Love

'Love'/Sandalphon headshot by 三郷かるは on pixiv.

Hate [twin brother] (alive)

Akira Chinen [boyfriend] (alive)

Minoru Hiyori [close friend] (alive)

Kyo Haku [close friend] (alive)

### Fate

Blackened of Riku Takahashi and Ayano Amari's deaths"Executed" by Kei Satsu (swap execution)

Survived

## Portrayal

### Design / Faceclaim

Sandalphon from Granblue Fantasy, Originally designed

*"Really, I think if anyone deserves a turn on the name reveal, it's me. I wish I was Hyakuya, that would be convenient. Do you know how hard it is to open a checking account when you only have one name? Bank tellers normally don't accept 'it's like I'm Shakira or Beyonce' as an explanation."*

 — Love in chapter four, talking to Minoru and Kyo.

**Love (**愛する**)** is a participant of the Towa Incident Killing Game. The killing game is not tied to a real Danganronpa game, however, it is instead featured on Quotev (@postdespair), and therefore, hosted online. Their title is Ultimate Informant.

## History

### Early Life

Love grew up with the rest of their family on a private, world-traveling yacht. Their parents refuse to tell them either of their countries of origin or where Love was born, so they are without legal citizenship in any country or any clue of their heritage. Their early years were happy ones, though, spent with loving parents who homeschooled them and their brother, and traveling the world, completely unaware that this was abnormal.

### Primary Events

As Love grew older, they began to sneak off the yacht with their brother Hate when it was docked in ports. Through this, they experienced the night life of many different cultures.

Hate was the first to realize that their parents treatment of the twins was abnormal and the expectations were unhealthy. Love was unable to ever truly dislike their parents like Hate had, but eventually grew sick of them not being accepting of their nonbinary identity or Hate's asexuality. When they were fourteen, Love was badly taken advantage of when on one of their and Hate's late night adventures. Their parents offered little support when learning of this, which was the final straw that caused Hate to be able to convince Love to run away with him.

For a little under a year, Love and Hate tried their best to make it together as wanderers. It was difficult, though, and the forced reliance on each other ended up being the cause of a lot of fights. Hate's anger issues reached a crescendo, and he attacked Love. They split paths after that. After this, they never saw their parents again, and would only see their brother occasionally.

Love settles in the Ikebukuro district of Tokyo. Unable to lead an honest lifestyle without any form of identification, Love gets wrapped up in the criminal underground, falling in with some unsavory characters. They discover they have a knack for weaseling information out of people, and start their career as an informant. Love quickly grows to adapt to this lifestyle.

When not busy with their job, Love focused most of their time on romantic relationships. However, they were awfully rubbish at deciding their partners, and they mainly went from one unhealthy relationship to another, as well as having several one night stands.

## Talent

Being the ultimate informant, Love is skilled in gathering information. However, this talent usually works better when the other party is unaware of it, and they made no effort to hide their talent in the game, so there is not to much demonstration of it in action. However, Love never really turns their talent off, and their constantly flirtatious, complimenting nature can be considered a main aspect of their talent, intended to put people at ease.

Most aspects of their talent, though, are only left referenced. Love briefly mentions that they typically work with or for the criminal underground. Oftentimes, they sneak into parties in disguise and smooth talk their way into securing drunken confessions they can sell. Other times, they'll usual sexual charm to find their way back to a target's house, downloading information off their computer to a thumb drive. Occasionally, Love has even been known to outright just break into people's houses. They also claim to have 'eyes all over the city,' implying they have a large network of associates willing to do favors for them.

## Before the Killing Game

Sometime before the events of the killing game, Love fell into despair, although they are unaware of this throughout the majority of the game.

As a despair, Love acted in a typical despairing fashion. Specifically, they would frequently track down ex-lovers and kill them in brutal fashions.

At some point, it is assumed that Love met Udamae Hinansho, Ghost, Yuuki Hyakuya, and Kaname Zabatsu. They presumably became close to Udamae and Ghost, considering them both close allies. While they went along with Yuuki's and Kaname's plans, it is heavily implied by the fact that Love had taken part in a plan to stop the killing game before it began that their relationship with the host and mastermind was largely negative.

However, they did assist in some of the planning of the killing game, killing at least five mall employees that worked in the Gucci store.

## Appearance

Love is a tall, slender person with fair skin and a relatively androgynous appearance. While they are unaware of this, they are of French-Italian decent. They take after their mother's Italian heritage, giving them curly, thick dark brown hair. They straighten it every day, though. It is shoulder length and they have a full set of bangs, although they are open swept to one side. Their eyes are bright red.

Typically, Love wears a horizontal red and black striped shirt paired with black suspenders and tight black or gray pants. In chapter two, Love is gifted a pair of bondage boots from the arcade for their birthday. Before this, they wore ankle length Gucci brand boots. Additionally, Love wears a full face of makeup, most notably red eyeshadow. Their nails are usually either painted red or black. They have three sets of piercings; the bottom is a small black heart stud and the two above are plain black studs.

During the prom event, Love wears a nondescript high-collared red dress with matching accessories, such as several necklaces and bracelets.

As a despair, Love wears a long sleeveless black coat with a standing up collar. This coat, their boots, and pants are all covered in leather belts with silver buckles that are buckled tight enough to bruise all over their body. They also wear a leather mask with a jagged teeth pattern on it covering their lower face. They do not wear any makeup and have a black leather face mask with a jagged, spiky mouth pattern on it that covers their lower face. Their hair had also grown out, falling down past their shoulders. It is implied that Udamae had to cut it for them before the game began.

- ***C/W for implied partner abuse*** -

Love has a number of scars over their body, namely on their collarbone and along their inner arms. These are implied to be from past romantic partners. They also have some scarring along their torso, including a few long knife scars, as if they'd been slashed, and one gunshot wound. These are likely from informant jobs gone wrong, though.

## Personality

Love, first and foremost, is flirtatious. They come off strong, using quite a lot of pet names and praising others frequently, heavily implying that they consider whoever they're talking to to be an ideal partner. If anyone asked them out or for any 'favors,' they wouldn't hesitate to say yes and like to make half-serious jokes to that effect. They try and flirt themself out of several situations, even with the killing game's staff. The most notable is when they try and seduce a Monokuma worker during chapter one to get out of participating in the motive. It did not work at all.

They tend to best be described as 'flamboyant.' They're rather vain and appearance centric, genuinely believing that they're an attractive person and willing to put at least an hour into their looks every morning to make sure they same that way.

Love's behavior is slightly customized depending on who they're talking to, although they try and maintain a relatively stable attitude so they won't be exposed of as a liar when talking to two or more people. There are some small differences, though, as they identify some people as preferring a more dominant attitude, and others who might want to feel like their superior. Another example is that when speaking to Udamae they tended to throw more slang into their dialect, talking in a more blunt fashion that mirrored her own. On the other hand, when they spoke to Kyo, they always tried to keep up a formal cadence that seemed to amuse her.

Love also seems to have an objectively poor sense of humor, frequently making bad, deadpan jokes and then being the only person to laugh at it.

In general, Love's primary mission is to stay on everyone's good side, and they made an effort to speak to everyone, or at least those they labelled as having the most potential for harm. This is for several reasons. As one may expect, part of this stems from Love not wanting to die, and thinking they'll be less likely to be victimized if everyone likes them. However, this is not their foremost concern, as Love has relatively high confidence in being one of the top three most combat capable people in the killing game. The only people who they think could potentially best them in a fight are Udamae and Bunnou.

Another important reason for this anxious to please behavior is simply habit. As an informant, the more Love can relax their target by flirting and praising them, the more information they can get. This behavior has leaked into their everyday life and they really have no conscious way to turn it on and off anymore. They tend to view all of their interactions like a job, treating casual conversations with the same calculated adoration that they treat work. This, notably, does not extend to investigations or the trial. They have full faith that murder cases can be solved without their help and only participated in the chapter three investigation because they felt personally connected to it.

What Love is relatively unaware of, though, is that they just like to make people feel nice about themselves. They feel rather worthless themself, wholeheartedly adopting the idea that they'd been raised with that they're only as good as they can make other people feel. It brings them a great sense of joy to see other people happy because of them. If they can't do that through flirting, they're left saddened and desperately trying to revamp their strategy so they can become a person more worthy of love.

Since they're rather patient with people who are typically considered problematic, they tend to primarily surround themself with that type of people, quietly trying to prove to them too that they're still worthy of love and understanding. They also believe that this is the only sort of person who could need them as well, and tend to feel awkward and embarrassed around more typically 'normal' people, thinking they have no place in a world like that. It reminds them that they've never really spoken to teenagers before or lived an honest life.

Love's outward persona would indicate that they're a confident, intelligent, person who wants to romance any and everyone, and they are mostly unaware of the fact that this is not all there is to them. They show a few moments of self-awareness, such as once they learn that they've fallen into despair, they're able to quickly guess what it would be that drove them there. Although they never outright say it, it seems to make them rather uncomfortable and they take to hugging themself when the idea of it overwhelms them. For the most part, though, Love cannot acknowledge the many feelings they have that are contradictory to their outward nature.

However, most of these thoughts are bubbling just below the surface, and they tend to bubble out at inopportune times. For example, when Love gets drunk during chapter two, they admit to Kyo that they miss Hate. However, when they're sober again, they deny that they miss their brother. This isn't an obstinate lie, but rather Love can't admit to themself that their "hate" for their brother is simply born out of a feeling that Hate dislikes them and the feeling of sadness that accompanies the sibling that they love hating them.

Another prime example is that Love is unable to understand what platonic love is for large portions of the game. When "Xhom" dies, Love tears up, saying that they had loved him. They were unable to differentiate their feelings of budding friendship towards the analyst with feelings of romantic love.

Deep down, Love knows that what they want is to be unconditionally loved, which is reflected in their love hotel, where the player - Akira, in this case - calms them down after an emotional breakdown and reassures them that he still loves them and thinks they're an important person even after seeing them like this. Another important aspect of Love's hotel is that the other player is a relative blank slate; there are no preconceptions brought on them, and instead Love recognizes the person for who they really are, which is shown when they start talking about the participant's and their real relationship. This implies that Love does not actually have an ideal partner type, and they'd be happy with anyone who's able to open up emotionally.

When Akira confronts them about their love hotel after it's finish, Love is initially unable to accept that it is true, believing that the only love hotel they could have fits their outward persona. It is clear they're quick to panic, though, and when Akira continues to push, they crumble, believing that if they have to admit that their past relationships had been unhealthy, than all of the suffering they'd undergone was pointless. After Akira continues to be kind to them, though, they seem to recover a bit.

After they learn of being a despair and Akira shakes some sense into them, Love tends to be more honest with themself, at least around those they care for. They're forced to admit that they don't know themself as well as they thought, and overall seem better for it. They're even able to sort of admit that they don't have romantic feelings for Minoru or the other people they consider friends, and put in a genuine effort to understanding them on a human level. They have a lot of motivation to get out of the game and crack it wide open, going as far as to loudly proclaim that to Kei.

However, that of course crumbles when they fall back into despair and kill Riku and Ayano. They don't go to much effort to hide their crime, and the only reason they don't confess immediately is shock. Once they are met with hard proof, they're quick to snap, demanding that they're executed quickly so they don't do it again and kill someone that they love. They're reduced to tears, although it's unclear of how much of this is over the murders and their own impending death and how much is related to their despairing memories. When 'Hyakuya,' who is then believed to be the mastermind, is mentioned, Love is quick to panic, implying that something happened between the two of them before the game started. It is only when Akira kisses them and the cast tries to help them escape are they able to calm down slightly. Of course, though, this escape does not last long, and Love "dies" thinking they had finally found happiness and stability, only to ruin it themself.

Overall, Love is a difficult person to read. This is partially in due to them purposefully trying to conceal their opinions to seem more likable and partially due to the fact that they're unaware of many of the true drivers behind their actions. Additionally, Love is not used to taking part in normal teenage conversation, which leaves them frequently unaware about what other people are talking about. They never admit this, though, and there were numerous instances where Love had gotten someone to open up and talk about something, and the best they could do was smile and nod along, struggling to keep up with the conversation.

## Love's Fate

After Love had been "executed," they were dropped outside of the killing game, where they were picked up by Future Foundation officers and transported back to Future Foundation headquarters. They were locked in a holding cell while they awaited the end of the game and the ability to receive therapy.

During the events of the fifth chapter, when Minoru briefly returned to Future Foundation, the two were able to meet again, and they hugged each other tightly. Minoru caught Love up on the events of the killing game and Love asked him to pass along the message that they were okay and proud of all of the survivors.

Once the game ended, Love was able to reconnect with the other survivors. Mizuki Hojo convinced Love to receive NEO World Program therapy for any remains of their despair in an interview that would later be featured in Despair Annihilation. They asked out Akira, which he accepted.

When it was judged that Love was no longer a danger to themself or others, they were released into the care of Chisafusa Tachibana and Blaine Akagawa. There, they lived with Akira until they were both old enough to get on their own feet. Akira and Love frequently shared a bed. They kept in touch with the other survivors, most notably Kyo and Minoru.

A few months after the game, Love, Kyo, and Minoru decided to open up a private detective agency. They all felt unsatisfied with their calm lives and wanted an opportunity to get one up on Future Foundation, which none of them were really happy with. They decide to name it the WGA. It stands for 'Whore Gang Agency,' although they decide not to tell people that.

## Trivia

* Love's birthday is February 14th, aka Valentine's Day, the celebration of affection and ***love***.
	+ It's an ironic thing considering their namesake, however, they have shown resentment against it due to sharing their birthday with their brother, Hate.
	+ Love is the second character in Guessing Game to have a birthday on Valentine's Day. The other one is Kayda Mioda.
	+ Love's birthday dates when Guessing Game occurs in universe - near the end of freshman year of high school, in Febuary.
* It was a running gag in Guessing Game that no one, including Kei, had any idea where Love came from.
* Love, unlike most despairs, did not kill any of their family members. They were unable to locate their parents. While it was originally intended that Love had killed their brother, Hate, admin Evergreen retconned this when they learned that Love had survived their execution, for the simple reason that it would make them too sad if Love had killed their brother. It was also reasoned that Hate would have been able to beat Love in a fight if they had sparred.
* There has been some minor debate about what Love's name would have been pronounced as if Guessing Game had been a real Danganronpa game. Admins were unable to decide if it would have stayed the English word for Love but with a Japanese accent, or if they would have gone by 'Ai,' (**愛**) the Japanese word for 'love.'
* Love's favorite food is box mac and cheese.
* Love has a motorcycle, which is shown at the end of Despair Annihilation. They painted flame and heart patterns on it.