Sei Satou
| Sei Satou | |
|---|---|
| Sei post-graduation. | |
| IC Information | |
| Full Name: | Satou, Sei |
| Gender/Sexuality: | Female/Lesbian |
| Species: | Human |
| Place of Origin: | Musashino, Tokyo, Japan |
| Age/Birthdate: | 21 (Dec. 25) |
| Height: | 5'9" |
| Hair Colour: | Sandy |
| Eye Colour: | Grey-blue |
| Romantic Status: | Single |
| Romantic Identification: | Dubiously monogamous |
| Residence: | Unit 304, Sun Lily Suites |
| Occupation: | Literature student and bad driver |
| Preferences | |
| Likes: | Teasing people, tea, cake, throwing people off their game, good books, writing, her car, virtuous girls, talking, white roses |
| Dislikes: | Stubborn people, taking life seriously, the subway, nunneries, talking about her past, being mistaken for American, Christmas, thorns |
| OOC Information | |
| Source: | Maria-sama ga Miteru |
Sei Satou is a woman from Musashino, Japan who arrived in Yuriba in late 2013. A graduate of a prestigious all-girls' school back home, she's outwardly cheerful and teasing, with a devil-may-care attitude, though it doesn't quite extend to outright hedonism.
Contents |
Psychological data
General personality
At a glance it's easy to buttonhole Satou as a typical flirt with overtones of a genki girl. In fact she's somewhat more complicated and her devil-may-care attitude tends to veil the fact that she's much, much wiser than her years and has learned to understand people through painful experience, which she doesn't talk about much. She doesn't show it much outwardly, and for the most part, first impressions of her tend to be that she's brash, rough around the edges and a bit of a charmer, with a propensity for little jokes and a fondness for teasing just about everyone she comes across. She predates shy and dignified girls indiscriminately and absolutely loves to throw them off their games, and she does a lot for the sake of evoking reactions in others and pushing their buttons. If ever an opportunity arises to make a girl blush or make someone mildly jealous, she can seldom resist taking it. Satou tends to be somewhat touchy, particularly with women she perceives as shy, and she's not above the odd surprise hug - or the odd surprise grope, for that matter. (Her peers back home call it her "old man" behaviour for one reason or another.) It's not often that she feels awkward; if she does she just laughs it off.
Satou is much wiser than she lets on, though it tends to come out only with those she's close to. Despite her outward lack of concern for just about anything, she's remarkably steady and prone to dealing with challenges in perspective, even if they rock her emotionally at first. She has an exceptional ability to read people, especially those in her relative age bracket. She gets a deep satisfaction out of being a shoulder for friends and loved ones to cry on, not for her own sake but out of a genuine caring for those around her. While prone to a little tough love now and then, Satou nevertheless keeps the best interests of friends at heart just about all the time. She's not one to deliberately hurt others beyond a bit of mild, harmless teasing.
Satou is an avid reader and can often be found relaxing in an armchair with a stack of books, often in English - she's extremely fluent in both English and Japanese. She devours American literature eagerly. She's also often found at the Dragon's Brew taking a cup of tea.
Romantic preferences
Satou comes from a background of being the only out-of-the-closet lesbian at an all-girls' Catholic school and being surrounded by prim and proper girls ranging from 'cute' to '10'. Yuriba is something of an adjustment to her because she's gone from one of the least inhibited people she knows to one of the more modest ones on the island.
The chase is much more important to Satou than the ends, at least with most people, and she far prefers flirting and subtext-laden two-girl friendships than she does sexual relationships. Though she'll seldom pass up an opportunity for a kiss, especially if it will embarrass someone or make someone else jealous, she's not the sort to leap quickly between the sheets, and she's a firm believer in leaving things to the imagination. She wouldn't, for example, show up at Naked Sunday or skinny-dip at the beach. Her actual, physical relationships are few and far between. Satou tends to maintain a few friends with benefits but will generally have one girl she considers her lover, with everyone else relegated to either the sexy friend zone or the regular old non-sexy friend zone.
Satou tends to build relationships through a deep sense of personal chemistry and is prone to falling for girls who can evoke strong emotions within her - namely, that irresistable sense of want, and especially that feeling where even something as simple as a soft-spoken conversation can carry enough subtext to make her heart flutter. When she does find that person she tends to favour whirlwind relationships that settle quickly into a neat little equilibrium. She's actually quite passionate but doesn't fully expose that side of herself save to those who have that chemistry with her.
She's also distressingly prone to falling for unattainable women, though classmate Kei Katou seems to have drawn this trend to a halt.
Relationships
Pre-Yuriba
- Kei Katou: Sei's university buddy, the two met when a teacher called Kei's name in class and Sei misheard and stood up. The two rapidly carved out a niche as heterosexual life partners, though there's room for more there. Sei finds herself pining for Kei's presence now that she's landed in Yuriba, having somewhat grown accustomed to her.
- Shimako Todou: Sei's petite soeur during her term at Lillian Jogakuen back in Musashino. The two share what at first seems to be a somewhat distant relationship, but it's more that they understand each other so well they don't need to cling to one another, allowing Sei to provide selective support and step back to let Shimako stand on her own two feet. Their relationship is not the least bit romantic; it is, however, far, far closer than a typical friendship.
- Yumi Fukuzawa: "Why am I the only one who's fallen prey to the evil upperclassman?!" -Yumi Fukuzawa, Season 1
- Shiori Kubo: "I lost to Maria-sama."
Yuriba
History
Not much is out there about Satou's early life, but like most of her former classmates she comes from a fairly good family - at least with enough cash to send her to a fairly exclusive all-girls' school.
Lillian
Sei doesn't go into detail often about her early life, but she's partly American and was born in Japan. She attended Lillian Jogakuen, a Catholic girls' school in Musashino, from infancy onward. It's evident enough that one of her first friends was classmate Eriko Torii and that they got off to a rocky start when Eriko poked fun at Sei's American features and Sei loudly dubbed her "Dekochin" for her high forehead, leading to a schoolyard brawl.
Most of Sei's commonly talked-about history dates back to her time as a high school student at Lillian's high school division. Something of a non-conformist, she came into the school with a chip on her shoulder, standing out among her classmates both for the slight hint of something Caucasian in her bloodline and for her sullen, contrary attitude. In those days she never joked around and never expressed much of a care about anything.
Lillian's hallmark is its soeur system, in which a girl gives another girl in a lower grade her rosary and they become basically sisters and have a special girl-girl friendship, inevitably with tons of melodrama and subtext. The other Lillian hallmark is its absurdly powerful and hysterically over-royalized student council, the Yamayurikai, headed up by the three roses - titled of course Rosa Chinensis, Rosa Gigantea and Rosa Foetida - with a boost from their petite soeurs, the en boutons. The payoff to all this exposition is that Sei caught the eye of the then-current Rosa Gigantea en bouton, who attested she wanted Sei as her petite soeur because she liked looking at her face. Sei agreed, finding that simple, plain-stated reason endearing and lacking in BS. Eventually the two carved out a solid if decent relationship, mostly because Sei's onee-sama knew exactly how to handle Sei's overall rebelliousness and indifference to everything. In the meantime she also struck up relationships with classmate Youko Mizuno.
Come her second year, Sei's onee-sama rose to take over the chair of Rosa Gigantea, with Sei herself becoming an indifferent Rosa Gigantea en bouton, even showing no interest in having a petite soeur. And then she walked into the school church one day and found the most beautiful girl she'd ever seen. What followed was an absolute whirlwind of a relationship that exploded into love - which, after a spoiler-rific maelstrom of concentrated melodrama, ended with Sei crying into her onee-sama's shoulder while she and Youko comforted her.
The incident was quickly buried, and Sei's peers wisely chose not to talk too much about it. Sei herself cut her hair and began changing her life, learning to smile and laugh and recapture some of that joy she felt with the girl she could never have. By the time her unnamed onee-sama graduated and the third year rolled around, Sei was more or less what she is today: A somewhat happy-go-lucky and profoundly fun-loving person whose occasional goofing around and playful groping of pigtailed shy girls neatly concealed her actual wisdom and profound ability to read people. Come third year she joined Youko and Eriko as the the three roses of the Yamayurikai - of course herself as Rosa Gigantea - and took on first-year student Shimako Todou as her petite soeur, albeit not without a lot of raw emotion and the occasional Youko-related prod. She was briefly caught up in controversy when she was accused of writing a steamy lesbian romance novel; spoilers ensued.
Upon graduating Sei didn't go far. She wound up at Lillian University, studying English and American literature and cultivating a close friendship with classmate Kei Katou while occasionally swinging by the old high school to impart sage advice and dip into the churning sea of platonic love and drama that is daily student council fare at Lillian Jogakuen.