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irregular[Character Name] Ken Hidaka
[Canon] Weiss Kreuz
[Point Taken from Canon] Directly following the events of Schreient, Episode 9 of Weiss Kreuz Kapitel.
[Age] 19
[Gender] Male
[Sexual Orientation] Bisexual, self-identifying as straight. Though Ken is only explicitly shown in brief romantic relationships with women, he develops at least three extremely close (and, usually, far longer-lasting) emotional attachments to other men - most notably with former friend Kouichirou Kase - on several occasions throughout the series. Ken would be unwilling to admit these were anything other than friendships.
[Eye Color] Brown.
[Hair Color] Dark brown.
[Height] 5'3" (160 cms). In other words, short.
[Other] Ken is legally dead, supposedly having died in a warehouse fire. The incident has left him with second- and third-degree burn scars on his back, though he isn't particularly self-conscious about this.
[Clothing] Casual to a fault. Ken dresses like pretty much every other late-adolescent guy did in 1998: he lives in jeans, tee-shirts and leather jackets to such an extent that he even goes out killing in them. He has a dim awareness that formal clothes exist, but largely considers neckties to be things that happen to other people.
REFERENCE:
As Weiss Kreuz is an older show, it lacks a series-specific wiki. A general Wikipedia page can be found here.
Ask Ken Hidaka who he is and he'll probably tell you that he's a florist and part-time soccer coach. He might go on to say that he doesn't think being a florist is all that great and that nobody warned him that a fan club would come with the territory. What he probably wouldn't go on to add is that he is also a scandal-tainted former professional soccer player who, after supposedly dying in suspicious circumstances, now works as an assassin for a team named Weiss. They report back to Kritiker, a covert agency formed by the Chief of Police to dispense a very final kind of justice to criminals that the law couldn't touch.
Ken's childhood was not a happy one. The only child of Catholic parents, his mother died when he was five years old, leaving Ken seriously depressed. His father - who also left the picture not long after, though canon is unclear on why - sent him for counseling with a nun named Sister Amamiya, who he came to see as a surrogate parent. A soccer prodigy, he was scouted by the J-league in his mid-teens, only to very publically fall from grace when he was falsely accused of match-fixing. His attempt to find out who was responsible for fitting him up very nearly got him killed when he and his best friend Kouichiro Kase were set upon by gangsters, who dragged Kase away and quickly and brutally took down Ken, leaving him for dead in a burning building.
Recruited by Kritiker during his recovery, he was sent to train with a group of militiamen and then recruited into Weiss. Soon afterward he was reuinted with a childhood friend, Natsuki, and Sister Amamiya - only to discover that the nun had been targeted by Kritiker for masterminding a string of murder/suicides. After Sister Amamiya used Natsuki as one of her pawns, Ken realized he had no choice but to kill her.
Making no bones about the fact that he was in it for revenge, Ken was convinced he wanted to know who was responsible for getting him kicked out of the J-league right up to the point he actually found the man responsible: Kase, his childhood friend and former teammate. Ken long believed that Kase had been killed the night he supposedly died, and only discovered that his friend was still alive when he walked into the mission briefing that named Kase as a target for his team: both he and the man he worked for, Genji Kouga, were members of a crime syndicate. Horrified by the prospect of having to kill the friend he'd only just been reunited with, and unwilling to believe that Kase could have known what his boss was up to, Ken desperately tried to prove Kase was innocent of the crimes he had been implicated in, going as far as to try and fail to convince Kritiker to take him off the target list - only to discover that Kase had been in on it all along. Worse was to follow when Kase, who had just poisoned his boss so that he could take over Kouga's syndicate, tried to murder him, leaving Ken with no choice but to kill his friend.
A chance meeting with a rather nice girl named Yuriko seemed to offer Ken an opportunity to find a way out. While out riding his bike not long after Kase's death, a near-miss with a semi saw Ken run off the road and running into Yuriko within moments. The pair hit it off almost immediately, and a sudden storm that saw them spending the night away from the city proved the perfect excuse to spend more time together. Though sharing a room with a single bed had Ken, characteristically, choosing to sleep on the floor, it only served to cement their relationship. The brief happiness Ken found with Yuriko, though, wasn't to last. Yuriko, bored of her office job, wanted to emigrate to Australia, and asked Ken to come with her. Though he longed to go, ultimately Ken's feelings of guilt and the impossibility of ever being open with Yuriko about the life he'd led and the crimes he'd committed pushed him into breaking off the relationship, and letting her leave alone. They never saw one another again.
A short while later, Weiss's missions see them becoming entangled in the doings of the Takatori family, a powerful financial and political dynasty whose current head is aiming to become the next Prime Minister. His second son Masafumi, a research scientist with a pronounced Messiah complex who heads a company named Kourin, has been implicated in the team's last two missions, and they are soon ordered to move against Masafumi himself. An attempt to go and talk to one of Masafumi's victims, a student who has started mutating after participating in a drug trial, leads to the death of the victim and Weiss's first encounter with Schreient, an all-female team who serve as Masafumi's bodyguards. A second confrontation at a Korin facility sees Ken gaining the enmity of one of the women in particular, a narcissistic former model codenamed Schoen, after he scratches her face during a fight. The team finally track Masafumi down, only for Masafumi to down one of his as-yet unstable potions and mutate into a fiercely strong monster. Though Ken's attempt to take Masafumi down by jumping on him and working out the rest afterward proves to be of no use at all, the monster is killed when the building catches fire, allowing Weiss to escape.
PERSONALITY:
In day-to-day life, Ken comes across as an ordinary, though somewhat naive, nineteen-year-old boy - lively, aggressively cheerful, extroverted, impulsive, occasionally oblivious and almost entirely terrible with girls. For all his usual cheerful confidence, he's pretty easy to embarrass. His tendency toward late-adolescent awkwardness becomes especially pronounced in his dealings with women, especially if they're showing clear interest in him. He gets round this problem by making a habit of falling in love by mistake, which is pretty much the only reason he got anywhere with Yuriko.
Ken's general hopelessness with women can be explained thusly: when he got together with Yuriko, Youji thought the very idea that Ken's sudden cheerfulness could be explained by a new girlfriend was hilarious, while Omi couldn't get his head round the concept. Nor could Ken, who reacted to Yuriko's obvious displays of interest by 1) attempting to leave the room, the building and possibly the prefecture; 2) sleeping on the floor; and 3) needing to be rebooted after she kissed him on the cheek. For all this, he fell fast - to the point that when Yuriko, an incredibly impulsive woman in her own right, mentioned she was emigrating to Australia and asked if he wanted to come with her, his response was 'Okay!'. While Youji's reality check was both hypocritical and unfair, he had a point: going to Australia with a woman you've known for three weeks when you can't speak a word of English is really not the world's greatest idea.
Once Ken has put his faith in someone, it's very, very difficult to convince him to break it. It took being set on fire, left for dead, and then shot repeatedly to convince him that Kase - a childhood friend Ken was exceedingly attached to - genuinely was as bad as Kritiker were painting him. Loyal to a fault, and nothing if he's not stubborn, Ken clung to the idea that Kase was innocent, just as he had with his mother figure Kaoruko Amamiya some months earlier - and, in both cases, it took hard and horrifying proof before he was prepared to believe it. Ken has developed quite pronounced abandonment issues as a result - he finds letting go of the people he cares about extremely difficult, and is prepared to go to extreme lengths to stay with them. He is, however, ultimately flexible. He's dealt with a lot of change and uncertainty in his life, and a lot of sudden reversals. For all his stubbornness Ken is a survivor: while he might not like letting go, he certainly understands why it's necessary.
Another of Ken's most noticeable traits is his temper, which could only be described as 'short' and has not been improved by a crash course in working retail. It's not particularly difficult to irritate him; he also has a tendency to fall back on defensive anger when he's flustered or upset. It's far more unusual for him to stay angry for very long. Though he can be extremely hostile toward strangers - especially to strangers he's expected to work with - and frequently loses his temper with the people he cares for, in these cases his anger has no genuine, long-lasting malice behind it. He's the kind of person you want on your side in a fight - as long as he's still standing he won't give up, and if he goes down at all he'll go down swinging. Prepared to give his all to protect the people he cares about, Ken believes the best about the people he considers friends: it takes a lot to make him turn on them even reluctantly. His loyalty isn't simply to people, though: he's prepared to go to the wall for what he believes in, even if it means going against his friends.
Ken is something of a perfectionist. Simply, he likes to be good at the things that he does - a trait that was benign enough when he was simply trying to be the absolute best soccer player he possibly could be. He tries, despite his lack of any real interest in the job, to be a good florist. But he spends his nights working as a hired killer, and there's a part of him that wants to be good at that too. He believes that his actions are sinful - while he is prepared to grant that Weiss may be a necessary evil, he still thinks what they do is wrong - and often feels profoundly guilty about it, but no matter how much he may dislike and disapprove of what he does he still wants to do it well.
Ken is a forthright person, sometimes to the point of tactlessness. If he doesn't see the point in doing something he'll say so, and repeatedly, regardless of how tactless his behavior might seem. He speaks his mind, often without considering how what he says will come across, still less if maybe it would be wiser to say nothing. He's a self-proclaimed 'action guy', preferring to act first and think about it later if at all, leaving him with a tendency toward recklessness which is only heightened when under stress. He's got the kind of mind that considers setting something on fire to be a great distraction tactic, without much regard for what might happen after that. Planning, for Ken, is something for other people to tell him about.
Though he's a lot less open than he initially appears, and its clear from his abandonment issues and his struggles with guilt that he only looks to be an uncomplicated, untroubled soul, Ken is still something of an innocent, and an optimist at heart. For all that Omi is two years younger, and he was not the last one to join, he is in some respects very much the team's junior member, and horribly ill-suited for the job.
POWERS:
Ken is as psychically inclined as a box of rocks - and not even specially selected occult gemstones buffed and polished to a high shine, just plain old common-or-garden rocks. In a box. As a former professional athlete and paramilitary, he is extremely physically fit and agile but, taking Anime Physics into account, he functions at a no-more-than-human level. At that level, though, Ken is genuinely extremely dangerous - he's a trained killer who specializes in close-range hand-to-hand combat using a non-ranged weapon, and the fact that he's still breathing and has all his lights and limbs is proof enough that he's gotten very good at this very fast. He has also had a degree of paramilitary training, and has been shown to be competent with not only his own weapons - a pair of bladed gauntlets based on the Indian bagh nakha - but with small arms and light weaponry.
When all's said and done, though, Ken is a normal human and a young one at that. He has absolutely no defenses against magic users or psychic manipulation - he is vaguely aware that psychics exist, but he has no idea how you'd go about getting rid of one if 'jumping on them and working it out from there' didn't work. He also, for all his strength, stamina and training, lacks long-term experience. He'd be able to fight back against another normal adult with combat training and would definitely try, but he'd have a hard time keeping up with someone who'd been doing this for years.
[Canon] Weiss Kreuz
[Point Taken from Canon] Directly following the events of Schreient, Episode 9 of Weiss Kreuz Kapitel.
[Age] 19
[Gender] Male
[Sexual Orientation] Bisexual, self-identifying as straight. Though Ken is only explicitly shown in brief romantic relationships with women, he develops at least three extremely close (and, usually, far longer-lasting) emotional attachments to other men - most notably with former friend Kouichirou Kase - on several occasions throughout the series. Ken would be unwilling to admit these were anything other than friendships.
[Eye Color] Brown.
[Hair Color] Dark brown.
[Height] 5'3" (160 cms). In other words, short.
[Other] Ken is legally dead, supposedly having died in a warehouse fire. The incident has left him with second- and third-degree burn scars on his back, though he isn't particularly self-conscious about this.
[Clothing] Casual to a fault. Ken dresses like pretty much every other late-adolescent guy did in 1998: he lives in jeans, tee-shirts and leather jackets to such an extent that he even goes out killing in them. He has a dim awareness that formal clothes exist, but largely considers neckties to be things that happen to other people.
REFERENCE:
As Weiss Kreuz is an older show, it lacks a series-specific wiki. A general Wikipedia page can be found here.
Ask Ken Hidaka who he is and he'll probably tell you that he's a florist and part-time soccer coach. He might go on to say that he doesn't think being a florist is all that great and that nobody warned him that a fan club would come with the territory. What he probably wouldn't go on to add is that he is also a scandal-tainted former professional soccer player who, after supposedly dying in suspicious circumstances, now works as an assassin for a team named Weiss. They report back to Kritiker, a covert agency formed by the Chief of Police to dispense a very final kind of justice to criminals that the law couldn't touch.
Ken's childhood was not a happy one. The only child of Catholic parents, his mother died when he was five years old, leaving Ken seriously depressed. His father - who also left the picture not long after, though canon is unclear on why - sent him for counseling with a nun named Sister Amamiya, who he came to see as a surrogate parent. A soccer prodigy, he was scouted by the J-league in his mid-teens, only to very publically fall from grace when he was falsely accused of match-fixing. His attempt to find out who was responsible for fitting him up very nearly got him killed when he and his best friend Kouichiro Kase were set upon by gangsters, who dragged Kase away and quickly and brutally took down Ken, leaving him for dead in a burning building.
Recruited by Kritiker during his recovery, he was sent to train with a group of militiamen and then recruited into Weiss. Soon afterward he was reuinted with a childhood friend, Natsuki, and Sister Amamiya - only to discover that the nun had been targeted by Kritiker for masterminding a string of murder/suicides. After Sister Amamiya used Natsuki as one of her pawns, Ken realized he had no choice but to kill her.
Making no bones about the fact that he was in it for revenge, Ken was convinced he wanted to know who was responsible for getting him kicked out of the J-league right up to the point he actually found the man responsible: Kase, his childhood friend and former teammate. Ken long believed that Kase had been killed the night he supposedly died, and only discovered that his friend was still alive when he walked into the mission briefing that named Kase as a target for his team: both he and the man he worked for, Genji Kouga, were members of a crime syndicate. Horrified by the prospect of having to kill the friend he'd only just been reunited with, and unwilling to believe that Kase could have known what his boss was up to, Ken desperately tried to prove Kase was innocent of the crimes he had been implicated in, going as far as to try and fail to convince Kritiker to take him off the target list - only to discover that Kase had been in on it all along. Worse was to follow when Kase, who had just poisoned his boss so that he could take over Kouga's syndicate, tried to murder him, leaving Ken with no choice but to kill his friend.
A chance meeting with a rather nice girl named Yuriko seemed to offer Ken an opportunity to find a way out. While out riding his bike not long after Kase's death, a near-miss with a semi saw Ken run off the road and running into Yuriko within moments. The pair hit it off almost immediately, and a sudden storm that saw them spending the night away from the city proved the perfect excuse to spend more time together. Though sharing a room with a single bed had Ken, characteristically, choosing to sleep on the floor, it only served to cement their relationship. The brief happiness Ken found with Yuriko, though, wasn't to last. Yuriko, bored of her office job, wanted to emigrate to Australia, and asked Ken to come with her. Though he longed to go, ultimately Ken's feelings of guilt and the impossibility of ever being open with Yuriko about the life he'd led and the crimes he'd committed pushed him into breaking off the relationship, and letting her leave alone. They never saw one another again.
A short while later, Weiss's missions see them becoming entangled in the doings of the Takatori family, a powerful financial and political dynasty whose current head is aiming to become the next Prime Minister. His second son Masafumi, a research scientist with a pronounced Messiah complex who heads a company named Kourin, has been implicated in the team's last two missions, and they are soon ordered to move against Masafumi himself. An attempt to go and talk to one of Masafumi's victims, a student who has started mutating after participating in a drug trial, leads to the death of the victim and Weiss's first encounter with Schreient, an all-female team who serve as Masafumi's bodyguards. A second confrontation at a Korin facility sees Ken gaining the enmity of one of the women in particular, a narcissistic former model codenamed Schoen, after he scratches her face during a fight. The team finally track Masafumi down, only for Masafumi to down one of his as-yet unstable potions and mutate into a fiercely strong monster. Though Ken's attempt to take Masafumi down by jumping on him and working out the rest afterward proves to be of no use at all, the monster is killed when the building catches fire, allowing Weiss to escape.
PERSONALITY:
In day-to-day life, Ken comes across as an ordinary, though somewhat naive, nineteen-year-old boy - lively, aggressively cheerful, extroverted, impulsive, occasionally oblivious and almost entirely terrible with girls. For all his usual cheerful confidence, he's pretty easy to embarrass. His tendency toward late-adolescent awkwardness becomes especially pronounced in his dealings with women, especially if they're showing clear interest in him. He gets round this problem by making a habit of falling in love by mistake, which is pretty much the only reason he got anywhere with Yuriko.
Ken's general hopelessness with women can be explained thusly: when he got together with Yuriko, Youji thought the very idea that Ken's sudden cheerfulness could be explained by a new girlfriend was hilarious, while Omi couldn't get his head round the concept. Nor could Ken, who reacted to Yuriko's obvious displays of interest by 1) attempting to leave the room, the building and possibly the prefecture; 2) sleeping on the floor; and 3) needing to be rebooted after she kissed him on the cheek. For all this, he fell fast - to the point that when Yuriko, an incredibly impulsive woman in her own right, mentioned she was emigrating to Australia and asked if he wanted to come with her, his response was 'Okay!'. While Youji's reality check was both hypocritical and unfair, he had a point: going to Australia with a woman you've known for three weeks when you can't speak a word of English is really not the world's greatest idea.
Once Ken has put his faith in someone, it's very, very difficult to convince him to break it. It took being set on fire, left for dead, and then shot repeatedly to convince him that Kase - a childhood friend Ken was exceedingly attached to - genuinely was as bad as Kritiker were painting him. Loyal to a fault, and nothing if he's not stubborn, Ken clung to the idea that Kase was innocent, just as he had with his mother figure Kaoruko Amamiya some months earlier - and, in both cases, it took hard and horrifying proof before he was prepared to believe it. Ken has developed quite pronounced abandonment issues as a result - he finds letting go of the people he cares about extremely difficult, and is prepared to go to extreme lengths to stay with them. He is, however, ultimately flexible. He's dealt with a lot of change and uncertainty in his life, and a lot of sudden reversals. For all his stubbornness Ken is a survivor: while he might not like letting go, he certainly understands why it's necessary.
Another of Ken's most noticeable traits is his temper, which could only be described as 'short' and has not been improved by a crash course in working retail. It's not particularly difficult to irritate him; he also has a tendency to fall back on defensive anger when he's flustered or upset. It's far more unusual for him to stay angry for very long. Though he can be extremely hostile toward strangers - especially to strangers he's expected to work with - and frequently loses his temper with the people he cares for, in these cases his anger has no genuine, long-lasting malice behind it. He's the kind of person you want on your side in a fight - as long as he's still standing he won't give up, and if he goes down at all he'll go down swinging. Prepared to give his all to protect the people he cares about, Ken believes the best about the people he considers friends: it takes a lot to make him turn on them even reluctantly. His loyalty isn't simply to people, though: he's prepared to go to the wall for what he believes in, even if it means going against his friends.
Ken is something of a perfectionist. Simply, he likes to be good at the things that he does - a trait that was benign enough when he was simply trying to be the absolute best soccer player he possibly could be. He tries, despite his lack of any real interest in the job, to be a good florist. But he spends his nights working as a hired killer, and there's a part of him that wants to be good at that too. He believes that his actions are sinful - while he is prepared to grant that Weiss may be a necessary evil, he still thinks what they do is wrong - and often feels profoundly guilty about it, but no matter how much he may dislike and disapprove of what he does he still wants to do it well.
Ken is a forthright person, sometimes to the point of tactlessness. If he doesn't see the point in doing something he'll say so, and repeatedly, regardless of how tactless his behavior might seem. He speaks his mind, often without considering how what he says will come across, still less if maybe it would be wiser to say nothing. He's a self-proclaimed 'action guy', preferring to act first and think about it later if at all, leaving him with a tendency toward recklessness which is only heightened when under stress. He's got the kind of mind that considers setting something on fire to be a great distraction tactic, without much regard for what might happen after that. Planning, for Ken, is something for other people to tell him about.
Though he's a lot less open than he initially appears, and its clear from his abandonment issues and his struggles with guilt that he only looks to be an uncomplicated, untroubled soul, Ken is still something of an innocent, and an optimist at heart. For all that Omi is two years younger, and he was not the last one to join, he is in some respects very much the team's junior member, and horribly ill-suited for the job.
POWERS:
Ken is as psychically inclined as a box of rocks - and not even specially selected occult gemstones buffed and polished to a high shine, just plain old common-or-garden rocks. In a box. As a former professional athlete and paramilitary, he is extremely physically fit and agile but, taking Anime Physics into account, he functions at a no-more-than-human level. At that level, though, Ken is genuinely extremely dangerous - he's a trained killer who specializes in close-range hand-to-hand combat using a non-ranged weapon, and the fact that he's still breathing and has all his lights and limbs is proof enough that he's gotten very good at this very fast. He has also had a degree of paramilitary training, and has been shown to be competent with not only his own weapons - a pair of bladed gauntlets based on the Indian bagh nakha - but with small arms and light weaponry.
When all's said and done, though, Ken is a normal human and a young one at that. He has absolutely no defenses against magic users or psychic manipulation - he is vaguely aware that psychics exist, but he has no idea how you'd go about getting rid of one if 'jumping on them and working it out from there' didn't work. He also, for all his strength, stamina and training, lacks long-term experience. He'd be able to fight back against another normal adult with combat training and would definitely try, but he'd have a hard time keeping up with someone who'd been doing this for years.
