Bio be here~
Character name: Sakata Gintoki
Character series: Gintama
Character Age: 27
Student or teacher? Teacher. Unfortunately for his students.
Classes Taught: 1st Year Social Studies (Ancient Japan); Homeroom 3-C
Living Arrangements: Teacher's Apartment 301
Background: [Link to canon background be here ♥]
Gintoki has always been a very mysterious person though his history is actually surprisingly normal, to a certain point. He was born to two parents who were poor but getting by, and they raised their son decently. He might not have always had as much to eat as he wanted, but was never hungry; he might not have had the best toys, but he was never bored. His father worked doing odd jobs, whatever needed doing around their town. He’d try anything once. His mother was a washerwoman. Gintoki was a curious but lazy brat who’d investigate everything he could get his chubby little hands on and then promptly take a nap with/on/around/in it. Most days, the only way to get him up for school on time was to wave a piece of candy under his nose or something. Still, if there was something that perked his interest, Gin would diligently work to understand it in a manner that often bemused or outright unnerved those who knew his lazy habits.
The interesting part of his life didn’t occur until he was nearly thirteen. The Sakata family was on their way home from an innocent, regular family picnic on a nice spring day. The air was crisp without being too cool, the sun was sweetly bright without being glaringly harsh, and the wind was just playful enough to tease their hair and clothes as they walked back towards their tiny apartment. All three were suitably content (although the look of disinterest on young Gintoki’s face would have stated otherwise). However, as they wound their way through the darkening streets and alleys of the bad side of town, they walked past a tavern filled with aggravated noise and the signs of an obvious scuffle. The family edged to the furthest side of the street. The bomb that some yakuza goon unleashed still caught them.
Both parents immediately shielded their beloved child and were killed right before Gin’s horrified, disbelieving eyes. He suffered some minor burn damage, mostly on his head; a chance brush with some flaming debris set his hair alight and it burned before he rallied to put it out. When it grew back, it was shockingly grey - silver, really - and unnaturally curly. The doctors informed him it was due to extreme shock.
(Gin still occasionally wonders just what kind of ‘shock’ would turn him into some European hair-metal delinquent lookalike. A natural perm is bad enough, but why the hell did it have to be freaking silver?!)
He had no other living relatives, both his parents being only children with dead parents of his own. However, a man came across him as he wandered through a half-wrecked town, dispassionately looting houses for necessities, seemingly unfazed by the glaring faces of the dead. When asked what he was doing, Gintoki shrugged and said ‘Surviving,’ explaining that the corpses clearly didn’t need what he was taking, and that he was only taking enough to stay alive himself. The man asked him if that seemed right to him; Gin shrugged again and replied that it didn’t matter if it was right to the world, it was necessary for him, and therefore it was right to him. The stranger appeared to ponder this for a while, then asked if he needed a place to live. Gin didn’t see much choice other than going with him. He seemed nice enough, at least.
The man turned out to be a teacher at a boys’ orphanage. He was wise and infinitely kind, quietly commanding the respect and devotion of all the children under his care. He had a finely-honed sense of justice and chivalry, something he taught to the boys in his own version of the ancient samurai code. Gintoki still follows his teachings to this day, although some would argue that he has warped them for his own taste.
Once the boys reached high school age they had to leave the orphanage and make their own way in the world. Gintoki and his group of friends found themselves dayjobs, but they were all youths of an unusually politically-activated bent. They joined protest vociferous protest groups and lobbyist campaigns, fighting for who they saw as the undermined, the shunted-off, the downtrodden. Of course, some of them were more intent than others, especially as they tended to get caught in bloody riots. Frequently one or more of their number were jailed. Gintoki always managed to escape the clutches of the police, and though his name became synonymous with rebellious protest action in his part of the country, there was never any evidence to pin him down. He became known in certain circles as the ‘White Ghost’, or even ‘White Demon’.
He took no particular pride in this nickname or the manner in which it applied to him.
After a while, Gin found that he was growing increasingly weary of losing his friends and comrades to either the justice of the law, or even - in a couple of extreme cases - to actual death. One of his friends reached this conclusion before him, and the last Gin saw of him was to bid him goodbye and good luck with his dream to become an astronaut. That point made him take a long hard look at his life and wonder what good he was really accomplishing in this manner. Sure, running around freeing animals from testing laboratories or hijacking a wrecking team about to destroy a much-loved building was pretty exciting, but these things still kept happening. It was a battle worth fighting that he could never win. Or maybe…maybe he just wasn’t fighting it the right way.
So it was that at nearly twenty years of age Sakata Gintoki studied up to receive his high school equivalency. With a bored, almost martyred expression he sat through college to earn his right to be a high school teacher. His former ‘comrades’ regarded this with a kind of amused, horrified disbelief. What the hell had happened? Was this really the Gintoki - the White Demon - they all knew and near-worshipped? Whenever he was asked about his suddenly change of heart, Gin would just yawn and say that at least this job got him home in time to watch his soap opera reruns at four, as if that was his most important care in the world. It was almost as if he’d totally lost his will to fight against all that was wrong in Japan. They couldn’t understand it at all.
Somebody did, though. A year or so ago a man named Julian or Julius or Jack or whatever dropped by Gin’s small, dishevelled home with a strange smile and way too much mascara. It seemed he’d taken note of what Gin’s graduated students had been up to since they’d left their teacher’s tender care. Evidentially the results had impressed him (as well they should - Oogushi-kun was shaping up to being one of Japan’s finest young democratically-minded politicians, and several more students had joined up for various charitably institutions, seemingly determined to better the world in whatever way they could) because Gintoki suddenly found himself with a job offer he couldn’t refuse. The chance to mould, as this guy put it, ‘the brightest stars on Earth’ (or something equally lame like that, anyway) was a pretty big draw.
But Gin says he went along for the significant pay increase.
Personality: Ask pretty much anybody who knows Gin and they’ll all tell you the same thing: “Nobody every knows what that guy is thinking.” That’s fairly accurate. Most of the time Gin doesn’t know what he’s thinking, primarily because he isn’t. Somehow he automatically reacts in just the way he wants to in order to achieve his Prime Directive.
He refuses to put into so many words exactly what that is, but basically it boils down to this: Protect those he cares about (almost everyone), kick some bad-guy ass (not necessarily in a literal fashion, he just likes to Stick It To The Man), and generally lead a carefree life (one with candy and soap operas and shounen manga). This is the precept Gin operates on, ordered by the chivalristic code of honour he learned as a youth and framed by his own experiences. He’s a man with a good heart who never overtly shows it. At times he can be inanely cowardly (don’t ask him about that one time with the camping trip and the ghost stories, please and thank you) and frequently he’s just plain bizarre (he still refuses to explain his obsession with the wooden sword he carries around like he’s married to the damn thing, and some of his ‘Zen’ quotes seem to come from nowhere) but he’s weirdly charismatic, a bit thoughtful (though it’s hard to tell), and really does just…love people.
All that aside, Gin can be frighteningly intense when the situation calls for it. He’s lazy and lackadaisical, but if you mess with him or one of the people he considers to be ‘under his protection’, he’ll make certain you regret it. And know what you did, exactly, to earn his righteous wrath. That fact that his Divine Judgement is frequently laden with misquotes or flat-out bizarre references to random anime or stupid tv shows somehow just makes it scarier. Nobody’s quite sure if he does that on purpose.
He’s loyal, though, and adopts a ‘crazy [male relative of appropriate age]’ attitude to anybody he takes a liking to. Don’t ask for proof of his affection for you. If you have it, you’ll know it’s there, and that’s why you’re by his side in the first place.