Mikan Tsumiki

## Appearance

Mikan has fair skin and long, choppy, dark, plum-colored hair that is cut unevenly as a result of bullying. The longest point of her hair appears to be just past her fingertips, whereas the shortest point is slightly above her neck. Her bangs flow straight down, but are also cut at visibly differing levels. She has pale gray-mauve eyes that almost constantly convey anxiety or tearfulness. There is a beauty mark under her left eye's corner.

She wears a nurse uniform which consists of a pale pink short-sleeved shirt with a white collar and puffed sleeves trimmed with white. A short, pale blue, slightly wrinkled pleated skirt is visible underneath. Mikan wears a white apron over this which is tied behind her neck with a ribbon. It is marked with two red lines on the left side of the apron, one going down to her middle and another short red line perpendicular to the vertical one in a simple design. As well as this, she has bandages wrapped around her left forearm and hand, excluding the fingers, and around her right leg from her mid-thigh to above her ankle. Additionally, she has a square gauze band-aid on her left kneecap and wears pale pink crew length socks and white loafers.

## Personality

Mikan is an extremely meek, paranoid and fragile individual who suffers from hazardously low self-esteem as a result of severe abuse and bullying. This has resulted in many behavioral symptoms such as being easily intimidated, breaking down and crying with little provocation, profusely apologizing and nervously stuttering while speaking. She constantly worries about annoying, boring or offending others, going so far as asking Hajime Hinata if it would be alright for her to remember his name when introducing herself. This delicate persona makes her a natural target for Hiyoko Saionji's predatory and cruel personality. However, as the Ultimate Nurse, Mikan tends to act much more confident while doing her job, and she is knowledgeable and intelligent. Her medical knowledge proves to be useful in murders, as she provides autopsy reports, including information on the corpse's state, details on injuries, cause of death, and time of death. Furthermore, she sometimes gives (often unwanted) health advice to others concerning things like eating and sleeping, and may occasionally start to describe things like bodily functions in way too much detail in her wish to give the other students' information on the subject at hand. Unlike most students, Mikan has even mentioned that she likes being on Jabberwock Island, because her classmates acknowledge her and her talent makes her useful.

Perhaps because of her high understanding of human physiology, Mikan is shown to be very skilled at reading people's faces, but she tends to over-analyze them and is quick to assume that she is disliked by those around her. She generally wants to be liked by and help other people, but her utter lack of confidence and wish to not be a bother causes her to rarely assert herself or state her feelings openly; if she feels the need, she will more than likely ask for permission from her peers to do so. This is exacerbated considerably during Class Trials, where despite her talent being incredibly useful for solving a murder, she will rarely ever speak up by her own accord. Since her social intuition is generally poor, if there is an awkward pause in a conversation, she will immediately begin to panic and apologize, believing it to be her fault. However, despite lacking many basic social skills, Mikan does actively attempt to gel with her surroundings by altering aspects of her conduct to suit what she projects as the thoughts of her peers. Notably, she appears exaggeratedly clumsy and often ends up in embarrassing and revealing poses, leading her to apologize profusely, though it's been heavily implied and even pointed out by Hiyoko that Mikan does these poses on purpose in order to gain attention and pity. Because of her insistently klutzy and cloying personality, even for all the pity and leeway she generally receives from her kinder classmates, many of them do still see her as somewhat off-putting, incompetent or irritating, causing them to distance themselves from her rather than outright mistreat her.

Because of the severe abuse she has incurred in the past, Mikan is very awkward and has a warped perception of both positive and negative social interaction. When treated with any sort of individual respect or sympathy, her first response is most often outright confusion, and sometimes assuming she has done something wrong. When first becoming friends with Hajime, she offers him to beat, strip, draw on or do other bad things to her, and states that she has done so multiple times with previous schoolmates so that they won't hate her and will continue to associate with her. She relates this to a belief that being ignored is even worse than being abused, thinking that the people who don't bully her don't care about her existence at all, a prospect that scares her much more. If someone treats her well and is outwardly kind to her in the long-term, she tends to become obsessive and cling to them, similar to the behavior of a stalker, which is interpreted as being extremely creepy (by Hajime at least), showing that she is unable to compartmentalize and reciprocate those positive feelings in a normal, healthy way. This was taken full advantage of by her supposed beloved, who turned that affection into a pathological, slave-like subservience.

By defaulting to a state of unnaturally intense submissiveness and self-deprecation as a defense mechanism, Mikan is somewhat prone to bizarre outbursts, where the repressed elements of her personality rapidly surface for brief moments before burying themselves again, usually followed by an apology for her erratic behavior. These traits include deep-seated resentment for her abusers, general frustration over how she is treated, various sadistic or otherwise disturbing obsessions, an intense yearning for control, attention and sympathy, as well as her sexual urges. During Chapter 2, she has a fleeting moment of lashing out angrily and shouting "you are done for" and "you're not gonna get away now that I've caught you" at no one in particular and seemingly completely out of nowhere, and then tries to write it off by claiming that she says nonsensical things when she's nervous. During one of the Class Trials, she also mentions that she finds a sudden urge to kill quite understandable (implying she has had such fantasies of enacting revenge on her abusers), and in Island Mode she mentions that she enjoys horror movies because of all the blood and helpless victims, especially appearing to enjoy bully characters getting what's coming for them. She also has a disturbing liking for syringes and shots, repeatedly offering them to Hajime when she gains access to the Pharmacy, and she even chases him around attempting to inject him with one during a Free-Time Event. She is also mentioned to creepily stare at Hajime after their free time together and he sometimes had a feeling that she is *forever* watching him from *somewhere*, indicating that she may have stalked Hajime. In spite of her often tightly pent-up demeanor, Mikan also shows by far the most sexual desire among all of Class 77-B's female students, particularly for Hajime.

The dichotomy of Mikan's two-faced psyche is best represented by her mixed motivations for becoming the Ultimate Nurse. Directly contrasting her abusers, Mikan sincerely wants to help those who have endured physical harm, and generally wants to assist and participate in the group. However, she has also admitted that she occasionally relishes the power she holds over the sickly, helpless people who have no choice but to rely on her and listen to her to survive. While acting as a nurse allows her to feel useful, something she doesn't normally feel, it also indulges her selfish urge to assert absolute dominance over something, a sensation she essentially never feels otherwise given her general docility. In her Island Mode ending, she openly contemplates rendering Hajime an invalid so he can stay with her forever, but he convinces her that he'll stay regardless, and thus doing so would be unnecessary. This shows Hajime's deft understanding of how Mikan manically depends on having other people around despite seeing herself as undesirable company, as well as his empathy toward her.

## Backstory

Mikan had a harsh life as a child. She was physically, emotionally, and possibly sexually abused by people in her family and in other places, like school. Among other things, she mentioned being splashed with water, smeared with mud, and getting burned with cigarettes. The bullies would beat her up, cut her hair, draw on her, use her as a target for dart games, make her responsible for their debts, and tell her to eat bugs and make her imitate animals. She was even told to strip at times. In addition, she didn't have any friends.

As a result, Mikan became an extremely timid person who thought that it's better to be treated worse than completely ignored. She feared loneliness and lack of attention more than the abuse and let people do whatever they wanted with her.

Because there was no one to take care of her wounds, Mikan learned to take care of herself from a very young age. As she became more and more skilled in this area, she took an interest in nursing, realizing that she could have a feeling of control over sick and injured people ー as the weaker people, they would have to depend on her completely and their lives would be in her hands.