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Player
Name: Lucy!
Personal Journal: fleeting!
E-mail: ilovelucille89@gmail.com!
AIM/Plurk: lucylovespluto!
Timezone: EST!
Current Characters in Route: Aradia Megido.

Character
Name: Chiaki Nanami.
Series: Super Dangan Ronpa 2.
Timeline: After the execution in Chapter 5.
Canon Resource Links: Wiki/story summary, DR Character Page, Wiki page.
Personality:

The first impression most people would get of Nanami Chiaki is that she's a bit slow - the sort of person who takes things at her own pace, unhurried and a tad disconnected from things like urgency. There's a decidedly sleepy quality to her disposition and way of speaking, which admittedly is helped along by the fact that she frequently puts her gaming before sleep. More than that, though, it's honestly true that Nanami does things at her own speed, and that speed tends to be cautious and careful and frequently causes Super Dangan Ronpa's main character to make remarks about Nanami's pacing and sense of time (admittedly she does fall asleep during conversations with Hinata a perfectly silly amount, so he's entitled). It's hard to rush Nanami along if she doesn't feel like being rushed, and she doesn't seem to have any problems putting something off for something else she'd prefer to do. At one point Hinata has to remind her to go to a group meeting, since she was getting in some gaming time before hand, which was a terrific example of excellent priorities at work.

This impression isn't helped by Nanami's conversational skills, which tend to involve frequent pauses. She gets better about it as she gets to know someone, but there are a lot of pauses in what she says, even so (or, rather, "..."s). In her very first meeting with Hinata, she told him this was because if she didn't take the time to compose everything she wanted to say in her head, it was hard for her to speak to people (although she added that it would probably get faster as she got to know people). Even when she's speaking at a more normal speed without the mental composition outtakes, Nanami's confused remarks and asides about games that pretty much no one else in her class had played tend to make her hard to follow for most of the people she spoke to. Part of the problem there was that she rarely starts out a remark about a game with the actual title, but instead makes circular remarks about the games based on events or fighting systems, or "this is like the game where x". The context often has to be dragged out of her, although she doesn't appear to be trying to make herself hard to understand or anything of the sort - it just doesn't seem to occur to Nanami that people might not have the context they need to understand all her references. Since she's astounded to find that Tsumiki has never played a game before ("that's like wasting 90% of your life"), this is probably a fair assessment of what's going on.

While her friends seem to eventually accept this as sort of par for the course, Hinata's narration often comments on wondering why Nanami is the way she is (particularly in her free time events, he wonders about her childhood) and continued bafflement about her reactions and way of looking at things. And admittedly knowing about her childhood does sort of shed some light on Nanami's quirks. As is eventually learned in the final chapters of Super Dangan Ronpa, the kids are not actually on an Island, but were instead in a virtual reality game. And instead of being one of the students hooked up to the game, Nanami herself was part of the game. The Super High-school Level Gamer was actually a Super High-school Level NPC, put in the island field trip as a monitor with her counterpart, the field trip's teacher, Usami (later Monomi). Developed by Alter Ego from the first game, who had in turn been created by Fujisaki Chihiro, Nanami didn't actually have a childhood. She's was an AI whose first real use was the game. With that information, her slight strangeness makes a lot more sense - of course Nanami has gaps in her knowledge of normal everyday things, and of course she's a little ill at ease with real live humans, her very first. It's like a giant ah-hah moment, really.

Further assisting the sleepy-slow image is Nanami's genuinely cool head. She's calm in most situations she's put in, and is one of the characters who has an easier time staying focused on the school trials, not often going off on tangents (surprisingly, almost; she makes next to no side remarks about games and never really gets stuck on a point that doesn't have anything to do with anything, or which is obviously false). Nanami isn't easily excitable, and proves to be a really reliable ally for Hinata in that sense, since...well, there are a lot of excitable characters in Super Dangan Ronpa 2. A lot. While new events and announcements often caused chaos amongst the students, Nanami was usually calm about them, and would either gently suggest a next step or just make a casual remark that gave her mental state as being Not That Worked Up. Even when upset, Nanami rarely does anything particularly rash. At one point her games are blown up (...Komaeda tries to scare the kids, and sets off a bomb near where her games were kept in the lodge) and Nanami doesn't do anything more than sadly stare at them the next day.

While it initially seems that Nanami isn't passionate or firm about much besides games, this simply isn't true. She actually gets fired up when she states that she won't ever stand for any mutual killing, and Nanami is always quite clear and straightforward about her dislike for the mutual killing game, and how she wants everyone to get through it together. When necessary, Nanami proves capable of speaking up without taking the time to think it through, and she can be direct and firm as the situation calls for it. She's the first one to ask Komaeda to shut up when he goes off on a rant about hope and despair in a trial (she asks politely, but it's still pretty jarring when the usually calm and go-with-the-flow Nanami tells Komaeda to knock it off). She's the one who slaps Owari when the other girl tries to strangle Komaeda, bringing her to her senses and pointing out that Owari isn't that sort of person.

Monomi remarks that Nanami is a very kind person ("Who do you think you get that from?") and this is in fact true. While Nanami doesn't think of herself as being overly good with living things, she's clearly fond of her classmates, and clearly wants them to do well and survive. She doesn't seem to have a bad opinion of any of them, going so far as to tell the others not to speak badly of Komaeda after he masterminded a situation that led to her unknowingly murdering him in an attempt to off all the non-traitor kids. Even with that situation, knowing she was going to die because of him, Nanami said the others shouldn't speak badly of Komaeda, and that in a different situation he wouldn't have acted as he did. Holding things against people doesn't seem to be much in Nanami's nature, outside of her obvious dislike and distrust of Monobear, who began the mutual school killings on the island.

Strengths:

• Nanami is an expert in gaming (although she notably has a problem with dating games, as in she...isn't great with them); she has a stupidly large store of gaming related trivia, and seems capable of breezing through nearly any video game given to her. This is relevant if anyone ever challenges her to a game-off but also is sort of relevant because...well, even if the Route world doesn't strictly follow the game mechanics (more than four moves, etc) Nanami has played the Pokémon games. She's familiar with the basic world information and a lot of the non-basic stuff, like an avid gamer who tends towards being a completionist might be. This is actually the sort of place where she'll feel at ease; asking her to play a game isn't at all an awkward request.

• In keeping with the above, Nanami displays a high level of genre-savvyness, so long as she's played games that connect to whatever situation she's been thrown into - although if the game genre-savvyness isn't correct, this is more detrimental than it wouldn't be.

• Keeping a cool head is another strength. Nanami is frequently shown to be calm, and there are very few times in the game where she'll snap at someone (this happens once or twice when she politely asks Komaeda to knock it off) or raise her voice. When strange things happen, such as Monobear attacking or any of the other surprising events, she tends to take a level tone and doesn't seem too thrown. She's able to stay calm enough to suggest that someone to guard the first body would be a good thing, albeit because that was the sort of thing that happened in that genre of game.

• Willingness to sacrifice herself for her friends is probably a very big one. When it comes down to it, Nanami encourages all the others to vote for her death, trusting in Komaeda's luck for her being the culprit, and thereby saving them and passing up her own "graduation".

• She can sleep while standing up. That's pretty impressive, you have to admit.

Weaknesses:

• Conversations aren't her strong point. Nanami likes to take the time to compose everything she says mentally or she claims to find it difficult to speak with people. She often has long pauses as she composes what she wants to say in her head, and has frequently fallen asleep on people during conversations (though not usually during tense ones. Mostly). Nanami's answers and comments also don't always make a lot of sense to most people - she has a habit of replying in terms of games she's played sometimes, and her way of looking at things combined with that can lead to some really weird responses. Just to give an example of that (because it's sort of hilarious and ridiculous), in one of her free time events Hinata has to pick where to go. There are three options. Airport nets him "The airport ... I don’t like airports because I feel like there might be a shootout ... and watching someone who’s not very good at FPS games always makes me disoriented." Park gets "Whenever I played games .... in the park ... kids would always gather around me for some reason ... that’s right that’s right, and there were some games you can only play in sunlight ... games that were too difficult for adults or shut-ins". And supermarket gets "I don’t dislike games where you use skateboards or wheelchairs to knock down zombies. Strictly speaking it should take place at a motel, but chainsaws work the best anywhere ... I do think that sounds kind of fun, so that sounds all right." Which was her way of saying "yes". Needless to say, conversations with Nanami are interesting.

• Nanami has admitted that "situations where you have to use something like emotions or feelings to come up with the right answer are a little hard." People make her sort of nervous, partly because the game itself is a trial run/first run; this is literally the beginning of the life of Usami and Nanami, and the avatars of the kids are their first actual "people" to deal with.

• Certain commonplace knowledge seems to just not be available to her. While Nanami has a huge library of game-related knowledge, she's completely clueless about a Japanese festival all girls her age (in Japan) would be familiar with, and certain food stuffs associated with that (although apparently not knowing milk came from cows was also a thing). Given the nature of her existence, and the fact that most of her information seems to come from games, it's likely that she has a certain lack of knowledge on things she'd probably be expected to have knowledge on (though a video game education apparently results in a surprisingly eclectic knowledge base).

• Nanami apparently doesn't pay too much attention to things like sleep and food when she's involved in a game. While that might not be too big a deal for an AI, it's probably not the best habit to have and she should really work on that.

• Dating sims are the one genre of game she can't handle and is bad at. Predictably, she's not really that great at understanding romance as a result (although these two things feed into one another, really).

Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Trainer.
Starter: Munna.
Password: Holland Daze.

Samples
First Person Sample:

[ So, sometime after her arrival and introduction, Nanami comes upon a Serious Problem that she really has to address. This requires her to connect to the network with a video, although she takes a moment to line up her words neatly before beginning to speak. Which means she just stares at the camera for a moment before speaking, but, well. It can't be helped. ]

This sort of game...it's just not right without a rival character. There's always the character who opposes you, isn't there? Not always a bad person, but...there should be someone trying to reach the goal before you, who takes the steps with you...

[ ...Hey, it's a serious problem if you're a gamer. Apparently.

Nanami continues on, frowning to herself. ]

...It's more traditional if my rival were to be my next door neighbor, or a childhood friend or enemy...or the person who was always praised in our hometown...or maybe someone who'd beaten me when we were little, who I swore to do better than...but...that sort of person doesn't exist, probably.

[ It's really unfortunate, but that's true. The frown fades, replaced with a look of determination. ]

But, it's the sort of thing this game needs! So, if there's anyone here who needs a rival...

...Please let me know. Thank you. Oh, and also...if your starter were super-effective against psychic types...that would be good, too. That's the sort of advantage a rival should have.

Third Person Sample:

"There are a few methods for training up weak Pokémon...some of the faster ones require items we don't have access to. ...I don't know if we can unlock them, with the quests not being available, so we'll ignore that for now." The lecture was being calmly given on the outskirts of New Bark, near the first patches of grass, by Nanami to her partner. Her partner was probably listening. Probably. The Munna floated nearby, at least, but it was hard to tell if it was awake or asleep...Its eyes were open, but it hadn't made any noise in a while, and they were the half-lidded sort of open.

Nanami continued on regardless, tightening and readjusting the straps of her new backpack as she spoke. It wasn't the same as the one she was used to - it was much less cute - but it had a bunch of useful things in it, and it was still pink. "We'll have to grind you up to a reasonable level. As my starter, you're going to help me level the others more easily. Though...if the usual thing holds true, you're probably a little above most of what we'll run into in this first area...but if there's going to be a rival battle at the next town, you should be above that before we stop grinding."

"You see, once you're at a good level, we can put the weaker ones in first. And then switch as soon as they're in - although if they can get in a few hits first, so much the better. Then you can finish up the battle, and they'll still get a share of the experience. ...It's not elegant, but it's the easiest way." And she didn't really have access to a lot of strategies, at the moment. Double battles would be a blessing, when she found out about those. For now, though, just the first-gen game rules existed. "Ah, I couldn't find out what type of gym the first one is, so we're going to have to try to get a good type coverage without knowing what to plan for."

Which was, admittedly, entirely okay. Not knowing what was coming up next made things more exciting.

"...I'm not sure if we'll get in trouble for catching Pokémon without having any of the how-to-catch-Pokémon lessons from those NPCs, but...the rules seem to be different here." To say the very least. At the end of her impromptu lecture, Nanami bit her lip, looking at the grass. By all rights, she shouldn't be anywhere, right...? Unless this was some sort of failsafe code. She hadn't known about anything like that, but that wasn't proof of something not existing. Or maybe this was what happened to AIs when they died. They went into games, or their afterlife was just...this. Whatever this was.

Kirby the Munna floated into her shoulder, a gentle nudge, and Nanami shook herself. "...Ah, you're right. It doesn't really matter, does it? As long as we're here, we should be going. The League challenge awaits."