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NAME
NICKNAME
CANON
CANON POINT
AGE
ABILITIES
WEAPON
HISTORY
PERSONALITY
Celestia Ludenberg (Her real name is Taeko Yasuhiro, but good luck getting her to ever admit that.)
NICKNAME
Queen of the Liars
CANON
Danganronpa
CANON POINT
Post-death
AGE
16
ABILITIES
She is a "Super High-School Level Gambler", which pretty much means she has godmod-level winning skill/luck in any game where something is being gambled.
WEAPON
Her chosen weapon will be a rose whip, her favorite item in-game. As it evolves with her experience and time there, she will begin to be able to control the end of the whip more like a flexible extension of herself rather than an actual weapon.
HISTORY
!!!WARNING!!!! Contains spoilers for Danganronpa.
Little is known about Celestia's early life. She was born in the Tochigi prefecture of Japan (more specifically, Utsunomiya, its capital city) as Taeko Yasuhiro, one that is famous for its gyoza. The accompanying Dangan Ronpa manga states that as a child she was ostracized for being "plain", and perhaps to compensate for that, young Taeko created the 'Celestia Ludenberg' persona so that she would stand out more, looking to figures like Marie Antoinette as her role model. To justify her new name as one given to her by her parents, she states at one point that her mother was a French aristocrat and her father a German musician, though this is clearly a lie.
Over the years, she has participated in many gambling matches and tournaments with extremely high stakes (including her entire fortune, assets, and even her own life), and was often involved with underground gambling. She was gathering money to fulfill her dream (living in a Western castle with many vampire manservants to tend to her needs), however, she did not manage to make it to her goal before she came to Hope's Peak Academy. Despite not quite reaching her goal, she made quite a reputation for herself in the gambling world, earning the nickname "Queen of the Liars".
While she was originally invited to Hope's Peak Academy (a school for students who are the most elite in their respective fields) for her incredible skill in gambling, after arriving, things started to go horribly wrong. The "Most Despair-Inducing Event In The History Of Mankind" occurred, and the school decided to keep any students willing to stay inside the school to keep them safe. Sometime after they had been shut inside the school, however, an organization called Super High School Level Despair took over the school. They wiped the memories of the students and their life there, making them think that they were just now coming to Hope's Peak and meeting their classmates for the first time. This is when the mastermind behind Super High School Level Despair revealed their plan for the students of Hope's Peak -- in order for anyone to leave the school, they must murder a classmate and get away with it. As their memories of the Most Despair-Inducing Event were erased, they are all anxious to leave the school, which kickstarts a horrible series of murders.
Originally, Celestia recommends that everyone adjust to their life here. If they all agree to live peacefully together in the school, then no one will be murdered, and they can continue to live on. However, in truth, she is deeply unhappy with being stuck there, and when the mastermind introduces a money-related motivation (10 billion yen to whoever can murder someone and get away with it, in addition to being able to leave the school alive), she finally makes her move. She manipulates two of her classmates and kills both of them, managing to almost get away with covering up her crime so that she can escape the school with the money, presumably to use it on her dream of living in a castle with many servants. However, she ends up accidentally letting a few small details slip, giving her away as the culprit.
Once she has finally been proven to be the culprit beyond any shadow of a doubt, she decides to give up gracefully, saying that if she were to be reborn, it would be as Marie Antoinette. She is killed by the mastermind for her crime by being tied to a burning stake, before being hit in the face with a fire truck.
PERSONALITY
The most important part of Celestia's personality is her near-impeccable poker face. Not only does she find it easy to lie to others, but she also prides herself on being able to lie to herself, and, in her words, "trick her own heart". No matter how panicked or upset Celestia is feeling, on almost all occasions she is able to retain a calm, cool, and collected exterior.
Her intelligence level is rather high -- in combination with her ability to lie well, it makes it incredibly easy for her to manipulate others. She was able to easily manipulate her fellow classmates by lying about their actions, even going so far as to convince one that the other had possibly sexually assaulted her. When interacting with her, her classmates seem to find her mysterious and difficult to understand, often due to the fact that many of them do not know which things she says are lies and which are true.
However, occasionally, her true feelings slip through the cracks. If something does not go the way she wants it, she has a ferocious temper that tends to show its head. She will often scream profanity at the offending person, clenching her fists or sticking up her middle fingers. It is a huge contrast to her usual cool, calm, and elegant outer facade, and others often find her angry outbursts incredibly frightening.
Celestia tries her best to indulge in elegance and extravagance wherever possible, in order to cultivate her "image". This supposed obsession with being surrounded by the best of the best even extends to people -- she ranks the people around her using letters. She regards the average person as a "Rank D", aka someone who does not particularly interest her. She notes that she has searched in many countries around the world and has yet to find anyone who was worthy of a "Rank B", let alone "Rank A." However, she also adds that there are a few "Rank C" people, and being at that rank allows one to apply to be her manservant/"knight". Anyone ranked lower than "D", according to Celestia, is someone who she has deemed unacceptable and unworthy of existing. She makes a point of noting that she hires someone to assassinate anyone who has the misfortune of being ranked below a D … however, that is clearly yet another lie.
Celestia also admires the excessive and lavish lifestyle of Western kings and queens, Marie Antoinette in particular. She tries to keep her speech as elegant and ladylike as possible, in keeping with that. She makes a show of valuing possessions and things over people -- she states at one point that the most dangerous match she had ever participated in was one in which she had accidentally spilled tea on her favorite dress and had to rush to finish the match in order to make it to the dry cleaners in time. She values luxury and being pampered and treated like a princess at all times, even down to the tea she drinks and how it is prepared. However, her favorite food is the gyoza for which her hometown is famous -- she remarks how strange it is that she would enjoy such "filthy, smelly sacs of meat". It is a small peek at what is most likely her "true" self, hidden beneath many layers of cultivated elegance and princess-like behavior.
Above all, Celestia absolutely hates feeling vulnerable or "exposed" in any way, although she does her best to cover up that side of herself by acting cool. At the beginning of their time at Hope's Peak, she was the one to suggest the rule that no one leaves their rooms at night, in order to prevent them all from living in fear of being murdered all night long. While she tries to pass it off as something that would simply benefit everyone, it is, in truth, a measure she takes to try and secure her own safety. Even when she is about to die, she continues to play up her "cool" side, pretending that she cared nothing for her classmates, and simply wanted the 10 billion yen that the mastermind had offered for some dream of living in a fancy castle. She always keeps her true feelings close to her heart, and plays her cards carefully so that no one will ever make their way in.