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Aug. 8th, 2012 01:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sockswithsandalsPlayer
Name: Laura
Personal Journal:appliances
Age: 21
Contact Info:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
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Other Characters: n/a
Character
Name: Buntarou Yotsuya
Canon: Kiben Gakuha Yotsuya-Senpai no Kaidan
Age: Unknown; anywhere between 18 and 25, from appearance, but because the oneshot of the manga has him as a young teacher I go with the early 20s range.
Suitability: n/a
History: I'm incredibly sorry for this wall of text I'm about to spit out but this canon has no Wikipedia page or wikia or even a tvtropes page.
Here is the manga itself, in all its wiki-less glory. So:
There's a school. It's a middle school. It has a legendary/illusory guy known only as "Yotsuya-senpai" who supposedly solves paranormal problems and other such things that one could not feasibly get a run of the mill authority figure involved in. Hauntings, possessions, that kind of thing. It is widely believed throughout the school that he might not even be real, because he's so rarely seen and people are a bit terrified of going to see this creepy dude with lots of creepy rumors about him. They're middle schoolers, they're a bit skittish. They also tell each other lots of scary stories, which is where the second protagonist comes in.
Protag #2 is Makoto Nakashima, an actual real middle school student, who is currently at her wit's end because her best friend Hinano Yayoi has gone missing. After several days, Makoto keeps hearing from her classmates that there's a demonic doll of some kind called "three-limbed Mika-chan" that goes around kidnapping people and taking their limbs out of revenge for how she has limb problems of her own, and a bunch of young girls who recently went missing were found missing one limb each. Therefore, Makoto should go hit up Yotsuya-senpai lest her friend lose her leg to this demonic doll!! Makoto doesn't even like horror stories and doesn't believe this nonsense, but she goes to where Yotsuya supposedly hangs out and begs. His door. To help her. She's about to decide this is dumb and pointless when SURPRISE HE'S A REAL PERSON OH SHIT and he's also, true to rumor, kind of a creepy weirdo. Meaning he scares the hell out of her, she screams, and he starts talking about how much he loves hearing people screaming.
What a guy, right. Yotsuya, as it turns out, doesn't go to class or act like a student in any way shape or form (other than wearing the uniform) because he's... well, he's not supposed to be there. He's intricately crafted himself as a phantom presence, the rumor no one knows the truth of for sure, because he wanted to, basically. In talking to Makoto about her friend's situation, he reveals that he really loves horror stories and hangs out on the roof of the school waiting for "plots" to turn up, so he can craft the perfect scary story. Makoto thinks this is a load of crap because it's not going to help find her missing friend, at which point he shuts her down by informing her that through stories you can sometimes reveal the truth, and if she helps him craft his perfect story, it could reveal what's happened to her friend. As such: using Makoto as "the virus" (Yotsuya is just so charming) to spread the horror story of the doll who steals limbs (properly, this time, as apparently the students were telling it wrong), and then having her inform Yotsuya of what happens as a result, he is able to not only develop his great horror story, but also gets a pretty good idea of who is kidnapping and murdering these girls and taking their limbs.
It's a home ec. teacher. Yeah. Yotsuya corners him and, using the telling of a horror story about these little girls who are coming back to steal the limbs of the person who took theirs (and a conveniently placed Makoto in the hallway with a fake leg in her hand, for dramatic effect), he manages to terrify the shit out of this teacher and get him to confess for his three previous murders. And they save the fourth victim! Except it isn't Makoto's friend, which kinda sucks.
So Makoto asks Yotsuya to help her again, and this time Yotsuya makes up a story about a girl who was lost in a building while it was being built during a game of hide and seek, and still haunts the school asking are you ready? etc etc, if you answer her then she'll take you away KYAAA SCARY!! Because, as it so happens, Makoto's friend suddenly vanished and left all her stuff, clearly having been taken somewhere. Hide and seek is the logical first jump to make, of course. So, after creepily watching students from the roof, Yotsuya deduces which totally insane 14yo probably is guilty, and again uses Makoto to help him corner the culprit and tell his scary story. And it works!! And Hinano was saved!!
And it was all very charming. Yotsuya then assumes Makoto will always bring him plots to make stories out of until she dies, which she objects to rather strongly, but oops he ignores it. The next story is completely formulaic and doesn't have much to do with the overarching plot, so I'll just gloss it: there's a supposedly haunted tree that a dead girl was buried under and when a big hole appears under it, people start spreading the rumor that OH NO SHE'S CLAWED HER WAY OUT OF THE GRAVE. Enter Yotsuya, who has to step in to scare the shit out of the dead girl's nephew, who is trying to manipulate his dead aunt's old teacher into killing himself the same way his aunt did: hanging from the tree. There's some weird stuff about artists killing themselves in order to get "the perfect composition" and it's just really weird. Trees. Yotsuya saves the day and no one dies this time.
Anyway, then Yotsuya tells Makoto that if she can find someone called Kanako Tomashima, she won't have to look for plots for him anymore. She agrees immediately, even though he tells her that Tomashima became so obsessed with discovering plots that she chopped up her own body and sent her body parts individually away to find even more plots!! Tomashima, according to the story, will kill you violently if you try to talk to her without bringing her any plots. During Makoto's quest, in which she fails to find anyone by that name or any record of her existing in the school at all, there is a little side bit about how their class has a new teacher, Shinamo, and he moved Yotsuya's desk. The one he doesn't use, because he doesn't go to class. This is apparently vastly offensive to Yotsuya, because he needs that desk there to add to the spooky atmosphere of his spooky reputation, and he resolves to absolutely destroy Shinamo's spirit in revenge. He uses the Tomashima story, spread throughout the class by Makoto already, to terrify Shinamo. Makoto winds up being a part of this performance, too, as she's dressed up like she has a horrible neck wound (since Tomashima cut off all her body parts and stuff) and put in place as Tomashima just so Shinamo will put Yotsuya's desk back where it belongs. After this, Makoto discovers that the characters used to write her own name rearrange into "Kanako Tomashima," and that Yotsuya played her, hard. However, since she's now regarded as the scary legendary Tomashima who needs plots for the phantom Yotsuya-senpai, people flock to her with paranormal tales, and Yotsuya tells her that was his plan all along--technically, she's not looking for plots for him anymore! Ha ha! Ha....
The next two stories are formulaic again--the first is the story about a game called "Kokkuri-san," which supposedly summons a spirit to answer yes/no questions and guide players to decisions or something. It's basically a Ouijia board kind of game. Yotsuya is Greatly Offended by it, saying it isn't the real Kokkuri-san and just a bunch of fake spirits that are made of children's parts (yes......) that don't come to help but come to take people away. He sends Makoto off, again, to spread this news, and also to tell people about how to properly play this game: you need at least four people, and you can't leave before the game is finished are basically the most important parts. He tells her to look out for a "believer," that is, someone who believes the Kokkuri-san game is completely real and very important, instead of a fun thing like everyone's been treating it (they use it to get out of class, what a great school). As it turns out, there is one of these believers, and it's a girl in the class who starts going crazy and can't function without asking the game what she should do. Yotsuya steps in to stop her from hurting people over this game and supposedly breaks her obsession with it. He calls it a very strong self-hypnosis, where the player starts to actually believe there's a spirit guiding them, even though they're really just making excuses for actions they didn't have the courage to do previously.
NEXT there's a sort of similar story, in which this kid starts cutting off locks of hair from girls who have beautiful long black hair. Yotsuya frames these occurrences around a "Youko-san," who attacks girls for their hair because she's jealous of people who have more beautiful features than her, and wants to be the only person with beautiful hair. The guy kidnaps a teacher at the school, a lady named Komachi, which gets Shinamo involved with Yotsuya's little group because he has a huge crush on her. So Yotsuya and pals (Makoto, Shinamo, Makoto's friend Hinano) stage an attack on the kid by Youko-san while Yotsuya tells his awful story, which involves Youko-san cutting off his head because he took the pretty hair that should have been hers. The kid confesses where he hid Komachi (and she is not dead, which she was presumed to be when a headless dead body was discovered not long after she disappeared) and loses his shit a bit, saying over and over that he's completely right, until Yotsuya gives him a serious reality check and tells him he's wrong. At the end of the story it's revealed that the kid thought he was completely right because the school counselor, some dude named Kudou, told him as much, and was very convincing about it.
YOTSUYA DECIDES THEY ARE RIVALS that is to say, he walks by him in the hall and doesn't like how he looks, and tells Makoto they have the same scent. Okay Yotsuya you're a weirdo. The Kudou Debacle involves Kudou straight up going to visit Yotsuya and daring him to deal with all of the weird shit he's convincing the students of, and Yotsuya telling him that ALL THE SCREAMS BELONG TO HIM!!!! He still really likes horror stories. This bit is a callback to the Kokkuri-san bit, as more people suddenly are playing the game and playing it alone, which leads to a lot of people suddenly losing it and acting much unlike their real selves. Yotsuya and Team decide to fix everything, and concoct a brilliant plan to scare the shit out of everyone in an assembly enough that they renounce their connections to Kokkuri-san and break their self-hypnosis, like before. However, Kudou is a clever jerkass, and before they can start their plan he corners Makoto and tells her that she should watch out for Yotsuya, because someone like that has to be involved in some illegal things, come on. Seriously. He leaves her with her crisis of morals and goes into the assembly, where he starts making a speech about Kokkuri-san and how he believes in it and stuff. This causes one of the students to suddenly start attacking people. The plan is already looking foiled so Shinamo calls Yotsuya out directly and out he comes to give Kudou a hard time. Kudou laughs at him and watches the room slowly dissolve into chaos, and Yotsuya starts telling his horror story about what Kokkuri-san really does to people--at which point Kudou is like, yo dude, where's your little sidekick, huh, what's she doing. Yotsuya asks whether he tried to plot to get Makoto to betray him, at which point he laughs in Kudou's face and tells him he's just too smart to understand people like Makoto, who are quick to stop thinking about complicated things like that.
On cue!! Makoto hits the lights, and Yotsuya goes on with his story, which is basically that Kokkuri-san will eat your soul if you don't reject it quickly enough. He enlists Hinano, dressed up like Komachi and wearing a fox mask, for this task, and they even have the stray dog run around the room in the dark to really sell the evil mysterious soul-eating spirit atmosphere. So basically everyone renounces Kokkuri-san and Kudou is huffy about it, and then they find the head of that dead woman from the hair story in a box on the floor.
Wait what.
Yes they find a head in a box just sitting there, thus starting THE FINAL HORROR STORY!! The dead woman, as it turns out, is the sister of some guy named Seita that Makoto knows, who didn't really like him at all (because their mother died when he was born). They go off to solve this mystery again, and what basically happens is that the school principal killed her and left the clues around specifically so Yotsuya would find them, because he wants to be immortalized forever in his very own horror story. He explains all this when he has Yotsuya and co. in some obscure location in the old school building, and Yotsuya plays along and tells him a horror story about the girl's head coming back to haunt him and stuff... and then says he's never going to tell this story, sorry lol you don't get to make your own by killing people, that's not how it works. The principal switches to Plan B, which is burn Yotsuya to death so he'll be remembered for that, and Makoto and Shinamo are about to make a really stupid "jump over the fire" rescue of their dear weirdo pal when........
Kudou smashes the side of the building open with a crane and waltzes in to laugh at them. That actually happens. The principal is arrested and Yotsuya is saved!! but not before he finds a receipt on the ground that apparently had belonged to Seita's late sister. They go over to Seita's place to help him out with moving to live with his relatives, and set up a "horror story" that isn't really a horror story at all, but it does involve the illusion of a dead girl! Because, although Seita's sister kind of hated him, before she died she had written him a letter on the back of the receipt about... how she was going to die, but she wanted to thank him for being with her and wish him a happy birthday and give him some cake. So Seita sobs for a bit but it's cathartic and another job well done for Team Yotsuya.
Then the manga was canceled, so the last chapter is a bit weird in that Makoto cannot find Yotsuya for a damn long time. He is just not around, and none of his stuff is on the roof, and all that. He doesn't turn up again until some irrelevant kids come to his door and ask for his help the way Makoto did originally, at which point he tells her that he revealed himself to too many people and he needed to reestablish his "phantom student" role and other such things. She kicks him a few times because come on man, rude. Then they go to high school! And that's it.
His canon point will be after the end of the series.
Reason for Playing: He is actually known to up and vanish for long periods of time from the school he basically lives in for stupid reasons like, "I want everyone to think I'm not actually real" -- so this will be one of those times! With the added bonus of "how can we compare happiness to fear," because he has a special keen interest in intense emotions.
Personality:
Yotsuya is a Weird Dude. He spends almost all of his time on the roof of a school in a broken chair, under a ripped umbrella, reading manga and newspapers and horror books until someone comes looking for him for something or other, and he'll only help them if he feels like he can make a Good Horror Story out of their "plot." Horror stories and everything involved with them are pretty much his way of life: he loves hearing people scream at the end of a good story, and goes to great lengths to set up the perfect atmosphere, audience, and plot. He is vehemently opposed to actually being in the stories, which is why he has other people act in them and steps in only at the end to be the narrator. "Don't make a horror story out of nowhere" is one of his Rules to Live By, as he thinks the second someone actively tries to orchestrate the deeper action of a horror story (like you know, actually killing a girl and putting her head in a box like the principal did), then they stop being the narrator and become one of the characters. And that's bad.
He is very, very serious about all this. Despite the fact that he's over the moon about horror, because he is the "narrator," and again doesn't go out of his way to create horrific situations, he's not really a bad guy... at all. Creepy and eccentric, oh of course. Bad dude? Nope. He uses his stories to get multiple murderers to confess and stop a whole student body from going insane and killing each other, honestly. He's in it for the screams; the audience is part of the horror experience, after all, and what's the point if they all start dropping dead? Over the course of the series, additionally, he seems to learn to care about more than just horror, as shown in how he knows Makoto will pull through even after Kudou tries to turn her away, and later tries to stop Makoto and Shinamo from JUMPING OVER FIRE LIKE MORONS to get to him. He acts like he's deeply disturbed by all of this friendship stuff, but considering he follows the girls to high school, he's clearly attached to his friends. Also has an apparently malleable definition of "horror," as in the final episode with Seita, he claims the story about his deceased sister thanking him for being there is horror, although he prefers the kind with screams. Okay, Yotsuya, you're really just soft and squishy inside. Komachi and Makoto say of him that he "accidentally saves people," because he plays it up like he's just telling a story and it happened to work out for the best, which is true... but he still has moments where he does do nice things that don't end in someone getting arrested.
Most people, though, are either characters or audience to him. He knows how to get into people's heads, both by observing their actions and just because he's good at his stories, and manipulates them into, say, confessing murders!! All for the goal of making them scream in terror at the end. He's very smart and obviously creative, and makes a point to keep up with everything going on around him (watching... middle schoolers... with binoculars......) in case a plot turns up that he wants to follow, because he believes that within every horror story it's possible that you can find a sliver of truth, and by seeing the story through 'til the end, the ~truth with be revealed. Which he finds incredibly gratifying. And again, he will see everything through, even if it means he might get burned to death just so some guy won't get the ending he wants, so it's evident that he's incredibly persistent, if a bit... dumb.... Lacking in common sense, sometimes.
Besides that, he's clever and quick-witted and good at thinking on his feet, to save the day if something goes wrong in the middle of his plans. He prefers to work in the background and not be seen, to keep up his "phantom student" image, which he is also very serious about. He actually gets very angry when Shinamo moves his desk, because it screws up the spookiness of his image, and later disappears for several weeks because he'd shown himself to too many people at once and needed to reestablish himself as a creepy rumor. He likes very much being a kind of legend passed along in hushed whispers, that Yotsuya-senpai, I heard he's a spirit or something--that kind of thing.
Yotsuya's also kind of lazy, not just in having other people carry out most of his plans for him but just.... lazy. When the gang visits Seita, he just lays around on the floor while everyone else cleans up for a while. And he spends all his time in a crappy armchair reading magazines. What on earth he does with his time in order to get, like, money... and a place to live besides the roof..... is unknown. He also continuously insists that he keeps wearing the middle school uniform and hanging around, despite being way older than a middle schooler is because he hasn't graduated yet. Because he just hasn't bothered, most likely because it would ruin the whole rumor if the phantom student was listed as a graduate.
A final point is that he is just bizarre, in mannerisms and that kind of thing. He's confident in almost every situation in a way that makes people uncomfortable, with lots of maniacal grins and cackling laughter. Much of this is for the sake of the narration, but even in regular situations he tends to act over the top and gesticulate too much and make a lot of disturbing faces.
So there it is. All in all, Yotsuya is a wacky eccentric horror enthusiast who hangs out with middle schoolers and doesn't afraid of everything.
Abilities: Nothing. He is a Regular Guy.
Sample: meme thread, post sample, one more thread
Name: Laura
Personal Journal:
appliancesAge: 21
Contact Info:
Other Characters: n/a
Character
Name: Buntarou Yotsuya
Canon: Kiben Gakuha Yotsuya-Senpai no Kaidan
Age: Unknown; anywhere between 18 and 25, from appearance, but because the oneshot of the manga has him as a young teacher I go with the early 20s range.
Suitability: n/a
History: I'm incredibly sorry for this wall of text I'm about to spit out but this canon has no Wikipedia page or wikia or even a tvtropes page.
Here is the manga itself, in all its wiki-less glory. So:
There's a school. It's a middle school. It has a legendary/illusory guy known only as "Yotsuya-senpai" who supposedly solves paranormal problems and other such things that one could not feasibly get a run of the mill authority figure involved in. Hauntings, possessions, that kind of thing. It is widely believed throughout the school that he might not even be real, because he's so rarely seen and people are a bit terrified of going to see this creepy dude with lots of creepy rumors about him. They're middle schoolers, they're a bit skittish. They also tell each other lots of scary stories, which is where the second protagonist comes in.
Protag #2 is Makoto Nakashima, an actual real middle school student, who is currently at her wit's end because her best friend Hinano Yayoi has gone missing. After several days, Makoto keeps hearing from her classmates that there's a demonic doll of some kind called "three-limbed Mika-chan" that goes around kidnapping people and taking their limbs out of revenge for how she has limb problems of her own, and a bunch of young girls who recently went missing were found missing one limb each. Therefore, Makoto should go hit up Yotsuya-senpai lest her friend lose her leg to this demonic doll!! Makoto doesn't even like horror stories and doesn't believe this nonsense, but she goes to where Yotsuya supposedly hangs out and begs. His door. To help her. She's about to decide this is dumb and pointless when SURPRISE HE'S A REAL PERSON OH SHIT and he's also, true to rumor, kind of a creepy weirdo. Meaning he scares the hell out of her, she screams, and he starts talking about how much he loves hearing people screaming.
What a guy, right. Yotsuya, as it turns out, doesn't go to class or act like a student in any way shape or form (other than wearing the uniform) because he's... well, he's not supposed to be there. He's intricately crafted himself as a phantom presence, the rumor no one knows the truth of for sure, because he wanted to, basically. In talking to Makoto about her friend's situation, he reveals that he really loves horror stories and hangs out on the roof of the school waiting for "plots" to turn up, so he can craft the perfect scary story. Makoto thinks this is a load of crap because it's not going to help find her missing friend, at which point he shuts her down by informing her that through stories you can sometimes reveal the truth, and if she helps him craft his perfect story, it could reveal what's happened to her friend. As such: using Makoto as "the virus" (Yotsuya is just so charming) to spread the horror story of the doll who steals limbs (properly, this time, as apparently the students were telling it wrong), and then having her inform Yotsuya of what happens as a result, he is able to not only develop his great horror story, but also gets a pretty good idea of who is kidnapping and murdering these girls and taking their limbs.
It's a home ec. teacher. Yeah. Yotsuya corners him and, using the telling of a horror story about these little girls who are coming back to steal the limbs of the person who took theirs (and a conveniently placed Makoto in the hallway with a fake leg in her hand, for dramatic effect), he manages to terrify the shit out of this teacher and get him to confess for his three previous murders. And they save the fourth victim! Except it isn't Makoto's friend, which kinda sucks.
So Makoto asks Yotsuya to help her again, and this time Yotsuya makes up a story about a girl who was lost in a building while it was being built during a game of hide and seek, and still haunts the school asking are you ready? etc etc, if you answer her then she'll take you away KYAAA SCARY!! Because, as it so happens, Makoto's friend suddenly vanished and left all her stuff, clearly having been taken somewhere. Hide and seek is the logical first jump to make, of course. So, after creepily watching students from the roof, Yotsuya deduces which totally insane 14yo probably is guilty, and again uses Makoto to help him corner the culprit and tell his scary story. And it works!! And Hinano was saved!!
And it was all very charming. Yotsuya then assumes Makoto will always bring him plots to make stories out of until she dies, which she objects to rather strongly, but oops he ignores it. The next story is completely formulaic and doesn't have much to do with the overarching plot, so I'll just gloss it: there's a supposedly haunted tree that a dead girl was buried under and when a big hole appears under it, people start spreading the rumor that OH NO SHE'S CLAWED HER WAY OUT OF THE GRAVE. Enter Yotsuya, who has to step in to scare the shit out of the dead girl's nephew, who is trying to manipulate his dead aunt's old teacher into killing himself the same way his aunt did: hanging from the tree. There's some weird stuff about artists killing themselves in order to get "the perfect composition" and it's just really weird. Trees. Yotsuya saves the day and no one dies this time.
Anyway, then Yotsuya tells Makoto that if she can find someone called Kanako Tomashima, she won't have to look for plots for him anymore. She agrees immediately, even though he tells her that Tomashima became so obsessed with discovering plots that she chopped up her own body and sent her body parts individually away to find even more plots!! Tomashima, according to the story, will kill you violently if you try to talk to her without bringing her any plots. During Makoto's quest, in which she fails to find anyone by that name or any record of her existing in the school at all, there is a little side bit about how their class has a new teacher, Shinamo, and he moved Yotsuya's desk. The one he doesn't use, because he doesn't go to class. This is apparently vastly offensive to Yotsuya, because he needs that desk there to add to the spooky atmosphere of his spooky reputation, and he resolves to absolutely destroy Shinamo's spirit in revenge. He uses the Tomashima story, spread throughout the class by Makoto already, to terrify Shinamo. Makoto winds up being a part of this performance, too, as she's dressed up like she has a horrible neck wound (since Tomashima cut off all her body parts and stuff) and put in place as Tomashima just so Shinamo will put Yotsuya's desk back where it belongs. After this, Makoto discovers that the characters used to write her own name rearrange into "Kanako Tomashima," and that Yotsuya played her, hard. However, since she's now regarded as the scary legendary Tomashima who needs plots for the phantom Yotsuya-senpai, people flock to her with paranormal tales, and Yotsuya tells her that was his plan all along--technically, she's not looking for plots for him anymore! Ha ha! Ha....
The next two stories are formulaic again--the first is the story about a game called "Kokkuri-san," which supposedly summons a spirit to answer yes/no questions and guide players to decisions or something. It's basically a Ouijia board kind of game. Yotsuya is Greatly Offended by it, saying it isn't the real Kokkuri-san and just a bunch of fake spirits that are made of children's parts (yes......) that don't come to help but come to take people away. He sends Makoto off, again, to spread this news, and also to tell people about how to properly play this game: you need at least four people, and you can't leave before the game is finished are basically the most important parts. He tells her to look out for a "believer," that is, someone who believes the Kokkuri-san game is completely real and very important, instead of a fun thing like everyone's been treating it (they use it to get out of class, what a great school). As it turns out, there is one of these believers, and it's a girl in the class who starts going crazy and can't function without asking the game what she should do. Yotsuya steps in to stop her from hurting people over this game and supposedly breaks her obsession with it. He calls it a very strong self-hypnosis, where the player starts to actually believe there's a spirit guiding them, even though they're really just making excuses for actions they didn't have the courage to do previously.
NEXT there's a sort of similar story, in which this kid starts cutting off locks of hair from girls who have beautiful long black hair. Yotsuya frames these occurrences around a "Youko-san," who attacks girls for their hair because she's jealous of people who have more beautiful features than her, and wants to be the only person with beautiful hair. The guy kidnaps a teacher at the school, a lady named Komachi, which gets Shinamo involved with Yotsuya's little group because he has a huge crush on her. So Yotsuya and pals (Makoto, Shinamo, Makoto's friend Hinano) stage an attack on the kid by Youko-san while Yotsuya tells his awful story, which involves Youko-san cutting off his head because he took the pretty hair that should have been hers. The kid confesses where he hid Komachi (and she is not dead, which she was presumed to be when a headless dead body was discovered not long after she disappeared) and loses his shit a bit, saying over and over that he's completely right, until Yotsuya gives him a serious reality check and tells him he's wrong. At the end of the story it's revealed that the kid thought he was completely right because the school counselor, some dude named Kudou, told him as much, and was very convincing about it.
YOTSUYA DECIDES THEY ARE RIVALS that is to say, he walks by him in the hall and doesn't like how he looks, and tells Makoto they have the same scent. Okay Yotsuya you're a weirdo. The Kudou Debacle involves Kudou straight up going to visit Yotsuya and daring him to deal with all of the weird shit he's convincing the students of, and Yotsuya telling him that ALL THE SCREAMS BELONG TO HIM!!!! He still really likes horror stories. This bit is a callback to the Kokkuri-san bit, as more people suddenly are playing the game and playing it alone, which leads to a lot of people suddenly losing it and acting much unlike their real selves. Yotsuya and Team decide to fix everything, and concoct a brilliant plan to scare the shit out of everyone in an assembly enough that they renounce their connections to Kokkuri-san and break their self-hypnosis, like before. However, Kudou is a clever jerkass, and before they can start their plan he corners Makoto and tells her that she should watch out for Yotsuya, because someone like that has to be involved in some illegal things, come on. Seriously. He leaves her with her crisis of morals and goes into the assembly, where he starts making a speech about Kokkuri-san and how he believes in it and stuff. This causes one of the students to suddenly start attacking people. The plan is already looking foiled so Shinamo calls Yotsuya out directly and out he comes to give Kudou a hard time. Kudou laughs at him and watches the room slowly dissolve into chaos, and Yotsuya starts telling his horror story about what Kokkuri-san really does to people--at which point Kudou is like, yo dude, where's your little sidekick, huh, what's she doing. Yotsuya asks whether he tried to plot to get Makoto to betray him, at which point he laughs in Kudou's face and tells him he's just too smart to understand people like Makoto, who are quick to stop thinking about complicated things like that.
On cue!! Makoto hits the lights, and Yotsuya goes on with his story, which is basically that Kokkuri-san will eat your soul if you don't reject it quickly enough. He enlists Hinano, dressed up like Komachi and wearing a fox mask, for this task, and they even have the stray dog run around the room in the dark to really sell the evil mysterious soul-eating spirit atmosphere. So basically everyone renounces Kokkuri-san and Kudou is huffy about it, and then they find the head of that dead woman from the hair story in a box on the floor.
Wait what.
Yes they find a head in a box just sitting there, thus starting THE FINAL HORROR STORY!! The dead woman, as it turns out, is the sister of some guy named Seita that Makoto knows, who didn't really like him at all (because their mother died when he was born). They go off to solve this mystery again, and what basically happens is that the school principal killed her and left the clues around specifically so Yotsuya would find them, because he wants to be immortalized forever in his very own horror story. He explains all this when he has Yotsuya and co. in some obscure location in the old school building, and Yotsuya plays along and tells him a horror story about the girl's head coming back to haunt him and stuff... and then says he's never going to tell this story, sorry lol you don't get to make your own by killing people, that's not how it works. The principal switches to Plan B, which is burn Yotsuya to death so he'll be remembered for that, and Makoto and Shinamo are about to make a really stupid "jump over the fire" rescue of their dear weirdo pal when........
Kudou smashes the side of the building open with a crane and waltzes in to laugh at them. That actually happens. The principal is arrested and Yotsuya is saved!! but not before he finds a receipt on the ground that apparently had belonged to Seita's late sister. They go over to Seita's place to help him out with moving to live with his relatives, and set up a "horror story" that isn't really a horror story at all, but it does involve the illusion of a dead girl! Because, although Seita's sister kind of hated him, before she died she had written him a letter on the back of the receipt about... how she was going to die, but she wanted to thank him for being with her and wish him a happy birthday and give him some cake. So Seita sobs for a bit but it's cathartic and another job well done for Team Yotsuya.
Then the manga was canceled, so the last chapter is a bit weird in that Makoto cannot find Yotsuya for a damn long time. He is just not around, and none of his stuff is on the roof, and all that. He doesn't turn up again until some irrelevant kids come to his door and ask for his help the way Makoto did originally, at which point he tells her that he revealed himself to too many people and he needed to reestablish his "phantom student" role and other such things. She kicks him a few times because come on man, rude. Then they go to high school! And that's it.
His canon point will be after the end of the series.
Reason for Playing: He is actually known to up and vanish for long periods of time from the school he basically lives in for stupid reasons like, "I want everyone to think I'm not actually real" -- so this will be one of those times! With the added bonus of "how can we compare happiness to fear," because he has a special keen interest in intense emotions.
Personality:
Yotsuya is a Weird Dude. He spends almost all of his time on the roof of a school in a broken chair, under a ripped umbrella, reading manga and newspapers and horror books until someone comes looking for him for something or other, and he'll only help them if he feels like he can make a Good Horror Story out of their "plot." Horror stories and everything involved with them are pretty much his way of life: he loves hearing people scream at the end of a good story, and goes to great lengths to set up the perfect atmosphere, audience, and plot. He is vehemently opposed to actually being in the stories, which is why he has other people act in them and steps in only at the end to be the narrator. "Don't make a horror story out of nowhere" is one of his Rules to Live By, as he thinks the second someone actively tries to orchestrate the deeper action of a horror story (like you know, actually killing a girl and putting her head in a box like the principal did), then they stop being the narrator and become one of the characters. And that's bad.
He is very, very serious about all this. Despite the fact that he's over the moon about horror, because he is the "narrator," and again doesn't go out of his way to create horrific situations, he's not really a bad guy... at all. Creepy and eccentric, oh of course. Bad dude? Nope. He uses his stories to get multiple murderers to confess and stop a whole student body from going insane and killing each other, honestly. He's in it for the screams; the audience is part of the horror experience, after all, and what's the point if they all start dropping dead? Over the course of the series, additionally, he seems to learn to care about more than just horror, as shown in how he knows Makoto will pull through even after Kudou tries to turn her away, and later tries to stop Makoto and Shinamo from JUMPING OVER FIRE LIKE MORONS to get to him. He acts like he's deeply disturbed by all of this friendship stuff, but considering he follows the girls to high school, he's clearly attached to his friends. Also has an apparently malleable definition of "horror," as in the final episode with Seita, he claims the story about his deceased sister thanking him for being there is horror, although he prefers the kind with screams. Okay, Yotsuya, you're really just soft and squishy inside. Komachi and Makoto say of him that he "accidentally saves people," because he plays it up like he's just telling a story and it happened to work out for the best, which is true... but he still has moments where he does do nice things that don't end in someone getting arrested.
Most people, though, are either characters or audience to him. He knows how to get into people's heads, both by observing their actions and just because he's good at his stories, and manipulates them into, say, confessing murders!! All for the goal of making them scream in terror at the end. He's very smart and obviously creative, and makes a point to keep up with everything going on around him (watching... middle schoolers... with binoculars......) in case a plot turns up that he wants to follow, because he believes that within every horror story it's possible that you can find a sliver of truth, and by seeing the story through 'til the end, the ~truth with be revealed. Which he finds incredibly gratifying. And again, he will see everything through, even if it means he might get burned to death just so some guy won't get the ending he wants, so it's evident that he's incredibly persistent, if a bit... dumb.... Lacking in common sense, sometimes.
Besides that, he's clever and quick-witted and good at thinking on his feet, to save the day if something goes wrong in the middle of his plans. He prefers to work in the background and not be seen, to keep up his "phantom student" image, which he is also very serious about. He actually gets very angry when Shinamo moves his desk, because it screws up the spookiness of his image, and later disappears for several weeks because he'd shown himself to too many people at once and needed to reestablish himself as a creepy rumor. He likes very much being a kind of legend passed along in hushed whispers, that Yotsuya-senpai, I heard he's a spirit or something--that kind of thing.
Yotsuya's also kind of lazy, not just in having other people carry out most of his plans for him but just.... lazy. When the gang visits Seita, he just lays around on the floor while everyone else cleans up for a while. And he spends all his time in a crappy armchair reading magazines. What on earth he does with his time in order to get, like, money... and a place to live besides the roof..... is unknown. He also continuously insists that he keeps wearing the middle school uniform and hanging around, despite being way older than a middle schooler is because he hasn't graduated yet. Because he just hasn't bothered, most likely because it would ruin the whole rumor if the phantom student was listed as a graduate.
A final point is that he is just bizarre, in mannerisms and that kind of thing. He's confident in almost every situation in a way that makes people uncomfortable, with lots of maniacal grins and cackling laughter. Much of this is for the sake of the narration, but even in regular situations he tends to act over the top and gesticulate too much and make a lot of disturbing faces.
So there it is. All in all, Yotsuya is a wacky eccentric horror enthusiast who hangs out with middle schoolers and doesn't afraid of everything.
Abilities: Nothing. He is a Regular Guy.
Sample: meme thread, post sample, one more thread