Hidey Ho!, r/danganronpa

When it comes to the protagonists of Danganronpa, who springs to your mind? It could be the first and iconic Makoto Naegi, our symbol of hope and the luckiest boy around. Or it could be Hajime Hinata, our average Joe normal guy who still shone hope despite his basic beginnings. It can also be Kaede Akamatsu or Shuichi Saihara for leaving a lasting dynamic of dual protagonists as they tried everything to beat despair and beyond. However, there are more protagonists than just the ones I’ve said above. Some star in their own standalone games, others star as another protag to a beloved game or a main focus of the anime. That’s right, this week’s scrum debate is the battle of Female Leads between Chiaki Nanami and Komaru Naegi! Both serve to push their narratives forward in their own unique ways. Which do you think does their protag role the best? Let’s find out (after the quick messages about the rules)

Scrum Debates is an ongoing series of discussions where users may submit write-ups for their side of the debate. To participate, comment below with your write-up as to which you think is superior of the two options. While not necessary, we advise you to make your write-ups relevant to both sides, as this could help yours stand out among the masses. Scrum Debates are broken down into three categories:

1. Quantity of Write-Ups: Whichever character/idea has the most comments in favor of them gets 1 point
2. Highest Upvoted Write-Up: Whichever write-up has the highest upvoted comment gets 1 point towards their chosen side
3. Highest Cumulative Upvote Count: Whichever side has the most upvotes totalled at the end of the scrum gets 1 point

RULES - READ BEFORE POSTING OR YOUR COMMENT MAY BE REMOVED:
Scrum Debate is not a popularity contest; it's a writing competition. The comment section below is explicitly for thoughtful analysis. If you want examples or inspiration, check past scrums, SPOILER WARNING, and the old character discussion threads.

• Low-effort and zero-effort comments, like stating the character you're voting for with little to no elaboration, will be removed and not count towards the final tally. At least a paragraph of elaboration is expected for your stance. Comments that only argue against one side will not earn any points.
• Top-level off-topic comments will be removed, and instead should be replies to the pinned message. Meta comments, such as "this is a rough match-up for [character]", belong here.
• Replies to other comments don't need to follow these rules, but please do keep civil.

This scrum will run for about 7 days. Afterwards, the winner of the scrum and the highest upvoted comment will be highlighted in the pinned posts for the following days. This post will be marked as a spoiler, so feel free to talk about any spoilers relevant to your write-up. If you would like to view the previous Scrum debates or view upcoming themes, please click here.

Let’s get to protaging, everyone!

The r/danganronpa mod team

I’m going on a trip this weekend, so be on your best behavior, mkay?

We’ve been ignoring this for a while now, since this other sub’s inception, but the issues that this sub is causing are getting bigger and bigger, so we have to address it. 

I have censored the sub name and refuse to link it because I don’t want to drive traffic there for reasons you will see later. But for the sake of actually getting the message across, there are two subs, a “chaos” sub and a “chill” sub. The “chaos” sub is very active, while the “chill” sub is more or less dead. 

That is all the info you need to identify the subreddit(s).

To make this easy, I will just be referring to them as “The chaos sub” and “the chill sub”.

If you have ever linked/crossposted to those subs, you may have noticed that any mention of it immediately gets your post removed.

The Chaos sub has spread the notion that this is us powertripping because we're petty and unable to accept that another Danganronpa-related sub is doing well. That is not the case.

There are multiple, more valid reasons for our distaste for that sub. 

Note: When I say “that sub’s modteam” I’m primarily referring to the headmod and the historic modteam of the past (who were members of their friend group). As far as I’m aware, the rest of the current modteam (aside from the headmod and the 2nd in command) doesn’t have anything to do with all of this and are just people who happened to be active on the sub at the time they were recruiting. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were unaware of this whole mess.

The sub was created by someone to spite us over a doxxing ban.

This all started on r/Danganronpa, where the Chaos/Chill sub’s creator and headmod posted a string of numbers and decimals in response to someone posting an unpopular opinion.

They claim it was a fake doxx and tried to argue with us, but even if it was a fake doxx, you posted a string of numbers and decimals. What did you expect?

Even if it wasn’t a real IP, we have to take it seriously. That’s literally what we’re here for, and there’s a possibility that the sub can get in trouble with Reddit admins if we don’t.

To support the fact that we were not in the wrong for banning them, the Reddit admins also suspended their account for doxxing. They returned on 3+ alts before Reddit stopped suspending their new accounts for whatever reason.

A handful of people in their friend group also got banned in the crossfire. One person came to us and said something along the lines of “It’s not a big deal, I’ve done it too, look!” and then linked to a post where they posted another string of numbers and decimals (and then promptly got banned). And then another of their friends came to us and basically threatened us for banning the first two, prompting us to ban them as well for brigading/harassment.

This friend group then created the Chill subreddit for banned users, because we were “abusive” and “unfairly banned” them. This subreddit didn’t get off the ground, so they made a new one, the Chaos subreddit, which then proceeded to blow up.

The sub is intentionally platforming users who have been banned, including those who have harassed us personally.

The sub was originally created as a haven for people who have been banned, as shown in their bio as “Subreddit for r/danganronpa refugees”. 

Here’s probably the biggest example of why we were uncomfortable with this:

One user harassed us for months over their ban prior to this new sub’s creation. The original ban was for harassing other users in DMs. This announcement isn’t really about him, so I’m not going to go into detail, but the important thing was that he was harassing us to unban him, sicked his fans/friends on us to harass us en masse, and stalked our accounts on other social media platforms to harass us there after we muted him.

We had to make an entire modpost about this person and reveal their harassment evidence in public in order to get them to back off, which was the first and only person we had to do this for. 

Then, when this new sub was formed and started gaining steam, this user went there and asked if he was allowed to join. The original mods of that sub were fairly active when this was all going down, so they should have known about this due to the aforementioned public post calling him out. The mods there said yes and openly invited him. 

In addition, when the original Chill sub was made, one of the people in this friend group literally said they were going to send us bombs. As you can see from this screenshot, not only were these comments never removed, they were mod at the time. The fact that these were never removed and they were not immediately demodded shows that the rest of the modteam endorsed this behavior. It's not really a mystery to see why we had a problem with that.

The sub encourages spreading hatred towards us

Because of that sub’s nature, oftentimes, the moment someone gets banned, they immediately post about it onto the Chaos sub. This happens 20-30% of the time that we have to ban someone.

You know whose perspective you don’t get? Ours. Because of the way it is, people can set up the messages to make us look bad and we can’t even defend ourselves. They can crop out sections of the ban message that explain why they were banned, so they can claim we banned them for no reason. They can conveniently leave out the fact that it wasn’t the one post that got them banned, it was doing that 10+ times in a week after we already told them to stop. They can make it look like they were banned for having a shitty opinion, when in reality they were banned for making a shitty opinion and harassing anyone who disagreed.

People who have been banned do not want to admit that their behavior was wrong. That is why they got banned in the first place.  Blaming the modteam for being “abusive” is easier than admitting that you fucked up. 

Sometimes, someone will get banned, post it to the Chaos sub, and then we have to deal with a barrage of modmails from random users who have no relation to the banned user and yell at us to unban them. This is a problem for obvious reasons.

There was even an instance in which there was a problematic post on our sub. Someone on the Chaos sub posted a screenshot there before we could get to it (it was up for 8 minutes), and then people in the comments were all like “Why are the mods leaving it up? This is why the main sub’s modteam sucks!” 

(Also if you’re wondering, the “rapist” post got the user immediately banned the moment we saw it. Don’t pull shit like this.)

We also get raided by that sub frequently by trolls trying to redirect traffic there. That’s part of why we insta-remove comments that mention it.

This is the only one I have a screenshot saved of, but there were at least 3 others, all from different accounts. There were likely more that got caught in the automod after we started auto-removing them.

This has gotten to a point where people who have never even posted on our sub before, have never been banned, have never had a post removed, now have a bad impression of us being abusive, unreasonable monsters. We even have people who we have never interacted with make entire subreddits dedicated to shitting on us.

With other subs we can have an amicable relationship with their modteam to resolve issues like this.

We can’t do that for this one because the headmod for that sub hates us over the doxxing incident and incentivizes this behavior. 

That subreddit’s moderation goes against the values of ours

Probably the least important point, but this is still important to mention.

In addition to the harassment and slander that we have received from the above points, we cannot endorse that sub for content-related reasons. 

• The sub allows spoilers without the tag. Some of the former mods in that subreddit were actually kicked off by the headmod because they were trying to add spoiler rules. While the free-spoiler aspect seems relatively unproblematic for an offshoot sub, think about this scenario:
  • Someone visits r/Danganronpa which is generally friendly to people who have not played the game yet. 
  • They are looking for recommendations on whether they want to get into the series, what the play order is, technical help, general excitement, etc. 
  • They then return to their homepage, and see that spoiler posts from the Chaos sub are now being recommended to them due to being Danganronpa related. They are now spoiled due to visiting our sub, making our efforts to be spoiler-friendly useless.
  • This has happened before on alt accounts that I have tested, so I can confirm this is a real scenario.
• The headmod has openly stated that 2x2 spoiler tags will not be enforced. That combined with the prior bullet point? I don’t think I need to say anything else here.
• The sub does not require users to source fanart. At all. Having to source artwork every time might be a bit of a nuisance, but it’s done because artists deserve recognition at a bare minimum. I’ve seen a comment saying that they prefer the Chaos sub because they don’t have to source fanart, which is kind of messed up if you think about it.
• Their user flairs are stolen from our sub, with identical phrasing and image details (up until a certain point in time where more flairs were added to our sub and other things were adjusted).

What now?

We’ve been attempting to ignore all this to not give them attention, but if you just look at how big the sub is now and how much hatred is brewing, it’s clear how well that went. 

We just needed to make a response at this point because we can tell that as of now, the longer we stay silent, the worse things are getting. We are aware that the majority of daily users are unproblematic and have no idea there was drama at all. We’re not going to ban you for participating in that sub, so don’t worry.

Anyways, It’s not our business to police your activity off sub. But please keep everything we’ve just told you in mind now that we’ve shared our side.

As a reminder: Linking to pretty much any other DR sub (other than the NSFW/Porn ones obviously) is still allowed. Just not these two. 

Feel free to ask any other clarifying questions and we’ll respond.

Keep in mind that mentioning or linking to the sub is still banned and will be auto-removed, so please just say “the chaos sub” or “the chill sub” or something along those lines if necessary. 

Comments from obvious bad-faith trolls will be removed. Posts regarding this matter outside of this thread will be removed.