Character Analysis: Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu (Danganronpa)
One of the franchise’s most beloved arcs is, it turns out, commentary on toxic masculinity
WARNING: The following text contains spoilers for the game Super Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair (chapters 1 to 4, specifically). It also includes mentions of violence, grooming, and parental abuse. Reader discretion is advised.
Este texto foi originalmente publicado em português, aqui.
The fanbase of the Danganronpa franchise (Spike Chunsoft, 2010–2017) is notorious online for its clear-cut choice of favourites. Among fans of Japanese games, even those who have never touched a single entry of the series have surely heard of the charismatic, fashionable antagonist Junko Enoshima; the lucky, chaotic, unpredictable Nagito Komaeda; or the malicious liar Kokichi Oma. They are hard to avoid: besides the copious amounts of fanart depicting them, those three have inspired hundreds of texts and YouTube video essays analysing their personality, actions, and general psychology through microscopic lenses.
But, as the title gives away, this analysis is not about either of them. The objective of this text is to expand the reader’s perception about a character that, while beloved with much dedication by individual fans, due to starring in what the overwhelming majority perceives as a well-written character arc among so many aspects where Danganronpa falls short, didn’t inspire that same passion — perhaps because he isn’t as controversial as his franchise peers, but a complex character in his own right. This is an analysis for Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu, from entry Super Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair (Spike Chunsoft/Abstraction Games, 2012), the… “Ultimate Yakuza”?
The first thing one may notice about this character is that, in a world where all central characters have a special ability, a field where they are remarkably better than those in their age group (in original Japanese, the title that got translated in English as “Ultimate” is known as “chō kōkō-kyū”, something along the lines of “super high school level”), Kuzuryu received an odd title at least. The ability that Hope’s Peak Academy, a high school dedicated to teaching super-talented teenagers, recognised him as having is, well… being born as the heir of the Kuzuryu Clan, the biggest yakuza clan in Japan in-universe. And, let us all agree on this, this isn’t really a talent. But Fuyuhiko is fully aware of this — maybe too much.
The levels to which such self-awareness affects him are many, but let us start by the basics. On the first encounter that both the player and the protagonist Hajime Hinata have with Kuzuryu, his posture is clear:
This introduction sets the tone for his posture during the next chapters, at least initially: Fuyuhiko is distant, incredibly aggressive, and vehemently denies anyone’s attempts to approach him. So much that, during chapters 1 and 2, he is the only one out of the 15 characters (not counting Hinata) to who the player cannot talk at all — Danganronpa has the Free Time Events (FTEs) mechanic, that allows players to talk to their characters of interest, in between murders and other story events. During a party thrown in chapter 1 of the game, the yakuza is the only one who refuses to show up, despite his peers’ attempts.
The first question such behaviour poses is: “why?”. Even characters like Gundham Tanaka, the Ultimate Breeder, who masks his loneliness with a public persona that takes after anime villains, carefully crafted so that he looks unreachable, won’t turn down, at any given point, Hinata’s invitations to chat and pass the time. Why, then, won’t this boy with a baby face and the weight of a criminal organisation on his shoulders talk to anyone?
An obvious answer could be “because he’s associated to a criminal organisation and doesn’t want to involve civilians in his business, duh”. This is partially true, but instead of worrying about others’ involvement, what weighs the most on Kuzuryu’s initial behaviour is the immediate assumption that others want nothing to do with him. For multiple times, after the moment he inevitably opens up to the group (more about it below), his phrases are peppered with lines such as “I know a guy like me has no right to talk to you about this”. At the end of the day, he closes himself off to others before they do the same.
However, even during this initial stage, he isn’t completely closed off to the world. As chapter 2 of the game reveals, he has a strong bond with a fellow classmate: the Ultimate Swordswoman, Peko Pekoyama. It is literally impossible to analyse one without analysing the other in some measure. They were both raised in the same household — however, not as equals. A parentless child, Pekoyama was adopted by the Kuzuryu Clan as a baby, with a single purpose: to defend and fight for the life of the heir. This is where her exceptional skills with the sword come forth. She is not treated as any more than that, and ends up being convinced that she isn’t “Peko”: she is, in her own words, “a tool to [her] young master”.
Fuyuhiko doesn’t like the idea. Not only does he despise the fact that his superiors in the Kuzuryu Clan designated a bodyguard to “protect” him, thus showing how weak and inept they really believe their heir is; he despises the fact that she cannot see herself as a person. This is why he tries to push her away: when the game begins, he tells her that, from now on, she should make her relations with others a priority. They are equals.
Unfortunately, here occurs a communication error between them. What Peko understands is that, if Fuyuhiko doesn’t need a tool, he doesn’t need her. And, if he hates the idea of having a tool, he hates her by association. She includes this in her speech, once she reveals the true nature of their relationship to the group. He protests, tearfully:
“I… I never wanted a tool! I just wanted you! Only you! W-Why!? Why couldn’t you understand?! We’ve always been together, ever since we were kids! P-Please, Peko, don’t go! I need you! Don’t leave me!”
The most obvious — and most popular — interpretation of this sentence has romantic implications. Fuyuhiko and Peko are supposedly in love with each other, in an expression of “forbidden love” where the bodyguard, manipulated (really, groomed) into repressing all her feelings in the name of the “bigger task” of protecting her “young master”, would end up falling in love with him, and he would only have eyes for the person who protected him all his life.
But there are obvious issues with this line of thought. Not only would it be hard to dissociate Peko’s feelings from the Kuzuryus’ indoctrination, the idea that her life is worth less than Fuyuhiko’s, something that would make a romantic relationship become uncomfortable with the implication that they are not equals (something Fuyuhiko himself repeatedly abhors, but he isn’t fully understood by her on this idea): things stop working on the other side too. The truth is that young Kuzuryu doesn’t want to depend on Peko, or on any “help” the clan could possibly provide: he has always wanted to live on his own terms (despite admitting he “needs” her — his self-image is terribly distorted, for these and other reasons).
A possible interpretation for the passage quoted above is that Fuyuhiko’s “I wanted you” was simply referring to wanting a friend. If the fact that he pushes people away before the same is done to him isn’t a dead give of this, the Kuzuryu Clan’s sole heir is a lonely person.
After the death of his sister Natsumi (to whom he was always extensively compared, given as she was perceived generally by their family as a much better option for the heir spot than her older brother: she was naturally aggressive, arrogant, and cunning, all aspects he tried to emulate, to not as much success), all of the clan’s expectations were forced to land on him, to the disgust of certain subsections that wished for the girl to be the true heir (something she herself never wanted. Natsumi was perfectly content with calling herself the “Ultimate Little Sister”: according to her, “I don’t wanna lead the clan. I’m only this amazing because I’m [Fuyuhiko’s] sister!”).
There was crushing pressure for him to be someone of her level, someone that could effectively lead the Kuzuryu Clan, with all the natural talent Natsumi had, but Fuyuhiko lacked. He was never like her, and he knows this: this is where an enormous inferiority complex is born, as well as, perhaps, the feeling that someone like him, someone so incapable, but at the same time so suspicious according to society as a whole, had no right to seek friends.
And where does Peko come in? Well, she is the only person in the game’s context that is so close to Fuyuhiko. She would defend him from his abusive parents (he says that the violent fights they had between each other had made them try to kill their son by association), help him climb down from trees too high, and they both survived a kidnapping together. However, despite all this closeness, despite the fact she would be the only one that understood him on a personal level, the Kuzuryu Clan’s indoctrination made sure she would never allow herself to be truly his friend. She was “the tool”. “The young master’s sword and shield”. Not Peko. Not a personal friend. And she dies with this idea still in her mind, despite Fuyuhiko’s ceaseless protests, imploring her to understand that he didn’t want protection: he wanted company. (To emphasize the distance between them: despite having been inseparable from Peko for years, Fuyuhiko tells Hajime, during their last FTE, that he considers the protagonist to be “[his] very first friend”.)
(TL;DR: Kuzupeko is bad and doesn’t consider either of their baggages. Instead of lovers, they should be friends; and before being friends, they should work on deconstructing everything that led to their canonical relationship — that is, their alarming inferiority complexes. The true culprit of the situation both are placed in is not either of them for being instrumental to each other’s trauma: it’s the Kuzuryu Clan. And it should be destroyed — more below.)
During Peko’s execution — a mechanic which, in the game context, is always tailor made for whoever is being executed so as to inflict a unique flavour of “despair” on them –, the first idea the spectator gets is that she’ll tire herself out combating an army of marionettes (an allusion to her own status as a Kuzuryu marionette). However, a surprise element breaks into the scene: Fuyuhiko himself, desperate, still doing everything in his power to stop Peko from being killed. (Peko had come up with a stratagem that would allow Fuyuhiko to leave the killing game alone: she had killed someone, but since she was “just a tool”, she would not be the true killer, but him, who would have been the real perpetrator. It doesn’t work, and she’s executed anyway.)
In the middle of the confusion between him and the marionettes, Peko attacks… and ends up hitting him point-blank. She holds in her arms the one that, according to the Kuzuryus, she should have protected above her own life, wounded — and presumably dead — by the hand of the “tool” herself. Feeling such despair, she is, finally, executed.
As one may have presumed at this point, Fuyuhiko doesn’t die. He survives the attack, but loses all sight out of his right eye, as well as losing the only person in the group for whom he cared genuinely. Having witnessed the cruel death of the one who could never truly be his friend, he decides he cannot keep up his rude, unattainable façade to the rest of the group. After recovering from the wound on his eye in the island’s hospital, he returns to the others and introduces himself once again.
“My last name is Kuzuryu! My first name is pronounced ‘Fu-yu-hi-ko’! I hope we can get along from now on!”
It’s an honest (and adorable) effort on his end, but not everyone buys into it. Especially not the Ultimate Traditional Dancer, Hiyoko Saionji, who had just lost her only friend, the Ultimate Photographer, Mahiru Koizumi, due to the scheme Peko had orchestrated because of him, and she still denies any attempt at an apology on his end. This is why this happens:
Yes. After having just left the hospital, he promptly places himself there again. This is a seppuku attempt, suicide due to wounded honour, present in both samurai and yakuza culture. He survives this too (and, for plot reasons, with little to no sequels). From this point on, not only does Fuyuhiko open himself up to the group: he opens himself up to the player as well. His first FTE is unlocked in chapter 3, and it already begins by Hajime asking “how’s that wound on your stomach doing?”.
He becomes more active. More present in murder investigations (one of which, in particular, only finds a solution because, since Fuyuhiko was present in a given moment, the killer was unable to fabricate a strong alibi); more cooperative with the group; and, most of all, he starts making more of an effort to understand others. The biggest proof of this is when, in chapter 4, he takes the initiative of talking to the Ultimate Gymnast, Akane Owari.
This passage of the game is mentioned in the analysis I wrote about her, and is important to both characters’ arcs. Excluding FTEs, where basically all characters trust Hinata with their darkest secrets, this is young Kuzuryu’s most vulnerable moment in all of the game. It’s the moment where he opens up about the pain of losing Peko to someone else, despite still convinced that “a guy like [him] has no right to talk to [her] about this”. And it’s the moment where he comforts Owari, who deals with the guilt of having wounded her best friend, the Ultimate Team Manager Nekomaru Nidai, for a noble, but poorly thought-over reason.
It’s, after all, a moment of honesty, that lets the true nature of this aggressive, combative yakuza shine through: he suffers, he cries, but he helps others deal with the pain he, too, felt. (Owari apparently doesn’t understand or pretends not to, but, in the end, she brings these words to her heart. She cries when it’s her turn to do so, and both become friends.) Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu is a good person, despite every element surrounding him actively trying to convince him not to be so “soft-hearted”.
And here lies the final conflict of his arc: “do I really deserve to lead the Kuzuryu Clan?”. The answer he reaches, when it’s all said and done, is “yes”. And, indeed, he is a strong man, despite the clan’s attempts to bring him down, compare him to his late sister, make him be eternally protected by someone groomed into abandoning all of her humanity and not allowing herself to be his friend. However, and now enters the author’s personal opinion, an unexplored — and much more satisfactory — solution would have been to make Fuyuhiko drop his claim to the clan.
What, after all, does he owe to them? He was mentally abused, beaten by his parents to near death, repeatedly convinced that he was not up for the task, compared and underestimated his entire life — does he really need to give the satisfaction of accepting his post as heir to those who have never respected him? Does he really need to bend his knee to an institution that trampled all over him and Peko, all because they are his family, his “fate”?
But you see: this is not, exactly, the point where Fuyuhiko’s arc fails. This is the point where it could have become something even greater than what it is. Watching this character, who is so insecure, so convinced of his supposed weakness, flourish and become someone who lives with his head held high, speaking words of confidence that are honest instead of empty bravado, is refreshing. He may not need to be the leader of the Kuzuryu Clan, but he can very well exert such a function.
