Characters / Dominoes The Irregulars

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In General

A group of teenagers invited by the International Super-Hero Association to train to be future superheroes. Their mentor is Kudo Yuusaku, who strangely insists they keep his son in the dark about everything.

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• Accomplice by Inaction: As a group they are complicit in Yuusaku's abuse of Shinichi, although two of them—Hakuba and Ran—can at times take a more active role. Even when the nature of the situation is made so completely undeniable they feel the need to argue morality among themselves, no one so much as suggests actually doing anything to protect Shinichi from his father. Two even victim blame instead.

• Amateur Sleuth: The team's cover story for their constant meetings is that they're being specially trained in investigative work by the great detective Kudo Yuusaku.

• Bystander Syndrome: A particularly ironic example. These five teenage superheroes who act as secondary protagonists are being trained to be active problem-solvers in any conflict—but they're simultaneously standing aside, permitting, and even reinforcing the abuse of someone they claim to care about because their boss and his sidekick have assured them it's all For the Greater Good. Even when Yuusaku Mind Rapes his son and calls him useless and inferior directly in front of them, they do absolutely nothing and wait until Shinichi has endured the entirety of the indesputable mental assault before offering him empty platitudes.

• Child Soldiers: What the Irregulars functionally are, under the veneer of superheroship. They're being trained by Yuusaku to function like a specialized military squad and even report, brief, and debrief like soldiers. The fact that Hakuba has apparently been going on missions since elementary school makes it clear that ISHA's superhero program is a glorified child soldier grooming process. Deconstructed, as the Irregulars clearly demonstrate through how poorly they cope with and understand the negative impact their Irregular membership has had on themselves and those around them that many were not old enough to understand, consider, and manage the responsibilities and choices they obligated themselves to when they decided to join. Further, the way they're being "trained" basically amounts to the adults involved using the childrens' dreams of being superheroes to exploit them for human resources and shore up support for both actual disaster responses and the adults' personal manipulative agendas, using the children's ignorance of the emotional complexities of the situation to further their goals at the childrens' expense. At the point of his quitting in the post-Part 1 interludes, Hattori refers to his and Kazuha's membership as a "curse" that "ate them up and spit them back out, nastier and meaner and that much crueler." It's darkly fitting, then, that the bizarre "monsters" they occasionally fight and eliminate are also children, and often younger than them.

• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Of child/teen superheroes and teams comprised of them. The Irregulars—who are basically rough Expies of the Teen Titans—are exactly what you'd really get if you trained teenagers (and younger) to manage incredibly destructive abilities and weapons explicitly for combat with the goal of making them responsible for dealing with violent crises. Despite the International Super-Hero Association's literal mood-altering propaganda department doing their best work, they can't hide from the reader that their teen heroes are literally just glorified Child Soldiers.

• Expy: They're basically a conceptual deconstruction of the Teen Titans.

• Gaslighting: Downplayed. It's nowhere near Yuusaku's level, but they do have the tendency to not only lie about their own activities constantly and cooperatively conspire to reinforce these lies, but use their lies to implicitly or explicitly deny the reality of Shinichi's capabilities when speaking to him, only acknowledging the reality and accuracy of Shinichi's perceptions when he's not around. This has taken a serious toll on both Shinichi's perception of himself and on how he expects the world to see him. While some Irregulars are far more active in this than others, all are complicit until the end of Part 1.

• Good Is Not Nice: As a group they rescue civilians from gravity abnormalities, stop rampaging fire creatures from destroying downtown Tokyo, and fight terrorists. They genuinely desire to do good; they're just very bad at figuring out how to do that in their personal lives due to having no idea how to properly handle their complicated circumstances, which often leads to them being unkind in the extreme. Part of the tension and drama in the story comes from the ambiguity over the exact point at which good or understandable intentions cease to make up for cruel and exploitative behavior, and the Irregulars—a team of life-inexperienced teenagers who desire to do good but ignore how their decisions repeatedly hurt those around them—are one of the main ways this tension is communicated.

• Guilt-Ridden Accomplice: Despite trusting that their mentor has good reasons for keeping Shinichi in the dark, each of them are uncomfortable to varying yet increasing degrees with the effects their actions are having on Shinichi's quality of life and emotional health, though they all react to this guilt in different ways—with some burying conscious acknowledgement of what they've done, others struggling to justify it, yet still more desperately trivializing it. Two or three have so far openly expressed regret over their actions and decisions, but only Hattori has so far taken action in an attempt to correct for them.

• Horrible Judge of Character: To varying degrees regarding one very consequential character. The group is in varying levels of denial regarding the less-than-benign aspects of Yuusaku's and the Irregulars' choices when it comes to "handling" Shinichi, and generally comply with the policies because they have faith in Yuusaku's benign intentions, even if the effects on Shinichi are cruel. Unfortunately for the Irregulars, hurting Shinichi does appear to have been a feature of Yuusaku's plan rather than a flaw.

• Hypocrite: Often complain about limitations to their privileges as Irregulars—lack of transparency, secrets, limited agency, not being allowed to act as they see fit—but actively push and enforce these same limitations onto Shinichi to a far greater degree, and unlike the Irregulars, Shinichi did not sign himself up for this.

• Keeping Secrets Sucks: The choice to keep their secret identities secret from various loved ones wrecks havoc on their relationships with them. Many didn't realize just how much havoc when they signed themselves up, but they learned. The most notable casualties are the team's various relationships with Shinichi, but Ran also has to constantly lie to Sonoko and Hattori's and Kazuha's relationship was on the rocks before Kazuha developed powers and could be read-in as a member.

• Locked Out of the Loop: Despite keeping secrets from Shinichi and considering this justified, there's a lot they themselves haven't been told, and they're not happy about it.

• Missed the Recital: The Irregulars guiltily promise to attend Shinichi's championship game in exchange for him becoming docile and ceasing to resist what is increasingly identifiable as an extremely abusive living situation—an extremely abusive living situation in which the Irregulars are not only absolutely complicit, but in the conversation in which this promise to attend is made, are actively trying to passify Shinichi into accepting this abusive situation as right because they trust Shinichi's abuser to know better than Shinichi what Shinichi's life should be like. Then the Irregulars get wrapped back up in their own hero work and forget about the championship until it's long over.

• Murder by Mistake: Overlaps with Obliviously Evil. When the Irregulars fight the fireball creature in chapters 1 and 2, they aren't aware it's actually a terrified thirteen year old boy named Moriguchi Satoshi, whose powers have gone out of control due to being the victim of kidnapping and experimentation. They proceed eradicate him so brutally that all that remains of him is "sludge," which gets washed away by the flood they caused while attacking him.

• Obliviously Evil:
  • Whatever else was going on behind the scenes, the Irregulars genuinely didn't realize that the disasters they've been neutralizing originate with the missing children case and that when they smothered the flames of the fireball creature in chapter 2, they were literally suffocating a child to death. Given the implication that there have been similar mysterious disasters occurring in the months before the story began and the knowledge that there are forty-some children suspected to be kidnapped and experimented on in that time, it's very possible that the Irregulars, as Tokyo's resident team-in-training thus given most of the field work, have ignorantly murdered other children in a similar fashion.
  • Despite their intentions, the vast majority of their and Yuusaku's non-emergency efforts throughout Part 1 go towards stopping someone from trying to save said bunch of kidnapped homeless children until almost literally the last minute. Because of this, when the chance to save one of the children goes awry, there isn't enough time for another; Part 1 ends with yet another child's death in part because of the delay in focus and aid caused by Yuusaku and the Irregulars constantly setting up metaphorical roadblocks. It appears that most of them were so wrapped up in their own lives that they genuinely didn't realize what they were brushing off and impeding, and those that did were more focused on keeping a certain person in his place than on what that individual was trying to tell them; all they saw was Shinichi being rebellious against Yuusaku's decided order of things and decided they needed to make him stop and didn't want to validate anything he was trying to prove through his actions.

• Part-Time Hero: They're superheroes in training but still in regular high school, and, as expected with this story, their inability to compromise the needs of their superhero careers with everything else in their lives is thoroughly explored—they've neglected and even exploited the ignorance of their non-ISHA relationships and many have abandoned their non-ISHA-related interests and activities, which has had disastrous personal consequences.

• Personality Powers: Hakuba's very tangibly (but not emotionally) perceptive, Hattori's a literal hothead, Kazuha is very brash and loud, and until faced with the fact that she's living in a Deconstruction Fic, Ran initially behaves like a stock hero character and has the powers to match. Aoko seems to avert this; she controls water but is brittle and inflexible, and almost as much of an impulsive hothead as Hattori when riled.

• Personal Space Invader: Shinichi considers them this, as he's a psychometric empath and the Irregulars have begun treating his house like their second home.

• Pyrrhic Victory: Their one (still debatable) victory over the course of Part 1 is successfully smothering the fireball creature in Chapters 1 and 2 to death underneath Aoko's wall of water. But not only does their chosen method of defeating it immediately cause an incalculable ecological and financial catastrophe to the surrounding area, it's later revealed that the creature was a kidnapped child experimented on to the point of losing control of their powers, recasting the entire situation as the Irregulars pulverizing and destroying a terrified thirteen year old boy so thoroughly that only sludge remained of the body. Their apparent success makes them child murderers.

• Secret Identity: All a Part of the Job.

• Snowball Lie: Discussed by Hakuba and Ran in chapter 7. At the time they joined ISHA, none of them were mature or experienced enough to understand and be prepared for the massive consequences of keeping a Secret Identity from those who had previous been close to them.

• Stunned Silence: Their supposedly respectable mentor Kudo Yuusaku's incredibly psychologically and emotionally abusive lecture towards his son Shinichi in chapter 9 leaves them absolutely stunned. After a few minutes of silence followed by failed attempts to placate the victim whose abuse they were and ultimately still are complicit in, the shock turns to furious verbal conflict.

• Would Hurt a Child: Unwittingly, but still. When they find out that, rather than fighting ordinary monsters, they were actually killing children that had escaped from experimentation, they're absolutely horrified. It's unclear as of the end of Part 1 how much ISHA knew about the truth behind the "monsters."

Hakuba Saguru/"Hawk"

"You shouldn't even be sticking your nose into a detective's case, anyway. How many times have we talked about this?"

The team leader of the Irregulars, and Yuusaku's sidekick and unofficial surrogate son. His meta-ability is his heightened physical senses.

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• Abusive Parents: Not to the same extent as Shinichi, but Yuusaku's also abusive to Hakuba in order to maintain his allegiance, just in a more subtle way: when Hakuba is outraged and hurt over the openly abusive treatment Yuusaku gave Shinichi in chapter 9, Yuusaku reacts with deep condescension, writing off Hakuba's pain and emotional hurt as something in the line of "Shinichi's dramatics" and implying that such emotions are childish and beneath someone like Hakuba. It's clear that Yuusaku has groomed Hakuba to be a Child Soldier from a young age and also destroyed his ability to willingly recognize Yuusaku's intentional abuse, given his cognitive dissonance in Chapter 10, mentally insisting that Yuusaku doesn't like to hurt people while Yuusaku talks badly about Shinichi and openly verbally abuses Hakuba. As for Hakuba's biological parents, little is known but it can be concluded that they've been out of the picture for a while, as Hakuba himself states that Yuusaku raised him. An offhand comment made by Hakuba in the Interlude implies that his biological father does not approve of his life choices and that Yuusaku was the first person to believe in Hakuba's abilities, which adds a lot to the opportunistic grooming implications inherent in Hakuba's relationship with Yuusaku.

• Because You Were Nice to Me: Hakuba feels loyalty to Yuusaku because Yuusaku was apparently the only person around Hakuba as a child to believe in Hakuba's potential. Yuusaku seems fully aware of this.

• Break Them by Talking: Saguru is perhaps not as adept at it as Yuusaku, but still perfectly willing and, in fact, frequently defaults to engaging in emotionally manipulative and dishonest tactics when conflicts arise. He verbally abuses Shinichi when Shinichi comes to him for support in the missing children's investigation and, when confronted by Hattori's desire to quit the Irregulars, he initially tries to talk him out of it by strawmaning Hattori's reasons and their impact in a clear attempt to control Hattori via instilling guilt. When this fails, he's left floundering. Hakuba is so used to using condescending and derogatory language under a mask of politeness or authority to control people by this point that he defaults to it even when he knows it's wrong and repeatedly regrets it afterwards.

• Child Soldier: Stands out amongst a team of them. Unlike the rest of the Irregulars, who were recruited in their middle school or high school years, Hakuba has been the Night Baron's sidekick since he was at least eight years old.

• Emotion Suppression: Hakuba partially does this to himself to hide from how guilty and ashamed he feels at how they collectively treat Shinichi, but the unhealthy behavior is encouraged by Yuusaku to the point of causing Hakuba more hurt.

• Expy: The Robin to Yuusaku's Batman.

• Failure Hero: Despite being a lauded Teen Genius, detective, and superhero, Hakuba fails even at things he should be good at throughout Part 1.
  • His effectiveness as a leader appears mediocre at best; he doesn't solve Part 1's big case (that's done by the guy both Hakuba and Yuusaku have repeatedly insisted over whom Hakuba is superior); he doesn't protect the city—in fact, he and his team arguably destroy more structures than they protect; he does protect civilians... but not the ones whose need for protection drives the plot's conflict (he's notably led his team to kill and/or abuse those civilians and/or arguably cause their deaths through a failure to perform his duty proactively as both detective and hero); and just when it looks like he and the rest of the teenage cast are about to subvert this by working to solve one of the plot's major crises in an effective manner, ISHA cruise missiles the problem before they can do anything.
  • By Part 1's end, Hakuba's failed to even perceive the majority of the arc's criminal case until someone else explains it to him in the last chapter, failed to impede KID from freely doing what he wants, failed to manage/control Shinichi, failed to protect Shinichi, failed to protect the kidnapped children like he promised Shinichi, failed to have a meaningful impact in the protection of Tokyo during the Black Hole Crisis, and doesn't even manage to obtain either kind of nullifying agent (neither the superior intravenous nor inferior aerosol varieties). About the only "successes" Hakuba leads his team to achieving in Part 1 are the death of the fireball "monster" in chapter 2 and assisting in the slew of minor incidents during the early gravity anomalies of the Black Hole Crisis, and even those are tinged with personal failure in hindsight. There's a deep and poignant irony to this situation, as Hakuba, positioned by Yuusaku onto a pedestal and stepping on Shinichi all the way up it, fails at every goal he believes he's caused all of this misery for.

• Foil: To Shinichi. Both are son-figures to Yuusaku, both had the same childhood dreams, both have similar interests and hobbies. Hakuba was given validation and a position of importance, but doesn't have the people skills to lead effectively; Shinichi was put under a glass ceiling and denied Hakuba's opportunities, but proves himself a natural at that position and leadership.

• For the Greater Good: Hakuba's eventually revealed to be desperately clinging to this idea in order to live with himself as he watches Shinichi emotionally fall apart almost entirely due to Hakuba's and Yuusaku's choices. It's decreasingly comforting to the moral quagmire he's stuck in as Part 1 progresses, leading to him hanging up on Yuusaku while his mentor's giving orders and chancing Shinichi's incredibly risky plan to save the little girl whose existence is risking millions of lives.

• Gone Horribly Wrong: Hakuba's decision to expose KID's identity to Aoko has horrible consequences, with many of the immediate ones being, frankly, easily foreseen, because KID himself openly warned of them. KID's identity was the only leverage Hakuba and Yuusaku could realistically use against KID in a Mexican Standoff, wherein KID held a similar leverage over their identities in regards to Shinichi. In retaliation for exposing him to Aoko despite this, KID makes good his warning and exposes them to Shinichi, which sets alight the copious kindling that is years of tension stemming from emotional and psychological manipulation and abuse and results in a domino effect of horrible and long built-up consequences that destroys the desperately maintained delicate stability of the cast's lives and functionally burns the facades of the status quo to the ground—along with a significant amount of Tokyo. In the fallout, Yuusaku has been exposed to the Irregulars as a murderer and child abuser, the Irregulars grapple with the fact that they're accomplices to a variety of cruelties as well as guilty of child murder, KID is done playing nice and has acquired the means to literally depower ISHA and its associates of their meta-abilities, Tokyo is in shambles with casualties in the hundreds if not thousands, and Shinichi is missing and implicitly presumed dead, though no one can bring themselves to speak of that tangibly unspoken presumption. The horror, regret, and guilt Hakuba feels in the Interlude following the end of the Black Hole Crisis for causing much of this tragedy pretty much solely to hypocritically spite Kaito for his manipulative relationship with Aoko is palpable.

• Hypocrite:
  • Hakuba supports and actively participates in Yuusaku's discouragement and abuse of Shinichi. Hakuba's apparent main reason for his allegiance to Yuusaku is that Yuusaku supported Hakuba's dreams and believed him capable even when Hakuba's biological father didn't. Hakuba evidently knows the pain of a critical and unsupportive father but helps his surrogate father figure hurt said father figure's biological son in a similar and likely worse manner.
  • One of the major reasons Hakuba can't stand Kaito is because of how Kaito uses Aoko's trust and ignorance of Kaito's identity as KID against her for his own benefit. However, Hakuba and literally all of Hakuba's allies do the same thing to Shinichi. Not only this, but the larger amount of power, time, and people conspiring against Shinichi has enabled Hakuba's side to do significantly more damage, of which Hakuba was an active participant, so Hakuba's moral high ground is practically in the negatives on that matter.

• Idiot Ball: Appears to grab this firmly when he outs KID's identity to Aoko, despite KID openly warning that he would retaliate and expose the Irregulars to Shinichi in turn if this was done, Hakuba having just as much if not more to lose from Kaito's threatened retaliation, and Hakuba and Yuusaku having no adequate plan for preventing this threatened retaliation. The result is the Gone Horribly Wrong scenario detailed above.

• Insufferable Genius: Played with. Hakuba is genuinely smart, but when confronted with dissent or a loss of control of the situation, he, like Yuusaku, tends to weaponize his own perceived intellectual superiority to shut people down. In an interesting twist, Hakuba doesn't usually display his intelligence while doing so; instead, he usually appeals to his own reputation of intellectual superiority specifically because he can't actu ally justify shutting the people around him down rationally, either because he is disinclined to share his real reasons for doing so or because he genuinely doesn't have rational arguments to justify his stance but wishes to steer away from the situation regardless. It's implied in the Interlude that, for Hakuba, this is also a (very flawed) personal control mechanism; Hakuba tries to dredge up some condescending indignation in response to Hattori's questioning specifically so Hakuba himself can feel more in control and comfortable, but in this instance he fails.
  • His intelligence and skill at detective work and heroism starts to verge into The Alleged Expert territory towards the end of Part 1, since he spends a good portion of the story flexing his superior intellect but ends up requiring Shinichi to explain basically the entirety of Part 1's plot to him during the climax, because he missed it.

• Internal Reveal: After shutting Shinichi down at the beginning of the story, Hakuba finally gives Shinichi the chance to debrief him on the missing children's case in chapter 12, which finally clues him into the fact that he and his team have brutally murdered at least one child without knowing it. This shakes him so much he almost tells Shinichi the second major secret they're keeping from him, until Kaito interrupts.

• Irony:
  • Hakuba's meta-ability is his enhanced sensory perception, but despite this superior perception and supposedly being privileged with inclusion to all the knowledge everyone else is excluded from, Hakuba fails to perceive the majority of Part 1's plot until Shinichi explains it to him.
  • Despite insisting for the entirety of Part 1 that Shinichi isn't cut out for Hakuba's and Yuusaku's line of work as heroes, detectives, and leaders in crisis management, Shinichi basically ends up having to do Hakuba's and Yuusaku's jobs for them when it comes to the Missing Children's case and the subsequent Black Hole Crisis, which they appeared to be too distracted by personal drama to focus on.

• Kick the Dog: In order to try to keep Shinichi away from subjects his father doesn't want him near, Hakuba Gaslights Shinichi and deliberately rubs salt in Shinichi's emotional wounds by bringing up Shinichi's percieved inadequacy in the eyes of his father. Hakuba has apparently used this tactic so many times to shut Shinichi down that he calls it "the Yuusaku button."

• Lack of Empathy: Mostly subverted. Hakuba behaves in an unempathetic manner but his internal dialogue reveals he has the capacity to be empathetic regardless. However, he has been trained to suppress his emotions and subsequently seems to have lost a lot of emotional intelligence because Yuusaku has taught Hakuba that emotions are weaknesses that make people irrational. This is exemplified best by the fact that, even though Hakuba stresses that he and Ran need to remember that Shinichi's probably hurting more than them, he also somehow isn't sure whether Ran appearing to cheat on Shinichi with Hakuba hurt Shinichi and legitimately considers the possibility that it didn't.

• The Leader: Of the Irregulars. Unfortunately, not a very good one as of yet. He's smart and tactical, but horrible at emotional and moral leadership or support, very bad at managing his own mistakes, and outright terrible at handling or resolving conflicts and arguments within his team in a healthy or honest manner, resulting in he himself often arguing with rather than leading his teammates if the seriousness of the situation isn't conveyed well enough and others (often Yuusaku or Ran) having to intervene to save the situation from escalating because Hakuba can't manage it. He also doesn't have an accepted, unquestionable integrity to ground the team's trust when things go awry, or an ability to inspire much loyalty outside of personalities already predisposed to give it. When dealing with an interpersonal conflict he doesn't know how else to handle, he has a tendency to resort to the avoidant or abusive tactics he learned from growing up under Yuusaku, which often get the immediate result he desired but have long-lasting negative consequences. In essence, Hakuba's character is trying to become the great prodigy detective, upcoming leader of crime-fighting operations, and unifying force around which his team and friend group rally—but while Hakuba assumes the position and privileges of a leader, his behavior indicates that he's not naturally inclined towards the skills required to be one.
  • This is demonstrated pretty clearly by Hakuba's choosing between whether to follow Shinichi or Yuusaku on the Black Hole Crisis. On one level it's presented as a choice between Shinichi's refusal to compromise over the worth of human life vs. Yuusaku's idea of The Greater Good. On a more subtle level, however, the fact that Hakuba chose a side to follow rather than taking the primary leadership position himself gives away how ineffective Hakuba is as both a detective and a leader in the overarching story of Part 1; for all his supposed insider knowledge, he ultimately knew the least about the situation at hand and how to handle it, let alone how to lead others through it. Indeed, he relies almost entirely on information and plans that either Yuusaku or Shinichi give him to follow for all of Part 1, and his emotional arc revolves around an eventual act of rebellion via choosing to follow Shinichi in spite of Yuusaku, after which he goes back to following Yuusaku. When given the opportunity to choose between taking the leadership role in a group or following another, Hakuba defaults to following orders.

• Meaningful Name: Hakuba's superhero alias, Hawk, references his keenly enhanced hearing and sight.

• Mistaken for Cheating: There's implications in the early chapters of Part 1 that Shinichi suspected Ran was cheating on him with Hakuba; during the first Interlude, Hakuba proves that he's perfectly aware of what their behavior likely looked like and wonders whether they hurt Shinichi or not by behaving as they did.

• Morton's Fork: Secretly feels horrendously guilty for cooperating with Yuusaku's abusive policies towards Shinichi but also feels he can't afford to be emotionally available or honest for Shinichi in any way. His attempts to play it Scylla and Charybdis have made both Shinichi and his own teammates upset at him, all the while loathing himself more and more for the pain he knows he's causing.

• Must Make Amends: Heavily implied to be Hakuba's intentions in the post-Part 1 interlude. At that point in the story, he's realized some of the errors of his ways and just how late he was in doing so, and remembers back to his mother's words that the best apology is changed behavior. He makes an attempt to reach out to Hattori for friendship and breaks the rules on ISHA's information clearance by letting Hattori keep his ISHA communicator after he quit the team, with the implication that this is his attempt at "changed behavior" and a peace offering to Hattori. It's possible Hakuba also intends this to be a vicarious belated olive branch to Shinichi, whose "side" Hattori clearly intends to find, aid, and if possible, join.

• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: His dedication towards Yuusaku's allegedly protective policies towards Shinichi has resulted in a domino effect of devastation by the close of Part 1.

• No Social Skills: Probably his biggest flaw, the effects of which are made worse by how key it is in his role as The Leader. He's incredibly smart but socially inept and emotionally suppressed as well as bad at communicating on an interpersonal level, resulting in a failure of support for those around him.

• Parental Favoritism: It's still unclear why, exactly, but Yuusaku functionally adopted Hakuba and then gave him every privilege and advantage that he denied to his biological son. Predictably, Hakuba's and Shinichi's relationship didn't go well from there. It marked the first time Yuusaku's abuse fundamentally broke a close personal relationship of Shinichi's, but unfortunately not the last. Hakuba insists that Yuusaku dearly loves Shinichi and has sacrificed greatly for his wellbeing, but absolutely nothing so far besides Yuusaku's own frequently self-contradictory words to Hakuba in private supports this.

• Poor Communication Kills: In chapter 2 Hakuba shuts down Shinichi's attempts to share his suspicions about the Crows and the Missing Children's Case and disparages Shinichi's information and suspicions as worthless. His choice to do so has terrible consequences moving forwards. Hakuba reflects on this moment regretfully in the Interlude; however, he also asks for Hattori's friendship while continuing to sanitize and omit important information when talking with him, including failing to correct Hattori's presumption that Shinichi never tried to reach out for support with the information he'd uncovered. In reality, Shinichi reached out to Hakuba and Hakuba turned him away. In other words, Hakuba realizes poor communication really did kill in this case but chooses not to inform Hattori of Hakuba's ow part in this, possibly setting himself up for a repeat of the mistake.

• Prestige Peril: Hakuba always wanted to be a detective. Now he's a famous one despite his age and a superhero, following in the spotlighted footsteps of his famous mentor and surrogate father Kudou Yuusaku... but he got there because of Parental Favoritism at the cost of his moral and emotional integrity, his surrogate brother's happiness and freedom, and their entire relationship as brothers, so now Hakuba's miserable and quietly hates himself, spending the last several years avoiding Shinichi so he doesn't have to look at the consequences of his actions.

• Secret-Keeper: He believes he's Yuusaku's, but it's unclear exactly how true anything Yuusaku told him actually is.

• Sherlock Scan: Invoked. Hakuba was apparently trained by Yuusaku from a very young age to be a detective, and one part of that was to achieve this skill. He has yet to actually demonstrate it, though, and to his frustration and bewilderment, Shinichi still manages to be better than him at catching on to elusive and seemingly irrelevant details and using them to crack mysteries open, despite the fact that Hakuba was trained and Shinichi has been repeatedly barred from any training or involvement in investigation at all. Not that Hakuba will ever admit that to Shinichi's face.

• Socially Awkward Hero: Deconstructed. Hakuba is emotionally suppressed as well as rigid, poor at adapting in the face of social upsets, and bad at communicating on an interpersonal level, so while he can lead his teenage hero team through basic strategies, he's completely unqualified in guiding and regulating their work culture and social environment in an appropriate and healthy manner because he doesn't have the social and emotional intelligence to handle the issues, frequently resulting in a failure of support and guidance for those around him and inevitably leading to an increase in individual emotional hardships and conflicts within the team that they can't afford when their job as heroes is already so challenging on a personal level.

• Successful Sibling Syndrome: The "successful" sibling, with Shinichi as the "overshadowed" one. Yuusaku propped Hakuba up on a pedestal and lauded for his talents while imposing a glass ceiling on Shinichi that Shinichi to this day has never fully managed to subvert. Hakuba got to be a rising star in criminology while Shinichi had to fight just to become an investigative journalist. Hakuba suppresses a lot of guilt over this.

• Super-Senses: His power is his amplified sight and hearing.

• Tragic Hero: In Part 1. Hakuba compromised everything for his belief in and support of Yuusaku's assertions on how to handle matters involving Shinichi, trusting that these policies were the best course of action in order to keep the situation safe and stable, but all his efforts end in Pyrrhic Victory at best mostly because of Hakuba's reliance on these very flawed policies. By the first Interlude, Hakuba's position is clarified: he's long been caught between Willful Blindness and Heel Realizations over how much harm and pain these policies have actually caused Shinichi, but he perpetually feels like he shouldn't help Shinichi because that would break the policy and may help cause the negative consequences the policy was created to forestall. Yet Hakuba's also continuously realizing in hindsight all the times he should have helped Shinichi and didn't because of these very policies, and the omission of his support and action caused harm and tragedy anyways. Hakuba's fear that acting against these prescribed policies will harm things further has so far prevented him from getting out of this spiral of self-perpetuating damage.

• Undying Loyalty: To Yuusaku. It's not truly portrayed as a good thing, because Hakuba reinforces the destructive effects of a lot of Yuusaku's worst actions out of faith that Yuusaku is always right and no one has the right to question him. This turns Hakuba into an abuser just like Yuusaku, at least where their treatment of Shinichi is concerned. Current events have begun to strongly challenge Hakuba's loyalty, but the one time he strayed from Yuusaku's orders blew up in his face, so for now it seems they're still in this mess together.

• Unreliable Expositor: Because Yuusaku is such a distant and closed-off presence, most of what is known about him and his intentions come from Hakuba and Hakuba's conversations with Yuusaku, as Hakuba claims that he is Yuusaku's closest confidant whom Yuusaku entrusts with secrets he tells few others. Hakuba insists that Yuusaku has good reasons, loves Shinichi deeply, and has sacrificed more for Shinichi than Hattori could know. But in Chapter 10, though alone with Hakuba and thus having no reason to lie, Yuusaku gives Hakuba similar illogical rationalizations to those that he fed to the Irregulars, and despite Hakuba telling himself that "Kudo Yuusaku was not a man that enjoyed hurting his son, that wanted to break people down and crushing their hopes," Hakuba is emotionally gaslighted by Yuusaku in a manner clearly intended to instill shame in Hakuba for feeling upset at the injustice of Shinichi's situation and to reinforce Yuusaku's own authority over Hakuba, and further, Yuusaku insults and condescends Shinichi with seemingly no need to, because, again, no one else was around but Hakuba to require any kind of act. Hakuba claims that Yuusaku is pained by having to put on a heartless facade, but Yuusaku acts just as heartless when the act supposedly isn't needed. This not only implies that Yuusaku was and is abusive to more than just his biological son, but casts doubt over whether Hakuba has been honest with himself about Yuusaku as a person and whether Yuusaku has truly been honest with Hakuba about this situation, placing Hakuba and all information his perspective provides concerning Yuusaku firmly into this trope.
  • Discussed by Hattori in the Interlude, who not only (rightly) doubts Hakuba's ability to answer him honestly, but openly expresses the possibility that Hakuba was "fed" nonsense over the years to keep him complacent, an idea that disturbs (but, tellingly, does not surprise) Hakuba himself.

• The Unreveal: There's a second major secret he and Yuusaku are hiding from Shinichi, but KID interrupts before Hakuba can tell him. It's heavily implied by the second interlude that this secret is Hakuba's belief that Shinichi is Pandora.

• Was It Really Worth It?: This is the underlying nature of Hakuba's question to Yuusaku in chapter 10, after Yuusaku's Break Them by Talking scene in chapter 9. By this point, the information gleaned from Hakuba's scenes adds up to this: Yuusaku's apparent plan to spare Shinichi the pain of knowing whatever horrible secret they're hiding was predicated on being able to keep all of their secrets from Shinichi forever. Yuusaku then brought literally everyone around Shinichi in on at least some of the secrets Shinichi wasn't allowed to know, eliminating all possible emotionally open and honest relationships for his son. This is bad enough, but Shinichi is literally psychic, and can access others' memories through physical contact with them or objects they have come into contact with. In other words, from the beginning, the only feasible way to keep the secrets from Shinichi was Mind Rape, isolation, and abuse; tactics which only became more necessary to keep him ignorant as more and more people around him joined the conspiracy against him (although they would not have seen it that way). And Hakuba watched the entire time, a child and surrogate brother made complicit in his surrogate sibling's decade-long emotional battering. At that point, who did Yuusaku think he was sparing? The situation is so bad that Hakuba's moment of insubordination is only shut down by the fact that Yuusaku's convinced him that there is no other option left but to double down.

• We Used to Be Friends: With Shinichi. Hakuba still cares deeply for Shinichi like a brother would, and refers to him by his first name in conversation—but only when Shinichi isn't around, as a hurt childhood Shinichi told him to no longer refer to him by his first name (and given their culture, it's actually very disrespectful that Hakuba continues to do so behind Shinichi's back). But though Hakuba cares, he typically ends up giving Shinichi lectures implying how he's not good enough or capable enough to solve cases or others' problems. Present-day Shinichi tries to reestablish a bond of trust by sharing information from his investigation, but Hakuba throws it back in his face—along with deliberately preying on all of Shinichi's abuse-originating insecurities in an attempt to get Shinichi to stop investigating. While Hakuba's aware of the growing tensions, he doesn't seem to fully comprehend that that lecture really started Shinichi's crossing of the Rubicon—his and Yuusaku's actions have effectively entoxicated everyone's relationships with Shinichi to the point where Shinichi now sees all of them more like jail wardens. By the time Hakuba does realize how thoroughly and completely their assumed alliance as surrogate brothers has broken down, Shinichi has helped a supervillain strike against the Irregulars and almost defeat the Night Baron, and Hakuba can't bring himself to blame Shinichi one bit.

• Weak, but Skilled: Unlike the rest of his team, Hakuba's powers are less than impressive. His powers consist of heightened physical senses and a vague and unreliable sense of impending danger. In order to keep up with the rest of the team, he compensates through training in martial arts and focusing on honing his intellectual prowess.

• Willful Blindness:
  • All but stated to be Hakuba's strategy for surviving the Kudo family with his emotional stability in tact. He supports and is one of the biggest contributors to Yuusaku's and the Irregulars' treatment of Shinichi because he feels these tactics are necessary, but he still can't actually handle the guilt when forced to look at the full reality of the effect on Shinichi's quality of life and so he's minimized his exposure to it, only willingly interacting with Shinichi in small groups or one-on-one when he feels in control—to the extent that he chose to attend a different school explicitly to avoid seeing or interacting with Shinichi, and placed the burden of being Shinichi's sole emotional support onto Ran... who, due to her involvement with ISHA, quickly became just as emotionally unavailable as Hakuba. This leads to them, and the Irregulars in general, missing or ignoring warning signs indicating that the entire situation is, for lack of a better term, fast approaching critical mass, because Shinichi can't and won't bear the emotional load for them anymore.
  • There's an element of this in his attitudes towards Kaito, too. Hakuba almost always treats Kaito less like a human being and more like a cardboard cut-out caricature of a supervillain; he often immediately assumes the worst motivations for all of Kaito's actions and never even considers that Kaito could feel love or be in pain, or could have any motivations outside of wrath and sadism. This despite the fact that Hakuba knows why Kaito has chosen to oppose ISHA and the fact that even Yuusaku admits he deserves Kaito's hatred and has deliberately stoked Kaito's resentment and the escalation of his villainy by playing off the human emotions Hakuba never once dignifies with recognition. While Kaito can hardly be called a good person, it's tempting to wonder if Hakuba's total acceptance of the grinning KID facade as truth is more for the convenience of Hakuba's own mind, owing to how much more morally complicated KID's baggage would make Hakuba's already complicated current moral quagmire if Hakuba recognized Kaito as someone equally human.
  • It's worth noting that the above is an inversion of how Hakuba treats Yuusaku, despite Kaito and Yuusaku having more than a little in common; Hakuba insistently denies that Yuusaku could have any genuinely cruel or negative intentions and is constantly making excuses and rationalizations for Yuusaku's abusive behavior, using the secrets of questionable credibility that Yuusaku has told Hakuba as his excuse, despite making clear that he thinks Kaito's secret Freudian Excuse is no excuse.

Hattori Heiji/"Heliopause"

"Please, I know this secret thing is hard. But it's not like there's your dad's side and your side! We aren't against ya, Kudo. All that I ask is that you trust us. Just... trust me?"

The second official detective in the Irregulars' team and a literal hothead as a hero. He quits the team in the post-Part 1 interludes.

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• Bad Liar: He has tells for days, and instead of playing his slips off casually so they don't attract attention, he freezes up after misspeaking and avoids the person he'd slipped with for weeks, making it obvious he said something he wasn't supposed to.

• Broken Pedestal: While he never had a super idealistic impression of ISHA, Yuusaku, or the Irregualrs as a concept, he did join believing that he could make the world a better place and carry on his family's heroic legacy. By the second post-Part 1 interlude "Who Am I Now?" he refers to his membership as a "curse" and the environment it put them in as "this miserable place that ate them up and spit them back out, nastier and meaner and that much crueler." He quits the team, as the very idea of staying a member puts a "sour taste" in his mouth.

• Conflicting Loyalty: Hattori deeply desires Shinichi's friendship, trust, and admiration, and he recognizes and is deeply troubled by the clearly unjust treatment Shinichi is given by his father and his friends... but that father and those friends are Hattori's teammates, who are the ones who ordered and have enacted that very specific unjust policy towards handling Shinichi. This puts him between contradictory loyalties: loyalty towards Shinichi, whom he wants to befriend, and loyalty towards his boss and his team, who insist on isolating Shinichi. Initially Hattori coped with this situation by denying that there even were two inherently opposed sides (as evident in his character quote) and searching for some way to compromise between these two loyalties, usually ending up in trouble with both sides and then defaulting to compliance with the main beats of Yuusaku's and Hakuba's orders. However, his temper, sense of justice, and desire for sincere and loyal friendship with Shinichi inspire increasingly obvious feelings of dissent throughout Part 1. This culminates in the first Interlude, in which both Hattori and Hakuba finally openly acknowledge and discuss the Irregulars' oppositional relationship to Shinichi; Hattori chooses Shinichi and resigns from the Irregulars to go find him.

• Dumbass Has a Point: Hakuba and Yuusaku shut down Hattori's criticisms of their secrecy policy regarding Shinichi due to Hattori not knowing the full situation, thus considering him too ignorant to make relevant comments. But clearly Hattori picked up something they hadn't: by Hattori's attempt to assure Shinichi that they're not his enemies, it's obvious that he's realized that not only is the secrecy policy damaging and failing at its purported purpose of keeping Shinichi safe, but Shinichi is increasingly seeing them as his antagonists. Shinichi proves Hattori's concern warranted when he temporarily sides with Kaitou KID against them in order to further his cause of saving a group of missing children whom Yuusaku's minions have denied even exist.

• Easily Impressed: Kazuha thinks he's this, given his obsessive admiration of Shinichi. Kazuha implies there's people all around Hattori who deserve his admiration more and doesn't understand that Hattori admires Shinichi just as much for his iron will, resilience, and general uncommon strength of character in the face of adversity as his accomplishments—traits that Hattori has always desired and tried to emulate.

• Energetic and Soft-Spoken Duo: With Shinichi. Hattori's a very outgoing and friendly Motor Mouth around Shinichi, and while Shinichi is very confident when he speaks, he's generally The Quiet One and measures every word for maximum effect.

• Gone Horribly Right: It's implied Yuusaku and Hakuba saw Hattori's desire for friendship with Shinichi as another opportunity to monitor Shinichi and that they at one point encouraged Hattori's overtures for this reason. Through more exposure to Shinichi, however, Hattori ends up so admiring of Shinichi for his defiance in the face of adversity for the sake of his prinicples and ambitions that Shinichi essentially becomes The Paragon in Hattori's eyes, simultaneously also slowly revealing to him the misery of Shinichi's life circumstances, which cause him to question Yuusaku's and Hakuba's deeply flawed and morally questionable behavior towards Shinichi. This leads to Hattori resigning from the Irregulars to go find Shinichi in the aftermath of Part 1.

• Green-Eyed Monster: Played for laughs—Hattori deeply desires Shinichi's friendship and admiration, and resents Shinichi's favorite superhero solely on the basis of said superhero not being Hattori.

• Foil: To Ran, in terms of their relationship with Shinichi. Ran's had a life-long friendship with Shinichi that even eventually budded into a supposedly committed romance, but she still withdrew any kind of emotional support for Shinichi after joining the Irregulars, not realizing that this would destroy their relationship. Hattori was a relative newcomer working under Yuusaku's influence from the beginning whose growing desire to form a genuine friendship with Shinichi and full awareness that they are hurting Shinichi leads to him quitting the Irregulars so he can properly form that relationship.

• I Just Want to Have Friends: Hattori wants to be Shinichi's friend, but his Conflicting Loyalty between Shinichi and Shinichi's abusers make this difficult.
  • At one point, Hattori openly admits to Shinichi that yes, he is keeping secrets, yes, he knows his team's actions have hurt Shinichi, but he really wants Shinichi to trust that they're not against him and for Shinichi to accept his honesty-less friendship in exchange for Hattori's absolute trust in Shinichi. Hattori wants Shinichi's friendship so badly he's willing to offer Shinichi a compromised and superficial friendship that, under any examination, is functionally impossible: how can Shinichi believe he has Hattori's absolute trust if one of the conditions of the proposed friendship is that Hattori never trusts in Shinichi enough to tell him anything?
  • After Shinichi disappears at the end of Part 1 and Hattori decides he's going to find him, Hattori leaves the Irregulars so he won't have to compromise again.

• Ironic Name: Hattori's superhero name gives one heck of a mixed message. His powers both derive from and mimic the power of the Sun itself, but his superhero alias, Heliopause, derives its name from the furthest boundary point of the solar system at which the Sun ceases to have influence over anything further in space; hence, helio (sun) and pause (discontinuity). Hattori's superhero alias is literally named after the point at which a star's incredible power discontinues and is powerless to affect anything further.

• Irony: Hattori is the first to really realize the dangerous scope to which the Irregulars and Yuusaku have isolated Shinichi, and is desperate enough for Shinichi's friendship that he implicitly offers Shinichi what he knows is a bad deal hoping he'll take it—Hattori's verbal assurances of complete trust in Shinichi in exchange for Shinichi accepting that their friendship will have no honesty on Hattori's end. Although Hattori probably doesn't intend it to be, it's basically a trick, offering to trade an illusion of trust for Shinichi's friendship. Shinichi rejects the offer. In the Interlude, Hakuba implicitly offers the same thing—Hattori comes to him for answers and Hakuba asks for friendship while giving half-answers and sanitized information. Hattori recognizes that Hakuba is still not willing to be completely honest with him, so Hattori sidesteps Hakuba's request for friendship and, in doing so, implicitly rejects the same offer he previously hoped Shinichi would take from him.

• Legacy of the Chosen: According to Word of God, Hattori is a descendant of the very first superhero, and the first of those descendants to inherit that hero's very same powers. Living up to that legacy is a strain.

• Lima Syndrome: Yuusaku and Hakuba are implied to have encouraged Hattori's overtures of friendship towards Shinichi so that Hattori could help monitor Shinichi's behavior and keep him in line. Over time, Hattori became increasingly admiring and sympathetic towards Shinichi and more and more critical of the authority figures for whom he was working, leading to him first attempting to mentally reconcile the Irregulars and Shinichi as not actually against each other and then to quit the team to go find Shinichi at the end of Part 1 because he's faced the reality that they are.

• Master of the Mixed Message: platonic variant. Hattori is extremely friendly with Shinichi and is the sort to try and talk Shinichi's ear off until their opportunity for conversation ends and then call Shinichi up again later just to continue. From Shinichi's perspective, however, Hattori avoids basically everything important or personal as a subject matter, tends to randomly switch topics, and sometimes stops talking altogether and outright avoids Shinichi for seemingly no reason until something changes and he goes right back to being friendly. Shinichi describes him as "going from clingy to guiltily chilly basically every couple of weeks." While Hattori's distance fails to prevent Shinichi's suspicions—Shinichi refers to Hattori explicitly as a "shit liar"—Hattori's behavior does, ironically, succeed in making Shinichi consider him too unreliable of an acquaintance to befriend despite Hattori's explicit intentions, even before the incident in chapter 3.

• Motor Mouth: Shinichi considers him this, because he doesn't seem comfortable with silence, talks almost constantly about unimportant matters to fill it, and has even apparently called Shinichi up in the past to continue doing so. The only time he isn't this is when his Master of the Mixed Message bit comes in.

• Open Mouth, Insert Foot: Very friendly and candid to the people he likes when he doesn't have his guard up, which means he's very bad at keeping secrets from them and equally bad at recovering from the mistakes. This results in him semi-regularly Saying Too Much around Shinichi and, instead of passing it off smoothly, immediately clamping down and nervously avoiding and even ignoring him entirely for a time. Unsurprisingly, Shinichi's noticed.

• Playing with Fire: Heliopause has fire powers, and Hattori is noted by Shinichi to be involved in an unusual number of arson cases.

• Resign in Protest: What he does in the post-Part 1 interlude. While he never directly states a reason beyond his desire to find Shinichi and makes clear that the mess Hakuba and Yuusaku have created has made it impossible to be their ally and Shinichi's at the same time, Hattori's behavior and words also heavily imply that a significant motivator in his resignation is the all-around deceptive, manipulative, and morally questionable manner in which Yuusaku and Hakuba conduct themselves even when interacting with their own alleged allies. Hattori had been shown to be dissatisfied with Yuusaku's and Hakuba's behavior from early in Part 1, but the two had managed to argue themselves an out by stating that Hattori was simply too ignorant to recognize the wisdom of their decisions. However, the rapid succession of events from the False Kidnapping Incident through to the Black Hole Crisis appeared to have been the last straw, both for Hattori's tolerance of their behavior and for Hakuba's ability to defend their actions.

• Smarter Than You Look: While Hakuba sometimes underestimates his intellectual perceptions due to his hot-blooded and occasionally juvenile personality, Hattori's a competent detective in his own right and the first to imply suspicion that Shinichi's isolation and repression isn't an unfortunate bug in Yuusaku's secrecy policy, but a feature. He's also the only one so far to realize Yuusaku's information is unreliable at best and deliberately misleading at worst, wordlessly connect the riots during the Black Hole Crisis with the KID vs. Baron tragedy upon first hearing the details of the latter, and realize Hakuka is intentionally misinforming his own team.

• Star Power: Basically has the powers of a star.

• Take This Job and Shove It: As he puts it, "I quit." After Part 1, Hattori resigns from the Irregulars in disdain, having realized that Yuusaku and Hakuba have been deliberately manipulating them for use against Shinichi and that for all the heroism ISHA sets out to accomplish, it won't actually help Hattori do what he considers to be morally correct in the aftermath of the conflicts in Part 1—that is, helping Shinichi. In fact, Hattori now considers ISHA membership to be in his way.

• Token Good Teammate: While the Irregulars can hardly be called outright evil and most have good intentions despite their questionably moral actions, Hattori is the only Irregular to actually question the morality of Shinichi's treatment and genuinely conclude that it's wrong entirely on his own without shrinking back from the moral implications or letting Yuusaku manipulate him back into the complacency, something he does even before the others were forced to recognize the situation's abusive nature in chapter 9. He's also the first to defend Shinichi's actions against the other Irregulars during the false kidnapping fiasco, the first and most resolute to show signs of dissent against Hakuba's and Yuusaku's now obviously abusive policies, and the first (aside from Hakuba) and most enthusiastic to jump on board with Shinichi's plan during the black hole crisis. It's not surprising, then, that he quits the team after the events of Part 1.

Mouri Ran/"Angel"

“Shinichi [...] I just wanted you to be safe.”

The Irregulars' most versatile member and Shinichi's girlfriend until chapter 10. Ran absorbes her energy from the sun, and possesses flight, super strength, and invulerabilty.

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• All Take and No Give: Ran's interactions with Shinichi revolve almost entirely around what she needs from him with little to no reciprocation. This makes their relationship an interesting variation on this trope, as Ran is a superhero and is very altruistic to everyone else, but the strain of this means that she's increasingly inflexible and ungiving in her relationship with her boyfriend—constantly expecting him to be understanding without being open with him so he can understand, shaming him for taking liberties she herself does, offering little to no emotional support or availability yet mourning his increasing unwillingness to be open with her, and in general expecting Shinichi to let their relationship work entirely on her terms without any consideration or respect for what Shinichi needs or wants from it. Evidently this is not how their relationship used to be, but once Ran became Angel, the health of their relationship was one of the first things to be put on the chopping block and she became, despite her selfless dedication to her desire to help others, ironically a very selfish girlfriend unable to provide what her boyfriend needed from their relationship but unwilling to let him go because she still wanted him.

• Break Them by Talking: Ran's conversations with and lectures towards Shinichi are basically Lighter and Softer versions of Shinichi's father's own emotionally abusive rhetoric, with the insulting perception of him gently implied rather than directly stated. While we only see a few instances of this directly, it's all but said outright that this treatment characterizes the vast majority of their interactions in the last year or two because Ran, having cut everything but ISHA and Shinichi out of her life, has little else from her life that she can talk about honestly with him anymore. Early in the story it's heavily implied by Shinichi that this has deteriorated their relationship to the point where Ran's presence destroys his ability to feel proud, successful, or even generally good about himself, and he subsequently contemplates leaving his house via the dining room window to avoid encountering her or anyone who would alert her to his presence.

• Brought Down to Badass: As the Red Siamese thugs discover in Chapter 12, she has not neglected her karate skills even after winning the Superpower Lottery.

• Career Versus Man: Rare justified example where the Career and the Man wouldn't have problems coexisting if not for the fact that her boss is his abusive father who insists she tell nothing of her work to the man. Instead of choosing, she tries to keep both, which ends up ruining her relationship with Shinichi (the Man) because she doesn't want to balance her commitments and give time to her relationship when that might mean depriving time from others who might need her help, and so ends up constantly ditching their arrangements and neglecting him horribly for most of their relationship without giving him a reason why—and it's implied he ended up suspecting she was cheating on him with her coworker, Shinichi's own surrogate brother. Worse, the Career involves colluding in Shinichi's father's campaign of gaslighting against Shinichi and so she ends up actively participating in hurting him. By the time she owns up to how incompatible these two life goals have been with each other and how badly she's hurt Shinichi because of this, he's already broken up with her.

• Childhood Friend Romance: With Shinichi, although it's been functionally non-existent for a while. She only sees him every few weeks outside of class, and at one point during Part 1 Shinichi says that they haven't kissed since midsummer—it's April in the present. He breaks up with her in chapter 10.

• Commitment Issues: She professes to love Shinichi and can't even consider breaking up with him, even while unwilling to actually honor her own commitments as his girlfriend because she prioritizes her role as Angel first and foremost. According to Shinichi, he often doesn't see her for weeks on end outside of school, they haven't kissed in almost a year, and it's evident that she routinely chooses to spend much more of her time with his surrogate brother than him. She also backs his family instead of him in any conflict they have with him and doesn't seem to care about how he feels regarding the conflict until it causes him to withdrawal from her as well. Despite all this, she's devastated when he breaks up with her after once again failing to honor her commitments even as his friend, let alone girlfriend.

• Condescending Compassion: As Part 1 goes on it becomes more and more apparent that Ran's love for her boyfriend now manifests as this, although of course she doesn't realize it. She fully believes in the sincerity of her love for Shinichi but isn't emotionally mature enough to realize the unhealthy dynamics present in their relationship, of which this is one. Ran considers Shinichi "normal, delicate, [and] weak," but loves him in spite of this, and so helps Shinichi's father "protect" Shinichi by monitoring and shaming him for his attempts to rebel against his father's pre-approved life plan in favor of chasing his own dreams, disappointed that Shinichi can't put aside the same drive to help people that she herself also feels and gets to fulfill. Ran sincerely believes all of this is an expression of love and considers herself weak for not being able to withstand the emotional burden of Shinichi's own weakness and the risk that she might lose him because of his flaws. Despite declaring that the more obvious abuse Yuusaku gives Shinichi is "not okay," it's heavily implied in her perspective during Shinichi's "rescue" and her conversation with Shinichi after the championship game that she actually agrees with the degrading and condescending ideas about Shinichi that are behind the abuse without realizing that they and the overt nastiness of Yuusaku's words towards Shinichi are the same and while continuing to insist that she loves Shinichi dearly. That conversation's seeming confirmation that Ran actually sees Shinichi as "the same weak little fool his father [sees]" is the last straw in their relationship; Shinichi breaks up with her.

• Destructive Romance: Her relationship and one-sided power dynamic with Shinichi is extremely toxic to the point of containing more than a few emotional and psychological abuse flags,^* (By the present she has decided Shinichi's safety and her career are more important than his happiness, rights, or respect in their relationship; stopped treating him like an equal and partner; deprioritized caring about how he feels about her choices and the situations she puts him in; stopped talking honestly with him outside of shallow small talk or lectures about her disproving of his life choices; largely stopped spending time with him except when she feels she has to; started treating him like a precious possession rather than an actual person; and has evidently become habitually accustomed to shaming him, talking down to him, and even getting angry when he refuses to obediently conform and steps out of the behavioral lines she and her team draw for him without honest engagement or consent) though she's completely unaware of this until he begins pulling away from her. It's largely due to her desiring to maintain a romantic relationship with Shinichi while choosing to unquestioningly accommodate his father's abusive policies for the benefit of her chosen career path. Because of Ran treating Shinichi as her possession rather than as her equal, what was a healthy and supportive partnership devolved into a one-sided and oppressively restrictive Destructive Romance whose emotional effects are comparable to the neglect and deprivation Shinichi gets from his father and Hakuba, with Shinichi spending the first story arc dreading Ran's presence arguably more than anyone or anything else. After a depressing nine chapters of this extremely toxic and harmful relationship, Shinichi breaks up with her in chapter 10.

• Differing Priorities Breakup: This is a major aspect of Ran's and Shinichi's breakup, although there is a lot more to it. Ran put her dreams of being an ISHA hero far before her relationship with her boyfriend, and even once things are out in the open between them, still tries to justify what she did through her dedication to her supposed talents at heroism. On his side, Shinichi's dream is to be a detective, and when that is blocked, to be an Intrepid Reporter, a goal that is intimately tied in his mind with the achievement of personal agency, as his abusive father has been such a roadblock to Shinichi succeeding in his personal goals. While Ran used to support Shinichi, her priorities and attitudes changed under Yuusaku's tutelage and she began reinforcing Yuusaku's control and expressing disappointment and shame at Shinichi just as Yuusaku and Hakuba do, believing that Shinichi is too "fragile" to be allowed to pursue his dreams. Despite each sincerely caring for each other deeply, they break up soon after Shinichi discovers Ran's secret identity, largely owing to the fact that Ran's newly-revealed life choices have made it clear that their respective priorities are and have been incompatible with any possible genuine romantic partnership between them for quite a while now. They each seem to want the best for each other, but it's clear they have very different ideas regarding what exactly is best for each other.

• Flying Brick: Hers is a traditional power set: invulnerability, super strength, and flight.

• Freudian Slip: Her infamous line, "Shinichi... I just wanted you to be safe." In her mind, she's trying to communicate how much she cares about him. In the context of her situation, however, she's revealing how little respect she showed him as a person: she just wanted him to be safe; she hadn't been much concerned about anything else regarding him.

• Foil: To Hattori, in terms of their relationship with Shinichi. Ran's had a life-long friendship with Shinichi that even eventually budded into a supposedly committed romance, but she still withdrew any kind of emotional support for Shinichi after joining the Irregulars, not realizing that this would destroy their relationship. Hattori was a relative newcomer working under Yuusaku's influence from the beginning whose growing desire to form a genuine friendship with Shinichi and full awareness that they are hurting Shinichi leads to him quitting the Irregulars so he can properly form that relationship.

• The Generic Guy: Initially. Ran's the most traditional and genre archetype-fitting of the Irregulars; she's their naive gold-hearted ubermensch in the same vein as Superman and Wonder Woman, with the same stock powers of flying, super strength, and invulnerabiity. She's the Irregular that initially most resembles a Stock Superhero who would uncomplicatedly save the city and protect its helpless citizens and achieve a fulfilling career and personal life with the powers of true love and friendship and her superpowered muscles... if she weren't in a Deconstruction Fic. This ends up challenging her stock traits as she's forced to confront the logical consequences of the role and lifestyle of a stock superhero, and first up is the dissolution of her romance with the guy she's been constantly lying to for over a year.

• Good Feels Good: Ran wants to be a hero because she genuinely wants to help people and enjoys doing so.

• Good Is Dumb: She isn't very self-aware; oddly, despite seeming more socially active than Shinichi, her ability to recognize interpersonal problems is very poor. She can't manage the basics of creating a decent cover-story to save her life and ends up incriminating herself as an adulturess to her boyfriend, the presumption of which she doesn't even seem aware. She also never predicted the obvious social and interpersonal consequences of her decisions for her personal relationships; she bemoans Shinichi's distrust but is also not shown to have any qualms with spying on him and reporting his activities to his estranged father and surrogate brother, with the implication being that she blindly trusts it's to keep him safe and the violating nature of this doesn't occur to her at all. To her credit, the latter is implied to come more from immaturity and naivete than actual stupidity. All of the division and distrust she doesn't realize she's helped sow ends up only helping the plans of their various villains succeed.

• Hanlon's Razor: Her relationship suffers from this trope's corollary, Grey's law: her apparent ignorance and lack of foresight regarding the obvious hurtful consequences of her decisions for her boyfriend has an effect indistinguishable from deliberate neglect and manipulation and results in her appearing uncommitted, disingenuous, callous, and condescending towards him. Shinichi initially suspects she's cheating on him, and when he finds out the truth, he breaks up with her because he justifiably thinks she sees him as her inferior.

• The Heart: Ran is the moral compass and peacekeeper of the Irregulars; she's usually the most willing to see good in both sides of any internal conflict and the one to intervene if one of her team members is currently engaging in unnecessary conflict or is about to start one. As Hakuba notes, she rarely gets angry at anyone except her father and Shinichi. She's also one of the two most vocal about moral integrity when she's aware it's been breeched, the other being Hattori. As one of the most assertive and purely well-intentioned members of the team, her beliefs about the morality of their actions tend to guide and reflect upon the team's self-image. If Ran's picked a side in an inner-team argument, something within the team has gone horribly wrong.

• Heroic BSoD: While she continues doing her job in the aftermath of the Black Hole Crisis and the subsequent Tokyo Riots, the events of Part 1 have left her clearly shocked out and not functioning or processing well at all. Discovering the remains of a whole group of casualties scorched to the point of unidentifiable, among them being the kidnapped children, and realizing any of the disfigured bodies could be Shinichi's causes her to have a massive panic attack.

• Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance: Ran in chapter 10. When Shinichi derisively refers to the Irregulars' activities as "playing hero," Ran insists to Shinichi that they're not playing and that she's "good at" being a hero—but up to this point in the story, Ran hasn't exactly demonstrated the keenest ability to perceptively discern between right and wrong on her own. She seems to only know heroism in terms of ISHA's and Yuusaku's rigid policies, which have continuously been problematized when put under moral scrutiny throughout the preceding chapters—so she's good at being an ISHA Hero©, but laying claim to genuine moral heroism with so little self-reflection up to this point shows that, despite the rude awakening the previous chapter, she's still very out of touch with the complicated moral reality of her situation.

• Implausible Deniability:
  • The cover stories we see her give are terrible, and could hardly be expected to fool anyone who actually gave them a second glance, let alone Shinichi, given that she tells different stories to different people who talk to each other, so her lies end up outright proving themselves to be lies. In chapter 1, the Irregulars are all in Shinichi's house when he wakes up—though Shinichi avoids her, this clearly includes Ran, as Hakuba asks Shinichi why he's leaving before greeting her. However, when Shinichi goes over to the Mouri Detective Agency, Kogorou says Ran's been staying with Sonoko at one of her villas since Wednesday (the present day is Saturday). This, despite the fact that Shinichi knows Ran was at his house when he left just hours ago. Shinichi internally assumes that if he called Sonoko, he'll find that Ran gave her a completely different excuse. It's no wonder he thinks Ran's cheating on him.
  • Played for drama when Ran's implicitly Mistaken for Cheating with Hakuba. In chapter 3, Ran initially wants to accompany Shinichi on Shinichi's investigation, but gets a call and suddenly changes her mind, claiming she has to deal with "important business." Later, Hattori and Shinichi run into trouble during the investigation and Hattori calls Ran and Hakuba, the former of whom unhelpfully clarifies that they were together even before Hattori called them. Ran can't have been with her Internship team on outings with Shinichi's father—which is her only apparent excuse for needing to be with Hakuba that could credibly be called "important business"—because Hattori is on that internship team, and he was free to spend the day with Shinichi, unlike Ran, who appears to have found it really important to ditch Shinichi for Hakuba. It's really Not What It Looks Like, but because of the secrecy policy and the long list of transparent excuses that preceded this, no excuse really holds credibility at this point and the specter of what the situation looks like is very present but not directly addressed at the time.

• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Subtly subverted. Despite Ran having genuinely good intentions throughout the entire story, it can be concluded that her idea of what is actually good has been subtly warped by her own powers and position. She genuinely enjoys helping people and wants to do as much good as she can for everyone in the world, but under the surface her ideas about others, what's best for them, and who gets to decide what's best for them can be pretty... problematic.

• The Ingenue: Loving, caring, and completely oblivious to how much she's further damaged her boyfriend.

• Innocent Bigot: Ran expresses some implicitly Super Supremacist beliefs regarding the innate delicacy and weakness of those lacking metahuman abilities, using them to justify the abusive control and shaming tactics used on her boyfriend—she behaves as she does because she can't emotionally handle that he wants to have a dangerous job when she considers him so powerless and weak. She seems completely ignorant regarding the moral implications of this belief.

• Ironic Name: Ran's superhero name is somehow both this and Meaningful Name. In Judeo-Christian mythology, Angels are the obedient minions of God, the divine authority and supposed Big Good—and Ran is certainly obedient to ISHA, the supposed Big Good of her world, and to Yuusaku, its major representative in the narrative. But Angels are also supposed to be perfections of ultimate benevolence, and Ran (and her teammates) are neither perfect nor skilled at discerning between right and wrong. Her superhero alias ends up mirroring her own ignorant presumptions more than anything else.

• Irony: Ran claims to love Shinichi despite his weakness and feared that she'd lose him because of his flaws. Their relationship ends mostly because of her own.

• Living Emotional Crutch: Shinichi has always adored Ran from childhood, but it's discussed by Hakuba that the situation with Yuusaku's power plays and Hakuba's own switching schools to avoid seeing Shinichi basically forced Ran to be Shinichi's only consistent source of emotional support, as they'd left him with no one else. After Ran joined the Irregulars and ceased being that consistent source, she got away with taking a lot of unfair liberties in her relationship with Shinichi, which Shinichi seems to have tolerated since he was so deprived of other emotional connections. She doesn't seem to have been aware of how exploitative this situation became on her end because he's also her Living Emotional Crutch, to the point where she was clearly incentivized to continue the exploitation and replicate the atmosphere of emotional abuse because it gave her a perception of certainty over his physical wellbeing and continued presence in her life on her terms. The support for this by those around her meant she never recognized this behavior for what it was, just as others either also normalized it or were incentivized to keep their silence.

• Love Cannot Overcome: Shinichi breaks up with her in chapter 10 after realizing she thought of him as a burden. A burden she wanted to carry around, yes, but that Condescending Compassion made it all the more painful.

• Love Hurts: A sentiment she directly expresses herself. Ran truly believes she's in love with Shinichi, and throughout the entirety of her neglect and abuse of him, equally genuinely believed she was actually putting him first and doing what was best for him, only realizing after Shinichi finds out her secret that she has no good excuse to give him for what she's done. Even though she was aware of how much she herself was hurting and at least somewhat aware of how much her choices were hurting Shinichi, she never considered breaking it off with him because she loved him. When Shinichi breaks it off instead, both are devastated, but the fact that Shinichi simultaneously feels relieved demonstrates just how much pain their romance caused in the end.

• Love Makes You Evil: Downplayed. Ran has never wished to do anyone harm but has made a number of callous choices that result in quite a lot of harm towards those she claims to care for anyways, and when called out on it, she appeals for understanding by claiming she did all of it for the sake of her boyfriend's safety. This backfires. It's worth noting that Ran herself realizes even before she says it that this is a poor excuse and she doesn't actually have any justification for her actions.

• Mistaken for Cheating: There are significant implications in Part 1 and its interlude that, before discovering their secret identities, Shinichi suspected Ran was cheating on him with Hakuba. On their first day seeing each other in weeks, Ran offers to spend time with Shinichi, receives a sudden text, and then about-faces and blows Shinichi off claiming she has "important business" to deal with; when Shinichi is attacked by Tequila hours later, Hattori calls Ran and she shows up... With Hakuba, and unhelpfully clarifies that they were together. And Shinichi knows they weren't at a training seminar with his father - their only public excuse for spending so much time together - because Hattori, their fellow trainee, had his schedule free enough to investigate an arson case during this time. From Shinichi's bitter comments to Hakuba about how going to speak to Ran isn't worth it because he's sure she's already made plans he's not invited to, it's clear Ran has blown Shinichi off for the others' (and particularly Hakuba's) company with routine consistency. Given how Ran's not exactly good at hiding the fact that she keeps ditching her own boyfriend and lying about why, it would honestly be surprising if others (read: Sonoko) haven't also reached this conclusion.

• The Mole: Hakuba and Yuusaku use her as this for Shinichi occasionally, and put her on "surveillance" once KID makes his threat to expose them to Shinichi. Her instances of directed spying on Shinichi are heavily implied to be the only times she prioritizes spending time with him anymore.

• Nigh-Invulnerability: When her powers are working Ran cannot be injured. She used to be capable of experiencing injury, but since the development of her metahuman abilities she no longer does. She remarks at one point that she can't remember how to judge the difference in pain between a bruise and a broken bone because of this.

• "Not So Different" Remark: Shinichi's narration in chapter 10 heavily implies that this is now his opinion regarding Ran and Yuusaku of all people. Earlier in the chapter Ran is horrified to discover Yuusaku's more open and obvious abuse, but Shinichi still directly compares his relationship with Ran to his relationship with his abusive father multiple times throughout the rest of the chapter. After Shinichi finds out the Irregulars' and Yuusaku's secret identities, Shinichi's frequent comparisons all but state that he considers Ran's choices and condescending view of him to have transformed their relationship into an outright mimicry of Shinichi's relationship with his abusive father, just with the abusive undertones communicated through Ran's more gentle wording. Tragically, Ran appears so deeply oblivious to the effects and implications of her choices in the context of Shinichi's neglectful and abusive homelife—whose conditions she has ignorantly chosen to replicate and reiterate—that unlike Yuusaku, she legitimately doesn't realize she's caused any damage until she finally tries spending time with Shinichi again and realizes that, like with Yuusaku and Hakuba, he no longer wants to be around her.

• Parting-Words Regret: Brutally double-subverted. In chapter 12, Ran watches in horror as ISHA launches a missile at the tower Shinichi is in and she's powerless to stop it. She recalls her last conversation with Shinichi, in which he broke up with her for being, frankly, a horrible girlfriend, and regrets taking his presence in her life so for-granted, wishing she could have all the time in their relationship back so she could spend more of it with him, so they could apologize for all the wrongs they've stacked up with each other, even if they probably never could have made a romantic relationship work. However, Shinichi ends up surviving because KID pulls him from the tower at the last second, to Ran's relief... only for this to be the last time Ran sees Shinichi, because after Shinichi and KID split up, Shinichi disappears. As of the Interlude three days later, he's been declared a missing person—one of hundreds still unaccounted for in the aftermath of the Crisis and subsequent riots.

• Passionate Sports Girl: Ran was formerly the regional champion in her Karate Club and very serious about the sport, so when she suddenly stopped participating and dropped out, it was an alarming flag to those around her. Particularly since she wouldn't even tell her best friend or boyfriend why.

• The Power of the Sun: Her ability to absorb this is what makes her power combination so versatile. Ran's other powers would only be usable for a limited amount of time before exhausting her into ineffectiveness if not for the fact that her body can absorbs sunlight and convert it immediately into usable energy. This essentially removes the limitation of exhaustion from her powers during the day.

• Saying Too Much: Her character quote above says it all. On one level, she desperately wants Shinichi to know that she dearly loves him and, in her mind, what's best for him is all she's ever wanted and fought for. But on another level, she's accidentally admitting that her idea of his safety is all she's ever really prioritized. She "just" wanted him to be safe, in the exclusive sense; she didn't take time to think or care about whether he was happy, or stable, or free, and didn't even consider defending any other part of him but his physical wellbeing—at least, not since becoming "Angel." It isn't just that she's clearly come to see Shinichi as her burden, but that she wants Shinichi to be her burden, because then she gets to keep him for whenever she needs him and help decide, along with Yuusaku and Hakuba, what to do with him. Shinichi doesn't miss the implications of this line: he breaks up with Ran immediately after she says this.

• Secretly Selfish: Ran is a very caring and giving person who loves to help people, but over the course of Part 1 it becomes increasingly clear that her relationship with Shinichi exists solely for her own emotional comfort and that she hasn't given much thought or concern to his emotional needs in over a year. When she thinks about their relationship at all, her thoughts are entirely about what she needs from the relationship, what he is and is not giving her, and how much she can handle of his life choices.

• Super Supremacist: Downplayed. She's not an outright supremacist, but she has some troubling subconscious leanings in that direction. A lot of her more condescending statements and attitudes regarding her boyfriend (that he's too "normal, delicate, [and] weak" to be trusted even with his own wellbeing) come with the heavy implication that Shinichi seemingly lacking superhuman abilities is her justification for treating Shinichi the way she does because, without powers, she considers him too fragile and precious to be allowed the freedom of his own agency in a world so dangerous. This implies that these statements describe how she views all non-supers and she's just more personally emotionally invested in Shinichi.

• Swapped Roles: She and Shinichi have swapped roles from their canon relationship, with Ran being the secretive hero stringing her love interest along with frequent unexplained absences and Shinichi being the long-suffering, long-waiting love interest kept ignorant of his significant other's circumstances. However, Adaptational Context Change alters the surrounding circumstances of each of their personal lives to highlight just how wrong this kind of dynamic can go if the two parties can't manage to communicate, reconcile, and maintain trust despite secrecy. The result is a brutal deconstruction in which their relationship is simultaneously dependent and deeply deprivational.

• Toxic Friend Influence: Somehow both plays this straight in the emotional sense and inverts the usual way the trope functions. Instead of trying to emotionally manipulate Shinichi into actively doing bad things by encouraging him to break rules, as is more common for this trope, Ran tries to emotionally manipulate Shinichi into passively accepting harmful things by shaming him for not following rules. Because these "rules" are unjust policies put in place by Shinichi's Abusive Parents, this still makes Ran just as toxic as the usual variety of toxic friend.

• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Despite her and Shinichi's relationship being extremely damaging to him, the threat of others' harming Shinichi causes Ran to become incredibly emotional and destructive. To her own detriment, in the case of KID's false kidnapping.

• Wrong Genre Savvy: She expects villains to seek to threaten her loved ones per genre conventions and thus keeps her identity a secret from everyone outside of ISHA, including her boyfriend. Unfortunately, she's in a Deconstruction Fic, so it's that very secrecy that destroys that relationship. In fact, the fic plays with this by having the "villain threatens loved one" trope play out under the orchestrations of said loved one to confirm that she'd been deceiving them. Ran became a superhero with the noblest intentions and never foresaw how badly her decisions would hurt those she loves.

Nakamori Aoko/"Tsuyu"

"You really don't respect me at all, do you? You think I'm stupid! You think I'm some idiot you can lie to and use however you want!"

The newest member of the Irregulars, a teenage girl who can control and manipulate water.

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• Black-and-White Insanity: With an increasing removal from reality.
  • Initially this manifests in what appears to be naivete.
    • She insists that "the world was good and innocent and only one heartless criminal (KID) was at fault for taking [Kaito's] father away."
    • She uses very childish phrases to describe moral conflicts, referring to ISHA's enemies as "bad guys with too much evil in their hearts."
  • As the story goes on, Aoko's simplistic view gains an increasingly insidious subtext:
    • In chapter 5, when Aoko begins to rant about all of the pain KID has made everyone suffer (by which she means her and her family), Kaito asks about the pain her side caused his family, and her response ("You're a criminal! A supervillain! Just like he was!") is not only a dodge, but when added to her previous line, seems to imply the Kurobas deserved the pain of losing a family member because of Kaito and Toichi being KID.
    • In chapter 10, Aoko demonstrates a complete inability to feel empathy for Shinichi's Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal and suffering at Yuusaku's and the Irregulars' hands because he "betrayed them" and "helped a criminal" (KID). When Hattori bites back that Shinichi had good reasons, Aoko dodges by refusing to acknowledge the point and instead emphasizing the small amount of superficial damage Shinichi did to Ran during the conflict, the implication being that she sees Shinichi's victimhood as illegitimate because those who hurt him are her team, who are justified in what they did to him simply by virtue of Aoko considering them the "good guys"—and since they're the good guys, any act Shinichi took against them, no matter what reason, makes him unquestionably the bad guy. (Especially if that reason involves KID).

• Both Sides Have a Point: In her argument with Kaito in chapter 5, both she and Kaito make genuine points about the moral failings of each other's stances on the conflict between them; unfortunately, Aoko's self-evidently a hypocrite, and Kaito proves to be one himself later in the story, so neither take each other's points on good faith and both end up getting angry and largely ignoring the accurate parts of the criticism.

• Daddy Issues: Though it's rarely explicitly focused on, Aoko has major difficulties emotionally confronting her father's neglect of their family in favor of his job, and exhibits a variety of mental gymnastics techniques in an attempt to displace the blame for his choices onto others so she doesn't have deal with reality of the issue.

• Differing Priorities Break Up: Aoko and Kaito have a very extreme and explosive version of this which destroys both their budding romance and their friendship—on their very first date, no less. When Hakuba exposes Kaito is KID to Aoko, Aoko suggests to Kaito a way to "fix" the situation so their relationship can be salvaged; namely, Kaito turns himself in, does his penance in prison, and ceases to menace ISHA and the public any further. Kaito is so insulted by Aoko's suggestion (given that Kaito does not see ISHA as a benevolent authority and perceives them deserving of his vengence) that he verbally associates the life she wants for him with a surrender of identity and calls it "vapid." Aoko interprets this to mean that he saw their entire relationship as vapid, clings to the idea that she's trying to do the right thing, and Kaito replies with the character quote in his Character Folder. As much as they both did and likely still do really care for each other, their currently irreconcilable difference of opinion on ISHA puts them at opposite ends of the battlefield, and given Aoko's Black-and-White Insanity and Kaito's obsession with Revenge, it'd take something pretty big for either to decide to change their minds.

• Freudian Excuse: Aoko becomes irrational involving KID because her mother died alone in the hospital while her father was busy hunting that particular criminal. The legitimacy of this excuse is also subtly called into question by the fact that she's used KID as a scapegoat to dodge serious ethical questions about her own actions and the actions of others that she is complicit in; by the time of the story she's become the main embodiment of Black-and-White Insanity and arguably the most unstable and hypocritical and least empathetic member of the Irregulars. However, it should be noted that this death is implied to have been quite recent, and she apparently did her best to suppress the emotions so as not to ruin Kaito's own emotional recovery as he returned to the place of his traumatic childhood. Finding out Kaito is KID made her Black-and-White Insanity a lot worse.

• Heroic BSoD: The events of Part 1 take their toll; Aoko appears to be in this state during the subsequent Interlude.

• Hypocrite: When fighting with Kaito in Chapter 5, Aoko highlights the concepts of information abuse and abuse of trust, and when Kaito calls her out for this, she implies that it's okay for her to do those things because she's the hero, seemingly oblivious to the full implications of ISHA and her own team still using this tactic for their own convenience at the significant harm and expense of a number of innocents. This is highlighted further by her Mirror Character status with Shinichi yet complete Lack of Empathy towards his position when he takes action against the same circumstances she herself decried when she was put in them.

• I Reject Your Reality: Aoko's Black-and-White Insanity is beginning to descend into this territory. Aoko has claimed she joined the Irregulars to achieve justice for Kaito's dad and to protect other children from losing family members, but by chapter 10 both of these reasons have been slowly but thoroughly invalidated and Aoko is left pinwheeling desperately for reasons why Shinichi (and, by his proxy, Kaito) are the bad guys to the Irregulars' good but unwilling to examine or reflect on her reasons for feeling this way. Instead of accepting that these revelations change much of the circumstances surrounding her decisions, she refuses to acknowledge the obvious discrepancies between the reasons behind her choices and the reality of the situation, and instead deliberately dodges valid criticisms against her stance on the issue by firing off barely-related redirections and ad hominems. On the whole, Aoko so far demonstrates a pervasive tendency to seek refuge in a deliberately simplistic view of the world around her and scapegoat and strawman the antagonists in her life that may upset this view, with the implication being that this is because she doesn't want to face the more complicated and emotionally challenging reality. The resulting rejection of the reality of moral nuance appears to be her way of protecting herself from painful self-reflection, but it also makes her arguably and ironically the most villain-like member of the Irregulars as she arbitrarily justifies or condemns similar morally ambiguous behavior based almost entirely on which "side" committed the act, paving her way to Tautological Templar-hood. The end of Part 1 and the revelation of the fates of Satoshi and Santa seems to have forced her to look in the mirror at herself and ISHA. It's unclear how she'll ultimately respond; she's currently booted up into Heroic BSoD.

• Internal Reveal: Aoko finds out that Kaito is Kaitou KID in Chapter 5. Due to her Black-and-White Insanity when it comes to that particular criminal, she doesn't take it well.

• Irony: Aoko really joined the ISHA to work out her personal issues by trying to use Kaitou KID as an emotional and physical punching bag, but she covers it up by telling herself and others that she wants to get justice for Kaito's dad and to protect children, especially from suffering loss of family like Kaito did. By the end of part 1, not only is her boss in ISHA revealed to be responsible for Kaito's father's death, but Aoko herself has ignorantly murdered a homeless child without realizing it and her own organization brutally murdered a second in front of the Irregulars' own eyes. Given that there were forty street kids kidnapped and experimented on, there's a high possibility that both ISHA and the Irregulars have killed more.

• Lack of Empathy: Aoko can be quite empathetic for those she cares about, but she disturbingly demonstrates either a distinct unwillingness or inability to care about the pains and burdens of others if those others willingly oppose her and the side of the conflict she's chosen.

• Likes Clark Kent, Hates Superman: Aoko is romantically interested in Kaito until chapter 5 but intensely hates the Kaitou KID. Now that she's found out they are one and the same, her feelings are more confused, but she's so far fervently sided with ISHA against him and is currently desperately clinging to any reason she can find to maintain that he's the bad guy to ISHA's good, even though those reasons keep collapsing into irrationality.

• Making a Splash: Aoko can control and manipulate water, though she's still new and inexperienced at it.

• The Masquerade Will Kill Your Dating Life: Kaito's and Aoko's prospective first date is ruined by her finding out he's Kaitou KID.

• Meaningful Name: Aoko's superhero alias, Tsuyu, derives its name from Japan's midsummer rainy season.

• Mirror Character:
  • Despite Aoko insisting she's the good guy and Kaitou KID the bad, both have the same motivation and pretty poor ethical standards when it comes to enacting that motivation, having long ago conflated revenge with justice. In fact, the major thing that differentiates them morally is that, unlike Kaito, Aoko actively represses all self-awareness of this similarity, leading her to self-righteously claim a moral high-ground she hasn't earned.
  • She's this with Shinichi, as one might guess from her character quote above, which serves to underscore her startling Lack of Empathy for those she sees as being on opposing sides. Aoko is the first and main vocalist to decry Shinichi's choices in the aftermath of the false kidnapping incident, but up until that point, she'd probably had the most parallels with him as someone not trusted, not confided in, neglected and isolated by her family, and taken advantage of by those keeping secrets around her. They even have an almost identical moment of "why should I believe you?" when those who have kept painful secrets ask for their trust again (Shinichi with Hattori, and Aoko with Kaito). They suffer many of the same personal conflicts, but have reacted in very different ways.

• Murder by Mistake: While all of the Irregulars are culpable for taking the fireball creature down in Chapter 2, Aoko is the one who directly kills it: she uses her control over water to create a great wave to smother it, and its remains turn to sludge and wash into the surrounding environment. The problem? While she fully intended to drown the creature, she didn't realize said creature was a terrified thirteen-year-old boy suffering from the side-effects of having been experimented on. Instead of heroically taking down a monster, Aoko's first major victory on the team is retroactively realized to have been Aoko literally suffocating a child until he drowned.

• My God, What Have I Done?: Aoko is horrified upon learning that the fireball creature she destroyed was an innocent child, a realization which, when combined with the impact of all the other painful revelations about both Kaito and ISHA and her place in all of it, pushes her into Heroic BSoD in the Interlude.

• Never My Fault: During the Red Siamese Cats' robbery of Nanyo University, KID tries to warn Aoko that the RSC are very dangerous to her, but Aoko is too busy trying to beat him up to listen to his surprisingly earnest warnings and refuses to take his warnings as anything but lies. Because she's so focused on trying to beat up KID, she doesn't notice the RSC until they're in firing range, and ends up being electrostatically shocked from behind, afterwards KID disappears and she's left to fight off the RSC with Hakuba. She blames her injuries on KID for distracting her.

• Tautological Templar: Aoko points out that Kaito keeping the kinds of secrets he does is an abuse of trust and power... while her entire superhero team does this same thing for their own convenience at great expense to others. She outright claims that it's okay if she lies because she's doing it to protect people, a declaration whose validity has been challenged and refuted both before and after she says this within the story, even by Aoko herself in the very same chapter. One assumes, both from this conversation and from her dialogue in chapter 10, that the "logic" behind Aoko's thinking is that Kaito's actions are villainous because she considers him a villain, while her actions are heroic because she has dubbed herself a hero.

• Ungrateful Bitch: KID goes out of his way to warn her about the Red Siamese Cats, an anti-meta terrorist group that could seriously hurt or even kill her. Aoko replies by attacking him and refusing to believe him. When the RSC attack her, she blames KID.

Toyama Kazuha/"Banshee"

The forth member of the Irregulars to join after she developed the ability of a dizzyingly loud screech. She can also bounce at high speeds in a psuedo-flight manner described similar to a slingshot.

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• Childhood Friend Romance: With Hattori.

• Clingy Jealous Girl: It's hinted in the second interlude that part of her dismissive attitude towards Shinichi comes from jealousy over how much Hattori admires and obsesses over him.

• Flat Character: Through part 1. She gets very little attention and is largely defined by her relationship with Hattori and Ran, and while Hattori, Hakuba, Ran, and Aoko grapple with their choices and morality with varying levels of acceptance, growth, and denial, all of which lead to some change, good or bad, in their characters, Kazuha in Part 1 has very little to do in the plot besides react to developments and shows little visible challenge or change. She has one scene focused on her perspective, which only serves to reinforce preexisting implications about her allegiances and morality reflected by her reactions in others' scenes. The second interlude begins to change this with the introduction of a personal character conflict; her steadfast determination to earn a place in the Irregulars to be by Hattori's side and jealousy of Shinichi both cause a rift between her and Hattori when Hattori chooses to quit the Irregulars in part to help Shinichi.

• Foil: Her relationship with Hattori superficially resembles Shinichi's and Ran's relationship in many ways, what with them being romantically involved childhood friends, one of whom (Hattori) hid a secret identity from the other, which is why Kazuha thinks she has the right to judge Shinichi's response to finding out Ran's secret identity. In reality, they're Not So Similar.

• Lack of Empathy: While Aoko's dogmatic perspective means she insists most strongly that Shinichi is wrong for temporarily siding with KID against the Irregulars, Kazuha is the most callous and perjorative regarding Shinichi's actual suffering and abuse. It seems to come not from an actual inability for empathy but from a self-centered perspective; in chapter 11 she very clearly cares more about the problems and pains of the people who hurt Shinichi, whom she has a stronger emotional investment in, than she does about Shinichi.

• Meaningful Name: Kazuha's superhero alias, Banshee, sources its name from the spirit women of Celtic folklore infamous for their foreboding and terrifying Death Wail.

• Never My Fault: With the "my" in this case being inclusive towards her social group. Her one standout scene told from her perspective shows her clearly struggling to accept that others could be justified in holding the Irregulars accountable for the negative consequences of decisions they made with the best intent. When Shinichi breaks up with Ran because she's demonstrated that she can't have a healthy and functional romantic relationship with Shinichi and Irregular membership at the same time, Kazuha expresses aggression and anger at Shinichi for his choice and belittles his reasons for making it under the opinion that Ran doesn't deserve to be broken up with—despite Ran's objectively terrible treatment towards Shinichi and the breakup coming off the heels of Ran screwing up the chance he gave her to prove that she can do better towards him. To be fair, Kazuha's outburst is more than likely the result of her venting stress from the incredibly difficult situation the Irregulars are in at that moment, but it still manifests as a refusal to accept that Shinichi has both the right to decide the status of his own relationships and completely valid reasons for dissolving this one.

• Not So Similar: Despite having superficial similarities, Kazuha's and Hattori's relationship contextually seem to have had little to none of the all-encompassing abusive power-plays that makes Ran's secret such a betrayal. Kazuha not accounting for this enables her to mentally frame the sobbing and devastated Ran as the wronged party when Shinichi breaks up with her.

• Poor Communication Kills: Downplayed. When Hattori decides to quit the Irregulars, she's unaware of Hattori's realization regarding how unsatisfied he was with membership, nor how much respect Hattori has for her efforts to join the team. Hattori also believes she hasn't yet taken the time to fully consider the implications of how badly Shinichi was suffering under Yuusaku's and the Irregulars' collective "care" and "companionship." Kazuha had worked incredibly hard for her and Hattori to stay together as a dynamic duo and clung to their childhood promise to do so as an absolute. Unaware of Hattori's changing feelings towards Irregular membership and the secret Hattori has come to suspect Yuusaku and Hakuba are hiding, Hattori's decision to quit appears to Kazuha like Hattori is throwing everything they had together away to help Shinichi. A viscious argument inevitably ensues, and the two part on bad terms.

• Personality Powers: Kazuha's voice can be weaponized into an incredibly loud, percussive screech; she's also an extremely audibly communicative person with a proclivity towards shouting when expressing herself, defaulting to being loudly argumentative and verbally aggressive when she doesn't know how else to react. Both traits tend to stretch the tolerance of those around her when she's upset.

• Satellite Character: Deconstructed. For all of Part 1, her interactions, appearances, and positions all revolve around her friendship with Ran and her relationship with Hattori. The latter turns out to have been a conscious choice, as she held dearly to Hattori's childhood promise that they would both be heroes together and thought of the two of them as a matched set. Her prioritizing her proximity to her loved ones above all else skewed her moral judgement of the actions she participated in and led to her being so focused on being with Hattori in the team and being a good friend to Ran that Kazuha fails to notice Hattori's changing perspective or seemingly consider the wider implications of what's going on for anyone who isn't herself, Hattori, and Ran, and so the rug is completely pulled out from under her when Hattori quits the Irregulars after Part 1.

• Sour Supporter: While she does end up cooperating in Shinichi's plan at the end of Part 1, she's the last to join the temporary coalition and protests against Shinichi's "crazy" plan until everyone else on her team joins, upon which she declares "Fine! I'm comin' too!" It's later implied that while she can admit to his strengths, she's long had a soured opinion of Shinichi in particular owing to her jealousy over how much Hattori admires him despite his relatively less impressive station in life.

• Super-Scream: Kazuha can scream to volumes literally painful for others around her and thereby destroy or damage nearby items.