Haruno Sakura (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
medicalpunch) wrote2004-03-15 10:54 am
medicalpunch) wrote2004-03-15 10:54 am
[City of Ariel] Application
→ IC
□ Name: Sakura Haruno
□ Journal: medicalpunch
□ Series: Naruto
□ Canon point: Chapter 667
□ History: http://naruto.wikia.com/wiki/Sakura_Haruno
□ Personality: Over the course of the series, Sakura demonstrates a very dramatic -- and very realistic -- process of growing up. Unfortunately, much of it is steamrollered by plot events, not helped by the lack of decent attention the series gives to female characters and their personalities. But it's there nonetheless, and it makes her a significantly dynamic and very realistic character. As a contrast to a lot of the other characters, there are very few extremes with Sakura -- she paints a far more realistic picture of adolescent personality than most of her castmates, who are either very vaguely sketched-in or have very absolutist personalities (for example, Shikamaru and Sasuke are both absolutes with very little character balance.)
At series start, Sakura is twelve years old -- a highly intelligent twelve, but at the same time, relatively shallow, just starting to really figure out that boys are very fascinating creatures, and at the same time, very exasperating ones. She excels in her classwork, but like many children her age, her self-confidence is very fragile, and she's struggling to shape herself into someone that she likes and can respect. Because she wants to appear attractively feminine, she subsumes a lot of her more assertive, blunter, more forceful emotions, showing them only on the far side of the fourth wall as the gag known as "Inner Sakura" -- a manifestation of an outspoken, often vulgar, and extremely aggressive inner self that she struggles to contain. At the same time, because that "Inner" is a part of herself, it still leaks through into her everyday behavior at times, leaving her largely retiring with occasional severe outbursts of temper. It isn't a balanced state to be in -- but then, at twelve and thirteen (and twenty-seven, Kakashi's no better at it than the kids), there isn't a lot of balance to go around.
However, even then, Sakura's showing the seeds of the young woman she'll grow into. While her control over her emotions is spotty and variable, her control over her chakra is absolutely spot-on even fresh out of Konoha's ninja academy, and her ability to retain information is second to none. Even Shikamaru has to cheat off her during the written portion of the chuunin exam. These are traits that it takes self-control to really harness and exploit, so it sets her up to a position where she'll have to learn to control them if she wants to match her teammates' raw power and inborn talents.
And that's the ambition she hatches. Even beyond getting Sasuke back, it's not hard to see that her long-term, unstated goal is to excel -- as a twelve-year-old, she compares herself unfavorably to Naruto's raw power and Sasuke's inherited family talents, and decides that she has to be worthy of them. Rather than giving up, she indulges her inherent dogged determination, which stands her well at the times when her confidence fails, and promises herself that she will not be content to be the weak one. She will improve, she will be worthy of being their teammate.
(It would be worth noting that with a slightly different treatment, she should be absolutely worthy of that already, the Hermione to their differing Harry Potters; her intellect is, if anything, stronger than Sasuke's, and with more confidence she'd prove that. But the story is really about Naruto and Sasuke, and so she gets pushed into the background, the trials they face ones that are better overcome with raw power than with deep thought.)
The time jump between manga parts, for Sakura, kicks off with her marching into Tsunade's office and demanding that Tsunade take her as a personal student. Suffice to say, that takes a hell of a lot of gumption. Yes, there's symbolism behind it -- Team 7 as the successors to the Sannin and all -- but unlike with the mentor-student pairings of Jiraiya and Naruto, Orochimaru and Sasuke, there is absolutely no external reason for Tsunade to take Sakura on. Jiraiya is Naruto's godfather, and has a noted penchant for taking students; Orochimaru wants to take Sasuke's body and abilities for himself, and his intentions are balantly exploitative. Tsunade, by contrast, has only ever taken one student, who would have been her niece had her fiance not perished before they could be married. She's the brand-new Hokage, inheriting a village halfway ruined from Suna and Oto's combined attack. She has better shit to do! But she takes on Sakura anyway, because of Sakura's determination and force of will. That's a very important point in Sakura's favor, and speaks to the potential that Tsunade sees in her.
When things pick back up after the timeskip, we're quickly introduced to the new and more grown-up version of Sakura, who spends the next year or so of part 2 canon showcasing the growth that she's been through.
The most striking difference is that she no longer needs Inner Sakura, who makes a couple brief appearances and then vanishes, seemingly for good. Sakura well into her teens is forceful and assertive all on her own -- and even tips over the opposite line into occasionally becoming too brash, plunging forward into situations that almost certainly leave her outclassed -- the fight with Sasori, for instance. She's integrated Inner Sakura's temper as well, occasionally indulging in displays of anger that would almost seem uncontrollable, except for the overriding sense that she is absolutely in control of herself even at the height of them, and is expressing exactly as much anger as she cares to. It just happens to be a lot. And she's okay with that -- she's not all that concerned with seeming unfeminine anymore, not when there's a job to do. Sakura after the timeskip has better things to do than worry about whether she's appropriately girly, whether boys will like her with short hair and devastating punches. She's become much more honed as a weapon, as a healer -- she's too powerful now to let herself be held back.
Sakura's book-smarts and sharp mind have not decreased from part 1, either -- rather, they've developed into a battlefield sense of strategy. It's her idea, for instance, to allow Chiyo to manipulate her as a puppet during the confrontation with Sasori, melding Sakura's physical strength with Chiyo's personal knowledge of Sasori's puppets and techniques. She also, of the entire shinobi alliance, is the one to figure out just who the embedded traitor is, unveiling the Zetsu clone disguised as Neji. As someone who isn't particularly familiar with Neji on a personal level, that leaves quite a lot of deduction for her to have done. But something pings her enough that she sets up a verbal trap for him, and when he falls into it, she takes it very much personally to demolish him.
She still does struggle with confidence, however. While she has good reason to be much more confident at fifteen and sixteen than she did at twelve (since Tsunade's teaching has left her as a frighteningly competent medic and hand-to-hand fighter both), she still seems to question herself and her decisions at times, especially when it comes to either her personal life or to matters involving Sasuke. When she's acting purely as a ninja, she knows what to do, how to move forward. But when she finds her duties as a ninja conflicting with her feelings as a person, as Sakura, what's when she backslides, or tries to force herself with ultimately unfortunate results, such as her attempt to kill Sasuke -- squaring her duty as a ninja, to eliminate the traitor who has demonstrated obvious negative intentions toward Konoha, with her emotions, the desire to have Sasuke come home and be one of them again. Her attack ends up wild, uncontrolled -- there isn't the clear preparation, strike, followthrough that she shows at other times.
With Sasuke's return to the group, that source of conflict seems to be resolved within her -- her duty as a ninja and her perceived duty as someone who cares for Sasuke are no longer directly at odds. However, as Sai notes, there is an odd expression lingering on her face, a false smile that hints that there is certainly more conflict to come.
□ Age: 16
□ Gender: Female
□ Appearance: Sakura is a slender young woman, about 5'3, with light pink hair and blue-green eyes. She has a diamond-shaped seal on her forehead in the "third eye" position -- as of yet it does not have a canon color, so for lack of information I'm presuming it to be blue, the same as Tsunade's.
□ Abilities/Powers: Girl packs one hell of a mean punch! One of the skills passed down to Sakura by Tsunade is a specialization in enhancing muscular strength with the use of chakra, letting her pack a punch or a kick that can shatter enormous boulders or leave terrifying craters in the ground. You don't want to make her mad! And unlike simple physical strength, the fact that she's using her chakra, over which she has extremely precise control, means that she can fine-tune the use of that strength to precisely meet whatever the need is of the moment, whether that means judging her total used force to a hair, or selectively strengthening certain muscles but not others, to maintain a fine balance of power and finesse.
Even without the chakra enhancement, she's a fit young woman, very physically active, who works the long hours required of any medic, particularly one who serves a population largely devoted to putting themselves in harm's way for pay, as well as keeping herself in full combat training. So she's got a great deal of essential physical stamina, enough to let her do all these things without driving herself into the ground.
Another important strength to note is her total bodily control, as demonstrated most strikingly in her fight with Chiyo against Sasori. At the beginning of the fight, it's determined that while Chiyo knows how to fight Sasori, her aged body simply does not have the strength or flexibility required to do so; Sakura, in full physical fitness, has the strength, flexibility, and speed, but she does not have the particular knowledge that Chiyo possesses of Sasori's fighting style or the traps his puppets hold. So Sakura allows Chiyo to control her as though she were a puppet, guiding her through the fight. Even when weapons coated with deadly poison are passing within inches of her body, she remains entirely bent to Chiyo's will. For someone with lifelong combat training, including reflexes honed to an edge, to completely give over control of their body to someone else, to the point where she doesn't even flinch when Hiruko's bladed and poison-dripping tail comes within a foot of her face, speaks of an absolutely massive level of physical self-control.
Aside from the chakra strengthening mentioned above, Sakura also possesses some other notable "magic" abilities. For the first, Kakashi notes that right from the beginning, she may not have a lot of chakra, but she's extremely efficient at using what she does have. Any jutsu requires a particular amount of chakra, and many ninja, lacking good control of their chakra or good efficiency of technique, actually spend much more chakra than is required. Sakura, on the other hand, doesn't waste a single bit of it. She uses exactly as much as the jutsu demands, and not a scrap more, meaning that compared to others, she can do far more with less. And while that might sound like something of a weak compliment (since she still overall possesses a lower chakra level than many others), it actually has significant meaning, since jutsu can be sensed by others based on how much chakra they use -- how "splashy" they are. Sakura, operating with maximum efficiency right from day one, is much less likely to be noticed than another ninja performing the same technique, as she has no wasted chakra.
Even better, she's finally manifested the Yin or Byakugo seal, a particular form of chakra enhancement passed down from Tsunade. The seal gradually siphons off and stores a portion of Sakura's chakra, with a seemingly limitless storage capacity, which she can then tap into at a later time to put out enormous bursts of power all at once.
Her primary specialization, quite apart from punching things to death, is actually medical jutsu -- the use of chakra, as well as tools and medicines, to heal wounds or cure illnesses. Sakura is the protege of Tsunade, who is the most famous medical ninja in the Naruto world -- even people generally hostile to Konoha speak respectfully of Tsunade's medical skills. And Sakura, with her concentration, attention to detail, and precise control, has made herself every bit as much Tsunade's equal, as she demonstrates in dealing with Sasori's self-created poisons when no one, even the most talented medics in Sound or Sasori's own grandmother who taught him his craft, was able to do so. If it's broken, bleeding, burned, or anything other than dead, Sakura can fix it, given sufficient energy and motivation.
The talents that go into medical jutsu can also be used offensively. Techniques like chakra scalpel (very much what it says on the tin, using chakra in place of a physical scalpel to make incisions) can be used to sever muscles, nerves, tendons -- anything in the body that wants cutting, really. Techniques to smooth and align nerve pathways can be used to scramble their signals, and techniques used to soothe pain can also induce it. Sakura can create an antidote to almost any poison -- and she can create poisons so virulent that even Naruto's accelerated healing from the Kyuubi won't protect him from them.
Don't piss off your medic. She knows far too much about pain, and how to make you feel it.
□ Name: Sakura Haruno
□ Journal: medicalpunch
□ Series: Naruto
□ Canon point: Chapter 667
□ History: http://naruto.wikia.com/wiki/Sakura_Haruno
□ Personality: Over the course of the series, Sakura demonstrates a very dramatic -- and very realistic -- process of growing up. Unfortunately, much of it is steamrollered by plot events, not helped by the lack of decent attention the series gives to female characters and their personalities. But it's there nonetheless, and it makes her a significantly dynamic and very realistic character. As a contrast to a lot of the other characters, there are very few extremes with Sakura -- she paints a far more realistic picture of adolescent personality than most of her castmates, who are either very vaguely sketched-in or have very absolutist personalities (for example, Shikamaru and Sasuke are both absolutes with very little character balance.)
At series start, Sakura is twelve years old -- a highly intelligent twelve, but at the same time, relatively shallow, just starting to really figure out that boys are very fascinating creatures, and at the same time, very exasperating ones. She excels in her classwork, but like many children her age, her self-confidence is very fragile, and she's struggling to shape herself into someone that she likes and can respect. Because she wants to appear attractively feminine, she subsumes a lot of her more assertive, blunter, more forceful emotions, showing them only on the far side of the fourth wall as the gag known as "Inner Sakura" -- a manifestation of an outspoken, often vulgar, and extremely aggressive inner self that she struggles to contain. At the same time, because that "Inner" is a part of herself, it still leaks through into her everyday behavior at times, leaving her largely retiring with occasional severe outbursts of temper. It isn't a balanced state to be in -- but then, at twelve and thirteen (and twenty-seven, Kakashi's no better at it than the kids), there isn't a lot of balance to go around.
However, even then, Sakura's showing the seeds of the young woman she'll grow into. While her control over her emotions is spotty and variable, her control over her chakra is absolutely spot-on even fresh out of Konoha's ninja academy, and her ability to retain information is second to none. Even Shikamaru has to cheat off her during the written portion of the chuunin exam. These are traits that it takes self-control to really harness and exploit, so it sets her up to a position where she'll have to learn to control them if she wants to match her teammates' raw power and inborn talents.
And that's the ambition she hatches. Even beyond getting Sasuke back, it's not hard to see that her long-term, unstated goal is to excel -- as a twelve-year-old, she compares herself unfavorably to Naruto's raw power and Sasuke's inherited family talents, and decides that she has to be worthy of them. Rather than giving up, she indulges her inherent dogged determination, which stands her well at the times when her confidence fails, and promises herself that she will not be content to be the weak one. She will improve, she will be worthy of being their teammate.
(It would be worth noting that with a slightly different treatment, she should be absolutely worthy of that already, the Hermione to their differing Harry Potters; her intellect is, if anything, stronger than Sasuke's, and with more confidence she'd prove that. But the story is really about Naruto and Sasuke, and so she gets pushed into the background, the trials they face ones that are better overcome with raw power than with deep thought.)
The time jump between manga parts, for Sakura, kicks off with her marching into Tsunade's office and demanding that Tsunade take her as a personal student. Suffice to say, that takes a hell of a lot of gumption. Yes, there's symbolism behind it -- Team 7 as the successors to the Sannin and all -- but unlike with the mentor-student pairings of Jiraiya and Naruto, Orochimaru and Sasuke, there is absolutely no external reason for Tsunade to take Sakura on. Jiraiya is Naruto's godfather, and has a noted penchant for taking students; Orochimaru wants to take Sasuke's body and abilities for himself, and his intentions are balantly exploitative. Tsunade, by contrast, has only ever taken one student, who would have been her niece had her fiance not perished before they could be married. She's the brand-new Hokage, inheriting a village halfway ruined from Suna and Oto's combined attack. She has better shit to do! But she takes on Sakura anyway, because of Sakura's determination and force of will. That's a very important point in Sakura's favor, and speaks to the potential that Tsunade sees in her.
When things pick back up after the timeskip, we're quickly introduced to the new and more grown-up version of Sakura, who spends the next year or so of part 2 canon showcasing the growth that she's been through.
The most striking difference is that she no longer needs Inner Sakura, who makes a couple brief appearances and then vanishes, seemingly for good. Sakura well into her teens is forceful and assertive all on her own -- and even tips over the opposite line into occasionally becoming too brash, plunging forward into situations that almost certainly leave her outclassed -- the fight with Sasori, for instance. She's integrated Inner Sakura's temper as well, occasionally indulging in displays of anger that would almost seem uncontrollable, except for the overriding sense that she is absolutely in control of herself even at the height of them, and is expressing exactly as much anger as she cares to. It just happens to be a lot. And she's okay with that -- she's not all that concerned with seeming unfeminine anymore, not when there's a job to do. Sakura after the timeskip has better things to do than worry about whether she's appropriately girly, whether boys will like her with short hair and devastating punches. She's become much more honed as a weapon, as a healer -- she's too powerful now to let herself be held back.
Sakura's book-smarts and sharp mind have not decreased from part 1, either -- rather, they've developed into a battlefield sense of strategy. It's her idea, for instance, to allow Chiyo to manipulate her as a puppet during the confrontation with Sasori, melding Sakura's physical strength with Chiyo's personal knowledge of Sasori's puppets and techniques. She also, of the entire shinobi alliance, is the one to figure out just who the embedded traitor is, unveiling the Zetsu clone disguised as Neji. As someone who isn't particularly familiar with Neji on a personal level, that leaves quite a lot of deduction for her to have done. But something pings her enough that she sets up a verbal trap for him, and when he falls into it, she takes it very much personally to demolish him.
She still does struggle with confidence, however. While she has good reason to be much more confident at fifteen and sixteen than she did at twelve (since Tsunade's teaching has left her as a frighteningly competent medic and hand-to-hand fighter both), she still seems to question herself and her decisions at times, especially when it comes to either her personal life or to matters involving Sasuke. When she's acting purely as a ninja, she knows what to do, how to move forward. But when she finds her duties as a ninja conflicting with her feelings as a person, as Sakura, what's when she backslides, or tries to force herself with ultimately unfortunate results, such as her attempt to kill Sasuke -- squaring her duty as a ninja, to eliminate the traitor who has demonstrated obvious negative intentions toward Konoha, with her emotions, the desire to have Sasuke come home and be one of them again. Her attack ends up wild, uncontrolled -- there isn't the clear preparation, strike, followthrough that she shows at other times.
With Sasuke's return to the group, that source of conflict seems to be resolved within her -- her duty as a ninja and her perceived duty as someone who cares for Sasuke are no longer directly at odds. However, as Sai notes, there is an odd expression lingering on her face, a false smile that hints that there is certainly more conflict to come.
□ Age: 16
□ Gender: Female
□ Appearance: Sakura is a slender young woman, about 5'3, with light pink hair and blue-green eyes. She has a diamond-shaped seal on her forehead in the "third eye" position -- as of yet it does not have a canon color, so for lack of information I'm presuming it to be blue, the same as Tsunade's.
□ Abilities/Powers: Girl packs one hell of a mean punch! One of the skills passed down to Sakura by Tsunade is a specialization in enhancing muscular strength with the use of chakra, letting her pack a punch or a kick that can shatter enormous boulders or leave terrifying craters in the ground. You don't want to make her mad! And unlike simple physical strength, the fact that she's using her chakra, over which she has extremely precise control, means that she can fine-tune the use of that strength to precisely meet whatever the need is of the moment, whether that means judging her total used force to a hair, or selectively strengthening certain muscles but not others, to maintain a fine balance of power and finesse.
Even without the chakra enhancement, she's a fit young woman, very physically active, who works the long hours required of any medic, particularly one who serves a population largely devoted to putting themselves in harm's way for pay, as well as keeping herself in full combat training. So she's got a great deal of essential physical stamina, enough to let her do all these things without driving herself into the ground.
Another important strength to note is her total bodily control, as demonstrated most strikingly in her fight with Chiyo against Sasori. At the beginning of the fight, it's determined that while Chiyo knows how to fight Sasori, her aged body simply does not have the strength or flexibility required to do so; Sakura, in full physical fitness, has the strength, flexibility, and speed, but she does not have the particular knowledge that Chiyo possesses of Sasori's fighting style or the traps his puppets hold. So Sakura allows Chiyo to control her as though she were a puppet, guiding her through the fight. Even when weapons coated with deadly poison are passing within inches of her body, she remains entirely bent to Chiyo's will. For someone with lifelong combat training, including reflexes honed to an edge, to completely give over control of their body to someone else, to the point where she doesn't even flinch when Hiruko's bladed and poison-dripping tail comes within a foot of her face, speaks of an absolutely massive level of physical self-control.
Aside from the chakra strengthening mentioned above, Sakura also possesses some other notable "magic" abilities. For the first, Kakashi notes that right from the beginning, she may not have a lot of chakra, but she's extremely efficient at using what she does have. Any jutsu requires a particular amount of chakra, and many ninja, lacking good control of their chakra or good efficiency of technique, actually spend much more chakra than is required. Sakura, on the other hand, doesn't waste a single bit of it. She uses exactly as much as the jutsu demands, and not a scrap more, meaning that compared to others, she can do far more with less. And while that might sound like something of a weak compliment (since she still overall possesses a lower chakra level than many others), it actually has significant meaning, since jutsu can be sensed by others based on how much chakra they use -- how "splashy" they are. Sakura, operating with maximum efficiency right from day one, is much less likely to be noticed than another ninja performing the same technique, as she has no wasted chakra.
Even better, she's finally manifested the Yin or Byakugo seal, a particular form of chakra enhancement passed down from Tsunade. The seal gradually siphons off and stores a portion of Sakura's chakra, with a seemingly limitless storage capacity, which she can then tap into at a later time to put out enormous bursts of power all at once.
Her primary specialization, quite apart from punching things to death, is actually medical jutsu -- the use of chakra, as well as tools and medicines, to heal wounds or cure illnesses. Sakura is the protege of Tsunade, who is the most famous medical ninja in the Naruto world -- even people generally hostile to Konoha speak respectfully of Tsunade's medical skills. And Sakura, with her concentration, attention to detail, and precise control, has made herself every bit as much Tsunade's equal, as she demonstrates in dealing with Sasori's self-created poisons when no one, even the most talented medics in Sound or Sasori's own grandmother who taught him his craft, was able to do so. If it's broken, bleeding, burned, or anything other than dead, Sakura can fix it, given sufficient energy and motivation.
The talents that go into medical jutsu can also be used offensively. Techniques like chakra scalpel (very much what it says on the tin, using chakra in place of a physical scalpel to make incisions) can be used to sever muscles, nerves, tendons -- anything in the body that wants cutting, really. Techniques to smooth and align nerve pathways can be used to scramble their signals, and techniques used to soothe pain can also induce it. Sakura can create an antidote to almost any poison -- and she can create poisons so virulent that even Naruto's accelerated healing from the Kyuubi won't protect him from them.
Don't piss off your medic. She knows far too much about pain, and how to make you feel it.