Tenko Chabashira

***THIS CONTAINS POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA V3***

## **Appearance**

Tenko has fair skin, her legs maybe a little tanned, and is quite an athletic build, with notably wide shoulders and quite large muscles, which is probably due to her relentless Neo-Aikido training. Her eyes are a warm green color, her eyelashes are relatively thick, and she has a two slightly longer clumps of them sticking out at different angles, one towards the side of her face and the other diagonally down her cheek. Her hair is dark brown with a slight green tinge, and rather thin, and in length, it reaches about halfway down her calves. It's tied behind her with white ribbons in two low bunches, three extra hair ties placed at even intervals down her pigtails, the hair between them split into two clumps, leaving the last and longest stretch loose. A large green pinwheel bow with a white floral pattern is attached at the back of her head by two hair slides, and she also wears a lilac headband with a star-shaped adornment on the left side, and a matching-colored choker with a golden bell at her neck. She has a small mole below her bottom lip, centered to the left.

Her uniform is a double-breasted crop top, a rather desaturated blue, with the flannel collar of a seifuku, a large white bow sitting just underneath it in the center of her chest. This collar is white, with a blue line around the edge which matches her knee-high socks and the cuffs of her sleeves. Her skirt is very short, and has two layers of thick frills, described by Kazutaka Kodaka as a "fashion disaster that shows off the light-heartedness of a sporty girl mixed with the harmonious Japanese essence", and it is stated that Tenko added these frills herself to apparently make her uniform more appealing to girls. On her feet, she wears waraji, which she believes to be a common martial artist stereotype.

## **Personality**

Tenko is an incredibly noisy and generally cheerful person. She wears her emotions on her sleeve and has the habit of yelling out in a loud voice to show her fighting spirit. She suffers from overactivity and anger issues and directs her energy into her Neo Aikido. Even still, she claims that she is much calmer when compared to her childhood. She has also described herself as being "not very good at thinking" and appears quite gullible and very impulsive, using her emotions over logic. She refers to herself in the third person in the Japanese version.

As a Neo Aikido practitioner, Tenko takes pride in facing the opponent from the front, and she courageously tries to confront the Exisals. Indeed, despite being an Aikido practitioner, Tenko can be very aggressive and quickly resorts to violence, insisting that it's self-defense. She takes pride in inventing the Neo Aikido along with her Master and throughout the game, she will constantly threaten guys or Monokuma with her deadly Neo Aikido techniques, saying that it is very powerful. However, she admits that compared to Gonta's incredible power, she had no match for him. She has also admitted that she actually has very low tolerance to pain and is terrified of the idea of torture. She also occasionally has a panicky side in other situations, as she seems to panic in a Class Trial if she is suspected to be the culprit, and overall tends to react strongly in humorous ways. In the demo version, when Kaede talks to her after the murder, she immediately panics as she assumes she is being suspected.

Due to past experiences and her Master's irresponsible teachings and anti-romance stance, she feels a strong hatred towards boys, to the point of referring to them as "degenerate males" (replacing part of the normal word for boys with the kanji for death in the original Japanese) and openly stating all men should perish. She believes that interaction with boys will drain her Neo-Aikido spirit, and thus considers them her enemies. Due to her misandristic outlook, she makes up stories about how bad boys are in her head, such as that boys are much more likely to do negative and deceiving things than girls, like *always* being the first to lie and *always* shifting the blame right away. She dislikes boys so much that even the nice things they do can cause her to react very negatively. For example, she doesn't like boys praising her. If a boy compliments her looks, her expression will die in an instant. She also never allows a boy to touch her, throwing him reflexively if they even attempt to try. Her dislike of boys is portrayed as a very emotional and irrational opinion, as there are moments when a boy acts sensible and Tenko feels like agreeing with them, but then refuses solely because they are a boy. However, since there isn't much any actual reasoning behind her dislike for men, there are also moments when she seems to completely forget her hatred for a moment and she is shown to comfort boys such as Shuichi during moments of distress, doing other acts of kindness for them, and at rare moments, being able to admit that a boy can be a good person. Despite her hatred of men, she is capable of respecting them, like Gonta who is very sincere and deeply cares about his classmates, though she is always surprised and confused by genuinely good boys. Tenko has also implied that she hasn't spent much time with boys in the past, likely because of her master.

Contrasting her hatred towards boys, Tenko likes other girls much more. This also includes trans girls who have had gender reassignment surgery, supported by the fact she wants to shake Shuichi's hand but begs him to have gender reassignment surgery so she is able to do so. During dangerous situations, she recklessly rushes to protect all the girls, and only them. She also gets very shy and humorously humble if a girl compliments her looks, blushing strongly and insisting that her looks definitely aren't good, and gives excuses such as her face getting all wrinkled every time she drinks from a straw and her eyelids turning inside out whenever she washes her face with a towel. While often assumed to be very tomboyish due to her love for martial arts, she is in fact quite feminine, possessing great love for idols, fashion, and cute things. She apparently tries to be fashionable and more attractive to girls with some of her clothing, but she is instead described as a "fashion disaster". She appears attracted to girls, often having dreams about idols, and dreaming of becoming a "pampered celebrity" herself. With her love for small and cute things, Himiko is her obvious favorite, and she often admires, wishes to accompany and fusses over her, which annoys the magician. Even though she repeatedly accuses boys of being perverted, she herself is occasionally shown to be a bit perverted while thinking about Himiko, though she claims that her feelings for her are only pure and nothing like the way males think. However, Tenko is also shown to act embarrassed and panicky if Himiko points out her possible attraction to girls, and she seems to be shy about telling Himiko about it.

As she is so impulsive and reckless, Tenko occasionally doesn't notice other people's feelings and does what she wants instead. However, seemingly as a part of her Neo Aikido skills, she has a unique ability to read the emotions of those she throws. Whenever she does this, she correctly reads the other person's feelings and can give them right kind of advice as a result. Even when she doesn't throw others, she is occasionally shown to have a calmer moment when she is able to console and guide others, and show sympathy even towards boys. Notably, she is shown to get increasingly worried about Himiko, who keeps her real emotions hidden inside and even begins to ignore reality after Angie's "brainwashing". As the complete opposite of that, Tenko believes that expressing your feelings is completely natural and you shouldn't feel ashamed of them, whether it's crying, laughing, or anger. She is disturbed by Angie, who uses her faith as means to escape reality and doesn't confront her true feelings.

Despite her loud and aggressive nature, she is polite to everyone, even boys, referring them with the formal suffix "-san" (original Japanese release only). Her politeness is so powerful that it surpasses her hatred toward boys. She also accepts boys to be practitioners of Neo-Aikido out of necessity, though she isn't fond of the idea and just considers them "tolerable". However, after spending time with Shuichi, she begins to believe that Neo-Aikido can in a way "purify" degenerate males and make them good people like her master. In her Love Suite event, it's shown that she can even develop feelings for a boy if they are a fellow Neo-Aikido practitioner, though it's also indicated that this ideal person must also be very skilled in Neo-Aikido, noble and not the type who constantly thinks about sex. She considers any Neo-Aikido practitioners her comrades with a bond thicker than blood, and is also very loyal to anyone she considers her best friend or a role model.

## **Backstory**

As a child, Tenko suffered from severe anger tantrums and over-activity to the point that her parents were worried that she might not be able to fit into the society. Not knowing how to handle her, they sent her to live in a temple to help discipline her mind.

However, it seemed that Tenko was trouble even for the priests, so they had to come up with something else. During her mental training at the temple, she called the head priest "Master" and respected him greatly, and thus he declared himself the Master of martial arts. The head priest and Tenko came up with the martial arts of "Neo-Aikido", an unusually aggressive form of Aikido, to channel Tenko's energy into constant activity. Neo-Aikido helped Tenko and made her notably calmer, though she still remained very aggressive and overactive when compared to the norm. However, she also seemed to take the made-up martial arts a bit too seriously and dreamed of making it a national sport.

The Master also began to use Neo-Aikido as a way to develop Tenko's moral compass. As practitioners of Neo-Aikido, Tenko and her Master even used to wear masks and acted as "heroes of justice", helping people during day and night. This included things like carrying old women's belongings, helping children cross the street, catching thieves, punishing cheaters and sexual predators, and even helping girls who had tough break-ups.

In order to control her bad habits, the Master began to claim that various things would weaken her Neo-Aikido spirit and thus should be always avoided, such as being too excited about Christmas or Valentine's Day, eating more than three sweets a day, or failing to keep her environment clean. Because of his anti-romance stance, he also wanted her to not get close with boys and thus told her that interaction with them would weaken her. Tenko believed everything without question and took it all very seriously, and she had very little interaction with boys. She already had a dislike for men, seemingly due to all the sex offenders she had seen, but this turned into hatred as she begun to consider all men enemies that would drain her spirit and prevent her from mastering Neo-Aikido (though, she never realized that this should've logically included her Master as well). She believed that men shouldn't even touch her. Other bad influences from the Master included the belief that ex-boyfriends deserve severe physical punishments, and that you can even use unfair methods such as weapons or attacking before the match starts.