empatheias app

[windbreak]

⌈ PLAYER SECTION ⌉
Player: skarme
Contact: blitzente
Age: 22
Current Characters: Alphonse Elric (unerasable)


⌈ CHARACTER SECTION ⌉
Character: Yosuke Hanamura
Age: 17
Canon: Persona 4
Canon Point: Golden, March 20th, on taking Izanami's curse mid-battle for the protagonist.

Background: Fan wiki link.

Personality:
Imagine the platonic ideal of a standard hopeless teenage boy and you probably already have something that looks a lot like Yosuke. An underachieving high school student and the son of the manager of the local department store, he receives next to no respect in work, school and social life alike, and it's not hard to see why - he's not just unimposing, easily flustered and accident-prone, his transparent eagerness to latch onto people in general and girls in particular is outright painful to watch. He isn't always wholly insensitive - he forms fast rapports with all kinds of people, and can make a deceptively good mediator at times - but his ground state of being is nevertheless one with his foot jammed firmly into his mouth, made worse by his fondness for teasing. Within the self-proclaimed Investigation Team that becomes his closest circle of friends, he's usually content to act as comic relief, deferring the spotlight to his more "executive" friends when he isn't trying to help fling ideas at the wall or lighten the mood with his motor mouth. His other positive traits, such as they are, can be somewhat unreliable: he's a pragmatist at heart when not getting too carried away, he's decent at organising events and people alike when he can find the motivation, he has decent intuition and a sharp mind for deductive logic when his observational skills don't let him down, and all of those caveats apply more often than not. Overall, the main impression he gives is of a happy-go-lucky dork, some harmless loser just muddling his way through life.

The twist is that both parts of this impression cut deeper than they initially seem. A major theme of Persona 4 is that there's always more to a human being than what they knowingly present to the world, and Yosuke is no exception. Unlike an older character in the game to whom he can be considered a foil, his cheerful exterior isn't a front; he's a genuine extrovert who derives most of his confidence from the company of others, and he really does thrive in a light-hearted atmosphere. Still, though his joking and poor decision-making disguise it well, Yosuke is sharper than he looks, and his self-deprecating wisecracks from time to time are more on point than they sound. He's acutely aware that his lack of personal drive is the main thing stopping him from meeting his own surprisingly rigid standards and living a more fulfilling life; he's even more aware, thanks to his natural attention to others, that plenty of people in his life are doing far better by those standards than he is. Without constant validation from those apparently superior friends of his, Yosuke's self-image quickly tanks in comparison - and since that level of validation is neither healthy nor really possible, his admiration of said friends quickly becomes tangled up in a habitual, quietly seething resentment. This bitterness, in turn, is the basis of Yosuke's Shadow, the facet of his personality that he's least willing to accept: the deeply-held conviction that he deserves more, and screw whatever might try to remind him otherwise.

This self-centred outlook varies in how strongly it influences his decisions and behaviour, but it still affects him even after he's forced to outright confront it in the course of the plot. Without a support network to keep him in check - as was the case at the start of the game, when he'd recently moved from the city to a rural town and felt ostracised by most of the people there - he's susceptible to just about anything that promises to distract him for a little while. Murder investigations, surreal videogame-style dungeon-crawling or bizarre fighting tournaments: if it casts him as a hero in some new and exciting narrative, all the practical arguments he can think of won't keep him away for long.

His hankering for escapism coupled with his tendency to get carried away can in some cases overwhelm not just his better judgement but his empathy for others. In tense situations, his response to criminals is strikingly cold, to the extent that at one point in the game he must be talked down from committing retaliatory murder. Even in more normal circumstances, there are times when he'll deliberately push people's buttons and brazenly ignore boundaries for his own entertainment, failing to see the problem unless someone else calls him out on it. As it happens, the abovementioned older character who shares the broad strokes of Yosuke's backstory and attitude turns out to be the most prominent and least well-intentioned villain in the story. There's definitely an unpleasant side to this particular strain of immaturity, a darker kind of unpleasant than the many things Yosuke simply blurts out by accident.

But the negative parts of Yosuke's personality have their own flip sides, too - after all, a Shadow is part of a person too, not something that can be eliminated. Confronting his Shadow in canon didn't get rid of Yosuke's immature habits, but his accepting them for what they are has finally given his self-scrutiny something constructive to work on. One key part of his gradual growth has been realising that, contrary to his old beliefs, life in the country doesn't have to be stifling; it just requires him to take his connections to other people seriously, with no anonymising city lights to hide his true self behind. Regardless of whether his old high-school crush really did hate his guts before she died, meeting her was meaningful to him, and that kind of understanding is a buffer against just resenting his place in the world. Another epiphany was that if he works to support the people who already support him, he's improving himself as a person at the same time, which leaves a lot less room for getting jealous of them. These realisations of his are only stepping stones, and he knows he has a long way to go, but they get to the heart of Yosuke's character: for all of his childish screwing around, he's naturally inclined to put other people first. It's a tendency that fuels his worst excesses in some ways, but that same tendency is what makes him the loyal, selfless friend he is at his best.

In summary, Yosuke is a character whose earnestness compensates for many of his insecurities, invariably embarrassing and frequently an outright jerk but dependable where it counts. In briefer summary, Yosuke is a hopeless teenager, but there are worse things to be.

Abilities:
Yosuke can at will summon and dismiss a Persona, which is basically a character-specific fantasy summon monster but more pretentious. His unique Persona is Jiraiya, a floating shuriken-wielding humanoid roughly ten foot tall that specialises in wind magic. In combat, he tends to summon it at close quarters to straight-up wail on opponents, but it can cast a range of other spells to disorient enemies, create diversions, heal surface wounds and boost a person's agility to impressive levels. While durable, it isn't invincible - it's vulnerable to electricity, opposing magic and even sufficient amounts of conventional weaponry - and any injuries it sustains are felt by the user. On top of that, repeated summoning will cause significant mental fatigue, and emotional duress can prevent summoning outright. But it's still a credible weapon, moreso when deployed tactically.

At times of great character drama and/or exceptional personal development, a Persona may take on a more powerful form, although without rigorous mental training or other outside influence it will quickly revert. In Yosuke's case, his Persona can transform into the heavier-hitting Susano-o and possibly further into its final form Takehaya Susano-o, both of which are pretty much the same thing as before but on fire. If this came up at all, it would be temporary and worked into a player plot somehow.

Back when they obtained their Personas, Yosuke and most of his canon friends were also imbued with the ability to pass through ordinary TV screens as easily as water whether they want to or not. In canon, this is used to travel between the real world and the realm of the human mind. Given the lack of conventional TVs in this setting, this is here mostly for completion's sake.

Apart from these magical abilities and his chronic terrible luck, Yosuke isn't remarkable. He's quick on his feet but not exceptionally so, capable with knives and a few other small weapons but not formally trained in the slightest (since his canon point is partway through a boss fight, he'll at least arrive with light armour and some kunai on hand), and only as well informed about anything else as a regular teenage boy from the year 2012 can expect to be.

Alignment: Aiada. Canon itself describes his entire shtick as "jealousy of the superior", and his development is all about counteracting that so he can appreciate what he already has.

Other: Nothing comes to mind for now!


⌈ SAMPLE SECTION ⌉
Sample: Network sample from test drive + a thread from a previous game.

Questions: Again, nothing for now!