Danganronpa and Misdirection

Writing a good mystery is very hard.

Source

It's commonly said that comedy is the hardest genre to write, and honestly I'd have to agree with that. However, if you asked me what the 2^nd hardest genre to write is, I'd undoubtedly say mystery. This stems from a variety of things, but foremost in this is the sheer number of mystery stories that have been told. A mystery isn't mysterious if the audience knows what is going to happen, of course. It was a heck of a lot easier to write an engaging mystery even 100 years ago simply because less stories had been told and as a result, more new ideas. This is only exacerbated by the era we live in of information, where anyone can write a story and have hundreds of people read it easier than ever.

So what if you do want to write a mystery now? One way to do that is the most obvious: come up with something never done before. With your enemy being thousands of years worth of human thought, though, you're probably fighting a losing battle. So this leaves aspiring writers to pull on a variety of other methods to make their stories effective. My favourite technique out off all the ones I've seen is misdirection.

It's so simple at it's very core. What it entails is basically pulling the audience's attention away from what has truly happened. Now, you can do this in a variety of ways, with a wide range of fairness. You can gloss over all the important details. You could pull the audience in one manner of thinking, when in actuality that mindset was wrong from the start. You could even (rather unfairly) just never show what the important details are. Bur regardless, the common thread, the one that must be followed to successfully pull of this trick, is leaving the true solution out there while making sure the audience pays no mind to it. I love it when a story does this, and the absolute best execution I have ever seen of misdirection comes from Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc.

Spoilers follow, obviously. Seriously, don't spoil this masterwork of a mystery for yourself. I'm also assuming you've played it so it won't make much sense otherwise.

So Danganronpa is the sort of premise that if I was a fiction writer I'd be terrified of. A story where there are 5 separate murder mystery arcs AND an overreaching mystery to solve? A single mystery is already hard enough! Of course, as you know if you've played it (RIGHT?) the game somehow manages this feat, and manages to do it splendidly. I'm not here to gush about this, however. Today I want to take a comprehensive look through the first case of Danganronpa and look at how it plays with player expectations, tropes of the genre, and of course, how it misdirects you.

OK, so first we should look at the relevant elements before this case even begins. First and foremost is the setting, or rather the important part of it: the killing game. For our purposes, we'll hold the game here as the motive. Fairly self explanatory. Next, of course, is the eventual victim of the case, Sayaka Maizono.

Sayaka is an interesting element for many reasons, but let's just stick with her before her eventual death. To the player, Sayaka is initially presented as an ally, but more importantly someone the protagonist has a prior connection to. What she serves as is an element of stability and relief.

Following Sayaka is of course the 13 other students, ones that at this point we know very little about. A glimpse here or there, perhaps, but in the end our knowledge of them this early on is limited at the best. They're rogue elements.

Finally, there are 2 key events I want to examine as well. These are the CD reveals and Makoto and Sayaka swapping rooms. I'll call these the catalysts.

Seriously this is your last chance before major spoilers if you didn't listen to me before

So we'll fast forward to the events right before the investigation. Sayaka and Makoto swapped rooms for the night, and the next day Sayaka shows up in Makoto's room, murdered by the hand of someone in the group.

Now, this basic setup is great for a few reasons. First, it gives the other characters a reason to totally think on the wrong path in-universe. Obviously, if you're not Makoto, the primary suspect is him since the victim showed up in his room. This is the first way the game misdirects you, by having the actual characters be misdirected, giving a believable reason for it, and most most importantly, disallowing you yourself from thinking that line of reasoning is correct.

That last point is the most important because all the discussion around the case is going to be focused on that line of thinking, meaning you know it's wrong but the game isn't letting you develop other lines of thought. It's intentionally steering you away from the truth, and it's not doing it with any obvious roadblocks either. It's also a nice bonus to raise the stakes.

Another thing the game does that I really like is that it takes full advantage of the point of the story it's at. I can very easily see a scenario where a case similar to this happened later on in the game, but there is no way it would work as well because by that point you'd know more about your fellow students. At the start of the game, however, you've got 2 basic relationships in the game: you know nothing about the others, and you likely trust Sayaka. And then Sayaka is murdered. So you're left in a position where you can't trust anyone but the dead person lying on the floor.

Until you can't even do that.

I'm skipping ahead a bit, but eventually it comes to light Sayaka was the initial aggressor, and in all likelihood was just being friendly and open to Makoto to use him for said purpose. This is great, and I was absolutely freaking out at this revelation because it's brilliant storytelling for so many reasons. Primarily because you probably didn't think of this possibility, right? Everything thus far has been presented as fairly straightforward: Sakaya is trustworthy, nobody else is. But as it turns out, that's exactly what you were supposed to think, and as a result you never even thought of the possibility of her being the true aggressor in this situation. It's also brilliant at a few other things like making you trust nobody and letting you know the usual tropes are not in effect, but that's not what this article's about really. The misdirection is so prevalent not only in this case, but throughout the entire game.

That's Danganronpa's M.O. It's so simple but it works so well. You see it crop up with the Sakura's "Locked room" murder and even intentionally invoked with Byakuya's Genocide Jack troll(for lack of a better term). It's most clearly set and seen in this first case, however, which is why I chose to examine how it uses misdirection. The usage of this little trick isn't braindead, either. They carefully develop it each time (See Genocide Jack reveal) or cleverly bury the important details in the evidence (See Sayaka's motives).

It sees use in many ways, but again, the game is essentially at it's core always trying to get you to look and think in the wrong directions. There aren't many cases where the facts are all there and you simply need to piece them together. There is always some active effort to prevent you from doing so on the part of other characters or the plot itself. You'll notice if you look a little deeper how the actual mysteries wouldn't be that mysterious on their own. "Girl tries to kill man but in struggle man kills her" or "Person commits suicide alone in room" aren't exactly original twists nowadays. However, muddling the story with previous relationships or having actual attacks before the suicide contribute to you not going down the right path and getting sidetracked or interpreting things entirely wrong.

So I hope I've helped you see misdirection in action and how it can immensely help a story. Danganronpa makes liberal use of it and the second I finished it I immediately started to use it as an example here, I don't think I've ever seen a story use it quite so much. I could seriously go on and on about how Danganronpa uses storytelling tricks and gameplay elements for a long time, but I'll cut myself off now. I hope you enjoyed reading, and have a great day!