Fridge / Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls

Danganronpa Main Fridge Page
Main installments: Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc | Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair | Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School | Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony
Spin-offs: Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls

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Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

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Subpages:

• Fridge Brilliance

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Fridge Horror

• At one point, a Monokuma Kid ducks through a doorway. Moments later, an explosion makes it impossible to follow her. Near the end of the game, it's revealed that the Monokuma Kids' brainwashing helmets can be remotely detonated. The implications aren't pleasant.
• Kotoko's infamous Mini-Game is heavily implied to be her repeating her trauma, only placing herself in a position of power over the victim. Let's just hope that the amount of hands involved doesn't symbolize anything.
• One of the complaints is that other than Nagito and Izuru, none of the other Remnants of Despair appear in the game. Given some of the descriptions given in Danganronpa 2 Goodbye Despair of some of the things they did, it might be better that we don't see them.
• Haiji Towa is openly a Lolicon, and also feels that his half-sister Monaca should be grateful for the treatment she received from his family. You'd hope it doesn't mean a certain relationship, but in this series you can't be entirely sure.
  • Adding onto this, Monaca displays some rather inappropriate sexual behavior for her age, including hinting that she'll grant sexual favors to Nagisa and eventually French kissing him without his consent. Prematurely sexualized behavior is a tell-tale sign of child sexual abuse in real life, as already demonstrated with Kotoko, and in many cases the abuser is someone the child knows. Monaca lived in the same household as Haiji — the conclusion does not look pleasant.
• Nagisa's father was a teacher at Hope's Peak Academy. This is the same man who turned his son into an experiment and forcibly drugged and threatened him. Small wonder the Hope Cultivation Project was enacted if guys like this were part of the staff.
• In chapter 1, Masaru Daimon has a panic attack triggered by flashbacks of his abusive childhood at the hands of his violent father. Because of his fear, his arm starts trembling uncontrollably and he proceeds to beat it up until it's blue and purple to get it to stop shaking and force himself not to be afraid. Fridge Horror comes in when you realize this is exactly what his father used to do to "discipline" him, and as a consequence, it's the only way he knows to calm down when he is trembling and crying.
• The novel, Ultra Despair Hagakure, ends on a somewhat happy note, with Yasuhiro and Kanon successfully escaping from the Warriors of Hope, and nothing standing between them and freedom. However, during chapter 4, you have to go through a subway tunnel where, with a bit of searching, you can stumble across a female corpse with a notebook that contains the words "Big brother Leon" repeated dozens of times. Seems like their escape didn't end up going so well.
• It's ultimately revealed that Monaca actually faked breaking her legs in an attempt to get her father and half-brother to treat her better. Any kind of child abuse is already bad, but what were they doing to make it plausible to them that her legs actually were broken?
• It's shown that Monaca has no problems with triggering Kotoko's rape trauma. She also spends a lot of time telling Nagisa about her "high expectations" for him, which is the same sort of thing his parents said to him while essentially torturing him. In other words, Monaca is probably triggering his trauma as well, and no one, in-story or in the fandom, ever seems to mention it.
• Kotoko was raped by multiple producers. We can only hope that she didn't catch any STDs from them.
• It might be obvious, but the fireworks in the bad ending aren't fireworks at all, but the explosions of the Monokuma Kids' helmets.
• In the room where you first meet Haiji Towa, there are three documents that can be found in the room: Memoir of an Adult 1, Memoir of an Adult 2, and a list of the missing/dead. Memoir 2 is deeply disturbing; the writer claims the kids are "Devils in the bodies of children" and "damn devils!" before describing in graphic detail how they want to murder all of the children in massively violent ways. And then, during your first conversation with Haiji, he says that the children "aren't children anymore, they're devils" — making it entirely possible that he was the one who wrote it.
• Komaru losing all of her hearts and being vulnerable to a Monokuma unit leads to a Game Over script. In particular, the script involves her being disabled via Monokuma unit and thrown horizontally onto the surface below her, the unit then pouncing her. The script lends the player a few seconds to defend against the unit as it's doing this; if they decide to let Komaru get completely ambushed, however, the unit opens its mouth as wide as possible and forces Komaru's entire body down its throat head first, and that's INCLUDING the Megaphone Hacking Gun that Byakuya gave her, resulting in her dying. This doesn't seem like a consequential circumstance at first glance, as the game just allows the player to reset the whole predicament, but Makoto never has the opportunity to view the moment she's swallowed in the game as the only opportunity Komaru and Toko have to contact Makoto with a face-to-face recording system is when they're at the top floor of Towa Tower (and that's until Nagisa tampers with the power supply to disconnect him from the duo), so even Toko wouldn't be able to directly inform him about the death of his little sister, Komaru...
  • Also, because even the Hacking Gun is consumed, Toko has a lower survival rate as she can't eradicate every Monokuma ambush by herself. She requires Komaru's additional Hacking Gun to succeed in apprehending a Monokuma unit. Byakuya gave her the Hacking Gun so she could defend herself, and with it taken by the enemy with no method of retrieving it, Toko is left alone to become mercilessly victimized by the units and possibly end up in the same fatal predicament as Komaru.
• Throughout the game, all the Monokuma Kids encountered by Toko and Komaru appear to be about the same age as the Warriors of Hope, elementary school. Given their usual tactics, and the fact no one besides these children and the childless adults are seen alive, it's also entirely possible they also condoned the murder of middle and high schoolers so as to make their "kids only" paradise.
• Only adults who had never had any children were left alive. And given the aforementioned lack of children older or younger than elementary age, it's entirely possible that they also would have killed the parents of babies and toddlers. And given what was going on in Towa City, the suggestion of such young children left alone with rampaging robots and no adults looking after them depicts a rather grim picture.
• If the protagonists are successful in breaking the Monokuma Kids' brainwashing, how are they going to tell them that their parents (and possibly whole families) are dead? Ditto for the relatives of the deceased students of class 78.
• In Goodbye Despair, Nagito is depicted as being a teenager, but is actually several years older due to the Neo World Program wiping his memories, meaning he should be somewhere in his twenties. Komaru is said to be around fifteen to seventeen, making Nagito's involvement in the plot much more disturbing, considering he's a very creepy and unstable adult trying to manipulate a teenage girl.
• As one Let's Player pointed out, it's probably for the best that Genocide Jack stopped Kotoko's execution — having all those hands all over her would likely have brought back unpleasant memories...

Fridge Logic

• Throughout the game, it's repeatedly hammered in that Komaru is an ordinary girl with no talent who has to live up to having an Ultimate brother. But Komaru does have a talent- she can sense and talk to ghosts. You'd think that'd be the kind of thing that Hope's Peak would be very interested in.
  • Probably, but she was captured while she was still in middle school and Hope's Peak requires that someone is high school in order to be admitted. Not to mention that the only other time her ability was brought up, it was all but stated that the 'ghost' was just her teacher spying on her.
    • It's still worth noting that the information she gains from acting as Chairman Towa's spirit medium is something she had no way of knowing on her own - that Monaca was Haiji's sister. She was clearly mistaken with the case of her teacher, but that doesn't deconfirm the ability displayed at Towa Hills.
    • This game reveals there's an elementary school division of Hope's Peak while Danganronpa: Togami reveals a middle school division, so Komaru could have been scouted even before The Tragedy. However, as earlier points mention, the first instance was just her teacher spying on her and the other actually genuine case happened during this game. It doesn't seem like there were any other instances of this happening as Komaru would likely mention it sooner or later. Hope's Peak Academy scouts students whose achievements are made public or at least in some way known to them (or at least lucky students through lottery and Reserve Course students in their last couple years through exams and entry fee). Thus, they couldn't have scouted Komaru as a spirit medium. Even if she shared her first story with them, they would have found out it wasn't an actual ghost possession.

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