labofnaturerp ☥ application

[prophesis]

OOC INFORMATION
Name: Mari
Contact: gibberditz
Permissions: here
Age: 18+
Other characters?: n/a
Who Invited you?: Fey

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Ishizu Ishtar
Assigned Nickname: The Big Sis
Age: 21
Canon: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Canon point: post-manga, pre-DSOD
Character Information: Yugipedia [cw: cult upbringing, ritual scarification, murder, patricide, people skinning their own damn fathers, people worshipping trading cards, suicidal ideation/willingness]

Personality:

► What is your character's worst fear?

[big cw for suicidal ideation here]

Marik dying. That's it. That's the whole fear. Ishizu is someone who's had to endure all her life. She's endured a horrible sexist cultist upbringing where her birth was a cause of tremendous sadness since she wasn't a boy, she's endured losing her mother and her brother getting his back ritually scarred, she's endured trying to give that brother a little bit of happiness only for it to backfire and result in him murdering and skinning their father (possibly, oh god, not in that order).

Yet when he comes back to himself after the Murder she doesn't tell him that he blacked out and did it. She doesn't tell him anything, it seems - because she's afraid that Marik will take his own life if he knew the truth. She moves to try and stop him from defying the Pharaoh, but she isn't afraid until Marik's dark half takes over again and Marik, just as she'd feared, demonstrates willingness to die in order to stop him. She flat-out tells Kaiba she'll commit passive suicide (staying on an exploding, sinking island...it's a comic about card games....) if Marik dies or can't be saved from his dark half. Marik living, even Marik living consumed with a desire for revenge, is preferable to Marik dying. Anything is preferable to that.

► What is your character's most outstanding personality trait, and why?

Ishizu is a fatalist. This is not the same thing as saying she's a pessimist - but she does default to believing that everything is predetermined, and this belief is so strong that even after being proven wrong and gaining hope from that, she still can't help but natter on about Destiny. She has to try and put everything that happens into a little box marked "Fate", and she considers that a comfort - even if she ends up implying things like "we were all destined to suffer horribly so the Pharaoh could teach you that mindless hatred is bad, even if you'd have never known mindless hatred if we didn't live in a hole worshipping him in the first place."

The only time we see her acting in "defiance" of her fate is when Marik runs away from the tombs. She's willing to commit the "sin" of taking up one of the Millennium Items her family was forbidden to touch if it means she'll better be able to intercept and stop him - but even then, what's she trying to stop him from? Murdering.....the guy she's been told her family is "fated" to serve. Excellent job breaking out of the programming, honey, we're VERY proud of you.

And then she gains the ability to see the future. Don't give an earnest cultist who wants to be Good and therefore completely swallows everything you tell her about her destined role in life (in fact, I'd argue fatalism might be her coping mechanism, because if it's "fated" then the Horrors become more bearable) the ability to see the future. It only makes her double down on this shit. Ishizu is messed the HELL up and has NO idea.

On the bright side, however, her fatalism sometimes manifests as belief in people. The Pharaoh and his Priest are destined to fight again as friends, so since Seto Kaiba is the manifestation of that Priest, she has absolute faith in him. Ishizu's very good at entrusting her fate to others and believing they can make things better. It hasn't backfired on her.....yet.

► If your character could do anything with their life, what would they choose to do?

Exactly what she's doing at her canonpoint, honestly: live peacefully with her siblings, teaching others about ancient Egypt while making sure its dead stay dead. This might indicate a lack of imagination on her part, but Ishizu cares deeply for her heritage and is happy to preserve and honor it however she can. That said, while she's broken a glass ceiling in Egypt that hasn't been breached IRL - she's the highest-ranking archaeologist in the country - it wasn't for personal ambition. It was to help her reunite her family.

Honestly, given her fatalism, Ishizu is really lucky to derive true satisfaction from the same things her upbringing values. For most her life she probably wouldn't even have understood this question because what she wants to do has never mattered. Nowadays she'd admit to a preference for never going back into the hole in the ground if pressed, but she'd probably phrase it like "our family's destiny is now to live in the light". Admit she too has been enjoying freedom? Not even once.

► If your character were to take on a typical horror movie role, what role would they take? First victim, cynical hunter, last one standing? Or would they be the horror itself?

Ishizu would be the Side Character the heroes encounter en route to the Horrors who warns them of their impending dooms. They don't listen to her when she tells them they're about to make Very Bad Decisions, then she watches them ride to their deaths with poignant sadness in her eyes. Yet she lets it happen, because it is Fated.

Note: This changes dramatically if one of the people going to endure the Horrors is her brother Marik, in which case she's a member of the party: the sensible one who doesn't think staying in the obviously haunted locale is a good idea, but nobody listens to her. Despite having more sense than the rest of the cast, she probably dies trying to help her brother.

► Choose five horror-themed songs to create a playlist for your character, and detail why each song resonates with them.

"The Heroine" - Unwoman

I ask just one thing of you, to be here
Did I not let it slip that I was sincere?
That was my best poker face, trying not to care...

The other questions didn't give me a good outlet to discuss this but Ishizu is playing 4D chess inside her brain at All Times. (She's an Ishtar, they're built like that.) The entire Battle City arc of Yu-Gi-Oh! only exists because Ishizu mindgames Kaiba into running a tournament to bait out her little brother. She's serene and composed and you can't always tell what she's thinking and she's canny and tricky AF when she needs to be. Her deck strategy revolves around getting you precisely where she wants you and then flipping the tables.

....The world might be better off with Ishizu nerfed by her upbringing.

"Ablaze" - Alanis Morissette

To my boy, all that energy, so wild
Love your hues and your blues in equal measure
Your comings and your goings-away
My mission is to keep the light in your eyes ablaze

Although she's neither the eldest of the three Ishtar siblings nor the official head of the clan, Ishizu's the pillar holding this family together. Her primary story arc revolves around her attempts to save Marik from himself, and she's also a source of encouragement for Rishid - she brings him to tears by recognizing him as family towards the end of their arc, the thing he's wanted all his life. Ishizu constantly gives of herself for her brothers' sakes; there's a lot that can be critiqued here about gender roles and the expectation that women will manage men's emotions, but the societal norms of A Tomb In The Egyptian Desert aren't exactly progressive, so here she be. And she loves those boys SO MUCH.

"Brother Mine" - Suzanne Vega

Now I know that you're just my little brother
And I don't expect you to get everything just right
But I think you ought to use
A little more sense than what you're using
And maybe then things would be all right

Just because Ishizu loves Marik doesn't mean he can't drive her crazy, though. Much to her chagrin, Marik chafes against the restrictions of their upbringing. As children, she tries to be strict with him but doesn't always succeed; as adults, she opposes his ambitions to become Pharaoh himself. Mostly, however, she just wants him to be OK, and wishes he - and any other characters she sees acting foolishly - would stop making decisions that seem destined to end in the contrary.

"Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land" - Marina

Ancient dreams in a modern land
I'm trying to get back as fast I can
Back to a time before I had form
Back to a time before I was born

Although she was born in the modern era, Ishizu can sometimes come across as a woman out of time. She speaks cryptically and archaically, and moves through life with a mysterious grace. Where her brother Marik embraces the current year, Ishizu prefers to revere and emulate the past...and her "past" goes all the way back to Ancient Egypt, when her clan was founded. So she'll charter a boat if a sandstorm means a plane's out of the question for going somewhere, but she'll do so while musing about how it might be Destined, because the ancient Egyptians believed one traveled to the afterlife by boat....Prepare to learn a lot of Fun(?) Egypt Facts. Most of which have to do with burial rites.

~Mortuary cult!~

"Never Look Away" - Vienna Teng

So if you're out there in the cold
I'll cover you in moonlight
If you're a stranger to your soul
I'll bring you to your birthright
I want the storm inside you awoken now
I want your warm bright eyes
To never look away
Don't you ever look away

"We should never look away from anything" is advice that Ishizu gives Jounouchi's sister Shizuka when all this Card Game Murder starts to get to the younger girl. While Ishizu doesn't make an explicit correlation, she does segue from this right into discussing the Ishtar family's past and "tragedy" (read: Marik killing their horrible dad in self-defense) and it's not hard to draw a line between her advice to Shizuka and her regrets about Marik. Ishizu "looked away" from a lot of things as a kid - she's shown praying behind a pillar, obviously saddened but eyes squeezed shut, while child Marik is undergoing ritual torture. She was in denial about to what extremes Marik would go for a chance at freedom and just how terrible their childhood existence was, as well, and Marik snapped as a result. So now she's determined to walk into the future with her head high and her eyes up.

Roommates?: No preference.

Triggers/sensitive topics you'd like to avoid?: Pet/domestic animal death

RP Samples: Top-level ☥ More samples