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Out of Character Information

[Redacted, please use the OOC Contact Post to reach me]

In Character Information

character name: Shunsui Kyouraku
Fandom: Bleach
Timeline: Chapter 364 (after he gets shot by Starrk)
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 an important and high-ranking family, the Kyouraku clan, but you’d never know it from the way he behaves. On the surface, he appears to be flirtatious, lazy, perverted, and generally not the kind of person to whom you’d trust a military squad. In reality, he’s an extremely complicated person who very rarely shows what he’s truly thinking, except to a few trusted friends. To properly understand his character, we need to look back at his history a little bit.

As the son of a high-ranking noble family, Kyouraku would have grown up surrounded by wealth. What he wanted, he could have fairly quickly, and there were few people who would attempt to rein him in. As a second son, he was the ‘spare’, the backup plan in case something happened to his older brother. But as long as there was an heir, he was probably left to his own devices most of the time. Of course, he’d have been given the best of tutors to teach him all the proper noble duties and etiquette. However, Shunsui has a rebellious streak and probably resented being ‘second-best.’ That, along with simple boredom, probably led to him acting out and skipping his lessons, which in turn, led to his family looking at him as a troublemaker.

Shunsui did learn more than they realized, though. Yamamoto pointed out that as a young man, Shunsui didn’t like training and studying, but was wiser than most people realized. A lot of that came from watching people. Shunsui is a consummate student of human nature. His reputation for being a good-for-nothing meant that people didn’t take him seriously, which he found useful (indeed, he still maintains a bad reputation today). He grew cynical quite quickly, and disillusioned with the petty infighting of the nobles, and with people in general—although it should be said that he was quite naïve about what life was like for non-nobles.

Eventually, he ended up in the Shinigami Academy. I would guess that he probably was sent there because his family couldn’t figure out what else to do with him. However, at first, he was probably not a very good student. In fact, he probably found every way he could to try and get expelled. But instead, he met two people who changed his life.

Yamamoto is the captain-commander of Seireitei, and one of the few people Shunsui respects. He tamed Shunsui’s restlessness into a purpose, and gave him something to fight for. Then, there was Ukitake Jyuushirou. Ukitake is one of the few people that Kyouraku would say is a truly good man—perhaps the first good man he’d ever met. Although they were polar opposites, they completed each other, inspired, and pushed each other to go farther and be more than they could be on their own. We’ll talk a bit more about those dynamics in a little bit.

The most important thing to understand about Shunsui is that he does not believe that he’s a good man. If Bleach was done with Christian archetypes, Shunsui would be the kind of person who’d say he’s going to hell. He can, when necessary, be absolutely ruthless—and he will do things that he considers to be wrong, but 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 in fighting; when he has to do it, he’ll fight ruthlessly with the intention of ending things. If he’s asked, Shunsui will say he hates to fight, but his greatest fear is that he’ll come to enjoy the darker side of him. After all, his zanpakuto makes a game out of war and bloodshed. Because of that, Shunsui spends a lot of time hiding or suppressing his darker nature.

Shunsui is a sensual person by nature—in all senses of the word. He has a great appreciation for 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.

On that subject, Ukitake is more to Shunsui than a best friend. Shunsui admires Ukitake deeply for managing to keep his idealism and his sense of honor, despite the wars they’ve been in and the things they’ve had to do. Shunsui knows Ukitake is a far better man than he is; he considers Ukitake as his moral compass, and the person whom he trusts to hold him back from going too far into his darker side. One of Shunsui’s greatest fears is outliving his best friend, especially since Ukitake has an incurable illness. He’s terrified of what he could become without Ukitake there to check him.

Shunsui tends to be overprotective as a rule, especially of people he sees as innocent. This stems in part from his guilt over what happened to Lisa, but also because he believes that innocence should be protected as long as possible. In particular, this manifests in how he interacts with his current lieutenant, Nanao Ise. While he teases and flirts with her to get a reaction, he also has kept her out of the major battles in Bleach. When she offered to kill Chad for him, he stopped her, saying that he didn’t want her to dirty her hands, and he protected her when Yamamoto’s reiatsu threatened to suffocate her. To be honest, he’s probably too protective, but he doesn’t want to see her become what he is.

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

Writing Samples

Network Post Sample: [Shunsui turns on the Forge and grins easily into it, the very picture of an easygoing, carefree man—as evidenced by the pink, flowery woman’s kimono and the straw hat that’s perched on top of his head at a jaunty angle.]

Since it seems we’ll be stuck here for some time, we may as well get to know each other—and what better way than over the pleasant companionship of a good drink? I’m arranging a party in Duncan’s Pub for anyone who’d care to join me—especially all the beautiful women. [He grins and winks at the Forge.]

[But then, he turns a bit more serious, although the carefree look doesn’t completely slip away.] And I’d welcome any information about this world, as well, especially from anyone who’s seen the ‘twins’.

Third Person Sample: Shunsui is a man with a reputation for being the life of the party. There are hundreds of stories about him—some exaggerated, some false, and even a handful that are completely true. Almost everyone in Soul Society (even his lovely if straight-laced lieutenant) has been to one of his many parties, and have at least a few stories to tell about his antics. So it was ironic, Shunsui often thought, that someone with a reputation for being at home in a crowd often found himself seeking solitude.

Today, he was lying on the roof, watching the clouds above Anatole go by. This was a strange place, with an odd mixture of people and rules. If truth was to be told, he wondered if he was lying in a bed in Fourth, and this was some dream his mind was cooking up while it healed. His zanpakuto sometimes had the odd side-effect of giving him very vivid dreams—and a small, enclosed city ruled by two twins did sound like something they might have invented. Although twins was more the imagery he’d expect from Jyuu’s zanpakuto than his own.

If this wasn’t a dream, there was quite a mixture of people from his world here, including some of the traitors. That made him wary at the very best, particularly Aizen. Ichimaru, he understood—perhaps a bit too well. Shunsui knew what it was like to have dark urges, and the ‘games’ his zanpakuto played were more cruel than he was entirely comfortable with. Without Ukitake, he could very easily be as bad as Ichimaru, or worse. Aizen…well, the lust for power he understood—although frankly he thought that ruling the world sounded like a very boring job with too much paperwork. But to make a subordinate (especially a young woman) dependant on you in that way and then hurt her, that was unforgivable.

Anything else? N/A