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m-y-fandoms · 9 months

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COMMISSION: Kokichi Ouma dating a taller woman (headcanon list + drabble)

Word Count: 1.4K words approximately

Warnings/Details: SFW was requested, so any NSFW headcanons would have to be a separate piece. Expect fluff, romance, and possible unhealthy relationship elements because it’s Kokichi, but still SFW overall.

(A taller woman is defined here as literally even an inch taller than him, all the way up to a major height difference. I’ve dated a man only an inch shorter than me and definitely noticed that inch difference so we have a wide height range to work with here! I personally am imagining a woman at least a good five inches taller than him in my mind, but again, anyone taller than him in any way would work!)

As friends before you two were officially dating (but he had a crush on you):

Kokichi is definitely the type to tease and pick on the people he likes. It might even be hard to tell he has a crush on you because he’s mischievous and obnoxious with everyone. Depending on your personality type, you might enjoy just having his attention so often or, you might think he hates you or is just trying to bully you.

If you respond by liking the attention or teasing him back, he would get super confident and a little more touchy each time. It would become increasingly obvious that he’s flirting with you.

If you responded by pulling away or getting offended, he would become frustrated. In his mind it would be obvious that he likes you. Why else would he be giving you so much of his precious time and attention??? He would be a little whiny when you responded poorly or eventually feel the need to explain that he really likes you, but he would hate having to explain it. His cheeks would get all red, he’d roll his eyes, talking to you like you’re some idiot for not picking up on his cues.

Kokichi lies to everyone, even himself, so even though he acts like his height doesn’t bother him and even might joke about it sometimes, it probably bothers him at least a tiny bit deep down. He doesn’t make it a focus in his life but doesn’t like when people point it out, even if he plays it off and has a sarcastic rebuttal for them.

Therefore, when he finds himself crushing on you, a woman taller then him, he for sure would use your height to tease you. If he’s going to feel insecure, then everyone’s going to feel insecure. He doesn’t want you to think his height matters/is a flaw, so him teasing you will prove he’s confident in himself, right?

You’d definitely hear a bunch on uncreative jabs and nicknames: tree trunk, giraffe, skyscraper, stretch, bigfoot, lamp-post, daddy long legs, gigantasaurus, Goliath, stilts, rooftop, and so on and so forth.

He might surprise attack you, running and jumping onto your back and latching on. Whether or not this takes you down to the ground or you carry him around like a baby sloth matters little to him.

After you two start dating:

Sometimes, he will like to prove implicitly that he is not weak and not to be looked down upon for his size…

When you two are alone, he sometimes will pull at your hair or the collar of your shirt to bring you down to his height so he can kiss you or whisper in your ear.

He likes to put you in physically uncomfortable positions to fluster and corner you. Feeling like he’s in control and can make you nervous excites him.

He will corner you in hallways, push you up against walls and trap you in between his arms.

He’s much stronger then he looks, but like with most aspects of Kokichi, what you see initially, isn’t always what you get.

When you two are alone in his room, he will cage you below him on his bed to kiss you, hold you down, be more assertive and initiate make-out sessions.

If you’re sitting together talking or playing games, he might pull you onto his lap, reassuring you in his own immature, aloof way that you’re not too heavy for him.

The teasing never stops, and certainly not in public. Kokichi isn’t one to bring down his walls and be vulnerable and romantic in front of others. Protective, possessive, or jealous maybe. He reserves his true feelings and mushy moments for when you two are alone, and threatens you with death should you tell anyone.

If he does let out some PDA with you, it’s purposely to fluster you or scare away others that he thinks are interested in you.

Also, he’s very much the “Only I can make fun of Y/N” or “Only I can hold Y/N’s hand” type of boyfriend, especially if you’re insecure about your height already. He gets clingy and jealous even when you’re just being platonic with others.

You were sitting in your dorm room for once. Usually, you found yourself spending the night in Kokichi’s, but he was being rather secretive about his room for some reason this week. You sat next to him on the ground, looking at a splayed out deck of cards on the floor. You often spent the nights like this: with him, either wandering the school grounds and getting up to trouble or in his room where he could have you all to himself. He could be selfish like that, clingy. Sometimes seeing others get close to you made him more jealous than he’d like to admit.

And you could most definitely tell when it was one of his more needy days. He’d be more whiny, showing his true feelings through a furrowed brow here or a scrunched nose there. He sighed, tired of leaning his head onto your shoulder. He wanted more, more contact with you, more of you entirely. Without warning, he grabbed both hands firmly onto your legs and pulled you into his lap. He was sitting with his legs criss-crossed, and with an unexpected show of strength for someone of his size, he sunk his slender, pale fingers into the meat of your thighs and slid you effortlessly into his lap. He snuggled you in and you slotted perfectly into the cavity of his hips and thighs.

You squirmed in protest, gasping a little at the surprise of being lifted so suddenly. Your cheeks warmed up at the close contact and intimate position. He placed his chin back onto your shoulder, nuzzling against it every so often and resumed the game, handing you cards and promising not to cheat and peek at your hand (probably a lie).

When moments passed and you still squirmed about uncomfortably in his lap, he grunted, irate:

“Sit still, I’m trying to get comfortable!” He tilted his head, biting down into the skin of your shoulder in a childish display of frustration.

“Well… Kokichi… aren’t I a little heavily? Are you sure you want me to sit here like this…?” You finally voiced the apprehension behind your wriggling. You were bigger then him, and his frame was so lithe and petite. You felt like a beast crushing it’s prey. It wasn’t that you didn’t like the closeness and his touch, but you couldn’t help but feel self conscious.

“Why would I put you here if I didn’t want it, stupid head?!” He puffed his cheeks out in exasperation.

“It just… I mean I feel like I’m grating your pelvis into dust right now…” He wouldn’t say it directly, but he hated comments like this. Though he knew it was your own insecurities against yourself at work, he couldn’t help but be offended for himself, like you thought he was puny and weak at the same time. You would never say that to Gonta or Kaito, right? Even Kiyo, who was thin as could be would be spared from such comments. Why? Because he was 6’2”. Kokichi frowned at your comment, trying not to take out that anger on you, though he really wanted to.

“If you move even an inch, I’m going to bonk you over the head and knock you out…” he grumbled, wrapping both arms around your torso and crushing you into his chest in a show of dominance. He wanted to prove that he could hold you, he could be strong and in control, he could handle all of you.

You relaxed into his hold, feeling the beating of his heart against your back and deciding to let the topic go for now.

BONUS: In a NON-DESPAIR AU

He gets pissed, crossing his arms and practically steaming when you guys go to amusement parks and people imply that he’s not tall enough for certain rides.

He finds your body super attractive, content to sit back and simply watch you try on clothes without complaint.

He refers to you as his “tall gf” or “huge gf” in many different scenarios, even if you’re just the least bit taller than him.

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a-student-out-of-time · 1 year

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Danganronpa and the Mean Girl Problem

Hello, everyone! I’ve come to once again share my thoughts on something.

With the (as of writing this) recent release of Despair Time Chapter 2, I felt this was an appropriate time to discuss some things. First off, I am very interested to see where this fangan is going from here on out, and even from the first episode, I’m hooked.

I really enjoyed the character moments in the first episode, from Eden to Levi to Teruko to J to one of the subjects of my discussion today: Arei.

Now, I have to admit, Arei’s one of the most interesting characters in DRDT to me. She’s not my favorite- that honor goes to Hu- but she’s the one who I think has the most potential for character development within the narrative of DRDT. And that’s also something that concerns me.

See, that brings us to the point I want to address here is in the title. It’s something I’ve noticed across both the canon games and some fangans, which I’ll call the “Mean Girl Problem.”

(Spoilers for the canon games, DR3, the Another series, Despair Time, DR Antebellum, etc. will follow. You have been warned.)

(Also, this became a long-ass post. You’ve also been warned on that.)

As I’m sure many of us are aware at this point, Danganronpa is a very formulaic series. While we see different stories and character arcs play out, we nevertheless see similar archetypes and story beats across them. Sometimes these are broken in unique ways, but we often have very similar starting points.

Oftentimes, these repeated tropes have been deconstructed and explored in different ways, either in the games themselves or among fan games that seek to go beyond the formulaic writing. Even then, however, there tends to be repetition with a lot of them, mostly in terms of things like my least favorite trope, the double murder in Chapter 3.

What I want to focus on here is an archetype I’ve seen a lot and one that often leaves me thoroughly disappointed every time: the eponymous mean girl.

These tend to be female characters who are presented as bullies, either toward one character in particular or members of their group as a whole. I feel this archetype really got its start with Hiyoko in DR2, and it understandably became a point of contention with a lot of people. And it was later repeated with a lot of characters.

I can’t speak for all fangans, so I’ll stick to the ones I’ve seen. Among them, we’ve got Hiyoko, Ruruka, Natsumi and Miu in canon; Rei, Kizuna and Hibiki in the Another series, Mitsuba in Brave DR, Emilia in Antebellum, and Arei in Despair Time. I’ll leave Mitsuba out of this discussion, since Brave DR hasn’t made it quite as far as other fangans, but we still have a lot we can talk about here.

The Mean Girl Problem is a writing trend I’ve seen where these characters end up not receiving much narrative importance or opportunities for development, particularly in comparison to their male counterparts. And when they do, it’s usually squandered hard.

If you already have objections to this, I understand, but allow me to explain what I mean, character by character.

Now, DR1 didn’t really have a Mean Girl character, which is interesting. There were no female characters who were really openly malicious or antagonistic, unless one wants to include Celeste. However, she isn’t really an example of what I’m talking about. The problem really started in DR2:

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Hiyoko Saionji

As I said, this archetype began with Hiyoko. Her introduction had her crushing ants, making her creepy face and then calling Haime a wuss. From there, she spends most of her time complaining, manipulating and insulting everyone, aside from Mahiru who’s the only one that really puts up with her. Her worst insults are saved for Mikan, which...grr, but I’ll move on.

Now, Hiyoko being a selfish bratty girl is by design. She’s a member of the prestigious Saionji Clan and thus sees herself as superior to everyone else, so it’s at least understandable why she’d feel this way. Even if she plays it off in her Free Time Events that she’d been the subject of “assassination attempts,” which some of my friends have attributed to others getting back at her for her bullying, it’s clear she’s not well-liked in-story.

My point here isn’t that Hiyoko is a bad character. Quite to the contrary. Many people who defend her point out that she does have a lot more going on than just being a bully, and I fully agree. I like how much she loves her nation’s culture, how much she misses her dad and her belief that protecting something is a sign of love. That’s interesting.

The MGP stemmed from me asking a simple question: what purpose does she serve in the story?

It’s a serious question: what does her being a bully contribute to the narrative? What role does she serve, either thematically or in the plot itself other than being a member of Ultimate Despair? How does she actually change as a result of the story?

To all of this, I have to say “Not much.”

Now, I’m not going to say she didn’t have any purpose. Again, there were good moments with her. I like how she tried to make a memorial for Mahiru, but it came off as ominous and creepy to everyone, and she admits she’s not good at anything but dancing.

...Of course, then she turns right around and insults Mikan again.

And this brings me to another point about her: nobody in the story really seems to actually acknowledge Hiyoko’s cruel moments. Sure, they get annoyed with her, but nobody takes her aside and tries to explain why it’s wrong. Hajime makes some snarky comments about in her her behavior FTEs, but all he really seems to do is tolerate her.

Her bullying never really seems to factor that much into the plot, other than it just being something she does. Hell, even her being killed by Mikan had nothing to do with her bullying, but simply because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her being a bully was basically irrelevant to everything that ultimately happened with her in the story.

But here’s the part that really gets me: this moment in Chapter 3 where Hajime claims she’s changing:

Which, I guess I understand. It’s not the same thing as earlier, when she basically raged that Teruteru deserved to die horribly for committing murder, and that she wished she could’ve spat on his corpse.

Like, I guess that’s progress, going from “He deserved what he got” to “We’re only working together to escape because we don’t have a choice.” Still though, jeez.

And what comes off this? Again, basically nothing. Hiyoko can’t get her kimono on, Sonia suggests she use the full-body mirror at the music venue and that’s where she gets shanked by Mikan. Not because she was mad about the bullying and nobody doing anything to help, not because Hiyoko confronted her or she confronted Hiyoko.

No, she just walked in and Mikan went “No witnesses.”

And later on, DR3 confirmed that Hiyoko more or less acted the exact same during her time in Hope’s Peak. The only real progress we can really say she got was the fact that she acts more like a platonic tsundere toward Mikan in Side Hope.

Overall, it really seems like being a bully was the focus of Hiyoko’s character, when the game clearly wanted to acknowledge there was more going on with her. Yet most of the deeper elements with her were relegated to her FTEs.

And if she was bad, Ruruka was even worse.

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Ruruka Ando

Probably the biggest contender for the most hated DR3 character, Ruruka is, in a word, a self-centered bitch. Now, again, that isn’t to say that’s a problem and that there isn’t anything deeper going on with her character.

It genuinely seems like she has trouble with empathy, something that was shown when she and Seiko first met and she didn’t even really address that Seiko was crying over the dog she couldn’t save.

One could attribute that to her being a child, but throughout Seiko and Ruruka’s friendship, it becomes quite clear Ruruka asks her for more and more favors, going from medicines she needs to basic things she could probably just buy herself. This is acknowledged and addressed by the story.

What the story doesn’t do a great job of addressing is Seiko’s side of things, where it kinda seems to blame her for constantly accepting Ruruka’s requests and acts as if this is a “both sides are wrong” situation. I don’t think the story presented it well, and just made Ruruka look incredibly toxic and manipulative toward someone who has trouble saying no. Not quite the same as bullying, but more than enough to meet the standards of a Mean Girl.

The manga actually did one better and worse at the same time, where it brings up the idea that Seiko can’t eat Ruruka’s candies and addresses why she doesn’t make sugar-free ones: she refuses to acknowledge that Seiko even has an allergy and that she’s making it up to spite her. Sounds shallow and petty, but it’s a real thing that’s happened with some people.

If you don’t believe me, look up the woman whose in-laws fed her mushroom soup because she didn’t believe her when she said she had a mushroom allergy.

But again, the story wants there to be something deeper with these two. In the Future arc, Ruruka internally admits that she always saw Seiko as her hero, as someone with the talent and skill to do anything, and she was jealous because all she could do was make sweets. That’s an interesting motivation.

And the story doesn’t do all that much with it. Once again, the way it’s framed, Ruruka is a toxic and manipulative friend who wanted to use Seiko’s talents to cheat in her practical exam, and it was largely Nagito’s fault that things went south, then they had a falling out and were expelled.

There is a good story buried in this narrative. The problem is that Ruruka is presented in far too much of a negative light to really come off as someone with a valid point, while Seiko didn’t really do anything wrong. Izayoi is also barely a character and just follows her around everywhere, when maybe he could’ve been the mediator between the two of them.

But instead, after Seiko and Izayoi die, Ruruka nearly kills Kyoko and gets Koichi killed thanks to her bullshit. Granted, she was under threat of her Forbidden Action, but it was still framed as her being a villainous character, with her glaring evily.

This is not the face of someone who was forced into committing evil for the sake of her own survival.

And what happens after all this? What role does she have in the story? Nothing.

She wanders off on her own, rambling to herself about how she’ll survive, and then she gets killed by the hypnosis monitor thing- very graphically and excessively, I have to say- and then nobody even acknowledges her existence again.

I’ve heard speculation that the story of Ruruka, Seiko and Izayoi is meant to show why it’s important to trust your friends, but she had so few good qualities to her and so little going on within the narrative beyond just fighting with a roided-up Seiko that I could barely glean something like that.

She really just feels like she’s there to be an antagonistic force for a while, and when she’s not needed anymore, she’s shoved off to die. And if the story wanted us to at least feel for her, why kill her off in such a mean-spirited and graphic manner? Were we supposed to feel bad or feel like it was karmic?

Either way, it’s not a good look.

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Natsumi Kuzuryu

Here’s what turned out to be a retroactive example of the MGP: Natsumi, the girl who was originally only known through flashbacks and Twilight Syndrome Murder Case, in SDR2, who was originally just Fuyuhiko’s unnamed sister

DR3 came along and gave us a better look at her, though in a way I doubt we were expecting. From what Fuyuhiko had told Hajime, it seemed as if Natsumi was an Ultimate. Hell, he was sure she deserved the title of Ultimate Yakuza far more than him:

But what DR3 gave us was a girl who joined the Reserve Course, and just called herself the Ultimate Little Sister.

She certainly lives up to what Fuyuhiko was talking about, at least in how she was self-centered and arrogant. Even so, it’s obvious the two of them were very close, especially with how Natsumi looks up to him and dreams of joining the Main Course so she can stand by him as an equal.

The problem is, though, her intense rivalry with Mahiru and Sato, who she’s been in conflict with since Middle School. Once again, a character who we were lead to believe was an Ultimate turned out to also be in the Reserve Course.

Regardless, the two of them had an absolutely bitter rivalry, which as we’d learn would eventually lead to Sato murdering Natsumi, then Fuyuhiko murdering Sato in retaliation. DR3 had the opportunity to tell us a little bit more about Natsumi’s side of things.

And what we learn is that Natsumi fears being left behind with her brother in the Main Course, and wants to be acknowledge not for her talent but to earn a title so the two of them can be equals.

Now, Natsumi’s inclusion this way, while a weird retcon, isn’t pointless. It’s a pretty decent means of reinforcing the idea that talented and talentless people can’t mix, fueling Hajime’s insecurity. But once again, it really seems like it brushes over a lot of things with her cruelty toward Mahiru and Sato, none of which prove relevant for the larger story.

This is especially odd because the anime seemed more than willing to sympathize with Natsumi, while also neglecting to giving Sato a full name. And given that both of them die shortly afterward, it does feel a bit emotionally manipulative.

But once again, no relevance to the larger story. They’re not even mentioned once afterward.

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Miu Iruma

Now, Miu’s an interesting case because she has a huge fanbase. I understand why: she’s vulgar as hell, but also confident and hilarious. I call her a Mean Girl because, again, she often goes out of her way to insult and antagonize people for no real reason.

She’s different than the others, however, because she actually does contribute a lot of important details to the plot with her inventions.

It’s thanks to Miu that they get an overhead view of the first crime scene, she’s the reason why Chapter 4 happens, and she’s the one to provide the group with the weapons they need to take on the Exisals and learn the truth about their situation, both the manufactured one and the real one. So overall, she makes a massive impact on the story of V3.

My question is this: does this make her a character or a plot device factory?

Miu has basically no character development through the story, and is mostly just there for either making devices to move the plot forward, for comedy or for fanservice.

We do hits of greater identity and motivation for her in her FTEs and in Chapter 4, where we learn she received her talent after she was in a car accident that left her in a coma, waking up and finding she had a ton of ideas for inventions. And in Chapter 4, just before she attempts to kill Kokichi, she says the world needs her and her inventions.

This suggests either Miu knew what had “happened” to the world as part of the flashback light, or she didn’t but believed this idea in general. That, despite her crude behavior, she has genuinely altruistic motivations. That’s a good character quality for her.

And we don’t get much of that after this moment. The only memory of her anyone really has is of her and her inventions, and everyone except Kiibo basically hates her guts as a whole.

But what makes all of this worse in its own way is that this isn’t even Miu’s real personality, but a fabrication from Team Danganronpa. I can only go off of what we see here, so it’s hard to say what the real her was like, but the version we get here definitely falls victim to the MGP.

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Kizuna Tomori

Moving over to the fangan side of things, we have Kizuna Tomori, Class 79′s Ultimate Cheerleader from DRA.

Now, Kizuna is definitely closer to the Mean Girl archetype you might’ve thought of, i.e. a Regina George or Heather Chandler type. She acts all sweet and touchy-feely with Yuki, calling him nicknames and asking if he’ll buy her things when they get out.

And it goes on and on in her FTEs, where Yuki eventually wises up to the fact that she’s incredibly materialistic and she gets mad when he calls her out on it. Then she goes on to reveal that she’s the Queen Bee of her school, having boys do whatever she wants, buying her things and basically pimping out her fellow cheerleaders to them in exchange.

And it really seems like she doesn’t understand that this is a bad thing. Not that she knows and doesn’t care, but that she can’t comprehend that this isn’t supposed to be how things work.

Things get interesting in the last one, where she basically tries to have sex with Yuki, and he demands to know what the hell is going on with her.

She did all of this deliberately. She understands that she’s not a good person, but she’s also scared of guys who are only interested in her for her looks. She basically turned every guy who was interested in her into her servant, but in the process, she ultimately isolated herself from everyone else.

And there’s also the influence of her mother, Minako, who also seems to value her appearance. I can only image what kind of situation Kizuna was in to feel this way, where she was scared of being taken advantage of by guys if she drops this facade. One that’s kept her from even having friends.

In the game itself, Kizuna also isolates herself from everyone thanks to Tsurugi’s tyrannical rule, and also ends up quite lonely. Something Akane goes out of her way to help her with after she and Yuki find her crying.

It’s a really sweet and wholesome moment, where Akane assures her that she does consider Kizuna a friend, never saw her as weak and that they can confide in each other. Something Kizuna never really had before then.

And what happens afterward? Well, turns out she’s a fake bitch.

Which inevitably leads to Kizuna attempting to murder Akane.

The thing is, lying and scheming aside, Kizuna actually kinda has a point here.

The motive in Chapter 2 of DRA is, naturally, secrets. The one she found suggested local normal protag Yuki Maede might actually know the identity of the mastermind, and as we learn in Chapter 6, that turned out to be him.

Not only that, but Akane was actually his colleague and fellow Ultimate Despair. Kizuna unintentionally targeted both masterminds, and had she pulled it off, she may have actually ended the Killing Game early on. True, she was only focused on escaping, but it would’ve been beneficial to a greater number of people.

But what really bothers me is LINUJ’s attitude toward her. He created a pretty sympathetic backstory for her, which doesn’t excuse but explain her behavior, yet he admits in her design document that he made her to be the character everybody would hate and wanted to give her the most painful death possible.

Which he did in the form of a stab would in the stomach that took about thirty minutes to kill her. Like...jeez, dude. It’s also kinda hard for me to hate her not only when she’s actually kinda right on repeat viewings, but she also took the time to try and tell everyone it wasn’t actually Akane who killed her via dying message.

I also don’t want to be that person, but the fact that the character with the most sexualized design, the most overtly flirty and outgoing personality, and a backstory about trying to prevent guys from taking advantage of her weakness, is portrayed as an unrepentant villain?

Maybe it was unintentional, but it doesn’t sit well with me.

Really though, once again, I must ask why? What was gained from all this? What does it actually organically add to the story? Is there a lesson to be gleaned with this?

Not really any that I can see. I understand the points LINUJ raises when he talks about how we shouldn’t ignore the wrongdoings of a character because we sympathize with them, but I must also ask if utterly demonizing them for those wrongdoings is a bigger issue.

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Hibiki Otonokoji

Oh boy.

I’ve already talked at length about my problems with SDRA2 Chapter 3, but that was mostly me rambling about Kanade and the story. Instead, I’ll keep it short and focus strictly on Hibiki. Because out of all the victims of the MGP, Hibiki got robbed the absolute hardest.

I’ll start by saying that Hibiki isn’t so much a general bully as she is big sister bully. Her ire is mostly directed toward Kanade, who she insults, belittles, orders around, and harasses for her own amusement. At least it seems that way.

As we learn throughout the game, the Otonokoji Twins really have a mutually toxic relationship. Hibiki bullying Kanade is, according to the latter, because Hibiki’s actually a try-hard who’s jealous of Kanade for being better at her in everything: academics, athletics, even music. She hates losing more than anything.

That setup is at least an understandable motivation, and it could’ve made for some decent development opportunities, which the game actually did take at first.

See, because of SDRA2′s unique setup- there being five masterminds in the group- she understandably doesn’t feel safe trusting anyone except her sister at first. It takes a lot of work to get her to even leave her room and hang out with everyone.

Thanks to Setsuka’s encouragement, she admits that, yes, she wants to be friends with everyone. Hibiki is naturally a social butterfly, and even if she’s scared of what might happen because of the Voids, nothing will change if things stay the same.

And that’s a lesson she actually takes to heart afterward.

She genuinely tries to change her attitude and be more of a team-player with everyone, hanging out with them and trying to cheer up the group when they’re down because of their situation.

Because she takes responsibility for the things that happened, be it Yuri’s death at the party and Kokoro’s death due to the concert they held. And she’s doesn’t want there to be a third one.

She knows she’s not very smart, but she doesn’t want to be a burden on everyone and wants to contribute however she can. And the start of Chapter 3 actually shows her practicing what she preaches, even cracking jokes with everyone.

The disappointing thing is that everything that was going on with Hibiki was far, far more interesting to me than what actually ended up happening.

But instead of focusing on her trying to change and grow as a person, we got to spend the rest of the chapter glorifying another serial killer, turning Hibiki into a background extra and then revealing that her life had been literal hell, her parents are dead and her real personality probably doesn’t exist anymore, capped off with her dying a meaningless death.

A chapter that also effectively made her and her sister’s presence completely irrelevant to the actual story. While I complain about the MGP, nobody got it worse than Hibiki.

She deserved so much better than that.

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HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Rei Mekaru

Danganronpa Another’s original bad bitch, Rei is one of the few mean girl characters who actually managed to not only survive, but also receive development as a result. Good for her!

The thing with Rei is that she’s largely more similar to Byakuya than Hiyoko or Miu, although she dabbles in the Mean Girl archetype on occasion, particularly toward Kizuna. I’ll still include her because it’s an interesting example of slow-burn character development.

Rei starts out as cold, dismissive and condescending toward her classmates, and while she’s clearly intelligent, she’s also more than willing to let everyone try and solve the cases themselves while also insulting them at the same time. This continues on for some time, at least until Chapter 4.

It isn’t until she sees Haruhiko and Satsuki willingly sacrifice themselves, allowing the rest of the group to survive, that ultimately rattles her view on things and gets her to reconsider. She almost seemed baffled when Satsuki gave up any chance she had to escape.

Likewise, in what was a pretty hilarious moment, when everyone basically isolates Yuki when it seems like he might be the traitor, she calls them out on their sense of false righteousness when they talk about the power of friendship. It’s not often you see these sorts of characters touch on something like that : P

Really, Rei’s character development really seems to take place in the second half of the game, which is probably how she manages to avoid falling victim to MGP. SDRA2 hits us with what looks like Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome, only for it to be revealed she survived.

Of course, given that DRA already has Kizuna as a victim of the MGP, it was probably a given. Still sad that, by the end of SDRA2, she and Tsurugi are the only survivors of Class 79.

Emilia Carmine

We now come to what’s probably my favorite fangan thus far: Danganronpa Antebellum, which has its own resident Mean Girl, Emilia. Now, I’m gonna be frank with this: Chapter 3 of Antebellum isn’t finished yet, so I can’t really call this an example of MGP, and I hope I don’t have to.

What I will say is that Emilia does fulfill a lot of the Mean Girl tropes: she insults everyone, antagonizes them, and she’s easily the most foul-mouthed out of everyone. However, in contrast to the previous examples, she also has a genuinely sweet relationship with her best friend Mint, who she considers a brother. She teases him a lot, but it comes off more as teasing than actual bullying.

Even toward Shinku, she gradually goes from mocking him to opening up to him, to enjoying his presence. Emilia herself was raised in a very controlling, heavily restrictive manner by her father, who also kicked out her sister Elodie on account of her being trans. Emilia was very close with her, and would do anything to reunite with her. A motivation that nearly drives her to murder Shinku in Chapter 2, which, if it hadn’t been for Mint and the BDA, she very likely would’ve. Something she regrets immensely.

The sad part is, at the end of Chapter 2, her crime is revealed: burning down her father’s hospital, killing and injuring many people. A revelation that drives a wedge between her and Mint that never ends up resolved. While Emilia wants to make up with him, the group is split in half when the ceiling caves in and Emilia is killed in the game’s double murder, never even getting to see Mint again.

It’s too early to say, but this is feeling more like a genuine tragedy than a case of MGP, and I highly doubt she’s going to be forgotten by the end.

____________________________________________________

And that finally brings me to the subject I brought up at the beginning: Arei Nageishi.

Now, I called Arei the most interesting of the Despair Time cast because she has a quality that makes her a bit different from the other Mean Girl characters: she legitimately values friendship.

That might sound bizarre, given that she still openly insults and antagonizes the group. While she does go out of her way to be cruel to Teruko and Xander in her introduction, it seems like she wants to be included in group activities.

And of course, she falls into a self-pitying session of fake crying to get sympathy, which Hu shuts down immediately. Now, one could easily just write this off as attention-seeking behavior, but it’s the small details that interest me.

They shut her down on that.

Xander is, of course, disbelieving that she could be that oblivious to the situation. However, I think her behavior has less to do with her being oblivious and more to do with her having a skewed perspective.

See, when MonoTV shows up to announce the new motive, he specifies that there might be some bad news about their friends and family. Arei’s reponse?

No jokes, genuine concern over the motive.

And another moment that caught my attention was in the wake of the trial and Min’s execution. It was fucked up and horrifying, and everyone is understandably freaking out, but the reactions differ. Most everyone is freaking out about their situation, wanting to leave and being afraid of dying. Others are genuinely sad for Min, and among them?

Yeah, after the girl she’d previously accused of excluding her gets executed, Arei is genuinely upset to see her go. This was also after she’d spent the trial railing against any potential murders, mostly Teruko. She doesn’t make jokes, she doesn’t say she deserved it, she doesn’t shrug it off like it’s nothing.

She’s genuinely sad to lose Min.

Another insightful bit comes from her FTE with J, where she thinks to herself how fun it is to mess with her, and how she finds her cute.

Yeah, Arei has a system for how she bullies people, ranging from just teasing to wanting to utterly destroy their lives if they’re mean to her. A lot of this stems from the fact that she was the Queen Bee of her school, and like Kizuna, she used her looks and status to get guys to do whatever she wanted.

But the most interesting part to me is when J starts ranting about her mother, and Arei has this to share.

We’ll come back to this, but suffice to say, Arei has a very odd idea of what friendship is. She’s under the impression J likes her because she didn’t leave the situation.

Something else worth bringing up are the characters quotes from the tumblr page, both the public one and hidden ones. For Arei, these are as follows:

Public: “If I tell you a secret, will you promise to keep it?”

Hidden: “Because that’s what friends do”

And then there’s a hidden one in relation to the mysterious Mai Akasaki, who seemed to have been a friend to the entire group:

“She doesn’t like when her friends fight.”

For someone who continuously insults and looks down on the group, Arei sure has a lot of quotes in reference to friendship and trust.

Which brings me to the first part of Chapter 2, where MonoTV distributed the group’s deepest, darkest secrets...to the wrong people. And Arei, who’d previously been complaining about the situation, immediately quiets down.

She’s not making jokes, she’s not making fun of whomever’s secret she got. No, she is horrified.

This might’ve been easy to overlook after everyone is confused about not getting their own secrets, but after Arturo reveals J’s true identity to the group, Arei once again drops the jokes and complaints. She makes some pretty good points about their situation.

To me, this feels like a pretty group-oriented approach, subtly hinting she saw something really concerning and thus it’s better that they all start sharing secrets before things escalate in the four days before everything is revealed.

And the comments about having a famous parent like J are compounded here. I’m starting to get the sense Arei might’ve been neglected by her parents. Bullying and attention-seeing behavior like hers often stems from a lack of self-esteem, difficult home lives, and even being subject to bullying themselves. While Arei certainly has a high opinion of herself, what she really seems to want is attention and companionship.

I feel this makes for an interesting potential arc for her, given Despair Time’s themes of trust and betrayal. If her focus is on making and earning trust, it makes for a nice contrast to Teruko, who’s said she won’t trust anyone again and doesn’t want to leave. Like it or not, though, they’re gonna have to work together if they want to survive.

Of course, as interested as I am to see Arei’s development, it’s also a cause for concern. With how many death flags have already been raised just in part 1, both for her and for others, all we can really do is wait and see.

The True Issues With The Mean Girl Problem

Let me just say upfront what this essay isn’t about. This isn’t about how Mean Girls characters should never be made villains, this isn’t suggesting that anyone who engages in the MGP is inherently sexist or misogynistic and this isn’t about how any of the games or fangans I’ve mentioned are bad. DR3 is bad, but for numerous reasons.

No, this essay is me wanting to touch on the existence of a double standard I’ve noticed and how I feel this limits the works in terms of creativity. This isn’t a call-out post of creators in particular, just the acknowledgment of a writing problem.

Broadly, the MGP can be summarized in four points:

Mean Girl characters have sympathetic qualities to them, but they're very understated or left unexplored in the main story. Their defining feature there is being cruel or antagonistic to others.

Despite that, their bullying is often brushed aside and is simply shrugged off as annoying by the other characters. It has no impact on the story, does not catalyze character development and rarely has anything to do with their actual deaths or the death of any other character.

When they do start to undergo any significant character development, especially before Chapter 3, they tend to die more often than not.

Following their deaths, they're rarely mentioned by the narrative again, highlighting their overall unimportance to the story as a whole.

As I’ve said, a lot of these Mean Girls are much deeper than their portrayals within the main stories tend to want to explore, yet they’re often subject to much harsher criticism both in these stories, from creators and from the fandom.

On the other hand, male characters who present these traits are often given the label of The Rival, and I have to be honest in saying that a lot of Rivals end up doing things that are much worse than simply being bullies. Despite that, they all get a chance to develop:

Byakuya: Has a very condescending, classist view on everyone, and is the one who takes the entire concept of a Killing Game completely seriously. Seriously enough that he tampers with Chihiro’s body in the name of making the game more interesting, exposing Genocider Syo’s presence and figuring out who’s his biggest threat. He doesn’t give a damn about anyone but himself, at least until Chapter 4, when Makoto and Kyoko save him from getting everyone killed because he doesn’t even consider that someone might do something altruistically.

Fuyuhiko: Starts off SDR2 as a loud, antisocial asshole, one who wants nothing to do with the rest of the group (sans Peko) and who also contemplates what he has to do in order to win. He also makes threats, however baseless, like selling Mikan to a whorehouse or selling Hajime’s organs on the black market.

Kokichi: The biggest troll in all of V3 at best, and someone who self-identifies as an evil villain. A lot about his character is meant to be ambiguous, but within the confines of the story itself, Kokichi actively antagonizes and even endangers the group, from the Insect Meet-and-Greet to revealing Maki’s identity against her will, to tricking Gonta into killing Miu while believing their situation is a hopeless nightmare in order to save himself, etc.

Tsurugi: Essentially takes a page from Light Yagami in his utter dehumanization of criminals, viewing all those who dissent from his commands as potential criminals as well. His sense of justice is incredibly black and white, where killing for any circumstance whatsoever makes someone human garbage, and he’s happy to say as much. It gets to the point that he’s willing to force the group to commit mass suicide to prevent another murder.

None of this is a complaint about any of them as characters. I happen to enjoy seeing them and the roles they play in the story; Fuyuhiko gets the most development out of them all, Byakuya becomes more of a team player with his fellow survivors, Kokichi dies but is vindicated in that he helped bring an end to the Killing Game, and Tsurugi...well, that’s another matter entirely.

Tsurugi is a prime example of negative character development; not full-on villainization, but progressively becoming worse from his experiences rather than better. He doesn’t become a less violent and morally absolutist figure, but doubles down when he becomes leader of the Kisaragi Foundation, even willing to sacrifice Teruya and work with Syobai to stop Mikado.

The thing is, that’s still a form of development. It still falls in line with the concept of character progression, which the Mean Girls rarely seem to get. For them, their negative qualities aren’t brought on by the circumstances of the game, but are simply part of who they are. They’re rarely even worsened by the game itself, at least not in the same way Tsurugi is. They only seem to exist.

Now, I’ve seen some points raised about this, such as “Some people don’t change” or “They’re meant to serve as a warning about X”, and while I can understand those points, I have to ask why they don’t seem to be applied in the same way to Byakuya, Fuyuhiko or Kokichi, along with what sorts of object lessons rival characters are meant to serve as. Chapter 2 of DR1 has a solid and understandable lesson about the dangers of toxic masculinity, how succumbing to it in different ways ultimately culminated in the tragic deaths of Chihiro and Mondo.

It’s hard to have any sort of object lesson about Hiyoko, given that her death was unrelated to her bullying Mikan. It’s hard to say anything about Kizuna other than “she’s a bitch,” according to LINUJ. The closest you could get to with any sort of object lesson is probably Ruruka, but even then, it was so imbalanced and tried to show there being two sides that it doesn’t work.

Furthermore, if the goal is to show them as awful people, why is it that these characters are given so many sympathetic qualities that get people to like them, only to them cut them down in their prime and tell those audience members they were stupid for getting invested? Are they meant to be characters we hate and whose deaths we should find karmic, or are they meant to be tragic examples of someone not meeting their true potential? You can’t have it both ways, especially when those sympathetic qualities are barely touched on in the actual story.

I can genuinely see both sides of the argument; the ones that don’t like these characters because they’re bullies and the ones who want to see more because they clearly saw potential in them as characters. I completely understand why you might feel one way or the other, and I’m not saying you’re wrong.

If you want to make a character who serves as a foil to another, where both of them have similar flaws and negative qualities but one changes for the better while the other gets worse, you can absolutely do that. You can have characters who are genuinely bad people but who are still engaging. You can have mean girls, you can have rivals, you can have all kinds of wonderful creative characters like we do across this series and its fan entries.

My point with this is to show you why I feel that following the exact same character traits, and then writing them off as bad people simply because they’re bullies, feels not just uncreative, but borders on genuinely toxic and harmful. The idea that people can never change and that only bad people do bad things is not a healthy mindset to hold, especially when we might display these very traits without knowing it.

We can and should always work to be better, both as people and as writers. I love seeing people in stories and the real world learn from their experiences and grow better, hopefully with the benefit of hindsight. That can often come with needing to address the harm that’s done by actions and ideas we regret ever doing or holding, and if we look back and cringe at those moments, we do better for ourselves and others.

So what can we do here? Simple: let the Mean Girls get the same opportunities for development, growth, change and narrative impact as other characters do. As I said, it happens with Rival characters and it also happens with others through the games. Don’t restrict them or yourselves to the archetypical or formulaic writing you’ve experienced. If you don’t want to include a Mean Girl, you absolutely don’t have to.

For those that do, we also need to be willing to acknowledge and accept when mistakes are made by them, realistically approach the problem and see what can be done about it. Do they get better? Are they forgiven? What happens if they’re not? Or only some members of the group forgive them and others are hurt by those that do? Would they change by their own desire or would it be from someone calling them out on their behavior?

I know we love to say things like “X did nothing wrong” as a joke, but sometimes people will jump through mental gymnastics to justify liking a character, inventing stretched-out reasoning for why they’re not really at fault. I’ve never felt that way about any character I like; I fully acknowledge some of my favorite characters of all time have done some horrible things, and I still love them in spite of that.

If we could simply accept the idea that characters we love are and can be fucked-up people, we’d be a lot better off for it. Liking them doesn’t mean you fully support everything they do. Fictional people in fictional settings gives us a chance to explore things we may not be able to in the real world, either as a lesson, out of curiosity or for whatever reason we wish. And doing research for this essay, I can see Mean Girls have that appeal to them too, especially for those who relate to them.

I believe allowing Mean Girls to be more than just bullies is beneficial to both sides: people who want to see them move on from bullying because they don’t like bullies, and those who want to see them grow and have more prominence in the story. The multiverse of DR is rich with story potential for these characters that so rarely gets tapped to its full extent.

After all, in a series with a core theme about the importance of hope, wouldn’t it be best to show that some people do change for the better?