upcycled app

[shortforever]

Name: Maple
Age: 34
Contact Info: Maple#0822 on Discord or husbando

Character: Chuuya Nakahara
Canon: Bungo Stray Dogs
Canon Point: Near the end of episode 28 of the anime. (Episodes 25-28 cover the content of the novel '15'.)
CRAU, Canon AU: Nope! He's canon
Character Age: 15

Why do you think they can settle in a horror setting if they're under 18?: He's lived on the streets since age 7 and has murdered people before. Also he's got a godly being shoved in his body and can handle the stress of that. His life is already bordering on horror, he'll be fine.

Canon Abilities/Powers: Chuuya's ability is called 'For the Tainted Sorrow', and it lets him control the gravity of anything he touches. The object he's manipulating doesn't have to keep touching him after that first touch. As long as it has touched him, he can manipulate its gravity. He can also manipulate his own gravity at will.

It seems like a straightforward power, but what makes it dangerous is how creative he's gotten with it. For example, as long as he can see the attack coming and is prepared to use his ability, nothing can actually hurt him. If someone tries to shoot him, he can stop the bullets and flip them around and 'shoot' them back at the person. If someone tries to stab him, he can make them float up in the air. He can turn even pillows and leaves into deadly objects by throwing them with enough gravity in the right direction. And since his power comes from a god, it seems like the only limits to this power is 'what Chuuya's body can physically take before falling apart' and 'imagination'.

The key weakness to this is that it's not an 'always on' power. Chuuya has to be conscious and aware of what is going on, and think of what he needs to do in order to do it. (In canon, for example, someone nearly kills him via stabbing by putting Chuuya off his guard and hitting him in his blind spot, so he didn't know he was in danger.) What's more, if his concentration breaks, he loses control of the objects he had been manipulating and will need to re-touch them to affect their gravity again.

Chuuya also has a second power called 'Corruption', which is basically where he lets Arahabaki have control of his body and Destroy Everything. Like, in this form, Chuuya can make black holes. And since Arahabaki is in control, he has no impulse control and attacks both friend and foe. It's so dangerous that Chuuya refuses to use it unless Dazai (a power nullifier) is right there to bring him back from it. But I expect this part of his powers to be nerfed, and even if it's not, Chuuya isn't aware of 'Corruption' at the canon point I'm taking him from.

What is their greatest negative emotion towards an object, situation, or person in their past?: Chuuya has always had a short temper and a tendency towards violence, so he's got plenty of negative emotions to go by. But his hate for Dazai is probably the greatest one.

Chuuya hates Dazai. He fucking hates Dazai with every fiber of his being. Chuuya at every canon point hates Dazai (don't listen to shippers, they like the rivalshipping), but this Chuuya at this particular canon point hates Dazai in a rather visceral way, because the memories of what Dazai did are very fresh in his mind.

And what did Dazai do, exactly?

Well, Chuuya is a very powerful ability-user. Most ability-users tend to fill a niche with their ability, and they have to get creative to make it work. For example, one ability-user in canon has the ability of 'is immune to lemon-shaped bombs'. So he made a whole persona around using lemon-shaped bombs for his evil acts, because he is insane and blowing people up while being immune to those explosions is his thing. Most abilities in canon are like that though, they're very useful in very specific situations and are marginally useful otherwise.

But not Chuuya's. No, Chuuya's is so all-encompassing that he's OP in a canon where ANY ability-user is considered OP. And Dazai immediately saw that and went 'him. I want him. He's my plaything now.' So Dazai manipulated all of Chuuya's friends into thinking that Chuuya was going to betray them and sell them into child slavery, so said friends backstabbed him and tried to kill him before he could betray them. And then, when Chuuya was bleeding out and had nobody to turn to, Dazai showed up like "oh, looks like you need a hand. :) how about you join the mafia? :)"

Chuuya realized exactly what Dazai was doing about five minutes too late to do anything about it. And he hates Dazai for it. Chuuya is loyal to a fault, and he had no intention of betraying his friends. So being betrayed by them when he would literally do anything for them, that hurt. And knowing exactly who did it and that Chuuya could do absolutely nothing in retaliation, it burns Chuuya. It fills him with so much anger that his already-short temper is pushed to the limits.

But it's hard too, because Dazai is someone who understands Chuuya. Chuuya has a complicated past, and only Dazai seemed to see him as 'Chuuya' as opposed to 'a powerful ability-user' or 'Arahabaki'. Even his friends who betrayed him, they were largely using him as protection. (Chuuya knew they were using him, but he didn't do anything about it because he's loyal to a fault.) And before that utter betrayal, Chuuya had a kind of budding friendship/rivalry with Dazai. But then Dazai went and ruined everything and Chuuya is a teenager and doesn't know how to handle all of this. He hates Dazai, but he understands Dazai, and he trusts Dazai to a certain extent.

It's complicated. Very complicated. But that's his greatest negative emotion: the sheer rage and anger over how Dazai did him dirty and made him lose all his friends. And he's vindictive enough to hold onto that anger for a long, long time.

I know this is a very Dazai-centric answer, and I promise there's more to him than just his relationship with Dazai. It's just that this particular negative experience happened recently and is a cornerstone of his character, so I had to talk about it.

How aware are they of this negative emotion, and how do they act on it in canon?: He is absolutely aware of this negative emotion. This incident happened very recently at his canon point (like, within the last 24 hours recent) so the pain is very fresh and new. He does have plans to murder the shit out of Dazai for it at some point, but he hasn't done anything yet. (And spoilers: he never does kill Dazai, but they spend the next seven years antagonizing each other. It is exactly as unhealthy as it sounds.)

What is their greatest virtue?: Loyalty. Chuuya isn't one to trust easily, but once someone earns that trust then they have a true friend for life. If you are his trusted friend, he will back you up at any moment, no questions asked. If he feels responsible for someone in some way, then he will do everything in his power to protect that person and keep them alive and happy. (Important: one way to trigger his temper is to hurt someone he trusts or feels responsible for. You won't live long after that, but it will get him to act out.)

This comes from Chuuya's 'birth'. He was part of a government research program that was meant to give abilities to children who did not have abilities. At age 7, Chuuya was created by merging one of these children with Arahabaki. As such, he has no memories of his life before age 7. Also, his 'birth' leveled the research center, so he had no parents or adults he could rely on. He was left as a 7-year-old wandering the streets who had to feed and take care of himself.

The Sheep, a gang of orphans who run the streets and look out for each other, found Chuuya and took him in. They were the only ones who were kind to him, everyone else ignored him and left him to die on the streets. (Nobody knew that Chuuya was from the government research program, since the building got leveled and everyone died.) They fed him, and they gave him a home. That rare kindness in a world that is very unkind to those less fortunate is what bred that sense of loyalty in him.

Sometimes it goes to unhealthy lengths, such as when Chuuya ignored the signs that the Sheep were taking advantage of him for his ability in the name of "well, they're my family, I'd do anything for them so it's okay." And at points after the canon point I've pulled him from, he willingly subjects himself to being taken advantage of because of his loyalty to someone. But in general, that loyalty is a good thing. When you're basically an angry super-powered chihuahua, having someone holding the leash is actually a good thing.

How aware are they of their virtue, and how do they act on it in canon?: He's somewhat aware of it, especially the 'people are taking advantage of me but it's okay because they're my friends' part of it. Chuuya is surprisingly pessimistic, even about himself. But the better parts of that virtue are a bit harder for him to see, since he's not used to having nice things.

Items: 1 shitty hat, the clothes he's wearing



Samples: TDM threads!

Also, another thread! Important context for that thread: This was 4 weeks into a murdergame, Akira was his closest CR there, and Chuuya had just murdered someone and had gotten discovered at trial and just barely avoided being voted for death. I mention this because if it was someone he had just met, he wouldn't have been nearly as open about his feelings with them. (I wanted to link an example of how he opens up for people he implicitly trusts, as well as an example of the lengths he will go to protect people he sees as 'his'.)


Special Notes: SO. ARAHABAKI.

Arahabaki is within Chuuya. In canon, he says it's 'asleep' and that he doesn't want to go poking it and waking it up. Arahabaki is literally chaos and doesn't really have a personality of its own, it just exists to cause mayhem. But it's There and Chuuya is generally aware of it, and since it's a god I imagine Chuuya will ping as vaguely god-like. (Later he becomes able to wake Arahabaki up and let Arahabaki take control of his body, but Chuuya doesn't have that power at the canon point I'm pulling him from.)

Also I welcome any and all nerfs to Chuuya's powers. I don't aim to powergame and his power can be ridiculously OP. I have no plans to have him use Corruption (especially since he doesn't know about it at his canon point), and I can limit his gravity-shenanigans to mostly shenanigans. Outside of fights he mostly uses it to walk on walls and fly places and to troll people. 15-year-old Chuuya is slightly less murder-happy than his older self.

Comments

revisions (working on this still)

[shortforever]

Negative emotion awareness:

Chuuya's hatred of Dazai continues on for years after his canon point. Even though he and Dazai have to work together constantly, to the point of being called 'Double Black' because of how well their abilities work together, Chuuya still hangs onto that hate. Every instance of them working together in the mafia is met with a begrudging tolerance at best and outright antagonism at worst. Any time Chuuya is called on to work with Dazai specifically, he makes his dislike of the arrangement known. He complains loudly, yells at Dazai every chance he gets, and disregards a lot of what Dazai says. This antagonism is the hallmark of their three years in the mafia, and is absolutely a result of Chuuya's stubborn refusal to let go of the pain from when Dazai manipulated him at age 15.

When Dazai leaves the mafia at age 18, it gets even worse. Now that they're on different sides in this conflict for Yokohama, Chuuya does not hold back. He's shown taunting Dazai and punching him more than once, and he probably would have continued beating the shit out of Dazai if Dazai hadn't distracted him with information. And when they had to work again after four years of being enemies, they largely fell back into the 'antagonistic to each other but somewhat cooperative' arrangement they had in the past. Cooperation with Dazai is only tolerable in so far as it's needed to meet his other goals, such as protecting the people he's loyal to, which is why he cooperates during the Guild arc.

This kind of behavior is standard for Chuuya too, despite Dazai getting an extra-special dose of his hatred. If someone has wronged him or made him mad, he doesn't forget that anger. He gets petty and vindictive, and if it hits his temper right he will lash out immediately and violently. Ranpo also managed to hit his temper like this once, and he nearly got punched in the face with a gravity-assisted fist for it. Chuuya is just really bad at controlling his temper and holds onto his grudges.


virtue awareness:

Chuuya's loyalty is why Chuuya has made it so far in the mafia. He protects his own, even at a great cost to himself. Since his power is so ridiculously strong, he throws himself right into the thick of danger to pull his friends and allies out of trouble and protect them from harm. This is alluded to in the '15' section of the anime: two other teens ask Chuuya to help their mutual friends who have been captured, and until Dazai steps in to 'solve' the problem Chuuya sounds like he is ready to run right in to an enemy hideout and rescue those friends. He knows he's practically indestructible when he uses his ability correctly, so he takes a very hands-on approach to protecting those he is loyal to.

Similarly, when he becomes an executive in the mafia, he takes his responsibility to his underlings seriously. In fact, they're less like 'underlings' and more of friends to him. Instead of giving instructions from a safe distance away, Chuuya is always in the thick of things, fighting alongside his subordinates. And when they die, he takes their deaths very personally, and makes sure to get retribution for their deaths. This is shown in the 'Dead Apple' movie, when he gets notice that several of his men have been killed and he goes in-person to extract revenge from the person who killed them.

He stands by his loyalties, too. This is why he is still involved in the Port Mafia, even after he got what he wanted from them: the current boss, Mori, impressed him enough to earn his loyalty. And once his loyalty is earned, it is very hard to lose. Even being blatantly taken advantage of, as he was with the gang he was in during '15', isn't enough to get him to give up on that loyalty. He has to be literally backstabbed and cast out- as happened in '15'- before his loyalty is broken.