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Player Information:
Name: skarme
Age: 21
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
blitzente
Other Characters Played: N/A
Character Information:
Name: Yosuke Hanamura
Canon: Persona 4 (video game)
Canon Point: Golden, a week or so after the True Ending.
Age: 17
Reference Links: Fan wiki link.
Setting:
The established universe of the Persona series is a Japan-centric urban fantasy setting that in many ways is hard to distinguish from the real world in 2011. Brand names and other cultural icons are a little different, and some everyday technology lags a couple of years behind; for instance, flip phones are still fairly widespread. But for the most part, people in this world just wake up in the morning, work, play, study, hang out, stew in their own neuroses and go about their very recognisable lives.
Still, there are supernatural elements bubbling away beneath the surface, permeating much more of the setting than first appearances suggest. In the Persona universe, the mental is physical: the collective human subconscious is a tangible world unto itself, albeit almost impossible to access from the real world under normal circumstances. In this realm, the buried desires, emotions and other peculiarities of humans give rise to a host of bizarre monsters called Shadows, among other even more mysterious beings. The vast majority of Shadows are barely sentient, acting purely on instinctive aggression towards the conscious human minds that brought them into existence. But just as they vary in strength, they vary in self-awareness: some of the more powerful Shadows are sapient enough to talk, scheme and follow orders; still fewer of them manage to forge identities and personalities for themselves, even to the extent of forgetting their true nature; the most powerful of all take on roles similar to gods, working to influence both worlds and direct the course of humanity's development for their own ends.
At some point in the past, one such god-like figure came into being. Calling herself "Izanami" after a goddess of death in the mythology of the people who wished her into existence, she made it her mission to shepherd humanity as a whole towards its collective desire. However, with the rise of mass media and societal trends towards insularity, the once pristine landscape of the human subconscious became shrouded in isolating fog, and people's collective desires became distorted. While some people continued to hope for meaning in life, many despaired of ever finding it, and others desired to live their lives as if there was no inherent meaning at all. To determine which of these was humanity's true desire, Izanami set a plan in motion: she would hand-select three people to represent hope, despair and emptiness respectively, grant each of them the power to enter the realm of the human mind by themselves, introduce them to a community where all three were outsiders and could initially act as they pleased, then see for herself which player's subsequent actions left the most impact on the rest of humanity. Choosing the rural town of Yasoinaba (aka Inaba City) as the stage for her game, she took on the guise of a gas station attendant in the city's run-down old shopping district in order to keep an eye out for her candidates, and waited.
By spring of the year 2011, the game board was ready. Though Inaba was nowhere special geographically, outsiders to the local community came and went almost as fast as gossip did. First, a young police detective named Tohru Adachi reluctantly transferred to the Inaba police department following a mishap at his previous posting in the capital. Not long afterwards, a man called Taro Namatame, disgraced and fired from his council secretary job when his extramarital affair was exposed to the media, slunk back into town to live with his parents after having been away from the community for years. Then, just as the school year was about to begin, a 16-year-old city boy named Souji Seta* moved in with his Inaba native uncle and cousin for a year due to his parents' work. Izanami met each of these three as they arrived in town, greeting them casually and passing a sliver of her power onto them without any of them suspecting a thing. Meanwhile, among the rest of the population of the town, she began to spread word of a phenomenon of her own creation called the Midnight Channel: look into a switched-off TV at midnight on a rainy night, any rainy night, and someone will appear on the screen, depending on who the collective consciousness of the town wants most to see. At that point, she could largely sit back.
* Strictly speaking, he's a nameless mute protagonist in the original game. Souji is one of the two common fanon names, invented by an early licensed manga adaptation; the other one is Yu Narukami. But highlighting every instance of the name would be an eyesore, so I hope noting it like this is okay!
Her pawns moved fast. Within days of Souji's arrival, Adachi had murdered a high-profile newscaster and a local high school student with his newfound power to turn ordinary TV screens into temporary portals to the other world - normal people have no defense against hostile Shadows or ability to return to the real world on their own, so both women were quickly overwhelmed on the next foggy day, with only their dead bodies ejected via TV antenna for the rest of the police to puzzle over. The newscaster was Mayumi Yamano, the woman who Namatame dissolved his marriage for, and her death devastated him. Like the police, he had no idea of the cause, but he did know that Yamano and the high school girl had been on the Midnight Channel before their respective deaths; fearing that the serial killer responsible was still out there, and blindly convincing himself that the inside of the TV must be a safe haven, he resolved to save anyone else who appeared on the Midnight Channel by tracking them down first and pushing them inside.
Souji, too, became entangled in the homicide case soon enough. At first he was only concerned with settling into country life, but that put him in a position to hear gossip about the Midnight Channel too, and that led to him accidentally falling into the other world himself after trying to discuss it with Chie and Yosuke, two new friends he'd made at school. Unlike Adachi's victims, Souji had his own Izanami-awakened power on his side, and survived long enough for the three of them to find a way out - so when news spread about the unsolved murders, the three of them were the only people who could accurately guess at the cause of death. What's more, the case just happened to hit both of Souji's new buddies close to home: the second victim had been an old crush of Yosuke's, and the next person to appear on the Midnight Channel was Chie's best friend. Deciding that they couldn't remotely expect the police to solve a case as dangerous and fantastical as this one, the motley crew of teenagers swore to track down the killer themselves, appointing Souji as the leader of their self-proclaimed Investigation Team.
So the seasons went by, each new news cycle bringing a new face to the Midnight Channel as the population of Inaba clamoured to learn more about them, each person behind that new face being kidnapped by Namatame in the hope of keeping them away from the mysterious serial killer, each new kidnapping victim being rescued by the Investigation Team in the belief that the serial killer was the one responsible for those kidnappings too, and Adachi abusing his detective position to cover his tracks so he could enjoy the show from afar. After a year of twists and turns, it seemed obvious to Izanami which of the players was winning: both Namatame and Souji's team had been dancing on Adachi's strings this whole time, and Souji's group couldn't undo his actions or immediately apprehend him even once they finally caught on. Clearly humanity's strongest yearning was for the future that he embodied, one that despaired of ever improving and sought only to take the rest of the world down with it. She continued to watch as the minion she'd assigned to monitor Adachi strengthened its influence over him and prepared for the apocalypse.
But the Investigation Team persevered. Drawing on their bonds and the powers they'd painstakingly gathered from their travails in the TV world, they defeated the minion in question before it could drown the human world in fog, brought Adachi back home and handed him over to the authorities. Not only that - beyond Izanami's expectations, they realised that Adachi, Souji and Namatame had to have received their original TV-diving powers from somewhere, connected the dots, and managed to hunt her down too in pursuit of the full truth. Their showdown in the heart of Izanami's domain in the TV world was long and gruelling, but they subdued her as well, allowing her to reunite with the conscience she'd physically splintered away from the moment she'd started to plan her game. With her defeat, the bizarre homicide case was closed for good.
Life in sleepy Inaba went back to normal practically by the next day. Souji, who'd reached the end of his stay in the town, returned to the city without regrets - but he and the rest of the team had all left their marks on each other over the course of the year, and proved that humanity could decide its own future. For now, for the friends who saw him off at the train station, that would have to be enough.
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 isn't just unimposing, easily flustered and chronically accident-prone, his transparent eagerness to latch onto people in general and girls in particular is pretty pathetic too. He isn't wholly insensitive - he finds it easy to get along with people, and at times can be considerably more diplomatic than anyone would give him credit for - but his ground state of being is one with his foot jammed firmly into his mouth, not at all helped by his overly excitable attitude or his compulsion to tease other people in casual social contexts. While he soon settles into the second-in-command role in the team that becomes his closest circle of friends, often spurring the rest into action or setting the tone with his motor mouth, he hardly tries to stand out; he seems completely content to play comic relief and defer the spotlight to his more "executive" friends when it's called for. On the positive side, he's a pragmatist at heart when not getting too carried away, is decent at getting both things and people organised when he can find the motivation, and has a intuitively sharp mind for deductive logic when his observational skills don't let him down - but with all those caveats, the main impression he gives is of a happy-go-lucky dork just muddling his way through life.
The twist is both parts of that 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 that goes for Yosuke too. Unlike a more villainous character in the game to whom he could be considered a foil, he doesn't maintain a cheerful exterior as 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. However, impulsive streak aside, he's far from unintelligent, and rarely oblivious. His self-deprecating moments are little windows into his all too acute awareness that he isn't the most inspiring person on the planet, and that his lack of personal drive holds him back from living the most fulfilling life he can. That lack of personal drive doesn't translate to total apathy, as he does have a surprisingly strong moral sense, but this if anything only makes him judge himself more harshly when he falls short of his own standards. To take his mind off how banal his existence is, he's adopted a gregarious lifestyle, playing up his natural friendliness and empathy to form fast rapports with all kinds of people - but because he can't shut his self-awareness off entirely, he harbours a habitual quiet resentment towards anyone who appears to be doing better than he is, whether or not he otherwise likes them. 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 something more, and screw whatever else might try to remind him otherwise.
The extent to which this immature outlook affects his decisions and actions varies, but it still influences him from time to time 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 much more rural town and felt ostracised by most of the people there - he's susceptible to just about anything that promises to indulge his escapist side for a little while. Murder investigations, surreal videogame-style dungeon-crawling or bizarre fighting tournaments - if it places him in the role of a hero, all the practical arguments he can think of won't keep him away for long. This hankering for adventure coupled with his tendency to get carried away can in extreme cases get him so caught up in the narrative that he forgets his empathy for others: in emotionally charged situations, he consistently shows little empathy for criminals, to the extent that in the worst ending of the game he and a couple of other characters essentially murder a man who turns out not to be the killer they were trying to take revenge on after all.
But the negative parts of his personality have their own flip sides, too. Yosuke does have a good heart, and although overcoming a Shadow altogether isn't a realistic goal, he's committed to steadily working on the flaws that his forced him to confront. One key part of this process was realising that, contrary to how he used to think, a life in the country where everyone knows his face doesn't have to be stifling; it just requires him to take his connections to other people seriously. The death of an old high-school crush near the beginning of the game becomes arguably an even stronger motivation for him after he learns that she probably hated his guts, because she nevertheless meant something to him. Another was when he came to accept 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 resenting them. These epiphanies of his could be seen as stepping stones towards the core of Yosuke's character: for all of his childish screwing around, he's naturally inclined to put other people first. It's taken him a year of wrestling with his issues, and he knows he has a long way to go, but these days he's learned to treat that part of himself not as a vulnerability but as a source of real pride.
In summary, Yosuke is a character whose earnestness makes up for many of his insecurities, frequently embarrassing and sometimes an outright jerk but dependable where it counts. In briefer summary, Yosuke is a hopeless teenager, but there are worse things to be.
Appearance: An unimposing Japanese high school student with light brown eyes and hair, the latter dyed and gently styled into spikes. 175cm tall, thin, lanky, and prone to slouching like the teenager he is. He has a casual dress sense when not in uniform, favouring slightly loose-fitting clothes and bright, warm colours. His trademark accessory is a pair of large red and orange headphones, most commonly found hanging around his neck over other clothes. Here's a smattering of official artwork: 1 2 3 4 5 6.
Abilities:
Yosuke is one of a few humans in his world who can summon a Persona, a facet of his personality brought under the control of his ego and given physical form - like summoning and dismissing a character-specific demon at will, but more pretentious. His is Jiraiya, a ninja-like humanoid 2-3 times his size that wields twin shurikens and specialises in wind magic. In combat, he tends to summon it at close quarters, to create diversions, disorient enemies or just wail on things more efficiently than he can; it can also cast spells to heal surface wounds and temporarily improve a person's agility. While durable, it isn't invincible - it can be hurt by other magic, electricity and even conventional weaponry, any injuries it sustains are transferred to Yosuke, repeated summoning causes heavy mental fatigue and certain kinds of emotional duress can prevent a Persona-user from summoning at all - but it's the best weapon he has.
At the same time they obtained their Personas, Yosuke and most of his canon friends were also imbued with the ability to use switched-off TVs as portals to other (fixed, unchangeable) locations, passing through the screens as easily as water whether they want to or not. Given the lack of conventional TVs on the turtle, I'm listing that mostly for completion's sake, but there's an outside chance it could come up in dreams.
Apart from those two magical abilities, he's quick on his feet but not exceptionally so, capable with a knife (of the ordinary or throwing variety) but not formally trained in the slightest, and only as well informed about anything else as a bog standard teenage boy can expect to be.
Inventory: The clothes on his back, wallet, keys, a packet of cough drops, headphones, a red smartphone likely to run out of battery in short order, and a beige apron. All of these are completely mundane.
Suitability: Being a standard anime teenager, he's not the most obvious choice, but I think some of Yosuke's less immediately visible traits would make him an interesting choice for the setting, plus give him some fun options for development. For a start, I can see him stumbling into more of the politics than he intends, and adjusting quickly if necessity pushed him into it. His backstory already gives him experience with managing his image and herding people who don't like him much, and the prevalence of crime could totally get on the wrong side of his minor hero complex, so it would be great to figure out opportunities to get all of that into play - but there's also his chronic foot in mouth to push things south at particularly inopportune times, so there's a lot he could end up doing. On top of that, he's taken from a canon point right after his year-long pet homicide case gets completely resolved, so he's definitely in a mindset to start missing that mystery and stick his nose straight into any new intrigue he finds. As things stand, he has a chance to make a mark on the setting without the omnipresence of all his best friends, for better or for worse, and he's impulsive enough to take it.
In-Character Samples:
Third Person (Prose): Linked thread from another game - please let me know if you need more!
Network:
[handset, audio]
Yo! Uh, can everyone hear me? Geez, this thing is clunky...
[But as Yosuke trails off, he's already clearing his throat to try again. Haste makes waste, but screwing around too long makes for awkwardness, and exactly one of those is at the forefront of his mind today.]
Sorry to butt in, but I've got a real problem here! How should I put this... [Here, at least, he slows down.] Where do people go to get clothes - you know, better clothes - without the death glaring? Or a minimum, I guess. ...It can't be just me, right? Like, I've worked retail too, I know about bad days, but it totally wasn't my fault the water was deeper than it looked, or...
[Whoops, and then he got sidetracked. Can anybody blame him for feeling nervous while he's still out in the open, though? Sure, they didn't physically kick him out or anything; that doesn't change the fact that he knows death glares when he sees them. All the more so when they come from a dude with enough eyes to give him 50% extra free.
...Still, maybe he shouldn't have run away. Oh well, too late now.]
... Anyway, I'd appreciate it! Thanks!
Name: skarme
Age: 21
Contact:
Other Characters Played: N/A
Character Information:
Name: Yosuke Hanamura
Canon: Persona 4 (video game)
Canon Point: Golden, a week or so after the True Ending.
Age: 17
Reference Links: Fan wiki link.
Setting:
The established universe of the Persona series is a Japan-centric urban fantasy setting that in many ways is hard to distinguish from the real world in 2011. Brand names and other cultural icons are a little different, and some everyday technology lags a couple of years behind; for instance, flip phones are still fairly widespread. But for the most part, people in this world just wake up in the morning, work, play, study, hang out, stew in their own neuroses and go about their very recognisable lives.
Still, there are supernatural elements bubbling away beneath the surface, permeating much more of the setting than first appearances suggest. In the Persona universe, the mental is physical: the collective human subconscious is a tangible world unto itself, albeit almost impossible to access from the real world under normal circumstances. In this realm, the buried desires, emotions and other peculiarities of humans give rise to a host of bizarre monsters called Shadows, among other even more mysterious beings. The vast majority of Shadows are barely sentient, acting purely on instinctive aggression towards the conscious human minds that brought them into existence. But just as they vary in strength, they vary in self-awareness: some of the more powerful Shadows are sapient enough to talk, scheme and follow orders; still fewer of them manage to forge identities and personalities for themselves, even to the extent of forgetting their true nature; the most powerful of all take on roles similar to gods, working to influence both worlds and direct the course of humanity's development for their own ends.
At some point in the past, one such god-like figure came into being. Calling herself "Izanami" after a goddess of death in the mythology of the people who wished her into existence, she made it her mission to shepherd humanity as a whole towards its collective desire. However, with the rise of mass media and societal trends towards insularity, the once pristine landscape of the human subconscious became shrouded in isolating fog, and people's collective desires became distorted. While some people continued to hope for meaning in life, many despaired of ever finding it, and others desired to live their lives as if there was no inherent meaning at all. To determine which of these was humanity's true desire, Izanami set a plan in motion: she would hand-select three people to represent hope, despair and emptiness respectively, grant each of them the power to enter the realm of the human mind by themselves, introduce them to a community where all three were outsiders and could initially act as they pleased, then see for herself which player's subsequent actions left the most impact on the rest of humanity. Choosing the rural town of Yasoinaba (aka Inaba City) as the stage for her game, she took on the guise of a gas station attendant in the city's run-down old shopping district in order to keep an eye out for her candidates, and waited.
By spring of the year 2011, the game board was ready. Though Inaba was nowhere special geographically, outsiders to the local community came and went almost as fast as gossip did. First, a young police detective named Tohru Adachi reluctantly transferred to the Inaba police department following a mishap at his previous posting in the capital. Not long afterwards, a man called Taro Namatame, disgraced and fired from his council secretary job when his extramarital affair was exposed to the media, slunk back into town to live with his parents after having been away from the community for years. Then, just as the school year was about to begin, a 16-year-old city boy named Souji Seta* moved in with his Inaba native uncle and cousin for a year due to his parents' work. Izanami met each of these three as they arrived in town, greeting them casually and passing a sliver of her power onto them without any of them suspecting a thing. Meanwhile, among the rest of the population of the town, she began to spread word of a phenomenon of her own creation called the Midnight Channel: look into a switched-off TV at midnight on a rainy night, any rainy night, and someone will appear on the screen, depending on who the collective consciousness of the town wants most to see. At that point, she could largely sit back.
* Strictly speaking, he's a nameless mute protagonist in the original game. Souji is one of the two common fanon names, invented by an early licensed manga adaptation; the other one is Yu Narukami. But highlighting every instance of the name would be an eyesore, so I hope noting it like this is okay!
Her pawns moved fast. Within days of Souji's arrival, Adachi had murdered a high-profile newscaster and a local high school student with his newfound power to turn ordinary TV screens into temporary portals to the other world - normal people have no defense against hostile Shadows or ability to return to the real world on their own, so both women were quickly overwhelmed on the next foggy day, with only their dead bodies ejected via TV antenna for the rest of the police to puzzle over. The newscaster was Mayumi Yamano, the woman who Namatame dissolved his marriage for, and her death devastated him. Like the police, he had no idea of the cause, but he did know that Yamano and the high school girl had been on the Midnight Channel before their respective deaths; fearing that the serial killer responsible was still out there, and blindly convincing himself that the inside of the TV must be a safe haven, he resolved to save anyone else who appeared on the Midnight Channel by tracking them down first and pushing them inside.
Souji, too, became entangled in the homicide case soon enough. At first he was only concerned with settling into country life, but that put him in a position to hear gossip about the Midnight Channel too, and that led to him accidentally falling into the other world himself after trying to discuss it with Chie and Yosuke, two new friends he'd made at school. Unlike Adachi's victims, Souji had his own Izanami-awakened power on his side, and survived long enough for the three of them to find a way out - so when news spread about the unsolved murders, the three of them were the only people who could accurately guess at the cause of death. What's more, the case just happened to hit both of Souji's new buddies close to home: the second victim had been an old crush of Yosuke's, and the next person to appear on the Midnight Channel was Chie's best friend. Deciding that they couldn't remotely expect the police to solve a case as dangerous and fantastical as this one, the motley crew of teenagers swore to track down the killer themselves, appointing Souji as the leader of their self-proclaimed Investigation Team.
So the seasons went by, each new news cycle bringing a new face to the Midnight Channel as the population of Inaba clamoured to learn more about them, each person behind that new face being kidnapped by Namatame in the hope of keeping them away from the mysterious serial killer, each new kidnapping victim being rescued by the Investigation Team in the belief that the serial killer was the one responsible for those kidnappings too, and Adachi abusing his detective position to cover his tracks so he could enjoy the show from afar. After a year of twists and turns, it seemed obvious to Izanami which of the players was winning: both Namatame and Souji's team had been dancing on Adachi's strings this whole time, and Souji's group couldn't undo his actions or immediately apprehend him even once they finally caught on. Clearly humanity's strongest yearning was for the future that he embodied, one that despaired of ever improving and sought only to take the rest of the world down with it. She continued to watch as the minion she'd assigned to monitor Adachi strengthened its influence over him and prepared for the apocalypse.
But the Investigation Team persevered. Drawing on their bonds and the powers they'd painstakingly gathered from their travails in the TV world, they defeated the minion in question before it could drown the human world in fog, brought Adachi back home and handed him over to the authorities. Not only that - beyond Izanami's expectations, they realised that Adachi, Souji and Namatame had to have received their original TV-diving powers from somewhere, connected the dots, and managed to hunt her down too in pursuit of the full truth. Their showdown in the heart of Izanami's domain in the TV world was long and gruelling, but they subdued her as well, allowing her to reunite with the conscience she'd physically splintered away from the moment she'd started to plan her game. With her defeat, the bizarre homicide case was closed for good.
Life in sleepy Inaba went back to normal practically by the next day. Souji, who'd reached the end of his stay in the town, returned to the city without regrets - but he and the rest of the team had all left their marks on each other over the course of the year, and proved that humanity could decide its own future. For now, for the friends who saw him off at the train station, that would have to be enough.
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 isn't just unimposing, easily flustered and chronically accident-prone, his transparent eagerness to latch onto people in general and girls in particular is pretty pathetic too. He isn't wholly insensitive - he finds it easy to get along with people, and at times can be considerably more diplomatic than anyone would give him credit for - but his ground state of being is one with his foot jammed firmly into his mouth, not at all helped by his overly excitable attitude or his compulsion to tease other people in casual social contexts. While he soon settles into the second-in-command role in the team that becomes his closest circle of friends, often spurring the rest into action or setting the tone with his motor mouth, he hardly tries to stand out; he seems completely content to play comic relief and defer the spotlight to his more "executive" friends when it's called for. On the positive side, he's a pragmatist at heart when not getting too carried away, is decent at getting both things and people organised when he can find the motivation, and has a intuitively sharp mind for deductive logic when his observational skills don't let him down - but with all those caveats, the main impression he gives is of a happy-go-lucky dork just muddling his way through life.
The twist is both parts of that 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 that goes for Yosuke too. Unlike a more villainous character in the game to whom he could be considered a foil, he doesn't maintain a cheerful exterior as 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. However, impulsive streak aside, he's far from unintelligent, and rarely oblivious. His self-deprecating moments are little windows into his all too acute awareness that he isn't the most inspiring person on the planet, and that his lack of personal drive holds him back from living the most fulfilling life he can. That lack of personal drive doesn't translate to total apathy, as he does have a surprisingly strong moral sense, but this if anything only makes him judge himself more harshly when he falls short of his own standards. To take his mind off how banal his existence is, he's adopted a gregarious lifestyle, playing up his natural friendliness and empathy to form fast rapports with all kinds of people - but because he can't shut his self-awareness off entirely, he harbours a habitual quiet resentment towards anyone who appears to be doing better than he is, whether or not he otherwise likes them. 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 something more, and screw whatever else might try to remind him otherwise.
The extent to which this immature outlook affects his decisions and actions varies, but it still influences him from time to time 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 much more rural town and felt ostracised by most of the people there - he's susceptible to just about anything that promises to indulge his escapist side for a little while. Murder investigations, surreal videogame-style dungeon-crawling or bizarre fighting tournaments - if it places him in the role of a hero, all the practical arguments he can think of won't keep him away for long. This hankering for adventure coupled with his tendency to get carried away can in extreme cases get him so caught up in the narrative that he forgets his empathy for others: in emotionally charged situations, he consistently shows little empathy for criminals, to the extent that in the worst ending of the game he and a couple of other characters essentially murder a man who turns out not to be the killer they were trying to take revenge on after all.
But the negative parts of his personality have their own flip sides, too. Yosuke does have a good heart, and although overcoming a Shadow altogether isn't a realistic goal, he's committed to steadily working on the flaws that his forced him to confront. One key part of this process was realising that, contrary to how he used to think, a life in the country where everyone knows his face doesn't have to be stifling; it just requires him to take his connections to other people seriously. The death of an old high-school crush near the beginning of the game becomes arguably an even stronger motivation for him after he learns that she probably hated his guts, because she nevertheless meant something to him. Another was when he came to accept 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 resenting them. These epiphanies of his could be seen as stepping stones towards the core of Yosuke's character: for all of his childish screwing around, he's naturally inclined to put other people first. It's taken him a year of wrestling with his issues, and he knows he has a long way to go, but these days he's learned to treat that part of himself not as a vulnerability but as a source of real pride.
In summary, Yosuke is a character whose earnestness makes up for many of his insecurities, frequently embarrassing and sometimes an outright jerk but dependable where it counts. In briefer summary, Yosuke is a hopeless teenager, but there are worse things to be.
Appearance: An unimposing Japanese high school student with light brown eyes and hair, the latter dyed and gently styled into spikes. 175cm tall, thin, lanky, and prone to slouching like the teenager he is. He has a casual dress sense when not in uniform, favouring slightly loose-fitting clothes and bright, warm colours. His trademark accessory is a pair of large red and orange headphones, most commonly found hanging around his neck over other clothes. Here's a smattering of official artwork: 1 2 3 4 5 6.
Abilities:
Yosuke is one of a few humans in his world who can summon a Persona, a facet of his personality brought under the control of his ego and given physical form - like summoning and dismissing a character-specific demon at will, but more pretentious. His is Jiraiya, a ninja-like humanoid 2-3 times his size that wields twin shurikens and specialises in wind magic. In combat, he tends to summon it at close quarters, to create diversions, disorient enemies or just wail on things more efficiently than he can; it can also cast spells to heal surface wounds and temporarily improve a person's agility. While durable, it isn't invincible - it can be hurt by other magic, electricity and even conventional weaponry, any injuries it sustains are transferred to Yosuke, repeated summoning causes heavy mental fatigue and certain kinds of emotional duress can prevent a Persona-user from summoning at all - but it's the best weapon he has.
At the same time they obtained their Personas, Yosuke and most of his canon friends were also imbued with the ability to use switched-off TVs as portals to other (fixed, unchangeable) locations, passing through the screens as easily as water whether they want to or not. Given the lack of conventional TVs on the turtle, I'm listing that mostly for completion's sake, but there's an outside chance it could come up in dreams.
Apart from those two magical abilities, he's quick on his feet but not exceptionally so, capable with a knife (of the ordinary or throwing variety) but not formally trained in the slightest, and only as well informed about anything else as a bog standard teenage boy can expect to be.
Inventory: The clothes on his back, wallet, keys, a packet of cough drops, headphones, a red smartphone likely to run out of battery in short order, and a beige apron. All of these are completely mundane.
Suitability: Being a standard anime teenager, he's not the most obvious choice, but I think some of Yosuke's less immediately visible traits would make him an interesting choice for the setting, plus give him some fun options for development. For a start, I can see him stumbling into more of the politics than he intends, and adjusting quickly if necessity pushed him into it. His backstory already gives him experience with managing his image and herding people who don't like him much, and the prevalence of crime could totally get on the wrong side of his minor hero complex, so it would be great to figure out opportunities to get all of that into play - but there's also his chronic foot in mouth to push things south at particularly inopportune times, so there's a lot he could end up doing. On top of that, he's taken from a canon point right after his year-long pet homicide case gets completely resolved, so he's definitely in a mindset to start missing that mystery and stick his nose straight into any new intrigue he finds. As things stand, he has a chance to make a mark on the setting without the omnipresence of all his best friends, for better or for worse, and he's impulsive enough to take it.
In-Character Samples:
Third Person (Prose): Linked thread from another game - please let me know if you need more!
Network:
[handset, audio]
Yo! Uh, can everyone hear me? Geez, this thing is clunky...
[But as Yosuke trails off, he's already clearing his throat to try again. Haste makes waste, but screwing around too long makes for awkwardness, and exactly one of those is at the forefront of his mind today.]
Sorry to butt in, but I've got a real problem here! How should I put this... [Here, at least, he slows down.] Where do people go to get clothes - you know, better clothes - without the death glaring? Or a minimum, I guess. ...It can't be just me, right? Like, I've worked retail too, I know about bad days, but it totally wasn't my fault the water was deeper than it looked, or...
[Whoops, and then he got sidetracked. Can anybody blame him for feeling nervous while he's still out in the open, though? Sure, they didn't physically kick him out or anything; that doesn't change the fact that he knows death glares when he sees them. All the more so when they come from a dude with enough eyes to give him 50% extra free.
...Still, maybe he shouldn't have run away. Oh well, too late now.]
... Anyway, I'd appreciate it! Thanks!