I heard through the grapevine that Free! might not have enough canon to app? I am also using the novel High Speed! as additional canon (it happens five years before Free! and details a lot of earlier background stuff as well as giving most of the characters stronger narrative voices), but if you want to reject this on the grounds that only 8/12 episodes are out I'd be fine with that and just re-app in a cycle or two. If it helps any, I'd most likely drop him in here at the mid-canonpoint (end of episode 6 of 12) and then canon-update him after the anime finishes.
Player Name: Ruin Plurk: Ruingaraf Skype: Ruingaraf Timezone: Eastern Current Characters in Route: none
Haru is, at his best, a quiet and reserved young man who's a child prodigy at swimming as well as reasonably good in school. At his worst, he is an anti-social and water-obsessed eccentric with poor social skills.
Water seems to mean something special to Haru, something beyond a substance to be interacted with. Both the anime and the light novel open with his monologue about how the water is alive, and that to swim properly, one must quietly accept the water and let it accept you, so that both of you mutually exist in peace and do not fight the other. Additionally, he states that he goal in swimming is neither winning nor losing, or even time, but the idea of being “free” (a double reference, since Free is also a swimming event that is usually performed in the front crawl, Haru's specialty). The idea of freedom in the water is something of almost spiritual importance to him, referring to many things, including the silence, solitude, and sense of peace under the surface, the isolation from everyone and everything else other than his own physical exertion, and the lack of expectations or obligations placed upon him. Unfortunately, as High Speed references, this is a little more than just a sports protagonist quirk-- it's a coping mechanism for his social issues.
On land Haru deals with problems by ignoring them and not caring, and in water he runs away— leaves his problems, fear of other people’s expectations, and requirements of human interaction at the poolside. This sets part of a larger pattern with Haru that shows the weaker side of his character-- when conflict or anything he dislikes comes up, he retreats into himself beyond a wall of stoicism, by literally walking away, or by swimming to escape from his problems. When his opinion comes into a group discussion, he nearly always has nothing to contribute and opts to go with the flow (water pun intentional), sometimes even if he has strong feelings of his own, as in the case with the class project around the cherry tree. Once he does finally speak up, it tends to be in such an unreasonable and stubborn manner that it causes others to think of him as insensitive and cruel, even though he's usually more perceptive than he lets on about others' feelings. Because he generally lets his best friend, Makoto, speak for him, he's not really getting any better in the social department, either. The overall cycle tends to be something like Haru doesn't interact with people, until he's forced to. Then, he gets stressed and ends up either lashing out or saying something harshly blunt to make things awkward and potentially painful. After that he becomes further stressed by his inability to communicate and retreats, either to solitude or (most likely) to a pool, because the water is soothing and he can leave his problems back on land. This is the cycle that's become Haru's life.
When interacting with closer friends, like the swim club, Haru tends to stay off to the side more, but occasionally offers contributions in the form of blunt comments or semi-obvious statements. As the group's resident Straight Shooter, it tends to be his role to provide the comically serious foil, although he's not completely without a sense of humor (just mostly, and what little remains is so dry that it's hard to tell if he's being serious or not).
Although it rarely appears so, especially with his propensity to take Makoto for granted, Haru does genuinely care for the friends he has in his own aloof way. It isn't necessarily that he doesn't care, more that he does so from a distance and rarely feels such things need to be said out loud, or for that matter, acknowledged in any way. And so, as more recent episodes have shown, he is not entirely immune to Go Team speeches, and they are in fact one of the few things that can snap him out of his confused and lethargic depressive funks.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
+ Swimming It's not an exaggeration to say that Haru was a child prodigy at swimming, and even though he's seventeen now, he still has three more years until he's “normal” (the age of legal independence in Japan being 20). In the first episode, his closet is filled with old swimming trophies, and as of Episode 7, he was shown to be neck and neck with Rin, another prodigy swimmer aiming to enter the Olympics and hailing from one of the world's best swimming schools. In the beach training camp, the entire club swam distances of several miles each day in the ocean, which is no small feat. (This is probably a good place to ask-- because Haru can swim such great distances relatively easily, and even farther when pushing himself, would he be able to reasonably find Water Pokemon that would only normally be found by Surfing? If not that's cool, it's a curiosity question more than anything else.)
+ Art Haru is on several occasions shown to be a talented artist, both in drawing and other mediums, to the point that the art club aggressively tried to recruit him because of the poster he made advertising the swim team. Going out on a headcanon limb, I'm also going to apply this to him having very pretty (almost girly) handwriting and a good sense of color.
+ Cooking Because he's lived alone for some length of time, Haru is a pretty competent cook, although fish is his specialty (since it tends to be all he eats when left alone).
+ Intelligence It's remarked in High Speed! that schoolwork seems to be easy for Haru, implying that he's naturally bright to some degree. This is counterbalanced by Haru's apathetic attitude and his recent tendency to ditch school due to lack of interest now that he lives apart from his parents (and thus suffers no consequences for it).
+ Loyalty / Kind Intentions Once someone manages the arduous task of becoming Haru's friend in the first place, he will go to surprising lengths for them. While he is exceedingly poor at being emotionally supportive, he is the sort of friend who will show up at your door in total silence with appropriate clothes and some brushes if you said you were painting your room tomorrow. Or, in the case of High Speed!, diving into a flooded river to retrieve a scarf when he's delirious with fever and literally almost dying because Aki was upset. However, his best intentions have been known to backfire horribly because of...
- Emotional coherency / Social skills As addressed above, Haru's social skills are awful, and most of the time he doesn't even understand himself (becoming extremely confused in High Speed! by his feelings of friendly rivalry for Rin) let alone other people with a less... unique... worldview than himself. As such he becomes very uncomfortable with conversations that expect him to answer, particularly emotional conversations or sensitive topics where the other person is liable to burst into tears if he says the wrong thing. Basically, the majority of Haru's social interactions are a confused daze inside his head where he takes helpless stabs in the dark at what to say, even if they don't appear that way outwardly due to his stoicism.
- Stubbornness Haru isn't just stubborn as a quirk, he is destructively stubborn to the point that it tends to burn bridges between himself and other people. If Haru doesn't want to do something, he digs his heels in and refuses to do it to an amazingly ridiculous level, so that even his closest friends are unlikely to be able to change his mind. Unfortunately, this doesn't just apply to things he feels strongly about, either, it can sometimes crop up on completely irrelevant things such as what he wants to eat for lunch (always mackerel). Ultimately, this means he's generally bad in groups because if he vocally disagrees with the majority vote, there is no hope of making him go along with everybody else.
- Apathy It's not that he's lazy, it's that Haru simply doesn't care about most things, to an infuriating degree. And because he's so stubborn, it can be difficult to convince him to care about something once he has decided it's not worthy of his interest.
- Hyper-focusing On the flip side, if Haru has an objective in mind, there is no dissuading him or talking him out of it. Much like his stubbornness, all that really can be done is to get out of his way and pray that he doesn't seriously hurt himself in the process of whatever it is he wants to do. Since he is so apathetic most of the time, it's possible that once he does finally care about something, he throws his whole self into it. Alternately, he might just not be Haru if he wasn't being difficult somehow.
Pokémon Information Affiliation: Trainer (Swimmer) Starter: Staryu. Partially because, like Haru, it's mostly silent and can be hard for other people to understand. And partially because Starmie is the Water Pokemon with the highest Base Speed. Password: Ginger Snaps
Samples First Person Sample:
[A young man of high school age comes into focus on the feed. His gaze is intense and blue, but words seem to take him a minute. When they come, they're flat and harsh.]
Oi. Does anybody know where I can find a pool? [A beat, and he tilts his head to the side a bit, considering.] Or ocean. Lakes and rivers are also acceptable.
[Because clearly, the first concern one should have after being transported to a strange new world is finding a body of water, not asking when or how you got here, or why the starfish monster with the glowing jewel has attached all of its appendages firmly to your school bag, visible in the background of the video. Obviously, the water is more important.]
[Seemingly forgetting that the feed is still running, Haru throws off his shirt and drops his pants to reveal... a swimsuit. After a moment he looks back at it, stares for a moment, like he's thinking about adding something--]
Please respond.
[And with that completely unnecessary addition, he clicks the Gear off.]
Third Person Sample:
It's shockingly new, all of it, so much that it proved a struggle for Haru to process all of it. The words 'WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF POKEMON' stared back at him in a loud font off of the booklet he'd found in his backpack. The backpack that, coincidentally, looked like his school backpack but didn't appear to contain any of his possessions. It did appear to contain some basic living supplies and another swimsuit, but nothing offered any explanation aside from those words.
He had a headache. Maybe that was a sign that all of this was some kind of head trauma hallucination? But he'd never make an beginner's mistake like running headfirst into the pool wall. Besides, he'd been sleeping, and in his own bed to boot. It didn't explain how he'd gotten here at all. And beyond that, he knew what fever delusions were like, and these weren't it. Everything was too solid, made too much sense.
Abruptly, he wanted to swim. He ignored it, flipping through the pamphlet with a scowl.
The word 'Pokemon' rang the bell of some long-distant memory, like a game older kids at school had played years ago. He'd only ever had the Gameboy Advance system, so Haru had to conclude it had been for an earlier platform. Still. Pokemon. And that yellow rat, maybe--
Maybe this was a theme park. Or maybe he actually had been transported to some magical land where background music played constantly. Out of nowhere, a wave of homesickness crashed over him, and he squelched it immediately-- there wasn't much in Iwatobi for him, anyway, and nothing was going to be gained out of the scenario by crying about it.
There was no arguing with the facts, at any rate, and the facts seemed to place him in some place where people trained monsters to battle each other. As ridiculous as it sounded (like some kind of terrible after-school anime, something in the back of his mind decided), that was his life at the moment. It seemed pointless to speculate at the nature of how he'd gotten here when he very clearly was here, for that matter. Haru had the feeling that the 'how' and 'why' would have been anyone else's biggest questions, but to be entirely honest, he wasn't all that interested.
The best thing to do seemed to be to follow the path that had been laid out for him, flowing along with no resistance. Perhaps if he did that, he'd find whatever answers were to be had along the way. Or, if he didn't, that was fine too.
Haruka Nanase | Free! Iwatobi Swim Club | Reserve
Player
Name: Ruin
Plurk: Ruingaraf
Skype: Ruingaraf
Timezone: Eastern
Current Characters in Route: none
Character
Name: Nanase Haruka (prefers to be called Nanase-kun but also accepts Haru)
Series: Free! Iwatobi Swim Club, with additional canon from the light novel High☆Speed! and related material like drama CDs.
Timeline: After returning home from the beachfront training camp. (between EP 6 and 7)
Canon Resource Links:
http://mangahelpers.com/forum/showthread.php/2992276-High-Speed!-(Free!)-by-K%C5%8Dji-%C5%8Cji (Summary of High Speed!, I can link the full translation I read if you want, though.)
http://free-anime.wikia.com/wiki/Haruka_Nanase (Haru's profile on the Free! Wiki)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Free!_-_Iwatobi_Swim_Club_episodes (Free! Episode summaries)
http://digitalscratch.pmsinfirm.org/?p=6473 (Free! Drama CD #1 full translation)
Personality:
Haru is, at his best, a quiet and reserved young man who's a child prodigy at swimming as well as reasonably good in school. At his worst, he is an anti-social and water-obsessed eccentric with poor social skills.
Water seems to mean something special to Haru, something beyond a substance to be interacted with. Both the anime and the light novel open with his monologue about how the water is alive, and that to swim properly, one must quietly accept the water and let it accept you, so that both of you mutually exist in peace and do not fight the other. Additionally, he states that he goal in swimming is neither winning nor losing, or even time, but the idea of being “free” (a double reference, since Free is also a swimming event that is usually performed in the front crawl, Haru's specialty). The idea of freedom in the water is something of almost spiritual importance to him, referring to many things, including the silence, solitude, and sense of peace under the surface, the isolation from everyone and everything else other than his own physical exertion, and the lack of expectations or obligations placed upon him. Unfortunately, as High Speed references, this is a little more than just a sports protagonist quirk-- it's a coping mechanism for his social issues.
On land Haru deals with problems by ignoring them and not caring, and in water he runs away— leaves his problems, fear of other people’s expectations, and requirements of human interaction at the poolside. This sets part of a larger pattern with Haru that shows the weaker side of his character-- when conflict or anything he dislikes comes up, he retreats into himself beyond a wall of stoicism, by literally walking away, or by swimming to escape from his problems. When his opinion comes into a group discussion, he nearly always has nothing to contribute and opts to go with the flow (water pun intentional), sometimes even if he has strong feelings of his own, as in the case with the class project around the cherry tree. Once he does finally speak up, it tends to be in such an unreasonable and stubborn manner that it causes others to think of him as insensitive and cruel, even though he's usually more perceptive than he lets on about others' feelings. Because he generally lets his best friend, Makoto, speak for him, he's not really getting any better in the social department, either. The overall cycle tends to be something like Haru doesn't interact with people, until he's forced to. Then, he gets stressed and ends up either lashing out or saying something harshly blunt to make things awkward and potentially painful. After that he becomes further stressed by his inability to communicate and retreats, either to solitude or (most likely) to a pool, because the water is soothing and he can leave his problems back on land. This is the cycle that's become Haru's life.
When interacting with closer friends, like the swim club, Haru tends to stay off to the side more, but occasionally offers contributions in the form of blunt comments or semi-obvious statements. As the group's resident Straight Shooter, it tends to be his role to provide the comically serious foil, although he's not completely without a sense of humor (just mostly, and what little remains is so dry that it's hard to tell if he's being serious or not).
Although it rarely appears so, especially with his propensity to take Makoto for granted, Haru does genuinely care for the friends he has in his own aloof way. It isn't necessarily that he doesn't care, more that he does so from a distance and rarely feels such things need to be said out loud, or for that matter, acknowledged in any way. And so, as more recent episodes have shown, he is not entirely immune to Go Team speeches, and they are in fact one of the few things that can snap him out of his confused and lethargic depressive funks.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
+ Swimming It's not an exaggeration to say that Haru was a child prodigy at swimming, and even though he's seventeen now, he still has three more years until he's “normal” (the age of legal independence in Japan being 20). In the first episode, his closet is filled with old swimming trophies, and as of Episode 7, he was shown to be neck and neck with Rin, another prodigy swimmer aiming to enter the Olympics and hailing from one of the world's best swimming schools. In the beach training camp, the entire club swam distances of several miles each day in the ocean, which is no small feat. (This is probably a good place to ask-- because Haru can swim such great distances relatively easily, and even farther when pushing himself, would he be able to reasonably find Water Pokemon that would only normally be found by Surfing? If not that's cool, it's a curiosity question more than anything else.)
+ Art Haru is on several occasions shown to be a talented artist, both in drawing and other mediums, to the point that the art club aggressively tried to recruit him because of the poster he made advertising the swim team. Going out on a headcanon limb, I'm also going to apply this to him having very pretty (almost girly) handwriting and a good sense of color.
+ Cooking Because he's lived alone for some length of time, Haru is a pretty competent cook, although fish is his specialty (since it tends to be all he eats when left alone).
+ Intelligence It's remarked in High Speed! that schoolwork seems to be easy for Haru, implying that he's naturally bright to some degree. This is counterbalanced by Haru's apathetic attitude and his recent tendency to ditch school due to lack of interest now that he lives apart from his parents (and thus suffers no consequences for it).
+ Loyalty / Kind Intentions Once someone manages the arduous task of becoming Haru's friend in the first place, he will go to surprising lengths for them. While he is exceedingly poor at being emotionally supportive, he is the sort of friend who will show up at your door in total silence with appropriate clothes and some brushes if you said you were painting your room tomorrow. Or, in the case of High Speed!, diving into a flooded river to retrieve a scarf when he's delirious with fever and literally almost dying because Aki was upset. However, his best intentions have been known to backfire horribly because of...
- Emotional coherency / Social skills As addressed above, Haru's social skills are awful, and most of the time he doesn't even understand himself (becoming extremely confused in High Speed! by his feelings of friendly rivalry for Rin) let alone other people with a less... unique... worldview than himself. As such he becomes very uncomfortable with conversations that expect him to answer, particularly emotional conversations or sensitive topics where the other person is liable to burst into tears if he says the wrong thing. Basically, the majority of Haru's social interactions are a confused daze inside his head where he takes helpless stabs in the dark at what to say, even if they don't appear that way outwardly due to his stoicism.
- Stubbornness Haru isn't just stubborn as a quirk, he is destructively stubborn to the point that it tends to burn bridges between himself and other people. If Haru doesn't want to do something, he digs his heels in and refuses to do it to an amazingly ridiculous level, so that even his closest friends are unlikely to be able to change his mind. Unfortunately, this doesn't just apply to things he feels strongly about, either, it can sometimes crop up on completely irrelevant things such as what he wants to eat for lunch (always mackerel). Ultimately, this means he's generally bad in groups because if he vocally disagrees with the majority vote, there is no hope of making him go along with everybody else.
- Apathy It's not that he's lazy, it's that Haru simply doesn't care about most things, to an infuriating degree. And because he's so stubborn, it can be difficult to convince him to care about something once he has decided it's not worthy of his interest.
- Hyper-focusing On the flip side, if Haru has an objective in mind, there is no dissuading him or talking him out of it. Much like his stubbornness, all that really can be done is to get out of his way and pray that he doesn't seriously hurt himself in the process of whatever it is he wants to do. Since he is so apathetic most of the time, it's possible that once he does finally care about something, he throws his whole self into it. Alternately, he might just not be Haru if he wasn't being difficult somehow.
Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Trainer (Swimmer)
Starter: Staryu. Partially because, like Haru, it's mostly silent and can be hard for other people to understand. And partially because Starmie is the Water Pokemon with the highest Base Speed.
Password: Ginger Snaps
Samples
First Person Sample:
[A young man of high school age comes into focus on the feed. His gaze is intense and blue, but words seem to take him a minute. When they come, they're flat and harsh.]
Oi. Does anybody know where I can find a pool? [A beat, and he tilts his head to the side a bit, considering.] Or ocean. Lakes and rivers are also acceptable.
[Because clearly, the first concern one should have after being transported to a strange new world is finding a body of water, not asking when or how you got here, or why the starfish monster with the glowing jewel has attached all of its appendages firmly to your school bag, visible in the background of the video. Obviously, the water is more important.]
[Seemingly forgetting that the feed is still running, Haru throws off his shirt and drops his pants to reveal... a swimsuit. After a moment he looks back at it, stares for a moment, like he's thinking about adding something--]
Please respond.
[And with that completely unnecessary addition, he clicks the Gear off.]
Third Person Sample:
It's shockingly new, all of it, so much that it proved a struggle for Haru to process all of it. The words 'WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF POKEMON' stared back at him in a loud font off of the booklet he'd found in his backpack. The backpack that, coincidentally, looked like his school backpack but didn't appear to contain any of his possessions. It did appear to contain some basic living supplies and another swimsuit, but nothing offered any explanation aside from those words.
He had a headache. Maybe that was a sign that all of this was some kind of head trauma hallucination? But he'd never make an beginner's mistake like running headfirst into the pool wall. Besides, he'd been sleeping, and in his own bed to boot. It didn't explain how he'd gotten here at all. And beyond that, he knew what fever delusions were like, and these weren't it. Everything was too solid, made too much sense.
Abruptly, he wanted to swim. He ignored it, flipping through the pamphlet with a scowl.
The word 'Pokemon' rang the bell of some long-distant memory, like a game older kids at school had played years ago. He'd only ever had the Gameboy Advance system, so Haru had to conclude it had been for an earlier platform. Still. Pokemon. And that yellow rat, maybe--
Maybe this was a theme park. Or maybe he actually had been transported to some magical land where background music played constantly. Out of nowhere, a wave of homesickness crashed over him, and he squelched it immediately-- there wasn't much in Iwatobi for him, anyway, and nothing was going to be gained out of the scenario by crying about it.
There was no arguing with the facts, at any rate, and the facts seemed to place him in some place where
people trained monsters to battle each other. As ridiculous as it sounded (like some kind of terrible after-school anime, something in the back of his mind decided), that was his life at the moment. It seemed pointless to speculate at the nature of how he'd gotten here when he very clearly was here, for that matter. Haru had the feeling that the 'how' and 'why' would have been anyone else's biggest questions, but to be entirely honest, he wasn't all that interested.
The best thing to do seemed to be to follow the path that had been laid out for him, flowing along with no resistance. Perhaps if he did that, he'd find whatever answers were to be had along the way. Or, if he didn't, that was fine too.