Umemiya Hajime

PLAYER
NAME: Solstice
CONTACT: Discord, darkersolstice
OVER 18? Thoroughly.
CURRENT CHARACTERS: None yet

CHARACTER
NAME: Hajime Umemiya
CANON: Wind Breaker (manga/anime, not recently-cancelled manwha)
CANON POINT: A few days after ch. 162; post-Noroshi arc and post-thank you party.
BACKGROUND: https://wind-breaker.fandom.com/wiki/Hajime_Umemiya
SUITABILITY: Umemiya may be a teenager, but at his age he’s already the leader of a street gang. He’s used to working as part of a team (and as the leader of one), so slotting himself into the society of Bottlecap Bay will be simple, at least in the abstract. While he’s pretty well self-actualized in canon, dealing with the guild leaders and their flaws, as well as the complications of being a whole Pokemon will give him something to chew on.

QUESTIONNAIRE:

⟡ Your character is on an exploration quest when they find an injured Pokemon in need of help. This Pokemon appears to be in distress and is quite dangerous, posing a risk to your character even if they mean well, and putting your quest mission at risk. What do they do? What are some possibilities of how they work with teammates to address this, or do they go at it alone?

Umemiya is, unfortunately, a little bit the sort to poke the bear. To place himself past the boundary of someone’s comfort zone and offer himself to be physically attacked in order to make a point. He’s not going to ask anyone else to go there with him, and would likely ask someone else to run for medical supplies, but if others step into the metaphorical ring with him, he’d be heartened by them approaching matters the same way he does.

The canon example that this is perhaps most similar to is how Umemiya handles fights with rival gang leaders like Choji and Takiishi. In both instances, there was something that each of them needed from the fight that wasn’t just ‘beat Umemiya’. Choji had lost sight of what it meant to be a leader, and so Umemiya fought him to prove his fists were powerless because he had nothing to fight for. Takiishi was just looking for a true knockdown drag-out brawl with no limits, and Umemiya was willing to offer that–with the stipulation that if he won, Takiishi would tell him more about himself, open up as he hadn’t to anyone else before.

⟡ Your character's worst enemy has recently appeared in game, and has joined the guild your character is part of. They both want to tackle the same quest, and your character's enemy suggests that they work together as a team to accomplish this goal. How does your character respond to this?

Umemiya’s worst enemy to date is Endo Yamato, a Furin High dropout who left as Umemiya was revolutionizing the school and its place within the town of Makochi. Endo and several others walked rather than participating in the act of reforming the school’s image, preferring the chaos that it was prone to before.

For this reason, Endo offering to cooperate with Umemiya would be suspicious at the least. However, the circumstances in the Bay could conceivably have led to Endo choosing to work with others. Right? Umemiya would cautiously accept the help, but be waiting for a “Long Live the King” moment on a cliffside. After all, he’s a big believer in giving people chances to grow and change, and leans into the Defeat Means Friendship trope of shonen anime.

⟡ The leader of your character's guild has just approached your character with an offer: they will provide your character with extra supplies, reputation points, and help them with any of their current struggles. In exchange, they ask for your character to do a favor for them that may harm the other guilds, and will not specify what the favor is in advance. It sounds shady, but it's the deal of a lifetime in your character's path to get back home, and refusing it may cause strife for your character within their current guild. What do they think of this offer? What do they ultimately decide to do?

This is somewhere where Umemiya’s going to put a hard foot down. He isn’t someone who will compromise his morals under any circumstances, especially in a way that’ll harm the greater community. Even if it led to his guild leader kicking him out or making him sleep rough outside housing, there’s no world in which you see Umemiya accepting this deal.

Now, the confounding factor here is that Umemiya will stew on this alone, and unless there’s someone he’s built strong rapport with in another guild, he won’t bring this up to anyone else, especially the other guild leaders. He’s not good at going outside his circle; this is perhaps one of the few flaws we see in him in canon. When it comes to a large scale battle that threatens his entire town, he doesn’t think to ask for help from allied gangs. The choice to reach out to them is made by one of his juniors, who doesn’t even tell Umemiya he’s doing it.

⟡ Due to shortages on supplies, the city is facing issues deciding where to cut corners during this rough time. Somehow, the responsibility has fallen on your character's shoulders, and they have to make a decision. If they send out an extra team of Pokemon, they will be able to gather more food, and through that, save the lives of dozens of starving Pokemon that were in dire need of nutrition. However, the only Pokemon available to scout for food are those working at the pokeclinic, and sending them out would mean certain death for at least two ill patients. What does your character decide to do? How do they feel about this choice, and how would they deal with the pushback that comes from either side?

This is the sort of hard decision that would have Umemiya wringing his hands. Like, on the surface, the needs of the many ought to outweigh the needs of the few, but it feels wrong when there’s people who will actually die, either way. He might try to Kobayashi Maru the matter; have one of the medically-inclined Pokemon go out foraging with him, leaving the other to tend to the patients alone. Either way, the negative consequences of his choices would weigh on him in the long run.

What would be interesting is how this would affect his planning and future decisions, how he’d want to build systems so that there’s no chance of the same brutal choice coming up. That is, making sure more people are cross-trained to pinch hit in the Pokeclinic, building up a more robust food supply by gardening or otherwise making sure there’s no need for emergency foraging. The experience, as a whole, would galvanize him to Do Better.

POKEMON: Lucario. I’m imagining a moveset something like Life Dew, Metal Claw, Rock Smash and Reversal. The last there is to represent a core of Umemiya’s personal philosophy: “No matter how difficult the path, no matter how unreasonable the climb, no matter how absurd it gets, I will never lose.” Even when he’s down to 1HP, Ume’s the sort to remain on a brutal offensive. I like that Lucario gets a lot of team-centric moves, like Life Dew, Heal Pulse and Helping Hand, while still being a complete offensive powerhouse, like Umemiya is.

GUILD OPT-OUT: Opting out of Lum Berries.

The other two guilds are both very fitting for Umemiya, and offer interesting challenges in their own ways. Rimbombee is someone who Umemiya would probably consider a lot like himself, and his own leadership role within Bofurin, up until he starts learning about his habits of favoritism, and the degree of sacrifice he expects from members of his guild. While Umemiya is very community-minded at the core, the slant to Rimbombee’s perspective would be offputting and cause some interesting tension.

Counter to that, Mightyena’s defenders are a little simplistic and unstrategic. While a younger Umemiya might have been very much into the “just throw yourself at problems until they stop” attitude, having his own leadership role back home has led him to appreciate the help of strategic thinkers and planned engagements–though notably, he delegated out a lot of the actual strategizing instead of trying to do it all himself.

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