IMEEJI: Application

[iridascent]

Character name: Makishima Yuusuke

Character canon: Yowamushi Pedal

Canon summary:

Makishima was born to a rich family, growing up with an older brother and a younger sister. At some point in his youth (it’s never stated exactly when), he picked up bike racing as a sport. When he started out, he wasn’t that great at it; he was always awkward, not sociable, and people found him a little creepy. But he wanted to ride with others, and when he was deemed to be weaker than the rest of the team in his first year in high school, he took it on himself to develop his own style of riding; specifically, his style of climbing, which is a form of dancing that only he can do because of his abnormally long limbs.

He honed that skill, got to be on the team for his second year’s Inter-High race, and met Toudou from Hakone on the way. They started a rivalry of climbers, and started counting their victories to compete in numbers with one another. In his third year, he promised to settle the score at the Inter-High. In that year, he also took first-year Onoda (the protagonist) under his wing, and started training him to climb.

He takes on Toudou in the Inter-High, and Toudou beats him for taking the peak of the mountain in their race in day one of three. His team, Sohoku, eventually takes the Inter-High as a whole, and Makishima goes to England after he graduates early to study and work in fashion with his brother.

Character in canon:

Makishima is, first and foremost, very weird. He dyes his hair an iridescent green that shines red in the light, he wears absolutely abhorrent fashion (which he thinks is great), and his personality in general tends to be very off-putting as a first impression. He’s pessimistic, he has a hard time relating to other people, and he’s very bad at small talk and things to that effect. But once the surface has been broken, and the pessimism challenged with good results, Makishima is actually a fairly pleasant and gentle person.

Since he’s always had a hard time relating to people, but has always wanted to, this has cultivated that pessimism in him. He’s quick to think that things are going to go badly, focuses very hard on all those times that he’s right in those assumptions, and sticks to his guns even in the face of blinding optimism of his peers. However, this doesn’t mean that he wants things to be this way. He’s shown multiple times in canon to be excited and ecstatic to have those expectations shattered. He wants to be proven wrong. It’s that desire that keeps him clinging onto hard circumstances, that kept him from quitting racing altogether when his upperclassmen judged him harshly. His desire to see things be better makes him resilient in the face of darkness.

But he always does better when there are friends involved to bring him out of it. Makishima’s faith in his friends is strong, once they’ve proved themselves to him, is unbreakable. He’s slow to admit to it, and needs to work through his low point before he hits it, but he’s always the one who’s most steadfast in his opinion of his friends by the end of the situation. For example, in day two of the Inter-High in his third year, their third-year sprinter, Tadokoro, is dealing with weakness due to the heat stroke he suffered the day before. Onoda decides that he’s going to go to the back of the race to draft him (a technique in racing that lets the rider in front take all the wind resistance and let the riders behind them rest their legs) and Makishima tries to fight him on it because Tadokoro told him to leave him behind. But eventually, he relents, because he knows that if Onoda says he’s going to do something, he gets it done. He shows the same faith in Onoda the day before when a crash in the race puts Onoda in last place, and he tells Hakone’s team that he’ll be able to go race Toudou to the top of the mountain they’re climbing in three minutes, which is how much longer he expects Onoda to take to get around 100 racers between the him and his team. He’s rewarded both times.

Despite his surface personality being very thick with negativity, Makishima does have a tendency to get very fired up in moments of competition; particularly when he’s climbing in a race, and especially with Toudou. He even drops calling him by his last name in the final stretch of a climb, going from hardly talking to shouting Toudou’s given name, Jinpachi. Competition gets him worked up, and when he’s worked up, he talks more freely. He’s truly most comfortable when he’s climbing.

That’s not to say that he doesn’t like himself, however. He’s very comfortable in who he is, but that creates a deeper rift between him and strangers. He doesn’t fit many people’s definitions of “normal,” and tends to bend the rules on those norms at every chance he gets. He wears weird fashions, has his hair grown long and strangely-colored, he’s open about his love for gravure, and talks freely about how hard it is to talk to people. He doesn’t have any problem with himself; he just assumes other people do, and he’s rarely proven wrong. He finds whatever he thinks is pleasing and sticks to it, be it his questionable clothes or adopting a speech pattern from a television show because thinks it sounds cool to say “sho” at the end of every sentence.

As for how he responds to pressure, it depends on the situation. At first, he’s very likely to act like he’s going to give in. His pessimism takes control, and he wallows in it for a while. But after some time, Makishima can generally pull himself through, and he does it a little quicker if he’s got someone there with him to help. Losing the people around him would be easily the quickest way to break him. Makishima doesn’t like to be alone, and to lose the people he actually has would be the most devastating blow to him. In other situations, he’s likely to put his strategic mind to use once he’s been pulled out of his initial funk, and find a way to power through.

Character in Imeeji:

For the most part, Makishima’s patterns are based out of his core personality. He’s drawn to strange things by nature, and is alone because of that. He wants to be around friends by nature as well, and his pessimistic attitude is born from that. Amnesia is most likely to reduce him to that state. Makishima should still be strange, still be drawn to the weird and thought-provoking, and still be unable to figure out how to socialize.

His attitude is going to take some time to come out of; since he won’t have any memories, it’ll take him getting interested in someone (or them getting interested in him) for him to start to attach himself to a person. Once he does, he’ll be able to grow into a little bit more of a sociable person. The first little while will be rough for him, though. If he ends up in a trauma game earlier rather than later, he’s more like to try to reach out to those around him, both for self-preservation and out of his own concern.

Once he’s made his friends, he’ll still have that unwavering faith in them. Between being proven wrong and being endeared to others in and out of his unit through the trauma they’ll endure, Makishima will wind up even more fiercely protective of the people he cares about. He’s likely to get more worked up about his friends if they’re what he has to focus on, instead of something like his racing. Once he gets used to things, the competitive nature of games is likely to get him fired up.

Since his core isn’t changing, his response to pressure is probably going to be very similar, depending on how hard of a problem he has to face first. As stated earlier, if he’s got someone with him, he’ll probably end up clinging to them. If it’s something that he has to do alone, that’s particularly traumatizing, he’s probably going to fall in on himself at first and need more coaxing out later on. Once he has a feeling of what it is to belong to the team, he’ll probably be able to handle pressure a lot more readily.

I feel that future is now is probably the best fit for his personality, with the way he tends to be standoffish and just weird. He’d be able to explore the world around him in a way that feels rewarding a lack of restrictions with the experimentation live, and if he gets into a group debate, he’ll be annoyingly hard to convince of anything but what his side is saying. Plus, with the powers that come with the unit, I think Makishima would end up delving into his curiosity more even if he does get so traumatized he can’t reach out, making for plenty of good hooks to keep him interesting. He isn’t starting out the mad scientist, but he could eventually end up there with the natural encouragement the unit gives him.

In the same vein, I also like WILD CITY for him. Their dorm decorated horribly, which he would probably hate at first and then love later; their clothes would be fun to work with style-wise for him; he actually has an animal motif in canon, a spider for his climbing style; and the lives would be more comfortable for him and would promote his love of fashion once more. His video traits would also be hilarious to try to write him doing, since he’d be aware he was supposed to be acting.

However, I have a hard time seeing him in units like pep!pep!, ✩ZRAEL, and avante en garde. In those particular units, he’d feel too much like he’s forcing himself. He’s comfortable with his strangeness, and these units want something from him that he isn’t at his core. He’d hate to be acting that way, and he’d probably throw walls up and let people in much less if he were in a group where he felt like he couldn’t belong no matter what. It would be harder for him to get out-of-unit CR as well, if he were trying to fake. He’d brush people off if he couldn’t be himself in front of them.

Unit Preferences:

Priority: future is now, WILD CITY

Acceptable: sensitIV, Taisho Roman Revolution, Heart Soldier Senshi, AlcheME!, BAD END=DEAD END

Do not place: pep!pep!, ✩ZRAEL, avante en garde

Voice Samples:

https://bakerstreet.dreamwidth.org/5262731.html?thread=2326561419#cmt2326561419

https://bakerstreet.dreamwidth.org/5262731.html?thread=2327850891#cmt2327850891