Disclaimer: This is not a meme.

    You guys know Bandai, (or maybe you don’t, I forgot he existed for a longass time) he is the ultimate farmer, a weird beautiful man that dies in the second episode of dr3, he’s in charge of the remaining agriculture post apocalypse.
    His design is more on the cartoonish side, with a huge smile, build and cutesy expressions and voice, he’s clearly the token weird character in every main danganronpa series.
    Now let’s get to the main part of this essay, his death: I believe Bandais death works in so many ways and is one of the best in dr3 and the entire franchise, at this point you probably think I’m a crackhead, and you are not wrong, but I do have valid reasons for why I think its a great death:
    Dr side: hope was clearly trying to take a more realistic and grittier direction to contrast with side: despair more lighthearted tone in early episodes, Bandai dying early feels like a departure from the classic danganronpa more comedic tones. Bandai was also one of the characters trying to calm everyone down and was just generally a friendly presence, his death comes when all the infighting starts which is a cool idea.
    It shows you how the ng code kills the victim, in a memorable and terrifying scene, which is important because its how people were able to figure out Sonosuke’s true cause of death before the episode where it was revealed even aired, it also setups Seiko starting to create a cure which comes back when Kyoko is revived.
    It makes the stakes higher, his ng code was so unfair and out of nowhere that it makes you anxious for what the other codes could be, it makes you actually care about them instead of just dismissing them as trivial obstacles, and it doesn’t make you surprised when blatantly unfair codes like Kyoko’s and Chisa’s are revealed.
    In short while bandai by himself isn’t a great character I think he’s a great plot device and he shows the strenght of the dr writers in setting up the tone well early, which is shown throughout the series.