My Thoughts On Two of the Controversial Girlies (Hitomi Sasaki and Hanano Okazaki)
(VERY LONG POST)
Content Warning for moderate discussions of CSA and its effects, as well as some discussion of abusive parenting.
Also SPOILERS!
Just because I’m seeing these two characters get a lot of hate, I want to speak my mind on them. And I’m aware not everyone hates them, but I’m seeing a lot of it, and it’s definitely made me think. 
IMPORTANT NOTE: this will not include me justifying the behavior that these characters are disliked. Specifically, their harm of others, both physically and emotionally. Because there is no excuse for it. Those actions were wrong.
These are my attempts to analyze their behavior, and explain what I think happened in their heads. 
Regarding Sasaki… She was quite bossy, I agree with that. She grated on me a lot. There were a lot of times I thought she was really mean to a lot of people…personally, I think she was a bit meaner to the guys, but then again, a lot of them were more antagonistic towards her too.
However, given her background, I think this attitude makes perfect sense, not just as her being the ultimate student council president, but also with the fact that she is a CSA victim.
Being the ultimate student council president, it makes perfect sense that she would feel most comfortable in a leadership role.
In addition to that though, victims of these types of trauma often center a lot of their behavior around having control over stressful situations after the fact, especially when they are in a heightened state, a.k.a. when they are triggered. It was control that they didn’t have when they were in the midst of that abusive relationship.
If you ask me, Takeshi dissociating is similar in this regard. I see a lot of people reacting very strongly to Sasaki and her trauma, while kind of brushing over Takeshi. That’s very harmful. Both of their coping mechanisms often get in their way, and impede their overall wellbeing in the long run, but both are methods of attempting to reclaim control, and techniques which they used to survive their trauma.
While this situation isn’t necessarily a complete replica of their experiences with CSA, they are stuck somewhere they don’t want to be, that they didn’t choose to be, out of reach of any safe people, where someone could come in and violate their bodily autonomy, this time in the form of killing them rather than assaulting them, at any given moment. It’s safe to say that their trauma responses have been thoroughly triggered. I would say their responses are remarkably calm considering that.
Back to Sasaki specifically—I could make a whole other post about Takeshi—she did overlook the well-being of characters like Tamba to some degree. I think it was a very “end justifies the means” type of thinking. It’s also possible that at her core, she knew that this could be dangerous, and was trying to deceive herself into thinking that if one of them perished from the accident, that would be one body down. For reasons I’m about to explain, she probably wouldn’t think much further than that.
She also focused in much too heavily on the vents, not considering any other options. I might be a little bit biased in this regard because I like Nakamigawa a lot, though he’s far from perfect too. A lot of Sasaki’s mindset works off of denial, I think. She doesn’t want to think about the potential bad outcomes. She doesn’t want to think about the bad at all, it will break her down if she does. And that’s exactly what happened.
I think she also shouldered the position of leadership without asking for or accepting help because she didn’t want anybody to get too close to her. Being a survivor of CSA makes it very hard to trust other people.
On top of that, it seems like she really went through that all alone. Or maybe, she tried to tell someone, and they didn’t help her. Maybe they even romanticized it… or, based on her poem, (“you’re not a wolf, you’re little red, remember that…”) maybe they made her out to be the true “evil” one. Why would you ever want to ask someone for help with something that is causing you immense pain if that is going to be their response? And if you’re in that triggered state again, why would you want to let anyone close to you at all? Sure, people in this group would probably be willing to help Sasaki, but from her position, why risk it? 
OK, now onto Okazaki. I know a lot less about her right now, and came to despise her as a person for the pain she caused, while absolutely loving her as a character. However, I do have some speculation. Keep in mind, I don’t have a lot of physical evidence for this, so if you’re asking me for a source, I made it the heck up. But nah, I didn’t, I read into dialogue, vocal delivery, and things like that way too much.
Regarding Okazaki… I’m going off of the fact that Yonekura is her mother. The fact that Haruka Yonekura is one of the main people running this killing game already shows me that she has little to no understanding of empathy. She may have antisocial tendencies, possibly psychopathic or sociopathic as well.
(By the way, I’m not saying if you have these tendencies, that you too are a crazy person who makes teenagers kill each other. That’s a harmful stereotype. This is someone in which those traits have become highly malignant, and it’s also greatly exaggerated because…unfortunately fiction does that.)
Now, there may be a genetic link here. I’m not exactly sure how proven the genetic link concept is when it comes to these traits, but it’s definitely not off the table. In addition to that, I imagine being raised by someone who had traits like these may negatively impact your own development. It would be hard to learn empathy and compassion, or any kind of morality at all, from a mother who is willing to put actual children in a death game, including you, her own flesh and blood.
Thinking about this, I wondered if Yonekura was fine with Okazaki dying because she saw her as some kind of abomination. But based on the fact that she has little to nothing to say about her own child dying, I think it’s more likely that she doesn’t care at all. One way or the other.
Okazaki herself seems to not fully understand the degree to which her actions harmed the students. She does seem to understand the concepts of right and wrong, she just doesn’t seem to particularly care to keep in line with doing what’s right, especially if the “wrong” choice plays into her carefully crafted persona.
Now, again, I am not making an excuse for her behavior. The two murders that she committed were absolutely atrocious. Nothing that has happened to her will excuse that. However, I think it’s possible that she crafted her persona out of some kind of response to her mother’s complete lack of any sort of maternal feelings whatsoever towards her. Call it some form of subconsciously acting out, if you will, or trying to get a response from the world at large, being so steeped in indifference for such a long time. I think it’s very fitting that she is someone who makes masks, as I’ve heard people who deal with psychopathic/sociopathic/antisocial personality traits describe the face they put forward like a mask, or a crafted persona.
By the time the trial reached its end, I just wanted her to be quiet. And I think that was the point. She is so lost in this persona that she has, that she will quite literally never understand just how much pain she has caused, and just how much the people around her now loathe her. In some ways, I feel sad for her. Her response to Watari saying that she hated her especially, was telling to me. Because Okazaki seemed to be thinking from a shockingly logical perspective in this moment. Considering the fact that she seemed to take sadistic glee in her killing of Manami and Kazutoshi, like it was a performance rather than the actual atrocity that it was, this was a hard pivot. She seemed genuinely confused. “Why would you hate me? You get to survive now. I did this for you. Isn’t that what friends are supposed to do?”
Between this, and the fact that she seemed to genuinely like Harada, only to torment him during his trial as well… I think she’s capable of liking people. But she’s not capable of empathizing with them. Sure, she saved Watari, at the cost of two of her friends’ lives, and at the cost of damaging the lives of many others irreparably. Sure, she enjoyed spending time with Harada, and canonically held romantic feelings for him, yet again, there was that sadistic, almost childlike glee at basically twisting the knife in his chest as she repeatedly asked him where Sawa was. Like she finds his pain amusing. The apathy even applies to her own life as mortality creeps up on her… I’m sure she was aware that whatever death was waiting for her in the execution chamber was not going to be pleasant, and I’m also sure that she understood this was the end for her. Yet, she seemed gleeful about it. It was part of the performance. It was her final bow… All she cared about was the act. I think it was because there really wasn’t much underneath it. She was empty… she was never filled with anything.
I think Okazaki herself definitely shows signs of some kind of malignant antisocial personality traits. Empathy does not come naturally to her, but she can still like and even enjoy the people around her. She even managed to say something somewhat empathetic towards Watari before her death, bringing up Watari’s somewhat wishful thinking about them becoming foxes together in the next life. Maybe, there are some people where she doesn’t want them to be sad… Or at the very least, doesn’t like the idea of them not liking her. She was trying to remind Watari, “hey, we’re friends, right? You hate me, but I still like you. I don’t understand.”
One more giant disclaimer from me, because I’ve seen so many people have their words twisted, and I just…don’t want it to happen to me… I am not justifying the fact that these two characters killed three people between the both of them. The initial motives, maybe, are comprehensible—sleep deprivation can literally cause you to lose your mind, and will eventually kill you; though I think bad enough cold temperatures can certainly do that too, Okazaki especially was still off before that— but both were still ultimately ending the lives of another person brutally.
I’m an autistic psychology student, I enjoy these thought experiments. I like trying to figure out why people do the things that they do, good, evil, and in between. Maybe that says something about me, lol, I dunno. I don’t do this with real people, it comes much easier with fiction because I know that it usually doesn’t hurt anyone in real life.
Anyway, this is becoming a hyperfixation, in case you couldn’t tell. And if you for some reason read all of this, I owe you a drawing.
My Tetro Pink Tier List (SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA TETRO PINK. GO WATCH IT.)
Discalimers:
I literally love every single one of these characters. Every single one. Yes even the one I put last.
For the most part the characters are put in order, even within their tiers. Though the characters in the 2nd tier are pretty much on the same level for me.
