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[all_onis_are_true]

P L A Y E R;
NAME: Badge
AGE: 33. Well, 34 in April.
PLAYER JOURNAL: dragomorph
TIMEZONE: Central
CONTACT: dragomorph
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: N/A

C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Hiroshi
CANON: Ao Oni
POINT IN CANON: Post...game. Or something. See Point of Departure for details.
AGE: 16
APPEARANCE: His design as seen in the light novel/manga series.
CANON HISTORY: Hokay. So.

There is a basic framework to Ao Oni. Some kids visit a mansion that's hidden out in the middle of nowhere and is rumored to have monsters living in it. Surprise, it actually does have monsters living in it. So one kid ends up having to solve a bunch of puzzles while getting chased around by voracious blue monsters, eventually managing to escape by the skin of their teeth. Pretty straight forward.

And here's where it gets complicated.

See, for some reason, this simple little Z-rated game with a bare-bones plot got noticed. First it was by Japanese LPers who loved the weird little jump scares of the game, then by a light novel producer which specialized in making novelizations of freeware games. Then movies, and comics, and anime, and all sorts of stuff spun off from it.

Except, uh. Nearly every single one of these things has a different continuity. The original game itself shows drastic storyline changes between each version. Sometimes characters live. Most of the time they die, but not necessarily in the same order. Even Hiroshi changes entirely from a generic black-haired middle school student to the white-haired scarf-wearing nerd he's more famous as being today. Enormous liberties were taken in every version in order to fill the enormous gaps in plot and information that were present as a result of the game providing so little in the way of background information. And the animated movie even takes it a step further and assumes all the game characters are fictional, introducing a whole different set of protagonists instead.

So. In general, it's easier to go by the few common denominators, although bear in mind this is mostly from osmosis because about 50% of these canon interpretations aren't even in English:

- The mansion they visit is called the Jailhouse.
- Hiroshi will generally enter completely disbelieving the entire possibility of monsters. He is proven drastically wrong very quickly.
- He gets chased around by monsters, solving puzzles. (In all honesty, Ao Oni sometimes feels like an Escape Room game put into a horror RPG, which makes more sense when you realize that noprops makes escape rooms on the side.)
- At some point Hiroshi hides in a jail cell that the monster can't get into. It's probably the most famous scene, with a first-person perspective of the monster moving back and forth on the other side of the bars before suddenly and jarringly shaking them.
- People probably die. Usually it's Takuro, Mika and Takeshi.
- Takuro is a massive asshole in about 90% of the franchise. He's fine in the other 10%. We don't know either.
- Hiroshi gets out by the skin of his teeth at the end. ALTERNATIVELY, somebody hits the magic reset button and everybody is alive again but the cycle repeats. Or something. The spin-off writers started getting really creative.

This is pretty much all you need to know about Ao Oni. For Hiroshi as interpreted by this player, see the Canon Personality section.

CANON PERSONALITY: A quick note before I start: Hiroshi is basically about 75-80% original character, beginning as an idea I fleshed out from watching LPs of the different game versions. As different canon iterations came out, extra elements have been incorporated into his character, but the basic premise as I have it is pretty much the same. Ergo, the best way to view him is as a sort of amalgam of original and canonical elements. To be fair, he barely had a canon when I first developed him. Ao Oni the game - the only thing out at first - is not much for plot.

Hiroshi is, as one might suspect from his appearance and demeanor, a very intelligent young man. By first impressions, he appears to be very reserved and polite, resulting in an image of aloofness. This perception is not without warrant; being raised in a household with a stern, serious father who himself had little patience for nonsense has resulted in a similar mindset. As a result, his initial tendency in a situation is to point out the logical fallacies, which makes him look arrogant and frustrating to deal with.

Hiroshi tries as much as possible to view the world scientifically, refusing to leap fully into believing superstitious or supernatural ideas without a healthy dose of evidence. Prior to his time in the mansion, he would have refused to accept the idea of anything resembling magic or myth as existing in reality, as such things violate scientific laws. When presented with ideas that seem foolish or ridiculous, he shows no hesitation in breaking them apart, typically showing a more sardonic and abrasive side in the process. Generally, he tries to present himself as a man in full control of his emotions, logical and objective. A scientist, in other words.

Internally, it's not that simple. His experiences in the mansion, and the subsequent variant memories it has created, has resulted in a man with a deep sense of regret and anxiety regarding his own inability to affect things. Knowing that there exists multiple possibilities in which he could have NOT failed to get everybody out alive - even if logically, it should not have been his responsbility alone to do so - causes him no small amount of anguish. He is prone towards accepting an unrealistic amount of responsibility for when things go wrong, probably largely due to the fact that the incident in the mansion was arguably his biggest failure - and certainly the most fatal. Even prior to the mansion incident, he had a strong tendency towards self-sacrificial actions. Coming out the only survivor in his instance of the Jailhouse incident only made that worse.

This also highlights an aspect of Hiroshi which is less advertised: he is, in reality, actually a very caring individual. Even if he doesn't always show it on the outside, he is concerned about the needs and problems of people he is close to. As cold as he can sometimes appear, he can also be warm and considerate. He is certainly more than willing to put his life on the line for people he regards as friends. (Which also contributes to one of his biggest troubles: the knowledge that in the panic of a moment of pursuit in the Jailhouse, he'd run ahead of a companion who tripped rather than move to save them. Regardless of who that is in what timeline, he still has great regrets about that.) If he accepts too much responsibility, it is because he genuinely cares and wants to make sure as many people as possible make it out of a situation unscathed.

He can also be passionate when he wants to be. His biggest scientific passion is entemology, but any moment of scientific discovery can excite him. (Which actually leads, in one timeline variant, to him nearly getting himself killed. After all, how often do you confirm the existence of a lifeform heretofore unconfirmed before? ...What do you mean it's about to bite his head off?) In other words, it is possible to get him to act his age - it just requires stimulating the right interest.

As a final major point, the time in the mansion did change him in ways beyond purely traumatic. His capacity for thinking outside the box in moments of crisis became better honed thanks to the sheer number of puzzles hiding within the mansion walls. He is also much more willing to accept the possibility of strange and unusual circumstances, although he still maintains some skepticism unless presented with evidence. And it is much easier to get him to shift gears and consider new circumstances, which combined with his rational ability actually makes him more useful in such situations.

And, well, there's the matter of his... abilities. During his time in the mansion, Hiroshi often found himself having moments where things felt familiar, where he knew where things would be. Sometimes this helped him find things faster. Sometimes it just meant he was that much more surprised when things didn't turn out as his hunches suspected. This was strange enough, but after his time there, he found himself, well... remembering. Different timelines. Different variations. Friends were enemies. Enemies were friends. People who existed in one timeline may not have existed in others. Sometimes even he died, although those memories were obviously cut short.

Needless to say, it's not helping that whole "traumatized and remorseful" thing much.

POINT OF DEPARTURE: As stated previously, it's hard to depart from a canon that can't decide between versions what the hell that canon is. So instead, I will note the aspects I have personally retained from what I have gathered from the canon materials, as well as extra details I have made up:

- Hiroshi does not have a canonical family name. For simplification purpose, and to identify that this is very specifically my version of him, his last name is Yamane.
- His father is a cold, strict scientific type who doesn't much care for anything that can't be explained by science, and is mostly concerned about his son succeeding as an intellectual. His mother is a gentler individual whose more benevolent side explains the ways in which Hiroshi did not end up completely intolerable. In one dimension, his mother marries a different man who is nicer, and the combination of these two results in the somewhat more generic 1.0 Hiroshi. It's Complicated.
- Through some quirk of fate, the Takuro that Hiroshi knew is one of the friendly ones. But he COULD have been a bully if a situation in which Hiroshi helped him out when they were kids hadn't occurred. Even after that he wasn't 100% perfect, pushing Takeshi around a lot.
- Hiroshi is still a huge bug fanatic. He has some skills in archery as well but doesn't really pursue it that much.
- Hiroshi comes from a variant of the 6.23 game version. This means that his friends died and morphed into Onis.

Hiroshi is a post-game variant of himself. Most frustrating to him is that ever since the disaster in the mansion, he has found himself "recalling" different iterations of what happened in the mansion, up to and including the Golden Ending from Ao Oni 2016 in which literally nobody dies ever. Friends die in different combinations. Sometimes HE dies. Sometimes he doesn't even take in the same people. There is no one situation he can pinpoint where he could have done things in such a way as to guarantee he got the best conclusions to things. (And in a way, maybe that's for the best; Ao Oni 2 for mobile reveals that the whole goddamn effort to keep everybody alive is kind of futile anyway, or at least has established as such up through the Takuro scenario.) And this continues to be a source of trauma and anguish for him, even as he has forced himself to make peace with the fact that what's done is done.

The other major divergence is his deja vu. This is where it gets a bit meta: The version of Hiroshi I developed ties directly into the diagetic experience of a player who plays through different versions of the game. This means that while some things will be familiar, other things that you expect are familiar are in a totally different place, or don't exist, or exist in a different fashion. And that's how it works for Hiroshi: he doesn't remember a given scenario's variations until the very end, but he does occasionally get flashes of insight. This thing will happen HERE. This thing will be found THERE. But he's only correct about 50% of the time, making it largely less effectual than it could be.

VETERAN?: not even remotely

ABILITIES: The following are headcanon abilities:
- Deja Vu: Hiroshi will occasionally get flashes of insight informing him of where people, places, or things are. These are taken from the different dimensional variants of his experiences. But because that's the case, it's only accurate half of the time. As such, it's a gamble to rely on it as any sort of useful psychic premonition.
- Power of Recall: Upon completion of a major scenario, Hiroshi will begin recalling alternate versions of himself experiencing alternate versions of the events of the scenario. This is, as one might expect, completely and utterly worthless for anything other than possibly some strategic reexamination, and maybe some cheap possibilities of "what if" scenarios to toss into the meme section or something.

INVENTORY: His scarf and his schoolbag. That's it.
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? The Deja Vu has the POTENTIAL to be overpowered, but I think it would be more interesting in the hands of the mods as a way to throw a wrench into the works. Up to the mods whether you want that removed or not, though.

M A R K S;
JUSTIFICATION:
MAGICIAN: Hiroshi is both practical and creative, as judged by his ability to solve puzzles and his capacity to quickly reevaluate his situation such that he is still able to act rationally even in the presence of an irrational new reality. Not everybody would be able to immediate realize that running is a good option when confronted with something they didn't believe existed five minutes ago (although he actually reacts with excitement to the Oni in the manga and barely manages to avoid getting his head bitten off thanks to more wary friends). He is often the one to take the initiative in a situation, as judged by the fact he is frequently the one to investigate the source of a loud noise at the beginning of any Ao Oni game.

EMPEROR: His upbringing has created in him the idealized masculine image of an intuitive, controlled, and disciplined scientist. His unwillingness to believe in the supernatural prior to the events in the mansion highlights his inflexibility towards considering unorthodox explanations unless confronted with evidence. And evidence alone isn't enough; Hiroshi in the 2.0 to 4.0 versions of Ao Oni isn't even convinced the monster is anything other than somebody in a stupid costume until he literally sees one of his friend's heads getting bitten off in front of him.

STRENGTH: The flipside of Hiroshi is that he's actually capable of gentleness and sensitivity when he needs to be. Evidence of this mostly shows up in the untranslated novels, so I cannot unfortunately give specifics. The fact that he is willing to side with Naoki in the manga even when he's threatening him with an ice pick, though, as well as his compassion and protectiveness towards Naoki's young female companion indicates that he's really a nice guy underneath the cold, polite exterior. His sympathies towards Shun in other spinoffs indicates the same thing.

JUSTICE: Hiroshi is a smart cookie. He's the top of his class, has a strong intellectual curiosity, and always tries to base his decisions on objective rationale. It does make him a little overly critical of people who he feels are being irrational, though.

VETO:

FOOL: Hiroshi is honestly the only protagonist character in all of the Ao Oni franchise that isn't an ideal candidate for the Fool. He's too scientifically-minded and reserved for that.

DEVIL: While some aspects are applicable, Hiroshi isn't really passionate enough most of the time to fall under most of the aspects listed under this, with maybe the exception of anxiety. Also, uh, he's asexual. My headcanon, not official.

S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: Testrun post here.
PROSE SAMPLE: The situation with the monsters of the Jailhouse had taught Hiroshi that there were many creatures in the world that science did not - and could not - hope to understand. This was a truth he had been forced to come to whether he wanted to or not, having killed his friends as it had.

However, no amount of science or supernatural explanations would tell him that hypodermic needles swinging through the trees was in any way a possibility in anything outside of dreams. They didn't even have internal organs.

He sat back, taking in the surreal setting around him. Liminal Space, to some, was exciting and wonderous. To him, it was mostly just unsettling; absolutely none of the natural laws as he understood them seemed to have any meaning here. Vertabrae, for example, were meant to be the backbones of creatures, not actual creatures themselves snapping at what looked like living rocks. None of this made any sense, and they often left him longing for whatever strange new situation the Arcana had in mind to come all that much sooner. At least THOSE places followed a proper internal logic.

He jumped a bit and ducked into a nearby hollow... well, in theory it should be a log, but it was more like a large macaroni noodle. Still, it provided adequate cover away from the dangerous, carnivorous, uh...

Stethoscope.

...Jeez, this was dumb. At least when he was hiding from the blue monsters, they actually had TEETH to worry about. This felt more like the nightmare of somebody who really hated doctor appointments. That they were equally lethal just made it dumber. Although, at least, he had the sense to save his sigh of irritation until the stethoscope was further out of sight.

He may have had little tolerance for this nonsense, but that didn't mean he lacked a survival instinct. Unlike, say, whoever that is over there, who he tries to hiss at to get their attention. "Hey. Hey! You should not stand out in the open like that!"