[[ttly original essay idea: family background and such]]
So I was looking at Tomo's journal the other day, and saw this awesome entry which I had totally missed when it was actually posted. XDD So I figured I'd take a shot at writing something similar, because I always did want to get some of this stuff down. Basically, it's an essay about why I play Chizuru the way she does, with a focus on her upbringing and home life.
Much as I wish Chizuru would get more screen time (if for no other reason than to give me more material to make icons with), I think she occupies a pretty nice place in the major character/minor character spectrum. She's a bit of a blank canvas in a some ways, but at the same time she's strongly-defined enough for me to not feel as though I'm just making her up out of whole cloth. XD But! While her behavior and personality are decently well laid out by her appearances, her background isn't gone into at all. We don't know anything about her family, her childhood, anything like that; the most information we get on her life outside of her main circle of school friends is that she's a member of the tennis club.
But as I played Chizuru more and she got to know people at camp, it quickly became clear to me that that kind of information would be necessary. Chizuru's a talkative sort, and sociable; she's never struck me as the kind of character who would try to brush away those kinds of questions. Soooo I decided to make a bunch of shit up. XD Not entirely out of nowhere, mind you! I attempted to look at the way Chizuru acted in canon and sort of reverse-engineer a fitting biography from there. Though yeah even with that, this stuff is still pure invention; it COULD theoretically be contradicted by canon some day. However, given Chizuru's significance (or, more accurately, her lack thereof) to the Bleach storyline--I really, really doubt it.
So anyway. We have this Honshou Chizuru. She's a high school student, she's gay out of her mind, she's perpetually horny and not shy about expressing it. She has little good to say about men, as well as girls who she sees as displaying masculine traits. Her touchy-feeliness and tendency to turn conversations towards sexual subjects can make her seem shallow and single-minded, but from what we see of her reactions to her friends being hurt or put in danger, she really genuinely cares about them--even if she fights with them constantly under normal circumstances. And she doesn't seem to care that much about what people think of her. She likes being liked, but she doesn't rein herself in just because the things she says or does make others uncomfortable. Overall, she's more than a little strange, especially as far as Japanese schoolgirls are concerned.
And I don't think her upbringing had TOO much to do with that--her behavior as it stands today is something of a byproduct, if you will. I see her upbringing as having been pretty normal--practically stereotypical. She doesn't come off to me as someone who was raised in an atmosphere of extreme privilege or one of poverty, either; I place her as pretty solidly middle-class--perhaps leaning towards the upper end of middle, but not TOO far. House-in-the-suburbs, Dad working in management, Mom a housewife, no brothers or sisters. (I've seen other Chizuru RPers give her siblings, but she seems like an only child to me.)
Hers was, I imagine, a decently normal and happy childhood. Not perfect--somewhat distant father figure, as is fairly common in Japanese households--but not really traumatic, or marked by neglect. I had also originally decided there were no...hints of what she was to become in her early years, but then she and Chisame had this conversation about harrassing babysitters which made me decide otherwise. XD SO YEAH occasionally she got a little touchy, and got scolded for it, but her parents chalked it up to childhood misbehavior and forgot. Chizuru herself didn't think much of it, other than being confused as to why it was such a bad thing. THEY JUST LOOKED LIKE THEY FELT NICE what's the big deal? :(
It wasn't until junior high and the oh-so-fun onset of hormones that Chizuru began to see her behavior in a different light. It wasn't exactly an immediate, "oh my God I'm gay" realization, though. For a while, she believed she was--or, at least, that she should be--like all the other girls in her class. She sort of ignored the "whoa nice rack" signals her brain was feeding her and tried to focus her attention on boys. It was a little tough for her, and not just because of her brain MIXING HER UP--she'd always felt more at home with girls (g-gee wonder why) and had never really had any close male friends, so she wasn't quite sure how to approach them.
Nonetheless, she managed. She made friends with a guy in her class, got close to him; eventually she decided she had a crush on him. And I use the word decision legitimately here, since this was not an idea that just came to her, but rather one she had actively convince herself of. XD She figured, hey, it wasn't like she'd ever had a crush BEFORE. So how was she supposed to know what it felt like? And this guy was a cool guy and everything, so why shouldn't she like him in that way? So, pushing her doubts and THROBBING BIOLOGICAL URGES to the back of her mind, she worked up the courage and did the whole confession thing, and the guy reciprocated.
Obviously, it didn't really work out. But it wasn't for a lack of trying--well, some trying. About two weeks into this brave trek into the wilds of A Relationship (or, well, An Ill-Advised Junior High Relationship), Chizuru started to realize some things. One, she wasn't having a great deal of fun. They were seeing each other after school and occasionally on weekends, meeting at cafes and other such relatively afforable hangouts, but she wasn't enjoying doing these things as much with him as she was when she went with other friends--female friends. Two, he was obviously way more interested in the physical aspect than she was. He'd made a couple of clumsy attempts to get some making out going, which Chizuru had rebuffed immediately. Three...his older sister was really really hot.
That last one was sort of the clincher, yeah. When it hit Chizuru that her boyfriend's sister had the power to make her forget that he even existed, she knew that there was something a little more important going on here--that confusion and inexperience were not sufficient to explain what she was feeling. This realization was pretty distressing to her at first. As I see it, Chizuru was always fairly extroverted, but at this point she wasn't quite as blissfully unconcerned with the opinions of others as she is today. At any rate, she was very unsure of what to do, who to tell--or if she should even tell anyone. She eventually decided that, at the very least, it wouldn't be fair of her to keep stringing The Boy along. She tried to break things off without going into the whys so much, but he pressed her on it, and she ended up blurting out that she was starting to think she was attracted to girls. He was taken aback, but didn't seem--as far as Chizuru could tell--to react particularly negatively. So when that awkward exchange finally came to an end, she felt marginally better. Maybe, at the very least, he would be a little supportive, right?
Weeeell not really. The next day, she came to class and got a lot of weird looks, and a lot of the girls started keeping their distance. And then at lunch the name-calling started, and it dawned on Chizuru that he had told people--and now her whole class knew. And over the next few days, a lot of the students in other classes knew. Naturally, this was the last thing Chizuru really needed; she was already having a hard time coming to terms with this, and suddenly being under the unforgiving collective eye of her schoolmates, being subjected to their abuse--well, it didn't really help!
It only took a couple of days for her to snap.
Not in any kind of...destructive, break-downy sort of way, though. Chizuru just came to the conclusion that she couldn't let things persist like this. Her feelings about girls were obviously not going to go away--in hindsight, they'd sort of been around for years, so this whole tangled mess obviously wasn't anything passing. And if it wasn't anything passing then something had to be done about the shit she was catching from her peers, because she knew that just trying to bear up under it wouldn't work--that she really would snap if she tried that. Trying to just disavow everything probably wouldn't work, she concluded, so she ended up going the opposite route. The next day, one of her female classmates came up to her between periods and launched into a fairly typical tirade--blah blah blah dyke blah blah blah pervert blah blah blah. Chizuru smiled, nodded, and grabbed the girl's chest. She got slapped for it, but the smile never left her face for a second.
And so the counterattack began. If this was to be her reputation, Chizuru decided, she was going to live up to it--and then some. Screw what anyone else thought. She couldn't just go through her life trying to change herself based on other peoples' ideas of the way she ought to be--it just didn't make sense to her, especially when it came to something like this, which she had come to realize was beyond her power to change anyway. It was at this point that the exuberant, shameless personality of present-day Chizuru began to take shape.
But Chizuru's newfound resolve, while helpful in avoiding having her spirit crushed, didn't exactly endear her to her peers--her junior high days were pretty lonely, with few friends, almost none of whom were too willing to be caught with her in public. Towards the end of her second year, though, she met a girl--a slightly older one, a first year high school student. The girl started flirting with her rather obviously, which took Chizuru by surprise at first. Having spent so much time working through her orientation issues on her own, it was sort of weird actually meeting someone ELSE who was like her. Not bad, though! Chizuru found the other girl's forwardness refreshing, appealing, and the two started going out.
Chizuru felt the difference almost immediately. Seeing this other girl felt a lot more comfortable, a lot more natural than her foray into dating dudes had been. The relationship helped square things away for her; she began to really accept that this was what she wanted. And so things moved along, and . . . she ended up losing her virginity to her girlfriend. That first time was pretty far from the miraculous orgasmic pop-culture image of the perfect first time. Sorta pokey and uncomfortable, in fact. But a little time and a few more tries later, Chizuru experienced one of the most profound epiphanies she's had to date:
SEX WITH GIRLS IS AWESOME
Chizuru still looks back upon that relationship in a mostly fond light. Its end was a bit abrupt and lacking in closure, though--her girlfriend broke it off near the beginning of Chizuru's third year in junior high; her father was moving because of his work, and her family was going with. It took Chizuru a while to get over the sudden disappearance of this girl from her life.
So where, you might ask, were Chizuru's parents during this whole journey of self-discovery? Well, it didn't take long for word of Chizuru's classroom antics to reach them. Chizuru's teachers quickly became concerned with her behavior and called home about it. Chizuru tried to explain it away as pranks and jokes getting out of hand--her parents were still suspicious, but didn't really believe it could be much MORE than that. The full revelation didn't come until after Chizuru had started seeing her girlfriend. One day, Chizuru's mother was straightening up in Chizuru's room a bit--though Chizuru was at an age where she did most of that herself, Chizuru's mom was something of a neat freak--and discovered various . . . magazines that Chizuru's girlfriend had lent her. There was an acrimonious confrontation when Chizuru got home, which only got louder and angrier when Chizuru's father arrived. Chizuru's parents were not exactly old-line conservatives, but they weren't riding the wave of social progressiveness either; they had fairly normal, traditional expectations for their daughter, and yeah dating girls was definitely not amongst them.
This led to a long and steady deterioration of Chizuru's relationship with her parents. Somewhere deep, deep inside, there's still some love there on her part--it's just really well-buried by layer upon layer of resentment formed by their inability to accept her and her perception that they in fact might not love her anymore. This is part of why she's so willing to go with Chisame and leave her own world behind. She knows she'll miss her friends, but she feels that family-wise she's got nothing much to go back to.
God that was long. I DIDN'T INTEND FOR THERE TO BE THIS MUCH REALLY.
Much as I wish Chizuru would get more screen time (if for no other reason than to give me more material to make icons with), I think she occupies a pretty nice place in the major character/minor character spectrum. She's a bit of a blank canvas in a some ways, but at the same time she's strongly-defined enough for me to not feel as though I'm just making her up out of whole cloth. XD But! While her behavior and personality are decently well laid out by her appearances, her background isn't gone into at all. We don't know anything about her family, her childhood, anything like that; the most information we get on her life outside of her main circle of school friends is that she's a member of the tennis club.
But as I played Chizuru more and she got to know people at camp, it quickly became clear to me that that kind of information would be necessary. Chizuru's a talkative sort, and sociable; she's never struck me as the kind of character who would try to brush away those kinds of questions. Soooo I decided to make a bunch of shit up. XD Not entirely out of nowhere, mind you! I attempted to look at the way Chizuru acted in canon and sort of reverse-engineer a fitting biography from there. Though yeah even with that, this stuff is still pure invention; it COULD theoretically be contradicted by canon some day. However, given Chizuru's significance (or, more accurately, her lack thereof) to the Bleach storyline--I really, really doubt it.
So anyway. We have this Honshou Chizuru. She's a high school student, she's gay out of her mind, she's perpetually horny and not shy about expressing it. She has little good to say about men, as well as girls who she sees as displaying masculine traits. Her touchy-feeliness and tendency to turn conversations towards sexual subjects can make her seem shallow and single-minded, but from what we see of her reactions to her friends being hurt or put in danger, she really genuinely cares about them--even if she fights with them constantly under normal circumstances. And she doesn't seem to care that much about what people think of her. She likes being liked, but she doesn't rein herself in just because the things she says or does make others uncomfortable. Overall, she's more than a little strange, especially as far as Japanese schoolgirls are concerned.
And I don't think her upbringing had TOO much to do with that--her behavior as it stands today is something of a byproduct, if you will. I see her upbringing as having been pretty normal--practically stereotypical. She doesn't come off to me as someone who was raised in an atmosphere of extreme privilege or one of poverty, either; I place her as pretty solidly middle-class--perhaps leaning towards the upper end of middle, but not TOO far. House-in-the-suburbs, Dad working in management, Mom a housewife, no brothers or sisters. (I've seen other Chizuru RPers give her siblings, but she seems like an only child to me.)
Hers was, I imagine, a decently normal and happy childhood. Not perfect--somewhat distant father figure, as is fairly common in Japanese households--but not really traumatic, or marked by neglect. I had also originally decided there were no...hints of what she was to become in her early years, but then she and Chisame had this conversation about harrassing babysitters which made me decide otherwise. XD SO YEAH occasionally she got a little touchy, and got scolded for it, but her parents chalked it up to childhood misbehavior and forgot. Chizuru herself didn't think much of it, other than being confused as to why it was such a bad thing. THEY JUST LOOKED LIKE THEY FELT NICE what's the big deal? :(
It wasn't until junior high and the oh-so-fun onset of hormones that Chizuru began to see her behavior in a different light. It wasn't exactly an immediate, "oh my God I'm gay" realization, though. For a while, she believed she was--or, at least, that she should be--like all the other girls in her class. She sort of ignored the "whoa nice rack" signals her brain was feeding her and tried to focus her attention on boys. It was a little tough for her, and not just because of her brain MIXING HER UP--she'd always felt more at home with girls (g-gee wonder why) and had never really had any close male friends, so she wasn't quite sure how to approach them.
Nonetheless, she managed. She made friends with a guy in her class, got close to him; eventually she decided she had a crush on him. And I use the word decision legitimately here, since this was not an idea that just came to her, but rather one she had actively convince herself of. XD She figured, hey, it wasn't like she'd ever had a crush BEFORE. So how was she supposed to know what it felt like? And this guy was a cool guy and everything, so why shouldn't she like him in that way? So, pushing her doubts and THROBBING BIOLOGICAL URGES to the back of her mind, she worked up the courage and did the whole confession thing, and the guy reciprocated.
Obviously, it didn't really work out. But it wasn't for a lack of trying--well, some trying. About two weeks into this brave trek into the wilds of A Relationship (or, well, An Ill-Advised Junior High Relationship), Chizuru started to realize some things. One, she wasn't having a great deal of fun. They were seeing each other after school and occasionally on weekends, meeting at cafes and other such relatively afforable hangouts, but she wasn't enjoying doing these things as much with him as she was when she went with other friends--female friends. Two, he was obviously way more interested in the physical aspect than she was. He'd made a couple of clumsy attempts to get some making out going, which Chizuru had rebuffed immediately. Three...his older sister was really really hot.
That last one was sort of the clincher, yeah. When it hit Chizuru that her boyfriend's sister had the power to make her forget that he even existed, she knew that there was something a little more important going on here--that confusion and inexperience were not sufficient to explain what she was feeling. This realization was pretty distressing to her at first. As I see it, Chizuru was always fairly extroverted, but at this point she wasn't quite as blissfully unconcerned with the opinions of others as she is today. At any rate, she was very unsure of what to do, who to tell--or if she should even tell anyone. She eventually decided that, at the very least, it wouldn't be fair of her to keep stringing The Boy along. She tried to break things off without going into the whys so much, but he pressed her on it, and she ended up blurting out that she was starting to think she was attracted to girls. He was taken aback, but didn't seem--as far as Chizuru could tell--to react particularly negatively. So when that awkward exchange finally came to an end, she felt marginally better. Maybe, at the very least, he would be a little supportive, right?
Weeeell not really. The next day, she came to class and got a lot of weird looks, and a lot of the girls started keeping their distance. And then at lunch the name-calling started, and it dawned on Chizuru that he had told people--and now her whole class knew. And over the next few days, a lot of the students in other classes knew. Naturally, this was the last thing Chizuru really needed; she was already having a hard time coming to terms with this, and suddenly being under the unforgiving collective eye of her schoolmates, being subjected to their abuse--well, it didn't really help!
It only took a couple of days for her to snap.
Not in any kind of...destructive, break-downy sort of way, though. Chizuru just came to the conclusion that she couldn't let things persist like this. Her feelings about girls were obviously not going to go away--in hindsight, they'd sort of been around for years, so this whole tangled mess obviously wasn't anything passing. And if it wasn't anything passing then something had to be done about the shit she was catching from her peers, because she knew that just trying to bear up under it wouldn't work--that she really would snap if she tried that. Trying to just disavow everything probably wouldn't work, she concluded, so she ended up going the opposite route. The next day, one of her female classmates came up to her between periods and launched into a fairly typical tirade--blah blah blah dyke blah blah blah pervert blah blah blah. Chizuru smiled, nodded, and grabbed the girl's chest. She got slapped for it, but the smile never left her face for a second.
And so the counterattack began. If this was to be her reputation, Chizuru decided, she was going to live up to it--and then some. Screw what anyone else thought. She couldn't just go through her life trying to change herself based on other peoples' ideas of the way she ought to be--it just didn't make sense to her, especially when it came to something like this, which she had come to realize was beyond her power to change anyway. It was at this point that the exuberant, shameless personality of present-day Chizuru began to take shape.
But Chizuru's newfound resolve, while helpful in avoiding having her spirit crushed, didn't exactly endear her to her peers--her junior high days were pretty lonely, with few friends, almost none of whom were too willing to be caught with her in public. Towards the end of her second year, though, she met a girl--a slightly older one, a first year high school student. The girl started flirting with her rather obviously, which took Chizuru by surprise at first. Having spent so much time working through her orientation issues on her own, it was sort of weird actually meeting someone ELSE who was like her. Not bad, though! Chizuru found the other girl's forwardness refreshing, appealing, and the two started going out.
Chizuru felt the difference almost immediately. Seeing this other girl felt a lot more comfortable, a lot more natural than her foray into dating dudes had been. The relationship helped square things away for her; she began to really accept that this was what she wanted. And so things moved along, and . . . she ended up losing her virginity to her girlfriend. That first time was pretty far from the miraculous orgasmic pop-culture image of the perfect first time. Sorta pokey and uncomfortable, in fact. But a little time and a few more tries later, Chizuru experienced one of the most profound epiphanies she's had to date:
SEX WITH GIRLS IS AWESOME
Chizuru still looks back upon that relationship in a mostly fond light. Its end was a bit abrupt and lacking in closure, though--her girlfriend broke it off near the beginning of Chizuru's third year in junior high; her father was moving because of his work, and her family was going with. It took Chizuru a while to get over the sudden disappearance of this girl from her life.
So where, you might ask, were Chizuru's parents during this whole journey of self-discovery? Well, it didn't take long for word of Chizuru's classroom antics to reach them. Chizuru's teachers quickly became concerned with her behavior and called home about it. Chizuru tried to explain it away as pranks and jokes getting out of hand--her parents were still suspicious, but didn't really believe it could be much MORE than that. The full revelation didn't come until after Chizuru had started seeing her girlfriend. One day, Chizuru's mother was straightening up in Chizuru's room a bit--though Chizuru was at an age where she did most of that herself, Chizuru's mom was something of a neat freak--and discovered various . . . magazines that Chizuru's girlfriend had lent her. There was an acrimonious confrontation when Chizuru got home, which only got louder and angrier when Chizuru's father arrived. Chizuru's parents were not exactly old-line conservatives, but they weren't riding the wave of social progressiveness either; they had fairly normal, traditional expectations for their daughter, and yeah dating girls was definitely not amongst them.
This led to a long and steady deterioration of Chizuru's relationship with her parents. Somewhere deep, deep inside, there's still some love there on her part--it's just really well-buried by layer upon layer of resentment formed by their inability to accept her and her perception that they in fact might not love her anymore. This is part of why she's so willing to go with Chisame and leave her own world behind. She knows she'll miss her friends, but she feels that family-wise she's got nothing much to go back to.
God that was long. I DIDN'T INTEND FOR THERE TO BE THIS MUCH REALLY.