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[deloreans]

HITAGI SENJOUGAHARA | Bakemonogatari

IN CHARACTER
Name: Hitagi Senjougahara
Fandom: Monogatari Series
Canon point/AU: end of Tsubasa Cat arc (Bakemonogatari)
Journal: spites
Icon: LINK
Headshot: LINK
History:
☇ SERIES WIKIPEDIA
☇ CHARACTER WRITE-UP

Presentation:

Hitagi Senjougahara makes a striking first impression; by reputation, that sort of fragile, beautiful girl in your class whose presence feels like absence, often sick and always distant. And that's setting aside the impression she'll definitely make on your forehead with her stapler if you go looking for a second. Hitagi is sudden danger with a polite smile, something sharp in your mouth when you least expect it. You won't even know to expect it.

Generally these two things: "your expectations" and Hitagi Senjougahara have very little to do with each other except for when the latter takes an interest in tripping you up with the former, like your hazy thought of "typical delicate girl" is an invisible wire she'll pull taut between your feet just as you're crossing into the really quite groundless land of thinking she's like anything like normal.

Any girl who openly labels herself a tsundere can only be trouble.

That thing with the stapler is just the tip of the Office Depot-built ice(school supply)berg.

Hitagi Senjougahara talks like an assassin, like a seme rapist from a yaoi manga, a slightly unhinged philosopher, drops anime and manga references like a character from Genshiken and all delivered in the tones of a properly brought up young lady. She's well-read (liberally so which explains the references), well-bred (all death threats delivered in a modulated tone) and well-defended because as they (who are they?) say, the best defense is a good offense and her offense wins points for creativity and effort.

"Tsundere" is a little misleading because Hitagi traded in harisens for a stapler and shouting "Idiot!" or "Don't get me wrong..." for a more intimate form of verbal abuse, tailored to your insecurities, your secret hopes, dreams and kinks (some of which you may not even know exist much less have). Hitagi works at her verbal abuse and you can keep your rote insults in your eroges. In the space of a ten-minute conversation, from the moment she greets you with "I thought somebody had left a dead dog lying on a park bench... but it was just you" Hitagi can question your place in the evolutionary ladder, your academic performance, your purity levels, your complexes, your tendency to enjoy talking to young girls, anything is fair game if you're foolish enough to open your mouth and provide her with more ammo. Conversation, with Hitagi Senjougahara, is a battlefield, seeded with mines that could go off leaving you labeled as a wife-murdering sorocon or that could land you an offer to appear in your room naked under an apron... Verbally, she doesn't play nice, she doesn't play fair and most dauntingly at times, she doesn't play at all.

For all her outrageous declarations and verbal depredations, she can suddenly be disarmingly honest. After her initial bouts with Araragi of threat, flirtation and insults, upon gaining greater understanding of his personality and of her own feelings, Hitagi immediately confesses to him. As Hitagi herself explains, she was at first attempting to get Araragi to confess to her but once she learned that Araragi was the kind of person who would help anyone and that his encounter with her was no indication of special feelings on his end, she drops the game and declares that she loves him herself. First strike and merciless leaving no time for half-hearted hesitation, that good offense coming into play again. In theory, on paper (confessing to a guy when it turns out he didn't help you because he liked you?) it's terrifying but somehow purely Hitagi because if there is one thing to know about Hitagi in relationships it's that she's intense.

(It's the late blooming crazy virgin thing.

Or not.)

Upon confessing to Araragi, she requests that they make what kind of relationship they'll have clear and agrees to his stipulations that they be open to each other especially about the oddities they encounter. As their relationship unfolds, it's clear Hitagi is the one driving them forward though this isn't to imply that Araragi is an unwilling participant. Hitagi is fully intent on moving forward and moving forward together. Hitagi as a girlfriend has plans for the future but those aren't plans that dictate Araragi's but plans to accommodate whatever he eventually chooses to do: Hitagi off to university but sharing an apartment with Araragi so they can be together even if their career/school lives diverge. Hitagi also seems to be dictating the pace their relationship is going, from platonic nights of studying together to asking him out on their first date to bullying him into spending time with her best friend, Kanbaru Suruga and then trapping him in a car with her father to planning everything for their first date with no input from Araragi to feeling him up while he's trapped in said car with said paternal unit. This isn't just about Hitagi's inexperience and somewhat warped way of romancing via conquering invasion. This is actually to her romance via revelation. She reveals herself to him gradually, the study dates, her father and best friend, their first date chosen from a memory when her family was happy. This is Hitagi laying out all her cards, this is who I am, this is what I can do for you, this is what I have to offer. This is everything.

A reckless incursion, defenseless, a tactic only for those who've totally committed.

She's committed and she's in her own unique, semi-yandere way devoted. She's the kind of girl who when she talks about killing you, it may very well mean she loves you. To be more specific, she'd kill you to be the last person beside you when you died and woe to whoever gets in the way of that (like a different murderer). She's committed and more than a little jealous and absolutely dangerous (that yandere thing and that school supply thing and isn't it lucky that Araragi still has that vampire healing ability because ouch. eyeball). She's committed to supporting him however many times he comes back smelling like another woman. She's committed to trusting him to do the right thing and she's supportive, no questions asked, she'll take care of everything (schoolwork, alibis) while he runs off to help someone else. She's supportive enough to let him get hurt, to take care of him afterwards (admittedly by standing over his injured body and flashing him but that only makes her The Best. Girlfriend. Ever.) and neutralizing any threats he can't. She's in love with a boy like that, loved him not because he saved her. She loves him because he's the kind of person who would, who would save anyone even if it hurts him, even if it hurts her. She's in love to the point that she needs him to understand and to love what she has to offer: a starry sky, her loved ones and a damaged girl who used to be strange.

Motivations:

"Strange" and "normal" are distinctions she makes herself because she lived two years with her weightless body and disconnected emotions making her alien and that's the sort of thing that doesn't just leave a mark but recreates you. This is what living without weight means: your shoes are hard to lift all the time and your clothes drag like tangible gravity. You don't carry bags anymore and you learn to work with only what you can keep on hand. Your health evaluations are done in private and your records say 5 kilograms of girl. You measure every step like you'd fly off because you are weaker than the wind and all that weighs you down are your secrets and the things you carry to protect yourself. The world weighs heavy on you and you hold the world away, behind books and edges. You draw lines around yourself, an absolute territory that cannot be crossed, behind that line: normal, behind yours: strange. Everything that seems unusual is because you yourself are strange so it's you, all you and not them. Your mind has two years to align itself to this perspective.

Living two years like that, even restoring her weight and emotions fixes nothing. She remains estranged from her mother and carries over almost everything else. Her past and her secrets are hers to divulge in her own time and kindness, when not asked for, a form of hostility. Good intentions are just another excuse for optimism and self-deception and she's been there, bought that, lost a lot of money to con artists. Hitagi handles human interactions like combat, in terms she knows how to survive. She uses distance to protect herself first and full-on aggression second. She has her defenses down to an efficient science. As Araragi notes, she was able to create a Pavlovian reaction to staplers in a single experience.

Traits that already existed even before her encounter with the crab were exacerbated or revealed to be what they are: the budding defense mechanisms of the ideal popular girl. Hitagi herself states that she has a trouble with resolving things from her past. Hitagi, even before she lost her weight, usually removed herself from difficult and painful situations. She became estranged from her mother as the woman was lured deeper into the cult. After the incident with the cult leader, she traded away her pain and the connection to her mother. After she lost her weight and Kanbaru figured out her problem, she forcibly cut ties and in the cruelest terms possible declared that there wasn't even anything like friendship between them.

Another notable trait of Hitagi's, something she repeats like a mantra, is that she relies only on herself. She will pay her debts by herself. She will handle things herself. A normally admirable stance but in truth one that she's not been as consistent in living by as she might seem. She had developed this attitude even before her mother had betrayed her by handing her over to the cult leader --- she viewed her mother's reliance on the cult as a crutch and thus became that perfect Senjougahara simply to prove to her that this is what she could be without needing a crutch like her mother. It became a painful lesson after her mother stood by as the cult leader attempted to violate Hitagi and she realized that she alone would act to protect herself. After she was repeatedly tricked in trying to find a solution to her oddity, Hitagi faced Araragi and Oshino Meme with hostility and an eye to what she would have to pay. But this refusal to seek or even accept help is made into hypocrisy by the fact that Hitagi hadn't always shouldered her burdens by herself. After all, she had wished to be relieved of her pain and a god had answered.

It is in finally accepting this that Hitagi was able to truly save herself. Though Oshino had neutralized the god, Hitagi insisted in facing up to what she had done. She offered first her apologies and then her gratitude and her request to take back the weight she had been unable to carry. And though it fixed nothing, it fixes nothing the weight hollowing her out with the reality of her losses: her mother gone, her father absent, Hitagi alone, fixing things was never meant to be the point. Some things are lost forever and people cannot suddenly reset two years, saved memory and a girl is whole again. Hitagi Senjougahara doesn't work like that. She's still a girl who backhands with a compliment, a question, a declarative statement. She will still turn menacing on a dime and question her boyfriend's status as a carbon-based life form. Regaining her emotions and her weight can't change her past and her mistakes or who she has become but it does allow for change.

And her changes are these: she's a girl in love with a boy who would save anyone and they find ways to save each other every day. She keeps him from killing himself with his good intentions and he retrieves for her the things she had lost: her friendship with Kanbaru Suruga, her connection with her father. She doesn't carry her stapler as often anymore and she's able to choose her clothes without regard for how they weigh on her. She's learned that distance doesn't always help and that the only thing to do with pain is to live with it, to accept that it is no one else's to carry but yourself.

And her changes are these: Hitagi, who once traded her pain away, saying that that she can be grateful for that pain because it lead her to the person that she loves.

Give her time and she'll give you her timeline (because mapping her change is still something she'll decide for herself) and if you go in despair because she's groping you then claims you're a uniquely deviant existence that it takes a deranged potentially yandere individually to love you, here's the thing to keep in mind:

she talks about love.

SAMPLES
Thread: samples from percaligovideo: action tags » continuations

Prose:

There are arrows and axes and knives and weapons and men and women watching her, all edged things that gleam under the light. Hitagi stands in the center, dark hair and fragile bones and schoolgirl skirt and she knows what they see. A pretty enough girl who will probably die quickly. She doesn't hold that assumption against them. She ran track, never learned archery, never held a knife up to a killing arc. The weight of expectation is in their eyes and like the girl she was before, that weight isn't much. How slim her chances, how little the weight of her life.

She thinks back to what the guard that brought her in told her. Show them what you can do. Show them how you'll fight. What that guard didn't say and didn't have to: show them how you'll die.

She chooses to tell them instead. In this room, the many ways they could die, the weapons they don't even realize can be used against them. That man, the gaudy tie pin, gold tip that could be pressed into his eye, or a threat to drop into his mouth. That woman, the wires that hold her complicated hairstyle up, tangling around her skull, into her skin.

She tells them these things but does not do them. When she first walked in, there was that dangerous second, a moment when she would have. It hasn't been too long since the time when it would have passed from instinct into action, from reflex into true threat.

But this, they tell her, is a game. With rules and moves that she may not know but the principle is the same.

Think ahead.

So she uses words instead of the cutting scarring truth of deeds. There will be time enough to show them. Now is the time to tell them, to make an impression but one that won't leave too deep a mark.

There are scores, they tell her and she does not think of the how but of what the numbers would mean. Survival.

Ranked too high and she'd be a target for those looking to prove themselves. Ranked too low and she'd be a target for those looking to pick the weak ones off.

The middle is what she aims for and what she intends to get.

What is your character scored:

As far as suitability for participating in the arena, Hitagi would rate low-to-middle range in scoring her physical strengths. She has no known combat skills or training. However she was a track star in her junior high school years and since regaining her weight and emotions, seems to have resumed some kind of informal training. In Nekomonogatari Shiro, she's seen doing splits and stretching exercises easily and without any strain. In the same novel, in searching for a missing classmate, she ran all night around the town so it could be inferred that she has developed a great deal of stamina as well. Despite this, her flexibility and stamina can't be classed beyond that of trained athlete and without any other specialized training, she should probably only get mid-range scores for her physical attributes.

As for her mental capabilities, Hitagi is highly intelligent and has shown herself to be quite capable of improvising (using school supplies as weaponry) and adapting to the most unusual of situations (her oddity). In the past, she's also shown she's capable of committing violence in order to protect herself and her secrets. Admittedly, at that point in time, she had lost her emotions so she was unable to feel any guilt from her actions and thus there was nothing to curb her except the necessity of remaining discreet. She's also shown to have a fairly analytical mindset, one that works out solutions to situations based on exploiting the expectations of the people involved. She is NOT a genius however and while she's quite well-read again she hasn't undergone any specific mental training. I'd put her to the upper mid-level at the most.

I'm unsure about possible audience reaction to her. She's verbally quite facile and would probably acquit herself well in interviews considering her quickness with wordplay and banter. Basing it on real life responses to her character from series fans, she'll probably be a polarizing figure. People who might find her unpredictability charming would enjoy her but there's an equal possibility that she could be considered too extreme / off-putting. Either way, she's a very provoking character so she'd make for good entertainment.

My final assessment is that she probably shouldn't and wouldn't get anything beyond middling scores. (Although this is something she's also aiming for as per my sample)