Application for Guys and Dolls
PLAYER
[journal] truebluehorror
[age] 24; April 20th, 1987
[previous characters None
[character journal]
CHARACTER
[series] FLCL
[full name] Haruko Haruharu
[age] Physically, Haruko appears to be in her twenties (although she herself claims to be nineteen). In truth, she’s actually far older, although we don’t know how old.
[gender] Female
[canon point] Post-series, after leaving Earth
[reference] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLCL
[personality]
At first appearance, Haruko seems to be a rather capricious, nosy, flirtatious, and sometimes clutzy young woman. Many times Haruko appears to do things solely based around whim or whatever suits her current fancy. Examples of this include deciding to dress up in a parody of one of Elvis Presley’s suits and sport a pompadour while stating she’s going to give Naota lessons on playing the guitar, or deciding to dress up like a bunny girl while flying on her guitar while firing a slingshot at a giant robot. Perhaps more mundane examples (though “mundane” and “Haruko Haruharu” don’t go well in the same sentence) would be things like her decision to continue wearing a nurse’s outfit despite the need for the disguise having worn off long ago, and deciding to crash one of Naota’s classes in order to bring him lunch. Haruko also seems to always need some form of noise around her to keep herself interested. If she has a guitar available, she’ll strum it. If not, she’ll make noises to herself in order to keep herself going. She also does what she wants, when she wants, and with little concern as to what others might think of her for doing it. For instance, she ends up playing for a rival baseball team then the one Naota’s grandfather coaches since she’s (supposedly) in need of more money. Many of her actions, therefore, seem to have no rhyme or reason, or seem to have been decided on the spot. She herself even admits that she takes many of her actions without any thought or prior planning, stating she knows many of them will end up getting her in trouble but that she’ll “deal with it when it gets here”. She also has a bad habit of snooping through other peoples possessions, such as the fact that she gets to looking around Naota’s possessions the moment Naota is no longer in his room. This is indicative of how intrusive Haruko tends to be. In a similar manner, Haruko tends to be intrusive in conversation as well, speaking up whenever she feels like it whether her opinion is asked for or not.
Despite her initial appearance of being random and flighty in behavior, Haruko is actually quite capable, focused, and when it comes down to it ruthless in pursuing what she wants. Despite looking (and somewhat behaving) human, she herself is an alien, and a highly dangerous one. Her entire reason for going to Earth was her pursuit of the “Pirate King” Atomsk, an ethereal being and wanted criminal by the Intergalactic Police Agency Haruko (supposedly) works for. It’s unknown how long Haruko has been chasing Atomsk in an attempt to capture him, but it’s a game of cat and mouse that’s gone on for quite a while and has led to Haruko attempting to encage Atomsk several times. This encagement would be accomplished by finding a suitable person who possesses a N.O. gate within them and using that person as a receptacle to summon and capture Atomsk. Usually the gate is found in children, mostly male, going through adolescence/puberty, and can be awakened primarily through strong emotional reactions, especially those sexual in nature. That being the case, for quite some time Haruko has gone around finding boys who would work as proper conduits and would proceed to make them infatuated with her, using both sex appeal and through more subtle emotional manipulation in the hope that she could widen their use of/what they could pull through the gate in the hopes of eventually pulling out Atomsk. On the surface, Haruko doesn’t seem to have much attachment to the children she’s manipulated, or concern for the emotional or mental trauma she might put them through due to her actions. In the end, getting what she desires is the end all and be all of her actions, and she’s willing to sacrifice anything/anyone in order to get what she wants, including being willing to allow Earth to become brainwashed by an evil corporation named Medical Mechanica as long as it meant she could get the power she craved. This kind of behavior has led to most of the people Haruko has met having a poor perception of her in the end. This was certainly the case for one of the earlier boys she’d manipulated. This boy, Amarao, had become embittered and vengeful towards Haruko due to her playing with his emotions (although also still holding a crush on her), and essentially dedicated his life to keeping aliens and outsiders like Haruko off of Earth. During a confrontation with Amarao, now grown up, Haruko pulled no punches, showing she was more than willing to kill someone she’d previously used when they’d become an inconvenience to her. On the other hand, she does choose not to kill Amarao despite having a fairly good opening for a killing blow at the end of their duel, meaning she either didn’t see Amarao as a major threat (despite his ability to keep up with her throughout most of the fight) or that she actually was slightly fond of him, and perhaps of the other youth she had done this to before as well.
Of all the relationships Haruko has, and the one that shows off the greatest diversity of her character and personality, is her relationship with Naota Nandaba, the main protagonist of the story. As Naota possesses an N.O. gate, he’s Haruko’s current mark throughout the series. As such, Haruko takes on the role of a mentor, guardian, and tormentor while around Naota. Haruko simultaneously attempts to get Naota to better himself, such as trying to convince him to actually bother swinging a baseball bat (which Naota had earlier refused to do), looking out for him (such as coming to find him/protect him during the early fights with the robots that came out of the N.O. gate), and teasing him in several ways, often picking fun at behaviors Naota displays that Haruko perceives as childish (such as the fact that Naota can’t stand spicy/bitter foods). However, despite the fact that Haruko teases, torments, and in the end uses Naota to further her own goals, it’s shown that Haruko does have feelings for the boy. Not romantic ones, like Naoto had hoped/Haruko had led him to believe in order to strengthen the N.O. Gate he possessed, but Haruko does seem to like him, as first demonstrated at the end of Episode Four with how pleased she was that he actually proactively did something. She also offers Naota the chance to give up his normal life and come with her, twice, in the very last episode. The first time she appears to do this solely as a means of manipulating him in order to summon Atomsk. The second time, however, she seems sincere, but then states he can’t come with her, because he’s still a kid (and thus she could be looking out for his welfare for once). This could show that, in the end, while most of Haruko’s relationships with others are fleeting, and many times only a matter of necessity, she is capable of forming an actual bond with people, though she rarely acts very strongly on that bond.
[orientation]
For all intents and purposes, Haruko is predominantly heterosexual. Haruko frequently finds herself using her sex appeal on men, and she appears quite good at it. This would imply she’s known how to/has been seducing men for quite a while (and due to her alien nature, it’s probably been several centuries), and thus that she’s both the most familiar, and the most comfortable, in sexual situations with men. While due to her own capricious nature it wouldn’t be hard to imagine her in a relationship with a woman, she’d still be more of a 1 or 2 on the Kinsey scale rather than flat-out bisexual. It’s clear that Haruko favors men, both in using/manipulating them and in general.
[wish]
Haruko will be wishing to gain the very thing we see her purpose throughout the series: Atomsk’s power. What exactly Atomsk’s power is is never elaborated on in the series, or at least not perfectly. Considering Atomsk is a being made of N.O., a form of energy heavily present in FLCL, it’s power could be some kind of energy manipulation, and when Atomsk does appear in series it’s shown to be a very powerful being.
[requested house]
Inoshishi/Rebel House. If that doesn’t work, a second would be Satouzuke/Fake house.
[misc notes]
While being human in appearance, Haruko is actually an alien, and as such, has some rather incredible powers and equipment. She appears to have above human strength, sometimes far above human (she was shown capable of hitting softballs with such force that they left they entered the atmosphere and knocked a space station down). She’s quick, although not superhumanly so, though her agility nearly is. An example of this is in her dual with Amarao, where she managed to either dodge every bullet he fired at her, or managed to cut the ones she couldn’t traditionally dodge in half with a straight razor.
Along with her natural powers, she also has two pieces of equipment of note: her guitar and her Vespa. Her Vespa SS 180 acts for the most part as a normal Vespa aside from two things: 1) it can be used to fly, and it’s implied this is the form of transportation Haruko uses to get from planet to planet and 2) it uses Gundam models as spare parts. Her guitar, however, is her main weapon. She can use it in both melee as an axe like weapon, as well as have it double for ranged combat. Ranged, it’s shown to be able to fire in a manner similar to a rifle, as well as having a grenade launcher option. At the end of the anime, she left the one she’d be using (her own Rickenbaucher 4000) in favor of taking the double guitar-bass the Atomsk-powered Naota created at the end of the series. It can be assumed this guitar weapon would function similarly, if not be a more powerful version, of Haruko’s basic weapon.
SAMPLES
[sample # 1 [Action Log]]
While going through other people’s stuff wasn’t foreign to Haruko, she usually didn’t look in back alleys for it. She’d often found the best trash when she could find it was honest trash, and she wasn’t adverse to dumpster diving for profit. Or for the hell of it. But today, in a brand new town in a time period she hadn’t seen for a while, Haruko had decided to be more adventurous than usual. And it paid off.
She found a rickshaw.
She only briefly wondered what a rickshaw was doing in a back alley. It could’ve been deserted there, with cars starting to become more prevalent on the market during the 20s, and some poor slob lost his job driving it. Or it might have just been left there by someone still struggling to work, to make using it his job before time would overtake his profession and he’d be left with nowhere to go.
Haruko thought about that for about three seconds before taking the man-powered vehicle. Free rickshaw, and all hers for the taking. Hot diggity damn.
She would’ve laughed as people desperately tried to clamber out of her way as Haruko proceeded to tear ass as much as someone pulling a rickshaw could, moving up on the street and zig-zagging around people and other vehicles and vendors. She thought it was funny as hell.
“Outta the way, ya bums!” she yelled, just barely avoiding slamming into a family out on a stroll before merrily continuing to run down the street haphazard, now focused on making engine noises with her mouth. Clearly people were not taking her seriously as a vehicle of the road, and that needed to be fixed. The road was noisy, so she needed to make some noise. Just common sense there, she thought. If you wanted to be acknowledge anywhere in life, you had to make some noise.
And after all, people needed to know she was here, and respect the fact that she was on the goddamn road.
[sample 2# [Network Post]]
[The camera focuses on Haruko, lying down, biting absently at her pinky as she looks up into the camera, clearly bored. She has, though, clearly allowed her kimono to be tied a bit loosely on her, allowing a bit more cleavage to be seen than usual.]
A sadist must have founded this city to come up with a place this boring. I thought there was a reason I hated this time period, and now I remember its cause there was nothing to do unless you’re in America where they were having parties and dancing on street poles and all that.
I tried dancing on a street pole here and got yelled at. See if I ever do that again.
No wonder there’s so much fucking going on here. What else is there to do?
Hey. But I mean, it’s not like it’s what anyone thinks about all the time, right?
[She positions the camera a bit, tilting the focus slightly from her face to her chest.]
After all this, and making it your job, it can’t be all too interesting anymore. You get complacent with it, and it becomes work, and work is never fun.
[She moves her arm a bit, the fabric of the kimono adjust and slipping a bit, baring her chest a little more. Not fully yet. But close. The camera is practically focused entirely on it to.]
I mean, who wants to make sex work? Well, people always say you can have fun with your work but that’s a bunch of bullcrap. It’s what you tell kids to get them to shut up and just do what they’re supposed to do, and trick them into thinking it’s fun.
[And now the camera flashes back to her face, a small pout place on it. She bats her eyes a bit.]
You’re being tricked into thinking sex is any fun anymore. Isn’t that sad?
[Even if she isn’t in the mood for anything? Tempting and taunting people with sex? Favorite past time.
Well. Second favorite.]
[journal] truebluehorror
[age] 24; April 20th, 1987
[previous characters None
[character journal]
CHARACTER
[series] FLCL
[full name] Haruko Haruharu
[age] Physically, Haruko appears to be in her twenties (although she herself claims to be nineteen). In truth, she’s actually far older, although we don’t know how old.
[gender] Female
[canon point] Post-series, after leaving Earth
[reference] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLCL
[personality]
At first appearance, Haruko seems to be a rather capricious, nosy, flirtatious, and sometimes clutzy young woman. Many times Haruko appears to do things solely based around whim or whatever suits her current fancy. Examples of this include deciding to dress up in a parody of one of Elvis Presley’s suits and sport a pompadour while stating she’s going to give Naota lessons on playing the guitar, or deciding to dress up like a bunny girl while flying on her guitar while firing a slingshot at a giant robot. Perhaps more mundane examples (though “mundane” and “Haruko Haruharu” don’t go well in the same sentence) would be things like her decision to continue wearing a nurse’s outfit despite the need for the disguise having worn off long ago, and deciding to crash one of Naota’s classes in order to bring him lunch. Haruko also seems to always need some form of noise around her to keep herself interested. If she has a guitar available, she’ll strum it. If not, she’ll make noises to herself in order to keep herself going. She also does what she wants, when she wants, and with little concern as to what others might think of her for doing it. For instance, she ends up playing for a rival baseball team then the one Naota’s grandfather coaches since she’s (supposedly) in need of more money. Many of her actions, therefore, seem to have no rhyme or reason, or seem to have been decided on the spot. She herself even admits that she takes many of her actions without any thought or prior planning, stating she knows many of them will end up getting her in trouble but that she’ll “deal with it when it gets here”. She also has a bad habit of snooping through other peoples possessions, such as the fact that she gets to looking around Naota’s possessions the moment Naota is no longer in his room. This is indicative of how intrusive Haruko tends to be. In a similar manner, Haruko tends to be intrusive in conversation as well, speaking up whenever she feels like it whether her opinion is asked for or not.
Despite her initial appearance of being random and flighty in behavior, Haruko is actually quite capable, focused, and when it comes down to it ruthless in pursuing what she wants. Despite looking (and somewhat behaving) human, she herself is an alien, and a highly dangerous one. Her entire reason for going to Earth was her pursuit of the “Pirate King” Atomsk, an ethereal being and wanted criminal by the Intergalactic Police Agency Haruko (supposedly) works for. It’s unknown how long Haruko has been chasing Atomsk in an attempt to capture him, but it’s a game of cat and mouse that’s gone on for quite a while and has led to Haruko attempting to encage Atomsk several times. This encagement would be accomplished by finding a suitable person who possesses a N.O. gate within them and using that person as a receptacle to summon and capture Atomsk. Usually the gate is found in children, mostly male, going through adolescence/puberty, and can be awakened primarily through strong emotional reactions, especially those sexual in nature. That being the case, for quite some time Haruko has gone around finding boys who would work as proper conduits and would proceed to make them infatuated with her, using both sex appeal and through more subtle emotional manipulation in the hope that she could widen their use of/what they could pull through the gate in the hopes of eventually pulling out Atomsk. On the surface, Haruko doesn’t seem to have much attachment to the children she’s manipulated, or concern for the emotional or mental trauma she might put them through due to her actions. In the end, getting what she desires is the end all and be all of her actions, and she’s willing to sacrifice anything/anyone in order to get what she wants, including being willing to allow Earth to become brainwashed by an evil corporation named Medical Mechanica as long as it meant she could get the power she craved. This kind of behavior has led to most of the people Haruko has met having a poor perception of her in the end. This was certainly the case for one of the earlier boys she’d manipulated. This boy, Amarao, had become embittered and vengeful towards Haruko due to her playing with his emotions (although also still holding a crush on her), and essentially dedicated his life to keeping aliens and outsiders like Haruko off of Earth. During a confrontation with Amarao, now grown up, Haruko pulled no punches, showing she was more than willing to kill someone she’d previously used when they’d become an inconvenience to her. On the other hand, she does choose not to kill Amarao despite having a fairly good opening for a killing blow at the end of their duel, meaning she either didn’t see Amarao as a major threat (despite his ability to keep up with her throughout most of the fight) or that she actually was slightly fond of him, and perhaps of the other youth she had done this to before as well.
Of all the relationships Haruko has, and the one that shows off the greatest diversity of her character and personality, is her relationship with Naota Nandaba, the main protagonist of the story. As Naota possesses an N.O. gate, he’s Haruko’s current mark throughout the series. As such, Haruko takes on the role of a mentor, guardian, and tormentor while around Naota. Haruko simultaneously attempts to get Naota to better himself, such as trying to convince him to actually bother swinging a baseball bat (which Naota had earlier refused to do), looking out for him (such as coming to find him/protect him during the early fights with the robots that came out of the N.O. gate), and teasing him in several ways, often picking fun at behaviors Naota displays that Haruko perceives as childish (such as the fact that Naota can’t stand spicy/bitter foods). However, despite the fact that Haruko teases, torments, and in the end uses Naota to further her own goals, it’s shown that Haruko does have feelings for the boy. Not romantic ones, like Naoto had hoped/Haruko had led him to believe in order to strengthen the N.O. Gate he possessed, but Haruko does seem to like him, as first demonstrated at the end of Episode Four with how pleased she was that he actually proactively did something. She also offers Naota the chance to give up his normal life and come with her, twice, in the very last episode. The first time she appears to do this solely as a means of manipulating him in order to summon Atomsk. The second time, however, she seems sincere, but then states he can’t come with her, because he’s still a kid (and thus she could be looking out for his welfare for once). This could show that, in the end, while most of Haruko’s relationships with others are fleeting, and many times only a matter of necessity, she is capable of forming an actual bond with people, though she rarely acts very strongly on that bond.
[orientation]
For all intents and purposes, Haruko is predominantly heterosexual. Haruko frequently finds herself using her sex appeal on men, and she appears quite good at it. This would imply she’s known how to/has been seducing men for quite a while (and due to her alien nature, it’s probably been several centuries), and thus that she’s both the most familiar, and the most comfortable, in sexual situations with men. While due to her own capricious nature it wouldn’t be hard to imagine her in a relationship with a woman, she’d still be more of a 1 or 2 on the Kinsey scale rather than flat-out bisexual. It’s clear that Haruko favors men, both in using/manipulating them and in general.
[wish]
Haruko will be wishing to gain the very thing we see her purpose throughout the series: Atomsk’s power. What exactly Atomsk’s power is is never elaborated on in the series, or at least not perfectly. Considering Atomsk is a being made of N.O., a form of energy heavily present in FLCL, it’s power could be some kind of energy manipulation, and when Atomsk does appear in series it’s shown to be a very powerful being.
[requested house]
Inoshishi/Rebel House. If that doesn’t work, a second would be Satouzuke/Fake house.
[misc notes]
While being human in appearance, Haruko is actually an alien, and as such, has some rather incredible powers and equipment. She appears to have above human strength, sometimes far above human (she was shown capable of hitting softballs with such force that they left they entered the atmosphere and knocked a space station down). She’s quick, although not superhumanly so, though her agility nearly is. An example of this is in her dual with Amarao, where she managed to either dodge every bullet he fired at her, or managed to cut the ones she couldn’t traditionally dodge in half with a straight razor.
Along with her natural powers, she also has two pieces of equipment of note: her guitar and her Vespa. Her Vespa SS 180 acts for the most part as a normal Vespa aside from two things: 1) it can be used to fly, and it’s implied this is the form of transportation Haruko uses to get from planet to planet and 2) it uses Gundam models as spare parts. Her guitar, however, is her main weapon. She can use it in both melee as an axe like weapon, as well as have it double for ranged combat. Ranged, it’s shown to be able to fire in a manner similar to a rifle, as well as having a grenade launcher option. At the end of the anime, she left the one she’d be using (her own Rickenbaucher 4000) in favor of taking the double guitar-bass the Atomsk-powered Naota created at the end of the series. It can be assumed this guitar weapon would function similarly, if not be a more powerful version, of Haruko’s basic weapon.
SAMPLES
[sample # 1 [Action Log]]
While going through other people’s stuff wasn’t foreign to Haruko, she usually didn’t look in back alleys for it. She’d often found the best trash when she could find it was honest trash, and she wasn’t adverse to dumpster diving for profit. Or for the hell of it. But today, in a brand new town in a time period she hadn’t seen for a while, Haruko had decided to be more adventurous than usual. And it paid off.
She found a rickshaw.
She only briefly wondered what a rickshaw was doing in a back alley. It could’ve been deserted there, with cars starting to become more prevalent on the market during the 20s, and some poor slob lost his job driving it. Or it might have just been left there by someone still struggling to work, to make using it his job before time would overtake his profession and he’d be left with nowhere to go.
Haruko thought about that for about three seconds before taking the man-powered vehicle. Free rickshaw, and all hers for the taking. Hot diggity damn.
She would’ve laughed as people desperately tried to clamber out of her way as Haruko proceeded to tear ass as much as someone pulling a rickshaw could, moving up on the street and zig-zagging around people and other vehicles and vendors. She thought it was funny as hell.
“Outta the way, ya bums!” she yelled, just barely avoiding slamming into a family out on a stroll before merrily continuing to run down the street haphazard, now focused on making engine noises with her mouth. Clearly people were not taking her seriously as a vehicle of the road, and that needed to be fixed. The road was noisy, so she needed to make some noise. Just common sense there, she thought. If you wanted to be acknowledge anywhere in life, you had to make some noise.
And after all, people needed to know she was here, and respect the fact that she was on the goddamn road.
[sample 2# [Network Post]]
[The camera focuses on Haruko, lying down, biting absently at her pinky as she looks up into the camera, clearly bored. She has, though, clearly allowed her kimono to be tied a bit loosely on her, allowing a bit more cleavage to be seen than usual.]
A sadist must have founded this city to come up with a place this boring. I thought there was a reason I hated this time period, and now I remember its cause there was nothing to do unless you’re in America where they were having parties and dancing on street poles and all that.
I tried dancing on a street pole here and got yelled at. See if I ever do that again.
No wonder there’s so much fucking going on here. What else is there to do?
Hey. But I mean, it’s not like it’s what anyone thinks about all the time, right?
[She positions the camera a bit, tilting the focus slightly from her face to her chest.]
After all this, and making it your job, it can’t be all too interesting anymore. You get complacent with it, and it becomes work, and work is never fun.
[She moves her arm a bit, the fabric of the kimono adjust and slipping a bit, baring her chest a little more. Not fully yet. But close. The camera is practically focused entirely on it to.]
I mean, who wants to make sex work? Well, people always say you can have fun with your work but that’s a bunch of bullcrap. It’s what you tell kids to get them to shut up and just do what they’re supposed to do, and trick them into thinking it’s fun.
[And now the camera flashes back to her face, a small pout place on it. She bats her eyes a bit.]
You’re being tricked into thinking sex is any fun anymore. Isn’t that sad?
[Even if she isn’t in the mood for anything? Tempting and taunting people with sex? Favorite past time.
Well. Second favorite.]