Hanekoma headcanon
→MORTAL LIFE←
Sanae was born the eldest son to a large, desperately poor family in 1843 in the slums of Edo. He showed an early interest in art, but with a family that couldn't afford to reliably feed and clothe their kids, much less educate or sponsor them into apprenticeships, it was limited to charcoal drawings on walls and hanging around the printmakers' and painters' shops staring longingly until somebody got annoyed and chased him off with a broom. As he grew older and became jointly responsible for supporting his family -- through begging, odd jobs, theft, and anything else he could manage -- his time spent on art dwindled. In 1855, when Sanae was twelve, a powerful earthquake struck Edo, followed by a fire raging through the city. Sanae, who had been away from home when the earthquake hit, found himself separated from his family; the building where they had rented rooms was destroyed, their survival uncertain. He spent months returning to the place where their home had been whenever he could, but he never saw any of them again; from that point on, he was forced to survive on his own.
This involved picking the smallest, dingiest print shop that still displayed good work, camping on the back doorstep, and begging the owner to take him in until he'd worn the man down.
His manners and appearance were too awful for him to act as a salesman even in a cheap shop, so the shop owner set him to running errands, cleaning, pulling prints and -- eventually, as he noticed the way Sanae filled up every bit of wastepaper with drawings and designs -- began to train him in the techniques of cutting his own blocks. Sanae's work soon began to outsell his master's, and everything seemed to be going well until, when he was sixteen, his master caught a winter fever that turned into pneumonia and left him dead, his shop and tools sold by his family to pay off his debts, and Sanae -- talented, half trained and without any kind of certification or recommendation -- tossed back out onto the streets.
With the advantages of training and his significantly improved manners and language, he might have been able to land a place with a better shop, but he was too stubborn and proud of his own talent to accept working his way back up from shop-boy to artist a second time. Instead, he reverted to the lifestyle of his childhood to beg, borrow and steal enough money for carving tools, ink and paper. He started to eke out a living making his own prints from a tumbledown room he rented to sleep in, living on barley and turning out whatever sold. Romantic heroes, posters for the theater, beautiful women, even pornographic drawings; Sanae might be too proud to turn out rehashes of a master's artwork for a salary, but he was not too proud to turn his own creativity to any subject that would fill his pockets.
As he grew older, he was swept up in the growing anti-bakufu spirit. The resentment that he'd built up toward an establishment that kept him nameless, spurned and starving despite his talent flowered into a desire for outright rebellion. The borders that had been opened for the first time less than a decade ago were allowing new ideas in and spurring intellectual ferment; Sanae's imagination was fired by the potential for change. He fell in with a pro-democracy group and began turning out print posters for them, despite warnings from the police, and in 1866, at the age of twenty-three, his public opposition to the rule of the shogun and even of the Emperor finally got him arrested for sedition. He might well have been executed, or perhaps freed in the turmoil that followed the resignation of the Tokugawa shogun and the war against his last supporters, but Sanae didn't last that long: already malnourished, he swiftly succumbed to jail fever.
→FROM ARTIST TO ANGEL←
Freshly deceased, Sanae found himself in the Reapers' Game. He quickly discovered he had a knack for psychs and a killer instinct: getting to the end of the game with his partner was a cinch, but he found the taste of power and control intoxicating. Rather than return to life -- or ascend immediately to become an Angel -- he chose to remain in the UG as a Reaper.
On the RG, he continued producing his commercial and political prints, taking advantage of his new ability to escape onto the UG to avoid any further run-ins with the law. The Shogun resigned; his supporters fought a rearguard action from Kyoto, all the way up through Edo, and escaped briefly to Hokkaido before their final defeat; Edo was renamed Tokyo and declared the capital of Japan; and the new Emperor set in motion a rapid campaign of modernization and industrialization. Sanae - now using the surname Hanekoma as a reference to the winged lion that was his Noise form - worked his way up the ranks in the Shibuya District, spending a few years as a brilliant young officer before launching a coup against the Composer. Through a combination of native talent, surprise, and the Composer's fatigue after seeing his district undergo such devastating changes in such a short period, Sanae succeeded.
His tenure as Composer mellowed the anger and ferocity that had once ruled him; becoming aware of the higher purpose of the Game and the endless layers of order and enlightenment stretching out beyond the edges of his perception humbled him. Hanekoma came to understand the Game as an endless wheel of refinement, casting the not-yet-perfected souls down into Noise and wiping away their individuality, leaving the raw matter of their Soul to be re-formed and refined through other lives while the more powerful, more creative, more purely individual Players survive and ascend through layer after layer of selection and refinement.
---
Canon for Adstringendum
Some time after his death, Sanae, still a Harrier, was approached by a young mortal man, Yoshiya Kiryu, who -- to his shock -- was capable of spotting him on the UG. Yoshiya, who had been able to see onto the UG all his life, had a few questions; Sanae, surprised and intrigued by Yoshiya's unusual abilities, answered them for him, and the two struck up an odd friendship that lasted through Yoshiya's untimely death from tuberculosis in 1868.
Yoshiya and Hanekoma swiftly rose through the ranks together. Hanekoma, still driven by the angry idealism of his mortal self, made a bid for the Composer's position and succeeded, promptly installing his trusted friend Yoshiya as his new Conductor. After four decades as the Composer of Shibuya, Hanekoma realized that he was beginning to stagnate in his position, the lack of human interaction and challenge beginning to grate on him. He resigned his position in Yoshiya's favor, trusting the younger man's abilities and judgment... trusting them above his own, in fact, for the ways in which Sanae had matured over the course of his tenure as Composer had left him increasingly ill-suited for the role. He couldn't truly focus on his District when his insatiable curiosity had him always looking upward and outward for greater understanding. Still, his deep affection for Shibuya, and his friendship with its new Composer, drew him back. In 1912, as soon as he had settled sufficiently into the increased knowledge and power of an Angel, Hanekoma went to Shibuya's Producer and managed to wheedle him into allowing Hanekoma to take over his position.
Since then, he and Joshua have overseen the District together. Hanekoma mostly manages to remember his place as the facilitator of Joshua's vision for Shibuya, although his own powerful attachment to a place where he was Conductor for decades does occasionally get in the way. Joshua proved his own skill as Composer -- and his stubbornness, which far exceeds Hanekoma's -- by lasting almost a century and counting in the role; however, in the early years of the twenty-first century, Joshua's Shibuya, too, began to fall prey to stagnation and decaying levels of interaction. Hanekoma found himself in the position of choosing between his oldest friend and the hundreds of thousands of souls dependent on the District he loved.
At this point, the events of The World Ends with You begin.
Sanae was born the eldest son to a large, desperately poor family in 1843 in the slums of Edo. He showed an early interest in art, but with a family that couldn't afford to reliably feed and clothe their kids, much less educate or sponsor them into apprenticeships, it was limited to charcoal drawings on walls and hanging around the printmakers' and painters' shops staring longingly until somebody got annoyed and chased him off with a broom. As he grew older and became jointly responsible for supporting his family -- through begging, odd jobs, theft, and anything else he could manage -- his time spent on art dwindled. In 1855, when Sanae was twelve, a powerful earthquake struck Edo, followed by a fire raging through the city. Sanae, who had been away from home when the earthquake hit, found himself separated from his family; the building where they had rented rooms was destroyed, their survival uncertain. He spent months returning to the place where their home had been whenever he could, but he never saw any of them again; from that point on, he was forced to survive on his own.
This involved picking the smallest, dingiest print shop that still displayed good work, camping on the back doorstep, and begging the owner to take him in until he'd worn the man down.
His manners and appearance were too awful for him to act as a salesman even in a cheap shop, so the shop owner set him to running errands, cleaning, pulling prints and -- eventually, as he noticed the way Sanae filled up every bit of wastepaper with drawings and designs -- began to train him in the techniques of cutting his own blocks. Sanae's work soon began to outsell his master's, and everything seemed to be going well until, when he was sixteen, his master caught a winter fever that turned into pneumonia and left him dead, his shop and tools sold by his family to pay off his debts, and Sanae -- talented, half trained and without any kind of certification or recommendation -- tossed back out onto the streets.
With the advantages of training and his significantly improved manners and language, he might have been able to land a place with a better shop, but he was too stubborn and proud of his own talent to accept working his way back up from shop-boy to artist a second time. Instead, he reverted to the lifestyle of his childhood to beg, borrow and steal enough money for carving tools, ink and paper. He started to eke out a living making his own prints from a tumbledown room he rented to sleep in, living on barley and turning out whatever sold. Romantic heroes, posters for the theater, beautiful women, even pornographic drawings; Sanae might be too proud to turn out rehashes of a master's artwork for a salary, but he was not too proud to turn his own creativity to any subject that would fill his pockets.
As he grew older, he was swept up in the growing anti-bakufu spirit. The resentment that he'd built up toward an establishment that kept him nameless, spurned and starving despite his talent flowered into a desire for outright rebellion. The borders that had been opened for the first time less than a decade ago were allowing new ideas in and spurring intellectual ferment; Sanae's imagination was fired by the potential for change. He fell in with a pro-democracy group and began turning out print posters for them, despite warnings from the police, and in 1866, at the age of twenty-three, his public opposition to the rule of the shogun and even of the Emperor finally got him arrested for sedition. He might well have been executed, or perhaps freed in the turmoil that followed the resignation of the Tokugawa shogun and the war against his last supporters, but Sanae didn't last that long: already malnourished, he swiftly succumbed to jail fever.
→FROM ARTIST TO ANGEL←
Freshly deceased, Sanae found himself in the Reapers' Game. He quickly discovered he had a knack for psychs and a killer instinct: getting to the end of the game with his partner was a cinch, but he found the taste of power and control intoxicating. Rather than return to life -- or ascend immediately to become an Angel -- he chose to remain in the UG as a Reaper.
On the RG, he continued producing his commercial and political prints, taking advantage of his new ability to escape onto the UG to avoid any further run-ins with the law. The Shogun resigned; his supporters fought a rearguard action from Kyoto, all the way up through Edo, and escaped briefly to Hokkaido before their final defeat; Edo was renamed Tokyo and declared the capital of Japan; and the new Emperor set in motion a rapid campaign of modernization and industrialization. Sanae - now using the surname Hanekoma as a reference to the winged lion that was his Noise form - worked his way up the ranks in the Shibuya District, spending a few years as a brilliant young officer before launching a coup against the Composer. Through a combination of native talent, surprise, and the Composer's fatigue after seeing his district undergo such devastating changes in such a short period, Sanae succeeded.
His tenure as Composer mellowed the anger and ferocity that had once ruled him; becoming aware of the higher purpose of the Game and the endless layers of order and enlightenment stretching out beyond the edges of his perception humbled him. Hanekoma came to understand the Game as an endless wheel of refinement, casting the not-yet-perfected souls down into Noise and wiping away their individuality, leaving the raw matter of their Soul to be re-formed and refined through other lives while the more powerful, more creative, more purely individual Players survive and ascend through layer after layer of selection and refinement.
---
Canon for Adstringendum
Some time after his death, Sanae, still a Harrier, was approached by a young mortal man, Yoshiya Kiryu, who -- to his shock -- was capable of spotting him on the UG. Yoshiya, who had been able to see onto the UG all his life, had a few questions; Sanae, surprised and intrigued by Yoshiya's unusual abilities, answered them for him, and the two struck up an odd friendship that lasted through Yoshiya's untimely death from tuberculosis in 1868.
Yoshiya and Hanekoma swiftly rose through the ranks together. Hanekoma, still driven by the angry idealism of his mortal self, made a bid for the Composer's position and succeeded, promptly installing his trusted friend Yoshiya as his new Conductor. After four decades as the Composer of Shibuya, Hanekoma realized that he was beginning to stagnate in his position, the lack of human interaction and challenge beginning to grate on him. He resigned his position in Yoshiya's favor, trusting the younger man's abilities and judgment... trusting them above his own, in fact, for the ways in which Sanae had matured over the course of his tenure as Composer had left him increasingly ill-suited for the role. He couldn't truly focus on his District when his insatiable curiosity had him always looking upward and outward for greater understanding. Still, his deep affection for Shibuya, and his friendship with its new Composer, drew him back. In 1912, as soon as he had settled sufficiently into the increased knowledge and power of an Angel, Hanekoma went to Shibuya's Producer and managed to wheedle him into allowing Hanekoma to take over his position.
Since then, he and Joshua have overseen the District together. Hanekoma mostly manages to remember his place as the facilitator of Joshua's vision for Shibuya, although his own powerful attachment to a place where he was Conductor for decades does occasionally get in the way. Joshua proved his own skill as Composer -- and his stubbornness, which far exceeds Hanekoma's -- by lasting almost a century and counting in the role; however, in the early years of the twenty-first century, Joshua's Shibuya, too, began to fall prey to stagnation and decaying levels of interaction. Hanekoma found himself in the position of choosing between his oldest friend and the hundreds of thousands of souls dependent on the District he loved.
At this point, the events of The World Ends with You begin.