(( upbringing, familial/canon relationships, and lack thereof: part 1 ))
I hate you all, have another essay. D:
I've been thinking on this subject for a few days now. We've had S-S-SERIOUS POLLS before asking us about bits of our characters' backgrounds that we'd made up, or their family/home life, or family members that made a big impact on them, etc. And I was thinking about Chizuru-mun and how he's given Chizuru a homelife and a backstory that fit with his idea of her and why she acts the way she acts about her lesbianism and everything else. I always liked that. |D
So I got to thinking, and this is sort of a family essay and sort of a background/history essay and sort of a nature/nurture/personality essay, but what it really comes down to is a why my characters are the way they are essay, and some talk about why I made those choices/what I took from canon hints in the cases where I had to make it all up (read: Chisame and Miyako). Also some random shit. Because I felt like it. :Dd
I. Chisame.
Okay, so. Chisame gets absolutely no canon information about her family, home life, or background. NONE. There is never even an offhand mention of a mother or father--even Miyako gets one line referencing having a family. Chisame doesn't. And because Negima! is nowhere near ending and Chisame's getting steadily more important as the series goes on, I can't guarantee that everything I've sort of constructed in my mind about her family and childhood isn't going to be proven wrong in three weeks. XD; But--that hasn't stopped me from constructing it. I mean come on, Akamatsu almost never brings family into the equation at all unless said family is part of a major plot arc.
Even if Chisame's family and background aren't mentioned explicitly, there's a lot we can tell from the rest of the series. About her, about Mahora, and about her classmates. Some stuff of note:
. . . So, yeah, taking a look at it, what we know about Chisame and Mahora doesn't really add up to her having had a healthy situation at home. My guess is that she comes from a well-to-do family--I say that both of her parents are alive, but this is a personal choice, really--and that she was pretty much ignored as a child. I don't know if she'd have been rich enough to have servants, but if they did, she was probably kinda raised by them. She was given a large allowance to do with as she wanted, and no one ever checked up on what she WAS doing with it, because . . . no one really cared. Her parents are probably very busy people. They sent her off to boarding school and Chisame didn't protest, because she doesn't care much for them anyway, and HEY the more privacy for her cosplay the better.
Chisame pre-Mahora was already getting into her hobby, but not to the obsessive and time-consuming degree she is when the series begins. Just little stuff that could be easily hidden from a family you lived with, even if they didn't talk to you or check up on you all that often. She wanted to spend her money and make friends (but she SUCKED at it, she was shy and nervous and too smart for her own good and hadn't been socialized properly by her family), she'd been seeking companionship online and discovered the culture, and she wanted attention. And sexy cosplayers could get attention. By pretending to be something they weren't. Everyone wins!
And then she moved to Mahora and things really spiralled out of control. She had space, she was still getting her allowance PLUS some income from her website, absolutely no one was around to stop her, and she was getting even LESS attention and love than she had been at home and needed to fill in the gaps. And so Chiu was born, her secret life was born, and Chisame shut herself off from the world more than ever. Her parents have no idea about any of this. They probably send her a letter once in a great while, and Chisame probably either doesn't answer or answers as Chiu, the cute and happy and pretty schoolgirl. I imagine that is what her parents think she's actually like. And Chisame doesn't care; she wants love and friendship and attention and respect, but she's pretty well beyond wanting it from them.
This is all pretty bleak. XD And uh, obviously not canon, and could be disproved at any time while the series is still running. But looking at the list of canon facts . . . to me, it seems like the most likely scenario. She lives alone, she's been cosplaying for awhile, what the hell kind of parent would support their barely pubescent daughter in dressing up as a sexy bunnygirl and posting it online for hundreds of thousands of men to drool over? I don't think they know, and the only way they can't know--considering that Chisame owns, like, a small photographic studio by this point as well as a shitload of costumes and software--is if they pay absolutely no attention to her OR where their money is going.
And her failure as a social being and her need for attention and praise have to come from somewhere. This is how it all fits together for me. Chisame never experienced a normal family or social life as a child, she retreated into the Internet armed with money, her looks, the ability to fake being happy, and a need for attention, aaaand this is where she ended up.
Does she angst about it? Not really. I don't think Chisame really--understands how messed up that all is. XD; She gets that her hobby was abnormal and that she was "weird" and is socially maladjusted and all, but she's never sat down and thought about her family life or anything, and she has nothing to compare it to. There's no way she'll ever make the connection herself unless someone specifically TALKS to her about her family. She pretty much hates them, but is way beyond hating them in an active way, or caring. She probably never did. They're just total non-entities to her, because it's never clicked with her that maaaaaybe parents should like actually talk to their kids and know stuff about their personal lives. XD; She wouldn't be bitter or anything about it if it DID come up, either. Her upbringing has done its damage, and Mahora + camp is helping her work through stuff, and--yeah.
But I really think this goes a long ways towards explaining why Chisame is the way she is. She's nervous, easily irritated by people, overly "mature" and annoyed at people being childish or happy (she had to grow up pretty quickly and all), very very secretive, lonely, doesn't know how to make friends, etc. etc. It's not that she's totally unsocialized. We not she's NOT, and that she can actually be pretty insightful about certain things, such as Kotarou not wanting to talk to Negi after his loss in the tournament. But this is all--the kind of stuff that doesn't apply to her. Chisame learned about people online, and so her view of them is a bit warped. Ditto sex. She knows more about sex and is more aware of it than many of her classmates (like, she's one of only three people who actually registers that the big "party" where all the girls dress in bikinis and molest Negi in the pool is KIIIIINDA WRONG!), but it's not personal experience or interest, it's because she lives online and The Internet Is For Porn and she kinda made a living exploiting that.
So in theory, Chisame knows about what people want and how they act and about sexual subculture, because she's studied it and witnessed it and made money off of it. In practice? She has no idea how to handle people or social situations, because she didn't get that as a kid and it led to her not WANTING it as a teenager.
GO CHISAME'S FAMILY. :Dd
I swear the other sections won't be this long.
II. Tomo.
Parents don't get much canon in Azumanga Daioh, but what canon they DO get is pretty much uniformly positive. Most of the characters get a couple of offhanded comments about doing something with their parents or families, and that's it. But there's never a sense of neglect or awkwardness or tension in any of the families.
Of all the main characters, Tomo's relationship with her parents is probably the most overtly positive, even if it's only mentioned three or four times. She's an only child (I assume; siblings are never mentioned for any of the girls and Azuma tends to focus on that kind of thing if it exists), she has both parents and a dog, her parents buy her stuff when she wants or needs it, they play with her as if she's much younger than she is, they pay attention to her, they praise her, and they're easygoing about her going off to hang out with friends or on vacations and such without a curfew or anything. This is all stuff that's pretty explicit in canon. So I'd say Tomo has . . . pretty much an ideal family life. XD
This also explains a lot about her. She's spoiled, at least to an extent. She has an easy life and she's surrounded by love and she's been told that she's awesome by her parents. And so she acts spoiled, she seeks love and company and an easy life, and she believes that she's totally awesome. It's as simple as that. XD Her parents love her dearly and are sort of retarded and happy-go-lucky like she is, and they're a big retarded happy family and Tomo doesn't come into much conflict nor is she forced to deal with the real world, unless it's her friends who are forcing it on her.
Overall I think Tomo has a happy life and a very good outlook on life, but yeah, her more annoying personality traits--being loud, self-centered, etc.--stem from the same upbringing that allows her to look at the world through rose-colored lenses.
One thing I always feel I should mention, and one thing I always hope I make clear when I play--and it's very very possible to read and play Tomo otherwise, and I wouldn't call someone OOC if they did. It's just a different choice. But one thing about the way I choose to play Tomo is that her happiness and egotism are not a front. Nor were they developed in response to any sort of stressful past situation. Tomo's not like Norma, who--well, go read one of her essays for those spoilers. XD When Tomo says she knows she's awesome and great, that she's happy and loves life and thinks people should be open and play and such, she's not just saying that to cover up some deep unhappiness or doubt. And she never "decided to be that way." It's just the way she is, and it's the way she's always been, and her parents are very similar to her (albeit slightly more responsible--but perhaps not as responsible as they should have been, heh).
Tomo does have her insecurities sometimes, because she's a teenage girl and she's definitely not universally liked or attractive, and she knows it and deliberately doesn't take steps to remedy it. So yeah, she gets jealous and petty, she gets upset when people diss her, she worries she's not pretty or smart sometimes. But this stuff passes quickly and it's not present to a--I guess you could say a normal extent. XD The majority of Tomo's psyche honestly believes that she IS sexy and great and funny and awesome, and she doesn't have to think about being happy or staying energetic and putting on a happy face for the world. It is not fake or something she decided.
I think there's a trend where with MOST anime characters of her personality type, some past event pushed them to this behavior, or else they're secretly a lot more emo and self-doubting than they appear. This isn't so with Tomo as I play her, and it's something I always really liked about her character (and honestly, it's probably WHY she's by far the easiest character I've ever played). With Tomo, she's had a happy life, she has a supportive family, she's naturally a loud and annoying person who loves her existence and believes she can do and get away with anything. Her moments of doubt and confusion and semi-emo . . . exist, but they're short-lived, and she can deal with them in a healthy way.
So in camp, does Tomo miss her loving, supportive family and friends? Yeah, she does. She misses them quite a bit, actually. Her family a lot moreso than her friends, because she believes her friends are very likely to show up (and some of them have!). But she doesn't really emo about it, and she doesn't have many regrets about deciding to follow Sano when they escape camp. Tomo's not entirely convinced that her world ISN'T Sano's world, actually, because she knows that Sano comes from a Japan which sounds like hers except for all the power-user and tournament stuff--which normal people don't know about ANYWAY, so there's no reason to think they haven't actually been co-existing all along. (I know Mori thought they had. XD) If they're not the same Japan, she's not convinced that her Japan can't still be visited.
And in the worst case scenario, in which she's heading out into the world never to see her family again? . . . Well, Tomo would be sad about that, because she adores her family, but she's prepared. I took Tomo from right before she'd be heading to college and living away from her family and friends (although I think it's implied she's attending the same college as Osaka?) for the first time. Tomo came to camp expecting not to see her family for awhile, and not to see them often anymore. They had a long and tearful and retarded and loving goodbye before she came to CFUD. :((( So to an extent, this is something they dealt with as a family before CFUD even started. Ditto her friends. The end of AzuDai is all about the girls growing up and graduating and realizing they'll have to follow their own paths in life and grow apart a bit, but will still always be friends and always be together and won't ever fall completely out of touch. I so cried at the end of the manga. ;o;
. . . lol that's totally a tangent but it was something I meant to mini-essay on anyway, because it's come up in camp lately, and--this is why she's able to deal with the thought of POSSIBLY (like I said, she's veeeery unconvinced) never seeing Kagura again, but would have a minor breakdown if Sano left and she never saw him again. When it comes to her family and her canon!buddies, Tomo has known them for longer, she loves and is very attached to them and misses them and talks about them, but she was taken from the natural end of her series and the "We're not going to see each other much anymore" in both cases had been dealt with as well as possible. In camp, there is no natural end, she's never dealt with the possibility of like Sano or Ed leaving her behind and never seeing them again, and she would be incredibly affected if it happened without that sense of closure that AzuDai gives you.
. . . God I've typed long enough. Greed and Miyako will be another essay. A much shorter essay. XD; E-ENJOY PART ONE WHILE I RECHARGE OR SOMETHING.
I've been thinking on this subject for a few days now. We've had S-S-SERIOUS POLLS before asking us about bits of our characters' backgrounds that we'd made up, or their family/home life, or family members that made a big impact on them, etc. And I was thinking about Chizuru-mun and how he's given Chizuru a homelife and a backstory that fit with his idea of her and why she acts the way she acts about her lesbianism and everything else. I always liked that. |D
So I got to thinking, and this is sort of a family essay and sort of a background/history essay and sort of a nature/nurture/personality essay, but what it really comes down to is a why my characters are the way they are essay, and some talk about why I made those choices/what I took from canon hints in the cases where I had to make it all up (read: Chisame and Miyako). Also some random shit. Because I felt like it. :Dd
I. Chisame.
Okay, so. Chisame gets absolutely no canon information about her family, home life, or background. NONE. There is never even an offhand mention of a mother or father--even Miyako gets one line referencing having a family. Chisame doesn't. And because Negima! is nowhere near ending and Chisame's getting steadily more important as the series goes on, I can't guarantee that everything I've sort of constructed in my mind about her family and childhood isn't going to be proven wrong in three weeks. XD; But--that hasn't stopped me from constructing it. I mean come on, Akamatsu almost never brings family into the equation at all unless said family is part of a major plot arc.
Even if Chisame's family and background aren't mentioned explicitly, there's a lot we can tell from the rest of the series. About her, about Mahora, and about her classmates. Some stuff of note:
- Chisame lives completely alone and unsupervised in an apartment-type dorm on campus at a boarding school, Mahora Gakuen, at least during the school year.
- She's one of the only normal human girls in her class.
- She's almost certainly not an orphan, since Asuna's situation is treated as somewhat abnormal.
- Attending Mahora is most likely not cheap. People as rich as Ayaka and Konoka and Chao are looked at as a bit extravagant, but not strange or out of place, and the school's club and festival funds are obviously . . . suspension of disbelief territory. XD
- Chisame has a hobby which is expensive, space-consuming, intensely private, and which no sane parent would allow a 14-year-old girl to engage in.
- She's very undersocialized and has difficulty talking to people or expressing herself.
- She's desperately attention-seeking to the point of developing an alternate personality for the purpose.
- She's more sexualized and aware than many of her classmates.
- We have no idea how long she's had her website, but it's been long enough for her to learn the business and the Internet culture like the back of her hand, and to have reached a strong #1 on the webhit charts. I can't imagine she's been cosplaying for less than a year.
. . . So, yeah, taking a look at it, what we know about Chisame and Mahora doesn't really add up to her having had a healthy situation at home. My guess is that she comes from a well-to-do family--I say that both of her parents are alive, but this is a personal choice, really--and that she was pretty much ignored as a child. I don't know if she'd have been rich enough to have servants, but if they did, she was probably kinda raised by them. She was given a large allowance to do with as she wanted, and no one ever checked up on what she WAS doing with it, because . . . no one really cared. Her parents are probably very busy people. They sent her off to boarding school and Chisame didn't protest, because she doesn't care much for them anyway, and HEY the more privacy for her cosplay the better.
Chisame pre-Mahora was already getting into her hobby, but not to the obsessive and time-consuming degree she is when the series begins. Just little stuff that could be easily hidden from a family you lived with, even if they didn't talk to you or check up on you all that often. She wanted to spend her money and make friends (but she SUCKED at it, she was shy and nervous and too smart for her own good and hadn't been socialized properly by her family), she'd been seeking companionship online and discovered the culture, and she wanted attention. And sexy cosplayers could get attention. By pretending to be something they weren't. Everyone wins!
And then she moved to Mahora and things really spiralled out of control. She had space, she was still getting her allowance PLUS some income from her website, absolutely no one was around to stop her, and she was getting even LESS attention and love than she had been at home and needed to fill in the gaps. And so Chiu was born, her secret life was born, and Chisame shut herself off from the world more than ever. Her parents have no idea about any of this. They probably send her a letter once in a great while, and Chisame probably either doesn't answer or answers as Chiu, the cute and happy and pretty schoolgirl. I imagine that is what her parents think she's actually like. And Chisame doesn't care; she wants love and friendship and attention and respect, but she's pretty well beyond wanting it from them.
This is all pretty bleak. XD And uh, obviously not canon, and could be disproved at any time while the series is still running. But looking at the list of canon facts . . . to me, it seems like the most likely scenario. She lives alone, she's been cosplaying for awhile, what the hell kind of parent would support their barely pubescent daughter in dressing up as a sexy bunnygirl and posting it online for hundreds of thousands of men to drool over? I don't think they know, and the only way they can't know--considering that Chisame owns, like, a small photographic studio by this point as well as a shitload of costumes and software--is if they pay absolutely no attention to her OR where their money is going.
And her failure as a social being and her need for attention and praise have to come from somewhere. This is how it all fits together for me. Chisame never experienced a normal family or social life as a child, she retreated into the Internet armed with money, her looks, the ability to fake being happy, and a need for attention, aaaand this is where she ended up.
Does she angst about it? Not really. I don't think Chisame really--understands how messed up that all is. XD; She gets that her hobby was abnormal and that she was "weird" and is socially maladjusted and all, but she's never sat down and thought about her family life or anything, and she has nothing to compare it to. There's no way she'll ever make the connection herself unless someone specifically TALKS to her about her family. She pretty much hates them, but is way beyond hating them in an active way, or caring. She probably never did. They're just total non-entities to her, because it's never clicked with her that maaaaaybe parents should like actually talk to their kids and know stuff about their personal lives. XD; She wouldn't be bitter or anything about it if it DID come up, either. Her upbringing has done its damage, and Mahora + camp is helping her work through stuff, and--yeah.
But I really think this goes a long ways towards explaining why Chisame is the way she is. She's nervous, easily irritated by people, overly "mature" and annoyed at people being childish or happy (she had to grow up pretty quickly and all), very very secretive, lonely, doesn't know how to make friends, etc. etc. It's not that she's totally unsocialized. We not she's NOT, and that she can actually be pretty insightful about certain things, such as Kotarou not wanting to talk to Negi after his loss in the tournament. But this is all--the kind of stuff that doesn't apply to her. Chisame learned about people online, and so her view of them is a bit warped. Ditto sex. She knows more about sex and is more aware of it than many of her classmates (like, she's one of only three people who actually registers that the big "party" where all the girls dress in bikinis and molest Negi in the pool is KIIIIINDA WRONG!), but it's not personal experience or interest, it's because she lives online and The Internet Is For Porn and she kinda made a living exploiting that.
So in theory, Chisame knows about what people want and how they act and about sexual subculture, because she's studied it and witnessed it and made money off of it. In practice? She has no idea how to handle people or social situations, because she didn't get that as a kid and it led to her not WANTING it as a teenager.
GO CHISAME'S FAMILY. :Dd
I swear the other sections won't be this long.
II. Tomo.
Parents don't get much canon in Azumanga Daioh, but what canon they DO get is pretty much uniformly positive. Most of the characters get a couple of offhanded comments about doing something with their parents or families, and that's it. But there's never a sense of neglect or awkwardness or tension in any of the families.
Of all the main characters, Tomo's relationship with her parents is probably the most overtly positive, even if it's only mentioned three or four times. She's an only child (I assume; siblings are never mentioned for any of the girls and Azuma tends to focus on that kind of thing if it exists), she has both parents and a dog, her parents buy her stuff when she wants or needs it, they play with her as if she's much younger than she is, they pay attention to her, they praise her, and they're easygoing about her going off to hang out with friends or on vacations and such without a curfew or anything. This is all stuff that's pretty explicit in canon. So I'd say Tomo has . . . pretty much an ideal family life. XD
This also explains a lot about her. She's spoiled, at least to an extent. She has an easy life and she's surrounded by love and she's been told that she's awesome by her parents. And so she acts spoiled, she seeks love and company and an easy life, and she believes that she's totally awesome. It's as simple as that. XD Her parents love her dearly and are sort of retarded and happy-go-lucky like she is, and they're a big retarded happy family and Tomo doesn't come into much conflict nor is she forced to deal with the real world, unless it's her friends who are forcing it on her.
Overall I think Tomo has a happy life and a very good outlook on life, but yeah, her more annoying personality traits--being loud, self-centered, etc.--stem from the same upbringing that allows her to look at the world through rose-colored lenses.
One thing I always feel I should mention, and one thing I always hope I make clear when I play--and it's very very possible to read and play Tomo otherwise, and I wouldn't call someone OOC if they did. It's just a different choice. But one thing about the way I choose to play Tomo is that her happiness and egotism are not a front. Nor were they developed in response to any sort of stressful past situation. Tomo's not like Norma, who--well, go read one of her essays for those spoilers. XD When Tomo says she knows she's awesome and great, that she's happy and loves life and thinks people should be open and play and such, she's not just saying that to cover up some deep unhappiness or doubt. And she never "decided to be that way." It's just the way she is, and it's the way she's always been, and her parents are very similar to her (albeit slightly more responsible--but perhaps not as responsible as they should have been, heh).
Tomo does have her insecurities sometimes, because she's a teenage girl and she's definitely not universally liked or attractive, and she knows it and deliberately doesn't take steps to remedy it. So yeah, she gets jealous and petty, she gets upset when people diss her, she worries she's not pretty or smart sometimes. But this stuff passes quickly and it's not present to a--I guess you could say a normal extent. XD The majority of Tomo's psyche honestly believes that she IS sexy and great and funny and awesome, and she doesn't have to think about being happy or staying energetic and putting on a happy face for the world. It is not fake or something she decided.
I think there's a trend where with MOST anime characters of her personality type, some past event pushed them to this behavior, or else they're secretly a lot more emo and self-doubting than they appear. This isn't so with Tomo as I play her, and it's something I always really liked about her character (and honestly, it's probably WHY she's by far the easiest character I've ever played). With Tomo, she's had a happy life, she has a supportive family, she's naturally a loud and annoying person who loves her existence and believes she can do and get away with anything. Her moments of doubt and confusion and semi-emo . . . exist, but they're short-lived, and she can deal with them in a healthy way.
So in camp, does Tomo miss her loving, supportive family and friends? Yeah, she does. She misses them quite a bit, actually. Her family a lot moreso than her friends, because she believes her friends are very likely to show up (and some of them have!). But she doesn't really emo about it, and she doesn't have many regrets about deciding to follow Sano when they escape camp. Tomo's not entirely convinced that her world ISN'T Sano's world, actually, because she knows that Sano comes from a Japan which sounds like hers except for all the power-user and tournament stuff--which normal people don't know about ANYWAY, so there's no reason to think they haven't actually been co-existing all along. (I know Mori thought they had. XD) If they're not the same Japan, she's not convinced that her Japan can't still be visited.
And in the worst case scenario, in which she's heading out into the world never to see her family again? . . . Well, Tomo would be sad about that, because she adores her family, but she's prepared. I took Tomo from right before she'd be heading to college and living away from her family and friends (although I think it's implied she's attending the same college as Osaka?) for the first time. Tomo came to camp expecting not to see her family for awhile, and not to see them often anymore. They had a long and tearful and retarded and loving goodbye before she came to CFUD. :((( So to an extent, this is something they dealt with as a family before CFUD even started. Ditto her friends. The end of AzuDai is all about the girls growing up and graduating and realizing they'll have to follow their own paths in life and grow apart a bit, but will still always be friends and always be together and won't ever fall completely out of touch. I so cried at the end of the manga. ;o;
. . . lol that's totally a tangent but it was something I meant to mini-essay on anyway, because it's come up in camp lately, and--this is why she's able to deal with the thought of POSSIBLY (like I said, she's veeeery unconvinced) never seeing Kagura again, but would have a minor breakdown if Sano left and she never saw him again. When it comes to her family and her canon!buddies, Tomo has known them for longer, she loves and is very attached to them and misses them and talks about them, but she was taken from the natural end of her series and the "We're not going to see each other much anymore" in both cases had been dealt with as well as possible. In camp, there is no natural end, she's never dealt with the possibility of like Sano or Ed leaving her behind and never seeing them again, and she would be incredibly affected if it happened without that sense of closure that AzuDai gives you.
. . . God I've typed long enough. Greed and Miyako will be another essay. A much shorter essay. XD; E-ENJOY PART ONE WHILE I RECHARGE OR SOMETHING.