Nakazawa Roka RP application
OOC
alias: herongale
timezone: EST/ Detroit, Michigan timezone
chat: "herongale" at plurk is best; AIM is "leuchkaferchen"; gchat available on request; email is herongale AT hotmail DOT com
character journal: hey_you_loser
IC
name: Nakazawa Roka
age: 20
position & team: assistant coach, Bijou Dai Sayama
koushien dream email: yes_you_loser@koushiendream.net
history:
Once upon a time, a Japanese man who lived in Brazil married a half-Japanese, half-European woman, and together they had two children, named Roka and Riou, respectively. Riou was named after Rio de Janeiro, the capital (and second largest city) of Brazil, whereas Roka was named after some place no one has ever heard of, Cabo da Roca, which is a romantic cape in Portugal and which happens to be the westernmost point of Europe, and which is presumably the place where he was conceived during his parent's honeymoon. In some ways, this tells you everything you need to know about his early family life.
Somehow or another, he and his family ended up in Japan after spending his earliest years in Brazil. He grew up bilingual, so did not have problems with the language, and looked Japanese, which helped him to fit in, but during his early years in Japan, every time he opened his mouth he spoke with a foreign accent, which eventually faded in time. It was not too easy for him to make friends, since his accent made him somewhat reticent to speak at first-- taciturn, which in a child just seems like gloominess and grumpiness, but he did eventually make a friend in middle school, the irrepressible Tajima-lookalike, Takii. They played together on their middle school baseball team, and had planned on going to high school together at Tosei, which was pretty much Takii's favorite school. This plan crumbled when Takii injured his shoulder during the third year of middle school, and Takii went to Bijou, leaving Roka to play baseball without his Important Baseball Friend (an obligatory item for all emo Oofuri characters, it seems).
Worse for Roka, he soon learned that Takii had joined the baseball club at Bijou as a manager, which made Roka realize that Takii had specifically not gone to Tosei in order to avoid being around him. They ran into each other during the summer of their first year in high school, both of them meeting up in the stands at one of the games, and made a promise to meet again in their third year in the tournament, team versus team. This was a nice promise and all, but again fate threw a wrench in the works since Tosei's team lost in the first round during Roka's third year, and their teams never came up against each other at all.
Roka felt himself responsible for that loss, and was traumatized to the point of wanting to quit baseball for good (and he still has PTSD dreams about it, you know, because BASEBALL IS VERY SERIOUS BUSINESS), but because of his promise (and ongoing friendship with Takii), went to go see Bijou's game in the quarter-finals. In another bit of bad luck, that also just happened to be where Bijou's winning streak ended, and so Roka ended up seeing the end of Takii's final summer in high school baseball as well. After the game they met up once more, and Takii impulsively asked Roka to join him coaching the Bijou team. Whatever plans for his future Roka might have had, he pretty much changed them straightaway-- he had already given all his baseball equipment to Riou, but now because of Takii's request, was headed back into the baseball world-- this time as an assistant coach. To this end, he enrolled at the college division of Bijou, where he studies to this day.
Because of Kazuki, his kohai from his days playing at Tosei, and Riou, his brother, who is currently enrolled at Tosei as a freshman, he still retains fairly close ties to his old high school. It is intimated from one of his discussions with Kazu that he has spent some time helping out his former team, which is one reason why Kazu later was willing to pay him back by giving him detailed information about his own recent loss against Nishiura, an upstart team from nowhere with a fluky first-round victory, when otherwise Kazu would not have been willing to talk about it.
I think it is important to put all of these details on record, despite them being simple reiterations of events from the manga, because from a purely biographical standpoint, they really paint a picture of Roka as a devoted friend, and more importantly, as a kind of nice guy.
He is not a nice guy.
personality:
If Roka were to have an explicit baseball philosophy, it would almost certainly be the well-known axiom "if you're not cheating, you're not trying," followed up closely by a similarly well-known axiom, "it's not cheating if you don't get caught."
Roka is a very passionate, driven person, highly competitive and goal-oriented. Unfortunately, he has experienced several crushing blows to his psyche, as well as fairly regular bouts of bitter disappointment, and has come to the conclusion that life is not fair, that failure is in many ways inevitable, and that most of the rest of the baseball world is full of rosy-eyed idealists. He is full of disdain for all the romanticism and supposed nobility associated with baseball, and is frustrated by the way that people remain blind to the dark and unpleasant realities that underpin the sport.
First off, he has come to the unshakable conviction that pain is inevitable, and that injuries are simply a part of the game-- and that even with the best efforts injuries can happen to the most promising players, and lay bare the commonly accepted lie that hard work and dedication are a sure pathway to success... anyone, at any time, is in danger of having his baseball dreams crushed, and the way this happens in general is so arbitrary and unfair that he has come to the conclusion that since anyone can become injured, everyone should damn well be prepared to. He considers it one of the built-in risks of the sport, and therefore finds nothing wrong in encouraging a rough style of play that would tend to foster and encourage injuries... if it can happen to anyone, it really shouldn't matter any time it does. Besides, the injuries in baseball tend to be injuries only in the sense that they end baseball careers; broken bones and torn ligaments from collision injuries are all things people can fully recover from, if by "fully recover" you mean "able to walk and function the way any non-sports player can."
I think in a lot of ways, this comes from a vendetta against the entire sport itself. He is resentful of what baseball did to his life, and to the life of his best friend, and bitterness has festered inside him for so long that he has almost entirely forgotten that baseball, at it's heart, is supposed to be fun.
He is also ridiculously protective, to the point of becoming verbally (and occasionally physically) abusive. The primary objects of his protective instinct are Takii, his best friend, and Riou, his little brother. But how the abusive drive manifests is very different for each of these people.
With Takii, he is never directly abusive. In fact, although he is sardonic and pessimistic with his old friend, he never has a negative thing to say either to or about him. I think in part this is because Takii knows the "old him," the Roka he used to be before all these bad things started happening, and because Takii is the one who refused to let him quit baseball after his crushing loss at Tosei. Although he would probably never admit it, Takii's endless optimism and effortless good nature inspire him, and although he has all these pretenses that baseball is unfair and everyone should be willing to pay the price, he feels like his friend has paid more than enough of a price, and so is willing to do anything-- anything, to help his friend find a happy future with baseball. Everything Roka does at Bijou in terms of recruiting players to cheat/play roughly and recklessly, to trying to seduce great pitchers like Haruna to come over... it is all for Takii's sake, to support his career as Bijou's long term coach, which would never be able to take root if Takii cannot establish a winning program at this baseball-focused school, where he is thought to be too young to be any good as a coach. The very unfairness of that whole "too young" assessment, and how it kept the best players from considering Bijou when formerly it was a "destination school" for baseball-- that all adds to his resentment, and his determination. He considers it manifestly unfair that his friend suffers from these sorts of prejudices, and I think that some of his early experiences being an outsider in Japan feed into this, since he knows first hand how insidious and underhanded such prejudice can be. Also, and probably most importantly, I believe there is a part of him that lives in hope, and so accordingly he has gambled his own future in baseball based on whether Takii succeeds or not.
With Riou, this protectiveness clearly translates into direct abuse. I don't believe he is especially physically abusive towards him; for instance, I don't believe he actually hits Riou or damages his belongings (much)... he is probably just a lot rougher than most older brothers would be, more into shoving and pushing and grabbing. But it's clear that his instincts are protective: all that roughness is about "toughening him up," so that Riou can survive and maybe even succeed in a game he considers hazardous to body and emotions. For similar reasons, this is why he calls Riou a loser and mocks him, and he lead Riou on to believe that Roka didn't want him at Bijou because he wasn't that good at baseball, when in reality it was because Riou wasn't that good at academics ( and it seems that Tosei is not exactly a school for brainiacs). Tosei seems to be a good fit for Riou, and so it is probable that Roka pressed him to go there instead... where the schooling wasn't tough, but the baseball was awesome, and where he still had a friend (Kazu) around who could look out for his aggravating little brother.
So honestly, Roka has complicated and pretty much unhealthy relationships with these two people, and they end up bringing out his worse, most rotten qualities. So sad.
Fortunately, we see that Roka is not that terrible of a guy, when it comes to people he has no protective instincts towards. With Kazu, for instance, he's got a buddy who can definitely give as good as he gets, and Kazu doesn't require any "toughening up" nor does he need someone to go to bat for him as a stealth cheating assassin, helping him win games. He's certainly not sweet with Kazu, but it's more of a teasing relationship than a bullying one (like he has with Riou), and although Kazu frequently annoys Roka with his irritating ~~morals~~, he is not working to set out to crush Kazu's dreams or anything. He just wants Kazu to stay the hell out of Roka's ways as he does his black knight thing elsewhere.
And even more fortunately, in the last interaction we see him having with Kurata at the clinic following Bijou's win over Nishiura (the win which fulfilled Takii's Best 8 goal and helped secure Takii's place as Bijou's long term coach)... well, he is pretty much totally a dick to Kurata during that entire exchance, but at the end of it, when Kurata threatens to go to Takii and tell Takii of what Roka has been up to, and Roka pretends he TOTALLY DOESN'T CARE what Takii thinks of him, Kurata somehow senses this IS TOTAL BULLSHIT and ends up deciding to keep Roka's secret, and requests instead that all Roka's bullying towards players cease. In return, Kurata intends to quit baseball.
We see that Kurata's declaration that he will quit has a profound effect on Roka. First Roka is all like, "You're not that valuable!" and is prepared to blow Kurata off, but then Roka flashes back to the time when Roka told Takii that he was going to quit baseball... and how Takii refused to let him quit, even though at that time, he too "was not that valuable." Roka sees himself in Kurata, and although it's not exactly clear what conclusions he comes to from that, I suspect that he might be in a period where he is rethinking some of his assumptions about what baseball is, and what his own relationship to baseball should be, and how he will feel about baseball in the future.
Right now, at this point in the game where Roka will be introduced, he's in something of a transition period-- but it is also a time of great importance in his life, because now he has to decide: does he change his ways and adhere to a more honorable way of playing/coaching, despite knowing the truth about the innate unfairness of baseball... or does he continue down the same dark path he's been pursuing for some time now, knowing that it will probably only get darker and more ruthless down the way?
So he's kind of distracted by all that Moral Dilemma Bullshit. This means he's probably even more grouchy and unpleasant than usual.
strengths & weaknesses:
As with my Haruna app, I went overboard on the personality section, so no way can I answer this properly since I pretty much already did. XD SO, briefly--
strengths: determination, ruthlessness, coldbloodedness, evil
weaknesses: having a heart despite all that, secretly still loving baseball
SAMPLES
[first post: locked to Riou only]
HEY LOSER ~~~~ :)
(Yes I mean you, LOSER)
I HEAR YOU ARE TALKING BULLSHIT ABOUT ME HERE ON THE INTERNET
WHY DON'T YOU FACE ME LIKE A MAN, NEXT TIME I'M HOME DOING LAUNDRY?
alias: herongale
timezone: EST/ Detroit, Michigan timezone
chat: "herongale" at plurk is best; AIM is "leuchkaferchen"; gchat available on request; email is herongale AT hotmail DOT com
character journal: hey_you_loser
IC
name: Nakazawa Roka
age: 20
position & team: assistant coach, Bijou Dai Sayama
koushien dream email: yes_you_loser@koushiendream.net
history:
Once upon a time, a Japanese man who lived in Brazil married a half-Japanese, half-European woman, and together they had two children, named Roka and Riou, respectively. Riou was named after Rio de Janeiro, the capital (and second largest city) of Brazil, whereas Roka was named after some place no one has ever heard of, Cabo da Roca, which is a romantic cape in Portugal and which happens to be the westernmost point of Europe, and which is presumably the place where he was conceived during his parent's honeymoon. In some ways, this tells you everything you need to know about his early family life.
Somehow or another, he and his family ended up in Japan after spending his earliest years in Brazil. He grew up bilingual, so did not have problems with the language, and looked Japanese, which helped him to fit in, but during his early years in Japan, every time he opened his mouth he spoke with a foreign accent, which eventually faded in time. It was not too easy for him to make friends, since his accent made him somewhat reticent to speak at first-- taciturn, which in a child just seems like gloominess and grumpiness, but he did eventually make a friend in middle school, the irrepressible Tajima-lookalike, Takii. They played together on their middle school baseball team, and had planned on going to high school together at Tosei, which was pretty much Takii's favorite school. This plan crumbled when Takii injured his shoulder during the third year of middle school, and Takii went to Bijou, leaving Roka to play baseball without his Important Baseball Friend (an obligatory item for all emo Oofuri characters, it seems).
Worse for Roka, he soon learned that Takii had joined the baseball club at Bijou as a manager, which made Roka realize that Takii had specifically not gone to Tosei in order to avoid being around him. They ran into each other during the summer of their first year in high school, both of them meeting up in the stands at one of the games, and made a promise to meet again in their third year in the tournament, team versus team. This was a nice promise and all, but again fate threw a wrench in the works since Tosei's team lost in the first round during Roka's third year, and their teams never came up against each other at all.
Roka felt himself responsible for that loss, and was traumatized to the point of wanting to quit baseball for good (and he still has PTSD dreams about it, you know, because BASEBALL IS VERY SERIOUS BUSINESS), but because of his promise (and ongoing friendship with Takii), went to go see Bijou's game in the quarter-finals. In another bit of bad luck, that also just happened to be where Bijou's winning streak ended, and so Roka ended up seeing the end of Takii's final summer in high school baseball as well. After the game they met up once more, and Takii impulsively asked Roka to join him coaching the Bijou team. Whatever plans for his future Roka might have had, he pretty much changed them straightaway-- he had already given all his baseball equipment to Riou, but now because of Takii's request, was headed back into the baseball world-- this time as an assistant coach. To this end, he enrolled at the college division of Bijou, where he studies to this day.
Because of Kazuki, his kohai from his days playing at Tosei, and Riou, his brother, who is currently enrolled at Tosei as a freshman, he still retains fairly close ties to his old high school. It is intimated from one of his discussions with Kazu that he has spent some time helping out his former team, which is one reason why Kazu later was willing to pay him back by giving him detailed information about his own recent loss against Nishiura, an upstart team from nowhere with a fluky first-round victory, when otherwise Kazu would not have been willing to talk about it.
I think it is important to put all of these details on record, despite them being simple reiterations of events from the manga, because from a purely biographical standpoint, they really paint a picture of Roka as a devoted friend, and more importantly, as a kind of nice guy.
He is not a nice guy.
personality:
If Roka were to have an explicit baseball philosophy, it would almost certainly be the well-known axiom "if you're not cheating, you're not trying," followed up closely by a similarly well-known axiom, "it's not cheating if you don't get caught."
Roka is a very passionate, driven person, highly competitive and goal-oriented. Unfortunately, he has experienced several crushing blows to his psyche, as well as fairly regular bouts of bitter disappointment, and has come to the conclusion that life is not fair, that failure is in many ways inevitable, and that most of the rest of the baseball world is full of rosy-eyed idealists. He is full of disdain for all the romanticism and supposed nobility associated with baseball, and is frustrated by the way that people remain blind to the dark and unpleasant realities that underpin the sport.
First off, he has come to the unshakable conviction that pain is inevitable, and that injuries are simply a part of the game-- and that even with the best efforts injuries can happen to the most promising players, and lay bare the commonly accepted lie that hard work and dedication are a sure pathway to success... anyone, at any time, is in danger of having his baseball dreams crushed, and the way this happens in general is so arbitrary and unfair that he has come to the conclusion that since anyone can become injured, everyone should damn well be prepared to. He considers it one of the built-in risks of the sport, and therefore finds nothing wrong in encouraging a rough style of play that would tend to foster and encourage injuries... if it can happen to anyone, it really shouldn't matter any time it does. Besides, the injuries in baseball tend to be injuries only in the sense that they end baseball careers; broken bones and torn ligaments from collision injuries are all things people can fully recover from, if by "fully recover" you mean "able to walk and function the way any non-sports player can."
I think in a lot of ways, this comes from a vendetta against the entire sport itself. He is resentful of what baseball did to his life, and to the life of his best friend, and bitterness has festered inside him for so long that he has almost entirely forgotten that baseball, at it's heart, is supposed to be fun.
He is also ridiculously protective, to the point of becoming verbally (and occasionally physically) abusive. The primary objects of his protective instinct are Takii, his best friend, and Riou, his little brother. But how the abusive drive manifests is very different for each of these people.
With Takii, he is never directly abusive. In fact, although he is sardonic and pessimistic with his old friend, he never has a negative thing to say either to or about him. I think in part this is because Takii knows the "old him," the Roka he used to be before all these bad things started happening, and because Takii is the one who refused to let him quit baseball after his crushing loss at Tosei. Although he would probably never admit it, Takii's endless optimism and effortless good nature inspire him, and although he has all these pretenses that baseball is unfair and everyone should be willing to pay the price, he feels like his friend has paid more than enough of a price, and so is willing to do anything-- anything, to help his friend find a happy future with baseball. Everything Roka does at Bijou in terms of recruiting players to cheat/play roughly and recklessly, to trying to seduce great pitchers like Haruna to come over... it is all for Takii's sake, to support his career as Bijou's long term coach, which would never be able to take root if Takii cannot establish a winning program at this baseball-focused school, where he is thought to be too young to be any good as a coach. The very unfairness of that whole "too young" assessment, and how it kept the best players from considering Bijou when formerly it was a "destination school" for baseball-- that all adds to his resentment, and his determination. He considers it manifestly unfair that his friend suffers from these sorts of prejudices, and I think that some of his early experiences being an outsider in Japan feed into this, since he knows first hand how insidious and underhanded such prejudice can be. Also, and probably most importantly, I believe there is a part of him that lives in hope, and so accordingly he has gambled his own future in baseball based on whether Takii succeeds or not.
With Riou, this protectiveness clearly translates into direct abuse. I don't believe he is especially physically abusive towards him; for instance, I don't believe he actually hits Riou or damages his belongings (much)... he is probably just a lot rougher than most older brothers would be, more into shoving and pushing and grabbing. But it's clear that his instincts are protective: all that roughness is about "toughening him up," so that Riou can survive and maybe even succeed in a game he considers hazardous to body and emotions. For similar reasons, this is why he calls Riou a loser and mocks him, and he lead Riou on to believe that Roka didn't want him at Bijou because he wasn't that good at baseball, when in reality it was because Riou wasn't that good at academics ( and it seems that Tosei is not exactly a school for brainiacs). Tosei seems to be a good fit for Riou, and so it is probable that Roka pressed him to go there instead... where the schooling wasn't tough, but the baseball was awesome, and where he still had a friend (Kazu) around who could look out for his aggravating little brother.
So honestly, Roka has complicated and pretty much unhealthy relationships with these two people, and they end up bringing out his worse, most rotten qualities. So sad.
Fortunately, we see that Roka is not that terrible of a guy, when it comes to people he has no protective instincts towards. With Kazu, for instance, he's got a buddy who can definitely give as good as he gets, and Kazu doesn't require any "toughening up" nor does he need someone to go to bat for him as a stealth cheating assassin, helping him win games. He's certainly not sweet with Kazu, but it's more of a teasing relationship than a bullying one (like he has with Riou), and although Kazu frequently annoys Roka with his irritating ~~morals~~, he is not working to set out to crush Kazu's dreams or anything. He just wants Kazu to stay the hell out of Roka's ways as he does his black knight thing elsewhere.
And even more fortunately, in the last interaction we see him having with Kurata at the clinic following Bijou's win over Nishiura (the win which fulfilled Takii's Best 8 goal and helped secure Takii's place as Bijou's long term coach)... well, he is pretty much totally a dick to Kurata during that entire exchance, but at the end of it, when Kurata threatens to go to Takii and tell Takii of what Roka has been up to, and Roka pretends he TOTALLY DOESN'T CARE what Takii thinks of him, Kurata somehow senses this IS TOTAL BULLSHIT and ends up deciding to keep Roka's secret, and requests instead that all Roka's bullying towards players cease. In return, Kurata intends to quit baseball.
We see that Kurata's declaration that he will quit has a profound effect on Roka. First Roka is all like, "You're not that valuable!" and is prepared to blow Kurata off, but then Roka flashes back to the time when Roka told Takii that he was going to quit baseball... and how Takii refused to let him quit, even though at that time, he too "was not that valuable." Roka sees himself in Kurata, and although it's not exactly clear what conclusions he comes to from that, I suspect that he might be in a period where he is rethinking some of his assumptions about what baseball is, and what his own relationship to baseball should be, and how he will feel about baseball in the future.
Right now, at this point in the game where Roka will be introduced, he's in something of a transition period-- but it is also a time of great importance in his life, because now he has to decide: does he change his ways and adhere to a more honorable way of playing/coaching, despite knowing the truth about the innate unfairness of baseball... or does he continue down the same dark path he's been pursuing for some time now, knowing that it will probably only get darker and more ruthless down the way?
So he's kind of distracted by all that Moral Dilemma Bullshit. This means he's probably even more grouchy and unpleasant than usual.
strengths & weaknesses:
As with my Haruna app, I went overboard on the personality section, so no way can I answer this properly since I pretty much already did. XD SO, briefly--
strengths: determination, ruthlessness, coldbloodedness, evil
weaknesses: having a heart despite all that, secretly still loving baseball
SAMPLES
[first post: locked to Riou only]
HEY LOSER ~~~~ :)
(Yes I mean you, LOSER)
I HEAR YOU ARE TALKING BULLSHIT ABOUT ME HERE ON THE INTERNET
WHY DON'T YOU FACE ME LIKE A MAN, NEXT TIME I'M HOME DOING LAUNDRY?