Player Information

Name/Alias: Tiv
Player Journal: nornir
Contact: lightorchestra, nullascension @ gmail
Timezone: CST
HMD: Here
Already In-game: Apped Elaine Felkin (OC) this round!

Character Information

Name: Mikan Tsumiki
Fandom: (Super) Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair
Canonpoint: Chapter 1, prior to the first school trial.
Gender: Female
Age: believes herself to be ~16, but in reality is ~19.
Physical Description: A full-body sprite and her concept art.

History: Article for the game, and article for Mikan herself.
Previous Game History: N/A

Personality: ( As a note, Mikan is someone shaped pretty strongly by her experiences, so apologies if there ends up being a bit of history in the personality section! I'll be doing my best to keep it even. )

"She acts nervous, she thinks she's always wrong, and she'll offer to take her clothes off without your permission. I know she's not a bad person, but how do I talk to her?"

If you were to start describing Mikan Tsumiki, the phrase "cripplingly shy" isn't just a solid starting line, but painfully accurate - in every sense. She's immediately and pointedly nervous to be around all people, regardless of their level of intimacy, to such an extent that her social life is drastically affected. With that said, it isn't something so simple as a stutter or the occasional apology. In fact, when necessary she can speak very clearly, but every other sentence out of her mouth will be peppered with apologies during, if not shortly after - even when she's encouraged to speak. This goes so far that she even asks Hinata - the first person she meets at school that actually speaks to her - whether or not she can be permitted to remember his name. There's no question she would've forced herself to forget it if he'd said no. After all, she doesn't deserve the luxury of holding a conversation with someone, because she's so worthless and stupid and ugly and -

Those are the kinds of things Mikan thinks about herself, which she often vocalizes. As Hinata's summary of their first Free Time event says, she always seems to think she's wrong. This is in no small part due to the life she led prior to arriving at Hope's Peak academy, where she was (implied to have been) abused and belittled by her family and her peers, or ignored entirely. This has all left her self-confidence in the gutter, as you'd expect. Even if she hears that someone does like her, she finds it difficult to shake the idea that this isn't true - anyone who takes the time to be with her naturally must be tolerating her for ulterior purposes... which is just fine with her, actually.

"Her whole life she's done everything she can to avoid getting beaten up, including taking over debt and letting people throw darts at her. How did she end up like this...?"

As you'd expect of someone with such abysmal self-esteem, she will then do anything to avoid negative outcomes - her next favorite word after "sorry" seems to be "forgive me." It's worth noting that even when she isn't being treated poorly she still opts for these solutions over less extreme ones (as Hinata says, she offers to take off her clothes seemingly out of the blue). It'd seem to some that this is because she actually likes being treated poorly, but that isn't the case. Like anyone else, she wants to feel safe and appreciated (she compares the island she goes to school on to heaven, just because no one on it hurts her the way she has been, and even explicitly says that she hates being mistreated), but her experiences have warped her views of herself and other people so poorly that she doesn't feel it's possible. All that she can do is offer herself up to everyone else in order to help them all get along better. She's allowed people to draw on her, eaten bugs, done impressions of pigs or turtles giving birth, fallen in compromising positions - all for the sake of keeping the peace, of making others happy. In fewer words, she's altruistic, but in a self-effacing way.

But the funny thing about altruism is how selfish it can seem if you twist it a certain way. The way she was treated growing up, Mikan never received positive attention, and as a result she isn't able to distinguish between that and something more negative. Any attention is good, and negative attention is what she knows the most, so that's what she seeks. While she does what she does for other people, there's always the underlying intention of not being ignored. When she falls in an embarrassing position and shrieks about it, there will always be someone who shows concern for her, false or otherwise - and there will always be someone who mocks her, and always someone who seems interested... even those are better than nothing at all. This runs so deeply that she even thinks that anyone who isn't bullying her doesn't care about her at all, for better or for worse - if they don't want to do something to her, then they want nothing to do with her, and then they'll forget her and leave her alone.

"Mikan nurses anyone who is sick and hurt because they always trust her and listen to whatever she says. If I get sick, she might be the end of me..."

As the Ultimate Nurse, or because of her history, she's skilled at reading faces and is incredibly observant towards people's feelings - she knows when the mood is low and when to lighten it up with her "clumsiness" (some parts intentional, some parts accidental), which again, benefits both her and others. Behind her meek outward personality there is a certain degree of cunning - while this is most pronounced as part of her stint as a member of Ultimate Despair, where she seemed to be openly deceptive and even blamed others for treating her poorly, this doesn't seem to be something that was brought into being entirely through Junko's machinations. The key, as stated above, lies in exactly how she became such a good nurse: she learned to take care of herself because no one else would, yes, but when she began taking care of others, she realized that they were weaker than her.

The ill and the infirm were people entirely under her control, who had no choice but to trust her, to listen to her, to bend to her authority - and it was nice to be in that position. While she's willing to sacrifice herself to allow everyone else to be happy and to avoid being ignored, the attention she receives from people dependent on her is absolute. She doesn't need to do anything unnecessary to receive it, and if her Island Mode ending, where the simulation goes as planned and her memories are never regained is any indication, she definitely considers inducing those conditions on her own. And she has the ability to do so! She's the Ultimate Nurse, after all.

Hinata wasn't wrong to feel concerned. She isn't a bad person, but Mikan is someone very much so warped by the world she was born into, capable of both kindness and cruelty - they aren't mutually exclusive.


Abilities:
As the Ultimate Nurse, Mikan is a skilled medical professional. While her title translates closer to "Ultimate Health Committee Member," the change is likely due both due to the lack of school health committees in the west and her skillset. As the wiki says, one of her free time events implies she's qualified to give vaccines - more like a nurse, less like a student in the health committee. Thanks to this it's easier to think of her capabilities as a nurse's capabilities, but thrown into overdrive - she can even perform decent autopsies, which regular nurses probably can't actually do.

Semi-related to those abilities, she's good at reading faces and much more clever and intuitive than her personality lets on, based on her attempts to speak up during school trials. She can tell if someone's lying based on changes in their expression or their color, and notice even the earliest symptoms of illness.

Character Information
First Person Sample: You may link to a previous thread.
Third Person Sample: Test drive!