Disclaimer: This article contains spoilers for Danganronpa 1 and 2 and assumes you’ve played through them at least once. Please play the games before reading. Deals with heavy themes such as suicide.
Introduction
Despair, by its nature, is consuming. One can only avoid despair so long as they have motivation to, but motivation is exactly what the despaired person lacks.
The Danganronpa games understand this well; it is revealed that The Ultimate Despairs wrought destruction upon their loved ones as well as mutilated and starved themselves.
Extreme, sure, but this kind of behaviour captures something very interesting; destruction does not seem bad when one is already enthralled by despair. One cannot care because caring is essentially an act of trying to preserve something for the future, and if one has lost all hope, they do not care for the future.
For most of us it never gets so bad. I have never remained despaired for long. I should say here that when I say despair I don’t merely mean a synonym for depression which I have no personal experience with (although depression can be considered a kind of despair). Both hope and despair are very broad terms, and each of us might relate differently to their portrayal in the Danganronpa series. I will get to what despair is to me personally, but for now we will stick with the broader view, where despair is the opposite of hope, and discuss characters fall and avoid falling into despair. We start with question.
Why haven’t you fallen into permanent despair?
Maybe you have given the state of the world (climate emergency, rise of right wing extremism, genocides, negligent politicians, a literal pandemic). But you’re reading this article and are presumably alive, and trying to stay that way. Why? I’m not suggesting you should have given into despair. Please consider this a neutral question.
If despair is the opposite of hope, another way to phrase the question, is
What is the source of your hope?
This is one of the most interesting question Danganronpa: Goodbye Despair raises. In some ways this is a natural consequence of needing the story to go on: if the characters remain despaired, then our main character would have no reason to keep investigating and solving the murders, but the game embraces this and that’s what makes the portrayal particularly powerful.
Hope From Without and Hope From Within
One of the ways this is done is through inspiration from other characters. For instance, at the start of the game when the cast is all shocked by the fact they have to partake in this killing game, The Ultimate Imposter steps up. The other characters agree to follow their leadership, and indeed grow quite enthusiastic about the party he throws. The idea that at least one character is a reservoir of hope for the others to be revitalised by continues throughout the game, and is mostly taken over by Chiaki after Chapter 1.
Other than this, characters like Ibuki and Nekomaru also serve to encourage others. If you play through Ibuki’s route, you’ll find that throughout the other scenes, she was trying to help Hajime remember his talent. She also hosts a concert with the intention of bolstering everyone’s spirits, an act befitting her title as Ultimate Musician.
Nekomaru’s on the other hand is a Team Manager so of course inspiring others is a part of his personality; this is most strongly seen in his interactions with Akane who throughout the game he trains and builds a strong relationship with.
During their training, Akane becomes enthusiastic and filled with vitality. But when he dies, Akane enters a kind of depression she’s never felt before and has a hard time even understanding that she is depressed. Nevertheless, her memory of Nekomaru drives her forward. In fact, his second death drives every character forward, and the fact that Nekomaru sacrifices himself is both fitting since this is the second time he’s sacrificed himself for others and still surprising in classic Danganronpa way.
To varying degrees, the characters act as a support network for Hajime and each other. If not for The Ultimate Imposter taking over the situation, despair might have set in earlier. If not for Chikai, Hajime would have walked into the Final Dead Room and possibly died. If not for Nekomaru and Gundam’s sacrifice, the remaining cast might have been broken.
Hope from without is also present as the reason Hope Peak’s academy existed in the first place. The purpose of the academy, to the outside world, is to inspire hope within the populace. Ironically, it does exactly the opposite in how the reserve student jealousy is tapped into to begin The Tragedy. This is partly because this kind of hope is artificial as opposed to the intimate hope that is grown between the individuals on the island.
Hope’s Peak Academy says, “Here are the best and brightest of our generation. We cannot all be them, but we can support them and take inspiration from their lives,” while not saying, “And you have no hope of being worth even a fraction of what they are.”
Nagito is symbolic of this last part. He hears and embraces it. He wishes to be filled with the manufactured hope; from the very start of the game, his hope is supposedly the other Ultimates, who he sees not as friends but as beacons, as they were made out to be.
One is left wondering if his feasting on such meaningless hope is what makes him so hope-hungry all the time. His character can be considered an answer to the question, “If we accept that we only feel hope when looking upon those that shine brighter than us, what becomes of the brightest?”
Since Nagito is portrayed as rather unsympathetic for the most part, and since he is the cause of The Great Tragic event, this manufactured hope is clearly marked as wrong. In fact, it could be taken as the threat the game warns its viewers against, although what I personally took away as the main message will be explored in the last section.
All this is contrasted with hope from within. Some characters do this in what you might call a sustainable way (although since almost all became Ultimate Despairs it’s questionable how sustainable). The best examples are Chikai and Makato. Chikai is literally designed to encourage hope within the participants, and Makato is The Ultimate Hope; for these reasons you can consider them exceptions rather than the rule. Hajime too, at the final class trial, demonstrates this kind of inner hope, but the final class trial deserves a section all to itself.
The movement between external hope and internal hope is crucial element in the game and occurs in both the protagonist and Nagito. While in the early game Nagito is symbolic of the doomed admiration of Hope Peak, in the late game, during the funhouse chapter, Nagito’s source of hope changes from without to within.
He recognises that the other characters themselves truly are not what he thought they were, and begins to trust his own feelings and makes a startlingly good job of moving things towards his vision of hope. Within the game, hope from within is portrayed as massively more powerful than hope from without. Again, this is even more clear when this occurs to the protagonist in the final trial.
The Final Trial, My Hope and Despair
I mentioned despair could look like various things. For me, despair looks like playing video games all day, it looks like binging alcohol and junkfood, sleeping all the time, mindless consumption of media without thought. It is hedonism to the point of not looking forward to the future. It is drifting with windless sails.
The terrifying thing is that I could be more or less happy while despairing; I have no doubt that my brain will release dopamine if do all these things. If it doesn’t, I’ll just ingest more sugar, watch something more mindless albeit exciting. I’ll do nothing except doggedly pursue pleasure until I can’t and then—if there is nothing more that gives me satisfaction—I’ll end whatever disgusting remnant of myself remains. After a while, I wouldn’t even know I had strayed from the path I used to cared about.
I cannot let that happen.
This has nothing to do with people outside of me or expectations. It has to do with what I find meaningful; it is important that I think, contemplate, analyse so that I can see the truths of the world, and that I create things and that I express the world within me so that I’m not merely locked inside my mind. It is vitally important that I love someone and am loved in return.
Evolution, genetics, nature, nature, however it came to be that I find these things important, I do now. I am a thing that finds these things important and, crucially, wishes to retain their appreciation of life. I love that I care about fictional characters and real people, that I’m writing this essay, that I’m writing novels, and learning mathematics, and doing research. I love that I’m the sort of person who wants to live forever just because there is so many wonderful and important things to do. I love my dannie and long for a future where we get embrace the wonders of life together.
It’s because I love it so much that it’s terrifying that I might lose hope, but I know that as long as I have that terror, I’m on the right track.
Terror, together with love of what I am and want to become, are my sources of hope. They are what drive me forward. In this way, I can relate to Nagito, especially end game Nagito; he wants to become something, The Ultimate Hope, and I want to become My Ultimate Self. Although he is at first driven by his adoration of Ultimates, and his loathing of the talentless, his final hope comes from within and is focused entirely on himself. Of course his latter motivations are born out of the former, but just like my motivation’s origins are likely lost to the past, what really matters is what his motivations are at the moment. Like Ibuki says: “The person standing here right now is who you are.”
By now, my idiosyncratic and potentially maladaptive stance is clear: a completely internal hope is something that must be protected, it is exactly what is lost when despair sets in.
Unfortunately, even I despair. In the past I despaired about being loveless but those days are distant now. These days, I often am haunted by the spectre of the terror of despair. I wonder if I’ve really used my time the best way possible, if I’ve eaten too much junk food and shortened my lifespan. Maybe I’m not working hard enough, or working too hard on the wrong things and just deriving a very superficial satisfaction from the feeling of having spent energy. Am I resting or am I letting myself go? This spectre itself, although motivational in origin, can, ironically, bring me into despair. This is because internal hope does not come equipped with the checks and balances of hope from without; the easiest person to deceive is yourself, and it is easy to lose track of the hope within oneself as I have done more often that I like to admit.
My most recent episode of despair was centred on the thought my beloved and I are not really meant for each other. This originated in these thoughts of fear: what if my beloved and I are not spending enough time together because they do not want to spend time with me? What if our interests and needs and motivations are too misaligned and that by being near each other we will only cause each other to stray from the paths we want to be on? These fears are the echoes within the relationship of the fears I held within and for myself. They made things that were not necessarily problems into damning evidence, overwhelmed by better judgement and almost lead to an ending of the most wonderful hopeful thing I have in my life.
I overcame this despair, decided my thoughts were merely paranoid but even now I’m still trying to figure out exactly how and why they ended up that way. It is vital that I know because I was close; I might have given up on the right path out of fear.
I waited, though, and with agonizing slowness pieced together what was going on in my head. Not without emotional causalities for myself and beloved, unfortunately. If I want to become My Ultimate Self, the whole thing could have and should have been handled better.
Whenever despair happens, and I inevitably burst out of it with the relentless optimism I’ve cultivated over the years, I’m left gasping. I almost died; the me that I love and have done my best to cultivate was almost lost to the pull of despair, and I might not have even known it. I might not have caught myself in time and then it would be too late. In the former case, I might have lost the person and relationship within which I have grown and developed most.
I felt a very similar way in the final trial. Where one chooses between graduate and shut down, I thought as follows: “How do I chose? My life is important but if I graduate everyone I care about suffers. Is my life really worth that?” and eventually settled on shutdown sequence thinking of my loved ones. Just as in real life, I was stuck choosing between “Stay here and believe it will work out” versus “Jump into the unknown and try to find something else”. Both were giving up.
I didn’t have the chance to shoot the truth bullet, and I’m so glad I didn’t. Because what I should have done was believe in an alternative. If I had thought “No, there must be another way” I would h ave waited more naturally.
Fortunately for me, and for Hajime, Chikai appears at this point. She reminds Hajime that of course he should be unable to chose between these options. Of course I can’t pick one of these terrible, hopeless paths; I can just forge my own path. Of course. And in hindsight it is obvious; how could I lose sight of something so basic and important.
But I did. I had decided to chose the wrong path, and this event made me realise I wasn’t being My Ultimate Self. It should be the most natural thing in the world for me to try for the perfect outcome rather than settle for a subpar option. If I failed at that within the context of a game who knows how long I had been failing at that outside of the game?
Chikai that reminds the main character of this and this can be thought of as an igniting spark. It is only because this hope is generated from within Hajime that has has the power to overcome despair. Again, we see the power that an internal source of hope can bring.
Although it was the game that reminded me of the merits of internal hope, it is my responsibility to actually generate this hope. I need to make this the last time I need to be reminded. I know it might not be and I am grateful for games like Danganronpa for pointing out my weaknesses, even if it is scary to acknowledge them, and worse, shameful even, that I needed an external source of hope to reignite my internal source. I am left wondering: “If this piece of art hadn’t shown me the error of my ways, how long would I have strayed from the path I want to be on?” or even “Would I have found my way back?”
Along the same lines, in the final trial, Junko says it is easier to make those who long for hope from others fall into despair.
The reason I am ashamed that it was the game that pulled me out of despair and not myself is because I know I can do it; I spent years in a loveless state, alternating between despair and hope that I would find someone with whom to share souls. Since I had no-one, and would not allow myself to be given hope by my friends, I had to repeatedly motivate and push myself to be my ideal self for my ideal lover who I would one day meet. I am proud of the fact I always rose from despair, always ended up on track to be my ideal self I’m so grateful I’m able to do that. I hope one day to figure out how to avoid despair entirely, but for now, an unlimited capacity to bounce back is satisfactory.
Both internal and external hopes have weaknesses and although I am ashamed of needing injections of external hope sometimes, it’s not a bad thing that I receive them. Internal hope is a more powerful thing and necessarily if one is to succeed in bringing about the world they want as an individual, but it is fragile. It is easier to crush or corrupt, even for those who cherish it most strongly. The game explores the merits and weaknesses of internal and external hope as well as the false manufactured hope. There is room to debate the exact stance it takes, but it it at least makes the points that external hope on an intimate level is helpful, manufactured hope leads to tragedy, that internal hope is absolutely necessarily for overcoming despair and forging the ideal future.
Reader, is the flame of hope burning within you?
