lastvoyages app, in progress
User Name/Nick: Hilda
User LJ: starsandtildes
AIM/IM: aim: frilly betches
E-mail: palastinalied@gmail.com
Other Characters: dovehearted
Character Name: Naoto Shirogane
Series: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4
Age: 16
I know the age is questionable, but she’s a month away from 17 at her pull point, and she’s been in the professional world for at least a year or two at this point and can function as an adult among adults. I have no issues with her being taken less seriously on the Barge.
From When?: March 21st, 2012; assuming that the March 20th “true ending” events happened.
Inmate/Warden: Warden; Naoto’s been raised to love truth and justice, and while she has some serious past damage and some anger and self-confidence issues, she’s been working through them in a healthy way. She wants to solve whatever problem she's given, and even if that problem is "make someone a functioning human being", she'll go at it head-on.
Item: The card she uses to summon Yamato-Takeru.
Abilities/Powers: Well. Naoto’s a private detective of the Sherlock Holmes style, trained by the best Japan has to offer (Grandpa) and with what in her canon is a very strong case record (something like fifteen successfully solved). She’s also been trained with handguns and even though she’s probably never actually shot anyone monsters don’t count she can stay level enough to keep her half of a bad situation calm.
She also can summon a Pokemon Persona, Yamato-Takeru, a manifestation of her psyche that came from her getting into an argument with an anthropomorphic personification of her body image and maturity issues and realizing that yes, she did need help. She can’t call on it on the Barge, though, despite the card that helps her summon it being her warden item. I don’t think she can call on it outside of the Midnight Channel, an alternate dimension in her canon universe, and while its powers are appropriate for her canon, it relies mostly on instant death abilities, which aren't really suitable for the Barge.
Finally, I’m going to assume she’s fluent in English. It’s the kind of thing Grandpa would have cared about her learning, especially if she gets called in on something international. If it’s not a fair assumption, I've written her with issues with English before and can rewrite the samples if I need to.
Personality: Naoto is deeply passionate about everything she's involved in, and she’s always been incredibly ambitious, though her ambition of becoming the perfect detective has recently started to wane after the tangle of the case she finished literally yesterday, a serial kidnapping and murder investigation. Her concern with being “perfect” was about her image more than anything else, because she thought making mistakes would make her seem childish, and more than anything else, she wanted to be taken seriously as an adult.
Nothing went right for her in this last case, though, and it was only by working with others - kids her age, actually - in what was pretty much Scooby Doo with higher stakes that this case was solved. The obsession with her image was a misguided attempt to copy everyone she’d admired, people like her grandfather and her dead parents and the heroes in the stories she grew up on, and she’s started to remember just why she admired them. They had a drive to seek the truth at all costs, and when a mystery presents itself, Naoto herself has to see it through to the end, no matter what the risk to her or how crazy it gets. She gained her first understanding of what an investigator is through detective novels and kids’ television shows, though, so sometimes has an overly idealistic, black-and-white view of good versus evil.
Naoto stays remarkably cool and professional, almost cold, out on the case, as she has enough experience to not be thrown off her guard by most dangers. She's trained herself to recover quickly from shock, as if she doesn't, she'll miss something, and the smallest detail might be the key to the problem. However, she has some very rare and extremely noticeable breaks in the maturity and professionalism. When she’s held back from what she’s convinced is right, she doesn’t take it well. She got herself thrown off a case because she pitched a bitchfit reacted badly when the police wanted to close it up too quickly (she was right about them having the wrong guy), and at one point she was willing to cooperate in a suspect’s lynching because while the law couldn’t touch him, he needed to pay (her friend talked her out of it by convincing her there was more to the story, which there was).
Despite her professional competence, even at her best Naoto’s awkward in informal social interactions. She speaks in an overly formal way at times and often comes off as standoffish when she's simply at a loss as to what to do, and also has some difficulty with the line between friendly and professional behavior. If she's interested in what you have to say, the conversation may likely turn into an interrogation, and if she isn't, she might come across as rude and impatient because she wants to move on to the good parts. But even though she seems rude and has a mildly insulting sense of humor, Naoto’s not malicious. When she’s angry or wants to hurt someone, it's very clear.
She was raised mostly to be a detective and to interact with adults and never really had the opportunity or desire to be a teenager in appropriate ways. When she slips out of her professional responsible mode, then, she’s got rather “childish” interests (for the Persona 4 world), like robots, and isn't very good with people her own age unless they draw her in first. Being new to this “friend" business, she’s only really friendly with those she trusts strongly: her family back home and the rest of the Scooby gang she’s investigating with. Around people who impress her (she would die of joy at the Granada Holmes), she becomes rather shy and flustered. While she feels less like she constantly has to "perform" than she did before, she does have to show herself as that person's equal instead of an inferior. It's difficult for her to express positive emotions, so her friends are less obvious than her enemies, but once she trusts someone, she won't break the trust she hopes they have in her. She doesn’t do romance, either: she doesn’t see the point, and it’s not until recently that she’s been comfortable in her gender identification to want to touch it.
Yeah, Naoto’s had problems with being “Naoto”. Part of her “perfect detective” act for several years involved her presenting herself as a boy, since she was convinced no one would take her ambitions seriously as a girl. Japanese society has difficulty taking professional women seriously, especially in law enforcement, and she didn’t have any women to model herself on who would help her believe otherwise. The act was successful, since gender presentation in Japan relies heavily on body language and speech markers, which anyone can adopt. She’s been out as a girl for about six months as of her pull point, and though she didn't choose that at first, she's accepted being female as part of her identity. Though she still affects a fairly gender-neutral appearance and a more masculine style of speaking (though this last would be much less noticeable in English), it’s a preference rather than a disguise, and it's part of her being "Naoto" rather than any gender identification.
I think on the Barge, where there are people her age who have serious responsibilities, she’d be able to stay confident in her capabilities as someone so young and as a girl, even without her support system there. She probably wouldn’t be a very good Warden at first, since she gets overinvested in her job, but she learns a lot from failure and is also willing to learn from more experienced people. She has an incredible social growth spurt in canon, and I think this place will give her another one. As regards her wish… she doesn’t really have one yet, taking the deal with the Admiral more to honor her friend Souji moving away. His constant support got her where she is emotionally, and since she doesn’t have anything to give back to him, she’s going to pay it forward. She’s got regrets, but nothing she’d want to go back and change. As I said, she’s learned a lot from her failures.
Path to Redemption:
History: Here’s the plot of Persona 4, and here’s personal information. For clarity, “Mayonaka TV” is another name for the “Midnight Channel”.
Sample Journal Entry: [hey Barge Naoto has her comm propped up on her desk and wants to have a chat. She’s got a notepad out like she usually does and keeps glancing at it as she talks.]
I've heard a few stories about time travel since I've come to live here. The possibility intrigues me, though less for the science involved than its practical uses. So many misunderstandings about the past could be cleared up if we could find an observer who wouldn’t be tempted to affect it.
But the differences in our worlds’ perceptions of each other interest me further still. How many of you know if you exist as a fictional character in someone else’s world? The names of a few of my fellow residents are familiar to me, but only through books, and while some people treat them as real in literary discussions, I’ve found no evidence to believe that’s actually the case back home. [That last is said with a barely suppressed roll of her eyes.]
What do you think of your depiction, if you’ve seen it? I’m afraid I don’t know of any accounts of my life, and I wouldn’t want to see them if they existed. I want to make my own future without the burden of someone else’s vision of me.
Sample RP: [assuming she got the room she was renting in Inaba] Naoto would have loved to see her neighbor’s file, she thought as she worked over her own. She had a good inmate, someone whose psyche and motivations she could understand, but not overly sympathize with, but at the same time, any insight into why someone would blare French pop at four in the morning could help her deal with the issue in a way that would resolve it for both of them.
It wasn't the lack of sleep - she would have been awake anyway - but the sound that bothered her. She’d gone through an entire list of possible solutions. Earplugs: ineffective at muffling the noise to a tolerable level. The set of headphones she'd found in her drawer (labelled "Yosuke", strangely enough): broken. Most likely why Yosuke simply abandoned them in her house. Direct intervention with the inmate, from knocking on the wall or door? Unacknowledged, either deliberately or accidentally. (She assumed deliberately; his personality leaned towards the malicious.)
At least he was unpaired. It was time to go to the last option on her list. She quickly pressed through the buttons on her communicator and dashed off a quick message. "Admiral, [name] has turned his stereo system into an aggravation to this entire floor. Please take whatever action you see fit to remove the nuisance."
She waited a few minutes for the - who was it, Alizee? - to stop and be replaced by cursing. He wouldn't actually carry out everything he was threatening, but if he was that type of man to back up words said in anger, she hoped he never found out who was responsible.
Special Notes: There’s a lot of controversy in Persona 4 fandom over Naoto’s actual gender. LJRP generally agrees on female, since she explicitly says she is towards the end of the game, but there are enough people who think she’s trans and was given a bad deal by the writers that I think I should at least mention that it’s a thing that exists.
There are also two new versions of the Persona 4 story coming out soon: an animated adaptation this fall, and an expanded version of the video game next year. I don’t yet have any plans about how or whether I’ll incorporate any new information.
User LJ: starsandtildes
AIM/IM: aim: frilly betches
E-mail: palastinalied@gmail.com
Other Characters: dovehearted
Character Name: Naoto Shirogane
Series: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4
Age: 16
I know the age is questionable, but she’s a month away from 17 at her pull point, and she’s been in the professional world for at least a year or two at this point and can function as an adult among adults. I have no issues with her being taken less seriously on the Barge.
From When?: March 21st, 2012; assuming that the March 20th “true ending” events happened.
Inmate/Warden: Warden; Naoto’s been raised to love truth and justice, and while she has some serious past damage and some anger and self-confidence issues, she’s been working through them in a healthy way. She wants to solve whatever problem she's given, and even if that problem is "make someone a functioning human being", she'll go at it head-on.
Item: The card she uses to summon Yamato-Takeru.
Abilities/Powers: Well. Naoto’s a private detective of the Sherlock Holmes style, trained by the best Japan has to offer (Grandpa) and with what in her canon is a very strong case record (something like fifteen successfully solved). She’s also been trained with handguns and even though she’s probably never actually shot anyone monsters don’t count she can stay level enough to keep her half of a bad situation calm.
She also can summon a Pokemon Persona, Yamato-Takeru, a manifestation of her psyche that came from her getting into an argument with an anthropomorphic personification of her body image and maturity issues and realizing that yes, she did need help. She can’t call on it on the Barge, though, despite the card that helps her summon it being her warden item. I don’t think she can call on it outside of the Midnight Channel, an alternate dimension in her canon universe, and while its powers are appropriate for her canon, it relies mostly on instant death abilities, which aren't really suitable for the Barge.
Finally, I’m going to assume she’s fluent in English. It’s the kind of thing Grandpa would have cared about her learning, especially if she gets called in on something international. If it’s not a fair assumption, I've written her with issues with English before and can rewrite the samples if I need to.
Personality: Naoto is deeply passionate about everything she's involved in, and she’s always been incredibly ambitious, though her ambition of becoming the perfect detective has recently started to wane after the tangle of the case she finished literally yesterday, a serial kidnapping and murder investigation. Her concern with being “perfect” was about her image more than anything else, because she thought making mistakes would make her seem childish, and more than anything else, she wanted to be taken seriously as an adult.
Nothing went right for her in this last case, though, and it was only by working with others - kids her age, actually - in what was pretty much Scooby Doo with higher stakes that this case was solved. The obsession with her image was a misguided attempt to copy everyone she’d admired, people like her grandfather and her dead parents and the heroes in the stories she grew up on, and she’s started to remember just why she admired them. They had a drive to seek the truth at all costs, and when a mystery presents itself, Naoto herself has to see it through to the end, no matter what the risk to her or how crazy it gets. She gained her first understanding of what an investigator is through detective novels and kids’ television shows, though, so sometimes has an overly idealistic, black-and-white view of good versus evil.
Naoto stays remarkably cool and professional, almost cold, out on the case, as she has enough experience to not be thrown off her guard by most dangers. She's trained herself to recover quickly from shock, as if she doesn't, she'll miss something, and the smallest detail might be the key to the problem. However, she has some very rare and extremely noticeable breaks in the maturity and professionalism. When she’s held back from what she’s convinced is right, she doesn’t take it well. She got herself thrown off a case because she pitched a bitchfit reacted badly when the police wanted to close it up too quickly (she was right about them having the wrong guy), and at one point she was willing to cooperate in a suspect’s lynching because while the law couldn’t touch him, he needed to pay (her friend talked her out of it by convincing her there was more to the story, which there was).
Despite her professional competence, even at her best Naoto’s awkward in informal social interactions. She speaks in an overly formal way at times and often comes off as standoffish when she's simply at a loss as to what to do, and also has some difficulty with the line between friendly and professional behavior. If she's interested in what you have to say, the conversation may likely turn into an interrogation, and if she isn't, she might come across as rude and impatient because she wants to move on to the good parts. But even though she seems rude and has a mildly insulting sense of humor, Naoto’s not malicious. When she’s angry or wants to hurt someone, it's very clear.
She was raised mostly to be a detective and to interact with adults and never really had the opportunity or desire to be a teenager in appropriate ways. When she slips out of her professional responsible mode, then, she’s got rather “childish” interests (for the Persona 4 world), like robots, and isn't very good with people her own age unless they draw her in first. Being new to this “friend" business, she’s only really friendly with those she trusts strongly: her family back home and the rest of the Scooby gang she’s investigating with. Around people who impress her (she would die of joy at the Granada Holmes), she becomes rather shy and flustered. While she feels less like she constantly has to "perform" than she did before, she does have to show herself as that person's equal instead of an inferior. It's difficult for her to express positive emotions, so her friends are less obvious than her enemies, but once she trusts someone, she won't break the trust she hopes they have in her. She doesn’t do romance, either: she doesn’t see the point, and it’s not until recently that she’s been comfortable in her gender identification to want to touch it.
Yeah, Naoto’s had problems with being “Naoto”. Part of her “perfect detective” act for several years involved her presenting herself as a boy, since she was convinced no one would take her ambitions seriously as a girl. Japanese society has difficulty taking professional women seriously, especially in law enforcement, and she didn’t have any women to model herself on who would help her believe otherwise. The act was successful, since gender presentation in Japan relies heavily on body language and speech markers, which anyone can adopt. She’s been out as a girl for about six months as of her pull point, and though she didn't choose that at first, she's accepted being female as part of her identity. Though she still affects a fairly gender-neutral appearance and a more masculine style of speaking (though this last would be much less noticeable in English), it’s a preference rather than a disguise, and it's part of her being "Naoto" rather than any gender identification.
I think on the Barge, where there are people her age who have serious responsibilities, she’d be able to stay confident in her capabilities as someone so young and as a girl, even without her support system there. She probably wouldn’t be a very good Warden at first, since she gets overinvested in her job, but she learns a lot from failure and is also willing to learn from more experienced people. She has an incredible social growth spurt in canon, and I think this place will give her another one. As regards her wish… she doesn’t really have one yet, taking the deal with the Admiral more to honor her friend Souji moving away. His constant support got her where she is emotionally, and since she doesn’t have anything to give back to him, she’s going to pay it forward. She’s got regrets, but nothing she’d want to go back and change. As I said, she’s learned a lot from her failures.
Path to Redemption:
History: Here’s the plot of Persona 4, and here’s personal information. For clarity, “Mayonaka TV” is another name for the “Midnight Channel”.
Sample Journal Entry: [hey Barge Naoto has her comm propped up on her desk and wants to have a chat. She’s got a notepad out like she usually does and keeps glancing at it as she talks.]
I've heard a few stories about time travel since I've come to live here. The possibility intrigues me, though less for the science involved than its practical uses. So many misunderstandings about the past could be cleared up if we could find an observer who wouldn’t be tempted to affect it.
But the differences in our worlds’ perceptions of each other interest me further still. How many of you know if you exist as a fictional character in someone else’s world? The names of a few of my fellow residents are familiar to me, but only through books, and while some people treat them as real in literary discussions, I’ve found no evidence to believe that’s actually the case back home. [That last is said with a barely suppressed roll of her eyes.]
What do you think of your depiction, if you’ve seen it? I’m afraid I don’t know of any accounts of my life, and I wouldn’t want to see them if they existed. I want to make my own future without the burden of someone else’s vision of me.
Sample RP: [assuming she got the room she was renting in Inaba] Naoto would have loved to see her neighbor’s file, she thought as she worked over her own. She had a good inmate, someone whose psyche and motivations she could understand, but not overly sympathize with, but at the same time, any insight into why someone would blare French pop at four in the morning could help her deal with the issue in a way that would resolve it for both of them.
It wasn't the lack of sleep - she would have been awake anyway - but the sound that bothered her. She’d gone through an entire list of possible solutions. Earplugs: ineffective at muffling the noise to a tolerable level. The set of headphones she'd found in her drawer (labelled "Yosuke", strangely enough): broken. Most likely why Yosuke simply abandoned them in her house. Direct intervention with the inmate, from knocking on the wall or door? Unacknowledged, either deliberately or accidentally. (She assumed deliberately; his personality leaned towards the malicious.)
At least he was unpaired. It was time to go to the last option on her list. She quickly pressed through the buttons on her communicator and dashed off a quick message. "Admiral, [name] has turned his stereo system into an aggravation to this entire floor. Please take whatever action you see fit to remove the nuisance."
She waited a few minutes for the - who was it, Alizee? - to stop and be replaced by cursing. He wouldn't actually carry out everything he was threatening, but if he was that type of man to back up words said in anger, she hoped he never found out who was responsible.
Special Notes: There’s a lot of controversy in Persona 4 fandom over Naoto’s actual gender. LJRP generally agrees on female, since she explicitly says she is towards the end of the game, but there are enough people who think she’s trans and was given a bad deal by the writers that I think I should at least mention that it’s a thing that exists.
There are also two new versions of the Persona 4 story coming out soon: an animated adaptation this fall, and an expanded version of the video game next year. I don’t yet have any plans about how or whether I’ll incorporate any new information.