Character · Steins;Gate
Itaru Hashida
The lab's programmer weighs more than the equipment does and turns out to be right about most of it.
In Otakana the clue reads: Overweight hacker known as the super hacker
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Steins;Gate
- Letters
- 4 · Normal
Itaru Hashida goes by Daru, calls himself a super hacker, and gets treated as a joke by everyone including himself. He is also the only member of the Future Gadget Laboratory who can actually build anything. When Okabe needs a server broken into or a microwave rewired into something considerably worse, Daru does it, complains the whole way through, and does it correctly.
He talks in message board slang, ogles anyone who walks past, and gets told off for it by the lab's teenage neuroscientist in the same breath as he solves her problem. Steins;Gate is set in Akihabara in 2010, and Daru is the district in a swivel chair: maid cafes, doujin shops, forum in-jokes, a decade of internet culture worn as a personality.
Underneath it he is steadier than anyone else in the room. He asks the practical question, keeps working when the situation stops making sense, and is the friend Okabe leans on once the mad scientist act runs out of road. The visual novel gives him one of its quieter jokes, and it pays off very late.
Spelling DARU
DARU is four letters, taken off the end of his given name Itaru, which is how the nickname got built in the first place. Watch the vowel: it is RU and not RO, the same swap that catches people typing NARUTO from memory. Two consonants and two vowels alternating, and the game wants the nickname rather than HASHIDA.