hail helix i mean uh CR MEME

[beholdmydemons]

Character Relationships Meme

- Leave a comment with your characters.
- Reply to other characters, asking what theirs think of yours.
- tl;dr to your heart's content.

easy-peasy. HAVE FUN

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Carmen and Kirigiri on Leon, thanks!

[struck_out]

And that's what I get for forgetting to sign in. Sorry Alex!

[doitrockapella]

Carmen → Leon

Carmen has...a kind of interesting relationship with the Dangan Ronpa kids, I've found, and I think it stems in large part from the fact that she's an edutainment character and the horrible tragedy that was inflicted on the Dangan kids occurred in the setting of a school. It hits her as very wrong on a fundamental level, the idea that this group of kids weren't safe in their school, and that for them it ended up becoming a place for a bloodbath instead of an education.

Of the Dangans, Leon is the first one Carmen has talked to who's actually been a murderer. He's lucky, I think, that she got the majority of the story from Ishimaru first, and had plenty of time to acclimate to it, because under different circumstances I doubt she would've taken the revelation behind his actions very well — particularly considering his going excuse about "just wanting to help Maizono" comes off sounding really sketchy anyway. And because she can be pretty judgmental when it comes to people making choices that she personally thinks are wrong (or even just different from the ones she would've made herself), it wouldn't have gone over well for him at all.

Fortunately, by the time he did get to her, Carmen had come around to the idea that these poor kids got thrown into a really fucked-up situation, and that it's wildly not her place to try to dictate as a third party what they "should" or "shouldn't" have done; it's not about ~educating~ them as to how to do better, but about just being someone that they can connect with and feel safe around and maybe just...extend some semblance of comfort even if she can't solve their problems. Which is kind of a big thing for Carmen, because she is a raging problem-solver, and particularly so when it comes to other people's issues.

So Leon was one of the first people who really pushed Carmen into the position of trying to be a supportive adult rather than a source of answers, and I think she managed to figure out that what Leon really needs sometimes is just someone who he can trust to listen to him without passing judgment on him. Which isn't to say that Carmen isn't judging him on some level, but at least she's not outright telling him about it to his face. It's easier for her now to see past his actions and recognize that he's a scared, uncertain kid who was put into a traumatic situation where circumstances basically hammered home again and again that no one was going to help him, and no one was going to save him, and that if he didn't fend for himself he might just be the one to die, so he better fend for himself. And she finds that really horrible because that's a very animalistic, primal sort of mindset to be in, and Carmen is nothing if not cool and intellectual and full of superego.

...also, to combo-break the seriousness, she thinks it's really funny that he finds her attractive and frankly has no problem with it whatsoever, because she likes the attention regardless of its source and it's never a bad thing to have someone all flustered because you're apparently super hot.

So I think as far as Carmen is concerned, she wants to make sure that she keeps enough distance between herself and Leon that he doesn't end up clinging to her or getting weirdly dependent on her like she's the only adult who's ever understood him, but at the same time she wants him to know that she's available if he does need her and he's not without that sort of lifeline, the way he was in murderschool.

[freshprints]

Kirigiri → Leon

Aaaaaaand then there's these two.

So I've maintained for a while now that Kirigiri has a sort of Personal Shit List as far as her classmates go, and that the top three people she's actually really pissed off at are Junko, Celes, and Maizono — in that order. And that represents a sort of descending order of the "severity of their crime", if you will; Junko, obviously, heads the list because of basically everything, but then Celes is second because she actively planned a murder scenario intending to get everyone killed for the sake of her own personal gain while knowing that it would get everyone killed by doing it. And Maizono is third, because at the time she planned and attempted her murder, everybody knew that you had to kill somebody to leave the school but they didn't know how the murder game was going to be played out yet. So the reason why Celes is more egregious of an offender than Maizono is largely because of intent; Celes knew everyone would die for her and made that choice, while Maizono only accepted that one person would die for her and made that choice.

In Kirigiri's opinion, Leon falls more into the category where Mondo's sitting — people she doesn't necessarily have a whole lot of respect for on account of their short tempers and aggression issues, but who at least didn't actively plan to kill someone. And there's a lot about Leon that doesn't really sit well with her — he chases girls, he's loud, he's boisterous, he's very much her opposite in a lot of ways, and I think she tends to clam up and withdraw a little when she's around him because of it.

But at the same time, she doesn't blame him for keeping his murder a secret during the first trial because that's only to be expected, on a purely human nature level. Particularly given the way she acted when she was on the chopping block herself during the fifth trial — she understands what it feels like to have everyone coming after you, and your death an impending certainty, and making whatever choice you have to in order to keep yourself alive, even at the cost of someone else. And she's seen that Leon feels guilty about what he did, so there's something to that, too.

But what really fucks her up about Leon is, was, and will always be his manner of execution, because of all of the ones they watched, his was just...absolutely horrifying, and it was the first, and I doubt she'll ever be able to get the image out of her mind because even with all the dead people Kirigiri's seen in her life, that one was utterly traumatic in so many ways.

So yeah, a lot of what Kirigiri thinks about Leon is colored by the events that occurred during Chapter One, moreso than anything he's done in Johto thus far. Memories of murderschool are hard to let go of, man.