[city of ariel, application]

[deputes]

→ IC
□ Name: Saki Mikajima
□ Journal: deputes
□ Series: Durarara!!
□ Canon point: After Masaomi goes to Ikebukuro in Volume 6
□ History: http://durarara.wikia.com/wiki/Saki_Mikajima
□ Personality:
On the surface, Saki Mikajima seems to be a normal Japanese girl: pretty but also pretty ordinary. In conversation, she’s pleasant and relaxed. She comes off as assured and spirited, if a bit peculiar. For starters, she’s almost always wearing a knowing smile, even in situations that could be called inappropriate. She's known to casually make unusual comments that catch people out of left-field. She also speaks with brutal honesty about her thoughts and feelings, and does so with astounding blitheness. This honesty can, at times, be perceived as callousness, though it isn’t due to any intentional cruelty on her part. Simply put, Saki calls it like she sees it without sugarcoating for anyone’s benefit.

As is often the case however, there’s more to Saki than a few social quirks. Not much is made explicit about her background, but it's heavily implied that she was a victim of serious abuse from her family and for whatever reason, she has the further terrible misfortune of being under the guardianship of the notorious information broker, Izaya Orihara. For those who are unfamiliar with Durarara!!, this is a tried and tested recipe for disaster as Izaya happens to relish toying with people’s lives for shits and giggles.

What makes this worse is the fact that Saki venerates the man as though he were a god-like entity. So absolute is Saki’s confidence in Izaya that when asked, she outright admits that if he told her to jump off a bridge, she would do it simply because he told her to do so. Trusting Izaya, in other words, supersedes the need Saki to decide on her own actions. She doesn’t need to think for herself because she’s being guided by someone who happens to know everything.

Stated kindly, Saki’s misguided idolatry suggests that she values intelligence and perceptivity and that she’s also tremendously loyal to those she trusts. In a less flattering light, Saki is dependent and is in some ways, incapable of walking on her own feet. Although that implies that she’s weak-willed, that isn’t necessarily true. Izaya’s plan is one that’s contingent on Saki being tortured and she willingly carries it out without hesitation. This iron resolve of hers is a bit like a double-edged sword. When she has conviction, this girl can move mountains, but that impetus tends to be the result of external influence.

It would be easy to write Saki off as being gullible or stupid, but neither of those descriptions are really accurate. Highly perceptive in her own right, she is fully aware of both Izaya’s underhandedness and of the fact that he must consider her a pawn, but knowing this isn't enough to make her change her attitude. She acknowledges that her near-worship of Izaya a personal flaw, but she can’t take the steps to correct it on her own. This provides one further insight into Saki’s psyche: she clings to anchors that will stabilize her world, even if those anchors are self-destructive. But it should be noted that this tendency of hers is a force that operates on a very subconscious, very repressed plane. After all, relying on Izaya doesn’t assuage her doubts, it annihilates the very need for them.

Considering Saki’s mentality, then, it’s unsurprising that there are more than a few parallels between her and Izaya as well. In much the same way that Izaya openly embraces his twisted nature as an expression of his love of humanity, Saki has also learned to embrace the very worst of human nature in others. Lies become her truths and the ugliness that plagues the human condition becomes the beauty that unites everybody. Izaya even comments that Saki doesn't hate her abusive family for how they've treated her in the past. Everyone lies, so she doesn’t hold grudges when the people she holds close lie to her. Everyone has an ulterior motive, so it’s all right when people wear masks to hide behind. “Rose colored glasses” might be an apt description of her world perspective, but ironically what gives the world its rosiness is darkness. This is how she manages to be mistrustful without also being resentful or misanthropic.

In other words, Saki accepts people for everything that they are, good and bad. This is a positive quality in theory, but in practice it's deeply problematic. Saki doesn’t try to change or confront people when they’re doing something to upset her. Now, this acceptance isn’t because she lacks the courage to speak her mind; it has everything to do with the fact that she views people so unconventionally. As a result, she's incredibly tolerant and absurdly patient, but these qualities can make her seem like an atrocious judge of character when she gives her loyalty to those who really don't deserve it. In a way, Saki's tolerance is really a form of self-invalidation that she has to confront and a manifestation of how psychologically damaged she is.

It’s clear, though, that the lack of expectations she has of people functions as a shield to keep herself from getting burned. For example, when Saki learns that her boyfriend, Masaomi, didn't come to rescue her from the Blue Squares, she merely remarks that it was better that he didn’t come because he avoided getting injured. She doesn’t expect him to be a knight in shining armor so when he isn’t one, it’s more than okay- in fact, it’s exactly how the world should be.

Or at least that’s what she tells herself.

A lifetime of abuse has built up Saki's walls so high that the people that manage to breach it are same people she clings to quite desperately. When Masaomi told Saki that he would help her grow away from Izaya at the beginning of their relationship, it left a profound impact on her. When something or someone presents a legitimate challenge to her perspectives, her knowing smile fades. Starved of genuine affection, the fact that someone actually cares enough to reach out their hand to help is completely dumbfounding to her. So in return, she gives those who win her affection, everything of herself.

But as we've already established that Saki isn't really capable of normalcy, we see this is also taken to an extreme. It's true that Saki is quite willing to die on Izaya’s command, but she's also willing to do the same for the people she loves. A major reason she consents to being tortured is because Izaya tells her that it will end the gang war that is troubling her boyfriend. Again, her devotion to the people she values is obsessive and more than a bit unhealthy. That said, she’s also charmingly self-aware of the fact that her dispositions are abnormal, so while she can logic herself into accepting that Masaomi won't go the lengths she can and still love him for it, she can't accept the possibility that he didn’t show up because he doesn’t care about her at all. Even after he breaks up with her shortly afterwards and abandons her in the hospital.

That kind of irrational possessiveness is why Saki can be driven to do truly awful things. Under Izaya’s instructions, Saki spends a little over a year pretending to be unable to walk, unrelentingly preying on Masaomi’s guilt because she is told that is what will make him come back to her. Now, Saki is neither dense nor is she purely a victim coerced into obeying Izaya in this specific case. She knows that the deception will hurt Masaomi, but because his personal anguish qualifies how much he cares about her, she goes along with it. As long as his self-loathing binds him to her, she can feel, in some twisted way, that he loves her. It goes without saying that this emotional blackmail is insanely terrible on Saki’s part. Under the right circumstances, she can be manipulative and inflict immense amounts of emotional pain on the people she loves in order to keep them close. This draws yet another neat parallel between Saki and Izaya: both use love as a justification for their cruelty.

But it's equally true that love also highlights Saki's better qualities. She cares very sincerely and passionately about the people she loves, and will stand by them no matter what happens. She's a great nurturer and supporter, but because Saki is fundamentally driven by a desire for stability, she is highly dependent on people that can provide it. Throughout canon, we see that the degree of power and influence Izaya has over her is very much inversely related to the state of her relationship with Masaomi.

So while it does seem she's something of a hopeless case, it's also true that Saki struggles to face her inner demons and take baby steps towards independence. In the end, she shows that she isn't incapable of making decisions for herself and acting on them by defying Izaya at the end of Volume 3 of the light novels. But just as Masaomi himself aptly says about her in Volume 6: "Her innocence did not mean that she was a saint. On the contrary, it was a sign that as a human being, part of her was already broken. "


□ Age: 16. I will not be aging her up for Ariel.
□ Gender: Female (Physically and mentally)
□ Appearance:
While Saki’s height and weight are not officially stated in any canon materials, I estimate her height to be about ~157cm next to Kida’s 170cm (she’s about half a head shorter than him in the anime), and being as slender as she is, she can’t weigh much more than 46 kg. Her eyes match the color of her naturally dark brown hair which is cut into a short bob.

In the light novels, she's described as being quite pretty with a sunny smile, and looking like a "good girl type." Her overall taste in fashion is clean, feminine and relatively conservative. In the anime, she wears short skirts that accentuate her long legs paired with demure cardigans and tank tops. Her taste in accessories is likewise understated - she wears a simple silver necklace, and no other pieces of jewelry. She doesn’t have any piercings or tattoos.

□ Abilities/Powers: None.

□ Personal Items: Silver ID tag chain necklace, the clothes on her back, her purse, a cell phone, a wallet, lip balm and a pocket mirror.

□ First Person Sample: As a note, this sample was written for the setting of the game "amatomnes" which forcibly ages up underage characters; I won't be doing that at Ariel. Also, this sample was written with a slightly earlier canon point in mind, but her personality doesn't change much over that time period. That said, please let me know if you would rather see a different sample.

[Saki can't say with absolute certainty what it is that Orihara Izaya would do in this situation, but she knows that he wouldn't lose his cool. Ergo, neither should she. The logic is circuitous and flawed, she recognizes that much, but she has no idea what else she ought to do. Her initial state of undress, her apparent kidnapping, the changes in her body, the necklace that she wasn't wearing at the hospital - none of this makes sense, and the only person in the world that she can think of that could make sense of these oddities is the information broker she had just defied at home. It would make her feel ill if she dwelled on the wrongness of wishing he was here, so she doesn't. Instead she works toward figuring out what's happening.

When the video feed starts, it broadcasts a young woman dressed in a light blue hospital gown, sitting upright in a bed. Smiling as she is, most might assume she's at peace with the circumstances. Her tone is absurdly calm and does nothing to dispel the myth of her apparent serenity.]

This is so...peculiar.

[She angles her face away to look at the decidedly foreign (Mediterranean?) view outside.]

But it's nice, too.

[Which is to say that it's a nicer view than the narrow slice of Ikebukuro that she could see from her window at Raira General, but the non-sequitur goes unexplained. Saki faces the camera again, her doll's smile still perfectly in place.]

I never dreamed that I'd be spirited away. It's like something from an urban legend, like demons kidnapping careless children, isn't it?

But if it isn't a dream, is it magic?

[It's a nice thought. Magic can be stopped and potentially reversed, after all, and if that's all that needs to happen.... Like clockwork, a part of her mind begins reciting unhelpful axioms - Izaya-san would know what to do. Izaya-san knows everything about everything - and a nearly imperceptible flicker of worry slips into her mask of placidity.]

How can I break the spell?


□ Third Person Sample:
Test drive meme link:
http://theloonybin.dreamwidth.org/8555.html?thread=3647339#cmt3647339