@rovelae I mean, realistically speaking, none of the events of the chapter 5 trial would have taken place at all if Maki hadn’t gone to the Exisal bay with the poisoned arrows specifically intending to kill. I love her to pieces, and she’s a fantastic character, but I honestly don’t understand when people say that Ouma was singlehandedly responsible for the events of chapter 5, or that he “forced” Momota to participate in the plan despite Momota himself saying that he agreed willingly in the chapter 5 trial because he thought the plan would work.
That being said, I’m incredibly glad she lived in the end, and I think she does more or less atone for her actions considering Momota, the person she cared about most, does die as a result of everything that happened. I don’t honestly blame her for killing Ouma, because Tsumugi manipulated her so skillfully. It doesn’t necessarily exuse what Maki did, but I do think it makes sense why she took matters into her own hands, considering she thought Ouma was an incredibly dangerous person beyond reasoning with and that everyone else was naive for thinking they could just “talk him down.”
The one thing I would’ve actually liked to see is her apologizing to everyone else for nearly getting them killed in the trial. Dr1 chapter 4 is incredibly similar to ndrv3 chapter 5 in that Asahina is also manipulated by the mastermind and tries to mislead everyone to their deaths in the trial, but she later realizes how horrific this is and apologizes immediately afterward. But even without a direct apology, it’s true that Maki becomes much more of a team player from this point onward and contributes a lot towards helping the group in chapter 6, so I think she expressed her regret with her actions if nothing else.
I also personally don’t agree that Ouma was ever planning his own murder-suicide before Maki stormed into the Exisal bay. This is because it’s pretty heavily implied that Ouma’s plan to “end the killing game” was him pretending to be the ringleader and showing everyone the outside world in order to break their spirits.
According to Momota’s flashback in the chapter 5 post-trial, Ouma word for word says that he believed showing everyone the “despair-inducing truth” of the outside world would finally make them stop thinking about trying to escape from the school, and that would be enough to “make the killing game end.” That, combined with the fact that Momota was holed up in the Exisal bay with Ouma for at least a few days and Ouma never once broached the subject of a murder-suicide plan with him even once until after he was poisoned, makes me think the plan itself was a direct response to realizing the real ringleader had kickstarted the killing game back into action, and not something he accounted for prior to this.
In this same flashback, he also confirms that Maki being manipulated by the real ringleader was “a move up their sleeve that even he never saw coming.” This seems to be backed up by the genuine surprise that he shows when Maki storms the Exisal bay and tries to interrogate him. Not only does he have no idea who Junko Enoshima or the Remnants of Despair are, but he also repeatedly asks her why she’s even doing this. I believe these reactions show that he really did, genuinely believe the killing game was over right up until the moment Maki showed up.
As for why he kept Momota around if not for the sake of the murder-suicide plan initially, I think it was specifically to try and force Momota to cool his head after Momota came running at him with one of the electro-hammers. Not only that, but if there was anyone in the group likely to bolster everyone’s morale and try to get them to all work together and think about escaping the school again, it was Momota. Keeping Momota separated from the rest of the group had the added benefit of making sure none of the others became motivated enough to start thinking about trying to escape, which Ouma very much believed would’ve started the killing game back up.
I definitely believe Ouma thought it was likely that something was going to happen to him during the killing game, considering how paranoid he was--that’s why he left his will in his room with clues for everyone else, just in case he was killed. I just don’t think he ever actually planned to willingly die until his back was against the wall and he had no other choice. That was the moment at which I think he realized he couldn’t repeat the same sort of undehanded tricks that he’d aleady done to Miu and Gonta in chapter 4, and decided to use his own death as a “plan B,” to to speak, once his initial plan was already ruined.
I went through the chapter 5 post-trial just to double-check some of this information, and these lines in particular do seem to confirm that Ouma’s murder-suicide plan was something he started forming almost immediately in response to his initial plan being ruined, rather than something that he was planning from the start:
These are just my thoughts on it, anyway! I personally think that Ouma being so convinced that playing the villain would be enough to end the killing game makes his death a lot more tragic, since as smart and cunning as he was, even he really had no idea just what kind of ace Tsumugi had up her sleeve with the flashback lights.
As for Maki, I definitely would’ve liked to see some of her actions towards the other characters addressed a little more, but I don’t really blame her for trying to eliminate Ouma when she thought he was a huge threat and impossible to reason with, and the moral greyness of her actions is something I like to see. She absolutely does do some things that are in the wrong in chapter 5, but it does help to flesh her character out and she winds up growing a lot as a result of her mistakes.
