There's a few routes in this game that say a lot about how fickle and unstable Takumi can be, that really warps him on an existential level.
It's hard to grasp how sometimes, but I think it starts with this...
Essentially, he's a person whose 'programming went faulty'. Namely, the issue of 'Karua', and how she's at once both a propaganda piece projected into his brain [ETA: 'the propaganda piece' was the pod program but, not the point], and also Nozomi's words filtering in.
I don't think he's able to fully separate those things with conviction, as much as he wants to. He doesn't get how projection works, that's already something difficult for a sheltered and clueless teenager to unpack but... this is a whole other level of 'challenge: impossible' mind-fuckery. If the group have ever had some disconnect between their sense of identity and their 'memory', Takumi's is soup.
But what especially gets me, is his 'younger teen self' dismisses 'Karua's' studies in the most incurious way- 'what's this, the outside world? Why bother with all of that? Why do you care? Conspiracy theorist', etc. which I imagine is what he was 'supposed' to do with anything 'weird' like any potential new information. Until the programming got funny at odd moments when Nozomi's interest would seep through, and then, you'd catch Takumi responding to 'Karua's' interest... with more interest for once.
(Now the brain doesn't know what to do. Oh sure, you want to take charge of your destiny, but actually it's better to just sleep and forget it all. Not like you ever cared about learning anything, right?)
I'd say Takumi's avoidance mechanisms later, are a response to Nozomi's existence as if she was a virus. Which... says a lot about the fascist state of the Artificial Satellite, and how Takumi was designed for the 'most ordinary kind of life' that wasn't meant to know it.
It's kind of unclear how the programming works- whether it takes the subject's base personality and uses it to run an 'AI scenario' based upon whatever Kamukura wanted to project into them, or if it doesn't bother matching personality at all and just shoves scenes into their head regardless if it's something they'd do. Either way, it feels that something went especially wrong with Takumi, even if his personality matched the 'memories' he was given, because for the first time one of the pod-programs was actually adapting to outside stimuli.
The symbolism about that moon is especially interesting. Because Eito - the 'moon' - learns the truth about the world and its wars, and remains a significant challenge for Takumi to grapple with- only for him to kill him and redo everything at the end of the first scenario, suggesting he had kind of failed that (basically undoing the work that Eito had done to stop the weapon without knowing that they're not on Earth, for one...). The moon also represents 'illusion'- what the SDU look up at from Futurum is actually the Artificial Satellite where they've spent their whole lives in a pod, Eito's major trauma deals with illusions that physically warp what humans are (the glitch also doesn't even fully distinguish between 'Human' and 'Futuran' in the first place which makes it even less of an objective judgement)...
...on that note, this here from the Casual route continues to haunt me, and it's been hard to put into words exactly why. Because it might very well have come from Eito's mouth if he were there, since he's trapped in some terrible stuff too. But Eito's not there- that's a dream state that Takumi is in, so those words came from Takumi.
It's like his subconscious has been screaming to get out of the cage for a long time, but he keeps wanting to go back in anyway.
Forever haunted by something and I'm gonna bully you with it too
[SDU truth spoilers- and some interpretation thereof]
Karua's existence wasn't planned. At all. She's an accident caused by Nozomi's data affecting pod-Takumi's early development, apparently to the degree of making him and his mother latch onto her.
(I do believe that Takumi was supposed to be the boring normie protagonist with the most bogstandard mental stability [ETA: relatively, at least] but, when Nozomi got involved and introduced a 'wild card'... ohhhhh boy.)
But more importantly, Takumi and Eito share this in common- both of their pods were altered in some way, to profound extents. In Eito's case the intrusion screwed with the brain itself, giving him a kind of psychosis disorder. As for Takumi, something appeared in his world that shouldn't have been there, and his own brain was highly implied to be responsible for projecting a whole person.
In one Box of Calamity path, Takumi winds up experiencing a state of psychosis that causes the world to become horribly distorted. So maybe uh, Takumi already experiences something like this, if only under a very particular kind of distress. It would go a long way to explain why he experiences hallucinations at those times- like god damn, Karua's existence itself is like a drawn-out hallucination.
Anyways reminded of the post that says Eito is the institutionally-abused mentally ill type acutely aware of how 'alien' he is to the rest of the world, while Takumi drifts through his world unaware that anything's wrong and not wanting to believe it wasn't normal. Which is... fitting for the ways their pod worlds were affected, from early on.
I just realised that much of the reason Takumi was unable to fight Ima on the whole 'get Kako to see my side' thing early game, is because he too has preeeetty bad codependency issues that he's in denial of. It seems like he rarely - if ever - talked to anyone other than Karua, much less made any other friends, and in the dreams he responds to Karua like he's annoyed by her and often. On one level his annoyance is with her learning 'weird' stuff he's not interested in, but underneath that, kinda... feels like he resents her, but he's not saying it. He can't.
...with that face Takumi's making, I think he's saying that for his sake as much as he is Karua's
What especially bothers me about this, looking back at it, is that Takumi has been narrating his life despite it being such a 'mundane time'. The way this kind of self-narration happens in the first two Danganronpa games is that it marks a significant event from the outset- being in awe at coming to a famous academy for the first time. The third Danganronpa game has the protagonist stuffed in a locker and spacing out of her existence when she talks to herself, which puts a highly dissociative spin on that 'meta self-talk'- and well it would, she was kidnapped and possibly drugged for all we know.
In the Hundred Line prologue, we are introduced to the complex's emergency siren through Takumi and for all we know about his life until that point, that's the first time he's ever heard it, the way he pauses in shock to take in the message. But it's not. He's heard it many times, so many in fact that you'd expect him to roll his eyes and move Karua to hiding if he was really that nonchalant. His narration then proceeds to explain the presence of the sirens as 'something the society has accepted as normal', which is... a bit strange for someone who has accepted the presence of them without any issues.
The way this could have reflected any day in Takumi's life gives me the impression he's dissociating on and off at any point in any day, but we don't 'see' it happening because of how he narrates 'to us'.
Snapped the post because tagging would be tagging spoilers
But
Toxic Hirutaku potential much!? I'm thinking Slasher-like loops but where Hiruko is just so fixated on caring for Takumi above all else, and there's just no stopping her in the worst of it because her senses have just kind of. Gone. Doubly so if the break-loop attempt in the 55th ending FAILED and she's back at square one, oh God oh God
