OOC. Character Profile & Permissions [Dirty Vegas]
He had loved the world, once - he had loved the world and everything in it, and made himself believe that he could somehow protect all that he held dear through hard work and sacrifice. By getting stronger, fighting harder, staying on the path of the good and the righteous.
It had been easy to tell himself to keep going, while he had still been surrounded by friends. Even in the face of certain defeat, even with the fact that he lost someone he knew and loved with almost every fight, he felt as though he could carry on, for so long as there was going to be just one other person at his side or just at his back by the time everything came to an end.
The days became weeks, however, and those weeks became months, and in ones or twos or threes or more, he watched the rest walk away from the war in the dead of night, or saw them carted off like animals to alien prisons, or to the block.
He remembers what it was like standing in front of a table lined with their heads clearly, as though it were only yesterday.
An old veteran from a war whose name nobody remembered had once told Takasugi that the voices of the dead followed a man everywhere. “It’s in the eyes,” he muttered. “Those eyes and lips, saying things. Screaming. You can never figure out what they’re trying to tell you, unless you join them.”
Takasugi realized, on the day he quite certainly lost himself, that the best way of figuring out what they were trying to say was to make sure they stayed loud, hammering at your skull, pounding in your ears. That meant making more of them, with every cut of your sword, in every waking hour you had.
He wonders, sometimes, if he’ll ever really find out. He figures, though, that after he’s made a couple of mountains of corpses, one of them is bound to have the answer - or a piece of it anyway.
Years afterward, Takasugi’s standing on the deck of a dying ship, far above the beginning of s war that he himself started. He doesn’t need to look for too long in order to single out the figures of the two men who had once been his closest comrades. He’d recognize the way they fight - the way their swords dance - anywhere. Something in him stirs, something beyond the babbling mess of ghosts and memories, somewhere beyond all of that noise. For one split second, it’s his body - not his brain - that remembers what it was like to stand with them, to know, instinctively, what one needed to kill for and work one’s way towards it, confident in the fact there will always be someone watching your back. For one split second, his mind is clear.
There is a sense of loss, almost, but it is buried quickly, drowned by the remembrance that Sakata Gintoki and Katsura Kotarou abandoned the cause long ago. They walk a different path from his, one that takes them further and further away from the possibility of vengeance. They are content with living in a world that stole everything from them.
There is no greater sin than that of complacence.
So he watches the pair weave through the battlefield, cutting out a new future for themselves n the flesh and bone of their enemies, and he thinks to himself that this is what he’s given up, this is what he’s going to throw away. This is what he’ll destroy, between his own two hands.
Perhaps it isn’t important. Now that he’s carrying the weight and sound of the dearly departed inside of him, he’ll never be alone.
OOC
Name: Kae
Contact: derridamustdie (AIM) / derridamustdie@gmail.com
Age: 25
IC
Name: Takasugi Shinsuke
Fandom: Gintama
History:
I wrote this out for my app in Soul Campaign, because there isn’t much to go by on wikis and fansites.
Although the Amanto War has a number of notable figures among the samurai who resisted the alien invasion, four names stand out above them all: Sakata Gintoki, Katsura Kotaro, Sakamoto Tatsuma and Takasugi Shinsuke. Whereas Gintoki was better known under the moniker Shiroyasha (“White Demon”, which should probably go without explanation), and Katsura and Sakamoto were each renowned for their strategic brilliance and swordsmanship, Takasugi is best remembered as the leader of the Kihetai, a band of elite warriors - male and female - who were fiercely loyal to the head of their group and almost fanatically devoted to one cause: the liberation of Japan from the hands of the strange foreigners from space.
Suffice to say, the Amanto eventually routed the samurai rebels, and forced the Empire to her knees, effectively destroying the Shogunate and placing Japan under their thumb. The Shiroyasha disappeared, as did Sakamoto - Katsura and Takasugi gathered whatever was left of the Jooishishi to the best of their abilities and went underground, to continue their rebellion against the Amanto. Whereas Katsura seemed to retain the honorable and pure vision that the original Jooi had once had, however, Takasugi moved on to become a twisted shadow of his former self, willing to do whatever it takes in order to destroy the country he had once fought so hard to protect.
Canon provides us with no explanations on how the Takasugi that is shown in the memories of the main characters in Gintama became the villain that we have on screen now. He seems like somebody else entirely: sinister and vicious who lives only to kill and destroy, and seems to hold little love for people he grew up with, people who used to be his comrades-in-arms and perhaps the ones he used to call his closest friends.
Age: Between 25 to 27 years of age
Canon point: After the Itou Arc of the anime. Basically, it’s the point after Takasugi’s last big plot to overthrow Edo: his group had managed to gain the cooperation of Itou, a member of the Shinsengumi, and agreed to “aid” him in his coup d’etat attempt. Takasugi has encountered interference from Gintoki and Katsura - his old comrades - yet again, and was just about ready to go back to biding his time, waiting for the next big opportunity to strike.
Personality:
It’s easy, at first, to get caught up in the little details with Takasugi. Silver-tongued, scary brilliant, eerily perceptive and impeccably charming - he’s one of the few people who seem to have been born with the ability to draw people to him and reel them in with nothing but words. Never mind the fact that his smile’s a little too sharp and his face is broken: his charm and eloquence often disarm the initial bad vibes that most people may have around him. Either that, or it’s enough to make someone willfully decide not to care, and involve themselves with Takasugi anyway. Maybe that might even be the reason why they’ll try: broken things have a particular sort of appeal, after all.
The truth of the matter is, Takasugi is a man who is singularly defined by his rage over the loss of the one thing - maybe even the one person - he ever cared about. Canon indicates that while all of his old comrades entered the war with some sort of cause in mind, Takasugi only decided to fight because it was the life that Shouyo, his mentor and a man he deeply admired, had given him. Shouyo had given him a means to live in the world; as such, Shouyo’s beliefs were Takasugi’s beliefs, and Shouyo’s cause was Takasugi’s cause. Losing him, then, crushed Takasugi completely, leaving him with nothing but hatred for the world that had stolen Shouyo from him. If that wasn’t enough, there were also the horrors of the Amanto war to contend with, and the gradual disappearance of his comrades: these were people Takasugi had grown up with after all and may have come to love as his brothers, and throughout the course of the war, every single one of them ended up either dying, changing beyond recognition or abandoning the cause. Having to contend with the loss of Shouyo and fighting a hopeless battle is what drove Takasugi to cut everything away, sacrificing everything - morals, beliefs, emotion, his very humanity - to better focus on becoming a man whose convinced himself that he’s a beast whose sole purpose was to destroy the world that had been so cruel as to steal the only things that had ever made it world living in.
Such perfect and total focus on the path that one has decided that one must take, of course, means that one’s every thought and action are directed towards taking that road. Years of acting on this resolve to avenge his master render Takasugi pretty much incapable of seeing anything else, and he therefore views people in one of three ways: a tool to be used, an obstacle to get rid of, or a toy to play with while he waits for all of the things he has moved and the plans he has made to come together. He feels no compassion, no love for anyone - why should he? The people of his world had stood idly by when his sensei had been killed, and dare to carry on with their lives as though there had been no war, no great sacrifices, no samurai who had lost themselves fighting to give them a better world. As such, Takasugi won’t hesitate to drop people who have exhausted their usefulness to him and cut down the ones who have obstructed his path. This is something Takasugi is quite capable of doing, and it isn’t just because he knows how to hold his own in a fight: he also possesses a keen understanding of human behavior. Most people, to him, are like open books, and it is only too easily to pinpoint how people feel, and why they act the way they do. He uses that knowledge to move others the way he wants them to move, and those he cannot sway, he will take apart by capitalizing on their fears.
Overall, perhaps the best way to describe Takasugi is that he’s a force of nature - he does not make compromises, does not pull punches, and destroys whatever stands in his way, without exception. He’s a ruined man, and that only serves to feed his obsession and fuel the rage he feels over having the bottom of his world drop out from under his feet. Since Takasugi’s very nature, then, alienates him from everyone beyond his most fanatical followers, he’s bound to self-destruct sometime in the future, or get brutally cut down before accomplishing anything.
Powers/Abilities: Takasugi is an extremely skilled swordsman, and it isn’t just because he was taught by a fine master: he’s a war baby, born during a time of great conflict in his country, and he moved on to participate actively in the fight against the invading Amanto at a young age. He’s developed an instinct for danger, and knows the best - and fastest - way to dismantle any obstacle, human or otherwise, during a fight. At the end of it all, though, Takasugi is a human being, and humans break easily.
Permissions
Types of sex I am OK with: Oral, anal, noncon/dubcon, S&M play
Kinks or practices I enjoy: Bondage, toys, blood play, abrasions, burning, biting, breath control/choking, discipline, flogging/whipping/paddling, ice
Types of sex I'm not OK with: Vore, wet & messy, watersports and similar things
Kinks or practices I don't enjoy: Mutilation/amputation/castration, enemas, diapers, scat, swallowing feces/urine/vomit
Willing to write rape or dubcon?: Yep.
Is fade to black OK?: Yes!
If there's anything you've got in mind but you're not sure whether I'm good with it or not, just ask! I'm usually open to whatever.
It had been easy to tell himself to keep going, while he had still been surrounded by friends. Even in the face of certain defeat, even with the fact that he lost someone he knew and loved with almost every fight, he felt as though he could carry on, for so long as there was going to be just one other person at his side or just at his back by the time everything came to an end.
The days became weeks, however, and those weeks became months, and in ones or twos or threes or more, he watched the rest walk away from the war in the dead of night, or saw them carted off like animals to alien prisons, or to the block.
He remembers what it was like standing in front of a table lined with their heads clearly, as though it were only yesterday.
An old veteran from a war whose name nobody remembered had once told Takasugi that the voices of the dead followed a man everywhere. “It’s in the eyes,” he muttered. “Those eyes and lips, saying things. Screaming. You can never figure out what they’re trying to tell you, unless you join them.”
Takasugi realized, on the day he quite certainly lost himself, that the best way of figuring out what they were trying to say was to make sure they stayed loud, hammering at your skull, pounding in your ears. That meant making more of them, with every cut of your sword, in every waking hour you had.
He wonders, sometimes, if he’ll ever really find out. He figures, though, that after he’s made a couple of mountains of corpses, one of them is bound to have the answer - or a piece of it anyway.
Years afterward, Takasugi’s standing on the deck of a dying ship, far above the beginning of s war that he himself started. He doesn’t need to look for too long in order to single out the figures of the two men who had once been his closest comrades. He’d recognize the way they fight - the way their swords dance - anywhere. Something in him stirs, something beyond the babbling mess of ghosts and memories, somewhere beyond all of that noise. For one split second, it’s his body - not his brain - that remembers what it was like to stand with them, to know, instinctively, what one needed to kill for and work one’s way towards it, confident in the fact there will always be someone watching your back. For one split second, his mind is clear.
There is a sense of loss, almost, but it is buried quickly, drowned by the remembrance that Sakata Gintoki and Katsura Kotarou abandoned the cause long ago. They walk a different path from his, one that takes them further and further away from the possibility of vengeance. They are content with living in a world that stole everything from them.
There is no greater sin than that of complacence.
So he watches the pair weave through the battlefield, cutting out a new future for themselves n the flesh and bone of their enemies, and he thinks to himself that this is what he’s given up, this is what he’s going to throw away. This is what he’ll destroy, between his own two hands.
Perhaps it isn’t important. Now that he’s carrying the weight and sound of the dearly departed inside of him, he’ll never be alone.
OOC
Name: Kae
Contact: derridamustdie (AIM) / derridamustdie@gmail.com
Age: 25
IC
Name: Takasugi Shinsuke
Fandom: Gintama
History:
I wrote this out for my app in Soul Campaign, because there isn’t much to go by on wikis and fansites.
Although the Amanto War has a number of notable figures among the samurai who resisted the alien invasion, four names stand out above them all: Sakata Gintoki, Katsura Kotaro, Sakamoto Tatsuma and Takasugi Shinsuke. Whereas Gintoki was better known under the moniker Shiroyasha (“White Demon”, which should probably go without explanation), and Katsura and Sakamoto were each renowned for their strategic brilliance and swordsmanship, Takasugi is best remembered as the leader of the Kihetai, a band of elite warriors - male and female - who were fiercely loyal to the head of their group and almost fanatically devoted to one cause: the liberation of Japan from the hands of the strange foreigners from space.
Suffice to say, the Amanto eventually routed the samurai rebels, and forced the Empire to her knees, effectively destroying the Shogunate and placing Japan under their thumb. The Shiroyasha disappeared, as did Sakamoto - Katsura and Takasugi gathered whatever was left of the Jooishishi to the best of their abilities and went underground, to continue their rebellion against the Amanto. Whereas Katsura seemed to retain the honorable and pure vision that the original Jooi had once had, however, Takasugi moved on to become a twisted shadow of his former self, willing to do whatever it takes in order to destroy the country he had once fought so hard to protect.
Canon provides us with no explanations on how the Takasugi that is shown in the memories of the main characters in Gintama became the villain that we have on screen now. He seems like somebody else entirely: sinister and vicious who lives only to kill and destroy, and seems to hold little love for people he grew up with, people who used to be his comrades-in-arms and perhaps the ones he used to call his closest friends.
Age: Between 25 to 27 years of age
Canon point: After the Itou Arc of the anime. Basically, it’s the point after Takasugi’s last big plot to overthrow Edo: his group had managed to gain the cooperation of Itou, a member of the Shinsengumi, and agreed to “aid” him in his coup d’etat attempt. Takasugi has encountered interference from Gintoki and Katsura - his old comrades - yet again, and was just about ready to go back to biding his time, waiting for the next big opportunity to strike.
Personality:
It’s easy, at first, to get caught up in the little details with Takasugi. Silver-tongued, scary brilliant, eerily perceptive and impeccably charming - he’s one of the few people who seem to have been born with the ability to draw people to him and reel them in with nothing but words. Never mind the fact that his smile’s a little too sharp and his face is broken: his charm and eloquence often disarm the initial bad vibes that most people may have around him. Either that, or it’s enough to make someone willfully decide not to care, and involve themselves with Takasugi anyway. Maybe that might even be the reason why they’ll try: broken things have a particular sort of appeal, after all.
The truth of the matter is, Takasugi is a man who is singularly defined by his rage over the loss of the one thing - maybe even the one person - he ever cared about. Canon indicates that while all of his old comrades entered the war with some sort of cause in mind, Takasugi only decided to fight because it was the life that Shouyo, his mentor and a man he deeply admired, had given him. Shouyo had given him a means to live in the world; as such, Shouyo’s beliefs were Takasugi’s beliefs, and Shouyo’s cause was Takasugi’s cause. Losing him, then, crushed Takasugi completely, leaving him with nothing but hatred for the world that had stolen Shouyo from him. If that wasn’t enough, there were also the horrors of the Amanto war to contend with, and the gradual disappearance of his comrades: these were people Takasugi had grown up with after all and may have come to love as his brothers, and throughout the course of the war, every single one of them ended up either dying, changing beyond recognition or abandoning the cause. Having to contend with the loss of Shouyo and fighting a hopeless battle is what drove Takasugi to cut everything away, sacrificing everything - morals, beliefs, emotion, his very humanity - to better focus on becoming a man whose convinced himself that he’s a beast whose sole purpose was to destroy the world that had been so cruel as to steal the only things that had ever made it world living in.
Such perfect and total focus on the path that one has decided that one must take, of course, means that one’s every thought and action are directed towards taking that road. Years of acting on this resolve to avenge his master render Takasugi pretty much incapable of seeing anything else, and he therefore views people in one of three ways: a tool to be used, an obstacle to get rid of, or a toy to play with while he waits for all of the things he has moved and the plans he has made to come together. He feels no compassion, no love for anyone - why should he? The people of his world had stood idly by when his sensei had been killed, and dare to carry on with their lives as though there had been no war, no great sacrifices, no samurai who had lost themselves fighting to give them a better world. As such, Takasugi won’t hesitate to drop people who have exhausted their usefulness to him and cut down the ones who have obstructed his path. This is something Takasugi is quite capable of doing, and it isn’t just because he knows how to hold his own in a fight: he also possesses a keen understanding of human behavior. Most people, to him, are like open books, and it is only too easily to pinpoint how people feel, and why they act the way they do. He uses that knowledge to move others the way he wants them to move, and those he cannot sway, he will take apart by capitalizing on their fears.
Overall, perhaps the best way to describe Takasugi is that he’s a force of nature - he does not make compromises, does not pull punches, and destroys whatever stands in his way, without exception. He’s a ruined man, and that only serves to feed his obsession and fuel the rage he feels over having the bottom of his world drop out from under his feet. Since Takasugi’s very nature, then, alienates him from everyone beyond his most fanatical followers, he’s bound to self-destruct sometime in the future, or get brutally cut down before accomplishing anything.
Powers/Abilities: Takasugi is an extremely skilled swordsman, and it isn’t just because he was taught by a fine master: he’s a war baby, born during a time of great conflict in his country, and he moved on to participate actively in the fight against the invading Amanto at a young age. He’s developed an instinct for danger, and knows the best - and fastest - way to dismantle any obstacle, human or otherwise, during a fight. At the end of it all, though, Takasugi is a human being, and humans break easily.
Permissions
Types of sex I am OK with: Oral, anal, noncon/dubcon, S&M play
Kinks or practices I enjoy: Bondage, toys, blood play, abrasions, burning, biting, breath control/choking, discipline, flogging/whipping/paddling, ice
Types of sex I'm not OK with: Vore, wet & messy, watersports and similar things
Kinks or practices I don't enjoy: Mutilation/amputation/castration, enemas, diapers, scat, swallowing feces/urine/vomit
Willing to write rape or dubcon?: Yep.
Is fade to black OK?: Yes!
If there's anything you've got in mind but you're not sure whether I'm good with it or not, just ask! I'm usually open to whatever.