"Try your hardest, not just for the cameras, but for the world. Walk the runway like your life depends on it!"
Welcome, Beautiful SHSL students! The twenty of you have been chosen to model for the annual edition of HP’s Most Excellent, a well-renowned magazine featuring Hope’s Peak’s brightest, most outstanding, most conventionally attractive and definitely most photogenic students of the year!
Now turn, strike a pose, and get ready for your close-up, because this year’s issue will surely slay the masses!
Model-Ronpa
is a submission-based Danganronpa roleplay group hosted over Discord and Tumblr. Twenty of the most conventionally attractive and photogenic students in Hope’s Peak are offered a position to model for the latest edition of HP’s Most Excellent, a magazine that showcases SHSL students and their achievements over the past year. Their food, housing, and other necessities will be provided for the three weeks the students spend modelling for the the magazine, and they will be paid handsomely after the shoots are complete.
That is, or so they were told.
Upon arrival, the unsuspecting students find out that the invitation has been a glamourous lie, and are forced into a good old-fashioned killing game! Thusly, the 20 students are locked inside of the Modelling agency building, and forced to kill each other in order to escape! Can they survive together against all odds? Or will the competition drive some to pay the ultimate price?
If beauty is pain, then prepare to hurt.
The stylish tropes in this stylish roleplay include:
- A Student Body Divided
- Amateur Sleuth: Played straight for the most part, downplayed within certain students.
- Amusing Injuries: On very bad RNG rolls, the students tend to cause misfortune or injury to themselves, or have the environment cause harm to them. This can be taken seriously depending on the context and the severity of the wound, but most of the time it's played for humor instead.
- Anyone Can Die: Even being a roleplay, any of the characters can be a victim or culprit.
- And I Must Scream: The trio of Modelmascots as of CH.6 after being forced to maintain the form of Momoke. Also applies to several NPCs who underwent experimentation at Mir AI.co - particularly those who remember it like Mantis (Eigawa Reiko) and Asashima Kumi.
- Artificial Afterlife: As revealed with the appearance of AI-Huang in Chapter One, dead characters in HPME are preserved by A.I.s - apperances, memories, and all in tact!
- Body of the Week: Supposedly, every chapter results in at least one death that the remaining students have to investigate.
- Characters Dropping Like Flies
- Came Back Wrong: Applies to the mirAI.co's test subjects. Leading to several lashing out in violence at students throughout the game.
- Clear My Name/Clear Their Name: Happens whenever somebody is accused of the crime and fights the charges, or when their friends do their best to help them. Of course, the question of whether or not they're actually guilty is very real...
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The teams get their own colours: pink for Cute, blue for Cool, purple for Fancy and green for Funny.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: The executions, which are tailor-made for each culprit. Usually, they either mock their Super High School Level talent or exploit their deepest fears, ensuring their punishment is as terrifying as possible. Occasionally, a murder victim also dies in a particularly horrible manner.
- Fate Worse than Death: A possible punishment for an innocent party in the event of a mistrial, if it's not outright death.
- Deadly Game
- Dead to Begin With: Applies to the NPCs and background characters found in the game. The only real exceptions to this are The Chaperones, The Benefactors, Mamoru, and KIT.
- Developing Doomed Characters: That's some to most of the characters. Good luck figuring out which ones they are before they die. They consist of:
- Huang Xiaozhu, ex-SHSL Reality TV Show Host and HPME CEO, Prologue Victim
- Yuuna Kumagae, SHSL Tailor, Chapter 1 Victim
- Keiko Kimura, ex-SHSL Nail Technician and HPME Chaperone, Chapter 1 Killer
- Izumi Fujimoto, SHSL Musical Actor, Chapter 2 Victim
- Rika de Silva, SHSL Escape Artist, Chapter 2 Killer
- Adeyaka Sada, SHSL Inventor, Perishes due to the motive mid-Chapter 3
- Rowena Christine St. Bathory, SHSL Spirit Photographer, Punished by the mascots mid-Chapter 3
- Kaise Imamiya, SHSL Fashion Designer, Chapter 3 Victim
- Raketsu Hachimitsu, SHSL Violinist, Chapter 3 Killer
- Kyung Min Oh ("Mickey"), SHSL It Girl, Chapter 4 Victim
- Eiji Mazawa, SHSL Horror Musician, Chapter 4 Killer
- Riko da Silva ex.SHSL Supermodel, Chapter 5 Victim
- This trope also manages to involve most of the robots made for HP's Most Excellent as a result of their AI being the result of transhumanism experimentation.
- Died in Your Arms Tonight: Izumi, in Ryou's arms. Ryou is understandably very much horrified by this.
- Disguised Horror Story: The cutesy exterior aesthetics of Model Ronpa: Fashion Disaster! clash with the horrifying situations that take place within the plot.
- Dramatic Irony:
- Chapter 1's Group Fashion Show revolved around the theme of Cute. You would expect the appropriately named Cute Team to do well, right? Not only did they fail to break the top three where every other team in the agency had a representative (their highest scorer was Kaz at 5th), two of their teammates also took last and second last place. The judges must really be fickle.
- The chaperones are meant to be look after the students and guide them into not succumbing to the mutual killing game and all that, right? One of them is the first murderer.
- Despite being the one who has spent the most time with HP's Most Excellent's robotic staff, Mina is unable to stop the Judges going rogue and is unable to convince Mamoru not to punish her at the end of the second Group Fashion Show.
- Dwindling Party: The game began with 20 students. It will not end with 20 students.
- Dysfunction Junction: With twenty different characters (not counting the large number of NPCs), it's to be expected that something like this would happen. To what extent depends on the character in question...and the person playing them.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: But who knows how much the students will have to sacrifice to achieve it?
- Emotional Torque
- Everyone Is a Suspect: The objective of each trial is to find out who is the most suspicious.
- Everyone Went to School Together: Unlike the source material, these students remember their times together at Hope's Peak. The difference is that many of them were not in the same class and only a handful had spoken sparingly before they were invited to model.
- Evidence Scavenger Hunt: Once a body is discovered, the surviving students, culprit included, are expected to investigate for evidence to prepare for the class trial where they will attempt to find the person behind the crime.
- Fire-Forged Friends: Often, relationships (both platonic and possibly romantic) are formed due to the stress everyone is put under and the bonds created thusly.
- Hidden Depths: There are more to every character than meets the eye - it's just that some of them are rather open to telling others their backstories or feelings, and others keep it under such a careful lock and key.
- Humans Are Flawed
- Involuntary Battle to the Death
- Kangaroo Court: Only a few of the characters has any sort of background that might give them a step up in a court setting.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Considering its premise and the fact that it's a roleplay, the characters are not above poking fun at the supposed absurdity of their circumstances.
- Mystery of the Week: There's a new murder every two-three weeks in real life, and every half a week or so in-game.
- Pink Blood
- Public Execution: If a killer is caught or if someone is randomly chosen as a scapegoat, they are dragged away to a cruel execution that usually causes them a lot of emotional and physical suffering before they are finally killed.
- Random Number God: Many events in the game, such as the results of area explorations, are determined by a roll between 1 and 20. This can quickly build up into a lot of chaos if characters get multiple bad rolls in a row.
- Red Herring: Par for the course in a murder mystery. There's usually one or two big ones every case.
- Sadistic Choice: Kill one of your classmates, or spend the rest of your life in captivity — and when it comes down to the trial, fess up and receive a gruesome punishment, or escape with the blood of everyone else on your hands.
- Shout-Out: May contain references to popular culture, internet phenomena and call-backs to previous games the muns and their muses have been in.
- Teen Genius: All the students to some extent. They were initially accepted into Hope's Peak for being the best in their age bracket at what they do.
- The Man Behind the Man: There's a couple of layers of this going on in-game, but this is primarily with the Modelmascots + their "new administration".
- Tonight, Someone Dies: Specifically, every couple of weeks, someone will be murdered.
- Translation Convention: All characters are presumed to be speaking Japanese unless otherwise noted, even though the game is written in English.
- The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Shown in the Subterranean Laboratory of HP's Most Excellent that reveals the rest of the dark secrets the agency held - as well as a new investigation system ala Dungeons & Dragons!
- Win Your Freedom: Students are informed that escape is possible; they just have to get away with murder.
- World of Snark: Many of the students and NPCs have sharp tongues, or are just deadpan enough that their comments come off as such. Snark-to-Snark Combat is inevitable.
- You Can't Go Home Again
