(no subject)

[pinkflowergod]

Out of Character Information

player name: Meghan
player journal: clanoftheraven
playing here: N/A
where did you find us? I think that I originally wandered over from Kanna because there were so many players in both games at the time.
are you 16 years of age or older?: yes

In Character Information

character name: Kyouraku Shunsui
Fandom: Bleach
Timeline: Just after Ichigo and Urahara have defeated Aizen and the shinigami are returning home (about Chapter 422)
character's age: 2,000+ years old

powers, skills, pets and equipment: Shinigami skills fall into four different skill sets: kido (demon magic), hakuda (hand-to-hand combat), hoho (agility), and zanjutsu (swordsmanship). While Shunsui is capable enough in hakuda and kido, his major specialties are hoho and zanjutsu.

Hoho- This ability allows him to run at high speeds, fast enough that it would be difficult for an ordinary person to see anything but a blur.

Zanjutsu In its sealed form, Shunsui’s zanpakuto takes the form of two swords, a tachi (long sword) and a wakizashi (short sword). He’s effectively ambidextrous, capable of using either of both swords with ease. Like many zanpakuto, his also has powers that he can unlock with a verbal command. Its name is Katen Kyokotsu, and it can be invoked with the phrase, “Flower Wind Rage and Flower God Roar, Heavenly Wind Rage and Heavenly Demon Sneer”. When he invokes his shikai, his swords take the form of a pair of scimitars. They also have the ability to make children’s games real, and can manifest in several ways.

• Bushogoma- Based on a spinning top , this power allows him to throw wind and create tornados around its target.


• Takaoni- We didn’t see exactly how this game works, but the person who’s higher up ‘wins’.


• Kageoni- This power allows the manipulation of shadows. It allows combatants to attack any shadow as if it was the person who cast it, and also allows them to hide in a shadow.


• Irooni- This power allows only the color ‘called’ to be attacked. In other words, if either combatant calls ‘blue’, only parts of the body that are blue colored or covered in blue could receive damage. However, to maximize the damage, the opponent must call a color that he is wearing.

Shunsui also has a bankai, but it hasn’t been revealed, and isn’t likely to come up in Scorched. It should also be noted that his zanpakuto is highly temperamental. She’ll only let him use her powers when she’s in the mood to ‘play.’

canon history: link here

personality: Shunsui is the second son of a prestigious and high-ranking noble family, the Kyouraku clan. However, whereas captains such as Byakuya have embraced the decorum, duties, and honor of a high-ranking noble, most people wouldn’t guess Shunsui’s rank from his behavior alone. On the surface, he appears to be flirtatious, lazy, perverted, and utterly unreliable. He seems like more the kind of person you’d trust to plan a rowdy party than a person you’d give command over a military squad. However, while he is both naturally lazy and a definite womanizer, a great deal of the appearance he presents to the world is a façade. In reality, he’s an extremely complicated person who rarely shows his true thoughts to anyone but his closest friends. To properly understand his character, we need to examine his history in further detail. (As a note, much of this is extrapolated from canon; I have tried to make it clear what I’m using as a basis.)

As the son of a high-ranking noble family, Shunsui would have grown up surrounded by wealth and power. What he wanted, he could have fairly quickly, and there were probably few people who would attempt to rein him in. But as the second son, he was also the ‘spare’—the backup heir in case something happened to his older brother. Given that most of the noble families we’ve seen in Bleach have not been exactly close and well-adjusted, it’s likely that Shunsui was left to his own devices a lot of the time. Naturally, he’d have had the best tutors to teach him noble duties and etiquette, but he probably didn’t have much in the way of a father figure. Moreover, he may have resented being the ‘second-best’ to his brother, and between that and the laziness still present in his current personality, he was probably apt to acting out and skipping classes—leading to his family seeing him as a troublemaker, and feeding back into the sense of being ‘second-best’.

Still, Shunsui learned more than people realized. Yamamoto commented that as a young man, Shunsui disliked training and studying, but was wiser than most people realized. Much of that comes from his ability to watch and understand people. His reputation for being a good-for-nothing meant that people tended not to take him seriously, which he found useful. Being underestimated is a useful advantage—and it means people expect less of you. He still uses that tactic even as a captain, allowing people to think of him as nothing more than a lecherous drunk (not that he doesn’t both drink a lot and lech a lot; he can just kick your ass while doing it). However, beneath everything, Shunsui is ruthlessly practical and cynical, and I suspect much of that comes from his observations of noble life. The nobility of Soul Society is given to pettiness and infighting, and Shunsui was quick to see the harsh truths behind the pretty lies.

Eventually, Shunsui ended up at the Shinigami Academy. I would guess he got sent there because his family couldn’t figure out what else to do with him. At first, he was a dreadful student, and probably found every way he could think of to try and get expelled. But instead, he met two people who changed his life, and his relationship to them defines his personality.

First of all, Yamamoto is the soutachiou (captain-commander) of Seireitei, and one of the few people Shunsui respects. First and foremost, he was a father figure to Shunsui in a way I suspect his own father never was; he calls Yamamoto Yama-jii ( roughly ‘old man Yama,’ though a bit more affectionate than it sounds in English). Yamamoto saw the potential in the young noble and challenged him, forced him to begin living up to a potential Shunsui probably didn’t even see in himself. Moreover, he gave Shunsui a purpose, something he considered worth fighting and training for. Even though he dislikes fighting, Shunsui is willing to fight for Seireitei. Moreover, Shunsui says that Yamamoto taught him to live according to his own justice, something which probably helped him tame his rebelliousness into a cause.

Secondly, as a student, Shunsui met his best friend, Ukitake Jyuushirou. Ukitake is one of the few people Kyouraku would call a truly good man—perhaps the first good man he’d ever met. Although they were polar opposites, they completed each other, inspired each other, and pushed each other to be more than they could be on their own. Yamamoto says that no two shinigami have ever formed a more powerful team than they have; it’s perhaps telling that both Ukitake and Kyouraku have zanpakuto with two blades in released form. Over time, Ukitake has become his moral compass, the person he trusts to stop him from going too far and stepping over too many lines.

It’s extremely important to understand that Shunsui does not believe he’s a good person. If Bleach were a manga with Christian archetypes, Shunsui would be the kind of man who’d say he’s already damned. He can be utterly ruthless, and he will do things he considers to be morally wrong if he feels they’re necessary. At one point, he says, “It doesn’t matter who owes whom. From the instant they enter into a war, both sides are evil.” Shunsui doesn’t believe there’s any honor to be found in fighting; when he must fight, he’ll fight dirty and ruthlessly with the intention of ending things as efficiently as possible. Shunsui’s beliefs stand in stark contrast to Ukitake, who considers honor and the pride of a warrior to be more important than life. While Shunsui disagrees with Ukitake, this contrast is crucial to both their friendship and to Shunsui’s character.

Shunsui ultimately fears himself. He knows how ruthless he is; his zanpakuto makes games out of killing and maiming. Yet he also truly believes that fighting is evil, and his greatest fear is that he’ll come to enjoy that darker side. A great deal of the lazy, lighthearted façade he presents to the world is meant to hide his dark side even from himself. As a result, Ukitake is more to Shunsui than just his best friend. He admires Ukitake deeply for being able to keep his idealism and sense of honor even through the wars they’ve been in and the things they’ve had to do. Frankly, he’s terrified of what he’d become without Ukitake to check him, and it doesn’t help that Ukitake has an incurable illness. Moreover, Ukitake is, in some sense, a symbol of why Shunsui’s willing to fight. Ukitake is, ultimately, very innocent in his way, and Shunsui believes that innocence is worth fighting for, worth protecting in others even though it’s far too late to protect his own.

In a peculiar way, Shunsui can be quite protective. He doesn’t coddle Ukitake, though he does stand by him and support him even when he chooses honor over practicality. He does, however, get more than a bit overprotective with his current fukutaichou, Ise Nanao. Part of his protectiveness is due to guilt that his previous fukutaichou, Lisa, vanished on a mission he argued to send her on, but more of it comes from what he sees as her innocence. Nanao has been with Eighth Division since she was a little girl, and Shunsui considers it his duty to protect her from the harshness of the shinigami life as long as possible. While he teases and flirts with her to get a reaction, he also has kept her out of all major battles shown in canon up to his canonpoint. For example, when he offered to kill Chad for him, he stopped her, saying that he didn’t want her to dirty her hands. He knows she’ll probably lose her idealism eventually, but he doesn’t want it to happen any sooner than it must.

Shunsui is a very sensual person—in all senses of the word. He has a great appreciation for beauty (or what he considers beauty), regardless of monetary cost. To him, the cheap pink haori he wears is just as valuable as his expensive heirloom hairpins. He loves to lie on the roof and just watch the clouds go by. He also appreciates physical beauty in other people, particularly women. He enjoys sex, and he’s very good at it; he doesn’t see anything wrong with enjoying himself with another consenting adult. But very few of his lovers know the real him; few of them are allowed to see more than the fun-loving façade he presents to the world. In fact, he’s a quite lonely person.

It should also be noted that Shunsui drinks a lot—undoubtedly more than is healthy for him. A lot of the time, he doesn’t actually drink as much as people think he does (it’s an advantage when other people think you’re more drunk than you really are). But he also drinks to forget. Shunsui has lost a lot of people over the years, and he’s done a lot of things he hates himself for. And there are nights where he drinks to take the edge off the memory. On the worst nights, he’ll try to drink himself into a stupor so he won’t have to remember or dream. (He knows it’s not a healthy way to cope, but he’d also say that healthy is overrated.) He’s also been known to get into fights with Ukitake during this time.

why do you feel this character would be appropriate to the setting? Shunsui is one of the oldest taichou (captains) in Soul Society. He’s not invincible, but he can definitely take care of himself.

Writing Samples

Network Post Sample: [Shunsui pokes at the Forge, looking at it with some interest and more than a little concealed concern. They’d all thought they were out of the woods now, with Aizen defeated and Unohana getting everyone patched back up. But this—this was definitely not the Senkaimon platform, and this object wasn’t his communicator. Still, he hides his thoughts behind a lazy smile and strikes a rakish pose, tilting his hat down slightly to enhance the look.]

I know I’m charming, but if you wanted a visit, you only had to ask~. I’m always up for a good party.

[The light-hearted smile doesn’t change, but his tone grows a bit more serious as he asks:]

Sempai? Ukitake? Did anyone get pulled in along with me?

[Unohana had just been moving Ukitake through the gate for further treatment, and though she said he was stable enough to move, he was hurt quite badly. If he’d been pulled in here too, Shunsui needed to make sure he was all right.]


Third Person Sample: It was a lot to process, Shunsui thought, as he lay on the roof and watched the grey, heavy clouds pass by. That he had been here before, and had no memory of it. That Ukitake was from some time in the future, and Nanao-chan from further still. (Though admittedly, it was a weight off his mind to know that Ukitake would recover fully. Unohana’s healing skills were unsurpassed, but he still always worried that this illness, this injury might be the last.) And the news they brought—that was strange, too. Humans with odd powers. And that old business with the Quincies rearing its ugly head once again.

He sighed and sat up, pouring himself a small bowl of sake from a bottle he’d brought up with him. It was cold and blustery today—not the ideal day to enjoy relaxing on a roof. But he’d always sought out high places to think, and a little cold wasn’t going to kill him. He drew his pink haori around him a bit closer as he thought.

Too many enemies, he thought sometimes. Seireitei had made too many enemies. It was somewhat inevitable, of course. Its very creation had been controversial at best; it had taken almost every favor Yama-jii could call in to get the Shinigami Academy started at all, from what Shunsui had been able to gather. Many of the noble clans were less than happy about having an independent military force in the heart of Soul Society—particularly one that recruited the most talented fighters out from under their noses. And so, it was inevitable that they’d been drawn into more than a few fights that weren’t just against Hollows.

The shinigami had enemies, many enemies. That was simply a fact of the world. If you lived long enough, you simply gathered them, like a rat gathered fleas. But sometimes he wondered if it would someday be their downfall. If the ‘justice’ they claimed to serve would condemn them in the end.

Or perhaps he was simply a foolish old man who was growing maudlin in his musings. He chuckled as he felt the quiet, polite presence hesitating just out of sight. “You can come up, if you want. It’s not like I can’t tell you’re there.”

Anything else? N/A