Nanako Dojima's Persona: Tokuhime

Lady Toku, or Tokuhime, was probably the most well known daughter of the infamous sixteenth century Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga.  She’s best known for being responsible for the deaths of her mother in law, Lady Tsukiyama, who she detested, and her husband, which was an unintended consequence of getting the former killed.  Oops.

The specifics aren’t really all that important here, as I mostly chose Tokuhime because she was the daughter of a terrifying warlord, which I thought was a good enough callback to her own fears of her father in her shadow.  I dunno.

But, funny thing, this Persona’s design.  I have really good ideas for basically every other Persona I have left to design, and I hit a roadblock with Nanako for a while.  I only really knew two things–one, that it was to be a navigation Persona, not a combat one, and two, that I wanted it to be angelic looking.  You can see an earlier attempt on the bottom right of the lower picture.

However, I felt nothing was really working until I just looked at the design a completely different way–Personas don’t have to be big, monstrous things, do they?  That’s when I realized the direction I had to go.  Some more brainstorming, and I came up with this.

I wanted it to look like a cartoon, kid appeal character, something that Nanako would really like.  Soft, cute, and cuddly: and what soft, cute, cuddly thing does Nanako like the most?  Teddie, of course!  So the design became sort of what Nanako would imagine as a female counterpart to Teddie.  And I really wanted to sell what I thought would be Nanako’s personal excitement at helping the Investigation Team, so I gave it a magnifying glass (I know she’s also a fan of some detective show or manga in the adaptations I think).

I didn’t really pull anything from Tokuhime’s tale from the design at all (as there isn’t much to go on, really), so I decided to use the Oda clan symbol as her belt buckle and tie its flower motif into its dress, which helps connect it to Nanako more I think, what with her fond memories of her mother picking flowers at the riverbank.