is denoted with an “L”. To actually get fifty-three in any vaguely sensible way by combining Roman and Arabic numerals, it’d be L3. Or, heck, why don’t we write the whole thing in Roman numerals? Then it’s LIII. Which just so happens to look and sound very similar to the English word “lie”. If the Japanese writers of this game wanted to do a clever little number/letter trick, why didn’t they go for that? It would have been great! Or they could call it L3 but make the negative space between the L and the 3 look kind of like an I somehow, so that “LI3” almost looks like “lie” as well. Missed freaking opportunity there, guys. Instead it’s just very apparent that nobody in Spike Chunsoft (or Team Danganronpa, for that matter) has any idea how Roman numerals work.

“Danganronpa 25 was the best.”

Shout-outs to this person. They’re the only person we ever see here who mentions any series other than 1, 2 or the one they’re currently watching. Props to them for knowing what their favourite season is and sticking to their guns in a sea of people who disregard every new season that comes along as soon as it’s not current any more in favour of obsessing over the first ones like they’re the only ones that matter. Season 25 probably was genuinely one of the best ones if it has a dedicated fan like this. You go, random person. I feel you.

“This is my first Danganronpa.”

Huh, so despite how much Tsumugi is trying to make us think everyone is obsessed with it, there have to still be at least a few people who don’t get what all the hype is about, if this person only just decided to check it out for this season.

(Clearly there hasn’t been a large enough proportion of these uninterested people who are upset about the whole killing-real-people thing to be able to put a stop to it before now, though. Even if it’s not their thing, if the rest of the world’s okay with it then it must be fine, right???)

“I love Shuichi <3”

Yes, thanks, we’re getting that impression. This is probably the same person from before, who still feels the need to mention this while everyone else is talking about this being season 53.

Monokuma: “The seasons just kept coming, and with it came more killing games… Until it transcended games and anime to become this, the Ultimate Real Fiction…”

They gloss over this quite quickly, but it is important to note that yes, the earlier seasons really were just fiction in this universe like they were in ours. They’re not trying to retcon that the Hope’s Peak killing games were actually only happening for entertainment thanks to Flashback Lights and fabricated backstory. DR1 and 2 were completely fictional in this universe, which means that nothing happening here matters to or compromises that storyline at all.

After all, it does make sense that Danganronpa would need to have worldwide popularity already before society collectively decided that doing this with real people (but definitely not really real people, right) would be totally okay. It’s unclear exactly when the transition to “real fiction” happened, although Shuichi and Maki’s comments on the files in his lab kind of made me assume that there were more real ones than fictional ones. So… I was just shouting out season 25, but that one probably involved real people being killed, too.

“Leon”: “What, did the letter in there throw you off? Well, I guess that happens. But isn’t it just rad how it looks like a letter, but it’s really a number!?”

I am way too amused at how they made it be specifically Leon, mister 11037 himself, who mentions this point. Nice one, guys. Nice.

“Sonia”: “Since this is the 53rd season, one would expect to see a multitude of characters…”

Tsumugi: “But you only have memories from the first two, so you wouldn’t recognize any others.”

They shouldn’t even recognise the ones from season two, like I’ve been saying! But she’s been cosplaying them anyway. So it’s probably a lot less about keeping them recognisable for the students here and more just about pandering to those genwunners and twoers outside.

(Obviously there’s a very good out-universe reason for this, but, you know.)

Tsumugi: “So yes, I’m the mastermind! But the *real* mastermind forcing you to do this is… the people of the outside world!”

Way to deflect your responsibility, Tsumugi! Yes, everyone outside is also partially responsible by demanding this and giving it an audience, but you’re still the one who made it all happen and got everyone killed!

The audience starts chattering about how they’re the mastermind, but it’s in a way that sounds happy about it, like they’re just excited to be part of the story. They don’t seem to register the fact that, hey, maybe being literally actually responsible for the suffering and death of the characters they’ve been watching and caring about isn’t actually a good thing.

“Mmm… Shuichi’s nose <3”

Meanwhile Shuichi’s “fan” here still has a one-track mind and is getting increasingly creepy. I refuse to believe that this is the same person who was cheering Shuichi on earlier, since that person actually cared about him and didn’t only shallowly see him as eye-candy.

“put Maki back on kthx”

Also apparently Maki has “fans” too. But hers probably aren’t the good kind either.

“Mikan”: “The ones managing this killing game aren’t psychos like the Remnants of Despair…”

“Ibuki”: “They’re literal managers! Literally!”

Just because they’re managers, that doesn’t stop them from being shitty, evil people on par with the Remnants of Despair in terms of awfulness. They are quite evidently both.

Tsumugi: “So I want to hear your best guess. What company is running this show?”

…

Shuichi: “…Team Danganronpa?”

I love how Shuichi’s tone of voice makes it clear that he’s just pulling this name out of thin air. How is he supposed to know? Conveniently, Team Danganronpa were apparently just really uncreative when it came to naming themselves. (I guess this is realistic enough, though – our world does have The Pokémon Company, which makes Pokémon.)

We – and therefore presumably the students and the in-universe audience – get shown the opening movie that was right at the beginning when you start a new file, the one that summarised seasons 1, 2 and 3 and then implied this one would be a continuation of it. Which still doesn’t actually make any in-universe sense, since all the evidence other than this clearly points towards Hope’s Peak having not being part of this game’s backstory until Tsumugi improvised it in chapter 5. Maybe this was a promo video Team Danganronpa then hastily slapped together after that point to try and act like they totally had this planned all along?

The only difference from before (because it would have been a huuuuge spoiler to see this last time) is that we also see the supposed logos of every Danganronpa season up to 53. 4 through 10 are clearly the out-universe writers having a field day referencing other works of fiction, but then 11 through 52 are all exactly the same logo with only the number being different. Yeah, that’s not how it actually was, is it. The out-universe writers just didn’t want to take the time to make that many unique logos for a split-second each of screentime. (And, fair enough.)

We then get shown a collage of what appears to be basically all of the illustrations in this game. Which you’d think shouldn’t actually exist in-universe, because the audience’s camera is supposed to be Keebo’s eyes, and he wasn’t there for half of this stuff! So this strongly suggests that despite what Tsumugi’s going to claim about that later, the audience could also watch the game through the Nanokumas’ footage instead and potentially saw all the same scenes that we saw that way.

…Makoto is on there, though. He definitely should not be. The out-universe writers didn’t catch that, I guess.

Shuichi: “Shut up… Shut up!”

Yeeeaaah, I don’t blame Shuichi for this. Tsumugi and Monokuma and the audience have been blabbering on for quite a while now, barely letting him and his friends get a word in edgeways while treating them like objects for their amusement. That has to be awful.

And even aside from Shuichi’s feelings about it, the way the audience has been suddenly babbling excitedly about Danganronpa in general to the point of almost completely ignoring the characters who are in this actual story they’re supposed to be invested in is pretty shallow of them. That’s already a sign of how unrealistically awful an audience they’re going to keep showing themselves to be.

Shuichi: “No matter how many false memories we’ve been implanted with, *we* aren’t fictional!”

This line is here as a setup for the big reveal, of course, but even so… he’s right. Just because literally all of their memories from before this killing game are fake, it doesn’t change that they’ve been real people from the moment they got all of those memories.

Shuichi: (Who… are we…?) “We… are real! We’re living, breathing human beings!”

“Nekomaru”: “No! You’re just like MEEEEEE!!!”

I made Shuichi answer this incorrectly at first because I really feel like he would want to assert this… and he’s still not wrong! They are very definitely living and breathing right now, nobody can deny that!

“Makoto”: “You’re just fictional characters created solely for this killing game.”

“Teruteru”: “Nothin’ we can do about it, I’m afraid. Danganronpa’s that kinda property.”

I’m sure it’s much less some intellectual property dispute and more the idea that everyone might have slightly more issue with actual real people from the outside world being killed in this. It’s totally fine if they were created solely for the killing game, though, because then they’re not real and only exist to die here, right?

And honestly… that does make all the deaths in this game come across as just slightly less awful and tragic, in that context. Not because they aren’t still extremely real people who very much did not deserve to suffer and die, but, since they were created to die, anyone managing to survive and escape despite that feels like even more of a victory than in the previous games. It’s less Monokuma killing a bunch of people who were never meant to die, and more Shuichi managing to save at least a small handful of people who were never meant to live.

“Gundham”: “Your immaterial existence is a fabrication, independent of your actual flesh and blood.”

To translate the Gundham-ese: their “souls” were created separately from their bodies. Kind of like how they were discussing when going into the Virtual World how odd it is that the two can be separated like that.

Tsumugi: “Yep, you’re all fictional.”

“Ibuki”: “You guys out there beyond the fourth wall already knew that, right!?”

I like how this works as simultaneously talking to the people beyond both fourth walls at once, while not actually breaking the real one. (Though the people beyond the in-universe fourth wall are only telling themselves these guys are fictional and aren’t actually right.)

Tsumugi: “You all didn’t look like this when you first came to the Ultimate Academy… Those were your true selves. Now you’re all just fictional characters. That’s the truth.”

Shuichi: (That’s the truth? Then… our real identities…)

Don’t get caught up in her manipulation, Shuichi! You are not any less “real” just because different people used to inhabit your bodies!

Tsumugi goes on to talk about when they first arrived at the school as their pregame selves before they got their outfits and memories. And again, we saw this. It is quite ridiculous to assume we saw an entire lengthy section in the prologue which just straight-up didn’t happen. The game has lied to us, but only with very small lies of omission (re: Kaede’s inner monologue). If the game was willing to lie to us about entire sections we played through, we couldn’t trust anything. We couldn’t even trust if this trial we’re playing is really happening right now, or if anything we saw really happened, which would render this entire story meaningless.

“Byakuya”: “But boring, everyday characters have no right to be in Danganronpa…”

Honestly, why, though? Sure, the talents are supposed to be a Danganronpa thing, but you could totally do a killing game with ordinary people. It might make for an interesting change, especially after 53 seasons.

“Peko”: “Which means your Ultimate talents are all just fiction.”

They may have come from fake memories, but they have those talents now. Nobody can deny that Shuichi’s been a pretty great detective.

Maki: “Our talents as well…?”

Maki Roll, you never killed anyone, and you’ll never have to! This is great news for you!

…I bet if Kaito were still here, he’d immediately turn to her with a big grin and tell her that. Encouraging and being happy for the sidekick with a bright side to this would be way more important than however he might be feeling about this revelation in respect to his own talent.

Maki doesn’t react here with anything other than shock and disbelief, though, so I don’t know if this quite sinks in for her yet. It’s probably very hard for her to accept that she suddenly doesn’t deserve to feel guilty about anything. After all, this won’t diminish the effect Maki’s memories have on her and that she’s going to have to live with feeling like she’s killed countless people for the rest of her life. But knowing that nobody real actually died because of her has got to help a lot. I’m sure that’ll sink in eventually, once she’s had more time to think about it without the trial getting in the way.

“Chiaki”: “I mean, they suited you to a certain extent, but mostly in a placebo effect sorta way. Kinda like a form of autosuggestion… You know, like if you do it, it’ll all work out.”

We’ve seen Flashback Lights do plenty of things that aren’t just straight-up remembering stuff: brainwashing everyone to be filled with meaningless “hope” and a sense of the completely wrong meanings of the words “hope” and “despair” in chapter 5? Brainwashing Shuichi into suddenly being a creepy pervert for that optional scene in chapter 3? Kaito’s phobia of ghosts leading him to feel anxious and nauseous upon simply thinking about a certain irrational stimulus? So, given that, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine they can do this kind of thing too. Heck, most of the talents in this game are things that only require knowledge, and perhaps a certain kind of personality, something Flashback Lights can very evidently do. Some also require muscle memory, which is a bit more of a stretch, but it’s still memory.

The hardest one to buy for me is probably Angie’s talent. There’s some muscle memory and some knowledge involved, but a lot of what makes someone good at art is more intangible and hard to define and might be difficult to encapsulate in a Flashback Light. However, Angie was unique in that she explicitly did not remember creating her art, because Atua was supposedly possessing her, and she had to be alone for that to happen. That’s how she made the waxworks. So it’s possible that what was actually happening was some kind of hypnotic trigger making her pass out when she thinks she’s about to create something, and then the gamemakers put pre-created waxworks in her lab. Remember how Angie made four waxworks without having intended to? Almost as if the gamemakers weren’t sure who she’d choose for the ritual and just made all four in advance. …And, okay, admittedly it’s very unclear how anyone could have got inside the school to put the waxworks there, which is the same question as how a hypothetical clone-with-a-Flashback-Light would have got in for the resurrection thing if that was going to be possible. But there’s something there. (Can you tell I hadn’t thought of this idea until after the commentary for chapter 3 had gone up and so I’m awkwardly fitting it in here instead.)

And ultimately, if the characters being “fictional” is the point of this story the out-universe writers decided to tell, then that always had to include fictional talents as well, since Danganronpa insists on having all its characters be Ultimates. So Flashback Lights have to be able to do this, even if it’s a little bit of a stretch to believe, because it’s just necessary for the premise to work.

It’s a lot like how we had to buy that the Exisal randomly had a voice changer that could perfectly mimic any student’s voice, simply because that was vital for the fifth trial’s premise and that story wouldn’t work if it didn’t. We can’t just use the fact that it was somewhat unrealistic of the Exisal to have a voice changer as any kind of evidence to propose that it actually didn’t.

Another example: I once saw a blind LP of the first Danganronpa game where it got to the memory wipe reveal and Junko handwaved how memory-wipe technology worked. And the LPer was all “Um, no, how is memory wiping even possible? I think it’s pretty important to establish this, actually!”, like he was using the fact that he didn’t understand how to question whether it had even happened at all. But that was missing the point; explaining the technology really wasn’t all that important. The existence of memory-wiping technology was just a necessary part of that story that had to be accepted, because if memory wipes weren’t possible then that story couldn’t have happened. This story is the same, except with Flashback Lights and the multitude of things that they need to be able to do to make this story work. At least in this case, Flashback Lights and some of the things they can do are well-established already, which is better setup than the memory-wipe technology had in DR1.

Tsumugi: “Can you really say you’re not fictional now?”

Yes! Yes, they can and should say that!

“Hajime”: “Even if your body is real, your identities, personalities, talents and past are all fiction.”

Past, sure. Identities… maybe? At least if we’re just talking about legal identity? But their talents are quite evidently still talents now, as I’ve just been saying, and their personalities are also something they’re expressing right here and now. Even if they were deliberately crafted and created to be that way, it doesn’t mean those personalities aren’t now real. You can only call a personality “fake” if that person is knowingly putting on a façade and pretending to be someone they’re not. So the only fictional personality we ever saw was Kokichi’s supposed love for this killing game. …Oh, and Tsumugi’s, of course.

Also, hi, Hajime. It’s fitting that she’d choose him for this. If we’re supposed to believe that Izuru got shoved full of every single talent imaginable by them doing weird brain stuff to him, it’s perfectly reasonable to also believe Flashback Lights could do something similar on a lesser scale. And Izuru’s entire existence was created from that process, but that didn’t make him any less “real” of a person than Hajime was. If anything, it made him more real at that point, because he’d overwritten Hajime completely (at least until the simulation). It’s honestly a very similar thing. Maybe Hajime’s story partially inspired the idea for this game.

Shuichi: “…”

Unfortunately… this seems to be working on Shuichi.

…You want to know what Tsumugi ought to think of as the real reason she killed Kaito? Not to have his death inspire Shuichi to become even stronger. That would still be happening anyway if Kaito were still by his side encouraging him; all that was needed for that final push was for Kaito to admit that Shuichi’s even more of a hero than him and tell him that. The real reason for his death should have been because Kaito would completely annihilate what Tsumugi is trying to do here.

Because the only thing that matters is what you want to believe! Tsumugi is trying to argue that their pasts being fabricated means that they don’t count as “real” people, but who even cares about that? They believe they’re real, and have always believed that, and still want to believe that, so why should anything else matter? Someone like Kaito who puts such value in belief and has such strong, unbreakable convictions about being true to himself wouldn’t be listening to any of this crap. He’d be shaken to learn his memories are all fake and that his grandparents and fellow astronaut trainees don’t exist, sure, but it wouldn’t even scratch his belief in who he is. He’s Kaito Momota, Luminary of the Stars! Who cares if he’s only this way because someone else wanted him to be, it’s still who he wants to be, so it’s who he’s going to keep being, dammit! And, of course, upon seeing that his sidekicks are having trouble with this idea and are starting to doubt if they’re really real, he’d give them just the pep talk they’d need to keep believing in themselves and their own existences.

Kaito is exactly the kind of person who would be able to blow this whole trial out of the water, and nerfing him enough to prevent him from doing that required nothing less than him not being alive any more.

(Meanwhile, if Kokichi were still alive at this point, he’d be his usual infuriating self. “Oh, you guys are only just figuring this out now?”)

Also, if Kaito were still alive in this trial and ultimately ended up surviving and escaping while having learned that his memories are fake and he was never actually an astronaut trainee… you know that would not stop him from striding up to JAXA’s front door and being all “Let me take the astronaut exam, sure you already know I’m too young but you’ve also seen I’ve got exactly what it takes”.

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