App for forestcovered

[ultimatedespear]

( PLAYER INFORMATION )

Name: Steve
Contact: <opticblast | starfishplatinum#8582 on Discord
Are you over 17?: Yup!
Characters in Forest Covered: None yet!

( CHARACTER INFORMATION )

Name/Work Name: Mukuro Ikusaba/ Riru
Canon: Dangan Ronpa
Canon Point: Despair Arc, Episode 11
AU/CRAU: N
Age: 17ish? Probably?
History: Here. The DR wiki isn't exactly great, but it's an okay enough summary, I think. I can always write up a better one if you'd like!
Personality:
The first time we see Mukuro Ikusaba, she spends all of her screentime pretending to be someone else, gets killed off, and then her identity's revealed towards the end of the game without even a flashback to show what the real Mukuro is like.

Wait, no, don't go, there's more to her than that, I swear. See, unlike all the other characters in this series (who are all giant messes in one way or another), Mukuro has the unfortunate distinction of being Junko Enoshima's sister, and being related to the series' main antagonist means she never had a chance of not becoming a trainwreck of an entirely different type.

So let's talk about how she acts around her sister first, that's going to color everything else about her. While not sharing her sister's compulsion for despair, Mukuro is incredibly loyal to Junko. She might disagree with some of her sister's plans or be thrown off by what Junko asks her to do, but ultimately, she's the type to carry the orders out to the letter. If Junko says jump, Mukuro doesn't even ask how high, she just does it and takes as many bodies as necessary with her. Impersonation, assassination, even taking part in an insanely complicated plan to test out memory therapy? It's all in a day's work for the Ultimate Soldier.

Which of course, is never good enough. When your sister is a world destroying despair obsessed maniac, no amount of destruction, no amount of bases infiltrated without triggering alerts, none of that's going to please her. So Mukuro routinely ends up on the receiving end of verbal and physical abuse (including attempted murder) from her sister, and she's...honestly okay with it. Actually more than okay with it, judging from her actions in DR3 and in the Zero light novel, she enjoys it to an extent. She's willing to put up with her sister's horrifying actions and enjoy them because Mukuro believes that Junko needs her, and that she's the only one who really understands her sister's mentality. Which is incredibly messed up, but like I said, growing up with Junko means she never had a chance to be anything other than a complete disaster.

So with that said, we can't really expect much from Mukuro when it comes to interacting with people that aren't Junko. Being devoted to her sister like that, it doesn't really leave a lot of room for connecting to other people no matter how close they should be. She spent some time in class with her classmates, but there's not much to speak of there in regards to a bond, not at this point anyway. And despite joining a mercenary company at a young age and spending years in it? No real attachment to her fellow soldiers either. And besides, what's the point if at a moment's notice, her sister could hand her a knife, point at them and tell Mukuro to get to work? So given that, she's far from a social butterfly. She's not very talkative (with an exception we'll get to in a second), and is either to type to give cold standoffish answers, or just sort of fall all over herself if someone starts a conversation with her. But when you're a human weapon of mass destruction and one half of the pair that doomed the world, do you really need conversational skills?

Now that exception is talking about her talent. She's good at that. Being the Ultimate Soldier and having a fascination with things of that nature from a young age (either naturally or because Junko we just don't know), it's one of the few things she's passionate about. So when it comes to things like that, she can be a real chatterbox, sometimes even at the expense of what she's supposed to be doing. Remember way back when up there when it was said she was pretending to be someone else? Well the Ultimate Fashionista really shouldn't enjoy receiving rations as a gift, or talking about the advantages or disadvantages of wearing a suit of armor on the battlefield. She really is a hopeless case sometimes.

But maybe she won't always be. Believe it or not, Mukuro actually has the potential to not completely turn her life around, but to maybe escape from Junko's clutches and to maybe start forming better connections with other people. Of course it's an uphill battle and in a canon spinoff novel, requires a classmate to receive information from an alternate timeline, save her life, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. And even with that, her character doesn't entirely change, she still loves her sister, she's still committed to helping her despair, just in a different way. So while the potential for change exists, it's definitely going to take a lot of work to undo years of being Junko's sister.

Debt: Mukuro here absolutely signed up to pay off her sister's debt. She doesn't care about her own, but when the witch mentioned Junko's name, she signed up right away. Because she knows her sister's debt would be impossible to pay off on her own.

Previous Game Info: N/A

Inventory: Not being the type to carry a lot, Mukuro had her school uniform, her gloves, a combat knife, and her electronic student handbook.

Abilities: Mukuro's talent (since that's how DR tends to categorize abilities) is being the Ultimate Soldier. On paper, that sounds like a bunch of nonsense since what it essentially boils down to is that out of all the high school age mercenaries in Japan, she was the one most worthy of the title. Probably not much of a competition there, but with the way the Dangan world is, who knows?

What this essentially means is that if it's battlefield related, she's got this. Firearms, explosives, hand to hand, she can do it at all and at almost a superhuman level. She's also, and this is where we get into just how ridiculous Dangan talents can be, never been wounded (outside of when Junko's decided to be Junko). During Danganronpa Zero, she manages to take out multiple opponents at once in one flowing motion, criticizing their skills while doing so as well. Essentially in combat situations, she's shown to be nearly untouchable unless something breaks her focus.

Which doesn't mean she's unbeatable, not at all. We'll get into this a little in the next section, but it's not entirely hard to break her concentration. She's an awkward person, she can get thrown off her game, there's things she doesn't know how to deal with, and so on. So while she's a little overpowered , think of it this way: just because she can basically speed-run an action game in a real life setting, she can still screw up and get a game over no matter how good at it she is on paper.

Strengths and Weaknesses:

As far as strengths go, Mukuro's fairly strong physically, she isn't the strongest in canon, but she seems to be up there, capable of holding her own against Hope's Peak Ultimate Swordswoman with only a combat knife and thrashing several members of the Ultimate Octuplets (yes that's a thing) without breaking a sweat.. Combine that with her soldier talent and she's not somebody you probably want to pick a fight with.

Of course, this is balanced out by the fact that she's not really much of a planner. She's better at following someone else's strategy than coming up with the plan. She knows how to do stuff, sure. Infiltrating a location, taking out targets, she can do all that just fine, but that's just doing what comes naturally to her. If she had to actually sit down and think about things, she'd never get in the front door.

Which goes hand in hand with her being incredibly loyal to those who can give her direction. Both because of her talent and her upbringing, she's good at following orders, and basically Junko's attack dog at the point she'll be coming in from. Gain her loyalty (which like positive character development is hard, but possible according to that spinoff novel), and you've got somebody who's literally willing to go to war for you. And that's a pretty good person to know.

But on the other side of the coin at present, her loyalties are entirely in the wrong place, and once they're set, they're kind of hard to change. At present, she's thrown her lot in with her sister, a human trainwreck who's more than happy to inflict her special brand of despair on the world. And Mukuro would pretty much move heaven and earth to help her. She's that sort of henchman. The one that hangs around the final boss no matter how many puppies they kick, not because they're equally evil or anything like that, simply because that's who they're loyal to. You're not going to convince her to not help Junko, not without a ton of work, so if it's possible, congratulations, you've got somebody who can probably take down a fighter jet with a combat knife and some string. But be prepared to log in a lot of hours without getting anywhere.

And we have to mention that she tries. She tries so hard. Canon (alternatively, her sister) puts Mukuro in a lot of situations she's just not good at. Pretending to be Junko, having to manage her sister's weird convoluted amnesia plot while Junko's indisposed, or even being forced to provide the background music for a murder scene, these are all things she's not really good at. Give her a weapon and a target and she's got this, everything else...not so much. But she never seems to give anything less than her all, and even if she disappoints (which she always does), she tries her hardest to get the job done. And honestly she's...passable at things? Which gets us into the counterpoint for this one.

The downside to this one is Mukuro...doesn't have a lot of self esteem. At all. She's good at her talent, she has faith in that, but in anything else, haha no. So when she tries things that aren't that, she sort of has a self defeating mindset about it. She's not good at things that aren't being a one woman army (despite apparently being a good singer, and she managed to...not get expelled from Hope's Peak or banished the Reserve Course or anything like that). It's just that after a lifetime of being told she sucks at literally everything except being a soldier and even that's worthy of scorn, she's wholly bought into it. No matter what she does, it earns her things like being told she's nothing but a stupid fat ugly disappointment, so why would she believe anything else? People can tell her she isn't horrible, but when Junko's right there and so overbearing that it's all she hears, it's not going to sink in.

In short, the poor girl's a mess.

( SAMPLE )

Characterization Sample: Test drive should have enough comments by the next couple days!

I also have this if you want to see how she interacts with people who aren't Junko!