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Okay, so when I said I was done with discourse, I sort of meant general discourse. Given that you've clicked on this you've probably already prepared comments telling me I'm the worst human being alive for having my hated category consist of mostly fan favourites and/or major characters. And I am aware this will probably rustle the jimmies of even my most diehard friends and fans but here we are anyway because I am argumentative and desperate for attention, har har har.

So I set 2 limits for this:

1. I do the meme with the character sorter, so that all of it is plain to see in hard data. Here is the sorter: dangansort-plus.tumblr.com/
2. I only do the main games, ignoring DR:AE and all the other spinoff novels, animes, mobile games, tea towels, microwave ovens, etc.

Five. Shuichi Saihara
I'll be honest, I did not expect him to make it to 5. I like him lots, and I think both he and Kaede do have more personality and character than the fandom gives them credit for, though I'm not here to talk about how everyone in the fandom sucks at narrative design, myself included. I'm mostly just surprised because I thought he'd be further down the list given how much more I talk about other characters. And for all his shortcomings and having to be the party crasher to Kaede's "protagonist with tits" shebang, he's probably the most interesting and well-characterised protagonist of the lot, what all of them have been leading up to. He's also pretty relateable for the audience and shows Kodaka does have a strong grasp of the personality most attracted to Danganronpa in both hemispheres.
And also my kin is so fucking in love with him holy FUCK

Four. Gonta Gokuhara
"The perfect man doesn't exi-"
Man, what can even be said about Gonta Gokuhara? If he's not on your favourites list or at least a really strong contender for it, your opinions are just plain wrong. If not for him as a character, then for him as a person. There's not a bad bone in his body, he's just a really sweet guy who's not the sharpest tool in the shed. Also his trial made me bawl my fucking eyes out. I know this isn't as long as the Shuichi section, but I don't have much to say. I love Gonta Gokuhara and I think the only reason he was beat out thrice was due to me liking girls a lot.

Three. Mikan Tsumiki
I think Mikan made it up this high because I relate strongly to her, or I did in high school and TAFE. Too shy to approach people but still wanting attention, constantly apologising for my existence, still working out my sexuality and who I was attracted to, and like, just her in general. I don't relate to her as much nowadays since I've improved myself, but I still do find myself emulating her personality traits from time to time.
I also like Mikan because she's a fresh twist on several shitty anime genres, the big two being fanservice and yanderes. Her fanservice-y scenes are played somewhat straight, but I feel like there's two big differences that make it palateable: 1, they're also used as evidence (and BEING the fanservice is not all there is to Mikan), and more importantly 2. It's acknowledged she does it to get attention because she's so fucked up from all the bullying she got as a kid that degrading herself is the only way she knows of getting attention, and she'd rather degrade herself than have none at all. The yandere element also works better since it's a more unique take on the archetype: rather than just being "love at first sight! i'll murder your entire family if you look at another girl!", a. she needs a proper emotional connection before she even gets anywhere near that stage, and b. it's not because "i love you so much and i just want you to have eyes for me!!!", it's "i'm extremely desperate for attention and i'll keep you hovering on the brink of death if it means I get attention". Her job and her desires conflict with each other to a degree, which makes her more complex than a good or bad person, and I absolutely adore grey morality that actually IS grey morality and not "i'm a space neonazi, should I kill my mom alongside the 30 rebel ships I just destroyed or let her live?", not naming any kylo ren- i mean names.

Two. Ibuki Mioda
Anybody who's known me for longer than 3 years know I've been gay as SHIT for Ibuki for about half a decade now. She's probably the best example of a well balanced character that simultaneously doesn't have many obvious flaws, but isn't boring either. While I think Tenko incorporates comic relief AND narrative purpose better than Ibuki does, Ibuki does about everything else better than Tenko (I'm comparing them because same point of death, same role, same VA, same sexuality, they're pretty similar). Ibuki's more absurd life experiences and ridiculousness beat out Tenko's misandry, and Ibuki had insightful things to say during both trials - HELL, she and Mikan had PIVOTAL evidence in the first trial that saved everybody's ass! - while Tenko tended to just be EXCLUSIVELY comic relief and rely on being totally obsessed with Himiko, which as I've said before, goes past adorable crushes and into "this is legitimately creepy" territory. I'm getting a bit off track. Ibuki's pervertedness tends to stay in the realm of acceptability - one or two crude comments is about her "worst". She feels like one person, but one person who's both ridiculous and grounded at the same time, which is an INCREDIBLY difficult characterization to pull off.

On- Kirumi Tojo.
Though some of you may have seen this coming given how much I gush about her, I agonized a bit on whether to give top dog to Kirumi or to Ibuki. I argued with myself for which character's fashion sense I liked better, but that went nowhere. So I decided, fuck it. Best utilization of onscreen time, and for reasons that are kind of better done repeats of Ibuki's reasons, Kirumi is my favourite DR character.
I think it's the whole "I'm hypercompetent and considered perfect at nearly everything I attempt, but I somehow manage to avoid the Mary Sue label" thing Kirumi has going for her, as well as being absolutely gorgeous and just about everything I want in a character. Kirumi, in most inexperienced writer's hands, would inevitably be a Mary Sue, and yet Kodaka's writing manages to sell her as a believeable character who can fall from grace just as hard as any of the characters only good at one thing - and fall, she does, both literally and figuratively. She never comes across, to me, like 2 things I feared she might: either too robotic and perfect, or too much like Peko Pekoyama. The flaw "She's too selfless" is often a death sentence for a lot of character's likeabilities, but Kirumi sells it, and though she's probably one of the least talked about v3 characters, most fandomgoers agree with me. So for all those reasons and more, Kirumi is my favourite Danganronpa v3 character.

And now, onto the far, far, FAR other end of the spectrum.

Five. Kiyotaka Ishimaru
I'm gonna get a lot of flack for this entire category since the characters down here are generally universally loved by the fandom, most of them are major characters, and the fifth entry on the list is the DR1 fan favourite. If you want to know why I used his standard sprite - it is, quite literally, the only transparent image I have of him on my computer.
What saves Ishimaru from being lower on the list is being a good person and having a excellent intended message about effort vs talent, but aside from that I find his character insufferable to sit through. I've never really liked authoritarian characters much and he certainly has the feeling of having an enormous stick up his arse. Not only that, but I just find his characterization boring. He's "The guy who follows the rules but has no social skills!", and I'm not sure how I feel about the joke in the first chapter where despite staying in her presence for the past 3 days, he didn't know SAKURA, someone with a feminine name used almost entirely for Japanese women, was a woman, purely because she was built like a brick shithouse. I love Sakura, by the way, she definitely made it into the upper 20. I don't like Ishimaru. 5th worst.

Four. Kokichi Ouma
Okay, I'm cheating a bit with this one. Kokichi wound up LOWER on my list than this, but I did a bit of personal intervention because he is not as bad as the actual 2nd worst. Kokichi I think is the reverse of Kiyotaka - I understand why he exists, but he feels like less of a human being and more like a deliberate personification of the opposing force to Shuichi and Kaede's truth. Thing is, we already HAD a character that embodied lying, to the point where she lied about her name. Shirogane, while I thought she was also pretty bland and in the lower tier, at least brought a newer twist on older DR archetypes, feeling like a cross between Sonia and Hifumi with the hanging question of, "What if someone with these personality traits used them all to a diabolical advantage?" Kokichi, I feel, didn't add anything except "What if Celeste was a major character with a penis?" (assuming Kokichi has a penis, of course. And no. I'm not saying it).
I feel like when Kokichi gets to be a human being, he wouldn't actually belong in my most hated category and would probably get replaced with Hifumi or something. But when he gets forced to be JUST a foil to Shuichi's truth, he falls flat on his face and is worse than his predescessor. And yes, I will continue to refer to Celeste as such, and never decide on a fucking localised name for her.

[Okay, from about here on out are characters I legitimately hate rather than just find annoying.]

Three. Izuru Kamukura
Sometimes, things written by the author are worse. Izuru Kamukura is one of those times. Ironic. He could save others from boredom, but not himself. Har har, I'm introducing this with memes and he said memes in the TV show. It's funny. Laugh.
He is the warning of what Kirumi could have been - too perfect with not enough characterization or flaws to save him. The plot-given reasons to explain it do not excuse that. He is quite literally a Gary Stu and an unfortunate blatant power fantasy. Ironically, I like my boyfriend's writing for him more - at least he HAS some personality when my boyfriend writes him. As for sprites, well... I had to go look for one online. I had NONE on my hard drive.

Two. Nagito Komaeda
I feel like Nagito breaks the two themes of the Worst Character Category - too boring, or too fake-feeling. Nagito isn't either of these things. I think he's down here for just how oversaturated he is, vs. his actual worth as a character.
Brain worms or not, half the decisions he makes are nonsensical and probably more detrimental to his goals than a more straightforward approach. He drops off from Mikan's "morally grey" territory and enters the "pretty firmly Bad" territory, yet he's constantly characterized as being some intense morally grey antihero and gets put in nearly every game bar THH (because he hadn't been invented yet) as that role, even in v3 to an extent. I'm just sick of him, I suppose.

One. Sonia Nevermind
Everyone probably knows I really don't like Sonia. I'm not surprised she's my least liked character on the list. But while every other character down here has some pretty heavy flaws I don't like, they all at least had SOME purpose within the narrative. Aside from reassigning Sonia's speech to other characters, you could remove her and SDR2 would not change. The themes wouldn't change, the narrative wouldn't change considerably, the MURDER CASES wouldn't change. Sonia is a character with absolutely no right to exist and is a textbook example of forced diversity. I know it's weird to see that term used against a white character, but she is a character that exists only to represent a certain demographic (white foreigners in Japan) with no narrative relevance whatsoever. Not only that, but her personality, like Kiyotaka, is absolutely fucking grating in the same way Tsumugi's was - the latter, however, could be forgiven since there was a legitimate purpose behind her blending into the background, and that was actually really clever.
If Sonia died in Chapter 3 in Saionji's place, I think that would've been BETTER for the narrative, and I've discussed such with a friend of mine. Gundam and Kazuichi would've never had their falling out, we would've been able to see Fuyuhiko and Hiyoko potentially bond or at least tolerate each others' presences over the Chapter 2 murder, and at least Hiyoko has a character to her and had an arc. Sonia was a totally useless character and the only one where I think removing her entirely would be the best solution to her problem. Sonia Nevermind is my least favourite Danganronpa character.

OG meme: www.deviantart.com/marioking98…
Feel free to leave your betrayed tears in the comments or something.

Description
Okay, so when I said I was done with discourse, I sort of meant general discourse. Given that you've clicked on this you've probably already prepared comments telling me I'm the worst human being alive for having my hated category consist of mostly fan favourites and/or major characters. And I am aware this will probably rustle the jimmies of even my most diehard friends and fans but here we are anyway because I am argumentative and desperate for attention, har har har.

So I set 2 limits for this:

1. I do the meme with the character sorter, so that all of it is plain to see in hard data. Here is the sorter: dangansort-plus.tumblr.com/
2. I only do the main games, ignoring DR:AE and all the other spinoff novels, animes, mobile games, tea towels, microwave ovens, etc.

Five. Shuichi Saihara
I'll be honest, I did not expect him to make it to 5. I like him lots, and I think both he and Kaede do have more personality and character than the fandom gives them credit for, though I'm not here to talk about how everyone in the fandom sucks at narrative design, myself included. I'm mostly just surprised because I thought he'd be further down the list given how much more I talk about other characters. And for all his shortcomings and having to be the party crasher to Kaede's "protagonist with tits" shebang, he's probably the most interesting and well-characterised protagonist of the lot, what all of them have been leading up to. He's also pretty relateable for the audience and shows Kodaka does have a strong grasp of the personality most attracted to Danganronpa in both hemispheres.
And also my kin is so fucking in love with him holy FUCK

Four. Gonta Gokuhara
"The perfect man doesn't exi-"
Man, what can even be said about Gonta Gokuhara? If he's not on your favourites list or at least a really strong contender for it, your opinions are just plain wrong. If not for him as a character, then for him as a person. There's not a bad bone in his body, he's just a really sweet guy who's not the sharpest tool in the shed. Also his trial made me bawl my fucking eyes out. I know this isn't as long as the Shuichi section, but I don't have much to say. I love Gonta Gokuhara and I think the only reason he was beat out thrice was due to me liking girls a lot.

Three. Mikan Tsumiki
I think Mikan made it up this high because I relate strongly to her, or I did in high school and TAFE. Too shy to approach people but still wanting attention, constantly apologising for my existence, still working out my sexuality and who I was attracted to, and like, just her in general. I don't relate to her as much nowadays since I've improved myself, but I still do find myself emulating her personality traits from time to time.
I also like Mikan because she's a fresh twist on several shitty anime genres, the big two being fanservice and yanderes. Her fanservice-y scenes are played somewhat straight, but I feel like there's two big differences that make it palateable: 1, they're also used as evidence (and BEING the fanservice is not all there is to Mikan), and more importantly 2. It's acknowledged she does it to get attention because she's so fucked up from all the bullying she got as a kid that degrading herself is the only way she knows of getting attention, and she'd rather degrade herself than have none at all. The yandere element also works better since it's a more unique take on the archetype: rather than just being "love at first sight! i'll murder your entire family if you look at another girl!", a. she needs a proper emotional connection before she even gets anywhere near that stage, and b. it's not because "i love you so much and i just want you to have eyes for me!!!", it's "i'm extremely desperate for attention and i'll keep you hovering on the brink of death if it means I get attention". Her job and her desires conflict with each other to a degree, which makes her more complex than a good or bad person, and I absolutely adore grey morality that actually IS grey morality and not "i'm a space neonazi, should I kill my mom alongside the 30 rebel ships I just destroyed or let her live?", not naming any kylo ren- i mean names.

Two. Ibuki Mioda
Anybody who's known me for longer than 3 years know I've been gay as SHIT for Ibuki for about half a decade now. She's probably the best example of a well balanced character that simultaneously doesn't have many obvious flaws, but isn't boring either. While I think Tenko incorporates comic relief AND narrative purpose better than Ibuki does, Ibuki does about everything else better than Tenko (I'm comparing them because same point of death, same role, same VA, same sexuality, they're pretty similar). Ibuki's more absurd life experiences and ridiculousness beat out Tenko's misandry, and Ibuki had insightful things to say during both trials - HELL, she and Mikan had PIVOTAL evidence in the first trial that saved everybody's ass! - while Tenko tended to just be EXCLUSIVELY comic relief and rely on being totally obsessed with Himiko, which as I've said before, goes past adorable crushes and into "this is legitimately creepy" territory. I'm getting a bit off track. Ibuki's pervertedness tends to stay in the realm of acceptability - one or two crude comments is about her "worst". She feels like one person, but one person who's both ridiculous and grounded at the same time, which is an INCREDIBLY difficult characterization to pull off.

On- Kirumi Tojo.
Though some of you may have seen this coming given how much I gush about her, I agonized a bit on whether to give top dog to Kirumi or to Ibuki. I argued with myself for which character's fashion sense I liked better, but that went nowhere. So I decided, fuck it. Best utilization of onscreen time, and for reasons that are kind of better done repeats of Ibuki's reasons, Kirumi is my favourite DR character.
I think it's the whole "I'm hypercompetent and considered perfect at nearly everything I attempt, but I somehow manage to avoid the Mary Sue label" thing Kirumi has going for her, as well as being absolutely gorgeous and just about everything I want in a character. Kirumi, in most inexperienced writer's hands, would inevitably be a Mary Sue, and yet Kodaka's writing manages to sell her as a believeable character who can fall from grace just as hard as any of the characters only good at one thing - and fall, she does, both literally and figuratively. She never comes across, to me, like 2 things I feared she might: either too robotic and perfect, or too much like Peko Pekoyama. The flaw "She's too selfless" is often a death sentence for a lot of character's likeabilities, but Kirumi sells it, and though she's probably one of the least talked about v3 characters, most fandomgoers agree with me. So for all those reasons and more, Kirumi is my favourite Danganronpa v3 character.

And now, onto the far, far, FAR other end of the spectrum.

Five. Kiyotaka Ishimaru
I'm gonna get a lot of flack for this entire category since the characters down here are generally universally loved by the fandom, most of them are major characters, and the fifth entry on the list is the DR1 fan favourite. If you want to know why I used his standard sprite - it is, quite literally, the only transparent image I have of him on my computer.
What saves Ishimaru from being lower on the list is being a good person and having a excellent intended message about effort vs talent, but aside from that I find his character insufferable to sit through. I've never really liked authoritarian characters much and he certainly has the feeling of having an enormous stick up his arse. Not only that, but I just find his characterization boring. He's "The guy who follows the rules but has no social skills!", and I'm not sure how I feel about the joke in the first chapter where despite staying in her presence for the past 3 days, he didn't know SAKURA, someone with a feminine name used almost entirely for Japanese women, was a woman, purely because she was built like a brick shithouse. I love Sakura, by the way, she definitely made it into the upper 20. I don't like Ishimaru. 5th worst.

Four. Kokichi Ouma
Okay, I'm cheating a bit with this one. Kokichi wound up LOWER on my list than this, but I did a bit of personal intervention because he is not as bad as the actual 2nd worst. Kokichi I think is the reverse of Kiyotaka - I understand why he exists, but he feels like less of a human being and more like a deliberate personification of the opposing force to Shuichi and Kaede's truth. Thing is, we already HAD a character that embodied lying, to the point where she lied about her name. Shirogane, while I thought she was also pretty bland and in the lower tier, at least brought a newer twist on older DR archetypes, feeling like a cross between Sonia and Hifumi with the hanging question of, "What if someone with these personality traits used them all to a diabolical advantage?" Kokichi, I feel, didn't add anything except "What if Celeste was a major character with a penis?" (assuming Kokichi has a penis, of course. And no. I'm not saying it).
I feel like when Kokichi gets to be a human being, he wouldn't actually belong in my most hated category and would probably get replaced with Hifumi or something. But when he gets forced to be JUST a foil to Shuichi's truth, he falls flat on his face and is worse than his predescessor. And yes, I will continue to refer to Celeste as such, and never decide on a fucking localised name for her.

[Okay, from about here on out are characters I legitimately hate rather than just find annoying.]

Three. Izuru Kamukura
Sometimes, things written by the author are worse. Izuru Kamukura is one of those times. Ironic. He could save others from boredom, but not himself. Har har, I'm introducing this with memes and he said memes in the TV show. It's funny. Laugh.
He is the warning of what Kirumi could have been - too perfect with not enough characterization or flaws to save him. The plot-given reasons to explain it do not excuse that. He is quite literally a Gary Stu and an unfortunate blatant power fantasy. Ironically, I like my boyfriend's writing for him more - at least he HAS some personality when my boyfriend writes him. As for sprites, well... I had to go look for one online. I had NONE on my hard drive.

Two. Nagito Komaeda
I feel like Nagito breaks the two themes of the Worst Character Category - too boring, or too fake-feeling. Nagito isn't either of these things. I think he's down here for just how oversaturated he is, vs. his actual worth as a character.
Brain worms or not, half the decisions he makes are nonsensical and probably more detrimental to his goals than a more straightforward approach. He drops off from Mikan's "morally grey" territory and enters the "pretty firmly Bad" territory, yet he's constantly characterized as being some intense morally grey antihero and gets put in nearly every game bar THH (because he hadn't been invented yet) as that role, even in v3 to an extent. I'm just sick of him, I suppose.

One. Sonia Nevermind
Everyone probably knows I really don't like Sonia. I'm not surprised she's my least liked character on the list. But while every other character down here has some pretty heavy flaws I don't like, they all at least had SOME purpose within the narrative. Aside from reassigning Sonia's speech to other characters, you could remove her and SDR2 would not change. The themes wouldn't change, the narrative wouldn't change considerably, the MURDER CASES wouldn't change. Sonia is a character with absolutely no right to exist and is a textbook example of forced diversity. I know it's weird to see that term used against a white character, but she is a character that exists only to represent a certain demographic (white foreigners in Japan) with no narrative relevance whatsoever. Not only that, but her personality, like Kiyotaka, is absolutely fucking grating in the same way Tsumugi's was - the latter, however, could be forgiven since there was a legitimate purpose behind her blending into the background, and that was actually really clever.
If Sonia died in Chapter 3 in Saionji's place, I think that would've been BETTER for the narrative, and I've discussed such with a friend of mine. Gundam and Kazuichi would've never had their falling out, we would've been able to see Fuyuhiko and Hiyoko potentially bond or at least tolerate each others' presences over the Chapter 2 murder, and at least Hiyoko has a character to her and had an arc. Sonia was a totally useless character and the only one where I think removing her entirely would be the best solution to her problem. Sonia Nevermind is my least favourite Danganronpa character.

OG meme: www.deviantart.com/marioking98…
Feel free to leave your betrayed tears in the comments or something.