I'm surprised how I haven't seen people talking about how the fifth chapter of SDR2 and the fourth chapter of DR1 are clear parallels, Sakura and Komaeda being compared.
The fifth chapter of SDR2 plays almost as a subversion of the fourth chapter in DR1. Instead of needing to accept that the victim committed suicide instead of being killed, in SDR2, they have to accept that it wasn’t a suicide and it was a murder. Both cases handle the idea of poison being disguised, with the initial assumption of the killer handling Sakura her protein bottle full of poison, while Komaeda disguised one of the granades to have poison. In Sakura's case, poison was never disguised, in Komaeda, it actually was. In both cases, the victims leave a will where they apologize to a loved one, Sakura apologizes to Asahina and Komaeda to Hinata.
Both cases thematically handle the ideas of how love is necessary for understanding and how prejudice and hatred shape the understanding of a person by the others. In Dr1, it is necessary to take love, specifically Asahina's love, into account to understand the inner workings of the case. Togami, unable to take other people's emotions into account, is unable to resolve the case. In SDR2, the insights of someone who loved Komaeda are necessary to understand the case completely, Hinata’s love is a central piece to understand Komaeda's inner workings, at least to an extent.
Prejudice is important to both cases. The hatred towards someone that seems "rational" and "natural" that actually reveals a deep prejudice that is not actually that justified is the heart of both cases. In DR1, the violence and hatred towards Sakura are defended in the name of her being the "traitor," but the further the cases advances we can see that it's not about something so simple. The way she was so easily harmed by the other reveals that it's not so much about that, Sakura is not called "monstrous" because she is a traitor. She is referred to as that because she has an appearance the other characters find non-normative: because she is a masculine woman. It's Sakura's dehumanization due to her strength and masculinity, the actual reason for her violent mistreatment.
Komaeda is in a similar case. The cast insists that Komaeda's mistreatment is due to his beliefs and due to how dangerous he is. But the more we advance through the story, the idea that Komaeda's treatment is fully logical and normal becomes more and more strange. He is called a "pervert" by multiple characters despite not doing anything sexual, other characters that do similar things or worse things than him are more easily given the benefit of the doubt and treated with more dignity (Kuzuryu, Tsumiki, Pekoyama) it seemed like there was something in Komaeda that was more unforgivable than people who murder, than people who also have messed up views. The prejudice against Komaeda plays up in the trial, being an obstacle in understanding the case and also being even more exaggerated during it.
Both cases play with the idea of someone being hated by going against what is considered "normal"
