Akano Keiji

Personal Info
Alias: N/A
Age: 18
Gender: Male
Height: 6’ 2”
Weight: 165 lbs
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Birth Date: July 1st
Western Horoscope: Cancer
Birth Place: Tokyo, Japan

Skills/Talents

• Skateboarding: Keiji has been skateboarding for years, since it first became popular in Japan. He is more of a long distance rider than a trick rider, but he definitely can perform impressive looking tricks, and he has the excellent balance necessary to navigate a city like Tokyo or Shibuya on a skateboard.
• Basketball: Keiji has always been tall, and that means a prime contender for basketball clubs as a point guard. He has excellent hand-eye coordination, and this past time keeps him in shape, ready to run at a moment’s notice.
• Urban Exploration: As a semi-delinquent in Tokyo, Keiji and his crew have often found themselves jumping fences, climbing buildings, or even jump over rooftops in order to get to the next cool skate spot. He’s not an expert in parkour, as his goal has always been stealth over speed, and his talents are exclusively applicable in urban environments. Even still, Keiji can typically turn urban areas to his advantage and can almost always find an escape route (or an entrance route) if he’s given enough time.
• Abs: Trust me, if you listen to Keiji long enough, you’ll believe abs are a talent, too.

Backpack Contents

• Sports Bottle
• Pack of Cigarettes
• Lighter
• Gummy Candy
• Beef Jerky Sticks
• Gym Clothes
• Motorcycle Gloves
• Flashlight

Digivice

Digivice IC
Modifications: None

Personality
Keiji is...complicated. He has deep, ever present feelings, and has never been able to properly express them. So he hides them. He pretends like nothing bothers him. He pretends like everything is fine. But it’s not. Keiji will often cloak his other emotions in cockiness, or arrogance. That assured confidence that there’s nothing to worry. But no matter how good he thinks he is at pretending, his emotions show in his body. The tightness of his shoulders. The clipped speech. The tremble in his hands when he’s nervous or scared. His body has always been the way Keiji communicates with people, even when he doesn’t think so.

Because Keiji is do-er, not a say-er. He will not tell you he is in love with you. Never expect the soft, gentle words from him. His emotions are shown in how he totally destroys that bully who was picking on you. Or how he buys all the copies of the magazine that have your article in them. All of them. He feels those deep feelings and acts upon them, usually to extremes. Keiji is not a half-measures sort of guy.

And that’s a problem. Because he’s easily hurt. He doesn’t know how to healthily process emotions because his household was so strict on trying to make him perfect and obedient. So when something insults him or hurts him, he shuts down entirely. He’ll cut off conversation or abruptly get up and leave with no explanation. If it is an insult, sometimes he’ll over react. Go right for the nuclear option. Start the fight without waiting for your side of the story. And he holds grudges. His shell is thick and inside it he can wallow in resentment and anger for as long as he wants.

To his friends, however, those extremes can be beneficial. Nobody is more loyal than Keiji. His friends are people he would literally kill for. Keiji is a nice guy, painfully kind to a fault, as long as it doesn’t make him look weak. But that does not mean he’s necessarily a good guy. Violence and pain are ways to get what he wants, and while he doesn’t enjoy taking those particular tools out...he will if he deems it necessary. So when you need someone to make the hard decision...choose Keiji. He’ll do it, if the motivation is right. Keiji doesn’t choose to save the world. Or to complete the mission. He’ll pick his friends every time. Whatever he needs to do to save his friends. Even if that means the world goes up in smoke.

Speaking of friends, Keiji likes to have lots of them. He hates being alone. It leaves him with those thoughts and feelings he doesn’t know what to do with. He likes to show off and give people gifts. He gives them out a lot. It’s far easier to give people a present than to give away vulnerability. Cancer through and through, Keiji keeps his shell up for just about anyone, and seeing it crack, seeing the real scared teenager underneath, that’s tantamount to failure for Keiji. People who see him in his weakest moment, also get the full brunt of his rage. That’s not fair, and he knows that...but it doesn’t change how he responds. Which is sort of ironic, since Keiji is all about personal freedom. Choosing to do whatever you want. Be whoever you want. The imprints of his various lives have left him with a smattering of ideals that he tries to follow, yet when it comes to his own responses, his own reactions, Keiji is a rigid as his father. And that thought scares him, perhaps more than any other fear.

Appearance
The first thing that hits you about Keiji is his height. At over six feet tall, the boy is huge. He’s a bit on the thin side, favoring lean muscles over bulk. His skin is stretched taut over modest abs and a narrow chest, the muscles gained from cardiac activity and healthy eating instead of any kind of gym regimen. You’ll notice that skin is unmarred. Keiji is a purist about his body, allowing no piercings or tattoos of any kind. The second thing you notice are his hazel eyes, which burn with an unusual intensity at everything they look at. If you can see them, that is, since Keiji’s black hair tends to be messy and wild, often with a long forelock covering one or both of his eyes. He keeps it in that annoyingly chic ‘bedhead only, I don’t care what my hair looks like’ style that seems to dominate skater culture.

Clothing wise, Keiji is an eclectic mix, usually dressing depending on what he’s doing that day. There are only two constants in his wardrobe. The first is that he hates sleeves, and will generally avoid them. Most of his clothing have had their sleeves forcibly, yet artfully, removed. The second is that he always wear shoes he can move in. Not flat skater shoes that are big and bulky, but athletic sneakers that have some good grip of their own. Keiji never likes to be caught in footwear that’ll slow him down. Aside from that, Keiji tends to have two modes: Athletic or Grunge. When he dresses athletically, it’s all jerseys or tank tops, with sweatpants or shorts with tights underneath. Every now and again he’ll wear a vented workout shirt, the ones that are too big with those rips down the side meant just to show off. He likes showing off. His punk style is more fashionable, with flannels, leather vests, and tight fitting distressed pants. All, of course, ripped in just the right places to show off. He loves to accessorize, usually with multiple bracelets of different styles and necklaces, when he’s not dressed athletically.

FaceClaim: Haiykuu! • Tetsurou Kuroo • Akano Keiji

Personal History
Keiji and his father have never seen eye to eye. Keiji’s father is a traditionalist. He likes everything to be done by the book, to the letter, just as he was taught by his father and his father’s father. Keiji is the polar opposite. Keiji is reckless and impulsive. He goes with trends and doesn’t put much stock in rules or labels. Everything is about personal freedom and exploring your options. For his entire life, Keiji and his father have been in fierce opposition over their philosophies.

Even from a young age, Keiji was a doer. He liked to touch things. He loved to pull them apart. He loved toys he could interact with. Books and stuffed animals, one note toys that didn’t offer any imagination or activity, were quickly discarded. Early on he established his love of the physical. While his mother was glad to see an active son, his father wanted a son who could sit still, who got into the best schooling, and who was obedient. Keiji was never these things.

Not that Keiji wasn’t smart. He was intelligent. He understood the game played in schools and was bored by it. The endless assignments. The stuffy rules. The regimented day schedules. It all drove him nuts. He did just enough to get out and be a productive member of society. What made his days were his clubs. Keiji has tried nearly every sport offered. Volleyball, Baseball, Martial Arts, Archery. He would play anything he could, until he eventually settled on Basketball. Basketball never stopped moving, and that activity had always drawn the young boy. So he played it all the way through school. It defined him and gave him an out for when he finished school with barely passable grades.

But what really shaped Keiji was outside of school. Skateboarding. Keiji stumbled upon the sport purely by accident when he was nearly plowed down by a skateboarder who would soon become one of his best friends. Skateboarding was highly frowned upon in Keiji’s youth, cracked down on by police...and that made it fun. They would skate in secret, finding broken down areas or construction site during a lunch break. More often than not their sessions ended in being chased by the police. Keiji was having a blast.

And his father hated it.

By now Keiji was a teenager, so anything to thwart his uptight father was a plus. And he never stopped talking about how disrespectful skateboarders were. How trashily they dressed. How they ruined parks and sidewalks. Keiji used it all as fuel. His style started to blend athletic and skateboarder, all the parts his dad hated. It made their house extremely tense. They were snapping at each other all the time. Keiji was grounded more often than not. His mom tried to write it off as teenage hormones, and that they would’ve fought over something if it wasn’t skateboarding, but his father simply insisted that he was rude and disrespectful and needed to be corrected.

So, in the middle of his last year of traditional schooling, his father packed up the family and shuffled them off to Shibuya, accepting a promotion from his job and tearing Keiji away from ‘the miscreants’ who had so plagued his son.

Keiji was furious. He lost all his friends, he lost his cool skate spots, he transferred to a new, stricter private school meant to ‘straighten him out’. It was an awful present to receive on your eighteenth birthday. It almost makes you want to just run away...