APPLICATION; empatheias

[dogmatically]

⌈ PLAYER SECTION ⌉
Player: Aly
Contact: elympios
Age: 27
Current Characters: N/A


⌈ CHARACTER SECTION ⌉
Character: Ryunosuke Ibuki
Age: 16/17
Canon: Hakuouki
Canon Point: the end of Reimeiroku’s common route.

Background: Hakuouki general; Reimeiroku summaries/translations. I can provide more if necessary, since the canon’s dedicated wiki is useless….

Personality:

Upon meeting Ibuki, there are a couple of things that are usually pretty obvious. The first is that he’s rude as hell. The second is that he gets worked up very easily, almost comedically so. And both of these things are true, for better or for worse.

The truth of the matter is that despite those things, he’s not a bad kid. He looks like a punk, with his sour attitude and the messy mop of hair on his head, but he’s hardly any sort of troublemaker. He’s kind of the opposite really—he’s pretty helpless in a lot of ways and winds up getting himself into the sort of trouble he needs saving from. He grew up in Edo to a low-ranking samurai family, but thanks to financial difficulties, his father had sold their status off prior to his death… leaving Ibuki to care for his sick mom and work to try and earn them money. It was tough, and he didn’t live well, while also facing constant scrutiny from the samurai class for his circumstance. Upon his mother’s death, he became something of a wanderer with little aim or purpose…

Or self-preservation skills, really. Ibuki’s the kind of person who lacks a certain element of common sense (despite the fact that he’ll call people out on things they say he doesn’t find logical). He got beat up by ronin, and was starving and left for dead on a road when he was saved by Kamo Serizawa. Once Serizawa takes him in, we begin to see all the truth of Ibuki unfold. From the moment he wakes up, a week after being taken in by the Roshigumi, he doesn’t seem to care much at all for what’s going on around him. Despite the fact that his life had been saved and he’d been given shelter, he was in a rush to leave and get out… without even thanking his saviors. That sort of mentality is one that fades gradually through the course of the story, but only thanks to circumstance. He tends to lack the ability to have a lot of foresight when it comes to the consequences of his words, which makes his rudeness that much worse. Even when he’s grateful, he’s often bad at showing it, and worse so, he’s nearly always rude about something. Save for the higher ranking members of the Roshigumi/Shinsengumi, he addresses the people around him without any honorifics or suffixes despite their relationships, he has a sharp tongue and tends to say careless or insulting things without much regard for others’ feelings. One of the best examples of this is when he insults the lifestyle and decisions of Kosuzu, a young geiko in Kyoto he encounters during one of the group’s trips to Shimabara, Kyoto’s red-light district. Ibuki gets heated and worked up, insulting her to the point where she slaps him, and it’s not until someone else drags him back and forces him to bow his head that Ibuki even apologies and begins to the see the wrongs in his words.

Even if he means well, he can be short-sighted and inconsiderate, sometimes bordering on outright selfish. His upbringing has made him fiercely independent in some ways, believing he shouldn’t have to rely on others to survive—despite the fact that he isn’t very good at maintaining that. In fact, it’s often quite the opposite as he essentially becomes Serizawa’s page, or more accurately, an errand boy. More accurately than what he technically is though, is what Serizawa largely treats him as—a dog whose purpose is to fetch things. He even goes as far as to call Ibuki “Dog” rather than his name.

Though Serizawa looks out for him in some ways, the demanding and outright abusive nature he carries often only aids in Ibuki’s poor attitude about things. Combining that with his bitterness towards samurai and his hatred for the fact that he’s living with people who believe in that idea and want to carry it on only makes it worse.

But despite the fact that he’s quick to write them off, despite that he loses his temper often and carries on like a child, Ibuki does grow to care about the people around. What started as little more than a bit of curiosity can eventually develop to much deeper, lasting bonds with the men who would later become the Shinsengumi’s leaders and captains. He gains close friendship with Heisuke, a younger brother type relationship with Harada, and even Serizawa is something almost parental to him in ways. His relationship with Okita is always volatile at times, but they have a lot of shared hidden sentiments and Okita’s unpredictable nature and instability is something that causes genuine concern and worry for Ibuki. Towards the end of the common route, and into the individual routes, Ibuki starts to learn more and more of each of the men and begins to see that there’s a definite difference between men who carry the title of samurai that only wish to abuse it’s power, and men who wish to earn that title so they can be Japan’s future. There is something respectable in that, and though Ibuki can be dumb and ignorant at times, he’s not blind to the notion of fighting for a better future.

Fighting for a better future doesn’t necessarily mean he can’t see the difference between right and wrong, though. Not a fighter himself (and really, barely able to wield his sword for much), there’s little he can do about what he people around him get themselves into, but it’s clear enough that Ibuki definitely doesn’t always agree with their approach. Whether it’s the discovery of the rasetsu, a pseudo-demon being cultivated by way of forcing men who had broken the Shinsengumi code to drink a potion, or simply members of Shinsengumi taking their power and ability too far (such as slashing a group of sumo wrestlers in Osaka that that threatened them with staves), Ibuki isn’t afraid to call out or openly disagree with their methods. Even when he doesn’t call it out very openly, his narrative is clear: it goes against his own moral code.

When it goes beyond that, though, he can’t do much. He can give a lot of lip (a whole lot of it), but when in a bind, he has to rely on the very people he often argues with to save him. Unlike the skilled swordsmen who spent years training and preparing to face off in fights, Ibuki is the type to be totally paralyzed by fear. Even if he draws his sword, there isn’t very much he can do in most cases, even when he does try. Most people would likely look at it as more of a decoration or accessory than as an extension of himself, that’s how rarely he uses it.

Ibuki definitely has a lot of flaws that are apparent, but there’s a lot of other good within him, too. His own hardships and sense of right and wrong do give him a pretty decent moral compass when it comes to important things. Sure, he may not have much tact when someone saves his life, but he can also put himself on the line for people in other ways. If taking the Kosuzu route of the game, much of this becomes apparent. As he begins to fall in love with a girl in training to become a geisha, he also sees the hardships and suffering she has to go through and realizes how much she’s forced into doing. Not wanting that, and not wanting her to be married off to someone else, he does what it takes to get her out of that situation (in the one route where he actually gets the girl and his happily ever after). Even within the less tender routes, he comes to understand Okita’s hardships and wants to support him despite their volatile relationship. But really, it’s in Hijikata’s route that he care for others really shows. On this path, he loses his voice from a sword cut to his throat, and after Serizawa’s assassination, he stays with the Shinsengumi. He stays through to the absolute very end, witnessing the people he called friends all die one by one, apprenticing and learning to help in the ways he can. Up until the moment Hijikata decides to leave his life behind to be a “dead man” with Chizuru, Ibuki is there to be the background support and grow up in ways that separate him a bit from how he was at 16. So while some of those aspects would be prevalent during his current canon point, they’re certainly there and Ibuki is capable of letting those things shine through in times of need.

At the end of the day, Ibuki really is just a bakumatsu-era teenager with a lot of attitude, a lot of a heart, and a whole lot of growing up to do.

Abilities:

Ibuki is painfully human, so he doesn’t have much in the way of special abilities. Though he does carry a sword, he has very little proficiency at actually using it, save for a scant amount of lessons he’s gotten from the Shinsengumi members. It amounts to little more than proper stance and a basic grip on form, but the chances he’d be able to use that effectively in a tough spot are pretty minimal.

Aside from that? He’s kind of okay at art, but overall, he’s a pretty average kid with average capabilities.

Other: His hair needs it's own zip code.


⌈ SAMPLE SECTION ⌉
First Person Sample: musebox post!

Third Person Sample:

There wasn’t a single part of Ibuki’s body that didn’t ache.

It had been bad enough following the morning training with Saitou and his faction, then following it up running around the kitchen while trying to help Harada and Nagakura prepare lunch. As per their usual arrangement, much of the work was left on him—a clumsy teenager who hardly knew his way around the kitchen. That resulted in a nice burn from the hot pot of miso soup… though there was a part of him that knew he should be grateful it wasn’t worse, that alone hurt like hell. What made all of it worse was the evening, though.

Serizawa hadn’t taken too well to Ibuki returning with the wrong kind of sake—that had been the first smack directly to the back of his head with the tessen. Serizawa drank it anyway, of course, the proceeded to angry over petty matters. For Ibuki? That was true hell, because he was the one who always caught the brunt of those violent outbursts.

He hated it. He hated every second of being in this god-forsaken place. Stuck around a bunch of wannabes, wannabe samurai who wanted to carry a title that he found to be despicable. Even if the majority of them were good people, with good hearts and only the best intentions, Ibuki just couldn’t bring himself to agree with their methods. Especially when the leader was Serizawa, a man who who he wanted to hate so badly. The thoughts rang in his mind, repeating over and over as he laid out in the courtyard, watching the clouds roll through the night sky and blockading the moonlight. The part of him not consumed by how his body ached told him constantly that he should just run away. It wasn’t as if they’d miss him, considering he was nothing more than Serizawa’s errand boy, indebted because he provided food and shelter for a wandering kid. But it was for that very reason he couldn’t bring himself to just up and leave either.

“Agh... ! This is so annoying…” Ibuki whined the words to the sky, fully aware of the fact that there was nobody there to listen to his complaints. He was tired and exasperated, but also conflicted. He couldn’t leave, especially not in such a cowardly way. They expected that of him, after all, and despite the fact that he didn’t want to feel like he had to prove he was more than they believed him to be…

Well, he wanted to do just that. It was a two way street after all, and if these guys were going to somehow prove that they were different than the assholes who claimed themselves to be samurai, then he’d have to do the same in return to show he wasn’t just a whiny freeloader.
Questions: Nope!