Arthur Pohl

**Arthur Pohl** *(*アーサー・ポール *Āsā Pōru)* is a student of Class A in HPEBS and a participant of Killing Student Exchange. He's the main protagonist of *Danganronpa: Hope Noir**.*

Arthur has great abilities in creating and writing fiction, at the very young age of ten he published his first criminal. At the point of the story he already published fourteen books from his series. Hope's Peak Academy noticed that success and as a student of HPEBS Arthur wields a title of an **Ultimate Crime Fiction Writer.**

## History

### Early Life

Arthur has been born and raised in Westerstede, Germany. His mother was a successful writer and father owned a publishing company. Books were treated as something better than school and regular entertainment in Pohl family house, which made Arthur genuinely love books, comics and other mediums of general fiction, which became his greatest passion. Due to that Arthur began to write on his own, his parents called his talent an "unpolished diamond".

Ever since Arthur remembered, he had an imaginary friend named Gerard Fuchs. They were "growing together" and eventually Arthur got used to having a fictional person by him in hard situations. At some point Gerard also revealed to Arthur he's a detective and boy decided to adapt that fact into a main protagonist of his debuting book. That's how a crime fiction series about a teenage detective by the same name began to rise. Set in Wrocław (then Breslau) in 1920s, "Geschoßgenargument" soon was translated into many different languages and published all over the world, making Arthur one of the most popular young German writers in 21st century.

At some point in life he visited Garmish-Partenkirchen, where later HPEBS would be located, during holidays with his parents.

During his time at middle school, his aunt who taught music in there forced him to participate in lessons of playing on tuba. Since then he absolutely hates tubas.

## Creation and Development

### Name

The name "Arthur" comes from English history and is assumed to relate with traits like "bravery". It has been given to him due to author's huge love for this name. Family name "Pohl" supposedly means "somehow related to Poland" and it comes from both setting of Arthur's books (Breslau, today a city in Poland) and author's nationality, which he recalcitrantly tries to reference in his works.

## Appearance

Arthur is tall, quite well-built person without any further body problems. He has medium-long, grey hair, kinda messy, an ahoge sticking from the back. His eyes are grey as well, under the left one there's a noticable mole.

Arthur wears quite elegant outfit, but the charm dissappears as soon as one realise he prefers being comfortable rather than looking good. That's why his waistcoat (with quill-shaped buttons) is always unbuttoned, there's a fat stain on one of his white shirt's corners, and pens in his chest pocket have leaked. He also doesn't wear his jacket properly and his trousers are grinded off. Actually, the only properly wore pieces of outer clothing are his red shoes and a tie.

Arthur's full appearance.
## Personality

Arthur is a mostly static person, who enjoys peace and chill a bit more than being in a constant move, but in the meantime he noticed he always develops the greatest sympathy for energetic people, both in fiction and reality, as just their presence was giving him energy. This slowly developed into an insecurity he'd be boring for such people, which later evolved in a general fear of rejection because of his inability to keep up. He accepted it and just sticked to "boring friends" and "being boring" himself.

This changed when the Killing Student Exchange has began and Arthur, sitting on the side and taking notes of things happening around, has caught an eye of Alfred Reville, the Ultimate Director. Alfred is a definition of energy and he has found interest in Arthur's abilities and character, and when they got to know each other a bit better, he guessed Arthur can't find happiness of being himself in life anymore and tries to teach him his ways of spontanity, in return getting a lesson from Arthur how to sit down and get happiness from looking at a blank ceiling. As both were teaching each other something and shared many passions, they quickly became best friends. Their lifes; ideologies could be pinned down as "The Beauty of Statics" and "The Happiness of Expression".

Speaking of passions, Arthur dedicated his life towards creations. There is nothing he loves more than a chunk of good fiction, that being books, games, movies etc. He also uses everything he can in creating his own fiction: he's learning about things he's writing about and about writing itself, he often comes to the local park and writes situations taking place around him, that being for example random fragments of dialogues between people, kids playing in the playground, arguing parents, running dogs etc. He has lots and lots of pages in his notebook filled at the end of each day. What he loves the most is writing smaller and bigger stories of many genres, his favorites being (obviously) crime fiction, but also wierd westerns and space horrors. His biggest obstacles are romances and generally ways to begin a create a relationship between certain characters during the course of his books' plot. He fights it by noting down people's talks and asking everyone how they met someone in their lives.

When talking about his favorite pieces of fiction, Arthur gets very excited, sometimes starts talking too fast and once for a while he stutters. Over the course of *Hope Noir*Arthur learns to be fully himself, but also introduces new ways to his character, developing a newer self, who is closer to what Arthur wanted to be. He also gains confidence to speak his own mind, especially during Class Trials, even if it mean someone's 100% sure disagreement, as long as he believes he has a good point.

## Talent and Abilities

### Ultimate Crime Fiction Writer

Due to his successes on the writers' battlefield, Hope's Peak Academy invited Arthur to HPEBS giving him a title of Ultimate Crime Fiction Writer. This title explains that Arthur possesses great abilities in creating and writing fictional stories, but goes best with crime fiction and noir.

#### Translations

Since *Hope Noir* is written in Polish, titles appear in two languages: Polish in text, English in illustrations and other resources, including this Wiki.

### Deduction

As a writer, Arthur has a great imagination. This trait allows him to create various possible stories based on collected clues and isn't straight-forward about most possible versions. This makes him capable of avoiding possible misleads and connecting all found clues to the murder, even if they first seem as unrelated to the case.

## Relationships

### Imaginary Friend:

#### Gerard Fuchs

Gerard is Arthur's imaginary friend and a main character from his books. The fact they're literally the same mind helps Arthur, as he can express his own thought and feelings towards himself by talking with Gerard. Being a detective, Fuchs also provides Arthur with various tactics and stories from his life (which, obviously, Arthur has written himself), like how to remember something just by imagining a few random letters, and helps him in anything that requires more logic than intuiton, as he is a personification of Arthur's logical side.

Things begin to change over the course of the killing. Trial after trial, normally optimistic Gerard turns more on the pessimistic side, begins to value sacrifices and loses general trust towards people, as well as becomes very jealous of Arthur's friends, wanting to be real and have people to care about too. Only focusing more on achieving his goals, that being keeping Arthur alive so that he may finish the series and give Gerard a good ending. When after the sixth trial Arthur got his hands on Hope Noir, reading his own good ending and realizing the ways it's achieved, Gerard finally falls into despair, breaks out as a split personality, takes over real Arthur, gouges his eye and covers it with his eyepatch, self-proclaims himself as the Ultimate Detective and goes out to kill, just to leave this horrible school and get his good ending by making the stories real, as well as himself. Just as he's about to make a deciding move, inner Arthur takes over again and gives up, just as their consciousness is taken out by their would-be victim (with a strong bang). After waking up and escaping from nurse's office, he uses MonoTid's and Catherine's help to use Radio "Oblivion" and locks Gerard away from his mind.

### Classmates:

#### Alfred Reville

After observing Arthur for a while, Alfred noticed he mostly sits a bit away from everyone and just scribbles in his notepad. A question "why?" was an igniter for a huge friendship the two developed, as the two was fulfilling each other perfectly - Arthur lacked confidence and energy to live the way he wanted to, and Alfred lacked inner peace and ability to sit down and relaxed. The two were spending a lot of time together teaching each other their ways, learing about one another and generally strengthening their bond, to the point where third parties started getting suspicious about truth behind their relationship. The two trust each other to the maximum, and while accidents like Gerard Fuchs' outbreak were happening, none of them ever truly doubted each other.

#### Klaudia Klamczak

Similarly to Alfred, Klaudia helps Arthur convincing himself about his abilities, although she focuses more on helping Catherine with her trust issues or casually spending time with Alfred. Arthur often asks Klaudia about Wrocław and Poland, as it's a part of his research for his future books. They also often spend time together with Alfred and Catherine at the recreation zone. After the first trial, she has forgiven Arthur for accusing her of murdering James, saying he had a full right to suspect her, as well as everybody else.

#### Catherine Delacroix

While Cat is friends with Alfred and Klaudia and is neutral for the most part towards others, she holds grudge towards Arthur for saying she deserves the Supervillain title she hates after (in her opinion) reasonable abandoning him in the escape room on the beginning of The Mastermind's Challenge. Also, when Arthur was insecure about his usefulness during the game, especially when his friends put faith in his abilities (since he was a crime fiction writer, an Ultimate one), he did his best as a detective. Catherine viewed this as playing a hero and got really awful flashbacks with James as the main character. Some of the grudge she held towards the now-deceased Azure Thunder was transferred on the young writer. In return, he only ensured himself about her evil deeds and did his best to be the one who's right on a class trial. Their conflict went on, along with the killing game and the challenge, until the sixth trial, when Catherine realized he isn't playing a hero, but really is one, doing his best to help everybody, and that he's better than herself, since in a similar backstabby situation he, unlike her back in the day, hasn't gave up. She realized he's a good man and decided to save him during the seventh trial from erasing all his memories and help him in investigating the final murder, the mastermind and the killing game itself. She was also impressed by his determination to defeat the mastermind during the last trial. They left the school as friends.

#### Gianluca Bianchi

Arthur is a writer, Gianluca is a critic, and thus they're natural enemies. Especially since Gianluca has that ideology of his, where he thinks of people basing on what they show through their creations, and Arthur's literature doesn't really speak towards him. They have a lot of disputes about culture and world views, sometimes leading to fights. Eventually Arthur realized what stands behind Gianluca's criticism towards everything, that is his attempting to cover up his talent complex, and encouraged him about how his talent helps many creators, even Arthur himself, improve his works. Gianluca appreciates these words and the two finally make up together.

#### Gabrielle l'Hantise

Gabrielle develops friendship with Arthur after reading one of his books at school library and becoming a fan of Gerard's adventures. They were sometimes talking about it, and since both were generally nice towards each other and lived for quite a while, considering they were participating in a *killing* game. Since after the fourth murder inclusive Gabrielle, willing to help the boy who was already leading in trials, was trying her best to assist Arthur in investigations, believing he will eventually help them all escape from the school alive. And while Arthur was not really sure he is capable of doing that, he also liked Gabrielle and respected her strong belief in escaping the school.

Sadly, killing Gianluca led Gabrielle to some rough decisions, including pinning the crime on Arthur by preparing false evidence and by "assisting" in an investigation again, she led him to false conclusions. During the trial, Arthur found out he was being framed and by whom, leading to discovering the backstabber and proving his innocence, but feeling betrayed. He felt somehow bitterly after her death.

#### Samantha Kirschbaum

Similarly to Casimir, Arthur was impressed by Samantha's leading skills and charisma. He gladly listened to her speeches and was satisfied with having her, James and Elle as the class's council. He took her side during the class break-up and heavily disapproved accusing her of killing James. Much to his disappointment, she was guilty, but she was thankful for his faith in her. Much like the others, Arthur was sad after her execution.

### Other:

#### The Mastermind

Just as every other survivor, Arthur hates Yorukibo for masterminding this horrible killing game and other crimes he commited towards them. Arthur, due to their similarities, also sees Tristan as his personal nemesis, a twist of Arthur's reflection, his evil version, that has fully succumbed into their despaired personas. Thus Arthur states that defeating Yorukibo is his primary point of honor and is not willing to give up and follow his words, even after regaining memories of The HPEBS Purge. Instead he encourages the rest of survivors to not lose themselves, even after realizing what crimes they commited, and forced Yorukibo to give on this killing game and take full responsibility for killing Brenda O'Ryan by executing himself. Tristan, seeing it as a great opportunity to fill his friends with despair and giving hope even more meaning, gladly listened to Arthur and the survivors.

## Quotes

**Prologue:**

* "Ultimate Crime Fiction Writer, Arthur Pohl. Nice to meet you.".
* "Maybe try not to shit yourself, good sir! Son of a bitch...".

## Trivia

* His story is told from the eyes of Gerard Fuchs as his narrator, but after he's been locked away the perspective changed to Arthur.
* Originally Arthur was supposed to wear glasses, but then a few people noticed he strikes a great resemblence to Harry Potter, and also the author thought he lost the feeling of a protagonist by adding them.
* Reappearing quill motive on Arthur's clothes was inspired by the main design element of Rohan Kishibe.
* Arthur used to be forced to take lessons of playing tuba and now he genuinely hates this instrument, while playing it perfectly. If he wasn't and Ultimate Crime Fiction Writer, he surely would be the Ultimate Tuba Player.