Zain Zahran is a writer from Saudi Arabia with a minor in Literature. He likes reading detective stories. These days, he mostly plays visual novels and action-adventure games. His favorite game series include Zone of the Enders and Metal Gear Solid.

Danganronpa (2010–2017) is an acclaimed series of videogames by Spike Chunsoft as well as an anime by Studio Lerche.  Daganronpa largely focuses onhigh schoolers with memory loss who are trapped in a battle royale of murder mysteries in an isolated school setting, and whoever can commit murder and get away with it earns their freedom, or “graduates.” The videogames largely play like visual novels in which the player talks to classmates and builds relationships, punctuated by intense trial segments. Yet, at its core, Danganronpa is concerned with how we’re vulnerable to technologies of the image: Games of murder are televised to torment the world, virtual reality changes the user’s personality, a flashlight device overwrites memory, a video clip impels suicide, and the main characters discover they’re part of a reality show. Media technologies in Danganronpa entail physical and existential violence.      

The vulnerability to images in the game evokes Guy Debord’s account of the invasive, identity-erasing spectacle. As the leader of the Situationists, an international political and artistic movement, Debord (1931–1994) criticizes commodification and consumerism in Society of The Spectacle (1967), a book presented in 221 theses. The titular phenomenon describes how everyday life overloads people with ideologically loaded images which are     propagated through television, magazines, advertisements, celebrities, and more (Theses 6, 60). The world becomes a collage of reality and plastered fictions, and so we see more images of reality than reality itself (Theses 2, 1). Debord says the goal of a capitalist economy is not to fulfill human needs, but to grow itself indefinitely (Thesis 51). Hence, the spectacle creates within people homogeneous “pseudo needs” to encourage more and more consumption, ultimately sustaining economic inequality (Theses 51, 24). As a tool of class separation, the spectacle “is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images” (Thesis 4). A similar relation of power is allegorized through Danganronpa’s systemic competition. I argue that Danganronpa presents a struggle against the spectacle, in which media technologies mediate relations of violent competitiveness between people. 

I place Danganronpa in a self-aware subgenre called the “science fiction of the spectacle,” where both story and form (prose, visuals, and/or audio) interrogate the Debordian slippage between reality and image, implicating even the work itself in that slippage (Bukatman 29–30). Danganronpa is formally reflexive, with various minigames and in-world games that emphasize its gaminess, but I focus mainly on the content of the story. Works within the series share similar themes, explored in each iteration to varying degrees, so I examine the instances that represent relevant ideas best. I start by presenting some recurring motifs in how Danganronpa represents the spectacle and violent competition. Then I consider the midquel anime series, which crystalizes a link between media technologies and that competition. Finally, I examine self-alienation in spectacular society as it culminates in the third game, Danganronpa V3 (Spike Chunsoft, 2017), which explicates consumerism as an alienating force, ending with the characters diegetically destroying Danganronpa as a franchise.

Common Motifs in Danganronpa

Every chapter in each of the series’ entries involves a murder case. Friendship-building segments are followed by a classmate’s death. After collecting evidence, the player engages in a climactic trial where students attempt to unmask the killer, throwing accusations and debating the details of the crime. The player must catch incorrect statements and cite the contradicting evidence, as each contradiction steers the discussion closer to the truth. Enlightened by the player, the students vote on who the killer is. If the majority is correct, the killer is executed and the player moves on to the next chapter. If not, everyone except the killer is executed and the player gets a game over screen.

Danganronpa’s stylized premise exposes the competitive relations in modern life. Ruben Ferdinand writes that even in the pre-killing-game, the high school in Danganronpa is elitist, accepting only top performers in arbitrary specialties, thus creating hierarchies by designating those students as the best (“Ultimate”), such as      Ultimate Fashionista, Ultimate Writing Prodigy, and Ultimate Rich Kid. With “graduation” as the prize, Danganronpa’s killing games, which also resemble game shows, dramatize and gamify the competitiveness of the education system (Ferdinand). Media scholar McKenzie Wark says that living has receded into competitive gaming: Work, politics, and the economy all use “the same digital logic of one versus the other, ending in victory or defeat … everyone has value only when ranked against someone else. Every situation is win-lose” (Wark, Thesis 006).           

 

Junko Enoshima is the main antagonist of Danganronpa. The school doubly designates her as “Ultimate Fashionista” and “Ultimate Despair.” If Danganronpa presents a struggle against the Debordian spectacle, it’s fitting how much its villain associates with the spectacle. As a fashionista, Junko is a celebrity and a symbol of promoting and consuming commodities. As an embodiment of despair, she initiates the killing games and serves as the catalyst that dramatizes the school’s competitiveness. She repeatedly devises the media technologies that channel the spectacle. For instance, she broadcasts the first killing game on television, tormenting both the participating students and outsiders who watch the murders live. Moreover, like the profit-driven spectacle, Junko aims to reproduce herself indefinitely (Debord, Thesis 14). In Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair (Spike Chunsoft, 2012/2014), she literally duplicates herself as an AI in a virtual reality program that aims to hijack other people’s bodies by overwriting their minds, creating a world where only copies of her exist. In the Danganronpa 3 anime (Studio Lerche, 2016/2017), Junko figuratively expands herself by spreading a viral state of despair that’s transmitted through video, whose infected victims become her followers. In his scholarship on William S. Burrough’s The Nova Trilogy, Scott Bukatman notes a similar plot device of an “image virus” and calls it “a powerful metaphor for the power of the media” (75). Junko is a viral existence—one enabled by media technologies—that initiates and spreads violent competitiveness. She’s a near-personification of the spectacle.               

 

 

But in each game of the Danganronpa trilogy, the handful of surviving students eventually come together and overcome the killing games. While two of the protagonists feel alienated for lacking talent, they learn along with their classmates to believe in and cooperate with one another rather than compete against each other. Debord’s class critique transposes nicely to Danganronpa: “self-emancipation … can be carried out neither by the isolated individual nor by atomised and manipulated masses, but only and always by the class that is able to dissolve all classes” (Thesis 221). 

For example, students resist competition in the first videogame’s fifth trial. Junko Enoshima leaves a trail of clues leading to an innocent student, one with whom the protagonist has grown a bond of trust. To advance the story, the player must subvert the gameplay systems: the player must let an incorrect statement pass without citing the contradicting clue. Unsure of the truth, the protagonist chooses not to break their friend’s alibi, even at the risk of becoming suspicious himself. Danganronpa V3 offers a foil: in the first trial, a different protagonist makes the opposite choice, condemning an innocent friend to death. One takeaway from Danganronpa is that you don’t have to be special if you believe in yourself and others. The series represents this belief as the power of hope that the protagonists use to rally their classmates and counter Junko’s despair. In the anime series, a friend reminds the protagonist, “isn’t that little bit of optimism what’s great about you?” and that ultimately, “hope is infectious” (Danganronpa 3, episode 9).

The Violence of the Screen in Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak High School – Future Arc 

A particular chapter in the anime series, Future Arc (Studio Lerche, 2016/2017), is set in the headquarters of an anti-terrorist organization. There is a new killing game involving sixteen people, four of whom are survivors of the first videogame and have joined said organization. There is a shift in the subtext, as Future Arc takes the killing to the office. The characters are dressed in business formal attire and the murders occur in bland hallways and meeting rooms. The killing game regulates their sleeping and waking hours via drugs beyond their control and the mastermind behind it all is revealed to be the company chairman. Future Arc expands Danganronpa’s thematic domain: competition in the workplace is just as brutal as the school.

This killing game’s rules and ultimate solution—delivered via numerous mounted screens—crystalize a relation of violence mediated by images. The setup is as follows: there is a killer in the group, the participants are drugged periodically, and each time they wake up, they find one of them murdered. Participants must use their waking time to find and stop the killer before the next murder. The theme of competition reappears. The group leader fights for a utilitarian counterplan: they vote for a person to kill each turn, and if the murders stop, then that person must have been the original killer. The first videogame’s survivors oppose this strategy and believe they should work together. This killing game tests their ideals, as competitive violence seems like the easiest way out. 

But the solution to the murders undermines the utilitarian plan. There is no actual killer within the group. The reason for the deaths is that each victim had watched an animated video developed by Junko Enoshima on one of the mounted screens, brainwashing them into committing suicide in a way that looks like murder, arousing suspicion in the group. The utilitarian scheme is therefore useless, as more death wouldn’t have fixed anything. The setup of the killing game tricked the characters into fighting one another when they should’ve been working together. They end the killing game by shutting down all the screens, as their real enemy was the manipulative, competitive relation induced by those screens. 

Consumer Identity in Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony          

Images bury reality in Danganronpa V3. Metafictionally, the final chapter reveals that the whole Danganronpa franchise was in fact an immensely popular reality show called “Danganronpa,” with its current season titled “Danganronpa V3”. V3 is Danganronpa’s most Debordian entry. It traces the loss of reality and identity to the capitalist gameplay loop: consumption and production.      

As      mad consumers, Danganronpa V3’s characters drown themselves in fiction. They discover that they had had their memories erased voluntarily so they could join the reality show and participate in real murder.  The characters’ audition tapes show them to have been huge fans of “Danganronpa,” happily willing to kill if it means joining their favorite show. Before promising big murders, the protagonist says in their audition tape, “I’ll be anything to be part of the show … I’ll do anything to be a part of Danganronpa” (chapter 6). The characters avidly consume “Danganronpa” to the point of integrating themselves into it. They are not merely actors propagating the spectacle to consumers, they themselves are super-consumers, so much so that they become one with their favorite brand. 

But what follows is chilling alienation. The characters watch their audition tapes with horror. Their losses throughout the game, with their sweat and blood and tearful goodbyes, all crash against their cruel selves on tape. In showing this disconnect, Danganronpa V3 dramatizes the alienation of assuming the spectacle’s mass-produced desires: “The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else” (Debord, Thesis 30). The characters feel violated by the spectacle. One character’s intrusive thoughts are revealed to come from live audience feedback. Another character’s terminal illness and eventual death is revealed to have been deliberately engineered by the show’s writers, as is a third character’s romantic feelings. They have been tampered with to unknown extents. They no longer recognize what is real. To them, “real life is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, and ends up absorbing it and aligning itself with it … The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere” (Debord, Theses 8, 30). A catalyst for this existential crisis is the media technology that overwrites the characters’ memories. The flashlight devices that the characters thought were returning their memories throughout the story were actually overwriting them. Once again, media technology mediates violence: people have been killing one another based on a fake story and false motives.Production drives the spectacle in Danganronpa V3. Like preceding entries, Danganronpa V3’s spectacle mediates a social relation of violence, but the end goal here is more Debordian: indefinite production of a media franchise. “Danganronpa V3” is the hit show’s 53rd season. As Debord says, “goals are nothing, development is everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself” (Thesis 14). There is no ending in sight.

Danganronpa V3 aligns the show with its villain. This season’s mastermind is Junko Enoshima the 53rd, whose number implies that she has been the antagonist for all previous seasons. Wanting indefinite growth, Junko has reproduced virally via AI and video. In Danganronpa V3, she reproduces textually, not only within the plots of the individual seasons, but also by constantly reappearing across those seasons. In this manner, Junko and the “Danganronpa” show are interchangeable. Like its antagonist, “Danganronpa” is a spectacle placing people in competitive killing games. If Junko is a deadly virus, then so is the reality show with its viral popularity and cyclical violence.

In each season, Junko has a new plan to disseminate despair, then the heroes must reenact the murder-dances of the previous seasons and counter her with hope, and then it’s on to the next season. But by V3, the characters realize that even though hope has saved other lives before, it can be packaged and sold. Embracing hope and pleasing the viewers means that the show will continue. What the exploited characters feel towards the “Danganronpa” show echoes what Morgan and Purje say about spectacular social media: they “monetize our friendships, opinions, and emotions. Our internal thoughts and experiences are now commodifiable assets.” It’s no wonder the characters decide to destroy the entirety of “Danganronpa”. They resolve to stop playing. To progress, the player must stop interacting with the gameplay segments, boring the in-game viewers and getting them to stop watching the reality show. This resistance culminates in the set of “Danganronpa” being destroyed. It’s worth considering whether Danganronpa V3, a videogame, sees itself as a media technology mediating physical and existential fictional violence.

Danganronpa is a science fiction of the spectacle in two parts: it’s a videogame about the gamification of life via competition, and it’s a media technology about the power of media technologies to catalyze that competition. Ultimately, Danganronpa shows how vulnerable we are to the power of images. It proposes that there is no pre-mediated state, that we are irrevocably altered, one image at a time. But this very malleability is a chance to renew. Throughout Danganronpa V3, the characters build on that fiction by growing selves that are more compassionate than their consumerist selves, and that are brave enough for mutual trust, through which they can overcome the spectacular machine. It is with these grown identities that they choose to face the outside world. The ending of Danganronpa V3 shows the survivors, still unsure how much of what they know is real, looking beyond the rubble and into a new ray of light.

 

Works Cited

Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Kindle ed., Duke University Press, 1993.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Ken Knabb. London, Rebel Press, n.d. [1967].

Ferdinand, Ruben. “What Danganronpa and My Hero Academia say about school as an institution.” Medium, Accessed 14 June 2021.

Lerche. Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak High School – Future Arc. Funimation, 

2016/2017. Blu-Ray.

Morgan, Tiernan, and Lauren Purje. “An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle.’” Hyperallergic. Accessed 2 August 2020.

Spike Chunsoft. Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc. Spike Chunsoft, Windows PC, 2010/2014.

Spike Chunsoft. Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. Spike Chunsoft, Windows PC, 2012/2014.

—. Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony. Spike Chunsoft, Windows PC, 2017.

Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory. Ebook. Harvard University Press, 2007.