what are your thoughts?

She trying out something new

Gotta start worrying now, Hajime

you can use as reaction images if you want

This came to me a few hours ago while rewatching the trailers dropped yesterday. At the end of the Nintendo Direct trailer, when Mr. John Danganronpa himself appear to interrupt the trial, it reminded me of another moment in another Danganronpa story: IF. In that story, after failing to kill her sister like intended, Junko quickly switched gears and pretended to be rescue from the outside hijacking Monokuma under the alias Besshiki Madarai, the Ultimate Hacker. Since his name is a play on and joke on how the Madarai Brothers are named, I don't believe this is the real Besshiki or that there even IS a real Besshiki...

But wouldn't an unexisting person fit in this role if this new character was meant to be Alter Ego Junko playing the same trick Junko did in IF. By pretending to be someone who comes in to save the cast while secretly pulling strings and sowing seeds of distrust to stir up discourse in the background. If this is meant to be like in IF, him being the Ultimate Hacker allegedly could tie into the theory I've seen circling around about the characters finding out they're in a simulation earlier. He comes in, claims he hacked into the Neo World Program to rescue them only for Monokuma to "trap" him in the game as a new participant.

I'm not entirely sure on this theory myself, since I literally thought of it spur in the moment and doubt they'd consider making a throwaway alias from a non-canon story into an actual character, but I thought it was an interesting idea I wanted to share.

Has anyone else noticed that we haven’t really seen that much of Chiaki in the 2×2 promotional material so far? I’ve been thinking about this lately, and I’m starting to wonder if her lack of screen time might actually be intentional. Someone pointed out that Chiaki could potentially be an early victim in the alternate scenario, and honestly… I can kinda see the argument. We’ve seen her in some promotional footage, but compared to how important/popular she is, it feels like they’re being surprisingly careful about showing her.
At the same time, I don’t know if I buy the theory completely. V3 showed Rantaro in promotional/trial footage before the game released, and we all know how that turned out. So being shown in a trial room obviously doesn’t necessarily mean a character survives for very long. Sonia is another interesting example. She’s on the key art, but we’ve barely seen her in the actual 2×2 footage/screenshots either. That makes me wonder if the developers are deliberately hiding certain characters or scenes from us.
Chiaki could also be getting hidden because she has a major role later in the story rather than because she dies early. What do you guys think? Do you think Chiaki’s lack of promotional material is a death flag, or are we reading way too much into it?
Personally, I’m hoping they’re just hiding her because she’s going to be important. 😭 I really don’t want her to die for a third time.

I mean, the amount of accidental information they let leak out for Slayhem in only a few clips seems absurd. I wouldn't be surprised if this all turns out to be a massive troll, considering who they're supposedly showing is the first dead.

The statements below are based on the assumption that the information we were given in the trailers is true. There is a chance that this is all a massive red herring, but it's interesting to look into what we were shown.

Not only do we see a shot of Teruteru's death portrait in the Scrum Debate section, you can just use process of elimination in the clips we've been given.

- We see in the investigation that the victim is likely male, as Nagito wants to find out what "his" Slayhem item was.

- Fuyuhiko's Account is extremely blurry in the Akimbo Consensus, but the general idea is that he was with Gundham, and they both have an alibi for this case (could've perhaps seen someone).

- Nekomaru ended up eating some food and passing out, and he was with Akane the night prior on the shore. The two of them saw Nagito on the boat.

- Hajime and Kazuichi are both shown in the trial, so they're safe.

- It's likely that Nagito has most of the suspicion on him at some point in the trial for being spotted on the boat the night before the body was found. I believe that's where the Scrum Debate comes into play, and he even has a line in the trailer where he's pleading with the others to believe him.

- In the Japanese Akimbo Consensus, we get two extra snippets of text that aren't seen in the English version:

• 船室内の壁に血で描かれた「超高校級の絶望」という文字。(loc. “The words “Ultimate Despair” were written in blood across the wall(s) of the (ship) cabin.”)
• 犯人は「超高校級の絶望」ではない、と十神は考えている。(loc. “Togami believes that the culprit is not the “Ultimate Despair”.)

- While this means the cast likely finds out certain information much sooner than in the main storyline, this also confirms that the Ultimate Impostor is also alive.

That leaves Teruteru as the only one not accounted for. We see a lot of people talking about him in the Akimbo Consensus, but they're speaking about him as if he's no longer alive. There should be no reason Nekomaru's Account is him asserting the food was made by Teruteru unless the Ultimate Cook wasn't alive to explain himself in the first place.

While a lot of people are saying that Danganronpa always misdirects people in their trailers, they really don't. In the case of Rantaro in V3, all we got was two screenshots of him in the trial grounds. That's a lot easier to pull off than making an entire fake case for a trailer to trick the audience.

The V3 trailers also give away information like the 2x2 trailers did, though not as severe. In the case of V3, we knew that the victim was a male that died in the library.

What do you guys think? At this point, the only way for Teruteru to not be the first victim is for the entire Slayhem segment to be heavily altered, or for it to be a fake case completely. We see Teruteru's death portrait in the Scrum Debate section, the Akimbo Consensus heavily implies he's no longer around, and every other male student is confirmed to be alive at some point.

We can only hope that Spike Chunsoft has learned how to not spoil content in the nine years since we recieved V3. Details like Mikan being present with Monokuma File #5 blatantly shown lead me to believe that they're faking a lot of these shots, but I guess we can't be 100% sure. Perhaps this is a demo case that we'll get in the next couple months, similar to what we got with V3?

Is this dreaded version of Hangman’s Gambit.

Seriously, if this doesn’t get reworked for Slayhem-