Application: Empatheias

[whiteknightmare]

⌈ PLAYER SECTION ⌉
Player: Kiki
Contact: kikibug13 at gmail or plurk
Age: 36
Current Characters: Regis Lucis Caelum


⌈ CHARACTER SECTION ⌉
Character: Suzaku Kururugi
Age: 18
Canon: Code Geass
Canon Point: The end of Zero Requiem

Background: Suzaku on the Code Geass wiki.

Personality:
Who Suzaku is, what he identifies as, and how he presents, all undergo great changes, and all of the stages / events that lead to those changes leave their marks on his personality, some to a greater degree than others.

As a child, he was proud, rough, aggressive and confident even to the point bullying. Friendship mellowed him a little, but then a great watershed came when, in a fateful night, Suzaku - aged ten - killed his father, the Prime Minister of Japan. That event was traumatizing enough as it was, but the aftermath left even worse scars on him. Because not only did he not get punished for the deed, the reasons why the father and son had fought in the first place were misrepresented grossly, to the point where he got respect for his stances and actions. So there was a ten-year-old growing into a teenager, who knows he is capable of horrible things and getting away with them.

He forges himself into the kind of person who will not do that kind of thing again. He wants very much to change the world, to make it right, but he sets on a path he believes will accomplish that by getting as high into the existing system as possible, and changing things from that position of power, without shedding blood or exerting violence. He trains his body and mind extensively, and his willpower is already impressive - and consistently puts others before himself.

When canon picks up, with Suzaku seventeen years old, he is a soldier who effaces himself as much as possible, but has exceptional results - which get ignored, because he is one of a conquered minority. (It basically takes a mad scientist to give him a chance.) He also refuses to execute the order of shooting Lelouch, which was at the cost of his own life. (Nearly: he got saved by the bullet hitting his father's pocket watch within his uniform.)

Slowly, between reuniting with the same people who mellowed him out as a child (Lelouch and Lelouch's full sister, Nunnally), and a Princess taking him in, as her Knight and as somebody she greatly cares about, Suzaku begins to steady a little - until it all goes wrong, and Lelouch causes the death (in a particularly character-destroying way) of the Princess, which turns Suzaku many, many kinds of angry. Except his revenge is not (mostly) violent - no. His anger runs cold and calculated, after the initial reaction. He turns in his friend in to Lelouch's father, betraying him knowingly.

On the one hand, this gives him more reasons to hate himself, once the rage has faded some (and even more when he learns that it was not intentional on Lelouch's part). On the other hand, it helps further his goals of rising up within the system. Reinforcing the wonderful impression that doing wrong gets him praised, rather than punished.

The next big event which changes Suzaku rather greatly is the unintentional turn events where he sets out an incredibly destructive and lethal bomb on Tokyo, killing 10 million people immediately (the total count later goes up to 25 million) - seemingly including Nunnally. If there was any part of himself that he did not hate before that, it's completely gone at this point.

So the teenaged soldier who refused to kill a friend, who paused in pursuing a dangerous enemy to catch a woman falling from a high floor, who tried and tried and tried to do what was right? Ends up so bloodstained that no human being should have to carry that kind of weight. He can't make reparations for the lives he's taken and ruined. He can't even find escape by seeking death, because he has a very strong compulsion to live - the compulsion (Geass) which resulted in him shooting the bomb, in fact. He cannot resist it.

It all ends up in him reexamining a lot about himself. Combined with an intense experience in a spiritual world, he finally joins with Lelouch in Lelouch's plan to change the world for the better.

By his canon point, he is 'officially' dead, always wearing a mask and voice modifier, and - as the last step in the plan the two of them devise, he has just stabbed his best friend with a big sword, remaining guard to Nunnally with the empty, symbolic identity of 'Zero.'

All of these events are part of what his personality is, at that point. Because Suzaku doesn't shed aspects of himself - he suppresses them, as the hits keep coming and he needs to keep going. In the end, there is little that actually brings joy to him, the pleasure and satisfaction of the plans working and the world getting rebuilt better ending up not much against all the pain that he's constantly in. He honestly and profoundly hates himself, because his moral compass has never not been true, even if his actions have been against its rulings. And he grieves, all the time, for lives that he has taken or has not been able to stop the destruction of. There are two people who have been fully aware of the full scope of his choices - Lelouch, and the witch who gave Lelouch his power, C.C. (an immortal - another one who wishes for death but cannot die), and one of them has been killed by his own hand.

While he starts canon as wanting to work from within the system to change it, by the end his faith in systems is pretty thoroughly destroyed, while his treatment of people goes from accepting, to harsh, to very tolerant and understanding. All traces of his pride have been burned through, and he knows that people make mistakes, and all of them deserve more forgiveness than he does.

While all this churns inside him, what he presents to others - other than Lelouch and C.C., and possibly Nunnally - is a quiet, mild-mannered almost-nineteen-years-old. He doesn't seem particularly happy at any given time, and while there are hints that he gets angry / has a temper, he is very fast to turn that anger towards himself, generally, so there are very few outbursts. He will be very fast to come to anyone's aid, though, the faster the more dangerous the situation is, and in a quiet way attempt to atone for ills he has done in a different world.

Abilities:
Suzaku doesn't have any superhuman abilities, but his physical are peak. He is very strong and extremely fast, to the point where it almost defies belief. (He can outrun a camera-controlled machine gun shooting at him, for example, and have precise reactions out in fractions of a second in complicated situations.) He has reasonable mastery of kendo, and very good handle on both hand-to-hand combat (beyond kendo) and any sort of weapon.

His exceptional skill at controlling Knightmare Frames (big mechas) is utterly useless in the context, but he is one of the top two or three, in canon. (Kallen and Xingke being the other two.)

Another special characteristic is his willpower. It is incredible, to the point where he takes his Geass - the command to live - and uses its effects to aid him in battle, instead of only passively obeying it.

He also has shown an ability to recognize people who are able to grant Geass, such as C.C. and V.V. (Another useless one in Empatheias, possibly, but still.)

Alignment: Elios. One of his defining traits is deep and abiding hatred for himself (including addressed within his canon) so the goal will be to shift that to love.

Other: None just now.


⌈ SAMPLE SECTION ⌉

General Sample: Longer thread if you will brave InsaneJournal for reading, or Suzaku and Lelouch in the TDM.

Emotion Sample: Gravity increase on the TDM.


Questions: None right now!