Danilo Espinoza

"You can't control all the bad things that happen everywhere, everytime- you can only control how they affect you." -**Danilo Espinoza**, *Epilogue*

## Biolographical Information

### Alias(es)

Espinoza
Dandildo/Towering String Bean/Danny/Detective Dandildo Espinoza (by Maze)
Dandelion/Dan (by Henna)
Dad (by Danzel and Xavian)

### Occupation

Senior student at Complutense University of Madrid
Homicide detective in the Madrid Police Department (in 2046)

## Relationships

### Family

Unnamed father †
Juliette Espinoza (mother)
Denzel Espinoza (younger sister) Raphael Diaz (father-in-law)
Samuel Claremont-Diaz (father-in-law)
Henna Claremont-Diaz (wife)
Danzel Espinoza (daughter)
Xavian Espinoza (son)

### Friend(s)

Maze Montréal
Henna Claremont-Diaz

### Enemies

Maze Montréal (formerly)
Henna Claremont-Diaz (formerly)

## Production Information

### Inspiration(s)

Cj Sanchez
Lucio Damaris
Joaquin Manansala
Lucifer Morningstar/Chloe Decker

**Danilo Joaquin Espinoza** is one of the three central characters of STRAY and a member of the STR4YS. He is born to his mother, **Juliette Espinoza**, a medical lawyer and owner of the law firm **Espinoza & Co. Law Offices**, and he has a younger sister named Denzel. Danilo is a senior student at the Complutense University of Madrid, being Maze Montréal's classmate and eventual friend, along with Henna Claremont-Diaz who becomes his love interest and eventual wife. In 2046, Danilo is a detective working for the Madrid Police Department, as well as being the father to Danzel and Xavian.

Like Julian Navarro from *Beyond Worlds*, **Cj Sanchez** is the inspiration for Danilo.

## **THE ANTI-HERO ARC**

#### **DEATH AT THE MANOR**

Danilo was born on January 2nd, 2004, to his unnamed father and **Juliette Espinoza**, a medical malpractice lawyer. On March of 2013, Danilo's younger sister, **Denzel**, was born, and it was mentioned in the story how close Danilo and Denzel always are. On October of the same year, Danilo's father investigates the **Montréal Manor** and its killings, only to succumb to the hands of Natalia Montréal who hates trespassers.

#### **THE COLLISION**

Juliette, Danilo's mother, receives a new client who accidentally killed a patient on 2015 when the patient's family sued him, but they still lost the case. Juliette, distraught, busied herself which lead to her neglecting Danilo and Denzel, and having Danilo to look after his own baby sister. Because of how busy his mother is, Danilo figures he'd do the investigation for himself about what happened to his father and sneaks out of the house to go to the Montréal Manor, but he suddenly gets involved into a car collision. The motorcycle he's riding on falls and crushes his hand, leading to amputation and replacing it with a titanium prosthetic.

## **PHYSICAL APPEARANCE**

Danilo has a tall and slender figure of a larger build than other characters. He has russet brown eyes and dark burgundy red-dyed wavy hair parted to the left side of his head, with his natural hair color being dark brown. Danilo stands at around 5'7".

He wears a salmon-colored shirt under a brown leather jacket with an even lighter shade of brown on some of its parts, especially its right sleeve. He rolls the sleeves of his jacket up to his elbows, and it also has a breast pocket on the left side. Danilo wears gray pants secured with a gold-buckled belt. He has a black choker around his neck accompanied by a necklace with a cross pendant. Danilo has three bracelets on his left forearm: a salmon band and two black wire bangles. On his right hand is a black fingerless glove. Danilo wears brown-colored boots for footwear.

## **RELATIONSHIPS**

#### **Maze Claremont-Diaz**

Maze and Danilo eventually become best friends at the end of the story despite the fact that they didn't exactly start out as good friends. Danilo often calls Maze "Roomie" because they share the detention room a lot for breaking school rules. Maze doesn't usually care for Danilo's insults, though, as she knows he only does it to get under her skin and only fires back with her own comebacks. When Henna dies, Danilo comforts Maze and tells her that she can't control all the bad things that happen everywhere, and that she can only control how they affect her. His relationship to Maze is also her relationship to Henna's- viewing him as an older sibling.

#### **Henna Claremont-Diaz**

Danilo and Henna has their own disagreements, but it was eventually revealed that Danilo's personality only clashes with Henna's for the reason that he didn't want to be rejected, pretending that he doesn't actually like her at all as his coping mechanism and as a way to convince himself. Maze somehow knows Danilo's affections for Henna as stated in *Chapter 6* when she asks him, "See how easy that was?" when he finally asked Henna out. It was also to Henna that Danilo admitted why he's the way he is, as well as telling her the truth about why he's so eager to investigate the Montréal Manor. In the Epilogue, Maze mentions that he and Henna begin dating and got married before having Danzel and Xavian.

#### **Juliette and Denzel Espinoza**

Danilo has a rough relationship with Juliette Espinoza, her mother, because of how distant and out of reach he is to the extent that Danilo would have to practically raise his baby sister, Denzel, and develop a close-knit relationship with her. Because their father is out of the picture, Juliette would have to work a lot more in order to provide and support for both of her children. Danilo doesn't seem to understand this at the start and rebelled against her and disobeyed when he snuck out and investigated what happened to his father, which resulted in amputating his hand after a collision. Danzel Espinoza, Danilo's daughter, is named after his sister, Denzel.

#### **Danzel and Xavian Espinoza**

Danilo cares for his children as much as Henna does, and he usually appoints Maze to "babysit" their teenage children whenever they had to go to work. Danzel and Xavian are his and Henna's spitting image with different personalities: Danilo and Danzel are risk-takers and are usually reckless, while Henna and Xavian are more on the cautious side and care more about what they say and do. Danilo also cares about their education, and this was shown in the *Epilogue* where he scolds Maze and tells her that he and Henna had told her Danzel and Xavian are not allowed in the station. Danzel and Xavian is also shown to be playful around their parents and annoy them by bickering, indicating a close relationship with them.

## **TRIVIAS**

* Danilo shares the same name as **Oliver** in Beyond Worlds, with Oliver's first and second names being Danilo Vermont.
	+ **Parker Trinh**, one of the writers, stated that Danilo's second name, *Joaquin*, is a reference to Joaquin Manansala, the male protagonist from Got to Believe portrayed by Daniel Padilla.
		- Not only their names are similar- Danilo and Joaquin are both morally-gray characters especially toward to the protagonists (Maze (and Henna) for Danilo and Chichay Tampipi for Joaquin).
	+ **Kath Aguinaldo** also mentioned that Danilo's name is a reference to Daniel Espinoza, the homicide detective from the TV series Lucifer. Despite the name reference, Danilo was inspired by Lucifer Morningstar himself.
* Out of all **Cj Sanchez**'s characters in previous stories, Danilo is:
	+ the second to be a Capricorn who is born in January. The first is **Julian Navarro** from Beyond Worlds.
	+ the second to be a morally-gray character or a neutral character (as mentioned above); **Artemus Blackquill** is the first from The Arcana.
* The story title, STRAY, had not been directly mentioned by any of the characters, although in a draft of the story, it was Danilo who mentions the story title in the second chapter, when he says, "It's a generic black stray cat, you've probably seen a hundred of them in your life", to Maze.
* Danilo is the only one of the three characters to not have said any of the chapters' titles, even if Avellino Montréal stated Chapter 5's title, "The Greatest Sister Ever".
* **Stefen Sanchez**, one of the writers, mentioned that Danilo isn't really that religious and would rather not talk about anything religion-related, although he has enough knowledge of it as he imagines his grandparents would be very religious people and are probably the ones who gave Danilo his cross necklace. Danilo's knowledge was shown in *Chapter 6* when he comforts Maze on Henna's death, telling her, "You can't avoid pain because it's unavoidable- it's inevitable. What's optional is the suffering", and "You can't control all the bad things that happen everywhere, everytime- you can only control how they affect you."
* Danilo being a homicide detective in the future is a reflection of how his father is an investigative journalist while his mother is a lawyer.
	+ In some drafts of STRAY, Danilo supposedly wouldn't know what his ambition should be and assumed he'd be going with the flow.
* Danilo originally isn't a morally-grey character and was actually just Maze and Henna's bully that they unfortunately have been grouped up with.
* Kath imagined Danilo as a redhead from the start and that his fingerless glove was just really an accessory of choice, but the glove eventually became a part of the plot and his backstory. Danilo's red hair is similar to that of a Victorious character, Cat Valentine.
	+ It's worth mentioning that Kath had actually never seen a full episode of Victorious, and just clips from either Facebook Watch of TikTok.
* Langley Langston, a character from *Swan Song*, have a few similarities with Danilo:
	+ both are considered as delinquents and troublemakers with Langley having to stay in the Wall as a criminal, and Danilo has to stay in detention (often with Maze) because of breaking school rules.
		- both are redefined as law abiders at the end, with Langley joining Swan in the force and Danilo being a homicide detective.
		- both are also detectives.
	+ both have love interests who are all followers of the law (Swan is the adopted daughter of a detective, and Henna is the student council president.
	+ both have red hair- although Langley's hair is more of an orange color similar to Anna from Disney's Frozen, while Danilo's is a reddish-brown.
* **Cj Sanchez**, the inspiration of Danilo, joked that Danilo looked like a Neapolitan ice cream because of his color palette, which turned out to be true because Kath, the illustrator of Danilo's concept art, said she was actually eating Neapolitan at the time.