Spoilers for Danganronpa 3, Zero, and IF.
You are born into a cruel world filled with cruel people.
You are born just before another, a twin sister with hair as red as blood and an eye on the entire world, who can see things before they happen as if she is a prophet. She is of the darkness, of the Deep. It drips off her like oil as soon as she is born. You wonder why no one else can see it, and you realise that you are the only one who can see it. You have this burden.
You have a responsibility.
You will see it through.
You will see her safe.
The streets are your homes, the back alleys and shadowy lanes your friends. Grizzled men with cruel eyes watch over you with ill intent. They see your young flesh and lick their lips.
Your knife becomes your friend. It is bloodied more times that you can count.
You see their faces in your dreams. You sometimes forget how to sleep.
You and your sister have no one else to turn to and she and you survive for a long time on your own and pick at those that others leave behind, until she finds someone. A boy who pretends to not be able to stand her.
Regardless of how much she wants to leave you behind, you keep watch over them, over her-
Until you are gone.
Men in suits come and take you away while you and your family are away. You cannot remember whether they took you by force or you left willingly. You hate yourself regardless. You miss your sister regardless. Even when her words were cruel, you could still hear her. Even if her love was scrambled, it was still for you.
The men in suits, armed with sticks and rods stained with your blood, do not.
They break you. They break you and reshape you time and time again, deconstructing you like a jigsaw puzzle and putting you back together. They stab you and shoot you and bleed you like the pig you are until you learn to stomach the pain and return it to them.
It is when a trainer lies still on the floor with his skull bashed in and his insides painting the floor and you in the corner vomiting and crying that your trainers decide that you are ready.
You, once a cub, are now a wolf.
You are only ten.
And so they throw you into the fray and sink their teeth into those that oppose you. Blood stains your lips and clothes and you soak yourself in it. The screams and cries that you once bellowed out fade away with each fresh conflict.
Battle after battle, war after you, you cut away your weaknesses with a knife. Your emotions become weaknesses. You learn to shut them out.
At first, you try to remember each and every one of your kills. You try to memorise their faces and their names and their beings.
You stop trying soon after.
You become untouchable on the battlefield, a living weapon. You have no enemies, for your enemies are all dead.
They still haunt you in whatever sleep you can gain. They scream at you and roar their rage and their sorrow and their terror and tear your mind open and pick your thoughts apart until there is nothing left.
You wish you could stop dreaming.
Your thoughts and dreams are the Deep, the sorrow and madness that floods over you and threatens to pull you under.
Its embrace is a comfort, and you let yourself sink into it.
It is better to feel hate than to not feel anything at all.
You wish to be at your sister's side again. You wish to have never left her side in the first place. You would do anything to see her again, even if you have to burn the whole world down for it.
You would kill for it. You would, without hesitation.
You already have.
Your hands are stained red with blood. Your gored enemies lay before you in their hundreds.
You are already damned for hell.
You are already a monster.
What's a few more corpses compared to a reunion with your kin?
The Deep continues to hold you close. It is a warm, familiar embrace.
Your sister contacts you. You hold the message close to you. You return to your kin. She is famous now. You admonish yourself just as much as she does for not realising sooner.
She is no longer part of the Deep. She is the Deep now. Malice drips from her like oil. It is a different Deep than yours. Hers is other. Hers is more.
She is still your sister, and you will protect her.
She whispers into your ear her wants and needs. She pores her darkness into yours and it is familiar and wanted. It frays your mind and reconstructs it. Through her contradictions, her loving taunts and hateful comments, she whispers her desires to see the world wrapped in flames, all in the grasp of chaos and evil.
You will see her wishes through to the end.
There is a school. You need to prove your worth. You do so, and stain your hands with a red you have never touched before.
Innocent blood.
It is no different from the guilty.
You follow your sister obediently. You carry out her every word without hesitation. There is a school and she claims it to be the place where her darkness will spread out to the rest of the world.
It is a school of false hope and lies, of corruption and uncompromised malice all for the sake of achievements and accomplishments over the individual. Taking people away to be hollowed out and turned into the embodiment of their ambitions. Their aspirations, lofty-worded and filled with desires, are as touched by malice as your sister. Two evils pitted against each other.
If there is one good thing to come out of your sister's ambitions, it is that this school of evil will burn to the ground.
You are surprised by this thought. You never thought that you could feel such a thing.
You and your sister infiltrate the school. It is a mission that you have accomplished many times before. You will not fail because you cannot fail.
Your sister is counting on you. She always has been. You are the only one that can provide her with what she needs. She says as much to you through her barbed words and gestures and putdowns and sharpened smiles that cut through you like knives, piercing your mind and filling them with her thoughts.
You fill your mind filling up and emptying itself again and again. Your sister's words join the red-soaked men in your dreams. Your thoughts lap them all up. Hatred is a better existence than apathy. The Deep cloaks you like a shroud.
You enter the school. All the people inside are nothing but meat. Meat. Walking talking lumps of meat painted in an endless monochrome, your sister the only burst of colour in a grey world. All of these people are dead. All of them. They're all already dead. Reality just hasn't caught up.
The world is grey. Dark. The Deep bubbles underneath a surface of false reassurances, ready to burst at the right provocation. You see it all and you acknowledge it. You do not revel in it like your sister, but you welcome its familiar touch, like a thousand hands clasping at you, pulling at your flesh and ripping you open and drinking from you your being and soul and-
A blip of colour on the radar. You see the colour and he sees you-
And he smiles.
He smiles at you, and you find your name and function and merit of entry slipping out of you like water in an attempt to force him away from you...
And he still smiles and welcomes you and opens his heart to you.
His blip of colour becomes a beacon and you are mesmerised by it.
The boy is strange. Different. His given mark is much like the white-haired madman's, yet also something else entirely. You do not understand. There is no Deep within him, no hidden pool of darkness. He is not of the diseased flock of this academy, this slaughterhouse for the dead and the damned and the broken. He is not of the mad prophecies of the white-haired man and his corrupted callings. He is so much unlike the apathetic void of the hollow boy with the hollow mind and all the skills.
He is of the Sky, a boundless and endless horizon filled with possibilities, and you find yourself mesmerised by the sight.
You need to know more.
You follow him, watching him from afar. Even when you're handing a class with weapons for the first game to take place in the school and you're singing into a microphone as they spill their blood over the walls, your thoughts are on this splintered aspect of a new world that you only knew through words and the corrupt calls of the men in charge with this sickened place.
You intermingle with your classmates and find that they share the same spark of light within them as much as they do the darkness. The Sky's light flows into them through his proximity. You find that you enjoy their company as well, even if you do not (cannot) show it.
Your sister enjoys her time with them as well. You know this to be true. All the smiles that she shares with them and you, all the laughs and cheers, they are real and true. Genuine. She loves them and cares for them all.
That is why she wants to show them all the Deep, her Despair. It is how she shows her love. It is her love.
You wish to show them all love too.
But more than that, you wish to share in his love as well. He is of the Sky and he gives his love to everyone, and you find yourself angry that he would give his heart away so recklessly and trust so blindly and fully in the belief that the Deep can be overcome.
But he gives his heart to you like he gives it to everyone, and you hold it and cherish it and bask in its glow.
Even when you're thrusting your needles into a woman's skull and twisting and pulling them as she screams and weeps and feels her mind being reprogrammed, you close your eyes and hum the tune that he sung to you with a smile on your face.
Even as a girl is thrown into a deadly maze and beaten and broken as her friends' minds are pulled apart and given new shape and purpose within the Deep, your mind still drifts back to him.
You wish to have his love to yourself.
It is a greedy, selfish desire, but you still want to have it.
You spend more time with him. You watch him from afar and drink of his presence. He is luminescent in his cheer and his smile is soft and inviting and you have to resist the urge to lay yourself bare before him. Your sister erases her mind for an experiment and watches over her past friend and you watch over her and her new other-self meets the boy of the Sky and another comes and clasps his hands around his throat and-
And you take him down. You lay him down on the ground and resist the urge to paint the room red with his blood because how dare he threaten your beloved how dare he defile what is sacred with his filthy hands HOW DARE HE TOUCH WHAT BELONGS TO YOU-
You no longer know to whom you are referring too.
You stay with the boy more from now on. Sometimes you refuse to leave his side. He gets himself into trouble so easy. His worrisome trait, the mark of his uniqueness, leaves him open for danger so many times.
He shares so many secrets with you. He shares his insecurities, how he feels worthless with his luck compared to those around him, and you so badly want to hold him and shoo all his woes away as if they were nothing more than bad dreams.
Your sister tells you about how she killed her lover with so much glee and sorrow in her expression. You cannot imagine doing the same.
The boy enthrals so many to him without ever knowing or trying. His heart is so big that a million people can hold it as the same time. You wish that he wouldn't be so flippant with who he gave his love to, and you wish that so many people wouldn't show him the same love in return. A blue-haired singer and a white-haired detective give him looks of silent adoration. You wished they wouldn't.
But you do not blame them. His heart is too big for one person to come to cherish alone. And though you feel the Deep stir in your heart at the thought of them, you cannot bring yourself to hate them for it. The boy's compassion is like the sweetest poison, and all your peers and yourself drink it eagerly and share in it. You find community in these people who are as broken and scarred as you, and you realise just how much of a home this academy is for the emotionally damaged.
You come to care about all of them (but not enough to stop the inevitable. The whole world could burn so long as her sister and the boy you have come to care for will live).
The boy continues to open his heart to you and you begin to open yours to his and all you other classmates-now-friends and they welcome you anyway and-
And you realise, for the first time in your life, that there is another path that can be taken.
Your sister is the Deep, slick and dark and suffocating, the currents pulling you under to drown in the inky blackness, filling you with water, snuffing the air out from you as if a million hands are squeezing around your lungs, and lighting up your nerves like madness with the need to survive. There's peace in that, in a deranged sort of way. All you have ever known is war and combat and the sickening sensation of blood running down you like rivers.
But this boy... he is of the Sky, and the Sky is eternal and boundless, lifting you up to soar in the heavens for eternity. The wind flows around you in a gentle touch, its many fingers smoothing over your skin and caressing you. The air is fresh and free and warm around you, and you feel the urge to invite others up to fly forever in the heavens. The Sky is peaceful, loving, and begging to know peace.
If you focus hard enough, you can feel the touch of the gods.
Is that who this boy is? An Angel? One of God's warriors? Is he your Guardian Angel here to whisper sweet nothings into your ear and guide you to the promised tomorrow?
You wish to hold him in your arms and never let go.
You wish your angel didn't share his love with so many others. You wish he would love you and only you.
But the Devil is there, whispering into your ear, reminding you of your blood-bond, and you relinquish the faint longing in your heart.
It does not last for long.
The Deep begins to explode from the surface of the world outside, and you play your part well. A great Tragedy begins. Your Angel weeps for his family, and you want to tell him so desperately that they are safe, that you guided them to their shelter and locked them inside yourself. You remember clutching his sister in your arms as you bridle-carried her into her room and placed her onto her bed, tending to her as if she were as fragile as glass and leaving her in the softest bed you could find. You remember all the cruel people with monochrome masks you killed to get her here, all the evil people that tried to take her for themselves.
His family will be safe. You cannot say this to him, but you will make it true.
Your class is gathered together and sealed within the academy. You have to fight so many people to protect them on their way there. You're not sure who came up with the idea to lock all the latently talented people inside a single building, whether it was your sister, the men in charge of the academy, or the man who now leads you in authority as opposed to name before. It matters not anymore. All of it is according to your sister's plan.
You almost wish it would fail, even if you're still struggling to understand why.
Your sister sets her sights on the boy. It pains you to call him a loser, but it might be the only thing that spares him from her intrigue. She decides to have you spare his life, and you are grateful for it.
A year goes by. Preparations for the game are made. The academy loses contact with the outside world. You and your friends are alone.
And as you and the boy grow closer and you watch over him and the others and follow him across the academy and stand over his bed and watch his chest rise and fall in his slumber you finally find the words that you need to describe how you feel-
You love him.
You love him so desperately and needily that you want to hold him close and never let go and kiss his lips blue and mark him as yours and hold him until the only thing that he can love is you and forever you.
You have so many dreams of him now, of holding him in your arms and kissing him and making love to him and bearing a child with him to begin a new life of your own. His words are the sweetest poison and you wish to drink it greedily.
But then, you look down at your hands.
They are hot and wet and sticky-red with blood.
How many people have you killed?
You've lost count.
How many of them were innocent?
Too many.
Do you believe that you deserve this?
…No.
Do you want to deserve this?
…No.
Because nothing that you can do can ever make this right.
You have done so much, and killed so many and done so much worse. You have stained your hands red so many times in the name of your sister, and you know that you would and will do so again for her sake because she is your sister and you abandoned her and you are the only one who can understand her and give her what she needs and give her the happiness that you denied her all her life just as she tells you...
You have made yourself a monster. You have become one of the biggest monsters in history.
You have done so many terrible things.
So why would you deserve to be with the man that you love now?
You wouldn't.
You don't.
So you won't.
Even if it hurts.
And by God, it hurts.
But you've come too far to stop. You're already damned for Hell for eternity.
This... this is what you deserve.
The Deep pulls you away and drowns you, and your sister calls for your aid once again.
There's no turning back now.
The final day arrives and your task is given. One by one, your classmates are subdued and their memories wiped from their minds.
The Angel of the Sky is the last, and in that time you share together, those final moments you have with his mind still intact and yours near breaking, you stop, you open your mouth.
You reveal everything to him.
Every murder, every kill, every single act of evil. You reveal it all to him, the whos, whens, whats, hows, and whys.
Your sister would've said such things with glee, but your words come out in between fits of tears and blubbered sobs. He looks at you in shock, and you realise just how much you hate it when he cries.
You hate yourself so much more
You wish for him to scorn you. You want him to hate you. Hatred from him would be so much easier, so much better than the love that you do not deserve.
But then, as you look up at the Angel, he opens his heart to you once more and offers you something that you never thought you would see:
Forgiveness.
Redemption.
And you realise something that you never knew before:
He is not of the Sky. He is the Sky, just as your sister is the Deep. He is boundless and radiant in his compassion, and you want to bow to his feet and pray for him and to give him your life and soul for all eternity.
But you know that you deserve no such things.
Your hands are too dirty to stain his purity with. Your sister needs you, and you cannot resist her siren call any longer.
You knock your Angel out and erase his mind, begging for undeserved forgiveness all the way. When you carry him through the halls, you cradle him as if he were your lover. You set him down in his seat as gently as possible. Your hands glide over his skin for one last time, and you plant a kiss on his forehead.
Then you return to your sister and order for a new change to the rule:
Let him be the one who is spared.
You stand on the knife's edge between the Sky and the Deep.
Time to see which way the knife falls.
When your Angel finds you with the others, he does not recognise you, just like the rest. You are filled with so much pain, and you can't even say it.
The game begins, and you play your part well. You watch your Angel from afar once more, and you prepare for the moment when the ground will swallow you whole and you will stalk them from the shadows.
But your sister goes off script, and you realise that you never understood her at all.
She is the Deep, and she is the horror and terror as much as she finds joy in it.
Showing others the Deep is how she shows her love.
You lay on the ground, a dozen holes in your body as you bleed out before your angel and your friends, a crimson pool growing beneath you. You see the shock and horror in his eyes, the love inside him torn and frayed at the sight before his eyes.
And in your final moments, you have a vision. Whether it be a hallucination spurred on by shock and blood loss or a vision granted to you by God through your Angel, you don't know.
You see your Angel take the blades that pierced through you.
You see you carrying him to safety.
You see yourself leading your classmates to salvation against your sister.
You see your Angel and friends and yourself leave the game before it could even begin to take on the world and the Deep and bring down everything that your sister built.
You see forgiveness.
You see salvation.
You see redemption.
You see love.
And you realise that you could've turned against your kin and taken the right path at any time.
You feel the life fade from you, and you look at your Angel for one last time.
You realise that you are glad that he doesn't remember you.
Not for the selfish desire to preserve her memory as a victim...
But so that, when he discovers her deeds later, he will remember her for the monster she is, and not the woman that she wanted to be.
And as you die, you find comfort not in the suffocating Deep, but the endless, bountiful Sky as you pray for your Angel's salvation.
Your prayers will not go unanswered.
The knife falls, and you chose the Sky...
And in your death, the Sky chooses you.
Mukuro Ikusaba is such an interesting character to me, and it's such a shame that they fumbled her character in the D3 anime. It's to the point that I really wish we had a more substantial role for her in the Danganronpa franchise outside of the IF spinoff.
Mukuro is such a different kind of villain than Junko, in that's she's a lot more human and her sister. Junko Enoshima is less of a person and more of a concept given form, the living embodiment of despair, all the hatred and deranged malice of the world given flesh and form. She's more than just a scheming mastermind in that sense: she is an ideology all on her own.
Mukuro, on the other hand, is a much more banal form of evil; she doesn't do any of these things out of a sense of despair, or at least it's not to the same level as Junko's. There's darkness in her heart, which I really wanted to convey here, but it's not overriding her to the point of total misanthropy. Yes, she's unstable to a degree, but she never does anything out of pure malice. She hardly ever kills anyone out of despair or enjoyment; she does it all out of a job.
In a strange way, Mukuro operates as sort of a yin-yang to Junko: whereas Junko is the living embodiment of evil and despair, Mukuro is the human connection to evil. Junko is a concept, Mukuro is a person.
And that's what I think makes Mukuro the better character of the Despair Sisters.
Not that Junko isn't a good character. Sometimes you can have a pure evil villain as an antagonist, and it's not like Junko doesn't have any depth to her. Something that a lot of people tend to forget is that Junko is capable of feeling love, in her own twisted way. She loves her sister as well as her lover Matsuda from D:Zero. Hell, she loves her classmates as well. The problem is that her love is twisted by her need to feel despair, and as such she expresses that love by spreading misery wherever she goes and to whoever she feels deserves to feel it. To Junko, showing her loved ones despair is the ultimate form of love.
But Mukuro is ultimately someone with more human motivations: family. She feels an intense feeling of loyalty to her family after a long time of being separated from them, and she feels that she needs to make up for that by carrying out their every whim. It is family that drives her, in a sense.
It's a very real motivation, and it gives Mukuro a lot more of a connection to us as an audience than Junko herself. Let's face it, most of us will feel some level of loyalty to people related to us than not, regardless of if they have good intentions or ill.
If you had to choose between your friends and your family, which way would you go? Which one would you pick?
It's a very difficult question, and it's one that I wish we had seen Mukuro grapple with more in the canon. Honestly, I feel that it would've been better if D3 had been split into two different anime, each one being 24 episodes long. The extended runtime would've helped to flesh out a lot more than what the anime touched on and give more context to the entire world, much less with just Mukuro herself.
But then comes the question: does Mukuro deserve redemption for what she's done?
I think a lot of people forget that she's a villain, and that she's done a lot of fucked-up shit. In the Killer Killer manga, Mukuro wiped out an entire school with just a knife and left only two survivors. Mukuro killed an entire school's worth of innocent children on Junko's orders, and that's not even getting into the D3 anime where she helped orchestrate the first killing game, helped in the murder of the human Chiaki and the brainwashing of the 77th class, personally lobotomised Chisa on Junko's orders once again, and helped bring about the Tragedy that killed millions of people, including all the reserve course students that were brainwashed into killing themselves.
But a lot of that can be tied to her horrific upbringing and the mental instability that comes with it. Mukuro was a child soldier. Most of her life has been spent in war. That has to fuck you up on a psychological level, especially when you start fighting at such a young age, and I think that Mukuro has been a broken person for a long time. She's very clearly unstable in her own way, and I really tried to show that in this fic.
Mukuro, in her own unique way, is just as broken as Junko.
And yet, I can't help but feel like Mukuro has a certain sense of awareness of herself, more than even Junko has. I think while she's extremely loyal to her sister, there's a part of her that knows that she's done terrible things and can't ever make up for them.
But we also know that she's done good things as well. She saved Makoto's life in the D:Zero novels. That has to mean something.
She's also capable of love as well, as she clearly does love her sister, and she falls in love with Makoto as well. And like I said above, she's not as emotionally tied to despair as her sister is, and is capable of feeling and enjoying hope on top of that, hence her conflict between the Sky and the Deep (I really can't get away from the Destiny references, can I?).
And beyond that, we know that she's capable of making things right. The entire Danganronpa IF story is a redemption arc for Mukuro as she saves Makoto's life after he sacrifices himself for her, defeats her sister and ends the killing game early with no casualties at all. So she can do the right thing if given the choice.
But she's had her chances to make the right choice, and she didn't take it. We need to remember that.
So, ultimately, does Mukuro deserve redemption?
I don't know.
And that's why I like Mukuro, and characters just like her; because we get to have these kinds of discussions about them. She's such a wonderfully complex villain, and she has a lot of depth and potential - much like the rest of Danganronpa's cast (which really does speak to the quality of Danganronpa's writing, doesn't it?) - that we unfortunately never really get to see.
If Danganronpa ever does return in the future, I would like to see a story that focuses on Mukuro and her experiences, but for now, I'm satisfied with just this.
But what are your thoughts? Please let me know, follow and favourite, and with all that said and done, I shall see you all next time!
Titanmaster 117 out!