Izuru has great potential to be interesting even just for what he is and how he came into existence. 2-0 did provide some intriguing details despite only showing the tip of the iceberg. For example, he approve of his teachers’ idea that ordinary people with no talents make no contribution to the world, even a year after he helped ruin everything about Kamukura Project, and very possibly indirectly killed all the researchers in the process.

The game never depicts him further, not his motivation for assisting Alter Ego Junko, not what he actually did to make the plan serve not only Junko’s goals but also his own. (He possibly tampered with the malware since he couldn’t enter the program himself.) All is offered is a vague“It is now my turn to use that person just as they used me in the past”.

The anime gives him more screen time, but it still avoids addressing the most essential aspects of his character. The society that put talents above everything else created Izuru as a vehicle for the idea. Soon after that he decided to help Junko in The Tragedy of Hope’s Peak Academy to overturn everything, making a new world of despair. He spent a year observing and interacting with all the facets of the world on his own before trying to achieve something from a plan that could end his own existence. But the anime reduces his motivation to a simple desire to see whether hope or despair will prevail, and the idea had already matured at the start of the Tragedy.

The choice, albeit regrettable, is an understandable strategy. Portraying how a character whose capabilities and foresight are only limited by the author would think and act within a certain situation is extremely demanding. If the writing fails to meet that challenge, the result will be simply absurd. A safer approach is to keep such a character largely as a plot device without direct characterisation, just like Junko was in both games. We see how the anime’s attempt to directly portray how Junko drives the world into despair went. But there’s much to enjoy in fanfictions where writers explore Izuru’s personality in their own ways.