Sakuya Shirogane Le Bel

NAME: Joys
OVER 18?: yes
CURRENT PLAYER?: Yes, my current character is Need
PREFERRED CONTACT: PM, I'm on plurk and discord as Joysweeper

CHARACTER NAME: Sakuya Shirogane le Bel
CANON: Hatoful Boyfriend
CANON POINT: Five months post Bad Boy's Love, the 'true route' of the first game, but before the epilogue. Material from the second game Holiday Star is included.
HISTORY: There's a wiki page, but it seems to be going off a different translation than the official one. "Personality and Traits" is mostly right. "Synopsis" is excessively detailed about the first game but has nothing from the second! I'll summarize. In this setting, humans are a resentful remnant and uplifted talking birds, especially pigeons, have taken their place. An aristocratic fantail pigeon family known as le Bel has an outsized degree of power and influence in this world.

A Japanese noblewoman who'd eloped with a commoner had a child, Yuuya, and another egg on the way when Monsieur le Bel had the commoner killed and took the noblewoman to France. He demanded the egg be destroyed. Instead Yuuya swapped it with the egg she had with le Bel, which he smashed. Sakuya hatched and grew up as the le Bel heir, pampered but under great pressure, inculcated with severely racist, classist beliefs, and not permitted to make friends or pursue his own interests including music. When he was a child the mothers of his "half-siblings" sent assassins after Sakuya and he managed to suborn the best assassin to protect him. He had to take on a lot of responsibility quickly.

As a teen Sakuya was commanded to move to the family's Japanese estate and attend a school which employed Shuu Iwamine, a renowned doctor whose medicines had saved le Bel and thus was accorded Sakuya's respect. Sakuya met his brother Yuuya for the first time in years and despised him, as he'd been ordered. Also as he'd been taught, he held his classmates, most prominently Ryouta Kawara and Ryouta's friend Hiyoko Tousaka, the lone Human Representative, in contempt.

Being a le Bel, Sakuya was immediately student council president. Hiyoko joined just under him and challenged him, pushed him out of his comfort zone, forced him to engage more fully and even get his feathers dirty sometimes. Despite himself, he warmed to her, and to his classmates to some degree, but dismissed any indication that Yuuya was good.

While stargazing the class fell into a "dream", a pocket of the bird afterlife with a King ghost that wanted to keep them in comfortable stasis until death, and after. With everyone's help, the King was defeated.

Then Hiyoko was found dead and a mysterious opaque dome enclosed the school campus. Sakuya and Ryouta investigated and dark shit ensued. Shuu attacked Sakuya but Yuuya took the hit and revealed the truth of Sakuya's heritage before succumbing. Sakuya hunkered down with an existential crisis before pulling together and going on. Ultimately Ryouta, now a plague carrier, entered cryostasis with Hiyoko's remains as everybirdie else evacuated. Sakuya swore to return once medical science advanced enough to help.

"A le Bel - no, I never go back on my word!"

SUITABILITY:
The bird afterlife that Sakuya's seen involves riding trains through the stars with various companions and a friendly Conductor, stopping here and there, and slowly losing memories until reincarnation, so the setting of the Crossing will be half familiar. He's not going to be happy. There's a lot he doesn't want to forget! Whether he pays the toll for his first Crossing or not will depend on how overwhelmed he feels. He's likely to try to brave the wraiths at least once but will eventually accept the circumstances and generally be more in favor of paying as long as it's not something too essential. He'll both want to and be afraid of finding someone he cares about here; if he meets them, he wants to remember them. Also it's gonna be weird to him to be surrounded by humans.

Sakuya has a sweet, creative nature and cares deeply for others, but "nature" has been nearly buried under "nurture". He can be staggeringly racist, classist, and condescend even to people he actually likes; he's rude, he's snobby, he absolutely sees himself as above others. The majority of his awfulness is him parroting the le Bel party line, and he's noted as being less angry and closed-off than what he's projecting. He hides true feelings for people under aloof disdain because he's not permitted otherwise. Sakuya is afraid of Monsieur le Bel and knows how precarious his own favored position is. Even the idea of telling him "I want to pursue music", when le Bel has destroyed all of Sakuya's instruments and forbade him from the subject, is upsetting. The idea of having his own preferences let alone doing what he wants is there - he secretly learns to play piano - but he struggles to even articulate these things. Those personal goals, if you can unearth them, tend to be quite humble.

With this canon point he's less awful. That indoctrination doesn't just go away though, and medical research is expensive, he's overseeing care of Ryouta's sick mother, he's got some contact with the people trying to prevent birds and humans from going to war again... Having all those plates in the air means he's still been having to use the name "le Bel" and live in the mansion in order to make use of the family's resources, which also means having to keep up the facade of still being the proper heir and above everybirdie. On top of that he'll be upset about dying (here in the gap between ending and epilogue, I'm saying another assassin hired by "family" got him) and thinks he should have been on top of things enough to prevent it and that without his wing on the wheel everything he's trying to do will fall apart. He's worse the more upset he is but unlikely to hit his previous depths, and might even try out not insulting everyone's breeding.

Learning the truth about himself and Yuuya has crushed Sakuya. All this time he's obediently spat on someone who loved him genuinely and truly in a way he's learned to distrust, and who is really no different from him. Maybe innate, genetic superiority doesn't even exist, and maybe what he decides to do is more important than pleasing a frightful, murderous patriarch. He's scraped himself back together in part because it's what Yuuya would want him to do. He will "chase after Yuuya", that is, act with integrity, and knows he'll never find him but will find himself. And he does have a great deal of integrity! Sakuya has a strong sense of justice and is loyal, steady in a crisis, quite intelligent, and genuinely a good leader who doesn't have to be the center of attention or get any glory.

I want Sakuya's better tendencies to be drawn out and his worse ones worn down to a degree. He'll always be a bit overly direct with a big ego and probably fall back on bluster when emotional, of course! In short, I want to force people to take a big talking tsundere pigeon seriously as a character.

I also wanna note that while Sakuya can fly, because he's so big, has a fantail, and absolutely is not an athlete he can't just avoid all obstacles. I'm cool with various degrees of nerfing, or with there being falcon Wraiths, or what have you.
FIRST TOLL: Sakuya loses the memory of when his father took him to task for interacting with those of lesser station, in which Monsieur le Bel told him that those of impure blood are worthless beings, crawling in the dust, destined to die as miserably as they lived if not for the benevolence of the pure bloodline. It wasn't the first time he was chastised for that kind of thing, but with that imagery and the indirect threat it was the one that stuck.

He'll be a little less reluctant to engage with people and less likely to call them trash unprompted. I can make no promises on if an argument counts as prompting.
SAMPLES:
A tdm toplevel with five responders. Is that enough? I may have to wait until app open again.