I've recently finished the first Danganronpa and this thread is as good as an to get my thoughts out. Actually, while we're at it, how are you actually meant to play this series to get the full picture? As I understand, there's a light novel prequel to the first game you're meant to read before the second, the third mainline installment is actually an anime, and the third game is actually the fourth mainline installment, but also a reboot or something? Did I get that right? Anyways, considering I've only finished the first game I might be off the mark with a lot of what I'm gonna write, but bear with me:
Xed51 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 18, 2022 11:24 am
I think I said this on the old forum but Danganronpa is basically KTP/Silver Case without the politics. Even the line about the ultimate despair having no other goal than to cause despair is very similar to the line in the Killer7 intro where they describe the heaven smiles as doing terrorism for terrorism's sake.
I saw these as coming from pretty different places. The Heaven Smiles seem in that way mostly inspired by islamist terrorism and the paranoia thereof after 9/11, described as "terror for terror's sake" because the thought process behind religiously motivated violence feel incomprehensible to someone who doesn't share the perpetrators religion, or isn't religious at all. Violence that's based on a thought process that's impossible to understand might as well be completely arbitrary, and hence perfectly suited to inspire a general atmosphere of fear.
DR, at least on a surface level, treats Junko's ideology of despair as mostly an exaggerated depiction of teenage angst and rebellion evolving into full blown nihilism. It's of course not as simple as that, and I'll get back to that, but on face value, Junko is a spoiled teenage brat who commits acts of violence simply out of boredom. Her entire demeanour, not being able to have a conversation without playing up different over the top personas all the time, she seems more than anything like a caricature of dissafected youth adapting a cynical and nihilistic worldview. Hell, she calls people "lame" and "unhip" for rejecting that worldview.
There's been a fairly popular movie called Everything, Everywhere, All at Once early this year. If you haven't seen it, don't bother, it's sappy and unfunny. But that movies antagonist had a very similar "angsty teenage girl who became evil because she feels misunderstood". Now, that movie was effectively a soapy melodrama about a family who needs to reconnect, so obviously it didn't follow that premise through in any meaningful way. The girl in that movie (For a moment I thought her name might have been Hope, which would have been funny, but no, it's Joy) had some scheme about ending the multiverse by... baking a black hole bagel. It's a stupid non sequitur, never mind that. Where I'm going is, even though that movie is allegedly an action comedy, it used its action, i.e. violence, purely for the purposes of spectacle and slapstick. It had no interest in the actual ideology of violence, which DR clearly does and which obviously Suda does.
Suda's games, the Silver Case series specifically, is obviously mostly interested in how violence and terror are used to maintain control over a society, but what it shares with DR in regards to that is its interest in the metaphysics of it, in how violence and cruelty spread between people in a practically viral way. Mukuro's a character with very limited screentime and all the actual lines she has is when she's pretending to be her sister, but there's some pretty telling stuff in her backstory. In how she became radicalized as a teenager, went off to join a vaguely fascist coded militia only to adapt Junko's ideology of Ultimate Despair after she came home disillusioned. The whole believe system based on spreading despair through violence as a way to salvation with Junko as its prophet definitely reflects the role the idea of Kamui eventually takes on in Silver Case and its sequels.
The way it invokes collective trauma as a means to spread despair also somewhat mirrors many elements in the Silver Case games. It's kind of clever, because for a lot of the game I was second guessing myself whether it was intentional or whether I was just projecting something onto the game, but with the way it calls back to a nebulous past tragedy that seems to have occured at Hope's Peak I was wondering whether the game was intentionally trying to invoke a high school murder spree, until the blood soaked classroom on the top floor basically made it clear that that's what it was trying to invoke. Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty sure in universe the great tragedy that the first game keeps vague refers to a specific event which is clarified in the later games, but in a way the spectre of Columbine hangs over DR the way the spectre of 9/11 hangs over Killer7, as a great tragic event that shattered the spirit of a nation and marked the beginning for all subsequent murder rituals in high schools. Much like Hopes Peak general fortified architecture, the steel plated windows, the mounted machine guns and safety doors, all bring to mind the prison-like feeling footage of american high schools with their armed security guards and metal detectors.
Emphasised, of course, by how Junko/Monokuma outright tell you that the events of the game are a globally televised event with the purpose of bringing despair to its audience. Media in general and television in particular being one of the main transmitters of the ideology of violence is of course something else that comes up a lot in Suda's games, Killer 7 in particular. It's something I've been thinking about recently, actually, in the sense that television is a medium that's treated with justified suspicion by both the people alive before and after it became the dominant medium and only blindly accepted by those who grew up taking it for granted. In the sense of being a medium made for purely one sided, passive consumption of a stream of information determined by a third party that the viewer has no impact on. Despite being made in the early 80's David Cronenberg's Videodrome is still one of the best productions on the subject. The way it shows television waves warping the body and the mind of its protagonist, played by real life brainwashing victim James Woods, to turn him into an assassin for two allegedly warring secret societies with equally nebulous goals is still probably the most to the point, much less most stylish, version of that story.