Application - C&C
[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: Amy
AGE: 22
JOURNAL: smash_circuits
IM: Not Scandinavian
E-MAIL: candycanepolkadots@yahoo.com
RETURNING: I got me some of_animalia
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Kuwabara Kazuma
FANDOM: Yu Yu Hakusho (manga)
CHRONOLOGY: Post-series
CLASS: Hero
SUPERHERO NAME: n/a
ALTER EGO: n/a, Kuwabara fights YYH's villains as himself, and in the City he likely wouldn't pick up another persona, but he would help out as a hero whenever needed.
BACKGROUND:
Kuwabara Kazuma is first introduced in Yu Yu Hakusho as Urameshi Yusuke's school-mate and rival, who attempts to fight with him on a daily basis in order to prove himself the better tough guy and all-around punk kid at Sarayashiki Junior High. Although Yusuke beats him every time, Kuwabara stubbornly persists in these attempts. The rivalry, and overcoming it, is so much a part of Kuwabara's routine and ideology that, when Yusuke is killed in a traffic accident, the other boy turns up and throws a hissy-fit at his wake, illustrated as one of those who would miss Yusuke's being alive.
It's during Yusuke's quest to revive himself that Kuwabara's own, more unique abilities begin to come to light. As it turns out, he was born with a sort of sixth sense, a high spiritual awareness that allows him to sense spirits, among other things. This ends up helping Yusuke in a few ways, and so Kuwabara gets dragged into bringing the protagonist back to life. After this, the two are set to better terms. After Yusuke returns and becomes Spirit Detective, the two fight side-by-side in Genkai's tournament and their partnership is sealed. It's also during this tournament that Kuwabara gains his primary weapon, the Reiken (or Spirit Sword. Whatever.), which he uses throughout the series.
During a mission to defeat the Saint Beasts of Maze Castle, the four-person dream team is first formed. Kuwabara's first impressions stick pretty fast, and he strongly dislikes Hiei immediately (and the feeling's mutual). In the castle, he fights and (more or less) defeats Byakko the White Tiger, which shows off his mad, horribly clumsy, actually-mostly-dumb-luck skills. In the end, Yusuke defeats the boss character, they save their home-town, and there was much rejoicing.
Following that, Kuwabara declared to not help Yusuke with this Spirit World crap anymore, because it's just weird and he wants no part of it. He does let Yusuke use his VCR, though, and changes his mind. When he sees Yukina, an imprisoned girl that Yusuke's meant to rescue, he immediately falls zomgIN LOOOVE♥♥, and leaves to find her without even waiting for the rest of the rescue party. And without learning that Yukina is Hiei's sister, ouch.
So this rescue mission works out for them, and the battle gets to be all meaningful for touchy-feely Kuwabara, but it kinda' gets them further involved in a lot of violent business. A pair of demons who assisted Yukina's kidnapper, The Toguro Brothers, decided to pop up from defeat and invite Yusuke and his choice of four friends to The Dark Tournament. As a member of Team Urameshi, Kuwabara attempted to fight with a degree of honor and might've actually won enough to justify the degree to which he was pummeled. After defeating the Elder Toguro in a match, he helped Yusuke win the final match by actually attempting to get himself killed. That failing, he managed to fake his own death and help out anyway, and the team won the tournament.
There is no room in an action series for rests, so the characters have little time to contemplate being normal kiddies before another bad guy shows up. A former Spirit Detective, Sensui, and a band of troubled, psychic kids pop onto the scene to open up a portal to the demon world and destroy the human world. Oh, goody~ Kuwabara, however, had apparently lost all of his super speshul powers after the tournament, so he went to see a Metallica rip-off concert instead. When one of the psychics jumped him and his friends on the way home, Kuwabara was able to beat him by spontaneously developing a new technique, the Jigen Tou, that can cut through dimensional barriers. As it turns out, this is exactly was the bad-guys need, so they later kidnap him, bondage him up, and plan on feeding him to one of their club members. Not having any of this shit, the rest of the gang breaks into Sensui's cave, and Big Battle Number One ensues. Before it's all done with, Yusuke is killed (again) and Kuwabara gets to have a cry-fest about how Yusuke's totally his bff. Of course, Yusuke turns out to be secret demon-spawn and he comes back in demon-spawn form to beat Sensui before everybody else manages to get themselves deadened.
After this, Kuwabara more or less makes his exit, stage right. With the insistent and probably violent urging of his older sister behind him, he decides that he really ought to do the normal kid thing and go to high school. While the other three members of the crew move on to fight in demon world, Kuwabara takes to the books and spends his day-to-day trying to academically get by. He threw a fit about it, though, at least. At the very end of the manga, he's still working to get through high school and, as the demon world reveals itself to the human world, it's arranged for Yukina to stay with Kuwabara's family. The two of them are later shown to be visiting Yusuke's ramen stand.
PERSONALITY:
Kuwabara might be something of a surprising person. On one front, he is exactly how he looks. At least in the beginning, Kuwabara presents himself and develops a reputation as a thug, delinquent and gang leader, bizarrely large and intimidating among the majority of his peers. Even here in the beginning, however, with little character development in play, he's shown to be a man of determination. His one goal is to beat Urameshi Yusuke in a fight, and he doesn't give up no matter how many times he is (brutally) beaten. After Yusuke's death, his spirit is able to witness an incident involving Kuwabara's friend Ookubo. When his job is threatened, Kuwabara promises sincerely to uphold the conditions that will save Ookubo's job, and he does. Even in the face of more beatings and school-related stress, Kuwabara keeps his promise because he's genuinely true to his word. Below the initial thuggish impression, Kuwabara has his Iron Code of Honor, and that's his core. He follows it no matter what.
Kuwabara's natural-born psychic abilities cause him to get further and further involved in the businesses between the Human, Demon and Spirit worlds. After partnering up with Urameshi on accident, he's more or less stuck on the journey. From the beginning, he shows determination and fights to his fullest to the point of being repeatedly willing and expecting to die for his cause. He thinks, for a moment, that he can separate from the weirdness now surrounding his school-mate, but that changes very quickly when he sees footage of the captive Yukina. Displaying his strong emotionality, he immediately falls in love with her and it's solid. Even after helping to rescue her, he pines, and her presence later works to allow him to win another ready-to-die fight. His values, mindset and feelings have a strong influence on his every action and his connections to people help him tremendously in this respect.
There's also a line to be drawn for his enemies. Generally friendly and tremendously caring Kuwabara may be, but he is also a fighter at heart. He's prone to casual violence with his friends and possible, albeit clumsy, brutality with his enemies. There's a complex web in the series of racial values and moral values, and Kuwabara is one of the people who has to weave through this systems. On the one hand, his values are attemptively very black-and-white, good is good and evil is evil. On the other hand, it gets harder and harder to distinguish good and evil in the presence of demons with morals and humans without. Add in the idea that Kuwabara's the only real human among the Band of Friends, lagging behind at times, and everything begins to blur a little farther. In spite of his, however, he has a strong enough attitude to maintain his own judgments without too much conflict.
In the end, that might be just it. Kuwabara is human, however an unusual human he is. He tries to be the best man that he can be, dedicated and just and strong, but he is often easy to make mistakes and prone to conflict and emotional uprisings. He's fairly unique in character, and that's what he wants in himself.
POWER:
Reiken - Kuwabara's spiritual energy manifests in the form of a sword, and this is his predominate weapon. He can vary its length and create one in each hand.
Spiritual Awareness - The way that these abilities are used in the series seem to point out that those humans with a high spiritual awareness are essentially psychics. Kuwabara's abilities are given a slight range, mostly for the sake of being used as a plot device. For the most part, he can sense spirits and has a "Spider-Sense"-like intuition. In more dire situations, he's been shown to be capable of things like telepathy or out-and-out precognition.
In lieu of that probably counting as more than one power, this ability can be trimmed-down, with Kuwabara keeping so much as his supernatural intuition. It's basically the only one he uses, anyway.
Psychic powers in YYH are weird and fail.
Jigen Tou - When pushed to the extreme, the Reiken can tranform into the Jigen Tou, which can cut through barriers and dimentional divides. He uses this to break out of dimention-based monsters, tear down the barrier to the demon world, and once 'teleport' to the Spirit world by cutting through space.
He can only summon this when desperate and it would happen once, if at all. Again, if Kuwabara's powers need to be trimmed down, this can go pretty easily.
tl;dr, Kuwabara is a fail!psychic with a shiny sword.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
Voice Post - Japanese with English Translation Provided;
So. This is supposed to be some kinda other world, huh?
Funny. It ain't like any other other world I've ever seen. I'm not impressed. That can't even sound weird, with the stories that they're coming up with around here. It's ridiculous!
Besides! If whoever's running this place thinks that they can keep me here, they've got another thing coming! I told Yukina-san that I wouldn't miss dinner, and I fully intend to keep my promise.
I, Kuwabara Kazuma, will not allow some ridiculous foreign city to keep me prisoner!
Now! Who do I punch to get back to Japan? I'll find you, even if you don't confess, so you might as well make things easier on yourself!
Yukina-san~! I'll be home, soon!
... Otherwise, Shizuru's gonna kill me.
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
Things had been a lot quieter, lately.
Of course, things had been relatively quiet before, when Kuwabara had worked to get into a good high school after spending most of his junior high years fighting monsters, demons and overblown humans. Back in the beginning of all of that, he wouldn't have been able to picture doing those kinds of things, and not with Urameshi Yusuke, of all people. Now, though, it all seemed bizarrely nostalgic.
Not that the quiet life wasn't fulfilling. There was enough going on so that he wasn't just bored, craving the chance to fight again. No. That had faded, and now that Urameshi's tournament had decided a removal of the demon-world barrier, there was plenty in the human world to pay attention to. Humans were beginning to learn about the possibilities of worlds beyond their own, and that was something that he needed to keep track of. He still considered himself a defender of the human race, especially equipped to deal with whatever problems may be posed by citizens of the demon world. Plus, there were those demons who wanted to integrate peacefully to think of.
Yukina was staying in his household now, as part of all of that. He was sure he would always perfectly remember being introduced to this fact. Walking home from the library with Kurama, they'd run into Urameshi, strangely, fresh from the demon world. The three of them walked, talking, back to his house, where his dad stood outside with a cigarette and greeted the guys like he knew 'em.
"You've got to be like an ambassador," he'd said. "I expect you to do your part, too, Kazu."
He didn't really pay much mind to the fact that his father had never really mentioned knowing anything about any world other his own, and he brushed it off easily enough. "Yeah, yeah. I know."
Yukina was called in right after that, when his father announced that the matter was settled. She looked almost strange, in a t-shirt and jeans with her hair half-down. She was still absolutely beautiful, though. Every day and minute and second, she was! Her beauty didn't stop her from being different, though, and Kuwabara's father had charged him with protecting her from anybody who might act against her for that fact.
It was a task, of course, that he'd happily accepted. He'd vowed from the first to protect Yukina from who or whatever would dare trouble her. He wanted to provide her with an absolute safety and happiness.
So naturally, when he was running late this morning, about to rush out of the house and sprint to school, he'd stopped mid-stride when she caught him with a touch to the back of his hand. She'd pushed a box lunch into his hands and, with a very sweet smile, said, "You'll be home for dinner tonight, won't you, Kazuma-san?"
He was so moved, he could have cried! He'd flashed a grin so stupid that his sister scoffed from the next room. "Of course!"
Not so, apparently.
He'd been in the middle of lunch when he'd felt something strange, which quickly became a jolt of pain, and he thought that maybe his ears had popped rather loudly, and he shut his eyes tightly against it, and... When he opened his eyes again, he was not in his classroom. In fact, he was nowhere on his school's grounds. He was... Somewhere. Somewhere strange. Somewhere full of machines and really mad-science looking.
"Welcome to the City, Hero."
Great. Kuwabara suddenly felt cynical. Was something weird happening? He felt wobbly when he tried to stand again, working his jaw in the remaining feeling of his ears having popped. "What?" ... Yeah. Something weird was happening. Great.
Well, things had been a lot quieter, lately.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
n/a
NAME: Amy
AGE: 22
JOURNAL: smash_circuits
IM: Not Scandinavian
E-MAIL: candycanepolkadots@yahoo.com
RETURNING: I got me some of_animalia
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Kuwabara Kazuma
FANDOM: Yu Yu Hakusho (manga)
CHRONOLOGY: Post-series
CLASS: Hero
SUPERHERO NAME: n/a
ALTER EGO: n/a, Kuwabara fights YYH's villains as himself, and in the City he likely wouldn't pick up another persona, but he would help out as a hero whenever needed.
BACKGROUND:
Kuwabara Kazuma is first introduced in Yu Yu Hakusho as Urameshi Yusuke's school-mate and rival, who attempts to fight with him on a daily basis in order to prove himself the better tough guy and all-around punk kid at Sarayashiki Junior High. Although Yusuke beats him every time, Kuwabara stubbornly persists in these attempts. The rivalry, and overcoming it, is so much a part of Kuwabara's routine and ideology that, when Yusuke is killed in a traffic accident, the other boy turns up and throws a hissy-fit at his wake, illustrated as one of those who would miss Yusuke's being alive.
It's during Yusuke's quest to revive himself that Kuwabara's own, more unique abilities begin to come to light. As it turns out, he was born with a sort of sixth sense, a high spiritual awareness that allows him to sense spirits, among other things. This ends up helping Yusuke in a few ways, and so Kuwabara gets dragged into bringing the protagonist back to life. After this, the two are set to better terms. After Yusuke returns and becomes Spirit Detective, the two fight side-by-side in Genkai's tournament and their partnership is sealed. It's also during this tournament that Kuwabara gains his primary weapon, the Reiken (or Spirit Sword. Whatever.), which he uses throughout the series.
During a mission to defeat the Saint Beasts of Maze Castle, the four-person dream team is first formed. Kuwabara's first impressions stick pretty fast, and he strongly dislikes Hiei immediately (and the feeling's mutual). In the castle, he fights and (more or less) defeats Byakko the White Tiger, which shows off his mad, horribly clumsy, actually-mostly-dumb-luck skills. In the end, Yusuke defeats the boss character, they save their home-town, and there was much rejoicing.
Following that, Kuwabara declared to not help Yusuke with this Spirit World crap anymore, because it's just weird and he wants no part of it. He does let Yusuke use his VCR, though, and changes his mind. When he sees Yukina, an imprisoned girl that Yusuke's meant to rescue, he immediately falls zomgIN LOOOVE♥♥, and leaves to find her without even waiting for the rest of the rescue party. And without learning that Yukina is Hiei's sister, ouch.
So this rescue mission works out for them, and the battle gets to be all meaningful for touchy-feely Kuwabara, but it kinda' gets them further involved in a lot of violent business. A pair of demons who assisted Yukina's kidnapper, The Toguro Brothers, decided to pop up from defeat and invite Yusuke and his choice of four friends to The Dark Tournament. As a member of Team Urameshi, Kuwabara attempted to fight with a degree of honor and might've actually won enough to justify the degree to which he was pummeled. After defeating the Elder Toguro in a match, he helped Yusuke win the final match by actually attempting to get himself killed. That failing, he managed to fake his own death and help out anyway, and the team won the tournament.
There is no room in an action series for rests, so the characters have little time to contemplate being normal kiddies before another bad guy shows up. A former Spirit Detective, Sensui, and a band of troubled, psychic kids pop onto the scene to open up a portal to the demon world and destroy the human world. Oh, goody~ Kuwabara, however, had apparently lost all of his super speshul powers after the tournament, so he went to see a Metallica rip-off concert instead. When one of the psychics jumped him and his friends on the way home, Kuwabara was able to beat him by spontaneously developing a new technique, the Jigen Tou, that can cut through dimensional barriers. As it turns out, this is exactly was the bad-guys need, so they later kidnap him, bondage him up, and plan on feeding him to one of their club members. Not having any of this shit, the rest of the gang breaks into Sensui's cave, and Big Battle Number One ensues. Before it's all done with, Yusuke is killed (again) and Kuwabara gets to have a cry-fest about how Yusuke's totally his bff. Of course, Yusuke turns out to be secret demon-spawn and he comes back in demon-spawn form to beat Sensui before everybody else manages to get themselves deadened.
After this, Kuwabara more or less makes his exit, stage right. With the insistent and probably violent urging of his older sister behind him, he decides that he really ought to do the normal kid thing and go to high school. While the other three members of the crew move on to fight in demon world, Kuwabara takes to the books and spends his day-to-day trying to academically get by. He threw a fit about it, though, at least. At the very end of the manga, he's still working to get through high school and, as the demon world reveals itself to the human world, it's arranged for Yukina to stay with Kuwabara's family. The two of them are later shown to be visiting Yusuke's ramen stand.
PERSONALITY:
Kuwabara might be something of a surprising person. On one front, he is exactly how he looks. At least in the beginning, Kuwabara presents himself and develops a reputation as a thug, delinquent and gang leader, bizarrely large and intimidating among the majority of his peers. Even here in the beginning, however, with little character development in play, he's shown to be a man of determination. His one goal is to beat Urameshi Yusuke in a fight, and he doesn't give up no matter how many times he is (brutally) beaten. After Yusuke's death, his spirit is able to witness an incident involving Kuwabara's friend Ookubo. When his job is threatened, Kuwabara promises sincerely to uphold the conditions that will save Ookubo's job, and he does. Even in the face of more beatings and school-related stress, Kuwabara keeps his promise because he's genuinely true to his word. Below the initial thuggish impression, Kuwabara has his Iron Code of Honor, and that's his core. He follows it no matter what.
Kuwabara's natural-born psychic abilities cause him to get further and further involved in the businesses between the Human, Demon and Spirit worlds. After partnering up with Urameshi on accident, he's more or less stuck on the journey. From the beginning, he shows determination and fights to his fullest to the point of being repeatedly willing and expecting to die for his cause. He thinks, for a moment, that he can separate from the weirdness now surrounding his school-mate, but that changes very quickly when he sees footage of the captive Yukina. Displaying his strong emotionality, he immediately falls in love with her and it's solid. Even after helping to rescue her, he pines, and her presence later works to allow him to win another ready-to-die fight. His values, mindset and feelings have a strong influence on his every action and his connections to people help him tremendously in this respect.
There's also a line to be drawn for his enemies. Generally friendly and tremendously caring Kuwabara may be, but he is also a fighter at heart. He's prone to casual violence with his friends and possible, albeit clumsy, brutality with his enemies. There's a complex web in the series of racial values and moral values, and Kuwabara is one of the people who has to weave through this systems. On the one hand, his values are attemptively very black-and-white, good is good and evil is evil. On the other hand, it gets harder and harder to distinguish good and evil in the presence of demons with morals and humans without. Add in the idea that Kuwabara's the only real human among the Band of Friends, lagging behind at times, and everything begins to blur a little farther. In spite of his, however, he has a strong enough attitude to maintain his own judgments without too much conflict.
In the end, that might be just it. Kuwabara is human, however an unusual human he is. He tries to be the best man that he can be, dedicated and just and strong, but he is often easy to make mistakes and prone to conflict and emotional uprisings. He's fairly unique in character, and that's what he wants in himself.
POWER:
Reiken - Kuwabara's spiritual energy manifests in the form of a sword, and this is his predominate weapon. He can vary its length and create one in each hand.
Spiritual Awareness - The way that these abilities are used in the series seem to point out that those humans with a high spiritual awareness are essentially psychics. Kuwabara's abilities are given a slight range, mostly for the sake of being used as a plot device. For the most part, he can sense spirits and has a "Spider-Sense"-like intuition. In more dire situations, he's been shown to be capable of things like telepathy or out-and-out precognition.
In lieu of that probably counting as more than one power, this ability can be trimmed-down, with Kuwabara keeping so much as his supernatural intuition. It's basically the only one he uses, anyway.
Psychic powers in YYH are weird and fail.
Jigen Tou - When pushed to the extreme, the Reiken can tranform into the Jigen Tou, which can cut through barriers and dimentional divides. He uses this to break out of dimention-based monsters, tear down the barrier to the demon world, and once 'teleport' to the Spirit world by cutting through space.
He can only summon this when desperate and it would happen once, if at all. Again, if Kuwabara's powers need to be trimmed down, this can go pretty easily.
tl;dr, Kuwabara is a fail!psychic with a shiny sword.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
Voice Post - Japanese with English Translation Provided;
So. This is supposed to be some kinda other world, huh?
Funny. It ain't like any other other world I've ever seen. I'm not impressed. That can't even sound weird, with the stories that they're coming up with around here. It's ridiculous!
Besides! If whoever's running this place thinks that they can keep me here, they've got another thing coming! I told Yukina-san that I wouldn't miss dinner, and I fully intend to keep my promise.
I, Kuwabara Kazuma, will not allow some ridiculous foreign city to keep me prisoner!
Now! Who do I punch to get back to Japan? I'll find you, even if you don't confess, so you might as well make things easier on yourself!
Yukina-san~! I'll be home, soon!
... Otherwise, Shizuru's gonna kill me.
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
Things had been a lot quieter, lately.
Of course, things had been relatively quiet before, when Kuwabara had worked to get into a good high school after spending most of his junior high years fighting monsters, demons and overblown humans. Back in the beginning of all of that, he wouldn't have been able to picture doing those kinds of things, and not with Urameshi Yusuke, of all people. Now, though, it all seemed bizarrely nostalgic.
Not that the quiet life wasn't fulfilling. There was enough going on so that he wasn't just bored, craving the chance to fight again. No. That had faded, and now that Urameshi's tournament had decided a removal of the demon-world barrier, there was plenty in the human world to pay attention to. Humans were beginning to learn about the possibilities of worlds beyond their own, and that was something that he needed to keep track of. He still considered himself a defender of the human race, especially equipped to deal with whatever problems may be posed by citizens of the demon world. Plus, there were those demons who wanted to integrate peacefully to think of.
Yukina was staying in his household now, as part of all of that. He was sure he would always perfectly remember being introduced to this fact. Walking home from the library with Kurama, they'd run into Urameshi, strangely, fresh from the demon world. The three of them walked, talking, back to his house, where his dad stood outside with a cigarette and greeted the guys like he knew 'em.
"You've got to be like an ambassador," he'd said. "I expect you to do your part, too, Kazu."
He didn't really pay much mind to the fact that his father had never really mentioned knowing anything about any world other his own, and he brushed it off easily enough. "Yeah, yeah. I know."
Yukina was called in right after that, when his father announced that the matter was settled. She looked almost strange, in a t-shirt and jeans with her hair half-down. She was still absolutely beautiful, though. Every day and minute and second, she was! Her beauty didn't stop her from being different, though, and Kuwabara's father had charged him with protecting her from anybody who might act against her for that fact.
It was a task, of course, that he'd happily accepted. He'd vowed from the first to protect Yukina from who or whatever would dare trouble her. He wanted to provide her with an absolute safety and happiness.
So naturally, when he was running late this morning, about to rush out of the house and sprint to school, he'd stopped mid-stride when she caught him with a touch to the back of his hand. She'd pushed a box lunch into his hands and, with a very sweet smile, said, "You'll be home for dinner tonight, won't you, Kazuma-san?"
He was so moved, he could have cried! He'd flashed a grin so stupid that his sister scoffed from the next room. "Of course!"
Not so, apparently.
He'd been in the middle of lunch when he'd felt something strange, which quickly became a jolt of pain, and he thought that maybe his ears had popped rather loudly, and he shut his eyes tightly against it, and... When he opened his eyes again, he was not in his classroom. In fact, he was nowhere on his school's grounds. He was... Somewhere. Somewhere strange. Somewhere full of machines and really mad-science looking.
"Welcome to the City, Hero."
Great. Kuwabara suddenly felt cynical. Was something weird happening? He felt wobbly when he tried to stand again, working his jaw in the remaining feeling of his ears having popped. "What?" ... Yeah. Something weird was happening. Great.
Well, things had been a lot quieter, lately.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
n/a