Subject Line: Application | Name of Character IN WESTERN ORDER | Canon

♚ OOC
Name: Greer!
Age: 23
Contact: zhopa
Character In-game: n/a

♛ IC
Name: Doppo Kunikida
Canon: Bungo Stray Dogs
Canon Point: Chapter 41
Age: 22
Gender: male
Species: human
Appearance: he has a mullet ponytail

History/Background:

Bungou Stray Dogs is a manga about a bunch of fictionalized versions of authors. None of these characters share anything in common with the authors other than their names and the powers, which are titled and inspired by their work. Unfortunately, Kunikida's wiki page does not include more than a poorly written paragraphs of events so I'll be writing out most of it here.

A few things should be noted before I begin, namely that as of this moment, not all of the information regarding Kunikida's role in canon is present. The first novel, Osamu Dazai's Entrance Exam, is narrated by him and details the start of he and Dazai's partnership as well as one of his rougher cases. It is maybe halfway translated. For this reason, and for this instance only, I will be relying on episodes 6 and 7 of the anime adaptation to fill in the gaps, due to the anime's strict following of the known events of the novel.

Outside of that, everything else is taken from the manga and translated portions of Osamu Dazai's Entrance Exam.

Anyway...

In Yokohama, Japan there is a private detective agency with government ties that specializes in extremely dangerous cases that often involve a superpowered presence. As such, nearly all of the members of the agency have specialized superpowers to sufficiently combat the criminals they face. The Agency is led by a man named Fukuzawa Yukichi but is efficiently managed by his "student", Kunikida Doppo.

It's unknown at which point Kunikida joined the Armed Detective Agency but in the first light novel, Osamu Dazai's Entrance Exam, he's twenty and insinuated to have been employed as a detective for a fair amount of time. He's also a math teacher, which isn't really important but it sure is funny. Anyway, the novel starts and focuses on Dazai and Kunikida's first meeting and subsequent first case as partners. The case, which starts out as a simple haunted house/human trafficking investigation where tourists have been abducted via taxi, quickly turns into a revenge plot targeted at the Agency and, more specifically, Kunikida. The person behind it is anonymous, but in the warning letters sent to the Agency, they sign their name as the "Azure Messenger"*, a callback to the "Azure King", one of the most dangerous criminals Kunikida managed to stop. Much in the nature of their predecessor, the "Azure Messenger" threatens to bomb a significant part of Yokohama and allows only a short time frame to stop it.

Throughout the case, a number of characters pop up to both assist and disturb the investigation. While some of these are recurring characters that appear later in the manga, the most important ones are Sasaki Nobuko, a victim now placed under the protection of Kunikida and Dazai, and Rokuzou Taguchi, a teenage hacker and informant that Kunikida has essentially adopted as his ward after the death of Rokuzou's father, a policeman who initially worked on the "Azure King" case. As Kunikida and Dazai progress through the case it becomes evident that they have an excellent partnership, each working as the best foil for the other. The latter becomes most evident in the conclusion of the novel. Even after a victorious fight and stopping the bomb that threatens Yokohama, the identity of the overall mastermind, "The Azure Messenger", is unclear. That is, until Dazai deduces their identity and calls for a meeting between them, himself and Kunikida. Rokuzou also shows up uninvited, after having hacked the email (??) Dazai sent (??) to the "Azure Messenger".

At this point, the mastermind is revealed to be Sasaki. She enters and immediately shoots at Kunikida but Rokuzou sacrifices himself to take the shot instead. Sasaki states that she was romantically involved with the "Azure King" and wanted to carry on his motive, which was essentially extremist idealism. Due to Dazai's encouragement, Rokuzou manages to use the last of his energy to shoot Sasaki. Both of them die. Kunikida gets messed up and he and Dazai have an argument about Kunikida's own extreme ideas. Then that's all we know.

Fast forward two years. Kunikida's twenty-two and no longer a math teacher (again, irrelevant but still funny). He and Dazai have become the best partners within the Agency and things are as good as they can be when everyday is spent bickering.

One day, Dazai decides to interrupt a case they're working on to take in an orphan named Nakajima Atsushi. The case revolves around an evil tiger that destroyed an orphanage and maybe other bad things but canon is kind of unclear. The point is, Atsushi's not obviously involved and Kunikida takes issue with the distraction. Despite Kunikida’s anger, Dazai explains that he has a lead and instructs Kunikida to get the rest of the Agency and bring them to a chosen meeting place. Kunikida goes and does that while Dazai deals with the culprit–Atsushi, who is apparently a were-tiger. Due to Dazai’s negation power, Atsushi is able to be neutralized and is inducted into the Armed Detective Agency.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Atsushi has a large bounty on his head for whatever reason. You’d think it’d be for the orphanage thing. It’s not. Anyway, the bounty is so huge it attracts the attention of the Port Mafia, the local ruffians the Armed Detective Agency has had to deal with. They attack the agency a lot, including swarming the agency (Kunikida and the other detectives beat them up) and kidnapping Atsushi approximately three times and Dazai once. After the approximately third kidnapping the agency gets so fed up with the abductions that they actually do something about it. Kunikida is assigned to lead the search. Eventually, they find out Atsushi’s on a boat and Kunikida takes a small motorboat to save him only to get rejected because Atsushi wants an epic fight with a member of the mafia while the ship is exploding. Instead of trying to help in any way, Kunikida waits in his motorboat. After the fight he returns Atsushi and Kyouka, a super-powered girl Atsushi rescued from the mafia, safely to shore.

You’d think at this point, the whole Everyone Wants Atsushi plot would be tied up. You’d be wrong. Turns out the Port Mafia weren't the only ones interested in the bounty or whatever. A larger, international network of mafias also led by authors such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Russian mafia), Agatha Christie (British mafia) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (American mafia) have also taken an interest. They all decide they’ll try for the bounty, but F. Scott goes first, leading into a whole big arc where the American authors mafia piss off both the Armed Detective Agency and the Port Mafia and a big three-way war starts. Aside from the general management he typically seems to do, Kunikida’s main role is to try to save the Agency’s only two non-powered employees from being held hostages by H.P. Lovecraft and John Steinbeck. He saves them with the help of a coworker, Junichiro Tanizaki, and then fades into tangential relevance for the rest of the arc.

The Guild, as F. Scott Fitzgerald's mafia is called, is eventually thwarted once the Port Mafia and Detective Agency decide to team up. Deciding it's probably best to not be divided and conquered, they allow for a temporary truce and Atsushi and his mafia counterpart/rival, Akutagawa manage to stop F. Scott Fitzgerald's final plan. Which, by the way, is to crash a airborne whale ship called Moby Dick (I know) into Yokohama and destroy both the Agency and the Port Mafia. Despite the fact that they do manage to get the remote (??) that controls Moby Dick away from Fitzgerald, the whale is still hacked. But a united effort sends it crashing into the water, so everything's okay. They throw a party to celebrate.

There's a series of one-shot chapters after that including one in which Kunikida solo-stops yet another bomber who wants revenge on him. He shouts about his ideals and regrets a bit, blows himself and a little girl up, but everything still manages to be okay thanks to a healing ability possessed by another Agency member.

The chapter after that—his canon pull-point—is he and Atsushi approaching another one of the Agency's informants/hackers for assistance in identifying who the heck hacked Moby Dick. The informant/hacker is revealed to be a longtime friend of Kunikida's, Katai Tayama, who's ability is to essentially control technology. After going on a wacky quest to cheer up the depressed Katai, they leave the evidence and continue on their way. As of right now, it's still unclear if they have information on who was behind it but, due to the fact that this is a monthly, ongoing manga, we the readers know the culprit.

Surprise, it's Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

*The novel translations name both the original bomber and the culprit of the revenge plot "The Blue Bomber" and "The Blue Disciple". However, the novel translations are done by an amateur translator and are thus extremely rough. I'll be going with the anime's translation of "Azure Messenger" and "Azure __". It just sounds better...

Personality:

Kunikida wants to be the ideal man. Not in the standard way of attractiveness but rather as the epitome of a "good" person. A man of extreme morals, Kunikida has structured his whole life around both realistic and unrealistic expectations ranging from the simple and immediate ("complete the day's paperwork") to the lifelong impossible ("save every life"). Such grandiose goals call for a discipline that Kunikida takes over the top. Every second of his day is planned ahead of time and contained within a notebook always kept on him. His most important possession, it contains not only his meticulous daily schedule but his lifelong plan, personal notes (women must fulfill 58 requirements to be ideal and worth dating), shopping lists, budgets—if you can think of it, he probably has it within those pages. For Kunikida, every second of life must be spent upon the correct path in order to achieve the ideal he has defined for himself: inhuman perfection.

Obviously, there are a myriad of problems to his way of thought and life, the most obvious problem being when his schedule is disrupted. Which it is. A lot. Luckily, Kunikida is fully capable of adapting to accommodate life's discrepancies—though he does it begrudgingly. Generally, he's able to accept these changes with only a bit of grumbling but continuous and repeated offenses (Dazai) are a quick way to antagonize him.

On an average day, Kunikida is a relatively calm and tolerant man. He stays professional, putting the integrity of the Agency at the front of his mind. Or trying to. Unfortunately, when antagonized all of Kunikida's good intentions go to waste. The best examples of this are pretty much every interaction he has with Dazai, his partner, who goes out of his way to push Kunikida's buttons. Kunikida's reactions are predictable: a lot of shouting and screaming, a lot of gag violence and a dash of overdramatic speech and insults. As stated, Dazai earns most of the violence gag whereas others who try his patience usually receive dry comments and, at most, the shouting.

But there's a larger antithesis to his ideals and schedules than Dazai's teasing and it stems from his overarching goal. Kunikida is a detective who does not want to see anyone die. The sentence itself is a contradiction; no one in law enforcement can stop death. Kunikida knows this and says as much at multiple points in canon. He's experienced failure and it breaks him. Yet the key element to Kunikida's character is that he takes those broken pieces and mends them into something stronger than before. He's toughened himself to reality's oppositions and uses it to fortify his convictions. It's a devotion to ideals that most characters in canon cannot fathom and oftentimes mistake for naivete. They couldn't be farther from the truth. Kunikida knows full well he's chasing after an unattainable aspiration; he just doesn't see why that should stop him.

Which, essentially, means he's a stubborn piece of shit. While his devotion to his ideals is admirable, he's still a moralist and moralists always take the higher ground. He's too adamant in his own views that it can be hard to understand conflicting ones. The world isn't exactly black and white but the grey in between is definitely limited. While Kunikida has yet to be shown explicitly hating someone, it's pretty clear that he's disgusted by anyone who harms others in their own self-interest or the "greater good". This doesn't just apply to murder and violent crimes. In Osamu Dazai's Entrance Exam, the light novel which Kunikida narrates, he and Dazai consult an American secret intelligence agent on their current case. The agent offers them information under the clause that they illegally hand the bomber over to the United States instead of jailing him. Kunikida finds the behavior so despicable he chooses to leave without the information that is crucial to their case.

However, it should be noted that this rigid view of "evil" does not discount the fact that a person can change for the better. In fact, the concept is one Kunikida heavily believes in and can be seen repeatedly throughout canon. In chapter 40, we see a flashback of him encouraging a bomber he arrested to give up his criminal ways and set himself on path of justice. In the light novel, when a boy, Rokuzou, hacks into the Agency, he employs him instead of arresting him (although part of this is due to other factors). Evil acts are despicable, but they are only acts. The person is separate and a person, to Kunikida, always deserves a chance to reform. While he may appear different at first glance, in his heart Kunikida is a firm optimist and believes in the inherent good within all people. Sometimes more than he should.

Still, for a man whose two main modes are "calm" and "angry" that can be hard to get across. If we were forced to sort Kunikida into typical anime tropes he would fall under a tsundere, prickly on the outside and hiding a soft, gooey center.

A large part of that comes from how he speaks. To be frank, he's a jerk. Not that he means to be—in fact, he probably doesn't realize he's doing it. He's just a gruff guy, favoring straightforwardness and blunt truths over sugarcoated niceties that would sometimes be more appropriate. Kunikida cannot compliment someone without accidentally insulting them at the same time. What makes matters worse is that he's often not very good at phrasing any of it, as shown in one of the earlier chapters of the manga where he accidentally convinces Atsushi to leave the Agency. In reality, he was simply trying to make Atsushi establish his own responsibilities within the Agency itself. That's pretty bad miscommunication, not that Kunikida recognizes it. Similar to how he cannot comprehend the desire to do immoral actions, he also cannot comprehend why someone wouldn't understand how he communicates. Otherwise he would have at least apologized.

Beyond that, Kunikida is still part of the main cast of Bungou Stray Dogs, easily classifiable as an action comedy. While he is often placed in the straight man role when interacting with Dazai, he, along with anyone else in the manga, can act as his own independent comedy routine. He's overdramatic, gullible, easily flustered and spooked and acts like a preteen boy when it comes to romantic relationships. Despite his overarching workaholic nature, he has spare moments of laziness, averting smaller situations he should interfere with (Dazai misleading/pranking Atsushi a few times) simply because he just doesn't want to deal with it. Being responsible, uptight and idealistic doesn't stop him from being his own type of awkward goofball.

Overall, Kunikida's a pretty normal guy with some anger issues and impossibly high expectations for himself. He has his pitfalls, his failures but he doesn't let them own him. Those people he's failed have moved on; regrets won't save them. Nothing will. All Kunikida can do is carry their memory and move forward, learning from their deaths and finding worth in future successes. It's not a heroic thing to do, it's an obligation and Kunikida is nothing if not responsible.

Skills/Abilities:
Kunikida's ability is creatively named Doppo Poetry. It is item generation/summoning through the medium of a pocket notebook's paper. By writing down the name of an item and tearing out the page, Kunikida can summon nearly anything so long as it: 1. Does not exceed the size of the notebook, 2. He knows exactly how it is assembled and functions. Those restrictions aside, he has an infinite amount of items, weapons, etc. he could create. He mostly summons a wire gun. Once he summoned a shitty flashlight. He's a really creative guy.

As far as skills he'll actually have within the game: he knows Judo. Sure, we've only seen him do one move over and over again but canon implies he knows all of it. He'll still only use that one move, though.

In addition to that, he is referred to as one of the Detective Agency's best detectives alongside his partner, Osamu Dazai. Despite his goofiness, he is an intelligent man and very skilled at his job, both in the field and while managing the Agency's overall operations. He's not heavily implied to be the Agency's next director for nothing.

Other skills include: paperwork, cleaning, math, coming up with the occasional bizarre analogy

Magic Weapon: Fuck me up. aka randomize, please!

Carrier: A small giraffe, easily able to fit into a dog crate, with large furby eyes that never blink. Whether it walks or not is a mystery to Kunikida*; all he knows is that it appears very close to him, always staring intently. Even when it's slapping vertical objects with its neck—(its favorite hobby)—it is staring at him. It holds no interest in anyone else. Kunikida is terrified of it.

*Disclaimer: it does actually walk.

Sample:

Hey, listen up. I've noticed lately that this place doesn't understand a couple things. This sort of thing is to be expected but even so, there's one absence that's unforgivable. In the hope of a building code official being able to listen to this, I've gone back to dark days and prepared a lesson.

[Ah. Wait a minute. He should probably note:] ... This wasn't my department.

[But that aside! Kunikida clears his throat.]

"Bathroom. Noun. Plural noun: Bathrooms. A room containing a toilet and a sink and typically also a bathtub or shower."

[There's the pronounced slap of a book closing.] With all those public pools you call baths, Mr. Building Code Official, I can see how this idea might be a strange one. Luckily, I've simplified it for you.

It's a room. A small one. Attached to every room without fees that will turn my bank account into some desert wasteland. Your method of bathing is archaic! Especially with all these gear-covered contraptions [steampunk] around! Modernize! It's common decency!

[There's a murmur in the distance that Kunikida seems to pay attention to. Right, right. He's getting too worked up. When he speaks again, he's significantly calmer.] ... The least you could do is provide longer towels.

I don't... I don't want a front row view of an old man's genitals again.

[Had he meant to say that? No. The trauma kind of made him blurt it out. At least it still gets his point across! Unfortunately it also makes the person in the distance laugh. The audio cuts out while Kunikida's mid-yell.]


Other: i added this solely to whisper thanks for the reserve extension