Honkee Star Rail

No offense to you Gozu. I'm sure you do your utmost in your assigned area. But the Future Foundation as a whole looks like it suffers from the same messed-up culture that permeated Hope's Peak. People being put into high positions of power on the flimsy basis that they're former Ultimates. Ando for example being put in charge of food procurement in a post-Apocalyptic world. Just being a talented confectioner doesn't qualify her for such a vital role.

I do understand your concerns, however, Ruruka has proven to be a capable baker no matter what one may think of her. And thus, she has since been useful to the Foundation.

And of course, during such limited times, those who were originally alumni or took part in Hope's Peak come to together to stop Ultimate Despair from spreading across the land. For the future of not only ourselves, but the civilians as well.

Indeed. Though lately we have been falling apart at the seams.

I can only offer my condolences and do my part...

Thank you, Gozu. Your reassurance is appreciated and we are rather grateful.

Yeah.....

*sigh....* Excuse me...I'm gonna go to the bathroom...

I think I may just pace around, move my feet and stuff...

*Hina and Hiro leave the room...*

*sigh* .........'Makoto....'

BNHA x One Piece Crossover in that one scene during Enies Lobby Arc where I cried and crieddddd  😭 😭 😭

I’m confused,what did Haji do in ultimate despair girls (I only know about Komaru and the warriors of hope from the game)

//A lot of things. This is why I don’t stop at just him admitting to being a pedophile. Literally all the situations in the game time back to him and his father:

They treated Monaca like shit while she was growing up, which lead to her becoming cruel, manipulative, and accepting Junko’s influence in the first place.

They put Monaca in a position as Chief executive of Towa’s Robotics Branch, which is where all the Monokumas came from. Instead of monitoring what she was doing, they let her make them money and just turned a blind eye until it was too late.

They willingly cooperated with Ultimate Despair to both build Monokumas to intensify the Tragedy and manufacture both the air purifiers and the technology needed to fight the Monokumas while making Towa City into a safe haven. All because they were “in too deep” and valued their company’s reputation above all else. During the apocalypse.

When Towa City was suddenly but inevitably betrayed and thousands of people were dying, including his own father, Haiji refused to work with Future Foundation, a group who probably could’ve done a lot to help save lives and smooth things over, because he still thought the company’s reputation was more important than the lives of all those people.

He cowardly sat underground and did nothing for the longest time, something Toko actually called him out on, and would rather blame other people for the problems he and his father caused than take responsibility for them.

He makes an aside that he didn’t think Towa Group taking over the world would be such a bad thing? Yeah, maybe he just meant it as a joke, but I will never give this man the benefit of the doubt, especially not when he knows his family’s company is complicit all this.

When Komaru and Toko finally beat Monaca and got the controller for the Monokumas and Monokuma Kids away from her, even after being told over and over that smashing it would result in all the kids dying and start a war with Future Foundation to kick off a new era of the Tragedy- which Monaca literally stated was her plan- he keeps egging Komaru on to do it out of pure vengeance and spite. And then tried to take the controller from her to do it himself.

To expand on that latter point, he was willing to basically commit genocide on tens of thousands of children on the grounds that “they deserve it” for killing so many adults, even though were all under mind control and thus had no true agency in their actions. Which he knew, but still didn’t give a shit about. All he wanted was revenge.

And in the end, he still hasn’t learned anything and was apparently gearing up the resistance in the city to start a new plan of attack against the kids. Something that DR3 never followed up on, so we don’t know how that turned out, but I’m certain it wouldn’t end well.

//Tl;dr, he’s an abusive, cowardly, self-centered corporate brat who can’t take responsibility for his actions, willingly sacrificed millions if not billions of lives to preserve his company’s reputation as if it would actually mean anything, is fully and knowingly complicit in the emergence of the Tragedy to begin with, almost committed genocide and started a new war because he’s a vengeful idiot, and, oh yeah, the man is also an actual pedophile.

//I do not like Haiji Towa. At all.

Junko’s great and all but for me Hopes Peak Academy is the main antagonist of Danganronpa.

You’ve got the whole oh being part of the elite is actually really fucking stressful. And wow I wish I could do other things but my worth is entirely tied to this one thing I do.

Like we saw with Leon.

Then you’ve got them being a dick to everyone else. Like it’s one thing for them to be like oh you don’t have a talent our one school recognises as important?

I guess you’re nothing then.

But then they take it even further by creating the Reserve course. Ah yes let us give these peasants the privilege of being near us while also reminding them they’re nothing compared to us.

But also you know human experimentation.

It really hit home watching Danganronpa 3 and realising oh..any of these kids could’ve become Izuru Kamakura.

It’s just that they picked Hajime. Oh they frame it as a choice but no that kids fate was already decided the moment he was enrolled.

It would’ve been interesting if that ever got out. That Izuru Kamakura, was a Reserve Course student. That this beacon of terror was someone they all view as inherently worthless for being talentless.

Despite the fact that metric is one that only Hopes Peak uses and cares about.

I don’t blame any of the Reserve Course for wanting to burn the place down. The way they were instantly vilified the second they decided to rebel against the school.

Not only did they cover up the murder of a student but if this got out too…Yikes.

Honestly had the tragedy been less…colossal I genuinely believe Hopes Peak would be relieved by it. Sure they get some bad press but it’s one student, maybe one class.

In the grand scheme of things it changes nothing and they can all be discredited it.

Hell I can absolutely imagine a concept where Hopes Peak reveals Izuru Kamakura’s real identity and paints a narrative about this disillusioned Reserve Course student lost to jealously.

And despite the aid of the prestigious academy trying to help him, he turned into a monster. Even going so far as to bastardise our glorious founder with his name.

I can see them trying to wipe their hands clean of everything. Also I refuse to believe Jin Kirigiri was some unknowing man caught in the middle of this.

When he was the one running the place. And frankly I prefer the concept that he absolutely knew but tried to make amends with saving his remaining students.

With saving his daughter.

And being killed after refusing to give them up. Hoping that maybe just maybe he would be able to atone for the monsters he helped to create.

Junko’s also a monster that’s a fact but none of what she did would’ve happened if not for Hopes Peak.

And unfortunately only one of them got destroyed.

The maestro without his hat. They could never make me hate you, Balan.

I think they should make a game where you explore the abandoned husk of Hope's Peak Academy and you're haunted by Class 78's ghosts. Maybe it's some team sent out to do the whole "rebuild the school that was the root of all these problems in the first place" thing that happened at the end of the anime for some stupid reason. I miss those kids and I think it would be fun if they became fucked up murderous spirits because of how much they were left by the wayside in the meta grand scheme of things and their in-world history was pulverized by just being reduced to a footnote to the "and Makoto Naegi saved the world because he just had so much hopey-hope-hope!" shit. Especially in the context of a renovation, papering over the bloody walls and sponging up the gore and pretending everything is as it was and always has been. It's compeeeeeelling and also I think you could have a lot of fun with it mechanically. I can see Taka as some red-light green-light sorta thing where you can only move when he's not looking at you. Chihiro makes tech around you glitch out or spark (to the point of potentially electrocuting you). Mondo oozes through a tight corridor as a terrible blob you have to run away from. Eerie singing echoes from the bathrooms. Please god think about it.

Oh my god, you know what I just realised?

Makoto putting the Remnants of Despair inside the Neo World Program—as idealistic as his intentions were—indirectly makes him a Mastermind.

fem rei <3

Thought I get in on this holy bandwagon, but Luce has a friend to tag along.

The Post-Tragedy Horrors of Despair Time

Hello everyone, Mod Bubbles here!

This Halloween, I decided to do something a little different. Rather than a dedicated post or song parody, I've decided to share a worldbuilding analysis. A pretty fortuitous one, since we've recently completed Chapter 2 of Despair Time.

I'm sure it's no exaggeration to say that DT is a pretty dark fangan, especially within its own context. I wouldn't say it's as grimdark and nihilistic as some people are convinced it is, but there's some elements to it that I feel are worth analyzing going forward.

See, it's been established that DT is set within the Hope's Peak continuity. This would mean that the canon games sans V3 (and if you want to have fun with it, other fangans like the Another series) have all happened here.

According to a Q&A, DT is set around 70-80 years after the end of the Tragedy, so if you wanted to estimate based on in-universe dates (such as Makoto's Hope's Peak brochure saying 2010 in the earliest version of the game but 2014 in a re-release), that would put it sometime around 2080 to the mid-2090s. Veronika backs this up in Chapter 2, when she mentions the Tragedy happened "almost a century ago."

Why do I bring all this up? Because if you looked at DT, you'd probably never guess it was that deep in the future. I know I didn't at first. And this is all by design, but it goes beyond simple cosmetic details. Allow me to explain to you why this is probably the darkest timeline that could've happened after Class 78's victory over Ultimate Despair.

___________________________________________________

Modern Stagnancy

So if we look at the obvious, the world of DT looks pretty much identical to our own, which should be a good thing. When you consider that this is set after The Biggest, Most Awful, Most Tragic Event in Human History- an event that saw societal collapse, wars happen for the sake of destruction, massive pollution, rampant murder, and countless killing games- then it almost seems utopian.

Cities have long since been rebuilt, the skies are clear, there are functional trains, movies, celebrities, schools, music, art, Ted-Talks, the internet, all the trappings of normality. And that's really the problem.

Once the recovery efforts were underway, the goal of those in power was to rebuild things exactly as they used to be. Bear in mind, the world looks like our modern day, yet this is set deep into the late 21st century. In that context, the world almost seems stunted in its growth or even that it's regressed, given that CDs and DVDs are used rather than USBs or digital downloads.

Not only that, but this extends to societal attitudes as well. Nico was the victim of bullying over their status as an enby by everyone who knew, including their own father. It's almost the 22nd century and anti-LGBTQ bigotry like this still exists.

In that context, it feels less like the world is recovering and more that it's been stuck in its pre-Tragedy status quo, right down to continuing the Ultimates program that contributed to The Tragedy in the first place. And who would be motivated to do that?

2. Hope's Peak And Their Kin Are Stronger Than Ever

Probably one of the most contentious aspects of DR3's ending is that, after everything the people in charge of it were responsible for- exploiting their students, covering up crimes, human experimentation- Hope's Peak Academy was rebuilt by the survivors, now with Makoto as headmaster.

Now, one could make the argument that Makoto is a better example of hope and thus better suited to lead the school to follow its stated ideals than the Steering Committee ever was. That very well may be true, but as they also proved, nobody stays in charge forever. And now, because of his decision, Hope's Peak isn't contained to Japan.

There now exist Hope's Peak branches in every major country on Earth, with two in the United States. Teruko and co. are students of the East Coast Division's 27th class, meaning that one opened almost thirty years ago. This would also mean that Japan's Hope's Peak would have seen over 150 classes since its inception.

I bring all this up because, as has been made very clear by canon, Hope's Peak is a terrible place even in concept. When you remove the idyllic aspect of fostering talent and guaranteeing its students are set for life, the truth is that ultimates are stunted in their development. They're only encouraged to excel in their particular field, whether they really want to or not.

In addition, Hope's Peak has always quietly held this belief that only people with talent hold any worth; those without talent are just "ticks" who leech off the success of their betters. Characters like Byakuya and Nagito echo those very same sentiments, this extreme elitism that encourages people to view the "99%" as inherently inferior.

Even if you wanted to say Makoto managed to undo that idea, can we really say this divide would never come up again? No matter how many years pass or how many divisions of Hope's Peak are set up across the world? That seems really far-fetched to me.

Consider Min's bonus video. As she explains, she was never scouted by the school. Instead, America's Hope's Peak announced something called the Ultimate Contest for Eminent Students, where eligible high school students would be allowed to take a test, the best of whom would be admitted to the school when they graduated. The catch is that they had 12 years to prepare. Min, who was only 5 at the time, wasn't initially going to participate, but then the founder of a company called XF-Ture Tech approached her family- who was quite poor- and wanted to sponsor her in exchange for her participation.

She spent her entire life preparing for that test. And when she passed, she realized it was all really just an experiment to create their ideal version of the Ultimate Student. She even doubted that she was the best in terms of raw score, just that she met their desired expectations by cutting out everything else in her life for that test.

It also extends beyond just Hope's Peak itself. Those with power and influence now hold a strangle hold over the most vulnerable people out there, as we can see with the Lacroix family.

Rose wanted to help her family out of their financial limitations using her painting skills and her photographic memory, which lead to her becoming an art forger. However, at 15, she was found out and her family faced tens of millions in fines. This would've been the end, but then they were bailed out by a billionaire named Richard Spurling, founder of the Spurling Foundation. In exchange for clearing her charges, Rose had to sign a contract that meant she doesn't own the rights to anything she paints.

She hates what her life has become, where she can only ever really paint things at the whims of the Foundation because it was the only way her family could survive that mountain of debt. The exploitation there is undeniable.

No matter where you look, there's still exploitation and experiment abound with the school, corporations and the wealthy. And if you think the Spurling Foundation sounds bad here, they're implied to be responsible for something much worse.

Which is also brings us to Xander. See, there's a curious detail when we first meet him in the prologue:

And I agree. Xander being the Ultimate Rebel really doesn't fit him, as he's better described as the "Ultimate Revolutionary." Except there's no chance Hope's Peak would call him that, instead paying lip service to the idea in a digestible format to still support the status quo.

Xander is an activist who works to oppose corruption, but the ones who benefit from corruption wouldn't want him to flaunt that. It's a subtle but very clever detail that shows those in power still maintain a hold even over their beloved Ultimates.

They probably had no issue throwing the obviously corrupt under the bus to save their own hides, and raised Xander up with a quasi-supportive title. It gives them a chance to look like they're supporting what he's doing while still tying an element of a "rebellious child" to his image with the name.

Had Xander survived, he had a good reason to want to bring them down, especially the Spurlings.

3. Illness and Poverty

Xander's bonus video clued us in on what I believe is one of the most important parts of DT's continuity: the fate of the town of Chariton, implied to be where he lived. It seemed to be a small town, home to a couple hundred or a couple thousand people, where the only hospital for miles was "dinky, understaffed" and barely able to handle a minor flu outbreak. They were completely unprepared for what became known as the Chariton Incident.

When he was around 14, the town was hit by a disease that caused those infected to decay from the outside in; their limbs would stop working before their organs did, meaning they would just lay there and feel themselves slowly dying. So many died that nobody was left to move the bodies, so they were left where they fell, rotting in the summer heat.

The cause of this outbreak? A contaminated river that served as the town's water source. Chariton was an impoverished community, where people had no money to treat their water, get medicine from a nearby city or to even move out. It's also implied, based on Xander's anger, that Duke Spurling was partially responsible and that he got off the hook, which may be what drove Xander to become the Ultimate Rebel. Especially when you consider he's the only surviving member of his family.

Duke Spurling is, as the named implies and Dev has confirmed, the younger brother of Richard Spurling. The money and influence needed to get his brother off the hook is the very same that has the Lacroix family under his thumb.

So as we can see, Chariton was a major event in DT's canon. Not only does it showcase corruption, it also showcases understated but still prominent problems in the post-Tragedy U.S. If you pay attention, you'll also notice Teruko, Min, and Rose mention poverty playing a role in their lives.

As we can see, poverty plays a major role in their lives, and that extends beyond a personal level. Chariton's poverty is why the incident happened at all, and a big reason is because it's also an example of a medical desert.

"Medical desert" is a term used to describe regions whose population has inadequate access to healthcare. This can be all healthcare in general or in specialties such as dental care or pharmaceuticals. This is an especially prominent problem in rural areas, but it can affect urban ones too.

If that sounds implausible to you, today it's believed that around 30 million Americans- over 1% of the population- live over an hour from a hospital. Can you imagine how bad the problem is in a world after The Tragedy? All the damage to infrastructure, established institutions, the economy, and the population? I doubt Chariton was the first to see something this bad.

Ace's execution gives us more clues. In the Death By Illness section, there are several newspaper clippings on the wall, most of which are readable. One flashes on screen saying "Unexplained Illness Kills Thousands," which I believe is another reference to Chariton (why else would it flash on screen?), but there's more as well:

"More people are dying of cancer than ever before"

"Flu season claims thousands of lives"

"Falling rates of survival for hospitalized patients"

"Antibiotic-resistant infections a growing threat in this hospital"

One is harder to read, but I believe it mentions Chronic Kidney Disease being tied to an early death

Now, the interesting thing is that most of these are modern headlines, and they can be pretty misleading. The cancer one is actually based on the fact that more people are living longer lives, thus are reaching ages where they develop cancer due to their cell infrastructure breaking down naturally. It doesn't mean there's more cancer cases overall across all ages.

The only one that's not true is the falling rates one. Which suggests that not only was it Chariton, but healthcare infrastructure in general after the Tragedy seems to be a mess.

See, I was assuming that these articles are identical to what we see today. But it's also possible that the cancer one is now literally true, and it could be because The Tragedy was rife with this kind of horror. We know that terrorism, coups and wars happened for no reason other than to spread despair across the world.

Could you imagine how many nuclear, chemical, biological and radiological weapons were used? How many diseases and hazardous materials were seeded into the environment? If it's unsafe to drink tap water after a serious hurricane or earthquake, how bad is the problem when contamination is the goal?

And this doesn't even touch on how disturbingly easy it would be to spread long-term illnesses such as HIV or CJD in contaminated food and medical supplies. Some diseases have latency periods that last decades, meaning they could still be killing people even by the time DRDT is set.

Antibiotic resistance is also a very real and serious problem. Even today, some strains have become immune to even the strongest antibiotics available. This has given rise to Vancomycin-Resistant Enterococci or VREs, which are immune to basically every medication we can throw at them.

Now, it's still possible to deal with them, such as with naturally antimicrobial metals or experimental treatments such as CRISPR and Phage Therapy, but in a world that saw such a massive hit to everything? I'm certain antibiotic-resistance bacteria have become much more serious, potentially resulting in epidemics over the years.

And when these things happen, it's always the poor who suffer the most.

4. Lethal Repetition

Now we come to the most obvious example, something highlighted by the same reveal that DT is set nearly a century into the future:

Veronika, who provided us with information on the effects the Tragedy still has, apparently has never heard about The Killing School Life.

Now, it's important to keep in mind that most of the Killing Games in DR were pretty secluded and motivated. SDR2 was only broadcast to Future Foundation with the goal to allow Junko to escape into the real world, for example. However, DR1's Killing School Life was broadcast globally as a means to break humanity's hope by showing the Ultimates slaughtering each other. Instead, Makoto and co. managed to reinvigorate the world's hope and played a pivotal role in ending the Tragedy.

...And yet Veronika apparently hasn't heard any of it.

Now, there's two possibilities here, neither of which are good:

One is that the Mastermind has removed their knowledge of previous killing games, specifically. Now, I actually consider this an unlikely explanation because, not only does Teruko seem to vaguely remember the Killing School Life happened, but what's the goal in doing so for the participants?

The canon games all had solid reasons why the other masterminds erased the participants' memories: the revelation that they'd been killing their friends, the fact that their past identities were supposed to be undone to save them, even the fact that they weren't even who they were supposed to be in V3.

But what's the purpose of suppressing the memories of the Killing School Life in the participants themselves? Especially since this game is also apparently being broadcast to the outside world, although we only have MonoTV's word on that. Is it to undermine everything the survivors achieved or to get the participants not to consider the same strategies?

The other, more plausible explanation to me is that the mastermind isn't the one who erased their memories. The outside world did.

It's possible that, in the decades since the Tragedy and the drive to return things to the status quo, knowledge of the Killing School Life has been suppressed. It would be so easy to blame Makoto's decision to rebuild the school, but it's just as plausible that his attempts to genuinely reform the school were undone over the years.

Corporations and those that came after had a vested reason to improve their own reputations, and why would they allow their connection to the Tragedy to remain public knowledge? The entire thing began as a revolution of lower classes against the rich before it became a whirlwind of mindless violence.

So what does this mean for DT? This is more hypothesizing on my part, but I'd say this could tell us a lot about the potential motivations for this very killing game. Could it be someone trying to remind the world about this event and how we got here? Is it more retribution against the wealthy? Is it someone who was inspired by Junko to slaughter her friends? Or is it something else entirely? And what role does Teruko have if someone involved is so hellbent on trying to kill her?

For now, we can only speculate. But I can tell you that, based on what we've seen here, DT is probably the darkest future we could've gotten out of the canon series.

Happy Halloween, everyone!