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sleepdepravity · 5 months

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DISTRUTHS - general character notes

alright this post is about character backgrounds, character hangups, character developments, and the ideas i had for character dynamics. very many of these were not very developed, i will be honest, but here i go.

Actually, getting into some school stuff first. the students were chosen in terms of "being future leaders," and then they have some weird talents. But part of the concept i had in my head involved, their talents themselves aren't necessarily the leader traits, it's that their leader traits the headmaster saw exhibit as the talents they got assigned? i'm not sure if i'm explaining this right, maybe i'll explain more as italk about each character. but there's sort of the more "physical" traits, the "social" traits, and the "intellectual" traits. Akane, Koizumi, and Yuu (and to a certain extent, Katashi) are on the physical side, where they provide important...i guess you could say infrastructure stuff. (medical, mechanical, agricultural, and. extremely intense jack-of-all-trades.) quite a few of the others fall into the "social" sphere: Yamaguchi, Matsui, Minoru, Kotone, Oshiro. Yamaguchi is a good team player. Matsui is actually quite good at gaining a following, in terms of blogosphere (she really doesn't thrive in death game though, i guess). Minoru, Kotone, and Oshiro in particular are tuned into people? This is the reason why i said (way long ago) that Minoru and Kotone have max relationships with everybody else. Minoru, although tagged as a spirit medium, is really adept at easing people and understanding what others are going through. Kotone understands people to the point where they can mimic them, and that's how they can get into their roles. Oshiro, as a magician, is good at knowing how to direct people's attention. The "intellectual" group is K-1 (arts counts as intellectual), Tsubame, Noboru, Shinobu, and Megumi. Who may seem out of place, but part of the intellectual aspect is having a body of knowledge, and she's particularly good at sniffing out knowledge.

Anyways.

Mori Tomiko

The fake main character. I had always wanted her to be the second culprit, and I had always wanted to pull the trick of just quietly adding the knife to her inventory without telling the audience.

Her first cover story, being "SHSL Charisma," is honestly not far off the mark, given that she had been able to orchestrate a whole movement against her own mom's school project. She used Yuu to be able to get close to the school itself and influenced Seki to turn against everybody else. She held a lot of hate for the school and its ideals (which is completely fair) and then it sort of spiraled out of control for her. (I think you can kind of see some hints about this sort of obsession in the beginning and in her interactions with the others.) Since she was the fake main character, I don't have anything about what her free time events would have been like.

K-1

Chill guy. He doesn't particularly care much about music as his talent, probably because he used it as an outlet for dealing with his sister's supposed death and then it took off. I think he feels caught between the expectation of turning his hobby into a career and the fact that, this hobby was born out of grief that he doesn't quite feel like he's escaped yet. I think his free time events would center around feeling assured that he can just keep music as a side thing in his life, or even just drop it entirely if he feels like it.

Oshiro Haruki

Very much a guy with a mask. I...am not sure if I developed much for him...especially since I knew he'd be out of the way very quickly. I think his free time events would lean heavily on the theme of misdirection, but other than that, I don't know.

Kobayashi Minoru

Strangely enough, Minoru was originally going to be a survivor. Yuu was actually going to be the second victim, but then...i don't know when, but somewhere along the way I decided it might be more interesting and less straightforward for Yuu to survive and be roped into Mori's scheme. (The original murder was going to be more like Mori finding the note on Tsubame's door, being the one who almost died, then killing Yuu when he follows her.)

I do feel bad for Minoru dying. Their free time events would center around death and grief, showing off that they see the art of spirit medium as first and foremost a way to soothe the living. And also, showing that they have a keen sense of other people, able to pick up details...it's just that they believe it has to do with spiritual power. Other than that, they're quite sensible and practical. (which, thinking about it, i guess shows by the way they were able to leave hints to their murder.) They get along with everybody, even though not everybody gets along with them (Akane). In particular, I suppose they would get along with K-1 and Yuu. Back when they were a survivor, I had imagined them as grouping with Kotone and Noboru.

Nakayama Megumi

Enjoys being the villain, knows how to spin stories, and as a result also may sense when stories are being spun. She believes that being a bearer of the truth inevitably means being the villain, which is why she leans into it, especially since it means she can unabashedly say whatever the fuck she wants.

This does mean that she doesn't consult anybody else, which I suppose in a way led to her downfall. Without someone else to bounce off of, she focused on her own conclusions and pursued it, falsely thinking that Shinobu must have been the mastermind, or at least on the enemy team. The investigative journalist walks a lonely road...

Her free time events would have probably peeled back her life philosophy about truth and her isolation. and maybe potentially start getting her thinking about including other people.......right before her untimely death, lol. Of course, she enjoys needling Matsui. I remember vaguely thinking that she would like hanging with Shinobu too, at least until she thought he was literally part of the death game scheme? I'm not sure why.

Yamaguchi Nakazawa

Straight up a guy who has no secrets. He tries doing whatever he thinks is best for the group, and he's pretty good at it, even if he's overall uncertain about himself. Honestly, I don't think I had put much into his development either...

Koizumi Ren

He seems shy, but it's more that he doesn't like people. He says very harsh and snide things in such a gentle way that it often goes under the radar. Plants are much easier to deal with, and also cuter.

I think my concepts for his free time events would probably focus around his frustration with the image he puts off, or at least the image he thinks he puts off. Despite not liking people, he also can't help but not like the way he seems to be overlooked in the conversation too. He's got a lot of pent-up anger.

Wakahisa Shinobu

Part of a family of critics. Since his area of focus is video games, he ends up feeling embarrassed about it when he compares himself to the rest of his family, who are all about movies, art, music, books, all the "higher arts." At the same time, he has a lot of pride in his own opinions (as critics tend to be), and thus he keeps waving back and forth between supercilious and embarrassment of his own interests.

I remember specifically choosing the name "Shinobu," because it was a gender neutral name and I guess I was considering the plot point of "oooo maybe Shinobu is the name of that unknown girl from the opening cutscene and this guy is secretly replacing her" and I guess his execution scene is sort of a sly reference to that? but I don't think that would have actually gone anywhere.

Him and Yuu end up bonding. Yuu thinks he should really just talk with his family about his interests instead of assuming that they look down on him.

Tsubame Nihiri

I...honestly have a very personal bias to Tsubame. She's the character I created for the RP all the way back when, before i sort of took the RP and then developed a whole bunch of concepts into DISTRUST, so it was probably inevitable...and I also made her a philosopher so...but also, I wonder if I would have given her a different backstory if I had made DISTRUST later. Ah well.

Right at the beginning of her first year in high school, Tsubame attempted suicide, because she felt life was meaningless. She was rescued, but her parents preferred to keep her institutionalized rather than bring her back home. She quietly recovered for two (or three?) years, mostly reading and chatting with other patients before being discharged, and then got selected for the school, starting at the first year since she hadn't finished it before being hospitalized. (No idea what the first encounter between her and K-1 would have been like...)

In any case, she talks like an old man (which is why she calls everybody "-kun") and is logical to a fault, pursuing thoughts that most people would just toss out immediately due to them being...probably socially inappropriate. Her free time events would probably focus on her feeling too out of place with everybody else? In terms of her design...half of her hair has been cut short, but then the other half has been left long. I think...I did that to signify "indecisiveness" but...she turned out to not be indecisive...oops...

After the third case, when she realizes that she's actually like two years older than she thought she was, she also realizes that, well, she's an adult, which is why she starts working very hard to try to find a way to escape. It became very important to her that the kids make it out and she felt like it was her responsibility. Although she asked Kotone and Noboru for help, she didn't tell them her full plan, just said that she "had a plan" when they asked how she was going to outrun Monobear. I think one of the very earliest ideas was that she'd be waffling on whether she should go through with this plan when she talked with Matsui, and Matsui says something harsh which leads Tsubame to realize, yes, she wants these kids to be able to leave, and so she goes through with it.

I should probably also mention that the reason why K-1's ID was missing was because she found it first and hid it, and had a lot of private angst about the idea that she literally tried to murder her literal brother.

Tsukino Kotone

Someone who doesn't feel like they have a sense of self, and instead mimics others or inhabits characters that, of course, do have developed selves. An extremely wide range. Could potentially even mimic animals, I suppose. Even in the school pictures, they dress up the way they do during DISTRUST. Maybe that was just the major role they were voicing for at the time and, with the induced amnesia, that was the role they latched onto for now.

Along with Minoru, Kotone has full relationship bars with everybody, due to being very good at understanding other people. They do really have a lot of individuality, just unable to see it. Since Kotone keeps using other people as a marking point, they sort of measure themselves as "not like this person," "not like that person," and that results in a sense of self that seems to be "not anybody." Free time events would probably focus on the sense of self, and hopefully starting to recognize their own empathy and compassion as something that is real.

Matsumoto Matsui

Matsui is.....very much the product of. the '00s–'10s tumblr blogger stereotype. I do think of her as extremely competent in the blogosphere, able to communicate ideas very well to different audiences. Too bad this death game isn't a blog. She's also inflexible, of course, mainly seeing things in black and white, preferring a simple worldview because, well, that also makes things easier to communicate. But I think she probably could use her communication skills to great effect if she had been given some time to mature.

I imagined her engaging a lot with Tsubame, in terms of trying to barrel her with social justice issues and "defeating" her in rhetoric, but then gets frustrated because Tsubame will always run with it and absolutely will say "yeah, sure, i don't believe in gay marriage, because why should the state even be able to define marriage in the first place, maybe marriage doesn't even exist, what is marriage actually? why don't we try to define marriage? is marriage defined by love? what is love? what if by our current definition of love, nobody actually—" and then matsui throws a hissy fit and leaves.

her free time events would probably get her to actually show off her talent in the way that the main parts of the story can't, letting her really flaunt her knack for knowing what to say, in. like. normal circumstances. and also, hopefully, the free time events also will help push her towards some amount of flexibility.

Mizushima Yuu

Guy who was supposed to die early and then ended up surviving. I got accidentally endeared to him after I figured out in the middle of case 1 how his brain works, which is. essentially, taking basic knowledge and just smashing them together in bizarre ways that you can see the logic in but it's clearly wrong. (I still really like "well, i've seen cats that have two colors like that, and i heard a dog say "i love you" once, so maybe Monobear is an actual bear") I mentioned that he bonds with Shinobu, but now that I think of it, he'd probably bond with Tsubame too, just because she'd have fun playing with the way he thinks. I didn't intend for this until I started writing out these summaries, but I think he ends up bonding with Katashi, through sheer persistence and also because it turns out they have the same energy. Which.......i guess means all of the attempted murderers all like each other..............wow.........

Ryukana Katashi

Guy who would have probably been the hardest to really get a bead on, given how much he kept avoiding everybody. The main idea behind him was that, as intense as he is, he thinks everything he does is actually just the bare minimum anybody should do, which is why he doesn't even want to be in this school of "exceptional" kids. In his mind, he's just average, and he has an intense dislike for the idea of "talent," and an immediate distrust for everybody around him because they're associated with "talent." Or something like that. At the same time, he's........incredibly competitive. And he loves competition. From the beginning, I thought of him as a combination between Togami and Ishimaru. But I think...given the way I had him act, I don't think this would come across very often. He just wouldn't stay around anybody long enough to really show his full colors.

His main hang-up is that attributing things to "talent" feels like dismissing his hard work. And he works hard! At the same time, because the others have been labeled as "talented," he ends up looking down on everybody else, who didn't "work hard." His free time events would probably dig into that and get him re-thinking his biases. From the beginning, i did think that he'd end up hanging out with Tsubame a lot because of how she would just go with his flow. And, unlike Matsui, instead of getting frustrated, he'd go all in on a debate and absolutely relish the perceived challenge. They'd probably just be in a perpetual state of debating, having to put a pause on it to do other things. I think that would be funny.

Noboru Sato

The amnesiac. No matter what, his relationship status with everybody would be "zero." I'm not sure if I really had considered the full implications of having him be an anterograde amnesiac. I probably hadn't put in the full research I should have back then either. However, thinking on it now, the idea is just. kinda hilarious.

He lost a leg after the riots, which means he is in a constant state of "wow, what happened to my leg???" He has to keep refreshing himself on what's going on, and despite recording everything, it's not like he constantly checks his notes or can reread all the pertinent information, so. in all likelihood. for most of the story, he probably isn't fully aware that he's in a death game. His prosthetic leg was made by Yuu, who...apparently never fixed the length, but that might be because Noboru never brought it up.

However, as a historian, I figured that he'd be extremely good at piecing things together all the time. Hopefully this came across during the first trial. In my mind, what made him stand out as a historian was about his ability to make certain leaps of logic in how event A turns into event B, and making sound reasoning as to what people would be thinking or how they would maybe react during the time, given such and such circumstances. However. He truly would have just been going around just. not aware. Which is why Akane would trust him the most. He just doesn't have the capability of keeping the idea of murder in his head. Or even that there's a reason to murder anybody in the first place. I have absolutely no idea what his free time events would even be. The only reason he wouldn't treat each meeting as the first time is because he would be consulting his notes of every previous meeting.

Yukimaru Akane

The only one who remembers everything that happened. She really. Has a time of it. Having spent years with classmates and then they just start KILLING EACH OTHER. God. How wild.

I'm sorry, I don't have much else to say about her. I just keep thinking about how her perspective is so insane. Wow.

Seki Yumiko

The mastermind, SHSL luck. I don't think there's much more I can say about her that I hadn't in previous posts. (also, i'm tired.) I think Katashi would understand her the most, though, which would probably horrify him a bit. Which is a fun characterization thought.

#dangan ronpa adventure #okay hiiiii thank you DISTRUST is over now bye #thanks guys #also sorry

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vespertin-y · 1 year

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doing another v3 talentswap, but instead of a randomizer this time i swapped them with whoever they’re directly across in the trial circle!

shuichi - rantaro

survivor shuichi is making me INSANE. yes obviously it’s very angsty but i can’t stop thinking about the absolute chaos that would come from having fully-snapped ch6 shuichi from the beginning. the snark...

detective rantaro makes me sad because i can SEE exactly what that would be like. he’s not a real detective, only an apprentice - a real detective would be able to solve a simple missing person’s case, right?

kaito - gonta

entomologist kaito changes almost nothing about him but GOD you know that bug coat would be sick as hell.

astronaut gonta has several different directions it could go in,,,either someone accidentally left him on a space station and he was raised by aliens, or he’s a genius being pushed by his wealthy family to conquer the final frontier. either way his is full of So Many space facts and has no idea why people are terrified when he shares them!! insect meet n greet but he just sits everyone down and forcibly explains how space can boil and freeze your blood at the same time...

kirumi - kaede

pianist kirumi would be interesting bc i think without her maid duties she wouldn’t interact with her classmates much - she’s a very withdrawn person. which is concerning because she’s such a workaholic...pls let one of her classmates notice she’s been at that piano for twelve hours.

maid kaede would be very cute!! she keeps her motivation of wanting to see people smile, she just does it in a more direct way. i do worry that the implied bullying she faced in canon would be much worse if she had a service-based talent, though.....

ryoma - himiko

magician ryoma, hmm...we’ll go for a slightly less tragic backstory than canon and say he stopped performing after his cat assistant was killed.

tennis pro himiko just makes me laugh. she falls asleep on the court and still wins somehow.

maki - kokichi

leader maki didn’t want to be a leader - she smelled trouble at her orphanage and decided to get as many kids as possible out, including her right-hand woman who she is Most Definitely Not Gay For. she’s not in charge, definitely! she’s just the only one with any braincells around here, geez...

assassin kokichi...actually no fuck that. this would not happen. he would 100% find a way to kill himself rather than go along with the cult, that’s what makes maki and him foils - she would rather kill than die, he’d rather die than kill. for the sake of the talentswap, i’ll say that he’s ACTUALLY the shsl child caregiver, and give the assassin talent to pianist kirumi (she deserves some elegant murder i think). he owns a clown-themed daycare where he gives kids the love he never got and he is HAPPY >:(

angie - tenko

aikido pro angie is funny because that girl is a STICK. what is her 90-pound ass gonna do?? <- words of someone about to experience the wrath of god apparently

i’ve talked about artist tenko before and i still really like it!! emotional artist QUEEN we stan.

korekiyo - kiibo

robot korekiyo...i have nothing. separating The Humanity Guy from humanity is so fundamentally strange. bet he’s super weird tho, keeps asking people what it’s like to be made of blood.

anthropologist kiibo is my FAVORITE i’ve talked about it probably too much. he is very small and trying his best.

tsumugi - miu

inventor tsumugi is horrifying because my first thought was “one thousand monokubs” and that was so frightening now i can’t come up with any other concepts.

we all know what cosplayer miu would be like. i don’t need to explain that to you. it DOES make her love of kids shows funnier tho. infamous Horny Weeb secretly loves adorable children’s cartoons, more at 6.

circle under the cut!

#mem shuffles #v3 talentswap #dr #mem says stuff

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