Characters / Black Paradox

Spoilers are left unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

The Black Paradox

Maruso

• Brainy Brunette: See The Smart Girl. She also has brunette hair, as shown on the front cover.
• The Heart: Maruso is the only unambiguously good character in the story, as she soft-hearted, empathetic, and tries to help others. She tried to help Piitan, who was on the brink of death, while Taborou and Baracchi were focusing on collecting the stones that came out of Piitan. She is also the one that kept the other two characters alive, and came up with a plan to prevent total extiction of the human race.
• The Omniscient: Due to the portal in her brain to the afterlife, Maruso has a limited ability to see the future. When she's operated on by Dr. Suga to remove the gateway from her brain (as part of his plan to harvest more paradonite stones from inside the Afterlife), her ability to see the future is upgraded, granting her full omniscience. With it, she learns the full truth about what Suga has set in motion.
• Only Sane Woman: Maruso is the first to point out how messed up and dangerous it is to be selling the paradonite in the first place. Though this could be the result of her psychic powers kicking in to a moderate extent.
• The Smart Girl: Being a nurse, Maruso naturally knows a lot about physiology and anatomy. She even tells the other characters what a pylorus is, and where the word comes from.

Taburo

• Dirty Coward: Even though Taburo does not realize this, his cowardice and his inability to take responsibility for his actions are his primary character flaws and the root causes of his insecurities, thus why he has his doppelganger, a reflection of all of the good qualities he doesn't have, following him around everywhere. This is ultimately what does him in when he abandons Maruso at the villa.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Taburo is a selfish, greedy, and shady man. At the same time though, he is shown to care for others when it counts. Before he leaves Suga's villa, he is genuinely empathic towards Maruso for all of the hardships she had gone through, and planned to free her from the villa to expose Dr. Suka's plan to the public. Unfortunately, he was too late. Maruso appeared to be so traumatized and vegetative that he saw no hope in rescuing her, and left her there.
• The Smart Guy: Taburo is the one in the group that's the most quick-witted, and best cooks up plans and schemes. He is also one of the first in the group besides Maruso to realize how much the plan of cultivating the paradonite will fail, and attempts to book it out of Dr. Suga's villa.
• Survivor Guilt: Taburo is implied to be experiencing this when he abandons Maruso at the villa, as his doppelganger, which was what initially goaded him to commit suicide, had come back, and eventually succeeds in killing him. His entrance to the Spirit Realm also happens to be his shadow, symbolizing this cowardly act.

Baracchi

• Alpha Bitch: Baracchi is very self-serving and egotistical. She also rubs it in Maruso's face, despite her being in a fugue state, that Dr. Suga "doesn't love her anymore", and prefers Baracchi.
• The Ditz: Baracchi is not the crunchiest chip in the bag. She thought it was a good idea to sell stones that she had just found out had supernatural properties, and sent one to a personality that she was a fan of to promote them. She even falls head over heels for Dr. Suga, even when he's shown himself to be a corrupt individual, all because he compliments her for her looks.
• Dumb Blonde: See The Ditz. She also has blonde hair, as shown on the front cover.
• The Fashionista: Baracchi is always concerned about her beauty, which is why she despises her birthmark. She also runs a jewelry store, and treats the paradonite as a valuable jewel rather than a capsule for human souls.
• Two-Faced: She has a large birthmark that covers half of her face. It's so large she uses her bangs to cover it up. Her insecurities surrounding the birthmark are also what gets her to want to commit suicide.

Pii-tan

• The Cutie: A rare male, adult no less, example of this trope.
• The Eeyore: Pii-tan is the most pessimestic of the group, even more so than Maruso. Out of all of the four main characters, he wants to die the most.
• Put on a Bus: Subverted. Even though it seems that he died after his stomach exploded and got extracted, and his robot doppelganger appeared to replace him, it turns out that the Pii-tan robot actually had Pii-tan's soul. The guy never really left the group at all. His soul was just transferred into a robot body instead.

Others

Doppelgangers

• Greater-Scope Villain: The Doppelgangers are what led three of the main characters to attempt suicide, which in turn led to them discovering a portal in Pii-tan's stomach which held the parodonite, leading to the conflicts in the story. Despite this, the doppelgangers only appear in the first two chapters, and Taburo's doppelganger makes a return in chapter 5 after he abandons Maruso.
• Shadow Archetype: In the grand scheme of things, they are personifications of the reasons as to why the main characters want to commit suicide. Even when they don't seem to be around all that much, it is the character's insecurities that nonetheless opens gateways into the spirit realm, so their influence is still all the more present. Taboru's own doppelganger even returns to haunt him when he leaves the villa, abandons Maruso, and loses his will to continue working on the Paradonite Project, the reason he initially gave up his suicidal thoughts. This gets him to open his own portal into the spirit realm through his own shadow.

Dr. Suga

• Asshole Victim: Dr. Suga becomes a scapegoat by the rest of the world because of his discovery leading to the near-extiction of mankind. Not that he deserves any sympathy for this.
• Big Bad: He has pretty good intentions in mind by ending the energy crisis, or so he claims, but the ways he intends to fulfill this goal are utterly unethical. Otherwise, Suga is shown to be a liar and a cheater who takes advantage of the main characters.
• The Casanova: Behind closed doors, Suga knows how to pick up chicks, or at the very least get in affairs with them against their will. He is also quick to jump between girl to girl, and isn't afraid to kill them if they interfere with his experiments.
• Dub Name Change: The doctor is referred to as "Dr. Suga" in the VIZ edition, but was "Suka" in a previous lovalization.
• Karmic Death: When Maruso gets a tumor removed from her brain, she is able to project that Suga will die a gruesome death. When the world finds out that he's responsible for the near-extinction of mankind, he will be widley despised, and will be tortured to death.
• Mad Scientist: Suga extracts Pii-tan's stomach, enlarges it, puts it in a swimming pool, and puts a metal door on it. He also takes Baracchi's birthmark, and stretches it out onto a giant petri dish. And don't even get us started on what he does with Maruso's tumor.
• Necessarily Evil: Subverted, in that although he is cultivating the protagonists' body parts in the hopes of ending a major energy crisis, it is made more clear by the end that he's doing this more for recognition rather than out of noble intentions, with Marisou even calling him out for his hypocrisy by then.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: He begins having an affair with Maruso who is having continuous fits of terror, and is by this point mostly vegetative. What's worse is that he knows that she's close on the brink of death, and planned on disposing of her body when she does die.

Rei Taino