Asahina’s Story(ies): Understanding Aoi Asahina (PART 1: ASAHINA, THE GIRL) (PART 2 HERE) (#DR1 SPOILERS AHEAD) For a while, Asahina’s most unique characteristic is how normal she is. Compared to the rest of the cast, which tends towards the over-the-top (excluding Naegi), Asahina is pretty relatable: she likes making friends, doesn’t like murder, and eats when stressed out. She has her quirks, but nothing she says or does is so extreme that it would make you look twice if someone said or did it in real life. Then Sakura dies, and that changes things. Asahina – cheerful Asahina, Asahina of the irrepressible optimism - suddenly tries to get herself and her entire class killed. It’s a punch to the gut for the reader, because, after all – what could sink someone like Aoi Asahina so low that even she couldn’t pick herself back up? That’s one story. Then there’s everything that comes afterward: Asahina picking herself back up, and Asahina surviving the school life of mutual killing, and Asahina standing tall alongside her friends to face a post-apocalyptic wasteland with a heart full of hope. She and the other survivors are an unlikely group to rebuild all of society, and Asahina has a dead best friend to leave behind on top of that. But they’re all willing to move beyond the school and try anyway, even - especially – Asahina. Her breakdown was one thing, but this - this is another story. This post is, in many ways, a sort of sister post to the Sakura essay I wrote earlier. That one’s about an apparent superhuman who comes to show her overwhelming humanity; this one’s about an ordinary girl, who comes to show her extraordinary strength. They’re both human, though. They both struggle and despair and come to the brink of defeat - but they don’t fall. Asahina has her own stories to share, though, so…let’s start with those. Keep reading 7 years ago ♥ 342 notes

What Sakura Saw: Why Sakura Oogami and Her Character Arc Are Really, Really Important (#DR1 spoilers and a whole lotta words, evidence bullets, and analysis ahead. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.) Sakura Oogami: the princess, the queen, the goddess, the saint. She has so many glorifying titles heaped upon her by the fandom sometimes that you’d think she was custom-designed to be put on a pedestal. And, once you’d gotten to CH4 of Dangan Ronpa, you’d see where those titles were coming from. Among the rest of the cast - a bunch of scared, angry, vulnerable kids in a terrible place - Sakura shines: she becomes a beacon of selflessness and courage, sacrificing her life for the sake of her friends. The events of the chapter cast her in quite the holy light (the only part she forgets is the coming-back-to-life-in-three-days part), but stare at it too long and you might blind yourself a little. She was mortal, too, and not just in some technical sense. She had fears and weaknesses and struggles and blood that flowed red like the rest of us. There were a lot of factors in her life obscuring that fact before her death, and there was that bright white glow of postmortem respect afterwards, but every layer of obfuscation only makes her humanity more valuable. Her mortality, her fallibility, her inherent kinship with every other topsy-turvy human being that inhabits our world - that’s what makes her capable of being who she is. And it’s her inherent kinship with the scared angry kids of Hope’s Peak that makes her capable of becoming who she became. Fate made her a girl, and society called her an Ogre. Despair called her a mole, and hope made her a hero. Her story didn’t happen in a vacuum, in other words: it was an entire muddy world, and a pair of hopeful eyes, that let there be light. And that’s really important - because it isn’t what Sakura is but what Sakura became that inspires so much hope: not only for her surviving classmates, but also for the universe she resides in at large. Keep reading 7 years ago ♥ 911 notes

Understanding Hifumi Yamada (a lot of quotes and even more words about DR’s most underappreciated nerd) (Spoilers for DR1 up to CH3 within…but not much else, really. Anime-only fans, skip this post for now and come back in a few weeks.) Let’s talk about Hifumi Yamada for a bit. He’s a stock character type with a million more popular brethren, somewhere between Mort and Madarame on the “pretentious nerd” scale…but he’s not nearly as well-liked. He’s a virtuoso of a vast fandom culture not unlike our own, one whose depths have been plumbed by people far more respectable than I*, but he doesn’t get any respect himself…not from his writers, not from his classmates, and not from the fandom itself. He’s kind of a joke character, but no one’s willing to listen to his jokes - or pay attention to his story at all. But he does have a story, and I want to share it. I want to talk about the traits he has that you might find relatable, or the traits he has that you might find detestable, or however you choose to react to this particular sack of character flaws…but mostly I want to acknowledge that he, too, had an important role in his own story. Maybe he didn’t get to become the hero he aimed to be, but…let’s give him the dignity of being the protagonist of his own life for a little bit, shall we? Keep reading 7 years ago ♥ 583 notes

Understanding Celestia Ludenberg (a really long, really in-depth guide) (WARNING: DR1 spoilers ahead. Anime-only fans should skip this post riiight about now.) (Thanks to lamemily for helping me brainstorm!) Here’s something that’s funny about Celes and her character arc. She develops this really elaborate murder plot - and a ton of readers see through her from the start. (Who didn’t think Celes was being suspicious when they first read through CH3?) Then she gets exposed and sent to her death wearing this shaky cool-collected-remorseless-killer mask, one that had already been cracked in several places before - and a ton of readers totally fall for it. See, it’s possible to write her off as “a malevolent person who deliberately caused the death of two people for no reason but greed” and leave it at that. But then you’re leaving a lot of questions unanswered, like: Why did she make her murder plan so elaborate and unwieldy?

Why did she micromanage so much of her murder plot, to the point of drawing suspicion, and yet still gave Yamada so much responsibility within the plan - letting him kill Ishida unsupervised, and even letting him build the bulky Justice Robo suit that would become the key contradiction in her testimony?

Why did a purported SHSL Gambler lose her own gamble?

And what kind of talent is gambling, anyway? I want to answer these questions. I want to talk about Celes, and I want to help the fandom get a little closer to understanding her. So, let’s talk about: who is Taeko Yasuhiro? Keep reading 7 years ago ♥ 2,197 notes

A Long(er), Quote-Filled(er) Guide to Understanding Mondo Oowada (DR1 spoilers beyond here - anime-only fans should press J or K to skip this post riiiight about now! There shouldn’t be any SDR2 spoilers, though.) So, let’s talk about the boy who “ended up killing" twice in his life. When I say “ended up killing”, I’m of course referring to that one Monobear Theatre we’re given the very update before we find Chihiro’s body. It’s obvious how those words connect to Mondo’s murder - it’s the most accidental murder in the game. Mondo “ends up killing” Chihiro, plain and simple. So, when Monobear tells us how much harder a straightforward “I killed” is…how “you have to be able to think clearly and judge your emotions, and then perform them”, and “it’s a much more difficult thing than acting emotionally”…how it’s all about “people’s attitude toward the world”: is Monobear mocking Mondo, and if so what specific weak point is he targeting? And, when I say “boy”, I’m of course referring to Oowada being a boy. He aimed for adulthood, for real manhood, but in the end…what a poor, undecisive, goddamned child he is. The last character essay I wrote was a look at the stress of being a “role model" - of shouldering the burden of societal expectation at its highest and most unfair, and of being twisted into some sort of plastic Amigara Fault-shaped facade of a human being as a result. This is different. This is about the burden of counterculture; where do you draw validation from, if mainstream society won’t validate you? What kind of strange and unreachable moral ideals will you hold yourself to, if you’ve already been dismissed as immoral? It’s also about a number of other things, as listed in the bullet points below: The pressure of joining a group of teenage macho men at the age of (about) ten, and spending the rest of your life simultaneously playing the grown-up and playing around;

The pressure of everyone you know teaching you to hide weakness away as anger;

The pressure of being a “bad kid” outside of your gang and a “tagalong” within; and

How even child prodigies in teenage mischief can’t escape the pressures put upon them. There’s going to be a lot of ground to cover, but…let’s start with his childhood. Keep reading 7 years ago ♥ 599 notes