Welcome To The World

"This camera is only for IMPORTANT stuff!!!"

I’m not an angst person, but I had to get this idea out my head

fate.

it goes without saying that fandom as a whole is misogynistic. it definitely blows up in regards to the male female ratio of characters as well as fans themselves but even that sometimes goes completely out the window. whenever i refer to the writing choices in v3 i kinda hint at those choices being tsumugi’s choices; we know tsumugi shirogane is a video game character, she has no choices, “her” writing isn’t her own however there are conscious decisions made within v3 to frame them as such and within those choices we get insight into what tsumugi thinks will sell. the way i see it miu iruma was an experimental attempt at a female character having the qualities typically associated with the pervy male characters in the body of the bimbo female characters and if you take it a step further, gonta gokuhara is her opposite. if we bring tsumugi back into this it’s incredibly clear with her disdain and disgust at times with miu and overwhelming love and adoration for gonta, she definitely plays favourites and she does not hide it at all but despite attempting to subvert the character associations we make at first glance, tsumugi falls right back into reinforcing them because she is the personification of fandom in v3, and fandom is misogynistic.

i really like both gonta and miu but if we strip away my own opinions we get two very rigid characters, rigid in the sense that they have a niche they never fail to fall into, developmentally or not, miu is crass and gonta is gullible. to compare, teruteru is crass and sonia is gullible and those are perfectly acceptable things for those two to be, while quite a few people do find teruteru to be uncomfortable he is designed to be surprisingly perverted, he’s cute and short and his name is teruteru and so even though the first time we interact with him he’s fully jumped into his character there’s a comedic resignation that stays with him that’s especially emphasised during the first trial. we’re expected to laugh and shake our heads and go “classic teruteru!” because he’s a male character who can be more than the comments he makes to women and in sonia’s case there’s a reverence put in place for her that kazuichi sets the precedent for, she’s foreign and blonde and incredibly easy to incidentally rope into things and we accept her naivety because there’s a market surrounding whatever dere she is because she’s a female character.

sdr2 aside, gonta gets the best of both worlds, naive and male. we already know based off his gentle giant design that chapter four is going to be a rude awakening for him and so there’s an established gentleness when it comes to gonta, it’s shown he can be aggressive but never with any true malice behind it, he’s sweet and sensitive and cares about his friends and he’s also a murderer but that’s easy to brush off because it wasn’t really him. we can forgive his murder of miu because of kokichi’s involvement and if not that then the fact he had no memory of it and if not that then the fact that miu was going to kill kokichi and if not that then the fact that it would be better for miu to die than to face the despair that he also faced, which at that point doesn’t even sound that convincing. gonta is let off the hook because we all love him and we all feel a little bad for him, his limited understanding of the world despite his violent killing of miu makes it so that he can never fully be held accountable for it, in a way he reminds me of lennie from of mice and men, miu would be curley’s wife in this scenario and while i don’t think that’s the canonical reason behind the chapter four murder it would be really clever if that was the case. everybody hates miu except for keebo who surprisingly enough, as the audience surrogate, doesn’t really get a choice. she is incredibly perceptive in the trials, useful outside of them and as punishment for her existence she is strangled to death with toilet paper and it seems that only keebo and monotaro of all people truly care, it’s not new the idea of female characters being punished by the narrative for their “promiscuity” and it is old and repetitive but it’s especially interesting how that would even be relevant in a killing game, how the humiliation of female characters to prove a point permeates even in danganronpa of all things and while i do think miu’s character having a humiliation kink is something that can be seperate from the thematic way to be a woman, it’s very telling that even though she was the smartest, and definitely could’ve figured tsumugi out, her death had very little to do with her at all, it could’ve been anyone but then it would’ve lost the humour, that even sweet lovely kind gonta secretly wanted her gone too, that she was that bad.