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CHARACTER NAME: Takeru Takaishi
AGE: 15
CANON Digimon Adventure tri.
CANON POINT Post series.
HISTORY: Adventure main page and tri., disregarding any dub-specific terminology.
PERSONALITY:

Takeru is, first and foremost, an incredibly friendly and outgoing kid. Fearlessly social and brimming with confidence, he's the kind of guy who's happy to strike up a conversation with anyone. When it comes to girls he's already pretty popular, and though he's shameless in his flirting he doesn't seem to take any of it very seriously. He's polite, but not overly so, and merely associating with his friend group is all it takes for him to mark someone as fair game for teasing. He's a little brother--both literally and figuratively to the group as a whole--and lives up to the role by hitting just the right mix of obnoxious and endearing. In short, he's that friend who easily charms your parents and then proceeds to make faces at you every time they aren't looking.

He's also helped save the world a few times. Since tri. is almost entirely built on nostalgia, it's essential to look at the Digimon Adventure series as a whole to understand him.

When Takeru was eight-years-old, he and a handful of other kids from summer camp found themselves transported to the Digital World. There, they were forced to band together to learn how to fight and survive. As the youngest of the group, Takeru was pretty far from physically or mentally up to the task, and in the early days he wasn't much more than the token crybaby who honestly believed they could settle things by sitting the first big bad down for a friendly chat. Luckily, being a chosen one saddled with the fate of the world does wonders for cutting through a guy's pacifism, and Takeru was no exception. Over time he grew to accept the necessity of fighting and became determined to be someone strong and able to stand on his own. It's very important to him to be a useful, equal contributor to the team--even at times when no one would expect it of him. Self-reliance is something he takes seriously, to the point where he can be a little unfair about what he sees as depending too much on someone else. Likewise, he's been known to misconstrue well-meaning concern as being looked down on as incapable.

Going up against monsters of the week naturally had its share of traumatic moments too, and none affected him more deeply than the team's final showdown with Devimon. It was the first time Patamon was able to evolve into Angemon, and in the process Angemon was forced to sacrifice his own life to take down the bad guy. Even though digimon respawn and Takeru was able to reunite with his partner, that moment of helplessness is something that will always haunt him. Takeru is not a kid who deals well with loss (building on lingering issues from his parents going through a nasty divorce and splitting the family down the middle when he was younger), and as a result of the Devimon battle he's quick to get erratic if he has reason to believe Patamon is in danger.

He still has nightmares about Angemon's death years later, and harbors a grudge against the powers of darkness that can sometimes override his rational side. (See: stomping off to punch Ken in the face a time or twelve.) His evolution partner Iori has trouble reconciling the sweet, compassionate part of Takeru's personality with the cold, single-minded anger certain things bring out in him. These instances are rare, but worth noting for their intensity. Post-02, Takeru looks back on his losses of control with embarrassment, so it is at least something he's aware of and trying to improve on.

While not outright dishonest, Takeru also isn't the most forthcoming guy around. Iori has to go behind Takeru's back to get the truth about his past, and even in the general sense he tends to be selective in what he reveals about himself. Patamon, for example, gets a lesson in Takeru's family history from Tsunomon instead of Takeru himself despite months of being partners. His status as one of the youngest in the group aids a lot in what he's able to get away with, even as a teenager. Perhaps especially as a teenager, since by now he's had years of practice at honing his innocent routine and making the others' expectations of him work to his advantage. When he takes an infected Patamon out of quarantine, he's able to play it off as a selfish act of immaturity. When it becomes clear that something more serious is going on, he deflects the attention with jokes and refuses to open up to the people closest to him. He's not at full blown Stepford levels or anything, but in times of personal crisis he defaults to hiding his true feelings behind a smile.

For the most part, though, his positivity really is as genuine as it seems, and one can't talk about Takeru without mentioning the crest that embodies his most powerful trait--Hope. Hope in this case is probably best defined as the stubborn determination to keep fighting. Or, to quote the series,"Hope means not to lose the light, even when engulfed by darkness." His crest doesn't truly activate until one of the last episodes of Adventure, when the team's been defeated and Takeru is literally falling to his death and yet still believes they can somehow pull off a win. Ultimately, that's his role in the group--the voice of relentless optimism urging the others on and reminding them that together they can overcome anything.

By tri. Takeru has done a lot of growing up--he's more calm, more mature, more settled in his relationships. His temper has cooled down, and he's much less likely to get prickly about being asked personal questions. At this point he's played Chosen Child on two separate teams, so despite his age he's pretty experienced with apocalyptic weirdness. His creative side is starting to flourish (foreshadowing his future career as a writer), and he runs a blog to keep up with Digimon-related events around the world. He's come a long way from where he started, but the core of who he is--a good-hearted kid willing to stare down impossible odds--hasn't changed much at all.

CANON POWERS: Takeru's abilities as a Chosen Child are based on helping his partner evolve and (sometimes) opening gates to the Digital World--neither of which apply here even outside of power nerfing. Possessing the Crest of Hope might make him read a little differently than a normal human to those who can sense that kind of thing, but that's about the extent of it.
OTHER: Hipster sensibilities from 2005 are his real power, tbh.


CRAU INFO: n/a
MAGIC ABILITY: Photokinetic constructs. (There's a Blue Lantern hope joke in here somewhere.) He'll be limited to small scale, simple designs like shields and very basic weapons--nothing bigger than a person, and nothing overly complex. Anything he conjures up will take concentration to maintain, and will have an energy drain proportionate to its size.
ANY WEAPONS/MAGICAL ITEMS?: His D-3 digivice is technically a special item, but here it's essentially nonfunctional.
ANY PETS?: I'm assuming digimon have too much personality to count under this, so nah.