??????, Some fun facts about beta names, and "Die Kazuo...

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Some fun facts about beta names, and “Die Kazuo Matsuzaki Die”…

(#DR1 spoilers for…well, just CH1 really, and implied CH3 spoilers in the tags. Still, though, if you want to avoid all Dangan Ronpa spoilers and your Tumblr Savior hasn’t caught this post yet, then…here’s your warning.)

DISCLAIMER (FOR THE ENTIRE POST, REALLY): I’m not an expert on anything. If I made any mistakes send me an ask.

So today, as research for that Kuwata post I’m totally still working on, I promise, I went through the execution of “Kazuo Matsuzaki” - a.k.a. beta Kuwata. If you haven’t watched it yet, and if the idea of watching Kuwata’s execution over again with red blood doesn’t bother you, you can go watch it here and then come back.

…Alright. Welcome back. Here’s a bunch of useless trivia about kanji readings, baseball references that didn’t make the cut, and (at least) one really baffling canon translation.

First of all, I’ve seen a good handful of posts about kanji meanings for the canon Dangan Ronpa characters, but look at the two character names in the beta for whom we have kanji, for beta Kuwata and beta Naegi:

Leon Kuwata - 「松崎和雄」 - or “Matsuzaki Kazuo”, yeah. The kanji here are “pine tree”, “small peninsula”, “harmony/unity”, and “male”. (That “harmony/unity” kanji,「和」, is also read as “wa”, which I personally have seen around a mostly in Western discussions of Japanese sports, Japanese business, etc. In that context, it’s…a really ironic thing to name Kuwata.) Also, the full name is probably a reference to Kazuo Matsui, the first Japanese infielder to sign with a Major League Baseball team. (“Matsuzaki”, 「松崎」, uses the same “pine tree” kanji as “Matsui”, 「松井」.)

Makoto Naegi - 「主人公」 - okay, so he’s literally only referred to as “shujinkou”, or “hero/protagonist”, or otherwise known as “not actually a name”. If you want to be more liberal with the reading, though, you could take 「公」 to be his given name - which (as far as I know) is only ever read as “Satoshi” when a given name - and 「主人」 to be his surname, which would be read as…“Shujin”, and still “master/host/person in charge/etc”. Then he’d just be “Satoshi Shujin”, something kind of like “Paul Protagonist”. Or…you could look at alternate readings of 「公」, which is also read as “kimi”, or “a friendly/informal second-person pronoun”, or “buddy”, or “master” again. THEN he’d be…“Pal Protagonist”…?…Nah, it’s still definitely just supposed to be the word “shujinkou”. But, still, I don’t think any reading is given in the video itself, and…I want to believe. Satoshi Shujin. “Our intrepid hero, your Pal Protagonist”. Incredible.

Also, some other fun facts about that video:

- In the beta execution, the name given for Kuwata’s execution is 「千本ノック」, which is “thousand fungoes” (more literally “thousand nokku”, which is why it sometimes gets translated as “Thousand Knocks” in the OST. “Nokku” are fungoes, though) - which is actually the name of a real actual training regimen popular among (Japanese) baseball teams (for building spirit). (CTRL-F for “thousand-fungo” in that third link.) It’s also “thousand fungoes” in the canon execution, and the anime execution, and the manga execution…and in most if not all of those instances, it’s subtitled in English with “Million Fungoes”. Something went wrong.

- Sometimes the beta execution uses multiple names for the same character: like, Yamada’s full name is seen at the beginning (“Yamada Hifumi”, or 「山田一二三」), and then during the “spinning” sequence you can see him labeled as “Yuji Ando” (no kanji given). Kazuo Matsuzaki is also called “Kazuo Kurosaki” at some point. Considering that interview where Kodaka says that character designs were made before talents were chosen, maybe “Kurosaki” is from before Kuwata was solidified as a baseball player?

- In the finalized game, Monobear wears a baseball cap bearing Hope’s Peak Academy’s logo. In the beta, he’s clearly wearing a Giants cap.

- You can go through the entire video and the only person missing is Kirigiri (and the 16th student, but…), so she was apparently the one killed. She’s not referred to by name, though, even when our Protagonist’s asking Matsuzaki whether he killed her. (Which is kind of frustrating, because I really wanted to know what her beta name was, but - did Pal Protagonist and the gang not get to learn her name before she died, or something?)

- In the beta, as in the finalized game, it seems to be between Kuwata and Naegi in terms of who the culprit is (or, at least, that’s what beta Kuwata tries to argue before he gets voted off to his death). Naegi says it looks like Kuwata dunnit, Kuwata says Naegi coulda dunnit…who will win this life-and-death battle? (Spoiler alert: Naegi wins.)

- You can go frame-by-frame through that entire “spinning” sequence, but the only names shown are: Kazuo Matsuzaki(/Kurosaki), Yasuhiro Isogai (beta Hagakure), S. Rudenberg (beta Celes), and Yuji Ando (beta Yamada). Three of them have little descriptions attached in English, too, like:

S. Rudenberg: “makes a rank to everyone around her from A to E”. Well, yeah, that is a thing she does…
Kazuo Matsuzaki: “a punk rock lvoer [sic]”. Hahaha…oh, wait, you meant “lover” in the “fan” sense. Never mind -
Yuji Ando: “an ‘OTAKU’ that loves to get harmed by sadistic girls.”
…
…Oh.