Empatheias App

[truthstranger]

⌈ PLAYER SECTION ⌉
Player: Vector
Contact: vectorspace / Vector#9496
Age: 31
Current Characters: none

⌈ CHARACTER SECTION ⌉
Character: Shuichi Saihara
Age: 16-18 (high school age)
Canon: Danganronpa V3
Canon Point: post-game

Background: wiki

Personality:
CONTAINS FULL GAME SPOILERS!

The backstories, talents, and personalities of all characters in NDRV3 for the entirety of the game are completely fabricated; they were implanted as false memories, overwriting their original selves. Since Shuichi lives to the end-game reveal and is from that canon point, he is one of the few characters who know this, and also one of the few characters who we see a glimpse of 'real' personality for, in the form of an application video. Though he still has no memory of this video and can't even be entirely certain it's real, it does influence his self-perception.

If it is real, 'Shuichi' (his name was likely different) used to be a Danganronpa fanboy. He applied with great enthusiasm for the opportunity to have his personality rewritten to participate in a "Real Fiction" version of the killing game he followed avidly, specifically requested to be an Ultimate Detective, as those characters were his favorites, and was selected to be written as "the weakest Ultimate Detective ever," who would then grow over the course of the game. Shuichi no longer identifies with this person at all, but can't entirely disbelieve that it was who he was before. Still, the person he's become is much more important to him.

In fact, Shuichi's self-confidence is fairly low, though he improves over the course of the game with the help of his friends. Even before the revelation that he was probably never actually a detective at all, he believed his Ultimate title was a mistake given to him by a turn of luck finding a missed piece of evidence that allowed him to solve a case no one else could, and he struggles with the pressure of other people relying on his logic based on a title he doesn't think he deserves. However, he is eventually convinced to let people make their own decisions on whether to trust his conclusions or not, and slowly gains faith in his own reasoning as well.

Still, unlike many detectives who are driven by an unrelenting search for truth, Shuichi's relationship with the truth is more ambiguous and conflicted. He is willing to lie as a means to reach the truth, is often unsure if he made the right choice in revealing the truth, and is ultimately willing to obscure the truth if it's for an end he believes in. Coming into the game, he carries insecurity over the case he solved, where he learned the victim was a terrible person who he thought was rightfully killed by the culprit. While he manages to move past this, revealing his friends as murderers over the course of the story is an even harder thing to grapple with, and more than once he wonders if he shouldn't have let them get away with it. Eventually, he even takes advantage of Monokuma trusting his reasoning to try to lead him to the wrong conclusion about the culprit, despite the fact that it means lying to all his remaining friends.

While Shuichi eventually manages to take charge when it comes to investigations and logical arguments, in most situations he's a polite and acquiescent person. He's very tolerant of everyone's eccentric personalities (as he has to be, to be able to make friends with all of them during Free Time), even if that's sometimes ill-advised. His friends joke about how much he seems to like taking orders, and he's happy to be dragged along by more forceful personalities, especially optimistic and assertive people like Kaede or Kaito. Still, that doesn't mean he's entirely passive; with a little encouragement or under pressure, he will absolutely take initiative and stand up for himself, and both Kaede and Kaito encourage him to do so.

He can also be happy to indulge people in other ways. In the love hotel scenes, Shuichi is willing to play along with the romantic or sexual fantasies of all of his classmates, to greater or lesser extents. While these aren't strictly real ('a one night stand within a dream'), Shuichi goes into each fantasy with agency and curiosity. And even outside of fantasy scenes, Shuichi has affection for his friends that can edge into attraction; he'd be unlikely to to express it that way explicitly on his own, but it can leave him flustered when he gets close to people, either emotionally or physically.

Finally, while other Danganronpa installments are focused around their protagonist's fight to overcome despair and move forward with hope, Shuichi doesn't have quite the same outlook. He's extremely prone to pessimism, depression, and giving up, and he does improve and overcome some of that, but ultimately, both his hope and despair were entirely set up for the audience to enjoy. He has to stop engaging with the game entirely for it to end, and he was expecting to die in the process. He doesn't, but through no choice of his own. Shuichi is still largely at the beginning of his journey to come into himself (now that he's left to his own devices to define 'himself'), and to decide how he wants to live his life.

Abilities: Though he's not an Ultimate anything, Shuichi is fairly good at deductive reasoning. He's also very capable of lying believably to his friends. Other than that, his main ability is protagonist charisma.

Alignment: Piphron. Shuichi fights with balancing the distrust and skepticism that comes with being a detective with the desire to trust and believe in his friends.

⌈ SAMPLE SECTION ⌉

General Sample: Test Drive!

Emotion Sample: There are a lot of emotions in the test drive, but here's one