Defective Detective - TV Tropes
Defective Detective
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Canardo, hard at work as usual.
The greatest challenges a detective faces aren't always a devious criminal or a really tough case — all those are a cakewalk compared to managing their personal life.
The genius ones are nerds with trouble getting along with people or worse, have social or personality disorders. The hard-working ones are workaholics who let their family relationships slide because they're never home. The overworked and nervous ones dabble in drugs and court substance addictions (or blood ). The Film Noir detective and his descendants have terrible luck with women, who either end up dead , broken or distant; if he has a wife he may be cheating on her . And gods help him and his friends if some of the bad guys or associates that they helped put in the clink come back to haunt him.
In short, it's rare to have a detective as a main character in a dramatic story and have them not have at least one serious character flaw that's tangential to them actually working cases.
Not to be confused with Clueless Detective ; he's definitely not clueless, though not quite great either.
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    Anime and Manga 
Death Note : All of the Wammy's House detectives have problems. For a start, they're all orphans. Now for the individual issues: L's social skills are awful and he has no friends, Mello has a violent inferiority complex, and Near's ability to live everyday life is ranked by the supplementary 'How To Read' material as being almost zero.
Detective Conan :
Shinichi Kudo is a fantastic detective, but he's extraordinarily socially inept in many areas, particularly in picking up blindingly obvious cues that Ran is getting exasperated with his nonstop Hol mes trivia ( and that she may be flirting with him ). Oh, and he's spent most of the series shrunk to the body of a child , which lends itself to more than a few hardships.
Ran's father Kogoro is horribly bad with money; is often seen drinking or gambling and can't fix his relationships with his estranged wife. Before Conan/Shinichi helped him gain some success as a detective, he was completely down on his luck, but even now he clearly has issues. Alternately Played for Laughs (because he's also quite the Butt Monkey ) or Drama (since it's been implied more than once that he's kind of a Sad Clown ).
Monster : Lunge's obsession with Tenma verges on psychosis and ruins both his personal and professional life, Richard Braun is recovering alcoholic and Jan Suk is naive and trusting (which is a HUGE defect in a series with people with split personalities and/or false names, violent psychopaths and shady ex-intelligence operatives all out to try and control Johan, bystanders be damned).
MPD Psycho : The story is about Tokyo police inspector Yosuke Kobayashi, who receives a box at work containing his still-living but dismembered girlfriend. The gruesome sight, along with the culprit's insane unrepentance when captured, causes Kobayashi to snap and develop Dissociated Identity Disorder ( split personalities ), which becomes the focus of the story.
Psycho-Pass : Most of the Enforcers have a lot of emotional baggage which is why they're latent criminals in the first place. Inspectors are not exempted from this and when their Psycho-pass goes high due to the amounts of stress, they'll eventually get demoted to Enforcer. For examples:
Shinya Kougami used to be an Inspector until his Psycho-pass exceeded into high level when he saw the corpse of his Enforcer, Sasayama, and eventually got demoted.
Tomomi Masaoka is a veteran detective before the Sibyl System was implemented. He got demoted into Enforcer when he got frustrated on the new system which caused a strained relationship with his son.
Shuusei Kagari diagnosed as a latent criminal at the age of 5. Given how latent criminals are treated, he has lived his entire life in rejection from society, and the resulting sullen resentment towards the Sibyl System.
Yayoi Kunizuka used to be a former guitarist until her Psycho-pass exceeded into high level and was placed in a institution. She decided to become an Enforcer when someone she knew turned out to be a rebel against the Sibyl System.
Nobuchika Ginoza resents his father who became a latent criminal while his former partner, Kougami, got demoted. As the series goes by, he regularly visits his psychiatrist who warned him about his rising Psycho-pass rate. At the end of the show, he became an Enforcer after he saw his father died to save his life.
Though Akane Tsunemori seems to have no emotional baggage when she joined the bureau, her failure to save her friend's life from Makishima became a turning point to her and then, she learned the truth about the Sibyl System which made her lost faith in them.
Lupin III has Inspector Kouichi Zenigata, who despite being badass enough to be one of the only law enforcers in the world to consistently even get close to arresting the titular thief, sometimes gets reduced to being a bumbling idiot who is incredibly easy to fool. In fact, the Filipino dub explicitly has Lupin refer to him jokingly as "Defective" instead of detective!
    Comic Books 
The extreme personality of Batman is the real one while "Bruce Wayne" is merely a facade.
An episode of Batman Beyond confirmed this is true in the Dinniverse as well. A villain tries to manipulate Bruce Wayne by using subsonics to simulate his subconscious. It is revealed that this didn't work because the "subconscious" referred to itself as Bruce. Apparently, this isn't the name Mr. Wayne calls himself in his own head and he realized it was a fake immediately.
As of the One Year Later storyline, Bruce realizes how fundamentally screwed up this is and is trying to strike more of a balance between his two lives.
This interpretation has only been valid since the mid-80s (i.e., more or less since Batman: The Dark Knight Returns ). Prior to that, Bruce Wayne was his "real" identity.
Nick Kelly, in the British comic The Topper . His strip was originally called Send For Kelly and his assistant Cedric, but was later retitled Kelly, the Defective Detective . Ran from the 1950s to the early 1990s.
Sam & Max: Freelance Police : One of the many detective conventions parodied . Both are totally insane, but as a Heroic Comedic Sociopath team rather than as The Woobie . That said, they'll sometimes dip into this reasoning to justify their ridiculous actions.
Fillmore Press in Bedlam is The Profiler , possessing a very deep understanding of the criminally insane mind. This is due to the fact that he himself was once a crazed killer, now cured after a long stay in a psychiatric hospital. However, even with his medication, he mostly acts like an overgrown autistic child.
Detective Faisal Werner of Jannah Station tries really hard not to be one.
Inspector Canardo takes pretty much every type of detective work (murder investigation for the police, discovering infidelity for private clients, finding where the dying men hid the gold etc.) with the same bored look on his face. His personal life consists solely to drink in a bar alone. While he has a good heart despite being jaded his investigations rarely ends with arrests (either the villain escapes or dies) which doesn't bother him after his fourth drink.
Caballistics, Inc. : Detective Absalom (who also starred in his own spinoff) is an alcoholic.
    Film 
The Bone Collector : Lincoln Rhyme is paralysed following an accident yet continues to help solve crimes despite being bedridden. He has to be one of the most extreme examples: he can only move his head and one finger, and the only body function he is in control over is his breathing!
Ellis Fielding in Loose Cannons has a split personality disorder.
Hellraiser: Inferno : Det Joseph Thorne is a workaholic additionally obsessed with mysteries, puzzles and games of all types. When he does have time to go home to his beloved wife and kids, he often spends that time with a prostitute.
In The Alphabet Killer , Detective Paige always knew that she was different from her colleagues in her uncanny obsessive tendencies. She did not know, however, that these were the first signs of a mental illness that would lead to a psychotic break.
In Who Framed Roger Rabbit , detective Eddie Valiant not only has an alcohol problem, but also has trouble with his relationship and is traumatized by his brother's death.
Aubrey in Anamorph is The Alcoholic and suffers from Super OCD .
Code of Silence : Detective Cragie is an older, alcoholic cop who is well-liked within the department, but covers up his accidental shooting of a teenager.
    Literature 
Downplayed in Sherlock Holmes , who, in addition to being extremely cold and distant to most who knew him (it's no surprise he only has one real friend), had morphine and cocaine addictions that plagued him until Watson helped him get over them. However, the drug use stops when he takes on an interesting case, his eccentricities are only a small part of the story, and never get in his way while solving a crime. (The legacy of the character is perhaps a bit different— his personality defects are severely played up in many of the many adaptations to be found in the Film and Live-Action TV sections.)
Literary adaptations too— In Michael Kurland 's Moriarty series, Sherlock Holmes is portrayed as a bit more defective than in the original series, especially when it comes to his ability to think rationally about what Moriarty says and does.
Nero Wolfe has the flaws of a considerable ego, a touch of agoraphobia (or simply a marked preference for staying at home), and his considerable girth (he is said to weigh "a seventh of a ton," approximately 286 lbs making him "morbidly obese" in the era in which the story was originally written, but hardly noteworthy today). Wolfe is shown to be able to have the will to overcome all these flaws when solving crime.
In fact, Wolfe arguably inverts this; he's at his happiest being an eccentric, slighty kooky shut-in and and one of his great peeves is having to work. Rather than his eccentricities getting in the way of his solving crimes, Wolfe in fact tends to view the situation as people making him solve crimes getting in the way of his eccentricities.
Hercule Poirot : Poirot suffers from a minor case of OCD; the books go into more detail regarding his love of neatness than the television series — the first novel actually has him finding a vital clue as a result of rearranging the decorations on a mantelpiece.
Vicki Nelson in Tanya Huff's Blood Books series. Had to quit the police force after developing a degenerative disease in her eyes, and became a PI who teams with a vampire because she can't see at night.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union : Meyer Landsman of Michael Chabon 's novel is an alcoholic mess, has massive problems about family, guilt, religion, and chess, and is a hard-as-nails Determinator to boot.
The Little Sleep: Mark Genevich is narcoleptic and sometimes has hypnogogic hallucinations. Which is just a tiny bit inconvenient for a P.I.
Many members of Michael Slade's "Special X," the fictional RCMP homicide unit from Ghoul and other novels, have taken a pounding over the years. Zinc Chandler in particular fits this trope, having developed epilepsy after narrowly surviving being shot in the head.
Parodied in The Areas of My Expertise with a list of ridiculous detectives, including one who was his own worst enemy, one who was a Satanist, and one who never got out of his bathtub.
Kurt Wallander : Kurt has diabetes, an alcohol problem which is not quite alcoholism but always verges on it, no contact with his ex-wife, bad contact with his father and daughter, no friends, etcetera etcetera. (Fridge Brilliance: Shouldn't a limited third person narrative describe an actual alcoholic as a borderline alcoholic?) And in the end, for all his troubles, he gets to retire... with Alzheimers.
Ewart Backstrom in the Backstrom novels, an overweight boorish alcoholic of little ability and inflated ego.
Jack Vincennes in L.A. Confidential is a capable enough detective but he's also a recovering alcoholic and drug addict who once shot two innocent people under the influence. In something of a subversion, getting back on the wagon does not make him a superb crime solver but pretty much screws his life up.
Charles Todd's Inspector Rutledge, a shell-shocked WWI veteran who constantly hallucinates the ghost of a soldier he had to execute.
The Well of Lost Plots : Subverted. Thursday is hiding out in a very bad police procedural novel, and the protagonist, DI Spratt, is forced to have a dysfunctional family on the point of breaking up because the novel is so cliched. Thursday helps him out by making him subtly change the narrative. It turns out that the dreadful police procedural is a poor early draft of another Fforde novel , and when that novel is published Spratt and his family have become perfectly functional.
was a jerk before his legs got shot off in a botched raid. Now he's a bitter, hateful monster who delights in tormenting everyone around him, especially
the young cop responsible for his disability.
The protagonist of Fatherland , set in an alternate universe where Nazi Germany won WWII, Kripo investigator Sturmbannführer Xavier March is a socially isolated , rather taciturn workaholic, with hardly any social contacts except for two friends ( one of whom turns out to be a betrayer at the novel's end), a marriage in total shambles (his wife either divorced or separated, which is not made clear in the novel, but living with another man at any rate) and a son who hates him - being a fanatical young Nazi while March is utterly disillusioned with the regime and the ideology , actively resisting Party membership, not participating in any "national events" and being a borderline dissident. As if that were not enough, he seems to have a mild (at least) case of PTSD from his service in the war and some unresolved father issues, seeing as his father -like March- had been in the Kriegsmarine and had died at sea, with March feeling pressured to follow in his footsteps. Nevertheless, he seems to be one of the best investigators the Kripo has, with the "cunning of a fox" and a determination that seems to border on the maniacal . This trait, together with his cynical, disillusioned outlook and the fact that despite having grown up in the Third Reich, he has a very well functioning moral compass , and his persistent drive to find out what happened to the previous owners of his apartment ( who were Jews, so it's quite clear to the reader what happened to them ) both causes March a huge amount of problems and serves as the catalyst and main drive for the novel's plot.
    Live Action TV 
The Last Detective Dangerous Davies is seen as a defective detective and given all the crappy jobs because he is a police officer who turns in one of his own. At the start of the series this has caused his relationship with his wife to deteriorate.
Dexter , by status of being a sociopath who has to fake social skills, and a Serial-Killer Killer in his spare time. Angel, Deb, pretty much everyone Dex works with to some extent, actually, also fall into this.
Monk : The central character is the Trope Namer . He's a detective with obsessiveï¿½compulsive personality disorder, along with a plethora of smaller issues like a laundry list of phobias orbiting it. (Occasionally other characters and the promos even call him "the Defective Detective"). In the Russian dub, the name of the show is The Defective Detective!
To a lesser extent, Captain Stottlemeyer counts. He has had two failed marriages (his first one actually only lasted a week! The other lasted 20 years and fell apart in the normal way). His next serious girlfriend is Linda Fusco, who Monk and Natalie expose in "Mr. Monk and the Bad Girlfriend" as having shot and killed her business partner.
In the novel Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu, Lee Goldberg takes this Up to Eleven by having Monk during the titular Blue Flu working with three other detectives who have been involuntarily retired — each bonkers in a different way, and each with his or her minder. Natalie finds that their issues make Monk look normal. It should be noted that the mayor hired these four (Monk and the other three detectives) because of the labor shortage. And Natalie only needs to see one look at Monk to realize that the reason the mayor wants him to lead them is because even if he doesn't know them, he probably understands their troubles better than anyone else (besides their shrinks).
They are Jack Wyatt, a very Dirty Harry like detective with anger management problems who was fired after the city lost a number of lawsuits caused by his tactics. His anger management counselor Arnie is his helper. Wyatt uses these effectively in that we see him lead a SWAT team raid to capture a serial killer without any difficulty.
Then there's Cynthia Chow, a paranoid schizophrenic who sees conspiracy theories everywhere, who was relieved of her badge due to her condition getting pretty severe. Her "curse" becomes a "gift" in that it allows her to tie together seemingly unrelated cases. Jasper Perry, her shrink, is her helper.
Also, there is Frank Porter, an ex-detective helped by his granddaughter Sparrow, who has senility issues.
As mentioned under Literature, this aspect of Sherlock Holmes is often exaggerated in adaptation:
In Elementary , he is a socially inept recovering drug addict with serious Daddy Issues .
In Sherlock , he's an outright (self professed!) high-functioning sociopath. He is also portrayed as literally addicted to the intellectual stimulation of his detective work— in the first episode, he engages in a likely-suicidal action just because he needs to know if a deduction is right.
DI Chandler from Whitechapel has OCD. Normally it manifests itself in a need to have everything neat and orderly (to the point where he makes sure clean clothes and soap are near at hand), but the stress of the job can have Chandler going into a full-blown breakdown. He's been shown stuck in his office going through a counting compulsion, repeatedly turning the lights on and off in a sequence as his panic increases because he knows he has to stop and leave but he compulsion prevents him from doing so.
Ironside (1967) and its remake Ironside (2013) . In both versions, the title is a reference to the main character's wheelchair and his name, Robert Ironside.
Frank Pembleton and Tim Bayliss on Homicide: Life on the Street come to mind. Pembleton's single-minded drive for justice leads him to renounce his Catholic faith and leave his wife, at least for a while, and he has a stroke that sidelines him for much of the fifth season. Bayliss has to deal with an unsolved child-murder that haunts him throughout the series, the trauma of being sexually molested by his uncle, and a gunshot wound that changes his entire outlook on life.
Nearly every detective on Giardello's shift fits this trope to varying degrees: Munch and his ex-wives, Gee's estrangement from his son, Kellerman being dogged by corruption allegations stemming from his time in Arson, the depression that drove Crosetti to suicide...and on and on.
DCI Tanner in the series Second Sight: being ambitious, he attempts to conceal the fact that he's losing his vision from everyone but his detective partner.
Subverted to some extent with Jonathan Creek , who is often seen as weird and out-of-touch by his sidekick, but usually deals with life a lot better than they do.
Austin James in Probe is a genius in the Sherlock Holmes mold, and also socially awkward, callous, and, by self-admission, mildly schizophrenic.
Adam: Abusive father .
Waking the Dead : Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd, who believes that every problem can be solved by just shouting loudly enough. Violence prone, estranged from his son, and occasionally everyone else. Story arc in which he undergoes anger management therapy has somewhat predictable results.
The Unusuals (as its name implies) features a whole bunch of quirky detectives, but the two who deserve special mention are Banks and Delahoy, who are partners:
Banks, whose father, grandfather, and uncle all died at the age of 42, has himself just turned 42. He wears a bulletproof vest everywhere he goes (including to bed) and has basically idiot-proofed his entire apartment. He sometimes has panic attacks when he thinks he's going into a dangerous situation.
Delahoy, who has been diagnosed with a potentially-fatal brain tumor, is a Death Seeker who suffers from visual and auditory hallucinations. Sometimes, he receives messages from fortune cookies that help him crack his latest case.
The Inspector Lynley Mysteries : Oh my God. Lynley and Havers, both of them. One is a workaholic with a personal life worthy of a soap opera; the other is a Broken Bird who has raised antisociality and self-protection via jerkassery to an art form. Somehow, they become incredibly close friends anyway, which spawns an absolutely glorious amount of Character Development for both of them. And it is beautiful .
Columbo either has shades of this trope, or pretends he does, so well that the audience never sees him slip. Certainly the suspects believe he's one .
Michael Jericho of "Jericho of Scotland Yard" embodies this trope: His father was a Dirty Cop who was shot in front of him, and Jericho spends his entire career simultaneously trying to show his dead father up and make his dead father proud of him. He has no life outside his work, the only girl he ever loved married someone else while he and his partner Clive Harvey were off fighting in WWII, and his call-girl sometime-girlfriend winds up being basically kidnapped by the man who brought down Jericho's father. This leads him to be driven, harsh, and in so much pain it's difficult to watch at times.
Gregory House from House is a narcissist, drug addict, and in great pain. Treating run-of-the-mill illness is beneath him. His only escape is diagnosing tough cases that have stumped other doctors, much in the same way that the Great Detective solves cases that have stumped the police .
Detective Kate Beckett on Castle plays with the trope; she's clearly got issues surrounding the murder of her mother, but has apparently managed to more or less put it behind her at the beginning of the series ... until Castle unwittingly digs it all up again, leading to her eventually falling back 'down the rabbit hole' into her obsession with solving it over the course of the series. Season 4 further piles on by giving her psychological trauma following being shot in the chest in the Season 3 finale, leading to a complete PTSD breakdown in one episode. This aside this, even in the early episodes it's pretty clear that her mother's murder has left her more or less a cynical workaholic with little capacity to enjoy life outside of her job until Castle shows up.
Will Graham in Hannibal is odd and unsocial and is hinted to have an Ambiguous Disorder . To top it off, he has the gift of "pure empathy" which allows him to get into the minds of the criminals he hunts and causes him to experience nightmares and crippling anxiety. Not to mention the encephalitis (which causes hallucinations, disassociative episodes, and severe headaches) and his psychiatrist not only kept this from him but is Hannibal Lecter .
Benton Fraser on Due South : Lost his mother to a killer at age 6. Lost his father to another killer as an adult. His father (now a ghost) takes an intrusive interesting in spending time with him post-mortem. Framed for murder by vengeful ex girlfriend (who he had previously put in prison after they fell in love with each other).
Ray K: Caught in a bank robbery that scared him so badly he wet his pants in front of his future (now ex) wife. Had his whole life uprooted so he could pretend to be Ray V while the latter went undercover, leaving him to deal with the fallout from Ray V's previous actions without knowing anything about them.
But he must have had Ray V's files, which he could read to find out about him and his cases. Ray V may not have put everything in the file, however. I don't think he's as defective as Fraser or Ray V. The fandom just likes to make him into a victim.
Ray V: Abusive, alcoholic dad whom he continued to have issues with even after the guy died.(another case of arguing with the ghost). Had his whole life uprooted to go undercover with The Mafia, only to have it happen again and have to deal with having been replaced by Ray K in the meantime when he returns to the force.
Taken to truly ludicrous extremes by A Touch of Cloth , in which the entire cast is aggressively dysfunctional to a level of Stylistic Suck . Threatening to blow your own brains out to prove how serious you are about something is common. Jack Cloth, in particular, has many opportunities for happiness which he squanders in favour of truly amoral Dirty Business , and constantly hand-wrings about how he can't stand to get close to anyone because of his dead wife ( except when he does, a lot, with the entire rest of the cast ).
Doctor Who : In "The Robots of Death" the two detectives are the least mentally stable members of the cast, with the exception of the villain and arguably the Doctor . Poul spirals increasingly into madness between his paranoid agent hyperawareness and his initially mild Uncanny Valley Phobia getting triggered by the situation, and has a complete mental breakdown at the beginning of the fourth act that makes him useless from that point on. D84 is more helpful, but is clearly an eccentric by the standards of robots - somehow, it is able to go against its own programming in pursuit of its work, which leaves it less than stable, and its story ends with it blowing out its own brains in order to save the Doctor.
Both of the main characters for season one of True Detective embody this trope: outwardly, Rust Cohle is extremely quiet and stoic or even depressed. Get him to talk and he shows himself to be an incredibly cynical nihilist who claims human consciousness is a mistake of nature, mostly as a result of his deceased daughter. Cohle also suffers the effects of multiple substance abuse, both current and former, mostly due to an overlong period as a DEA undercover agent . His partner, Martin Hart, is outwardly a much better-adjusted family man, but in truth he's a self-justifying adulterer , so possessive of his family and mistress that he borders on treating them like devices to make him feel better, prone to solving his personal issues with violence or abuse of his authority, and also has some alcoholism issues.
Averted at first with Grimm concerning Nick Burkhardt. While he's dealing with his newfound status as a Grimm and the death of the only family he knows, he still generally avoids being a troubled or broken individual, and fairs quite well both as a person and as a detective...in the first season. Then his girlfriend loses her memories of him and his mom comes back, then he gets turned into an uncontrollable rage zombie who kills someone and leaves him with some Came Back Wrong issues, then he gets raped and loses his powers, and all the while he slowly-but-surely becomes more of a Blood Knight . After all that, he crosses into this trope.
The Method has an alcoholic Serial-Killer Killer with brain damage that causes hallucinations accept an apprentice for Passing the Torch before his hallucinations make him unable to work. Unfortunately, his method drives her to drinking too, among other things.
Bron|Broen deconstructs this, as all of its detective characters eventually find the effects of their flaws catching up with them :
Saga Norén: By-the-Book Cop with No Social Skills (according to Word of God , she is definitely on the autistic spectrum) and a tragic backstory that unfolds over the course of the show. Endures a Trauma Conga Line in series 3 when her protective boss is murdered and replaced by a new one who is well-intentioned but completely fails to understand her disability and thinks she can be bullied into "normality", and her abusive mother commits suicide and frames her for matricide . By the end of the season she's suspended from the police and in serious danger of being prosecuted for murder, leading to a suicide attempt.
Martin Rohde: He appears to be more functional than Saga, but his inability to be faithful to women proves to have partially caused the murders of the first season, and at the end of the second season he despairingly murders the first season's killer and is imprisoned himself.
Henrik Sabroe: Functional Addict whose family disappeared several years ago. By the end of his season he has been suspended from the police after his drug abuse is discovered.
Everett Backstrom in Backstrom , an overweight boorish alcoholic of little ability and inflated ego.
    Video Games 
Suikoden V 's Oboro apparently has a Guilt Complex the size of a small planet regarding all the underhanded crap he had a hand in as Nether Gate's intelligence director, and it's heavily implied one of the reasons he hasn't chosen Redemption Equals Death is his desire to help those who've been scarred (mentally and physically) by his from his former organization. It's also more openly made aware that Fuyo, Sagiri, and Shigure double as his Morality Chain , and a living reminder of his guilt in the case of the latter two.
Max Payne . Yes. Yes that's exactly what the title character has.
Schizo-Phrenzy
, a platform game, has the lead private inspector chase after a masked baby... while avoiding monsters that randomly appear.
The protagonist of 1997 Blade Runner video game, Ray McCoy, often seems a little bit dim and sometimes overly impressionable.
The game "Defective" from the IGN Pirate Kart is about this trope. The player takes the role of a detective shooting people, and then has to navigate through pools of imagined blood .
As of Tekken 4, detective Lei Wulong's girlfriend broke up with him because he'd rather solve cases rather than spend time with her. Considering he's not found another girl even until Tekken 6, he likely is still a huge workaholic. (Note that every time Lei enters a Tekken tournament, it's always because of a case he's on at that time.)
    Visual Novels 
Erika Furudo, the entitled detective in Episode 5 and 6 of Umineko: When They Cry , is first introduced as a Purity Sue but quickly turns out to be an arrogant, unempathic Attention Whore who is excited by the murders occuring, and treated even her boyfriend cheating on her as a criminal case. She describes herself as an "intellectual rapist". With a chopstick fetish . Yeah.
Danganronpa 's own Kyouko Kirigiri. As per her title, she's only a teenage detective, but like the rest of the cast has her share of problems. Her mother died when she was very young , her father abandoned her shortly after , the rest of her family look at her like a throwaway child thanks to the last two facts, and anywhere else she appears in the franchise reveals that she's seen enough death and violence that the idea of mortality hardly affects her anymore (to the point that she'll put her own life or the lives of others at risk without hesitation if it gains her an advantage in solving the school's mystery). All this culminates in an unfriendly disposition , a lot of trust-issues and a stoicism that prevents her from relating to anyone, save for the main character after a long while.
    Web Original 
Zeke Strahm of Seeking Truth has issues. He's grumpy, anti-social, and has no significant relationships outside of the one with his partner/ friend with benefits Lizzie. Dealing with a certain mind-shattering Eldritch Abomination doesn't help.
    Western Animation