Headcanon List
To be amended, edited, deleted or whatever as it takes my fancy.
- When Rena was taught to take photographs by her guardian/sensei, they used a professional camera with real glass lenses. It's heavier than a normal camera but Rena likes the weight. It gives her memories a sense of tangibility.
- She won't ever use a digital camera. The kanshu have already taken her memories once before; she doesn't think she could bear it happening again.
- She develops all of her photographs herself as she's afraid that if she gives the film to someone else to develop, they'll discover she's a lost rebound.
- Rena doesn't know basic milestones that people go through in their lives. Her being confused about Neene losing her baby teeth wasn't the first time that she's been baffled by this sort of thing. Puberty, for that reason, was kind of traumatic.
- She isn't sure what her relationship with Youhei was. She has so little experience to base it on that all she knows is that he was very dear to her and then he died.
- She's very lonely. Riku was the first person she reached out to, and only because Youhei was so adamant that he was a good person.
- She doesn't talk to people very well. It's because she knows that when she dies, she'll disappear completely from their memories. She is, at best, a transient presence. This attitude hurts her, but she doesn't understand why it does.
- Rena would die to protect humanity, but she doesn't really understand it very well.
- To call Rena a tsundere is a misnomer. She's really a weeping emotional sore with a strategy of chilly stonewalling to ensure that people don't see through her. While it's a maladaptive strategy, it's one that's served her well; Riku and Neene seem to be the only ones who've noticed how miserable she really is.
- Rena doesn't remember how to smile.
- Rena has no hobbies and no interests outside of school and fighting kanshu. The only reason she cares about school is that she wants to fill her gaps with any kind of knowledge, so that she can continue faking being fine and well adjusted, if distant.
- The things that Rena understands about social niceties and customs comes from magazines she's read. They're a little quaint and out of date.
- Rena actually does need her glasses. She doesn't wear them when she knows she's going to fight because they'll only get broken and she doesn't have a good story to explain how she broke them.
- Rena doesn't remember her birthday. She knows she must be sixteen because of what year she's in at school.
- She thinks "Arisugawa Rena" was her birth name. It doesn't really matter if it isn't, because it's who she is now.
- She doesn't have a preference for what type of phone she has. It's just something they need for work. So she doesn't understand what's so important about hers, other than it works.
- She visits the shrine not out of any real religious inclination -- she doesn't think she remembers any anyway -- but because it seems a good thing to do. She read it in a book.
- She has no real dreams about what she wants to do "afterwards". Afterwards to her seems an alien concept. She fights for an "afterwards" for everyone else, because she thinks they'd appreciate it more than she would.
- The jacket's her guardian's. She didn't want to wash it after he died. Eventually she had to, but until then she hid inside it and tried to make sense of things.
- She doesn't cut her hair for much the same reason. It would be practical for her, as a melee fighter, to have it cut short, but she was told that her hair was pretty when it was long. It's an indulgence.