Asking out of curiosity because I'm one of the people who loves pregame haha, but what do you think about the things Tsumugi revealed in Ch 6? Any thoughts/personal headcanons on the audition tapes? (I love your blog btw, welcome back <3 !!)
That’s a fun question with a somewhat complicated answer! I know some people in the fandom find the chapter 6 trial a really big point of contention and there are a lot of debates on whether everything she said was true or false, but I genuinely believe that having her information be a mixture of truth and lies is not only the most likely theory, but also thematically appropriate with the rest of the game.
At the end of ndrv3, Saihara doesn’t find himself “picking” between truth or lies, or deciding that one is objectively better than the others. Instead, he comes to the realization that both have their uses and both can be used for the sake of comforting or hurting other people, and that neither is inherently better or worse. I wholeheartedly believe this is supposed to be the main takeaway from ndrv3, along with the idea of fiction itself being a powerful tool that has very real impact on people’s lives, so I feel that it would only make sense if Tsumugi’s speech itself was a blend of the two.
A lot of the information we discover throughout the game seems to back this up, too. I do think she was telling the truth about some things, including the whole game being a reality show. Not only has DR always been pretty self-aware and tackled very meta, 4th-wall concepts, but its themes have always centered around the way society influences kids’ self-worth and gradually desensitizes them to violence and death.
Given how sdr2 talked at length about the harm that equating “talent” (a.k.a. “contribution to society”) to your worth and place within that society, I feel like ndrv3 taking it a step beyond that and tackling the idea of media itself shaping people’s ideas about their own self-worth to the point that they would be willing to die for essentially 15 minutes of fame on television makes sense to me. This is, after all, something that people actually do in real life.
Ndrv3’s final trial and ending got a lot of flack when the game first released in Japan for being “unrealistic,” with people protesting that no one would ever do that, or that you’d have to be downright evil or unhinged to willingly sign up for a killing game… but people can and have signed up willingly for all kinds of reality shows, including ones that put their lives at risk and involve extremely unhealthy or dangerous stunts. Combine that desire for making a name for yourself with a complete desensitization to violence and the idea that your own life doesn’t have any particular meaning, and yeah, I can see a lot of people being potentially interested in a reality show like Danganronpa.
Plenty of clues throughout the game also back up Tsumugi’s claims about the reality show. Saihara has multiple separate lines of narration noting that the school itself feels like some kind of “set, and that the way the Exisals are still carrying out construction is strange. When he investigates his own research lab in chapter 5, if I’m remembering correctly there are even 53 little case files on his shelf—a fun little tie-in, in my opinion. Ouma also comments as early as chapter 3 that, “if this people were watching this killing game, they sure would be getting a kick out of it,” which can’t be brushed off as a coincidence when we know Ouma was conducting his own investigation around the show and even saw the outside world before anyone else did.
That being said, just because I personally think Tsumugi was telling the truth about the reality show and the whole game being fictional, I don’t think everything she said was true. In my opinion, some of the most distressing claims she had were entirely made up, in order to try and truly break the remaining survivors’ morale and force them to resign to the idea that they had no choice but to go through the killing game all over again.
We know Tsumugi as a ringleader was someone who wasn’t afraid to improvise or create new “plotlines” in the narrative she was weaving for the killing game. The fact that she took matters into her own hands in chapter 1 and killed Amami herself, then pinned it all on Kaede, as well as the Hope’s Peak flashback light she created in chapter 5 to counter Ouma’s attempts to grind the killing game to a halt, all show this pretty clearly.
So I absolutely think her claim about everyone else’s personalities being “fictional” to the point of inputting thoughts, feelings, and even romantic attraction was completely made up. If the ndrv3 cast were fictional, it was in the sense of becoming a role that they wanted to be—not in directly influencing their thoughts or personalities, but by simply overwriting their memories with the flashback lights and then letting their own beliefs carry them from there.
The audition tapes she shows do seem wildly different from Saihara’s, Kaede’s, and Momota’s in-game personalities at first glance—but even then, I believe they’re still consistent with their actual characters. Saihara is someone who gets unhealthily attached to things, whether it’s media or people, and he has very little regard for his own life, even if he’s not willing to kill or hurt others. In-game, Kaede talks a lot about believing in others and trusting everyone, but the fact that she decides to commit murder and try to take out the ringleader herself is the biggest proof that she didn’t quite trust everyone as much as she claimed. And while Momota certainly isn’t murderous or looking to “kill everyone else,” the desire to become famous and make a name for himself is definitely still there.
It’s pretty clear to me that Tsumugi’s claim about being responsible for feelings (particularly for Saihara’s feelings for Kaede, and Maki’s feelings for Momota) is the most blatantly untrue thing out of nearly everything she said. This is because she also goes on to claim to have written Momota to be sick, so that he would eventually die from his illness and it would make his relationship with Maki even more tragic.
This claim is a pretty blatant lie, since in the chapter 5 post-trial Momota directly says that he has no memories whatsoever of being sick before the game started. If Tsumugi had truly written that to be a part of his backstory, as well as tied to Maki developing feelings for him, then it would have absolutely been included in the flashback lights. The fact that Momota can’t remember being sick a single time in his memories, as well as Tsumugi’s genuinely panicked reaction to finding out that he’s ill in chapter 5, proves in my opinion that she was completely making stuff up in order to try and shut down the survivors’ arguments and break their spirits (it also makes me think that at least part of the outside world must be pretty fucked up, since Momota’s illness is as real as it gets and might be linked with the outside world).
In other words, I think Tsumugi told the truth where applicable, and then twisted the facts and sometimes even told outright lies in order to try and achieve the result she wanted. It feels in character for her, as someone who improvised and re-wrote the “script” for her game constantly, as well as thematically appropriate for an entire game about distinguishing truth from lies.
There are a lot of remaining mysteries at the end of the chapter 6 trial that we don’t really have any answers for, either! Tsumugi’s comment about being a “cosplaycat criminal” is really ambiguous and interesting for that exact purpose, since it could refer to her being a part of Team Danganronpa or even refer to some other unknown group that may have hijacked the killing game away from its original purpose. It’s impossible to really know for sure what she meant by those comments, but it’s definitely fun to speculate!
Anyway, these are just my thoughts on Tsumugi and the ending in general. I absolutely love ndrv3’s ending and always have; I feel like it was such a great conclusion for the entire series while still leaving things perfectly open-ended for fans to theorize and make their own interpretations. Thank you for giving me a chance to share my thoughts, anon, and thank you for supporting my blog!
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