app for recursion

[tragedyinabottle]

<u><big><big>OOC Information</big></big></u>

<strong>Name</strong>: Penbun

<strong>Are you over 18?</strong>: Y

<strong>Contact</strong>: PM@this journal

<u><big><big>IC Information</big></big></u>

<strong>Character</strong>: Sayo Yasuda

<strong>Age</strong>: 19 but claims to be 16

<strong>Canon</strong>: Umineko

<strong>Canon Point</strong>: just after events of Confession of the Golden Witch

 

<strong>History</strong>:

http://umineko.wikia.com/wiki/Sayo_Yasuda.

 

<strong>Personality</strong>:

Sayo is a character defined by her loneliness and inability to fit in. These issues would plague her for the entirety of her life, from the moment she came of age on the island of Rokkenjima till her death by drowning in October of 1986.

Because she had no friends as a child, as most of the other maids disliked her, Sayo spent most of her time alone in her room or elsewhere on the island. During these times, she would take to reading mystery novels, a habit she picked up from senior servant Chiyo Kumasawa, and she would try with all her might to solve the riddles and murders found within these books before they were revealed by the author. Doing so helped Sayo to become something of a clever young girl who took great joy in not only solving mysteries but also later writing those of her own.

While mysteries were Sayo's hobby of choice, she also dealt with her lack of friends by constructing imaginary friends for herself to fill the void in her heart. We see this with the maid Shannon, an embodiment of Sayo's desire to fit in and be a perfect servant; the demon Gaap, created to explain away Sayo's tendency to misplace her keys and other items while working; and Beatrice, a persona of hers based on Rokkenjima's legend of the Golden Witch Beatrice—and she would sometimes even pretend that it was these and other characters who helped her to play pranks on the other maids who made fun of her.

Pretending to be a witch, and discarding Shannon and her wish to be an ideal servant, was something of a coping mechanism for Sayo, one that allowed her to look beyond the issues of her day-to-day life, as they were the problems of a human, and not worth the time of a powerful witch. To go with her new role, Sayo also created a place called the Golden Land, which would serve as her own personal haven from the real world and later became an important part of the game boards of various witches and Game Masters throughout the story.

In time, Sayo, going by the name “Shannon,” eventually made friends with the young children of the Ushiromiya family, who visited once a year for the family conference, and even fell in love with the boy named Battler. Sayo often matched wits with Battler over various mystery novels they both enjoyed and even imagined herself on occasion someday marrying him and starting a family after he once promised to return the next year and take her away from the island while “riding on a white horse.” However, due to a major personal event in his life, he failed to return the next year, and Sayo's heart was broken—she would never truly be the same.

Overall, before her fall, Sayo was a lonely and isolated girl who balanced her unhappiness by spending most of her reading mysteries and other fiction. By making imaginary friends for herself and partaking in the fictional world of magic and witches, she was able to cope with her dark feelings by pretending that she literally was not human. But when she fell in love with Battler and later experienced heartache following his failure to return the year, her illusions fell apart and changed her destiny forever.

After all of this, Sayo tried everything in her power to be happy. She made friends with Jessica Ushiromiya, fell in love with George Ushiromiya—both friends of hers from years ago—and slowly approached something like happiness. But her life would soon become defined with issues now outside her existence, those of loneliness and the isolation of her youth, but rather those that were intrinsic parts of herself and her identity.

The first of these is the issue of her gender. Due to the strange circumstances of her birth, Sayo was born male but raised as a girl due to severe genital injury as an infant. Because of this, as she hit puberty and her body failed to change, she became depressed and eventually was so trouble by the issue that she couldn't so much as look at herself in the mirror at times. She attempted to correct the issue by living as a boy for some time, taking the identity of a servant named “Kanon” when she did, but it did little to fix the problem, and Kanon became just another role she played in her daily life.

The second is the issue of her lineage. In time, Sayo discovered that her father was the head of the Ushiromiya family, Kinzo Ushiromiya—and that her mother was Kinzo's own daughter. This led her to an awful breakdown, as everything she knew about herself was thrown into flux. All of her love interests, as it turned out, were doubly related to her, and, combined with the issues related to her own body mentioned above, she began to see herself as entirely worthless to the point that she called herself “Furniture”—a mere thing that was less than human and not deserving of love.

The Sayo of 1986 is a bitter and hollow shell of a person. No longer seeing herself as capable or worthy of love, what lingers in her heart is hatred and resentment. Hatred towards herself for mangled body, her cursed blood, and her inability to give those she loved what they wished for in life. Hatred towards her family for causing her to be born in such a way in the first place, as well as all the horrible events that went along with it. Unable to see herself as someone who could love anyone or be loved in kind, Sayo once more saw herself as something other than human, but in the most negative terms possible.

To end everything, she put her love of mysteries into action and wrote several scenarios in which she killed the entirety of her family in a bloody murder game. Along with these scenarios, Sayo wrote out three rules to govern them. The first two were simply rules of the game itself, constructed as a framework around which her stories were written, but the last is a heartbreaking “Someone, please stop me!” As far gone as she was—to the point that she wished to die and take everyone with her—Sayo still clung to hope that someone, anyone, would save her. In particular, she notes, if Battler were the one to do so, she would give up everything and devote the rest of her life to being with him.

In summary: Sayo began life as a shy, clumsy, and isolated little girl who used fantasy and fiction to shield herself from the sadness of her daily life. She took on different roles—Shannon the maid and Beatrice the witch for example—to try and distance herself from reality. But in the end, she couldn't truly escape it, after falling in love and ultimately having the loss of that love define her short adult life.

Because of the tragedies of her life—those of her gender, birth, and family—Sayo became embittered, began seeing herself as useless and less than human, and truly grew to hate everyone and everything around her. She once more called herself a witch, but this time as a Game Master who could spin stories of bloody murder rather than the innocent escapist fantasies of her youth. But even amidst all of this hate and plotting of murder games, she still clung deeply to one small shard of hope, and with all her might she wished for someone to save her, with Battler, the love of her childhood, being the one she truly wished to see.

 

<strong>Etc</strong>: I feel that Sayo is an appable character because we are not only given her complete backstory in the visual novel’s chapter 7, where the character of Claire stands in for Sayo as not to reveal her face, and recently (2015) the rest was revealed in the special manga only chapter “Confession of the Golden Witch” where the story from part 7 was fleshed out and we are able to see Sayo in full in all her angstyness. She also is a character who’s various personae are just facets of her whole self, Beato is her taking on the role of the witch of the island of Rokkenjima, Shanon came from her desire to be a perfect maid, kanon was her attempt to live as a male that failed miserably, and the demons in Beato’s care are all clearly modeled after her caretakers, Genji and Kumasawa. So in my view she is a complete character that, with Confession as its basis, has a complicated and appable personality and his.

 

<u><big><big>Persona</big></big></u>

<strong>Name:</strong> Gaap

<strong>Branch:</strong> Combatant

<strong>Type(s):</strong> Dark, light

 

<strong>Style(s):</strong> Healer

 

<strong>Passive:</strong>Defensive

 

<u><big><big>Writing Sample</big></big></u>

http://soulgemmed.dreamwidth.org/46962.html?thread=7302514#cmt7302514