[OOC: Velvet Key Application]
Player Info:
Nickname: Button
Age: 19
Personal LJ: makeshift_6
Method of Contact: AIM/MSN: redbuttonofdoom@hotmail.com ; plurk: zombiecannon
Characters Played: N/A
Character Info:
Name: Yuu Kanda
Age: 18
Canon: D.Gray-Man; Manga
Pull Point: Chapter 165, post-zombie arc, before the new HQ gets attacked.
Background Info:
History:
Kanda's Wiki!
Series Wiki!
Personality:
Largely thanks to his traumatic and tragic past, Kanda has brought himself up to be a very closed individual with few friends within the Black Order. It isn't so much that he's entirely isolated so much that he has a deep, deep distrust for most human beings, particularly adults, and that by nature tends to cause him to hold everyone at arm's length. It's commonly said that Kanda is a cold and uncaring person due to this great distrust of others-- however, he's been shown to provide a very twisted, limited form of sympathy through distraction at times when it really matters, such as taunting Lenalee when she was afraid of Louvier after the Black Order moved locations. He's more likely to express his sympathy by pissing someone off rather than being comforting-- giving them a distraction and a way to vent out their problems on an external source.
He throws himself into his tasks with the dedication and focus a college student writing a term paper would envy, going so far as to letting himself be killed-- multiple times, thanks to his regeneration abilities-- for the sake of his missions. A particularly notable example of this is shown in the battle with Skin, one of the Noahs that control the Exorcists' enemies, the Akuma. Kanda “dies” four times during the course of the fight, once out of ignorance, once at the end, and twice by careful planning. Thanks to his regeneration, he also tends to be fairly reckless, rushing into dangerous situations and risking everything without a second thought.
Even before the tragedy in is past, however, Kanda was always a very bitter, cynical, arrogant and blunt person. The number of friends he has he can count on one hand, and the number of people he actually likes is fewer than that. The current total of people he likes is at 2, one of which he believes is dead. Really, most sincerely dead, seeing as he thought he killed that person himself. The other person is Lenalee, whom he's described in the drama cds as being “like a sister”. In his interactions with her, it's shown that he's more than just a coldhearted bastard-- he does care, at least enough to listen to her problems and berate her a little for them. Just enough to pull her out of her self-pity for awhile, but nothing more. However, to everyone else, he doesn't seem to be concerned over their problems at all, if they don't affect him or his mission. In his and Allen's first mission together, he even abandons him to fight the enemy alone, knowing he'd probably either get killed or at least badly injured, for the sake of protecting the Innocence they came to get, callously telling his partner that it's his fault for rushing in head-first in the first place. But as soon as Allen's mental state starts to jeapordize the mission, Kanda yells at him that he “hates guys who can't keep a promise” even worse than the naïve person he sees Allen to be. (Allen had promised to protect a pair of people, but had failed to stop the level 2 akuma they were fighting.) This brusque comment gets Allen up and fighting again, to show his worth-here, again, Kanda shows his slightly more supportive side, even though it's highly disguised under vast amounts of animosity.
Game Specific:
Arcana: Several arcanas easily fit him, but I'm going to go with Priestess.
Justification: Upright, Kanda's shown a deep understanding of what makes people tick-- shown particularly by his kicking Komui into gear and coaxing him into supporting Lenalee and her decision to fight in the later chapters. He has common sense in spades-- to the point where common sense and logic are what he relies on the most, particulary when he's allowed to work by himself and maintain his own mental balance. Usually when left to his own devices, Kanda is a very serene and calm character-- it's dealing with other people, particularly those who completely lack that all important common sense that drives him up the wall.
In reverse, Kanda does at times obsess over the superficial-eating only soba when he has the option, for instance, or decimating a group of irritants to find his hairtie. In ignorance he finds a home-he's not stupid so much as he's uneducated, having found no interest in the scholarly arts when his life is dedicated to fighting. He has very short-sighted goals at any given time, usually defined in his mind as “missions”. While he is a member of a selfless group, Kanda's reasons for being in there are sincerely selfish. He's only there to find one person, and that's it.
Samples:
First Person Sample:
[Up on the roof today, a senior is eating his lunch. He looks downright frustrated, and is ranting a bit at the sky.]
What is so damn hard about that class that they'd need to get the same information repeated three times over?! It's not quantum physics, it's just common sense! Those people are morons!
[To anybody who comes up to him now, he throws an annoyed, angry scowl.]
What the hell do you want?!
Third Person Sample:
Kanda would be the first one to admit that he'd never taken much of an interest in the scholarly realm of things, back at the Order. There had never been time, or reason to do it. It had always been the more sensible, more logical thing to devote his free time to training and keeping his mind and body strong. But now, while those things were still important-now, academics and abstract thought had become valuable as well. So he found himself with a bunch of schoolbooks that he was supposed to study and understand-but most of the material in those pages were too advanced for him, to his chagrin. So that's why, right now, he is sitting out in the dorm lounge, books on subjects from algebra to this world's history arranged in neat stacks on the table in front of him, similar stacks of blank paper slowly turning into stacks of neatly written notes.
He could do this, dammit. He would do this. He could focus on a single exercise for hours, maximizing the precision and strength of a single movement-he could certainly focus on a book full of information he needed for his new “mission”. A self-appointed mission: to excel in his classes. And he swore to himself that he would.
Besides. These heavy textbooks made for good bludgeoning weapons for anybody who tried to break his concentration. There was some merit to that, as well.