roseblooms | Application

▶ PLAYER
HANDLE: Alex
CONTACT: PM to

roseblooms, please!
OVER 18? Yes.
CHARACTERS IN-GAME:
Jotaro Kujo (

starmark) from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders
Reimi Sugimoto (

doreimi) from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable

▶ CHARACTER
NAME: Kurama (Shuichi Minamino)
CANON: Yu Yu Hakusho
CANON POINT: Midway through the Three Kings arc, prior to the Demon World tournament.
AGE: 18

BACKGROUND:

▶ Kurama on the Yu Yu Hakusho Wiki

The above has a pretty thorough summary of Kurama's background in canon, but as a quick bullet-point summary:

▶ Artifacts of Darkness Arc — Kurama's introduction, in which he combines forces with two fellow demons in order to steal a set of three cursed artifacts from Spirit World. Though the other two demons want their respective artifacts for malicious ends, Kurama steals a wish-granting artifact that will allow him to save his dying mother's life, at the cost of his own.

▶ Saint Beasts Arc — As part of his parole for the theft of the above artifacts, Kurama (and Hiei) are ordered to accompany Yusuke and Kuwabara to infiltrate a castle and defeat four powerful demons who are preparing to launch an assault on humanity.

▶ Rescue Yukina Arc — Kurama, still on parole, is told that his chance at atonement for his crimes will be negatively impacted if Hiei causes any harm to humans. This is a problem considering a group of shitbag humans have kidnapped Hiei's twin sister Yukina and are torturing her for profit.

▶ Dark Tournament Arc — A deathmatch fighting tournament is being held by the aforementioned shitbag humans from last arc. Kurama and the others are told that they'll be immediately killed by the arc's Big Bad if they don't agree to participate. They do, and along the way Kurama begins to discover certain long-suppressed secrets about his past as the legendary kitsune bandit, Youko Kurama.

▶ Chapter Black Arc — Following shortly after the Dark Tournament, a group of seven humans with mysterious spirit powers are seeking to open a tunnel to Demon World and release all of the powerful demons there into the living realm because their leader, Yusuke's predecessor as Spirit Detective, has decided that humans are irredeemable and deserve to be eradicated. Kurama and the others attempt to prevent this from happening; along the way, Kurama's conflicting nature of being both demon and human is tested, with some particularly ugly results.

▶ Three Kings Arc — The resolution of Kurama's arc of exploring his identity and deciding how to reconcile both the demon and human sides of his personality. His backstory as a legendary bandit is covered in more detail as he is reunited with one of his old partners and becomes involved in a territory dispute in Demon World. This culminates in yet another tournament, because of course it does, and when it concludes he chooses to return to the human world with (most of) the rest of his friends.

PERSONALITY:

Kurama's personality is one of dual and sometimes competing natures. In his present form, he is technically a half-demon; in the world of Yu Yu Hakusho, "demon" is a general term for various supernatural species that inhabit different dimensions of existence. As a fox demon, Kurama was born and spent the first several centuries of his life living in Demon World (or Makai, as it's sometimes referred to), where he ultimately cultivated a reputation as a notorious master thief. However, this notoriety also earned him his fair share of enemies, and following one particular ill-fated encounter, a badly-wounded Kurama chose to evade capture and execution by crossing the realms and hiding himself in the Human World (Ningenkai), where he fused his spirit with that of an unborn human baby. Thus, he is now a creature of two natures, human and demon, with the attributes and tendencies of both.

However, these different sides of Kurama are not split personalities, nor is the human Shuichi Minamino a mere host body being possessed by the fox demon Youko Kurama. Rather, Kurama is a demon who receives a massive dose of human priorities without really expecting to, and thus has to try to reconcile those new feelings and considerations with the already-formed identity he'd had in the past.

When we first meet Kurama, he's skilled at modeling the behaviors of humanity, but there's still a noticeable disconnect. Though he steals the Forlorn Hope for the purpose of curing his human mother from her terminal illness, this course of action is born neither of empathy nor altruism. Kurama's perspective is revealingly self-centered even in his most self-sacrificing moments; he frequently refers to his mother as "the woman", and he confesses that it's personal guilt that's driving him to make the decisions he's making, rather than any particular empathy for his mother's obvious suffering. Kurama is aware that using the Forlorn Hope means trading his life for his wish, but until it's explicitly pointed out to him, it never seems to occur to him that his mother might be distraught to learn that her teenage son had sacrificed his own life for hers. It's as though Kurama expects his mother to react to his sacrifice the way a demon would — prioritizing her own self-interest before all else — rather than experiencing horror and despair at the death of her son.

Kurama's mission to save his mother therefore serves as a perfect case study of the problem that Kurama must grapple with over the course of the series: learning how to take the personality and priorities that he'd had as a demon and incorporate his newfound humanity into them.

As a fighter, Kurama is cautious, strategic, and above all, ruthless. Not only is Kurama a brilliant tactician and a powerful supernatural entity in his own right, what makes him most dangerous of all is the fact that he will prioritize winning over everything else, including his own well-being and even sometimes human conventions of morality. He often ends up injured in battle because he deliberately waits out his foes and learns their attacks before retaliating, so as to better respond to and overcome them. When the situation calls for it, he's perfectly willing to set aside considerations of whether the ends justify the means and simply achieve the ends by whatever means he deems necessary. He is the only member of Team Urameshi willing to enter into battle with eleven-year-old Amanuma despite his age, and he doesn't pull any punches in defeating him regardless of it. He is also capable of killing literally without a thought, as shown when he beheads the telepath Gourmet through nothing but instinct and muscle memory, without ever once giving the telepath a conscious thought to read in the first place.

However, Kurama's nastier demon tendencies are tempered by his evolving humanity. He demonstrates a willingness to protect the weak and innocent, and functions as a dependable and capable member of Team Urameshi, actively participating in attempts to preserve the human world from the supernatural threats that might endanger it.

In downtime moments with his social network, the attributes of Kurama's human side come to the forefront more openly. He is both witty and sarcastic, willing to poke fun at any of his comrades if they create an opening for it, and equally willing to jump on the bandwagon and join in teasing someone else if another member of the group is already doing it. He's incredibly intelligent, well-read, and insightful, but also enjoys card games and likes to play video games as one of his pastimes. Of all the assorted members of Team Urameshi, if someone is going to drop a tactical nuke of laser-guided shade, the likeliest suspect is Kurama. And in some ways, he's the character most willing to be the voice of the people and say what everyone is thinking — such as when Yusuke risks everyone's lives on a battle tactic that even he himself didn't know would work, and Kurama comments that "all this time [they'd] thought [he] was a brilliant strategist, when really [he was] just a lucky fool."

So, who is Kurama? He's a creature of many facets — a human boy, a demon fox, a ruthless tactician, a deadpan snarker, a reliable teammate, a self-sacrificing idiot, a loyal friend, a dutiful son. He's what happens when you take someone who cared only for himself for a thousand years and then introduce him to a support network full of meaningful people to love. He's polite when it's advantageous, mild-mannered when it suits him, manipulative when he needs to be. He's the kind of fighter that even renowned fighters are wary of pissing off. He's the kind of friend who's going to find a way to come through for you whenever he's fighting for you.

If it means his own life, then so be it.

If it means someone else's, well. More's the pity for them.

POWERS/ABILITIES:

▶ PLANT MANIPULATION — As an "S-Class ranked" fox demon, Kurama possesses a vast amount of Demon Energy, which is basically a self-generated form of spiritual magic used to power and facilitate his attacks. Specifically, his attacks come in the form of plant manipulation; by using his Demon Energy, Kurama can do a number of things with plants, including but not limited to: accelerated growth, transforming reasonably benign plants into more aggressive or deadly ones, altering the form and nature of plants (as in the case of transforming a single rose into his trademark Rose Whip, which despite being comprised of plant matter is so strong that it can slice through solid stone without difficulty), and so on.

A laundry list of the attacks he uses in canon can be found here, but in brief, he can make weapons out of plants, he can cause them to grow in certain ways, he can control their movements, and so on. Note, however, that Kurama cannot produce plants out of thin air; his powers only let him manipulate plants that already exist, which is why he carries a number of them on himself at all times. Locking him in a room devoid of plant life would render his abilities largely useless because he would have nothing to manipulate.

Some of the plants that he keeps with him (see his inventory below) are plants native to Makai, and so it's questionable how much of what they can do is the plant itself and how much is Kurama's influence. We do know, however, that plants can take on different and more sinister natures "when grown under a demon's energy", so even normal plants can become Rather Monstrous™ if Kurama wills them to.

The obvious nerf here, of course, is that Kurama is capable of running out of Demon Energy, and the nastier the plant, the more energy he'll have to expend to summon it. As we see firsthand in canon, if he runs out of energy, the transformation will expire and the plant will fall apart with nothing left to sustain it.

▶ PSYCHIC AWARENESS — Kurama seems to possess some level of general psychic abilities. He is capable of perceiving supernatural energies on a sort of psychic radar and can make very general guesses about how powerful those energies are based on those perceptions. He is shown to be able to communicate telepathically with another spiritually-sensitive person at close range, though he is not capable of reading or influencing other people's thoughts, so this seems to be limited solely to communication and not alteration.

▶ HEIGHTENED SENSES — Even in his half-demon state, Kurama has an unusually powerful sense of smell and can track people over long distances by scent, as well as discerning between one person and another on the sole basis of smell. He has more sensitive hearing than a normal human's and is also capable of reading lips.

▶ TRANSFORMATION — It is possible for him to revert back into the form he possessed as Youko Kurama, a full-fledged demon. In this form, his Demon Energy increases exponentially and more of his demonic personality traits come to the forefront. As Youko Kurama, his powers don't explicitly change; he simply has access to more of his latent power than he does in his half-human form. Additionally, his transformation renders him somewhat more animalistic in appearance, possessing ears and a fox tail in addition to a growth spurt and a palette swap.

▶ LEGENDARY BANDIT — Even without his demon powers, Kurama is canonically notorious for being an incredibly deft thief — to the point where even his technical enemies still recognize him with titles such as "Legendary Bandit" and "King of Thieves". He was cracking safes back when he was still a fox (and didn't even have opposable thumbs — how's that for skills?) and he therefore still retains the skillset of a master thief in terms of pursuits like infiltration, lockpicking, safecracking, and carrying out heists.

▶ NERD HOBBIES — On a more mundane level, Kurama is highly intelligent, excels in academics, and among other things is apparently very good at video games.

INVENTORY:

He's going to come in with the seeds for six Demon World plants, as follows:

• Death Plant / Shimaneki — A plant sown in an opponent's body that grows its roots through the target's bloodstream, allowing Kurama to immobilize or puppet them by manipulating the plant, or to kill them by spurring the plant to blossom and burst forth from within.

• Ojigi Plant — A plant that responds to movements or heat by closing its leaves around its prey and crushing it to death. Sort of a Demon World variant of a Venus flytrap or a mimosa plant. Also inexplicably shoots lasers. Do not meet one in a dark alley.

• Bloodsucking Plant / Vampire Crystal Rose — A plant that seeks blood and/or heat, attaches itself to its victim, and drains them of their blood before blossoming into a large rose-like flower.

• Lamp Weed — Small phosphorescent plants whose main function is essentially to glow in the dark. Not inherently harmful or violent.

• Sinning Tree / Janen Ju — A plant that effectively functions as a Lotus Eater Machine. It sinks its tendrils into a victim and immobilizes them by showing them delusions and hallucinations, while all the while it feeds off of them slowly.

• Parrot Grass — A shrub capable of mimicking sounds, like a parrot.

MOONBLESSING: Iris

▶ SAMPLES

His top-level on the TDM, which has 2+ subthreads beneath it — though I can partition them out into multiple links if you'd prefer!

Application | prismatica

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