- Eighteen complete strangers find themselves trapped within Hope's Peak Academy, once a school that accepted only the very best, now a playground for evil and despair. With their moral fraying from isolation, entrapment and the constant attacks of their captors and the evil bear Monokuma, will they be able to band together and find a way to escape with hope in hand?— Description of the fanfic
Please note that this page is heavily under construction. There will be missing slots, placeholders and author notes here as it's not yet finished.
A fanfic and very loose adaptation of Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc by Mad Red X 12, albeit taking an extremely different path to his other video game fanfictions. Like its inspiration, it begins by introducing Hope's Peak Academy, a illustrious private school in Japan that only accepts the best of the best in all fields from idols to gang leaders to architects - all except for Makoto Naegi, a completely Ordinary High-School Student who got in thanks to being selected out of 10,000 other students in a random lottery. As he arrives for his first day at school, he finds Hope's Peak unusually abandoned, and soon blacks out. When he wakes up, he finds himself trapped in the academy with the windows and exits all bolted up, and meets the other seventeen students in his class, who've all suffered a similar incident and have no idea what's going on. Soon, a sadistic robotic Killer Teddy Bear named Mr. Monokuma introduces himself and reveals that they have been "brought into a experiment", and must survive and find a way out of the school, either by exploring the school to find a escape route (something Monokuma himself says is unlikely) or by "graduating" by killing another student and getting away with it at the resulting class trial, which will result in everyone else being executed instead. With that, he leaves to allow the students to begin, leaving one last cryptic warning of that "lesser" hims are abound.
And then it all goes to hell in a handbasket. As soon as the gate that locks the second floor off opens, the class finds a bloodstained nightmare, with borderline Alien Geometries and rooms and architecture that just make no sense, and swarms of non-sapient Monokuma robots that will attack them on sight. A small organisation of evil children known as the "Warriors of Hope" are acting on orders of the mastermind behind the nightmares, using advanced technology to hunt down the teens out of their desire for a "paradise for all children" that can only be achieved by the deaths of all adults and teens. A mysterious and unseen Wild Card known only as "The Intruder" is loose in Hope's Peak, always one step ahead of the students as they formulate a elaborate plot that will surely mean trouble for anyone in their path. And on top of all this, the class still has to deal with the very real threat of one of their own snapping and murdering someone out of desperation to escape, not helped at all when Mr. Monokuma begins providing additional motives for wanting to murder as he lusts for a spectacle.
Now, it's up to Makoto to find a solution to all of this. He must make the group of complete strangers around him into Fire-Forged Friends, take the reigns of leadership, keep everyone stable and properly supplied, and lead this unlikely team to defeat the Monokumas and Warriors of Hope, find out the secrets of the school and how it seems to be disobeying the rules of logic, and locate a way out for them all, even with the ever-mounting pressure and the later realisation that a traitor hides among the group. But some secrets are best left forgotten, and eventually Makoto and the other students are going to find a truth they don't like... and perhaps it won't like them either.
The story is still in progress and can be read on MadRedX12's Fanfiction.net page HERE
. Progress is slow, but Mad Red X 12 is determined to get it finished.
It was so I could experience the ultimate pain. A pain called Tropes...:
- Absurdly Exclusive Recruiting Standards: Hope's Peak Academy is an elite school whose graduates go on to be the most successful and influential figures in society. To get in, one must be of high school age and be universally regarded to be an "ultimate," the very best in your field or hobby - a difficult task to be sure. Other than that, students can earn enrollment through a lottery to accept an ordinary student as a "ultimate lucky student", or attend an expensive "reserve course" for students determined to be not-quite ultimate but who want the opportunities associated with the Hope's Peak name.
- Academy of Adventure: Not the fun kind of adventure, but Hope's Peak definitely qualifies.
- Adaptational Abomination: Hope's Peak Academy itself. In the Visual Novel, it had some noticeable Bizarrchitecture (namely the swimming pool on the second floor somehow occupying the same space as the multi-story gym on the first floor), but this could be justified by gameplay requirements. In this story, on the other hand, Hope's Peak has become an outright Eldritch Location with rooms and Alien Geometries that make no sense. An explanation for how all this is possible has been confirmed to be revealed later in the story.
- Adaptational Badass:
- Hifumi's Ultimate talent is upgraded from Ultimate Doujin Writer/Fanfic Creator to Ultimate Indie Creator, and he is portrayed as being able to create an entire indie game with 3D models and sandbox mechanics by himself in only a week.
- Natsumi Kuzuryu and Sato, two Reserve Course students without any Ultimate talent in canon, are given their own Ultimate titles as the Ultimate Mafia Leader and Ultimate Survivalist respectively.
- Adaptational Heroism:
- Sayaka, Leon, Mondo, Hifumi and Celestia aren't killers here... at least, not killers of their own violation.
- Adaptational Ugliness: Toko in the original game at least had a decently kept outfit and hair. In The Distrust Project, her uniform is in tatters and her hair is unkept like in Danganronpa 3, with Makoto describing her as looking like she's been dragged through a hedge.
- Adaptation Deviation:
- There are eighteen students rather than fifteen (including a single Canon Foreigner and two minor characters from the second game and anime). Mukuro also doesn't pretend to be Junko in the story.
- In addition to the dorm rooms, each student has their own Research Lab facility similar to the ones in Danganronpa V3.
- Hifumi has a fedora.
- Arc Words: "Who do you trust?"
- Big Brother Is Watching: Part of the paranoia-drenched atmosphere - Monokuma has monitors and cameras installed throughout most rooms of the building, including the dorm rooms. The only known areas where there are no cameras are the dorm room bathrooms, the public bath, the individual Research Labs, and the hidden dorm rooms on the upper floors.
- Black Blood: Averted - due to not having to deal with censorship, blood in The Distrust Project is red rather than the neon pink the games use.
- Bloodier and Gorier: The author has confirmed that the story will be significantly more violent than the original games.
- Closed Circle: All of the windows in the academy are covered with steel bulkheads, and the school greenhouses have painted blue skies over top. When the students are able to access the second floor and beyond after their first day in the academy, they find opened windows that lead outwards into a endless blackness.
- Darker and Edgier: All over the place.
- Trigger Happy Havoc's Hope's Peak is a pristine Gilded Cage. The Distrust Project's Hope's Peak is a post-apocalyptic, blood-soaked wasteland outside of the relatively intact first floor, with tables and chairs toppled and sprawled along the floor, multiple chalk outlines of bodies, broken walls and large chunks of rubble everywhere (with bloodstains suggesting that multiple people were crushed to death by the collapsing walls and ceiling), shattered windows that lead outwards into a seemingly endless darkness, and crazy gibberish scrawled on the walls in chalk and blood.
- Deadly Graduation: The "graduation clause", which seems to be the only guaranteed instant way out of Hope's Peak.
- Disabled in the Adaptation: Celestia is revealed to have a form of Autism Spectrum Disorder in the story.
- Ditzy Genius: There are so many oddballs within the group that it becomes easy to forget that every one of them earned their title for a reason.
- Dysfunction Junction: All of the students, with the exception of Makoto, are in some way damaged or have led a difficult life.
- Home Base: The first floor of Hope's Peak and the various outposts on the upper floors are considered this to the group as a whole. In addition to this, each Ultimate has their own dorm room and Research Lab, a facility specially built for them and their Ultimate talent.
- Meaningful Name: The original concept for what we know as Danganronpa was a game known as "Distrust", that was scrapped for being too dark and disturbing to be marketable. The Distrust Project takes elements from what little we know of the scrapped Distrust game and refits them into the setting of Danganronpa, such as the darker and more serious tone and the school being in ruins (outside of the pristine first floor).
- Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic: Downplayed. The characters speak like this when calm, but when stressed or awkward, they tend to mumble, stammer and repeat themselves.
- Ridiculously Average Guy: Makoto - the only reason he got into Hope's Peak was pure luck, after all. As it turns out, he's more than he realises.
- Tomboyish Name: Kazuo Matsuzaki, which unlike a lot of examples is actually her real name.Kazuo: My mom wanted a boy.
- You All Meet in a Cell: Much like the game, this is how the students meet each other.
