application at virtualimmersion

[deloreans]

OOC
Name: erie
Contact: starcounts & letterbee @ GMAIL
Personal Journal: deloreans
Are you older than 14?: Yes

IC
Name: Hitagi Senjougahara
Age: approx. 17
Game Handle: Senjougahara
Canon: Monogatari Series ☇ WIKIPEDIA ☇ CHARACTER WRITE-UP

Appearance: IMAGE

Personality:

Hitagi Senjougahara makes a striking first impression; by reputation, that sort of fragile, beautiful girl in your class whose presence feels like absence, often sick and always distant. And that's setting aside the impression she'll definitely make on your forehead with her stapler if you go looking for a second. Hitagi is sudden danger with a polite smile, something sharp in your mouth when you least expect it. You won't even know to expect it.

Generally these two things: "your expectations" and Hitagi Senjougahara have very little to do with each other except for when the latter takes an interest in tripping you up with the former, like your hazy thought of "typical delicate girl" is an invisible wire she'll pull taut between your feet just as you're crossing into the really quite groundless land of thinking she's like anything like normal.

Any girl who openly labels herself a tsundere can only be trouble.

That thing with the stapler is just the tip of the Office Depot-built ice(school supply)berg.

Hitagi Senjougahara talks like an assassin, like a seme rapist from a yaoi manga, a slightly unhinged philosopher, drops anime and manga references like a character from Genshiken and all delivered in the tones of a properly brought up young lady. She's well-read (liberally so which explains the references), well-bred (all death threats delivered in a modulated tone) and well-defended because as they (who are they?) say, the best defense is a good offense and her offense wins points for creativity and effort.

"Tsundere" is a little misleading because Hitagi traded in harisens for a stapler and shouting "Idiot!" or "Don't get me wrong..." for a more intimate form of verbal abuse, tailored to your insecurities, your secret hopes, dreams and kinks (some of which you may not even know exist much less have). Hitagi works at her verbal abuse and you can keep your rote insults in your eroges. In the space of a ten-minute conversation, from the moment she greets you with "I thought somebody had left a dead dog lying on a park bench... but it was just you" Hitagi can question your place in the evolutionary ladder, your academic performance, your purity levels, your complexes, your tendency to enjoy talking to young girls, anything is fair game if you're foolish enough to open your mouth and provide her with more ammo. Conversation, with Hitagi Senjougahara, is a battlefield, seeded with mines that could go off leaving you labeled as a wife-murdering sorocon or that could land you an offer to appear in your room naked under an apron... Verbally, she doesn't play nice, she doesn't play fair and most dauntingly at times, she doesn't play at all.

For all her outrageous declarations and verbal depredations, she can suddenly be disarmingly honest. After her initial bouts with Araragi of threat, flirtation and insults, upon gaining greater understanding of his personality and of her own feelings, Hitagi immediately confesses to him. As Hitagi herself explains, she was at first attempting to get Araragi to confess to her but once she learned that Araragi was the kind of person who would help anyone and that his encounter with her was no indication of special feelings on his end, she drops the game and declares that she loves him herself. First strike and merciless leaving no time for half-hearted hesitation, that good offense coming into play again. In theory, on paper (confessing to a guy when it turns out he didn't help you because he liked you?) it's terrifying but somehow purely Hitagi because if there is one thing to know about Hitagi in relationships it's that she's intense.

(It's the late blooming crazy virgin thing.

Or not.)

Upon confessing to Araragi, she requests that they make what kind of relationship they'll have clear and agrees to his stipulations that they be open to each other especially about the oddities they encounter. As their relationship unfolds, it's clear Hitagi is the one driving them forward though this isn't to imply that Araragi is an unwilling participant. Hitagi is fully intent on moving forward and moving forward together. Hitagi as a girlfriend has plans for the future but those aren't plans that dictate Araragi's but plans to accommodate whatever he eventually chooses to do: Hitagi off to university but sharing an apartment with Araragi so they can be together even if their career/school lives diverge. Hitagi also seems to be dictating the pace their relationship is going, from platonic nights of studying together to asking him out on their first date to bullying him into spending time with her best friend, Kanbaru Suruga and then trapping him in a car with her father to planning everything for their first date with no input from Araragi to feeling him up while he's trapped in said car with said paternal unit. This isn't just about Hitagi's inexperience and somewhat warped way of romancing via conquering invasion. This is actually to her romance via revelation. She reveals herself to him gradually, the study dates, her father and best friend, their first date chosen from a memory when her family was happy. This is Hitagi laying out all her cards, this is who I am, this is what I can do for you, this is what I have to offer. This is everything.

A reckless incursion, defenseless, a tactic only for those who've totally committed.

She's committed and she's in her own unique, semi-yandere way devoted. She's the kind of girl who when she talks about killing you, it may very well mean she loves you. To be more specific, she'd kill you to be the last person beside you when you died and woe to whoever gets in the way of that (like a different murderer). She's committed and more than a little jealous and absolutely dangerous (that yandere thing and that school supply thing and isn't it lucky that Araragi still has that vampire healing ability because ouch. eyeball). She's committed to supporting him however many times he comes back smelling like another woman. She's committed to trusting him to do the right thing and she's supportive, no questions asked, she'll take care of everything (schoolwork, alibis) while he runs off to help someone else. She's supportive enough to let him get hurt, to take care of him afterwards (admittedly by standing over his injured body and flashing him but that only makes her The Best. Girlfriend. Ever.) and neutralizing any threats he can't. She's in love with a boy like that, loved him not because he saved her. She loves him because he's the kind of person who would, who would save anyone even if it hurts him, even if it hurts her. She's in love to the point that she needs him to understand and to love what she has to offer: a starry sky, her loved ones and a damaged girl who used to be strange.

"Strange" and "normal" are distinctions she makes herself because she lived two years with her weightless body and disconnected emotions making her alien and that's the sort of thing that doesn't just leave a mark but recreates you. This is what living without weight means: your shoes are hard to lift all the time and your clothes drag like tangible gravity. You don't carry bags anymore and you learn to work with only what you can keep on hand. Your health evaluations are done in private and your records say 5 kilograms of girl. You measure every step like you'd fly off because you are weaker than the wind and all that weighs you down are your secrets and the things you carry to protect yourself. The world weighs heavy on you and you hold the world away, behind books and edges. You draw lines around yourself, an absolute territory that cannot be crossed, behind that line: normal, behind yours: strange. Everything that seems unusual is because you yourself are strange so it's you, all you and not them. Your mind has two years to align itself to this perspective.

Living two years like that, even restoring her weight and emotions fixes nothing. She remains estranged from her mother and carries over almost everything else. Her past and her secrets are hers to divulge in her own time and kindness, when not asked for, a form of hostility. Good intentions are just another excuse for optimism and self-deception and she's been there, bought that, lost a lot of money to con artists. Hitagi handles human interactions like combat, in terms she knows how to survive. She uses distance to protect herself first and full-on aggression second. She has her defenses down to an efficient science. As Araragi notes, she was able to create a Pavlovian reaction to staplers in a single experience.

Traits that already existed even before her encounter with the crab were exacerbated or revealed to be what they are: the budding defense mechanisms of the ideal popular girl. Hitagi herself states that she has a trouble with resolving things from her past. Hitagi, even before she lost her weight, usually removed herself from difficult and painful situations. She became estranged from her mother as the woman was lured deeper into the cult. After the incident with the cult leader, she traded away her pain and the connection to her mother. After she lost her weight and Kanbaru figured out her problem, she forcibly cut ties and in the cruelest terms possible declared that there wasn't even anything like friendship between them.

Another notable trait of Hitagi's, something she repeats like a mantra, is that she relies only on herself. She will pay her debts by herself. She will handle things herself. A normally admirable stance but in truth one that she's not been as consistent in living by as she might seem. She had developed this attitude even before her mother had betrayed her by handing her over to the cult leader --- she viewed her mother's reliance on the cult as a crutch and thus became that perfect Senjougahara simply to prove to her that this is what she could be without needing a crutch like her mother. It became a painful lesson after her mother stood by as the cult leader attempted to violate Hitagi and she realized that she alone would act to protect herself. After she was repeatedly tricked in trying to find a solution to her oddity, Hitagi faced Araragi and Oshino Meme with hostility and an eye to what she would have to pay. But this refusal to seek or even accept help is made into hypocrisy by the fact that Hitagi hadn't always shouldered her burdens by herself. After all, she had wished to be relieved of her pain and a god had answered.

It is in finally accepting this that Hitagi was able to truly save herself. Though Oshino had neutralized the god, Hitagi insisted in facing up to what she had done. She offered first her apologies and then her gratitude and her request to take back the weight she had been unable to carry. And though it fixed nothing, it fixes nothing the weight hollowing her out with the reality of her losses: her mother gone, her father absent, Hitagi alone, fixing things was never meant to be the point. Some things are lost forever and people cannot suddenly reset two years, saved memory and a girl is whole again. Hitagi Senjougahara doesn't work like that. She's still a girl who backhands with a compliment, a question, a declarative statement. She will still turn menacing on a dime and question her boyfriend's status as a carbon-based life form. Regaining her emotions and her weight can't change her past and her mistakes or who she has become but it does allow for change.

And her changes are these: she's a girl in love with a boy who would save anyone and they find ways to save each other every day. She keeps him from killing himself with his good intentions and he retrieves for her the things she had lost: her friendship with Kanbaru Suruga, her connection with her father. She doesn't carry her stapler as often anymore and she's able to choose her clothes without regard for how they weigh on her. She's learned that distance doesn't always help and that the only thing to do with pain is to live with it, to accept that it is no one else's to carry but yourself.

And her changes are these: Hitagi, who once traded her pain away, saying that that she can be grateful for that pain because it lead her to the person that she loves.

Give her time and she'll give you her timeline (because mapping her change is still something she'll decide for herself) and if you go in despair because she's groping you then claims you're a uniquely deviant existence that it takes a deranged potentially yandere individually to love you, here's the thing to keep in mind:

she talks about love.

AU History:
(Since the series is set in modern-day Japan, the alterations to her backstory would primarily be to remove the supernatural elements in her life. For example, instead of losing her weight and emotions due to the intervention of the weight god, Hitagi's traumatic experience would cause her to become emotionally disconnected.)

Hitagi Senjougahara lived the extraordinarily charmed life that normal girls get to: she was once the only child of a well-off family. She was popular, well-liked and outgoing, had great grades and was the ace of the track team. She had problems at home, but who didn't? Whatever terrible things happened in life, she didn't seem touched by it. It seemed like she'd used up all her bad luck when she was younger; born with a heart condition and in and out of hospitals, it took a drastic operation to save her life.

But the bad luck was only beginning.

Unable to cope under the strain of Hitagi's potentially terminal condition, her mother fell in with a cult that took her time, her attention and emotional independence. And somehow Hitagi's miraculous recovery only made her more involved with the group, believing that it was through the cult's intervention that her daughter was saved and yet this also drew her further from her family and from Hitagi. So much so that they became nearly strangers, Hitagi successful in school, her mother sinking deeper slowly going into debt and the family sharing the same home but seldom talking until a traumatic event broke even that. The summer before Hitagi entered high school, Hitagi's mother brought home a cult leader having been led to believe that he would enact a ritual to help Hitagi. The only thing he did was violation.

Hitagi looked to her mother to save her. Her mother did nothing. And finally Hitagi acted to save herself, striking the cult leader with a shoe. The injury had repercussions; everything even their home was taken away for compensation. Her father buried himself into work to pay the debts and divorced her mother, took Hitagi and left. Hitagi, reeling, found herself to blame. If she hadn't protected herself, if she hadn't struck he cult leader...

Her family came apart, her life fractured and to keep from breaking under the pain, she broke herself away from the pain. The Hitagi that entered high school was different from the Hitagi that had left middle school: emotionally withdrawn, silent, distant from her old friends and discouraging new ones with a wall of disinterest. Her grades were higher than ever but she was constantly alone. When the situation began to take a toll on her health, she was pushed into seeking medical help. Eventually she was approached about participating in a study on the use of FullDive technology in therapeutic programs. Due to her reluctance, she was invited to try a soon-to-be-launched game that used FullDive technology as well: the VRMMORPG Sword Art Online.

Samples
First Person: samples from percaligovideo: action tags » continuations & network + action posts

Third Person:

For a few seconds, minutes perhaps, the crowd in the plaza was quiet.

It was a silent shock that gripped almost everyone and it was as if no one could cry out. If someone made a sound, even in shouting a denial it would bring a finality to Kayaba Akihiko's words. So the silence stretched out, a perfect quiet, a perfect stillness. After all, in a simulated world, there wasn't even any real need to breathe.

Hitagi was silent for another reason.

Crying out wouldn't have helped, would have only drawn unnecessary attention. At school, it was easy enough to keep her distance from the rest of the class. Frequent absences, her old reputation, the assumptions people made based on her looks and demeanour, that was all it took. Even if her classmates wondered, asking questions was as far as they ever got.

In this game however, people felt comfortable in striking up a conversation with complete strangers, asking to form parties and comparing previous game experiences. Even the ones who'd struck out on their own were caught up in the same excitement, the same unseen energy that moved through everyone.

That energy was gone now, replaced by a paralyzing fear.

Hitagi hadn't felt either emotion.

But she saw the change that came over the crowd, anger and horror finally breaking through. People yelled, argued about what was possible, insisted it was just a joke.

Behind her someone whispered, it can't be real.

Hitagi didn't look back, didn't answer except in her head. She felt the rasp of cloth on her skin, heard the unsteady sobbing of a young girl in front of her, felt her hand close on nothing. What was?

Hitagi had read the manual out of her usual thoroughness, the habits of a girl who read everything. Was it possible? It could be. But she didn't base that judgement on what she'd read but on what she'd heard in Kayaba Akihiko's words. She'd heard that before, that certainty in what he could do to them and how little they could struggle in response.

Whether it was true or not, it was safer to act as if it was.

This was what he had done to them, an overwhelming task in a world he controlled.

But no matter how futile, she would find a way to fight.