Re-App Application
I made some changes to the personality section when I reapped Joshua, as well as made some new samples, so I figured I should post up the new app here. Warning: TL;DR
» Name: Joshua Christopher
» Fandom: Chrono Crusade
» Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrono_Crusade -- Wiki page. Used to have a lot more information, but Wikipedia standards kinda…cut down on a lot of it.
You can also read the scanlations here: http://www.mangareader.net/297/chrno-crusade.html The different translations vary in quality, but it should give you at least a basic idea. Most manga readers online have the scanlations, that’s just one place out of many you can get them.
» Canon Point: A few months after the ending of the manga (but not the epilogue). Probably about a month after he returned to his world from Atia, as well. (He’ll have his memories.)
» Gender: Male/Male.
» Age: Physically, before coming to the island, he was fifteen-almost-sixteen. He’s about that mentally as well, although he can be a bit immature or surprisingly mature for his age depending on the moment you catch him.
» Orientation: Heterosexual. Joshua’s love life isn’t really the focus of his scenes too much (partially because most of the time we see him in canon he’s either an 11-year-old or mentally screwed up by the horns on his head), so his sexuality is pretty vague, but there’s a few scenes in the manga that hint at him being attracted to girls. The most obvious of the girls he’s attracted to is Azmaria-it’s shown that there’s a “connection” between them as early as the 2nd volume, when he manages to enter into a dream of Azmaria’s and speak to her. Although this isn’t exactly romantic, it does set the stage for their later relationship-they’re compared to Chrono and Mary Magdalene (an obviously romantic couple), Joshua blushes when he sees her dolled up in a pretty dress, and in the epilogue to the manga it’s heavily implied that Joshua ends up marrying her. (They’re shown holding hands at Rosette’s funeral and Azmaria has a ring on her left ring finger, and she’s later shown to have a grandchild who bears a striking resemblance to Joshua.)
There are also occasional hints that he might have romantic feelings towards his maid, Fiore. Although at times they’re shown as having a servant-and-master relationship, and at others a “like brother and sister” relationship, Joshua seems to cross both of these boundaries on a few occasions. Probably the most overt one is when he questions Fiore telling him her orders are to guard him-knowing that Aion’s orders were actually to kill him-and ends up hugging Fiore from behind in a way that is definitely not related to a master/servant relationship and seems a bit too intimate for a brother/sister relationship. (Fiore seems to think as well, as it gives her a pretty strong blush for a character who supposedly feels no emotion). Later, in the epilogue, when Rosette seems to be talking about her MIA love interest Chrono, Joshua responds by talking about Fiore, saying “I want her back. It’s so hard to wait for her…”
(It should be noted that the manga differs greatly from the anime in how their relationship is portrayed, in the anime Joshua seems certain Fiore is his ACTUAL sister, but in the manga there’s only two parts he refers to her as “sister”-when they first meet and he’s confused, and their last conversation, in which Fiore asks him to call her it once more. It’s clear in the manga that while he can’t remember if Rosette’s his sister or not, he KNOWS that Fiore isn’t her.)
I can’t get much more solid than that because the mangaka of Chrono Crusade seems to be pretty fond of ship teasing, but what little there is for Joshua romantically in the manga seems almost entirely focused on the girls in his life.
» Personality: Joshua is a boy of contradictions. On one hand, he’s been through many hardships from a young age, which has forced him to look at life from a grown-up perspective. On the other hand, Joshua is often nothing more than a whiny child trying to get his way. At times he can be selfless, willing to endure hardship for others and in particular his sister, but often he selfishly decides what’s best without asking others how they feel. He was at one time an “Apostle”, or a holy chosen messenger, and later in his life he even joins a religious order, but he also joined a group of demons known as “Sinners” and-while manipulated by them at a young age-seems to have genuinely agreed with their beliefs. However, there are some things that are consistent-Joshua is a bright, imaginative boy with a need to protect others and a desire to do the right thing and find his place in the world, even if he’s unsure of what that really is.
To understand Joshua, it’s best to start with his backstory. When Joshua was very young (about five or so), his parents drowned in a shipwreck. In front of his father’s empty grave, Joshua promised his older sister, Rosette, that they would become adults together-while inwardly promising to himself that he would become strong so he could protect her. Although that memory faded to his subconscious, he never truly forgot it, and it ruled the large majority of his actions even into his teens.
Joshua seems to have always been devoted to Rosette, and being orphaned only increased that. After they were sent to an orphanage, Joshua was practically attached to Rosette at the hip. When Joshua felt well enough, the pair enjoyed hiking out to a nearby forest and exploring.
I say “when Joshua felt well enough” because Joshua was often sick as a child with seizures and cough-like symptoms. This illness arrived at the same time that Joshua was granted the powers of an Apostle-the ability to manifest angelic wings and to heal others (but not himself). Unknown to Joshua, every Apostle seems to have to suffer through some sort of payment or ‘curse’ for their powers. For Joshua, his powers used his own body’s energy to heal others, which meant that the more he used his powers, the weaker his body became. Joshua had no idea that his powers were the cause of his illness, and both his own kindness and his sister’s encouragement to use his powers caused him to become sicker and sicker, rendering him too weak to stick to keep his promise. His frustration over being taken care of and too weak to protect his sister made him an easy target for Aion, a demon and a leader of a group known as “Sinners”. Aion gave him a pair of demon horns and promised Joshua that if he put them on his head, he’d be strong enough to overcome his illness. This was absolutely true, but since Joshua was human and his body wasn’t built to handle the overwhelming power the horns gave him, the horns quickly drove him insane and also degraded his memories so badly that after years of staying with Aion under the influence of the horns, he didn’t even remember his sister’s face.
In order to save Joshua, Rosette formed a contract with another demon, Chrono (the original owner of Joshua’s horns). By allowing him to drain the energy from her body and shortening her lifespan, Chrono was able to use his powers without his horns. Together they eventually were able to track down Aion, rescue Joshua from the horns, and stop Aion’s plans to destroy and recreate the world. Joshua is arriving to Atia after this rescue.
The reason why I decided to go into Joshua’s backstory with that amount of depth is that we don’t see much of him after he’s had the horns removed, so discerning Joshua’s personality as a sane teenager requires quite a bit of examining his traits as a child and with the horns as well as after his rescue, and examining how he changed throughout the story.
From the beginning, Joshua is an imaginative bookworm and the Roaring Twenties equivalent of a major geek. He consumes a large amount of dime novels-cheap genre fiction that were sort of the precursors of comics-and when he’s not reading his books, he’s daydreaming about his own adventures, or even making plans to become an explorer with his sister. He’s fascinated by adventure stories, sci-fi, and the occult, and he’s constantly bringing up the stories he loves in conversation. This is heavily implied to be because of his illness keeping him confined to his bed. He admits in an inner monologue that he often kept his eyes pointed to the sky, because there was “too much light” present in the games his sister and the other orphans played below his window. He envied the other children for being healthy, and he desperately wanted to become strong-so as an escape, he threw himself into heroic fantasies of cowboys, witches, aliens and faeries. He hero worships the protagonists of his favorite stories, and it’s highly likely that this is part of what draws him to Aion, who is a very powerful and intelligent demon.
This extends into his teen years, both with and without his horns. He is drawn to powerful people, and often gets excited to see them fight so he can discover which one is the strongest. He also revels in the power that Chrono’s horns grant him, constantly testing his limits even though he’s well aware that the horns are causing him harm. In a way, he seems obsessed with a heroic ideal of masculinity-he loves guns (at one point even half-jokingly saying to Rosette that someday he’ll save her from a group of bandits with a single shotgun), he admits to a priest that he hates that Rosette acts “just like a boy” while he wastes away with his illness, and his vague memory of his promise to himself to protect Rosette drives him to become as strong as he can. In fact when he and Rosette are finally reunited, he rejects her when she tells him to give up the horns, saying his sister was “nice” and she’d never ask him to give up what makes him strong and become confined to a bed. He does eventually realize that he’s using the horns as a crutch, and he can’t truly be considered mature until he lets them go and rely on his own strength, but it’s a struggle for Rosette to help him reach that conclusion. Even after he gets rid of the horns, there’s still hints that he remains attached to his childhood heroes-he comments on his dream of being an explorer to Rosette, he’s fascinated by how powerful another Apostle, Azmaria, is and also admires how well she uses her powers, and the epilogue shows photos that imply that he did, in fact, explore the world with his sister.
In general, Joshua is a very emotional person, although it might not be readily apparent. In comparison to his hot-blooded older sister, he seems a bit more thoughtful and calm (if a bit snarky), but that’s mostly because…well, Rosette’s REALLY over-the-top with how much her emotions get the best of her. When he’s shown separate from her, it’s pretty clear that both of the Christophers are ruled by their hearts instead of their heads. As a kid, this showed itself by how quickly he’d get into an argument with Rosette, as well as occasionally committing cruel pranks--when Rosette throws a bucket full of water and ruins his book, he quickly decides to get back at her by sprawling on the ground with the bucket on his head, intentionally making her believe that she knocked him out cold and knowing full well that she’d feel guilty about this because of how ill he is. His impulsiveness is the reason why he gets the horns in the first place. He’d already agreed to go to the Magdalene Order to learn how to control his powers, but he’d been told that becoming strong “would take time and a lot of work”. Aion’s offer of instant power was what drove him to take the horns and slap them on his head.
With the horns, his impulsive, emotional nature magnified to uncontrollable levels. Among other powers, the horns gave him the ability to overhear other’s thoughts, but he had no idea how to control what he did and didn’t hear. This seems to be a large contributing factor to how the horns literally drive him insane. My personal theory is that because of the telepathic “noise” he gets from the people around him, at times he was actually unable to hear his own thoughts, causing him to heavily rely simply on emotion and impulse. This means that with the horns he often acts like an immature brat without a care in the world, and also gives us some insight into what Joshua is like when he isn’t thinking through his actions and worried about social graces. With the horns, Joshua is flippant, quick to anger and often uncaring about other people’s lives. He uses the power of the horns to freeze the kids in the orphanage in stone to make their noise “stop”, and when meeting Chrono causes his horns to “scream” in pain when they recognize their true owner, he shoots Chrono and nearly kills him to end the pain. While without his horns he has a great deal more self-control, this violent temper still sometimes rears its head, particularly in times of extreme stress-when Rosette collapses at his feet and Chrono admits to him that Rosette made a contract with him to fuel his powers with her life energy, Joshua snaps and starts to beat the already badly wounded Chrono until his knuckles are bloody, screaming curses and calling him a “monster.” In general, Joshua rarely cries or even verbally processes his emotions, and violence seems to be one of the ways his emotions can burst out of him.
This isn’t to say that Joshua doesn’t care about others-in fact, he cares quite a bit for them, and that’s part of the reason why he became so sick as a child in the first place. As much as he resented other people for being healthy, we’re never given any indication that he ever turned anyone down when they asked him to heal them with his powers. He immediately heals a cut on Rosette’s knee with very little resistance, and one of the other orphans notes that Joshua once healed his broken leg. After he gets rid of the horns, he brushes away the wounds the horns caused in his head by saying “I’ve hurt a lot of people much more than this. I can handle a little pain.” This idea seems to rule his motivations later in his life-in the epilogue set when he’s in his twenties, we find out that Joshua eventually joined the Order and devotes his time to charity work and helping to rebuild New York City (which his actions inadvertently destroyed). Azmaria guesses that this decision was driven in part by a desire to make up for his bad choices, and we’re given nothing to disprove this idea. While this altruism he shows as an adult is probably driven at least by his regret, it still seems to be part of his nature-after all, one of the last things we see Joshua do in the main timeline of the manga is going to Azmaria’s side to try to comfort her after the events of the end battle have shaken her.
Even though he’s a far more selfish person when he has the horns, Joshua still shows a strong amount of devotion and care to the people he considers important to him. There is no one that this focuses on more than Rosette. As a kid, even though they bicker like the siblings they are, it’s clear that Joshua really cares for Rosette. For example, he felt a lot of guilt over Rosette deciding that she should become a doctor to help find a cure for him, even though she herself admitted that she was “probably too stupid” to actually accomplish this dream. (This is yet another reason that he decided to take the horns.) After he takes on the horns, his insanity and degrading memories cause him to fabricate a false view of Rosette as perfect and he becomes obsessed with her to an incredibly unhealthy degree. A large amount of his time is spent thinking about his sister, mourning their separation, wondering where she is…at some points he even chants the word “Sis” over and over. When they are finally reunited, he’s overjoyed to see her again, taking her into his arms and asking her if she’ll stay by his side “even when the world is torn apart and put back together”, then declares that he won’t let anyone separate them again, even if it means he has to kill the people that want to tear them apart. While this is definitely influenced in part by the horns and his desperate attempts to try to piece together his fragmented memories, his devotion for her is strong even without them. As I mentioned above, he does not take the initial news about his sister’s contract well at all, and when he realizes that the reason she took the contract was to try to save him, he’s obviously grief stricken. His devotion to Rosette causes him to be at times aggressive toward Chrono (who he seems to realize is in love with her), but when Rosette makes a decision to go into on one last dangerous mission with Chrono to try to stop a catastrophic weapon, he decides to trust him-albeit with obvious reluctance and with a brotherly warning to take care of her. In the epilogue, Joshua’s job seems to keep him apart from Rosette for long periods of time, but as soon as there’s news that she’s become ill, he rushes to her side. The epilogue implies that Joshua’s still a doting brother into his adulthood, spending quite a bit of time talking to her and enjoying the last moments they have together before her all-too-soon death.
While Rosette is first and foremost in Joshua’s heart, she’s not the only person he shows a strong attachment to. Joshua also has strong ties to his maid, a fellow Sinner named Fiore. Although at first blush their relationship seems very much a twisted version of the stereotypical master and servant, there’s quite a bit more on the surface. Fiore has also lost a sibling due to being with the Sinners, and as Viede notes, they’re both drawn to each other because they’re “missing something.” At times this manifests itself as something of a sibling-esque relationship, but there’s several hints that Joshua has more romantic feelings for her. The first time he’s shown with his horns, he asks Fiore if she was “worried” about him during a battle, then offers up his hand for her to lick at a cut on it. Her very presence was a comfort to him when the affects of the horns on him were unbearable, and he relies heavily on her for guidance and advice. In the end, it’s Fiore that convinces him to speak to Rosette and figure out if she’s really his older sister. Joshua is so attached to her that he’s even able to sense her emotions, which she often denies she even has. When she goes against Aion’s orders to kill him if the horns overwhelm him and decides to protect him instead, Joshua is able to call her out on this. Although he doesn’t argue with her that she’s “a doll with a heart of stone”, he points out her expression makes her decision clear and holds her tight. Although he does eventually let her go, years later in the epilogue it’s still shown he heavily cares for her, saying that it’s hard for him to wait for her to return because he misses her and wants to thank her for everything she did for him.
In the end, Joshua’s selfishness and stubborn attempts to become powerful at any cost are intertwined with his loving, devoted side as much as it’s opposed by it. His desire to protect Rosette is part of what drove him to make a dangerous deal with a devil to become strong, but remembering his promise to grow up with her is what gives him the strength to let go of the horns and try to protect her with his own strength. His self-centered choices lead to both people close to him and total strangers being hurt or even killed, but his regret over his actions fuels his later desire to care for others and help them. He’s drawn to the Sinners because of their power and their rebellion against the norm, and believes whole-heartedly in Aion’s vision of a world without the “system” that keeps others from accomplishing their dreams, yet as an adult he joins a religious organization, one of the very “systems” Aion was rallying against. At the point I’m taking him from, the end of the main timeline of the story, Joshua is right in the middle of the tug between these two sides: he’s just left the Sinners, and in the final battle thrown himself on the side of Rosette, Chrono, and the Order. However, in the final battle he tries to reason with Aion, and seems to show concern for him in the aftermath of the battle as soon as he’s determined that his sister is okay. While in the epilogue he seems happy and on the path to making up for his past sins, that’s about 7 years in the future for where he’s being taken from. For now, he’s right in the middle of processing what he’s done and searching for a way to become strong and “grown up” without relying on deals with a devil.
» Appearance: Joshua has blond messy hair and bright blue eyes that hold a spark of imagination in his eyes without Chrono’s horns and are filled with utter insanity with the horns. He’s tall for his age and has matured fairly quickly (or, rather, the mangaka admits that Joshua “looks too old” when he’s 15), and has a lanky, thin build. In fact, he’s thin enough that he’s probably on the edge of being underweight (one of Rosette’s first reactions when she sees him again is to ask “Have you lost weight? Are you eating okay?”), partially because of being sickly as a child and partially because of the strain Chrono’s horns had on his body. His style seems a bit formal to someone from our modern day, typically seen in a suit with a long coat and a tie, but it’s fairly messy-he keeps his shirt untucked and his tie hanging loosely from his neck. He’s got a bit of a “bad boy” sense of style, and perhaps a love of the dramatic-in a promotional art piece that shows characters in modern-day clothing, he’s depicted as wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and a leather jacket with flames on it. That was probably meant to be for when he was on Aion’s side, but there’s still a sense of “cool” to the outfit that’d appeal to him. At Atia he’d probably mix a 1920’s aesthetic with a stylish-but-casual modern look for his clothing.
Since he’s being aged up to 18, he’ll probably be somewhere in-between how he looked as a 15-year-old and how he looks in the epilogue (when he’s around 22ish). Still a bit scrawny looking and thin, but his proportions evened out a bit more, his face a bit more angular, taller, broader shoulders. His hair’ll still be in his messy blond cut instead of the closer-cropped style he has in the epilogue. Since he looks fairly mature at his regular age I’ll mostly use icons from that time period, but I’ll probably use a few from the epilogue as well (both so I’ll have more ‘sane’ expressions to choose from and to make it clear that he’s a little older looking than how he is in the main bit of the manga).
» Suitability: Although Joshua can be immature at times, most of what we see of him after he has the horns removed is in line with his true age or even a little older. He accepts responsibility for what happened when he had the horns almost immediately after he loses them, and the epilogue tells us that he worked towards making amends for it (since he joined the Order, possibly to “atone” for what he did, as Azmaria guesses). This shows that he’s aware of how his actions affect others, and should mean he'll be able to handle all the baggage and consequences that can come with sex.
Also, it’s mentioned in a flashback that Joshua was expected to move out of the orphanage when he was fifteen, hinting that at the time period he’s from, he’s expected to already be self-sufficient at his age. While he undoubtedly has some issues to work through due to his horns, he was already showing signs of independence with Aion (being one of the key players in Aion’s plans), so having to live and work on his own is, while not something he’s probably choose for himself, something he’s capable of.
He’s also probably not at all clueless about sex, even though it doesn’t really come up much when we see him in canon-he’d be awkward about it, sure, particularly since at the point I’m taking him from he’s probably been taken in by the Catholic-lite Magdalene Order, but I doubt that being with the Sinners was a very sheltered environment, and he had horns that led him to involuntarily read the minds of people around him. He probably got plenty of sex ed just based on that alone. (Plus, since he has his memories from when he was in Atia before…yeah, he has a pretty good idea of what he needs to do, plus an idea for the entanglements sexual relationships may cause.)
SAMPLES
» "amatomnes" Entry:
[video]
[Joshua stares at the camera, his shirt buttoned crooked and his face bright red. He’s clearly been thrown off balance and he looks rather unhappy, although determined.]
Before anyone says anything, I don’t need a guide and I know where I am. I’ve been here before and I’ve seen the damn bunnies. Okay?
[He takes a deep breath, forcing himself to calm down.] I…I need to know if there’s anyone from my world that’s still here. Fiore, or…Miss Satella, or…or…Aion….anyone. I’d just like to know. And is the Seventh Heaven café still here? If I’m back then I guess I’ll need to get a job.
And those I met here, I’m sorry. I-I didn’t choose to-I wanted to leave, but not like that. Not leaving so many things unfinished. I thought…back home I thought it was a twisted, dirty dream. I didn’t know…
[Obviously distraught, he lowers his head and grimaces.] I didn’t know I left so much behind.
» "amatomneslogs" Entry:
It wasn’t that Joshua was a stranger to wet dreams. He’d had them before, including a particularly strange one where he’d been forced to sleep with several people by a bizarre kidnapper. In fact, the girl in this new dream was one of the ones he remembered from the old dream, someone he never met before but that he seemed to conjure up in his mind every time he had one of these dreams, ever since the first one.
The strange thing was that this time, the dream was so vivid, as if he was actually experiencing it. He was able to study all of her features closely, from her long blond hair and curvy figure to the cute, shy smile decorating her face. She was gorgeous, someone that certainly wouldn’t sleep with him outside of a dream. He could feel his heart beat faster as she laid back and pulled him to her. She pulled him into a kiss, and he reveled in the feeling of her lips on his, her smooth skin against his finger tips as he ran his hand along her waist. He’d have to confess this to Father Remington in the morning…enjoying something like this would probably be considered a sin, but…for the moment, all he could think about was his desire.
Waking up from the dream was jarring. The cool sea breeze coming from the window made him shiver and huddle into his blankets closer. It wasn’t that cold, really, but cold enough, particularly since he’d chosen to go to bed naked.
Joshua frowned. When in the world did he ever go to bed without clothes on? He quickly sat up in his bed and looked around the room. A large, expensive looking bed with curtains hanging from it and blowing gently in the sea breeze. His clothing folded up neatly at the foot of his bed. A room that looked like it was part of a palace…
The memories came rushing back. That strange dream he’d thought he had wasn’t a dream at all, just vague and fragmented memories of this place. He really had done all of those things! His mind felt overloaded with the sudden rush of information he was remembering, almost like that noise the horns had brought into his head when he had them. Sleeping with Ada not out of need, but lust…allowing Aion to seduce him when he’d been turned into a girl and ENJOYING the feel of the Sinner’s touch…touching his own sister until her collar loosened…
The anger over being forced to sleep with someone to save his life and protect his memories, mixed with the guilt that the memory of his past actions brought, of the knowledge that some part of him always enjoyed it-it was enough to make him feel sick. He laid back down on the bed, digging his hands into his hair and forcing himself to breathe slowly and stay calm. He couldn’t panic. If he did, he wouldn’t be able to think. When he panicked, he made bad decisions. He had to stay calm.
He reached up to his neck and tugged on the braided leather collar around it in futile hope that this time, he might be able to remove it. Of course that didn’t work, it was fastened around his neck just as securely as it had been before. At least it was still loose. How long did he have? Two weeks or so? Less?
Okay. That’d be plenty of time to get settled, depending on who and what was still here. He thought back on who from his world still remained. He knew there were quite a few people coming and going in the last months he was here. Rosette and Chrono he remembered, but he was pretty sure they’d left before he did. He hoped so, anyway…facing Rosette here was always mortifying. He felt even more guilt thinking that, but as much as he wanted to spend time with her, having her here was…horrible, for both of them. He wanted her safe, and home.
Aion was still here when he left, he remembered that. He grimaced, recalling the fight that Aion had started when he regained his powers. Bastard. He couldn’t rely on Aion this time, he was just too set in his ways.
But Fiore…he remembered Fiore being here, too. That just made him feel worse. After everything she’d done for him, all the support she’d always shown for him..he’d just up and left her without a word. She was “just a doll”, maybe it wouldn’t matter to her, but it still made him feel like a jerk.
Okay, so, first things first, figure out who was still here. Maybe talk to Fiore if he had the chance. Then he needed to…see if his old job was still available…and if he wasn’t going to stay with Aion, he needed to find a place to stay. With a deep breath, he got out of the bed and marched over to his clothing, quickly pulling them on (and in his haste, sloppily buttoning up his shirt). He grabbed the device he knew would be there and flipped it open. Luckily he still remembered how to use these pretty well.
Doing his best to stay calm, he started up a video recording and began to speak.
» Name: Joshua Christopher
» Fandom: Chrono Crusade
» Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrono_Crusade -- Wiki page. Used to have a lot more information, but Wikipedia standards kinda…cut down on a lot of it.
You can also read the scanlations here: http://www.mangareader.net/297/chrno-crusade.html The different translations vary in quality, but it should give you at least a basic idea. Most manga readers online have the scanlations, that’s just one place out of many you can get them.
» Canon Point: A few months after the ending of the manga (but not the epilogue). Probably about a month after he returned to his world from Atia, as well. (He’ll have his memories.)
» Gender: Male/Male.
» Age: Physically, before coming to the island, he was fifteen-almost-sixteen. He’s about that mentally as well, although he can be a bit immature or surprisingly mature for his age depending on the moment you catch him.
» Orientation: Heterosexual. Joshua’s love life isn’t really the focus of his scenes too much (partially because most of the time we see him in canon he’s either an 11-year-old or mentally screwed up by the horns on his head), so his sexuality is pretty vague, but there’s a few scenes in the manga that hint at him being attracted to girls. The most obvious of the girls he’s attracted to is Azmaria-it’s shown that there’s a “connection” between them as early as the 2nd volume, when he manages to enter into a dream of Azmaria’s and speak to her. Although this isn’t exactly romantic, it does set the stage for their later relationship-they’re compared to Chrono and Mary Magdalene (an obviously romantic couple), Joshua blushes when he sees her dolled up in a pretty dress, and in the epilogue to the manga it’s heavily implied that Joshua ends up marrying her. (They’re shown holding hands at Rosette’s funeral and Azmaria has a ring on her left ring finger, and she’s later shown to have a grandchild who bears a striking resemblance to Joshua.)
There are also occasional hints that he might have romantic feelings towards his maid, Fiore. Although at times they’re shown as having a servant-and-master relationship, and at others a “like brother and sister” relationship, Joshua seems to cross both of these boundaries on a few occasions. Probably the most overt one is when he questions Fiore telling him her orders are to guard him-knowing that Aion’s orders were actually to kill him-and ends up hugging Fiore from behind in a way that is definitely not related to a master/servant relationship and seems a bit too intimate for a brother/sister relationship. (Fiore seems to think as well, as it gives her a pretty strong blush for a character who supposedly feels no emotion). Later, in the epilogue, when Rosette seems to be talking about her MIA love interest Chrono, Joshua responds by talking about Fiore, saying “I want her back. It’s so hard to wait for her…”
(It should be noted that the manga differs greatly from the anime in how their relationship is portrayed, in the anime Joshua seems certain Fiore is his ACTUAL sister, but in the manga there’s only two parts he refers to her as “sister”-when they first meet and he’s confused, and their last conversation, in which Fiore asks him to call her it once more. It’s clear in the manga that while he can’t remember if Rosette’s his sister or not, he KNOWS that Fiore isn’t her.)
I can’t get much more solid than that because the mangaka of Chrono Crusade seems to be pretty fond of ship teasing, but what little there is for Joshua romantically in the manga seems almost entirely focused on the girls in his life.
» Personality: Joshua is a boy of contradictions. On one hand, he’s been through many hardships from a young age, which has forced him to look at life from a grown-up perspective. On the other hand, Joshua is often nothing more than a whiny child trying to get his way. At times he can be selfless, willing to endure hardship for others and in particular his sister, but often he selfishly decides what’s best without asking others how they feel. He was at one time an “Apostle”, or a holy chosen messenger, and later in his life he even joins a religious order, but he also joined a group of demons known as “Sinners” and-while manipulated by them at a young age-seems to have genuinely agreed with their beliefs. However, there are some things that are consistent-Joshua is a bright, imaginative boy with a need to protect others and a desire to do the right thing and find his place in the world, even if he’s unsure of what that really is.
To understand Joshua, it’s best to start with his backstory. When Joshua was very young (about five or so), his parents drowned in a shipwreck. In front of his father’s empty grave, Joshua promised his older sister, Rosette, that they would become adults together-while inwardly promising to himself that he would become strong so he could protect her. Although that memory faded to his subconscious, he never truly forgot it, and it ruled the large majority of his actions even into his teens.
Joshua seems to have always been devoted to Rosette, and being orphaned only increased that. After they were sent to an orphanage, Joshua was practically attached to Rosette at the hip. When Joshua felt well enough, the pair enjoyed hiking out to a nearby forest and exploring.
I say “when Joshua felt well enough” because Joshua was often sick as a child with seizures and cough-like symptoms. This illness arrived at the same time that Joshua was granted the powers of an Apostle-the ability to manifest angelic wings and to heal others (but not himself). Unknown to Joshua, every Apostle seems to have to suffer through some sort of payment or ‘curse’ for their powers. For Joshua, his powers used his own body’s energy to heal others, which meant that the more he used his powers, the weaker his body became. Joshua had no idea that his powers were the cause of his illness, and both his own kindness and his sister’s encouragement to use his powers caused him to become sicker and sicker, rendering him too weak to stick to keep his promise. His frustration over being taken care of and too weak to protect his sister made him an easy target for Aion, a demon and a leader of a group known as “Sinners”. Aion gave him a pair of demon horns and promised Joshua that if he put them on his head, he’d be strong enough to overcome his illness. This was absolutely true, but since Joshua was human and his body wasn’t built to handle the overwhelming power the horns gave him, the horns quickly drove him insane and also degraded his memories so badly that after years of staying with Aion under the influence of the horns, he didn’t even remember his sister’s face.
In order to save Joshua, Rosette formed a contract with another demon, Chrono (the original owner of Joshua’s horns). By allowing him to drain the energy from her body and shortening her lifespan, Chrono was able to use his powers without his horns. Together they eventually were able to track down Aion, rescue Joshua from the horns, and stop Aion’s plans to destroy and recreate the world. Joshua is arriving to Atia after this rescue.
The reason why I decided to go into Joshua’s backstory with that amount of depth is that we don’t see much of him after he’s had the horns removed, so discerning Joshua’s personality as a sane teenager requires quite a bit of examining his traits as a child and with the horns as well as after his rescue, and examining how he changed throughout the story.
From the beginning, Joshua is an imaginative bookworm and the Roaring Twenties equivalent of a major geek. He consumes a large amount of dime novels-cheap genre fiction that were sort of the precursors of comics-and when he’s not reading his books, he’s daydreaming about his own adventures, or even making plans to become an explorer with his sister. He’s fascinated by adventure stories, sci-fi, and the occult, and he’s constantly bringing up the stories he loves in conversation. This is heavily implied to be because of his illness keeping him confined to his bed. He admits in an inner monologue that he often kept his eyes pointed to the sky, because there was “too much light” present in the games his sister and the other orphans played below his window. He envied the other children for being healthy, and he desperately wanted to become strong-so as an escape, he threw himself into heroic fantasies of cowboys, witches, aliens and faeries. He hero worships the protagonists of his favorite stories, and it’s highly likely that this is part of what draws him to Aion, who is a very powerful and intelligent demon.
This extends into his teen years, both with and without his horns. He is drawn to powerful people, and often gets excited to see them fight so he can discover which one is the strongest. He also revels in the power that Chrono’s horns grant him, constantly testing his limits even though he’s well aware that the horns are causing him harm. In a way, he seems obsessed with a heroic ideal of masculinity-he loves guns (at one point even half-jokingly saying to Rosette that someday he’ll save her from a group of bandits with a single shotgun), he admits to a priest that he hates that Rosette acts “just like a boy” while he wastes away with his illness, and his vague memory of his promise to himself to protect Rosette drives him to become as strong as he can. In fact when he and Rosette are finally reunited, he rejects her when she tells him to give up the horns, saying his sister was “nice” and she’d never ask him to give up what makes him strong and become confined to a bed. He does eventually realize that he’s using the horns as a crutch, and he can’t truly be considered mature until he lets them go and rely on his own strength, but it’s a struggle for Rosette to help him reach that conclusion. Even after he gets rid of the horns, there’s still hints that he remains attached to his childhood heroes-he comments on his dream of being an explorer to Rosette, he’s fascinated by how powerful another Apostle, Azmaria, is and also admires how well she uses her powers, and the epilogue shows photos that imply that he did, in fact, explore the world with his sister.
In general, Joshua is a very emotional person, although it might not be readily apparent. In comparison to his hot-blooded older sister, he seems a bit more thoughtful and calm (if a bit snarky), but that’s mostly because…well, Rosette’s REALLY over-the-top with how much her emotions get the best of her. When he’s shown separate from her, it’s pretty clear that both of the Christophers are ruled by their hearts instead of their heads. As a kid, this showed itself by how quickly he’d get into an argument with Rosette, as well as occasionally committing cruel pranks--when Rosette throws a bucket full of water and ruins his book, he quickly decides to get back at her by sprawling on the ground with the bucket on his head, intentionally making her believe that she knocked him out cold and knowing full well that she’d feel guilty about this because of how ill he is. His impulsiveness is the reason why he gets the horns in the first place. He’d already agreed to go to the Magdalene Order to learn how to control his powers, but he’d been told that becoming strong “would take time and a lot of work”. Aion’s offer of instant power was what drove him to take the horns and slap them on his head.
With the horns, his impulsive, emotional nature magnified to uncontrollable levels. Among other powers, the horns gave him the ability to overhear other’s thoughts, but he had no idea how to control what he did and didn’t hear. This seems to be a large contributing factor to how the horns literally drive him insane. My personal theory is that because of the telepathic “noise” he gets from the people around him, at times he was actually unable to hear his own thoughts, causing him to heavily rely simply on emotion and impulse. This means that with the horns he often acts like an immature brat without a care in the world, and also gives us some insight into what Joshua is like when he isn’t thinking through his actions and worried about social graces. With the horns, Joshua is flippant, quick to anger and often uncaring about other people’s lives. He uses the power of the horns to freeze the kids in the orphanage in stone to make their noise “stop”, and when meeting Chrono causes his horns to “scream” in pain when they recognize their true owner, he shoots Chrono and nearly kills him to end the pain. While without his horns he has a great deal more self-control, this violent temper still sometimes rears its head, particularly in times of extreme stress-when Rosette collapses at his feet and Chrono admits to him that Rosette made a contract with him to fuel his powers with her life energy, Joshua snaps and starts to beat the already badly wounded Chrono until his knuckles are bloody, screaming curses and calling him a “monster.” In general, Joshua rarely cries or even verbally processes his emotions, and violence seems to be one of the ways his emotions can burst out of him.
This isn’t to say that Joshua doesn’t care about others-in fact, he cares quite a bit for them, and that’s part of the reason why he became so sick as a child in the first place. As much as he resented other people for being healthy, we’re never given any indication that he ever turned anyone down when they asked him to heal them with his powers. He immediately heals a cut on Rosette’s knee with very little resistance, and one of the other orphans notes that Joshua once healed his broken leg. After he gets rid of the horns, he brushes away the wounds the horns caused in his head by saying “I’ve hurt a lot of people much more than this. I can handle a little pain.” This idea seems to rule his motivations later in his life-in the epilogue set when he’s in his twenties, we find out that Joshua eventually joined the Order and devotes his time to charity work and helping to rebuild New York City (which his actions inadvertently destroyed). Azmaria guesses that this decision was driven in part by a desire to make up for his bad choices, and we’re given nothing to disprove this idea. While this altruism he shows as an adult is probably driven at least by his regret, it still seems to be part of his nature-after all, one of the last things we see Joshua do in the main timeline of the manga is going to Azmaria’s side to try to comfort her after the events of the end battle have shaken her.
Even though he’s a far more selfish person when he has the horns, Joshua still shows a strong amount of devotion and care to the people he considers important to him. There is no one that this focuses on more than Rosette. As a kid, even though they bicker like the siblings they are, it’s clear that Joshua really cares for Rosette. For example, he felt a lot of guilt over Rosette deciding that she should become a doctor to help find a cure for him, even though she herself admitted that she was “probably too stupid” to actually accomplish this dream. (This is yet another reason that he decided to take the horns.) After he takes on the horns, his insanity and degrading memories cause him to fabricate a false view of Rosette as perfect and he becomes obsessed with her to an incredibly unhealthy degree. A large amount of his time is spent thinking about his sister, mourning their separation, wondering where she is…at some points he even chants the word “Sis” over and over. When they are finally reunited, he’s overjoyed to see her again, taking her into his arms and asking her if she’ll stay by his side “even when the world is torn apart and put back together”, then declares that he won’t let anyone separate them again, even if it means he has to kill the people that want to tear them apart. While this is definitely influenced in part by the horns and his desperate attempts to try to piece together his fragmented memories, his devotion for her is strong even without them. As I mentioned above, he does not take the initial news about his sister’s contract well at all, and when he realizes that the reason she took the contract was to try to save him, he’s obviously grief stricken. His devotion to Rosette causes him to be at times aggressive toward Chrono (who he seems to realize is in love with her), but when Rosette makes a decision to go into on one last dangerous mission with Chrono to try to stop a catastrophic weapon, he decides to trust him-albeit with obvious reluctance and with a brotherly warning to take care of her. In the epilogue, Joshua’s job seems to keep him apart from Rosette for long periods of time, but as soon as there’s news that she’s become ill, he rushes to her side. The epilogue implies that Joshua’s still a doting brother into his adulthood, spending quite a bit of time talking to her and enjoying the last moments they have together before her all-too-soon death.
While Rosette is first and foremost in Joshua’s heart, she’s not the only person he shows a strong attachment to. Joshua also has strong ties to his maid, a fellow Sinner named Fiore. Although at first blush their relationship seems very much a twisted version of the stereotypical master and servant, there’s quite a bit more on the surface. Fiore has also lost a sibling due to being with the Sinners, and as Viede notes, they’re both drawn to each other because they’re “missing something.” At times this manifests itself as something of a sibling-esque relationship, but there’s several hints that Joshua has more romantic feelings for her. The first time he’s shown with his horns, he asks Fiore if she was “worried” about him during a battle, then offers up his hand for her to lick at a cut on it. Her very presence was a comfort to him when the affects of the horns on him were unbearable, and he relies heavily on her for guidance and advice. In the end, it’s Fiore that convinces him to speak to Rosette and figure out if she’s really his older sister. Joshua is so attached to her that he’s even able to sense her emotions, which she often denies she even has. When she goes against Aion’s orders to kill him if the horns overwhelm him and decides to protect him instead, Joshua is able to call her out on this. Although he doesn’t argue with her that she’s “a doll with a heart of stone”, he points out her expression makes her decision clear and holds her tight. Although he does eventually let her go, years later in the epilogue it’s still shown he heavily cares for her, saying that it’s hard for him to wait for her to return because he misses her and wants to thank her for everything she did for him.
In the end, Joshua’s selfishness and stubborn attempts to become powerful at any cost are intertwined with his loving, devoted side as much as it’s opposed by it. His desire to protect Rosette is part of what drove him to make a dangerous deal with a devil to become strong, but remembering his promise to grow up with her is what gives him the strength to let go of the horns and try to protect her with his own strength. His self-centered choices lead to both people close to him and total strangers being hurt or even killed, but his regret over his actions fuels his later desire to care for others and help them. He’s drawn to the Sinners because of their power and their rebellion against the norm, and believes whole-heartedly in Aion’s vision of a world without the “system” that keeps others from accomplishing their dreams, yet as an adult he joins a religious organization, one of the very “systems” Aion was rallying against. At the point I’m taking him from, the end of the main timeline of the story, Joshua is right in the middle of the tug between these two sides: he’s just left the Sinners, and in the final battle thrown himself on the side of Rosette, Chrono, and the Order. However, in the final battle he tries to reason with Aion, and seems to show concern for him in the aftermath of the battle as soon as he’s determined that his sister is okay. While in the epilogue he seems happy and on the path to making up for his past sins, that’s about 7 years in the future for where he’s being taken from. For now, he’s right in the middle of processing what he’s done and searching for a way to become strong and “grown up” without relying on deals with a devil.
» Appearance: Joshua has blond messy hair and bright blue eyes that hold a spark of imagination in his eyes without Chrono’s horns and are filled with utter insanity with the horns. He’s tall for his age and has matured fairly quickly (or, rather, the mangaka admits that Joshua “looks too old” when he’s 15), and has a lanky, thin build. In fact, he’s thin enough that he’s probably on the edge of being underweight (one of Rosette’s first reactions when she sees him again is to ask “Have you lost weight? Are you eating okay?”), partially because of being sickly as a child and partially because of the strain Chrono’s horns had on his body. His style seems a bit formal to someone from our modern day, typically seen in a suit with a long coat and a tie, but it’s fairly messy-he keeps his shirt untucked and his tie hanging loosely from his neck. He’s got a bit of a “bad boy” sense of style, and perhaps a love of the dramatic-in a promotional art piece that shows characters in modern-day clothing, he’s depicted as wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and a leather jacket with flames on it. That was probably meant to be for when he was on Aion’s side, but there’s still a sense of “cool” to the outfit that’d appeal to him. At Atia he’d probably mix a 1920’s aesthetic with a stylish-but-casual modern look for his clothing.
Since he’s being aged up to 18, he’ll probably be somewhere in-between how he looked as a 15-year-old and how he looks in the epilogue (when he’s around 22ish). Still a bit scrawny looking and thin, but his proportions evened out a bit more, his face a bit more angular, taller, broader shoulders. His hair’ll still be in his messy blond cut instead of the closer-cropped style he has in the epilogue. Since he looks fairly mature at his regular age I’ll mostly use icons from that time period, but I’ll probably use a few from the epilogue as well (both so I’ll have more ‘sane’ expressions to choose from and to make it clear that he’s a little older looking than how he is in the main bit of the manga).
» Suitability: Although Joshua can be immature at times, most of what we see of him after he has the horns removed is in line with his true age or even a little older. He accepts responsibility for what happened when he had the horns almost immediately after he loses them, and the epilogue tells us that he worked towards making amends for it (since he joined the Order, possibly to “atone” for what he did, as Azmaria guesses). This shows that he’s aware of how his actions affect others, and should mean he'll be able to handle all the baggage and consequences that can come with sex.
Also, it’s mentioned in a flashback that Joshua was expected to move out of the orphanage when he was fifteen, hinting that at the time period he’s from, he’s expected to already be self-sufficient at his age. While he undoubtedly has some issues to work through due to his horns, he was already showing signs of independence with Aion (being one of the key players in Aion’s plans), so having to live and work on his own is, while not something he’s probably choose for himself, something he’s capable of.
He’s also probably not at all clueless about sex, even though it doesn’t really come up much when we see him in canon-he’d be awkward about it, sure, particularly since at the point I’m taking him from he’s probably been taken in by the Catholic-lite Magdalene Order, but I doubt that being with the Sinners was a very sheltered environment, and he had horns that led him to involuntarily read the minds of people around him. He probably got plenty of sex ed just based on that alone. (Plus, since he has his memories from when he was in Atia before…yeah, he has a pretty good idea of what he needs to do, plus an idea for the entanglements sexual relationships may cause.)
SAMPLES
» "amatomnes" Entry:
[video]
[Joshua stares at the camera, his shirt buttoned crooked and his face bright red. He’s clearly been thrown off balance and he looks rather unhappy, although determined.]
Before anyone says anything, I don’t need a guide and I know where I am. I’ve been here before and I’ve seen the damn bunnies. Okay?
[He takes a deep breath, forcing himself to calm down.] I…I need to know if there’s anyone from my world that’s still here. Fiore, or…Miss Satella, or…or…Aion….anyone. I’d just like to know. And is the Seventh Heaven café still here? If I’m back then I guess I’ll need to get a job.
And those I met here, I’m sorry. I-I didn’t choose to-I wanted to leave, but not like that. Not leaving so many things unfinished. I thought…back home I thought it was a twisted, dirty dream. I didn’t know…
[Obviously distraught, he lowers his head and grimaces.] I didn’t know I left so much behind.
» "amatomneslogs" Entry:
It wasn’t that Joshua was a stranger to wet dreams. He’d had them before, including a particularly strange one where he’d been forced to sleep with several people by a bizarre kidnapper. In fact, the girl in this new dream was one of the ones he remembered from the old dream, someone he never met before but that he seemed to conjure up in his mind every time he had one of these dreams, ever since the first one.
The strange thing was that this time, the dream was so vivid, as if he was actually experiencing it. He was able to study all of her features closely, from her long blond hair and curvy figure to the cute, shy smile decorating her face. She was gorgeous, someone that certainly wouldn’t sleep with him outside of a dream. He could feel his heart beat faster as she laid back and pulled him to her. She pulled him into a kiss, and he reveled in the feeling of her lips on his, her smooth skin against his finger tips as he ran his hand along her waist. He’d have to confess this to Father Remington in the morning…enjoying something like this would probably be considered a sin, but…for the moment, all he could think about was his desire.
Waking up from the dream was jarring. The cool sea breeze coming from the window made him shiver and huddle into his blankets closer. It wasn’t that cold, really, but cold enough, particularly since he’d chosen to go to bed naked.
Joshua frowned. When in the world did he ever go to bed without clothes on? He quickly sat up in his bed and looked around the room. A large, expensive looking bed with curtains hanging from it and blowing gently in the sea breeze. His clothing folded up neatly at the foot of his bed. A room that looked like it was part of a palace…
The memories came rushing back. That strange dream he’d thought he had wasn’t a dream at all, just vague and fragmented memories of this place. He really had done all of those things! His mind felt overloaded with the sudden rush of information he was remembering, almost like that noise the horns had brought into his head when he had them. Sleeping with Ada not out of need, but lust…allowing Aion to seduce him when he’d been turned into a girl and ENJOYING the feel of the Sinner’s touch…touching his own sister until her collar loosened…
The anger over being forced to sleep with someone to save his life and protect his memories, mixed with the guilt that the memory of his past actions brought, of the knowledge that some part of him always enjoyed it-it was enough to make him feel sick. He laid back down on the bed, digging his hands into his hair and forcing himself to breathe slowly and stay calm. He couldn’t panic. If he did, he wouldn’t be able to think. When he panicked, he made bad decisions. He had to stay calm.
He reached up to his neck and tugged on the braided leather collar around it in futile hope that this time, he might be able to remove it. Of course that didn’t work, it was fastened around his neck just as securely as it had been before. At least it was still loose. How long did he have? Two weeks or so? Less?
Okay. That’d be plenty of time to get settled, depending on who and what was still here. He thought back on who from his world still remained. He knew there were quite a few people coming and going in the last months he was here. Rosette and Chrono he remembered, but he was pretty sure they’d left before he did. He hoped so, anyway…facing Rosette here was always mortifying. He felt even more guilt thinking that, but as much as he wanted to spend time with her, having her here was…horrible, for both of them. He wanted her safe, and home.
Aion was still here when he left, he remembered that. He grimaced, recalling the fight that Aion had started when he regained his powers. Bastard. He couldn’t rely on Aion this time, he was just too set in his ways.
But Fiore…he remembered Fiore being here, too. That just made him feel worse. After everything she’d done for him, all the support she’d always shown for him..he’d just up and left her without a word. She was “just a doll”, maybe it wouldn’t matter to her, but it still made him feel like a jerk.
Okay, so, first things first, figure out who was still here. Maybe talk to Fiore if he had the chance. Then he needed to…see if his old job was still available…and if he wasn’t going to stay with Aion, he needed to find a place to stay. With a deep breath, he got out of the bed and marched over to his clothing, quickly pulling them on (and in his haste, sloppily buttoning up his shirt). He grabbed the device he knew would be there and flipped it open. Luckily he still remembered how to use these pretty well.
Doing his best to stay calm, he started up a video recording and began to speak.