Kaito Momota: There’s More to a Hero
There’s a lot of things to like about Kaito as a character, but one of those things that I don’t see talked about nearly enough is his absolutely fantastic character arc. Yes, you heard me – while his main role in the story may seem to be to support Shuichi and Maki’s development, that doesn’t stop Kaito from having an arc of his own too. It’s technically not character “development” if you define that as a character growing stronger and overcoming their problems, since that’s rather pointedly not what happens with Kaito, but it’s nonetheless a progression that is a clearly deliberate part of the story. It’s just done very subtly – which is precisely why I like it so much and one of the biggest reasons Kaito is my favourite character in V3. I still enjoy character arcs that are fairly out in the open, like Shuichi’s and Maki’s are thanks to Kaito encouraging them to talk about things, but I enjoy delightfully subtle character writing even more, and that’s exactly what Kaito’s arc is.
So I’m going to talk about it. At great length. Strap yourselves in.
Before we get into Kaito’s arc in the actual story, though, there’s some things we first need to establish about Kaito’s worldview that are central to the way he acts during his arc.
Kaito’s paradoxical opinion on weakness
Kaito’s biggest priority is helping out other people, especially those who are weak and in need of support. He thoroughly advocates the idea that it’s okay to be weak, just so long as you can accept your weakness and work on overcoming it. Clearly he’s thought about this idea often enough that he’s even come up with his own way of framing it that puts a positive spin on things – the emotional weakness is your “enemy” that you have to “fight” by getting stronger. And as long as someone has made the decision to fight that enemy of theirs, Kaito will do everything in his power to help them through it, because no-one should have to carry their burdens alone. He’s so good and encouraging and supportive when it comes to helping others deal with their weaknesses.
And Kaito is so delightfully, excruciatingly hypocritical when it comes to applying any of this philosophy to himself.
He suffers an awful lot throughout the story – not only does he spend half the game slowly and painfully dying and being very much not okay about it (he can’t die here; he hasn’t even gone to space yet!), as someone who’s always trying to support and protect the people around him, he hates the fact that he hasn’t been able to stop any of the killings or save anyone or find a way out of here. If it were anyone else feeling this way, Kaito would be encouraging them to talk about it with their friends, because even if their friends wouldn’t necessarily have an answer for their problems, just sharing the burden rather than trying to bear it alone would help. Yet Kaito himself refuses to do so – he constantly, stubbornly insists that he is Completely Fine and definitely not dying and doesn’t have any kind of worries whatsoever.
Even if it’s difficult for him, Kaito should be willing to try and accept the “weakness” that he clearly considers his illness and inability to save everyone to be. His own advice, advice he gives to others numerous times, says that it’s okay to be weak as long as you can accept it, that accepting your weakness and talking about it with your friends is the first step to getting stronger. But Kaito refuses to accept his own weakness or share it with anyone – he doesn’t even really try to, as if the part of him deep down that realises he’s weak doesn’t even want to become stronger.
“I can’t show weakness in front of my sidekick…”
The best way to appreciate what’s at the core of this apparent contradiction is to look at Kaito’s Harmonious Heart event in the bonus mode. I’m delighted that this event exists to explore the topic of Kaito’s weakness and why he hides it, but I also think it’s quite reasonable that such a thing only happens in a non-canon AU. Kaito is so damn stubbornly determined to hide his weakness under all circumstances, especially from Shuichi, that it’s perfectly natural that this topic would only get explicitly addressed in an AU scenario where Shuichi literally gains mindreading powers.
Kaito’s problems in this AU are nothing compared to in canon – nobody has died, and he doesn’t have the virus, and he’s playing an active role in their escape just by befriending Shuichi. Yet even so, something as small as briefly worrying that they might be stuck here forever is enough for Kaito to berate himself over. He has such unreasonably high standards for his own “strength” that even a fleeting pessimistic thought that he immediately shoots down counts as being weak and not like him.
But the most important statement of them all is Kaito thinking, “I can’t show weakness in front of my sidekick”. All of the non-optimal outcomes of the event, which includes the two that don’t even target that statement, have a running theme of Kaito’s belief that showing weakness to his sidekick is The Worst Possible Thing that he could ever do. The second-best outcome, which results in a familiar show of Kaito insisting he’s Totally Fine and obviously not freaking out about this (which Shuichi can tell is not entirely truthful), has Kaito make a point of how he definitely wouldn’t freak out to Shuichi in particular – as if showing weakness to somebody else who isn’t his sidekick wouldn’t be quite as bad. In the second-worst outcome, where Shuichi agrees that Kaito doesn’t ever show him his weakness (and is probably about to follow up that he should), Kaito cuts him off by insisting that yes, that would be absurd. But since he can’t shake his negative mood, he’d rather leave than continue to risk showing weakness to Shuichi, even though this means passing up on a chance for them to hang out together. And the worst outcome happens if Shuichi tries to reassure him that it’s okay to be afraid sometimes, because all Kaito hears from that is confirmation that Shuichi has seen his weakness. He hates having made Shuichi worry about him and considers this to be failing his sidekick.
What we can gather from this is that Kaito hiding his weakness from his sidekicks is, strange as it may sound, him being really idiotically selfless. He is convinced that he must not under any circumstances show any ounce of weakness to his sidekicks, because that would constitute failing them as the person meant to support them and help with their problems. Clearly Kaito has a very specific definition of “sidekick” that is quite different to the usual one: he means it as someone whom the “hero” is supporting and mentoring through their issues, in which all of the help given is entirely one-directional, from the hero to the sidekick, and never the other way around. He believes that his sidekicks need to see him as this completely invincible pillar of support in order for him to be able to help them – that if they ever realised he isn’t so invincible and has weaknesses and worries of his own, they’d lose all faith in him and wouldn’t be able to be inspired by or depend on him any more.
The best outcome of the Harmonious Heart event happens when Shuichi correctly realises that the core of the issue is him being Kaito’s “sidekick” and deliberately moves the focus away from that. In Kaito’s definition, a hero can’t afford to show weakness to his sidekick lest he fail at properly supporting him – but Shuichi is also his friend, and friends are equals who can show weakness to each other and support each other because that’s what friends do. If Shuichi sees him as not just a pillar of support but also an equal friend whom he’s willing to offer support to, then Kaito showing weakness to Shuichi won’t constitute “failing” him. Learning this is enough to already make Kaito feel better, without him even needing to open up about the feelings that were bothering him in the first place – meaning that the thing that was really bothering him the most all along was the fear of letting Shuichi down. (He’s not lying when he says he’s alright now, because he does so in a much more subdued way than when he is Definitely Fine™.)
Which suggests that in canon, too, that very fear of showing weakness to his sidekicks and ending up unable to support them any more is in and of itself the biggest worry Kaito has. It’s bigger than any of the initial worries, like his impending death and his powerlessness, that he’s afraid of admitting to them in the first place. He would rather deal with those fears entirely by himself than risk letting his sidekicks down by sharing them – he’s so idiotically convinced that showing weakness would be failing them and so determined not to ever fail them that he is actively making his own suffering worse. Kaito is so incredibly, self-destructively selfless and I love it.
What it means to be a “hero”
Of course, Kaito’s conviction that he couldn’t ever support his sidekicks any more if he showed weakness to them is stupendously dumb of him. Even aside from the part where his sidekicks are also his friends and are willing to support him too, having weaknesses and struggles shouldn’t automatically make you a failure as a hero – if anything, it should be the opposite. If Shuichi had been aware of just how much Kaito was suffering and yet fighting through it to smile for their sakes, that’d most likely have inspired him even more. Obviously the heroes that struggle but keep fighting regardless are the most inspiring ones! What kind of stories has Kaito been reading that he believes heroes are only heroic if they always win without any trouble at all?
As it happens, the answer to this question does exist, in the form of Kaito’s second and third free time events where he tells of his heroic past “adventures” that turn out to be just make-believe games he played as a kid. These two events seem at first glance to be mostly extraneous – entertainingly ridiculous, sure, but apparently not that useful for helping to understand what makes him tick. But they do still have significance, because they show us Kaito’s idea of a hero – and it’s someone unrealistically flawless. His supposed adventures are just one big wish-fulfilment tale of him achieving cool feat after cool feat, straight from the mind of a child who’s yet to grasp the idea that showing a hero overcoming genuine difficulties and hardships makes a much better story than just showing them succeeding effortlessly in everything they do. Yet Kaito still tells this story as if it really happened. Obviously he knows it wasn’t real, but he talks as if he wants it to be, as if he doesn’t have any sense that it’s childish and over-the-top and way too simplistic to truly make a compelling narrative.
And at this point, I would object to the notion that Kaito never grew out of such simplistic stories and started appreciating more complex narratives as he grew up from that little kid into a young adult. Except that Kaito is a character in Danganronpa V3, and that means that he literally never did grow up like that. He began his existence as a high school student who saw heroes as being flawless and invincible when he was an overimaginative little kid and therefore still does now. In fact, I’m almost positive that the in-universe writers never meant for Kaito to have all of these weaknesses and issues that I’m talking about here at all. I believe Tsumugi saw Kaito as merely a narrative device to further Shuichi’s character development, and she gave him the virus not for the sake of his own storyline but so that Shuichi would eventually be forced to stand on his own without Kaito’s support. To that end, the only kind of backstory she wrote for Kaito was one of him being (or pretending to be) exactly the kind of idealised hero that she thinks would help inspire Shuichi, without giving him any kind of ongoing difficulties or weaknesses of his own to work through during the killing game. And so it’s pretty ironic that that’s precisely why Kaito ended up with so many issues and his whole delightful character arc – because he was ingrained with this unrealistically perfect standard for heroism that no actual human being could possibly hope to meet. Kaito is so harsh on himself and his own weaknesses compared to how accepting he is of everyone else’s because he’s meant to be the hero who inspires his sidekicks, and heroes aren’t supposed to be even the slightest bit weak.
There is one more exception to Kaito’s attitude towards weakness other than himself, and that’s Ryoma. You’d think Kaito would have acknowledged that Ryoma was weak and in need of support and reached out to him, like he does to everyone else who needs it. But he doesn’t – because, in his own words, he saw Ryoma as a hero. It’s not even a stretch to imagine that Kaito really did mean the same kind of impossibly cool hero as in his own childhood stories, given that Ryoma had freaking shounen anime tennis superpowers, and Kaito had probably heard about that. So Kaito holds Ryoma to exactly the same irrationally high standards of “heroism” that he has for himself: a hero must be invincible in order to be suitably heroic and inspiring, and if they show themselves to be weak and fallible and struggling, then they’ve failed anyone who ever looked up to them. Kaito doesn’t realise until it’s too late that Ryoma is someone he could have helped – maybe even saved – because he’s too hung up on the fact that Ryoma failed in his role as a hero. That hostility that Kaito shows towards Ryoma for being “weak”? Yeah, that’s exactly the same kind of thing Kaito would therefore be directing towards himself when he’s feeling weak too.
Putting Shuichi on a pedestal
So now that we’ve established Kaito’s worldview and his messed-up double standard about heroes, it’s time to get into his arc during the actual story. The main core of it is his hidden jealousy of Shuichi, and one of the two contributing factors to this is the way he comes to see Shuichi as stronger and more of a hero than himself.
There’s subtle hints that Kaito seeing Shuichi this way begins to happen as early as chapter 2, in fact. In their first training session, as Kaito explains why he’s doing this for Shuichi, he says that he’s been asking himself “Is the one Kaede entrusted her wish to really this weak?” and that it’s made him feel frustrated. The only other time Kaito uses the word “frustrated” to describe his feelings is when he’s admitting to his jealousy at the end, making me think that there’s a similar thing going on here, too. Shuichi showed incredible strength in Kaede’s trial, facing the truth – a truth that Kaito himself also struggled to accept – and saving everyone despite how much it hurt. Kaede entrusted her wish to Shuichi because she recognised that strength in him, that potential to continue to be the one who faces the truth and saves everyone.
Kaito’s frustration comes from the fact that Shuichi can be so strong in one sense but at the same time still be weak and in need of support in another. In Kaito’s worldview, people are one or the other: either they’re strong, invincible heroes who inspire others, or they’re weak and deserve support to help them grow stronger. It doesn’t make any sense that Shuichi can be both, and that bothers Kaito in a way he can’t properly articulate because he isn’t consciously aware of this double standard of his. Still, despite his confusion, Kaito is able to recognise Shuichi’s weak side as something he can help with and is determined to do so, because it’s the best way that he can carry on Kaede’s wish.
Of course, once Shuichi has Kaito’s support, he starts being able to fight that weak side of him a lot more, to the point that Kaito very quickly begins to see nothing but strength from him. In the second trial, when Shuichi answers Kirumi’s protests of “Don’t you want to protect everyone?!” by declaring “I’m doing this because I want to protect everyone!”, the camera briefly pans to Kaito saying “Shuichi…” in surprise. That’s all he says; it’s such a small thing amidst the argument between Shuichi and Kirumi, but the fact that it’s there at all means that something meaningful has to be going on in Kaito’s head at that point. Given the timing of it, I believe this is Kaito being taken aback at just how much of a hero Shuichi is managing to be, apparently without Kaito’s help. Chapter 3’s trial doesn’t help matters either, because thanks to Kaito’s phobia, Shuichi ends up proving that he can investigate and solve an entire case just fine without any help from Kaito.
Since Kaito is stuck on this false dichotomy that people are only either strong or weak and cannot be both, he takes this kind of thing as a sign that Shuichi is simply strong after all, and therefore never really had any weaknesses or needed Kaito in the first place. This becomes noticeable even before the third trial: in the first training session in chapter 3, once Maki leaves and Kaito and Shuichi are discussing the idea that she needs this because she’s weak, Kaito says, “Well, in that sense, you’re… No, your case is a little different.” Kaito was about to start talking about Shuichi’s weakness and compare it to Maki’s, so he still wasn’t quite thinking this on a fully conscious level – until he stopped himself as he realised that Shuichi’s case is different to Maki’s because, as far as Kaito sees it, he’s not weak. But Kaito already doesn’t want to confront the idea that Shuichi might be strong enough to not need his support, so when Shuichi asks him what he means, he hurriedly changes the subject.
He’s wrong, of course; Shuichi still has those same weaknesses and still needs Kaito’s support, even though he’s been able to grow a lot already because of it. Kaito being unable to see this is partly because of his inability to comprehend people being both strong and weak at the same time, but it’s also in large part because Shuichi really does seem a lot stronger from the outside. It’s one thing to play as Shuichi and see all of the anxiety and self-doubt inside his head, but almost all of that is confined to his inner monologue. On the surface, and particularly in class trials, Shuichi appears to be effortlessly solving the cases and saving everyone, and that’s the Shuichi that Kaito sees. When Kaito confesses his jealousy to Shuichi at the end, he seems genuinely unaware of the obvious truth that Shuichi could only keep being that strong because of him. If he’d known that, he’d have had no reason to be jealous at all.
A really bad time to be dying
But even though Kaito comes to see Shuichi as more flawlessly strong than he really is, that alone probably wouldn’t have been an issue. Kaito should have been able to simply be proud of Shuichi and not jealous. His past sidekicks, whom he talks about in his fourth free time event, have all reached greater heights than he’s currently at (and while he might be exaggerating a bit about how much influence he had on them, I don’t believe he’s outright lying in this one) – but he’s totally okay with that and is just happy that he was the one to help them achieve greatness. It’s all fine so long as Kaito can remain confident in his own strength and keep believing that he’ll also be that awesome one day.
So the other, arguably more important contributing factor to Kaito’s jealousy of Shuichi is the way he starts to see himself as weaker than he wants to be, first as his phobia renders him useless for half a chapter, but then on a much more serious level as he realises that he’s dying. The constant pain he’s in by at least chapter 4 onwards (as evidenced by his comments about his Virtual World avatar) serves as a constant, unyielding reminder of the fact that his death keeps getting closer and closer and there’s nothing he can do about it. Even though he’s determined not to show it – because this is weak of him and he cannot fail his sidekicks by letting them see it – he has to be feeling so, so scared and powerless. And Kaito’s not only afraid of dying; he’s even more afraid of dying pointlessly. Although he’s as desperate to survive as anyone else, he’d be more able to accept the idea of dying if it were the kind of death a hero would have, some sort of sacrifice to save everyone and help them all escape this killing game, since everyone else’s well-being is even more important to him than his own. But at this rate, he’s just going to die. For no reason. For nothing.
Still, we see barely any of this on the surface. Even though Kaito really shouldn’t be hiding it so stubbornly, even though he’s only doing so because he’s terrified of “failing” his sidekicks if he lets them see what’s really happening to him, the way he continues to smile and do his best to support his friends despite what he’s going through is really impressive and takes incredible strength. But recall Kaito’s Harmonious Heart event, where even having a brief pessimistic thought counts as being weak to him, despite the fact that he immediately shoots it down and pushes himself to stay positive, which he should be able to understand is strength. Even though he’s dealing with the fear and helplessness of his inevitable death in such a brave, selfless way, none of that matters to Kaito next to the fact that he’s feeling that fear and helplessness in the first place. People are only either strong or weak and can’t be both, so if he’s feeling like this, then he must be weak, right? But that’s unacceptable – he’s supposed to be the hero to Shuichi and Maki, not the weak one who needs their support.
Kaito spends most of chapter 4, the first chapter in which he’s fully aware that he’s dying, desperately trying to compensate for it and prove that he can still be the hero. It’s the only chapter in which he repeatedly tells Shuichi and Maki that they shouldn’t bear their burdens alone, which is more than just him being excruciatingly hypocritical – his underlying reason for it is that he’s trying to stress that they should let him help, that he can help. Of course, he spent most of chapters 2 and 3 helping Shuichi and Maki bear their burdens too, but the difference is that in those chapters, he never made a big point of the fact that he was supporting them. He just did it, without expecting any acknowledgement. So the fact that he suddenly seems to subtly want acknowledgement for it in chapter 4 when it never mattered to him before has to be caused by the way his impending death is making him feel. Kaito’s words to Shuichi and Maki encouraging them to share their burdens are him desperately trying to prove that he’s not useless, that they still need him and he can still support them and make a difference even though he’s weak and dying (right?).
Think about how Gonta acts during chapter 4, constantly offering to help and trying to think of even the smallest ways he can be useful to everyone because he’s feeling so powerless in his inability to protect people. That’s a pretty direct parallel to how Kaito feels during this chapter too; he’s just much less honest about it.
Case 4: the build-up
There’s also a gradual but very deliberate build-up of Kaito being made to feel inferior next to Shuichi from the beginning of chapter 4’s investigation. First Kokichi insists that Kaito shouldn’t be Shuichi’s investigation partner because he’s the initial suspect, thus allowing Shuichi to prove for a second time that he doesn’t need Kaito’s support to investigate a case. Then Kokichi starts objecting to Kaito’s involvement not even because he’s a suspect but just because he’s totally annoying Shuichi and getting in his way and obviously couldn’t possibly have anything useful to offer him, right. Meanwhile, most of the others have started to mindlessly rely on Shuichi’s detective skills to save them and frequently talk about how great he is, rubbing in the apparent fact that Shuichi’s so much more of a hero than Kaito and doesn’t need him at all. And Shuichi himself obliviously contributes to this with his experiment with the cell phone, in which Kaito is briefly and subtly thrilled that Shuichi needs his help, only to find that the “help” consists of “stand there doing literally nothing and then look like an idiot as I log you out without warning”.
Even in the first half of the trial, things don’t go easy on Kaito. Everyone continues to hail Shuichi as their sole saviour, something Kokichi deliberately fuels, which is still him purposefully jabbing at Kaito’s issues even though he does so without mentioning Kaito at all. Not only that, but Shuichi also ends up refuting several of Kaito’s arguments, even before Gonta becomes the main suspect. Partly this is because Kaito wasn’t allowed to investigate properly and has an incomplete understanding of the facts compared to Shuichi. But still, the fact that he even tries to make arguments despite knowing his understanding is probably incomplete is a result of him being determined to contribute as much as he can and show that he’s not useless. Back in the second case, even though he investigated with Shuichi that time, Kaito barely took part in the actual deductions in the trial and was happy to sit back and watch Shuichi solve things and just give him the encouragement he needed. But not here. Not when he’s dying and Shuichi can do everything without him and he’s desperate to prove that he can still make a difference. Yet, because his arguments are wrong, his attempts to help just end up making him look even more obviously inferior to Shuichi than he would have done if he had sat back and said nothing.
Kaito’s Rebuttal Showdown in particular is great – on the surface he makes it sound like he’s helping by pointing out his sidekick’s mistake and offering to help fix it, but the reality of it is that Kaito is desperately trying to prove that Shuichi needs his help. Usually Kaito would have enough faith in Shuichi to let him finish his argument before questioning it, but here he jumps in mid-sentence because he’s overeager to find the slightest thing he can “help” with – if he’d just waited another few seconds, Shuichi would have gone on to explain exactly how Miu could walk through that wall and they wouldn’t have needed to do this at all. And Kaito is clearly a lot more bothered than he claims to be at the fact that he turned out to be wrong and only ended up wasting Shuichi’s time.
Case 4: the breaking point
While Kaito is trying as hard as he can not to let all of this get to him, and he mostly does a convincing job of pretending that it isn’t, things finally reach breaking point once it becomes clear that the culprit has to be Gonta.
Kokichi would try and have you believe that Kaito’s whole problem in this part of the trial is that Shuichi being a detective means that he’s more suspicious of others, the exact opposite of how Kaito is, oh how ironic. But Kaito knows that’s not really the issue. His principles about believing in people come with the acknowledgement that you’re taking a risk by doing so, and that if you do turn out to have been wrong, that’s on you for misjudging them. Shuichi’s detective’s instincts really aren’t so incompatible with Kaito’s philosophy at all. Even back during the investigation in chapter 1, Kaito encouraged a hesitant Shuichi to investigate any suspicion that he has (even if it were towards Kaito himself) until he’s satisfied, because doing anything else isn’t how a detective should act. This culminates in Kaito confidently declaring at the beginning of chapter 4’s investigation that even if he was the culprit, Shuichi would still see it through and reach the truth. He has no genuine reason to be angry at Shuichi during this trial – Kaito would never blame Shuichi for being the way he’s supposed to be. More than anything, Kaito knows that Shuichi is being strong by being able to acknowledge painful truths like this, and at the best of times he’s able to be proud of Shuichi for being this way.
This isn’t so much about belief and suspicion. Like everything up to this point, this is about strength – Shuichi’s strength and Kaito’s weakness.
Let’s face it: the possibility that Gonta could genuinely be the culprit is agonisingly painful to anyone who believes in him and appreciates how much of a pure, earnest, selfless person he is, which of course includes both Kaito and Shuichi. By this point, Shuichi is more than capable of enduring that pain and pushing through it to confirm the truth. He’s had a lot of practice at doing so since Kaede’s trial, and thanks to both hers and Kaito’s support, he’s spent a lot of time talking about it and thinking about how to overcome this weakness of his. It’s not that Gonta’s guilt hurts Shuichi any less – it’s just that he’s grown strong enough to deal with it.
But meanwhile, this whole time, Kaito has had absolutely no practice at confronting his own pain and weakness. The worse his illness has become, the more ashamed and afraid he’s felt, and the harder he’s tried to ignore it and block it out and avoid dealing with it. Unlike Shuichi, he hasn’t grown any stronger or better at healthily dealing with his own problems at all. So when Gonta comes under suspicion and things begin to hurt, Kaito isn’t strong enough to face it. His initial, instinctive response is to block that out too, insisting that Gonta being the culprit is just not possible and so there’s no point even discussing it.
And yet, by doing that, Kaito is running away from the truth, the exact thing Shuichi used to struggle with but has now become so good at that he makes it look almost effortless. All Kaito is doing is proving yet again how much weaker and less of a hero he is than Shuichi. The only way for this to be wrong, for Kaito to not be the weak one here, is for him to keep desperately arguing that Gonta being the culprit isn’t true, because if it isn’t the truth then he’s not being weak by refusing to admit it, he’s just being logical, right? So Kaito shifts from saying they shouldn’t be talking about it at all to making rational-sounding arguments defending Gonta – but even so, there’s hints that Kaito realises deep down that Gonta really must have done it, and some of the points he tries to make use facts that he knows aren’t true. The more arguments Shuichi shoots down and the more certain Gonta’s guilt becomes, the more obviously weak Kaito is being by refusing to accept the truth, so the more desperately he has to deny that it’s the truth at all to avoid looking weak.
Kaito gets angrier and angrier towards Shuichi as the trial goes on, but it’s not remotely that he truly is angry at Shuichi for listening to Kokichi and doubting Gonta – his accusations along those lines are not the point and are just excuses to justify his anger. The real reason for it is simply that the pain of knowing that Gonta really is guilty and that he’s being so much weaker than Shuichi by refusing to accept it is too much for him to keep inside. Kaito’s only way of dealing with pain that he can’t handle and can’t suppress is by lashing out in anger – hopefully at a deserving target, such as usually Monokuma, or in this case, Kokichi. A lot of his anger at Kokichi here is not really a rational attempt to argue that he’s the culprit, especially once that gets proven impossible, but is just Kaito trying to deflect his pain, to have someone he can blame so that he’s not the one at fault here by being unable to face the truth. He even lashes out at Kokichi by voting for him at the end, which is so pathetically, desperately pointless because he knows that Gonta is the culprit and that if everyone else was equally weak as to do the same thing as him then they’d all be killed. But some of Kaito’s anger also gets directed at Shuichi as the one shooting down his arguments and proving how weak he is and being effortlessly stronger than him. The last thing Kaito wants to do is hurt Shuichi and make things even harder for him, but he’s so desperate and in so much pain that he can’t control himself and realise what he’s doing and stop.
Ideally, Kaito should have been able to let his belief in and friendship with Shuichi support him through this painful ordeal of realising that Gonta killed someone. But of course he can’t do that – he’s supposed to be the hero and Shuichi the sidekick and it’s not meant to go the other way. Shuichi even does try and reach out to him and acknowledge the pain he’s in – “I know how you feel. I know because we all feel it” – but for Kaito, admitting that he feels this way and that Shuichi is dealing with it better than him is inconceivable. Instead of accepting Shuichi’s support, the pain of the notion that he even needs it just makes Kaito even more defensively angry, and it’s this that triggers his Argument Armament and him fighting more directly against Shuichi than at any other point in the trial. This gets even worse at the end, when Kaito coughs up blood in front of everyone and it becomes near-impossible to hide how weak and pathetic he thinks he is, and then on top of it all Shuichi reaches out and offers to help him back to the dorm, making it so obvious who’s really the hero here. All Kaito can do in a desperate attempt not to have everything fall apart even more is to furiously push his best friend away, insisting that he can walk on his own, that he doesn’t need Shuichi’s help.
Rock bottom
The next morning, Kaito’s scrambling to pick up the broken pieces, to convince everyone that he’s completely fine and keep pushing them forward as best he can. The only sign he gives that he’s not fine and that the nightmare of the previous trial really did happen is that he’s no longer looking at or directly talking to Shuichi.
It might seem on the surface that Kaito acts this way because he’s still upset with Shuichi for what he did to Gonta during the trial, but that’s not it at all. For one thing, if he were angry at Shuichi, then expressing it by refusing to talk to him would be incredibly passive-aggressive of him, which is not remotely how Kaito operates; if he has a problem with someone, he’s never afraid to let them know it. But more to the point, he no longer has any reason to be angry. Kaito’s anger during the trial had no rational reason behind it and was nothing more than him lashing out in the heat of the moment at the awful situation that was unfolding. That wouldn’t have lasted into the next morning. Consider the time he punched Shuichi at the end of Kaede’s trial, which was another emotional reaction because he was too upset to think straight and understand that Shuichi had a different way of reacting to the pain of Kaede’s death. The next morning, Kaito apologised for that, because he’d had time to re-evaluate it and realise it was a mistake. So again with Gonta, Kaito should have had plenty of time to calm down and acknowledge that what Shuichi did was necessary to save everyone else, something he’d really known the whole time and just couldn’t admit to in the heat of things. Shuichi talks about how he doesn’t feel right apologising to Kaito when he knows his actions weren’t wrong – and Kaito would agree with that. More than once, Kaito had mentioned his principle that you shouldn’t apologise for something you believe was the right thing to do, even if it didn’t work out so well. Therefore, it should be clear that Kaito isn’t angry at Shuichi or waiting for an apology or anything of the sort.
Kaito’s problem is with himself. While he’s had a whole night to calm down and stop feeling that reactionary anger towards Shuichi, that’s also given him plenty of time to think about his actions during the trial. And what did he do? He showed weakness in front of his sidekick. Huge, significant, undeniable weakness, while Shuichi showed nothing but strength. Not only that, but despite having always promised he’d support Shuichi no matter what, that he’d help Shuichi carry his burdens, he utterly failed to do so during the trial. Rather than helping Shuichi through the painful ordeal of accusing Gonta, Kaito made things even more difficult for him by lashing out like he did.
This is why Kaito won’t look at or directly talk to Shuichi in the beginning of chapter 5 – because he’s too ashamed to face him. He feels like he’s failed Shuichi so completely that there’s no going back from it, that Shuichi must have lost all faith in him, that he doesn’t have the right to call Shuichi his sidekick any more when he’s so much weaker himself. Every time Kaito looks at Shuichi, he’s reminded of how much stronger than him Shuichi has proven himself to be, how badly he wishes he could be that strong but isn’t. He’s just about able to keep up his façade and pretend everything’s normal in front of everyone else, but he can’t bring himself to do so for Shuichi because he’s convinced Shuichi would see right through it. Yet Kaito still can’t outright admit to his weakness in front of him (much less in front of everyone), so instead he just pathetically runs away from the whole issue by trying to pretend Shuichi isn’t there.
It’s very telling, during their conversation through the hangar window later that chapter, that when Shuichi hesitantly tries to bring up Gonta’s trial, Kaito just immediately starts talking about how much he believes in Shuichi and how great of a detective he is. He doesn’t even mention Gonta or reassure Shuichi that he did the right thing in that trial or anything of the sort, because he always understood that and that was never the problem in the first place. While he’s still not quite yet admitting to having been jealous, Kaito’s praise of Shuichi here is his way of saying he’s come to terms with the fact that Shuichi is stronger and more of a hero than him. Everything else aside, Shuichi’s still his best friend and Kaito’s incredibly proud of him, and that’s all that matters in the end. Facing the literal end of the world does wonders to make you re-evaluate your priorities like this.
Trying to “fix” things
Really, they should have talked about this much sooner, during any one of the awkward silences earlier in chapter 5. If Shuichi had realised what Kaito’s problem was, it would have been simple for him to reassure Kaito that he doesn’t feel let down at all, that he doesn’t blame Kaito for not being strong enough to face the truth because he knows how that feels, and that they need to stay friends and keep supporting each other, now more than ever. But Shuichi doesn’t do this, because he doesn’t realise the problem is on Kaito’s end and assumes that Kaito is angry at him for Gonta’s death. This is in large part down to Shuichi’s own insecurities and tendency to irrationally blame himself for everything bad that happens that has even a little bit to do with him – that irrationality would easily extend to assuming Kaito must be blaming him too. But it’s also partly because, one way or another, Kaito actually succeeded in getting Shuichi to look up to him and assume that he’s basically invincible – emotionally, at least. Even though Kaito ends up convinced after trial 4 that Shuichi must have realised how weak he is, Shuichi still hasn’t. So Kaito’s determination to have Shuichi see him this way ends up working even better than he expected to the point that it makes Kaito’s own suffering worse yet again, because it renders Shuichi incapable of realising what the problem is and helping Kaito when he needs it the most.
Of course, the other way for Shuichi to realise what Kaito’s problem is would be for Kaito to actually tell him. The responsibility is really on Kaito to start the conversation here, and he should be perfectly aware of that. He was in the wrong during Gonta’s trial, not Shuichi, which means he’s the one who owes Shuichi an apology. But even though Kaito already feels like he’s failed Shuichi and shouldn’t have anything to lose on that front, he’s still terrified of letting Shuichi see any more weakness than he already has. So rather than working on mustering up the courage to face Shuichi and admit to all the pain he’s in, Kaito instead spends the first half of chapter 5 fixating on a plan to fight Monokuma and get them all out of here. This sounds unrelated, but it’s not – this is almost entirely about trying to compensate for his failure in Gonta’s trial. Kaito can’t admit to failing Shuichi while he still feels nothing but weak and useless compared to him, but if he can make up for it somehow, prove himself to be a hero worthy of looking Shuichi in the eye again, then it’ll be so much easier to apologise for failing him. He doesn’t want to give Shuichi an empty apology for something that he feels like he’s still doing right now.
If you pay attention to the way Kaito goes about his plan, you can see the signs of what it’s really mostly about. The first thing is that it’s not at all for the sake of saving himself: when he announces it to the group, he says, “I’m going to get you guys out of here.” Not “us”. Just “you guys”. Kaito must know that his illness is almost certainly too far gone by now, and the time limit it’s giving him is no longer for his chances of survival. It’s for his chance to finally make a difference and be the hero who saves everyone, because he can’t die like this – he can’t die a failure.
Because the second thing about Kaito’s plan is that while of course he cares about saving everyone else, and he tries to present the plan like that’s what it’s about, it’s specifically about him being the one to save everyone else. He asks for everyone’s help in fighting Monokuma, but then insists on making all of the preparations himself, not accepting any kind of help at all in getting things ready or coming up with an actual strategy for the battle. If Kaito really, truly wanted the plan to have the maximum chance of success, he’d have asked everyone to give their input on how to best fight Monokuma – but he knows that would only result in Maki (and maybe also Shuichi) basically running the whole plan instead of him. If this weren’t chapter 5, if he hadn’t failed so utterly during the previous trial and been so desperate to prove himself, Kaito would have been fine with that and happy to let his sidekicks take the spotlight. But right now, he’s desperate for it to seem like it’s his plan, his actions that are making the difference.
The other kind of hero
See, Kaito’s concept of a “hero” kind of has two separate versions of it. On the one hand, there’s the type of hero that he is to his sidekicks: someone who supports and inspires them and helps them find the strength to overcome their weaknesses and reach their full potential. One of the things the word “luminary” can mean is “someone who inspires or influences others”. That’s why Kaito calls himself the Luminary of the Stars! He absolutely deserves that title; he is so incredibly good at being that kind of hero, more so than anyone else (even if he is far too willing to sacrifice his own well-being for it). But that alone isn’t enough for him, especially not now he’s shown such obvious weakness that surely Shuichi couldn’t possibly find him inspirational any more. Not when Shuichi has been the other kind of hero this whole time: the kind that takes action and Gets Shit Done. Both types of hero are capable of making a difference – but the impact of the luminary kind is vague and nebulous, whereas the impact of a direct-action hero is indisputable. Kaito can’t be satisfied with just being a luminary now that he’s doubting more than ever whether Shuichi even needed him to be one in the first place, all while Shuichi has undeniably saved everybody’s lives four times over.
That’s not to say this is the first time Kaito has tried to be the action-oriented kind of hero instead of the luminary kind. During each of the previous cases, Kaito often tried to talk himself up as if he’s good at investigating, not to mention directly trying to “help” with his off-base deductions as he grew more desperate to be useful in chapter 4, despite that he very much doesn’t have that detective’s instinct and should know that his worth in investigations comes from simply being there to encourage Shuichi. And in chapter 1, before he’d begun to make himself useful by supporting Shuichi (because Kaede already had that covered), Kaito spent the chapter constantly insisting that he was going to do something about the situation. He really wants to be this kind of action hero who can get stuff done and make an obvious, definitive difference. He talks big, saying he’s going to do something when he doesn’t even have a plan yet, not simply as empty words to make himself look good but because he genuinely intends to follow up on those words and come up with a big plan that’ll save everyone.
Unfortunately for Kaito, while being a luminary is something that comes naturally to him, he is kind of terrible at taking direct action and having decent plans, however much he might hate to admit it. In a situation like this killing game, the sort of plans that work are complicated plans that require a lot of thinking outside the box and careful strategising – and Kaito’s mind just doesn’t work that way. All of the plans he does come up with throughout the game – his “strategy meeting” in chapter 1, his attempt to break out of the hangar with a crossbow later in chapter 5, and especially his plan to fight Monokuma here in early chapter 5 – all use the same basic idea of “just fight the problem hard enough and we’ll win”. Kaito’s mindset is way too straightforward, so the only plans he can think of are equally straightforward and therefore very unlikely to ever succeed. Yet he refuses to accept how bad he is at this and let someone else handle the planning, especially not now, when he’s failed Shuichi and is desperate to make up for it and prove that he can be this kind of hero too. By doing this, he’s just digging himself deeper into a hole of failure – all that Kaito’s insistence on the plan being his plan really achieves is making it so much less likely to succeed than it would have been if he’d accepted everyone else’s input.
How to really be a hero: the hard way
But just when they’re about to start Kaito’s plan, Kokichi comes along and drops the Electrohammers on them and proposes they use those to get through the secret tunnel instead. Assuming he’s not lying, it’s a proper, well-thought-out plan, designed specifically to target the things standing in their way. Next to that, Kaito’s haphazard pile of weapons and complete lack of a strategy looks exactly like the pathetic, desperate mess that he always secretly knew it was. It’s a huge risk to trust Kokichi, but taking that risk is still far more likely to result in their escape than what Kaito was trying to do. So Kaito has to stand there and accept that if he truly cares about saving everyone and getting them out of here – if he really wants to be even a little bit of a hero in the end – then it doesn’t have to be his plan. Even if it’s from someone like Kokichi, anyone’s plan will do so long as it works. It looks like it practically causes Kaito physical pain to decide to follow Kokichi’s suggestion, but he does so all the same. He’s finally acknowledging his inadequacies and taking the road that’s most likely to save everyone anyway. If Kaito hadn’t been at rock bottom here thanks to everything that led up to this point, he might never have accepted this, but right now he’s got nothing to lose.
This goes double for Kaito’s decision to participate in Kokichi’s murder plot. Killing someone, even if it’s someone who’s literally asking to be killed, goes against every fibre of Kaito’s being. While Kaito’s self-destructive levels of selflessness regarding his sidekicks mean he’d have absolutely done so just to save Maki from being executed, he also makes it clear that that’s not the main reason and even if Maki hadn’t been in danger he’d still have done the same. Again, it’s about Kaito being desperate to make a difference no matter what, even if he has to make compromises like accepting his plans are terrible compared to Kokichi’s, and trusting someone he hates that much, and becoming a murderer. If Kaito wants one last chance to help save everyone and finally be a hero before his time runs out, this is his only choice.
This is also despite the fact that Kaito knows the plan is extremely unlikely to actually succeed. His unshakeable faith in Shuichi’s awesomeness makes him almost certain that Shuichi will be able to figure out the truth and unwittingly show Monokuma who the real culprit is in the end. Yet Kaito goes along with the plan anyway despite knowing that it only has a tiny chance of fooling Shuichi and succeeding – because he’d rather take a tiny chance than none at all. And even if the plan does fail to achieve what Kokichi wanted from it, even if it isn’t a perfect success that instantly ends the killing game, it’ll still help everyone else at least a little by proving that Monokuma can’t break his own rules and is beholden to some kind of audience. It’ll give them hope that there’s other people out there, give Shuichi something to work towards figuring out. It’s not remotely the grand, flawless heroic victory like Kaito would have had in those games he played as a kid, or like he’d been trying to insist he was capable of throughout most of this killing game – but it’s something, and that’s infinitely better than the utter failure he was terrified of dying as before Kokichi told him the plan.
And simply becoming a murderer isn’t the only way in which Kaito is willing to absolutely shatter his own convictions if it might help him save everyone. Lying to his friends by pretending to be Kokichi for the whole trial as well – that’s such a big deal coming from Kaito. At one point during trial 4, Kaito denounces Kokichi for the way he’s always putting on a mask and never showing his true face, which, since Kaito has been wearing a mask over his own insecurities for that whole chapter, could be seen as wildly hypocritical. But I really don’t think it is. Despite the lies Kaito does tell, one thing he hates the idea of lying about is the kind of person he is, and that’s what he’s getting at here when he says “true face”. Kaito is always someone who genuinely wants to help out everyone else, and he never lies about that. He may lie about how capable he is of actually doing so, or of how important helping everyone else is compared to how much help he really should be getting for himself, but he tells those lies precisely because of how badly he wants to be able to help. Kaito is always completely sincere about the true core of his nature and intentions and would never hide that behind a mask. Being true to himself like this is extremely important to Kaito, and that’s why Kokichi angers him so much for being the very opposite of that. It’s to the point that he outright says to Kokichi, “I don’t wanna survive if it means I have to stoop to your level”. He would rather die than compromise these convictions of his and only keep surviving as someone who isn’t even able to be up-front about the things that really matter to him.
So Kaito being willing to hide his true intentions, to bite his tongue on how much he cares about Shuichi and Maki and hates seeing them suffer by thinking he’s dead when he could fix that in a heartbeat, to act out Kokichi's manipulative insincerity and actually stoop to his level for the entirety of a trial… Even though it’s only temporary and he knows he’ll get the chance to explain himself to everyone in the end, that’s still absolutely huge. If it were only for his own survival, Kaito would never go that far. But for a chance at helping to save everyone else? His only chance left to be a hero and prove himself next to Shuichi and not die a pointless, meaningless death? He’d do damn near anything.
A hero’s story
Throughout my first time experiencing case 5, I was terrified of the possibility that Kaito was the one under that press, less because I didn’t want him to die than because I didn’t want him to have lost. I didn’t want Kaito’s story to ultimately be one of someone who’d tried so hard to be a hero but failed at every turn, culminating in his final pathetic failure at the hands of Kokichi here. The narrative had repeatedly done its best to make Kaito seem expendable, to highlight the way his recklessness is overzealous and idiotic and barely achieves anything next to Shuichi’s careful logic, so it genuinely seemed like this bleak fate could have been how it all ended for him.
But it’d be a crappy story if the hero lost so easily, just like it’d be a crappy story if the hero won so easily. Turns out the out-universe writers knew exactly what they were doing, and all of this build-up – all of Kaito’s weakness and failure and apparent inevitable loss – only served to enhance the impact when he finally managed to win. I was absolutely elated when I realised for sure that Kaito was the one inside that Exisal, that he was not only still alive but still fighting, sacrificing absolutely everything in a last attempt to save everyone. It was still only a partial, bittersweet victory, but he’d more than earned at least that much after everything he’d done. Kaito’s real overall story turned out to be one of struggling and feeling helpless and facing failure and being forced to make compromises, but still never giving up and pushing through it to seize at least some kind of victory regardless. Whether Kaito realises it or not – but I think he might have just about grasped this by the end – that’s the kind of hero story that’s truly worth reading.
