#* absolute notebooks.

ooc. Kei's birthday is in spring, a little after the start of the new school year in Japan-- this could mean he's either one of the oldest or youngest in his year in Kotesashi, but for the purposes of this blog I decided to make it the former!

ooc. A small note I guess, but a lot of Kei's expectations of different social situations are highly influenced by media. He's gotten sort of better about it at this point compared to when he started when he woke up without his memories, but he's still very much an awkward boy running on fantasies when you get down to it. The Commander is better about this than the Master, because he holds the memory of needing to shape an image and his behavior based on his understanding of social situations in order to protect himself and Haruka; meanwhile, in the latter's case, a lot of his idea of social situations were shaped by what Kei back in junior high saw as the ideal based on the shows he watched late at night. That said, the Commander was also shaped by those memories of experiencing isolation, so when he's not trying to perform some kind of image of baseball cool or putting on a PR face, he's pretty socially awkward too. If anything, the Master is the more sociable one!

ooc. Kei's father isn't really a character (as of writing) in canon, but for the purposes of this blog I decided to conceptualize someone to round out Kei's childhood a little more. Not many remember the man the Kaname patriarch had once been: a professional pitcher in the Nippon Professional Baseball league, a rising star whose potential legacy was snatched away from him due to an excruciating shoulder injury. In that moment, the short career of Kei's father had abruptly ended. Since then, Kei's father has been chasing after his glory days, looking to escape the mundanity of irrelevance through his vices. It's because of this that the man is rarely home, barely present in the lives of his son and wife. The arguments that erupts between his parents whenever both were around one another doesn't help, either. He does love his son in a way, and shows it in the only way he know he can; spoiling him with gifts and presents, such as his first ball and gloves for playing catch. It was an attempt to fill the hole of his absence through material goods; none of it worked for Kei, of course, adding to his complexes around the adult figures in his life constantly failing him. His mother is more present, but often wrapped in her own world and far too calloused with her words, an unreliable figure who errs on the side of letting her son do what he wanted to the point of negligence. At a young age, Kei learned he only had himself to rely on. This created an anxiety for Kei that bled into his treatment of Haruka, up to the point of his injury and 'amnesia'. Kei witnessed firsthand what injury and irrelevance could do to a man; it was all the more reason for Kei to control the conditions around his best friend and battery partner, to make sure Haruka would be delivered to the future and have a long and successful career. No matter what happens to Kei. Canonically speaking, Kei's bio cites both his parents love and spoil him, and not much else. In the context of this blog, this is true-- but the love isn't enough to repair what years of negligence has caused.