Folkmore App

[revengeisalie]

★ Character Information ★

Character Name: Asano Rin
Character Age: 17
Character Species: regular ol’ human
Current Health: Recovering from frostbite, otherwise good. Don’t worry about it, she’ll be fine.
Outfit: Red kimono with blue flame pattern on it, yellow obi, straw sandals, hair rings tied to the ends of her braids (usually one has medicine and the other poison in it), a shoulder bag.

Character Canon: Blade of the Immortal (manga)
Link to History: Hailing from a very fictionalized version of late 18th century Japan, Rin is the daughter of a samurai, her father the head of what seems to have been a fairly well-to-do sword school. Which, y’know, could’ve been a swanky life, if one Anotsu Kagehisa and his sword school/gang, the Itto-ryu, hadn’t paid the Asano home a visit on Rin’s 14th birthday and killed her parents right in front of her.

Traumatized by the events of this bloody night, Rin soon swore revenge. Except, being a teenage girl of no particular sword skills, she wasn’t very successful. Her luck did turn a bit once she ran into an 800-year-old nun, who instructed her to seek out Manji, the manga’s titular immortal, and hire him as her bodyguard. After probing her a bit, Manji agrees to this and the two go on their very messy revenge spree.

From there on out, Rin and Manji meet and kill a few of the Itto-ryu members who were part of the massacre, and fail to kill a few others. Rin pursues Anotsu to another part of the country, only to part ways with him again, not without promising to kill him another time. Then, Manji is held captive by Habaki Kagimura, a high-ranking samurai in a huge, secret experiment trying to transfer his immortality to other people, which ends up failing and being cut short when Rin invades the dungeon with the help of Itto-ryu fighter Doa. Afterwards, she runs into Anotsu again, who tells her Itto-ryu has been banished from Edo and is leaving for Hitachi to reach an undisclosed destination. Rin follows him there, not without a run-in with some foes and allies that ends up giving her frostbite.

Once they reach Hitachi, the long final battle begins, in which various parties face off against each other until only Rin, Manji and Anotsu as well as two friends of Rin’s are left. The men fight, but Manji spares Anotsu – only for Rin to rush at him as he’s about to board a boat to China and run him through with her sword. He falls into the sea and she presumes him dead. After this, she returns to Edo.

Canon Point: Between the final battle and the epilogue, after returning to Edo, the details of which I shall bullshit to the finest degree. Also, the manga was finished in 2012, it’s been around for a while.
Canon Iteration: Original flavor canon.

★ Folkmore Roles & Attributes ★

Skills:

• basic sword skills
  
• has these cute little throwing knives
  
• can mix some medicine and poison
  
• amateur sleuthing
  
• deductive skills
  
• strategic abilities
  
• can improvise in a pinch
  
• has some acting skills
  
• manners of a samurai’s daughter
  
• knowledge of Edo’s criminal justice system
  
• has written poetry before
  
• can pack a punch if you make her angry enough
  

Canon Abilities: Rin is an extremely average human teenage girl.
Role: Legend
Role Qualities/Attributes: Wings! She’ll eventually learn to put them away, but not at first.
Role Reasoning: So, Rin is an interesting case. After all, her main goal throughout all of the manga is revenge. Yet despite this, she is fundamentally a good person, which is why she spends so much time second-guessing herself. Because she can see other people’s points of view and abhors senseless killing. There are multiple times at which she takes mercy upon and even teams up with so-called enemies. She is also incredibly headstrong and takes on some kind of leadership frequently. For example, in her relationship with Manji, she is his employer, and he largely follows her lead on who to kill. Later, when Manji is stuck in a prison, Rin takes the leadership role in the plan to bust him out. And while her main goal during the infiltration of Edo Castle is definitely to get Manji back, she also cares about all the other victims of the immortality experiments, going so far as to make sure the survivors are freed and expressing shock and disgust at their treatment several times. Yet it is also here that she states Manji’s life is more important to her than that of any random person, and she is willing to kill to free him. Thus, my idea is to have her as a conflicted Legend who very much has the potential to fall.

★ Personality ★

OPTION 2 QUESTIONS (PICK 4-5) 100-300 WORD LIMIT EACH:

What was the most traumatic experience your character endured? How did this change them?

The murder of her parents, without question. On her fourteenth birthday, Rin witnessed as the Itto-ryu killed her father and then brutally gang-raped her mother. We meet her again two years later, at age sixteen, and there is no indication she had anyone who could have taken her in in the meantime. Thus, I assume she was pretty much entirely alone in the world for two years. If not for this event, she likely would’ve continued to live a peaceful life with her parents and eventually gotten married. As it is, she is absolutely stuck in her grief and sees no way to resolve this except revenge. This also leads her to enter the criminal underworld of Edo; teaming up with Manji, a mass murderer, to achieve her goal and eventually becoming a wanted criminal herself.

What is the most important and defining relationship(s) in your character's life and why?

Without a doubt, her relationship with Manji, her bodyguard. As per the above question, we can assume she was alone for two years after her parents’s death, and then she meets Manji and he becomes sort of her anchor. Also, she’s sixteen at that point and thus in prime teen hormone time, and she quickly develops a crush on Manji that becomes a more solid love later on. He protects her and helps her carry out her revenge, and though he is gruff and not very emotionally expressive, he clearly does care for her and sometimes tries to cheer her up in his own way, which she appreciates (and sometimes calls him out on, to his extreme indignation). Rin feels guilty because Manji is always getting cut up for her, and thus also indebted to him. Later in the manga, she feels that her affection for Manji makes her stronger and pushes her to new heights.

Additionally, I’d say the relationship with her nemesis, Anotsu Kagehisa, is also pretty important, as it’s her driving force throughout the manga. Throughout numerous encounters with him, she at least tries to understand his point of view, sometimes comes to have a grudging respect for him, and the both of them seem to have a sense of being beholden to one another, even as her plan to kill him never changes. She comes to view it as her duty to bear witness to whatever he’s doing. She also stalks him across the country, as you do.

What is your character's moral code? Do they have one? Why or why not?

Her moral code is kind of still in development! She is only seventeen, after all. In general, she thinks killing or doing harm to people is wrong. Yet she spends the manga on a path of revenge, which at first is mainly dictated purely by her feelings of grief and rage at the perpetrators, and later matures into something that entails more deliberation. There is a point where she decides to let Anotsu, the man she wants to kill, go, because she feels there’s still more she has to learn. In the end, she kills him in part because he starts saying things that suggest he would just continue the cycle of revenge if she lets him live, so she feels like she can’t let that happen. However, she also thinks protecting a loved one is sometimes worth sacrificing the lives of people opposing her. But even then, she implored her accomplice, Doa, to avoid killing as much as possible; which admittedly was also for strategic reasons, as Doa was the lone good fighter among the two and Rin didn’t want her to spend all her stamina too early. At the same time, Rin is fundamentally helpful and will even step in when she sees a stranger in need. There are also sometimes situations of high distress and/or exhaustion, in which we see that Rin perhaps doesn’t have the energy left to think too hard about it and just wants to get out of the situation alive. Beware such situations, because she may just ask her bodyguard to kill your whole entire group. She also adheres to what most characters who are halfway decent people adhere to, which is that you don’t kill non-combatants, and believes in fairness in combat, monetary exchanges and services done for each other.

What does your character feel like they struggle with still? Where could they improve? This could be physically, mentally, emotionally, or otherwise.

Right now, Rin is at a point where that is a bit hard to figure out! She’s finished her revenge quest, and most of her desires and uncertainties pertained to that. However, she will now need to figure out how to move forward in her life. My thought process was that she followed the fox to Folkmore for this exact reason, so she can have more time and input to figure out what she actually wants out of life, and how she wants to conduct herself in the future. Early on in the manga, she states that she feels that sometimes things happen before she’s ready for it, and I think that sentiment would apply nicely here.

What would your character sacrifice to get what they want or to reach their potential? What have they sacrificed already?

Rin has already sacrificed her dignity, reputation, her father’s school’s principles and nearly her life to get things she wants on various occasions. If the expected payoff is good enough, no telling what lengths she’ll go to. In her very first interaction with Manji, when he asks her to prove her resolve, she starts undressing and tells him he can do with her what he wants (it backfires HARD). When pursuing Anotsu to Kaga, she has a fake c-section scar cut into her belly so she can pass as someone else to illegally pass the checkpoint out of the Edo domain, on threat of beheading, should she be found out.

What is a time where your character failed drastically at something and how did it impact them, what did they do about it?

Well, she spent about thirty standard manga volumes trying to get her revenge and failed at it numerous times; whether it was because of uncertainty, because of mercy or because her entire quest got derailed by her bodyguard being stuck in a horrible murder dungeon. In the end, she always got back on track and kept trying. She did get more deliberate in how she handled her uncertainty, over time; while at first, she was surprised when met with a new fact or point of view, she reached a point where she made peace with the fact that she didn’t know everything there is to know yet, and decided to postpone her revenge until she felt more certain about it. She told Anotsu as much; but nevertheless, she promised to eventually kill him.

★ Player Information ★

Player Name: Val
Pronouns: she/they
Are you over 18?: lmao. yes
Contact(s): honeyfoot, honeyfoot on discord
Who Invited You?: Fiona!
Current Characters: N/A
Permissions: Here. It’s for another game, but has the relevant info.
Writing Samples: TDM: detention with Makie
TDM: Detention with Mizu
TDM: snowy confusion with Manabu