I finished playing Danganronpa V3 this weekend and wanted to think about the overarching story and what I as a consumer of the game gleaned from it. I won’t mention any specific plot points for any of the games but since I am writing about thematic things, if you feel worried about spoiler territory, I would like to say to stop here.
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Danganronpa is a series of mostly visual novels in which a group of students are isolated and forced to engage in a game where the only means of escape is to kill another participant and get away with it. If they do, they walk away and everyone else dies. If caught, only they die and the game continues. According to the rules, once 3+ people discover a body, the students enter into an investigation phase, to gather clues that they use in a class trial. The rules to the game are very clear and enforced strictly. The trials have no nuance because the only thing to expose is who mechanically committed the murder and the only outcomes are to live or die. It’s in this strict framework that the writers explore a variety of themes and aim to extract as many tears from me as humanly possible.
I loved the V3 ending. One reason I loved it is because it reminds me of the tightrope of artistic responsibility. Using subversion and exaggeration as a tool adds impact to a work. In the short term, the dopamine brought by novelty makes the works that employ it stick with us but in time, we adapt to novelty and normalize subversion, turning warning into an aesthetic.
“Killing Games” like this game are a perfect example of this. The point of stylizing violence and presenting us with exaggerated scenarios like those from is to highlight the parallels between the injustice within these fictional worlds, and our current path as society. The challenge is that by using popular media as the channel, the creators end up doing as Audre Lorde warns not to do: they use the master’s tools to try to dismantle the master’s house. Using a capitalistic forum to disseminate an anti-capitalist message can only go so far and often the commercialization glosses over the point.
Also, outrage at fictional injustice gives us a false sense of being good people. We rail against bullies and root for underdogs. But these reactions seldom move the needle. We often go back to our real lives and reinforce behaviors that harm the very groups who are suffering and we cried for in fiction. There is also a danger in that by casually engaging with content like this we normalize the very things the message of the work warns us about and dulls our ability to notice red flags within our own society.
The way I navigate this is to understand my responsibility as a consumer of information. My responsibility in understanding what effects media has on shaping my world view, and engaging in the message in a way that refuses to convert the stylization into an abstract concept. I know when I need a break do something for the fun of it, but try to balance with the mental nourishment I need to not only keep my sense of empathy, but grow as a person.
I think Team Danganronpa understands nuance and used the ending of V3 to warn us not to lose our empathy and humanity as we engage in their story. That true binaries seldom exist, and that sometimes it’s in those clean binaries that we shelter ourselves from the very truths the story is conveying.
Stories are mirrors. Danganronpa reminds us of that and asks, why do we like killing games so much? And why has nothing changed despite the despair they warn us of?
Giving up on life and choosing death...is nothing but a blasphemy towards life. It is a violation of the natural order! It is the arrogance of humanity!
– Gundham Tanaka (Danganronpa 2)