![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
In repayment to myself for surviving the second most miserable class ever today, I'm going to spend some time doing something that is only relevant and enjoyable to me, and that I've been wanting to do for a while: ramble on about my old roleplaying characters.
As a small measure of mercy to those who are far enough from sanity to actually read my journal, I'm sticking them behind cuts. Feel grateful.
Kamiya Ashura was my character for the Mage game a friend of mine ran in my senior year of college. Said game was set in Japan, '04, starting out in Tokyo and eventually moving to Osaka. Ashura herself was (very) loosely based on a character of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
majochan's by the same name-- the main points of connection being the personal name and the fiery tempers of both. Other than that, the two are completely different; Majo's character provided the jumping-off point for mine. Of course I asked Majo first, and she was gracious enough to allow me that liberty.
My Ashura was a combination of the above-mentioned traits, and also a few ideas lifted from the Rig Veda manga by CLAMP. Said manga has another Ashura, based on the Ashura of Hindu/Buddhist mythology (see this website for more information). One of the guiding principles behind her conception was that she was half-good and half-evil-- that she had immense power for destruction, but how her power would be used would be anyone's guess.
Ashura, true to form for the large majority of my characters, had a hugely complex and angsty backstory. She was born in pre-WWII Japan and had a fairly normal and loving family- two parents, three older brothers. But she tended to run wild, and her temper made her extremely difficult to control and deal with. At some point during her childhood she ran into (literally) a Buddhist monk, who recognized the potential in her, and likewise recognized that she could easily end up dead or worse unless someone took her in hand. He persuaded her family, and Ashura spent the rest of her formative years in an isolated Akashic monastary (Akashics are an order of warrior/monk mages; their philosophy is a combination of Buddhism/Daoism/etc from across the entirety of Asia). At said monastary she learned how to fight, which she loved and excelled at; she attempted to learn things like meditation and sutras and scripture, which she hated and was not particularly good at; and she absolutely worshipped the ground her master (the monk who found her) walked on.
While she was a teenager, she began to experience horrible visions akin to glimpses into some of the nastier levels of the Buddhist hells-- except she knew that they were visions of the future for the place she was born. As time went on, they became continuously more detailed, and continuously worse. She felt compelled to try to stop what she saw coming, and this led to her first ever arguments with her master. He did not want her to go; she was certainly not ready, and he feared what would happen to her if she left the monastary too soon. Surely those who were better equipped should handle whatever was coming. But Ashura, convinced by her visions that she was doing the right thing, left anyway.
And so she was in the city of her birth, Hiroshima, when the atomic bomb fell.
The shock of the bomb falling knocked her clean out of the timestream, and she came back into existence some forty-five or so years later. By the time she figured that out, she had also figured out that her family had been killed by the bomb (a tour through the Peace Memorial Museum proved both enlightening and devestating). Lost and not knowing what to do, she managed to get back to her monastary mainly by instinct-- only to find that it had been destroyed some years before by some kind of immense battle that had left the entire place in uninhabited ruins. The only thing she found there was a box containing a sutra scroll and a ritual bell missing its accompanying staff.
She went back to Hiroshima, and after a series of steadily worsening run-ins with the local yakuza, relocated to Tokyo and found a job teaching martial arts (at least some things don't change too much with time; beating the stuffing out of people with your bare hands will always be the same). And that was where she was when the game opened: lost in time, angry, and using her anger to cover the fact that her self-confidence was practically shattered.
Oh, and then her visions started coming back.
And that was Ashura.
As a small measure of mercy to those who are far enough from sanity to actually read my journal, I'm sticking them behind cuts. Feel grateful.
Kamiya Ashura was my character for the Mage game a friend of mine ran in my senior year of college. Said game was set in Japan, '04, starting out in Tokyo and eventually moving to Osaka. Ashura herself was (very) loosely based on a character of
majochan's by the same name-- the main points of connection being the personal name and the fiery tempers of both. Other than that, the two are completely different; Majo's character provided the jumping-off point for mine. Of course I asked Majo first, and she was gracious enough to allow me that liberty.My Ashura was a combination of the above-mentioned traits, and also a few ideas lifted from the Rig Veda manga by CLAMP. Said manga has another Ashura, based on the Ashura of Hindu/Buddhist mythology (see this website for more information). One of the guiding principles behind her conception was that she was half-good and half-evil-- that she had immense power for destruction, but how her power would be used would be anyone's guess.
Ashura, true to form for the large majority of my characters, had a hugely complex and angsty backstory. She was born in pre-WWII Japan and had a fairly normal and loving family- two parents, three older brothers. But she tended to run wild, and her temper made her extremely difficult to control and deal with. At some point during her childhood she ran into (literally) a Buddhist monk, who recognized the potential in her, and likewise recognized that she could easily end up dead or worse unless someone took her in hand. He persuaded her family, and Ashura spent the rest of her formative years in an isolated Akashic monastary (Akashics are an order of warrior/monk mages; their philosophy is a combination of Buddhism/Daoism/etc from across the entirety of Asia). At said monastary she learned how to fight, which she loved and excelled at; she attempted to learn things like meditation and sutras and scripture, which she hated and was not particularly good at; and she absolutely worshipped the ground her master (the monk who found her) walked on.
While she was a teenager, she began to experience horrible visions akin to glimpses into some of the nastier levels of the Buddhist hells-- except she knew that they were visions of the future for the place she was born. As time went on, they became continuously more detailed, and continuously worse. She felt compelled to try to stop what she saw coming, and this led to her first ever arguments with her master. He did not want her to go; she was certainly not ready, and he feared what would happen to her if she left the monastary too soon. Surely those who were better equipped should handle whatever was coming. But Ashura, convinced by her visions that she was doing the right thing, left anyway.
And so she was in the city of her birth, Hiroshima, when the atomic bomb fell.
The shock of the bomb falling knocked her clean out of the timestream, and she came back into existence some forty-five or so years later. By the time she figured that out, she had also figured out that her family had been killed by the bomb (a tour through the Peace Memorial Museum proved both enlightening and devestating). Lost and not knowing what to do, she managed to get back to her monastary mainly by instinct-- only to find that it had been destroyed some years before by some kind of immense battle that had left the entire place in uninhabited ruins. The only thing she found there was a box containing a sutra scroll and a ritual bell missing its accompanying staff.
She went back to Hiroshima, and after a series of steadily worsening run-ins with the local yakuza, relocated to Tokyo and found a job teaching martial arts (at least some things don't change too much with time; beating the stuffing out of people with your bare hands will always be the same). And that was where she was when the game opened: lost in time, angry, and using her anger to cover the fact that her self-confidence was practically shattered.
Oh, and then her visions started coming back.
And that was Ashura.
