APPLICATION: THE QUIET PLACE

[countersway]

OOC:

Player Name: Sirea
Age: 28
Contact: zombifiers or PM

IC:

Name: Kazuma Kiryu
Canon: Yakuza
Canon Point: After being released from prison in Yakuza 1
Age: 37

Spoken language(s): Japanese
Username: ryuoh
To the Mods: N/A, unless a cigarette addiction counts.

History: Click around the wiki to the individual games of Yakuza 0 and 1. Just trust me on this. You don't want to see what the Yakuza wikia looks like.

Personality:

The Yakuza series spans a total of nearly 30 years, so while I'll be taking Kiryu from a relatively early canon point, it's definitely worthwhile to take the entire series into consideration when talking about him as a character. His core traits never change all that dramatically throughout the years, so looking at the full context of his actions makes those traits easier to understand. These are the nuts and bolts of Kazuma Kiryu as a person:

➜ true neutral. Kiryu's guided by his own personal sense of right and wrong and has absolutely no sentimental attachment or loyalty to the Tojo Clan after leaving it, despite giving 10 years of his life to them plus another 10 years in prison on top of that because of them. He can kill fifty of their men with his bare hands and then turn around and fight tooth and nail to protect the organization as a whole, if for no other reason than he sees the value of their power and influence in terms of a balance between lawful vs unlawful. In Yakuza 0, he says that he makes decisions based on whether he loves something or hates it, and that doesn't really change at any point in the series.

➜ conflicted. Kiryu joined the yakuza for all of the wrong reasons at the young age of 17, and he's so acutely aware of how stupid of a decision it was that he has a crisis of self in Yakuza 0. He was just a lonely orphan kid who wanted a life of glitz and glamour and respect, but all of the two-timing and backstabbing and blood and betrayal that comes part and parcel with that high-rolling lifestyle never really fit him right. It eats at his conscience and his honest nature at times, and he has the thought on more than one occasion that he just can't hack it as a yakuza. But he also has his pride, and that coupled with the enormous sense of responsibility that he feels towards literally everyone and everything in his life leads him to swallowing his doubts and hesitations so that he can become the respected crime lord that he is at the start of Yakuza 1/Kiwami. And to some degree, he does take pride in what he does. He's big on decorum, doing his job well, and getting it done right.

➜ Dojima no Ryu. Kiryu is a hardened yakuza with a strong work ethic who was just one solid nod of approval away from starting his own family before his whole life kind of went sideways. The game never goes into details about the extent of his criminal activity, but it's pretty safe to assume that he's gotten his hands dirty with all of the horrible shit that yakuza are known for (blackmail, extortion, assault, murder, drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, etc). There's no way that he would be in a position to become a family patriarch if he hadn't put the work in. Both on the streets in day-to-day street fights and collections jobs, and also in the room where it happens, wheeling and dealing and politicking, there's no one who gets the job done better than Kiryu. He's actually famous (infamous?) at the start of Yakuza 1/Kiwami, with the title of "The Dragon of Dojima." And when I say famous, I mean famous. Like, "gossip columns written about him in local magazines" famous.

➜ loyal and protective. Kiryu has this really bad habit of and tendency towards cutting off pieces of himself in order to keep the people he loves safe. That's ultimately how he ends up in prison just before his canon point. Kiryu does ten years for a murder he didn't commit and wasn't even present during. Why? Because Nishiki is his sworn brother, and Kiryu just loves him so damn much. I mean, Nishiki's sister was sick and about to undergo surgery; she needed her big brother there. What was Kiryu supposed to do in that situation... right? He couldn't just let Nishiki go to jail. This is also the same mindset he has with regards to why he sticks with the yakuza even though it's not a great fit for him morally; he's his father's responsibility, since Kazama was the one who stuck his neck out for him and brought him into the fold in the first place. Kiryu just can't let people down. It's not in his nature.

➜ diplomatically violent. I know that doesn't make any sense, so let me explain. Kiryu's someone who values diplomacy and a peaceful approach; he's very live and let live. (see: true neutral) He puts Terada and then later Daigo in the seat of Chairman because he believes that both men would rule with an even hand and be guided by their intellect and principles as opposed to knee-jerking to violence and war over every little thing. But the fact of the matter is that when the rubber hits the road, Kiryu's a very swing first and ask questions later type of person. When diplomacy falls through (as it almost always does), Kiryu's the first person to move in the direction of solving problems with his fists.

➜ control issues. Kiryu lone wolfs it so hard that he frequently forgets that he has friends at all. He often has to be reminded that it's okay to ask for help, and that really can't be understated. The one thing that really defines Kiryu is just how damn responsible he feels all the time. Everything that goes wrong in his immediate sphere becomes his personal problem to deal with, and he tries to involve as few people as humanly possible in order to mitigate the amount of collateral damage done to others over things that he feels are his burdens to bear.

➜ intimacy issues. Springboarding off the last bullet point, when I say that Kiryu "has friends" I don't really mean that he has friends. He has people in his life who care about him, people that he can go to for help if he ever needs it for any reason, and people who really wish he'd hang around more often, sure. But after being released from prison in Yakuza 1/Kiwami, he never has anyone that he just casually hangs out with for the fun of it and just to enjoy their company. That part of his life ends alongside his relationship with Nishiki, and it's something that he seemingly never cares enough to try to repair within himself.


But not everything about Kiryu is dire serious business all the time; he has lighter, more fun sides to him too. He's also:

➜ paternal. This is a man who ends up with TEN children by the end of the series (the 8 kids he adopts at the orphanage + Haruka + Daigo) and gets super hyped in Yakuza 6 when he becomes a grandfather. He doesn't biologically father any of his children, either; he just kind of collects them over time. In Yakuza 0, he's told by a fortune-teller that he'll become, "A dragon among daddies." She's right.

➜ a sore winner. This might be a weird trait for a true neutral character to have, but Kiryu has it. He doesn't compete often, but when he does, he plays to win. And when he does, he turns into That Asshole who constantly has to remind everyone that he won, and he'll hold his victory over the heads of the losers. (He really ought to go back to prison for this double homicide.)

➜ shockingly progressive. Kiryu is put into a lot of situations in these games that are explicitly sexual in nature, and he never judges or gets uncomfortable with what's happening around him, even if it's not really his thing. He explicitly does not kinkshame. He's comfortable going into drag bars and even recommends one to an acquaintance who was looking to broaden his horizons. He never slut shames. There are several times over the course of the series where people assume that Kiryu is gay, and he's never offended (or even really pushes back on it all that hard, if at all, because who cares honestly).

➜ adorably awkward. For as stubborn and principled as Kiryu can be, he can also be a colossal dork and idiot. He has this thing where he gives people the benefit of the doubt so often that it can be easy to trick him into stupid things -- like, say, that time that he, a 37-year-old man, honestly thought that the entire Majima family had been turned into zombies just because of some B-grade movie makeup. Or the time that he sat through an entire sales pitch for a pyramid scheme and came very close to actually buying in because the lady told him that the water that she was selling would make his erections last longer. Or that time he ended up sitting in on and watching an S&M session, even though he wasn't a paying customer.

Yakuza's a weird series.

Abilities/Skills:

Kiryu has no supernatural powers. Technically. I mean, I personally would consider getting shot three times and then going through a final battle gauntlet and a boss fight to be supernatural, but whatever.

But seriously. Kiryu's a man forged of fire and steel -- a master of hand-to-hand combat and the use of improvised weapons (though he also does have light katana training). His stamina is unparalleled; he can take hit after hit after hit after hit and barely even flinch. He knows how to fire a gun, but he doesn't own one himself, and it's certainly not his first choice to use in any situation.

Also, canonically, he can sing. He can dance. He can cook. He's a courteous driver. He probably cuddles after sex.

Samples: LOG | NETWORK

Comments

CANON UPDATE

[countersway]

Kazuma Kiryu countersway
Sirea
Date of update: 4/26
Length of time gone: 20 days
Details: Kiryu will be aging 11 years (37 to 48), so a lot has happened. He'll be going from the very beginning of Yakuza 1 to the very end of Yakuza 6. In that time, he's become a father 10 times over (literally, the man has ten children) and a grandfather. He was inducted as the Fourth Chairman of the Tojo Clan and then resigned within the same hour, which caused his status as an infamous cultural icon to blow up even further. Two of his kids became famous. He's been battling survivor's guilt and has already gone through his mid-life crisis. He went back to prison. He faked his own death. It's... been a lot. I'll do a very, very quick game-by-game rundown with the major takeaways in terms of Kiryu's character development.

THE REMAINDER OF YAKUZA 1
Nearly everyone that Kiryu has ever dared to love dies in this game. Most of them in the same night. His father, his sworn brother, his sister, his other sister (who he was in love with idk orphanages are weird), most of his friends -- all of them die, one right after the other. Now tie that back into the parts of my app where I repeatedly hammer home just how goddamn responsible Kiryu feels about every single thing at all hours of the day. Yeah, it's ugly, and we'll come back to it a bit later. Away from that, at the very end of the game, Kiryu is sworn in as the Fourth Chairman of the Tojo Clan. He resigns immediately, but the title of yondaime follows him around for the entire rest of the series.

It's not all bad, though. Kiryu becomes a father in this game, which gives him a reason to stay on his feet. Though he never legally adopts Haruka (he never legally adopts any of his kids, actually, because he's fully aware of what would happen if he tried to as an ex-yakuza), she's always by his side and encouraging him to be at his best.

YAKUZA 2
A year after the events of Y1, the Tojo Clan is in trouble following the assassination of Kiryu's successor. With no one else there to keep the ship steady and on course, Kiryu steps in despite his retirement, feeling obligated by his daunting and ever-present sense of responsibility. Enter Kiryu's second child, Daigo. While Kiryu insists that the reason that he wants to make Daigo the Sixth Chairman simply because he thinks that Daigo's the best man for the job, Daigo's mother recognizes right away that he's doing this in part because of the guilt he feels over Nishiki's betrayal of the Tojo Clan -- part of which includes the murder of Daigo's biofather, Sohei Dojima. You might remember that murder as the one that Kiryu plead guilty to and went to prison for for 10 years, despite not having done it. Kiryu carries Nishiki's sins on his shoulders as his sworn brother. It doesn't matter how many people tell him that he's not responsible; he feels that it's on him to set things right.

Basically, Yakuza 2 is the game that establishes Kiryu's survivor's guilt. His character is introduced to us in that game by suffering from intense nightmares over what happened to him in Y1, he says out loud that he doesn't know why he's the only one still alive, and he also says that he thinks of himself as mostly useless except in extreme circumstances like mass chaos, anarchy, and the looming threat of war. So many of Kiryu's actions moving forward in the series are informed by this guilt and trauma (for reference, see: Daigo as Sixth Chairman. Kiryu's just lucky that Daigo did actually end up being good at the job), but it comes in ebbs and flows depending on timing and circumstance.

Again, though, it's not all bad. Kiryu falls in love in this game with a detective from Osaka named Kaoru Sayama. This is important to note because it shows that, at least in this game, he's still willing to try. He loved Yumi, failed her, and watched her die in Y1. But even in spite of that, he still opens his heart to Kaoru a year later. It's the only time in the series that we get to see even a glimpse of what Kiryu looks like in the role of a lover, and it's a shame because...

YAKUZA 3
... pretty much the first thing that happens in Y3 is that Kaoru leaves Kiryu. She's forced to choose between him and her career, and she chooses her career. Kiryu swallows his feelings and takes that L gracefully, but getting dumped by Kaoru is the bullet that kills his love life for the entire rest of the series. He and Haruka then move out of Tokyo and down to Okinawa, and Kiryu becomes the director of an orphanage there called Morning Glory. This is where we meet his other eight kids, and also where we learn that Kiryu's kind of a massive helicopter parent. He's heavily involved in his kids' lives and doesn't really seem to have any hobbies or friends outside of them.

That's pretty much it. Yakuza 3 exists primarily as a stepping stone to the next phase of Kiryu's life.

YAKUZA 4
Kiryu's hypocrisy comes into full view in this game. This is the second time in the series that he gets told that the reason all of these catastrophic events in the Tokyo underground continue to happen is because he completely abdicated on his duties, abandoned the Tojo Clan without even attempting to lead as Chairman, and stuck Daigo's ass in the chair without any real guidance or training. He harps honor, accountability, and decorum -- demanding them from everyone else, without even stopping to realize that he fails to execute them himself. Except, unlike in Yakuza 3, he finally starts to take this criticism to heart. After a long string of murders and betrayals in the Tojo Clan, Kiryu gets caught up in the whirlwind of protecting his legacy. "The Tojo Clan is the only proof that we ever walked this earth." Kiryu says that he's ready to accept his fate and stop fighting against it, and at the time that he says that, it sounds like he means it.

After this game, though, the fever breaks. Kiryu comes to the conclusion that Daigo carries his legacy, not the Tojo Clan itself. Daigo and the kids at Morning Glory are the proof that he's walked this earth, and so Kiryu abandons the Tojo to its own devices once again and heads home to Okinawa. This is important, so keep it in the back of your head, and we'll come back to it quite a bit later. And thus, the cycle of violence caused by Kiryu's hypocrisy continues, and the future refused to change.

YAKUZA 5
Reality smashes through the front of Morning Glory Orphanage. Haruka gets scouted by a talent agent, who takes one look at the place that Haruka lives and the people she lives with and immediately notices that the almost co-dependent relationship that Kiryu has with his kids is actually kind of toxic. Kiryu created this perfect safe haven for his kids, but he overdid it until it got to the point where none of them wanted to leave. Park (the talent agent -- who, ironically and unbeknownst to Kiryu, is also Majima's ex-wife) convinces him to take a step back and sell the orphanage so that these kids don't get released into the world wholly unprepared for it -- and while he's at it, to get his own fucking life together and learn how to be a whole, complete person on his own.

So he does. Kiryu sells the orphanage to Park, who helps him staff it with people that he feels that he trusts, and he disappears. He then moves to Fukuoka and works as a cab driver under a fake name, fully aware that he may never see Haruka again, since it would destroy her career as an idol to be tied back to an infamous ex-yakuza. Meanwhile, Daigo keeps an eye on him from afar and follows after him in secret. He tracks down the Patriarch of the local yakuza family and prostrates himself before him, begging the Patriarch to keep an eye on his dad and help ensure that he can retire in peace -- which is a huge deal, since Daigo is the Chairman of the largest yakuza organization in Japan at that time. Of course, butterfly effects happen, Kiryu gets pulled back into the bullshit, but this time around he's in no state of mind to really handle it. His kids were his life, and without them, he's kind of a black hole of guilt, loneliness, and violence just going through the motions and sucking in and destroying anyone who gets too close.

Kiryu's intense survivor's guilt comes to an ugly head in this game. About 3/4 through the game, Kiryu watches Daigo get shot, and there's nothing he can do to help him. He can't even beat the hell out of the guy who did it. Bruised and bloody, Kiryu breaks down crying in Saejima's arms, asking aloud, "Why does this happen every time I get involved? Why does someone else always have to pay the price?" Not long after, another character tracks down Haruka and more or less asks her (and I'm super paraphrasing here), "Hey, can you go talk to your dad? Because we're all kind of scared that if Daigo Dojima dies, Kiryu's going to kill everybody in the entire city of Tokyo, one person at a time. And uh. You know he could." She doesn't do that, because the whole point of their separation is to try to shake off the unhealthy, co-dependent part of their relationship -- and she's right to do so.

Daigo lives, Kiryu doesn't kill everyone in a 50-mile radius, and Haruka gives up her life as an idol so that she can go back to being Kiryu's daughter, but it all ends in a massive, massive scandal. Haruka admits to her ties to the yakuza and is disgraced as an idol, the Tojo Clan gets blamed for rampant violence and destruction on the streets of Kamurocho and that's Daigo's responsibility as Chairman, and Kiryu's pre-existing infamy makes him the perfect scapegoat to plaster all over the news.

YAKUZA 6
Yakuza 6 picks up right where 5 left off, and Kiryu once again volunteers to go to prison in an attempt to take the heat off of Daigo and divert attention from Haruka. This time, his sentence is only three years, because it's largely a PR move on the part of the police. After being released from prison, Kiryu has completely run out of fucks to give for these goddamn yakuza and their goddamn bullshit. He discovers that during his incarceration, he's become a grandfather by way of Haruka, and he falls in love with his grandson and the idea of being a grandfather immediately. All he wants is to finally be done with his old life and truly, honestly retire with his family in peace.

There wouldn't be much of a game if that were to happen, so of course he gets roped back into yakuza shenanigans, even if he has to be taken almost quite literally kicking and screaming. What starts as a quest to track down Haruka's baby daddy turns into an uncovering of a massive yakuza and governmental conspiracy, and Kiryu ends up seeing too much. A politician offers him hush money in an attempt at keeping the government's secrets, but Kiryu turns him down. Instead, he fakes his own death, because he believes that things like this are going to just keep happening as long as he's around. Protecting his kids and his grandson is the most important priority that he has, and now that the government's involved, his plan is to disappear and hope that his absence gives them an opportunity for a safe and normal life.



SUMMATION OF CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
There's a lot about Kiryu that doesn't change over the course of the series. Everything in his original application is still valid. He's still a true neutral with a hero complex and a heart of gold that makes him gullible as fuck. No matter how much time passes, that will always be true. What does change is that he becomes more and more self-aware as the series goes on, and that comes to an ugly head during Yakuza 6. He becomes a master of "do as I say, not as I do" and he's more than willing to admit to his own flaws -- even if he takes absolutely no steps towards changing them or bettering himself. The fact of the matter is that Kiryu's just getting older now, and he's starting to feel it. He's tired, his patience has thinned (which does actually lead to some decent snark that 37-year-old Kiryu wouldn't pop off with, to be fair), and he's been carrying around so many regrets for so long that he projects them like crazy onto the people around them in a desperate attempt to stop them from making the same mistakes that he's made. Worse yet: while he recognizes all of these things to be true, he also feels like it's too late for him to make things right with the people whom he feels he's failed.

And if he resented his infamy before, it's the worst it's ever been now. Y6 Kiryu makes it a habit of going out of his way to not tell anyone who he is in yakuza terms, and even when they do find out, he leans hard on the insistence that he's a civilian at best and simply "washed up" at worst -- even though the latter is clearly false. His opinion of himself and his legacy is abysmally low, because he always looks at these things in the greater context of all of the people who have had to suffer and die as a direct result of his actions. He snaps at people for putting him on a pedestal and repeats over and over again that he's no saint.

What it comes down to is that, even by the end of Yakuza 6, Kiryu never fully gets over what happened to him in the first game. In particular, it's Nishiki's betrayal and suicide that haunts Kiryu's steps the most. Though Kiryu still operates on the assumption that people are inherently good and will choose to do the right thing if given the chance, it's only ever when those circumstances are at a distance to himself. After a while, the concept of personal intimacy seems to just disappear from Kiryu's character all together -- and it's a problem that builds up and becomes worse as the series goes on. In Yakuza 5, he becomes so isolated that he nearly starts to cry when he learns the lengths at which Daigo went to in order to try to ensure he could retire peacefully, because he honestly couldn't fathom the idea of anyone honestly and unselfishly loving him that much -- not even Daigo, whom Kiryu looks at as a son.

Remember when I said to keep Kiryu's hypocrisy from Yakuza 4 at the back of your head, and we'd come back to it later? At the end of Yakuza 6, he writes Daigo a letter lamenting how he failed him as a father; he explains how his own personal relationships have suffered throughout most of his adult life and how he's thrown away so much time that he could have spent with his kids and the people he loves, because he's been running scared of his past -- except, Kiryu fakes his death at the end of that game, leaving Daigo and everyone else to fend on their own again. He's still throwing away time that they could and should be spending together; he's still running. Kiryu's status as a living legend in the yakuza world is based around the idea that he's the unbreakable man who never backs down from a challenge and can never be beaten... but Yakuza as a series ends in Kiryu's defeat. He's pitted against the one thing that he can't stand to face -- his own intimacy issues, his own trauma, and the lack of self-esteem he's lived with ever since the events of Yakuza 1 -- and he loses. Instead of rising to the challenge of being a diligent father to Daigo -- instead of accepting his responsibilities to the Tojo Clan and doing his part to lead -- he backs down and runs away, never to be heard from again.

Kiryu will very likely spend the rest of his life in his self-imposed exile desperately lonely and, uh, preparing for the eventual robot takeover of the human race.

(That last part was a joke.)