Character Analysis: Akane Owari (Danganronpa)
WARNING: The following text has spoilers for the entirety of Super Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. It also mentions sexual harassment and violence. Reader discretion is advised.
Esse texto foi originalmente publicado em português, aqui.
Over the last few years, the Internet has fallen in love with the concept of “himbo”. This term defines a male character who is pretty, often boasting enormous physical strength, but is also hopelessly dumb. “Himbo” is a mixture of “him” and “bimbo”, another concept that defines a conventionally attractive but dumb female character. Miss Akane Owari, from Super Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair (Spike Chunsoft/Abstraction Games, 2012), is, basically, portrayed as the female version of a “himbo”, but not exactly a “bimbo”.
Let us explain this logic: Owari, who carries the title of Ultimate Gymnast, is an athletic and strong young woman, with such an unshakable fighting spirit that it’s given her problems in the past, about which we will talk more later on. Her ability is indisputable, but her wits (at least academically speaking, because the character proves herself to be quite resourceful) are questionable. She has trouble understanding concepts when they’re explained with “fancy words”, as she says, and sometimes comes off as a bit naïve, believing her peers’ lies easily (a somewhat contradictory trait, given her history — more about it below). Therefore, she has the personality of a “himbo”, despite her gender not matching the definition.
Besides this, Akane is absolutely passionate about food: in a given scene, she tries to face off against Byakuya Togami, the Ultimate Affluent Progeny, another character who eats a lot, in an eating competition. However, he turns her down, saying “commoners” like her shouldn’t try to get to his level. Many other scenes in Danganronpa show Owari eating to her heart’s content.
Akane Owari’s three defining traits have already been established: she’s hotheaded, dense, and a big eater. And she never drops any of these. Because of that, most Danganronpa fans see her as “shallow” or “underdeveloped”. However, all those three traits hide truths about her: these truths are briefly talked about in the main storyline, but are properly layered out in the game’s Free Time Event (FTE) mechanic.
These events are the mechanic Danganronpa introduces so that the player can build friendship and trust between the protagonist, Hajime Hinata, and his fifteen classmates. During FTEs, the characters have intimate conversations with Hinata, in which they talk about their past, their fears and ideals. It’s no different with Akane (fun fact: “Hajime” means “beginning”, and “Owari” means “ending”; that’s because the two of them were meant to be rivals, but the idea was scrapped). When the player chooses to talk to her, she talks about her past, her family, and what the place she was brought up in taught her.
The past
In more detail: Akane is the older sister to seven kids, who she calls “the li’l ones”. She spent her childhood in the slums. Her parents were both unemployed, and her mother constantly brought new boyfriends home — during Chapter 2 of the main story, Owari says “they would get drunk and give me full body massages”. This quote refers to sexual assault from her mother’s boyfriends, but, living in an environment where this behavior was so common it ended up being normalized, it goes right over her head. So much so that she talks about this dark past in an incredibly casual way, in addition to having a twisted notion of pudency, and that shocks and confuses her peers.
Still inserted in this world of abuse, she tells Hinata, in her first FTE, that, in her childhood, she taught herself to do parkour to escape from sexual predators. That was when her relationship with gymnastics began. Her father, noticing the girl’s agility, motivated her to enter competitions, to winning streaks from Akane. Despite her talent, she wasn’t in it out of passion, like most of her Ultimate friends: she was in it for the money, giving it everything she’d got to raise her siblings.
(This is why I believe Akane being portrayed as “dumb and gullible” in the main storyline of Danganronpa 2 is contradictory. Were she to be easily fooled in this life of providing for her siblings, she would have been scammed, undergone serious violence, or possibly killed. It feels like the writers insisted in going down the racist route of making their only dark-skinned woman a “dumbass”, despite Akane’s unquestionable resourcefulness and hardworking spirit.)
Having “the li’l ones” in mind, Owari ended up exposing herself to more harassment. She took up a waitress job in a café, following a recommendation from one of her mother’s boyfriends, and, while working in there, she came into contact with a regular client: an old gymnastics coach, who would grope Akane and compliment her body. He harassed her and insisted in taking her under his wing so much that she finally gave in, becoming a professional gymnast for money — and said money allowed her to move to a better house, with her siblings.
In this waitress job, Akane says she would “borrow” as many leftovers from the café as she could. She also looked for food in trashcans and trees, often having to fight other people for survival. After being beaten up a couple of times, she got physically stronger, and was no longer threatened. Violence was commonplace in the slum where she grew up, to the point Akane grew used to seeing dead bodies on the streets “every morning”. That led her not to seek friends, and not to bother learning people’s names. This last trait is used as comic relief in her FTEs with Hinata: she calls him “Hank”, “Hector”, and “Harvey”, before finally remembering that his first name is “Hajime”.
It also led her to suppress her emotions as much as she could. She is deathly afraid of being perceived as weak, and that comes from the fact that, in the concrete jungle where she was brought up, showing weakness equaled death. In the fourth FTE, Hinata learns that Owari has a fear of ghosts, something that shames her to the point of rage. Furious, she demands this remains a secret.
The present
After layering out all of her traumas, she finally gains some depth. Akane is hotheaded because of an obsession with strength and a paralyzing fear of weakness; she’s dense because she’s used to talking with her fists; and she’s a big eater out of the trauma of starving in her childhood. About her lack of friends mentioned above, she becomes close friends with the Ultimate Team Manager, Nekomaru Nidai.
Together, they shine. Initially, Nidai likes Owari because he sees potential in her, in a much friendlier and less predatory way than her former coach (he also massages her often, but literally, not an euphemism for harassment); Owari, on the other hand, likes Nidai because she never backs down from a good fight, and she sees the team manager, in all his sheer strength, as a worthy opponent. They usually fight as training, normally at Akane’s request, who always loses, but has lots of fun.
Nekomaru also frequently sees himself in the function of having to calm the impulsive Akane down. This reaches an extreme: in Chapter 3, the gymnast’s rage against Director Monokuma, a teddy bear who keeps the Danganronpa characters enclosed in a space — an island, in this game — until they decide to kill each other, leads her, in a completely reckless and even suicidal way, to challenge him to a fight, apparently to the death.
Owari doesn’t stand a single chance against the bear, who is heavily armed, precisely to avoid this kind of attack. After a few minutes of showdown, Monokuma finally decides to kill her, and he shoots with a bazooka at her… but hits Nidai, who throws himself in front of his friend, saying “don’t die, Akane” before he blacks out. (After a series of events, he returns; more about it below.)
The sacrifice of her first friend, one of the few people she remembered the name of, obviously has Akane shaken. However, to the others, she seems completely aloof to what happened, at first sight. This is nothing more than a fruit of the hard shell she grew over the years, to survive in the slums. But her suffering is exposed to everyone else when, coming up with another one of his motives for murder, Monokuma introduces in the island the Despair Disease. The idea is that the ones who catch it develop different symptoms, which affect their behaviors, in ways such as overblowing a personality trait, completely switching one’s personality, or revealing one’s deepest secrets.
As well as three other characters, Akane catches the disease. Her particular symptom is defined as “cowardice” — yes, exactly the weakness she dreads so much, but the one that, at the end of the day, is present in her, as well as in every human being. Basically, the Despair Disease blows her mourning over Nekomaru wide open. She cries nonstop, something she’d never allowed herself to do before in the narrative, and says over and over again that she thinks of herself as weak. In the end of the chapter, she discovers that the classmate who treated her illness, Mikan Tsumiki, the Ultimate Nurse, murdered two other girls, and the fact brings her to tears — that are promptly disregarded as “aftereffects of the disease”.
But the fact is that this disease awakened something in her. Her friend Nekomaru returns from the dead, as a high-tech robot, and, despite her initial shock about his appearance, which leads her to, again, want to attack Monokuma (this time, the team manager’s sturdy body completely absorbs the bazooka’s impact), she is clearly happy.
They say good things can never last. And that certainly rings true for Nidai’s return: not even half a chapter after coming back, he dies again, this time beyond any repair, after falling four stories down and being decapitated in the process. And Owari cries. Cries in front of everybody, with no shame and no disease affecting her, cradling his robotic head in her arms and getting dirty with motor oil (which the game pictures as a blue liquid). She is so shaken up by what went down that she can’t even leave Nekomaru’s side, and is disgusted by the idea of dismantling him for an autopsy, despite agreeing later.
Sadness is replaced by anger. Akane Owari’s highly dangerous, flammable anger. She threatens whoever killed Nekomaru multiple times, saying she’d “beat them up so much they’d never walk again”, but this gets dropped when the murderer’s motives are revealed. Gundham Tanaka, the Ultimate Breeder, had killed Nekomaru in a fight. The objective? When one murdered the other, the group would be released from a second enclosed space created by Monokuma, where everyone would starve to death if they refused to kill. Both Nekomaru and Gundham agreed to sacrifice themselves for their friends (the latter refuses to admit it, hiding behind his “super-villain” persona).
Akane understands the sacrifice. She forgives Gundham. And, after watching the murderer of her best friend get stomped by a herd of animals, she says:
Owari: Dammit… DAMMIT!!! I’m so pissed off… I need to throw something! You all spent so much time worryin’ about each other… and thanks to that… things ended up like this…You’re all… full of shit… every last one of you… but the biggest piece of shit… is me! Dammit…! Why am I so weak?!
In her past, living in a natural selection scenario, she thought worrying about others was a weakness, and has ever since defined herself as nonchalant — another sign of her hard shell. But she knows that’s not true. It was out of worry for her that Nekomaru sacrificed himself, twice, to keep his best friend alive. And he’s not weak. Akane knows he’s the strongest person she’s ever met. This experience redefines her concepts of strength and weakness.
Besides her faithful companion Nidai, she has Hinata’s support. In their fifth and last FTE, she talks about her paralyzing fear of weakness, mentioned above, and he declares she’ll never walk alone — because, when everyone bands together, they can overcome their own weaknesses. This comforts Owari, who squeezes her friend’s hand, saying she’d never felt a hand so warm before.
Hinata: Akane gripped my hand tightly. I felt a strong bond forming between [the two of us]… That’s right… we’re not alone. We can move forward and overcome our worries and hesitations. I hope Akane, who’s been living alone her whole life, is able to understand this, even if it’s just a little.
To a lesser extent, she also finds a good friend in Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu, the Ultimate Yakuza. Like Owari, he also suffered the loss of someone close to him, who was also a participant in Monokuma’s killing game: his subordinate Peko Pekoyama, the Ultimate Swordswoman. She did her “young master’s” dirty work, killing someone who was an accomplice in Kuzuryu’s sister’s murder, while proclaiming herself a mere tool. In tears, the yakuza shows the full extent of his wish to be her friend, but it’s too late: she gets executed as a murderer, in a sequence that uses him as a prop, and accidentally causes him to lose his right eye.
Knowing what it feels like to be haunted by someone else’s sacrifice, Fuyuhiko offers Akane his full support, often meeting her so they can talk about the people they lost. Initially, she doesn’t quite grasp it, and ignores his advice when he says it’s okay to cry, but, when all is said and done, she allows herself to break down in front of her peers, which impresses them. They grow close, with Akane calling Fuyuhiko “Baby Gangsta”, much to his anger.
She is also helped by the Ultimate Mechanic, Kazuichi Soda. They aren’t close, but he helps Akane process her grief: as a gift to her, he uses parts of Nekomaru’s body and builds her a tiny robot, “Minimaru”, that still retains the original’s personality and can perform massages — Kazuichi remembers how much the gymnast loved those. She carries this robot everywhere, and cares a great deal for it.
The conclusion
Akane Owari, who grew up lonely, afraid to make connections in a neighborhood where people turned up dead every morning, is ultimately helped by all the bonds she forms in the killing game. She grows as a person and is able to abandon the ideas that, in the past, allowed her to survive, but, in the present, were no longer an efficient way to keep on living. She never drops her constant eating or her pent-up rage, but grows to understand that, sometimes, showing weakness is alright.
The height of this is a small line she gets, at the end of the game (she’s one of the five characters who make it out alive). When her friends express their fear of the uncertain future waiting for them, as the world they live in crumbles away, she says something that she would never have said before:
Owari: But it’s okay, right? It makes sense to feel scared, right?
Considering the scene mentioned above, Owari’s shame in showing fear — “weakness” — to Hinata, this small piece of dialogue makes all the difference. Paradoxically, she’s no longer afraid of fear. Her friends’ love and advice made her reach her maximum potential as a person. When it’s all said and done, Akane really is worthy of the Ultimate title, in more senses than she believes there to exist.
