expiation app

[warhawks]

Player: Cassie
Contact: palkia @ plurk, moredred @ discord
Age: 30+
Current Characters: N/A

Character Name: Asa Mitaka / Yoru
Character Canon: Chainsaw Man
Canon Point: Chapter 132; she wakes up here instead of the hospital.
Age: 17 (Asa) / ??? (Yoru)

Crime: Mass Murder. Technically not something Asa's guilty of yet (though Yoru certainly is), but more than applies to her later on in canon.

Background: Asa / Yoru

Personality:

Asa Mitaka is a hot mess, and that's without factoring in the literal devil in her head. But we'll get to that part in a minute.

The thing about Asa is most of her problems are relatable, on the surface. Sympathetic, even. She's lonely. She's anxious. She's insecure. All things that would normally inspire empathy in a reader, and ideally lead to an arc of her overcoming them, and becoming a healthier person. Except... she doesn't. She only gets worse. More selfish. More cynical. More toxic. More and more desperate to justify her existence to herself and the world as she sinks deeper into the mire of awfulness that her life has become.

Worst of all: she knows it. Better than anyone else. But if you were to ask Asa directly, you'd be met with a bevy of excuses. Those people she killed? That wasn't her, that was Yoru. Her crappy attitude? Maybe if you weren't being so rude, she wouldn't have one. Bad things are always happening to her, never because of her. Those redeeming factors she once had — her sense of empathy, her genuine wish to connect with others, her attempts to reciprocate kindness shown to her — are still there, but you'd be hard-pressed to notice any them at first blush, or stick around long enough to learn. Her good side might as well be the dark side of the moon, for how often anyone gets to see it.

Asa is utterly wracked by guilt over even the smallest mistakes, but she's even more terrified of confrontation, so she runs from them. She has a recurring nightmare of running down an alley, all while desperately trying not to step on the corpses piling up under her feet. What's waiting at the end? God help her if she ever finds out, but it's certainly not going to be pretty. She always tries to do the right thing, but not for any real moral reason. It's only because doing wrong will make people think less of her, and that's what she's most afraid of. No good deed goes unpunished, but no bad deed goes unseen.

But that's Asa. Now, let's talk about Yoru — because as time goes on, they get harder and harder to separate. To outsiders, and to each other.

Yoru is the War Devil. That's not just a fancy title: devils embody their name (more specifically, people's fear of the thing they're named for), and so Yoru is War itself. Every time a soldier marches into battle, every time a bullet is fired at an enemy, every time a fighter jet takes flight, it all happens in her name. She exists because of war; war exists because of her. As far as fears go, it's a doozy.

So what kind of personality does War have, when forced to share a mind with a teenage girl? Well, she's violent, for one. No surprise there. Though Asa manages to keep a somewhat tight rein on her for most of the series, Yoru thinks other people's suffering is deeply amusing. She's impulsive, but she's also shrewd enough to lay (relatively) low and only pick fights she thinks they can win. "They", because she's limited by Asa's weak human body. If she had her own still, well, she'd show you. For now, please stand by while she yells at Asa some more about making a stronger weapon.

There's a good reason for her to be (ironically) somewhat gun-shy: she knows what it's like to lose a part of herself, literally. In the Chainsaw Man universe, both the concepts of WWII and nuclear weapons have been completely erased from the collective consciousness, all because a part of Yoru was eaten in hell by a devil with the power to erase concepts. To erase her. And ever since, she's been utterly terrified of losing more. Of being forgotten completely. All her bravado, her bombastry, her bluster — it's all in service of her bruised ego, every bit of it. All to regain what she lost, both in terms of power, and her comrades that were eaten. If Asa is insecure, then Yoru is Insecure with a capital I. She has to be the strongest, or else she's in danger of being the weakest.

In the end, what they both care about is how others perceive them. Asa wants to be seen as a good person. Yoru wants to be seen as powerful. They both want to be seen. One swings wildly between unrivaled self-loathing and equally unrivaled selfishness, the other between abusive mother figure and petulant child. They're a headache and a half, and the fact they have to share a body and mind only makes them both worse.

Abilities:

➤ Weapon creation: Yoru (and Asa by extension) have the power to turn things, living or otherwise, into weapons by establishing "ownership" of them. The concept of ownership is deliberately vague; all that matters is Asa (or Yoru's) personal perception. The more guilty she feels about destroying the thing, the stronger the weapon. Some examples in canon: turning a ruler into a sword (reasonable), someone's severed hand into a grenade (okay), turning an entire aquarium she "bought" with a million yen into a spear (you see what I mean about perception).

(For my own sanity, she won't be making any weapons out of any living things in Expi. That part will just be mysteriously non-functional. The only flesh-based weapons she'll be capable of making will come either from her own body, or something like a severed limb.)

➤ Enhanced physical abilities: Asa is a completely normal girl at the start of the series, becoming slightly stronger and more durable after Yoru possesses her, but still within reasonable limits. Later in canon, after the fear of war begins to spread amongst the populace, her power increases: she stops a sword with her bare hand, when it previously cut off her arm with no issue. In Expi, she'll be more powerful in times of conflict and fear, and weaker during peace.

➤ Misc: Yoru, as the War Devil, is skilled with all forms of weaponry used for human warfare pre-1999: swords, spears, guns, axes, even grenades. This won't apply to anything futuristic, or alien in origin.

As a note: in theory, Asa should be able to drink blood to heal herself like every other devil and fiend, but she's never shown doing so. It's unknown whether she's unable, due to her unique circumstance, or simply unwilling. I personally headcanon the latter, but until canon confirms one way or the other, it won't happen in-game regardless.

Inventory: Just her clothes!

Samples: TDM thread, one with Yoru involved from another game.

Questions: If you need more clarification on her powers or anything else, please lmk!