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W@tchtower Grotto is a work in progress story of a currently unclear medium, that Team Karasu has been messing with and tweaking for about 11 years.


W@tchtower Grotto provides examples of:

  • Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Forrest and Mikami have occasional moments like this, in which Mikami stops hiding how much he cares about Forrest.
  • Belligerent Sexual Tension: Between Forrest and Mikami most notably.
  • Birds of a Feather: Luz and Yukai-toki bond over their nigh-identical ideas of, and approaches to justice.
  • Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: Orelo and Pendragon, respectively, were this when they first met. They've changed radically as they've grown up together.
  • Destructive Romance: Kutsuuko and post-revelation Nana never quite reach this level, but they approach it and often dance just around its borders with the way that they keep completely randomly and inadvertently running into each other. Kutsuuko knows Nana broke him, and Nana knows he broke Kutsuuko. Most likely because of how long they were together and because of Kutsuuko's left-over Stockholm Syndrome paired with Nana's sense of guilt and obligation, there's this underlying feeling that they are fated to be together, one way or another.
  • Domestic Abuse: One of the most consistent themes of the story relates to just how many kinds of domestic abuse there are, and how trauma affects different people in different but equally valid ways.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending: No one gets out of this story unscarred, and those who get happy endings, or at least the promise of a future happy ending, have to work their asses off for it between the external AND internal forces that stand against them. Mikami most of all.
  • Eating the Eye Candy: Nageki does this with Kyuun quite a bit, when they're supposed to be enemies.
  • Everyone Is Bi: There are very, very few straight characters in W@tchtower Grotto. There are slightly more gay characters, but most of the cast is bisexual.
  • Florence Nightingale Effect: Only serves to amplify Luz's attraction to Yukai-toki.
  • Friends with Benefits: Nageki and Kyuun after she and her party pull him back out of his own head. They never become an Official Couple, but they do end up very close friends, emotionally and physically.
  • High-School Sweethearts: Pendragon and Orelo knew they were going to get married years before they actually did, and they've been maintaining a healthy, stable marriage for a long time now.
  • Lord And Knight: Kyuun and Yonbanme have a dynamic like this, during all phases of Kyuun's character development.
  • Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex: Averted for Nageki and Kyuun and similar mortal/immortal couples.
  • Meaningful Name: Most characters' names.
  • Platonic Life-Partners: Nageki and Kyuun, Desiderius and Annabelle, and Yukai-toki and Mezzo-Forte.

Characters

Characters will primarily be separated by location. This page is in the process of being cleaned up.

    open/close all folders 

    The Main Heroes 

Nageki Shikimori

  • Tomboy and Girly Girl: The tomboy to Mizune's girly-girl. As Mizune grows more comfortable with herself and understands that she doesn't have to dress as femininely as possible at all times to be a real woman, Mizune and Nageki's wardrobes swap this trope depending on their whims.

Mizune Tamazuna

  • Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Baby blue.
  • Fashion Hurts: She endures the pain, though. It's a source of where some of her dysphoria comes from, the idea that fashion hurts for her at all. What worries her is the idea that fashion hurts for every girl, but they don't complain about it because they've had to hurt their whole lives, while Mizune has 'only' had to hurt from the time she started presenting as a woman.
  • The Pollyanna: Though she's an awfully quiet lady, she tries her best to be the optimist to Nageki's realist.
  • Trans Tribulations: Her human world equivalent, unfortunately, cannot safely live and present as a girl. She's closeted, and presents entirely as a boy.
  • Shrinking Violet: She starts out this way.
  • Tomboy and Girly Girl: The tomboy to Mizune's girly-girl. As Mizune grows more comfortable with herself and understands that she doesn't have to dress as femininely as possible at all times to be a real woman, Mizune and Nageki's wardrobes swap this trope depending on their whims.

Annabelle

  • Older Than They Look: Annabelle's maturity flip-flops between that of an elderly man and a young adult depending on the situation, which makes it hard for him to figure out how old he "truly" is. He errs on the side of more elderly, being afraid of assuming he's young enough to date someone around him when he is not. His true self is absolutely a young adult, but seeing himself from time to time as an old man helps him cope with this dilemma. He doesn't realize this yet and won't for a long time.

Mikami Bimromav

  • Time-Travel Romance: Saving his friends and the rest of the world takes second-place priority to making sure Forrest is alright. Of course, it isn't so bad that he would stay in a timeline in which everyone died but Forrest, but... It would be very, very tempting.
  • Tsundere: Type B, towards Forrest.

Forrest Nagakawa

  • The Mentally Disturbed: Forrest lives with a psychotic disorder (unsure exactly which kind) that comes with visual and, very rarely, auditory hallucinations. His hallucinations tend to put maggots and insects in places they don't belong. Combine that with the Black Plague-like diseased he witnessed spreading (and was lucky to never contract) in his hometown as a child, and you get a real fucking nightmare of a brain time. This event that wiped out most of his hometown traumatized him, and he is left with mild symptoms of PTSD today.
  • Stepford Smiler
  • Wise Guy: To Mikami's Straight Man.

    Pamater 

Kaur

  • Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Yellow.
  • Hebephile: One who is extremely self-loathing, one who has never harmed a child, and one who has never engaged with child pornography of any kind or any medium. He is desperately trying to find some kind of 'cure' for his problem, and is starting to, without hesitation, consider straight-up castration if it means it'll fix who he is.
  • There Are No Therapists: There in fact are, and one plays a crucial role in him figuring out the root of his desires and eliminating them altogether.

Himeko Shikimori

Gendo Shikimori

Carroll

    Mellifluora 

Rabbi Bimromav

Vehal Bimromav

    Somnepoch 

[wip]

    Illicichor 

[wip]

    The Tradegium 

Ischel Calgaround

    The Golden Principality 

The Golden One

  • Shout-Out: To a certain far-right Youtuber. And not necessarily a flattering one.

Sir Swain Gozelinus Weekender

    The Diamondpoint Kings 

General tropes for the Diamondpoint Kings include:

  • Cool Crown: All of them except Desiderius sport one of these.
  • Impractically Fancy Outfit: All of them, but Nana is the least awful offender.
  • Requisite Royal Regalia
  • Royals Who Actually Do Something: Except Kyuun, who just goes with what Nana, Hachi and Desiderius decide. Even then, Desiderius just goes with what Nana and Hachi decide, he's just better at presenting the illusion of free will by trying to somehow, anyhow, get another voice into the discussion, but usually fails.
  • Wholesome Crossdresser: Though not all of them are good people, their wardrobe has nothing to do with their personality.

    The Country in Midnight 

Nana of the Stars

  • All Take and No Give: That was the nature of his relationship with Arya, and part of what made it so hard for the boy to pinpoint was the fact that Nana wasn't like this with his friends and acquaintances. It seemed to be reserved for those he knew intimately, which was a list that consisted of Arya and Arya alone.
  • Abomination Accusation Attack: In response to Yukai-toki's threat to reveal the less palatable details of his relationship with Arya to the public - something that was somewhat of a desperate bluff to begin with, he didn't even know if the public would care - Nana dishes out one of these by shooting back an elaborate story that Yukai-toki is only getting this worked up because he's jealous. Which wouldn't be a big deal if any old person did this, but... It's Nana. And the story is just elaborate to make Yukai-toki think twice about his motivations, giving Nana extra time to prepare in case Yukai-toki really was going to make good on that threat. Luckily, he never gets a chance to.
  • Believing Their Own Lies: This is one of the ways Nana grew into such a horrible person, no one was keeping him in check and he, who absolutely had the intelligence to know what he was doing if he simply sat down with himself and was honest for once, simply put all his power into believing his own lies rather than changing for the better before it was too late.
  • Character Development: Far, far too late to actually make a difference in Arya's wellbeing, but there is a point at which Nana realizes he deserves every bit of Arya's ire towards him, and he dug the grave he is currently lying in. It leads to him becoming a much more humble, selfless person, stepping down from his position of power and becoming a wandering knight, since he can't exactly do the noble thing and die, being immortal. His motivation in this is not to be forgiven or for his sins to be wiped away, but rather, to become a tool to people who could use him for good. It's not exactly the healthiest way of developing as a person, to give up your own autonomy and personhood in the attempt to become better, but it's a massive improvement over tyrannical abuser.
  • Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Purple.
  • The Empath: Nana's near-psychic ability to be able to tell what people think of themselves and others, and what they plan to do next all boils down to supernatural levels of intuition and empathy. However, he seems to have only one blind spot: himself. In fact, his magic mirror doesn't even seem to work on his own self; all he sees is his normal reflection staring back at him. This is something he admits to feeling quite anxious about.
  • Ephebophile: He, to this day, would not admit it, but he was and still is. Nana justified his attraction to Arya with the fact that they technically did fall in love when they were both young, and it couldn't possibly be his fault that Arya stopped aging, so how can he just stop being in love? That logic, faulty, as it is, implies he has never had romantic or sexual interest in any minor after Arya, which is not true.
  • Expository Hairstyle Change: He lops most of his hair off, leaving it about shoulder-length after his big revelation. And holy fuck, is it excruciatingly painful, as the stars in his hair can feel.
  • I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: By the end of things, anyway, far past the point of "too late" for either he or Arya to end up incredibly fucked up.
  • Manipulative Bastard: It's hard to deny that the genius King of the Country in Midnight is anything but a master manipulator, but it's clear that he only uses his talents for the good of his people. Well, probably.
  • Marital Rape License: With Arya, he subconsciously believed he had this, particularly when Arya started drifting away from him.
  • Never My Fault: By use of Insane Troll Logic that's sane enough that he consistently fools himself into believing he's done nothing wrong.
  • Nice to the Waiter: Nana's apparent sympathy for the underdogs in society make him seem very, as the kids say, woke, but this is only true until you realize why he sympathizes with them, and how.
  • Royal Brat: He may have played this trope straighter as a young child with all the embarrassingly spoiled behavior and pouting that comes with it, but now that he is a man, he retains most of the sinister implications of this trope with just about none of its associated childish behavior.
  • Sexual Extortion: There were several times when he withheld affection, conversation, reassurance and validation from Arya until he got what he wanted.
  • Took a Level in Kindness: See Character Development.
  • Tragic Dream: His involved living happily ever after with Arya. Then he violently murdered the dream. The only person he has to blame is himself.
  • Troubled Abuser: Nana himself being a victim of primarily emotional, but sometimes physical neglect as a child does inform a lot of his more toxic neuroses, such as his entitlement to being unconditionally loved and accepted. However, [[Supernatural cool motive, still pedophilic abuse.]]
  • Universally Beloved Leader: The people of that country know that he is charismatic, intelligent, attractive, and that he is taking care of their basic needs just about as much as they would expect any king to. This translates to blind approval, which gets incredibly unfortunate for those who do know what he's really like.
  • Why Did You Make Me Hit You?: This is the attitude Nana took with much of his abuse towards Arya, genuinely believing that he was reacting as every rational, normal person would in his circumstances.

Gossick

    The State in Thunderclouds 

Hachi of the Storm

  • Knee-capping: Hachi is the reason Annie needs a cane to walk.

Annie

  • Berserk Button: His is feeling like people aren't respecting his personal boundaries, and with most people, he lets his discomfort be known. Loudly. Not with Hachi, the person who has given him this trigger.
  • Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Yellow.
  • Hates Being Touched: It's easy to assume this is just another part of his angry, standoffish personality. It comes from somewhere.
  • Knee-capping: Hachi did this to him years ago, which is why Annie needs a cane to walk.

    The Kingdom in Clearing 

Kyuun of the Woods

  • Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Persian blue.
  • Everything's Sparkly with Jewelry: Kyuun is the most diamond-studded of the four kings with jewelry in his hair and on his robe.
  • Lack of Empathy: Cognitive empathy is what he's lacking in, largely due to his depression - he can barely see an inch ahead of his nose. Given the fact that his behavior seems to fit the description for Asperger's on that trope's page to a T, he could have a condition I haven't paid close attention to.
  • Mad God: Becomes much more mentally unstable than he already is under the weight of his new power, when he rebels against the other four diamondpoint kings.
  • The Mentally Disturbed: He is severely depressive with occasional manic upswings (currently unsure if this fits the criteria of bipolar disorder since said upswings are relatively mild for most stories I've heard, and they are rare) over the course of his story, and he only begins to learn how to live with it when he is far away from the toxic, oppressive colleagues who have controlled him into silence in the face of injustice.
  • Pungeon Master: As a Mad God, he's a huge fan of time puns. Nageki even joins in with him eventually.
  • The Quiet One: He tends to let his louder counterparts do the talking. And he hates it.
  • Sacred First Kiss: Hachi took his. It didn't affect him quite the same as most recipients of this trope, and he doesn't want to call it traumatic, but... There's a reason he's so afraid of Hachi, and that reason is most likely mild trauma - more from the fact that Hachi (and people like Hachi, like Nana) could have done worse.
  • Unfit for Greatness: Which is why his advisor, Yonbanme and he step down from the throne in the end.

Yonbanme

  • Ignored Enamored Underling: To Kyuun. Kyuun is a bit Oblivious to Love due to his severe depression, and to be fair, Yonbanme has never exactly said it... But that doesn't mean everyone around him can't tell right away.
  • I Kiss Your Hand: He does this with Kyuun every so often, prompting a little dazed, flustered stammering from his king.
  • Older Than They Look: The one witch who subverts this trope by actually looking much closer to his true age than a very young adult.
  • Yandere: Though he possesses a level of self-awareness most Yandere characters don't. He would never hurt Kyuun, even if Kyuun falls in love with someone else. But if anyone, ANYONE, makes any unwanted advance of any kind on his king? That's the point at which he has to start fighting the murderous intrusive thoughts... Or don't.

    The Palace in Anemone 

Desiderius of the Sea

  • Abusive Parents: For as awful as they were to his brother, Pastor, Desiderius' parents were even crueler to him. Desiderius' father, in particular, felt that he was preparing Desiderius for the burden and agony of being king by subjecting him (often by proxy through his guards) to horrific psychological, emotional, physical and sexual abuse/torture. Desiderius' mother did nothing to stop her husband, and it's unclear if she refused to act out of fear or out of sheer apathy.
  • It's All My Fault: He blames himself for just about everything that goes wrong, whether it actually is his fault or something he was complacent in, or not.
  • Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Cornflower blue.
  • Rape as Backstory: Just one of the many ways his senile father thought he was preparing Desiderius for the pain of the position of king is, he would order his guards to beat and rape Desiderius quite often. It didn't help things that the guards, even ones who seemed kind and well-intentioned, started doing their jobs a little too well, with a little too much enthusiasm.
  • Stepford Smiler: Between the trauma of his abusive childhood and the knowledge that he cowardly stood by as just about the same kind of abuse was being inflicted upon one of his colleagues' advisors.
  • [Unfit for Greatness: Which is why his advisor, Annabelle and he switch roles in the end.

Pendragon

Orelo

Espino

     The Spire in Wonder 

Yukai-toki of the Forgotten Lullaby

  • Excessive Evil Eyeshadow: Subverted in the sense that he's got the dark eyeshadow and lipstick one might expect of a villain, but he is actually the most morally upright of the Diamondpoint Kings.
  • Fetish: One for being worshipped. He doesn't tend to think much of it and doesn't really think of it as such, especially after spending so long in the Forgotten Lullaby. And then comes Luz.
  • Papa Wolf: These were his feelings for Arya, which Nana tried to portray as something else in order to get him to doubt himself.

Mezzo-Forte

    The Pearl Sovereignty 

Pastor

  • Abusive Parents: His parents were the first to instill him with the idea that he, due to his disorders, is completely inept and helpless, and thus might as well not even be alive.
  • Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Coral pink.
  • Color-Coded Eyes: Pastor's eyes used to be dark green, and he falls in line with the idea of green eyes signifying sexy free spirits.
  • Disabled Means Helpless: Averted. This isn't true of Pastor at all. His developmental disabilities most certainly affect his life and make it difficult for him to function "normally" in society, but because everyone he knows has treated him as if his disabilities make him helpless and inept (even Arcane, who is supposedly on his side!) from birth until now, he has more problems with resentment of the people around him and learned helplessness than anything else.
  • Faking the Dead: To escape the bondage of royalty and pursue the life he has always wanted, and not the one that has been thrust upon him.
  • Hollywood Autism: Averted, he doesn't have any special skillsets tied to his autism.

Arcane Ariatongue

    The World Beyond the Mirror 

North of the Mirror

    wip 

Kutsuuko/Arya Kurosawa

  • Freudian Excuse: If you'd been through what he had for as long as he had, you might be a little pissed off at the world, too, and you might be a little drunk off of power, too.
  • Heroic RRoD: (dubiously canon) He ends up growing so powerful that his body can't hold the magical strength inside him, and it literally falls to pieces from this.
  • Mouthy Kid: If anything from Nana has rubbed off onto Kutsuuko, it is that talent at dealing out tongue-lashings to those who you think deserve it - only from Kutsuuko, he's not stretching the truth.
  • Rape Leads to Insanity: A case of Truth in Television, the sexual abuse and grooming he went through makes him psychologically and emotionally unstable, paranoid and misanthropic - but this is obviously not the way all survivors respond to trauma.
  • The Mentally Disturbed: He shows clear signs of PTSD with the way he frightens and starts crying so easily when people press him too hard about the man who hurt him, the poor thing... Yep, and the symptoms are much less soft and palatable than they at first appear - they're what real PTSD often looks like in young survivors.

Arya Kurosawa/Kutsuuko

  • Abusive Parents: He had emotionally abusive parents who never accepted his best efforts, no matter how hard he worked to please them. This set him up to believe for much of his life that he had to work hard and suffer to make people approve of him and love him.
  • Boy of Black Magic: Not only on account of being a witch, his personality was certainly like this - cold, elegant, graceful - to people other than Nana.
  • Mind Rape: It seems like Pendragon did this to him, entirely on accident, by stabbing him through the heart when they fought. When she saw him screaming and curling up on the floor, she started to put the pieces together, and to this day she feels absolutely terrible for doing that to him. What she doesn't know is, that's not what happened at all. Her attack only jolted his conscience enough for him to fully realize how miserable he was, and what Nana was really doing to him. The recognition of severe trauma hit him all at once.
  • Unequal Pairing: Nana and Arya were this, not only as king and advisor but fully-grown adult and teenager.

    The Diamond Court 

Amaya Lasker

Lucerne "Luz" Fortunato

  • Ambiguous Gender: Luz is agender, or they prefer for their gender to be thought of as "none".
  • The Determinator: Luz stops at nothing to reach the Forgotten Lullaby, even if it means inadvertently killing a palace guard in a fight over demands for information.
  • Government Conspiracy: Once they become aware one's going on, and has been going on for years, they become utterly obsessed with it and only grow more and more entrenched in it, losing more and more to it until they finally solve it, essentially showing up on Yukai-toki's doorstep in the Forgotten Lullaby, covered in blood (belonging to them and possibly others too they don't remember?), missing one of their memories in the ritual to get them there, disheveled and unkempt, not having slept in days, and at first completely incomprehensible in their speech.
  • Sanity Slippage: The deeper and deeper they go down the rabbit hole, trying to figure out what happened to Yukai-toki and where he went, this happens.

    The Rebellion 

Pidgeon

  • Villain Ball: He loves holding it. It is his favorite of all the balls. It's great. He loves it!

Vehal Bimromav

Contralto

    Extra Sidecharacters 

Ose Shalom

Suvi and Yisra

Sir Knight/Nana and the Stars that Ceased to Shine

  • The Determinator: No matter how obviously depressed and exhausted he is, there is nothing he can't do.
  • Ephebophile: That's something about himself that hasn't seemed to disappear. He still loves Arya, against his better judgment, the only difference now is he hates himself for it and he refuses to make that Arya's problem by being upfront about it.
  • The Mentally Disturbed: He's got some pretty heavy depression, depersonalization disorder, and he has apparently developed a psychotic disorder of some kind: he experiences delusions that tell him that his bare skin is venomous, and he must cover it all, at all times, or else he will hurt people. Delusions they may be, but when the truth about who he is comes out, said delusions don't seem quite so random anymore.
  • Must Make Amends: One thing Nageki and her party know about their knightly friend is that he feels the need to repent for something he did in his past, but no one figures it's that bad since he's such a great dude! Hahaha, oh.
  • Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality: He's definitely got it. It turns out he's got very good reason to distrust his own mind and body when thrown into a sexual situation.

Terran "Terrandus" Denzo

  • Yandere: Look, he's not responsible for what happens to you if you hurt someone he cares about. Even if you don't hurt them badly, or just say something mean to them, he still can't help but feel that immediate rush of borderline-homicidal anger that comes over him when he argues with himself in his head, graciously deciding not to make you regret it. Bear in mind, not actually-homicidal. He's a pacifist! He doesn't kill anyone. He just knows people can take a lot of pain before they keel over.

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