Nagito Komaeda (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
unluckless) wrote2034-09-01 12:20 pm
unluckless) wrote2034-09-01 12:20 pm
Entry tags:
Application -- Cerealia
Applicant Info
◎ Name: Daisy
◎ Journal:seasided
◎ Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
seasided or PM unluckless
Character Info
◎ Character's Name: Nagito Komaeda
◎ Character's Canon: Super Dangan Ronpa 2
◎ Character's Age: 20ish
◎ Canon Point: Post game
◎ Background/History:
Series Wikia
Chapter Summaries
Character Specific Freetime Summaries
Wikipedia Entry (contains DR1 & SDR2)
Complete Translation LP (In progress, occasionally pay-walled)
HEAVY SPOILERS FOLLOW
◎ Is the character a hacker and/or do they have a sixth-sense? Nope! Just a lucky little investigator.
◎ Personality:
Above everything else in the whole world, Nagito Komaeda is obsessed with hope. The idea of inspiring hope in the world sets something like a fanaticism in him, a frenzy that defies all logic and rational thought. This doesn't seem to faze Komaeda. He has built his entire world, his entire frame of reference for life around hope and Hope's Peak Academy and the students (the Super High School Level talents) who go there. It warps something in him to the point where he is willing to do things that most would consider wrong or immoral or crazy or just plain confounding.
But let's back up. When we first meet Komaeda, he's seems normal enough. There's something vaguely off-putting about him (though that may have as much to do with his pallid appearance and pale, wild hair as anything else) but Hinata still winds up traveling around with Komaeda as they explore the island. Sometimes the things out of his mouth are a bit odd, but for the most part, at first there is nothing all that out of the ordinary (for an island of weirdos anyway). Then the first murder and its ensuing trial happens, and Komaeda's personality shifts. Or at least, the part of him that had been lingering beneath the surfaces comes to the forefront.
It's discovered that he was planning on murdering someone (maybe, though he may also have been trying to lure someone else into killing him, as he happily offers the same later, to help anyone who wants to help plan a murder or be their victim, so long as it is done for the good of creating hope in the world.) This is the first time he starts rambling in near euphoria about the hope that he sees shining in all the other students that he is on the island with.
All but him.
Hope is everything he says and wants and thinks and breathes. Later in the game the player plays a bit from Komaeda's point of view, and even his thoughts underscore this obsession with hope, with somehow being a tool of hope, with only really having worth if he can do something for that hope, for the classmates he sees as being the beacons of that hope. It dominates his thoughts. It guides each and every one of his actions, this desire to be a part of creating hope. He wants to shed his Super High School Level Good Luck and become Hope instead. That seems to be the only way he'll ever be able to consider himself worthy of, well, anything.
Komaeda has a huge inferiority complex. His self worth is so low that he regularly refers to himself as worthless and trash. He believes that because his talent is only luck, he is something lesser than his classmates. He describes his "talent" as lesser because it cannot be controlled or used to do anything purposeful. It simply happens to him, and to the people around him. He blithely chatters on to Hinata about the events in his life like the death of his parents in a plane crash after being hijacked and hit by a meteor, his kidnapping by a crazed murder, and how they all turned around to be "good luck" when they led to something positive happening after all the horror, such as finding a winning lottery ticket. Komaeda sees his luck as a great balancing act, where bad happens and good follows, and it evens out. The better the good, the worse the bad.
Komaeda also talks about a terrible diagnosis of stage 3 malignant lymphoma and frontotemporal dementia (he says he has six months or a year to live, and his brain is atrophying), though this preceded his being admitted to Hope's Peak as the lucky winner of a place in the class. And given how big a fanboy he is of Hope's Peak, this was the best luck there could be. He also admits that he's lonely, that he's pushed everyone away because of his attitude and fanatic belief in hope, and with his family all dead, he's alone, and dying. He then brushes all of the talk of loneliness and wanting love as a joke, as something he read somewhere. He may have even been trying to just pass all of it off as a joke, especially given the often erratic way that he acts, which seems to lend some credence to the idea that his brain is not quite right and he is in fact mentally ill due to this disease. However, we later find out that the events of SDR2 take place years after the characters believe they do, so Komaeda did survive longer than a year, but it's quite possibly a trick of his usual luck at work.
Despite being obsessed with hope and very vocal about being willing to help plan a murder (even his own!) to further hope, Komaeda is not a gloomy person. He has his moments of it, but even when he's talking about murder or how worthless he is, or the tragic turns of luck that his life taken, he does it in a blithe and cheerful manner that is, perhaps, even more off putting. He jokes often, sometimes at his classmate's expense, even while he looks in awe upon them all.
Komaeda seldom gets angry, only really showing this side of himself when he believes that the actions taken are in furtherance of something that is not hope. In the third chapter's trial, he is not trying to aid the murderer as he has in the past because he recognizes that her reasons for doing it were not hopeful reasons, but rather just the opposite. So he does not aid her; on the contrary, he works against her to help Hinata specifically in the trial. And having Komaeda working against you is a bad thing. He's extremely perceptive, and very intelligent when he isn't gushing about hope and how unworthy he is. When investigations are going on, he is often one to help. He also purposefully drops specific hints to Hinata in the third trial, in a way that everyone else thinks was just him wasting time summing up what was already said. Instead he was actually revealing a detail that had been overlooked as unimportant. He plays dumb though, and tells Hinata that he hadn't had any idea he was giving him that hint.
Aside from hope, one thing that Komaeda trusts in above all else is his luck. He falls back on it several times -- in one instance, he chooses to put five bullets instead of one in a gun to play Russian Roulette. Even later when he stages his own death to look like a murder, he counts on his luck to accomplish it and identify the traitor in their midst.
One other thing that needs to be talked about is a huge spoiler for the game: the field trip and the island are actually a virtual reality world, a simulation that is meant to help the "students" who are a part of it, though it was hijacked by SHSL Despair and instead of growing their bonds and friendships, they get to murder each other. Outside the virtual world, years have passed that Komaeda and none of the other students remember. They are no longer students. They are all members of SHSL despair. Komaeda in particular is seen having chopped off his own hand and attached the hand of Junko, the leader of SHSL despair. He says this is because he hates her and wants to try to understand her. In a way, she is his polar opposite. Komaeda will do anything for hope. Junko will go to any length to create despair.
When he discovers some parts of the truth within the simulation, he's thrown into a downward spiral. The truth, or some version of the truth filtered by Monobear, is his reward for surviving the dead room and the game of Russian Roulette -- which he made harder by loading all but one chamber of the gun because he didn't believe it challenging enough for his luck with only one bullet. When given the files, he learns that his classmate are actually agents of despair, rather than the scions of pure hope that he initially thought they were. There's a lot of disillusionment and desperation that arises because of what he discovers and goes through.
Since despair is the antithesis of everything Komaeda believes in, something in him breaks, to know that both he and the people that he has admired so fanatically are actually part of despair. He loses his eerie cheerfulness and optimism and basically sets out on a course to self destruct in order to save the one non-despair person who has infiltrated the group. He stages an elaborate scheme -- pretending to blow up the island and then staging his own suicide so that at least one of the other students will be "responsible" for it and thus the culprit. In his final communication (though it is corrupted by static and partially undecipherable) Komaeda explains that he hopes his sacrifice can earn him a place as SHSL hope. So despite his desperation and the meltdown that leads him to turn against himself and his classmates, he's still clinging stubbornly to hope and doing something to help hope flourish. Though he believes he's killed himself, he's actually lying in a coma in the real world due to his "death" in the simulation.
In the midst of his final scheme, Komaeda acts distant and dismissive, sometimes arrogant, instead of fawning over his SHSL classmates. It's not that his look on himself or his self esteem has changed. He hasn't risen. They've fallen. But he still is clinging to the sliver of hope that he could someday be worthy of being called SHSL hope. He's willing to die for this chance and to take the people he now sees as abominations with him. He believes in his luck enough that it will work, that the outcome will be the right one. As such in his final communication, he addresses both outcomes in case only the "intruder" is executed.
Basically, with this turning point, Komaeda has been hit in the face by a truth that he does not want to hear. He's still working out how to deal with it, but his first and most violent reaction is to remove himself and all his "despair" classmates from the equation -- though he shows at least some willingness to still believe in them at least a little, or he wouldn't have addressed them in his final communication. Komaeda had the opportunity to confront this truth and his failure to engineer the deaths of his classmates and what that means during his time in his previous game. That will be discussed in the section below, but over all it has tempered some of his desperation and given him a still-tentative idea about wanting to change for the better and create some future with his classmates, despite what they all are.
In the end, Komaeda is an isolated, lonely thing. He seems genuinely thrilled when Hinata or anyone deigns to spend time with him, as he says, despite how worthless he is. He is both a cheerleader and a menace to his fellow students, praising them as beacons of hope, but always offering to help craft a murder scenario or become someone's victim to see their hope shining brighter. He acts cheerful often (though is prone to moments of seeming to withdraw into himself) and is much more perceptive than he looks. He comes off as crazy, but he seems to be remarkably self aware about it (remarkable in that he recognizes how crazy people seem to think he sounds, but believes he is perfectly in the right nevertheless and does nothing at all to change it.) And there is a consistency in his logic; his views and logic is just so skewed that to others it may be hard to see. But when it comes down to it, nearly every action he takes is to promote hope. He's complex and more vulnerable than he wants to let on, and views himself more as a pawn of his "talent" and wishes instead to be a pawn for hope, to create something bright and worthwhile in the world.
◎ Powers/Abilities:
Komaeda has no real abilities or powers except one. He has Super High School Level Good Luck. This title was bestowed on him because he won a lottery for a spot in the most prestigious high school in Japan. But his luck doesn't end there. Throughout his life he has had amazingly good luck. But it always comes with amazingly bad luck. For example, his family and he were on a plane that was hijacked. But a meteor struck it and killed the hijacker. But it also killed Komaeda's family. But he lived. And then he got an inheritance.
Later he was kidnapped by a murderer and put in a bag. In the bag, he found a lottery ticket which was a winning ticket which made him rich.
During the events on the island, he faces a game of Russian Roulette. But instead of just putting one bullet inside the gun, he puts in 5 so that only one slot won't kill him. He puts it to his head, fires, and walks away. Because his luck prevailed again.
◎ Weapons & Other Special Inventory:
Crowbar, beaten up backpack filled with first aid supplies and a few sad little rations, scythe, small stuffed sheep of great sentimental value (all acquired in his previous game)
CEREALIA-Specific
◎ Element: Air
◎ Sense: Touch -- Some time prior to the events of his canon, Komaeda cut off his own hand and attached the hand of Junko Enoshima after her death, to somehow try to understand her and the despair that she advocated. Because of this and because of his revulsion to that hand, touch is his most important sense. He's come to appreciate it a great deal more lately, especially after he had Junko's hand removed, leaving him with only one hand and a very obvious reminder. This makes touching harder for him, and as such, he's come to appreciate it more, especially with as isolated as he has been for so much of his life. With his parents' deaths when he was young and his self-admitted tendency to push and/or frighten people away, Komaeda has only recently begun to understand the real precious value of human contact.
◎ Seven Character Traits:
Negative: unstable, lacking self worth, isolated
Positive: perceptive, intelligent, determined
+1: obsessive
Samples
◎ First-Person Sample:
Theads from Haven: (warning for DR2 spoilers/mild body horror) 1 | 2
◎ Third-Person Sample:
Komaeda couldn't sleep. It was well past any reasonable hour, and exhaustion weighed so heavily upon him that there couldn't exist a single explanation or reason that he would be here, lying on his back and staring at an unfamiliar ceiling. Well, it had been unfamiliar. An hour or two later, he'd mapped most of it as best he could through the low lighting. The bed beneath him was soft -- startlingly, blessedly soft and warm, pillowed and comfortable -- and therefore strange, alien, downright foreign. It should have been wonderful though, a long-forgotten comfort that he ought to be grateful for.
And he was. In theory.
In practice, it all seemed wrong. Not that Haven had ever seemed right, not that those dilapidated cots and ruined buildings had ever seemed like anything but a protracted and inescapable nightmare. But this place wasn't right either. Oh the whole computer programming, reconstituted, copy and code, that wasn't as unbelievable as it ought to be. He'd been in a computer virtual reality simulation before. His life had passed out of normal quite a while ago, and belief wasn't the problem at all. He could believe quite a bit without too much effort.
No, it was the comfort of it. Compared to Haven, hell, compared to the island, this place was remarkably safe seeming -- so far. And he couldn't bring himself to believe that it wasn't some new and creative trap that was still waiting to be sprung, waiting for him to relax his guard, even a centimeter. "Maybe I've gotten paranoid..." he murmured to himself, sighing before finally rolling onto his side, curling up into the fetal position, defensive and oddly small, like the darkness of the room was growing and expanding and leaving him adrift in all this space and dark and quiet.
Maybe worst of all was that he couldn't figure it out what sort of luck this was. If all of it was true -- that worlds had ended, but some information that had become him had been salvaged, what of that was good luck? What of it was bad? How did he even begin to balance that equation, and how much of it was his own fault? Had his luck finally thrown the entire universe into oblivion to settle the debt of good fortune? 'That... even for someone like me, that has to be too dramatic a thought, doesn't it?' The questioned echoed in his thoughts, silently as it had emerged the first time, but screaming and deafening regardless.
The blankets draped over him felt like they were weighing him down, smothering him and suffocating, so he kicked them off and sat up. His hair, more of a mess than usual, fell forward into his face even as he looked down at his hand and his handless arm, both in his lap. Whatever this place was, trap or reprieve, truth of fiction, he had to figure it out. It wasn't the first time that he'd faced down a difficult investigation. Even for someone without talents to fall back on, he'd do what he could, to figure it out. What other choice did he have?
◎ Is your character retaining any previous game memories?
Yes! Komaeda will becoming in with the memories from his year spent at![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
havenrpg, a rather intense horror game with significant plot-driven events. Characters wake up in an eerie, ruined town called Haven and learn they have been taken and are being held by something called the Yao Corporation. Yao aren't nice people. They routinely torture, experiment on, mess with or just outright kill the characters in their clutches. Beyond that, Haven is not a land of plenty, so Komaeda is in a physically worn out state -- thin, malnourished, paler and with constant dark circles under his eyes. He's also accumulated a number of physical scars: a tattoo on his chest that says "passed" a number of smaller scars from different monster encounters, and of course he's missing a hand after his and Hinata's "do it yourself" surgery free time when they removed Junko's hand from his arm.
Mentally, Komaeda has had to watch terrible things happen to himself and people around him. It's always been worse when it was other people. In one instance he was part of a large group that was kidnapped and viciously tortured/experimented on, and he managed to be passed over by that torture. He assumed he'd been saved by his luck and had a great deal of guilt over it.
His time at Haven has had a big impact on him. When he initially arrived, he was taken from an earlier canon point where he did not know the truth about his and his classmates roles as SHSL despair. In a way his time at Haven and his interactions with his classmates there made it easier for him to eventually come to terms (sort of) with this revelation, especially his interaction with Hinata as well as other people in Haven. Despite how awful things got for him, people were generally kind and willing to talk to him and help him out. It was a bit strange for him, but he managed to strike up some friendships, though he had a tendency to keep people at arm's length and not let them close. Still he managed to be on friendly terms with a number of people despite his idiosyncrasies.
The most crucial relationships that affected him at Haven were the ones with his classmates especially Sonia, Nanami and Hinata -- since their time on the island really was quite short, he got to know them all a great deal better and actually was able to come to the point where he could dare to call them friends.
Hinata and Komaeda arrived in Haven at the same time and not on the friendliest of terms. Komaeda idolized Hinata as one of the SHSL students, and was always in awe that Hinata would even bother talking to him. It took a long time for them to understand each other, but after being stopped from killing himself to test out if people actually were resurrected in Haven and after being stopped from risking monster-infested tunnels by himself, Komaeda slowly got to know that even if Hinata didn't like him, he was looking out for him. Komaeda was fully aware that they were not friends and would explain such to people, but over the next six months, he and Hinata grew closer and came to trust each other. About half a year into their time at Haven, they actually became friends. This was a shocking and extraordinarily important moment for Komaeda, one he had never expected. As time went on, he and Hinata continued to grow closer and his feelings for his classmate (that existed even in his canon timeline) grew -- though they were interrupted for a time by his canon update and the new knowledge of what he and Hinata truly were, his anger and his betrayal at learning that truth -- until they both admitted their feelings.
After his canon update, Komaeda withdrew and hid from his classmates out of fear and hurt and anger and frustration, especially when he learned that his attempts to destroy all of them hadn't worked. But slowly, bit by bit, he came to realize that his failure was probably a failure for a reason. That's how his luck works. And his prior interactions with his classmates in Haven made him open to at least hear Hinata and Sonia out. Though he was mistrustful and uncertain about whether it was pointless, he tried to let go of his anger and give them a chance to prove that they were choosing to be something more than despair, even if they were not pure hope any longer. After a time, they managed to convince him of this, and he decided to try to be something more than the mistakes that he had made as well.
Over all, Haven has made Komaeda a little quieter and more circumspect. He's a little jumpy and paranoid given all the horrors he's faced, but he also has begun to trust himself and his classmates just a little, has begun to look to actually having a future somehow. Though hope is still one of the most important things to him, it's harder to hold onto now, and he has a sneaking suspicion there might be more to life than just hope. He's slowly learning to trust people. Generally though, he's still struggling with his self worth and his fears of being a pawn to his "talent" of luck. He's still intent on working towards spreading hope, but he's more willing to listen and try to trust people rather than simply pursuing his own designs on "helping" others achieve that hope no matter what the cost.
◎ Name: Daisy
◎ Journal:
seasided◎ Contact:
unlucklessCharacter Info
◎ Character's Name: Nagito Komaeda
◎ Character's Canon: Super Dangan Ronpa 2
◎ Character's Age: 20ish
◎ Canon Point: Post game
◎ Background/History:
Series Wikia
Chapter Summaries
Character Specific Freetime Summaries
Wikipedia Entry (contains DR1 & SDR2)
Complete Translation LP (In progress, occasionally pay-walled)
HEAVY SPOILERS FOLLOW
◎ Is the character a hacker and/or do they have a sixth-sense? Nope! Just a lucky little investigator.
◎ Personality:
Above everything else in the whole world, Nagito Komaeda is obsessed with hope. The idea of inspiring hope in the world sets something like a fanaticism in him, a frenzy that defies all logic and rational thought. This doesn't seem to faze Komaeda. He has built his entire world, his entire frame of reference for life around hope and Hope's Peak Academy and the students (the Super High School Level talents) who go there. It warps something in him to the point where he is willing to do things that most would consider wrong or immoral or crazy or just plain confounding.
But let's back up. When we first meet Komaeda, he's seems normal enough. There's something vaguely off-putting about him (though that may have as much to do with his pallid appearance and pale, wild hair as anything else) but Hinata still winds up traveling around with Komaeda as they explore the island. Sometimes the things out of his mouth are a bit odd, but for the most part, at first there is nothing all that out of the ordinary (for an island of weirdos anyway). Then the first murder and its ensuing trial happens, and Komaeda's personality shifts. Or at least, the part of him that had been lingering beneath the surfaces comes to the forefront.
It's discovered that he was planning on murdering someone (maybe, though he may also have been trying to lure someone else into killing him, as he happily offers the same later, to help anyone who wants to help plan a murder or be their victim, so long as it is done for the good of creating hope in the world.) This is the first time he starts rambling in near euphoria about the hope that he sees shining in all the other students that he is on the island with.
All but him.
Hope is everything he says and wants and thinks and breathes. Later in the game the player plays a bit from Komaeda's point of view, and even his thoughts underscore this obsession with hope, with somehow being a tool of hope, with only really having worth if he can do something for that hope, for the classmates he sees as being the beacons of that hope. It dominates his thoughts. It guides each and every one of his actions, this desire to be a part of creating hope. He wants to shed his Super High School Level Good Luck and become Hope instead. That seems to be the only way he'll ever be able to consider himself worthy of, well, anything.
Komaeda has a huge inferiority complex. His self worth is so low that he regularly refers to himself as worthless and trash. He believes that because his talent is only luck, he is something lesser than his classmates. He describes his "talent" as lesser because it cannot be controlled or used to do anything purposeful. It simply happens to him, and to the people around him. He blithely chatters on to Hinata about the events in his life like the death of his parents in a plane crash after being hijacked and hit by a meteor, his kidnapping by a crazed murder, and how they all turned around to be "good luck" when they led to something positive happening after all the horror, such as finding a winning lottery ticket. Komaeda sees his luck as a great balancing act, where bad happens and good follows, and it evens out. The better the good, the worse the bad.
Komaeda also talks about a terrible diagnosis of stage 3 malignant lymphoma and frontotemporal dementia (he says he has six months or a year to live, and his brain is atrophying), though this preceded his being admitted to Hope's Peak as the lucky winner of a place in the class. And given how big a fanboy he is of Hope's Peak, this was the best luck there could be. He also admits that he's lonely, that he's pushed everyone away because of his attitude and fanatic belief in hope, and with his family all dead, he's alone, and dying. He then brushes all of the talk of loneliness and wanting love as a joke, as something he read somewhere. He may have even been trying to just pass all of it off as a joke, especially given the often erratic way that he acts, which seems to lend some credence to the idea that his brain is not quite right and he is in fact mentally ill due to this disease. However, we later find out that the events of SDR2 take place years after the characters believe they do, so Komaeda did survive longer than a year, but it's quite possibly a trick of his usual luck at work.
Despite being obsessed with hope and very vocal about being willing to help plan a murder (even his own!) to further hope, Komaeda is not a gloomy person. He has his moments of it, but even when he's talking about murder or how worthless he is, or the tragic turns of luck that his life taken, he does it in a blithe and cheerful manner that is, perhaps, even more off putting. He jokes often, sometimes at his classmate's expense, even while he looks in awe upon them all.
Komaeda seldom gets angry, only really showing this side of himself when he believes that the actions taken are in furtherance of something that is not hope. In the third chapter's trial, he is not trying to aid the murderer as he has in the past because he recognizes that her reasons for doing it were not hopeful reasons, but rather just the opposite. So he does not aid her; on the contrary, he works against her to help Hinata specifically in the trial. And having Komaeda working against you is a bad thing. He's extremely perceptive, and very intelligent when he isn't gushing about hope and how unworthy he is. When investigations are going on, he is often one to help. He also purposefully drops specific hints to Hinata in the third trial, in a way that everyone else thinks was just him wasting time summing up what was already said. Instead he was actually revealing a detail that had been overlooked as unimportant. He plays dumb though, and tells Hinata that he hadn't had any idea he was giving him that hint.
Aside from hope, one thing that Komaeda trusts in above all else is his luck. He falls back on it several times -- in one instance, he chooses to put five bullets instead of one in a gun to play Russian Roulette. Even later when he stages his own death to look like a murder, he counts on his luck to accomplish it and identify the traitor in their midst.
One other thing that needs to be talked about is a huge spoiler for the game: the field trip and the island are actually a virtual reality world, a simulation that is meant to help the "students" who are a part of it, though it was hijacked by SHSL Despair and instead of growing their bonds and friendships, they get to murder each other. Outside the virtual world, years have passed that Komaeda and none of the other students remember. They are no longer students. They are all members of SHSL despair. Komaeda in particular is seen having chopped off his own hand and attached the hand of Junko, the leader of SHSL despair. He says this is because he hates her and wants to try to understand her. In a way, she is his polar opposite. Komaeda will do anything for hope. Junko will go to any length to create despair.
When he discovers some parts of the truth within the simulation, he's thrown into a downward spiral. The truth, or some version of the truth filtered by Monobear, is his reward for surviving the dead room and the game of Russian Roulette -- which he made harder by loading all but one chamber of the gun because he didn't believe it challenging enough for his luck with only one bullet. When given the files, he learns that his classmate are actually agents of despair, rather than the scions of pure hope that he initially thought they were. There's a lot of disillusionment and desperation that arises because of what he discovers and goes through.
Since despair is the antithesis of everything Komaeda believes in, something in him breaks, to know that both he and the people that he has admired so fanatically are actually part of despair. He loses his eerie cheerfulness and optimism and basically sets out on a course to self destruct in order to save the one non-despair person who has infiltrated the group. He stages an elaborate scheme -- pretending to blow up the island and then staging his own suicide so that at least one of the other students will be "responsible" for it and thus the culprit. In his final communication (though it is corrupted by static and partially undecipherable) Komaeda explains that he hopes his sacrifice can earn him a place as SHSL hope. So despite his desperation and the meltdown that leads him to turn against himself and his classmates, he's still clinging stubbornly to hope and doing something to help hope flourish. Though he believes he's killed himself, he's actually lying in a coma in the real world due to his "death" in the simulation.
In the midst of his final scheme, Komaeda acts distant and dismissive, sometimes arrogant, instead of fawning over his SHSL classmates. It's not that his look on himself or his self esteem has changed. He hasn't risen. They've fallen. But he still is clinging to the sliver of hope that he could someday be worthy of being called SHSL hope. He's willing to die for this chance and to take the people he now sees as abominations with him. He believes in his luck enough that it will work, that the outcome will be the right one. As such in his final communication, he addresses both outcomes in case only the "intruder" is executed.
Basically, with this turning point, Komaeda has been hit in the face by a truth that he does not want to hear. He's still working out how to deal with it, but his first and most violent reaction is to remove himself and all his "despair" classmates from the equation -- though he shows at least some willingness to still believe in them at least a little, or he wouldn't have addressed them in his final communication. Komaeda had the opportunity to confront this truth and his failure to engineer the deaths of his classmates and what that means during his time in his previous game. That will be discussed in the section below, but over all it has tempered some of his desperation and given him a still-tentative idea about wanting to change for the better and create some future with his classmates, despite what they all are.
In the end, Komaeda is an isolated, lonely thing. He seems genuinely thrilled when Hinata or anyone deigns to spend time with him, as he says, despite how worthless he is. He is both a cheerleader and a menace to his fellow students, praising them as beacons of hope, but always offering to help craft a murder scenario or become someone's victim to see their hope shining brighter. He acts cheerful often (though is prone to moments of seeming to withdraw into himself) and is much more perceptive than he looks. He comes off as crazy, but he seems to be remarkably self aware about it (remarkable in that he recognizes how crazy people seem to think he sounds, but believes he is perfectly in the right nevertheless and does nothing at all to change it.) And there is a consistency in his logic; his views and logic is just so skewed that to others it may be hard to see. But when it comes down to it, nearly every action he takes is to promote hope. He's complex and more vulnerable than he wants to let on, and views himself more as a pawn of his "talent" and wishes instead to be a pawn for hope, to create something bright and worthwhile in the world.
◎ Powers/Abilities:
Komaeda has no real abilities or powers except one. He has Super High School Level Good Luck. This title was bestowed on him because he won a lottery for a spot in the most prestigious high school in Japan. But his luck doesn't end there. Throughout his life he has had amazingly good luck. But it always comes with amazingly bad luck. For example, his family and he were on a plane that was hijacked. But a meteor struck it and killed the hijacker. But it also killed Komaeda's family. But he lived. And then he got an inheritance.
Later he was kidnapped by a murderer and put in a bag. In the bag, he found a lottery ticket which was a winning ticket which made him rich.
During the events on the island, he faces a game of Russian Roulette. But instead of just putting one bullet inside the gun, he puts in 5 so that only one slot won't kill him. He puts it to his head, fires, and walks away. Because his luck prevailed again.
◎ Weapons & Other Special Inventory:
Crowbar, beaten up backpack filled with first aid supplies and a few sad little rations, scythe, small stuffed sheep of great sentimental value (all acquired in his previous game)
CEREALIA-Specific
◎ Element: Air
◎ Sense: Touch -- Some time prior to the events of his canon, Komaeda cut off his own hand and attached the hand of Junko Enoshima after her death, to somehow try to understand her and the despair that she advocated. Because of this and because of his revulsion to that hand, touch is his most important sense. He's come to appreciate it a great deal more lately, especially after he had Junko's hand removed, leaving him with only one hand and a very obvious reminder. This makes touching harder for him, and as such, he's come to appreciate it more, especially with as isolated as he has been for so much of his life. With his parents' deaths when he was young and his self-admitted tendency to push and/or frighten people away, Komaeda has only recently begun to understand the real precious value of human contact.
◎ Seven Character Traits:
Negative: unstable, lacking self worth, isolated
Positive: perceptive, intelligent, determined
+1: obsessive
Samples
◎ First-Person Sample:
Theads from Haven: (warning for DR2 spoilers/mild body horror) 1 | 2
◎ Third-Person Sample:
Komaeda couldn't sleep. It was well past any reasonable hour, and exhaustion weighed so heavily upon him that there couldn't exist a single explanation or reason that he would be here, lying on his back and staring at an unfamiliar ceiling. Well, it had been unfamiliar. An hour or two later, he'd mapped most of it as best he could through the low lighting. The bed beneath him was soft -- startlingly, blessedly soft and warm, pillowed and comfortable -- and therefore strange, alien, downright foreign. It should have been wonderful though, a long-forgotten comfort that he ought to be grateful for.
And he was. In theory.
In practice, it all seemed wrong. Not that Haven had ever seemed right, not that those dilapidated cots and ruined buildings had ever seemed like anything but a protracted and inescapable nightmare. But this place wasn't right either. Oh the whole computer programming, reconstituted, copy and code, that wasn't as unbelievable as it ought to be. He'd been in a computer virtual reality simulation before. His life had passed out of normal quite a while ago, and belief wasn't the problem at all. He could believe quite a bit without too much effort.
No, it was the comfort of it. Compared to Haven, hell, compared to the island, this place was remarkably safe seeming -- so far. And he couldn't bring himself to believe that it wasn't some new and creative trap that was still waiting to be sprung, waiting for him to relax his guard, even a centimeter. "Maybe I've gotten paranoid..." he murmured to himself, sighing before finally rolling onto his side, curling up into the fetal position, defensive and oddly small, like the darkness of the room was growing and expanding and leaving him adrift in all this space and dark and quiet.
Maybe worst of all was that he couldn't figure it out what sort of luck this was. If all of it was true -- that worlds had ended, but some information that had become him had been salvaged, what of that was good luck? What of it was bad? How did he even begin to balance that equation, and how much of it was his own fault? Had his luck finally thrown the entire universe into oblivion to settle the debt of good fortune? 'That... even for someone like me, that has to be too dramatic a thought, doesn't it?' The questioned echoed in his thoughts, silently as it had emerged the first time, but screaming and deafening regardless.
The blankets draped over him felt like they were weighing him down, smothering him and suffocating, so he kicked them off and sat up. His hair, more of a mess than usual, fell forward into his face even as he looked down at his hand and his handless arm, both in his lap. Whatever this place was, trap or reprieve, truth of fiction, he had to figure it out. It wasn't the first time that he'd faced down a difficult investigation. Even for someone without talents to fall back on, he'd do what he could, to figure it out. What other choice did he have?
◎ Is your character retaining any previous game memories?
Yes! Komaeda will becoming in with the memories from his year spent at
havenrpg, a rather intense horror game with significant plot-driven events. Characters wake up in an eerie, ruined town called Haven and learn they have been taken and are being held by something called the Yao Corporation. Yao aren't nice people. They routinely torture, experiment on, mess with or just outright kill the characters in their clutches. Beyond that, Haven is not a land of plenty, so Komaeda is in a physically worn out state -- thin, malnourished, paler and with constant dark circles under his eyes. He's also accumulated a number of physical scars: a tattoo on his chest that says "passed" a number of smaller scars from different monster encounters, and of course he's missing a hand after his and Hinata's "do it yourself" surgery free time when they removed Junko's hand from his arm.Mentally, Komaeda has had to watch terrible things happen to himself and people around him. It's always been worse when it was other people. In one instance he was part of a large group that was kidnapped and viciously tortured/experimented on, and he managed to be passed over by that torture. He assumed he'd been saved by his luck and had a great deal of guilt over it.
His time at Haven has had a big impact on him. When he initially arrived, he was taken from an earlier canon point where he did not know the truth about his and his classmates roles as SHSL despair. In a way his time at Haven and his interactions with his classmates there made it easier for him to eventually come to terms (sort of) with this revelation, especially his interaction with Hinata as well as other people in Haven. Despite how awful things got for him, people were generally kind and willing to talk to him and help him out. It was a bit strange for him, but he managed to strike up some friendships, though he had a tendency to keep people at arm's length and not let them close. Still he managed to be on friendly terms with a number of people despite his idiosyncrasies.
The most crucial relationships that affected him at Haven were the ones with his classmates especially Sonia, Nanami and Hinata -- since their time on the island really was quite short, he got to know them all a great deal better and actually was able to come to the point where he could dare to call them friends.
Hinata and Komaeda arrived in Haven at the same time and not on the friendliest of terms. Komaeda idolized Hinata as one of the SHSL students, and was always in awe that Hinata would even bother talking to him. It took a long time for them to understand each other, but after being stopped from killing himself to test out if people actually were resurrected in Haven and after being stopped from risking monster-infested tunnels by himself, Komaeda slowly got to know that even if Hinata didn't like him, he was looking out for him. Komaeda was fully aware that they were not friends and would explain such to people, but over the next six months, he and Hinata grew closer and came to trust each other. About half a year into their time at Haven, they actually became friends. This was a shocking and extraordinarily important moment for Komaeda, one he had never expected. As time went on, he and Hinata continued to grow closer and his feelings for his classmate (that existed even in his canon timeline) grew -- though they were interrupted for a time by his canon update and the new knowledge of what he and Hinata truly were, his anger and his betrayal at learning that truth -- until they both admitted their feelings.
After his canon update, Komaeda withdrew and hid from his classmates out of fear and hurt and anger and frustration, especially when he learned that his attempts to destroy all of them hadn't worked. But slowly, bit by bit, he came to realize that his failure was probably a failure for a reason. That's how his luck works. And his prior interactions with his classmates in Haven made him open to at least hear Hinata and Sonia out. Though he was mistrustful and uncertain about whether it was pointless, he tried to let go of his anger and give them a chance to prove that they were choosing to be something more than despair, even if they were not pure hope any longer. After a time, they managed to convince him of this, and he decided to try to be something more than the mistakes that he had made as well.
Over all, Haven has made Komaeda a little quieter and more circumspect. He's a little jumpy and paranoid given all the horrors he's faced, but he also has begun to trust himself and his classmates just a little, has begun to look to actually having a future somehow. Though hope is still one of the most important things to him, it's harder to hold onto now, and he has a sneaking suspicion there might be more to life than just hope. He's slowly learning to trust people. Generally though, he's still struggling with his self worth and his fears of being a pawn to his "talent" of luck. He's still intent on working towards spreading hope, but he's more willing to listen and try to trust people rather than simply pursuing his own designs on "helping" others achieve that hope no matter what the cost.