#drante lockdown

hi!!! ive FINALLY started ante and even before i started the prologue i was IMMEDIATELY captured by Mint!!! hes so cute! so I had to draw him :D!! i have some thoughts up to where i stopped below!

- CHP 1 SPOILERS UP TO DEADLY LIFE BELOW - -

okay so i immensely enjoyed drante lockdown, i love talking and theorizing about what’s coming next and i adore the characters and character dynamics

but (and this is not a real but) i feel completely out of my depth when beginning to consider writing fic for it. meanwhile, even though we have less of pjeg’s story i feel able to jump into (my interpretation of) damon maitsu’s mind.

i’m about to compare damon and shinku but not in a way that assigns value to either one of them. i just think it’s interesting to think about what makes these two fangans so different despite having the same source material, and both being games.

at the core of danganronpa is the mystery. not just of the individual cases, but of the overarching story. love or hate the mysteries (or the answers to them), they are as much part of danganronpa as the class trial. mystery is to danganronpa what adventure is to zelda.

what’s interesting to me is that these two fangans handle this mystery element in almost opposite ways.

in pjeg, the mystery is the killing game. why are they there? who is tozu? mara? what is with the biblical imagery? why is there a force field? where are they? their world is not ours, though it looks close enough that it’ll trick you. it’s only when you dig deeper, notice the way they talk about books, the names they use for states, that you realise things are different beyond just the concept of “ultimates”. we only have one chapter out, but the setting and the world is what the player is asked to question. it’s what we’re left to ponder.

damon maitsu is a not a mystery. yes, there are details about his life that are revealed to us (and will be revealed to us) but they are not vital to understanding who he is. we understand incredibly well who he is. the reason he struggles socially with his classmates is because of how direct and blunt he is. he calls it as he sees it, and so far his internal narration pulls us into his world. i know who damon maitsu is. i know what makes him tick. i may not know the specifics of his upbringing, but i don’t need to.

in drante lockdown, the world is still a mystery, of course. we are left with questions about our guards, about our custodian, about the anti ultimate movement. the circumstances of the killing game will always be a question, that’s unavoidable, but i would argue that it is not our core mystery. our core mystery is, in my opinion, shinku kutsuki.

when thrown into the killing game, and informed that every participant is there because of a crime they committed, the player’s first question is; what did our protagonist do? the game could’ve answered this immediately, reassured the audience that it wasn’t that bad, and our poor sweet crime novelist doesn’t belong there at all. but it doesn’t. through two chapters, we haven’t learned shinku’s crime, and i thoroughly doubt it’ll be revealed in this next batch of voting. the game leaves hints, leads to come to conclusions based on assumptions, but it hasn’t confirmed anything. and i think, given drante lockdown’s themes and the way it’s challenged assumptions when it comes to characters like ismene (and mint. and molly. and and and), shinku’s crime is not going to be something we expect.

so damon and shinku are opposite in that damon is just about the only person we can trust, while shinku is someone we absolutely cannot. (at least until more content comes out and disproves all of this analysis and i look like an idiot)

so to bring this long winded post back around to fanfiction, that is why i have struggled to put myself in shinku’s shoes, but i find myself living in damon’s with ease. i think i understand damon. but how can i begin to understand shinku when such a core part of his identity and character is being withheld from us?