Kyouko Kirigiri: A Heroine’s Journey/An analysis on an emotional girl
Kyouko Kirigiri’s is a story of emotions, and how the girl came to respond to them. You may try and assume she acts so very detached because of some crippling emotional weaknesses, but the reality is that people that can hold back their personal feelings and endure stoically are often people with the strongest grasp on those feelings. I know this from experience.
Let’s dive right into the mystery that is Kyouko Kirigiri.
Her imagination is an expansive one, to say the least (but we’ll get to that)
She goes through most of the game -and likely through life in general- pushing her red-hot emotions down into a compartmentalized box separated from cold logic in loyalty towards her family’s indoctrinated idea that they can only cloud one’s judgment.
The alternative of slowing down was likely never a real option for her with her eyes being so focused as they are on the road in front of her and the many truths it holds to navel gaze about the implications of the code. Maybe on some level, she needs the outward truths of the world around her specifically not to look inward so long as it helps her cope with the trauma she would be forced to acknowledge if she ever did. If the truth sets most people free, then not knowing must be tantamount to death or despair with how eagerly she puts herself in danger for the truth’s sake; her father taking her off the case at the end of DanganRonpa Zero being enough to nearly bring her to tears for the only time in the franchise proves just how important the truth really is to her.
I prefer to think of her as a girl that’s full of emotions, but who chooses to hold them back because she sees that detachment as the best tool she has to express her compassion: through saving lives.
They were her friends...
Every single one of them...
After all, if she truly lacked compassion, she wouldn’t be able to ease Naegi’s feelings about Maizono, absolve Owada in his last moments nor would she try so hard to prevent her fellow captives from needlessly defying Monokuma.
All that said, some people take this to mean that because she thematically represents justice in the series (see the eagle insignia on her necktie, a common symbol of justice in Western law) that she must be deeply honorable or moral in how she conducts herself when in reality she’d interrogate, blackmail and sacrifice just about anything she has to in order to solve the case and save as many as possible. This conflicting separation of logic and emotion -choking down any pain that comes with miming detachment and weathering every trauma when expressiveness would put herself at ease out of a sense of duty- is her personal sacrifice when she works.
DanganRonpa/Zero, Volume 1, Chapter 13
DanganRonpa/Zero, Volume 2, Chapter 9
You could argue that this kind of double-think towards experiencing her own type of personal morality while occasionally ignoring it in favor of the bigger picture makes her an even grander force of justice than if she was truly so susceptible to just any common morality: after all, justice must be blind to both situation or circumstance in order to be truly fair. But maybe the simple fact she would do everything in her power not to entertain these question during work is why she’s best suited to represent justice.
As painful as it might be to feel compassion while having to shut it off for the sake of the case, she proved time and again that she’d go to every practical length she could in order to solve the mystery, including subtle ways like keeping the group centered on the task at hand during trials and in daily life, or in extreme ways like leaving her door open to protect Alter Ego, testing the loophole regarding The Mastermind’s ability to control Monokuma while monitoring everyone’s activities, and then using that to steal the MonoKey and hide out on the second floor dorms for days (possibly without sleep, as it’s not clear if the no-sleeping rule extended to a space without cameras/monitors).
I’m going to use this favorite quote of mine to encapsulate her approach to the situation:
If one wants to move forward, danger can’t be avoided.
To solve a mystery, one must be fully aware of the risks, and keep on going anyway.
It’s probably best to point out here that in part with pursuing the mystery at all costs, she chose to work alone under the fear that one of them could be The Mastermind; justifiable or not, this still essentially means she suspected everyone to some degree, and thus never quite showed the same trust to Naegi that she expected of him.
This comes in part with her compulsion to consider nearly every conceivable possibility which could be used to explain a mystery, while slowly eliminating possibilities off her mental list as the evidence piles up before arriving at her conclusion. With how easily this allows her to mute her own reactions to developments that other people wouldn’t have been able to predict, you could almost describe this as a softer version of Enoshima’s analytical skill, were it not for her extreme paranoia as a result of it.
A mystery is a series of river pathways... and she guides the boat...
It’s actually speculated by Samidare in the very first chapter of DanganRonpa Kirigiri while she’s describing her ability to ‘sense the reaper’s footsteps’ that this ability could have been an offshoot of her measuring multiple outcomes like she describes above.
Whether she’s some mathematical genius that wields a vast reservoir of knowledge to attack the case from every conceivable angle, it’s made fairly clear that she’s had a wealth of life experiences and worked exceedingly hard through them to become what she is today. That kind of path will always lead to its own share of negative traits. For one, she’s a massive hypocrite across most of the first game, carrying herself with a better-than-thou outlook on the rest of the group by how unwilling she is to share information with them (shouldering the responsibility in an unintentionally arrogant way). Again, she has to see the bigger picture with herself as the sole force capable of bringing the game of death to a conclusion. This is both fact and yet inherently hypocritical if she accepts it.
Ishimaru, and later Togami, were the only ones to ever call her out on this
You can best see this in action when she shuns Naegi so fiercely in Chapter 4. Consider that he has no solid proof of Ogami being the traitor, and how this leaves him stuck between a loyalty to two friends in which treating both of them fairly is mutually exclusive and would most likely cause more personal damage on Ogami’s end. On her professional end, as a student with a monopoly on the school’s secrets and information flow, the most likely conclusions to take from another student keeping the truth from her is that they’re:
A. Hiding something for The Mastermind’s sake.
B. Hiding something for their own sake (i.e. could be The Mastermind)
C. Hiding something for the sake of someone who applies under A or B.
Let’s just ignore for a moment that everyone else in the class had lied to her, tried to misdirect her or withheld information from her at least once, hence her claim that dead bodies are more honest than living ones. Since she never grew particularly attached to those people, it would have been that much easier to not be unaffected by it. As for Naegi, it makes some sense she’d be angered by the thought of misplacing that trust in him with how much closer he managed to grow to her than the rest.
It doesn’t quite dawn on her that the secret he’s hiding could be destructive -as any naked truth can be- because she doesn’t see the truth as something with a bias if everyone in the killing game is equally worthy of suspicion in her mind (if you aren’t guilty, you should have nothing to hide). She basically holds him accountable to her standard of dehumanizing suspects without holding herself accountable for making herself so difficult to trust against how much she’d been asking of him.
It’s also worth noting that her later apology for this marks the only time in the game we see her blushing sprite outside a Free-Time Event, because admitting she got too angry is her admitting she’s been overly emotional, and that’s the part she finds most embarrassing ahead of every other time she’s shamelessly ignored social customs in order to better pursue the mystery. In other words, she finds her emotions embarrassing.
Even Naegi of all people manages to note her unusually emotional state during that time, both exposing her capacity for emotion and making clear just how deep her trust issues run.
It almost makes her speech to Togami at the end of that trial even more meaningful if she’s admitting that human feelings are a complicated matter and that she herself had recently learned this lesson from Naegi.
So we’ve established just a bit of how she thinks. Now enter her opponent.
A part of Enoshima’s influence involves bringing out a person’s worst possible side to invoke an internal source of despair, and Kirigiri is no exception.
What people tend to miss about her actions in the fifth trial as she calmly sends Naegi to his death is that she was acting exactly as she always has from the start, pursuing the mystery at the expense of everything else: there’s no arrogance in the phrase that the school’s mystery could never be solved if she dies.
This moment is key in understanding how she’s approaching the trial
You could assume from her phrasing of that she acted without guilt for her actions on the assumption that she was always going to be the trial’s target, or that the best possible solution would be to clear both Naegi and herself of suspicion if at all possible: notice her smile when she shuts down any suspicion against herself while Naegi is in the clear. Despite her all-encompassing insight on every logical resolution to the mysteries before her, she can be surprisingly insular with regards to her own position as the lone figure with the perspective worthy of tackling that mystery.
Whatever her intentions, she was essentially following her code of unhindered detachment to its natural conclusion, holding tight to her usual strategy of refusing to work with anyone else and being vague. By describing the trial as “The Mastermind’s trap” the way she did, Naegi ended up becoming just as much of a threat as she was because of his proximity to her investigation leading him to nearly figuring out what she meant. This right here is all her worst traits backfiring in the worst possible way by nearly killing the one person who trusted her against all expectations, with the alternative result coming from that same person whom she tried to teach pursuing a flawed truth with the same gusto as she would have (you have to wonder if the irony in that entered her mind as she headed down the conveyor belt).
So to be plain, she tried her very best and failed spectacularly. Her family’s philosophy to never take a side and to keep as neutral as possible so that the truth can be reached without emotional distraction for anything or anyone was still used to detach herself safely from the seriousness of accusing someone of a crime.
To claim neutrality, one must also consider the danger neutrality carries to be wielded as a weapon that divorces oneself of blame when swung, because once you’ve stopped acknowledging the responsibility of your truths leading to consequences for others, your neutrality has already been devalued by personal interest (i.e. shifting blame out of self-preservation). Any code that ever-flawed humans swear by is subject to corruption from the little conveniences that lead to its existence (which is why we adapt those codes over time). Not even the Kirigiri family can escape that.
This may have been the first time she was truly forced her to step back and properly examine this approach at its most extreme consequence, admitting it was outdated and irrational in its extremity and that it was ultimately guided by a level of cowardice beneath bravery. I believe her coming to acknowledge her own issues in the trash dump and apologizing for them as opposed to having them said aloud by someone else is a powerful moment for her, because building her up to being that competent for an entire game and then exposing the weaknesses behind her strength and having her grow through those weaknesses is good writing. These are what elevate Kirigiri from being a good character to a great one. So maybe she owes thanks to Enoshima for exposing her worst side.
Perhaps it sounds like I’m criticizing her too harshly with all this, but I personally believe that liking a character without acknowledging their flaws shows the same amount of respect as treating them like a doll or a plaything, dancing for our entertainment rather than breathing and thinking on their own.
Hers are legitimately humanizing flaws so intrinsic to her character that they go on to inform her better traits as well, deconstructing the reasoning behind why she's so good at solving mysteries, both sides incapable of existing without the other. After all, real people are full of hypocrisies: when properly analyzed, just about any worldview will eventually show a flaw or a contradiction that the people holding them prefer not to confront. There's nothing wrong with that; it’s a part of our nature as humans to hate seeing our weaknesses stare us in the face. I think she's a much better character for having personality defects and little hypocrisies in her thinking.
I realize the DanganRonpa series has grown a tendency to work towards subversion of common plot elements, and this causes people to question why the first game lacks said element, but these same people also forget how often the characters themselves in the first game serve to deconstruct the worlds and archetypes they represent as if to comment on the life lead by someone so defined by a single talent and the expectations that come with it.
The writers could have made her the badass noir-style detective character that always knows what's going on and who plays everything cool no matter what, and she’d still basically be a good character: plenty of escapist fantasy stories revel in making characters interesting by how powerful they are. Given how powerful the SHSL Detective would be in the context of a mystery-solving game, she might very well have been in danger of becoming a Mary Sue if not for the game taking so many opportunities to subtly break down her world-view and show her to be wrong based on her ingrained traits (rather than just giving her superficial, surface-level flaws for flaws’ sake).
Worse yet, Naegi would have been much less effective as a protagonist if he wasn't as vital to her character development as he was. I realize some like to depict her as some kind of mentoring figure towards Naegi, but I believe this setup does a disservice to both of their development arcs as the give-and-take type of relationship it really is. After all, there’s evidence suggesting that she herself had begun to learn from him just as much as she’d been teaching him. She wouldn’t have come to respect him enough to label him the Super Highschool Level Hope if this wasn’t the case.
So to wrap this part up, she basically serves to depict how, realistically speaking, most solitary lone wolf type anti-heroes would be seen by a normal guy like Naegi: rude, unapproachable and vague to fault.
So now that she’s confronted some of her flaws and learned to at least trust Naegi, how does she move forward after promising to tell him everything? She shows him the only trusting face she knows how to put on. That face just happens to involve directing all those held-off emotions towards her father.
I think a lot of people tend to miss this part of her story. Notice how often after this point she brings up her Kirigiri pride? How she mentions wanting to move out of her father’s shadow so that she can stop being seen by the rest of her family as a “throwaway child”?
This is a girl that’s spent so much time overseas that she chases down the only hint of Japanese culture in the school at the first opportunity. This is a girl that’s been thrown into the criminal underworld from a young age as opposed to living in regular society for so long that only a fellow detective like Samidare could have ever been her best friend. She needs her family pride if she wants to truly belong to something, and like before when it was mentioned that one must take risks to truly gain anything, she risked that very pride in becoming the famous Super Highschool Level Detective Kyouko Kirigiri (achieving fame: the greatest sin a Kirigiri can commit) in order to completely cement her worth to the family once and for all.
A part of that came with a hatred for her father.
I think much in the same way she may have had doubts about embracing the family code, I honestly don’t see her insisting that her father means nothing to her and calling him down at every opportunity as anything more than a defense mechanism in order to become more like a proper Kirigiri. She learned from a young age, by her father’s example, that no failed detective is worthy of love in the Kirigiri family, so like a proper Kirigiri, she’ll reject him as adamantly as possible.
By letting herself be guided by emotions towards his school, she’s acting to shut down her emotional attachments to him all at once and thus become a perfect Kirigiri detective
This is why between the bones and the photograph, it’s not so much what emotional reaction she’s having so much as it’s that she’s having an emotional reaction to them
DanganRonpa/Zero, Volume 1, Chapter 15
And that’s why she’s so full of confusion and frustration at having to admit her own unconditional love for her father in the last moments before she leaves for the final trial. Whether or not it’s a reaction she can appreciate, she’ll still use the anger behind it to fuel her vengeance on The Mastermind.
And this right here is exactly why her final moments within that final trial are so important. After fighting an opponent that had utterly outsmarted her, whom logic had failed to explain, and who had ruthlessly corrupted her reliance on the truth which had held her up all her life by offering one even she couldn’t fully grasp or accept, she finally decided to accept her own emotions and to trust in them instead, for the first time making a decision -to leave the school- that wasn’t based on logic. It’s the cornerstone of what makes the entire ending so powerful in seeing this group choosing to hope even after all the struggle.
So in the end of all this, her entire story here practically reads like a classic Hero’s Journey, more closely than Naegi’s does despite his being the protagonist. Her inability to overcome the final obstacle almost implies that Naegi serves as The Goddess or the Supernatural Aid in her story, or his hope taking on a similar purpose.
Miraculous Circumstances: Being born into a clan of the world’s greatest detectives.
The Ordinary World: Her anonymity from society as a member of the Kirigiri family is far from ordinary, but takes on a similar role in this context.
The Call to Adventure: Her father’s shadow on her life.
Refusal of the Call: Her Kirigiri pride, which motivates nearly her every action, would have to be sacrificed in order to pursue her father.
Crossing the First Threshold: Leaving her anonymity behind and joining regular society, with the Hope’s Peak talent scout serving as the Threshold Guardian.
The Land of Adventure: Hope’s Peak Academy.
The Belly of the Whale: The Tragedy, escaping despair with her classmates, and then losing her memories.
Road of Trials: The game proper, with the option of killing someone serving as The Temptress.
Night Sea Voyage: Stealing the Monokuma key and gaining access to the second-floor dormitory.
Atonement: Rescuing Naegi after her need to solve the mystery at all costs nearly kills him.
Atonement With the Father: Finding The Headmaster’s hidden room and confronting the force which has held a shadow on her life.
Apotheosis: Her resolve to accept her feelings towards her father and utilize all her detective skills to bring down his killer, the Mastermind.
The Ordeal: Falling to despair in the face of the truth.
Seizing The Sword: Choosing hope instead, and pulling the lever for despair to lose.
The Return: Leaving Hope’s Peak Academy behind, and venturing into a hopeless world with hope (The Elixir, in other words)
I hope this has done something to clear away any ideas people have about her being too stoic to be interesting, that she’s not compassionate or that she’s not full of inner conflicts and insecurities of her own. Sometimes the characters who hide these facts are the most interesting mysteries to unravel.
