#dr post

Keep in mind that during this chapter a few key points happen that set the stage for what's to come. I am talking about Kirigiri's critical comments towards him before the Class Trial, and that Asahina was able to slap and threaten him.

These series of events do four things:

One, Asahina's actions hardened his viewpoint on Asahina as emotionally reckless and stupid, someone who he will underestimate in the later parts of the chapter.

Two, this outburst makes him double down on the idea of emotion as inferior and childish.

Three, Kirigiri's warnings make him believe he can elude betrayal, that he only has to worry about the ones who are already suspicious to him.

Four, due to being humiliated still by Asahina's surprise slap on him, he wants to regain his composure and status again amidst the cast as someone unflappable.

To me, the last point is why Togami himself went to great lengths of drinking most of the poison bottle in front of everyone. It's a way to show how untouchable and smart he is as a player, that he can surprise the others once more and remain unscathed at the very end from thinking many steps ahead of them.

However, this is where Kirigiri's words and actions click into place with humiliating the crap out of him.

When Asahina is interrogated to be lying, Togami starts to lose his resolve. He fell for Asahina's downplaying of her own intelligence and how she made obvious tracks because he believed she didn't have the capabilities to make a cleaner crime scene, and never thought deeply on why personally she would commit murder on her best friend.

He has honed in so much on the idea of killed or be killed, that the obvious contradictions went right under his nose. It didn't help that Naegi had to point this out to him afterwards.

Enter Kirigiri.

Now that Togami has lost his footing with Asahina's reveal, she then tells him that there is new evidence, surprising him once again by adding another unpredictable factor to the trial.

Stacking on to that, she rubs in that he was the one who gave it to her, and that he was too busy acting like a smartass with the bottle that he didn't inspect the evidence closer in the first place.

Since Togami does have some respect for Kirigiri in being capable of deduction and yet sees himself still as one of the best within the group, Kirigiri hones in on this. She adds how she's "amazed" that someone like him would overlook this, adding in a feeling of his intellect and capabilities being looked down upon in disappointment by a semi-peer.

Togami notes this indirectly in his dialogue, but during this scene, Kirigiri is intentionally omitting the answer to the clue also.

Compared to how she omits info from Naegi in past trials due to wanting to observe his capabilities, Kirigiri wants Togami to get desperate in this moment. He is already feeling out of the loop with multiple factors outside of his control, and not being able to think of a proper conclusion on his own due to being put off guard.

Contrasted with his past lectures—about how you can't trust people, and that you have to do things on your own—she now has Togami begging other people for an answer on the situation. To the point where his anger and frustration makes his requests sound childish, as if he's the impatient one compared to everyone else in the room.

To add even more insult to injury, Kirigiri then diverts the answer to Naegi. The person who Togami has mocked multiple times for being a commoner, someone who will never be equal to him, and who he sees as dense as a rock despite acknowledging his past deduction skills.

By doing this Kirigiri puts Togami into a corner where if he truly wants the answer to his question then he has to beg someone who is the complete opposite of everything he defines as a successful person, and you can see Togami processing this for a few seconds before relenting angrily.

In previous sessions, Togami was able to have a say in the trials and even be a massive influence in how the line of inquiries followed through; the moment Kirigiri put Naegi on the spot and gave him the reins, the tide has changed and is now in their hands.

Trial 4 has Naegi and Kirigiri carrying the deduction phase in solving Asahina's betrayal and Oogami's suicide, and doing an amazing job tying up a lot of loose ends in rapid succession much to Togami's bewilderment.

He is completely falling behind, and this makes him even more humiliated and angry as he loses his cool during the second half of the trial.

He yells about Kirigiri giving him loaded questions, about how unfair it is that she knows more than him, basically watching this man go into a tantrum right in front of everyone he's previously mocked for being emotional. It is just an avalanche of continuous pathos triggering the same humiliated feelings with each second he reacts to them.

He has to listen in shock as Asahina is found out to have been the one who betrayed them, and that suicide was the only viable way for the crime scene to occur. Asahina and Oogami took him by surprise, and if it weren't for Naegi and Kirigiri to disprove the former's claims, they all would've been executed. Togami fell for all of it, and gets hit once more with the feeling of being wrong, of losing to people he never expected to best him while Kirigiri continues to refute him without hesitation.

He's then placed in a position where Kirigiri and Naegi have beaten down his arguments well enough for him to dejectedly apologize after yelling, which is huge for someone like him.

The best part about this is that the moment he does this, Togami takes a full backseat to the entire debate as Naegi and Kirigiri interrogate Asahina and reveal the truth over Sakura's death.

He interjects a few times, and he only jumps back into the conversation completely at the finale—all to ask Makoto how he was able to beat him.

And in the end, Kirigiri responds (in frustration, which is hilarious) by telling him the exact reasons why he never was able to solve this case. She didn't even have to go on a huge tangent, all she needed to do is hit him right where it hurts: his pride, his black and white viewpoints, his inability to win, and that he is just as vulnerable and volatile as the rest of the people he looks down upon.

These lines themselves wouldn't have gotten to him before. We have seen how resistant Togami was when the group tried to argue with him over his behaviors, but now, each sentence hits him like a stack of bricks due to being dragged through the mud multiple times all to prove Kirigiri's point that she was right, and that he was wrong.