Toko Fukawa

Touko Fukawa (腐川 冬子 Fukawa Touko) is one of the characters featured in Dangan Ronpa: Academy of Hope and High School Students of Despair. She was a gloomy novelist with a persecution complex. One of her romance novels, 'Before the Sea's Scent Fades Away', was a huge hit that even managed to make fishermen to be popular with teenage girls for a few months. Despite her young age, she has already won several awards and is constantly on top of selling list. She survived the final trial and escaped with other survivors at the end of the game.

Appearance
Fukawa appears to be tall to some extent, always seen in attire that consists of a dark female school uniform and her glasses. She has long, black hair that is worn in twin braids.

Personality
Due to her severe persecution complex that originates from the bullying that she have to live through in her younger ages, Fukawa is highly suspicious of other people, frequently accusing them of thinking bad things about her. She has also caused others to give a bad first impression of her as she is known to blatantly insult others, even though it is the very first time they have met.

However, Fukawa does appear to be friendly sometimes, most specifically around Byakuya Togami, whom she have shown an one-sided affection for. She had developed such confidence for him that she would become very submissive around him, even to the point of taking orders from him.

During the investigation of the murder of Sayaka Maizono in the first chapter of the game, another trait of Fukawa's was revealed to be that she takes extreme dislike in blood. Apparently, even the slightest sight of blood would make her faint, causing a part of her to awaken known as Genocider Syo.

Pre-Despair Incident
-Speculation-

Tumblr user condesces theorizes that sexual abuse during Touko's childhood could be used to explain pretty much everything about her personality and actions.

Original Text:

naturally, a discussion of fukawa has to take into account her mental illness, which closely fits with the highly controversial dissociative identity disorder. from the research i’ve done, the most accepted explanation is a combination of genetic predisposition and severe early childhood trauma. it seems likely that she was a victim of severe abuse (my speculation is that it was sexual abuse, but either interpretation works for the larger interpretation of her character). this abuse is what brought out the secondary personality of syo and defined most of her personality. there is considerable evidence for her abuse independent of this explanation of the causes of DID; however, i think that it provides a much more coherent framework within which to understand her abuse and her character as a whole.

   note: not much is understood about DID, including whether it exists at all or is entirely fictitious, so take this with a large helping of salt! the evidence for my interpretation of fukawa as an abuse victim is not solely drawn from “she has a split personality,” however, so i don’t think the speculative elements of the disorder cause my argument any major problems.



fukawa is clearly self-loathing; she projects the loathing she feels for herself onto others through her persecution complex and belief that everyone hates her. she speaks repeatedly of herself as worthless and fantasizes about being made into a garbage can, and it’s difficult to explain her refusal to bathe other than as seeing herself as not worth cleaning. she irrationally fears and resents others for perceived wrongs against her, but those wrongs are rooted in her own self-hatred rather than reality. the extremeness of her mental distortion around her own value and her internalization of the idea that she is literally garbage, along with her history of being bullied, strongly suggests a history of abuse to cause these issues.





also in support of the idea that fukawa was an abuse victim is her tendency to demonstrate sexuality in extremely inappropriate, often nonconsensual ways: whether forcing verbally graphic sexual scenarios on aoi; stalking, sexually obsessing over, and forcing unwanted attention on byakuya; or, as syo, murdering the objects of her sexual interest. at the same time, she fetishizes the idea of her own worthlessness, abuse, and degradation. (in light of her self-loathing and likely history of abuse, it seems clear that this is an extension of her psychological issues and is problematic for her mental health, rather than just a healthy fetish.)





furthermore, her entire coping strategy revolves around escapism: whether through dissociating into syo or creating a fantasy, her only way of dealing with her problems is avoidance. in order to avoid the horrible circumstances of her childhood, whether in the form of bullying or outright abuse, she let herself escape into fantasy, creating and inhabiting vivid and realistic stories in her mind as a way of living a perfect life rather than her own, very imperfect one. and she’s incredibly skilled at it: after all, she wrote her first wildly acclaimed romance novel, a genre almost defined as escapist literature, at ten years old. although fukawa is clearly a prodigy in her own right, i’d argue that this ability was intensified by her circumstances — by the constant need to escape from her situation and her constant practice doing so.





this tendency is clearly demonstrated in her reaction to being locked in a murder game: rather than dealing with her situation or breaking down entirely, she simply avoids it through her fixation on togami, an obsession into which she can escape mentally. she doesn’t love him; she is infatuated with what he symbolizes, and what he symbolizes is an imaginary, perfect romance — an ideal almost entirely impervious to the reality of his disgust and indifference towards her. rather than letting facts and flat statements of his disgust jar her from her irrational belief, she instead incorporates them into her infatuation, performing any task he asks of her, now matter how humiliating or menial, and fantasizing about becoming his garbage can. throughout this she continues to delude herself into thinking that their relationship is a legitimate one, rather than entirely a construction of her own fantasies.





taking these behaviors as a group rather than as individual traits, it’s not difficult to see how she could be reenacting a pattern of abusive behavior and unwanted sexual advances that she experienced herself, as well as frequently toxic coping strategies formed as a reaction to these experiences.





this abuse (and other factors, like genetic predisposition) is what caused touko to develop the alternate personality of syo — at first as a way of protecting herself, and later as a way of reclaiming the agency that her primary personality no longer possessed. it’s likely that syo was the one to take the abuse so that touko didn’t have to; touko faints or switches to syo at even the slight of blood, a trigger it’s unfortunately easy to imagine occurring during extreme abuse, sexual or otherwise.





moreover, syo’s behavior speaks to her motivations. the people she kills are all people whom touko wanted sexually, and her killing of them can be seen as a very distorted fulfillment of this desire (particularly in light of touko’s obsessive and intrusive ways of pursuing her own sexual interest). in that sense, syo represents agency and activity in contrast to the passivity and submission to her circumstances that characterizes touko: syo knows what she (and touko) wants, and she gets it.



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but despite being a serial killer, syo remains uncaught; this indicates not only her intelligence, but also a self-preservation instinct that i don’t believe is restricted solely to her own personality, but also to touko. of course, their survival is inextricable (that is, syo cannot endanger touko without endangering herself), but at the very least syo does not show a careless disregard for either of their lives, and throughout their time at hope’s peak, shows a great deal of restraint in her actions, harming no one even when provoked into fighting by aoi. (even here, the only real restriction on her actions was not to kill anyone, in order to avoid execution: that leaves a very wide range of things she could have done to aoi while still leaving her alive, but syo left her with a relatively minor cut instead.)

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<p class="MsoNormal">i think the best evidence for syo as a protector, rather than simply as a killer, is her decision on the way to the final trial to kill the mastermind herself. although circumstances had changed at that point, the decision to personally kill the mastermind is not a selfish one — it would be a tremendous risk to herself and touko, and i think that speaks to the fact that at that point in her development, syo considered the others to be under her protection in addition to touko. even at this point, keeping her head down would likely be the safest option for herself and touko; but after adding the other surviving students into the equation, acting to protect as many of them as she could made much more sense.

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put simply, the level of touko’s dysfunction and the degree of the distortion of her reality seems too enormous to not have a similarly devastating cause. all the evidence we have of both fukawa’s personality and syo’s fits with this explanation, although it is never clearly spelled out in the text itself. regardless of whether the writers intended fukawa to be interpreted as more than simply ‘bullied’, the interpretation of her as an abuse survivor seems valid to me, given the evidence presented. i think taking her thicket of flaws — irrational, bitter, resentful, spiteful, delusional, tolerant of murder — and looking at them in the context of what makes a person like that only makes her more interesting. sympathy doesn’t wash away her flaws — it just casts them in a new light.

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High School Life of Mutual Killing
-coming soon-

Execution (from official Visual Fanbook)
First Kiss Prank - Fukawa is thrown out of complete darkness. In a distance Togami can be seen, so she begins to run towards him and tries to jump at him, when a huge roller appears between the both of them. Although she tries to escape desperately, it catches up and kills her by pressing her into a thin paper-like appearance. This execution is only described in the official Visual Fanbook.

Quotes

 * “I know what you’re thinking… I know what you’re dying to say… You’re thinking how you’ve never seen such a fatty in your life, aren’t you…? Laughing behind my back…?”
 * “You… don’t have to reply…”

Gallery

Trivia

 * Touko's voice actor, (which is Miyuki Sawashiro), is also the voice actor for Saeko Busujima from Highschool of The Dead.