Nightposting

there were two of these and I don't know which of you is telling the truth. therefore I will answer both with different answers for the original question.

So class 78 needs converted to Despair and to aid Junko in place of class 77. There are two ways I think this could play out; one where Junko really talks them around and they go full Despair, and one where she reaches some sort of twisted equilibrium with her more hopeful classmates that significantly changes her plans. This one is the former.

I thought about it and have laid out the insecurity that Junko uses to blackpill every classmate and what Junko subsequently uses them for.

Makoto asks Chihiro, "Are you ready?"

Chihiro does not enjoy the network like some of their teammates do. On some level, they've all been conditioned to crave guidance and submission, but there's only so much one can enjoy being a tool in someone else's hands. People like Mondo and Toko appreciate getting out of their own heads for a while, while Sakura and Leon enjoy the simplicity of having a clear, achievable goal.

Chihiro doesn't like the sensation of someone else in his head no matter how used to it he is, and he probably never will. It doesn't change anything. He still appreciates that Makoto gives him the illusion of agency when they have the time for it. Junko likes to sneak up on him.

"As ready as I can be. Is it still only me and Sayaka for this mission?"

"Yep, you two should be more than enough." Makoto smiles encouragingly. Then, he snaps his fingers. It's their cue to meet the head's eyes; the heads don't need them to look to connect them, but it makes the process smoother for everyone. Chihiro makes direct eye contact and feels Makoto's will settle atop his own. Whatever Makoto wants is what Chihiro wants, whatever Makoto orders his body to do is what it will do, there is no disruption between Sir's command and Chihiro's obedience.

"Report your connection status," Makoto orders.

"Full connection, Sir."

Junko likes to tease when she does her connection test. Her commands are always along the lines of tell me I'm pretty or kneel down and lick my shoes. Once, when she was really pissed off she made Hiro--well. There's a reason Chihiro appreciates how professional Makoto's connection checks are. He can be talked into an evil one every now and then, though, so he has to keep on his toes even with him.

Something flighty sits at the periphery of his mind, and Chihiro realizes that Sayaka is already connected. He shouldn't have stalled so long, Sayaka doesn't really like the network either, if he'd known he was keeping her waiting--enough, floods through Chihiro's mind. You have done nothing wrong. Stop acting like it.

Chihiro's guilt evaporates. Makoto's word is absolute truth when they're connected, so Chihiro has no choice but to believe him. Walk with me.

They meet Sayaka at the door. She's vacantly pleasant, just like Chihiro. When they reach their destination, Chihiro immediately gets to work infiltrating the office building's wireless network. He can't hear whatever order Makoto relays to Sayaka, but she approaches the front door with a sway to her hips and smile on her face.

Sayaka will handle the receptionist first. I'll tell you what to change in their schedule.

Chihiro can only imagine half of the mission. The moment the receptionist speaks to her they'll be lulled into ease. They'll tell Sayaka anything she asks once she tells them it's nothing to worry about. It's physically impossible to distrust or disagree with Sayaka when she's active.

You will put Munakata Yachi on the schedule of Gabu Taichi for right now. Erase any conflicts.

Yes, Sir.

It's easy to do. Their cybersecurity is standard for a day traded company, which is to say it's less than nothing to Chihiro. He pulls up the relevant c-suite's internal profile and puts Sayaka's cover where it needs to go to give her indisputable right to go upstairs.

She's in. Revert any changes you just made.

Chihiro's mind is empty for a while as Sayaka does her work inside. Every few minutes, Makoto's affection wordlessly floods through their thread of the network. On simple missions, Makoto will often send some sort of regular acknowledgement to assets on standby. Chihiro hasn't been forgotten, only set aside for a short while.

She's located the private computer and plugged in the thumb drive. Upload everything you were briefed on and anything else that might be useful to objective three.

Laptops that aren't connected to the internet are nuisances to Chihiro, being out of his reach until he can touch them under normal cicumstances. The code on the thumb drive Sayaka plugged in is benign, only turning on the network connection of the computer and pinging Chihiro once available. It's easy to sift through this guy's hard drive, but it does take several minutes.

I'm done, Sir.

They wait together for Sayaka to make her way out of the building, Chihiro wiping the cameras behind her of the entire day so far.

Sayaka's peppy smile slides off into vague pleasantness as she reaches them.

"Good work you two," Makoto says. "Time to go."

Their handlers have heavily discouraged them from disconnecting until they're back at base. Chihiro isn't really sure why, but neither Junko nor Makoto answer the others when they ask, so Chihiro has never asked for himself. Even though it feels like an eternity every time the mission is complete but he can't have his brain back, eventually, they do make it home.

Sir snaps. Chihiro and Sayaka look to him as one. He turns to Sayaka first, and her shoulders slump the same time that her eyes brighten. Makoto turns to him next, and Chihiro feels the weight of the head's will slowly lift away, unwrapping his mind from the comfortable but smothering blanket of the network.

"Everything feel alright?"

"All good, "Chihiro croaks. He could really use some water.

More thoughts under the cut, this got away from me. I also now realize that you said "ultimate despair" which implies they helped set up the tragedy instead of just falling to despair, which would be an entire other thing. I would like thinking about it if you want though

I've not thought about it before, but it IS a fun thought experiment. I think the only way class 78 falls to Despair is if Makoto falls first, and the my favorite way I see that happening is just after the Tragedy starts.

Maybe Junko wants to revel in the despair of her classmate's helplessness while they're aware enough to hate her even more, and tells Makoto about the killing game after it's all set up. Maybe she tells him it's going to be so awful that even the broken world outside will feel bad for them. Do you think you'll die first, Makoto? You're such a doormat it wouldn't surprise me. There's nothing you can even do about it, you know? Our friends are going to die.

At any other moment in time, he wouldn't believe her, and if he did believe her, he would believe that she could be talked out of it, or failing that, contained. She just started a worldwide Tragedy, though. Everything is fucked, his classmates agreed to live in this school forever because they could all see that it's fucked. He doesn't know where his family is. Junko is going to take even more from them just because she likes hurting herself.

In my 78 despair AU, Makoto murders Junko before she can erase their memories, but not before they've locked themselves inside together. He doesn't try to convince anyone else, doesn't give her the benefit of the doubt. This is post-trial 1 Makoto lashing out at unimaginable cruelty, with no Kyoko to hold him back. 50/50 on whether or not Mukuro is there. Having her there would be both security and despair-inducing for Junko, so let's say she is, and she let's it happen. She could step in at any time before Junko fully dies, Makoto is not a professional killer...and she doesn't.

Looking a beloved classmate in the eye and killing them breaks something in Makoto. It doesn't matter that it was to save his friends, it doesn't matter that Junko was awful, he killed another person. She was awful, but she could've gotten better, maybe. No one gets better if they're dead. Junko is Dead. Makoto killed her. The world outside is still an ongoing Tragedy.

There are a lot of ways to approach the class trials and what they have to say symbolically in THH, but I want to examine class trials as a metaphor of interpersonal conflict and how Makoto navigates it.

A class trial is fundamentally a disagreement between people on an important issue. It is about the process of answering questions any issue involving more than one person should consider. What is the truth? How do you not only find what the truth is, but make it palatable? How do we get even the most disagreeable kinds of people to act on what is best for everyone? That's why the gun is so interesting to me. As a metaphor for how Naegi sees what he’s doing during trials, this is how he frames/ feels about his own voice.

It’s a weapon he’s using against people. At the beginning of the game it's a weapon he's using to protect himself, then ultimately by the end to protect the others. From Junko, from despair, from themselves--the parts of themselves susceptible to the former. It remains a weapon.

You would think it doesn’t suit someone so non-aggressive. Makoto is a bit of a jackass, and he's not immune to lashing out, but a bullet is a precise kind of harm. It’s less about aggression, then, symbolically, and more about disruption. Mr. Normal McNothingspecial visually disrupts other people's words by firing at them with a gun.

It is abnormal behavior to cause disruptions. Be polite, save face, blend in. This is what is expected of the average person in society. The flash and spectacle of a gunshot draws attention. The sharp crack of a gunshot demands attention. Makoto is making a scene. To openly disagree with someone to the point of undermining them is outside of what would be considered acceptable behavior when talking to his peers. The importance of the issue on the table removes Naegi's ability to cling to normalcy. Normal boys don’t carry bullets in their pocket, but even though Naegi doesn’t start any of these conflicts, they involve him anyway, so he can’t just nod along to whatever the majority is saying. He can’t go with the flow if it’s going the wrong way. No one is allowed the dignity of deflection or overlooking a faux pas, everything you say can and will be used against you, ruthlessly. Often, Makoto is the one using his friends' words against them.

The game is a disruption of normal life. The gun is a disruption of normal conduct.

There’s nothing civil about a gunshot wound. Getting shot overtakes your entire nervous system. It hurts like a bitch and keeps hurting. In an argumentative context, this is humiliation. Nobody wants to make their friends look bad. Nobody wants to make others feel bad. To get to consensus, everyone in the room must be on the same page, and there's not always a way to do that that doesn't hurt someone's feelings or image. Naegi cannot allow them to be wrong; openly disagreeing with them still feels like shooting them point blank. It’s so backwards to normal it can only be framed as violence.

It also plays into Makoto’s insecurities about how insignificant he feels next to people his own age, his own class even. A gun, unlike a knife or sword or fist, is an equal opportunity sort of weapon. A pop star can’t win a knife fight against an athlete. Even a loser who does their research on reddit could kill someone with a gun. There’s something to believing yourself to be powerless, and giving yourself power through a weapon anyone can wield. Load the bullet, aim, fire. See the look on your friend’s face. Reload. Any of these people could shatter you like glass if they decided they wanted to, but you can do this much. You can load another bullet into the chamber. Makoto is so insistent that his class trial performances are nothing special. He doesn’t believe he could do it if it was special; anyone can be effective with a loaded gun.

I think this leads into the concept of Makoto’s future survivor’s guilt quite elegantly. The very process of forming consensus wounds his friends. Over and over, every time a new shock to the system. He’s hurting them by arguing with them, by never letting anything slide, by disrupting discussions when they head the wrong way. Some of them couldn't handle the stress and cracked, and died. They died because he never let a bullet go unfired, except that he did.

He never shot to kill Kirigiri. He did let someone save face. He didn't use her words against her. If he could do it for her, should he have done it for the others? Would they be alive if he hadn't hurt them? Should Alter Ego have let him die? He lied, he lied, so why did his friends die and not him? Why didn't anyone shoot his own hypocrisy at him when he came back? (nothing about the killing game was anyone's fault but the mastermind's. It will still feel like he could have been kinder.)

That last segment, shooting the hope bullet, brings this rejection of politeness somewhere interesting to me. In this framework this one last shot, is not a metaphorical killing blow. In effect, he is killing Junko, but in practice, this becomes surgery. Targeting the center of his friends' fears, their worst impulses, and excising the parts of them that hurt them the most. An outlet to bleed the rot that accumulates over an adolescence's worth of trauma, over a killing games worth of despair. Sometimes, humans cut someone open to heal them. Naegi shoots his friends to inspire them. This is significant! Guns are not tools the way other weapons are, the only thing they should be able to do is injure, yet this moment defies that box. There is always hope in this world. This world where even a gunshot can be kind if the hands holding it care about you.

I think this says something else nice too. That to be truly inspiring, to change the world, (to help a friend) you can’t be afraid of disrupting the peace. Minding your own business is great for a trip to the grocery store, but when it matters? When someone you care about is looking you in the face saying some absolute nonsense? Disrupt them. Stop that thought in its tracks. Conflict with them now is a better alternative to losing them altogether later. Some things are worth causing a fuss about.

Komaeda was declared the winner of their debate today, and Ishimaru feels thoroughly trounced. He knows that there were flaws in his upperclassman's argument, but attempting to address them in the moment had eluded Ishimaru today, unable to satisfyingly counter one before Komaeda redirected the conversation to another (wrong) argument. If he wants to win tomorrow, he needs not only to better prepare his own case, but a new strategy entirely.

He asks Naegi to come to the debate club's next meeting. "Not to argue!" Ishimaru assures him. "I would like your assistance in my upcoming debate against Komaeda on Friday, and to better prepare, you must study the opponent with your own eyes. There's nothing more reliable than a primary source when researching!"

Naegi reluctantly attends the Wednesday debate. Komaeda and Koizumi are against each other first, and Naegi mostly pays attention. He might let his mind wander and doodle in the margins in the middle there, but debate for the sake of it just isn't really his wheelhouse. Then, it is Ishimaru's turn to debate Komaeda and Naegi witnesses a car crash. They're supposed to be talking about the effectiveness of national vs local environmental policy to combat deforestation--how on earth did they get to arguing over whether efforts can ever surpass born talent???

At first, Naegi only feels uncomfortable in a vaguely insecure way. Then Komaeda just keeps talking and he forgets to take any notes entirely because he's completely flabbergasted. The school has to know he acts like this, right? Why are they letting him walk around like this? After club is over Ishimaru asks what he thought of Komaeda's presentation and Naegi can only say, "Healthy people don't talk about other people like that. Do you think Hope's Peak would pay for therapy? Because that guy needs it."

"I will bring your concerns up to the staff at a more appropriate hour! However, I insist we return to the topic at hand. Perhaps crushing his arguments will be enough to change his despicable mindset!"

Naegi doesn't think it likely. He follows Ishimaru to the library anyway to compare notes. Mostly, Ishimaru shoves his own extensive notes at Naegi, every argument Komaeda made in frenzied handwriting on page. "How would you refute this first argument, Naegi?"

Ishimaru really wants this, Naegi thinks. This matters to Ishimaru more than he realized. He doesn't really get it, the drive his classmates all share to win, but he's never needed to understand to lend them a hand. Naegi musters up the energy to really attack this.

"First off, your strategy of taking down one point at a time would actually be better served if you start by pointing how none of these arguments make any sense together."

"Huh?"

Makoto points to the first bullet point, and then somewhere halfway down the page points to another argument. "These two things don't belong in the same conversation, let alone a coherent argument. Let Komaeda make his points, as many as he thinks he needs to, and then find the ones that don't make any sense together. Press him on it, make him justify why those two things aren't contradictory. They are, so whatever he comes up with will be nonsense. Use that reason to frame all of these, and they'll all come up short by his own reasoning."

"It appears I was missing the forest for the trees. I was so focused on how contradictory his statements were to my own beliefs that I didn't notice how contradictory they were to his own previous words." Ishimaru looks over the arguments list more closely, and points to five eleven and twelve. "Not all of them are, though. These two work quite well together, and strengthen his previous argument here. He is not an incompetent opponent, so how would you dismantle this reasoning?"

They talk it over. Ishimaru rarely gets to see Naegi like this. He'd asked for his help specifically based on previous averted disasters where Naegi has successfully talked his classmates out of foolish behavior, but he hadn't anticipated that Naegi would go all out for this challenge.

Ishimaru loves it when his classmates give their all to something. It's both motivating and reassuring when his peers show the initiative needed to be upstanding citizens. He himself will need to be his best to keep up with them, and more personally, he enjoys taking note of what they're passionate about. However, Naegi doesn't often show passion for things. It's somewhat disappointing, but Ishimaru can admit that his willingness to never take anything too personally is a boon in their class of eclectic and often headstrong personalities. He's honored, in that light, that his classmate took Ishimaru's request for assistance so seriously.

Ishimaru utterly destroys Komaeda on Friday. He knew Naegi was the right person to ask about this, the look on the club members faces when putting into practice this alternative style he'd studied is very, very satisfying. Arguing with his rival usually feels like attempting to walk uphill in a landslide, but today Ishimaru has felt more in control of of conversation than ever.

Komaeda compliments him on his victory. "I'm glad that I was able to push you to new heights. It only makes sense that I was thoroughly beaten today."

"Yes! This is the power of effort, you know. I studied Naegi's strategy for hours in preparation for this moment, and such hard work paid off!"

"...Naegi's strategy?"

"Naegi Makoto, Class 78's own lottery winner. He is very persuasive when he feels the need to be, and I requested his advice on how to better reject your ridiculous world view. He was very helpful!"