Background Series Part 2 · 7:35am Dec 5th, 2020
Hello all! Welcome to my second part of my background series into Danganronpa: In Harmony's Wake, where you get some insight into my writing process. Today's post will focus primarily around the formation of Chapter One, and the influence this would have on the story moving forward. As such, there will be many spoilers, mostly unmarked. The ones that will be marked are those for Chapter Two and onward. Viewer discretion is advised.
First, we start with our victim and culprit. As mentioned in other posts, Timber Spruce, our blackened, and Wallflower Blush, our victim, were written from the get go into these roles. From the very beginning I had no intention of allowing either to survive. As such, it was critical they got to display as many elements of their personalities as I could manage within their brief lifespan, and I used them as tools to help demonstrate the sort of changes the memory wipes had on the personalities of the passengers.
Wallflower Blush was altered most of all. Despite being a somewhat bitter, if lonely individual, Wallflower was never the outright nasty, vindictive individual she became in this story. That's because she managed to get some friends before she left high school, and actually became far happier as a result. But Monoponi's memory wipes took that all away. As far as she knew, when she woke up on the cruise ship, she never had a single friend. Ever. All knowledge was stripped away. There's many reasons for this, but without going into later chapter spoilers, suffice to say that she was deliberately used as a demonstration of why trying to stick to yourself is a bad idea in a Danganronpa style setting. Trusting everyone is equally bad, but if you trust no one at all, no one will be there to help you should you make a foolish mistake.
Some people might wonder why she felt the need to pursue Timber's note, especially since it was so obviously a trap. The reason is exactly what Rarity speculated: the chance, however slim, that someone might actually show real interest in her, despite her standoffish nature, was too much to resist. It pulled at her heart strings, pulling on what little was left of destroyed memories of friendships long since gone. But she didn't expect much, which is why she went prepared. She was also cocky and overconfident, assumed Timber was a coward, and thus was entirely unprepared for his actions. There is more I want to go into yet with her, but I as I mentioned: spoilers.
Now for Timber Spruce, I've already detailed in the past why I don't care too much for him, and I won't repeat myself further on the issue. In order to get the murders started with the kind of people we had here, MLP characters, I needed one of two things. I either needed some sort of accident, which would see someone be unfairly executed, or I needed someone conceited enough to assume their own selfish desires mattered more than other's lives, but stupid enough to still act first, to be the one who got the ball rolling. Timber, thus, was the logical choice, as Diamond Tiara, for all her faults, is too smart to act first.
Timber's focus on Gloriosa was, in some ways, a poor justification for his own actions. Was it the conscious reason he acted? Sure. Was it what he told himself was the reason? Yes. Was it entirely? ...No. The truth is, deep down Timber has his own self-preservation in mind just as much as his sister. He didn't know these people, most of them didn't seem to care for him, and he saw no reason their lives should be considered more important than his own. In addition, Timber's particular version of creativity allowed me some leeway with the first mystery that I wouldn't otherwise have.
But that's enough for the characters. Let's talk the mystery, and some of my admittedly odd choices in it. When I first decided to write this story, I wanted to create interesting, compelling mysteries, more difficult to solve than the average Fanganronpa. So I cut my teeth on this one, and some of the oddness of it... shows. It has a few particularly bizarre choices that I often wish I had run past someone else a bit more than I had chosen to. There's a reason my husband became crucial to helping me figure out the later ones! 
As with all of my mysteries, I started by writing a closing argument, and then picking apart pieces to form clues. Much of the core mystery remained the same from first draft to finished product. The backpack ropes, for example, was always a part of the mystery, long before I'd even considered Rarity making streamers at the party. It was intended as a bizarre, why would anyone do this type of clue, exactly the sort of thing a man like Timber Spruce would come up with, by focusing on the wrong sort of thing to obscure. The purpose of these ropes changed a few times during the writing, however. Originally they were the cause of death, by strangulation. Then they became restraints, and finally the combination of restraint, red herring, and knock-out tool that they were in the finished product.
Then there's the actual cause of death. Believe it or not, no, originally Timber was not going to kill Wallflower by smashing in her brain stem! 
In fact, originally, the cause of death was a broken neck. By using the ropes. Yeah. 
Thank goodness I didn't go that route. I had the common sense to do my research and realize how foolish that was not too long afterwards, and before long it turned into what you read. The actual means to do it did change, however. At one point it involved a broom handle, at another point, a meat tenderizer. (Yes, really.) Then I settled on the ice, because I had figured out the next item on the list...
The opportunity! A pool party was always in the works, but how Timber would leave the party was up in the air for quite a while. Drugging something at the party to force people to leave was an obvious choice, in retrospect a bit too obvious. How he administered the drugs, though, that took a while to determine. In fact, it wasn't until the very last draft, the one you read, that I bothered to explain how he drugged the cider at all! For most drafts of the trial, the question ended up going unaddressed, by having them dodge around it.
Some of the other details naturally transformed on the fly, and this has since proven to be the case with each of the mysteries moving forward. Chapter One took a while to write, and I ended up throwing in details I hadn't originally anticipated. This is part of my writing style. I set a general outline, a series of intents, and then let the rest develop through the course of writing, allowing the characters to help dictate some of their actions. For instance, this was the case with the first aid kit. I still had no idea how he was going to get his hands on it until I decided Sunset would sleep in. I then backtracked and built other things around that, to help keep things consistent. This process has worked remarkably well.
Apart from that, there's not much more that needs to be said about chapter one. It is what it is. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask, and I'll answer what I can. The next part of this series won't be until Chapter Two finishes and Chapter Three is at least part way into publishing, because I'll want to go into some things that... changed, massively, from my original plans...
I think the most interesting writing decision so far was to hook Sci-Twi up with Flash instead of Timber, when in canon, Sci-Twi and Flash had very minimal interactions, and it was Princess Twilight who had the romance arc with Flash, even if said romance was among the things wiped from Flash's memories.
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There are reasons for that, which I deliberately avoided touching upon, due to spoilers. Nothing major, but still enough I'd prefer to hold back for the time being. You'll get more of an explanation...mmm... let's say after Chapter Three has finished posting.
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Alright