Hilarious In Hindsight / Danganronpa

All spoilers will be unmarked ahead. You Have Been Warned!

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In general:

In General

• Danganronpa wouldn't be the last work to portray a worldwide cult centered around a cartoon bear.

Main installments:

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

• Mukuro-as-Junko's snipes at Sayaka, the Decoy Protagonist, once you learn about her soft spot for Makoto in IF. In her introduction, Mukuro tells Makoto that Sayaka's face is just as photoshopped as hers. Then in Dangan Academy, if he expresses interest in hearing Sayaka sing, she insists that she lip-syncs.
• In one Monokuma Theater segment in Chapter 3, Monokuma talks about how "the world doesn't have nearly enough "Li'l's"" and how adding "Li'l" makes even "Li'l Arsonist" and "Li'l War Criminal", among others, sound cute. Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls revealed that Junko had already recruited five elementary-school "Li'l Ultimates", who would later attempt to massacre all adults in Towa City to create a "children's paradise".
• Kiyondo clearly draws inspiration from the Super Saiyan transformation, but his white hair and blue aura when he transforms make him more closely resemble Ultra Instinct.
• School Life of Mutual Selling, a parody of this memetic employee training video, which was uploaded before the English dub came out, has Toko call herself "Jill". In the English dub, one of the various names given to Genocider Sho is Genocide Jill.
• This video, which manages to predict the English voice actor for Hifumi before they were announced.
• In the Murder on The Rockport Express arc of The Adventure Zone: Balance, Jenkins pulls a Junko.
• Kiyotaka Ishimaru, voiced by Kosuke Toriumi in Japanese and Sean Chiplock in English, is the Ultimate Moral Compass and had "relations" with a "gangster" (Mondo). The very same pair of actors were later chosen to voice Guido Mista, a literal gangster who's not at all concerned with moral compass.
• In one of Celestia's Free Time Events, she mentions playing Mahjong with a silver-haired boy who claims to have the Devil's Luck. This was meant to be a reference to Akagi, but you wouldn't be faulted for thinking she was talking about Nagito Komaeda.
• In Chapter 2, Mondo suggests tying up and gagging Byakuya to make sure that he doesn't kill anyone, which Makoto rejects as going overboard. This is exactly what Nekomaru and Kazuichi end up doing to Nagito in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, after the latter reveals himself to have a few screws loose.

Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair

• Before Monokuma transforms back to Junko, he say's that he's just going to skip his second and third forms and go straight to his final form. An obvious reference to Frieza, complete with a power up sequence. Fast forward a few years to the Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F' movie, and Frieza himself says almost the exact same line. Funnily enough, the younger brother of the dub voice for Frieza is also the voice of Monokuma in the anime adaptation.
• Chiaki's pep talk to Hajime during the climax of the game is eerily similar to the climatic conversation between Madoka and Homura in the last episode of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, to the point that certain lines could be swapped out with each other and only the most ardent fans of both would notice the difference. Now, seeing as how this falls under hilarious rather than simply heartwarming, you get three guesses as to who delivers both speeches in their respective English dubs - and the first two guesses don't count.
• During Nagito's speech about how Hard Work Hardly Works at the beginning of Chapter 2, he says "No matter how hard a small dog tries, it will never become a large dog." The joke's on him since although he doesn't remember it, chronologically earlier in Danganronpa 3: Despair Arc, Nagito accidentally made Gundham's pomeranian temporarily grow giant after it drank Ruruka Ando's steroid.
• Kira Buckland voiced Ibuki Mioda in this comic dub, and would later become the official English voice of Hiyoko Saionji in that game, who said to Ibuki "It's a good thing your hearing is good, because your face, body, appearance, and personality totally suck."
• Nagito's compulsive, outrageous lying under the effects of the Liar Disease makes him sound like Kokichi Oma.
• When Nekomaru is sparring with Akane, Akane chants "Muda" as a Shout-Out to Dio Brando. Nekomaru's English voice actor, Patrick Seitz, would later provide the English voice for Dio.
• The first person who dies is an imposter, which is treated as the start of the killing game. 6 years after the game's release, Among Us came out, where having an imposter dying first would mean that a "killing game" wouldn't happen in the first place.
• At the beginning of Chapter 5, Kazuichi guesses that the Killing Game is probably being ran for the entertainment of "a bunch of crazy rich dudes." 9 years later, there's a deadly game of such nature now.

Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School

• Chisa Yukizome just so happens to look similar to Monika, moreso with her Side:Despair design
• Kyosuke's Fan Nickname of Yu Narukami went full circle once the OP showed him shooting himself in the head. He also has a katana.
• When everyone is quick to accuse Makoto of being the traitor, Koichi instead points toward Miaya Gekkougahara, on "just a hunch". Come Episode 4, it seems he was right.
• A longstanding fandom joke is that Monaca's manji Exotic Eye Designs make her look like a Nazi. In Side:Future Episode 7, Monaca ends up Putting on the Reich.
• In a meta way. Junko's comments about how she can get away with so much because of her looks and personality can be seen as ironic once she becomes a Base-Breaking Character due to her role in the death of Chiaki Nanami and brainwashing Chisa.
• In this fanmade parody of Danganronpa, they ended up showing a class trial for an Original Character named Jason, who was the Ultimate Animator. Here, the actual Ultimate Animator went on to survive the Final Killing Game and become a Big Bad, only to then be redeemed and survive the series.
• By sheer coincidence, the airdate for Side:Hope, September 29, happens to be Koichi's birthday. Side:Hope reveals that Kyoko survived her seeming death, meaning Koichi's Heroic Sacrifice wasn't for naught.
• After Kyoko's resurrection became heavily divisive among the fandom, the English dub accidentally put an outtake in Side:Hope that had Kyoko stating this:
  Kyoko: "Yeah, I don't get this either. Pretty sure I died."

Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony

• One optional dialogue in Gonta's Free Time has Shuichi advising Gonta that he shouldn't let himself be too influenced by fictional characters. From the player's perspective, that's not only a paradoxical advice, but goes directly against Shuichi's beliefs in the final trial.
• In a meta sense, Miu is a Lady Swears-a-Lot and her Japanese voice actress is played by one of the actresses who plays Chihiro Fujisaki (a character who never swears) in the Danganronpa: The Stage play. So, in a way, this game will kinda have many swear words coming out of the voice of Chihiro.
• Korekiyo's voice actors, Kenichi Suzumura and Todd Haberkorn, both played Hikaru Hitachiin in Ouran High School Host Club, which had a female crossdresser as its main lead, and as it turns out, this time around they're playing a male crossdresser of sorts. Then this is either made better or worse with the reveal that he had an actual sexual relationship with his sister, considering the fact that playing up the Twincest trope was the Hitachiin twins' main act.
• On the Danganronpa subreddit in Reddit, Tsumugi was voted as the most likely killer in this game. Turns out, Tsumugi is the Mastermind.
• The mastermind cosplaying the past characters can make a lot of things Hilarious in Hindsight.
  • Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School has received a meme of Kiyotaka being the mastermind by fans. In this game, the mastermind actually cosplays as Kiyotaka (among others).
  • Another one related to Danganronpa 3: There was a fan theory that Chisa Yukizome was disguising herself as Aoi Asahina, which was met with controversy due to the Unfortunate Implications of brownface. Another of Tsumugi's cosplays is of Hina.
  • The "Threegami" meme that began after the release of Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair became more hilarious once Tsumugi cosplayed as both Byakuya and the Ultimate Imposter (a.k.a. "Twogami") here. Not only there was a "Threegami", but a "Fourgami".
  • In the first game, Monokuma gives the students a picture that had some of the students think the other students were working together as co-masterminds. Given how the mastermind ended up cosplaying those "other students", it may not entirely be a farfetched idea.
  • Some months after the game has been released in Japan, Junko Enoshima was listed as the "Most Popular Game Character to Cosplay" in the 2018 Games Edition of the Guinness World Records. It seems Tsumugi has an influence there.
• When people critized Shuichi for taking over Kaede's role as the protagonist, Shuichi gets the last laugh as Keebo replaces Shuichi himself as the protagonist at the end.
• A day before the game's release, somebody ended up making a video of Kokichi dancing to "What The Hell" in a similar way to "What The Hell, Komaeda" memetic video. It makes the comparison between those boys more ironic.
• In Danganronpa 3, Karen Kisaragi, the girl when who went Axe-Crazy during the Student Council killing game over her mother, was voiced by Honoka Inoue. Honoka's mother Kikuko Inoue is in this game as Kirumi Tojo. Even more amusingly, Kirumi is also a killer.
• Both Alter Ego Junko◊ and Nagito both predicted the events of Chapter One where Kaede ended up being the killer. Slightly subverted when Kaede was actually innocent.
• Depending if you view Shuichi as a Vanilla Protagonist or not, it becomes quite ironic that Kokichi ended up viewing him as somebody who was so interesting that he can't figure him out.
• Given The Reveal at the end, this Monokuma Theater segment from Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair becomes way more relevant now.
• Many have noticed Kirumi's resemblance to 2B, which only intensified when it was announced that Kira Buckland will be doing her voice in the English version.
• Todd Haberkorn narrated a WatchMojo video depicting the Top 10 Worst Girlfriends in Anime. Given The Reveal in Chapter 3, it made seem like Korekiyo is deciding which girls would not be good friends for his sister, especially since Ruruka Ando found herself on that list.
• In the last days of the first game's Something Awful LP, one of the comments that came up when the trailer for Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair was posted upon seeing Hajime, Chiaki, and Nagito was wondering if the Makoto-esque protagonist (in this case Hajime) would be killed off first in favor of what seemed to be his "detective" partner (Chiaki) or his rival (Nagito). Two games and an anime later, this is somewhat reversed; the Makoto-esque detective becomes the protagonist after the partner-like main character uses a distinctly rival-esque debate style before being killed off.
• The first few lines of the opening of Danganronpa: The Animation, "Never Say Never", rather concisely summarize some of the plot twists of Chapter 6.
  "Reality slips, far away. Fiction comes alive, we start to play. Hope is no more, behind a closed door, as we drift away from where we were before."
• The psychopaths-only gladiator games in Killer Killer don't look so outlandish now that the Killing Game was revealed to be a killing game show. Bonus points for the stadium in the former being packed with bloodthirsty fans. And since the events of the Hope's Peak saga are revealed to be fiction in this verse, Killer Killer and the installment it spun off from seems to be the pure, distilled version of how the participants of V3 work in a different world— only difference is that the former two don't involve brainwashing of any kind.
• In Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, players were initially led to believe that Byakuya had been brought back as a survivor of the previous killing game only to become the first victim. In V3, this is exactly what happens to Rantaro.

Spin-offs:

Danganronpa Zero

• There were a few jokes on the internet about Danganronpa games that replace most of the cast with multiple variations of the same character, like 14 Kiyotakas and a Byakuya, or 14 Byakuyas (including the Ultimate Imposter from Goodbye Despair, so really only 13) and a Hagakure. Well... Considering Madarai is in Hope's Peak due to two collective talents shared between the 8 brothers, it can be safely assumed that they are all members of the same class (and year, since they are octuplets). Since every class can only have 16 students equally split between guys and girls, this means that they single-handedly took up the male half of their entire class.

Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls

• Considering Kurokuma is Junko's AI, him asking Nagito if he's finally going to come out of the closet becomes funnier when Episode 7 of Danganronpa 3: Despair Arc shows that she witnessed Nagito fall in love with Izuru, as he shot him.

Danganronpa Togami

• A Running Gag present in Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls was Toko constantly accusing Komaru of Brother–Sister Incest. Given the relationship between Byakuya and Shinobu here, this is comically ironic.

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