Cheloneuniverse

Long hair Hinata is an absolute blessing, let the survivors braid his hair into something whack. Long hair Hinata rights.

[points] YEAAAAAH YOU GET IT

I'd like to add to your recent meta re: komaeda being hinata's doppelgänger. it annoys me that people still insist they're entirely different when it's plainly stated what's happening in game; monokuma outright calls hinata out for running away from things that he doesn't like facing. several times--in the main game, not the FTEs--hinata states almost exactly what's going on in komaeda's head before deciding he's overthinking and shaking it off. he's scared of seeing himself in komaeda.

Exactly! Komaeda points out towards the end of his last FTE–a little bit before the famous aborted love confession–that the reason Hinata can understand him better than anyone is due to the fact that they’re so much alike; and that’s something Komaeda has felt since the moment they met on the beach because Hinata never had a “special” aura about him, the kind that people with talent normally emit. Hinata himself even reluctantly admitted that that’s true in his mind but he got defense and denied being a “miserable bystander” like Komaeda, which is something anyone can tell isn’t remotely true, at least by the end of the game. Hinata is so miserable and obsessed with the idea of talent society conditioned him into believing he needs to be remotely worthy, debatably even moreso than Komaeda, he had no qualms about going through with something as shady as the Izuru Kamukura project for a misguided notion of talent and hope. In fact, what Komaeda did in 2-5 with the desire to become ultimate hope in his heart parallels that, with the only difference being is that it took Komaeda until his worldview was wholly challenged to realize that, no, all along he didn’t want to be just a stepping stone for others’ hope, he wanted to be someone who can embody hope himself and feel accepted by those around him.

Of course this sentiment isn’t exclusive to FTEs and we see it a lot throughout the main story (and that’s one of my favorite aspects of Komaeda’s FTEs, almost every bit of dialogue, however trivial it may seem, is reinforced by the main story or in some cases Island Mode, the latter of which might not be hard canon but it’s definitely personality canon), especially during chapter 1 when Komaeda asked Hinata to be his investigative partner out of all the students (“Hmmm… you’re easy to talk to, and I feel like you have a scent similar to mine. We both harbor special feelings toward Hope’s Peak Academy… Isn’t that right?”) or when Hinata was angry with him in the post trial segment and Komaeda mistakenly thought Hinata hates him now (“That stings… I felt you and I were quite similar… you hold a special feeling toward Hope’s Peak Academy… just like me.) This was brought back in chapter 4 when Komaeda told Hinata that despite his beliefs he still cared for the latter, which leads me to my next point and it’s that Komaeda, from the very beginning, saw Hinata for the person he truly is and fell in love with that. Meanwhile Komaeda truly believed that Hinata had to have a talent so it’s not like he was being fake when he reassured Hinata that it must be an amazing one and he’ll remember eventually, he just managed to convince himself of that so he was more or less in denial because all his life he’s been absorbing the narrative that normal people are worthless and only symbols of hope are worthy of hope and his coping mechanism is built on that when he was head over heels for the antithesis of all that.

I have a lot of thoughts about Hinata and Komaeda in 2-5 but if i ramble about that then this post will never be over and I’m not sure I should’ve said this much, but I very much believe that the ending of SDR2 is symbolic of Hinata finally getting out of his comfort bubble and confronting everything he’s been so avoidant to face head-on (including the complicated feelings he has for Komaeda), but really it’s super obvious that those two come in a set when even some of their sprites are alike, they’re paired together in a lot of promotional material and it’s only the two of them we see in chapter 0. I could go on about this but I wouldn’t be done for hours if I did.