Chapter Text
Hi. It's been so long that I have obtained a PC with a higher resolution monitor, and now all of my screenshots are massive unless I manually code them to be smaller. Welcome back! It's great to be back.
I've been mulling it over, and while I have stated in the past that a good Danganronpa Execution should be a sort of character study, I never actually done a deep-dive into the executions of my favorite game in the franchise and talked about what the executions say about the characters.
So, let's change that.
First and foremost, let me explain what I mean by "A Good Danganronpa Execution Should Be a Character Study."
What I mean by this, is that an execution is supposed to fill the characters with overwhelming feelings of despair. Not just fear, pain, or suffering, but what makes them feel despair is the kicker--and while one can attribute things like guilt, regret, pain/suffering, and such feelings towards the act of dying itself to be the cause--despair is a complicated emotion that is pretty personal to every individual. While dying can cause despair, it is typically the regrets of life that are the root of the despair, and not the act of dying itself.
So the executions in the Danganronpa Franchise aren't meant to just be brutal spectacles of torture and gore--they are personalized to mentally torment the blackened as much as their bodies are being tormented, if not more so.
So in that case, what does Kaede Akamatsu's Execution, "Der Flohwalzer", say about her and her deepest despair?
First, we see that Kaede's execution takes place on top of a big piano. While this may seem only relevant to her talent, it actually plays a larger role in Kaede's character (and despair) than you might think.
Kaede's talent was always looked down upon when she was growing up.
While she loved playing the piano herself, her obsession with it was something akin to a special interest--and that special interest got her name-called at the bare minimum, though it is far more likely that Kaede was teased or outright bullied maliciously as a child for her interest in the piano.
And as she states here in her flashback, her special interest never faded despite that. While we see this in a typically good tone, that she was able to keep a hobby that she loved despite the (at bare minimum) teasing... there is often a sadder reality that people don't see when it comes to this sort of situation. And that is, despite her love for her hobby manifesting into her late teens/early adulthood as a professional skill...
A continued obsession is still relentlessly teased for.
Despite her outgoing, forward personality, Kaede is actually a deeply insecure person. Likely born with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder), Kaede's interest became a target for constant teasing and belittlement, giving her immense feelings in inadequacy and insecurity. Her passion is her greatest strength and flaw in her eyes--it's all she's good for, and she's a freak for it. So while she may obsess over and love playing the piano, she has a much more complicated relationship with the skill that she may not even realize--that it is a source of both joy and pain for her.
In her execution, the piano represents her pain from all those years of belittlement--and the despair of possibly resenting something you otherwise adore with every ounce in your heart. And now, the despair of dying to something you love.
In the next shot, we see this:
While we cannot see everything that is on top of the giant Piano, we do see a robotic version of Monokuma's head looming over Kaede, as well as this a little later on that ties into the themes of what this could represent:
With Monokuma figuratively looming over her, the Monokubs controlling her movements, and the fact that the real Monokuma is conducting the scene, there is a very clear theme of puppetry at play. With the help of the Monokubs, Monokuma was able to "puppeteer" Kaede's actions into getting what he wanted--an (attempted) murder. By playing into Monokuma's trap, she betrayed her new found friends and started the killing game. She cracked under pressure--and speaking of pressure...
This execution is all about pressure, and the failure of withstanding that pressure.
Firstly, it isn't just that Kaede is being executed on a giant piano--she's being executed in the middle of a concert, a very populated one at that. So many eyes are on her from all of the Monokumas in the audience, but there were also so many eyes on her before that--a total of fifteen other eyes, to be exact.
She was the one who brought them all together, after all.
In a way, Kaede was being watched by her fifteen other classmates--being watched as the person to guide them, to unite them... to protect them. She put on a brave, strong face for everyone--and that facade ended up crumbling when she couldn't take the pressure of the time limit. Her weakness as everyone's little glimmer of hope shattered the moment she took that shot-put ball into her hands and let murder settle into her heart.
Speaking of--that giant clock in the scene is hard to miss, isn't it?
If we are talking about Kaede's Ultimate Despair, then it's clear what this clock represents--the kind of pressure that ended up doing her in and making her succumb to Monokuma's will. The clock is giant, easily being the biggest thing in the room--even bigger than the giant piano.
However, notice the other clock? On the left side?
This clock isn't moving, and it doesn't ever start moving. It's a bit hard to read, but the time on the clock says "9:00"
Rantaro's time of death was 9:10 PM. If the inactive clock is stopped at 9:00 PM, then it could represent the final moment Kaede had to back out of her plan--which she did not. The moment she solidified her decision--the moment where she made her greatest mistake.
The moment where she crumbled under pressure.
Though going back to the smaller clock for a moment--see the playing card next to it? It's a 6 of Diamonds. While this card can have many meanings, according to this website, it means specifically "You are being mislead of confused." Though I am not 100% sure on this one, it could represent Kaede being misled into believing that she was killing the mastermind with her plan. Speaking of cards--
This one was hard to blow up and smooth out, but it's clear that this is an Ace of Hearts, and it's inverted.
According to that website again, the Ace of Hearts is the House of True heart, and means that there has been a breakthrough in feelings related to love. If we were to invert this interpretation (as one does with inverted Tarot Cards), this could mean that an inverted Ace of Hearts is the opposite--a back-step in feelings regarding love or even a total catastrophe. Considering that Kaede's motives are to save everyone from an untimely demise, people she immediately wanted to call her friends after mere hours of knowing them--if this reading on the card is true and the inversion is also correct, then this card represents the feelings that were manipulated and used to cause Kaede to crack under pressure-- the source of her despair.
We can also see these cards on display in miniature form on the spikes of the Piano case--four cards are visible, and two of them are the Inverted Ace of Hearts and the 6 of Diamonds.
Two other cards are visible but hard to read--but I believe the more visible one, here, is the two of clubs.
While there is a spot in the middle that could make this the Three of Clubs, the orientation of the two clubs on the card we can see are inverse of one another--something that is shown in the Two of Clubs card, and not the Three of Clubs card. Also, the meaning of the two of clubs according to this website matches up with the themes of this execution perfectly and tie into Kaede's despair as well. To Quote, "Two of clubs means contradictions and hesitation before taking an important decision. No matter how long you think and wait, you won’t be 100% certain. Two of clubs is sign that you will have to make a leap of faith. We live our lives only once. Unfortunately, there is no rehearsal."
The final card is, unfortunately, unreadable at this current time. There might be a way to find the card by reverse engineering the game to find the texture or model of the card used, but otherwise...
At best, we can guess it's a Two or Three of Spades or Clubs. I'm guessing it's a Two of Clubs, but it's impossible to tell what card it is from such little information.
Enough about the cards, though--let's talk about rag-doll cats!
This cat doll is a form of a rag doll, which when combined with the word "cat", gets you the cat breed "Rag Doll Cat." Considering that wordplay often comes up in mystery genres, it's very likely that the doll is meant to represent a rag-doll cat. When looking at what this breed of cat could mean spiritually, it can represent "unconditional love", which plays two parts here. It could be referring to Kaede's unconditional passion for the piano (as we discussed earlier) and/or represent her unconditional love for her fellow classmates. The "unconditional" part of her love driving her to murder to save them all, even--once again, a representation of her greatest source of despair, the weakness that drove her to murder.
This cat later starts slamming it's head into the floor--or, the top of the piano--which is often seen as an action of frustration.
The rest of the objects on the top of the piano are really hard to make out--like there could be a caterpillar to invoke the feelings of Alice in Wonderland, but I am not sure how relevant it is.
So we are moving on.
Why hello there, clock, showing up right when the Monokubs start literally puppeteering Kaede by the noose of her neck...
(Interesting thing to note here--we only actually see Monokid and Monodam puppeteering Kaede. It never shows us the other three.)
Speaking of puppeteering, let's talk about the song the Monokubs make Kaede play.
The name of the song played here is a very poor version of Flohwalzer (Flee Waltz) which you can find here. In Japanese, however, the song is titled "Neko Funjatta" (ねこふんじゃった, I Stepped on the Cat) that is commonly associated with lyrics akin to these. It is known to be a very easy song, often a beginner's song for learning how to play on the piano. I struggled to find any superstition or saying relating to stepping on a cat, but there is a potential nursery rhyme-esque thing that has the lyric "If you kill a cat, you will curse for seven generations," but I can't find any more information about it at the moment.
Still, the relation to cats isn't the only thing about this song that makes it fit along with Kaede's execution. Remember how I said just before that during the execution, the song was being played poorly? And how before I mentioned that Kaede's self esteem was so low that she believed that "all she was good for" was playing the piano?
In her final moments, she was being puppeteered to play a beginner's song horribly to emulate a sense of failure. A failure that, in theory, should have been as easy as playing this song--killing the Mastermind and ending the Killing Game before it even started. While this sounds like a much more complicated task to us, the reader, to Kaede, it was pretty straightforward and simple. She had a plan and everything--a very complicated one, at that. It might have been a simple rube goldberg machine, but it still required her to carefully plan the slope of the shot put ball to make sure the speed was correct as well as that it kept the momentum up until it needed to lose momentum, which is something we see in game that happens even though the ball misses. It didn't go flying off the shelf--it landed right next to Rantaro, meaning that Kaede was able to plan for it's speed and carefully crafted her machine to make it fall on the right spot.
To make such calculations without testing it (as far as the reader is aware, at least) means that Kaede was hyper intelligent and calculative--so to her, the action of "Killing the Mastermind" might have sounded more simple than she initially assumed.
There is also an element of her past here--the part of her that thinks all she is good for is playing the piano. Now here she is, playing one of the easiest songs she's ever learned in front of a huge audience and failing. She's not even worth her salt as a pianist. That's what she died believing. She failed to be a leader, she failed to be a friend, and she failed at being the only thing she was ever good at--and in the end, she was nothing but a freak.
The themes of failure are echoed in a chorus of 'boo's given to her by the audience of Monokumas.
They aren't just booing her, however--they are throwing stones.
From the blood stains on Kaede's body, we can assume that the stones had hit her, and she either was hung to death or stoned to death.
Let's talk about each aspect of her death and how it ties in to the themes of her execution and her greatest despair.
First of all, the noose is a common item often associated with death, either by gallows or by suicide. In this case, the noose more than likely represents elements more of the latter than the former, as Kaede ended up sacrificing herself (AKA a "selfless" suicide) to try and kill the Mastermind in her own trial. Unfortunately, she did not succeed, thusly, she ends up "Killing Herself" for a failed plot, for no reason. Her "suicide" also marks the start of the Killing Game, which adds an extra layer of grief and despair to the theme.
The stoning to death aspect of it, however, I've not seen many people actually discuss. Also known better as simply "Stoning", this form of punishment was a capital punishment where a group of people (often "free of sin", a reference to the Bible) throw stones at the criminal until they die of blunt force trauma. Due to it's ties with early Christianity, stoning is often paired with the idea of those "free of sin casting the first stone" onto the one who is full of sin. In this case, the act of stoning Kaede is referencing how the class ended up condemning her as a blackened (a "sinner" if you will) and leading her to her execution. This aspect of Kaede's despair referencing her forcing her classmates to do the unthinkable and condemn her--get her executed--and her guilt for starting the killing game.
The rest of the Execution is a bit irrelevant, however--since Monodam killing the Monokubs during the executions was not planned (with Chapter 4 being an exception, but if I get to that I'll discuss that part further and how that death relates specifically to Gonta's execution) so what can we conclude from analyzing what we can about Kaede's execution?
The greatest despairs Kaede knew were about Time, Pressure, and the love needed to drive her into murder.
Kaede is a very intelligent girl with a heart of gold. Her heart always being in the right place, even when her head is not. Her cracking under pressure was inevitable due to her nature, and Monokuma's obvious willingness to use it against her. But it also says a lot about her life as well--about how she pressured herself to continue with her piano despite her hardships, the subtle hints towards how her passion for playing piano were complicated at best, and at worst, debilitating--and how, in the end, she masked her pain and insecurities by continuing to play a piano and smiling for the crowd of people in her life.
And that is what, I believe, her Execution says about her.
Thank you for joining me as I dove head first into analysis again, and I hope you enjoyed the read!