Empatheias app
Jul. 4th, 2016 04:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
i_thinkPlayer: Paul
Contact:
Age: 24
Current Characters: N/A
Character: Chiaki Nanami
Age: 17 (apparent)
Canon: Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Canon Point: End of Execution 5
Background: Here!
Personality: Super Dangan Ronpa 2 takes place in a world in which a group of terrorists known as Ultimate Despair wreak havoc across the globe, constantly pulling new people into their ranks as more and more people fall into despair. Central to their plan is taking over Hope's Peak Academy, a special high school for students who are the best at what they do. A rival group, calling themselves the Future Foundation, rescues fifteen of the Hope's Peak students who have fallen into despair and places them inside of a simulation called Dangan Island. The students' memories of falling into despair are wiped, and they are invited to rekindle their hope by spending time together on the island. This plan is soon thwarted when a malevolent virus masquerading as Monokuma, the bear who took over Hope's Peak Academy and forced its students to start killing each other, intervenes and turns Dangan Island into a new battleground in which students must kill each other to graduate.
The first key to understanding Chiaki is to understand what she is and how she came to be -- because she isn't human. Despite being one of the sixteen people on Dangan Island, Chiaki was never a Hope’s Peak student. Rather, Chiaki is an artificial intelligence designed by a Hope’s Peak student and subsequently modified for the purposes of monitoring the Dangan Island simulation. Many of her personality quirks and motives stem from this — and yet, not all of them do.
To start with, Chiaki is exceedingly logical in how she solves problems and interacts with the world. She goes about solving problems very procedurally, and often takes a long time thinking before deciding how to act or what to say. This makes her an exceptional detective during trials on Dangan Island, as she is careful to make sure the group has covered all their bases before voting, and stopped the group from making the wrong decision on more than one occasion. Chiaki is often very curious, as well, especially regarding things she has no familarity with; she spends a lot of time with Hajime learning about things like animal husbandry and holiday traditions.
It only makes sense, then, that her Ultimate talent is a fairly logical pursuit, one dealing with systems and the understanding and exploiting of them — and so, Chiaki is the Ultimate Gamer. Chiaki enjoys and excels at pretty much every type of game — shooter, beat-‘em-up, platformer, racing — except for dating sims. Chiaki has so many games on her mind at all times that even if she takes a long time to figure out what to say, gaming lingo or references will frequently invade her speech. She uses the tropes and elements of other worlds to explain the one she lives in — for someone with such a networked mind, this makes perfect sense to her, even if it makes her come across as a little spacey, or it means it’s not always easy for others to understand her. Additionally, Chiaki’s obsessive focus on gaming often means she forgets to eat or sleep, and she will often stumble around half-awake as a result; her friends, including Hajime, have had to help her lurch home more than once.
On top of this template — a quiet yet logical girl with a passion for immersive, escapist, often competitive, systematic media — Chiaki was given a particular directive upon being released into Dangan Island, and this is where her belief system begins to take form. Chiaki was inserted into Dangan Island in order to live among the students of Hope’s Peak during their rehabilitation, and to report her findings back to their rabbit teacher Usami, Chiaki's dear friend. However, once the situation became more dire thanks to the intervention of the Monokuma virus, Chiaki’s purview expanded. After all, the Dangan Island simulation, and by extension Chiaki as well, were designed to bring several victims of Ultimate Despair back into the light of Hope, and so Chiaki began doing her best to keep everyone alive. Sometimes this merely meant aiding in solving cases and gathering evidence; however, in a few occasions, Chiaki actually intervened to keep her friends from making bad decisions. In one occurrence, she slapped Akane before she could strangle Nagito to death; in another, she convinced Hajime to reconsider before attempting a dangerous and potentially suicidal challenge while they were all trapped in a funhouse.
The thing is, though, that Chiaki doesn’t do this merely by taking over every single murder case on the island, unlike game 1’s Ultimate Detective Kyoko Kirigiri. Chiaki shares a curious parallel with fellow Island resident Nagito Komaeda: as part of a rehabilitation program, Chiaki has a nearly unwavering degree of belief in her friends to pull through. Having to doubt someone enough to vote for them to be executed hurts her, which is why she ultimately is okay with her friends voting to execute her, as it symbolizes their intent to go on living. Chiaki does her best to inspire tenacity in her friends, even after her execution when a remnant of her seems to visit all five survivors and brings them out of despair. In her day-to-day interactions with them, Chiaki isn’t the loudest or most extroverted of girls, but she is quietly social and cares very deeply about her friends’ well-being.
There is, of course, a caveat to this. Chiaki does have nearly as much belief in herself and her goals and convictions as she does in her friends. And yet her goals are all outwardly driven, and she sometimes seems to care far more about her friends’ well-being than she does her own. When she is found to be the accidental murderer of Nagito, her reaction is placid in comparison to the horrified reactions of her friends. Regarding how Chiaki will fair without a given directive, only time can tell, but it seems safe to say that a human Chiaki will face some uncertainty regarding her goals and identity. Still, her curious and friendly nature will remain, and Chiaki will forge ahead, moving forward as she always does.
Abilities: Despite being an artificial intelligence, Chiaki has very few extraordinary abilities to speak of. She has spent a lot of her time playing games and excels in nearly every type of video game, except for dating games, at which she is notoriously weak. Chiaki has also shown an ability to see when situations between her friends are about to get out of hand, and step in; as somebody who naturally puts others before herself, she is fairly empathetic despite being something of an introvert. Finally, Chiaki has strong logical and analytical abilities due to a combination of her own logic-based existence as an AI, her love of all videogames including mystery games, and her experiences in the trials of Dangan Island.
Alignment: Chiaki will be aligned with Daimonia. Contrary to some of her classmates, Chiaki's greatest emotional weakness has little to do with hope or despair; Chiaki has a pretty unfailing belief in the abilities of her classmates. Rather, Chiaki is sometimes in danger of letting her grief overwhelm her; when her friends are killed, and when they are later trapped in a room with no exit and no food, Chiaki becomes sad and sometimes ineffective, as somebody who doesn't know how to deal with her emotions well. On the flip side of that coin, Chiaki's relative naiveness and tendency towards escapism evident in her obsession with video games allows her to experience many moments of unbridled joy at the miracles of the world, virtual or real. Despite being an artificial intelligence, Chiaki has a fair bit more emotion than a robot might, thanks to the deep personality that her father built into her.
Other: Although Chiaki is an AI in canon, she will have a human body upon arrival in Empatheias.
Sample: Thread Sample here; Empatheias sample below.
[ The first thing Chiaki felt was disorientation. In truth, though she was programmed to seem and act human, she was not used to the overwhelming sensation of being human. The act of breathing in and out, of feeling every new biological sensation in her body -- it was almost overwhelming.
Combine that with what she saw when she finally looked up -- a street that looked nothing like anything on Dangan Island -- and it was hard for her to believe that any of this was real, or happening to her. She didn't think this was some effect of the code, was it?
And as she tried her best not to go into panic mode, the world seemed to glitch -- from her perspective, anyway. In reality, it was Chiaki who was briefly fading in and out, not quite aligned with the reality of her situation, her emotions holding her back.
She got to a nearby building and leaned against it, catching her breath. The wall was solid under her hand, the ground flat under her feet. Okay. She would get through this. Like she did with everything else. ]
Questions:
