Roleplay / Dangan Roleplay Round Two

"Where's the threshold for what it takes to be a decent person? One good thing? Five good things? One more than any of us did?"

— Schuldig

Tropes from the second canon round of Dangan Roleplay.

This round provides examples of:

• Adventure Duo: Naomi (serious) and Anna (silly).
• All for Nothing: The poor person who was pushed to murder by the Dark Secret motive had their secret revealed when they were convicted. Another who killed to get back home in hopes of preventing even more death turned out to have actually come willingly and left his world in good hands, learned only with the Hope's Army reveal. Then there's Simon and Betty, whose case never would have happened if they'd had all their memories and the would-be culprit had known the truth, and the mole, who signed on to protect a secret that, pre-memory suppression, everyone already knew.
• Ascended Fridge Horror: What happens when everyone is sent back home after going through the horrors of murder school and their home has gone without them for months? Especially when some of those people were dangers to society to begin with? Answer: There really is a Ginger Genocide.
• Ascended Meme: The game references some memes related to the characters, like Adachi talking to cabbages. The most glorious of all is in the ending, where Madison returns from Round 1. "Surprise, bitch" indeed.
• Awful Truth: Lysandre being the mastermind and having succeeded in blowing up his own country. This is even an Awful Truth to himself; he wiped his own memories in part so that the bonds he formed with Hope's Army would be genuine and he would suffer like he concludes he deserves.
• Befriending the Enemy: Schuldig, followed by a few of the others once he starts to succeed, does this with Henri. It works.
• Billions of Buttons: The announcement console Archer discovers (and plays with), plus a similar one for fabricating motive videos.
• Bitter Almonds: Monobear "thoughtfully" stocked the pantry with an enormous bag of them. So far there have been at least two incidents of attempted cyanide poisoning, one of them actually successful.
• Bittersweet Ending: Thirty people are alive and the dead are resurrected... but Kalos still has a lot of rebuilding to do and a lot of people can't go home again — or are too changed by their time at murderschool to feel like they'd fit in even if they can.
• Boring Return Journey: After the survivor pool finds the god of life and asks it to revive their classmates, the next log follows a Time Skip to after everyone's either gone home or settled down elsewhere.
• Central Theme: "You can change, no matter what you've done or who you are" and "Friends, strangers, and enemies, everyone needs someone to learn to understand them."
• A Chat with Satan: Almost everyone in the survivor pool has a couple with the "ghosts" and with one another, leading up to self-examination on both sides in the Graduation Exam.
• Chekhov's Classroom: After the broken translator motive, Cammy starts offering German lessons to the students. Henri can't speak German and Schuldig's speaking it fluently exposes that the ghosts weren't real. Since all the other students were going to the lessons, Henri is outed as the fake.
• Chekhov's Gag: Dan's decision to stuff silverware down his pants becomes a Running Gag throughout the round. Its also the first clue that he's responsible for Naomi's death when the silverware is melted into a blade.
• Chekhov's Hobby: Cecil has a very unusual hobby involving rituals. This knowledge helps to prove his innocence during the third trial.
• Chunky Salsa Rule: So much so that even the mods used the phrase to describe the mess where Hanbei's head used to be. And then Cynthia slipped and fell in it...
• Connected All Along: Twenty-eight of the thirty students comprised Hope's Army before their memories were blocked. There's also the Internal Reveal that Lysandre and Archer knew each other.
• Cover Innocent Eyes and Ears: Occasionally done to Anna, especially if Naomi's there to judge.
• Create Your Own Villain: In turning a blind eye to the events of Round One until too late and then taking Lysandre at his word when he said he was okay, it can be said that the Future Foundation did this. Lysandre himself clearly thinks they should take responsibility, and he sets Round 2 up to make them suffer.
• Creepy Basement: The final investigation takes place in one, which is also (in part) a Torture Cellar.
• Dark Secret: The motive for week 2.
• Dénouement Episode: Technically, there were three epilogue logs.
• Doomsday Device: The hollow centre of the school is the firing path for the Ultimate Weapon, which itself is still right in the core of the bunker.
• Do Not Adjust Your Set: It's revealed that the entire game was recorded and sent as a video feed to the Future Foundation. As well, the fact that the mastermind didn't do this to warn civilians of his country's impending destruction when he'd previously hijacked everyone's Holo-Casters the last time he tried factors into the final trial.
• Dying Clue: "Kotozute" for Inaba.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Both players and characters were put through the wringer and a happy ending was not assured.
  One of the players, after the epilogue: YOU FUCKERS TRIED SO HARD TO MAKE PERMADEATH STICK AND WE EARNED THIS
• Earth All Along: This wasn't Hope's Peak's reserve campus in the DR world. This was a reconstruction in the post-apocalyptic Kalos.
• Elaborate Underground Base: The mastermind's lair in the nonuple-sub-basement... and it later turns out that the whole school is one.
• Elite Army: The Walking Spoiler that is Hope's Army: twenty-eight people sent on missions to save the multiverse.
• "Everyone Comes Back" Fantasy Party Ending: A much more tense and solemn version: In the Graduation Exam, illusions of the dead appear as holograms at their podiums, while the real things are watching the proceedings as ghosts.
• Evil Is Not Well-Lit: The Final Courtroom, at least until the lights go on.
• Evil Redhead: "Genocidal Ginger Bad End" was a popular joke for this round because three of the four red-haired students were antagonists who almost or actually had very high kill counts. Including the Mastermind.
• Faint in Shock: Sycamore faints when he sees Lysandre fake his death.
• Faking the Dead: Inaba, when going through her theories at the sixth afterparty, suspects that, if the mole wasn't just recruited after Lysandre's "death", they must actually be a student who faked their own death. While her theories are wrong, somebody has faked their death: Lysandre himself.
• Fast-Forward to Reunion: The Time Skip in the end to the party, which not only acts as a goodbye between those who stay with the Future Foundation and those who leave but also reunites everyone with their loved ones from home.
• Fiery Cover-Up: The incinerator is put to good use in Week 7 to conceal evidence.
• Fission Mailed: Week 9 had a fake bad end: Henri cheats and the class is sentenced to a mass execution, which the mastermind puts a stop to.
• Forced into Evil: Subverted. Some of the final party believe this of Lysandre when evidence comes to light that he was the Mastermind. He wasn't. He was doing it completely of his own will and even overthrew the one who was trying to use him.
• Foreshadowing: Reading over the logs again now that the round is over changes a lot. There's a good deal of planned foreshadowing, like one character freaking out over a motive that is later revealed to have pushed them to become the mole, but what's particularly impressive is all the unintentional foreshadowing from the players.
  • After being drugged by Tran, Betty notes not to accept food or drink from strangers. Tran himself should have listened to that advice. Three days later, he was targeted for murder just because he was the most likely to accept free food that had been poisoned.
  • Inaba discusses the idea of making a computer game and Sonico suggests that she make one character a ghost. Inaba is later one of the "ghosts" Henri has his holo-bots impersonate.
  • Dan, more than most, reacts with immediate revulsion and denial after being given the first motive. While he's not the first murderer, this motive actually kickstarted the slow burn that led to his breakdown throughout the game, culminating in his committing the last murder.
  • Early on, Anna and Naomi remark that maybe you just can't learn to understand some people. The whole round ends up exploring the idea that you can and should.
  • Adachi muses that maybe the group's been trapped there on the whim of a bizarre god. He's only half wrong. They were trapped by someone who captured and used a death god to lure them out.
  • Schuldig comments wryly to both Lysandre and Sycamore that he wants to go to Kalos, find the legendary Xerneas, and see if it will play Head It. They were in Kalos all along, the survivors do find Xerneas, and... Schuldig throws yarn at it and teaches it how to play. And just like Sycamore said, it gets the yarn stuck in its antlers.
  • Adachi was the murderer the week that the dead were amusing themselves with the King's Game, popularized by his canon.
  • Tobias muses that those who survive will either be "legitimate, calculating masterminds or bleeding hearts." Though all went through Character Development and learned either to understand and care for others or to survive in a harsh world, the survivor pool can still be boiled down to those two categories.
• Gag Haircut: Beat's self-done haircut late in the game looks like it'll be this. However, it quickly turns serious, becoming a symbol of his bond with Naomi, who fixed it before falling victim to the Mentor Occupational Hazard, and his ascent to the protag slot.
• Geometric Magic: Archer doodles alchemical arrays on his notes. Kirei, whose world also uses magic circles, is extremely interested.
• The Gods Must Be Lazy: Averted with Xerneas. Still, c'mon, Arceus, you're supposed to be stopping temporal anomalies from screwing up your world... then again, it wouldn't be the first time he left it to someone else.
• Good Is Not Dumb: Characters who started out innocent (Sonico, Anna) and Book Dumb (Beat) ended up making it out by seriously focusing on solving cases and puzzles with clues that would have flown over their heads earlier in the round.
• Hall of Mirrors: Miriam Tristesse's execution after the first trial.
• Happy Ending Override: Following from Round 1's Sequel Hook. The Future Foundation's oversight let Junko escape in Lysandre's head, the "your world's been destroyed" motive turned out to be fake in the end of R1 but in R2 Lysandre made his own come true, and the Foundation's own people get dropped into murderschool. At least now Junko's Deader than Dead?
• Have You Told Anyone Else?: Seems to be the case when Naomi asks this of Simon after he confides in her about the crown. However, Naomi isn't the one plotting to kill him that week, and the question was out of genuine concern.
• Icon of Rebellion: When the students discover the DR1 case files and remember Monobear's profile, they wonder if Idiot Hair became one of these because someone with it might have foiled a murderschool plot in the past.
• I Didn't Mean to Kill Him: Case 8's killer had been ordered to kill somebody, but the victim wasn't exactly who they'd have chosen if they'd been lucid about it.
• Instant Illness: The third motive, "Monkey Fever."
  • Temporary Blindness: The fever induced this in approximately 1/6 of the afflicted. As the name Monkey Fever might imply, there were two other strains that caused deafness and muteness at their most severe.
• Insomnia Episode: The fifth motive resulted in this for about over half the cast, when the gates between floors were sealed. Of course, the rule about "no sleeping outside the dorms" was still in full effect, meaning that only a few characters were technically allowed to sleep. Some off of that floor got away with sneaking in some ZZZs in the infirmary, but Naomi couldn't because she had to watch over them.
• Interface Spoiler: Used very effectively for foreshadowing up to the ninth trial. The Electronic Student Handbook displays profiles for all thirty students plus Monobear, which was brought up ICly in the beginning of the game as well as when the information room was opened. Nobody thought much of it, since Usami/Monomi had her own profile last round. During the ninth trial, Monobear refuted any claims that he had tampered with the crime scenes, framed Cynthia, or killed Dan without cause, because he couldn't do those things as the headmaster. That is, until (as Beat discovered) it came to light that he could do those things... as the thirty-first student.
• It's All Upstairs From Here: Inverted. The floors unlocked go down, and the journey to the final destination is down even further.
• Just Got Out of Jail: Adachi and Cammy, not that either remembers.
• Killed Off for Real: One of the first official announcements about this round was that it was going to avert the Everybody Lives twist ending of the last round. There was still an option of character revival, but it was exclusively reserved for the "Golden Ending", which had high IC and OOC requirements. Even when those were actually met, tragedy still hung over the group when they realized that, even though they'd tried to save him, the Mastermind wouldn't be coming back... yet, anyway. And that had to be earned with a lot of hard work, too.
• Kill It with Fire: After the first trial and execution, Lysandre decided to start people on burning Monobear in effigy.
• Kinda Busy Here: Phoneless variant: during Simon and Betty's wedding, Beat and Dan crash the proceedings to announce the murder of Sanae Hanekoma.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Part of the premise this go around. Like in the original game, everyone has memories that were taken from them by Monobear. The difference is, they know about the memory wipe from the beginning and regain a memory after each successful trial, often completely out of order. It's not quite as precise as you'd think; Monobear admits in the opening log that Kirei wasn't meant to lose a whole decade of his life.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: For DR1, SDR2, and all represented canons, particularly Pokémon X and Y.
• Longing Look: Anna notices the way that Naomi and Walker look at each other and deduces that they must be in love before either of them will admit it.
• Man-Eating Plant: Audrey, who lives in the greenhouse.
• Marshmallow Hell: When Beat, Naomi, and Walker come upon Inaba's body, Beat breaks down crying and Naomi offers him a hug... while she's still holding her decapitated zombie boyfriend's head. Walker gets shifted in the awkward group hug to get a face full of boob.
• The Marvelous Deer: Lysandre and Sycamore teach the other students about the legends of Xerneas, the god of life, which is a deer. This turns out to be relevant, and the deer itself appears and gives everyone their Golden Ending.
• Matchlight Danger Revelation: In the Mastermind Trial, the final courtroom is dark but the lights later turn on to reveal the Ultimate Weapon.
• Mercy Kill: Betty's motivation for trying to commit Murder-Suicide with Simon.
• Mole in Charge: It looks like this when Lysandre, the group's leader, is "killed" as a rebelling mole. The truth is even worse: Amnesiac Mastermind in Charge.
• Mook Horror Show: Some of the students go into dissonant shock when they realize that, as Hope's Army, they likely killed the Flare admins.
• Mortal Wound Reveal: When Kirei shows that Inaba stabbed him in the "heart" with a pitchfork, with shadows leaking out as he finally drops dead.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Cecil.
  • After Week 8, Kirei.
• Noble Male, Roguish Male: Lysandre and Schuldig, to hear the latter say it.
• The Not-Love Interest: On top of flirting with everyone he meets, Schuldig is Kirei's "fake-ass unofficial off-the-record in-spirit boyfriend".
• Object Ceiling Cling: Anna's pancake. She flipped it too high and it stuck on the kitchen ceiling, decomposing there for weeks.
• Of Corpse He's Alive: When Betty turns up dead, Simon, whose memory and grasp on reality have been slowly eroding, goes on a "date" with the corpse. Essentially, he's pulling this on himself.
• Oh, Crap!: Often the last expression on a culprit's face when they're being executed. Also, Anna when she gets caught watching through the crack of a slightly open door as Naomi and Walker finally kiss.
• Once is Not Enough: Poor Inaba didn't anticipate that stabbing Kirei with a pitchfork in self-defence wouldn't kill him right away.
• "Open!" Says Me: Immediately before discovering Vinh Tran's body, Kirei solves the problem of a locked door by punching it.
• Phlebotinum Breakdown: The motive for the 8th Week involves the game's Translator Microbes shorting out. This doesn't seem to have been something Monobear had actually intended...
• Power Crystal: Among Cecil's regains are supplies for a bloodstone array he uses for protection spells. Not that it prevents any murders.
• Product Placement: The Kit Kat people should really be paying the mods. (Or maybe not, since the characters end up getting sick of the omnipresent candy.)
• Rage Against the Reflection: The case 1 victim, Vinh Tran, punched and broke a mirror shortly before dying.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Deconstructed with Hope's Army. Elite Army or not, many of them are pencil-pushers, civilians, minors, loyal to another organization before the Future Foundation, criminals under probation, or just Obviously Evil, and the superiors they're reporting to are a bunch of traumatized teenagers whose best-of-the-best talents lie far away from world-saving. Naturally, they fall for an obvious trap, fail their mission, and end up so wrung out from the torture and the Bunker Life of Mutual Killing that followed that many of them quit after they're recovered so they can go live normal lives.
• Redemption Equals Death: Repeatedly explored and painfully twisted and subverted. Homura starts out as her innocent former self, starts to see evidence and regain memories of her eventual alignment and fate, and is eventually Driven to Suicide to keep herself from becoming that person; over time in the afterlife, she develops and eventually turns good again, so death equals redemption. Lysandre turns against Monobear and undergoes a Heroic Sacrifice for it, only to actually be the mastermind, having faked his death. Adachi tries to rebel after developing deep relationships with other cast members and remembering the "it's not too late for you" moment from canon, but things go horribly wrong for him. Kirei spends his entire time in-game examining his conscience and wondering if he can become a good person, but eventually decides that it's impossible for him to be anything other than evil and kills two people before dying — in this case, failed redemption equals death. Of three remaining villains, one is full-time wearing the protag pants now, one is awkwardly wondering what this thing called "positive emotion" is, and one took a look at the others and decided that there's no point in deciding not to be a horrible person.
• Rejected Apology: While Simon largely forgave Beat for the chair incident, and Betty and he had managed a tense understanding, Sonico (and through her, Adachi) refuse to have anything to do with Beat for almost the entire rest of the game. Considering he keeps yelling or fleeing every time he tries to apologize, her stance is understandable. Sonico relaxes only slightly when Beat salvages Inaba's things so Monobear can't get his hands on them, and fully changes her mind about Beat after her boyfriend tries to frame him for murder.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: Subverted when everybody thought {...} had died taking a hit meant for Beat. Unable to kill an innocent, Monobear "fixes him up", rendering him a talking head.
• Revealing Skill: When the survivors are starting to piece together the Mastermind's identity, Schuldig tests this theory by throwing yarn at Monobear. The bear headbutts it back perfectly, proving the hypothesis: Lysandre is the Mastermind because his AI Monobear knows how to play Head-It.
• Room 101: The mysterious rooms on the seventh floor and the actual torture chamber on the eighth are pretty ominous and some horrible things definitely went on down there.
• Saying Too Much: Adachi exposes himself as Walker's killer when he accidentally names the real murder weapon.
• Send in the Search Team: The Round 2 class, save two, were actually Hope's Army, members of the Future Foundation sent in to retrieve a rogue Lysandre. This did not go well. In the first epilogue, they meet their own search party.
• Signature Item Clue: It was pretty obvious that case 8 was a Frame-Up, but who did the framing was harder to figure out... until you noticed that Adachi was missing his tie and the paper crane left at the scene was his.
• Snow Means Cold: Cynthia mentions that she doesn't like cold days with no snow because cold without snow defeats the purpose.
• Something We Forgot: In the end, a freshly-revived Lysandre makes arrangements with the Future Foundation to not let Audrey, who'd been left behind, starve to death in the bunker. Ice King's crown, however, is discussed and deemed too dangerous not to just leave down there.
• So Proud of You: Archer awkwardly admits this to Cynthia late in the game.
• The Stinger: After the "end" log tagged "final log", one more log went up to wrap up the story and confirm that the characters did indeed find the god they were looking for.
• Story-Breaker Power: Beat accuses the Week 9 culprit of being the real-life equivalent of a Game-Breaker when Adachi summons Magatsu Izanagi. He's actually not this, as he's nerfed like anyone else and can't or won't attack.
• Sympathetic Murderer: Almost everybody, even if this round had far fewer altruistic or self-defence murders than the last. Even Jay and Ike had their reasons, as badly as they're condemned for what they saw as the only solution.
• Taking the Bullet: Walker jumps in front of Beat to shield him from an explosion. This renders him a talking head until his death.
• The Talk: Naomi's clinical sex ed lecture for the more sheltered students.
• Terrifying Rescuer: Inverted. "BLACK SUIT! PUNCH 'IM!"
• That Makes Me Feel Angry: Dan, when he tries to deal with both his confusing emotions and Beat's broken English during the "no translator" motive. "Dan mad! Dan mad mad mad mad!"
• This Is Gonna Suck: The group reaction to Adachi breaking down and summoning his Persona.
• Together in Death: Betty tried to commit murder-suicide to mercy-kill Simon but failed. Even so, they ended up in the afterlife together soon enough and reconciled.
• Two-Teacher School: Joked about with Monobear's side role as the "janitor" (cleaning up bodies).
• Underdressed for the Occasion: Everyone gets to attend a(n interrupted) wedding in the same outfits they've been wearing every other day.
• Uniformity Exception: In the final investigation, all but two students have Future Foundation uniforms waiting for them. This turns out to show that the ones left out were a civilian and the enemy.
• Unsettling Gender-Reveal: A minor one happens in case 1: Adachi thought the victim, Vinh Tran was a girl and questioned why their body was found in the men's restroom. People were quick to correct him, leaving him rather shocked.
• Villainous Breakdown: Adachi during his trial. Big time.

  "Just hate me, okay!? Hate me for the murderer I am! That's easier on everyone!"

• "The Villain Sucks" Song: Adachi sings insulting Filk Songs about Monobear when he tries to either feed Audrey or get evidence out of her and not get eaten in the process.
• Was It All a Lie?: Discussed - Sonico briefly wonders this following Adachi's trial and execution. While talking to Beat, she concludes that it wasn't, but says somewhat bitterly that she almost wishes that were the case, if only to make it easier to come to terms with.
• Wham Episode: The final trial, dear god. What do you mean, Lysandre is the mastermind!?
• Who Murdered the Asshole: Done painfully with Dan and subverted in the end. In the trial, the characters, even the ones who actually liked Dan, discover his Hidden Depths and regret how they treated him, even though he was a total jerk to them. When they all feel pity and remorse for seeing him as the kind of person anyone would want to get rid of, it turns out that none of them killed him.
• Who Writes This Crap?!: Observing that motives and murders always happen on the same day, Schuldig jokes that maybe they're living in a cheap TV show. Kirei replies that the writing staff must be incompetent.
• Wistful Amnesia: The heart remembering what the mind forgets is a common occurrence here. Near the beginning, for example, Lysandre feels a need to put Cecil's protective charm on not just Sycamore's door but that of his forgotten awkward ex, Archer. The Hope's Army reveal showed that a lot of the game's unlikely CR, like Archer-Cynthia, Schuldig/Kirei, and Sonico/Adachi, had also been close in the past... and Betty and Dan had still hated each other.
• Writing Indentation Clue: Beat finds some on a whiteboard that indicate the testing period of the memory-wiping drug.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Many of those left alive at the end end up somewhere else, whether settling in Kalos or returning to the Future Foundation, either because something's become of their home, they're supposed to be dead there, or just because their time in murderschool changed them too much to let them go back to normal.