The reason I take issue with most people who say DMMD is problematic is because they always call it problematic because of the bad endings and never because of Nitro-Chiral’s blatant racism against the Ainu and against Black people.
Yeah, the bad endings are bad. Thats the point. They’re not supposed to be good and happy and morally just. They’re what happens when someone’s mind is completely broken and they’re labeled BAD ENDINGS because they’re not supposed to be the favorable outcome. They’re sick and twisted BECAUSE they’re the bad endings, BECAUSE it’s showing the absolute lows of the human mind. You’re not supposed to forgive or those endings, you’re not supposed to find a redeeming quality about them. That’s not the point of a bad ending. But again, this isn’t the reason that the game and even the anime is actually problematic.
What’s truly problematic is everything about how they wrote and how they treat Mink (and even Mizuki, the only other character we see with a darker skin tone, even if not by much). His whole backstory is literally a genocide against native islanders, which in this case as it’s set in Japan, are the Ainu. They don’t even beat around the bush about that. He’s the last one of his culture left. Then, they are giving him multiple Black features such as his dreads (unsure if this is also something related to Ainu culture, or if this is something appropriated and used against the Ainu, but regardless it’s still racist), and they make a racist caricature of an angry, violent POC. Even in his good ending, he still doesn’t really get any redemption or any closure. In fact, his “good ending” is him just moving away. Nothing about helping preserve his culture or restoring the lands that were stolen from him and his people. He just moves away. It’s clearly a colonizer ass “good” ending.
Then with Mizuki, even though fans loved him and wanted him to have a route when they released re:Connect, they just used him as something to be beat up and abused to move the plot line forward. And where he’s the only one with darker skin we see aside from Mink? Yeah, racist as all hell.
I say all this as a DMMD fan. I’ve been a fan of it for honestly way longer than I should have been (I was a teen who thought I was “mature” on the internet) and I still am a fan of the potential this story had and of the cast of characters that I’ve had so much fun engaging with their stories over all this time. Except for Mink’s, because even before I had learned *why* it was so bad, it always just made me feel gross and I could never get myself to like his story because it was just so horribly racist and even what was supposed to be a “good ending” was hollow and empty and meaningless in the long run, which isn’t what Mink deserved.
