Despair on your final breath Suffer as you face certain death This curse is the only truth And all our pasts show the proof

Today we’re going to discuss a certain element of the V3 ending and why people need to get a clue already because the previous games all offer hints that will help you understand it (Spoilers, obviously):

So, in DR1 if the cast had wiped each other out it would have extinguished the last embers of hope. Now, let’s look at SDR2:

Junko would have taken over the world again.

Meanwhile, what we got in V3 is…some lame talk about it being just reality TV and the cast are just normie losers who signed up, also there’s nothing for them to return to but they totally signed up to win or something (Also, fictional despair). But is there really all there is to it, or were there clues in chapter 6 that don’t add up?

Let’s review what we found in chapter 6:

1) Rantaro’s video showing he had been in a previous killing game no one knew about. Notably, he also fails to show up in the funeral picture showing Kaede in chapter 2, and here people in the outside world show they had no idea she had been executed. Despite being a ‘winner’, Monokuma calls him the ‘Ultimate Who Cares’ so here’s further evidence that winning is pointless

2) Ouma’s motive video doesn’t just establish that he wasn’t a Remnant of Despair, it also shows him with people who may have been Ultimates themselves which flies in the face of the narrative that Ultimates have pretty much never met each other

3) A History of Hope’s Peak shows that the events they were shown are off…but, why are they lies? Just for chapter 5, or was there more to it?

4) The clue spells out ‘King’ ‘horse’ ‘twins’ and on top of that the door leading to Ouma’s lab is ancient. That is, it’s been there longer than V3 ever happened so how could he be ‘fictional’?

Other bothersome things:

1) You get ‘Hope’ as a bullet in DR1 and ‘Future’ in SDR2. You don’t get ‘Truth’ in V3 - Why is that?

2) Ouma is the only character in the group that ever brings up the audience before chapter 6, and each time it’s clear that he hates them. It’s purely illogical for Shuichi to believe that people who have been watching them die over and over and who didn’t care at all when it was revealed Monokuma had cheated would suddenly care. Plus, how could he even be so sure anyone was watching?

3) Even if you think Monokuma’s second motive for chapter 1 was a bluff, it doesn’t make sense that basically committing suicide would somehow work to dissuade the audience if there was any chance at all that the cast could have met a Game Over that early. Doubly important when it implies whoever’s running Monokuma may have just a bit of a disagreement with the ‘audience’

4) The cast was abducted as far as Europe to a building so old it was built centuries ago, based on my research on its architecture and Kaede’s remark about not being able to read any of the languages in the library’s books excluding anything Asian. The location of Hope’s Peak being in an area no one could possibly miss was important because bad things had to have gone down for people to not come to their rescue (And yes, I’m aware that people did make an attempt), so why was such a place used if Dangan Ronpa was supposedly just a popular show? The location of Jabberwock Island was also important, so it should be alarming at the least that you get basically nothing about it

5) Setting aside the utter idiocy of ‘signing up to get a talent’ when your chances of dying are near 100%, the logo of the Ultimate Academy has Monokuma’s eye cutting right across the kanji for ‘talent’. This is in itself a stark contrast to Hope’s Peak Academy where things were set up right before they went horribly wrong (At least, in that Jin had no idea who else was he harboring) and when Maki asks Monokuma about what he wants in chapter 2 he pretty much said he just wants them to kill each other. The other popular explanation that the cast were normies who were kidnapped makes no sense either, because if you look back at the prologue Shuichi only calmed down when he realized Kaede didn’t know his name, which means their true identities one way or another were known to their captors

6) This fucking screenshot:

Despair = Death. Death = Despair. There’s no such thing as a Dangan Ronpa game where death was not the equivalent of despair.

Shuichi in chapter 2 had seen in a weird and seemingly context-less flashback that he didn’t want to live any more and wanted to die with everyone else. He then dismisses this scene later saying he wants to live and get out with everyone else…but in that flashback, he hadn’t been killing himself literally, he had been ‘killing’ his true identity. This serves as a parallel to DR1 where the cast had forgotten their choice (But not voluntarily, which is important) and so tried to get out, but in the case of the V3 cast neither the truth nor lies would have offered any comfort because surely…the final despair had already happened. They’re already the ‘dead’, shambles of their former selves and destined to die without knowing the truth of what they had done.

And speaking of which, linking the matter of Rantaro’s erasure from the world and Tsumugi being a ‘lie’, what do you think that spells out? Shuichi had thought their deaths would put an end to the killing games and the ‘audience’ had seemingly agreed, but the previous Dangan Ronpa games had always made one thing clear: Losing chapter 6 means it’s Game Over…permanently.

To summarize this post, Shuichi may be right that their deaths would be the last and there would be no more killing games…but not for the reason he’d think. There wouldn’t be any need for killing games if their deaths results in erasure of the truth and everyone in the world kills each other after all! Additional food for thought here, but perhaps V3′s ‘Makoto’ was in itself already a horrible lie based off this reducing the original Makoto’s impact to a ‘normal high school kid who loves Dangan Ronpa’ - If so the true mastermind’s plan was to re-write the ‘past’ so that the world was never saved and with the deaths of the cast that lie surely would have deceived the world.

If ‘Hope’ had never won, then it follows that Despair did. If Despair won, then evil too has won. And it would be so in the past…the present and the future. Forever.