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The two protagonists from Blattodea: a hobo-roach and her spotlight-stealing ant girlfriend.


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    Chiyuri Haijima 

Chiyuri Haijima (這島 ちゆり, Haijima Chiyuri), alias American Cockroach/Wamongokiburi

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/chiyurihaijimaprofile.png
"Tora tora tora! A surprise attack has been achieved!"
"We vagabonds... are not weak people. We do not give in to our hard fate. We accept the absurdity of society... and we are willing to occupy the lowest position. We are strong winners... who enjoy our freedom by ourselves!"

A bright and optimistic 17 years old orphan with cockroach powers. After escaping from Pomario as a child, Chiyuri was adopted by a homeless man named Yamato and has been happily living with him and his community since. Unfortunately, that peace is ruined by the aftermath of the Arachnid Hunt...
  • Achievements in Ignorance: Chiyuri pacifies and befriends Dinoponera, who unknowingly to her is an infamous Child Soldier who is too agressive and psychotic to get along with anyone else despite her sincere wish to have friends.
  • And Now for Someone Completely Different: It was known since Arachnid ended that Shinya felt a newcomer heroine was needed since Alice became too powerful, but Blattodea itself pulls a surprise switcheroo between Alice and Chiyuri. It only showed Alice in the marketing for the series' launch and let readers expect Megumi Oki to be the titular blattodea heroine.
  • Animal Motifs: Cockroaches aren't predators, so the series twists the traits of those bugs into things useful in combat for Chiyuri in any way it can. For example, Chiyuri can shoot energy blasts because cockroaches have "spread over the world like a wave".
  • Animal-Themed Superbeing: Like Gokiburi, Chiyuri has cockroach-based powers but awakened them at birth. She's abnormally strong and fast, and has Super-Senses thanks to her antennae. But while Goki is likened to house roaches, Chiyuri is themed after wild, stronger, American roaches.
  • Attempted Rape: It is known that the author starts most of his stories with the heroine being molested or tortured, but Chiyuri suffers harsher sexual indignation in the first few chapters of Blattodea than Alice did throughout Arachnid as a whole. Even her friend Dinopo tries raping her on occasion due to being half-zombified, but Chiyuri only seems to get annoyed with her for it.
  • Audience Surrogate: Chiyuri is a mostly normal girl who's suddenly thrust into the apocalyptic scenario caused by the Organization. She is retconned into Dinoponera's backstory to look after her after all the... unpleasant things that happened, making the roach-girl the (maybe) perfect and official Fix Fic character for any reader who cares for the ant-girl.
  • Batter Up!: Her weapon of choice against the zombies is a baseball bat.
  • Big "WHAT?!": She seems to go "EH?!" at things as much as Dinopo does with her "ไม่มีทาง".
  • Bindle Stick: Rather than the stereotypical bag on a stick, Chiyuri carries her stuff in a duffle bag and Dinoponera keeps a gym bag.
  • Book Dumb: She never went to school and her first impression of it is Dinoponera getting traumatized in just half a day at Shouran High, as she doesn't know a Carnival of Killers took place there. Still, the narrator makes a big deal of her being able to raise her intelligence in critical situations.
  • Break the Cutie: Downplayed; Chiyuri starts out very carefree, so in just a night her new friend gets rape-zombified in some death game, her uncles of a sort try to rape her but get killed by said healed friend and Yamato gets run over by the zombie hordes while poor hobo-roach is helpless to do anything but flee in tears. Over time, though, she mostly overcomes it while travelling with Setsuna and goes back to enjoying her homelessness despite the whole country being torn apart.
  • Calling Your Attacks:
    • Whether she's just launching Setsuna airbone with a punch to the belly or tearing a zombie's head in half, she will call "Cockroach Breaker" any time she lands a good hit. Her barrage of punches in particular has her shouting "Degradation Equals Freedom!" upon finishing.
    • Whenever she avoids some kind of threat, she shouts "Emergency escape!"
  • Cardboard Box Home: She used to sleep inside a cardboard box next to a bridge, and while taking shelter with Dinopo in a warehouse the girls also sleep in boxes. This relates to her roach-person motif, as she's fond of enclosed spaces.
  • Catchphrase: Chiyuri often talks out loud about the advantages of being a hobo and then affirms that "having no home is the best", with spread arms for bonus points. The third time she's seen doing it Dinoponera starts complaining that no, being homeless is no good at all. It also works as a parallel to Megumi's "being hated is the best" catchphrase.
  • Celibate Hero: After Megumi was said to have Extreme Libido due to being a cockroach-girl, the narrator babbles about how female roaches can reproduce asexually or mate only once to stay pregnant for life to make Chiyuri into this trope instead. She wants slow and steady romance and is irritated by her half-zombified friend's lack of self-control and repeated attempts to molest her at night.
    "You're overwhelmed by lust... Unless we're dating, I can't allow you... to have sex with me!"
  • Combat Pragmatist: Chiyuri sucker punches Abu into submission before he can fight Hibiki, who is disturbed by Chiyuri's lack of sportmanship. Made ironic by her correctly identifying how Abu is the kind to sneak under the blind spots of enemies to kill them instantly at a time he was going for a different approach by first learning from how Hibiki fights.
  • Commonality Connection: She knows just enough of the Sailor-Force anime to catch Dinoponera's attention, which allows her to pacify the murderous little ant. It's also implied that Dinopo having been homeless as a child helps her sympathize with the roach despite the disdain for civilians she had shown back in Arachnid.
  • Dark and Troubled Past: She's an abandoned child who escaped from Kabutomushi's abusive training at Pomario. She hasn't shown any trauma over that so far, though, and was raised well by Yamato.
  • Depending on the Artist: The sketches for chapter 1 of Blattodea show the author draws Chiyuri with a plain hairstyle that makes her look much like Alice, which seems to be his template heroine.
  • Dissonant Serenity:
    • Chiyuri feels a little too happy about being destitute. Her introductory scene shows her being nearly gangraped in her sleep, but she just jumps away and ignores her attackers like she's too carefree to be upset. Averted when she nearly gets zombified later that night and is absolutely terrified.
      "I'll use my privilege to sleep anywhere I want, whenever I want. That's kind of hard to beat. Hmmm... In the end... Not having a home... is the best!"
    • At Hibarigaoka Prison, she happily tells Alice and Hanakamakiri that Setsuna is now a Good Girl and that in any case she can keep the Zombie Infectee from starting any trouble. On one hand, Alice and Hanakamakiri are shocked to hear something so overconfident from someone who's a nobody to them. On the other, there is enormous Dramatic Irony in Chiyuri acting so casual about the "rape correction" her friend suffered while Setsuna's status is unknown after she's implied to have been coerced into training under her indirect rapist Sasori for three months.
    • Right afterwards, some infected guy with a long incubation period goes undead and starts attacking those around him. Alice and Hanakamakiri start panicking, but Chiyuri happily tells them not to worry as Himekuwagata shows up and stabs the guy through the mouth. A Zombie Apocalypse is happening, Setsuna went M.I.A. after almost getting raped by a hundred people and almost getting sliced in half, the zombies are able to break in unnoticed, all the inmates and prison staffers are rapist scumbags and Chiyuri just... doesn't seem to care...
  • Early Installment Character-Design Difference: A bonus poster for Blattodea volume 1 portrays Chiyuri with blue eyes and a red scarf, but the cover for volume 2 settles them on red and grey, respectively. Also noticeable is that the that cover portrays her with gloves on, which doesn't actually happen until chapter 12 on volume 3.
  • Evil Counterpart: Inverted as Chiyuri is a light foil to Alice, Gokiburi and Dinoponera all at once. Gokiburi even appears to be her archnemesis for the story.
  • Exposed to the Elements: Despite wearing a jacket, a scarf and gloves during daytime, Chiyuri often sleeps while only wearing underwear and without a roof over her head. Even discounting the amount of rapist thugs in the setting, it shouldn't be healthy for a homeless girl to sleep so confortably inside a box next to some bridge like that.
  • Expy:
    • Going by her Leiji Matsumoto theming, Chiyuri Haijima is likely inspired by Tetsuro Hoshino from Galaxy Express 999 in how she's a impoverished girl in shabby clothes who lost her family.
    • Her hairstyle, hat and clothes make her highly resemble Mayuri Shiina. Even their names are similar, and the time travel theme of Steins;Gate matches with Setsuna being named after Sailor Pluto and having a pseudo-time-slowing power.
  • Extreme Omnivore: Thanks to her hobo-roach powers, Chiyuri can eat anything without getting sick. She can consume spoiled food and drink a lot of booze due to this, and Juzuhigemushi's aphrodisiacs don't work on her either.
  • First-Name Basis: With Dinoponera, who is so excited to become Chiyuri's friend that she allows Chiyuri to call her "Setsuna". Previously, Dinoponera wasn't known to have a civilian name.
  • Foil: Chiyuri is a Contrasting Sequel Main Character counterpart to both Alice and fellow roach Megumi who is even paired up with Alice's Evil Counterpart Dinoponera to better match the two Arachnid protagonists.
    • Unlike Alice, Chiyuri is a pure brawler who can overpower her and Dinoponera's Hyper-Awareness abilities on brute force alone, with no planning or weapons. She is no pushover, but when the thought of killing Dinoponera crosses her mind she dismisses it and talks things out instead — unlike how Alice usually fixates on having no choice but to kill her enemies and drove Dinoponera away with fear.
    • Chiyuri has an unfortunate past but is still way more carefree than Alice despite being homeless and is far kinder and more well-adjusted than Gokiburi, Dinoponera, Imomushi... and just about everyone else in the cast. Even after Yamato suppposedly dies and Chiyuri is left with just Dinopo for company, the two try to move on and start having fun fighting the zombie apocalypse.
    • She was raised and trained properly by Yamato, who appears to be a good guy. Alice was forced to kill her father figure Kumo, Goki has an Odd Friendship with her Sadistic Teacher Kabutomushi at best and Dinoponera is implied to have been abandoned by her Fair-Weather Mentor Paraponera.
  • The Fool: Chiyuri is a naive, innocent and often barely-dressed vagrant girl in a planet of rapists who hasn't the vaguest idea what's going around her but keeps on surviving anyway through quick thinking and brute strength.
  • Got Over Rape Instantly: In Chiyuri's introductory scene, she escapes from a trio of thugs who were trying to rape her in her sleep but is oddly carefree about it, being too stubborn to change her lifestyle even if she admits it's dangerous to be sleeping all scantily-clad out in the open. It's quite ironic, then, how she's one of the characters who keep emphasizing how Setsuna was sooo changed for the better from being beaten and raped...
  • Good Is Not Soft: Despite being homeless, Chiyuri is pretty much the only mentally stable and good natured girl with a fine upbringing in the whole cast of the series, or even the author's works in general. She'll still beat the crap of anyone who harms her or Setsuna, to the point of attempting to kill Imomushi to protect Setsuna despite otherwise following a no kill rule. And although Chiyuri is surgically written for the "Dinoponera did nothing wrong" crowd, even the ant-girl isn't spared from punishment if she misbehaves.
  • Hair Antennae: In the setting, roaches like her and Megumi are the only bug-people shown to have functional antennae which they use for detecting and avoiding threats. An oddly common drawing error in the story is the illustrator forgetting to put them atop Chiyuri's head even though he never makes that mistake on Megumi.
  • Hobos: Chiyuri had a carefree homeless life with Yamato and his friends on a public park helping them crush cans for recycling, and even in the apocalypse she tries to remain cheerful while travelling with Dinoponera.
  • Horrible Judge of Character: One of Chiyuri's few flaws as a dumb and forgiving Nice Girl who doesn't know the kind of trouble she's involved with.
    • Although Chiyuri isn't blind to Setsuna's faults, she cherishes her and exaggerates to others how much of a good girl she has become as a result of her "terrible experience". When zombie Setsuna attempted to attack her, Chiyuri thought she was drunk and was confused because the ant-girl had been "so nice" that morning even though they had a fight and were dangerously close to using lethal force on each other.
    • She believes Hibiki is a good guy just because she mistakes him for another "Sailor-Force" fan, not knowing he's quite the psycho who's only recently been reconsidering his actions and grudge towards Alice because of how depraved Megumi has been acting as a prison director.
    • Chiyuri talks a rapist thug out of sexually harassing Alice and Hanakamakiri, and tells them that he is a good person deep down. The scene conveys that while it might be too psycho of Alice to want to demolish the entire prison because of a rapist or two, Chiyuri might be acting too forgiving to everyone for her own good.
  • Humble Hero: She's very polite and underplays her own strength to others while praising how "insanely strong" her friend Setsuna is.
  • I Just Want to Be Free: Even as a homeless girl, Chiyuri is happy to live as she wishes. She was taught by Yamato to lead a dignified life not bound to anything, but after finding she wasn't free from the Organization, losing Yamato to the zombies and being tasked to help Setsuna, Chiyuri must fight tooth and nail for her freedom. She's then disgusted by finding girls being treated as sex slaves at Hibarigaoka Prison, and sets out to take Gokiburi down so they can be free too.
  • In a Single Bound: The first unusual thing shown about her is her explosive jumping ability.
  • In the Name of the Moon: When Hibiki antagonises Chiyuri with his Kamen Rider-like boasts, Chiyuri retorts by spouting Sailor Moon one-liners. A certain ant-girl relegated to tiny background panels has her heart melt away the more Chiyuri does it.
  • Indy Ploy: As a roach-person, Chiyuri's IQ increases in times of emergency, allowing her to make up plans and tough decisions on the fly. The insect trivia given for this is internet nonsense, though...
  • Innocent Fanservice Girl: Chiyuri is so innocent and carefree that she doesn't mind sleeping or walking around in her underwear. She doesn't even bat an eye at having to fight a nude Dinoponera.
  • Ironic Name: She's codenamed "Wamongokiburi/American Cockroach" even though she's themed after the Space Battleship Yamato and doesn't do anything American. In fact, she jokes about Pearl Harbor when she captures Setsuna's heart.
  • Ki Attacks: The Wave Cannon taught to her by Yamato is the first long ranged beam attack seen in the series. As a Fa jin kind of attack, she gestures a Kamehame Hadoken to shoot but the blast is invisible. Her going on the defensive before attacking is compared to how roaches have spread like a wave around the world by simply fleeing from predators for millions of years.
  • Kiai: "Dadadadadada!!"
  • Locked Out of the Loop: Chiyuri knows nothing about the Organization and Setsuna apparently never spoke of the Arachnid Hunt in detail to her. The clueless hobo only has a vague idea that Setsuna lost a fight to somebody named Alice and became a Zombie Infectee that must be taken to her.
  • Made of Iron: Imomushi tries to break Chiyuri's neck and thrashes her like a ragdoll, but the roach is shown to be as tough as Kabutomushi and is only very briefly knocked out from such damage.
  • Macguffin Delivery Service: Yamato tells Chiyuri that only by delivering Dinoponera to the new Organization Boss, Alice, the outbreak can be stopped. Meanwhile, Bekkōbachi and Hanakamakiri plot to keep Alice in the dark and kill Dinoponera so they can eliminate as much as possible of Japan's population.
  • Meaningful Name: The "這" kanji in "Haijima" means "crawl" and she's a roach-girl. Tentomushi mockingly points this out and calls Chiyuri somebody who only survives by using sneak attacks and hiding in the shadow of the strong.
  • Morality Chain: Setsuna refrains from killing too much and acts nice to keep Chiyuri from getting upset with her, until she gets fed up with all the people trying to harm them and declares she would rather kill them all.
  • Muscles Are Meaningless: Like all other girls in the series, Chiyuri packs a lot of power and endurance despite her slender figure, and can further power herself up to get on Kabutomushi's level.
  • Never Bareheaded: Chiyuri wears a frilly and patched bucket hat most of the time. It only gets put away during fight scenes, showing off her roach-like antennae to allow her to perceive threats all around her.
  • Nice Girl: Chiyuri is all around kind, confident and social, without any psycho traits to her like either Alice, Megumi and Setsuna. This is why she does the impossible and befriends a maniac like the ant-girl, because unlike Imomushi or Alice she decides to focus on peacefully resolving the conflict with her rather than aggravating it further.
  • Only Friend: Actually earned the ever problematic Dinoponera's friendship, and it was well worth it.
  • Only Sane Woman: Downplayed, as while Chiyuri might seem way more stable and kind than Alice or Kabutomushi, there's still something... off... about how carefree she often is about the Crapsack World she is stuck in.
  • Parental Abandonment: The narrator explains Chiyuri was abandoned due to being born with a "serious condition", but all the reader can see is that she was born a cute roach-girl with antennae on top of her head.
  • Pervert Revenge Mode: After Setsuna has been so throughly raped, the one character who should be doing lewd things to the girl when she gets horny subjects her to comical Domestic Violence instead. She even blasts Setsuna with the Wave Cannon at one point.
  • Playing Possum: Chiyuri fakes being crushed by Hiyokemushi's armored arms to escape from him, with narration funfacts detailing how that's typical for cockroaches.
  • Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: Chiyuri can punch so fast she trumps Dinoponera's Concentration Driving Free.
  • Remember the New Guy?: During Arachnid, Dinoponera never mentioned having any friends. Chiyuri is retconned into Dinoponera's backstory a few hours before the Arachnid Hunt so the two do become friends and because of that Dinopo is able to overcome the horrible fate she suffered during Arachnid.
  • Rescue Romance: Although Chiyuri plays hard-to-get, it's clear she became infatuated with Setsuna after being saved from the zombies by her. The author's afterword in Blattodea volume 5 outright describes Chiyuri as being attracted to Setsuna and showering her in "unconditional love without expecting anything in return".
  • Scarf of Asskicking: Wears a grey scarf and is a powerful close-ranged combatant.
  • Stepford Smiler: Most of the time, Chiyuri appears to be doing just fine in the post-apocalypse. But in one scene she's shown crying in her sleep over her master's death like Alice in the prologue and feeling useless about not being able to find the spider-girl for a whole year to attempt to resolve the outbreak.
  • Stripperiffic:
    • Part of her costume is just tights under a shirt barely long enough to cover her panties and that turn transparent at the writer's convenience. Concept art shows they considered giving her shorts at some point.
    • She sleeps wearing just a white tank top and panties and sometimes fights like that too. Much like Imomushi back in Caterpillar and also Hitomi from the author's Killing Bites, actually. Must be yet another Author Appeal thing.
  • Super-Reflexes: Has roach-like antennae for detecting and evading threats.
  • Super-Speed: She's about as fast as Gokiburi, if not more, which she uses for rapid-fire punching and strategic retreats.
  • Super-Strength: She's about as strong as Kabutomushi, as she's able to pin Imomushi to the floor... at least until Imomushi goes into her Unstoppable Rage mode to smash the roach all over the place, and like Kabuto she still gets up to keep fighting.
  • Swiper, No Swiping!: Just over 200 chapters into the overall series, Chiyuri orders a cartoonishly ugly thug to stop sexually harassing Alice and he, in fact, apologetically stops.
  • Tell Me How You Fight: Chiyuri uses explosive Bajinquan techniques that exaggerate the concept of "Fa jin" by enabling her to shoot invisible ki blasts. This befits a stubborn Space Battleship Yamato-themed girl and, like in Baki, it also ties to cockroaches being able to instantly skitter away from threats.
  • There's No Place Like Home: Unlike how Gokiburi tries to hide away from the zombie apocalypse in an underground bunker and how Alice despairs over not belonging anywhere, Chiyuri is shown to be happy with her homeless status and believes it grants her freedom.
  • Thou Shalt Not Kill:
    • When she realizes Dinoponera is immune to blunt force, Chiyuri wonders if she'll need to kill her somehow but decides against it and cleverly talks things out instead. It says something that murdering someone even crossed her mind in the first place, but Yamato remarks he taught her to be able to survive without killing.
    • However, Chiyuri gets so angry at Imomushi nearly killing her for no reason and attempting to cripple Dinoponera that after one attempt to make her surrender she fires the Wave Cannon with killing intent. Imomushi only survives thanks to her ability of redirecting kinetic energy into the ground.
  • Training from Hell: She couldn't stand Kabutomushi's harsh training at Pomario and managed to escape from there. Under Yamato's guidance, she turned out very strong all the same.
  • Tsundere: Chiyuri clearly likes Setsuna back but tends to react to her affection with indifference or even comical physical abuse.
  • Un-person: She couldn't go job hunting if she wanted because she has no citizenship. The Organization has claimed all her documentation as if they own her very existence, like they do with all of their assassins.
  • Unwitting Pawn:
    • Unknowingly to Chiyuri, Yamato was training her under the Organization's orders after she thought she had escaped from Pomario.
    • The evil staff of Hibarigaoka Prison prosecute Chiyuri and Setsuna partly due to assumptions that they were sent there or manipulated in some form to sabotage the place. Ironically, Chiyuri really hasn't the faintest clue of anything involving either the Organization or Serena.
  • Use Your Head: Headbutts are an attack that Chiyuri consistently performs every so often in the story, likely to characterize her as thick-headed. It's also reminiscent of how her counterpart Megumi unconciously fought Geji back in Arachnid.
  • The Worf Effect: After a good showing against the henchmen in Hibarigaoka Prison, Chiyuri suffers an instant knock out from Shoichiro's Ki Manipulation punch to show how strong he is and ends up captured.

    Setsuna Dinoponera 

Setsuna Dinoponera (セツナ・ディノポネラ)

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/arachniddinoponeraprofilev2.png
Friends can be beaten into all shapes and sizes!
"Someone who's as strong as me. Someone I can share my worries, my happiness, and this world with... I'm searching for a friend like that."

A cheerfully deadly girl who, as a Child Soldier raised by mercenary Paraponera in Thailand, awakened an odd ability named Concentration Driving Free that enables her to freely enhance her reflexes. One of the Organization's strongest members, Setsuna takes part in the Arachnid Hunt to make friends... on her terms. She wields a pair of gauntlets with hidden blades coated with Dinoponera ant venom, which she's always happy to be punchy and pricky with.

Things don't turn well at all for Dinopo at the Arachnid Hunt, but Blattodea gives her a friend in Chiyuri and a major role in the whole zombie apocalypse mess.

Spoilers for her appearance in Arachnid will be unmarked.
  • Abhorrent Admirer: A downplayed one to Chiyuri, like how Megumi is to Alice. Chiyuri is fond of Setsuna but keeps having to push her off after the ant-girl turned into a nymphomaniac from getting rape-zombified. However, she treats poor Setsuna with far more slapstick violence than Alice ever did to Megumi.
  • Achievements in Ignorance: Dinoponera hadn't the slightest idea her venom is the cure for the "gang-rape terrorist attack". By stinging Alice, Kabutomushi and Kamadouma she made them resistant to the army ants' virus (not that any of them end up needing it); and she herself is saved when Alice forced her to stab herself.
  • Achilles' Heel: She overrelies on her Bullet Time ability to avoid immediate threats around herself and can be blindsided because of her tunnel vision and recklessness. And as Imomushi puts it, she's also so used to stomping on people that she quickly cracks and turns cowardly if her life is at risk.
  • Aesop Amnesia: Even after all the pain she went through while trying to make friends in all the wrong ways at the Arachnid Hunt, Setsuna still runs off without Chiyuri at Hibarigaoka Prison just to recklessly fight and kill people. As a result, she gets molested, stripped and is almost killed before, to add insult to injury, Sasori knocks her unconscious.
  • Age-Inappropriate Dress: Setsuna's Sailor Moon-esque middle-school Sailor Fuku already looks short on her and is out of place in Alice's school where the girls wear blazers. It can be said to convey that she's trying to hold to a childhood she's never had, given she keeps wearing it even after it gets tattered by the zombies that assaulted her. Setsuna loses the uniform for good when it is slashed in a fight against Rin, ironically leaving her butt-naked and humiliated in front of Sasori.
  • Agony of the Feet: After blocking Hibiki's entire repertoire of kicks, Dinoponera just raises her blade at his final attempt with a look of pity.
  • All Webbed Up: Alice eventually incapacitates Dinoponera like this without her noticing and uses the webs to force Dino to stab herself on the leg.
  • All Women Are Lustful: Dinoponera is by her own words an Innocent Fanservice Girl but she is twisted into a "rape-zombie" for a while and screws three thugs who assaulted her into oblivion with a psychotic grin on her face. Even after recovering her senses, she still has brief relapses and sometimes tries to rape Chiyuri.
  • Alas, Poor Villain:
    • Arachnid Volume 11, in which she gets defeated, paralysed and raped by zombies, ends with a short omake (written by Murata's wife Sato) about a 9 years-old Dinoponera and her father family bonding, with Paraponera seeming a surprisingly nice parent for a crazy mass murderer and little Dino telling him that she plans to go to Japan when she grows up.
    • Even though she was in the wrong, Blattodea portrays her defeat by Alice's hands in a even more pitiful light. She's then finally seen as a zombie, stumbling around while crying out for Chiyuri and falling victim to yet more rapists before going into a frenzy and raping them right back. She does soon recover her senses, but is left traumatized from the experience.
  • Alternate Character Reading: Her codename is given with "巨針蟻/Oo-hari-ari" in brackets, but nobody calls Dinoponera ants that. Instead, it refers to the Giant/Asian Needle Ant or Pachycondyla chinensis (オオハリアリ, written in kanji with 大/dai instead of 巨 for 大針蟻)... which she actually isn't ever compared to by the narrator despite Pachycondyla being the sister group of Dinoponera. Fan translations use the common name for Dinoponera, "Giant Amazonian Ant", instead.
  • And I Must Scream: Sasori paralyzes and throws Dinoponera to a bunch of sex-crazed students who rape and zombify her. Not only she is made to still feel everything, but she very likely suffers the rape in slow-motion thanks to her powers, given how scared she becomes. Afterwards Dinoponera is barely conscious and, judging from her distress upon recovering, that little incident of her going crazy and infecting a trio of rapists who attacked her wasn't out of her own will either.
  • Animal Motifs: Mainly Dinoponera ants and with the often-confused Paraponera clavata mixed in. Blattodea then expands this into a general Ponerinae motif.
    • Setsuna's docile behavior around Chiyuri actually fits her Dinoponera motif better than her usual psychoness, no matter how the author plays those ants as agressive. They are surprisingly calm for their size, can be held on one's hand without issue and if startled tend to flee before attacking. Proper Paraponera clavata bullet ants, on the other hand, are known to be agressive.
    • Dinoponera ants have stings powerful enough to prey on small reptiles and threaten allergic people but they don't quite hurt as much and for as long as a Paraponera's sting. As such, they ended up with the moniker of "false-tocandira" in Brazil despite being interesting bugs in their own right. In the story, Dinopo is always unfavorably compared to her powerful father Paraponera, a serial rapist and killer who abandoned her and ended up killed by Imomushi anyway.
    • Dinoponera is a lonely girl who's looking for friends. Dinoponera is an unusual genus where the low numbers of a given colony plus the large size and strength of each ant leads them to forage individually. This is actually never pointed by the narrator.
    • Dinoponera's habit of pinning people to the ground and punching them is comparable to ants of rival colonies locking mandibles and boxing with their antennae.
    • Dinoponera's ability to stun people with screams is compared by the narrator to how Dinoponera ants can stridulate. Only her and Paraponera get this trait, even though several other kinds of insects can make such noises.
    • Dinoponera being able to recover from the Queen's Rule to save Chiyuri is compared to how Megaponera analis are known to retrieve injured comrades from raids on termite nests. Those ants are able to treat their injured with self-made antibiotics, again tying with how Setsuna is portrayed in the series. One aspect of this unmentioned in the manga is that heavily injured ants refuse to release the pheromone that calls for help, as if sacrificing themselves to save on resources. Also, from 1994 to 2014 Megaponera was synonymised with the Pachycondyla genus.
  • Antagonist Abilities: As an overhyped villain in Arachnid, Dinoponera had power and agility that far outclassed most of the cast on top of looking like it was impossible to injure her with blunt attacks. She humiliated Imomushi, Kabutomushi, Kamadouma and Riokku by dodging, blocking and ignoring their every move like they meant nothing to her — even before she started getting worked up with her hyper focus ability. After the comeuppance she was put through by Alice and Sasori, Dinoponera becomes one of the lead heroines in Blattodea but she is handicapped by her half-zombified status and seems much less effective on her own, to the point Imomushi easily defeats Dinopo and even makes her bleed from a headbutt to the face.
  • Apologetic Attacker: At first, she doesn't intend to seriously injure Alice and apologizes for getting carried away with her knee drops.
  • Arc Villain: She's the main threat in Arachnid for around three volumes.
  • Arrogant Kung-Fu Girl: She's extremely smug and makes a point of humiliating her enemies by nonchalantly avoiding and tanking several hits before trampling them.
  • Ass Kicking Pose: Crossing her arms with the elbow blades out, but like Alice she often stands still to look like she's wide-open.
  • Asshole Victim: She's one of the assassins who are callous enough to kill a civilian during the Arachnid Hunt (by accident, but she shrugs it off) and tortures several Bugs including Alice before she is defeated and gets a harsh Fate Worse than Death. Although Dino is presented as pitiful by the narrative, in-universe Kabutomushi orders Alice to execute her without mercy despite being portrayed as unwilling to kill in Caterpillar and Yoriko openly shows disdain for whatever might have happened to her while talking to Alice afterwards.
  • Attempted Rape:
    • She is paralyzed by Sasori and then tossed to a crowd of army ant zombies who rape and infect her.
    • As the thugs who try to rape her right after she left the Arachnid Hunt as a zombie learn, in that state she will beat people up and force herself on top for some very rough sex with a demented grin on her face.
    • Dinoponera seemingly tries to harm Chiyuri upon finding her, but instead fully regains consciousness and saves her upon finding Chiyuri about to get raped by her now infected homeless friends. However, Dinoponera is later shown to have become nearly as perverted as Gokiburi since she loses control and repeatedly tries to force herself on an half-asleep Chiyuri, who nonchalantly pins her to the floor as punishment.
  • Avenging the Villain: Averted; Dinoponera has no intention of avenging her father's death to Imomushi and is in fact ok with how he died in battle against a strong person.
  • Awesomeness by Analysis: At one point Dinoponera recognizes Alice uses Obfuscating Stupidity to bait her enemies and even notices the strings set ahead of her, but afterwards Dino is characterized as being very tactically dull despite having a time-slow ability, such that she tries to use her full power to perceive Alice's traps and still doesn't realize she's already all rolled up in threads that might have been there since the very beginning of the fight.
  • Ax-Crazy: Her cutesy looks are accompanied by insane glee whenever she pummels people. Despite wanting friends, once she starts fighting she just can't stop and it only worsens as she gets more riled up, with her becoming foul-mouthed and thinking up much nastier ways of killing her enemies.
  • Badass Adorable: She's such a gleeful, adorable and mildly innocent psycho that it can be difficult to outright hate her for all the rash misdeeds she does throughout the Arachnid Hunt.
  • Badass and Child Duo: With Paraponera, though how protective of her he really was is unclear. It looks like he just had her try to keep up with him and imitate how he fought, or else die alone. On the other hand he seems to have treated her well enough whenever the two were not fighting and named her Setsuna after a character she likes.
  • Badass Arm-Fold: Does this to display her gauntlets and needles. And Alice takes advantage of it.
  • Badass Back: Like Oki, she's fond of looking away from her opponents. It helps that she can easily use her needles from that position, but it does her no good when Alice realizes how fixated she is on attacking like that.
  • Badass Boast:
    • She explains her C.D.F. to Chiyuri in detail, bragging that nothing the roach can do will hit her. Then Chiyuri retorts that it means nothing until she tries, and turns out to be right.
    • To Hibiki refusing to tell her about Alice unless she defeated him:
      "Oh, it's that simple? You'll tell me if I beat you? Thank you so much! Then I won't hold back... Allow me to beat you down!"
    • Subverted when she declares she'll put a stop to Alice's Instant Expert exploits. Alice takes the opportunity to shut her up.
      "Don't worry! Giving you three days, let alone tomorrow, I'll make sure you won't return, for all of eternity!"
  • Badass Normal: During her childhood, she was just a little girl with firearms.
  • Be Careful What You Wish For:
    • She spends the Arachnid Hunt babbling about how she wants friends, and ends up gangraped to near-death while Sasori laughs about giving her "a lot of friends".
    • Part of Dino's grudge against Alice was envy for how the spider-girl had a reliable mentor compared to her father Paraponera. Then in Blattodea she ends up captured and forcibly trained by Sasori, with scenes mirroring them with Alice and Kumo.
  • Beauty Is Never Tarnished:
    • All the kicks from Hibiki which had badly hurt Alice couldn't scratch Dinoponera or even get any dirt on her clothes. It's subverted when a badly hurt Alice slaps Dinoponera, smearing her face with blood.
    • After being raped by the zombies her clothes get all tattered and she starts stumbling around drooling with a stoned look on her face. And then Imomushi injures her nose with a Caterpillar Cannon headbutt, finally breaking the unspoken rule that Dinoponera doesn't bleed from physical blows.
  • Being Good Sucks: The few acts of kindness Setsuna shows to others after spending a year with Chiyuri backfire on her one way or the other. The villains repeatedly disparage their relationship as something that made Setsuna even more frail than usual and place the girl under the care of Sasori of all people to unlock her true potential.
  • Berserk Button: She hates people who didn't earn their power through effort. Her demeanor gets turned upside down as soon as she hears Alice mastered her ability without much combat experience. Alice exploits this thoroughly, repeatedly taunting Dinoponera into a flying rage that ultimately causes her to lose the fight.
  • Big Ego, Hidden Depths: Dinopo may be full of herself, but she did have to survive extreme conditions of war to become as strong as she is. Blattodea also shows that she is capable of being a sugary cuddlebug friend to people she does respect.
  • Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Keeps a easy-going and polite facade when she greets people, but thinks little of them and has an arrogant, sadistic and bratty side that becomes more evident as she gets worked up. She isn't outright a Fake Cutie though, as deep down she can be a loving friend.
  • Bitch Slap: Gets a very embarrassing slap from Alice that doesn't hurt her but does damage her confidence and shocks her to the verge of tears.
  • Black Comedy Rape:
    • While being forced to make out with Kuramoto, Alice says she has no good memories of kissing. Her inner thoughts equate the cutesy "Take That!" Kiss she got from Dinoponera to her uncle Yoshio attempting to rape her back in the beginning of the series.
    • Dinoponera was the only named character who got helplessly raped by the zombies at the Arachnid Hunt, all while Sasori mocked her for "making a lot of friends". Once she leaves the school, she gets raped again but is portrayed as a nymphomaniac in that state, pinning down and having a rough Destructo-Nookie with her assailants until they turn undead as well. Her going lucid for real and saving Chiyuri from also getting raped is a major Mood Whiplash from how graphic Chiyuri's molestation was, and even as Dinopo is trying to be dramatic and heroic, the story overfocuses on the loss of her panties as if it's a Brick Joke to how she was intentionally portrayed without panty shots in Arachnid.
    • Setsuna then keeps attempting to molest and even rape Chiyuri because of her zombiefication and lack of social skills, even when Chiyuri is sleeping or in front of other people. This is played for laughs every time, and Chiyuri isn't above hitting Setsuna and knocking her out to get her to stop.
    • In Blattodea, Setsuna ends up stripping and masturbating before a bunch of people after being tricked into drinking spiked water. Point being, she's been brought so low at this point that she's raping herself while Juzuhigemushi calls her a "natural nymphomaniac". Chiyuri is next to her the whole time telling her to stop but doesn't actually do anything either until snapping out of it and beating Juzuhigemushi up. Maybe deep down she also wanted to watch?
  • Blade Below the Shoulder: Has extendable venomous needles inside her gauntlets.
  • Blade Run: She playfully jumps and walks on Kabutomushi's Kabuto Horn while dodging it.
  • Blood Knight: Dinoponera gladly welcomes any challenges made to her, even when they come out of misunderstandings. And when she starts fighting she can't seem to stop until she murders her opponent, her search for friends be damned. Her namesake ant is in fact a kind in which all the female workers beat the crap of each other for days until one is accepted as the colony's alpha.
  • Bond Villain Stupidity: A recurring thing with Dino is that she's so smug and overconfident that she wastes too much time blabbing and toying with her foes. Because of that, not only she ends up getting repeatedly owned but only ever scores a single kill, and a civilian at that. Despite being hyped as the ultimate assassin in the Arachnid Hunt.
  • Brainwashed and Crazy: Dinoponera gets infected by the rape zombies thanks to Sasori, and is reduced to wandering around while crying out Chiyuri's name. When some guys attempt to rape Dinopo in this state, they get dominated by her instead. Fortunately, thanks to Alice forcing her to stab herself with ponerine venom Dinoponera is later able to shake off the brainwashing and save Chiyuri from also getting raped.
  • Break the Haughty: Alice gives Dinoponera her just desserts and Sasori humiliates and breaks her much further by tossing her to the rapist zombies. The whole incident traumatizes her quite a bit, as just remembering how helpless she was against Alice makes her freeze up and start crying.
  • Breakout Character: Dino was of little importance to the plot of Arachnid and got uncerimoniously tossed to the zombies towards the end, but as her baggage of tropes here shows she stole every single scene she was in and was one of the more popular characters alongside Kabutomushi and Gokiburi. Blattodea comes up with an excuse to promote her to tritagonist as Chiyuri's best friend and reveals the reason she was called to Japan was to be turned into an ambulant cure for the outbreak.
  • Bring My Brown Pants: Dinoponera finds Alice wetting herself in pain very amusing, but has no better control over her bladder when she is the one agonizing on the floor.
  • Bullying a Dragon: She threatens Yoriko and Oki to get Alice to fight seriously against her.
  • Butt-Monkey: Blattodea gives Setsuna a co-protagonist role, but not exactly in a flattering way. She's depicted as a Cute Clumsy Girl, is pushed around by Chiyuri, becomes very ineffective in combat and her character is made to revolve around rape, whether it is Played for Drama or for laughs. In short, she changes from an imposing villain to a borderline joke character.
  • The Cameo: In the first episode of No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!, Tomoko's brother is seen reading volume 8 of Arachnid. Dinoponera's in the cover.
  • Catchphrase:
    • Telling her opponents that they might be good enough to be her friends.
    • "Mây mii thaaŋ" is for when she's upset and translates from Thai to "no way", but is also read as "unbelievable" or "unacceptable" since it's intended as a Precure reference to Cure Black often crying out the same.
    • When she's happy, she instead shouts "dī māk", which can be read as "very good" or "great".
  • Cavalier Competitor: Dinoponera is the second kind. She treats battles as if they're games while going back and forth between complimenting her opponents' efforts and taunting or threatening to kill them because they're boring. When she grows hateful towards Alice, though, it is because she views her as undeserving of being powerful, rather than simply not liking that somebody is stronger than her.
  • Character Development: She starts out as a prideful and psychotic villain who can't make friends, but a ton of humiliation and earning a friend in Chiyuri helps her become sympathetic and kind even to civilians.
  • Characterization Marches On: The first glimpses of Dinoponera make her look very ominous, like she's an Emotionless Girl rather than the Genki Girl she really is. Even early artwork like the picture above all have her frowning or looking deadpan. Her expressionless look from when she greeted Imomushi in chapter 35 even got changed into a smug smirk on the Volume 7 release to make the transition less jarring.
  • Charles Atlas Superpower: She grew so strong and agile from her years of fighting in battlefields. She even thinks of her C.D.F. ability as a divine miracle only made possible by how determined and hard-working she is.
  • Cheerful Child: Which coupled with her being a little killing machine, makes her quite the Creepy Child.
  • Chickification: She goes from a powerful Ax-Crazy villain who hijacked Arachnid for around a year to a mellowed-out love interest who's practically useless in combat and who keeps doing very lewd things against her will.
  • Child Soldier: Among the younger Organization members, she's the one who fought in battlefields as a mercenary since she was a little kid.
  • Children Are Innocent: Despite her nasty attitude and all the killing, part of what makes Setsuna a tragic character is her depiction as an innocent little war orphan on flashbacks. And she's still rather naive despite her experiences with Paraponera.
  • Clingy Jealous Girl: She acts possessive towards Alice only a few minutes after meeting her. Later on Blattodea, however, Chiyuri pretty much flirts with Imomushi to Dinopo's face and we don't even get to see the ant-girl react to that...
    "I said we're going to be friends... So why are you talking with other girls?"
  • Clothing Damage: The zombie rapists who assaulted Dinoponera removed her panties, tore off the tie of her sailor uniform and left both the shirt and her undershirt rather tattered, though just how much is inconsistent from scene to scene. Also, during the battle against Rin, Dino's skirt and shirt are both chopped in half and she's left butt-naked.
  • Cold-Blooded Torture: Dinoponera gives poor Alice the worst of her sting and pummel routine.
  • Combat Pragmatist: Doesn't refrain from things like stabbing Hibiki while he's distracted from talking to Kabutomushi.
  • Conditioned to Accept Horror: Paraponera raised her to treat killing as fun and games.
  • Conflict Ball: Firmly holds it after finding out what Alice's ability really is, trying to torture and kill her just for mistakenly perceiving the spider-girl as a privileged civilian.
  • Corrupt the Cutie: She goes from being innocent and disgusted at the army ant zombies to being a nymphomaniac who keeps forcing herself on Chiyuri after getting gangraped.
  • Crazy-Prepared: Subverted; her senses and battle tactics seem to rival Alice's, but it's more like she's always using Bullet Time to react to things without really thinking some steps ahead or outside the box.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle: She's always either on the giving or the receiving end of those.
    • Dinoponera's introduction scene has her disarming Imomushi and beating her silly before nearly killing her. Their battle is interrupted by Suzumebachi knocking Imomushi out, and Caterpillar retcons it by adding that Imomushi actually thought of Dinoponera as inferior to Paraponera and was confident she could defeat her.
    • For several chapters, Dinoponera bullies Kabutomushi and Kamadouma like it's a walk in the park, and even when she gets beaten by a barrage of kicks from Kamadouma she doesn't get hurt and has the gall to claim she wasn't hit. Then she goes and knocks the heavyweight Riokku with a single uppercut.
    • Dinoponera dominates Alice for most of their fight, only failing to kill her due to trying to be friendly at first and then out of sadism after getting hateful towards her. Alice is then able to figure out how C.D.F. works and toys around with Dino before making her incapacitate herself.
    • Sasori taunts the stressed out Dinoponera into a fight and stings her with paralyzing venom, defeating her instantly. She only doesn't kill Dino because Suzumebachi wanted to use her as a guinea pig to be raped by the army ant zombies and produce antibodies against their virus.
    • Blattodea has a rematch between Imomushi and Dinoponera, and this time Imo soundly beats Dino by catching her fist and heatbutting her so hard she actually bleeds. Chiyuri prevents Imomushi from breaking Dinoponera's leg, and then the ant-girl ends up in a spectator role mirroring Gokiburi's in Caterpillar. Even in a second try Dino still gets caught in a Facepalm Of Doom and is further humiliated, though she gets Imomushi in range for Chiyuri to blast her with a Wave Cannon.
  • Custom Uniform of Sexy: Although the Sailor Scout expies she's a fan of have exposed navels, Dinoponera avoids baring her belly by wearing a black shirt under her sailor uniform. It's most likely a nod to Nagisa getting her abdomen covered up by an identical black turtleneck shirt in Futari Wa Pretty Cure MaX Heart.
  • Cute and Psycho: Dinoponera is a brutal and adorable little psychopath who really wants friends.
  • Cute Bruiser: She's strong enough to knock out Riock, a Mighty Glacier who towers over her, in a single hit.
  • Cute Clumsy Girl: Her crooked bangs are explained as a mistake from being distracted by a cat while cutting her hair.
  • Dark Action Girl: She's powerful, sadistic and is so used to fighting that she kills on a whim.
  • Dark and Troubled Past: She's very glad and proud of surviving who knows how many armed conflicts in Thailand with only Paraponera mentoring and helping her.
  • Dark Magical Girl: Dinoponera is an unhinged and lonely Sailor Moon fan who's named Setsuna and who has time-based powers. She tries to violently befriend people and has "Impossible!" as her catchphrase. The problem is that Alice is a tragic dark magical girl in her own right, and the two end up only misunderstanding and torturing each other when deep down they're kindred spirits. Chiyuri, however, fits the standard kind-hearted and dorky magical girl archetype, and their friendship is the reason Dinoponera is able to recover from being a mind-broken rape zombie.
  • Death Glare: Gives a intense one to Alice upon declaring her an enemy.
  • Deer in the Headlights: A flashback of her childhood shows her frozen in fear as a handful of mercenaries prepared to kill her. Then "Concentration Driving Free" kicked in, and in the next instant she's surrounded by corpses while crying in relief.
  • Defeat Means Friendship:
    • Dinoponera says she fights people to test their worth as friends, but isn't ever satisfied by her opponents, even if she admits they're strong. Once Alice defeats her, Dinoponera runs away in fear, not helped by Kabutomushi still being hostile towards her.
    • Blattodea reveals she did make friends with Chiyuri before fighting in the Arachnid Hunt. Chiyuri can trump Concentration Driving Free and is a Sailor-Force fan on top of that, so Dinopo is genuinely smitten with her.
  • Defensive Feint Trap: When Dinoponera is lying on the floor with her left leg skewered, she bawls her eyes out while begging for mercy. Alice feels sorry for her. Kabutomushi, not so much. While they discuss what to do with her, Dinoponera screams at Alice's face to loosen her threads and Kabutomushi almost crushes her in response. But then Dinoponera just runs away, having lost the will to keep fighting the two.
  • Defiled Forever: Oh boy... At first, Setsuna is an innocent girl who wears "pure white" panties. The series very specifically only shows said panties in Caterpillar, when you already know she gets badly raped by zombies later on. Then Blattodea introduces her innocently stark-naked slightly further back in the timeline in a scene also dripping with irony. The "punchline" is a trio of thugs pointing out how Setsuna's panties have been ripped out of her before she ends up raping them as a wacky STD-riddled zombie. Afterwards, she keeps forcing herself on an annoyed Chiyuri or suffering from shameful strips until her usual schoolgirl costume is slashed to pieces.
  • Depending on the Artist:
    • The sketches for chapter 1 of Blattodea have been made public, and they show how differently the author portrays Dinoponera looking psycho or distressed compared to how his illustrators do.
    • In both Arachnid and the reprise of her debut shown in Caterpillar, Dinoponera is often drawn with Hellish Pupils to look creepy. So far Blattodea only rarely portrays her with those, and only when she's surprised or scared. No Blush Stickers on her anymore, too. The Exotic Eye Designs she's supposed to have while C.D.F. is active are also ignored in the sequel until volume 5.
  • Didn't See That Coming: A big flaw of hers is playing around so much or being so careless that her opponents are able to use some absurd technique to beat her out of her prized Bullet Time ability. Chiyuri's and Hibiki's beatings, Alice's string trickery and finally Sasori's mechanical tail all give her embarrassing defeats.
  • Die or Fly: Concentration Driving Free first manifested when she had to defend herself from a half-dozen mercenaries at once. The scene plays much like how Alice tried to attack Kumo in the beginning.
  • Dirty Coward: Despite her sadistic personality as a villain, Dinoponera easily goes from being frustrated to begging for her life the more she loses control of a fight. Imomushi accuses her of subconsciously getting cold feet because she's become "too strong" and can't handle life-threatening danger anymore.
  • Disappeared Dad: Paraponera got killed by Imomushi a year prior to the Arachnid Hunt. Whether he truly cared about Dinoponera is left ambiguous.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: "Former child mercenaries hate her! Civilian girl became an OP assassin in just two weeks." It's not like Dinoponera doesn't have a point, but she goes way overboard by immediately trying to kill Alice on principle, despite knowing little about her.
  • Dissonant Laughter: Dinoponera is fond of announcing her beatdowns with an "AHAHA!" and then laughing madly while punching her victim's face off.
  • Dissonant Serenity: She's nonchalant about being attacked by the other insects and treats those battles as games, wears a sickeningly sweet attitude as she beats them up and acts like their most powerful attacks are no big deal.
  • Doomed Hometown: She hails from a Burmese village that was burned down by the Myanmar army.
  • Drama-Preserving Handicap: As Chiyuri's sidekick in Blattodea, Dinoponera is hardly the cocksure Invincible Villain she once was thanks to her defeats at Alice and Sasori's hands, on top of her half-zombified status making her into a bit of a threat to her dear Chiyuri and being implied to degrade her concentration ability. She's now often scared by threats and can be bloodily injured by blunt attacks despite nothing being able to do so back in Arachnid.
  • The Dreaded: Hibiki once heard from Kumo that Dinoponera could grow to be unstoppable. And indeed, she's scary enough that Sara becomes afraid that she could kill everyone on her own. On the other hand, the usually well-informed Kabutomushi had never heard of her.
  • Dub Name Change: The 2022 English translation of Arachnid at Manga UP! calls Dinoponera by the common name for bullet ants in Brazil, "Tocandira".
  • Dynamic Entry: She kills a zombie with a single flying kick and then impales another through the head to save Chiyuri, in a scene that invokes not only Hibiki's recurring Rider Kicks but also specifically the time Gokiburi saved Alice with a Goki Drop.
  • Elite Mook: Dinoponera's natural strength and crazy demeanor make her quite... something as a mostly mindless sex zombie. Luckily she doesn't remain that way for long.
  • Empowered Badass Normal: She doesn't have any mutant powers, and only learned "Concentration Driving Free" when she was around 9 years old.
  • Establishing Character Moment:
  • Everyone Has Standards: She is shocked upon seeing the promiscuous Army Ant zombies for the first time, and cries that Japan "is a disgusting country". Unfortunately, she gets infected by them and ends up just as horny until she comes to her senses to help Chiyuri.
  • Evil Is Petty: She's comically selfish, is a casual killer, mocks Alice's sob story of how her mother supposedly commited suicide and nearly kills her out of senseless envy for somebody she barely knows.
  • Evil Laugh: She's the kind to laugh like a loon while hitting people. Besides that, she gloats over Alice peeing herself due to having all of her limbs stabbed with poison.
  • Exotic Eye Designs: Waving irises evocative of a crosshair or a clock indicate her use of Concentration Driving Free even before she explains it.
  • Expy: Even though Setsuna is named that and likes Sailor-Force a lot, her design also contains a few nods to Nagisa Misumi from Futari wa Pretty Cure like her outfit (black turtleneck shirt, bracelets), manneirisms ("Arienai!") and fighting style. There is even an illustration from the author's wife depicting Dinopo dressed like Cure Black.
  • Eye Scream: She almost impales Kabutomushi's eye, and also considers doing it to Sasori.
  • Fatal Flaw: Pride and naiveté. Dinoponera clearly thinks the other insects and people in general are below her and goes ballistic when she learns that Alice's ability came from being an Instant Expert with The Gift rather than from years of fighting. This makes it extremely difficult for her to get along with other people, and her overconfidence plus how she childishly views the Arachnid Hunt as some kind of game lead to her downfall when she is defeated by Sasori.
  • Fate Worse than Death: While cornered by enemies in a childhood flashback, Dinoponera is terrified of being captured and raped but she succeeds in killing them. Later she gets defeated by Sasori and is thrown to the zombie orgy on the floor below while paralysed.
  • Faux Affably Evil: A bubbly and polite girl she may be, but Dinoponera is so eager to torture and murder people in cold blood that one wonders how serious she actually is about making friends. The reason she doesn't come off as completely heartless is that as messed up as Dinoponera is, she honestly is trying her best.
  • Fight Magnet: She just wanted to find Alice, but people kept jumping at her. It's ok, though. She can spare some time to play with them...
  • First-Name Basis: Dinoponera calls Chiyuri by her given name without honorifics and allows the roach to call her Setsuna-chan. After the Arachnid Hunt, she starts introducing herself like that to everyone. Dinopo actually being called that was never mentioned before Blattodea.
  • Flash Step: Her evasion stat is off the charts, partly because her C. Drive allows her to always take the optimal course of action.
  • Foil: Every single one of Dinoponera's traits paint her as an Evil Counterpart for Alice, to the point of her being an Identical Stranger who's only a day younger and both girls repeatedly getting scenes that mirror each other. In Blattodea she also becomes just as much a counterpart to Megumi in all the bad ways.
    • She and Alice are orphans who have been trained by skilled assassins to become their successors, but whereas Alice is a good girl who was recently forced into this kind of job, Dinoponera was trained from a very early age and grew more than a little twisted from it.
    • They have the same sort of concentration ability, but while Alice was born with hers and only had to learn how to control it, Dinoponera earned hers after years of training. Both girls also favor opposite fighting styles.
    • Alice has always been shunned by people due to her disability and Dinoponera thinks the first step in finding people like her is to indiscriminately beat the crap out of everyone, so they both have No Social Skills to make the friends they desire so much.
    • A recurring thing with Alice is that deep down she's plotting to murder everyone around her and would, by her own words, sacrifice the world for her own freedom. Dinopo, on the other hand, has hints of a genuinely lovable friend underneath all that bitchyness and is nowhere as defiant as Alice when she ends up in mortal peril.
    • In Blattodea, Setsuna ends up relegated to Megumi's role of a clumsy jobber of all things, while Chiyuri does all the weight lifting like Alice and Kabutomushi did in previous series. Like Megumi to Alice, she is very uncomfortably clingy to Chiyuri — peharps even more either because of her half-zombiefication or due to her lack of social skills and year-long friendship with the roach-girl. Unlike the manipulative Megumi, though, Setsuna never comes off as malicious when she tries to molest Chiyuri.
  • Foreshadowing:
    • After Dinoponera says she and Alice have the "same power", her eyes begin to be depicted with a waving effect similar to Alice's, further implying that her ability involves concentration.
    • After Yamato locks himself behind a gate to Hold the Line for Chiyuri and Setsuna, the ant-girl is framed behind the gate's bars when he says they need her brought to Alice to solve the incident. Chiyuri and Setsuna end up in a prison while looking for shelter, unaware that the Organization plans to have Setsuna killed to prevent the end of the outbreak.
  • Freudian Excuse: Grew up as a child soldier with a psychotic Blood Knight father encouraging her to grow into a violent elitist bitch.
  • Friendless Background: She could only relate to her father Paraponera, but she also says she doesn't consider him a friend. It's suggested that although he was her only family and treated her well, she couldn't rely on him during combat and was left to die if she couldn't keep up with him. One taunt from Sasori also implies that he eventually abandoned her. Blattodea subverts this by establishing she made friends with Chiyuri just before arriving at the Shouran highschool.
    Setsuna: "People... used to call me a demon's child in Thailand. I was always alone, so... I'm going to make a lot of friends in Japan."
  • Genki Girl: She's the one character who puts the most emphasis on cutesy manners.
  • Giggling Villain: One of her tics. She frequently laughs and giggles while dodging or taunting enemies if she's being playful.
  • Girl with Psycho Weapon: A girl who repeatedly impales people with her venomous elbow blades.
  • Given Name Reveal: Dinoponera was only a few months old when Paraponera picked her from her mother's corpse, so her birth name is completely unknown. Blattodea establishes Paraponera named her "Setsuna" after a character from the Sailor-Force anime she likes so much. Notable in that it serves the point of humanizing her when she's trying to make friends with Chiyuri, whereas all other previously unnamed characters get named on plain text boxes.
  • Going Commando: Dinoponera has no upskirt shots for the entirety of Arachnid, but the redraw of her debut in Caterpillar gives her panty shots. Blattodea then starts fixating on how she ended up bottomless after being gangraped. A year goes by after joining Chiyuri and she's still like that.
  • Goomba Stomp: Knocks out Hibiki flat on the floor by stomping on his head because she was distracted from impaling it.
  • Gratuitous Foreign Language: Her dialogue is peppered with Thai words. She also suddenly starts spouting Gratuitous English in Blattodea for some reason.
  • Green and Mean: She wears green (because the in-universe Sailor Pluto is Sailor Emerald instead), is cruel, selfish and wields a weapon coated with venom.
  • Green-Eyed Monster: She's dangerous and gets ticked off with jealousy at the nature of Alice's power.
  • Guns Are Worthless: She's never shown wielding guns outside of her warzone flashbacks and easily destroys two pistols Imomushi tried to use against her.
  • Hard Work Hardly Works: Having spent her entire life in battles to grow as strong as she is, Dinoponera reacts badly to how Alice's power comes from a mental disorder she recently mastered in two weeks.
  • Hated by All: Described by the author on the afterword for Blattodea volume 5 as a Tragic Villain who's hated by everyone because of her unstable and ferocious nature and who rejects everyone in turn. The exception is Chiyuri, who sees past Setsuna's flaws, tames her and pours unconditional love onto her.
  • He's Back!: So Dinoponera got defeated twice in a row, was gangraped for hours and turned into a zombie. Still didn't keep her from resisting the Queen's Rule and dramatically saving Chiyuri for the sake of their friendship.
  • Hellish Pupils: She is often depicted with thin white pupils and gets both the recurring iris and pupil concentration effects when she's furious.
  • Hoist by Her Own Petard: She gets increasingly tangled up without noticing and has a taste of her own "medicine" upon being forced to stab her leg. And since Alice forces it to get stuck in there, she agonizes in pain more than Alice did from a dozen stabbings. Ironically, Dinopo's venom is what saves her from being stuck as a zombie as it grants antibodies against the "Queen's Rule" virus.
  • Humanizing Tears: While she's very violent and abrasive, those occasions when Setsuna is reduced to Broken Tears show her sensitive and vulnerable side. This helps make her look more sympathetic to the audience.
  • Humiliation Conga: As a villain, Dinoponera gets toyed with by Alice and is then forced to stab herself with agonizing venom. She flees in tears only to get provoked into a fight by Sasori, who paralyzes her and gets her rape-zombified by the Army Ants. She stumbles her way out of the school just to end up raped again, but recovers and starts redeeming herself by saving Chiyuri's life. Even then, she becomes a Butt-Monkey worse than how Gokiburi used to be, getting repeatedly incapacitated, abused and humiliated in multiple situations.
  • Hyper-Awareness: Due to her "Concentration Driving Free" (changed to just Concentration Driving/C. Drive in Blattodea) ability, she can freely control her focus to perceive her surroundings in slow motion much like Alice does with her C.E.C..
  • I Just Want to Have Friends: Dinoponera does sincerely want friends, but being far too picky and beating to death anyone she can't symphatize with unsurprisingly does her no good.
  • I Know You're Watching Me: When Sara first finds her, Dinoponera is ominously looking towards the camera... but it's subverted in that she doesn't seem to be aware of Sara's plans. Or much of anything else.
  • Impaled Palm: Impales Alice's palms, arms, legs and even her butt with her venomous needles. Those are the only wounds to leave scars on poor spider girl.
  • Impaled with Extreme Prejudice:
    • She makes good use of her evil acupuncture for torture. When intending to kill, she tries to stab Kabutomushi's heart and gets blocked by her armor. She also tries to impale Hibiki's head but gets distracted and just stomps him.
    • In the end of their fight, Alice forces Dinoponera to stab herself on the left leg and gets the needle stuck there for over a minute.
    • Blattodea introduces her Dino Spines with her actually stabbing one guy through his head like she tried to do on Hibiki. Since the zombies have no Plot Armor, it becomes her go-to move to heavily injure them.
  • Implacable Woman: Steamrolls everyone on her way to meet Alice without taking any damage from anything she couldn't dodge or block.
  • In the Back: She often backstabs people. Even when she should be trying something else.
  • Inferiority Superiority Complex: Her conflict with Alice boils down to this trope, as she doesn't want to admit there could be people stronger than her who didn't go through the same level of hardships as she did.
  • Informed Attribute: Chiyuri claims Setsuna has become a Very Good Girl with a caring heart after all that's happened to her. Unfortunately, poor Setsuna is stuck in the apocalypse with only Chiyuri as a friend and pretty much everyone else wants to rape and murder her, so we barely if ever get to see her being nice to anyone besides Chiyuri. In fact, if given the chance, the ant-girl goes right back to her reckless and violent ways.
  • Innocent Fanservice Girl: In Blattodea, Dinoponera was bathing nude on a fountain when Chiyuri first met her. She wasn't bothered to get caught in the act but also wasn't flaunting her body in any way. The ironic thing is that she wasn't overtly sexualized in Arachnid outside of a couple pieces of bonus artwork, on top of being last seen about to be raped by a bunch of zombies. Despite being able to recover, she still ends up overwhelmed by lust from time to time while crying that she's not actually lewd.
    Setsuna: I'm half "ant", so... sometimes... I just can't control myself!
    Chiyuri: Yeah, but... That doesn't mean you have to attack me in my sleep, right? Like, at least try to get on my good side, or get me some sweets... Actually... Aren't you just kinda lewd in general? The first time we met, you were completely naked.
    Setsuna: N— NO! I'm NOT lewd! That was a one time thing!
    Chiyuri: Really?
  • Insane Troll Logic: Dinoponera defines friendship as people on the same level who are able to share their feelings, but she's too self-centered and goes around beating everyone with extreme prejudice with no sign of ever being able to accept anyone. She also tries to kill Alice's friends so she can have her for herself, unable to see how this behavior scares people away from her. Her whole characterization is probably based on how dinoponera ants beat each other up for days until one is accepted as the gamergate, but even then the ants don't fight to the death.
  • Interplay of Sex and Violence: Dinoponera's habits of repeatedly impaling people and taking pleasure in dominating and brutalizing them to the ground can easily be read from a sexual angle. At first she's shown to be innocent in such matters, but after turning into a half-rape-zombie she does get aroused from stabbing, beating and mutilating people.
  • Ironic Name:
    • "Setsuna" is a buddhist unit for the smallest possible amount of time, referring to bittersweet and short but enjoyable experiences. Dinoponera's special ability is to enhance her consciousness so even short moments can last forever to her.
    • Setsuna Dinoponera, a big "Sailor-Force" fan, gets really lovey-dovey with Chiyuri the roach-girl, unlike how Setsuna "Sailor Pluto" Meioh really dislikes roaches. It's also ironic how dinoponeras are the biggest kind of ants and Pluto is the tallest Sailor Soldier but Dinopo is just an average-sized anime schoolgirl at 1.54m tall.
  • Irony:
    • Dinoponera wants to prove that she's better than Instant Expert Alice, but the more they fight, the tougher Alice becomes by copying her. And besides the karmic method of her defeat, she's knocked out of the plot in such an unceremonious way that it looks like storywise she was just a device to provide Alice with a powerup.
    • Tells Kabutomushi that ants are light enough that they always fall as softly as feathers, no matter from how high they fall. When both Kabutomushi and Dinoponera fall from a good height later, Dinoponera lands much less gracefully.
    • She's always saying that she's looking for friends. Sasori sure gave her plenty. Not to mention Dinopo first triggered C.D.F to avoid getting raped back when she lived in conflict zones but it was being overconfident in that ability that got her paralysed by Sasori and raped by the Army Ants.
    • It seems like Dinoponera is so screwed up she couldn't ever make friends, but then Blattodea shows Chiyuri earning Dinopo's respect and the ant-girl becomes a sickeningly sweet friend to her. All to make what happens to Dinoponera afterwards all the more tragic.
    • When Dinoponera saves Chiyuri, the narrator talks about how Megaponera analis ants are the only animals other than humans who retrieve injured comrades and nurse them back to health. This contrasts with how Dinoponera was abandoned by Paraponera as a child and felt horrified at how nobody came to help her when she was raped. Also, the woman who got her raped is a nurse. The research paper that the story references is from 2017 so Dinopo possibly only got to have such a triumphant comeback from her 2014 zombification by sheer happenstance.
  • It's All About Me: Selfishly makes a spectacle out of herself while torturing people during the Arachnid Hunt, which is something Yoriko calls "masturbatory" while demanding her to stop hurting Alice.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: As nasty as she is, Blattodea shows Dinoponera wouldn't treat a friend badly. The problem is that her violent personality makes it hard to make one to begin with. When Dino is trying to share her past with Alice she does seem genuinely kind, but then she blows up when the truth about Alice's ability is revealed.
  • Jerkass: Dinoponera has a massive ego for such a little girl. Even if she doesn't look like she bears ill will towards anyone, she really doesn't mind killing anyone who can't reach her high standards. And she brutally beats and tortures Alice with scorn, even though Alice is hardly at fault for having the C.E.C. ability or being dragged into being an assassin.
  • Karmic Jackpot: Saving Chiyuri's life earns Dinopo her Undying Loyalty, which is very useful when everyone else hates her and wants her killed to prevent the end of the zombie outbreak.
  • Karmic Rape: Dinoponera was a very bad girl to Alice, and while she wasn't killed for it, she was still harshly punished by being raped to half-death when the eviler Sasori tossed her to a crowd of sex zombies. It's hard to not see her as being tailor-made for the trope, given her personality and actions as a villain, what kind of series this is... or even the fact she's loosely based on a character who happens to be the subject of a H-doujin that's one of the author's earliest works that can be found archived online. After Dino recovers due to a Contrived Coincidence, it is revealed the whole point of her being called to Japan in the first place was to get her raped and turned into an ambulant cure for the outbreak.
  • Kawaiiko: She's usually pretty cheerful, polite and adorable. However, she can be quite a bitch at times and is very violent and cruel to her opponents.
  • Kick the Dog:
    • Dinoponera casually kills a random worker of the school just to intimidate Kabutomushi. She feels guilt upon considering that they could be related, but they weren't, so why should she care? And later she, at her most unhinged state of mind, picks on Alice and tortures her badly for no good reason.
      Dinoponera: "I'm sorry, were you talking about this? I just swept some trash aside— Was he an acquaintance of yours?..."
      Kabutomushi: "Not really. Just a random old guy..."
      Dinoponera: "Ohhh, okay! Thank goodness!"
    • In Blattodea, she was completely willing to kill Chiyuri for interrupting her bath and boring her, but changes her tune when the roach knocks her out of Concentration Driving Free mode.
      "To be honest, your special attack... is <mediocre>. Ahaha! Well then, I'm tired of this. Guess it's time to kill her..."
  • Kick Them While They Are Down: Her stings aside, jumping on top of downed opponents to break their faces with rapid-fire punching is her Signature Move. She also flips a downed Alice with a kick to make her properly punchable.
  • Lack of Empathy: She feels most people are weak worms she wants nothing to do with, to the point that she tries to make friends with a strong person like Alice while also trying to murder her friends. Yamato hopes the humiliation she suffered at Alice's and Sasori's hands can instill some empathy in her and even help her resist her zombiefication.
  • Laser-Guided Karma: For all the fun she has poisoning people and laughing at Alice for wetting herself in pain, Alice forces Dinoponera to stab herself and it turns out she can't handle that much pain, either. She pees herself and cries like a baby, just like Alice.
  • Leeroy Jenkins: Runs off without Chiyuri at Hibarigaoka Prison just to fight and kill enemies, which leads her to deep trouble as she's attacked by hundreds of rapists, barely avoids being killed by Rin and is cornered by Sasori again.
  • Leg Focus: Setsuna's shapely legs with Zettai Ryouiki are her mandibles as an ant-person, so she's always pinning people to the floor with them before going nuts with her punches.
  • Lightning Bruiser: She's fast and strong enough to take on Kabutomushi, Hibiki and Riock with little effort.
  • Like Parent, Like Child: Dinoponera is an unreasonable fighting maniac psycho like like her father Paraponera, but in the end she's just a naive girl starved for love rather than the completely depraved berserker monster he was.
  • Little Miss Badass: Both as a child and as her present 16 years-old self.
  • Little Miss Snarker: Chirpy as she is, Dinoponera is harsh and condescending to people who bore her.
  • Loners Are Freaks: In a inversion, she does want friends but has no idea what she's doing.
  • Luminescent Blush: She often has a slight blush on her cheeks that covers her whole face when she's embarrassed.
  • MacGuffin Super-Person: Dinoponera basically got called to Japan just to get raped in the army ant outbreak, which only due to sheer coincidence she survives due to Alice making her stab herself with her own venom which produced antibodies against the deadly queen substance virus. So then Yamato tasks Chiyuri with bringing Dinopo to Alice so they can put an end to the outbreak, but a year goes by and they don't find her. What's worse is that Serena and Karina want her killed to keep the outbreak going until most of the people in Japan are gone.
  • Made of Iron: Played straight in Arachnid but downplayed in Blattodea after she's half-zombified.
    • Even when clearly punched and kicked all over or sent to crash her head on walls and floors, Dinoponera doesn't seem to get hurt. The problem is she isn't used to pain, and breaks down when Alice not only tricks her into stabbing herself but also forces the venomous sting on her leg for over a minute. Sasori then easily defeats her with paralyzing venom.
    • After being unfazed by a million punches from Chiyuri, Dinoponera bleeds to a physical blow for the first time when she gets hit by Imomushi's headbutt cannon. Another moment that shows just how frail she's become is when she gets knocked out cold by a Wave Cannon from Chiyuri that likely wasn't meant to hurt her much.
  • Magical Skirt: Arachnid goes out of its way to avoid panty shots when she's knocked around or is viewed from below during her acrobatics despite all the fanservice with the other girls. However, the Caterpillar artist doesn't care and adds some in redraws of scenes where there weren't any before. Then she is introduced stark naked in Blattodea, and the story sure likes showing her off — which comes off as Black Comedy because the punchline is a group of thugs pointing out she's Going Commando after she was already raped by the Army Ants. Afterwards, Dinopo can't seem to make any action pose without having her bare undetailed crotch exposed.
  • Maniac Tongue: While in half rape-zombie mode she tends to stick her tongue out a lot, in a way that makes her look goofy and mischievous instead of psychotic or even sexy.
  • Meaningful Name: She is named after Setsuna "Sailor Emerald" Midorigaoka, the in-universe counterpart of Setsuna "Sailor Pluto" Meioh from Sailor Moon who has time-based powers similar to hers. In Buddhism, "setsuna" is the smallest unit of time in which a piece of consciousness moves, and also refers to short and bittersweet experiences.
  • Menacing Stroll: Does one while walking on Kabutomushi's spear. And when she stands back up after being hit by one of Hibiki's kicks, she has this insufferably arrogant look on her face as she, unharmed, walks towards him.
  • Mighty Roar: Bowl-haired Setsuna and her father are able to stun people with sudden screams, as if they are stridulating like ants. This is treated as exclusive to them even though several other characters in the series are themed after bugs capable of stridulation. Another way to look at it is that she is mimicking Sailor Moon's "Supersonic Waves" attack.
  • Mini Dress Of Power: She wears a sailor school uniform, likely because she expected the schoolgirls at Alice's school to wear them. They're all wearing blazer uniforms, though, so her gauntlets aren't the only thing making her stand out in that place.
  • Misery Builds Character: Inverted; as being a Child Soldier since she was 4 made her very unempathetic and entitled. After she's nearly raped to death, however, the story is particularly insistent in pushing the idea that it made her "learn pain and be reborn as a kind girl with a caring heart", as Chiyuri of all characters puts it.
  • Missing Mom: Her mother died from a gunshot to the head when their home was destroyed.
  • Muscles Are Meaningless: It's like her gauntlets give a huge boost to her attack power or something. Of course you know it makes peeeerfect sense because ants can carry several times their own body weight blah blah blah.
  • Nature Versus Nurture: The narrator once wonders if Dinoponera became so sadistic to be able to survive her battles in Thailand or if she survived because she was twisted all along. Given how Paraponera raised her and how misguided and somewhat innocent she acts, Dinoponera does tend more towards nurture.
  • Near-Death Experience: As a child, she awakened her "Concentration Driving Free" ability to kill some mercenaries much like how Alice tried to kill Kumo on the beginning of the story.
  • Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Dinoponera throws a big temper tantrum about Alice being unfairly strong, but loses the fight and Alice becomes even stronger by copying her C.D.F. ability like it's no big deal.
  • Ninja Log: When Rin the butterfly ninja appears to have slashed Setsuna in half, there's just a chopped skirt on the floor. It's then seen that the now bottomless Setsuna narrowly avoided both that and a shuriken Rin had thrown to her side at the same time.
  • No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: She beats down Imomushi, Kabutomushi and Alice badly while laughing out loud.
  • No, I Am Behind You: This false-tocandira girl is pretty good at this stunt. Except for when Alice is the one pulling it on her.
  • No-Sell: She barely dodges Hibiki's second Rider Kick, jumping back so it only grazes her. The third one, however, with all that stomping? She claims it still barely hit her at all. In Blattodea, getting punched hundreds of times by Chiyuri doesn't even bruise her, either, but later the trope is finally subverted by Imomushi's Caterpillar Cannon, which does leave Dinopo with a bleeding nose.
  • No Sense of Personal Space:
    • In the middle of a fight, she smooches Alice in the lips just to tease her, and then acts innocent to Gokiburi who's yelling insults at her.
    • Dinoponera bearhugs Chiyuri when she accepts her friendship proposal, with neither of them batting an eye to how Dino is naked at the time. She keeps being clingy afterwards, much to the annoyance of Chiyuri who despite being implied to like her back is reluctant to make things official.
  • No Social Skills: Dino has really... unusual ideas about how to befriend people, but if she does acknowledge someone as her friend, she actually can be rather pleasant.
  • No Sympathy: After Alice tearfully reminisces about her mother's supposed suicide, Dinoponera wrongly believes Alice's mother really did succumb to despair and coldly responds she was too naive and that Alice's whining is pointless.
  • Nonchalant Dodge: Blocks and dodges many attacks with ease, while looking smugly tranquil.
  • Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: Sasori repeatedly mocks Dinoponera for being this. Despite all the hype, it turns out Dinoponera's combat training against hapless mercs in the battlefield, as harsh as it was, couldn't prepare her for the gimmicky bug assassin scene. Dino can stomp on foes who emphasize raw power like Kabutomushi and Hibiki, but chokes just as easily against trickier enemies who are as nimble as her.
  • Not Afraid to Die: Subverted. Alice reduces Dinoponera to a sobbing mess and she starts begging for her life, even though Alice didn't look like she wanted to finish her off.
  • Not So Invincible After All: Dinoponera steamrolled half of the cast in Arachnid until Alice figured her superior concentration powers are nothing she can't learn in a short time, which was followed by Dinopo's humiliating defeats at both Alice's and Sasori's hands due to her becoming Blinded by Rage and several scenes in both Caterpillar and Blattodea (such as Imomushi taking back her opinion of her strength and Chiyuri easily beating C.D.F.) retroactively portraying the ant-girl as a small potato of a fighter.
  • Offing the Annoyance:
    • Dino was willing to kill Chiyuri for interrupting her from bathing on a public fountain which would cause trouble to the nearby homeless people, and gets a Megaton Punch on the stomach for her troubles.
    • Dinopo thoughtlessly kills a harmless teacher who was talking to Kabutomushi. When asked about it, she worries that the guy was related to Kabutomushi but shrugs it all off when told he wasn't.
    • Dinoponera threatens to kill Yoriko, who was telling her to quit being a bitch, just to get a rise out of Alice.
    • When Setsuna and Chiyuri are being arrested and mocked by Megumi and Momoko at Hibarigaoka prison as if they're weaklings, she gets fed up and whispers to Chiyuri if she can kill them. Chiyuri just tells her to be patient, as they can now at least be safe from the zombies while inside the prison.
  • Offscreen Teleportation: All it takes is a blink for her to inexplicably appear behind people.
  • Oh, Crap!:
    • Whenever her opponents actually surprise her. She is shocked when Chiyuri blasts her out of her "frozen world" and later gets a hilarious look of disbelief when Alice captures and causes her to stab herself. Much less funny is her horror at being defeated by Sasori and thrown to the rape zombies.
    • Inverted when she, as a still passive zombie, gets raped a second time: there's a reaction shot meant to echo the previous one of her grimacing in fear of the zombies but there's instead a big dumb smile on her face as she gleefully beats, fucks and infects her assaulter.
    • Despite resisting the Queen's Rule and making a dramatic vow to protect Chiyuri, Dinoponera is clearly shaken from the traumatic experiences she just suffered and lacks the confidence to confront the horde of zombies that approach them right afterwards. Doesn't help that even the ones she dealt mortal injuries to still get back on their feet.
  • One-Woman Army: Was trained to be this. It shows.
  • Only One Name: She's introduced as "Setsuna Dinoponera" in Blattodea, with a double hyphen in the Japanese text to emphasize the foreign name order, but the synopsis page for the series in the Gangan Joker magazine states "Dinoponera" is really just her codename rather than a surname... until the third version of the page went back and referred to her by her full name again.
  • Otaku: She doesn't geek about it like Hibiki and Riokku, but since Paraponera taught her japanese and she also liked the Sailor-Force anime, Dinoponera became obsessed about japanese culture and used to think it was a country full of strong magical girls. She likes wearing sailor fukus and becomes increasingly disgusted at how the japanese turn out to be as perverted as the people of her homeland. In Blattodea, Chiyuri gets Dinopo to calm down and bond with her by proving she is also familiar with magical girl animes.
  • Outside-Context Problem: She wasn't supposed to be at the Arachnid Hunt, but for some reason she comes out of left field to the school, wanting to get a good fight out of Alice instead of trying to kill her for the prize money. In Blattodea it turns out she was called as a countermeasure against the zombie outbreak.
  • Perpetual Smiler: Unless she's on a bad mood, angrily ranting, swearing and being overall unpleasant. And even then she might just change from ambiguously sweet smiles to creepy sharp grins.
  • Pet the Dog: When Chiyuri finally gets Setsuna to stop fighting and be her friend, Setsuna is shown to be capable of being a pleasant and kind schoolgirl after all.
  • Plot-Irrelevant Villain: Arachnid dedicates 3 volumes to a mean Mirror Character of the protagonist without relevance to the plot just to get her violated offscreen by zombies like trash, with only the sequel eventually explaining her role at that point... was in fact to get raped.
  • Poirot Speak: Occasionally speaks in Thai, and her vocabulary noticeably increases in Blattodea.
  • Poisoned Weapons: Dinoponera venom is something very unpleasant to get stinged with, even if it doesn't hurt as much and for as long a a proper Paraponera clavata's sting. Dinoponera claims the poison coating her needles is worth a thousand dinoponera stings. That's got to hurt, but Kabutomushi, Hibiki and Alice just thrash on the floor for a bit before being able to resist the pain and stand up to resume the fight.
  • Power Fist: Her gauntlets make it apparent that she's far from harmless.
  • The Power of Friendship: Despite her many flaws, Dinoponera is protective of Chiyuri and comes to her senses as a Zombie Infectee partly because of it — even if the story REALLY likes pushing the Rape Portrayed as Redemption thing first and foremost. She becomes very close to Chiyuri in the outbreak and improves as a person from it, unlike how Alice only ended up suffering after ditching her problematic friend Goki.
  • Promiscuity After Rape: Turned into something of a nymphomaniac after getting horribly gangraped by zombies. At least she didn't turn insane from it like several other characters in the series and she only lusts after Chiyuri anyway.
  • Psycho Lesbian: She hits Alice for "talking with other girls" and then threatens Oki and Yoriko. And is shameless enough to kiss Alice's mouth while Oki is watching. However, she completely drops this behaviour upon getting furious at Alice.
  • Put on a Bus to Hell: After her defeat to Sasori, by way of imminent rape from the student mob while she's paralysed. Six real life years later, Blattodea finally shows her as a pitiful zombie... and recovering from that to save Chiyuri's life.
  • Put the "Laughter" in "Slaughter": She laughs maniacally whenever she's pummeling people.
  • Raised by Dudes: Became a bloodthirsty sociopath from being raised by an amoral mercenary, but her background didn't detract from her femininity at all. Bless them magical girl animes.
  • Rape as Backstory: At the time she awakened C.D.F., she was deathly afraid of getting raped and killed by a group of armed mercs. This makes her rape from the army ants due to inefficient use of her ability awfully ironic.
  • Rape as Drama: Setsuna is raped almost to death by zombies, gets raped again after leaving the Arachnid Hunt and, after recovering from her zombiefication to save Chiyuri and crying in anguish for a bit, is unironically told that she was pretty much called from Thailand to get raped and that it is supposed to be a good thing.
  • Rape Portrayed as Redemption: After being so bitchy and violent to everyone, Dinoponera gets horribly gangraped for hours while paralysed and is turned into a sex-crazed zombie. After she manages to recover her senses, Blattodea spins her rape into a coming-of-age experience that helps her mature from being a haughty brat and ties the fate of the world around it.
    Chiyuri: Setsuna-chan has become a really good girl. (...) After losing to Alice-san, she had a terrible experience and learned what pain is. She was reborn as a kind girl with a caring heart.
  • Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: She first jumps on top of downed people before pummeling them like this.
  • Red Oni, Blue Oni: The red to Alice's blue. It is noted Dinoponera draws focus from being worked up, unlike Alice who calms herself down while concentrating.
  • Religious Bruiser: Complains that God wouldn't allow someone like Alice to gain a power like C.D.F. without earning it like she did.
  • Reluctant Fanservice Girl: Blattodea turns Dinoponera into this, as she tends to relapse into a half-zombie to thoughtlessly force herself on Chiyuri. Juzuhigemushi also gets her affected by aphrodisiacs, so then she starts masturbating practically naked while crying and denying she's being lewd. Also, every time somebody mentions her Poneratoxin acting against the army ant virus, Dinopo is portrayed naked on an Imagine Spot while looking quite annoyed to be there.
  • Retcon: Her "Concentration Driving Free"/C.D.F. ability is shortened to "Concentration Driving"/C. Drive in Blattodea for some reason. It actually went back and forth between versions for a few chapters before settling on the retcon version.
  • Retractable Weapon: The venomous "Dino Spines" on her gauntlets. It's not made clear what toggles them.
  • Reused Character Design: Because she's meant to be a lookalike of Alice, Dinoponera is also on the list of analogues of Turis from Jackals. Interestingly, while the heroines of later works such as Killing Bites and Himenospia tend to both resemble and act like (or as foils to) Alice, Dinoponera's character traits and plot points are reused for characters that do not resemble her — except for one instance in Caterpillar.
    • In Caterpillar, Kabutomushi faces an antagonist, Himekuwagata, who in her teen form looks like a light-skinned Dinoponera with black hair. This is played for the irony that Kabutomushi does defeat her with the Heracles Horn by severing her leg — mirroring how Alice incapacitates Dinopo — but chooses to spare her, unlike how she is defeated by Dinoponera due to lacking her secret weapon and then insists Alice should kill her.
    • In Himenospia, Serena gained her wasp-like powers when she was a child and was grateful to God for it much like how Dinoponera believes her C.D.F. is a divine gift. Serena also steals a kiss from the heroine later in a way suspiciously close to how Dino did to Alice, especially considering all the other blatant throwbacks to Arachnid.
    • In Killing Bites, Hitomi is a rude, battle-crazy foreign orphan who only cared for her adoptive father; Nodoka caused a huge mess over wanting to make friends and Koyomi is not only introduced in a situation suspiciously close to how Dinoponera was introduced but, much like Serena, also steals a kiss from the heroine later in a scene framed even closer to the original. Youko's smug attitude and naiveté, combined with just how she's humiliated before turning a new leaf, are also a dead ringer for what happens to Dinoponera.
  • Rite of Passage: Paraponera stings are used for coming of age rituals by Brazilian indigenous people. In Arachnid, Alice has her awakening moment upon resisting the Test of Pain from Setsuna torturing her, while Setsuna herself can't handle being impaled in the leg and runs away in tears. Then she gets raped and Blattodea turns that into part of her rite of passage too, with the narrator calling the rites of the Sateré-Mawé people a more valid way to gain empathy for the pain of other people than whatever's being done by "civilized" folks in Japan.
  • The Rival: Everything about Dinoponera screams "Alice's rival character".
  • Rose-Haired Sweetie: The magazine version of chapter 33's color page depicted her as bright pink-haired, but this was before she first displayed her Kawaiiko attitude. Her intended hair color appears to be white, but even then it has a hint of pink or purple in some illustrations.
  • Sabotutor: It is shown that Dinoponera would be long dead if she hadn't stumbled into her Concentration Driving Free power. Her jackass father pretty much just handed her a gun, expected her to fight as well as him and then abandoned her when she didn't.
  • Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training: She's a great fighter, but since she grew up with only her Blood Knight father for company, she has No Social Skills and a Lack of Empathy for most people. Hardly a good thing for someone who's trying to make friends.
  • Sailor Fuku: She wears a green sailor uniform that already looks short on her and is a fan of the "Sailor-Force" magical girl anime.
  • Say It with Hearts: Both to punctuate her death threats and to sound just plain cute.
  • Shadow Archetype: Dinoponera is what Alice thinks of herself: a girl who really wants friends but isn't able to make any because she's a creepy and selfish murderer.
  • Ship Tease: Has some Foe Romance Subtext with Alice in Arachnid. In Blattodea, Dinoponera becomes very close with Chiyuri and the roach-girl even implies they might eventually sleep together if Dinopo can romance her properly.
  • Shrinking Violet: She becomes rather shy while asking Chiyuri, Imomushi and Alice to be her friends.
  • Shy Finger-Twiddling: Does this gesture whenever she's feeling embarrassed.
  • Significant Birthdate: December 13. She just happens to be a single day younger than her lookalike Alice.
  • Skilled, but Naive: Dinoponera is very strong and has been a mercenary since she was a kid, but is still very childish, short-tempered when things aren't going her way and overconfident. Alice also calls her out on how she is over relying on her C.D.F. ability to the point she can't do much without it.
  • Slasher Smile: Briefly grins like this while attacking Sasori.
  • Small Girl, Big Gun: Carried firearms larger than herself when she was a kid.
  • Small Name, Big Ego: Dinoponera might be dangerous, but once you consider her naiveté, overconfidence, and how much damage she actually causes compared to the humiliating defeats that knock her out of the Arachnid Hunt, she ends up a pretty overhyped and unfitting successor to the monster her father was known as.
  • Smug Smiler: To hilarious extremes. Her response to Hibiki kicking her several feet away? Just silently looking at him with the smuggest smirk ever. Oki is mad at her for having kissed Alice? Dinoponera just gives her a knowing glance.
  • Smug Super: Given Dinoponera is overly proud of her upbringing and abilities, she frequently looks down on other people and flips out at how a commoner like Alice can pose a threat to her. But although Dinoponera does put on a good show for a while, she isn't as strong as she thinks and her overconfidence brings about her defeat. Twice in a row. Her rape and time spent as a zombie naturally shake Dinopo for some time, but after a year of working with Chiyuri she overcomes her trauma and goes back to killing enemies with a soft smile on her face.
  • Soft-Spoken Sadist: Whether she is being too enthusiastical or chillingly serene while torturing people, she sure enjoys it a little too much.
  • Sole Survivor: The only survivor of a ruined village in Burma. She's specifically of the Karen/Kayin minority.
  • Spanner in the Works: Blattodea reveals there was a major reason for Dinoponera's seemingly random shenanigans — her venom produces antibodies that counter the Queen's Rule virus. So Suzumebachi has the genius idea of getting her raped to make her an ambulant cure and provide a solution to the zombie outbreak, thwarting other members of the Organization who want as much as possible of Japan's population to be eradicated.
  • Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Dinoponera is a bit of an over-the-top Attention Whore, spectacularly beating and demeaning people while hogging the spotlight for herself despite seemingly having nothing to do with anything. Even after she got Put on a Bus to Hell, her motifs ended up used for multiple characters in the author's other series, to the point one antagonist in Caterpillar is a recolor of her. Blattodea then effectively promotes Dino to tritagonist, not only giving her a proper name but also making her friendship with Chiyuri and her recovery from being rape-zombified major plot hooks.
  • Stealth Hi/Bye: Sometimes does this, such as when she first meets Alice by appearing between her and Yoriko.
  • Stealth Pun: Being themed after Dinoponera ants and named after Setsuna Meioh makes her a "Gamergatekeeper".
  • Stepford Smiler: She looks cute and happy, but she's really nuts and very lonely.
  • Stunned Silence: Dinoponera's reaction to Chiyuri beating her and at Alice's rant about how the Organization ruined her file and is still harassing her. And also when she's struck down by Sasori's frankly improbable stinger.
  • Submissive Badass: Setsuna is bossy to most people and most Dinoponera species have a system of dominance among female workers to determine the alpha in a colony, but Chiyuri wears the pants in their relationship.
  • Sugar-and-Ice Personality: She is a crazy sadistic bitch, but all her talk about wanting friends is sincere and she proves to be a surprisingly loyal and caring companion once Chiyuri earns her respect.
  • Super-Reflexes: An effect of Concentration Driving Free and the reason why she keeps dodging and blocking everything. Much like Alice, it's like Time Stands Still for her.
  • Super-Senses: At one point, Dinoponera hears Alice talking on the floor above her and recognizes there are more people with Alice.
  • Super-Speed: Her agility seems to be on par with Oki and Geji, allowing her to seemingly teleport all over the place.
  • Super-Strength: Her strength level is somewhere between Oki and Kabutomushi. She can casually lift Alice with one arm and a single good hit from her can be an instant knockout.
  • Superpower Lottery: Dinoponera's C.D.F. ability gives her Super-Senses as good as Alice's, so there are few things she can't defend against. She is none too happy to learn that actually anyone can improve their concentration by controlling their heart rate and that Alice only needs a few days to catch up to her.
  • "Take That!" Kiss: It's danguerous to space out when you're fighting, Alice! That Oki is close by to rage at Dino suddenly kissing the spider-girl on the lips only makes it funnier. This scene notably repeats in Himenospia and Killing Bites with characters who are thematically similar to Dinoponera kissing the local heroine who resembles Alice.
  • There's No Place Like Home: Setsuna doesn't despair over it like Alice, but Chiyuri glorifying their homeless status in the middle of a rape zombie outbreak annoys her. She can't even watch anime anymore!
  • This Cannot Be!: When nervous, she repeatedly mutters "mây mii thaaŋ", which is thai for "no way". The furigana for it in the manga reads "Arienai", meaning "Impossible", likely in reference to Nagisa Misumi.
  • To the Pain: Likes to explain the mind-breaking effect of her poison to her agonizing opponents while wearing that adorable giggling face of hers.
  • Too Slow: "Too fucking easy, slowpoke." The slowpoke in question being an impaled Alice about to scream her lungs out.
  • Took a Level in Kindness: Setsuna is nothing but kind to Chiyuri and is told to learn empathy for the pain of others after struggling with her zombiefication, so while Megumi's treatment of them gets her a bit murderous again she's also genuinely friendly to the female civilians at Hibarigaoka Prison.
  • Trademark Favorite Food: Give her candy she wouldn't find in her home country and she'll turn halfway back into a nympho-zombie.
  • Tragic Dream: Her dream of making friends is sincere, but she is too Ax-Crazy to make any. Even when Chiyuri manages to get Dinoponera to calm down and becomes her first friend, Dinopo remarks that her standards have increased even more.
  • Tragic Villain: An innocent girl who just wants friends and is the last survivor of a massacre is raised by a mercenary to be a murderer and is lured to Japan for the purpose of being raped an inordinate amount of times by zombies to turn into an ambulant cure for their virus.
  • Training from Hell: She was raised by a mercenary in Thailand and fought in armed conflicts since she was a little child by imitating his actions.
  • Trauma Button: In Blattodea, she freezes in fear whenever Alice or Sasori are mentioned.
  • Trauma Conga Line: After mostly recovering from her zombie status and saving Chiyuri, Setsuna becomes one of the main heroines in Blattodea and ironically ends up in a better spot than the lonely Alice for some time. Unfortunately, Setsuna is portrayed as being more wimpy and clumsy than ever and half of the story's plot revolves around her being a rape victim. Most of the cast wants to murder her, and its not known if taking her so-called antibodies to Alice would be a good thing either. Her only hope at becoming strong again is being trained by Sasori of all people after being humiliatingly saved and captured by her when Rin was about to slash her to pieces.
  • Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: She's been raised to kill for fun and acts like a perverted goofball towards Chiyuri.
  • Uncertain Doom:
    • Setsuna gets gang raped offscreen by zombies in Arachnid and disappears from the rest of that story. Caterpillar repeatedly makes indirect and suspiciously ominous allusions to her and reprises her fight against Imomushi while still not mentioning her fate. It's only in Blattodea that her status is cleared up, with her barely recovering from being zombiefied and saving Chiyuri.
    • Setsuna is beaten and captured by Rin and Sasori, the latter of which needs her alive for the ant-antibodies thing. After several chapters, there is a sudden flashfoward to three months later just to show an unconcerned Chiyuri and Alice meeting for the first time with no mention of what happened to Setsuna. It is then shown that she spent that period of time locked in a basement and training under Sasori's care, with the story still making a lot of suspense about what might've been the results of that.
  • The Ugly Guy's Hot Daughter: She's plenty beautiful and is the adopted daughter of Paraponera, a typical Fat Bastard villain.
  • Underestimating Badassery: Dinoponera really underestimated Chiyuri's raw physical capabilities and how danguerous Alice can be when she sets her mind to it. She also underestimates Sasori right afterwards and gets defeated instantly.
  • Unskilled, but Strong: It's repeatedly noted that Dinoponera has become so complacent with her Hyper-Awareness power that she can't predict and outsmart enemies who are able to get past her gimmick.
  • Unwitting Pawn: Without telling her anything, Suzumebachi summoned Dinoponera from Thailand to provide a means to cure the Queen's Rule virus... by sending Sasori to get her raped by a bunch of zombies, which Dinoponera only survives by having previously stabbed herself with her own venom by coincidence.
  • Used to Be a Sweet Kid: A messed up and bloodthirsty but rather innocent kid who wishes to have friends? Dinoponera really is the same as she's always been like.
  • Villain Ball: Dinoponera attempts to finish Alice off by leaping and backstabbing her. It doesn't work, but being blinded by rage at this nobody overwhelming her, Dinoponera still tries the same move over and over even after getting slapped to the ground and despite previously stating she can see how Alice likes to bait enemies into her traps.
  • Villainous Breakdown: She increasingly loses her cool once Alice, "a cheater who became strong despite having a peaceful life", surpasses her. By the time Alice is done with her, Dinoponera is so scared and confused that she can only think about apologizing and begging for mercy.
  • Villainous Crush: She's very friendly to Alice when they begin fighting, even if she does punch Alice and threaten Yoriko to get her attention. She even gives a passionate kiss to Alice to show how fast she can move.
  • Villain: Exit, Stage Left: Dinoponera flees upon being defeated by Alice, only to get cornered by Sasori right after.
  • Villains Want Mercy: For all her cruelty, Dinopo is a bit of a Dirty Coward, unlike how viciously persistent her father was.
    • Refuses to give a break to Alice while beating her down, yet can't help but beg for her life when Alice defeats her.
    • Starts begging for her life again when Sasori is about to let the army ants rape her.
  • What Measure Is a Mook?: The series portrays Dino as a horrible little murderer only by letting her kill minor unnamed characters (some of which had it coming), meaning Alice actually has a more meaningful kill count than her.
  • White Hair, Black Heart: She isn't too high on the evil totem pole, but is quite deranged, has no problem about killing and declares war on Alice over feelings of pride and jealousy.
  • Whole Costume Reference: Dinoponera enjoys "Sailor-Force" and dresses like a Sailor Soldier, but part of her costume is a black undershirt evocative of Cure Black and there's no indication within the story that either it or her "Unbelievable!" tic come from her being familiar with the Pretty Cure series.
  • The Worf Barrage:
    • Dino likes torturing people with her venomous stings, but some, like Hibiki, overcome it and keep fighting. Eventually, she devolves into trying over and over to backstab Alice and ends up forced to stab herself. She agonizes from the pain and gives up the fight, even getting mocked by Kabutomushi for apparently being sensitive to pain (the blade was forced by Alice to be stuck on her leg the whole time after all).
    • Dinoponera realized her C. Drive at a point she would've been gang-raped and killed otherwise, considers it a divine gift for her efforts and is awfully proud of it. However, Alice manages to copy and improve upon the technique, lambasting it as a crutch Dinoponera is useless without. And it is proved when Sasori knocks her out of C. Drive mode and gets her, ironically enough, violated by rapist zombies. Furthermore, Blattodea retroactively shows Chiyuri also defeating C. Drive on the first try, making Dinopo look even more foolish in hindsight.
    • Even her No-Holds-Barred Beatdown is worfed in Blattodea when Imomushi catches her fist and counters with a headbutt that actually injures Dino before she can trigger C.D.F.. Given she's seen Imomushi do her cannon headbutt before and even blocked it easily without using C.D.F., this is yet another case of her holding the Idiot Ball.
    • After Alice started gaining an edge over Setsuna, the dash-and-backstab attempts of the latter not only become ineffective but seem reduced to be the only thing Setsuna ever does no matter how much it fails, to ridiculous extremes in Blattodea where she almost gets killed by repeatedly attempting it on stationary opponents.
  • The Worf Effect:
    • To set up Dinoponera as Alice's strongest challenger, Imomushi, Kabutomushi, Hibiki and Riock are subjected to comically absurd one-sided battles. None of them could lift a finger against her. But after Alice's tricky string tricks deal with her, Dinoponera herself gets on the receiving end of the trope when she's pathetically defeated by Sasori's surprise tail just so the reader can know how truly danguerous the scorpion lady is.
    • In Blattodea, Dinoponera is the first antagonist Chiyuri faces and (sort of) defeats. Dinoponera is so impressed with Chiyuri that she asks her to be her friend without any strings attached.
    • Imomushi does much better in her rematch against Dinoponera and hits her with a headbutt right in the nose. She threats to break the ant-girl's leg while she's downed, while calling back to a retcon from Caterpillar that Imo actually never thought Dinopo was anything special. This makes it necessary for Chiyuri to come to help, and the roach doesn't have an easy time either. After outright no-selling so many beatings, this is the first time Dinoponera bleeds from a physical blow in the entire series so far.
    • In Blattodea, Hebitonbo is easily defeated by her venomous needle when she first uses it in the story, finally lifting the girl's morale after several chapters of humiliation and the official Gangan Comics' Manga UP Twitter profile just posting her rape scenes over and over for pity points... but this just leads to her being humiliated even more as she's unable to fight a practically stationary Rin and then gets sedated by Sasori without even realizing it.
  • Worf Had the Flu:
    • Was stressed out from her defeat to Alice when Sasori ambushed her, so Sasori has an easy time getting on Dinoponera's nerves and goading her for what would've been a slow, bloody demise if getting Dinoponera raped instead wasn't so much more amusing.
    • Dinoponera gets overwhelmed by Chiyuri, who's far faster than her C.D.F. can handle. Chiyuri was spared some hassle because Dino wasn't fighting too seriously and was unarmed at the time.
    • It is also inferred that being half-zombified handicaps her concentration ability without giving her extra strength or making her unable to feel pain like the other zombies. As the author once put it on Twitter, "ants are more vulnerable to environmental degradation than caterpillars and cockroaches" — and Dinoponera lucida in particular happens to be an endangered species.
    • When Chiyuri and Dinoponera meet the staff of the Takobeya room at Hibarigaoka prison and encounter Juzuhigemushi, it is revealed the mineral water bottles they were given by the female workers were laced with aphroadisiacs. Poor Dinoponera had drank way more than Chiyuri, who's even immune, and instantly becomes incapacitated.
    • After knocking Hebitonbo down, in what's her first cool feat after several chapters of humiliation, Dinoponera claims she's been Willfully Weak for a long time out of fear that Chiyuri would hate her murderous habits and declares she won't hold back against any of the Organization's assassins anymore.
    • Megumi believes she and Geji only subdued Setsuna so easily because Chiyuri softned her up. After Setsuna is effortlessly humiliated and captured by Rin and Sasori, the latter talks about how Setsuna must only be used to fight in the wilderness.
  • World's Best Warrior: Dinoponera is hyped as if she's much stronger and vicious than her father and with the added bonus of an Hyper-Awareness ability. This is harshly subverted with one Worf Effect moment after another, with the series going to great lengths to reframe poor Dinopo as an utterly incompetent weakling. By Blattodea, she's repeatedly mocked as just a little girl with too many emotional vulnerabilities and flaws in her fighting style to be the fearless monster that Paraponera was.
  • Worthy Opponent:
    • Her idea of friendship material. She thought Alice could be a kindred spirit to her, only to declare her the opposite of that instead because of how Alice was born with The Gift despite being a plain civilian.
    • Dinoponera gives a break to Chiyuri when the roach lands a million punches on her despite C.D.F. being active, and is overjoyed to see they have a lot in common.
  • Yandere: After just meeting Alice, Dinoponera gets annoyed at how she is avoiding her to "talk with other girls" and tries to get rid of Oki and Yoriko.
  • You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: It's implied Suzumebachi sent Dinoponera towards Alice as a means for Alice to improve her abilities. After Dinoponera loses to Alice, Sasori meets her with very bad intentions and says she heard about her from him... However, Blattodea establishes the whole point of summoning Dinoponera was to get her raped for a graaaand purpose.
  • You Killed My Father: She doesn't mind that Imomushi killed her father because he was always looking for strong opponents anyway.
  • Zombie Infectee: Dinoponera retains some of her mental faculties even as a zombie and manages to come back to her senses when Chiyuri is being attacked by other zombies. She doesn't get the chance to explain herself to Chiyuri during the confusion and tries to act like she's fine afterwards, but Yamato quickly shows concern for her after saving the two. He explains her venom lets her resist the zombiefication and asks that she remembers the pain she went through to not lose her mind again.


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