Chapter Five Part 7 Up! (Feb 27th) · 7:40am Feb 27th, 2021
Part 7 is now up! And thus we have a cliffhanger for Saturday.
Still not too much I want to say about the trial, but there are a few things down below I’ll cover. Before that though: I wrote a new short, called Reassurance. It is a piece of Flutterdash fluff that is canon to DR:IHW.
Now, of course, a few of you might ask: how is that possible when I depicted Flutterdash in the main story as entirely platonic and sisterly? Ah, well, two reasons, though both are arguably slightly spoilery.
1. In universe, the mastermind, because of certain events regarding a certain Cruise Mode, as well as other reasons, deliberately deleted anything involving those two having a romantic relationship, and also made them focus more on the memories that suggested a sibling like relationship instead.
2. Out of universe, when I first started IHW I decided to make Flutterdash sisterly rather than relationshippy because I was afraid of having too many romances around, and worried that if I involved too many queer themes, no one would like the story. This… may or may not have also influenced the Flashlight shipping existing. I obviously changed my mind on that after the initial posting showed there was nothing for me to worry about there, since there’s so much queer stuff in later Chapters, but it was too late to change my mind on how I depicted FlutterDash, since it would be kind of weird for Rainbow to outright say in Chapter One that they’re like sisters and then turn around and decide to date Shy after all.
So basically what this means is that, pre-killing game, FlutterDash was a thing, just like Rarijack. Not necessarily with marriage involved, but they were a couple.
As for the trial itself… let’s talk narratives for a moment.
I knew going in that no matter how much I wanted to believe otherwise and told myself otherwise, that few to no one would believe Sunset was really dead. I know tropes too well myself. I wouldn’t have believed it if I was reading the story. As ace_attorneyfan800 pointed out a few times, Fanganronpa 101: you don’t kill the protagonist unless it’s in chapter one or chapter six. And though I did struggle with whether or not to kill Sunset, I did ultimately fall on the side of not actually killing her, and no amount of end-chapter stingers were going to convince people otherwise.
But. That did not stop me from going down the route I went with this Chapter anyway. It’s still too early to give every reason why I did this, but it was very important for narrative reasons that everyone in the story thinks Sunset died. It was crucial, in fact, for plot purposes later on. This had to happen this way. It was a necessity.
It was also important because it goes along with the themes I’ve had running through this story, that of how important friendship is, in any situation, especially with lovers. Sunset foreshadowed this when she spoke to Trixie back in Chapter Three. She acknowledged, even then, that she wasn’t friends with Adagio. And because she wasn’t friends with Adagio, their relationship was doomed to failure.
Friendship matters. People matter. And when someone feels like they can’t trust those around them, like they have no friends, no one to turn to, and the only one they did depend upon turns out to be the same one responsible for hurting them, they break. And Adagio broke.
There’s more here I’d love to say, but anything else would be spoilery, so I’ll leave it at that for now. But trust me when I say: I didn’t write two different “Is she dead?!” stingers just for the readers. It was for the story as a whole.
Well said regarding the importance of friendship. Love/Romance is a powerful thing, but without friendship, what good is it?