Nanami Chiaki

Chiaki can be reached at her email address, contacted personally on the mirror, or found at her house.

Art source

Player name: Paul
Contact info: miyazaki895
Other characters currently played: N/A

Character name: Chiaki Nanami
Age: 17 in appearance; likely much younger
Canon: Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Canonpoint: post-game

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, in a world of heroes fighting nightmares, 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.


Wish: At the end of Super Dangan Ronpa 2, only five of the Dangan Island simulation’s fifteen residents were able to wake up and escape the despair they had before the simulation began. They immediately began to work on waking the other ten, who were killed within the simulation and are now supposedly braindead. It’s implied that there may be remnants of Chiaki still left in the simulation, as she was able to aid the other five in escaping the Monokuma virus even after her death, and a Chiaki in this situation visited by a certainly friendly white cat-like creature would inevitably have a single, simple wish: "I wish for the others to wake up."

Not “I wish for the others to escape their despair” — Chiaki has enough belief in her friends that she doesn’t think that will be a problem. But she knows that the hardest part, what the five awoken subjects are working hardest on, is to get their friends out of the comas they’re trapped in, and Chiaki would want to give them that extra push, so that the remaining ten wouldn’t have to be stuck in the game they’re not a part of anymore. She would want to give them the determination to wake up and keep living that she gave the other five, as that sort of determination is part of her own creed. Kyuubey would wake the ten from their comas; these ten would regain both their memories of being in despair prior to the simulation, and their memories from during the simulation, and it would be up to the previously-woken five to calm them down. But Chiaki believes in her friends, and knows that they have the hope necessary to bring the others back from despair.

Passive ability: Oneiric reality manipulation. Chiaki’s wish breaks her friends out of the video game simulation she lives in, and it also brings Chiaki herself, living code, into a human world. Chiaki is a girl of two worlds, and she often blurs those lines by sleepwalking, sleeptalking, or flat-out falling asleep while standing up.

Her passive ability, then, will further involve the blurring of worlds: the dreams of a sleeping Chiaki will affect the real world. This will initially be in small ways: a small object in Chiaki's dream may appear in the real world, or the lights in the real world may dim if Chiaki is dreaming of somewhere dark. Chiaki will not be able to control this ability. In early stages, this power will be fairly confusing to her, as it will become harder for her to tell whether or not she is dreaming.

As this power is upgraded, Chiaki's dreams may begin affecting the world in larger ways. For example, a sleeping Chiaki might be able to summon a weak shield even while asleep, leaving her not entirely defenseless during battle.

Active ability: Healing others. As Chiaki's wish was to bring her friends out of a coma, Chiaki will be able to heal other people and fellow magi, initially small wounds but larger ones as she learns to use her power. This will be fairly taxing on her soul gem. Chiaki will not be able to use this ability on herself.

Weapon: NES Zapper. This functions as a short-range pistol. It is not useful for long-range attacks.

Sample: Dear Player post.

For crystal messages, meetings, or what have you!