I Keep Thinking About How Maki Says She Joined The Assassin Cult To Protect Her Childhood Friend From

I keep thinking about how Maki says she joined the assassin cult to protect her childhood friend from being the one to go through it instead, but like... what if they were just manipulating her? Pretending to target the friend and hoping Maki would take the bait, with her being their real target all along? Because if the friend really was as kindhearted and emotional as Maki describes, those aren't good traits for an assassin, regardless of how strong you are, and surely the scouts would know that. They're experts, they'd be able to tell when someone doesn't have the emotional aptitude for a life of killing, never mind if they're athletic.

Also, Maki says that during the training they tried to break her, but her memories of her friend kept her going. What if that was the point? The assassin training was torturous and horrific, and the kids are about 10 or 11 when being put through that -- they would break if they didn't have some reason to hold on. Assassins are an expensive investment, and I doubt the cult would want their kids dying before making it out of training and carrying out some hits. Maki sees it as herself managing to resist somewhat, like a small "win", but perhaps the cult were banking on that, they were using her love for her friend against her to inspire her to survive the training and become a better assassin. Maybe they realised that if there was a way to give these mangled, messed up kids a sliver of positive reinforcement, the tiniest flickers of motivation, but in a way that the cult could fully control, then they'd end up with more resilient assassins. And with Maki this method was a roaring success.

And then what if they were the ones who had the friend killed off once she'd outlived her usefulness, and they needed Maki not to have any distractions from her work now that training was over... And they made it look like an accident, with the friend heroically saving a child, so that Maki would retain those good memories and use it to keep herself going, as opposed to breaking down and giving up now that her entire reason for doing all this was gone. She says it herself: "the memories of her I keep inside me have kept me alive till now." So maybe they were manipulating her and using her all along, letting her believe it, letting her keep this tiny sense of self in order to make sure their star assassin stayed alive and didn't give up entirely... I mean, we already know they're manipulating her by using her care for the orphanage, right? The better she does, the more funding the orphanage gets. They're already using that against her. It is a stretch to believe they'd use the person she loves most in the world against her too?

If that was the case, the worst part is that it happens all over again. She saw her protection of her friend as a personal victory, none the wiser to the fact that it's exactly what the cult wanted... and then here she is in the killing game, seeing her character development as another personal victory... only for that to be exactly what Team Danganronpa wanted, too. She could finally stop hating herself, start accepting that she too deserves happiness, that she can have friends again if she wants, only for none of it to supposedly be real. It's just "good TV". And the entire assassin backstory might not even be real, either. Maybe I'm just falling into the same trap by finding it so interesting and obsessing over it when it was all fake anyway. We'll never really know. Lies within lies, manipulation within manipulation...

But regardless, it DID keep her alive until now. And she does survive in the end. At least that much is real, so does it matter if the rest of it wasn't? Why do I stay up at night thinking about this??