Celestia Ludenberg

 THE BACKSTORY CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA 1 CHAPTER 3 

Appearance
Celestia wears a white lace-bonnet with white ribbons and has black hair in two large twin-drill pigtails. However, these are clip-ons evidenced in the event of the girls bathing in Chapter 3, as she is seen without them. She has pale skin, red eyes, and gold spherical earrings which have an image depicting the cross engraved into them with a red gem placed in the center in each. She also has long, black nails.

Celestia wears a gothic lolita-style outfit, consisting of a white blouse with a Long-point collar, a white ribbon tied around her neck, a black jacket that includes white ribbon lacing down the sleeves, fastened by a simple white ribbon across her chest to reveal her red tie (consisting of a butterfly pattern layered on top of various spears with skulls attached to it) and the waist of her skirt, which is many-tiered and features white lace.

Celestia wears knee-high stockings trimmed in ladder lace, dark red mary janes with a thick heel held on her feet by three grey buckles, a white lace headband, and a silver, Gunmetal plated ring (reminiscent of a Gunmetal Armour ring designed by Vivienne Westwood) layered in overlapping sections on her index finger.

Personality
As an experienced gambler, Celestia appears collected, cold, and cunning by nature. She possesses the ability to manipulate others to do her bidding and can lie with a straight face, this is shown when she is able to manipulate Hifumi to make her royal milk tea. She is shown to be fairly intelligent, referencing several aspects of game theory such as Prisoner's Dilemma or Zero Sum Game, and her manipulative and coercion skills are shown in Chapter 3, being able to deceive the majority of the students, including Byakuya up until the class trial. Her intelligence is also shown in previous cases in which she, alongside Kyoko, Byakuya, and Makoto are the ones to bring up crucial points and is also capable of keeping up with Byakuya and Kyoko's train of thought during the trials as well.

Celestia is a very ambitious person, as she declared that she will do anything it takes to win, and is ready to go as far as murdering someone or manipulating others in cold blood. She is extremely selfish and values her life over the lives of others, stating she has no problem sacrificing others in order to save herself. She also has a lot of pride, refusing to surrender no matter how far into a corner she's pushed, as long as the chance for victory remains.

Celestia believes in adaptability to be the key to survival, rather than strength or intellect, and she acts upon this by setting up measures such as the voluntarily imposed night-time curfew to protect the other students, as well as herself, from potential killers during the Killing School Life. She often reminds others to obey the curfew and is often annoyed when people such as Byakuya Togami, violate the curfew, showing her authoritative and commanding nature. After the death of [nah fam not sayin - krys/cyan/novo/hayloft], she coldly remarks that people who disobey the rules pay the price. In reality, she was lying about having to adapt and more than anyone wanted to leave the school, showing how easy it is for her to hide her emotions.

Her mannerisms are strict, refined and her spoiled nature emphasizes this due to her aspiring to be like European royalty. She even has a habit of ranking men between Rank A and Rank F, supposedly to test who is worthy of being one of her servants. She despises her real self as she dislikes ordinary and common things and considers her real identity and name to be one of "a loser". Celestia speaks softly and smiles often in order to imitate Victorian mannerisms and etiquette as a lady. She usually uses polite language whenever she talks to the others, but her short-temperedness surfaces when something fails to go as well as she expects it to, such as when Hifumi fails to make her royal milk tea as she likes it.

Backstory
Celestia was a notorious liar - to the point of earning the nickname "Queen of Liars" - and so it is difficult to determine what, if any, of her self-reported life prior to the Killing Game is fact. By all accounts, it seems she was given the given name Taeko Yasuhiro and born into a likely working-class family in the capital of Tochigi Prefecture, Utsunomiya where she came to love its most famous food, gyoza. As mentioned in Danganronpa Kirigiri, Celestia had been a gambler for at least 3 years before becoming a student in Hope's Peak Academy. She has defeated many known gamblers including Ryou Ooba (a former gambler). Celestia had a cat named Grand Bois Chéri Ludenberg whom she spoiled and loved dearly. She taught him to enjoy eating gyoza and made it his favorite food, an example of their close bond. Grand Bois became a captive for Monokuma's first motive during the Killing School Life, which revealed that he meant more to Celestia than any possible living relatives.

Celestia loathed her true self and the common world she was born into, considering her given name of Taeko Yasuhiro a "loser's name", and so sometime during her childhood, Celestia retreated into an obsession with European royalty - particularly of the Victorian and Rococo period and European historical figures like Marie Antoinette. To make her life appear more glamorous, she took on the European-sounding name "Celestia Ludenberg" and concocted a fictional backstory for herself in which her father was a member of the French nobility, and her mother was a member of a German family of musicians. She began adopting a fake ambiguous European accent and wearing and designing her own well-known line of lolita fashion. Her ultimate dream in life was to own and live in a European castle filled with handsome male servants dressed as vampires, and this dream is what led her into the world of gambling in order to raise the significant amount of money she would need.

As a person adept at lying, she became extremely successful in the underground gambling scene, able to even win games she had never played before simply on the strength of her ability to deceive and manipulate the other players. In Japan, gambling is illegal and largely controlled by the Yakuza, so Celestia frequently put her life at risk by playing against and defeating dangerous individuals to win the large sums of money she was chasing, particularly as an underage young girl. Despite these genuinely dangerous experiences, even in recounting the events to others she was prone to exaggeration, and instead of telling the real story would recount the stories of well-known gambling fiction such as Liar Game, Akagi, and, 81diver, inserting herself into the fictional narratives as if they were real.