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Rena Ryuugu ♪ Reserved ♪ Part 4 twilightsparkle May 28 2011, 18:18:48 UTC
But in spite of her somewhat peculiar habits and shy nature Rena is quite possibly the most mature member of the group. She's always there to act as a mediator between an arguing couple, essentially forcing them to both take a step back from the argument before helping them to resolve their differences, and she's not afraid to interject when she feels that someone's being treated unfairly, especially if it's a friend of hers. She's perceptive enough to gather when someone's upset, tactful enough to draw out problems through what might at first appear to be smalltalk, and patient and understanding enough to keep from passing judgment when someone confides in her about their problems, instead using her own personal experience and worldly knowledge to give them advice regarding the situation or simply tell them what they need to hear.

Rena is both intuitive and perceptive, so much so that it almost seems as though she's able to read a person's mind. In Meakashi she was able to determine both that Shion (who was posing as Mion at the time) was in love with Satoshi and that she hated his little sister Satoko, whom she was jealous of for stealing Satoshi's attention away and angry at for being a burden on him, and was even able to vocalize the other girl's thoughts while only knowing a very small amount about the relationship that the three shared. Later in the same arc she was able to deduce who it had been Shion (although she believed that it was Mion, Shion's twin whom she had been posing as) was responsible for Satoko and Rika's disappearance and how she had committed the crime just by looking at the contents of Satoko and Rika's kitchen.

Rena is self-sacrificial to a fault. She holds the happiness of those around her above her own, even at the cost of her own personal happiness. She to concern her friends, to make them see her as a troubled person or to otherwise risk taking away their own happiness, so she hides behind a cheerful facade, locking away her problems and hiding them from those around her. Regardless of how valid or persistent they might be, if she feels that her concerns will hurt someone Rena will try to rationalize and dismiss them. For a long time she ignores her disliking Rina, her father's girlfriend, believing that she had no right to trample on his happiness when she could have prevented her parents' divorce. She dismissed her feelings as being an inevitable result of the aforementioned divorce and her being too immature to let go of her father, whom she wanted to keep to herself. In Onikakushi, she continues to pursue and try to help Keiichi even after he hurts her time and time again, eventually putting herself in a position where he's able to kill her in an attempt to get through to him. A more literal example of this can be also be seen in Minagoroshi, wherein she taunts Takano in order to draw attention to herself knowing that she would be killed in order to try and to give her friends a little more time.

Rena feels very strongly about both Hinamizawa and its guardian deity, Oyashiro-sama, as a result of the downward spiral that her life took after she moved to the city; at some point or another she became convinced that all of her life's problems were caused by Oyashiro-sama, who had cursed her for breaking one of the village's sacred rules in moving away from it. This belief was only further encouraged by the way that her life improved once she moved back to Hinamizawa, making it a subject that she's very passionate about. She can range from calm, such as trying to help Satoshi and Keiichi when they were suffering from the 'curse,' to bordering on creepy with her claims that she was once cursed and that she's the only one who can help and understand those who are going through that, to outright deranged when someone denies the existence of the curse.

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