Curate, connect, and discover
Very cool. As a fan of Izuru - honestly mostly due to his cool hair - it always makes me sad that he just disappears post-game, especially since co-existing with Hajime in daily life is such an intriguing concept. What does Izuru look like in his twenties? Thirties? How do the others react to him? Do they know he’s still there? So many questions to explore!
ive always interpreted postgame hajime/izuru as for the most part separate entities but with a degree of fluidity too (some days they can communicate some days they cant, they can very distinctively tell who’s fronting some days and some days they can’t at all, some memories they share and some memories they don’t and some memories may get mixed up between the two etc etc) but ive always liked to think that komaeda, with his freakishly observant nature, teaches himself how to clock which one is which pretty accurately.
hajime doesn’t always tie his tie evenly, izuru always ties it perfect. izuru always sits with either the worst or best posture youve ever seen, hajime is always somewhere in between. only hajime seems to wear casual clothes. if the tie color is any different from the usual green, that’s izuru. izuru styles his hair a bit neater, and if they’re overdue for a trim, izuru’s probably been fronting for a while. hajime likes his coffee fairly dark, izuru likes it with 10 spoonfuls of sugar.
so using this he can also tell when one is masking as the other (usually it’s izuru masking as hajime because he doesn’t want to deal with everyone —save for komaeda —being an ass/generally weird to him unprompted. theyre still working on that. but hajime has his reasons sometimes too). hajime’s tie is a little too perfect today. he’s being slightly quieter than usual. he recoiled when kazuichi leaned in to clap him on the back — but only slightly. no one else would’ve noticed.
sometimes these conflicting tells don’t indicate one pretending to be the other, but a more merged state. distinguishing that tends to have a larger margin of error, but when one masks as the other, usually the tells are consistently towards one or the other, and when they’re more merged then the tells are mixed (wearing casual clothes but having neat hair but having hajime’s posture but having izuru’s sweet tooth for example).
a couple years postgame i think komaeda learns to tell when they’re talking in headspace too, based on the tiny little changes in expression when they zone out. to tell WHAT theyre talking about komaeda definitely needs situational context (ex: if hajime randomly zones out while youre talking to him, izuru’s probably commenting on something you or he said. given enough context, komaeda can even guess what izuru says too), but he can usually at least tell when theyre talking. hajime’s subconscious facial expressions are more obvious then izuru’s, but if izuru’s brows are a little furrowed while he’s zoned out then they’re talking, and if his face is completely neutral then he’s just zoned out.
of course komaeda is wrong sometimes, because things aren’t that simple. but he tends to be freakishly accurate. once he picks up on who’s who that day, he’ll walk up and refer to them by name and get it right first try and no one knows how. sometimes komaeda only needs to see the back of him for a second or two before he can tell (that’s already three things he can observe: hair, posture, and if the back of the tie is tucked under the shirt collar properly. hajime usually forgets to check that). or sometimes he’ll go “does izuru want to add something?” if he can tell they’re talking to each other and everyone is like how could you tell.
the freakish observation is returned on hajime and izuru’s part of course, but it’s different because komaeda is no Ultimate Analyst or anything. it’s just a gay tendency.