Dumpy dump
@hanamukes
- Just in general, her overall story focuses a lot on her trying to find a reason to go on. She admits that she clings to music with her life, and is using it to find meaning in her life. Her singing being something that can make people happy is what gives her meaning
- To her, singing is her life in the most literal sense. She claims that if she were to lose it, she wouldn’t be able to go on and life wouldn’t be worth living anymore. She says she cares about it more than she cares about other people because it’s her very lifesource
- She once tried to give P a book that she bought after she finished looking through it, and when asked why she didn’t just let him read it and then keep it, she said there’d be no point in bringing it home when nobody else would read it. “Books are things to be thrown in my house.” Later in OFA (One For All), she elaborates that at first, her parents just bickered, but one day her father threw a book, and when it passed by her eyes, she realized that their happiness had ended and life was never going to be the same
- She didn’t fully elaborate on this, but she said she’s legitimately scared of her parents, and she’s scared of getting close with others in fear that something she does will make them turn out just like her parents
- She says her brother’s death wasn’t the hardest part of the 9 years she lived with her parents after his passing. After she opened up to P about it, she was able to talk about him more freely with others. The hardest part of that time of abuse was when her mother one day told her that she was the reason they (Chihaya’s parents) never got a divorce and thus stayed together in misery. Chihaya believes their abuse is her fault; her existing forced them to stay together and become so violent, and she wished she could just disappear “just like Yuu”
- She also says her parents used to be nice, and that’s why it’s so scary that they turned out the way they did
- A plotpoint in the second game (I refer to it simply as 2) is that Chihaya’s really forcing herself to sing, to the point that she’s straining her throat in the process. If she keeps singing, she’ll lose the ability to sing for good. When faced with this, she decided that she’d keep singing anyway, despite knowing what would happen and was ready to give up on singing altogether after. She says this after having said earlier in the game that if she stopped singing, she wouldn’t want to live anymore…
- When her trauma is stirred, she has a tendency to lose her voice. Unlike the anime, this affects her speaking too. She’s completely unable to get a sound out at all and is only able to gesture with her body what she’s trying to say. Trying to use her voice causes her to cough and hack. She says she was like this for a full 6 months when she first learned Yuu had died; “I only got my voice back while I was sobbing one day. Up until that point, I had honestly convinced myself that Yuu took my voice with him when he died.”
- Just in general, she has a fairly weak body and is quite prone to getting sick
- She says she doesn’t believe in Santa because when she was young, she once caught her parents putting presents beside her pillow
- She hates doing her homework and especially at school, because if she tries to study in the library there, other students will try to approach her and she gets annoyed when they don’t stop talking about irrelevant topics. She studies in the public library instead
- Chihaya uses a lot of metaphors in her speech to get her point across. Some examples include referring to her dream as flying, she says she doesn’t want to fall into the ocean midway as she tries to reach her dreams, she compares her heart to an empty desert, she says it feels as if snow piles up in her heart “so maybe if I close it off for good, my pain will stop,” she says it feels like a “wheel” in her family fell off when things started to fall apart. The lyrics to her image songs are an honest representation of the things she actually says
- She’s not good at talking and always sources her songs as a good way to understand her. This applies to her image songs and things she sings in general; for example, in her Master Artist 2 album, she says Arcadia refers to her “goal,” Megare gets across her desire to reach the top of the idol world, and Ai ni Tsuite displays what she views love as
- She hates wearing skirts because they feel too “airy,” and in general hates putting on stage outfits. She gets uncomfortable really easily, and close to the time she debuted, was really difficult about the outfits she’d wear, always getting mad at P for making her put on a swimsuit and claimed “Nobody’s going to be happy seeing me in this anyway. Why don’t they have someone more suited do this instead?”. She says she wants to be a singer, not someone to be gawked at. Even after her development, she still quite dislikes putting on outfits, but doesn’t complain as openly about it
- She gets easily discouraged and insecure when doing something she’s not confident in. For example, when she was forced to do maid cafe work, she was too stiff in her manners and scared her customers, and when P thought that having her friends around doing the job with her would at least calm her down in this situation, Chihaya ended up comparing her failures to their successes and got even more discouraged
- She’s really bad with technology and once needed P to help her try and find an MP3 player. Despite doing a month of research on it before eventually reaching out to him, she mistakenly called it a “PM3” player and had no idea what she was even looking for in one when he asked which specs she wanted. “I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking you.”
- She’s jealous of Yayoi’s happy family and wishes she was born into hers instead. She also says if she and Yayoi were siblings, Yayoi would be the older one because she’s a competent elder sister unlike herself. Imai’s interpretation of their relationship is that Chihaya really admires Yayoi because she’s able to do the things for her siblings that she was unable to do for Yuu before he passed
- Haruka once asked Chihaya for singing advice, and Chihaya’s response was to give her recommendations but to also add “Please stay the way you are. You don’t want to sing like me.” She was referring to her over-dependance on singing when she said this. She legitimately respects Haruka for how honest and sincere her love for music is, which she feels she lacks
- On this note, part of her growth is her trying to become less dependant on music and sing again for her happiness and because she wants to, rather than feeling like she needs to
- In the first game, the path to Chihaya’s happiness was to completely ignore her parents and try to become a singer despite them
- When she starts living alone, she’s still relying on her parents and needs their signatures etc when she does renewals on her apartment. In OFA, P offers to act as her guardian, which she declined at the time but appreciated the thought. She’s really ashamed that she can’t just cut them off altogether
- This said, despite that she sometimes feels sympathy for them, Chihaya claims she hates her parents and doesn’t want to talk about them around the time she debuted. She says watching them makes her never want to start a family of her own out of fear that her child might go through the exact same thing she did, because she doesn’t trust herself to not turn out like them. She hates people who she views as self-centered and don’t care about taking things out on others. She actively avoids trying to upset people in any way she can because doing so makes her just like them.
- This puts her attitude in episode 20 of the anime into a scary perspective. Chihaya hates upsetting people, she hates putting frowns on people’s faces, she hates worrying people, she does everything in her power to make people happy… and yet she completely shut down and snapped at Haruka as well as worried all of her friends. The guilt she must have felt, on top of all of her other things eating away at her (her feelings on Yuu, her reflecting at how her parents treat her, to put it bluntly; her feeling suicidal over how she’s the reason they’re like that)... her at least trying to apologize later in the episode, but Haruka forgiving her right away had to have meant a lot to her
- This in mind, in OFA, she eventually moves on a bit and gets excited at the thought that she might have a child one day, because she would want to tell them “Thank for your being born.” The thought is enough to bring her to tears
- She believes that she has to bear all of her pain by herself, and when P once tries to hug her to comfort her, she gets upset because she thinks it shows that she’s weak and needs to be stronger
- She sometimes asks for headpats from P, because her parents never gave her one and she’s always craved that kind of affection
- She says the 9 years when she lived with her parents after Yuu died and before she debuted were “nothing but suffering”
- She makes a lot of references to crying. Only two of her image songs (Me ga Au Toki and arcadia) don’t make a direct reference to her crying. As far as times we’ve actually seen her cry go; she cried when her parents got divorced (she felt as if she had nothing left to look forward to in her life when the one thing she waited 8 years for didn’t leave her with a sense of relief), she sobbed herself to sleep when she lost her voice in a drama CD because her trauma got stirred up (“I can’t take this anymore… somebody… anybody.... Please save me… (nobody will come to my rescue because I have nothing other than my singing).”), she cried when she got her voice back in 2, and she started sobbing after she sang Saihyou for the first time because the song hits home a little too much
- In Saihyou, the line she struggled with most is the one where she says “Farewell.” She says that she was never able to say that to Yuu, even though it’s a word she says every day, and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to sing the song “safely” because of it. Cue her violently sobbing as mentioned above
- She had Saihyou written to be able to move on from his death as well as her past
- Dogs are her favorite animal and she wishes she could own one. On the contrary, she doesn’t like cats because she thinks they’ll run away if she takes her eyes off of them, and she doesn’t like penguins because she doesn’t like seeing them cooped up in a pen
- She freaks out easily when put in a horror setting. There was a zombie skit that was put on that she was a part of, and she was terrified at the thought that her friends would die and she wouldn’t be able to save them
- She lived with Azusa for an unspecified period of time, and for unstated reasons. She also once visited her house bearing a gift just because she wanted to see Azusa (this was during the period of time leading up to episode 19)
- She was out of work for a full 2 weeks during the events of episode 20 before they started writing Yakusoku
- While she went abroad to America, she took special care of her throat because they never found the cause of her losing her voice
- Coffee is her favorite drink, but she claims it tastes and looks gross when she drinks it around other people (specifically her mother). She says it looks like she’s looking into a bottomless, murky pit
- She says she forgot what snow felt like even though she has memories of having played in it before and her parents took her to a snowy mountain before. “It’s like there’s a gap in my memory, where it was completely wiped clean…”, P guesses that a snow related incident might’ve happened to make her wipe out the memory, but she completely shuts down at this and it’s never brought up again. She also compares a ‘snowy place that never warms up’ to herself
- She has a tendency to forget her birthday and questions why anyone would care to celebrate her being born. She claims it’s been “a very long time” since anyone did
- On her days off, she focuses solely on training or work. She never goes out with family or friends, spending her day from the second she wakes up to the second she sleeps focused on music in one way or another
- You can tie virtually anything she does back to singing. For instance, she once explained that she was reading a romance novel that was the rave at school because understanding why things are popular would benefit her career. She gets upset with herself when she does things that don’t feel productive, or directly benefit singing, so she frequently comes up with excuses and ways to tie things in when it’s not necessary
- Love is considered a weakness of hers. She doesn’t understand romance, and says she can’t relate to people who cast aside everything in life for romance. She also avoids getting close with people because it’s not necessary in her eyes, and because she doesn’t want to bond with someone only for her to “lose” them somehow. You have to approach her first and genuinely care about her for her to open up to you at all. All she wants in life is to feel needed somehow
- In the first game, her tension (mood, essentially) drops a lot at the beginning of each week. This highlights that her mood drops when she gets home every day. Just in general, she has the most unsteady tension in the game, so much that it’s referred to as the “Chihaya Spiral.” Her mood drops a lot, and quite easily, and the only way you’re able to truly recover it is by winning auditions with her, otherwise her mood stays at the bottom of the barrel and she’s prone to skipping work
- She constantly frames her childhood (what she considers when she was “happy”) as a long time ago, so long ago that she can’t remember what it truly felt like and she’s unsure she’ll ever experience happiness again