Looking Back At DR Talent Development There's Really Some Interesting Introduction Between Some Characters,

you know what i really would’ve liked to see in dr3?

the remnants facing life-altering consequences for their actions. even though they were brainwashed, they still committed atrocities yet faced no real backlash that affects their life.

sonia being stripped of her rank as princess while her country bans her from her former kingdom. she tries to reason with them initially because she’s so stunned and resorts to her commanding princess self, but no one acknowledges her. they threaten her and almost arrest her, but she escapes. she no longer has a home or a family.

gundam being mistrusted by animals. he tries communing with them, but they refuse them. they lash out, biting him and rejecting him. they remember how he used them for evil.

saionji and ibuki being blacklisted in dancing/musical performances. former fans who felt the agony of their “concerts” recognize them and charge at them, trying to turn them in for their crimes. they no longer can dance or sing without retribution.

koizumi’s pictures being seen as despairing propaganda. her former work means nothing. all that matters to the world are her evil photos. no one will accept her work even when she tries to photograph “hopeful” things.

hanamura’s family has been blacklisted in the food/catering industry. if his siblings are alive, they want nothing to do with hanamura. it’s implied he may have killed his dear mother, so his brother and sister despise hanamura even though they left the family. like sonia, hanamura no longer has a family.

kuzuryuu and pekoyama have no clan left. the kuzuryuus could be dead or they decided to give the leadership to someone else if they came to their senses. they deny help to kuzuryuu and pekoyama, blaming them for their family’s decline. they only have each other.

that’s what i REALLY wanted to see. of course, hope arc is about “hope” and is seem as a “perfect happy ending,” which, considering the “gray” endings for sdr2 and drae, seems pathetic in comparison. these are people who, despite being brainwashed, committed terrible crimes. they shouldn’t be left off the hook so easily even if they endured their own private killing game. they say they will shoulder the burden of despair, but they go off hand-in-hand without consequences for their crimes. they pretend to be remnants, but they don’t face any backlash for what they did to thousands of millions of people.

the cool kid 😎

DANG and his buddy RONPA

never not on my bullshit

i’ve found that i’ve drawn quite a bit of them in bed

 please watch Yokai Watch

I would like to hear the essay about how hope peak is bad!

In order to understand why Hope's Peak is intrinsically bad, you have to look at the reason it was founded first off. Not for the betterment of talented students, but for researching them for the Kamukura Project which can basically be summed up as, to quote @prompt-master, who helped me with this, "unethical hidden experimentation of a minor with the interest of erasing his identity and turning him into a human tool." Pretty fucked up, enough to make the statement that Hope's Peak irreparably sucks on its own. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

We also see in DR3, SDR2, and in THH that Hope's Peak actively covers up murders for its students. This includes both Syo and the whole situation with the Twilight Syndrome Murder Case in DR3 and SDR2, wherein quite a few murders were just...brushed under the rug by HPA. (There's also the student council KG, but IIRC they never figured out who did it.

Also, there's all the failed Kamakura Project test subjects. All in all, there's quite a few deaths that Hope's Peak has under its belt.

We haven't even mentioned the psychological effects of HPA yet, especially on the world around them.

First up, the normal complex. to quote Prom once more, “the normal complex is a term...to explain the phenomenon of how EVERY SINGLE nontalented character in the series shows some form of low self esteem regarding how normal they are. Hinata, Naegi, and Komaru are the biggest examples of this. It doesnt matter how special they are, they will always see themselves as normal and lesser because they were raised on the belief that talent=worth”. In a society where Hope’s Peak exists, this is just...how things are.

There’s also the exploitation of the Reserve Course students. Yes, Komaeda’s view of them might be an extreme example, but it’s very indicative of the climate towards them--someone in the reserve course will never be a talented student, no matter how hard they try. However, they can still graduate from HPA, which is still an honor--so people keep funnelling INSANE amounts of money into the program. And then they can use the reserve course students as guinea pigs--because who cares if someone untalented goes missing?

And they don’t even TEACH there. In DR3 it shows how the only real requirement is that they prove their talent at the end of the year. In fact, quite a few students just skip most of their classes. 

Also there’s the fact that Kirigiri is the daughter of the principal and it’s HER class that was given shelter. That’s like, nothing compared to everything else in here, but it’s still incredibly suspicious just knowing about Hope’s Peak in general.

Tl;dr: From its inception, Hope’s Peak Academy was not meant to help its students, only to conduct unethical research on them and exploit those it deems “untalented” to further said research. This is only, like, ONE reason it’s super fucked up.

I’m not sure if you already seen this, but I already made a post detailing how DR3 missed an opportunity to explore Chisa Yukizome spreading her despairing influence all across Future Foundation, and the same with Kyosuke Munakata spreading his hopeful influence across the agency as well.

https://emmanueljmoreno.tumblr.com/post/621579421446537216/yukizome-and-munakata-or-a-missed-opportunity-in

submitted by @emmanueljmoreno  

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I did not see this! So thank you for sending it to me. I think you make some excellent points. I also very strongly believe that Yukizome and Munakata had all the elements to be one of the most compelling characters in the danganronpa series, Munakata especially. Like you said, it’s a bit odd that Yukizome wasn’t the main antagonist. Narratively speaking it makes the most sense. We connect with her in the beginning of future where they establish her connection to Munakata and how she also has a similar talent of Hope to Naegi. And in despair she is the one we learn more about and bond with. We see her struggle and her fall and her happiness and her sadness. We don’t get that for Tengan however, which makes us not connect well with him being the mastermind. Although, you could argue that she DOES as you propose, since she tricked Tengan into watching the despair video which led up to the events of dr3 future, but I think it was poorly executed, and that Yukizome should have shown more villaney.

As for Munakata I have always headcanons that he approves of immoral experimentation on individuals with despair in the name of hope. You can find a lot of parallels between HPA and the FF, both of which are incredibly corrupt in the name of “hope”. Munakata should’ve been a grey villian in the sense that we understand he is in the wrong but we also understand why he thinks this way. Such as thinking Naegi is dangerous and a threat. And these sort of experiments could lend to that. At first it started with antidepressants, then brainwashing, then torture. Nothing seems to work. This is why in Munakata’s eyes, who has bared witness to years of this testing, believes the only way to get rid of despair is to kill everyone with it. This lends into his corruption (his form of despair is more so “corrupted hope”, hence his eyes not being swirls). It also explains why he’d be so against Naegi’s own unethical (altho more “peaceful”) experiment on the remnants

There’s quite a lot of room to develop these characters in a compelling way, hence why I think dr3 future SHOULD have been a game and I’ll always be upset that it wasn’t

The future foundation basically just gave Makoto a free unwanted subscription to trauma, amnesia and depression.

bomber neglects one tiny detail: the massive number of other gay people who also play splatoon

This Post but for Hiyoko. Like i've seen ask blogs when she's treated horribly when everyone is equally as awful. In the end, that's one of my biggest gripes of post-sdr2 content. The lack of accountability the remnants often recieve by the narrative

Seeing that post you made just now actually reminded me of something. This post-SDR2 RP blog storyline. Which claimed to be about the whole cast healing, and would be even-handed to everyone. Yet the writer's biases against Nagito constantly crept in, as there were noticeable double standards in the way he was treated compared to the rest of the cast.

Like I realized something upon looking at it again. It's Nagito, and Nagito alone who has to actually face his victims from when he was an Ultimate Despair. He's the one who gets ragged in person on by cast members from UDG. The others meanwhile? They never actually have to meet someone they personally wronged. There are no survivors of Novoselic (which got completely genocided in their version of events) ever confronts Sonia for example.

This is actually the case in a lot of fan works. It is very easy to tell when the writer has a bias against Komaeda. Personally, a thing I noticed when reading is that it feels like they all tend to put the other remnants in a good light while he is just. Separated. Similarly to how the fandom treats him in general by acting like he is the worst of them all. There's always that subtle undertone that shows they only hold things against him, which, again, is often because of the rooted ableism in how the fandom portrays him.

Funny... Since his actions really are tame compared to the others, he never even directly hurt anyone, unlike them. It's weird how the fandom doesn't hold the characters accountable for actual murders in the first place, but can I just mention how Komaeda (including Hinata) was the only remnant who didn't do anything violent and messed up except cutting his arm off?

As for Komaeda being the only one to face the people that he wronged, I saw that people even tend to make the remnants forgive each other immediately (or easily) or don't write any tension between them, making them friends. It's very confusing since they don't have normal relationships even in sdr2 and because they always make them target Komaeda with all the negativity... And because they literally killed each other. They would all be aware of how messed up they are and have to learn to accept it... They don't even have a reason to call Komaeda fucked up anymore because they've done worse, or rather he's fucked up too. They don't have to like him (they would realistically only tolerate everyone except the ones closer to them in the first place anyway), but it'd be way different, and they wouldn't be hostile. The fact that Komaeda would be peaceful makes that even more believable.

(Also do you mind sharing the name?)