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Character Application - Folkmore
Jan. 26th, 2021 11:28 amCharacter Age: Somewhere in her 20s - I headcanon about 24.
Character Species: Human
Current Health: Terrible. She has tuberculosis and was just shot to death by an artillery brigade.
Outfit: A short-sleeved, purple kimono with floral imprint and a shawl and geta.
Character Canon:
Link to History: Her history is long and complex. I have made the abridged 500 word version for the app here! If you need any more context, I had to write out her history myself years ago because the Wiki is empty and the full history is here.
Canon Point: Late manga, at the point of her death.
Canon Iteration: Original canon
Canon Iteration Explanation: N/A
Skills:
- deadly with a sword.
- deadly with most 18th century Japanese weapons
- kinesthetic genius. She's a master of her environment
- she's trained in the arts of hospitality, companionship, singing, playing the shamisen, and sex, having been both a geisha and a prostitute
- she can teach her sword style, which largely revolves around speed and momentum.
- she probably makes depression an art form, too.
Canon Abilities: She's just human. A badass normal at the high end of the scale, but human only.
Role: Familiar
Role Qualities/Attributes: A loner and exile, both imposed on her and later chosen for herself, she will manifest the eyes and feathers of a crow.
Role Reasoning: Makie could be a myth. But she is no leader and is very bad at making her own life choices. She becomes a prostitute just because her mother told her to. She agrees to kill Manji because Anotsu asked her to. She's at her deadliest when protecting those she cares about, and she follows their lead 99% of the time. She shows kindness to the weak and has no deference to the law, ride or die for one person only... and is aimless when she has no person to turn her attention to.
Makie is not a strong-willed person and is quite fragile in personality and ego. TV Tropes describes her as a broken bird, and that’s very accurate; she is melancholic and she’s grown up with the knowledge that, according to Edo society, her existence is the greatest shame a family could bear. Killing people brings her no joy. Being a geisha brings her no joy. Being a whore certainly doesn’t. She can’t commit to any one road in life, and a woman with impressive sword skills has no place in the strict society of mid-Tokugawa. Makie has grown up feeling strongly that she has no place, no roots, that she shouldn’t exist, and it shows in how conflicted and miserable she is. She believes she is a fallen woman who can’t have dreams like other people.
Her capacity for empathy and compassion is quite high, and she smiles and talks to children on the street (notably girls), encouraging them and comforting them. As a geisha she is self deprecating yet capable of good conversation, both playful and more softly serious. She can be a kind and gentle and sometimes teasing woman, and is often quite candid about what she’s thinking or feeling in various situations.
There are possibly two things that instill any kind of peace or positive emotion in Makie. One is her shamisen which, while it does double as a place to conceal her weapon of choice, is nevertheless an instrument she’s shown to play on many occasions, creating her own music and songs, and she is shown on two occasions to be alone and playing without an audience. While it’s a skill she likely picked up somewhere between the brothel and the geisha house, it’s clear that it gives her a moment of peace.
The other is Anotsu Kagehisa. The first person to ever praise her swordsmanship, the only student she’s ever had, the only man to hold her in respect through her early years. She loves him, and cannot bear to shame him. She insists on paying him for his freeing her from the brothel, she would kill for him, she will protect him at cost of her own life—and did just that. At first, she’s convinced he only loves her for her sword because Makie has low self esteem and little respect for herself (she refers to her own songs as amateur, she can’t see why a man would love her or even like her for who she is-- sex or her swordsmanship, she’s not a person to them, she is a figure of shame or something exotic, depending on their point of view.) The promise she made Anotsu give her when they were young—that one day, he must be more skilled than she is—is not one she expects him to keep; rather, she takes joy from the fact that she can defeat him, because it means she has a reason to stay by his side. She’s needed. It’s Anotsu that pulls her out of her depression and eventually gives her drive to go on. It’s Anotsu who gives her a path forward as his bodyguard, and she takes to it with lethal flair.
All in all, Makie is a complicated individual who would have been a lot happier if she’d been born in a different century. She’s indecisive, flawed, compassionate, sad, and self-destructive and she sees no joy in living on. On the other hand, when she fights, she’s a different person. She’s a dancer, she’s canny, instinctive, cunning, and moves so fast she’s yet to be in a fight where she gets a single drop of blood on her despite the slaughter around her—and she has killed a lot of people. She is both terrifying and awesome to behold, her face blank and serene, and she develops a terrifying reputation by the end of the manga.
When it comes to full potential, Makie is already highly skilled on the physical side-- but lord, her emotional side is a complete mess. She’s depressed, she’s passively suicidal and pretty uncaring about most of life as a result. Reaching her full potential is a matter of getting her to engage and develop actual relationships and a support network and widening her very narrow viewpoint on life so that she begins to see the joy in even just small things. It will be rough at first because she’ll just want to disappear, but slowly and surely, she could learn to live for herself. And that would be amazing.
