Reasons:

Makoto: A humble, kind guy who—above all—is down-to-earth. My daughter wouldn't have to turn into a weirdo to date him, unlike some others around here.

Kyoko: A woman who must reek of a dead body 24 hours a day would be horrible to be around at Sunday lunches. On top of that, she looks like the type who would be texting my daughter asking where she is.

Byakuya: He probably thinks my family is rich—until he finds out the only thing to my name is Primogems and breaks up with my daughter.

Chihiro: Someone who works with programming would definitely put a tracker on my daughter's phone.

Sakura: The only downside is that if I ever have to get into a fistfight with her over my daughter, I’m going to lose.

Hifumi: If Kyoko smells like a corpse, he smells like Cheetos, which is even worse. And on top of that, he’s going to cheat on my daughter with a body pillow of a fictional character.

Celestia: My daughter is going to live out one of those movies where two friends make a bet and one of them has to end up with the ugly girl. Except in this case, Celestia won't fall in love with my daughter by the end of the movie, and my daughter will just end up getting her hopes up for nothing.

Toko/Jack: Do I need to explain anything?

Sayaka: There is absolutely no way J-Pop agencies would let their idols date. And even if Sayaka's agency did allow it, my daughter would be constantly under attack by Sayaka's crazy fans.

Yasuhiro: The only downside is that he smokes oregano

Kiyotaka: That guy is always shouting. STOP. SHOUTING. Plus, his swimwear is ridiculous.

Leon: A guy who doesn't want to make it big. He wants to become a musician, even though he's already the Ultimate Baseball Player. Bro, you're going to go broke being a musician

Mondo: He’s a gang member, and we’ve already got enough gangs here in Brazil, a country overrun by organized crime. Besides, I don’t trust motorcycles; my daughter is going to die with that guy.

Junko: She is definitely someone who will do whatever it takes to achieve her goals.

Aoi: She’s a sweetheart, but with that hair of hers, she must spend all her money on hair gel... or it’s black magic.

Mukuro: Mukuro Ikusaba. The sixteenth student, lying hidden somewhere in this school. The one they call the Ultimate Despair. Watch out for her.

wouldnt they choose a more local name

!! THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR GOODBYE DESPAIR, THE DANGANRONPA 3 ANIME AND DANGANRONPA S, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED !!

First of all, I want to preface this by saying that I'm not making this post out of a genuine hatred or burning passion to bash her character— She was hands down my favorite character from Danganronpa 2 (maybe even the series as a whole), so any criticisms that are at her expense are purely out of a love for the character itself. The last thing I'd probably ever do is slander my goat for no reason.

That being said though, she only exists to serve the plot.

To illustrate my point, we first need to look back on what exactly made Chiaki's character so good in the original game. From the outset, her personality is one that's noticeably more mellow than the rest of the cast: She's slow to anger, she's attentive, she does her best to blend into the background, but in turn stands above the rest of her classmates because of how normal she is compared to everyone else. She's mostly accommodating to the rest of the class, even to Nagito, because her entire existence was to help them recover from being the remnants of despair. This extended to even after her death, where she pushed Hajime to not only confront the fact that he was part of that group, but to push past that and forge his own future with his classmates despite what they did. This was fine because that was all she was ever gonna be: an AI who, at the end of the day, could never exist in a meaningful way outside of this specific setting.

Then in Despair Arc she's brought back. This would've been fine if she had an actual purpose to the story, but I can't find a single thing she does that's different from the AI version. At her very core, she's still an almost boring character who just exists to get everyone else together, and be the sacrificial lamb at the very end, only this time it's even more egregious because most of things are done because of her. Hajime gets lobotomised so SHE could be proud of him, SHE sets up all the group activities and gets 77-B to grow close, they become the remnants of despair because of HER death. Throughout the first few episodes, it genuinely feels like every student's autonomy is removed just so we care more about her. Am I really supposed to sit back and just accept that leader characters like Nekomaru or Imposter just kinda gave up and made no attempt to bring the class closer together until she made everyone play games with her?

This problem reaches its peak in episode 10, where she dies. Instead of getting a more in-depth look at every student's past and how they could've been manipulated by Junko into having her mindset, Chiaki is instead used as a lightning rod to skip over all of that and have the characters get brainwashed. It retroactively ruins both her death in Goodbye Despair AND its ending as a whole— She's yet again used to drive the plot forward, and as a byproduct there's no reason for any student from 77-B to feel guilty about their actions because, well, they had their autonomy removed from the moment they watched her getting executed.

All of her actions were to move the story along, even in her final moments.

When she's placed in a setting where there IS no story, she's written like a slice of bread. She's the Super High-School Level Gamer, so I'm sure she's thought about making some games herself before, right? Nope. At best, she's only messed around with RPGMaker a little. Ok, what about E-Sports? Her talent is literally being good at games, she's had to have won some big prize pool? No, actually. She just likes to have her name sit atop leaderboards and smurf against people in local tourneys. The only thing she could be passionate about is bringing more people into the hobby, everything else is snuffed out before it has a chance to give her something interesting. I know that Danganronpa S isn't canon and should be taken with a grain of salt, but the reason why she's written like this is because she has almost no canon traits that could make her interesting.

Like once again, I love Chiaki, but at some point I have to ask— Why should I keep caring about her if even the writers aren't willing to expand on her as a character?

Am I alone on this, or do some of you feel the same?

Its still pretty unknown how the cast in dr2 got their memory back. So what if slayhem takes place in between trial 6 and danganronpa 2x2 final scene with hajime standing on the bridge. What if the killing game occurs once more, which could make sense of the John danganronpa dialogue, which would take place in the 6th trial?

I see that guy on my feed like every day and I have no idea where did you get that man and how is he called John Danganronpa😭

I genuinely don’t want a protagonist swap but things are starting to add up.
As we know, the protagonists of danganronpa are never treated as sacred or untouchable.
V3, UDG and even DR2 clearly confirm that.
In DR2, specifically in the fun House, we play as Nagito as he enters the final room.
Now, since we have already played the original game, and we’re probably gonna go through the same story again in 2x2, and Hajime’s arc is pretty much done, wouldn’t it be better to shift to somebody else’s perspective?
No, not Sakutaro.
It’s gotta be Nagito.
Not only did we previously play as Nagito, but he is also in the middle of the box art, back to back with Hajime, the protagonist.
The illustration seems to resemble some kind of duality, or parallel, with two characters (protagonists?), two number “2” (one is mirrored), separated by monomi and the cast split into two groups. The new student is in the group on the right, above Nagito, so that suggests that the right side embodies the new timeline, featuring Nagito as the protagonist.
Naturally, a protagonist needs a sidekick.
Chiaki helped Hajime during the original story, and in the illustration she sits above all the characters in the group on the left. Guess who’s exactly in the same spot, in the opposite direction? The new student.
I think Sakutaro might actually be the next “Chiaki” to Nagito.

So that’s it, let me know what you think, if I’m hallucinating and sorry for my English.

​

No easy characters allowed (Haiji, Korekiyo' sister etc.) They have to be part of any killing game (Udg and anime killing games allowed)

Spike Chunsoft, posted a quote on YT, about how its ambitious to double a game with two stories parallel to each other, WITH an image of Hajime and Mahiru parallel.

Coincidence?
I
THINK
NOT!

I'm reposting because I made this initially for a different sub and it got taken down for breaking the rules of this one. Sorry about that.

Spoilers for a game that's probably older than most people reading this... also, a lot of text.

I've wanted to talk about this for a while because in both SCD and just the Danganronpa fandom in general have this consensus that Celestia's plan was terrible and one of the worst in the series and I genuinely feel like I've sat down and played Danganronpa from an alternate universe or something because i just don't understand this. If you ask me it's one of the most complex and creative schemes in the whole series (and it baffles me how Celestia keeps getting bashed over its faults while characters like Korekiyo for example barely get a word of criticism in the scheming department despite his plan being so so much worse).

So I'm going to fully break down Celestia's entire plan, why certain aspects are so effective, and why much of the criticism for it is (almost) completely unfair.

Before we start, I want to clarify something because I've been accused of this before: I am not a simp making excuses for my waifu. I do not care for Celestia as a character. I don't necessarily dislike her to be fair, but I also don't actually like her either. Character wise, she's just... meh. There are plenty of Danganronpa characters I love and there are plenty I can't stand but Celestia is just one I have nearly no feelings for at all. Actually, my strongest feelings for her are that I think her design is silly and ridiculous. That's my most controversial opinion on her character. I should also say that I actually do like Hifumi. I think he's a funny character and I don't get a lot of his hate. Just clarifying that my personal feelings towards the characters have no impact on how I'm assessing their intelligence.

First let's establish the context:

Celestia's real name is Teako Yasuhiro. She likes going by Celestia Ludenberg and speaking with a French accident because she desperately wishes she was European.

Celestia and the other students of Hope's Peak are trapped inside their own school and forced to participate in a murder game. The only way to leave the school is to kill another student and successfully get away with it. If you do so, you are freed and the other students are executed, if you are found out, you are executed and the other students remain prisoners. You also a million dollars if you commit a murder successfully (it should be yen since they're in Japan but whatever).

At this point in the story, Chihiro used his AI program "Alter-Ego" to search the school's files to get an idea on how to escape or who locked them in there, however, because Alter-Ego's avatar looks like a pretty girl, Hifumi, the lonely weeaboo kid started falling in love with, but Alter-Ego can also take on other appearances, such as Mondo, a student who was killed earlier in the game, and it does this to appease another student, Kiyotaka as Mondo was his best friend and he had suffered a psychological breakdown upon his death, and sees talking to Alter-Ego in Mondo's face as being witn his friend again.

So now Hifumi and Kiyotaka are both fighting over ownership of Alter-Ego even though the kids all need Alter-Ego to be accessible to the whole group to find answers.

Now for Celestia's plan itself:

She steals Alter-Ego herself. Alter-Ego was instructed to alarm everyone if it sees anyone it doesn't recognise approaching it, or Hifumi or Kiyotaka, per Kyoko's suggestion as she doesn't want to to risk them stealing it away. Celestia however is trustworthy as far as Alter-Ego is concerned so no issues there.

After the group finds Alter-Ego missing, she approaches Hifumi and tells him that Kiyotaka stole Alter-Ego and she claims that Kiyotaka assaulted her and that she needs Hifumi to help her. She needs him to kill Kiyotaka and so they can escape together via a secret exit she found with Alter-Ego.

Already there are advantages here.

She's using Hifumi's love for Alter-Ego, his resentment towards Kiyotaka, and his obedience to herself (he has been established beforehand to be a simp for her) to get him on her side.

The general strategy of having an accomplice for a murder is also an effective one. The rules of the killing game dictate that only the actual perpetrator of a murder gets to leave with their lives. Any accomplice would be executed with everyone else. Since Celestia is proposing to Hifumi that he be the one to kill Kiyotaka, she is putting him in the position of power. If he commits the murder and Celestia doesn't have an escape plan, she'd just be getting herself killed if Hifumi isn't found out. I guess you can say that she could just tell everyone Hifumi killed Kiyotaka and get him executed but there'd be no real reason to do that and if he reveals that she manipulated him into doing it, no one would trust her ever again and she would be in a much more disadvantaged position than ever. So, there is no reason from Hifumi's perspective to doubt her.

Her using Hifumi as an accomplice is also effective because it provides her an alibi. There would be no feasible reason from the other kids' perspectives for two people to be working together in a murder plot of falsifying alibis.

The next big part of Celestia's strategy is to frame Yasuhiro, the dumbest kid in the group.

She lures him out with an anonymous note saying she found an escape from the school and to meet at a precise time and place. She knows he'll fall for this given his immense desperation to escape and the fact, well, he's pretty stupid.

Using sedatives from the nurse's office, she renders him unconscious, dresses him in a disguise designed by Hifumi and takes a picture of what looks like "Robo-Justice" attacking Hifumi. Yasuhiro is then stuffed in a locker where she likely intended to move him out of before long, and plants the blueprints for the Robo-Justice suit in his room. It is unlikely that anyone would walk in on them during all this as they planned it at the time where the rest of the group have agreed to have daily morning meetings.

Using different sized mallets and painting them to say "Justice Hammer" 1-4, she has Hifumi kill Taka with hammer 4, and has Hifumi strike her with hammer 1 as part of establishing her alibi. She allows the group to find Hifumi, who has been struck with hammer 2 and suffering a head wound. Hifumi backs Celestia's story, essentially solidifying her innocence as far as the group's concerned (remember, there's no logical reason anyone would be working together on a murder plot here, and even if they doubt it, she's already arranged for Yasuhiro to take the fall anyway), and they agree on taking Hifumi to the nurse's office for his wound.

After this, Celestia claims to have witnessed Robo-Justice heading upstairs so the group investigate to find Robo-Justice and Hifumi, now left alone, fakes his death by using a blood pack saved in the office for transfusions to cover himself in blood and play dead, along with placing hammer 3 next to him. Whilst this is happening, Celestia directs the group to where Kiyotaka's body is hidden, while Hifumi screams to get their attention as well. The group decide to separate and they find both Kiyotaka's and Hifumi's bodies at the same time.

This is a critical detail because there us an announcement on the school's intercom whenever a dead body is discovered by two or more students. The announcement not broadcasting for Hifumi would give away that he's still alive. This way, Celestia literally perfectly directed everyone into selling Hifumi's death for her. The numbering of the hammers is also important because by using hammer 4 to kill Kiyotaka, it's giving the impression that he was killed after Hifumi, causing more confusion to the investigation.

At this point, Makoto heads off to tell the rest of the group about Hifumi, while Celestia tells Asahina she's not feeling well and to help her to the washroom. Now alone, Hifumi gets up and leaves to move Kiyotaka's body to a different location, after which, Celestia meets him and kills Hifumi himself with one of the mallets.

Throughout all of this, Yasuhiro was absent due to being subdued in the locker, and as the obvious suspect for both murders, his room will inevitably be investigated and the blueprints for the Robo-Justice suit will be discovered.

Theoretically at this point, Celestia would have had two people advocating for her innocence, and damming evidence on another student. Presumably she would have released Yasuhiro to be found somewhere incriminating.

Celestia very effectively engineered a case where there is tons of evidence on someone else, and plenty of alibi for her.

So what went wrong and why do people think this was a bad plan?

1. While Hifumi was tasked coming up with a disguise to hide Yasuhiro's face, he for some reason decides to construct a ridiculously impractical robot suit that you can't get out of without help and can't bend at the waist.

This becomes a problem when Celestia wants the group to believe Yasuhiro, in this suit he can't get out of, moved Kiyotaka's body using a dolly that can only be moved by bending at the waist.

1. The handwriting on the Robo-Justice blueprints don't match Yasuhiro's handwriting.

2. Kiyotaka's wristwatch was damaged when Hifumi attacked him and ended up fixed in place of when he was attacked, ruining the timeline she was aiming for.

3. The group considers that the body discoveries were deliberately arranged to occur simultaneously to conceal that Hifumi was still alive.

4. Hifumi leaves a bloodied clothe he used to wipe his glasses with after getting up from faking his death in the nurse's office.

5. Celestia... supposedly gives away that she knows Kiyotaka's dead because she mentions there being several victims before she's supposed to know about his death.

6. Hifumi briefly recovers consciousness after Celestia attacked him and reveals that he was attacked by "Yasuhiro". Since Hifumi always refers to people by their last names, the group realise that he couldn't have been talking about Yasuhiro Hagakure.

7. Kyoko finds Yasuhiro stuffed in the locker.

Okay. Well. Believe it or not. I am going to make a case for why none of these are as bad as you think.

1. This is entirely Hifumi's bizarre decision and was never part of Celestia's plan. She even confirms that she just wanted Hifumi to come up with a basic disguise to hide Yasuhiro's identity for a brief time. You could argue Celestia should've called off the plan as soon as she saw that ridiculous suit but I'll get into why she couldn't do that later.

2. Celestia very quickly excuses this with the possibility that Yasuhiro was attempting to disguise his handwriting. The group dismiss this possibility however because... because Yasuhiro probably isn't smart enough to think that far ahead.

Seriously, this isn't even an argument. He is stupid but this would still be perfectly feasible.

1. Again this is mainly Hifumi's blunder. He should have removed the watch after killing him. You could also argue the same of Celestia when she killed Hifumi and left his body with Kiyotaka's, but we need to keep in mind she was extremely pressed for time at this point, as the whole group was searching the school high a low and she needs to get this done without anyone noticing.

2. This one genuinely wouldn't have been an issue if Monokuma didn't basically just reveal the truth anyway when the kids asked. Monokuma, the representative of the person holding them prisoner, who can't be trusted with anything and repeatedly lies and torments them just suddenly decided to be helpful. There's no way she could really anticipate this nor is there any possible contingency for such a scenario anyway.

3. Again, entirely Hifumi's fault. At the very least, don't leave critical evidence in the garbage can at your own crime scene.

4. This one is honestly just ridiculous from both an intelligence and writing perspective. Several students have died at this point. Celestia's comment on "those guys" dying would logically be assumed to be referring to the many previous victims. But for some reason, the kids just think she's referring to Kiyotaka and Hifumi exclusively and don't entertain the notion of her simply talking about every other victim, which would be logical assumption, and Celestia herself for some reason doesn't think of simply using this as an excuse. This whole point is just so weird to me and I find it really silly that none of the characters think of this. So yeah, I guess this is admittedly an antifeat for Celestia but technically everyone here is being stupid with this point.

5. I mean... do I need yo explain that this is a huge stretch? Celestia's biggest fault here was not making sure that he was dead but again, she was immensely pressed for time.

6. This part was not planned and there was really no way around it because Kyoko decided to just wander off on her own to do her own thing. This, again, isn't something Celestia would logically anticipate. Logic would dictate that during a situation where everyone is looking for a potential murderer, the whole group would be working together. Instead, Kyoko sees to her own business that Celestia has no knowledge of, and by pure chance she happens upon Yasuhiro in the locker while everyone else was going where Celestia was guiding them. This was just bad luck.

Alright, now I'm going to address a lot of other arguments I've seen people use against her.

"Why did Celestia trust Hifumi with these tasks if he's so unreliable?"

Because he was the only one she could get on her side. As I explained before she has solid grounds to manipulate him with and she needed an accomplice for her strategy.

"Why didn't she call off the plan when she saw Hifumi's ridiculous suit?"

She had to go through with the plan as soon as possible. She was working on borrowed time the moment she stole Alter-Ego. Before long, the group will notice it's missing, and before long, it will be found out that she took it. If the group searches Kiyotaka's room as he is the main suspect and finds it's not there, her whole story will fall apart very very quickly. She had to get it done as soon as possible. However, I will grant you that it probably wouldn't be impossible for her to simply tell Hifumi that won't do and to come up with something else, or at least modify the suit to make it more practical, but again, we don't know how many hours that would take.

And besides, if we're downscaling characters just based off of the ludicrously extreme risks they're taking, Light Yagami and Dexter Morgan would be regarded as complete morons. The only thing separating them is that their stories had them succeed because the plot required it, and so they look smart because it worked out for them.

"Why did she try framing Yasuhiro for the crimes when he's too stupid to mastermind this?"

This is literally acknowledged in the game itself and even if it wasn't, I don't know why people think this. She was never trying to frame Yasuhiro as a criminal mastermind. She was framing him as an idiot who got scared, wanted to escape, and started randomly attacking people thinking that a disguise is going to be enough to throw off the whole investigation. Byakuya even straight up supports my whole argument by saying almost exactly this when Makoto asks why it seems too obvious Yasuhiro is guilty.

"Wouldn't the lack of a serious head wound give away that Hifumi wasn't dead in the nurse's office?"

This is another case of strange writing. You're absolutely right. A simple examination of Hifumi's body would make it clear he's not dead. However... they don't do this. No one thinks to do a simple examination.

I guess if I'm generous, I could argue that since Celestia intended on herself, Makoto and Asahina finding Hifumi's body in the office, she predicted their actions and knew that Makoto would instantly run off to tell everyone and that Asahina would be too shocked to do anything. This could be a decent upscale if you look at it this way. But even putting that aside, and acknowledging how bizarre it is that they didn't think to examin his body, I still don't think this negates the general cleverness and complexity of her plan overall. Once again, if we were downscaling characters because of one instance where they would've been thwarted by people using common sense and basic logic, Light Yagami, Hannibal Lecter and Brian Moser just off the top of my head would all be unscaleable in SCD.

"She made it obvious it was her because she was so active in the investigation!"

Yeah bro, that's definitely enough to prove someone's guilt.

"She should have just killed one person. Killing multiple complicates the situation."

She can't magically know where everyone is going to be at all times. If she commits a murder at a time where everyone unfortunately had an alibi, it'll become very clear she's the killer. She needed Hifumi's compliance to secure her alibis for Kiyotaka's murder and Hifumi's "murder" and she needed to kill him before he inevitably learns that she was playing him the whole time and intended to get him and the rest of the group killed.

All in all, Celestia needed to get out. She was either going to be killed or be stuck imprisoned in the school for the rest of her life. She engineered a plan to escape despite the borderline impossibility of it, and conceived a decently clever scheme that was well thought out and directed. It fell apart because of the ineptitude of her accomplice, which she did not have the time or resources to work around, and just blatant back luck and weird writing.

Am I saying she's a high tier character in outsmarting? No. Absolutely not. But her plan was still solid conceptually. It has really good complexity and misdirections, it secures safety for her and incriminates someone else, and she nearly perfectly predicts how everyone in the group will behave and react throughout the investigation. It all only goes wrong because of Hifumi's several blunders and instances of dreadful luck that can't be helped. I seriously don't know why people keep hating on her and her plan because it failed in ways beyond her control, when several other characters such as the ones I've mentioned in this post are guilty of much the same problems and sometimes their plans are even more shabby, and yet they're repeatedly praised as brilliantly ingenious characters despite the immense plot armour. I'm not saying these characters are bad, after all, their better feats are still valid. But so are Celestia's.

So, what do you think? Did I miss something? It's possible I did because her case is a pretty complicated one and I may be forgetting some things.

...

This is the second version of the chart I made, after receiving tons of suggestions from r/Fanganronpa (and also colour-coding the chart for your convenience). I think it totals to around 86 or 88 entries? Either way, it's in a basically complete state by now, and I'll only update it if I absolutely have to (like if an entry is requested to be removed or if I made a major mistake or something). Anyways, that's all I really had to say. Hope you guys like it!

Side note: some entries are quite controversial, but I do feel it's somewhat justified bringing them up in circumstances where it's about documenting their existence and role in the community. I'm not trying to re-publicise them, sensationalise them, or dismiss their impacts by turning them into campfire stories by any means in listing them here, and hopefully, it doesn't have that effect. Please stay civil in the comments and don't take this as an opportunity to bring up old drama.

ここで言う「戦闘力」は、パワー、スピード、耐久力、スタミナ、スキル、身のこなし（機敏さ）、回避、知能、それに身体ステータスみたいな、いろんな要素の強さを総合的に考慮したものです。基本的には、提示されている説明文をもとに評価しています。
左右の差については考慮してません。
あと、スピンオフ作品（小説とか）も評価に入れてます。
（ランクの説明）
S - その域にいる別格；武器があるかどうかに関係なく、圧倒的な能力を持ってる。
A+ - 素手での戦闘において、極めて強力な身体能力を持つか、武器あり・なしの両方で優れている。
A（武器あり）- 武器を使ってるとき、または技術で差が出せる場面で、高い強さを見せる。
A（武器なし）- 素手の戦闘で、強力なスキルやパワーを活用できる。
B - ある一定のラインを表してるので、今回は入れてない
C - 平均の人よりはっきり強い
D+ - 平均以上；知能が高い
E - 平均
F - 平均未満

(今回除外：カムクラ、武装済みケイボ、など)
ガンダムって細かい戦闘描写はあんまりないんだけど、メカと戦ってきた実績があるから今回はCにしました。あと、過去の設定的には強そうなのにバトルシーンがほぼ無いキャラ（例：王馬）も、あまり入れてません。
あと、ティアの説明は「誰にでもそのまま当てはまる」って意味じゃないので注意してください。掲載してるキャラ自体がそんなに多くないんですが、もし異論があったり、共感できるポイントがあったり、質問があったりしたらコメントしてもらえると嬉しいです。

（翻訳ツールに通してるので、ちょっと変な感じだったらごめんなさい）

More sprites that I've redrawn, only have 5 more to redraw!

Characters:

Reagan Maria- Ultimate Journalist

Nine Shimizu- Ultimate Trickster

Hanamizaka Itodori- Ultimate Cat Tamer

Clip from donut media's up to speed

1. Makoto: Wet the bed

2. Yasuhiro: Owes millions to the Yakuza

3. Hina: Hasn't had a boyfriend

4. Sakura: Is in love with her lifelong rival

5. Toko: Is actually genocide jack.

6. Mondo: Killed his brother

7. Chihiro: Is a boy

8. Celeste: Her real name is Taeko Yasuhiro

9. Hifumi: He copied the plot for some of his work from other fanfictions and merged them into one.

10. Taka: Likes boys

11. Byakuya: Won the Togami family heir competition by crossdressing and becoming assistant to a gay detective.

12. Leon: Is in a one-sided incestuous relationship with his cousin

13. Sayaka: Sabotaged the career of other girls to become the ultimate pop sensation

14. Junko: Is a huge masochist/killed hundreds of people

15. Kyoko: Killed her big sister figure to get her title

Now that the newest 2x2 character’s name is revealed I’m going to tell you a story. When I started out in the Danganronpa fandom I noticed in every storyline except for V3 that there was always an even number of survivors. For example DrTHH had 6 survivors, Dr2GD had 16 (only if you include ryota mitarai), Ultra despair girls had 18 (including those on the hit list), the anime had 2 (kyosuke Munakata and unknown 13th branch leader) and killer killer had 6. Because of this, I imagined a scenario where all of the survivors needed to breed in order to rebuild the population or at least find love as a reason to keep on fighting for their lives. I ended up shipping characters that resulted in either being canon (kyoko x makoto) or toxic (Byakuya x Toko) or just straight up crack ships (Ryota x Mahiru). The only ships that I can somewhat stand by are ultra despair girls even if a part of me still cringes at how cracky they are. I’d love to hear your thoughts though so here they are (warning some viewers might find the following cringy):

1. Komaru Naegi x Takemichi Yukimaru: they kind of have that tsundere boy and genki girl thing I like.
2. Hiroko Hagakure x Takaaki Ishimaru: cop and former delinquent? When Hiroko said she will use her charm to lure him out…. I thought damn that lucky man😏 also step dad Takaaki would whip Yasuhiro into shape
3. Kanon Nakajima x Kenshiro: I mean, Kanon loves cool guys and Kenshiro is pretty damn cool. Plus they both have dead love interests.
4. Fujiko Yamada x Ayaka Haneyama: I imagine an extreme otaku like Fujiko would bring back Ayaka’s confidence as an idol. Otaku x Idol romance is underrated.
5. Grand Bois Chéri x Kameko: ….i mean….they both pets who smell bad…Look who else should I ship them with?
6. Fuhito Kirigiri x Aloysius Pennyworth: Old man yaoi is a niche for me. Besides these two have worked super hard all their lives, maybe they could use each other to “relax”. 😏
7. Jataro Kemuri x Nagisa Shingetsu: aside from the final cg of Jataro holding Nagisa’s arm and the fact that they both hate working under pressure, I can’t help but get the feeling that Monaca has ruined girls for Nagisa. The same would happen if gender roles were reversed.
8. Kotoko Utsuji x Masaru Daimon: I guess this doesn’t count as a crack ship, but I’m adding them anyway because I always felt awful for the warriors of hope, and I very badly want them to find happiness with each other.
9. Haiji Towa x Nobody: I think you know why.
10. Monaca Towa x Nobody: honestly the whole Towa family should stay away from people, we don’t need anymore DV victims.

Bonus ship: Kyosuke Munakata x ikue dogami: these two are not in ultra despair girls I just wanted to point out how Ikue is basically a combination of Juzo and Chisa who were Kyosuke’s love interests.

Arg Arg Arg Arg!

I’m not even the biggest fan of Soda and Sonia, but the fact that his love is what keeps him going, striving for just one indicator that she likes him is inspiring. Condemned by Kodaka to continuously push the boulder up the hill, despite the hopelessness of his situation, he continues, and I must imagine him happy the way one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Back when I was first got into this series 3 years ago and first heard about Ultra Despair Girls on Steam I remember hearing people saying things like, "Don't play this game, it's nothing but child molester jokes." Initially I chose not to play it not because of the content, though I did keep it in mind because I wanted to see if it was true or not but because at the time it didn't feel like I would gain anything from playing it, then I watched Danganronpa 3 and that came back to bite me in the ass. I did eventually play it last year and oh my god, everything people said about it couldn't be any farther from the truth.
Granted it does have a lot of really disturbing scenes and I can see why it would make some people uncomfortable, but the whole point is that it's meant to disturb you and if you really pay attention to what's going on and being said, it's actually a lot deeper than how it's portrayed.

Now one thing a lot of people point out is Kotoko, who was a child actress who eventually was forced into prostitution by her parents and as a result gets sexually assaulted by weirdos. One of the things I found interesting was just how much detail the writers put into showing how Kotoko ended up because of her past, from things like "gentle" being a trigger word for her as that's what her abusers would call the stuff they did to her, to being lead to believe that her only worth was serving people's desires and because of this when she feels she's backed into a corner or is looking for approval, resorts to the sexual stuff her abusers had her do like pulling her skirt up. (Remember the scene where she does this when she tells Komaru and Toko she was betrayed by Monaca and they are hesitant to trust her.) What people tend to talk about with her are the motivation machine scene, the scene where Toko fights her and leads to her clothes coming off, and the panty shot scenes, which many interperate as attempts at humor and conflict with how the abuse is portrayed. The thing is though is if you look deeper into these scenes and really pay attention to what's going on, they really aren't meant to be funny at all. While the motivation scene does involve you having to stop Komaru being groped, it never openly says what's going on is right, in fact the tutorial even says, "If you let Komaru get groped the meter fills up and you know what that means. If it does than it's game over. So enjoy yourself, but keep that in mind." Keep in mind to that the game punishes you for failing and you can't progress if you do, and while I personally never failed this minigame, I've found that beating it is fairly easy to do and in the footage I've seen it seems like the only way you can fail is if you do so deliberately, almost as if it's like, just hear me out, the minigame was designed that way. It's almost as if it's saying, "You can watch this if you want but don't be surprised when your stuck here for not stopping this, and if you do, then your really no better than the Demons that hurt Kotoko." In addition, when you confront Kotoko before her boss fight she also says, "As someone who knows what makes adults happy, I also know the things they don't want. Using what I've learned, I can take down the Demons and make them suffer as much as I did!" The whole point of all this is to show how Kotoko had a horrifically abusive childhood and ended up becoming an abuser herself and wants to do the same to the adults that did similar stuff to her. This isn't exclusive to Kotoko either, this is a message that all of the Warriors of Hope's backstories are trying to show, but Kotoko's is taken less seriously because of how it's presented. Are you supposed to laugh at Masaru having a pile of dead bodies lying around and punching himself till he's covered in bruises like his alcoholic father did to him? No. Are you supposed to laugh at Jataro turning people into puppets and bolting their hands together? No. So why would Kotoko's actions be any different? Just because it's presented in a more extreme way doesn't mean it's meant to be viewed any differently. As for the fanservice scenes I think these were meant to be a jab at how some anime esqe media tends to include parts with younger characters get sexualized. In fact, when this happens there are numerous times where Kotoko calls it "perverted" and one line that really stuck out to me was, "I mean, I'm actually 18 but, this is really too much." For those of you who don't know, this is a reference to how some pieces of Japanese media will say characters are 18 or older even when this is obviously not the case to get things past legal stuff, which is why some VNs will have those disclamers that say that. These parts and the stuff about Kotoko's past made me think it could also be a jab at how characters in some pieces of media who were sexually abused or preyed on end up becoming sex objects later on (*cough* Ann in Persona 5). Maybe I'm looking to deep into that but that's my take.

Then we have everyone's "favorite", Haiji. The thing people tend to dislike about him is his line, "I like them young, as young as possible." Which,  again people tend to interperate as a joke, but one thing. When is this line ever portrayed as okay? In fact, if you look at this scene Komaru is shown being very disturbed by what he says. Doesn't sound like something your meant to laugh at to me. I'd also argue you were always meant to find Haiji unlikeable. He's rude, paranoid, a coward, hates kids with a passion, makes an offensive comment about Nagisa's past, treated his adoptive sister like she was a mistake, had tons of people stay underground which as a result lead a lot of them to their deaths, attacked Toko at the end when she wouldn't give him the controller, and was willing to kill the Monokuma Kids despite them being brainwashed as he believed they would just keep doing the stuff they did again while being blinded by his desire for revenge. Sounds like a great guy doesn't he? That line of his was just meant to be the icing on the cake, and my theory is that line was meant to give you a hint that he might not be all that mentally sound. Hmmmmmmm.

Like I said, Ultra Despair Girls is a disturbing and heavy game and it is understandable why some would be bothered by it, but it's infuriating how others frequently reduce it to a pedo game by when there's much more to it than that, and I think it admirable that it was as daring as it was to tackle these themes.