A little less gruesome content then the last post, I want to blog about another anime that I have watched recently. This anime is called Danganronpa, and it is about an elite high school called Hope’s Peak Academy and a group of superstar high school students that all have their own unique talents. It is produced by Lerche.

Source: Amazon

The plot of this anime includes every student trying to escape the school, which has been locked shut and impossible to breakthrough. The only way for the students to be free is if they kill a classmate and do not get caught. The way they get called out is by trial and the group deciding who did it. If the group accuses right, then the murderer gets put to death while the game goes on for the rest of them. If the group guesses wrong, then the murderer gets freed, and the rest of the group gets executed. In the beginning, no one believes that anyone would murder a classmate for a game, but the first murder happens right at the opening ceremony when Monokuma is explaining the rules of the game. The panic then begins as the students now know that people will actually die.

My favorite part of the anime is when two of the power-hungry characters get into a fight and somehow end up being friends. When one of them is going to get executed because he killed his own brother, the other actually votes against him getting killed. If the culprit did not vote for himself to die, then the rest of the group would get executed because the vote has to be unanimous. If the vote is not unanimous, then the whole group dies, and the culprit gets to go free.

I should mention that while trapped in this school, the students get access to a fully-stocked kitchen and all of the necessities they would need to survive. So why would they need to kill each other in the first place? Monokuma mentions at the end that they will be forced to live in the school forever until someone “graduates,” but he keeps adding rules as the game goes on to keep it interesting. For example, there are already security cameras everywhere so that Monokuma knows who murdered who for sure. As the game goes on, access to different floors of the building is unlocked, which unlocks more secrets to what really happened at Hope’s Peak Academy to make it like that way it is in the present day. Apparently, the students agreed to sign contracts to be there for the rest of their lives without knowing it. That’s why every student was knocked out upon approaching the academy.

This is a less gore-intensive anime considering there are not any guts popping out of people when they die like in Corpse Party. The blood is also pink instead of red for some reason. The executions are pretty clean in the fact that they do not physically show the characters being killed. Go ahead and watch it on Crunchyroll!