Music / MILGRAM

”Will you be able to forgive them after listening to their sins?”

— Es, "Undercover"

Come, sing your sins.^note  From left to right. Top row: Futa, Kotoko. Second row: Shidou. Third row: Mu, Yuno, Mikoto, Kazui. Fourth row: Haruka. Last row: Amane, Mahiru.

Milgram (stylized as MILGRAM), introduced in 2020, is an interactive music project managed by OTOIRO and co-produced by DECO*27 and Takuya Yamanaka.

Es, the prison guard and Audience Surrogate, is the protagonist of the story. Memory hazy, they awake in a prison facility called MILGRAM, where they are greeted by Jackalope. Jackalope explains that MILGRAM houses 10 prisoners, who, despite appearing fairly average at first glance, are all murderers. It is Es's job to determine whether the prisoners should be ruled guilty (not forgiven) or innocent (forgiven) for their crimes.

There is a catch, though—Es, as well as the audience, are initially clueless as to what each of the prisoners' crimes are. Jackalope explains that those sins aren't revealed through interrogation or anything conventional, but rather through extracting the prisoner's mental images and displaying them as a song accompanied by a symbolic music video. These music videos are uploaded to MILGRAM's official YouTube page for viewers to examine and make theories and conclusions regarding what the prisoners' sins are.

After these music videos are released, viewers are encouraged to visit the MILGRAM official site and vote for whether or not they forgive the prisoner for their sins. The first music videos do not reveal all there is to know about the prisoner and their crimes, so this process of releasing videos and voting repeats three times, the audience growing more and more informed with the release of new videos. This is referred to as the three trial system.

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Tropes that MILGRAM provides an example of:

• Aerith and Bob: All prisoners have normal Japanese names, while the guards (Es and Jackalope) don't.
• Age-Inappropriate Art: Amane's cover song for the second trial is "Animal". While the cover leans more into the aspect of her dropping her "good girl" image and going feral, the song is rife with sexual euphemisms that sound unfitting for a child to sing.
• The Alcatraz: While Milgram is fairly lax with the rules as far as prisons go, there don't appear to be any ways in or out of it (which presents one hell of an Ontological Mystery when you think about it).
• Alternate Reality Game: The entire project is this, with viewers acting as "prison guards" to judge whether or not the prisoners are "forgivable". The result will change the next season's music videos and storyline.
• Ambiguous Situation: The music videos are basically the prisoners' crimes, as seen through their eyes. Because a lot of them are convinced of their innocence, in denial, or otherwise uninclined to be straightforward, it can be very difficult to understand what actually happened. In some cases (aka Mu), what's shown in their Second Trial video puts what happened in their First Trial video into a completely different context. In Amane's case, her First and Second Trial videos have done a lot of explaining as to why she committed her murder, but not who.
• Amen break: "The Purge March" includes the amen break drums in the first two of four bars leading up to each chorus.
• Amnesiac Hero: Es wakes up in Milgram with no memories, other than their name and the fact that they are the prison guard. The only information we have about them is their age and height.
• Arc Words: "Forgive/Not Forgive" appears a lot in song lyrics, especially from the Second Trial onward, hammering in the theme of the project.
• Art Evolution: For the first half of Season 1, the Limited Animation was very apparent, with CGIs, Recycled Animation, and lots of panning/static shots added in-between. From "half" onward, all music videos are fully animated, while the narration and trailer videos still use Limited Animation.
  • Special mention toward the "Weakness" music video, with notably much lower quality art compared to the rest and the use of Recycled Animation were painfully clear, though you may justify it as the representation of his Sanity Slippage.
• Art-Style Dissonance: Parts of "Magic" are animated in a papery chibi style, including the loop of Amane getting tortured by the cult leaders.
• Asshole Victim: A few characters earn sympathy points because murder victims definitely deserved it. Kotoko killed predators who attacked children, Amane killed one of her abusive cult leaders, and Mu killed her bully though the context that Mu was the bully first makes Rei a much more complicated example.
• Audience Participation: This is Milgram's core, stand-out feature, allowing anyone to decide and vote on whether or not they want to forgive a prisoner. Fans can also ask prisoners questions through the mobile app from time to time.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • Meta example. The "Song of the Prisoners" trailer includes a preview of the first chorus of each prisoner's song...except for Mikoto's preview, which comes from the last chorus of "MeMe" to hide the song's true nature (the final chorus is the climax of the very minimalist and light choruses that contrast with the death metal-esque verses, fooling the listener into thinking the whole song sounded like that).
  • In "Magic", the only hint of someone dying is the absence of the orange cat that Amane took care of. "The Purge March" reveals that the cat was a literal cat and couldn't have been the victim.
• Big Damn Heroes: In "John Doe", Es is on the receiving end of a pummeling from Mikoto's alter. Before he can do any more harm, Kotoko arrives and knocks him out cold with a single hit.
• Bilingual Bonus: While the lyrics of the prisoners' songs are translated, any text in the music video itself never is. They can provide additional details concerning the context of each video's events.
• Book Ends: Whereas "I Love You" opens up with Mahiru discovering her boyfriend hanged himself, the video ends with the same corpse, now in first person perspective.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Jackalope does this very subtly in his "This is the Milgram" video, using a plural pronoun to refer to Es near the end.
• Changing Chorus: Every song has at least one variation on its chorus. Sometimes there are two sets of lyrics that are both sung at the end ("Weakness", "Umbilical", "Throw Down"). Sometimes only the last chorus is different ("MeMe", "It's Not My Fault"). Sometimes the chorus's lyrics and backing track change progressively ("Backdraft", "Cat", "The Purge March").
• Chromatic Arrangement: Seen in "Magic" with the four leaders of Amane's cult. Gachata is green, Yuri is yellow, Gozake is blue, and Riyone is pink.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Defied by Es. Although explicitly told that they can run Milgram and judge the prisoners however they want, Es chooses to simply talk with the prisoners rather than using violence or threats (although they do occasionally slap or kick a prisoner, usually to make a point or shut them up).
  Es: Though I say it's an interrogation, at this point, I have no intention of being rough with you.
• Color-Coded Characters: Each prisoner has a color associated with them that accents their uniform as well.
  • Haruka's is blue.
  • Yuno's is pink. (Overlapping Pink Means Feminine and Pink Is Erotic)
  • Futa's is red. (Example of an overlap between Red Is Heroic and Red Is Violent.)
  • Mu's is yellow.
  • Shidou's is indigo.
  • Mahiru's is orange.
  • Kazui's is teal.
  • Amane's is green.
  • Mikoto's is gray-blue.
  • Kotoko's is magenta.
• Comic-Book Time: Time passes in Milgram such that characters celebrate their birthdays multiple times, and everyone's hair grows longer in the interim. However, they don't seem to age, and the female prisoners notice that their menstrual cycles seem to have halted. It's most obvious with Amane, who is still acknowledged as a 12-year-old in addition to her lack of growing up.
• Connect the Deaths: Kotoko has a board of various maps in the HARROW MV to track down criminals.
• Cover Version:
  • Each of the prisoners (and Es) have a cover of one of DECO*27's popular VOCALOID songs included in their albums. Haruka covers "Two Breaths Walking", Mu covers "Otome Dissection", and Kazui covers "Yowamushi Mont Blanc", to name a few. They're unrelated to their crimes, but are rather meant to provide insight into their characters.
  • A Miku cover of "Undercover" was posted on DECO*27's main YouTube channel to celebrate MILGRAM's first anniversary.
  • When a prisoner's song reaches 1 million views, an Es cover of the song is uploaded as a commemoration.
• Convicted by Public Opinion: This is, in essence, how Milgram works, but not just in a literal sense: the audience is theoretically meant to vote prisoners guilty or innocent based on their crimes, but because a lot of the facts about the crimes have been withheld, obfuscated, or concealed, the audience is voting based on what they think happened, which is often very different to what later videos show. There's also the fact that many of the audience are voting innocent or guilty based on their own personal feelings about the prisoners, with the actual crimes not coming into it. For example, Kotoko's second vote has been overwhelmingly 'guilty', but it's not because of the crime, it's the audience's revenge for her attacks on Futa and Mahiru.
• Cypher Language: Milgram's runes generally correspond to English letters, although there are fewer characters than there are English ones. The writing is everywhere: they're printed on the prisoners' uniforms, used as borders and background text in some of the videos, and - going by Shidou's word - plastered all over the prison walls.
• Dark Reprise: "I Love You" is a partial one for "This Is How to Be in Love with You", as the chorus of the song goes right back into its predecessor's poppy chords and tone while Mahiru talks about how much she loves her boyfriend. The song also makes it very clear that she believes that same love was what caused him to take his own life, even though she felt like she was only trying to express her love in her own way.
• Death of a Child: Present in Haruka's First Trial video, Weakness.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The Es covers' MVs are the original videos desaturated to near black and white, along with digital glitches layered on top.
• Dysfunction Junction: Each prisoner is considered a 'killer', and have either gone through some trauma to have been pushed to that state, or deal with the inner turmoil that follows taking someone's life.
• Eldritch Location: It's not obvious at first, but consider how Milgram literally reads minds to make songs out of, and how it's often referred to (usually by Es) as its own entity.
• Expository Hairstyle Change: All characters have their hair become notably longer between seasons, with some changing hairstyles.
• Fairytale Motifs: Kotoko's videos bring to mind Little Red Riding Hood, with Kotoko being compared to both Red Riding Hood and the wolf.
• Fan Disservice: Mikoto has three Shirtless Scenes in MeMe's MV. In order, they are Mikoto taking off his blood-stained clothes, washing away the blood in the shower, and sitting in a bathtub full of blood.
• Flower Motifs: Rampant in Shidou's First Trial MV, Throw Down.
• Foreshadowing: In the last chorus of the 'Undercover' MV, you can briefly see the silhouettes of prisoners killing Es in a manner relevant to their actual murders. For instance, Mu can be seen holding a box cutter (which she used to kill her victim in After Pain). Futa can be seen only shouting at Es, which makes sense considering the fact that he bullied his victim into suicide.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Let's just say that you're going to be pausing the music videos a lot if you want to catch everything.
• The Friends Who Never Hang: Haruka and Amane are the only two prisoners who have never had a one-on-one conversation in the MILGRAM app's timeline. Justified, since Haruka is very uncomfortable around young children and thus actively avoids her.
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: Out of the 10 prisoners, 5 are female and 5 are male.
• Innocent Blue Eyes: Though it's more of a turquoise color in this case, the project uses these symbolically whenever a prisoner is voted forgivable or innocent.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: In his voice drama, Kazui concludes that since the prisoners can't hurt Es, then Es must not be able to hurt them either. Es is more than willing to immediately prove otherwise with a slap to the face.
• Jerkass Has a Point: In "YONAH", in response to Es admonishing her for attacking the other prisoners, Kotoko points out that A, nearly everyone (including Es) would approve of a murderer being attacked by a vigilante if they didn't know either party, and B, a warden who becomes so attached to the prisoners they're watching over that they're prepared to give them lighter or no sentences/punishments based on things like how much they like them or how long they've known them is a useless warden. Es objects to this, but she's not wrong.
  Kotoko: You let their sins off just because they're close to you? You're making the punishment less severe just because they get along with you? What's next? Going to give them leniency for their looks? For their personality? For how long have you known them?
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Unlike Es, who does not remember anything from their life before MILGRAM, Mikoto only claims to not be able to remember the "sin" he had committed.
• Laughing Mad: With Haruka in Weakness. Turns into Cry Laughing by the end of the MV.
• Letting the Air out of the Band: "I Love You"'s outro has its visuals based on the merry-go-round, but it and the music slows down to a halt when the carousel includes the hanging corpse of Mahiru's boyfriend among all the horses.
• Limited Animation: All meta/trailer videos, along with music videos from "Undercover" to "This Is How It Is To Be In Love With You".
• Lyrical Dissonance: Many of the songs are rather upbeat despite the lyrics portraying the prisoners' state of mind and how they feel regarding their murder.
• Malicious Misnaming: Mu was the victim of this in her MV, with one of the writings on the blackboard misspelling her last name, Kusunoki, as Guzunoki ("guzu" refers to a stupid/indecisive person and "guzuguzu" can mean "dawdling" or "complaining").
• Meaningful Echo: The lyrics of "Deep Cover" include the repetition of "Under" from "Undercover" and similarly reference the other inmates. This combines with the imagery of the video to make it clear that Kotoko wants to be the authority of the prison and thinks she'd be better at it than Es.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown:
  • Mikoto's alter unleashes one of these on Es in "John Doe", and it does not sound pretty.
  • Kotoko tears into a child abductor in her MV, assaulting him with only her hands and feet until he dies.
• No Periods, Period: It's implied in one timeline conversation between Mahiru and Mu that the women aren't getting their periods as a general effect of Milgram's environment.
  Mu: You're the same, then? ...That it's gone...
• No-Sell: According to Jackalope, prisoners simply cannot attack prison guards, seen in action for the first time when Futa attempted to attack Es and was met by an invisible wall. In an interesting twist, an attack seems to be defined as "intention to harm", as Kazui managed to physically restrain Es just fine, only losing feeling in his hands when he tried to apply pressure.
• Pink Girl, Blue Boy
  • The first two prisoners, Haruka and Yuno, fit the trope in terms of their color motifs.
  • In "Weakness", the boy who presumably is Haruka's younger self and the young girl with him also fit, wearing a blue polo shirt and a pink dress respectively.
  • Although they belong to a group of four, Gozake and Riyone are the Blue Boy and Pink Girl respectively, as they're introduced together later in the MV than Gachata and Yuri.
• Rage Against the Heavens: Overlapping with Rage Against the Author: the prisoners perceive their judgements as voices in their minds telling them that they're guilty or innocent/forgiven or not forgiven. Many of the Second Trial songs and voice dramas have the prisoners directly reacting to this, with quite a few being furious at their judgement.
  Yuno: I find those kinds of assumptions preachy and unpleasant! They're worthless! Arbitrarily deciding that I'm pitiable. Arbitrarily making up a backstory for me. Creating a personally idealized version of me. Creating an acceptable version of me.
• Recycled Animation: Mostly in meta/trailer videos, but very apparent in the "Weakness" MV, with many scenes is reused three times in one video.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: On the flip side of Innocent Blue Eyes, red eyes are used to represent prisoners who have been voted unforgivable or guilty.
• Rule of Symbolism: The music videos, along with the album covers. The videos are extracted from the prisoners' memories and thus very warped by their biases and emotions, which manifest as various symbols and motifs. What the symbols mean is up for grabs, though.
  • Haruka with spotlights, water, and photorealistic animals.
  • Yuno with traditionally "girly" and "innocent" things (plushies, balloons, dating...)
  • Futa with things that are deemed "rebellious" like graffiti and video games.
  • Muu has hourglasses, sunset, and bees.
  • Shidou with stylized flowers, pomegranates, and patient name tags.
  • This Is How To Be In Love With You features Mahiru in a birdcage, complete with falling feathers. I Love You meanwhile prominently features a carousel as well as strawberry cake.
  • half focuses on a green apple and masks and takes place entirely within a theater. Cat also adds magic tricks and doves.
  • Amane with clouds, which are heavily implied to symbolize the cult she belongs to. In Magic, she is also the only human character; everyone else appears either as mascot of some sort or an animal. It also happens within a TV show.
  • MeMe has Tarot Motifs all over the place, not to mention that the song itself switches between intense, metal-esque verses and calm, quiet choruses.
  • Kotoko with wolves. "Deep Cover" also has the other prisoners symbolised by chess pieces, each customised to incorporate elements of the prisoner's backstory/personality.
• Rule of Three: Milgram's Three Trial system. Three trials also means that each prisoner gets three songs.
• The Smurfette Principle: In "Magic", Riyone is the only girl out of the four leaders.
• Sanity Slippage Song: "All-Knowing And All Agony", which shows Haruka slowly killing more and more animals trying to make his mother love him, eventually snapping and killing a human when she rejects him completely.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Lyrical Dissonance aside, some songs don't match up with the mood of the video. In particular, Mahiru's second song, "I Love You", has her joyfully singing about how much she loves her boyfriend while feeding him dead rats, while Amane's second song, "The Purge March", has visuals of clouds, rain, and drowning during the very upbeat-sounding chorus.
• Stealth Pun: Kotoko's motif in "Harrow" is wolves, and the video shows her to be a vigilante who works by herself. She's a lone wolf.
• Sympathetic Murderer: All the characters are killers, but they all had a motive that wasn't necessarily malicious to do so. It's up to the audience to decide whether that's enough to forgive them, though.
• Tautological Templar: Kotoko believes that as a vigilante, it's morally right for her to punish murderers who have been found guilty. The fact that A, she's also considered a murderer, B, she attacked two people who couldn't defend themselves and beat them nearly to death, C, nobody asked, told or ordered her to punish them, she did it entirely of her own volition, and D, the actual authority of the prison rebuked her and told her that she was wrong to do it and it's not what they wanted hasn't changed her viewpoint at all- she's still right, and she should be able and allowed to punish anyone who's guilty without reprieve.
• Teens Are Monsters
  • Four of our ten murderers are teenagers. However, they're still fairly sympathetic given Milgram's premise.
  • Played straight with Mu's bullies, who are around the same age as her. Even worse is that it's implied that they used to be her friends.
• Theme Naming: Many of the titles of the prisoners' voice dramas have a noticeable theme: Haruka's reference 'the weak', Yuno's refer to 'zero', Futa's reference fire, Mu's are two words with the second being the letter B, Shidou's are the names of a god, Mahiru's reference love, Amane's use religious terms, and Kotoko's are each one word in all-caps.
• Token Good Teammate: Downplayed in "Magic". Compared to Gachata, Gozake, and Riyone, Yuri is visibly reluctant to punish Amane after she helps the cat, but he still goes through with it.
• Tough Love: According to Jackalope at the end of the first trial, Amane being voted "Unforgiven" was an attempt at this for Es/the viewers. Many fans voted Amane "Unforgiven" not because they believed that she herself doesn't deserve forgiveness, but because they believe that by voting that she is innocent, that it will only further cement her beliefs that her actions were justified. The fans' logic seems to be that the sooner she realizes that she's been brainwashed and deceived by her cult, the sooner she can begin healing. Healing from cult-based trauma is by no means a pleasant experience, especially from experiences so severe and for someone as young as Amane, but ultimately, the fans seem to want the best for her, even if that means she'll feel rejected in the process. However, when she was actually branded Unforgiven at the end of the first trial, Amane took the opposite reaction to what the audience hoped—she just doubled down on her belief that she didn't do right by her peers and denies herself even simple luxuries like cake. It doesn't help that she had already gotten subjected to Tough Love by her "teachers", if the "Magic" PV is anything to go by.
• Truck Driver's Gear Change: "half" and "Magic" both modulate up a half step for the final chorus. "It's Not My Fault" modulates up for the first and last chorus but modulates down for the outro.
• Unmoving Plaid: The shirt that Shidou wears in "Throw Down" has a floral pattern that never moves.
• Unreliable Narrator: Since the framing device of all the music videos is that they are how the focal prisoner sees their respective "sin," a lot of them are incomplete, biased, or represented in such a way that it's hard to tell what's actually happening unless the viewer pays very close attention.
• Wham Episode
  • "Crying B", Mu's voice drama. She's the first prisoner to really point out how weird it is that Es doesn't seem to know what their own standards of judgment are or even how they think. Any possibility of Es actually going through some introspection is blocked by a sudden and unexplained debilitating headache.
  • "John Doe", Mikoto's voice drama, in which Mikoto's alter manages to successfully attack Es multiple times.
  • "TASK", Kotoko's voice drama. Es starts off by thanking Kotoko for saving them in "John Doe", to which she takes the iniative in the interrogation and proposes a deal to Es: Agreeing to share information with one another in order to figure out what 'MILGRAM' really is. At this, she successfully drives Es into yet another panic attack.
• You Bastard!: Despite inviting the audience to become the whole cast's judge and jury, the story just as bluntly condemns the audience for doing so. Futa and Yuno actively hate the audience for their verdicts, the former because he believes that what they're doing is no different from the cyberbullying campaigns he launched and the latter for believing that they only Forgave her because they thought her naive. Some of the inmates even dare the audience to vote a certain way again, half with gratefulness and half with resigned acceptance (such as Shidou, who wants to be Unforgiven but asks to be voted Forgiven because his medical skills are indispensible; or Mikoto's alter, who wants Mikoto to be voted Forgiven, because Mikoto had nothing to do with the murder(s)).
• You Wake Up in a Room: If Mu's account of what happened to her is accurate, then the prisoners woke up in Milgram very soon after they committed their murders, with no memory of how they got there.

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