Application for Scorched
Out of Character Information
player name: Batty
player livejournal: batty_chan
playing here: Scar, Kaien Shiba
where did you find us? Played here for two years :D
are you 16 years of age or older?: y~
In Character Information
character name: Kotetsu T. Kaburagi
Fandom: Tiger and Bunny
Timeline: Episode 25, in the epilogue
character's age: Not given in canon. Mid/late-thirties; I’d guess approximately 37
powers, skills, pets and equipment: Kotetsu is a NEXT, one of a group of powered individuals that began appearing about 45 years ago in Sternbild City and has continued into the present. His ability is known as the “Hundred Power,” so named because it increases every physical factor hundredfold. The most obvious uses of this ability are for his strength and speed, but on two occasions, he’s used it for specialized purposes, such as for an improvised healing factor in episode 13 and to increase the sensitivity of his hearing in episode 17. The downside is that he can only use this power for five minutes, and then he needs to wait an hour before he can use it again.
Starting in episode 14, Kotetsu begins losing his powers, and as of the epilogue in 25, he is down to one minute every hour. In Anatole, I would like for his powers to slowly climb back up towards its original five minutes over the course of several months, and eventually exceed it, to a maximum of ten minutes before the one hour recharge, in approximately a year.
Kotetsu will be arriving in his hero suit which serves primarily as a means of protection, especially when Kotetsu’s powers are not activated or have run out. The suit is fireproof and can expand greatly without being compromised, as seen in tests performed by the mechanic who created it, Saito. The right arm of the suit also contains a larger-scale version of the grapple-watch he ordinarily wears, and the wires were shown to be strong enough not to be able to be cut by even a power-saw. The suit also has a “Good Luck Mode” which makes the arm bigger, but otherwise...has no function other than “looking cool.” Under the hero suits, the heroes wear a black body-suit.
Since neither is particularly practical for everyday wear, I’d like for his usual outfit to arrive with him in Anatole.
He can also cook fried rice. ;D
canon history: http://tigerbunny.wikia.com/wiki/Wild_Tiger
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tiger_%26_Bunny_episodes
personality:
The first thing to know about Kotetsu is that he cares about you. He cares about your life, your health, your physical safety, your mental and emotional well-being. Whether he’s known you for years or only a week, it doesn’t matter--you’re still important. And you’re more important than him. Kotetsu is the very epitome of selflessness; he takes the creed of “Hero” to its very ultimate extreme, living every moment and aspect of his life for others. If he can take a moment or an hour or even a day out of his life to put a smile on your face, he’ll do it with a smile on his, as seen when he passes by a crying kid in a park and goes out of his way to get the boy’s balloon out of a tree.
But despite wanting to help people in any and every way he can, Kotetsu actually has a very healthy respect for boundaries. He understands full well that there are some things people would rather not talk about, and isn’t one to pry. He himself rarely talks about his wife’s illness or death (the one time it comes up, he cuts off the conversation saying that talking about such depressing things “makes him uncomfortable,” although it’s likely that part of it was that he knew it would make others uncomfortable), and when he learns that Barnaby’s parents were murdered in front of him when he was four, he responds that “everyone has their own burdens to bear,” not to be cold, but rather because he feels it’s not his business unless Barnaby chooses to talk to him about it.
This is all a very noble attitude, but it often gets him in trouble. His constant emphasis on everyone else above himself leads to him keeping secrets to prevent others worrying about him, and it almost never has positive results for him. He hides the fact that he is a Hero from his daughter so she won’t worry about the dangerous life he leads, which causes her to resent him for never being home. In the second half of the series, he doesn’t tell Barnaby that he’s losing his powers and keeps quiet about his decision to retire when the other is dealing with his own issues, and the latter reacts understandably poorly when he finds out. According to his elder brother, he even tried to hide the fact that he was developing NEXT powers from his family when he was a kid.
It’s a bad habit, and far from Kotetsu’s only one. As much as his goofy and quirky demeanor is genuine, he sometimes uses it to his advantage and plays the fool to distract others because they won’t expect that he’s faking it. For instance, at one point during the Jake incident (eps 10-13), Barnaby storms off in anger and the other heroes ask Kotetsu what he said to upset him like that, and he lies that he was explaining the origin of his hero name Wild Tiger (a move that would have been incredibly insensitive, given the context), because he didn’t want to put his partner’s emotional turmoil on display for the others. Only Nathan/Fire Emblem could tell he was lying; all the others were fooled.
He also tends to jump into making promises without being sure he can keep them, and disappoints people when he fails to. In the second half of the series, he struggles with the promise that was his wife’s dying wish--to always be a hero, no matter what--when he finds out he’s losing his powers. He promises his daughter to quit his job and be there for her more but fails to do so when Barnaby is having a veritable identity crisis and Kotetsu can’t bear to add to his burdens by announcing his retirement. Ultimately what is one of Kotetsu’s most admirable qualities is also perhaps his greatest flaw: he doesn’t have a distinct set of priorities; he wants to help everyone at the same time and sometimes that is just not possible.
These failures hurt him deeply, because as selfless as he is, Kotetsu is still human, and like everyone, he desires to be needed and wanted. We see this in both comedic and more painful contexts, from his arguing with a pair of children that didn’t want to buy his trading cards, to his disappointment when all the other heroes thank only Barnaby for saving the city from Ouroboros, despite them knowing full well that he wouldn’t have won if Kotetsu hadn’t figured out Jake’s second power and left the hospital while he could barely walk to tell Barnaby. (It’s worthy of note that this was another instance of him hiding things to keep others from worrying about him--he used his Hundred Power to speed up his healing rate and seal the most superficial of his wounds and pretended he was fully healed; this time, it was Antonio/Rock Bison, who’s known him since high school could tell he was faking it.)
This is not to say that Kotetsu does what he does for praise or recognition. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. In Sternbild City, being a hero has been commercialized into a veritable industry, with Agnes Joubert, the producer of Hero TV, willing to do just about anything for ratings (even put her own life in danger, as seen in the bomb scare episode), and heroes competing for “points” to get the coveted title of King of Heroes. Beyond that, heroes are hired by corporate sponsors, and pleasing them is what keeps one in the hero business. Kotetsu is one of the very few who couldn’t care less about points or publicity stunts, which we see from the very first episode--Agnes tells him to wait for a commercial break before attempting to stop the hijacked train, and he refuses, says that saving people can’t wait for a commercial. Kotetsu/Wild Tiger is in fact one of the least popular heroes at the beginning of the series, to the point where he buys his own trading cards when he discovers them at a merchandise stand, completely untouched where several of the others are sold out or significantly depleted, and for the first half of the series, after his original boss is bought out by another company, his new boss constantly pushes him around by saying “if you don’t like it, you can quit”, an ultimatum for which Kotetsu could never choose the latter. He also cares very little about property damage, and often has large fines taken out of his salary from damage incurred to buildings and other structures while protecting people.
Kotetsu takes all of this without the least word of complaint, however, and he goes into his job every day without resentment. This is because, as he tells Karina in episode 4 when she is frustrated with the thankless nature of being a hero and asks why he keeps up with it, he likes to save people, and that is all the reason he needs. It’s really this statement that is the best summary of Kotetsu; he has a deep love and respect for life (to the point where he’s distraught at being unable to resuscitate criminals burned to death by a vigilante) and it is everything he does and is to protect and preserve it.
Strengths:
As both a hero and a person, Kotetsu’s greatest strengths of character are in his compassion and determination. Kotetsu’s overriding care and concern for everyone extends even to the criminals he fights, and it ultimately wins the respect of his allies and foes alike. In the second episode, he manages to talk down a rampaging young NEXT boy who’d been bullied for his powers and convinces him to use his powers for good by relating his own story of how he’d faced the same as a child and how he’d been inspired to become a hero by Mr. Legend, the first of Sternbild’s heroes. His attitude is such that even Lunatic, a vigilante NEXT who believes in eye-for-an-eye justice (he only kills convicted murderers) and considers the Heroes’ notions of justice to be naive and ineffectual, considers Kotetsu a worthy adversary.
Even though he sometimes stumbles in knowing how to be a good father to his own daughter Kaede, Kotetsu is the sort of man who others can draw strength from, who inspires hope and loyalty and courage, and he is very good at offering advice when it is needed. Throughout the first half of the series, Kotetsu inspires Karina not to give up being a hero when she finds herself fed up with the nature of the career, helps Ivan find his confidence as a hero and gives him the courage to move out of the background and actually work toward protecting people, which he had been afraid to do since his failure to act years ago cost his best friend his chance to become a hero, and helps Pao-Lin understand and appreciate her parents better, and reaffirms that she is in fact loved when she was questioning it. And then there is Barnaby, for whom Kotetsu becomes the first person he has emotionally connected with in twenty years.
Kotetsu is a man that never gives up, no matter how high the odds are stacked against him. He always hopes for the best, always encourages those around him when circumstances are difficult. When Barnaby expresses his frustration with being unable to remember the face of his parents’ murderer, having hunted him for twenty years with only a single lead to go on, Kotetsu tells him that it’s not something he can force himself to remember, and he will definitely find the culprit someday. He later continues to reassure Barnaby when the city is taken hostage by Ouroboros and forced to release Jake Martinez (the man he thinks at that point is the murderer), and when the heroes are forced to fight against him or have the city sunk, Kotetsu continues to fight even after his powers run out, looking for some way to hit Jake as an ordinary human, even as he is knocked down time after time.
Weaknesses: As mentioned earlier, Kotetsu has a bad habit of keeping secrets. This isn’t so much about not trusting others as that he cannot bear to see others suffer on his behalf, and he often fails to realize that such actions often hurt those he cares for more than whatever it is he is so afraid to tell them. One of his great flaws is that he’s always giving so much of himself being everyone else’s pillar of strength that he leaves little room for dealing with his own problems. And his cheerful demeanor belies a whole host of personal problems that he just bottles up because it’s better for him to deal with it than anyone else. It’s a bit of a double standard he has, and it’s almost ironic how willing he is to be a shoulder to lean on for anyone else, but usually keeps everyone at arm’s length from him.
Perhaps it is a logical extension into his role as a Hero, then, that Kotetsu is incredibly reckless. He charges right into battles based on intuition above strategy, and he doesn’t think for a moment before rushing headlong into danger to protect others. The clearest example of that double standard is seen in the first confrontation with Lunatic, when he and Barnaby suspect he is silencing members of Ouroboros and Barnaby is blindly charging at him, enraged by the possibility. In this case he is the one who maintains a level head, and doesn’t hesitate to risk his life to protect his partner from the attack he wasn’t prepared for.
why do you feel this character would be appropriate to the setting? Kotetsu’s literal profession back in his own world was as a superhero. It’s been his job both to protect the city from dangerous criminals, and to rescue citizens from such calamities as natural disasters and terrorist bombings. In addition, he has faced off against nearly all of his fellow heroes when they were brainwashed to think he was a criminal, and more than one high-tech android programmed to destroy Heroes (one was malfunctioning, the other two were specifically targeted at him in particular, and then the Heroes in general). Due to his personality, he would want to immediately get involved with the branches of the Alliance and would generally attempt to assist both the Scorched and Anatolians wherever possible.
Writing Samples
Network Post Sample:
Sample #1
Sample #2
Third Person Sample:
Link~