[OOC] I.
MUN
Name/Nickname: Fal.
Journal: falsiloquence.
Email: falsiloquence@gmail.com
IMs (AIM/MSN/YIM): AIM: war on horizon.
Timezone: GMT.
CHARACTER:
Name: Nozomu Itoshiki, where Itoshiki is the surname. When his name is written horizontally with the surname first, the combined kanji creates the word 'despair'.
Age: It's never officially specified. Going by appearances, he's probably around his mid-twenties.
Series: Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei ("So Long, Mr. Despair"), anime-verse.
Species: Human.
Gender: Male.
Occupation: High School teacher.
Point of canon to be drawn in: The end of (Zoku) Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei.
Preferred level: Terra.
Appearance: Itoshiki Nozomu is reasonably tall - about 5'9" - and bespectacled. He has grey eyes and dark, spiky hair; it's side-parted and falls over his left eye often. He wears a traditional hakama and patterned kimono every day, and only wears casual modern clothing when he is visiting his family home.
Personality: Nozomu's world is a pretty surreal one, and Nozomu's a pretty surreal character as a result.
One of his most notable traits is his tendency to attempt suicide over generally absurd things. It might be better termed as pseuicide; he doesn't actually seem to want to succeed, although it's not really a cry for attention either. He's generally stopped in his attempts to kill himself, and twice by Fuura Kafuka. When she almost kills him in an effort to save him, he panics and exclaims, "what if I'd died?!"
He's incredibly neurotic and paranoid. He frequently overthinks the most minor details in day to day life, and has a tendency to blow simple matters entirely out of proportion. He often misunderstands the intentions of others and always for the worse (for example, falsely believing that one of his classmates wants to meet his eyes so that she can claim sexual harrassment, or believing the father of one of the students is buying a book in order to torture her). He'll rant about anything with very little prompting. It's almost impossible to have a normal conversation with him when he starts to do this.
He has a habit of, after a particularly heated rant about something, proclaiming, "I'M IN DESPAIR! THIS (rant subject) HAS LEFT ME IN DESPAIR!" which is sometimes followed by an effort to kill himself, usually by hanging. Through the topics he gets engrossed in and his often radical and stupid conclusions, he often goes on missions to prove his claims correct. He seems to have a bizarre opinion on just about everything to do with modern society.
His behaviour towards people changes at any given time, depending on what issue he's hung up on. He can be very warm and approachable to his students when they catch him at the right time, or he can be aggressive or avoidant. All that aside, he does have occasional moments of lucidity, during which he almost behaves like a normal teacher. He can even be encouraging, though not always in the best of ways (for example, encouraging a pair of students having relationship problems to kill themselves as the ultimate act of true love).
He is incredibly fearful of commitment and of having people see into his heart.
He keeps a box full of materials with which he can kill himself. It's full of a variety of things, though his favourite method seems to be hanging.
Abilities: He's very good at avoiding eye contact and running away.
History: Nozomu's history isn't really divulged in the series thus far. What is currently known mostly concerns his family situation, but there are few details about his upbringing or even his relationship with the rest of the family.
He originates from an extremely wealthy and influential family whose mansion resides in Kuraizawa, Shinshu Prefecture. They intend to get Nozomu to marry through a tradition in which marriage is validated through eye contact, and he's endeavouring to avoid it.
He's the youngest son of the family, and his siblings in order of age include the disowned Enishi Itoshiki, the surrealist painter Kei Itoshiki, the doctor Mikoto Itoshiki (who bears a striking resemblance to Nozomu) and Nozomu's younger sister Rin Itoshiki, who is a master of flower arranging. He has a nephew by Enishi called Majiru, who is brought to live with him and with whom he doesn't easily get along. All of them have names that, when written horizontally, bear a resemblance to a word ironically associated to their circumstances.
Nozomu goes on to become a teacher after leaving his home.
The series doesn't expand greatly beyond that, as most of the episodes revolve around a joke, a social issue in Japan, and/or the introduction of the characters, and so Nozomu doesn't develop significantly. There are several AU-like episodes in which the circumstances of his arrival or his living there are different. Because of the nature of the show, it's difficult to tell what's true and what isn't sometimes.
False memories:
Much like his canon, he belongs to a very prestigious and wealthy family who reside in Elysium, and is the youngest son. There's a lot of pressure on him to marry as he's slowly getting older, as marriage is a strictly-held tradition in the family; however, he prefers to avoid the issue.
Initially in his early post-grad years, he was a salaryman working at a company specialising in the sale of health-food products, and he did reasonably well there. Although it was located in Terra, it gave him considerable freedom from the pressure placed on him by his family, and he enjoyed his more modest living conditions.
Unfortunately, he fell in with a few rather shady members of a cult in the Abyss, and wound up in (what only he could consider) dire straits. He was receiving some mild pestering via voicemail, a problem he felt he couldn't share with others. In his own mind, he blew it up to the point where he felt like he was being stalked at work, and that soon they would be coming to kill him as a sacrifice.
He decided to relocate and changed his line of work to throw them off the scent. Due to his decent grades, he was able to train to be a teacher, and took work in the local High School.
Sample role-playing post:
Sometimes it was hard to find a reason to get up in the morning.
Alright; most of the time, it was hard to find a reason to get up in the morning.
Actually, now that he thought about it, he couldn't remember the last time he woke up in the morning and considered the coming day with anything but an overwhelming sense of pending disaster. When had he last looked at the sunrise and thought, "oh, that's a beautiful sunrise!"? Never, probably. Or worse, if he had, it had been no more than a dream that dissolved with the rising of the real sun, an ugly golden light that did nothing but highlight every inch of a despairing city, a despairing man's room, and a despairing man curled in a lump under the covers, denying the existence of society.
But this introduction is running a little behind schedule. These were the events of twenty minutes ago. In the present, Nozomu pondered them while he brushed his teeth, drowsily looking at himself in the handprint-smeared mirror and imagining with horror the sea of faces that awaited him in his classroom. A sea of them. A wild sweeping torrent of faces, all expectant, all fixed on him. The nightmarish cacophony was still in his ears from last week - teacher! teacher! teacher! and it drummed at his temples. It was as though they could never get enough - always demanding more information, more clarification, more help with understanding their homework, the world, the question on page three, his "weird behaviour". It never ended.
Never.
And that was what waited for him now; he was already running late, and there'd be no time to prepare himself. He could turn truant, but he did that last month and was almost fired. No, he needed the money, that wretched substance that kept the city equally afloat and miserable - only paper, and he could draw his own face on a sheet of similar size and what would be the difference to the shopkeeper anyway, couldn't he tell that it was made of the same molecules that made up everything else? It was all pointless! And what was he doing, educating a million more salarymen - or teachers who would eventually steal his job - all with nothing but a lust for money and living in their eyes?! They were all just wolves released into the wild of the society that made them what he was and there was him making it happen, creating monsters every year! Destroying his own future with every student he passed!
He sprayed frothy-saliva-ey toothpaste on his reflection like a demented facial, clutched at his skull and screamed at the top of his lungs.
"I'M IN DESPAIR!
THIS MORNING HAS LEFT ME IN DESPAIR!"
For Nozomu Itoshiki, this was how he began his Mondays.