Dangan Ronpa
[By Aevee Bee. This article was funded through Patreon under the ZEAL project. ZEAL provides high quality criticism of rarely discussed games, and showcases the talents of exciting new writers and artists. For details and information on how to donate, please check out our patreon!]
Fiction for teens is important, and the most important fiction for teens is fiction deemed unsuitable for teens. It’s an incredibly deft art of creation to make work for young adults that isn’t patronizing or trite and that’s probably why teens start seeking out stuff ludicrously inappropriate for them, because they have learned that sex and death exist and are fairly suspicious of stories that do not acknowledge them. It is hard to find anyone who will take you or your experiences seriously as a teen, and often fiction is the first place you will find it (and sometimes, for a long time, the only place). There's a lot of junk in Dangan Ronpa, and finding and talking about making art that isn’t junk is important, the most important, but we also grow up next to junk and can’t escape junk, and junk can be resonant in ways that sometimes literally nothing else is. You can't do a casual Tumblr search through the Dangan Ronpa tag and not see that this game is touching something important for a lot of young folx, and that is because not despite its melodrama, severe tone shifts, over the top characters, and bizarre backstory. Dangan Ronpa was not made as accidentally as many of our favorite games here at ZEAL, which is worth taking seriously if for no other reason (I say even though I think apologizing for taking stuff aimed at young adults seriously is really boring and unnecessary (as are spoiler warnings, so consider this here is yours right now because I’m not holding even a little back)).
If you have been reading ZEAL for a bit, maybe it is apparent by now my favorite thing is fiction that doesn’t care if things get weird. Other things Dangan Ronpa is not afraid to do: be excessive and indulgent. Make jokes in a game about murder. Genre shift from slapstick comedy to genuine violence without time for the reader to emotionally prepare. Be melodramatic. Let its characters be less than pristine. Be lewd. Have characters that are impossibly huge and outgoing with exaggerated personalities. Suddenly become a science fiction narrative about contagious existential despair spread by high school students that destroyed the entire world. Deliberately draw attention to how they are not even explaining how any of the science fiction plot devices required for this twist actually work!
We here at ZEAL have been talking about the creation of characters and worlds in games, frequently about accidental decisions with fascinating consequences, which makes Dangan Ronpa a bit different because so many of its decisions around character and world aren't emergent consequences of the game system but baked into its premise. That's why the blood in Dangan Ronpa is searing pink, because they wanted a game about teens murdering each other to be purchasable by teens, maybe saying in and of itself just about everything about Dangan Ronpa knowing its audience. Stories about hot teens dying are terribly compelling, for everyone but especially for teens. Dangan Ronpa is hugely popular among a demographic that it’s just barely on the edge of being technically suitable for, and that is not weird but exactly what I would hope and expect; waves of recession have cultivated a Japanese young adult fiction industry for teens that not only are fully aware how awful entering society is going to be and how difficult it will be to even do it.
As the premise is "teens murder each other and must figure out which one of them did it or be killed themselves" Dangan Ronpa is hugely melodramatic, a convergence of both the mastermind's plot to fill the students with despair and the creator's desires to fill the players with supercharged emotions. Throwing super intense characters in a super intense situation gets teen feelings in ways that not a lot else does—it's quite the opposite of the realism of teen experience but captures the truth that's in the sheer intensity of how dramatic and overwhelming and apocalyptic and life or death living can feel, and not just for teens.
Real human beings don’t actually behave like the cast of Dangan Ronpa either, yet Dangan Ronpa still works very well at a sort of melodramatic truth beyond the truth, even because of it. It's possible to cartoonishly distort and exaggerate the texture and character of anime characters and still have them resonate with reality, no differently from how Dee Goggans plays with their physical anatomy in the title illustration up there at the top. The deliberate exaggeration works well as it’s not the point of Dangan Ronpa to provide a subtle and meditative critique in the first place so much as it is about representing how intense and awful it is to be a teen. The personalities are less realistic than the murders but they’re there for the same reason, because impossibly intense hot teens dying is very compelling no matter how clearly the seams show.
This is the exact reason why every characters is “ultimate something-or-other,” not even just a stock type like the jock or the nerd or whatever but the ULTIMATE jock/nerd/whatever. The framework for creating these super intense characters is of course equally extreme, and the game even draws your attention to the fact that they’re larger than life. There’s practical reasons for this — cliche character traits are easy starting points to build from; Fire Emblem:Awakening does this too, and believe me it is very hard to create that many characters in a plot vacuum without some kind of structure. The personalities have to be huge so that they’ll clash with each other, because that’s the place at which the characters start getting interesting and this game is noticeably more about the motives and emotional results of the murders than the logic puzzle of solving them. It’s important that the characters are at odds with themselves as much as each other, too, to give them weak spots and vulnerabilities and places for motive and conflict. So say, the Ultimate Swordswoman is played to type as this cold-eyed badass, but she has a ludicrously cute name (Peko Pekoyama). The contrast makes her interesting; you want to know why she’s like that. The Ultimate Punk Rock Girl is based on subtle nods to impossibly cute ultrafeminine anime K-on, yet she’s got dyed hair and piercings and talks at 100mph.
Dangan Ronpa’s willingness to let their characters be less than pristine is part of why Dangan Ronpa stands out compared to a lot of its anime contemporaries. The characters are very funny, but a lot of what makes them funny is a function of their emotional baggage, the contradictions between the self they show the world, and the person they really are. Mikan, Ultimate Nurse, apologizes reflexively and attracts bullying like a lightning rod and that is extremely, painfully relatable, despite that her clumsiness is played for laughs; there is an uncomfortable edge to her weakness and fear beyond the joke of it, and it's a hook the story continues to build on. Hiyoko, the Ultimate Dancer, bullies Mikan at every opportunity, and it becomes clear that's because Hiyoko is clumsy, awkward, and helpless herself, and she’s reacted to bullying by being a bully herself. She’s more merciless to Mikan than anyone else precisely because the weakness she despises in Mikan is the weakness she despises in herself, and that never needs to be said out loud because you were her or knew someone like her and you know enough about how human beings work to do the math yourself.
Mikan's arc is particularly fascinating, as she is the one character who gets back her erased memories during the course of either of the Dangan Ronpa games. In Dangan Ronpa 2, the cast are all victims of a world-wide contagion of existential despair started by their classmate Junko Enoshima, and while we know that at one time all of them were utterly enthralled with and obedient to her, Mikan is the only one who gets to talk about it.
Mikan describes how a specific person (who couldn't possibly be anyone but Junko) accepted her fully and completely and returned the love she gave her in full. It's impossible to argue that the distance and pity her classmates treat her with is equal to the feeling she's describing. Dangan Ronpa is ostensibly about hope resisting despair, but Mikan comes in as a reminder, of how compelling Junko's despair for the sake of despair was. Matthew Burns told me, while we were discussing this essay, that one of the more quietly terrifying realities of adolescence is the knowledge that one day you’re going to have to enter society while simultaneously becoming aware that society is deeply horrifying.
The most believable thing in Dangan Ronpa is that existentially despairing high school students destroyed the entire world. It is not very realistic, sure, because no one ever offers teens the means to destroy the entire world, but it is pretty emotionally believable; I mean, I sure did want it. This is a super high school level weird world building decision to explicitly make though, which I love just on principle, and I love ten times more because of the refusal to actually explain on any level how any of the process of destroying the world actually happened. Answers to how the students had their memories of the world ending erased or what the actual moment of despair so powerful just experiencing it destroyed all hope on the planet was are deliberately and explicitly not given.
That is kind of an audacious decision when way too much of contemporary science fiction and fantasy worldbuilding takes such pride in creating and detailing and expounding on the complexity and consistency of a fictional universe without remembering to give you a reason to care why. Instead, Dangan Ronpa has Junko declare she’s not going to explain the plot device, because the mechanics of how the world ended are irrelevant to why the world ended: “I could explain it, but it wouldn’t be any more believable, would it?” Junko gets it. It would be trivial to detail a science fictional device X that would make for a plausible explanation here, but that would require spending a lot of time and energy on the least relevant and important part of a story that is ultimately about sad teens dying. But why not completely forgo a logical explanation when it’s the emotional truth that’s much more interesting? If you’re going to build up continuity garbage, at least only build up the parts that we care about!
It’s a game about the characters and Dangan Ronpa could never make the ending believable without Junko. Junko doesn’t answer how the world ending, but she embodies the why; to use a murder mystery metaphor, Junko explains the motive but not the method, and in this story that’s by far the most important part. Junko is hilarious and cute and beautiful and clever and has zero inhibitions and is very believably compelling to people who are realizing that the world is not a very good place and does not love them. Junko loves them though, even if what she loves about people are their tragedies, not unlike the audience. Bad things happening feels real and she loves that. She loves it when other people feel hopeless but she loves feeling hopeless too, and because of that she’s terrifyingly invincible, and she is because she actually feels everything so strongly. She gets to have everything, the freedom to feel without ever feeling anything bad, because emotion itself is pleasant to her, whether it’s good or bad. It’s an unbelievable premise, but Junko makes the idea of the world ending due to worldwide existential despair believable because of how she makes despair seductive, makes despair disturbing, makes despair sexy — she is after all the Ultimate Fashionista, and she makes despair a look and it looks good on her, so it’s not too hard to understand why she was able to make the world over with it.
Dangan Ronpa has a different angle—please, give me more of this angle. I never ever care about how the science fiction premise works; I promise, from the bottom of my heart, to believe in the explanation of absolutely anything you tell me, even if the explanation is "I don't even feel like explaining it." Science fiction or fantasy isn't even a good way to describe Dangan Ronpa; it's just pure Anime, reality cartoonishly distorted in ways that will make feel real. My earnest belief is that science fiction or fantasy should do the same, alter reality only insofar as it brings out the truth reality can't bear. I have no use for explanations that don't offer me that.
